by Jack Hamlyn
NECROPHOBIA
Book #4: HELL CITY
Jack Hamlyn
NECROLOGUE
By that point, I wasn’t even sure how long all of it had been going on. Time seemed to have lost all meaning. I could only remember events.
I remembered my life in Yonkers with my son, Paul, and my wife, Ricki. I remembered that the first zombie I saw was Bill Deforest. He had been dead a week. I found him feeding on one of my neighbors. That’s how it had started for me. After that, the dead were everywhere, filling the streets. I remember hiding out in my basement with Ricki and Paul and Diane, Ricki’s sister. I remember that first night very well—the dead tore the neighborhood and our house apart and we trembled, waiting for them. The next day we headed out with another neighbor, Jimmy LaRue, and hooked up with my old friend, Tuck. Tuck, an ornery ex-Marine Vietnam War hero, had a survival bunker, a tower, and we did all right there until an air strike destroyed it. I remember the night we fled from it very well because that was the night the zombies got Ricki and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
We hid out at one place after the other. Long story short, we met a woman named Riley who had escaped from a school in the Bronx where she was being held captive by ARM (the American Resistance Movement) in a school that had become a sort of rape camp. We staged a raid on the school and got nearly all the women out of there. We were proud of that. I know I was. It was fights like that that kept me sane.
After that?
Well, one raid after another, always on the move as the dead stalked us and we fought running battles with ARM and countless other survivalist groups. I ended up on my own in NYC—the city of the dead—and fought street by street, house by house, only to be drafted by The Brigade and pressed into a zombie extermination unit. The entire idea was ridiculous, of course. There were millions and millions of zombies in NYC. Exterminating them one by one was an impossible task. Suffice to say I escaped to the Catskills to find my friends, ended up in a helicopter crash, was hunted by survivalists, befriended by a cannibal who fed me human meat (I didn’t know it at the time) and escaped again to hook up with Robin. Still trying to find my family, Robin and I fought outlaw bikers and zombies and were imprisoned in an ARM blood farm which was liberated by mutants. I’ll skip the maggot entity—it still makes my flesh crawl.
After all that, I found Tuck and the others or they found me and then we were heading back to the Catskills and the Silo. And the truly ugly part was that I had the worst feeling we weren’t going to make it.
DEAD ON ARRIVAL
“How long?”
Tuck smiled in the flashlight beam. “About ten more minutes, give or take. These babies have fifty gallon tanks, Steve. You can’t fill them in five minutes, you know.”
I knew, but I was worried. We were standing in the parking lot of a gas station that was long abandoned like everything else. Our armored vehicles—Guardian ASVs—were pulled up to the back of a big diesel tanker that had been left there probably during the primary Necrophage outbreak. In my mind, I could just about see the driver getting his rig into the lot to unload his tank, but he never did because he was infected. He probably died and rose up to walk amongst the ranks of the living dead.
That was the ugly reality of this brave new world of ours where dead things no longer stayed in their graves, but violated all the rules of tried and true natural science and walked again as flesh-eating zombies. It sounded like the plot of a bad movie or a cheap paperback, but it was true enough. God knew, it was true enough.
Tuck, ever resourceful, had spied the parked tanker when they had passed it the day before and made a mental note of it for refueling the Guardians. He and Jimmy handled it. It was really a matter of popping the locks on the tanker valves, then plugging the hose into the tanks of the Guardians and opening the valve with a wrench. It was strictly gravity feed so we didn’t need a pump.
But it took time.
More time, I thought, than we really had to spare.
Four hours before, Robin Arduccio—my teenage sidekick, you might say—and I had hooked up with Tuck and the others by sheer chance after we fled the hellzone of Perryville. We brought another survivor along with us, Sandy, and that brought our number up to eleven. We were spread out across the parking lot on perimeter guard. While the vehicles were refueling, we were very vulnerable and I think we all felt it.
I know I did.
We had put a lot of miles behind us, but we had a long way to go back up to the Catskills to the Silo. I had never been there. It was a situation Tuck and the others fell into during my absence. I was excited about it, though. Not just because of the security of the place and the people there—nice, normal people—and the fresh food and soft beds and hot showers, but because that’s where my son was. I had been gone from him for over six weeks by my figuring and maybe as much as two months. There was no way to know exactly. All that time while I was fighting to survive so I could get back to him he had thought I was dead.
To me, that was the greatest horror of all.
Paul had lost his mother to hordes of the walking dead and now he was living with the awful certainty that he had lost me, too. It was something I had been living with for a long time and it was eating me alive. I had already gotten on the radio several times, but even at long range it’s only good for about twenty miles and the Catskills, of course, play havoc with communications.
That’s why I was itching to get going again.
Every mile brought me closer to the point where I could communicate with the Silo and let him know I was all right. Patience. It was really just a matter of patience, but I was running real low on that. Feeling on edge, I walked over to Robin and bummed a cigarette from her. She and Ginny were talking about something very heatedly, but fell silent as soon as I got within hearing range. That made part of me paranoid, while another part really didn’t care.
“Thanks,” I said, getting a nice little kick of nicotine that sharpened my mind.
“Well, I’m always happy to be of service,” Robin said. “That’s what I’m here for.”
Ginny sighed.
I smiled. Sarcasm was part and parcel of who and what Robin was and it helped her keep her edge, you just had to learn not to take it too seriously. I scanned the parking lot, not really liking what I saw. Everyone stood around in little groups chatting, not paying much attention to what was going on around them. Scott and Seppy, two of the Silo crew I didn’t know real well, were chatting and laughing about something. Carrie and Sandy were leaning up against one of the Guardians. Diane and Sabelia were the only ones that looked vigilant, but both of them seemed more interested in me than any potential threat.
But I was okay. I had been through the ringer in the past six weeks and I looked rough. There was no denying that, but I was far from done in.
The minutes crawled by.
My nerves were getting worse. Something was bothering me. Whether it was the fact that we were on the outskirts of a little town which was always a threat or I just needed some damn sleep, I couldn’t be sure.
“Shit!” I heard Scott say. “They’re coming!”
We were all alert then and we had weapons in our hands. I saw right away what he was talking about. The dead were coming. And not just three or four of them but dozens coming from the direction of the town. They pushed a wave of hot putrescence before them as they came out of the darkness. We started shooting right away, dropping them as they came on.
“See if you can hold ‘em off a few more minutes,” Tuck said. “We almost got a full belly here.”
Easier said than done.
Diane climbed into the Guardian that was already fueled, turned it over and got the lights on so we could see just what sort of hell was facing us. It was bad, re
al bad. The zombies were coming in waves like breakers crashing onto a beach. There were hundreds of them and they were coming for us. We were doing a good job of dropping the scattered groups out in front, but there was no way we could hope to repel the bulk of them with nothing but M4 rifles. We needed heavier firepower.
Carrie climbed up into the turret, the remote weapons station, and sighted in on the deadheads with the M2 machinegun. She started firing into their ranks, .50-caliber rounds literally making them explode as she strafed them with short, economical bursts to save on ammo.
Everyone else had drawn back to the vehicles.
“All right, load up, everyone!” I called out. “There’s too many of them!”
They needed no further urging, climbing in through the side doors. By then, the zombies were filling the parking lot despite the fact that Carrie was cutting them down like trees. There was always more and more. Jimmy, Scott, Seppy, Ginny, and Carrie hopped into one Guardian and the rest of us climbed into the other.
The Guardians were great.
Make no mistake about it, but they were cramped. They were designed for four people—driver, commander, gunner, and dismount—not six. I remember guys in Iraq that loved them, but hated how tight they were inside, especially when they were outfitted in full battle rattle.
“Got it!” Tuck said.
He climbed in and we shut the doors. There were so damn many zombies that Ginny in the lead Guardian and Sabelia in ours, started blasting away with not only the .50-cals but with the 40mm grenade launchers, cutting us a path. Diane was driving our Guardian and I climbed into the right seat, the commander’s chair, and watched the action through the bulletproof windows.
“QUIT FIRING!” Tuck shouted at Sabelia in the turret. He pushed past me and got on the radio and told Jimmy pretty much the same thing, that he wanted no shooting.
“What the hell’s up with you?” Diane asked him.
“I’m conserving ammo. We’ll need it later.”
“So we’re just going to sit here and twiddle our thumbs?” Sabelia said.
Tuck turned to me. “Tell your old lady that I don’t twiddle.”
Sabelia was fuming, her hot Latin blood nearing full boil. I gave her a look that told her to play along. I knew Tuck well enough to know he was up to something. He had a plan, but he would not share it until he was ready.
“We’re in no danger,” he said. “We’re locked in. They can’t get at us.”
“I don’t get it,” Robin said.
But I did. I got it real well. Tuck was up to something. He had some kind of master plan in mind, only he wasn’t going to share it with us until he was damned good and ready. I only understood one small part of it.
He was using us as bait.
CREMATION
Up in the front, I watched the dead massing.
It was surreal and nightmarish.
In the floodlights of the Guardian, the dead swarmed in with gnashing mouths and hooked fingers. Several approached the front of the vehicle, their faces bloodless and waxen, patched with mildew and grave fungi. More and more moved in, staring into the lights with eyes like boiled eggs, white and oily. For a moment or two, they just stood there like graveyard statues. Then they began to move, trudging through the remains of the others that the machineguns had ripped open. There were gutted torsos and scattered limbs, heads with faces blasted free, bones and blood and excreta…a liquid slopping pool of it like the drainage from a slaughterhouse.
“Oh God,” I heard Diane say.
I threw a spotlight out there and saw nothing but the dead crowding in until the lights were filled with what seemed hundreds of corpse faces. It was like the gates of Hell had been thrown open.
“We’re going to have to blast our way out,” Sabelia said.
“Not a good idea,” Tuck told her.
“Why the hell not?” Sabelia asked.
But I already knew.
I could smell it.
The stench of the dead was strong out there, as it came in through the air vents and firing ports. But there was another smell now: diesel fuel. It was pungent and gagging. That was Tuck’s plan, of course. The fuel was still running from the tanker out there, gushing from the hose and spreading across the parking lot.
I got on the radio. “Jimmy, no shooting. I don’t care what happens. No shooting. We’re sitting in a lake of fuel.”
“What the hell happened?” came his reply.
“Tuck forgot to shut the valve off on the tanker.”
Tuck laughed with a perfectly evil sort of sound.
The radio crackled. “Funny how he forgets things.”
“Yeah, ain’t it?”
Robin giggled. “Good old Tuck,” she said. “Using us as fucking bait so he can have a zombie barbecue.”
Tuck laughed again.
Meanwhile, the zombies were filling the lot steadily. Several dozen were investigating the Guardians. They knew we were in there and their hunger demanded that they get at us. They kept slapping their hands against the doors, clawing and scraping and pounding their fists. More and more swelled in.
By then, the stink of diesel fuel was making our eyes water.
The girls were coughing and making gagging sounds. I was, too.
“Man, I’m getting a serious head rush here,” Diane said, as if she were enjoying it.
“Okay, Tuck, that’s enough now,” Robin said. “I’m pretty thoroughly asphyxiated here.”
He turned to me. “Steve, tell Jimmy to back on out. Tell him to cut around the station and into the field. Get on the road. We’ll join him there.”
I relayed the message and Jimmy’s Guardian revved up and backed away into the darkness. I could hear zombies thudding off of it, the tires rolling over them. Then we were backing away, too, knocking clusters of them aside and rolling over still more. The Guardian lurched as it smashed them beneath its wheels with crunching and pulping sounds. It was sickening. Once we were free of the masses, Diane swung the vehicle around and paused at the edge of the field as Tuck had instructed her.
“All right,” he said as wave upon wave of the dead filled the parking lot. “Lob some incendiaries at them, Sabelia. When she lets ‘em fly, drive like hell, Diane!”
Sabelia swung the turret around, sighting in on the undead mobs with the roof-mounted night sight and opened up with the 40mm grenade launcher. The MK 19 is technically a grenade machinegun because it puts out something like sixty rounds per minute. We didn’t need that kind of firepower, though, so Sabelia just fired off a couple rounds and that was plenty. As soon as they flew, Diane got the Guardian rolling with some haste.
Through one of the gun ports, I saw what happened.
The white phosphorus rounds struck dead center of the zombie army with hissing red-white clouds of fire. The lake of diesel fuel went up instantly. It made a rushing VAROOOOOM! sort of sound, engulfing not only the dead in an eruption of flames, but the gas station and the tanker truck, too.
And that went next.
There was a thundering explosion that made the Guardian jump and the lot, the station itself…hell, even the trees nearby went up in the mother of all conflagrations, an immense, blinding fireburst as the tanker split open like a peanut shell and released an ocean of burning fuel. I saw a gigantic white-hot mass of rolling fire rise two-hundred feet into the air and then rain back down like napalm. The zombies were incinerated by that point and black clouds of smoke blew across the field, rising high into the sky like the spouts of tornadoes.
Even some distance away inside the Guardian, we felt the heat.
By then, we were rolling down the road and gradually the glowing inferno that painted the sky red disappeared behind us.
“See, Tuck?” Robin said. “That’s why little boys shouldn’t play with matches.”
There was silence for maybe two seconds before we all burst into laughter. If comedy depended on timing, then Robin’s was perfect.
KICKED IN THE TEETH
Abo
ut twenty miles down the road, the shit started flying as we suspected it would. It began when the radio crackled and Jimmy came over the com and said, “We just seen lights up ahead. Looks like a chopper coming in low…yeah, there it is again.”
By then, Diane had spotted it. “I saw it. It just flew back over the treetops.”
“Things are going to get hairy now,” Tuck said.
He was right. There was no way to know at that point what kind of chopper we were dealing with. Maybe it was just an unarmed Blackhawk out on a scouting mission or a fully-armed Kiowa Warrior or Apache. It was hard to say. ARM had been liberating military hardware all over the state from what I heard and maybe the country, too. They could have had just about anything. About the only thing we had to answer back with was the .50-cal machineguns on the Guardians…that was, if we could draw the chopper in close enough.
The atmosphere grew decidedly tense.
“Are we in danger?” Sandy asked.
“Now what gave you that idea?” Robin said.
“Jimmy wants to know what to do,” Diane called out.
“Tell him to keep rolling for now,” Tuck told her. He called up to Sabelia in the basket. “I’m gonna spell you up there for a bit.”
She climbed down and he went up to the remote weapons station. Up there, he could manipulate the .50-cal and grenade launchers. That was the beauty of the Guardian. Like the Strykers I knew so well, you could do all your fighting by remote control while under the hood of the armored turret. Of course, if that chopper had air-to-surface antitank missiles, the basket, like the rest of the vehicle, was about to become an iron coffin.
The chopper made another pass, this time flying less than a hundred feet above both Guardians. They didn’t engage any weapons, but I had the nastiest feeling that was about to happen.
“Gotta be those ARM pukes,” Tuck called out.
The American Resistance Movement were the primary scavengers atop the bone pile of the country. I refuse to call them predators exactly. I preferred to liken them to rats. We’d had nothing but trouble from them as we fought to stay alive and every chance we had, we gave as good as we got. Something that wasn’t always so easy because there were so few of us and so many of them. There were lots of survivalist enclaves out robbing and murdering each other, but ARM was the worst. There were thousands of them, remains of real military units and lots of trigger-happy GI Joe wannabees that saw the fall of civilization as their golden moment to get weapons in their hands and act out their fantasies.