100 A.Z. (Book 2): Tenochtitlan

by Nelson, Patrick T.

  “You got this,” Tock said.

  “I know,” Carla said before angling her body around the opening to peer inside. She saw the zombies and carefully lifted her shotgun. Carla let off two rounds into the pack before repositioning herself away from the window. The undead stormed toward her. She was just out of reach and avoided their grasps. The zombies streamed out the open window as Carla yelled at them to spur them on. The horde kept pushing the frontrunners out the window. They plummeted into the water below and the rabid crowd in the building across the way reached an even higher decibel.

  Tock nodded his head seriously. “Zombie shower.”

  After few minutes of this the floor was nearly clear. The rest of the group went through the stairwell and finished up.

  The following day, Tock worked on breaking a hole through the rotting concrete floor with a sledgehammer “left” for them. This was the final floor. The Martyrs fended off the zombies attracted by the noise of his swinging hammer.

  “Hurry!” Carla yelled. “We’re running out of ammo!”

  “I’m swinging!”

  Tock broke through and made a hole the Martyrs could fit through. They dropped into the two boats waiting for them. As they pushed off they were met by a flotilla of guard boats.

  John looked back and saw a strange figure in the building they’d fought through. It looked like a zombie but didn’t move like one. A few cats milled about at its feet. John caught a glimpse of his eyes and knew it was a necromancer.

  The crowds in the buildings were ecstatic. The new Martyrs of the Flood had prevailed.

  Polo had made it so they could succeed. That had been the point all along.

  Chapter 19

  “Fools!” Quintana seethed. He had just come from a meeting with the king’s advisors. They had congratulated Quintana on successfully defending the city during the arrival of the herd and restoring hope to the people through the re-enactment of the Martyrs of the Flood. Quintana had tried to explain that he had nothing to do with either. Not only that, the threat was still present.

  “Don’t be faithless,” they had said. “The herd will take care of the invaders.” They assured him the king would control this monster herd. In addition, the survival of the new Martyrs was a sign to the people of faith rewarded.

  Quintana had mentioned reports he’d received concerning spies in the city. He ran off the number of refugees who’d arrived in the city in the last month. His security teams couldn’t keep up with the influx of immigrants, so people had entering nearly at will. For all he knew they were all members of the terrorist organization Brothers of Tlaxcala.

  Paranoia, they had said.

  Not paranoia, he argued.

  Quintana requested that soldiers be pulled away from guarding recreational activities in order to guard the walls, the food and water supplies, and the king himself.

  Fearful actions, they had said.

  Quintana stormed about the city to check the critical vulnerabilities himself. It was essentially a futile task, but it made him feel like he was doing what he knew was right. The politicians and religious leaders wouldn’t listen, leaving only him.

  He ordered his ever-dwindling number of men on to round-the-clock watches of what he saw as the biggest weaknesses. This meant twelve of the main food storage buildings and the five rainwater basins. He also had men covertly guarding the king’s temple. If he wasn’t allowed to openly do the common sense thing and increase the guard, then he would do it in secret. The wall received no additional protection. He had to draw a line somewhere and the local terrorist threat was probably already in the city. If the northern invaders crossed the river, he could shift manpower to the wall at that point. With limited resources, he had to do more with less.

  As Quintana readied to inspect the southern water storage basin, a loud explosion in the distance sent a tremor through him. He ran to the nearest building, which was a soup shop, and climbed onto their roof to get a better view. He saw the smoke rising from amidst the herd.

  Within the hour, he had been summoned to the temple. The king was suddenly anxious.

  “Quintana! What devilry is out there that you have not prepared us for?” the king’s rasping voice accused.

  Quintana could not see them through the hood over his head, but he knew the king’s executioners were present.

  “King, I have not been given enough resources to fully investigate the threat that waits at the edge of the lake. Much has been said of the generosity of the herd, that it waylaid our foe. This is true, but no one has considered that their leader might also be able to direct the herd.”

  There was silence.

  It was a dangerous tactic, insinuating someone could have more control over the undead than the king.

  “You blaspheme, Quintana!” the king spat out.

  “If they control them, they don’t deserve to. I have met them in battle, and they are everything we have come to expect of northerners. Brutal, unrefined, uncaring. We must defeat them so that your majesty remains in control of the undead. Only you are worthy.”

  There was silence again.

  “How do you propose we destroy them? We cannot send forces out to meet them. Our armies are marching here from distant battlefields but are weeks away. We were careless in our defenses. I see that now.” The king took a tone Quintana had never heard before. His statement about someone else possibly controlling the herd had struck a nerve. Quintana was now playing the same manipulation game as the religious leaders.

  Instantly, Quintana had everything he had been crying for—more guards, more civilian forces, fewer games. The leaders would attempt to create a registry of all the refugees who’d entered the city since the Panama Canal herd had crossed.

  Two days later, some men were caught trying to put rotting corpses in one of the main water basins. After questioning them, Quintana learned they were working for the northerners. It confirmed his suspicion that regional forces who resented Tenochtitlan, rightfully or otherwise, might see an opportunity in this.

  The men were questioned for days, and all Quintana learned was that the northern leader, his enemy, was named “Sara.”

  He hadn’t expected a woman.

  He was pleased the king now saw things as they were and provided the resources to match. Perhaps Quintana was another who resented Tenochtitlan and saw this as an opportunity to get what he wanted, as well.

  Chapter 20—February 101 A.Z.

  The gun clicked behind Obevens’ head. The chamber was empty.

  “You live, Captain,” Sara said. “Your girlfriend won’t, though.”

  Drew looked at Sara, dissatisfied with the decree.

  “And no one likes a snitch,” Sara said. She motioned for her men to grab Drew. They carried him by his arms and legs to the buried walkers and threw him screaming into their midst.

  “Now back to business,” Sara said.

  The Academy army had rounded up a thousand straggling walkers that filtered in from the herd. The men refashioned their own clothing to build makeshift harnesses. They were nothing like the real thing, but functioned. Only twenty-six were bitten in the effort.

  Sara shook her head at the walkers. They were old, short and weak. Nothing like what she’d pulled out of Peterson prior to her departure. The thought enraged her. She would remedy the situation as soon as she was inside the city.

  But how? How would she get into the city? The question had plagued her since seeing the true expanse of the lake. One hope was to starve the citizens out. But starving might take weeks or months she didn’t have. Another idea was to have infiltrators in the city redeploy the floating bridge. But the infiltrators wouldn’t be able to put the bridge out unnoticed. There had to be another way.

  She called for Dalbec.

  “Thank you for that explosion. It helped us in a dangerous moment,” she said.

  “Y-you’re welcome!” Dalbec replied, delighted to be recognized.

  “Speaking of ideas, do you have any on how
to get us across the lake and into the city?” she asked.

  “Me and you?” he asked.

  “The whole army,” she corrected.

  “Ahh, that’s harder. Um, no, I don’t have anything in mind. I can think about it, though,” he said.

  “Yes, please think about it, Dalbec. We need a way across that lake.” If his squirrely little mind couldn’t figure it out no one could.

  ***

  Despite exhortations, orders and threats from Sara, weeks passed with no movement and no progress.

  Dalbec had a plan, but it hinged on a lot of unknowns. They prepared, regardless, and hoped and waited.

  Sara’s army was stuck in a doldrums.

  They’d lost about a thousand men in the weeks since the explosion. The herd had surged again against their narrow path, and men at the front were getting infected at an exorbitant rate as the makeshift harnesses on the geldings failed. To save the main army, the front line of people fighting off the herd had to be cordoned off by spearmen—even though many people were still unbitten. The spear men blocked and fought off their own men as they plead to be let through.

  Sara was down to about 8000 soldiers, half of what she’d left the Springs with. They would have lost thousands more except for Dalbec’s tireless work toward improving sanitary conditions.

  The only movement they’d seen from the city were some occasional boaters coming to gawk at the carnage. Sara had her men continue to hack through the buried walkers. It was narrower than the original path, but they were now at the water’s edge. The lake was putrid and would provide no relief to their dwindling supplies. They only thing keeping them going were the occasional rains. Food was dangerously low. Thankfully, the men kept rations on them, but even they were nearly gone. Things would get ugly. There was already talk of who would get eaten first in the frenzy to not starve.

  Then the alert sounded. Boats on the water. Hundreds of boats. The attack was coming.

  Sara prepared the scene. Her porters had managed to salvage some of her food and luxury items. She ordered a table set with her remaining food and all the bottles of liquor.

  ***

  “King, they are starving! We don’t need to attack them. And surely you don’t need to be present,” Quintana pleaded. His plan had backfired. By suggesting there might be a more powerful necromancer than himself, the king felt he needed to take action or appear weak. Quintana realized he’d actually made the king deathly afraid. Afraid the populace would find out, he really had no control of the dead, or afraid he might lose some knowledge by letting the invader’s leader simply perish—who knew? Either way, Quintana had gravely miscalculated. The religious leaders watched from the sidelines and mocked him behind his back.

  Tenochtitlan readied the hundreds of boats required to carry 3000 men across the lake for an assault. Quintana personally oversaw the loading of riflemen and melee fighters. They would take no zombies. Pike men were placed on every boat to safely push away any floating biters in their way. It would be a safe crossing, but ultimately an unnecessary one, in the mind of Quintana. Yes, the herd was thinning. This might allow the invaders to escape and regroup. He saw that. It was still too soon to have to take any action, though.

  Quintana wondered if in actuality this was all precipitated by their fear of dwindling food and water supplies in Tenochtitlan itself. He wasn’t privy to all the king’s counsel. Quintana had witnessed The Feast of the Martyrs where the six survivors of the Marriott building were fed like kings. The people had cheered, bags of rice were being handed out. It made no sense.

  Logic hardly guided Tenochtitlan, though.

  They launched first thing in the morning. Quintana was close to the king’s barge. The king himself requested to see the battle and this great necromancer from the north.

  They reached the edge of the lake and took light enemy fire.

  The boats quickly landed on the sandy beach on the opposite side of Lake Texcoco and the forces disembarked. The northerners had been kind enough to remove most of the buried walkers from the beach, which provided a spacious area for Quintana’s men. The rancid water lapped against the shore, and Quintana made sure none touched him.

  Tenochtitlan snipers took out their northern counterparts and establish good lines of sight. The northerners had constructed defenses out of piled zombie corpses. The northerners shot from these positions and axe and spear men tried to protect their shooters from the Tenochtitlan attackers. Quintana was shocked at the decimation of numbers since he saw them last. He’d encountered some 15,000 humans and the same number of walkers in Gleeson. Now there were barely a thousand men defending their “queen.” Hopefully this reassured Tenochtitlan’s king he was still the most powerful. Quintana looked back at the king’s barge, which maintained a safe distance offshore.

  An hour later, they had killed or captured all the men, but there was no sign of Sara. Quintana questioned the captives, and they all claimed to be the only survivors. Sara had been carried away by the herd six days prior. Quintana sighed a breath of relief. She was better dead than an object of superstitious fixation for the king.

  Once they had rounded up all the prisoners and made sure none were armed, the king insisted on coming ashore. He wanted to inspect the battlefield. He was particularly interested in Sara’s tent, which still stood. The attack appeared to have interrupted some of the officers having one last hurrah with Sara’s supplies in the tent, to include liquor. Quintana’s immediate subordinates were enjoying themselves with the leftovers, as the king landed. The king was covered in a head to toe robe, so no one could see any identifying features on him. He walked daintily in the sandy ground, and Quintana awaited some sort of criticism of the battle. The king walked by and said nothing. He was only interested in the last vestiges of the woman who could have become queen of Tenochtitlan for her superior control of the undead. Quintana didn’t even warn his men the king was coming. Let them revel. They’ll probably be praised by the king even as they drink her liquor, Quintana thought.

  The king entered the tent, and Quintana sat down on a rock. This was a needed victory. The city had held out.

  Quintana’s mind didn’t rest, though, and he thought of having to deploy again to fight the Western Government army up north. As he let out a deep sigh, he heard shots come from the tent. He jumped, but then figured the men were just firing in the air. Celebration. He daydreamed while looking at the buried walkers not one hundred yards from him. They swayed in the ground, reaching for him. He hated it out here. Then he thought he glimpsed something behind them.

  Quintana stood to get a better look. It was true. There was something taller than the buried walkers, and it was moving. Quintana walked to one of the corpse piles to get a higher vantage point. He climbed to the top and looked in the direction of what he’d seen. He immediately jumped down and ran as fast as he could to the tent. He tore open the flap to shout, “Get the king back to his boat! There are men hiding in the fields!”

  What he saw stopped him short. All his subordinates were on the ground in pools of blood and liquor. Northerners with guns were holding the king and had taken off his covering. There were large trenches in the ground with their covers now thrown off. The enemy had been hiding right underneath them.

  It was the first time Quintana had seen the king. He was small, pale and sickly. His mouth was stained red with Quintana didn’t want to guess what. And there she was, too, calmly sitting in a chair, pouring herself a drink. Sara.

  Chapter 21

  Sal, Chambers and Ellie fought the walkers. Whenever they couldn’t handle the numbers, a bullet would come from nowhere and alleviate the pressure.

  “I’m tired of this game,” Chambers huffed.

  “If we want their help we have to play,” Sal replied tiredly.

  “Let us die, just stop playing with us,” Chambers said, defeated.

  “They want us to know who is in control,” Sal said.

  It was working. None of them had any doubts as to who
was in control.

  “W-w-who are they?” Ellie asked, seeing that Sal wasn’t as irritable and might answer her question.

  “The tribes of Southern Texas. Well, one in particular. I think they’re called the Tower Tribe. Tower? Maybe it’s Castle. Something fortification-ish.”

  The flow of walkers slowly stopped. Something was shooting in the distance to lure them off in another direction. The three collapsed to the ground and rested. Ellie’s forearm was sore from all the swinging of her club. She wasn’t very good with the weapon and had only taken out maybe three biters. Chambers had been sure to express his disgust with her abilities, and the choice to bring her along. Sal assured Chambers that she was important, otherwise the invisible snipers would have shot her. Chambers assured Sal this was because she was a female. Even barbarians surely had some sense of chivalry.

  “They don’t see many pretty women around here,” Sal said.

  “P-p-pretty?” Ellie had never been called that before. Soon she would see why Sal was so generous with his compliment.

  At first light, a small dust cloud appeared to the east of them. It swirled larger and larger. After another half hour, they saw it was a group of men approaching on horseback.

  “Get behind me!” Chambers instructed Ellie. She complied, refraining from mentioning that he wouldn’t be able to protect her, regardless.

  There were twenty of them. Swaths of drab fabric covered their bodies and concealed their faces. They all wore beat-up rifles of various types. They slowed as they neared, drawing their guns and forming a wide circle around the three travelers.