Apocalypse Atlanta (39 page)

They were damned quiet.  They didn’t breathe, pant or gasp like humans would; and they certainly didn’t snarl, howl, or growl.  Peter found that a bit annoying too; the movies always made sure monsters had distinctive sounds.  Not so with the zombies.  The process that converted, animated, whatever, them from humans into zombies stilled their hearts and lungs.  No breathing, no air moving in and out, and thus there was no sound.

The only sound they did make was whatever their feet scraping or stumbling or stepping across the ground made.  That could be enough, sometimes, but the zombies didn’t seem to have a uniform level of individual coordination.  Oh they were all pretty bad compared to even a clumsy human, but some of the zombies could walk a lot closer to normal than others.  The slightly more able zombies made less noise when they staggered towards you, dragged their feet less.

It made them quieter, which  made them more dangerous.  Plus the zombies tended to stand around, or wander very slowly, moving more slowly than a person might crawl, when nothing had triggered their pursuit instinct.  They had a number of wounded from, and had lost four dead, when a Guardsman rounded a corner or obstacle and found they were already within grabbing range of a hungry zombie.

As Johns went around the car, a Ford Taurus with a huge impact dent on its front end that looked suspiciously like it had hit someone, Peter stopped and turned.  The zombies to their north, a pack of at least fifty, were moving this way, but he could see the last members of the unit just now making the turn.  So long as you kept moving at a brisk walk you could stay ahead of a zombie.

But zombies didn’t get tired.

Satisfied the Guardsmen were still keeping up, Peter turned back front and followed.  There were about ten soldiers ahead of him, Johns followed by another pair who were assigned to watch Johns’ flanks so he didn’t have to divide his attention, then a clump of soldiers who had passed Peter when he stopped.  They moved cautiously, their rifles moving in concert with their heads as they swiveled and turned to look in all directions.

Peter glanced up after a couple of steps.  The Westin Peachtree still burned, more visible now that they were closer to it.  If they kept going in this direction, unlikely considering the runaround the zombies were giving them, they’d be near the hotel soon.  Peter hoped they found a breakthrough to the east before they got that far; he didn’t want to get anywhere near the Westin.  Word was it had been on fire since around sunset.  He didn’t like the sound of that.

As that thought slid through the back of his mind, he heard the snap of gunfire.  Instinctively he whirled, checking, but even as he turned he realized the fire was too distant to be anyone in the unit.  He caught Foreman’s eye, and jogged back several yards to join him.

“That’s not civvies.” Foreman said, carefully keeping his voice neutral.

Peter nodded.  He could see the hope in the back of Foreman’s eyes, and took his lead from his friend.  It wouldn’t do to get the unit excited before there was something certain to be hopeful about.  “Military, gotta be.” he said calmly.  The chattering crack-snap of M-16s being rapid fired was distinctive, but he also heard heavier weapons going off.  And there were a lot of them.

This was Georgia, a key Southern state, and there were a lot of weapons floating around.  Part of Southern culture was guns, but not this many.  Not all in the same place.  Peter cocked his head, trying to fix the location.  The buildings in the area distorted and redirected the echoes, but he was pretty sure they were off to the southwest some, but not too far.

“Southwest?” Foreman asked after a moment, clearly having been doing the same thing as Peter.

“I think so sir.”

“Okay.  Find them as quick as you can.”

“Got it.” Peter nodded.  Raising his voice, he addressed the entire unit.  “Double time, we’re going after whatever that is.  Shooters, you’re plowing the road for us.”  He broke into a run as the rest of the Guardsmen lifted their pace to a jog.  Peter caught up with Johns just as the point got close enough to the intersection to begin seeing what the cross-street looked like.

“Southwest.” Peter told him, settling into a position a few feet behind and to the side of Johns and his two backup flankers.  “As best you can obviously.”

“Well we’re taking a right here then.” Johns said unnecessarily.  He led the ragged column, which was a generous application of the word if there ever had been one, around the turn.  The handful of shooters, those who Peter had noticed seemed able to actually hit what they aimed at, had to take down about ten zombies as they made the turn.  Their path west was still clear as they started passing West Peachtree Street, but Peter saw the flankers heft their rifles into firing position as they entered the intersection.

A moment later he saw why.  To the south it wasn’t a problem.  There were probably seventy or eighty zombies in the street there, but they were all headed away from the unit, probably toward the mass of gunfire that was still going off to the southwest.  But to the north there was another forty or fifty zombies, and they were also headed south.

Peter took another long look west, trying to evaluate.  If the echoes weren’t throwing him off too much, they were close to whatever was doing all the shooting.  They were on North Avenue, which went across the Connector two blocks to the west.  He brought his weapon up to his shoulder and took a fast look through the optical scope, not wanting to take the time to lift the binoculars.  Sure enough, the overpass where North traversed the Interstate was pretty thick with shuffling bodies.

So whether or not the unknown shooters were close, the unit was going to have to either reverse course or cut south on the next cross-street.  And if Spring was as tangled up as West Peachtree, they could easily end up surrounded.  Peter looked over his shoulder, then stopped jogging long enough to turn and walk backwards for a few steps to get a better look.

“Well, our trailers should get past these fuckers anyway.” Peter muttered to himself, seeing the soldiers bringing up the rear of the unit were likely to clear past West Peachtree before the zombies to the north could close the intersection.  Turning back forward, he caught up to Johns again and tried to remember to breath evenly, steadily, as he jogged along.  Holding his breath wouldn’t change the odds any.

As they spilled into the intersection at Spring Street, Johns and his left side flanker looked south towards Linden Avenue, while Peter and the right flanker looked north.  Peter winced a little, seeing another large zombie pack that was headed right for them.  The leading elements of the pack were maybe twenty feet distant.  He resisted the urge to swear, with difficulty, and glanced south quickly.

What he saw gave him a long pause, longer than he’d intended.  He could feel the zombies to the north reaching out to get their hands on the unit.  They were the closest threat to him, and he and Foreman needed to do something about them extremely quickly.  But what was happening to the south was just that surreal, and he had to take several seconds to look.

A block past Linden was where the Connector curved southwest, so there was the overpass for North Avenue to their west as well as another for Spring that was two blocks south of where he stood.  He could just see the Spring Street overpass as it went across the interstate.  But between that and where he stood was a convoy of humvees and fire trucks.

They were stuck on Spring, just south of Linden where the curving off-ramps that connected Spring to the Interstates below terminated.  The two lead hummers were skidded sideways, one over turned on its side and the other jammed up against its under carriage.  Directly behind it was the first of the fire trucks, trapping it against the wrecked hummer.

The rest of the vehicles in the convoy were stuck together, a little untidily and occasionally at angles indicating their drivers had tried to avoid the nose-to-tail chain of collisions, but they were all touching and crammed in.  A teaming mass of zombies blanketed the intersection of Spring and Linden, flooding around the vehicles and down the off-ramp, pounding on the doors and windows.

“Captain!” Peter shouted, kicking himself back into gear.  Whatever was going on at Spring and Linden, and there was a lot happening there, it meant nothing to the men and women with him if they were trapped and eaten by zombies.  He looked away from the gunfire that was spitting from within the surrounded humvees to find Foreman just arriving next to him.

“Shit, they’re trapped.” Foreman observed as he stopped and looked at the fighting to the south.

“We’re about to be too.” Peter said, grabbing his friend’s arm and pointing at the encroaching zombies to the north.

“Engage north.” Foreman said after a single glance in that direction.  “Clear everything with teeth that way that’s coming here, at least a block out.  Or slow them down somehow.  I’m going to try to raise someone over there.”  He lifted his radio and started fiddling with the frequency knob.

“Firing positions, take out everything north of us.” Peter bellowed, waving his arms and pointing north as heads turned to look at him.  “Flanks, cover east and west.  Take your fucking time, conserve ammo!”

Peter waited until he saw most of the unit was shooting north along Spring, then brought his AR-15 up and settled himself.  Forcing himself not to give into the crawling need for haste that was enveloping his spine, he settled the dot in his sight on the forehead of a man with half the skin on his face missing beneath the bill of the Tennessee ball cap perched on his head.  His thumb clicked off safe and into semi, and he squeezed off the shot.

His round took the zombie right below the orange ‘T’ logo on the hat.  As the zombie collapsed, Peter hardly had to adjust his sights at all.  The zombies behind that one were doing what zombies always did, press forward without bothering to take notice, or cover, as they staggered toward their next meal.  Peter shot another Tennessee fan, then a trio of zombies wearing Auburn attire, and added a man with a Jeff Gordon t-shirt to his tally.

He was just lining up on a zombie who was still dressed in some comic book or cartoon character’s outfit when he heard several rounds zip past him.  He often liked to tell people, when they asked for whatever reason, that once you’d been shot at it was an experience and sensation you never forgot.  There was a lot of noise, with a lot of rifles firing that made it quite hard to hear, but he instinctively threw himself to the pavement as something in the back of his mind told him to.

Cries of pain and surprise erupted from a number of the Guardsmen around him as bullets took them.  Peter twisted, staying low, and saw muzzle flashes from the trapped convoy swinging in their direction as the soldiers within fired indiscriminately.  “Down, down, down!” he shouted.  “Everyone down, incoming fire south.  Down!”

Soldiers went down, some diving prone positions while others were collapsing as blood flowed.  Peter took a fast count and came up with about ten wounded from the fuckers to the south.  “Keep clearing north, keep an eye on the flanks.” he shouted, then looked around, staying flat and begrudging every inch he raised his head trying to see better.

He finally spotted Foreman near the southeastern corner of the intersection, a few feet off the sidewalks.  Peter low crawled over and roughly shook the captain’s boot twice when he was close enough to reach.  “Sir, you find their frequency?  We need them to watch their line of fire.”

He heard, faintly beneath the gunfire, a gurgling groan.  Peter crawled closer, and then saw the blood that stained Foreman’s utilities.  “Oh shit!” Peter snarled, twisting his arm back to one of the lower pouches on his pack.  He yanked out the surplus medical kit he’d picked up as part of his personal gear.  It didn’t have any of the injectors for pain, those were illegal without a prescription, but otherwise was stocked with everything he needed for emergency treatment of most combat wounds.

“Captain.” Peter said urgently as he opened the flat plastic kit and grabbed a pre-packaged bandage.  “Captain Foreman.”  He ripped the waxed paper open and got the bandage out as he tried to get a sense of where the injuries were.  Spurting blood, pulsing in time with Foreman’s heartbeat, drew his attention to the right hip.  Ripping at the cloth, he widened the tear and revealed a bloody expanse of skin.

His fingers drew a sharper groan of pain from Foreman as he probed the skin, but he found the wound and pressed the bandage down atop it.  He held it in place while he frantically wiped away blood with his free hand, looking for the exit hole on the back of his friend’s body.

Finally, as the bandage started soaking through, he gave up and grabbed a fresh one from the kit.  Either he was missing it, or there was only the entry hole.  That was bad.  If there wasn’t an exit wound, then the bullet was still inside.

Peter ripped open the second bandage with his teeth and slapped it down atop the sodden pad already in place.  Almost as a way to distract himself from the thought of the hip wound, he got his pocket knife out.  The knife wasn’t a switch blade, just a standard folding knife, but the way his thumb snapped it could have been mistaken for a spring loaded one.

Still holding the bandages in place, he got the knife into the bloody hole he found midway up the right side of Foreman’s shirt.  Pulling outward to avoid cutting Foreman, he slit the shirt open wide enough to see bloody skin beneath.  Dropping the knife, he grabbed the rent in the shirt and pulled hard, opening it up further with a rip.  Where was the wound . . . there.  He got a third bandage out and opened it with his teeth, then got it into place.