by James Cook
Just as Kelly predicted, the walkers were slowly pushing their way to the end of the shitpile and coming up the left flank from the bottom of the hill. Ethan set his feet, adjusted his rifle against his shoulder, and sighted in. He kept both eyes open, one focused and peering through his ACOG, and the other unfocused, using it like a motion detector to keep the broader battlefield in sight.
Several infected stumbled into each other, heaving and thrashing, ruined mouths open and teeth bared. A couple of them fell down, and the ones behind them, uncaring and oblivious, stepped right over them. One of the fallen walkers began to pick its head up only to have a ragged foot smash it back to the ground. Ethan might have found it funny, if not for the fact that the downed walker couldn’t have been a day over thirteen when she died. As she struggled to rise, he put the reticle just below her nose and pulled the trigger. The back of her head exploded gore on a passing ghoul’s feet.
As usual, Ethan felt a wave of pity. A sense of loss at what that poor little girl might have become. At the cruelty of a God who let such things come to pass. But then he shoved it down, bottled it up, and stuffed it firmly into the back of his mind. No time for that. Not here, not now.
He had work to do.
He kept firing until one magazine was empty. Reloaded. Began firing again. The infected kept coming. Sometimes he got them on the first shot, sometimes he didn’t, but he kept them more or less at the thirty-yard standoff. Time went by, he wasn’t sure how long. His ears began to hurt from the report of so many firearms. Should have grabbed some earplugs, idiot. The horde switched direction, moving away from the right flank and flowing down the hill like water. They bunched, and bulged, and struggled, each vying to be the next one over the mound. Kelly moved ten men from the right flank to the left, ordered Ethan’s team to move up and straighten out the front rank, and then sent a four-man fire team halfway up the adjoining hill. Now they had the horde hemmed in, trapped behind a growing hill of corpses. Caught in the saddle of two hills, the shitpile began to resemble a dam, stopping the flow of undead under its own weight. Ethan had to admire Kelly’s strategy. Force them into a hollow and pile ‘em up. Clever. Gotta remember that one.
“Come on boys, we got ‘em trapped!” Kelly shouted. “Pour it on!”
Everyone was standing now. Ethan felt his face stretch into a smile but kept his breathing steady. His rifle bucked against his shoulder, over and over again. He could feel the heat of the barrel through the shroud. They were winning. They had held the line, and the undead were dwindling, a dozen or more joining the shitpile every second. He fired, and fired, and fired again, feeling a little thrill of elation every time a walker fell. Kelly goaded them on, shouting encouragement. Ethan’s eyes widened, taking in the scene, searching for his next target. The hill on the right seemed to have run dry, so he shifted left. That vector was covered; he would only be creating a crossfire by shooting that way. Kelly noticed at the same time he did.
“Thompson, you and your men stand down. Wallace, have your squad fall back. Alpha can handle the rest.”
Nice of you to let your own squad finish the job. Ethan shook his head, but let it go. The horde was done for and that was what counted. Let Kelly have his fun. He’d earned it.
No longer focused on his sights, Ethan could see the firing line formed a V-shape across the two hills where they had trapped the infected. The creeping unease he had felt earlier in the day came back in a rush, wiping the smile from his face.
The horde.
They hadn’t come alone, and all eyes were focused down the hill away from the U-trac. No one was watching their back. In the space of one heartbeat, it occurred to Ethan they were awfully vulnerable.
In the space of the next, he heard the pounding of hooves.
ELEVEN
I winced inwardly as my teeth cracked through the bones of the teenager's fingertips.
The reaction was born of two kinds of sympathy. One for the unavoidable loss of life to the bottomless hunger within me, and the other out of shared agony—I lost fingers the same way. There was no pain for me now, but I remembered what it was like having a chunk of my hand bitten off. And I’ll be damned if at times it didn't feel like those digits were still there.
The boy's scream was deeper than I would have expected, and he struggled hard. Give credit where it's due, the kid didn't go down without a fight.
Unfortunately for him, he was outnumbered by a wide margin. The small camp my horde came across held only half a dozen people in it, him the last one living. The afternoon sun filtered through the trees, carefully placed and manicured in the little park we were in, dancing from the leaves to dapple across the boy's face.
Then another ghoul tore away his cheek while a third plunged its fingers into the soft meat of his gut, and his story was done.
Everyone ends the same way. We die and entropy takes hold, our bodies disintegrating into a million little pieces. What I—my body, rather—was doing didn't seem all that different. Just faster. Before long, what had been a boy was only a red smear outlined by hair and the odd bone that hadn't been dragged away.
I felt the blood dripping down my face and tried to wipe it off on my sleeve, but as always, my arm didn’t respond. It irritated me that I was unable to even do that much. I couldn't even be a neat murderer.
It's the little things.
The camp was trampled beneath the weight of our swarm, tents flattened and supplies crushed. More gunshots had peppered the air during the long day, the last set leading us directly here. A deep suspicion took root in me, one I tried my best to ignore. It was outlandish to the extreme. After all, who could be that evil?
It seemed impossible that someone would lead us here on purpose.
And really, there was every chance the deaths of the teenagers camping here was just the misfortune of kids living in a world that had become a horror movie turned real. A small, sardonic part of me noted that they shouldn't have set themselves up this way. There are reasons the stereotypes exist.
Giving myself a mental shake I threw off that thought. Jesus, I had spent too much time dwelling on my situation. It was leading my thoughts to dark places. Though as a practical matter, they really shouldn't have been camping in flimsy tents with no weapons right next to a road. Might as well have been hanging steaks around their necks.
The camp was small, though. I had no doubt someone was herding us toward a destination, but they could have easily missed the poor kids here. The tents were covered fairly well, hidden beneath debris and boughs to camouflage them. There had been a fire but someone had smothered it with dirt. If my body hadn't walked right into it, I might not have even noticed.
As the swarm left the trampled campsite behind, civilization happened. It wasn't a gradual process; one minute our feet were scraping along the blacktop of that dusty country road, the next we were coming around a bend in sight of buildings. Bigger than the small towns behind us, but not a city by any stretch. Buildings that stood more than two stories high, chain restaurants and stores poking out among the faded old brick.
Wherever we were, it wasn't small. A medium-sized town but just as empty of life as anywhere else.
Well, that's what I thought.
*****
Our movement through the city was a sort of paradox. It was much slower going than the forest, but infinitely more interesting. I'm not hating on nature or anything, but after a while, the trees tend to blur together.
Night had fallen, but the moon was near full and bright, transforming the city into a washed-out ghost of itself. I felt as if I were in an old photograph, a faded likeness of what used to be.
The swarm worked its way through the labyrinth of broken streets, shattered glass crunching underfoot. On several occasions, we came across completely blocked streets and turned around only to wend our way to another.
During the long trek from barrier to barrier, I worked on sifting through the things my senses were telling me. I was paying attention well enough thi
s time that as the sun set and the world went black, I felt the gradual sharpening of my perceptions. Imagine suddenly being able to tell scents apart like a dog, to hear like an owl, for the sensitivity of your skin to raise up so high that the brush of a single hair feels like a finger touching you.
My senses didn't go quite that far, not individually. But as I took in new smells and sounds, and felt every tiny wisp of air, the individual parts added up. It was a lot of noise to work through, but I gritted my teeth, so to speak, and did it.
My vision didn't get any better, but it became obvious the strange disassociation I'd felt a few days before hadn't been because my body was less sensitive. Rather, my mind had been too distracted and set in its ways to understand what was happening.
Over the course of a few hours, punctuated by another pair of gunshots, I brought myself into a rough harmony with all the input. And man, let me tell you, I kind of wish I hadn't.
My chest rose in tiny breaths, not enough to see with the naked eye but more than sufficient to bring a host of smells to life. There was the stench of my body as it slowly desiccated, the fading smell of piss and shit leftover from my victims’ final evacuations as they died. When I tell you that was the least of it, it's to make you understand the sheer volume of awful that came with my efforts.
There were bodies decomposing somewhere in the city. Nearly every surface was streaked with old blood. Streets, walls, cars, you name it. The iron scent of it turned up the volume on my body’s hunger, and as we passed carefully erected barricades, I realized this place had been staged for a battle. I'm not a military guy by any means, but even to my untrained eye, it was obvious people had made a stand here.
And they lost.
My theory was borne out as we made it deeper into the town. The place was like a giant blood droplet hitting the ground—the outskirts were spattered with it but the closer to the center you got, the thicker the coat.
We entered a sort of bailey, an open killing ground running the length of the street, which stopped abruptly at a tangled wall of old vehicles. The spaces between buildings on either side were stuffed solid with waste and debris, and the ground … it was like a paint truck had jackknifed there. I never knew there were so many shades of blood. The pavement before me was brown with it, and black, and maroon, and even the bright crimson of fresh arterial flow. There were shoe prints, boot tracks, and even the outline of bare feet in a dozen shapes and sizes, with and without whole sets of toes.
It reminded me of those old dance mats, you know? The ones with the outlines of feet and dotted lines to show you how to move.
The wall of cars fifty yards ahead of us wasn't any cleaner. Indeed, from what I could see, it was worse. Jagged pieces of metal jutted out all over, lumps of flesh with dangling trailers of skin adorning them. The wall stretched wide to rest against the ground floor of an old church on one side, turn-of-the-century stonework making the twisted steel seem weak. On the other, the wall blended into the facade of a coffee shop, one of those international chain deals with shitty coffee but great atmosphere.
A thin cry drifted over the barrier in front of us, and the entire swarm perked up as one. A few seconds later, a grating shuffle reached my ears coming from our far left. As we moved toward the wall of cars, excitement rose up within me. This was an obvious trap, and the odds looked good that I was about to die. To be set free.
Right then, the piles of trash and debris in one of the blocked-off alleys burst apart, revealing another swarm of undead.
Then all hell broke loose.
Our combined numbers surged against the line of abandoned vehicles, pushing like a colony of ants against a massive piece of food. I saw other cars behind the line acting as braces to keep the whole wall from collapsing under the strain.
There must have been enough attacks that the defenses had been badly tested, though, because to my right I saw one of the cars start to move, giving a low squeal as the tires fought against the bloodied pavement. The bracing vehicle behind it was perpendicular and off by a few degrees, which was enough to allow the horde to shove its way through. A narrow crack, just a person wide, but when a dam begins to crumble you don't think, oh, it's just one little hole. You see that jet of water bursting through, and you understand it's enough. The game is over.
We poured into the gap and across a cleaner section of town. There were signs of recent habitation: the smell of old, doused fires, a scattering of empty cans of food, even what I was sure was a bucket used as a toilet. Not a large area behind the wall, but one that was marked by human habitation.
My body moved with the rest of the swarm, following our perfect directional sense toward the sound of that shout. It was forward of the small guard area—I was assuming its function, but it seemed reasonable—but not far off. A block down the road from the barrier might as well have been a different world altogether.
The streets were clean, free of the crumbling remains of society's fall. No glass or dead to be seen, but signs of living people everywhere. Clothes strung across wires between buildings, the smell of food cooked not long before, a hundred little things that raised my spirits with the hope that people could carry on and then crushed them as I realized my swarm was inside their defenses. A wailing cry broke out so close to us that it seemed to come from within our ranks.
My eyes were dragged toward a building, heavily fortified with armored windows and spiked defenses. Another wail, and the swarm surged toward it in a wave. For the briefest moment, I thought the people inside would have a chance. The place was clearly a fallback point, and more than sufficient to hold off a bunch of dead bodies. That hope died a sad and quick death, though. The people inside must have been in a rush, and who could blame them when two large swarms of ghouls appeared in silence in the middle of the night?
Circumstances can change even the most innocuous mistakes. Leaving a door open used to be a small sin.
Now it was a fatal one.
For a brief moment, a small candle of hope burned within me that this was some kind of trap. Immediately inside the door was a narrow stairwell, the doors on either side of the landing boarded over. The only direction to go was up.
It seemed a perfect killing zone to me, and I couldn't get the image of cows herded down a slaughter chute out of my head. I was somewhere in the middle of the crowd bustling into the building, the stairs rapidly filling with the dense press of the walking dead. Ahead I saw the narrow stairway bristle with them, and my heart leapt as the overwhelming thunder of gunfire pounded against my eardrums.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Click. Click.
“Shit, I'm empty,” a voice shouted, blowing out my candle of hope. “Get out the window and head across the roof!”
Hearing human speech rocked me. It shouldn't have, since I'd spent my entire life not thinking twice about people talking. But while I had my thoughts to keep me company, they weren't words. People so rarely think in language. It's just too slow.
Days of hearing nothing but moans, screams, and breathy rasps left me unprepared for the casual utterance of structured language. It was a sudden reorientation toward the real world. It was only then that I understood the drift happening to me: the world and the horrible things in it had slowly become less and less real to me.
A lance of pity pierced my heart. I hoped the man staying behind to buy his people time would change his mind. There were obviously too many ghouls for any one person to handle, and packed tight as we were, something as simple as a piece of furniture thrown against the crowd trying to top the stairs would be enough to buy him time.
Chips of bone and shreds of rotten flesh spattered down the stairs and across my face as the man defended his home. He cursed and shouted and—strange to my ears even more than hearing speech again—laughed as he pumped away in tight swings with his crowbar. It wasn't the kind of laugh that sends chills down your spine. There was no malice in it, no sinister urge. It was the pure, joyful guffaw of a man drinking in every last second o
f life. Like some Zen priest recognizing that each moment of existence is a gift.
And yeah, it was a little crazy too.
His fall was inevitable, and like the cliché, he went down swinging. As the horde tore him apart, he became another one of the endless masses of victims. Another screaming, dying voice rallying against a brutal end.
By then the front ranks were thin and my body was able to move forward enough to claw a few handfuls of meat, greedily shoving the prize into my mouth. The salty taste of hot flesh would have been easier to deal with if my brain wasn't sending signals to vomit that were being ignored.
The bodies behind me moved around the press, eager to follow the scent of the other victims. Somewhat relieved and still chewing my meal, I found myself following them.
No. Not myself, goddammit. My body. My body followed them.
A tall window opened into the night, the glass long since removed and the space turned into a clever escape route. The heavy wood planking over the empty hole lowered down like a drawbridge on heavy cable, landing on a makeshift catwalk that led to the adjacent building. Beyond it, the family that had escaped the swarm was trapped.
On the street below, a few dozen ghouls clawed at the brick, hands sweeping only a few feet from the isolated stretch of roof where the family cowered. A woman, eyes fierce if understandably forlorn, two adolescent children, and a baby not old enough to walk.
The older kids were boys for whom shaving was still an abstract concept. They might have been twins; each had similar hair and eyes, shape of face and bearing. The baseball bats cocked over their shoulders even rested at the same grim angle. A dozen other dead people went down the ramp to the rooftop in front of us, the family ready in the dead-end corner created by the makeshift construction behind them.
The boys were vicious and effective, knocking the first few enemies from the slender ramp easily. But they were also reckless, overreaching and allowing themselves to be grabbed. The bottom dropped out of my stomach as I watched them tumble to the pavement below under the iron grip of ghouls who got in just close enough. The woman, who I assume was their mother, screamed with such force I actually heard her voice break. Something in her throat snapped under the incoherent wail of anguish. Moments later, the horde was on her.
