Dead Man's Land: Books of the Dead 3

by R. J. Spears

  “Let’s think of this as a proof of concept testing with the pikes,” I said. I had my serious doubts about them, but desperate times mean desperate measures.

  He nodded and moved toward the pikes, with me following. I plucked mine out of the wet soil. It came out of the ground with a wet sucking sound. I looked over as Brandon did the same. He looked a lot more confident than I did. Then again, he was our weapons master and preferred his swords and other bladed weapons. Me, I liked my ball bat, but I didn’t see it working against these armored bastards.

  It took a couple seconds to get used to the heft of the pike. It was heavily weighted toward its metal point, but after a couple practice jabs, I got used to its awkward balance. Getting the damn thing into a moving target was going to take some doing.

  Brandon, on the other hand, was off and running, heading up one of the safe lanes in the cables. We had designed the web of cables in such a way that there was several clears path through them back to the buildings. These paths zig-zagged through the cables. For the zombies, it was like a maze though, and they still stuck to their “shortest-distance-between-two- points-is-a-straight-line strategy” and kept constantly falling and then struggling to get back up.

  A hail of gunshots came from the building, and I looked to see several zombies moving up the driveway. Rifle barrels stuck out windows and various holes in the building, firing on the approaching undead. The zombies shook off the impact of the bullets and faltered a little, but did not go down. Another volley of bullets came down on the zombies, and two fell from headshots, while two more toppled from leg wounds. Those two struggled to get back up on their good legs, but fell repeatedly and then began to crawl forward. They were not easily deterred.

  I cautiously moved up my own safe alleyway between the cables, approaching the zombies. It felt a hell of a lot better having them at a safe assured distance. Even though I had done a lot of up-close work with the undead in the past, these armored zombies seemed a lot more formidable. Still, like the fool I am, I continued on.

  A zombie spotted me and sped up, changing its course and heading straight for me. It desperately reached for me with hands covered with jagged metal, but just as it closed the gap down to ten feet, it tripped over a strand of cable and went down on all fours. I quickly moved up and drew back my pike as I surveyed the top of the thing’s head for a weak point. There was a gap on the crown between two pieces of metal, and I aimed for that. I put all I had into the jabbing motion. It was either dumb luck or some divine providence, but I struck right where I was aiming. The sharp point pierced through the thin flesh and through the thing’s skull, as if it were made out of hot butter. It dropped like a brick and slid off the end of my pike with a sickening, sucking sound and clanged against the ground. A thin line of reddish-black goo dripped off the point. An odor of wet decay permeated the air around the body as more of the goo oozed out of the puncture wound, like ketchup from a bottle. I had no intention of ever using that formula on my hot dogs. Not now, not ever.

  Of course, I will probably never see another hot dog in my lifetime. That is if I lived long enough to have a lifetime.

  I heard a grunt off to my left and looked to see Brandon yanking his pike from the top of the head of another fallen zombie. A jut of red gushed out of the zombie’s head and shot onto Brandon’s feet.

  “Fucking gross,” he said.

  A clattering noise sounded in front of me, and I turned to see another zombie flailing around, face down, with its feet caught up on the cables. Unlike the others, this one had its head fully encased in what looked like sheet metal with no obvious openings.

  I looked to the metal end of my pike and then to the metal covering the zombies’ dome and did some calculating. This was going to take a lot of pounds per square inch of pressure, but I thought I could pierce the thing’s metal hide. I reared back with my pike and brought it forward in one fluid motion. The metal tip broke through the metal covering and buried deep into the zombie’s brain cavity.

  Just for good measure, I jiggled the end in its skull for a couple of seconds. Stirred, not shaken came to mind. Just the opposite of James Bond, but I still had a license to kill.

  I yanked my pike free just in time to avoid another zombie tripping and stumbling forward. Like most of the others, the top of its head was mostly exposed. I drove my pike home, sending it deep within the thing’s skull. It convulsed for a second, and this time, the reddish-black goo spewed out of its mouth. This was not pleasant work.

  “Take that, dead asshole,” Brandon yelled as he dispatched another one.

  A hail of bullets came from behind us. The zombies in the driveway had made it to the building and were trying to make their way inside. Several rifle barrels poked out of windows and holes as the people inside fired on the zombies. A handful of zombies fell, but most staggered from the bullets, their armor taking the impacts, and came, back toward the openings.

  “Get back from the windows,” a voice shouted, and I looked up to see Aaron with half of his torso out the window. He had his hand pulled back, preparing to toss something down on the zombies. It took a few seconds, but the rifle barrels retracted inside.

  “Fire in the hole,” Aaron yelled and tossed his payload down among the zombies.

  Brandon and I ducked down just as the grenade exploded. I closed my eyes to protect myself against any debris, and when I opened them again, I saw parts of zombies strewn about in front of the wall. One stood up, missing an arm, and stumbled forward. It looked like someone had used a cheese grater on its face, pieces of torn flesh hanging down in several places. Someone inside waited just long enough for it to get within range and shot it in the eye.

  Another one, missing half its leg and with the other one hanging on by a few pieces of meat, dragged itself along toward the entrance. A shot rang out, and it dropped to the dirt, where it stopped moving entirely.

  When I turned my attention back to approaching zombies, I saw a zombie in mid-fall, toppling right toward me. Instinctively, I whipped my pike up, and the thing fell onto its point, impaling it as the sharp end of the pike, pierced the thing’s metal hide. The impact knocked me back, and I pushed my end of the pike down to the ground, leaving that end sticking into the grass. Between its weight and momentum, the zombie continued to drive the pike into its chest as it worked its way down the pike’s shaft and towards me.

  Its fingers whipped only an inch away from my face. Like the other one, it had jagged pieces of metal strapped onto its hand. Some sick bastard had really thought this through.

  I yanked my pistol from my holster and brought it up as quickly as I could. I pulled the trigger and put a bullet right into the thing’s eye before it could make that last inch. It slumped forward, all its undead life ebbing away, and fell off to my right in a heap with my pike still sticking into its chest.

  It took some effort, but I was able to roll it over and pull my pike fee. When I said, effort, I meant I had to stick a foot onto the zombie’s chest and yank hard to get the pike out of the thing’s chest. I’m sure if someone saw me doing this, he might think he was watching a battle from the Middle Ages. I could see the commercial playing in my head with the announcer saying, “Tonight on the History Channel….”

  “A little help over here,” Brandon shouted, and I jerked my head in his direction in time to see him in a dance of death with a zombie. Like my pike, his was also sticking into the chest of a zombie, but this one remained standing. They moved in a tight circle as the zombie swiped at him. Two more zombies steamed towards him, but, like the others, they paid no attention to the cables and did headers at the same time, after tripping over the cable.

  I leapt over two cables and got to Brandon and his dance partner just as Brandon swished by me.

  “Pivot it, and put its back to me,” I said.

  “That’s easier said than done,” he said, grunting with exertion.

  “Just do it.”

  It took some doing, and he had to go to one knee,
but after a couple of jerking motions, he was able to get the things back to me. I pulled out my large hunting knife and reached around the zombie’s head to its face and pulled the blade back in a snapping motion and drove it deep into the thing’s eye socket. It went limp and slid off the end of the pike onto the ground.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said. “There’s too many of them. Even if they trip and we take them out one at a time, there are just way too many of them. Once they get past these cables, we’ll be swarmed.”

  “What do we do then?” he asked.

  “Pull back inside, and try to hold them off,” I said as I watched the two closest zombies regain their feet. “If we can’t, then we will have to run.”

  “Fuck that,” he said.

  “If all of them get through the fence and we can’t find a way to stop them, it might come to that.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  A churning, low mechanical growl came out of the fog, and we both stopped. The growl rolled through the fog, long and menacingly deep, getting closer by the second.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It sounds like a tank.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  The growl got louder. Brandon brought up his rifle and sent a spray of bullets into the faces of the dynamic dead duo headed our way. Most of the bullets bounced ineffectually off the armor, but with the amount of shots he fired and with just the simple law of averages, a couple would have to find a soft spot and did. The undead pair fell backwards, but as in the past, ten more zombies took their place. Even more unsettling, the growling mechanical sound grew ominously louder.

  We waited in breathless anticipation for about five more seconds, when a dark shape appeared in the fog, rattling our way. It gradually took form and looked like a large, dark rectangle rumbling our way. It broke out of the fog, and while it wasn’t a tank, it didn’t ease my fear all that much.

  Eighty thousand pounds of bulldozer steamed down the gently sloping hill toward the fence. Trailing behind this behemoth was a line of obedient zombies. It was as if they were ready to get that first place in at the free open house of the new all-you-can-eat buffet. The line was so long that it disappeared into the fog.

  This was not good.

  “Time to pull back,” Brandon said.

  Chapter 24

  Reversal of Fortune

  Rex powered the bulldozer forward, reveling in the immense power of this brute of a machine. It was like a child’s dream come true. Move over Bob the Builder; here comes Rex the Destroyer.

  Rex saw the main building through the thinning fog and even spied several of their opponents out in the field between the fence and the building. They were using spears of some sort on the zombies. He had to nod his head in admiration at their guts, but thought that they were a stupid as hell. There’s no way he’d try to take on these armored beasts in hand-to-hand combat. .

  This grudging admiration wasn’t going to stop him from killing them. If Anthony wanted them gone, Rex saw it as his job to take care of them, and he didn’t plan to be pretty about it.

  He pushed the bulldozer to ramming speed and chugged it forward on a collision course for the fence. The rambling pace of the bulldozer seemed a perfect complement to the armored undead soldiers as they followed along in their customary shuffle. It reminded Rex of his favorite World War II movies. He was the tank driver, and they were the foot soldiers.

  Just for good measure, Rex brought up his AK-47 and sent a spray of bullets at the two retreating men. He knew at his current distance, it was like spraying a garden hose at them, but he thought, What the hell? At least it would keep them on their toes.

  The fence came up fast, so he dropped the rifle and concentrated on the task at hand, which was busting the biggest hole he could in the fence. It was a simple task, and he had the perfect tool for the job.

  The bulldozer hit the fence, and speed wasn’t the deciding factor, bulk was. The fence went down as if it were made of balsa wood, the metal pickets snapping into pieces and spreading across the field like pickup sticks. Rex kept the bulldozer churning forward for about twenty feet before he brought the beast to a stop. He knew he could have kept going, but why get his hands too dirty when he had an army to do his work? His fingers danced across his control keypad, and the zombies started to move through the gaping hole in the fence.

  Still, he had his individual part to play. Rex reached down and picked up the RPG Anthony had given him and took aim. Just about ground level would do, he thought. He’d put in a nice opening for the soldiers to stroll through and get acquainted with the ‘lovely’ people inside.

  He watched the two men running for the building and timed his shot to intercept their path back to safety. They were just about home when he pressed the launch button; the warhead sped away in a flash of streaking light. A second later, the front of the building exploded, sending a plume of smoke into the air.

  Before the smoke could dissipate, Rex found himself caught in a shower of bullets. He ducked down as the bullets pinged off the tough metal skin of the bulldozer. He grabbed the controls and brought the shovel up, making it a very effective shield.

  As the people in the building continued to fire on him, Rex smiled as the bullets bounced harmlessly off the shovel. He watched the zombies stream past him and down the driveway, toward the new entrance he had just made in the building with his RPG. The clock was ticking down on the people at the Manor, and they didn’t even know it.

  Brandon had a slight lead on me, despite carrying all his weapons and the RPG. We were just about to the building when a hissing noise came from behind us. I turned to see when something whizzed past me, and a second later, I was bathed in a field of blinding white. A black wall slammed down on the light, shutting it off completely and utterly.

  Then, I saw horses. Lots of horses. All my mind could do was ask, “Where the hell did all these horses comes from?”

  It took another few seconds for me to realize that I was no longer in reality, but had been whisked away to one of my all-expenses paid, vision vacations. I could just imagine the advertisement for these visions. “Tired of that bothersome reality, then why not take a trip to the land of visions where you get to experience cryptic and sometimes frightening things.” It wasn’t a great sales pitch, but I never had any control of them, including when they came and what they were about. I’d had bring up a complaint with the program manager someday. If I survived.

  Men were riding the horses. They wore dark uniforms and carried guns. They were stampeding towards me, but I wasn’t really there with them, so I wasn’t concerned. How I knew this, I wasn’t sure, but my perspective had a dream-like quality to it, reminiscent of some of my most vivid visions.

  Then, I tried to guess why God was sending me a vision of horses while we were under attack, but there was no guessing what God was doing, so why try? It was better just to let the show play out. Tickets were free.

  Then again, it could be that my brain was so jumbled from what had just happened that it was making up its own movie. Why I cast horses in this picture was beyond me, if that were the case.

  The men on the horses began firing at something over my shoulder. I turned and saw Indians (Native Americans for the enlightened) firing back from among a small set of teepees. There weren’t a lot of Indians, but they were defending their people, and I knew they would do whatever they had to do to fend off the attackers. I saw women and children running away from the battle, heading for a grouping of tall pine trees.

  A uniformed horseman cut around the teepees and made a beeline for the women and the children, firing on the retreating Indians. Something in me was horrified, but despite my revulsion, I continued to watch. A male from the tribe broke from the group of defenders and took aim on the lone horseman. He fired, but his shots went wild, and the rider furiously continued on toward the frightened women and children. The tr
ibesman redirected his aim, and the next thing I saw was the horse toppling over, sending the rider in a violent spill. The rider went still. The Indian had shot the horse out from the under him.

  The women and children safely continued their run for the woods, but as for the rest of the story, the scene faded away, and I was left with blackness.

  Well, blackness and confusion. That’s standard operating procedure with these visions – show me something horrific and let me figure it out. I had no idea what the takeaway was from this vision, but God was almost never direct in His communications with me. I had learned to live with this.

  The blackness started to ebb away, and I found myself looking up into a slate gray sky as flat as an endless wall. I was back in reality, and something in me wished I could have stayed with my vision. That nagging something told me that no matter how ghastly my vision was, reality was going to be so much worse.

  That reality swept over me whether I wanted it or not, the sheer weight of it nearly bowled me over. The last two things I remembered were a streak of light whizzing past me accompanied by a violent hissing sound. That was followed by an explosion that lifted me off my feet and tossed me in the air like a child’s play thing, carelessly discarded.

  I lost time for a while. For how long, I wasn’t really sure. It was as if someone had just spliced a vital part of my life away. One minute, I was running, and the next I was sitting up with an insistent buzzing in my ears.

  I sat there staring blankly at a huge smoking hole in the front of the Manor’s main building, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how it got there.

  No, that hole just wasn’t going to work at all. It was going to be hell to fix, but I knew Travis would figure it out. He was good that way.

  My thoughts circled around themselves like this for several seconds, trying to sort out this incongruous picture, until I turned my head slightly and a pair legs appeared in my periphery. They seemed twisted at an unnatural angle. Making this new picture even more disturbing was the copious amounts of blood covering his pants.