Death and Biker Gangs (6 page)

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Get on inside. I’ve got one bird we managed to clean up enough to get off the ground. If we clear the area we 
should 
be able to dump some napalm on ’em and call it a night.”

“Bad idea,” Tony said. “You saw what came out of Astra. You dump napalm on them and they’ll just be…well, zombies on fire.”

“Something came out of Astra?” I asked. This was all news to me. “
What
came out of Astra?”

“Not asking for your opinion, McKnight,” Hammond said, ignoring my question. “Drop off the lady and get to Hastings. Odds are any brigands you’d run into are already here. Might clear the way for you.”

The grim expression on his face belied the hopeful tone of his voice.

Tony started hauling me toward the building.

The ground rocked, and red fire seared the air in front of us. I flailed around, nearly falling over. Tony wrenched me backward, and I wound up pinned to the ground underneath him. Crumbled asphalt ground into my cheek.

“Hold position!” Hammond bellowed at his soldiers. “Hold 
fucking 
position before—”

Scarlet light flooded the steps of the science center. “Stay down,” Tony barked in my ear. “Stay 
down!
”

I flung my left arm up, trying to shield my face and eyes from the heat. 
Red fire. Red fire. What does that mean? 
The earth bucked underneath me. We’d all gotten used to relatively frequent tremors after the meteors came calling, but this felt more like a full-on quake than the muted complaints of the planet.

I lifted my head and squinted through the smoking, burning haze. “Shit,” I croaked. “What was that?”

“No!” Hammond bellowed into a walkie-talkie. “No, I said Sector 
Eight 
is infested, 
this 
we have under control, you’re shooting at 
us
, dammit!”

Something shrieked by overhead, and the science building shuddered, spewing a jet of cement and rebar our way. I yelped when little chunks nailed my hands, burning my skin. Tony gasped and cringed against me. 
Shit. 
He must have been taking the brunt of it.

 “Cease fire!” Hammond shouted through the uproar. “I said 
cease
 fire!”

I tried to scoot backward, but Tony’s weight held me in place. 
Building’s under fire…that means I need to get out of here. 
No way was I hanging around while they decided to demolish the place.

SHOOM! 
Another rocket soared by overhead, embedding itself in the front doors. I flung my head back down as fractured glass fountained over the perimeter, drawing shrieks from some of the unfortunate sorts it skewered. I squeezed my eyes shut.

Sharp pain jabbed through my left hand, and my eyes popped back open. I lifted my head long enough to make out a bloody cut along the back of my hand, but not much else. 
Well, that’s not good.

“Ashton’s not responding,” Hammond shouted at his soldiers. “I don’t know who’s in that damn tank. Swarm it, knock it out, 
protect that building—
”

Hundreds of booted feet moved out, crunching over bits of broken construction material and stepping around wounded comrades. Tony was still half on top of me, coughing violently. I felt around and grabbed his sleeve. “Tony. Tony, the tank’s shooting at us. Time to go.”

He rolled off me and rose slowly to his knees, looking utterly ghastly in the red light. “Bikers don’t know how to use tanks,” he said.

“Apparently these do!” I made myself get to my knees, ignoring the eruptions of pain along my back and legs. I grabbed Tony’s shoulder and shook him roughly, my blood spilling onto his leather jacket. “We gotta go. Come on. Don’t make me carry you.”

 “You couldn’t carry me if your life depended on it.”

“Suck it. I carried bigger men than you in college.” Actually, I hadn’t, but I’d faked courage for too long to quit now. “Get up!”

We scrambled away from the science building, away from the overturned humvees and sprawled bodies. One of them reached out, and old habit forced me to stop and kneel down next to the soldier. “Where are you hurt?” I asked, pretending not to see the sucking chest wound.

The soldier leaned toward me and opened his mouth as if to whisper…and then his jaws snapped shut on my bicep.

Holy shit, I really 
am 
getting stupid
. My heavy jacket dulled the immediate punch, but I felt the pressure around my muscle. I fumbled for the rifle, for my pistol, oh 
shit 
not now—

The ghoul’s head snapped back as a bullet discharged, and I immediately jerked away, checking my arm for punctures. The jacket had held, although I’m sure it would have given way if he’d kept gnawing on me.

Tony stooped down to pry the dead man’s pistol and some clips out of his belt. “These might come in handy,” he said. “Thanks, Private.”

He didn’t mention my near-fatal gaffe. I decided that meant he was either worried about something else, or else distracted by as-yet-undisclosed wounds.

I almost hoped for the latter if it would shut him up for a little bit.

The roar of a third—or was it fourth?—shell sounded overhead, and the bright streak of light shot past the science building. It detonated somewhere in the back, shooting flames and debris a good seventy feet into the air. Hot air blasted my face, and I was pretty sure blood was trickling down my nose. I wiped it aside in a hurry, watching the fire stretching toward the heavens. “Hammond said they were shooting at the building,” I said, just in case Tony had missed that part of the conversation. “He went to stop them…”

Tony nodded, similarly transfixed. He shook himself free, though, and stuffed the pistol and its ammo into his backpack. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Hastings.”

I don’t know how I got my legs to even move, much less run. But you learn certain things in the course of trying to stay alive—you learn how to ignore pain and fatigue, or at least funnel them away to deal with later. I held onto my rifle and pounded after Tony, willing to let him pick a path through the twisting, flame-lit confines of Elderwood Refugee Camp.

We passed burning tents and melee combat, men and women fighting with the undead or each other—it got hard to tell in this sort of lighting. We wound through living quarters and exercise areas, crunching over shell casings, broken bits of belongings, and military equipment. A toy robot’s head rolled off when I stumbled over it, disappearing into a partially collapsed outhouse.

By the time we’d left Astra, the city was largely abandoned. We didn’t have to see what happened when the revenants came across hundreds of living people, didn’t have to see what happened when order broke down into utter chaos.

The universe, of course, couldn’t let that stand. I couldn’t blame this on the meteors or general human asshattery; this was all on the zombies.

Sector Twelve housed the single men, and like the military areas, it seemed largely abandoned. Tony picked his way through the tents, swinging around at every noise. “All right, let’s just head this way. Processing was under lockdown, maybe it’s safer there…”

“Wait!” Dax’s shout was a welcome sound, though I realized he was sprinting toward us from the direction of processing. A small, panting golden retriever was hot on his heels.

“Processing’s gone,” he said. My heart twisted—or maybe that was my lungs, struggling to get some air that wasn’t coated with ash and heat. “I just came from there. They tried to set up a blockade…”

Considering the fact that he was carrying his backpack and was all the way over here, the blockade probably hadn’t been terribly effective. I reached a hand out to the dog. “Hey, Evie,” I said, holding out a hand to her.

She whined and tucked her tail between her hind legs.  

Tony looked around, then focused his attention on Dax. “There’s no way through?”

Dax shook his head. “I was heading to the science building. Lieutenant Reyes said we were supposed to retreat there…” He stared nervously over our shoulders at the inferno we’d left behind. “What did you 
do
?”

“Nothing,” Tony said. “Hammond wanted to barbecue.”

Dax looked at me.

“Brigands got the tank,” I said. “They’re shelling the science building. We were just there.”

“Well,” Tony amended, “we’re assuming they’re brigands. If the zombies have figured out how to use heavy artillery, we might as well give up.”

Dax looked between the two of us, his blue eyes enormous. “Then what the hell are you doing?”

I looked at Tony. What 
were 
we doing?

“I need to get to Hastings, and I’m not leaving you two here to be zombie chow.” Tony jerked his head toward the darkness outside Sector Twelve. “Back gate’s that way.”

Dax’s mouth fell open. “We can’t just 
leave 
in the middle of—”

Another concussion made the air shake, and huge flames leaped upward from the center of camp. The flickering overhead lamps switched off at once, and for a few seconds, everything grew quiet.

Then the screams began.

“I’m going to Hastings,” Tony barked, “and if they’re still around, they’re going to send soldiers, because we’re going to be lucky if half of ours haven’t been turned into a midnight snack. You can come along, unless you’d rather hang out here with the fences down and a horde after you.”

If you survive long enough, self-preservation becomes second nature. Dax, suitably convinced, nodded. “I see your point.”

We started walking.

The sound of fighting and screaming dropped behind us, bleeding away beneath the dog’s panting and our gasps for air. I thought we were headed south, away from the bulk of the conflict. Hammond had kept this part of campus empty, intending to put in greenhouses to jump-start the food production chain.

In hindsight, that had been my first inkling that this might turn out to be a long-term living arrangement.

The southern gate was a flimsy-looking chain link contraption—really, the sort of thing you’d expect revenants to bust through in no time—and Tony held up a hand. “Hold your breath and listen.”

We listened.

The dog growled.

Shit. 
Evie had turned into quite the proficient zombie detector. “Everybody quiet,” Tony said. I looked at the dog. She stared past the fence, into the darkened mass of the Elderwood suburbs.

Tony glanced up at the makeshift guard tower. “Looks like everyone’s been recalled. Dax, give me some light.”

Dax fumbled with his belongings, then switched on a big flashlight.

Shit. 
A half-dozen dead guys milled around just outside the fence. One pressed his hands up against the chain links and moaned loudly, and the others shuffled over to join him. Tony got right up close to them and nudged the lock with his pistol.

“You can’t just blast it off,” Dax said. “Even if you actually manage it, they’ll walk right in!”

“Not if we put them down.”

“What about the others?” Dax went on. “They’ll hear you shooting.”

The first thing you realize in a zombie apocalypse is that the dead are extremely persistent. The second thing you realize is that where there’s one, there’s many. The horde may thin out for a bit when they get distracted by a noise in the bushes or a nudie magazine in an abandoned 7-11, but there are 
always
 more.

Tony swung around to glower at him, completely heedless of the drooling dead dude not a foot away. “The camp’s fucked anyway.”

 “They’ll be more fucked if we leave the back door open,” I said. “Go find the damned key.”

He sent me a dark look, but swung his rifle over his shoulder and climbed up into the guard tower. We could hear him rummaging around, knocking things over and issuing curses that were probably directed at the undead 
and 
us.

Dax kept his flashlight trained on the ghouls, but he glanced at me. “Is it wrong that I’m fantasizing about leaving him here?”

“How about you fantasize about Vibeke blowing away those dead dudes?” Tony jumped down the last two ladder rungs with something clutched in his fist. “Light them up, Vibster. We gotta get through that fence and lock it back down before more hear the festivities.”

There’s a lot of things I never thought I’d do. Survive the zombie apocalypse, for starters. Go weeks without a hot shower. Get promoted to something resembling a combat medic without ever joining the military. Turn out to be a halfway decent shot. Get called 
Vibster.

The undead are easy to stop, provided they aren’t actively swarming you. You line them up, say a prayer if you’re inclined, and they usually topple like dominos. A professional soldier with an M-16 can do all kinds of damage, provided he aims in the general vicinity of the head.