The North: A Zombie Novel

by Cummings, Sean

  “What are you seeing, Sid?”

  The turret spun sharply to the right and then back to the left. The whirring of the turret gear filled the inside of our carrier. “We’ve got a muzzle flash from a sniper in the grain elevator and about five others taking pot shots at us from behind the wall of cars. I’m ready to engage.”

  “Line ‘em up in your sights, Sid,” I answered back. “Ark Two, what are you seeing?”

  The sound of static filled my ears and then Cruze answered in a sharp voice. “There’s a big-ass cloud of dust from behind the barricade. I can’t tell what it is, Dave, but from the looks of it we’re talking heavy equipment of some kind.”

  “Roger,” I said as my heart started pounding. “Well … they started shooting first. Ark Two, engage the barricade with your turret guns. Sid – fire a short burst into that sniper’s nest!”

  The turret spun a quarter turn as I finally spotted the cloud of dust. It was big enough to suggest that whatever they had pulled out was likely a piece of altered farm equipment – possibly a tractor or a large front-end loader. I spotted the light trail of a tracer round fly into the top of the grain elevator as the general purpose machine gun spat a small burst of rounds over my head.

  “Stay in the ditch and push forward with both carriers!” I shouted into the radio. “As long as we’re in the low ground they’ve only got our turrets to fire on.”

  “Copy that!” Cruze replied. Doug slipped the carrier into gear and we started crawling forward, the engine rumbling steadily. I gazed out through the periscope to see round after round hitting the hull, bouncing off in a spray of paint chips and sparks. The cloud of dust to the left of the elevator was mixed with thick white smoke, a sure sign that whatever the Eden clan had pulled from behind the barricade was diesel-fuelled. That was a positive development – we’d have something to siphon off if we were successful in taking the village. I could see Ark Two’s turret to my left as we edged forward, still taking on small arms fire.

  Another burst of rounds echoed through the carrier as the stench of burning gun oil and propellant gases filled my nostrils.

  “Got him!” shouted Sid.

  I looked up at the grain elevator just in time to see a man’s body slumped in the makeshift window near the top. The rifle over his left shoulder slipped off his body and fell to the ground.

  “Holy shit!” Cruze’s voice roared through my headset.

  “What are you seeing?”

  “Twelve o’clock and coming up from behind the barricade. That is one big-ass bucket … oh shit!”

  Small explosions of dirt kicked up off the surface of the road, one after the other. “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!” Cruze bellowed.

  I couldn’t see what Cruze was seeing but I sure as hell knew from the trajectory of the dirt spraying off the roadway that the Eden survivors had a machine gun.

  “I’m hit!” she bellowed.

  A tremor of fear seized me as Doug slipped the carrier into reverse. “How bad?” I answered.

  There was a moment of heavy static and then Cruze answered. “Mel’s bleeding … got clipped in the shoulder with some hull shrapnel.”

  “Stand by!” I answered. “Smoke away, Sid!”

  I could hear the distinctive thunk of our smoke dischargers firing off the left side of the turret. I peered out through my periscope to see the air fill with a billowing cloud of white smoke.

  “They’ve got a heavy machine gun!” I shouted into my radio. “How big?”

  “It’s a .50!” Sid answered in a panicked voice. “I can see it … they’ve mounted it in the bucket of that loader. Holy shit, where the hell did they get that?”

  “Don’t know and don’t care!” I barked. “Ark Two, how’s Mel?”

  The radio hissed. “I’ve got a field dressing on Mel’s shoulder,” said Cruze. “It’s not too bad – I can’t find the projectile anywhere but thank God it was shrapnel she got nailed with.”

  “Pull back now, Cruze! They’ve got a .50 caliber and if that thing hits either of us, we’re screwed!”

  “Roger,” Cruze replied.

  A .50 caliber machine gun is a deadly weapon to face in any battle. Our lightly armored carriers were no match even for non-armor piercing rounds. The muzzle velocity from the gun alone would give the bullets enough power to blast through our hull like it was a paper target. We had to do something fast – once the smoke cleared we’d be shot to pieces, even if we were better armed than they were.

  I looked back over my shoulder. “Dawson … pull out the 60 mm mortar, I’m coming back and we’re going to take that gun down now!”

  She gave me a thumbs-up as she unstrapped the mortar tube from the hull and screwed on the base plate.

  I scrambled to the rear of the carrier and pulled a long metal box out from underneath the tarp on the floor. Ripping off the safety wire, I flipped open the lid to see a dozen long black tubes with the words HE FRAG painted on the sides in yellow. I quickly started tearing off the tape holding the ends of the tubes together and gave each a sharp twist. Inside each one was a 60 mm mortar round with charge increments attached just above the tail fins. Dawson threw open the rear door and hopped out of the carrier, keeping low for cover. I shifted my legs out the back and hauled the case containing the twelve rounds onto the crew seat.

  I gave Jo a stern look and pointed to her jump seat. “Stay inside, and when I start hammering on the door, Jo, you make freaking sure you look to see that it’s me and Dawson before you let anyone in, got it?”

  She nodded, the helmet bouncing up and down over her eyes. “Okay … just be careful,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  I lifted the case of ammo onto the ground and shut the door, my carbine slung over my shoulder. I quickly scanned the area surrounding us for a firing position with decent cover, deciding on the shoulder of the road a few feet away from the carrier’s left side.

  “Over there,” I said. “Push the base plate in good and hard and I want a fixed firing pin – no lever firing, I want these rounds away as quickly as possible.”

  Dawson nodded as she scrambled to a spot on the shoulder. I crouched over, pulled the ammo crate up beside her and then took a quick look up the road. The entire area in front of the barricade was obscured by our smokescreen, but that didn’t mean we weren’t taking on enemy fire. Small arms rounds ricocheted off the hull of my carrier and whizzed up into the air, the defenders of Dinsmore firing blindly into the field of white smoke. The good news was that I didn’t hear the distinctive pop, pop, pop of the machine gun, but that would last only as long as our smokescreen did.

  I could still make out the entire grain elevator, along with the sign for the Fast Gas station. In a few moments we’d be raining down a lethal mixture of high explosives and sharp metal fragments on the Eden tribe and I didn’t want them to come anywhere near that fuel station.

  There is a sight line painted up the side of a mortar for the team to align the gun, but what’s really happening is that you’re eyeballing it when you aim. You have to estimate the distance to the target, and you have to adjust the propellant increments on the tail fins of each bomb to match your estimate, or the rounds will overshoot the enemy.

  I guessed that the barricade was about 500m away, and the machine gun in the front-end loader bucket about 100m further behind. I decided to remove four of the five propellant increments and use the first round as a gauge. “You ready?” I said to Dawson. “We’re talking five hundred meters … you lined up?”

  Dawson adjusted the angle of the tube and pushed hard into the dirt. “The first one will decide the rest of the shots. I’m ready to go.”

  I pulled off the safety wire on each round and laid them out in a row beside me. Then I took one last look up the middle of the road and carefully inserted the tail fin assembly into the tube.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said shakily as I let go of the round, the tail fins disappearing into the tube.

  The mortar kicked, and emitted a loud, hollow
thunk, the round shooting out of the tube faster than the eye could follow. Seconds later there was a flash of light, followed quickly by an explosion as the round hit. A mixture of dirt and black smoke drifted high into the air, followed shortly after by bloodcurdling screaming.

  “Good aiming, Dawson,” I said as I pulled the safety wire off a second round.

  She shuddered. “We’re firing blindly, Dave. We need to take out that gun.”

  No sooner had the words left her lips when I saw the bucket lift slowly higher into the air, above our rapidly dissipating smoke screen. Its gun started firing in a series of loud pops, the rounds hitting the road in front of us and ricocheting high.

  “We need to take that out now!” I roared. Dawson tilted the tube forward no more than an inch, and I slid the tail fin assembly into the nose of the tube and released it.

  There was another hollow-sounding thunk followed seconds later by an explosion, and this time I could see that we’d landed a round behind the barricade. The Eden tribe’s machine gun started firing full auto now in an attempt hit us; the rounds kept ricocheting off the road about 30 feet to our front.

  “That got ‘em,” Dawson shouted. “Fire for effect!”

  I pulled the safety wires and propellant increments off the remaining ten mortar rounds and started dropping them into the tube one after the other. Round after round of high explosive, high fragmentation bomblets rained down on the Eden tribe’s barricade, filling the air with a deadly mixture of metal fragments and explosive force but that .50 caliber machine gun kept on firing at a murderous rate.

  We quickly ran out of mortar rounds. I had another case inside the back of the carrier, but I didn’t want to waste them firing blindly at that barricade. Judging from the wails of the Eden tribe’s wounded, they’d taken on serious casualties – now the only thing left to do was to silence their machine gun. I raised my carbine to my shoulder and took aim through my scope. Two men, who looked about middle-aged, were seated firmly inside the enormous bucket I was just about to squeeze off a pair of rounds when a sharp burst of automatic fire shot out from the turret of Ark One, tearing into the men and sending a splatter of gore into the shining steel bucket. I lowered my weapon and motioned for Dawson to get the mortar back into the carrier.

  She picked up the tube and raced back to the carrier, banging on the door with the base plate. It swung open seconds later and Dawson climbed safely back inside. My heart pounded like a jackhammer as I pulled my weapon back to my shoulder and gazed down the road at the carnage we’d caused. Through a thin haze of smoke I could see a number of cars in the barricade were on fire. Voices called out from behind the barricade, laced with pain and anguish.

  Regret burned through me, even as I tried to remind myself that they’d shot at us first. We were simply defending ourselves against the people who’d killed that family in the barn, a few miles back. It was suicide for outgunned amateurs to engage a pair of fully armed APC’s in combat, but clearly the Eden tribe hadn’t figured that one out in time. I lowered my weapon as I spotted a strip of white cloth dotted with a smattering of blood fixed firmly to the barrel of a hunting rifle.

  Dinsmore had decided to surrender and I whispered a small prayer of thanks. Without Cruze’s quick thinking in calling for a smokescreen, we would have been ripped to shreds by that heavy machine gun. I shouldered my rifle and plodded back to the carrier, where Jo handed me a bottle of water. I slugged it back in a series of shaky gulps, then wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my coat and handed the bottle back to Jo.

  “Good shooting, Sid!” I shouted.

  “Yeah … you see that flag?”

  I crawled into the back and pulled the door closed. “I saw it. How bad are they?”

  The turret spun quickly to the left and then to the right. “I can’t see any bodies, but I do see a chick running around back there with a first aid kit.”

  I climbed back into my crew commander’s hatch and flipped open the door. I slipped on my headset and looked over across the road at Cruze, who was peering at the carnage through a pair of binoculars.

  “Ark Two,” I said into the radio, my voice still shaking. “Weapons hold … move up and secure the area. We can’t offer a lot, but we’ll do what we can for their wounded. Keep your guard up.”

  The radio hissed. “Will do. Are we expecting a counter attack?” asked Cruze.

  I sighed heavily. “Beats the hell out of me, Cruze. We’re six months past the end of the freaking world – why should we expect anything less?”

  19

  We pulled into Dinsmore and parked both carriers in front of the now smashed barricade. Tiny shards of glass, mixed with countless strips of torn metal and barbed wire lay scattered about in all directions, and the air smelled of smoke and cordite. A thin stream of blood trickled from underneath the shattered wall of cars, collecting into a pool inside a tire track. They’d probably used the front end loader to build their barricade.

  We found a young female, who didn’t look much older than any of us. She had matted blond hair that was filled with dirt and her face was dotted with small flecks of blood. She was dressed in a pair of torn jeans and a grease stained sweatshirt featuring a faded image of a RUSH album cover and her hands and forearms were covered with blood as she applied pressure to a middle-aged man’s neck wound. A human leg lay against a battered automobile door, its former owner lying on his back. His lifeless eyes stared up at the chalk-colored sky – his Remington hunting rifle was twisted around his arm by its sling.

  The man with the neck wound looked to be in his mid- forties. His breathing was shallow, and he struggled to say something to the woman, but all he could manage was a gurgle.

  When someone dies, it’s as if the body becomes deflated somehow. Your muscles relax and your chest falls as your lungs empty out that last breath of air. Your eyes sink back into your eye sockets and your face becomes loose, almost flaccid.

  That’s what I saw the very moment that man died. Beside him was the body of a teenage boy, probably no older than Sid or me. His midsection was torn open – his intestines spilled out across his lap like they’d been dumped out of a bucket. A few feet away, draped across the hood of one of the cars, lay the body of a man whose jeans were coated in arterial blood. A gash about six inches long had been torn into his left thigh. Even in death the man held his rifle, the shining black barrel aimed straight down the middle of the grid road leading into town.

  The lone survivor of our attack cursed violently as the man she’d been tending to died with her hands pressed hard against his neck. She lunged toward us, her eyes blazing with hatred. Sid whipped his carbine across his chest in a sharp, almost fluid movement. He landed a hard butt stroke to her forehead and she dropped like a stone.

  We caused this.

  The survivors of Dinsmore might have fired the first shot, but we ended it in a haze of smoke, high explosives and burning metal. I would have felt pity for those who’d died, but as I gazed at the grim scene, all I could think about was that family of four, murdered in cold blood back at the barn and that if we didn’t protect Jo, if I couldn’t protect her, then she’d wind up just like them.

  Sid pulled out a couple of nylon cable ties from the pocket of his combat pants. He knelt down in front of the girl and flipped her onto her stomach as she moaned loudly. He pressed his knee on the center of her back and bound her wrists together, giving the end a sharp tug. She wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  He grunted. “Does this mean she’s a prisoner?”

  “Of what?” I said flatly. “We’re not at war, Sid.”

  The giant Newfoundlander stood up and gazed out at the carnage. He motioned to the closest dead body. “You sure about that, Dave?”

  “Get her back to the carrier,” I said, ignoring his comment. “We’ll question her once we move past the barricade. She’ll have probably come to by then.”

  Sid nodded as he bent over and picked the girl up. She moaned a couple of times as he slung her o
ver his shoulder like she was a sack of flour. I walked over to the three dead bodies and collected their weapons. They wouldn’t be in need of them again, but we might.

  The rumble of our engines filled the air, and I was just about to head through a gap in the barbed wire fence to scope out the area, when at the last second I decided against it. Dinsmore might have been a tiny village and we’d just killed five of its residents, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sniper willing to take pot shots at me. We still had about an hour to scrounge before nightfall, and I had no desire to stay longer than that – the sound of the mortar explosions would have echoed for miles. That meant the Eden tribe might come running from any number of small towns and villages between our position in front of the barricades and the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.

  Not to mention creeps.

  And where were the creeps? How in the hell could a group of six survivors keep a tiny hamlet clear from the wandering hordes of monsters. We’d already had our own run-in with the creatures a couple of hours down the road – it didn’t add up.

  I doubled back to the carriers and scurried behind Ark Two so I could check on Melanie Dixon. I noticed a series of four oblong dents in the hull just behind the crew commander’s hatch. Each ding was about an inch and a half long and the armor looked like it had been folded back – that’s how powerful their gun was. Below the dents was the actual hole where the .50 caliber round had penetrated.

  We lucked out, pure and simple. If another round or two had managed to make its way inside, it could have hit the fuel tanks and brewed up the ten thousand pound machine, burning everyone inside alive.

  Our prisoner was huddled in the corner next to the engine panel. She had an angry-looking red welt on her forehead, and her stringy blond hair dangled limply onto her shoulders. She glared at me through narrow green eyes and she stuck her jaw out defiantly and started kicking at the tarp underneath her feet.

  “You killed them all!” she shrieked. “You’re murderers – every last one of you!”