by Jack Hamlyn
We hid in a courtyard between two blasted buildings, secreted in the shadows of an immense rubble pile.
“Do you even know where the house is now?” Sabelia asked.
I was honest: “No.”
Jimmy chuckled, his breath wheezing from his lungs. This was hard enough on me—a guy in his thirties—and Sabelia—a woman in her twenties—let alone poor old Jimmy who was getting so close to seventy that the seven and zero were casting a shadow over him. But he never complained and his age never became a factor. He fought with us and worked as hard as anyone.
Once, just after The Awakening when we were still at Tuck’s tower and had been going through some rough action fighting deadheads, I said to him that it was a hell of a way for a man to spend his retirement.
He said, “Hell, Steve. As bad as all this is, it beats the shit out of wasting away in a rocking chair, watching the world go by and the nursing home getting closer. I haven’t felt this fucking alive since I was nineteen giving Uncle Ho’s pissbags hell in the Delta.”
It wasn’t that he liked any of it. No sane person liked what Necrophage had done to the world. Yet, fighting for survival had invigorated him and renewed him in many ways and I understood how it made him feel better about himself and gave him a reason for being. My greatest fear was that his luck was going to run out one of these times. He was an old friend and practically like a grandfather to my son. His death would be bad, very bad.
He wasn’t a suicidal type of guy, but there was an undercurrent to his words whenever he talked about getting old and sick. “Ain’t no more nursing homes,” I remember him saying once. “A man can’t afford the luxury of dying in bed, pissing himself like a pig in the straw. These days, when a man goes, chances are he’s going to die like a man. He’s gonna go down fighting.”
And my guess was that’s exactly what he wanted and the idea kind of scared me.
Anyway, the three of us rested there, silent and alert. I don’t think any of us were worried about our predicament; we were thinking about the others. I was just hoping that They were lying low.
The fighting went on, the heaviest stuff a few streets over to what I thought was the west. It was a constant jarring cacophony of urban warfare over there—machineguns clattering like typewriters, small arms fire, RPG strikes, and artillery barrages. Now and again, I’d hear a chopper coming in low on a fire mission. It was such confusion on the ground that I bet the gunners never knew whether they were hitting the enemy or their own men.
After ten or fifteen minutes of downtime, we got up and Sabelia stopped us before we moved.
“Listen,” she said.
I heard the clomping of boots in the street.
By firelight, I saw two ARM troopers coming up the sidewalk out there. I knew they were ARM because they wore Kevlar helmets. One was helping the other along who was clearly injured. They chose to rest not twenty feet from us, sitting down and putting their backs up against a shelf of fractured concrete. They waited there, muttering and smoking cigarettes.
We were pretty much stuck.
If we wanted to leave, it meant we’d probably have to kill them and I don’t think any of us wanted to do any killing that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Besides, the shooting might draw others in.
We waited.
Down the street there was a horrific explosion that was either a missile or an artillery shell. The ARM duo pressed together, covering their faces. Flames rose up from down there, casting flickering light. It was then that we saw four and then five shapes creeping stealthily up on the soldiers.
“Crazies,” Jimmy whispered and our hands tightened on our weapons.
There was no doubt that he was right. They were spidery, inhuman shapes, ratlike and stalking, moving in ever closer to their prey. They were very patient, eerily so. When they were but a few feet away, they dove on the soldiers. It took everything I had to remain hidden and not intervene on ARM’s behalf. The soldiers were quickly beaten down with clubs. One of them was not killed outright and I heard him whimpering, saying, “Oh please…don’t kill me…please don’t kill me…”
One of the crazies picked up a slab of concrete the size of a cinder block and crushed his head with it. Something in all of us snapped. We just couldn’t take it anymore. We jumped up, bringing our M4s to bear.
The crazies heard us and froze.
One of them hissed.
Another gnashed his—or her—teeth.
We opened up and dropped them alongside their victims. And as we did so, someone across the street began to fire at us. Slugs punched into the rubble around us. There were snipers over there and I spied a muzzle flash from a second-story window.
We pulled back and got away. Not two minutes later when we were out of harm’s way, a chopper came swooping down. It opened up with miniguns, saturating the courtyard with rounds, chewing up everything. There would have been nowhere to hide if we were still there.
Breathlessly, we ran down another street.
We saw more night fighters firing at fleeing bands of ARM soldiers. They fled in our direction. We cut down another alley and out into yet another street. The fighting had been very hard there. I saw dozens of corpses, mostly ARM troopers. Pools of blood glistened in the moonlight. The night fighters were dressed in black. Amongst them were a variety of weapons—M-16s, M4s, AKs, riotguns, you name it. From what I could see, they all carried gas masks. That disturbed me.
But there was no time for closer inspection because we weren’t alone.
The dead were coming.
ZOMBPOX
The question that kept coming back to me again and again like a ghost haunting the ruins of a deserted house was this: how long could we go on? We’d been through so much shit by that point that it was like a stink that clung to us. We were dipped in it, had it rubbed in our faces, and shoved up our noses…and this particular shit smelled like death, gassy and hot and putrefying. The world all of us had known, the world we had grown up in and lived in and trusted, was gone. It was dead. We were trudging through its remains day by day, all clinging to some hope that once the dead were put back down and the crazy survivalists were buried with them that we would be able to put it back together again like the pieces of Humpty Dumpty.
Some days I believed it.
Other days I didn’t believe it at all.
But that’s what we were fighting for. That’s the thing that kept us going and we all dreamed about it, we all fantasized about the day it would come and we were safe and happy and relaxed, the corn was growing high and the children were singing happy songs and the sun was bright and warm. As the days ground into weeks and the weeks became months, it got harder to believe it. The life we led, the life all sane survivors led, was ugly. This wasn’t a crappy horror movie or a silly comic book or some ridiculous video game, it was reality. A world hunted by the walking dead and the survivors were frightened rabbits scurrying from one hole to the next.
That’s what it was like day after day.
My little band had camaraderie. We all put on a strong face for one another, but I knew inside that we were scared to death. Scared of the crazies out there and the zombies and maybe scared of ourselves for the dark, inhumane things we had to do just to stay alive. Necrophage, or Zombpox as we called it, was out there, smoldering like old bones in a crematory pit and we knew it. It was the shadow that haunted us continually. The fear of contracting it was the greatest fear of all. Everything else paled beside it. What would you do when you got it? And, worse, what would you do when someone you loved got it?
INTO THE SHIT
There was nowhere to escape to.
A mob of the dead saw us and moved in our direction, faces and bodies torn, mouths chomping and fingers reaching. Behind us, down the alley, the fighting picked up and we heard the thudding of heavy machineguns and the rumbling of vehicles out in the streets.
We had no choice.
As the dead came on in a revolting, maggoty arm, we took up firing positions
with our backs to a building. Despite the fear we felt, we opened up on semi-auto, choosing targets and dropping zombies, blowing their heads apart and splashing their brains across the pavement.
Still more came.
We hopped behind a rusting car and I tossed a few WP grenades at them. The grenades exploded with blinding flashes of light, engulfing the dead in mushrooming flames. The air was hot with the smell of seared corpses. Several zombies struggled still forward, white phosphorus clinging to them and continuing to burn. They blazed and sputtered, pieces of them dropping off and eventually the last few stragglers collapsed as the WP melted the flesh from their bones.
But it was hardly over.
Attracted by the stench of roasting carrion, more zombies came out of the darkness. Most of them fell on the remains in the street. Men, women, and children cursed by Zombpox and turned into ravening cannibal corpses, began tearing apart the corpses of soldiers and night fighters, gnawing on limbs and yanking organs from bellies and smashing heads to get at the buttery folds of brains.
The more adventurous ones went after the burning dead, ripping them apart and chewing on crunchy, blackened meat. The crispy gnawing sounds were almost more than any of us could take.
We moved away down the street, past the burning hulk of a disabled LAV-25 that was split into three pieces. It must have been hit by an armor-piercing shell or an antitank missile. The body of an ARM trooper was hanging from the wreckage, impaled on a four-foot shard of metal. A naked teenage zombie boy was chewing on his throat with slobbering, gluttonous sounds.
He turned as we approached, grinning at us with a blood-smeared face. Great sections of his flesh were missing as if he had been peeled. He went back to his meal and we got out of there as fast as we could.
After that, we were constantly dodging zombies, ARM patrols, and stalking night fighters. Every time we found a place to lay low, we were forced from it. We were bone tired. We needed rest badly.
We cut down an avenue into a residential section, thinking we were getting away from the action only to stumble into the killing fields once again. It was dark in the neighborhood with no fires burning, but we could smell death all around us. Worse, we could see shapes moving.
We clicked on the tactical flashlights fixed to the rails of our rifles and saw everything in detail.
More corpses, but not ARM troopers or night fighters but what looked like ordinary men, women, and children than had been lined up and gunned down. It was an atrocity.
All those cold cuts brought out the zombies in numbers, of course. Bodies were spread all around us and we were right in the middle of a human buffet. Most of the walking dead had plenty to eat and were completely disinterested in us. But some ghoulish gluttons tossed aside what they’d been eating and came right at us.
This time, there was no wall to put our backs up against.
The best we could do was to form a sort of triangle and fight.
As the other maggot-eaters continued dining, I started blowing away the dead that came for us. Jimmy and Sabelia were doing the same. A woman brandishing the well-stripped arm of a child moved at me and I put a round in her forehead. The entrance wound was clean, bloodless, almost surgical, but the exit wound took out the back of her skull. Hell, it kicked it out like rotten wood.
She fell and two more replaced her.
It became a killing frenzy then.
They wanted us and we did everything we could do to keep them from getting us. We were firing and firing, hot shell casings piling up at our feet and still they came, more and more all the time, it seemed. For every one you dropped, three more came at you. We emptied magazine after magazine and still the tide was not turned. And the worst part, the very worst part, was that there was no real exit for us. We were hemmed in tight.
Something had to give.
Or, better, I had to make something give.
We were still managing to hold the dead off at about twenty feet, but that wouldn’t last forever. I had to punch a hole through the wall of them. I had two frag grenades left in my pouch. I took out one, pulled the pin, and tossed it. The three of us went down. There was a booming explosion and zombie fragments rained down over us.
“FOLLOW ME!” I cried.
The grenade had pulverized four or five zombies and driven a dozen more back that were hit with blazing bits of shrapnel. The wall had weakened. Before the dead could recover, I charged into them, shooting and batting them aside. I didn’t know for sure if I was immune to Zombpox, but I had been bitten once and survived it, probably due to being infected by a weakened strain. They reached out for me and it was such close quarters that it was near impossible to get a decent shot off, so I smashed them with the stock of my M4, battering and beating them aside. I kicked and punched and swung the rifle. One of them got an arm around my neck and I flipped him into a trio of others.
We were free, or nearly.
I gunned down four more and then we were running, stumbling, tripping over partially-devoured corpses in the street. Sabelia and Jimmy were still with me, thank God, both of them shooting and dropping the dead as we charged ever forward until their numbers became insignificant and there was light at the end of the tunnel.
We slipped between a couple of houses and turned our lights off, hunkering down in the darkness.
“Anyone get bit?” I said.
“No,” Sabelia said. “I can’t believe it, but I didn’t.”
“Jimmy?”
“Oh no,” he panted. “I’m fine. Tired as hell, but I’ll live.”
I had a feeling he was in worse shape than he was admitting, but at least we made it out in one piece. Given the odds, that was a miracle in and of itself. We sat there for maybe ten more minutes, enjoying the downtime. The fighting was tapering off now and I only heard random gunfire in the distance.
Were we safe?
I doubted it, but we were in better shape than we had been earlier. That was something. It was about that time that we heard the marching of what seemed dozens of feet. I reconnoitered back the way we came and saw what appeared to be an army of the dead heading in our direction. In the fading moonlight, I could see that they were literally everywhere. We would never be able to sneak around their lines.
I went back and told the others.
“Best thing, maybe,” Jimmy said. “Is to get into one of these houses.”
“If they come after us, we’ll never hold them back,” Sabelia said. “I’m on my last magazine.”
“Me, too,” I said.
Jimmy nodded. “I can’t have much more than a dozen shots left.”
Which put our armament at a serious disadvantage. I had one frag grenade left and a knife. Yeah, we were definitely in the shit. And as we hashed it out or attempted to, the dead were pushing in closer and closer and we began to smell the stench of their corruption.
We got to our feet, checking out the houses around us.
Most of them had been hit hard. Their walls were scathed by gunfire, windows shattered, doors torn off hinges. I guessed that ARM had hit them, that the corpses we saw in the street had been the people from these houses. We continued on, checking them out and finding nothing promising. A zombie woman stepped out of one and I shot her between the eyes.
I could hear the army getting closer.
Though the dead were most assuredly slow nearly all the time, it was their numbers that were frightening. And from what I saw out there heading in our direction, I knew we didn’t have a chance in hell of holding them off.
Then Sabelia said, “Look.”
In the backyard of one of the houses there was a fort of sorts suspended up in the air on four pillarlike posts. It was basically just a square box with a roof, no windows, open on all four sides. It was about thirty feet up in the air and must have been built as a kind of playhouse for kids. I clicked on my light and saw a rope ladder hanging down.
“The dead aren’t much for climbing,” Jimmy said.
My greatest fear was that onc
e we were up there we’d never get down. I was envisioning the three of us up in the fort while down below hundreds of zombies waited with that unnatural patience of theirs, hour by hour and day by day. Not that it would realistically go on that long—if Tuck and the others didn’t get to us, ARM probably would—but what if?
“What do you think?”
“I like it better than waiting here,” Sabelia said.
Jimmy nodded. “Me, too.”
The zombies were getting closer so there was no time to really hash it out. In fact, three of them had already shown and were moving in our direction. They had to go and I knew it. If they started mulling around, others would come and do the same thing.
Jimmy and I held the rope ladder while Sabelia climbed up it. She went up fast with her usual athletic agility.Then I held it while Jimmy climbed. He was not quite so fast. He moved up it almost painfully and I had to wonder just what sort of aches and pains he was suffering from that he wasn’t telling us about. I noticed also that he seemed to be favoring his left arm. That gave me concern.
Finally, he was up.
As I grabbed the rope, I noticed the sky was brightening in the east. Sunrise wasn’t far off.
“Steve,” Sabelia called down, “you want me to pop those three maggot-eaters?”
Honestly, I didn’t want her to. I was afraid the noise of gun shots would draw unwanted attention and I didn’t like the idea of being trapped up in the fort and having to fight against some particularly randy ARM troopers, but those deadheads had to be put down before they attracted more.
“Yeah, go ahead,” I said.
She was quick and efficient. Crack, crack, crack! went her rifle and down went the zombies. She was a damn good shot, getting better all the time. I hurriedly climbed the rope ladder and pulled it up behind me, shutting the trapdoor.