Medora: A Zombie Novel (22 page)

Anderson leaned over the other side of Ortega and brought his gun up to
the head of woman who was slumped forward in her seat, with both of her white femur bones sticking out through her kneecaps.

“Hey!” Ortega yelled at him, “Just wait for me to have a look first and then shoot.”

“Yes, sir,” Anderson said softly, taking his gun back.

Ortega continued walking down the crooked
aisle but stopped at each row to inspect every person in every chair with Anderson doing the shooting afterward. They quickly developed a system of Ortega checking three people at a time with Anderson following him with three rapid shots. Anderson sighed in silent frustration at the time Ortega seemed to be taking with each body. He turned back to Jeremy who looked back at him and shrugged his shoulders.

From the Humvee, Dave could hear the three gunshots followed
by a small moment of silence and then three more shots. He was continually looking over his shoulder; behind the Humvee and down whatever small alleyways he could see from where he was stationed. They’re somewhere, he thought, they are out there right now. Walking slowly away from the Humvee, he approached a small alley in between two one-story brick buildings and could see stretching green farmland that ran into a distant tuft of trees. He jumped a little at the next three pops coming from the airplane.

Back on the plane, Anderson watched Ortega as he continued down the
aisle inspecting every passenger. He spoke up, “Hey, Captain, where do they usually keep the passenger manifest?”

“It’s usually somew
here in the cockpit, so go look for it.” He had stopped at a bald man dressed in a dark suit who was severely doubled over his seat belt, positioned unnaturally from a broken spine. Ortega looked down at him and lifted his bearded chin upwards to get a look on his face. The man’s eyes slowly opened and his mouth fell open, releasing a round collection of coagulated blood that fell on his suit and slowly slid down his shirt. The man lifted his arms and ineptly grabbed for Ortega’s neck. Ortega quickly backed away from him, put his gun to the side of his face and pulled the trigger. The bullet left out the man’s opposite cheekbone, taking his nose and upper half of his face with it leaving behind a blackened crater with two eyes resting loosely above.

Ortega looked up above at the overhead compartment and tried opening
it, but the latch was stuck. The entire bulkhead had crumpled together and changed shape from the impact of the crash. Taking a long serrated blade from his side, he firmly stabbed it into the thin plastic compartment and started using it as a saw to create an opening. “You two get to the cockpit and look for the flight manifest.”

“Yes, sir.”
They squeezed past him and kicked in the narrow cockpit door that was already ajar. The cockpit was empty and the windshield had been shattered inward with black blood that had dripped down the glass and had dried in place. “Cockpit has no bodies,” Jeremy yelled back to Ortega who was now busy sawing a large hole in the thin plastic of the luggage compartment.

“Just get the items,” he yelled back. He was now spilling small bags of luggage out of the hole he had made. Bending
down, he inspected a small leather bag. “Did you find the flight manifest?” He opened the small bag and produced a metal canister from it.

Jeremy came back into the main ca
bin, “Yes sir, and the black box. Sir, would you like us to finish making sure each of the bodies are dead? Some of them still might wake up on us.”

“Yes, finish them up.” He stood up and placed the small canister in his pack, “You say
there are no pilots up there? I haven’t seen any pilots back here either.” He looked out a small oval passenger window and saw Layton standing still with his back against the plane wreckage.

“Hey, hand me that manifest.” He took the loose papers from Jeremy and read
it over, and then bent over and searched the bald man that he had just shot and found his wallet, which he inspected and put into his pack.

Anderson
stopped shooting the passengers and looked at Ortega for a moment. Ortega stared right back at him and the two men paused in silence.

“Who is he?” Anderson asked.

“You don’t need to know.”

Anderson put his gun down to his side.
“Yes, sir. Do you want me to keep shooting these bodies?”

“No, no, in
fact, forget it. Let’s get off the plane, because with all this noise we’re making, I have a feeling we’re about to be surrounded.” He turned back towards the tail end of the plane and walked up the slanted aisle, his boots stomping on the hollow floor.

Out in the alley, Dave made his way to the end and stepped out to the back end of a small shop
. He looked to his left out into the open fields and saw a crowd of dozens of people walking toward him. “

Oh,
shit!” he yelled. He picked up his walkie-talkie. “Hey, I see them out here outside of the main street behind the buildings. They hear us and they’re coming in!”

Without
any obstacles of the city, the sick moved swiftly across the open field, guided by each other’s movements like a flock of geese in the sky. It appeared that they earlier had knocked down a wooden fence surrounding a cow pasture and had been chasing a few cows around a small farm. Dave lifted his gun, thought about firing and then decided to run back towards the Humvee where the rest of the unit was gathering. Ortega and the others were jumping down from the airlock of the plane.

“Hey,
hey, Boomtown, get your ass over here!” Clarence yelled at him, holding his rifle outward towards the alley. Dave came running down the small alleyway with the horde now slowly following. He looked over his shoulder and could see their light shadows from the low laying sun coming around the corner.

Ortega stomped down the
quiet street and joined the unit at the Humvee.

“Boomtown, how many do you see out here?”

“I don’t know. There’s a whole herd of them out there. Maybe fifty or a hundred, it’s hard to tell.”

“
Well, how many, fifty or one hundred?”

“Closer to one hundred.
They’re coming. They hear us and they know we’re here.”

“Coming where, right down that alley you just came from?”

“Yes, I, I think so.”

Ortega glanced over towards the empty alley, his large black eyebrows furrowing beneath his helmet. “Clarence, go get the flamer and position just outside the alleyway by the wall of the building.” Clarence quickly disappeared to the back of the Humvee.

“I want Layton, Anderson and Jeremy standing directly in front of the alleyway. When you’re in place, wait for my word and I want you to fire your guns in the air at about thirty-second intervals to draw them down the alley. Now it’s safe to assume that there are other infected people walking around not just coming down through that alley. Clinton and I are going to stay back, covering your asses from any other of the infected that are going to hear the shit storm that we’re about to make.”

Clarence now had the tank on his
back, was waddling up to a brown-bricked building, and leaned against the wall in place around the corner from the alley. Anderson, Layton and Jeremy ran into the middle of the street a few hundred yards from the plane on their left and were standing directly in front of the alley with Clarence on their front right flank positioned at the mouth of the alley.

Ortega looked at Dave
. “Get in the truck.”

Dave silently opened the door to the Humvee, slammed it shut and looked out the window towards the alley with his gun pointing out.

The group of men stood still, as a warm wind swept through the main street, whipping brown dust up around them. A silence descended on them as they waited for the horde to come. Dave looked out the window at Clarence, with his thick-rimmed glasses staring down as he leaned against the building behind him. Anderson stood with his rifle pointed upwards, staring straight down the dirty alleyway that led to the open sky behind. He could see shadowy figures and a few bobbing heads beginning to stumble down the shallow corridor. 

“Alright, aim up and fire
,” Ortega yelled.

The three men simultaneously unleashed a frenzy of fire and bullets into the air with continuous loud cracking with each burst of the triggers. The figures swarmed in the alley, picking up movement,
organizing into streaming rows of bodies as they could all detect the sound and movement, each instinctually drawn in by the cacophony of gunfire.

“Keep firing! Clarence, get ready for the torch!”

Clarence wrapped a large pair of black rubber goggles around his glasses and dropped them over his eyes. Pumping the nozzle of the flamethrower once, he let out a shot of liquid fire onto the sidewalk, ensuring that the flamethrower was primed. 

The
horde was almost breaching the entrance to the street when Ortega gave the command for Layton, Anderson and Jeremy to open fire on the crowd. A dozen of front line bodies took the brunt of the first blow of bullets. Their limbs and faces were quickly pulverized by the gunfire, slamming them into the rows behind them, causing congestion of the flood of the infected as it streamed into the alley. As the front row of the horde fell to the ground, the next in line started taking the gunfire and falling as well, creating a dam to the stream of bodies from the alley.

“
Keep it going! Build up the bodies at the entrance there.”

The gunfire continued as new bodies emerged from behind the bloodied pile of flesh and body parts
. The continuous firing knocked down each surge of the infected.

“Hold your fire!” Ortega yelled out and turned to Clarence with his hands cupping his mouth. “Let the fire loose!”

Wearing elbow-length black rubber gloves and an aluminum apron, Clarence stepped out in front of the horde, the cylindrical fuel tank towering from his shoulders. A heap of bodies was piled in front of him with several men and women clambering on top, attempting to hurdle themselves over the human blockade that had accumulated. Clarence pulled a long trigger-handle on the handle of his flamethrower. An ignition trigger sparked briefly at the end of the nozzle before a bright orange ribbon of fire shot out. He raised the angle of the nozzle, showering the heap of bodies in the liquefied fire. Clothing and flesh spontaneously burst into flames as he began sweeping the entire entrance with fire.

From the Humvee, Dave could hear the sizzling of skin perforated by erratic moaning. He saw that the
horde was no longer trying to advance but was weighed down by the flames and bodies, collapsing downward as one blanket of flesh.

Clarence released the trigger and pulled his goggles up, inspecting his work. The alley had become a gaping
charred hole with greasy blood flowing towards his feet and the rain gutters of the main street. Singed hair and pearly white bones peaked up from the amorphous heap of bodies that rocked with intermittent movement from whatever survivors there were down the alley. He waited longer, watching the alley.

“Just wait a minute more, Clarence. Those bastards might be finding another way to Main Street
,” Ortega said, staring down the alley with binoculars.

Movement from the
rearview mirror of the Humvee distracted Dave’s vision. He turned in the seat and saw several stragglers of the horde who had made their way to another side of Main Street and were slowly approaching.

“Hey, Captain Ortega!”
Dave yelled out the window. “Here they come from down the street.”

Ortega looked over his shoulders,
slid his sunglasses up his receded hairline and put his gun in a side holster on his belt. “Everyone, get in the Humvee, now!”

Anderson yelled back, “Captain, captain, we got this one. It’s only a dozen or so of them. This is a piece of cake
. We can just take care of it now.”

“Anderson, get your stupid ass in the Humvee
. I don’t want to hear any more shit out of you.” Ortega approached the bumper of the Humvee, put his boot up, crossed his arms and looked at the group of men as they approached. “We’re leaving this city. It’s compromised. Let’s go!”

Anderson approached Ortega and spoke
to him quietly. The two men walked together away from the group and began shouting at each other for a few moments and then returned to the Humvee. Anderson’s face was red and angry.

The unit assembled at the Humvee, looking past the vehicle at the approaching infected people. Ortega got in the front seat and put on a headset as Anderson leaned over to Clarence who was dissembling the flamethrower gear at the back of the Humvee. “What’s he doing? There’s only like ten more out there. How many more could there possibly be in this tiny town?”

“I don’t know, man, but we should just do what he says. I’m so sick of putting this huge tank on my back. Since when did I become the flamer?”

Seeing his opportunity, Layton joined the conversation, “You’ve always been the flamer of the unit, Carl.”

“Eat, shit. Are we going?” Clarence looked through the Humvee at Ortega who was talking through the headset.

“Alpha access, 382741, full airstrike, I repeat, 382741, full airstrike.
ETA request at ten minutes, 1745 Eastern Time. The unit is evacuating now. This is my last confirm.”