A Place Outside The Wild

by Daniel Humphreys

  As defensive terrain went, it was lacking. The bulk of the solar panels and their mounting frames secured one flank, but the other was only partially blocked by a heat exchanger. They had no cover to the front.

  When their attackers breached the doors, at some point they'd spread across too wide a front for the SEALs and Miles to cover. They’d chewed it over as much as they could in the time they had left, but there was nothing they could do about it.

  Ross had shrugged it off. “If they’re smart enough to climb, and they’re smart enough to get through the blocked doors, then they’re smart enough to come at us from multiple directions. But my hope is, they’ll come at us just like they did the helicopter. Yeah, they’ve got some new tricks up their sleeves—” Miles had refrained from pointing out that few of the undead had clothes of any sort at this point, though it was tempting. “But I don’t think they can overcome their baser . . . Programming, I guess. I don’t think you can call it instinct. If they see a target in front of them, they have to go for it. I blow the claymores, row by row, spreading it out as much as possible. We just need forty minutes.”

  “What the hell,” Foraker said. “Beats dying in bed.”

  Now, as Miles knelt at the edge of the roof, he pulled his gloves out of his backpack and put them on. He’d promised his daughter that they would keep him safe, but that wasn’t looking so good at the moment.

  Who’s going to take care of my family if I don’t make it home?

  The first clang of flesh against metal sounded and derailed his train of thought. “Don’t worry about the future,” he whispered. Miles pulled rifle magazines out his vest and lined them up on the ground in front of his position. He had one in his rifle and eight spares. At 30 rounds per, he had a total of 270 loaded rounds. There was a bandoleer of stripper clips with another 210 rounds in his backpack, but he didn’t know if he’d have time to reload his magazines once they were empty. With the mag in his pistol and the spares in his pouch, he had another 52 rounds of .45.

  Janacek settled down next to him with a nod and began to line up magazines of his own. The thumps against the door came with a growing, persistent frequency, but each man ignored them for the moment. They had time yet; the numbers they faced weren’t great enough to overcome the obstacles they put in place.

  “Scoot over a bit,” Janacek murmured. “You anchor up against the solar panels on the left flank and I’ll cover you on the right.”

  Miles looked at him for a long moment and tried to read the expression on the SEAL’s face. Janacek was as cool as always, but he thought he detected a hint of something other than disdain in the other man’s eyes. For what it was worth, he didn’t think that he’d ever call Miles ‘nugget’ again. “Thanks,” Miles replied, and shifted. “It’s been a privilege.”

  “Don’t get all sappy on me,” Janacek growled. He went prone on the gravel, supporting the barrel of his SCAR on top of his rucksack.

  Foraker and Ross fell back as well. The lieutenant knelt on the far right flank and began to wire each pair of claymores into a separate clacker. “Slow, aimed fire on my call, gentlemen. Brian, Mr. Matthews — focus on the left vent opening. The Chief and I will target the right. Once there’s a buildup in the kill zone, I’ll call fire in the hole. Conserve your ammo until after the explosion. We don’t have the bullets to double- or triple-kill them as they’re taken out by the claymores. Same goes for zone two. After zone three we may need to fall back in a semicircle.” He glanced at his watch. “Thirty-seven minutes, fellas. Time is on our side here.”

  “. . . Need to grab some stuff.”

  Tish scrambled down the hallway before Frannie acknowledged her words. Her friend was a good, if not great, nurse, but Tish didn’t like the speed at which the blood had saturated her side. Maybe the bullet hadn’t hit anything vital, but she didn’t have the luxury to take Frannie’s self-diagnosis for holy writ. She lurched into the break room and tore open the storage cabinets. As she rifled through the supplies, it occurred to her that she was spoiling all the effort they’d just spent cataloging and arranging.

  She loaded up her arms, tucked her chin on top of the stack to hold it in some semblance of order, stepped back out into the hallway, and . . .

  Tish froze as she met the eyes of the infected standing outside of the clinic.

  Let’s use glass doors in the clinic, they said, Tish thought wildly. Natural light will be good for the patients, and will save electricity for more important equipment.

  Well, shit.

  Neither of them moved, and Tish got the unnerving sense that it was studying her just as much as she was studying it. She’d been up close and personal with them before, of course. They’d just been . . . fresher.

  On the Day, she’d collapsed at the end of forty-eight hours straight and passed out. The flu had been running hospital staffs ragged, and little niceties like breaks had been catch as catch can. When she’d started slurring her words, the other staff pushed her inside the physician’s sleeping lounge and closed the door.

  The screams in her nightmares had chased her from sleep, but she hadn’t escaped them when she’d returned to the waking world. The screams had been right outside the door.

  Tish had survived that day, but the door of the staff lounge had been solid oak. Glass in an aluminum frame just didn’t have the same gravitas.

  Outside, the infected cocked its head and inspected the doors.

  Miles said something about them acting differently. Something Charlie said. She’d forgotten it until now, lost in the tumult of his departure. This was for sure different, and it was a change she didn’t like. A look of cold calculation from a thinking predator was far more terrifying than that of a mindless automaton.

  She kept her eyes on it and eased forward. It didn’t seem to pick up on the motion, but if it did, it didn’t react to it. As she got a little closer, she began to notice other differences.

  As she was one of only two doctors, the community had, for the most part, wrapped Tish in bubble wrap over the last eight years. When their numbers had been fewer, she’d gone on her share of supply runs. As soon as they had the population to take that over, the community forced her and the other medical staff to remain behind the walls. Despite that, she was familiar with the physiological changes the infected had undergone over the years. She’d examined more than a few bodies that Pete or the wall guards had brought her, in hopes of determining what sort of time frame they were looking at until the infected rotted away.

  Rotting was the wrong term, of course. After reanimation, they did not rot, in point of fact. Whatever process kept them up and moving made them almost literally antiseptic. The bacteria, insects, and fauna that would reduce a body in the open to bones had no effect while the infected was up and moving. Remove the head from the equation, though, and they rotted away — fast. Tish had no way to tell whether it was an accelerated rate or the impact of the already degraded tissue, but it was measurable.

  Wild animals had learned to leave the infected alone. Tish had once observed several coyotes collapsing and succumbing to seizures shortly after attacking an infected and biting it.

  The most recent examples she’d seen were little more than skin and bones — gray skin the texture and consistency of leather wrapped over the skeletal structure. Withered musculature that had uncanny strength despite its appearance drove them along. She didn’t have the skills or training to perform an autopsy, but she’d observed the same dark structures anchoring the teeth and striating the muscle. She and Grady had long theorized that whatever it was, it was what did the work of muscles. The remaining tissue, more often than not, was more akin to the long-term bedridden than that of a person who could get up and walk around.

  This infected was different, and it was a change that was rather disconcerting, the more she thought about it.

  It still had the wiry frame and build of its brethren, but it looked more robust, somehow. The musculature of its arms and legs was more pronounced, and th
ere was enough muscle on its torso and shoulders to give it an admirable v-shape. The surface of its skin was still the gray of the grave, but she saw darker patches, here and there, that looked for all the world like healed scars. And, unless the infected had been in the habit of suffering severe bite wounds before dying, she theorized these were the bites that had felled it.

  She’d have called the thought crazy if she’d put it spoken word, but the thing looked like it was healing.

  But it was dead — that was impossible, right?

  The thing reached out and tapped a forefinger on the glass. Tish bit back the urge to scream.

  “Tish! What’s going on?” Frannie called. She resisted the urge to call back out. Her hands were too burdened with supplies to wave her friend off. Tish settled for shaking her head.

  The infected put a palm on the glass door and gave it an experimental shove. The door separated from the sill seal with a sucking hiss and bounced inward. The double doors were on free-swinging hinges and could open inward or outward. Had to have the damn glass doors.

  It reared back, and she could tell that it was preparing for another, more robust shove, and she made her move. She swept her hands out from under the medical supplies. Rolls of gauze and bandages bounced off the floor as the cauterizer landed with a sturdy clatter of metal and plastic on the floor.

  Tish jammed her foot in front of the center of the doors to keep them from swinging in and fumbled for the lock with hands that suddenly felt absurdly clumsy. Get it get it get it.

  She sighed in relief as the bolt slid home, locking the two doors together. She kneeled and threw the locking bolts at the bottom corner of each door to secure it even further.

  The infected burst into action and its hand slammed into the glass again with a boom that rattled the doors in their frame. “Frannie,” Tish said with a calm that she didn’t feel, “We’ve got a problem.”

  It was a close-run thing, even riding in the LAV.

  Pete directed Hanratty off the blacktop and through the gravel around the grain bins. Hanratty had pushed the LAV to what felt like ridiculous speeds, and the rear wheels slewed around as he made the turn. Despite the rush, trickles of zombies already trickled around either side of the facility. A slowly-collapsing circle of guards covered the main entrance to the storage warehouse.

  Pete swallowed. Did I make the call soon enough?

  He shook off the question and shouted forward to Hanratty. “Can you back it up to the doors?”

  The Marine didn’t answer, but he gave a thumbs-up. Rooster tails of gravel shot out from the big vehicle’s wheels as he cut the wheel over and gunned it. Pete clutched his rifle and shouted over the roar of the engine.

  “We can’t take much time — we need to unload and get inside. If it looks like we aren’t going to make it inside, we’ve got to go down hard. I ain’t lettin’ these sons o’ bitches anywhere near my family, ooh rah?” There was a vague chorus of replies and nods, and that just would not do. Funny. Despite all the years and injuries behind him, he fell right back into his squad leader persona. He mimed screwing a finger into his ear and shouted, “I CAN’T hear you!”

  That worked — if their replies weren’t in the proper verbiage, they at least had the proper tone. He glanced out the rear hatch as Hanratty began to back up. The guards at the door grasped their intent and shifted to allow the bulk of the armored vehicle to form the third wall of their defensive front.

  Hanratty cut it close; Pete might have argued about the distance, but he couldn’t complain. As the engine cut off, he leaned over and threw open both crew doors. The vehicle was just far enough from the silo for them to open. So close, in fact, that several of the guards who’d been covering outside had already withdrawn inside. The others looked to be assessing the possibility of doing the same. “Move, move, move!” Pete shouted. “Cover to the side of your door!” He put words to action, pushing off with his working prosthetic before he could wince at the thought of the drop.

  The stiffness of the damaged leg threatened to pull him over as his opposite foot hit the ground. He reached out and grabbed one of the flanking guards to support himself. The man jumped in surprise, but Pete put his mouth close to the man’s ear and shouted, “Fall back inside, we’ll cover you as we dismount!”

  The guard gave him a frantic nod and pulled away. Pete staggered at the sudden loss of support, but he regained his balance and ground the ball of his stiff leg’s foot into the gravel. Thus supported, he flipped his rifle off of safe and began shooting. The trickle was thickening. They didn’t have long before there’d be more surrounding them than they had guns to hold off, but they didn’t need long. He hoped.

  The volume of fire intensified as the men and women inside of the armored vehicle dropped down and joined the lines of defense flanking the door. Pete dropped an empty magazine and slammed a replacement home as he turned his head to shout, “Start pulling inside, closest to the doors! Smooth and steady, people!”

  Hanratty hit the ground behind Pete and shouted, “Last man!” Pete nodded and kept shooting.

  Slowly, the lines of defense thinned. This was the trickiest part. As they fell back inside of the warehouse, the volume of fire they put out lessened and allowed their approaching foe to come closer and closer.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad, Pete thought bitterly in the midst of another magazine swap, if they’d acted like they always had. If they’d just come straight on, the piles of their fallen brethren would have built up a bulwark. These were cagey, dashing forward in fits and starts. They fell back as the defenders took down groups of their attacking forces. It was almost as if they were trying to assess the relative strengths of the living defenders. And, to make things even worse . . .

  “Down!” Pete roared and knelt as far as he could. Spears whistled overhead. One of the guards wasn’t quick enough. He fell to the ground, speared in his stomach. Before Pete could open his mouth to order the coup de grace or perform it himself, Charlie lowered his shotgun and silenced the man’s screaming with a single shell. “Thanks,” Pete said with a grimace. He raised his head to find that he was one of only a handful of remaining defenders. “This is it, inside now, move!”

  His stiff-legged stagger ended as Charlie wrapped arms like iron bars around his waist and lifted as he dove for the door. Pete would have cried out at the indignity of the whole thing if the press of the other man’s arms hadn’t driven the air from his lungs.

  Inside, Charlie staggered and took them both to the ground as he fell. Pete caught as much of his weight as he could, but Charlie took the brunt of the fall. With a hysterical laugh, Pete rolled sideways and faced the door. They needed to get it shut, right . . . he relaxed.

  Hanratty slammed the door and stepped aside as a couple of the others took up a heavy iron bar and slotted it into brackets on either side of the door. The first was in place just in time; heavy blows sounded on the reinforced aluminum. Dust vibrated out of the door frame as the assault continued. The second and third bars above and below the first stiffened the entire assembly, but the strikes continued.

  “Well,” Hanratty said, his voice drained. “I hope they haven’t rediscovered the can opener.”

  Pete held back the nervous laugh; they weren’t out of the woods yet. “Buddy check,” he snapped. “We’re looking for scratches. Anyone get a spear wound?”

  In the beginning, it had been a tense occasion, but over the years they’d winnowed out the ones who were of the sort to rabbit when facing potential death. They patted each other down. The guard who checked Pete took a long stare at the rip in his slacks until Pete rolled his eyes and knocked on the prosthetic. “’Tis not even a scratch, Sir Knight.” The other man relaxed, but the continued pounding on the outer door was putting them all on edge.

  Pete was about to declare they needed to move to the central silo when a quiet stand-off at the edge of the huddle boiled over.

  “Drop the shotgun, asshole!” One of the warehouse staffers yelled. He
had his pistol pressed up against the back of Charlie’s head.

  “Ah, hell,” Pete muttered, and hobbled over. Charlie’s face was turning red with suppressed anger, but he kept himself still. “What’s the problem here?” Pete studied the warehouse guy for a moment and said, “Foster, right?”

  He must have been correct because the kid didn’t correct him. His hand shook as he hissed, “This guy didn’t even try to help Malcolm, he just capped his ass!”

  Pete tried not to sigh. “Foster.” The other man didn’t look at him, so he repeated himself with a firmer injection of command tone. “Foster.” Their eyes met, and Pete barked, “Things have changed, son. They got, hell, smarter, I don’t know. They climb fences and they throw spears. And they’re dipping their spears in infected tissue. It does the same thing as a bite and they don’t even have to get close. All right? Malcolm was turning, even if he didn’t know it yet.”

  The other man stared at Pete. He opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing. Finally, he lowered the gun from the back of Charlie’s head and tried to slide it back into the holster at his waist. His hands shook so much it took him several attempts before he brought it home.

  Silence reigned in the warehouse. Pete was about to open his mouth to suggest they move into the main silo when his radio hissed with low volume static. With a frown, he brought it up and adjusted the volume knob. “Come back,” he transmitted. “Last not copied.”

  “Mr. Matthews?” a young voice said in a quiet tone that was just this side of a whisper. “Is that you, sir? It’s Alex, Alex Worthington.”

  Ah, hell. Pete rubbed his forehead. He keyed the radio and lowered his voice. “Alex, where are you?” He released the button and prayed for a different answer than the one he expected.

  “I’m up in the nest, sir, with Cara. And, uh.” His voice faded out for a moment, as though he were speaking to someone else near him. “A couple of the younger kids, sir, Twigs.” There was the sound of a scuffle and a different voice came over the radio as someone else claimed the transmitter.