Dead Man's Land

by R. J. Spears

  I considered the possibilities and drifted off to sleep, thinking maybe, just maybe, this baby thing would turn out well. When they said all good things must come to an end, they must have been talking about sleep, because some annoying buzz woke me up less than an hour later.

  This time, it was the blare of a staticky, half-muted voice that broke me out of my slumber.

  “Joel, come in. Joel, come in.” It was Brandon, and his tone was insistent.

  I wanted to ignore the call, but a sinking feeling in my gut told me not to. I grabbed my walkie-talkie and keyed the talk button. “What is it?”

  “Our spotter down on the road says there are some vehicles on the highway, coming up from the south.”

  “How many?”

  “He’s not sure, four or five maybe. They look like trucks. There’s a heavy fog covering much of the road. ”

  “Put out the alarm,” I said, looking at Kara and nodding my head. “I think this is it.”

  Chapter 21

  Out of the Mist

  A person could use any cliché he wanted. The fog was as thick as pea soup. The fog was so thick a person could cut it with a knife. If the fog got any thicker, it would be a wall. Whatever it was like, we really had no idea what was coming our way. It could have been a whole fleet of ships or a flock of turtles for all we knew.

  I just knew we had to get ready for it. I had Brandon and Jo sound the alarm. The word spread quickly throughout the buildings. We moved all the kids to the interior of the complex, just in case the attackers decided to come at us from all four sides.

  From Paige’s story, it sounded as if they had used mortars and bazookas or rocket launchers, along with a zombie army. We had no passable defense against those other than to keep down or take them out first. We had drilled for days and had a few surprises of our own. As far as military hardware, Brandon and Aaron were in charge of that. I was in charge of troop movement. I only hoped some of what Greg had taught me had sunk in.

  I stood in the southwest corner on the third floor, which normally gave a great view of the vista in front of the complex, but, on that morning, it provided me only a view into a great wall of gray and milky white. My only hope was that the fog would also work in our favor, too.

  “Brandon, where are you?” I asked via the walkie-talkie.

  “I’m on the second floor below you,” he said. “I’m locked and loaded with an RPG. Aaron is opposite me at the end of the hall with one, too.”

  “Jo, are you in position?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am,” she said, “ready for anything.”

  I liked her confidence, but there was no way any of us were ready for what was about to happen. None of us had faced off against a zombie army. Yes, we had faced the undead, but these weren’t rogue zombies herding together in a mass. This was a concerted army with an unholy puppet master pulling the strings. Plus the undead would have living and devious allies. There was nothing to be done about it. It was one of those ready or not scenarios because they were coming, no matter what.

  I bounced through all of the rest of the troops stationed around the complex. Even Steve Hampton was at his post, but I sort of doubted whether he would get out in front of anything.

  “Joel, come in.” It was Travis. He was out in the hills to the north of the camp with a couple of other sharp shooters.

  “Come in, Travis,” I responded.

  “I just heard some engines shut off,” he said. “They could be as close as a quarter of a mile away.”

  “Can you see anything at all?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “I just heard them.” He paused for a few seconds. “I think they’re unloading.”

  A part of me wanted us to go out and meet them and maybe give them a little surprise, but I knew our cause would be best served from a defensive position. Greg had drilled that into me. They would have to take our castle, and that’s what we had going for us. So, standing pat was what we would do, but the wait was excruciating.

  Kara seemed calm and ready while I thought I might jump out of my skin. Jumping out of my skin didn’t seem to be an option since I was in charge. I wondered if George Washington or General Patton felt like that while they waited for an unknown enemy to arrive.

  I looked so intently into the fog that my eyes tried to make sense of the random shapes in the shifting patterns. More than once, I was about to announce that the enemy had arrived, but it just turned out to be nothing more than a change in the density of the fog.

  As it turned out, Kara was the first one to spot them.

  “There’s something coming out of the mist over on the right side,” she said as she brought her rifle up into a firing position.

  Dark forms appeared in the fog, shambling along in that way only zombies and geriatrics do. Initially, shapeless dark forms were all they were, but they became more defined as they started to break through the fog, and that’s when I really got scared. Their normally curved and irregular forms were broken up, with hard edges and straight lines.

  There was something eerily familiar about the shapes, and I felt ice form in my stomach.

  “They look different,” Kara said, “like they’re wearing something.”

  Brandon decided to chime in and said, “What the hell?”

  Travis took that moment to break through on the walkie-talkie. “They’re wearing some sort of armor.”

  Travis had hit the proverbial nail on the head. They were wearing armor, but wearing it was not the best way to describe it. Metal had been welded, bolted, and wired onto their bodies. With many, metal seemed to wrap around their heads, while others had scraps of metal tied to their bodies with barbed wire. They moved slowly along, their metal plates clanking together, breaking up their normal moans and groans in a dissonant fashion. If the situation hadn’t been so terrifying, it would have been comical as they shambled towards us like junkyard knights.

  This was the scenario of my vision, and it was quickly becoming a collage of nightmares. The visions, with their prophetic sneak peek of things to come, were nice, but offered no recipe for handling the troubles they previewed. With this, I knew only bad things were soon to come. There’s a saying, ‘To be forewarned is to be forearmed,’ but I seriously had no plan for armored zombies. Who would?

  “What do we do?” Steve Hampton asked over the walkie-talkie. “How do we go for headshots when their heads are encased in steel?” His tone edged toward a panic screech.

  “Keep calm, Steve,” I said, “we have the fences and a whole lot of weapons. Just remember, we have the defensive position here. They’ll have to go through a whole lot of bullets to get to us.”

  An armored zombie army wasn’t all the Lord of the Dead brought to the party.

  I heard a distant whistling sound and tried to will away the fog to see what it was, but the fog remained. A section of the fence along the front of the complex did not.

  A white hot explosion appeared, causing everyone to blink. Pieces of the fence rained down on the front driveway, leaving a small gap where the fence had been. The zombies started in that direction.

  Another whistling sound came, and the gap widened as an explosion blew more fence away.

  I was really starting to hate my visions then.

  Up until now, no shots had been fired from our side. I aimed to change that.

  “Don’t let any zombie through that gap,” I yelled into the walkie-talkie. I pulled it away from my mouth and said, “Kara, no one’s firing.”

  “I’ll change that,” she said, closed her left eye and aimed. She pulled the trigger two seconds later, and a bullet winged off a zombie trying to get through the hole in the fence. She had hit it in the side of its head, but the bullet deflected off the armor. The zombie stumbled back a step, but regained its momentum and came back toward the hole.

  She fired off another shot, but, this time, aimed for the chest. The bullet struck home, dead center, but the armor shook off the bullet. The zombie missed a step for a second, but the
n powered forward.

  I brought up my walkie-talkie and said, “Somebody upstairs on three, go ahead and take some shots.”

  A guard named Larry responded, “I’m on it.”

  Ten seconds later, a round of shots rained down on the zombies. Of the eight or so zombies at the head of the charge, only one fell and didn’t get back up. The rest kept coming as the bullets bounced off their newly armored hides.

  So much for good aim winning the day.

  “Brandon,” I said into the walkie-talkie, “you’re going to have to bring some heavy weapons into play.”

  “We have only so much ordinance,” he said.

  “Is there a better time to use it?” I answered.

  “No, I guess not,” he said, “so get ready for some big booms.”

  I brought up my rifle and aimed at two of the zombies just outside the gap in the fence. I let go with a series of shots. My bullets slammed into the armored zombies, knocking one of them back and the other one completely off its feet. They were undeterred, and both started back for the fence. One of them crawled along. Somebody must have gotten lucky and kneecapped that son of a bitch.

  A whooshing sound filled the air, and I saw a smoke trail lead away from our building on a direct course to a load of zombies fighting to make it through the gap in the fence. A fireball consumed the space where the zombies had been, and when the smoke cleared, the bodies and body parts of a dozen or more zombies lay scattered outside the fence. A dozen or more lay strewn about the ground, stunned.

  “YEAH! Take that you fucking undead bastards,” Brandon yelled, but his voice disappeared into the fog.

  His blast was a mixed blessing though. While it had knocked quite a few of the undead out of action, it has also widened the hole in the fence. I started to point that out, but Brandon gave them another dose of his special medicine.

  His rockets smashed into the zombies starting to regroup just outside the fence, and it didn’t matter how good the armor was, they were toast. The ones in front of the small group literally disintegrated, bones, flesh, and armor going this way and that. While it was gratifying to see them go down like that; the true effect was muted by the number of zombies we would have to kill.

  “How do you like that?” Brandon asked as he shouted into the fog.

  This was answered with another whistling sound, and a section of fence at the south side of the complex exploded into a fireball. They followed this up with another small horde of zombies breaking through the fog and heading in that direction.

  “Aaron, you’ve got to keep them from getting through the gap,” I yelled. “Come on people, let’s pour it on.”

  My message finally got through, and people inside the complex started firing. It started out as a few shots, and then they laid it on. The cacophony of shots rolled like thunder. A few shooters got lucky, and their bullets either made a direct hit into an eye or slipped through a break in the armor, and a few of the zombies fell, but most just kept coming.

  Meanwhile, they blew open another section of the fence, and more zombies headed toward that opening. Our fences were becoming about as porous as The Titanic.

  “Joel, what are we going to do?” Brother Ed asked over the walkie-talkie. “Most of our shots aren’t having any effect.”

  Brother Ed had a good question, and I hoped that someone had an answer because I was so fully entrenched in Plan A that Plan B wasn’t even on my radar. I felt as if I were caught out in the open with no defense. Greg always had said the best offense was a good defense, but our defenses didn’t seem to working.

  I looked to Kara, and she looked back at me and said, “We should hold off until they get inside the fences. Until they’re closer, we’re wasting our ammo.”

  I keyed my walkie-talkie, “Everyone, stop firing. We need to wait until they get inside the fences before we fire.”

  Steve Hampton broke in, “But you said we had to keep them outside the fences!”

  “I know I said that, but things have changed. Our bullets aren’t getting past their armor. We need them closer so that we can get shots into their eyes.”

  “Their eyes?” Hampton exclaimed. “We’d all have to be marksmen to do that.”

  “Unless you have a better idea, then that’s the plan.”

  “Brandon and Travis, change to the alternate channel,” I said and then switched the channel on my walkie-talkie to channel thirteen. We had predetermined that some of our chatter was best suited for a private discussion. Why we picked “lucky thirteen” was beyond me.

  “What is it, Joel?” Travis asked.

  “What do you see out there?” I asked.

  “Not much,” he said. “This fog is too thick. Sometimes it shifts, and I think I see some trucks or something, but then it shifts back.”

  “Let us know as soon as you see something more definitive.” Before he could respond, I addressed Brandon. “How many of those RPGs do we have?”

  “I have four left, and Aaron has three. “Not enough to defend us for long.”

  “How many grenades do you have, then?”

  “Maybe a couple dozen.”

  “Okay then, hold back on the RPGs. Get those grenades dispersed so that we can toss them down on the zombies once they’re close.”

  “They’re going to have to be mighty fucking close,” Brandon said.

  “You think I don’t know that. That’s our game plan for now. I’m switching back to the main channel.”

  Our attackers changed the rules of the game just ten seconds later.

  Chapter 22

  Game Changer

  “Felix, send in your soldiers,” Anthony shouted.

  Felix fumbled with his control panel for a moment, nervous about getting this right. The last thing he wanted was a corrective shock. His neck was still blistered in places from the last time that Rex had nearly shocked the life out of him.

  The vast majority of his soldiers plodded along into the fog and toward the Manor, but two at the back of the pack acted as if they were marching to the beat of their own drummer, turned ninety degrees, and began shambling toward the back of Rex’s school bus.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t get them to correct this course of action, and while he focused all of his attention on them, his main contingent began to slow down, and a few even stopped moving altogether. Felix’s fingers, slick with sweat, danced over his control panel, but no matter how hard he tried, the two wanderers maintained their errant course away from the Manor.

  He was so fixated on his control panel that he didn’t hear the sound of boots coming up from behind him. He did notice the blinding pain in the back of his head as Rex slapped him open-handed on the back of his skull.

  “What the hell are you doing, numbnuts?” Rex growled.

  “Those two aren’t responding to my control commands,” Felix said, his voice cracking towards the end of the sentence.

  “You know what, Felix? You’re a Class A, number one fuck-up,” Rex said and brought up his master control panels. While he wasn’t the maestro that Anthony was, he had some game. Within ten seconds, he had the two stragglers rounded up and the rest of Felix’s contingent on the forward march.

  Rex turned to Felix and said, “I don’t know why he lets you stick around. If it were up to me, you’d be zombie food. But mark my words, one more screw up, and I’ll take care of you myself.”

  “Rex,” Anthony shouted from inside the murky grayness, “should we try more mortars?”

  “No,” Rex responded, “I had those first shots pre-targeted. With this fog, we have no idea if we’d hit anything with new shots. We don’t have an endless supply, and we need to keep some back in case we need to bring down some on their roof.”

  “We might need some extra firepower, then. Can you get that done?”

  “I’m on it, boss man,” Rex yelled back. He strode past Felix and toward his school bus, but stopped when he got beside Felix and feinted with a backhand. Felix cowered away, and Rex laughed.


  “That’s right, little man,” Rex said, “remember, I’ll kick your ass if you fuck up again.”

  Felix wondered if he wouldn’t be better off dead, but took heart in the knowledge that things were going to change for the better soon.

  Rex went in the bus and rummaged around under the front seat for a couple of seconds. He found what he was looking for and thought, it is time to bring a little more punch to the party.

  I was about to check back in with Travis when a new sound came out of the fog. It was the same whooshing sound that had come from Brandon’s RPG. It turned out that we weren’t the only ones with interesting and fun toys.

  The RPG came out of the fog like a lightning bolt and slammed into the front of the building, exploding in a white-hot fireball. I felt the building shake under my feet and then firm up. It was an unsettling feeling. Buildings aren’t supposed to shake. Maybe in California, land of the earthquake, but not here.

  “What was that?” Kara asked, her face looking somewhat stricken.

  “RPG,” I said, trying to downplay the impact, but how do you downplay someone firing an RPG at you? I brought up my walkie-talkie. “Report in.”

  “Holy shit,” Steve Hampton yelled over the walkie-talkie, “they hit us with some kind of bomb!”

  “Steve, calm down, and let me know what you see,” I said as calmly as I could.

  A new voice came over the walkie-talkie, “We took a nasty hit on the second floor. We’ve got some flames,” It was Jo, and she sounded winded, but relatively in control.

  “Can you stop the fire from spreading?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” she said, “but I’ll let you know if I can’t.”

  Something in me didn’t want to know, because if she couldn’t, things were going to get very, very hot. I surveyed the battlefield and saw zombies streaming through the gaps in the fence. The limited size of those two gaps was the only thing keeping us from being swarmed over at that moment. They bunched up in the gap at times, stumbling over each other, but they always made it through.