Everyone was standing, and most of the officers held small notepads as they jotted down last minute details. Only the three old farts, the colonel, and Sergeant Lawrence seemed at ease with whatever bombshell the colonel just delivered. Dr. Singh and I stood to the side as the officers filed out, but Captain Natushek was the only one to offer even a nod of recognition as he passed. My good buddy Shurman noticed me, too, but only gave a look that seemed to indicate his desire to hold his breath in my vicinity. And I showered this morning and everything.
Quickly, the numbers dropped to just the colonel, Lawrence, and his next two victims—I mean, guests. Master Sergeant Hobbs, the senior sergeant that usually played doorkeeper for the colonel was noticeably absent today and I wondered what that meant. Maybe nothing, and the man was off on an errand. I hoped that was all.
“Sorry to keep you men waiting,” the colonel said, and he nearly sounded like he meant it. No, this man didn’t wear his rank like a suit of armor, like some. He was no Shurman, a little man with the power he always wanted. In fact, the colonel looked to be even more worn down today than usual. Whatever had his clans gathered couldn’t be good.
“No problem, sir,” I replied before the doctor might come up with some kind of complaint. I liked Gupta, but he was a bit of a whiner sometimes.
“So, what brings you by today, Brad?” the colonel asked, as if he wasn’t in the middle of some important work of his own.
So, sensing the need to get to the point, I filled Colonel Northcutt in on my latest adventure, stressing the need to pull up ladders and secure access to the walls. I didn’t mention McKinney, but I could see the wheels turning in the man’s head.
“Crap. Doctor, does this track with what you told me yesterday?”
“I’m afraid so, Colonel. So far, the First Wave infected seem to be the most, well, advanced, but as I said before, we can expect to see the others begin to act in this manner. Also, this seems to fit with the observations made about the First Wave infected being capable of influencing other infected.”
“They can herd the other zombies?” I blurted out, seeing the danger in that idea. Actual communication? That was most unwelcome news.
“So it would seem.” That was all the doctor would commit to, but it was enough.
I ran my fingers through my thinning hair and caught the colonel’s eye. “We have to warn the scavengers. This changes the way they will be able to work. If they can continue working out there at all.”
Northcutt nodded, and then when he spoke, it was with a new topic. “By the way, Brad, good job on bringing in those survivors. Thirty-eight more living souls, and from that close to Houston is amazing. However, that does bring up a new concern. Mike Brady, the leader of that group, just decided we were the real deal and shared a bit more intel with us.”
“Okay. That’s nice,” I said carefully. “I’ll be sure and let Ken know. He was the one who figured out how to get them to stop. He made initial contact, too. I just sat with them on the drive back.”
Dr. Singh gave a bit of a harrumph at my words, but I chose to ignore him at the moment. I didn’t need the praise, not when somebody else did the lion’s share of the work.
“Well, whatever the reason, Mike seems to think you are the reason they are still alive. Anyway, after they went through quarantine, he took Sergeant Bishop aside and confided more information. Apparently, his group had contact with four other groups of survivors still in the Conroe area. He said he tried to get some of them to go along with his group, but for one reason or another they declined.”
More holdouts, and the zombies are getting froggy. Oh, boy.
“So is that why you had all your company commanders gathered? Mounting a rescue mission?” I asked hopefully.
Northcutt looked away for a moment, then cleared his throat. “No, unfortunately not. I wish that were the case. I might as well tell you men this now, since you will hear it soon enough. We have another mission upcoming. One that will require half of our troops to relocate for an unknown period of time. Shurman and Ashcroft are being pulled, along with their companies. So we’ve begun adjusting the perimeter and shortening our lines. That includes temporarily withdrawing from Jasper and placing the planned reclamation efforts there on hold.”
That was a bit of a body blow. We had barracks full of potential settlers in Onalaska and Woodville, not to mention here in Livingston, and they were ready to get started with the homesteading chores.
Sure, folks were a little antsy over these new zombie activities, but maybe we were spoiled by our string of recent successes. Heck, even the expected stream of new migrating zombie hordes turned out to be manageable, barely, with the application of the Northcutt method of disposal. I didn’t try to claim credit for the idea, since by the time I came to the colonel with the rudiments of a plan, he already had men working on the implementation. Like I always said, the man was on the ball.
“So where are they going?” Doctor Singh asked, and I saw Sergeant Lawrence give a little wince. Not much, but enough to tell the topic wasn’t something the colonel was going to welcome talking about.
“Comanche Peak,” Colonel Northcutt intoned gravely, and I swallowed back a curse.
“I know the name, but not the meaning or context,” Singh said with a shrug.
“Nuclear power plant,” I supplied helpfully, and felt my skin crawl a little bit. “About sixty miles southwest of Dallas.”
“Well, the facility is the heart of a Safe Zone, albeit a smaller one, and so far the engineers have managed to keep it at least on standby if not actually generating. But there’s a newly formed horde in the vicinity, and it is headed their way. Apparently, the diesel runs they have been making have attracted attention of the worst kind.”
“Diesel? It is a nuclear power plant. Why would those people need diesel?” I asked, suddenly stumped.
“To run the generators. Apparently the plant can’t supply the power necessary to run everything in standby, which I know sounds ridiculous,” Colonel Northcutt explained.
“I guess they weren’t expecting a zombie apocalypse,” I quipped. Saying that never gets old.
“Anyway,” Northcutt continued, ignoring my jab, “the plant got a company of Rangers deployed there early on, but they’ve taken losses and are now at about half strength. Command is worried they are going to lose the safe zone, and the plant. Which could have catastrophic side effects.”
“Like New York City,” I felt myself whisper out loud.
Somehow, everybody knew about NYC. The East Coast was littered with nuclear power plants, and given the speed of the fall in those first few weeks of the zombie apocalypse, a meltdown was nearly inevitable. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were confirmed hotter than a fifty-dollar pistol in Times Square, and most of the coast from Maine to Florida was considered uninhabitable. If the zombies didn’t get you, then the radiation would.
“Yes, like that,” the colonel confirmed.
“Anything we can do?” I asked, knowing the colonel needed to be able to rely on the civilian side to hold security. Losing Jasper would hopefully be a temporary thing, but if we couldn’t hold on to the existing communities then we were all screwed.
“Actually, there is. I need you and the other members of the civilian defense force to volunteer more hours out on the Deadline, and we need to get more folks trained up to join the force. That was the thrust of why I had Bill Harrington and his lieutenants in here, anyway. They need to mount a recruiting drive. We have over ten thousand people in these settlements, so there should be more bodies to fill in the gaps. You stepping up should go towards drumming up more support in that quarter. You might even get some additional shooters trained up to help with the workload.”
I just nodded. I might not be the most personable man around, but I knew my job. Since the Bypass to Hell had been completed less than a week before, I’d already claimed my favorite shooting spot for duty. Maybe I could get Casey and Ken to rotate in a few hours with me in the
next few days. And I knew Ken, social butterfly that he was, would talk at least half a dozen would-be exterminators into showing up for a slot or two. Hey, who could pass up free tutelage from the master?
“All right, but should I wear my Captain America tee shirt, or would that be too much?”
The colonel actually managed a tired smile at that even though I could see Sergeant Lawrence rolling his eyes. That was okay. I just wanted Northcutt to smile, if just for a moment. So much depended on this man holding us together, and the last thing I wanted was him to stroke out on us from the stress. The pressure of the job was slowly grinding the man down, and all of us with eyes and a functioning brain knew this man was the key to our continued survival.
We’d come a long way from those horrible, bloody first few weeks. A lot of people, good people, made the ultimate sacrifice to get us here, and Colonel Northcutt was the best chance we had to ensure those deaths were not in vain.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“You see,” I announced softly, laying the crosshairs on the forehead of the straying zombie, “when they are this tightly packed, making the head shot is actually much easier. Sure, they are jostling each other, but the actual motion itself is reduced because they are standing so close. Fish in a barrel.”
I squeezed the trigger at the last word, and the zombie’s head opened like a dark flower blossoming in the pale morning sunlight. I was set up on an overpass about four hundred yards from the target, and the double row of cars lined the stretch of road for as far as the eye could see looking south. To the north, well, the end of the line came about six hundred yards from our current setup, and from here we could all smell the vile combination of stinking zombie shit, nasty decomposing body odors, and the pungent reek of flaming rubber from the pit.
The stack of cars might look haphazard at first, but I knew the arrangement went in with considerable forethought. Tanks drained and wheels removed, the double layer of stripped and crushed vehicles presented a barrier that averaged a bit over six feet tall and twenty feet wide. At first, I thought using cars was wasteful, but we had plenty of wrecked vehicles, and saving the wheels meant we had a vast store of the things if we ever needed them. As for the bad tires, well, more fuel for the fire.
Livingston had some small industrial base, and one of the plants situated not too far outside town turned out to be a recycling center. Specifically, the plant took in used tires, chipped them up, and turned the pieces into filler for new highways, among other things. Who knew, right? Turns out the stuff burned pretty good, too.
The Northcutt method didn’t rely on tall walls or massive earthen structures, at least, not on this end. Using a combination of solar powered compact disc players and the judicious use of the “blood bombs” Doctor Gooden described, the zombie eradication efforts focused on drawing the suddenly more adventuresome zombies along the Bypass from Hell, this gradually shrinking chute leading to an eventual drop off into that fifty-foot-deep hole at the end of the path. Of course, that last bit of the trail was at a deceptively steep angle, so that the hapless zeds had little chance to stop their descent into the flaming pit. Think of a greased and tilted Slip ’N Slide and you get the idea.
And no, someone else came up with the name for this monstrosity of a zombie thrill ride, not me. Most of the younger folks didn’t even get the backhanded reference to one of AC/DC’s greatest hits. Hell, most of them wouldn’t even know who AC/DC used to be.
The whole thing was a ten-mile-long trap that pulled in a steady stream of zombies heading out of Houston and tromping toward our front door step. That initial monster horde of over fifty thousand Ken and I scouted definitely gave this trap a workout. I heard how several times the near-panicked troops had no choice but to go to their rifles. They held the line though—what we morbidly referred to as the Deadline—in that desperate attempt to carve the waves of dead flesh into more manageable chunks.
Since then, the zombie trap worked better than we had any hope to expect. According to the figures I’d heard bandied about, the trap had already seen the ending of over one hundred thousand zombies in just over a week in action. I reckoned if this Rube Goldberg contraption proved out over time, I might be out of a job.
“All right, boys and girls, anyone want to tell me why I took that shot?” I asked the half dozen students gathered on the shoot mats laid out across the asphalt shoulder of the blocked overpass. They ranged in age from Casey at just eighteen to one old geezer I knew was in his seventies and had to use a cane to make the walk up the hill. All of them had binoculars, though, in order to watch the action.
“Because you had the shot?” one of the thirty-somethings guessed, his long brown hair flopping down over his face while he stayed glued to the eyepieces of the binos as he spoke. Goober, I thought. One of those guys who somehow managed to make it this far into the ZA without getting himself and others eaten. Maybe a local who hightailed it inside the Safe Zone as soon as the first row of trailers went up. Now, here he was fresh off walking the wall and full of zombie-killing piss and vinegar.
“No, and a bad guess,” I replied. “You aren’t here to take the shot just for giggles. Anybody else?”
“Because he had a gimp leg,” Casey finally said after nearly a minute of silence.
“Why would that matter?” I asked, keeping my voice noncommittal. I heard one of the younger guys in the group give a snort, as if he expected me to rip her for that answer.
“He was slowing up the works, and zombies were beginning to pile up behind him. Too many pile up and they spill out over the walls.”
“Ding, ding, ding,” I said louder than before. “Yes, and we have a winner. Correct, Casey. The job here is to anticipate the problem and act before it becomes a thing. Zombies building a ramp out of their own bodies and finding a way past the stacked cars qualifies as a problem.”
“But how could you be sure that was going to happen?” the older gentleman asked, and I could tell he was trying to piece everything together. When to act, and when to hold off.
“That is a good question, and the answer is part experience, and part simple logic. We all know that letting the zombies stack up close to the wall is a bad thing, right?”
This question elicited a group of “yeahs,” which meant I still had their attention. Good, because I wasn’t much of a teacher.
This question led to more questions as the group struggled to answer my increasingly complex hypotheses. I gave them some real world examples from my own time out in the wild, and eventually even the thickest-headed trainees began to get what we needed. Honestly, I wasn’t trying to discourage anybody since the trap had multiple shooting positions just like this one that needed watchers and shooters 24/7.
No system is perfect, and the colonel picked the route and the overwatch locations with an eye toward keeping the zombies on their side of the double stack of crushed cars. Hell, he even measured the height of the walls to make sure the shooters had the best view from the elevated shooting platforms. Or from the top of conveniently placed overpasses. Like I said before, this trap was laid out with forethought.
“Is that one trying to open the car door?”
It was one of the middle-aged guys, short and balding but with a slender build that made me think he was a runner in his past life. Fit looking, anyway.
“Call out the location,” I replied and the man did a passable job of clueing us into what he was seeing. And yes, the zombie in question did appear to be working at getting one of the crushed car’s passenger doors open. Looking at the digital readout on my fancy laser system, I saw the range was five hundred fifty yards.
With the holdover in mind, I centered on the creature’s leathery skull and waited for the shot. I was surprised as always when the rifle bucked against my shoulder. The .308 Winchester round packed a nice recoil, but at these ranges, I wasn’t about to trust the .22s to get there with sufficient pop. Right tool for the job, in this case.
I saw the black spray as the bullet struck t
he creature high on the forehead. Boom. Down.
Now, that door was never going to open. Not in a hundred years, what with the roof of the car crushed down nearly flush with the hood, but that wasn’t the point.
“Smart enough to open doors means they earn a bullet. All right?” I announced. “Everybody got that? We don’t want any smart zombies gumming up the works.”
“Doesn’t the gunshot draw them to you?”
The voice was familiar, but not one of the class. I lowered my weapon and half rolled to look back. Mike Brady stood there, looking clean and wearing freshly laundered jeans and a patched nylon windbreaker.
I’d covered this before with the class but figured it was a valid question.
“One shot will get a little reaction. But at this distance, they can’t see us. Give it a few minutes and they move on. That’s why you have to make your shots count. This isn’t about shooting them up; we just want them to keep moving, which is why we have the CD players set up at intervals. They cluster, but then there’s always something ahead to move the herd.”
“Until they reach the Pit,” Mike finished, nodding. “They showed me that yesterday. Very impressive piece of engineering.”
“Yeah, these old boys around here know how to work the heavy equipment. Can I help you with something, or you just come to watch the show?”
I wasn’t trying to be rude, but I had shit to do and didn’t need the sideshow at the moment. Northcutt turned out to be right again; we needed more trained shooters to keep the trap moving. Despite my grumbling, all these folks here could shoot, even the hero needing a haircut.
The best shot out of the group at six hundred yards proved to be the old man, a guy named Wallace, but Casey placed somewhere in the middle of the pack. Which for this collection, was nothing to sneeze at, and most of them had been personally vetted by Bill Harrington, the retired master gunnery sergeant who essentially ran our militia group.
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