Decay (Book 2): Humanity (15 page)

“He now has a J carved right into his face,” Michael said before letting out a victorious snicker. “So anyway, now that we have ‘dishonored’ one of their leaders ‘against the treaty’, they, of course, left out the part where they destroyed supplies that we needed to keep
you
.” He pointed to Guillermo when he said that. “Alive. We are at war with them. They will do whatever it takes to kill us. Unfortunately for them, we don’t die. We are too smart for them to kill.”

“Wow,” exclaimed Guillermo. He looked over at Jonathan, who was sitting quietly on a bucket seat taken from an old Mustang. Jonathan was deep in thought, his heavy coat folded in his lap. His gaze rested on the semi, but he wasn’t looking at it. He wasn’t even awake in the sense that he was consciously there. His mind was somewhere else, up in the mountains with Reese.

“What’s the plan, Randy?” Bill asked as he walked into the dorm room that Randy inhabited at the college on the north end of the city. “We can’t get through that wall. They won’t let us get close enough at any time of the day. Also, people are starting to ask about the others. Jerry, Tim, Brian, Jennifer. They want to know where the other board members have gone. I certainly can’t tell them that we took them down to the Mississippi and dropped them off the bridge.”

“Tell them the board never came back from a conference they had with the other group. They went to meet, to find a way to put this nonsense behind us. We just want to live peacefully, after all. Nobody has to know that those cowards wanted to avoid a war. A war with the tribe of insects that did
THIS
to my face!” Randy screamed, the bandage over his healing nose made his voice nasally, as he pointed to the white scar on his face. The scar stood out like a white chalk line on a blackboard.

Bill touched his own scar gently. Instead of thinking about the
boy
who did that to him, he thought about how Randy was going to allow him to do it a second time that day in the hospital. Randy–that damned coward–hiding in here while everyone else busts their asses for him. Randy couldn’t even pull the trigger on the board members. Bill had slit their throats, one by one, while they slept in their beds. Bill had assembled a few trustworthy men and took the bodies out to the river.

While Randy barked orders from his cozy little room, Bill had done what he could to keep everyone together. It would be Bill who would go to everyone this morning, this vicious, cold morning, and explain to them that the board went to that meeting. Word was sent from the other camp. They had killed the members of the board, and they would soon be coming for the rest.

“We have to act!” he bellowed as the small community looked on with sadness in their eyes. “We have to show them that we won’t stand for this injustice!” Applause started from the group, slowly at first, but interrupted by Bill before it could develop. “I don’t want a war. Randy doesn’t want a war. They marred our faces out of pure hatred for us! Even after what
they
did, Randy wanted peace, forgiveness, but they sent a clear sign that
they
don’t want peace.
They
. . . want . . . A WAR!”

The crowd that filled the college campus erupted into a chaotic jumble of cheers, applause, and war cries. The roars drew fiends to the fences. The tall, thick fences that were built with chain link fence, barbed wire, rail road ties, steel beams, and utility poles torn from the ground. It couldn’t compete with the wall at the other camp, but it would do just fine in keeping the undead out of the community. The fiends rattled the chain link fence as they fought to enter. The metallic rattle only added to the terrifying rumble thundering from the campus.

Chapter 20

“Ok, stand right here,” Jonathan said to Guillermo as he walked him across the crunchy grass. They stopped thirty feet away from a small moving truck on the other side of the large yard from the garage, the doors were closed.

“What’s this?” Guillermo asked.

“Open the door,” Jonathan ordered Michael, who grabbed the handle, flung the door open and sprinted across the grass in a way that was made awkward by his thick clothing. They watched as light filled into the box. The fiend stepped out, almost tumbling over as he dropped down to the cold earth. “It is alright,” Jonathan assured Guillermo as he saw his friend take a step back. “Just watch.”

The fiend’s sight finally fell on them, and he let out a shriek. The shriek reminding Guillermo instantly of little Sam from the BCRC lab, yet it was much weaker than Sam’s shrieks had been. It lacked the power that small child commanded. “I’ve never heard another one make a sou—“

The fiend rushed at them, startling Guillermo and causing him to land on the hard ground. The undead man shrieked and ran, running as fast as the star of a high school track team. Maybe faster.

Within feet of the three men the fiend came to a complete, jerking stop. His body stopped, anyway, his feet continued forward, swinging his legs out in a half circle. As soon as the dead man hit the ground he rolled over and was back to his feet, clawing and digging in an attempt to reach its victims. Blood trickled down from his mouth, and his gray-yellow eyes were filled with an intense hatred.

“What the–?” Guillermo asked, trying to understand what just happened.

“Some of them can run, Guillermo,” Jonathan stated. “I have captured a few. Setting up a lab, I was able to study them. Not as effectively as I would have liked, but I found that there is some kind of mutation that the chemical is undergoing. Perhaps evolving? It is incredible! The rate of speed some of these ‘runners’ can reach have been recorded at ten, to as much as fifteen, miles per hour. They are fast.”

“You sound a little more excited than you should be by this, Jonathan,” Guillermo said. His laugh was really just a slow sigh. “This seems pretty bad. Can they, you know, can they evolve, beyond this?”

“Evolution is perfectly possible when you think about it,” Jonathan explained. “As living bodies become harder to come across and even harder to catch, their bodies adapted. They have to move faster to keep up, but it can work to our advantage.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been asleep for a while,” Michael said. “We’ve done quite a bit of work in the past few weeks.”

“We have been collecting,” said Jonathan slyly.

Guillermo knew right away what that meant and felt sick. “You know how that ended in Colorado, Jonathan.” He rubbed his temples with his middle and index fingers. “It ended badly for a lot of people.” He shook Jonathan from his arm and shuffled his way slowly toward the house.

“I have faith in you, Jonathan,” Michael assured.

“Thanks. He is right, though. We really should work on more fail safes. I wish I would have grabbed the journal from my experiments with the fluoroantimonic acid that we picked up from BCRC. I think the two of us could have really produced a powerful weapon. I just hope th—“ The explosion rocked the earth, and Jonathan saw Guillermo fall to the ground. He ran over to help his friend while Michael ran to the stairs that led up the wall.

“What the hell was that?” he asked as he reached the top. One of the guards pulled his mask down from his face.

“They are launching rockets at the wall,” the guard stated.

“Shit.” Michael looked out from the top of the wall and into the field across the street. A small army marched through the field and projected another small rocket toward the wall. It emerged from the smoke, arching high before hitting the wall low. Three desert sand Humvees rolled up out of the tree row next to the field, followed by two tanks. A fourth Humvee sat out of sight on the far side of the field.

The M58 Wolfs drove up onto the road in front of the wall and cut right down the center. The old tank’s tracks rattled and clanked on the concrete. A thick white smoke emitted from them, blocking out the entire field. Another rocket emerged from the smoke screen leaving no time to react. It hit high, just underneath where Michael was standing. He lost his footing and tumbled down the steel grated stairs, catching himself before he made it far enough to cause any serious damage to his body.

Thunder roared from the Humvees as the Browning .50 caliber machine guns unleashed their volley of lead. Muzzle flashes looked like heat lightning behind the heavy smoke that blanketed the street. Guards on the wall returned fire with military issued M16s, aiming for the flashes or spraying out into the field, hoping for a lucky round to take someone down. Another rocket, this one shot high, dropped straight down into the camp.

The explosive hit the pump for the well, causing water to spray wildly into the air. It pooled up, unable to soak into the frozen earth. Jonathan felt another rumble, and saw a chunk of the wall crumble away. Smoke from the M58s poured in through the opening. “Rob!” he screamed as he saw the Mad Man running toward the wall. “Mad Man Rob!” he screamed again, this time being heard over the sounds of gunfire, bullets, screams, and explosions.

Mad Man Rob turned to look at him. Jonathan pointed to the large silver semi-trailer that was parked next to the moving truck on the opposite side of the yard. With a nod of understanding, Mad Man Rob ran toward an old yellow backhoe. Smoke rolled from the stack as the machine started. The smell of diesel exhaust filled the air.

Driving over to the trailer, Mad Man Rob pushed it along. The flat tires slid across the frozen grass. He pushed it through the small pond that was forming around the well pump, sending small waves crashing at Jonathan’s feet. As the smoke continued to fill the air like a thick fog, Mad Man Rob sounded the horn on the backhoe.

The blast sounded like a foghorn blaring somewhere in the cold mist. Jonathan looked down at the expanding pool of water that danced precariously around his black boots. Explosions and gunshots pelted out somewhere in the mist like a distant war. Frozen earth trembled violently beneath him, disturbing the water’s tranquility. The experience was dream-like to him, almost like déjà vu. Pretty sure he had done this before, Jonathan turned his head to the sky, expecting to see the planes fly by, but there were none. Their chemicals didn’t burn his skin, causing large welts and bubbles and melting his skin off in thick layers.

With the silver trailer backed up against the hole in the wall, Mad Man Rob hopped down from the backhoe and ran back to the garage. He still had tricks up his sleeves, Jonathan knew. Then the sound of lead piercing metal spread a smile across his face. The rat-a-tat-tat was followed by shrieks that echoed from a metallic planet far away. Those shrieks were soon followed by screams, which were followed by a fresh round of gunshots from further out from the wall.

The undead in the trailer were illuminated by the dim light that seeped in as two men pulled the doors open and prepared to climb in. Their plan was to detonate a charge that would send shrapnel through the murdering devils inside the wall, using their own barricade as a weapon against them. Instead, the small horde, minus the few that had been destroyed by the penetrating lead, shrieked and charged out quickly.

They moved faster than the two men could react. Tearing into flesh and breaking bones. Swinging their arms wildly, the fiends grabbed ahold of anything they could. The men’s bodies were crushed under the weight of the horde as the fiends trampled over them in an attempt to rip their lives away. By the time the fiends moved on, running into the smoky field to find their next victims, the men lay dead. Their torsos were flattened, and their guts spilled out onto the concrete, neither body had arms or legs, and their heads had been busted open.

Through the smoke that continued to pour from the M58s the small army in the field slowly advanced toward the camp. They were slowed down by the screams that came from the thick smoke. Each man looked to the man next to him. None of them were soldiers, and they knew it. Trembling with terror, the men took slow breaths and listened. Their gas masks allowed them to breath comfortably in the smoke, but it hindered their senses slightly, as these scared man hadn’t worn anything like them before.

A young man, a boy really, watched his father walking slowly in front of him. The father was barely visible through the smoke, and he couldn’t help but think this was going to end badly for them. He knew, at his young age of fourteen, that they were at every disadvantage here. He tried to talk his father out of coming. Telling him that they couldn’t win this battle here, but he
is
just a boy after all. What does he know about war?

He felt something streak past him in the smoke. The streak was followed by a muffled scream. Soon there was another streak. Soon there was another scream. The boy’s heart pounded. He could feel it in his eye. Keeping his father in view, he kept walking forward, praying under his breath.
God protect my family
. The frozen grass crunched just to his left, and the scream was so close. Something sprayed his coat and jeans all down the left side of his body like a Super Soaker.

Wiping at his side with a gloved hand, he brought the hand to his masked face. Blood. Blood had sprayed him. Just then he realized he had lost track of his father. He had walked on not realizing his son had stopped following. The boy ran forward in a panic. Searching and spinning, he knew his father couldn’t have made it far. Stepping on a soft, wet dirt pile in the field caused him to hit the ground hard, spraining his wrist.

The boy lay on his back to catch his breath, lifted his head, and realized the dirt pile was his father’s body. The man’s face had been crushed into his skull, but the boy knew that terrible haircut. His mother had cut their hair–his father’s sandy blond was now streaked with blood and brain matter–in the only haircut she knew how to do. A terrible interpretation of Elvis’ hair that looked like it was done by a blind man.

“Dad!” The boy’s scream came out slightly muffled. Then he saw the fiend ripping strips of flesh from his father’s abdomen. “DAD!” he screamed again. He raised his rifle, still really unsure of how to use it, and pulled the trigger. The round hit the fiends shoulder, irritating the dead man.

The dead man leapt over the man’s body and tackled the boy, who fired every round from the rifle into the fiend’s dead face. His gray eyes bulged as the pressure built in his skull. Pulling the fiend away, the boy knelt by his dead father and cried. His cries were followed by rage. The people behind the wall were responsible for this, and they would pay.

Grabbing his father’s rifle, the boy walked through the smoke toward the wall. He would single-handedly take them all down. Caring nothing for the fiends that lurked in the dense smoke, he marched. He marched until his feet hit pavement. He marched until his hands touched the wall that protected the animals that had locked themselves safely behind it. Following the wall along, he came to the hole stoppered by the silver trailer. The two bodies, or what was left of them, lay splattered across the concrete.

The boy knew why they had been sent. One of them carried a bomb, and he would use it to blow this hole wide open and tear the throats out of each one of these bastards on the other side. After a minute of searching the gooey mess, he found the charge, a heavy wad of clay with a display wired into it. He climbed into the trailer, the smell of rot and gun smoke was so thick it penetrated his mask.

He didn’t know how big this blast would be, but he estimated this block of C4 must weigh about five pounds if not slightly more. The boy knelt down in the trailer just on the other side of the wall and began to press the buttons on the display. Completely unsure of what he was doing, the boy never knew he died. The blast liquefied his body and turned his bones into powder. Metal from the trailer flew in every direction inside the wall, and the wall, already weak in that spot, collapsed.

“Michael!” screamed Jonathan as he lost his brother in the explosion. He had been working to stop the water that had been flowing from the well when the explosion took down the wall. The elderly man that he had been working with was killed by a rivet from the trailer. It tore through his heart, splattering Jonathan with his warm blood. “MICHAEL!”

The gunfire and smaller explosions continued on, producing a deafening roar that Jonathan could feel in his chest. He couldn’t even hear the splashes as he ran through the cold, ankle-deep pool that had filled half of the side yard. Jonathan ran toward the wall, ignoring his squishy boots and cold feet. Guillermo stepped out from the door on the front of the house and yelled to Jonathan as he ran by, but Jonathan heard nothing of what he said.

“Michael!” he screamed again, this time using a temporary silence to his advantage.

“I’m here!” Michael hollered back. He climbed over the rubble that used to be a thirty foot wide section of the wall. “I’m fine. We need to move another trailer up.” The twins stepped over several other bodies that had been shredded by the shrapnel.

“Where did Mad Man Rob go?” Jonathan asked, not realizing that even in this desperate moment he couldn’t shorten it to Rob.

“He is putting the finishing touches on something. I can move the next trailer in. You see if you can help anyone here, and you may want to keep your weapons handy,” Michael said.