by SP Durnin
“A fhag ganade! Fhag ganade! Fhag ganade!” Foster gritted his teeth as the bone realigned. “Shid! Yu endoyed thad, ooman!”
Rae showed him no empathy. “Next time set it yourself.”
“Ah will!” George squinted at Allan.
The slim mechanic stood a short distance away, shaking and holding his ribs, struggling to keep it in as his face turned beet-red. “Good thing she didn’t pull the pin first. And don’t let Sampson hear you say things like that. I’m sure he’d be offended.”
“Thig’s ligh whad?” Foster asked darkly giving him “The Stink Eye.”
“Fag! Grenade!” Ryker’s eyes were bugging out. “Oh! All I can see is Richard Simmons skipping around with a Roman candle, shooting fireworks at people and yelling ‘Prepare to be fabulous’!”
“Boy, iv yu led tha’ grin gid oudda condrol, so helb me…”
The incensed expression of the aged man’s face pushed Al over the edge and he staggered back, howling in laughter.
“Das id.” George moved to pursue Ryker, who turned and took off through one of the vehicle bay doors with a quickness. At least, with as much quickness as someone who couldn’t breathe, because they were laughing so hard they might very, well pee themselves could muster. “I don’ keah if the liddle pick idz O’Conna’s best fend, I’b gonna kill im…”
“Alright, what’s the big emergency that just couldn’t wait ten or twenty more minutes?” Kat demanded as she and Jake strode down the clam-style hatch, hand-in-hand. Neither looked in the least bit self-conscious about it, but the blue-haired Asian did give Foster a dirty look. “That’ll teach you to bust in unannounced when a girl is trying to have some quality time with her fella’.”
Jake stroked her lower back. “Easy.”
In a display of iron will, Rae didn’t allow her expression to change one iota. George watched it for even a ghost of a grin, but she didn’t let on he’d just virtually had his own words thrown back at him. “Well, since it seems we’ve killed just about everybody that needs killin’ in the area, this time it’s just the usual.”
“Could we narrow that down a bit?” Cho shivered as Jake’s fingers played over her spine. “For us that could be nearly anything. UFOs, a sex cult of werewolves, Godzilla showing up off the coast…”
George snorted. “True enough. The short version is we’ve got a pair a’ hordes bearing down on us.”
“Oh, give us a fucking break, will you?” O’Connor closed his eyes and shook one fist at the heavens. “We fought a war just a few days ago! Is having some time to recover before you shit on our riff again too much to hope for?”
“Feel better?” Cho hugged his waist.
He sighed. “Not really. But it couldn’t hurt to ask.”
“If you’re finished?” Rae asked. “Like Mr. Tact here says, there’s—”
“Love Machine.”
She looked at George. “What?”
“My new nickname, hot-stuff.” He pulled a cigar from his tool-bag and lit up. “Got a ring to it, yeah? Lo-o-o-ove Machine.”
“I am never. Ever. Calling you that. Not ever.”
Foster waggled his eyebrows. “Bet ya’ will.”
“Argh!” Norris gripped her head with both hands and counted to ten. Out loud. “Anyway! Like he says; we’ve got two, large hordes coming towards Pecos. We need to come up with a way…quickly…to insure they don’t pile up over the walls and turn us into kibble. We just wanted the two of you to come along when we speak with the council.”
O’Connor didn’t reply. He stood there, eyes far away, wearing the oddest expression.
“Hey.” Kat used one hand to turn his face toward her. “Where’d you go, hero?”
“I have an idea,” he told her.
Cho was leery. “Does it involve using yourself as bait, as trade, sitting in a watchtower, or destroying a dam?”
“Nope.” Jake shook his head. “In fact, if I’m right—and I’m not a hundred percent positive I am—we may not even have to fire a shot to eradicate the lot of them.”
“Then, I frikkin’ love your plan!” Kat said brightly. “I want to marry your plan and have its babies!”
George motioned them to follow him the door. “One step at a time. First: you tell us about this idea a’ yours while we walk, boy. If it’s viable, we convince the council ta’ help set it up. After we make these hordes comin’ dead again, we blow this place for sun, surf, and fresh seafood on the West Coast. Then you and sex-kitten over there can bump ugly all you want to spawn yer own little clan of crazy-ass, rug-rat ninja.”
“Are you sure we still need him?” Cho looked at Jake with a pained expression. “I can make it look like an accident, I swear. Nobody would find out. Nobody.”
“Maybe later,” he soothed.
Kat pouted adorably. But she didn’t move to kill anyone either. Jake took that as a sign of her growing sense of restraint.
I should lock the door of our sleeping pod from now on, he thought. Maybe even find some handcuffs? No, that wouldn’t work. She could pick those in about two seconds flat without even trying.
Arm around Cho’s shoulders, he followed George and Rae. “Okay. Here’s what I was thinking, what if we…”
* * *
“Are you people out of your minds?” Wilson screamed.
“Slow your roll, Nancy. Let’s hear the fella’ out.” Garth chuckled as Rancher Nichols comment caused the woman obvious agitation. “We’ve got time.”
Jake shook his head. “We don’t really. We’ve got the personnel, we’ve got the skills, but these two groups of maggot-heads are really getting close, so time is exactly what we’re short on. That’s why we need to do this now, before the leading edge of either horde shows up at the gates and we lose the opportunity.”
Ted stood looking from the school’s second story window. “How fast can you do it?”
Wilson almost had a seizure. “You can’t seriously be considering…?”
“Do you have a better idea?” Jake demanded. “If so, now’s the time! I for one don’t like the thought of going out there with two gigantic crowds, who want to eat my ass, due to show up within the next few hours!”
Secretary Wilson had bupkis. That was evident from the way she sat there, silently doing a fair impression of a goldfish.
Ted glanced about at the other councilors. “Time’s against us, folks. I say we go with O’Connor’s plan.”
“I’m for it.” Garth’s shaved head nodded as did Nichols’s under his Stetson.
“Seconded!” Willow slapped her palm on the table. “If their battle with General Hess is any indication, Jake and his friends have a talent for winning against impossible odds. I’d much rather take this chance, than regret our inaction when the creatures are coming over our walls.”
“We don’t even know if they will! Or can!” The Secretary clearly didn’t want to accept the possibility of zombies gaining entry to their sanctuary.
Rae stepped forward and tossed a small pile of pages on the table. “These are numerous aerial photographs of the two hordes. You’ll note that the one to the north stretches for nearly a mile. The southern one is a little less numerous, but estimations place their combined number at somewhere over one-hundred and fifty thousand dead. The walls might be double-layered steel filled with rock and dirt, and they’re surely far too heavy for any number of those things to shift. But that’s more than enough zombies to stack up a mere thirty-six feet to top the barriers. There’s not enough ammunition in the whole town to stop them if that happens. It’s either this, or everyone scatters with what they can.”
“We can’t evacuate Pecos with such short notice! There aren’t enough operational vehicles to transport even half—”
“Precisely.” Rae closed off Wilson’s final line of argument. “We could make it to safety, no problem. We have George and the Mimi. You saw what it did to Hess’s monster, and the armor on that thing was an inch thick. Do you think a horde of rotten corpses could really stop her? You do remember
how we got here, don’t you? There had to be over five thousand of those things Route 285. Now, think about what thirty times that number will be like. If we had any sense at all, we’d hop in the Mimi and bail on you right now. But we not going to. You can’t leave, so we won’t. So. What’s your answer?”
Sergeant Major Close stepped away from his place by the door. “No offense to the council, but further discussion is pointless. This is our only chance. O’Connor? My soldiers and I are ready to help. How many men do you need?”
Jake’s eyes got that look. The one they’d had during his breakdown just after Laurel’s death, when his mind had gone bye-bye for weeks, until Cho broke him out of it. It scared her, and very little did anymore.
She put a hand on his arm. “Babe?”
To Kat’s relief, Jake shook the expression away. His shadowed eyes regarded her with calm determination and more affection than she’d ever deserve. That was why she’d waited for him. That look right there. The one that let her know for certain he loved her, and would do anything, absolutely anything it took to keep Cho safe.
Even if nine times out of ten she was the one that saved him.
“All of them.”
He offered his hand and Close took it in his own. “Done.”
“Alright.” Jake turned to his friends. “Let’s get to work.”
* * *
“Jesus H. Christ. Look at all of them!” Mooney stared over the wall at the approaching horror, Sampson, Nichols, and Garth on one side, Gwen and her husband-to-be Mark on his other, with the survivors of Langley intermixed into the defenders of Pecos.
The southern horde made it to their walls only an hour prior, and the creatures were already packed nearly shoulder to shoulder against the barrier. Their moans, calling out dumbly for the taste of living flesh, chilled the defenders visibly. Many people crossed themselves, some prayed, others spit down at the ghouls or cursed the horrid things as they waited, but all felt the cold hand of fear. The Dark Angel seemingly made his rounds with abandon that afternoon, but the living were thankful for his presence.
They only hoped his cousin Death didn’t decide to stop by unannounced.
* * *
At the north gate, Garth crinkled his nose and sniffed. “You know, that’s gotta be the worst thing about the whole damn apocalypse.”
“Which part? The lack of variety in your diet, or the whole ‘Zombies trying to eat the living’ thing?” That came from Ryan Szimanski. While still battered, and in possession of some seriously aching ribs, Ted hadn’t been able to keep the search team leader from taking a place on the wall.
“It’s the smell. You kinda get used to it after a while, but a bunch of these nasty shits get together and it’s like the stink just amplifies.” The shaven-headed man took a swig from the canteen at his hip. “Know what it reminds me of?”
“Your date last Friday night?” This came from a healthy-looking country girl by the name of Heather Vern Nielsen.
Heather and her long-time fiancé Josh—both from Montana—had been stranded in Pecos from the start of the outbreak, just like Szimanski and his girlfriend. In the days since Ryan’s team had been decimated by Elle and Gale’s advance RUST unit, she’d become his second in command. The feisty brunette carried a seven-round Remington 870 she’d received from Ted’s store of firearms, and two full bandoleers of shotgun shells crossed between her breasts over a black ‘Bitch, I see dead people!’ t-shirt. She also favored all manner of modified farm tools when it came to in-close fighting, an inordinate number of which she somehow carried about in a Hunger Games pack on her back. Ryan had witnessed her produce everything from sickles to the head of a pitchfork out of that thing, and had no Earthly clue how she fit so many into such small a backpack.
Then again, he’d seen his girlfriend Kari pull an actual pair kung fu sai out of hers.
It must be a woman thing. He decided, silently.
Garth winked at Heather. “Ah, if you were just twenty or so years older girl, I’d call for a preacher right this second. No disrespect for you intended, Josh. But no. After I thought about it a bit, the whole damn world seems to smell like a moldy pig carcass, that’s been dunked into an overflowing Port-a-John. In the middle of July. In Arizona.”
Ryan considered that. “Wow. You have given that some thought.”
“Eh. Occupies my spare time. All minute and a half of it, right before I finally get my nightly three hours of sleep after the last team checks back in.”
“That explains your winning personality,” Heather laughed.
Garth glanced at her and did a double-take. “Now, I know you weren’t holding that a minute ago. Where the hell exactly did you get that pick-ax?
* * *
The zombies just kept coming.
There were so many at the walls, at the gates. Willow couldn’t even begin to count them all as the moaned out drunkenly and pounded the flesh of their dead fists against the steel walls of Pecos.
If not for the barrier containers stacked three high, the South Texas haven would’ve had no chance at all. Simply blocking the streets with automobiles wouldn’t have worked, because the press of so many bodies would eventually move the sturdiest of commercial vehicles. Fortifying a warehouse or something of the like had been proposed in the early days of the outbreak, but that plan too was flawed. Jake had spoken with Willow about whey he and his friends had to abandon Foster’s hideaway. Reinforced concrete walls are worth exactly zip when you’re running out of food. The thought of chain-link fencing was a joke. Only in very remote areas—and perhaps with a strand or two of razor-wire on top, to further stymie the dead from simply climbing over—that might be sufficient. If it was well maintained. And well-guarded. And you had the ability to keep your perimeter fully illuminated round the clock. But against numbers such as those Laurel’s twin saw beyond their walls now was a different story altogether.
It was much like watching an ocean. A bloody, ravenous, foul-smelling, gore-soaked, carnivorous, rotting ocean, but an ocean all the same.
It was the way the things moved. While the dead didn’t cooperate in any way, Allan had long ago pointed out there were similarities common to each zombie.
Their natural state seemed to be “roamer mode,” as Al termed it. The creatures staggered about numbly, never resting, never sleeping, never stopping, until they encountered some kind of stimuli.
If a zombie smelled living flesh—and it didn’t seem they had an enhanced sense of smell, thank God—it would search it out.
If a sound piqued its curiosity, the thing would attempt to locate the source.
If one caught sight of prey, however, all bets were off. Every zombie, every single one, reacted the very same way. Upon observing a living human, their first response was to begin that awful gurgling moaning. Whether this was an unconscious scare tactic or a way to alert other members of their horrid fraternity to the presence of fresh meat, no one had any idea. Then the creature would advance towards prey, teeth clacking together loudly like a pair of hellish castanets, still moaning for all it was worth. It should be noted that this action often caused the zombie to bite off its own tongue. Jake and his party had encountered many a creature which had done just that, but the maggot-heads never seemed to care.
After locating and closing on their prey, the dead attempted to grab whatever they pursued. A person, a car, the enormous blade on the prow of the Screamin’ Mimi (which always resulted in them becoming “roadkill”), it didn’t matter. Zombies were terrifying. They didn’t feel pain, they couldn’t feel fear, and they didn’t have an ounce of empathy, mercy or human compassion.
But they were also stupid as a sack-full of hammers.
Unlike the living, zombies didn’t associate with one-another. They had no society, or hierarchy. They didn’t even possess the fundamental ability to reason or to plan. During their journey from Ohio, Rae had noted many times the ghouls had all the cognitive abilities—and memory retention capacity—of the average goldfish. That
fact was why humanity still existed. Homo sapiens would band together to accomplish a task, or overcome a threat. They would, save for only the most extreme and solitary-minded cases, seek out more humans when they were lonely. While it was common knowledge that animals such as canines are “pack animals,” few realized human beings are as well. They’d fight to protect each other. Protect their mates. Their offspring. The young of other members of their species, even though they shared no genetic relation. They’d give their lives for them, for a cause, for the place they called “home,” or simply for what they believed to be “The Right Thing.”
Yes, monsters were real.
Yes, they vastly outnumbered the normal humans.
Yes, the dead had taken what once belonged to humanity for themselves.
Yes, their only wish, their only goal, was to devour and make the world a silent graveyard of empty cities and putrid flesh.
But they would not succeed. Not when there were those still among the living with the hearts of heroes. They didn’t have to be the biggest, or the fastest, or the most handsome. They didn’t require the combat training of a super-soldier, or the physical abilities of a martial arts master. They had no prerequisites for high IQs, or to possess the genius common to great minds throughout history. It wasn’t required that they be paragons of virtue, or cling to a long-dated code of Medieval morals. They didn’t even need to be especially courageous. They were just people, after all. Heroes experienced fear, as everyone did. They simply didn’t allow it to rule them. To dictate their actions, or lock them in a state of ennui in which action was unthinkable. As the old saying went, ‘Heroes are no more brave than any normal person. They’re just brave for one second longer’.
Willow came to this realization as she stood beside Ted on the wall, listening to the dead cry out pitifully in hunger below. Despite the brave face she wore, she was frightened nearly out of her mind, and with good reason. There was teeming mass of pissed-off, homicidal, undead cannibals outside, wanting to tear down their defenses and devour everyone within Pecos. Who wouldn’t be terrified in the face of such horror? If given a choice, Laurel’s twin would much rather be in a closet somewhere with the door locked, curled into a fetal ball and crying her eyes out. But that wouldn’t help the situation at all. So when Jake and his companions put forth yet another of their hare-brained schemes, she’d squared her shoulders like the rest and prepared herself for a fight.