by Tufo, Mark
BT had just finished up with his last opponent. He’d brought both swords inward and sent the head into the air like a popped champagne cork. Of all the random things my brain tended to house for later consideration, I hoped that wasn’t going to be one of them. Something about watching a woman’s decapitated head spinning in the air would be sufficient fuel to keep me in a padded room for the majority of my stay in an assisted living facility. We were now close to being behind the field of fire. As of yet, we’d not been adequately reinforced, so I wasn’t sure what exactly was happening or why we were finally restoring some order.
“The gates.” BT smacked my shoulder and pointed; they were shut. There were still plenty of zombies in here with us, but no longer an endless supply, like when your mom grows a bumper crop of cauliflower. At least now we only had to eat what was on our plates rather than receiving unlimited refills. I feel like that could be a version of hell I found myself in, if that was the direction I was headed. A steady diet of all the foods I detested; lord knows there’s enough of them. What could be crueler? Plate never empty and no leaving the table before it was clean. BT was breathing heavily, as was I, from the exertion. No wonder rifles had bumped swords as the preferred killing method. We had a moment to catch our breath, but that was it. Dewey had somehow caught wind of the change, and, instead of breaking through, it seemed that their marching orders were to now inflict as much damage as possible.
I don’t know what he did or how he did it, but the zombies went into a berserker mode. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like they were well-behaved savages under normal circumstances, but this was above and beyond that. They went nuts, running with increased speed, their arms a blur of activity, their mouths clacking wildly; they were slamming into people like violently flung bowling balls. Screams for help rang out; these were usually quickly followed by gurgled cries and the tearing of flesh from bone. It was like Dewey was stepping down on the adrenal glands of his minions; it wasn’t sustainable, he knew that. Didn’t matter, though. It got the results he desired as battle-weary Marines were succumbing to the onslaught.
BT and I were doing what we could, but right now, that wasn’t much more than dealing with the creatures directly to the front. I felt a burning in my shoulder, thought maybe I’d been winged by a bullet. I could feel the warmth of the wound spread down my shoulder blade and halfway down my arm, then my mobility suffered. When I didn’t see blood, I thought a torn rotator cuff or something equally impeding. I was in trouble. I shifted the sword to my left; there was a large drop off in coordination, aim and power, but I was making up for it in enthusiasm. Wanting to live has that effect. The zombie invaders were finally beginning to diminish into manageable numbers, so, obviously, this was the cue for the replacements to come in and sweep up. It was almost like they’d been waiting in the wings to make sure it would be all right before coming out and exposing themselves to the danger. I knew that wasn’t the case; I was just in a great deal of pain and tired as fuck, and the day had just begun.
BT dragged me back as the military personnel with rifles filled in the gaps. “Dragged” is a strong word, almost suggests I didn’t want to go. That was not the case. We rearmed ourselves, then my guardian angel did me a solid, I saw the grip of my pistol and pulled the blood and gore coated 1911 from beneath a zombie and headed back up the wall. The tank was out in the middle of the field of battle, surrounded. We could see smoke, so we knew it was running, but it wasn’t doing anything.
I’d lost sight of my sergeant during the battle; I was happy to see her up on the wall, unscathed. “Is it stuck?” I asked Stenzel, who was watching through her scope.
“Don’t think so; I can see the tracks, and they’re clear. I think it’s shriekers, sir.”
“Can you kill them?”
“I could if I knew where they were.”
“How is that possible?” BT asked. “I mean, Trip’s crazy little tinfoil hats hold back the signal; how can the military-grade steel those Marines are encased in not do the same thing?”
“It’s a composite material,” Stenzel said. We looked at her. “What? Maybe if either of you paid attention to our training sessions, you’d know that.”
“I had a hangover,” I told her in defense.
“For two weeks?” she asked.
“Have you met him?” BT asked.
“The hatch is opening!” Stenzel let the shock of that come out in her words.
The first question I wanted to ask was why, but I knew. If there were a batch of shriekers right outside that tank, the people inside would feel like their minds were being flayed open and the exposed parts subjected to a blow torch. It was quite possible the poor bastard opening the hatch thought he was somehow going to be able to escape; it was also possible he couldn’t care less. The only thing he would be leaving behind would be his life. With the unaided eye, it was difficult to tell what exactly was going on. Thankfully (or not), Stenzel was narrating the action.
“Someone has popped out. There are arms around him—looks like they’re trying to drag him in. His face is a mess. Blood,” she added after a moment. “He’s moving too fast…looks like it could be leaking from his ears.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. I hated using His name in vain, something drilled into me a good long while ago, but right now, it seemed appropriate, and I didn’t think He’d mind, maybe He’d consider it a plea for help. Couldn’t hurt, right? I knew firsthand that a shrieker let loose in your mind was a painful endeavor, but had they once again jumped up the evolutionary ladder? Could it not only feel like you were having your brain sliced open, but truly be happening? Could they somehow be creating embolisms? That seemed reasonable and horrible; what chance would we have if they could rip our brains apart remotely?
I might not have been able to make out too many details from this distance, but it would have been impossible not to see the speeders trying to take advantage of the tank opening up. They were swarming the hulking machine. Somehow, those inside had pulled their wayward squadmate back in, but they’d not been able to secure the hatch. Stenzel began firing, as did the entirety of the line, but there were just too many. I don’t know how many got in, but enough that if there had been a tank stuffing contest, like the phone booth stuffing fad back in the ’70s, a world record would have been set. Whoever had been in there was in as much danger of dying from being crushed as they were from being eaten. The shots ceased once it was realized that nothing we did now would be able to help those poor souls trapped. I won’t swear it, but I thought that maybe the sixty-ton war machine was rocking back and forth, and it was a foregone conclusion as to why.
“Umm, where’s the radio?” I was looking around.
“What’s going on?” BT was looking for the next threat.
“I think we need to put an RPG in that tank,” I said.
“You think the old man is going to authorize that? He’ll want to grab that thing back, if and when this is over,” BT said.
“Do we agree that Dewey is different? That he’s lightyears ahead of the rest of his class?” I asked.
“Yeah,” BT answered tentatively. “No way,” he said, seeing where I was going with this. “Operating a tank is way beyond their skill set. Come on, Mike, you think a zombie is going to be able to drive a tank into our wall?”
“Don’t need to know how to drive to work the guns. We just watched them take down a helicopter, stop a tank, and breach the gates in under an hour. I don’t know about you, brother, but I don’t care to see how much more they’re capable of.”
“Fuck you and your paranoia.” He didn’t say it in a mean way, but rather that he knew I was leaning in the right direction and didn’t want to hear it. Stenzel had gone to look for a way to communicate with Bennington. BT and I watched as the first of the zombies came back up the hatch. She was covered in blood; could have been a stand-in for Carrie during the pig blood scene. I gave her a trio of bullets; she fell over to the side and on top of her fellow monsters. I killed the
next four in a similar fashion. I wanted to make a point, to show them that they couldn’t just eat us and get away with it. Then I realized the futility of trying to send them a message. They didn’t care; couldn’t have been any more ambivalent if they wanted to. They were incapable of those feelings. They no longer possessed the same desires, concerns, or morals as a person. To attribute any sense of humanity to them was nothing but anthropomorphizing, and it was a waste of energy.
Stenzel was standing with the radio, though the operator was nowhere in sight. My hope was that he’d dropped the heavy equipment and made a run for it, but the hastily wiped up blood on the side led me to believe…other things. I had to climb the rank ladder to get to the colonel, starting with a private. Once I told him I was going to break his teeth out and make a necklace with them, he sent me on to a sergeant who didn’t even bother listening to my diatribe as I was handed up to a lieutenant.
“This is Lieutenant Saunders, go.”
“This is Captain Talbot. I need to speak to the colonel.” I’d repeated this statement three times now. One more and I was going to start making good on my threats.
“I’m sorry, Captain, I cannot get you through to the colonel at this time. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a war.”
“Saunders? You the kid that looks like he’s twelve? Listen, Lieutenant, I’m not calling the colonel to fucking exchange banana bread recipes. I’m smack dab in the middle of that war you’re referring to, and if you don’t goddamned hand that phone over to him now, I am going to have my top reach up inside your colon and pull your tonsils out through your ass! We clear?”
“Why the fuck do I have to reach up there?” BT whispered.
“I’m a captain now,” I said, taking my finger off the send button. “I can’t be expected to be making puppets out of humans; the officers’ club frowns on that kind of thing.”
“This is Bennington.” Our leader sounded harried. What had happened around us had been bad enough; it was likely he’d heard similar reports all around the base.
“It’s Talbot, sir.”
“This your ‘told you so’ moment, Captain?”
“Not up to it just now, sir. We have a tank here that has fallen into enemy hands. I want to have an RPG round or two put into it.”
I was expecting him to call me crazy or have me launch a rescue or at least argue against it. Was not expecting the green light. “I’ll send a team as soon as I can. Anything else, Captain?”
“No, sir.”
He hung up quickly. Five more zombies had come out while we waited, then the tattered remains of the tank crew, less one, my guess they’d kept the gunner, either turning him or coercing him to do his job. What was left of them could have fit easily into one casket. A shiver ran up my spine as a gray arm, could have been the color of a garment but looked like dead skin, reached up and pulled the hatch down.
“You have got to be kidding me,” BT said. “You going to call the colonel back and tell him to hurry up?”
A large truck pulled up and three men hopped out. “Looking for Captain Talbot!” A few pointed in my direction. They grabbed a couple of green plastic cases and headed up the wall. They had everything out and set up pretty quickly.
“You sure about this?” the triggerman asked as he looked out the oversized sight.
“I know it’s a waste of a tank, but yeah, it needs to be done.”
“No, what I’m saying, sir, is that I think someone is alive in there. The turret moved a bit.”
I’d not noticed anything of the sort.
“There’s nothing living in that machine,” BT said.
We all watched as the turret moved again. BT, Stenzel and myself in horror, while the RPG team watched with sadly expectant hope.
“Stop that machine, Corporal.” I was pointing but that was completely unnecessary.
“But, sir.”
“I realize this is tough to swallow, but a zombie is spinning that turret, and what do you think is going to happen to us when it figures out how to fire the main cannon?”
The corporal looked to his crew and then at me again before sighting down the enemy. The turret was still moving.
“Corporal, if you can’t or won’t shoot, hand it over,” I said.
“But…but there’s people in there.”
“No time for this,” I said as the terrifying weapon kept moving. I snagged the tube from his hands, my injured shoulder protesting every extraneous movement. I placed the tube atop my shoulder. “Backblast area all secure?” I asked.
“Backblast area, all secure,” one of the men from the team responded.
I did feel a slight hesitation; depressed the trigger anyway. There was an authoritative whoosh as the projectile flew from the front of the barrel. I kept my sights on target like I was firing an old school TOW missile. Not sure who’s familiar with that brainchild of a weapon; it’s pretty much the same as an RPG except for one significant difference: the projectile is attached to the firing apparatus by a long, thin cable. This way, as the gunner readjusts his aim on, presumably, a moving target, the information is passed simultaneously to the grenade. Sounds great in theory—I mean, who wouldn’t wish they could have readjusted their aim sometimes? And the ability to do it in flight? Sounds like a dream. Yeah, that’s right up until the fact occurs to you that this is all happening in an active war zone, and while you stand there with your oversized pecker exposed, everyone on the opposing side is going to do their best to take you out before your missile strikes.
My round hit the side of the tank. While the explosion was exceedingly spectacular, I didn’t do much more than scrape the paint. Not sure when the technology had first been introduced, but all tanks these days had protective, reactive armor on them. Meaning when a projectile strikes, the plating explodes outward, deflecting all the energy away from the canned occupants. Had to figure the brains at the Pentagon were getting pissed off, losing billion-dollar tanks to a fifty-buck round. It was a very effective means of protection, especially on a moving tank. The idea that you’d be able to hit the same spot twice were minimal, and with that in mind, I reloaded. By now, the turret had turned three-quarters of the way toward us. My rocket streaked out, and we got another grand explosion that blew apart more than a few zombies in the general area, but my primary target had been wholly unaffected. I had succeeded in destroying another panel, though. Thirty or forty more shots and I should be to the meat of it.
“Fuck,” I muttered, letting the nose of the tube dip.
“The tank, sir, shoot the tank,” the corporal from whom I’d taken the weapon said. He sounded as panicked as I felt. We were all staring down the 120-millimeter barrel, and even at a hundred yards or so, it looked impossibly big. I’ve had the displeasure of looking into the barrels of many rifles and pistols, they pale in comparison to the cannon now aimed our way. Peashooters.
“Load me up!” I said much too loudly. I think it was because I was trying to cover up the sound my balls were making as they scurried up into my midsection looking for a place to hide. Probably sounded something like a squeaky-hinged door creaking open.
“Hit the tank, Mike! I don’t want to go out like this,” BT said. While all of those around us were cringing and crouching, he stood ramrod straight. He’d decided if we were gonna go, he would look as stoic as possible. And seriously, at this point, it wasn’t like covering your head was going to do the least bit of good.
I got a pat on my back to tell me I was reloaded and the back chute was clear. I took a deep breath; if I missed, I fundamentally knew that our time here on earth was measured in seconds. “No pressure,” I said as I depressed the trigger. I think if a historian should ever come around to ask all of those on the wall what had transpired next, there would be a dozen different eyewitness accounts. A fair number will say my shot went straight down the cannon barrel, and maybe it would have…but there’s an equal chance it had actually sailed straight over the top of the tank and we all died. That
’s one theory that floated around; we had all died on the wall that day and it had happened so quickly that none of us realized we had passed over. Of course, it was Trip that had let this little dandy escape his mouth, later on. It didn’t help that he went around continually pinching us to make sure we were real and then, to make double-sure, he asked those too far away to pinch whether they could see us.
I’d love to say my shot exploded the fully operational Death Star, but what I think happened goes something like this: I fired my rocket (which truly did look like my hastily aimed shot was going to skitter over the top of the tank like a skipped stone on a smooth lake), and the zombie inside had also fired. The recoil of the heavy barrel pushed the entire front end of the tank up, just enough that my round either collided with the tank round or the barrel. Either way, the explosion was cataclysmic for those inside and nearby. Secondary explosions had us ducking for cover as destroyed parts flew away from the blast in a complete arc. When the explosions finally died down, there was loud cheering and whooping from all those that had witnessed the event. I got enough claps on my shoulder to dislocate it. My expression of shock hadn’t changed much as I found BT through the celebration. I mouthed the words, “I missed” to him. He replied, “I know.” My head was flooded with a swirl of emotions, obviously joy, but there was also disbelief and intense fear. It is difficult to reconcile that one shot ago you had less than one hand’s worth of seconds left.
“How you doing?” BT had muscled past everyone else, who were much too busy being happy they still drew breath.
“Pretty sure I could throw up right now.”