by R. J. Spears
Jones remained facing away from her. “I don’t think you do. I served with these men, some of them for years. I trained them. Yes, I lost a few over in the Mideast, but it was nothing like we’ve lost in this...this…” He trailed off.
“Okay, we don’t know, but I do know that we haven’t thanked you enough for your courage to do what is right.”
She thought she sensed him relaxing a little, but he still refused to look in her direction, which she found unsettling.
Del continued his quiet inventory of the contents of the jeep. There wasn’t really that much more, but he did find a half box of MREs. It wasn’t the Ritz, but they had eaten a lot of canned crap lately. These would be a good change of pace. He started to inform the others but quickly saw that scenario and read the body language between Jo and Jones. Better to keep his discovery to himself.
“You know, I’m not sure I know what is right or wrong anymore” Jones said. “What just happened seems so wrong to me.” He paused and Jo could sense the dilemma roiling in his head. “And I’m not sure how I can make this work for me anymore.” He paused, lowering his head, turning inwards and seeing all the years of serving with his men. Of serving under the Colonel. He had thrown that all away because of what he thought was right. Was anything right anymore?
Jo started to say something else, but he pulled away from her and walked down the road toward where they had parked the truck. She thought that this was possibly a good sign. He could have just walked away from them. Or worse. It was obvious that he was in the midst of intense inner turmoil. Twice he had been forced to take sides, and there was no doubt that he was reliving those choices. Maybe even regretting them.
She knew they might be able to pull off what they had to do without him if they had to, but his skills and capabilities were such an asset. The risk went up exponentially without him. Then again, if he was against them, she knew there was no chance. He was clearly a highly skilled and lethal man. She hoped and prayed that it didn’t come to that because she didn’t think they would survive if they had to go against him. In fact, she knew they didn’t stand a chance.
Chapter 35
Massacre at 132 Elmhurst Street
The Harley-thing’s zombies shambled between the houses on either side of the target house, moving almost soundlessly through the morning mist. However, the Harley-thing had done it. He had expertly and quietly herded his gang of the undead through the houses behind the target home without triggering the notice of the people in the houses ahead. This is just what Kilgore wanted. There could be no back escape hatch of the people in the houses. No way for Jason Carter to get away.
When the lead zombies broke around the corner of the target house, the man drowsing in the rocking chair took notice, but Kilgore could tell that the man was stunned because he slowly rose from his chair without raising his weapon.
Beltran looked over to Miller and whispered, “That’s our cue.”
The two soldiers checked their aim and let loose with their guns.
Miller and Beltran poured on the fire, bullets streaming from their guns at a dizzying and punishing rate. In the pre-dawn dimness, the few tracer bullets they had spaced in their ammunition flew like hyper-fast fireflies. They shredded their target, the lone sentry on the porch of the middle house. He never knew what hit him as Beltran flicked a line of bullets across in his first volley of shots. The man’s body literally blew apart, spraying blood onto the front of the house.
Light’s popped on in the adjoining houses, and Soto pointed to them to make sure Kilgore knew.
“That was to be expected,” Kilgore said. “It looks like Carter and his friends have new friends. We can’t let those people out of the houses. Get to your position and attack.”
Soto moved off wordlessly, while Kilgore targeted the house on the right with his grenade launcher. He zeroed in on the front door just as it opened, and a man with an assault rifle stepped out on the porch. Kilgore pressed the trigger, and that was it. The front of the house exploded inward in a fireball, launching the man into the street. In flight, he let loose of his rifle, and his body slammed down into the driveway head first, bones breaking. If the explosion hadn’t killed him, the impact surely would have.
Fire erupted out the windows of the house, spraying out like orange and yellow blooms. Even over the roar of the weapons, Kilgore could hear screams from within the house. It brought him no pleasure to kill innocent people. They were just obstacles in his way. Collateral damage. It was acceptable.
A rip of bullets sounded behind the left house. Kilgore spotted a couple zombies being torn about by whoever was firing. It had to be the people in the house, but the zombies were serving their purpose.
Kilgore picked up his walkie-talkie and yelled into the microphone, “Soto, circle around and seal off any escape route. Jason Carter cannot can get away!”
Kilgore set down the grenade launcher and lifted his rifle. He saw someone trying to shimmy out the side window of the burning house. He aimed at the person and fired. Instead of getting away, the potential escapee plopped out of the window and onto the ground, lifeless. It didn’t lay there long before a zombie stumbled and fall on the body, tearing into it. Another one joined the first one, and Kilgore looked away.
There was no telling if the body was Jason Carter or not, but it didn’t matter. He’d kill them all before he let any chance of Carter getting away.
A man jumped out a second story window of the burning home. Kilgore could see that the man must have broken an ankle in the fall because he was limping badly when he stood to escape. That just made the man easier to take down, and Kilgore did it with three easy shots.
A stray zombie moved on the fresh kill, falling onto its knees and tearing into an already shredded arm. Kilgore directed his attention elsewhere, letting the zombie have its pound of flesh and then some.
The front of the middle house exploded after Miller let loose with an RPG. Flames poured out of the windows on the first floor. A person engulfed in fire jumped out of a window, stumbled into the front yard, and fell face first onto the grass. Flames enveloped the body as it flailed in pain, but the flailing stopped, and it didn’t move again. The body continued to burn, and Kilgore swore he smelled the stench of burning flesh from across the street, but he conceded it was probably just in his head.
The front door burst open on the house on the left, and three people came out in an orchestrated set of moves, with the first one moving to the right, the next person stepping to the left, and the last one came out, went to one knee and started firing immediately. Bullets pelted the wall over Kilgore’s head, and he ducked and rolled to the protection of a large oak tree.
This heroic effort didn’t last long as Miller and Beltran opened up on the three attackers. The person on the right took several bullets to its head and neck, rocking back against the front of the house before slumping to the porch.
A bullet caught the attacker in the middle in the shoulder, spinning him around, and knocking him back into the doorway where he lost his weapon. He pushed off the floor and went for his rifle, but a line of bullets from Beltran’s gun cut across the porch like a zipper and started at the man’s leg and ripped up his torso, knocking him down for good.
The third attacked, a woman with a rifle, quickly assessed that a heroic last stand was going to get her killed and started running for the railing at the end of the porch. Bullets zipped into the wall behind her, tracking her movement. She made it to the railing, put a hand down on it, and started to vault it when a bullet caught her in the back, driving her over the railing and into the side yard. She lay there for a moment then started crawling on all fours toward the second house. Too bad she was slow because a zombie caught her leg. It tugged on her leg like a dog, jerking it back and forth. She kicked back with her other leg, but the effort was weak, barely phasing the zombie. It refused to let go and fell on her. Ten seconds later, she started screaming. That didn’t last long.
The people inside
were brave and maybe even a little toughened from their experiences in a zombie-filled world, but nothing prepared them for trained and hardened soldiers. The Harley-thing’s zombies were just the icing on the cake.
The windows broke outward from the third house, and Kilgore saw barrels come out next. Whoever it was blazed away with their weapons. Each muzzle flash from the weapon lit up the pre-dawn haze like muted lightning. There was nothing strategic or accurate about their shots. Kilgore could tell it was sheer panic, and that delighted him. That meant that anyone with any poise was most likely already dead.
Soto’s job was to cover that house, and he went into action, waiting until the people inside stopped firing. He had Miller’s big gun from the helicopter. The .30 Cal. Kilgore had made them extract it from the wrecked chopper and, with the helicopter on its side, it was a bitch of a job, but he was glad they now had it. He had improvised a mount for it, using the sturdy nook of a tree. When he pulled the trigger on the weapon, it sounded like a miniature cannon on the moist stillness of the air.
The houses in this neighborhood had been built in the late 1990’s, and they had gone up fast and cheap. Volume and speed had been the contractor’s mode of operation. They weren’t shoddy by any means, but there weren’t any refinements of construction in the homes and certainly no brick or anything that could stop a .30 caliber bullet.
The people inside felt safe with a wall between them and their attackers. They had a lesson to learn.
Like a hot knife through warm butter. Like the sunshine through the air. Like water over a waterfall. That’s how each bullet passed through the walls of the house. What it did to human flesh and bone was even more devastating. Each bullet pulverized bones and shredded muscles, knocking the people inside across the room as if they were scarecrows. Each impact with their bodies left a bloody mark on the wall.
Soto burned through an entire belt of ammunition, swiveling the gun from left to right and back, ripping the house to pieces. The cheap vinyl siding shredded, fell onto the ground like confetti. When the ammunition belt was near its end, he zipped his aim to the second floor, shattering windows and tearing holes in the wall.
The attack went on for another five minutes. All the soldiers, including Kilgore, fired on the three houses relentlessly. There was no discrimination between the living and the dead. The zombies had served their purpose, acting like a cork in a bottle, blocking any rear escape route. They were expendable now.
It was then that Kilgore realized that he hadn’t seen the Harley-thing for over ten minutes. Racked with ambivalence, he had to admit that the creature creeped him out, but he also knew that it was there for a reason. In that vein, he hoped that it had gotten out of the line of fire.
Flames and thick black smoke started to rise from the house on the right, the wind from the west wafting the smoke in and over the rest of the neighborhood.
Kilgore stopped firing and locked his eyes on the house, waiting for the rats to leave the sinking ship. The cheap construction of these houses would provide no protection. No one would want to be in that house in the next ten minutes because it would be their funeral pyre by then.
The other soldiers, sensing that Kilgore had stopped firing, let up on their pace, too. Miller and Beltran no longer fired on full-automatic but spaced out their shots, shooting at anything they perceived to be movement.
Kilgore lifted his walkie-talkie and said, “Time to move in and mop up.”
He moved out from the cover of the oak tree and strode across the street, swiveling his aim across the houses, ready and waiting for anything. As he made it to the middle of the street, a zombie broke from the body it had been chewing and headed in Kilgore’s direction. He watched it stumble along, blood and flesh hanging from its mouth, and wondered how these things had become their confederates. When the world had turned upside down, these things were the enemy, but the rules seemed to shift like sand in the desert.
There was no Harley-thing to control it at that moment, so Kilgore was no different from its last meal. He was next on the menu.
It got to within ten feet of Kilgore, and he shot it in the head. It collapsed in the street as dead everyone in the houses. At least, nearly everybody.
Kilgore caught movement out the corner of his eye and saw Miller and Beltran moving into the street on his right. Both of them had their weapons up and were ready to shoot anything that moved. Something must have done just that but was out of Kilgore’s sight line, because Miller flicked his rifle in that direction and let off a string of shots. Whatever had been moving must have stopped because Miller stopped firing.
When Kilgore refocused on the house in front of him, he saw something move at the back corner. Two shadows joined together. A man helping another person who was limping badly. It was nearly impossible to tell in the shadows covering them, but Kilgore knew the limping person was a woman. There was something about the way she moved.
No one’s getting away, he thought and brought up his rifle, taking aim on the silhouettes moving toward the back of the house. Another form came into the scene, a shambling shadow, blocking their escape path. One of the two human shadows must have been armed because Kilgore saw the brilliance of two muzzle flashes and heard the report of the shots. The shambling shadow went down and didn’t get back up.
Kilgore lowered his aim, hoping to take out the legs of the two escapees, and fired four quick shots. He wanted to ask some questions if he could. That is if it wasn’t too much of a risk. No use getting shot when victory was at hand. He pulled the trigger on his rifle, and both the shadows flew forward, tumbling across the grass.
Moving forward with an increasing pace, Kilgore rushed past the front porch of the house and started down the corridor between the two houses with his rifle still up.
Smoke drifted around in the air from the house burning just down the street, masking the two people he had just cut down in a thin Gaussian layer. The air was still breathable but wouldn’t be for long. Once the house was fully engulfed in flames, there was a good chance the fire would just hop from house to house. With no one to stop it, Kilgore guessed it could take out the entire neighborhood and maybe the whole development.
Kilgore slowed as he got closer to the downed couple, using a slide-step method, while keeping his aim locked on them. Once he was standing over them, he discovered that his suspicions had been correct -- it was a man and woman. She had dirty blonde hair splattered with blood. A gray knit beanie lay just a few feet away from her head. Two bullet holes dotted her lower back with blood oozing out onto her leather jacket.
“Tsk, tsk,” Kilgore chided himself for his poor aim.
He directed his attention to the man who was on his back, holding a wound on his thigh. He grimaced in pain as blood coursed between his fingers. Kilgore had gotten those shots right.
He saw the woman struggling to move, presumably to the rifle just a couple feet away. She was a fighter, he thought. Her cut-off gloved fingers reached through the grass, trying desperately to get at the rifle that she had lost when she was shot. One of the bullets must have damaged her spine, because her legs weren’t working. No matter how hard she tried to grasp the gun, she couldn’t make much forward progress. With each attempt, she yelped loudly in pain as tears rolled down her cheeks, streaking through the dirt and grime.
Kilgore watched her strain to get her weapon back and admired her grit and determination, but it didn’t matter. She was the enemy, and she had to be dealt with. He raised his rifle and shot her two more times in the back, and she stopped moving altogether. With each shot, the man on the ground jumped.
“Why did you do that?” the man asked.
He moved over to the man, standing next to him, aiming his gun at the man’s chest.
“That looks like a nasty wound,” Kilgore said.
The man grunted in pain and said, “I think it’s nicked an artery. I’m going to bleed out if we can’t stop the bleeding.”
“And how do we do that?” Kilgore aske
d.
“I’m a doctor,” the man said, wincing through his pain. “If you can get me some supplies, I might be able to do something.”
“And why would I do that or anything for you?” Kilgore asked.
The man had no response and clearly was getting the message that his life was probably measured in seconds, either through blood loss or gunshot wound.
“Tell you what,” Kilgore said. “I’ll get you what you need. You just have to answer a few questions.”
“I don’t have time for questions,” the man said. “I need to stop this damn bleeding.”
Kilgore pushed out the rifle and poked the barrel into the man’s wounded leg, and the man howled in pain.
“You have plenty of time,” Kilgore said.
The man gritted his teeth, holding back the next scream.
“Here’s what I need to know,” Kilgore said. “I need to know if you have been with or seen a mute guy. Small and skinny. His name is Jason Carter.”
The man continued to grimace in pain, but for the briefest of moments, his eyes flicked to Kilgore.
“Who the hell are you?” the man asked.
“Who I am doesn’t matter,” Kilgore said as he leaned over the man. “You know something, and you’re going to tell me.”
Wheels turned in the man’s mind. He knew the likelihood of stopping the bleeding was astronomically bad. If he could get some sort of medical supplies, he was the only one who could do anything, but it would be nearly impossible to perform any sort of procedure on himself.
Compounding things was the fact that he could feel himself weakening with each second, dizziness swarming his head. Dark blue sparkles flashed at the edge of his vision. Soon, those sparkles would dim, would be replaced with darkness, and he would go under for good.
He was still in the game, though. He also knew the soldier standing over him could bring on a world of hurt before he died.
The question was what he could do to keep from giving up his friends.