by S. P. Durnin
Henry and the blonde sergeant finally closed the rear hatch, and the four survivors clambered into the vehicle. They all felt a lot better once they sat within its armored cab.
While the average, military model Humvee was already fairly secure, this one was a step up. Its bulletproof windows had been reinforced further with a cross-hatch of one inch thick, steel bars, making entry impossible, even with all the windows down. Rae had actually welded them to the door frame, so it would take the force of an eighteen-wheeler—or a bulldozer—to pull the bars free. The fixer evidently had a lot of time on her hands during her posting at her junkyard cache, so she’d even gone a few steps further. George’s well-endowed email buddy had constructed a crash bumper straight out of The Road Warrior, then bolted the heavy thing over the hummer’s grill and front end. By doing so, Rae had turned the olive green vehicle into a zombie-pulping, battering ram, nearly capable of smashing its way through a brick wall. It had come in handy numerous times over the last two months. It rocked at pushing aside wreckage on the roads, and even at sending the odd creature to the big, fiery flesh-feast in hell. While neither Rae nor Elle would admit to it, someone had painted an enormous, yellow smiley-face—complete with a pair of fangs that would do a troll proud—on the bumpers face. So that was what their group had dubbed Jake’s Humvee. The Troll.
Prior to the outbreak, the writer had driven an army Jeep he’d purchased online—assembly required—in a big, ol’ honkin’ box which he’d named “Beast.” That being the case, when Foster’s niece had suggested “Troll” Jake had rolled his eyes, but hadn’t really come up with a good argument against it. The vehicle was tough, green, and ugly, so the Troll it was.
Kat activated the Hummer’s glow-plug, waited for it to charge and started her up. The engine came to life with the roar of a hungry predator, ready and willing to do battle against the mindless hordes walking the abandoned wastelands most of the United States had become.
“Ready to see what’s shakin’?” Against her better judgment, Kat felt a sudden urge to go find out what had stirred up the local infected.
Leo’s eyebrows went up. “What? We’re gonna go looking for them? Is that a good idea?”
“I’m up for a little action.” Elle wore a blood-thirsty smile.
“You always are,” Leo said wryly.
Elle blew him a kiss. “And you love it.”
“True,” he conceded.
Kat looked at Henry from the corner of her eye. “Big guy?”
Sampson gave a theatrical shrug. “Hey, you’re the boss. Just so you know. If I get bitten? I’m gonna come back and eat you first.”
The pretty Asian put the Troll in gear and made a U-turn onto 15th Street. “I would say don’t make promises you can’t keep, but I don’t think the infected care about someone’s lifestyle.”
“I think they’d be considered Omni-sexuals. They’ll eat anybody,” he replied.
“Well then. Time to meet the neighbors.” Elle grinned, checked her rifle again and set it to fire three round bursts. “Oh, darn. I forgot to make a casserole. I remembered to bring the party favors though.”
CHAPTER TWO
Mel ran for her life.
She’d known it was a stupid idea to go out in the daylight but had really wanted to be outside in the sunshine, if only for a little while. She missed a lot of things about normal, everyday life; her mom and dad, her friends, even her sometimes annoying older brother. What she really missed though, was how the world looked in the nice sunny morning.
The fourteen year old hadn’t seen that often over the last few months, thanks to Doomsday and all. The girl had been hiding in an abandoned home in the cul de sac on west Flint Street, going out only after darkness fell. Since the power had been out in Vanita for months, it was the safest time for her to scrounge for food, refill her water jugs from the pump just east of the baseball diamond and search for items that might help her survive. She’d been in pretty good shape, considering. Lonely and still frightened beyond words most every waking minute, but she’d been surviving.
It was getting pretty hard for her to find toilet paper though. That was why, in the early morning hours, Mel ventured outside to loot another house two blocks over. She’d been careful, staying hidden in the narrow tree line until she’d reached Olive Street and been sure to wait for any hint they might be around before crossing to the other side. She’d moved quickly into the third house down, the one Mrs. Lawson had lived in. The sixty year old woman had been in in Colorado visiting family when everything happened so, thankfully, the teen hadn’t needed to deal with her hungry corpse. Mel raided the bathroom closet on the second floor and had found a four-pack of Charmin.
Guess I’m allowed to squeeze it now, she’d thought, shoving it into her backpack. Then she’d headed downstairs to check the absent senior’s kitchen for unexpired edibles.
The pantry was full of canned goods, Oreos, dried beans, and to Mel’s delight, fruit cups. Lots and lots and lots of fruit cups. Since she’d been living off Chef Boyardee ravioli, Tang and Shredded Wheat for weeks, the sight of it all filled her mouth instantly with drool. She stuffed as many of the fruit cups as she could in her pack and took half a dozen more to eat right there. After grabbing a spoon from the kitchen drawer, the girl had decided she’d go out in the back yard to enjoy her find. She’d made sure to check the surrounding yards as well for any creatures, because Mrs. Lawson’s fence was only four foot chain-link, before carefully opening the door. Seeing none, she settled down on the rear steps and began to consume sweet, peachy goodness.
Halfway through her fourth, one of the infected had stumbled into view. Neither one saw the other right away. Mel was preoccupied with her peaches, while the creature had been following a squirrel, attempting to catch and eat the fuzzy-tailed, little tree rat. Once it saw the girl’s arm move up, bringing another spoonful to her mouth, it noticed her and stumbled towards the short fence while letting out a bubbling moan. The teen had almost jumped out of her skin, but did jump up off the step, fruit cup forgotten. She saw the thing heading in her direction and quickly set off across the yard away from it, hoping to circle the next house and lose it between the buildings.
So of course, a pair of them shuffled around the corner into her path.
Mel swerved around them and trotted into the street. There was no way she could return to her hideaway until she’d ditched them. She couldn’t risk having them roaming around outside, pounding on the house’s doors, drawing more creatures to her location and decided to circle the block. The things were dangerous but slow, so the girl had reasoned outdistancing them shouldn’t be a problem. What had been a problem, was the quartet of infected coming from the north on South Miller. Mel quickly decided to cut east another block while they stumped closer. She’d found another nine coming from there as well, along with a trio staggering down from the northern side. That had been bad. While the teen was able to stay out of the oncoming creatures’ grasps, she was getting farther and farther from her hiding place. If she continued on and more kept showing up, the frightened girl would quickly find herself surrounded and then consumed, but she didn’t have any choice now. They kept getting closer and she’d had to run. She could hear a lot of moaning too, which had sent a chill up her spine and driven her to move her tiring legs faster.
Turning east once again, Mel sprinted for the corner of Gunter Street and prayed none of the things were coming from that direction too.
* * *
The girl had come out of nowhere, running hard and trying to look in every direction at once. She was in the center of the street before any of them knew it, and froze to stare wide-eyed at oncoming death in the form of the Troll’s crash bumper.
“Son of a bitch!” Kat yelled. She slammed her booted foot down on the brake pedal and yanked the wheel towards the passenger side. The hummer turned right ninety degrees and went into a horizontal slide,
its heavy tires screeching on the pavement.
“Ohshit-ohshit-Ohshi-i-it!” Sampson gripped the dash, as if doing so could slow their armored vehicle minutely and stave off what was about to happen.
Kat had a moment where she swore she could see herself reflected in the girl’s eyes, just before the younger female disappeared with a scream and the hulking machine slid to a halt.
“Holy fuck!” Elle and Leo held each other protectively in the rear seat. They’d both been positive the Troll would tip over when it began its slide. Elle’s eyes were so wide, the whites showed all the way around. “Tell me that was a zombie!”
“D-Did we just hit someone? Someone living?” Leo stuttered.
Sampson attempted to pry his fingers loose from the dash. “I think so! Those things don’t tend to scream when you run them down!”
Kat finally won the battle against her uncooperative seat belt and unlatched it, then grabbed her sword. “Elle! Topside! Now! Leo, you cover! Henry, with me!” Then she threw open the door and leapt out.
“Here we go!” Opening the roof turret, Elle stood and took hold of the only good thing to come out of their group’s assault on the Purifiers home-base. An MG-34 machine gun. The belt-fed, twenty-six pound weapon could fire 7.92mm at the rate of eight hundred rounds per minute. Basically, enough to shred anything you pointed it at. They didn’t actually have any ammo boxes that would hold that much at one time, so it was limited to a maximum of 250 rounds before someone would have to reload. It wasn’t really all that accurate for nailing head-shots either—which was what you had to do with zombies—but it was great for tearing off limbs and generally slowing the ugly things down. The leggy, blonde had used it with great success while rescuing Jake and Kat on the night Laurel died. Now, she unbolted the stays holding the weapon’s bi-pod stationary, swiveled its muzzle 180 degrees to the rear, pulled the charging lever back, and took aim down the street to the west.
“I see her!” Henry called. The big man was down on one knee, gazing beneath the vehicles undercarriage as young Salizar watched his back. “She’s not moving!”
“Crap! Leo, get up on the on the front and watch our escape route! Henry? Time to earn our paychecks.” Kat pulled the Glock from her thigh holster and dropped into a shooters stance.
“Wait. We actually get paid for this?” Henry asked.
Leo all but jumped up on the hood as Sampson circled around to help her face the oncoming infected. There weren’t that many. Only thirty or so.
“Elle? Kill any outside fifty feet, then shut down.”
The blonde broke into a wide smile. “Going live!” With that, she unloaded on the dead.
While it was broad daylight, tracer rounds still made ugly orange streaks as the MG-34 spat sub-sonic death downrange. Five of the creatures were blown into their component parts in seconds. They’d been grouped closely together and the weapon turned them into flying schmutz in short order. Another six dropped as Elle targeted them one by one, sending rounds into their center mass, and separated dead torsos from their still snapping craniums. She whooped loudly when one of the heads sailed into the bed of a pick-up, but kept firing and cut another pair in half.
Henry and Kat hadn’t sat idle during her show of controlled chaos. Sampson took careful aim at the nearest infected and vaporized six of their skulls with his riot gun. He cursed loudly after missing three shots, hitting the creatures in their chests instead of their heads, before aiming carefully to put each of them down for good.
Cho was no slouch either. She hit eight of them squarely with her silenced Glock 19. The weapon had virtually no recoil, and it made no more noise when it fired than a popping kernel of Orville Redenbacher’s Original Recipe. She could handle the larger—and much louder—weapon as Henry did, if she chose to. She’d more than proven that by killing a small pack of them on the football field with Jake, on day one of the outbreak. Kat liked the nearly silent pistol though, because it didn’t attract attention. She was a ninja, after all.
Kat and Henry changed up to their melee weapons for the last five creatures. The things were a bit too close, and shooting multiple firearms in tight quarters was dicey at best. So as Sampson took a good grip on his mace Kat pulled her sword and then they waited for their opponents to move into striking range. That was the only good thing about fighting zombies, really. They didn’t tend to follow any detailed or complicated plans. They didn’t have a chain of command or act as a group. They couldn’t care less if you killed the one standing next to them in the slightest. Each of them—every single one—was a microcosm unto itself. Unfeeling, uncaring, and totally unconcerned with the fate of any others of its ilk. They saw prey, they walked toward prey, they tried to grab and eat prey. That was about the extent of their cognitive abilities.
The huge man clubbed the first in the top of its head with his nail studded mace, causing the creature to stop mid-moan. Its eyes crossed comically, and the long nails spiked its brain like an awful butterfly on a pin. It dropped to the filthy street, and Sampson promptly turned to face another. Cho knew he didn’t hate the things as some of their party did. He pitied them. Walking around, mindlessly eating other people? That was no way to end your life. Or un-life, rather.
Kat, on the other hand, was unable to find the slightest bit of pity for the nasty droolers anywhere in her heart. She simply wanted to destroy the rotten things, before they took anyone else she cared for away from her. Her sword whipped out and took the head off the nearest zombie, as easily as someone would swat an annoying insect. She jumped up, spun midair, then cut another one’s head off just above its eyeballs. The thing didn’t even realize three quarters of its brain was missing as it moved to take another step forward, and then fell dead to the street. What was left of the zombie’s grey matter spilled out over the asphalt, and closely resembled long-rancid stir-fry.
The last was once a horribly thin woman, who’d favored ridiculously tight, lime-green hot pants. Kat blinked at the sight. If she hadn’t known better, the ninja-girl would’ve thought someone had dug up Karen Carpenter.
Cho’s lip curled in disgust and she kicked the moldering scarecrow in the teeth. The forcefully-moving sole of her boot sent it flipping backwards, ass-over-teakettle. Kat was eager to end this little dance, so she sprang forward as the zombie got to its hands and knees, and then brought the tip of her grandfather’s sword down into the back of the creature’s head. Not many people knew that dead bone became brittle over time, but the pretty Asian did. The point of her katana passed easily through the rear of its skull, on into its dead brain, and exited through the zombies left eye. The thing collapsed and the she pulled her sword free with a satisfied flourish, sending old blood and moldy-smelling puss arcing out in a semi-circle around the limp corpse.
Kat looked around for more opponents and, seeing none, called out to the others. “Clear!”
“Clear!” Henry echoed, and stomped on the head of an infected he’d downed, just in case. It pulped under his heel like a stinky, stinky cantaloupe, coating the bottom of his yellowish work boot with brackish goop.
Leo and Elle also confirmed the area free of infected, and the survivors began to come down from their adrenaline fueled high. They were getting better, Kat realized. When they’d first begun the little cross-country trek, it would’ve required everyone in their group to take on a pack of infected that large, just to be safe. Jake, along with Laurel, Allen, Maggie, and Foster had done it once while they’d been in Columbus. O’Connor and George Foster had both been through serious combat training at some point however, so that had made a big difference at the time. Now, Kat and her team had decimated an almost equally large group, sans any close calls or losses. It made her feel better about their chances of actually reaching still-distant Pecos, Texas safely.
Who am I kidding? She thought, as she watched her companions reload their weapons. We’ll all probably still end up getting eaten too, eventuall
y.
Kat moved to kneel beside the Hummer and peered underneath the undercarriage cautiously. It seemed the girl had dropped to the pavement just prior to being smashed by the vehicle’s armored side. The lucky teenager still lay wide-eyed on the asphalt as she stared at the heavy steel, just six inches from the tip of her frightened nose. The girl didn’t look like she’d been injured in her brush with becoming a hood ornament, even if she was pretty grubby at that moment. Her face was smudged, her clothes carried multiple stains, and it looked like she hadn’t been able to wash her hair
for weeks.
She was a wreck, basically.
“Are you alright?” Kat asked, as she visually inspected the girl again for any protruding bones or widening puddles of blood. It was a miracle she hadn’t been pulped. “Are you hurt?”
Other than looking at her the way a cornered animal would, the girl didn’t respond.
Kat waved at her under the edge of the frame. “Hey. Um. You can come out now. We killed all the zombies, so they won’t—you know—be chasing you anymore.”
The girl didn’t reply and retreated farther under the Humvee at Kat’s words, scooching away between the vehicle’s heavy axles.
Sampson crossed his arms. “You scared her,” he chuckled.
“If you think you can do better, feel free to bring your Jolly Green Giant butt down here and try,” Kat said, and wondered if she should try to pull the girl from under the Hummer. “We need to get her out of there. Not just to check her for injuries and bites, but because we need to get moving. We’re late getting back as it is, and who knows if our creepy playmates on the street here have any hungry friends in the area.”