Dos

by Allen Gamboa

  “I fucking hit them and they’re not stopping!” Vanelli blinked several times to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing.

  “Headshots!” Hale said remembering that’s how they killed the cartel men that had attacked them earlier.

  Both soldiers were baffled that shots that would have usually killed someone only staggered the advancing crowd. The shots to the head seemed to be the only thing that put them down for good so Vanelli started to carefully place his shots as the mob grew closer.

  “Good call, Sarge.” He squeezed the trigger of his rifle. “I guess you Air Force guys are good for something after all.”

  “Yeah, well your momma seems to think I’m good for a lotta things.” Hale winked at Vanelli as he slapped another magazine into his rifle. They resumed firing on the fast moving crowd. Hale realized that at the rate they were going, they wouldn’t be able to stop all of the crazies before the mob rolled over them. He quickly reached into his tac vest and removed a fragmentation grenade. After he pulled the pin and tapped Vanelli on the arm to show him the explosive, Hale threw the device underhanded into the middle of the group. The grenade detonated among the cannibals. Several of the hungry crowd were ripped to pieces by the explosives. A few others lost limbs and were thrown to the ground. Others stumbled over the fallen ones, tripping but slowly getting back up on unstable legs. The grenade had slowed but not stopped the voracious mob.

  “Fuck me!” Vanelli’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “They're still coming!”

  “I never ever get to use these.” Hale grabbed another grenade and tossed it. “More fun than you would think!”

  Both men ducked down as the explosive tossed a couple of the crazies up into the air while eviscerating several others. This time it was Vanelli that lobbed a grenade at the cannibals that still staggered in their direction. More of the crazed crowd went down but some of them still stood and continued their insane death march in the team’s direction. Hale noticed many of them were missing limbs and had horrific shrapnel wounds that would have killed a normal person.

  “What’s that smell?” Vanelli gagged. ”It’s nasty!”

  “Must be those pair of your mama’s panties I have in my pack!” As Hale raised his rifle to fire on the thinning crowd, he could see the hurt look on Vanelli’s face. “Fuck, Vanelli, don’t pick now to get all butt hurt. That smell is guts and stuff. Those freaks are all fucked up.” He brought the rifle up to his shoulder. “Besides, I left you mama’s panties on the chopper.”

  “He’s gone, Doc,” Morgan said as he grabbed Doc's arm to stop him from juicing Amatuzo with the defibrillator again. The medic had failed all three times to start the downed soldier's heart with the mini unit. Kegy angrily shoved the unit aside and shook his head.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He dropped his face into the palm of one of his hands and tiredly rubbed his eyes. “His wounds weren’t life threatening. He should still be alive. I don’t fucking understand it!”

  The sound of an explosion came from Hale’s direction. No way that could be good, Morgan thought to himself. The sergeant glanced down at Amatuzo’s pale, unmoving body and slowly shook his head. He had met the kid’s wife and children a while back when they’d come to visit the soldier for a weekend. Nice little family. The sound of another explosion pulled Morgan from his thoughts.

  “We need to move, Doc.” Morgan gently squeezed the medic’s shoulder as he stood up. “Duley, help the Doc bag Amatuzo; we’ll take him with us.”

  Even in the dark, Duley could see the pain in Morgan's eyes.

  “Come on, Doc,” Duley said sorrowfully as he reached into Doc’s med pack and removed a folded body bag. Duley swiftly unzipped the bag, hating every second he had to handle the damned thing. “Help me with, Tuz. At least we can take him home to his family.”

  “Sure,” Doc Kegy said, his voice thick with anguish. “Travis… Amatuzo.”

  “We got this, Doc,” Duley said, trying to calm the medic down. “We got this.”

  “Coming in!” Hale said into his mic as the two soldiers ran back to the rear of where the rest of the team had been. He noticed Morgan was standing and watching for them as they sprinted the last few feet.

  Morgan dropped his rifle to combat rest as Hale and Vanelli abruptly stopped in front of him. Vanelli quickly turned in the direction they’d came from and brought his rifle up into a firing position.

  “Clear for now,” Hale said, breathing a little hard. “We must have put down about forty of them fuckers. It was crazy, Morgan. Just balls out crazy. Cleared them out though.” Hale wiped his face with a gloved hand. “I don’t know what the hell is going on with these freaks, but headshots are the only thing that puts them down.”

  “We blew them up and they just kept coming!” Vanelli said, his voice raising a little and cracking.

  “Hale?” Morgan frowned as he looked from Vanelli to the Air Force sergeant. “What’s he mean?”

  “We chucked some grenades at the freaks and still they came, crawling and dragging themselves.” He took a breath. “Blowing their fucking heads off was the only thing that worked.”

  “One of those freaks was blown in half and he still tried to come at me!” Morgan could hear the panic in Vanelli’s voice. “He pulled himself along with one arm. I’ll see that fucking thing in my nightmares, Sarge!”

  “Shit.” Morgan saw the raw fear in Vanelli’s eyes and it gave him a cold chill in the night heat. The sooner they left this place, the better. He noticed the weird shadows the fires were making and swore he could see some real horrific shapes in them. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Not soon enough,” Hale agreed. He could see Doc Kegy and Duley zipping up what appeared to be a full body bag. Cross and the drug leader were visible but he didn’t see the rest of the team. Hale nodded in the direction of the medic. “Who is it?”

  “Amatuzo,” Morgan said somberly.

  “Fuck.” Hale exhaled. “Good kid.”

  “Yeah,”—Morgan rested a hand on Hale’s shoulder—“I know. We’ll deal with this later; right now, we need to go. Those grenades probably rang the damn dinner bell for the rest of those things!”

  “Right.” Hale watched as the Doc and Duley gently loaded the body bag onto the stretcher. There had been too many ‘deal with it later’ situations in his career. In his experience, you never really dealt with it; something else always took its place and you pushed things further and further down. Too many faces, too many friends lost or damaged. Hale considered himself one of the fortunate ones; he had a support system in his family.

  The suppressed sound of a rifle discharge came from behind him. Hale abruptly turned, weapon ready, to see Vanelli backing up in his direction.

  “Didn’t see that one!” Vanelli said almost hysterically as he aimed his rifle barrel near his feet. Hale and Morgan, rifles in combat position, followed where the younger soldier was staring and pointing his weapon. “She almost had me! I didn’t see her!”

  “Ho-lee fuck!” Morgan stepped over next to Vanelli and gently pushed the barrel of his rifle down with a gloved hand.

  About a foot away from the soldier’s boot was a jagged, outstretched hand that was attached to the legless, shrapnel-riddled body of a dark-haired woman. There was a fresh wound in the top of her head where Vanelli had shot her; thick, black, blood oozed from the entry hole. Morgan had seen men bleed out in seconds with wounds like the woman’s. There was no way she was alive when she crawled all the way over to the young sergeant.

  “I didn’t see her,” Vanelli said in a panicked voice.

  “It’s okay, Vanelli.” Morgan patted him on the forearm. He was at a loss for an explanation that made any sense.

  “Move out!” Morgan said into his headset. “If you get any contact, you shoot them in the head. I don’t care if it’s man, woman, or child. In the head!”

  “What the hell?” Snake looked back over at Redwood who just shrugged. “Fucking great. Just wonderful,” the point man grumbled
. “Shoot women and children? This is some freaky shit!”

  “Maybe you should have joined the Coast Guard then, Snake.” Redwood gently hefted the body bag that held Travis’ remains over his shoulder. “Lead on point man.”

  “How can you be so calm, Redwood?” Snake asked as he nervously watched the area ahead of them. With the adobe wall to left and several buildings and alleyways to their right, the soldiers were exposed to the possibility of danger every thirty feet or so.

  “Snake, I’m always going to win,” Redwood said with confidence. “I’m not going home in one of these.” He lifted his hand that had a grip on the body bag. “I’m just not going to be put in one of these damned bags.”

  As the team swiftly followed behind Snake, Hale traded positions with Vanelli. The young soldier was still pretty shaky from their previous encounter with the cannibals and Hale thought it might calm Vanelli down some if he was positioned closer to the other team members.

  Hale trailed behind the soldiers as they quickly moved out and away from the destroyed statue of Bob and the bull and toward the rear of the compound. He was a little concerned about Morgan’s mention of ‘ringing the dinner bell’; he and Vanelli had indeed made a lot of noise during their one-sided battle. If there were any more of those freaks lurking about, they’d know where to come for a hot meal. If there was such a thing as ‘hyper-hyper vigilant’, Hale was it.

  “How much farther, Bob?” Morgan asked the cartel man as they slunk along near the wall. The sergeant had moved up next to Cross and her captive.

  “Not too much farther,” Camacho told him. “It is a big brown building with double doors.”

  “Does it have a painting of you on it?” Cross smirked.

  The shorter cartel boss just glared back at her. If he had caught this American bitch on her own, he would have fed her to his tigers; better yet he would have cut her up and then hand-fed pieces of her to them while she was still alive. Camacho’s black eyes cut holes right through her.

  “Bad thoughts will get you in trouble, Bob.” Cross winked at him.

  “How you doing, Cross?” Morgan quietly asked the redhead.

  “Freaked the fuck out just like everybody else,” she said out of earshot of Camacho. “You?”

  “Just trying to stop from staining my boxers.” He smiled. “We get this fuck on the chopper and we're good.”

  “If there is a chopper,” Cross whispered. “Dead silence from the captain and everyone else is not a good sign.”

  “We’ve been in worse spots before, Cross.” Morgan squeezed her shoulder. “There’s always a way home.”

  “I just don’t want home to end up being in the belly of one of those creeps.”

  “I won’t let that happen, Ronnie.” Morgan winked. “I still owe ya for Mali.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  PLAYING WITH ITS FOOD

  CAMACHO’S COMPOUND

  Dirty Sanchez found himself surrounded by a crowd of the hungry undead; he wasn’t aware that they were reanimated corpses. In Sanchez's limited scope of understanding, he just thought a bunch of drunken junkies had invaded the compound. It wasn’t until he slapped a few of them with his whip, slicing the skin off of some of their faces, that he realized something was amiss.

  He cracked the whip at the throat of the closest member of the crowd, snapping its neck in the process. The man’s head flopped to his chest and bounced a few times on it as he continued to blindly advance on Dirty Sanchez. The cartel thug snapped the whip again and dead still came at him. Cursing, Sanchez dropped the whip to the ground and unslung the street sweeper shotgun from his shoulder. He hefted the big gun in his hands and began randomly firing on the fast moving group.

  “Fuck you, putas!” Dirty Sanchez shouted while he emptied the automatic shotgun on the undead as they began to encircle him.

  Black blood and gore splattered back on the cartel man as his weapon ran dry. He jerked the trigger until there was only the click click of the empty shotgun. Sanchez growled as he gazed on what was left of the voracious crowd. Several of them still stood, holes in them seeping black blood, while many more were sprawled on the ground still moving. In his wild shooting spree, he had not hit one of them in the head.

  “What witchcraft is this?” Sanchez wiped some flesh off his mustache and gripped the empty shotgun like a bat. He swung on the first undead to reach him. The butt of the shotgun struck the woman in the shoulder and knocked her on her butt. Sanchez slammed another one in the face with the street sweeper and the man flopped to the ground unmoving. He hadn’t noticed the foul smell of the walking dead but he did notice the ones that were crawling on the ground, missing limbs and other body parts, unnerved him.

  Sanchez swung at another of the crazies and sent it stumbling over some of the ones that scrabbled along the ground then he turned to run away from the remaining dead. Before Dirty Sanchez could even open his mouth to squeal, a big razor sharp claw slashed him across the face.

  Sanchez dropped to his knees and grabbed at the bloody, shredded side of his face. The tiger’s claw had sliced open his eye and removed most of his right cheek, exposing his jaw. The pain was immense and Sanchez had a brief flash of pleasure as he realized how much his hundreds of victims had suffered at the claws and teeth of the tigers. His small moment of sick joy was abruptly interrupted by the mighty jaws of the tiger crushing down on his neck. Dirty Sanchez prayed to Saint Malverde that he would be granted the mercy of blacking out.

  Unfortunately, Saint Malverde wasn’t listening to Sanchez today.

  Maverick easily dragged the cartel man away from the hungry undead, not wanting share his prey with them. Sanchez roared in agony and fear as he was carried away by the big Bengal tiger. Dirty Sanchez knew his death would be slow and excruciatingly painful… Maverick always loved to play with his food.

  KEEP IT ZIPPED!

  CAMACHO’S COMPOUND

  “What a shitty day, Sarge!” Vanelli grumbled lowly into his headset as the team moved along. “I’ve been hit in the face with a bottle, shot, attacked by a tiger, grenade in the ass, and fucking angry cannibals trying to eat me. What else?”

  “Don’t!” Morgan put up a gloved hand. “Just don’t say another word.”

  Morgan wasn’t particularly superstitious but you never ever said it sure is quiet or what else?—that was just begging for bad things to happen. Vanelli knew that it was bad karma putting it out there; his mouth had just got the better of him.

  “Keep it zipped, brother,” Duley said as he hefted the front of the stretcher with Amatuzo’s remains on it. “You don’t want me stepping back there and putting my size ten’s up your ass.”

  “Well…” Duley heard the sound of plastic wrinkling and slight vibration on the stretcher. Confused, the soldier glanced over his shoulder to have a look at what was causing the movement. Duley stopped short, almost dropping the stretcher. Doc Kegy had already come to a halt and stood dumbstruck as the bag with the dead body began rocking back and forth. Both men quickly set the stretcher on the ground and jumped back.

  “What the fuck!” Doc Kegy covered his mouth with his hand and slowly approached the body bag. He knew for sure the young soldier was dead; there was no natural reason for the movement inside the bag.

  “Doc?” Duley glanced over at the medic, his eyes wide in fear. "Doc, why the fuck is Amatuzo doing that?”

  “Help me get it open!” Kegy looked over at Duley. “Once we get it opened, step back in case he’s… like the others.”

  “What do you mean, Doc?” Duley asked, a little more than unnerved.

  “Hold up, Bravo team,” Morgan said into his headset. The team leader was hoping, along with the others, that Amatuzo was alive.

  “He had small injuries except for the bites.” Kegy knelt down next to the body bag as the man inside desperately fought to escape the confines of the plastic coffin. “He died from his bites and shouldn’t have. Just stand back.”

  Doc carefully unzipped the bag most of t
he way down. A pair of ice cold hands quickly snaked out of the small opening and ripped the bag all the way open. Jaws snapping and black drool splashing out of a hungry mouth; Amatuzo sat up and grabbed Doc Kegy by the tactical harness with the body bag still wrapped around the dead man’s legs. The medic stumbled backwards and crashed into Duley, sending him to the ground and trapping him beneath the Doc and the freshly reanimated Amatuzo.

  Camacho had witnessed the whole scary incident. If his hands hadn’t been cuffed, he would have been busy doing the sign of the cross so he settled on rattling off a quick prayer to the Narco saint, Malverde. He noticed that the female soldier had turned her attention to the demon on the stretcher. Now was the time to make a break for it before more of those horrible things showed up to steal his black soul. Camacho slipped as he tried to head butt the sergeant and ended up smashing his forehead into Cross’s jaw, dazing her for a few seconds. He took the small window of opportunity and made a sprint for freedom.

  Duley found himself pinned to the hard cobblestones while Doc Kegy wrestled with the ravenous corpse that had been their former friend and teammate. The medic batted at Amatuzo’s hands as the man clawed at him and tried to get his jaws on his exposed skin. Doc could see there was nothing behind his former teammate’s hollow eyes. As the terrifying sound of broken teeth smashing together resounded loudly in Doc’s ears, the medic came to a fast realization he was fighting for his life against this voracious dead man.

  “Doc!” Duley groaned as he tried to roll the men off him. “Doc!”

  “He’s not alive!” Doc shouted as he smashed the cannibal in the face with a gloved hand. The hungry corpse bit down heavily on the medic’s left wrist and only succeeded in crushing his watch.