by Jack Hamlyn
Phil didn’t even bother commenting on that. He had already told us what he thought was the cause of it, but that didn’t change the fact that things were fishy. That it took us three days to put down the zombies that flooded the compound. And it was an ugly, scary three days.
“It’s gonna look bad if you leave.”
“So I’m a fucking prisoner?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I’m leaving anyway. You want me to stay, put me in irons, or let your jarhead friend kill me. That should do wonders for the kids.”
I tried everything.
But he’d had it.
NIGHT SIEGE
It was my night on watch. I pulled it with Tuck. The way it worked was that we had two people on watch. We brought a cot up into the tower and stuck it in a little anteroom. That way, one person could sleep while the other watched. Tuck was on edge that night, because it was the first night he had spent without Phil at arm’s length.
“He better not try anything.”
“I was just down there. He’s sleeping. Besides, Riley’s there and so is Sabelia. He has no opportunity to do anything but sleep.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said, “but I don’t think you are.”
I left him there and took my turn on the cot. I was tired and I didn’t want to argue the fact anymore. I went out fast, dreaming as I often did of Ricki and the life we’d once had.
I came out of a deep sleep about two hours later to the sound of breaking glass and gunfire; Tuck shouting at the top of his lungs: “THEY BREACHED THE PERIMETER! THEY BREACHED THE FUCKING PERIMETER!”
I stumbled off the cot, pulling my boots on and grabbing my CAR-15. I was confused and thickheaded, but I was ready to bust. Just like in the war, I came out of it quick enough and was ready to fight…or as ready, as you can ever be when you’re facing down an army of the living dead.
Because that’s what was out there…or so I thought.
The first thing I saw was that an entire section of the tower’s glass front was shattered. The pieces of it were everywhere. The generator was running full tilt down below and that’s because Tuck had thrown the switches, lighting up the compound below.
I was going to ask him why in the hell he had shot out the glass, when I got my answer. Several automatic weapons—they sounded like AK47s—opened up and bullets peppered the tower. If Tuck hadn’t knocked me down, I would have taken one of them.
“Gotta be ARM. It’s a raid.”
Tuck jumped up and fired a couple three-round bursts from his CAR-15. It was answered by more small-arms fire. I detected the sound of three or four separate shooters, which is a little trick I picked up during the war. After you were shot at a few dozen times, your ears learned to distinguish numbers.
“Are you guys all right?” Sabelia called out, coming up the stairs.
“We’re okay! But watch the doors down there! They might try and break through!”
When she was gone, both Tuck and I jumped up and fired indiscriminately in the direction of the shots. Our attackers fired back at us. It was cat-and-mouse. I knew right then that whoever was out there, they were professionals. They stayed in the dark, just outside the lights, firing from one location and when we returned fire, they had already scrambled to a new position. We played the game for maybe ten minutes. Tuck got more daring as he tried—successfully, I might add—to draw their fire. He stopped dropping down with me.
“Stay down there,” he ordered me. “I want them to think one of us is down.”
I didn’t mind at all.
Tuck would fire, then dart back behind the modular window partition as the front of the tower was raked with gunfire. Two more of the windows went, dropping sheets of glass inside, one of them right on top of me. Tuck fired. They fired. At the time, I didn’t know what he was doing. I heard him say, “These guys are pretty good.” What he was doing, it occurred to me later, was counting on the fact that these guys had assault training. This meant that although they had been schooled to take advantage of any possibility, they would still react as they had been taught—in a particular pattern. Which is the downfall of most military training, as any guerrilla can tell you, because when the shit starts flying, trained troopers will fall back on what they have been taught, operating in a predictable pattern.
And Tuck was learning that pattern.
Making them give it away.
It kept on and on, firing and counter-firing, and then Tuck said, “Here we go.” He jumped up and fired not at where they had been, but where he knew they would go. Bingo. One of the guys out there started screaming. And from the sound of it, he’d been hit pretty damn good. They all opened up at the tower then. Tuck did not return fire. He did nothing. He was waiting for them to get back in their assault pattern and they did. Once there, he fired. They fired. He fired. They fired. Pattern time. He fired and another one cried out.
“Oh boy,” he said. “They’ve got the gates open. Zombies are coming in.”
There was an explosion that rocked the tower. Either they had fired an RPG into us downstairs, or something even worse had just happened.
“Steve,” Tuck said. “You better get down there. Get everyone organized. We might have to get in the tunnels and out to the Strykers. Move!”
I did as I was told. I started down the stairs and I could hear some of the girls shouting. Then the lights went out. It was my worst fear but one I suspected right away when I heard the explosion: they had blown one of the doors and now they had gotten to the genny.
It was time to fight in the dark.
THE DARK
When I got down the stairs, nearly tumbling down them in the dark, a bright light blasted me in the face. “Steve?” Jimmy said. “Where’s Tuck?”
“He’s cowboying it with the goons out there.”
“Well, we got goons in here. The genny’s out.”
“Let’s go see why.”
“I think Riley already did.”
“Shit.”
My first thought was for Paul, but Jimmy said he was with the others in the bunkroom and was fine. I led Jimmy down there anyway, just so I could be sure he was safe, and also because it was on the way to the generator room. When we got to the doorway, I knocked and announced myself and Dorothy answered it.
“Everyone okay?” I said.
“We’re fine, Dad,” Paul said.
I nodded. “Okay. We think ARM is hitting us. We might need to get the hell out of here fast. So everyone start packing their stuff, we might have to make a run down into the tunnels.”
We were always ready for such an eventuality. Our food and supplies were always packed in case we had to roll out in a hurry. I didn’t need to tell anyone what to do. By the time the words left my lips they were already in action, organizing.
“Where’s Sabelia?” I asked.
“She went with Riley and Mia to the genny room,” Diane told me.
That made a white bolt of fear cut through me, but I did my best not to show it.
“What do you want me to do?” Phil said.
“You can come with us to the genny.”
“Okay,” he said. There was no hesitation in his voice, which I liked.
The three of us moved down the corridor with me in the lead. I didn’t know what to expect. Jimmy had a CAR-15, but Phil was unarmed. I debated whether to give him my Sig-Sauer, but decided against it. I wasn’t totally convinced he wasn’t part of what was happening so I didn’t want a loaded gun at my back.
We cut down the corridor and made for the steps that led to the genny room below and right away I heard shouts…shooting.
“Shit,” I said, breaking into a run.
The door leading below was partially opened I saw as my light splashed over it. It made me nervous. A perfect ambush. I pushed it open, and for a split second, I was silhouetted in the doorway. Easy kill. Being an ex-Stryker trooper, I had very little experience in house-to-house fighting. All I knew was that it was th
e worst kind of warfare and those few times we’d done it in Iraq I had been scared shitless…then remorseful and almost guilty later when I realized we’d kicked the door in on a hovel, and the only thing we’d accomplished was to make children cry and mothers wail, further debasing them.
Jimmy and Phil were waiting for me to make a move.
So, to hell with common sense, I kicked the door in the rest of the way and waited for bullets to puncture my chest. Thankfully that didn’t happen. I charged down the metal steps, making one hell of a racket and when I reached the bottom, I had company.
A zombie was standing there.
In life, it had been a quite large, quite obese African-American woman, but in death, it was a hulking monstrosity of rolling flab patched with rot and mold. I put my light right in its face purely by accident…and I saw it had no eyes, just gaping black holes in its face. It heard me just fine, though, and its jaws yawned wide, a discolored drool hanging from the chin.
“Fuck,” I heard Phil say.
As it reached for me—and it was so close I could see the knucklebones popping through the skin—I opened up with my CAR-15. I busted six rounds into it, driving it back a few feet and spraying corpse-slime about. Its mouth yawned wider, teeth seeming to slide from the puckered gums until they were practically yellow fangs.
I aimed at its head.
Click.
Click, click.
I was out of shot. I had just spent my last six rounds and not a one of them had been a headshot. The zombie woman came at me, maybe knowing this and maybe just anxious to unzip me crotch to throat and glut herself on my guts. She came forward, drool almost gushing from her mouth.
Phil let out a cry and before I could slap another mag in my carbine or pull my 9mm Sig, Jimmy nudged me aside none too gently and busted rounds into her skull on full-auto. Her head flew apart like a vase stuffed with meat, and the next few seconds were as garish as they were cartoonish: she did not go down as most did. Instead, she stumbled from side-to-side, whirling in drunken circles, almost pirouetting as if she was dancing a fucking waltz. And this with practically nothing above her shoulders but shattered skullbone and a draping confetti of flesh. Then she went stiff as a board and fell over like one, too.
I inserted another mag into my CAR-15 and called out, “Sabelia? Riley? Mia?” and my voice echoed out in the concrete hollows down there as if I was shouting into a pipe.
Here’s the insane thing: you never know when a memory is going to jump into your head, tap you on the shoulder, and say, hey, remember when? And that’s what happened as I called out for the girls. I remembered when I was a kid that my brother, Charlie, and I used to ride our bikes out to the outskirts of Yonkers to catch green leapers in a frog pond out there. Beneath the road was a culvert pipe and I would get on one end, he would get on the other, and we’d shout back and forth. It amused the hell out of us for some reason. The pond or culvert is no longer there, of course. There’s a prefab suburb of ugly modular homes where the pond used to be, and Charlie went to his grave just shy of his fourteenth birthday when he went into anaphylactic shock following a hornet sting.
But that’s what I remembered.
And of all times.
I heard Sabelia call out. I heard her distinctly say to get the hell out of there, but I wasn’t about to do that. The bowels of the complex were a series of garage-sized storage rooms and the one with the genny was down from our location a bit. I pulled out my Sig-Sauer and gave it to Phil without a second thought when I saw a pair of zombies coming in our direction. We dropped both of them with a minimum of firing, but the ones that came next came in numbers.
I didn’t take the time to count but there was more than a dozen.
Instead of backing away as was my normal tactic when dealing with maggot-heads, I charged in firing, Phil and Jimmy taking my lead and doing the same. We put most of them down and killed the others when we got within spitting distance.
“BEHIND YOU!” I heard Phil shout as he jumped forward and shot another one in the face that did no dance, but folded up to the floor. It was the second time he’d saved my ass, and believe me, Tuck or no Tuck, I wasn’t forgetting it.
We got into the next room, shining our lights around and I saw a pair of what I thought was ARM troopers on the floor…six or seven zombies feeding on them with horrid chewing and slurping sounds. They were completely disinterested in us, unlike a group of others that came lurching out to meet us.
We opened up and dropped them, dropped a half dozen more, then still more until our weapons were hot and smoking in our hands. A few stragglers roamed around, beginning to take interest in us. One of them, for some crazy reason, was in the corner scratching at the wall as if she was trying to dig her way out.
“STEVE!” Sabelia cried. “RUN! THEY’RE ALL OVER THE PLACE!”
Too late.
I swung my light around and scoped out the situation easily. Sabelia and the girls were inside the green metal cage, which housed the generator. They had locked themselves in, or, been locked in by the ARM pukes. I didn’t know which and I had no time to think it over because the dead came at us with a full frontal assault. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say there were a good twenty-five of them. They came at us with mouths open and teeth chomping and we lined-up and started putting them down with careful headshots to conserve on ammo. We dropped the first ten or twelve and then it got very hairy as they pushed in and we were forced to retreat.
Fighting in situations like that is always very dicey, because it’s pitch-black, you’re confined, all you have are your flashlights to see by, and you stand a real good chance of killing one of your own.
I didn’t know how Jimmy and Phil were faring and I didn’t have time to look. I kept my light on the zombies, aiming for heads and mowing them down. I’m not sure how many I dropped, but I had to reload. I paused to slap in my last fresh magazine. I had to dance a merry jig to keep out of their way, smashing them in the faces with the stock of the CAR-15, kicking out and hitting them as what seemed dozens of hands reached out for me, coming out of the darkness, anxious to get a grip on me.
I fired, fought, and fired again, their fingernails scraping my face, hands tearing at my hair, ripping my fatigues. Finally, there were no more, and I was still on my feet, bloodied and bruised and scratched-up, but still in one piece. I was amazed to find Jimmy and Phil in the same condition.
I ran over to the cage.
Locked. Another heavy-duty Masterlock.
“We came for the genny,” Riley said, “and those ARM assholes were waiting for us. They threw us in here. They got Mia.”
“ARM?” Jimmy said.
She shook her head. “The zombies.”
I swallowed.
“Are you okay?” Sabelia asked.
“Never better,” I panted, thanking God that we hadn’t hit one of them with all the shooting.
Just as I was contemplating blowing that chain off, Phil disappeared and came back with a hacksaw. He cut the chain, but it took precious minutes to do so. Then we were all together. Upstairs I could hear shouting and gunfire. My scalp was crawling. Paul was up there. Diane was up there.
We had to get to them and fast.
I led the way out, leapfrogging corpses until my light found the stairway and then
I heard Sabelia shout, “STEVE! STEVE, LOOK OUT!”
I turned just in time to see a zombie coming at me.
It was Mia.
MIA
She came walking out at me with a very casual sort of stride like I was an old friend she wanted to embrace. I saw her open her mouth, her lips forming my name.
“STEVE!” Sabelia cried out.
Mia had reanimated very quickly and I could see how they had gotten her. There was a gaping bite out of her throat. Dried blood was smeared over the ghostly pallor of her face and down her neck. It was all over the hoodie she wore. She grinned as she came for me; her eyes dead white, her teeth long and narrow, stained pink. She lic
ked them with her tongue that was dark with her own regurgitated blood.
She reached out for me with fine, pale fingers.
“Oh, Mia,” I said.
The others were crying out at me, but not shooting because I had inserted myself between them and Mia and I wondered later if it was by accident. I had pity for Mia just as I’d had for the other girls from the ARM rape camp. Mia had been an excellent shot, a good medic, and a better friend. She had been fine-boned, wiry, and almost delicate in life. In death, she was a caricature of that. She was a hollow-cheeked wraith with white skin, huge lusting eyes, and long rodent-like teeth.
She was a thing from a grave.
She only wanted to tear my throat out. She existed by that equation. There was nothing more to it than that. A walking corpse propelled by cannibal hungers that wanted to pull my entrails out and gnaw them to pink strings, to rip out my jugular and bathe in the sweet red waters of my life.
I let her get in close.
It was reckless and stupid, and I couldn’t afford such things. Yet, I let it happen and I think if I did it again I would have done it the same way. She might have gotten me. It was real close. I was holding my rifle with the barrel pointed upwards at a slight cant. I felt her cold fingers rake my throat, and then tear at my shirt and I could smell her breath, which was like the depths of a tomb.
The others were crying out.
Shouting.
They were generally going ballistic.
“Stay back,” I ordered them. “I’ll handle this.”
Mia had hold of my shirt and I saw the saliva course down her chin, bloodstained teeth gnashing. I saw them part as she zeroed in on my throat. What I heard then was what I never expected to hear from one of the dead: a voice. She parted her lips and said in an airless squeak, “Steve.” By that point, she was inches from my throat and the muzzle of my rifle was just beneath her jaw. There’s a weird fascination to look death in the eye and to feel its chill against your cheek. That must be why people engage in dangerous sports, and that must have been why I let her get in so close. What I’m going to say now will sound not only creepy, but obscene and even disturbing, but part of me almost wanted to feel her teeth sink into me. There was some strange erotic thrill at her closeness, at her pale skin, and cadaver eyes…her hunger, which was absolute, carnal and irresistible.