Grey didn’t waste a second. “Dornier and O’Hannon, take the left flank. Use that stretch of trees to get close. Riley and Morganstern take the right, go up the stream bed. Sadie and Rogers, you’re with me. If you see a stockpile of shells, unload everything you have at it. If not, take out the gunners. Any questions?”
Hearing Morganstern’s name, Sadie sluggishly turned and saw the handsome private. She smiled but so dead were her muscles that by the time the expression reached its fullest, he had already turned away, following orders. A hand turned her around.
“Sadie? Are you okay?” It was Captain Grey staring into her face, looking worried.
“I can’t feel my hands,” she said, everything from her elbows down was dead to her. She didn’t mention that her head was spinning and that there were strange dark spots in her vision that would flare wide for a second and then shrivel into nothing.
“That’s normal,” he said kindly. “Give it a few minutes. That was a bit of a rough trek. Here, let me take this.” Gently, he pulled the M4 from her hands. He unloaded it and tossed the taped magazines to the soldier named Rogers. Grey also unslung the bandolier of little bombs from around his neck and handed them to the soldier.
Rogers, who was gasping for air and swaying on his feet, grimaced as he slung them across his shoulders. He looked as utterly exhausted as Sadie felt. She was so done in that she was slow to realize that she had been disarmed.
She grabbed Grey’s arm as he turned away. “What am I supposed to shoot with? You took all of my bullets.”
“It’ll be for the best,” he said putting a hand on her shoulder. “We only have so many rounds and Rogers is a proven marksman.”
“Then what did I come all this way for?” she asked, shaking the hand off. “You didn’t think I would make it, did you.”
Grey ran a hand through his short hair, looking tired for the first time. “Honestly, no I didn’t, but I didn’t want to say no to you. That being said, now that you’re here, you’ll follow orders without question.”
“And what are my orders? Stand around picking my nose while you men do all the fighting?” She knew she was being strangely childish. In truth, she didn’t want to fight at all; Grey was right, she was only average in a battle situation such as this. She only excelled when she was close and she had the edge in hand speed.
“You won’t be standing around,” he said. “Keep low and keep out of sight. If one of us gets shot, you’re to move up and take his weapon and continue the fight.” She could tell that he had thought up the idea on the spot. Neither of them looked happy with the orders. “If...if you have to move up,” he added, “Don’t fire from the exact same position. They’ll have the spot dialed in. Move first and then shoot. Got it?”
“Got it,” she answered.
The Azael are going to kill you, a voice inside her head said when Grey turned away.
“Yes,” she whispered to herself. “Yes, they will kill me.” The field in front of them was so open and there were so many enemies camped up the road that she knew she had no chance to get out of there alive.
Chapter 13
Deanna Russell
Neil’s job was simple yet tremendous in its scope: In the course of one day, he had to win over the twenty-four hundred civilians in the valley, convince them that he was their true and legitimate leader, and then, essentially take away all of their rights and command them in the surprisingly dangerous auxiliary roles that General Johnston was in desperate need of.
Deanna, who was given the title of Lieutenant Governor, had the sole job of organizing these civilian “volunteers,” assessing where they were needed the most, and getting them there before the defenses crumbled and they were overrun by the endless hordes.
At first, her role was rather small. The walls were holding and the various off-shoots of the two main hordes were being contained. She basically concentrated on keeping the men supplied with ammo, food and water; a relatively simple job. Then came the realization that the ammo wouldn’t last and that the night would see the zombies breakthrough if something wasn’t done about supplying the men with light.
She formed teams to scrounge for makeshift weapons and other teams to gather wood; at that point she had nearly a thousand people working for her. Her head began to spin with how much had to be done. It was simply too much for one person and so she grabbed two of her fellow ex-whores: Joslyn and Veronica, and created the positions of Deputy Governor and had them head up the two projects.
Deanna was still running around like mad when the Azael blew up the valley’s artillery in the middle of the night, vaporizing a team of civilians in the process. She didn’t have time to mourn. General Johnston found her in the Stanley Hotel and added to her burden.
“I need secondary walls built behind the first ones,” he said, his eyes, manic and twitching, and his hand wrapped around her bicep in a crushing grip. “The ones we have aren’t going to last, not when they get their artillery zeroed in. We need at least one fallback position, per gate. Wait, make it two, and I need them by sunrise.”
He wanted her to build two fallback positions for both the Red and the Blue Gates? By sunrise? Her mind was reeling. “What am I supposed to make them out of?”
“I’ll leave it to your discretion,” he answered. “I have to go; we have another hot spot to stop up. The stiffs have found their way into the valley by way of Dry Gulch Road. How the hell they managed that, I don’t know.” He then walked away from her so quickly that she didn’t have time for a follow-up question.
Right at that moment, she wanted to give up. What was being asked of her was impossible. She had the equipment and the supplies: cement, mixers, rebar, and the forms all ready to go. There were literally tons and tons of material in a Department of Transportation stock pile just off of Route 36; it was all useless.
The thirty-foot walls that were the main line of defense at the Red and Blue Gates had taken weeks to build, she had hours.
Her eyes strayed to the large map of Estes pinned to the wall. She should’ve been looking for places to start construction, instead she was looking for ways out of the valley. There were only two, Route 7, which meandered south and then bent back east back towards Denver, and Highway 34 which snaked west into the heart of the Rockies.
She was just tracing 34 when Neil came bursting into the room. “Good! I see you’re on top of the new walls. Time is of the essence. I have two-hundred new volunteers right outside. I know, I know, it’s not enough, but trust me I’ll find you more.”
After a flash of a smile, he breezed out of there just as quickly as he had come in. “Shit,” Deanna said. For the next minute, she felt lost. It felt like the entire weight of their defense had been heaped on her shoulders. It also felt like running away was the thing to do.
Then she went out to look at her volunteers who were massed in the parking lot, standing with their hands stuffed in their pockets and with their faces lined with worry. They were a motley crew, made up of men and women of all ages and sizes. There were even a few of the renegades thrown into the mix. Fred Trigg was right in front and for once he wasn’t sneering or looking haughty.
He was the first to speak. “How do we defend our home?” he asked.
The simple question sent a jolt through her. She’d been on the run for so long that she barely remembered the concept of home. Home was a place of comfort, of safety, and of love. Since coming to the valley, she had all three in abundance and she realized they shouldn’t be given up so easily.
“One second,” she told him. As they waited, she tried to picture what the valley looked like in the daytime. There were many new farms and many pretty, little houses. There were shabby hotels that had, back before the apocalypse, charged an arm and a leg during the peak tourist season. There were also tall trees, mostly pine and aspen.
Then there was the clutter of the old life: derelict cars, termite-ridden telephone poles, satellite dishes and traffic lights that no longer blinked. She bent
her mind upon all of these and an idea formed: the telephone poles could be uprooted and, along with enough hewn-down trees a new wooden palisade could be built across the narrower portions the two main highways coming into the valley.
“Ok, here’s what I need done right away,” she said. “There is some construction equipment out by 36. We need a couple of dump trucks. I’m thinking about using the old telephone poles that are all over town to build a wooden wall like the ones the old settlers used to build to repel Indian attacks. While I find the best locations for the new walls, I want you to dig up the poles and start collecting them in the trucks.
One of the volunteers, a stick thin man with a protruding Adam’s apple and bulging eyes raised his hand and asked: “Aren’t those, like, cemented into the ground? I think they are.”
Deanna didn’t have a clue, but if they were, then digging them out wouldn’t work at all. The idea of cement triggered a new thought: even if they could get the poles out of the ground, how was she going to plant the poles across a highway? She’d have to dig up the entire stretch, stick the poles into the ground, fill the holes back in and hope that would be proof against a hundred thousand zombies stacking up against it.
She was sure she didn’t have the engineering skills to pull it off, especially overnight. In her mind, she could picture the entire thing swaying slowly back as the undead piled up against it...and then falling right over.
“Unless we brace it with something else,” she said to herself. Boulders were the first thing that came to mind, the valley was strewn with them, yet they were monstrous and she worried how they would lift them into the back of the dump trucks. They only had one crane and it was the slowest machine Deanna had ever seen.
“It’s too bad Jillybean isn’t here,” Fred said, not realizing that at that moment Jillybean and Brad were even then working their way closer, intent on destroying the walls protecting them from the zombies.
Slightly miffed that Fred didn’t think she could come up with a way to build a wall, Deanna spat out: “We don’t need her. I have a plan. It just needs shaping.” Or bracing, she thought. What else can I use to brace the wall?
Her eyes fell on the nearest thing in the parking lot: a dead car. Its gas cap was popped and its wheels were sagging; it appeared altogether sad and almost useless. The sight of it clicked something in her mind. Given enough of them stacked one atop the other it could brace the wall better than any number of boulders.
“Hell, it could be the wall,” she whispered, realizing suddenly that stacked cars would be simpler and easier to build a wall with. “Change of plans,” she said, dropping down the stairs, lightly. She went right to the car, a green Subaru Outback with faux wood panels, and slapped it on the hood. “We’ll build the wall out of cars. Break up into teams of ten each. You’ll push the cars up to where the new wall is to be built and then we’ll use the crane to put them into place.”
Fred raised a hand. “Can’t we tow the cars up?”
That was a better idea. “Sure, but only if we can find rope or chains very quickly. Send out the smallest of you to find some, the rest of you need to start hauling. We need...” She paused to calculate: how many cars would it take to create a wall a hundred and fifty feet long by thirty feet high? A rough estimate gave her ninety per wall and she would need four walls. “We need three hundred and sixty cars, stacked and ready to go in six hours.”
It didn’t seem like a lot to that many people and so, in an excited mood, they allowed Deanna to divide them into teams and send them out. It was a much harder job than anticipated. First, there were very few tow ropes or chains to be found in the dead of night. Estes Park had been a tourist town and thus the great majority of cars were expensive and the owners far more likely to call Triple A, than to attempt to tow the cars themselves.
Another problem that presented itself was that unless keys were found to the many cars lying about, their steering wheels would remain locked and their transmissions stuck in park.
Still, despite the obstacles, the cars were collected, slowly. By three in the morning, an immense stacking of cars split the highway a hundred yards west of the Red Gate. One wall done! Deanna then had the crane shifted to the Blue Gate. It was a painful process as the crane moved on its massive caterpillar treads with aching slowness, crawling at three miles-per-hour. Nearly an hour was wasted in the transition.
Deanna was out of her mind with worry and yet, the second wall fairly flew up compared to the first. Because of the delay in moving the crane, there were lines of cars ready to be stacked; more than was needed as it turned out. The crane operator worked as fast as he could as the people of the valley labored like ants, hauling car after car along the steep and winding mountain roads.
With thirty minutes to go before sunrise and the second wall built, Deanna again shifted the crane. She had wanted to build the first of the two backup walls a quarter mile down from the wall she had just finished, however General Johnston appeared and told her to hurry with all possible speed back to the Red Gate.
“That’s where the hammer will fall, I know it,” he said, casting nervous glances to the east where the sky was gradually turning to indigo. “How long to build the next wall?” he asked.
“Two and half hours,” she had answered. Even with moving the crane back to the Red Gate, she felt her teams could put up another wall in that time. They had worked out many of the kinks concerning timing and spacing, and although the ‘hauling’ crews were tired from the long night, they still had spunk—they were so close to the front lines that they could hear the soldiers fighting and dying and it drove them past what they could normally have attained.
“To the Red Gate!” she ordered. When some of the civilian crews, who had just pushed two tons of rolling Detroit iron up a mile of hill, gave her an incredulous look, she added: “Let’s leave the extra cars here; anything already up the slope stays.”
There was a brief cheer and then the people turned around and started walking back down to the valley. Johnston watched, seemingly in pain. “Can you get them to hurry? Please? When the sun comes up...” He didn’t need to finish his sentence. She knew that the enemy artillery would start raining down shells.
“I don’t think stacked cars are going to stop artillery,” she said.
“Of course not,” he answered, over his should as he headed back to his Humvee. “Let me worry about the artillery and you worry about the walls.”
Deanna had enough worry-room inside of her to agonize over both. She watched the general’s Humvee speed back toward the valley with an ache in her gut. In all likelihood, they would never get the second wall up behind the Red Gate in time.
They had the crane halfway up the slope towards the Red Gate when the first artillery shell exploded just on the other side of the hill they were trudging up. The sound was terrifying. It was louder than anything she had ever heard and it sent a shiver of fear right into her guts.
Everyone threw themselves to the ground and huddled there, waiting for the next shell to strike. The next one came about a minute later and landed much further away.
“Ok, that wasn’t so bad,” Deanna said, getting to her feet. There were old leaves in her long, golden hair and when she went to pull them out she saw her hands were shaking. She also saw that she was the only one still standing. “They, uh, missed. So let’s keep going. Come on.” Only a few of the civilians climbed to their feet. Deanna forgot the leaves and strode over to the nearest person—it was the same balding, skinny fellow who had mentioned the telephone poles being cemented into the ground.
“Get up,” she said to him. “They aren’t shooting at us, they’re shooting at the Red Gate and that’s a quarter mile from here.” When the man stood, it seemed to be a catalyst for the rest. The crane started slogging upwards again and the crews went back to the cars and began pushing. There were ten people per car bent well over and driving with the strong muscles of their legs and back.
As they struggled on, they were
passed by three trucks hauling cars, two with chains and one with a thick tow rope. The people gave the truck a long suspicious look. So far two chains had snapped that night sending cars careening out of control. One young woman, barely out of her teens had her leg broken, while on the second occasion, an entire crew was sent running to keep from being ground beneath the tires.
Once the truck was passed they bent to their burden again. Groans escaped them as the car was slow to gain momentum on the slope, which was steeper than most. Deanna was close and so she added her strength to the effort.
Above them came the ripping sound of another shell. “Keep going!” Deanna ordered as two of the pushers hesitated and the weight of the car on the rest increased. The shell landed well away from them, sending up a plume of smoke.
“What do we do if they start a forest fire?” a woman asked. It was a cool dawn and yet she was dripping sweat from her chin in a steady lip, lip, lip, as she pushed.
“We’ll count ourselves lucky,” Deanna answered. “Better a death from smoke inhalation than a death from them.” They had just crested a hill and the sight before them was, as always, a horrible one. From above, it looked as though Highway 34 was a river of corpses that poured into a teeming reservoir of undead held back by the concrete wall that made up the Red Gate. The reservoir of dead was over thirty feet deep in places.
Even as they watched, the lone artillery piece hit just shy of the wall, landing in the great mound of bodies. The thunder of the explosion was muted, as was the impact of the shell.
As they pushed, the valley people waited and watched for the next shell to hit. Again it was a single blast and again it landed among the undead. “They got the range,” squeaked the balding, skinny man. He was not wrong.
From across the tops of the mountains, they heard multiple thuds as though giants were dropping boulders for their own amusement. The air screamed with incoming shells and everyone slunk low just in case there was a wild miss. Two of the shells found the mark, hitting near the wall and sending bodies and part of bodies flying everywhere. One of the shells missed short, landing further back on the highway and killing thirty zombies. The fourth shell crashed into the side of a mountain half a mile away.
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