“How many deaders are behind that door?” Molly asked.
“Enough,” Clayton said. “And the hell is that thing,” he asked as he pointed at the cart the scientists were rolling along.
Molly rolled her eyes and said, “It’s some crazy-assed contraption. I’ll let them explain it.”
The scientist named Hollaway must have overheard what Molly had said in a loud voice, “Young lady, this is no crazy-assed contraption. It’s just an experiment that Dr. Darke and I have been working on for a while. Say science, for science’s sake. Up until now, we had no practical purpose for it.”
Clayton eyed the eight-foot-long cart, taking in the four fold-out solar panels and the sixteen car batteries on the bottom shelf of the cart. Strapped to the side was a long metal pole with a cord attached to it, which led to the back of the cart.
“What does it do?” Henry asked.
The corners of Dr. Darke’s mouth turned up into a smile, and he said, “Let’s just call it a portable electric chair.”
“A what?” Clayton asked.
Dr. Hollaway stepped back and pointed at the solar panels, then said, “Those solar panels are feeding energy into those batteries for storing.” He stepped over to the cart and pulled off the metal pole and held it up. “This pole delivers a powerful electric shock, strong enough to kill a zombie.” He held up his index finger. “You see, Doctor Darke and I have been experimenting on a theory that these undead things can have their brains shut down easily by just the right amount of voltage. In a long run of experiments over the past year and attempting different levels of current, we have determined--”
Clayton cut them off by saying, “Can you just cut to the damned chase? Just how the hell do you press the end of that pole to a zombie’s head?”
Darke was the one to answer, “Well, that is what you call, the rub. You see, we couldn’t convince Eli to allow us to experiment in the field. And well, we could see his point. You couldn’t very well ask a zombie to stand still, but Doctor Hollaway and I have been positing that this could be the ideal conditions to field test the unit.”
“And by that, you mean here?” Henry asked.
Hollaway scratched his chin for a moment, obviously weighing his next words. “Well, if we could knock a small hole in the wall, or say that door, at head height, someone could shove that pole through, and there you have it.”
Clayton’s brow furrowed, and he asked, “And you’re damned sure that this thing works?”
“Well, in our lab tests, we determined the right amount of current to terminate a zombie,” Darke said.
“But that’s gotta take a hell of a jolt,” Clayton said.
Hollaway once again stuck his index finger into the air and said, “Not as much to kill a normal human, say what they used in prisons with their electric chairs.”
Darke chimed in and said, “Oh, much less. We hypothesized that these zombies have much less brain power than a living human. It took only a fraction of the current to…” he stopped and searched for a word, then said, “to lobotomize them entirely.”
“How do you suppose we make a hole in the door?” Henry said.
Hollaway let out a little chuckle, “Well, that seems obvious. You just use one of your guns to shoot a hole in it.”
And that’s what they did. It took awhile for the group to get enough materials to brace the door properly. They had to find a way to shore up the gate that Kent had been holding in place with the bulldozer’s big blade. Kent fell out of the bulldozer’s cabin, his body limp from the stress and exertion. A couple of the men carried him away to the dormitory for a much-needed rest.
As they all waited, a few of the party used the ladders to climb up on the walls. Once up there, they saw the zombies down below and began shooting down onto the undead. For the men, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, and it gave them a deep sense of satisfaction.
Despite being exhausted, Henry rushed to the wall and shouted up, “Stop shooting! Hold your fire.” It took him half a minute to get the men to stop firing.”
“Son, what the hell are you talking about?” A squat man with a bushy beard and mustache asked while looking down at Henry. “It's easy pickings. They aren’t even running away.”
“Eli said you don’t have a lot of ammunition left,” Henry said. “You don’t want to burn through what you have when we can try something else.”
“Like what?” The man said, obviously annoyed.
Henry raised his hands in the air and said, “Think of something, but don’t waste your ammo. This is probably not going to be your last battle with the dead.” He stared long and hard into the man’s face, then added, “Or the living. Do you want to be defenseless because you couldn’t think of a way to take these zombies out without using all your bullets?”
That broke through to the man and his compatriots, and they began to search for other ways to take out the zombies. In the end, they devised long spear-like poles with sharp metal tips from some rebar that had been placed outside the wall long ago for a construction project that had never happened. They used ladders they had brought for a potential rescue attempt to climb to the top of the walls. Once there, they had a perfect vantage point to look down at the zombies pressing against the wall. Their faces looked up at the living, breathing humans in frustration - their food just out of reach.
This gave the men on the wall the perfect opportunity to spear their poles down and into faces and eyes. The rebar had just enough heft to break through skulls and into the undead creature’s brains. It was bloody and taxing work, but the men seemed to enjoy it and even started a competition to see who could kill the most zombies.
All the while, the scientist prepared their portable electric chair, as they had come to call it, and got up against the door. Clayton had already blasted a sufficiently big enough hole in the door for the pole to be pushed through.
“This is some crazy shit,” Clayton said as he stood by the hole in the door. Zombie faces appeared just inside the door, peering out at the juicy humans outside longingly. A few of the zombies tried to reach through the hole, but Clayton bashed those fingers to mush with the butt of his rifle.
Clayton turned back to the two scientists, who were powering up their contraption. “You guys ready to roll with your...your electric chair pole thingy?”
“Yes, we are just about ready,” Darke said, tinkering with a set of dials on a control panel on the side of the cart.
“How many jolts can that thing deliver?” Henry asked, watching the scientists doing their final prep.
“It’s low voltage. We think it can do over two hundred,” Hollaway said. “Maybe even three hundred.”
“You probably won’t get to that many,” Henry said. “They’ll pile up outside the door quickly enough to clog it.”
“But we certainly have enough brain power to move to other spots in the wall,” Darke said, tapping the side of his head with his fingertip. “Where there is a will, there is a way, my mother used to always say.”
“Let’s just get this shit show on the road, as my daddy used to say,” Clayton said.
“Well, certainly,” Hollaway said, but he turned to Darke and asked, “Do you want to have the honors?”
“It was your idea,” Darke said.
“But you perfected it,” Hollaway said.
“One of you eggheads just do it,” Clayton said.
Darke took the long pole and started it toward the hole. Once he was within a couple of inches of it, he said, “Doctor Hollaway, turn up the current.”
Hollaway did as he was told, and an audible hum came from the contraption.
Darke closed one eye as he waited for a face to appear directly in front of the hole. It only took twenty seconds for a zombie with a partially mauled face to get situated straight ahead. Darke jammed to the pole through the hole, and it connected right on the dead thing’s forehead. There was a snap of electricity and a small blue flash of light.
The zombie’s head jerke
d back, and it collapsed in on itself.
Darke turned around with a huge smile on his face and said, “Success,”
Chapter 125
Coda
“Do you think it’s really safe to go back inside?” Bonds asked as they stood at the front gates.
Inside the gates were piles and piles of zombie bodies. For the past week, the people of the Sanctum had been killing the zombies trapped inside the walls. It had been painstaking, gory, and just plain hard work. They speared a lot of them, dropped heavy objects onto others, and when they got lazy, just shot them. At one point, a few of the Sanctum people poured gasoline down on the zombies, then set them afire. This was put to an end quickly. No one wanted a flaming zombie to run into one of the buildings and set it on fire. That would be a bad thing.
The scientists put their contraption to work and took down a lot of zombies. Using their shock-pole required boring holes through the walls, but the Sanctum had more than enough engineers and construction guys to take care of that. In some cases, they just pounded a brick out of the way. The only thing that stopped Hollaway and Darke was when they drained the batteries or had a cloudy day.
Throughout their clearing efforts, they heard sporadic gunshots from within the Sanctum. They could only guess that the people left inside were fending off zombies. This caused ripples of concern to wash over the people outside the walls as they had people they cared about still trapped inside.
These gunshots were extremely infrequent and random. It was as if there was a sniper or something slowly picking off zombies, but this was never confirmed.
Lassiter said, “Bondsy, we have killed every last one of them.”
Bonds leaned forward on his toes and craned his neck inside the gate, taking a look in every direction. “Are you sure?”
“What we didn’t kill, Howie and his men did,” Lassiter said.
“But how do we know for sure?” Bonds asked again.
Lassiter pivoted toward Bonds and said, “There are no guarantees in life. We may have a little clean-up to do, but those people we put in safekeeping inside are probably down to their last few bottles of water and may only have crumbs to eat. We have to go in, ready or not.”
Bonds shoulders slumped at the inevitability of what they had to do, but he bucked up and got ready. Or, at least, as ready as he could.
“Let’s go, boys,” Lassiter said. “It’s time to take back our home.”
The forty men behind Lassiter and Bonds cocked their guns, slid back the slides on their weapons, and clicked off safeties. While Bonds was reluctant, almost every one of the other people in their squad were more than eager. Many of them had people inside that they wanted rescued.
Henry and Clayton stood at the back gate with Donovan. Kent was at the controls of the bulldozer once again.
“Old familiar places,” Clayton said.
“Do you think we’ve taken out all of them?” Henry asked.
“Enough of them,” Clayton said.
“That’s not reassuring,” Henry said.
“We can take whatever’s left,” Clayton said. “Hey, Kent, open the gate.”
Kent gave an exaggerated thumbs up and revved up the engine of the bulldozer. Charcoal colored smoke coughed out of the stack on the back of the dozer as Kent put it in reverse. The beast-like machine jerked backward, and the gate fell flat on the ground, and a cloud of dust exploded into the air. The absence of the gate left the back entrance wide-open.
Henry and Clayton led the clearing party of forty well-armed people inside. Once all of them got past the entrance, Henry and Clayton pulled to a stop, and the fighters bunched up behind them. All of them were more than ready to retake the Sanctum. A couple of them even let out loud war whoops.
Clayton put his hands on either side of his mouth and shouted, “Spread out, but stay together. If you see a deader, shoot it. You don’t need to chase them. They’ll come to you.”
The fighters did as they were told and spread out, leaving a six-foot gap between the person beside them. A few of the party nodded their heads, and a few looked a little tense when it came to this mop-up job. Clayton would keep a close eye on those people. With how keyed up they were, it would be easy for them to shoot one of their fellow fighters in the back.
“I’m going to fire three shots in the air to let them know we are here,” Clayton said. He lifted his rifle and did as he said he would, firing three shots. “Let’s go,” he said. And with that, they started their march toward the heart of the Sanctum.
Progress was slow and orderly, with each person with their rifles up. Clayton watched the fighters to their right, and Henry had the ones to their left. Henry felt strange supervising a group of people who were much older than him, but in his short time on the earth, he had more experience taking down the dead, so they deferred to him.
They made it thirty yards inside when Clayton saw the right side of their line spreading out too much, and he shouted for them to tighten their ranks. The fighters complied without complaint.
About ten yards later, a man at the far end of the right line shouted in an excited voice, “There’s one!”
All eyes went to the right, and the zombie was easy to spot. They almost always were. There was no deception or stealth. They saw a human and operated on the fastest way between two points was a straight line principle. It plodded toward the right side of the line, stumbling every few steps, obviously wounded.
The man who shouted brought up his rifle, and took aim, tracking the zombie in his sights. Before he could pull his trigger, a shot sounded further off to the right, and the zombie’s head exploded in a geyser of blood. It collapsed into a pile and moved no further.
When everyone looked in the direction of the shot, they saw forms in the shadows of the entryway of the building. A wariness swept over the line, and everyone came to a stop.
The forms moved out of the shadow, and Henry’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest as Jo appeared. Behind her was the man named Howie. Henry barely knew him, so his focus was on Jo. He felt a tightness in his chest, and his eyes went blurry with tears as she made her way to the fighters.
Henry wanted to break from the line to run to Jo, but he knew he needed to maintain his composure. It was hard, though.
Howie and Jo cut the gap between the building and the line of fighters in half when he shouted, “You sons of bitches sure took your time getting to us.”
A couple of men in the line chuckled a little.
One of the men shouted, “But we are here now, and that’s what matters, right?” There was a sense of laughter behind his words.
Howie’s face twisted into a scowl, but he held back whatever he had to say. Henry got the impression that a scowl might be Howie’s default position.
Jo and Howie were twenty feet away when Henry could no longer contain himself, and he broke from the crowd. He rushed out to meet Jo, and she seemed as eager to see him as he was to see her. They embraced, and she hugged him tightly.
“You did a good job, kid,” Jo whispered. “I’m so glad to see you.”
He had trouble getting out the words, but he said, “Me, too.”
Howie’s voice boomed, “What the hell took you so long? Those old farts I was trapped in there with were driving me crazy. One more day with them, I was ready to get bitten by one of those zombies just to be free of all their bellyaching.”
More than a few of the fighters laughed this time.
“Ahhh, you’re all a bunch of assholes,” Howie said, slapping the air with one of his hands.
Henry and Jo broke their embrace, and both of them wiped their eyes.
“How’s Sergeant Jones?” Henry asked with some hesitancy.
“He’s okay,” Jo said. “I was able to get him to where Howie and his people were. Turns out one of the older ladies used to be a nurse, and she was able to tend to Nate.” She stopped herself, then said, “Sergeant Jones.”
Clayton stepped close to Jo and Henry and said, “I hate to bre
ak up this happy reunion, but we have some people to rescue.”
“Rescue my ass,” Howie said. “We had it covered.”
One of the Sanctum men said, “I thought you were just complaining about how long it took us to get inside.”
Howie shot the man the finger, and the laughter present earlier increased in intensity. After a few seconds, Howie started to laugh himself.
Clayton leaned in close to Jo and asked, “How many deaders are left inside?”
Jo said, “There are small pockets of them. I think some of them made it inside buildings somehow and then popped back out at times.”
“So, we still have some to mop up?”
“Only a few,” Jo said.
Clayton once again shouted, “Let’s end this laugh-fest and get back to work.”
A couple of men let out groans, but they were half-hearted protests.
Clayton put his arm in the air and let it fall as if he were dropping the starting flag at a race and yelled, “Gentlemen, start your engines.”
With that, they recommenced their mop-up effort. Within two hours, they had every last zombie left on the inside dead and gone forever.
Epilogue
The Call
The early morning sunlight streamed in through the dormitory room window, casting a warm glow onto the twin beds pushed tightly together. Sergeant Jones let out a groan and pushed up a hand to ward off the light. It was a futile gesture, and he knew it.
“Stop moaning, old man,” Jo said from under the heavy sleeping bag they shared.
“I wanted to sleep in,” he said.
“There is no rest for the wicked,” she said as she pulled the sleeping bag over her head.
“What about you, woman?” He asked. “Are you taking the day off?”
She peeked out from under the sleeping bag and said, “I guess I could since I’m not wicked.”
Jones shook his head back and forth, sighed exaggeratedly loud, then pushed open his side of the sleeping bag, letting in the chilled morning air. He slid out of the bed and placed his bare feet on the cool tile floor. A shiver went through his body as he reached down to pick up the flannel shirt that he discarded the night before and slipped it on.
The Deadland Chronicles | Book 4 | Siege of the Dead: Page 52
