The Rising Horde, Volume Two (Sequel to The Gathering Dead )

by Stephen Knight

  “Hooah, Sarmajor.”

  The sniper fired again, and Forringer spun away before the ejected shell struck him. Down the line, another rifle fired, and then another. Gartrell walked toward the sandbags and pulled his binoculars up to his eyes. He looked out past the circles of trenches, fences, and concertina wire. Zombies shambled through the smoke, their flesh burnt black and every wisp of hair gone. Some of them were still smoking, and some of them were so badly burned that their skin looked as if it had melted on their bodies, leaving them even more hideous to behold. Gartrell hadn’t thought that was possible.

  “How many have you guys shot on this wall?” he asked Rabin.

  “About twelve or so in the past fifteen minutes,” Rabin responded. He still didn’t look up from his rifle’s scope. “In the hour before that, maybe four or five. It looks like they’re starting to figure out that coming directly from the east isn’t working out for them.”

  “Yeah, looks like we need to get some eyes out and see what we can see.” Gartrell spoke into his headset’s boom microphone and reported the increasing activity on the southern wall. And above and behind him, more weaponsfire rang out from the observation towers.

  ***

  “It’s not so much that the zeds to the east are getting smarter and trying to avoid the bombing runs,” Captain Chase said after reviewing the UAV data. “What’s happening is that those necromorphs coming up through Mexico aren’t finding any habitations they can feed on, so they’re just moving northerly until they roll up onto our southern zone.” As he spoke, a black and white video played on several monitors throughout the tactical operations center. It showed hundreds of thousands of zombies surging toward the camp from the south, having picked their way through San Antonio and other former human enclaves.

  “How many?” McDaniels asked. He sat at the main briefing table with Rawlings on his right and Haley on his left. He had told Gartrell, Switchblade, and Major Carmody to knock off for a few hours.

  “Tough to say, sir. But based on what’s just in our vicinity that we’ve seen through the UAVs? It’s got to be another several million heading north. There’s nothing to distract them from coming directly here.”

  “Now I’m starting to get an idea what a pretty girl feels like in some meat market bar,” Haley said.

  “You’re not about to make some sort of confession, are you, Colonel?” Rawlings asked.

  “You want me to rip that mustache right off your lip, Commander?”

  Rawlings chuckled and looked back at the monitor. There was no mistaking that Bull Haley had been shortchanged in the humor department.

  “We’ll need to get some satellite review of the territory,” McDaniels said. “We had it before; let’s see if we can get it again. Captain, you know how to make that happen?”

  Chase nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. Pass it on to someone else to do, then. You look like you’re about to fall asleep on your feet.”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “The hell you are,” Haley said. “You’d better do as you’re told, Captain. We need you on your game here, son.”

  Chase didn’t seem to like it, but he nodded. “Roger that, sir.”

  McDaniels nodded back. “Is there anything else from you on this, Captain?”

  “Negative, sir.”

  “Any other developments we’re not already aware of?”

  “Not that I know of, sir.”

  “Then get some rack time. Don’t come back until at least sixteen hundred hours. That gives you a good five hours. Understood, Captain Chase?”

  “Understood, sir. First Lieutenant Genovese will assume command of TOC operations.” Chase pointed to a man at the end of the trailer.

  The man stood and presented himself. Whereas Chase was so big that he had to bend his head to enter the center, his second in command barely met the Army’s minimum height and weight requirement.

  “Damn, is that an Army officer prototype?” Rawlings said.

  “If he is, then the dead have a lot to worry about, sir,” Chase said with a touch of irritation in his voice.

  Rawlings held up his hands. “Easy there, tiger. Just being convivial and all that.”

  “Maybe we ought to put the interservice rivalry stuff aside for the next few weeks or months,” McDaniels said. “We’ve got a lot to keep after; let’s not start getting on each other’s nerves just yet.”

  “Roger that,” Rawlings said.

  Chase looked appropriately chastised. “Sorry for my attitude, sirs.”

  “You’re doing a bang-up job, Captain,” McDaniels replied. “All of you MI guys are pulling more than your own weight keeping the rest of us slope-headed Neanderthals organized, and I appreciate that.”

  “Hey now, just who are you talking about there, exactly?” Rawlings said with a smile.

  “All of us—I make no distinctions here.” McDaniels nodded to the screen. “But let’s not forget who’s coming for dinner, and let’s not forget who’s going to be the main course.” He looked back at Chase, who still hovered nearby. “Get out of here, Captain. Come back at sixteen hundred. Lieutenant Genovese, do you have an idea of how many units of vaccine we’ve shipped so far, and can you get corroboration from wherever they’re being delivered to? Fort Carson now, right?” McDaniels ignored Chase, looking past him toward the diminutive lieutenant who was his second. Chase eventually got the message, and he reluctantly left the operations center.

  “Will get you that information ASAP, Colonel. We’ve never made a request for a pingback from the receiving end of the chain, but you’re right. Someone needs to keep track of that. I’ll see that it gets done. Do you want the rest of the information in a verbal pulse or just sent to your workstation?”

  “Electronic copy is fine. Let’s make it a scheduled activity with twice-daily overviews. Good copy?”

  “Roger that, Colonel.”

  “Good. Let’s see the fence cams, please.”

  The footage from the UAVs disappeared and was replaced with high-definition images from the outer perimeter. Most revealed nothing more extraordinary than billowing smoke and the scattered bodies of some zeds that had been serviced by sniper fire. The western exposure was starting to heat up, he noticed. More necromorphs were shambling around the perimeter, as if seeking to avoid the brunt of the bombardments occurring to the east and north. Already, several bodies were stuck in the concertina wire there, hanging limp and lifeless. In the background, more carnivorous corpses fell to the sand as sniper fire found them with pinpoint precision.

  “It seems like they’re easily drawn to where we want them at night,” Haley said. “It must be the lights.”

  “Gartrell mentioned some time ago that they do appear to be attracted to light, and if they associate that light with food, they’ll go through anything to get to it.” McDaniels paused for a moment. “You know, I wonder if we can use that to our advantage, somehow.”

  “I’m listening,” Haley said.

  “All those zeds coming in from the east and north, they’re probably the biggest threat. The densest threat, anyway. If we can figure out a way to delay them with some lights, make a good portion of them cluster in one area, we might be able to get the Air Force to hit them with a bomb and take them all out.”

  Rawlings snorted. “What, you mean a nuke?”

  “A daisy cutter,” Haley said.

  McDaniels nodded. “Exactly.” He pulled up a map of Texas on his workstation, then brought it up on one of the monitors. With his mouse, he highlighted an area between Odessa and Midland. “We’ll presume that there are no survivors left in this region here. They were either evacuated or overrun days and weeks ago. If we can set up some kind of visual and maybe aural attractor out here where it’s nice and flat, we might be able to get a big enough group together for the Air Force to take out.”

  “We don’t know if the area’s uninhabited,” Rawlings said.

  “Even if there are still survivors there, we n
eed to consider this,” Haley said. “I doubt we’ll be able to kill enough to even make a dent in their numbers, but the long and the short of it is, we aren’t going to be able to handle millions and millions of stenches. We don’t have the beans, bullets, and barriers.” He paused. “But if there’s any way we can verify any fortified hide sites that civilians might be using, we should consider extracting them. I don’t want a repeat of what happened at the front gate last night. It’s too tough on the men.”

  “Then maybe it’s better if we don’t look too hard for any survivors,” Rawlings said. “It’s a real long shot we could get anyone out alive and not lose our own guys in the process. In a normal operation, we would consider losing a few, but here? We could lose the entire rescue element, and maybe even the aviation asset as well.”

  “Good points from both of you,” McDaniels said, “but we might not have enough time to do anything about any survivors we locate. Let’s take that on a case-by-case basis. Lieutenant Genovese?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Sorry to resource you again so soon, but could you do a couple of things for us? Ask Rapier if they can make another satellite pass over the area indicated on that screen and determine if there are any possible signs of survivors hiding in fortifications that the zeds haven’t broken down. And find out how many daisy cutters the Air Force has in its inventory. We might have a use for them in a couple of nights.”

  10

  Dead Jeffries walked for fifty days straight.

  Never pausing to rest, never deviating over any obstacle unless insurmountable, not even going to great lengths to pursue prey, Dead Jeffries and thousands of Others moved inexorably eastward, then south, tracking along the Gulf of Mexico coastline. At first, their march had been harried by military attacks, most of which were ineffective, but the did serve to delay progress. As the days folded into weeks and weeks gave way to months, the attacks lessened until they finally stopped. By the time that happened, well over ten million necromorphs preceded Dead Jeffries and the Others, advancing into Texas like a plague of locusts.

  In Texas, they found more food. Dead Jeffries had no idea why so much prey had not fled, why the prey had chosen to stop and fight. It was a worthless gesture, for within days, every great city the necromorphs came across fell to them, the living devoured in the streets, in their homes, in their skyscrapers. Again, more military fought against them, and while tens of thousands of necromorphs were returned to death, the defenders were finally forced to retreat. Dead Jeffries had only fed twice during those great battles, but other things of importance had been collected. Weapons. Ammunition. Even what Dead Jeffries would have recognized as 105 millimeter artillery pieces, if Dead Jeffries still had a fully functional brain. While they did not communicate amongst themselves in an intelligent manner, Dead Jeffries recognized that many of the Others were like him, advanced, still retaining elements of what they were before death. When dozens of dead towed the artillery pieces along with them, Dead Jeffries suffered a momentary, distant realization that the weapons might be useful in obtaining food, just like the assault weapon Dead Jeffries carried could be used to wound prey and bring it down so Dead Jeffries could feed.

  The legions of dead continued flowing west, their numbers so great that they darkened the northernmost portion of Texas like black ants marching on a pile of white cane sugar. Dead Jeffries and the Others avoided the conflagration surrounding Fort Hood, content to hunt down the scarce prey in the region before continuing their march, where the gently rolling plains of Texas gave way to scrub brush and earth so dry and desiccated that it was almost sand, where clouds of black flies surrounded the dead like a welcoming veil.

  Dead Jeffries began walking faster. Whatever was calling to him drew near, and Dead Jeffries needed to hurry.

  Otherwise, the Others would cease to exist.

  11

  “Remember, humans are more important than hardware,” Roberson announced over the intercom.

  “Quality is better than quantity,” Gogol said.

  “Special operations forces cannot be mass produced,” Estrada added.

  “And competent special operations forces cannot be created after emergencies occur, such as when legions of the fucking carnivorous dead take over half the country,” Kelly said, embellishing the last of the four Special Forces Truths as the four Green Berets rode in the back of a regular, plain-Jane Army UH-60 Black Hawk. “Which leads me to ask the following question: why the hell are we doing this again, exactly?”

  A fifth man stirred on the other side of the Black Hawk’s troop compartment. “You know the drill, Sergeant Kelly. We drop the generator, hook it up with lights, fire it up, and broadcast tunes over a pair of loudspeakers.”

  “I get all that, Captain,” Kelly said. “But do we really think the stenches are going to be attracted to one of Crazy Hank’s mariachi CDs?”

  “Hey, we’re in Texas! Who wouldn’t be all over Pepe Aguilar?” Estrada said.

  “I’m sure the zeds aren’t very discerning when it comes to works of music,” Captain Zinader said. “Or in this case, works of noise.”

  “Cold, Captain. Totally cold,” Estrada said.

  “With our luck, the racket’ll probably drive the zeds straight toward the camp.” Kelly looked out the open cargo door. Fifty yards to the right of the helicopter was another Black Hawk carrying the rest of Operational Detachment (Alpha) 034, call sign Gambit. Kelly could see one of the other Green Berets sitting next to the door, a sergeant named Hawkins, a real joker. In past insertions, Hawkins would always be flipping them the bird, but instead Hawkins’s eyes were on what lay below them. Kelly looked down as well.

  The landscape was full of stenches. For as far as the eye could see, there were zombies in every direction, slowly marching toward the camp and Joint Task Force SPARTA as if they were no more than army ants. The sight was breathtakingly horrifying, chilling Kelly to the very bone. As the helicopters passed overhead at five hundred feet, several zombies turned and looked up at them, their flat eyes following the aircraft, mouths agape.

  Kelly turned back to the helicopter’s interior. “Hey Captain, just a question. Are we actually expected to survive this, or is this a one-way mission?”

  The captain turned and regarded Kelly for a long moment. “That, Sergeant Kelly, depends on how much warrior ethic you possess.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Kelly said.

  “Hey, man, try not to soil your Depends,” Roberson said, pointing at the legions of dead on the ground. “They think it’s perfume.”

  “Good to know things are looking up. And I mean that literally; those things are watching us fly past them.”

  “We’ll have full gunship support for this, Kelly,” the captain said. “You ever seen an AC-130 work over an insertion point? That’s some mighty big boom-boom, enough to hold the zeds back so we can do what we need to do and get out. Just remember your drills, guys.”

  Gambit had drilled for three hours straight, learning how to hook up the light poles to the generator that was currently slung beneath the Black Hawk, flip it on, and switch on Estrada’s iPod, which was connected to battery-powered speakers. It would take less than four minutes to get everything running with two men doing the work and the others providing security. After that, they would pile back into the Black Hawk and be home in time for an early dinner. They would then wait for the bright flash on the horizon that would hopefully signal the end of thousands of zeds.

  Well, at least that’s the plan, Kelly thought. Drop a generator in the middle of the desert, hook up some lights, play some tunes, then boogie while an AC-130 from an Air Force Special Operations Wing blasted the living crap out of the stenches. And in case things got too close, there were two AH-64D Apache Longbows trailing the Black Hawks. They’d provide top cover and additional fires, if required.

  “Gambit, we’re approaching the landing zone,” one of the aviators said from the cockpit. The Black Hawk’s crew chief and door gunner, seated back-to-
back on either side of the helicopter, leaned against their pintle-mounted machineguns and got ready to go weapons hot.

  Kelly was a little ill at ease that a regular Army flight crew was taking them in, instead of the Night Stalkers or another Air Force special operations aviation unit. Those elements trained to a higher degree of specialization than regular ass and trash drivers, but Kelly figured beggars couldn’t be choosers. So long as the aviators managed to get them into the LZ and then picked them up before the zeds started chowing down on his ass, he was generally good to go.

  The captain leaned out of the open doorway on the helicopter’s left side. “You in contact with the gunship?”

  “Roger that, sir. They’re about to open up and create the LZ for us. We’ll establish an orbit outside of their kill box and wait for the word to go in.”

  “Hooah.”

  As the helicopter entered a right turn, Kelly leaned out into the rotorwash once again. He saw the slate gray form of the AC-130U establishing an orbit of its own, its four props catching the sunlight as they spun. A converted C-130 Hercules transport, the AC-130U Spooky II was a well-armed and widely respected munitions platform. Equipped with a 25-millimeter Equalizer Gatling cannon, a 40-millimeter Bofors cannon, and one 105-millimeter M102 Howitzer—all located on the left side of the aircraft—the AC-130U could inflict remarkably devastating punishment even against fortified targets. Kelly knew from his time in Iraq and Afghanistan that the retrofitted cargo plane was a weapon system of nightmares, and that many an eager jihadi had scored an early meeting with Allah, thanks to the tender ministrations of the AC-130. He sensed movement and glanced over his shoulder to see Gogol, Roberson, and the captain joining him and Estrada at the door. The wires from their headsets swung in the breeze.

  “This ought to be worth the price of admission,” the captain said. “They can stay low and spend a lot of time on target since they know no one’s going to be shooting at them.”