A Place Outside The Wild

by Daniel Humphreys

  Charlie unslung the lever-action and jammed the barrel into the biter’s face. At this range, there was no chance of missing, and he added another body to the growing pile at the base of the ladder.

  The ladder at his back vibrated, and he glanced up. One of the kids from up in the nest was starting to come down. He slammed his hand against the side of the silo three times until the kid met his eyes. Charlie shook his head and pointed back up to the top.

  Let us clear this out first, he thought, but the kid got the gist of it from his gestures. He started climbing back up. Charlie resisted the urge to sigh and turned his attention downward.

  Pete was getting a bead on the climbers. The stack of bodies around the ladder was making it more difficult for those on the ground to climb up. Charlie jacked another round into the lever-action and took aim. The next-highest biter was a good twenty feet below. He missed the head, but the impact of the bullet into its shoulder shook the thing loose, and it fell to the ground.

  He saw the motion out of the corner of his eye before he heard the rush of the body falling through the air. Before he had a conscious realization of what was happening, he leaned sideways and grabbed hold of a support wire.

  The biter clipped him on the shoulder, slammed into the side of the silo, and crumpled to the floor of the catwalk.

  What the hell?

  Charlie straightened and put a quick shot in the back of its head. He swept his head around as he tried to discern where it had fallen from.

  He saw the next one before it duplicated the maneuver the first had attempted. The smaller storage silo across from where Charlie stood was a twin of the one that had been set up as the shelter. The external ladder, though, was on the opposite side.

  They’d reached the top of the ladder and gotten onto the rounded dome of the bin. From there, they could turn and look down on the position Charlie held. It would have been faster to come at him on the catwalk from their silo to the Crow’s Nest silo, but he would have seen that coming. With his attention focused down, an attack from above was canny.

  Maybe not so dumb after all.

  The second jumper didn’t have quite enough speed, and it described a long, slow ballistic arc that terminated at the base of the ladder.

  If they were climbing this one, then . . .

  Charlie turned to look at Pete. He waved his arms over his head to get the other man’s attention. Pete raised his head from the rifle with a puzzled look on his face before he caught Charlie’s motions. He turned in place as the first biter slid down the curved face of the shelter silo. Pete yelled out and swung the barrel of his rifle into its head to push it to one side. It slid past the hatch and into the open air.

  But that was just the first — more and more began to pop up. A few of them hammered at the air vents in the top of the silo to gain access, but others crept toward Pete. They’d figured out that each silo had its own ladder, and that they were all interconnected at the top.

  “Come on!” Charlie yelled-gargled. He shouldered the lever-action and began firing. At this range, he hoped that the bullets wouldn’t punch through and ricochet.

  Pete cursed and started to lurch across the catwalk. With his leg locked out straight he had to almost move sideways. Behind him, the next biter slid down the side and made a grab for the rail before falling to the ground. The one after that made the drop just right, though, and the catwalk shook under the impact. Even worse, the following biter took an identical approach. It was as if, Charlie realized with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that each, in turn, learned from the mistakes of the others and adjusted their approach.

  My God — are they talking to each other? He turned and glanced — case in point; the ones atop the opposite silo who’d been trying to leap across the gap had disappeared. The catwalk encircling it was empty so far, but presented with their new intelligence, he felt sure that they’d be seeing an attack on that front soon.

  He couldn’t keep firing without hitting Pete. Charlie opened the action and fed shells into the Marlin’s tubular magazine. He still had the M4, but he couldn’t shake the sense that he was going to need the firepower, and soon.

  Halfway across, Pete turned and aimed his rifle across his body. The empty clip pinged out, but at least one of his shots hit home. The first biter in line behind him sagged down and created a temporary blockade. While the others wrestled at the lifeless corpse to clear the way, Pete crossed the rest of the bridge and met Charlie at the base of the ladder.

  “Up,” Charlie said and jerked his thumb in the same direction.

  Pete hesitated, but Charlie just shook his head and frowned.

  “I’ll make it snappy,” Pete promised. “When I get up top, I’ll cover you to climb.” He slung the empty rifle over one shoulder and started climb-hopping up the ladder.

  The live biters finally lifted their lifeless counterpart and tossed it over the side. Charlie bared his teeth.

  Let’s do this, then.

  He aimed and took methodical shots. The narrowness of the path helped him, but the oncoming biters still bobbed and weaved. Years of easy shots hadn’t prepared him for a walking corpse that tried to avoid gunshots. The Marlin clicked empty after he’d taken down only three of them. That was enough of a blockade to give him some breathing room, though, and he fed more shells into the weapon. He’d thought his pockets were overflowing with rounds, but he was emptying them fast. He glanced up — Pete was halfway up the ladder.

  Hurry up, you old fart.

  Charlie shouldered the lever-action and resumed firing.

  Hanratty dropped the can of linked ammunition to the floor with a grunt. Jim Piper had led them on a meandering route from the shelter to the warehouse, then back to the where they’d entered the complex.

  Charlie and Pete should be up top by now.

  They needed to get a move on and provide a distraction, or every infected in the damn compound was going to be crawling over each other to get to them. He turned to Rivas, Patterson, and the handful of people who’d volunteered to come along. “All right. Patterson, you lead the way. Get into the driver’s seat and get the engine started. Rivas and I will cover you.” He turned to look at the motley collection of men and women who’d come along, and immediately regretted the judgment. They looked scared, to be sure, but their faces were also determined. These people are survivors, he reminded himself. What they lacked in military discipline and uniformity they made up with tenacity and capability. “We load up in twos.” He glanced at Jim Piper and fixed the man with a fierce glance. “You’re on the door. Drop the locking bar as soon as you see the doors slam on the LAV. Worst case scenario, we can hold up in there.” On top of weapons and ammunition, they’d loaded up on bottled water and rations to supplement what was in the vehicle. It wouldn’t last forever, but if they got stuck inside at least they would have something to stave off dehydration.

  He cocked his head at the sound of gunfire. The metal walls muted much of it, but it was recognizable. “That’s our cue. Let’s do this.”

  Chapter 38

  Wood splintered as the sharpened bone at the tip of the crude spear punched through the interior wall of the surgical suite.

  Tish licked her lips and raised the Glock, but her father said, “Wait. Wait for it.”

  She glanced over at him; with the wound in her side, Frannie wasn’t of much use, so she was leaning against the wall in the open corner of the room. Her dad was sitting up, once again, in defiance of her advice. The queasy expression on his face and the slight side-to-side movement of his upper torso would have given her a sense of ‘told you so’ satisfaction if she weren’t so terrified.

  “Just a little hole,” Larry managed. “Give them a bit longer. Wait till you see the grays of their eyes.”

  Lizzie laughed, though there was a frantic tinge to it. “That’s your great advice? Man-eating, walking corpses are digging through a wall to come at us and that’s all you got?”

  Larry grimaced and gave her a look
. “Yes, sorry to say, that’s all I got. I . . .”

  “Shut up,” Tish hissed. The other three looked at her with varying degrees of confusion and annoyance. “Don’t you hear it? What is that?”

  The survivors had four cans of linked ammo that worked in the LAV’s machine guns — 800 rounds, all told. Not a little, but not a lot. If they wanted to make a dent in the horde, they needed to be . . . creative.

  Hanratty couldn’t help but think that he might have erred in expressing that to Corporal Patterson. The Corporal whooped in joy as he gunned the LAV’s big diesel and jerked the wheel to steer toward a clot of infected. They froze, unsure whether to flee or to attack. That indecision came at a price as the front of the armored personnel carrier slammed into them. A few might have been lucky enough to pass beneath the undercarriage, but the LAV's big tires ground just as many into the dirt.

  Bone thumped on metal as a cast spear bounced off of the vehicle’s sides. For now, Hanratty had decided to keep all the firing ports sealed. When and if they did start firing, he’d stick to the machine gun in the turret. He didn’t want to risk a lucky toss plunging a spear through one of the side gun ports or taking him down from the cupola. In the last encounter maybe one in every four or five had carried a weapon, now every other one seemed to be hauling something around. He wondered with a sick sense of curiosity what they’d done with the infected they’d gotten the bones from. Maybe they’d been the dumber, slower ones?

  “Corporal, if you roll this thing, I’m going to kick your ass between your ears,” Hanratty shouted. “Get over to the clinic.”

  “Ooorah, Captain,” said Patterson. He pulled off the blacktop and made a broad turn through a freshly-planted garden. Hanratty winced, but a few crushed vegetables were of little concern compared to survival.

  “Ouch,” he said as the LAV came around and the clinic came into sight through the viewing slit. The crowd of infected were packed around the building three and four deep.

  Well, at least that indicated there were survivors inside.

  “Patterson, make a run in front of the building and thin them out. Rivas, if you get a good angle with the 240 after that, take your shots. Just make them count, friendlies inside.” He turned around and glanced at the civilians who’d tagged along. Most of them were unknown, but one of them from the fight at the fence — Simmons, he thought his name was — seemed to have taken the lead. “Your people ready?”

  The other man swallowed and gave him a thumbs up.

  “All right. We’re going in hot. We’ll clear as many of them off as we can, but we’re going to have to open up and help any wounded back inside.”

  One of the other men slapped Simmons on the back and shouted, “Just get us there and back, we’ll do the rest, Captain!”

  Hanratty pulled back around and smirked. He didn’t know if it was the sudden change of management or the psychological support the presence of the Marines and the LAV offered, but the demeanor of the survivors was completely out of phase with what he’d seen when they first entered the shelter.

  I’ll take it.

  Patterson gunned the engine and steered the LAV close to the clinic. The staccato thump of bodies on the frame filled the cabin. In the sudden noise, Hanratty almost missed the alert chime of the BFT. He glanced down at the screen and had to read through the message three times before he comprehended what it read.

  A smile crept across his face. “Step on it, Patterson!” Sounds like we’re in for a show, and I don’t want to miss it. He began to key in a reply.

  The interior of the helicopter — Foraker informed Miles that it was a CH-53K ‘King Stallion’ — was claustrophobic despite its imposing size. There were a bare handful of seats bolted along the left bulkhead. A series of crates that looked fabricated from odds and ends filled much of the remaining floor space. Miles could have sworn one patch of metal had a Chevy badge on it, though the entire assembly had been spray-painted the same shade of olive drab.

  Ross noticed his interest and leaned over. He had to scream into Miles’ ear to be audible over the thunder of the engines. “They designed these bad boys to be heavy lift choppers. One of these suckers can haul an LAV. We don’t have much use for that, so they retrofitted it to carry as much as ammo as we could cram in.”

  Miles shook his head in amazement and gave the SEAL a thumbs-up. Despite what had to be literal tons of ammunition in the belly of the helicopter, the ground was a blur. The Black Hawk had been fast, but this was the next level. Ross elbowed him and pointed. There were machine gun stations immediately behind the cockpit to either side. The gunner on the right — starboard, he supposed — beckoned to Miles. He unstrapped his harness and made his way forward, though a sudden shift of the deck beneath his feet made the movement more difficult.

  The gunner handed Miles a headset and gestured for him to put it on. After Miles did so, the sound of a rough Southern drawl in mid-sentence replaced the sound of the helicopter’s engines.

  “. . . Coming up on the objective now, you got the civilian on, Chambers?”

  The gunner spoke into his own microphone; the sound was just out of sync with the movement of his lips. “He’s right here, Captain.”

  “Howdy, son, Captain Billy Heppel, U-S-M-C. We lost contact with our Marines at your camp for a bit, but we’ve got them up. Hate to say it, but looks like your walls got breached. I’m going to do a flyby and see if I can pique the interest of the deadheads. You take a look and let me know the best place to shred ‘em.”

  The sense of relief Miles had felt at his own survival washed away in a sudden surge of terror. He swallowed past the sudden thickness in his throat and said, “You got it.”

  He turned to look out the side of the helicopter. The gunner had the handles of his machine gun to hold onto, but the bank of the chopper left Miles unsteady on his feet. He searched around for a moment before he saw a canvas strap bolted to the ceiling. He grabbed on and looked even as he prayed that Heppel was wrong.

  They’d circled around and come in from the east. The thunder of the engines faded as the pilot slowed, giving Miles an opportunity to take in a sight he’d hoped never to see.

  The grounds of the settlement were overrun, and as best as he could tell, every creature on the ground below moved with the same brisk motions as those they’d faced in Cincinnati. A ripple seemed to go through the crowd as the helicopter passed overhead.

  The largest concentration was around the silos, and he let out a sigh of relief. So some of his people had made it. The dead wouldn’t have paid attention, otherwise.

  His breath caught in his throat — there were people in the Crow’s Nest, shooting down at a mass of zombies on the lower catwalk. As he watched, more cascaded over the top of the nearest silo and dropped down onto the catwalk to join in the assault. Still more hammered at the ventilation grates leading into the shelter. Knowing that they could climb had been terrifying on top of the building, but he hadn’t made the next mental leap. If they could scale an elevator shaft ladder, how hard would a chain-link fence be?

  We might as well have had no walls at all.

  A couple of people in the Crow’s Nest noticed the helicopter and began pointing and waving. Miles leaned forward, and his jaw dropped.

  Trina was up there. For a moment he was almost convinced that they’d locked eyes, but they swept by and the moment was gone. Miles turned to look toward the cockpit, though the pilots couldn’t see him.

  “Some of my people are still alive! They’re clustered on the west side of the compound.” He craned his head to try and see more as they passed over the western gate. The helicopter turned to come back about.

  The eastern half of the community was barren, compared to the area around the silos, which teemed with zombies. “Can you pull them to the east side, and keep your fire north and south?”

  “Sho’nuff,” Heppel replied. “Johnson, warm up the flare dispensers. You heard the man — keep your fire north and south, we don’t want any blue
on blue. Whose turn is it to pick the playlist — Nash?”

  The gunner standing next to Miles shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Tim, if you roll with Drowning Pool again, I’m going to scream.”

  The gunner across the way turned and erected a middle finger. “Just for that, I should, you dweeb. How about we kick it old school, Cap? Start ‘em off with Paradise City.”

  “I like it,” Heppel drawled. “Going to hover. Roll flares. Let’s rock.”

  The last en bloc clip pinged from the Garand, and Pete laid it aside with a curse. He fumbled the bolt-action off of his shoulder. Before he could bring it on target, one of the dead surged forward over the mound of its fallen brethren and stabbed at Charlie with a spear.

  He twisted, but the head of the spear still skated along his side and opened a bloody gash. Charlie stabbed the Marlin forward and discharged it at point-blank range into his attacker’s head.

  The half-dozen attackers on the opposite side of the catwalk hesitated, as though waiting for something.

  Damn, Pete marveled. They know.

  Charlie jacked another round into the Marlin and fired, taking down the first in line. The remaining attackers seemed almost taken aback that he was still fighting.

  Pete preyed on the still moment and fired at the next in line. As it fell he worked the action to chamber the next round in the magazine. At such a short range, .308 was bound to over-penetrate, but at this angle, his fire was more likely to go into the ground than the silo.

  “Charlie, get your ass up here!” Pete screamed.

  Below him, the other man jumped as though startled. For a moment, Pete worried that Charlie’s immunity didn’t work on this new strain, but he looked up, met Pete’s eyes, and nodded.

  As soon as Charlie’s foot was on the first rung of the ladder, the attackers ended their pause and surged forward. Beside him, Cara pumped rounds out of her M&P, but the .22s had even less effect than the higher-velocity rounds out of the M4 had earlier.