Zombie Rush

by Joseph Hansen

  ****

  The sharp report of a .45 spun Benson’s attention around. He saw for the first time that there was a zombie in the truck bed with them and it now sported a very large hole in its head. Justin sat beyond the dead beast with the barrel still smoking, and Benson gave him a nod before he went back to firing at the mass of dead runners that seemed to be increasing at every turn.

  ****

  Justin looked at the man, who stared back at him in horror. The man slowly looked down at his own leg and Justin followed his eyes, seeing the gash in his leg that was definitely missing flesh. Blood flowed freely from the wound; it was a bite. Their eyes met again and the man shook his head back and forth, quickly trying to deny the inevitable. Justin mirrored his actions and they both looked out the back of the truck, confused as to what could possibly happen next. They saw that there were too many just a couple feet off the tailgate, their rage spurring them on with unbelievable speed. The truck seemed to move at a leisurely pace as it made its way through the debris, the slightest slowdown spelling doom for the three of them if not everyone in the truck cab.

  The man’s eyes looked down as he suddenly became very calm and resigned as he leaned forward to whisper into Justin’s ear.

  “I can feel it already. It burns everywhere at once. I can feel it in my veins.” He paused. “My name is Michael,” he said significantly and Justin knew that he would never forget… Michael.

  Michael jumped up with both ends of the broken hockey stick in his hands and jumped out the back of the truck, throwing a cross-body block into the oncoming horde.

  ****

  “What the hell?” Benson shouted as he watched Michael fly into the mass. Then he saw him regain his feet and start to swing and jab the broken sticks for only a couple of seconds before the mob absorbed the man. Justin and Benson would have soon been in their grasp and suffering the same inevitable fate if he had not sacrificed himself. Benson saw the look of awe on Justin’s face. He could see that the boy saw it for what it was; an act of self-sacrifice that most people didn’t have in them to do. The stranger had saved his and Justin’s life and the kid knew it.

  “He was bit!” Justin said too softly to be heard.

  “What?” Benson asked, incredulously.

  “He was bitten!” he screamed through tears and he pointed at the dead zombie that had inflicted the wound. Benson nodded his head regretfully yet grateful that the man’s sacrifice had worked. He then struggled to lift the body of the infected up and over the tailgate, watching as it hit the ground—a limp chunk of flesh that landed like a bag of sand. He looked at Justin with a sad look.

  “He fought well. I don’t even know his name.”

  “His name is Michael. He told me before he died; he said ‘my name is Michael.’” Justin looked out the back, suffering from more than a little shock.

  “Michael, remember Michael,” he said softly to himself.

  ****

  Lisa was surprised by how few zombies were coming out of the cracks. Her group seemed to grow with every block, shocking her with the amount of people who survived the initial onslaught. She couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if Buck and Skit hadn’t spurred her into action. Would they have hid in their apartments until the Zs eventually found them, or would they have gone out scavenging and stealing in order to survive? She didn’t see a scenario where the latter could ever end well. Bonding together from the start was the best thing that could have happened, and she regretted her desire to initially run away along with her decision to wait a day and plan. So many—if not all—of these faces would have disappeared by the time morning came. Buck, on the other hand, would have fought until he died right in front of his apartment building. She knew that simply by the way he was swinging his hammer out on that street corner. He was a valuable fighter, too valuable to be squandered in a pointless battle on a random street corner.

  She remembered the flow of battle early in the day as people headed out of the city with the dead hot on their heels. Would the dead continue on to the next town without ever a thought of coming back here? She doubted it. As soon as the food thinned out on the shoreline, they would return from the beaches and converge on downtown once again.

  Men and women of all areas of life walked together on the way to the one defensible place that they themselves would set up and maintain. This was important and Lisa knew it. It wasn’t an evac site or a place where handouts were passed out and everybody was hustled about like cattle until some stranger decided you were worth saving. It was a place where they would stand and fight, support each other, and rain their own type of hell down upon the zombies. Many spoke of just that same thing; nobody wanted to give up their city to the dead.

  Several cats and multitudes of dogs walked with the troop, some seeming to have owners and others just following along where the energy led them. She didn’t know if they were attracted to Tonka or they were so accustomed to humans that it had become their very nature to band with them. They had an uncanny way of knowing where the next batch of Zs was to come from and constantly posted up in front of an alley or abandoned car. Lisa encouraged people to go and destroy those who were trapped to get them used to how to stop the zombies and also because threats were best eliminated when you had the upper hand.

  Groups of zombies would come at them from around a corner or an alleyway and small satellite shooters from their group would meet them without fear. They simply had the need to fight and protect, rather than lie down and die like so many others.

  “I wonder where they all are?” she heard Ernie mutter from beside her.

  “What did you say, Ernie?” she asked, and he paused as if he didn’t want to spoil the mood but then decided to.

  “You didn’t see it out on the bridge, Lieutenant. We were holding them back pretty good and then the bulldozers got overrun and the front-end loaders couldn’t keep up. They started coming from the island and the mainland in numbers I never even imagined. When I reloaded, I saw all of the drivers and soldiers we met up with piling into the cab of the loaders; some even sitting up on the roof as they headed towards the Rockwell shore.”

  Lisa became very quiet as he relayed what had happened. She could see that he needed to get it off his chest, but it was just all so hard to believe when he looked so fresh-out-of-the-shower cleaned up. Now he was as much of a mess as they all were. But if there were that many why—

  “That was when I saw Tanner and Tommy go down,” Ernie continued on the verge of tears.

  “Tommy? He was with you then? What happened next?” she pressed as bells went off in her head.

  “I got in my truck and tried to block them away from Colleen and screamed at her to get in the truck, but she ignored me and fought like an animal until, well… until she got bit. Then she took four or five more shots and pulled it up under… up… under… here,” he stuttered and pointed under his chin

  “Yeah, that really sucks, Ernie,” she said. She meant it, but she couldn’t help sounding a little snide. She hadn’t given Nobles the opportunity to off herself and she could see by her eyes that she wouldn’t have done it herself. Lisa couldn’t allow herself to hesitate. She knew that it was those moments of compassion, where you think, This one might be immune or maybe she’s not really infected. That is when mistakes are made and people got hurt or worse. “You’re going to have to hang tough though, Ernie; you’re the one in the uniform, remember? Head back there and give one of those guys a break on our left flank, would ya?” she said with a slap on his back. He nodded and dropped back.

  Finding out about Tanner was distressing her; she was second in command behind Tanner and had half hoped he would show up to take the reins.

  Approaching the target area of Sam’s Club, Lisa wasn’t quite sure what she was actually seeing. It looked more like a truck stop than a shopping center, except the multitude of trucks were parked in a uniformed pattern with zero clearance between them. It had become a twelve-foot-high double wall of traile
rs surrounding the building.

  “I wouldn’t think that a wall of semi-trailers would be strong enough to hold back a horde,” Lisa mumbled to herself.

  “They can’t,” said a man walking next to her. “But they would have to get up about eight feet before they would be effective. Otherwise, they’re pushing on the edge of the floor and framework down below, and I can’t see that being effective without equipment. Where the floor stops, the wall joins and that’s the strongest point. It’s designed to handle high crosswinds, so it will take a lot to collapse the walls. They could get through the ceiling, but that would also trap them for a while.”

  Lisa looked at him, impressed by his confidence and knowledge, but there was something bugging her about his theory.

  “I would think the weight of bodies alone would cave the walls in,” she said, only half-appreciative of this man who was so impressed with his own speculative knowledge.

  “I thought about that too but I just don’t know for sure. A crowd pushing on a single point would destroy it pretty quickly, but I don’t see zombies as having that sort of unified focus. They would be more of a flood of water; except not nearly as heavy. They would only be able to pile so high unless the pile was just right and I don’t see that happening either. The bulk of their weight would fall in a downwards force, like pouring a concrete wall; the weight is concentrated downwards to a much greater extent than it is outwards. Actually, I would feel pretty safe behind a wall of semi-trailers,” said the man, but before she could get his name, he ran off to talk to someone he recognized.

  What he said made sense to Lisa though, even zombies have to obey the laws of physics; a hundred pounds is a hundred pounds regardless of where it comes from and the downward pull of gravity will forever be a factor.

  Lisa had no idea what she was walking into but it was much more than she could have hoped for on such short notice. Her group walked through a long corridor of semi-trailers with their frames flat on the ground and the wheels removed. Loose wheels were jammed between any gaps, creating a safe passageway of steel walls a hundred and fifty feet long, ranging in height from eight to twelve feet until it opened onto the street surrounding the Sam’s Club and its outer lots. It was a safe passageway for a hundred and fifty feet. The makeshift gauntlet was not only going to include the Sam’s Club and surrounding shops, but would also encompass the hospital grounds as well. Lisa felt a moment of panic. It was way too much space to try to protect. All she wanted was the building to hold up in and plan things out; there was no way they could handle all of this.

  Then she saw men and women running here and there helping to fortify the makeshift walls as others up on flatbed decks cut rebar into what looked like spears and thicker ones into clubs.

  In a way it made perfect sense when she looked at the general topography and how it lent to this being a better plan than just taking the Sam’s Club itself, but would they be able to close it off in time?

  Each trailer was pointed nose first out into the approaching danger but angled to make up more of the wall’s length. Staggered, it made the bulkhead stronger and didn’t allow a congregation point of more than twenty feet along the angled sidewall that tied right back into a fresh bulkhead. It looked solid and gave the living a forty-foot cushion from the sights and sounds of the infected. Some of the doors to the trailers were opened and it dawned on her that the trailers were all full of products.

  More of the encampment came into view, and she saw generators running to power lights and the reefer trailers. Bulk fuel trailers were parked off to the left of the strip mall and although people hustled about, it looked like none of the buildings had been entered. In fact, the entrances seemed to be avoided completely.

  There were shooters already clearing out a sparse field of zombies before concentrating the shooting in the area that Lisa’s group had just come from. Lisa couldn’t help but think that they may have taken a bigger bite than they could chew. What the group was doing was great, but it could be too ambitious. It was obvious that the trailer wall was not complete and was just barely coming past the hospital in the distance, leaving over a couple of hundred yards left to be closed off.

  It was too late to do anything about it now. Arguments and controversy would only slow things down, so she just shut up and looked for Brett.

  An older man stood in the center of the chaos of busy people rushing past him from multiple directions, trying to follow the instructions of a select few. She saw him at the same time that he saw her and he flagged her over. Most of the group with her had picked up on something to do as soon as they entered the enclosure. They stopped and waited for a giant four-wheel drive forklift to cross in front of them. It passed by on its way to lift a fully loaded grain trailer so that four men could take the wheels off and then set it flat on its steel frame. More semis filed between her and Brett as they hurried to finish the wall of trailers that could mean life or death.

  Brett waited next to an older man who had a similar size and build to himself, making it obvious that they were related.

  “Hi Lieutenant Reynolds; this is my dad and the architect of our impromptu fort. He has a job for everybody and a plan.”

  “Pleasure meeting you, Mr…?”

  “Brett Senior, but you can call me Brett,” he said in an all-business manner then he leaned in to show her the sketch he was working on. “This is what I am planning; we’ll have three arms that shoot west, south, and north…”

  Lisa looked at his plans and wasn’t able to make neither head nor tail of the chicken scratches that he had made.

  “This is all going to depend upon mass, direction, and using their constants against them,” Brett Sr. said, and Lisa found herself wishing that the man she had talked to earlier was still in sight.

  “I see that you have made some plans, Brett. Why don’t you just handle the fortifications while I get these buildings stabilized and we’ll meet later? I mean, let’s face it, me jumping into your plans now is not going to help things, especially when there’s so much else to do.”

  “Okay, that’s probably for the best. If you find any military people or guns, send them over, we have a few, but we’re going to need lots more.”

  “I will,” she said.

  She knew that she should stay there and see what he was planning, but it looked as if none of the buildings had been breached yet and the internal end of the fortified area was deadpanned as everybody tried to stay out of the construction people’s way. That was a job more suited for her and Tonka. She scanned the crowd until her eyes landed on a small group of women and men that looked… different. She signaled to Bryan and Leon who hadn’t strayed very far from her since they pulled her the radio station. She then waved over some of the ones she had issued firearms to.

  “Gentlemen, we have a lot of work cut out for us and I need your help. First off, we don’t want to use any firearms inside the perimeter—there are just too many people here. I need you to start selecting some people and start checking these buildings for zombies. Bring a couple of these stray dogs with you; they’ll warn you early. They all seem to have an innate sense of the undead, so pay attention to them and post guards at all the buildings that you clear. Everything in these buildings is now community property whether the owner is here or not, understood? We need several of you to go to that flatbed and grab a bunch of those cut pieces of rebar and bring it to the hospital.”

  “Is that fair? I mean the owner should have a say in it, don’t you think?” Bryan asked.

  “Of course it’s not fair. Well, not to that individual, but is any of this fair? A say is one thing, but control over it is a whole other story. We have the masses to care for now. We have stepped beyond martial law and into a need for basic survival. Everything now belongs to us and the cause we face, so place guards, utilize everyone—even the animals if you can. If they're going to eat, then they are going to earn it. Start at the Longhorn Steakhouse and get that cleared top to bottom, and then move on down the line
to the strip mall with the Subway store. Teach people as you go; no shooting and leave the real estate as clean as you can. Ernie, go with them and try to find some workers in the crowd. We need body haulers, cooks, aid workers, and people to simply run water and stuff to the fighters. Get some cooks set up in the Longhorn and the Subway once they’re cleared and have them start putting out food for the fighters. Get some people meeting new arrivals at the gate to check for bites then have them sent over to the ATT building to be assigned… unless they are military or shooters, then send them to Brett.”

  Lisa could feel her emergency response training kicking in as each direction flooded out. These were suddenly no longer people or victims, they were soldiers—her soldiers, and she had no reservations in projecting her authority. It wasn’t much of an army but it was all she had and now that she knew Tanner was gone, it was up to her to set things rolling.

  “Ah, excuse me, Lieutenant, but shouldn’t I be with the shooters?” Ernie leaned in and whispered conspiratorially under his breath.

  “Do as you’re told, Officer Arnst; I need you to do this. Your uniform will draw people to you, so you have to be in control; the more of a handle we have on things off the bat, the more they will follow us down the road… got it?”

  Ernie nodded, though his face showed that he felt cheated.

  “As the buildings clear, we need a list written of essential things. First of all, we need large containers that we can start filling with clean water. Set those up along the boulevard behind the ATT store; in fact, get tables from the Longhorn when it’s cleared and run a feed and supply line down that stretch of boulevard and take care of anything else that comes to mind because I know that I’m missing a lot. Tell the cooks to think soups and stews as being the best way to conserve what we have; there are close to a thousand people here already and more on the way, and they can run through a lot of food in very little time. We didn’t ask for a zombie war but if we’re going to do it, we’re gonna do it right,” she said, noting that she had the attention of all three. Ernie didn’t want to do this kind of work and would rather be pulling a trigger, but she could see in his face that he would do it to the best of his abilities and whine about it later.