###
On a chilly November night, Victor Kuruk made his way from the Single Tree police station to the southernmost wall. He made spot checks every night, ensuring that the walls were manned, that the sentries had what they needed, and that all was well. For most of the past week, he’d also driven down the narrow transit corridor that connected the town to the airport and checked the defenses there. The airfield was a big place, and a break-in would be tough to detect without constant surveillance. While Corbett had brought at least two of everything, electronic surveillance devices had been hard to come by, at least in sufficient number to observe every inch of wall where a zombie horde might somehow gain entry. They had men patrolling those sections. So there was no reason for Victor to do his nightly checks, but he found he slept better when he did.
As he parked his Dodge truck at the foot of the wall and stepped out, he pulled his leather jacket tight and zipped it up. The air was cold and sharp, hinting strongly that winter was coming. Corbett’s people had brought additional snowplows. The man had thought of virtually everything, and Victor found that impressive. Barry had done a much better job than Victor would have, even if Victor had the man’s unlimited budget.
The bitter bite of lowered temperatures invigorated him, making him feel ten years younger, while the hot desert summers lately seemed to sap his strength. He sighed. His had not been a wasteful life—at least, not once he’d aged past his drunken, combative formative years—and on the whole, he had done some things that had been eminently worthy. If death were to strike, Victor hoped it would come on a night like this, when he felt more like a warrior than some Native American elder who wasn’t that far away from the great retirement home in the sky.
The southern wall, which overlooked the highway approach, was as quiet as it had ever been. As he scaled the ladder that led to the top of it, he heard a rumbling in the distance. He frowned. Thunder? It happened sometimes, even in the higher elevations, but not enough to be considered more than a rarity. And almost never at night. He could recall that happening only once, when El Niño visited in the late 1990s.
The four men on the upper deck stirred uneasily as he clambered onto the platform. They were all facing the desolate roadway that extended away from the town. The thunder rolled again, distant and tinny.
Victor narrowed his eyes, listening. Not thunder. Gunfire.
“It’s from Ridgecrest,” one of the men said.
“No way, Jimmy,” another said. “Too damn far. Even if they were shooting artillery pieces, we wouldn’t be able to hear them.”
“Well, it’s military, whatever it is,” Jimmy responded.
“What makes you say that?” Victor asked.
“It’s definitely a military unit down there,” Jimmy answered. “I can hear the Mark Nineteens. They’re in a fight.”
Victor grunted. He had no doubt the man was right. The night was dark and still, and mountainous terrain served to amplify the sounds of even distant combat. It was just a low murmur, but Victor had no trouble discerning it for what it was: a pitched battle.
While they had no contact with Ridgecrest, Victor didn’t doubt the encampment was sizeable. Given that the Navy had a large presence in the community thanks to their weapons testing site, he imagined it was as likely to hold out against the zombie hordes as Single Tree was, perhaps even more so, depending on what kind of manpower and ordnance they had at their disposal. But if a military unit had been caught outside its walls, then those men would have one hell of a fight on their hands.
Or was Ridgecrest already overrun, and the unit fighting out there was making a run toward us? The possibility of that set Victor’s nerves on edge.
Zombies had been walking up on the town as well. Small groups, never more than ten or so, would entangle themselves in the wire. They would be shot, and the corpses were dropped into pits to be burned. It made sense that the hordes would have found Ridgecrest and perhaps overran it.
Looks like we’ll be winning the jackpot soon enough. Victor wondered how big a zombie horde would have to be to have overwhelmed Ridgecrest, which had actual military units.
“Gentlemen, if a sizeable force of zombies hits us, do you know what to do?” Victor asked the men.
“We call Lennon, and he calls you,” one responded.
Victor nodded. “Stay sharp,” he said before turning back to the ladder.
###
Norton lay in his bed, staring at the dark ceiling. Danielle was stretched out beside him, breathing deeply beneath the comforter, her breath warm against his arm. He heard the distant rumbling in the distance, and he didn’t quite know what it was. Thunder? Construction equipment moving in the night? The first was extremely unlikely, though the latter was decidedly less so. But it didn’t sound like either, and that worried him.
He slowly extricated himself from the bed and pulled on his jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. He tucked the Shield inside his waistband and padded out of the bedroom. He walked to the sliding glass door in the kitchen and, after cautiously peering outside for a moment, pulled open the door and stepped out into the backyard. The lights were off at his parents’ house.
Norton stood in the chilly night air and listened, his right hand on the butt of the pistol beneath his shirt. The noise was a bit louder out in the yard but still very distant. It was irregular, like the random thumping of a giant’s heart just before a fatal coronary. He didn’t know what to make of it, but he was sure it wasn’t coming from inside the town. In fact, had he been asleep when it had started, he wouldn’t even have noticed it.
“It’s gunfire, babe,” Danielle said from behind him. “Someone’s getting their war on.”
Norton spun around, startled. She stood in the kitchen, still naked, her hair messy. She wasn’t wearing her prosthesis, which meant she’d hopped from the bed on one leg and followed him through the house. Balancing on her remaining limb, she had her hands on either side of the open door.
In the darkness, he could barely make out her features, which were illuminated by the sparse moonlight. “You’re going to catch a cold running around naked like that,” Norton said.
“I don’t run. I pogo.” She pointed at his hand resting on the Shield’s butt. “That a gun in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?”
Norton grunted. “Both, in this case. Go back to bed.”
“Somebody’s in some deep trouble out there somewhere. Big guns. Definitely military. Maybe China Lake, though that’s a bit far away. Must be a fair-sized military unit, though. I’m not hearing small-arms fire. More like arty.”
“Arty?”
“Artillery, babe. Old zed is walking up on a fixed base somewhere, and they’re getting shelled for their trouble.”
“How do you know that?”
She reached down and patted her stump. “Iraq. Heard it and seen it before.”
“So with artillery, they’ll make it, right?”
Danielle cocked her head. “Yeah, I don’t think so. That’s full immediate suppression fire. Every piece of hardware is firing whatever’s loaded. If they’re going all out, you can bet they’re hammering away at a massive enemy formation. No one does that for the hell of it. What we’re listening to is someone’s last ditch effort at staying alive, babe.”
The thought unnerved Norton. He deflected the emotion by saying, “Why are you calling me babe all the time now? I’m like a million years older than you are.”
“I could call you daddy. Would you like that?”
Norton laughed in spite of himself. “Go back to bed, girl.”
“Come with me. If you have enough left in you, we can make some boom-boom of our own.”
“Is that all you want me for?”
Danielle paused for a second then shrugged. “For now.” She turned and hopped back into the dark house.
###
Hailey was on the south wall again. Though the day was warm and bright, the weather was definitely turning cooler. Over the next few weeks, winter
would make its presence known.
A small group, three men and one woman, advanced toward the outer wire, all carrying weapons and packs. They were filthy and pale, and as they wended their way through the abandoned cars on the highway, Hailey could see they were plenty desperate.
“Let us in!” one of the men called out when they stopped at the wire.
Hailey stood up so they could see him. “Not going to do that. You guys can walk around, keep heading north.”
“They’re right behind us!” the man said. “Please, let us in!”
Hailey peered down at them. “Who is right behind you?”
“Who do you fucking think?” the woman screamed. “The zombies! Thousands of them!”
One of the other guards brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes and started scanning the area. Another reported what they’d just heard to the men on the tall wall behind them.
“How far back?” Hailey asked.
“A couple of miles, maybe not even that,” the woman replied. “Please, just let us in!”
Hailey looked down at the man on the radio. He was a young Native American, one of Victor’s guys. “What’s the word?”
“The word is they walk around,” the radioman said. He shook his head. “Sucks.”
“Ask if they can pass through and we let them out of the north side,” Hailey said.
The younger man narrowed his eyes. “You know the answer to that already.”
“Come on. Ask anyway. All right?”
The radioman sighed and brought the walkie-talkie to his mouth.
Hailey turned back to the four people standing outside the wire. “We’re asking,” he called out. “Sit tight for a minute while the bosses figure it out. Where you from?”
“Ridgecrest,” the first man said. “We got reinforcements. Marines. Held out for four days against a horde. We think they came from Vegas. Then a bigger one rolled up from LA. The Marines even had air support, and they weren’t able to hold them back.”
“How long you been on the road?”
“Two days. Our ride shit the bed about twenty miles from here. We stopped for the night, then this morning, we saw a few thousand stenches walking up on us.”
“They see you?”
“I doubt it. We move a bit faster than most of them. They don’t really go into full-on charge mode until they see meat, but then, some of them can run like Usain Bolt.”
Hailey grunted and looked down at the radioman. “Well?”
“You know the answer. They go around, they go back, or they sprout wings and fly away. Doesn’t matter. They’re not getting in.”
Hailey turned and looked back at the tall wall. The men there stared back at him, but he didn’t see anyone he recognized as an authority figure. He shifted his gaze back to the radioman. “Come on,” he said.
The radioman shrugged. “You want to mess with Corbett’s troops? Like that guy Lennon? If you do, you got brass ones, bro.”
Hailey sighed and turned back to the little group. “Guys, you have to go around. We can’t let you in. Sorry.”
Their faces fell, but the woman asked, “Got any water you can spare? Ammunition, food?”
“Walk around. Check in with the north side detail. They might have something for you there by the time you get to them.” Hailey motioned toward the right. “Head west and walk along the wire. You’ll be under observation the entire time, so don’t get any ideas.”
The woman glared at him. “You guys think you’re prepared? You guys think you’re ready for what’s coming? Here’s a tip: you’re not.”
Hailey nodded. “Thanks for the information.” He pointed. “You need to go that way.”
###
Four hours later, the first wave of zombies arrived.
The staff manning the southern guard towers saw them first, when the horde was still almost a mile out. The people on the short walls were pulled back inside the town before they could be seen, and the sentries on the tall walls were told to stay hidden. Only the guards in the towers remained, concealed behind the deeply tinted glass in each tower. The shift change would happen under the cover of darkness, when the desert night was as deep and dark as outer space.
The plan had been established early. While small groups of zombies were killed and burned, a large force would be allowed to approach without any action being taken. So the zombies walked right into the first layer of defenses. The razor wire failed to deter them, but it did slow them down until the sheer force generated by the press of bodies overwhelmed the fences. Zombies trampled each other as they surged into the trenches on the other side of the wire, falling into them and piling onto each other. Within one hour, the trenches were full of undulating bodies that roiled and squirmed in the warm daylight. More zombies pressed forward, walking right over the grotesque carpet of writhing bodies. They were initially stymied by the line of HESCO barriers. Though a few managed to climb over the structures, the majority were either too uncoordinated or too stupid to even try. They surged against the barriers but made little headway, even with the mass of bodies behind them pushing them forward. The HESCOs were too heavy to move, so the zombies just mounded up behind them, thrashing and moaning.
The mounds grew larger and larger, until they finally spilled over the barriers, tumbling over them like fetid avalanches of rotting flesh. Awaiting them were more stretches of razor wire and tanglefoot wire, which served to trap and immobilize the front of the wave. But the numbers of stenches coming over the HESCOs overran those defenses, and soon, zombies were trying to scale the hard-packed berm that led to the tall steel walls surrounding the town.
In less than three hours, the horde had defeated most of Single Tree’s elaborate fortifications. All that stood between them and their meat buffet was the final high steel wall.
###
“What worries me most is having a break-in during the night,” Victor said. “Even with night vision, we won’t be able to take control of the situation very effectively.”
Corbett nodded and looked around the room. All the principals were there, sitting around his big dining room table: Walt Lennon, Gary Norton, Victor, Max Booker, and Gemma Washington. The only absentee was Hector Aguilar, which was fine since no one really wanted to see him anyway. Once the walls had gone up, the irascible pharmacist had holed up in his two-story house, probably unlikely to emerge again until Hillary Clinton came calling to tell him the emergency was over.
But at least we have our emergency backup agitator, he thought, looking across the room at Jock Sinclair, who was dutifully taping the proceedings. The English broadcaster wore a pinched expression as he fiddled with the camera.
“Nighttime would be pretty tough,” Lennon said. “But it’s still doable. As long as we keep them bottled up in the kill zones, we’ll be good to go.”
“But they’re not finished,” Victor pointed out. “Some of them are just chain-link fences.”
“They don’t all have to be steel walls, Victor,” Corbett said. “I’d hoped they would be, but we just didn’t have the time to get them all erected. And now that the horde—or at least, one of the hordes—is here, we can’t exactly fire up the tractors and get them pulled into place.”
“You’re telling me that chain-link fences will hold them back, Barry?”
Corbett grunted. “I’m telling you that they’ll channelize the dead into our kill zones, no matter what they’re made of. We keep the zombies moving, and they’ll go where we need them to go. We might have a few bolters here and there, but it’s a lot easier to take care of them individually than as a single monolithic threat.”
“‘Monolithic threat’?” Max Booker snorted. “Taking a page or two from Reagan’s playbook, are you?”
“Hey, if it fits, Max.”
Booker shifted in his chair. “How many of them are there, anyway?”
Lennon consulted his notes. “We’ve counted up to six thousand, four hundred seventy-three. But that’s only those that are where we can easily s
ee them. Our drones don’t have a large range. It might be fifty thousand or more. We’ll never be able to get an accurate count, so I think we can just classify their numbers as a shit-ton and call it a day.”
“So what happens if this shit-ton of zombies penetrates the wall in different places at the same time?” Booker asked.
“We’ll use the partitions that were put up to segregate incursions and take them down one at a time,” Corbett said. “It’s all in the plan.”
“You ever try to fight fifty thousand enemy at once, Corbett?” Booker asked.
“Nope.”
“So how can you be confident it will work?”
Corbett snorted. “Who said I was confident? I just said that’s what we’ll do.”
Booker stared at him. “To tell you the truth, I was expecting to hear something else. You’re the one who sold this plan, Corbett. You mean to tell us now you don’t think it’ll work?”
Corbett looked at the mayor evenly. “I got us this far, Max. If we’d listened to you or your pal Aguilar, we’d all be huddled in our houses as the damn things flooded the entire town. You know how many we’ve killed already? Over two hundred. How many people have we lost? None. If Single Tree had been left in your capable hands, I think those numbers would probably be inverted.”
“That doesn’t change anything,” Booker snapped.
“Guys, why don’t we shut the fuck up about who’s got the biggest dick in this game,” Norton said. “But just to help things along in that context, we can rule out Lennon. I understand he has no penis because it was blown off in Afghanistan.”
Lennon blinked. “I’m sorry, Mr. Norton, but you’re very ill-informed. That happened in Grenada.”
Norton laughed. “Well, okay then.” He sobered quickly. “Anyway. We are where we are, which is surrounded by a growing horde of zombies, and they don’t smell very nice. Maybe they get in, and maybe they don’t. If they don’t, no problem. If they do, different story. So we have all these fences and walls erected to move them into certain spots where we can kill them. I’m cool with that. But what if we get hit with, say, a hundred thousand of them? That’s possible, right?”
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