He fell from her view and she didn’t dare look up over the huge tire to see what had happened to him. To stand would mean a real and certain death. Nothing could live through the barrage of lead. Even with their initial advantage of surprise, the renegades were outgunned two-to-one. Though to her abused ears, it seemed more like a hundred-to-one.
She was so overcome by the noise that she thought that she was deaf to everything except the sound of automatic rifle fire, but then someone managed to get to one of the fifty caliber machine guns. It put everything in perspective. She had thought she knew what loud was, then the gun opened up like chain thunder. It was God’s jackhammer, dwarfing all other sounds.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
The sound of it caused waves of pain to spike her ears. It blasted trucks and pontoons alike and everything she had seen and felt before was tiny in comparison. Sadie froze in place, not out of fear, but she was struck numb by the sheer amount of noise, mayhem and death around her.
Then she saw a flash of light like a blazing fast fairy zip by. Then another came and another. It was coming from the fifty-cal. They were using tracer rounds and as Sadie watched from between the axles of the 5-ton truck, she saw the gunner walk his bullets right up to one of the cage fighters. The heavy slugs tore the man into pieces, shredding him up as though he were no more substantial than cotton candy.
Captain Grey leapt from the truck he’d been crouched upon, landing with a bang on the hood of Sadie’s 5-ton. With tracers zipping ever closer to him, he aimed his rifle, shot once and then jumped down to crouch next to Sadie.
For a second all was quiet.
“What are you doing just sitting there?” he asked. “That guy on the other truck has been asking for ammo for a while now. Get your ass in gear and get him some!”
Grey’s voice seemed muted even though he was standing right next to her and Sadie realized the noise of the guns had partially deafened her. Then, suddenly, sound flooded her ears. There was someone screaming out beyond the hangar. There was the sound of breaking glass and the thump and ting of bullets striking the trucks. There was someone yelling for ammo and another someone yelling something about their flank being turned. And there was the sound of the zombies. They were moaning by the hundreds and hammering the walls and doors of the hangar with their fists so that the building shook beneath their blows.
And still Sadie wasn’t scared to the point of freezing. She got to a crouch, grabbed a crate of prefilled magazines and was about to race off when she remembered the fifty-cal. “What about the big gun?” she asked Grey.
“Don’t worry about it. That one will be quiet for a little while.” She popped her head over the hood long enough to see a man slumped over the gun. Grey grinned and said, “He’s probably flash fried to the barrel.”
“Oh good,” Sadie replied, feeling queasy, not just at the answer, but the glib way Grey had given it. “I gotta go.”
Due to the weight of the crate, she waddled to the far end of the truck and peeked out. Bullets were impossible to see, but the flashes of fire from the rifle barrels couldn’t be missed. Seeing them, one thought came across the wires in her head: They were all aiming just at her! By God, it seemed so.
“Don’t freeze up,” Grey said. “Remember, you are fast as lightning. Now get moving. And tell that bastard not to waste so much ammo.”
She ran to other truck and it felt like she was running in glue. How long was she out there with a hundred guns blasting in her direction? “Holy shit! Holy shit!” she gasped when she had made it across and was huddled behind the truck.
There was a man crouched against the same truck, using the canted front tire as cover. “What are you waiting for? I need some fucking ammo,” he yelled to Sadie.
She wasn’t about to run over to him. In truth, she hadn’t been targeted by more than one or two of the River King’s men, but she had been seen by more and now the truck was being whittled down as ten rifles were ripping hot lead into it, trying to get at them. The best she could do was slide the magazines to him, one at a time.
“Try not to use it up so fast this time,” she admonished.
“Fuck that. I’ll use as much as I need to.” He slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle and peeked out just long enough to have thirty bullets zip his way. “Now that is wasting ammo. You missed me you bunch of mother-fuckers!”
There came another cry for bullets. Sadie turned to race away and stopped, now paralyzed by fright at what she saw. The garage-style back door was being systematically bashed inwards. Already it was bowed to such an extent that zombies were squishing through at the edges. She dropped the crate, pulled her pistol and killed the ones she could see. It did little good. The zombies redoubled their efforts to get inside.
“Damn it! Where’s the fucking ammo?” someone yelled.
“Coming,” she screamed back, holstering the pistol, and grabbing the crate. She had to get past two different open areas where bullets were flying hot in order to find the man in need of bullets. Neil had beaten her there.
“I got this one,” he said, and was just about to dash forward into the line of fire when she stopped him.
“No! Not like that,” she said. “You can throw it to him. Watch.” The man was up in the cab of the truck. Sadie yelled to him, “Hey you! I’m going to throw up a few magazines. Catch!”
“No,” he called back. “I think I have a problem here.”
“He must be hurt,” Neil said. “You stay here. I’ll go see if I can help him.”
Sadie pulled him back. “No way, Neil. You’re hurt, too. You won’t be able to climb up there; not quick enough, not with people shooting at you.”
“You won’t be able to either,” Neil replied.
He was probably right. She saw that, although the space was narrow between the truck and the pontoon, she’d be completely exposed. “I know, I’ll go up the back. You stay here and keep an eye on the zombies.”
“Zombies?” He followed her pointing finger. “Holy moly.”
She grinned at his method of cursing. “That’s my Neil,” she said and then heaved her crate of ammo into the back of the 5-ton and climbed up after it. Sadie was forced to slink low; bullets were raking the vehicle from bow to stern making it deadly to raise herself more than two feet off the bed. She even shoved the crate ahead of her just in case something ricocheted the wrong way.
“Hey! You ok?” she called out when she got to the front of the bed. There had been a window separating the cab and the bed, but it was blown out. There was blood on the edges of the glass. “Are you hurt?”
“Just gimme the ammo,” the man said.
“Ok, but you don’t sound good.” She held out two magazines and it was a red hand that reached for them. “You’re bleeding.”
“No shit,” he slurred. The way he talked made him sound drunk. “I need two more mags. I think anymore might be a waste.”
“Not if you take your time and don’t blow through your ammo.”
He sighed wearily. “It’s not the ammo I’m afraid of running out of.”
Sadie chanced the bullets that were flicking their way. She quickly leaned through the window and saw the cage fighter…or what was left of him. Half his face was shot away. The skin of his jaw hung in a bloody flap and she could see his teeth; some were in place, stuck up in his gum line like they should have been, others were on his shoulder or on the seat of the 5-ton. It was hard to tell how many times he’d been shot but gory wet ribbons of flesh and blood hung all down his chest.
Shock had her staring. “Get down,” he mumbled, and waved her back, accidentally flicking fresh blood into her face. She fell back onto the bed, not a second too soon. A hundred bullets plinked and clinked all around them.
When it abated for a second, she said, “It’ll be okay. You’ll be alright.” It had just come out. Empathy for the man’s plight had spoken the words, not logic. Even if the River King’s men left at that very moment, the man would be far from alright.
>
“Just give me the ammo,” he said in his slurry voice.
“Yeah, s-sure. Anything y-you want.” Her voice cracked as she handed two more magazines to a man who wouldn’t be alive in the next five minutes.
He didn’t waste a second, maybe because he didn’t have any left to waste. He sat up and fired in a long burst at the Humvees that sat out in the open. The return fire was even more intense, causing Sadie to huddle down behind her crate. The moment there was a let up, he sat up and fired again, this time until his gun went dry.
“You still there?” he asked, as he crouched again, below the level of the dash, and slipped a new magazine in.
“Yeah. Do you need something? Some water or something.” How would he drink it without a real mouth? she asked herself, feeling stupid.
“No, I don’t need anything. I just wanted to say: I think you’re pretty.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked. She was sure she didn’t look pretty just then. She had begun to hurt inside for the man and the intense pain was causing her to cry; she knew that, by now, her heavy mascara was halfway down her face in a gruesome mask.
“Yeah…hold on.” He sat up and began spraying the Humvees with lead. He was killed then. Someone had crawled up into the Humvee with the second fifty-caliber machinegun and now blasted the 5-ton to smithereens. The heavy rounds were stopped only by the engine block, and even then, they bounced around, zipping through the light steel of the dash, killing the wounded cage-fighter almost instantaneously.
The heavy rounds even began to penetrate the metal wall of the bed frame. Sadie’s first inclination that she was in trouble came when a piece of metal sliced across the back of her hand. She looked up to see the wall separating the bed from the cab coming apart.
She had only one direction for safety and that wasn’t out the back gate. The bullets were running front to back which meant she had to leap off the bed and into the narrow and extremely dangerous alley between the 5-ton and the pontoon it was parked next to.
With lead flying all around, she leapt up and vaulted over the side of the truck. Like a cat she landed on her feet and was moving before she’d fully absorbed the impact of the fall. Inches behind her, the fearsome glow of zipping tracers followed her to the pontoon where she dove for cover beneath the double wheels of the flatbed.
The fifty gunner foolishly kept up his tremendous barrage and Captain Grey made him pay. He ducked out from behind the truck that Sadie had just jumped from, and, with cool and deadly accuracy, he shot the gunner between the eyes, and then, just as quickly, he ducked away again.
Sadie leaned against the tires as her breath ran in and out of her hotly as though she had just sprinted a hundred meters rather than the few feet she had.
“You ok?” Grey called from behind the truck.
“Yeah. What about Neil? He was back there, too.”
Neil appeared a step behind the Captain and gave her a wave. He was perfectly framed against the backdrop of zombies finally breaking through the back door and rushing over each other to get at the trapped renegades. Sadie’s mouth came open but she was otherwise frozen.
There was even a lull in the firing that she could have spoken into, a brief period when she could have been heard clearly by everyone in the hangar. She could hear Neil easily enough as he asked, “Are we winning?”
To her it was a ridiculous question, even discounting the zombies pouring into the room. They were being decimated from the front and now the steel edges of the perfect trap were closing in on them from behind. Grey must’ve thought the same thing because his brow came down and he opened his mouth, probably to bark out something demeaning but then his eyes stopped on Sadie’s face. Her throat was so tight that a squeak couldn’t escape it; she raised a hand and pointed behind them.
Neil turned, as if in slow motion, and had barely reacted to the presence of zombies in their rear, when Grey sprang into action. In one swift motion he turned Neil back around and started forcing him up onto the bed of the truck. Since he had the use of only one arm, Neil needed all the help he could get, but even with help, he was going too slow. Sadie saw that he would make it up only at the expense of leaving Grey prey to the charging beasts.
And then Sadie was sprinting. She ignored the bullets whipping around her and dashed across the dangerous alley to come to a halt in an even more dangerous situation, she had just put herself between her friends and their onrushing death.
She began firing her Glock, and for the first time in her life, she felt completely as one with a weapon. She aimed, pulled her trigger, and killed. Not a bullet was wasted and not a second of time either. The back hangar door was 20 feet wide, allowing for the passage of a mob of zombies and even with her shooting the best she ever had, she was almost swallowed whole by the swarming zombie army. And yet she kept firing.
The fusion between woman and gun was so complete that when she pulled the trigger on nothing but air she was able to drop the empty clip and slapped home a new one before the first hit the ground. She was shooting again in a flash, dropping zombies literally at her feet; her spent brass plunking off their dead faces.
“Sadie!” Neil screamed. He was in the truck and Grey was climbing in behind him.
The girl turned on the spot and ran in a blur to the truck. At that moment she felt great. Healthy, whole, and young; she didn’t need the outstretched hands in order to bound up into the bed. She was so full of herself at that moment that she was actually smiling as she stood in full view of both sets of her enemies.
The passage of a bullet within a whisker of her nose brought her to her senses. Grey pulled her down. “Where’s Deanna?” he shouted into her face.
“I don’t know.” How could she know? To her, the battle was pure chaos. Zombies were flowing like a horrid, putrid river all around the trucks. There were screams all around them as some of the cage fighters, failing to make it to higher ground, were eaten alive.
“Deanna!” Grey bellowed at the top of his lungs. If there was an answer, it couldn’t be heard over the moans of the undead and the continual thunder of the guns. Grey was dangerously exposed and it was Neil who hauled him down to safety.
“What do we do?” the smaller man asked, looking as though he had reached the limit of his leadership. There was no good answer, or at least, there wasn’t an answer that could be truthfully given that wasn’t something along the lines of: Die with as much honor and dignity as you can muster.
Grey knew the truth as well as Sadie: they were losing the battle. It seemed impossible for him to put that into words. He shook his head and then shrugged and then bit his lip.
Sadie poked her head up to check their situation. It was a depressing sight. Just at the moment there were only three guns firing from within the hangar and they weren’t firing at the River King’s men. Bullets were fearsome, but the zombies were doubly so. And across from them, the River King’s men were still blasting away. Although there were ten bodies laid out on the tarmac around the Humvees, that wasn’t even half of the River King’s force. Worse, Sadie could see in the distance the telltale dust of more vehicles heading their way.
The renegades were doomed.
Grey saw the dust also, and for the first time since Sadie had known him, he looked rattled. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said in a grim voice. “We’re each going to save at least one bullet for the end.”
Chapter 30
Jillybean
Ernest had his arm extended, gesturing at something behind her but he wasn’t the only one who’d seen something. She had half-turned to look, when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a gang of zombies at the far end of the dock heading their way. Her finger came up and the two of them were now pointing in opposite directions; she was sure that what she was pointing at was far closer and probably much more urgent.
For some reason, he had pulled out a glittering knife, which she thought strange and even worrisome. Ipes suggested she should relax. Don’t worry about the knife, he told
her. His voice was tight and higher than normal and yet it held the authority of her father, Ram, and Captain Grey all in one…and that was worrisome to.
How could he ask her not to worry? The knife was so close to her that she’d almost lost an eye when she had turned. If she couldn’t worry about that, what could she worry about?
Trust me, he said in a calmer voice.
That wasn’t so easy to do. He’d been acting strange from the moment they had run into Ernest in the woods. The zebra normally didn’t care for him but for some reason, he had turned a 180 and was now fully on the man’s side, agreeing with him about everything and overlooking any oddity that surfaced, such as coming upon the fully stocked boat so easily. That should have sent red flags up, but Ipes had only asked her not to fret. And now he was asking her to ignore the knife and the weird look in Ernest’s eyes.
There was only one explanation for Ipes’ behavior: He’s finally onboard; he’s finally being good, Jillybean said to herself.
That’s what it is, Ipes agreed. Ernest knows what he’s doing. We should trust him.
That would’ve been easier to do if Ernest wasn’t suddenly acting so strange. As though he didn’t trust Jillybean, he took an awkward step back before turning to take in the charging zombies. Quickly, he sheathed the knife and pulled his tiny .22 handgun. It looked like a toy.
“No, don’t use that,” Jillybean said. “Come on. We can get rid of them easier and far quieter.” She hurried down the ladder and waited expectantly for him in the boat. He followed, wearing a smirk, and when he was seated, he shoved them away from a piling that sported tar three feet above the waterline. They watched as the zombies came to the edge of the dock and started pitching forward into the water. The current took them away. It was all as easy as flushing a toilet.
He laughed aloud. “Maybe I was wrong, you may still come in handy.”
She didn’t know what he meant by that but she did know that there had been tension in the air and now it was gone, completely. “So, what was over there?” She meant across the river.
The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades Page 32
