Rise (Book 2): Age of the Dead

by Gareth Wood

  There was another barricade, intact. I had missed it on my first scan of the town. It was composed of tires and sandbags, and it blocked the entire width of the bridge. On the bridge itself were about twenty or so prone bodies, at distances of ten to fifteen meters from the barricade. Somebody had been sniping. I looked carefully, but there was no movement at the barrier. There were also no bodies on the far side that I could see.

  Eric turned to me. “We should check that out. There might be people up there.”

  “I agree,” I said, “but let’s see about the rest of the town from here before we go anywhere.” The last thing we needed was to get ourselves ambushed by a large group of undead. We had to check the roads and streets, get an estimate of the number of zombies in the town, and make sure our path there and back was clear of debris and wrecked vehicles.

  * * *

  The area behind the bridge barricade was a peninsula wedged between the Columbia River and the Kicking Horse River, and the police station and hospital were on the far side of the bridge from us. It was a very defensible location, and I imagine it was the fallback point for the whole town if the area was attacked by raiders or the undead broke out nearby. We still couldn’t see any motion behind the barricade, and it was impossible to see immediately behind the barrier at all. I turned away and looked at the route we would have to take. Down the Trans-Canada to the river valley elevation, just a few hundred meters, and then turn left onto the Highway 95 turnout. That road looped under itself and went a few hundred meters more to the bridge, passing between shops and houses. The bridge itself was empty of cars and debris, but there were those bodies lying out in the sunlight. There appeared to be a sign about halfway down the bridge, but it was fallen over, and we couldn’t read it from here. I panned carefully along the entire length of the road we would need to take to get to the barricades, and saw only a few undead out moving about, perhaps a dozen on the road, and maybe another ten or so in the nearby streets. The population of the undead here was very thin, it seemed. The living had probably been fairly well organised, and had destroyed many of the zombies before retreating over the water.

  We spent a half hour watching and estimating, and finally decided we could get down there to the bridge easily if we could get past the upper barricade we were parked next to. That turned out to be easy. The townspeople had installed a gate in this barrier, a large sheet metal and pipe construction that had replaced the wooden block they had used when I last came through here. This one was solid. It could be winched up by someone turning a wheel on the other side, and blocked open with a four-by-four post. It was tall enough that a large truck could get in, and wide enough for two cars to pass without touching.

  Eric and I went over and took some pictures of the mechanism. This gate was really good, and we could use this idea back in Cold Lake. He stood guard while I turned the wheel, and in two minutes I had the gate open and both vehicles had driven through. We blocked the gate open with the post, in case we had to leave in a hurry, and then climbed back into the vehicles. I got into the F-250 with Sanji and Amanda, and Eric got in the Highlander with Darren.

  We drove down along the highway, and turned left onto the road that led to the bridge. Three shambling undead lurched into our path from the ditch, but we went past them before they could try to grab hold. They walked along behind us, arms reaching.

  Around the circle we went, down under the road we had just driven in on, and then south onto the bridge road. This was Highway 95, and passed south through the town and on to Radium Hot Springs and beyond. It was also the only way across the Kicking Horse River. We passed more undead, all of them older ones by my estimate, with blackened flesh and split skin, bones evident under the corruption and decay. They had missing patches of hair, burst eyeballs, or black tongues. Each of them was an inexplicable nightmare of cannibalistic hunger that knew nothing save primordial instinct and animal drive. Each of them should have been lying silent and immobile in a grave somewhere, not walking and feeding and stinking. I shook my head to clear it of these thoughts. I needed to focus on the now.

  We passed the last of the houses, and drove onto the bridge. I looked to Sanji, who was driving.

  “Slow it down. We don’t want a ribcage to burst a tire.”

  “Right,” he agreed, and braked to a nice slow crawl. We wove between bodies for half the length of the bridge. Water rushed below us in a bright blue flood of icy cold. I looked back at Amanda, who looked nervous. I smiled at her, as reassuringly as I could. She smiled a little in return.

  “It’ll be okay, Amanda,” I said. I looked at the Browning in her hip holster. “Got extra ammo for that?”

  “Three clips, and twenty extra rounds in my pockets,” she told me. Sunlight glinted off her piercings.

  “Good. Get ready. Once we clear the bodies we have to get out and see if we can find a way over that barricade.”

  “Right,” she said.

  I had a similar amount of extra ammo for my Browning, and two clips for the C7A1 tucked into pockets. I wasn’t planning on carrying the rifle, though; I wanted a hand free for climbing.

  We passed the sign, but it was lying face down. We didn’t want to stop out here to take a look, so I told Sanji to keep moving. He pulled the truck up to about ten feet from the barricade, where I saw that it was higher than I had initially thought. It stood maybe ten feet high, and was built of wooden logs, tires, and barbed wire, with sandbags and sheets of plywood thrown in for good measure. It stretched from one end of the bridge to the other, with no breaks for vehicle access, indicating that the people who built it didn’t expect to ever see anyone living come from this direction.

  I climbed out and looked back. The far end of the bridge, several hundred feet back, was crowded with a dozen trailing undead. They were coming for us. We would have to be quick here. The Highlander was pulled over to the side about twenty feet back, and Darren was getting out and watching the back trail with his C7 raised and aimed. I turned to the barrier and called out, hoping for a response.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?” I called, “Hello? We came from Cold Lake! Is anyone there?” There was no reply. I looked back at Sanji, and motioned him to move the truck forward closer to the barrier. He pulled it up, and Amanda climbed out the passenger side. Together we climbed up on the hood of the F-250, and stood up high enough to look over the barricade only to be met with the sight of bodies lying on the other side, in the sunlight.

  I swore quietly and counted fifteen corpses. Men, women and children, all lying near the wall. Cause of death was a mystery, but they smelled of hideous decay, and none of them was moving around. They were the lucky dead, the ones who stayed down. Amanda looked queasy, and I was gagging at the smell myself. I stepped back, pulling her with me, and turned to look at the far end of the bridge. The dozen undead there had become thirty. They were still moving forward, slowly closing the distance between us. Unless you were a sharpshooter like my wife, they were still out of rifle range. None of us was a sharpshooter. We would have to either try to drive through the mass of them, which was not a good idea, or shoot them as they got into range. That was better, but we had no exit here. The river running below us was freezing cold, so going into that would bring on hypothermia. There was no break in the barrier that we could get vehicles through, so if we went over the wall it meant abandoning the trucks and going on foot. Not fun at all.

  “We’d better climb down,” I told Amanda. She had seen the same thing I had, the same numbers of undead approaching. We climbed down and I had Sanji turn the truck around. Eric got out of the Highlander after turning it, and we had a good look at the undead swarm coming to devour us.

  One long look through the binoculars told me I had been stupid. There were fifty of the walking dead on the bridge now, and out of the houses and side streets there were hundreds more coming. We could see them above the long un-mowed grass, walking down residential roads towards the bridge, and the unwitting feast that had blindly driven right in
, oblivious to their presence.

  Eric turned to me and said, “We are totally fucked.”

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!

  I jumped up on the back of the F-250, and estimated the nearest undead to be just over seventy meters away from us. It would not take long for them to get into biting distance. I jumped down and yelled to Sanji.

  “Get the C7’s out, you, me, and Eric!” While Darren grabbed the rifles for us I turned to Amanda, who was staring towards the approaching horde with horror. I stepped in front of her, forcing her to look at me.

  “Grab your shotgun, and get in position. Follow Sanji’s lead, and don’t fire until they’re close!” She looked at me with frightened eyes, but nodded and ran to the truck. Sanji had turned the truck around now, and was facing back the way we had come. He jumped out, shotgun in hand, and climbed up into the back of the truck so that he could fire down into the approaching swarm. Amanda climbed up with him, and they both took positions behind the cab.

  Darren came running up, handed me my C7A1, then ran to take a position near the front of the Highlander. He’s the shortest of us all. Even Amanda is taller than Darren. The Highlander was just too big for him to lean across easily, so he knelt by the front of it. Eric stood leaning across the hood of the big Toyota, and checked his weapon. I did the same as I walked to the opposite edge of the bridge. I wanted to be able to shoot from cover, and the only good cover left was the pedestrian fence that ran along the north side of the bridge. It was a metal divider between the vehicle surface and the narrow walking path. On the opposite side of that was the rushing water of the river below; I could feel the cold spray of it as it ran over rocks and boulders.

  “Amanda! Sanji!” I called, “Hold fire until they are just beyond the trucks. We have the range, you guys take down whatever gets past us. Got it?”

  “We got it, Brian,” Sanji replied. He went back to telling Amanda what to expect, and I looked over at Darren and Eric. Both had checked their weapons now, and Darren had a spare clip on the ground in front of him. He looked scared, but then we all did. Eric was the only exception. He looked calm, and drew his knife and tested the edge. He replaced it and took up his rifle again, aiming over the hood. I didn’t have to tell either of them what to do, we had been through this sort of thing once or twice. I turned back to the undead.

  They were a lot closer now. More than sixty were on the bridge itself, and the streets behind them were crowded. This was not going to be any fun. I checked my ammunition, and found I had four clips plus the one in the rifle itself. I made sure I was on single fire, and took aim. I was taking a bead on the closest walking corpse, a thin bald man with suspenders and a bloody yellow shirt, when Darren spoke up.

  “Dibs on the leader,” he said. He fired twice when the creature was sixty feet away. The first bullet hit the thing in the cheek, and started to spin its head to the left. The next struck the temple as the thing was staggered, and burst out the other side as a black spray. Baldy toppled, joining the other corpses on the pavement. The zombies behind Baldy were not quite at the optimal range yet, so I whistled to Darren.

  “Show off,” I said. He gave me a thumbs up in return, then went back to aiming.

  The next ten minutes were hell on earth. As the crowd of grasping and moaning abominations came within sixty feet of the front of the Highlander, the three of us opened fire. Darren took the center of the crowd, I took the left edge, and Eric took the right side. We fired single shots, aimed for the head, and tried to remain calm as they got closer and closer. Soon the crack of gunshots was lost in the background, just another sound in the chaos. We started out doing well, dropping one zombie at a time, but there were too many for us to deal with this way, and the group was soon forty feet away. I changed clips when I ran dry, and looked back up to see that several of the undead had gotten far too close to us. I shot a woman’s corpse in the face, and even as she fell, I was tracking the next one, a teenage boy who reminded me of Darren. We had killed at least thirty of them by this point, but more and more were coming. A quick glance showed a few hundred of them on the bridge. Christ, where had they all come from? I went back to the task at hand.

  Shooting as carefully as I could, I managed to hit a tall man with no shirt. He had tattoos on his neck and arms. His brains sprayed over those behind him as he fell, and he joined the slowly growing pile of dead bodies.

  More shooting from my right as Darren fired three rounds into a huge man, and then ran out. He changed clips as the tall corpse staggered forward, and Eric leaned over the Highlander hood and fired two more rounds at the thing’s head. One bullet finally got through to the brain and the giant fell. I fired and fired, hitting a solid target of skull and brains about one shot in four. Not bad. Jess would be impressed.

  A trio of hungry dead men lurched at me, and they got as close as ten feet from me before I managed to kill them all. The huge group of walking corpses had closed to about twenty feet on average now. They just kept coming! The smell of rotting tissues was overwhelming, and I was having trouble breathing. I looked down at the river for a second, wishing for the water to carry the stench away, and heard someone call, “Brian! Look out!”

  It had red hair and one good arm, but it was all over me before I could raise my rifle. The left arm grabbed at my neck, and the stump of the right arm batted at my face. I fumbled with the rifle, then dropped it as my judo training took over. I inhaled a miasma of foul odour and putrefaction, and twisted as the thing brought its teeth in towards my face. My left hand went beneath the thing’s chin, and my right grabbed it by the pants. Something squished under my grasp, and I felt cold wetness, but I lifted while dropping my center below the creature’s hips. I lifted and twisted, and the flailing body went over the railing to vanish into the water below. I turned around to see another one five feet away, but its skull was shattered by a shotgun blast from atop the truck.

  Whether it was Sanji or Amanda that had just saved me, I had no idea. I grabbed the C7 from the ground, and took a quick look around. Darren had moved back, and the front to the Highlander was a killing zone. Eric had retreated as well, and was near the back of the F-250. I decided the better part of valour was surviving the day, and ran back towards the truck, yelling at Darren and Eric as I moved.

  “Get up on the truck!” And to Sanji and Amanda I called, “Climb! Get on the wall!”

  Sanji fired once more over to my right, and then turned to the wall. He climbed up in just a few seconds, and perched on top, holding his hand down for Amanda. I looked back over my shoulder, and saw that the Highlander was completely surrounded by the hungry dead. Darren climbed onto the deck of the truck ahead of me, and I was close behind. We stopped to check on Eric, who was still shooting.

  “Eric! Come on!” I took aim at a creature wearing a football uniform, and fired three shots. The bullets smashed its skull, and it fell back into some others. Eric darted around the fallen things, and grabbed the side of the truck as dozens of the undead closed in behind him. I reached down and grabbed his arm, and started pulling him up. Darren was already climbing the wall, and Sanji was yelling at us. My heart was pounding, and I didn’t hear anything other than my own breathing. The undead closest to the truck grabbed Eric by the legs, and my progress pulling him up stopped. Rotten hands started to pull him back, and I put my leg up on the side and pulled as hard as I could. I thought I was going to lose him, but he yelled and struggled up. I heard gunshots and the resistance vanished, and Eric landed on me in the back of the truck as I fell over. We scrambled up, and jumped to the wall. The F-250 was surrounded now, and the undead were reaching for us as we climbed, grasping over the side with rotted arms.

  I made it to the top, Sanji pulling me up the last foot, and reached back for Eric. As I looked down I realised I had left my rifle in the truck. Dammit! Finally we were all on the wall. Three hundred mindless walking dead crowded around the base of the barrier, reaching for us.

  Eric had been right, we were totally fucked. We
were separated from the vehicles by enough zombies to tear us into bloody ribbons, and I had left my rifle in the back of the F-250, along with all of our supplies.

  “Shit! Look!” Amanda called, pointing to the far side of the barricade we perched upon. Through the trees and across the lawns on the far side there were more undead approaching. If we stayed here we were all going to die very soon. Fuck! The closest one on the land side was still about one hundred feet off, so we had time. I looked to the others.

  “We climb down, run to cover, and circle back to the vehicles later. Okay?” Everyone nodded except Eric, who was looking back at the swarm on the bridge. “Darren, cover us while we climb down.” I grabbed the edge and lowered myself slowly down the ten feet, then waited with my Browning drawn amongst the dead at the base of the wall for Amanda to climb down the tires and wood. Sanji was next, and when he got to the bottom I asked him how much ammo he had left. He had twenty shells, and whatever he was carrying for his pistol. Amanda had sixteen shotgun shells as well.

  Darren shot the closest land side zombie just then, and started climbing down. Eric stayed above to cover him, and fired at three undead as they approached. Two of them fell. The third staggered as it was shot in the chin, and bone and rotten flesh splattered everywhere. Looking around, I could see the houses, the road, and the river flowing south. There were only a few zombies coming for us here, compared to the horde on the bridge. I waved at Eric and called him to come down. He swung his rifle up to his shoulder and started climbing, and as he turned I saw it. His left leg was bleeding. There was a torn section of fabric on his left calf, and I could see blood running down his leg. It was colouring his pant leg almost down to his boot.