The armory’s door was closed and standing in front of it was Bascomb.
Halverson balked. Bascomb was the last person he wanted to see.
“You didn’t say he was gonna be here,” Halverson told Jones.
“Who do you think sent me for you?” said Jones.
Reno, Victoria, and Parnell gathered behind Halverson, watching Bascomb.
“We’re the last line of defense for mankind,” announced Bascomb. “Without us to defend it, society will crumble into an abyss of chaos. We are all that stands between the continuation of humanity and the termination of it.”
“I didn’t sign up for a lecture,” said Reno.
Bascomb began pacing back and forth, puffing himself up as he resumed his speech. “We are the last best hope of humanity. If we die here, humanity and all it has strived for throughout the centuries dies with us.”
“Cut to the chase so we can arm up,” muttered Reno behind Halverson’s back so Bascomb couldn’t see he was the one doing the talking.
“I want all of you to know what’s at stake here,” went on Bascomb. “It’s not just one man. It’s not just me, or you, or you,” he said, pointing at different persons standing before him. “It’s all of us. It’s mankind. We are the last bastion of humanity. If we fail here, humanity fails. We cannot fail. We will not fail.”
“Talk about a blowhard,” muttered Reno, still hiding behind Halverson.
“I—”
“Here we go,” chimed in Reno.
“I, yes I, am the embodiment of man. I stand for all of you.” Bascomb made a sweeping gesture with his hands. “I represent all of you. What I have built here is a society that represents all of us equally. It is a society that must continue to exist at all costs. It is a society greater than any single person in it. The sum is greater than its parts.” He hammered his fist down. “We must stop the infected from overrunning our island! If they want war, we’ll give them a war they’ll never forget!”
With a flourish, Bascomb opened the door to the armory and stood aside.
His security guards cheered and bustled into the armory snagging weapons and ammunition from the fully stocked shelves.
Halverson, Reno, Victoria, and Parnell plowed into the armory, casting around for weapons.
Halverson’s eyes lit up when he caught sight of his weapon of choice for CQB (close-quarters battle)—an H&K MP7. He snared the MP7 from the metal shelf and sought out magazine clips of 4.6 X 30 mm cartridges.
“We’re gonna cut those things to pieces,” said Reno, snapping up an MP7.
Halverson jammed a Sig Sauer P226 semiautomatic into his waistband.
“Now we can do them some damage,” he said, eying his MP7.
“Your eyes lit up like a kid’s in a candy store when you set foot in here.”
Halverson looked impassive.
“You should have seen the look on your face,” said Reno. “You must have a thing for guns.”
Halverson paused a beat. He displayed his MP7. “This is the only way to deal with those things. We have to destroy them. It’s them or us. Putting them in jail is a joke.”
“You’re preaching to the choir.”
Halverson flicked his eyes around the armory and located a leather bandoleer. He crammed the bandoleer full of MP7 magazines and looped it over his shoulder. He repeated the process with another bandoleer and slung it over his other shoulder.
“All right!” said Reno, impressed. “Rambo time.”
Reno followed suit, draping bandoleers over his shoulders.
Jones gathered the group together inside the armory. “We’ve only got three Zodiac boats. The men that can’t fit on the boats will stay on the island and patrol the shoreline for any sign of the infected invading the island.”
“None of that arresting-for-a-trial bullshit. Right?” said Reno. “We shoot to kill.”
Jones nodded. “This is war. They declared war on us, so they’re gonna die.”
Bascomb overheard them and strutted into the armory. “The infected aren’t just lawbreakers now. If it’s war they want, it’s war they’ll get. They’re the enemy. That means shoot on sight.”
The men cheered and jostled out of the armory.
Jones motioned to Halverson, Reno, Victoria, and Parnell. “You’re in my Zodiac. We’re the lead boat and we’re gonna hit them so hard, they’ll give up and turn back.”
“We’re on the same page now,” said Halverson.
“Let’s beat it before we have to listen to another one of Bascomb’s speeches,” said Reno.
An AK in his hands, a bandoleer slung over his shoulder, Jones jogged out of the armory with Halverson, Reno, Victoria, and Parnell in tow.
Chapter 65
Armed to the teeth, Halverson, Reno, Parnell, Victoria, Jones, Tattoo Head, and several other security guards piled into the first Zodiac. All told, the crew numbered a dozen.
They cut through the fogbound bay waters with their xenon searchlight guiding them. The other two Zodiacs, each bristling with twelve heavily armed security guards, followed in the first Zodiac’s choppy wake.
At the tiller of the lead Zodiac, Jones, who had discovered the bridge-building ghouls earlier, knew where to steer.
Spindrift from the frothing sea sprayed Halverson’s face as he peered through the murky curtain of fog and darkness ahead.
“How far out are they?” he asked, holding onto the rope on the gunwale of the Zodiac in one hand, and gripping his MP7 in the other.
“Not far,” answered Jones.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he had to veer abruptly to starboard as the Zodiac all but crashed into the creatures lumbering through the mist in front of him.
The infected were even closer than Jones had thought. They must have lengthened their bridge in his absence, he decided.
Bracing themselves in the Zodiac to avoid falling out as the craft slewed, their hands preoccupied, the crew was unable to open fire on the ghouls.
“We’ll get ’em coming back,” said Jones, heaving in a circle.
He eased up on the throttle as they neared the ghouls once again.
Teeth clenched, Halverson opened fire on three ghouls traipsing through the water attempting to extend their bridge of stiffs.
Faces and heads shredded, two of the ghouls plummeted into the ocean.
Reno blew away the third ghoul even as clutches of ghouls knelt down and stretched out on the ocean’s surface to extend their bridge of decomposing flesh toward Alcatraz.
Scores of the creatures poured out of the darkness, slogging over the soaked backs of their companions that lay stretched out on the ocean.
The two other Zodiacs pulled up and their crews fell to laying down fire on the ghouls.
No matter how fast the islanders mowed down ghouls, hundreds more took their places to resume the task of building the bridge.
“We’re fighting a losing battle,” said Reno, as he unleashed another burst of MP7 fire into the ghouls.
“What about a flanking maneuver?” suggested Halverson, jamming a new clip into his MP7 and racking the first cartridge into the chamber.
“How so?” asked Jones.
“We go farther down the bridge and cut it in half.”
“Good idea,” said Reno. “Then the newest half of the bridge will sink.”
Halverson nodded. “Without support, it’ll collapse.”
Reno looked up into the sky. “What’s that noise?”
Halverson could hear the roaring of an engine above them. He didn’t have to see it to know what it was.
“It’s another Predator drone,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jones. “Those things can’t see squat through this soup.”
“Then it might crash into us,” said Reno.
“It’s got radar,” said Halverson, “but it can’t photograph and target us.”
“I hear ya.”
Jones turned the Zodiac and accelerated parallel to the bri
dge.
Meanwhile, the crew continued peppering the creatures that were lumbering through the mist on their bridge of death.
The entire length of the bridge was chockablock with shuffling ghouls.
The two other Zodiacs were following Jones, Halverson could see with difficulty in the fog.
Pelting the creatures on the bridge with gunfire, one of the Zodiacs strayed too close to the bridge. The ghouls sensed live humans in their proximity. Driven by hunger, dozens of them lurched off of the bridge and into the boat.
Halverson watched in horror as the creatures set to tearing apart the hapless crew in the Zodiac.
The crew did their best to shoot the invading ghouls, but the creatures swarmed over the craft in no time. They tore arms and legs off the crew and chewed on the limbs with relish. Fountains of blood spouted all over the boat, turning it into a charnel house.
Ghouls tore stomachs out, unspooled intestines, and bathed in the hot blood that sluiced throughout the boat. Two creatures tore a head off one man. Blood from his ripped throat geysered ten feet into the air, as the two fought over the head, trying to grab it for themselves.
“We gotta help them!” cried Tattoo Head. “My buddies are over there!”
He aimed to shoot at the ghouls on the boat. Then he thought better of it and in frustration lowered his AK lest he hit his comrades.
“They’re beyond help,” said Jones quietly.
He made sure to keep a safe distance from the bridge so the nearby ghouls wouldn’t have a chance to board his boat like they had the other Zodiac.
The ghoul-laden, blood-soaked Zodiac drifted away from the bridge and disappeared into the fog as the creatures polished off their blood feast, and the screams of the crew tailed off into an eerie complete silence that froze Halverson’s blood.
Nobody said a word next to him. Nobody moved.
Everybody sat still, listening to the nerve-racking silence in mute horror, eyes trained on that area of the fog in which the infested boat had vanished from their sight.
At last Jones managed to break the silence, voice cracking. “Let’s try to cut through the bridge over there.”
“How are we supposed to cut through it?” said Reno. “It’s not like we have swords.”
“With bullets. Don’t shoot at the infected that are on the bridge. Shoot at the bridge itself.”
“We’ve got to get the creatures to loosen their grips, so the bridge collapses,” pointed out Halverson.
“I don’t see how we can shoot their heads,” said Reno. “Their heads are underwater. The water’s gonna slow down the velocity of the bullets. They won’t have enough power to enter the brains.”
Halverson realized that what Reno had said was true. Not only that, it would be impossible to hit the ghouls that were lying down in the middle section of the bridge with gunfire, as their heads would be protected by the bodies of the ghouls that stretched out on either side of them.
“We gotta try,” said Jones.
“There’s one other option—and nobody’s gonna want to hear it,” said Halverson.
“What’s that?”
“One of us walks onto the bridge and shoots down at the creatures’ heads in the bridge.”
“What kind of a half-assed idiot would want to do that?” said Reno.
“He’d be surrounded and eaten by the infected on the bridge in seconds,” said Tattoo Head.
“At this angle it’s impossible to get headshots at the zombies that form the bridge,” said Halverson.
“We can lay down so much fire on them that we might be able to cut their bodies in half with our barrage,” said Jones.
“Yeah,” said Tattoo Head.
“We’re still not gonna be able to hit the ghouls lying in the center of the bridge,” said Halverson.
“At least none of us will die, using my plan,” said Jones. “Your plan is a suicide mission. Whoever steps on that bridge is dead meat.”
With that, Jones guided the boat to within ten feet of the bridge and opened fire with his AK-47 on the bridge. Everybody in the Zodiac followed suit, plastering the cadaver-bridge with a hail of bullets.
Meanwhile, throngs of ghouls continued to scrabble and splash to the end of the water-soaked bridge to extend the bridge to Alcatraz.
Frustrated, Jones lowered his AK and signaled with his arm. “That’s enough. Hold your fire.”
Reno inspected the bridge from the Zodiac. “I don’t see any signs of damage to the bridge.”
Tattoo Head shook his head, scoping out the bridge. “Me either.”
Victoria stood up precariously in the boat. “I have an idea.”
“I’m listening,” said Jones.
“What if we kill the ghouls walking on the bridge so that their corpses pile up and act like a blockade to the other ghouls?”
Parnell nodded. “Might work.”
“The ghouls will just crawl over the blockade,” said Halverson. “I’ve seen these things in action before.”
“Anything’s worth a try,” said Jones.
“We have to break the bridge. It’s our only hope of stopping their progress.”
Jones ignored him and fired a burst into the ghouls that were lumbering across the bridge. He dropped three of them in their tracks.
“Open fire!” he ordered.
The rest of his security guards followed his example, slamming the trudging ghouls with lead.
Halverson, Reno, and Victoria jumped into the fracas.
A pile of corpses soon formed and impeded the progress of the shambling ghouls. The congeries slowed the ghouls down but did not stop them. They simply crawled over the pile of carnage and resumed their trek to the end of the bridge.
Shrugging, Jones lowered his AK. “I’m plumb out of ideas.”
“Maybe that big pile of corpses on it will cause the bridge to collapse,” said Reno, eying the heap of motionless bodies.
“It doesn’t look like it’s sinking into the sea,” said Victoria.
“Too bad we don’t have any bombs we could drop on it.”
“Looks like my plan’s the only one we’ve got left,” said Halverson.
Nobody said anything.
Chapter 66
“The problem is, nobody here wants to commit suicide,” said Reno.
Halverson stood up in the boat, his MP7 slung over his shoulder. “Then I guess I’m elected. Just give me cover fire. Blow away those things when they try to go over the barricade of corpses and get at me while I’m on the bridge.”
Reno gawked at Halverson. “You’re nuts. Why do you hate living?”
“Back where I come from the guy who thinks up the plan has to do it,” said Tattoo Head.
“What if we ram the bridge with the Zodiac?” suggested Jones.
“That won’t work,” said Halverson. “We’ll all end up beached on the bridge, and the ghouls will wipe us out.”
“Maybe not. Maybe our propeller would cut through the bridge and saw it in half.”
“How wide do you think that bridge is?” asked Victoria.
“I’d say it’s at least twenty feet across,” answered Parnell, scrutinizing the bridge. “But it’s hard to tell because of the fog.”
“I doubt our propeller’s gonna cut through twenty feet of corpses without breaking,” said Halverson.
Jones massaged his chin, thinking about it. “You’re probably right.”
“Anyone got a cigarette?” asked Tattoo Head.
“No,” answered Victoria. “I stopped smoking when my mom died of lung cancer.”
A pall of silence fell over them.
Halverson looked at Jones at the tiller. “Let’s get closer to the bridge so I can jump onto it.”
“You have even less chance of succeeding than if we ram the bridge with the boat,” said Reno.
“We have to do something,” said Halverson. “If the creatures reach the island, we’re doomed.”
“Think about it. You’re gonna have to kill at least twen
ty of those creatures that form the bridge and pry them apart before the other ghouls kill you.”
“They’re gonna be all over you like white on rice as soon as you step foot on that bridge,” said Tattoo Head.
“You won’t last five minutes,” said Reno.
“Anyone want to go with me?” asked Halverson.
Nobody answered.
“If I can’t do it I’ll jump off the bridge,” said Halverson.
“I’m telling you right now you can’t do it,” said Reno.
Situation normal—hopeless, decided Halverson. It was hopeless ever since the plague had hit, but he kept going nevertheless.
Jones eased the Zodiac closer to the bridge.
“Not too close,” said Tattoo Head, “or we’ll wind up like the other crew.”
Halverson pictured the ghouls invading the other boat and tearing apart the crew.
As they neared the bridge, everyone on board opened fire on the nearest ghouls, clearing a path for Halverson to make his leap.
But a few feet from the bridge, Halverson mounted the inflated gunwale of the Zodiac and prepared to jump. He must be crazy to do this, he decided, heart pounding at a furious pace.
He couldn’t stand on the side of the bobbing boat much longer without losing his balance and pitching head over heels into the ocean swells. It was time to fish or cut bait, he decided.
As the boat bobbed upward, he leaped. Barely making it onto the bridge, he fell to his knees on the back of one of the prone ghouls that formed the bridge. Arms outstretched, ghouls immediately shambled toward him, mouths gaping and drooling.
The passengers on the boat raked the ghouls with gunfire as the creatures descended on Halverson.
Bounding to his feet Halverson inspected the ghouls that lay flattened out beneath him. Their heads were, for the most part, turned downward into the ocean. One creature, however, turned its head to the side as Halverson stood above it.
The creature’s eye snapped open and gave Halverson a turn. The milky blue eye seemed to be staring directly at him.
Halverson grabbed his MP7 and commenced firing into the heads of the ghouls stretched out under him. Hoping the ghouls would release their holds on their fellow ghouls as they died from their head wounds, he blasted three ghouls’ heads into bits at point-blank range with his MP7.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 78