Old men and kids with .22 rifles took aim. Middle-aged women and out of shape businessmen threw themselves down in the puddles of blood left by the wounded soldiers. With squinted eyes and gritted teeth, they fired their guns. They were the rifles behind every blade of grass General Yamamoto had warned about, the sleeping giant filled with terrible resolve. The people of Lakota faced their fears, swallowed them down, and kept pulling triggers. The undaunted Americans who absolutely would not stop. Ever. They would rather die on their feet, than live on their knees. Slippery Jim and his band of underage delinquents ran up and down the ladders with cans of ammo. The kids deemed too young to be of any use and had been delegated to babysitting. James Robert Jones knew what would happen if the men with the shaggy black beards made it through the walls. They would all wind up like his sister or the nuns. He and his crew had trained hard. Gage knew about guns and Slippery Jim knew how to appropriate things. He’d stolen some ammo belts, and they all practiced tossing cans and snapping links until their fingers were raw, but they got good. They were fast. They knew a big problem would be getting the right ammo to the right guns, at the right time. His group could scamper up and down the ladders and across the damaged containers faster than any of the old people. They would help. They would die before they stopped fighting. They would never surrender.
“We need one of the miniguns in sector 5,” Wilson said from the war room. “There’s a bunch of them moving along the trench toward the hole there.”
He was watching the monitors and the live feed from Tina’s quadcopter. Carl and Wire Bender had set up a wireless network, and the raiding crews had brought back all the drones they could find. Carl was in the Methodist Church bell tower flying his, and Tina was controlling the other one from a platform in the corn silo at the farm. Between the two, Wilson had a good overview of the battlefield, he could see where the largest concentration of jihadis were gathering.
The trench gave them perfect cover. If Jimmy Winchell and Sammy could have finished it, it would be half full of water and would have had electrodes from the power plant buried in it. They could have fried anyone using it for cover. As it was, it made them impossible to hit. The shots from the wall only kept them ducking. There were a few hundred running for one of the holes though. The shooters spread out on the wall wouldn’t be able to stop a concentrated rush. Not without the chain guns spraying them with hundreds of rounds a second.
“We only have to hold them for another half hour, maybe,” Cobb told him on the two-way, from his position at one of the guard shacks near the main gate. Outpost six just radioed in. The horde is coming up the tracks, they’re only a few miles out.”
Captain Wilson acknowledged, but they had to hold the wall until then. He had only recently gotten the mini-guns stripped off of the helicopters at Camp Gruber, up near Muskogee. With the nearly unlimited ammo they’d snagged from McAlester, they could fire them until the barrels melted down. All six of them. Four thousand rounds a minute of .308 could do some serious damage to anyone or anything.
Tommy had welded up some tripods and rigged up an electrical source to spin the barrels, and it took a whole squad of men to carry and operate one. Once they were set up, they couldn’t be moved quickly or easily, and they still needed all the help they could get to feed it, to snap together 500 round links of ammo. It would spit out a thousand bullets every time you pulled the trigger.
The men and women of the remaining mini-gun crews were sitting in the pickup trucks, waiting for orders. They could be anywhere in the compound within minutes. They could set up and cut down hundreds of men in a single trigger pull. But they knew they were targets. If only one radical could get a shot off at them with the rockets, they would be blown to smithereens. They knew the risk, but drew courage from each other. The wall must hold. Everything they had, everything they had worked for, depended on it. They were grim-faced and moving in a matter of seconds when Captain Wilson directed them to sector five. Right where the wall was the most destroyed, the fighting the heaviest, and the casualties the highest.
The first crew man-handled the heavy gun up the ladder, set it up and fired on the radicals, sending them scurrying back to the partially dug moat. The mini-gun chewed up enormous chunks of dirt, but the attackers were holding fast, hunkered down deep. They stopped firing after seven or eight thousand rounds and drug the gun a good twenty yards to set up again. The Muslims were still hunkered down, shooting AKs blindly over the edge. The men and women lying prone on the wall kept searching for targets, anyone foolish enough to pop above the edge for an aimed shot.
Cobb hurriedly climbed back down to ground level. He needed the dozer over at one of the breaches in the wall to clear the rubble and the path on top was impassable, the container had been hit and was partially destroyed. He had semi trucks on standby, positioned all around the perimeter, pulling in tight and blocking holes where they were needed. They were heavy, fully loaded with various supplies, and wouldn’t be easily moved aside. The radicals had blown the tops off of many of the upper containers, sending them tumbling or making the path across them treacherous. They were trying to keep the damage at a minimum so they could get in and still hold the town against the horde they knew was coming. That would all change when they heard the keening and saw the ten thousand bearing down on them. They would open up with everything they had in a panic to get through the wall, not caring if it was beyond repair.
There was a huge explosion and Cobb grimaced as he saw the top of one of the containers disintegrate, and chunks of bodies and chain gun fly out into the fields. Direct hit. He was starting to get worried. Somehow, the Muslims had them outgunned, and the damn moat gave them perfect cover. They were going to need a miracle to get through this.
48
Daniel
When the minivan had gotten low on fuel, he’d spotted the U-Haul rental store. Trucks were lined up and fully fueled, keys hanging in a lock box that he forced open with his K-bar. He’d hit a pawn shop on the outskirts of some nameless burg in West Virginia and gathered up the best guns, and all the ammo they had for them. He’d done a smash and grab for an armload of food at a general store, on a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, Eastern Kentucky. He didn’t run into any trouble until he after he’d crossed into Missouri, still running the backroads and avoiding the big towns.
He was on a county road, with houses spread out few and far between, and dead tired when he spotted a simple hunting lodge on the outskirts of a little farming community. He hadn’t seen a zombie since he outran a horde when he got off the freeway crossing the Mississippi. He had caught himself nodding off at the wheel more than once and needed a few hours of shuteye. He’d been up for a few days now, his eyes were gritty and if he didn’t kill himself in a wreck, he’d wind up making a bad decision and get killed by the zeds. He spotted a likely safe spot, and on a whim, he swung into an Outfitters parking lot and slipped in behind the building. There were a few pickups and a dirty eight-wheeled mud bogger in the lot, but the place seemed deserted. He listened for a few minutes before he got out. Nothing stirred except the unharvested winter wheat and sunflowers that rippled and danced in the breeze. None of the undead came running out to greet him. None came charging up the road after him. He got out and stretched, he needed fuel or a new vehicle anyway. Maybe there were keys inside for one of those trucks. He was in the bootheel of Missouri, a lonely, rural place with a lot of lowlands in standing water, a reputation for lawlessness, and a history of moonshiners. Daniel read this from a flyer in the lobby of the Dirty Rice Outfitters and felt right at home. It wasn’t a fancy lodge like he’d seen on TV, made of giant logs and fireplaces that you could roast a cow in, but it looked comfortable and he was tired. He checked every room before he relaxed, but his nose told him the building wasn’t hiding any of the undead. He didn’t find a stash of guns like he was hoping, but they did have good beer and a bunch of duck calls. He grabbed himself a cool one out of a beer fridge and checked the doors and windows one las
t time before catching some sleep. He noticed a zombie slowly crawling across the yard of the house across the road. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, only that it had wisps of gray hair shooting out in all directions, and it was inching across the grass in tiny little increments. Most of its arms were gone and its legs were just dragging behind, getting caught up on things. He watched for a few minutes with bleary eyes as the sun blazed bright orange on the far western horizon. He really should go out and kill it, but the thing was harmless. At the rate it was going, he’d probably get a full eight hours sleep before it made it across the road. He’d take care of it in the morning. He barricaded himself into one of the rooms and only took one swig of the beer before he had nodded off in the recliner.
He awoke to the pounding of the undead on the building. He was out of his chair in a flash, had his gun up and was easing toward the door. He had chosen a room with no windows and now he put his ear to the door. Were they inside the building? He had braced the back door he’d kicked in, there was no way they could get through it, but the front of the building had a lot of glass. He listened for a long moment. They knew he was inside, but they weren’t in a frenzy. They were almost acting indifferent, like they weren’t too concerned if they got to him today, tomorrow, or next year. He bet all that would change if they caught sight of him though, that would send them into a tizzy. He needed to see how many there were, see if he could shoot his way out. He wondered where they came from, too. There couldn’t be that many people around. This part of the country was sparsely populated.
He eased the door open and carefully made his way around the lobby, then to the back door. He kept quiet and stayed hidden in the shadows, but the moonlight showed him plainly what was outside. The building was completely surrounded, ten or twenty deep everywhere he looked. Thousands of them. He slipped back into the room and latched the door. He was well and truly trapped. He sat back down in the recliner and looked at the faintly glowing hands on his watch. Four a.m. That had to be the horde that followed him off the freeway. He had lost them easily enough, but when he thought back on it, he hadn’t made any turns. He was exhausted, hadn’t been thinking clearly, and had driven straight here. No zigs. No zags. A straight path. That crawling old corpse had led them here. He should have killed it last night. He should have remembered to change up his route to confuse them. He should have chugged energy drinks and kept driving. Nothing to be done about it now. He’d figure something out when it got daylight. Like the true Marine that he was, he pulled his hat down over his eyes and went back to sleep.
He prowled around the building the following day, inventorying what little food and beverages there were. Plenty of beer, a whole fridge full. Not much in the way of food, though. The undead were still outside, still listlessly slapping at the building, or stumbling around in the parking lot. Too many to plow through with the U-Haul pickup truck, and he never did find keys for the four-by-fours in the lot. He found a set of keys with Argo on the ring and figured they must go to the Mud Bogger. Not much else of use in the place, so he dug out a few board games from the main hall and returned to the room he’d set up. He knew he was going to be here a while, maybe a car would drive by and pull them all away in a day or two. If not, he’d have to come up with something. Meanwhile, with a case of beer, a few bags of chips and a game of monopoly, he proceeded to kick ass and take names of the car, the boot, and the dog every time they landed on Park Place.
On the third day, with the crowd outside still thick around the whole building, it was time to shit or get off the pot. He didn’t have a lot of options.
He could stay here until the beer ran out and he starved to death. No good.
He could shoot his way through and get to the pickup truck, but it would never make it through them to the road. It wasn’t four-wheel drive and didn’t have much ground clearance. He’d get stuck, they’d smash through the windows, he’d get eaten. No good.
He could shoot his way to the four-wheel drive trucks, break in and try to hot-wire one of them. Meanwhile, a few thousand undead would be smashing through the windows, and he’d get eaten. No good.
He could shoot his way to his truck and take off through the fields, the crowd was concentrated around the lodge in the parking lot. But he could tell they were muddy, he could see standing water. The truck would get stuck within a few feet of leaving the hard pack of the parking lot. They’d smash in the windows, he’d get eaten. No good.
He could shoot his way through them then run like hell through the muddy fields. Surely, he could keep ahead of them long enough so most of them bogged down. Unless there were some freshly turned, some only a few weeks old, they’d run him to ground before he got a hundred yards, then eat him. No good.
He eyeballed the keys in his hand. The ones marked Argo. The ones that went to the Mud Bogger parked out back.
Maybe.
What if this outfit had another one that wasn’t here and this was the keys for it? What if they did fit, but the battery was dead? Then you’d run like hell, hope there weren’t any super-fast ones, and all the rest got slowed down by the mud.
There. A plan of action. Let’s go, Marine. Daylight is burning, he told himself and started gathering supplies.
The building was multilevel, and with a little effort, he drug a lot of stuff out onto the roof near the front of the building. They heard him and started up their keening, becoming more agitated as they reached for him. He found a good tow rope in one of the closets and wasted a few rounds shooting a couple of holes in the roof, on either side of the peak, at the rear of the building. He fed the rope through them and tied it off, giving himself a fast way down. He made one last inventory check, ensuring he was ready, then went back up front and started making noise. He yelled at them, tossed chairs and beer bottles, and generally did whatever he could to get them into a frothing frenzy and draw them all to the front. They screamed and raised their arms to him. He stood on the peak of the roof, bowed to them, then broke into a soulful rendition of House of the Rising Sun, belting out the song with gusto, his rifle the microphone stand.
“Thank you! Thank you!” he shouted and bowed, then unbuttoned his fly. Halfway through the golden shower, he noticed the gray-haired old zed with the missing arms and useless legs at the back of the crowd. It was still trying to get to him. He finished his business then brought up his gun. That thing was what caused all this. He should have killed it the first day. No time like the present to right a wrong, though, and he splattered its head with a single shot.
The crowd went wild.
Daniel blew them a few more kisses, then crouched down out of sight as he tossed the stuffed dummy he’d made over the edge. He hoped it would keep them all fighting over it for a few minutes, giving him that much more time to make his escape out the back. He sprinted to the rear and jumped, using the rope to slow his fall. He hit and rolled, came up running with the keys in his hand. It was an open-top bogger and he was already in it and looking for the ignition when a scream went up from the back of the horde. One of them had spotted him. He found the key slot and hit the switch. It fired right up and in half a second, he’d figured out how to make it go and was splashing off the gravel and into the fields. He heard them give chase for a little bit, but didn’t bother turning to look. He was long gone and looking for his next ride. One that wasn’t quite so breezy. The November air was downright chilly.
Daniel crossed the Canadian River a dozen miles south of Lakota in another U-Haul pickup. He’d never noticed before, but the little rental agencies were everywhere. The keys were easy to get, and the trucks were always full of fuel.
He was getting close and he wasn’t sure if he had gotten here fast enough, that delay in Missouri had cost him days. He could see heavy, black smoke on the horizon ahead of him. The battle had already started.
Daniel was watching the billowing smoke as he drew closer, looking to see if there was fire dancing in it. Trying to determine how bad the situation ahead of him was goin
g to be. He slammed on his brakes at the last second, barely avoiding an old blue Mustang that came tearing out of a dirt road. Daniel slid toward the shallow ditch and bounced through it, skidding to a halt and killing the engine as he bumped up against a telephone pole. He watched as a steady stream of cars came out of the dirt road, all heading for Lakota. Most were driven by women, and they weren’t wearing head scarves or burkas. They weren’t Muslims from the looks of it, they must be going to join the battle on the good guy's side. He started the truck back up and slipped in behind the last car as it came out and took off up the road, chasing the sounds of war. He could hear it now, the occasional boom and flash of explosions, of rockets or grenades. He heard the steady hail of small arms fire and the rapid machine guns chattering, and he didn’t know which side was winning. The cars merged onto the main road and when Daniel looked to his left, he nearly swerved back into the ditch again. There were thousands of zombies running as fast as they could down the railroad tracks, heading straight for the sounds of battle. They were spread out and stumbling and falling over the uneven rail bed, but they were coming. Never stopping. Never tiring.
He looked over his shoulder and the horizon was black with them. At the rate they were running, the lead elements would be at the town’s wall in fifteen or twenty minutes. Daniel rode the bumper of the car in front of him, urging it to go faster. If they had a plan, it better happen fast and without a hitch.
49
Gunny
Zombie Road III: Rage on the Rails Page 30
