by David Rogers
As the plow trucks curved out to pass the front of the semis, the lead Dog followed. But he was braking as the trucks kept going, and brought his vehicle around to the left toward the store. Spider followed suit, and stood on the brakes hard enough to catch the Dog behind him off guard. The Taurus rocked as it was rear ended, then again as Spider hit the lead car as it stopped with its bumper in contact with the back wall of the store.
Darryl looked behind him and saw the other cars seemed to be following suit perfectly, slamming themselves into a curving line, bumper to bumper, along the side of the semi, then at an angle to curve around and continue the chain of collisions past the front of the semi.
“Everybody fucking out, on my side.” Darryl ordered, fumbling for the door handle. He got it open and spilled out of the car. The other two townie pickups were here, along with the tow trucks, parked up against the side of the trailer perpendicularly. The Dogz cars hadn’t left as much space as he would’ve liked between the pickups and the line of barricading cars, but it would do.
Dogz were emerging from the cars. Darryl looked around quickly. The back alley seemed largely clear of intact zombies. For the moment. There were a number of bodies on the pavement down toward the far side of the store, but many of them weren’t moving, and the ones that were seemed able only to crawl. The walkway abutting the loading docks looked clear too. Darryl put two fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply.
“Six Dogz, up on the walkway.” he shouted and pointed as heads turned to him. “Don’t go past the cars. Everyone else, spread the fuck out, shoot the fucking zombies, and watch your motherfucking asses!”
Bikers moved, some scrambling to pull themselves up onto the concrete walkway while others began to spread themselves along the line of cars. Darryl moved between the two pickups and ducked under the trailers awkwardly to reach the north side so he could take a look at what was happening over there. He scraped his back against a bolt and hissed in pain; it hurt even through the vest. Wincing, he ducked lower as he crossed under the second trailer and straightened cautiously as he cleared it.
Dogz were taking up positions behind the cars; some standing and bringing rifles up to their shoulders like he’d told them, while others dropped down and laid the weapons across the hoods. Most of them. Darryl whistled again and repeated the command to spread out, then had to go and physical grab and shove several of his brothers that still didn’t seem to get it.
Zombies were rounding the far corner of the store, coming from the front and side of the building. Dozens and dozens, with more behind them. They were already under fire, but few were falling as bullets ripped through them. Darryl took a look and thought for a moment. They’d been provided with a lot of ammo, but it wasn’t infinite. At the rate the Dogz were ripping shots off, it wasn’t going to last even a quarter of the time necessary.
“Hold your fire, hold your damn fire.” he shouted.
“Fuck you DJ, they trying to eat us!” Mad yelled back.
“Aim fools.” Darryl shouted. “Use the fucking sights. Slow down. Think. We got time. Head shots, remember, you aiming for the head. What gonna happen we shoot everything off and they still coming?”
Some of the Dogz were listening, settling down and starting to pick their targets, but Darryl had to move along the line and repeat the commands over and over to individual bikers. Slowly the fire got organized, and the rounds stopped pouring out like water. Zombies started falling steadily. He paused to take a slow breath as the Dogz fell into the new pattern, staying reasonably calm.
“Like that. Aim slow, aim careful.” he yelled. “Just like that. We gotta hold till they done inside.”
Finally with a moment to think about something other than the zombies, Darryl looked up at the walkway. The loading dock doors were open, but he didn’t see any sign of activity beyond that. The Dogz who had climbed up had split themselves appropriately, putting three on either side to face along the alley in both directions. They had their rifles up and shooting, but methodically, calmly.
The pickup trucks flanking the semis had a pair of people in the bed of each. The four on this side of the semis were the only townies in view, but they weren’t just standing around. They’d set up some wooden crates in the backs of the trucks and laid a machine gun across them, one per truck. Darryl had no idea what kind they were, but the weapons were definitely not rifles, and only machine guns used the big ribbons of linked rounds he saw spooling up from beside the crates.
Two of the townies were crouched behind the machine guns, but they weren’t shooting, not even the rifles or pistols they had in addition to the heavy weapons. Their partners though, also had rifles and pistols, and the rifles were in use. Firing from the raised position in the trucks, they were shooting over the heads of the Dogz behind the cars below and in front of them.
Darryl felt like he should be doing something, but he knew he needed keep checking what was going on. He had almost no idea how to be in charge of a gunfight, but he knew shooting, and he knew no one else was going to step into the role. He moved up to the front of the semis with that in mind, reminding himself he hadn’t checked on the Dogz holding that part of the line. The back of the store faced a thick stand of trees. As he came around the cab of the near semi he saw zombies were emerging from the trees, but in threes and twos.
Six Dogz were facing them from behind the cars jammed in ahead of the trucks. Darryl checked with each personally, moving up behind them one at a time and repeating his orders about staying calm and making sure to aim before firing. They weren’t as panicked as the ones on the north side, which might have something to do with the extra cars in front of them. Not all of the cars had been needed to form the barricade around the semis, and the Dogz had parked the extras across the front edge of the half-circle barricade.
“Make sure you let the brothers on the sides know if you start seeing too many to handle.” Darryl yelled into 180’s ear. The Dog nodded, and Darryl moved around to the south side to see how they were doing. Zombies were coming from that direction as well, but the corner of the alley was further away from the semis, and there weren’t as many zombies rounding it. The bikers facing off against them were fairly calm, but Darryl made sure to again remind them one by one to not burn off ammo too fast.
He finished talking to the last biker, then heaved himself up on the walkway with a grunt. Darryl bumped his knee on the concrete in the process, but his adrenaline was fully kicked in now, and he barely even felt it. Regaining his feet, he looked in both directions quickly, then took a peek into the back of the semi-trailers. He saw a line of wooden pallets leaning against the trailer walls; and flat, unfolded boxes as well. Two townies were in each trailer, waiting. Darryl frowned curiously, then jumped as a beepy horn sounded behind him.
Turning, he stepped back quickly when he saw one of the promised forklifts was waiting in the dock doorway. The forks had a pallet stacked with three layers of boxes that had food piled up to the top edges of the cardboard. The forklift rolled past him, a pair of lights mounted on the top of the roll cage illuminating the trailer as the driver went all the way to the front before dropping the pallet unceremoniously.
As soon as the pallet was down, the forklift reversed. One of the townies tipped the next pallet over flat, and then both began piling empty boxes on it. The driver didn’t even wait for them to step clear before he shoved the forks through the slots on the pallet and lifted it. He backed straight out, past Darryl and through the loading dock doors before spinning the machine expertly and heading back into the store.
“They might not be fucking kidding about how fast they gonna be.” Tank shouted at Darryl from next to the dock door over the sound of gunfire.
“Guess not.” Darryl nodded, relieved, but too stressed to show it. He looked in both directions along the loading alley, then crossed past the dock doors – checking the other one to make sure he wasn’t about to be run over by a forklift – to the north side and dropped to one knee. Pulling the M-
16 up to his shoulder, he laid the gun level with his elbow resting on his thigh and put his eye to the sights.
The crowd of zombies was well past a couple hundred strong now, though their progress was slowed significantly by the bodies of their twice dead fellows in their way. The leading edge of the hungry horde was nearly a third of the way to the semis now, staggering, crawling; all of them ignoring the bullets ripping into them as they continued to press forward.
Darryl brought a dirty and bloody face into view, bracketed in the sights, and squeezed the trigger back. The M-16 went click without firing and he paused in confusion for a moment, then swore and reached for the charging handle. Racking it back, he loaded the first round from the new magazine and aimed again. This time the weapon fired , spitting three bullets and disintegrating the skull of a zombie wearing medical tattered scrubs.
Clicking the selector switch over to single shot, Darryl fired several more rounds off, then checked the south side of the loading alley by turning his head in that direction. It was fine; the zombies there had a lot further to walk, or stagger really. Some zombies were joining in from the tree line, but several of the Dogz were engaging those first. The bikers were keeping ahead of the incoming corpses, for the moment.
Darryl watched another forklift trundle out and into one of the semis, then he turned back to the north and resumed firing. There were nine Dogz down behind the north cars, three more up on the walkway, and him; all firing in that direction, but the zombies were still pushing forward despite the ones falling. It was like trying to hold back water with rakes, which he couldn’t believe.
Over a dozen assault rifles in use and the damn zombies were still pushing in. Despite the ones that died for good, the ones that lost mobility in limbs when bones were broken, or those that tripped or fell, there were still more behind kept coming. Darryl emptied two magazines into the horde, but the horde was starting to get uncomfortably close. He didn’t think it would be but maybe another twenty or thirty seconds before the first corpses would be at the car blockade.
When the two machine guns on the north side opened up, it startled him badly even though there were nearly three dozen rifles firing. The rifles were loud, but the machine guns’ roar cut right through all of it. And the townies working them either knew what they were doing, or had been coached well, because they were spending their fire beautifully.
Each gun started from the edge of the pack – one from the tree side, the other with the zombies staggering forward next to the back wall of the store – and fired a steady stream of short bursts. They were walking their fire methodically toward the center. Whatever bullets they were firing, and Darryl had no clue, the rounds were hitting hard. Really hard.
As he watched, limbs were being blown off; legs and arms alike. When the bullets hit torsos and groins, they tore huge holes that spilled organs and intestines out; when those same innards weren’t pulverized or hurled out the back of the target as the rounds kept going. Missing arms didn’t seem to bother the zombies very much, and neither did the organ damage; but when a leg was removed the zombie went down and couldn’t get back up.
In less than half a minute, the guns had walked their bullets back and forth several times; creating a ragged bulwark of bodies and body parts on the ground. The fire was lancing through two and three zombies at a time. The pile was several bodies deep nearly everywhere, five or six in some places with the penetration the rounds had. Not all the zombies on the ground were motionless, but even the ones that looked able to maybe get back up were being tripped over and fallen across by the nightmares behind them.
The hammering of the machine guns stopped. Darryl looked to see the shooters were working on reloading, lifting up the ends of fresh belts of ammunition to ready the weapons once more. Darryl hadn’t spread the word around, but he knew there wasn’t all that much ammunition for the machine guns. What they’d just fired off was probably significant amount of what was available. Oblivious, Dogz were cheering, but they trailed off and started shooting again as they saw the zombies were undeterred.
Throughout it all, the zombies never stopped. They didn’t flinch, yell, moan, despair, or give any sign they noticed anything except the humans sheltering behind the cars and up on the walkway. Their empty eyes stayed fixed on the potential meals, ignoring everything else no matter how horrific or devastating. Silently, persistently, they just kept coming.
It was unnerving as hell.
Darryl put couple more magazines into the north side, then saw the south was finally getting a little tight. The machine gunners on that side apparently thought so too, because right about when he started getting nervous, they opened up and raked the other half of the loading alley the same way. More cheers, then the steady spitting of the M-16s resumed in earnest.
Darryl stopped counting how many magazines of ammunition he was using. He stopped noticing what the zombies looked like. Men or women. Adults or children. Relatively intact or bloody and ragged. White, black, brown, yellow; sports fans, rednecks, college kids, cops, military, medics, office workers, suburbanites – they were all just something that was trying to kill him. To kill his brothers.
Four times, he hopped down from the walkway and did a circuit around the inside of the makeshift barricade of cars. When he came to each Dog, he’d clap them on the shoulder to get their attention, checking to see that they were still alert and in the fight. A few looked annoyed at his interruption, but most gave him fierce grins or shaky thumbs-ups. Darryl didn’t fault any of them for fronting their bravery; he was scared nearly shitless himself.
Everything about this was beyond unreal. Last week they’d been bikers who cruised around and partied; and now they were shooting it out with hundreds of zombies in Athens. But none of the Dogz were giving up the fight. Each one kept the rifle in their hands up and firing, combining their bullets with those of their brothers, working to hold the nightmare back as the townies continued to fill the semi-trailers with the store’s contents.
Some of the Dogz were less measured with their firing than the rest. These were starting to have serious problems with their weapons overheating. Darryl had heard a few stories of such things happening, but this was the first time he’d ever seen it. The affected M-16s had barrels that were smoking quite heavily, and radiated heat that could be felt without even touching them. That could be felt even when just holding the weapon by the grip.
He never would have guessed metal, weapons grade metal, could be pushed so far just by firing bullets; but it was happening. And, based on the same gun-store rumors and ‘no-shit stories’ he’d heard about; he knew if it went on too much the guns could actually catch fire. That the metal could begin to burn, not just smoke and heat up. Darryl came down off the walkway to warn the Dogz about the problem.
A few of the brothers realized something was wrong; others had to be told when Darryl alerted them. In all cases, he instructed them to switch over to their pistols, and to slow down their firing. A couple had to have it explained to them very specifically – in shouted words over the mass of gunfire – what would happen if they didn’t lay off the M-16s so they could cool some.
The piles of bodies on either side of the semis grew deeper, which slowed but didn’t stop the zombies. The machine guns lashed out twice more, adding to the height of the line the gunners had apparently decided was their sweet spot. There was hardly any blood, but there was plenty of gore. The zombies didn’t bleed much, mostly not at all; but they had all the bits and pieces inside them humans did. Organs spilled out and mixed with the broken corpses. Body pieces were everywhere like a macabre jigsaw puzzle had been upended.
Darryl was inured to it without even trying. It should have been utterly disgusting, but he took a perverse sense of relief at the sickening array of carnage. Every little piece of the horror show was one less thing trying to eat them. One less zombie that would have a chance to add to the forces of the cannibalistic hungry. Only a head shot stopped a zombie for good; but dismantling it
into its component pieces was almost as good. Dead or alive, it couldn’t walk or crawl if the limbs were removed.
Just as he was about to drop down for another check of his positions, he was interrupted. The tap on his shoulder he didn’t even feel, until the tap turned into a hand that grabbed. He barely stopped himself from lashing out with a reverse elbow as he turned. It couldn’t be a zombie, but he was keyed up and way beyond being on edge. When he looked, one of the townies was standing there holding a walkie-talkie. He leaned in close to Darryl, putting his head next to the biker’s as he shouted.
“We’re almost ready to leave. Sixty seconds.”
Darryl didn’t bother to lift his own radio. He grabbed the townie and twisted the man’s head to the side. “What about the plows?” he yelled.
The man shifted so he could yell into Darryl’s ear again. “One is circling around now. When we’re all in the cars, he’ll blast through here and lead us out.”
There were supposed to be two plow trucks, there had been two plow trucks, but Darryl didn’t bother to ask why only one was coming back. He knew whatever the reason, the townies had probably already had that question and answer session over the radios. One would have to do.
“Okay.” Darryl pointed at Tank. “Tell him when you all out of the store and loaded in your cars.”
“Got it.”
Darryl dropped off the walkway between the semis and went to the cars blocking the cabs near the trees.
“We about to roll out.” he yelled to 180, though he had to grab for and tip up the biker’s M-16 when the man startled and jerked around with it. The barrel was hot enough to hurt even through the palm of the fingerless leather riding gloves Darryl wore.
“What?” 180 demanded aggressively.
“We gonna roll out. They almost done.” Darryl repeated, leaning in close with his head next to 180’s. The biker nodded, and Darryl leaned in closer, raising his voice further. This next part was important. “Us Dogz all gonna pile up in these cars. Tell your guys.” he said, indicating the ones at the front. “We gonna leave the rest.”
