District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (42 page)

“Understood,” Duncan said into the secondary radio. “How
about you release our friend and we’ll grant you your wish.”

Astride the Humvee with Daymon at the wheel, Lev set his
radio down on the cupola rim and shifted his aim up by a few degrees, the iron
sights on the Ma Deuce settling on the wall just about where he guessed the
bitchy-looking blonde’s navel to be.

“That
man
is under arrest for looting,” Adrian spat
into the radio. “We caught him red-handed.”

“You already took your pound of flesh,” Duncan said. “Give
him to us and we’ll be on our way.”

“If I don’t?”

The radio tuned to Channel 10-1 came alive. Taryn said,
“Oliver hasn’t moved a muscle. And the blood stopped flowing from his stump.”

Duncan sighed. “And the rest of the
people
inside?”
he asked Taryn.

“The ones who moved the cars and trucks are coming to the
gate armed with what look like AR-15s.”

“Thank you, Taryn,” Duncan said. “Everybody hear that? If
Oliver’s gonna live we have go in now.”

Dregan voiced his approval over the group frequency.

“Weapons free, then,” Duncan said. “Ray, take your shot if
you have it.” After handing the binoculars over the seatback, Duncan selected
Reverse and was lifting his foot off the brake pedal when Foley said, “I think
Adrian just ordered the blonde to shoot.”

The second the word “shoot” rolled off of Foley’s tongue,
the windshield spidered from a hole punched just below the rearview mirror. A
millisecond later, carried on the air escaping his lungs, a pain-filled moan
was making the rounds of the cab.

In his side vision, in quick succession, Duncan saw the
binoculars falling to the seat, a spritz of blood paint the air between him and
Tran, and Foley’s arms reach for the sky. In the next half-beat, with the crack
from the rifle echoing all around, Foley’s limp body crashed to the floorboard
behind the seats adding a resonant
thud
to the volley of gunfire coming
from behind the gate.

They’re just women.

Dregan’s fateful words as well as everything that had just
happened in less than the blink of an eye registered to Duncan at the same
point in time he was seeing the blonde nearly split in half by a short burst
from the .50 caliber Browning.

Unbeknownst to all who had witnessed the blonde’s body jerk
violently, she was already dead before the first finger-thick slug tore through
her stomach and blew a bowling-ball-sized plug of bone, muscle, and flesh from
her upper back. Because a split second prior to Lev letting loose half a dozen
rounds from the turret-mounted .50, Ray, roughly five hundred feet away, had
reacted quicker, his Winchester Model 70 delivering the 190-grain hunk of lead
that pierced the blonde’s sternum, shredded her beating heart, and causing that
initial death spasm prior to the .50 slugs tearing into her.

The sound of bullets impacting the Dodge met Duncan’s ears.
“Get back there and see what you can do for Foley,” he bellowed, matting the
accelerator, which started the wheels to spinning and a cloud of blue smoke
swirling around the pickup’s bed.

Without uttering a word, Tran punched out of his seatbelt
and crawled over the seatback.

Back at the brown lake house, Taryn exhaled sharply. Upon
seeing the woman in yellow and the gun she was brandishing seemingly cease to
exist—there one second, gone the next—she swung the scope away from the growing
halo of pink mist and noted the armed
rats
scurrying from the gate to
their vehicles. As she opened her mouth to report the development, to her
horror she saw one of the women passing by Oliver drag something shiny across
his exposed neck. “They’re running,” she blurted. Then, as an afterthought,
though watered down on account she didn’t know the facts, she added, “One of
them just did something awful to Oliver.”

There was no verbal reply. Just muzzle flashes coming from
the good guys to the left, then return fire lancing from the rifles of the two
women who were just now rising up over the wall.

Where’d you go, Lotta?
thought Duncan, as outgoing tracer
fire from the .50 cut the air over his wildly fishtailing Dodge.

“He’s dead,” was the answer he got from Tran. Out of
context, sure. But nonetheless heartbreaking, because Duncan was the one who,
instead of having Foley stay behind with Wilson, Taryn, Peter, and Cleo, had
caved and let him come along on this ill-planned affair.

Suddenly the windshield in front of where Tran had been a
few seconds ago took some more rounds, caved inward and began shedding
pea-sized kernels of sharp-edged glass. Then fabric and foam exploded into the
air as more bullets tore into the still-warm seat-back where Tran had been
sitting.

Hollering into the radio, Duncan directed Lev to engage the
shooters on the wall.

One step ahead of the barked order, Lev had delivered a second
ten-round burst right after the first, hitting only the barrier’s concrete lip,
which sent a cloud of gray dust swirling about the shooters and sending Adrian
diving for cover.

Seeing the wall absorb the rounds, Duncan stood on the
brakes. As the truck came to a complete stop and was enveloped in a rolling
cloud of tire smoke, in his mind’s eye he was imagining an aerial view of the
houses, cul-de-sac, stocks, and their relation to each other. Determining that
the stocks, and thus Oliver, were well to the right of the gate on wheels, he
told Lev to rake the gate with the Ma Deuce.

No sooner had Duncan asked than the .50 was punching holes
clean through the gate to no great effect.

One of the twins popped up and fired off a dozen rounds.

Bullets pinging off the front of his truck, Duncan spoke
into the radio in a voice devoid of the authoritarian timbre he’d used on Lev.
“Dregan, I need you to put some rounds on the gate.”

Dregan responded at once, letting loose a three-round volley
from the grenade launcher that went
choonka, choonka, choonka.

There was a half-second of silence as seemingly everyone
paused and waited with bated breath for the 40 mm rounds to cover the short
distance and find their mark.

In the back half of the drawn-out second the silence was
erased when the grenades exploded against the gate in quick succession, causing
Duncan to duck his head and miss the metal panels shearing apart and scattering
on the ground inside the perimeter like a discarded poker hand. Duncan also
missed seeing Dregan’s follow-on three-round-volley land among the fleeing
vehicles, which started the fire whose smoke he saw when he finally rose up
from the seat and peered over the dash, thanking God he hadn’t suffered the
shrapnel wounds he’d been anticipating.

Daymon came on over the group frequency. “Old Man, you’ve
got a pair of rotters at your nine o’clock. They’re too close to engage.”

Having been draped across the center console, there was no
way for Duncan to have seen the pair of zombies as they emerged from behind the
chain-link surrounding the nearby lot full of vehicles. With the trio of dull
concussions still ringing in his ears, Daymon’s blurted warning went unheard.

As Duncan rose up off the seat and looked ahead to assess
the damage inflicted on the gate following the triple thunderclap that had sent
him ducking for cover, a hunched-over female specimen reached through his
partially open window and intertwined her gnarled fingers in his thinning gray
hair.

Keeping his foot on the brake, Duncan powered down the
window with his left hand. Meanwhile, he hefted the Saiga from the seat with
his right, jammed the semi-auto shotgun’s gaping muzzle against the beast’s
neck and pulled the trigger—
twice
.

The first deafening blast didn’t do much. The slug only succeeded
in shredding dermis and flesh a few inches above her right clavicle before
rocketing out the back a little misshapen and with barely half the kinetic
energy as when it had struck.

The second shot shell, however, was filled with nine
high-caliber lead pellets. It was cycled into the chamber automatically by the
escaping gasses created by the previous shot and discharged as soon as Duncan’s
finger caressed the trigger the second time.

Gotta thank Daymon for this new toy
, thought Duncan
as the newly released swarm of shot moving at thirteen-hundred-feet-per-second
punished the creature’s face, half of the pellets finding brain and finishing
what the slug had failed to do.

Gone half-deaf from the double shotgun blasts, Tran rose up
from the back seat with his face, neck, and jacket front streaked with Foley’s
blood. Finding himself face-to-face with a young male first turn, and unsure
what to do, he locked eyes with Duncan.

“Power the window down and shoot the bastard,” Duncan
instructed even as he was practicing advice contrary to his own by pulsing his
window up.

Hands shaking, Tran raised the Beretta level with the
abomination’s head, which strangely was tilted dog-like and staring at him with
eyes devoid of emotion, yet still harboring a spark of recognition.

Seeing a split-second flash of his own nightmarish visage
reflected back at him off the window glass, Tran instantly relived his long
march surrounded by the dead leaving Jackson Hole. The mask of his own dried
blood he had worn then had helped him blend in and walk among them. The same
thing was happening now. So he used it to his advantage, pulsing his window
down and pressing the muzzle into the demon’s left eye.

Though not as loud as the shotgun, the 9mm’s report still
roared inside the cab. As the spent shell pinged off the back of Duncan’s head,
the gory blowback of blood coated the window outside and left a constellation
of crimson dotting the white headliner directly above Tran’s head.

Ears ringing mightily, Tran ran the window up and crawled over
the shredded seatback, thankful to be alive.

When Duncan shifted his gaze from the fallen corpses to the
rearview and noticed the Humvees advancing on his position, barely thirty
seconds had elapsed between the first salvo from the Ma Deuce and Tran earning
the right to ride shotgun in his truck.

After watching the Zs crumble beside the Dodge, Lev threw a
few more rounds from the Browning at the point in space the gate used to
reside.

“Well I’ll be a sombitch,” Duncan said, shifting the rig
into Drive. “Dregan put the hurt on the gate.”

“And the house is on fire,” Tran added.

“So it is,” replied Duncan, craning to see through the
nearly destroyed windshield. “Maybe we give Foley a Viking’s sendoff. He
doesn’t have any kin.”

“No.” Tran said insistently. “He must be buried on the hill.
For me, the same when I go.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Up ahead, the Humvee driven by Daymon charged through the
destroyed opening, passing overtop the twisted metal sheets with a hellish
racket.

Falling in behind Dregan’s Humvee, Duncan started to think
aloud. “I hope he checks his fire. Oliver is to the right.”

No sooner had he said it than the radio crackled to life.
“It’s mostly clear,” Daymon said. “The leader is down behind the scaffolding.”

“Alive?”

“Yeah,” Daymon replied. “But she’s got the same kind of
injury Oliver
had
. Key word …
had
. Come on in. Lev is covering
her and the squirters.” There was a brief moment of silence, then he was back
on the open channel. “Lev wants to know if he can hose down the retreating
vehicles.”

“Negative,” Duncan said as he wheeled the Dodge slowly over
the rent metal panels. “We’ve got their leader. That’s good enough.” Once
inside, he saw the back gate and a number of pickup trucks speeding away, brake
lights flaring as they slowed and turned onto an identical feeder road a
quarter mile away. He shifted his gaze to the Humvees and noticed that they had
been parked so that their weapons were covering the semicircle of homes.

The radio in Duncan’s hand crackled to life again. “I see
one of the lookalike girls,” said Gregory. “I will dismount and take her
prisoner.”

“Be careful,” Alexander Dregan said to the son recently
spared a painful death to Omega. “Shoot her if she moves.”

Pulling the Dodge to the curb next to the stocks, Duncan
killed the engine and craned over his seatback. Foley was slumped sideways on
the floor, staring straight up, mouth agape. The man’s white tee shirt, parka,
and jeans were crimson. The rear seat was awash in blood and viscera and fine
down feathers from his punctured parka. The bullet’s exit out his back had no
doubt left a wound many times larger than the nickel-sized hole where it
entered. Hearing the low rumble of the F-650’s V-10, Duncan gripped the wheel
two-handed and banged his head against his own white knuckles. “Stupid, stupid,
stupid,” he chanted as Jamie brought the truck to a halt just outside his
window.

Hearing the engine cut off, Duncan sat upright and shifted
his gaze back to Oliver. Let it linger, resisting the urge to run headlong
across the open ground to check the man’s neck for a pulse that his gut told
him wasn’t there. Instead, he picked up the two-way radio set to 10-1 and began
issuing orders. He tasked Daymon and Lev with clearing the homes of lingering
bad guys … or gals, whatever the case may be.

Since the Dregans were already securing the prisoners,
Duncan sent Jamie out across the cul-de-sac to take up station near the newly
discovered rear gate. Surely the dead had heard the gunfire and explosions and
revving engines of the fleeing vehicles.

Then Duncan looked into the rearview. Framed by the bent
gate panels still attached to the crude set of wheels, he could see the upper
story of the green house Ray had chosen to set up his overwatch. He thumbed the
Talk key. “Ray … you there?”

“Where am I gonna go?”

Good point
, thought Duncan. He said, “Sit tight and
watch the road and gate for baddies and rotters. If all goes well, we will be
by to get you shortly.”