“Will,” I say.
He doesn’t respond. I pry open an eyelid and his pupil is fixed and dilated. He isn’t breathing anymore.
“Damn it, Will!” I curse. I shake him violently. “Wake the fuck up.”
Claire reaches a hand over and places it on my shoulder.
“Chase,” she says. “He’s gone. You can’t do anything for him.”
“Let him go,” Sarge says. He grabs my hand that is clutching the lieutenant. “You’ve got to let him go.”
I shake my head. Not just because I don’t want to drop his body on the side of the road, but I still can’t accept the fact that he is gone.
As much as I don’t want to, I let go of the lieutenant, and his weight slides off of me as his body falls out of the truck and into the night.
My good hand balls up into a fist. I raise it up wanting to punch something so bad. Then I remember I already have one fucked up hand and can’t afford to wreck the other one.
“This is fucking bullshit!” I yell.
In the front seat, Mac quietly drives the truck while Sarge wraps a bandage around his forearm. I take a breath and try to pull myself together. We still aren’t out of this shit yet, and I’m worried that we will have even more problems soon.
“How’s your arm?” I manage to ask Sarge.
“Don’t worry about me,” Sarge says. “I’ll be okay.”
I can tell by the flat tone of his voice, that he does not fully believe what he is saying. The truth is we have no idea what will happen. No one that has been bitten by one of those things has lived long enough to find out what comes next.
“What the fuck are we going to do now?” Mac says.
“We keep going,” Sarge says.
“To Los Alamos?” Mac says. “No fucking way, man. You can’t be serious. Everyone is fucking dead. I’m done with all this shit.”
“Mac is right,” I agree. “We can’t keep going like this. We will all just end up the same way.”
“I don’t like our chances back at Holloman much better,” Sarge says. “We finish the fucking mission. Otherwise all of this was for nothing.”
“Sarge,” I say. “We won’t make it there.”
Sarge looks down at his arm and considers our situation. He knows I’m right. I don’t even need to tell him this time. Still, it is never easy to admit defeat, especially for a Marine.
“I don’t know,” Sarge says.
“Well, we better figure it out soon,” Mac says. “We’re ten miles away from Alamogordo.”
It’s not like we have a lot of options. Our backs are against the wall, and we only have each other left. As we reach the town of Alamogordo, the decision is made for us. The intersection at the highway is flooded with the dead. Mac brings the truck to a stop and we sit there in the middle of the road with the dead closing in on us from both directions.
“Guess this is the end of the line,” Mac says. “It’s been nice knowing you guys.”
“Fuck that,” says Sarge. “Let’s go. Everyone out of the truck.”
“Where are we going to go?” Claire wants to know.
“Anywhere but here,” Sarge says as he slams the door.
We follow his lead and exit the vehicle as the dead converge on us. The area surrounding the highway is mostly mobile homes, a few small shops, and a border patrol office.
“This way,” Sarge says. He runs for the left side of the street, heading toward a dark alley between a convenience store and a barber shop.
“We got time to stop for a happy meal?” Mac gestures at a fast food restaurant on the corner.
“If you don’t shut up and keep moving, you’re going to be a happy meal,” Sarge tells him.
We reach the end of the alley, step over the trampled remains of a chainlink fence, and head for a row of mobile homes. I can see several silhouettes wandering between the trailers in the moonlight. I check back over my shoulder to see if the dead are coming down the alley behind us, but it seems like they did not notice us slip away in the dimly lit street.
Unfortunately, the scattered corpses that wander around in the dusty lot of the trailer park take notice of our approach. There aren’t too many of them, but any sound we make will only draw more attention from the horde near the highway.
Mac raises his rifle and swings the stock at a corpse that gets too close, and it collapses on the ground. The thing reaches back up and grabs at his leg as he tries to step away from it. Mac hits it again as the thing tries to bite him. It latches on to him again with jaws wide open, but Mac swings the rifle around and puts a bullet in the thing.
Sarge tells him to cease fire, but the sound has already alerted every one of those things for miles. I glance back and notice some of the dead in the street are turning and making their way toward the alley.
“We need to get off the streets,” I say.
We start running across the desert, weaving through the dead on the path to the mobile homes. Sarge tries the door to a trailer, but it is locked. One of those things inside starts raging and knocking over what sounds like pots and pans. I run ahead and try the next dumpy looking residence with pink flamingos sticking up in the yard. The unlocked door pops open and I stick my head inside. It is dark and quiet and reeks of years of smoke, mold, and sweat; the scent of years and years of misery.
I wave them over and we pile inside. After I shut the door and lock it, we wait in the darkness and listen to the dead moaning and bumping into shit as they approach our position. We duck down and crouch on the floor that smells like an old bathroom stall and hope that the tide of the dead will pass by us.
“Never thought it’d end like this,” Mac whispers.
“If you can keep your mouth shut for more than five minutes, we might just get out of here alive,” I tell him.
Mac finally shuts up. Even he realizes this is a time where fucking around at all will get us killed.
Hours go by.
The dead gather outside.
Hundreds of them.
Mac stares at a spider crawling across the ceiling.
Claire sits on the floor beside the couch with her arms folded across her knees so she has a place to rest her head. I thought she managed to sleep until she finally picks her head up, and I can see the tears in her eyes.
Sarge starts to look worse. Perspiration collects on his forehead and trickles down his temples as he stares at the picture of his family. He has to know he will never see them again. Maybe he is just hoping that he will be with them soon.
I finally manage to sleep a little by resting my face on my knee. When I open my eyes again, the faint morning light illuminates the trailer. The sun comes up, and the temperature immediately starts to climb inside the aluminum tomb. The dead still move all around us, moaning and bumping into the trailer every few minutes. No matter how many times they make a noise outside, I still get scared they are about to swarm the trailer. Finally, I decide to peek through a window and recon the situation to get an idea of how bad it is.
The dead completely surround the trailer. Hundreds and hundreds of them slowly trudge along in the same direction. I turn my head to the left to see where they are going and notice a distant trail of smoke drifting up to the sky.
“They’re all going that way,” I whisper as I gesture toward the kitchen area of the mobile home. “There is smoke in the distance. Seems like maybe that is drawing them.”
“Holloman,” Sarge says. “That’s where they’re all going.”
“You mean all that and we didn’t even steer them away?”
“I don’t think so,” Sarge says.
“All those people there,” Claire says.
“Some of them might have made it out,” I say.
“Nothing more we could have done for them,” Sarge tells her. “We tried.”
One of the stiffs outside bangs into the trailer again and we all quiet down and wait some more. We can move around a bit inside, but we have to be careful not to draw attention to ourselves.
>
Mac crawls to the kitchen and finds some lukewarm water bottles in the fridge and some stale girl scout cookies. That helps keep us going, but it doesn’t take long to get really uncomfortable inside this metal box. The dead are starting to smell pretty awful, and it seeps inside through the open windows.
I notice Sarge keeps messing with his arm, trying to adjust the bandage and resisting the urge to claw at it with his fingernails. The blood soaks through the fabric. I reach in my bag and grab an extra bandage I had for myself and hand it to him. Sarge unwraps his arm and inspects the wound. Severe bruising surrounds the bite. Puss trickles from the tissue where the skin and tendons were ripped open. It looks bad, but Sarge is a tough motherfucker. He just cringes as he pours some water to flush the wound and wraps it in a clean bandage.
“I hate to say this,” Mac whispers. “But I have to take a shit.”
“Fucking hold it, Mac,” I curse him.
“What do you think I’ve been doing?” he says.
He crawls by me and makes his way into the bathroom. Since he can’t flush the toilet he just leaves it there to fester.
Fucking asshole.
Finally, night comes back around and most of the dead seem to have moved on. I push the curtain aside and take a look outside again. There are still a few dozen stragglers wandering around, but nothing like the horde that went through here earlier. If we hold out for a little longer, we may just be able to make it out of here.
“We should be able to move soon,” I whisper.
“I don’t think I’m going anywhere,” Sarge says.
I look down at him again and notice that he is shivering and soaked in a layer of sweat even though the air around us is dry as can be.
“We’ll get you help,” I tell him. “We just need to hold out a little while longer.”
Sarge shakes his head.
“I can feel it,” Sarge says. “I’m not gonna make it.”
Twenty-one
Within a few hours, Sarge struggles to form sentences and can only keep his eyes open for a couple minutes at a time. His forehead feels much hotter than it should, too. I know we’re going to lose him soon, and it feels like there is nothing we can do about it.
“We got to try and do something for him,” I tell Mac.
“Like what?” Mac says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “We have to help him. We can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
“Just leave me here,” Sarge mumbles.
“We can probably make it to the truck,” I tell Mac.
“Then what?” says Mac.
“He’s right,” says Claire. “There’s no one out there that can help us anymore.”
“What about you?” I ask her.
“Me?” she says.
“You know about all this zombie shit,” I say. “Can’t you do anything to help him?”
“I’m not a doctor,” Claire whispers. “And even if I was, we have nothing.”
“Graves,” Sarge says loudly as he tries to sit up.
“Not so loud, Sarge,” I remind him and put a hand on him to keep him from moving. He is becoming delirious and doesn’t have enough sense to keep quiet at the moment.
“I’m serious, Corporal,” Sarge says. “I’m not going to make it.”
“Quiet, Sarge,” I whisper. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He reaches in his pocket and pulls out the photo of his family and a note.
“Don’t you even fucking try to give me that shit, Pedro,” I warn him. “I’m not taking that.”
“Just fucking take it,” he growls at me and shoves the note in my chest. “If you get out of this fucking mess alive, you find Melissa, and you give it to her. Please.”
I take the note with my shaking hand and tuck it in my pocket.
“Now, listen to me,” Sarge tries to sit up but struggles to push himself off the floor. “There’s no way I’m ever gonna make it out of here. You know it as well as I do. But I can still buy the rest of you some time.”
Sarge tells us when the dead thin out enough for us to make a break for it, he will create a diversion to help keep them off us. I look at Mac and he shakes his head.
“We can’t do that, Sarge,” I say.
“I’m not fucking asking, Chase,” he says.
“There has to be a better way,” I insist.
“There’s not,” he says. “It’s the only way you will ever make it out of here. You have to let me do this. I’m going to die anyway.”
When I hear him say it out loud, the eventuality of his death hits home. I look down at the floor.
“You two need to get Claire out of here,” Sarge says. “Find a way to get her somewhere safe. Finish the mission. Do it for the rest of us.”
“Okay,” I finally agree.
We wait until it is light out to make our move so we have better visibility. The only problem is that Sarge barely has the strength to stand anymore by the time the dawn breaks. In a way, I was hoping we’d have to carry him out of here so he couldn’t insist on sacrificing himself to save us.
When it comes time to make our move, he finds enough strength to pick himself up and prepare to go. He gives Mac all of his ammo except for one mag.
“I won’t need more than this, but you will,” he tells Mac.
“You sure about this?” I ask him one last time to give him an out if he is having any second thoughts. “We can just try to make a run for it.”
“I got this,” Sarge tells me.
I give him a hug and then Mac does the same. Then Sarge props the barrel of his rifle on his shoulder with the muzzle pointing to the sky, and opens the door. He takes a look around at the sun coming up and casually walks down the steps like he was heading out for a relaxing walk on a lazy summer day. It’s probably the bravest thing I’ve ever seen, and even though I never thought I could have respected him more, I do now.
Sarge walks right up behind a corpse a few trailers down the road, before the topless dead man in filthy jeans notices and slowly turns around. Sarge fires a round at his face point blank, and the body falls to the ground.
“Come on, you motherfuckers!” Sarge yells.
Another corpse turns and stumbles toward him.
“You want to play?” Sarge yells in his best Cuban gangster impression. “Okay.”
He fires at the corpse as it reaches for him. More of them start moaning and wandering in his direction. Sarge drops to a knee for a moment and lowers the rifle to brace himself by placing the muzzle in the dirt. He turns back to look at the trailer, and I see a smirk on his face before he rises to his feet again.
“Let’s go,” Mac urges me.
“Come on!” Sarge yells at the dead as they close in around him. “I’ll send you all to fucking hell!”
I resist the compelling urge to stay and watch Sarge die. It might sound morbid, but I kind of feel like I should be there to witness his final moments of bravery. Instead, I follow Mac through the door as Sarge limps in the opposite direction of the highway, firing at the dead from the hip.
“Say hello to—“ I hear Sarge scream, but he suddenly stops yelling and resumes firing his rifle at the dead.
“Stay close,” I remind Claire as we crouch and run across the lawn back toward the alley. Sarge continues firing while we make our way back to the Humvee. As I open the door, the shooting stops. I stand there holding the handle. In the distance, Sarge screams.
Mac fires up the engine and yells at me to get inside. I glance around the street. The dead are rushing toward us from every direction. Mac hits the gas before I even get the door closed.
“We ain’t getting very far,” Mac reminds me while pointing out the gas gauge.
“Just get us out of here,” I say.
He makes a right at the intersection and heads north through town. There are still scores of the dead wandering aimlessly through the streets, but not nearly as many as two nights ago when we were forced to abandoned the truck. Most of them have
probably made their way over to Holloman, drawn by the fire and smoke. We can only imagine how bad things got there, but we don’t want to.
“Do you think we have enough to make it to the next town?” I ask Mac as he weaves down the road, swerving through the dead that mindlessly throw their bodies at the truck like flies to a bug zapper.
“How the fuck would I know?” says Mac. “Probably not. These dinky towns are all like twenty or thirty miles apart.”
The only thing that might be more likely to kill us than the dead is the desert. I don’t want to risk getting stuck out there. As we drive, I scan the streets for any place that we might hole up.
Unfortunately, the stiffs are all over the place. If we stop now they’d just surround us again. We need to find some place where there aren’t more of those things around than we can handle quietly. We have to get farther away from the center of town.
“Make a left up ahead,” I tell Mac when I spot a residential street.
He steers us down the road a little too quickly and the tires squeal when they skid over the pavement. We follow the long street and pass by several intersections, until the road curves to the right. I peer between the houses on the left and see nothing but desert behind them. There are a couple of stiffs wandering the street, but nothing we can’t handle if we are smart about it.
“Stop here,” I tell Mac and point to a house on the left side of the road with the front door left wide open. There is a body visible on the front porch, but it appears to be motionless on the ground.
We step out of the Humvee and run up the driveway. I help Mac drag the body out of the way and then we close the door and slide the deadbolt into place.
I catch my breath as we listen to the silence inside the house.
It sounds clear.
Claire climbs on the couch in front of the windows in the family room, pulls the curtain aside and takes a look up and down the street.
“Still just those same ones out there?” I ask her.
“Yeah,” she says.
“How many?” I ask, just to be sure.
“Four of them,” Claire says.
I walk over to the fireplace and grab the poker from a stand.
ROTD (Book 3): Rage of the Dead Page 13
