by Jon Schafer
Eastridge mentally ran over the assets they had in east Texas and Louisiana while at the same time taking into consideration the need to keep the operation low key. He could dispatch a search and rescue helicopter, but how would he explain his actions if they came to the attention of the Joint Chiefs? He was already pushing his luck by using his contact in the NSA. On top of that, orders had come down a few days ago stating that no military assets were to be used in rescuing or contacting any civilians. The rationale behind this being that the military needed everything at their disposal in their fight against the dead. This was the reason Polk hadn’t responded to the distress call in the first place. Additionally, the people they were trying to find were now on the move. He knew they were heading south, but with all the back roads in the area, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Deciding that he wouldn’t make a move until he found out exactly where these people were, General Eastridge said, “Lieutenant, I want you to continue to monitor the radio for this particular group. If you hear from them again, you have my permission to contact them. Get their exact location and then call me directly. I don’t care if it’s four in the morning, as soon as you hear from them, you need to call me.”
“Yes, sir,” Dwight replied.
“Now hold on the line, I’m going to transfer you back to my aide. He’s going to give you the direct number to my office as well as another number where you can reach me at night.”
After hanging up, Eastridge leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. He wanted to do more, but his hands were tied. Ever since the Joint Chiefs had received the report on the latest successful test of the Malectron, it was full steam ahead on that project, and to hell with everything else. The Chairman himself had ordered that all testing at their other facilities be suspended, and that their personnel and equipment be transferred to Doctor Hawkins if he needed it.
This, coupled with the order to abandon any and all civilians, made Eastridge feel as if he’d made the right decision. He knew for a fact they had refugee centers that were only at half capacity, and his suspicions were that the Chairman had an ulterior motive. In fact, the man had almost come right out and said so when he told the Joint Chiefs at their last gathering that he wanted the military to be the only armed force in America. He explained that if all the gun-toting survivalists were wiped out, it would make it so much the easier once order was restored.
Leaning forward, Eastridge picked up a file and went back to work, his attention often wandering to the phone on his desk as he willed it to ring.
***
Staff Sergeant Fagan stood in front of Major Cage’s desk and asked, “Do you believe that shit they said about Lieutenant Randal going AWOL, sir?”
With a grimace, Cage said, “About as much as I believe in the Easter bunny.”
“So what happened to him?” Fagan asked.
“They probably transferred him to one of the Dead Cities,” Cage replied. “The resupply chopper came in that morning before Hawkins went out, so my guess is that they put him on it to get him out of the way. They must have seen us together and gotten suspicious after we rescued those people at the processing plant.”
“Do you think they’d really go that far?” Fagan asked.
Cage shrugged and said, “It’s not like they killed him or anything.”
“Think he told them about us helping him trying to delay Hawkins?” Fagan asked.
“We have to assume he did,” Cage said with a grimace. “I hate to think that way, but we can’t take any chances. That means we’ve got to lay low for awhile. We need to concentrate more on finding someone who’s immune, rather than slowing Hawkins down.”
Fagan shook his head and said, “I haven’t heard anything from General Eastridge since we talked to him that first time, sir.”
“Do you think he’ll come through?” Cage asked.
“He said he would, sir.” Fagan replied and then asked, “So what do we do in the mean time?”
“We wait,” Cage replied.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Happy Hallow Insane Asylum:
After Heather pulled through the gate and stopped, she siphoned the last of the gas from her truck and split it between the four vehicles they would be taking. Once she was done with this, she helped Steve load the others into the minivans and Brain’s truck. Steve told them to leave their doors open in case they had to retreat to the house, and asked one last time if any of them wanted a weapon.
They all declined.
Once everyone was situated in their seats, Steve went to stand by Tick-Tock at the .50. They had decided to use it outside of the fence because if they fired it from inside, they might tear the uprights in half if one of the heavy rounds hit them. They might be leaving, but Grimm and the raggedy twins would still be here and would need all the protection they could get.
Steve still had one hope, and it was slim at best. The woods were too thick for the dead to make it through, so they had to come down the road. The lane that led to the asylum from the highway was a quarter mile long, meaning the dead would have to actually come looking for them. They had discussed this possibility constantly, but in the end, it came down to whether the Z’s would sense them and come after them or continue on and join the mob to the east.
It was a tossup.
The coin landed wrong and the first of the dead appeared forty minutes after Heather pulled inside the compound. Because the trees grew so close to its sides, a light fog still hung on the road. It made the dead appear as shadowy figures at first, but there was no mistaking them by their lurching walk. Steve counted five, so he told Tick-Tock to hold his fire. They might be stragglers who just happened to turn while the rest of the dead herd continued on. They would take these silently, so they didn’t attract any attention.
Waving to where Grimm was standing by the gate, Steve hefted his baseball bat and said, “We’re up.”
Like a wraith, Grimm seemed to float across the ground as she moved forward. Within seconds, she was at his side and they both stepped forward.
“You take the two on the left and I’ll take the three on the right,” Steve told her.
Grimm laughed and said, “How about I take the three on the left and you take the two on the right?”
“However you want to do it as long as we do it quietly,” Steve told her.
The Z’s picked up speed and started whining when they saw Grimm and Steve. Completely naked, except for one still dressed in a fireman’s jacket and helmet, they carried a variety of wounds leaking black puss. One was missing an arm and another a hand, while a third moved on stumps, its legs gone below the knees. Surprised, Steve could see that the double amputee moved faster than the others, so he concentrated on taking that one out first.
Readying himself to swing for the nosebleed seats as soon as it came within range, he saw motion out of the corner of his eye. He turned to take a quick look and saw Grimm move forward with her scythe at the ready. In awe, he watched as she sidestepped the charge of the legless thing while reaching back with her scythe and hooking her blade under its chin. With a sharp tug, she took its head off before swinging around in an arc that cut another zombie in half at the waist. She jumped out of the way of the two dead sections while she reversed the blade and swung in the other direction. This connected with the third Z and sliced through both of its outstretched arms.
Steve took a step forward but suddenly realized that it was too late for him to get into the fight. Grimm was like a whirlwind as she leapt between the two remaining Z’s and spun in a full circle. Her blade hummed as it cut through the air before taking off the tops of both heads. Before their bodies even hit the ground, she had reversed direction and buried the tip of her blade in the top of the head of the Z she had cut the arms off of. Moving slower now, she almost sauntered as she approached the Z she had cut in half.
The dead creature squealed as it tried to reach out at her. Grimm stopped and rested her scythe against the g
round. Steve watched as she waited until it had crawled to within range, and then, almost too fast to follow, she cut off its head with one swing.
Grimm turned to him and said with a laugh, “Or maybe I’ll take all five and you can watch.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” Steve said in awe.
“That’s how we roll here at the Happy Hallow,” she told him.
***
Standing outside the passenger door of the minivan she would be riding in, Mary looked at Sean sitting in the middle of the front bench seat and said, “So far, I’ve only seen a couple of Z’s and Grimm took care of them.”
“So they might have missed us,” Sean said hopefully as he leaned over, trying to see around the truck in front of them. “I heard you all saying that they might miss us completely.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Mary told him. “Those things seem to be able to smell us.”
Sean shifted nervously in his seat and said, “If they do miss us, we need to stay here. That was the recommendation of the committee.”
Mary shook her head and said, “No matter what happens, we leave here today, and that was the recommendation of our committee.”
Looking at her in shock, Sean asked, “You have your own committee?”
She pointed to where Steve was heading toward them and said, “Yeah, and here he comes.”
They watched as he stopped at the lead truck and talked to Denise for a moment before he turned and headed back toward the gate.
Denise got out of her truck and came back to relay his message. “Steve said that they took the first few out, but to get ready because they can hear the main group moving down the highway.”
“Hear them?” Sean asked.
Denise held up her hand for silence, “Listen.”
They all paused, and the faint noise of a thousand dead voices whining and hissing could be heard. Sean’s eyes got wide and he started visibly shaking. Reaching for the driver’s side door, he tried to open it.
“Sit your ass down,” Mary told him.
Sean keep pawing at the door lever, so Mary pulled out her pistol, grabbed it by the barrel, leaned in and rapped its butt against the back of his head like she’d seen people do in the movies. This shocked him into immobility, but then he started hyperventilating. The people in the back of the van yelled in outrage at the treatment of their leader, so Mary reversed the pistol and pointed it over the seat at them, slowly tracking it back and forth.
Excited and horrified by the fact that she had just hit someone for the first time in her life, her voice was high-pitched as she said, “You need to shut up and listen. Stay in your seats and you’ll be fine.”
Everyone in the back of the van froze as they looked down the huge bore of the handgun.
Surprised that they obeyed her, and not realizing it was the gun that caused them to shut up and not what she said, she stuck the pistol back in the waistband of her pants and said, “Now, don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right.”
Her words turned into a lie when the noise of a rifle firing, and then the hammering of the .50 caliber heavy machine gun, split the quiet Texas morning.
***
Steve was only halfway across the field when he saw the mass of Z’s coming down the road. Jumping forward into a sprint, he was at Tick-Tock’s side in seconds.
“Here they come,” his friend said in a low voice.
“Hold your fire until they get to where the trees end and the road opens up into the field,” Steve told him.
“Already on it,” Tick-Tock said as he pulled back the charging lever to feed the first round into the chamber. “It’ll create a choke point.”
Tick-Tock could see the dead clearly as the last dregs of fog burned off in the sun. Some were clothed, while others had a variety of tattered clothing hanging from their bodies. Only a few were completely nude, which led him to believe that a majority of this group had been hiding in vehicles. A handful of the faster ones leading the main body of the dead reached the kill zone, but he held his fire. Steve would deal with these individuals; his concern was the mass of Z’s behind them.
Not worried about making noise anymore since it was obvious that the dead knew they were here, Steve used his M4 to fire single rounds into the heads of the lead Z’s. This energized the ones behind them and they came forward in a rush. From his left, he could hear Tick-Tock saying to himself, “Wait for it. Wait for it.” And then he yelled, “NOW.”
Tick-Tock squeezed off a short burst with the .50 caliber heavy machine gun. Seeing his bullets punching into the chests and stomachs of the dead, he adjusted his fire and let loose. His rounds smashed into the heads of the closely packed Z’s, some of them blowing through two and three of them before losing velocity. Black puss, brains and skull fragments flew into the air as the dead at the front of the pack were mowed down.
After three sustained bursts from the heavy machine gun, it was empty. Tick-Tock grabbed his rifle and fired a few shots at the Z’s he’d missed and then yelled, “GO.”
He and Steve turned as one and ran for where they could see Heather standing in the opening of the gate, firing her CAR-15 at the advancing horde. Once safely inside, they turned and covered her while she secured the locks. Once this was done, all three of them started firing at the Z’s who had already made it halfway across the field.
The dead poured down the road and spread out a few feet to either side of it. They were focused on the food in front of them and came toward the gate in a straight line. Despite the fire being poured into them from Heather, Tick-Tock and Steve, there were so many of them it was like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper. For every one that fell, three more took its place as they stumbled over the bodies of their own.
As the dead neared the gate, its three defenders backed away out of reflex. They continued firing in order to stem the flood of Z’s and lessen the impact on the fence, but it seemed futile. The dead hit the gate with an audible bang and it bowed in slightly before springing back. Prepared to flee if needed, the trio stopped and stood their ground when they saw that their first line of defense was holding. After firing the last rounds in their magazines almost point blank into the grotesque, whining, blue-grey faces that assaulted them, they reloaded and slowly backed away from the dead arms reaching through the uprights to grasp at them.
After a few steps, Steve turned and started running for the lead truck. He passed Brain crouched over a car battery at the right side of the lane and said, “Wait for my signal.”
Steve jumped up on the hood of the Ford and then looked in awe at the number of Z’s still flowing down the road and onto the field. They were already bunched up twenty deep at the gate, so the newcomers flowed out to cluster against the fence on both sides of it. He could see the stakes in the ground where they had planted the landmines, but there weren’t enough of the dead around to justify setting them off yet.
Looking to where Brain was poised over the battery with a wire in each hand, he called out, “Not yet.”
“Let me know when,” he yelled back.
Steve looked at the other vehicles, pleased to see that everyone was where they were supposed to be. Only a few more minutes and they would leave.
***
Sean could feel himself losing his sanity at the sight of all the dead pushing against the fence. All the dirty faces with their teeth bared, and their equally filthy hands reaching toward him, made his skin literally crawl at the thought of them ripping into his flesh. His mind screamed at him to flee, but his body was frozen in place. Screams of horror came from behind him and he felt his head turning in slow motion to look. It was his people. They were yelling something at him but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was as if the English language had escaped him.
With a snap, he came to his senses. He could now understand that his people were screaming at him to get them out of here. Looking past them, he saw that the doors of the mansion stood wide open. His fir
st thought was to get out of the minivan and run for them, but what safety did a house hold against the number of dead coming at them?
Turning to look forward again, he could see more dead lining the fence. He focused on their twisted faces and saw fresh blood on some of them. With the truck blocking his view of what was directly in front of him, his mind latched on to the idea that the dead had caught Steve and his buddy out in the field and had eaten them. He saw someone climbing onto the hood of the truck in front of him, but in his crazed state, he thought it was one of the dead attacking Denise. For a second he focused on his reflection in the rearview mirror and could see his mouth opening and closing as he tried to say something.
Then his mind snapped again.
They’re gone, his brain screamed at him. Steve was gone and now it was everyone for themselves. He even said the word, “Gone,” but it was lost in the screams from the back of the minivan. This caused his panic to grow and energized him into action. He had to act to save himself.
As he slid behind the steering wheel, he caught Mary’s attention as she leaned down to yell at everyone to shut up. Seeing his hand reaching for the ignition, she pulled her pistol and pointed it at him while screaming in a high-pitched voice for him to stop.
Sean’s stomach dropped and he felt a surge of adrenalin go through him when he saw the handgun pointed at his head. Rage flooded his mind and body at the thought of these Neanderthals and their guns. They had no idea what they were doing, and it was their fault that he was this situation in the first place. They had treated him and his people like nothing more than swamp donkeys, and now they would get them all killed.
Reaching out with a speed born of fear and madness, he grabbed the barrel of the .40 and twisted it out of Mary’s hand.
“We’ve got to go,” he screamed, “They’re all dead.” Then he stuffed the pistol under his leg and turned the ignition of the minivan. The engine cranked once and caught.
Seeing that Sean had lost it and was ready to drive off, Mary knew she didn’t have time to un-sling her rifle. She could see her pistol sticking out from under his leg, so she lunged at it with her left hand while reaching out with her right to rake her nails into his eyes and down his face.