by Mark Wandrey
“Motherfucker!” Harry screamed. “Cocksucking bastard!” He managed to roll on top of the other man, the infected’s arms under Harry’s legs, and he’d wedging his left arm under the man’s chin. He slammed his right into the guy’s solar plexus with stunning force, but the infected showed no reaction except to try desperately to bite Harry’s arm.
“Ann, Nicole!” Vance yelled.
“Contact!” both women yelled at the same time as they began firing in their own areas.
It was a whirlwind of violence. Vance fired as fast as he could aim, dropping the last of the sprinters only a handful of yards before they would have reached him. The last one, a beefy woman in her forties, nearly had her left arm severed at the elbow by the last round in his magazine. She spun to the ground with a screaming snarl. He dropped the magazine, catching it with his left and stuffing it in the bag on his waist, and he found a full one by touch. There were only three full mags remaining on his harness.
“We have a shitload of trouble!” Ann cried. Vance shot a look from his zone to hers. There had been dozens, now there were hundreds. His lips skinned back from his teeth. You stayed on your sector; that was small unit tactics 101. Another yell from Harry made Vance glance down. His attacker had gotten a hand loose and was tearing at the bandages on his chest. Blood flowed, and Harry bellowed in rage and pain. He tried to pull back, and the infected did the seemingly impossible—he arched hard enough to launch Harry off of him. In a split second the infected rolled up and started a leap at Harry.
With a feral snarl Harry and Belinda’s two Shepherds, Rock and Dewey, leapt from the rear of the crew cab and crashed into the infected. Their chewed collars trailed behind them, white teeth flashing in the dim moonlight as they tore into the infected with savage fury. White teeth were stained red in a heartbeat.
“Boys, no!” Harry bellowed and grabbed one of them by the collar to try and pull them off. Vance cursed, still unable to fire on the infected. He checked his sector, clear, and switched to Ann’s direction.
“Ann!” he barked. She was in mid-magazine swap. “Moving to your sector!”
“Good thing!” she said, engaging her M4’s bolt and raising the weapon back up just as Vance started firing.
“Tim, how we doing?” Vance asked.
“All set,” Tim answered, “last gallon going in.”
“Help Harry, the dogs are loose!” As if on cue, Lexus leapt out to join the fray, her leash also chewed. Harry finally managed to pull one of his dogs off the infected. With his left, he drew his handgun cross body, pushed the other dog aside with a foot, and shot the infected at point blank range. Once, twice, a third time. The dogs all moved back from the gunfire. They were trained not to be afraid of it, but the muzzle blast was painful at that range.
“Help!” Nicole yelled. Vance looked to see a group rising from the cover of brush to rush her. They’re fucking stalking us, he thought. He turned and dropped two before his magazine was empty again.
“In the trucks!” he yelled.
“The dogs!” Harry yelled. Harry looked, and all three dogs were attacking a dozen infected, ripping at them like frenzied sharks. The infected didn’t seem to know how to respond. They’d alternately swipe at the dogs, which would fall back, then try to run at the people by the trucks only to be attacked by the dogs again.
“In a minute,” Vance said. Tim got Harry up and into the truck. Vance moved to the front, tossed the empty antifreeze container aside, slammed the hood down, and hooked it with the bungee before going back to help Tim with Nicole. He fired twice at rushing infected as he went. Belinda was just beginning to come around. She was unsteady on her feet, and he could see the glimmer of blood from a scalp wound where her head had hit the truck.
“Mah bag-g,” Belinda said, her words slurred, and pointed. Tim scooped it up as he half-helped, half-carried her to the other truck. Everyone fell back to the doors of the trucks. Vance moved and shot, running another magazine empty, and dropping the empty. He cursed when it slipped from his fingers but didn’t stop to retrieve it. He slammed another in and stroked the bolt release, firing immediately. One magazine left.
The other truck roared to life, and a human wave raced at them. Vance did a mag dump on them, not even aiming, just working the gun from side to side. Movement to his left caught his eye. Three rushed the other truck just as his wife, Ann, was opening the door. He dropped the empty magazine and reached for the last one, knowing that even as he slammed it home, it would be too late. Ann saw them too. In the restricted space between the door and the truck seat, she couldn’t use her M4. She speed-drew her Glock 30 and fired, dropping one, but the other two crashed into the door, pinning her. She screamed. Vance tried but couldn’t get a clear shot.
Lexus came out of nowhere, leaping over the truck bed and crashing into both of the infected, sending them flying backward. She grabbed one of them by the foot, her powerful jaws snapping closed, and Vance could hear bones snap 15 feet away. She shook the limb hard enough that the infected’s whole body was flung from side to side. Ann hesitated, and Vance yelled for her to get in the car. He shot the other one as it got back up and was reaching for the dog, then he had to clamber into the truck. There was barely room with Tim, Harry, and him in the front seat.
“Rock, Dewey!” Belinda called from the other truck, following it up with a double whistle. The two dogs raced out of the gloom and into that truck. Vance was about to pull his door closed when Lexus made the front seat that much more crowded by careening up onto his lap. With some effort, he got the door closed.
A woman slammed into Vance’s door, her filthy visage mere inches from his face. Her teeth were bloody, cracked, and snapping at him. She tried to beat on the window, but it sounded funny. He looked and saw she was missing her arm below the elbow. It was the one he’d shot a short time ago. The bone stuck out an inch past the meat, veins and muscles exposed and glistening in the truck’s cab light. The artery wasn’t bleeding.
“What the?” he started to say, then she realized she was missing that limb, looking at the stump curiously, and switched to her remaining hand. It smashed against the window with amazing force, and Vance jerked away. Lexus bared bloody teeth and lunged against the glass, trying to get at her. “GO!” he cried, and Tim slammed the truck into gear and punched the gas. The two trucks shot out of Tarpley, heading west into the night.
* * * * *
Chapter Twelve
Morning, Sunday, May 1
Kendalia, TX
“How much?” Cobb asked, leaning over the private to examine their haul.
“Maybe 2 gallons,” PFC Colbert said, sloshing diesel in the plastic can.
“Fuck,” Cobb said. He wanted to kick the empty fuel cans all over the fire station’s deserted bay, hear the bonging and crashing off the corrugated steel walls. It would have given him some satisfaction, at least. But he didn’t, because they would have heard.
He’d thought Kendalia deserted when they’d arrived the previous day. But less than an hour after getting the sputtering Stryker APC into the abandoned fire station and securing the doors, they had visitors. First one, then two, then a dozen of the infected methodically swept the area. He’d watched them from the station’s glass office window, looking through a tiny slit in the blinds. They’d move around, stop, listen, sniff the air like animals, and eventually move on. They’d continued to smell around the office door and the big bay door. They knew he and the private were here. Somehow, they knew.
“We can wait them out,” Colbert said again; it was almost a mantra.
“More keep showing up,” Cobb reminded him, “and there’s a lot of glass in this building.” Security in a little rural fire department wasn’t a high priority. “Are you sure you searched thoroughly?”
“Yes, Colonel,” Colbert insisted. The driver was a lazy and complaining SOB, as far as Cobb was concerned, but he had a well-developed sense of self preservation. That was something in his favor. “I wish I hadn’t come alo
ng when you grabbed me back in Ft. Hood.”
“Put it in the Stryker,” Cobb ordered. For a change, Colbert just nodded and went to pour the fuel into the big armored transport. They’d searched the entire building. Aside from some firefighting equipment, there wasn’t anything of use to them. No so much as a cracker or a bottle of water. They had MREs and water in the Stryker. With only the two of them, enough for quite some time. They’d been eating in the APC. Cold MREs were no joy, and something else for Colbert to complain about. He should have considered that was too much for the PFC to take.
After Cobb finished checking the windows, carefully monitoring the nearly three dozen infected now endlessly circling the fire station, he washed the diesel off his hands in the restroom. They’d been using the water heater as a source. As he was finishing up, he found himself thinking about his home near the Mexican border. His dead wife had a dinner of turkey and gravy on the table. It was such a vivid memory; the smell filled his nostrils. He was just drying his hands with paper towels when he realized the smell wasn’t a memory.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Cobb hissed as he rushed into the kitchen. Colbert had the windows all covered, but two MREs were steaming in their self-heating pouches.
“I figured since we’re leaving, might as well grab some warm chow.”
“We’re surrounded,” Cobb said, looking around for a way to get rid of the food quickly. He yanked open the cabinet under the sink and reached for a garbage bag.
“It’s just a couple a—”
The glass over the sink exploded as a woman leapt through, sailing over Cobb and crashing into the kitchen table. At the same time, the kitchen door was nearly blown off its hinges by two men hitting it at the same time. The glass in the door exploded, flying across the room and over the two surprised occupants.
Cobb rolled away from the infected who’d flown over him, drawing his M9 from the thigh holster. The infected who’d collided with the kitchen table got back to his feet with amazing speed. Cobb was fast as well, shooting instincts honed from decades of military service. His thumb released the safety and he double-actioned the pistol into the woman’s chest, staggering her, then fired two quick follow-up shots—one into her chest, and riding the recoil, the next went into the bridge of her nose and took the top of her head off.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Colbert screamed and ran out of the kitchen, leaving Cobb with the two who’d come through the door.
“PFC!” Cobb yelled, “Get your ass back—” he was cut off when another infected dove through the window, this time a wiry little guy who could have been a trapeze artist in a previous life. He landed by the dead woman and snarled at Cobb before lunging. Cobb rolled to the side, firing several times and missing. The agile little zombie did the unexpected; he dodged behind the table to avoid the fire!
From the direction of the garage he heard shattering glass. “No!” Colbert screamed, and Cobb heard another M9 perform a mag dump, followed by a scream.
“Fucking idiot,” Cobb said as the circus freak swung out from behind the table. Cobb was ready and put him down with a double-tap. He looked past the crumbling infected to see dozens more racing for the now askew kitchen door. “Time to go,” he said and rolled to his feet.
The kitchen was being swarmed. Even though he’d heard Colbert being attacked in the garage, he chose the uncertain over the certain. He paused just long enough to snatch up Colbert’s M4, which had been left propped up by the door. He’d been so panicked by the attack that he hadn’t even remembered it.
As he shot out the door, he safed and holstered the M9, then took the M4 in both hands. He used his thumb to flip the selector from ‘safe’ to ‘semi’ just as he rounded the corner into the garage. Colbert was still alive. He probably wished he wasn’t. The PFC was keening and weakly trying to beat away two infected who were ripping his intestines out. Cobb shot the two infected in the back of the head.
“Help?” Colbert begged. He tried to reach for his intestines, shuddered, and fell back against the rear of the Stryker. Cobb did a quick assessment and came to the only conclusion possible; he ran up the ramp and stopped, looking over the side and down at the dying PFC who stared up at him in horror.
“You want them to get you, or me to end it?” The sounds of crashing and running feet came back in the direction of the kitchen.
“Don’t leave me?”
“I’ll take that as option two,” he said and shot Colbert in the head.
There was a thump against the front of the Stryker. Cobb flipped the rear ramp control. Electric motors whined, and the hatch began to rise quickly. An alarming stream of infected rounded the corner from the kitchen and raced toward the door. Cobb thumbed the selector to ‘auto’ and raised the gun. You didn’t hip-fire a weapon, like in the movies. Doing that just wasted ammo. He wasn’t wearing battle rattle; they’d taken it off yesterday in the relative security of the fire station. He vowed not to do that ever again. The magazine in the gun was all he had to hand, so those rounds needed to count.
Cobb sighted at chest height to the left, pulled the trigger, and fired a long burst as he tracked to the right. He fought the muzzle rise, an instinct born from firing thousands of rounds. At around 700 rounds per minute, the M4 could empty a magazine in as little as two and a half seconds. In that one burst, Cobb put 14 rounds into the packed group of infect in one second. The door was half way open. Most of them had been hit, but more tried bulling their way through. He took a step onto the rising ramp, and repeated the burst in the opposite direction, emptying the magazine in a most surprising manner.
“That’s for my team,” he said as the bolt locked back, and he stepped off the door and away from the pinch point at the bottom. The door had half a foot to go, and had slowed to finish its closing cycle, when a pair of hands appeared, and a body crashed against the outside. Cobb dropped the M4 on the nearest seat and drew his M9. A second later the door closed, and he heard the sickening crunch of hands being mangled. The infected’s scream was mostly muffled by the inches of composite armor.
In moments, he could hear them jumping on and climbing all over the Stryker, trying desperately to find a way inside. He marveled at their persistence as he moved forward. In the driver’s compartment, one was looking in the armored window at him, beating at the four-inch-thick bullet resistant glass impotently. He smiled and give it the finger as he squeezed into the seat. Cobb had several inches and fifty pounds on the now dead Colbert.
“Drivers are always the small guys,” he said as he flipped the power control to active and pressed the starter. The big Caterpillar C7 diesel turned over a couple times and roared to life. The infected went absolutely insane, pounding, clawing, and prying at every square inch of the vehicle. “No way to open the door,” he said, glad he’d stowed the .50 caliber when they’d parked the vehicle. He slid the transmission into drive. “You might want to get off,” he said to the one outside pounding the glass. It smashed its head against the window, tearing open the skin on its head and smearing blood everywhere. “Fine.”
Cobb reached up, grabbed the control on the shutters, and jerked it down with all his might. The big armored plate smashed the infected, crushing its skull, and the body slid away. He nodded and pulled the plate closed, leaving him only a half-inch-wide slit to see through.
“More than enough,” he said as he released the parking brake and pushed the accelerator pedal. The engine spooled up with a roar, the eight drive wheels squealing a little bit on the concrete as the Stryker lurched forward into the big main doors and through them. The corrugated steel folded around the front of the vehicle, breaking and tearing, and crashed onto the roof. Cobb didn’t slow. The doors’ attachment points held to the building on both sides, and the structure parted in the middle. It acted like huge steel claws and ripped the dozens of infected hanging on the Stryker away, tearing them to bloody rags.
A few who’d been outside the doors were ground under the spinning tires. A few bodies might have be
en enough to high center or slow a car, a truck, or even a Humvee. The Stryker was 18 tons of steel with six-foot-tall tires. Cobb scarcely noticed the bodies as he crushed them to death and rolled onward.
On the street, he spun the wheel right, aiming the vehicle west. The monitor above showed out the back of the Stryker where at least a hundred infected were giving chase. He accelerated to 35 mph and watched them quickly dwindle behind him. The “low fuel” light was already on, and he did the math. That two gallons of diesel had bought him maybe 15 miles, if he was lucky. Grimly, he drove onward, the last man standing.
* * *
Near Utopia, TX
They covered 20 miles as the sun began to rise behind them. Vance was shaking slightly, petting 80 pounds of panting dog in his lap. Lexus started to whine as the sun approached the horizon.
“Utopia Town Limits” the sign read in the headlights.
“Better stop before we get into town,” Vance told Tim, who just nodded. A short distance ahead on the left was a propane company. “That works,” he said, pointing. The property was a couple acres and had a big stack of propane tanks for placement at homes, a small warehouse, an even smaller office, and a single massive tank used to fill smaller tanks and trucks. Tim angled into the warehouse, its door standing open. Vance glanced over his shoulder and saw headlights following them. Once both trucks were inside, they shut them down.
Tim jumped out and raced back to the bay door. Vance tried to follow, but Lexus was panting and drooling.
“Come on girl,” he said and opened the door. She looked up at him and whined. “Hop down.” The dog shook her head like she’d just gotten out of the water, then jumped down. Harry came out behind him, sliding down to sit on the running board with a groan of pain. Belinda came around the truck with her medical bag. She’d cleaned some of the blood off her head, but still looked like a mess. The other women both went over to help Tim secure the door and check all the other exits.