Slow Burn: A Zombie Novel (42 page)

“
Man, I hate to run! “ I said, gasping for air.

“
You know you are bleeding?” Jack replied.

Looking down, I dismissed the blood and wiped it on my pants. “It isn’t mine.”

Jack waited for an answer but shrugged after he didn’t get one. “Thanks, Mike, I will see to it this ammunition gets handed out right away.”

I explained where Lewis kept the ammunition and had Jack send several men to get the rest of it.

“
I’ll get them on it!” he replied over the growing gunfire.

Guards from the other shifts began to show up and joined in the fight. With no rest for the wicked, I too was back in the fight. The new ammunition was having the desired effect, and the shooting was beginning to pick up. Soon I was awash in violence as a stream of zombies continued to arrive all around us. They were a cross section of former America. I tried not to, but if you looked at their clothing you could often tell a lot about their former lives. I shot former McDonalds’ employees walking along still wearing their drive through headsets, mechanics still covered in grease, garbage men, office workers and nurses. There were car wash attendants stumbling alongside construction workers still wearing their tool belts. School children came at us, along with nursing home residents and every age group in between. The elderly were probably more agile than they had been in years.

The battle intensified. I stopped to take a breather and twisted open the cap off a bottle of water. As I tilted back my head to take a drink from a water bottle, I saw that daylight was fading. Peering at the horizon, I could tell there was an ominously dark storm front moving in very fast from the west that was making night fall much earlier than normal. Faint rumblings of thunder could be heard in between the cracks of rifle fire and shouts from the people fighting on the barrier wall.

That damn moaning sound was getting annoying as hell. We had been at this for hours at least.

I grabbed Stephen as he hurried past me to deliver some more ammunition to guards on the raised platforms. This work was made more difficult than it needed to be due to the fact that Sgt. Henderson had never bothered to sort the ammunition. Most of it had been taken from sporting goods stores and just thrown into cans, the different calibers all mixed together. But there was a lot of it thankfully.

“
Hey!” I told Stephen. “The sun is going down soon, and there is a thunderstorm moving in. We need to get the portable lights up and running soon! Go tell Jack to get someone on it immediately.”

Stephen yelled for me to go do naughty things with my mother but I knew he would get it done. I headed back to our ambulance to grab my bat and shield. Inside the rear of the shadow-filled ambulance, I picked up my bat.

“
Now where is that damned shield?”

Outside I heard the steady gunfire and shouts for help on the line. Then a cry of pain...sounded like someone may have got bitten! In the background I heard several portable light plant engines fire up. One must have started up nearby, for there was a sudden increase of light that lit up the back of the ambulance. Now seeing a corner of the shield poking out from under my backpack, I grabbed it and hopped out of the ambulance. The wind had picked up in the few minutes I was in my truck. Smoke from the gunfire began to whip away from the killing fields and mix in with the smell of the zombies. I paused a moment to make sure my backpack was ready to go as well.

Before closing the top I stuffed in the
Dark Tower
book I had taken from the library. The damned book was just starting to get good. I would hate to lose it…might not ever find out what happens.

With the arrival of the wind came a sharp temperature drop. I ran to the wall and hopped on top of a flatbed semi-trailer to see what we were up against.

I dropped my rucksack and bat with shield onto it, then looked out and down Glenwood Street to the west of our location. Something did not sit right.

The wind, which had picked up, was now starting to make large trees bend and creak. And it had brought something else with it as well.

I couldn’t place my finger on what made my cop hunch scream in warning. The crash of thunder in the distance was slowly getting closer, as did the number of zombies that were assaulting our wall. To conserve ammo I let the others shoot while I cleaned up any stragglers that got through to my section of the wall with the bat.

Now as dusk fell and with the approaching storm overhead, rain began to lightly fall and picked up into a steady downpour. Wind pushing the rain at a sharp angle made for a slippery footing on top of the vehicles we stood on. Finally, the current wave of infected was destroyed, and I stood there catching my breath as others reloaded magazines and rifles while they had a spare moment. I tilted my head back to let the rain quench my thirst. Looking down our lines, I saw that everyone that was willing to fight was now on the front, manning the barricades that surrounded the safe zone. You could feel the urgency of the situation at hand. You could see it in their faces. They had known this moment was coming since they had arrived here, little by little, person by person, over the last week. I was proud of the fight many were putting up on such short notice in the worst of circumstances. Even Holly, the liberal young woman we had rescued at the Aldi's grocery store, was now standing on the roof of an old Ford Bronco, holding a small Ruger .22 rifle. Robert was there as well, shotgun at the ready. Troy Lundell was farther down, surrounded by firefighters. Still… many hundreds more just waited in the relative safety of the school building itself for someone else to save them.

I was sure that was what Lewis and Henderson were doing right now.

There it was again. My mind snapped back to the present. That loud roaring of thunder clouds that seemed closer than ever only had one problem.

Where the fuck were the flashes of lightning? Something was just not right, I could taste it.”

The adrenaline dump that hit my body felt like a kick in the balls. My head snapped forward, and I looked out into the darkness. The lights we had could not shine very far out into the kill zone due to the driving rain. Now as I struggled to see past the edge of the lights, shadows began to form and dance.

Maybe the movement is just trees moving from the wind?

I shouted for the others around me to be quiet.

As silence fell, the storm churned and flowed above us. The clouds thickened and the wind picked up yet again. The thunder now seemed right on top of us.

“
Where’s the lightning?” I heard someone ask.

It dawned on me that these were not sounds of the storm we heard closing in.

What we heard was the roar of our death coming from the throats of thousands of undead.

I felt my blood run cold as out of the darkness a horde of undead thousands strong rolled into sight, roaring for our blood.

“
Fuck me!”

The reports coming in from the weather satellites showed some nasty storms far to the north, and Matvei was glad that as of yet they had not run into any bad weather themselves. Fighting the infected proved to be hard enough as it was, and Matvei didn’t need any more problems. He was having a bad enough day already. He drank a cup of black coffee and waited for a situational update over the radio. Everything had been going according to plan up until today. Communications had been flowing in all day, and the word from his main elements had been encouraging. The group sent to Houston arrived early and managed to already secure a large area and take on some of the locals for labor. Texas had a large Hispanic population, and they seemed to be more willing to help than the whites. The latter seemed to be regarding them as an invading army rather than a rescue party. The one thousand man contingent proceeded cautiously into the Dallas metropolitan area and was completely intact, having mowed down any and all opposition from the infected.

Word from the smaller groups was just as good. The Brownwood and Brownfield contingents arrived and were augmented by the local gang population. The Brownwood location received a large contingent of allied MS-13 gang members from the Dallas area. Matvei didn’t like the gang but needed the bodies for now. They were reporting widespread destruction in the Dallas Metro area. Attempts at quarantine and refugee camps had failed, with any survivors heading for the hills. The two contingents headed for New Mexico were set to arrive shortly and reported no difficulties.

This morning all of that changed. Hector reported to Matvei just after dawn that their force in Brownwood spotted a large military convoy moving west down Highway 67. They appeared to be a ragtag assortment of soldiers but were at least a thousand strong. They had heavy equipment and were doing everything right, sending out reconnaissance parties and flankers. Matvei ordered his men to lay low and hoped the convoy passed through town. That didn’t happen.

How did they know we were there?
Matvei now asked himself.

Either way, his people were now taking a beating at the hands of the U.S. Army.

The MS-13 gang was the first to make contact, having very little respect for the soldiers. They attempted to set up an ambush on a patrol but instead got cut down themselves. A pair of M2 Bradley fighting vehicles tore them up pretty good. The mercenaries had a much higher level of respect and tried to pull back. After pitched small arms fire, they found their escape route cut off by a group of IAV Strykers. That was the last update Matvei had received. He spent the next half hour waiting anxiously for an update before Hector was again able to make contact.

Matvei heard heavy machine gun fire and explosions in the background. He angrily grabbed the radio to find out what was happening.

“
My orders were to lay low!” Matvei screamed into the radio.

“
We tried, sir,” the voice responded, “but those bangers started tearing into the locals something fierce. There were dozens of reports of rampant raping and killing done by those little punks. I think the convoy was just passing through, heading west, but the locals managed to get word to them.”

“
Can you make a break for it?” Matvei asked, already fearing the answer would be no.

“
Negative!” the voice shot back. “We have heavy contact on all sides. This was one big motherfucking convoy.”

Another large explosion could be heard over the radio.

“
Brownwood, do you copy?” Matvei asked several times before getting an answer.

“
That was close!” the mercenary on the other end said. “They have an Abrams tank parked right out in the open, and it’s putting a beating on us.”

Matvei winced at the news. He didn’t even recognize the voice that he was talking to. The commander of the operation was probably already dead.

“
How many of our people are still alive?” he asked.

“
I have no fucking clue, Captain,” the man responded. “A rifle company cut us in half, and we are pretty scattered. And from what we can tell the soldiers are just shooting anybody they capture. Our main base of operations was the Brownwood Coliseum, and they have already taken that. They must not have liked what they found. There are probably twenty or thirty of us holed up in this huge church south of the highway. We did put up a good fight when they first tried to storm us, and now they seem content to sit back and shell us. I think there is still another group of us at a Mormon church south of town.”

“
And weapons?”

“
We have a couple of RPG-7’s and a SPG-9 recoilless rifle left,” he replied. “That’s it for heavy stuff. Those and our PKM machine guns are the only reason we are still talking. It’s looking like they are preparing for another assault, and I’m thinking I’m gonna try and make a run for it. Later boss, good luck to ya.”

With that the radio went silent for the last time.

A group of men had gathered around Matvei to listen in, and they were now silent.

“
Shit,” Matvei cursed. “Well, it looks like we can cross Brownwood and its two hundred men off the map.”

“
What now, Captain?” Raul asked.

“
We continue to my place,” Matvei ordered. “This changes nothing for us. Let’s move out and keep our heads down.”

Dark and turbulent clouds raced in from the west, and gradually the wind picked up. It started as a slight breeze that soon began to bend small trees and toss around loose garbage strewn in the deserted streets. In a shadowy alley in the downtown area of Joliet, a piece of darkness split away and emerged as a human figure. Pausing next to a boarded up old building, the figure looked around to make sure he was alone. Looking up at the dilapidated structure and then the front door, he moved forward and took hold of a weather beaten board barring the entrance. With a crack of wood and the protesting squeal of nails, the board was ripped free. The man then reared back and booted the door open. Pieces of the door jamb scattered onto the landing on which he stood and were swept away by the winds of the approaching storm. Checking again to make sure the noise did not attract attention, he turned and made a hand gesture towards the dark alley. Soon, several figures stealthily approached and entered the now open doorway.