“All right, enough. We need to run,” Duncan said. “We’ll deal with your reloader later.”
The two ran back to the car as another wave broke over the hill, and twenty zombies tumbled into view standing up and moving towards the pair. The groan they set up was answered by another huge noise behind them, and Tommy knew the battle was far from over.
They drove back, hurrying because the zombies were now pouring over the hill, and were starting to reach the road. Tommy had to swerve around several pockets of ghouls, and one actually reached the car, only to bounce off the fender as Tommy aimed for it while he drove past.
Behind them, the zombies were walking up the road, chasing down the meals that had been so tantalizing in front of them and then suddenly swept away to the north.
Tommy and Duncan drove until they saw the gathering of cars two miles north as instructed. The distance gave them only about a half an hour of time to prepare for the next assault. To the north was another town, and there was no way they were going to face a horde that size without proper battlements and protection.
Duncan reached the commanders first. He could see they were not happy, and some of them were openly scowling and speaking in low tones to each other. One man in particular was sitting on his hood with his arms crossed, openly talking about inexperience and stupidity. I’ll remember you, Duncan thought as he reached the center of the group.
“All right. Here’s the deal. We need to get ahead of this group. I figure we killed about five hundred to a thousand zombies out there,” Duncan said.
“Yeah. We killed. Didn’t see you on the line,” the man with the crossed arms spoke.
Duncan took a deep breath. “I went to where the line was breached, and pulled a fighter from a car. What did you do?” Duncan threw the challenge out in the open and the group of men and women went silent. The tension was thick, and Duncan was marking where everyone was sitting in case he needed to move quickly.
The man with the crossed arms unfolded them and stood up slowly. He glowered at Duncan, and his hand twitched near his gun. Duncan watched him without blinking, keeping an eye on the gun hand.
Tommy chose that moment to intervene. “Both of you stand down. Now. We have bigger problems.”
Duncan let the tension flow out of his body, but he kept a wary eye on his adversary. The situation was far from being over and everyone knew it, but for the moment, the group still had a common enemy.
“Stand down my ass. We could have killed them damn zombies, and you lost your nerve. You called us back before we could really get going!” The man, whose name was Breck, looked around the group and grinned when he saw he had a few nodding supporters.
Tommy looked the man squarely in the eye. “Stand down or you are relieved. Your choice. Make it now.” Tommy said the words slowly but clearly, a trick he had learned from John. He never broke eye contact and had total faith that Duncan would deal with whatever might transpire outside of his field of vision.
Breck fumed and nearly bared his teeth in frustration, but he knew in the end he would lose. If things came to a head here and he came out on top, it was only a matter of time before Talon and James got back.
“Standing down. Sir,” Breck said.
Tommy took his eyes off of the man and addressed the group.
“The zombies are coming. We hit them but barely made a dent. There’s too many to face head on, and we are running out of options before they are on us. I’ll be honest, I need some ideas right now. If they were just regular zombies, I’d say let’s circle the wagons, set up a defensive perimeter, and let them come to us. But these guys need a special kind of killing.”
“Can we dig a trench? Let them fall into it? Wait, no, helmets. Damn.”
“What about a wall? No, same problem.”
“Hell, I’m tapped.”
“Same here.”
“What is that fool doing?”
The last statement caught everyone by surprise and as one they looked over to where Duncan was facing off with a small mesquite tree. He knelt down and pretended to aim, then shook his head and got up again. He tried it lying down and the aiming was worse. He turned over and lay on his back with his arm over his eyes.
“Nothing, he’s as stuck as we are.” Everyone turned away, and some of the commanders were looking at the horizon, trying to calculate when the horde would arrive.
“Got it!” Duncan yelled. Everyone turned back to see him still lying on his back, but this time he was aiming a rifle at the tree. The simplicity of the solution suddenly struck the group and there were excited murmurs as the assembled commanders pondered the new information.
“All right!” Tommy said. “Here’s the new plan. Two shooters per car, they can reload their own mags. One driver. The two in the back lie down in the trunk or on the truck bed and shoot upwards into the zombies. Driver keeps an eye on things and skedaddles when necessary. Clear?” Several nods circulated the area. “Get going. We’ll use the 345 road as the center point of the line and slowly go north from there. Dismissed.”
The group walked away, and Duncan and Tommy watched them go. Duncan spoke first.
“Think we’ll have trouble with him again?” he asked.
“Was the Pope Catholic?”
“Do you think the pope is still alive?”
“Probably. All religious leaders seem to somehow survive the worst of human conditions, somehow.”
“Let’s get this done.”
The two men walked over to their car, and Duncan drove them to where the semi trucks were parked. The drivers were waiting for instructions and looking off to the horizon. Tommy looked the same way and he could see just at the horizon level a rippling mass that boded ill for everyone.
“Fire them up!” Duncan yelled. “I need you on a line on the road in ten minutes!
“What are we doing?” a driver asked.
“Just being a barricade. We want to keep the horde coming at us and not scattering all over creation. Move it!” Duncan yelled back. “Follow my lead! Let’s go!”
Duncan waited for the men to clamber into their cabs and fire up the big diesels. He pulled out ahead of them and passed the long line of cars waiting to get into position. The idea was to just slowly ride forward, and shoot the zombies as they tried to grab at you. In theory, everything should go well.
Duncan led the trucks down the road, and then signaled them to get into a long line along the road. The drivers complied, and when they reached their destinations, they quickly put their blockades up, turning ten semis into a nearly solid wall. The drivers were perfectly safe in their cabs, but all of them would be on the roofs of their trailers helping out with some sniping.
With the trucks in place, Tommy and Duncan got out of the way of the fighters who were eager to close with the enemy and inflict some damage. Tommy told Duncan to find a high point where they both could exercise their rifles. As they drove, Tommy pointed out a truck that had a man lying in the bed with a pistol in each hand.
“You do realize that no matter what you do from this point on, you will never be as cool as that guy?” Tommy said.
Duncan looked. “If he lives, we should promote him.”
“John can do it when he gets back.”
“Right.”
The line of cars and trucks assembled themselves along a line heading east and west. The hard part was the waiting while checking and rechecking gear that had already been checked several times. The horde walked closer and closer, and drivers eyed the land in front of them, making sure to note where the ruts and holes were. Shooters made sure they were secure in their vehicles, all of them having fastened themselves to the car or truck in some fashion.
There wasn’t any particular order or firing discipline needed. The fighters just went to work when the opportunity presented itself. Duncan and Tommy busied themselves with making long-range shots at zombies that tried to walk around the other side of the truck line.
The crackle of gunfire was constant, and
as the car line moved back, piles of corpses were being left in its wake. It was as if the cars were a very large snail that was leaving a trail of slime behind it.
A quick look at the battle itself left Tommy to believe they might actually pull this one off. Thousands of bodies carpeted the plains, and it was plain to see the strategy had been a sound one. The moving cars were too irresistible to the zombies, although it must have been frustrating to have the buffet table driving away from you all the time.
The drivers were careful to pick terrain that would offer the easiest passage, trying not to throw off anyone’s aim or run the risk of someone tumbling out of the back of the cars and trucks. The shooters were taking a great deal of risk, because sometimes the zombies were almost within grasping distance before they were shot.
Duncan watched the battle with his scope, this time mounted on a rifle, and occasionally fired a shot. The noise from the battlefield was deafening with the cars, the shots, and the groans of the zombies combining to punish the eardrums and tighten the neck muscles.
“Looks like they’re starting to thin out,” Tommy said. He’d been shooting for a while and was nearing the end of his ammunition supply for his rifle. Which was a good thing, too, because he was sure Duncan would want to go down and join the fight.
“Seems like it. We’re going to have a hell of a cleanup after this,” Duncan said, firing another shot.
“We have the earth movers. We’ll dig a mass grave and put them in there,” Tommy said.
Duncan turned to look at his friend. “You’re not thinking of using the earth movers on the soldiers’ bodies, are you?”
Tommy shook his head. “God, no. Did you think I meant that? Hell, no, these were the defenders of this country. We’ll lay them in properly.”
Duncan nodded and fired another shot. “Good. We’d have a full-scale rebellion to deal with, and not just from that idiot Breck.”
It took a while, and the sun was well past the noon hour before the final soldier was put down. Several cars overheated, and the crews had to abandon them to the horde, while guns overheated and ammo supplies ran low. But in the end, the field was clear, and the survivors knew they had done something significant in the fight against the undead.
Two days later, Duncan met with the commanders again. This time Breck was absent, having been sent out to scout ahead while the army dealt with the huge pile of corpses the latest battle had tallied.
“We’re on the road again tomorrow; going to head south until we hit the next major metropolitan area. After that we head west and get ourselves into New Mexico. Any questions?” Duncan said.
“Any word from John or Charlie?” one commander wanted to know. Several nodding heads told Duncan others were taking a serious interest in John’s absence.
Duncan shook his head. “We figure he’s about where he needs to be, so hopefully he will get the situation resolved and get our people back.”
“What if he doesn’t come back?”
Duncan wasn’t offended by the question. Everyone took their chances in the field, so death wasn’t such a far-off proposition. “Then we keep going. In all honesty, did you really have anything better to do?”
That got a response of laughter which defused the dark conversation.
Duncan dismissed the group as Tommy walked in.
“They looking for John and Charlie?” he asked.
“Still. You think they’re okay?”
“Better than whatever they’re running into that they don’t like.
“True. How do you think our people are doing?”
Tommy thought for a moment. “Probably trying to find some way of killing their captors.”
Montana, Ravine
Casey was frustrated. They had been digging for two weeks, and by her estimation, they were only about halfway there. The first diggings were much more successful, but as they dug farther and farther into the landslide, more rocks and rubble had to be moved out of the way. Some of them were large enough that the tunnel had to be diverted, and that meant time and fear of discovery. More than once one of the fighters stationed to watch the rim shot at a curious head peeking over the side. One of them shot a mirror to pieces that someone had attached to a stick to see what was going on.
Casey vented her frustration in a meeting with Alice down where the creek disappeared in a small cave under the rock. More than one fighter speculated about heading into that dark tunnel, but none of them figured they’d come out the other end alive. The water moved in with deceptive slowness, but just past the outer rim you could see the water pouring with increased velocity, vanishing into blackness darker than absolute night.
“It’s worse than I thought,” Casey said. “The rocks are unstable, the ice is not holding things back, and we’ve had two cave-ins already. And we’re not even halfway there!” Casey ran a hand through her hair. “Ugh. Maybe we should just come out the top and climb for it,” she said, looking up at the cliff face for the millionth time. She hated the cliff, hated the people who lived on it, hated the creek, hated everything about this prison.
Alice held out a calming hand. “You have to be patient, dear. You’ve given this camp something to root for, something that allows them to see progress being made. Hopefully, it will bear fruit.” Alice looked up at the cliff face, then back to Casey. “Have you given any thought to what you plan to do once you reach the top?” she asked.
Casey nodded. “We figured we’d get most of our people through the tunnel during the night then make our way into the town. We round up the community, shoot the man who killed Haggerty, then get the rest of us out with whatever we can get from our vehicles. Supply up and head out.”
Alice thought for a moment. “Would you kill any of the townspeople?”
Casey nodded. “If we had to, and if they supported that bastard, Hobbes, yes.”
Alice looked again up at the cliff. “I see. Well, you do what you have to. Thank you, dear, for speaking with me.”
Casey nodded and walked away, not feeling very good for the meeting. She felt like Alice was not really interested in the tunnel and was distracted for some reason. Maybe she’s starting to lose it, Casey thought as she made her way over to her car. She wanted to rest a bit before tonight’s digging, and the air today had an especially nasty chill about it. Every glance at the sky told her snow was coming, and that was good for the digging as most people on the mountain would stay indoors and leave them alone for the night. It might be an opportunity to move some of the heavier obstacles out of the way.
The snow started around half past sundown. Casey was standing outside the tunnel entrance when an odd sound drifted through the air with the snow. It was a kind of clanking noise, like something heavy was being lifted slowly.
Undeterred, Casey sent the four-man team of diggers into the tunnel with instructions to dig as hard and as fast as they could. Casey was tired of waiting, tired of hoping that John Talon would rescue them, tired of everything. She would get out of this damn canyon or die trying.
Suddenly there was a loud crashing sound, like steel striking stone. The clanking sound started again, and when it finished there was another crash. Casey looked at the men and women around her and was greeted with a lot of shrugs. A lot of strange noises happened on top of the canyon, and this was likely another one of them.
The clanking sound stopped, and it was replaced by another sound, this one was a low grinding with a hissing noise that got louder and louder. Casey looked up through the snow and felt like she was flying up at the rim of the canyon. Except that she wasn’t the one that was moving, the canyon rim was coming down to meet her.
“Get out! Get out of there!” Casey screamed. Her cries were drowned in a roar of rock and stone that fell from the canyon wall. Others cried out as well, and then ducked back as the debris and stones fell all around them. One person got too close to the falling rock and was felled by a stone the size of a bowling ball.
The uproar seemed like it lasted forever, an
d small stones fell with regularity for at least another fifteen minutes. Casey was held back by two other fighters, and she struggled to try and reach the four men who had been suddenly buried under a house-sized chunk of cliff.
“Noooo!” Casey yelled. She broke free of her captors and ran towards the rock pile. Small stones dribbled down around the edges of the tunnel. From the ruined passage, a dark liquid slowly poured out, pooling at the base of the hill. Even in the darkness everyone knew what it was.
Casey fell to her knees at the edge of the puddle, holding her head in her hands and crying. She paused long enough to look up at the cliff and snow melted on her face.
“You bastards! Why do you want to keep us down here? Why?” Casey cried out the sky but didn’t get any response.
On top of the cliff, Carson Hobbes listened to Casey’s cries and smiled to himself. He turned to the person at his side.
“You did your part, so you can leave. Doubt you could show your face to any one of those people down there after this,” Carson said.
Alice was furious. “You said no one would get hurt; that you would make sure that no one was in that area!” She could hear Casey’s cries as well, and knew there would be a reckoning for her treachery someday. When she first found the note at the creek bed, she was hesitant to send it back. But when the offer was to be lifted out of the canyon and sent on her way, it was too much to resist.
“I lied. So what? I like to win.” Carson pointed to the far trail that led up the hill through the community. “Follow that until you run out of mountain.”
“What do I do for supplies?”
Carson shrugged. “Your problem. Should have brought up your own.”
Alice’s shoulders sagged as she realized she was alone in this venture. “I don’t know where we are,” she said in a small voice.
Carson sighed long and loud. “When you reach the end of the trail, no matter how many turns you’ve taken, you’ll be facing east. What you do from there is up to you.”
Alice took a deep breath, and started walking towards the trail. As she passed Carson, he suddenly moved, grabbing her by the arm, and with a shift of his feet he spun her around, and threw her out into the empty air over the canyon.
White Flag of the Dead (Book 9): The Zombie Wars (We All Fall Down) Page 7
