Shirley watched the field of zombies. The soldier watched her.
“Doc?” Nicholas asked. “Do you know what’s going on?”
Shirley turned her gaze on the young man. He was in his late twenties and had frequented the rape tents often, but at least he’d never beat the girls. His skin was a dark chestnut and his full lips were attractive under his round nose and dark eyes. If the men were going to visit the women, she’d rather they be like Nicholas.
“Nicholas, something is happening with the virus that animates the dead. Let’s pray it goes in our favor,” she said as she turned her attention back to the crowds below her.
Like a wave moving through a vast stadium during a major sporting event, Shirley watched the crowd of zombies stop their convulsing. Over half the assembled crowd suddenly fell limp to the ground. Shirley felt as if her tongue began to swell when the remainder of them turned their dead eyes toward the barrier. It was as if they had been sleepwalking and suddenly woke up.
What had been a slow ambling crowd turned into a fast, violently aggressive swarm. The dead began to run, some on all fours, at the barrier. The grunts and howls that preceded them raised the hair on the back of Shirley’s neck. Then her feet were swept out from under her as the trailer beneath her rocked under the impact of the assault. She cupped her bruised elbow and watched the creatures throw their bodies repeatedly at the barrier. Some of the men fell into the swarm and were immediately set upon. Creatures pressed against the barrier fell beneath those who raced in from behind causing them to stack in piles against it. They were single minded in their effort to gain access to the living flesh atop the structure. She realized that even with the men firing into the crowd, the zombies would overrun the barrier in a few minutes. There were simply too many of them.
Shirley slid on her butt toward the ladder and climbed down. The civilian population of the camp stood huddled together looking to her with questions in their eyes. There was less than a hundred. Tears threatened to fall down her cheeks as she considered the truth of the situation. She knew that few, if any, would survive the hour.
“We must flee! Please hurry! We only have a few minutes!” What else could she say? She looked at the children, which made up about a quarter of the camp population. Their wide terrified eyes were the anchors she needed.
Automatic gunfire erupted from the top of the barricade. The soldiers were fighting to remain standing as the entire structure shook under the assault of the dead creatures. Screams rose from the children and their families as their imaginations added to the chaos they were seeing with their eyes.
“Nicholas!” Shirley cried. “Nicholas! Get down here!”
It took the man several seconds before he realized that he was being called. He hesitated, tore between using his rifle to slow the imminent slaughter of civilians and the hope that the doctor had an idea. Refusing the ladder, he leapt from the barricade to land heavily next to Doctor Shirley.
“We’ve got to get them out of here,” Shirley screamed over the tumult. “Make the soldiers at the east barrier open it so that we can get through!”
His eyes swept the terrified faces that looked to him with such fear and hope that he nearly wanted to cry. “Let’s go,” he said with resignation.
Shirley shooed the crowd after Nicholas. She offered words of encouragement where she could and swatted at the hind end of those who failed to move fast enough. When they started past the rape tents, Shirley stepped inside.
“Let’s go girls! Time to move! No, Missy leave that, you won’t need it where we’re going. Marsha, grab Sissy! Let’s move!” Her voice was like iron and propelled the women from their sleepy depressions like a prick of a pin.
Shirley Baker was standing outside the flap of the last rape tent when the final woman scurried past her and ran down the camp heading toward the eastern barrier. Then stars suddenly exploded in front of her eyes. The world spun and she watched with mild detachment as the ground swung left then right and then rose up to meet her. The breath was knocked from her and she wondered at her inability to draw a breath. She could tell that she’d been hit from behind. In fact, the soldier who had ran into her flipped end over end and landed on his back before scrambling back to his feet. His face was a mask of pure terror as he looked frantically back in the direction he’d come.
Shirley lifted her head to see what the soldier had been looking at and found herself watching more than a dozen loping zombies tramping at full speed between the tents heading right for her. The scene moved in slow motion. The oncoming crowd of zombies was a mixture of men, women and children. Their faces were feral with snarls and lust. Their eyes seemed to communicate a hatred that mirrored the violence seen in their actions. Doctor Shirley didn’t have time to wonder about how this new strain of virus was affecting their brains as unconsciousness overtook her.
* * *
Nicholas led the increasing mass of people down the western slope of the camp and then up the eastern slope. “This is W-1 to E-1, come in!” he screamed breathlessly into his radio.
“Go, W-1,” came the electric voice.
“Open the barrier! I repeat, open the barrier! The western barrier has been overrun! You are the only way out of here!”
“Copy that.”
Sprinting up the hill, Nicholas watched the men on the eastern barrier scrambling. He could hear the panting and hoarse coughing from those behind him. Many of the children couldn’t run anymore.
Machine gun fire erupted from in front of him. The soldiers on the eastern barrier were firing in two directions at once. Many of them had their weapons pointed at the ground out beyond the barrier, while others having seen the undulating hordes of raging dead coming from the west, pointed their weapons inward hoping to give the civilians enough time to escape.
“W-1, we’ve got a problem. The dead are coming around from the north and south edges of the camp. If I open the barrier, they’ll get inside.”
Nicholas skidded to a full stop. The afternoon air was cool and in that moment, the one thing he would remember as he turned his face to the sky was a single cloud that was shaped like a turtle. It meandered slowly westward. The blue sky was like water. He sighed and stepped over to one of the dozens of barrels stacked next to him that held their drinking water. Plunging his head beneath the surface of an open fifty-gallon drum, he relished the silence that came with submerging his ears. Then a thought occurred to him.
The water soaked him as he lifted himself from the barrel. “E-1, I need you to push the barrier open anyway,” he said, turning to the crowd around him. “Keep the entrance clear until we can get there!” Then to the crowd of expectant faces he said, “I’ve got an idea . . .”
* * *
Over a quarter of an hour passed as the group finally approached the western barrier. The trailer that had been blocking entrance to the camp was pushed aside leaving about four feet of space to squeeze through. Unfortunately, there were over a hundred raging zombies on the heels of the tight knit group. Explosives had whittled the larger number down to the few dozen that now hounded them tirelessly from behind.
There were seven soldiers holding the pass between the trailers and a mound of dead had filled the gap leaving no way to pass one way or the other. Every milky eye that rose over the mound was shot straight through adding another corpse to the increasing size of the blockage.
“Heads up!” Nicholas screamed. Pins flipped through the air over his shoulder as he flung two High Explosive grenades at the wall of dead zombies. The soldiers dove for safety behind the edge of the trailers. Nicholas hit the ground while those behind him followed suit.
The detonation filled the air with bloody confetti. Bits and pieces of corpses fell from the sky like red hail. The concussive force pushed the empty trailers further apart. There was no time to waste as more of the bloodthirsty creatures sought entrance to the camp. Nicholas recognized the strategic advantage the zombies had at this point. If they had been smarter, he would have thought
they’d planned this pincher maneuver — zombies pushing from behind while zombies waited in ambush to trap their unsuspecting prey between them.
Not this time, Nicholas thought to himself. “Soldiers, on me! We’re pushing through!”
Automatic rifle fire tore away at anything that moved near the opening between the trailers. The soldiers led the group forward one step at a time, until it became apparent that the zombie horde coming up from behind was going to overtake them. The group then shifted. Five soldiers covered the front and six covered the rear. The civilians in between carried armfuls of ammunition, extra clips, and what was left of their cache of grenades. As the soldiers emptied their magazines, the civilians fed them new ones while others frantically reloaded the empty magazines.
Soon the tight group passed through the gate over the piles of bodies that littered their path. When they topped the hill just outside the western edge of the camp, the truth of their situation became apparent. All the gunfire over the last hour had drawn every violent dead creature for miles around. Thousands and thousands of them swarmed up the hill toward the small group. Nicholas turned to the civilians and counted their resources. They could hold off for maybe another twenty minutes, but that was it.
There was an older man in the group, who looked to be in his sixties. The man’s eyes were soft and kind. He was the only one whose face was not a grimace of fear and desperation. He nodded slightly at Nicholas. Nicholas nodded back and then turned his weapon on the first row of zombies to reach the hillcrest. Their roaring, yelling and squealing was drowned under the steady chatter of gunfire. Bodies were shredded. Heads exploded like watermelons under fire. Yet, they continued to come and come and come and come.
When the ammo ran out, the soldiers drew their sword-like knives and engaged the enemy hand-to-hand. The older man standing in their midst watched one soldier go down and then another. He smiled softly, reached into the box labeled “High Explosive Grenades,” and began to pull the pins on the olive green cylinders inside.
The hilltop ceased to exist a few moments later.
CHAPTER TWENTY
C andice jerked when her face fell forward into the warm water as she fought to stay awake. Her legs had already fallen asleep and her lower back was cramping. Questions plagued her, as she sat wrinkling in her fifty-gallon drum. Where would she go from here? When should she try to leave her hiding place? There was no way she could remain in the water barrel indefinitely.
Candice held her breath and listened. Though she couldn’t see what was going on outside, she could try to listen for noise. It took several minutes for the water to stop sloshing against the sides of the barrel before she realized that there were no sounds of groaning, wailing or grunting coming from her immediate vicinity. Should she open the lid of her barrel and peek? Fear curdled her stomach and she wondered what Doctor Shirley would do in this situation.
A half hour passed. Finally, she balled what courage she had into a tight knot in her chest and lifted the lid. Blinding afternoon light flooded the barrel so much that she was forced to close it. She’d been in the dark too long to be able to see anything right away.
She listened. When no monsters came to drag her out of her hiding place to devour her, she tried again. This time she lifted the lid to allow just a sliver of light into her watery abode. She couldn’t see out, but it did allow her vision to adjust to the light.
In moments, she was able to lift the lid enough to turn her head sideways and look out into the camp around her. There were bodies scattered everywhere. A half-eaten soldier scratched his way across the ground as a newly awakened member of the undead. His bowels strung between his moving upper torso and the lower half of his body, which lay several feet away.
Candice swallowed hard to reign back her gag reflex and watched with great dismay as a dozen or so zombies prowled through the camp not more than fifty feet from her position. They moved with barely contained aggression. Sometimes they would push, shove, and pound on each other with their fists as if settling for brief bouts of violence was enough to satiate them until a real victim could be found and mutilated. It was almost too much for her. She wanted to scream.
She started to lower the lid when one caught her attention. At the back of the pack of zombies was a particular zombie she had hoped never to see. Tears streamed from her blood shot eyes and she choked off a sob as she recognized the body of Doctor Shirley Baker walking among the dead. Her corpse was covered in viscera so that she looked like a cannibal straight out of a Wrong Turn movie. Her body language bespoke a living death.
The healer turned into a monster, Candice thought, and closed the lid, smothering herself in complete darkness. It wasn’t fair! If it hadn’t been for Doctor Shirley most of the women in the rape tents would have died. This included herself.
Unable to contain her grief, Candice pushed her face under the water and screamed. The sound bubbled around her so loudly that she cut off her voice with such suddenness that she nearly drowned herself. What was she thinking!
She coughed and a cold chill ran up the back of her neck. They had to have heard her. Turning her head to the side, she pushed the lid up slowly to see if she had attracted the attention of the monsters.
The herd of undead stood without moving, frozen in place. Every face was aimed at her, even the creature that was the doctor stared at her. She had given herself away and there was little she could do about it. She closed the lid ever so slowly.
The darkness that enveloped her was more than physical. Fear choked her and she began to quake causing the water to lap about her chin. She was not a woman prone to prayer, but in that moment, she prayed like a martyr at the stake. The growling and the sounds of heavy footfall approached her barrel. Then she was forced to brace her hands on the sides as her hideaway was knocked around and nearly tipped over.
The lid was suddenly pulled off and light invaded her sanctuary with such force that her only defense was to fully submerge herself in the hope that somehow the water would deter them.
Hands grasped at her hair and hauled her from the barrel. She screamed into the horrible face of what was once her beloved friend.
* * *
When Shirley opened her eyes, she knew that she was awake, but that was all she knew. The sensations she felt, the smells and sounds that surrounded her told her that she was not in her bed. Panic seized her for a moment as she tried to recall how she had gotten here and more importantly, where “here” was.
There was the prickly feel of grass against her face and the scent of moist cool earth told her she must be on the ground. Just under the earthy scent was another peculiar smell that hinted of something spoiling. She was also laying beneath something heavy because try as she might she could barely move her arms that were pinned beneath her. She opened her eyes and waited for them to come into focus. Something wet trickled down her face.
It was then that she realized that she was indeed on the ground because she couldn’t see past the legs of someone lying atop her. A small group of people limped past. No, these were not people, she thought to herself as everything that had happened over the past several days came rushing back to her.
The creatures groaned and Doctor Shirley could hear one of them grinding its teeth as it passed. A quick assessment of her situation made her realize that she was lying beneath several zombies that for one reason or another had stopped moving. They were no longer animated by the virus.
Doctor Shirley waited for several minutes until she was sure that she was alone before trying to squirm out from beneath the dog pile. It wasn’t easy. The corpses that lay across her were those of full-grown men, one was morbidly obese and had been shot in the stomach so that his entrails had soaked her from breast to knee. When she pushed at the body, her hand slipped into the empty cavern of his belly and brushed against his backbone. It made her shudder with revulsion.
“I am a doctor. I do this for a living,” she reminded herself quietly as she finally managed to slide out from b
eneath the gruesome mess only to find herself lying prone on the ground surrounded by a couple dozen zombies staring down at her. She thought for sure that her time on earth had reached its end. She was surprised to find that they completely ignored her. Apparently, being covered in a dead man’s entrails afforded her a measure of camouflage — meaning that a zombie’s means of identifying its prey was not based solely on sight. She would have to give the matter deeper consideration later.
Rising to one knee, Shirley reached down and scooped up the red slurry that piled on the ground about her and smeared it over her body, arms, legs, and neck. Her clothing was already saturated with it and the stench made her vomit twice before she stood on two very shaky legs.
The crowd of zombies moved further down the camp and Shirley followed just far enough behind to remain outside their circle of aggression. She wondered if in some strange way this was what Diane Fosse felt like living freely among the gorillas in the Congo. The scientist in her wanted to observe details of the zombie existence now that she could stand among them without fearing for her life, but another thought turned her attentions to the camp around her. She might be reasonably safe from being eaten alive, but she was moving in the direction Nicholas had taken the women and children. She was moving toward those who would most likely be killing zombies and who would kill her thinking they were killing one of the undead.
The camp was completely deserted and roaming clusters of zombies could be seen here and there within the camp’s barriers. Their signature growling and occasional scuffling with one another set the older zombies apart from the newly made zombies who still lurched and shambled around like newborn babies still learning motor control.
Suddenly, the walking corpses in front of her stopped moving. Like Meer cats on the Serengeti, the crowd of flesh eaters turned their heads simultaneously toward the twenty or thirty barrels that had been set aside to hold the camp’s water resources. Something had captured their attention and Shirley listened and watched closely to see what it was. Then she heard what sounded like a cough coming from inside one of the barrels.
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