These Dead Lands: Immolation (30 page)

“Carl, how am I going to know if we need to leave?”

“I’m giving you an MBITR.”

Kay shook her head. “A what? An emitter?”

“MBITR. A one forty-eight.”

Kay looked up at her husband, completely clueless. “Carl, what is a one forty-eight? Is it a weapon?”

Her husband snorted. “No, babe. It’s a radio.” He pulled a black box that looked like a walkie-talkie on steroids from his belt. It had a huge whip antenna that wiggled back and forth.

“I don’t know how to use that,” Kay said.

“It’s not a big deal—it’s pretty much just like a normal walkie-talkie. You turn it on here”—he showed her the power switch—“and then, you just listen to it. We’ll use call signs. You’ll be Kilo for Kay, and I’m Charlie for Carl. Curtis is Charlie One and Josh is Juliet. Now, if you need to talk to me, just press here”—he pointed at the side button—“and after it beeps, begin to speak. When you’re done speaking, say ‘over’ and let go of the PTT.”

“PTT? Carl, what are you talking about?”

“The push-to-talk button.” Carl pointed at the button on the side again. “That’s just what we call it for short.”

Kay felt flustered. While she’d been an Army wife for their entire marriage, she had never been particularly interested in military equipment. She’d learned how to shoot and had paid extra attention to emergency procedures, not because she found any of it fascinating but because she had two young boys to care for. “Carl, I don’t know…”

“Babe, I don’t have time for this right now. Just do what Hastings told you, and listen to this radio. Okay?”

Kay took the thing from him. She regarded it for a moment, hefting it in her hand.
Push the button to talk.
She could handle that. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Carl gave her a quick kiss before bending down to do the same to his boys. He hugged them all then turned to grab the rest of his gear.

Kay put it down on the bunk. She looked over at Diana and Hastings. The captain was helping the woman with their bags. Diana held the rifle they had taken from the roughnecks who had killed Kenny’s parents. Hastings finished his work, glanced up at Diana, then reached down and touched Kenny’s head. The boy didn’t acknowledge the contact; he just kept looking at his flapping hands and burbling nonsensical sounds. Hastings paced over to his bunk, grabbed some gear, and hurried back to the front of the barracks. Kay saw Diana watching him go with a curious expression on her face.
Worry? Fear?
Kay didn’t know what to make of that.

Carl followed the captain. “Listen to the radio,” he said again over his shoulder.

All the soldiers left the building, leaving the women alone with their young charges.

*

Observation Post Two
was at the intersection of Fisher Avenue and a much narrower road named Biddle Drive. Containers had been set across Fisher Avenue, blocking it off. What used to be decorative stone pillars on the side of the road by the Fort Indiantown Gap sign had become part of the barricade set up to channelize the reekers.

The engineers had been busy. They had set up a series of wire obstacles arranged in depth along the open area off the road, all the way to the wood line. The obstacles continued down Biddle Drive, along with more containers blocking off the smaller side roads down Biddle. The trees had done well at slowing the reekers down, but they weren’t stopping them completely.

As Hastings rode up with his men, he could see the excavator’s mulcher arm moving about almost frantically. The noise was loud enough to be heard over the gunfire.

At various points along the line, reekers were caught up in the wire obstacles. Several had made it closer by walking over the fallen bodies. The sheer volume of zombies, coupled with the leapfrogging effect, had allowed groups of corpses to penetrate parts of the wire obstacles and get closer to the OP and along parts of Biddle Drive. The situation wasn’t out of control just yet, but the potential for that loomed large. Hastings could see that if they didn’t stop the oncoming tide of the dead marching up Biddle Drive, things were going to get dicey.

Fortunately, a large group of the reekers had been attracted to the sound of the excavator mulcher on Fisher Avenue, which meant their time would soon come to an end. A long strung-out line of zombies advanced toward the road, but the din of defending soldiers’ gunfire had also caused smaller clumps of reekers to continue toward the road.

“Crusader One Seven, stay at the OP and lay down fire with the Mark,” Hastings said over the radio as his Humvee barreled down the road. “I’m headed down Biddle to mop up any of the squirters coming through the QRF’s lines. Over.”

“Roger, Crusader One One,” Ballantine replied.

Once Hastings’s Humvee turned off Fisher and headed down Biddle Drive, Reader immediately opened up with the .50 caliber. Reekers were coming out of the wood line as unaccompanied individuals—singletons, in military parlance—and more were standing in groups on the shoulder of the road, seemingly confused by the sheer volume of noise coming from every direction. Fifty-caliber rounds tore through them, ripping off limbs and body parts. Those that hadn’t taken a shot to the head slowly squirmed on the ground, trying to get back on their feet. The ones still standing turned toward the oncoming Humvee, and Hastings wondered if they were happy to finally have a target.

“Watch your fire, Reader,” Hastings called over the vehicle’s intercom. “We have friendlies along this road.”

“Roger,” Reader replied, but the distinctive rhythm of the .50 caliber continued as he sent fire into the wood line.

Hastings heard the familiar sound of an M-134 mini-gun behind them and wondered who was shooting it. The ripping blare of short and long chainsaw-sounding bursts competed with the racket coming from the excavator mulcher, but the mini’s chatter was still discernible over the din.

The QRF had arrived right before Hastings’s team, and they were trying to fill in the gaps and pick up the slack, but several reekers had slipped through and were staggering about on the road.

Turning the steering wheel, Guerra nodded toward the straggler zombies. “Don’t worry, sir. I got this.”

“You do, huh?” Hastings asked.

“Yup.” Guerra lined the vehicle up and ran right over the jaywalking reekers, toppling them like bowling pins. The Humvee rocked from side to side as bodies bounced off the front bumper or got sucked down beneath the tires. Guerra cackled like a kid on a carnival ride.

“Stop fucking swerving!” Reader shouted over the intercom just as Guerra hit another reeker. The corpse’s putrid body folded up under the vehicle and banged along beneath the undercarriage for a few feet before it was ejected.

Guerra kept laughing as he lined up on the next reeker. “Hang on, it’s gonna get bumpy!”

“Reader, be careful with your fire!” Hastings called again.

“
Hijo de puta
, take that!” Guerra screamed as he sideswiped one zombie and drove over another. “I’ve wanted to do this for the longest time! You ever see those fuckers who walk out into the street without looking and just expect you to stop because they’re
walking
? Like, ‘I’m a pedestrian, so you have to stop for me’? I fucking
hate
those assholes!” Guerra accelerated and ran down another reeker.

*

“Stilley, pull over
alongside the road here,” Ballantine ordered as Hastings’s Humvee accelerated away. “Hartman, lay down fire along the wire!”

Sergeant Hartman swung the cupola mounted to the top of the Humvee around as Stilley stomped on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a less than gentle stop. The sudden halt didn’t seem to bother Hartman. He began firing at the approaching reekers right away.

“What the fuck?” Ballantine shouted as he and the others piled out of the vehicle and began shooting at the closest reekers. He had been expecting to hear the
thump-thump-thump
of an MK19 from the Humvee’s cupola. Instead, he heard the buzzing roar of a minigun. He dropped a reeker that had been stumbling across the road in his general direction, popping two shots right into its face. Once he was satisfied the zombie wasn’t going to get up and make another pass at biting his ass, Ballantine looked over his shoulder.

Hartman was in the cupola, whooping it up as he slung an M-134 minigun by its A-frame grips. The weapon barked out a fusillade of 7.62 fire across the engagement area, chopping reekers into pieces.

Apparently, Sergeants Guerra and Hartman had been busy. Not only had they accomplished the tasks they had been given, they had upgraded their firepower situation. Ballantine wondered what else they had done and not told him about, and he made a mental note to circle back with the troops and ask when he had a chance. At the moment, he was glad for the surprise. Hartman was doing his best to lay down the three-thousand-rounds-per-minute rate of fire the gun was capable of in short, controlled bursts.

The engineers had done a good job at the checkpoint. They had built wire obstacles in depth and incorporated concrete Jersey barriers to help channelize and slow the reeker advance. Feeling no pain, the reekers just pushed one another into the obstacles, ignoring the razor wire that cut into their flesh like a knife through butter. The sheer volume wanting to move forward created an effect Ballantine had last seen at a rock concert. The bodies were piling up in an effort to surge forward, and Ballantine wasn’t sure how much longer portions of the wire obstacle would hold.

The Jersey barriers, meanwhile, were actually working pretty well at holding the reekers up long enough for the soldiers to pick them off. Hartman rained fire across the row of Jersey barriers, hosing the reekers with a head-high stream of bullets. But as fast as he could mow them down, the fallen were being replaced by more swarming up from behind. In some areas, the weight of all those zombies in the rear pushed the ones in front right over the barrier and into the wire obstacles on the other side. Ensnared in the ground-level wire, the reekers struggled to regain their footing and move forward. While several were held back by the remnants of their clothing and exposed gray flesh caught up in the wire, some managed to crawl forward. They made for easy targets, but there were so many of them that some of the soldiers had stopped taking the time to aim and were just spraying in that general direction.

Ballantine called out, “Well-aimed shots! Aim for their heads!”

The National Guardsmen looked worried, and the last thing Ballantine needed was for discipline to erode and the men to panic. He shouted words of encouragement as he fired into the reekers and handed out ammo magazines. Hartman’s minigun kept up a constant chatter as the soldiers changed magazines, so there were no significant breaks in the defensive fire.

But the corpses began to pile up around and in the wire. Other reekers were walking over the twice-dead bodies, and it wasn’t looking to Ballantine that they were going to stop coming.

To everyone’s surprise, the excavator mulcher’s pitch changed substantially. The operator had lifted the mulcher head out of the sea of reekers, and he was driving the vehicle off of the lowboy trailer, its widespread treads crunching over corpses. Heading deeper into the field of reekers, the excavator’s motion attracted the zombies, causing them to shuffle away from the weak spots on the wire. As they began to amass around the lumbering excavator, the machine’s operator again lowered the mulcher’s head and began liquefying reekers. The noise worked to attract even more ghouls, and they fearlessly marched toward it. The break in the assault on the wire obstacle gave the soldiers the opportunity to pick off those reekers caught in the wire.

Ballantine turned back toward the Humvee. Hartman elevated the mini-gun’s spinning barrels, shifting his fire so he could reach deeper into the rows of reekers in the field. Together, the mini-gun and the mulcher were making a difference.

Then, Hartman began reducing the minigun’s rate of fire.
Oh, what the fuck?
Ballantine reached for his radio’s PTT button.

Hartman’s voice came over the net before Ballantine could transmit. “Stilley, I need more ammo. Get over here,
now
!”