51
* * *
Danny’s team took advantage of the confusion and distraction caused by the blast and slipped back into their hiding spots in the trees. Danny stood behind a big oak tree ten yards from the rim and studied the activity on the bottom through the magnified scope attached to his M4. He smiled, remembering the invader's reactions when they looked up after the explosion and saw the line of shooters no longer stood on the edge of the bluff. Their jaws dropped, they blanched and murmured to one another; some even set their weapons down and rubbed their eyes or fiddled with the sights on their rifles as if convinced they weren't seeing things correctly. The explosion caused some to lose composure and fire where he and his team had stood. Bullets whizzed and snapped overhead, bark flew, and bits of wood peppered the ground around them, but none of the shots came close to hitting anybody. The danger would come when the enemy aimed their shots rather than firing blindly at spots where their targets used to be. But if things worked out according to plan, by that time there would be so much chaos and confusion down below it would be difficult for the invaders to get off a good shot. They would have to find a target at a bad angle 100 yards above them, zero in on it, and fire, all amid the enormous distractions yet to come. As long as his crew used their sight lines and stayed behind the trees their chance of getting hit was slim. The enemy finally seemed to be getting organized. A sturdy looking fellow with slicked-back hair appeared to take charge. He spent about a minute yelling at a handful of men — eighteen, by Danny's count — and three women. That group had assembled the fighters into clusters of about fifty and done their own yelling. Now, instead of milling around aimlessly and appearing to be at a loss for what to do, they formed five big teams. Each team had a guy standing in front of it and giving orders.
He trained his scope on the explosion site. It looked like thirty enemy combatants lay dead or injured. A team of five tended them. A company of fighters in fancy blue uniforms stood in a protective ring around the Jeep that held their boss lady. She had ducked down out of sight for now, but he had observed earlier as she stomped over and engaged in a shouting match with the slicked-back-hair guy. He couldn't help but chuckle when he saw her- she looked to be a real piece of work, everything Coy had said and more. Who showed up to a battle in full make up with perfectly coiffed hair and jeans so tight they appeared to be poured on?
Gunfire disturbed His ruminations. Five shots, perfectly spaced, one after another — bang-bang-bang-bang-bang — from the south. Danny set his mouth in a grim smile. The gunfire was Coy's signal that the real fun and games were about to begin. He spoke in a stage whisper and commanded the people on each side of him to pick a target and zero in. His team passed the order down the line; in short order, all of his shooters had their rifles up and trained on a combatant below. He sent out a second edict- no matter what, nobody was to shoot until he gave the command.
Danny steeled himself. A lot was about to happen in a short time. Terrence and Jiri believed the best way to overcome their opponent’s huge superiority in numbers was to inflict massive damage right at the start of the fighting. Take at least half of them out in the first fifteen minutes and leave the survivors panicked and confused.
He recalled a conversation with Jiri a few days ago. It was the end of a long day of readying for battle, and they were drinking a couple of lukewarm beers and talking about the fight to come. "If the combat isn't over an hour after the first shots are fired," Jiri said, "we'll lose."
Danny turned his head and spit a stream of tobacco juice. Wiping the sweat from his brow he grimaced and re-shouldered his rifle. "I don't lose, Bubba." After a moment of searching, he found his target again and took aim.
52
* * *
Terry Simeon looked at the bulldozers lined in a row at the far end of the pit for the hundredth time. Something wasn't right about them, something other than the wooden planks attached to each dozer's blade.
He’d had been at G-CORE for five months; for the invasion he was assigned to a team of nameless nobodies headed up by a scary psychopath named Stump Wesson. His oldest daughter died on the second day of the outbreak, his son on the fourth, and his wife and youngest daughter disappeared on the eighth. A native of Diamond, a tiny town eight miles south of Carthage, he passed the Glorious Church of the Redeemer twice a day on his way to and from work. It took him three months to run out of food and water. When he did, he made his way to the church in search of help.
Men with loud voices and big guns met him at the entrance to the grounds. They had him strip and inspected him for bites, then sent him to a bathhouse. A fat nurse with a surly attitude ordered him into a tub filled with cold water and scrubbed his skin pink. She ordered him from the tub; while he dripped water and shivered, she coated him with delousing powder and covered the powder with flea spray. "Stay there and don't move!" she commanded before stomping away. She returned fifteen minutes later to spray him clean with a water hose and hand him a threadbare towel. "Dry yourself off," she sniffed.
A skinny teenager with a severe acne problem entered carrying two plastic bags. He opened the first and pulled out a pair of underwear, a tee-shirt, socks, jeans, and plastic flip-flops. “I had to guess at the sizes,†the teen said. “I’ll give you a voucher you can use for more clothing at the general store.â€
Terry regarded the underclothes, nonplussed. “What happened to the clothes I wore here?â€
“We burned them.†He handed the other bag to Terry. “Toiletries. Use them, and shower on a regular basis. The Queen doesn’t like it when people stink.â€
Terry rubbed his forehead. “The Queen?â€
“Yeah. Look, buddy. You came here looking for safety from the biters, right?â€
Terry nodded.
“Well, you found it. But there’s a procedure. Don’t ask a bunch of questions. Just go through the procedure and by the end you’ll have answers to all your questions.â€
He did, and they were. They assigned him a two-bedroom house in the subdivision with another single man for a housemate and gave him a job working cattle even though he spent most of his adult life repairing heavy equipment. He didn’t like cows but chose not to complain. They provided a home, enough food to subsist on, and he didn’t have to worry about walking down the street and encountering a biter. He kept to himself, ate his meals at home, sat in the back of the sanctuary once a week during church service, and read three or four books a week. He eyed the bulldozers and backhoes when he passed by them on the walk to work and home again and often thought about letting someone in charge know they weren’t taking full advantage of his abilities. But keeping his head down seemed the wiser course of action, so he remained silent.
Overnight, the community was on the verge of war. Like every able-bodied male and childless female, he was assigned to a crew. They met twice a day for ‘drills’- ninety-minute nightmares consisting of Stump and his two assistants fondling the women, calling the men pussies, and abusing everyone during the hand-to-hand combat training. Stump issued him a rifle and a box of ammo. The crew spent one short session learning how to load the magazine and attach it to the rifle. They weren’t allowed to fire them though. Stump said they’d just miss the target and end up killing someone important.
Terry was one of the few who didn’t fall under the sway of Kayla’s speech the night she declared war. He mourned his wife every day and she was the Queen’s opposite in every way; so unlike most, he wasn’t drawn to her physically or emotionally. In fact, as she laid out her case for war she created more questions for Terry than she answered. But he kept them to himself and reported as ordered at five the following morning.
He enjoyed the trek across town. It was the first time he left the compound since the day he showed up, and he basked in the pleasant weather and a day with no cows. But a sense of fore
boding kicked in almost as soon as he walked down the long, steep hill and crossed into the bottom of the pit.
No one seemed to know what to do, including Stump and Stump’s higher-ups. They milled about nervously until Stump and the other crew leaders yelled at them to get into formation; after a few minutes standing at attention discipline broke down and they milled around some more. Their opposition blew up the road, sealing off the only exit. That seemed ominous. Stump had told them over and over their forces outnumbered the opposition 20-1, and they were starving and out of weapons; then forty of them appeared high on the rim of the bluff, pointing weapons they weren’t supposed to have. The mortar exploded. Terry developed a sour taste in his mouth and an invisible weight on his chest made it hard to breathe.
Through it all, his attention kept returning to the dozers. Eight of the boxy yellow machines in a row, with those odd wooden planks over the blades. The planks were offset; the bottom of the blade was uncovered, and they rose higher than the blade’s top. Oddly, the top board on each dozer, the one above the blade, had three holes in it. They sat at the other end of the pit but Terry had good eyes. The holes were uniform- each looked about eight inches across.
Terry stared at the holes in the planks. A connection tried to form, but he couldn’t quite find it. Stump yelled something and the unit responded. Terry moved with them but slowly, as if in a dream. Stump appeared out of nowhere to block his path, cursing him and telling him to move.
Terry pointed at the equipment. “You should send men to check out those bulldozers. Something isn’t right about them.â€
Stump roared and cuffed him, sending him sprawling to the ground with a busted lip.
He wiped at the blood and gawked at the dozers, his eyes bouncing from one to the next. For no reason he understood, the mortar that exploded came to mind. Mortar… holes… mortar… holes… mudder… holes… mudder…holes… murder… holes… murder holes. His brain tried to help. It sent his body every signal in its arsenal that said ‘Panic!’. His mouth was dry, his stomach rolled, his hands trembled and cold chills ran down his spine.
Stump screamed at him all the while, bellowing for him to get up and rejoin his unit until the big bully’s face was scarlet and his chest heaved. He flashed a bitter grin and pulled a pistol, aiming it at Terry’s head.
His brain flashed on a memory. Terry and his youngest daughter, Raven. Raven sat on his lap and they watched a show on the History Channel. Raven was going through a princess phase and Terry was a history buff, so the program about English castles during the middle ages appealed to both of them. A series of castle walls played on the screen, each displaying an ornate and brightly decorated row of apertures cut through the thick stone fortification. The narrator, John Hurt or some other smart-sounding English guy, explained the castle’s defenders used these openings to shoot arrows at attackers. They stood in front of the openings, giving them the best aim at the enemy; the attackers were usually too far away for the small spaces to be viable targets. Hurt intoned the common name for them and Terry was immediately taken by it. Rarely had he heard a more apt description for something designed to kill.
He looked past the barrel of Stump’s gun into the man’s eyes and pointed a shaky hand at the dozers. “Murder holes.â€
“You bet,†Stump said in an agreeable tone. Then he pulled the trigger.
A sledgehammer-like force struck Terry above the eye, but there was no pain. Blackness quickly followed.
If he’d remained alive he would have seen Stump look at him with disgust and turn away. He only made it a few steps before two unexpected developments stopped him.
A turbulence rolled through the assembled troops, starting with those closest to the tunnel entrances. Shouts of concern, angry curses, even a few screams. The men in front were pointing; some backed up, and some shouldered their weapons. A group of fighters on their way to investigate a tunnel fired a few shots then turned and ran to rejoin the formation. Stump struggled for a glimpse at the cause of all the commotion but couldn’t see past the rows of troops in front of him.
And far across the pit, where Terry had been pointing when Stump shot him, a bulldozer engine clattered to life. Then a second, and a third, and then all of them.
53
* * *
Coy stared at a patch of ground fifty feet below him and fifteen yards beyond the tunnel entrance. He had a bolt ready in his bow and he held it over the flame dancing in the fire pit. The intruders on the quarry bottom recoiled; shouts of fear and cries of alarm rolled across the mine pit. He dipped the bolt into the fire. The strip of cloth tied to the shaft burst into flame. It burned hot and with intensity for a few seconds, then lessened. It reminded him of a gas grill set on low.
The enemy formation roiled as the fighters scrambled away from the dead. Sporadic gunfire sounded. Kayla’s Jeep backed toward the far side of the quarry, her guards jogging alongside in their protective circle. Captains cursed and shouted, trying to get their men in formation. A few of them struck their men when they wouldn’t move where the captains ordered and two men were shot where they stood. Coy didn’t know if they died for refusing orders or not reacting fast enough and didn’t much care.
Just when he thought he’d jumped the gun and his fire would go out, a figure shuffled into view below him and to his left. He took a deep breath, led it a few feet farther than he normally would, and launched his bolt. It spiraled harmlessly to the ground four feet behind the creeper.
He cursed under his breath, nocked another bolt, and bobbed it into the flame. When he looked down, he saw the number of targets had increased; a half-dozen of the dead had shuffled out of each of the three tunnels. He heard several of the distinctive whizz noises the cloth-laden bolts made as they flew; his teammates were in the game. Below, a creeper with no left arm went up like a dry Christmas tree. It burned much like the cloth did- several seconds of white-hot intensity followed by a steady burn. Being on fire didn’t affect the creeper; it kept shambling toward the invaders. Several of them fired and it crumpled.
On the rim over to his left, dozens of rifles fired into the troops below; enemy fighters fell and laid still or writhed and screamed. Danny’s crew had joined the battle.
Coy fired his third bolt and finally hit home. He squinted his eyes against the initial glare as a fuel-soaked creeper burst into flame.
Danny’s crew kept up a withering fire. The forces below shot back blindly; some stayed in formation and fired, others scrambled for protection behind limestone boulders, jeeps, and anything else that might shield them from the bullets crashing all around them. Below the ear-splitting cacophony of gunfire he could make out the rumbling and growling of the bulldozers as they crawled into position, their blades up to deflect any shots fired their way.
The dead swarmed the bottom. Coy didn’t even bother ducking behind the boulders between shots anymore. Nock-flame-shoot nock-flame-shoot again and again. He missed more than he hit, but by the time he loosed his last bolt at least sixty creepers were on fire across the quarry. The invaders shot most of them, but the beauty of the plan was that a bullet put them down but didn’t douse the fire. Time after time, a creature shuffled by one of its kind crumpled on the ground and burning. One little touch was all it took to create a new fireball edging ever closer to the intruders. Coy laughed out loud once when a shambling torch caught a bullet in the throat. The impact knocked it back into a clump of the dead behind it. One after another they erupted until all five blazed as they shuffled toward the enemy- and then a sixth when the one with the throat wound regained his feet.
The burning creepers weren’t a weapon; they were a terrifying diversion. While the invaders battled the dead, the gunmen on the bluff fired at them with impunity. Dead, dying, and grievously wounded raiders clad in black littered the quarry bottom. And now
the bulldozers were almost in place and ready to play their role in defending the tunnels.
Coy nocked an arrow, lit it, and fired it high into the sky, then followed it with two more. His team recognized the ‘halt’ signal and rose from their hiding spots. They backed away from the rim until they were out of the fighter’s sight lines. Everybody but Coy ran north to join Danny‘s team and trade their crossbows for rifles. He headed in the other direction.
He circled the grounds around the quarry, running at quick and easy pace. He was barely breathing hard a few minutes later when he joined Terrence. The peace officer stood in the center of his clearing, holding a grenade launcher in each hand and wearing an evil smile. He held a tube out to Coy. “Are you ready to blow up some shitheels?â€
Instead of accepting the tube Coy raised his binoculars and trained them on the intruders. “Yea, but I have to find somebody first.â€
54
* * *
Magnus crouched behind a sofa-sized chunk of limestone. He held his rifle in one hand and held the giant rock for support with the other. He peered around the quarry bottom, chuckling and shaking his head. The last he saw, Kayla huddled on the floor of a Jeep at the far side of the pit, her Queen’s guard dropping like flies. It didn't much matter though- there would be no takeover of the tunnels, no Kayla, Queen of the Midwest. They had lost. They had lost, and he couldn't even organize a retreat to the church because the smart fuckers they attacked destroyed their only escape path. The smart fuckers had thought of everything.
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