by Bobby Adair
Dalhover looked back up at Murphy. “Don’t let him do anything stupid, especially things like trying to talk to people. You got me?”
We were at the remains of our front gate. The council members melted in the crowd of bystanders, already talking a mile a minute. I grabbed Dalhover’s arm and turned him to face me. “Are you coming with us? Tell me you’re not going to try some stupid John Wayne shit and stay here if we go.”
“I’m trying to save your life, Zed. I’m trying to save you from yourself. I’ll stay because duty dictates it. I’m no general. I’m not even an officer.” He spat another gob on the asphalt. “But you know as well as I do, I’m the top military man in Bal, and a leader doesn’t run out on his troops.”
“But we’re supposed to?” I asked.
“You know it’s different, so don’t pretend like it’s not. Nobody’s gonna tie me up and hand me to Preacher Dick for crucifixion at sunrise.” Dalhover pointed his arthritic thumb at the crowd. “These people, they’ll do that to you. You wanna throw your life away for that kind of loyalty, be my guest.” He looked back at Murphy. “Ortega will want to call another goddamn meeting. War by committee—what a tragic joke that is. I’ll drag it out. Give folks time to rant their shit. Tell them we’ve got to wait for the results on those stupid amputated arms. Buy you some time. If a mob doesn’t materialize by the time that meeting is over, it will soon after. Before that happens, you need to take dipshit here and the others and get out through the south gate. I’ll have someone there I can trust to open it for you.”
36
“Zed,” Steph’s pause hung in the air for moments and moments that seemed like minutes and then hours.
Murphy and I had stopped by the empty lot we used for parking the scout Humvees and trucks. We had six running Humvees, four of those armored, and two trucks. Each of the Humvees had a machine gun or a grenade launcher mounted on top. Most of the other Slow Burns were already there, checking ammo loads and fluid levels. Gathering the Slow Burns together, we quickly passed along the details of what had happened outside the front gate. All were mortified. Murphy told them Dalhover’s plan. Everyone who had loved ones to gather hurried off, with at least one other Slow Burn or a dependable normal along. We agreed to gather back at our staging area in twenty minutes.
Hoping twenty minutes wasn’t too long, Murphy and I rushed off to the hospital. Murphy wasn’t attached to anyone at the moment, and his sister had passed years before. Steph and me, he insisted, were his only family left. I didn’t argue.
With Murphy just inside the door of the small room the hospital used for a pharmacy, keeping it private for Steph and me, I asked her, “What’s wrong? Do you understand the situation?”
“I don’t—” It wasn’t like Steph to lose her courage when saying something difficult.
“Just tell me.”
Her eyes glassed with tears. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to travel.”
That felt like a punch to the nuts, and I found myself unable to speak as I stood there, hands on her arms, trying to convince her to gather what she needed.
“I’ve been sick,” she explained.
“How—” I didn’t have a clue what to say, so many questions and emotions were running through my head. “I don’t—”
“Go for as long as you need,” she told me. “I can stay here. They’ll take care of me until you return.”
“What kind of cancer do you have? How sick are you?”
“Zed, please. We don’t have the time to even begin that conversation. Trust me when I tell you, please. Here at the hospital is the best place for me to be right now.”
“I don’t understand. You’re working crazy hours. How can you be too sick to travel?”
“Zed, listen to me.” It was her Captain Leonard voice. “I need you to go. I need you to be safe.” She turned to Murphy. “Get him in that Humvee and get him out of town. Murphy, I’m depending on you.”
Javendra burst into the room, brushing past Murphy, whose attention was on Steph. He blurted, “I just heard. The fingerprints match.”
“Wait.” I didn’t believe it. “Those frozen arms? You’re telling me those fingerprints actually match the one he cut off?”
“I was just there,” he continued,”when they checked. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it myself.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. “It’s got to be some kind of trick, right?” I looked at Steph for the answer.
“I don’t know,” she told me.
“I can’t explain it either,” offered Javendra. “Perhaps with some more time. I could run a DNA comparison and—”
“We don’t have the equipment for that here,” Steph told him.
“None of that is gonna matter in about fifteen minutes,” Murphy told us. “Pretty quick, everybody in town is going to know, and then, Preacher Peppy Dick’s bullshit might start to smell pretty good to some of these folks. You hear what I’m sayin’?”
“Steph,” I begged. “I can’t leave you here.”
“You have to.”
“I’ll take care of her,” Javendra told me. “I swear to you, Zed.”
Steph wrapped me in a hug, squeezing me so tight I thought she wouldn’t let go. But when she did, tears were rolling down her cheeks. “You have to go. I promise, I’ll be here when you get back. All this…this, stuff. It’s not as bad as it might seem at the moment. Don’t worry about me. Get out of here while you can.”
An explosion rumbled through the night, followed immediately by another.
“What was that?” asked Murphy.
Machine gun fire rattled from somewhere outside the wall.
The tornado siren Balmorhea used to alert the town in case of attack wailed loud and strong.
Losing his temper, Murphy yelled, “That lying motherfucker. He’s attacking us now.”
37
We’d trained for it a thousand times—more likely an understatement than an exaggeration. Despite the relative peace of the previous few years, we’d never grown complacent about security. Not totally. Footsteps ran through the hospital’s halls. Outside, voices shouted. Everyone had a place to be when the town was attacked. An exact place.
I cast off all thoughts of flight, as well as the raging animosity I’d felt growing toward my neighbors.
Steph pulled me close and gave me a quick kiss. “Don’t die out there, Null Spot. I love you.” She turned and followed Javendra to wherever the hospital staff gathered at the beginning of a crisis. She had her duty. In moments, those tasked with protecting the hospital and its vulnerable occupants would bar the doors and barricade the windows, turning it into an Alamo they’d defend from fortifications on the roof.
Murphy grabbed my arm and dragged me toward an exit. “C’mon, dumbass.”
With legs that listened better than the rest of me, I started to run, knowing the best thing I could to do to keep Steph safe was to get to my assigned station, ready for war. Following Murphy into the cold dark, we sprinted across the old football field. Five blocks lay between us and our rapid-response vehicles, the six Humvees manned by the other Slow Burns and an additional eighteen militiamen and women. Altogether we were a solid unit. We’d been hardened by war with the hordes of infected, and especially the running battles we’d waged against a gang of thugs out of Chihuahua who’d tried to work their way up through the Davis Mountains some years back.
A series of violent explosions ripped through the night, flashing yellow against the low-hanging clouds. Dozens of fires glowed from the east. Machine gun and dispersed rifle fire popped all around. But not from inside our walls.
“Who are they fighting?” shouted Murphy. “Who’s out there?”
I didn’t know, but it made me mad that I was left out of it. That is, until I heard a familiar old sound and felt a feeling in my feet that seemed like it was from another life. I stopped in the road, just two blocks from the Humvees.
“C’mon,” Murphy shouted. “What’s wro
ng with you?”
“Listen.” I pointed at the ground. “You feel it?”
The howls outside the wall rose up on a thousand infected throats. No, ten thousand. Maybe ten times that. The ground rumbled with their footfalls. It felt like a horror from so, so long ago, so terrible it etched itself into my subconscious—the naked horde, when they attacked Dr. Evans’s family farm all those years ago, pouring over the far slopes, washing over the barn and farmhouse, killing everyone in minutes.
Murphy’s eyes went wide. “Shit. Holy mother of monkey fuckers!”
38
As we ran, I formulated my best course of action, where my mobile, lethal unit could maximize its killing power with what I knew raged towards us out there in the night.
Grace already had the Humvees running when Murphy and I arrived. I didn’t waste a second as I climbed into the front passenger seat of the lead vehicle. I was, after all, the captain of the rapid response unit. “Grace, are we all sorted out on the comms?”
“All set up,” she confirmed.
I strapped the radio headset on. Murphy climbed into his position behind the .50 through the roof hatch. I told Grace, “Roll for the rear gate.”
“We’re going outside?” She didn’t approve.
“Do it.”
She started the vehicle moving as I radioed the other Humvees in our unit to follow. “We’re under attack by a horde of Whites.”
That surprised everyone inside my Humvee just as much as it surprised those over the comm. I switched the radio to Balmorhea’s command channel. “This is Zed. I need Dalhover on the line.”
He answered almost immediately. “Are you with your unit?”
“Rolling,” I told him. “I don’t know what one has to do with the other, but there’s a White horde out there. A big one.”
“Just now figuring that out.”
“We can be more effective outside the wall, hunting, drawing them off, rather than inside plugging holes.”
“Agreed,” he rasped.
“This one feels big.”
“Yep. I feel it.” Dalhover wasn’t talking about transient emotions. He wasn’t that type of man. He felt the rumble in the ground, heard the howls shiver the air.
I was reluctant to say it over an open channel, but I needed to know 100% that Dalhover and I were on the same page. “This might be a bug-out scenario.”
“Get me some hard facts.”
“We’re headed for the back gate. Send the order to open it up for us.”
“Good luck, Zed.”
“Good luck to all of us.”
“A horde?” Grace asked, as she kept a sharp eye for any residents running across the road in front of us.
“You can’t hear them over the diesel.” I pointed at the fires glowing beneath the clouds. “Those explosions. That gunfire. That’s not directed at us.”
“Preacher Dick’s army is fighting them outside?” she asked.
“Yep.” I didn’t see any other possibility. I turned in my seat for a glance at Jazz, who had the seat right behind mine. “Once we get outside the wall. Shoot anything that moves. Make sure Murphy doesn’t run out of ammo for that .50.”
In front of us, the rear gate slowly rolled open. As soon as the gap was wide enough, Grace gunned the engine and our Humvee lumbered through.
“Josh,” I called over the radio.
“Yep?” he answered.
“You take Enrique and Alice around the west side of town. Make a wide loop. Slaughter all the Whites you see. Most of all, recon and report.” I didn’t want to let my fear out of the bag to infect the others, but we needed to assess that scope of the danger. “If this horde is too large to fight off, everyone in town will need to bug out. The sooner the better.”
“Got you, boss. Josh out.”
As Grace left the pavement to run through a cornfield, Josh’s three Humvees peeled off to the right. Fires, large and small, flickered in the darkness in front of us. A huge explosion detonated a mile or so away. The shadows in the distance seemed alive, wild. Dancing.
“Gabe, Hannah,” I called over the radio. They were the commanders of the two Humvees following us. “Stay on my six. Let’s keep a tight line. Things are going to get hairy out here. Grace, don’t stray too close to the wall.”
She looked at me in a way that made it clear she didn’t need detailed instructions. And she didn’t. Nobody on my team did. “Just tell me where you want this thing and how fast you want to get there.”
I smiled. “Sorry, boss.”
Tess, the girl in the seat behind Grace laughed.
“I got movement.” Murphy’s gun barked, sending tracers streaking into the darkness, seeming to ignite sporadic fires out of nothing.
“What the hell?” wondered Jazz aloud.
“Get us closer,” I told Grace.
She swerved. The Humvee bounced through the furrows as it picked up speed.
“Holy cow!” hollered Jazz. “One o’clock.”
I looked out front, just off to the right, and saw it. A mass of flames rolled down the southernmost hill, illuminating hundreds of running human forms in stark shades of guttering yellow and black.
“What is that?” Grace’s tension belied her unspoken guess.
“One of Preacher Dick’s APCs.” That was my guess. It was all it could be. But an armored vehicle, engulfed in flames? “Good Lord.”
Murphy fired again.
“Let me know if you need me shooting,” I told them.
Everyone laughed. Such was my reputation, which was why I still carried the sawed-off shotgun and manned the radio from my command seat. I was good at that.
“Good God,” muttered Grace as she tapped the brakes.
Flooding across the desert through our headlight beams, a mob of Whites dashed toward Balmorhea. Only, they didn’t look like any kind of Whites I’d ever seen.
39
I shouted, “Floor it.”
Murphy spun the .50 around to our front and ripped into the running horde. Jazz’s and Tess’s guns opened up.
Over the sound of gunfire, howling Whites and clinking bottles—clinking bottles? I called into the radio, “Gabe, Hanna, get right on our ass! Push if we get bogged down.” Those were the only orders I had time to give.
The Humvee smashed into the Whites, and they burst into splashes of flame as we ran them down.
“What the heck?” shouted Grace.
A noxious, eye-burning stink of vinegar and gunpowder blew into the Humvee.
Blinking to clear my eyes, I blasted a White within arm’s reach of my door. His head exploded in a red slurry as I fired again. I reloaded both my barrels in a heartbeat, taking the moment while my hands were running on muscle memory to realize that nearly all of the Whites I could see in the wildly changing light were wearing gas masks. All of the masks were of a similar design—some yellow, most brown. Most wore canvas jackets, coarse-cloth pants and military boots. Some carried knives, some machetes, others wielded truncheons and bats.
The Humvee slowed in the crush of bodies in front of us. I told Grace, “Gun it.”
“That’s the Lynaugh stink,” shouted Murphy as he loaded another belt into his .50.
I blasted two more rounds, pointed center-mass, and a White burst into flames as he crumbled. The sudden firelight gave me a glimpse of others with bottles dangling from clips on their belts.
Tess fell into a coughing fit.
Something crashed against our windshield, bursting in flames and broken glass.
“Shit!” hollered Murphy as he ducked inside.
A wave of fire engulfed our vehicle. I pulled back from the flames flowing past my window. Something hit us from behind, throwing me forward then back into my seat.
“It’s Gabe,” coughed Grace. “He’s pushing us.”
My radio crackled with calls from Gabe and Hannah, checking on our welfare.
“They got Molotovs,” hollered Murphy. “They are the fucking Molotovs!”
“
I can see now,” Grace told me, calmer than any of the rest of us. “I can see.”
Flames still burned across my half of the windshield. The Humvee picked up speed and the ride got a little smoother. Murphy climbed back through the roof hatch, and I worried for a half second that his ammo would start to cook off and kill him. In the next moment, I realized if it was going to do that, it already would have. His weapon boomed to life.
“We’re out of it,” Grace choked, as the flames started to burn out on my side of the windshield. I didn’t need to add, for the moment.
A quarter mile ahead, a dragon flame blew across the desert, engulfing a pickup full of black-clad soldiers and illuminating another. Flaming people jumped, their screams lost in the thousands of howling troops. They were quickly engulfed by a tide of Whites.
“You see that?” Murphy called down. “Flamethrower.”
“Why is Preacher Dick using a flamethrower on his own guys?” asked Jazz, coughing and choking on her words. “That’s not Josh, is it?”
“No.” I knew he was miles away, far on the other side of Balmorhea, in an armored Humvee. I called him on the radio just the same. “Josh, you okay over there?”
“We got thousands of them all around us!” he hollered. “We lost Alice. We’re in trouble here.”
“Get out,” I ordered. “Get back to the south gate if you can. Protect that road.”
“Will do, boss. Josh out.”
“Oh, no.” Grace had overheard all of it.
I commed in to Balmorhea command. “Can Dalhover talk?”
“No, Zed,” the girl answered. “They’ve hit the outer defenses.”
I looked left and saw the flash of hundreds of guns firing along the top of our walls. The thunder of the gunfire hit me half an eyeblink later.
“Tell him it looks like a Sarah Mansfield situation out here.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“Just tell him. He’ll know.”