It appeared to Halverson that Rogers was losing his mind.
“Once you kill zombies, it’s a piece of cake to kill people!” cried Rogers. He started laughing his head off.
He continued aiming his pistol at soldiers and blasting their heads.
Halverson didn’t know what to do. He wanted to get out of here as much as did Rogers, but Rogers seemed to be on a maniacal killing spree. To interfere with Rogers at this point might mean Halverson’s death.
Halverson glanced at Tom. Tom was just as confused and horrified as Halverson. Tom, it was obvious to Halverson, didn’t know how to react to Rogers’s access of violence.
“Zombies! Zombies are here!” cried someone in the crowd.
Halverson realized the cries were emanating from the same direction that the screams had come from.
A soldier with an AK-47 loosed a burst into Rogers. His chest bloody, Rogers crumpled to the ground.
Terrified, the crowd stampeded, not knowing what was happening what with all the gunfire and hysterical screams about zombies.
It became clear to Halverson that zombies had somehow entered the compound and were assaulting the crowd that was funneling into the stadium. Stampeding spectators jostled Halverson every which way in their haste to flee the area.
Tom, Rosie, Mildred, and Tanya gathered around Halverson.
“What do we do now?” asked Mildred.
“We need to get out of here before the soldiers attack us in retaliation against Painter’s death,” said Tom.
“Not to mention the zombies attacking.”
Halverson could now make out several zombies stumbling into the panicked crowd. Their yawning mouths dripping with freshly drawn blood, the creatures were clawing the air in front of them and snagging anybody who got in there way. Whoever was unfortunate enough to cross paths with the voracious creatures was mauled by them.
Arterial blood spurted ten feet into the air as zombies ripped out the throats of the spectators who fell into their clutches.
Distracted by the onslaught of the zombies, the soldiers weren’t paying attention to Halverson and his group. The soldiers were intent on clearing a path through the helter-skelter crowd toward the creatures so they could repel them.
Halverson could hear zombies moaning with delight as they fed on flesh freshly torn from members of the crowd that had fallen into their clutches. The unearthly moans seemed to panic the crowd even more. It was a maelstrom of confusion wherever Halverson looked.
A sea of distraught human bodies was pounding against the chain-link fence that surrounded the stadium. People were trampling each other into the ground in their desperation to escape from the zombies.
It looked to Halverson like thousands of zombies were staggering toward the stadium from the road. Wall-to-wall zombies stretched everywhere as far as the eye could see into the darkness.
No matter how many of the creatures the soldiers shot, twice as many seemed to supersede them.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” said Tom, his face frantic.
“The question is, where to?” said Halverson. “We’re surrounded by those things.”
“We stay here, we’re dead meat.”
Indeed, the gyrating crowd seemed to be acting as a vortex, sucking Halverson and his tiny band into its center where the zombies lurked.
“How can we move anywhere surrounded by all of these people?” said Rosie, attempting to stave off people in the mob who were shoving past her.
Jostled by the crowd, Mildred was having a hard time keeping on her feet.
The torrents of people generated by the mob seemed to have a life of their own as well as a path of their own. Everybody was moving in a different direction, ginning up mass confusion and increasing the panic among the mob.
Meanwhile, the teeming hordes of zombies steadily plowed their way through the crowd, tearing off arms and heads and consuming them with blood-smeared mouths. The individuals in the crowd that stumbled were even less fortunate. As soon as the zombies spotted a downed person, they pounced on him and tore apart his entire body in their lust to devour it.
Halverson could make out even now three zombies crouched over a supine man pushing sixty. They were ripping his chest apart, grabbing ribs in his rib cage, breaking them off, raising them to their mouths, and bolting down the flesh and blood on them, picking them clean. Moments later, the creatures were hoicking the bloody coils of his intestines out of his shredded stomach and munching on them like they were sausages. After the creatures polished off the colon they searched for more organs to chow down.
The zombies were coming from two directions, as near as Halverson could figure. The two armies of creatures were crushing and annihilating the crowd with the stadium as their focal point. If the crowd ran away from one swarm of zombies, they ended up running into the arms of the other.
“We’re caught in the center of this mess,” said Tom. “We need to get to the side somehow.”
Which was easier said than done. The crosscurrents generated by the movements of the crowd were sucking everyone toward either one horde of zombies or the other.
“Whatever you do, stay out of the stadium,” said Halverson, fighting off the crowd. “We get stuck in there, we’re trapped.”
“Where’s Tanya?” asked Tom.
He cast around for her in the milling mob.
Halverson followed suit. He caught sight of her fifteen-odd feet away. The impetus of the panicked mob was carrying her away from Halverson and Tom like a rushing river. She was too weak to resist the onrush of the unruly mob.
“Over there,” Halverson told Tom and pointed at Tanya.
Tom was closer to her. He and Halverson tried to pick their way through the mass of humanity flooding past them.
“Tanya!” Tom yelled.
Halverson didn’t know if she could hear Tom. The screams and groans issuing from the rowdy crowd were drowning out all other noise. In any case, thanks to her loss of blood from her suicide attempt she looked out of it to Halverson. She didn’t even appear to be fighting the onrushing mob. She looked to be drifting along, going with the flow—no matter where it bore her.
Tom clawed his way through the individuals crammed against him. He slugged a roly-poly man in the face and shoved the guy out of his way. The fat man made to retaliate. Before he had a chance, another man snatched the fat man’s arm, spun the fat man around, socked him in his mug, and kicked him into the eddying crowd.
Tom fought the riptide of the mob and managed to reach Tanya. Woozy, she gazed at him with uncomprehending eyes. He took a firm hold of her elbow and steered her away from the vortex’s center.
Halverson craned his neck around to search for Mildred and Rosie.
“If I had my shotgun!” Mildred screamed some ten feet away from Halverson.
She was pounding a man with her fists. The man was trying to glom onto her. He looked to Halverson like a fireman in his late thirties. The rangy fireman was easily over six feet tall. Grim-faced, he was wearing a navy blue uniform and had ear protectors on his head. Then Halverson noticed another thing about his face.
The fireman’s mouth had blood streaming from it. On closer inspection, Halverson realized the fireman was missing the flesh from half of his face. His right jaw and cheekbone were exposed.
It wasn’t a man at all, Halverson could now see. It was a zombie.
Like everyone else in the crowd, the zombie was being propelled by the surging, hysterical mob. Borne toward Mildred, the creature grabbed her flailing arms and bit her throat between its blood-soaked jaws.
Christ! thought Halverson. He kept looking around him. Where was Rosie? he wondered.
At that moment, he felt a hand clawing at his back, tugging his shirt out of his blue jeans. He wheeled around, fixing to slam a fist into the offender’s face. He reined in his punch at the last minute when he saw it was Rosie clutching his shirt trying to keep up with him as he was being borne along by the mob.
She cl
asped his elbow.
With her at his side, Halverson plowed his way through the throng to Tom and Tanya.
Halverson scanned the fleeing crowd, which wasn’t making much headway on account of its sheer size.
“Where’s Lemans?” he said.
“I could care less,” said Tom. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Oh shit!” burst Halverson.
“What?”
“I see him.” Halverson placed his hand over Rosie’s eyes. “Don’t look,” he told her.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
A thin, frail girl no taller than five foot three with a pallid face thrust her way toward Halverson through the crowd and distracted him from the heinous sight of Lemans.
She wore wire-rimmed spectacles over her angry beady blue eyes that were layered with a white film. She was scowling at Halverson. Her dress hung in tatters on her reedy frame like some maniac had taken a knife to it.
The top right quarter section of her head was missing. Halverson could see her slimy brain exposed. Blood streamed from her emaciated, sneering lips.
Even though Halverson had no gun, he retained a few magazine clips in his leather bandoleers. He withdrew a clip from a bandoleer. He raised the clip above his head. He drove the clip down into the exposed quarter of the female creature’s brain. The metal clip made short work of the tender brain matter, driving through it like a cold chisel.
Still scowling, the zombie dropped to the ground, reduced to a motionless pile of rags.
Zombies were infiltrating the crowd from all points, Halverson realized as he looked up from the ragged congeries of dead flesh spraddled on the ground.
He returned his gaze toward Lemans. Halverson shook his head in dismay. It didn’t take a genius to see that Lemans was beyond help.
In full view of the grids of bright lights that were illuminating the field in anticipation of the zombie games stood zombies encircling Lemans.
Four zombies, to be exact. They were drawing and quartering Lemans. Each had a grip of one of Lemans’s limbs and was tearing it out of Lemans’s sockets. Each was wresting a limb in a different direction.
As he was lying supine in the air, supported by the zombies grasping his limbs, Lemans let loose with a banshee scream of terror. It was a bloodcurdling cry from the maw of his belly that rent the air and sent shivers down Halverson’s spine.
“My God!” screamed Tom, his eyes bugged out and fixed on the gory scene of Lemans’s last moments.
As Halverson’s hand dropped before her eyes, Rosie covered her eyes with her own hands, unable to watch.
Tanya was still too dazed from her wrist slashing to figure out what exactly was going on around her. She watched Lemans with incomprehension and befuddlement as she tried to make sense out of what was happening to him. Almost like a zombie, decided Halverson, the way she was acting. He started at the thought when he realized the implications of it. Was she turning? he wondered.
“Wake me when something good happens,” said Tom.
“Tell me about the rabbits, George,” muttered Halverson.
Tom shot a puzzled glance at Halverson.
The zombies hoicked the limbs out of Lemans’s body. Blood spouted in all directions, cascading over the infield. Bathed in Lemans’s blood, the zombies gorged themselves on Lemans’s arms and legs.
Another zombie moved in on Lemans’s torso. The zombie was dressed in a cop’s black uniform. With its beer belly drooping over its leather belt the creature skittered toward Lemans. It grabbed its large beak and excavated snot out of one of the nostrils. Only it wasn’t snot, Halverson could see. It was a twisting maggot. The zombie flicked it away.
The creature stamped its foot on Lemans’s chest, pinning his torso to the ground, bent over him, seized his head and wrenched it, trying to rip it from his neck.
Halverson could not stand much more of the ghastly scene of Lemans’s demise. Awash with Lemans’s blood, the football field beneath the four zombies seemed to gleam a bright red under the banks of high-intensity stadium lights overhead.
The panicked crowd continued to surge. They were pressing Halverson and his group against the chain-link fence that encompassed the stadium.
At least he wasn’t inside the stadium, decided Halverson. He had that to be thankful for. The stadium was a death trap, as Lemans had tragically found out. Once inside there, you were done. The zombies would not let anyone in the stadium escape the bite of their teeth.
Halverson saw that Tom had a hold of Tanya. Beside Halverson, Rosie was clutching his arm, digging her nails into it. Now that the four of them were bunched together, it was as good a time as any for them to make their move, decided Halverson.
“Head for the jeeps,” Halverson told Tom over the ocean of people washing him toward the fence.
“We’ll have a boatload of company there,” said the beleaguered Tom.
Halverson watched him fight off two heavyset males in the unruly crowd. They were steamrolling their way past him using brute force to clear a path. Tom took a swing at one of the burly duo and missed.
The crush of the horde of terrified people was so strong that it was bending the chain-link fence toward the stadium. Halverson realized the fence simply didn’t have the strength to withstand both the onrush of the crowd and the throngs of zombies thrust against it.
Halverson knew that if the fence gave in, the zombies would herd everybody into the stadium. Nobody would survive the ensuing bloodbath.
To withstand the onslaught of zombies, Halverson would have to break away from the fence.
The panic had become so extreme people were pummeling, kneeing, and kicking each other in their desperate efforts to take a powder.
Behind him Halverson could see geysers of blood shooting skyward from individuals being assaulted and devoured by zombies maddened by bloodlust. The mere sight of blood enraged and enlivened the zombies, eliciting moans and groans from them. The zombies’ herky-jerky movements accelerated as the zombies zeroed in on the fresh blood, it seemed to Halverson.
The surge of people against the Cyclone fence increased in strength as the zombies whaled the mob, forcing it back on its heels toward the stadium.
Halverson started clawing and elbowing his way through the crowd away from the fence. It was like swimming against a riptide.
Apprehensively, he heard the fence creaking as it gave way to the crush of people.
To avoid being mashed against the fence, frenzied individuals in the mob were trampling each other as they stomped down the fence and stampeded into the stadium, where they hoped they would find safety, only to find a dead end. There were no other exits in the stadium, Halverson knew.
The zombies piled in after the doomed people.
The earsplitting screams of zombie victims choked the air.
Somebody kneed Halverson in his thigh. Halverson kicked back blindly, not knowing who had launched the attack against him. Rioting people were lashing out in every direction in their haste to bug out.
Desperate to avoid being sucked into the death trap of the stadium, Halverson fought tooth and nail against the surge of the mob in that direction.
Doggedly, Halverson pressed on through the jumbled horde of fleeing people interspersed with zombies. He threaded his way through the madding crowd. He saw with relief that Tom and Tanya were able to keep up with him.
Somebody slammed a haymaker into the side of Halverson’s face. The fist had come out of nowhere. He had no idea who had launched it. His nose bloody, Halverson shook off the blow. Arms were flailing everywhere. Anybody would punch anybody to escape this frenzied onslaught of humanity, Halverson knew.
The juggernaut of zombies kept crushing against the crowd. The pressure was relentless.
Halverson made out a strange sight as he peered over the bobbing heads of the mob that enveloped him. One of the circus zombies that had its neck collared in a burning tire was climbing stuporously into the stadium’s bleachers.
The klutzy creature fell i
nto the bleachers. Soon the wooden benches around him became engulfed in flames. Whipped by the hot, arid Santa Ana winds, the growling blaze spread like a flash.
In no time, thirty-foot tongues of flame were shooting skyward and licking the plum night sky. The already-hazy air billowed now with smoke. The already-hot air became suffocating. Flames devoured the stadium benches like kindling.
Sweat poured out of Halverson’s face. It felt like a furnace where he was being swept along and crushed by the gyrating mob. The sight of the fire served to exacerbate the crowd’s panic.
Saffron plumes of flame crackled and snapped as they danced ever higher. Ushered by the wind, the scorching flames wavered and leaned toward the mob, fanning fear that rippled through the steaming multitude.
Now the mob in unison recklessly tried to reverse its course and beat it out of the stadium. But it wasn’t that easy, Halverson knew. The legions of zombies from behind the mob continued to bulldoze it into the burning stadium, no matter how hard everybody in the morass of humanity fought against them.
Halverson started. Above the roar of the flames he heard gunfire.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Halverson didn’t know who had a gun. He could not see anyone with a gun. Was the shooter firing at the zombies or firing at other members of the crowd in his panicked attempt to escape? Halverson wondered.
Halverson managed to twist his body around in the crowd. He made out the source of the gunfire. It was a brawny man dressed in a blue-and-green Aloha shirt. He was firing a revolver at anybody in the way of his escape route. Members of the crowd were dropping dead or wounded beside the gunman, Halverson could see.
As one, the crowd reacted to the gunman. They became enraged. Like a boa constrictor, the crowd coiled itself around the gunman and squeezed him to death. Suffocated, his ribs crushed, the man went limp in the crowd, which carried him along for a few feet before sloughing him off and leaving him as a lump of defunct flesh on the ground.
Halverson pressed on, continuing to angle away from the chain-link fence. He needed air. Like the crushed man, he felt like the crowd was immuring him. He had the anxious feeling the crowd would end up as his tomb.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 22