A Place Outside The Wild

by Daniel Humphreys

  Great, they’re not only smarter and faster, their heads are harder.

  “Alex! Under my bunk,” Pete snapped. “There’s a footlocker with an AR and a bunch of mags.” It was a custom 300 Blackout job like Miles’, though Pete had gone with a plainer setup. Miles liked to hang every ‘kewl’ accessory he could find on his guns. Pete had put his foot down when he’d shown up one day with a rail-mounted bottle opener. There were some lines you just didn’t cross.

  Alex scurried away to find the gun as Pete fired again. Two rounds left. Charlie was halfway up the ladder. Shoot — miss — one round left. Zombies at the base of the ladder.

  Pete leaned over in an attempt to get a bead on the first one. Fired — hit. He laid the bolt action on the floor next to the Garand and reached out to help Charlie up through the hatch. “Get that M4 up, Charlie.” He turned back toward Alex, “Damn it, where’s my — ah.” Alex slapped it in his hands. He pulled back the charging handle and looked back at Charlie. “Now we’re cooking with gas. We can hold them off longer. Alternate fire. By the time we clock out of rounds there should be enough bodies in the way they won’t be able to climb up.”

  “Right,” Charlie rasped. Pete glanced down at his side.

  “Hell, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig. Cara! Get the first aid kit.”

  “I can help!” A little kid Pete didn’t recognize at first chimed in. He glowered, but the kid refused to shrink under the weight of his glare. Of course. Pete had seen that stubborn expression before.

  “Twigs, right? I’ll ignore why you’re up here, but if you can help, you do it.”

  Pete turned away, leaned over the opening and took aim. The thwack of the 220-grain subsonic slamming into the head of the first zombie up the ladder was much more satisfying than the whine of a ricochet. “I’ll cover this. . . .” Pete trailed off and cocked his head to one side. “You guys hear that?”

  Even as he asked it, he realized both what the sound was, and the fact that most of the kids would never have heard it before. He glanced at Charlie. The other man frowned, then mouthed, “Chopper?”

  Pete turned to follow the noise. On the horizon, a speck came into sight. It swelled larger as the thump-thump-thump of the rotor blades grew more and more overwhelming. They were booking, whoever they were.

  The helicopter followed the path defined by the county road. As it got closer, he could make out the ‘USMC’ painted on the side in bold, black lettering.

  “Yes!” Pete shouted. “The Marines are landing, kids!”

  The helicopter slowed. For a moment, he could make out of a pair of faces in the gunner’s station behind the cockpit. One wore dark goggles and a helmet, but the other — his heart leaped into his throat.

  My boy’s alive. Thank you, Lord, my son is alive.

  Trina recognized the figure as the helicopter rushed past and shook the entire nest. “That’s my dad!” She threw a celebratory fist to the heavens and ululated a cry of sheer joy.

  It was a shout that, in point of fact, one could almost describe as laughter.

  The helicopter was moving away as fast as it had approached, but he felt no fear — the Marines wouldn’t leave them behind. Not his people. Just over the eastern fence, it turned to come back around and came into a hover thirty feet from the ground. He glanced down; for the moment, their attackers had paused. Was there just too much sensory input for them to decide where to attack?

  Pete grabbed Trina and hugged her tight. “Watch this, kiddo. It’s about time you learned about fireworks.”

  Twin arcs of glowing flares shot from the sides of the hovering monstrosity and tumbled through the air. At the same time, the gentle chords of an electric guitar began to pulse from massive speakers mounted on the stub wings. A smile crested Pete’s face, and he recalled his conversation with Hanratty. What had the man said? ‘We’ve got a few helicopters with those big psyops speakers on the side’?

  He’d scoffed at the time, but as the drums joined the guitar solo and Axl Rose’s melodic snarl boomed out, he couldn’t help but laugh, himself.

  The zombies committed themselves to the attack now. The horde flowed away from the silos and the other besieged buildings. They stormed toward the emission of light and sound that must have seemed irresistible. The attackers on the catwalk melted away, leaping over the side like lemmings. By this time, there were enough bodies on the ground below to serve as a cushion that many got up and joined the new assault. Just as many leaped to their end.

  The dead became a living, surging mass beneath the chopper. “Oh, won’t you please take me home . . .”

  And as the guitar solo began, the heavy machine guns on either side of the helicopter opened up. The laser-light of tracers joined the flash of the flares, and sure enough, it was one hell of a fireworks show.

  A wave front of shredded flesh and bone cascaded away from the lines of the gunfire. Still, the zombies came on, heedless of the fact that they sprinted to their destruction.

  Pete let out a Bronx cheer and shook his rifle in the air. “Close air support, baby! How do you like that, you half-rotten pieces of shit!”

  The helicopter slowly rotated in place, revealing a third gun mounted on the lowered cargo ramp. The rate of fire was nowhere close to continuous. Pete assumed that the pauses and rotation provided time for the guns to cool and for the gunners to find the densest clusters. All the while, the music pumped and throbbed — now something electric and fast by ZZ Top — but at this point, the flares seemed unnecessary. Everything on two legs within the fence line that could get eyes on target had focused either on salvation or destruction, according to their own perspective. As Pete watched, the LAV pulled up to the edge of the helicopter’s killing field and added its own fire to the fray. Compared to the high-speed destruction of the helicopter’s .50-caliber machine guns, the ground vehicle’s fire seemed superfluous. He half-wished he were down there putting steel on target himself, though.

  And then it happened. It was something he hadn’t seen in the years since Z-Day, though it was not an unfamiliar sight when one fought the living.

  Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of their brethren were down, obliterated from above. Where once they might have stood their ground, seemingly unaware of the consequences, these were different. For better or worse, they had changed. They had grown past what they had once been, and so confronted with potential destruction, the survivors turned away from what should have been their final demise and fled.

  It wasn’t a fast run, which gave the armored personnel carrier and helicopter more time to whittle at their ranks, but it was fast enough. They made it back to the fence, and to the school buses, and at that point, the settlement fell silent as the firing ceased. Perhaps it would have been worth it to try and destroy even more of them, but Pete understood the thinking. Why damage the barricades they had left? Yes, the enemy had shown they could scale them. Pete also knew that their bland acceptance of the security offered by fences and walls was a thing of the past.

  More than the infected had changed. Yes, their enemy was not as close to collapse as they’d dared to hope, but they’d been vigilant once before. They could be so again.

  And this time, they weren’t alone.

  Chapter 39

  The vibration shook Charlie awake.

  For the second night, he’d slept a deep, dreamless sleep. He eased up in bed and tried to reduce the pressure on his side. Tish had sewn his wound shut in the clinic the night before, after they’d made the final sweep of the settlement and ensured the interior was clear.

  As always, fights with the biters ended in binary probability. There were those who survived and those who were infected. They’d found plenty of the former. There had been, oddly enough, none of the latter. There were twenty people missing and unaccounted for. Presumably, they’d succumbed to infection and were destroyed in the final attack or had fled with the others. It could have been worse. Most of the shelters had held. Most.

  The engines growled outsid
e, shaking the floor a bit more.

  The first road convoy from Camp Perry had shown up around midnight. The heavy-lift choppers had already been ferrying troops and lighter supplies back and forth during that time frame. He hadn’t been there, but he’d heard how poor of an initial welcome the rest of the community had given Hanratty. The new arrivals didn’t have to deal with that. The town was ecstatic, in an almost celebratory mood despite the pain of their losses.

  Charlie stood up, prepared to wince. The motion felt smooth and natural, though, and he twisted to the side to present his flank to the mirror on top of his dresser. In the absence of a sink and faucet in his cabin, he made do. He’d left various bathroom clutter spread across the top of the chest — a pitcher of water and a large, ceramic bowl, as well as other toiletries.

  The bulge of the bandages wrapped around his middle was visible beneath the threadbare t-shirt he slept in, but other than that, nothing. It looked, for all the world, as though it were freshly applied.

  With a groan, Charlie doffed his shirt and studied his side again. Surely there’d been some sort of seepage over the night — but no, the bandage was clean.

  His curiosity unraveled into gnawing worry. He fiddled with the bandages in search of a seam, but gave up and cut them off with his pocket knife.

  The gauze pad came away from his skin with ease. He glanced at it before discarding it on the floor. The pad had a faint discoloration of blood, but that was it.

  The gnawing worry transited into shock.

  Charlie fingered his side even as he stared at the reflection in the mirror with wide eyes.

  The seam of his wound had healed over. There was some scarring, as he might have expected, but it was a thin, puckered seam in his flesh, dotted here and there with extraneous bits of stitches. He supposed at some point he’d need to have them removed, but that was a small concern at the moment. Of more importance was the fact that the seam in his flesh was a dull, silvery gray.

  He recalled the slight quaver in Miles’ voice the night before as the other man worked his way through a tumbler of Pete’s celebratory Scotch.

  Nanomachines.

  Charlie’s mouth went dry, and he poured a measure of water from the pitcher on the chest of drawers. As he took a deep drink, he almost immediately began coughing. Most of the water ended up on the mirror, but he bent over and continued hacking into the bowl. He had the sense there was something in the back of his throat that hadn’t left enough room for the water to pass. He coughed and coughed. It occurred to him that he might be about to suffocate when something liquid shifted and splattered out of his mouth into the bottom of the bowl.

  He gasped for breath; great, heaving wheezes of air — clinging to it like something he’d lost for years and not mere moments. Charlie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned over the bowl, studying the mass he’d coughed up. It looked like nothing else but raw, stringy meat, shot through here and there with bits of pale white.

  “What the hell?” he whispered, and fell silent. The voice was his own, just not the one he’d heard since Z-Day.

  He stared at himself in the mirror, forcing his eyes as wide as they could go, but they’d not yet betrayed him. They were white — a little puffy from sleep — but recognizably human.

  “What’s happening to me?” he said, louder this time.

  “You sure about this?” Miles asked.

  Pete hefted the duffel bag at his side. He seemed to weigh it as though trying to discern if it held too much. “Yeah,” his uncle drew out. “I’m sure.” He turned to face his nephew. “You going to miss me?”

  “Not a bit,” Miles assured him, though he felt certain that the thickness of his voice bore witness to the lie.

  Pete laughed and dropped the duffel to throw both arms around him. “Well, I’m sure as hell going to miss you, boy,” he whispered into Miles’ ear. He pulled back. “It’s a bigger world now, and from the sounds of it, Hanratty’s people could use all the help they can get. This is always going to be home base, though.” He shrugged.

  “Well, where you headed first?”

  “Got a meeting with General Vincent. He’s the head honcho behind this herd of cats. From what Hanratty tells me, I’m liable to end up in planning or logistics, most likely.” Pete turned and waved a hand at the bustle of activity on the eastern end of the camp. Bulldozers pushed the bodies of fallen zombies into hastily-dug trenches even as semis brought in prefab housing and other supplies on lowboy trailers. Everywhere he looked, people moved with purpose, though there was an air of frenetic disorganization to the entire thing. Miles had to laugh. Yeah, it was a herd of cats, all right, but that was a lot better than the emptiness of the alternative.

  “Why do I suspect,” Miles mused, “that you’re not going to settle for some sort of cushy desk job?”

  Pete did his best to look innocent. “Who? Me?”

  “You.”

  His eyes twinkled. “Swift, silent, deadly, kid.”

  “Well, you got two out of three, at least.”

  Pete laughed and slapped his damaged leg. “Sounds like they’ve got some good techs up at Perry, I’ll be bouncing around before you know it.”

  Over the wall, the echo of a helicopter became audible as another approached. It was funny, Miles thought. They’d spent so long hiding and being quiet. The enemy had changed, though, and hiding and being quiet were no longer effective. What was effective, though, was providing them with too much feedback. Enough sensory input and the part of them had learned animal cunning lost control. They could herd them — they could destroy them. He smiled. If you couldn’t hide from the enemy, being bold was a good alternative. Somehow, that seemed more palatable than cringing behind a wall. They could laugh, now. If for no other reason, that made it all worthwhile.

  “There’s my ride,” Pete said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He hefted the duffel bag and hobbled toward the area they’d designated as a landing zone for the incoming choppers. When he was halfway there, Miles called out, “Nobody blames you, Pete.” Last night, when they’d gathered together, family and friends, to commemorate their triumph and to remember the fallen, he’d admitted to them that he’d known of the nearby horde for some time. The revelation had stunned them into momentary silence, but for the most part, as each examined it from their own perspective, they agreed with his judgment. The community hadn’t been ready. They’d been in denial, complacent. If he’d tried to tell them, they wouldn’t have listened.

  The hardest truths made the best lessons. But only when made painfully and evidently obvious.

  Pete turned back and looked. He smiled, but sadness tinged it. “I know, son. But I do.”

  There was plenty of room in the clinic, so overcrowding wasn’t an excuse to try and get out. Even if he’d wanted to give it a try, Tish had put a preemptive foot down.

  Larry was feeling a hell of a lot better, though he was still somewhat sensitive to light. So, instead of fighting it, he accepted his daughter’s medical advice and remained in bed. That didn’t mean he wasn’t receiving visitors, though most of them rushed away in reaction to Tish’s protective scowl.

  She was getting to that stage with Jim Piper, but he was either unaware of her dark looks, or didn’t care. “I can’t believe you didn’t know.”

  “In case you missed it, I’ve been a little busy the last few days,” Larry said and rubbed his forehead with his fingers. It was still throbbing a bit, but he refused to voice any complaint to Tish.

  “Fair enough. We finally got enough serious suggestions to name the town. Norma wanted to announce it the other night during the town meeting. But, well, the Marines showed up, and that didn’t work out.” He dug a much-folded piece of paper from the pocket of his jeans. Jim grinned. “How about we make a double announcement of it? You taking the position and our name.” His grin faded. “The rumor mill has already spread the name far and wide, but I’ve been able to keep a lid on Norma’s replacement.”

&n
bsp; “You keep coming and going like this, they’re going to figure it out.” After Norma had regained consciousness, the survivors in the shelter had informed her that she was stepping down. There’d been more than enough survivors present to form a quorum. The spontaneous motion had passed with unanimous consent. There’d been some bickering back and forth about her replacement, at which point Jim had suggested a secret ballot of the most popular nominees. When they tallied the results, it was close, but Larry had been the top choice.

  Larry took the paper from Jim and unfolded it. “If you guys named it Woodbury, I’m leaving.” He folded a corner of the washcloth on his forehead up so he could see a little better.

  Jim didn’t reply, but if anything, his grin got bigger.

  Larry looked at the list of names and the number of votes next to each and smiled despite his headache. “Huh. How about that.”

  Once again, Vir was outside the wall.

  This time, though, heavy equipment and ever-growing piles of construction supplies surrounded him. Dozens of sharp-eyed Marines lined the perimeter, watching for incoming threats.

  “You Singh?”

  He turned and nodded at the man in the odd-looking camouflage, made up of patterns of blues and blacks. “That’s me.”

  The other man stuck out his hand. “Lieutenant Commander Rick Ferris, US Naval Construction Forces. I hear you’re a structural engineer?”

  Vir shook his hand and beamed. “Yes, indeed I am. I must say, I hadn’t expected to get the opportunity to build much more of anything in my lifetime, so this is definitely a happy occasion.”

  Ferris laughed. “Well, I’m glad we’re finding survivors, Mr. Singh. I’ve got a few of my team leaders and supply folks waiting in the command track. If you’d care to join me, we’ve got a rough sketch of the planned wall expansion and we’d love to get your take on it. We’ve got plenty of supplies. You guys did one hell of a job with what you had, but it would surprise you how quick we can build up something with Conex trailers and heavy equipment.”