“How exactly do you intend to help us?”
The man smiled, showing a gap where his left front tooth used to be, “Relocation!” he said as if it were a saving grace. “We’re here to help you to Lincoln, Nebraska, where there’s food, shelter, and a military presence to guard the people against the Fallen.”
“Not interested. And if you’re military, I’m Bugs Bunny.”
Unfazed, the Triumvirate man tried anew, “As I said, we have a strong military presence with armor and aircraft support. If you would please follow us, we can take you straight there. Of course, you will have to surrender your weapons and that tank to us immediately. Security, you understand.”
Seyfert snorted. “I believe the man said we were fine. We’re headed north, and don’t need your protection. Thanks all the same.”
The man’s smile disappeared. “I’m sorry, I really am, but you are travelling in US military vehicles, and those have all been recalled to Lincoln, as have all military personnel and any civilians in the area. You and your companions will need to come with us.”
Two more men got out of the first desert camo Humvee, and another popped through the hatch at the fifty caliber M2 machine gun on the second, although he didn’t cock it. All the newcomers now had their fingers on the triggers of their assorted weapons, even though they were still pointed at the ground.
“My friend told you we’re heading north, not south west. Thanks for the offer, but we’re on our way to a military base in northern Iowa.”
“Iowa?” the driver said and cocked his head. “What’s in Iowa?”
“That’s classified.”
“Is it now? I believe you have mistaken our intentions. It wasn’t an offer, but a demand that you come with us. This is your last chance to comply.”
Seyfert shook his head and smiled. “Look, Chief, we’re not coming, and quite frankly you’re out gunned and out trained. We don’t want to shoot you or get shot at, so this is your last chance. Fuck. Off.”
The driver narrowed his eyes. “We have an attack chopper two miles out, if we—” He was interrupted by one of Bourne’s men who walked around the LAV holding a green tube with what looked like a blast shield on the side of it. “What’s that?”
“If you were actually military,” Androwski said, “you would know that is a Stinger missile. Anti-air. We have six more, and if you look at the LAV behind me you will see tubes on the side. Those are also anti-air missiles. You’re full of shit on the helicopter anyway, but tell your bird if he comes within three miles of us in the air, we’ll shoot him down. Also, if you don’t leave in the next thirty seconds, we’ll fucking kill you all.” At this, both he and Seyfert raised their MP5SD3s and pointed them at the driver and passenger.
The Triumvirate men began to raise their weapons, but Seyfert screamed, “Don’t!” and they stopped. The driver’s eyes were wide, but there was a smirk on the passenger’s face.
“Something funny?” demanded Seyfert.
“Yeah, you’re being covered by—”
“Two snipers three hundred meters back?” finished Androwski. “I guess we’re not copasetic.”
Two pops sounded, and then more weapons were pointed at the Triumvirate men.
“Your snipers are down. Twenty seconds, nineteen, eighteen…”
The passenger nodded, obviously angry. “Good luck on your trip up north.” He turned. “Saddle up, let them go!” His men got back in the Humvees and they turned their vehicles around. Dust and broken asphalt spewed from their tires as they began speeding back the way they had come.
Seyfert looked back at the LAV then at Androwski. “You told him the snorkels were missiles?”
“Yeah, I didn’t think he would know the difference.”
“Pity we don’t have any Stingers,” Bourne said thoughtfully as the LAV thundered down the road. He smiled and looked at Androwski. “Great bluff by the way, but they have probably already radioed our position to Lincoln, and I’m sure they’re dispatching help as we speak.”
“Then we best haul ass, sir,” Stark yelled over his shoulder from up front. The convoy of three vehicles picked up speed and they ate up the miles as they travelled due east through the Iowa flatlands.
“The Stinger we have is functional, sir,” Seyfert replied, “but we only have one shot, and flares or ECM from the bird may counter it. Then they can stay a half mile up and take us apart with their guns or rockets.”
“With any luck they’ll be chasing us north. Where are we anyway?”
Anna looked at one of the screens in the LAV, then back at a map. “This is Route 18, we just passed the turnoff for Route 69 south, which puts us about…ten miles west of a town called Clear Lake.”
The colonel was smiling at her. “Maybe it’s a good thing we did take you along. Who taught you how to read a map?”
“Taught me? You just look at it.”
His smile widened. “I guess you do at that. It’s getting late, and we should pick up fuel at a truck stop, or one of these smaller towns.” He picked up his radio. “All units, we need fuel, so keep your eyes open for stations, or farms with pumps.”
Twenty minutes later, the LAV pulled up to a white sign on the side of the road, the Humvee and truck behind. The sign had originally read Welcome to Clear Lake, Population 786. The 786 was crossed off with a red slash, and the number 522 was below it, also crossed off in red. Several other numbers were below or to the right and left of the original, all crossed off. The numbers dwindled down to 51, and then ALL DEAD was scrawled in the right corner. A truly dead man with a pistol in his lifeless hand was crumpled under the sign.
There was no gas station in sight, not that anyone could see farther than was illuminated by the headlights of the LAV. The town was dark, and as the sign indicated, dead.
“Our pickup is vulnerable,” began Bourne, “so you boys need to stay on your toes. We’ll proceed through town in the LAV, and check for a pump station and assess the hostiles. Don’t get complacent, and keep checking your six. Maintain radio contact at all times, and engage undead only if they pose a direct threat. Deal with human threats appropriately, but don’t get trigger happy, anybody left alive in this town is probably starving and scared.” They transferred twelve fuel cans from the back of the truck to the armored vehicle.
As the LAV moved away, a soldier got out of the Hummer with a high-powered light and flashed it in all directions. A lone undead was slowly making its way toward them from the south. The man got back in the vehicle and pointed right. “We got one coming from over there, keep an eye on it, and we’ll take it out with a suppressed weapon or an entrenching tool when it gets close.”
The light was extremely bright and, according to the manual, illuminated up to a hundred yards, so the soldier had been able to see the zombie, and the zombie had seen the light. Some of the other hundred or so zombies that were approximately one hundred and thirty yards away had also seen the light and heard the vehicle engines. Like a flock of birds, their direction changed from south to north, and now they plodded toward the unaware men.
Clear Lake may have been picturesque once, with its pretty store fronts all facing the main road and its single traffic light suspended over the thoroughfare. Now there was trash in the streets, burned stores and crashed vehicles. Festering corpses with holes in their heads, unattended and left to rot, lay here and there as well. Newspapers blew across the headlight beams like tumbleweeds through the darkness.
A military presence had been in this small town as well. An abandoned deuce and a half transport truck, the torn canvas top blowing in the wind, had come to rest halfway through the front window of a barbershop. The driver’s door on the truck was still open.
It didn’t take long for the townsfolk to come out to greet the newcomers. Several shapes materialized out of the shadows, and made for the LAV on dead legs.
“How many?” Bourne asked Anna.
She was looking at the thermals on the screen in front of her, white shapes stumbl
ing in the gloom. “Nine, but there are a lot of places they could be hiding.”
“Strictly speaking, they don’t hide. They do just pop out though, don’t they?”
“I know, right? They…hold on…” She peered into the starboard monitor. “Stark! Stark that road we just passed has a gas station, I saw it!”
The LAV braked, Stark managing to turn the behemoth in the middle of Main Street. He backed into a red Toyota Tundra, leaving a huge dent in the driver’s door of the truck. “Shit.”
“You want me to drive, Navy?” Dallas shouted from the bench in the back.
“I want you to shut it, redneck!”
Androwski looked sheepishly at Bourne, “Sorry, sir.”
Seyfert stood and climbed into the turret hatch, as John’s Gas and Go came into view through the front windows. He donned his night vision glasses and popped the hatch open, cocking the light machine gun on the hull.
“Thirty seconds people,” Bourne said almost casually, “smooth and by the numbers. Seyfert, are we clear?”
“Negative sir, we have hostiles. Six at least, and the window front of the station is gone. Take them?”
“Negative, we’ll go hand to hand until it gets bad. Henson, Wilcox, provide close cover, the rest of us will fill the tanks. Rick, you stay in the LAV with Stark and cover the back hatch. If this gets out of hand, fall back to the LAV. It takes one minute to fill a five gallon jug, we have four gasoline and fourteen diesel to fill. I want to be out of here in twenty minutes.”
The soldiers Henson and Wilcox snapped together two harpoons that they had made using a crude drawing provided by Teems. They were the first out of the hatch, and within seconds had dispatched their first undead. Several more were staggering toward the station, but rather than meet them, they covered the others as they used Chris’s pump to put fuel in the tanks.
It went smoothly. The two soldiers speared any approaching zombies, and Seyfert shot several more from his perch atop the LAV with his suppressed MP5SD3. Dallas and Bourne humped the cans back to the LAV as Anna filled them with the pump. They had three diesel cans left to fill when Seyfert opened up with the LMG. “Contact right! Fall back, there are too many!”
Not needing to be told twice, the fuel crew pulled the pump and ran for the safety of the armor, three cans left behind on the concrete. The undead appeared from nowhere, and there were dozens. Two different howling screams came from behind, and Henson spun to face them, fumbling for his sidearm. Sprinting up the road from the east, two fast movers came directly at the young man. “Screamers!”
Forty feet from the hatch, he realized he wouldn’t make it even though the others were yelling for him. Henson turned, took aim, and fired at the first one, scoring a hit at chest level. The thing flopped down and scraped across the road, leaving skin. His infected cohort kept running, and Henson fired again, missing. Adjusting his aim, the soldier fired two quick shots, both hitting the other blood-soaked thing in the abdomen. It staggered and fell, putting one hand to the ground and one on its bleeding mid-section. Looking at the man the creature closed its eyes hard in pain, and tried to scream at him. Only choked gasps came out, and it fell forward on its chest trying to crawl.
Henson realized that he had just shot a teenage boy and was saddened to his core. He immediately thought of his little brother, but that thought was shaken by the hollering behind him. He turned toward the LAV and saw the hatch closing as Wilcox, Bourne, and Dallas fought off a small horde of undead clawing at the rear of the vehicle. More were coming from his right and behind him. Seyfert gave one more burst to the front of the LAV, and spun his weapon at Henson. “Run! That way!” He pointed south. “We’ll pick you up!” He opened up on another group coming from the east, behind where the sprinters had come from. Seyfert fired over Henson’s head into the smallest group coming from the south, the clearest direction for Henson.
“RUN DAMMIT!” Seyfert screamed at him and he finally got going. The LAV was backing up to meet him, crushing some undead in its path, when another runner appeared and jumped up on the side of the vehicle. Henson reached the small crowd blocking his path and fired at their heads. He holstered his weapon and deployed his harpoon, destroying another creature, but as it fell, it dragged the harpoon with it, spinning the living man sideways. Getting a good look at the LAV as he twisted, Henson saw the runner climbing up after an oblivious Seyfert, who was carefully firing into the crowd. As he lay on his back, he pulled his sidearm and drew a bead on the sneaky creature to Seyfert’s side. Henson took a deep breath as three creatures fell to their knees around him coming to his level to feast. He let half the breath out and squeezed his trigger.
Seyfert couldn’t understand why Henson didn’t get up, they were right on him! The SEAL’s eyes went wide as he saw the fallen soldier aiming at him. His ears were screaming from the machine gun fire, so he was unable to hear the shot from Henson’s pistol, but he saw the muzzle flash. He felt rather than heard something slump next to him on the hull of the LAV, and he spun to see a farmer with a hole in his head rolling off the hull to the street.
Henson tried to roll to his left, but he ran into the bare and bloody feet of a dead woman in a blue bathrobe and she fell on top of him. Frantically, he pushed at her, but the others had reached him and halted his escape, and she had fastened her hands around his tactical webbing. Her head snapped back when he shot her in the face, and she released him. He felt a searing pain in his left hip and ear at the same time, and he continued firing until he was empty. The creatures were pulling on him, his weapon arm snapping to the right. He felt more pain in his forearm as he thrashed and kicked. Then they were biting him all over. The soldier saw an old woman chew his ring and pinky fingers off with a jerk of her head. He heard machine gun fire, and had a moment to think that this was a terrible time for a headache, before he mercifully died.
The barrel of the light machine gun was still smoking as Seyfert closed the turret hatch. “He…”
Bourne put a hand on his shoulder. “We saw, son. You did the right thing.” The colonel shouted up front, “Stark, get us back to the rendezvous point ASAP.”
Seyfert sat down hard on the padded bench. “Guy scored a headshot from a hundred feet with a pistol on a moving target. He saved my life and I shot him.”
“An’ wherever he is, he’s thankin’ ya for it,” said Dallas. “I promise.”
28
“Shit!” Murray yelled and threw the mic at his feet in the Humvee. It dangled by the cord and he watched it swing. He and the other three men in the vehicle heard what had happened to Henson from Stark via the radio.
The dead thing they were keeping an eye on was forty feet away now, and moving steadily toward the parked vehicles. “Fuckin’ things! They’re everywhere,” Murray said, grabbing an entrenching tool from the clip on the passenger door. He opened the door and got out, starting toward the thing coming at him. “This is not your country!” He unfolded the spade and snapped it in place. Murray yelled a battle cry and swung the shovel with all his might in a sideways arc. He took off damn near half its head, and the dead man in an orange jumpsuit crumpled to the ground. The back of the jumpsuit had letters on it, and as he had left the powerful flashlight in the Hummer, Murray pulled his pistol and used his tac-light to read I.S.P. in black bold print. He was using the jumpsuit to clean the entrenching tool of blood and brain, when he heard a noise in the scrub behind him. He spun, but couldn’t see anything as he squinted into the gloom. Raising his tac-light, he panned right to left, “Holy fuck…” he whispered and ran back to the vehicles.
“Look at Murray running,” laughed Biggs as he pointed out the right side of the Humvee. “Looks like a little school girl getting chased by a bee.” Keleher and Stenner chuckled as well. They were still laughing when he scrambled into the vehicle, slamming the door and picking up the mic. Keleher leaned forward from the back seat. “What’re you runnin’ from, chicken shit?”
Murray used the interior handle to swivel the exter
ior spot light on the passenger’s side and clicked it on. “Them,” he shouted, as the light illuminated dozens of undead staggering toward the vehicle.
“Holy fuck,” Keleher, Stenner, and Biggs said in unison. The red Dodge pickup beeped its horn and Webb, the driver, screamed over the radio: “Fucking move, Biggs! Go!”
Biggs threw the Humvee in gear and floored it, the Dodge pickup following close behind. Murray keyed the mic, speaking concisely, “Wanderer, this is Roadtrip One, do you copy over?”
“Roadtrip, this is Wanderer Actual, we have hostiles, bugging back to your position as initially communicated.”
“Negative, Wanderer, we have hostiles as well. Dozens, maybe hundreds just outside of town. Roadtrips One and Two en-route to your position.”
Undead were staggering out of the gloom on both sides of the road now, the headlights of the Hummer illuminating them more and more as they got closer to the pavement, “Request alternate evac route, things are getting bogged here.” Men, women, and children were materializing out of the darkness now all with the same intent.
“Standby Roadtrip, we’re looking.”
Up ahead the things had already stumbled onto the road and were coming straight at the oncoming headlights, looking for a quick dinner. The Humvee had some light armor, while the pickup was unshielded although faster than the military vehicle. The undead were beginning to pinch the vehicles from three sides, and it wasn’t long before evading them wasn’t possible. The first thump on the driver’s side of the Hummer sent chills down Murray’s spine. The creature went spinning away, but two more took its place and followed behind the vehicles. “Roadtrip Two, tighten up, we can plow for you.”
“Copy One!”
The pickup sped up slightly, and soon the vehicles were only ten feet apart as they sped down the rural road at forty miles per hour. The thumps were more common now, and one went under the Humvee with a satisfying crunch. The truck behind braked and swerved a little as the crushed zombie was spit out from under the tires of Murray’s vehicle. Several more creatures in the road, heedless of the danger, moved straight at the front of the oncoming trucks, and were plowed under or pushed to the side. Inevitably, one rolled up the hood and over the roof of the Hummer, getting caught in blast shield in front of the machine gun turret.
Run (Book 2): The Crossing Page 17