Zombie Road IV: Road to Redemption Read online

“Agreed,” Gunny said. “Looks like they’re keeping quiet, hoping the mob will go away.”

  “Wire Bender said they were out of food and water,” Bridget said, trying to estimate how many people could cram into a city block surrounding a building. “They must not have had a backup plan. Must have thought their walls couldn’t be breached.”

  “Yeah,” Hollywood agreed. “I’d a had that church stuffed full. Enough ammo to kill everything, enough food to last a month. Hell, they don’t even have a way out of town. There’s no gates.”

  “Guess they hadn’t anticipated a horde big enough to go over the walls,” Gunny said. “This place is so far out in the sticks, I bet there weren’t enough of the zeds within a fifty-mile radius to do it.”

  “Yeah, well, now we gotta deal with it,” Griz said. “You got a plan, Gunny?”

  “Plan A was to lead them all away, but we can’t do that,” he said. “I guess we’ll go with Plan B.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this,” Griz deadpanned, as he peered out of the window, doing the same thing Gunny was doing. Looking for positions with good fields of fire.

  They were in the section of town that had housed the wealthier members of the community. The bankers, the business owners, and the lawyers. The houses were old and stately, many of them with a Victorian flavor. They picked out four that either had third story windows overlooking the street, or a widow’s walk on the roof.

  “You guestimate how many there are? We bring enough bullets?” Gunny asked, when Bridget finally nodded after her intense scrutiny of the crowd.

  “There’s about fifteen hundred of them, maybe two thousand,” she said.

  Gunny checked his loadout. He had six magazines for his M-4 in his Molle vest, the extra mags for his Glock, and the ammo can he was carrying. There were 420 rounds in it, already on stripper clips ready for speed loading. The rest of the crew had about the same, with Griz the only exception. He was lugging his M60 and a whole backpack of ammo. They had plenty of rounds. More than plenty. They had enough to kill a thousand zombies twice over.

  “Griz, this house has the best line of sight down the street, you set up here with the pig. We’ll get over to the other houses and make sure they’re good to go.”

  Griz followed them down, dragged the couch over to the door, and jammed it in place against the foot of the stairs. He used the kitchen table and the refrigerator tilted on its side to block the back door, forcing them snugly against the cabinets. Nothing would be coming through them without power tools or a bulldozer. The windows were high. Hopefully, the zeds would be so spread out between the four of them, they wouldn’t break through.

  They made similar fortifications with the other houses, barricaded every door and figured out their escape routes if all went wrong. Gunny was the last to appear on the widow’s walk of the house he’d chosen and laid out his ammo, all the magazines facing the way he liked them for a quick reload. He looked around at the others in their positions, curtains removed, magazines laid out, and looks of resigned determination on their faces. They knew their fields of fire, they could cover each other, and were ready to commence the killing. From their height advantage, they could shoot down on the mob and not have to worry about stray bullets hitting anyone inside the building. It wasn’t a pleasant job, mowing down the undead, it was shooting fish in a barrel. It had to be done, though, and the best way to take care of unpleasant business was to just get started.

  Gunny daubed a little Burt’s Bees ointment under his nose, then keyed his handheld. “One up,” he said, and waited for the others to check in. Griz was the last and when he clicked off, Gunny squeezed the trigger. The rest of them opened up, popping heads one at a time, taking aimed shots. There was confusion, at first, among the undead packed around the Kingdom Hall. It took them a minute to figure out where the new noises were coming from and that they meant fresh meat. Maybe easier to reach meat. While the crowd was still muddling around in confusion, the team was dropping them fast, moving from one closely packed and barely moving target to the next. They were jammed in so thick, many of the freshly-dead undead remained on their feet, held up by the horde.

  A graying man in shredded pajamas, with an eye plucked out by a crow, finally spotted one of them and let out a keening scream. He started running toward them the best he could with his worn-down feet and six-month dead muscles. The others joined the chase, many of them stumbling over the bodies that were slumping to the ground. The Lakota Crew had already dropped thirty or forty in the opening volley of the battle and they kept firing, snap-shooting and moving from one target to the next. It was easy pickings now, even if they missed a shot, the mob was so tightly packed the bullet would plow into the next head. Griz was leaning against the window sill to steady his aim, trying to kill as many as possible before they spread out. Once a few hundred started running for the houses, he set aside his M-4 and put the 60 to his shoulder. He had his belts strung together, a round chambered, and a tin can wired just below the feed tray so the shells wouldn’t bind and pop the links. He aimed for the mob and let them feel the full force of the heavy machine gun. It chewed them up, each round ripping through a half dozen bodies before it buried itself in the ground. Heads exploded, collar bones splintered, rotting intestines were blown out of fist-sized holes, hip bones were disintegrated, and if he was lucky, a leg was shattered before the bullet finished its job. The noise was terrible, deafening, in the still-early evening. The circling crows and vultures flapped frantically away from the roar of the guns and fire of the tracers as they laid waste to the unnatural bodies. Griz fired in short bursts, trying to make every round count as the streets filled with more and more zeds pouring around the other sides of the church, joining the attack. The fastest of the runners were at their doors within minutes and started their incessant pounding, bodies piling up, adding tons of pressure against the wood. Gunny dropped his second magazine, slapped in a fresh one, and continued to pick targets. Hundreds were on the ground, heads shattered or bodies broken so badly they couldn’t stand. The horde stomped them into the asphalt, splashing rotting livers and spleens, crushing rib cages, breaking backs. They came around the building, a constant flowing stream, nearly uncountable, their numbers growing.

  “I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this,” Hollywood said and slapped in another mag, trying to drop a body with each round sent down range.

  Me, too, Gunny thought, but didn’t have time to answer. The backside of the building had hidden the majority of the zeds. There had been twice as many hidden from view and now they were running and stumbling around the church, mindlessly chasing the noise. The streets were filled with them, the houses were starting to get surrounded, and over the constant pounding of the guns, he heard the first window shatter. They were prepared to deal with a thousand, even two thousand undead, but not three or four thousand. They didn’t have enough ammo and they couldn’t cut the numbers down fast enough to prevent them from ramping up and through the windows. He shifted his fire over to the broken window and the grasping hands two stories below Bridget. He was dropping bodies, but it was futile. There were just too many and all he was doing was making a mushy ramp for the mob surging forward. He concentrated back toward the center of the street, she still had two barricaded doors between her and the horde. They should hold. Once the zeds were inside, they couldn’t muster up a lot of force against the doors, as long as they weren’t at the end of a hallway.

  Other windows were starting to break, everyone’s ears were attuned to the sound, picking it up despite the constant barrage of gunfire. It was a defense going down. It meant that death was clawing its way closer. Griz splashed hundreds more heads before his ammo ran out. There were at least a thousand dead bodies splayed out in the street, crushed underfoot and hidden by the masses still moving, still running, still trying to get into the houses.

  Gunny ran out of full magazines and ripped open the ammo can to start reloading. The stripper clips made it fast and clean and by the time h
e’d replenished his mags, the gunfire from the others had become sporadic. There was enough left in the can for one more refill, but then he’d be down to his pistols. They weren’t in trouble, not yet, but they would be. Griz switched over to his M-4 and after the thunder of the machine gun, it sounded tiny and weak. The plinking of a toy. It still cut them down and every time he pulled the trigger, a body slumped to the ground.

  Gunny heard the windows break below him and leaned over the railing of the widow’s walk to look, he saw hundreds packed against the house, climbing over each other to get in. Hollywood was concentrating his fire on them, taking them out, but they kept coming. The piles of dead outside the houses were ten deep and they couldn’t shoot them fast enough to stop them from pouring in through a dozen broken windows. They tried, all of them covering the swarming mobs, but it was futile. Bridget’s shoulder ached from the constant bucking of the gun, her eyes stung from the thick gunpowder smoke filling the room. Liquefying rotten guts and spoiled blood splashed into the overgrown grass, poisoning it. The stench filled the air and made it past the daubs of coconut or peppermint ointment under their noses.

  The zeds weren’t strong and were no longer very fast. They’d been dead for months, their skin hung loose and muscles sagged. The run from St. Louis had left a lot of them with feet worn down to the bone: a shell of a human that nearly anyone could kill by itself. But their sheer numbers made them a formidable opponent, they just kept coming and coming, never stopping, never resting, and never tiring. Gunny heard them trying to crash through the door of the walk. It was at the end of a short hallway and they had plenty of leverage to smash against it. He hadn’t expected them to break through the other door so fast, he’d had it jammed shut with a couple of dressers dragged from bedrooms. They must have smashed right through the drywall, bypassing his barrier entirely. The widow’s walk door wouldn’t hold, not against a hundred bodies pressing against it. He stuffed his full mags back in his vest, grabbed the ammo can, and ran to the end of the walk where it ended at the back of the tall rounded cupola. He set the can on the railing and started filling his empty mags as fast as he could, one eye on the door, waiting for it to smash open. It did and he snatched the last of the stripper clips, cramming them into his cargo pockets then hopped up on the rail, scrambling for the witches hat roof. He was glad it was shingled and not tin, he never would have been able to climb up, it was so steep. He needed a harness and some rope, that would make life a little easier, but he didn’t have anything like that. They hadn’t expected the back of the church to be hiding so many of the undead. Big mistake. He wrapped an arm around the lightning rod at the center of the peaked roof, pulled on it to test its strength. Solid. It would do. He tossed his Molle vest over it, then looped his belt through the side strap. After double checking the buckles, he stood and put his weight against it, tentatively at first, but it felt solid. He took a step down the roof so the pressure was against the base of the pole, leaned toward the edge, and then shouldered his rifle. There was a lot more killing to be done.

  Bridget and Hollywood were on the roofs of their houses, too. The widow’s walk had seemed like a good idea at the time, he could move about freely and not be confined to one room. Now, with the belt cutting into him and zombies only a few feet away, it didn’t feel like such a great plan. Gunny targeted the clawing, keening things pouring out of the broken door, not wanting to start a ramp of bodies on the walkway right beneath him. The last thing he needed was to go hand to hand with them.

  Everyone was still stacking bodies on the street, but they were finally starting to thin out. Each house had hundreds crammed into them and they were relatively safe on the roof. Zed couldn’t climb out of windows and then up. The ones that tried all fell into the mob below, trying to force their way in the broken windows. The gunshots continued to echo through the air for a time, but one by one, the M-4s fell silent and the sound of pistols replaced them. Gunny’s bolt locked back on his last loaded mag. He rested his weight against the belt and dug into his pocket for the last of his bullets. The frantic moaning and clawing of the undead surrounded him and he could see them reaching for handholds, trying to get onto the roofs of the other houses. Bodies came flying out of the window where Griz was, then he was on the sill, scrambling desperately to get on the roof before more biting mouths got to him. His house was overrun, too. Gunny aimed and fired, blowing a head to pieces as it lunged for Griz’s kicking legs, then took out another that leapt after him. His door had smashed in faster than he’d expected, he’d almost been mobbed.

  Griz threw his bulk on the roof and just lay there, breathing hard. Within seconds, the reaching hands were pawing at the gutters, trying to follow him up.

  “Ceasefire,” Gunny said into his mic. “We need to figure something else out.”

  “This has turned into a SNAFU,” Griz said, laying on his back, catching his breath. He was covered in black blood, a long knife still in his hand.

  “Is everyone out of ammo? Y’all down to pistols?” Gunny asked.

  They were.

  Gunny sighed.

  This was not going according to plan. Not at all. The church was cleared at least. Everything that could run, walk, or crawl was away from it and trying to get into the houses. Maybe the people inside could help somehow. Rescue the rescuers.

  “Can anyone get down, make it back to the wall?” Gunny asked. “There’s only a few hundred left. If we had a couple of boxes of ammo, we’d be able to finish this off.”

  “I ain’t climbing down no gutter pipe,” Griz said, his two hundred and thirty pounds still planted on the roof, staring at the rising moon and listening to the screams of the undead.

  “I can, if you pull them all out to the street,” Bridget said. “I can make it to the roof of the carport. It’s an easy drop from there.”

  “Could wait for Scratch and Stabby to get back,” Hollywood said, reloading the last of his ammo into empty magazines. He was sitting on the peak of a huge rambling home that had been someone’s pride and joy before it became filled with the stinking, rotting undead. Now its fine antique furniture was smashed, the wallpaper smeared with pus and blood, the intricate woodwork broken and crushed underfoot.

  “I’d rather go toe to toe with blades than have to listen to that idiot brag about how he rescued me for the rest of my life,” Griz said.

  Gunny laughed. Those two were always at odds, but he’d seen the big man weep unashamedly when Scratch had taken a bullet through his chest.

  “Yeah, he would be insufferable about it,” Gunny agreed, then readjusted the belt, taking some pressure off his waist. They’d jumped into this whole thing a little too quickly, they should have done some more recon. He’d been in worse situations before, though. This was an aggravation, but his team was fine, they’d been through harder times than this. He still had a few cards up his sleeve. Once Scratch and Stabby were in range of the little handhelds, they could let them know what they needed. Griz would just have to deal with the teasing. He saw Bridget massaging her shoulder and realized his didn’t feel all that great. They’d all pulled triggers a thousand times or more. He drew out his poke and started rolling up a smoke, ignoring the keening, clawing hands a few yards below him. He rested on his haunches, the belt holding him firm on the steep roof. Maybe the people in the church could come out and help them mop up before Scratch got back. Surely, they had some more ammo stashed somewhere. The doors remained closed.

  Hollywood finished his reloads, walked the perimeter of his roof and wound up like the rest of them, staring at the church.

  “Ungrateful bastards,” he said. “The least they could do is acknowledge us. Wave or something. There’s nothing around them, they can come out.”

  “HEY!” Griz cupped his hands and bellowed at the darkening church a block up the road. “A little help?”

  No one answered. The doors stayed shut, the shadows grew longer.

  “Something isn’t right,” Bridget said. “You think it was breached
on the other side? You think the zombies got in?”

  They looked at each other, an unsettling feeling coming over them. Gunny took another drag from his smoke and stood to get a better look. What if all this had been for nothing?

  The lightning rod snapped without warning. No creaking or groaning, no bending and slowly giving way. One second it was holding his weight, the next he was tumbling head-first over the edge. Bridget screamed and Griz sprang up, pulling his .45, but there was nothing they could do. They watched helplessly as he tried to grab the gutter, missed, and plunged into the eager arms of the horde on the widow’s walk.

  He still had a look of surprise on his face when he slammed into their upturned mouths, bowling them down, breaking long-dead bones and cushioning his fall with their rotting bodies. The railing broke and Gunny tried to roll away from them as they slid onto the oversized dormer roof. Grasping hands found his legs and his roll became a desperate kicking, his boots breaking faces and sending splashes of contaminated blood across the shingles. They fought their way down the slope, Gunny moving furiously, kicking and punching and flailing, anything to keep their teeth from finding his flesh. The rest of them poured out of the house and followed the struggling meat over the side. They tripped off the walk, couldn’t find their balance on the angled shingles, face planted, then slid right over the edge and onto the first story roof. Gunny managed to grab the gutter on his fall to the next roof, but the thin metal ripped free. The tumble wasn’t far, but he landed off balance and was immediately knocked down again by falling bodies, their dead weight sending him sprawling. He kept rolling away, trying to put some distance between them. The undead poured out of the third-floor doorway, followed the running mob through the broken rail and bounced down the roof. They hit, rolled, tumbled, and then plunged all the way to the ground. Bodies crumpled and piled up, brittle bones shattered, and the rain of zeds continued unabated for minutes. The long-suffering undead didn’t complain: if they could walk, they struggled to their feet and stumbled back into the house. If they couldn’t, they dragged themselves along the ground, occasionally being flattened by a falling body. The only command they obeyed was the insatiable need to bite and tear human skin. To taste human blood.