Apocalypse Aftermath

by David Rogers

  He emerged out into the patio area, looking along the fence line quickly before starting up the ladder leaning against the back wall of the building. Nothing caught his eye beyond the fence, but even with the moonlight it was still dim, and the fence was tall enough to make seeing over it difficult unless right up against it.

  “Yo, Tiny!” Darryl called as he mounted the rungs. The two rifles were still going off, but PK appeared at the edge of the roof, looking down at him while wearing an excited expression.

  “Big crowd coming from the north.” the biker told him.

  “How many?” Darryl asked.

  “Whole lot. Couple dozen.”

  “At least fifty.” Tiny rumbled. Darryl heard the rifles’ bolts being worked, then both went off again a moment later.

  Darryl stopped near the top of the ladder and turned to look in that direction. The elevation let him see clearly past the fence, and he saw human shapes coming out of the tree line. They were moving slowly, some staggering quite badly, and most were weaving or lurching sideways as they headed for the clubhouse fence. Darryl swallowed the obvious question he’d been about to ask; no one human moved like that. Not in numbers that large anyway. And certainly not without attempting to communicate when people started shooting at them.

  “PK, you three who rocking shotguns keep your fucking eyes on the rest of the fence.” Darryl ordered quickly. “You fucking hear me? Watch the fence so we don’t get nothing else sneaking up on us. You on fucking watch, so fucking watch.”

  “Yeah, sure DJ.” PK nodded.

  Darryl went back down the ladder as more Dogz started spilling out of the clubhouse. Most of his brothers were still blinking sleep out of their eyes, and only a few of them had thought to bring their shotguns, but everyone was armed at least with a pistol. Bobo had made it clear that no one went unarmed anywhere, even inside the clubhouse. Darryl and Shooter had made sure everyone understood the importance of safeties, leaving weapons in the holsters, and not fucking around with them.

  “North fence.” Darryl shouted, waving his shotgun over his head and pointing to make sure people knew north from south. With brothers like Needles and Stony wandering around in a nearly perpetual haze, plus his years handling drunks as a bouncer, Darryl knew better than to assume simple directions were simple enough for everybody. “North. That way. Got a big ass clump of zombies headed in.”

  Muttering and swearing arose, but Darryl raised his voice and overrode all of it as the rifle wielding bikers on the roof fired again. “We gotta get out to the fence and take care of them.”

  “In the dark?”

  “On foot?”

  “The fence will hold but not if we let a bunch of fucking zombies keep pounding on it.” Darryl said. “Let’s go Dogz.”

  Darryl turned and jogged toward the fence, purposefully not checking to see who was following. He heard other heavy footfalls trailing him though, so some were. Darryl led the way to the center of the fence and stopped a few feet from it so he could take a look. The ‘lot’ the clubhouse sat on had been farmland back in the 1800s, but trees had crept back in a little since. There was still a good amount of cleared ground though, and maybe sixty feet from the fence he saw the leading edge of the ragged zombie horde.

  A lot of them looked like college students, but there were both children and adults mixed in as well. Most of the zombies had been through whatever zombies went through being and becoming zombies, and showed signs of injury. Some heads wobbled on necks that were bloody or had pieces of flesh missing. A few arms dangled uselessly at their sides, though except for two that were missing entirely, Darryl couldn’t say if it was because bones were broken or something else. Some of the zombies dragged a leg as they staggered forward, but it only slowed, not stopped, them. One was missing a foot below the ankle, and was walking without concern – though unsteadily and decidedly lopsided– on the remaining stub.

  Clothing and skin both were dirty, and in many cases in tatters. Shirts and pants were ripped in multiple places, some clothing only barely clinging to the body it was trying to cover. Most were bloody, and Darryl saw bones showing where bone shouldn’t be visible; which was to say, never. Many of the zombies showed evidence they’d been meals for other zombies before whatever was turning them from humans to corpses to walking corpses took over and made them join the ongoing dinner party. A lot of the visible bones that weren’t the result of an obvious fracture seemed to be from the gaping bite marks in their flesh where tissue had been eaten away.

  “Okay, watch where you point the damn guns.” Darryl shouted, finally glancing around. About thirty Dogz were spreading out along the fence. “Use the sights like we showed you. Take your time, shoot slow, and aim for the head like Mr. Soul told you about from the news. There a lot of us and we got the fence, so ain’t no need for no one to get to panicking.” He laid the shotgun down in the grass at his feet and put his hand on the holster he’d hooked back onto his belt.

  “There a lot of them too.” Joker said unhappily.

  Darryl drew the Glock 26 and ejected the flush magazine that was designed to fit with the pistol’s small, concealable nature. Tucking it into his pocket, Darryl replaced it with one of his extended magazines. With thirty-three rounds it hung quite a way out of the pistol’s grip, but Darryl didn’t care how it looked; and it looked fairly ridiculous. What he cared about was it gave him a lot of shots to kill zombies with, and he had another one with just as many before he needed to revert to the flush mag or go looking for a box of ammo to reload the extended magazines with.

  The ammunition situation was something both he and Shooter were a little concerned with. Thousands of rounds sounded like a lot until you started dividing them among dozens of armed people. And when getting more wasn’t as easy as just ordering some from the store. Because they had some at the moment, getting more was lower on the list than other priorities, but Darryl had done a little watching of the news himself.

  If a really big pack of zombies showed up, the Dogz could be in trouble.

  Pistols started firing around him, and Darryl raised his own. But he held his eyes on the pack without peering through his sights yet, studying the results of the firing. He saw a few zombies jerking a little like they were taking hits, saw a few more spray a little blood – and a lot more of other things – from definite hits, but none were falling.

  If the Dogz kept shooting like this, there’d be a lot of trouble to go around.

  “Knock it off, knock it off!” Darryl yelled, turning his head and shouting in both directions.

  “They coming at us.” Perv protested.

  “Make sure you aiming.” Darryl shouted. “Stop fucking shooting until they close enough you can be sure you can hit what you aiming at. You just wasting ammo.”

  “Gotta learn some time.” Light laughed.

  “Wait until I fire.” Darryl told everyone. “Just wait. Get used to how the sights move when you aim. Hold steady and squeeze the trigger back nice and smooth. Pistols ain’t no good for long range and neither are shotguns.”

  The zombies staggered closer as rifles from the clubhouse roof continued firing. There were three back there now, but only about every third shot was killing a zombie. Darryl waited, made himself keep waiting, as the horde continued to approach. Corpses were noticing the line of Dogz on the other side of the fence, the heads fixating on men who stood uncertainly with weapons in their hands. The staggering steadied into a slightly more purposeful shuffle, and the horde began to spread a little bit as individual zombies locked on to whoever had caught their dead eyed attention.

  “DJ?” Mad asked.

  “Just wait.” Darryl commanded.

  “But—”

  “We ain’t got enough ammo to just go throwing it around.”

  “How close you gonna let them fuckers get?” Needles complained.

  Darryl had been considering that. He, personally, felt comfortable shooting from thirty-five or forty feet away. But he’d been shooting at the
range for years, and had a lot of practice. The rest of the Dogz, not so much, except Shooter. As another rifle round shattered a zombie skull out beyond the fence, Darryl was pretty sure Shooter was awake and up there putting 30-06 bullets to good use. But the rest of the Dogz were amateurs.

  “Just wait.”

  “DJ . . .”

  “DJ know what he doing.” Bobo’s voice boomed from behind them. Darryl didn’t bother to turn, but he was relieved the Top Dog was up and about. “Y’all need better targets. Just hold up.”

  Darryl watched the zombies stagger through thirty feet, then raised his Glock and finally looked through the sights. The three glowing dots – two back near the hammer and one on the end of the barrel – lined up on a woman with long black hair whose face looked like it had been run over a cheese grater, or more probably dragged along asphalt. The skin on one cheek, from temple to chin, was rough with deep scrapes and crusted with dried blood. He considered how his sights were holding on her as he watched her approach.

  The further away a target was, the less movement was needed to adjust aim. Which meant any movement made more of a difference in where the aim point was. His sights were wavering a little as she bobbed and staggered toward the fence, and he made himself keep waiting. Closer also gave a bigger target as well, at least visually. Every bit would help. Up to a point.

  She finally got to twenty feet, and he decided that was as good as it was going to get. The Glock barked in his hands as he squeezed the trigger back. His bullet entered her face just below her nose, and she crumpled amid a glinting shower of bone that caught the moonlight as the back of her skull shattered. Darryl adjusted his sights as the Dogz to either side of him opened up as well. Most of the pistols were firing fairly steadily, but a few were dumping bullets at the zombies a little faster than he knew was possible if they were being aimed.

  He ignored that as he centered his sight dots on another zombie. It went down as someone else shot it, so he shifted again, to an older man who had a trucker’s tan line across his forehead. The cap that would have caused the gradation in his skin from being habitually perched on his head was gone, but that didn’t matter anymore. Darryl put his second bullet through the man’s face, then a third into a younger man who looked like he’d been in maybe his early twenties before he ‘died’. The bullet killed him for good.

  Darryl pulled his gaze back from the sights and glanced over the entire horde. Maybe a third were down, and others showed obvious bullet wounds. None were bleeding, at most just a thick oozing that was definitely not what a bullet was supposed to do when it hit a body. Zombies didn’t bleed, not unless they were ‘fresh’. The news had said that several times, but Darryl hadn’t really had an opportunity to observe it until now.

  On one hand, it was a little helpful; it lowered the gore factor. On the other . . . it was disturbing in the extreme when a bullet went into someone’s chest, made a hole that exposed bones and organs, and the ‘person’ just kept coming for you. Without even having the decency to bleed or act like it hurt.

  Shaking his head, he rushed his next shot, then settled back down and killed another pair before he heard the first shotgun go off. He glanced left and saw Smoke had stepped close to the fence with his shotgun up and leveled at the zombies. There were still about thirty on their feet, and they were getting close. Smoke was working the slide as Darryl glanced at him, and the shotgun blasted out another load of pellets into the zombies. One fell over backward, but it was still moving as it went down. Not dead yet.

  Other Dogz were thinking the same thing, and pistols were being holstered or dropped in favor of shotguns. Darryl shot another zombie, then another, as more shotguns started firing. He scowled as he saw the first zombie make it to the fence and press against it, straining to reach past the heavy wooden boards spanning the posts. Those posts were sunk into several feet of concrete, but Darryl wasn’t prepared to bet his life on them if enough zombies had time to push on them.

  Door Mat, a small and scrawny Dog who took a lot of shit from his brothers for it, darted up and put the barrel of the shotgun in his hands almost right up against the zombie’s head. Darryl winced as the blast took the zombie’s head clean off in an impressive spray of bone and brains. The pellets ripped the creature’s skull free from the neck, but left enough of it intact to be quite disgusting as it arced away from the collapsing body. Door Mat skipped back as he struggled with the unfamiliar weapon, trying to get another shell ready to fire. Two more zombies were already moving into place where the one had fallen.

  Darryl shot a corpse that was waving its arms over the top of the fence at Evil, who was standing a foot out of reach and still fumbling to switch to his own shotgun. Reminding himself to stay calm, to trust the fence was going to give enough time to stay calm, Darryl tracked right and took out another zombie. Most of the Dogz had shotguns in their hands now, and the noise was getting quite loud as the long guns started sweeping the fence.

  Not just sweeping along the fence though. Some of the sprays of pellet were splintering through the wood. The Dogz had used thick two by twelve boards for the fence sections, but close range shotguns were enough to start weakening the boards. Not all the bikers were being as careful with their aim as they perhaps could have been, and the top boards of several sections were starting to take a pounding.

  There was nothing for it. About a dozen zombies remained, and with all the shotgun fire there was little chance Darryl, Bobo, or anyone else could try and advise caution. Weasel lost his shotgun when he got close enough for the zombie he was trying to kill to knock it from his hands. The biker scampered away as Crown took the zombie out from a few feet to the side of the retreating Weasel. Darryl plugged another couple himself, and a mass of shotgun shells finally finished the rest off.

  The firing tapered off, leaving his ears ringing. Darryl looked from end to end along the northern fence line, then stepped closer and peered cautiously over it. A number of bodies lay on the grass outside, with more scattered around in the field beyond. Perversely, he still saw two moving. He aimed and fired at both, lingering long enough to make sure all motion had ceased when their heads had been pierced by a nine millimeter bullet, then panned across the entire collection of carnage a second time to check again.

  “That all of them?” 2C asked, talking loudly.

  Darryl knew how he felt. His ears felt like he’d been mashed up against the speakers at a concert, and even yelling, 2C’s voice sounded a little hollow. He heard some of the Dogz answering, a mixture of swearing and cautious agreement that the zombies were all dead, while a few others whooped and cheered at the destruction.

  “We gotta do something else about the fence.” Bobo said. Darryl turned to see the Dogz leader had come up behind him.

  “What about it?”

  “Find a way to keep them fuckers from getting in that close against it.” Bobo said, gesturing at the splintered boards along the top. There were some holes, and one section had split entirely through and was sagging from the nails holding it to the posts with its middle fully separated.

  “Dunno what.” Darryl shrugged. “Moat?”

  Bobo grinned. “I was thinking punji sticks maybe, but a moat ain’t a bad idea neither.”

  “Bobo, I was fucking kidding.”

  “I ain’t. It a good idea.”

  “How the fuck we gonna dig a moat?” Darryl asked as he stepped away from the fence and ejected the extended magazine from his pistol. “Even with them augers we used on the fence posts, you talking about days of shovel work to put a damn moat in.” He considered the clay that made up most of Georgia’s soil and scowled. “Fucking weeks more like.”

  “There ways. I’ll talk to you about it in the morning.”

  Darryl shook his head as he raised his head and waved at the guards up on the clubhouse roof. One of them waved back and gave a thumbs up. Nodding tiredly, Darryl leaned down to pick the shotgun up from where it lay on the grass. One more thing to worry about, but not tonight
. He needed more sleep.

  Especially if they were going to dig a damned moat. He really hoped Bobo was kidding.

  * * * * *

  Jessica

  “This is you, 303.” Austin said, using the key to unlock a door on the left. “Nice and close to the stairs.” he added, tossing his head at the stairwell door that was on the opposite side of the hallway.

  “That’ll come in handy I suppose.” Jessica replied as he swung the room door open. “I mean, unless we’re counting on the power staying up?”

  “I’m not.” Austin shrugged, though his tone was on the slightly positive side of neutral. He stepped through the door and stood aside holding it open. Jessica hesitated briefly, and he smiled. “Honest, every inch of this building has been checked since we arrived. It’s clear.”

  “We have to be careful.” Candice said solemnly.

  “That’s right. Good girl.” Jessica said, squeezing the girl’s shoulder lightly before limping past Austin. The lights were already on, and she blinked when she made it past the short entry hallway at the door. “My God, this is . . . just for us?”

  “You don’t think someone with my skills came cheap do you?” Austin laughed as she took in the room. “And trust me, rich clients like to be pampered. For the ones who wanted to take a look at the kind of protection they’d be receiving if they signed a contract, Eagle made sure they were comfortable.”

  “I’ll say.” she said wonderingly. She had been told it was a suite, and they hadn’t been kidding when they called it that. The room was large and comfortable, with expensive furniture and fittings artfully and expertly arranged throughout the space. There wasn’t a kitchen, but there was an off-set wet bar on the front wall with a handsome wood finish.

  “This is bigger than my–” she started, then cut herself off. The house in Lawrenceville brought up bad memories. “Not yet.” she told herself silently. “Not opening that box up quite yet.” Instead she just shook her head again. “Very plush.”