“I’m not sure how long I can keep this up,” Donovan said. “This thing weighs a ton.”
“Told you to pick something lighter,” Mason said, just as he was swinging his ax at another zombie trying to get a grip on the top of the wall. His swing was off, and instead of striking the creature’s neck, it hit the zombie’s arm right at the shoulder. The blade cut so deeply into the arm that it nearly severed it. The only thing holding it on was several stringy tendons.
Still, the zombie was undeterred and swung its undamaged arm at Mason. Its hand latched onto Mason’s leg, grasping it in a vice-like grip. It dug its fingers into Mason’s thigh, nearly paralyzing him with pain as he cried out.
Donovan said, “Son of a bitch,” as he yanked back his pry bar and swung for the fences. The turned end of the pry bar crashed into the zombie’s forehead, literally tearing its face off and sending it tumbling back down the pile of undead.
A shrill scream came from fifteen feet down the wall. A zombie was on the wall and on top of a woman. It had its teeth clenched onto her shoulder, and blood oozed between them.
A man stood next to her, paralyzed in terror.
Donovan yelled, “Shoot it!”
The yell broke the man from his trance of fear, but all he did was look at Mason and say, “I’m out of bullets.”
The woman shrieked again and beat futilely at the zombie as it pulled back with a mouthful of flesh.
“Hit it with your gun!” Donovan screamed.
The man pulled his rifle and stared at it with a clueless expression.
“Hit it! Hit it now!”
The man finally got it, drew back his rifle, and sent the butt crashing down onto the zombie’s head. The woman continued to scream at the top of her lungs. The man was forced to hit the zombie again. Donovan heard the crunch of the zombie’s skull crashing. It collapsed onto the woman as she emitted pitiful whimpers.
Donovan looked further down the wall and saw a similar scene playing out. One man was grappling with a zombie while another pistol-whipped the undead thing.
“This is going to shit,” Mason said.
“There’s another one over the wall,” Donovan said as he looked back in the other direction.
“Should we pull back?” Mason said.
“To where?” Donovan said.
Someone let out a scream closer to the gate. When Donovan looked in that direction, he saw a man fall over the wall into the mass of zombies outside the wall. The zombies went to work on him, tearing into him with their teeth and hands.
“Oh God,” Donovan said.
“We’re not going to make it,” Mason said.
All along the wall, people who had run out of ammunition were using a variety of weapons ranging from clubs to baseball bats to swords to repel the zombies coming over the wall. In most cases, the humans were winning, but in too many instances, the zombies had made their way onto the wall. Even when they were dispatched, another one climbed over the wall.
Donovan had a strong sense that the tide of this battle was shifting, and that meant they were losing the war. He wondered if there was some kind of fallback position? Could they withdraw to someplace they could defend? When he batted around ideas in his head, he didn’t see anything better than the wall. He knew going in that if they didn’t win with it, then there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it at all.
“Help me!” A woman off to Donovan’s left yelled.
When he looked that way, he saw a man on his back and wrestling with a zombie. A woman stood over him, trying to get the undead creature off him. She battered the zombie’s back with the butt of her gun. She landed blow after blow, but the zombie jerked its head forward and clamped down onto the man’s neck where it met his shoulder. The man let out an ear-piercing scream. A moment later, the zombies reared back with a big chunk of the man’s flesh in its mouth.
Four armed men jumped down from the wall, but one of them went down hard, clutching his ankle. The others looked at the injured man, but then started running in wild panic away from the wall. Anywhere but here and there was nothing holding them back.
Donovan looked down at the ground, wondering if he and Mason should make a run for it, but he knew there was no place to go. It was fight or die. His kids were in one of the halls, hunkered down and waiting for him to tell them that it was all right. They were safe, and the living had won, and the dead had lost.
The problem was that he didn’t see that happening.
That’s when he heard it. A loud mechanical clattering noise. When he looked in the direction of the noise, he saw Garver’s helicopter floating up over one of the buildings in the interior of the Sanctum.
He felt a sense of hope rise with the helicopter’s appearance, but it was a guarded hope because the chopper didn’t look right. Instead of floating effortlessly in the sky, it seemed to have a shuddering motion as it drifted along.
Still, it was a medicine for his melancholy. Maybe, just maybe, it could help reverse the tide. Maybe.
Chapter 68
Flight of Valkyries
“Garver, why does it seem like this thing is going to shake apart?” Jones asked as he gripped the armrests of his chair.
“Hey, Captain Kirk, you’re the one who said I had to get this fucking thing back in the air,” Garver shot back.
“Okay, okay,” Jones said, putting up a single hand in a gesture of surrender. “I guess I’d rather die in a fiery crash than be eaten by zombies.”
“You know, you’re really building up my confidence here,” Garver said as he pushed the chopper further up in the sky.
Jones felt like he was in a mechanical flying beast instead of a fine-tuned fighting machine. A persistent and intense vibration rippled throughout the craft, sending shivers up Jones’ seat and shaking his bones. Every few seconds, a dangerous rattling noise sounded from the back of the chopper, making Jones think of a giant metallic rattlesnake.
“What are we doing?” Garver asked as he fought the controls to keep the helicopter steady.
“Fly us out front,” Jones said. “We need to see what we can do.”
Garver pushed the stick to the right, but Jones could tell that the helicopter was fighting him.
“Come on, you son of a whore,” Garver said.
He must have won the battle because the chopper headed toward the front of the Sanctum. Even damaged, it didn’t take long for the helicopter to make it to the wall.
“Holy fuck,” Garver gasped out.
Jones leaned forward in his seat, and his breath was almost taken away. Hundreds and hundreds of zombies mobbed the front wall. From the sky, their mass looked like a giant, dark snake writhing on the ground. In places, the snake was on and over the wall.
“Shit,” Jones said under his breath.
“This fight is over,” Garver said.
“No, it’s not!’ Jones snapped back. “We need to get down there and give them some support.”
“This isn’t like over in the Mideast,” Garver said. “A strafing run might take some of them out, but it isn’t going to scare the rest away.”
“If we don’t do something, all those people are going to die,” Jones said.
“That asshole is still out there with his rocket launcher, too,” Garver said. “I push this bird too hard, and she’s going to shake apart. When that happens, we’re dead.”
Jones turned in his chair and locked Garver in a flinty stare. “You don’t do this, and I’ll shoot you.” His hand was on the gun holstered at his side. “You got it?”
“You shoot me, and we both die,” Garver replied, speaking slowly as if explaining the situation to a child.
“Then, so be it, but we’re doing what we can,” Jones said, “And we’re doing it now.”
Garver closed his eyes for a moment and just shook his head. When he opened them, he said, “Hold on.”
Garver grabbed the stick and took the craft on an outward path around the walls. After passing the walls, he pushed the chopper
downward, hard, and fast. Jones felt like he was on a rollercoaster, and they were heading down the fastest and most dangerous hill. If the helicopter had been rattling before, it now felt like it was about to come apart.
“We’re going in low and fast,” Garver said, not even looking at Jones. “I’m not giving that bastard and easy shot at us.”
Garver cut the helicopter hard in the sky and started racing toward a line just above the zombies outside the wall. They couldn’t have been more than fifty feet off the ground.
Through the windshield, Jones saw the wall and the zombies coming up impossibly fast. Two seconds later, Garver let loose with the machine guns, spitting out bullets like a rain of fire. The ordnance tore through the zombies like a hot knife cut through butter on a warm day. Only this butter was made of rotting flesh and bone.
The old pilot held the craft on an arcing path along the circumference of the wall. All the while, he kept his finger down on the trigger. It was a devastating display of flying military might and an equally impressive bit of flying skill. The bullets churned the zombies trying to climb the wall. A few of the shots came so close, it chipped off pieces of red brick.
Until then, the zombie horde was only wrapped around the front half of the Sanctum, but there was a thick mass of undead still making their way toward the wall. Both Jones and Garver knew that this was only a reprieve for the fighters on the ground. The zombies would regroup and muster up a new attack. Still, it was something.
Garver was just about to the end of the long line of the undead when the machine guns ran dry, the mechanism clicking away.
“I’m out,” he said as he pulled the craft upward toward the blue of the sky.
“Don’t you have more?” Jones asked.
“We’ve been using up ammo all across the state,” Garver said. “Colonel Kilgore didn’t leave that much back at the base in the first place.”
“What about rockets?” Jones asked, knowing he sounded desperate.
“I bring down rockets, and I’ll probably blow a hole in the wall,” Garver said.
“We need to do something,” Jones said as he slammed his hand down onto his armrest.
“I’m all out of tricks,” Garver said. “Why don’t you send in the ground troops?”
Jones mulled this idea over. He’d already lost a Humvee to Jo and Clayton when they headed to the back wall. What they had left wasn’t really suited for head-on fighting. Attempting an artillery attack with the MAV again targeting the zombies at the wall could be disastrous if they landed on the wall itself. He knew if they knocked a hole in the wall, the zombies would stream in like water.
“There’s got to be something,” Jones said, but he wasn’t finding anything.
“This thing has half a tank of fuel,” Garver said. “We can always run.”
“No,” Jones said sharply, but in the back of his mind, a voice said, ‘Not yet.’
Garver had the chopper at around five hundred feet, hovering in the sky. At this height, they had a panoramic view of the Sanctum. The zombies out front were already shambling back toward the wall, walking over the dead bodies of their undead colleagues, pressing them into the ground like bloody mush.
“Get us out front one more time,” Jones said.
“Are you fucking kidding?” Garver said.
“We have two more of those fire bombs we dropped down into the forest,” Jones said. “I want to see if we can use those.”
“That is totally and completely insane,” Garver said.
“Listen, I don’t--” Jones started, but Garver grabbed the stick and pushed it up.
“Hold on!” Garver shouted. “RPG!”
Jones fell back into his seat as Garver shot the damaged chopper straight up. Jones saw a field of white fluffy clouds floating innocently in the sky above the rising helicopter Certainly, you couldn’t die if that’s all you saw ahead of you.
Unless it was a preview of heaven, he thought.
Chapter 69
A Pause in the Festivities
A pulsing sense of exhilaration flowed among the people on the wall. The helicopter had swept in like an avenging angel and obliterated the zombies at the base of the wall. Whoever had been piloting the chopper had done one hell of a job. The high caliber bullets not only removed the immediate threat of the zombies at the wall but had also churned the pile of zombie bodies away.
Still, they knew it was only a brief respite. They watched as the zombies outside the carnage brought down by the helicopter started to regroup and move forward.
That’s when Donovan saw a flash off in the distance next to the side of a two-story building. A smoke trail streaked through the sky toward the helicopter.
Someone down the wall yelled, “RPG!”
Everyone on the wall seemed caught in the grip of the scene playing out before them. At the speed the rocket was jetting through the sky, the drama would be over quick.
Mason felt a tightening in his guts. A twisting tension and a sense of dread. He actually leaned to the right as he watched the helicopter as if his own body movement might move the aircraft out of harm’s way. He knew it would be close.
Then, just like that, it was over. The RPG narrowly missed the tail end of the chopper and exploded in the sky, sending out a spray of orange and yellow.
Donovan yelled, “There he is,” and pointed in the direction of a figure holding what looked like a long metal tube.
Mason asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The smart one,” Donovan said. “He’s next to that two-story building. He’s carrying a rocket launcher.”
Mason scanned the area where Donovan was pointing, and the sun glinted off something metal there. That’s when he saw what he thought was a zombie holding a metal tube.
“It’s him,” he said softly. “But what are we going to do about it?”
Donovan lifted his rifle and said, “I’m going to try to shoot the bastard.”
Two seconds later, Donovan pulled the trigger, and a stream of bullets flew toward the figure in the distance. He knew it was a long shot, but he had to try. After twenty seconds, he let off the trigger.
“What the hell are you shooting at?” A voice shouted in the distance.
When Donovan looked at who had spoken, he saw Eli traipsing down the wall toward him.
“It’s the smart one,” Mason yelled back at Eli. When he looked back toward where he had seen the smart zombie, he only saw a sea of dead faces looking back at him.
A look of surprise passed over Eli’s face, but he jerked his head in the direction of where Donovan was firing. He narrowed his eyes as he scanned the landscape for some clue that a smart zombie was there. A figure moved, but it could have been another zombie for all he could tell.
Donovan lifted his rifle into the air and slammed the butt down onto the top of the wall, and screamed out, “Dammit!”
“What?” Mason asked.
“He got away,” Donovan said. “He went behind that building.” He pointed at a two-story building off in the distance behind the swarm of zombies.
When Mason tried to get a bead on the smart zombie, all he saw were bobbing heads of zombies as they came toward the wall. Not one of them looked pleasant, either.
“Where is he?” Eli shouted at Donovan as he made his way along the wall, walking past people looking out of the horde shambling toward the wall.
Donovan desperately scanned the area around the building, but he saw nothing.
Eli came up next to Donovan and asked, “Where did he go?”
Donovan pointed toward the building and said, “He ran behind that building.”
“Are you sure it was one of them?” Eli asked.
“Unless a run-of-the-mill zombie has learned how to fire a rocket launcher, then I’m sure it’s one of the smart ones.”
A man yelled in their direction, “Eli, What the hell are we doing? They’re getting ready to make another run at us.”
Eli bit his lip, then qui
etly asked, “What should we do?”
Donovan had wondered when Eli would try to hand this hot potato off to him. He knew it was only a matter of time, so why not now?
“Get everyone ready for the next wave,” Donovan said.
“Everyone’s low on ammo,” Eli said, and there was a desperate quality to his voice.
Donovan reached up a hand and rubbed the stubble growing on his chin. “Then they’d better be ready with their hand weapons.”
“So, we’re there?” Eli asked.
“We’re past that,” Mason said, stepping up beside Donovan. “Do you see him?”
“No, no,” Donovan said. “But I don’t think he’s gone far.”
“Should we go after him?” Eli asked.
Donovan let out a long breath, then said, “You’ll have to go through all of them. Are you ready to do that?”
Eli looked down at his feet and didn’t answer Donovan’s question but came back with one of his own. “What’s the best play for us?”
Donovan was quiet for a moment, his brow furrowed in thought. “You need to get Jones to send his men up here. There’s no use holding those guys in reserve any longer.”
“But they’re at the back, too,” Eli said.
“Then send half to the front and the other half to the back,” Donovan said.
There was a long pause as the three men just stood in silence. Maybe this was the last bit of quiet they would get for a while. Or maybe their final bit.
Eli brought out his walkie-talkie and tried to call Jones, but someone else answered.
“Who is this?” Eli asked. He listened for a couple of moments, then said, “Oh,” and looked skyward.
Donovan followed his gaze and saw the helicopter falling from the sky. A smoke trail followed it down, and it looked as if the blades were barely spinning.
Mason said, “Oh, no.”
Without a word, Eli turned and then rushed down the wall to the closest ladder. Then he shimmied down it so quickly, it looked like he jumped. Once he was on the ground, he sprinted toward the interior of the Sanctum and away from the wall.
The Deadland Chronicles | Book 4 | Siege of the Dead: Page 30
