Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (24 page)

I shook my head to clear it of dark thoughts and darker anger, peered through the Ruger’s scope, and started looking for the best way to approach the strip mall.

I spotted an old irrigation ditch that ran along a gradual slope in the landscape that would hide me while I snuck in from the west. It was probably an unnecessary precaution—it didn’t really stand to reason that there would be anyone still living here—but I hadn’t stayed alive this long by being stupid.

Staying low, I followed the crease in the terrain and approached at an angle that would make it tough for anyone looking out a window or from a rooftop to see me. As I got closer, I heard birds flitting and chirping through broken panes of shattered windows, and the intermittent moans of infected.

The walkers hunger for birds the same as they do any other animal, but even with their rot-addled brains, they still manage to figure out that they can’t catch the swift little creatures. Or maybe it’s just that there are always other birds around to catch their attention. Either way, when walkers see birds, they moan at them. But not much else.

Oddly, as soon as the sun goes down, this behavior stops. During this time, the infected only make noise when they are near larger, ground-based prey. No one knows why. It’s just another one of the many mysteries surrounding the walking dead.

I soon reached the small cluster of buildings near the railroad tracks that were once businesses but were now just broken shells. There was a trailer park ahead of me and, farther down the road, an assemblage of small brick-walled houses. The trailers looked like something out of a low-budget horror movie, with crumbling porches, broken windows, and stained aluminum siding. Their insulation had been ripped out by wind, rain, and water damage, and lay strewn around the overgrown yards like orange and yellow confetti. The houses beyond didn’t look to be in much better shape.

Reaching the strip mall, I poked my head around the corner and did a quick scan. The trailer park was directly across from me, and in front of it was a single crumbling road running parallel to the railroad tracks. The moaning I heard was coming from the storefronts to my left, where the community’s former residents wandered aimlessly, groaning and bumping into one another. They all gazed upward, staring disconsolately at a contingent of barn swallows that had taken up residence in the nearby rooftops.

On any other day, I might have found the situation sad, and vaguely humorous in a fucked-up kind of way. But not this time. The infected were right in front of the building where Morrow had stashed his map and, in order to get it, I had to get past them. If Gabe had been with me, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But alone, it was a gigantic pain in my ass. I ducked back around the corner and weighed my options. 

I could get their attention and lead them away, but doing so would burn up time and energy I could ill afford to lose. Another option was to climb onto a rooftop and just shoot them, but the noise would attract every walker within a square mile. If I did that, I would have to set a hard pace southward and hope I could reach my next stop before they found me. Considering the distance involved, that didn’t seem likely. That left me with only one option.

Gently and quietly, I took off my pack and laid my rifles down against the wall. The CZ and its holster were just going to get in the way, so I left them behind as well, but I kept the Sig. Shooting my way out of here was a bad idea, but I still wanted the option available, just in case.

Now I had to decide which implement of destruction to use—ax or crowbar. Unlike Gabe, I’m not strong enough to brandish a weapon in each hand and cut through hordes of infected like a pissed-off scythe. Staring back and forth between the two weapons, I began to sorely miss my small sword. Or pig-sticker as Gabe liked to call it. (Sometimes he mixed things up and called it the ghoul-ka-bob.) Despite my friend’s snarky comments, it was a great tool for dispatching the undead. My technique was to find a Y-shaped tree limb, trim it down, and use it to hold a ghoul in place by jamming it under the creature’s neck and lifting up. Holding the stick like a lance gave me leverage against my target, and left my other arm free
to deliver the killing strike—a stab straight through the eye-socket.

It wasn’t the most crowd-pleasing way to kill a walker, but it was fast, effective, and it kept them out of arm’s reach. The absolute last thing you want to happen is to let a walker to get a grip on you. They’re not any stronger in death than they were in life, but due to the fact that they never get tired, and they can use one-hundred percent of their strength at all times, they feel super-humanly strong when they grab you.

Sadly, my small sword was at Allison’s house back in Hollow Rock, so I would have to make do with the tools at hand. The crowbar was great for crushing skulls, but it was slow. It usually took me two or three good whacks to put a ghoul down for the count. For that reason, in my case at least, crowbars are only useful against one or two ghouls at a time. Any more than that and I run the risk of being overwhelmed. 

The ax, on the other hand, was good for more than just brain busting. I could sever a walker’s head, or use the broad blade to disable their legs and reduce their mobility, making them easier to kill. Considering that I had quite a bit of work ahead of me, I decided that the ax was the best tool for the job. I cinched my scarf over my mouth, tightened the strap on my goggles, and retied my headscarf. Hefting the ax in my hands, I stepped around the corner.

A ghoul spotted me immediately and let out a hiss that sounded like a porcupine raping a rattlesnake. I lifted the ax over my head and chopped into his forehead, cleaving his skull like splitting wood.

“Shut up, you.”

I wrenched the ax free as it fell, then took a few running steps to the next-closest ghoul. She was in reasonably good shape for a corpse. Most of her skin was still in place, not all of her hair had fallen out, and she was still recognizable as human. Might have even been pretty, once. Her only visible wound was a mouth-shaped gouge on her forearm. A small one. Like from a child.

“Poor thing. I hope it wasn’t your kid that did that.”

I swung the ax again, this time burying the blade through her temple. She dropped, and it took me a couple of precious seconds to pry the blade loose.

Meanwhile, the other walkers had spotted me and began growling and keening, their faces twisted and their hands grasping as they lurched toward me. I backed off a few steps, took a quick look around, and jogged back around the corner of the building. A rutted old gravel path started at the end of the cracked pavement, ran through a field of patchy grass, and terminated at
the grain hopper next to the railroad tracks. My best bet was to lure the walkers into the open, run circles around them, and pick them off one by one. It was going to take a while, and it was going to be hard work.

“Nothing for it, Riordan. This is why you stay in shape.”

I turned and waved an arm at the walkers who were lunging forward as a single mass.

“Come on then, you fuckers. Let’s do this.”

I quickened my pace out to the middle of the field and began to sidestep in a wide circle around to my left. The first two walkers that came within range were nearly on top of each other, shuffling shoulder to shoulder. A front kick to the chest sent the smaller of the two tumbling backward and gave me the space I needed to behead his companion with a two-handed backswing. The one I had kicked landed at the feet of two others who promptly tripped over him and landed in a heap of struggling, moaning limbs. I dashed into the opening and used two quick swipes to cut the knees of ghouls on either side of me, then retreated and circled around to the other side.

So far, so good. I spotted another infected walking in front of two larger ones close enough to trip them. Taking two running steps, I executed a textbook jumping sidekick and planted my size twelve into his sternum. The bone crunched under my boot, and the little ghoul’s arms flapped comically as it bowled into the walkers behind him. I had enough time to chop two of their heads open as they struggled to get back up, and then the other ones began to close in, forcing me to back off.

To my left, a massively obese man reached toward me with one arm, and one ragged stump that ended just above the elbow. I ran around to his unprotected side, took half a step behind him, and brought the ax down at an angle into his knee. The blade cleaved through flesh and bone, and the big ghoul toppled over sideways. A quick follow up swing divided his skull into two equal halves before I backed off yet again, and circled the horde.

The dance continued for at least five minutes, and round and round we went. Five minutes may not sound like very long, but when you are running, throwing kicks as hard as you can, and swinging a heavy ax, it feels like an eternity. I managed to whittle their number down to just ten ghouls before my strength started to flag. With my arms trembling, and my lungs burning, I jogged away about a hundred yards and put the ax head on the ground, bending over it and leaning on the handle while I gasped for breath.

“Fuck me.”

I straightened up, dug a canteen off my web belt, and took a long, grateful drink.

“What I wouldn’t give for a silencer right now.”

The temptation to simply pull my pistol and get this thing over with was strong, but doing so would only lead to having more walkers to contend with, so I left the Sig in its holster. Besides, I had handled this many. What was ten more?

Backing off, I let the walkers follow me closer to the tree line. I would need plenty of space to give ground once I circled them and started busting heads again. As I watched, one of them tripped on a depression in the ground and face-planted into the grass. I couldn’t get to him—he was in the middle of the pack—but it felt good to laugh.

When I was down to twenty feet of breathing room, I broke into a jog and ran around their left side. Finding a good vector, I turned, ran in at a sprint, and channeled my momentum into a spinning swing that sent the top half of a walker’s head flipping through the air. Another step brought me in range of what had once been a skinny, tattoo-covered young man who couldn’t have been a day over twenty when he died. I batted his arms aside, sheared off the front of his knee, and backed off as he went down. Rather than deliver a killing stroke, I retreated. He wasn’t much of a threat anymore, and the other walkers were getting too close for comfort.

“Okay. Two down, eight to go. Let’s get this done.”

I blew out a couple of deep breaths, and ignored the trembling in my arms. The ax was getting damned heavy.

The horde got close again, and this time I managed to take out four more of them before backing off. Two of them marched close to one another, just over arm’s length apart, and it was a simple thing to dart between them, hack their ankles like brittle saplings, and then kill each one with a downward stroke to the back of the head. Another ghoul behind them tripped over their bodies, and I wasted no time stepping up and dispatching him. The fourth was alone, and a simple baseball swing to the throat sent her head spinning one way and her body the other.

As I stood waiting for the remaining walkers to come within range again, a rustling of branches and the sound of something running over dead leaves caught my attention. Looking behind the walkers, I caught a brief flash of color, and the fleeting impression of a massive body running at incredible speed before it disappeared into the shadows of the forest.

That brief flash of color, a burnt orange glimpse of sleek fur stretched tight over rippling muscle, told me exactly what had been tracking me all day. My blood ran cold, and I wanted to kick myself for not bringing my rifle, not that I was entirely sure it would have done me any good. Facing a thousand walkers—something I had actually done before—would have been far preferable to taking on the thing dogging my trail. 

“Okay, Riordan, you know animals hate the dead. It won’t get close while these things are around. Focus on what’s in front of you. One threat at a time.”

I steadied my breathing, clutched my ax, and waited.

They shuffled onward, ever onward, and I met the first of them with an overhead chop. He was a good bit taller than I was, and the angle was awkward, so I didn’t kill him on the first try. Another swing, harder this time, and he ate dirt. The rest were close behind, so I circled left to make the tall ghoul’s body perpendicular to their path. The next closest one tripped over him, making it easy to end its unnaturally prolonged life. I stayed close to the body to get a shot at one of the last three.

What happened next, I can only ascribe to bad luck and fatigue. My breath was coming in short gasps, my arms trembled, and the ax felt like it weighed about a hundred pounds. A couple of blisters had sprung up on my fingers, and I was beginning to feel weak from having eaten so little that day. It wouldn’t have happened a year earlier when I was raw-boned and full of whipcord muscle, toughened by the struggle to survive in the harsh, unforgiving Appalachians. But several months of plentiful food and soft living had sanded away my hardest edges, and made me a shade less sharp than I used to be.

I know. Excuses, excuses.

The last three ghouls were in a cluster, their arms brushing one another’s shoulders as they reached for me. I swung for the first one, but my weary arms didn’t quite raise the ax high enough, and the blow clipped the walker low on the face, the blade lodging in his jaw. If I had been less tired I could have pulled it free, but I wasn’t.