The Farm - 05 (5 page)

“Powers!” Biggs shouted.

It was too late. With a muted
crack
, the rear of the wooden pen imploded beneath the surging weight of the zombies. Powers turned, probably sensing the incursion more than anything else—certainly, Biggs knew he wouldn’t have been able to hear the pen’s fence breaking over the noise of his own gunfire. Biggs looked in the mirror again, and saw Klein was already down on the ground, covered by a mound of flailing bodies. Powers fired into the mass, but it was a lost cause.

Klein was suffering a horrible death, still screaming beneath the undulating pile of the dead.

More hands reached for Powers, and he ripped open the front passenger door as Biggs dropped the transmission into gear.

“Go!” Powers shouted as he leaped into the vehicle’s cabin. “Jesus, Captain, fucking
go!
”

Biggs stomped on the accelerator, and the Suburban lurched forward. The door slammed shut on its own accord as Powers thrashed about, stretched across the seat and the center console, his helmeted head butting against her side. The dead slapped at the vehicle as it charged forward, blasting through the crowd that had assembled before it. Biggs fought to keep the vehicle under control as it bounced and shuddered through the dense pack of dead meat, sending some bodies flying, others to the ground where they were crushed beneath the truck’s big tires. Powers sat upright in the passenger seat and grabbed a hold of the handle mounted on the A pillar, struggling to keep himself from being thrashed around as the truck bulled its way through the dead. Biggs kept her eyes forward, watching as the stenches went down, still reaching for her even while several tons of Detroit steel rolled right over them. She spared a glance in the rearview mirror, and saw the frightened kids clinging to each other in the back seat.

“It’s going to be all right, kids,” she told them. “Hang in there.”

“Captain, get this thing on the road!” Powers snapped.

Biggs saw an opening ahead and cranked the wheel to the left, stomping on the accelerator. The Suburban tore across the field, weaving around the dead wherever possible, slamming into them with enough force to send them flying into the next county where it wasn’t. She brought the truck into a wide, skidding turn around the barn they had spent the night in, then saw a slash of concrete in a break between shambling bodies. She steered for it, and the Suburban bounced mightily as it crashed through the gathering stenches.

And then, the Suburban was on the road. With surer purchase now that the tires were on a paved surface as opposed to grass and dirt, the Suburban handled a bit better, and she was able to weave around the stenches on the road. The SUV was pulling strongly to the left, and she hoped it was just because she’d blown the alignment, and not a tire. She risked another glance in the rearview mirror, and she saw the farm receding in the distance. The girl raised her head just then, and she turned to watch her home fade away.

“Man, this is some dedication on display here,” Powers said, almost conversationally.

Biggs glanced over, and she saw a corpse was hanging onto the passenger sideview mirror, the same one with which she had watched Klein die. The zombie out there was being dragged down the road, but it wouldn’t release its grip on the mirror’s frame. It tried to pull itself up, its cloudy eyes rolling wildly in its pockmarked face, dried tongue lolling; and then, the mirror snapped off at its base. The Suburban jounced as the stench went under the rear end. Biggs fought with the vehicle as it danced all over the road, tires screeching for a moment before she brought it back under her control.

“Well.” Powers leaned back in his seat and let out a heavy sigh. “Well, that wasn’t so bad, I guess. Except for losing Klein, I mean.”

“And their dad,” Biggs added quietly.

Powers seemed to consider that for a moment, then he turned back and looked at the two youngsters in the back seat. The boy was still weeping, so terrified that was all he could do. A quick glance in the mirror again told Biggs the girl wasn’t all that far from melting down herself.

“Yeah, my condolences, kids,” Powers said. “Really. Sorry we couldn’t have helped.”

“Just shut up,” the girl said.

Powers nodded and faced forward again. He shifted his rifle between his legs, then pulled off his left glove and rubbed his eyes with a grimy hand.

“How’re you holding up, Sergeant?” Biggs asked.

“I probably should’ve slept a bit last night,” he said.

Biggs only grunted as the Suburban accelerated up a hill. The grunt turned into a near full-on scream when the SUV crested the rise, and she and Powers saw what was on the other side.

Stenches. Thousands of them—no,
tens
of thousands, all marching across the landscape, heading up the road right at the speeding SUV as it bore down on them at over eighty miles an hour. Biggs stomped on the brakes, but it was too late. The stenches were too close, and they were driving too fast.

“
Fuck!
” Powers shouted, belatedly reaching for his seat belt, though by the time his fingertips touched it, the Suburban’s battered nose plowed through the first ranks of the dead like an ice breaker smashing its way through a frozen sea. Biggs fought to control the vehicle as it rapidly decelerated, and then the air bags deployed, shoving her back into the seat and knocking her senseless. She felt her ears pop as the air pressure in the SUV suddenly increased, and felt the hot blast of escaping, superheated air venting out of the bag almost instantly as her hands were torn from the steering wheel. Beside her, Powers swore up a storm as the SUV lurched from side to side like a staggering drunk, the sounds of multiple impacts filling the cabin. The girl screamed as she was flung into the back of Biggs’s seat, and an instant later, the boy was up front, rocketing between her and Powers, sprawling across the worn center console with a cry.

And then the Suburban crashed to a sudden halt, tilted crazily to the left as the engine died.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Powers screamed as the airbags wilted, deflating with small whines. He fought against the collapsing bag before him, trying to get to his rifle. As the bags shrank, Biggs saw the mass of zombies outside, converging on the disabled vehicle like a rotting avalanche crashing down a smooth hillside. One was already lying across the crumpled hood, its body battered and broken and leaking viscous black fluid across the sun-faded blue paint. It raised one mangled hand and flopped it against the cracked windshield, leaving a smear of gore. Powers stared at it as he finally found his rifle and pulled it into his hands. His eyes were wide with fear.

“Oh, hell!”

“Powers.” Biggs had to raise her voice over the vicious pounding that suddenly filled the vehicle’s cabin as the stenches slammed against it, trying to find a way in. “Powers, help me with the boy.” She reached down and gently turned the boy over on the narrow center console. His eyes were closed, and his jaw was slack. He was either unconscious, or dead.

Powers looked down at the boy and let out a panicked bray of laughter. “What do you want me to do for him, Captain? Sing him a lullaby? We’re fucked, Captain—all of us!” he shouted, as the pounding seemed to rise to a crescendo. Twisted, disfigured faces appeared outside his window, pressed against the glass, pounding on it. Others appeared outside the window to Biggs’s left, pressing against it, mashing themselves against the Suburban’s battered body. Sheet metal squeaked as it was compressed.

Glass exploded inward behind her, showering her with fragments. The girl in the back seat let out one pale cry, and Powers twisted in his seat, a snarl on his dark face. All traces of the rational, experienced, disciplined NCO Biggs had trusted her life with were gone. Powers had devolved back into his most basic form, and he was going to go out fighting. He raised his rifle and fired into the mass of dead flesh that surged into the cabin through the shattered rear window, descending upon the girl there like some demented swarm of locusts. She screamed, in agony this time, and Biggs felt the struggle against her seatback. She grabbed the boy’s still form and tried to pull him forward, but something already had his legs; an instant later, he was ripped from her grasp. A cold, foul-smelling hand reached around the seat and grabbed her left shoulder. Biggs cried out and struggled against it as he found her own rifle. Powers burned through his entire magazine as the dead continued to pile onto the Suburban, their writhing bodies covering every window, blocking out most of the morning light, casting the soldiers in almost total darkness. Biggs leaned forward against the steering wheel, and the horn blared as she pressed against it, trying to get enough room to turn and bring her M4 to bear on the stenches in the back seat. The reek of the dead filled the air, along with the brighter, coppery scent of fresh blood. The girl was no longer screaming, and to Biggs’s utter horror, she could see she had already been torn asunder by the abominations behind her. One of them was crouched over her, feasting on her lips and cheeks, ripping them away in great, gouging bites, ignoring the nonfatal bullet wounds to its shoulders and chest. Biggs managed to get her rifle into a decent firing position and popped the stench right in the skull at close range. The corpse fell forward over the girl’s body, but then another one shoved it out of the way and began ravaging the girl even further. Beside her, Powers was weeping, his tears cutting swaths through the grime that covered his face, as he struggled to load one of the Magpul magazines from the house into his M4. Biggs was surprised to see the window behind him had imploded; she hadn’t heard it, as she was half-deaf from the close-quarters gunfire and the never ending moans of the dead. A dozen hands pawed at Powers, dragging him backward, and Biggs knew that he wanted to reload his weapon so he could fire one last shot: the one that would end his life before the dead could do their work.

Biggs turned and fired two rounds into his face without a word. The soldier’s lifeless body flopped and went limp, but that didn’t seem to bother the dead. They still hauled Powers’s fresh corpse out of the vehicle like kids tearing open presents on Christmas morning. And that’s exactly what they did to Powers—tore him right open before Biggs’s eyes.

And then, more squeezed in through the shattered passenger door window, reaching in for Biggs.

Her ammunition lasted longer than she’d thought it would, but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.