by D. J. Molles
“What do we do?” Torri yelped.
The Humvee hit the bridge again, clattered over it. Harper glanced in the side view mirror, trying to size up the horde spilling over the top of that hill, but there didn’t seem to be an end to them. They just kept coming and coming. At least a thousand. Maybe more.
The radio barked at him: “Harper! What’s going on?”
Harper didn’t recognize the voice when it yelled. He keyed the mic back. “Lot of infected comin’ our way. We’re going back up the street.”
“Where are we going?” The radio asked.
Harper wasn’t able to force himself to sound calm and collected. “We’re fucking going someplace else! If everyone would shut the fuck up I might be able to figure out where!”
Julia pointed up the road. “There was an industrial park a few miles from here.”
Harper looked at her, released the microphone button. “What?”
“We passed it a few miles back. Big industrial park.” She pointed her thumb backwards. “If we break line of sight, they’ll slow down a bit. We can hide out in one of the buildings, or at least off the road so they don’t see us. Maybe they’ll pass by.”
“Fuck.” Harper rubbed his head, suddenly overcome by the gravity of the situation. This was the biggest horde he’d seen since they’d cleared Smithfield, and they’d been contained in the city. He’d never seen a horde out roaming the countryside like this. He almost felt responsible to stop them before they railroaded some innocent group of survivors.
But what could they do? They didn’t have the resources to make an effective stand. And they didn’t have the time to hunt the horde, thinning it out over the course of a week like a herd of bison. He could no more stop it than he could stop the passage of a hurricane bound for them. Their only option would be to sit it out, wait for it to pass, and hope others in the way got lucky.
Camp Ryder, he thought. What if they follow the highway all the way back to Camp Ryder?
Unlikely.
But the thought still made his guts clench, cold and fiery all at once.
“Fine,” he waved up the road. “Go for it.”
The Humvee rolled past the shopping center on the left, the convoy pulling out into the roadway behind them, everyone hanging out windows and turrets and trying to get a look at the horde, pointing and yelling with wide open eyes and mouths like they were witnessing some seismic event, some crack in the earth’s crust that was racing towards them.
Torri was suddenly slapping the back of Harper’s seat. “Mike! Mike!”
Harper jerked away from her, but looked out the left side of the vehicle as they passed by the shopping center. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he assumed it had something to do with Mike. “What? What’s wrong?”
Torri was on the verge of hysteria. “Mike! They forgot Mike!”
They were too far passed the shopping center now. Harper couldn’t see what she was talking about, only the snake of green and tan vehicles lumbering up and out of the parking lot behind them, diesel fumes pluming out of their pipes as their engines worked in overdrive. “Shit! Are you sure?”
Torri was sure enough that she seemed on the verge of throwing herself out of the moving vehicle, twisting every which way in a panic, hands going to the door as though she might open it at any moment. “Go back! Go back!”
“Fuck! Julia, spin us around.” Then he grabbed up the radio again and transmitted. “Everyone else keep going to the industrial…” he groaned, trying to keep himself upright as Julia chirped tires cutting a tight U-turn. “…the industrial park a few miles up. Everyone just keep going.”
The front end of the Humvee lifted up as Julia accelerated back towards the shopping center. The string of their convoy ripped passed them, the wind from their bulks shoving the Humvee around, the drivers and their passengers staring at Harper’s Humvee as though they were insane to go back.
Up ahead, Harper could see a figure that seemed to be running after the convoy, and it stopped in the middle of the road, stutter stepped with anxiety, then turned and looked northward. Then the figure bolted back towards the shopping center.
“That’s Mike!” Torri cried. “That’s him!”
“Where the fuck’s he going?” Julia yelled. “Can’t he see us coming back for him?”
“C’mon, Mike,” Harper growled to no one in particular. “Don’t make us fucking chase you.”
Julia honked the horn, trying to get his attention, but either he couldn’t hear it, or didn’t care. The figure disappeared back into the parking lot. “He’s gonna try to hide, dammit.”
Harper leaned forward in his seat. “Get in there, Julia!”
She hit the parking lot, taking the curb and screeching tires. Out the driver’s side, Harper could see down the dip in the road, and the wall of bodies racing towards them, close enough to see the insanity in their eyes, their gnashing teeth, their clawed fingers. The roar of them overpowered the noise of the engines, the thousands of them screeching madly, filled with some insatiable hunger.
Torri leaned between Harper and Julia’s seats, pointing out the windshield. “There! There! Mike!” she yelled, as though he could hear her.
Straight ahead of them, Mike ran for one of the closed businesses.
The Humvee shuddered violently and this time Harper could definitely hear the M2 thundering over their heads, the concussion of each gunshot seeming like a physical thing, slapping the roof of the vehicle.
Julia made a circle in the parking lot, blaring the horn the whole way, until Mike finally stopped running and turned around to see the Humvee pulling up alongside him. His wife threw open the door, leaning through Gray’s legs as he desperately tried to maneuver the turret to bear on the horde. Between the rapid blasts of the .50 BMG cartridges, Harper could hear Gray yelling, his voice like the barking of an old coon hound, “We need to go! We need to fucking go!”
Harper turned and looked out his open window at the street and the big open parking lot before him. All the exits out of the parking lot were suddenly choked with bodies, an imminent, inevitable avalanche of them pouring into the parking lot, coming straight for the Humvee, and Harper could see that there was no way they were getting out of this unscathed. He could see the bright red, .50 caliber tracers punching holes in concrete, ripping through bodies, one after another. The targets so jam-packed together, running shoulder to shoulder and back to front, that each projectile shredded multiple infected, tearing limbs and opening body cavities and causing great spurts of blood and chunks of humanity to fly up into the air in the path of each round.
And it was barely slowing them down.
We’re fucked. We’re fucked. We’re fucked.
Mike leaped into the vehicle, landing atop his wife.
Harper slapped Julia’s shoulder. “Fucking go!”
She slammed on the gas.
Gray screamed, because he knew what was coming.
The Humvee lurched forward, and at the same moment was slammed in the side by the wall of bodies. Harper felt his stomach flip-flop as he registered the sensation of being lifted. The engine roared but the vehicle seemed to stall. All around them the noise was unbearable, the stench sudden and overpowering. Hundreds of starved, savage faces screamed at them, wiry arms clawing through the open windows, trying to get to the meat inside.
The Humvee’s front end suddenly pitched, the spinning tires ramming down onto crushed and trampled bodies, immediately grinding them down and sending up a great spray of blood to either side of the vehicle. Harper had the muzzle of his rifle just protruding from the window, amid all those grasping hands, and he fired indiscriminately, squinting his eyes and closing his mouth as the spray of blood washed back, both warm and cold on his face at once.
The Humvee trundled over the carpet of mangled bodies, found a patch of concrete on the other side, and caught some traction. There was nothing ahead of them but more bodies, a sea of bodies, all of them pushing in towards the Humvee so th
at the ones that reached the grill were immediately crushed. Not by the force of the vehicle, but by the force of the horde compressing them. They twitched and howled and jerked about against the ram bars, eyes bulging, bones crunching, blood erupting out of mouths and noses and ears, and then they disappeared underneath the vehicle as the others clambered wildly over them, some of them falling to their deaths under the tires or the feet of the horde, some of them vaulting onto the hood, only to catch a .50-caliber round and be flung off in pieces.
And all the while, Gray just kept yelling at them to go, as though he didn’t understand that no matter how hard they pressed on the gas, the simple mass of humanity around them would not allow the vehicle to do more than plunge forward into bodies, get mired in filth and flesh, then plunge forward again when it found purchase. Harper could see the rise of the parking lot, the exits that led to the road and they seemed close, but didn’t seem to be getting any closer. For one sickening moment he thought he felt them move backwards, but then they were forward again, toppling a wall of infected, only to be overpowered by another.
His rifle went dry, and he tried to reach for another magazine, but there were so many arms reaching through the windows that he couldn’t fight them off and simultaneously load his weapon. He felt the rifle jerk in his grip, didn’t want to lose that rifle, could not lose that rifle, so he just held onto it with both hands and began to pull back, ripping it back and forth like a dog rending something from another’s grip.
He could barely focus on anything but his own terror. The filthy, blood-scabbed arms and fingernails black with grime that Harper could not even imagine, the faces behind them with their gaping mouths, reaching in desperately, trying to get him between their teeth.
In the turret, Gray’s shouts suddenly changed in pitch. The aggression went out of them and it was pure fear, high-pitched and unmanly, and it sent shivers up Harper’s spine when he heard the man scream, pride and all concept of shame lost.
He managed to rip the rifle away and turned his body inwards, avoiding the clawing hands that reached for him. In the same movement, he looked back, his heart pounding hard and fast and his eyes searching up into the turret for what was wrong with Gray. Now the man’s legs kicked out, thrashed, his whole body convulsing. His screams were an ululating wave, and they reached a crescendo as his entire body seemed to lift out of the turret, like he was being sucked up by a tornado.
Harper dropped his rifle and lunged out with a cry of alarm, grabbing a hold of Gray’s legs. “Gray!” he shouted, then to Torri and Mike, “Help me! Help me!”
But Mike just sat there, blank faced as ever. And Torri had the muzzle of her rifle in her window, firing madly with her eyes closed, blood from the bullet wounds she was inflicting splashing the window and speckling her face.
“Oh Jesus!” Gray screamed. “Oh Jesus get ‘em off me!”
Harper pulled back on the legs, but Gray only cried out harder, the sound of the M2 silenced as Gray fought for his last moments. Harper could only see the light pouring in from the turret, could not see what lay beyond it, or what was happening to Gray’s upper half, but the cries suddenly became gurgles and the legs locked out, the feet twitching about loosely.
“Gray!” Harper shouted. He didn’t know whether to keep pulling at the legs or not.
The body lurched in his grasp, and then blood began to pour down it, into the cabin of the Humvee. Great gouts of it, and then flesh, and then coils of gut, pale and meandering. They dropped suddenly from the open turret and Harper recoiled as they wrapped his arm like a snake. Above them, dozens of hands and feet stamped on the hood of the Humvee, a hundred claws scraped against the metal and then dug into flesh, and Gray convulsed twice more as blood and urine poured down his pant legs. And then the only movement to his body was the thrashing of the creatures feeding on it.
“Julia!” Harper yelled, unable to control his voice. “Get us the fuck out of here!”
She didn’t respond directly, just screamed out a curse.
Harper could feel the death in the limpness of Gray’s limbs, knew there was nothing else that could be done for the man. Now it was their lives that were at stake, and he would not sacrifice the rest of them for the sake of saving Gray’s body, no matter how sick it made him. He let go of the legs, and almost instantaneously the body was pulled through the turret. One great heave and it was just Gray’s right leg dangling through the turret hole, and then that was gone too.
Mike seemed to suddenly realize what had happened. His voice was drunken, delirious with fear: “Oh my God! Oh my fuckin’ God, they got Gray!”
Whether it was Gray’s body that distracted the horde with the promise of a mouthful of flesh, or whether it was simply luck, the tires once again rolled over a pile of infected, found the concrete on the other side, burned through the slime of blood and caught traction. And when the Humvee lurched forward again, it kept going, the sea of bodies suddenly parting.
Julia hit the inclined exit at thirty miles an hour, almost left the ground, then screeched loudly and nearly spun out as she yanked a hard left-hand turn back onto the highway in the direction they had last seen their convoy only moments ago.
As they reached the pinnacle of the movement, Harper could hear the tumble of limbs falling from the roof of the Humvee. In the side view mirror he could see the bodies—Gray’s and two others—hit the concrete hard and then roll limply along until they flopped off the road and into the ditch.
“Brakes!” he said to Julia.
She got up speed and then slammed them. They all flew forward, Harper catching himself before his face hit the windshield. But nothing else came off the roof.
“Okay, go!”
And then they rocketed forward again.
Harper twisted in his seat, shoved his head through the window as his fingers felt shakily for that magazine he’d been trying to get. The open window and the side of his door were a mess of gore, and even in the rushing wind of the moving vehicle, he could still smell the stink of it—all that blood mixed with shit.
Behind them, the horde spilled back out into the roadway, running after them desperately, a never ending chase. How long could they run like that? At a full sprint? It seemed like they just kept going until they were dead. Until Harper or one of his team killed them.
Mike filled the sudden silence with sounds of panic. Each intake of breath a wheeze, each exhale a whimper, his whole body moving to the rhythm of his hyperventilation. His eyes were wide and red and building with tears.
Harper managed to get the magazine seated in the well of his rifle and charged it. He looked back at Mike, trying hard to mask a boiling anger that he had a hard time explaining even to himself. “Calm down, Mike,” he said, his voice a little harsher than he intended it to be. “Take a deep breath and let it out slow.” He wanted to slap the guy, get some sense back into him. “Fucking get a hold of yourself, man.”
“Hey!” Torri punched the back of Harper’s seat.
Harper spun. “Hey what?”
Mike had his head in his hands.
Torri scowled. “I think he’s been through enough!”
Harper punched the top of the radio console, his knuckles skinning and stinging. “We’ve all been through enough, for chrissake! What gives him the right to fucking tune out and cost us lives?” Harper felt his face heating up and he looked at Mike. “What fucking right do you have to tune out, motherfucker? Your life harder than the rest of us? You had to do worse things than the rest of us?”
“Harper!” Julia yelled.
But Harper didn’t feel like stopping. It came out of him as uncontrollably as vomit from a sick man. Bad feelings that needed to be purged. “Why is it that you get to go off into la-la land, Mike? What has happened to you that is so fucking unbelievably horrible that you’re not fucking paying attention when I say on the radio to get in the fucking truck and get gone?! Gray’s gone because we had to come back for you!”
Torri punched him in the face.
Harper grimaced, his fist balling and for a moment he thought he might punch Torri’s nose through the back of her skull. But just then the radio squawked, and it seemed to draw them out of the moment so that the anger was pulled back from the tipping point, like a kettle being removed from a heater coil.
“Harper! Julia! You guys okay?”
Torri looked surprised at herself, but still angry at Harper.
Julia grabbed Harper by the arm, pushing him as though she were trying to get him to turn in his seat and face forward again. “Answer the radio, Harper. We’re almost there.”
In the back seat, Mike lifted his face out of his hands, somewhat in control of himself. “He’s right.”
Torri looked at her husband. “He’s not…”
“He’s right. He’s right about everything.”
Harper grabbed the radio handset, but looked back at Mike. “Just fucking forget it, Mike. Torri. Both of you, fucking forget I said anything. I just…got a little heated.” Then he transmitted on the radio, “Yeah, we got out. We’re coming up on you guys in just a second. Which building are you in?”
Radio static, then: “All the way down on your right. Last building. We’re parked behind it.”
Ahead of them, a drive opened. The trees to either side of the road drew back like curtains and they could see the big, square industrial buildings of the complex. Factories. Warehouses. Strings of small businesses that could not afford a storefront location.
Harper slumped in his seat, stared at the rifle between his legs, then picked it up.
Julia turned them onto the drive that led back into the complex.
For the moment, everyone was silent.
Harper looked out the window. Just looked at the passing buildings with the mold creeping up on the siding, steady and insistent. And he shook his head, and his voice was just a whisper, barely audible to anyone but himself. “What the hell is happening to us?”
CHAPTER 21: BRUTALITY
Lee stared up into the sky as it turned from bright sapphire to a deep, murky cobalt. Like he was descending into the ocean, staring up at the dwindling brightness of the surface waters. He felt it too, like the compression you might feel on that descent—the sickness and fever crowding around him, making his brain fuzzy. The chill like that of cold waters that the sun hasn’t touched in eons.