World of Ashes II (21 page)

              The windows to the home were shielded with car doors John and Daniel scrapped, each with gun slots for taking down the infected if they swarmed the house. Every door had a solid steel bar across it like a castle, the only way in would be absolute brute force, hopefully something zombies weren’t organized enough to accomplish. The fighting got closer, riot gear clad militiamen ran towards the sounds of gunfire. Minutes later drastically fewer of them were running in the other direction, hundreds of zombies at their heels, including those who’d previously been militiamen.

              Daniel saw Joanne take Kaylee into the attic, a small space existed to store random stuff, it wasn’t well insulated but it was safe and provisions were stored there. John started to point his M1A1 through a gun slot, but Daniel stopped him. There was no need to draw attention to their house, the number of zombies was too great to risk a swarm. The neighbors were doing a fine job of drawing the zombies in, and Daniel and John witnessed firsthand the flaw in their punji stick design in horrific detail. Across the street the first three or four corpses that fell into the pits were incapacitated, sure, but after that the rest of them just used the front rank as a convenient bridge over the pits. The neighbors opened fire and several bullets broke daylight through John’s kitchen wall, the room closest to the defending house.

              John ran to the pull-down ladder to check on his wife and granddaughter. They were okay, but Kaylee was mortified. To her the zombies were far away, she felt safe at her grandparent’s home, the shattering of that illusion was almost more than the kid could handle. Kaylee started screaming and Joanne had to cover her mouth, nearly choking her. Daniel motioned for everyone to be as quiet as possible, but Kaylee broke free of her grandmother and ran to his arms. She was perfectly silent so long as Daniel held onto her.

              Just outside the front door the first trio of zombies had been pushed over their fence by the sheer numbers in the road. One by one they stood themselves up and began meandering in the general direction of the shooting and sirens. A fat woman whose brown skin had begun to turn green tripped over Kaylee’s Bigwheel and landed face first on an open punji pit. The next two got tangled up in the swing set before finding the fence on the far side and falling over it too. That was a relief, but there were hundreds, possibly thousands more shoulder to gnawed shoulder across the roads. This was what the refugees from the tip of Florida had been fleeing, what they’d tried to warn Crystal River about on their frantic path north. A house down the block from them was being overrun, John could see it all from the vent slats in the attic. Someone had made the mistake of shooting at the zombies through the slats in their windows, the gunfire taking down a few but drawing in thousands. Though they were shooting from the second story window, the sheer number and pressure of so many corpses against the garage door finally broke it down in a clatter of sheet metal.

              Unlike John’s house, in which every door was battened down like a ship at general quarters, these poor bastards had probably left the inner garage door unlocked or maybe even wide open. Suddenly the shots weren’t coming from upstairs anymore, muffled by the walls as the battle was brought indoors.

              “Get on the roof!” John let himself say aloud, willing his neighbors to hear him. Joanne moved quickly to cover his mouth. They knew all of their neighbors. Their friends were being eaten alive right now and there was positively nothing they could do to help. The elderly couple resigned themselves to prayer while Daniel held Kaylee. Eventually the gunshots stopped, and then so did the screaming.

              For almost a full day and night the Sittons and Daniel didn’t hear or see any more living people. It took that long for the bulk of the miles-long herd to pass through town and continue farther up the coast. The first sign that anyone had survived was a neighbor driving slowly down the street in a GMC Suburban that had been augmented with what was supposed to suffice for armor. The wheels had spikes of rebar welded to them, which made mincemeat of zombies on the side of the truck, the windows replaced by sheets of steel like John’s home. If it wasn’t so damned functional, Daniel would have thought it was a cheap prop from a movie.

              Joanne waved an orange flag from the attic vent slats and the truck stopped. The man and his three sons used silenced weapons to shoot the zombies remaining in the area, finally making it to the Sitton’s doorstep. A lumberjack of a man, Don Thorn was an imposing figure known throughout the town for having chopped his own wife’s foot off with a dull hatchet in one swing to save her from the virus when bitten.

              “I’m so glad to see you, Don.” Joanne hugged him when she opened the door. “Have you seen anyone else? Do you know how many?”

              Don’s expression soured, not that it looked like he ever smiled in the first place. “I don’t know anything for sure. We just managed to get out of our garage only a few minutes ago. I’ve never seen a herd of them that big before… We just didn’t have enough ammo to stand. We had to hide.” Don didn’t like the idea of hiding from a fight, especially from zombies. For him to have taken his family to ground the scope of the threat must have been more than a small army could have handled.

              “Well it’s a miracle to see you.” Joanne hugged him again.

              “If you’re all okay, we need to keep searching for survivors. We’re heading towards the docks, see if anyone got to that Rusky boat.” Don pointed toward the pillars of smoke in the direction of the boat launches.

              John stepped outside to look. “Take Daniel with you and leave Maggie here. She can’t run away from the vehicle of it gets stuck.” He had a point. Don’s wife might be a real fighter, but she had also lost her foot just above the ankle less than three weeks ago. Bad news when you had to run a lot. Maybe that, and with the food shortages, is why you didn’t see a lot of really fat, or handicapped people after the zombie apocalypse. It was an unfortunate, politically incorrect truth, but right now Darwinism was taking no prisoners.

              Daniel unflinchingly volunteered to go, but Kaylee didn’t want him to. He tried to explain that he had to find Jose and Camilla, but still had to part ways with Kaylee crying her eyes out. She might have understood what he was doing, but she was scared and he didn’t blame her, he was too.

Don’s Suburban was roomy, but it was old and dirty and smelled like stale cigarettes and beer. The carpeting on the sealing was peeling down almost everywhere, revealing the orange dust the padded insulation had become. Daniel hadn’t met any of the Thorn brothers before, they were responsible mostly for the fences, his responsibilities to the town kept him near the water. At this point in the battle they all smelled bad, but if rumors were true this was probably the Thorn norm, though. Two of the teenage boys lit cigarettes, the third one shared a can of snuff with his dad. Daniel was offered both, but he wasn’t a fan of either. He’d used vaporizers rather than smoking cigarettes before, but that fad had ended in high school along with curfews and believing fingerbanging is sex.

Two blocks of blood and zombie-grime, rotted flesh and clothes, pressed against and smeared along walls, sidewalks and fences. What was once a picturesque town was now a biological hazard zone. There had been a desperate last stand near the center of town, someone with a machine gun melted the barrel shooting at a wave of zombies. At what point they’d figured out how stupid they were for doing that was anyone’s guess, but there was no evidence whomever it was had stayed to be eaten for their folly. That gun could have made a real difference if some assclown hadn’t tried to play hero and actually knew how to use it. At point blank, a machine gun at head level was the perfect recipe for Zombie Stew, and now it was fucking slag.

The Thorns had mastered silent hand signals and even sign language to communicate while hunting. This served them wonderfully in a life after civilization. Daniel felt really behind on his combat skills, he had no idea what 90% of their communications meant. Rather than bourdon their efforts to search for survivors he went about figuring out where, if at all, the warped M249 might have a spare barrel. It wasn’t a guarantee it had one at all, the one on Captain Ricci’s boat had had two extras, but this one was probably just something a refugee scavenged from a fallen checkpoint. Most civilians wouldn’t think to look through boxes for spare parts, or apparently for the gun oil that came with it.

After stashing the machine gun and the two ammo belts the would-be gunner had left behind, Daniel tracked down the trail of spent brass to where the moron had originally run from. It was a shaved-ice stand someone had taken the sign of off, poorly painted over with a thin coat of white wash, and sloppily marked
Police Sub Station
.

Sighing, Daniel figured there was no spare barrel in there either, so he didn’t look. The gun was crap and the ammo was useless in any other weapons system. Maybe the Thorns would want to keep this ammunition, though. Most of the bodies in the streets nobody recognized. There were barely two thousand people in Crystal River, almost small enough for everyone to know everyone. What few bodies they did find that looked fresh were gnawed down beyond where the point where the virus could use the body. Daniel poked one with a stick, and when it didn’t move he guessed that even if EV-1 had control of this corpse’s brain, there was nothing left for it to manipulate. He saw one of the Thorn boys take a hatchet to a zombie’s head, then do it again and again at different points in the yard. He must have found a yard with punji pits in it, a really full one at that.

The first home they found that had been occupied was almost burned to the ground. The upper floors collapsed inward and cinders were still smoldering. A fried corpse’s hand was raised into the air, an empty and partially melted handgun fused to it in a death grip. The next three houses were a similar situation. Daniel was beginning to lose hope when he made it to the street Jose was staying on. Cautiously he approached Camilla’s single story home, rifle at the ready. Most of the façade was stripped away, the sky-blue house now a gross maroon with streaks of brown and green fleshy chunks festering on every inch.

Taking out his flashlight, Daniel signaled the home. He stopped at the car port, the small Nissan hatchback Camilla owned was pushed into the yard and trampled on, the windshield smashed in from the sheer weight of so many zombies. At first there was no return signal, but then suddenly the lights on the little car flashed. Someone inside had the key fob and was letting him know they were alive. This meant they knew undead were near, possibly inside.

Being mindful to be quiet, as there were still dozens of zombies lurking in fenced in yards and other debris, Daniel made it to the front door and cleared the hundred pound concrete angel-yard ornament and dead zombie that were in front of it. Someone was on the other side working to get out too and Daniel paused to figure out who it was. The person on the other side of the door wasn’t flipping the locks, instead it was clear that between scratching at and yanking sideways on a latch that didn’t turn that way, the other side was keeping at least one zombie at bay.

Taking a step back, Daniel considered his situation. There was no way the outward opening house door was going to budge unless he turned the knob, so he didn’t. He didn’t know what window in the house they had signaled him from, but it would have to be within sight of the driveway. Choosing not to risk his companions still searching for survivors, Daniel looked through each window until he found the sliding glass doors behind the house. Whoever was alive was inside a bedroom that faced the back door. From his angle Daniel looked inside and saw that there was no obstruction between the main hallway and the bedroom, except for a large Hispanic woman with a bite on her right thigh that was the start of a ripped chunk of flesh. She was clawing and gnawing at the front door, probably because the virus assumed Daniel was still on the other side. That must have been Camilla’s mother, someone Daniel hadn’t met yet, and now never would. It made his task much easier, emotionally a least.

On the side of the house a window faced the inside, but it had bars on it that couldn’t be taken off anymore. The window slid up and Camilla’s bright red fingernails appeared from the dark and quickly tossed a shiny silver house key out to Daniel. He chose to enter through the back door of the house, which faced a tool shed that had been knocked over and trampled by the herd. The latch wasn’t smooth or quiet and he was certain the dead inside would hear him, but apparently not over her own frenzy to get out of the house.

Inside it smelled like rotting meat and shit. Like most of the undead, Camilla’s mother had partially voided her bowls and bladder either during the process of dying, or in the short time between death and resurrection. Her blood and droplets of fecal matter were smeared from the back door, where she’d likely been bitten, in a circle around the house where it was smeared further by Jose and Camilla’s footprints as they’d run away in terror. Jose’s guns were on the kitchen table, the M16 in pieces where he’d been in the middle of cleaning it, and the M9 jammed partially under the kitchen stove. How it had gotten there wasn’t really the issue, probably during the struggle. Either way, Jose would have had no way to take the woman down, so they’d barricaded themselves in the master bedroom.

Taking a seat at the kitchen table between the sink and where the blood trail circled, Daniel squeezed off a shot, sheering off the top of the woman’s head and dropping her body in a puddle of blood and blackened infected brain matter that dripped down the wall until the hair clumped and stuck to the lock. In hindsight, he could have handled that a bit more gently. A bottle of Maker’s Mark was sitting on the table, a shot glass tipped over where Jose had been enjoying his day off and preparing his equipment for the next patrol. Daniel refilled the glass and waited for the bedroom door to unlock. Camilla, at the sight of her dead mother, rushed to her side and fell into a fit of tears. (Yes, in the blood/poop.) That would have happened either way, but Daniel felt truly horrible for the condition the young woman had to find her mother in. He downed the shot of whiskey and poured himself another. It was going to be a very long day.

By nightfall the survivors of the undead tsunami that had washed through their sleepy little resort town gathered by the marina. Of a known post-viral population of just over two thousand, barely six hundred were still alive. To put that in perspective it would be like having everyone in a small town high school killed by a fire, except for the freshman class. So much destruction was wrought on the infrastructure of the town that by the light of the ruined tiki bar Captain Harrisburg announced that they would be abandoning Crystal River in hopes of finding another town of holdouts farther up the Gulf of Mexico near Texas.

This caused an uproar, or at least as much as the decimated population could uproar. People argued that with the herd past them it was safe to rebuild, but after a list of destroyed infrastructure was read off to them by Harrisburg, the decenters quieted and instead the argument was made to go around Florida’s panhandle and around to the east coast, rather than toward the rogue state of Texas. At least that way the farthest north they’d go was Nova Scotia, versus finding an infected and unlivable Texas and Louisiana and ending up running into the same Cartel that murdered Daniel’s crew.

The deciding factor in that argument ended up being fuel. There wasn’t enough to make Savannah, let alone Nova Scotia. Nobody could guarantee there was anywhere to get more fuel between here and there, even if they went right instead of left. The best idea anyone had was to make for Port St. Joe, which was still in Florida, but a sparsely populated area with a safe harbor. From there they could choose to stay or go on to Texas. The kicker to the plan, though, was to remove anything heavy from the Russian minesweeper
Sonya
, raise her waterline as far as possible and tow the ship out of King’s Bay. She would then escort three other ocean worthy yachts with a shallow draft, easily fitting everyone who would go.

Of course not everyone would leave, namely Chief Kuzma and the Thorn family. Kuzma didn’t think the minesweeper could be floated far enough up, even faced with the evidence that a simple storm surge had taken her in there in the first place. The Thorns on the other hand, just didn’t want to abandon their home. It wasn’t like anyone could force them to go, but they understood strength in numbers and knew they couldn’t just wait around a ruined town already plundered of resources. When the popular vote was to leave, they didn’t fight it.

Almost everything that wasn’t a weapon, food, or water was thrown overboard. Fold out lawn chairs replaced solid furniture and everyone got used to the idea that they would have to sleep sitting up with all the bunks removed. Daniel shared his space with Jose and Camilla, alternating who was going to be awake when. The preparations went on uninterrupted for two straight days. Signs of another herd of zombies in the area, or maybe even the same one, could be seen on the horizon as one pocket of survivors was attacked and overrun after another. Daniel wouldn’t have guessed there were that many people still alive out there, but zombies didn’t generally set fires, nor was it terribly plausible they’d trigger more than one or two on accident. The image of burning zombies walking from one fire to the next crossed his mind, and it occurred to him that the only thing worse than being eaten alive, was being eaten
and
burned alive at the same time.

Captain Harrisburg, now the last surviving town official of any capacity, ordered that they wait until daybreak to try to leave King’s Bay. She felt it was too dangerous to try to navigate in the dark, and she was probably right. They’d succeeded in raising
Sonya’s
waterline by almost two feet, threatening to tip the small ship over if she were made any more top heavy. The extra supplies, mostly what little had come from the Tampa Bay voyage, would have to be trucked from the landing in town to another landing that was on the other side of the marshlands that separated them from the Gulf of Mexico. None of the other boats had to have so much accommodation, but then none of the other boats had heavy guns or armor. If the Cartels were still operating in the Gulf, being caught without
Sonya’s
guns would be little more than providing the bad guys with more free food and boats.

Daniel volunteered to be with the trucks that would transport the guns to the ocean side parking lot. The fewer people on the ship the better right now, and at least he might get the chance to shoot one of the alligators that had been getting bolder. There was no such luck, the gators were still not out, probably waiting for the zombies to go away. It wasn’t like a zombie was a threat to the ancient beasts, their thick hide would protect them from that, but ingesting the infected flesh was probably a death sentence for them as well.

Chief Kuzma came up behind Daniel, his constant smoking assuring he wasn’t that stealthy. “I am sorry I did not come to see you after your crew was lost.”

Daniel hadn’t expected an apology. “It’s fine. People die.”

Kuzma looked at Daniel like he was crazy. “Is not
fine
, Daniel. I lose friends, even before the
nezhit'
. Is never fine. I just thought maybe…” Kuzma searched for the right words, lighting another cigarette to fuel his lingual muse. “You blame yourself, but is not your fault.”

Again, Daniel was stunned nearly to speechlessness. “If you say so, Chief.” Was all he could think to say. How was it not his fault? How was losing Lea not his fault? How was any of the stupid shit that had happened to him in the last three months not been a direct result of his own actions? You could only blame the zombies for so much.

The trucks started and the small convoy left for the boat landing known as Fort Island. Not really an island, Daniel wondered if there had ever actually been a fort here. He was contemplating that very question when the bright noon sky was cast into shadow by an explosion not many miles away. It shook the ground they were on and sent a shockwave rolling across the trees toward the survivors.

“What the fuck was that!?” Everyone seemed to shout all at once. For the locals the answer was clear and terrifying, perhaps even more so than infected cannibals eating your face.

              “That’s got to be the nuclear power plant.” Someone said within earshot. The word nuclear went through the survivors on land and in the boats faster than electricity. The people who’d lived in this area already knew the Administration had taken the crisis as an opportunity to shut down all of the industries they considered a vice of a capitalist nation. All the reactors were taken offline, the radioactive materials sent somewhere classified (probably the bottom of the ocean) and the power grid turned over to costly Green plants. No wonder the power had failed so early in the fight.

              Those in charge on land tried to calm everyone, explain that the nuclear materials were gone, but that didn’t help much. The Fukashima disaster wasn’t that long ago, nor the legendary Chernobyl. Everyone was panicking now, some people running toward the boats and others still into the swampy woods. Plumes of smoke rose into the northern sky and against all belief and probability the bright yellow fire of a rocket engine put a guided missile down on the power plant from the west. That was what the explosion was, danger close incoming from ship to surface missiles. Daniel looked toward the Gulf of Mexico and saw what his mind was sure was another illusion. Dozens of ships, fuel tankers, Coast Guard cutters and even what had to be the outline of a destroyer were coming over the horizon. A flight of helicopters rose above the ships like hornets stirred from their nest and pounced on their enemy.

              At first the survivors were excited, hoping for some reason these helos were there specifically to save them. Nothing could be farther from the truth and in only minutes the squadron’s course was clearly to the right of them and towards the inert power plant. Daniel was still looking out at sea instead of at the choppers and was one of only a few who saw the destroyer begin to lob shells from her deck gun. The squadron made a pass over the refugees, the two Whiskey Cobra attack choppers laid waste to something under the tree line just before the last shell from the destroyer hit in a fusillade from one side of the power plant to the other. The rest of the helos were larger, maybe CH-53 variants, but none of them were Army Chinooks or Marine Ospreys, none of them were meant for rescue.

              The bow of the two yachts towing
Sonya
came around the last row of trees, whoever was onboard could now see the ships at sea. It made sense that Captain Harrisburg would try to make contact, the announcement that she would went over the radio along with an order to establish a perimeter. People weren’t listening, though. Half the survivors were waving at the ships, the other half were distinctly under the impression that they were going to be under attack next and made a mad scramble for the three boats. Granted, there were less than six hundred people at this point, but in a confined space like a small parking lot with water or swamp on all sides it wasn’t long before they were dealing with a stampede inside a corral. Either an alligator or a zombie stuck in the mud startled someone and a shotgun went off. Everyone started screaming, because you know, by now nobody was used to gunfire or something stupid like that. More guns started going off and even more jackasses started panic screaming. The noise was unbearable and confusing.