by Jack Hamlyn
Behind us, the gunfire was getting louder and closer.
We climbed down the ridge, stepping over corpses. We kept our weapons up and ready for action. When we reached the bottom, I grabbed her and pushed her down. “Quiet,” I said when she protested and, being Robin, man, did she protest.
I heard someone approaching.
A pair of mutants came out of the darkness. I had the feeling they were heading off to link up with the mop-up detail. There was plenty of real estate. They could have passed by us in either direction. The ridgeline ran at least a city block that I could see.
Of course, they came right at us.
Robin tensed next to me.
They hadn’t seen us. When they were about fifteen feet away, I opened up with the MP-5 and dropped both of them. They squirmed on the ground. The blood pouring out of their wounds glistened in the moonlight. It was not red, but more of a gray slime.
When they stopped moving, I edged in and kicked one of them. It did not stir. The gas mask it wore was not the modern variant I trained on—the M40—but an older version that looked almost primitive, maybe Soviet cold war issue. With the attached hood, it was creepy looking like one of those skullish, snoutlike masks the guys in World War I used.
Kneeling down, I grabbed the hood and yanked it off. The gas mask, which was fitted into the hood, came off with it.
Robin was right: the mutants didn’t have faces like we did.
What I was saw was something like a great mass of fungus, a webby white-gray clot of growth that had eaten away the flesh and netted itself to the skull beneath. Bright yellow fibers, thick around as fingers were threaded through it. The only thing that marked it as a face were two lidless eyes that looked like jellied cherries. The fungi hung down over the chin like a beard.
“Let’s go,” Robin said. “Please. That thing gives me the creeps.”
This was a man once, I thought, before that growth overtook him. A man.
It seemed incredible, impossible. I pressed the barrel of the MP-5 right where the nose might have been and it gave. The face was loose and spongy. I thought about that guy I had seen in the Bronx after I had been separated from Tuck and the others…he had been soft and yellow, engulfed by some morbid growth. There had also been a skull in the armory at White Plains that had literally been growing into the wall behind it. It all had to be connected. I had heard about a bioengineered grave mold that had been released in hopes that it would consume the walking dead and destroy them…was this it? Was this the end result of introducing a synthetic organism into nature?
The questions kept going through my mind as Robin got increasingly impatient while I kneeled by the bodies. But I had to know. If I had to fight these things, I had to know what they were in the first place.
I heard a rustling.
“Steve…it moved,” Robin said. “Get away from it.”
It looked dead to me. I didn’t imagine that even when it was alive, it would have looked living.
“Steve, goddammit.”
I heard the rustling now myself. I stepped away from the corpses. They were indeed moving, but not in the way Robin meant…this was not motion, it was expansion. The corpses were expanding with a rubbery, stretching sound like balloons being pumped full of gas. Then, huge and rounded like beach balls, they exploded…one after the other, ejecting drifting yellow clouds of spores.
Robin cried out and maybe I did, too.
This explained the split-open mutant corpse I had found. Upon death they bloated up and burst, releasing fungal spores to the four winds. Unlike most fungi, I doubted that the spores would grow into new individuals. It was a good thing we were wearing protective gear or we might have breathed them in. Maybe that’s how the mutants were created.
We moved off, breathless, sickened, scared.
As we neared the fog pockets of poison gas, there was activity behind us. I turned and saw at least a dozen mutants on the ridgeline with more coming up over the top every moment. They did not move with any military efficiency. No patterns, no tactics, no forward scouts. They just poured over the hilltop like ants, rushing about, mingling, making that weird whirring noise which must have been some kind of communication.
I had no doubt they were coming for us.
WAR ZONE
They would have hunted us down like dogs.
I knew that much.
As we ran into the fog of poison gas, I looked behind us and I saw they had paused on the ridgeline. There were maybe twenty or thirty of them and they seemed to move low to the ground with an almost hopping sort of motion. What stopped them from coming after us was the delicious bounty of bodies they found. They set on them like barbarians, rending and tearing and stabbing with their bayonets. We had been forgotten about, at least temporarily. We moved through the gas mist. It was thick and fuming like the steam from a pot. We couldn’t run through it; we kept tripping over bodies, stepping into blast holes.
We moved slow, but we kept moving.
We climbed another hill and at the top, we were out of the gas. The mutants were still at it, dragging the corpses to the top of the ridgeline to do their grisly work. It was at that moment, as I looked back at them, that there was a resounding explosion. A massive KARRR-UMPHHHH sort of sound and immense clouds of fire rose into the sky. Behind the ridgeline, it was a blazing inferno. As it went up, for one split second, the mutants were black shapes against its blinding flash of light—then they were gone. The shock wave hit them, and tossed them away like burning matchheads. They stumbled about in flames at the bottom of the hill and fell over.
We were protected from most of it by the ridgeline itself.
Still, a cremating wind blew out at us, punching a hole through the gas clouds. For one second there, it was like standing before a 500° oven with the door wide open. Imagine that with a sixty-mile-an-hour wind pushing it at you. It hit us and knocked us right off our feet.
We got up and the firestorm behind us seemed to be engulfing the entire compound. I figured it would keep the mutants off us. That was something. Our gear protected us from the blazing wind, but inside my suit, it was stifling. I didn’t know what happened. All I could guess was that the fire must have found an ammo dump or a couple propane tanks, maybe both.
“Jesus Christ,” Robin said. “And we walked through there.”
We moved off into the swirling fog of poison gas. We began to come upon bodies of ARM troopers that, I thought, had been hit by nerve gas. It was appalling. That’s the only word that seems to fit. They had died undergoing horrible convulsions. Their mouths were open so wide they had split at the corners, bloody foam ejecting in clots. Limbs were askew, bones thrust from their skin. Their faces were bruised and contorted, eyes filled with blood and looking like they were going to pop right out of their heads. I didn’t even want to think about the agony they had been through.
More corpses.
These were hit by blister agents and looked like wieners on a hot grill that had split open. We did not linger. We came across mutants riddled with bulletholes and a few that had been simply blown apart from sporing. The fighting and dying had been vicious. There was no doubt about that. As poison rained from the sky, ARM and the mutants fought a vicious close-in struggle here. Their dead were everywhere. It was like a harvest field whose crops were corpses. The gas, it appeared, had killed many while they fought, if the jumbled dead could be any indication—ARM troopers and mutants had died with their hands locked on each other, knives buried in throats and bellies. It seemed that when they got in close like that, the thing was to strip away each other’s gas masks or damage canister filters, anything so your adversary would have to breathe the toxic air.
We moved on through the mist of death.
The clouds were almost luminous from the great conflagration behind us. A figure stumbled out at us and we saw it was a mutant. It wore no gas mask. We both had our weapons up, but we didn’t fire. The mutant stumbled forward, going down to his—or her—knees. The front
of its poncho was slimed with some sort of gray paste. It shook and shivered, vomiting out more of that gray stuff, before falling face-first into the dirt.
We started to see zombies.
They had broken into the cages, probably by sheer force of their numbers, and were busily feeding on what was inside, chewing and slurping. We avoided them, ducking past stragglers. By then, more than a dozen were behind us, all moving in our direction as if they had caught our scent.
We ran.
We ran the best we could until we reached the gate which had been blown right off its hinges. Here was freedom. Here was what we had been waiting for. I saw quite a few burning vehicles, but definitely nothing serviceable. We were on foot, but at least we were out of the compound and that, in my mind, was definitely something.
There were bodies scattered about on the road. A few zombies picking away at them. The moonlight was bright enough to guide us away. I was feeling hopeful and I should have recognized that as trouble, because whenever I started thinking things were going to be all right…the shit hit the fan. And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. Robin cried out and I saw two dark shapes had her, dragging her off into the shadows. She was fighting, but she’d dropped her rifle, and one of them had a death grip on her throat.
I didn’t bother thinking; I reacted.
I ran at them and hit them with a diving tackle. Zombies. I saw that right away. Robin scrambled away, getting to her feet. As one of the dead came at her, she drove it back with well-aimed kicks, completely forgetting about the gun on her belt, the pistol she’d taken from the ARM corpse.
I would have helped her, but I had my own trouble. The other zombie—a big, hulking bear of a man whose face was like confetti—moved much faster than I expected. Before I could get up, he was on top of me, tearing and thrashing at my mask with clawing fingers, worked up into some manic feeding frenzy, because with my NBC suit on, he just couldn’t get at me. But he was trying, God how he was trying. I kept trying to throw him off me, but he was heavy and vicious, thrashing at my face mask and pummeling me with his fists. Every time I got an edge, he forced me back down with his weight.
I saw Robin mere feet away.
The zombie had her. They were locked together, struggling. She was stronger, but he was determined. They fought and clawed and struggled like a couple kids going at it at recess. But she tripped and fell and the zombie was on top of her, pinning her, beating at her mask.
She cried out for me to help her, but I couldn’t help her because I was having a hell of time helping myself. The big zombie found the edge of my hood and began to yank on it. Without its protection, I had no doubt he would bite me. Maybe I was immune to their bite, but I wasn’t about to bank on it. With him distracted with trying to get my hood off, I pulled the knife from my belt. It was hard to grip properly with the chem glove. I nearly dropped it, but I managed to fumble it into my fist and jab it right into the side of the zombies throat. Once, twice, three times. It wasn’t until that last stab, that the big man took notice. He grabbed at the knife and I threw him.
I crawled away.
Where the hell was my MP-5?
I had lost it when I made my diving tackle. No time. I ran over to Robin and kicked her attacker free. I pulled her to her feet and the zombie was up by then. He came at me with raised hands and I punched him three or four times in the face and that made him stagger backwards. Then something hit me. It hit me hard, driving me to my knees. I didn’t know what it was, but I was seeing stars. When I tried to get up, something hit me again, putting me back down.
I saw Robin pull her pistol—a .38 police special—and shoot her zombie down with two rounds to the face. It staggered two or three steps and went collapsed. I rolled over and saw my zombie. He had a large stone in his hand. He was kneeling next to me, raising it for another devastating blow.
Robin jerked the trigger of the .38.
She put a round into his face. He managed to rise up for a moment, his face blasted from the bone beneath. He looked darkly comical standing there with my knife sticking out of the side of his throat…then over he went. When he was down, Robin kept jerking the trigger even though the .38 was out of shot.
By then, I was up.
Up in time to see that the pack of zombies that had followed us from the compound was moving down the road at us. There were several dozen. I saw a few that had once been ARM troopers. They were pouring forward. They were within ten feet of us.
“RUN!” I called out to Robin.
I scrambled on the ground, looking for my MP-5 and found it just as the first few were nearly on top of me. I brought the machine pistol up, aiming it at eye level and drilling three zombies, putting their lights right out. Gore spattered the others, but it didn’t slow them, of course. They came on in a silent mob, hands reaching out for me. I emptied the magazine into them and ran to Robin. She couldn’t find her M16 and we weren’t about to waste more time looking for it. By then, the zombies seemed to be coming from every direction, a voracious horde.
It was not easy running in our NBC gear. We plodded along, moving at a slow jog, distancing ourselves from the pack, but never losing them. They kept on our trail. Like wild dogs running deer, sooner or later, they would run us to ground.
BATTLE FATIGUE
That’s the thing about the zombies that’s easy to forget: their drive.
When they’ve scented meat, nothing will stop them. Your average adult is more physically powerful than your average zombie. Hell, I’d taken on two or three at the same time (not out of choice) before. You can beat them. You can easily win a contest against them, but there’s so many of them. So goddamned many of them. They just keep coming and coming. You can easily outrun them, but sooner or later, friend, you’ve got to rest and they don’t.
Robin and I ran like hellhounds were on our trail.
We ran until we were out of breath and, believe me, in the NBC suits that didn’t take too long. Robin wanted to take them off, but I wouldn’t allow it. Not just yet. We rested there on the road, sitting on a crumbling stone wall enclosing a pasture. It seemed like we’d only been there ten minutes when we saw the dead coming down the road. We took another run, had another rest, and there they came again around a bend in the road. We could keep it up all night, but in the end they were going to get us and that was a fact.
“C’mon,” I told Robin. “We have to find shelter.”
“I’m tired, Steve. I’m really tired.”
I was, too, but when it came to survival situations, I knew from experience that I was never as tired as I thought I was. If you pushed your body, untapped reserves of strength would reveal themselves. So I made Robin walk. I couldn’t get her to jog and I was pretty sure I couldn’t get myself to jog either. Walking at a fast clip was the best we could do. Like it or not, we poured it on.
About twenty minutes later, I stopped.
“What?” she said.
“Down there. That’s what we need.”
“There’s nothing down there, Steve,” she said, looking out across a farmer’s field. “Just grass and more grass. And the river.”
“Exactly,” I said.
There was a culvert alongside the road. We climbed down into it, fighting through cattails and a few feet of murky standing water, and then climbed up the other side. I pretty much pulled Robin along and she kept swearing at me the whole time. Then we were moving through a high, unshorn field of wheat, stumbling along until we came to the river. We leaned against willow trees on its bank, staring out over the dark, slow-moving waters.
“Now what, oh brilliant one?” Robin said.
“Now we cross the river.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind, man? I can’t swim. I’ll drown.”
“I won’t let you drown.”
“Bullshit. I’m not going out there. Besides, it’s cold out. The river’ll be freezing.”
“Getting our feet cold is the least of our worries.”
We had to cross.
There was no way around it. I knew one thing about zombies: for whatever reason, they did not like water. I had never seen them try and cross a river or even a fast-moving creek. Why? I don’t know. I think they looked at it as a barrier. Like a wall, they simply went around it until they found a bridge. Maybe it was an instinctive thing. I didn’t see any zombies up on the road yet, but I knew they were coming. They would scent us. I wasn’t sure whether they would slop through the culvert or not. But I wasn’t going to relax until we were on the other side of the river.
I took Robin by the hand and led her into the water. The river was maybe sixty feet across. I chose the narrowest part I could find. Sixty feet isn’t much as far as rivers are concerned, of course. It’s minor in comparison with the Mississippi which spans a mile in places, but sixty feet was still a lot and especially with the shape we were in. The simplest thing to do would have been to strip out of our NBC suits, but I wanted to keep them on. They were airtight for the most part and they would insulate us from the chill of the water.
It was shallow, barely above our knees for the first fifteen feet.
Then it got deeper. By the time we got out into the middle, it was up past our waists and it kept getting deeper. Robin was only about five feet tall, while I was over six. So when it got up to my chest, it was up to her chin. She climbed up on my back and I piggybacked her. The water held her weight, so I barely even knew she was there. The water kept getting deeper and deeper. I was just waiting to step into a hole or a sudden drop-off. By the time the water was to the chin of my mask, I was really sweating it, but by then we were approaching the other bank and it gradually dropped away until it was up to my waist. Robin climbed off me and we both climbed up onto the bank.
“Hey, that wasn’t so bad,” she said.
As her beast of burden, I wasn’t so sure of that.
We rested for a time and then I said, “Let’s go.”
We moved about ten feet into a field that bordered a stretch of dark woods. There we stopped. It was time to get out of our protective gear. We were several miles away from the compound by that point.