Necrophobia - 02 Read online

“Little John told them,” Sonny Boy said.

  He had long suspected that Little John was up to something, and now he knew for sure. As Little John lay dying, his guts shot out from ARM machine gun fire, he had confessed the entire thing. He had been passing info to ARM for some time, and with that information, they had slowly baited the Brigade into a trap. The only thing he hadn’t figured was getting killed in the process. The Biocon Units that had been out on the raid were destroyed, as were their vehicles. When the Apache flew in to give close air support, a Stinger missile fired from a rooftop had struck it and it went down in flaming pieces.

  Yes, everything carefully planned.

  It was at this point that Jonesy said, “We got our own problems. There’s thousands of zombies surrounding the encampment. If they bust through that fence…”

  “Why do you suppose Little John did it?” I asked.

  Sonny Boy said, “They must have offered him something. Something that turned his black little heart.” He shook his helmeted head. “Greed is the root cause of evil, gentlemen, and Little John was seduced by its dirty love.”

  “He got caught in it, that’s all,” Jonesy said.

  “Yes, let us remember the scriptures, my brothers. You can’t take fire in your bosom without getting your clothes burned. Praise Jesus almighty. That’s a lesson I hope you’ve learned as well, Steve.”

  “Meaning?” I said.

  “Just a theory I been working and polishing, letting the hand of the Lord guide me as I do in all things,” he said, laying it on thick as honey as usual. “Just this idea I have been rolling around to see if it gathers any dust. Just wondering if I can trust you, is all. Because, bless your heart, son, I’m not sure I can.”

  How right he was. I didn’t argue with him or try to make him see things differently. That, of course, was what he wanted me to do so it was exactly what I would not do. Let the fires of paranoia build in him. Let them engulf him. Let him sweat in the heat. I was going to kill him and I had a funny feeling that he knew it, too.

  We flew over the cemetery of the city as night fell, staying high above the rooftops. Jonesy cut over Central Park and the Upper East Side until we reached the East River. He followed it back down to Murray Hill. By the time we cut back into Manhattan and flew over the United Nations building, Sonny Boy was getting very, very nervous. He couldn’t reach anyone at the encampment. Either they were all dead or they were fighting a pitched battle.

  As we came in, we saw it was both.

  Rain was falling in heavy sheets, obscuring things, but we saw enough to fuel a lifetime of nightmares.

  The helicopter’s spots showed us probably not thousands of zombies outside the wire and backed-up in the streets for as far as the lights could see, but hundreds of thousands. It looked like Time Square on New Years Eve. Gunners were in the towers pouring machine gun fire into the masses but it was like throwing a handful of peas at a charging elephant.

  Jonesy set us down near the punishment shack. I jumped out while he was three feet off the ground and that was my mistake because the chopper lifted right back up again and I realized I had been duped. Why had I been in such a hurry to disembark? It was probably partly from habit—when you’re a combat soldier it’s reflex; you jump out when the chopper gets close to the ground—and partly because fighters were badly needed.

  Regardless, cursing myself in the rain, I watched the chopper lift and hover, and then set down atop Brightwater’s building. I knew what was going to happen then. At least, I thought I did. They were going to pick up Brightwater and evacuate. Maybe that had been the plan all along in case the encampment was overrun.

  I heard men shouting, men screaming, pouring out rounds at the zombie hordes. Grenades erupted. The ground shook from explosions. I didn’t care about any of that. I had to get up to the roof of the building. If I didn’t make it, I was a dead man. Because everyone there was dead now. Something very human in me that had managed to survive all the desperation, degradation, and raw animal brutality, wanted to help them. It wanted to rush over there and defend the encampment and their lives until the end.

  However, something else changed my mind very quickly.

  Rockets.

  They were being fired from somewhere in the distance and they were pouring down on the encampment in a constant, shrieking barrage. They filled the sky like locusts and came down everywhere with a constant thumping, drumming Whump! Whump! Whump! that shook the earth and threw me into the puddles. Night became day as buildings went up and came down again in flaming debris, as clouds of fire and churning smoke rose up into the sky. Every time I pulled myself up, more rockets came down that threw me to the sluicing, muddy ground. They hit so close that the ground erupted and fell back on me in moist clods.

  I saw the fence go down and the gates fall in.

  I saw one of the gun towers take a direct hit.

  I saw another tower shake and fall, as the zombies poured forth in a destructive, insatiable barbarian horde of clawing hands and biting mouths and death-stink. They were a carnivore army and the defenders fell before them, were yanked apart and obliterated as if they were fed into wood chippers. The zombies went right over the top of them in a ceaseless flood of the living dead. They came wave after wave, like soldiers wading ashore at Anzio, each wave larger and more determined to get at the human cattle in the razor wired pen they had so long been denied. They were unstoppable and voracious, backlit by lightning flashes of exploding rockets, by fires and burning wreckage that illuminated the driving rain and the horrible forward progress of the undead forces themselves.

  I ran.

  Soaking wet and slicked with mud I ran for Brightwater’s bunker. I saw a dozen others heading in the same direction. It was easy to find rising up in the night, the running lights of the chopper like a beacon atop it. I had to get there before Sonny Boy and Brightwater slipped away or there would be no escape possible.

  Six or seven others were ahead of me and as they closed in, a machine gun carefully positioned in the sandbags opened up. Five of them dropped as bullets raked them. The sixth fell screaming and wailing not far from me. I went to the earth and crawled forward through the mud that was slick and oily with the falling rain.

  The machine gun opened up and more people dropped behind me.

  I crawled forth, moving in little fits and jerks, trying not to draw attention, trying to be a corpse, lying still when the gun opened up so my moving silhouette could not be seen. If that gunner had NODs or, worse, an infrared scope, I was a dead man.

  Behind me, the zombie army converged and marched forward.

  They found the wounded and began to feed on them, the night punctuated by the screams of men being slowly devoured. The machine gun opened up again, firing nonstop, throwing out hundreds of rounds that dropped the zombies into the mud with their writhing food. Whoever was firing was going to melt that fucking barrel.

  Wriggling like a worm, I crawled forward.

  When I was five feet from the sandbags, I pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it over the rampart. There was a blinding flash and a thundering explosion and the gunner cried out. I jumped up and threw myself over the sandbags, rolling over and firing, putting about eight rounds into the gunner, finishing him off.

  I stood.

  The zombies were fifteen feet from the sandbags. The door was locked and I blew it open. I threw myself inside. I had maybe a minute or two before the dead took that door right off its hinges and made short work of me. The rockets continued to hit outside, but nowhere close the bunker. Still, the walls shook and the glass rattled in the windows. With the hot, blazing fires going on outside, the rain having serious trouble bringing it under control, there was plenty of light to see by. It was spotty, but more than enough for my needs. The main generator for the encampment was out, but I knew that the bunker had its own power source. I had no idea where the switch was to turn it on, though.

  And I didn’t have time to look.

  No time at all. />
  I was in kind of an office. There was a big cabinet against the wall. The thing felt like it weighed about 500 pounds. Panting and gasping, I got it in front of the door and shouldered it in place. That would hold them off for a time. The windows were barred so I had some breathing room.

  I wondered where Doreen was. The idea of leaving her behind did not sit on me well, but in that chaos I knew I would never find her. A quick peak out the windows showed me that there was thousands of the dead moving at the bunker.

  Panic breaking loose in me; I searched around until I found a stairwell. I climbed it to the top, still hearing the thunk-thunk-thunk of the chopper’s rotors. All was not lost. Not yet. Not just yet. I took the stairs two at a time until I got to the top. The door was locked but I wasn’t about to be stopped now. I hit it with everything I had which was considerable with the adrenaline coursing through me. I put my shoulder into it and the door, just a cheap hollow job, flew right open so easily that I lost my balance and hit the floor, and that was the only thing that saved my life.

  Somebody opened up on the other end of the hallway.

  Hot lead flew over me, chewing into the door frame.

  I was so geared to action by that point that I was firing from a prone position before I even thought about doing so. Reflex, pure reflex. And it paid off because some of my slugs were right on target. Somebody cried out and I heard them hobbling away. It was Sonny Boy and I tagged him.

  I heard him alternately sobbing and giggling from behind a door at the end. “Slicker than a weasel and deadlier than a serpent,” I heard him say in a moaning voice. “Praise His name, Steve, praise His name!”

  How he knew it was me, I couldn’t guess. Maybe he saw me in the muzzle flash and knew I would be coming after him after dumping me out in the yard. And, just maybe, he knew I was just determined enough to get the job done.

  “Give it up, Sonny Boy,” I called to him. “There’s plenty of room on that Blackhawk for you, me, and Brightwater.”

  “Brightwater,” he said, swallowing repeatedly like his mouth was full of blood. “Colonel Brightwater took his own life a month ago…we deemed it prudent to…to maintain the illusion that he was in seclusion.”

  Why wasn’t I surprised? Sonny Boy had been running the whole show. The Blackhawk that circled overhead during the raids was not ferrying Brightwater about for a bird’s eye view, it was probably on standby in case Sonny Boy needed to make a hasty retreat.

  “All right, there’s plenty of room for two.”

  “Except, I don’t trust you, Steve. You have an agenda…I distrust men with agendas. To the zombies with you! Like the dogs eating Jezebel, the bellies of the dead will be full tonight, praise God for that which they are about to receive.”

  I thought that maybe he was getting delirious. He was so crazy; it was really hard to tell.

  Downstairs, I heard the cabinet fall as the living dead stormed into the bunker. It would not take them long to find us. Within a minute, they’d have us, if I knew my zombies, their hunger, and their drive.

  “The legions of the netherworld have arrived, Steve, and you will go with them. So sayeth I, so sayeth I. For I am the king of terrors and I do surely hold the keys of Hell and Death in my fucking left hand.”

  The door opened and something came bouncing down the hallway.

  A grenade.

  I threw myself backwards down the stairwell just as it went up with a resounding eruption of light, sound, and heat. White phosphorus. I had slipped down the first four steps when it went off and that saved me from getting very toasty, real fast. Regardless, the hallway above was full of flames and churning smoke. But below me, the zombies were pushing up into the stairwell. I put my SureFire light on them and a dozen rotted faces with gnashing teeth had sighted me. I ran back up the stairs and into the flames, going low with my arms crossed in front of my face. Holding my breath, I ran at top speed right into the inferno. I was through it in a matter of seconds, but the heat lit my hair on fire and scalded the back of my hands.

  I could hear the zombies coming.

  I could hear the rotors still whooshing on the roof.

  I ran through the door Sonny Boy had disappeared through. He was gone, leaving a bloody smear in his passing. By the looks of it, he had not been walking but maybe dragging himself forward like a dying dog. My SureFire light on the blood trail, I followed it into another hallway and then to another door. There was a set of rungs leading above. I got there in time to see Sonny Boy’s boots pulling away through the trapdoor above. He was hit good, but he still had the tenacity to make it that far. Amazing.

  I looked back once and three burning zombies were coming down the corridor. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and climbed up to the top. I peered out through the trapdoor. I spotted Sonny Boy quickly enough. He was dragging himself around a set of air conditioning ducts. The Blackhawk was around the other side, still waiting.

  Even with the noise of the rotors, he heard me and fired with his rifle. But he was near done in and his rounds came nowhere near me. I put three more in him and he dropped the rifle. I ran up to him for the deathblow.

  When I got there, he was alternately giggling and gagging, pausing now and then to vomit out a spray of something dark that the rain washed away instantly. “My Father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions. You believe that, Steve? Do you? C’mon, boy, do the deed…get it done with,” he gasped. “Put Sonny Boy down, holy God, put him down! Because God forgives, my friend, but Sonny Boy don’t. Do it, boy, do it, and go to your God at the appointed hour with a dirty soul and bloody hands! And now…now Sonny Boy, why his tongue has run just plain dry and he’s all done talking this time around…praise Jesus, let us gather in His holy, holy name…let me be washed clean in the blood of the lamb…”

  I shot him point blank in the head.

  His skull flew apart and what was in it sprayed into the pools of rainwater.

  “You ain’t worth a shit alive or dead,” I told his corpse. “Praise Jesus.”

  I came running around the ducts, making for the Blackhawk and Jonesy must have seen it was me and maybe thought I was coming to kill him, because he lifted the bird up and the rotor wash nearly knocked me back. But I couldn’t afford to miss my ride. Head tucked low, I ran for the chopper that had just lifted clear of the roof. What I did next I did out of pure inertia and pure survival instinct. I ran to the edge of the roof and I jumped. There was a dizzying, unpleasant moment of vertigo as I fell through empty air, feeling the appetite of thousands of zombies below me…then my hand gripped the skid and the chopper suddenly dipped down.

  I thought it was going to crash.

  Whether Jonesy was trying to bring her in low to feed me to the zombies or whether the sudden addition of my two-hundred odd pounds made the Blackhawk’s center of balance shift, I couldn’t say. But it was dropping, dropping lower and I was hanging on by one hand, dangling there, and getting closer by the second, thousand of hungering faces just below washed clean of gore by the falling rain. They were reaching up to snag me, to draw me down where I could be torn apart in proper fashion. The nose of the Blackhawk continued to dip. I got another hand on the skid and tried to throw my leg up and over it, but I kept missing and on the last attempt, my weight worked against me and one hand slipped free.

  I saw the zombies reaching for me.

  I felt the Blackhawk losing altitude.

  I saw the bunker just behind me like a desert island awash in a sea of the walking dead. Then I got my other hand up, just as I felt dozens of hands grabbing at my boots, and clawing at my pants legs. I was fighting to keep my grip as I felt them seize me, but then the chopper was rising and I had two zombies hanging from me. The skids were wet. Holding on was hard enough with just me. I felt my fingers slipping. Crying out, I kicked with my left leg and that zombie went hurdling into the crowd below…but the other hung on tenaciously.

  I kicked and kicked. “GET THE FUCK OFF ME YOU FUCKING WORMHEA
D!” I screamed, more for my own benefit than anyone else’s. “LET GO! LET GO! LET THE FUCK GO!”

  By this point, the Blackhawk had gained altitude as Jonesy banked it up Park Avenue, but my rider would not let go. Below, Park was crowded with zombies. Just jam-packed. It looked like those old World War II newsreels you see after the Japanese surrendered, thousands and thousands mulling. I kept trying to kick off the zombie as it climbed my right leg. Using every last shred of strength I had, I pulled myself up onto the skid.

  I saw my rider.

  It was Doreen.

  They must have gotten her that afternoon when I was off fighting with the Brigade. Her eyes were blank white, mouth chewing, face stained by black gore that ran from her mouth and nostrils. She clawed on me for purchase and I gave one last good kick.

  She fell free, but she was gripping the skid with one hand.

  Her fingers were slipping.

  I hoisted myself up into the Blackhawk.

  Lying on my back, I panted and panted, finally getting my wind back and some strength in my limbs. It was then that I saw Doreen pull herself up into the cabin. She was naked. Zombies weren’t in the habit of stripping, so it must have happened before death. I wondered if she had died reliving the trauma of her fourteenth year.

  There was no time to think.

  I brought up my TR-15 and even then, I felt how light it was. I was low on ammunition. I would have drilled her in the head, but the chopper shifted and my shots went right into her belly and she came for me. No time for anything else. I went at her using the butt of my rifle like a battering ram. I smashed her in the face again and again, tearing flesh from her cheeks, smashing her jaw, shattering her left orbit until the eyeball hung loose by a thread of optic nerve. I gave her one last shot, feeling something in her face give and then she fell back and out of the chopper, careening end over end into the crowds far below.

  I tossed the empty carbine aside and went up to the cockpit.

  Jonesy made no move to stop me.

  By then, I had my Gerber knife out, and I had the blade against his throat. “So you thought you’d leave me down there so the zombies could have a little snack, eh?” I shouted in his face. “Didn’t work out so good, did it?”