Surviving the Dead (Novel): The Hellbreakers

by James N. Cook

  To the east were several blocks of houses interspersed with a few large, vacant lots. They had been on my list, but I had never worked my way far enough south to raid them. I wondered how much of the area we were responsible for.

  “Lowe, take the door,” Hahn said. “Chu, you’re on point. I’ll be right behind you. Cason, watch my six. Elena, take your team around back and wait for my signal.”

  “Got it,” Elena said.

  I followed the team around the back of the building. Elena inspected the door. “Crowbar,” she said.

  Rohan reached into a duffel bag he’d brought and produced the required tool. Elena put the flat end into the seam of the strike plate and pushed. The door creaked and there was a loud pop.

  “Should be easy enough,” Elena said. “Stack up.”

  I looked at Rohan. He took position next to the door, his Marlin repeater held at port arms.

  “Get behind me,” he said. I gripped my axe and obeyed. “Watch my back,” Rohan said. “I’ll watch yours. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  There was a thud and a crash from the front of the building. Elena grinned. “That’s our signal.”

  She pushed hard on the crowbar, leaning her weight into it. There were two pops, a screech of bending steel, and the door came open. Elena dropped the crowbar, drew her pistol, and stepped back. Lily was first through the breech, M-4 at the ready. Elena followed.

  “Stay with me,” Rohan said as he entered. He broke right. I saw Elena and Lily to my left.

  “Clear!” Hahn shouted from somewhere.

  We were in a storeroom. There were shelves along the walls with a few dusty, broken items on them. A mop bucket was overturned in one corner. Cobwebs lined every corner and spanned the width of the metal shelving along the walls. Elena clicked on the flashlight on her pistol and lit up the room. My motorcycle helmet had a polarized eye shield which preserved my vision from the glare. The four of us stood around looking at each other.

  “Clear!” Elena shouted. Someone’s fist boomed against an interior door.

  “That you in there, Elena?”

  “Yeah. Coming out.”

  The door was locked. From the arrangement of the hinges, I saw it opened outward.

  “Got it,” I said. Elena looked at me and stepped back.

  “Go for it.”

  Back in my fighting days, I was known for my kicks. The left high-kick scored the knockouts, but the right push-kick set them up. There is an art to throwing a proper push-kick. You have to step into it, thrust your hips, bring one arm back as a counterweight, and follow through as if you’re kicking into the target, not just at it. Done properly, you can throw all your weight into it and hit your target like a battering ram. In the past, I’d usually aimed for the liver. In this instance, I aimed for the doorknob. The technique felt familiar, like riding a bicycle. The old muscle memory was still there, waiting to be utilized. The door splintered at the jamb, flew open, and crashed into the back wall on the other side. I turned to Elena and gestured her through with a flourish.

  “After you.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “You kick like a mule.”

  “It’s a talent.”

  Hahn and company stood on the other side, staring.

  “Nice work,” Hahn said. “Find anything?”

  “Negative,” Elena said.

  Hahn waved an arm. “Regroup out front.”

  Rohan went out back to retrieve his crowbar. Before we left, Chu pulled a can of paint from his assault pack, dipped a brush into it, and painted a large X on the wall next to the front entrance. He saw me looking.

  “Lets the other squads know the building is clear,” he said as he put the paint and brush away.

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  The next destination was a house behind the gas station. This time, we switched roles. Elena took the front door and Hahn maneuvered around back. I discovered that my team’s call sign was Crow and Hahn’s was Raven.

  “Crow, in position,” Elena said into her radio. A few seconds passed while she listened. The rest of us were stacked up outside the door, waiting. Elena pointed at me.

  “You’re on breach,” she said.

  I assumed she wanted a repeat performance of the push-kick and stepped around Rohan. Before I could do anything, Elena put a restraining hand on my chest.

  “Just get the door open and back off,” she said. “Rohan’s on point. He’ll go through first. Me and Lily will follow. You bring up the rear. Make sure nothing comes up behind us. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  The hand moved. “All right. Go for it.”

  Another hard kick. This time the door broke halfway off its hinges and came to rest hanging askew, blocking Rohan from entering. A follow-up kick tore the second hinge loose, sending the door flipping through the air before skidding across a filthy stretch of laminate floor. Rohan did not hesitate, nor did the others.

  Unlike the gas station storeroom, this place was not empty. Two moans sounded from my left, and another took up the chorus on my right. I had less than a second to take in the situation. In that time, I saw a very obese woman wandering out of a hallway, a man and a teenage boy getting up from the floor in a dining room, and a little girl of perhaps ten tumbling down a stairwell directly in front of me.

  “Shit.”

  I hopped back from the stairs. The girl hit the floor, twisted at an impossible angle, and began to stand up. I raised the axe high and swung straight down. The top half of her skull sheared off cleanly, giving me clear, cross-sectional view of her inner cranium. There was no fluid, only a viscous black substance around the edges. The brain matter was reddish rather than gray. Her body went limp, causing the black goop around the brain to slosh out onto the floor. The smell was abominable. I swallowed hard, took a step back, and forced my eyes upward.

  On one side of me, Lily leveled her M-4 and put two rounds into the obese woman. Her head snapped back, the red-rimmed eyes went blank, and she fell limply to the floor. On the other side, Rohan put a .38 special between the dead man’s eyes with his lever gun. Elena raise her pistol, which I recognized as a Glock 19, and put a round into the teenage boy’s sinus cavity. A hole appeared to the left of his nose, barely a millimeter below his eye, and a plume of red brain tissue splattered the wall behind him. Both the man and the boy hit the ground.

  The four of us looked around. My ears rang fiercely from the concussion of gunshots in an enclosed area.

  Need to get some earplugs.

  Elena pointed her pistol down the hallway while Lily covered the stairs with her rifle. I looked out the door behind me. Nothing but hot sun, dirt, and desiccated shrubbery. Rohan worked the lever on his Marlin. The empty shell casing flew to his right and a fresh one went into the breach. He took a moment to reach into his messenger bag and feed another round into the tube before heading into the kitchen. I went with him. Hahn and her people crashed through the back door, shattering the window set into it and showering the linoleum floor with shards of glass. Chu pointed his rifle at me for a brief moment, then moved it down and away.

  “Shit. Sorry, Muir.”

  A few seconds ticked by before I could speak. “It’s okay. No harm done.”

  “You clear?” Hahn called out.

  “Sweeping the hallway,” Elena replied. “We don’t have anybody upstairs.”

  “Got it.” Hahn pointed at Lowe and Chu, and jerked a thumb upward. The two men headed toward the staircase. “Get your people outside and set up a perimeter,” Hahn told Elena. “We’ll clear the house.”

  “Right.” Elena waved over her shoulder.

  When we were outside, Rohan and I took the corners of the house facing west. Elena and Lily took east. We stood so that each of us was visible by two other team members at all times. Sensible, I thought.

  A minute or so passed, and Hahn emerged from the house with her team behind her. Cason looked incongruous in tactical gear, like he was dressing up for Halloween. Chu hu
ng back and painted the entrance while Lowe covered him.

  “Anything good?” Elena asked.

  “Not unless you need some six-year-old laundry detergent.”

  “I’m sure supply will want it. They want everything.”

  “All set,” Chu called out. Hahn looked around.

  “What do you think, Muir? East or west? It’s your first day on the job, so you get to pick.”

  I glanced around the neighborhood. The helmet cut off my peripheral vision, forcing me to turn my shoulders to increase my field of view. “East. All the houses here face the street. We’ll work our way around the block.”

  “Sounds good. Let’s do it.” Hahn started walking.

  There was gunfire coming from all directions now. It sounded like kids setting off fireworks en masse on the fourth of July. The drumbeat of shod hooves galloping over pavement thundered from the south. I could see the wagon train on the highway buzzing with activity, militia troops crawling around it like ants, runners with the supply platoon bringing back wheelbarrows full of items I could not make out from a distance. Before following the others, I absorbed the sound and fury of it all, the manic but somehow orderly coordination, and could not help but feel a sense of admiration.

  These people might be crazy, I thought, but there’s a method to it.

  “Muir! Let’s go!”

  I looked at Elena. Her face was a mask of impatience.

  “On my way.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Three hours later, the axe had accounted for twelve more ghouls. I also killed eighteen more with the Ruger and popped five stumbling toward me from up the street with the AR-15. Rohan said they were nice shots. I shrugged and told him it was easy with the scope dialed up to maximum power. He called me a cheat. I told him if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.

  The others killed their share as well. It did not take long for me to lose count of how many the squad put down, but I’m fairly sure it was in the low triple digits.

  Along the way, in a neatly organized garage, we discovered a gun cabinet. Rohan pried it open with the crowbar and a three-pound hammer. Inside were two AR-15s, a shotgun, a .22 rifle, several nine-millimeter pistols, and more than a thousand rounds of ammunition in green metal boxes.

  “Good stuff,” Hahn had said, looking at it. “Match grade 55 grain FMJs, 64 grain bonded soft points, and a shitload of 77 grain OTM. Sierra match-kings at that.”

  “Awesome,” Elena replied.

  I had no clue what any of it meant, so I stayed quiet.

  Hahn picked up one of the ARs. It had a long stainless steel barrel, a fixed stock, and a large scope. “Must have used this to hunt coyotes.”

  “Supply’s gonna want that,” Cason said. “Designated marksmen always cryin’ for long-range shit.”

  “They’ll probably want the ammo too,” Hahn said pointedly. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  She left. The rest of us looked at each other.

  “I got dibs on the nine-mil,” Elena said, and began stuffing boxes into a gym bag she’d picked up somewhere.

  Rohan excused himself. Cason grabbed ten boxes of the 77 grain stuff and shoved it in his assault pack. Before leaving the room, he leaned over and spoke in a low voice.

  “Those green-tips be fine for ghouls, but they ain’t the best for the living. Know what I’m saying?”

  I stared at him. “No. What do you mean?”

  “I’m saying it ain’t just the dead you got to worry about. The living be just as bad sometimes.”

  I thought about the smoke I had seen on the other side of the city, the gunfire I had heard, the spotters’ reports of activity to the east, and started to ask Cason if he knew something I didn’t. But he left the room before I could say anything else. I stared into the cabinet for a few seconds.

  “Why not. Better safe than sorry.” I took ten boxes of the 77 grain ammo and went back downstairs.

  The others were waiting for me. Hahn was on the radio, earpiece pressed under two gloved fingers. After nearly a minute, she waved us outside. I was glad to go; the room was stiflingly hot.

  Once outside, I removed my helmet and took a deep breath. It never failed to amaze me the way one bad thing could lessen another bad thing. Such as how the wind on my sweat-soaked skin felt downright cool despite the temperature outside being around a hundred and ten. The motorcycle helmet was great protection from ghouls, but damn if it didn’t feel like wearing a sauna on my head.

  “Okay, folks,” Hahn said. “We’re withdrawing. Ghouls are pushing the perimeter squads back. We’ll fall back to the platforms and draw the hordes eastward. It’s going to be a long night, so grab whatever food you have in camp, fill up your water, and bring as much ammo as you can carry.”

  I nodded my head tiredly. The others did as well. No one spoke.

  “Let’s move.”

  We made it half a block before Hahn’s radio squawked again. She held up a fist. The others stopped, so I did too. Hahn listened with her head down. Finally she clicked a button at her throat.

  “Roger that,” she said and turned around. Her left hand rubbed the back of her neck and she let out an irritated breath. “I hate to do this, but I need volunteers.”

  No one said anything. Lily rolled her eyes and muttered a few curses.

  “Volunteers for what?” I asked.

  Hahn met my gaze. “Some people from supply got moated in about half a klick north of here.”

  “They got what?”

  “They’re stuck on a rooftop and surrounded by ghouls.”

  “Oh.”

  The others stayed quiet except for Lily. She slowly shook her head. “No fucking way,” she said. “Last time I nearly got eaten. Somebody else can do it this time.”

  “Who is it?” Rohan asked.

  Hahn’s eyes never left mine. “One lieutenant and four runners.”

  Alarm bells started ringing in my head. “Which lieutenant?”

  “Fleming.”

  My heart fluttered. “As in Cary Fleming?”

  A nod.

  “Where?”

  Hahn reached in a pocket and opened up her map. Her finger pointed out a housing development near Pasqualetti Mountain Ranch.

  “Familiar with the area?” Hahn asked.

  “Yeah.” I turned northward and set off at a jog.

  “Hey, wait a minute!”

  I did not slow down. I did not look back. Hahn’s voice faded as I went. I heard her put Elena in charge and tell her to get everyone back to the convoy. Seconds later, running footsteps caught up to me.

  “Goddammit, Muir.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re supposed to wait for more volunteers.”

  Still nothing.

  “Now I have to go with you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes I fucking do.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I put on my helmet and picked up the pace.

  *****

  There was a brief period of worry when I realized I did not know exactly where to find Cary. But then a stream of smoke leapt upward ahead of me and a bright red flare blazed against the sky.

  “Command must have called Cary,” Hahn said. “She’ll pop smoke in just a second. Lead us right to her.”

  I had already angled toward the flare. As Hahn predicted, a cloud of dark green smoke began billowing up from a rooftop several blocks away.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and started running.

  The houses flew by like fence posts. Hahn kept up with no trouble. One block passed, then two, and finally I turned a corner and skidded to a stop. Hahn slowed down and halted a few steps in front of me.

  “Fuck me running,” she said.

  There must have been a thousand of them, pushing and reaching and howling loud enough to make my ears hurt. I saw five people on the roof. Four of them were sitting down, hands clenched around weapons. Cary was standing up and waving her hands over her head. The hands faltered for a secon
d and her head craned forward. She had recognized me. Not a big feat considering I was the only one in the militia who insisted on wearing a firefighting suit and a big black helmet in the searing heat. The axe was probably not hard to recognize either.

  “No way we’re getting through that,” Hahn said.

  I slung the axe. “We don’t have to. Come on.”

  The ghouls were so engrossed with Cary’s gesticulating figure we were able to draw within fifty feet before any of them noticed us. But when they did, it stopped me cold.

  A head snapped around, the eyes bloodshot, the face pale and gray, half the skin sloughed off and dangling by oozing shreds. The muscles and membranes beneath the tattered exterior looked exactly like the gray monstrosity I had seen on my last solo raid. Whatever bizarre metamorphosis was occurring within the creature, it appeared to be mid-process. The thing turned in my direction and opened its mouth. I can only assume it roared at me since the mad cacophony around it was far too loud to make out any individual voices. In the space of seconds, five more ghouls took notice, whipped around to face us, and began their own chorus.

  “There you go, shitheads. Sing me a song.”

  I reached in a pocket, drew the Glock, took careful aim, and dropped three ghouls. The reports were only marginally loud enough to make out over the horde’s wailing, but it was enough. Hundreds more heads turned in my direction. A few ghouls broke off from the main body and began stumbling toward Hahn and me. I emptied the rest of the magazine, not really paying attention to what I was shooting at, just trying to gain their attention.

  It worked.

  “Okay, nice job,” Hahn said, edging backward. “We should really think about running now.”

  “Just a minute.”

  I reloaded with one of my spare magazines, pocketed the empty one, and began squeezing off rounds. Eight more infected went to their final rest. I had no idea where the other shots ended up, but the gunfire accomplished its mission. The entire horde was focused on me now, hands clawing at empty air, blackened mouths agape, eyes staring in uncomprehending rage, shrieks of raw hunger tearing at ruined throats.

  “Okay,” I said as I reloaded and stowed the Glock. “Now we can run.”