A seven-year-old, sacrificing herself for an entire company of adults. It was preposterous and stupid and morally bankrupt and perhaps it was even a little evil.
“Hey!” Sadie suddenly cried. “What are you doing? Slow down.”
Somehow the Humvee was barreling through the valley at seventy miles an hour with Neil at the helm, his hands like vice-grips on the steering wheel and his eyes growing dewy with tears.
“Oh sorry. I was just in a zone, I guess.” At seventy miles an hour, they had crossed the valley in two minutes and already they were winding their way up route 36 towards where the Blue Gate had once stood. They passed teams of men and women, some pushing cars, some hauling food or water. Neil waved like any politician would and tried to appear confident in spite of the greasy feeling inside of him. Guilty or not, it was important that the people saw him as confident and brave. Any sign of weakness would have a terrible effect on morale.
They had to leave the Humvee at the first of the smaller walls and go on foot from there. It wasn’t far and two walls later they were at Blue Gate 2, the much bigger and much flimsier wall of cars they had been standing on only an hour before.
General Johnston came zipping down the ladder like a ten year old boy and greeted Neil and Sadie with his usual white-toothed smile. “You two disappeared so quick we didn’t have a chance to talk logistics. Though it’s only logical that we first decide on a destination. The contingency plans we drew up last year...”
“We aren’t going,” Neil said, interrupting. “At least not yet. If we delay the Azael as long as possible, there is a chance that we just might win.” He went on to explain the idea they had worked up. Johnston made a grumbly sound in throat and then turned away to look up into the hills.
“Maybe,” he said mostly to himself.
Sadie walked around in front of him and planted herself there. “It will work and when it does, I doubt we’ll ever be bothered by the Azael again. If we run, we’ll probably never stop running.”
“Your plan has holes, namely what to do with half a million stiffs. If the Azael leave, which I doubt they will, we’ll still have the stiffs on us. But that’s almost a moot point. My guess is that if we stall for too long, the Azael will come against us in force and it will be hard to stop them with so many of my men fighting off the zombies.”
“It’ll be hard, but not impossible,” Sadie said. “I’ve fought with your men. They’re incredible. They fight like lions.”
The general grinned at the flattery and then sighed. “This is your parade, Neil. You’re the governor, but have you considered how many lives will be lost if we try to hold out?”
“I have and I’ve considered the fact that moving forty-two hundred people across mountains to who knows where may end up costing even more lives. How are we going to feed them all? I’ve seen the stores of food we have left. It’s a couple of week’s worth at most. Here, we have an entire valley filled with food almost ready to harvest.”
“And if we fail, we’ll have even less,” the general snapped, angrily. He immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. Neil, I will do as you ask but you should still prepare for the worst. As a precaution, we should send a scouting party out to Steamboat Springs. Also we’ll need to start loading the five tons with the essentials. And we’ll need to start moving the cattle if we have any chance at saving them if things don’t go our way.”
Neil agreed, consigning himself to another long, long day of work. Actually, it was a couple of days of near nonstop running around, most of which was work related and the rest relegated to avoiding Michael Gates. Marybeth had died seconds after Neil and Sadie had, for want of a better word, fled the clinic. Michael had ranted about “foul play” to anyone who would listen, but few people had the time or energy to, and what was more, even fewer cared. That Marybeth was going to die had been a foregone conclusion to everyone except Michael.
Since a confrontation was the last thing he wanted, Neil tried to keep as low a profile as he could. He scheduled meetings in odd spots: the forest on the western end of the valley, or at Lake Estes on the little beach that could barely fit a hundred bodies laying out to catch the warm sun, back in the day, or at the Department of Transportation depot which was always deserted.
And he had Sadie run interference for him. She didn’t question this despite the rumors floating around that somebody had switched off Marybeth’s IV and despite how odd Neil looked and acted whenever the subject came up—he was always very quick to change the subject, though this wasn’t hard to do.
There were a thousand things that had to be done and ten thousand discussions in order to get them done.
The first thing Neil accomplished was the digging of the moats in front of the smaller walls. The backhoes and the front end loaders worked nonstop for eight hours in front of what was being called Blue Gate 3, in order to make it a much more impressive barrier. The ditch was thirteen feet deep twenty feet wide and a hundred and forty seven feet long.
It was calculated that it would hold the squished remains of ten thousand zombies, once there were tens of thousands more piled on top of them compressing them into goo. It was tested minutes after its completion as Blue Gate 2, the feeble first attempt by Deanna at wall building, collapsed. They had hoped Blue Gate 2 would hold for twenty-four hours, but it was so rickety that the General pulled his troops off as the last embers of twilight became the first gloom of full night.
Two hours later, the weight of the zombies mounded before it became too much. The center went first, falling over with a tremendous crash, and then, seconds later, the entire thing came down releasing an avalanche of bodies, body parts and a hellacious brown sludge that had everyone turning away or risk becoming violently ill.
“Light the tower,” Neil called out the moment Blue Gate 2 came down.
The tower had been high on Neil’s list of things that had to be done right that second. It was a welded structure of pipes supporting a platform of corrugated metal that stood thirty feet high and just three feet from the back of Blue Gate 3. Only once it was completed and the wood arranged on it in the form of a teepee did someone point out that there was no way to feed the fire once it got going save by chucking more wood up on it from the top of the wall of cars.
Neil came very close to cursing yet managed to hold onto his fake politician’s smile, though it wasn’t nearly so wide as it had been. The solution was to build a second tower behind the first. This one was taller than the first and resembled the Eiffel Tower in its shape. To feed the fire, it took ten men clinging to the metal work almost one atop the other, each handing the next a cut of wood until the last man, thirty-five feet in the air, leaned out and dropped the wood into the roaring flames.
Everyone figured the job would be hell and yet there was no shortage of volunteers. The smallest men were chosen since the structure hadn’t been built by an engineer. A fellow named Barry who had welding experience flung it together as fast as he could, which turned out to be just in time for Blue Gate 2 to fail.
The zombies slogged over the piled bodies and parts of bodies and in minutes nothing could be seen of Blue Gate 2. It was just an uneven hill covered in the undead as they surged forward. The pit before the new wall was half filled before the tower lit properly and then night was turned to day by the tremendous bonfire.
The soldiers shied back from it, squinting from the heat and the sharp light; the zombies simply stared in awe—at least those in front did. The ones further behind saw it as a beacon and they trudged onwards, eagerly pushing those in front of them. Those that stumbled were crushed beneath the feet of the rest, and there were many thousands who stumbled as they tried to make their way over the remains of Blue Gate 2.
“Is it working?” Sadie asked.
“It’s hard to tell,” Neil answered.
“It’s slowing them down a little,” General Johnston said, “And that’s a win if you ask me.” Three hundred soldiers stood watching the zombies and e
verything was strangely quiet save for the crackling of the fire. An hour passed and the moat slowly filled, but it wasn’t like it had been before where the zombies tore at everything in a fury to get at the humans.
It almost seemed orderly how the dead crushed one another. The press from behind was continuous and there were enough lame and one-footed zombies to ensure that falls would occur three or four times a minute. They didn’t just happen in the moat, it occurred all over and to Neil it looked as though the river canyon in which this part of I-36 had been laid out in was slowly filling higher and higher with the undead. The ones that weren’t crushed only stared upward at the great ball of fire in the sky.
Hours went by in which the bonfire had to be replenished over and over again by sweaty, ash-faced men, however by ten that night General Johnston said: “I can’t believe that it’s working.” Everyone began to grin—all save Neil. He had too much to do.
The back hoes were sent to start digging a new moat in front of Blue Gate 4, just in case it started raining and the bonfire went out. He also had to deal with the two hotspots diverging from the overflow of the Blue Gate. They had both picked up and men had to be shifted, including Barry the welder, who started in right away with another pair of towers. These went up in a matter of hours since they didn’t have to be nearly as high.
At the first hotspot, the bonfire tower stood fifteen feet tall and the second “feeder” tower was seventeen feet. The moment the bonfire was lit things became a snap for the men. The zombies would forget them entirely and become transfixed by the flames. In minutes they were butchered with ease.
Neil then sent Barry onto the Big Thompson River where the sound of gunshots had been going on all night. Meanwhile, Neil went to Red Gate 3 with Sadie trailing after him. The battle here was in full swing. A major greeted them just before Red Gate 4, which was an impressively massive wall of cars.
This wall had the luxury of time as it had been constructed. The derelict crane sat between the two walls and in hindsight, Neil wished that they’d had the forethought to drag it out of there, but events had happened too quickly and no one had known if Red Gate 3 would hold.
It had done a marvelous job, but it would not last. “Take me up there,” Neil said to the major. “I need to see the battle for myself.” The major gave Neil a peculiar look that implied he didn’t think Neil was up for it—and he was likely right.
Neil swallowed his fear of heights and mounted the wall, not by ladders, but by what the men called the “giant steps.” On the safe side of the wall, the crane had stacked cars, first one, then two atop each other, then three high, and so on until the last was a dizzying fourteen cars tall. The steps had to be climbed or scrambled up, and the last put them so high up that Neil, afraid that a gust of wind would pluck him off the heights and send him screaming down to the road below wouldn’t stand up straight. He stood in a crouch and made sure each foot he planted was square on a hood or trunk and not on the roof of the cars which dented inwards under his weight and caused him to wobble.
He might have whimpered a bit because the major told him: “Everyone is like that at first, but you get used to it after a while.” Sadie acclimated to the heights and the frightening drop in seconds. She stepped across to the main wall, which was made up of two rows of stacked cars pointing nose-on towards the zombies instead of broad-side. This made a much sturdier platform, but it remained to be seen if it would hold up under the weight of the mounting hill of corpses.
The hill of dead had already reached to the lower lip of the wall, however the mound leading up to the hill wasn’t as fully formed as had been the case when Blue Gate 2 had been overwhelmed. There was still a gentle slope that the slain zombies would roll down. It was when the mound reached critical mass and there was nowhere for the dead to go that the wall’s strength would be truly tested. The weight on it would be enormous.
Following Sadie’s lead, and yet still shy, Neil placed a tentative foot on the wall and then strode across, still in a crouch and now fighting against a wave of vertigo. A soldier, who was resting on a windscreen as if he was at a drive-in movie rather than a war zone set fifty feet in the air, put out a steadying hand.
“These the reinforcements?” the soldier asked. Neil didn’t care for the over the top note of shock in the man’s voice, however he understood it. Sadie was small and slim and, while Neil was slightly bigger, he was also, in spite of the dark, clearly on the verge of wetting himself.
“No,” the major answered, sharply, suggesting by his tone that the soldier would be wise to shut his mouth. “This is the governor and his assistant. He wanted to see the fighting for himself.”
The soldier looked Neil over. “That’s good, I guess. You know, Governor, if you step over to the trunk of that next car, you’ll feel a lot better.”
Neil made the move, scary as it was and found that the soldier was right. The car he stood upon was exceedingly steady and his fear of falling completely vanished to be replaced by a fear of being swallowed alive by the wave of zombies crashing up against the wall. It was a lesser fear in truth and one that he could manage at least. “Thanks. This is much better,” he said, standing to his full and not very commanding height.
“Told ya. Hey, I heard that you and that girl stayed on this wall when everyone else ran away,” the soldier remarked, giving the underside of his scruffy chin a good scratching. “Is that true?”
“It was a different woman, actually, but yes. And this, this is Sadie Walcott, daughter of the River King. She was the one who blew up the howitzers this morning and then saved Captain Grey’s life. If you ask me, she would make a fine replacement for any of you men.” Instead of beaming in a show of gratitude as she normally would have, Sadie turned away.
The soldier reappraised Sadie with a raised eyebrow. “Cool,” was all he said.
The major also gave Sadie a second look, but it was brief and was accompanied by a grunt of appreciation. He then directed Neil closer to the thin line of men who stood at the brink of the great hill. They fought with an assortment of weapons and these were stranger than the others Neil had seen. Long poles of metal or two-by-fours that stood higher than any man, were the preferred weapons.
The soldiers would bring them back, high over their heads and then send them whistling down to crush zombie skulls and to send brains and blood flying. Even near misses were enough to stun one of the beasts and that was as good as a kill.
As Neil watched, he saw a young man swinging what looked like the runner of a bed frame. It glanced off the side of a zombie head, denting it but not caving it in. The runner tore the creature’s ear practically off and thudded home, breaking its collar bone. The beast lost its grip, teetered at the top of the tremendous pile of previously killed zombies and then was pulled back by others climbing with single-minded determination. Very soon the one-eared zombie was lost under the pile.
“That soldier mentioned reinforcements,” Neil said. “Have you had a lot of casualties?”
“Three tonight,” answered the major. “One bite and two pull downs.” At Neil’s questioning look, the major added: “A pull down is when a man slips or has his weapon snagged or yanked and he falls down there.” He pointed at the hill which squiggled and writhed and slowly grew larger. “When that happens, our mercy shooters take care of the man.”
The major inclined his head toward a soldier who stood at the center of the wall with a long barreled deer rifle in his hands. Next to him, sitting on the roof of a jeep and eating a sandwich was a man with a canon-like spot light. Nothing more needed to be said about what would happen if one of the men accidentally fell in among the zombies. There could be no rescue once that happened and yet the men swung their modified halberds without fear.
Neil’s next question, having been sparked by a sudden groan of metal coming from somewhere deep in the wall beneath his feet was: “How long will the wall hold?”
The soldier who’d been reclining on the windshield laughed as Neil flung his
arms out. “You just have to ignore that. It happens all the time.”
The major seemed to take no notice of the groaning metal or of the soldier. Casually, he checked his watch, glanced down at the mound of corpses that stretched from one steep ridge line to another, and then shrugged. “I’d categorize that hill as a decent sledding hill. When the slope is practically gone and it reaches ‘kiddy-hill’ status, that’s when I think it’ll be time to pick up stakes and go.”
“But it might go sooner than that,” the soldier said. “It could go anytime. That’s why no one hangs out at the base anymore. Hell, even that ol’ duff who was running the crane has packed it in.”
It could go anytime...Neil didn’t like the sound of that. “Ok, I think I’ve seen enough.” He went back into his crouch as he made his way to the “giant steps” and he did his best to ignore the desire to kiss the earth when he was finally down. Sadie went down with the ease of a mountain goat and beat him down by half a minute, though again her customary smile was gone.
“The wall’s already leaning,” she mentioned. She stood at its base, looking up. Although he didn’t want to, Neil felt that it was his job to look as well. The second he did the wall groaned once more, sending a shiver up his back. The major looked as well and didn’t seem all that concerned.
“Same, same,” he said. “Nothing to fret over yet.”
The wall came down at eight the next morning. Neil watched as he took his breakfast high atop of Red Gate 4. He hadn’t slept a wink the night before and was so tired that he was only slightly alarmed when a stiff breeze shook the wall under him. Red Gate 3 had been abandoned two hours before and just like at the Blue Gate, there was a festival type atmosphere among the soldiers.
The men made bets as to when it would fall or how far the top cars would roll. Some snoozed in the new sun and others did their level best to chat up Sadie, who had fallen asleep in Neil’s Humvee sometime around three in the morning and was a good deal more awake than he was. Just like at the Blue Gate, the unimpeded zombies crawled to the top and then dropped like stones to smack into the road below. There was a very large pile of the beasts, most of whom were still alive but broken in many place, when the wall of cars finally came down.
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