“Good God!” Sinclair said, and he found he couldn’t even hear his own voice over all the frantic firing around him.
###
The zombies came over the walls like a gray, rotting waterfall. They slammed into the ground almost as single mass, cutting off Danielle and her fire team from Lennon and the others. One of the guns in the towers had sputtered its last—it was out of ammunition, and there was no chance of resupply in this environment. The new tide of stenches surprised everyone, including her. Bodies fell on top of bodies, and while those at the bottom of the piles were pretty severely smashed up and not an immediate threat, those which endured softer landings were still plenty mobile. She paused firing long enough to do a quick headcount. There were thirteen shooters on the ground, and a few more still on the wall. More stenches were coming over the top, virtually an unending stream. And not just in her immediate location. There were additional breaches to her left and to her right.
In other words, what had been a relatively leisurely shoot with about thirty to forty zombies had just gone to three to four hundred of them, with at least twenty-five percent of that force mobile and looking for a meal.
“Fall back!” she shouted. “Bring them into the kill zone!” Most of the defenders couldn’t hear her, so she started motioning them back with hand signals, in between gunning down stenches that got too close. On the far end of their formation, one of the gunners was taken down by a running zombie—it literally sprinted right toward him like Usain Bolt, bare feet slapping on the pavement of Main Street like two dead fish. Three shooters turned toward it, but it was moving so fast that a head shot was out of the question. Then, one of her guys went down when the zombie crashed into him, taking him to the ground. Teeth flashed in the fading sunlight, and jagged nails slashed. One of the other shooters ran over and tried to kick the thing off the struggling man, but it held on tight, head snapping back and forth as it tried to find a good place to bite. Danielle didn’t see what happened next, for she was suddenly busy as a throng of dusty corpses shuffled toward her. She raised her rifle and drilled each one through the head, watching the bodies hit the deck as her rounds did their jobs and shattered skulls. When she checked back to the left, she saw the shooter who had been taken down as free now... but he was bleeding from a large gash in his shoulder.
Danielle realized she was watching a future dead man.
She turned back to where she had seen Lennon and his men head for one of the ladders that led to the top of the wall. All she saw was were bodies; shuffling dead moseying this way and that as even more corpses fell from the sky, slamming to the ground. She heard gunfire from that direction, so the men were still alive, and still fighting. There wasn’t a lot she could do for them, not with the number of fighters she had available. But she really couldn’t see what was going on, due to the zombies milling around. She needed elevation.
She turned toward the row of HESCOs nearby and grabbed a hold of the wire mesh that surrounded the container. As she struggled to clamber up its surface, she realized that this was a circumstance where the prosthesis was actually doing more harm than good; it was configured for walking, not for climbing. She felt the knee joint wasn’t bending quite far enough, and the socket which covered the stump of her thigh was coming loose, pulling away from the sock that covered the remains of her limb. It made her slow to climb, which gave the stenches time to close the gap between them. The rifle was useless to her at the moment, as she would have to unsling it and transfer it to her left hand. Instead, she drew the pistol at her hip and fired left-handed at the dead. The big .45 slug hit the first one right in the nose, knocking it back like a bowling pin where it took out two others. Good enough. Danielle put the pistol on top of the HESCO and hauled herself up. The prosthetic limb felt loose, but it came with the rest of her, so that was a plus.
Atop the earth-filled HESCO, she took a moment to put weight on her prosthesis, snapping the socket back into place over her stump. Bullets whizzed past her like angry bees from the secondary wall behind her—some of the gunners up there were trying to engage the dead on the ground. Danielle thought that was pretty damn dumb, but then she saw Lennon and his group pretty much encircled by the dead at the base of the ladder. A few guys had actually gone up, but they were climbing back down now. The walkway overhead was full of moving corpses, and from where she stood, Danielle could see there was no way to take the wall back from the dead. So she raised her rifle and started shooting the ghouls surrounding Team Lennon’s position, walking rounds from the outside of the formation toward the inner edges. She took care to ensure her rounds wouldn’t travel through a zombie and strike one of Lennon’s men, so she fired more slowly than she would have if that wasn’t a concern. Just the same, she racked up a pretty good frame by the time she had exhausted her magazine.
While reloading, she noticed more of the dead had made to the HESCO barrier, and they were crowding around her position. The rest of her team had fallen back, but they continued firing as they retreated, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
Stepping away from the cluster of dead reaching toward her, she resumed firing on the ring of corpses that had encircled Lennon’s team. As the bodies fell, she saw Lennon pull something from his vest. He was shouting, but the words never made it to her ears. Then he hurled something. She’d been in the Marines long enough to know a grenade when she saw one.
“Grenade!” she shouted, turning toward her fighters. It was doubtful they heard her, and she wasted no time in flattening herself against the top layer of soil in the HESCOs. The dead reached toward her, but they weren’t close enough to grab her... yet.
The grenade exploded with a thunderous boom that was made even louder by the close proximity of the walls. Danielle thought she could her fragments slapping against the sides of the HESCOs, but she was certain that wasn’t the case—it was just too loud for her to hear any noises on that scale. She pushed up from the HESCO’s top and shouldered her rifle. Swinging its barrel back to where Lennon’s team had been fighting, she saw the grenade had blown a large hole in the zombies surrounding the men. Lennon led his team through the opening, firing on the move. Danielle added her fire to the mix, dropping stenches as they reached for the men. Just the same, one of them went down. He was covered instantly by writhing bodies that fought with each other for the same piece of meat. Danielle found herself once again firing into a mound of bodies, not to kill them, but to spare the human being beneath them some final moments of agony.
A fusillade of fire hit the stenches that had been surrounding her position atop the HESCO. Danielle looked down as Lennon’s team rolled up, and the narrow-faced leader indicated the open gate in the second wall with one knife-handed motion.
“Kennedy, move your ass!” he shouted.
Danielle knew an order when she heard one. She ran along the top of the HESCOs, slipping and sliding in the exposed soil. Her prosthesis made her flight look awkward and ungainly; despite the advanced implement, it was still no replacement for a flesh and blood leg, but Danielle had mastered running on it months ago. Despite the uneven footing and her inelegant flight, she still made better time than the men below. By the time they made the gate, she was just climbing down the last HESCO. Her prosthesis was still tight against her stump this time, so she was able to turn and get right into the fight. Several dozen zombies were surging after Lennon and his men, and she wasted no time in dropping them.
“Get inside the wall!” Lennon shouted at her as he ran up. “Come on, Jane Wayne, move it!”
Danielle turned and loped toward the open gate on the other side of layers of razor wire fences. There was a small opening between the emplacements, just big enough for two people to pass through side by side. More people were on the other side, all of them armed. From behind the razor wire barriers, they opened up. Danielle heard bullets zip past her like angry bees, thudding into dead flesh as the monstrosities behind her soaked up the punishment. Over the din of fire, she heard their shuffling
footsteps. They were still coming, still surging forward, shambling after her despite the punishment they were taking. She heard someone scream, loud and piercing over the gunfire, and she slowed. As she started to turn, rough hands pushed her forward.
“Keep going, Marine!” Lennon bellowed in her ear.
Danielle practically fell through the opening in the razor wire, and people there—uniformed cops from the reservation police—caught her before she hit the ground and dragged her through. Lennon and the rest of his people bolted in a fraction of a moment later, and more cops slammed the razor wire gate closed. It didn’t take more than a moment for the sound of metallic ringing to sound as zombies blundered right into the razor wire’s embrace, ignoring the slashing metal as they tried to push through it. As the stenches piled into the obstruction, carving open flesh and slicing tendons and stringy muscle, Danielle turned and looked past them. There was an undulating mound of dead thirty feet back. One of Lennon’s troops had been taken down, only seconds from safety. He or she was being devoured beneath the pulsating mass that was already so thick that newcomers wouldn’t have a chance at getting even a tiny shredded piece of meat.
Lennon raised his rifle and fired into the mass, ripping through a magazine in record time. Bodies jerked and twitched as the 5.56-millimeter rounds slapped into them, but none of them were killing shots. Danielle wondered what Lennon was up to, as he struck her as far too disciplined to waste ammunition like that. As Lennon inserted a fresh mag into his rifle, another former Marine put a hand on his shoulder.
“Forget it, Walt—he’s already gone, man. He’s dead, and you know it.”
“Fuck,” Lennon said. It was a simple statement of defeat.
Danielle stopped to adjust her prosthesis. It was threatening to come loose from the stub of her leg once again; while Corbett had bought her the best leg money could buy, it was still fake. It wasn’t designed take that kind of punishment she’d just put it through, but it was all she had. It had to hold up, otherwise she’d be meat for the dead.
Not happening, she told herself, and as she did, she was surprised to discover her thoughts were less of herself and more of Gary Norton. Girl, that man doesn’t need you to take care of him.
The dead continued to throw themselves against the rows of razor wire fencing. On the secondary wall, defenders continued firing into the mass of stenches. The thunder of gunfire was neverending, just as intense as she’d ever heard it in Iraq, only this time it was arrayed against an enemy that was indefatigable. As if to prove this, the first layer of razor wire bowed inward, sagging against the mounting weight of the dead. Danielle raised her rifle and starting taking them out at ground level, but in a way, that just made it worse. Dead zombies slumped in the wire, and their body weight served to make it sag even more.
“Pull back!” Lennon shouted to the defenders around him. “This shit wasn’t meant to hold forever. Get behind the wall!”
The defenders behind the row of razor wire fencing filed back to the secondary wall. Danielle hung back, covering their retreat with Lennon and his hard core fighters. When the older man noticed she was still with them, he gave her a curt nod.
“You fight pretty good for a girl,” he said.
“You fight pretty good for an old man,” she responded.
Lennon snorted. “At least I’m younger than your boyfriend, lady.”
Danielle swapped a depleted magazine for a fresh one. “Jealous?”
Lennon snorted again and shook his head. “Fall back, Marine.”
###
The fighting continued through the night, and not just along the southern walls. There were breaches in the northern and western walls as well, where the dead mounded over the barriers and tumbled over the perimeter walls. Fighting them at night was a difficult proposition, but the darkness was a small advantage for the defenders. The stenches were dumb to begin with, and night blindness didn’t make them any more adept. They fell into trenches, were bottled up behind HESCOs, and blundered into razor and tanglefoot wire traps where they could be killed quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, their numbers were massive. While the defenders of Single Tree were well armed and more or less disciplined in their approach to combat, the vast number of enemy combatants gave the zombies the necessary mass. And since Barry Corbett hadn’t thought he’d need a squadron of B-52s and four batteries of artillery on hand, that mass meant Single Tree would fall.
By dawn the next day, Corbett realized it was unavoidable. They could hold back the dead for a few hours in some instances, but as the minutes ticked by, the defenders became more exhausted. Weapons eventually malfunctioned, or those holding them simply became less accurate. Reloading took time in the back field, and in some instances defenders were without ammunition for minutes at a time. Corbett and his people had underestimated the demand, even though all of them were experienced. They had over fifty years of military experience, and all had fought in intense battles before. No one had forgotten what they’d learned, and their tactics and techniques were sound. But the dead just didn’t pause to reconstitute forces or to rest and refit. They just kept coming. In the end, Single Tree had as much chance of stopping them as New Orleans had at stopping Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“How much of the town have we lost?” Corbett asked. He sat in a trailer near the high school, along with Lennon, Victor, Max Booker, and of course, Jock Sinclair. For once, Sinclair didn’t look like a puffed-up English dandy. He was filthy, and his normally perfect hair was in disarray. Gray speckled razor stubble dotted his chin and cheeks. He looked as worn down and drawn out as the rest of the people sitting in the trailer’s small parlor did. And outside, gunfire continued to roar, and dire reports issued forth over the walkie-talkies.
“About twenty percent,” Lennon said. “Most of it’s in the south, but the masses in the north are starting to squeeze in. We’re having a bit of trouble rotating people in and out to reinforce them because the incursion from the west is still giving us some trouble. East is still clear, though it’s heating up. The only places that are clear right now are the airport and the conduit.” The conduit was the relatively narrow walled stretch that connected the town to the airport. Corbett wasn’t surprised there wasn’t a lot of activity around the airport, as there was nothing there to draw the dead. Aside from Rod Cranston, the airport manager, and some staffers who had remained on site, there just wasn’t enough meat to draw the dead in.
Won’t be that way forever, Corbett thought.
“Fatalities?” he asked.
“Seventeen so far,” Victor said, his voice a low murmur. “With another fifty-three wounded. Several of those are infected. They’ll turn into stenches.”
“Some already have,” Lennon said.
Corbett looked across the dinette table at him. “And?”
“And they were killed,” Lennon said.
Corbett started to ask who had been killed, but he decided he didn’t really want to know. A lot more people would die, and he would know a great many of them. In fact, he would probably be one of them.
Lennon didn’t wait for anyone to come up with any follow-on questions. “With the surge from the west, we really are in danger of the town getting cut in half,” he said. “It’s going to be tough to get it under control, but if we don’t, then anyone caught up north is going to have to shelter in place or just up and die. Those are the only two options.”
“They’re coming over the walls?” Corbett asked.
“Where there are walls,” Victor said. “In some places, there’s just fencing. Maybe HESCOs. But those aren’t enough to hold them back for very long, not when they know there’s people in the area. And we can’t kill enough of them.”
“The security situation is deteriorating pretty quickly,” Lennon said. “We might need to start looking at other options.”
Sinclair spoke for the first time from behind his camera. “What other options?”
Corbett turned toward him. “You’ll find out in due
time, Mister Sinclair. In due time.”
Sinclair grunted. “So much for an ‘official record,’ right?”
Corbett ignored him and turned back to Lennon. “You have the A team ready?”
“They are.”
Corbett turned to Victor. “Any idea where Norton is?”
Victor raised a brow. “I believe he’s at his house, where you told him to stay. Though he won’t be staying for much longer, I would guess. He’s about to get a bunch of hungry dead people for company. Are you going to make the fall of Single Tree into a TV series? If so, he’s your man, but word is he doesn’t come cheap.”
“I’ll need to speak to him. Can we get him here?” Corbett directed this to Lennon.
“When?”
“Soon, Walt. Soon.”
“I’ll see to it.”
###
Lennon was good to his word. Norton arrived in his Jeep fifteen minutes later, along with his parents. Corbett grinned when he saw Beatrice Norton step out of the vehicle, wearing a peach-colored pant suit and match wide-brim hat, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses so gigantic they wouldn’t have been considered fashionable even back in the 1970s. Arthur Norton was more adequately attired for the occasion. Jeans, a sweater over a collared shirt, and a bulky barn jacket. The elder Norton also carried a black LWRC rifle, and when his coat parted as he climbed out of his son’s vehicle, Corbett caught a glimpse of a Smith & Wesson pistol at his hip. While Arthur Norton didn’t handle the rifle like a seasoned pro, he obviously had enough respect for the weapon to ensure its business end wasn’t pointed at anything but the ground.
In counterpoint, Beatrice Norton held a large, pale-colored purse.
Corbett shook his head at the duality of the picture.
Gary Norton climbed out from behind the wheel. He toted along one of his own rifles, the Heckler & Koch AR that he apparently favored over the LWRC. He also wore a tactical vest full of mags for both rifle and pistol. His eyes were unreadable behind his sunglasses when he looked toward Corbett standing next to the trailer. Corbett motioned him over. Norton slung his rifle and did as instructed, his parents trailing along behind them. Beatrice was obviously frightened by the incessant gunfire, but Arthur kept his eyes out, scanning the area behind his prescription glasses.
The Last Town (Book 5): Fleeing the Dead Page 20