The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  The shadows were in the shape of people, only they weren’t people at all. Thuy was finally starting to get that. They weren’t “infected persons” as she had insisted for so long. They were zombie monsters that she had helped to create.

  And now they were at her window.

  She and Deckard were in a patrol car; he was slumped, his neck crooked so far to the side that it was a little unsettling. It looked as though he had broken it in his sleep. He’s going to have a heck of a crick when he wakes up, she thought. She had aches of her own—her left shoulder, her back, both knees, and so on.

  Thuy was fit, but also thirty-seven. She was no spring chicken and what might have gone ignored twenty years ago now made her cringe and groan as she sat up. It felt like a win just to do that. She hadn’t had many wins in the last few days and so she took it.

  “Yay me,” she muttered, scratching the grit out of her eyes and looking around at the interior of the car. The radio was hissing softly, a continuous fuzzy sound. As she was still in the process of waking up, she found herself staring at it and at first the static was calming. It was a steady, white noise that had a stupefying effect that made her eyelids heavy and her brain sluggish. The noise was practically engrossing and she tuned out the moans and the shadows beyond the windows.

  Right at that moment, falling back to sleep seemed like a legitimate plan. After all, wasn’t the cure for exhaustion, sleep? “Yes, sir it is.” This line of reasoning seemed extremely logical and very quickly her eyes were closing once again.

  They popped open when something thumped into the side of the police cruiser. It’s only another zombie, she thought and then wondered how she could be so calm about being so close to a creature that would eat her face if it could only work a door handle or if it realized that there was just a quarter inch of glass separating them.

  That woke her up for good. It also got her feeling paranoid. Had they locked the doors? Of course, they had. Compulsively, she had triple checked them, hitting the Unlock All and then the Lock All buttons three times in a row.

  Now, her right hand strayed to the door and she was about to go through the quick routine again when she stopped herself.

  The buttons made a clunking noise that could be heard outside the car. In fact, it would be heard and then they’d be attacked once again. By how many? Would it only be a mere handful of zombies this time, pounding on the glass or scratching the paint off the doors as their black nails bent back, or were there a hundred of them out there ready to tear the doors off the cruiser and haul the two of them out into the afternoon sun where they could feast. It was impossible to tell without cracking the windows and that was the last thing she wanted to do just then.

  Thuy settled for wiping away a bit of the condensation from the glass with the fleshy part of her balled fist. “Oh no,” she said, under her breath. She thought she had been quiet, however Deckard had heard.

  “How many?” he asked, pushing himself up, grimacing and rubbing his neck.

  “Thirty or so. It’s hard to tell. Do you want some Tylenol for your neck? I know I can sure use…” She jumped in her chair as the glass next to her thudded. Thuy turned to see a zombie’s face smearing black gunk across the window as it tried to stare in at them. Their eyesight was generally so poor that she only gave the creature a thirty percent chance of picking her out.

  Moving would only draw its attention, so she forced herself to remain still despite the urgent desire in her to scream to Deckard to get them out of there.

  Through the marred glass, the beast stared for nearly half a minute before it tried to bite Thuy through the window. Smashing into the glass knocked out one of its front teeth and splintered another, but the glass held—for the moment. The monster lifted what Thuy thought was a fist, but it was only a raggedy stump of gnawed wrist.

  Deckard was already reaching for the keys to the ignition when the stump hit the glass, striking it at an angle which deflected the majority of the force down. A shard of bone that was still attached at one end to the zombie, stabbed down between the glass and the frame of the door and got stuck. Thuy stared, not knowing what to do while Deckard started the cruiser with one hand and wiped furiously at the fogged-over windshield with the other.

  This gave him a head-sized, cloudy view in front where he saw a much larger number of zombies than the thirty Thuy had mentioned. There were thousands all heading east in long lines. The closer ones heard the car’s engine and turned toward them.

  “I can’t see!” Deckard cried, sticking the car in gear and spurting it forward. “Find the defrost.”

  There seemed to be a lot more dials and whatnot associated with a police cruiser than in a normal car, but Thuy was able to scan through them rapidly despite the car bouncing along. She got both the front and rear defrost going just as they left the road and flew down a steep hill, hitting hidden stumps and moss-covered logs and zombies, lots and lots of zombies.

  It was rough ride and what lay at the bottom of the hill Thuy didn’t know because the window was still covered. She just knew that if they hit something big or got stuck in a bog, they’d be in big trouble. From what she could see, Thuy could tell they were in the middle of one the larger hordes. Unbidden, she glanced away from the grey windshield and towards the pistol they had found back in Hudson.

  Had it been just an accident that the Taurus PT92 just happened to have two bullets left? Or was it fate telling them that their time was nearly up? Thuy was a scientist and didn’t believe in fate, she believed in the Law of Probabilities, which was based in Probability Theory—a way of relating conditional and marginal probabilities to determine the outcome of certain events.

  She felt safe when mathematics were involved. It gave her the illusion of control and yet she had an irrational desire to throw the Taurus out the window; as if she could change the fate that she didn’t believe in by modifying one element of it. Of course, she couldn’t throw the gun out the window because there was still a zombie attached by the wrist to her door.

  “Deck,” she called to him and then jerked her head when he glanced over. “It’s stuck.”

  He grunted and with the fog clearing, he lined the side of the cruiser up on a tree and with all the fanfare of scraping a turd from his shoe, he knocked the zombie away.

  Now, Thuy could see just fine and wished she could go back to driving with blinders on. They were still bouncing and dodging their way through what felt like the entire zombie army. They weren’t even on a road. In front of them were two ruts, which suggested that someone had driven through the area.

  Had it been anyone else behind the wheel, she would have told them…no, she would have ordered them to turn around. But, she trusted Deckard. In the last four days, he had come through time and again, demonstrating that he was much more than he seemed.

  “Do you have a destination in mind?” she asked, clicking on her seatbelt and bracing her legs against the inevitability of a crash.

  “We’re near where I crossed back into the Zone.” He frowned at the steering wheel as the cruiser hit a dip and a knob popped off the dash. “There weren’t this many zombies before. I’m worried that the line didn’t hold.”

  Thuy frowned as well, not quite understanding. “I would think that would be advantageous to us. We should be able to slip through while they reform.”

  “They were nice people,” Deckard explained.

  “Oh, sorry.” She knew that one of her greatest failings was in her inability to see the humanity in humans. She tended to see people as beginning and ending with what they did for a living: phlebotomists were people who drew blood, firemen put out fires, and soldiers fought battles. Sometimes they lived, sometimes they died, but only rarely did she remember that they were real people with real families.

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” Deckard said, but didn’t sound convincing. He pointed ahead of them. “I think the line was over that hill.” The twin ruts ran up to the bottom of the hill and then skirted to the right, runni
ng along its base. After a mile or so and about ten thousand zombies, he swore under his breath and said, “This isn’t taking us anywhere. Hold on.”

  There was only a bar over the door to hold onto and it wasn’t all that convenient, though she supposed that nothing about the cruiser had been designed to mount such steep hills. Deckard went right at the hill, going straight up it with Thuy holding onto the one bar and thinking that there would certainly be a cliff on the other side, or that from above they would see that the little rutted path actually cut through a much shallower slope if they had only driven a little further. And this was assuming they made it to the top at all.

  The hill grew so steep that she felt the front of the cruiser wanting to tip backwards. Whenever it got too bad, Deckard simply fed the beastly machine more gas, as if speed was the answer to everything.

  Up and up they went and Thuy foolishly looked back for barely a second before she slammed her eyelids down, gritted her teeth, and gripped the bar until her knuckles were so white she suspected that they would split through her skin at any second.

  Then they were on top of the hill and for some reason, Thuy found herself out of breath and sweating. Deckard was stoic, staring out at the further hill.

  The defensive line had been shattered by successive waves of zombies. In front of them they could see the corpses of thousands that had been chopped down by every weapon known to man. Thousands more were pushing up and over the hill, disappearing into the forest beyond.

  “Damn,” he whispered. Thuy was about to offer what condolences she could, but just then he took his foot off the brake and sent them hurtling down the far side of the hill. She reacted much as a cat would if it were in this situation. Her nails clawed the upholstery and her sneakered feet were splayed on the dash. She had never ridden a rollercoaster in her life but assumed it would be just like this: horrible.

  Gravity sucked them down at an astounding pace, which made the trip down very fast. Before she could catch her breath or collect herself, they were plowing through the corpses that littered the bottom of the ravine between the two hills and now she was glad for Deckard’s apparently reckless driving. They needed all the momentum they could get just to make it through what seemed like a stagnant river of corpses.

  The ravine was so foul that she actually looked forward to the run up the next hill which was blessedly small and less steep.

  Deckard drove along the top of the hill where there was another mass of bodies strung out just inside the tree line. He found a landmark and then turned east until they came to a tent that lay on its side. “Oh man,” he whispered. There were great tears in the fabric, and there were splashes of fly-covered blood everywhere, but only a few corpses, which were bullet ridden and torn to pieces.

  Only a single “living” zombie was standing near the tent. The rest were either struggling around the hills or, having already mounted them, were heading east where the rattle of gunfire could be heard. The lone zombie turned dull, black eyes on the cruiser as it pushed down from the crest of the hill through the thin forest. Deckard only had the two bullets in the Taurus, so he used the cruiser as a weapon and ran the beast down, pinning it beneath the front tires. He then opened the door and gave it a glance. It looked to him, with its feeble gesturing, like a dying cockroach. It would keep, he supposed.

  “Hold on,” Thuy said, sliding over and grabbing his arm. “Put on your mask and gloves before you go out there.”

  She thought it was crazy to leave the safety of the car, but he wasn’t gone for half a minute before she opened her own door. The outside of the car was covered in sprays of black blood which was disgusting as well as dangerous. She grabbed a can of disinfectant, which she used with such abandon that she had to duck back in for a second one.

  As she worked, Deckard went to the tent and, despite his latex-covered hands, he used a stick to pull back the torn fabric. Inside were two boxes of MREs, a radio, three cots and a hundred and twelve rounds of 5.56 ammo. He took the bullets and the food and stowed them in the cruiser. All around the forest floor were spent shell casings but very few corpses of any sort. He didn’t like it.

  Deckard wanted to explore more, however there were a few dozen zombies making their way through the forest towards them and he had to shoo Thuy back inside the cruiser. He paused before moving on, picturing the fight as it likely went down. “The line fell unexpectedly,” he told her. “The horde crested the hill in one big wave. It couldn’t have been more than an hour after I came through.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The lack of bodies,” he told her. “If any of the soldiers were injured, they would have turned after a few hours and if the zombies were hurt, they healed and walked away. That way.” He pointed east.

  There was a trail through the forest, one made by the passage of hundreds of feet. Deckard decided to follow the trail. Every hundred yards or so they would come across piles of bodies and they weren’t always zombie bodies. He slowed to look at these, but only stopped when he saw an M4 sticking out from beneath one of the corpses.

  This was why he had come in this direction. Deckard stopped the cruiser, took one quick look around and got out holding a fresh can of disinfectant.

  Thuy got out as well, she had to urinate so badly her lower abdomen was swollen and she worried that if she waited any longer, she would pop. She couldn’t remember the last time she had used the bathroom. “I have to…you know,” she said to him.

  Deckard had just knelt and was reaching for the rifle’s strap. “Sure, but stay close. I won’t look, I promise.”

  She knew that he wouldn’t; still she wasn’t one for camping and wasn’t quite sure of the mechanics or what the entire procedure of urinating in the woods entailed. Did she take her pants off? Or did she leave them on because she was in an environment where a fast get-away could be in order? If she left them on, she was quite sure she would make an embarrassing mess.

  A skirt was starting to sound pretty good at that moment. “Uh, Deck? Do you, uh, happen to know the, uh, how to, uh…never mind. Sorry.” She had a deep enough tan that she didn’t turn pink when she got embarrassed and for that, at least, she was thankful.

  “Pants off,” she decided. And that meant she would be going a little deeper into the woods. Thirty yards off she spied a run of bushes which seemed very appropriate for the moment. Since she couldn’t have cared less about botany or biology, beyond microbiology of course, she had no idea of what sort they were.

  They were leafy and green and hopefully not poisonous. They blocked Deckard from view and she had her pants halfway down before she noticed the corpses. There were seven or eight and she assumed that because of the headless state of two of them and the fantastic amount of blood, that they were very dead, but then she noticed that one of the corpses was staring at her.

  At first, she thought that it had simply died with its eyes open, but then the eyes blinked. Thuy’s body did a spazzy, reflexive jump. The same sort of jump a person makes when they walk into a cobweb in the dark. She might have also let out a yelp, but wasn’t sure.

  The body attached to the head was covered in blood, both old red blood and black blood. “You smell good,” it said in a low, gravelly voice. “You smell like a treat.”

  Face to face with a zombie, her pants almost to her ankles, Thuy knew she wouldn’t smell good for much longer; her bladder was screaming to let go.

  Chapter 16

  1– 2:08 p.m.

  —Brunswick, Maryland

  “Shoot him, now,” Anna Holloway said, rain dripping down her chin. “It’s the only way you’re going to live through this.”

  “Dropping your gun is the only way that you are going to live through this,” Katherine Pennock shot back.

  Anna groaned in exasperation. “Will you please stop? I need a hostage, one that will listen to me and obey my commands. What I don’t need is a wanna-be secret agent who thinks she’s all that. Now, shoot him and you’ll live beyond the next five minute
s.”

  Katherine tensed, her muscles bunching, ready to spring. She wasn’t going to shoot Eng. Anna’s insistence that she kill her unarmed partner smacked of a set up. She saw how it would go down: if she killed Eng, then Anna would kill her and if she was ever caught, she could claim that Katherine had been out of control, killing both the guilty and innocent.

  Either way, Katherine would end up dead. “I don’t think so,” she said, lowering her gun. “You’ll have to do your own dirty work.” She went so far as to drop the pistol and regretted it the moment she did. Without it, she felt naked.

  “What? Do you think that as a woman I’ll be too caught up in my emotions to pull the trigger?” Anna asked, a smirk on her face. “Let me show you how a real woman protects herself.” She took one step to her left, her shoulder touching the thrumming aluminum wall as she aimed her pistol at Eng. His only chance was if lightning would suddenly shoot down from the storm above them and fry Anna.

  The trigger was halfway back when a new sound could be heard over the rain beating on the roof. It was the Blackhawk dropping down from the clouds. Jennifer Jackson had dragged Rowden's body out of the way and now she squatted behind the M240, determined not to die as he had. She wasn’t going to give the bad guys a second to blink—or so she thought.

  What she hadn’t expected to see was the FBI woman with a gun pointed at her head. She was standing directly between the two bad guys and as much as Jennifer wanted to let the M240 rip, she hesitated, just as Rowden had.

  Katherine did not hesitate. She wasn’t a wanna-be anything. She was an FBI special agent, a rank that she had worked her ass to get. The Blackhawk dropped into a hover, ten feet off the ground, its blades ripping through the rain, sending the drops hurtling sideways with stinging force.

  When Anna blinked against it, Katherine made her move, spinning with her right arm out. Her forearm hit Anna’s wrist, smashing it against the side of the building. The gun went off, the bullet drilling through the siding. Katherine ignored it; she was already following up with her next strike: a stunning left hook to Anna’s cheek, which landed a half-second after the first.