James Robert Smith, page 25
Only one person who’d come out of Harvest had been living. The man in the lead was obviously alive, Stockman could see that much, even through his binoculars. But everyone else who emerged was undead. All of them, apparently. And freshly dead, at that. Worst of all was that most of the forms that came staggering out, following the man who’d opened the gate, were women and children. They had been so recently alive that many of them, at first, appeared to still be so. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just assume that all of these women and girls and their children were merely weak from fatigue, or from hunger, or taking such clumsy, tentative steps out of fear of the soldiers who had their home surrounded.
Stockman wanted to call out to those soldiers. He wanted to scream down to them, warn them. But he knew that there was far too much distance between his position and theirs for this to have done any good. All he’d have accomplished would have been to give away his position to the roaming dogs and their undead charges. At the last, all he could do was watch and take note as the initial hoard swarming out of the church and the surrounding buildings advanced on the militia from City of Ruth and, quite simply, overwhelmed them.
They fought, of course, but because of the sheer surprise of the attack, they were lost. As he’d watched, the various companies that had been assembled in a semi-circle at the western-facing side of Harvest collapsed. Some individuals managed to fight free, but they did so without their APCs, without their howitzers, without their large caliber weaponry. Stockman watched the survivors go racing up the cleared road leading back to City of Ruth.
The dogs and zombies followed, as did Nate Stockman. He wasn’t quite sure just why, but follow he did.
***
The day had faded as Nate had crawled along the high ground, looking down on the road whenever he had the chance to hit a clear patch where the tree cover allowed him a view. There weren’t too many survivors left fleeing along the road toward City of Ruth. Most of those who had been overwhelmed had scattered into the forest, and those he figured had the best chance of getting away. But the woods were full of dogs. And it was then that Nate Stockman realized that no one was leading these packs of feral hounds. As he’d suspected when examining that dog corpse, they had learned to herd the zombies on their own. Somehow they’d figured out that it was an effective way of clearing out the living humans, who were their only real competition these days.
It made perfect sense. He only hoped that he could make it back to Sparta to impart this news.
He was on the verge of turning north again. The dogs had thinned out and he hadn’t seen or heard a single hound this high on the hill for some time. And he did not want to follow the road any farther if he could help it. He was getting dangerously close to City of Ruth and they would certainly take him captive if they found him. Or maybe worse than that, they might execute him. Roland Thompson certainly feared that bunch, and for good reason. They’d been on the verge of attacking a community that had been composed basically of women and children. City of Ruth needs women, and all that, he figured.
Stockman was going to allow himself one final glance at the situation on the road. He hunkered down at the verge of a patch of rhododendron and raised the lenses to his eyes. There was a knot of people on the road, and they weren’t able to move, it seemed. Peering down, he realized that he was looking at four men and a woman pretty much trapped in the center of the roadway. They were surrounded by advancing deaders with a complement of dogs snapping at the heels of the zombies. Not that the walking corpses needed any encouragement at that point; they smelled blood.
Lowering himself down the very steep slope to a bit of rock outcropping, he knelt there and looked again, trying to get a better view. He focused the binoculars on the five living people. His heart stopped. Standing guard over a wounded soldier was Timothy Nalley.
Shit, Nate thought.
Sgt. Nalley was certainly as brave as any soldier he’d ever commanded. He hadn’t chosen him for the removal of the fuel of those nuclear plants, but damned if he could have picked a better man for the job. And here the man was yet again, surrounded by the undead, trying to defend what was left of his fellow soldiers.
Stockman watched Nalley instructing the others. Only two of the men looked to be able to fight, and they were laying down an effective volley of shots that were doing a good job dropping zombies in their tracks. But the dogs were there in the rear, protected, and spurring on more of the dead things that seemed to be constantly arriving from the shadows. It was only a matter of time until the dead overwhelmed those straggling few survivors.
Stockman didn’t even have to think about it. There was no way he was going to abandon this man a second time.
Tim Nalley stood his ground. As near as he could figure, they had maybe 200 rounds left. He had some unused clips, as did the other two soldiers who were still standing. He wasn’t even sure who those guys were, but they were following orders. The Deacon trained his soldiers well, that was for certain.
But this was it. There was no way they could hold out much longer. The sun was almost gone and when it got dark they’d be firing by moonlight. If they had any ammunition left by that point. He wished that he could get a shot at the dogs, but the way they stayed at the rear and the way they kept moving, he had not been able to lay down any fire toward them. They were plenty smart, that was for sure. This was demon’s work, he was certain of it. Only a demon could make a dog smart enough to lead zombies against the living.
All round him the corpses were piled up. He and the two healthy soldiers formed a three-pointed defensive perimeter around the woman and the wounded man. He suspected the fellow had been bitten, but he hadn’t been able to check; and the guy wasn’t in any condition to ask. Nor was the woman, who seemed all but mute since she’d come running toward them. She must have gotten out of Harvest before the mass suicide. At least, mass suicide seemed to be the only explanation for what he’d witnessed. He’d thought all of those women and all of those little kids had been coming to them to surrender to the protection of City of Ruth.
How wrong he’d been. Of course all of them had been wrong about that. And now it was far too late to cry about it.
The stench of decaying clothing and the black, clotted blood and brains of the undead lay about them like a heavy cloud. Nalley and the others were contracting their tiny bit of ground as groups of zombies kept marching out of the forest, advancing on them. One of the soldiers had begun the operation screaming at them to stop, but the man’s voice had given out and Nalley hadn’t heard a peep out of him for some time. But the man’s gun still talked.
“Don’t use any automatic fire,” Nalley instructed them. “Keep it on semi unless it looks like you might get overrun.” No one answered him, but the shots continued to come one at a time, at intervals, and so he knew they’d heard.
The sun was all but gone, now. He looked up at the tops of the trees, a few dried leaves hanging on here and there. The forest was really scary to look upon. Normally, he loved looking at forests in late fall and in the winter. When the leaves were all off the trees, you could see forever through the woods, and it was one of his favorite times to go hiking. But this was horrible. As far as he could see there were scores of the undead, all marching on their position, spurred on by the dogs that he could hear and only glimpse briefly through the tall, straight trunks and hiding amidst patches of shrubs and brambles—merely flashes of brown and black and white fur that he could not target. This was the work of Satan himself; he was sure of that.
He blinked sweat out of his eyes. There wasn’t much time left for them. He had to admit that. Maybe ten, fifteen minutes, at best. There was no way that he was going to allow himself or anyone under his protection to end up as one of the undead, plodding around and existing only to destroy the living.
“They’re coming in,” one of the men screamed. A squat, redheaded kid he’d seen back in City of Ruth, but whose name he didn’t know. Nalley turned just a bit to see what he was screaming about.
One of the dogs had led out a large group of the undead. He wasn’t going to stand there and count them, but more than a dozen deaders were advancing from one spot, appearing as a mass from behind a decrepit frame house that stood right up on what had been a sidewalk in years past. The dark, rotted faces, the staring eyes, the bared teeth, the grasping hands. This was probably going to be the last stand, he knew. He and the other two soldiers would have to concentrate all their fire on that one group, and then others would come in free and clear. Nalley lowered the barrel of his AK47 just a tad, seeing that the woman who was cowering at his feet was not looking at him. She’d never know, he thought, and felt his finger beginning to tighten on the trigger. She’d never know.
Suddenly there was an explosion from behind the advancing knot of undead. He recognized the sound. A grenade had detonated in the midst of the attacking dead, taking out most of the ones in the rear. The rest still advanced, but they’d been so torn apart by the shrapnel that most of them could barely move. Guts were everywhere, and two of the zombies even tripped and fell on their own entrails. Then there was gunfire. Someone was shooting down on what was left of those zombies, taking them out one by one.
Nalley and the others looked up, in the direction from which the gunfire was emanating. Coming downhill, out of the trees and shadows was a man in full police armor, handling his automatic weapon with expert precision. He knew what he was doing. However, Nalley did not recognize the armor and the man was definitely not wearing the khaki issue uniforms of City of Ruth troops. So the man was obviously from Harvest. Realizing this, Nalley felt himself flinch just a bit, but also knew that if the man were interested in revenge, he would likely already have been dead.
There was something, apparently, to be said for a common enemy.
For the first time, the former Army Sergeant found himself able to take a clear shot at one of the dogs that was herding the undead toward his position. He took the opportunity to fire and his shot was true. The dog went down in a crimson spray and did not rise. One of its fellows, standing nearby, nipping at the calves of one of the animated cadavers broke and retreated as it was spattered with the other dog’s blood.
In a few moments the armored figured came down to street level and began motioning for the others to follow. They did not hesitate, looking down the road to see another wave of the deaders staggering toward them, the ever-present sound of hounds to the rear of them.
“Help me get this man to his feet,” Nalley ordered the other two soldiers. Together, he and the kid whose name he could not quite place stood the man up and, each supporting him by an arm, they began to move as fast as they could toward the man who was beckoning them to join him in the trees.
“Who is that?” the kid asked, his face grimy with sweat and dirt.
“I have no idea, soldier.” Behind them, the other man was leading the woman along, too. She was middle-aged, but seemed relatively fit. Nalley figured that she’d do okay as long as she didn’t lose her head.
“He’s not from City of Ruth, is he?”
“No, I don’t think he is. What’s your name, young man?” he asked, taking a glance at the strained, freckled face beneath the red hair hanging down damp and dark across his brow.
“Billy,” he said. “Billy Beck.”
And that was all he ever got out of the kid as, unexpectedly, and so quietly that he never saw them coming, there were suddenly dozens of reaching arms grasping for them, scores of open mouths baring teeth, thousands of pounds of moving dead flesh instantly upon them. There had, obviously, been a great knot of the undead standing silently in the dark woods that closed in around the simple little house beside which they were trying to escape. None of them had noticed the things waiting there, so still had they been.
Once more, Nalley’s first thought was that the stranger must have intended this, but as he was pushed to the earth, he looked up to see the dark, armored man had also been overwhelmed and mashed to the ground, unable to fire his weapon in time. Finally, he heard the woman. She screamed as teeth found her unprotected flesh. He could hear them tearing at her, and thankfully it didn’t take long for her to grow quiet. Nalley did not look toward her to see what had happened. He was concerned totally in protecting himself.
The zombies swarmed over the people as they always did in such situations. All of the people were screaming by that point, the strong as well as the wounded, and this seemed to only spur the undead to increase their own movements. They grasped and tore and bit.
Pushing the filthy hands from his face, Nalley got his fingers around his .45 and pulled it out of its holster. He stuck it in the mouth of the nearest zombie who was trying to bite him, and pulled the trigger. The big slug tore the top of the thing’s head off, but as its body slid away, another zombie filled the gap. Other hands were pulling at him, trying to tear off his clothes, to pull his flak jacket off of his torso. Some of the dead found their hands suddenly full of the little things he had on him—flashlight, canteen, ammo clip. And this satisfied some urge in them and they wandered off to examine what this was they’d come away with. This happened with the zombie who’d been trying to tear at his thigh and Nalley was able to regain his feet as it stopped to examine the length of cord in its hands.
He peered around. The forest was teeming with the undead. The rest of the soldiers and the woman were already dead, and he hoped that there wouldn’t be enough of them left for reanimation. But all it took was an intact brain. He could only pray that they’d be utterly consumed. There were certainly enough of the monsters surrounding him to accomplish this.
The other three bodies were drawing the attention of the zombies. All of that blood and fresh meat just couldn’t be ignored, especially now that it had stopped resisting. Nalley was desperately casting about, searching for an escape route. He looked to where the stranger had been pulled down; figuring that, by now, the deaders would have his armor off and his flesh in their grasp.
But once more he was surprised. There was the report of the man’s AK47, followed by a second and third shot. The figure was not firing at the creatures nearest him, though, but at the ones who were closest to Nalley. He realized that his way was clear to join the other man, if he moved fast enough. His own rifle was gone, and he was now down to this single pistol and two ammo clips. The others were dead. He took his chance and bolted.
Already the other was moving at quite a pace uphill. Nalley kept with him, though, following the armored soldier through the forest and up the slopes, glancing back only a couple of times to see if they were pursued. But the zombies had lost interest in them once they’d begun running to higher ground, and the meat steaming in the night air had their undivided attention. The dogs, he soon realized, were nowhere to be seen, having moved on once again, apparently also looking for other targets.
As for City of Ruth, it was completely overrun. Nalley could only continue to follow his rescuer ever higher, only glancing back one time when there was the muffled thump of a big explosion and the sky lit up. Thinking of Lot’s wife, but unable to stop himself, he turned to see City of Ruth silhouetted against a glowing orange-yellow fire that was soon consuming everything. “The LPG,” he muttered. The other man was too far to hear him, though, and wouldn’t likely have cared what he was saying anyway.
Nalley continued to follow.
Finally, after roughly an hour of continuous climbing, taking them north and west, the other man motioned for them to stop. “We’ll rest here,” the man gasped, his voice muffled by the gore-spotted visor that was still pulled down over his face.
Nalley joined the other man in a sitting position on the moist loam of the forest floor. White oaks stood above them.
“You’re from Sparta, aren’t you?” Nalley asked. It made sense.
The other man took off his helmet, and even in just the moonlight, Sgt. Timothy Nalley recognized the tired, haggard features of his former commander, Colonel Nathan Stockman.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Nalley whispered, his gun coming up, ready to fire into Stockman’s skull.
But Stockman fired first. He’d sat with the barrel of his rifle aiming at Nalley, the safety off. The single bullet tore through the sergeant’s chest and left quite a large hole in his back, just below the right scapula.
“Goddamn it,” Stockman said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
His eyelids were suddenly too heavy to lift, but Nalley did his best to look up at the traitor. “You left us, you godless coward. You deserved to die. You deserved to die. Not me.”
“So it goes,” Stockman said. He reached down and pulled the .45 from Nalley’s bloodied hand. Checking to ensure that a shell was chambered, he fired a single round through Nalley’s skull.
“What a waste,” Stockman told the corpse. “What a fucking waste.”
He turned, then, and headed for Sparta.
Message to a Convert:
Once a week the radio had to be used. It was risky, but it had to be done. All precautions were taken.
In the shadows, not far from where that hinged door waited beneath a stack of wood and a few inches of dark soil, the radio was uncovered from its clever concealment. A practiced hand checked the battery charge and switched it on there in the absence of light. There was a low hiss.
“I’m here. Over,” the voice said. Somewhere, it was received through a haze of static noise.
“Something’s happened,” came the reply. “No time to elaborate. We are under attack. Over.”
The figure was dark, not unlike the shadows in which it now hovered. A head leaned in close to the small radio, a practiced hand covered the small light above the speaker. “What do I do? Over.”
“Prepare our most forceful response,” came the reply. “We’ll send you a sign. You’ll know it. Check back in an hour. Over.”
The radio went dead. There was only the hiss of nothingness sighing over the frequency. Straightening, the figure revealed nothing, and in fact quite fluidly replaced and hid the radio. But the thoughts were on other things; things hidden under a layer of dirt and behind a simple wooden door placed perfectly in the earth.
