by Cleek, Caleb
The onward march halted briefly when a finger branched out to the edge of the road and pushed against a fence holding a lone cow. The sheer weight of the group was sufficient to splinter the boards. The cow started to run, but the movement drew the horde’s attention. Initially three individuals broke into a sprint after it and then more joined the pursuit. The cow didn’t have anywhere to go in the small field. Twenty bodies promptly covered it like ants on a candy bar. The growing swarm took it to the ground, where it kicked briefly before being subdued by the hungry onslaught. Death quickly followed. A man came out of a house a short distance away and raised a gun to his shoulder. In an instant, the mob’s attention was diverted toward the farmer. Forgetting the cow, the group moved in unison toward the rancher, who quickly retreated into the security of the home. The helicopter descended low enough that the camera could frame the front door.
As with the wooden fence, the force of the bodies pushing against it forced the door open. The farmer was briefly glimpsed in the high power lens, gun to his shoulder, standing firm, before he was overcome and disappeared into the mass of nearly twenty bodies. The anchor woman announced that the helicopter was dangerously low on fuel and had to return to the airport. Prior to turning back, the camera zoomed out to give a wide angle view of what was happening. The horde was continuing its march down the highway, minus fifteen or twenty individuals that had come out of the house and returned to the bloody cow carcass.
“That was Kenny Smith,” Lester commented somberly in disbelief. “They just killed Kenny.”
Everybody moved to the east side of the house where they could look out the large picture window. The advancing group was visible a quarter mile down the road, ambling toward them as if taking a relaxing jaunt. Six minutes later, it was nearly even with the house, but still in the road.
Mildred, who had been sitting, suddenly stood, lines of panic chiseled in her ashen face. “Where’s Templeton?” she asked, hobbling across the room. “Templeton!” she yelled. “Where are you, Templeton?”
In response, there was a high pitched, whiny bark from the front porch. If the bark wasn’t enough, the shrill squeak of the spring when Mildred opened the screen, followed by the loud bang of it slamming into its frame behind the miniature dachshund, turned every head on the road. The throng howled in unison as it charged the house.
The house sat on a basement constructed of cinderblock walls. Only four feet of it was actually below ground level. The top half of the basement was above the ground but had no windows. It looked like a tall foundation. The extra five feet put the windows of the first story above the reach of the infected. The only entrance into the house was up the porch and through the front door.
Zeke and L.C. took up positions side by side at the far end of the living room, across from the front door. L.C calmly lifted his rifle to his shoulder and looked from Zeke to Mike before focusing on the door. “Fellows, better make every shot count,” he admonished as he snapped the safety off and moved his finger from the frame of the rifle to the trigger and awaited his first target.
Tracking the advance of the infected didn’t require looking out the window. In fact, everybody had moved away from the windows, hoping that remaining out of sight would also keep them out of the half-witted minds outside the house. The sonorous shrieks provided all the information needed to determine the location of the swarm. Meagan jumped and yelped when a running body thudded into the side of the house hard enough to rattle a window and knock a picture off the wall. The frame crashed down, sending shards of glass skittering across the hardwood floor. Feet pounded hollowly on the steps to the porch. Footfalls softly tread up and down the length of the porch. Heavy breathing replaced the guttural howling, keeping pace with the sounds of walking feet.
Then the clamor ceased. Silence hovered over the house like a morning mist clinging to the ground. Nobody moved, inside or out. The moment of truth had arrived. Had the group lost interest in a meal it had not seen and was preparing to move on, or was it simply perplexed by the puzzle of the closed door?
Zeke unconsciously held his breath, not daring to hope that they would simply lose interest. It was too much to ask for, and he knew without a doubt what the result would be if they breached the house. Kenny Smith’s demise, broadcast to the world, removed any question of that. The infected would swarm the six individuals in the house like Alaskan mosquitoes on a fly fisherman standing in the shade. They would be torn apart, screaming in agony as they were slowly devoured alive, one bite at a time.
Zeke released his breath as the first body hit the screen door. The force of the impact caused the door to rebound off the frame just far enough for the spring to pull it closed again with a resonant bang. The sound was all that was needed to recapture the attention of the entire mass of rotting flesh. Feral voices wailed and bayed against the entrance. Thumps and thuds throbbed relentlessly against the door. Each resounding bang of the screen fueled the fire of madness building outside. The fervor of the throng reached a crescendo as the wooden frame of the screen snapped audibly.
“Get the women upstairs!” L.C. barked to Lester. “Get behind a locked door and barricade it with whatever you can.”
Templeton whimpered pathetically from behind the chair when Mildred got up. She stumbled in terror as she moved toward the stairway. To her credit, Meagan maintained her composure and grabbed Mildred’s arm, keeping her from falling to the floor. Lester took the lead as they made their way up the flight of oak steps.
Zeke suddenly leaned his shotgun against the wall and ran across the room toward the door.
“What are you doing? Get back here!” L.C. shouted after him.
“I’m going to try to brace the door,” Zeke said as he grabbed onto the edge of the heavy oak table and began dragging it toward the front door. Once he reached the entrance, Zeke upended the table and shoved it against the door. As he crossed the room to move more furniture, an increasingly loud thump thump thump began to eclipse the cacophony of noises from the ravenous beasts outside.
“It’s the military helicopter,” L.C. yelled. Confirming his statement, a deep, continuous booming accompanied chunks of the road flying into the air as the twenty millimeter canon tore through the press of bodies scrambling toward the house. The massive projectiles ripped through flesh and bone and slammed into the roadway. The armor piercing rounds were designed to smash through tank armor and the road was much softer than hardened tank steel. The high velocity rounds plowed a bloody furrow down the middle of the road, splaying bodies into pieces.
The infected continued their assault, undeterred and oblivious to the death raining down on them from above. If anything, the noise fanned them into an even greater frenzy than before. Zeke watched through a window as the massacre unfolded. The helicopter entered a side-slipping circular path that kept the nose and canon pointed toward the rapidly advancing center of the group. As the torrent of bullets ripped into the middle of the crowd, bodies fell to the ground and were churned into a bloody conglomeration of flesh and dirt.
Within seconds, the throng of bodies around the house had been reduced to a handful of crawlers and stragglers. All that was left of the original mob were the thirty or forty that had already made it onto the porch and were still slamming against the door, attempting to gain entrance to the house.
Zeke watched the helicopter side slip until it was facing the front of the house twenty feet off the ground and four hundred yards away. In a heart stopping moment, he realized what was about to happen. “Take cover!” he screamed as puffs of smoke erupted from the nose of the helicopter and were driven to the ground and rolled to the sides, driven by the force of the rotor wash.
The helicopter instantly converted the house to a gazebo as bullets blasted through the front and back walls. The door was blown to bits and infected that hadn’t been pulverized by the salvo boiled into the living room, chased by more rounds from the cannon. Staying was not an option. If the infected didn’t rip him to shreds, the he
licopter would. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he screamed over his shoulder to L.C. and Mike.
It was too late. Mike and L.C. were down. A round from the helicopter had more or less cut Mike in two. He was dead before his body hit the ground. L.C. was on his back, drenched in blood. Zeke couldn’t tell if he was hit by a bullet or flying debris. The infected poured into the room, their focus locking onto the two men straight ahead. Unaware of Zeke’s presence in the corner of the room, they ignored him. As they darted past he fired his pistol, but to no avail. There were too many and they were moving too fast. Seven or eight of them dropped on Mike and L.C. in a feeding frenzy, their disgusting shrieks and howls failing to cover L.C.’s agonizing cries for help. Another five or six were drawn to the stair case by the uncontrolled, panicked wails from upstairs, and more continued to pour through the door.
Zeke started for L.C., but he knew it was too late. Even if he could get the pack away from him, they had already ripped into him. He was exposed and would become infected if he survived the assault.
With no way to help the others in the house, Zeke picked up an end table and smashed it through the street facing window. The tinkling glass drew the attention of an infected woman kneeling over L.C.’s still squirming body. Guilt nearly paralyzed Zeke as he climbed through the casement and dropped the seven feet to the ground. He knew there was nothing he could have done for L.C., and he couldn’t have made it upstairs to help Meagan or Mildred and Lester, either. Still, he couldn’t overcome having left them behind. Whether he could have helped them or not, he felt he had abandoned them.
A crawling infected man dragged himself toward Zeke, blood trailing behind him from the stumps of legs severed near the hip. As Zeke ran past, a hand stretched out, grasping for his legs. Teeth clacked harmlessly behind him and fetid breath escaped its lips in a hiss. Zeke rounded the side of the house, making for the thick tree line at the back of the property a hundred yards away.
Thirty feet from the edge of the woods, Zeke looked back at the house. His eyes locked onto Meagan who was hanging out the bedroom window on the second story. Her mouth was moving, but the noise of the helicopter, which had opened up on the house again, overpowered whatever she was saying. Zeke sprinted back to the house. His heart was pounding like a drum when he yelled at Meagan, “Can you jump?”
“It’s too far!” she screamed above the sounds of the thumping rotors, booming canon, splintering wood, and howling infected. He knew she was right. It had to be eighteen or nineteen feet from the edge of the window to the ground. A broken or badly sprained ankle would mean near certain death.
“Is there any rope?” Zeke asked, desperately hoping for a way to get her out.
“No,” she yelled frantically.
Zeke racked his brain for a way to rescue her. “Is there a bed?” he yelled back, an idea forming in his head.
“Yes,” was the panicked reply. “I don’t think I have much time.”
“Take the sheets off the bed and tie the ends together.”
“Why?”
“You’re going to make a rope to climb down.” A look of understanding suddenly appeared on her face. A workable plan of escape erased the crippling terror of impending doom that, moments before, had left her paralyzed with fear. She disappeared from view as she moved deeper into the room. Thirty seconds later, she reappeared in the window with sheets in her hand. In view of Zeke, she took the corners of the two sheets and tied them together.
“No,” Zeke yelled up at the window. “You need to leave more at the end so you can double knot it. Otherwise, it will come apart when you put your weight on it.
She quickly undid the knot and retied it. This time there was enough material left at the end of the knot to tie a second. She pulled on the ends of the sheets and locked the knot tight. “What do I tie it to?” she asked looking around the room.
“You need something that is long enough to stretch across the window,” he yelled back. “Is there a chair or something? It has to be strong enough to support your weight.”
She disappeared again, returning ten seconds later. In her hand was a broom with a wooden handle. “Will this work?” she yelled down, her voice once again filling with panic. Having heard her voice, the infected, which had been feeding on Lester and Mildred in the adjacent room, were drawn to the bedroom and initiated an assault on the door, trying to bang their way into the room.
“They’re trying to get in!” she screamed, tears once again cascading down her face in saline torrents.
Realizing they would breach the room any moment, Zeke put aside his doubts that the broom stick was strong enough to support her weight and, with as much reassurance as he could muster, affirmed that it would hold her. “Tie the sheet to the middle of the stick. Don’t forget to double knot it.”
Meagan worked feverishly, adrenaline making her fingers clumsy. In spite of her degraded fine motor skills, she completed the knot. Under normal circumstances, she would have easily worked out the next step, but under the terror of being eaten, she couldn’t figure out what to do with the broom.
She stood at the window, looking uncertainly at the stick in her hands. Zeke realized she needed further direction. “Hold onto the stick and drop the sheets out the window.” Without understanding his plan, she complied. The sheet rope cascaded down and was tugged to the side by the breeze, unfurling like a huge flag of surrender. “Put the stick across the window and make sure there’s plenty protruding past either edge.”
As he was yelling, the helicopter fired a short burst into the house. The rapid booming of the helicopter’s canon covered his directions, so he shouted them out again.
As she placed the broom stick across the window, the physics of the plan clicked in her mind, and a look of understanding and confidence reappeared on her face. Keeping tension on the broom, she positioned herself in the window facing away from the room, sheet rope in her hands.
She paused, considering the best way to begin her rappelling climb downward. In a crash that Zeke could not hear, the infected broke through the door. Without warning, in a move that caused Zeke’s teeth to tightly clench together in fear for her safety, she jumped outward, sheet sliding through her fingers. A tenth of a second later, she tightened her grip on the sheet, arresting her fall. The broom stick bowed outward under the weight, but refused to break.
What started as a straight fall powered by gravity turned into an arc toward the house as she swung inward on the sheet like the pendulum on a grandfather clock. Her body slammed into the side of the house with a jolting impact that crushed the air out of her lungs, and left her stunned. In spite of the pain, she refused to release her vice-like grip on the sheet. Her timidity and fear were unexpectedly replaced with a desire to live, a will to do whatever it took to stay alive. As she clung helplessly to the sheet, feet dangling ten feet above the ground, an inexplicable realization swept over her. She would survive. She would never again allow herself to be a helpless, passive victim of her circumstances. Hand over hand, she lowered herself down the sheet. Her feet sought purchase on the side of the house, but found nothing to take the weight and ease the burning in her forearms and biceps. She continued descending and fought past what she thought was her ultimate, endurable limit of fatigue. Finally, she reached the end of the sheet. Her feet were still five feet from the ground when she released her grasp and fell the rest of the way, landing with bent knees absorbing the joint-jarring shock of the impact.
Meagan looked up at the window to see a young man in his twenties eyeing her from the position she had just vacated. His furious voice chased after her as she followed Zeke to the tree line.
Looking over her shoulder, she saw the man leap from the window in pursuit. The earth’s pull on his body created enough force to shatter both of his legs on impact. Undeterred by his inability to walk, he continued his pursuit, dragging himself on his elbows. Another body leaped from the window and then a third, fourth and fifth. The results were the same for each.
Zeke and Meagan reached the woods and disappeared into the thick, entangling mass of bushes, small trees, and kudzu. The sight of the nightmare behind them was quickly blotted out by dense foliage.
Chapter 23
Just after they entered the woods, a loud whoosh preceded an explosion. A second later, a concussion blasted through the woods, knocking leaves from the trees. Meagan felt the pressure wave slap her in the back, leaving her ears ringing. Wood debris from the house rained down around them, some pieces large enough to break branches off the nearby trees. A black column of smoke billowed into the blue sky. They didn’t slow until they had traveled half a mile from the house.
Finally Zeke pulled up and stopped. Meagan, who had been staying right on his heels, stopped, too. Zeke bent over and supported the weight of his upper body by resting his hands on his knees. He grabbed gulping breaths of air, trying to restore the deficit of oxygen and rid his body of excess carbon dioxide.
Meagan was winded from the breakneck race over rough terrain, but not nearly to the extent that Zeke was. In an uncharacteristic show of calmness, she said, “I bet you’re wishing you spent less of your gym time growing your arms and more of it working on cardio.”
Zeke did a double take in response. Ten minutes ago, she shrieked in terror when one of the infected ran into the side of the house. Now she was calm and making jokes after having narrowly escaped being eaten and blown to bits.
“Yeah, I suppose a little extra cardio training would come in handy right now,” he admitted suspiciously, wondering if she was undergoing some sort of mental breakdown. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“As good as can be expected,” she answered. Her voice definitely contained emotion, but the debilitating panic from before had been replaced by an air of control. Knowing what he was really asking, she continued, “I don’t know what happened to me. Something in me changed when I was climbing down the sheets. I know I’ve been really emotional since this started.” She paused and looked at the ground in embarrassment. “That isn’t me. I’m normally a very level headed person. When everything started, something snapped. I felt broken, like I couldn’t handle what was happening. My family was infected and I was trapped in the city with nobody.