He heard another explosion on the far side of town, beyond the northern barrier. I hope that was Casey hitting an IED, he thought, then started shouting and waving his arms. He was nearing the wall, trying to draw attention to himself from the men and women frantically working to set up more machine guns and make repairs. They saw him and waved him on. It took them a few minutes, but someone finally grabbed an aluminum ladder from the inside and dropped it down for him to climb. He got to the top, just starting to get his breath back.
“How are we doing?” he asked between pants. “How many dead?”
“A lot,” a woman answered. “We didn’t know they had rockets.”
“We’ll never stop the horde,” another man said resignedly as he came to the top of another ladder with his arms laden with ammo cans. “There’s too many.”
He started back down to get more bullets, though. His prediction of failure not stopping him from doing everything in his power to kill as many as they could.
Gunny stood, grabbed a pair of binoculars from the shot-up guard shack and surveyed the land before him. The rail-bed was a solid mass of the undead, pulled in from Dallas and everywhere else. The train was shot to shit, pouring fuel and oil out all over the ground. He couldn’t use it to lead them off. The fastest runners were already at the trenches, but they would fill up with bodies soon enough. In another ten minutes the main horde would be spreading out and running across the fields at the walls. They would keep piling into the trenches, and in no time they would run right across a human bridge. Next, they’d start stacking up against the wall, climbing all over each other in their attempts to get at the untainted blood. Another ten minutes and there would be so many piled up, they’d be flowing over the top. He knew Cobb had organized a retreat. They’d gone over plans for a worst-case scenario. There was a train already warmed up and idling in the center of town for everyone to pile into. The old, and very young, the sick and injured, should already be in and waiting. They would have to abandon Lakota. They’d be back, though. They’d retreat, regroup, and fight another day. They’d made it this far, this was just a setback. The main thing was the people. They had to save the people. Every life counted and there was no use throwing any away if a battle was unwinnable. Ten thousand zombies running at your walls was unwinnable. All they could do was take out as many as they possibly could before the retreat order was given. The more they killed now, the easier it would be later.
The man carrying ammo topped the ladder again and set another twenty-five hundred rounds of loaded AR magazines down with a grunt.
“Is the train ready?” Gunny asked no one in particular. “You guys have your retreat routes planned out?”
“We’re retreating to the courthouse,” the woman said as she set another M-60 up on a tripod and ran screws into the top of the container. “We just got word a few minutes ago. Whoever those people were that came through here left us a little thank you present on their way out. They used a rocket launcher to blow up the train tracks just north of town.”
It took a lot to surprise Gunny anymore, but this did. Casey had trapped them. He had seen the train being loaded as he drove through to make his escape, and decided he didn’t want them to leave. He wanted to kill the whole town. Gunny’s knuckles popped as he clenched his fists in rage. That low-life scumbag bastard, he thought, his mind filling with images of him beating Casey to death with his bare fists.
“We hold in place until we can’t hold anymore, then we run for the Courthouse,” she finished, and started linking belts of ammo together to feed into the gun.
Gunny grimaced and glassed the field once again, estimating the time they had before the full-scale retreat. How long after the undead came over the wall would it be until the bodies piled up high enough to break through the upstairs windows at the courthouse, he wondered. Not long. There were enough in this horde to stack all the way up to the roof. They weren’t going to win this fight.
Gunny looked far to the right, toward the end of the wall. Towards his house. Lacy was here somewhere. He’d like to see her before this was all over. At least Jessie was still out in the wild. Maybe he could set up a new town, with General Carson’s help. He had already made a name for himself in just a few short weeks. He was a good kid. Gunny wished he could see him one last time, too.
At least the damn jihadi problem was solved, he thought. He was pretty sure that most of the fighters in the States had been at this battle. The fields were littered with bodies, thousands of them. With the attack on their border walls and cities in the Middle East, they wouldn’t be coming back to American shores for hundreds of years. Maybe never. They were as broken as the rest of the world.
Gunny looked back at the town, at the useless train now sitting in the middle of it. They were going to lose it all.
The last city.
The electric lights.
The clean drinking water.
The cell tower broadcasting Bastille’s goofy radio shows nationwide.
The gas station with the fuel to run the trucks.
All gone because a madman couldn’t stand for someone else to have something he didn’t.
I should have just shot him the minute I saw him, Gunny thought. Let the chips fall. He knew why Cobb was having them retreat to the courthouse. It was the only plan he could throw together in the ten minutes or so they had. Wasn’t enough time to get everyone crammed into truck trailers. Most of them were still fully loaded with supplies anyway, they just didn’t have any empty ones here in town. Most of the cars had been driven out into the surrounding areas and parked, no one wanted a car cluttering up their garage anymore. Bicycles and golf carts were how everyone got around now.
Gunny ground his teeth and looked back over the town, trying to find an answer, a way out for seven hundred people. They should have had buses. Or empty trailers. Or ferry boats. Or something. He spotted the reefer units still full of frozen beef and refrigerated vegetables from Dozer and the Hutterites. The tanker at the gas station.
Gunny stopped and looked back.
The tanker.
He had an idea. Maybe.
“Is that tanker still full?” he asked.
No one knew, so he grabbed the radio and hailed Cobb.
Scratch came back on.
“He’s busy. What do you need Gunny?”
“The wagon at the gas station. Is it still loaded?”
“It is. Came in yesterday,” Scratch said. The Sisters had him on light duty, he was supposed to be helping with the clerical work at the courthouse when he wasn’t annoying everyone in the free world with his radio show. He was in a guard shack on top of the wall, laying out magazines for his M-4.
“Plan B,” Gunny said. “Tell them to make sure the main gate is clear in a few minutes, I’m going out.”
He ignored the questions Scratch shot back at him, nearly ran down the ladder and jumped into the idling vehicle they were pulling the last of the ammo out of. He didn’t even close the door, just hit the gas and cut the wheel, letting inertia slam it shut. He floored it, the little pickup truck nearly getting airborne when he left the road and tore out across the field toward his house. Gunny drove like a bat out of hell, fighting nerves and fighting time. This would work, he told himself. Damn right, it would. It had to. He slammed to a stop in his driveway, next to his tired and broken Peterbilt. The puddle of tranny oil was bigger, but he saw that Lacy had thrown a bag of kitty litter on it to soak it up.
I’m going to hear about this, he thought as he climbed aboard, taking the huge step over the missing battery box step. She hates stains on her driveway.
The key was in the ignition, right where he’d left it, and the old girl fired right up. He revved her hard to build up the air pressure and before the buzzer went off, he heard Griz hailing him on the radio.
“Got a plan, Boss?” he asked when Gunny acknowledged.
“Gonna take the tanker from the gas station outside the wall. Let the zombies play in it,” he replied. “The
y clearing the front gate?”
He had enough pressure built up to move the truck and pushed the air brake button in. He grabbed reverse and blindly backed out. Both mirrors were broken.
Griz was already at the station when he got there and was winding up the legs on the trailer as soon as he heard the fifth wheel jaws click in. Gunny jumped down to hook up the air lines, but Griz tossed him a heavy fireman’s suit instead.
“I got it,” he said. “Gear up.” Then he started connecting the hoses.
Gunny looked at the pile of heavy clothes and started to protest. “I’m planning on dropping the wagon, not burn up with it.” Griz had that fatalistic look, like things were bad and only going to get worse. The same look he’d had right before he jumped off the bridge yesterday. Or was that two days ago? Gunny couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember when the last time he’d actually laid down to sleep, either. Real sleep, with boots off and everything.
“I know all about your Plan Bs.” Griz said and jerked his chin toward the silvery clothes. “Get dressed.”
If was quicker to just do it than argue, so he started stripping down and putting on the suit. It had tight-fitting pants and shirt similar to long johns that went on under the primary set of clothes.
“This doesn’t look like typical fireman’s outfit,” Gunny said as he pulled on the crinkly pants.
“It was in one of the closets at the Fire Station,” Griz said and helped him fasten the jacket. “Forest fire gear. Supposed to be better.”
There was a pullover mask, but Gunny tossed it in the seat, he probably wouldn’t be needing it anyway.
“What’s the plan, how you gonna light this up?” Griz asked as he made sure the joints on the suit were sealed properly.
“I figure I’ll crack the caps open when I leave the gate then drive into the middle of the horde. I’ll spread as much gas as I can over a big area. They’ll all follow the truck once they notice it. I’ll pop the trailer release valve, toss a road flare and get the hell out of there. They’ll burn fast, man. They’ve been dead for months, they’re like mummies,” Gunny said, pulling on the skin-tight gloves.
“Good plan,” Griz deadpanned. “How do you get out? You gonna outrun a fireball?”
“I’ll have the back of the Pete against it, should be all right.”
He grinned, but Griz wasn’t amused.
“That’s a shit plan,” he said.
“I know, ” Gunny said, getting serious for a minute. He opened his toolbox on the side of the truck and pulled out a handful of road flares. “But it’s all we got.”
The two men stared into each other’s eyes for a moment.
“We’ve been on some pretty good teams over the years,” Griz said. “Me and you’s always been the survivors.”
“I ain’t dead yet,” Gunny said. “And half our team is still in Atlanta. We need to go get them when I get back.”
Griz quietly nodded, then Gunny turned to climb up into the cab. Griz helped shove him in, over the giant first step.
“You need to get Tommy to fix that,” he said as Gunny slammed the door.
Gunny smiled down at him. “I’ll do that as soon as I get back. Hey, they’ve got flare guns on top of the wall, in the guard shacks,” he said.
Griz looked up at him.
“Just in case,” Gunny said.
There was a long pause before Griz answered.
“Just in case,” he finally agreed and they bumped fists as Gunny dropped it in gear.
52
Gunny
Griz had taken the shortcut through the fields and was already at the gate when the tanker pulled up. Gunny could hear the screams of the undead on the other side of the sally port as he hurried into the central area and hit the brakes. Griz waved for him to stay in the truck as he ran to the tanker and started popping the caps and throwing open the levers. Nine thousand gallons of gas began splashing out. He slammed the safety bar back down and gave him a thumbs up as he ran back to the interior gate. Back to safety. Gunny hammered on it and bounced over the bullet-riddled bodies, getting the truck and the gurgling gas away from town as fast as he could. The machine guns stopped chattering as he ran through the gears. They didn’t want a stray round to light the whole place up before he could drench down the main horde. It was almost on top of them, thousands upon thousands, running and stumbling for the town just a few hundred yards down the railroad tracks. Some were streaming in from the road, but the vast majority were still on the rail-bed There were bodies strewn everywhere across the field, the fastest runners and the remains of the Muslims, all cut down by the guns on the wall. Soured black blood, mixed with the fresher scarlet, already seeping into the soil. The sun was almost below the horizon. In the twilight, the gibbous moon was already making an appearance, as if to watch the struggle unfold. The mob attacking the truck was relentless and innumerable. Thousands of undead had been running for days for the promise of blood and there it was, just a few inches away, behind metal and glass. Gunny shifted gears and kept plowing through them, but he was already being buried. They were tumbling up over his plow and landing in broken-boned heaps on his hood. They slammed against the rebar welded over his windshield and screamed at him, forcing their faces between the rusty steel. Sometimes with cracked skulls, and half-rotted ears torn loose. They bit at the windshield and he was driving blind, trying to remember how close he was to the trench, and how far away the train was. If he could get near the locomotives then get the gas into the ditch, that was where he could inflict the most damage. They were swarming toward him and he blew the air horns, drawing them in. Letting them know dinner was coming. He couldn’t tell if he was still on the dirt road that paralleled the trench, or in the field, the truck was rocking violently as he crushed bodies and ground them under his wheels. Thousands of them jumped and leaped and clamored for a handhold on the rig, and he had to drop another gear to keep his momentum up. Hundreds of gallons of gas poured out of the valves, mixing with the blood of the fallen. The trailer started to bog down in the churned-up dirt and the dozens of corpses being caught up in the axles. The wall of bodies in front of him was getting deeper, and he was starting to think he might not make it all the way to the trains. The motor was screaming as he tried to keep his speed up, and the old Pete kept driving them down, sending bodies tumbling. He heard a ripping, chunking sound over the roar of the engine, and knew one of the corpses had been crammed up under the hood. He heard the fan blades ripping it to shreds, tearing the belts loose, breaking the shroud, and sending debris slicing into his radiator. Gunny held nothing back, he kept the tach in the red zone as he fought for every foot of ground, bouncing over hundreds of clawing bodies. This old girl had treated him well over the years, had kept a roof over their heads, food on the table, and had never left him stranded on the side of the road. This was her last ride and Gunny knew it was his, too. He split a gear and kept her moving.
He had to be almost there, had to be almost to the train and the center of the horde. He’d slowed a lot, he was going less than twenty, and couldn’t force any more speed out of her. The tires were churning up dirt and blood and guts, and spraying rooster tails of gore. Gunny wasn’t even trying to steer arcs around them anymore, to spread the fuel to engulf as many as possible. He could barely steer as the tires rolled over the undead, half the time they were in the air, or squishing through gut-slick bodies. It was like driving on ice, and there were so many on the hood, it made seeing where he was going nearly impossible. From what he could see out of the side window, he knew he was bouncing his way toward the trench. The truck was straining and he split another gear. It wouldn’t be long before they ground him to a halt. He pulled on the mask, it was going to be soon now, and reached for the road flares. He knew if he popped the brakes to drop the trailer, he’d never get moving again. There were too many of them, he’d never grab traction in the bloody mud. Once he stopped, it was over. Should have disconnected that safety years ago, he thought. If he could get to the t
rains, if he could add their fuel to the blaze, he might kill enough of those things to give the town a fighting chance. There were still thousands of gallons left in the tanker, though. When it blew, maybe it would send flaming debris into the diesel spills.
He hadn’t planned to go out this way, blown up in a fireball while fighting zombies in a truck with the engine over-revving, temperature gauge climbing fast, white steam hissing from under the hood, tranny out of oil, the gears protesting, and black smoke belching out of the stacks. He wanted to die at home in his bed, surrounded by family. He felt weightless for a second, like that feeling he got when the roller coaster slowly made its way over the first and tallest hill and started its descent. Gunny floated out of his seat before slamming back down as the truck flew over the edge of the trench. The blade caught the dirt and crumpled, the hood folding in and the cab twisting, breaking the welds on the rebar and sending them flying. He felt the trailer splash open and pull the truck violently over on its side, whiplashing him through the shattered windshield. He slammed into a pile of the undead jammed between the crumpled hood and the twisted blade. They recovered fast and were coming at him with shattered legs and crushed bodies, but he was faster, leaping away from their reaching hands. His heart was in his throat as he looked around for the road flares. He had let go of them, they could be anywhere.
Plan B then. Or was it C?
He sprang to the edge of the trench and threw himself over, getting away from the thousands of gallons of gas splashing out of the tanker. Griz’ll shoot it with the flare gun, he thought. He just had to get far enough away that the blast wouldn’t blow him to bits. He might actually live through this, after all. He started running, but only made a few yards before he stumbled over a rut cut by his spinning tires and was tackled to the ground, a snapping biting thing trying to tear through the heavy fabric of the fire suit. He punched out but another body landed on him. Then another and soon he couldn’t even move as dozens of hands and teeth tried to tear into him. It was getting hard to breathe, he was being crushed.
Zombie Road III: Rage on the Rails Page 32