The crowd was mainly stacked up on the open parking area, but by now stragglers lapped completely around the building as well. This was an incoming tide of stinking, rotted flesh and leaking fluids. Even after I managed to put down the whole horde, the wrecked refuse of once-humans meant the entire parking lot would need a lot more than a power washing to make the area livable. Or even decontaminated.
I thought about the dead and wondered if I’d let my mouth overload my ass. My big Ford crew cab pickup was still parked around back behind the building, but if the situation went sideways, there was no escape out that way. The flesh eaters had the truck surrounded twenty deep or more, and I worried they might start piling up on the truck and build a ramp up to the roof. Zombies weren’t smart, but sometimes they accidentally killed you anyway.
Trying to figure out how many zombies were already out of the picture, I fell back on the numbers I’d worked out over the last few months of Hell. I averaged six shots per minute, or a shot every ten seconds, when I was presented with targets this close and without having to account for wind. Even accounting for shooting at a downward angle, I nearly had to
try
to miss a headshot from fifty yards or less.
At six shots a minute for at least three hours of shooting, I paused to do the math and shook my head. I came up with 1080 shots, so probably already a thousand down under the feet of the growing horde. No wonder my trigger finger was getting raw even though the shooting gloves. A thousand down, and you couldn’t even see the effect with the crowd this big. I hadn’t seen a horde of Zs this size since Houston and frankly, I was starting to get a tiny bit freaked out. Oddly, the still-sane part of my brain found that worry somewhat heartening to an extent. For so long, I’d wondered if I could feel anything other than sadness, or hatred.
The roof was less than twenty feet off the ground, which meant the dead didn’t have to pile up too many layers to ramp up to the level of the rooftop. Maybe Colonel Northcutt was right, and I had bitten off more than I could chew. Clearing Woodville had been no picnic, but the total there had been less than five thousand.
“What the heck”, I finally muttered and went over to my tent. After Woodville, I always brought a tent with me on a job both to shelter me from the spring rains and to give me a place to retreat to for some “mental health” time. Zombies don’t moan like you see in the movies, but they do make this weird sniffing thing that has nothing to do with breathing and everything to do with tracking prey. Individually, the sound is annoying but multiplied by tens of thousands, the hissing can drive someone out of their minds in a few hours. If I lived, I would likely be subjected to the sound for days. Fortunately, the earplugs helped mute the sound of both the music and the dead.
Then, the last track on the AC/DC disc ended and I recognized the familiar instrumental opening from one of my all-time favorite songs. “Hotel California” by the Eagles. Cliché I know, but my Dad had loved this song and it was something we could share. I’d found myself listening to a lot more music since the dead rose. The Doors also made some pretty good tunes for the current predicament mankind found itself in, I mused. Ditto for Blue Oyster Cult. I hadn’t been a big fan of pop culture before the fall of mankind, and I routinely complained about the silly and banal forms of entertainment grown men found necessary to get through another day. Now, at least I didn’t have to wade through any more reality TV, but a little news would be nice. Maybe the Weather Channel, too.
Making a quick meal of canned stew reheated with my little multi-fuel one-burner stove, I wolfed down the bland contents and forced myself to sit still for a few minutes. Meditation was not my habit but in high stress situations, I simply found that taking the time to clear my thoughts actually worked to reduce my blood pressure. I knew this clean up job was going to be hard when I scouted the town, but I reminded myself I had plenty of food, water and ammo to see me through.
After lunch, I took a few minutes to run a patch through each of the rifles and add a little oil to the mechanisms before starting on the painful job of reloading the empty magazines. I’d scavenged several different models of magazine reloaders, but the most effective method I’d found was still doing the job manually, one round at a time. That took forever, though, and the Butler Creek loaders worked almost as well, so I did about half of them using the device.
Hell, nothing was 100% reliable and we were just shooting zombies. Not like I was trying to land the Space Shuttle or perform brain surgery. So I loaded up my mishmash of 20 and 25 round magazines and got back on the clock.
At three p.m. on the nose, I saw the three red flares arc into the sky and suddenly I felt a thousand times more isolated than I did before. That was the signal the National Guard troops were finished evacuating the high school holdouts, those survivors who barricaded themselves into the main building and somehow managed to keep the dead out for all this time.
The Colonel learned about the group last month after a scouting team got around to checking the main campus of the school. A sharp eyed soldier spotted the horde from a distance, still clamoring to get at the fresh meat inside. They broke off their planned approach and dropped back a bit to observe.
Zombies didn’t that riled up about anything except the prospect of a meal, but the scouts could not get close enough to the barricades at the time to pass a message to the people trapped inside. Not on their first mission, anyway. A few days later, they came back with a plan. That project required a little bit of misdirection and a lot of guts on the part of the scouts, as they braved not only the zombies but potentially the survivors inside as well.
Sometimes, people didn’t want to be rescued by the military. That could because they feared the troops were rogue, or because they had their own misdeeds to hide. I blame the media. Again, sometimes people watched too many zombie movies and they confuse fantasy with reality. The military wasn’t really there to claim control or steal their women. Or take their guns.
Which is just stupid. As long as you are pointing your guns at the zombies, the Guard would gladly help you find more ammunition for your rifle. Heck, when I’d hit the roadblock south of Livingston, just a month after the First Wave struck and I’d lost my family. I had six other survivors crammed in my van, mostly folks from my old neighborhood and all armed to the teeth. All the guard asked was if we’d help them gun down the horde approaching from the town side.
I was using just the two Ruger 10/22s from my personal collection at the time, and one of the soldiers had been impressed with how I could make headshot kills so consistently with the little rifles. That’s how I first came to the Colonel’s attention, I think. Not that I am the best shot by any means. I just kept going and since I didn’t care if I lived or died at the time, I stood the line and kept killing zombies until the last one fell. It went down almost on top of me.
The individual National Guardsmen had all suffered losses in their families, but Colonel Northcutt gave them, and us, something to work towards in clearing and salvaging to help the survivors. Now, if you start acting like a jackass and preying on other humans, then you have a problem with the Guard. And these days, nobody wants a problem with our soldiers, because they represent the only force taking a stand against the dead. Plus, they will hang your ass if you get too far out of line.
Martial Law is nothing to sneer at when troops existed to enforce the rules. And Colonel Northcutt wasn’t some power-mad despot. His rules basically ran to common sense and playing nice with each other. No murder, rape, or stealing from other survivors hit most of his high points. Really, the kinds of things you teach your child as a parent…
I let that train of thought go, because the going further down that path hurt too much. I told myself to quit goofing off instead of getting back to work. Like the guys hanging around the break room fixing coffee they won’t drink after lunch. Delaying the inevitable return to the grind.
Aim, squeeze. Aim, squeeze. The little Ruger rifles had almost no recoil and with the extended magazines I could maintain a steady rate of fire. The 22 Long Rifle caliber was not considered by most gun snobs to be a real “manstopper” round, but the zombie heads proved to be a bit softer than their human, living, counterparts and the 22 LR had several factors in its favor.
First, it did the job. Yes, sometimes I had to use a second round but most times one shot to the grape took down the shambler. Second, 22 LR was light. I could run around with 5,000 rounds of it in a backpack and still get where I was going. Try that with 308 Winchester. Finally, the stuff was everywhere. At least here in Texas. If you salvaged a house and found only one type of ammo in a dresser or stashed in the garage, chances were it was 22 Long Rifle. Or some type of 12 gauge shotgun shell.
After running six magazines through the rifle, I stopped and switched to the next one. Shooting out a barrel was next to impossible with a 22, which was another point in their favor, but barrels did heat up. Hence the multiple copies of the same rifle. All the magazines were interchangeable and I barely had to look up when swapping them out.
As I kept up the firing, I finally noticed a few gaps in the throng. I was careful to drop zombies in groups, and well out from the store itself. I still worried about a ramp forming, and by shooting in groups of fifty or so and then moving over a bit I managed to create my own little “firebreaks” in the crowd. However, for every one I dropped, another seemed to wander up and join the party. I had anticipated another five hundred to wander their way here from the school, drawn by the shooting now that the chewy treats inside the confines of the campus were gone. What I was seeing looked like more than five hundred. Like maybe double or triple that figure.
By five o’clock, I was beginning to tire and the late spring sun heating up the tar on the roof added another assault on my nose. As if the stink of so many thousands of slowly decaying corpses wasn’t bad enough. At least there was something I could do about the smell. Digging a paper mask out of my bag, I treated the material with a drop of dark liquid and donned the mask.
Early on, I’d found a box of car deodorizers at a car detailing shop and discovered the scent used to freshen up vehicles helped cut the stench, a bit. This was not the scented hangers, mind you, but the industrial strength stuff. That one drop I used had been diluted with water already to cut the potency.
I never used the stuff when salvaging, because the whiff of a decaying corpse might be all the warning I had the house was occupied by one of the unquiet dead. I knew a girl who called them that. We all had our own pet names, but inevitably we came back to using zombie, because it fit so well.
Also, despite the calluses, my trigger finger was nearly raw under the gloves and gauze wrap I used. This was an occupational hazard, even though my hands were as callused as any lumberjack or stone mason, the constant motion wore away at the hardened tissues. I’d started off with hands as soft as a baby’s bottom, but after three months of doing this job I figured I had successfully weathered all the blisters I was ever going to get.
Since I was taking a break anyway, I set aside the rifle I’d been using to let it cool and picked up the next one in line. Some shooters name their weapons, usually something ironic or sentimental, but for me they were just tools. I did number them, one to six, and used a little White-Out brush to write the number on top of the buttstock for identification.
Picking up Number Four, I levered a fresh magazine in place and began my work once again. I emptied the magazine, dropping twenty five for twenty five that time, and removed the scope from my eye to gauge the crowd as I exchanged magazines. I didn’t like the way the mass of dead pressing up against the front of the store began to mound up, so I spent the next ten minutes building breaks in the parking lot and further back on the overrun highway.
By dropping twenty or so zombies in a tight cluster and repeating the process as needed, I created “ripples” in the tide of the dead, forcing them to approach along corridors. Zombies took the path of least resistance, and by channeling the flow I could somewhat direct the dead. I did not want to choke off their approach to the store but I did want to create a bit of separation. This breathing space would then allow me to deal with the masses accumulated just below.
Target selection and timing dictated I take slow, careful shots to break up the building pile of bodies creeping up the side of the building. Unlike what we learn from Hollywood, a gunshot does not usually blow a body backwards ten feet. Even if you shoot someone with a cannon, that just blows the body apart. I’ve seen what a thirty millimeter cannon does to a zombie. A cloud of mist and some smaller pieces scattered about. Fifty caliber machine gun rounds just disassemble the corpse no matter where the round strikes, and the shock jellies the brain. Believe me, if I had access to an unlimited supply of fifty caliber ammo, that would be what I would use instead.
So, in real life, not the movies, many things are way different than we would otherwise think. I know I learned a lot of otherwise esoteric facts from my time in the zombie apocalypse. For example, when shot in the head, a zombie, like a real live human, tends to fall forward, especially when shot in the head with a small, light round.
The dead had no concept of personal space and would climb or crawl right over one of their less mobile brethren to reach a live person. As a rule, zombies made for poor climbers, but they could still crawl and claw their way up. Though clumsy individually, their movements were almost ant-like in their persistence. I feared if I looked closely, I might see some sort of organization taking shape. Not that such would happen, but because that would mean my mind had finally slipped those last few gears.