The Rising Horde, Volume One

by Stephen Knight

  Dead Jeffries pulled off the Marine’s body armor, ignoring the man’s screams as it ripped open the battle dress blouse beneath. Dead Jeffries sank its teeth into the soft, warm flesh of the Marine’s abdomen and tore away a great chunk. Blood welled from the wound, shining brightly in the light. The Others crowded Dead Jeffries away then, overwhelming it by sheer mass alone as they descended upon the Marine, their seeking hands and teeth ripping apart his abdomen. Dead Jeffries fought against them, but there were too many. Dead Jeffries was losing out on the only meal around.

  Something, a vague, dreamlike memory trickled through Dead Jeffries’s brain, like sand down a funnel. Dead Jeffries crawled along the roof until it found what it was looking for: the Marine’s assault rifle. With its dead, numb fingers, Dead Jeffries pulled the weapon toward it and, after a long moment, held the weapon’s butt-stock against its shoulder. Turning toward the feasting Others, Dead Jeffries pulled the trigger and shot them all. One. Two. Three. Sometimes Dead Jeffries had to shoot an Other more than once, but eventually, their corpses fell to the rooftop, lifeless again, forever inanimate, as dark ichor leaked from the bullet holes in their heads.

  Except for one. One of the Others looked at Dead Jeffries with eyes that weren’t quite as lifeless, that still held a vague sparkle of something different, something unique. It backed away from the still-twitching Marine, its face and chin covered in a sheen of blood. Dead Jeffries watched it for a long moment, then fell to its knees and attacked the Marine. Dead Jeffries ate and ate, until the Marine shuddered his last. And then the meat was no longer what Dead Jeffries wanted, for the Marine had become a new Other. The reanimated Marine moaned, its dead eyes casting about, looking for food it could not effectively hunt; its legs and arms were mostly gone, devoured by the rest of the group.

  Dead Jeffries rose to its feet and looked across the rooftop. More of the Others milled about, searching for more prey. Dead Jeffries did not join them. Dead Jeffries somehow knew there was no more prey there. As it watched, one of the Others must have sensed the same thing, for it walked right off the roof and plummeted to the ground.

  Something thundered in the sky overhead. Most of the Others ignored it, but Dead Jeffries turned its face upward. A helicopter flew high in the sky. Dead Jeffries watched it for a long moment as it headed away from where it stood. It headed away from the columns of smoke that rose into the air from the east. Sounds echoed in the near distance: sharp, harsh reports. Gunfire. Dead Jeffries listened to the staccato blasts for a moment, and again, another trickle of something occurred in Dead Jeffries’s brain.

  Memory.

  Intelligence.

  Dead Jeffries knew the food was moving. Dead Jeffries already wanted to eat again, which meant it would have to follow the food. Dead Jeffries slowly walked toward the open rooftop door, not noticing that the Other—the one who had backed away from the food—followed.

  Dead Jeffries kept the rifle.

  The rifle could help Dead Jeffries get food.

  8

  “Hey, Roche. Did I show you my tattoo?”

  Staff Sergeant Jorge Roche sat in the truck with half of 2nd Platoon, A Company, 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, as it bumped and trundled its way down some Texas highway. The six-by-six’s engine and the noise its knobbed tires created as they rolled down the thoroughfare were loud, so loud that Roche had figured even Sergeant Wally Dobbins, or Doofus, wouldn’t be able to talk. Regrettably, that was not the case. Nothing shut up the Doofus.

  “No, you didn’t show me your tattoo, and I really don’t want to see it,” Roche said, raising his voice over the din.

  “Man, check this out,” the Doofus from Roofus, Kansas said. He pulled up one of the sleeves on his BDU blouse and exposed a series of Chinese characters.

  Roche had to admit they looked kind of cool. “What’s it say?”

  “It says ‘killing dragon,’” the Doofus said proudly. “Fuckin’ awesome, huh?”

  “Hey, Shin!” Roche yelled to the Ranger sitting across from him. Staff Sergeant Kent Shin didn’t stir, and his head lolled forward, bobbing from side to side. Roche kicked Shin’s boot. “Hey, Shin, check this out!”

  Shin raised his head. He was an indecently handsome guy, and Roche thought he should have been acting in Hong Kong chop-socky movies. He looked like a younger, more intense, less round-featured Chow Yun-Fat. But Shin had told Roche over a zillion beers one night that he’d always wanted to be a Ranger, ever since reading about what the Regiment went through in Somalia. That kind of shit created real men, and Shin wanted to know if he had what it took.

  “What the fuck do you want?” Shin asked.

  Roche pointed to Doofus, who held out his arm proudly. “What does this shit say?”

  Shin leaned forward slightly and looked at Doofus’s tattoo. He threw his head back and laughed, long and hard.

  “Hey, what the fuck?” Doofus said.

  “Doofus! What the hell did they tell you that said?”

  “It says ‘killing dragon,’ man!”

  Shin laughed again. “You asshole, it says ‘soy sauce!’”

  “What?” Doofus stared at the tattoo as if he could suddenly read it himself. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Totally not shitting you,” Shin said, leaning back against the bench seat. “Where’d you get that done?”

  “Off-post at Rising Ink. That old guy, the ’Nam vet—”

  “Murray Watts.” Shin nodded. “I know him. He knows Chinese better than I do, man, and he totally fucked you up. You’re a labeled condiment, Doofus.”

  “No fucking way! You’re just jerking me around, man!” Doofus yanked down his sleeve.

  “Dude, do you know Chinese? Did it even occur to you to look around on the Internet to see what ‘killing dragon’ written in Chinese would even look like?” Shin asked.

  “Watts said that’s what this said!”

  Roche chuckled. “Doof, Murray Watts is a pothead and known prankster. I heard a command sergeant major with third battalion went in a few years ago to get a tattoo that said, ‘I Love Mom,’ and he walked out of there with a tat that said, ‘I Love Men.’ Watts got the shit kicked out of him, but he laughed the entire time.”

  “You guys are full of shit!” Doofus shook his head.

  Shin shrugged and closed his eyes. Doofus was seething.

  Roche nudged him and tried to smooth things over. “Take it easy, Doof. If Shin’s not fucking around with you, it can be removed. But we’ll run it by Jimmy Tang. He’s from Taiwan; he knows more about this shit.” He jerked his thumb toward Shin. “Shin’s a Korean. He probably doesn’t even know how to read a takeout menu from a Chinese restaurant in English.”

  “I like numbah sixty-nine, gang-raped pork!” Shin said, screwing on a thick, glottal accent. Kent Shin had the ears of a bat, could hear practically anything.

  “You’re a fucking prick, Shin!” Doofus said.

  “Ah, fucking plick numbah fifty-one, lound eye!”

  Roche kicked Shin’s boot again. “All right, all right, knock that shit off, man.” Doofus was starting to get really wound around the axle, and he didn’t want him getting too hot under the collar. They still had a few hours to go before they got to wherever the hell they were going, and the last thing he needed was for Shin and Doof to spend the entire trip sniping at each other.

  “Yeah, yeah, all right,” Shin said.

  Doof made an indignant sound and leaned back against the seat, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked away from Shin, and some of the other Rangers in the truck smiled at his discomfort.

  Roche figured it was good to have the distraction. Anything to take their minds off rampaging zeds was a good thing. No one wanted to think about that shit. He wondered how the family guys were holding up. He looked around the truck and looked at them: Harrison, Pfeiffer, Gupta, Chavez, Alberts. They all looked as ready as anyone else, total Rangers to the core. Roche was happy he wasn’t married and had no kids. He didn’t know how he’d
be able to stay mission focused if he had that weight to carry around, too.

  Thank God for the little things.

  ***

  McDaniels and Gartrell met briefly with Colonel Jaworski, the commanding officer of the Army Corps of Engineers unit on-station—a major named Guardiola—and his senior staff, which included civilian and enlisted engineers. Also in attendance were the commanding officer of the aviation detachment from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Major Carmody, and his appointed liaison, a chief warrant officer four named Billingsly. Held in the TOC trailer, the meeting was mostly a meet-and-greet session, where the officers and enlisted “heads of state” would be introduced to Jaworski’s command philosophy and what the CO considered to be mission essentials.

  “Basically, I want us to survive anything that’s going to come our way,” Jaworski said after the initial round of introductions. It was tight in the trailer with all the meeting attendees in addition to the staff from the military intelligence company, and a lot of people were standing as opposed to sitting. Jaworski was on his feet, having abdicated his seat to McDaniels. “There’s a lot of bad stuff going on out there in the world right now, and it’s headed for this country. We need to make sure we’re ready, and if we need something—anything—we’d better get our arms around what it might be and ask for it now, because you know what? In just a few days, we might be on our own.”

  Major Guardiola, a short, solid man with a shiny bald head and vaguely sleepy features that belied the fact he was completely alert, looked at Jaworski with a puzzled expression. “Sir, aren’t you maybe reading a bit too much into this?” Guardiola had an unusually deep voice, like that of a radio talk show host. “I know what happened in New York is happening all along the East Coast, but it’s going to take a long while for those things to make their way here.”

  Jaworski turned to the towering Captain Chase, who stood at the far end of the TOC. “Chase, can you put up that satellite data on this screen over here? I want to show these guys what’s happening.” He pointed at a large LED flat-screen monitor over the briefing area table.

  “Yes, sir. Do you want it to cycle through, or—”

  “Yeah, yeah, cycling through is fine, I’ll do the narration.”

  A moment later, the screen came to life. The legend on the bottom indicated that the footage was from a satellite, and the territory under examination was the Texas/Mexico border where Mexico’s Nuevo Laredo and the Texas town of Laredo faced each other from opposite sides of the Rio Grande. The border had been effectively closed by the Texas Army National Guard a week ago, and the military presence on the American side of the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge was substantial. The National Guard presence was spread out all along the American side of the Rio Grande River, and it looked as if every tree, every bush, every blade of grass had been razed so the Guardsmen had unobstructed fire lanes.

  On the Mexican side of the border was a buildup of a different kind. Thousands upon thousands of Mexican nationals had been bottled up at the entrance to the bridge by the Mexican military and police. Even if they hadn’t been stopped, the mass of vehicles at the base of the span had created an impassable blockage. There were people—or perhaps bodies—floating in the river. Several of those bodies were surrounded by a dappled halo effect, and it took McDaniels a moment to figure out those figures were under fire from the shoreline.

  Zeds.

  “Here’s what happened yesterday at the U.S.-Mexico border,” Jaworski said. “As you can see, there’s a rather impressive mass of humanity just waiting to get into the country, since for the first time since day one, the border’s been effectively closed. It only took the zombie apocalypse to get that done, if you’ll pardon my sarcasm. Take a look at the bottom of the display where the Mexican citizens are massed behind the vehicles.”

  The image changed slightly. More people suddenly surged forward, caught in a still frame, but McDaniels could see the difference quite clearly. Hundreds of people had shifted position, hurrying northward, running between the stalled motor vehicles on the bridge.

  The next image, with the timestamp a minute later, showed thousands of people on the bridge, running over cars and trucks, trampling their fellow citizens, leaving broken and bloodied bodies in their wake. And at the southern portion of the picture, a mass of new figures had appeared, figures that were blackened and dull, almost as if they’d been drawn in with a charcoal stick. Stenches. Thousands and thousands of stenches.

  Another frame. The civilians were gunned down by the Mexican military and police on the bridge, but that did little to stop the tide of humanity seeking escape from the walking dead. More zeds flooded into the picture, overwhelming the civilians at the base of the bridge, swallowing them beneath a wave of filth and rot.

  Another frame. The Mexican authorities fled across the bridge for the fortified American presence to the north. They didn’t make it. American fire pulverized them and the civilians behind them. Fires erupted as Mexican Army vehicles exploded, sending tufts of black smoke into the air.

  “Here’s where it gets interesting,” Jaworski said. “You seeing this all right, Major Guardiola?”

  “Yes, sir.” Guardiola’s voice was soft, hushed.

  Another frame. Half of the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge was suddenly gone. The entire half of the span that extended from Mexico across the Rio Grande River had disappeared, reduced to nothing more than great chunks of debris that emerged from the muddied river beneath a cloud of dust and haze. Bodies—hundreds of bodies—were in the river. On the Mexican side of the waterway, the stenches continued to amass, swarming over the warm bodies lined up along the Nuevo Laredo shoreline, chasing them into the river, ignoring all but the most precise actions of defense. Streams of smoke pointed from the American military presence back into Mexico. The National Guard was opening up with the big guns, from artillery to tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to squad automatic weapons.

  “They’d rigged the bridge a few days ago, before things got seriously out of hand,” Jaworski said almost conversationally. “Kind of a last ditch attempt to keep the zeds at bay. Of course, it didn’t really seem to work all that well…”

  Another frame. Thousands of zeds emerged from the turbulent waters of the Rio Grande, advancing toward National Guard units, ignoring the absolutely hellacious amount of firepower directed their way. The Guard had decided to rely on its size and composition to protect the Texas border, not precision and quality of fire. But the stenches just weren’t impressed by M1A3 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, or Strykers or M249 light machineguns.

  McDaniels knew how things were going to end up. Another frame proved him to be correct. Laredo was inundated by a flood of the walking dead, a flood that rose up from Mexico.

  “So in Laredo alone, there were about eighteen thousand Guardsmen and other reserve component units. They were due to be reinforced today by additional active duty units out of Fort Hood. Obviously, that’s probably not going to happen now, and the focus is likely going to shift to our immediate south.” Jaworski paused to take a drink from his mug.

  “To our south, sir?” Guardiola asked.

  “San Antonio,” McDaniels said. He turned away from the screen and faced the Army engineering officer, who sat directly across from him. “Major, I want you to complete that trenchwork by nightfall, and I want you to bust up the driveway that connects the facility with Route Three Eighty-Five and replace it with a mobile bridge that we can drop if the need arises. The bridge needs to be able to accommodate not only civilian vehicular traffic, but fully loaded Strykers and HEMT tankers.”

  Guardiola started to say something, but McDaniels pressed on without giving him the opportunity to speak. “Once the trenches are complete, I want a dirt berm as high as you can make it completed overnight. The berm needs to surround the entire complex. Tomorrow morning, I want HESCO barriers on top of the berm as our first stage defense system. And I’ll expect you to start building observation
towers as well, as soon as you can.”

  “Colonel, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we don’t have any HESCO concertainers here,” Guardiola said.

  Concertainer units, designed and built by HESCO corporation, enabled the construction of rapid and efficient engineered fortifications with dependable protection characteristics. Used in a wide variety of configurations, they could form a simple perimeter wall to a more complex unit of bunkers.

  “Sounds like someone has an item for their wish list,” Jaworski said. “If I were you, Guardiola, I’d put out a request for as many HESCO units as you can get, because I think McDaniels is right. A lot of resources are going to be thrown into San Antonio, and you might want to get whatever you can right away.”

  “Yes, sir.” Guardiola opened a notebook and scribbled in it furiously; in counterpoint, his attending NCO typed on an Apple iPad. “What else, sir?” Guardiola asked McDaniels.

  McDaniels looked at Gartrell. “Sarmajor, I’m going to defer to you on this, but I think we’d be better off going medieval here. Usual defenses aren’t going to work, and we might have tens of thousands of zeds headed our way. Kill zones will be our best friends.”

  “Hooah. Major, maybe you and I should get together with your staff and hammer out some major shopping lists,” Gartrell told Guardiola. “But instead of the HESCO units on the berm, we should maybe use CONEX units, starting with the ones we already have. They’ll give us more elevation, and they’re impossible to climb unless your name is Spider-Man.”

  McDaniels nodded. “Great idea. We’ll need every container unit we can get, Major. Put that on your shopping list.”

  “I can transmit that now, sir.” The engineering NCO waved his iPad. “HESCO and CONEX units. I’ve put down three bailey bridge sets which can be constructed, too.”