“
Savages crashed the southwest gate, from what Wilson said.”
“
Great. That explains why they’re all over us.”
“
Yeah.” I put up my rifle. The Zeds were fifty yards and closing. Brains started to fly as we cut them down. Rain washed their rotted blood into the grass. We'd have a big clean-up job ahead of us, if we survived.
The swing set and plastic climbing wall weren’t going to give us cover much longer. I pulled the pin on a grenade and hurled it into the moaning pack in front of us. White phosphorus exploded and commenced to burn everything within twenty yards. Another grenade followed as we fell back. None of the rest of my crew made it to the park. We went over the train tracks in a cluster.
I keyed the comm-net. “Kenny?”
“
Yeah, Danny.”
“
We can't make it to the firehouse. We're cut off. My platoon is trapped in the houses. My house and Dog’s squad are together. We’re moving north toward the train station.”
“
Understood. How many Zeds you see?”
I paused for a moment. I saw a wall of rotted bodies out there.
“
Thousands.” I said into the mike. “We don’t have enough ammo to kill them all.”
“
Understood. Will call up the dragons.”
“
Roger that. Death out.”
“
That oughtta even things up a bit, eh?” Dog grinned.
“
Yeah,” I said, “if they work.”
I keyed the comm again.
“
Third platoon, this’s Captain Death. We're falling back to depot. Rally here if you can make it. If not, stay in place, and we'll come to you as we're able.”
I got responses from the houses in the affirmative. One squad had tried to link up with us but got forced into one of the empty houses. Luckily, we'd set up a few of the homes we hadn’t demolished as safe houses.
“
Have faith, Danny,” Pepper said. She laid her hand on my shoulder. “The dragons’ll work fine.”
I heard the big diesels roar to life a couple blocks away.
“
I hope so,” I muttered as we ran to the red-brick depot. Another toy my brother found in mothballs on the Island. A lot of Vietnam vintage stuff got stored there, including a half dozen of the dragons. We had two of them—basically, Patton tanks with flame throwers mounted on for barrels. They pumped napalm from two hundred-gallon cells mounted on the back of the turret. Back in the Vietnam days, they were used to “pacify” villages. We thought the things might work nicely on amassed zombies. We just had to prove it.
We ducked into the old railroad depot on the run. It had been empty for years, then used to store junk. When we went into defensive positions last year, we cleaned out the junk out and used the building as a shop for working on the trucks and such. One could fit three pickups into it lengthwise.
The steel door slammed behind us. Dog sent two of his people to check entrances. Four windows faced south. We'd welded steel bars in front of the glass. At the time, we didn’t know why, but we had a thought we might be in this position someday.
The Zeds were half a block away and closing.
One of Dog’s people had an M-203. One of the great things about having a brother in the Army: I get all the cool toys. Here was, in essence, an M-16 with a forty-millimeter grenade launcher under the barrel.
“
Private Jinks!” I shouted. “Give them rotten fuckers somethin' to think about. If we can keep them at the bridge, they won’t be able to get here too easy.”
The girl nodded. I knew she was seventeen, but damn, she looked twelve. A scared twelve. She slid a grenade marked
F
into the tube. I was about to ask her what it was, then she took aim and squeezed off a round. The swarm had just started to shuffle onto the bridge when the contents of that round hit them.
F
for
fletchets
. Two hundred sharpened nails with stabilizer fins on them. The blast tore through the swarm. More than a dozen fell with the first round. Jinks followed it with a second and dumped even more. The nails hacked through rotted flesh and kept on going. Jinks grinned as the rest of us opened up with our rifles. We were less than a block from the fire house, but we might as well have been a mile from our destination.
“
They’re across the crick!” Dog shouted. “Jinks, pour on the grenades!”
Explosions ripped through the swarm as fast as she could load and shoot. The deaders were close enough now for Pepper’s MP-5 to be effective. She cut loose with that sweeper and raked the Zeds head-high. The front rank fell. Bodies filled the small creek. Those behind simply walked across the dead. We fired on them until our guns ran dry and they were too hot to touch. The Zeds were ten yards away when I pulled the pin on one of my grenades and tossed it at them. Ol’ Willie Peter will make you a believer, as the Vietnam vets say.
The white phosphorus went off and lit the inside of the depot with flickering, white light. That was when some crazy Zed yanked Pepper around and took a chomp out of her shoulder.
She screamed, shoved it away, and dropped the bastard with a burst from her gun. He was a fresh kill, marked up like a Savage with his face pierced and tattooed and one arm missing. A loop of guts hung from his belly and tangled around his leg. He tried to stand up, so I put a round through his face.
“
They’re inside!” I screamed.
Thirty rotted bodies streamed toward us from the back of the building. One of the steel doors in the back swung open. More started to push through.
“
Jinks, throw some WP back there!”
She shot me a scared look.
“
Do it now!”
She nodded, fumbled a shell into the gun, aimed, and cut loose. The WP popped. Flames shot up and cooked the rotten bastards back there. It also cut off those wanting to come in for a snack.
It got a little hairy after that. We got a few shots off, but we were too close for the guns. The ricochets off the brick started to do some damage to us. We got down to whatever hand tools we could grab. Jack handles, tire irons, crowbars, wrenches—whatever we could use to splatter skulls came suddenly into play.
I don’t know how long it took, but we were the last ones standing. Bill dashed through the WP still burning in the back to slam and lock the steel door. Dog was chewed up pretty bad. Heather worked on him with the med kit we all carried. Jinks held him down while Heather cleaned the wound.
I reached for Pepper before she toppled. Not much light to see by; only what the windows let in, and they were clogged with Zeds. The WP was burning out, but I yanked Pepper's helmet off so I could see her neck.
“
I love you, Danny,” she said. Her left hand came up to stroke my face. It was shaking. The wound wasn’t bad, but it was bleeding. Deep bite, but no flesh gone.
“
Listen to me, Pepper. You’re not going to die. Focus and stay with me.”
“
I can’t die. We’ve got a baby. After all these years, I’ve got a baby.”
“
That’s right. We have a baby. Michael. You have to focus on that. Michael needs his mommy. He still needs fed, remember.”
She smiled at me as I shot her full of antibiotics. We were all vaccinated against the Z-virus, but those bastards had God-knows-what in their rotten mouths. I poured a small tube of rubbing alcohol over Pepper's wound. She yelped as it washed out.
“
You gonna milk me later?” Pepper asked. She managed a smile.
“
If you let me.” I started to wrap a field dressing over the bite.
“
Boss, we gotta get Dog over to the firehouse. He’s pretty bad.” Bill crouched next to me as I worked on Pepper.
“
We’re about fifty yards off. How many deaders out there?”
“
Don’t know. I’ll do a quick survey.”
I smiled at Pepper. “We’ll get you over there and get you patched up, too.”
She nodded at me. “You know, I hated your guts the first time I saw you.”
“
Feeling was mutual.” I grinned.
She grabbed my hand. “You have a way of growin' on a person.”
“
Like a fungus?” I smiled.
She smiled back. “If we get outta here, and I survive, you’re gonna be a dad again.”
I stared at her for a moment. I started to say something, then Bill dashed back.
“
Get away from the windows!” He glanced around him. “Matter of fact… Jinks, get in that office. Rest of you follow.”
He grabbed Dog under the arms. Heather got Dog's feet. I lifted Pepper and followed.
“
What’s goin’ on, Bill?”
“
Cavalry. In this case, they're ridin' in on dragons instead of horses.”
I grinned as we slammed the door behind us. I could hear the diesel motors over the moans. Then came the sound of a giant blowtorch as they lit up the swarm around the depot. It got real hot for about ten minutes, then I heard no more sound but that of the flames as they consumed rotten flesh. The bastards smelled nearly as bad while they burned as they did shuffling around.
Bill tapped me on the shoulder.
“
Your comm-link’s down, Boss.” He held up a severed wire from my helmet. “Sergeant Shepard is out there in a dragon and says it’s safe to come out. South door’s clear.”
I helped Pepper to her feet, grabbed our gear, and led the way out the door with one of her arms flung around my shoulders.
“
You got a lousy sense of timing, you know that?” I told her.
She threw a slanted smile at me as we rushed out the door. Flames rose from piles of bodies. Greasy, black smoke drifted into the slate-gray sky. Rain did little to stop napalm from burning. It washed around in puddles and stuck to the sides of the building. Some ran into the small creek out front and set soggy, floating bodies on fire.
As fast as we could move, we got to the firehouse. There stood the engines in a defensive perimeter, a squad of riflemen behind the trucks and popping any Zeds that showed their rotten mugs. We squeezed between two engines and dashed into the firehouse.
Inside, we found controlled chaos. Already, the wounded were coming in to be laid out on the tables. I spun Pepper toward one and sat her down. We lifted Dog onto another and laid him out flat. Then I saw how bad he'd been hurt. Blood pumped from his throat. His shoulder was torn up. The left side of his face was pretty much shredded.
“
Doctor Leary, we need help over here!” I shouted.
A red-haired man in his forties trotted over in his white coat. “It’s Doctor now, eh?”
I shot him a look. “I don’t have time for this. We’ve got wounded.”
“
Yes, you do.” He shouted for his nurses—his wife and daughter. The two of them started on Dog. The wound was cleaned in moments, and they started to assess the damage. Leary moved to Pepper.
“
Young lady, haven’t I told you no more rough sex?” He pulled the bandage off Pepper’s wound. Pepper chuckled. “Hmmm. Pretty deep.”
When she took my hand, she was still shaking. I glanced at her. For a Mexican girl, she'd gone pale. Her hand felt cool to the touch.
“
Guy that bit me,” she stammered through chattering teeth, “that was my husband before you.”
“
What
?”
“
Don’t look so shocked. I did have a different life before this happened, you know. Glad it’s you now.”
Leary began to wash out her wound. “You were a lucky lady, Pepper. It’s not much of an injury, but I don’t want you going into shock. I need you to concentrate. Stay awake, okay?”
“
I know, Doctor Leary. I’m working on it.”
“
Doctor, she’s pregnant again.”
Leary blinked at me. “You ever think of pulling out sometimes?”
“
I won’t let him," Pepper interjected, easing down on her side as Leary wrapped a blanket around her. "Making up for lost time.”
“
All right, well, that changes things.” He glanced away. “I have to get back to Dog and the others. Heather? Can you clean and dress this wound properly?”
Heather came over to the table. “Yessir, Doctor.”
“
I could use another nurse, if you can spare her, Captain.”
I grinned. “So it’s Captain now, eh?”
“
I don’t have time for this,” Leary said, cocking a brow.
“
Heather, stay here and help out. Radio Jen and Sandy. Let them know what’s going on. I’ll be back.”
I kissed Pepper goodbye and told her I loved her. I stopped to look Dog over for a moment. He was shaking hard as he took my hand. He met my eyes. We nodded to one another, and I was out the door.
I gathered my gear and my crew. As we were leaving, more wounded were arriving. I found Kenny.
“
How’s it look out there, Boss?” I asked.
“
Bad, but we’re getting it under control. The dragons are doing a hell of a job, like I figured they would. We’ve gotta get the rest of the Zeds corralled.”
“
Main Street?”
“
If we can pull it off. Think you can lure them in?”
“
If we can get the west gate closed up, we can bring ‘em in.”
“
Gate’s already closed. I didn’t want them gettin' any farther into town than they already were. Only gate open is the east gate and the one on Hill Street.”