A deader staggered out of a cedar thicket toward them, its clothes filthy and torn. It looked like it had been dead for a decade, scraps of shrunken meat clinging to bone and its empty eye sockets packed with worms. Its jaw lowered and lifted again, bringing together huge yellow teeth.
“Where the hell do I shoot it?” Arjun asked, unsteadily aiming the gun.
“The head!”
“It’s nothing but a skull!”
Sydney retreated behind him as the hideous thing clattered forward, limbs jerking and twisting beneath its ragged burial suit. “Just shoot.”
Arjun thumbed back the hammer and pulled the trigger. The sudden percussion of the .32 was like a thunderbolt in the previously serene forest. A crow gave a startled caw from an overhead branch and winged toward the sky. The bullet, if it struck anything, made no mark on the monster.
“We can outrun it,” Arjun said. “It doesn’t have any shoes, either.”
“It barely has any feet. Give me that thing.” She grabbed the revolver and lifted it in a two-handed grip.
The deader was only ten feet away, skidding on leaves and mud, when Sydney fired. The round struck the skull near the central suture that divided the hemispheres of bone. The skull cracked and a large chunk of it blew out the back, sending up a dust of grimy gray powder. The deader teetered and wobbled like a marionette on a slackened string, but it didn’t fall.
“Is it dead?” Sydney asked.
“You mean, is it dead again?”
“It’s not moving.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Its slender ivory fingers tinkled like a wind chime as the arms oscillated back and forth. But it was no longer moving toward them.
“His buddies might’ve heard,” Sydney said.
“They don’t have ears.”
“Like that matters. Let’s get out of here.”
As they sprinted the rest of the way to the fence, Arjun detected motion all around them. He couldn’t tell how much was his imagination and how much was an actual army of zombies closing in. When the two of them emerged from the forest and onto the bright, sunlit pasture, Arjun felt as if they’d crawled out of a deep mausoleum.
The farmyard was abuzz with activity as they passed through the barbed wire. Knocker must’ve alerted the others, and the two gunshots reinforced the immediacy of the threat. People scattered out from the farmhouse in all directions, some of them heading across the pasture toward Arjun and Sydney.
“Must be the real thing,” Arjun said.
“Let’s see how we can help,” Sydney said. “And they need to know these things are not freshies.”
Knocker and two others approached them at a jog, all of them carrying rifles. Knocker, in his buckskin jacket and oilcloth bushman hat, looked like he was ready to fight a long-forgotten war. His belt held a hatchet in a sheath, a canteen, and several pouches of ammo as well as a walkie-talkie. His heavy-looking rifle featured a long scope. Arjun didn’t know the other two men, but he’d seen them around the farm.
“You two okay?” Knocker said in his usual terse, gruff tone.
“Yeah,” Arjun said. “We put one down back there. One of those grave monkeys, looked like it had been dead a while.”
“Head shot?”
“Yeah.” Arjun didn’t tell him it was Sydney who’d delivered the killing blow. “We saw a bunch more on top of the ridge.”
“I ran into a pack of ’em. They were chawing on a buck I’d put down.”
“Let’s fan out and wait until they hit the fence,” one of the other men said. “We can pick them off one by one.”
“What do you want us to do?” Arjun asked.
Knocker eyed them dubiously, noticing Sydney’s shirt was half unbuttoned. “You won’t be much good with that peashooter. Why not check in with C.J.?”
Arjun was relieved, but Sydney said, “We can be back-up, in case any of them get past you.”
“If they get past us, we’re going to need more than that. At least get a rifle.”
Sydney nodded, and they headed across the pasture. The livestock sensed the unease, and the horses whickered while the cattle plodded toward the barn. By the time they reached the farmhouse, guards had been deployed all along the perimeter of the property. C.J. and Sonia were on the porch, along with Jacob and the other three children in the group.
“Pick out a rifle,” C.J. said. “They’re laid out on the table inside. The ammo is beside it.”
“Why is everyone scattered?” Arjun said. “We only saw them on the ridge.”
“We’ve got company for dinner,” Sonia said. “We’re surrounded.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Rocky didn’t like his vantage point from the barn’s loft, but at least it had windows on two sides in addition to the large sliding doors at each end.
He posted his best marksman at the south door and he took the north, the direction from which the two gunshots had come. Meg covered the west, and a pale, sickly old gentleman faced east. Knocker had reported zombie activity along the ridge line, which would’ve been fairly easy to defend, but a guard along the driveway saw them approaching from the main road as well.
Now they couldn’t escape using the vehicles, even if they’d had time to plan and pack. An old logging road ran beyond the pasture and into a pine forest, but it was only passable with four-wheel drive. And even if they ran, where would they find another place as viable as this one?
No, he agreed with C.J. and Sonia’s assessment: They would have to hold it.
He’d added a Barska scope to his M16, which created an effective range of a few hundred yards. Still, he couldn’t quite cover the entire pasture before him, but at least he could knock down anything that threatened the house and the children inside.
He sighted through the scope to where Knocker and two others took up positions fifty yards from the fence line. The driveway was well defended, since it offered the easiest access to invaders. Any zombies that reached the gate would find themselves in a crossfire.
Those that breached the fences would encounter a second line of fences. With armed resistance spread along the various pressure points, the group could hold off a small army. What worried Rocky was that they might be facing a big army. It almost seemed as if the attack was organized and that they’d been outflanked on purpose.
“Any possibility that these things can communicate?” he called to Meg.
“Not unless you believe Jiang Li’s theory about communicative properties at the cellular level,” she responded.
“What about these that have been dead for years? They don’t even have brains.”
“Maybe there are vestigial nerve endings in the lining of the bone.”
“What the hell does that mean?” the old man croaked. “Can these sons of bitches talk?”
“No, this would be more like biological telepathy,” Meg said. “Where they react to each other through multiple senses, the way ants and bees do. Sort of a uniform social intelligence.”
“Christ, I wish the cancer had taken me when it had the chance. Commie zombies. Fuck me.”
Rocky had already accepted that science had no explanation for this horror show. But Meg still clung to the lifeline of rationality and logic despite all evidence to the contrary.
“Maybe Cameron Ingram has something to do with this,” Rocky ventured.
“What?” Meg said. “He appointed himself commander-in-chief of the zombie army?”
“Maybe not in such plain words. But what if he’s influencing things in ways we can’t understand?”
“Don’t tell me you’re buying into the ‘Antichrist’ conspiracy, too?”
“How else do you explain these things coming up from their graves? No virus could do that.”
“Ingram’s evil, no matter how you slice it,” the old man interjected. “And these rotten-assed creatures are evil, too. I’m fine with lumping them all together.”
“All I know is Ingram effectively declared war on everybody who didn’t join his
church, which is now a government, which is now a world authority,” Rocky said. “Either way, he left us to die without any military support.”
“We have you,” Meg said.
“If I had a grenade launcher and an M2, maybe I could make a difference. But right now the numbers don’t look good.”
Before Meg could respond, shots erupted across the pasture. Knocker and his crew fired at a swarm of deaders pouring out of the trees. The things moved with an erratic mania, jittering and shaking as they encountered the fence. They hung on the barbed wire, pieces of rotted meat tearing away as they writhed and flailed against the wire.
Some of them flipped over the top strand and regained their footing. Others tripped and then discovered they could crawl under the lower wire. Most of them were recent victims of the infection and were more or less intact, but others appeared to be grisly stacks of spoilage that were little more than skeletons.
Meg could cling to a delusion that these things weren’t creatures sent straight from hell, but Rocky had no problem with the idea.
The only question was How do you kick Satan’s shiny red ass?
Knocker’s crew appeared to be holding back the attackers, which numbered in the dozens. A few strays entered the pasture along their flanks, causing the horses to stampede in panic. The strays were too far away for Rocky to settle the red dot of his scope on, so he swept his aim along the nearest fence line.
More zombies came out from the scrub along the creek and encountered the fence unopposed. “Hostiles to the northeast,” he called out, and then reported the activity to C.J. via walkie-talkie.
Rocky then settled in and opened fire, aiming carefully. He only had three magazines of ammo, and a wild spray of three-round bursts would soon leave him depleted. But even with the scope he wasn’t too successful with head shots, primarily because the creatures employed such an erratic gait.
Just when he had a skull or forehead centered with the red dot, the thing would lurch and the bullet would sail high or strike a shoulder. The old man added his single-shot .240 to the fusillade, but his eyes were bad and he mostly provided moral support and choice curse words.
“Zombies on this side!” Meg called. “Coming across the feed lot.”
Rocky abandoned his post for a moment to dash across the loft floor and look over Meg’s shoulder. He reported the twelve to fifteen deaders to C.J., and then checked out the south, where a hayfield stretched for half a mile. At first he saw nothing, but then the man watching in that direction pointed to motion in the tall grass. The zombies approached through a swath that the locusts had cleared.
Rocky took up his position again and targeted the approaching horde. He managed to knock down two with head shots, but another half dozen seemed to spring up to take their place. Farther away, Knocker and his crew were forced to retreat from the horde, leaving a litter of rotten bodies glistening in the sun. A distant scream pierced the air, coming from one of the outbuildings near the gate—the farmhouse’s first casualty.
Rocky’s walkie-talkie hissed amid the roar of the four people firing: “Rocky, come in, this is C.J., over.”
Rocky fumbled for his walkie-talkie, reluctant to interrupt his fighting. “Rocky here, over.”
“Jeb and Lacy are down, and O’Donnell is wounded. Gate’s vulnerable now. Can you get a warm body there, over?”
Rocky realized he was the only one he could trust to handle the situation. “I got it, over.”
“Copy that. We’ve got breeches on all sides. Might have to fall back and tighten our perimeter, over.”
“Use your judgment. We don’t want to get stretched too thin. Over and out.”
Rocky told the others to hold the fort, and then descended the wooden ladder that led down from the loft. The zombies probably wouldn’t be able to climb it, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He called Meg to pull it up after he reached the barn floor, and then he raced across the barnyard to the driveway.
Marty and Louise were positioned among the parked vehicles, firing almost at random into the forest. Rocky hadn’t had time to train everyone, and now he regretted it. He’d indulged in the luxury of peace, embracing the fantasy and ignoring the evil all around them. Lives would be lost because he’d relaxed at the wrong time.
Two deaders had already managed to clamber around or over the steel entrance gate and were headed toward the house. Rocky took down the first, a freshly rotten female in a housecoat and slippers, with a close shot to the temple, and then employed his KA-BAR to pierce through the eye socket of the second. A slew of others banged against the gate, trying to force their way through, hissing and clawing.
Rocky found Lacy lying sprawled near the gate, her head between the metal rails. The deaders were chewing on it, ripping away chunks of scalp, their lips bright red and coated with hairs.
Jeb had been yanked over the fence, with only a shredded strip of cloth from his jacket to mark his passing. A cluster of deaders were gathered around his corpse, feasting on his flesh. Rocky fired an angry burst into their midst, causing them to fall against each other for a moment, and then they resumed feeding.
Rocky found O’Donnell in the shed, bleeding from a gash on his forearm. O’Donnell sat with his good hand clamped over the wound, his face twisted in pain. His rifle leaned against the wall out of reach.
The man peered up from beneath the bill of his Carolina Panthers ball cap. “Guess I done messed up.”
“You’re doing fine,” Rocky said, pulling his first-aid kit from a pouch. He retrieved a roll of gauze and wrapped the wound but could already see the infection spreading outward and up the veins of O’Donnell’s arm.
“I know what’s going to happen,” O’Donnell said. “I want to keep fighting until I turn.”
“Hold on, I’ll be right back.” Rocky ducked out of the shed, saw a zombie straddling the gate and about to drop over, and fired a three-round burst that knocked it back to the other side. The gate posts were wiggling in their holes, coming loose from the ground due to the constant push and pull of the zombies. It wouldn’t hold for long.
The shed held lawn mowers, a tiller, and a couple of chain saws, along with several five-gallon cans of gasoline and jugs of motor oil. “How serious are you about fighting to the last breath?” Rocky asked O’Donnell.
“Serious as a heart attack.”
Rocky dipped a second strip of gauze into one of the gas tanks and stretched it out toward O’Donnell. He took a lighter from his pocket and pressed it into O’Donnell’s hand.
O’Donnell understood.
“It’s going to hurt like hell,” Rocky said. “If you time it right, you can use the rifle just before it blows.”
O’Donnell managed a grimace of a smile. “No dice, amigo. I’ve only got one good hand. The lighter it is.”
Rocky patted the man on the shoulder. “Sorry.”
“Not your fault. If you’re ever in St. Petersburg and run into a gal named Helena, tell her I love her.”
“Copy that.”
Rocky left O’Donnell to his final musings and headed back up the driveway. O’Donnell’s sacrifice might knock out ten or twenty, but once the gate was gone, the entire farm would be vulnerable. He paused to direct Marty and Louise to focus their firepower on any zombies coming up the driveway. Then he continued to the house.
He knocked on the heavy wooden door and identified himself. Sonia let him in. C.J., Sherry, and four children sat in the living room, grim-faced. Kit, the oldest, was reading a picture book to the others. Jacob pretended to listen but kept glancing over at Rocky.
“Sherry, take the kids upstairs, please,” C.J. said in a calm but strained voice.
Once they had gone, Rocky said, “We’re losing the gate, and it looks like the western fence won’t hold, either.”
C.J. bent over a crudely scribbled map of the property, pointing out the various pressure points and sentry posts. “Knocker lost one of his crew, and Cheryl and Dave are gone. Bill took the pickup to the lo
gging road and I haven’t heard back from him. Arjun and Sydney are holed up in the chicken coop so they’re probably safe. Doc and five others got cut off down here near the creek. If they were lucky, they moved back toward the road. Otherwise, I don’t see how they make it out of that marshy ground alive.”
“They’re closing in on all sides,” Sonia said. “Unbelievable. Like they’re following a tactical strategy instead of just randomly looking for a meal.”
“I think we should pull everybody back to the house,” Rocky said.
“Won’t we be trapped then?”
“Not if we move fast enough. We mass up and then find a weak spot and bust through. It means we lose the farm, but at least we’ll still be alive.”
“I won’t sign on for that,” C.J. said. “I was born here, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let these walking sacks of shit take it from me. And Sherry’s so hardheaded she’ll want to stay, too. But the rest of you should go.”
Rocky looked at Sonia, who nodded and said, “Sounds like the best bet.”
“We’ve got six walkie-talkies out, but two of them are out of commission,” C.J. said. “I’ll call in the people I can, but we need a runner to reach the others.”
“I’ll do it,” Kit called from the top of the stairs, where she’d apparently been eavesdropping. “I’m fast, I’m in good shape, and I’ve got bad-ass lime-green sneakers.”
Sonia started to protest but C.J. said, “You’re drafted, honey. It’s all hands on deck now. Come and get this map.”
A low rumble filled the air, vibrating the tin roof of the farmhouse. “What the hell is that?” Sonia asked.
But Rocky knew exactly what it was. He burst out the door and into the yard. The Black Hawk hovered a few hundred feet over the house, whipping dirt and grit against the windows.
Rocky waved and shouted, squinting against the turbulence. He could see the pilot looking down, talking into his headset. The chopper was armed with an XM5 grenade launcher in the nose and an M134 minigun ported on each side. That wasn’t quite enough firepower to exterminate the zombies sweeping across the pastures from all directions, but it would inflict enough damage to give the group a fighting chance.
Revelation: A Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Thriller (Arize Book 2) Page 22