by Jack Wallen
“Hundreds, thousands – who gives a shit. Anytime we’re dealing with more than one of those bastards, it’s a chore.” Ronald’s voice grew angry, accompanied by ropes of veins in his neck and face.
“Sam!” Sellers called from the roof. “I got nothing. I can’t see beyond the tree line.”
Sam turned and marched his way back to the house. Both Ronald and I followed him in. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he called for Bethany.
Bethany had begrudgingly agreed to sleep in the attic. Before Sam could bellow again I informed him I would retrieve the woman. I hated to wake her, but the commander had an obvious need and would not give up until that need was fulfilled. I knew that of military types. Persistent.
When I returned with a half-awake Bethany, Sam wasted no time.
“Can you hack the government satellites for images of what’s going on, in real-time, around this area?” Sam was back in commander mode and we were glued to every syllable.
“I can.” Bethany’s reply was met with a get to it nod from Sam.
The hacker extraordinaire sat in front of the laptop and began her beautiful finger dance over the keys. It didn’t take her long, and when she succeeded, her eyes tripled in size and her lips mouthed what might have been the most frightened ‘Oh shit’ I had ever witnessed.
Sam moved to Bethany’s side and glanced at the screen. When he looked up he said simply “We are about to go to war.”
I wasn’t sure if it was fear or a morbid curiosity, but I had to see the view so totally frightening to a woman who had been through the very eye of this horrific needle. What I saw threatened to fold me inside out. On the screen was a bird’s eye view of our location. Coming in, from all sides, completely encircling our house, were the undead. We were the obvious focus of a massive attack.
“Why are they so God-damned interested in us?” Sam pounded his fist on the table.
“It’s Jacob. They want Jacob.” I had already let Bethany in on the dirty little secret, now it was time to inform our leader.
And I told him everything I knew. I expected him to grab the baby and heave him out the door; give The ZDC what they wanted so we could survive. Sam was still military, after all, and our immediate survival was threatened by our having the baby.
I was shocked when he insisted the undead could play a rousing game of hide and go fuck themselves before he’d hand over Jacob. I wasn’t sure if it was Sam’s ever-growing fondness for those in our group, the idea of long-term survival, or just making the life of The Collective that much harder. Whatever it was, something had Sam insisting the baby remain under our protection.
“How much time do you think we have before they arrive on our doorstep, Bethany?” From the sound of Sam’s question, he had something up his sleeve.
Our resident hacker took a moment to stare at the monitor, calculations practically flashing across her eyes. A few blinks and she had the answer to the only question that really mattered at the moment.
“An hour, tops. Probably more like thirty to forty-five minutes. That’s the best, most accurate answer I can give.” Bethany was clearly disgusted with the lack of precision in her reply.
Sam immediately took the lead.
“I want to build a ring of fire around the house. It’s the only way we can keep…”
“Sam, it won’t work. First, the time it would take to build a fire to encompass the house would exceed the time we have before the horde arrives. Second, there’s no way we’d be able to build a fire that would last long enough to keep thousands of zombies from reaching us. We need to get away from this house.” Bethany’s tone of voice did not betray her words. She was certain in her thoughts.
“And just how do you suppose we do that?” We’re surrounded,” Sam argued.
Once again, Bethany’s eyes were alight with thought and scheme.
“We did it in Paris, we can do it here.” Bethany confused us all.
“The sewers.”
Two words clarified everything. She had led her group safely around Paris underneath the streets. There was no reason the sewers of a strange city in Pennsylvania couldn’t serve the same purpose.
“Everyone pack up and prepare to go underground,” Sam commanded, no one argued.
Each member of our group set about packing up the necessities to help us survive whatever unknown lay ahead. That unknown was huge and could be our undoing. It was becoming quite apparent we would not just roll over and give up. The human race didn’t stand a chance without us. We knew that. Our responsibility was clear.
Bethany arrived back on the main floor first, baby in front and a backpack in the rear. Her face was lined with concern. When she’d used this tactic before, there was no infant along for the ride. I stared at the woman in awe, wondering if I would have ever been capable of beating the odds as she had. My guess was a resounding ‘no.’
As soon as Sam arrived, he dropped a bomb that sucked every breath of air from our lungs.
“Anyone happen to see a sewer entrance anywhere?”
When no one replied, Sam bellowed for Ronald and Dom ‘front and center.’ The lithe man appeared first, ready to take whatever command his superior officer had to give.
“I need you two to run point, locate an entryway into the sewer system, and make sure the path is clear. Bethany, how much time has elapsed, since you first brought up the sat’ images?”
“Eleven minutes, forty-three seconds,” Bethany stated exactly.
“Ronald, make it fast,” Sam appended his command.
Not a word was said as the two men zipped out the door. We were possibly counting down below twenty minutes. I wasn’t sure why Sam didn’t command us all to follow Ronald to save time. I started to bring that very point up, but Bethany beat me to it, point blank.
Sam replied very simply by saying the primary goal, at every second, was to keep Bethany and Jacob safe. If we followed Ronald into the open, randomly wandering the street, safety could not be guaranteed. His point was valid. But precious seconds were ticking by.
Over two minutes passed. Time sped by. We quite possibly had less than eighteen minutes.
“What the fuck is taking that lunatic so long?” Sellers exploded.
The tension was as thick as the fear. A trail of sweat ran down my lower back. When I reached to scratch my head, my hand was violently shaking. Fear had its cold hand on my heart.
“I’m going out.” Sellers grabbed for the door. Before she could turn the handle, Sam had his fingers wrapped around her wrist. Slowly he pulled the woman’s hand from the door. She didn’t argue.
We reached the fifteen minute mark before Ronald returned, without Dom. The look on his face clearly registered defeat
Sam approached Ronald. “What did you find? Where’s Dom?”.
“The first sewer entryway was blocked. When we managed to locate the second, we got in maybe one hundred yards before the path was overrun with zombies. We ran, but Dom didn’t make it. He tripped on the way and the fuckers piled on him. While they were busy devouring him, he managed to cave in the entryway to keep the fuckers from following me out. We’re fucked.”
The commanding officer let the report sink in for a few ticks of the second hand. That precious cargo, time, was quickly slipping away. In a matter of minutes the ring of undead would close in on us.
Sam took a deep breath and released the tension in a single, violent sigh.
“Prepare to fight. It’s our only hope. Danielle, get Bethany and Jacob to the attic. Seal them up with provisions enough to make it through this oncoming shit storm. Everyone else, arm yourselves and get ready for battle.” Sam headed toward the stockpile of weapons, before he turned back to look at me. “Danielle, once you’re finished with Bethany, we’ll need you here to fight.”
My heart stood still as a chill sped through my bloodstream. I knew what this was: Our last stand. We were about to go up against thousands of zombies in order to protect the fragile future of mankind. Our tiny army and an a
ttic door was all that stood between the undead horde and the genetic sequence of the infant in the arms of Bethany Nitshimi.
I escorted mother and child to the hideaway above of the house. “Bethany, remember the cure. That box I gave you is the only living strain. You must keep that with you, and safe, at all times. If I don’t survive this, you will need to find someone capable of reproducing the cure as well as a means of distributing it.” Bethany assured me she would do everything I asked. As she climbed the stairs my heart sank with the thought that I might never see the woman again. Without so much as a ‘goodbye,’ I lifted the attic stairs to seal the future of mankind away from the death-march army growing nearer by the second. Thankfully, the temperature had cooled. For the moment, mother and son would be safe.
When I arrived back at the front line, Sam handed me the first weapon I would handle and then offered some quick advice on shooting quickly and efficiently. This was a point and shoot affair, no time for aiming, no time for thought.
I laid the barrel of the gun on the window pane and held my breath. They were coming, they were close, I could feel it. A vibration tickled the air around us, a smell that existed somewhere within the boundary between the living and the dead affronted my nostrils.
There is some piece of the human brain that longs to pull up its fondest of memories when faced with mortality. Some say their lives ‘flashed before their eyes.’ I like to think it some strange mixture of regret and joy. Regret for what will be left behind and joy for experiences lived.
It should have been no surprise that my mind went directly to that amazing time spent with Lindsay Godwin. From a professional coupling grew an emotional, physical, and mental joining the likes of which I had never before experienced. All of a sudden I found myself longing for the man’s voice, his touch, his laughter. Most of all, having Lindsay’s brilliant mind with us now would have proved to be a godsend. Although his knowledge of battle tactics had been severely lacking, his understanding of the enemy we were up against would have been invaluable. Fortunately, I had a fairly intimate knowledge of the monsters. We would just have to hope it would be more useful than my aim.
A thunderstorm of screams and moans assaulted us. We were minutes, maybe seconds, away from first contact.
Just as my mind and my hands relaxed, a crashing sound shocked me back to reality. A disembodied mailbox flew through the air and smashed against the house.
Simultaneously Sellers, Ronald, and Sam let loose a military-esque battle cry and a lone Screamer exploded from the pitch darkness. Ronald fired off a single shot and dropped the monster mid-stride. From the other side of the room, Sellers let off a round and from the sounds of her celebratory ‘Hoorah,’ she dropped her first.
“Keep ‘em sharp, people,” Sam shouted. I assumed he was referring to our shots, seeing as how our stockpile of ammunition probably did not exceed the enemy head count enough to afford many misses.
A silence overcame the area. I couldn’t help but think we were experiencing the calm before a final, brutal storm.
“Sam, what the fuck?” Sellers broke our silence.
“Wait for it. Wait for it.” Sam’s Star Wars reference wasn’t wasted.
Sellers slowly released a hiss of air in an attempt to release the building tension.
A blast of wind blew, rattling the summer leaves on the trees. I wouldn’t have been surprised by a crack of lightning and roar of thunder to add yet another layer of terror to the ambiance.
The tension was abated when chaos took over. It was as if the Queen of Fire and Darkness herself made an appearance to upend the moment into pure Hell. Without even a screech of warning, a gang of screamers tore out from a thicket of trees and ran directly toward the house. For a moment I wondered how they knew where we were. My brain instantly reminded me how.
Jacob.
Both Sam and Ronald took a shot and dropped two of the undead army before Sam shouted for me to fire. I couldn’t believe I had been sitting there, all along, without firing a single round. When I finally did, the shot went wide. Maybe somewhere on some parallel dimension, I hit something. In the desperate ‘now,’ however, I missed beyond imagination. The zombies continued forward at a pace I’d never seen them reach. The sound of the undead army reached inside of the house now. It was on.
I pointed my weapon at the closest zombie and pulled the trigger. To my surprise the bullet ripped through the monster’s torso. Thick liquid and flesh splashed the ground, but the beast continued on. So far I had fired two shots and still hadn’t lessened the numbers by a single digit.
We couldn’t afford me shooting, but me not contributing to the destruction of the enemy was out of the question.
Inside I heard continuous shots and outside I witnessed the continued dropping of targets. I was the only one in our group missing the mark.
“Come on, Danielle, we need you!” Sam yelled over the tattoo of gunshot.
This time I focused my eye in the sites of the gun, took a deep breath, solidified the cross hairs on the nearest zombie, and slowly pulled the trigger.
The bullet seemed to go Hollywood and leave the barrel of the weapon in slow motion. Seconds, minutes passed as the projectile traversed the space between hammer and head. When the bullet finally reached its target, it was dead on.
Pun fully intended.
I dropped my first of the horde. It felt oddly satisfying. Instead of giving myself a moment to revel in the small victory, I hoisted the gun, fixed the sights on the next target, and dropped a second zombie. This was getting too easy.
Meat and brown ooze was flying all around. Inside of me some sick, perverse joy was building. I was enjoying this, finding a thrill in the kill. Had I finally lost what little humanity remained in my mind and heart?
“Heads up!” Sam screamed. I wasn’t sure the ‘why’ of the warning, but shortly after it was announced, I felt a blaze of heat and the smell of roasting meat. Sam had tossed a hellfire grenade to thin out the herd a bit.
The commander had left a few of the tiny bombs at each window and instructed us to use them only when the numbers grew too great to thin out with bullets.
When a second and third, hellfire nearly seared my back, it became all too clear things were quickly going from DefCon 1 to DefCon Fucked. I couldn’t let what was happening with the others thwart my concentration, so I continued firing. Somehow I’d been lucky enough to very quickly learn the finer points of dropping zombies without wasting ammunition. And when I heard machine gun and rifle fire coming from the others, I knew things were dropping back to a manageable state.
And then things changed. All went silent. Minutes ticked by and not a single Moaner or Screamer came at us.
“Sam, what the hell?” Sellers’s frightened whisper called out.
“Hold steady.” Sam’s taut reply silenced the soldier’s concern.
Those two words were the last spoken before a Hell like no other was loosed upon us. What came charging from the trees was, most unfortunately, quite familiar to me. The ‘failed’ experiments I had created in my lab – the real monsters – came speeding at us. The sound was like a thousand trains slamming on their brakes and simultaneously blasting their horns.
For the briefest of moments, I was torn. Those abominations had been my doing. Under my care and watch they were bred, designed, and cared for. Within the breath of insanity, I thought ‘Could I possibly kill these magnificently damned creatures?’ But then reality pimp-slapped me across the face and my finger began dancing over the trigger of my weapon.
I wasn’t sure if it was nerves, but the initial shots missed. Just as the first of the inbreds was about to come within deformed-arm’s reach, my bullet struck home and dropped the thing permanently to the ground.
From across the room I heard the blazing crack of machine gun fire and every combination of every syllable of profanity ever invented.
When the sound of an unnaturally feminine screech issued from Sellers’s mouth, I turned to see one of the
nastier creatures to ever be spawned in my lab reach its head through a window and bite completely through Ronald’s right shoulder. The mouth of the beast was large and the teeth razor sharp enough that the shoulder never stood a chance. Ronald’s arm was easily pulled free when the monster gave its head a dog-like shake. Blood sprayed the face of the creature as well as the wall around him. Just as Ronald was about to pass out from shock, the bastard zombie reached in, engulfed the man’s head in its mouth and bit through his neck.
Over the din of battle, the popping of Ronald’s skull was audible as the thing chomped down. Gray matter and blood oozed from between its lips as it chewed and swallowed.
Sellers hoisted her gun and nearly emptied a full clip into the thing’s face.
We had lost another man, but managed to hold off yet another wave of the undead. In losing that man – our best shot at that – our chances of surviving grew increasingly slim.
I looked at Sam who had a fire bomb in his hand. He gestured to the box of similar grenades at my feet, suggesting I follow suit. I saw no reason to argue. I placed one grenade in each hand and prepared to launch. It was crucial I not get jumpy and toss what might be our only hope out at the first zombie I saw. I had to wait to try to take out as many as possible. That was not going to be easy, seeing as how instinct dictated that I react the second I sensed danger. And, believe me, there was no shortage of danger around.
Sellers sobbed as she picked up her own hellfire bombs. If we had time, I would have allowed my heart and arms to reach out. Luxuries such as empathy were not afforded when your life was dangerously close to being taken away.
“Incoming!” Sam yelled.
I pulled my eyes away from Sellers and turned my focus back to the windows. Every molecule of breath was stolen from my lungs when my eyes landed on a large group of Screamers bearing down on my side of the house. The noise shook the walls and rattled the inside of my skull. I had a grenade in each hand, which was a stupid move. In order to ‘pull the pin’ I needed a free hand, so I sat one of the weapons down, took in a deep breath, pulled the pin, and lobbed the bomb outside. The fire was released almost immediately and engulfed the group of zombies. As the walking dead burned they began running around aimlessly, their sense of sound and smell completely disrupted, consumed by the blaze. Flesh and meat sizzled and cracked as the bodies gave into a final, fiery death. The sight was hypnotic, but then I’d always had a boyish fascination with fire.