The Remaining - 01

by D. J. Molles

  “If we shoot him they’ll hear the noise and come running,” Lee thought aloud.

  Jack’s eyes remained on whatever he saw through the scope. “It may not make much difference.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s going to come over here.” Jack spoke as if it were a bad joke he’d heard before. “You should get the girls up here.”

  “Yeah,” Lee squirmed off the ground into a squatting position. With each passing second the possibilities of how this was going to go were dropping off. There were only a few scenarios now, and all of them ended with the house being overrun. He voiced his opinion: “We can’t keep them out.”

  “Nope. Patio door’s smashed open...bunch of ground floor windows...front door didn’t look that sturdy to me. I give it ten minutes max before they’re inside.”

  Lee craned his neck and tried to count again. “Fuckin’ A, there’s a lot.”

  “Probably about eighty.”

  Running was out of the question. The girls couldn’t go on. For that matter, Lee wasn’t sure how much longer he and Jack could go on without water. Fighting was the only option, and that option looked grim. Lee couldn’t count on the girls or Sam to be combat effective, which made it a 2 against 80 fight. With limited ammunition, and dehydration and fatigue setting in, their odds weren’t something a betting man would take.

  Lee felt like he should speak with Jack more, formulate some sort of grand plan that would allow them to escape this situation, or at least give them the upper hand in the fight. But there was no situation to plan around. It was a basic fight for survival. Kill as many of them as you can. Pray to God there’s a tomorrow in store for you.

  Lee stood up when he was clear of the window. “I’ll get the girls.”

  CHAPTER 14: SEIGE

  He flew quickly down the stairs and scooped up his rifle and his pack. He told the girls to go upstairs. They grabbed the meager bit of water left to them and went upstairs without asking questions. Abby looked numb, but Angela was clearly terrified, clinging with a white-knuckled grip to the big black shotgun in her hands. Lee didn’t know if she’d heard the conversation, or she could tell from Lee’s face that something was wrong. Sam followed the girls, and Tango tagged along with him.

  Lee was about to follow them up when, as an after thought, he stepped back into the dining room. Two at a time, he drug all the wooden chairs from around the dining table and began laying them over on their sides at the base of the stairs, their legs pointing out. Crude man traps. The stairs were a natural choke point and the only entrance to the second floor of the house.

  He vaulted the banister and ran up the stairs. Angela waited at the top of the stairs, looking down at him with wide eyes while Abby and Sam peered around her. Lee pointed to the bedrooms. “Guys, grab everything you can out of these rooms and throw it down these stairs. Make the biggest trash pile you can.”

  “Okay!” Sam said eagerly and ran into the master bedroom.

  Angela and Abby were more reserved. Angela nodded and guided her daughter into the room across from Stephanie’s old room.

  “Cap’n, they’re headin’ this way,” Jack called from his lookout.

  “Jack, set up over here.”

  There was a crash from the master bedroom and Sam came out lugging a night stand half his size. “Is this good?”

  “That’s great, buddy!” Lee gave him thumbs up and Sam tossed it down the stairs where it clattered into the chairs. Lee was dismayed to watch the tiny wall of chairs shuffle as the object hit them. His wall might look big, but bricks with no mortar don’t stand very strong.

  Sam ran back into the bedroom. Angela and Abby came out simultaneously and started throwing things down the stairs. They were tossing them down so fast, Lee couldn’t catch what they were. Slowly, the pile of junk at the bottom of the stairs grew. Clothes and pillows were thrown, books and DVD’s, small pieces of furniture. Lee and Jack grabbed the mattress and box spring from Stephanie’s bed and shoved it down. It was a tight fit, but it would force someone to stop and negotiate over it.

  Jack had run back into Stephanie’s room to glance out the window again. “Shovel Guy’s pretty much making a B-line for us.”

  Angela spoke up. “How many of them are there?”

  Lee didn’t specify. “Lots.”

  Jack looked back at Lee. “You got any more 40-mike-mikes?”

  Lee nodded and held up two fingers. Jack didn’t need to explain. Lee shucked the two 40mm grenades out of their pouches, held one in his hand and shoved the other into the M203 receiver. He locked back and armed the weapon as he slid quickly over to the window overlooking the front yard.

  Glancing around the curtains his stomach dropped. The image of the mass of bodies, squirming towards the house like a single entity with Shovel Guy at the lead made Lee’s stomach churn. He felt it now—the adrenaline dump. He thought about dying, about being torn to pieces by a mob of crazies. He thought that it was the most likely outcome, and his body coursed with the nearly-overwhelming desire to survive. Flee, and live to fight another day. Leave all these stupid civilians behind. Save yourself.

  Almost against his will, he looked at Jack and spoke. “Any chance they might pass us by?”

  The words were hollow.

  Jack shook his head. “They’re fixated, Cap’n. They ain’t goin’ nowhere. Hit ‘em now, while they’re still all bunched together.”

  Lee didn’t have to explain his concern to Jack. It was still within the realm of possibility that Shovel Guy, with the horde in tow, might poke around the house a bit, then get distracted with something else, and leave, taking the group with him. But if Lee opened fire, it would send the infected into an aggressive frenzy and it would be a fight to the death.

  It was clear that Jack felt their path had already been chosen for them. Now it was just time to make what they could out of it. Lee stuffed his desire for life behind his conscious decision that he wasn’t going to leave these people. Live or die, they were his problem now. He flipped up the M203 sights and jabbed the window hard with the muzzle of his weapon.

  The glass shattered.

  As though they were of a single mind, linked by an invisible neural connection, every head in the mob of infected simultaneously snapped up to look at the window. Lee wasn’t sure what came first—the scream of rage or the guttural thunk of the barrel spitting out a grenade, but he watched the first round hit right in the middle of ten infected, shredding the closest ones into body parts and meat fragments, and throwing others a few yards. Lee was quick with the reload, but the horde had already begun to run for the house, spacing their ranks out and making the blast less effective.

  Lee had barely retreated from the window when he felt the house shake violently as the mob of infected hit the front door. Glass shattered downstairs and Abby started screaming. What looked like a hatchet crashed through the window and glanced off the side of Jack’s rifle just as he steadied to take aim. The two men exchanged a glance that said way too close.

  “Lee!” Angela’s voice slipped through Abby’s piercing wail. “They’re coming through the windows!”

  “Let’s go!” Lee slapped Jack on the shoulder as he turned and ran for the top of the stairs. He took a quick glance down. Daylight around the edges of the front door. It rattled on its hinges, pounded mercilessly from the other side. Flecks of wood and drywall flew off the doorframe. An arm reached through the broken sidelight and groped around for anything it could lay a hand on.

  Lee grabbed Sam and the two girls in a bear hug and pushed them into the master bedroom. Before closing the door and backing into the hall, Lee caught Angela’s gaze. He pointed to the shotgun in her hands. “You take the safety off?”

  Angela nodded fiercely, her hair flying in her face.

  “Don’t open this door until I say it’s okay.” Lee slammed the door closed behind him. From downstairs, he heard the distinct sound of the front door giving way.

  Footsteps cluttered th
e landing and Lee registered the hissing, moaning, screeching sound that echoed up the walls. It made his stomach turn over. Jack looked at him and Lee thought he looked pale and scared.

  He was sure he looked the same.

  He dropped his pack and kicked it over to Jack as he shouldered his M4 and flipped on his red dot sight. “Get the other pistol out of there and every bullet you can find.”

  Lee took a knee at the top of the stairs and pointed his rifle down. At least twenty faces stared up at him. Hands caked in dried blood reached for him. Others held makeshift weapons—crowbars, hammers, knives—and jabbed and swung at the air. Bile rose in the back of his throat, and only after the bitter taste hit his tongue did he notice the overpowering stench. Like rot and body odor and feces.

  The makeshift wall creaked and moved under the weight of the horde pressing in. Lee picked his target and put the red dot of his scope on the bridge of the nose and pulled the trigger. He didn’t wait to see if his target went down. He put the dot on another head and pulled the trigger. Then another. His shots were even and paced, but panic was knocking at the back door of his mind, trying to spur his trigger finger.

  He was counting rounds as he sent them downrange. One shot was a triumph. Two shots was a tragedy. It wasn’t long before he felt the bolt of his M4 lock back, indicating an empty magazine. He checked the chamber—clear—then flipped the mag out and grabbed another from his vest. How many did he have left?

  His mind screamed at him to get his weapon back in the fight.

  It happened so fast, Lee didn’t get a good look at the attacker. He got the impression of someone young, maybe a teenager, dressed in what he thought looked like a soccer uniform, vault clear over the blockage at the bottom of the stairs and landed inside the stairwell with a screech. The creature rolled and squirmed till he was on his feet again and bolted up the stairs, shrieking at Lee.

  The boom of Jack’s .308 rifle was like being punched in the face.

  A chunk of the soccer player’s chest went missing and he flew back down the stairs, crashing into the junk pile at the bottom and laying still.

  Lee didn’t waste the time to thank Jack. He slammed his fresh magazine in, recharged his M4 and went to work. The infected were yanking at the chairs now, pulling some of them out of the way. Lee tried to identify and focus his fire on anyone that appeared to be messing with his blockade, but was confronted with a new problem. The pungent sting of cordite was filling the air, and the smoke was obscuring the already-dim hallway, making his targets hard to see. He couldn’t tell where his rounds were hitting, and whether he was taking anyone down with his shots. For all he knew, he might have just wasted the last ten rounds.

  Panic stabbed his gut again and he forced himself to slow down and count his shots.

  Fire...

  And scan...

  Fire...

  And scan...

  Every so often the stairwell would explode as Jack pulled his trigger again. But with only five rounds, that wouldn’t last long. Another mag change. Lee watched the empty magazine tumble down the stairs.

  Another, fatter infected was clawing its way over the banister and into the stairwell. Lee put one to the top of his head and the fat creature just hung there, motionless, halfway over the banister. Another determined attacker pushed the fat one over the banister and attempted to maneuver over. This time it was Jack’s rifle that took the shot.

  Lee refocused on the ones trying to pull at his trash barricade. Though their brain was damaged by the plague, it was obvious that they were able to recognize an obstacle and formulate some plan around it, in order to get to a victim. Almost as though they were following the commands of a single consciousness, one infected would step up and yank at chair, only to be dispatched by a bark from Lee’s rifle. Before the first had even hit the ground, another was replacing the fallen infected and pulling at the chairs again. It was with a sudden scream of rage that an infected the size of a linebacker grabbed a huge mound of trash and furniture in his arms and ripped it out of the way. Despite his size, it still only took one 55-grain bullet to bring him down, but the damage was already done.

  The infected began pouring through the narrow opening into the stairwell, like water over a collapsing levy. The other portion of the blockade was suddenly enveloped and disappeared in a mass of bodies. Their screams were suddenly intensified. The horde rushed up the stairs, too fast for Lee to choose his targets. He began pulling the trigger indiscriminately. Bodies would fall back like weeds cut down by a scythe, and—dead or only injured—they would tumble back into the others, creating a new blockage of human bodies directly in the middle of the stairs. Their progress up the stairs stalled for three of Lee’s pounding heartbeats, and then the horde pressed forward again, climbing over the bodies of their dead and injured.

  To Lee’s right, the boom of Jack’s .308 changed to the pop-pop-pop of pistol fire. Lee found his back pressed against the wall, the stairs in front of him. His M4 went dry—a quick mag change and he was back in the fight—but even that brief cessation in his suppressive fire gave the infected horde a few more feet in a battle of inches.

  Pop-pop-pop and Jack’s pistol went silent.

  Lee edged to the left, towards the master bedroom, while Jack picked up his rifle and began swinging it like a baseball bat, standing to the right of the stairs, near to Stephanie’s room, and smashing the solid butt-stock into anything that popped up from the stairs.

  Lee could not imagine the mound of dead infected humans that lie at the bottom of the stairs, but the horde kept coming, kept pressing them back. Now Lee and Jack were being divided, and the oncoming attackers were reaching the top of the stairs, filling the gap between the two comrades. Lee held Jack’s gaze for a brief moment before he disappeared under a wave of infected.

  “Jack!”

  Lee kept firing, kept recharging his weapon after every empty magazine, but he found himself backpedaling, now against the closed door of the master bedroom. He no longer saw individuals in the oncoming mob, but only a faceless, amorphous mass of sickening human flesh, all gnashing teeth and clawing hands. Lee emptied his last magazine.

  The mass did not stop coming.

  He transitioned as fast as he could to his pistol, but it was too late. Out of the crowd, what looked like it used to be the leg of a large piece of furniture slammed into his left shoulder, knocking him down. For a brief second he couldn’t see. But he refused to quit, refused to get taken out like that. By a fucking piece of furniture. He felt his back hit the ground, his head and neck pressed up against the master bedroom door. He tucked his gun arm tight into his body and brought his MK23 to his chest, pointing out.

  He felt someone on top of him, but still couldn’t see past the bright sparklers going off all around his eyes. He felt arms, a shoulder, a neck. He grabbed hard around the neck with his left hand, felt his attackers hands clamp desperately around his own wrist as he shoved outwards. It was a rough approximation, but he pushed the muzzle of his pistol into what he thought was his attacker’s chin. He shut his eyes and mouth and turned his head away, ready for the fountain, and pulled the trigger.

  The writhing body on top of him became dead weight.

  He hugged the body close to him, felt a river of warmth running down his neck and chest, smelled the shit and piss and horrid unwashed odor, but clung tight to that body like a drowning man to a raft. Perversely, he felt comforted by the weight. A human blanket. A body shield.

  He punched out with his pistol, and in the narrow section of his vision that had cleared, he began picking off targets as they rushed him. He counted rounds as they went out, a death-clock on its last seconds.

  Two.

  Three-four.

  Five.

  Six-seven-eight.

  The bedroom door supporting his head was suddenly gone. He felt the back of his head slap the ground and thought his head had exploded. There was white fire and sparks and a boom that he felt in his sinuses. Then another, and anothe
r.

  Hot shotgun shells were falling from the sky, burning his face. Angela was yelling for him to get in the room. Lee shoved the body off of him and rolled onto his hands and knees, then launched himself past Angela’s legs and into the bedroom. He was up on one knee when he heard Angela grunt and fly backwards into the footboard of the bed.

  Lee twisted in time to see a shovel coming down on him like an axe. He jumped forward, felt the shovel head glance off his ankle and recovered his position on one knee. He punched out with his pistol and put his sights on the big naked man in front of him. At the same time, Angela let loose with another 12 gauge round that ripped apart Shovel Guy’s left shoulder, nearly shearing the arm off.

  The big man stumbled back with a groan, but he still held the shovel in his other hand. The shovel was big, but he whipped it around like a toy, even with only one hand. Angela ducked and went fetal at the foot of the bed and Shovel Guy waved his weapon back and forth in rapid arcs.

  There was a vicious growl, and suddenly Tango was attached to the big man’s upper arm. The shovel dropped to the ground. Shovel Guy flailed and screeched, but Tango wasn’t letting go.

  Lee was quick to his feet, not wanting to take the shot with Tango in the picture—it would have to be a contact shot. He closed the distance and managed to maneuver himself directly behind Shovel Guy. He put the muzzle at the base of the man’s skull, pointing upward, and pulled the trigger. The top of his head erupted like a shaken soda can and the body turned heavy and collapsed.

  Tango followed the body to the ground and kept growling and ripping at the arm. Lee grabbed the dog’s collar with his non-gun hand and yanked the dog back with a sharp, “Leave it!”

  It was anything but silent.

  Lee heard ringing in his perforated ear drums, the rasp of his own breath, Angela gasping for air, the two kids whimpering in their hiding place somewhere in the room. He could hear the blood rushing through his ears like he was standing under a waterfall. All through the house came the pathetic lilting moans of the dying.