by Jason Ross
“Sergeant, this is Juan. We’re moving out now. ETA five minutes.”
“Bring everyone you see on the street. Everyone,” Mat ordered. “This is all-hands. I’ve got over a thousand enemy combatants converging on my position.”
“Fuck me,” Cabrera swore over the radio.
Gray, cotton swirls of smoke drifted over the college, across the field and into the woods. Mat didn’t know if the smoke was a sign that they were getting the fire put out, or if it meant the surrounding neighborhoods had caught fire too. The town could easily burn from the inside out, but that wasn’t Mat’s problem. The fire crew wasn’t even on the same radio frequency as him.
The refugees poured across the highway like a flood. They plunged off the edge of the blacktop and into the fringe woods around the Carroll hay farm.
The highway was over a mile away from Mat’s position on the HESCO barrier, and the rats disappeared as soon as they hit the trees. They’d cross a half-mile of pasture, another windrow of trees, and then they’d appear on the edge of no man’s land, south of the Carroll’s cluster of homes. Mat prayed Old Man Carroll had evacuated ahead of the wave of zombies. The Carroll’s had been unwilling to abandon their family homestead to the predations of the refugees. They’d been fending them off for months, on the wrong side of the HESCO.
The first rats surged onto no man’s land just as the QRF arrived.
“Spread out along Smith Street,” Mat ordered on his radio. “Be prepared to displace along the barrier wherever the fighting gets heaviest. They’ll hit us in five mics. I have eyes-on across the field. Use the poles whenever possible. Shoot anyone carrying a firearm. Good copy?”
His team leaders acknowledged and sprinted to their positions up and down the four hundred yard stretch of wall.
Luckily, the pork-laden wind cut across one of their best sections of HESCO; their most-defensible position. They’d stacked logs from the lumber yard, wired them together with bailing wire, then piled vehicles behind the logs to stabilize them. The logs would be easy for a healthy man to scale—eight feet tall at the most—but atop the logs was a wobbly, six foot chainlink fence. The starving rats could scale it, Mat had no doubt, but his defenders would ram them with the greased poles through the holes in the chainlink. So far, he could see less than a hundred defenders atop the Smith Street HESCO, but more were coming. A hundred or two against thousands.
Mat scanned the tree line. Hundreds of rats surged into no man’s land, then lurched into the swirling scent of cooked pork. Mat picked out a man with a double-barrel shotgun, wading through the muck with the rifle at port arms. Mat slid the barrel of the SCAR heavy through the chainlink alongside a post.
The wind sighed against the fence, sending a gentle sway along its length. Mat let his sight picture undulate with the post. He waited for the glowing red chevron of the ACOG to pass over the man’s torso and he timed his trigger press to match.
Whoom! The SCAR barked. The man fell face down in the mud. Two men following flipped him on his back, and one snatched up the mud-caked shotgun.
Whoom! Mat blew a hole in his chest.
He couldn’t allow himself to get tunnel vision this time. The moment he turned his attention elsewhere, another rat would pick up that shotgun, but Mat was in command, and he had to watch the whole battlefield.
He keyed the team radio. “The tree line is five hundred meters. Hold fire until they’re under two hundred meters. Acknowledge.”
Range by fire, Mat thought grimly. His AR would’ve struggled with this distance and the crosswind. This was no urban gunfight. This was a siege—a merciless ocean of desperation against whizzing bullets and a few hundred defenders, if they even got to Smith Street in time.
Mat had killed the only two guys he could see carrying obvious firearms. At least six hundred rats stumbled in the field, through the mud toward the town. When they got another hundred yards closer, Mat and his men would have to shoot anyone who looked threatening, which would be everyone, and then they would run out of ammo.
Inevitability swamped him. The weight of the six remaining magazines in his vest felt like a stretching length of paracord, holding him dangling over the abyss. When those mags ran dry, the sea of enemy would overwhelm his position, and whether they killed him or not, he and William, and everyone in the town, would starve.
Hundreds more crossed the highway in a mighty wave. The smell of pork would empty a thirty-square-mile swath of woods. The pock-pock-pock of his men firing into the ranks of rats picked up tempo and Mat’s worry rose with it; a savage, clawing futility.
“Save your bullets for people with edged weapons,” he coaxed over the radio. “Use the poles on everyone else.” At most, there were two thousand rounds of ammunition along the half-mile of wall. He could see almost that many enemy, at a single glance.
Another three hundred rats staggered out of the woods and onto the field of battle as Mat dropped his transmit button. “Save your ammo for people with serious weapons,” Mat spoke to himself. He didn’t bother to push transmit. The rats were upon them.
Gladys Carter Home
McKenzie, Tennessee
* * *
“Miss Carter! Hold on. Miss Carter.”
The voice of one of her P.E. students shook Gladys out of her call to arms. She bounded off her porch, dressed in full military kit, on her way to the rally point at the baseball diamond.
“Miss Carter, help!”
It was Candice McClaughlin, Jim Jenkins’ step-daughter. She was with Sergeant Best’s son, William.
“Miss Carter. We need help. My step-dad—er Jim—is doing something he shouldn’t. He’s going to shoot the poison gas.”
Gladys stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the kids, not understanding. “The town mucky-mucks said okay to the poison?”
“No, I mean the other stuff. The mustard gas. He’s loading it into a van right now,” the girl explained while her hands flailed at the air.
Gladys wasn’t at the top of the information food chain. It was entirely possible that this morning’s mass attack on the north HESCO called for such weapons. She would never use mustard gas on people, but her vote barely mattered.
“There’s an attack across from the college. You two need to get to the school to shelter until this passes.”
“No, Miss Carter,” William barked. “You don’t understand. Mr. Jensen’s been touching her. He’s been touching Candice.” The boy turned to the girl. Her eyes fell to the sidewalk.
“Mother of God,” Gladys muttered. The truth clarified, suddenly. Her head raced forward to catch up with something her gut already knew.
“And he’s going to do something bad with that poison gas. I know it,” William said. “Mr. Jensen was acting weird. And talking weird too. He pointed a gun at me and said that he was the only one who could save the town. He’s a psycho, Miss Carter. And he has poison gas. Lots of poison gas, and cannons to shoot it.”
In her rational mind, Gladys knew that using poison gas without the town’s say-so and committing pedophilia landed on two unrelated squares. But in her human mind, she felt the two things criss-cross like French cheese and bad breath.
Something clicked in her brain, like the last tick of a grandfather clock before the bell goes gong-gong-gong.
Jim Jensen is a motherfucking sociopath.
She knew something was off about the man. She’d seen his shuffles and half-steps on the high school campus, like the feet of a basketball player hankering to step back for the three-point shot. She’d watched him do his little dance in the staff room, and while passing through clusters of kids. Something had been off about the man. Something just wasn’t right, but it hadn’t been until the girl’s eyes dropped to the concrete that Gladys fully understood.
Click.
That dude’s a true-blue psycho, and he has weapons of mass destruction.
“Does anyone else know?” she asked the kids.
They shook their heads.
“Find your
dad. Find Mat. Tell him what you told me. Hurry.” The former WNBA player launched from her yard in a ferocious sprint—a pace she could maintain all the way to that cocksucker’s house on Forrest Avenue.
Jim Jensen wasn’t home. Gladys turned in circles on the sidewalk in front of his house.
No van. No jars of poison gas. No ego-maniac pedophile in the yard or in the house.
While Gladys spun, she caught snippets of info from her QRF team radio on the wall, six blocks north of Jensen’s house. All the town’s defenders had dashed to Smith Street to fight off a huge attack. She’d been called to join them on the HESCO, but now she had bigger possums to fry.
The explosion. The column of barbecue smoke over the town. The tornado siren. The rattle of gunfire.
She put it together bit-by-bit. The pork drying facility at the lumberyard burned, and the clouds of pork smell had stirred the refugees into a frenzy.
Jim Jensen probably planned to counter-strike the mob with poison gas. He might see it as a way to prove to the town he was a hero, someone special—someone who could abuse his step-daughter while the town looked the other way, as though that was ever going to happen. Gladys had been molested by her dad’s friend, and that’s exactly the kind of shit that sonofabitch would’ve come up with in his twisted head.
Where had Jensen gone? She forced herself to slow down and think.
Jensen had poison gas and a cannon that launched jars. Her combat team was lined up on Smith Street. The best place to launch gas into the mob would be the community college football field. Maybe.
“Gladys to Sergeant Best,” she radioed for the tenth time. Nothing. Either his radio was out-of-range or Mat was busy fighting for his life. Gladys fingered the short antenna on her radio. She’d forgotten the longer one on her kitchen counter.
Gunfire rattled to the north. Smith Street. Her team.
The football field. That’s where Jensen would go, she felt certain.
She ran north up Nolan Street and cut across a backyard with a pretty white gazebo and another yard with a truck up on blocks. It was a mile to the football field, give-or-take. She’d be there in less than eight minutes.
Gladys heard a sonorous thumping, like the first bars of the song Stand By Me—like a rhythmic mortar, firing six shots in a row. She’d never heard anything like it, but she knew in her gut: the town of McKenzie, Tennessee had just joined Sadaam Hussein and Benito Mussolini in using chemical weapons against their own citizens. She poured on the speed and fired herself like a missile toward the sound.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.
Mat Best hadn’t ever heard that sound on a battlefield, but within a few seconds realization dawned: Jensen was launching poison gas into the rats.
Thunk, thunk.
It was Jensen’s pneumatic cannon. He’d built a multi-barrel version.
During the time it took for Mat to reach a conclusion, he’d killed two men and a handgun-wielding woman churning across the field of hay stubble and mud. A few rats turned back in the face of the rifle fire, but for every rat who faltered, ten more appeared on the edge of the woods.
The Carroll farmhouse had been completely overrun. The woods teemed with a human flood that reminded Mat of rats he’d seen overflowing a burning field in Iraq. Rank upon rank of desperate people drove each other forward, pushing, shoving and lurching into the wind. Mat was already down to three mags.
The first wave hit the HESCO barrier at the eastern end of Smith Street. Mat didn’t dare shift resources in that direction. The human tidal wave would strike along the entire half-mile-long stretch in the next thirty seconds.
“They’re getting through!” one of the Cabrera brothers screamed into his radio.
“Monica, this is Mat. Send all newcomers to the east end of the line. Repeat, have the townspeople head to the east end. If the rats get over, the townies have to beat them back.” Mat knew it wasn’t going to happen, even as he ordered it. Ninety-nine percent of the townspeople weren’t capable of the level of violence required to survive this. It was a scrambled egg mess of a battle. The rats on the east end didn’t even pause on top of the HESCO to fight the defenders. They leapt over and ran for the smell of barbecue. Mat’s men were little more than speed bumps.
Up and down Smith Street, townspeople fought, wrestled and clung to the rats that’d made it over. The townies were five times as strong, because they’d been eating actual food, but they had none of the desperation of the rats. The refugees fought to get past, and when they did, they disappeared into the neighborhoods like filthy water down a drain.
The rats that lost their fight with the townies either stayed down or crawled back to prop themselves against the inside of the HESCO. But even then, half of them caught their breath, then made another run for it. Once a rat was over the wall, there was no way to get them back on the other side.
Mat watched an elderly lady with a revolver hold six men and a girl captive against the town side of the barrier. Five more rats flew over the top and bolted for the cover of the homes. The lady blasted one of them, maybe by accident. Half the people she had “arrested” got up and ran for it while she went to see if she’d killed the guy she’d shot.
“Hold the line,” Mat ordered into his radio. “We’ll deal with the ones that got past later.”
Mat had seen at least a hundred rats make it over into town. If enough of them got in, the town would be done. He had no idea what that number might be. But if they overwhelmed them, the HESCO wouldn’t matter. The rats would eat everything not protected by a gun, and all the guns were on the wall.
“Hold the HESCO. Even if they’re getting past. Slow them down.” Mat didn’t know if it’d work, but he began to think of the HESCO, not as a medieval wall, but as a semi-porous barrier, like a fleece jacket in the rain. It wouldn’t keep out the weather, but it might be just enough to keep from getting drenched. The rats weren’t turning to attack his men once inside the wall. They ran for the pork instead.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.
Mat’s attention turned back to the sodden hayfield. He expected to see flying missiles, arching over the battlefield, then wispy clouds of yellow smoke. Instead, he saw nothing; just rambling, clotting masses of filthy people.
Maybe the jars didn’t break when they hit the mud.
That wouldn’t surprise him. Random shit happened all the time in war, even with a multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial complex. With Kerr jars and potato guns, who could say?
Then, a knot of twenty rats wavered in the middle of the field. They stumbled, fell to their knees, then pitched over. Some writhed in agony in the mud, others went still.
Another patch opened in the sea of rushing rats, then another. There were no explosions, no smoke, no sign of poison gas except men, women and children scythed down to the mud.
Mat slung his rifle and snatched his binoculars.
A ten year-old boy went down, clutching his throat. A woman rolled in agony in the filth, coating her hair with sludge. An old man fell to the ground, like a chopped pine and didn’t twitch a muscle; dead upon impact.
Mat dropped the binos and whipped his head left and right, giving the sensitive skin on his ears and cheeks a chance to test the wind. It was still blowing from the southwest, at about five knots. But he knew from long-range shooting school that the wind in one part of the field didn’t guarantee wind in another part. Wind swirled. A lot.
What would happen if the wind turned? Could the poison reach the HESCO, or the town? The prevailing wind would definitely carry the poison across the Carroll’s homestead.
There were no hills or trees in no-man’s land—just tilled mud—so Mat prayed the wind would behave and not blow it back across his men. But a five knot wind was close to no wind at all. Light wind had a mind of its own and could whirl around at the slightest provocation. Gas attacks were notorious for killing “friendly” forces. Mat kept one eye on the waves of starving rats and another on the fickle wind.
But they might just win. Mat’s eyes narrowed to see if the tide of oblivion could be turned.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.
Jensen had dialed in his pneumatic mortar because the next wave of death cut across the heaviest wave of rats. Mat saw several of the jars flying through his binos this time, falling from the heavens like tumbling capsules of malevolence. They slapped to the ground and blew into fragments. Thirty seconds later, men, women and children began to drop like flies passing through the flame. Mat sagged, jerking his binos away from another child strangling on her own vomit.
The battle wavered as the possessed mobs stumbled over piles of their dead. Newcomers inhaled the gas, twisted, and added to the twitching layers of bodies. Thirty meter-wide sweeps of the rough-turned hayfield twisted with the struggle of the doomed.
The mass of rats finally reckoned with the invisible destroyer in their midst and slowed their advance. Thousands tarried, screamed terror, then choked on the swirling, silent, chemical weapon.
For a moment, it looked to Mat like the poison gas might stem the tide. The overwhelming thousands flooding across the field thinned and slowed. Rats poured back across the field toward the tree line, like vermin caught between the brushfire and the exterminators.
Hundreds, maybe a thousand refugees contorted, screamed and thrashed in the mud. Mat’s radio had gone silent. Every man on the HESCO line stood, mute and boneless, as they watched the destruction of their enemy.
