Casey’s whispered voice in my radio earpiece startled me and I muffed the shot. Tore out the approaching zombie’s throat, but it was still a miss since the shambling corpse didn’t miss a step. Zeroed again and fired. Hit. One down, eighteen hundred to go. And fifty approaching from the freeway. Plus another hundred to the rear. The net was closing and we were being surrounded.
“Case, pull up into that driveway and stop on the south side of the store.”
“We going to pull a jailbreak, boss?” Casey asked, and I noticed her voice was steady. She might be afraid, but she was controlling the emotion.
I glanced back over my shoulder, clocking the mini-horde of zombies shuffling and straggling up the feeder road. Working together, Casey and I could carve that number down to a dozen or so with a few minute’s work, but I wasn’t sure we would have the time. We’d give it a try, anyway.
When Casey started moving, I assumed a stance on the tool box and took a grip on the twin luggage rails running along the sides of the roof. Ken wanted to remove them but I objected, knowing they would come in handy sooner or later. The warm barrel of the Ruger I was using rocked again my chest as the truck climbed the slight ramp leading to the store’s parking lot.
I looked up and saw it was a Joanne’s Fabric Shop flanked by an Ashley Furniture Store. So, nothing useful for me in either store though under other circumstances, I’m sure Roxy would want to loot the fabric store. She was a hardcore quilter, after all.
When Casey pulled around to the side of the store, I was not surprised to see a narrow strip of asphalt leading to what looked like a two lane-street running behind the row of shops. Probably going all the way down to the Tractor Supply Store.
As soon as Casey parked, I stepped off the tool box into the bed of the truck and then climbed down to the ground. Yes, a youngster could have vaulted off the tool box and landed without a care. Or sprained an ankle and become zombie bait. You learn quickly not to take stupid risks if you intend to survive as a breather in the Zombie Apocalypse. Surviving as a zombie was much easier, of course.
Casey popped the door and I slid in, grabbing the mic as I moved.
“Guys, this is Charlie Three. We’ve been pushed off the road. Just too many and we were getting hit from all sides. Did you make it to the target?”
Bill’s voice came back a few seconds later. He sounded a bit winded, but not worried. Like I could tell much from his carefully controlled tone.
“Roger that. They were planning their own breakout when we showed up. We’ll be moving to Bravo rally point in five. Can you continue to assist, over?”
“Don’t have a choice, Bill,” I replied, forgetting radio etiquette for the moment. “If we move, we unplug your escape route. We’ll hold here for five minutes, but can’t promise anything beyond that.”
Bill’s voice came back immediately. “Roger that. Five minutes and hit the road, Charlie Three. Out.”
“Out,” I echoed, and replaced the microphone.
Turning, I caught Casey’s eye and nodded. “We’ll try to stay with the truck, but I want you up on top of the building in case we get cornered.”
“You want me to use the M4? I’ve got a double loadout in the bag and thirty loaded magazines.”
I paused, knowing the clock was ticking down in an awful hurry. We needed to get the ladder up and Casey into place with all her tools ready.
“Take ’em all. Just be aware those things will start jamming after about two hundred rounds or so. I’ll stay here and hold at the truck. We just need to give them five minutes.”
Casey glanced over my shoulder as the first stumbling row of zombies came into view, rounding the corner and stumbling into the space between the two stores. I didn’t need to look. I could read it on the young woman’s face. The tightness around her eyes and the faint lines around her mouth told the story.
“I don’t know if we have five minutes,” she said.
“We got this,” I replied, the lie tasting like ashes on my lips.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We bought the convoy those five minutes, but in exchange we lost the truck under a wave of hungry dead. Casey made the best of her perch on the roof, raining down shot after shot on the heads of zombies. For every one she shot, two more seemed ready to take their place. I’d heard that expression before and thought it was hyperbole, but seeing it in reality was daunting.
The numbers just kept growing, despite our combined efforts. This wasn’t like in Jasper, where I’d taken up a similar firing position in front of the “Something” Wok restaurant. There, I’d spent days whittling down the number of the dead until all I’d been facing were the leftovers of that massive horde. This time, the horde was barely dented and attracting more members the whole time.
The first line of zombies fell easily enough, cut down in seconds. The two stores formed a rough L-shape in the parking lot with an approximately fifty-foot-wide section of asphalt serving as a driveway to the shared back parking lot. That fifty feet wasn’t much of a bottleneck with only two shooters, but we did our best. The Ford was parked next to the fabric store, ladder extended to the roof, and my shooting position was less than one hundred yards from the open corner. The building to my left limited my shooting arc in that direction, but I still had plenty of targets. More than plenty, in reality.
I was in the zone, exterminating every target my sights crossed. I burned through the first magazine in under a minute. Maybe in half a minute, since my finger felt like it was constantly squeezing. As long as I had rounds, I could maintain the fury. The zombies just couldn’t stand up to the rate of fire Casey and I were delivering. But they kept coming, and we had to stop to change magazines while they never did anything but keep pressing forward.
I did the math and we would come up short. Keying the headset, I called Casey.
“Keep firing while I move everything else up. Try to build up a wall around the truck to buy me some time, okay?”
“On it, boss,” she replied tersely, completely focused on getting the job done.
I took down the zombies right on top of the truck, buying myself a few seconds to pull prepacked satchels out of the crossbed toolbox. More ammo, more food, and a limited amount of camping supplies, check. Then, under the bugout bags, I found the hard, plastic-sided box containing spare radios, CB, and shortwave, and a folding panel solar charger for the electronics. That had to go up as well. Violating my own safety protocols, I set the Ruger aside and started up the ladder, the aluminum struts sagging under the weight of ascent.
Probably need to replace this ladder next trip, I thought idly as I hauled over a hundred pounds of supplies up the approximately sixteen feet to the flat roof of the fabric store.
I barely stopped to dump the bags and box before backing down the rungs. The ladder jerked and swayed, and at first I thought it was my hasty descent. One look down showed the truth. Despite Casey’s determined marksmanship, the latest surge of zombies was pressing up against the sides of my truck. I saw a sea of gore-covered and filthy arms reaching up to welcome me into their starving embrace. Casey was speaking in my ear, but I couldn’t hear what she said. Couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
Climbing back down into that rapidly growing horde made my bowels threaten to release, but I did it anyway. The simple truth was, I had no choice. We needed the rest of those supplies if this became a siege. I’d found plenty of withered, sunbaked corpses over the months of survivors who got themselves treed by the dead and lacked an escape plan. I would not die that way.
If something happened to Bill and the rest of our group, I wanted options. So I let one foot follow the other as I descended into hell.
Pop, pop, pop, pop. My suppressed pistol played in counterpoint to Casey’s shots as I tried to eliminate the most immediate threats. The sound of their hissing nearly covered the squeaks as the Ford flexed on reinforced shocks, but I felt the truck surge and sway from the sudden press of bodies on three sides. The weight pressed the fourth side into the
side of the building, and I hoped the monsters didn’t wreck my truck in their zeal to eat us. I really liked my truck.
I had three more rifles, still in their soft-side cases and strung together, as well as the Ruger I’d been using. When I reached for the rifle, I was surprised to see another hand questing for the weapon as well. A filthy, dead white hand missing two fingers at the first joint and smearing black ichor on the roof of my truck. Those remaining dead fingers closed around the barrel of the rifle a second after my hand snatched at the curved plastic grip, and a tug-of-war briefly erupted. Then I lined up the barrel to the black blood-encrusted head corresponding to that questing hand. Pop.
The corpse must have been standing on the bodies of other fallen, because the mass flexed and suddenly the body disappeared, replaced immediately by more and more of the disgusting monsters, all eager to get a bite out of me. Clawed fingers brushed at my clothes, seeking a grip as I scooped up the spare rifles and final satchel filled with some toys I didn’t want to leave behind.
“Get the fuck out!” Casey screamed, and for some reason I heard her this time. “The truck is moving. The ladder is going to fall! Move, move, move!”
I moved. Well, I stepped back to where the metal brackets Ken welded into the truck bed served as anchors for the twenty-foot-long extension ladder. Up until now, those shallow brackets served their purpose, but with the truck bucking uncontrollably, the ladder was swaying like a flagpole in a hurricane. Safing the rifle in hand, I slung my load and took one last look around as the zombies seemed to fill the horizon from where I stood.
I mounted the ladder and pulled myself up to the next rung, my gloved fingers tight on the sides as I pulled myself up for another rung, and another. Grasping, greedy hands fell away below me and I was glad to be out of that dogpile of the dead when a pain erupted in my left shin that nearly ripped me off the ladder. Suddenly I couldn’t feel my leg, and then I could, and it was nothing but agony.
I screamed out in pain, in shock, and wondered who shot me. My hands locked on the ladder until I felt the metal flex, but pain continued unabated. Looking down, I felt a moment of vertigo as I looked for blood on my pants leg, and saw something that finally made the pain fade as a jolt of shock ran through my system.
The creature staring up at me with those milky, wide eyes looked like it had been baked by the sun, a shriveled prune of a man-shaped horror. It was taller than most, probably a good six feet plus, and standing on the mound of writhing bodies underneath, it had just enough arm’s reach to use the three-foot section of rebar gripped in one gnarled brown hand.
The monsters surrounding the First Waver buffeted the creature with their weaving, grasping arms, clutching uselessly at me, and I felt a surge of hope as I forced myself to once again grip the sides of the teetering ladder and hopped up, gaining another rung.
Daring another glance down, I saw the dark, wrinkled and scarred face looking up at me, and I swear it had a crooked smile on its lips as it swung the iron rod again, aiming for my good leg. I was just a few inches too high, though, and the tip of rebar bounced off the rung where my right foot now stood.
I hopped again. My left leg jostled the metal of the ladder and another lightning bolt of pain shot up my leg. I felt my traitorous fingers loosen in that instant, but I growled like a mad dog and hung on, flexing my shoulders as I rose up. And then I did it again, and again. My actions grew feverish in my desire to reach the top, for I knew in the depths of my soul that this creature, this monster in twisted human form, would not give up.
Focused on getting up those last few steps, I didn’t see the First Wave dead man move below, but I felt the effects as the ladder began to cant to the right, sliding, sliding ever so slightly. Fuck, if he could not reach me, he was going to push me off and into the ravenous thousands below. I would be thoroughly consumed before my stripped bones hit the ground.
One more jump, and I felt the ladder shift again, and then I was at the last rung and the world started going sideways in earnest. With a grunt, I lunged for the edge of the building and felt my chest slam into the brick façade and my gloved hands wrap around the short lip at the edge.
In a normal setting, pulling myself up the side of the building would have been easy. Since the world went to shit, I worked out regularly in our gym, lifting the weights, doing the push-ups. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise: upper body strength is just as important as cardio in the Zombie Apocalypse.
In this case, though, I was not at my best. With an already abused left shoulder, an injured ankle and weighed down with an extra forty pounds of gear, I was struggling mightily to pull myself up enough to hook my right leg over the verge of the rooftop. In fact, my grip seemed to be slipping ever so slightly as I tried desperately to chin myself. Twice I tried, failed, and worked up my nut to give it a final, third-try push that would succeed, or leave me too exhausted to keep holding for long.
As I struggled, I heard a sound in the near distance that drowned out the disgusting snorting hisses of the zombie mosh pit below. That steady roar of muffled engines was the convoy using the distraction of my impending demise to beat feet out of the neighborhood.
I wasn’t angry or upset by their retreat. We were here to give them the distraction necessary to pull out those survivors forted up at the self-storage center next to Tractor Supply. This was my job, or some variation of it, and really the only reason I had to stay alive and sane. Instead, as I struggled and felt my arms start to go to rubber, the only hate I could generate was towards the zombies. Them, I could hate until they tore me apart.
Sudden contact on my gloved hands made me jerk, and I felt a tugging growing stronger as I struggled to make my aching arms function.
“You gotta help me here,” I heard in my ear, and I realized who was trying to help. Casey.
“Hey, you try hanging out here and see how you like it,” I barked back, and then I made that “third time’s the charm” surge with all my remaining strength. Admittedly, Casey’s efforts helped, and I was sure her skinny little pipestem arms were knotted with effort.
Slowly, painfully, I rose up enough to hook my elbows on the lip, and then I managed to drag my right leg up and over the side of the building. I felt like I’d just summited Everest as I rolled my body over onto the roof of the fabric store.
“Man, you are one heavy old guy,” Casey pronounced with a wheeze. “I thought for sure you were a goner.”
“Yeah, me, too,” I managed to utter as my heart was still trying to climb out of my chest.
“Well, this sucks,” Casey said, more to herself, it seemed, than to me. “We are stranded up here and our friends all just bailed on us. Just like Junior Prom.”
I couldn’t help it. I started laughing and couldn’t stop until my air ran out. So much for maintaining my taciturn impression on the young lady.
“Dude, this ain’t funny,” Casey huffed. “Sure we got some supplies, but our ride is down there, surrounded by thousands of those dead bastards and Bill just left us behind.”
Sitting up, I tried to reach the stabbing pain in my shin, but my stomach muscles seemed to be locked up. I sat up but couldn’t complete the move. Seeing me, Casey suddenly took a step back and her hand fell on the pistol grip of her M4. Oh, yeah, time for a bite check.
“Not bitten,” I pronounced, holding up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “One of those fucks clocked me with a club. Rebar, I think. Hit me right on the fucking shin with it. Hurts like crazy but I can’t tell if it is broken.”
Casey just goggled at me for a solid moment, then a crooked grin seemed to split her features. I shivered, remembering the face of the prune man who delivered the injury.
“Are you shitting me? You expect me to believe that it’s the zombie apocalypse, and the zombies are going around hitting the uninfected with clubs? The only thing more sick about this is if he’d actually managed to hit you in the head.”
“Yeah, laugh it up, funny girl,” I said snidely. “If it is broken,
guess who gets to carry me down the ladder?”
“Uh, in case you missed it, Brad, the ladder is gone. If your leg is broken, you’re kinda fucked. Not like we aren’t anyway, trapped up here. So, what is the plan?”
I shook my head. Kids these days. “Not that ladder,” I said with a disappointed sounding sigh. “The emergency ladder rolled up in one of these bags. And we are not fucked. Our friends won’t abandon us, but we need to make contact. And as for being trapped? Well, this is one of those times where I get to earn my pay. Even if I’m doing this for free. Let’s get my ankle looked at and then we can start earning our pay. This is what zombie exterminators do, after all.”
“Seriously?” Casey asked, with a little touch of hope in her voice.
“Seriously. All that running and gunning we were doing before? That is fine, but not what being an exterminator is all about.” I waved generally, meaning to encompass the packed parking lot. “How many you think we have out there? Three, four thousand? Five thousand? Fuck, ten thousand? That’s what we do, Hard Case.
“So the plan is to sit up here under our umbrellas and shoot zombies. Until we run out of bullets or they run out of bodies. We leave the suppressors on, handle that crowd down there, and self-extract if we can recover the truck. If it won’t start, then we’ll send out a call for help, but Bill will come for us.”
Casey cast a skeptical glance my way. From some of the things she’d said, Casey hadn’t had a lot of faith in humanity before the zombies rose.
“He will come,” I repeated. “Leave no man behind is his motto. Plus, if he didn’t at least come back with a good story of how I died, Roxy would have his ass.”
Casey nodded at that. “She seems really nice at first,” the young woman confirmed, “but that little old lady scares me sometimes.”
“Me too, Case. Me, too. Now, can you see about getting this boot off so we can see how badly that club-wielding zombie fucked me up?”
Casey nodded again, this time more solemnly, but I could see just a hint of a smirk shining through. “Sure thing. You mind if I take some pictures? For my scrapbook, you know? Plus, Kate won’t believe me otherwise.”
Hunger Driven (Book 2): Fight the Hunger Page 25