The Shores Of The Dead: Omnibus Edition

by Josh Hilden

  “Everyone will eventually be issued a fighting pike.” The rough voice of Liam Harrison said, giving name to the new weapon. “Mr. Millette created the weapon and he says that he and his helpers,” he gestured to Benny and two of the engineering students, “Can make one an hour if they have the materials.”

  There was an impressed muttering from the group. Jennifer beamed at Benny, who was blushing in embarrassment. The first dozen were then passed out to the top melee fighters in the group. They were mostly the same ones who cleared the ground floor of the engineering building. Nathan looked at the weapon as if it had been crafted by the god Hephaestus and handed to him by Athena Herself.

  “There will be daily instruction on how to use the new pikes. Sgt. Sanford and Lt. Carson,” Liam gestured to Jennifer and Clay, “Will be the instructors. If we are going to act like a military unit as we head north, then we need to get organized and trained.” Most people thought that they heard a little excitement in his voice. “We need to begin conserving our ammunition until we establish a permanent base where we can manufacture replacement rounds. We need to begin using more melee weapons against the Dead.”

  That had been before they had left the city of Findlay as one group. Days were spent creeping up the highway, clearing wrecks and dealing with curious walking corpses took up more their time as they headed North than actual travel. Nights were spent finding safe lodging and attempting to get in some training and sleep. Slowly but surely they came together as a unit. By the time they left the interstate to search the City of Bowling Green for supplies, the I-75 Rangers were born.

  “This is Jennifer. We have survivors holed up in the football stadium, over.” Jennifer was leading the recon element, and her group had been the first to reach the city.

  “This is Liam. What is the situation? Over.”

  “General there are several hundred of the Dead around the stadium. Several living people are on the top of the stadium bleachers, they are waving their hands and I assume screaming their fool heads off.” Everyone could hear disgust in her voice. “The Dead are congregating directly under them, over.”

  “I don’t think we can leave them there, over.” Kyle said breaking into the conversation.

  “Do you have a plan? Over” Liam asked.

  “Same thing we did in Findlay, over,” Kyle replied.

  6

  Stadium Parking Lot

  November 3, 2012 (Day Seventeen)

  3:45pm EST

  “Hey, free fucking lunch!” Kyle screamed at the rotting and stumbling Dead. He and four other volunteers were perched on mountain bikes. Professor Hodges’ students had taken responsibility for modifying them when were salvaged from the school security building in Findley.

  The Dead slowly turned and saw the five mobile meals, quickly losing interest in the fools in the stadium. The first time that he tried this trick in Findley, he’d been ready to puke his guts out with terror as he watched the Dead slide toward him. This time was different. They’d all become hardened, and the act of confronting the Dead face to face was becoming the rule versus the exception.

  “Alright boys and girls, remember to keep the speed low and watch where you are going. It would fucking suck it you went face over handle bars and broke your arm.” Kyle sounded conversational as he bundled his long hair under his Dayton Dragons baseball cap.

  When the Dead were less than 20 yards away, the four of them set off across the parking lot at a gentle speed. It took 10 minutes till the Dead were far enough away for the rest of the Rangers to head to the stadium and clear the remaining Dead.

  Jennifer was the first to enter the stadium, and she nearly threw up at the stench that rose from the field. The sight that met her eyes as she stepped to the edge of the field was almost worse than the smell. There had to be at least 2,000 corpses stacked in the middle of the once green area.

  “The cops were using the field to stack the Dead for burning until the things finally fell apart.” A voice behind her said.

  Jennifer whirled around raising her pike to strike. Then she realized the person standing there was speaking and not moaning. But to look at the woman, it would have been difficult to tell the difference. She was dirty and smelled of death.

  “Why did you stay in here?” Jennifer asked. She turned and saw about another dozen or so dirty, smelly people.

  “We were students at the school before all this, working with the Red Cross, trying to help the injured and deal with the Dead ...” She gestured lamely at the field. “They told us they were going to get us out. By the time we realized no help was coming we were surrounded.

  “So what were you going to do, just starve to death in here? I mean Christ did you even try to fucking escape? My brother is out there leading those Dead bastards away from you, and you never even tried to save yourselves?” She was screaming at the end.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, and she broke into sobbing tears. Jennifer shook her head in disgust and headed back outside. Rangers poured into the stadium to extricate the survivors and anything of value.

  “You were a little hard on her hon.” Ben said as she walked toward the command Hummer.

  “They never even tried to escape.” She spat at him.

  “I know, but they needed our help. They were scared and not everyone is strong like you, Jen.” He was attempting to sooth her and she let him, she knew she needed him. He took her in his arms, and she kissed him before he could kiss her.

  Kyle and the other riders returned as they broke their long kiss and the moment of serenity. Jennifer jumped when she felt a movement in her abdomen. Benny had headed over to talk to Kyle and she ran over to tell them, her daughter had just kicked.

  There was still a reason to go on.

  Chapter Five

  1

  Base Camp of the I-75 Rangers

  South of Belleville Michigan

  November 8, 2012 AD (Day Twenty Two)

  1:30pm EST

  It’d been a while since they heard a live broadcast. The last repeating one they investigated had been at the University of Toledo. They’d intended to skirt the city as a unit, but when the distress message from the university told them the people there were sitting on a ton of pharmaceuticals, a recon party was dispatched. Jennifer led a squad into town, and they found that the barricades at the University had been down for days. They managed to rescue one terrified janitor who’d locked himself in the staff kitchen at the medical school.

  The problem had been that the rest of the Rangers were dug in west of the city on the edge of the suburbs when they’d been attacked by a thousand or more of the Risen Dead. They managed to fight them off, but half a dozen of them had either been bitten or killed outright before the melee was finished.

  The trip remained quiet until they reached the cross over for Interstate 94 between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. That was when they received the first transmission from the small lake side city of Belleville.

  “This is the City of Belleville to any still living outside our barricades. Do you read me? We have been trapped inside the city for more than a week and we are surrounded by the Dead, all contact with the state and federal governments has been broken. We have power and water but we are desperately low on food. We have exhausted our fuel and ammunition reserves and we are unable to break the siege. Please, we have children here and we need help.”

  The voice crackled through the speaker in Liam’s Hummer for the sixth time in the last 40 minutes. Across the savaged landscape that had been small town America, they could see the wall sentries watching them with binoculars. The people of Belleville knew they were hearing the broadcast.

  “Shouldn’t we answer them?” Scarlet asked Kyle as the bulk of the Rangers milled around the command vehicle. They’d already established the camp, and nobody wanted to think about heading out to look for supplies until it got darker. They’d all decided the fear they felt of the dark was worth enduring to take advantage of the hideously poor eye sight of the Risen D
ead. The debate was still raging, especially with the survivors from Bowling Green, as to what senses the Risen Dead used to hunt their prey. Some of them thought that waiting till dark might actually be helping the Risen Dead.

  “Maybe, but I think Liam wants to be sure they aren’t going to feed us to the Dead in order to save themselves.” Kyle was only half listening as he watched the horde writhe and push against the improvised earth and debris barrier around the southern portion of the city’s downtown core. It was surrounded on three sides by water, and recon had shown the bridges and causeways were all blown except for the four lane blue monster on the northern edge of the city, which was heavily barricaded and manned by defenders with fire hoses. The city still had electric power, which seemed to be coming from an ancient hydroelectric plant. It wasn’t clear if the plant was automated, or if there were people there keeping the turbines moving.

  Everyone strained to listen as the voice continued.

  “Please respond, this is Jeremy Lang and I am the chairman of the city council, and we are in need of assistance. We can see you encamped south of our position, and I am certain that you are hearing us. We are willing to trade you anything that we have, if only you can get to us and allow us to escape.”

  Kyle reached over and turned down the volume of the radio when he saw Liam get to his feet. “OK everyone, let’s talk.” Liam said and the adults of the group gathered around the Hummer minus the five Clay Sanford chose to watch the area outside the circle. “They seem to have a really strong position inside the barricades, and we need a few days of rest.”

  Liam looked a lot older to Kyle now than when they first met in Dayton. The man had been as good as his word. He kept their little group of survivors who fled the carnage of the fall of Wright Patterson together all the way through the rotting core of the Buckeye state. And he managed to get people to come with them who had skills that would be useful when they reached the Upper Peninsula and stopped running. If anyone asked Kyle, he would have admitted he was more afraid of the coming day when they planted their flag and defended the chosen ground as opposed to running. At least when they were running, they never stayed in one place long enough to attract too many of the Dead or to rouse the curiosity of bandits.

  Clay Sanford was the first to speak, the former Ohio National Guardsman was believed by the rest of the survivors to be the most experienced fighter in the group. Kyle had learned during a shared guard rotation near Monroe, Michigan, that Clay was convinced Liam Harrison had more combat experience than everyone in Clay’s old guard company put together.

  “General, we are going to have to divert as many of those things away from the gates as possible before we make our move. Going in there shooting will exhaust most of the ammo we have at the moment. We are going to have to treat this like Findlay and Bowling Green.” Sgt. Sanford’s command of the Armory was absolute, and if he said that they would be out of ammo after such a fight, it could be considered gospel.

  “I’m not so sure that is a good idea,” Jennifer said. “In the other two operations, there were far fewer of those things in a much more open area. If we send more than a couple of runners out there they will be tripping over themselves trying to get away.” She gestured to the environment, “Everything here is tightly packed, homes and businesses are butted right up against the lake. The mountain bikes are a no go there are wrecks and obstructions everywhere.”

  “And we still don’t know for sure how they hunt.” Dr. Jason Aten said. The Air Force Doctor had been clinical and to the point even before the horror at Wright Patt AFB, but since then he seemed to grow more and more detached from the situation. “Yes, they will follow a man across the open, but why? We have observed specimens with no eyes that have managed to follow a person with no problem.” They’d discussed the question from every angle and they had no satisfactory answer. Kyle still held to the theory that they had some sort of sixth sense that allowed them to “see” the auras or life force of a living person.

  “Even if we don’t know the why we do know the end result. One person on foot should be able to lead them away and then double back with little problem as long as they are careful.” Clay said.

  For the next 10 minutes they debated the "who" and the "how" when a voice spoke up.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Everyone turned and looked at Kyle. He was the person a lot of them came to when they had problems, and now he was volunteering for a potential suicide mission. He looked around at the expressions on the faces of his friends and loved ones, on the faces of his new family. “I’ve done it before, and if I’m careful this shouldn’t be any more dangerous. I’ll just need to give myself more time to get back.”

  Liam Harrison nodded at him and gave a small smile. Many of the others looked at him with a little awe and a lot of respect but one person did not. Scarlet Parker looked as if she wanted to kill him.

  2

  South of Belleville Michigan

  November 8, 2012 AD (Day Twenty Two)

  4:30pm EST

  The plans were made and the decision was firm, but Kyle was having a problem convincing Scarlet of that. He knew she needed to have her say, but he thought she must know there was no changing his mind. They’d been sharing a sleeping bag continually since Findlay, but there had never been time to have a real conversation. He though a lot of what was coming at him had been building up since then.

  “Why do you have to be the one to do this?” Scarlet demanded. “Damnit, Kye, you are not a soldier, there isn’t anyone saying that you have to be the bait. Let Benny do it, or one of those assholes from Bowling Green.” She didn’t really mean the asshole comment, the former students and Red Cross workers from the University were good people, even if they did have a tendency to talk like everyone else was uneducated and they had teach them. The only person they seemed to respect was Kelly Hodges.

  Kyle made a giant mistake and allowed her through his mental defenses. He looked right into her green eyes, and everything in his heart screamed at him not to do it. But he knew in his head he was the one best suited for the task. Benny was still shaky from the concussion in Dayton, and Liam didn’t trust anyone else to run interference for the group. This wasn’t like Bowling Green or Findlay, they needed someone with endurance and stamina to do this. It might have been a few years, but Kyle had been a hell of a runner.

  “Scarlet,” He started and then realized he had no argument that would satisfy her so he just started talking. “Benny was never as fast as me even when he wasn’t hurt. And I don’t trust anyone else to do this.”

  “Bullshit!” She yelled and everyone within earshot tried hard to pretend that they weren’t listening to the argument. “You just want to impress Liam, you just want him to know that you are as tough as anyone, you just want to prove you’re not a coward. Well here’s a news flash for you dumbass, NOBODY BUT YOU THINKS YOU’RE A COWARD!” Huge tears ran down her face making trails in the dirt and dust that coated all of them, but they were tears of anger and the rage that had birthed them burned on her young and beautiful face. “There are at least 2,000 of those fucking things down there, and you’re just going to walk out into the open and let them chase your skinny ass, are you fucking crazy or are you just retarded?!”

  “Someone has too.” He said quietly.

  “Then take a fucking bike!” She jabbed her hand into his chest as she said that.

  “We would be risking the bikes by breaking them out in this environment, and I would be worried I would have to ditch it anyway. Besides that, I am the fastest one here.” He wanted to say he wouldn’t do it. He wanted to take her in his arms.

  He reached for her and she started hitting him. He caught several fists in the chest and shoulders and two slaps across the face before he got his arms around her, arms that were thicker and stronger than they’d ever been in his entire life. He pulled her tight, and before he knew what he was doing, he was talking and the words that poured from him seemed to have a life of their own.
>
  “I love you Scarlet. I love you more than I ever thought I could love someone in my entire life. I don’t even care if you feel the same way, but if something does happen, I need you to know that I love you. I can’t trust anyone else to do this, because if it doesn’t work those things could swarm us and you could die.” He was crying now, and she had seized up against him and was crying so hard that her next word could barely escape from her spasming throat.