by Spriggs, Kal
"It will work out," Jack said. He looked up as he saw Professor Cedano running their way. He tried to tell himself it was good news. Maybe he'd figured out some way to extend their supplies. Maybe he'd had a good idea. Maybe this was all some horrible nightmare and Jack was about to wake up.
“Captain,” Professor Cedano puffed as he hurried up. “Just got a call from some of our scouts. Team Three cut across a road and drove close to Jacksonville as a shortcut and they found a whole lot of zombies, barely got away from them all.”
“They aren't leading them back here, are they?” Tim asked nervously. He had reason to worry. Jacksonville Illinois was only eight miles straight line distance from where they stood. A horde of zombies would cross that in only a couple of hours.
“No, no, no, of course not,” the Professor waved a hand. “No, but what had them all gathered is the interesting part. There are survivors! At least a few hundred, they think. In what looks like a prison or jail on the east side of the town.”
“Did they make contact?” Jack asked, chewing on his lip as he considered it.
“No,” Luis Cedano shook his head. “But they saw men on the roofs of the buildings in the prison. Thousands of zombies around the outside. They may need help, they could be allies...”
“They could be trouble,” Tim grumbled, unconsciously echoing Jack's thoughts. “For that matter, I don't know if we could feed another few hundred mouths. Not unless we find some serious food stocks at this or our next stopping point.”
“We should still check it out,” Jack said, even though he privately agreed with Tim. They picked up a few people, here or there... but hundreds? Jack sighed. “Go get Captain Wachope and... Chavez and Knighton, I think. Tell Team Three that I want them all at the command post to brief me.”
“Yes, Captain,” Professor Cedano snapped off and turned away, clearly happy about the idea of saving more people.
“Thousands of zombies?” Tim asked quietly.
“Not a chance in hell,” Jack replied, in just as low a voice.
***
Chapter Four
Jack silently crept up the slope of the overpass, careful to make no noise and to avoid any sudden motion that a zombie might pick up from a distance. Beside him, his normal two companions for these types of missions stayed low. They were almost a quarter mile away from the prison, but he was still glad for the caution.
Warrant Officer Tom Knighton was a big man and he carried a small arsenal. Jack liked to have the former tanker around, in part because he appreciated the firepower, and in part because it was simply amusing to see the man lugging so many weapons. Yet the warrant never complained about the weight of his gear and weapons.
Lieutenant Stephanie Baxter was his radio operator. She'd been a communications officer back in their old unit, and she was best able to coax signals out of their military radios. Her cool head and quiet demeanor also suited Jack to have on his team.
Hector Chavez rounded out the rest of his team. The retired sergeant first class had also been an amateur mixed martial arts fighter. He reminded Jack most of a bulldog, with a stubbornness and tenacity that Jack appreciated. He was also scarily good with the big kukri he carried.
Jack slowly crested the rise and looked down at the prison.
He was doubly glad for his caution as he saw thousands of undead milling in the open areas around the prison, the closest of them within a hundred yards of the overpass. Jack swallowed a bit as he took in their numbers. There were enough of them that, if they'd all hit the fence-line in one spot, the zombies would have toppled it from sheer weight.
They had already knocked down several sections of the outer fence, he saw. Yet the inner fence seemed to be holding for the moment. That wasn't to say that the inner fence was clear, however. The entire inner perimeter was lined with zombies and in sections, Jack could see sections of fence wobble and rock under the weight of zombies pressing against it.
Just how the defenders had managed to spread out the threat, rather than having zombies mass from one direction, Jack didn't know.
He brought up his binoculars and scanned over the entire area, pausing to look at the approaches and take in details.
“Any sign of life, sir?” Hector Chavez asked.
“Not yet,” Jack replied. Yet the zombies wouldn't try so fiercely to get inside if they hadn't seen or sensed something. The lower floors of the prison barracks were all locked down, and Jack didn't see movement on the upper floors either. Yet on the roofs of the buildings he saw plants and gardens laid out. From how green those plants were, he'd guess that someone was taking care of those gardens.
He spent a good twenty minutes watching before he finally saw a side door on one of the prison barracks open and a group of people hurry from one structure towards another. Three of them wore heavy riot gear, complete with shields, while the other three looked to be a woman and a pair of children. Interesting, Jack thought.
He lowered the binoculars. “You saw?” Jack asked softly.
“Roger,” Chavez scowled, “survivors. Damn, I was hoping we could give this one a pass.”
Me too, Jack admitted. There were far more zombies than his group could handle. If they tried, they'd be swarmed under in a matter of minutes. No standard truck would be able to drive through that horde. Their train could manage, but it wasn't like there was a set of train tracks through this area.
“Anything on the radio?” Jack asked.
“Not a thing,” Lieutenant Baxter said.
That didn't leave them a lot of options. Any kind of visual communication such as signaling with lights or something ran the risk of miscommunication or of attracting zombies. There was no way to get close enough to throw any kind of message over the fence, either.
“Anyone have any ideas?” Jack asked softly.
“We don't have to help them,” Chavez said. “They could be convicts. This was a prison, after all.”
“We just saw a woman and children,” Knighton said softly.
Chavez grimaced, but he didn't argue. While some part of Jack agreed, he didn't know what kind of people these survivors were... there was the element of survival at play. The prison clearly couldn't hold out much longer, not without some kind of help.
“Some kind of distraction, maybe?” Jack asked.
“Runs the risk of getting the entire horde together in a mass,” Chavez grunted. “Worse, some of the ones opposite the distraction could stampede the fence trying to get to it.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. They needed more information. They needed a way to contact the people inside, and they needed something to give them an edge. “Let's quarter the town. It's not very big, we search for anything that might be useful.”
They signaled the affirmative and Jack and the others eased back down the slope. Whoever these people were, Jack wasn't going to leave without getting them some help.
***
The group paused as the afternoon sun had begun sinking. It turned out that Jacksonville, Illinois wasn't all that big. Worse, there were a lot more zombies in the town than Jack would have expected.
“Grain silo is a no-go,” Hector Chavez puffed as he took a seat on the floor. They'd cleared a small office on the west side of town, and they used the storage room at the back of the small building since it had a back door as an exit and no windows. “I counted at least four hundred zombies in the area. There was some sign of possible survivors on the upper area, but when we got a closer look... well, they must have run out of water or hope.”
Jack flinched at Chavez's hard tone. Yet he knew well enough what the man meant. Plenty of survivors went to high places and grain silos made better places to hold out than most. They had a huge food source, elevation to avoid zombies, and they offered the chance to signal for help.
The problem most survivors ran into over time, though, was a lack of clean drinking water... and a loss of will to survive as they realized that their chances of rescue were next to nothing. All too often Jack had seen
the results. Most survivors, when faced with that bleak future for themselves and their families, chose to take their own lives. While throwing themselves from the tower offered a release, there was no guarantee of the fall killing them. Most chose to hang themselves and there were all too many “dancing zombies” strung from tall buildings and structures throughout the Midwest. The zombies were too stupid to get themselves down, so they hung like obscene fruit, testaments to the loss of hope.
“There's a truck-stop, but it's all pretty-picked over,” Baxter said softly. “No diesel or gas left in the tanks, every one of the trailers has been searched through.”
Most of these small towns had survived a little while, right up until the big hordes of undead from the bigger cities had come, drawn by light and sound, or simply some sense for the living. Unfortunately for Jack's people, that meant the small towns rarely had any supplies or resources to draw upon.
“There's a construction site to the south,” Knighton reported. “Couple of big vehicles, but they're siphoned of fuel.”
“Tracks?” Jack asked. Tracked vehicles were better, they would just crush zombies under their treads which made them less likely to bog down on corpses.
Knighton nodded, “A there's a D7, which would do a number on the zombies.”
“Too slow,” Chavez grumbled. “Remember what happened in Cincinnati.”
Everything had gone wrong in Cincinnati. But Chavez was right. A dozer couldn't move fast enough to prevent zombies from climbing up the sides or rear. They might be able to armor the cab, but that would limit visibility and increase the chance of the driver hitting someone or something they didn't want hit. “Any snow plows? Anything with a bit more speed?”
They all shook their heads. For that matter, with the lack of fuel in the town, they'd have to call someone to bring some, probably by truck. If that was the case, then they ran the risk of drawing too many zombies to manage or causing the same sort of stampede that they wanted to avoid.
Jack sighed. There has to be a way...
“That construction site, road or utilities?” Jack asked.
“Uh, utilities, I think,” Tom said. “Big concrete culverts, by the looks of things, just south of the highway.”
Jack cocked his head, “How big?”
“I don't know... eight feet tall, box culverts, I think,” Knighton considered it for a long moment. “Thirty foot sections, I think?”
Lieutenant Baxter nodded, “Yeah, Captain, I saw about forty or fifty sections of it, all stacked up, like they were going to cross the highway or something.”
Jack considered that for a long moment. “That's pretty big culvert, did you see what they're tying it into?”
Both of them shook their heads.
Jack considered the amount of daylight they had left. He didn't want to be on foot when it got dark. The undead would have the advantage then, since any use of light would draw more of them. “Let's check it out.”
***
The construction site was frighteningly close to the horde of zombies, yet there was a slight slope that provided cover and concealment in combination with the highway itself to screen them a bit.
It looked as if someone had been about to replace the older storm sewer that went under the freeway, yet Jack hadn't seen a ditch on the other side. He went down to the old, rotting concrete and peered inside. He saw only darkness... and part of him shied away from the idea of going in that low, dark tunnel.
The very thought of fighting undead in such a space terrified him.
Yet he thought through the layout of the prison and the location of the storm sewer. Could this lead under or even near the prison? If it did... would it provide access?
Jack couldn't abandon the idea. He glanced at Lieutenant Baxter, “We're going in. You and Chavez watch our backs.”
“Sir...” Chavez looked more than a little uncomfortable. “We're running out of daylight fast.”
“Just a quick recon,” Jack said. “If we're not back in fifteen minutes... go to the fallback point.” They didn't have much time, so he tucked his head and went inside. After a moment, he brought up his flashlight. The old storm sewer was partially clogged with sand and gravel. Here and there were piles of rubbish, leaves, sticks, and even old tires.
The concrete of the tunnel was peeling, revealing sections of rusting steel rebar. It wasn't someplace that Jack would have wanted to be in at the best of times. It might have been an eight foot tall culvert, but with the quantity of debris, Jack had to stoop. With the uneven floor, staying alert to threats was difficult, at best.
He counted off the seconds as he walked, the clank of Knighton's many weapons and the sound of their labored breathing the only sounds, echoing oddly in the tunnel. Jack quickly lost any scale of where they were. The tunnel wasn't exactly straight, it ran at an odd angle and in sections it dipped and rose. One section it had partially collapsed, leaving only a three foot gap for Jack to scurry through.
He had almost decided to give up and turn around when he caught a glimpse of faint light up ahead. Jack's pace picked up and he felt his spirits rise. The tunnel did open up somewhere. By his best guess, they must be near, possibly at the prison and...
Before he could finish the thought, a hand clamped around his ankle.
***
Jack had drawn his blade and raised it to chop down at the hand, but he froze as he saw a young man shake his head and hold his fingers to his lips.
Jack lowered the blade, looking over to see that Knighton had raised his Remington 870.
The young man, little more than a boy gestured towards the gleam of light and shook his head. He pointed instead to the side.
Jack shone his flashlight there and his eyes went wide. What he'd taken to be another section of collapsed tunnel was something else entirely. Someone had dug through, and he could see where they'd chipped through the weakened concrete and cut through the rebar.
The tunnel was low and dark, and the bracing looked to be barely adequate. Yet Jack did a quiet appraisal of it and the time he had. If he went down that tunnel, he wouldn't make rendezvous with Baxter and Chavez. Yet this was his opportunity, maybe his only opportunity, to link up with the occupants of the prison. He nodded his head and crawled into the tunnel.
There was no light and dirt dribbled down on him from above. Jack had never considered himself claustrophobic, not until he'd gone fifty feet or more into the tunnel and he still saw no exit. At seventy feet in, his mind had begun telling him that there wasn't an end, that it ran on forever and that he would die in this tunnel.
At a hundred feet, the tunnel spat out into what looked and smelled like a sewage manhole. Another young man, equally dirty as the one who'd grabbed him on the far end, stared at him with big, shocked eyes. “I'm Captain Jack Zamora,” Jack said. “I'm here to help.”
“You're... you're here to rescue us?” The young man asked.
“I'm here to help,” Jack repeated. He didn't want to get anyone's hopes up, not when he wasn't certain that he could accomplish much, if anything. “Who's in charge, here?”
“You... you'll need to see the Colonel,” the boy said eagerly. “He'll know what to do!”
“The Colonel?” Jack asked. He felt his own spirits rise a bit. Perhaps someone a bit more senior than him had survived. If this Colonel had organized things well enough here, then maybe Jack could turn over his responsibilities...
“Yeah!” the boy nodded, “He's military, like you! This way!”
The boy led the way up the ladder. Behind Jack, Warrant Officer Knighton emerged into the manhole, grumbling and cursing as he dusted dirt off himself. “I'll need to clean my weapons to get them ready to use,” he muttered.
“You'll be fine,” Jack replied. “Let's go meet the locals.”
They followed the boy up the ladder. The sewer manhole opened up in some kind of metal shed. It took Jack a moment to orient to his position. When he did, he brought up his radio, “This is Six, I've made contact with the s
urvivors, go to our fallback position and return in the morning, over.”
“Roger, Six,” Baxter's reply came after a long moment. “See you in the morning.”
The boy waited for him at the door. When Jack came up, he worked the heavy steel bar on the door, opened it a crack, and then waved across at the nearest building. Jack recognized it as the one that he'd seen the men escorting the woman and kids into. A moment later, the door opened and three men emerged. They wore riot gear, like the ones he'd seen earlier.
They rushed across the open ground. A moment later, Jack realized why they'd rushed, as a zombie charged them from the side. Two of them held the zombie off with their riot shields while the third swung a fire ax into it. Jack saw that they must have rehearsed the maneuver, but they clearly didn't know how to take down a zombie. The ax blow smashed the undead's skull, but it still pawed at them. The one with the ax kept hacking at it, doing grievous wounds, but not enough to incapacitate it. They're taking too long, Jack thought.
On that cue, another zombie came, drawn either by the sound or possibly just slower than the first. This one tackled one of the shield-bearers and Jack saw the other two men start to panic. The boy started to close the door, his eyes wide in terror, but Jack put a hand in the way and caught the door before it could close. He pulled it wide and rushed out, drawing his blade.
He went for the zombie that had knocked down one of the guards, first.
Jack's first blow severed the zombie's forearm. He followed the motion up with a kick that threw the undead back, and then hacked down on it's shoulder to sever the other arm.
The armless zombie was mostly harmless at that point, but Jack kicked it again to give the guard room to stand. He spun in time to see Knighton hack the legs out from under the first zombie, then pull the fire ax out of the guard's hands and use it to sever the creature's arms with two quick blows.