by Wick Welker
Raff knowingly and unmistakably kicked her in the chest with his heel, and stood over her as she writhed in pain, clutching at his knees. Quickly, he brought his boot down squarely on her face, making her small frame jolt beneath him. He continued to pummel her head until he heard the back of her skull crunch against the deck and knew that it was safe to stop. Without looking back down at her, he turned quickly, knowing that she was only the first.
As he turned, someone fell into him, with another body collapsing from behind. Raff fell backward, tripping over the girl below him, and fell hard onto his back. Before he could see who was on top of him, he felt someone’s teeth sink deep into his Achilles tendon.
The sunlight around him dimmed as the fog came up, filling the ship deck with its airborne poison. He kicked and screamed as more crewmen piled on top of him, their long faces looking down, hysteric and craving.
Chapter Eighteen: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
With his eyes shut, Dave heard the humming from the tank intensify. His back vibrated against the wheel treads, which shook his body until the pulse released, and the humming stopped. He opened his eyes just as a wall of the infected collapsed at his feet from the EMP pulse. The mass of men, women, and children all fell simultaneously, falling over each other, and dropping like lumber. The hill leading up out of the crater was littered with motionless bodies that were within the radius of the pulse. He felt like he had just been dropped in the middle of a war on the moon.
“Michaels?” Dave yelled out, crawling to his knees, and clearing scattered limbs out of his path. “Where are you?”
“Up here.” He heard her yell from above and saw her standing on the tank treads with her EMP-57 rifle pointed in the air. “You can always just crawl on top of the tanks, man.” She scanned the crater. “Is Wang dead?”
“I don’t know, there are so many bodies…” Dave looked around the dead, pushing bodies away with his boot.
“Full forward out of this fucking crater!” Douglas yelled into their headsets. “Forward ground team! Who’s alive?”
Yen finally spoke up from the other side of the tank, “The last time I saw Wang he had a friend gnawing on his neck, the dude’s dead. I see Tripps and Michaels and….” He came around the front of the tank. “Oh, here’s Jacobs. Get up man!” Yen found Jacobs with his hands covering his ears, ducked under the front of the tank. “Hey! We’re moving out, get the fuck up!” He reached under and grabbed his arm, yanking him out from underneath.
“Let go!” Jacobs came crawling out as Michaels and Dave met them at the front of the tank. “A little last minute with that pulse, huh? Holy shit.” Jacobs got to his feet and looked at Dave. “Are we getting out of this hell hole of a ditch?”
“Forward team, start climbing!” Douglas yelled. “Next airstrike is coming up ahead of us in three minutes.”
“Move out!” Michaels yelled, nudging Dave with the butt of her rifle. She took off running up hill with her knees kicking up as she negotiated her way through the body parts. The rest of the forward team followed over the hundreds of strewn bodies.
Dave finally understood why they made them run through so many car tires during their training. Slipping on loose intestines and exposed muscle, he breathed deep as he followed the crew up the hill. The shock tanks from behind revved up their engines and jolted forward. The entire hill had become a muddy slush of human remains in front of them as they hiked.
In the middle shock tank, Stark had crammed himself into a back corner where he continually worked and honed calculations. He unknowingly muttered to himself about magnetic field vectors and the resistance of the average power line in Mexico, a detail of which he had absolutely no idea. The two soldiers manning the tank periodically looked back at him as they were adjusting their controls and following the convoy out of the crater.
This is idiotic, he thought. Complete science fiction. He didn’t quite understand how he found himself stuffed into a gigantic shock tank heading into a city with twenty million of the infected dead slapping around outside, when he was in his cozy lab only twelve hours ago. It’s Mayberry and Rambert turning more and more desperate, they have no clue what they’re doing any more. He looked down at his satellite phone and dialed a number.
Rambert picked up. “Stark, are you at the power plant yet?”
“What?” he scoffed. “We just barely reached the city limits, and we are completely surrounded by the infected. It’s like we’re tunneling into earth, but instead of dirt, it’s human bodies. This is going to take forever. And I just…”
“What?”
“What the in hell are we even doing?” Stark asked.
“What do you mean?” Rambert let out a long breath.
“This idea is just so… I don’t know, it’s crazy, and the chances of it working are essentially zero.” Stark quieted down after he noticed the two drivers of the tank looking back at him.
“And you’re telling me this now?” Rambert said.
“Oh no, Larry, don’t give me this shit. I never told you this was going to work. You’re the one who jumped the gun on this whole thing. You just sent me down here without thinking twice about it. I’ve been saying we just need to detonate the nukes this whole time.”
“The conversation that you’re trying to have, you know the one where you’re telling me that this is crazy and we shouldn’t do it, that conversation can’t happen anymore because you’re already in one of those tanks, and you’re leading a squad into the most infested city on the planet. All I want to hear from you is that it either worked or that it didn’t. Do you understand that?”
“Fine, yes, whatever. I just hope you’re not relying on my dumb luck like last time.”
Rambert paused for a moment. “Do you love your country?”
“Larry, what the hell?” Stark said.
“Do you love this country?” Rambert repeated.
“Don’t give this cheesy bullshit right now.”
“I need to hear it,” Rambert said without humor.
“I’m in this metal coffin going straight into the heart of the army of the dead, aren’t I?”
Rambert sighed. “I’ve got to go. I have two entire naval fleets in Venezuela that just went into radio silence.”
“The hell? That’s like thousands of people.”
“As far as you know, the virus has never been airborne, right?”
“What? No, it’s only transmitted through blood or saliva.”
“Beckfield didn’t say anything to you about the virus being made airborne?”
“No. What is going on?”
“Not sure yet, just call me with updates.” Rambert hung up.
Before Stark could think about Venezuela, he felt the tank bounce up and down, and looked at the monitor that was connected to an outside camera. He saw fields of dead bodies leading up the hill out of the crater. Well, at least the pulses are still working, he thought. God help us if the virus stops responding to it.
Outside, the forward ground team had made it up to the crater ridge that led toward the city. Dave saw a new wall of the horde that was at the edge of the previous tank pulse radius. The horde stumbled over those that had fallen in front of them. The tanks rolled up from behind the forward ground team, rupturing torsos, and crushing the heads of the fallen infected.
“Convoy come in, next airstrike coming in at our twelve, this time we’re going around the fucking infected crater trap,” Douglas erupted into everyone’s earpieces. Five seconds later, a loud crack with a delayed explosion shot up into the air a hundred yards in front of them, from the second airstrike. The same cloud of bodies and fire billowed into the air just as before. A fighter jet flew overhead and shot off into the dawn sky as the ground team continued forward at a jogging pace, breathing heavy through their gas masks.
The light from the explosion showed that the entire desert in front of them had become a muddy field of thousands of bodies. Slowly, the stench crept into their masks, but Dave was able to resist the ur
ge to gag. His boots became heavier with a black sludge that he constantly rubbed off on the bodies as he waded through. All of his gear felt heavy from the fog of humidity that had settled around them.
Approaching the next airstrike crater, there were no longer whole bodies, but shredded muscle and open thoracic cavities mixed with blasted glass and torn clothing fabrics. “Convoy, we’re going due south of the crater,” Douglas said, prompting the forward ground team to bunch over on the left side of the crater ridge. Dave saw the same blast zone of billowing smoke as with the previous airstrike. The convoy inched around the edge of the crater, with the Bunny trailer bobbing up and down over the desert floor that had become carpeted with bodies.
“Tripps,” Michaels flickered into his radio, “did you ever think you’d ever be doing anything like this in your life?”
“I feel like we’ve seen so much shit already that jogging through a field of thousands of infected bodies hasn’t really fazed me,” Dave said.
“We’re not coming back out of this city,” she said flatly.
“I know.”
She didn’t respond, but stepped in front of him, hopping over an obese man whose legs had been gnawed off —only two femur bones stuck out from his hips.
Yen and Jacobs moved ahead of Dave, keeping their EMP-57s drawn and flashlights pointed ahead, continually scanning back and forth.
The convoy of five tanks wrapped around the blast crater with the flank and rear ground crews jogging along in silence, ignoring the blood sloshing in their boots.
Beyond the second crater they saw the next wave of the horde that was outside of the previous airstrike.
Once again, Douglas got on the radio preparing the convoy for an airstrike; the bombs smashed through the sky like lightening, clearing a new path for the convoy to proceed. For the next hour the ground teams sweated in their uniforms, ached from the weight of their gear, and suffocated beneath their masks.
Dave began to reduce human beings only to their mechanical parts: shoulder blades hold together the rotator cuffs, the stomach is actually underneath the sternum not below it, the liver is on the right side and the inside of someone’s abdominal cavity—it suddenly becomes bright green if you step on it too much. He learned that blood could take on a variety of shades from deep black to a pastel red depending on what it mixes with and where it dries. He watched Michaels with her head down, looking at the bodies beneath her, and wondered what she was thinking.
Another airstrike and another crater full of body parts and fire. The convoy continued into the city limits without becoming overwhelmed by a horde or having to use another pulse from a shock tank.
Dave saw Yen and Jacobs become bored as they deliberately stomped onto organs or kicked away severed heads like soccer balls.
“Would you assholes stop that shit?” Michaels annoyingly yelled over at them. Ignoring her, they continued kicking away at body parts as they jogged along. “Idiots,” she muttered, too exhausted to berate them more.
The convoy had finally made it past the desert outside the city and found what looked like the beginning of a city road. They swung along another crater ridge and bounced up and down on the scores of bodies that covered what was once a paved road.
“There are no roads in the city of the dead,” Michaels said solemnly, which went ignored by the front team. They jogged past what was once a gas station but had since been ripped apart in an explosion leaving the carport roof blasted upward, swaying precariously in the wind.
Dave saw several dilapidated apartment buildings a few blocks away that spilled over with bodies pumping out of every window and falling from the roofs.
“Convoy, I have some bad news. We will no longer be able to rely on the airstrikes to tunnel our way through into the city. If we start bombing around the buildings we’ll create too much rubble that will get in our way. We can’t have buildings suddenly collapsing on us either. After the next airstrike, it’s just the tanks, and us. Be ready, we can do this.” Douglas’ voice lost its typical hard-ass tone. “Remember, we must keep a two minute delay between tank pulses, or we risk getting swarmed. We cannot wait for all the tanks to recharge at once. Ground team, our success depends on you keeping the horde away inside each two minute interval…good luck.”
“Douglas is losing it. He sounds like a dad talking to his kids,” Michaels said, looking over her shoulder down an alleyway.
The last airstrike erupted down the street, throwing up several streetlights beyond the convoy, and scattering bodies into the air, smashing them into buildings. “Here we go, guys,” Dave said, checking and rechecking the battery life on his rifle.
“Shit, we need more front people. There’s only four of us here,” Yen complained, and then quickly pointed his rifle to the right after something caught his eye. “Those airstrikes aren’t doing shit this deep in. We’ve got movement by that water tower.” He clicked on his radio to Douglas. “Sir, we’re going to need a tank pulse right now. We’ve got enemy sighted at our three o’clock. I think we’re starting to get encircled now that we’re getting into the city.”
“Roger that, prepare for pulse,” Douglas responded, after which the tank behind them hummed into life, and released a pulse.
The front team looked toward the water tower as all of the infected fell to the ground.
“Targets destroyed,” Yen shot back to Douglas.
“We’re going to be picking up the pace,” Douglas said to the convoy as the tanks moved faster behind the front team. The convoy approached the blast zone of the last airstrike, which had left behind cracked open buses, and flipped cars. All the vehicles were bathed in the human remains; dripping with tissue and charred from the airstrike. Dave felt heat coming off the cinderblock buildings that weren’t destroyed from the bombing.
“Get through the rubble fast and start firing at will,” Douglas said.
The front team ran up through the concrete and glass debris of the street, stepping over fallen street lamps, and checking down alleys. There were stragglers of the infected that began to seep in, falling from buildings, and stumbling down the streets that were now suddenly vacant. Dave saw a stream of them filing in through an alley on his left and shot his EMP-57 in their direction. They dropped to the ground.
Michaels and Yen ran ahead as they saw a wall of them that were bumping on the opposite side of a chain-link fence. They collapsed from their pulses. The front of the convoy paused at a street intersection where Jacobs saw a clear wall of the horde only two blocks away that was moving in on them like an ocean wave.
“Oh fuck me, there are… thousands, just thousands right there…” The fear in his voice quivered through his dry mouth as the second shock tank released a pulse. A dozen rows of the dead fell to the ground, only to expose the next wave of the horde behind them that were out of range of the tank pulse.
“Front team, move to the three o'clock, we’re going that way!” Douglas yelled out.
Michaels and Dave ran out to the horde and fired their rifles, dropping dozens of the dead at a time, only for dozens more to crawl in from behind them. “One minute and fifteen until the next tank pulse. Keep them back. Flank teams, stay flank, do not move to the front, we need you right there. Rear team, report any movement when you see it.”
Michaels, Dave, Yen, and Jacobs lined up as the convoy turned the street corner to face the incoming horde. They started to fire at will as the horde dropped in front of them, with the next endless wave to move in from behind.
“We’re keeping about a hundred feet back as we move, sir,” Dave radioed to Douglas.
“Keep it up, thirty more seconds,” Douglas replied.
From the corner of his eye, Dave saw movement of the infected rounding a corner at their side. Swinging his rifle down, he grabbed a slender, cylindrical tube from his belt, and threw it as far as he could at them, which released a sudden flash of light with a pulse. He brought his rifle back up to the front assault as the infected at their flank fell to the groun
d from the grenade pulse. They’re coming in on us, he thought in the back of his mind, circling back around and absorbing us within them.
“Tank Two, fire!” Douglas yelled out as another large pulse came from the convoy, wiping out another hundred feet of the horde that encircled them. “Two minutes starts now—rear team is reporting assaults from behind. We will be completely surrounded soon but will maintain clearance if we stay cool and keep our rhythm,” Douglas said.
The convoy pushed deeper through the city streets as daylight peeked over the eastern horizon behind them. The complete blackout of the city in front was beginning to wash away with the morning glow. Dave saw the downtown buildings in a constant flux of human beings streaming from every window. Freeway overpasses erupted with masses of infected people and completely covered the traffic jams that had been created during the initial outbreak. As the convoy continued sending pulses and paving their way over bodies, Dave turned a street corner, and looked down into a shallow valley that led to the center of the city. The entire valley was one unified and continuous swarm of the infected that had pooled over cars, buildings, and trees. He couldn’t make out any signs of the city structures beneath them; the dead had stacked on top so that they were heaped up over the small homes and power lines.
“It’s like a, like a gigantic heap of ants, you know? You know when they just start crawling over each other—like on a sidewalk crack?” Jacobs said while throwing a pulse grenade down the hill beneath them.
“Yeah, Jacobs, the analogy is pretty immediate to everyone,” Michaels said as she started down the hill, firing at the impending horde in front of them. “How’s everyone’s battery life? Any one need a change out?”
“Getting close, but I’ve got two more charge packs, so I’m good for a while,” Dave said as he followed behind her, being careful not to slip on the slick road around the bodies.