by Carl Meadows
Guilt; the chosen weapon of all immature assholes.
Hmm, actually, it’s starting to get a little dim outside. Largely this is due to a thick overcast autumn sky, but still, it’s almost 5.30pm and the three of them aren’t back yet. The sun won’t go down for another couple of hours, but I can’t help being a little worried. Nate’s always so damn punctual.
OCTOBER 7th, 2010(2nd Entry)
WHERE ARE THEY?
It’s 9pm, Freya.
I’m really fucking worried now. I’ve tried Nate on the walkie every fifteen minutes for the past three hours, but there’s still no answer. The builder’s yard might be on the edge of its range. Shit, I hope that’s it. The alternative is too fucking scary to consider. But something is definitely wrong.
I’m going out. In the dark.
Alone.
There are no other trained guns here. It’s all on me.
Fuck.
MY GIRL
“Where did they all come from?”
Mark’s voice held a note of barely contained panic as the three of them looked down at the mass of undead filling the builder’s yard. Nate stared down miserably at his rifle and radio, lying at the foot of their precarious sanctuary. All he had was his Glock, with two spare magazines. At seventeen rounds each, it simply wasn’t enough for the task.
“Well, that’s the burning question, isn’t it?” murmured Nate.
Loadout wise, they could never have prepared for the horde that had poured into the yard, but Nate cursed himself for his rare complacency. There were rows of houses either side of the road further down, and small industrial units dotted further up, but even if they all emptied, it should not have generated a horde of this magnitude. Nate was having trouble grasping the sheer scale of the undead assembled below them, but even more difficulty in trying to understand the ‘how.’
Arriving mid-morning, they had cleared the offices and yard of any lingering undead after finding the gates open. There had been only four on the premises in total and a quick scan of the scene had revealed why. An accident with a forklift had crushed a worker’s leg under a fallen pallet, and with no emergency response coming as the world started to burn around them, the poor bastard had died from blood loss and shock. The evidence of blood-stained teeth, and another worker in a hi-vis vest shuffling around with a ragged chunk missing from his arm, told the old marine a clear story. The driver of the forklift had been next to the man, wracked with guilt at injuring his colleague, and the speed of the turn caught him unawares. Bitten, the man had retreated into the office where he likely turned after bleeding out, the vast rivers of blood signifying the likelihood of a brachial artery tear. Two people had been killed in the ensuing chaos of his reanimation and any other surviving employees had fled, some of them likely with bites to accelerate the spread of the menace. Nate and the others had put all four undead down with melee weapons to keep noise to a minimum.
The rest of the day had been largely uneventful, as the three of them worked to assemble everything Mark needed on to a flat-bed truck, emblazoned with the name and number of the wholesaler. The truck was fitted with a loader crane just behind the cab, combined with hydraulic stabilisers to deploy while in operation. Able to easily lift huge stacks of bricks, it would be a useful addition to their vehicles and finally allow them a means to move wood burners from nearby farmhouses into the lodge ready for winter. After hunting down the truck’s keys in the office, all they had to do was locate the materials and tools Mark needed for his planned projects, secure it to the truck, then Nate and Alicia would ride back in the pickup, and Mark would drive the loader truck. It would be a tight turn on the small country road through the gates of the lodge, but perfectly achievable. All in all, they’d had a positive day.
Until they didn’t.
It was around 4pm when they finished securing the last of the items to the truck. All three were tired, both from the mental drain of forever being on alert, and the back-breaking physical labour required in the loading. Then a single word from Alicia dragged their attention to the gate.
“Zombie.”
One appeared, then four, then ten, then thirty. Nate had muttered a curse for not checking the street more meticulously. Caught up in their work, they’d grown complacent as the day wore on.
With so many, the only option was to start shooting, and Nate gave the order, giving Mark and Alicia a baptism of fire. Anyone going beyond the gate had to carry a sidearm as backup on Nate’s insistence, so both carried Glocks at their hip and the two of them were armed with pump shotguns. Neither carried more than twenty shells though; six in the weapon, six on the barrel neatly lined up in sheaths, and a further eight in deep, easily accessible pockets. Both carried a seventeen-round Glock with one spare magazine. Any engagement expected to go beyond that meant that no amount of ammunition should justify them hanging around. If they needed more ammo than Nate had deemed necessary for a regular run beyond the gate, the situation demanded exfil with immediate effect. Mark and Alicia were not trained soldiers, so they needed to move.
But the only exit to the yard was quickly filling with undead.
Nate’s loadout was considerably more, with two spare magazines for his L85 at thirty rounds each and one primed in the weapon. All told, between them they had around two-hundred and fifty rounds between 5.56, 9mm, and 12-gauge buckshot. Nate could put consistent accurate fire downrange, but Alicia and Mark wouldn’t score a kill shot with every trigger pull. They were still novices. Even if they were crack shots, it still wasn’t enough.
As they started firing, it quickly became apparent that the thirty they could see were only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. More undead came piling in, slow and steady, lacking the purpose they had seen in the unliving wall blocking the central road through town a day earlier. However, despite their amble, they were relentless and densely packed. Within seconds of the shotguns booming and the steady whip-crack of Nate’s rifle on semi, the gateway was entirely obstructed and the undead oozed into the yard. There was no way of getting to the pickup, parked near the gate as it was, and the flatbed was perpendicular to the gate and needed fully turning before any escape could be made.
“Inside the offices?” bellowed Mark above the roar of gunfire, the pungent smell of discharged ammunition thick in the air.
Nate shook his head, wincing a little as a hot casing ejected from the rifle and caught a bare patch of skin on his arm. The last thing he wanted was being trapped inside a building and the unholy monsters surrounding every possible exit. They needed elevation and time to thin the mass from a point of safety. The bed of the truck wasn’t high enough, as grasping hands could still reach the edges and one misstep could see one of them hauled from the truck and ripped to bloody chunks. Even if they killed the undead around the truck and didn’t make a mistake, every downed corpse would become a stepping-stone for the advancing rearguard, making access to them easier with every kill. They would end up potentially being the architects of their own demise. No, the truck wasn’t high enough and they needed to thin the herd. With how quickly the undead had filled the yard, it was too dangerous to even attempt a bolt for it now.
“Keep fire steady, stagger it,” ordered Nate. “Don’t let up. Always one shooting.”
Mark and Alicia both looked pale and terrified, but to their credit, they nodded and focused in line with his command, firing alternately and blasting the nearest targets. Every shot didn’t kill, but every downed zombie was an obstacle for those behind to navigate and Nate was gratified when a pack of them went down in a tumble like toppled dominos, slowing the encroachment.
Satisfied he had a moment, Nate glanced round and spied a blue-painted stepladder, the type used in warehouses to reach higher levels of racking. It was more like a wheeled staircase and scanning the area behind them, the veteran spotted an elevated position that would give them the desired level of safety and immediate respite.
“Back slowly,” he called, even as he ran to the wheeled stairwa
y. “Towards my voice.”
Alicia and Mark did so and he allowed himself a small smile of pride as the dark-haired woman called out, “Reloading!” Communication was everything and it took a level of clear thought to keep that up when under pressure. Now she had calmed down a little since her liberation, Alicia had proven to be an apt student. If they ever got out of this mess, he would upgrade her to rifle training. He was certain she had the chops for it now.
Nate kept talking, using his voice as a lodestone to guide his two comrades as he wheeled the stairway into position and locked the brake into position. Sweeping his rifle forward, he turned back and moved between the two of them.
“Up the stairs, on top of the bricks,” said Nate. “I’ll go last. When you get the top, fire down on them, and slow them as much as you can. Mind you don’t blow my head off, eh?”
“On top of the bricks?” queried Mark.
“Move,” he ordered. This was no time for debate or reassurance. Time was a luxury quickly dissipating as the undead continued to swell. They easily numbered three hundred in total and Nate swore silently as gunfire rattled his senses. Where had they all come from?
His heart pounding, the swell thickened and advanced too swiftly, with no way to keep them at bay any longer. The lead zombies were too close, relentlessly plunging forward, their all-too-familiar lunge creeping ever nearer, when the thunder of two shotguns above him rained down into the mass.
Puffing his cheeks out in relief, Nate turned and headed for the stairway, but mis-stepped as he placed his boot on the stairs. Intending to bound up them two at a time, his foot was too near the edge and slipped, sending him sprawling forward, his hands flashing out to stop him from smashing teeth-first into the metal. A brief blaze of pain flashed up his leg as his shin smashed against the edge of a step. Wincing, Nate quickly regained his footing and began to move up the stairs.
“Nate!” called Alicia, her voice near panic.
It was a warning, a proximity alert encased in terror. The brief slip had allowed one of the undead to get too close, and neither Alicia nor Mark were willing to risk their amateur shooting skill on a creature so near to him.
As he began to push up the steps, his forward momentum was arrested by a tightening pressure across his chest. Somehow, the undead’s grasp had latched to the strap attached to his rifle and reflexively gripped it. His forward momentum would be reversed in an instant as the zombie, a couple of steps lower than him, would drag him down. If he tried to fight it, if he tried to risk battling with the undead, his balance would be destroyed, and it would be a grim and ignoble end.
Years of training, experience, muscle memory, and instinct ignited as he processed all the possible outcomes in a millisecond, acting without thought or hesitation. He reached up and released the clip of his makeshift strap, feeling the weight vanish as the material dragged across his chest and the zombie tumbled backwards, taking his rifle with it.
Without looking back, Nate bounded up the stairway and climbed to the top of the brick pallets, turned, and gave the ladder a savage kick from the side, watching as it toppled away from their perch to crash onto the concrete and pin a handful of undead beneath it. He had no idea if the undead could navigate upwards, but he was taking no chances.
“Everyone okay?” he panted, heart pounding painfully in his chest. Too damn close.
Both were scared and a little wild-eyed, but unharmed.
“What now?” Alicia asked.
“Call for backup, now we’ve got a minute,” replied Nate, reaching up to his chest. Frowning, he looked down. “What the fuck?” The radio was gone.
Peering off the edge of their fourteen-foot platform of wrapped bricks, Nate looked down to where his rifle lay on the concrete. A few feet away lay his radio.
“You’ve got be fucking kidding me.”
“What’s up?” asked Mark.
“When I released the strap of my rifle, it must have caught the radio as it whipped back and unhooked it,” sighed Nate, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. “It’s down there.”
“What do we do now then?”
“Without the rifle, that’s a whole shit ton of ammunition I’ve got on my person rendered useless. Ammo count?”
“Still got the two magazines of Glock and six shells left,” said Mark after a quick count.
“Same on the Glock, and eight 12-gauge,” sighed Alicia.
Nate quickly did the sums. “So, between us we’ve got a total of seven magazines of 9mm including those in the gun, so that’s eighty-five, and fourteen buckshot. Shitting hell,” he huffed in frustration.
“That’s not enough for all of them,” observed Mark. “Probably not enough for even a third of them as it stands.”
“No, it most certainly is not.”
“So, what do we do?”
“Right now?” Mark nodded in response to the query. Nate laid across the top of the plastic wrapped bricks. “We get our shit together and take a minute.”
“But Nate…”
“Mark,” he interrupted, his voice low. “Right now, we can’t do shit. We’re safe for the moment. These brick pallets are a solid platform, stacked to fourteen feet, and as heavy as my fucking heart is right now. The undead can’t shift this weight, the pallets are wrapped in thick plastic sheeting that would need a blade to cut through, banded with metal strapping so they don’t shift, so the bastards down there can’t knock the bricks out and fuck their stability.” He blew out his cheeks, just wanting a moment’s respite. “Everything has just gone to shit, I’m paggered, and I just need a fucking minute, reet?”
Mark and Alicia both looked at him quizzically.
“What?” he demanded.
“Paggered? Reet?” Alicia looked bewildered.
Nate snorted. Whenever he was exhausted, or had a few too many drinks, the old Yorkshire slang crept back into his vocabulary, the accent of his childhood having been smoothed out over years in the military.
“Paggered is exhausted, reet is right.” He smirked. “All reet?”
Nate looked at his watch; it was a little after 5.30pm. They had been trapped on their brick tower for almost an hour and a half, watching with trepidation as the light began to dim behind thick, ominous clouds. Sunset was only a couple of hours away.
Despite the heavy rainstorms of the previous week, the autumn had been unseasonably clement so far and one of the reasons they had done this run to the yard so soon. Mark could use the more temperate climate to get the generator housing built in readiness for the inevitable cold snap.
It would still be cold tonight though.
“I don’t understand where they all came from,” said Alicia, echoing Mark’s query from moments earlier.
“What I don’t understand is why they’ve suddenly gone so docile,” murmured Nate.
“Eh?”
“Look at ‘em,” he said, flicking a hand at them. “Despite us chatting up here, they’ve gone all docile, like they don’t really want us anymore, now we’re out of reach. They always react to sound, but they don’t give two flying shits about us now they can’t get us. It’s weird.”
“Everything’s weird nowadays,” huffed Mark.
“Weirder than usual, then.”
“What do we do, Nate?” Mark struggled to keep the fear from his voice. “Charlie’s alone back there. I need to get back to him.”
“Aye, you do, but you need to get back to him alive, sunshine. Try and make your escape now and you’ll be dead in a snap. And the boy isn’t alone. He’s well cared for.”
“We can’t just sit here.”
“Aye, we can,” said Nate. “We wait for backup.”
“There is no backup!” hissed Mark.
Nate turned to face him, a twitch of irritation narrowing his eyes.
“I get you want to get back to your kid, but listen to me, and listen well. We do have backup. She’s about five-foot six, as agile as a squirrel on steroids, and one of the most resourceful individuals I�
�ve ever known, and I’ve served with some of the best. No one gets left behind with that kid. No one.”
As if listening from afar, the radio below them crackled into life, the slight Liverpool accent like music to his ears.
“Nate, you fucking mentalist, where the fuck are you?”
Nate grinned back at Mark and Alicia. “There’s my girl,” he said with a wink. “Right on cue. “
The moment Erin’s voice hissed over the radio, the undead appeared to straighten, their sightless gaze aiming down towards the handset, and the swell moved.
“I swear to fucking God, Nate, if you’re fucking with me, I will cut your old man balls clean off. It’ll be easy, seeing as those low-hanging fruit slap the water every time you sit down for a shit.”
Nate couldn’t even laugh as Erin’s Liverpool accent thickened with anger. It always became more prominent when her blood was up, just as his Yorkshire accent intensified with tiredness or alcohol. Instead of laughing at one of his favourite quirks, he watched in morbid fascination as the undead moved like a creeping tide in the direction of the radio, crowding it in their silent mass.
“I’m going to keep checking in, Nate,” came Erin’s voice, slightly muffled by the density of monsters crowding the handset. “And if I find you’re fucking with me, those balls will come off with rusty scissors operated by my left hand… and I’m not left-handed. I’ll make an absolute pig’s ear of it, Nate.” Her tone changed then. “Nate? Nate? Nate, for fuck’s sake, answer me!”
His heart almost broke as her tone transformed from mock anger to genuine fear at his silence.
“I’m here, kid,” he whispered. “I’m right here.”
The next few hours were torture. Every fifteen minutes, Erin’s voice crackled into life, sparking the undead to crowd the radio again, and each time Nate could hear her fear intensify. The humour was gone, and all he could hear was her pleading for him to answer, shouting into the void of the airwaves, demanding to know what was happening. It was killing him.