Out of his pickup bounced Mack and Wyatt from the cab and the two Ham radio guys from the bed, accompanied by two gun-wielding militiamen that were new to him. These militiamen were different from those who had been pressed into the fight for the island. Most of the ones Billy had seen were regular soft guys; these two were flat-stomached and deeply tanned. They wore matching khakis festooned with pockets from ass to ankle and nondescript t-shirts under tactical vests with no markings. Besides the distinctive baseball caps, ZZ-Top serial killer beards and sunglasses, what really set them apart was the Mk18 battle rifle each of the men carried. They looked slightly different from the ones he had brought back from Pascagoula, but he didn’t think twice about it.
“Get on board, let’s shag ass!” Billy yelled to them as they jogged towards the boat.
The escapees from the radio station clambered aboard with the two bearded militiamen covering their rear, slewing their Mk18s left and right, watching for targets.
“They climbed the walls. It’s crazy,” Mack said breathlessly. Billy listened to her update on the situation downtown as he let Cat take the boat out of the Marina and out to sea. He heard how the Company at the bridge had held out until the machineguns jammed. How the thousands of infected had used their own bodies to climb over the hastily built wall, still oozing fresh cement, and swallowed up the defenders. How reinforcements were making a fighting retreat through the city to the backup line of defenses across the Fort Road leaving town. How the engineers were going to cut the power to town before bugging out to their windmill, so that when they came back after there would not be as much damage to the electrical grid. How they had boarded up the door to the station from the outside with the Bing Crosby evacuation song set up on repeat and it would play until the generator ran out of diesel.
“Well, at least Stone sent you guys some bodyguards,” Billy said, alluding to the two bearded gunslingers.
“Oh yeah, Bert and Ernie are great.”
“Bert and Ernie?”
She laughed, “Yeah, that’s what they said their names were. Who cares these days? They helped rig the equipment up, spent all morning talking to Ike, and watched our back coming out of town. They shot three infected that we ran into. Bang-bang-bang, three bodies. Right in the head. Pretty scary stuff.”
They moved down the beachfront and as the sound of gunfire grew louder, he could tell they were getting closer to where the rear guard action was taking place. He could only imagine how desperate the fight was.
««—»»
Most of three separate companies of infantry had rushed to the bridge. Almost as soon as they arrived, the forces melted away like a snowball tossed into a crematorium. Once the Horde of infected had swarmed over the barricaded cement wall, they had proved largely unstoppable. Reid and Stone fought back-to-back, forming the center anchor for the thin camouflaged line that slowly fell back from the barricade and down the bridge to Gulf Shores.
Stone had planned for this as best he could over the past few days. His primary plan was to stop the invasion at the bridge while the civilian population sheltered at Fort Morgan. If that failed, he would keep the army intact and fall back through the streets as slow as he could, fighting a delaying action to let those who hadn’t wanted to go to the fort bug out and get the hell out of Gulf Shores before the zombie wave broke over the town.
In the neighborhood between the bridge and the Fort Road, he had ordered a mandatory evacuation and prepared it as a battleground over the past 24-hours. It meant sacrificing a neighborhood to draw the Horde away from the rest of town and allow those few holdouts who would not evacuate the time to get to safety.
The Fourth Company of militia was broken up into independent teams to staff this line of defense all the way back to the Fort Road. He had set up sniper positions on every building with a second story; roadblocks covered choke points on the streets. They would channel the infected into the blockhouses. Brick homes were transformed into blockhouses by boarding up walls and windows inside and out, and sand bagging doors closed from the inside. Mirrors were placed around corners inside the houses so the defenders could see movement a split second before the infected could see them. At one end of the room would be the entrance, at the other end a bunker with a team of militiamen. When the room got too full of infected to fight anymore they would bug out.
Escape routes from these houses were via holes cut into ceilings and up through the roof. Portable ladders were then pulled up to prevent the zombies from following.
Several of these blockhouses were equipped with improvised bombs. Made from homemade black powder packed into Tupperware containers filled with screws and bolts, the explosives were ignited with electric matches and speaker wire. Once the house’s defenders would sucker a group of the infected inside and the house would fill with dozens of ravenous attackers, the militiamen would escape to the roof and make their getaway by moving from roof to roof several houses down where they would set the charge off by touching the lead to a car battery. The idea was to slow down the invasion as long as possible. To trade each house, each block for enough zombies and eventually, if given enough blocks, the infected would be exterminated.
Once they withdrew from town, they would trade road for time and with the infected traveling at five miles per day they had set up a defensive across the island from water to water every four miles down the Fort Road. They were prepared to fall back all the way down the island to prepared positions the entire 26-miles to Fort Morgan. If any infected remained, the entire population would shelter under siege at the two-hundred year old citadel until they waited them out.
All of the children, the infirm, and the elderly were ordered to the Fort two days before. When the wall fell, the brick walls of the bastion already sheltered some 900 souls. The fort was the most logical redoubt on the island. It was large enough for 2,000 people to huddle in its casemates. The stockpile of commodities from the warehouse in Loxley was stored there. The rainwater cisterns, capable of holding enough water to support everyone, had been sampled and declared still operable. Best of all, a long dock accessible only by passing through the Fort itself, kept the charterboats and shrimpers at the back door. If somehow the fort fell, the final act was that the boats could evacuate everyone left to the old Singing River Naval Station where they could start over.
It was a workable plan and Stone believed he would never have to use it. The bridge wall should have held. As he directed the withdrawal down the asphalt incline from its bloody ruins and into his hometown, he could not believe it had come to this. The choke point there had been the obvious lynchpin in the defense of the island, he kept telling himself. He had been able to focus all of his forces across a front only 60-foot across. It should have held. He felt cold and clammy, and his hands shook as he reloaded his rifle and yelled orders, pausing every few feet to coordinate forces outside of his earshot via radio.
The only way to save the situation was to fall back in an orderly fashion, stopping at each strongpoint and holding it as long as possible. It was only when you were seconds away from being overrun that you could allow your forces to fall back to the next strongpoint and start all over again, trading space for time. He had to keep the army intact or else everything was lost.
He felt Reid leave his side and turned to see what could cause such another unimaginable turn of events. He saw Jenny, the emotionally stunted and immensely powerful German Shepherd that was Reid’s whole world surrounded by a ring of a dozen infected who were reaching out for the animal. The dog snapped and threw streams of white foamy spittle out with each bark. Rearing up on her hind legs, she stood upright using her massive front paws to knock infected assailants off balance and flat on their backs. However, no matter how many she knocked over it was in vain.
Stone yelled to Reid as the First Sergeant rushed to the dog’s aid, shooting her attackers in the face until his magazine ran dry. The old soldier yelled an unbroken and unrepeated litany of curses as he turned in a bladed stance. He used the muzzle and buttstock of his empty rifle and carve his way through the pack of undead to his baby. Finally, the First Sergeant made a hole large enough to allow the dog to leap over the back of the closest zombie and affect her escape.
As the dog ran, the circle closed and engulfed Reid inside of it, the mass of fetid zombies crashing down upon him. Other nearby MPs and militiamen, transfixed by the event, fired into the circle to save Reid. Hundreds of rounds annihilated all movement in the gang pile to save the First Sergeant at its center.
Stone led the assault into the groaning writhing mess and found Reid prostrate inside the stack of meat atop him. He choked and coughed blood down his face. Stone felt ill as he realized that it was the bright red crimson pumped by a living heart and not the rotten congealed black blood of the infected.
He dragged the First Sergeant backwards by his web gear, with a dozen militiamen and MPs covering their withdrawal. After opening a gap of several hundred feet, he let the sergeant rest on the cold ground in the brown autumn yard of a pretty two-story house with dormers and a white picket fence. Stone checked the sergeant for wounds and found at least two bullet holes in the old man’s upper thigh near his hipbone where his body armor didn’t cover. The holes poured blood and the combat gauze that he pressed against it from his own trauma kit blossomed red instantly.
Reid looked up at him, his tanned leather skin faded to a chalky white as the blood flowed away from him. He shook his head and moved his lips but no words would come. Stone felt the man’s sticky hands on his face, smoothly caressing his cheek as he blinked slowly.
“It’s okay. You are going to be fine. You’re doing good,” Stone choked out through his tears.
The sergeant shook his head again, very slowly. Stone wanted to tell him how much he depended on him. How much he needed him. He could think of nothing to say that made any sense. He couldn’t think of anything to do except press the useless gauze to the man’s bloody hip. Looking into the steel blue eyes of the First Sergeant as he lay on the grass, it was the first time he had ever noticed how grey the man’s eyebrow and hair was. How ancient the warrior had grown.
“Silent night,” Stone croaked, low and quiet. He could not remember the words to any literary passage, poem he had memorized, or hymn that he had ever sung in church and it was the most appropriate thing that popped into his mind.
“Holy night,” he sang softly.
“All is calm.
“All is bright
“Round young virgin mother and child,” his eyes so full of tears that he could not keep them open.
“Holy infant, so tender and mild.”
He could see the First Sergeant’s eyes blink heavily, fluttering like a moth trying to take flight.
He saw the man’s eyes open wide and the pupils began to dilate. One small tear fell across the man’s face, leaving a clean smooth trail through the cake of blood and dirt. Jenny placed her muzzle on the man’s chest and whined.
“Sir, we have to go,” Stone heard the young voice of Oswald through the fog in his head. He could feel her hands tug at his web gear. “We have to go sir. They are fixing to blow the block here.”
With that, the improvised explosives went off in the house only a hundred feet behind them with a thunderous roar and a shower of smoke, glass, and debris. As he got up and moved down the road with Oswald pulling him along, Jenny got up and followed at his heels.
— | — | —
ChapteR 55
November 26 1300
It was Thanksgiving and Billy sat down on the hard cold steps of Battery Duportail, a concrete structure inside the old Fort, to eat his holiday meal. A heavy cake of cornmeal took up half the plate, the other half piled high with boiled shrimp. While he was grateful for anything, he chewed the tasteless food slowly and with meaning, imagining that it had more flavor than it did. At least he had his kids with him for dinner.
Billy took a bite from the sawdust-flavored cornbread and looked out over the parade grounds of the fort. Fort Morgan had turned into the world’s biggest low-budget renaissance fair. The place looked absolutely out of control. Like a Nazi concentration camp but without the barbed wire and snazzy striped pajamas. All you could see were clothes hanging everywhere, forming makeshift walls. A hazy grey mist gathered from the smoke of dozens of small heating fires and the mass of unwashed human filth. Although the citadel offered protection and working salt-water toilets, there were no shower facilities and only enough freshwater for drinking and cooking. With no heat, the cold bricks felt more like ice cubes with every night that passed. Spud and his people were making a killing trading for blankets, socks and knit caps they had stockpiled.
There was no soap or hot water.
Billy coughed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. With so many people in such proximity for a week, everyone was sharing the same mutated cold back and forth. The least common denominator in the fort was the sound of coughing. Everyone had one of their very own.
Wyatt closed his laptop and sighed. “Well that’s it, battery exhausted.”