These Dead Lands: Immolation (69 page)

“They were, sir. But the numbers are just too much for us to handle.”

Victor nodded. “I know. It was a crapshoot from the get-go, but it had to be tried. If we’d been able to contain the dead for longer, it would have helped give us more time to dig deeper trench lines, but no plan survives contact with the enemy.”

“So what’s the plan now, sir?” Hastings asked, looking around the TOC. Everyone was busy, but all the soldiers and the few civilians in the center shared that pinched, stressed expression that told him they knew they were in for a hell of a night.

“No substantial changes. When the horde to the east gets in range, we’ll start hitting them with artillery to try to break up their advance. A lot of the barriers will divert them into the woods, at least initially, but we can expect those to eventually fail. The train is ready for movement, and we’ve already relocated Senator Cornell and his wife to one of the passenger coaches we scrounged up. He didn’t want to go, but he’ll be safer there.”

And also able to bug out if things go to hell
. Hastings kept that thought to himself and asked, “What about the rest of the civilians, sir?”

“We’ll move them there once the vehicles have been loaded up. We’re already lifting MRAPs with cranes, along with some HEMT tankers and gun trucks. The plan is to use the cranes at the Naval facility to offload so we can start the road movement to Bragg, and then the train continues on to the west. We’ll start moving personnel tomorrow morning if things begin to deteriorate.”

“Are you thinking we’ll be able to hold out, sir?”

Victor studied Hastings for a long moment. “What do
you
think, Captain?”

Hastings didn’t look away. “In New York, we had a small advantage in that the dead needed to use the bridges and tunnels to get out, so we were able to keep them contained for a bit and slow their progress. But once they started walking out of the Hudson, they grouped up and attacked that way. We don’t have any bridges or tunnels here, sir, only back roads and forest. I’m thinking the dead are going to be able to amass, and from what I saw a couple of hours ago, twenty-foot-high container walls aren’t enough. Even with ten-foot berms, they’ll eventually be able to pile up enough that they’ll just walk right over each other and come over the top.”

“We’ll see, Captain. We’ll see,” Victor said. “Why don’t you take a moment to get yourself cleaned up a bit? Have a cup of coffee then join me over at the UAV station for a look around.”

“Yes, sir.”

*

“Hello, boys,” Slater
said as he sat down on a crate beside Guerra, Stilley, and Reader. Hartman and Tharinger rolled up with him, all looking fit and rested, Guerra thought.

“Master Sergeant Slater, what a surprise,” Guerra said, looking up from his MRE. “What’re you guys doing down here?”

“Well, since you allowed the Guard to let the reekers in behind us, we figured it might be in our best interest to retreat from our position and come back home,” Slater said. “Really, Guerra, you couldn’t show the Guard how to fight?”

“Hey, that shit weren’t no joke,” Stilley said. He had cream gravy all over his mouth from the pork sausage he was eating. “There were, like, hundreds of thousands of ’em, man! It was like New York all over again!”

“Wasn’t,” Slater said.

“No, it was, Sergeant!”

“‘Wasn’t a joke,’ guy. Not ‘weren’t no joke.’ Where the hell did you learn English?”

Stilley smiled broadly. “I’m a leading product of the Detroit public school system, Sergeant!”

“You mean the city that was a wasteland
before
the zombie apocalypse?” Slater glanced at Guerra then jerked his head toward the double-stacked container wall that towered over them atop a broad earthen berm. “Maybe he’s one of them.”

Guerra shook his head. “He’s too stupid to be a zombie, Sergeant Slater. Take my word for it.”

“Well, I heard he does like eating man meat,” Reader said. He gave Tharinger a fist bump. “Dude, you’re alive.”

“How the hell do you figure that?” Stilley asked.

Reader smirked. “Well, you’re gay, right?”

“
What
?”

“Come on, Stilley. I saw you eating Dannon yogurt at breakfast. Hell, you had three of ’em.”

Stilley frowned. “So?”

“So what does it say on Dannon yogurt?”

Stilley looked so perplexed that Guerra thought the man’s head was going to explode. “How does eating Dannon yogurt make me gay, motherfucker?” His voice was so loud that even the troops on top of the wall could hear him over the gunfire.

Reader replied, “It says ‘fruit on the bottom.’ Get it? Fruit? Bottom?”

Guerra chuckled. “Heh, I like that. I gotta remember that one.”

Stilley was still clueless. “What the fuck does
that
mean, Reader?”

Slater laughed when Reader, Tharinger, and Hartman all did face-palms. “Private Stilley, you
do
know which end of an M4 to point at the enemy, right?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Stilley said before turning back to Reader. “So what does that shit mean, man? I don’t get it!”

“It means that word play for you is harder than Chinese algebra is for the rest of us,” Guerra said. “Take it from me, Stilley, it was a joke. Now laugh so we all don’t think it’s a miracle your brain has enough power to move your legs.”

“Ha-ha,” Stilley said, returning to his meal. Guerra could tell from the soldier’s sullen expression that he still didn’t get it. He wished he still had his phone, so he could take Stilley’s picture and upload it to Facebook. Then he remembered that Facebook didn’t exist anymore.

Slater shrugged off his ruck. “Well, this is going to be a long fight.”

“What’s that? Educating Stilley?” Reader asked.

Stilley clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Man…”

Slater snorted. “No, no. Nothing like that. I mean this”—he jerked his thumb toward the container wall behind them—“is legitimately going to be a long fight. We’re in a pretty good place here.”

“Don’t count on it,” Guerra said. He reached for the remainder of his pound cake and popped it into his mouth. He washed it down with a slug of lukewarm coffee. “You should’ve seen those dead bastards swarm across the creek. Took down the wire barriers like they were nothing and just dragged the tanglefoot all over the place. After a while, there were so many bodies hung up in the shit, the rest of the reekers just walked over the ones that were trapped.”

“Yeah,” Slater said. “I’ve seen it before. We used the same tactic in Boston. Worked until it didn’t, and then the stiffs got into the tunnels. We thought we had them then, because we demoed all of them, but that only took care of some of the stiffs from the city. When we found a couple hundred thousand coming in from the suburbs, that’s when the pucker factor went to ten.”

“Sounds tough,” Guerra said.

“It was. I haven’t shit anything but linguini since.”

“Please, I’m tryin’ to eat here,” Stilley said.

Slater snorted again and looked around. The lightfighters were surrounded by a mix of Army soldiers and Guardsmen, all waiting to rotate into the fighting positions up top. Guerra watched Slater out of the corner of his eye. The guy didn’t give off much of a vibe. He was apparently the sole survivor of his unit, but the experience didn’t seem to have impaired him in any way. He remembered when he’d first seen Slater all those days ago, when he’d offered Hastings some claymore mines like some car trunk salesman trying to interest a pedestrian in a pair of stereo speakers or Nike knockoffs from China. Guerra had thought the guy was kind of odd back then, and his opinion hadn’t changed.

“You rotating up with us?” Guerra asked.

“Yeah. Sure. Gotta fit in somewhere, and right now, what we need are guys putting bullets through skulls. At least no one here is still trying to push nonlethal methods. We had the Boston PD crying all over us because we weren’t using nonlethal loads in the beginning like they were. Goddamn New Englanders, they bring beanbags to gunfights.”

“We had the same thing in New York,” Hartman said. “The NYPD wanted us to use nonlethals, but once we lost a company, our commanding general said fuck that.”

“That was on like the second day we got there, right?” Reader asked. “When we were posted in Columbus Circle?”

“That was some crazy shit,” Tharinger said.

“I saw Beyoncé’s building get torched,” Stilley said, a mournful tone in his voice.

“Probably one of her weaves caught on fire,” Reader said.

“Man, you need to find a heart somewhere, Reader. That lady was a national treasure.”

Reader favored Stilley with a smirk. “Really? Well, if it makes you feel better, I watched a reeker eat Kanye.” Reader held a still-wrapped pound cake in his right hand as if it were a microphone and sang, “I’m a let you eat me in a minute…”

Stilley laughed. Apparently, he’d forgotten all about the fruit-on-the-bottom bit. Guerra was disappointed; he liked watching Stilley when he was down. It was a tragic circumstance, kind of like when Wiley Coyote failed to catch the Road Runner.

“Trade you for your pound cake,” Stilley said.

“I don’t want your gay-man yogurt, Stilley.”

Stilley’s face fell. “Damn, man. I’m not gay. I’m not even feeling jolly right now.”

Guerra barked out a laugh. The conversation had all the hallmark of a Greek tragedy, lightfighter style.

*

An hour later,
Ballantine saw the trenches around the post were full of reekers, and the oncoming waves of the dead walked across them as if they weren’t there, crushing the heads of their trapped fellows in the process. They crashed through the wire barriers, overwhelmed the lines of HESCO containers stretched out before the berms like breakwaters, and filled in all the secondary trenches. Multiple rows of claymores had dispatched thousands of the dead, and infantry soldiers with weapons had dropped ten times as many from along the container walls and guard towers. Despite all that, for a time, it appeared the forces defending the Gap had things under control. The reeker elements that had swept up from the south were being steadily eradicated, and the piles of dead reekers were a testament to that. By the time the zombies got to the base of the berms, they were bottled up, and they became easy pickings for the soldiers on the container walls.

But then, the hordes from the east entered the fray. Drawn to the front gates by the sound of combat, a hundred thousand reekers shambled, ran, walked, hobbled, and crawled toward the National Guard training facility. From the towers, the soldiers could see a great dust cloud on the horizon, where over a million more zombies were approaching. The reekers came down the highway, picking their way around and over abandoned vehicles, walking right through all the bombardments and sniper fire. Their numbers were too great, and containing the horde was nothing but a faint hope. Killing it was off the table entirely.

Ballantine stood next to Slater, pounding out round after round, the barrel of his M4 glowing cherry red as he burned through magazines at an astounding rate. Before mounting the wall, he had brought up as many cans of ammunition as he could carry, and he had instructed the other men to do the same. Slater was on an M110 sniper system, plunging 7.62 man-killers down range as fast as he could. The rest of the guys were on standard M4s, taking down targets that made it to the berm. Even through his gloves, Ballantine could feel the blistering heat coming off his weapon’s barrel. If he had to switch to full auto and spray and pray, he knew he’d blow a hole right through it, rendering the weapon totally useless until he could swap out the barrel or get an new entire upper receiver.

Slater turned to him as he paused to reload his rifle’s box magazine. “You know, Big Sarge, I think we are totally fucked!”

“What makes you say that?” Ballantine asked. His voice sounded small and distant, even to him. “Thought you snake eaters lived for this shit!”

Slater got back on his rifle and popped off a round. The ejected cartridge bounced off Ballantine’s helmet. “I’ve never been in a fight where my trigger finger is getting tired! At least, not when there was anyone left alive to shoot at!”

“Don’t worry, Slater. None of those things are alive, so you’re good to go!”