Cry Zombie Cry (I Zombie Book 5)

by Jack Wallen

  “Son of a bitch,” Keller whispered. “I don’t like these odds one fucking bit.”

  “Why aren’t we still firing?” Jordan questioned, and was answered by the resurrected sound of gunfire.

  The team managed to take down all of the Screamers before they could reach the center of the train car. The Boners, on the other hand, were a different story altogether. The margin for error when shooting the armored zombies centered on a tiny slit in the exoskeleton near and above the eyes. It was the only weakness.

  Only one member of the team held sharpshooter status.

  “Jordan,” Keller barked, “see if you can get a better shot up high.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  Like a spider, Jordan scrambled up a pile of crates that took him over halfway up the wall. As soon as he found his footing, he wrapped the strap of his rifle around his arm, took in a deep breath, and steadied the sights of the weapon.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  Shoot.

  One of the Boners dropped, a spray of rot pluming from its face.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  Shoot.

  Miss.

  “Fuck!” Jordan shouted, before readying himself to fire again.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  One of the Boners was on Snake, its gray fingers cupping the soldier’s head. An inhuman scream issued from the soldier’s mouth as the Boner clamped down on Snake’s head with every ounce of force the creature had.

  The crack of bone was the only split-second warning before Snake’s skull gave up the ghost and sprayed blood and gray matter over the floor.

  The Boner dropped the limp body and released a wall-thumping roar as the other living-dead juggernauts rushed the soldiers. Before another shot was fired, every member of the team but one had bled out—skulls crushed, necks snapped, life drained.

  Keller crouched beneath the communication console, between the legs of one of the mannequins. It took every ounce of control she could muster to calm her breathing and staunch the flow of tears. Cowardice was a foreign concept to her; yet here she was, weeping like the little girl she hadn’t known for over twenty years.

  Eventually, the clacking sounds of the Boners departing brought her some comfort. When she finally stood, death surrounded her. The sight and the smell of blood, organs, and flesh assaulted her until a steady stream of vomit rose from her throat and spattered the ground in a chunky Jackson Pollock tribute.

  “Mayday,” Keller whispered into her radio. “My team is down. It’s just me now.”

  “Keller, it’s up to you, then.” José spoke efficiently. “Stop those drop-ships at all costs.”

  She returned her radio to its holster and turned her attention to the communication console.

  A keyboard and computer screen stood sentinel over the console. On the display was an overlay map with three blips moving slowly.

  “Shit,” Keller whispered, and clumsily fished her radio from its holster.

  “José, it’s Keller.”

  Silence.

  “José, where in the hell are you?”

  “José here. What’s going on?”

  “We’re too late. The planes are in flight.”

  “Stop them.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t care.” José‘s voice took an angry turn. “Just stop those planes.”

  The radio went silent. Keller pulled the chair from the desk and flung the mannequin to the floor. Before taking the seat, she tossed nervous glances over her shoulders. The room was clear.

  “Damn it,” Keller spat, as she took in the console.

  She tapped a few keys on the keyboard. For a second the screen responded and then went black. After a pause, the screen filled with a warning, “Mess with the best, die like the rest,” and then went black for good.

  “Romero One to command.” The voice crackled from a small handheld receiver.

  Without hesitation, Keller snatched up the receiver and pressed the call button.

  “Romero One, this is command.”

  “We’re on schedule. Drop should happen as planned.”

  Keller’s mind raced around every possible option until only one solution survived the maddening vortex.

  “Romero One, this is command. I have orders for you to return to base. The mission has been postponed.”

  Silence.

  Keller stared wide-eyed at the receiver, waiting for a reply.

  “Bravo one hotel three six tango charlie niner niner Echo.”

  Silence.

  “Command,” the static-filled voice returned. “I need your authorization code.”

  “Fuck!” Keller smacked her palm to her forehead. Her eyes darted about the console in search of anything resembling an authorization code.

  “Command, we cannot comply with the order without verification.”

  Keller continued her search across the station. She came up with nothing.

  “Command, this is Romero One. Order to return denied. All ships continuing to drop-off zone. Romero One out.”

  The radio faded to a final silence. Keller was tempted to reopen the lines of communication to make one more attempt at the order to return. Instead she grabbed her own radio.

  “José, it’s Keller. I’ve failed. Repeat, I’ve failed.”

  Keller was met with yet another, more frightening, silence.

  *

  Where Keller’s team had an exact location of the communication hub, José‘s team went in blind. There was no way to pinpoint the coordinates of an untagged baby. To make matters worse, this wasn’t just any baby, so avoiding security was sure to be an impossible feat.

  The team entered through the kitchen car. The smell of a hot meal nearly knocked them to their knees. José glanced around at his men, lifting an eyebrow to ensure they understood the mission took precedence over growling stomachs.

  Skinny Marks took in a great suck of breath and closed his eyes against the delicious smell. José slapped the young man’s forehead hard enough to knock it into a stainless serving cart. Skinny rolled his eyes and shook his head. José pointed; the men moved on.

  “How are we going to know where to look?”

  The voice was that of Shane McDouglass, a displaced Scot who refused to give up his kilt and fought like Highlander meets Braveheart.

  “Listen,” José whispered.

  “For what?” McDouglass raised his voice a bit too high.

  José glared and gestured for silence. Finally, he nodded forward. The men turned their stealth up and silently made their way out of the kitchen and into a hallway.

  There were no signs of anything out of the ordinary. José looked around desperately and suppressed a sigh of frustration. The last thing he needed was for his men to see doubt cross his face. Instead, the leader pointed forward. The men moved on.

  The hall came to a T-intersection. Every man turned his head back to command. José complied and pointed to the right. There was no logic to the decision—he merely had to keep his men moving.

  The new route led them into a storage bay. Tucked inside the room was something to fill nearly every possible need. Food, medicine, technology…anything and everything to keep a small army alive and kicking. The first thought to pop into José’s mind was a quote from his favorite song: In the final seconds, who’s gonna save you. He knew the answer: the smallest army of one.

  There was no baby.

  The room was a dead end. José wasted no time in getting his men out of the room and back down the corridor. At the T, the men continued forward. As the team neared the end of the hall, the air was assaulted with screams and roars.

  Every man turned inward and begged for someone to offer up a quick out. There was none. They turned to flee to find a Boner standing at the end of the hall. The beast leaned forward and released a roar that threatened to strip the color from their flesh. When the thing had finished raging against the strangers, it stood up straight; the clack and ra
ttle of its bones brought one of the teammates to his knees. José grabbed the man by the collar and yanked him back to his feet.

  Again the beast raged.

  Hawkeye Demmare stepped forward, his right hand rising with a pistol at the ready. Hawk earned his name from being both a crack shot and a M*A*S*H fanatic. When the group saw him draw his weapon, an unexpected calm overtook them.

  The Boner lowered its hands and leaned forward. Before the monster managed to take its first step toward the team, Hawkeye ripped off a single silenced bullet. His aim was dead on and the shot pierced the veil of the zombie’s right eyeball. A quick splatter of thick, brown slop shot out and the mockery of evolution clattered and rattled to the floor.

  Not a word was spoken. Everyone took in a slow, simultaneous breath and stood to continue their journey onward. José raised an arm to stop the group. He carefully continued to the next hall intersection and stopped. A quick look back at the crew and a single nod of his head drew the team together.

  A momentary silence overtook the area. Just as José was about to signal the men on, two soft voices ignited the tension.

  “What are we going to do?” the first voice asked.

  “What can we do? As much as we try and deny it, we are nothing more than his puppets,” the second voice answered, growing louder.

  José glanced at Hawkeye and nodded in the direction of the oncoming voices. The sharpshooter stepped to the head of the group and leveled his gun into the hallway intersection. When the two men came into view, the first thing they saw was the barrel of the overlarge semiautomatic pistol.

  “On your knees,” said Hawkeye.

  The two men complied.

  José stepped out of the group and stood in front of the kneeling men.

  “The baby. Where is he?”

  Silence.

  Hawkeye placed the unfeeling barrel of his weapon against the temple of the nearest man.

  “Answer the man.” Hawkeye’s voice was cold.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the nearest man said.

  “Yes, you do,” José said. “If you don’t answer me, I promise your brains will paint your buddy with a spectacular design.”

  “Car six,” the second man confessed. “But you’ll never get to him. The inner sanctum of that car is guarded by every nightmare we could dream up.”

  José nodded to another team member who pulled out two syringes and simultaneously drove the needles into the flesh of the men’s necks. Before the surprised look had dissipated from their faces, both men were sprawled across the hall floor.

  “What car are we in?” José looked around for any sign of location.

  “According to the map, we’re in nine. Six should be three cars that way.” The team’s scout pointed toward an exit.

  “Well then, what are we waiting for?”

  It took mere minutes, and zero incidents, for the team to reach car six. The door to the car hushed open to allow a plague of noise to attack anyone within range. The soundtrack to the apocalypse greeted, threatened, and seduced fear from the hearts and guts of the men. Roars, screams, moans—every nightmarish sound the imagination could bring to life existed in that singular moment.

  Weapons were swiftly drawn. Knives, guns, Taser…anything useful for undead hand-to-hand.

  “José, can you see—”

  Before the question was completed, a deafening screech tore through the air. Every weapon swiftly pointed in the direction of the joyless noise.

  The walls rumbled. No one had a chance to react before the first of the zombies leaped through the open door and on top of Freddy “F-Bomb” Davis. Freddy shot his hands up and grabbed the Screamer’s head. The jaws of the monster clacked and chewed at the air in a desperate attempt to sink its rotting teeth into the flesh of the living.

  José leveled his pistol at the monster’s occipital ridge. The bullet tore through bone and gray matter as if it were slipping through warm butter. The Screamer fell instantly silent and dropped to the ground.

  “It’s go time, boys,” José shouted.

  The team spilled into car six, where an undead menagerie awaited their arrival.

  What greeted them wasn’t the standard zombie fare. Here were the rejects of evolution, the mistakes Mother Nature would never have allowed. Darwinian nightmares filled the tight room: Creatures with multiple mouths, misshapen heads and backs; beasts with oversized arms and undersized control.

  In the center of the car stood a glass-wall cage housing a bassinet on a stainless steel pedestal.

  Gunshots and unholy roars echoed off the surgical metallic walls of the car. A zombie with three arms and a bad case of cyclops-psycho stomped its way to the group, grabbed F-Bomb, lifted him over its head, and tore his body in half as if it were a baguette. The crunch of bone and tearing of flesh nearly sent the team packing for the door. Before Three Arm could turn his softball-sized eye onto another member of the team, every weapon took aim and fired. The beast did a wacky pop dance to the floor and went silent.

  Before a single heart could repeat its own rhythm, another bastardization of humanity came at the group.

  “Hold him off!” José shouted. “I’m going to grab the baby.”

  The men stood their ground as the next malignant nightmare attacked. The creature was covered with festering sores, each of which oozed and dripped a stagnant brown paste. The repugnant smell brought tears to the eyes of the nearest fighters, blurring their vision and their aim.

  José cozied up to the perimeter of the room until he was out of eyesight of the beast. Once clear, he stepped near the glass cage. Instinctively, he scanned the glass walls for traps and alarms. Nothing.

  “Where is the goddamn door?” he whispered.

  The walls were without seams. There was no apparent way in or out. Only one possible route to success presented itself. José pulled out his pistol and aimed for one of the lower corners of the enclosure. It was a huge risk; glass could rain down upon the baby, slicing and dicing the child into its grave.

  A collection of roars and screams gave the team leader every incentive he needed to pull the trigger.

  “What the—?”

  The bullet embedded itself into the wall. There was no shower of shards, no crackle of glass, just a click and a thump. José took aim again and released another round. This time a spiderweb crack appeared around the second bullet. After six more shots, the integrity of the lower portion of the wall gave way enough to open up enough of a gap for the leader to crawl into the room.

  As the war continued on around him, José cleared the crawlspace and pulled his way inside. Within the glass walls, the sound of the raging battle was somewhat muted.

  “Hello there, little guy.” José‘s voice was soft and melodic. “I’m going to get you back to your mommy. Does that sound good?”

  The fragile baby was all smiles and the biggest, brownest eyes possible. A head full of bright red hair spilled down from his head.

  The temptation to pull an Indiana Jones maneuver and slip something in place of the baby and bassinet was great. It was possible there was an alarm on the pedestal; after all, the value of the child was immeasurable.

  José had nothing of significant value…not even a hat. Instead of going Indy on the baby, he simply snatched him up, slipped the baby through the hole, and pulled himself back into the real world.

  When the leader of the Zombie Response Team unit returned to the exit of car six, it was to find every man on his team shredded and spattered across the floor and the walls. There was no sign of the undead attacker.

  José sucked in a tense breath and steeled his will against the sight and smell of death.

  “Come on, Jacob, we have to get out of here.”

  chapter 28 | in sheep’s clothing

  With the Guignol Gang fully armed and prepared to defend the castle, we were off to see the Wizard of Odd. I decided against leaving anyone behind. The idea that thousands of living humans were to be collected in on
e location, and making enough noise to raise the undead, had my personal paranoia in full swing. We didn’t have the luxury of a full-blown army at our disposal, so our little battalion would have to do.

  We were armed to the point of ridiculous, everyone prepared to lay waste to the horde. In the process, hopefully, the puppet masters themselves would make an appearance and fall to our collective blade.

  “Anyone else feel like we should have a soundtrack playing behind us?” Rizzo smirked. “If this were a film, we’d be walking in slow motion to a Daft Punk tune. Life would be so much better with a good soundtrack.”

  She was right…though I might have a different song playing in the background at the moment, something that would inspire me to climb the wall without my arms feeling like they might erupt into flames.

  “‘Hot for Teacher,’” Jamal snickered. He glanced around at us, as if he’d been caught with his hand in a rather naughty cookie jar. “Did I say that out loud? I meant, that’s the song I’d have playing at this moment.”

  “Care to explain why?” I asked.

  “Not really.” Jamal blushed.

  We hit the wall, a few of us laughing under our breath. The moment was like a dream—or the precursor to a nightmare. There was no way to know what we were about to walk into, so a bit of levity was probably the one thing keeping us all from realizing that what was going down would most likely drive us all mad.

  “Will someone tell me why we haven’t bothered to construct some sort of ladder for this wall? Or maybe find an opening?” Echo called out.

  “The harder it is to get out, the harder it is to get in.” Morgan broke her silent concentration.

  “Okay, that I can buy.”

  Somehow, Echo found an untapped store of energy and sped up the remainder of the wall.

  “Holy crap!” she exclaimed. “You’re not going to believe this.”