The Deadland Chronicles 4
Siege of the Dead
A Books of the Dead Novel
By R.J. Spears
Other Books by R.J. Spears
Books of the Dead
Sanctuary from the Dead
Lord of the Dead
Dead Man’s Land
Into the Deadlands
The Living and the Dead
Dead Run
Dead End
The Living Dead Girl
The Deadland Chronicles
Running from the Dead
The Undead Horde
The Endless Dead
Siege of the Dead
Forget the Zombies
Forget the Alamo
Forget Texas
Forget America
Author’s Note: This book is a part of the Books of the Dead series and takes place after Book 7 in that series. For the most part, you can enjoy this book without reading the Books of the Dead series, but there are some references to the events that occur in the Books of the Dead series along with some character background in that series.
Chapter 1
Fly Over
The sky was full of fluffy white clouds against an azure blue background. Airman Garver called skies like these his Superman skies because he expected Superman to blast out of the clouds at any moment. Or, at least, he had when he was a kid.
Still, it gave him a little exhilaration as he banked the helicopter a little too fast, surprising Jo, causing her to reach out to steady herself in her seat. Jones seemed prepared and unperturbed, so Jo didn’t shout out a protest even though she wanted to.
“How far do you want me to fly, Sergeant Jones? Garver asked.
Garver sat in the pilot’s seat with Jones in the co-pilot’s seat. Jo had a chair behind Garver, and Eli was behind Jones.
The rotor’s pounded away, reverberating throughout the chopper. It was Jo’s first time in a helicopter, and the motion was making her feel a little green, but she kept that to herself.
“We just need to see where they are,” Jones said.
“What then?” Garver asked.
“Then we pull back and start the fires,” Jones said.
“Are we sure about this plan?” Garver said.
“It’s what we decided on,” Jo said.
“I didn’t decide on it,” Eli said. “In fact, I think this is a bad idea.”
“Do you have a better one?” Jones asked, not looking back at Eli.
Eli took in a long breath and let it out, then said, “Well, we face them down when they get to the Sanctum.”
“There could be thousands of them,” Jones said, staring out the windshield. “We have to take a chance to cut those numbers down, or else we will be overrun.”
Eli tossed his hands in the air and said, “We don’t even know this will work.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Jo asked, turning toward Eli.
“But setting the forest on fire could work against us,” Eli said. “Sure, the smoke could obscure their vision, but it also blocks our view, too, and that scares the shit out of me..”
“Thousands of zombies headed our way scares the shit out of me,” Jones said.
“Have you considered what an out-of-control forest fire could do?” Eli asked. “What happens when the city starts to burn? You know we can’t call the fire department anymore.”
“I’m betting it stops at the river,” Jones replied.
“What if it doesn’t?” Eli countered.
“Karen Gray said we go with this plan,” Jones said. “We could go back and forth all day, but I say that ends our discussion.”
Eli crossed his arms and sat back in his seat, looking a little petulant. “That doesn’t mean it’s the right move.”
They continued to fly along in silence, but it was a heavy one as the passengers held back their thoughts and their fears. They had all been through the wringer over the past months, with some being put through it more thoroughly than others.
Garver and Jones represented the soldiers who arrived at the Sanctum, on the run and just ahead of a monster zombie horde. Garver sat at the far edge of his fifties, a lifetime airman who was looking forward to retirement before the world went down the drain. He had a little gray in his hair to prove it.
Jones was a soldier through and through. Or, at least, he had been. Because he was a good soldier, he followed orders, but that only could go so far because a real soldier served the greater good and not just a leader. That led Jones into a conflict with his commander that almost cost him everything.
With the exception of his wounded leg, he was a nearly perfect human specimen. As an African-American, he stood out a great deal among most of the survivors at the Sanctum. That, and he stood in at six-foot-three and hit the scales at two-twenty, most of which was muscle. His distinguishing feature was his shaved head, which gleamed in the dim glow of the helicopter’s cabin.
Jo represented a group of survivors who spent much of their time on the run. It seemed that every time they got settled into a safe haven, something or someone was damned sure to make sure they couldn’t stay there. Sometimes it was the dead, but more often than not, it was the living, fighting for power or survival.
Just looking at her, you wouldn’t expect that she had what it took to lead their group. Catching her from one angle, you saw a plain-looking middle-aged woman with auburn hair a little out of control. But when you took her head-on, you saw a handsomeness and a metal behind her eyes. You knew she was made of sturdier stuff.
Eli seemed out of place with the others. If taken on physical attractiveness, he would rate the highest among them, but there was a nervous and cautious energy about him that made him hard to be around. He was second in command at the Sanctum when everyone would have guessed that he would take control, but there was an undercurrent of self-doubt about him. It was as if he wanted someone else to blame for the mistakes.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to make up your mind,” Garver said. “Because they are just ahead.”
Unconsciously, everyone in the helicopter but Garver leaned forward in their seats and stared out the windshield. Jo couldn’t help herself as she let out a little gasp.
Even though they were miles away, a literal ocean of zombies shambled along, spreading across the landscape, blotting out the ground and everything. No one in the helicopter attempted to measure their spread, but it was easily a quarter of a mile wide and equal distance in depth. They looked like a slow-moving tsunami, dark and menacing, filling everyone inside the helicopter with a deep sense of dread.
“Shit,” Jo said, and her mouth seemed to have gone dry.
“Turn back now,” Jones said. “We don’t want them to lock onto the chopper and follow us back.”
Garver didn’t need to be told twice, grabbed the stick, and put the chopper in a long looping turn. Already a little airsick, Jo had to close her eyes and take deep breaths to clear her head. Although she had seen them before, this aerial view gave her a new and very frightening perspective on their numbers. In her gut, she wasn’t sure how they would survive the onslaught headed their way. There were just too many of them, and she saw their chances of surviving as being frighteningly small. Truthfully, she thought they almost had no chance, but she kept that to herself.
They flew in silence for several minutes, the helicopter cutting through the sky with precision. Whatever thoughts each of them were thinking, they kept them to themselves.
“So, where are we starting these fires?” Eli asked as he craned his neck, trying to get one last look at the zombies headed their way.
“T
his is your territory, I was hoping you could tell us where best to start them,” Jones said.
Eli turned his head to look out the front window again. He situated his body to get the best view and studied the landscape ahead.
Everyone else was quiet, letting Eli contemplate what their path should be. The terrain below was covered in a dull swath of color as the leaves on the trees were transitioning from their spectacular display into the brown decay of fall. A few of the trees still bloomed with bright yellow and orange. County roads cut through the trees and thick vegetation, looking like dark ribbons winding their way through the sea of brown.
“Well, if they were south of the river, we’d be totally screwed,” Eli said. “They’d be able to basically just walk right into the city.”
“Well, first, aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” Jo said. “Second, they are on this side of the river, so let’s move on from that.”
Eli shot Jo a sour look, but did move on. “We should start fires down at Canaanville and move on a northeast line from there,” Eli said.
“I have no idea where this Canaanville is, so it’s probably best if you just point,” Garver said.
Eli followed Garver’s direction and started pointing, saying, “There, there, there, and there.”
Jo leaned forward in her seat and asked, “What about when?”
“That depends on how fast we think the zombies will travel,” Jones replied. “What do you think, Garver?”
“Shit, do I look like I’m an expert on how fast zombies travel?” Garver responded.
“Take a guess,” Jones said. “You’re up in the air high enough to do that.”
Garver closed one eye and cocked his jaw for a moment. Then he said, “Thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”
“What about how fast the fires will spread?” Jones asked.
“Do I look like Smokey Fucking Bear?” Garver asked.
“Eli, you got any foresters or anyone that can answer those questions?” Jones asked.
Jo broke in and said, “Listen, it’s going to take a while for fires to spread. We should do it as soon as possible. Better too soon, rather than too late.”
Jones rubbed his chin and said, “You’re probably right.” He turned to Garver and said, “We had better get the party started, I guess.” He turned back to Eli and Jo and asked, “You ready for this?”
“Why do we have to do all the dirty work?” Jo asked in mock annoyance.
Jones lifted his bad leg and displayed it for them to see. He had been shot in an ill-fated and ill-conceived attack on a former safe haven of Jo’s people.
“How long is that going to be your excuse?” Jo asked.
“I’ll make it work as long as I can,” Jones said. He gently lowered the leg, then said, “Garver, take us to the first place Eli pointed.”
Eli and Jo left their seats and moved toward the back of the helicopter, where the incendiary devices had been stowed. They sat lined up in two neat rows, looking innocent and harmless. They weren’t heavy things, but they were very, very dangerous.
One of the research scientists back at the Sanctum had designed and built them. They weren’t elegant. In fact, they were relatively crude, being not much more than gas cans with explosives on their side. And there were almost no safety precautions.
“Level us out, Garver, and take it slow,” Jo said.
Garver did as he was told because he knew they had to handle the incendiary devices with great caution. One wrong move, and they all went down in a fireball.
Working together, Eli and Jo moved the first device to the door. Eli’s job was to open the door. Jo had to light the fuse and push it out.
“The first drop site is coming up,” Garver said.
“Open the door, Eli,” Jo said.
Eli did as he was told, grabbed the handle, and slid the door open. Wind rushed in, blowing Jo’s hair away from her face, biting at its chilled temperature.
“Ten seconds,” Garver said.
Jo started a mental countdown in her head. When she hit five, she lit the fuse. When she hit one, she pushed the device out the door and said, “Bombs away.”
Holding onto the side of the door, she leaned out the door, watching the device fall through the sky. She had to lean out even further as they flew away from the drop site. It took eight seconds for the device to hit the ground, where it exploded into a fireball, spraying flames over the trees.
Garver pivoted the stick slightly and headed the chopper toward the next site as the flames began to spread, catching everything in its path on fire.
Chapter 2
Enemies on the Way
“Did you see that?” Audrey asked as she looked over to Maxwell. In the distance, smoke billowed into the sky, dark and ominous.
She had broken from her group of the undead on the right side of the massive horde and slogged her way across the frontline to get closer to Maxwell. It was a dangerous move as they had learned the best way to control the massive throng of zombies was for the four of them to spread out. Now that Grayson had broken from them, leaving their group with only three members, their control had diminished. This reduction left their influence over the zombies in a very tenuous position. More than once, they noticed some of their horde splinter off and wander away aimlessly as they got outside of the influence of the half-dead things they were.
“What is it?” Maxwell asked, peering ahead.
“Looks like a forest fire or something,” she said.
The quality of their voices was raspy and deep as they sounded almost robotic, but not quite. Audrey, Maxwell, and Lance were less than human and more than dead, standing in the in-between territory between life and death. Somehow this difference gave them a sort of control over the undead. It wasn’t intentional, but an innate byproduct of what they had become. They emitted some kind of magnetic pull on the undead, causing the zombies to swarm around them.
None of them understood how their sway over the zombies worked. They knew it was the result of some risky and near unholy experiments conducted on them in Indianapolis. Each one of them consented to the tests because they really had no choice. Turning down the experimental serum meant they would succumb to the zombie virus, die, and then transform into one of those undead things.
They had all been infected with the zombie virus. Audrey and Maxwell had been bitten while outside the testing facilities and on the run from the undead. A researcher working on the experimental trials plucked them out of a hospital ward and whisked them off to the facilities in Indianapolis. No consent forms were signed. That sort of formality was out the window with the undead threatening to take down the living.
Audrey remembered the fear coursing through her body as the zombie virus took her further and further down the road to death. She would have signed away her very soul to live. Somewhere deep down beneath the anger and hatred she now felt almost constantly, she wondered if it was really worth it.
Grayson and Lance had been intentionally infected by the experimenters. Prior to the fall of man, they had been yanked out of the maximum-security prison in Pendleton, Indiana, because they were on death row and considered expendable. With society breaking down as things worsened every day, some of the norms and rules were tossed aside in the search for a cure.
“Do you think it will be a problem?” She asked.
“Not for them,” Maxwell said, waving his hand in the air to encompass the undead swarming around them, plodding forward like a slow-moving flood of lava.
“What about for us?” She asked. “We aren’t like them.”
“We may have to divert around the smoke if it gets bad,” Maxwell said. “I don’t think the smoke will affect us that badly. We are closer to being like them than I would like to think.”
Almost nothing bothered or deterred the undead. Not bullets, not blades, not explosives. They just kept marching on with the sole purpose of eating. But somewhere down in what was left of their shriveled brains was a primal fear of fire and deep, rushing
water. Still, if the enticement were great enough, the zombies would walk through fire or dash into a raging river if a delicious human was within reach.
“Go back to your position,” Maxwell said as he looked off to the right. “I can already see that some of our minions have started to wander off.”
When Audrey looked in that direction, she saw a few dozen zombies peeling off from the edge of their horde. That told her that they were limits to their influence and they needed to mind that very carefully. Losing too many soldiers in their undead army could turn out to be a problem.
Audrey reached out for Maxwell’s hand, and he grabbed it and gave it a squeeze.
“Be careful,” he said.
“I will,” she replied, and unclasped her hand from his and headed back toward her position on the right side of the horde. It was not easy going as whatever unholy essence they now carried inside drew the undead to her like a moth to a flame. While there was part of her that missed her full humanity, another part of her relished the strength and power she now possessed. This was the part of what they had become that made her feel more than human. Greater. Better.
They had the strength of three to four men and, like the zombies, felt no pain. In a world full of death, those two qualities served them well.
She surged through the mass of undead, sometimes struggling like a person fighting through the pounding waves of the ocean. The zombies congregated around her, sometimes blocking her path forward. It was at that time that she reared back and punched one of the undead things out of existence.
None of the other zombies ever reacted to what she did. They just went on following Audrey and the other smart ones as if they were the essence of life. And death.
Chapter 3
Dissension in the Ranks
As they flew over the Sanctum, Jo could see that the place was like a beehive of activity as people moved from one task to the next. Some people worked to shore up the walls while others moved ammunition into position for the coming onslaught. It seemed as if every person on the ground was in motion doing something. Jo knew that the approaching zombie horde was a powerful motivating factor. Impending death tended to get people’s asses in gear.
The Deadland Chronicles | Book 4 | Siege of the Dead: Page 1
