Donovan threw a hand in the air and said, “That’s just great.”
Mason asked, “Where the hell is he going? He’s not just running away, is he?.”
Donovan looked down the wall at Lassiter, who stood looking just as perplexed as he felt. “Hey, where did Eli go?”
Lassiter just shrugged and raised both of his hands up in the universal gesture that said, I have no fucking idea.
“We have to get these people ready,” Donovan said. “I’ll go this way and tell everyone to get their hand weapons ready and to conserve ammo. You tell Lassiter to spread the word.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Mason said and headed off to see Lassiter.
Chapter 70
Plugging the Hole
“How much ammo do you have for the machine gun?” Henry yelled down at Clayton just after he had fired off another rip of bullets. Smoke poured off the barrel of the .50 caliber gun.
Clayton’s barrage had been a repeat of his last two blasts. The zombies approaching the hole in the wall had been shredded by the torrent of bullets. The bodies lay in a straight line, torn, ripped, and bludgeoned. The problem was that the zombies outside his line of fire just kept coming.
All along the wall, people fired down onto the approaching zombies. Most of the bullets hit them, but as many struck torsos as made headshots. Just like on the front wall, they were burning through ammunition like it was on sale. And like on the front wall, they had a limited supply.
Clayton looked up to Henry and said, “I can do one, maybe two, but after that, I’m out.”
Jo put a foot on the open threshold of the Humvee and boosted herself up. “We’ve got to get something to block that hole.”
“Like what?” Henry said.
“I don’t know,” Jo replied.
The slender man standing next to Henry pointed past Clayton and Jo, and asked, “What about that?’
All of them followed the trajectory of his finger until their stares landed on a bulldozer next to a four-story brick dormitory. It had been used earlier to shore up the walls by pushing mounds of dirt against them in places.
“Do any of you know how to drive one of those?” Clayton asked.
Henry shook his head and Jo did the same.
“Well, shit,” Clayton said.
That’s when the slender man said, “I can drive it.”
Every one looked at the slender man and Clayton asked, “What the hell is your name? I sure can’t just call you that skinny white dude.”
“The name’s Kent,” the slender man replied.
“Do you think you can drive that bulldozer close enough to block that hole in the wall?” Clayton asked.
“Yes, sir, I think I can,” Kent said, and he wore a prideful smile that seemed really out of place, but Clayton ignored it. “I worked construction for fifteen years and know my way around heavy equipment.”
“Well, get your ass down and get it done,” Clayton said. “Shit!”
Clayton spotted another surge of zombies making their way toward the hole in the wall.
“Make it fast!” He shouted as he aimed the machine gun toward the hole and placed his hands on the trigger of the big gun. By the time Kent hit the ladder, Clayton was sending a salvo of bullets out the hole, streaking like red hot fire into the faces and bodies of the zombies. Spent shells clinked onto the roof of the Humvee.
When Kent hit the ground and started his run for the bulldozer, Clayton’s gun ran dry with the final spent shell casings dancing their way onto the ground.
“That’s it,” Clayton said. “I’m all out.”
Jo popped out of the passenger door of the Humvee holding a duffel bag. “We can use these.”
“Use what?” Clayton asked.
Jo fished her hand into the bag and pulled out a hand grenade. “These!”
“Hell yeah,” Clayton said.
“They’re getting closer!” Henry shouted down from the top of the wall.
Jo yelled up to Henry as she pulled back her arm, “Catch!”
She let loose of the hand grenade and it flew true to Henry, who snatched it out of the air as if it were a baseball. She pulled another grenade out and tossed it to Clayton. He wasn’t as graceful as Henry, but grasped it with two hands.
“I guess the question is whether we toss them all at once or in stages?” Clayton said.
“Stages,” Jo said. “Henry, you throw first, then Clayton. I’ll follow up last.”
“How many of those things do you have?” Clayton asked.
“Just these three,” Jo said.
Clayton grimaced, then said, “Then I guess we have to make these count.”
The rumbling sound of a diesel engine rolled their way, and when Henry looked in that direction, he saw the bulldozer choke out a plume of smoke as Kent revved it up. Kent must have put the big mechanical beast in reverse because it jerked backwards a dozen feet, churning up the turf behind it.
Someone screamed up on the wall and when Henry turned, he saw a dozen zombies making a beeline for the ragged hole in the wall.
“I’ve got to go now,” Henry said.
“Go for it,” Clayton said.
Singled minded, the zombies shambled toward the hole. Henry knew it wasn’t possible, but he thought some of their faces looked eager. If not that, at least determined.
It came down to when, and he knew it had to be soon or else they’d be at the hole and then inside. The problem was that he had never thrown a grenade in his life. He had seen movies where soldiers tossed grenades the way baseball players threw a baseball, carefree and easy. This thing he held in his hand weighed a lot more than a baseball. And it was deadly. If he made one mistake, people on the wall might die. He could, too.
After his mother’s death, being dead wasn’t a bad idea. He corrected that thought. It wasn’t after her death. It was after Molly had killed her. It would be a release from this pain. From the rage boiling inside him.
But time was running out. He pulled the pin, gauged the forward motion of the zombies, yanked back his arm and let the grenade fly.
The little metal bomb hit the ground and bounced innocently along the turf for five feet, then rolled gently into the midst of the zombies. A second later, it exploded.
The grenade did what a grenade should do. The initial blast tossed the zombies closest to it backward, rending flesh, limbs, and bone off the undead creatures. For the ones outside the immediate blast range, shrapnel tore into them. Most of it slammed into torsos and legs, but contrary to popular belief, you didn’t need a headshot to take down a zombie. Sure, a headshot put them down for good, but if you blew out their knees or snapped a tibia or a fibula, that thing was down. Yes, it could crawl, pulling itself along on its arms, but for all intents and purposes, it was out of the fight.
Henry’s grenade did a number on the zombies, taking out a total of ten zombies and incapacitating a half dozen more. While it was just a drop in the bucket when it came to the horde’s total size, it stopped the immediate surge toward the hole in the wall.
Henry whirled around and shouted, “I’ve stopped the leading edge. Get that bulldozer up here!”
The problem was that no amount of shouting was going to make the bulldozer go faster. It lumbered along, crushing a wooden bench in its path, but it was still fifty feet away. The next line of the undead were less than thirty feet behind the ones Henry blasted with the grenade.
It was a race between the bulldozer and the zombie, a true match of the slowest moving objects on the planet, but the zombies had the lead.
Chapter 71
Falling Angel
Jones gripped his armrest so tightly he was almost sure that his fingers would tear through the molded plastic. The helicopter spun in a lazy circular motion as it fell. He guessed a slow circle was better than a dramatic and fast fall. That meant they still had a chance. Or least he hoped so.
“You going to be able to keep this thing in the air?” He asked.
Garver gripped th
e stick in both of his hands so hard it looked as if he were trying to keep a runaway bull from tossing him off into the sky.
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Garver said through gritted teeth. “Now, be quiet and let me focus on keeping us alive.”
“What went wrong?” Jones asked, still white-knuckling their descent.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Garver asked. “I told you this thing wasn’t in good enough shape to fly. It took everything left in her to make those evasive maneuvers. Now, she’s done.”
Jones looked in Garver’s direction, “Listen, it was either try to fight or get eaten by zombies.”
“Or fly the hell out of here,” Garver replied.
Jones decided not to engage with that train of thought. He could tell that Garver was doing everything he could to get the bird from falling like a brick.
“Are we going for the landing field?” Jones asked, feeling more than a little dizzy from the spinning craft. One moment he saw the interior of the Sanctum flashed by the windshield, and in the next moment, he saw a field of zombies.
“There is no landing,” Garver said. “We’re crashing. The two big questions are whether we will survive it, and then if we do, whether it’s inside the wall or outside.”
“If we land outside the wall, our asses are dead,” Jones said.
“You think I don’t know that?” Garver growled. “Now, shut up.”
The walls swooshed by in front of them, and then the zombies swished by again. Jones caught a glimpse of the wall below. He saw more of the field outside the wall rather than the interior grounds of the Sanctum.
“You gotta nudge us inside the wall,” Jones said.
Garver grunted as he fought the stick and slammed his feet against the foot pedals.
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Garver said. “This damn thing is falling like a rock. I have almost no control at all.”
“But you have some,” Jones said.
“Very little,” Garver said.
They continued their slow death spiral as the ground came up faster and faster. Jones considered it a minor miracle that they were still in the air at all. This caused him to send up a prayer for God to send a gust of wind or an angel to push them inside the wall. Well, that and to keep them from an all-out, fiery crash into the ground.
“I have an idea,” Jones said.
“You got some flying monkeys ready to fly out of your ass,” Garver said.
“What if, on the next revolution, we fired off one of our rockets when we’re facing out toward the field?” Jones asked.
“Are you fucking crazy?”
“No, you said you don’t have any control,” Jones said. “Maybe shooting off a rocket will give us the push we need to get inside the wall?”
The helicopter hit five hundred feet, and to Garver, it felt like the pull of gravity had intensified as they fell even faster. If something didn’t change in the next ten seconds, they were hitting hard and doing it outside the wall.
The reality was that the crash would probably kill them, but if they did survive, then the zombies would get them. While he didn’t relish either fate, he’d prefer not to be eaten. Or burning alive.
He knew this was a longshot, but he was all out of tricks.
“Fuck it!” he said as he put his left hand on the trigger for the rockets and waited.
Out of the windshield, Garver saw the interior of the Sanctum, but the helicopter made a long, slow revolution. When the zombies filled the windshield, he fired not one, but two rockets. Too bad he’d never see them hit.
But something happened. It wasn’t magical, but more science. The expulsion of the two rockets kicked the helicopter backward with a firm but gentle force.
Below, Jones saw the wall getting closer under them, and he breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they just might make it inside. Then a new fear hit him. What if they hit the wall and made a big hole in it?
This nearly paralyzed him, but then he surrendered himself to the thought that he had no control over anything at that moment.
A low mechanical groan sounded above them. It was followed by what sounded like Thor’s hammer slamming into the side of the chopper. The whole craft shook so violently, Garver’s hands came off the stick.
“Oh, shit,” Garver said as he grabbed back onto the stick. “We’re going to hit hard.” He grunted, trying one last futile effort to exert control over the uncontrollable. “HOLD ON!”
Jones grabbed both armrests, digging in hard, and watched as the ground came up fast below them. The next thing he felt was a jarring crash that reverberated up his arms like sledgehammers. The impact was so intense, he thought the fillings in his teeth might be knocked out, and a black wave of unconsciousness threatened to take him under.
“Don’t you fucking pass out,” Garver yelled. “We’re on fire.”
“Fire,” Jones said, but the word came out long, slow, and sluggish. Garver’s face shimmered and darkened in alternating seconds as it floated in the air. But then a thought entered his consciousness -- he was barely ambulatory with his leg injury. How the hell was he going to get out of this thing if it caught fire? That’s what got his blood moving again, pushing back on the darkness. Abject terror had that kind of effect on people.
Despite being groggy from the impact, his senses remained intact enough for him to ask, “Did we make it inside the wall?”
Garver said, “No, but we’re damned close.” He swiveled his head around in both directions, then said, “The crash and the blades knocked the shit out of the zombies around us. The flames are keeping the rest back. We might have a chance to get away, but we have to move our asses and do it now.”
Still somewhat foggy, Jones mumbled out, “Okay.”
When he tried to unclick his seatbelt, something wouldn’t give. He was locked into the seat as if he were welded there. That’s when he smelled the smoke leaking into the cabin.
If his fear was at one-hundred percent before, it shot up to one-fifty as he struggled to get free. He closed his eyes and worked to quell his runaway panic. Letting it get the best of him would get him killed. It took almost ten precious seconds to get his fear under the ninety percent level, but he did it.
One step at a time, he told himself. First order of business, get out of this fucking seat belt.
Chapter 72
Slamming the Door
If this was truly some sort of sporting event, the announcer would have called it a nail biter. Only in this case, there would be a definite winner and a definite loser, and Jo didn’t want to be on the losing side. Losing meant you were very dead and in an ugly way.
The bulldozer chugged along in what looked like slow motion. The zombies, while not being fleet of foot by any means, had a slight edge when it came to which of them would make it to the hole in the wall first.
Clayton had moved down to the driver’s seat of the Humvee and was revving the engine to get it out of the way of the bulldozer, stopping a few feet away.
While people were still shooting away at the zombies, a large mass of them surged forward, seemingly driven by the hope they could take that enticing shortcut through the hole. Looking out through the jagged break in the wall, Jo saw what she thought was anticipation on the faces of the dead as they stumbled along. She also caught the putrid bouquet of their undead stench. It was enough to make your stomach turn over, but that was the least of her worries.
Jo knew she couldn’t hold off the zombies forever, but it was time for her to act. The grenade might just buy them enough time for the bulldozer to make it to the wall.
“Everybody get down!” She shouted as she pulled the pin on her grenade.
Jo was twenty feet back from the hole and hoped she hadn’t played the waiting game too long as she approached the wall. She was hyper aware of herself, feeling the balls of her feet hit the loosely packed dirt. Her breath came in short intakes through her nostrils. The metal casing of the grenade felt cold in her hand.
A zombie who would have been considered morbidly obese in life had the lead of the surge of the undead. He looked as wide as a car and the decomposition process had not been kind to him as torn pieces of flesh hung down over his already drooping gut. She guessed that his slow pace had slowed the zombies behind it. She sent up a prayer of thanks that this guy hadn’t skipped seconds and thirds at the buffet.
“Henry, Molly, duck down,” she shouted as she pulled back her arm. She didn’t look up at them to check to see if they followed her directions as she hit the point of no return.
Just as she jerked her arm forward, a horrible thought shot through her brain. What if the grenade hits the wall and bounces back inside?
She conceded it was too late to even consider that as she released the grenade.
In high school, she had played softball and it seems as if all that muscle memory remained still intact. The grenade flew straight and true as it passed through the hole.
Ultimately, she didn’t see where it hit as she dived toward the ground and ended up rolling against the inside of the wall. She hit it just a little too hard, and she felt a jolt go through her body.
The grenade went off two seconds later, and she felt the concussion even through the wall. She even thought she heard something splat. Something wet.
There was no waiting, though. She knew she couldn’t just lay against the wall. So, she pushed herself to her feet and went toward the hole just as a cloud of smoke wafted through it. Once it cleared, she gazed out in the field and saw zombie bodies strewn about in various states of dismemberment. The ones still deemed ‘operational’ rolled along the ground, and a few crawled toward the wall, wanting what was inside -- which was food.
“Get out of the way,” Clayton shouted.
When Jo whirled around, she saw a wall of steel headed her way. The mechanical grinding of the bulldozer roared away behind it.
Had it been moving faster, she would have surely been crushed, but thankfully, the bulldozer moved painfully slow. Still, she was forced to jump out of the way as the big blade lumberd by her. As she hit the ground for the second time in a matter of seconds, she heard the metallic clang of the blade hitting the wall. For some reason, it made her think of a crypt slamming shut.
The Deadland Chronicles | Book 4 | Siege of the Dead: Page 31
