“They’re in the bag!” Maxwell shrieks, her voice frail and terrified, still trembling from the cold. “But we don’t have time to stop and dig them out. Guys, they’re gaining us, quickly! And I mean fucking quickly!”
My vest. I put it in my vest, back at the dam. To knock the tree into the water after we made it across. I still have it in my pocket. It’s been there this whole time.
“Felecia, take the bag.” I rip it from my shoulder, handing it off to her without explanation, and she takes it without question. This is why we’re still alive, the connection between us, the unspoken bond, the understanding and respect we have for one another.
The worried look in her eyes dissipates the moment she meets my gaze. She has no idea what I’m doing, but because it’s me doing it, she knows it’ll all be fine. God I hope she’s right.
The second my hands are free of the weapon-filled relay baton, I remove the grenade from the little pouch on my chest, which judging by the size of it, was made specifically for a grenade to fit into. That or a really big condom. I’m glad I forgot it was there because I would have been reinitiating myself into the peepee club every time I remembered I had a bomb strapped to my chest. And I think I’ve already proven myself as an esteemed member.
We’re close enough. I can hit it from here. It’s just like skipping stones, only I’m running as fast as my legs will carry me across the mangled terrain. And if I do it wrong, I blow up. So, yeah, basically the same.
I rip the pin from the grenade and hold my breath. One. Two…
CHAPTER 35
I toss the grenade like I’m trying to break the world record for the longest rock skip, keeping it low to the ground just in case my timing is off. Which I’m really hoping it isn’t. When I was a kid, I thought they detonated on contact, and now I’m kind of wishing they did.
The sudden blast shakes the ground, sending chunks of lawn spraying into the air.
It’s weird to be running towards the explosion. I can feel the force of it trying to push me backwards. When you see it, it just seems like the detonation sent a gust of wind blowing outward from the epicenter. But it’s more than that, you feel it in your bones, like shockwaves or a current of electricity passing through you.
I still can’t tell if it worked. We’re running towards it like there’s a hole in the fence big enough for us to fit, but I can’t see through the dirt and small stones clogging up the night air.
The dust doesn’t settle until I’m practically able to reach out and grab the fence.
The broken fence. It worked! We’ve got a hole big enough to squeeze through. Only problem, now they do too.
I grab the bag from Felecia after passing through our opening, holding the hot links of metal out of the way so they can crawl under. “Max, go! We’ll try to hold them off.”
“I see at least three birds, one’s gotta work. Sami, you’re with me,” she shoots over her shoulder, racing across the airstrip without a second wasted.
To my surprise, the newest member of our team takes off after Maxwell, no argument or snarky comments. Honestly, I would too if I could, but these guys will be bursting through the broken fence in a matter of seconds, and Max needs at least a few minutes to get the chopper ready for lift off.
“Marty, what do we have for guns in here?” I ask, pulling my sword from my back. If it were one of the big ones, I’d feel like a Viking right now. Or He-Man. Conan. I guess this kinda makes me Snake Eyes. I’m okay with that.
“Machine gun,” he says, more like a question than a statement.
“Perfect. Clip their ankles through the fence. Slow ’em down.” I nod at Felecia, sword already gripped tightly in her bruised hands. “You ready to do what we do best?”
“Really? Here, now? You sure it’s an appropriate time to be doing that?” she asks with a wink and a kiss in the wind.
“Whoa-ho-ho,” Marty chuckles before letting off a round of ammo into the legs of the approaching soldiers. “Hey, don’t let me stop you. I’ll let you know when your assistance is needed. Son of a bitch, assistance needed. Hope you got your rocks off because sexy time’s over already.”
The bullets pierce their shins, sending them crashing face first into the dirt and bouncing back to their feet like it ain’t no thang. They’re vertical again before they’re done eating grass, clumps of it literally hanging from their mouths as they sprint towards us, a stampede of humanity, no fears or morals. Soldiers of the apocalypse dead set on conquering the world without even realizing they’re doing it.
This might as well be a training exercise to them. What’s a bullet to the shin when half your face has already been chewed off and your arm’s been eaten down to the bone like you’re a damn buffalo wing?
Felecia and I hop to opposite sides of the hole while Marty dumps more bullets through the fence, penetrating ankles and feet, kneecaps and shin bones. It barely affects them. You’d think he was pelting them with a BB gun.
“Sweet Jesus,” Marty whimpers between bursts of bullets, taken aback by the approaching horde. He hasn’t been here before. “Fuck me, guys, are we really doing this? Are we counting on this fence to hold?”
There’s no time to answer before the frontline of infected militants are throwing themselves at the chain link wires. The posts shake and sway beneath the weight of thirty soldiers crashing into it in unison. Pretty sure Marty just re-inducted himself into the peepee club, and if he tells you he wasn’t already a member, he’s lying.
Bloody hands reach through the holes in the fence, shredding the webs of flesh between their fingers as they push harder, reaching for us. Desperate. Snarling and barking, ravenous coyotes mauling a wounded rabbit.
Their teeth latch onto the fence, ripping and tearing like they can chew through metal. I swear I hear their teeth grinding, squealing like nails on a chalkboard as they chomp away, cutting their cheeks on the woven steel. Tongues poke through, flapping about, trying to get a taste as the infected infantry swarm the fence in droves.
“Here they come,” I mutter as a trampled soldier realizes he can crawl through the hole we made under the fence. “Marty, keep shooting ankles, we’ll try to cut the rest off at the pass.”
Our swords clang off the first neck that rears itself through our gateway, a guillotine too dull to decapitate the trampled zompire. My blade bounces back, barely breaking skin. Felecia faired a little better than me, hers is stuck in his spinal cord.
What do we do? We couldn’t fend off hundreds of these things with sharpened swords, let alone dull ones that may as well be wiffle ball bats.
Out of ideas, I jam the tip of my blade into his skull, skewering him to the ground as his body flails about, trying to pull himself under the fence. Does he not even realize there’s a piece of metal currently pinning him to the ground?
Felecia wedges her blade deeper, grinding against the discs in his neck, slowly prying his spinal column apart. I can feel things popping through the vibrations in my handle. I don’t even wanna know what’s going on down there.
I can’t hear her over the rapid fire of Marty’s machine gun, but the way Felecia’s face is contorted, mouth open in a disgusted sneer, I can tell she’s screaming. Not a scared scream, but the kind of scream you’d imagine a person would emit when they’re ripping a living creature’s head off, while said creature is still alive.
Her blade rocks back and forth, a butter knife sawing into raw steak. Blood bubbles out of the incision, pooling up in the shallow hole I blew in the earth. And he’s still trying to claw his way towards us, both hands clutching the dirt, pulling himself closer, only he can’t get any closer with my sword holding him in place. There isn’t enough room for him to rotate his body.
Thrusting all my weight into the sword, I jam my boot into his shoulder blade, pushing him back with everything I have. How much longer can we keep this up? He’s only the first one trying to slither through. What happens when the others realize they can try it too?
Something crunches.
I can’t quite hear it over the echo of the machine gun rattling my brain but I can feel it reverberate through my foot and right up my leg. We must have broken his spine. The way his neck is stretching as my sword holds his head in place, my foot pushing his body back through the hole. The flesh over his throat snaps back like an elastic, popping his head right off his body in a gruesome cascade of blood mixed with shards of bone.
We did it. We stopped him from getting under. That makes one. Only a hundred or so to go.
Would it be acceptable to… no, it wouldn’t… but when else will I get an opportunity like this, if ever? I probably won’t. The chances of it ever happening even once are slim to none. I’m sorry, I have to do it.
Ripping my sword from his severed head and digging it into the ground, I exclaim “you, shall not, pass!” at the top of my lungs, with a fury that should make the infected infantrymen turn and run the other way. In fact, I’m kind of surprised when they completely ignore what is hands down, the most impressive Gandalf impersonation known to man, if I do say so myself. At least I thought it was pretty damn convincing.
“Oh my god,” Felecia grunts, dropping her face into her palm. “My boyfriend, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, by choice.”
“You know, that brings up a valid question,” Marty says between rounds. “Russian mail order brides. You think they’re going up in price or down? Because I could really use me one of them.”
“Are you kidding?” Felecia asks, attempting to slice through another neck and failing miserably. “We get outta this alive, you’re an international hero. G-Milfs are gonna be throwing their wrinkly cooters at you.”
“You don’t say. Screw the mail order brides. Ladies, Marty’s back on the market. Mums the word around Maribel though, I think we really got something– oh fuck me with the sharp side of a hammer. They’re climbing! We got climbers on our hands!”
I jam my sword into the slithering soldier’s neck, right beside Felecia’s, and yank on it. If we keep pulling in opposite directions, we’ll have to rip through eventually. But eventually’s taking a lot longer than we have time for. What the fuck are these thing’s, half squirrel? How the hell are two of them at the top of the fence already? Thank god someone had the foresight to line it with barbed wire.
“They’re coming in too fast,” Marty shouts, letting off a sporadic shot here and there. “I can’t get any ankles, they’re all too close. We gotta bail, guys, I’m talkin’ now!”
“We can’t,” Felecia screeches as we pop this bastard’s head off like we’re pulling apart a wishbone. “Max needs more time, we gotta think of something else! Noah, fire! It worked before on big groups, we gotta light ’em up, like back at the school.”
“Say no more, hang on.” Marty drops to his knees, rifling through the duffel bag as I poke the only sharp part of my sword left through an incoming eyeball.
Twisting and turning it as if it were a screwdriver spiraling into her brain just isn’t doing the trick. I was hoping I could puncture something vital and make her stop moving. Felecia’s katana digging into the female soldier’s other eye should be helping a whole helluva lot more than it is.
The optic nerve unravels from her socket, tearing when it can’t withstand the pressure anymore. A regurgitated cough of acid reflux fills my mouth when what’s left of her detached eye clings to my blade. Zombie kabobs, yum yum.
The only thing holding this chick back are the two bodies she’s trying to crawl over. They’re taking up the entire entrance, she’s just shredding herself to bits on the bottom of the fence. Do you think she gives a flying fuck if both of her eyes have been ripped clear out of her skull? She knows exactly where we are, and not being able to see us isn’t going to stop her
“Shit, incoming!” Marty hollers, his head tipped skyward, pack of matches in his hand.
The first of the climbing corpses launches himself off the top of the fence.
CHAPTER 36
Fight or flight instincts kick in. Without so much as telling my body to, I tackle Felecia out of harm’s way. What an asinine thing to say, we live in harm’s way. In fact, I’m quite certain we’re the mayors of it.
Don’t ask me what good this is gonna do. Sure, his half a mile fall from the top will probably break a few bones, but he’ll care about that as much as Billie Eyeless here cares about her newly acquired handicap. And he’s only the first of the flying zombies. There’s four more about to crest the barbed wire precipice.
I brace for impact, covering Felecia’s body with mine… but it doesn’t come. Okay, I get that this fence is really freakin’ tall, but it’s not that big. He should have landed by now. If you tell me they’ve learned to fly, that’s it, I’m done, the war’s over.
Felecia rolls out from under me, retrieving her sword as I spring to my feet, searching for the missing jumper.
He’s still on the fence, dangling from the top, his body swaying as he tries to break free. His arm’s tangled in the barbed wire. Suspended fifteen feet above us, kicking and squirming, he’s still reaching down with his free hand.
I can see Felecia’s mouth moving but her words are cut off by a flurry of gunshots. Marty’s standing over the hole in the fence, dumping shells at incoming crawlers. They’re actually pulling out the bodies currently blocking their path. Not good, not good at all. This means they’re thinking. Using reason. Something’s in their way, they move it. They didn’t do that before, I swear.
The gunshots continue to echo in my head even after his finger’s off the trigger. Is it off the trigger? Dammit, it’s not, he’s still squeezing. He’s out of bullets. I swear I can hear them bursting from the barrel when clearly they are not.
Marty drops the gun and lights a match, tossing it at the fence. I don’t know what he did but a small explosion ignites a handful of army fatigued zompire legs, at least I’m assuming it was small. To be fair I can’t hear much right now so it could have been a huge bang with just a little ball of flames and I wouldn’t know the difference.
He shouts something, maybe something about a packet, but I can’t make it out. And Mom always said that listening to my headphones too loud would cause me to go deaf. Bet she never imagined it would actually be from my bus driver using a machine gun to shoot zombies at close range. How long until the echo dies off? It’s muffled but I can still hear…
The helicopter rotor. That’s not the machine gun echoing in my ears, it might have been at first but not anymore. They got the chopper going! Those aren’t echoes, those are propellers!
And not a moment too soon.
Our fence climbing friend splats off the small patch of lawn, his arm still dangling from the razor wire above us. And he’s not alone, the others are fumbling their way over it, shredding their bodies to bits, blood dribbling down the chain links like rain. Fingers are falling left and right, slabs of severed flesh sliced off by the rings of deadly wire.
Oh my god, that’s a scalp! The top of someone’s head just bumped my shoulder, hair and all. Is now an appropriate time to puke up my meatballs? Because I think it’s about to happen.
The woman is still suspended at the top of the fence, tangled in a web of barbed wire wrapped with a string of razor sharp spikes, as if the barbed wire weren’t already enough. Her face has been mangled beyond recognition, it’s just a slab of raw hamburger. Were it not for the body, I’d never guess it was even human.
“Go, run,” Felecia screams, her voice rising and falling awkwardly because she can’t hear herself any more than I can. “Sami’s waving us over. We gotta get the hell out of here.”
Marty grabs me by the arm, pulling me away from my position at the hole in the fence. “We can’t hold ’em off any longer brother, time to go.”
I realize I’m stabbing at any piece of anatomy that tries to squeeze through the hole, but I don’t even think I’m trying to hold them off at this point, I’m just kind of frozen in a state of shock. Body parts are showering me, casualties of the fence wrapped in razor wire.
&
nbsp; And more just keep coming, slamming into those already trying to contort their bodies to fit through the tiny diamond shaped openings. They can’t fit, they can barely squeeze their hands through, but they’re trying anyway. It’s like watching cheese get shredded in a grader. Bits of flesh are flaking off, falling like blood soaked dandruff.
We all abandon our post at the same time, making a mad dash across the landing strip, knowing we’re about to have a stampede of maimed soldiers chasing us. Let’s just hope the holes Marty blew through their shins are enough to slow them down, kinda like this duffle bag is slowing me down. What did Maxwell put in this thing? If she’s got a rock collection in here, I am so throwing them at her.
Without it I could probably pull ahead, even with it slamming off my hip, but I stay neck and neck with the two who have been with me from the start. Day one survivors. You’re damn right. I would have stayed with them even if I could have pulled ahead.
These guys are gaining on us. How? Half their bodies are stuck on the fence! I can see arms and legs from here, and all I’m doing is peeking over my shoulder. There is literally a freakin’ leg dangling from the barbed wire, no body attached! You can’t possibly tell me this dude is running.
Oh come on! He’s not running. Oh, no, no he’s hopping, like a deranged bunny rabbit. How the hell is he catching up to us? Who shoved an Energizer battery up his ass and can you please insert one in mine? I could really use a boost right about now.
Why do I feel like I keep getting slower? I know my body’s exhausted but I’m pushing as hard as I can and I’m still bringing up the rear. Maxwell’s rock collection shouldn’t be slowing me down this much.
Fuck me! It’s not. The bag’s not slowing me down, it’s what’s clinging onto the bag. How is she still moving? Her fucking scalp bounced off my shoulder. She’s missing a damn arm, probably the one dangling from the razor wire, and her other one is grabbing the duffel bag?
Blood Type Infected (Book 5): The Departed Page 22
