by Joshua Guess
Miles had reappeared and after some fierce back and forth with the rest of the former prisoners was elected their temporary leader.
“Thanks for the save,” Miles said to Emily as the group sat around the small table in what had been the guard's office.
“No problem,” she replied. “Once we saw them take Mason, we knew something was going down.”
Kell had heard bits and pieces of what had happened beyond the confines of the church. Emily's team had been charged with watching the pair of snipers set to guard the church from a distance. By sheer bad luck the two guards had spotted the SUV carrying Mason and decided to check in. The two men had seen Miles and his party going for the sleeping guards in their living space.
They hadn't seen Emily and her people stalking them from behind.
“What does a strike team mean?” Kincaid asked Mason, both men on Kell's left. “Seems like overkill to ship in soldiers for a zombie attack.”
“Probably a contingency,” Mason said. “If they thought the attack was orchestrated by someone—a good guess, by the way—then they wouldn't want to risk the personnel here falling into enemy hands. The research, either. It would give up their operation.”
“Sure,” Kincaid said, “but the place is already done for.”
“The people in charge probably don't know that,” Kell said. “Right now all they're getting is radio silence. Rawlins and his guards have checked in by now, so they know something went down here.”
Mason nodded approvingly. “Right, and that means they have to send in fighters. The sooner the better, actually. They'll want to hit us before we abandon the place and spread the knowledge it exists.”
“How did you find this place?” Miles asked Emily.
She snorted a laugh. “Whoever these fuckers are, they're not subtle. The road here was clean. Like, super clean. They spent a lot of time and effort fixing and clearing it to drive on regularly. I lost sight of the guys bringing my friends here a few times, but I always knew to keep on the pretty roads.”
Kell oscillated between the two conversations, which themselves were part of a larger discussion going through the room. Though the five of them were seated at the table, another half dozen people leaned against the walls, chatting. The small talk and exchanges of information had been going on for a few minutes, then reached a sort of critical mass as one person after another ran dry of facts. Eventually the cross talk started, those outer conversations turning inward to the table as people sought clarifications from one of the people sitting at it.
Kincaid raised a hand for silence. “We're going forward with the understanding that we'll have to make a fight of this either way. The transports will be here in the next day or so, assuming no delays on the road, but the strike force could be here any time. The people in charge of this whole setup have some pretty serious resources, which apparently includes maintaining and fueling a plane they can just send off full of fighters on a whim.”
The room stayed silent but for the creak of furniture and the rustle of clothing.
“Any prisoner,” Kincaid said, facing Miles, “who wants to fight with us, can. We have a stock of extra weapons in addition to what your people took from the bodies of the guards and their stores.”
Miles nodded, his face grim. “I'll talk to everyone.”
“Make sure they decide fast,” Kincaid said. “No one will blame them if they don't want to fight, but we need to prepare. We can't afford indecision.”
“Sure,” Miles replied, less enthused.
They discussed the usual from there, working out the possibilities based on what their own capabilities were up against what sort of force the enemy might bring to the fight. The advantage was theirs, given an equivalent or even slightly larger number of bad guys. Defending a place had inherent advantages.
Kell wasn't sure it would be close to an equal fight. Whoever the nameless people behind this facility were, they had brains. They had resources. They had the will to use them. Those three things together made them a terrible foe. Add a desperate need to keep their activities quiet, and it was a recipe for an overwhelming attack.
He didn't shy away from making the point, either. No one was silenced and no conjecture outright dismissed from consideration. For the first time in a long while, they faced a truly unknown enemy. Anything was possible.
This point was made clearly an hour into the meeting when a scout burst through the door, heaving ragged breaths and unmindful of the half-dozen pistols snapped up in response to his surprise entry.
“There's a swarm coming in,” the scout said. “Maybe half an hour away.”
Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “How convenient.”
The scout grimaced. “We were ordered not to engage the enemy for any reason, but when we saw them harrying zombies this direction, I was sent back to warn everyone.”
“It's a common enough tactic,” Mason said. “It's going to make defense a harder.”
Kincaid pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment. “Get every decent shot with a rifle on the roof. I want them picking off living people only. We'll need as many people fighting hand to hand as possible. I don't want to waste bullets on the dead if we can help it.”
Kell listened to the string of orders, sometimes supplemented by Mason's suggestions, and saw the shape of the fight to come. They would have to clear the swarm fast, or it would be a distraction at best. At worst, if the horde of zombies simply loitered, it would provide cover for enemy agents to get close. That too was a tactic all of them had seen before.
Kell idly wondered when someone was going to try to tell him to stay out of the fight. Thinking about the trove of data a dozen yards away, he was curious whether he would listen.
Thirty
He didn't listen.
Admittedly the discussion was short and heated, comprised mostly of Mason and Kincaid trying to convince Kell it was best for him to stay safe and Kell trying to convince the pair of them that it was in fact physiologically possible for them to go fuck themselves.
Eventually both men gave in and Kell went hunting for his gear.
There had also been a brief but frantic argument on whether or not they should try to ferry the prisoners to somewhere safer before the enemy arrived. Kincaid was for it, but Mason won by pointing out that they couldn't spare the bodies if they wanted to defend the church, and that any activity on the road might be spotted. The last thing they wanted to do was split the strike teams up. It would be chaos.
Kell searched room after room, a huge ring of keys taken from a dead guard jangling as he went along. There were surprisingly few locked doors, most of the rooms being for storage of more mundane things. After a few frustrating minutes trying to match keys to locks, Kell gave up and started kicking in doors.
Like many a mystery date, door number three was lucky. Inside the room were rows of steel mesh lockers, each stuffed with bags of personal belongings. Kell found his after less than a minute. Not many people had heavy jackets with armored plates.
His right shoulder and collarbone were stiff but only pained him when he raised his hand above his head. Getting dressed was easier than it had been in what felt like epochs, though he had apparently been lied to about his stuff getting cleaned.
It was a short dash to the nave, where Kell shared the location of the personal belongings. There were more than a few happy faces at the news. The end of the world meant growing used to not having things, but also attaching more meaning to what you did have.
Just as he was about to leave the room, Emily walked in. For a second his brain spun its tires at the sight of someone walking through the open door, which had always been shut and locked when not being actively used. Even knowing what had happened to change his circumstances didn't eliminate the expectation that the door would be shut and secured.
“Got something for you,” Emily said, gesturing for him to follow.
She led him outside and to the van. Kell could hear the approaching zombies in the distan
ce in the same way you heard a thunderstorm. Low, menacing, and inevitable. Either the swarm was closer than the scouts thought—unlikely—or it was pretty large. While he couldn't make out individual noises, the aggregate of shuffling feet hissing through tall grass and clomping in the dirt made it sound like a drunken army.
Logic told him that there couldn't have been many zombies to send, not the overwhelming force he was imagining. The whole point of this place was to avoid large concentrations of the dead. So it was likely nerves amplifying his fear.
“Here you go,” Emily said, straightening from where she had been digging in the van and tossing something to Kell.
His right arm, free of its bindings, shot out on instinct and caught the spear.
It wasn't his old one, the length of battered metal that had seen him through so many close calls. Whoever had packed gear for this trip had decided to add a cache of new weapons instead of risking one Kell had sentimental attachments to.
“Nice,” Kell said, flexing his gloved fingers around the friction tape winding around the haft. “What's this made of? It's light.”
“No idea,” Emily said. “Someone found a bunch of bar stock and Patrick played around with it until he decided it was tough enough for weapons.”
The spear was very close to his own, the tip a simple narrowing of the haft rather than a blade shape. It looked like a giant, thin pencil with an elongated tip. The bare metal parts shone almost white beneath the flood lights.
Kell stretched, letting his hands get a feel for the weapon. He tried to judge the pain in his shoulder, tried to form some idea of how much mobility he had. The real test would be in the heat of the moment, he knew. Fighting with Mason made him sure he could do it again. Chimera helped the healing process along, and Kell wouldn't have been surprised to find a ridge of stiff, fibrous tissue similar to what New Breed zombies had beneath their skin growing under his own to support his damaged clavicle.
“You think you're going to be able to manage?” Emily asked.
From anyone else the question might have been loaded with subtext. From her Kell could take it at face value.
“Do you think I should stay inside?” Kell asked, the question equally honest.
“Couldn't say. You're a smart guy, Kell. You know your limits. Sometimes you need someone to stop you and tell you when you're pushing too hard, but this doesn't look like one of those occasions. If you think you're up to an extended fight, then I'll have your back.”
Kell smiled. “If you're watching out for me, I'm pretty sure I could fight missing an arm. Maybe a bit of leg, too.”
She gave him a wink. “Don't think I'm going to let you get lazy, big fella.”
When the zombies came, they did it all at once. The hills surrounding the church slowed them but didn't stop them. They were too gently sloping for that. The small rises of land jutting up from the perimeter were in the direction of the airport, which was also the direction of the zombie invasion. The enemy hadn't any need to be subtle about who was sending this particular care package.
The smell of so many tasty humans overrode the natural instinct of the undead to avoid too much expended energy. Left to their own devices, zombies were like water in seeking the path of least resistance.
Prodded by the promise of someone to eat, they became much more energetic.
The swarm burst over the small rise of dirt and grass at the end of the parking lot, hemmed on one side by the fence surrounding the garden and by the rise of another hill on the other. Aside from those two features, there was no natural barrier to stop or even slow the slavering horde.
“Front line, ready!” Mason called.
Kell was in the second line, which was situated about a foot behind the front. They had used several of the remaining vehicles in the parking lot to create a funnel to direct the swarm toward the fist of men and women Kell was a part of. The people in front of him rested on one knee, each holding their massive shields in an interlocking pattern.
The zombies saw their prey and sped up as a result. A few lost their footing or were pushed only to be crushed by the rest. If they'd had access to an arsenal as simple as a big pile of rocks, they could have rolled them down the hill at the crowd to thin the ranks.
“Contact in three!” Mason shouted.
The front line tensed in a clatter of shields, and a wave of zombies crashed against them. This wasn't the chaotic dance most combat with the dead had been in the early days. Kell didn't throw himself against the enemy as he had when defending Mason between the fences. Instead he trusted the people next to him to do their job.
His spear struck out, each thrust finding a weak spot. It was a comfortable sort of fight, well-practiced. Hit below the jaw or through the eye, wait that split second to make sure you scrambled the brain, then pull the weapon out. The bodies fell at first, but then began to pile up. When the weight of the fully dead before them began to add up, Mason called for the line to step back.
They did it in unison, by Mason's count. The packed corpses took a spill, the zombies moving over them tumbling. The lot beyond the barricade of SUVs was growing a large delta of dead people, some slipping through the cracks in the defense.
Kell caught the other defenders in his peripheral vision as they moved in threes to slaughter the trickle of zombies who made it behind the lines. Most of his attention was focused on the job at hand, though, which would require another step back any second. The gap they had opened was also filling with corpses.
Just as Kell's arm began to ache from the repetitive motion, Mason called for a rotation. Kell's line struck out as one, less worried about killing strikes than they were about slowing the tide. On the back stroke they stepped back together and let their replacements move up.
Free to look around, he took in the scene. The swarm was finishing its pile-up, the back end mostly composed of stragglers. The parking lot was thick with the sickly smell of flesh not quite dead but far from truly alive. If the zombies were their only concern, hundred or so filling up the lot would have been manageable. The defenders would work safely, as much as it was possible, to thin the herd methodically.
Unfortunately they didn't have that kind of time. The swarm was part distraction, part attrition tactic. The living enemies who had sent it would use it to their advantage in any way possible.
The obvious solution was to take down the zombies as fast as possible without wasting resources. Kell stretched his arms, working out the kinks the tight spear work had built up in his biceps. The really fun part was about to begin.
“Get ready for the spill!” Mason shouted.
Kell stepped back, arraying himself in the rough semicircle of people holding melee weapons a few yards behind the shield and spear line. At Mason's command, the replacement spearmen abandoned the line as Kell's had. The shield-bearers followed, darting to either side of the barrier as they stepped to the rear.
The pile of crushed and torn corpses was impressive, Kell thought. It served as an effective barrier in its own right, if one the zombies could still climb. They did so, the first several of them falling hard and splattering to the ground with gruesome results. Those following had an easier time, though their unsure footing made them easy prey.
The zombies came through the gap into a ring of steel. The uninitiated would have seen it as a far worse defense than the shield barrier had been, and to a degree that was true. But the mass of zombies had grown large and insistent enough that without a release of the pressure, they would have crushed the shield wall by sheer weight.
They came in twos and threes at first. Kell called out his kills before he made them to avoid clashing weapons with his partners. The stream grew dense quickly, requiring the circle to widen. That, too, was fine. As the carpet of dead zombies spread, it created an obstacle course every dead person who followed had to navigate.
The circle grew, and more defenders stepped in to fill the gaps. Some of these held firearms, though the standing order was only to use them to sav
e a fallen comrade or if everything went to hell. Everyone at least had a knife, though the shooters would only use short blades to put down a wounded zombie.
The pattern continued for another minute, and by then the circle was huge and sparse. The nearest person to Kell was a yard away.
Mason, who stood a few paces from Kell, cleared his throat. “Full attack!”
Thirty-One
Seen from above, the parking lot had a certain grisly symmetry to it. The pool of zombies on the approach side took up about as much real estate as the carpet of bodies on the killing floor. The difference was that one side had easy footing while the other was a dense patchwork of tangling limbs. It was, Kell noticed, his fight between the fences writ large.
When Mason bellowed the order to attack, that rough circle of downed zombies was bristling with standing ones frustratingly picking their way through the mess.
Kell leaped forward and resisted the urge to boot the nearest zombie back into its brothers. The point was to kill as fast as possible, after all.
So he swooped low, letting the upward thrust of his legs provide most of the force as the spear traveled forward. This one was especially rotten, because the spear passed through the bottom of its jaw with ease. A solid foot of gore-spattered metal erupted from the back of its head.
Kell stepped back, dragging the body onto a patch of clear ground before whipping the spear in a huge overhead chop onto the skull of another dead man. Had it been an axe, Kell would have cleaved the thing in two down to its sternum. As it was, the blunt cylinder made a divot four inches deep and dropped the zombie in its place.
When he reset himself, Kell saw the line bulge nearby. The person on his right—a man from Haven he had never met—was too close when the small burst of zombies surged forward. The guy didn't lose his cool. Instead of panicking, he leaned his exposed head and neck back as the zombies grasped his coat and drew his machete behind his head like a punch.
