They were dragging from the strain of the endless battle. They were so low on ammunition that they had to wait to shoot until the dead were practically on top of them. They were without reinforcements unless they considered the skinny farm boys with their deer rifles and their fourteen bullets, as reinforcements. And they had nothing to eat unless they managed to wave over one of the old grandmas in time. These old ladies just appeared on occasion carrying big potfuls of soup or stew. Sometimes they had a backpack full of apples or pears or tortilla chips. The men and women on the line ate whatever was offered and they were thankful.
It was obvious to Ross that the line couldn’t hold without airpower and when the President took it away, a fifty mile stretch disintegrated. In minutes, Sergeant Ross was no longer a company commander. He wasn’t even a platoon leader. He was just one man standing in the breach so the rest could flee and find whatever shelter they could.
When the President heard about the debacle, he said to the junior officer, “That’s what they get for rebelling against the President of the United States of America. Maybe the other states will fall in line and finally respect my authority. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes sir,” the junior officer answered in a hollow whisper.
Right at that moment, the President was the ultimate master of life and death, and he knew it. He had finally achieved greatness!
“Yes,” he said, with a beaming smile. “It is right and that’s because I am right.” It was as simple as that in his mind.
Perhaps the least of humanity was Truong Mai. There wasn’t much left to him. The radiation from the nuclear bombs had taken all of his toes and three of the fingers on his right hand. His left arm had been sloughing off bit by bit and it was now only a stump. He had one eye left, no ears, lips or nose. He was a horror of being to look upon, and yet he had walked twenty miles and hadn’t seen a soul.
The countryside of China was vast and seemingly empty. The people had fled into the interior, most on foot. They had walked all night with whatever possessions they could carry. Some had televisions on their backs, some had family heirlooms. Most had luggage. They had been weighed down and after twenty miles, they couldn’t go any further.
There were five million refugees strung out in a wide arc surrounding the blast zone—and Truong walked square into the middle of that arc. People were everywhere, mostly sleeping, but a few were cooking over smoky little fires. They thought they were safe, after all, the government had declared victory. A new holiday was being created and parades were being planned.
Not a single one of the peasants cared about such things. All they cared about was what they were going to eat that night and where they were going to live and what had happened to Uncle Qe or Cousin Soun? Parades were for capital people, not for peasants in the provinces.
Truong had his pick of victims, but he wasn’t choosey. He fell on the first person he came to, a middle-aged man with a bowl haircut, swollen feet and a saggy belly that was painfully empty. He had been sleeping in the shade of a willow with twenty others and they all came awake when he suddenly screamed.
His scream was out of revulsion and not pain. Truong’s few remaining teeth had fallen from his rotted gums the moment he had bitten down. They had barely broken the skin, only a tiny scratch—but that was all it took for everything to start all over again.
The End
***
Author’s Note
Thank you so much for reading The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it. If so, I’d like to ask a favor: the review is the most practical and inexpensive form of advertisement that an independent author has available in order to get his work known. If you could put a kind review on Amazon and your Facebook page, I would greatly appreciate it. I will also choose my favorite reviews and send the reviewers a signed copy of the book as a thank you.
Peter Meredith
PS If you are interested in autographed copies of my books, souvenir posters of the covers, Apocalypse T-shirts and other awesome Swag, please visit my website at https://www.petemeredith1.com
Yes, there will be a Crusade Day 5, but while you are waiting, you’re probably wondering what to read in the meantime. You could go with my Undead World novels that have over 2,000- five star reviews. A lot of people seem to like them. Or you might try my new series: The Gods of the Undead, but be forewarned: there is an obscene amount of blood spilled and skin flayed and love lost and all sorts of sadness. On the other hand there are also heroes and heroines, bravery and sacrifice. And there’s adventure that spans the world as two people fight the undead from New York to darkest Africa.
As many stories do, it starts small with just one man.
The Edge of Hell
Gods of the Undead, A Post-Apocalyptic Epic
Prologue
Alex Wilson
Officer Alex Wilson had to pull his cruiser over. He didn’t need to, he had to. It didn’t matter that he was in the middle of a southbound lane on the FDR Drive. He had to see and he had to hear for himself what was happening.
He pulled over and cut the siren; the lights he left on, whipping around, cutting the night in blinding red and blue. At first, all he heard was the insane babble of the dispatchers—in three years on the force, he had never once heard fear in their voices. Normally, they spoke in lackluster tones that suggested they were bored to tears with their jobs.
Now, they were screaming into their mikes, ordering units from all over the city to converge on the bridges that spanned the East River, connecting Queens to Manhattan.
“What’s happening?” someone demanded over the radio. “Dispatch, say again, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know…I don’t know. I’m not supposed to tell, but…but they’re monsters, I think,” was the strange reply the unknown officer received.
Alex flicked off the radio and sat still with his head cocked. Even through the heavy glass, he could hear the pop, pop, pop of gunfire, only it wasn’t just: pop, pop, pop. It was a thousand pops going off all at once. Feeling a sudden churn in his guts, he climbed out of the cruiser and the sound of the battle assaulted him. He was a mile away with a wide river between him and the fire-fight and still the sound was frightfully urgent.
He didn’t rush off, however. The churning in his guts intensified, and only slowly he climbed back into the cruiser. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered and then stuck the car in gear. Gradually, he built up speed and far too soon for his liking, he was at the Queensboro Bridge and being directed to heel his cruiser in next to a row of forty others.
Even as he pulled in, another cruiser squeezed right up next to him and another pulled up next to that one. He slid out of the car, feeling his stomach twist, going beyond churning; it was a curdling sensation that made him feel sick.
The officer in the next cruiser beat him out, rushing to pop his trunk. “What is it?” he asked as Alex reluctantly opened the trunk on his cruiser.
Alex couldn’t answer at first; the sound of the guns firing was now mingled with screams. So many screams. “I-I don’t know,” he said after taking a gulp of air.
“They said monsters,” another officer said, a fake little laugh in his voice. It was a high, oddly girlish sound as if someone had a good hold of his balls and was giving them a healthy tweak.
Another officer further down the row of cruisers was screaming: “Masks! Get your damn masks on! Come on, damn it!”
Masks meant there were germs in the air…zombie germs. The idea that just breathing could turn him into one of them was horrible and Alex dug in his trunk for his protective mask. It came in a pouch that he buckled around his waist. It took three tries to snap in place and as he struggled with the simple buckle, the sound of the firing came closer and the screams grew ever more urgent and loud. People were dying right on the bridge and yet Alex felt as though he was moving in slow motion. He couldn’t seem to get his feet moving despite the urgency in the air.
Some of the officers were pulli
ng on their masks and others were hauling out shotguns or Colt M4s. Alex only had his 9mm Sig Sauer P226 and it felt altogether puny, certainly too puny to use against an army of undead.
He needed something bigger: a machine gun or a grenade launcher. Anything would be better than the pistol. “Hey,” he hissed to the officer who had pulled in next to him. “You don’t happen to have a…”
Just then, someone turned him around and screamed in his face: “Get to the line! Hurry!”
Alex was pushed and shoved onto the bridge where his fellow officers were lined up. There were forty or fifty of them, all looking green, all sweating and scared. Alex was sure he looked just as terrified. His hands shook as he tried to check on his second magazine. It dropped, clinking on the cement. Frantically, he scrambled for it. He was deathly afraid, but of what exactly, he didn’t know. He had no idea what they were facing and yet he was practically pissing himself.
Questions ran up and down the line: “What’s going on? What’s happening? What are they? Are they really zombies? Really?”
No one knew, but it wasn’t long before they found out.
The bridge stretched east toward Queens. Normally, a person could see across the half-mile span without a problem but just then, the far end couldn’t be seen. A swirling black cloud engulfed it. And it didn’t just hover over it, it advanced against a gentle westerly wind.
Within that unnatural black cloud were creatures masquerading as people. They shambled forward, bringing with them a horrid stench of decay. It was so bad that even the veterans of a hundred murder scenes ripped their masks out of their holders and pulled them on.
Gagging from the stench, Alex held his mask to his face, but didn’t put it on. The mask would cloud his vision and he needed to see what he was dealing with. Monsters was what the dispatcher had said. Seconds later, he saw that she had been wrong. These weren’t exactly monsters—they were zombies. They could be nothing else.
The creatures stumbling though the swirling darkness had been people at one time, only now they were the living dead. They were corpses somehow imbued with life. They limped along, dragging ropes of intestine and leaving long trails of blood and pus behind them. Their decayed and rotting flesh hung in ribbons off their bleached bones.
They were horrors that had no right to live and there were thousands of them.
Someone yelled: “They-they’re zombies! Aim for the head!”
Alex was way ahead of him. He had the mask in one hand and the Sig Sauer in the other. He peered down the iron sights, waiting until the leading wave of monsters was within thirty yards. He couldn’t miss from that distance.
A captain screamed: “Fire!” The line of officers let loose with a ragged volley, some using handguns, some shotguns and some M4s. Those zombies in the first line were staggered, many falling, causing the wave of undead to slow as it stumbled over them. More shots created more mayhem and the bridge became an obstacle course of black blood and rotting limbs which slowed the attacking monsters even more.
Alex shot his Sig Sauer dry and in the three seconds it took to reload, the zombies were ten yards closer. Strangely, the thunder of the guns going off all around him and the acrid stench of the spent gunpowder calmed his nerves to a degree.
It didn’t last.
A foul creature, grey and stinking of death, pushed itself over the mound of wriggling bodies and came for Alex. He aimed and fired, certain that he had hit the zombie in the head; however, it didn’t fall or even slow.
“What the hell?” he whispered and then took aim again and now at twenty yards he knew he was a good enough marksman to plug the bitch dead center. He caressed the trigger, there was a shock that ran up his arm to his shoulder, and then he saw the thing’s head rock back, bone and brain and unknown crap flying onto the bridge.
Again, it didn’t fall. It just kept coming closer and closer, close enough that Alex could see a gaping hole just off center of its forehead.
Alex wasn’t the only one just realizing that things were far worse than they realized.
“Oh, my God!” someone screamed. “They’re not dying!”
That wasn’t possible. In the course of two hours, the world had turned on its head and yet these were zombies, flesh-eating, brain-chomping, undead zombies and everyone knew that you could kill a zombie with a head-shot. That was supposedly a fact, and yet the zombies kept coming, seemingly impervious to any bullet. Even the creatures that had collapsed earlier, were fighting their way to their feet.
Movement out of the corner of his eye had Alex turning. Some of the men were running away! Everything was suddenly chaos. A few men ran, a few fired their weapons, a few stood there not knowing what to do.
Alex glanced down at his Sig Sauer for a brief moment, tempted to toss it away and run, but he managed to swallow his fear long enough to empty the gun into the corpse that was now only ten yards away. The 9mm blazed with orange flame as Alex hit the zombie with every round. It jerked with each strike, coming to a standstill almost within reach. Then the two just stared at each other; Alex trying to come to grips with this new reality, and the zombie trying to stand with a body that had been torn to shreds.
An officer next to Alex stood with his head wagging side to side, saying: “That ain’t possible.” His pistol sat useless in his hands.
Another officer, this one a round-bellied sergeant who had been too long at the desk, yelled: “Keep Firing! Keep firing!” He had a shotgun and when he pulled the trigger, the zombie in front of Alex flew back, its head coming off its shoulders. Every time the sergeant squeezed the trigger on the gun, his belly would jiggle and a zombie was blasted back.
Alex watched him with one thought in his head: I’m going to die. There were too many zombies and not enough men with shotguns. He started backing away. With only a pistol, he didn’t think he stood a chance. A second later, it rattled on the pavement as he turned to run. The sergeant caught him.
“Stand your ground!” he roared into Alex’s face.
“Give me your gun and I will!” Alex yelled right back. It was suicide to stand there with only a pistol. Already a dozen officers were screaming with zombies latched onto them, tearing them to pieces with their teeth alone. Those officers with shotguns and M4s were able to hold back the flood of walking corpses, but anyone with only a pistol was already running or dead.
The sergeant hesitated, seeing the truth of the situation around him, but somehow, he found the courage to hold out the shotgun. Alex eagerly snatched it and began blasting the walking dead. The shotgun was like a cannon, it thundered and flashed with every pull of the trigger, throwing body parts into the air.
Over and over he fired, his hands growing numb, the corpses piling up in front of him in a mound. When his gun ran dry, he fed shells from the bandolier on the strap, he had twelve shots left—they went in less than a minute. He turned to yell for more ammo, only to realize that he was all alone.
The line of officers had fallen. Some men had run off and some were being fed on by the creatures. The lucky ones had their throats torn out, the unlucky ones were being eaten alive, screaming at the top of their lungs.
Alex spun, desperate to escape; however, before he could take his second step, a grey hand with bloody fingers reached out from the pile of corpses and grabbed his ankle. He went down, the empty shotgun flying from his grasp. He tried to pull away, only the zombie had a grip of iron and a strength that was irresistible.
Slowly, Alex was dragged to the mound of corpses and pulled under, his screams growing more and more muffled until he was buried entirely and the teeth of a dozen zombies tore into him.
Fictional works by Peter Meredith:
A Perfect America
The Sacrificial Daughter
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four
An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2
Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3
The Punished
Sprite
The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1
The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2
To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3
The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1
The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2
The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3
The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4
The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5
The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7
The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8
The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9
The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10
The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One
The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two
Pen(Novella)
A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)
The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)
The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)
The Drawer(Short Story)
The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)
The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World
Table of Contents
The Apocalypse Crusade 4
The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead Page 40