by Frank Tayell
The soldier had a sidearm at his belt, but his hands were empty. The next uniform to climb out held a rifle one-handed with the barrel pointing down. Tom was a hundred yards away now. The pilot stepped out, followed by a fourth military uniform, this one also wearing a helmet. The pilot raised a hand, waving at the crowd.
The barrel of Tom’s rifle lowered an inch. The pilot reached into the helicopter and picked up a rifle as the fourth figure removed his helmet.
“Powell!” Helena’s voice echoed above the crowd. A shot was fired, but not from Tom, nor from the guards. It missed. The second one hit the pilot in the chest. The other three took cover. Tom was too close to the crowd now fleeing in every direction and he’d lost the elevation that would have given him a clear shot. He ran forward, rifle raised. There was a third shot, but he couldn’t see who fired it. Powell and his men opened fire, shooting indiscriminately into the crowd. Tom didn’t have a clear target so he aimed at the helicopter, emptying his magazine into metal and glass. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw people fall. He heard them scream. He heard others yell.
He ejected the magazine and slotted the spare into place. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No haven anywhere in America, except this one. It was being destroyed, and it was his fault. He ran, firing burst after burst, and realized that he was almost alone in the open. A helmeted figure rose from behind the helicopter’s skids, a pistol in his hand. Tom pulled the trigger. It clicked. The magazine was empty. He dropped it, but before he could reach the holstered .45, the man’s head was blown apart by a shot that came from somewhere to Tom’s left. Tom drew the pistol. The last guard reared up. Tom fired, emptying the magazine into his chest.
“Powell!” he bellowed as silence descended. The shooting had stopped.
“Powell!” he yelled again, ejecting the magazine and slotting a fresh into place. The only sound was the screaming of the injured and the sobbing of the dead.
He saw the man’s legs underneath the helicopter. For a moment, he thought Powell was dead, and then a foot twitched.
“Get out!” Tom barked. He grabbed at the man’s ankle, tugging him from under the skids.
“You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man?” Powell asked, cowering.
Tom would, but he held his fire. He glanced around. He saw Kaitlin, a hunting rifle in her hand, walking across the lot toward the bodies. He saw Jonas bending over one. No one was approaching them. He turned back to Powell.
“It’s just you and me, Powell. Why did you come here?”
“To end this,” Powell said, pushing himself into a sitting position with his legs bent, his hands held across his knees. “You know, I said you should have been killed years ago. Your old family friend did like things done in far too complicated a fashion.”
Tom raised the gun, but stilled his rage. There were too many questions that had to have answers. “How did you find me?”
“Where else would you go? The satellites confirmed it. That fire truck was like a signpost.”
“Where did you come from?” Tom asked.
“You mean is anyone going to come after me? Everyone is dead, Mr Clemens. America is gone. The country is in ruins. It’s all your fault, you know. If you’d simply played your part, even now, our nation would be rising from the ashes. Instead, you clipped the phoenix’s wings. It will never fly again.”
“You betrayed the cabal, didn’t you? You and Addison. He schemed to put himself on top, and you planned to kill and usurp him.”
“How can you betray a conspiracy?” Powell replied. He placed his palms on the ground and pushed himself to his feet.
“Stay down!” Tom barked.
“Addison was a pawn, just as Farley and Sterling were,” Powell said, raising his hands above his head. “Not too dissimilar to what Maxwell was for you. Addison’s betrayal didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. None of this does. You may have destroyed this country, but you did not destroy us. The cause lives on, eternal.”
“What? Hiding out in some bunker? Where?”
“A bunker? Oh, no. The world is a big place, Mr Clemens. So, as I said, I came here to end this. I didn’t start the gunfight, nor did I want to. I didn’t come here with violence in my heart. But what do you want, Mr Clemens? A trial? An execution? Or would you prefer a prisoner exchange?”
“Your life in exchange for whose?” Tom asked.
“There’s someone you need to speak to,” Powell said. He turned around and reached into the helicopter.
“Don’t!” Tom warned.
“It’s a radio, Mr Clemens,” Powell said, holding a small black box up by a corner. “Mr Clemens. Mr Sholto. Thaddeus. There is someone who wishes to speak to you.”
He held out the box. Tom stared at it. Powell tossed it at him. Tom fumbled the catch, taking an involuntary step back, and caught the glint of something metal in Powell’s other hand as the man leaped.
Tom managed to grab Powell’s wrist, holding the knife back, but the man’s momentum pushed them both over. Tom landed hard, Powell on top, and the man had his other hand on Tom’s gun hand, holding it down as the knife’s gleaming blade inched closer and closer.
“I told you,” Powell hissed. “I wanted—”
But before he could finish, he was pulled back and off. Tom saw Jonas throw Powell up and down onto the asphalt. He saw Jonas level his gun and fire three times into the man’s chest.
“No judge, no jury,” Jonas said. “Just me.”
“No.” Tom said. “No.” He pushed himself up, and over to Powell’s body, but the man was dead. He ran to the helicopter. There was no radio beyond the microphones built into the helmets.
“No. No. No,” he hissed. He walked back across the cracked lot and picked up the object Powell had thrown at him. It was a small black plastic case. Inside were iodine tablets.
“What?” Jonas asked. “What did he say? What are you looking for?”
“Tom!” Kaitlin yelled. He looked up. She was crouched over a body fifty feet away. He knew who it was long before he reached her. Helena lay unmoving, though her eyes were open. A red stain spread across her chest.
He reached down and took her hand. It was already cold.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said.
“Tom?”
“I’m here,” he said, leaning closer. Her eyes didn’t focus.
“I never found Jessica,” Helena whispered. “I wish I had.” She gave a rasping cough. “I looked for her. That’s important. I did what I could, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Tom said. “You went looking for her, and she knew that. Your sister knew that you wanted to make amends. She knew that, Helena. Helena?”
She was dead.
He wanted to bellow. He wanted to scream. It shouldn’t be like this. Not her. Not here. Not now. Kaitlin went to help with the other injured. Tom stayed on his knees, trying to think of something to say, of anything that might give meaning to Helena’s death.
“It’s over,” he finally said. And it should have been. There should have been time to grieve, to repent, to regret, to revel in victory, or dwell on Powell’s last words. There wasn’t time. Instead, there was a shot. Then another. They came from the north.
“Zombies.” He was running before he realized, and halfway to the bridge before he remembered he was unarmed save for the bowie knife at his belt. He didn’t turn back.
Gregor stood on the barricade, hunting rifle in hand, firing shot after shot down the road. With the sheet-metal gate closed, Tom couldn’t see what lay beyond, but he could hear it. Even the crack of the rifle couldn’t drown out the sound of hundreds of feet, of hundreds of sighing, gasping dead mouths. He ran to the barricade, and up the steps. Standing next to Gregor, he realized he was wrong. There had to be thousands of them. A long thin column that stretched as far the eye could see, and probably a lot further.
He grabbed the rifle from Gregor’s shaking hands. “Go back to the village. Get more people. More ammo. More guns. Go.”
He took aim. There was no shortage of targets. He fired, reached for a cartridge, and properly took in the horde. In truth, there was no way of knowing how many there were. The long column stretched to where the road bent out of sight, but the creatures weren’t sticking to the path. A low wall ran from the bridge to fifty yards beyond the edge of the razor wire. Beyond that was a metal crash-barrier. The zombies spilled around and over those low impediments. He fired, hastily reloaded, and fired again. The razor wire was thick on the road, but stretched thin across the ground to either side. He fired. Reloaded. Fired, barely aiming. He had to get them to head toward him, toward the barricade, toward the razor wire that might slow their progress. He aimed. Reloaded. Fired. An undead woman in a red coat reached the razor wire. Tom fired at a zombie behind. The red-coated creature’s legs caught in the wire. It fell, face first, into the mass of razor-sharp blades. He fired, not looking where he hit. Another creature reached the wire. This one tripped on the squirming, living corpse. He fired. Hats, bare heads, coated and bare-armed, freshly dead and others with skin ripped away; their features blurred into one as he aimed and fired, aimed and fired. He ignored the zombies, focusing instead on the growing pain in his shoulder as the rifle bucked with each shot.
There was a roar of sound to his left, and again to his right. Jonas, Kaitlin, and the dark-haired woman he’d met at the bed-and-breakfast were there, firing into the seething mass. He aimed, fired, and tried to remember her name.
“Do we aim at the ones on the razor wire, or the ones behind?” the woman called out.
“Just shoot them,” Jonas yelled back. The zombies fell as bullets hit. Some were dead, but some rose back up. Tom reached for another round. The box was nearly empty.
“We need more ammo,” he said, but his voice was drowned out by the tramping feet and snapping mouths, ripping cloth and tearing flesh, and hammer’s hitting percussion caps at far too infrequent a rate. “Ammo!” he yelled. “We need ammo!”
“Naomi,” Jonas said, grabbing the woman’s arm. “Go back to the village. Tell Martha to get the children onto the boats. I want a couple of people on the other barricades to the west and south, but everyone else is to come here. Bring all the ammo. Go. Run!”
Tom fired, picked up the last cartridge from the box, reloaded, and aimed just below the brim of a red baseball cap. He fired. The cap flew off as the zombie collapsed.
“I’m out. We’re out.”
“One magazine left,” Kaitlin said, firing a round. She ejected the magazine and inserted her last.
“Can we blow the bridge?” Tom asked.
“That wouldn’t slow them for long,” Jonas said. “Not nearly long enough. We need to hold them here until Martha’s had time to load the boats.”
“Here we stand,” Tom said, grabbing a boathook and jumping down onto the far side of the barricade.
“You have to stand somewhere,” Jonas said, following him down. Above and behind them, Kaitlin fired one measured shot after another. The razor wire was slowing the zombies. Tom raised the boathook, but there was no close target. Despite their furious thrashing of limbs and snapping of mouths, they still didn’t move quickly.
“Here we stand,” he murmured again. “This is not what I thought when we came up with that slogan.”
The zombies tripped on the wire and fell. The creatures following lost their footing as they tried to walk over an undulating sea of corpses. On hands and knees, they crawled forward until the mass of death behind pushed them down onto the wire where they, too, became ensnared.
Jonas raised his .45, braced his left hand on the butt, took careful aim, and fired. Tom waited, feeling worse than useless. This was a fate that he had brought on the village. Albeit unwittingly, he was nonetheless responsible.
The nearest creature was caught in the wire fifteen feet from them. Funneled by the barrier and the low brick wall, the rest were getting closer. The front rank of that column fell, but there were always more behind. A wall of snapping, snarling, hissing death, a twisted mockery of the people they’d once been. Jonas fired, slowly emptying his gun.
“I’m out,” he called, holstering it and drawing his bowie knife. “That was Powell, was it?”
“Powell? Yeah.”
“He was the guy who came looking for you in January,” Jonas said. “Said he was FBI. Had brown hair, and didn’t have the scar, but I recognized him.”
“The zombies followed him here, and he followed me. I’m sorry,” Tom yelled back.
“If you want to apologize for something, it’s for buying a house here in the village. But if it wasn’t here, you’d have bought one somewhere else, and that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be here now. Even if you weren’t, who’s to say Powell wouldn’t have turned up. Where does it begin? Where does it end? Someone once told me that a life well lived is a life full of regrets.” He said something else, but Tom didn’t hear it over the noise of the undead. They were getting closer, a great heaving mass of death that the two of them stood no chance of stopping. Tom raised the boathook. The firing had stopped. Kaitlin must be out of ammo. He didn’t turn to look. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to see her there, or see that she’d gone back to the village to help the children escape.
The nearest zombie was less than five feet away, crawling over the wire on wrecked legs and shredded hands. As it looked up, opening its mouth in a snarl, Tom stabbed the boathook forward, spearing the point neatly through its eye. With a tug, it came free. The zombie collapsed, but there was another behind it, and one on either side. He stabbed forward again and again at the heaving carpet of death. The zombies were four feet from him now. Three feet, and being pushed from behind more than pulling themselves along. He stabbed down again.
“Go,” Tom yelled at Jonas. “Get out of here.”
“Yep. Any second now,” Jonas said, raising his knife.
It was stupid. Futile. Once the zombies were past the wire, he and Jonas would be killed in seconds.
“Go!” Tom yelled. “Get out of here. Go and—”
And his words were drowned out by gunfire. One shot, then a dozen, then a fusillade. Jonas grabbed his arm, dragging him back to the barricade. There were ten people standing on the low rampart, firing shot after shot into the undead ahead and those to either side.
A zombie reached the end of the wire. It pulled itself forward onto the asphalt. Its legs shredded to the bone, it was unable to stand. Tom darted forward, stabbed down, then moved back to the barricade. The fusillade continued. Another zombie reached the end of the wire. Jonas ran forward, slashing his knife at its skull. Tom went to meet the next, and a pattern was established. They dealt with the creatures that reached the barricade while the shooters aimed at those further away. For the first ten minutes, Tom was sure they would be victorious. After half an hour, as his strength ebbed, so did his confidence. The boathook broke. He drew the bowie knife. He slashed. He hacked. After another hour, he was exhausted. One more zombie, he decided, and then someone else would have to take over. He cleaved the knife down on a scabbed scalp absent of hair. One more zombie. After the next he’d take a rest, but the next came, and he hacked down and stood his ground.
The firing slackened. It didn’t stop, but the aim had shifted toward the left and right. He blinked, focusing on the road beyond the immediate few feet in front. It was littered with bodies. Some were still, but others moved, twitched, and thrashed. The wire trapped some. Others were immobile due to broken limbs and shredded muscles. At the end of the wire, the zombie in the red coat, now torn and tattered and stained a far darker crimson than the dye, staggered to its feet. A shot rang out. It collapsed.
“Is it over?” Naomi called out from behind the barricade.
“Not yet,” Jonas said. “Not today. But someday, maybe.”
“There’s more coming,” Kaitlin called. “I count eight. No, ten.”
Tom wiped his hands on his coat. He had stood his ground, waiting for them to come once before, at the motel. If he survived the day, he
doubted that this time would be the last.
Epilogue - Departure
March 18th, Crossfields Landing, Maine
“Tell me about her,” Kaitlin said.
They stood by Helena’s grave. Tom made a final adjustment to the pieces of wood that he’d tied together. He’d burned her name onto them, but it seemed a pitiful marker, especially since there was no chance of anything more formal ever being erected.
“She was a teacher,” Tom said.
“I know that. I meant something else.”
Tom thought of their escape from New York, and their journey through Pennsylvania. There hadn’t been many happy moments. Not that he hadn’t been glad for Helena’s company, but their time together had been spent fighting for their lives. “She wanted to help other people,” he said.
“That’s a good epitaph,” Kaitlin said. “A better one than most people get.”
It was a little over forty-eight hours since the helicopter had landed and Helena had died. After the initial wave of zombies had been killed, the undead kept coming, just not in such great numbers. It was fifty in the first hour, twenty in the next, and then a handful every hour for the rest of the day and through the night. They’d used lights rigged to car batteries to illuminate the road, and killed the last zombie just before dawn. Of course, they’d not known that at the time, and no one had felt confident saying it until an entire day and night had gone by, and another sunrise arrived, with no more shambling creatures appearing on the road to the north.
When they’d counted the undead, they’d discovered fewer than three hundred had been in that first wave. Tom still couldn’t believe it was so few. He was sure he’d killed at least that number himself.
“I think he lured them here,” Tom said.
“Who lured what?” Kaitlin asked.
“Powell and the zombies,” Tom said. “He did it before, at the motel, the first time he nearly caught us. Nearly caught me. Helena saved me, then.”
“I don’t want to talk about him here,” Kaitlin said. “To be honest, I don’t want to talk about him at all. He’s dead, and from what he told you, no one else is going to come.”
