Hoffman and the Cook went to her assistance but they were too late. A disgusting lust had risen in the infected assailant who eagerly tore the dead female MP’s pants from her body and began to violate it. Hoffman placed his M16 at the base of the skull of the principal necrophiliac and scrambled the monster’s brains just as it began to pump away.
The swarm of infected surged over the hummers like ants on a pair of captured grasshoppers. Muzzle-flashes and yells punctuated the fight and served to pinpoint where the defenders stood. A small group of infected made their way past the hummers and directly for the ladder truck.
Billy had prepared his response over the past couple hours for just this contingency. He only had four rounds left in his .38. He never was much of a sharpshooter but even if he had been, he doubted the snub-nosed barrel of the Smith and Wesson was any kind of accurate past Ping-Pong table range. He held the weapon in his right hand and retained a hold on the Denver tool with his left.
When the first of the group made his way to within ten feet of Billy, he had the revolver level with the woman’s nose. She was a fat woman in a business suit with broken heels, a pair of scissors stuck in her shoulder, and she went down with a shot to the forehead. The second and third of the group, a pair of teenage boys, joined the infected woman on the ground with careful headshots. His last shot was a black woman in some sort of fast food uniform.
Fighting the urge to throw the now-empty revolver away, he shoved it back into the pocket of the turnout coat and hefted the Denver tool.
A desperate man is like an animal when in a fight. Contrary to what you see in the movies, the average person is not killed simply with the single blow of a seemingly innocent household object. A man will not necessarily go down like a bag of dirt after a whack from a sledge. More often than not, he will still be fighting, and may be slightly pissed at you. This fact of life, multiplied by a factor of 100 in an infected person, made every interaction with them life or death.
Billy cracked the last two of the infected group that had been attacking him with the sledgehammer side of the Denver tool and stood there, chest heaving. His stomach was knotted so tight he felt like he was going to throw up. The bile reached into the back of his throat and bathed his tonsils with acid. He could smell his own vomit leaching into his nostrils but he did not succumb.
He checked himself out in the flash of the ladder truck’s strobes. Everything seemed to work and, most importantly, none of the blood was his.
The machineguns had opened back up. Reid was behind the sights of one of the M240’s. The weapon’s former gunner was sprawled out lifeless and missing his eyes on the back of the hummer. Billy could see Stone and Durham, back-to-back, standing next to the hummer with zombies on both sides of them. The two Coastguardsmen were kneeling by the wheel-wells of the second hummer, firing around the corners at oncoming assailants.
“The best first aid is rounds down range! We’ll triage after the shooting stops,” Stone yelled above the din of the fight to no one in particular.
The mob that was trying to force the bridge seemed to have grown ever larger instead of diminishing. Billy could see a series of multicolored blinking lights in the distance rapidly approaching from the horizon. Over the din of the machineguns, he could hear a high-pitched whine of turbine engines reverberating through the night from the direction of the oncoming Christmas tree lights.
The sound belonged to a big grey whale of an airplane. Billy judged it at least some 60-feet long, held aloft in the sky by two massive rotors, one atop each wing like a helicopter. Multicolored navigational lights blinked at every corner of the huge plane as it came to a hover just a few hundred feet from the bridge. Its two huge rotors sounded like an immense eggbeater and were louder than any helicopter Billy had ever heard. Inside the red-lit cockpit of the aircraft, Billy could just see the reflection of flashing lights and two pilots in flight helmets observing the scene in front of them.
The craft hung suspended in midair over the waterway, pivoted slightly, and then turned to the side. The two huge rotors on the craft, which looked half helicopter and half plane, extended almost the entire length of the device. Billy could see a ramp yawn open between the massive twin tails. A heavy machinegun, larger than the MP’s M240s, started to fire at the infected in front of the hummers. The heavy machinegun was both louder and lower, like the rumble of God’s muscle car. Glowing tracer rounds, resembling beefed-up roman candles, fired three rounds a second and had an immediate impact on the crowd. As the rounds surged out from the aircraft and into the onrush of infected humanity, the tracers floated out to their targets.
The fiery projectiles removed limbs, decapitated, and literally burst apart anything that they hit. The infected melted away under the intense crossfire of the two hummer-mounted machineguns and the new heavy artillery that poured into it. The mob, for lack of a better word, was pureed. Ricochets rung out everywhere from the rounds hitting the reinforced concrete of the bridge. Glowing red and yellow swarms danced as bullets and concrete chips careened off the roadway and skittered in all directions.
Billy hugged the side of the ladder truck and instinctively tucked his head down. He could feel the propwash of the huge rotors roll across his body, blowing his borrowed turnout coat open, lifting his t-shirt halfway off his back, and creating a vortex of debris everywhere. He closed his mouth and eyes as he felt wet spray coat his face from the bloodstained road at his feet. Gravel and sand stung his skin.
Then just like that, as quick as it had appeared, the aircraft stopped firing, pivoted away from the bridge, craned its rotors forward, and departed to the northeast. Billy watched its navigational lights grow smaller and saw the aircraft dip down past the tree line away from the waterway and disappear.
He ran to the hummers. Stone had the radio handset pressed to his ear and was talking rapidly into it.
“What the hell was that thing?” Billy asked.
“Air Force CV-22 out of Eglin. They use ’em for spec ops. The TOC found ’em circling around Pensacola and advised them of our situation. They said they had two belts of .50-cal left for their ramp gun but couldn’t stick around, as they are bingo fuel. They are landing over at Jack Edwards to refuel,” Stone said as he kicked bodies at his feet for signs of life.
Durham was counting the rounds left in his Glock, his shotgun broken in two pieces at his feet.
“For once, the Air Force is good for something,” Hoffman said. His M16 was slung across his chest and Billy could not tell what was smoking more, the weapon or the Camel menthol stuck just below the Chief’s ample moustache. “They really saved our happy horse shit on this one.”
His friend the Cook was busy throwing up.
Reid had climbed down from the M240 mount inside the hummer and was covering the seminude body of the female MP with a tarp. He soon did the same for the MP that he had put down and looked Billy in the eye as he did it.
“The pilot of that CV-22 said the route was clear headed down the highway north of here as far as they could see. So we may have won this little engagement,” Stone said, gesturing from where the zombies had come.
“Let’s hope so. I, for one, am out of ammo,” Billy said.
“I imagine. I looked back during that bar room brawl we just had and saw you swinging like Babe Ruth back there with that yellow sledge of yours. Pretty hairy horse shit,” Hoffman said, the cigarette bobbing on his lips with each syllable.
In the predawn mist, smoke from fires on both horizons wisped up to the heavens. A roadway of bodies, mangled, churned, and hacked in unbelievable horror, carpeted the foot of the bridge for several hundred yards from the ladder truck, past the hummers and down the highway.
Billy had seen a hundred splatter flicks as a teenager, read Dante’s Inferno, fought dozens of house fires, and only hours before had seen a school populated by tiny corpses, but what he saw before him on the bridge trumped it all. No matter how many books you read, or Hollywood explosions you see, you could never prepare for this blizzard of gore.
“After Atlanta was burned to the ground three times in a month by Sherman, one of the residents said something to the effect that ‘Hell is a great black dead bird and she has laid her egg here,’” Stone glanced around and grimaced. “Now I can grasp what he meant. It looks like that same egg has pretty much hatched.”
As perfect, divine punctuation on Stone’s comment, the men turned to the sound of a far-off explosion coming from the direction of where the CV-22 had disappeared. A fireball rose in the distance from the area in question.
“That our flyboys?” the Cook asked. He wiped green chunks of bile from his lips with the back of a bloodied hand.
“Jack Edwards airfield is about where that fireball is. Small field, I can’t imagine there was much there for them,” Billy said.
Stone got to the radio chatter into it for a status report from the Tactical Operations Center (TOC). The TOC, located back at the armory, advised that the island was finally under control although casualties were high, the cutter was still below them under the bridge, and the CV-22 had lost contact after it landed at Jack Edwards. They hoped to have reinforcements to the bridge within a few hours. After that, a scouting patrol to the airport was discussed.
They policed up the area and assessed the situation. The entire bridge defense force now consisted of Billy, Stone, Reid, Hoffman, the Cook, and Durham. It was found both that Spud had vanished, and that his body was not among those on the bridge. The fire hat he had worn lay neatly placed on the driver’s seat of the ladder truck.
Four MPs were lifeless and mutilated under a dusty tarp. No one counted the bodies of the infected or even bothered to try to move them.
Stone kneeled down on both knees and looked at the tarps, his helmet off, and face bare. Through closed eyes, he mumbled.
“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed, and the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, and their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still,” Stone recited from memory.
No one else had any words.
Autumn along the Alabama gulf coast usually brought pre-morning fog as the temperatures hit the dew point in the low 60’s. The cool morning haze that accumulated made everything the consistency of a wet paper towel. Small biting gnats collected in the condensation on the back of Billy’s neck and buzzed about his eyelashes. His clothes stuck to him and his underwear bunched in ways henceforth unknown.
The smell of the diesel exhausts from the hummers and ladder truck parched his throat. The bright copper smell of drying blood, the pall of cordite and gunpowder from the thousands of rounds fired all mixed together in a unique aroma, an
after-the-battle eau de toilette
.
From the north of the bridge came the now-familiar echoes of an M4. First one or two shots, then three-round bursts. Reid flipped down the NODs on his helmet and quickly flipped them back up. The image glowing nothing but bright green feedback in the morning haze. The firing grew closer and more ragged before it eventually died out altogether.
“That could be the crew of that CV-22 trying to escape and evade back to us,” Stone said.
“I’ll go,” First Sergeant Reid growled, reaching for an abandoned M4.
“Get back on that 240, Top. Watch that area and tell me what you see,” Stone said.
“Hooah,” Reid said, looking for another belt for the weapon. Only one of the machineguns was still functional. The other had overheated and a round had jammed in the barrel, putting it out of action. Reid busily removed the belt from the dead weapon and carried it to the one that was still working, trying to come up with a combination that worked.
“We got any more of that 5.56 left?” Hoffman asked. His magazines were empty, as were the Cook’s. Stone advised them to look around but was not hopeful.
In the distance just off the foot of the bridge, Billy could make out a pair of figures running through the haze. They wore green flight suits and carried M4s. They kept looking behind them as they ran.
“Son of a bitch,” Reid said. He had seen what they were running from.
At least twenty zombies were chasing the two flight personnel, and were rapidly gaining.
“You got that 240 ready, Top?” Stone yelled.
“Hooah, frickin’ slaying bodies, good-a-go,” Reid grumbled in lifer speak and as he did, chambered a round in the mounted machinegun.
“Engage them as soon as they get in range, Top” Stone said.
“Good-a-go.”
Seconds stretched forever as the group on the bridge watched the two flyers run, stumble, and then pick each other up. The pack of infected was running and even crawling on all fours after them, shortening the gap.
“I got about five hundred meters out, Cap,” Reid said, one eye squinting through the sights of the machinegun, adjusting the dial for range.
“Send it,” Stone said.
Reid was firing as Stone’s words were still in the air.
Controlled bursts from a professional who was clearly an assassin with an M240 reached out. The light was poor but it was better than they had fought in all night and the Sergeant’s rounds soon found their mark, bowling over infected and dropping them lifeless for good in mid-stride.