by Mark Rivett
Just then, the sound of heavy machine gun fire from the Humvees added itself to the moans, snarls, cries, and screams. The force shook the entire building, and the noise was deafening.
“I need you to hold on to this rope very tightly, okay?” Kelly addressed a teary- eyed child, who nodded in understanding. Nearly paralyzed by fear, the young boy gripped the bed sheet. Kelly hoisted him out the window and began to lower him. “When you get to the ground, run! Run to the soldiers in the trucks, okay! Don’t stop for anything! Just run!”
The five-vehicle convoy was pouring everything it had into the first floor. Tracers zipped past the escaping civilians and into the monsters that pursued them. Beyond the fenced in area, a sea of shambling dead—drawn by the commotion—was approaching. Some followed their brethren into the DDC via the hole in the music store, while others gathered at the worn and tortured fence. Minute by minute, their numbers were growing.
Miguel braced his back against the splintering door. He glanced over his shoulder, and his eyes caught the motion of the office drywall giving way to the hammering fists of the voracious dead. He slowly slid one hand down to his sidearm and shouted: “We’re losing it!”
Carl grunted and tried to keep himself pressed against the door while simultaneously reloading his rifle. “We aren’t gonna hold much longer!”
Kelly glanced up from lowering children to the ground and looked at the survivors. Some comforted the children, while others struggled against the door with the soldiers. “Everyone! You gotta climb down with a kid on your back or jump! Go! Go now!”
Private Stenson watched a mother descend to the lot with a child on her back. Suddenly, two clumsy zombies staggered from the front doors of the DDC and snarled. The woman took one look and hit the ground running, keeping the child on her back. Stenson quickly dispatched the pursuing ghouls. More and more zombies were wandering into the parking lot from the DDC. Most were mowed down by heavy machine gun fire from the convoy, but a few survived. Walking or crawling, many pulverized and bullet-ridden bodies continued their pursuit of the living. So long as their brains were intact, they would not relent.
A fetid hand burst through the drywall next to the door, reached up, and gripped Miguel by the arm. Miguel screamed and fought against its grip. Pam pushed herself up from holding the door, pinned the arm against the wall with her boot, and fired her rifle into the elbow until the limb was severed and useless.
“We got trouble.” A voice came over the communications system. Pam looked out into the lot, and she noted that one of the Humvees was no longer firing into the ground floor. Instead, it unleashed devastation on the huge mob of dead gathered at the perimeter fence and threatening to bring it down. The fence already shook violently as sheer body weight began to accumulate against it. The crews on the ground were picking off as many as they could… but the hordes were growing. Escape routes were rapidly disappearing behind walls of mindless flesh-eaters. If the fence were to fail, the convoy, the DDC, and everyone inside would vanish in a violent frenzy of bloody death.
Miguel struggled to stand while keeping his weight against the door. He drew his pistol, and he fired into undead limbs that broke through the drywall. He was hoping to shatter bone and sever tendons. “They’re breaking through!”
Kelly fought against the terror screaming at her to run, and she helped a woman out the window. Almost all the children were on the ground now and a handful of civilian adults remained.
A hissing corpse pushed through a weak spot in the wall. It slithered onto the pile of struggling soldiers, gripped someone by the arm, and bit down. A spray of blood erupted from the screaming man. Another soldier lunged to help his comrade. In one fleeting instant, chaos exploded.
The door splintered open, and soldiers fell to the ground. Howling undead clawed after anyone within reach, trampling and tripping over bodies in an all-consuming madness. An endless wall of death vomited into the office, and everyone—soldier and civilian—was in the fight of their life. Snarling hungry ghouls were met with combat boots, knives, and fists.
“JUMP!” Pam screamed at the remaining civilians. She pried a ghoul off Carl, threw it out the window, and pulled him out of the dog pile. Carl got to his feet, and joined Pam in helping whomever they could.
“GO! GO! GO!” Miguel yelled. He thrust his combat knife through the jaw and into the skull of a zombie before rolling out of the melee. As the room filled with ravenous dead, anyone who was not trapped swallowed their fear and leapt from the second story window to the blacktop below.
Private Stenson turned from covering the civilians on the ground, and plunged his bayonet into the head of a ghoul that was feasting upon a civilian woman. He turned to Kelly Damico and nodded toward the Humvees. “Go” he urged as he drove the butt of his rifle into the skull of a zombie crawling towards her.
Kelly nodded, accepting the fact that there was nothing more she could do here. She climbed out the window, lowered herself to the ground, and dashed toward an open Humvee door.
Miguel joined Pam and Carl in trying to pull civilians and fellow soldiers from the fray. “It’s time to go!” he yelled, but the notion seemed as futile as it was obvious. Those that could escape were already hurling themselves toward the vehicles. Those who could not, lay dead and dying.
Carl seemed oblivious to Miguel. “Go! Get up! Get to the convoy!” he screamed at a soldier lying on the ground. The dead soldier stared up at Carl with lifeless eyes; its torso a mangled wet mess from the chest down. “Go! Jump! Run!” Carl fired into a ghoul feasting on another soldier pinned in a corner. The man was already dead, and the first twitches of reanimation were overtaking him.
Miguel and Pam grabbed Carl by the arm and pulled him back. “Sergeant Carl Harvey! We have to go now!” Pam shouted.
Carl staggered backward in their grip. His legs looked wobbly and for a second, Pam thought Carl was going to pass out. There was something strange in Carl. He was exhausted from the struggle, but more than that, he was losing his resolve. Not his resolve to fight the undead, but his resolve to retreat in the face of insurmountable odds, and count himself among those that could escape.
“They’re dead!” Pam screamed. “We need you! Come on! We have to jump!”
Carl paused, considering his options.
“Now!” Miguel bellowed.
“Okay… okay…” Carl nodded reluctantly.
Pam, Miguel, and Carl, turned to face the mayhem outside and took a deep breath as they summoned the courage to drop to the parking lot. With outstretched claws at their backs, the three soldiers hurled themselves to the ground.
Pam landed hard with the sound of cracking bone. Her mind raced in terror as she waited for the pain to hit her – what had snapped? Where was she hurt? Could she still run?
“FUCK!” Miguel screamed as he rolled onto his back gripping his lower leg. His face grimaced in a mask of agony.
Pam and Carl looked at each other with the realization that the sound they heard hadn’t come from either of them. As undead began to rain down from the second story window, Carl and Pam hoisted Miguel to his feet between them. Each held a pistol in their free hand, and they fired while back-pedaling with their comrade in tow.
Chapter 24
“Shit!” Carl lost his grip on Miguel’s collar and fell backward.
Ghouls poured from the shattered window onto the pavement below. In their mindless pursuit of the living, they followed their prey to the ground – their clumsy bodies hitting the blacktop awkwardly. They fell to the earth with sickening splats or crunches, ignored their injuries, and crawled toward their nearest victim. The zombies were relentless despite floppy broken limbs and twisted torsos. Soldiers, civilians, and dead tumbled together in a pile of chaos consisting of guns, knives, teeth, and claws.
Pam—fueled by adrenaline—continued pulling Miguel with one arm, while firing her sidearm wildly with the other. Miguel kicked a pursuing ghoul away with his good leg. He reloaded his rifle and sighting an appr
oaching zombie, grit his teeth through the pain and fired. The back of the monster’s head erupted in a gout of black gore, and it tumbled to its knees.
“HELP ME! PLEASE! PLEAAAAAASE!” A civilian lay on the ground screaming. Pinned beneath a rotting and writhing corpse, she was unable to free herself before two—then three—then five—ghouls joined in tearing bloody chunks from her body.
A soldier who had just jumped to the ground barely regained his footing before two ghouls tumbled on top of him, knocking him back down. He twisted around and attempted to scramble away, but a rotten hand caught his leg.
Carl rolled to his feet and gripped his fellow soldier by the shoulder, pulling with all his might. “I’ve got you!”
The soldier screamed in agony as the zombie pulled itself up his leg to sink its teeth into his thigh. He screamed in a mix of rage and pain, fumbled for his sidearm, and emptied his entire clip into the thrashing mass of undead. He popped in a new clip and placed the barrel in his mouth.
“No!” Carl ordered.
It was too late. With a pull of the trigger, the soldier collapsed. Carl let the man slip from his grip, and he backed away. A handful of undead began chewing on the man’s legs.
“God dammit!” Carl turned toward his convoy to come face to face with a half-dozen snarling undead.
“Carl!” Pam screamed as she continued pulling Miguel along the ground.
Miguel and Pam unloaded their weapons at the growing swarm that surrounded Carl. Heads exploded and bodies thudded to the ground, but there were too many.
As zombies were closing in all around him, Carl held his rifle like a club. He was trapped, and taking some monsters with him before he went down was all he could ask for. “Come on!” he taunted. “Come get me!”
The sound of a dozen consecutive pops from above coincided with each of Carl’s attackers falling to their knees before collapsing face-first onto the pavement. Carl looked up in confusion, and his eyes found a young soldier who stood perched in the corner of the second story office window. Most of the undead that surrounded the soldier were preoccupied with consuming fresh victims. The rest had their attention focused on the escaping soldiers and civilians.
“Stenson!” Kelly Damico screamed from the convoy.
“Get her out of here!” Stenson shouted at Carl. He stood, slammed the butt of his gun into the face of a walking corpse, and changed the magazine of his rifle. Some of the nearby ghouls began to turn their attention towards the Private.
“Stenson! Come on!” Kelly Screamed. A sergeant yanked her inside his vehicle and slammed the door. Two walking corpses reached for the space she had just occupied, but they only stumbled into the car window to leer at her menacingly.
Carl jogged over to Miguel and Pam, gripped Miguel under his arm, and hauled him to his feet. “We need to go!”
Pam holstered her sidearm and wrapped Miguel’s other arm over her shoulder. She shouted into the communications network. “We need a driver in every car!”
The soldiers had retreated to their vehicles. Four mounted guns were now splitting fire between the zombies accumulating on the fence, and the zombies pouring out of the DDC. The mass of bodies pressing against the fence was immense, and over a thousand hissing faces howled at the convoy as portions of the fence began to collapse. The vanguard of undead scrambled over the battered obstacle toward the vehicles.
“It’s giving way!” Someone screamed. The chain links stretched like a fish net, and the struts shrieked as they were pressed to the breaking point.
A civilian woman helped Miguel into the lead Humvee, and Pam dove inside behind him. Carl ran to the driver’s side, opened the door, and was about to get in when he stopped. He glanced around, oblivious to the impending danger, as if he was searching for something.
“Let’s go!” Pam screamed through the communications network.
A series of gunshots rang out from within the vehicle, and Carl turned to see Miguel pointing his rifle out the driver’s door. Carl turned back around in a daze to see three corpses crumpled on the ground behind him.
“Wake up, Carl!” Miguel shot his commanding officer an angry look. He never had to raise his voice at Carl. Carl was the type of leader he admired, the type of leader whose focus and caution had saved his life more times than he could count. Something had changed though. Carl seemed distant, or a step or two behind real time. “Carl! Get in!”
Tortured metal screamed over the dissonance of rampaging undead, and a huge section of the fence tumbled over. It was followed in quick succession by another and another. An ocean of undead poured toward the convoy. Carl took one last look at the second story office window where several of his men lay dead. The young soldier, Private Stenson, who had remained behind to cover their escape was nowhere to be seen. Carl took a deep breath, nodded silently, stepped inside the vehicle, and closed the door.
“Let me in! Please! Let me in!” A woman cradled her bleeding arm that had been mauled by several bite marks. She banged on the passenger side window. Carl locked the doors and shifted the vehicle into reverse. The woman stumbled forward, tears streaming down her face.
“Help her!” a child in the back yelled.
Carl ignored the plea, revved the engine, and brought the convoy to face the mass of approaching dead. The bitten woman was engulfed by the lead pack of ghouls. They then slammed against the Humvee windows and leered at the living within. They pounded on the armored trucks with angry fists. Civilians screamed, and machine-gunners closed the top hatches to make the vehicles impregnable. Carl sighed as he spoke, “I’m… I’m pushing through! If I get stuck, someone pushes from behind…”
“NO!” Pam’s face took on a look of terror. She pointed to a narrow alley behind them that was between the DDC and the adjacent building. “Go that way!” The memory of their last desperate push through a swarm of undead was all-too fresh in her memory. If a vehicle broke down this time, there was no help – no air support, no recovery team, no reinforcements. They would be on their own… and that would be a death sentence.
“Okay, disregard that last order. Follow me!” Carl floored the gas, and the vehicle zoomed forward. It smashed into packs of ghouls as it went. He had full faith in Pam, and he also had no wish to relive the bloody mayhem of the previous night. It had cost too many lives. He jerked the wheel sharply to make a U-turn, and plowed up and over a sand bag fortification. The tires squealed, and the Humvee plowed through more undead. He led the convoy back around to face the alley.
He stopped the truck for a moment. “It’s gonna be a tight fit.” Carl said to the other drivers.
“Buckle up!” Pam added.
The Humvee roared forward. With two simultaneous bangs and a shower of sparks, the right and left mirrors were shaved off. Garbage cans and lingering undead alike were crushed beneath the armored vehicle’s bulk as it built speed.
“Where does this go?” Carl asked, noting that the chain link fence at the end of the alley was looming larger and larger as he approached.
Pam didn’t answer, but she bit her bottom lip.
“Specialist?” Carl asked with a growl.
As the vehicle reached the end of the alley, Carl got his answer. The Humvee crashed through a rusted metal fence and over a ledge that overlooked a small city park. The engine howled, and the vehicle hurtled through the air. Civilians screamed in terror as they felt themselves in free-fall.
The drop was nearly two stories, and the landing was hard. The three-ton vehicle loaded with passengers slammed into the ground with a bang before skidding forward and taking out a child’s swing set. Miguel groaned in pain as he held his leg, and Carl glanced in his center mirror.
“Keep moving when you hit the ground. We don’t want to land on top of each other,” Carl said through the communications network. He continued to press on the gas, and he plowed forward through the playground.
“Hit the ground?” a questioning voice came back over the network.
Four more Humvees, one a
fter another, shot from the ledge into the park below. They drove forward before sliding to a halt. Dust settled, and the crews sat silently for a moment, collecting their wits. Their endurance was taxed, and their adrenaline was wearing thin.
The cacophony of the undead hordes atop the hill echoed through the San Diego streets. The handful of undead that had pursued them through the alley slowly trickled over the edge and tumbled to the ground.
Pam opened her laptop and began typing. She pretended to be oblivious to the stare of disbelief that Carl and Miguel had fixed on her.
“Unprofessional, Specialist Grace. Very unprofessional.” Carl spoke over the communications network to let everyone else in the convoy know that it was not his idea to take the escape route through the alley.
“San Onofre is… um…that way.” Pam awkwardly pointed behind her and up a side road that sat perpendicular to the alley that had just ejected the military vehicles.
“Hey, Pam, can we get a warning next time you decide to take the convoy base jumping?” Someone from another vehicle joked over the network.
“Seriously…” Carl shook his head and sighed as he pulled the convoy onto the road and began driving in the direction Pam had indicated.
“At least we didn’t have to drive through that mess of WDs,” Pam shrugged.
Chapter 25
Dr. Henry Damico set his small suitcase at his feet and sighed. He was not a materialistic person, but in packing for his trip, he realized that all the clothes he owned—indeed all his worldly possessions—were now stuffed neatly into what amounted to a carry-on bag. Had he considered he would never see his home again, he would have packed for something more than a weekend trip. It seemed absurd to yearn for the small luxury of being able to choose from more than three outfits. Already the threads were starting to fray, and the knees of his pants and elbows of his shirt were almost worn through.