What Zombies Fear 3: The Gathering

by Kirk Allmond

  The room she was in had a window that faced the park; she must have subconsciously picked it. She didn't like to mention it, but Kris had a wicked case of morbid curiosity when it came to watching people. The train was coming in fast just outside Centennial Park, and she tried, unsuccessfully, to make herself ignore it.

  ----

  Victor felt the first walking corpse smash into the blue V-shaped shield he had erected in front of the train and watched it fly into the air well above the height of the train. As the crowd thickened, more and more zombies smashed into the shield. Individually, each impact felt like a pinprick in his brain. By the time they were a quarter of the way into the two-mile long park, there was a steady stream of corpses flying off the train. The huge number of impacts on his shield felt like a thousand daggers in his skull. He knew the TCD wouldn't last very long without the shield; he struggled to hold it as long as he could.

  They made it just past halfway through the park full of rotting corpses before he felt the shield drop, like a rubber band snapping the back of his eyeballs. He cradled his head in his hands and pressed his palms on his temples, trying to press the pain in his head away. He nearly lost consciousness from the pain. The train smashed a huge number of zombies, sending them rolling outward like the waves behind a speedboat, toppling thousands more zombies on either side of the train. Flying body parts destroyed many of them as the plow on the front of the speeding train obliterated the walkers in its path. They left a swath of dead and dismembered bodies fifty feet on either side of the train.

  The Track Clearing Device held up much longer than he expected without the enhancement. At three quarters of the way through the park, the massive number of impacts and increased drag started to slow the train. The more they slowed, the less damage they were doing. Victor had recovered his senses enough to realize that they weren't going to make it.

  “Stop the train and get to your cannon, Shelton,” Victor said. He felt him apply the brakes, although they weren't really needed; the zombies were doing the bulk of the braking. The train rolled to a stop about half a mile from the far end of the park. “Open Fire!” Victor yelled to every human within two miles.

  ----

  His voice was in her head again, and that made her extremely uncomfortable. What made it worse was that she came to the realization that his voice wasn't external. It was inside her mind, and she wasn't able to block it out like she could with everything else. She shifted awkwardly, debating what to do.

  With a sigh, she walked over to the apartment window, apple in hand, and pulled the curtains to one side. Kris looked down at the horde below. Off to the side, the train looked like a wedge among the dead. It had come to a total stop with a sizable amount of corpses strewn to either side. She could see Tookes, Leo, John, and Renee from her position. Everyone was doing something except for Tookes. Why was he just standing there?

  ----

  Vic saw Leo's aura disappear from the train. She reappeared on the roof of a building behind them, and a tracer round from John's 50mm cannon flew upwards towards Leo's position. Leo disappeared and reappeared, immediately followed by a couple of bullets from John. She was finding all the supers; Victor saw the path of the tracer rounds flying upwards toward the rooftops as John executed some waiting zombies Leo had found.

  Repeatedly, she hopped from building to building. While she was searching, John and Shelton were keeping the crowd away from the train.

  Victor closed his eyes and concentrated, looking for streams of data. Supers controlled the lower zombies by briefly connecting to each like a mental leash. He slipped into an altered state of consciousness where every sensation was heightened. He felt the cold wind of winter licking his skin, and goose bumps rose on his arms. The sun was noticeably warmer on his back. He could smell the trampled grass under the feet of the horde, and he could separate out the smell of rotten flesh from the gun-smoke wafting towards him from the cannons. He could hear the thoughts of all the humans around him. If he concentrated, he could hear John's thoughts. Every ounce of his concentration was on acquiring targets and aiming the huge gun. His thought stream made no sense to Tookes, just streams of numbers. Every once in a while, the pattern would change, and a thought would be in English. “Four hundred eighty rounds left. Six hundred eight-four immediate threats. Two hundred four threats left at empty. Two seconds to reload increases immediate threats to three hundred seven.” Alternatively, he would hear, “Barrel needs time to cool in one hundred five rounds.”

  When Vic opened his eyes, he could see tens of thousands of lines of information flowing from the horde of zombies to various points in Atlanta. They looked like white ropes of light, flowing along the streets or up to the rooftops. He picked the closest one and followed it. When he had traced these connections back to the source before, he thinned his aura down to a super fine point and drove it into the part of the brain that was sending out the orders. This time, he blunted the end and hurled himself up the channel towards the source. He felt the impact as he drove the dull spear of his aura into the super's brain. Then the stream blinked out, and he was back on top of the train.

  He watched the streams flow down into the horde. At this end, they jumped from zombie to zombie, like lightning bolts hopping from one conductor to another. The white hot ropes twisted and bounced, the ends enveloping the head of each corpse as it delivered its orders before releasing and moving on to the next. It reminded him of a grotesque puppet show.

  A stream connected to one particularly disgusting zombie directly in front of him. Without thinking, he wrapped his aura around the end of the connection. “Advance towards the living.”

  He followed the rope to the next. “Advance towards the living.” There was no response from the corpse.

  On the third hop, he slid his aura underneath the rope, forming it around the zombie's head as the super had done. The rope connected to Victor's aura. He felt a powerful compulsion: “Advance towards the living.” He redirected that order and replaced it with, “Stop.” The corpse stopped where it stood.

  Victor had a second to wonder if this was how Max controlled all those zombies outside of that strip club before he latched on to the rope again, following it back to the zombie sending the orders. Instead of smashing into its brain, he spread the end to envelope its head. He drove into its brain and issued one order. “Save Max.”

  The second he gave that order, he felt something slam into him. His head felt like it was in a vice. “Really? You think you can take over my lieutenants?” Laura's voice thundered in his brain. It felt like worms crawling through his skull as she searched for something.

  “Hello, Laura. I don't think I can. I did take over one of your lieutenants. I got bored with how easy it was to kill them. Why don't you come down here and talk to me face to face? That went pretty well for you last time,” he said, trying to bait her into coming down to the field.

  ----

  “Really? You think you can take over my lieutenants?” Kris has never heard that voice before. It resonated deeply inside her skull. This voice—this female voice—felt nothing like Tookes' voice. Her voice was cold, calculating, and cryptic. Kris might have been annoyed at Tookes, but his voice didn't chill her body like this one did.

  “Hello, Laura. I don't think I can. I did take over one of your lieutenants. I got bored with how easy it was to kill them. Why don't you come down here and talk to me face to face? That went pretty well for you last time.” It was Tookes responding. His voice was a warm and familiar light that passed through her subconscious. Kris saw the bright blue trail of his voice stretching from the train to a window four floors up from where she was standing.

  Fuck me; she's in the same building?

  ----

  Victor concentrated his shield in the tiniest pinprick inside his skull and expanded it out with all of his might. There was some pressure from the outside, but he easily pushed her out of his head and raced up the rope from his own brain back towards her. She severed the
connection, and Victor was abruptly back on top of the train.

  He was vaguely aware of the chain-guns roaring through bullets. He was so focused on his own tasks he had shut out almost all other noise. While he contemplated his next action, he noticed the tracers creating paths like lasers through the crowds. They had ten thousand rounds for each of the five cannons. Victor was suddenly worried at how long it was going to hold out. It felt like they had all the ammo in the world yesterday morning.

  "Time to nut up or shut up," he said to himself, quoting his favorite movie character. He drew his hatchet right as the cannons stopped firing. He leaped off the roof of the train. As he flew, his aura solidified into armor around him. He landed so hard the ground shook, smashing a zombie that had the misfortune of standing in his landing zone. He landed with his left knee in the gooey remains of some corporate raider's skull, his left hand down to absorb the last of the momentum. The zombie had been wearing a gray silk suit, which probably cost more than Victor made in a year. When he hit the ground, a small blue wave rolled off him, turning every zombie within a hundred feet of him to dust.

  “Dad, not so hard. You don't have to use so much,” Max's voice echoed inside his head.

  “Thanks, Buddy. I'm not sure what I'm doing. I didn't do that on purpose,” Victor sent back. “Can you tell me how to do it?”

  “You just think about them going away,” he said.

  "Oh. So simple," Vic said aloud. He was vaguely aware that the guns had stopped firing.

  He stood up as John, Leo, and Renee jumped down from the train. Remnants of Corporate Guy's brain ran down his leg, the shield keeping it from touching the fabric of his pants. He handed Renee a pouch out of his backpack, and she took off at a run across the open area. She disappeared from sight about ten feet before the first zombie, headed towards the middle of the field on a special mission.

  "Fuck, Tookes, why didn't you tell me you could do that blue shit?" asked John.

  "Didn't know I could. Certainly don't know if I can do it again," he said as a bullet impacted his armor hard enough to knock him back a step.

  "Sniper!" he yelled as he heard the report of the rifle, but John had already fired three rounds. Two seconds later, a headless corpse for each of John's bullets toppled off the roof of a building at the far corner of the park, over a mile away. They flopped head over heels as they fell, crushing a few unlucky zombies standing at the base of the building.

  "Sorry, mate, we must have missed a few," said John. Leo looked ashamed.

  "That armor's a trick. Glad they shot at you and not me," he added.

  "Let’s make sure that doesn't happen again, please," he said.

  The huge horde had closed in on them as they spoke. John dropped the duffle bag in his hand and shrugged his backpack off his shoulders. The open bags were stuffed with magazines, guns, and loose ammunition.

  "Now comes the hard part," Vic said.

  John drew a pair of Glocks, and Leo pulled her kukris from their sheaths.

  "The three of us against the world, just like old times," he said with a grin.

  Leo disappeared in a cloud as John started shooting zombies. He fired both guns, reloaded, and emptied them again. Corpses piled up fifty feet in front of them.

  "That's great, John. See how high you can stack them! Can you create a corpse-berm around the train? The goal is to keep them off the train as long as possible."

  John waited until a zombie tripped over the corpse of one they'd already shot before shooting it in the head. The second zombie landed across the corpse of the first with a wet thud. He continued firing, laying out a semi-circle of corpses around the train.

  With John covering him, Victor latched on to another data rope. He was defenseless while he was concentrating this hard; even John's gunshots from right beside him faded away. He'd learned his lesson from before; he still had a ringing migraine from defending against Laura's attack. This time, he drove up the data stream and severed the brain stem of the super.

  "One down, several hundred to go," he said aloud. His voice came to his from outside his own head, detached and ghostly.

  “Tookes has fuckin' lost it. There's no way we're going to survive this,” Victor heard John think as he said, "What?"

  One by one, Vic killed the supers that could only send one data stream at a time. He had always envisioned this as driving a very long spear into the brain of the lieutenant that was giving the orders. As a result of killing off their handlers, the stupid zombies nearest to them became disorganized. Instead of climbing directly up John's pile of corpses, they started trying to go around the pile, helping John seal off the ends of the corpse-berm beside the train.

  "One thousand rounds left, mate," John said.

  "Can you slow down some? I need more time," Tookes said.

  “Leo, how’s the back of the train doing?” he asked her, and she appeared beside him.

  "I've got them a dozen high. They're mostly starting to circle the pile now," she said.

  "Good, let’s slow down then. I need more time. Just stick to capping those that hit the top of the pile," he said.

  Most of the lower tier supers were dead. There were only a few single data streams left way at the back of the horde, all the way across the park. He spotted two white lines leading to the same location and followed one of them back to the source. This time, when he drove his spear into its brain, it was as if he hit a thin wooden shield. He mentally pressed harder, driving his spear through the shield. The ropes evaporated, and he selected the next super.

  This time, he thinned the top of his aura even more. The ultra-fine point pushed easily through the super's meager defenses, and he was back at his body. It was extra work; for the first time, he realized that he wasn't going to be able to do this all day. Leo, John, and Victor had killed about a third of the shamblers, but there were still hundreds of supers left.

  "John, how's your ammo?" Victor asked.

  "I have about ten minutes left at this pace," he replied.

  “Renee, are you ready? Count to ten and fire one shot if you're in position.”

  "John, stop firing for fifteen seconds please," Victor said to him.

  He counted to ten and heard a single gunshot from all the way across the park.

  “Corbin, the train is yours. Get Max to safety as soon as you can.”

  "Leo, can you take us to where that shot came from?"

  ----

  "What are we waiting for, Laura?" Kris was paying close attention to the voices four floors above her. She could hear that there were three of them up there. This male voice was scratchy and sounded like it had been stretched too thin.

  "It's not time yet, Jake. They're not close enough." It was Laura speaking now. Her voice was cold and cryptic just like before.

  "Bullshit. I'm tired of waiting. Let's just do it now." The third voice had a sexy southern Georgia accent. If he looked anything like how he sounded, it was a shame that he was dead.

  "Ben, shut up. I'm counting on Tookes' desire to kill all of these soldiers to lead him and his friends towards the middle of the field. Once they get there, fifteen five-gallon cans of plastic explosives will vaporize them. We have to get them away from the train; we need Max alive." Kris heard the three of them walking above her. They moved from the dining room into the living room. One of them pulled back the curtains to watch the battle below.

  Fifteen five-gallon cans of explosives? Jesus Christ! Kris's thoughts were frantic. Laura was going to blow the field. From this vantage point, she could see Tookes, John, and Leo. She could pick out Renee's heartbeat but wasn't able to specifically tell where she was in the horde. Kris needed to warn them, but it would be too late. By the time Kris got to the ground floor, they would all already be dead.

  Tookes, she thought, I knew it was a trap. She's going to blow the park!

  Kris's thoughts tumbled out of her brain and expanded out of herself, much like when she projected the dome. Her words stretched down the side of the bui
lding and hit Tookes in the back of his head. She could feel his subconscious inside her own. Their thoughts intertwined into one solid color, and Kris could see every memory Tookes had. Every thought about rebuilding a world that was safe for the next generation. Every dream of peace and tranquility, every hope of watching Max grow up and find a wife and have children of his own. All of the responsibility he felt, the weight of feeling like if he didn't step up to make a difference, no one would.

  "Oh fuck," she said aloud. "I get it. Jesus Christ, I get it!"

  “I know. So am I. I sent Renee out to plant charges all throughout the park. She's got them ready. I hope you're a safe distance from here. It’s going to be big,” sent Tookes.

  “No, you don't get it. She said that she has fifteen five-gallon buckets of plastic explosives. You're going to be seriously fucked unless you get out of there. I'm on the twentieth floor in the building behind you. She's four floors above me with two others. She's going to wait until you move to the middle of the park to set it off, but the other two are urging her to get it over with.”

  “How big can you make that sound shield of yours?” Tookes asked.

  “How do you know about that?” she replied.

  “I saw you do it when you walked away from the train. You were talking to John, and then you surrounded the two of you with some sort of aura that cut off all sound. Can you expand that to cover the whole park? Or at least the bulk of it?”

  “Fuck if I know. I just enveloped an entire floor of this building. It's not like I do this often.”