They heard the first of the bookers before they saw it. The thing screeched at the top of its festering lungs, hidden from them by the falling snow. Mickey shouldered the USAS-12 and sighted, looking for a target.
“No,” Bear said, pressing a palm to the barrel of Mickey’s auto-shotgun, hefting his mace in his other hand.
“Where is it?” Julie asked, anxious.
“There!” Gwen pointed through the swirling snow.
The snow slowed the thing. As they watched it came at them in giant strides, like it was moving through molasses. It wore a neon rain slicker and stood out in the white. Suddenly it roared and changed paths, loping away from them, back in the direction they had come.
“Buddy!” Julie yelled.
He stopped in the snow well behind them, stood there, saddle bags draped over his shoulders, hands at his sides.
“Dammit.” Bear scuttled through the snow towards him. The booker closed in on the other man.
Gwen’s M16A4 fired once and the 5.56mm slug caught the booker above its ear, exiting the opposite side of its head. The echo of the shot reverberated as the body slouched to the powdery white.
“Shit,” Gwen said.
Bear looked back at her. He knew if she hadn’t taken the shot the zombie would have reached Buddy before he reached the zombie.
There were screams and whoops and more bookers came for them.
“It’s on, now,” Mickey said. “Gwen, stay here with Julie. I have to cover Bear!”
“No.” She was already rushing as fast as she could past the man. “Wait here for us!”
“Gwen!” Julie called after her.
“Can you hear me?” Buddy stared blankly at him.
Gwen fired her M-16 from behind them.
“Damn.” Bear slung the mace over his back and drew the Glock with the green laser sight. “Come on.” He bent over and put his shoulder to Buddy’s hips, then stood with the big man and all his equipment draped over his shoulders.
“You’re heavy. You know that?”
Buddy didn’t say anything. He lay across Bear’s shoulder as Bear plod back towards the group.
The snow fell heavily—thick flakes from the lowering sky.
“Bear, behind you!” Gwen screamed and he turned. Two bookers were making for him and Buddy. He extended the Glock and depressed the trigger slightly, the green laser sight lighting up on the chest of the closer of the two beasts. He corrected his aim and loosed three quick shots. The first undead dropped.
Mickey was discharging his shotgun on automatic up ahead. Gwen turned and saw half a dozen bookers streaming towards her, staying clear of Mickey and Julie. Though she did not comprehend why they ignored Mickey and Julie she was grateful they did so. Mickey managed to drop two of them as they passed. Gwen concentrated on the remaining four, sighting through the snowfall, shooting, missing, shooting again. A zombie head jerked back. The thing landed on its face in the fresh powder.
Bear stood beside her with Buddy on his shoulder and fired his Glock, as she blasted another zombie with the M16.
“I’m out,” he said, dropping the clip from the Glock then reloading, the task made all the more difficult with Buddy on his shoulder.
Gwen dispatched the last of the charging zombies.
Julie screamed something at them. He squinted at her through the falling snow. She was shouting—“Look out!”—and when he turned to look behind them the zombie hit him head-on, knocking him to the snow. Buddy flopped off to the side, nearly catatonic, helpless.
“Bear!” Gwen fired the M16 as the bookers descended, emptying the final rounds of her magazine in the chest and head of the nearest. Then she was also born to the ground by two of the things clawing and snapping at her.
The zombie on top of Bear cracked open its mouth mere inches from his face and the fetid stench that roiled out of it was nearly overwhelming. He jammed the Glock in the things’ maw and it bit down on the locked open barrel. He made a fist and his gloved hand punched the grip of the pistol, ramming it through the creature’s head, the barrel rupturing out of the back of the thing’s neck. It crumpled and he rolled over in the snow. Shadowy streaks showed in the snowfall as more bookers charged them.
He reached out and grabbed the foot of one of the things that had knocked Gwen down and pulled it towards him. The undead let go of the woman, shrieked and twisted and sat up, intent on munching on Bear now, but he punched it in the face, stunning the beast. While it blinked and its mouth hung open, he reached his gloved hand in and ripped the jaw off its face.
“Fucker—motherfucker!”
Gwen stabbed the zombie she wrestled with repeatedly. Unlike a human being the thing did not try and protect itself. It kept reaching for her and its groping hands absorbed several of her knife blows. Finally she managed to stab it through the forehead and it stopped struggling.
There was a sputter and a roaring buzz. She looked up and Bear stood with his chainsaw. He looked something fierce. As she watched he raised the chainsaw above his head and bellowed at the zombies hurtling towards them. As he brought the saw down on the nearest booker, she found her M16A4 and quickly reloaded. She pulled back the bolt and chambered a round then started picking off targets.
Buddy laid in the snow near her feet.
Bear buried the blade of his chainsaw in the head of a zombie, forcing it down. The saw’s roar muffled, a mist of red filled the air. The zombie’s hands shot up spastically like a marionette’s then dropped to its sides as he yanked his saw free and swung it horizontally. There was a sheer of sparks and then red as it cut through another monster’s skull.
She fired, felling a zombie. As the head of a zombie next to her disintegrated in a scarlet spray she felt like she had been punched in the shoulder. She was knocked off her feet for a second time.
“Shit.” She scrambled to a seated position despite the fact her right arm wasn’t responding. She drew her pistol with her left hand and tried to figure out how she could take the safety off with one hand.
Bear’s saw cut off as abruptly as it had started. Mickey frantically called her name, “Gwen! Gwen!”
“Gwen.” Bear was down beside her. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I—my arm, I can’t move my arm.” Adrenaline coursed through her system.
“Oh Gwen. Oh Jesus, I’m sorry.” Mickey had a forlorn look on his face and was near tears.
She realized what had happened. Mickey had blown the head off the zombie next to her. Some of the buckshot had caught her, enough to knock her off her feet.
“Mickey, shut up. I’ll kick your ass later. Help me up.”
“You get her,” Bear said. “I got Buddy.”
It was slow going through the snow and the path wasn’t clear. As they walked Mickey tied his belt around her upper arm and pulled it tight.
“We’ll stop somewhere up ahead,” Julie said, “and check that arm out. Somewhere where it’s safe.”
“Where’d they all come from?” Gwen grimaced in pain. “What are all those zombies doing here?”
“Keep moving,” Bear said. “The bookers always come first.”
“Listen,” Julie said.
“Oh, Gwen, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”
“Shut up. I know you didn’t mean to shoot me.”
There were faint groans and protests around them, but visibility was limited in the falling snow. Zombies were out there, the slow moving ones.
Bear hadn’t been eating the way he should have these last few days. Their rations were limited and he wanted to make sure Julie got the sustenance she needed for herself and the baby. He would forego most of his own rations in such a way that no one would notice, making sure Julie got more than the others because she needed it.
He pressed on as far as he could but knew he would soon collapse in the snow from exhaustion. He couldn’t let it come to that. Better to turn and face the undead hordes while he still had some strength. A few minutes later the snow let up. They faced a wooded
hill, and he made his decision.
“We stop here,” he said.
“Here?” Mickey asked.
“We’ve got to keep going,” Julie said.
“I can’t.” Bear breathed heavily. “Not with him.” He crouched and shrugged Buddy off to the ground. He stood and arched his back, trying to draw his elbows together.
“There might be thousands of them out there,” Gwen said. “Let’s leave him and—”
“No!” Julie said. “How many times do I have to go through this with—”
“I don’t mean we leave him on the ground,” Gwen said, feeling woozy as she settled herself on the snowy hill. “We’ll put him up in a tree or something.”
Bear shrugged out of his equipment and gear, laying his weapons side by side on the snow near where he stood. He buried the mace handle up in the snow at his feet. He looked at the Glock in his hand and holstered it.
“Mickey, let me see that shotgun of yours.”
“Well, this should be interesting,” the voice belonged to a female and came down off the hill.
Bear turned.
There was a black woman seated on the rise several yards away from them. She had an enormous afro and a scar down one side of her face. She was dressed in white camouflage fatigues that helped her blend into the hill, but on top, incongruously, she wore a waist length Red Kangaroo fur jacket. Next to her was a backpack and she had an M-16 with an M-203 grenade launcher attached resting across the pack, the 16’s butt in the snow.
“You’re planning on fighting those zombies all by yourselves?”
“Who—who are you?” Mickey asked, aware his hands were without a weapon, as were the woman’s.
“You can call me Tris,” she said. “That’s what they call me. And I get real uncomfortable with your friend aiming that street sweeper at me.”
“No offense,” Bear said. “Make your intentions clear and we’ll decide where I bury the buckshot.”
“My intentions? Take a look at this.” Tris raised her hand slowly. She was gripping a hand grenade. “See this? Fragmentation grenade. And that’s the pin hanging off my neck on the chain. I wear this for the day my time to check out comes. Planning on taking as many of those dead motherfuckers with me.”
“Like Blaster,” Mickey said under his breath, thinking of Uncommon Valor.
“It was Sailor,” said another female voice behind him.
He turned and there was a woman with an MP-40 submachine gun there, decked out in white from head to toe. Even her boots were taped up with white duct tape or something to help her blend in.
“See Tris? He knows the movie I was talking about.”
“Yeah,” Tris said, her focus on Bear. “My friend Lauren there told me about the grenade around the neck thing. You know, I get real nervous when people aim anything larger than a .45 at me. And when I get nervous, my palms get real sweaty, and when my palms get sweaty…”
Bear lowered the muzzle of the USAS-12 but kept watching Tris.
“I’m going to stand up now, so don’t any of you get jumpy with those bang sticks.”
Tris stood and Gwen could see she was tall, at least as tall as Julie, and the afro added another eight to ten inches on her. Tris replaced the cotter pin in the grenade and secured the explosive device around her neck, tucking it under her fur.
“You’re right,” Mickey said. “It was Sailor. Tex Cobb.” He turned to Tris. “What’s with the pimp jacket?”
“That how you talk to a woman when you first meet her? Well wise-ass, let me assure you, I keep my pimp hand strong.
“Sounds like you brought all of them this way,” the black woman added, referring to the moans drawing closer.
“The tall one looks pregnant.”
“You pregnant girl? Damn, big man, there you go with that shotgun again. I just asked your friend a question. You don’t have to go and get all hostile on my ass.”
He lowered the muzzle.
“Shit,” Tris said.
“Yeah, I’m pregnant,” Julie said. “You a farmer? What’s with the sickles.”
In addition to the various pistols she wore on her person Tris had two hand-held sickles strapped to her back.
“Tris isn’t into agriculture,” Lauren said. “She’s like death. The other one don’t look so good,” Lauren indicated Gwen.
“Fuck you, you skinny bitch,” Gwen managed.
“What is it with you people?” Lauren asked. “I meant you look like you’re bleeding to death right here and now. It wasn’t a comment on your looks.”
“What are you two doing out here all alone?” Mickey asked.
“We’re not alone.” Tris raised a hand and waved it forward. Figures materialized from the hill, camouflaged against the snow in white parkas, holding assault rifles wrapped in white tape and cloth. One by one the figures came down the hill, fanning out, and Bear figured if he had to he could take out one, maybe two, before they lit him up.
“That big mean looking motherfucker hits me with that shotgun,” Tris said out loud, “you blow him in two, okay Lore?”
“I got your back.”
Lauren had her hands on the pistol grip and stick magazine of the vintage German submachine gun. She kept it aimed at the ground but appeared ready to bring it up into play if she had to.
“Bear?”
His good eye darted to the man who had called his name.
“Bear? Is that—Buddy! Buddy, no way, I—”
“Panas?” Mickey was overcome with joy. “Panas, is that—”
“Mickey! Julie and Gwen—Gwen what happened?”
“I shot her,” Mickey said sheepishly.
“Oh,” Panas said. “It’s okay, Tris. I know these people.”
“These the people you’re always talking about?” asked the black woman. “From the city?”
“Yeah. I can’t believe it, but yeah.” Panas reached them and hugged each in turn, starting with Mickey. “Julie, my god, you’re—”
Gwen lay down on the snow, exhausted.
“I am,” she heard Julie say.
“We got a couple hundred Zeds coming to play,” a man’s voice.
“Well, Steve, let’s get ready to rock,” Tris spoke.
Gwen’s head felt thick.
She watched Panas embrace Bear. He couldn’t get his arms around the man.
“Damn, bro, you’re a big one,” she heard someone say. “Anyone ever tell you you reminded them of a wrestler or somebody? My roommate is going to friggin’ love you…”
“Gwen, can you hear me?”
Panas.
“Y-yeah,” she said but it felt like someone else was spoke for her.
Bobby? Was that her Bobby leaning over looking at her?
“Okay, this woman is going into shock,” a voice, seemingly from a distance. “We’ve got to get her back to…”
And then all was black.
When she opened her eyes she was in a warm bed in a softly lit clean room. Her Bobby was no where to be seen. Instead, Mickey was sitting next to her bed in a chair.
“Gwen.” An expression of pure joy swept over his face.
“Mickey…”
“Thank God you’re okay. I feel so bad, I can’t—how do you feel?”
“I feel…fine, I think. What’s this?”
She raised her arm. A tube disappeared in her forearm.
“An IV. Dr. Malden said you lost a lot of blood. It was my fault, Gwen. I shouldn’t have taken that shot. Not from so far away. Not when the zombie was so close to—”
Crusade (Eden Book 2) Page 20
