The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (18 page)

“Anything, Nantz?” he called out again to the
gunner.

“If I saw anything, Sergeant, you’d be the
first to know.” Heinlich shook his head at the disrespectful tone.
He would have to have a little talk with Nantz later about his
military decorum.

He looked at his watch. Time!

“Dogwood One, this is Dogwood Two. Time to
bug out.”

After a moment he heard Shavers’ deep
baritone voice over the radio reply that they were wrapping it up.
He glanced over at the Kroger and saw one last buggy of groceries
being thrown over the top of the truck’s bed and the rest abandoned
as Carroll and Benton beat feet for the Humvee. Shavers jumped down
off of the rear of the truck and raced to the cab while Red Beard
McCully climbed in the passenger side.

“The sooner we pop smoke the better I’m gonna
feel!” Heinlich yelled back to Nantz. He jammed the Humvee into
gear and raced forward to meet Benton and Carroll.

Without warning, the loud booming of the M2
opening up on top of the Humvee split the silence.

He heard Nantz yelling over the radio.
“Contact! Contact! Ten o’clock!”

The fifty continued to thump out its deep
staccato beat as Heinlich glanced to his left at the trees that
separated the parking lot from Lee Highway.

His eyes nearly bulged out of his head. It
was like a cold, dark tidal wave breaking through and around the
trees. It was a massive swarm and they were racing with their
adrenaline-fueled distance-eating gait in a rolling wave of death
right at the squad. He squealed the tires to a stop beside Carroll
and Benton and they threw open the doors and dove into the vehicle,
slamming the heavy doors shut behind them. He glimpsed the
slow-moving HEMTT pulling away from the Kroger about fifty meters
from his position as he spun the wheel and pointed the nose of the
Humvee toward the boulevard.

The M2 rattled the vehicle with its sustained
fire and was now joined by the lighter sounds of Carroll’s and
Benton’s M4s firing through the Humvee’s open windows.

The big eight-wheeled truck was too slow
pulling away from the storefront and the wave of crazies slammed
into it with the force of a herd of buffalo. The mass of bodies
swarmed into it like a single entity and Heinlich watched in horror
through his side mirror as the truck actually came up on its side
wheels with the force of the impact. The truck sustained its
forward momentum, the giant tires climbing up and over bodies that
piled beneath it, crushing them to a gelatinous pulp. Once the
starboard wheels left the ground the accumulating bodies of the
crazies caught beneath it acted as ramp while the vehicle careened
forward, canting closer and closer to the tipping point.

Shavers must have hit the brakes and the
truck slammed to a halt before its center of gravity shifted too
far over and it sat rocking precariously on four wheels before
falling back onto all eight, still canted as if on the side of a
hill, which it was; a hill of bodies both alive and dead. Like a
giant colony of ants the horde swarmed up and over the vehicle
until it was completely covered in a squirming throng of
bodies.

“Dogwood One! Dogwood One! Do you copy,
over?” Heinlich screamed into the mic, his gravelly voice breaking
from the stress.

There was only static as a reply.

Then the radio came to life and he heard
Pickeral’s distressed voice asking for another situation report.
The Humvee bounced over the parking lot divide away from the
monstrous swarm and raced across the grassy knoll that divided the
boulevard from the lot.

“Gypsy Hill Base, this is Dogwood Two, we
have a situation!” he screamed into his headset, struggling to
control the Humvee while it went airborne from the sidewalk and hit
the southbound lanes of the boulevard. “We are in contact with a
large force of hostiles! Shavers and McCully’s Hemmitt is overrun!”
he yelled into the radio mic, watching the remaining swarm chasing
after them like a solid living blanket.

“We gotta go back and get the First
Sergeant!” screamed Carroll as he did a quick magazine change.

“Look back at that shit!” he yelled while
gunning the vehicle down the road. “I don’t think there is a First
Sergeant left to get!”

Where the truck had been was a large blob of
writhing, roiling creatures. They s filled the parking lot from end
to end and then as one the expanse of mad, raving creatures shifted
direction in a fluid motion like the flock of birds he had spied
moments ago, and followed the escaping Humvee, flowing around and
over the lump where the HEMTT sat like a boulder in a raging
stream.

“Dogwood two, this is Gypsy Hill base, do you
request the release of Gypsy Hill mobile?” he heard Charlotte
Pickeral asking over his headset. Gypsy Hill mobile was the tag
they had given to the standby Stryker for this mission.

“Oh shit!” he cried out before he had a
chance to reply to Pickeral. Ahead of him and racing toward them
through the fields and trees that lined the boulevard less than a
klick to the north was another swarm.

“Tangoes at our twelve!” he called out to his
passengers then keyed the mic for the comms. “Gypsy Hill Base, this
is Dogwood Two, send in Gypsy Hill Mobile. Have them rendezvous at
the staging area!” he yelled over the hammering and staccato blasts
of all the rifles as the Humvee ground to a halt. “Gypsy Hill, we
have two OPFORS. One at Statler Square moving north, the other
southbound on Statler Boulevard. Estimate over three thousand
hostiles total.” He had no idea how close his guess was to reality.
However, he would have been horrified to know that he had
underestimated by half that number.

He glanced at Carroll on the passenger side
of the Humvee. “How many 40 Mike-Mikes you got?”

“Six,” Carroll replied curtly, emptying
another magazine out his window at the new threat approaching from
the north.

“Benton, how many 40s?” he yelled out over
the ear-crushing sound of the .50 to the woman in the rear
passenger seat.

“Dozen.”

“Use the 2-0-3s to clear me a path through
the field at ten o’clock!” He pointed through the windshield to the
scrubby, dry field that part of the swarm was transiting in a cloud
of dust as it broke for the road.

“Roger that, Sergeant!” Carroll broke open
the M203 grenade launcher that hung beneath his M4 rifle and shoved
what looked like an oversize shotgun shell with a conical nose into
the breach and snapped it shut. When he squeezed the trigger there
was a pop as the high-explosive round fired from the tube and
sailed toward its target. It hit among the vanguard of advancing
crazies and detonated with a window rattling explosion. A
half-dozen of the creatures were practically vaporized in the
blast. Soon another round left Benton’s 203 and exploded in the
midst of the swarm, flattening a wide swath of them with the
explosive shockwave.

“Sergeant, we gotta move!” Nantz screamed
down at him as he paused the smoking M2.

Heinlich looked into his side mirror exactly
when the first of the chasing crazies leaped like a wild beast onto
the back of the Humvee. Without hesitation he jammed the
accelerator to the floorboards and the Humvee leaped forward,
throwing off the crazy man as the sentient flood of creatures
chasing them reached the spot where they had been sitting a second
ago and bounded over the fallen crazy, swallowing him in a sea of
madness.

The Humvee sped forward toward the smaller
advancing swarm. The smoky thumps of the detonations of the HE
rounds from the M203 blew a path through the thick mass of
growling, screaming, semi-human creatures. The Humvee hit the curb
and bounced into the air hard enough to just about eject Nantz from
his position on top of the vehicle. They came down hard onto the
dry field littered with scrub brush and dead crazies and shot
onward into the path cleared by the grenades. Nantz paused from
firing on the swarm behind him long enough to reach down and buckle
in his gunner’s belt to the shackle on the hatch, then resumed his
job of blowing apart the targets following them. Though they were
easy to hit, it was like firing on an avalanche; it didn’t even
slow down the rolling mass.

They sped through the path that the
explosives had cleared through the swarm, flying by crazies stunned
or injured by the explosions.

“I’m out!” Carroll reported as he fired his
last HE round. He switched to his M4 on three-round bursts, taking
out any crazies trying to regain their feet. Heinlich saw the
trailing edge of the swarm less than fifty meters ahead.

All around them the horde closed in.

“Down to three!” Benton yelled as she leaned
out and fired another round into the mass of creatures in front of
them. It slammed into the chest of a fat, naked woman and exploded
in a red cloud of vaporized blood and flesh, clearing another ten
meter circle in the throng of encroaching bodies.

Benton fired off her last three HE rounds in
rapid succession, opening a bloody route through the remaining
creatures that were still rushing in on the vehicle. The Humvee
bounced over the torn and mutilated bodies before punching through
the last of the crazies bounding like enraged animals toward them,
the vehicle’s armored bumper smashing them aside with bone crushing
thuds. They shot clear of the swarm and raced recklessly across the
remainder of the field, through some stunted trees and out onto the
hardball of Route 250, an east-west corridor through the city.

Heinlich veered sharply left, driving
westbound in the eastbound lanes and dodging the scatterings of
abandoned vehicles as he raced away from the swarms. When they
reached Lee Highway and slammed a left onto the four-lane road, the
chasing swarms were lost to sight behind them. They were circling
back in the general direction of the Kroger in a wide arc that
would take them to the staging area which was a National Guard’s
Overseas Mission Support (OMS) Annex off of Village Drive. The OMS
Annex was literally on the other side of a couple acre patch of
dense timber behind the grocery store. Too close to the hostiles,
Heinlich thought, although at least it was a fenced-in secure area
with a building built like a bunker where they could resupply their
dwindling ammo. The OMS building had been designated as a mission
staging area for this operation. It also acted as an forward
operating base for many of the 29th’s tactical operations against
the hordes. If the Gypsy Hill location was compromised, they could
always retreat to here. On the downside, there were two swarms
bedding down in dens very close to the compound, the same two
swarms that were now as stirred up as a nest of mad hornets.

He turned into the small macadam road that
led to the gate of the OMS annex, driving slower now, trying to
keep the sound of the Humvee to a lower volume and not broadcast
their position to the enemy. He drove past an elongated commercial
livestock barn where the inhabitants’ carcasses lay scattered in
piles of bleached-white bone and torn hides where they had been
slaughtered and eaten by the crazies early in the pandemic.
Heinlich pulled into the entryway of the annex in front of the
single-story windowless white bunker-like building with an
adjoining parking lot surrounded by fencing topped with multiple
coils of razor-wire. Another fenced parking area off to the left of
the facility containing military vehicles was separated by a
non-secured parking lot adjacent to the front of the stone
building. Carroll jumped out, grabbing the keys for the gate from
the glove compartment, and rushed up to the chain-link gate,
unlocked it, and promptly threw it open while Nantz covered him
with the .50. Heinlich drove through the open gate into the parking
area filled with a variety of National Guard military vehicles and
shut down the engine.

Through the ringing in their ears they heard
the mad chorus of sound from the voices of thousands of crazies.
The way the noise carried through the forest and echoed off the
buildings it sounded as if the wild racket was emanating from all
around them. After hurriedly relocking the gate, Carroll strode to
the doors of the white building and unlocked them, throwing them
open.

“Gypsy Hill Mobile, this is Dogwood Two. We
are at the staging area waiting your arrival. What is your ETA,
over?” Heinlich asked into his mic.

He heard Hernandez’s steady, calm voice reply
that they were fifteen minutes out and then ask for an update on
the situation in their area of operation.

While the request was coming over his headset
he swiveled in his seat and called out to his M2 gunner. “Nantz,
get a SAW up on the roof. Take Carroll and Benton and set a
perimeter on the top. Resupply on your way up and grab a couple of
cans for the fifty when you come back out!”

“Roger, Sergeant!” Nantz jumped from the
Humvee and headed for the building with Benton a few steps behind
covering their retreat.
She’s
making
a
great
soldier
. Heinlich thought to himself as she
disappeared through the door.

He keyed his mic again to reply to the
Corporal’s situation request. “Gypsy Hill Mobile, this is Dogwood
Two. We are secure in the compound. Large force of hostiles to the
north and east that may be converging on this position. We are
setting up a defensive perimeter.”

“Roger Dogwood Two. ETA now ten Mikes. What
is Dogwood One’s status, over?”

“Gypsy Hill Mobile, we’ve had no contact with
Dogwood One. Their position at the target area was compromised,
over.”

“Roger Dogwood Two. Keep the gate clear for
us. Out.” The channel went silent. Keeping the mobile headset on
his head, the Sergeant grabbed his M4 rifle and exited the Humvee.
He looked at the fencing and frowned. “If that swarm wants in here
they’ll come through that like a hot knife through warm butter,” he
muttered quietly to himself, feeling like a caged lamb waiting for
the lions to arrive.
At
least
this
lamb
has
teeth
, he thought grimly, clutching his weapon
tightly. He walked over to the gate and waited for the Stryker to
arrive as he planned in his head the hopeful rescue of Dogwood One,
or at least, body recoveries. Like the Marines, they wouldn’t leave
anyone behind if at all possible.