He gave a low whistle to the drovers, who parted for him and then clopped his way right past. One of them cursed in amazement: “Mother-fucker!” Another whispered: “Don’t do it, man.”
Undeterred, Brad aimed the horse square into the middle of the pack and, at the same plodding rate, they plunged into the horde. The zombies were thrust aside by the massive beast and in seconds they were in the thick of things. Even though she was so high up, Jillybean pulled her legs in towards her. She had never been in the midst of such an ungodly host. Ugly, rotting heads turned in their direction, teeth champed in hunger, and evil eyes watched them, looking for any sign of humanity.
Even her brave heart was unnerved by being so utterly surrounded by the walking dead.
Brad gave no indication that he was in the least bit nervous. He steered the horse expertly through the throng and it plowed ahead like a battleship cutting up a small river. It was hard going for the animal and many times it staggered as one hoof or another came down awkwardly on one of the zombies. When this happened, Jillybean’s heart would leap into her throat; however, the horse was indeed sure-footed.
It was a long uphill journey for both man and beast. They trudged through the mob for three hours, until the horse began to stumble in weariness and Jillybean was just about to faint from the sickening stench rising from the corpses. Brad steered them to one of the softer hills shooting up all around them. It rose gradually and bristled with a young pine forest.
A few zombies were on its slope; perhaps a hundred, not many in Jillybean’s opinion and yet there were enough to cause Brad’s courage to falter. “Aw, shit,” he whispered. The horse had gone thirty feet up the hill and just plain stopped. Its legs shook and it breathed in a wheeze; it was finished as a mount, which meant they had to dismount under the watchful eyes of the zombies.
“Do exactly what I do,” Jillybean whispered.
She began to moan: “Uuughuhhh...” Ever so slowly, so as not to betray her humanity, she brought one foot around, twisted in the saddle and then slid down the horse’s withers to plop down in the wet leaves. “Uuughuhhh...” she went on moaning and only gradually did she try to stand.
With the dark and the shredded poncho and the hood it was hard to tell what she was and the zombies barely gave her much of a glance. Now, it was Brad’s turn.
“Uhhgh!” he said in what was practically a bellow. It was too loud and too short of a sound and the way he swung his leg over the pommel was far too human!
Jillybean had stepped away from the side of the horse until the chain at her throat had stopped her. Now, she took a willing step back, saying: “Uughuhhh...” the way a zombie was supposed to sound. Brad gave her a quick and altogether human look.
“Uughuhhh...” she said again and let her head hang and her eyes loll listlessly in their sockets so that nothing was exactly in focus.
He seemed to catch her meaning. “Uughuhhh...” he said, more accurately this time. He then came down off the horse and landed in a crouched ball. The zombies all around stared at him as if waiting for him to jump up and betray himself as human.
“Uughuhhh...” Jillybean encouraged. None of the zombies batted an eye at her. Even the chain around her neck was strange enough not to be considered human. Brad waited in his crouch and Jillybean guessed he was waiting for the monsters to turn away, but she knew that they wouldn’t unless acted upon by an outside force. “Uughuhhh...” she tried again.
Finally, Brad got the idea. “Uughuhhh...” he said. From then on things went a little more smoothly. After surreptitiously looping the horse’s bridal around a branch that Brad pretended to stumble against, the two humans slowly made their way up the hill. There were zombies all the way to the top though there were fewer with each step up. When they reached the peak, they found a crag of rock to hide behind. Each leaned against the rock, huffing thin air into their lungs for well over a minute before Brad slid a pair of binoculars out from beneath his poncho.
“Damn,” he whispered. Far away and far below them the land opened up and in the dim starlight they could barely make out the Estes Valley. “I can’t see the highway from here. Come on, we have to get closer.” He gave the chain a tug and started pulling her down the hill. For a time they went quickly. There were only a few zombies to worry about on this side of the hill and the slope was easy.
It didn’t stay easy. At the bottom of the hill was a ravine where water ran when it rained or when the snow melted. Now it was a thin river of zombies going single file to who knew where. Going into their routine, the two joined the stream for a time until Brad took a sudden lunge to his left, dragging Jillybean up another hill.
This one had only a partial view of the highway because of a much taller ridgeline that crowded in from the north. Down again they plunged, Brad going at a pace that wasn’t safe at all. He was trying to beat the sunrise. Already in the east, the sky was no longer pure black, it was a dark, velvety purple.
They struggled up toward where the ridge crested at about nine thousand feet. Far below them were trees and dark hills and between them was the highway that had looped around a mountain and was back, heading straight for Estes.
“We need to get closer before the sun rises,” he whispered, dragging the bone-tired Jillybean on. Brad went slower now, acting like a zombie who had lost his way. He was afraid of military snipers. His head flicked around at any sound. It wasn’t a good zombie performance; however, it got them practically to the level of the highway without getting killed.
They found a little hollow in the side of yet another tree-covered hill and hunkered down just as the sun broke the horizon—they had a perfect view of the Red Gate and the sea of zombies in front of it.
Jillybean wanted a better view; however, Brad brought her up short by the chain. She turned to see him wrapping it around a branch high out of her reach. “Can’t have you running away,” he said with a grin.
Chapter 11
Sadie Walcott
Sunrise was the slow reveal of nature. As the sky in the east went from indigo to navy to a pretty cobalt, the forest and the hills gradually came into focus. The colors weren’t right, not at first. Everything had a strange orange cast, even the green trees were washed out by the diffuse light. It was all very pretty and Sadie didn’t enjoy a second of it.
She was sitting in the dew, crouched against the truck of a pine tree, her legs growing stiff beneath her. She hadn’t climbed to nine thousand feet for the view. She was there to kill if she could.
The morning was pretty, but the earth was hard and chill and damp. The morning sung with birds but the earth gave up only sly, furtive noises. She hugged the earth hiding behind the wormy trunk of a downed tree. Across it and pointing out was an M4 she had snatched from a sleeping soldier.
As things came into focus, she scanned under every tree and bush, but if there was a spotter for the Azael somewhere on the ridgeline across from her, Sadie couldn’t see him.
Against her explicit orders, she rose up slightly to get a better view of the land. She had been told by Captain Grey not to move a muscle. She was to remain perfectly motionless because movement drew the eyes, movement gave away her position. Movement made her a target.
That had been four hours before when Grey had reluctantly chosen her to accompany his picked team of men who were there to hunt down and kill any enemy spotters that everyone agreed had to be up in the hills somewhere. “They can’t hit what they can’t see,” General Johnston had said when he asked for volunteers. “They’re up there waiting for sunrise to rain hell on us. Your job is to kill them before they can radio in any messages.”
The enemy artillery barrage from the night before had been one of the scariest things Sadie had ever seen. With her heart thumping, she had watched as the incoming rounds had landed with pin-point accuracy on the valley’s artillery position. The explosions were beyond thunder; the loudest thunder was an itty-bitty firecracker compared to these explosions. They were far more massive than she had cou
ld have guessed; they had taken her breath away.
She was lucky she had insisted on staying with Captain Grey’s company. The brief artillery barrage had ended up killing everyone within a hundred yards of the gun emplacements. Along with thirteen civilians, who had been hauling ammo from a munitions truck, an entire heavy weapons platoon had been wiped out.
Three of the four 105mm howitzers had been destroyed, utterly. They were bent into unrecognizable alien shapes. The one that wasn’t destroyed had its carriage assembly damaged. It could no longer elevate its barrel beyond fifteen degrees meaning it was no longer serviceable as a howitzer.
One of the remaining artillerymen, a sergeant named Ortiz, who had chosen a very lucky time to take a leak, said that the gun could still be fired, the one problem: it could be used in direct fire missions, only. Sadie found out that meant they could only shoot the weapon in a straight line; with all the hills and peaks surrounding them, the gun was next to useless. And, sadly, that was the good news.
There was bad news on every other front. Both the Red and Blue Gates were on the verge of being overrun. Neither had been built to take on the numbers being pressed forward. The mound of corpses in front of the walls was so vast that it was now similar to a tidal wave about to break over the wall. When the undead were struck down, they could fall nowhere else but onto the men on the wall.
It was a horrible thing to experience and though the men were fighting with courage and strength, everyone knew that neither virtue was limitless. The soldiers were so exhausted that they came off the line and fell asleep, still covered in gore.
Worse than the exhaustion of the men and the fact that they were slowly being overwhelmed was the night’s appalling rate of attrition. Grey’s company had suffered eight deaths during their six hours in the Big Thompson River. The 3rd Company manning the Red Gate had ten men killed and the Blue Gate saw seven die. The deaths among the various smaller gorges and vales branching from the two main routes of attack were in equal proportion.
All in all that first night of the siege saw seven percent of the soldiers die—it was a rate that couldn’t last. Each death put that much more of a burden on the living. Yet the deaths weren’t in vain by any stretch of the imagination
PFC Paul Wesley set a standard of heroics that became the fabric of legend in Estes. Fighting like a hero to the bitter end inspired the others who were bitten or scratched to make their final hours count in service to their people. Not a man inflicted with the zombie disease asked to be taken out of the line; they remained until they were overwhelmed or they were so far gone that they had to be put down by their fellow soldiers.
During the night, the lines held, barely, and everyone hoped that the day light would bring with it a renewed vigor from the men. They would be able to see what they were swinging their make-shift weapons at for a change, which meant they had a fighting chance—but only if the walls held, something that didn’t seem likely now that their enemy had a tremendous advantage in artillery.
Sadie lifted herself higher. There was a fire in her belly, an anger that burned away all caution. So what if the spotters saw her? Let them see. Let them shoot at her if they dared. They would give away their position if they did and she wasn’t the only one hidden in the hills. Close to three hundred men had foregone sleep in order to give the rest a fighting chance.
She scanned until her eyes were scratchy tired, and strained her ears to hear anything that might sound like a radio or the whispered words of someone about to direct fire, but there was nothing to hear except the caw of a few corpse-fattened crows.
Ten minutes went by in which the world firmed up before her. Ten wasted minutes.
Suddenly, there was a thump to the east as though part of a mountain had fallen to the earth. This was followed by a tearing sound above her as if the sky had been woven of blue cloth and was being ripped down the middle. She knew exactly what the sounds were and her heart was in her throat; she turned to look back toward the Red Gate.
The gate lay far below her. It was a strange sight with the flood of zombies rising higher and higher before it, so that the wall was practically invisible. From that height it appeared to be a damned river and, in truth, that was exactly what it was.
The first of the explosions missed by a good three hundred yards, landing on the side of one of the many surrounding peaks. There was a blast of smoke, but otherwise the damage seemed muted by the distance.
Forgetting her purpose there, she fretted over the next strike and waited for the next shot. She was brought around by the radio hooked to her belt. “This is Sierra Six, does anyone have anything?”
Sadie jerked her head around to scan the hills before her—nothing. Everything was all perfectly natural. She was still staring when the distant thump came once more. Afraid, she spun and watched the wall as above her the sky was ripped again; this time the explosion occurred only a hundred yards further beyond the wall. It was also seventy or so yards north of the wall.
That was far too close.
“Everyone up!” Captain Grey’s voice came over the radio. “Get up and charge at anything that even looks like it could hold a spotter.” The order was pure desperation. Regardless, every one of the three hundred men and the one teen, jumped up and charged at every dark place in front of them.
Sadie ran down the short slope in front of her and then labored up to the ridgeline, expecting at any moment someone would stand up and blast a hole in her. No one did. She huffed up the hill and went to every spot that had seemed evil to her from across the ravine. The only enemy she found was a frightened chipmunk which chattered in terror as it scampered beneath a log.
A few seconds later the sky ripped again and, unable to help herself, she swiveled her head to follow the progress of the sound until there was an explosion somewhere to the north of the hill. Smoke billowed on the far side of the hill where the day before a squad had been fighting in a deep gorge.
For a brief moment she pictured the apple -cheeked Private Morganstern and wondered where he was and if he was still alive. “That doesn’t matter,” she said, with a shake of her head as again there was the faraway thump.
There was a spotter to kill! She ran from place to place and not far away others from the valley were dashing everywhere there was the least bit of cover. Once there was a gunshot and Captain Grey asked, eagerly over the radio: “What do we have? Who was that?”
“It was nothing, sorry.”
“Who is this?” Grey demanded.
“Private David Alvares. It was a bird, sorry. I was shooting at a bird.”
“Everyone keep looking,” Grey growled into the radio. “He’s on one of these hills, damn it.”
No one considered the possibility that the spotter was lower down, mixed with the zombies. Logic dictated that the spotter was sitting up in the hills overlooking the valley. Eventually, even Grey had to admit defeat. Artillery shells were now landing all around the wall of the Red Gate. The enemy had found their mark.
“Attachment, bring it in,” Grey said over the radio in a quieter voice. “Meet at the start point on the double.”
Sadie paused to catch her breath and as she did, she saw an explosion right on the wall of the Red Gate itself. “Shit,” she muttered, before taking off at a loping, ground-eating run back to where they had initially started. The further she went, the more she found herself surrounded by the men who had volunteered to hunt down the spotters. They were all despondent and ran with their chins down.
Grey was in the clearing staring down at a map as Sadie arrived. She was one of the first and, she was one of the first to catch her breath. Grey counted the men and seemed disappointed that they were all there.
“No one saw anything?” he asked. “Footprints? A glob of spit? A broken branch?”
The men shook their heads and Sadie was right there with them. The land had been barren of any human touch. “Sorry, Possum, we got nothing,” Grey said into the radio.
“Son of a gun,” a
voice replied in muted anger. Sadie recognized the voice as Neil’s. Even under these circumstances, he couldn’t bring himself to curse like a man. “I’ll be right there.”
Grey glanced at the radio in puzzlement for a moment, before looking around at the press of soldiers crowding around him. When his eye caught Sadie’s, his shoulders jerked slightly. It seemed to wake him to his duties. “Alright men, fall in. I don’t care about pay-grades just give me four ranks.”
All around Sadie the men shuffled about, finding a spot. Each ‘dressed right’ and then stood at attention. It was an odd mix of officers, buck privates, grizzled sergeants and one Goth teen girl who stood apart from them.
Soon a Humvee came roaring up. Out of it jumped Neil Martin and General Johnston. Neil was first to speak: “You got nothing?” he asked looking up at the hills. “How is that possible?”
“They could be using a drone to spot with,” Grey suggested gesturing with a finger at the sky. “Or they might have someone who knows what they’re doing, like a Seal or a Delta. If so we’ll never find them. Who knows? They might have a traitor in the valley.”
General Johnston grimaced at the suggestion. “Not likely. But however they’re spotting for their artillery, they got it dialed in and it’s just a matter of time before the Red Gate fails.” All eyes swung to look down on wall. Sadie was surprised that it was still standing with all the bombs landing all around it.
The tremendous hill of corpses was, for the moment, protecting the wall by absorbing the greater part of the blasts with their bodies. Fountains of gore and black blood were flying everywhere. The carnage was so great that it finally stopped the assault on the wall. The few zombies that lived through the barrage seemed numbed by the violence; they stood staring vacantly all around and not attacking.
Neil, who looked sickened by the sight, was the first to turn away. “The wall won’t last and neither will the second one the civilians built last night out of cars. The only way to stop this is to stop the artillery.” Johnston and Neil shared a look, seeming to come to some agreement.
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