Necrophobia - 01 Page 11

  But that didn’t mean they would behave that way every time.

  As far as I was concerned, they were unpredictable.

  When you’re dealing with a predator—any predator—you can never know how they’ll react. That was the gray area we had to contend with the next day when we made our plans. We announced them to everyone, save Maria who was very sensitive about things and was out working in the gardens with Diane and Jimmy.

  I thought Ricki would kick up a fuss. She did not.

  “Their numbers have to be thinned,” Tuck told them. “For our own safety.”

  That was practical and that made sense. Ricki understood it. Of course, we left out the part about me being bait.

  About an hour later, the four of us went through the back gate in the armored Jeep and drove across the field to the ambush site that Tuck had chosen. It was basically a deep, rocky pit about three-hundred feet across and twice that in length. There was a trail leading down there. My job would be to draw the zombies in. Only problem with that being there was no other egress but that trail. Once I was down there with them I was in danger. I could probably climb out, but it would by risky with the sheer walls. Tuck said once I had drawn them down into the pit, he would throw me a rope and yank me out.

  “Be on time,” I told him and meant it.

  “Don’t worry, Booky. I have your best interests at heart.”

  “See that you do.”

  He smiled and stroked his beard. “Course…something were to happen to you, Ricki might just need a man in her life…”

  We got down to it.

  First things first. While Jimmy and Diane stood on guard with .30-30s, we went down into the pit and set out six Claymore mines which would waste the majority of the zombies. We daisy-chained them together and wired them to a single clacker above. My job would be to get on the other side of them before the zombies did.

  Claymore Mine

  Type: Anti-Personnel Device

  Kill Range: 160 feet, optimum

  Ordinance: C4 + Fragmentation munition=

  Total annihilation of enemy

  Once the mines were set-up, Tuck went through the whole thing again and again with us. Once I was out, fire the mines. Then the four of us would pick off the stragglers one by one. The trail leading out would be a danger so Jimmy would station himself there with not only a .30-30 but a CAR-15 to put down a heavy volume of fire. We all carried CAR-15s in addition to our Sigs. Single shots to the head was what we had in mind, but if it came to it we’d cut them down any way we could.

  We got back in the Jeep and drove around towards the front of the fence. I opened the door and jumped out. Tuck handed me a Motorola walkie-talkie so we could coordinate things. Diane kissed me before I left and Jimmy shook my hand. Tuck just said, “Don’t be a wimp.”

  I stood there, watching the zombies in the distance as the Jeep pulled away and got out of visual. All righty then. Like I didn’t have a care in the world, my CAR-15 slung over my shoulder and my Sig-Sauer hanging low on my hip, I sauntered down towards the front of the gate and one of the first things I noticed was that there were a hell of a lot more than forty of them. I was guessing sixty to seventy which I didn’t care for at all. I had gotten pretty good at estimating the sizes of mobs in Iraq so I was figuring I wasn’t far off.

  The zombies were just standing there like a bunch of extras waiting for the director’s cue. They were facing the fence, but none of them came within ten feet of it. I walked on down there, whistling. I was within twenty feet before they saw me. That close I could smell them—God, like roadkill, hot and festering. Men, women, children. When one saw me, the others all seemed to see me, too. They turned almost simultaneously and looked over at me

  They began to gnash their teeth.

  They studied me with eyeballs that were blanched white with tiny black pinprick pupils that saw very well, apparently.

  Then they started to move.

  I got on the walkie-talkie. “I made contact,” I said.

  “Well don’t dance with ‘em,” Tuck told me.

  “Roger that.”

  One thing I knew was that I could not panic. If one of them started running at me, I fully intended to panic, but that didn’t happen. They came at me slowly as was their way and I backed away one step at a time. I didn’t know how good their vision was. I made sure I kept about twenty feet between us, but I never got any farther away than that because I didn’t want them to lose interest.

  I kept backing away.

  They kept coming.

  I don’t know what happened then and don’t ask me, but…I stopped. I just stopped and stood there as they came on. I was like a kid playing chicken with a knife. But something made me stop, made me look shivering death straight in the face. Made me stand there and watch it coming for me. Ruined faces watched me, dead-white eyeballs sized me up, teeth made ready to tear into me. The ones leading the pack had their hands raised to grab me. At such close range I could actually see the parasites living on and in them: worms, carrion beetles, burrowing insects. I could smell the hot fetid stench of their graveyard breath.

  And I remember thinking: If you don’t move, asshole, you’re lunch.

  That’s what I thought and the most frightening thing was that for a moment there, one brief instant that is cold silver in my memory, I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I was locked in place. I had seized up. I had never frozen like that in combat, not even my first firefight. But there I was, totally in control of the situation, and in no real danger if I kept moving…and I froze.

  I watched them come on.

  Fifteen feet.

  Ten.

  Five.

  So close I could see the flesh of their reaching fingers hanging like confetti. And when those hands were but inches from my face, I let out a cry and backpedaled away. I fell down, got up, kept backing as fast I could until I put the requisite twenty feet between us. I had no idea what had happened. To this day I cannot figure it…but it was almost like I wanted them to get me. I’d seen guys do crazy things like that in Iraq, standing up in a firefight, strolling casually forward as AK-47s ripped up the ground all around them, pausing to light a cigarette as mortar shells exploded in every direction.

  But I never thought it would happen to me.

  But it had.

  Some weird inexplicable trigger was pulled, some switch was thrown deep down in my psyche and it scared the shit out of me. I kept backing away, playing Pied Piper and leading my zombies away, still shaking about freezing up…and that’s when I realized that not only had I locked up, but that I was not respecting my enemy. Because I heard dragging footsteps in the gravel behind me.

  I turned and there were three of them closing in on me and what disturbed me most was that they were soldiers. They were dressed in desert camo BDUs, tanker helmets and goggles. What I could see of their faces was concurrent with what I had been seeing in a lot of them: their mouths were just ragged puckering holes like they’d chewed their own lips off like Dick said Elena had. They came at me, all teeth and gums, blank eyes glistening behind their goggles.

  I brought up the CAR-15 and drilled some rounds into them to drive them back, pivoted, and did the same with the mob bearing down on me. Then I dropped one soldier with a round that drilled right through his goggles and I caught the second in the face with another round which drove him to one knee, his hands gripping his shattered jaw. The third was on me by then and I knew I had to fight like never before. I didn’t have time to turn the CAR-15 on him. As I put down the second zombie, he was already on me. I felt his hot, rancid breath in my face and I swept the rifle stock around and hit him in the side of the head. Then I hit him again and again, pushing him back, getting those teeth away from me.

  Then something grabbed my ankle.

  The second deadhead was not so dead. I had caught him too low, just beneath the nose in the maxilla. The slug must have been deflected enough so that it didn’t enter his brain. Gripping my leg, he dragged himse
lf forward to bite and I put a three round burst right through his face. He relaxed his grip, shuddered, and did not move. The third one came again and I fired point-blank, blowing his chest apart, then I gave him three rounds in the eyes and he went over like a post.

  By then, of course, the mob was nearly on me.

  Tuck was shouting over the walkie-talkie but I didn’t have time to answer.

  I leaped over the bodies and ran full-out.

  The mob followed, some of them dropping away to feed on the soldiers but the majority coming in my direction. They were moving no faster, I thought, but perhaps the smell of blood and meat had gotten them excited because they were all chomping their teeth. I moved along the fence until it ended and I heard the Jeep coming. Tuck must have heard the shooting and was coming to my aid.

  “I’m all right,” I said over the walkie-talkie.

  “GODDAMMIT, BOOKY!” Tuck shouted. “I ALMOST SHIT MY PANTS OVER HERE!”

  “Sorry. Three unexpected guests showed up.”

  I waved at the Jeep and Tuck pulled around and went back to the hide in the trees.

  I led the undead through the grass out into the field where we would sort out their asses on a permanent basis. I wondered if Ricki was up on the walkway with her spotting scope watching the action. I really hoped not. Halfway across the field, I paused, letting the dead catch up to me and scanning in every direction to see if there were any more strays pushing in on me. I saw none. But that was part of the problem that we had with the field. The grasses were short in and around the pit, but not much farther on they grew high and wild, tall yellow sedge where it would have been real easy for dozens of the dead to hide.

  I made it to the pit and waited for the mob.

  They came, spreading out now in a wall of enclosing death. I let them close ranks to about twenty feet again and I started down into the pit. The trail leading down canted at an easy thirty degree angle until it reached the bottom which was about twenty feet in depth. I got down there and waited, very much aware that I had Claymores at my back and zombies at my front. The dead began to ring in the sides of the pit and then, following one enterprising deadhead, they all started down the trail. They didn’t move in single file. They were not orderly. They came in threes and fours, pushing forward, some of them falling and rolling, others pushing and fighting to get out in front. Just slavering pack animals, no cohesion, no unity. Just hunger.

  I backed away towards the Claymores. I had to get them all down here, all bunched-in. As I was wondering if that was going to happen or how I would be able to do it, the problem was solved by the dead. They were so voracious to get at me that they literally flooded down the trail like some surging river of piranhas. They weren’t much different really: just a swarm, a hungering school. They got down into the pit, congregating and bunching-up, stumbling forward.

  I heard the Jeep racing to the pit.

  “They’re all down there with you,” Tuck said. “Get in position.”

  When they were fifty feet from me, I got behind the Claymore line and went over to the sheer wall. The zombies came forward. They were all gnashing and chomping their teeth.

  “How’s about that rope?” I said over the walkie-talkie.

  “Coming,” was the response.

  The zombies were massing, pressing in, filling the pit with their dark stink and darker intent. They were fifteen feet from the Claymores and closing. I looked up. I saw Diane up there. She was yelling at Tuck. Jimmy was there, too, he looked nervous. I didn’t care for where this was going.

  “You better get that rope down here or I’m fucking hamburger,” I said over the walkie-talkie.

  It dropped down behind me. Tuck had tied a loop in it and I worked it over my head and shoulders and tightened it under my armpits. He began pulling and I began climbing.

  “There’s no time!” Diane called down to me.

  The zombies were ten feet from the Claymores.

  “COVER YOUR HEAD!” Tuck shouted and I did just that.

  The Claymores went off simultaneously with a thundering THUMP-THUIMP-THUMP! and when I looked back, the smoke clearing, I saw that the pit was a field of gore and body parts and trembling limbs. About 90% of them had been blasted to fragments but the others, undaunted, were coming for me. There were maybe a dozen left. As Tuck pulled me out, Jimmy and Diane started popping them one after the other. By the time I climbed up and over the edge, they were all dead down there.

  “Just like clockwork,” Tuck said. “Easy as pie.”

  I didn’t necessarily agree with that, but things had worked out so I wasn’t about to bitch about the close-calls I’d had.

  “Gah,” Diane said, turning away from the pit. “What a mess.”

  “That should clean ‘em out for awhile,” Jimmy said.

  I was going to agree when Tuck said, “Shit.”

  As we had feared, the dead were coming through the grass. Not just a scattered few but thirty, forty, maybe fifty of them and they were all soldiers like the ones I put down. Somewhere very near to us, an entire unit had gotten infected. By the numbers I was seeing, I was guessing it had been a company strength unit, mechanized infantry or armor judging from the helmets. They came out of the grass, sighting us and closing in for the kill.

  We opened up on them and dropped four, then five and six. We kept shooting until we tagged ten of them.

  “INTO THE JEEP!” Tuck cried out.

  We needed no coaxing.

  We made it to the Jeep just as the main force converged. We barely got the doors shut and they were everywhere. Tuck threw the Jeep in drive and smashed five or six out of his way and rolled over several of them. He brought it around and as he did so I saw that the tall yellow grasses were thick with them like locusts. They were everywhere. And more seemed to be coming from every direction.

  “We better make that gate before they do,” Tuck said.

  They were massing and we didn’t bother with the side gate. Tuck pulled around front and we encountered a dozen more walking dead in two and threes. Diane went up through the hatch with her CAR-15 and thinned their numbers. But more were coming. We just got through the gate before they converged.

  Barely.

  NIGHT DEFENSIVE POSITION

  After sundown, we watched the zombies massing out there with our NVDs, studying them at length in the green fields of our scopes. There were more than ever. I don’t think I’m over-exaggerating when I say there were upwards of 100, possibly approaching the 150 mark. Most of them were soldiers, but there were plenty of civs out there mulling around with them. As before, they were keeping their distance from the fence but I wondered how long that would last. We were quickly approaching the sort of numbers that simple ambushes could not contend with, not unless we got our hands on some real firepower—a .50-cal machine gun or a minigun, some grenade launchers or mortars. We needed heavy squad weapons to disperse and annihilate a group like that.

  And all we had were rifles, shotguns, and a few automatics.

  “This is where you call in an airstrike,” Jimmy said.

  In my mind I could see an F-16 Falcon making a run at our friends and dropping clusterbombs and napalm. How easy that would have made things. I was beginning to wonder if there were any pilots left out there to fly them. Things were getting worse on the national and international scene. The internet was down now and radio traffic was sporadic. Everything was crashing and that didn’t give me much hope that we were winning the war as such. According to what little we could glean from radio broadcasts, the Necrophage pandemic had been called a species-threatening event by several microbiologists, which meant that the old human race was teetering very close to the edge. Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe…there was no word coming out of any of those places. News from the UK was sketchy. Canada had sealed its border with the US and they were reporting something like 50% of the population were dead or dying from the infection. There was absolutely nothing coming out of Central or South America.

 
But we knew things were going on.

  We were still seeing helicopters flying far overhead, many of them I could tell by their profile were Army AH-64 Apaches equipped with miniguns and rockets for direct fire support. I was guessing they were flying sorties into the Big Apple. We sure could have used their help. A couple runs by one of them and our problems would have been over with.

  We watched the dead and they waited patiently.

  Maybe they realized their numerical superiority was their edge and maybe they knew that in the end they would have us. I doubt it, though. But I suppose it’s a very human sort of thing to grant things intelligence that have no real intelligence whatsoever.

  Just after eleven that night, our power went out.

  Everything went black and I saw the world as our Medieval ancestors must have—a threatening, forbidding place of clutching shadows and menacing night shapes. It was so unbelievably fucking black I really couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The only light came from the stars above and it was a hazy night so they weren’t exactly bright. I could see the glowing ends of the cigarettes that Tuck and Diane were smoking, but nothing else.

  I think we all sort of panicked.

  I could almost feel the tension moving from body to body out on the walkway. But it was Ricki who gave it a voice: “THE LIGHTS! THE LIGHTS WENT OUT!”

  “It’s cool, lady,” Tuck said. “The genny’ll kick on in…five…four…three…two…one…”

  We heard an engine kick on somewhere and I knew it was down in the cellar beneath the crib and the lights came on, nearly blinding us. They came on, dimmed, flickered, then held. Beyond the fence the zombies were still waiting. They had not moved.

  “I’m surprised we had power this long,” Diane said.

  “Me too,” Tuck said. “You ain’t afraid of the dark are you, Ricki?”

  “Of course not,” she said.