Then several waves of hundreds of zombies poured over the wall.
“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 a single mass, cutting off Danielle and her 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. 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 that had softer landings were still plenty mobile.
She paused to do a quick assessment. 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. What had been a relatively leisurely shoot with about thirty to forty zombies had just gone to three to four hundred, 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 in between gunning down stenches that got too close, she started motioning the shooters back with hand signals. At the far end of their formation, one of the gunners was taken down by a stench that had sprinted right at him, bare feet slapping the pavement of Main Street like two dead fish. A couple of the other shooters ran over and tried to kick and pull the thing off the struggling man, but the zombie 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 because she had to turn her attention to a throng of dusty corpses shuffling toward her. She raised her rifle and drilled each one through the head. When she checked back to the left, she saw the shooter who had been taken down was free, but he was bleeding from a large gash in his shoulder. Danielle realized she was looking at 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. She heard gunfire from that direction, so the men were still alive, but she couldn’t see them from where she stood.
She made her way to the row of HESCOs and grabbed the wire mesh that surrounded one container. As she struggled to clamber up its surface, she realized that her prosthesis was actually doing more harm than good. It was configured for walking, not for climbing. The knee joint wasn’t bending quite far enough, and the socket that covered the stump of her thigh was coming loose, pulling away from the sock. It made her slow to climb, which gave the stenches time to close the gap between them. The rifle was useless, 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. The big .45 slug hit the first ghoul in the face, knocking it back like a bowling pin so that it took out two others.
Danielle put the pistol on top of the HESCO and hauled herself up. Atop the container, she put weight on her prosthesis, snapping the socket back into place over her stump. Bullets whizzed past like angry bees from the secondary wall behind her. Some of the gunners up there were trying to engage the dead on the ground. At first, Danielle thought that was pretty dumb, but then she saw Lennon and his group were pretty much encircled by the dead at the base of the ladder. A few guys had apparently gone up, but they were climbing back down. 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 enemy.
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 had to take care so her bullets wouldn’t travel through a zombie and strike one of Lennon’s men, which meant she fired more slowly than normal. However, she racked up a pretty good number by the time she had exhausted her magazine.
While reloading, she noticed more of the dead had made it 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 around Lennon’s team. As the bodies fell, Lennon pulled something from his vest. He shouted something, but the words never made it to her ears. Then he hurled an object at the zombies.
“Grenade!” she shouted then flattened herself against the top layer of soil in the HESCO. The dead around the container reached toward her, but they weren’t close enough to grab her… yet.
The grenade exploded with a thunderous boom that echoed off the walls. Danielle thought she could hear 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 rose and shouldered her rifle. Swinging its barrel back to Lennon’s team, she saw that the grenade had blown a large hole in the zombies’ formation. Lennon was leading his team through the opening, firing on the move. Danielle added her fire to the mix, dropping stenches as fast as she could. One of them suddenly went down. He was covered instantly by writhing zombies. Danielle found herself once again firing into a mound of bodies, not to kill them, but to spare the human being beneath some final moments of agony.
A fusillade of fire hit the stenches surrounding her position atop the HESCO. Danielle looked down as Lennon’s team rolled up, and the narrow-faced leader gestured the open gate in the second wall with one knife-handed motion.
“Kennedy, move your ass!” Lennon shouted.
Danielle moved along the top of the HESCOs, slipping and sliding in the exposed soil. Her prosthesis made her movements awkward and ungainly, but she 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 it to the gate, she was climbing down the last HESCO. Her prosthesis was still tight against her stump, 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 loped toward the open gate on the other side of the layers of razor-wire fences. She headed straight for a small opening between the emplacements that was just big enough for two people to pass through side by side. More fighters were on the other side, and from behind the razor-wire barriers, they opened up. Bullets zipped past her and thudded into the dead flesh of the monstrosities behind her. The zombies were still coming, still surging forward, shambling after her despite the punishment they were taking. She heard someone scream, the shriek 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 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 through next, then some of the cops slammed the razor-wire gate closed.
A second later, a gaggle of zombies blundered into the razor wire’s embrace, ignoring the slashing metal as they tried to push through it. As the stenches piled into the obstruction, Danielle looked past them and saw an undulating mound of dead thirty feet away. One of Lennon’s troops had been taken down, only seconds from safety.
Beside her, 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 bent over to adjust her prosthesis. It was threatening to come loose from the stub of her leg 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 had to hold up. Otherwise, she’d be meat for the dead.
Not happening, she told herself, and 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 fired into the mass of stenches. The thunder of gunfire was never ending, just as intense as she’d ever heard it in Iraq, only it was arrayed against an enemy that was indefatigable. As if to prove that point, the first layer of razor wire bowed inward, sagging against the mounting weight of the dead. Danielle raised her rifle and started taking them out at ground level, but in a way, that just made it worse. Dead zombies slumped in the wire, and their weight served to make it sag even more.
“Pull back!” Lennon shouted. “This shit wasn’t meant to hold forever. Get behind the wall!”
The defenders behind the row of razor-wire fencing began retreating to the secondary wall. Danielle hung back, covering them, along 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 smiled sardonically and shook his head. “Fall back, Marine.”
###
The battle continued through the night. Breaches appeared in the northern and western walls as well, where the dead mounded over the barriers and tumbled over the perimeter walls. Fighting at night was a difficult proposition, but the darkness gave a small advantage to 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 were well-armed and mostly disciplined in their combat, the vast number of enemy combatants gave the zombies an edge. And since 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 hopeless. They could hold back the dead for a few hours, but as the minutes ticked by, the defenders became more exhausted. Weapons malfunctioned, or those holding them simply became less accurate. Reloading took time, and in some instances, defenders were without ammunition for several minutes. Corbett and his people had underestimated the demand. They had over fifty years of military experience, and all had fought in intense battles, but the dead 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 had at stopping Hurricane Katrina.
Corbett met with Lennon, Victor, and Max Booker in a trailer near the high school. Lennon brought Jock Sinclair with him at Corbett’s request. 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. Outside, gunfire continued to roar, and dire reports issued forth over the walkie-talkies.
“How much of the town have we lost?” Corbett asked.
“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 giving us problems. East is still clear, though it’s heating up. The only places completely good 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. With only Rod Cranston—the airport manager—and some staffers who had remained on-site, there wasn’t enough meat to draw the dead.
“Fatalities?” Corbett asked.
“Seventeen so far,” Victor said. “With another fifty-three wounded. Several of those are infected and will turn when they die.”
“Some already have,” Lennon said.
Corbett looked across the dinette table at him. “And?”
“And they were killed,” Lennon said flatly.
Corbett started to ask who had been killed, then 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 continued, “With the surge from the west, we’re in danger of the town getting cut in half. 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 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 are people in the area. And we can’t kill enough of them.”
“The security situation is deteriorating pretty quickly,” Lennon added. “We might need to start looking at other options.”
Sinclair spoke 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 asked Lennon, “You have the A team ready?”
“They are.”
Corbett looked at Victor. “Any idea where Norton is?”
Victor raised one eyebrow. “I believe he’s at his house, where you told him to stay, though he won’t be there 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 asked Lennon.
“When?”
“Soon, Walt. Soon.”
“I’ll see to it.”
###
Norton arrived in his Jeep fifteen minutes later, along with his parents. Corbett grinned when he saw Beatrice Norton step out of the vehicle. She wore a peach-colored pantsuit and matching wide-brim hat. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses so gigantic they wouldn’t have been considered fashionable even back in the 1970s. Arthur Norton had on jeans, a sweater over a collared shirt, and a bulky barn jacket. He also carried a black LWRC rifle, and when his coat parted, 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 held a large tan purse. Corbett shook his head at the duality of the picture.
Gary Norton climbed out from behind the wheel. Toting the Heckler & Koch AR that he apparently favored over the LWRC, he 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 waved at him. Norton slung his rifle and strode over, his parents trailing along behind them. Beatrice was obviously frightened by the incessant gunfire, but Arthur
kept his eyes out, scanning the area.
“Yassah, boss,” Norton said, doing his Winchester impression from the old Jack Benny show.
“We should have a quick chat,” Corbett said. “You have some time?”
“Gee, I don’t know. I was hoping to be able to get in a quick nine holes of golf today then maybe hit a spa for a massage. What’s up?”
Corbett led him out of earshot of his parents. “Your boat,” he said in a low voice when they were a few feet away. “It’s in good shape, right? Eighty-five-foot Pacific Mariner?”
Norton pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead and looked at Corbett with narrowed eyes. “It was when I left it, yeah. I always fill the tanks after every trip, and I hadn’t received any alerts that it was sinking before cell service went out. Odd questions to be asking, given that we’re out in the middle of the desert and the boat’s in Ventura County.”
“How long would it take you to get it out of the marina?”
“Usually, thirty to forty minutes. She’s been idle for a while, so I’d need to do all sorts of checks. She’s end-tied because of her length, so depending on the tide, getting out into the channel isn’t that tough. But she’s not the kind of boat one guy can handle.”
“You don’t have to worry about manpower,” Corbett said. “How many people can she take on?”
“Legally? Eighteen.”
“Norton, I don’t expect the Coast Guard to be checking your load. How many?”
“Thirty, maybe forty. Won’t be comfortable, and I wouldn’t want to be hauling that many souls through heavy seas, but it’s an expedition yacht. It can take some nasty stuff.” Norton glanced back at his parents. “So I guess we’re already at that point where contingency plans are about to be considered more seriously, huh?”
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