The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

by Meredith, Peter

  “Keep pushing!” Deanna commanded. She pushed for a few seconds to make sure that the rest were as well and then slapped the skinny man on the back. “Keep going. It’ll be ok.”

  She turned to see how the other crews were progressing. All of them had lost a great deal of steam. She jogged down the hill, yelling encouragements to them. They responded but their fear weighed on them and their pace wasn’t near what it had been. The Red Gate wall couldn’t last. She saw the next salvo hit: three landed almost on the wall itself and the fourth was short.

  The soldiers were now running from their positions on the wall and Deanna stopped what she was doing to squint down at them. She knew Grey would be one of the last to leave the wall; however when the final few sprinted away from the wall to the somewhat sketchy safety of the line of stacked cars, Grey wasn’t among them.

  “Thank God,” she whispered, thinking that he was safe.

  Just then the crane drew up along side of her. The operator, a jovial red-faced man, leaned out the window and pointed at the cloud of smoke lying over the wall. “If this keeps up, you know we’re wasting our time here.”

  “The general assured me that he’s going to take care of the guns.” She pointed in the opposite direction, towards the valley and said, “Probably missiles or an attack helicopter or something like that.” When it came to the different weapons systems available, she was generally clueless, but she knew about missiles and helicopters.

  The crane operator looked a lot less jovial as he said: “I don’t think we gots any of them.” He then shrugged and ducked back into the cab of the crane.

  Deanna tried to tell herself that the man probably didn’t know all the secret gadgets that the military kept hidden, and yet, she had seen precious little in the way of impressive army hardware. The 105mm howitzers that had been parked down in the valley had been frightening enough, right up until they had been destroyed.

  She decided that she would simply trust General Johnston and ignore the explosions that erupted twice a minute for the next half hour. In that time, she directed the crane to where she wanted the third wall set up—this time deep in a gorge where the highway snaked around a sharp peak. She hoped that the mountain would shield the wall from the artillery fire...if it came to it.

  Then she began directing the excruciatingly slow, hand-propelled traffic. It was imperative that each car was shoved into the exact proper position forty feet from the crane in order to keep the flow of work going. Whenever there was a miscue, the crane would take hold of the car wrong and it would dangle, oddly and dangerously. One car actually slipped from the grip of the crane and took out half the existing wall which had to be rebuilt.

  They were still trying to unjumble the cars when Neil came up in a Humvee. Deanna didn’t wait for him to stop before she asked: “How’s Grey doing? He’s still alright, isn’t he?” Neil hesitated and this, more than any artillery shell caused her heart to skip a beat. “What is it?” she asked, clutching at his arm and searching his face for answers.

  “It’s nothing,” he replied, his eyes sliding down and to the side. “It’s just that Captain Grey is heading up a team, uh, a team of the fittest men, soldiers actually. And their job is to go and take out those guns.” He pointed, not at any guns, but at the horrible carnage being wrought among the horde of zombies piled before the Red Gate.

  The repeated explosions had turned the area before the wall into a burning soup of charred blood and a black viscous sludge made from who knew what parts of the zombies. Floating in the crud were arms and feet and other sundered parts. Those zombies that were still “alive” and who had arms were doing a strange swim-crawl through it all, while those without just sort of bobbed there.

  Thankfully, there weren’t many of these “live” ones left before the wall. The continuous explosions and the pall of smoke hanging over the area discouraged the main press of the horde to advance. This was an unforeseen blessing. The concrete wall itself, which had been built to stop a horde of up to ten thousand, had cracks running up and down it from top to bottom and any concerted effort by the zombies would have brought it straight down.

  Deanna tore her eyes from the carnage and the soon-to-be-obliterated wall and stared at Neil in disbelief. “Grey did what?” she demanded. Before he could answer, she added: “He’s attacking their camp you mean? In broad daylight? With how many men?”

  He made a face as if he had a sour stomach before answering: “Twenty.” Her eyes went as wide as they could go and he was quick to say: “I’m sorry, but it was the only way. If we had…”

  “Twenty!” she exploded, cutting him off in mid-sentence. The number was so incredibly small that she couldn’t really comprehend it. Had they been going in at night with the idea of a sneak attack she could envision the plan working, however in the daylight it was a suicide mission.

  Neil began to stutter out excuses, but she wasn’t listening. Her mind was shutting down—her love could be dying even then. She knew him; he would pit himself against any odds to get at those guns. And that meant he would die.

  A bolt of hot anger rushed right through her and, before she knew it, she slugged Neil in the face. “How could you?” she seethed. “He was your friend!”

  “He still is my friend,” he countered, touching a delicate hand to his cheek. “And Sadie is my daughter; you’re not the only one who has something to lose if they fail.”

  “You sent Sadie?” she asked in astonishment.

  Neil shrugged. “She’s a survivor, and she’s tougher than anyone gives her credit for. Not to mention...” His words dribbled away as a series of explosions directly on the wall itself finally brought it down.

  Chapter 14

  Sadie Walcott

  With the simple and likely deadly orders given, Grey nodded to Sadie, and then he and Rogers bent low and began shuffling through the last of the underbrush. Before them there was almost no cover: waist-high grasses and a few stands of pine and aspen were it. When they ran out of forest, they began to crawl quickly through the grass. On their left, Dornier and O’Hannon were almost invisible moving through the forest that stretched nearly to the road. On the right, only the tops of their heads gave away Riley and Morganstern as they worked their way along a stream bed.

  With the three groups so separated, Sadie realized that she could only act a backup force to one of them. She felt a strange pull towards Morganstern; she fought against it. “I love Nico,” she said to herself and then wondered when the last time she had had even pictured his face. It had been so long that her memory of him was already dimming.

  “I don’t even have a picture of him to...” A gunshot stopped her tongue and sent an electric surge of adrenaline shooting through her body. She dropped into a crouch and peered through the underbrush, fully expecting to see a battle on the verge of breaking out.

  The shot had come from the right where Morganstern and O’Hannon had crawled, but there wasn’t a follow-up shot. Had they disturbed some poor man or woman of the Azael off relieving themselves?

  No one seemed to take the gunshot as a warning of things to come. A few heads swung to look over the field, but for the most part the Azael went on as if nothing had happened.

  Thankfully, there were only a few people in and around the battery of guns, the great mass of the Azael were far up the road, well away from the thunder of the artillery which, even from three hundred yards away, was enough to rattle Sadie’s eardrums.

  When no great outcry occurred, Sadie finally began to move. She had dithered for almost a full minute without following any of the three teams, now she scampered low after Captain Grey and Rogers; theirs looked to be the most dangerous route and she felt she would be picking up one of their weapons sooner than she wished.

  Afraid that through her inexperience she was going to give them away, she went along, squirming so low that she couldn’t tell which way she was going exactly. The steady boom of the artillery drew her but she had no idea where anyone else was and there
was no way she was going to lift her head to check.

  Like some sort of blind snake, she slithered closer and closer to the boom of the big guns with the dread certainty that she had passed Grey and Rogers. Only the relatively tame chatter of small arms fire stopped her. Six guns seemed to go off all at once; shots left, right and center. The center guns were right in front of her; Captain Grey was very close, but unseen. She could tell it was him by the quick, controlled patter of his M4. He didn’t waste a shot.

  Putting her head back down, she crawled forward just as the grass above her parted with the whisper of passing bullets. They were coming so fiercely that the grass waved as if in a wind and small green shoots rained down over her prone body. She forced herself on, hugging the earth until she found herself just behind Grey as he crouched behind a log. It was being thumped heartily by incoming rounds and it sounded like some tribal drum being beaten rather than played.

  “Hey!” Sadie yelled. There was no sense being quiet now, there was a veritable storm of noise all around them.

  Grey glanced back and instead of greeting her, he snapped: “Get your ass away from me! You want to get killed? Move to the side, damn it.”

  She wanted to be angry at the way he had spoken to her, however the moment she had moved a dozen feet to her right, the air above her was no longer filled with the passage of hot lead; it was a blessed relief. Someone on the other side was using a machine gun and along with the tat-tat-tat of the gun, there were blazing tracer rounds flashing by, looking like something out of a science-fiction movie.

  Rogers was to her right, but slightly ahead of her. Because the land dipped a little she could see him quite well. He too had found one of the half-buried logs in the field and was crouched down behind it. He was working his gun, a slightly bigger version of the M4, in an odd way. Instead of shouldering it and sighting down the barrel, he had it cocked slightly with the tip of the barrel pointed at an angle. He pulled a trigger half-way up the barrel and there was a foomp sound.

  He ducked down, but Sadie sat up a little higher to see what he had done. A second later there was an explosion thirty yards or so distant from the howitzers. There was a flash and some smoke, but it seemed altogether insignificant compared to the huge guns, which had gone silent.

  A bullet zipping by reminded her that she couldn’t expose herself if she wanted to live through the next five minutes. She dropped and hugged the ground again in a firm embrace. “Too far!” she yelled over at Rogers. “It landed well past the guns.” As she watched, he slid out one of the little bombs from the bandolier and shoved it into the open port of the tube that was attached beneath the barrel of the M16.

  Again he aimed the gun in his odd way and fired. Sadie risked a look to see where the shot fell, but didn’t get a chance to see. The second she popped her head up, a tracer whipped within an inch of her face, blinding her. She dropped like a rock while all around her dirt and grass flew into the air. The bullets were missing her by the breadth of a hair. A scream that was beyond her control tore from her throat as she began to roll to get away from the barrage lancing in at her.

  In mid-roll she saw the strangest sight: Captain Grey standing with the blue Colorado sky painted all around him. He was making himself a perfect target. For a full second, he stood there as he aimed his M4 with all the precision of a surgeon. Just as the air around him blurred with the passage of an unknown numbers of rounds he fired.

  Immediately, the machine gun went silent. Sadie did not see what had happened to the captain; the machine gun wasn’t the only gun firing in her direction. A dozen were, and a dozen or more were firing at each of the soldiers, and the rest of the army of the Azael, five or six thousand men, were running down the highway to join the fight.

  Sadie wanted to keep rolling right out of there. The ‘suicide’ mission she had feared this to be was fast becoming a reality. Yet, she didn’t run.

  Above the din, she heard the odd sound of Rogers grenade launcher and, against all reason, Sadie popped up in time to see the bomb explode on the highway sixty feet to the right of the howitzers and twenty feet in front of a row of parked five-tons.

  “You’re way off to the right of the guns!” Sadie yelled.

  “I’m trying to hit the fucking trucks!” Rogers screamed back. He was crawling in her direction, while she was crawling in his. It was death to stay in any one place, but it wasn’t smart to clump up and so she rolled back away. He stopped as well as the land between them was suddenly torn up as machine gun bullets peppered the ground.

  Someone new had manned the machine gun. It was going hot, blasting fire and metal from its muzzle. It was a nightmare weapon to Sadie, perhaps because the tracer rounds could be seen—it almost appeared as though the bullets were hunting her, searching for her in the tall grass.

  Again, the daring captain exposed himself to kill the new gunner. He seemed to be able to aim by hearing alone. He stood, aimed and fired in about a second, and again the machine gun went quiet. However, the rest of the guns were not. A God-awful fury of rifle fire raked the area Grey had dropped down into.

  With her heart in her throat, Sadie broke the cardinal rule and crawled on her hands and knees toward where she had last seen him. He was nowhere to be seen. The only sign he had been there was the blood. It was all over the ground, bright and wet.

  “Grey!” she hissed just above a whisper, afraid that he wouldn’t answer.

  He didn’t answer. Fueled by panic, she crawled as fast as she could, following a bloody path through the grass. She didn’t have to go far. She found Grey lying on his back, staring up at the blue sky. He was sticky red from head to toe. With one shaking hand, he was clawing at his lower abdomen.

  Forgetting the battle, she scurried up to him with tears in her eyes. “Grey,” she said in a mumble as she fixated on the cascade of blood running off him. “Are you...”

  “I’m fine,” he grunted. “Help me get this belt off.”

  The request was so far out of the blue that she had to stare at his midsection for a moment to understand he meant the belt around his waist. She couldn’t help wonder, why on earth he would want it. After a few seconds, during which she could only blink, dully, she moved his fumbling hand away, undid the buckle, and slid the belt from its loops. She held it out to him but he pushed it away, weakly.

  “Don’t give it to me. You’ve got to tie off my arm.” Only then did she see that much of the blood on him was coming from a squirting wound in his bicep. “Lay it right over the top of that and cinch it down as tight as you can get it.”

  “Oh, right.” In three seconds, she had worked the belt around his arm and pulled it as hard as she could until he grunted. “Where are else are you hit?” She started scanning his bloody aspect: there was a gash on the side of his neck, a hole in his shirt, low down on his side, and there were two big dark wet splotches on his right leg, one on the side of his thigh and the other on his calf.

  The calf wound looked to be the next worse and she started to pull back the leg of his pants when Grey pushed her away. “Don’t worry about me... go spot for Rogers…We have to take out those guns… That’s all that matters.” He spoke in short bursts between gritted teeth. His pain was obvious.

  Taking out the guns wasn’t all that mattered to Sadie, but she knew Grey, she knew what a hero he was. He wasn’t going to be ‘babied” in the middle of a fight, especially when he had a mission to complete. Reluctantly, she left him and squirmed through the grass. She had gone maybe twenty yards when she heard the foomp sound that Rogers’s grenade launcher made.

  On instinct, she lifted up just high enough out of the grass to see over the green tips. She was able to scan the fighting in a blink: to her left the forest where Dornier and O’Hannon had gone was being pounded from two directions at once; leaves and bark were flying in all directions. Eighty yards to her right, where Morganstern and O’Hannon were, nothing could be seen. There were so many bullets heading their way that the grass had been veritably tr
immed almost to the level of the stream bed.

  And much closer, she saw Rogers peeking his own head up to check to see where his grenade had landed.

  There was a bang and a flash of light smack dab on the hood of the middle truck. Its windshield blew in and there was a cloud of sudden black smoke. The desperate need to explode the ordinance and get out of there let wishful thinking override prudence on both Sadie’s and Rogers’ part. Both were still there with their heads foolishly held out in the open, seconds later, each filled with the hope that the truck would blow sky high.

  But there was no explosion.

  Sadie recovered her wits first as bullets started hissing past her ears. As if in slow motion, she started to drop down again, her eyes flicking back to Rogers hoping he was doing the same thing, instead he was still there for everyone to see. She wanted to scream to him to get undercover only she saw that there was something wrong with him. His eyes were staring at a horizon only the dead could see.

  Slowly, he spun and she saw there was a hole just above his right eye and a larger one in the back of his head. With unhurried grace, he threw his arms wide and topped back into the grass to stare eternally up at the sky.

  A crackle of static filled her ears and deadened her mind. She was utterly numb between the ears save for one thought: get that grenade launcher!

  Her life didn’t matter, not just then. Getting the grenade launcher was the only thing that had any meaning to her. She burst out of the tall grass, not like a pheasant in fear of the hunter, she burst out like a cheetah. In two strides she was at full speed, outracing bullets that trailed after in her wake.