Survivors (14 page)

“Oh, fuck me,” whispered a wide-eyed Rico, looking up from the ground.

The response was immediate: from out of one of the trucks behind them came the sound of a dozen low-pitched moans.

“Shamblers!” cried Harris. “Back to back! Keep moving toward the far end! Move, people, move!”

The sailors formed up, each scanning a field of fire.

An infected corpse loomed up from the shade behind a wrecked SUV, a rotting hand grasping at the trunk. It pulled itself up to a standing position. Wendell took aim and fired. The round caught the shambler in the forehead, and it dropped back down to the ground, unmoving.

“They’re coming from behind!” Jones called out. Undead things had begun to emerge from their hiding places under the wrecked trucks, lured by the sounds of gunfire and the macabre moans of their shambling brethren.

Rico’s MP-5 chattered on semiauto, but many of his rounds missed, striking the creatures in the chest and neck. Two more went down, but the odds were swiftly turning in the shamblers’ favor. More were coming.

The large, empty trailers behind the trucks were as inviting to the infected as a bed was to an exhausted soldier. They didn’t seem to mind the heat. It was the darkness that comforted them.

Their figures, merely silhouettes in the back of the open trucks at first, became more distinct as they stumbled into the light. Most appeared to be from the vehicle wrecks, and they sported open and dry wounds to the head. Two were missing limbs, and one had blood caked around its mouth, dried into a grotesque beard.

“We’re surrounded!” said Smith.

Stiles’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked from the imminent threat toward the far end of the bridge. Shamblers were now approaching from both directions. From the Lexington side of the bridge, infected were pulling themselves from piled wrecks. The survivors moved closer together, firing at will. Shamblers dropped left and right, but for each one that fell, a pair seemed to appear and take its place, the virus’s version of a stumbling Hydra.

Worse, from what Stiles could see, there were small neighborhoods on either side of their destination. He could see even more doddering figures emerging from side streets to reinforce their undead companions.

“This is very, very bad,” said Rico in a trembling voice.

“Thank you!” Stiles shouted, not having to keep quiet anymore. He levered another round into his Winchester and dropped a shambler with a well-aimed shot. “It’s always nice to know when things have gotten somehow worse. I swear to God”—he shot another dead thing dead again—“if we get out of this, I’m going to feed you that fucking gun.”

A scream cut through the gunfire. A shambler, crawling under a car, had grabbed Brown by the leg and was pulling him down. He fell hard and his breath was knocked out of him in a whoof of pain. Brown twisted his weapon around and fired at the prone shambler. The shot might have worked—but Brown’s own foot was in the way. The round tore through his boot, ripped through his flesh, and exited the sole of his boot. The sailor screamed in pain and reached out his free hand to Jones and Smith.

Smith grabbed at Brown’s arm, trying to pull him free, but the shambler had a firm grip.

“Don’t let go, man!” Brown cried. “Don’t let go!”

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you!” Smith yelled. “Hold on!”

Brown’s reply was cut off as the shambler sank its teeth into the sailor’s leg. Blood poured from the wound.

“Brown!” Smith shouted. “Don’t let go!”

Despite his strong grip, Smith felt Brown’s hands slipping away. With a final effort, Smith attempted to pull the wounded sailor free as Jones opened fire on the dead man. His hands came loose, and Brown, screaming in agony, vanished under the car, dragged violently by the shambler. Wet, sloshing noises drowned out the sailor’s wails. Smith recoiled, horrified. Brown, out of sight under the vehicle, was being eaten alive. Brown’s screams abated, and fell away into silence.

“He’s gone! Focus fire on the shamblers!” Harris said, all business. There would be time to mourn for Brown later. “Rico! Hillyard! Cover our backs! Everyone else, focus fire front! Clear us a goddamn path!”

The shamblers were looming up as if by magic, appearing from behind the remnants of cars and pulling themselves up from the shady confines of half-open trunks. What had once been a half-dozen were now well into the twenties, drawn by the gunfire and frantic shouts of the survivors.

“Gangway, motherfuckers!” Allen shouted, flipping the selector switch of his MP-5 to three-round burst.

Stiles watched Harris follow suit, sending rounds downrange as fast as he could manage. He didn’t even seem to be trying for head shots anymore. The inertia of the lead was enough to cause the shamblers to stumble and fall, giving the survivors a chance to move past them without fear of being grappled and bitten.

“Move! Move!” Harris shouted. “Get to the exit! Go!”

The group double-timed it, firing as they went. Most of their rounds went astray, but a few struck home. Here and there a shambler fell, pegged through the head or neck. The majority, however, absorbed the fire and continued their advance, arms held out in front of them, moaning incessantly.

Hal leapt up onto the roof of a wrecked car and scanned the scene. Shamblers had cut off their retreat, and even more were between them and the far end of the bridge. One, with a bloody stump for a hand, tried to climb up on the car, but Stiles took careful aim with his weapon and fired. The round tore through the infected’s head, and it slumped against the hood, slowly sliding off to the pavement, leaving a trail of brackish, congealed blood in its wake.

“We can’t win this!” Hal said.

“Fuck winning this!” Allen shouted, firing into the shambling hoard. “I just wanna live!”

Stiles took stock of the situation, and realized Hal was right. They were vastly outnumbered, and on the confines of the bridge, they had no room to maneuver. Another shout from Hal, atop the car, solved the problem for them:

“Jump for it!” he yelled, gesturing wildly at the edge of the bridge. “It’s only a few feet!”

“They’ll just follow along the bank!” Smith protested.

“They’re shamblers! We swim fast enough, we live!” said Hal. “You do what you want. I’m out of here!”

Turning and saying the quickest prayer he ever had, Hal leapt from the bridge and hit the water, sinking down under his splash, the heavy pack he was wearing pulling him under. Stiles followed shortly after.

“Come on, you assholes!” Allen shouted. “Basic water survival! Find something that floats and follow it into the drink!”

He pulled a five-gallon bucket from the back of a nearby pickup truck and emptied it onto the tarmac before throwing it over the side and throwing himself after. Stiles smiled at this, even as he fired round after round at the approaching death.

Navy training, God love it.

Rico and Hillyard each grabbed ice chests and followed them over the handrail, and Wendell had found a basketball somewhere.

A hard hat came sailing over to Harris, and he stopped his barrage of bullets to catch it.

“One for you, skipp—” Jones’s yell was cut off by the sudden appearance of a hand from the bed of the utility truck he’d liberated the hard hat from. It sat up out of the back, a desiccated and dry bundle of infected sticks, and ate a chunk out of Jones’s shoulder.

Smith dove at the dead thing, knocking it away from his shipmate with screams of rage before emptying his clip into the infected’s skull.

The mass of hungry dead gathered and Stiles could wait no longer to see how the deckhands’ tragedy would resolve itself.

He could swear, as he hit the water, that he heard a pair of gunshots ring out.

Hal Dorne kicked in the water, cursing himself for an idiot while his chest burned.

Out of the frying pan, into the river.

A strong hand closed over his and pulled him up. As he burst from the depths, he caught a glimpse of his rescuer. Quartermaster Third Class Allen, grinning from ear to ear, held the retiree up with one hand, the other wrapped around a yellow five-gallon bucket.

“Come on, old man,” he chided. “Plenty of buoyancy in this here piece of plastic for the both of us. Good idea, using the river. Bad idea, not taking anything with you but your heavy-ass pack.”

Hal shook the water from his eyes. “Whatever, punk. Where’s Stiles?”

“Right here,” Stiles said from four feet away. He floated on his back, the bottoms of his boots tucked in his underarms, helping him stay up. “I think I lost my crutch.”

“Enough chatter,” Harris said on the way past, holding a gray construction hard hat to his chest. “We have to get to the opposite bank and outrun this group of infected if we want to make it.”

The group turned and linked arms where they could, kicking together as a team and working to the bank of the river. The whole way, Wendell kept coughing, spitting up water.

“Fucking monsters,” he said, finally loud enough for Hal to hear. “Goddamn abominations. Shit-sucking
assholes
!”

This last was screamed out, causing most heads to turn his way, those of the sailors and the infected on dry land.

“That’s torn it,” Stiles said, looking at the shambling mass of undead idiots trying to wade in for a hot mouthful. The unliving, unthinking bastards were walking out into the water, arms out and oblivious to the current. One by one, they stepped in, and as they got about waist-high in the water, the river swept them away.

“Holy shit,” Allen said. “I think we got one of them, whaddaya call? Strategies?”

Harris’s face was grim set, and he nodded. “Good job, Wendell. Take up the call, men, and keep kicking!”

Again working as a team, the group turned into the current to maintain their relative position to the shore and started yelling obscenities at the infected still on the muddy bank. What started as a game for most turned sour quickly, as the cathartic shouts began to release some of the pent-up frustrations of the past six months. Throats that were calling out witticisms were rapidly going hoarse as real emotions brought out the agonies each of the men was carrying with him. For a full five minutes, until all of the slow-moving infected had stepped into the water, the seamen (and Hal, Stiles, Katie, and Ron) shouted and raged into the uncaring blue sky.

Panting, crying, half-sick with swallowed river water, Wendell turned to the nearest sailor, Rico, and smiled.

“Well.
I
feel better.”

The loss of Smith, Jones, and Brown weighed heavily on the group, but Hal knew it was more so on Wendell, as he was their Sea Dad on the USS
Ramage
; in doing their indoc and teaching them the ship’s damage control systems, he’d gotten to know the trio of deckhands. Of the almost three hundred men that the
Ramage
carried, the deckhands were all that was left of Wendell’s seafaring family. Hal knew he didn’t really feel better, but he got it out, and that would have to be enough until they reached Omaha.

Harris, as was befitting the group’s leader, was the first to reach shore and start the mad scramble up the muddy slope. One by one, the survivors helped each other out of the water.

“Fuck,” Rico said, slumping down against a tree stump. “What now? Our shit’s all wet, our ammo might be ruined, and we’re out our truck. We still got, what, two hundred miles to go?”

“Stow that bilge, sailor,” Harris said, looking out thoughtfully. “US 283. We follow this to get to 80, then . . .” The Commander trailed off.

Hal tried to remember something, a detail that was just mentioned in passing. “What’s over here?”

“Besides Lexington?” Katie asked. “I think Wes said there was a military—”

“Museum!” Harris finished with a laugh. “The Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles.”

“Very nice,” Hal said. “Boys, we have a little more hiking in front of us, but pretty soon we’ll be riding in style.”

Stiles nudged Hillyard. “‘In style,’ he says. Like a six-by-six is the lap of luxury.”

“The museum is just on the other side of I-80,” Harris said. “Not too far from here. And then we have, yes, two hundred miles to go. So get up, wring your socks out, and let’s get a move on.”

“Yeah, you bunch of Navy sissies,” Stiles said, hopping on his one good foot. “This is no time for a sit-down, or sit-in, or whatever you hippies call it.”