“All right, Rangers, listen up. Once those things start to make it across the first trench, take ’em down. I want them blocked, so they have no choice but to spread out along the inside of the trench. I want a pile of bodies so high they have no choice but to try to go around. You understand what I’m looking for?”
“You want a pile of meat so high the rest of the stenches can’t get around it. Hooah, Colonel!” said the Ranger next to him. He shouted, “Once the stenches come out of the trench, open up! Let’s make a pile! Pass it on!”
McDaniels heard the command passed down the line on either side of him. He repeated the order over the radio, and a moment later, Haley’s booming voice repeated it over the loudspeakers. Overhead, the first pair of Apaches broke station and turned back for the aviation assembly area. They had gone weapons dry. The second Apache team took their place, and more rockets arced through the gloom, adding their violence to the regular detonations caused by the mortar team.
“Looks like everyone can stop sitting on their hands now, Colonel.”
McDaniels recognized Gartrell’s voice, but he didn’t turn to look at him. “A little sooner than I’d hoped. The zoomies must’ve messed up. They delivered a load of conventional bombs instead of incendiaries. Didn’t do shit to hold the stenches back.”
“Make a hole, make it wide!” Gartrell said to the Rangers. They pushed aside and allowed the sergeant major to move in next to McDaniels. Gartrell pulled his binoculars from his knapsack and raised them to his eyes. It was all he could do; the zeds were well outside his AA-12’s range. “So this is the fault of the Air Farce, huh? Typical.”
“You know anything about an inbound AC-130 with a classified payload?” McDaniels asked.
“Negative. Air Force Special Operations Command rarely informs lowly enlisted men in other services of their plans. But at least it’s a shooter, so hopefully the gunship will visit hellfire and damnation upon a few thousand of our closest friends.” Gartrell surveyed the situation for a moment. “I take it that we’ve decided to let them fill up the trenches and then burn them down?”
“Affirmative. I don’t want to use up any more bullets than we have to. And the way I figure it, the flames will hold them back long enough for the zoomies to get their act together.”
“Roger that.”
McDaniels saw one zed suddenly step back from the edge of the trench. It faded off to the side, jostled by other corpses that plunged into the abyss without hesitation. The zombie wore a pair of tattered blue jeans and the dusty remains of a denim shirt that revealed pasty white skin. There were several bite sites all across the ghoul’s chest, and one of its nipples had been bitten off, leaving a deep gouge in its pectoral muscles. The ghoul kept moving sideways, pushing through the cascade of tumbling zombies, its dull eyes on the distant wall of CONEX containers sitting high atop the tall earthen berm.
“Target at about two o’clock, Sarmajor. Check it out.”
“Got it, Colonel. Looks like we have a smarty out there. Hey, Rangers, take a look at this.” Gartrell lowered his binoculars and pointed out the single zombie shuffling away from the mass of necrotic flesh that tumbled into the trench. “You guys see that one?”
The Rangers standing nearby all turned their rifles toward the zombie and examined it through the scopes mounted on top of their SCARs. All of them gave an affirmation that they had eyes on target.
“Why isn’t it moving with the others?” one Ranger asked.
“Because it’s one of the super zeds,” McDaniels said. “It has a higher operational threshold than the others. Those are the ones that are very dangerous, troops. Keep your eyes out, and if you see anything like that guy there, kill it right away.”
“You want us to shoot it now, sir?”
“I want one of you to shoot it, not everyone.”
The Ranger sounded offended. “Of course not, sir. I have the shot.” McDaniels glanced over at the Ranger who stood on the other side of Gartrell. He had his SCAR shouldered and tracking the target.
McDaniels turned back to his scope. “That’s going to be a hell of a shot with a SCAR, Ranger.”
“Then watch and be amazed, sir.”
McDaniels snorted. Typical Ranger braggadocio.
The Ranger’s rifle cracked once, and an instant later, the zed went down as the top of its head was shorn away. The second line of razor wire was still standing in that area, and the corpse fell into it and hung suspended above the ground.
“Huh,” Gartrell said. “Pretty good shot. Beginner’s luck, right?”
“No way, Sergeant Major. All skill, and it’s a repeatable procedure.”
Gartrell snorted. “From your lips to God’s ear, son.”
Above the din of combat and the moaning of the dead, McDaniels heard the droning rumble of turboprops. He looked up into the slowly brightening sky and saw a dark shape of an AC-130 lumbering through the air.
“Looks like the zoomies are back to make some amends,” Gartrell observed.
“Uh-huh.”
“Leonidas, this is Hercules Ops. Over.”
“Ops, Leonidas. Go ahead. Over.”
“Leonidas, this is Ops. The AC-130 is about to make its first gunnery orbit, and they’re setting up to engage about five hundred meters outside the wire, on the other side of the road. They need to step down to three thousand feet, and they want to make sure none of our aircraft or personnel are in the zone. They want your permission to fire. Over.”
“Ops, this is Leonidas. As far as I’m concerned, they can fire whenever they’re ready. Make sure the Apache and Little Bird teams know where the Air Force kill box is so they don’t move into it. Over.”
“Leonidas, Ops. Roger that. Air Force will be initiating their mission in about sixty seconds. Over.”
“Ops, this is Leonidas. Roger.”
The AC-130 moved further downrange, heading toward the growing glow on the eastern horizon. McDaniels watched it descend, then turned back to the tide of dead spilling into the trench. He saw arms flailing below the trench’s rim. The pile of bodies was almost at the top. Some corpses began picking their way across the undulating mass. Most fell off to either side, but one or two made it and slowly began hauling themselves out. The second trench was thirty meters away, and the path to it was free of obstructions, so the defenders on the wall and in the observation towers would have clear lanes of fire.
“Okay, guys,” McDaniels said. “Hit ’em.”
The Rangers opened up, and the ghouls staggering across the rolling pile of thrashing corpses went down. All along the wall, rifle fire rang out in intermittent bursts, and zombies fell. Soon, the zombies had no choice but to step around the growing pile of dead, and they fell back into the trench.
“There’s got to be thousands of them down there by now,” Gartrell said.
“Probably.” McDaniels spoke into this microphone. “Operations, this is Leonidas. Take a look at the trench cams and let me know how full the first trench is. Over.”
“Leonidas, this is Hercules Operations. Ah, it looks like the first trench is only about twenty, twenty-five percent full. Over.”
“Well, shit. That’s not enough,” Gartrell said. He’d heard the response over his own headset. “Tell you what, sir. I’ll take some troops down with me, and we’ll stand on the other side of the trench, away from that pile up there.” He pointed at the mass of bodies visible inside the first trench. “I guarantee you most of those things will come right for us, and we can spread them out a bit.”
“Ballsy move, Gartrell. You sure you want to be the one to do it?”
“Not much danger to it, so long as none of these young Rangers shoot me in the back.”
McDaniels held up his hand, beckoning Gartrell to stand by. “Ops, this is Leonidas. Let me speak to Hercules Six. Over.”
“Leonidas, you’ve got Hercules Six. Go ahead. Over.” Haley’s voice was all business, its usual flat monotone.
McDaniels relayed Gartrell’s plan, exp
laining that they couldn’t reasonably ignite the trench until it was close to capacity. “Otherwise, it’s just a waste of incendiary,” he added.
“Understood, Leonidas. But the Sarmajor should not be the one allowed outside the wall. I’ll have some of my troops do it. Better to keep the Sarmajor and his smarts on the inside. Over.”
McDaniels looked at Gartrell. “I have to agree with him, Gartrell.”
Gartrell shrugged. “Hey, whatever you guys think is best.”
“Hercules Six, this is Leonidas. Roger, I agree with you. The sergeant major will remain inside the camp. Dispatch your team as quickly as possible. Over.”
“On it, Leonidas. Hercules Six out.”
McDaniels rubbed his eyes. “Well, that’s—”
A sudden flash in the desert made him stop in midsentence, and the Rangers on the wall around him reacted to it. McDaniels looked up as a lancing stream of green-white light stabbed out from the orbiting AC-130 like a laser beam from a science fiction movie. The beam moved through the masses of the dead, and sparks and fire rose into the air. McDaniels looked through his rifle scope, squinting against the beam’s intensity. Whenever the beam touched one of the dead, the corpse was literally disintegrated on the spot, exploding into a puff of flame and greasy black smoke.
“What the fuck is that?” Gartrell asked.
“Damn, the Air Force is using phasers against the zeds!” one of the Rangers said. “It’s like freaking Star Trek!” Several of the Rangers cheered when another beam shot out from the AC-130, and another few dozen dead were effectively atomized. The beam didn’t last for very long, only one or two seconds, but the Spooky was traveling fast enough that the beam effectively slashed through the densely packed zombies like a scythe through wheat. After a four or five second pause, the beam would sear the air again. Another few dozen stenches disappeared into smoking piles of disassociated flesh.
“Huh. Looks like the zoomies modified one of their airborne laser systems and turned it into a ground attack weapon,” McDaniels said. “Guess their classified payload isn’t so secret anymore. Looks great, but we’re going to need about a million more of them to make a difference.”
***
Staff Sergeant Jorge Roche led his chalk through the interior gate and into the V-shaped kill zone that faced the zombies rolling in from the east. He and the rest of his nine-man element wore their SOICS gear, full Darth Vader mode. Ahead, the zombies amassed in the first trench, their moans and howls and hisses filling the air, countered by semi-automatic gunfire that Roche thought was remarkably restrained despite its lethality. If he’d been on the wall, he’d be rocking and rolling with everything he had.
“Ops, Chalk Two-Four. We’re approaching the second trench. Go ahead and lower the bridge. Over.”
“Roger that, Chalk Two-Four. Bridge is on its way down. Over.”
Roche led the way toward the slowly descending drawbridge, his gait a series of long lopes that covered ground quickly. The eastern horizon was brightening, and his night vision goggles were of little use. Pretty soon, he’d have to slip on his sunglasses, as the sun would strike him full in the face. The drawbridge fell into place and formed a wide avenue of reinforced plate steel that could support heavy construction equipment. The Rangers scurried across it quickly, and as soon as they were standing on the stretch of real estate that separated the two trenches, the drawbridge retracted into its upright position.
The stenches across the chasm went wild when they saw the Rangers. They lurched toward them, tumbling into the trench like carnivorous lemmings. They displayed not even an ounce of self-preservation, and that opened a big can of worry in Roche’s belly. Everything he’d been told was true. Those things would sacrifice themselves, go through any ordeal, to feed.
Movement to his right caught his eye. He turned and raised his weapon as one of the zeds made it across the undulating pile. It was a runner, one of those stenches still in good enough physical condition to move fast. It sprinted toward them, practically roaring, its eyes dull and vacant, its jaws spread wide. Its entire head disappeared a moment later as a big caliber weapon—probably one of the .50 cals some of the snipers used—blasted right through it. The headless corpse skidded across the packed desert earth.
“Okay, let’s roll,” Roche told his men. They moved northerly at a subdued pace, ensuring they stayed in view of the zombies coming through the wire. The pack of wailing dead followed, moving away from the massive pile up in the center of the first trench. The zeds marched right into the excavation, tumbling to its bottom, slamming into the jellified jet fuel and accelerants that made up the incendiary mixture at the bottom. Thousands of them. Roche heard them smash into it like rocks hitting deep mud. He drifted over to the edge of the trench even though he had been warned against doing so. He peered into its depths and saw the dead flailing, looking up at him with hungry faces, their teeth clicking together as if they were biting the air. The fall hadn’t bothered them, and the fumes from the incendiary cocktail didn’t seem to do much either. Roche shook his head and stepped away from the edge of the trench, keeping one eye on the path ahead and another on the huge pack of stenches that followed them on the other side. The trench was filling up nicely.
By the time they’d walked around half the camp, the word came for them to retreat across the second trench at the next drawbridge, which was located across from the western gate. Roche acknowledged the command, and he urged his troops to follow him at a faster pace. The angry horde of corpses didn’t lose interest. Instead, the sight of the would-be prey slipping away only increased their agitation, and they surged into the trench, reaching for the soldiers the entire time. Once the men were safely across, the drawbridge was raised, and Roche led his chalk around the camp again, drawing more zeds into the second trench.
It was full in less than ten minutes.
“Chalk Two-Four, this is Operations. You’d better get back inside. We’re going to ignite the trenches.”
“Roger that, Operations. Chalk Two-Four, out.” Roche waved the Rangers toward the east gate. They’d circumnavigated the entire camp. “Okay, let’s get the hell out of here!” He stood overwatch as the Rangers jogged past, the electrically-assisted actuators in the joints of their SOICS gear whining slightly in the brightening morning.
Roche lifted his rifle and scanned the trench lines. The first trench was overflowing; the second would be in a similar condition in just a few minutes. Out in the desert, fire suddenly blossomed as more incendiaries were dropped onto the ranks of the dead. The flames splashed across the tortured landscape like fiery water, immolating everything they touched in an instant. Roche turned away from the sight and hurried after his men. He didn’t want to be outside the walls when the trenches went up.
14
The trenches burned for almost an entire day.
Ignited by white phosphorus charges, the volatile incendiary soup burned at thousands of degrees. Those actually in the mixture melted almost immediately as the combustible caught and burned at such high temperatures that necrotic flesh and bone were essentially vaporized. The column of withering heat ascended immediately, melting the outer layers of the concrete sheath that contained it as it caused the rest of the necromorphs trapped within its confines to explode. The biological shrapnel was then disintegrated by the heat, and to those who witnessed the immolation of thousands of zombies, it looked as if the corpses almost disappeared in the bright light. The white smoke from the mix turned black as it reduced the zombies to a harmless scattering of invisible carbon molecules that gently wafted away from the camp, courtesy of the light breeze.
The heat was so intense that those standing guard on the wall could feel its caress even through the desert day. In places where the fallen concertina wire was close to the trench line, the metal wire glowed red-hot. The billowing smoke made it impossible to see the desert beyond the trenches, even from the observation towers. For the rest of the day, the only visual contact the staff in the tactical ope
rations center had with the outside world was through helicopters and unmanned drones, which flew over the obscurant. The electronic devices along the perimeter could see through the smoke, so some margin of “ground truth” could be retained. What they showed, while neither shocking nor unexpected, was still jarring.
The army of stenches outside the camp simply marched into the wall of flames and smoke surrounding the installation.
McDaniels and the others watched on a monitor in the tactical operations center without much comment. The zeds staggered to their own destruction without any hesitation, hundreds at a time. The necromorphs knew no fear.
“I gotta wonder,” Haley said after a time, “if we have enough incendiary mixture to keep them out of the camp.”
“I requested more three days ago,” McDaniels said. “We’ve got what we’ve got. There isn’t any more that can be sent to us.”
Haley looked at him with surprised eyes. “You’re kidding me.”
McDaniels shook his head. “Bull, I wish I was. The fact of the matter is the entire military just isn’t prepared to fight an enemy in these numbers. Not here, not inside the US. And not without things going nuclear.” He nodded toward the monitors. “Even the Russians couldn’t stop them, and I heard they used low-yield nukes. That took care of the immediate infestations, but even they couldn’t nuke their entire country to save it.”
“Colonel McDaniels?”
“Go ahead, Chase.”
“Rapier Actual is looking for you, sir.”
McDaniels exchanged glances with Haley and Gartrell, who hovered nearby. “Anyone want to bet this isn’t going to be good news?”
“Maybe he’s calling to tell us he’s got his mitts on some more incendiary mixture,” Haley said.
“Maybe he’s calling to tell us to eat a lot of beans and keep a Bic lighter handy, so when the zeds come over the walls, we can light our farts on ’em,” Gartrell said.
McDaniels snorted and shook his head. “I never knew you could be such the comedian, Gartrell.”
The Rising Horde, Volume Two (Sequel to The Gathering Dead ) Page 15