by Spriggs, Kal
Jack heard a door slam and he saw that the boy had shut the door to the shed. A moment later, he heard the bar slap down. Smart kid. He caught further motion from the corner of his eye, and turned his head to see a half-dozen more undead shambling in their direction. Worse, the zombies on the perimeter fence had begun to surge against the fence. The longer they fought out here, the more frenzied those zombies would become.
Jack gave the fallen guard a hand to his feet, “We need to move.”
The three guards turned and ran for the prison barracks. As they came up to the door, someone opened it and all of them piled inside.
“Ho-lee-sheet,” one of the guards muttered as the door slammed behind them. “How... you... you took down those zombies like they was nothing!”
“There were just two of them,” Knighton muttered.
“I'm Captain Jack Zamora,” Jack said, “I'm here to help. We have some support on the outside. Can you tell me how many...” He broke off as he heard thumping against the door. The heavy prison door held, for now, but the guards all flinched back from the moaning and thumping coming from the outside.
“How many survivors are there?”
“The Colonel,” one of the guards muttered, “he should know... he's the one in charge.”
Jack smothered his impatience. How have these idiots survived. “Lead me to him.”
A woman spoke up, “I'll take them.” Jack looked over at where she stood near the door. Since he didn't see anyone else, he had to assume she was the one who'd had the sense to open it for them as they'd run up. “Thank you, ma'am.”
“No problem,” she nodded at the guard that Jack still supported, “you saved my husband. I'm Connie Elliot, by the way.”
All the good ones are taken, Jack thought to himself. But he didn't say anything. He followed her down the corridor. The lower level of the prison was entirely deserted, yet as they come to a set of stairs, that changed radically. The smell of human waste and sweat struck him first. Then, as they came onto the second floor, there were dozens of people, entire families camped in prison cells, many with nothing more than a bucket for waste and a pile of blankets or possibly a mattress on the floor. The doors to the cells were open, but many of the survivors stared at Jack with hollow, hopeless eyes.
“How many?” Jack asked softly.
“Just over a hundred in this barracks. We can't fit anymore here, not safely. Another two hundred in the other buildings.”
“Over three hundred survivors?” Jack asked in surprise.
“A lot of them are just kids,” Connie said softly, nodding at the end of the corridor. Jack saw dozens of children there, most of them sitting quietly. That wasn't right, in Jack's opinion. Children shouldn't live in this kind of fear. “We tried to get more of the town here... but the last groups were overrun before...” She broke off. “At least we got most of the kids safe.”
“You did well,” Jack said, thinking of how difficult it must have been to keep so many people alive. Just to provide food and water for so many to survive for months was a huge accomplishment. To try to evacuate people into the prison while zombies bore down on the town...
She didn't reply. Soon enough they came to what had once been a security office of some kind. “Colonel,” Connie said, “we got visitors from the outside.”
The tall black man looked up, from where he was studying a map. “Really, that's...” His eyes widened as he took in Jack and Knighton as they stepped into the room. “Military?” He asked in surprise.
“Formerly of Third Infantry Division,” Jack said. The black man didn't look old enough to be a Colonel. In fact, Jack wouldn't guess he was older than thirty.
“Thank god...” the man said. He waved at Connie, who stepped out and closed the door behind her. “I thought we might be the only ones... the only ones left in the whole world.” He had a deep, powerful voice and a certain presence, but Jack didn't know whether to trust that.
“There are other survivors,” Jack said. He looked around, not seeing signs of any equipment. No radios, he thought, either their batteries went out or they ran out of power to charge them. Jack didn't want to think about how terrible it would be not to know if anyone else in the entire world had survived.
“What about in town?” the man asked, “some of the people in town got cut off, when the zombies showed up, and they were going to try for the grain silo...”
Jack just shook his head.
“Ah,” the black man's expression went sour. “Damn.”
“So,” Jack said, giving him a moment to absorb the news, “who are you?”
“I'm Sergeant Ronald Shaw, formerly of the US Army, sir,” he replied with a half-hearted attempt at a salute. “The locals, they didn't know my rank and they just took to calling me Colonel. I swear, sir, I never impersonated an officer, they just fixated on me being military and...”
“How'd you end up in charge here?” Jack asked.
“My convoy was overrun on our way up to Chicago. Most of them... well, they didn't make it. I ran black on ammo and me and two others headed south, trying to find someone to link up with. There was no one, though, sir. Everything just fell apart. Me and the others split up, said we'd meet here and bring help if we found it... only I was the only one who showed up at all. The townsfolk, they were in survival mode, but they weren't organized. I got them preparing defenses here at the prison and elsewhere around town... but before I could do much we got rolled over by a mass of undead from the west.”
Jack took a moment to consider all that. “What was your MOS?” A soldier's MOS was their occupational specialty, it defined what they'd been trained to do. Jack would have figured infantry or something like that from the tall man's lean look.
“Ninety-two Golf,” Shaw replied.
“You're a cook?” Knighton and Jack both stared at him in shock.
Shaw gave a smile, his white even teeth bright against his dark skin, “Culinary Specialist, or that's what the recruiter told me. People got to eat, sir.” He cleared his throat, “So, how many soldiers you have, sir? Enough to get us all out of here?”
Jack and Knighton looked between each other. “A dozen or so capable of fighting. Not enough ammunition or heavy weapons to do much of anything against that mob you have out there,” Jack said.
Shaw's face fell. “I was hoping for a tank company or something.”
“Most of our resources are concentrated on our train,” Jack said.
“What, like a wagon train or something?” Shaw asked.
“No, a diesel-electric locomotive,” Jack replied. “Fifty cars long, three engines. We're on a set of tracks about eight miles south of town, though we could bring it onto the tracks that run north of here, but I'm not sure how much good that will do.”
Shaw gestured at his map and Jack moved close enough to see. It was a map of the prison, he saw, with buildings and sections of fence drawn on and annotated. “They've overrun a couple of the prison buildings,” Shaw said. “We just don't have the trained people to man this place. Some of the guards stuck around after everything went to hell, they're the core of the people I've got, but they're not really suited for this.” His expression went distant, “Nobody is suited for this.”
He let out a tense breath, “Anyway, we've been pulling back to smaller sections, trying to consolidate, getting ready to run... we had enough food to hold out for almost six months, but we're getting low at this point.”
“Water?” Jack asked.
“Hand pumps through a well. It's a deep one, clean water. We are growing some stuff on the rooftops to augment our stored food, but...” He pointed at two sections of the fence on the south and east sides. “The fence line is damaged here and here. Too many undead, too much weight. We've had a few leakers, plus a few of our people have died of sickness, age, and suicide. They don't stay buried...”
“Burning them before they rise is your best bet,” Jack said.
“We've taken to putting a big chunk of rock or concret
e on their chests, it keeps them pinned and we pile enough dirt on them so that they can't wiggle free,” Shaw's expression went distant again. “But there's too many of them inside the wire for us to do that now.”
“You were tunneling out, looks like you have an escape route,” Jack said. He considered that for a long moment. “We might could get everyone out, get them to my train...”
“When you crossed from our tunnel to the building, I take it you saw how the zombies reacted?” Shaw asked.
“Yeah,” Jack nodded. They'd surged against the fences. He thought about how the undead had already damaged the fence. If they saw dozens, hundreds of living people that close, there was no way the fence would last long enough to get everyone out.
Shaw nodded as Jack's expression shifted. “That's the problem. We can't dig down through the foundation of the prison itself or even the ground around it, it's too hard, most of the prison yard is paved and we can't protect our people while they dig out there anyway.”
Jack understood the problem. It wasn't that they didn't have a way out, it was that they couldn't move enough people quickly enough for it to help. The low, narrow tunnel that he'd entered through would become a death-trap if even one zombie got inside. Moving people to the entrance, and then down and through, would take time, time in which the zombies outside would knock down the remaining fences and swarm any defense.
Jack pursed his lips as he considered the issue. There wasn't an easy solution... yet his mind went to the construction equipment outside the perimeter and the sections of concrete box culvert. He felt the stirrings of a plan beginning to form.
Jack brought up his radio and spoke into it, “Baxter, this is Zamora, I need you to get Paul on the radio and see what he thinks about something.”
***
Chapter Five
“You think the fences will hold up to this?” Chavez growled as he and Jack looked down at the prison from the overpass. It had taken three days of work to get their plan ready to go. In that time, a couple more sections of fence had begun to fail under the press of zombies.
I wish it had been a maximum security prison, Jack thought to himself. A nice heavy reinforced security fence like the ones he'd seen around maximum security prisons would have been great. They might not have even needed to save these people.
Then again, they wouldn't have been able to release the prisoners from a place like that. From what he understood, most of the prisoners had simply run off, headed home or at least to be someone else's problems.
“It should hold long enough,” Jack answered. He hoped so, anyway. The plan was risky enough as it was. He really didn't want to think about the fences failing at the last minute. This would go from a rescue to a massacre in seconds.
He glanced off to the west at the construction site. Paul Montandon stood next to the big crane, several of his mechanics looking on nervously. Jack hoped that everything worked, but their plan didn't require it. That was why they had two plans.
At least they'd been able to start up the other trucks. They were on the far side of town, so the noise hadn't attracted the entire swarm of zombies. The handful it had brought had been easily dealt with.
“You good with your part?” Jack asked softly.
“No,” Chavez growled. He looked angry. “Idiots can barely take care of themselves, in a static position. When this goes, they'll probably fall apart.”
“We'll do what we can,” Jack said. As it was, the survivors were barely holding on. If they lost their outer fence, then each building would become an island. They had too many mouths to feed and too few resources, to hold out individually. As food ran out, as their stocks of water ran out, they'd fall, one by one, either taking their own lives or having some of their number succumb to death, rising as zombies and killing the rest. It was a pattern that Jack had seen the end results of, repeated so many times that death had ceased to be a number, it had become a constant.
The stark calculus of the situation was that even if half the survivors died in the escape, then that meant half of them would survive. And if some of Jack's people died in the process, then at least they would save some civilians in the process. This is what we signed up for, Jack thought.
Jack patted Chavez on the back, “See you in a few hours.”
“Don't be late,” Chavez growled. Then he scooted back from the crest and, without another word, moved in a low crouch to where two more of their people waited. Chavez waved for them to follow and then entered the storm drain.
Jack waited as patiently as he could, counting off seconds. Shaw's people were ready, Chavez would do his part. Hopefully the equipment would all work as planned. Jack's mind insisted on rolling through everything that could go wrong. The construction equipment might not start. One of the trucks could break down. The survivors might panic and stampede. This could all go horribly wrong and Jack could lose most, possibly all, of his fighting people and--
“Six, we're ready to go,” Chavez growled. The radio transmission ended Jack's train of thought and it was as if someone had turned a switch. All of Jack's uncertainties melted away. His people were committed. “It's go time,” Jack muttered to himself. He toggled his radio, “Initiate.”
***
Chavez and his two people rushed out of the metal utility shed. All three of them carried bolt cutters and they ran, not for the buildings, but for the fences. On sight of them, the zombies around the perimeter began to surge against the fence-line. Sections of it bowed, nearly failing under the pressure... but it held, for now.
Each of those men ran for one of the three gates. Chavez ran for the eastern one, the one with the most zombies. Jack watched as the NCO raced up, brought out his bolt cutters, and sliced through the chains holding the gate together. One, two, three... and as the third chain parted, the weight of the undead began to force the gates open.
Chavez didn't wait to for them to swing wide, and neither the other two soldiers. All three of them dropped their bolt-cutters and sprinted for safety. As the gates swung inwards, a tide of living dead rolled through those gates. Hundreds, thousands of undead bore through those portals, a wave of dead gray flesh with three living men racing just ahead of them.
If any of those three men had so much as stumbled, they would have been dead before anyone could do anything to help them. Jack bit his lip so hard that he tasted blood as he watched them run for safety. As planned, doors opened on the nearby buildings and all three men raced inside... the doors slamming shut behind them just before the masses of undead slammed into the walls.
The impact sounded like a car crash and dozens, possibly hundreds of the undead were crushed by the weight of those that came behind. The prison buildings visibly shuddered under the weight of impact and Jack silently prayed that the doors held up under that mass.
Just a little longer, he thought to himself.
The undead rolled into the prison, funneling through the three gates until they filled the entire prison yard. Thousands of them, all pawing at the doors of the buildings, smashing each other into ruin in their attempts to reach the living, breathing people in those buildings. The moans were like a dull roar, and for a second, it looked like some kind of obscene carnival event, with thousands of undead pawing at one another, growling and moaning at the proximity to the living.
As the last of the massive horde worked its way through the gates, Jack gave a nod. “Alright,” he keyed his radio, “Paul, get your guys moving.”
Down at the construction site, a big diesel engine grumbled to life, followed by another, and another, and another. No sooner did one of the big pieces of equipment start up than the operator for each started rolling it forward.
Quickly... Jack thought to himself, it's all about the timing...
He watched the prison yard and he could see pretty much exactly when the zombies sensed the rumble of those engines over their own moans. Parts of the horde started to turn. The rear ranks of the mob shifted in place and hesitated. Interesting, Jack though
t to himself, it's almost as if they're trying to make a decision.
It was too late for them, though. Two bulldozers settled into place, blocking the south gate to the prison, the tall blades positioned to cut off any access. A moment later, the wheeled loaders rolled into place at the east gates, one after the other, angling their digging blades as barriers, keeping the zombies inside the prison yard.
The last vehicles from the work site rolled up along different weakened sections of fence, the drivers parking them right up against the fence posts as bracing, before setting the parking brakes and abandoning the vehicles.
Jack watched with a critical eye as the zombie horde shifted, bodies shoving against one another as they spotted movement. They surged back towards the fence and the entire fence-line shuddered and bowed under the impacts of thousands of zombies... but it held.
It just has to hold a little while... he thought. “Paul,” Jack snapped over his handheld radio, “Bring it up.”
The crane truck rumbled forward and stopped just south of the fence. Paul helped to set the bracing even as the driver ratcheted up the engine to a loud roar. Jack watched as Paul's mechanics scurried around, constantly looking to the fence and the masses of undead.
He ambled over, casually, nodding at Captain Wachope, who sat on the back of the crane, only a few feet away from the fence. There was no way that Josh was really so unconcerned, but Jack understood his purpose. If the security team looked unworried, then the workers might be at least a little reassured.
The zombies were going into a frenzy, some of them shoving their arms through the chain link, ripping the flesh away in the process. Others were being crushed, one zombie's chest shattered and its skull burst, brains and bits of tissue spraying through the chain link, from the pressure of all the bodies behind.
The entire fence, especially around the crane, was bowing... but it held.
“Fire trucks are coming,” Josh Wachope commented with a nod towards town.
Jack looked over. He hadn't heard the report, not over the sound of the crane's engine.
