Zombie D.O.A. Series Four: The Complete Series Four

by JJ Zep

  If Councilman Barlow is torn, Colonel Robert Benson is quite the opposite – firmly resolved. He is scrambling aboard his command Humvee now, the calm veneer of the veteran soldier resting across his handsome face. Bobo has been fortified by the ampoule of BH-17 (Blueberry Hill to its friends) that courses its way through his veins, even now transforming his DNA in ways he cannot begin to comprehend. Colonel Benson knows only one thing, he has a mission to complete. Successful completion of this mission will earn him that much-coveted star on his shoulder. He believes he will die a happy man should that objective be met.

  Sitting just a couple of vehicles back in the convoy that has just now begun to roll towards Manhattan, Dr. Alex Payne has ambitions of her own. Hers are somewhat loftier than Colonel Benson’s but then again that’s only to be expected. She’s always considered Bobo something of a dimwit. Dr. Payne also carries a secret of which Colonel Benson is unaware. Bobo will never make general. In fact, Bobo has already passed on. He isn’t even Bobo any more. He just doesn’t know it yet. She allows herself a smile as she considers that scrap of intelligence and thinks about her lover, Marin Scolfield. She looks forward to their reunion.

  Kelly Collins, too, is wistful for a reunion. Except, in her case, she dreads that it may never occur. She is sitting on the couch in the living room of her apartment, copious pillows supporting her back, her distended belly bulging before her. She is alone in her thoughts but not alone in the room. Her children, Charlie, Jojo and Samantha as well as Ferret (a fully-fledged member of clan Collins these days) sit on the couch opposite, yawning and dozing in traveling clothes. At Charlie’s feet, Luigi, their pet Akita, lies with his chin resting on his paws. Every so often, he emits a low whine and lifts his head, as though he senses danger.

  There is a knock at the door, Charlie runs to open it and returns with Joe Thursday, Hooley Hoolihan and Kelly’s mother, Janet. Joe’s smile can’t quite mask his concern. Hooley attends to his wife, who insists loudly that she’s done running and is going nowhere, no matter what. Kelly offers coffee, and waddles to the kitchen to prepare it. Her belly cramps as she walks, not the first time it has done so this morning. The sky through the kitchen window has begun to lighten and Kelly casts an eye towards it. “Where are you Chris?” she asks of the heavens, then implores, “Come back to me.”

  forty two

  There were four claymores left and no time to wire them. Instead, Chris spaced them out on the ice, and then backed off as the first of the Z’s stepped tentatively onto the slick surface. The zombie managed three steps before its feet drifted away from it and it spilled to the ice, coming down hard. The crack of breaking bone reverberated across the river but it hardly seemed to bother the Z. It tried twice to rise, and then started clawing its way towards them, pulling itself on its belly like some bizarre species of penguin. Chris stopped it with a single headshot.

  Along a broad front, more Z’s were reaching the shoreline. They stumbled onto the ice, falling, rising again, lurching forward, trampling those ahead of them, their numbers swelling, becoming a veritable wall, thousands strong.

  “Hold,” Chris said as he withdrew the pin from his grenade, “Hold!”

  He let them come, waiting until they’d almost reached the Claymores and then shouted, “Now!” and lobbed his grenade. Left and right of him, other missiles arced through the air. He hit the deck and in the next moment came the first of the percussions. Then a cacophony of thumps, studded with the whistle of flying shrapnel.

  The aim had been to break up the ice with the grenades, creating a water barrier between them and the Z’s. Many of the grenades, though, landed among the creatures. Chris saw one of them catapulted into the air, another ripped apart as one of the claymores was detonated. And their objective had been achieved. Under the Z’s, the ice had ruptured, pitching many of the forerunners into the water, stopping the progress of those coming behind.

  That may have been true of this stretch of the river. But up ahead, the Z’s were still streaming forward.

  Chris pulled himself to his feet, oblivious to the icy water that had seeped into his clothes. “Let’s move!” he shouted and was running himself, slipping, fighting for balance. To his left he saw the Z’s swarming along the riverbank, some already out on the ice. He heard shots fired behind him, shouts. He kept going.

  He thought he could see the barricade wall now, make out the barbed wire and obstacles that ran into the river at its left flank. How far still to go? Nine hundred yards? Eight hundred?

  A loud crack sounded from behind him, and then a scream that stopped him trying for forward momentum.

  “Dad!”

  He dropped instantly to one knee, leg out like a runner striving to make base. His foot caught and sent him tumbling. He was up and running the minute his boots gained a foothold. Up ahead he could see his team gathered in a loose circle, the flashes of their rifles as they concentrated fire on the approaching Z’s. An SMG clattered, flame spewed from a flamethrower, a couple of grenades were detonated, all to minimal effect. The Z’s crept relentlessly forward. Chris absorbed all of this in the sliver of a second, and then he saw Ruby plunge through a gap in the ice and he was running.

  “Chris!” Julie screamed as he approached. “It’s Chico, he –”

  Chris thrust her aside.

  Ana made a grab for him, “Don’t –“

  He barely noticed as he barged past her towards the hole where the thin ice had given way.

  “Ruby!” He screamed into the black water. “Ruby!”

  He tossed his rifle aside, started working at his ammo belt. Ana made another grab for him, her nails digging into his arm.

  “Chris don’t! You’ll die in there!”

  He took a step towards the hole, dragging her with him.

  “Chris, Jesus no. Kelly, your kids! They need you!”

  A crack sounded, a fissure snaked its way across the ice, Chris fetched a breath of frozen air and prepared to plunge into the water.

  And that was when Ruby broke the surface.

  “Ruby!” He fell to his knees, onto his belly, reached for her. He felt a grip close on his ankles and then Ruby’s hands grab his, and he was being hauled backward pulling his daughter with him.

  He sat on the ice, sobbing, holding her, kissing her hair. Ruby was crying too. “I couldn’t save him dad, I couldn’t save him!”

  The guns clattered, the Z’s moved in. It was over.

  forty three

  “No one gets in.”

  Justine looked up at the thug barring her way, a bald guy with pink skin and a roll of fat overspilling the collar of his shirt. The thug had an Uzi slung over his shoulder, held casually, but with the barrel pointed directly at her heart.

  “Not even me?” she said, batting her eyelids and favoring him with her sweetest smile.

  “No one gets in,” the thug repeated.

  “Why don’t you just call up?” Justine said, she reached out and placed a hand on his sleeve and the thug made a fatal mistake. He allowed his eyes to follow her hand. Justine reacted the minute his attention wavered, bringing up the heel of her other hand to connect firmly with his sternum and simultaneously twisting the Uzi towards him and pulling the trigger. She grabbed him by the shirtfront as he fell, marched him backward into the foyer, using his bulk as a shield as the other guards opened fire. Justine let them get off their initial bursts and then wrenched the Uzi free and rolled away, firing as she did. By the time she stopped shooting the four guards in the foyer were dead.

  She vaulted to her feet, tossed the Uzi aside and crossed towards the elevator, standing to the side as it pinged open and two more guards rushed out. She finished them with single shots from her 9-mil, then stepped into the elevator and punched the button for the 27th floor. As the car rode upwards, she lifted the service trapdoor and climbed through.

  She waited until the car stopped, waited till the doors slid open, waited a few seconds longer. Inevitably, one of Barlow’s idiot bodyguards, the fa
t one, stepped across the threshold. Justine flipped back the lip and pumped a round into the top of his head. Then she dropped into the elevator and stepped out. A bullet whizzed past her head. Justine froze, turned, and saw Barlow’s other bodyguard standing to the side of the foyer, a pistol clutched in both hands. The man was wide-eyed, ashen, visibly shaking. A dark stain was spreading across his fawn-colored pants. She smiled at him, gave him a wink and then drilled a bullet into his forehead.

  Barlow’s door, as she’d expected was locked. She opened it with a couple on well-placed rounds, shucked the magazine and slotted in a fresh clip. She stepped into the apartment.

  “Councilman Barlow? Mr. Mayor?”

  No reply. She worked her way through the apartment, half expecting him to do something stupid, like take a shot at her.

  But Barlow wasn’t in the mood for taking potshots it seemed. She found him on the patio, dressed in pajamas and a silk dressing gown, staring out towards the barricades.

  “What have I done?” Barlow said, without looking at her. “Dear God, what have I done?”

  “You did what was necessary to fulfill your ambition, Councilman. I kind of admire you for that.”

  “Admire?” Barlow said. “What’s to admire? I’ve just condemned every man, woman and child in Manhattan to death.”

  “A tad melodramatic, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You didn’t send the radio signal, Councilman.”

  “No, I didn’t. But I’m sure you can do that yourself, right after you press your detonator and bring down the wall.”

  “I suppose I can.”

  Barlow said nothing. He looked east towards the buildings on the Fifth Avenue side of the park, the faint blush of sunrise just visible beyond them.

  “You going to shoot me?” Barlow said eventually.

  “Do you want me to?”

  Barlow seemed to consider for a moment. “No,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”

  He walked to the edge of the roof and without pausing threw himself over the railing.

  ***

  He should have been freezing, but the world had taken on the surreal quality of a dream, where every sensation – sight, sound and feeling – seemed warped and fantastic. The Z’s were closing, slipping, falling, but closing nonetheless, and despite the heroic efforts of the defenders they would not be held back. There simply was not enough ammo.

  Chris was on his feet, shouting commands, the AK hot in his hands. Beside him, Ruby wielded her blade to deadly effect. To his right, Sphinx dispensed lethal fire from the SMG, further afield Strangler set the world ablaze with his flamethrower. Rifles bucked in the hands of Ana, and Julie and Eddy. Carlito pitched grenades. The ice was thick with Z’s, fouled with their blood. Still they came. Relentless. Closing. No retreat was offered. The ice behind them was wafer thin, then slush, then frigid water.

  When the explosions came, massive blasts, one, and then the other close behind, the combatants seemed to pause. Then every Z, those on the ice, and those in the fields beyond, turned and faced south, where the smoke was clearing to reveal a vacuum in the place where the barricades had stood.

  Kill The Dead

  (Book Fifteen of the Zombie D.O.A. Series)

  J.J. Zep

  PUBLISHED BY:

  JJ Zep

  Copyright © 2013

  www.jjzep.com

  one

  A pair of explosions ripped across the frigid, morning twilight, the first at a distance, the second much closer, its fat thump bouncing back off the empty buildings, off the expanse of ice, off the embankment on the other side of the Hudson. A geyser of debris - football-sized chunks of plaster and cinder - was thrown a hundred feet into the air, to hurtle earthward and rupture the frozen surface of the river. Cracks appeared, snaking out like alien serpents; the surface itself appeared to drift, to shift underfoot.

  Chris felt himself pitched forward. He twisted and broke the fall by coming down on the meat of his upper arm. He rolled and brought the AK instantly into a firing position… then stopped.

  The mass of zombies that just seconds before had been shuffling across the ice determined to tear him and his team apart, had stalled. Their heads were cocked at odd angles, as though tuning in to some unknown frequency. Those beyond, on the Hudson River Greenway, on the streets, had assumed a similar posture. They stood, unmoving, an army of scarecrows, the breeze fluttering their ragged attire.

  “Boss?” Paulie queried from beside him. “Boss, what do we do?”

  Chris stilled him with a hand, came up into a crouch and signaled for his team to hold their positions. Truth be told, he had no idea how to respond to this turn of events. In all of the sixteen years since the initial zombie outbreak, he’d never seen anything like it. He’d seen Z’s react this way of course, usually in response to particular radio frequencies, but he’d never seen a radio frequency achieve this effect. It was as though every zombie in the Wastelands was participating in a bizarre game of Simon Says.

  Simon says stop and listen.

  His attention was drawn to one Z in particular, an emaciated old crone with a face split almost exactly down the middle, one half showing skull bones the color of marzipan, the other, a mask of putrid, rubberized flesh. This Z had begun slowly to turn and now started shuffling towards shore. Another zombie followed, and another, until the whole throng was in motion, their shuffling gait taking them back towards the riverbank.

  There was movement in the park too, and on the streets. An exodus was underway, thousands of the creatures, tens of thousands, stepping grudgingly, a black mass of the undead, heading south, a trajectory that would take them towards lower Manhattan, towards his family.

  Panic bubbled up and he stilled it. He scanned the shoreline, seeking not so much a path, as an inspiration. Was there a way out of here? If there was, he didn’t see it.

  He was perhaps fifty yards from shore, the ice under his feet stable, but that behind him fissured, wafer thin in places, the flow of the river clearly visible underneath. Closer in, the surface had been broken by grenades and claymores.

  The only way across lay a hundred yards south, a thin strip of ice that looked solid enough for them to scramble across. But what then? Even if they could make it to the riverbank, what then? They’d be in amongst them, among the dead.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a distant rumble, then by a rifle shot that caused him to flinch. Not a rifle shot, he now realized, a backfire. There were vehicles crossing the George Washington Bridge.

  two

  “Chris!”

  Julie was shuttling across the ice towards him, running crouched over. She slid in beside him. “Chris, I think we can cross over there.” She pointed to the strip of ice that Chris had spotted earlier.

  Chris didn’t respond, he was looking over Julie’s shoulder, back towards the bridge, where a line of vehicles was working its way slowly across. Even at this distance the boxy shape of the Humvees was unmistakable and it was equally clear that they weren’t local. These were finished in sand-colored livery, not the drab military green of Dave Bamber’s stock.

  “Chris?”

  “Yeah,” he said abruptly, bringing his attention back to Julie.

  “I said, it looks like there’s some solid ice a bit further down where we can cross.”

  “Maybe so, but that will just put us in the middle of them.”

  “I don’t think so, they’re moving away. Look.”

  He did look, and saw that Julie was right. The Z’s were drifting away from the shore, heading across the greenway to merge with their brethren sleepwalking south on the Henry Hudson Parkway.

  He cast a quick glance towards the GWB, where the convoy had almost completed its crossing. He looked back towards the band of ice that Julie had pointed out, towards the copse of scrawny trees and bushes just beyond it.

  “What do you think?” Julie prompted.

  “I think we need to haul ass, but we’d better wait
until those Humvees are across.”

  “Who are they?” she said, looking back over her shoulder.

  “I’m not sure.” He had a pretty good idea, though. An idea he didn’t want to contemplate too deeply.

  As the last of the Humvees dropped out of sight, Chris got instantly to his feet. He let out a shrill whistle, drawing attention, indicated for his team to follow. Then he set off himself, veering right.

  The ice was littered with dead zombies and he slalomed between them, not daring to run but setting a fast pace anyway. They needed to reach the shelter of the trees before the Humvees got here. At the same time, he didn’t want to attract the attention of the Z’s. Their numbers might have thinned but the greenway was still clogged with the creatures.

  The rumble of the Humvees reached him again. He reckoned there were maybe twenty of them on the bridge, plus a number of supply trucks. That was a fair sized force, but hardly big enough to take Manhattan. Then again, it was likely to be all the Corporation needed. Why ship an army clear across the country when you could rouse up a rabble of Z’s to do your work for you? He found himself wondering what this was about, why the Corporation had decided to launch an attack on New York, why they’d chosen to do it now? Those questions would wait. He had more immediate concerns.