These Dead Lands: Immolation

by Stephen Knight

  Hastings didn’t look away. “In New York, we had a small advantage in that the dead needed to use the bridges and tunnels to get out, so we were able to keep them contained for a bit and slow their progress. But once they started walking out of the Hudson, they grouped up and attacked that way. We don’t have any bridges or tunnels here, sir, only back roads and forest. I’m thinking the dead are going to be able to amass, and from what I saw a couple of hours ago, twenty-foot-high container walls aren’t enough. Even with ten-foot berms, they’ll eventually be able to pile up enough that they’ll just walk right over each other and come over the top.”

  “We’ll see, Captain. We’ll see,” Victor said. “Why don’t you take a moment to get yourself cleaned up a bit? Have a cup of coffee then join me over at the UAV station for a look around.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  *

  “Hello, boys,” Slater said as he sat down on a crate beside Guerra, Stilley, and Reader. Hartman and Tharinger rolled up with him, all looking fit and rested, Guerra thought.

  “Master Sergeant Slater, what a surprise,” Guerra said, looking up from his MRE. “What’re you guys doing down here?”

  “Well, since you allowed the Guard to let the reekers in behind us, we figured it might be in our best interest to retreat from our position and come back home,” Slater said. “Really, Guerra, you couldn’t show the Guard how to fight?”

  “Hey, that shit weren’t no joke,” Stilley said. He had cream gravy all over his mouth from the pork sausage he was eating. “There were, like, hundreds of thousands of ’em, man! It was like New York all over again!”

  “Wasn’t,” Slater said.

  “No, it was, Sergeant!”

  “‘Wasn’t a joke,’ guy. Not ‘weren’t no joke.’ Where the hell did you learn English?”

  Stilley smiled broadly. “I’m a leading product of the Detroit public school system, Sergeant!”

  “You mean the city that was a wasteland before the zombie apocalypse?” Slater glanced at Guerra then jerked his head toward the double-stacked container wall that towered over them atop a broad earthen berm. “Maybe he’s one of them.”

  Guerra shook his head. “He’s too stupid to be a zombie, Sergeant Slater. Take my word for it.”

  “Well, I heard he does like eating man meat,” Reader said. He gave Tharinger a fist bump. “Dude, you’re alive.”

  “How the hell do you figure that?” Stilley asked.

  Reader smirked. “Well, you’re gay, right?”

  “What?”

  “Come on, Stilley. I saw you eating Dannon yogurt at breakfast. Hell, you had three of ’em.”

  Stilley frowned. “So?”

  “So what does it say on Dannon yogurt?”

  Stilley looked so perplexed that Guerra thought the man’s head was going to explode. “How does eating Dannon yogurt make me gay, motherfucker?” His voice was so loud that even the troops on top of the wall could hear him over the gunfire.

  Reader replied, “It says ‘fruit on the bottom.’ Get it? Fruit? Bottom?”

  Guerra chuckled. “Heh, I like that. I gotta remember that one.”

  Stilley was still clueless. “What the fuck does that mean, Reader?”

  Slater laughed when Reader, Tharinger, and Hartman all did face-palms. “Private Stilley, you do know which end of an M4 to point at the enemy, right?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Stilley said before turning back to Reader. “So what does that shit mean, man? I don’t get it!”

  “It means that word play for you is harder than Chinese algebra is for the rest of us,” Guerra said. “Take it from me, Stilley, it was a joke. Now laugh so we all don’t think it’s a miracle your brain has enough power to move your legs.”

  “Ha-ha,” Stilley said, returning to his meal. Guerra could tell from the soldier’s sullen expression that he still didn’t get it. He wished he still had his phone, so he could take Stilley’s picture and upload it to Facebook. Then he remembered that Facebook didn’t exist anymore.

  Slater shrugged off his ruck. “Well, this is going to be a long fight.”

  “What’s that? Educating Stilley?” Reader asked.

  Stilley clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Man…”

  Slater snorted. “No, no. Nothing like that. I mean this”—he jerked his thumb toward the container wall behind them—“is legitimately going to be a long fight. We’re in a pretty good place here.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Guerra said. He reached for the remainder of his pound cake and popped it into his mouth. He washed it down with a slug of lukewarm coffee. “You should’ve seen those dead bastards swarm across the creek. Took down the wire barriers like they were nothing and just dragged the tanglefoot all over the place. After a while, there were so many bodies hung up in the shit, the rest of the reekers just walked over the ones that were trapped.”

  “Yeah,” Slater said. “I’ve seen it before. We used the same tactic in Boston. Worked until it didn’t, and then the stiffs got into the tunnels. We thought we had them then, because we demoed all of them, but that only took care of some of the stiffs from the city. When we found a couple hundred thousand coming in from the suburbs, that’s when the pucker factor went to ten.”

  “Sounds tough,” Guerra said.

  “It was. I haven’t shit anything but linguini since.”

  “Please, I’m tryin’ to eat here,” Stilley said.

  Slater snorted again and looked around. The lightfighters were surrounded by a mix of Army soldiers and Guardsmen, all waiting to rotate into the fighting positions up top. Guerra watched Slater out of the corner of his eye. The guy didn’t give off much of a vibe. He was apparently the sole survivor of his unit, but the experience didn’t seem to have impaired him in any way. He remembered when he’d first seen Slater all those days ago, when he’d offered Hastings some claymore mines like some car trunk salesman trying to interest a pedestrian in a pair of stereo speakers or Nike knockoffs from China. Guerra had thought the guy was kind of odd back then, and his opinion hadn’t changed.

  “You rotating up with us?” Guerra asked.

  “Yeah. Sure. Gotta fit in somewhere, and right now, what we need are guys putting bullets through skulls. At least no one here is still trying to push nonlethal methods. We had the Boston PD crying all over us because we weren’t using nonlethal loads in the beginning like they were. Goddamn New Englanders, they bring beanbags to gunfights.”

  “We had the same thing in New York,” Hartman said. “The NYPD wanted us to use nonlethals, but once we lost a company, our commanding general said fuck that.”

  “That was on like the second day we got there, right?” Reader asked. “When we were posted in Columbus Circle?”

  “That was some crazy shit,” Tharinger said.

  “I saw Beyoncé’s building get torched,” Stilley said, a mournful tone in his voice.

  “Probably one of her weaves caught on fire,” Reader said.

  “Man, you need to find a heart somewhere, Reader. That lady was a national treasure.”

  Reader favored Stilley with a smirk. “Really? Well, if it makes you feel better, I watched a reeker eat Kanye.” Reader held a still-wrapped pound cake in his right hand as if it were a microphone and sang, “I’m a let you eat me in a minute…”

  Stilley laughed. Apparently, he’d forgotten all about the fruit-on-the-bottom bit. Guerra was disappointed; he liked watching Stilley when he was down. It was a tragic circumstance, kind of like when Wiley Coyote failed to catch the Road Runner.

  “Trade you for your pound cake,” Stilley said.

  “I don’t want your gay-man yogurt, Stilley.”

  Stilley’s face fell. “Damn, man. I’m not gay. I’m not even feeling jolly right now.”

  Guerra barked out a laugh. The conversation had all the hallmark of a Greek tragedy, lightfighter style.

  *

  An hour later, Ballantine saw the trenches around the post were full of reekers, and the oncoming wa
ves of the dead walked across them as if they weren’t there, crushing the heads of their trapped fellows in the process. They crashed through the wire barriers, overwhelmed the lines of HESCO containers stretched out before the berms like breakwaters, and filled in all the secondary trenches. Multiple rows of claymores had dispatched thousands of the dead, and infantry soldiers with weapons had dropped ten times as many from along the container walls and guard towers. Despite all that, for a time, it appeared the forces defending the Gap had things under control. The reeker elements that had swept up from the south were being steadily eradicated, and the piles of dead reekers were a testament to that. By the time the zombies got to the base of the berms, they were bottled up, and they became easy pickings for the soldiers on the container walls.

  But then, the hordes from the east entered the fray. Drawn to the front gates by the sound of combat, a hundred thousand reekers shambled, ran, walked, hobbled, and crawled toward the National Guard training facility. From the towers, the soldiers could see a great dust cloud on the horizon, where over a million more zombies were approaching. The reekers came down the highway, picking their way around and over abandoned vehicles, walking right through all the bombardments and sniper fire. Their numbers were too great, and containing the horde was nothing but a faint hope. Killing it was off the table entirely.

  Ballantine stood next to Slater, pounding out round after round, the barrel of his M4 glowing cherry red as he burned through magazines at an astounding rate. Before mounting the wall, he had brought up as many cans of ammunition as he could carry, and he had instructed the other men to do the same. Slater was on an M110 sniper system, plunging 7.62 man-killers down range as fast as he could. The rest of the guys were on standard M4s, taking down targets that made it to the berm. Even through his gloves, Ballantine could feel the blistering heat coming off his weapon’s barrel. If he had to switch to full auto and spray and pray, he knew he’d blow a hole right through it, rendering the weapon totally useless until he could swap out the barrel or get an new entire upper receiver.

  Slater turned to him as he paused to reload his rifle’s box magazine. “You know, Big Sarge, I think we are totally fucked!”

  “What makes you say that?” Ballantine asked. His voice sounded small and distant, even to him. “Thought you snake eaters lived for this shit!”

  Slater got back on his rifle and popped off a round. The ejected cartridge bounced off Ballantine’s helmet. “I’ve never been in a fight where my trigger finger is getting tired! At least, not when there was anyone left alive to shoot at!”

  “Don’t worry, Slater. None of those things are alive, so you’re good to go!”

  Mortars cracked behind them, and rounds exploded among the dead a hundred meters out. Fifty-caliber machine guns racked the zombie ranks from the towers, along with the slower MK19 grenade launchers. Some of the guys on the wall were even lobbing hand grenades over the side, blowing up knots of zombies trying to climb the berm. For every zombie face blasted apart, fifty more seemed to take its place. They were piling up on the berm, actually making contact with the bottom of the container wall. The dead paid a price for the attack, but they just didn’t care. They were coming, and nothing as mundane as several thousand guys shooting at them was going to change their minds.

  A CH-47 pounded overhead, flying out over the sea of dead. It banked around, and the gunners in the shoulder doors and on the ramp began slanting lead into the zombies, hitting them from behind. Their fire wasn’t particularly accurate, and the reekers didn’t care either way. While a human enemy would have had to duck to avoid the grazing fire, the ghouls below just ignored it.

  “You know, I kind of wish I’d gone into aviation right about now!” Slater yelled. “At least those guys can get the hell out of Dodge!”

  “And go where?” Ballantine asked.

  “Bragg, of course. We could land at every airport on the way and take on fuel. At a hundred seventy knots, we could make it there in a day!”

  “How’re you going to get the fuel with no power for the pumps?” Ballantine asked. He ejected an expended mag and slapped in a new one. He waved the rifle around a bit, hoping to cool off the barrel before resuming firing. It was probably a dumb thing to do, but the last item on his bucket list was Get Caught by Zombies While Holding Busted M4.

  “They have portable pumps for sucking gas out of blivets,” Slater said. “I’ll bet if we could tap into a fuel pond, we could use one of those to tank up a shithook, easy!”

  “And what if Bragg is gone by the time we get there?”

  “Bite your tongue, Ballantine. In that case, I’d reverse course and head for the Great Lakes. I could grab a boat and make a run for Canada if the fuel ran out. Less people up there, less zombies, a lot of unsettled land—that’s the ticket. Better than fighting zombies and alligators in Florida, don’t you think? Maybe I should bring that up to Hastings.”

  “Yeah, well, like you said, you’re not an aviator. Unless you’re going to tell me you know how to fly a helicopter?” Ballantine resumed firing.

  “I don’t, but I’m willing to learn!”

  Guerra leaned toward Ballantine as he swapped out magazines. “Hey, ladies, I hate to barge in on your conversation, but we’ve got a fucking problem to the right!”

  Ballantine looked that way, and all he saw were Stilley, Reader, Tharinger, and Hartman going to guns on the dead. Hartman had scrounged up a SAW, and he was tearing through the dead, trying to push them back from the wall. All the men were lying in a virtual sea of expended cartridges that was a good four inches deep.

  “What’s Stilley doing now?”

  “It ain’t Stilley, for once,” Guerra said. “Push up and check it out!”

  Ballantine stopped firing and rose to his knees. At the far end of the wall, about three hundred feet from where he stood, he saw soldiers retreating while firing. The zombies had managed to gain a foothold and were coming over the wall.

  The sound of the Chinook’s rotor beat changed substantially, and the big aircraft looped around and headed toward the incursion. It settled into a hover, and the gunners on the aircraft’s right side started hammering the reekers with everything they had.

  “What is it?” Slater shouted. “What do you see, Ballantine?”

  “You were right,” Ballantine said, as more and more zombies piled up against the wall and began climbing over the top. More soldiers dashed toward the breakthrough, hurrying to reinforce the soldiers that were being pushed back. “We really are fucked.”

  *

  “Colonel, they’ve pushed over the line. We’ve got several dozen reekers on our side of the wall, with more coming over,” Major Bonneville said. “This is confirmed by Wildcat.”

  Hastings knew Wildcat was the call sign for Lieutenant Colonel Gavas, the Cav squadron commander who was in charge of overseeing the wall defenses. When he heard gunfire that sounded much, much closer than that coming from the wall, he pulled out his M4 and got to his feet.

  “Relax, Hastings,” Victor said. “Pontiac, where’s the breakthrough?”

  There was a big map of the post on the table where Victor, his executive officer Herbert, Command Sergeant Major Parker, and several other members of Victor’s senior staff sat. The map had been annotated with all the defensive modifications made over the past several days.

  Bonneville pointed at the long line that demarcated the container wall that stretched along the Gap’s southern exposure, blocking it from highway access. “Right here, sir, over by Area Eleven. Near the utility group and not too far from the general hospital.”

  “The hospital?” Hastings looked from Bonneville to Victor. “Sir, we need to—”

  Victor waved him to silence. “It’s already been shut down, Hastings. It was evacuated yesterday. We didn’t have any critical care patients there, anyway. They’re in the barracks at Area Six.” He turned back to Bonneville. “Okay, we have a response team on the ground mopping up the squirters?”

  “U
nderway. But if we can’t plug that hole, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble,” Bonneville said.

  “AMP, can we get a surveillance platform over there?”

  “Uh, sir, report from Hawk Three,” said one of the enlisted soldiers manning the bank of radios. Hawk was the call sign issued to the remaining Chinooks.

  “Let’s hear it. What’ve you got?”

  “Southern wall has been compromised in the same area, sir. They say we can expect over a thousand reekers on the ground inside the wall at any moment.”

  Victor nodded to Bonneville. “Get some firepower out there, Pontiac. Right now.”

  Outside, the gunfire on the ground increased almost exponentially. Bonneville turned back to the radios, and Lieutenant Colonel Herbert started going through the papers on the table before him.

  “Sir, they’re pretty close to us,” Herbert said. “We should consider relocating to a more secure area. We have all the C&C Humvees right outside.”

  “I’m not convinced we need to go anywhere just yet,” Victor said. “Captain Hastings?”

  “Sir?”

  “Do me a favor. Run out there, take a quick look around, and give me a no-bullshit assessment. Avoid enemy contact, but try to get a good picture of what’s going on. All right?”

  Hastings put down his rifle and slung into his rucksack. “You got it, sir.”

  “You have commo with you?”

  Hastings slapped the MBITR clipped to his vest. “I have the freqs already, sir.”

  “All right. Take one of the Humvees out front. Make it quick.”

  Hastings left the headquarters building at a run and crossed the parking lot to where a line of Humvees sat. He ignored the ones with the boxes on them. They were full of radios and the like. He pulled off his ruck, tossed it into one of the regular troop trucks, and hopped behind the wheel, ignoring the young NCO who stood nearby, rifle in hand.

  He didn’t have to guess where the action was. The sound of active fighting led him right to it. He drove across the parking lot, turned right onto Fisher Avenue, then hung another right onto Service Road. The container walls were straight down Utility Road, which was the next intersection. He saw armed Humvees already clustered there, along with several Strykers and what would be called a “shit-ton” of dismounts, all already going to guns on reekers stumbling through the trees. They weren’t that far from the headquarters building, maybe only a ten-minute walk. But the group at the intersection of Utility and Service were making short work of them, especially the GAU-19s, which didn’t leave a lot left of any zombies that happened to get into the stream of .50-caliber fire.