by Glynn James
He had lost them. He had to have lost them.
And as he lurched forward, favoring his bad leg, and as the beads of sweat arced from his dappled forehead, and as he scanned ahead, desperate to see that bend in the road…
He heard it behind him. Close and coming fast – very, very fast.
The fear told him to just keep going, to run faster, to get home. To get to his mother.
But it was too near, and he had no choice but to turn.
With inhuman motions on a vaguely human shape, the thing juddered up the road at him, impossibly fast, locked on, its dead eyes fixed on the boy’s defenseless, fleshy body, its withered arms half-pumping and half-outstretched to take him.
The boy brought the shotgun up to his shoulder.
And he tried to take aim.
Extremity
Inside the cabin, the operators were in the final stages of kitting up – either to head out for Lakeview and their nautical ride north, or else to kick off a missing-person search. As usual, they were ready for anything. They’d go where they were told. And they’d get the job done.
Regardless of the cost.
Dr. Park sat at the kitchen table now. With power up, he had brought his laptop back online.
And he was getting his head back into his vaccine research.
Because he knew that everything the people around him were risking, and daring, and sacrificing, was all because of that – because of him. And he knew that his hardest and most indispensable work was probably still ahead of him. Surviving, getting out of undead North America, was just a starting point. After that, he had a whole world to save.
Right now, he needed to use the time to make sure he was up to speed.
Everyone in this group contributed.
No one shirked.
* * *
Mark smoked his cigarette down to the filter – and possibly a little past that. He ground the butt out on the fence before him, gazing balefully through the dark at the generator and bulbous fuel tank to his left.
Sarah and her goddamned fire safety…
It was starting to look like safety was a one-way street. At least as far as their marriage was concerned. He started to pocket the cigarette butt, but then remembered Sarah’s obsession with policing the area around the cabin, her visceral hatred of littering – and he flicked it high over the fence, into the darkness, and out onto the dirt beyond.
Threading his fingers through the wire of the fence, he gazed again down the dirt road, seeing only to the point where it bent in the forest, thirty yards out, very dim and indistinct. He could see almost nothing now, with the light nearly completely gone.
And their son still wasn’t back.
Mark frequently failed to understand his wife’s tactical logic. He was nevertheless always obligated to comply with it. But what he really couldn’t understand now was her willingness to leave their only child out in the wilderness, a wilderness filled with monsters, even as the sun went down. The leader of the soldiers had specifically offered to go out with his own men and search. As it had been their abysmal behavior that had caused the boy to run off, this seemed more than fair to Mark.
But it seemed like his feelings, long discounted around here, had dropped in importance down to nothing.
He began to reach for another cigarette, then thought: Fuck it. And fuck HER.
If Sarah wanted to hide out inside with her soldier boys, while their son was missing and in danger, she could do so. But he didn’t have to play along. He turned on his heel, stalked back to the woodpile, and unwedged the axe from the stump it was stuck in.
As he pulled it free and hoisted it up onto his shoulder, a sound behind him caused his head to snap around, and his eyes to drill into the gathering darkness.
A figure, lurching and hobbled, rounded the bend of the road.
For one second, Mark thought the walking dead had found them.
Then he looked closer.
It was his son.
* * *
Less than a minute earlier, when the boy had turned to find the Foxtrot hurtling down on him from up the road, his first reaction had been to bring the shotgun to bear, and try to make another seemingly impossible shot on the galloping nightmare.
But then his mother’s voice somehow sounded in his head.
No gunfire near the cabin. NO MATTER WHAT.
Even in extremity, even in his mortal peril, she scolded and judged him.
And he complied.
With no time to spare, with the slavering abomination nearly upon him, he switched his grip, flipping the weapon around and hefting it instead by the barrel. And he drew the stock back behind his head, and then swung it at the creature’s head like an incoming fastball.
Nearly miraculously, he hit it straight on, and with full power – splattering the already-rotten head like a sausage piñata, and sending it splashing in a broad arc across a wide area of dirt and foliage. Unfortunately, the body lost little of its momentum, and plowed straight into the reedy youth, sending him five feet up the road and over onto his back.
Spluttering and coughing, marshaling his last strength, he heaved and rolled the twice-dead and headless body off of him. He then levered himself to his feet, his wounded and fatigued leg howling in protest, leaned over to retrieve the shotgun – and then paused to feel in his front jeans pocket that the timing belt was still there.
It was, thank God.
He then took a couple of deep breaths and resumed his stagger up the road. It would only be another few dozen yards, and then he would be home. And safe.
But at this point he was so pummeled, and exhausted, and weak from unceasing terror and blood loss, that he was totally oblivious to the sounds that followed behind him up the road.
Had he heard them, he would have understood that his progress had been even slower than he knew. And that he’d more than once blacked out and slumped down to the dirt, only rising and carrying on after precious minutes had bled away.
Finally, if he’d worked out all of that, he might have lamented the irony of his successful, and silent, swing for the fences on the head of the fast one that came for him.
Because if he’d fired his weapon instead, he would have alerted the others in the cabin.
They would have had precious seconds to react.
And everything might have played out differently, and perhaps less fatally, than it did.
* * *
Inside the cabin, everyone heard a shout, and all eight of them startled. Handon surveyed the room. “Stand fast,” he said, his voice not brooking any dissent. He nodded at Sarah, who moved to the door, lifted her rifle from the rack, and put her hand on the doorknob. Handon stepped up behind her, his HK416 now also held two-handed, by the pistol grip and the tactical foregrip on the front rail.
The two stepped outside together.
And they beheld a scene with terrible depth of field.
In the foreground was the back of Mark Cameron, up against the fence, one hand on his axe, and the other on the locking mechanism of the gate.
In the middle ground, on the other side of the fence, was their son, looking weak and terrified and on the verge of collapse. And he was, Sarah Cameron instantly clocked, her eagle eye zooming in on the blood and the limp, wounded in some indeterminate but very disturbing way.
And, finally, in the background there was a crowd scene. Dozens of the dead, lurching up the dark road and spilling out into the clearing. They were maybe five seconds behind the boy.
Sarah and Handon both pulled their rifles to their shoulders and sighted in.
Flicking at her safety with her right thumb, Sarah put her finger inside her trigger guard. But before she discharged her weapon, she shouted a single syllable:
“MARK…!”
Her voice was so emphatic, and so commanding, and he so well trained, that he stopped in place and twisted back around to face her.
“Do not open the gate!” she shouted, her eyes pleading. There wasn’t time to exp
lain more – that the dead were too close, that she and Handon had to clear away some breathing room first… and, most critically, and damningly, that the gate itself opened outward.
Mark only got the short-form message. And it validated for him everything he hated, and now thought he knew, about his wife. He didn’t bother trying to answer her in words. He simply narrowed his eyes and gave her a single acid look that communicated itself perfectly even in the near-dark. It said:
What the hell is wrong with you?
He then turned, worked the latch, swung the gate out, and jogged out and forward, his axe held high and wide over his right shoulder.
* * *
Handon knew the game was up now. He surveyed and evaluated the situation, as was his job and native calling, nearly instantly. He gave Sarah one beat to call to her husband. But when he saw the man go out anyway, he went to work. He started putting chin points behind the bright-red dot of his EOTech holographic sight.
And he began blowing infected brainstems out the backs of heads.
The crisp chuffs of his suppressed shots faded under the unsuppressed ones of Sarah’s Mini-14. Her rounds only came at about half the rate of Handon’s.
But she was shooting around her family.
And they were both shooting to save them – to buy them the precious breathing room that might allow them to get back inside the wire. There was no time for anything else, only to shoot from where they stood. There was just too little slack in the system.
But for at least the next second, Mark reduced it even more – he was still moving away, toward the horde – and the boy was still moving away from it too slowly. Slower than the horde was coming in.
Five rounds triggered off, then ten, then twenty, alternately jarringly loud and whisper-smooth, the identical long, golden 5.56mm casings raining down around the porch, tinkling on the wood, bouncing dully into the dark around them. Sarah expertly held her barrel way out on its length, for more stability, rather than amateurishly in close by the magazine well; and Handon held his foregrip; and they both shifted their aims fractionally, panning from side to side, over and again, making shots and sometimes missing them, but developing a sense that they were at least thinning the mass of the dead.
But it was all happening too quickly and chaotically really to assess or analyze, even for Handon. And then, a second later, they saw Mark Cameron reach his son.
The boy collapsed into his arms. His father caught him with his left arm and shoulder – but instantly had to defend them both, bringing the axe heavily into a dead forehead directly in front and bearing down on them.
And with this, a single sob choked Sarah Cameron’s throat – because she could not shoot through her husband or her boy, and had to simply watch as the man engaged his attackers to the front. But she swallowed the hot sob down, pulled her rifle tighter in to her shoulder, and carried on making herself every bit as useful as she could possibly be.
She’d been trying to avoid this day for a very long time.
But now that it was here, she’d use every ounce of her skill and energy trying to save it.
And to save her family.
* * *
Mark Cameron held up the limp weight of his son, while he tried to unwedge the axe from the head he’d buried it in. Terrifyingly, the creature was still clawing at him – he simply hadn’t penetrated far enough into the brain, coming in from the top down. An explosion sounded below him and to the side, and knocked them both back a step, and Mark realized the boy had fired the shotgun. The animated corpse rocketed backward from the sheer muzzle energy of the buckshot round fired point-blank.
But the corpse also took Mark’s axe with it.
And another dead man was on them instantly. The boy, running on adrenaline and terror now, elevated his barrel and lined up a point-blank head shot. The twelve-gauge boomed again, almost knocking the weakened boy to the ground, and he and his father both saw the head of their attacker disappear in a red and gray mist.
Tragically, once again, it was the wrong part of the head.
The doomed and hellish creature had simply stopped existing above the nostrils. But the brainstem abided – and the half-headed, sightless monstrosity still lurched at them, gnashing and grasping. Mark gave it a mighty kick in the chest with his boot, sending it over backward. He then shrugged his son up a bit higher, and pulled them both back toward the fence, stumbling like also-rans in a three-legged race.
The boy was audibly crying now. And Mark’s own mind was screaming in protest as well, nearly whited out by terror and regret. It was all going wrong, and it didn’t look like ending well, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Instead, he just lurched the two of them forward, his own muscles failing from the cold horror and exertion, toward the possibility of salvation.
Around them, bodies continued to hit the ground – their disanimation not obviously connected to the sounds of rapid chugs and barks from the porch. But Handon and Sarah were still mowing the grass. Though everything was happening too quickly to track… everything was also falling apart.
The father and his son reached the fence.
They both banged into the outward-opening gate, slamming it fully closed.
As Mark pulled them both upright, and tried to back away to make room to open it…
Nightmare hands clamped down on their backs and shoulders.
Saddle Up
Fifteen silhouettes stood in the failing light of sunset that fell across the Virginia air station, buffeted by the blasting wind that had arrived out of nowhere during the early evening. Most of them were staring at the massive metal monstrosity that had been towed out of the last warehouse to be searched. Among them were some of the most skilled surviving aircraft maintenance personnel and aeronautical engineers on the planet, who just happened to be part of the air wing crew of the USS John F. Kennedy.
Over by the plane, which sat at the end of one of the main runways, facing outwards, another dozen people were busying themselves. Four pilots had come over from the JFK; not one of them had flown anything remotely like Chuckie before, but all of them claimed that it would be “no problem.” The Flying Fortress might be ancient, and the dazzlingly gaudy silver and yellow might be difficult for a naval or Marine aviator to take seriously. But the B17 Flying Fortress had been kept in immaculate condition up until the day it was left abandoned in the warehouse, and its engine was in perfect repair – though it hadn’t turned over in years.
But someone had loved this plane.
Chuckie. Wesley had to admit even the name made him smile. This plane had actually flown in World War II, and thanks to one of the engineers being a complete geek and history buff, they knew that it was one of only a dozen of its kind still working when civilization fell. Chuckie had spent most of its later service entertaining civilians at the air station’s many air shows, or sitting on display in the museum in Virginia Beach. How it ended up hidden at the back of a dusty warehouse was a question that would probably never be answered.
Wesley took a deep breath and turned to Fick.
“Is it airworthy?” Wesley asked.
Fick shrugged. “They’re still trying to unfuck themselves and figure that out. And Drake is stewing over us using it, but even he admitted that it may be the only option. Though they definitely can’t land that big bastard on the flat-top. Its landing distance is too long, there’s no tailhook – and if we mount one, they’re pretty sure the whole goddamned airframe will tear apart when we try to stop it that fast.”
“So how do they think they’ll get everybody back if it can’t land?”
“It’s got to launch, fly out, make the extraction, and fly back in time to land here before the storm arrives.”
“But that’s just hours away.”
“If they don’t make it, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way: everyone onboard can just jump out over the ocean with packed canopies. Then they’ll ditch the plane in the sea and try to fish everyone out afterward. It’s a goddamned sh
ame, not to mention dangerous as hell. But that’s life in the ZA.”
Two of the engineers approached, both with uncertainty in their eyes. Fick looked upon them with an expressionless gaze.
“So. Is it going?”
“Yes,” said the taller of the two men. “It can go.”
For the next half-hour Wesley stood by and watched organized chaos. He had a distinct feeling that he should be doing something helpful, but didn’t really know where to put himself. He did manage to make himself useful for a few minutes, helping to load some ammunition crates. The Marines stood hunched over the monstrosity of a twin-barreled machine gun that was perched at the tail of the plane. He overheard them as he loaded boxes of ammo.
“Jesus Christ, dude,” one said. “Are these really Ma Deuces?”
“Look for yourself,” the other said. “The M2 hasn’t changed since fucking World War I. Best heavy machine gun design ever. And we’ve got nothing but belted fifty-cal.”
The first shook his head. “Hilarious. I manned one of these on a Humvee in the First Battle of Falujah.”
“So then you know how to load one. Get to it.”
The other complied, though muttering, “I only got the duty ’cause the first three guys got hit…”
At this point, Wesley wandered off.
Chuckie was, with his limited opinion and knowledge of aircraft, one of the shiniest, gaudiest things he’d ever seen. When the dust had fallen away from the skin of the plane it had revealed a gleaming, reflective body with bright yellow, red, and blue markings, including a W stamped on the tail. W for Wesley, he thought, though he didn’t share that with anyone. He didn’t think they would see the humor in something so vain applied to such an ancient and storied flying machine.
The grounds of the base had become a beehive of activity. The pilots spent the time either pacing around the plane, pointing at things that Wesley couldn’t see, nodding at one other, or huddling in the cockpit.
