Eastern Front: Zombie Crusade IV (45 page)

Luke still hadn’t heard from Gracie by the time the barge he was on hit the shore, but he figured she’d find him soon enough as the rest of the boats were heading toward Vicksburg and there was still an hour of daylight remaining. He found it hard to believe how much had happened since he’d joined the phalanx in the pre-dawn hours; they’d actually defeated the horde. Jack’s plan had worked
, and most of the Allied army had survived. As he looked over the steep bank he was about to climb back up to the bridge he realized again however, that several thousand soldiers were now mostly in pieces on the battlefield. The ground was so littered with corpses and gore, in fact, that Carter ordered a left-face when their barge was unloaded and led everyone around the mess near the river.

Eventually they completed a one-eighty and came back to I-20 between the corpse-strewn railroad-cut and the first defensive line manned by the phalanx. Here the bodies were all hunters, and more than a few were still breathing.

“Form a skirmish line,” Carter yelled out. “Stick a blade through the skull of everythin’ still movin’ between us and the bridge.”

Nobody liked the order, but it sure beat the dangers they’d faced the last time they were on this ground. This was mopping up, and the sooner it was done the sooner everyone could head back to camp. The line had covered about a hundred meters before a column of troops came up the bank from another barge that had just landed, and Luke looked up just in time to see
a familiar young woman carefully working he way through the carpet of corpses. Gracie covered the distance to Luke as quickly as she could, expecting to help dispatch wounded hunters with the rest of the clean-up crew, but Carter waved the teens off to the side of the main carnage.

“Jack’s on his way down, but David’s chompin’ at the bit to rendezvous with the professor, so we’re gonna meet
up with ‘em halfway between the railroad cut and what’s left of the first berm.” Carter winked at Gracie, “He prolly wants to make ya a general for savin’ our sorry asses with yer brilliant plan.”

David caught up with the trio, and he was the first to
spot Jack slowly walking across the battlefield, punching through not-quite-dead hunter brains with the business end of his halberd. Carter led his friends to a relatively clear spot where one of the bombs had flattened a wide patch of the berm, and they waited several minutes for Jack to pick his way through the carnage and join them. There were no intact corpses in the vicinity, only pieces of the hunters that had experienced a blast first-hand.

Jack was grinning from ear to ear when he reached Carter and the others. “I do believe we pulled it off,” he
bragged, “not that I ever doubted it.”

David groaned. “Even though the last thing you need is something to make your head even bigger, I’ve got more good news. And it is good news. It’s incredible news, and it can’t wait another minute.”

“We all know yer wife’s expectin.’ Are ya havin’ twins or somethin’?” Carter slapped David’s back. “I gotta tell ya though, baby news ain’t all that excitin’.”

David stumbled a bit from the force of Carter’s
friendly blow and tripped over a piece of a hunter partially buried in the dirt. He steadied himself and grinned mischievously. “It is if the baby is my brother’s seventeen-year-old son.”

Jack grabbed his brother, “Are you talking about Maggie’s baby?”

“Maggie, Margaret, Cleveland Art School pacifist, in a way she actually did lose you to the war—“

Luke wasn’t sure what he was hearing, “
Are you talking about my mother?”

David turned to Luke and gently explained, “Before she was your mother, she was Jack’s high school sweetheart. She never told him she was pregnant. He never knew about you.”

Luke was speechless, and Jack’s mouth hung open in disbelief until Carter spoke up. “He does look like ya.”

“You both even have those weird double-jointed thumbs,” David added. “Check it out.”

Jack and Luke eyed each other cautiously, keeping their emotional confusion in check as they tried to process David’s revelation. Without speaking, Jack and Luke discarded their gloves and compared hands. Sure enough, they both could bend their thumbs completely backward.

“I don’t know what to say
—“ Luke began as he leaned down to pick up one of the gloves he’d dropped. The next few seconds seemed to unfold in slow motion as a small patch of ground shifted near Luke’s feet. What at first looked like a hard clump of debris rose to the surface, then instantly rotated and came alive. As the hunter’s head snapped out from under the dirt, it instinctively sought the nearest human target. The creature’s teeth sunk into the soft flesh of Luke’s hand as Gracie screamed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.W. Vohs is a former soldier and high school history teacher. He lives in northeast Indiana with his wife and children.