Verge of Extinction (Apex Predator Book 3) (27 page)

He saw the man with the bolt cutters catch up with Chief Romanov.  The chief yelled something to the rest of his sailors.  The trio fired several rounds towards the mass of dead.  Several bullets zipped close enough to Sgt Procell to make him duck as he ran.

He didn’t dare turn around.  He simply hobbled along as fast as he could towards the group.  Several more shots rang out as the group rounded the corner.  He was still twenty yards away.  He put his head down in an effort to squeeze all the speed he could out of his leg.

He looked up just in time to miss the man wearing the red baseball cap and white shirt.  It was the man who had followed him into the office.  The man took careful aim as the NCO rounded the corner.   Sgt Procell could hear several shots close behind him. 

Then the man soon slid his shoulder under Sgt Procell’s left arm.  “C’mon Sergeant,” he pleaded.  “They’re right behind us.”

He could see the others swarming over the dozers.  First one ACE and then another began to rumble, driven by a Seabee.  He saw the door of one of the D7’s thrown open.  Black smoke soon belched from its exhaust stack.  The two men reached the other D7 just as Chief Romanov cut the lock.  “Go!” he told them as he leapt from the vehicle.

Sgt Procell scampered up the rear of the armored bulldozer, laying flat on the roof.  The other man climbed into the cab and turned the engine over.  The sudden appearance of a cloud of black smoke momentarily choked Sgt Procell.

After ensuring everyone was either driving or riding in one of the engineering vehicles, Chief Romanov sprinted for the humvee.   Three of the civilians followed suit.  Sgt Procell saw several zombies close to their path.  The old sailor sure was cutting it close.  He took careful aim and fired a single round each into the heads of the two closest zombies.  Both fell before they could reach the foursome.

The humvee lurched as the Chief stomped on the gas pedal.  The ACE’s pulled in behind him, followed by the two D7’s.  The Chief led them around the third building in an attempt to put some distance between them and the zombies who were following them.

Unfortunately for them, more zombies approached from that quarter.  He threw the wheel over to the right and circled the building again.  The line of zombies began to stretch out behind them.  The next left brought them back to the motor pool area.  This time thought, the line of zombies was slowly marching left to right in front of them.  The old sailor gunned the engine of the humvee, upending several zombies as he did.

Looking back, he could see the closest ACE had also sped up. This time the zombies weren’t lucky enough to merely get upended.  Several of them were literally ground into the concrete by the tracks of the olive drab colored vehicle.  He led the group to one of the holes in the fence, honking his horn the entire way.

SSgt Brown was on an eastbound leg of his route when the other humvee charged from between the buildings, followed by an ACE.  Nice, he thought.  He’d seen the ACE at work in Iraq.  He knew it was a very capable earthmover.  A second ACE appeared.

“Hold on,” he told the women.  He slew the wheel to the right and pressed down on the the gas, slamming into several zombies as he did.  Jen let her knees bend like shock absorbers as he bounced over the uneven ground at high speed.

The humvee reached the pavement about 200 yards ahead of Chief Romanov.  He glanced in the rearview mirror once before zooming off to the east.  He could see the Chief’s hummer and one of the ACE’s.  Good.

Sgt Procell’s voice almost gave out from yelling.  “Stop!” he yelled one more time.  But it was no use.  The humvees and ACE’s turned the corner without slowing down.  What he didn’t know, and no one had told Chief Romanov, was that the D7 had a top speed of about 6 miles per hour.  These two hadn’t been started or maintained in a couple of months at least.

He looked at the growing hoard of dead flesh.  They were neither gaining on, nor falling behind the humans.  Shit!  How the hell did he end up stuck on a slow assed bulldozer?  He looked ahead wishing one of those 30 mph ACE’s would come back.  He loved the ACE.  He was now convinced that he should hate the D7.

“What the hell?” the man in the baseball cap yelled to the soldier.  “This is bullshit!  Don’t they see us?”  The answer was a big fat no.

Ten minutes later, the abbreviated convoy pulled up to the northern gate of the Haven.  SSgt Brown and Chief Romanov pulled over to allow the construction vehicles to pass.  He was just getting out of his vehicle when he heard the old sailor start cursing incessantly.  He could see fear and anger in the man’s eyes.

“What?” he asked as calmly as he could and still be heard.  “What’s wrong?”

“The dozers!” the man said.  “We lost the dozers.”  SSgt Brown could hear the panic in the man’s voice.

“What dozers?”

“We got a couple of D7’s, real civilian type dozers with armor plating.  Your Sergeant Procell and a couple of the civvies were bringing up the rear.”

Jen had heard the conversation.  Her heart sank when the man mentioned Sgt Procell.  “We have to go back,” she told them from the turret ring of the HMMWV.  SSgt Brown thought for a second.

Finally, he looked at the sailor in disgust.  “Get these ACEs where they’re needed.”  He looked at his girls.  “We’ll go back for them.”

Jen again had to let her knees act as shock absorbers as SSgt Brown jerked the wheel left and then right around abandoned cars.  She hoped for her sake that they found the others on a long straight away, and not at a corner.  She cringed at the thought of being thrown from the vehicle in a head-on collision.

“There!” she yelled, pointing.  The green dozers crawled toward them from about a quarter of mile to their right.  SSgt Brown jerked the wheel to the right one more time.

They could all hear the gunshots as they closed on the duo of dozers.  Jen’s heart sank when she saw it.  Behind the second dozer was a mass of moving grey flesh.  She had never seen so many dead in one place before.   They literally seemed to stretch to the horizon.

“Pull over,” she ordered.  “Pull over now!”  The vehicle skidded to a stop behind a green Dodge pickup.  He slapped her left leg and unbuckled his seatbelt.  The message was clear: “out of the way.”

He couldn’t believe his eyes.  The last time he’d seen a hoard that big was the first day.  His heart skipped a beat.  His mind’s eye flashed back to that horrible day.  How the zombies had blown through Alpha Troop like they hadn’t even been there.

But this group was larger.  They were being funneled down a fairly narrow street, but there were so many of them.  How do we get them off the dozers?  He dropped back down into the driver’s seat.  He tugged on the gear shifter and jammed his foot onto the gas.  The vehicle careened towards the dozer.  He slammed on the breaks as he came to the last cross street and backed in.

“Let’s see if we can’t draw some of them off of the dozers,” he told the girls.  They waited intently as the dozers rumbled slowly past the parked HMMWV.  Once passed, he hit the gas.

The vehicle hurdled through the intersection, striking several zombies with the right corner of the hood.  Two were upended and landed momentarily on the hood before sliding off.  He jammed his palm into the horn as the vehicle continued down the road.

Jen scrambled back into the turret ring.  She needed to see what was happening behind them.  Nothing, that’s what was happening, nothing.  The zombies hadn’t paid them any mind.  They simply continued to follow the dozers as the lumbered down the street.  Oh shit, she suddenly thought.

“We’ve got to stop them,” she yelled to SSgt Brown.

“What?” he asked as he jammed the breaks.  He could also see the zombies hadn’t followed.

“That road leads right to the Haven,” she announced.  She was right.  Everyone knew it.  Right now, the dozers were leading a giant hoard of the dead right to the gates of the Haven.  They had to do something to stop them.  Jen figured they had about four blocks before it would be too late.

SSgt Brown gunned the gas, circling the block.  He hoped to catch the dozers at the next intersection.  He just made it.  The humvee slid into the intersection just as the dozers cleared it.

Jen began firing at the zombies who were only feet from the driver’s side of the vehicle.  Several of them began banging on the doors and windows, leaving bloody streaks as they did so.  When SSgt Brown judged that enough of the dead were attracted to them, he gunned the engine, again, knocking several to the ground and crushing one or two below the driver’s side tires.

Jen stopped firing as they pulled slowly away from the crowd.   A few zombies tried to follow them.  But, most of them continued south behind the dozers.  Damnit!  She fired a few shots in frustration, but nothing would really make a difference.  “No!” she shouted into the vehicle.  “Only a few took the bait.”

“One more time!” he told her.

A minute later, they sat stopped.  They were 100 yards from the intersection, behind a four car pileup.  “Shit!” SSgt Brown yelled in frustration.  He hadn’t even realized there was a traffic jam.  Now, here they were 100 yards from the intersection, watching the dozers lead the zombies closer to the Haven.  He slammed the vehicle into reverse and gunned the gas, narrowly missing an orange Honda in the process.

The next intersection would be their last chance.  He gunned the engine in an effort to beat the dozers.  He’d been reacting on the fly.  He needed some time to come up with a plan, even if it was just a moment.

They slid to a stop 50 yards from the closest dozer.  The area wasn’t going to help.  The corner had 3 houses with the northwest corner vacant.  There were few cars on this street.  Trees!  There were trees in both front yards.  If he could knock them down and block the road, it could buy them enough time.

He jumped onto the ladder of the first dozer.  “Can you knock that tree across the road?”  The man looked puzzled.  “Sure,” he answered. “I guess.”

“Do it,” he ordered.  “Do it now!”

He leapt to the ground and ran to the next dozer.  He noticed that his efforts had paid a small dividend.  The closest zombie was about 100 meters away.  “I need you to knock that tree across the yard.  Try to get it as close to the house as you can,” he ordered the man.  For his part, the man nodded his head and continued driving the dozer.

The big NCO ran back to his humvee.  If the trees fell right, he could use his truck to block the last of the holes.  The zombies would stand there for hours trying to get over the fallen trees.

He watched as the first tree fell across the road, blocking it and about half of the yard on the east side.  He slid the humvee into the space between the house and now exposed roots of the tree.  It fit almost perfectly.  The last of the women were climbing out of the truck when the second dozer’s engine began to growl loudly, signaling that it was pushing the second tree over.  SSgt Brown could see it was none too soon.  The first of the approaching zombies were filing past the dozer.

He and the girls fired several shots at the zombies as the tree fell.  To everyone’s horror, the tree landed squarely on the roof of the house.  Zombies streamed through the newly formed tunnel of tree branches.  It was slowing them down a bit.  But, it was definitely not stopping them.

The man driving the second dozer, the one Sgt Procell was riding, quickly jumped to the ground.  Without a look, he sprinted towards the newly built wall of the Haven.

Sgt Procell realized he was in trouble.  He was stranded eight feet off of the ground, surrounded by an ever growing hoard of zombies.  He had been shooting almost nonstop since they left the base.  He was down to about 100 rounds of ammo.

“Get up the tree!” Theresa yelled to him.  “Get on the roof.  We’ll meet you around back.”  She did not wait for the rest.  She sprinted around the south side of the house, mere feet away from the closest zombie.  She fired two shots from her shotgun as she passed.  Several rifle shots reassured her she was not alone.

A quick glance told her Sgt Procell was almost on the roof and that the crowd of zombies was growing, fast.  “Hurry,” she yelled to the others.  She hopped over a small chain linked fence to get into the backyard.

She saw the soldier coming over the crest of the roof.  “C’mon!” she ordered.  “We have to go!”

The older man rubbed his leg.  He knew he couldn’t run with them.  “You go!  I’ll be fine till you can come back.”  Hell, he thought, it’s only 200 meters outside the gate.

“C’mon!” she repeated.  “We’re not leaving you.  You’ve got to jump!”  She could see the fear on his face.  He’d rather stay there and maybe starve than run again.

“You have to go!” he countered.  He pointed to the fence.  The flood of grey flesh was quickly surrounding them.  “You know I can’t make it.”  The other three were firing a steady stream of lead in the direction of the fence.

“We have to go now,” SSgt Brown told her.  “We’ll come back for you!” he yelled to the other soldier.  He took three magazines from one of his pouches.  “Here,” he said as threw them up one at a time.  “You may need these.”

He turned to run to the back fence.  That direction had far less zombies than the other three sides did.  Ten years ago, that part of the fence had been damaged by a storm.  The previous home owner hadn’t really fixed it so much as made it look good.  No one in the group knew of the storm or the damage it caused.  Unfortunately, just before they reached the fence it fell.  A couple of dozen zombies began shambling towards the now overexposed group.