The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (28 page)

The bullet took out its right eye, vaporizing it before tumbling into its black brain. It slithered back into the hole. Jerome stepped up to the edge and looked in to find Cori looking at him as blood gurgled up from a gaping wound at his neck. He tried to say something but this only caused the blood to bubble.

Though he couldn’t speak, his eyes said everything. They accused him of desertion, of being AWOL, of leaving his buddy to die.

“They needed me more,” Jerome told him. “That whole section of the line would’ve…” he had been pointing back the way he had come but then movement caught his eye. There were more zombies around him, a lot more. Thirty or forty were converging right on him. Again, his hands worked their magic and the M249 swung up. He fired in shorter bursts now, conserving his ammo, doing in two or three rounds what he had been doing with seven or eight.

Even while his hands worked, he saw Cori out of the corner of his mouth, pleading something with silent lips. Was he asking to be rescued or put out of his misery? Or maybe he had a note for a loved one in his pocket? None of that mattered. Jerome wasn’t going back in that hole for all the money or glory on earth. He slowly backed away until he heard the snap of twigs behind him.

There was relief at first but then he turned and saw that it was another zombie. How did it get back there? They should’ve only been coming from a single direction!
The line has fallen.
The thought just bloomed in his mind, taking it over completely. The line has fallen! They had lost. They were surrounded, overrun, dead.

With the last of his bullets, he blasted out the face of the zombie…and then he was running for his life. His gear weighed him down and caught on trees and brushes. The
Hammer of the Gods
was the first to go; without bullets, it was useless. He let it fall. Next to go was his helmet which wouldn’t stay properly even on his head. It would slip in front of his eyes turning him blind, making the panic turn him crazy. It hit with a thud and a second later, it was tripped over by the onrushing zombies who were nearly as fast as he was.

The mask went next, then his chest rig, and then his MOPP coat. Now he was faster and he blundered through the forest until he was on the trail that the Humvees had used. He stopped long enough to look both ways. No headlights were in view but there were others on the path. The ones sprinting were the humans—there were not many of them. He ran, angling towards the closest soldier. Jerome was almost up to him, when the man went down with a garbled scream.

“Shit! My ankle, my ankle…”

Jerome barely slowed. The hero in him was dead. There were no more visions of parades or medals in his mind anymore. Stopping to help the injured soldier would only get them both killed. This wasn’t Nazi Germany or Iraq where the distance to safety was measured in yards. If he stopped for that soldier, it could be miles before they found safety. And he was already winded.

These were the excuses he used as he treated the fallen soldier as dead already and shied away. In seconds, there was the sound of firing in Jerome’s wake and then screams.

“That was the right thing to do,” he gasped. “Anyone would’ve left him.” Saying the words didn’t seem to help with the sick feeling in his gut that had hit him the second the soldier had fallen. It persisted right up until he hit a two-lane black top, and then he felt a bizarre sense of relief as if the road represented some sort of safety. He stood on it for ten seconds turning his head back and forth and praying with all his might that a Humvee or a truck or anything would come by.

Another scream, this one off to his right, had him running again. He ran up a treed hill on the other side of the road and had made it halfway to the top when he heard a Humvee barreling up the road. Without hesitation, he turned and charged back down, waving his arms and screaming.

He made it to the road just ahead of both the hummer and the wave of zombies. “Stop!” he screamed with the last of his breath. In his pounding heart, he knew that if it didn’t stop he’d be killed; there was no more strength in him to run. With that in mind, he stepped into the Humvee’s path. There was a screech of tires and Jerome found himself screwing his eyes closed and grimacing, expecting to be crushed under the machine, only he wasn’t, though it was a near thing. Pebbles sprayed across his boots and the heat of the engine washed over him, but the metal grill stopped just short.

Jerome reached out a shaking hand and touched the hood as if to confirm that it was real and then he went around to the passenger side of the vehicle, always keeping his hands on it so as to keep it from simply evaporating back into the night. A window rolled down and a soldier was there. It seemed that he was talking however, no sound came out.

“The line has fallen!” Jerome screamed into his face. “They’re everywhere! They’re…” Just then, the gunner standing in the turret started lighting up the night with the .50 cal. The sound was deafening and again the man in the passenger seat started moving his lips and gesticulating madly. When Jerome only stood there trying to puzzle out the motions of the man’s lips, the man grabbed him and yanked him close.

“Get in!” he screamed into Jerome’s face before thrusting him toward the next door.

The sound of the gun muted the second he jumped into the hummer and he was able to hear his own words: “The line is fallen.”

“Shut up!” the man in the passenger seat yelled. He then flicked on a radio on the console. “Delta is crumbling. The line is ruptured in at least three spots. We can’t hold any longer.”

Seven miles away, General Collins heard the words as clear as a bell. They stung. The line was failing. The men were being reduced to fear-filled children in the face of the horde. He didn’t blame them. These weren’t other men they were fighting, men who knew reason and fear, these were monsters in league with the night and they didn’t need their teeth to kill. A simple touch would do the trick.

This was what was causing his men to turn tail so easily.

“Pull them back,” he said. He spoke with one of his liver-spotted hands resting across his eyes, feeling a weariness ache his bones. “Charlie and Echo will have to pull back as well. We can’t leave them hanging like that.”

There were a number of ‘Yes sirs,’ but Collins wasn’t listening. He stood up—as far as he could in the cramped Command and Control Humvee—and went to the door to look up at the night sky. “Where are you? Damn it, where are you?” Dr. Lee’s supposed miracle was late and without it, his lines would continue to disintegrate under the constant grinding attack. And with the miracle? Maybe they could hold on…maybe.

A ripple of confused gunfire erupted directly west of him. Every caliber he could think of was being shot. It was a strange and desperate sound, something he was becoming all too familiar with. His men would fire like mad for a few minutes and then run.

How far this time, he wondered? The new battalion command post was seven miles back from the lines and it still seemed too close.

Again, he glanced up at the sky. Except for the stars, it was all sorts of empty. “Please,” he whispered in prayer, before ducking back in. “Someone give me an ETA on those birds.”

“We can’t, sir,” a lieutenant answered. “Our aviation company is on the line, fighting. I have a link with…let’s see...forty-six Blackhawks and six Chinooks only two of those are grounded for repairs. The rest of the Blackhawks are under brigade level control.”

“Yeah, that’s great, but I wasn’t asking about
our
birds,” General Collins said as more gunfire sounded.

The same lieutenant made a sound of annoyance in his throat. “We can’t talk to them either, not by radio at least. I can put a call into Otis if you want. It might take some time since they’re probably busy too.”

Collins shook his head. Phone calls now would eat up too much time. The birds would either get there or not, and his men would either die horribly or not.

Six miles away the Humvee Jerome Evermore was in, came to a stop. They were north of Danbury where the woods were beginning to thin and little gentlemen farms sat looking expensive and deserted.

“Everyone out,” the driver barked. There were six men crammed in the vehicle and three more on top. Another Hummer pulled up behind theirs and an equal number of men tumbled out, each looking about with wide eyes. Although there hadn’t been a single shell fired, they were shell-shocked and none strayed far from the Humvees.

“All right,” one of the soldiers said in a strident voice. He seemed unnecessarily loud as if the thunder of the .50 cal in his ear for so long had turned him old. “I need you men to spread out. You see that barn?” He pointed and everyone squinted at a building a few hundred yards away. It was only a smear of white in the dark. “I need the last man situated there. The rest of you fill in to this position.”

No one moved.

The barn seemed far away, and worse, whoever was stuck sitting in a hole in front of it would have no cover on their flank. Zombies could just curl up around him and take him from front and back.

Jerome looked down at his boots; they were scuffed from the day’s adventures and he was just thinking that they would need a coat of polish before the next drill weekend, when the man who had been speaking—his rank, if he had any was lost in the dark—tapped him on the shoulder.

“You. I want you to anchor the line.”

“I—I would, I swear but I don’t even have a weapon.” He spread his arms to show everyone that he wasn’t just being a coward, though if any one asked where it was he didn’t know what he’d say. Every excuse that came to mind sounded like a shit-ton’s worth of cowardice.

The soldier in charge turned to the next man: “You, step up. It’ll be fine. We’re going to fill in the line from there on.” The man whose shoulder had been slapped let his jaw drop and he looked around hoping to see some John Wayne hero-type step forward to claim his spot, but all the men there had seen the horror and they too looked down at their shoes or the grass or perhaps they toed a rock. None believed the promise that more men were coming.

Each man was then picked to take a spot and they left, most with a deep breath and a stony look suggesting they were ready to fight. Jerome watched them go with an increasing sense of relief until the man in charge turned to him. “Here you go.”

Jerome cocked his head like a quizzical dog. “Uh, here you go, what?” The second after he said this he noticed that the man was holding something out for him to take. It was a holstered pistol. “Oh…Uh, you want me to…uh take that?”

He was trying to rein in the urge to add: You want me to fight zombies with a goddamned pistol? The idea was astounding to a man who had seen them up close. “Look, I would, but…”

“Good,” the soldier said, shoving the weapon into Jerome’s hands. “You’re the anchor on this end of the line. Hold it as long as you can. I promise, we’re rounding up more men.”

A second later, the Humvees were spitting dirt and roaring off into the night. Jerome squatted down next to a sap-dribbled pine tree with a string of curses whining out of his mouth in a high whisper. Forty feet away someone else was making the same noises and Jerome shushed him, afraid that he would attract attention. He could barely remember the big, manly feeling he’d had not too long before when he had killed so many of the fiends.

Now, he knew only a heart-pounding fear. It grew in his ears and his hands shook. The night seemed to grow darker and darker and then there came sounds from the woods in front of him: the snap of branches, the crunch of leaves, the thump and skitter of rocks being kicked, and of course, the heavy ragged breathing of the zombies.

Belatedly, he checked the pistol: a nine-millimeter Beretta. He counted his ammo and summed up the frightfully low number of forty-six rounds for the gun. Forty-six wouldn’t last him ten minutes in battle, but then the accusing face of Cori Deebs came to him complete with all the blood and the bubbles and the pain. It made Jerome rethink the number.

He had forty-five bullets to work with. He would save one as a last resort.

With the sounds picking up, he feared he wasn’t far from that moment. Sound traveled far in the night and it was some minutes before he saw the first shadows coming steadily on in a long wave. By then his fear had him almost hyperventilating, and he wasn’t the only one on the line feeling it.

A man fifty yards to his right, hissed: “Oh fuck!” and shot his rifle. Other men fired as well, but Jerome couldn’t. He couldn’t waste one of his forty-five bullets shooting at shadows. With his puny gun, he’d have to wait until they were close…painfully close, and with the dark he feared to take a shot from further than ten feet. He clicked back the hammer as the other guns roared.

But then there was screaming from in front of them. “Hey! Stop shooting, damn it! We’re human.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” the man closest to Jerome asked.

The men in front grumbled and one answered: “Jeeze, we didn’t even know anyone was there. Now don’t shoot, we’re coming up.”

“Wait, hold on!” someone cried. “How do we know you aren’t infected? How do we know you weren’t in The Zone and are trying to bust out?”

There was a general cry of indignation and a sharp-voiced man came walking up, fearlessly. “Look jack-wads. We’re from the 643
rd
MP Company from right here in fucking Connecticut. Anyone want to check my ID? You’re welcome to.”

“No,” the reply came.

“Good, now where is the end of the line? We’ll fill in from there.” As they were more of a line segment, the man, a sergeant by the name of Segal posted seven men on the far end and eight on the nearer one next to Jerome. 

He was almost mewling with gratitude, but the feeling didn’t last long. The zombies were coming again. No one doubted it this time and once again, someone whined: “Oh fuck.” Most everyone agreed with the statement.

Sergeant Segal did not. “At ease that shit!” he barked.

Men cringed at how loud the sergeant was being and one had the temerity to say: “Shush or they’ll hear.”

“Let them hear,” he yelled back, his booming voice reaching to both ends of the line. “We need to stop cowering in fear and running at the first contact. Listen, boys, Connecticut is only so big and if you keep running you’re going to run out of state real quick.” The sounds in the forest grew and came on faster. Segal flicked on a flashlight and pointed it outward. “We need to man up, right this second. We need to put a halt to this or our families will be the ones to suffer. Now makes some noise! Louder! Get mean and get nasty and we just might get out of this alive.”

Jerome felt a stirring reminiscent of when he had been wielding his M249 and mowing the fuckers down. He gripped his pistol tighter and gritted his teeth. “Fuck yeah!” he snarled.

“Fuck yeah is right,” Segal declared. “Now let’s make some noise. Let’s bring them right to us and wipe them out.”

The first part of the plan was the easier of the two. The men cried out in a yankeefied version of the rebel yell and the zombies came on. In a minute, the firing began and once again, Jerome with his pistol was forced to wait, but not long. Soon the black-eyed terrors came stumbling out of the woods with their mouths gaping and their clawed hands reaching.

With his rediscovered bravado intact, he waited until the first was eight steps away before firing. For a fraction of a second, the light blinded him and by the time he blinked his night-sight back there was another of them charging. At six paces, he put a hole in the thing’s forehead dead center. Again, the flash was like a strobe, limiting his vision so that it felt as though he was taking extra-slow blinks.

Four paces: and something horrible and mangled, something that looked like it had pulled itself out of a plane crash came closing in from his right. Another shot and another ugly thudding sound. The night was now a solid inky wall of blackness out of which creatures from hell strode. One monster had its head hanging by some tendons and a xylophone of creaking vertebrae. It took two shots to bring the thing down.

Another was without arms. It waved stubs.

Most came at him with chunks missing, fingers gone, jaws torn practically off and the skin of their cheeks split to the ear. Jerome’s bravado began to fade, replaced by a crazy, mindless panic. Involuntarily he took two steps back and then a third.

“Hold the line!” roared Sergeant Segal. “Stand your ground.”

It felt as though Segal was talking only to Jerome and with a feeling of guilt, his boots planted themselves as three of the things came at him. The last went down at his feet making a gurgling noise. There were more and they never stopped coming. A man began screaming: “Help! Shit, it’s got me, it’s got me.”

Others wavered, their hearts quailing. The fight was a nightmare and, up until Dr. Lee’s miracle occurred, only Sergeant Segal and his booming voice held them in place. Nothing else on earth could have. The old adage that a man fought for his buddy in the next hole didn’t have any bearing on this fight. The dark made it seem like each man was fighting his own war, and if he did happen to catch the twinkle of a muzzle flash it wasn’t fired from a friend’s gun. They were strangers surrounded by more strangers…and all of them were surrounded by death.

But then the miracle came in the form of a tremendous white bird that spat out a series of mini-novas as it banked over the battlefield. Each of the novas was bright enough to turn night into day. Jerome could finally see what was coming to eat him—the numbers were terrifying and yet he was able to fight the urge to run. Finally, he could assess the danger. He even saw that off to his right were a series of trees that had fallen during some long ago storm. They would make an excellent barricade.

He blasted out the useless brains of the closest zombie and then jogged the twenty feet and took a position behind the trees. The zombies came at him and got tangled in the branches or were brought to a standstill by the belly-high trunks. Calmly, he shot them down.

His gun clicked empty just as the flares descended into the trees.

“Oh please come back,” he whispered, his head canted upward as his hands went through the motions of reloading. The sound of the twin engines on the Coast Guard HC 144-A Ocean Sentry burrrred away, and for a time, he stared after the twinkling lights, but then the fiends came and he fought in the dark but always with an ear out.

A few minutes later, the plane was back and more flares were ejected and the men cheered and smiled as they fought.

The plane was far from its usual Atlantic haunts where its eleven-hour flight time and its two-thousand mile range made it ideal as a search and rescue craft. General Collins was embarrassed that no one but Dr. Lee had thought to contact the Coast Guard and ask for assistance. They were technically a part of Homeland Security and his mind had been on the purely military side of the question.