In a few minutes, there were dozens of zombies fighting the fire on themselves-yelling and screaming with echoes of humanity. Their clothing went up like tinder, and the flames took on a life of their own as they sought out new victims.
Liam caught a whiff of the burning flesh and immediately lost his lunch. Between Wilder's blood on his face, that zombie's stomach contents on his shirt, and this new stench wafting into his nose, his body had endured enough.
He unloaded but there was almost nothing in his stomach, so it wasn't as embarrassing as it might have been. Some of the men continued to laugh, and the excitement over there rose slightly when he did his thing, but the laughing seemed to be settling down.
Sabella remained serious. “This is great, but it isn't hurting them. Well, I mean it isn't killing them,” she said after watching for a bit. Her daughters came up to see why he and their mom remained on the ridge of the roof. Sabella didn't turn them away, though he felt it was truly horrible to allow younger kids to see the fire.
I'm a kid. She should turn me away from this.
No matter what he told Sabella and everyone else, he didn't mind being “just a kid” inside his head. In no universe should a sixteen-year-old boy have to protect his great-grandma from zombies, or only date pretty girls when the world is ending, or watch the terrible things flames did to zombie flesh. He longed for that Pinocchio wish of wanting to be a real boy.
Liam stood speechless as the fire took on a life of its own and spread like mad.
Would the whole crowd from horizon to horizon soon be naked and burned? They were dead as far as he was concerned, but it still didn't feel right. It would be far more humane to put zombies out of their misery, rather than make them suffer needlessly in a mass fire. On a more practical side, the zombies burned out of their clothes appeared more ghoulish and horrible than the others.
The men on the roof cursed and yelled instead of laughed. Sometimes it came across with uncanny clarity. A few times they fired guns, but as best he could tell they didn't aim at them. Instead, they attacked the fire walkers. He wondered if those bad men had some civility after all. Putting those sad zombies down was a good thing.
For a few minutes, the fire jumped from zombie to zombie in an ever-growing and distinctly visible ring of orange and yellow chaos. He couldn't see the fire below the farmhouse roof, but the wooden structure was probably in great danger. The burn line spread to the outbuilding and promptly surrounded it. It also moved toward the copse of trees adjacent to the metal structure. That's where the men were really putting down the infected. Not that it mattered. There were far too many. Men and women stumbled into the small wood and fire hit the underbrush like splashes of gasoline. The fire got to work consuming everything that would burn.
“What's that?” he pointed to the small clump of woods beyond the two green tractors. The trees next to the outbuilding seemed to be a hidden storage area. There were several long racks of firewood, a couple pallets of plywood, and tons of rebar and other building materials. Once the fire burned away the camouflage netting covering it all, it went to work on the rest.
There was also a large silvery tank on stilts. The netting burned away in a flash, making it seem to shine in the sunlight once it was revealed.
“I'm not sure,” she replied dryly.
“You don't think it's got gas in it?” The big round container was at the edge of the gravel parking area. If this was a farm and if the outbuilding was used to store farm equipment, it made perfect sense the owners would benefit from a storage tank for their fuel. It was about the size of a small car, but it felt jumbo jet-sized because it now sat inside an intense cooking fire.
The men on the other building were no longer laughing, waving, shooting, or shouting. They saw the fuel tank for what it was and tried to get as far away from it as possible. Some people slid off the roof as they crowded to the far side to get away from what was coming.
A few gunshots peppered the people on the roof and bodies were thrown over the side.
“They're killing each other,” Liam remarked while staying low on the rooftop.
As the minutes ticked by, the crowd got smaller as it pressed against the rear corner of the outbuilding. The men struggled to get as much distance from the tank as they could, but it came with a toll.
When the fire raged in anger up the trees and around the fuel tank, the bad men pushed a group of girls and women over the side. Liam gasped along with Sabella because it was probably her daughter being tossed away. Zombies were pretty thick in front of the outbuilding, but he couldn't see what was happening on the backside where they went down.
“I'm going to kill those sons of bitches,” Sabella declared. “Somehow. Some way. I'm going to make them pay for doing that.”
“We don't know for sure,” he started to say as there was a loud pop at the front of the fuel tank.
The fire had lapped at the round cylinder like a Thanksgiving turkey inside a hot oven and it was finally done cooking.
“Get down,” he yelled, figuring something bad was coming. He pushed Susan down, so her head was lower than the topmost ridge of the roof. The four of them sat on the front side of the roof but he wondered if that would even matter.
What followed was a deep boom he'd not felt since the bombs fell on the Arch grounds. The house rattled underneath him, and a hot heat seared the top of his head and doused him in the stink of gasoline and burned flesh. An intense heat baked them even as it stole all the oxygen.
His ears failed him while he choked. The explosion was so loud and the concussion so intense he only heard silence and a distant metallic echo. He felt the air rush back over the roof as if filling in the space the explosion had created. A distinct mushroom cloud punched the sky like an inky black fist.
As he lifted his head a secondary explosion ripped through the echoes in his ears. He felt it, more than heard it. There was a brush of heat, but nothing like the previous one.
Sabella's girls screamed and cried out in fear, though they seemed far away. For some time, he put his hands on his ears, then popped them off again-trying to get his ears to register something. He almost jumped when someone tapped his shoulder.
Sabella pointed over the top, but he couldn't look away from her. The once pretty woman was now covered in black residue and her luxurious brown hair seemed dried out and faded. Blood ran in a little trickle from her left nostril. Even her silver cross was blackened by the event.
“Are you okay?” he shouted. He wasn't deaf, but his ears weren't right.
She nodded. “The girls are shaken, but fine. Look!”
He finally turned to see what they'd unleashed.
The fuel tank exploded, no doubt about that. It had stripped the leaves and other greenery from the trees and undergrowth around it. The upper branches of the trees remained intact, but they burned like tall candles on the flat farmland. Black soot covered everything that got touched by the explosion and a sickly black smoke rose from whatever was left burning.
The zombies got the worst of it.
“Oh my God,” Sabella said. Her voice came to him from somewhere down a long tunnel.
She pushed her curious girls back below the ridge of the roof, so they couldn't look. He, on the other hand, could not look away. The fuel had burned so hot it melted many of the zombies into smudges nearest the fuel bomb, and many sickening piles of flesh floundered between the structures. Those farther out from the blast burned from head to toe and screamed in blood-stilling cries that penetrated his damaged ears like sacrificial daggers. When the dust and smoke cleared from around the farmhouse, he fully expected to see the rest of the zombies unaffected and in good health.
“I have to go over there,” Sabella said in a sad voice.
Liam couldn't stop her, but he put his hand on her shoulder to try. Now was the time to make a run for it because the zombies had been pushed back like the Red Sea out on the parking lot, but he feared what they would find if they rushed over there. He tried
not to think of where Victoria was at that moment because no one could have survived that explosion.
The air soon cleared enough they could see some of the outbuilding. The explosion had ripped the roof off the left half of the structure where it was closest to the fuel bomb. The front wall had been crushed inward, and the interior was a cauldron of dancing flames.
Smoke and dust swirled for a moment before moving off the right half of the metallic building like a magician pulling back his cape.
Sabella made the sign of the cross and kissed her necklace.
“Lord, what have I done?” she said sullenly.
No one remained on what little was left of the roof.
Mama Bear
The steel walls around Victoria buckled with an explosion. It was jet-engine loud and oven-door hot for those first few seconds. Metal ripped and bent and for a second it felt like the whole building was going to tip over. Everything in the room that wasn't bolted down hopped or fell until it was all on the floor. Flames briefly shot in the room from a long, thin gap where the ceiling met the inner wall.
Much too late, she yelled, “get down,” and dropped to the floor. The cool concrete pad offered very little comfort as fingers of flame wandered in under the door.
“Stuff something under there,” she called to Russ because he was closer to the doorway.
The boy never moved however, and it struck her she couldn't hear her own voice. She felt the reverberation in her lungs, but her ears weren't working. A second later she choked on the fumes and all thoughts of “doing something” turned to a fish-like gasping for air.
Please God, I'm sorry for my sins. Forgive ...
When she came to, the first thing she noticed was that someone had moved her to the end of the room, near the tipped over refrigerator. A teen boy was out cold next to her and they were surrounded by junk like it had fallen from shelves. In her lightheadedness she forgot his name. It took several firm shakes on his back to get him to acknowledge her.
“Just ten more minutes, mom,” he complained. “No, I don't have any homework-well, maybe just a little.”
She shook harder.
“I'll make the bus, stop it,” he demanded in a burst of anger.
“Hey, wake up!” She really jostled him.
He spun over like a crocodile and looked at her with wide eyes. The power had gone off, so the hanging bulb was useless, but the roof had warped and separated in several places. Light beamed down from the openings. It also came through the bullet holes in the outer wall.
“Where are we?” she started to say before he cut her off.
“Shhh,” the boy said in a quiet voice. “Listen.”
Her head was a groggy mess, but she remembered all the noise. She exhaled with gratitude that she wasn't deaf, but it was oddly quiet. There wasn't anything to be heard inside or out. No tapping on the roof, no banging on the walls, no music, no shouting, no guns.
What were we doing? Zombies, I think.
The dream world where she'd met Marty and Liam was, she'd convinced herself, a manifestation of Heaven. A doormat to the wonders of the heavenly universe. Now she imagined the loud and chaotic zombie world had ended and she would go into the peace-and blessed silence-of that waterfall place. Liam would be there, and Marty would show up soon enough. Eventually her sister and parents would arrive. They'd be on the journey together. It would be-
“Hey, you in there?” the blonde teen boy asked with a tap on her shoulder.
Her head swayed because the stink of fuel sat heavy in the room. Liam stood up and tumbled into the outer wall.
Not Liam, you goof. That's ... I can't think of his name.
While she struggled to remember the name of the young boy, he used the wall and a sideways table to guide himself toward the door. Away from her.
“Liam, don't go without me,” she croaked.
“Who's Liam?” the boy replied.
“Who is Liam,” she thought as she stood up. The dizzying feeling was strong, and it took a second to hold onto a wall, but she knew an emergency was taking place around her.
“Russ,” she yelled. “Your name is Russ-ty.”
“No, jus' Russ,” he said while examining the door and placing his hands on it. “I don't hear anything. I think we can go out.”
“Russ,” she repeated, as much to herself so it would sink in.
Liam is my boyfriend. My missing boyfriend.
“Yes, let's go.” In a daze she grabbed Margaret's shotgun as well as the other one. As she made her way behind Russ she intended to give one of them to him, but she hesitated. Russ turned to see her holding the guns and seemed surprised.
“You trust me?” he asked.
“Why shouldn't I?” She knew there was a reason, but exhaustion combined with the fumes made it hard to think.
He pointed to the ceiling.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, feeling bad for having forgot he almost killed himself. “I'm so so sorry your mom died in here. Is there anything I can do for you?”
As the seconds passed, her head cleared from the fog of the fuel and lack of clean oxygen. There was no doubt she'd saved him from killing himself in the heat of that moment, but there was also no illusion she could prevent him from doing it if that's what he really wanted. They were all riding the coaster without seatbelts, now.
“You can let me have a gun,” he said sadly. “I promise I won't hurt myself.”
There was no time for lectures on the value of life, or whatever, so she decided to let things play out. She offered the smaller shotgun and he took it with a smile.
“We're getting out of here,” she said. “Whatever wrecked this place might have killed all the zombies, because I don't hear them.”
They spent a precious few seconds clearing the junk away from the door, so they could get out.
When the door swung open a crack, Russ picked up the gun again and turned to her. “Thanks for stopping me. I'm not sure why I did that. I know my-” he looked at his dead mother on the floor, “-mom wouldn't want me to give up. I'm not going to. Ever,” he said with emphasis.
She smiled in return, happy mostly that she didn't have to worry about him.
“You ready to run for it?” he asked.
“Every danged day,” she replied gravely.
He pulled the door open all the way.
2
She felt like she'd walked into an oven and started sweating buckets. It was hot, yes, but the grisly baking of zombie flesh was already done. She was blessed with a medical professional's stomach, but Russ only held out for a few seconds.
Neither of them stopped moving toward the wide opening at the front.
Fire had consumed the room and turned everything-everyone-into ash and ... bits. Black ooze symbolized where zombies had once stood on the dance floor. A heavy blanket of smoldering smoke lay draped over the room, but the fire had burned itself out for the most part. She avoided looking directly at the remains, for fear of seeing them move.
The roof of the building had been taken clean off the front part. Sunlight poked through the smoke trails above. For the first time she had a sense of how powerful the explosion was. When she reached the door, where Russ had already arrived, she stood next to him and took in the scene with awe.
Bodies lay strewn everywhere. To her right, nearest the skeletal remains of the two tractors and the ashy remnants of the undergrowth beyond, the zombies had become goopy heaps exactly like those inside. To her left, the corpses were wrecked, burned, and disfigured, but a few still moved an arm or leg.
The mixture of gasoline, flesh, and random synthetic smells finally made her gag. Her stomach made it halfway up her throat, but she choked it back down.
“This is ... just horrible,” she said in a distant voice.
Beyond those nearest the garage, the condition of the zombies improved. At the outer edge of the blast radius-beyond the house-the crowd of infected remained thick and menacing. The only thing saving them, she guessed, was their
erratic movements and lack of direction. They seemed to walk in circles, fall down, roll around on the grass, or stay perfectly still. A precious few walked in her direction across the wasteland.
“Let's get back to the house.”
She heard him, but her attention was focused on the roof of the farmhouse directly in front of her. A figure stood on the peak of the roof and waved at her like he wanted her to come up.
Her eyes watered up because she'd never been so happy to see someone. There was so much wreckage and death around the outbuilding that she expected the farmhouse to be gone, but there it was. And Liam was there, too.
“Liam!” she shouted. “He's up there. Let's go.”
She took off in front of Russ, so he had to follow her across the smoky parking area. She made for the back door of the house on the patio. It was easy to see because the back of the house had been blackened by the explosion. All the windows were shattered, and the hedges and trees were stripped bare. Much of the siding had been blown away, revealing plywood and heavy support beams holding up the walls. The giant blue tarp that she'd last seen on the ground behind the house had been blown into the sky and was now draped over the back side of the roof.
“I'm coming!” she shouted up to Liam just before she lost sight of him.
“I can't wait!” he yelled back.
The house looked like it had been violently torched, though it wasn't on fire as best she could tell.
Russ caught up to her on the patio but they both slowed near a black cylinder making a hissing sound. It was stuck in the hedge and a small jet of fire pointed down into the dirt.
“Is this the bomb?” Russ asked.
“Maybe,” was all she could say as she felt herself float by. It looked like a propane tank from the family barbecue, which would make sense if they were near the patio. If it blew up while they passed, the whole show would end in a flash. It was hard to peel her eyes from it until she reached the door to the house.
Zombie Escape_More Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse Page 10
