by S. P. Durnin
Penny remembered. She’d been bitten and was on her way to becoming one of the hungry dead, when Winston Hess had his butt-buddy shoot her in the chest. She remembered falling to her knees and then... Nothing.
She should be dead. She was dead, just not ‘lying down, sleeping in the loving arms of Jesus’ dead. Raising her shaking hands to her face, Penny realized what had happened. She’d turned. She was a goddamn, zombie. A flesh-eater. A maggot-head. Dammed to roam until she rotted away, eating other people to sate the endless hunger of...
Wait.
She didn’t feel hungry.
She didn’t feel anything. She couldn’t feel her favorite tank top, now sticky with her blood, against her breasts. She couldn’t feel the goddamn, stiff-soled combat boots George insisted she wear in place of her hiking boots. She couldn’t feel the lump on the back of her head from falling backwards onto the surface of the road.
Nothing.
Penny turned her gaze back towards Langley. Half the barrier had been destroyed and there were creatures everywhere within the town. Hundreds and hundreds of them. How long had she been out? Dead? Whatever? The dam and roughly a hundred yards down Main Street in Langley proper was covered in gore. Much of it was on fire, and nearly all of it was recognizable as something that had once been a person though. How many dead zombies would it take to create such a picture?
Carson didn’t want to know. To be honest, she didn’t care. She was one of them now.
But she was dammed if she had to act like it.
The northern sidewalk was only a few feet away and Penny stepped clumsily onto the broken concrete. It was going to take a substantial amount of practice to get used to the lack of sensation in her new body.
Hah! That’s a laugh. She thought. I’m not going be getting used to anything soon.
And with that, Penny Carson pushed her dead body over the guardrail, falling unnoticed into the water below.
* * *
“Showtime, bitches!”
Smiling with barely restrained anticipation, Kat pressed the pretty-pretty, shiny, red button on the transmitter Jake had wired to their car battery.
Most people don’t realize that the Pensacola Dam, also known as the Grand River Dam, was Oklahoma’s first hydroelectric power plant. Built from 1938 to 1940 it was the longest multiple-arch dam in the world, composed of 510,000 cubic yards of concrete and 23.9 million pounds of steel and iron reinforcements. That’s techo-speak for It is one big, strong, mother-fucking structure.
But its builders had never counted on one George Montgomery Foster: Navy Veteran and All Around Ass-Kicker.
When the aging fixer first discussed as he’d put it ‘Blowing the living shit outta the jumped up, lakeside speed-bump,’ with Jake, the beatific expression on his face had been frightening. George had immediately gone to Rae and begged her to print out the dam’s structural plans. He’d spent only two hours poring over them before insisting to go outside the eastern wall to have a look a one particular section. Ignoring Bee’s, Mooney’s, and Rae’s quite vocal protests, Foster stripped down to his skivvies—blue boxers with large white anchors in a slightly polka dot pattern, of course—and dove into the Lake of the Cherokees. Just to be absolutely sure of what he was seeing, mind you.
After Foster had dried off, and Rae had recovered from the screaming hissy-fit she’d had when he’d leapt from the dam, they had a brief discussion about the possible uses of diesel fuel, det-cord, Styrofoam, and black powder, when applied to a liberal amount of C4. Surprisingly, Rae had begun smiling at that point too, which—at least to Jake—was more than a little disconcerting.
Then the pair of evilly smirking fixers told him what they were going to do with all of those things that went ‘boom!’
* * *
The explosion was impressive, by all accounts.
While Foster had placed the more powerful shaped charges below the waterline—with the aid of some scuba gear and air tanks they’d salvaged from one of the boats in the small Marina—he’d been insistent about the need to “double-down,” which was why of the fifty barrels lining the southern lane of the causeway, twenty of them held a volatile mixture of Rae’s own invention. Basically, while George’s depth charges would fracture the lower section of a single arch deep in Pensacola’s belly, Rae’s diesel-based, napalm would generate such heat—after carving a ten meter wide rift in the road—that the combined stress from both explosions would warp the dam’s support structure. Normally, it would’ve taken quite a bit of time to cover such an area with flammable gel, but the fixers circumvented this problem by gently tamping dime-sized blobs of C4 below each of the barrels, then dusting a thick line of black powder along the edge facing the dam. This would keep their modifications from being seen by anyone approaching from the east, as well as directing the blast of burning gel towards any oncoming enemies once detonation occurred.
When Cho generated the activation pulse with their small transmitter, a toggle switch on the rear of Rae’s remote minigun closed and every bit of power in the Die-Hard cells was forced through a pair of copper wires. One ran next to the curb, to the napalm barrels, the other threaded its way into the water on the north side of the dam.
Anyone watching wouldn’t have been able tell the resulting havoc was actually caused by the two different explosions. The same moment two-hundred and fifty gallons of napalm turned the road into an inferno the likes of which few had ever seen, the dam shook as a gigantic geyser burst upward from the lake. When the water fell, it had absolutely no dampening effect on the petroleum-based napalm. If anything, the deluge spread the blazing gel around further, so instead of ten meters that looked like a snapshot straight out of hell, it was actually more like thirty.
Then the road shook violently once more and the entire damaged arch lost its battle against the laws of physics.
With sounds that could very well have been made by the devil’s battle ax striking a mountain, gigantic cracks ran upwards from the bottom of the dam, worked their way skyward as the pressure began bending its superstructure.
Hess realized what the survivors had done, but was powerless to stop it. He bellowed at the MATTOC’s operators, commanding them to move them back away from the coming destruction. Unwilling to risk his monstrous transport for what was now a lost cause, and furious over his defeat at the hands of a group of the mindless dead.
Then the arch collapsed, taking an entire section of the dam along.
Waters composing the Lake of the Cherokees burst forth from the gap, taking yet more steel and concrete along with them as they began their rush south to flow into the mighty Mississippi and eventually to unite with the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Gulf of Mexico. The torrent was monumental. It uprooted trees and pushed boulders along with the power of its muddy waves. While normally quite clear, it seemed the lake had been infused with all the angry spirits of the area’s original inhabitants. As if all the ghosts of long-dead Native Americans had come round again to wipe the land clean of the scars of Man and bring about what those of Japanese culture called Saigonoshinpan no hi, or simply ‘Doomsday.’ Many of the dead fell into the maelstrom created by the ingenious fixers of Jake’s party and would trouble the living no more.
A larger number of the creatures were turned into little more than splattered goop on what was left of Langley’s east wall by the force of the blast. That was good news.
Even better, yet more mistook the sound and fury generated of the water to mean there was prey somewhere in that direction. Legions of them fell into the breach when they attempted to walk across thin air in their unreasoning hunger.
The bad news was that the massive explosions had also weakened the structural integrity of what made up Langley’s east wall. More specifically, the supports for the school bus turned watchtower.
The one that teetered ominously with the shaking of the dam, causing Jake and Kat to freeze hig
h in their crow’s nest perch.
“Here’s the plan,” Kat braced her feet on the ledge of the crows nest against the swaying. “You distract the things down there, and I’ll run like fun for the nearest horizon!”
Jake threw his body in the opposite direction, hoping to offset the tower’s motion. “Goddammit, we’ve had this discussion before! Running isn’t a plan! It’s what you do when a plan fails!”
“I’m pretty sure this situation qualifies as an ‘epic fail,’ wouldn’t you say?” Kat wasn’t giving him an inch.
“Cut us a little slack, for fuck’s sake!” Jake called to the sky, thoroughly pissed with what Kat termed as the Uncaring Sky-beasts. What everyone else called gods or deities. “I can’t believe after all we’ve been through lately, the gods are going to let us die by something stupid! Like falling into a burning building!”
“That’s not a good idea!” Kat gripped the swaying bus with one hand and his tactical vest in her other. “They don’t really have a very nice sense of humor, you know?”
He had to agree with her just then because, looking out over the town, O’Connor saw that most of the nearby buildings were actually on fire. Pistol Pat’s looked like nothing more than an oversized bonfire, the bait-n-tackle store—along with its second story apartment—next to the tower was almost completely engulfed, even the nearby post office had thick columns of black smoke billowing from its windows.
George and the others left just in time. Jake mused, as hot ashes wafted up from Langley’s pyre. I think even the Sunset Bar and Grill is on fire. Damn. Mooney will shit a square turd when he hears about that.
It seemed the general took their destruction of his route into what he perceived as the perfect stronghold less than well, because his MATTOC began firing on the town. There was no tactical benefit in doing so. Repairing the road—let alone the dam itself—with thousands of gallons of water per second pouring through the break was a pipe dream. Hess knew it, and had decided a little reprisal was in order.
So he shelled the barrier again.
One more shot was all it took. The cannon roared and a round blew the heavy support beams keeping the school bus vertical. The creatures beneath the tower, the ones that were currently doing impersonations of Tiki torches, all but ignored the explosion as it burst their unfeeling eardrums and blasted little bits of shrapnel into their bodies. Many were blinded by the blast, and left to continue their pathetic existence without ever again possessing the benefits of ocular-based hunting capabilities. They didn’t bat an eye.
They also didn’t care that the only human stronghold in Oklahoma had just fallen. Not to the dead, but to human ambition.
The watchtower toppled briefly, then came smashing down onto the last remaining section of Langley’s barrier, and finally came to rest hanging ponderously out over the drop off. O’Connor and Cho were sent tumbling towards the vehicle’s rear end by the impact, slipping and sliding along the length of its steel roof like awkward table hockey pucks. Jake tried to halt their slide by latching onto the far edge with one hand then used his other to snag Kat’s arm as she slid by him, but their combined momentum was just too great. Even as he latched onto her, Cho went over the roof’s lip causing him be yanked along after her. Flailing out with his free hand for support, Jake managed to grab onto the rear bumper, but that put them both hanging precariously under the emergency
door.
As Kat swung in his grip, Jake did his best not to cry out as searing pain shot up from his deltoid and into his neck. It was so intense he nearly passed out. Stopping their downward motion had nearly popped he left arm out of its socket. The ex-author felt something in the joint begin to tear as the bus bumper cut into the meat of his hand. He screwed his eyes shut as he fought against the pain.
“Hold on!” He locked his grip on Cho and strained against the metal.
As she dangled there, Kat looked down into the eighty-foot void beneath her boots. She knew he’d lever let her go, not even if it meant dislocating his shoulder, then they would both end up in the raging torrent below.
She couldn’t allow that to happen.
Speaking calmly, Kat tilted her face up to regard Jake while she relaxed her hold on his arm.
“Drop me.”
O’Connor’s eyes flew open. “What?” His teeth clenched as his shoulder burned, and the cords in his neck stood out with the effort of supporting their combined weight.
“We’ll both die!” Kat let go completely and her water-slick vambrace began inching through his trembling grip. “Do it! There’s no way you can save us both, and you have to find the others again. You promised!”
“Forget that!” He bared his teeth and desperately tried to halt her downward slide. “You hold on to me, dammit!”
“I’m not afraid.” Her wrist was slowly passing through his fingers. “Let me go.”
Jake’s eyes bulged wide in panic. His arms shook and his hand was crushing hers. “No!”
“I love—” she began.
Then Kat slipped free.
Time froze, or seemed to. Jake was familiar with the event. It was referred to as tachypsychia. Basically a neurological condition that alters the perception of time, induced by physical exertion or traumatic events. Someone in the grip of Tachypsychia normally experiences an extremely rapid heart rate (two hundred to three hundred beats per minute), rapid breathing, and their pupils dilate to allow more light to enter the eye. These symptoms are brought about due to their adrenal medulla dumping a shit-load of adrenaline directly into their bloodstream in a time of great stress. Among other effects, this had been known to cause temporary loss of color vision, increased auditory sensitivity, and a heightened pain tolerance. He knew all this because he’d experienced it before. In Bosnia, during the initial zombie outbreak, during his battle with the Milo Tompkins—the Purifier’s second in command—and finally when he witnessed Laurel sacrifice herself at the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Lake Complex. He wasn’t thinking about any of this at that very second, though.
All that went through his head, the one and only fact that burned its way into Jake’s brain like a white-hot sea urchin, was someone he cared a great deal for was being taken from him.
Again.
And that was enough.
He’d had enough.
As time resumed its normal flow, allowing Kat to begin her fall once more, Jake kicked away from the tailgate and dove after her.
The ninja-girl screamed in rage and denial as he streaked down, away from light and life and safety. She wanted to curse him for following her headlong into oblivion, but realized it would be pointless.
They were both going to die.
* * *
The wind of her passage sent Cho’s blue, pixie-cut hair flying in her face, drawing stinging tears from her eyes as the dam’s top receded quickly and Jake sped nearer. She realized then that she might at least be able to touch him before they hit bottom. The flood waters roared down unabated to her right, turning the stream below the falling pair into an angry torrent of mist. The waters seemingly fell far more slowly than she herself did, and she hated them for it. Hated the water for not knowing its doom—like hers—was fast approaching on the rocks below.
Kat had no time. They had no time. Not even the precious minute needed for her to tell Jake how she’d felt for so very, very long. She reached out for him vainly. His hand was so close. Only inches away. He sped towards her, arms outstretched as he plummeted uncaringly to his destruction in her wake.
Their fingers brushed together for the briefest of moments before Jacob O’Connor and Katherine Brightfeather Cho plunged into the flood-waters. The outlines of their forms tumbled, becoming indistinct until finally disappearing into the mists, unnoticed by the roiling torrent draining from the Lake of the Cherokees into the Neosho River.
And then they were gone.
ABOUT THE AUTH
OR
For over a decade, S.P. Durnin crisscrossed America seeking the perfect pint of Guinness, while developing a deep love/hate relationship with the idea of hungry, mobile corpses. Previously he was known to keep a morning after backpack in the trunk of his car for if he woke up in a strange place, but in recent years took the next logical step and upgraded to a Bug-Out-Bag. Keep Your Crowbar Handy, Rotting To The Core, and Assuming Room Temperature are the first novels set within his zombie-verse™.
S.P. resides in Ohio with his family, one (mutant) dog, and two (very spoiled) cats that he refers to as “the crazy, furry, stupid, little ninjas,” until the inevitable zombie apocalypse.
While this concludes book three, our survivors will return to fight the hungry dead—
and have their fates decided—
in the climactic, final novel of the series:
Death Tax.