Wilson sent another creature to its second death, yanked his staff free, and slipped behind Taryn. Bellowing, “Spread them out!” at Tran, he sprinted back to where Sasha was engaging the Zs hung up on a sagging length of barbed wire. Along the way, he discarded the staff, dragged the M4 around on its sling and thumbed its selector from Safe to Fire.
Skidding to a halt beside Sasha, Wilson hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Fall back!” he ordered, making chopping motions toward the spot uphill where he wanted her to go.
Feet planted a foot apart on the spongy ground, Sasha turned to run but got nowhere. Instead, as the muck refused to release her boots, the unused momentum was redirected groundward and her body followed suit.
Sasha sat down hard, then pitched over onto her back. As a result, one boot tore free from the mud and her leg followed through. Mud sent airborne from her freed boot traced a lazy parabola above her body before plopping to the ground about her head and shoulders. As she went to roll to her stomach so she could rise and run, cold fingers wrapped around her ankle and she was being dragged toward the fence.
Seeing all of this happening in her side vision, Taryn left the clutch of rotters to her fore and followed in Wilson’s footsteps.
Thrusting blindly at the dead with her staff, Sasha screamed to Wilson for help.
A yard from Sasha’s prostrate form, Wilson summoned the Todd Helton in him and went to ground, sliding on one hip, feet first toward Sasha as if she was home plate. Coming to a grinding halt, with more grass and mud pelting Sasha, Wilson thrust his M4 through the fence at the dead. Unable to discern which of the creatures in the pile owned the hand attached to his sister, he poked the suppressor into a random face and triggered a round. He continued firing into the scrum, three or four seconds in all, until the fingers gripping Sasha’s ankle went slack.
“The fence is failing,” cried Taryn as she grabbed some of Sasha’s jacket and helped Wilson get the teen to her feet.
If Sasha was grateful, she didn’t voice it. Instead, she tossed her staff to the ground and in a flash the Ruger rifle was off her shoulder and in her hands. In the next beat she was stepping to the listing fence and firing into the dead, to no great effect.
“Cease fire, Sash,” Wilson screamed. “Uphill, now!”
As he raised his rifle to acquire a new target, he heard a groan off his right shoulder. Swinging his gaze toward the sound, he witnessed the wooden fence post jerk once and then lean hard over in his direction.
Reacting quickly to Wilson’s command, Sasha lowered her rifle and started backing away from the fence, uphill, her boots finding purchase this time.
With the post working its way out of the ground before his eyes, Wilson looked away long enough to get Taryn’s attention and motioned for her to follow Sasha. Then, as Taryn was turning and taking her first steps toward their agreed-upon fallback position, Wilson looked across the field at the rapidly approaching Tran. Directing the sprinting man uphill with the same chopping motion as he had his sister, Wilson bellowed, “Fall back and ready your rifle.”
When Wilson finally reacquired Sasha, she was already a good distance uphill and nearly to the row of graves, where everyone was to regroup.
Chapter 28
Ten seconds after Wilson rejoined the others at the top of the hill where the ground was mostly level, the fence opposing the fire lane where the dead had emerged finally failed. Initially the top two strands of wire snapped, sending a row of rotters five abreast face first into the trampled grass where Sasha was nearly lost. Then, under great stress from the two dozen dead things scrabbling out of the ditch, the remaining shin-high strand of wire snapped and brought the pair of gnarled fence posts down with it. As the sharp cracks echoed around the clearing like a pair of high-caliber gunshots, a third post was uprooted and an additional ten-foot-wide gap of fence east of the first was breached.
Wilson flopped down onto his stomach next to Heidi’s grave. He was breathing hard and the sweat beading on his brow and upper lip was migrating south. To his left, near Helen and Ray’s freshly filled graves, Taryn was comforting Sasha. Off his right shoulder, lying between the twin rectangles of bare soil holding Brook and Foley’s remains, Tran was fumbling with his weapon.
“Pull the charging handle all the way back,” said Wilson. “It’s the T-shaped thing below the rear sight. Then you throw the safety … it’s on the left side near the trigger guard.” He paused while Tran followed the directions. As the man snugged the rifle to his shoulder and peered through the EOTech optics, Wilson went on, “Go for the newer turns first. Head shots if you can. If they get too close, go for the legs to disable them. Then finish them while they’re down.”
“I know the basics,” Tran said. “It’s just that guns are still Greek to me.”
Sasha’s little Ruger came to life. Three shots. Back-to-back-to-back. The crackling reports rolled across the tiny group and swiftly dissipated.
“I’m still learning,” Wilson admitted. “And I’m not sure if it’ll ever be second nature to me.” Through his M4’s optics, starting east and slowly panning west, he surveyed the gently arcing length of 39. The roadside ditch where Tran had been looked as if it held a dozen or more twice-dead Zs. Tracking left a couple of degrees revealed the Zs he and Taryn had culled. He figured there to be maybe eighteen kills between the two of them—most of them belonging to her. Continuing on, he glassed the ditch and road adjacent to the failed run of fence. His dozen kills there had been trampled into the ditch as the two dozen dead currently clambering uphill toward him poured through the breach.
Arms and legs bent in unnatural angles jutted from the ditch. A slack face atop the pile stared up at him. The male Z’s lifeless eyes wore a sheen of mud. Grass and dirt caked the shock of blond hair. Mud had found its way into its ears and spilled from its gaping mouth.
Finished with his split-second assessment, Wilson aimed his M4 at the approaching pack and selected a target. With the holographic pip centered on a female Z’s nose, he threw the safety off and pressed the trigger. The suppressed report was nothing like the noise made by the failing fence post. It also paled in comparison to Sasha’s rifle. The abbreviated pop of the round leaving the M4 was swallowed up by the trees at Wilson’s back.
The speeding 62-grain hunk of lead was traveling close to 3,000 feet per second when it struck the rotter between the eyes with a wet smack. Instantly the Z’s head snapped back like a broken Pez dispenser and its body jerked up straight. As the corpse continued its one-way trip to the soft ground, back arched at a crazy angle, a rooster tail of brain matter spewed from the mortal wound.
To Wilson’s left, Sasha’s little weapon reentered the fray. Her shots were coming slow and steady now. Little Sis is listening to Taryn, he thought to himself as petite shell casings trailing wisps of gun smoke skittered across Ray’s grave.
On Sasha’s left side, Taryn was making her shots count. With each bark of her suppressed M4, a rotter would fall and begin a slow motion downhill tumble, steamrolling the long grass flat along the way.
Wilson glanced to his right and saw Tran heeding his words by targeting the speedier Zs. For every three or four shots fired from the man’s rifle, one Z would convulse and crash vertically and get swallowed up by the long grass.
Seeing the last of the dead summit the ditch and begin the long uphill trudge, Wilson rose up to one knee and started targeting the more mobile specimens among the twenty or so spread out before him on the lower half of the hill. In a matter of seconds he had burned through an entire magazine but had only thirteen kills to show for thirty spent rounds. Not a good ratio by any stretch.
To Wilson’s left, all firing ceased. Simultaneously, Sasha and Taryn aimed their rifles at the sky and commenced changing magazines. Off his right shoulder, Tran’s rifle went silent. In the next beat the older man was leaning over his rifle and tugging on the slightly curved magazine.
“Right side of the rifle,” Wilson called over. “The button above the ma
g well dumps the spent magazine.”
He did a hasty head count of the dead still moving uphill toward them.
Seven.
Mostly first turns.
Wilson looked over his shoulder at Sasha. He said, “Check your fire. You too, Taryn.” He cupped a hand by his mouth and told Tran to pull the charging handle, engage the safety, and stand by.
Gun smoke drifted west from Tran’s position as Wilson rose, moved the M4 around to his back, and picked his staff up off the ground.
Wilson looked to Taryn. “I’m going to get these,” he said. “Keep them in your sights in case it’s too much for me.”
“You sure you want to do it like this?” Taryn asked.
“Got to save the ammo,” answered Wilson. He regarded Sasha. “You did good. Make sure you keep one eye on the woods to our left. Though it’s overgrown, the fire lane continues on somewhere back there. I figure there’s an outside chance some of the deadheads could have picked it up on this side of the state route.”
Sasha shot him a look that could only be construed as No effin duh. She had already been jumped by a deadhead real close to where she was right now. She sure as hell wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice.
Taryn rose up to one knee and snugged her rifle tight to her shoulder.
Wilson looked each person in the face as he rose and plucked his staff from the grass beside him. Without another word, he gripped the medieval weapon two-handed and started waking downhill, on a collision course with the remaining monsters.
***
A minute after switching weapons, Wilson had released seven more souls from their hell on earth. It made him feel good. He hoped if his mother had turned, someone got to her early. Set her free, too.
Savoring the thought of Mom being in a good spot instead of shuffling around some airport somewhere, he looked at his small group’s contribution to the cause. Twice-dead Zs littered the lower two-thirds of the hill. Here and there amongst the unmoving corpses, gravely injured Zs struggled to stand. Near the breach in the fence, a pair of first turns looked pathetic as they tried to claw their way from the roadside ditch. From one end to the other, State Route 39 was rotter free.
Blood still dripped from Wilson’s staff when he returned from his own personal crucible.
Taryn and Sasha were huddled together on the ground next to Heidi’s grave. Their rifles and staffs sat in a jumble beside them.
Tran was standing nearby but wouldn’t look Wilson in the eye.
“What’s up?” Wilson asked. “I finished the job without wasting any more bullets.”
Lifting her gaze to meet his, Taryn said, “It’s Sasha. You need to take a look at her leg.”
Face blanched white, Wilson dropped his staff and ran to his sister’s side.
Chapter 29
Cade pulled the F-650 close to the ice cream truck’s crumpled rear end. On the passenger side, upside down and flanked by waffle cones heaping with colorful scoops of ice cream, were the words, Brady’s Treats. The truck’s dirt-caked grille faced north by east. The doors out back hung open—the passenger’s side door connected by a single hinge. The ground in the truck’s shadow had been tilled up by the passing hordes. In the mud just off the truck’s fender were numerous prints made by bare feet. Nearby were imprints left by tennis shoes with intricate-patterned soles, boots with lug soles, and, seemingly, everything in between. Every single one of the thousands of individual prints in the vast mud plain were facing north; the direction of the horde’s march.
Stilling the motor, Cade said, “While I take a look inside the truck, why don’t you climb in the bed and see if you can find the Screamer.”
Shaking her head, Raven said, “I’m going with. I’ll look for that noisy piece of junk when we get back.”
As if saying Suit yourself, Cade shrugged and scooped up his M4.
Raven lifted her rifle from the floorboard and elbowed her door open. Jumping from the truck, she found the ground on her side pretty firm. It was dotted with patches of grass and showed very little evidence of the zombies’ passage. Swinging her gaze forward, she saw a ten-foot-wide swath of smooth ground mostly devoid of grass. It was the starting of an uninterrupted path that ran diagonally south by west from the ice cream truck, all the way to the state route. Though she was no great judge of distance measured in feet or yards or miles, like her dad, as she traced the path from the road back to the truck, she knew it had to equal at least a full city block. The footprints dotting the compressed dirt were nowhere close to being as deep as the ones marring the soil flanking it.
Cade slammed his door and looped around front of the Ford. He was nearly to the ice cream truck’s open sliding door when Raven sidled up next to him.
She said, “Do you see anything moving?”
He nodded. “Still belted into the driver’s seat. I think it’s big enough to be Dregan. And I’m pretty sure he’s no longer one of us.” He regarded Raven, “You want to check it out?” He was testing her. However, when she said yes, he had a hard time concealing his amazement. “You sure? I totally understand if you don’t want to see him as a zombie.”
Raven said nothing. She strode around front of the truck with purpose, crouched down by the open driver’s side door, then craned her neck and looked inside.
Cade followed but kept his distance as she moved aside what looked to him like a misplaced curtain.
Raven said, “Dad … you need to see this.”
After checking his six and their flanks, he made his way to the open door and crouched next to her. Seeing that the fabric hanging down where window glass should be was tenting in places, he said, “What’s up with the curtain?”
“That’s no curtain,” she said unemotionally. “It’s Alexander Dregan’s long cowboy coat.”
“It’s called a duster,” Cade said as he tugged aside the stiff canvas-like fabric to expose the pale hand and scrabbling fingers that had been causing it to bulge and ripple. From wrist to elbow the appendage was stripped of its skin and most of the underlying flesh. The inside of the duster was coated with dried blood. Stiff scraps of flesh and skin clung to the fabric.
Cade crouched, craned like Raven, and peered into the gloom. Sure enough, the elder Dregan was in there. And he was upside down and still buckled to his seat. He had suffered greatly at the hands and teeth of the dead. Also, based on Cade’s initial glimpse, it appeared he had suffered greatly at his own hand before the ravenous dead got to him.
Pointing to the latter was the fact that his face was peeled away from the nub of cartilage that used to be his nose to the rear of his skull. Powder burns stippled the ashen lump of flesh dangling where an ear should have been. Starting a couple of inches above the powder burns and directly in line with what Cade presumed to be the man’s ear canal was a shallow, two-inch-wide furrow. The damage, likely caused by a glancing blow from a large caliber bullet, ended at the crown of Dregan’s head where the round all but scalped him before careening off on its altered trajectory. While Cade was no kind of ballistics expert, he figured if he looked long and hard he would find a thumb-sized bullet hole somewhere in the ice cream truck’s roof. Likely directly above the passenger seat.
That wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t an episode of CSI. Dregan was done now. That much was clear. Cade hoped the man hadn’t suffered before he died the first time. Hell, if the reports were accurate, Dregan had single-handedly saved Bear River from falling to the mega-horde.
The man deserved a monument erected in his honor, not the second-guessing sure to come should the obvious failure of his last mortal act come to light.
Cade looked to the pistol in Raven’s hand. It was black with knurled walnut grips, its slide locked open. Even though undead Dregan’s flesh was beginning to spoil, Cade smelled the gunpowder clinging to the recently discharged weapon over the sickly sweet odor coming off the body.
“I found this on the roof,” she said, offering it to him butt first. “Which is now basically the floor
.”
Nodding, Cade took the pistol. “Dregan knew his job was done. He got the horde this far and tried to end his own life before they could get to him. He used the last bullet in the magazine, too.” Keeping his fingers clear of undead Dregan’s snapping teeth, Cade pointed to the burn marks he’d spotted. Then, using the pistol’s muzzle, he traced the channel the errant bullet had carved into the man’s skull. “He must have jerked his hand at the last moment.”
“Maybe the horde hit the truck and made him miss. There’s a bunch of dents in back. Like it got rear-ended by a dump truck, or something.”
“That’s a possibility. At any rate, the damage caused from the bullet entering and then immediately exiting at the crown of his head was catastrophic. I’d be willing to bet he lost consciousness instantly.”
Raven made a face. “He still suffered,” she said with a certainty only a twelve-year-old could convey. “And in a way, he still is suffering.”
As if the thing hanging upside down and batting futilely at the duster in the way of a possible meal understood that its previous life and current predicament was under scrutiny, a wet guttural growl rolled over its bloated tongue.
Cade removed his cap, bowed his head, and wagged it slowly side-to-side.
He went still and regarded the Colt Model 1911 clutched in his fist. “You want the honors?”
Nodding, Raven said, “Should I use his gun?”
“I think you should. That way we can say he died by his own hand.”
“But he didn’t the first time.”
“Maybe he bled out from the wounds and did die. We don’t know either way. I think it’s best if we finish what Dregan started and let his kin build their own version of what happened here.”
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 13): Gone Page 19
