by Joshua Guess
He turned to his own team. One was Kelsey, the other a younger man Kell didn’t know well at all named Juan. “I have the longest arms, so let me stay in front. Step in if I get mobbed, and always speak up with what side you’re on so I don’t accidentally hit you. No heroics. Just work together and we’ll be fine.”
Kelsey nodded, perhaps a little nervously, but the young woman was seasoned enough to not let the fear rule her. Juan grinned.
“Just try not to put one of those big elbows in my face, okay? I’m too pretty.”
“Yes, you’re gorgeous,” Kell said. “Don’t get cocky. Your face isn’t going to stop a zombie unless it’s as a snack.”
Shapes emerged through the trees as the sounds of approach reached a crescendo.
“Here we go!” Kell boomed over his shoulder.
He moved toward his assigned stretch of barrier. There weren’t enough people to allow everyone to remain static, so each triad covered a given length of the makeshift wall. Kell was happy to do it. While Emily was better at fighting than him, she was also a more capable leader. She assigned groups, organized the support teams made up of the refugee kids, and ran the show.
For once it was nice to have everything be simple. Point him at a target and let him fight.
The first zombie bumped up against the side of a truck. The hood reached its chest, but the starving thing didn’t notice or care. Its arms stretched over the smooth metal, clawing strips of paint away as it tried to pull itself over. Kell, unworried about the paint job, silently thanked the dead man for making it easy. His baton sang through the air and slammed home, its weighted end making easy work of the zombie’s skull.
“Back up, boss,” Juan said, and Kell did.
The young man crouched with his crowbar and thrust it toward the ground beneath the truck two-handed. Only when he’d stepped back far enough could Kell see the zombie that had tried to slip under. Juan’s strike hadn’t quite done the job—the angle was terrible—so Kell snatched the stunned zombie by its outstretched arm and yanked it forward.
“On your right,” Kelsey said, followed by a beautiful kick worthy of any NFL punter. Her boot caved in the side of the skull and, unless Kell missed his guess, snapped its neck in the process.
“Nice one,” Kell said. “Come on, Juan. Let’s push him back under.”
The work had just begun. The woods made it difficult for the swarm to become a flood, but there were definitely more of them than Kell would have liked. It wasn’t the sort of combat you wrote home about with astounding play-by-plays, but closer to chopping wood. A necessary, repetitive, and fairly safe way of getting the job done.
“Son of a bitch!” Juan shouted a few minutes later when a New Breed zombie burst through the woods at a run, and being faster, smarter, and stronger than its old school brethren, managed to hurl itself neatly across the hood of a car.
Kell shoved the younger man to the side and threw himself into the zombie with a hard shoulder block. Fear exploded through him in an unexpectedly powerful torrent, sending a cold line of terror through his stomach and beyond. Kell tucked his head, not eager to get another scar.
Physics, unlike biochemistry or genetics, is a predictable set of rules. The zombie had momentum, but its body was dehydrated and thin, and the person it had been wasn’t much past average in size to begin with. Kell, on the other hand, was past six and a half feet tall and even in the food-poor conditions he lived in, still outweighed his enemy by a solid eighty pounds.
It wasn’t anything like unstoppable force meeting immovable object. The zombie bounced off Kell, its back slammed against the fender of the car it had slipped over.
He raised his head just in time to see Kelsey flow into the narrow space between Kell and the dead man and jam her knife into its eye before it could find its bearings.
“Thanks,” Kell said. “That’s twice now. I’m gonna have to get you a medal when we’re done.”
His tone was light, but his heart continued to hammer. Memories of the day his face was ruined appeared and were pushed away in constant blips and flashes. He tried to stay cool, but it was nearly impossible.
“Hey, man,” Juan said, putting a hand on Kell’s arm. “You’re okay. Nothing to be ashamed of. I almost shit my pants just then. You’re okay now.”
Kell nodded, knuckles cracking as they gripped the baton even harder. “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m good.”
It was an obvious lie, but the others didn’t call him out on it.
If there was an advantage in having to fight for your life and work for your food after the fall of civilization, it was the conditioning. Kell would have rather fought a brief, intensely violent struggle that was over in a few minutes than the hours-long slog of slow, grinding activity that followed.
The defenders didn’t take stupid risks, which meant no one leaping over vehicles to fight among the dead. It was something Kell might have done—had done—in the past, but the years had given him patience. The only element of such a risk he would have preferred was getting it over with quickly.
“Here’s some water,” Kell said, handing a canteen to Kelsey, who slugged back a mouthful before passing it to Juan. The kids serving as helpers were marvelously efficient, bringing food and water to the fighters, hauling dead zombies out of the way of using them to fill gaps in the wall, even treating wounds.
Kelsey wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “This is fucking crazy, man. Thirty seconds of fighting, two minutes of waiting for the next one to get close. How many of these things are there?”
“Could be thousands,” Kell said. “If they followed those soldiers, chances are the swarm attracted more zombies over time. That’s kind of how they become swarms.”
Juan shook his head tiredly. “We’re gonna need a break soon. I can barely lift my arms.”
There was not disagreement to be found. The work was unpredictable and full of so much stop and go that they never had time to get any real rest. Kell stopped being the primary in their trio half an hour in, letting the other two rotate to the front as needed. It helped stave off the worst of the exhaustion creeping through their bones, but the woods were still full of approaching forms.
No rest in the near future.
Juan stood and put his fists into his lower back, arching as he popped the vertebrae. He stared out forlornly through the trees. “Back to it?”
“Yep,” Kelsey said, accepting a hand up. The pair of them gave Kell a lift, and once he was on his feet the water seemed to move around in him a bit. He knew it wasn’t really that, but the small burst of energy as his circulation improved was welcome enough that he bought fully into the self-delusion.
Kell was back in the front when a zombie rushing toward him caught his attention in a way that had little to do with how badly it wanted to eat him.
The rest of the swarm had the tattered or often entirely missing clothes of zombies long risen. This one, however, looked almost alive. Its body was covered in black fatigues and armor, though the torso was misshapen. A knife hung on its belt next to an empty holster. The dead man stood out from the rest like a bonfire at night, so obvious it almost hurt his eyes.
“Is that one of those soldiers?” Juan asked. “The ones who attacked us?”
“Must be,” Kell said, trying to figure out how one of them had come so far.
Kelsey suddenly burst into ugly, vicious laughter. “Oh, holy shit. Do you guys get it?”
Juan and Kell shared a brief glance and shrugged. As Kell leaned forward to club the zombie to death, she explained through fading bubbles of vindictive glee.
“Those fuckers must have left a truck behind. I’d bet anything they were going to try to sneak in with this swarm, just in case we had a fallback point somewhere nearby.”
Juan pulled the dead soldier across the hood by its limp arm, then nudged the body onto its back once it was on the pavement. “Wonder what happened to them?”
Kelsey knelt, measuring the dent in the hard armor with her hands
. “About the size of a steering wheel. I bet they crashed. The others might be out there, though I have no idea if they’re alive or what.”
“Probably dead,” Kell said. “If this guy got out of his vehicle, I’d guess the others did too. We’ll keep an eye out, but it’s pretty hard to imagine a crash powerful enough to kill someone outright left them in any shape to walk, much less march, and attack us.”
It was dusk before the seemingly endless swarm began to peter out. By then nearly everyone had accumulated injuries, many people had several. Kell had missed a swing badly and got a nasty bite on his calf as a result, though his pants hadn’t ripped. The force of it still broke the skin, though, and the ache was a hell that only increased the longer he stood.
The last few zombies fell and no others appeared to replace them. The long spring days made it difficult to tell exactly how long they’d been at it, but the evidence was littered around the space. Piles of bodies, some haphazard, others stacked like cords of wood, were everywhere. Kell’s shoulders burned from pulling them over the barrier, but letting too many land outside it would only make climbing over easier for the zombies that came after.
“I think I’ll be able to sleep for the next week,” Kell said, easing himself into a crouch Sweat still coated his face, but only in a thin layer. No amount of drinking had been able to replace the water he’d lost from so much activity. “I think we’re going to drain the tanks tonight. Hopefully we’ll…”
“Multiple contacts!” screamed a voice from atop the van they used as a watch post. “Moving in fast!”
Kell bolted to his feet and was rewarded with a mild wave of dizziness. Every cell in his body begged for rest, food, and water.
Groans filled the air all around, turning to curses and not a few muffled sobs as the enemy appeared.
A dozen New Breed streaked forward at breakneck speed, too fast for the tired defenders to react perfectly. Most of them made it over the barricades at, Kell noticed, carefully chosen spots that were particularly low to the ground.
Juan and Kelsey backed away as the closest New Breed barreled toward them, setting themselves for combat.
Kell had had just about enough of this shit.
“I want a fucking nap!” he screamed. It wasn’t the best war cry, but was probably the most honest. Costing him an effort that felt ripped from his bones, Kell forced himself into a fiddly, difficult maneuver that required grace.
His left foot shot forward while his right remained planted. He rocked with it like a fencer, his torso shifting down and ahead. Timing was crucial, and Kell nailed it. His legs were going to hate him in the morning. Then again, maybe he’d just die. That would be nice.
The New Breed was too close and moving too fast when Kell dropped into this weird, crab-like lunge. Momentum carried the dead man into his grasp, though not for long.
Kell hooked an arm between its legs and pushed up and back as hard as he could, flinging the dead man over his head entirely. The New Breed were smart—smart enough to shepherd an entire swarm of zombies at the bunker to wear out its defenders, akin to tenderizing meat—and fast. They had coordination on par with an average living human.
But even normal people didn’t tend to react well to being treated like the stone tucked into the business end of a catapult. The zombie came down with a meaty crack, already scrambling to rise to its feet when Kelsey stomped on its neck so Juan could deliver the killing blow.
Kell lumbered forward, too tired to dip into the reservoir of fury he always carried around as survival fuel. The strain of the day prevented him from moving with the deliberation he’d have needed to kill with single strikes.
So he didn’t.
Instead he waded into the smaller but devilishly fierce newcomers and didn’t concern himself with killing them at all. He saw Andrea on her back, arms and legs tangled with the crouching New Breed trying to slam her brains into the pavement. She was intensely focused, using her limbs to hold off the attacker. Not many people had the talent and presence of mind to use Jiu-Jitsu on a zombie, but the slim woman managed it without apparent effort.
Still, Kell helped her along by kicking in the side of the zombie’s right knee as he walked by.
“Thanks,” Andrea said. “I got it now.”
“No problem,” Kell mumbled.
The next zombie was being held off by constant blows from baseball bats, batons, and other blunt objects. The four people trying to avoid being mauled couldn’t quite get past its tight defense. It was easy to protect your head with your arms if you were already dead and didn’t care how much damage your arms took.
Kell walked up behind it and drove an elbow into its lower back. The blow knocked the zombie forward, hands instinctively coming away to regain balance. Kincaid was one of the group, and swung his baseball bat down in a brutal overhead arc. He winked at Kell.
He moved on to the next.
Mason
One of Mason’s first instructors insisted there were only two types of combat. Mason disagreed. When asked by one of the many psychiatrists required to examine him why, his reply was that saying there were two ways of fighting was as asinine as saying there were two kinds of food. A short and heated discussion followed, during which the psychiatrist pondered the meaning of Mason comparing combat to life-giving nourishment, and Mason’s reply that sometimes a fistfight is just a fistfight and afterward you want a fucking sandwich.
He was right and the instructor was wrong, but it was a matter of degrees instead of kind. There were two very broad categories of combat, within each of which existed a spectrum. His teacher, a grizzled, hateful old bastard named Max, called them hard and soft fighting. Hard fighting was composed of pure science and solid math. An enemy was x distance away and required y amount of destruction to sort him out. Hard fighting was all about definitive facts.
Soft fighting centered on intuition. It relied on training, psychology, and a certain amount of innate talent at reading people and situations combined with a wide scope of knowledge. Mason was good at both. This wasn’t some revelation he’d come up with, but military doctrine that existed as long as standing armies had.
Which was why he wasn’t afraid of popping out of the drainage ditch in the middle of a firefight with smoke and fire everywhere like the world’s deadliest jack-in-a-box. Sure, a stray bullet could fly and hit him in the head and that’s it; lights out. But he might have an aneurysm forming in his brain, or a clog in his arteries, or a giant bird could fall out of the sky and impale him through his guts. The trick wasn’t somehow escaping the odds, which was impossible, but managing them.
Knowing the trick to moving the grate in the pipe meant no one would expect anyone to appear in the middle of the courtyard. The fact that Mason wore all black gave him a certain degree of camouflage, at least in the burning chaos and on a casual glance. Chances were, his scars would immediate call attention to him, but that moment of realization before reaction percolated through the brain and into the nervous system was something he was used to exploiting.
It helped that Greg and Allen drove their car through the roiling smoke and into the compound. Secondary explosions rocked the house in carefully chosen locations as the brothers circled it, tossing small homemade bombs. They weren’t shy with gunfire, either, which was returned unevenly.
Mason raised his rifle—not the beautiful long-distance affair he’d left behind, but an assault rifle—and moved in a wide lateral arc around the house. He put three-round bursts through the nearest window, which bellowed smoke as the glass shattered. A face appeared in it, attracted by the sudden thinning of the smoke, and the mercenary began to climb out.
Killing the man didn’t cause Mason to slow a bit.
Part of him shuddered at the thought of putting his back to the barn since any structure could serve as a potential hiding spot for his enemies, but he’d watched the place all morning. No one had moved more than a dozen yards from the main house. It seemed unlikely in the extreme these mercenaries
had the foresight and discipline to station men for hours at a stretch inside a half-destroyed building on the off chance someone assaulted the compound.
Managing risks sometimes meant taking them.
The car buzzed around the house and in front of Mason, then sped out through the missing section of fence. More sporadic gunfire spewed from the north side of the house, and fired at it from a shallow angle. Almost no chance he’d hit anyone. That wasn’t the point. Almost before the bullets were out of the barrel, Mason reversed course and sidled up close to the house in a crouch.
He came to rest at the corner, raised the rifle, and aimed at the door on the opposite side of the house from the windows he shot at. As predicted, the men inside saw the car speeding away and, not realizing someone was on foot inside the fence, took their chance to get out.
It was rotten luck that the first man out swept his weapon left instead of right, though through the haze and given the minimal silhouette Mason provided, he still might have missed seeing him. Mason fired another careful burst, stitching a line upward from elbow to neck.
The second man didn’t reel back fast enough and caught another burst. Mason’s aim had been hasty, however, and missed wide of the center mass and caught the man’s gun hand and weapon instead.
Whoever was behind was smart enough not to poke their head out, so Mason scuttled along the wall once more until he was a few yards from the doorway. He pulled a grenade, one of the few military issue ones left in the RV’s stores, and stepped out to toss it in a sidearm throw.
“Fuck!” someone bellowed inside.
A gout of smoke and shrapnel jettisoned from the door as a rolling wave of sound battered Mason’s ears. This was the worst part. The approach was hard, sure, but short of entering the grounds he could have run off at any time. The first minute of terrified confusion was when he was at his most effective. He could take advantage of the will to live overriding training and common sense, like the guy trying to climb through the window.