by D. J. Molles
Off to the side of the garage, Lee opened the utility closet and found the hot water heater. Dropping his go-to-hell pack, he extracted his knife from inside and tapped the side of the water heater. The sound was the best he had heard all day.
“Thank you, Jesus,” he mumbled.
He’d tapped the tank low to the ground. He estimated that there were at least a few gallons from the point he’d tapped. Just to test, he tapped a little higher. This time he heard a hollow clank. So there wasn’t much water in the tank, but a few gallons were better than nothing.
He crammed the pitcher under the drain spout for the water heater and cranked the ball valve. Clear water flowed out and Lee thought it looked beautiful. With the angle he had to tilt the pitcher, he was only able to fill it about halfway. He brought the pitcher of water back into the house, carrying it like it was liquid gold. He grabbed another cup from the kitchen cabinets and took everything into the dining room.
The look on Angela’s face was one of immense relief.
Lee poured glasses of water for both of them, speaking as he handed them out. “Drink it very slowly. You’re both extremely dehydrated and if you drink it too fast you’re going to throw it up. Take a sip, then wait a minute before taking another one. Keep doing it until the pitcher’s gone.” Lee looked at Angela. “There’s another gallon or two in that tank outside, so don’t give it all to Abby. You need it more anyway.”
Neither Angela nor Abby answered, as they were busy sipping.
“Captain…”
Lee turned and found Jack leaning over the stairs and waving to him. Jack jerked his head upstairs. “Bad news,” he said.
Lee’s fingertips tingled. He left the living room and flew up the stairs, close behind Jack. Jack made for Stephanie’s old room that overlooked the road, but he stopped short of the door, with his hand held up to caution Lee. He bent down and walked at a half crouch over to the bedroom window. He took care not to touch the curtains but carefully peered around them.
“Middle of the road,” Jack whispered.
Lee mimicked the Marine’s caution and stood back from the windows, where he knew the shadowed room would keep him in darkness, invisible to the outside, as it was obvious Jack felt there was someone or something outside that might notice their movement.
Lee heard it before he saw it. The metallic rasp of steel being drawn across concrete. It was a long, eerie note with no beginning and no end, stuttered and interrupted every so often with a soft clank-clank.
Even in the waning sun, the image shimmered from the heat coming off the road. In the back of his mind, he noted that the mirage did not flow in any direction—no wind, and an easy shot at two hundred yards—but every other part of him vibrated like a gong and his pulse picked up speed.
A big man, maybe 6' 4" and 240 pounds, without a stitch of clothing on his body, walking slowly along the road. With his left hand he dragged a shovel behind him, the steel head scraping steadily across the road, sometimes striking a loose bit of concrete or a small rock and making the shovel head bounce off the ground: clank-clank.
He was focused intensely on the house, the way a man dying of thirst might stare at the mirage of an oasis in the distance. Lee got the uncomfortable feeling that the man was staring right at him.
“Infected or not?” Jack said quietly.
“No idea,” Lee admitted. “He looks fucked up, though.”
“You want me to take him out?”
“Not yet.” Lee pictured the crushed and bloody heads of all the people the man had smashed with his shovel. “Let’s see what he does.”
“Roger.”
The two men were huddled between the window and the small bed. The floor was strewn with all things Stephanie: jeans with flowery pink stitching on the pockets, a pink “princess dress” she’d worn for the previous Halloween, a stuffed panda. For a brief moment he fixated on the panda, imagining it under the arm of Stephanie while she slept.
Jack slowly pushed his back against the side of the bed and brought his knees up to his chest, resting his rifle on them, pointed out toward the road. He squinted into the scope. He craned slightly to see over the top of the windowsill.
He made a sucking noise with his teeth. “He’s not the only one.”
Lee sat up a little higher and looked for himself. Coming from farther down the road, a few more were meandering out from behind the trees that obscured the southern section of the road. At first there were only one or two, spaced out by several yards. But like a stream swelling from ice-melt in the spring, they seemed to multiply. Every time Lee started counting, the number doubled, the crowd of them getting thicker. Some of them walked steadily forward, while others ran in erratic circles, but as a group they seemed to be following the leader: the man with the shovel.
“Pack instinct,” Jack said coolly, as though he were watching a nature documentary. “They’re gonna do whatever Shovel Guy does.”
So Shovel Guy was the dominant one, established by whatever primal firing of synapses had occurred inside their brain stems. Finding safety in numbers. Was it the FURY bacteria eating them away to their very base instincts, or were they adapting to overcome? Was this devolution or evolution?
Lee didn’t like it, however it was sliced.
And Shovel Guy was now standing at the end of the driveway, still staring at the house but not yet approaching it.
“If we shoot him they’ll hear the noise and come running,” Lee thought aloud.
Jack’s eyes remained on whatever he saw through the scope. “It may not make much difference.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s going to come over here.” Jack spoke as if it were a bad joke he’d heard before. “You should get the girls up here.”
“Yeah.” Lee squirmed off the ground into a squatting position. With each passing second the possibilities of how this was going to go were dropping off. There were only a few scenarios now, and all of them ended with the house being overrun. He voiced his opinion: “We can’t keep them out.”
“Nope. Patio door’s smashed open… bunch of ground-floor windows… front door didn’t look that sturdy to me. I give it ten minutes max before they’re inside.”
Lee craned his neck and tried to count again. “Fuckin’ A, there’s a lot.”
“Probably about eighty.”
Running was out of the question. Angela and Abby couldn’t go on. For that matter, Lee wasn’t sure how much longer he and Jack could go on without water. Fighting was the only option, and that option looked grim. Lee couldn’t count on anyone but Jack to be combat effective, which made it a two-against-eighty fight. With limited ammunition and dehydration and fatigue setting in, their odds weren’t something a betting man would take.
Lee felt like he should speak with Jack more, formulate some sort of grand plan that would allow them to escape this situation or at least give them the upper hand in the fight. But there was no situation to plan around. It was a basic fight for survival. Kill as many of them as possible. Pray to God there’s a tomorrow in store.
Lee stood up when he was clear of the window. “I’ll get the girls.”
CHAPTER 14
Siege
Lee flew quickly down the stairs and scooped up his rifle and pack. He told Angela and Abby to go upstairs. They grabbed the meager bit of water left and went upstairs without asking questions. Abby looked numb, but Angela was clearly terrified, clinging with a white-knuckled grip to the big black shotgun in her hands. Lee didn’t know if she’d heard the conversation or if she could just tell from Lee’s face that something was wrong. Sam followed and Tango tagged along with him.
Lee was about to follow them up when, as an afterthought, he stepped back into the dining room. Two at a time, he dragged all the wooden chairs from around the dining table and began laying them over on their sides at the base of the stairs, their legs pointing out. Crude mantraps. The stairs were a natural choke point and the only entrance to the second floor of
the house.
He vaulted the banister and ran up the stairs. Angela waited at the top, looking down at him with wide eyes while Abby and Sam peered around her. Lee pointed to the bedrooms. “Guys, grab everything you can out of these rooms and throw it down these stairs. Make the biggest trash pile you can.”
“Okay!” Sam said eagerly and ran into the master bedroom.
Angela and Abby were more reserved. Angela nodded and guided her daughter into the room across from Stephanie’s old room.
“Cap’n, they’re headin’ this way,” Jack called from his lookout.
“Jack, set up over here.”
There was a crash from the master bedroom and Sam came out lugging a nightstand half his size. “Is this good?”
“That’s great, buddy!” Lee gave him a thumbs-up and Sam tossed the nightstand down the stairs where it clattered into the chairs. Lee was dismayed to watch the tiny wall of chairs shuffle as the object hit them. His wall might look big, but bricks with no mortar didn’t stand very strong.
Sam ran back into the bedroom. Angela and Abby came out simultaneously and started throwing things down the stairs. They were tossing them so fast, Lee couldn’t catch what they were. Slowly, the pile of junk at the bottom of the stairs grew. Clothes and pillows were thrown, books and DVDs, small pieces of furniture. Lee and Jack grabbed the mattress and box spring from Stephanie’s bed and shoved them down. It was a tight fit, but they would force someone to stop and negotiate over them.
Jack had run back into Stephanie’s room to glance out the window again. “Shovel Guy’s pretty much making a beeline for us.”
Angela spoke up. “How many of them are there?”
Lee didn’t specify. “Lots.”
Jack looked back at Lee. “You got any more forty mike-mikes?”
Lee nodded and held up two fingers. Jack didn’t need to explain anything. Lee shucked the two 40mm grenades out of their pouches, held one in his hand, and shoved the other into the M203 receiver. He locked back and armed the weapon as he slid quickly over to the window overlooking the front yard.
Glancing around the curtains, his stomach dropped. The image of the mass of bodies, squirming toward the house like a single entity with Shovel Guy at the lead, made Lee’s stomach churn. He felt it now—the adrenaline dump. He thought about dying, about being torn to pieces by a mob of crazies. He thought that it was the most likely outcome, and his body coursed with the nearly overwhelming desire to survive. Flee and live to fight another day. Leave all these stupid civilians behind. Save yourself.
Almost against his will, he looked at Jack and spoke. “Any chance they might pass us by?”
The words were hollow.
Jack shook his head. “They’re fixated, Cap’n. They ain’t goin’ nowhere. Hit ’em now, while they’re still all bunched together.”
Lee didn’t have to explain his concern to Jack. It was still within the realm of possibility that Shovel Guy, with the horde in tow, might poke around the house a bit, then get distracted with something else and leave, taking the group with him. But if Lee opened fire, it would send the infected into an aggressive frenzy and it would be a fight to the death.
It was clear that Jack felt their path had already been chosen for them. Now it was just time to make what they could out of it. Lee stuffed his desire for life behind his conscious decision that he wasn’t going to leave these people. Live or die, they were his problem now. He flipped up the M203 sights and jabbed the window hard with the muzzle of his weapon.
The glass shattered.
As though they were of a single mind, linked by an invisible neural connection, every head in the mob of infected simultaneously snapped up to look at the window. Lee wasn’t sure what came first, the scream of rage or the guttural THUNK of the barrel spitting out a grenade, but he watched the first round hit right in the middle of ten infected. It shredded the closest ones into body parts and meat fragments and threw the others a few yards away. Lee was quick with the reload, but the horde had already begun to run for the house, spacing out their ranks and making the blast less effective.
Lee had barely retreated from the window when he felt the house shake violently as the mob of infected hit the front door. Glass shattered downstairs and Abby started screaming. What looked like a hatchet crashed through the window and glanced off the side of Jack’s rifle just as he steadied to take aim. The two men exchanged a glance that said, Way too close.
“Lee!” Angela’s voice slipped through Abby’s piercing wail. “They’re coming through the windows!”
“Let’s go!” Lee slapped Jack on the shoulder as he turned and ran for the top of the stairs. He took a quick glance down. Daylight around the edges of the front door. It rattled on its hinges, pounded mercilessly from the other side. Flecks of wood and drywall flew off the doorframe. An arm reached through the broken sidelight and groped around for anything it could lay a hand on.
Lee grabbed Angela and the two kids in a bear hug and pushed them into the master bedroom. Before closing the door and backing into the hall, Lee caught Angela’s gaze. He pointed to the shotgun in her hands. “You take the safety off?”
Angela nodded fiercely, her hair flying in her face.
“Don’t open this door until I say it’s okay.” Lee slammed the door closed behind him. From downstairs, he heard the distinct sound of the front door giving way.
Footsteps cluttered the landing and Lee registered the hissing, moaning, screeching sounds that echoed up the walls. It made his stomach turn over. Jack looked at him and Lee thought he looked pale and scared.
He was sure he looked the same.
He dropped his pack and kicked it over to Jack as he shouldered his M4 and flipped on his red dot sight. “Get the other pistol out of there and every bullet you can find.”
Lee took a knee at the top of the stairs and pointed his rifle down. At least twenty faces stared up at him. Hands caked in dried blood reached for him. Others held makeshift weapons—crowbars, hammers, knives—and jabbed and swung at the air. Bile rose in the back of his throat, and only after the bitter taste hit his tongue did he notice the overpowering stench. Rot and body odor and feces.
The makeshift barricade creaked and moved under the weight of the horde pressing in. Lee picked his target and put the red dot of his scope on the bridge of its nose and pulled the trigger. He didn’t wait to see if his target went down. He put the dot on another head and pulled the trigger. Then another. His shots were even and paced, but panic was knocking at the back door of his mind, trying to spur his trigger finger.
He was counting rounds as he sent them downrange. One shot was a triumph. Two shots was a tragedy. It wasn’t long before he felt the bolt of his M4 lock back, indicating an empty magazine. He checked the chamber—clear—then flipped the mag out and grabbed another from his vest. How many did he have left?
His mind screamed at him to get his weapon back in the fight.
It happened so fast, Lee didn’t get a good look at the attacker. He got the impression of someone young—maybe a teenager, dressed in what he thought looked like a soccer uniform—vaulting clear over the blockage at the bottom of the stairs and landing inside the stairwell with a screech. The creature rolled and squirmed till he was on his feet again and bolted up the stairs, shrieking at Lee.
The boom of Jack’s .308 rifle was like being punched in the face.
A chunk of the soccer player’s chest went missing and he flew back down the stairs, crashing into the junk pile at the bottom and lying still.
Lee didn’t waste the time to thank Jack. He slammed in his fresh magazine, recharged his M4, and went to work. The infected were yanking at the chairs now, pulling them out of the way. Lee tried to identify and focus his fire on anyone who appeared to be messing with his blockade, but he was confronted with a new problem. The pungent sting of cordite was filling the air, and the smoke was obscuring the already-dim hallway, making his targets hard to see. He couldn’t tell where his rounds were hitting
or whether he was taking anyone down with his shots. For all he knew, he might have just wasted the last ten rounds.
Panic stabbed his gut again and he forced himself to slow down and count his shots.
Fire…
And scan…
Fire…
And scan…
Every so often the stairwell would explode as Jack pulled his trigger again. But with only five rounds, that wouldn’t last long. Another mag change. Lee watched the empty magazine tumble down the stairs.
Another, fatter infected was clawing its way over the banister and into the stairwell. Lee put one to the top of its head and the fat creature just hung there, motionless on the banister. Another determined attacker pushed the fat one out of the way and attempted to hurdle the banister. This time it was Jack’s rifle that took the shot.
Lee refocused on the ones trying to pull at his trash barricade. Though their brains were damaged by the plague, it was obvious that they were able to recognize an obstacle and formulate some plan around it in order to get to a victim. Almost as though they were following the commands of a single consciousness, one infected would step up and yank at a chair, only to be dispatched by a bark from Lee’s rifle. Before the first had even hit the ground, another was replacing the fallen infected and pulling at the chairs again. It was with a sudden scream of rage that an infected the size of a linebacker grabbed a huge mound of trash and furniture in his arms and ripped it out of the way. Despite his size, it still only took one 55-grain bullet to bring him down, but the damage was done.
The infected began pouring through the narrow opening into the stairwell, like water over a collapsing levy. The other portion of the blockade was suddenly enveloped and disappeared in a mass of bodies. Their screams suddenly intensified. The horde rushed up the stairs, too fast for Lee to choose his targets. He began pulling the trigger indiscriminately. Bodies would fall back like weeds cut down by a scythe, and—dead or only injured—they would tumble back into the others, creating a new blockage of human bodies directly in the middle of the stairs. Their progress up the stairs stalled for three of Lee’s pounding heartbeats, and then the horde pressed forward again, climbing over the bodies of their dead and injured.
