Zombie Wake (4 page)

A screech sounded, loud and long.
It was
Toothbeak
. Human hair emerged from her beak
and an object was clearly lodged in her throat. Her neck resembled a crescent
moon. Her head swaggered back and forth.

Putting animals out of their misery
is not new for me. For the hogs, we quickly went back to normal bullets, a
fast, effective method. I’ve seen pictures of a giant boar in Vanuatu brought
down by one swift club to the back of the head. Following a long wind up,
skinny arms delivered the whack. It looks just as effective as our means
without the heavy metal environmental hazard. The image of those spindly wiry
muscles pulling down a club spurred my next line of attack.

The wall of dead park visitors
continued its shambling, slow motion advance. I found myself relieved that real
zombies—real zombies
?—
were slow. As each
of my bullets left the barrel of my Smith and the adrenaline level went up, I
found myself in condition red but knew I was teetering on the edge of condition
black. These were terms I had taught to my student over the years. They refer
to the way the human body reacts to stress. As the amount of stress increases
the human body begins to shutdown non-vital processes. The vision narrows down.
People in this state describe feeling like they can focus in on minute details
but have almost no peripheral vision at all. Time slows down.

I holstered my 40 cal and went to
my last resort. The baton. I had stubbornly hung on to my solid wood 44-inch
straight stick for nine years. Finally, out of laziness more then anything
else, I hung the old mahogany red diamond wood stick up and went with a
stainless steel (for the beach) collapsible straight stick. While it’s promoted
as an Asp for its fast snakelike strike, I never bought into the idea that it
had a venomous bite. I remember taking a ration from my team because I was the
defensive tactic instructor who always talked about the silly “radio antenna”
batons that so many officers were carrying. I always said that if you’re going
to a club fight bring a club not a radio antenna.

Now I’m in need of some skull
cracking and I’m carrying a radio antenna. My old stick, the diamond wood one
would have made short
work
of these things. But
instead, I whip the handle of my Asp out to the side and feel a surge of
anticipation as the baton extends with an audible rasp. The small metal ball at
the end coupled with its collapsible characteristic gives it the appearance of
an obese radio antenna. The little ball, about twice the size of a marble, the
business end, could put a hurt on the most tenacious of resisting felons. Or so
the brochure claimed.

The first monster to come within my
range was a fat woman in a bathing suit that she had no business wearing. There
were bulges in all the wrong places and it looked like the shoulder straps were
cutting into her flesh from the load. I raised the baton up over my head, one
handed, and then reversed with a swift downward swing toward the center of her
head. I knew before I even started the strike that it wasn’t fast enough. The
baton hit the center of her skull and bounced back six or seven inches in the
air. The woman grunted and did a
sorta
shuffle in place and then growled and started to reach for me.

This time I wound up like I was
swinging for the cheap seats. I visualized a target 6 inches past the left side
of her head and swung from the right with the intention of blasting right
through her temple and on through. The end of the baton hit her temple with an
audible crunch as I let out a grunt that would make any black belt proud. The
side of her skull and face crumpled in several inches and she dropped like 300
pounds of
jello
.

The instant I made impact I took
several steps backward and felt a wave of guilt come over me. I had just broken
a cardinal rule by aiming for the head. From day one in the academy we had been
taught to avoid certain targets. The head was the biggest one. Never ever hit
someone in the head with a baton. And now, there before me on the splintery
planks of that pier, was the quivering evidence of what a baton could do to the
human skull. I shuddered at the sight of the glistening clearness of cerebral
spinal fluid dripping out of her nose. The woman’s monstrous torso shuddered
once and then was still.

A tall gangly zombie in a Body
Glove wet suit stumbled as it stepped over the body and continued its advance.
This was getting ridiculous. It seemed like every time I dropped one of these
things there were two more to take its place. I wasn’t sure how much more
pier
I had but I knew that I would soon be on the last 50
feet, shark country. There was an age-old war of pier real estate that went on
between the mackerel slingers and the shark fisherman. Shark hunters felt that
the end was their country. They would show up on a busy Saturday armed with
massive poles and ice chests and
march
like a platoon
right out to the very end and wedge out all the other fisherman. I couldn’t
count the number of times I have responded to shark country to break up a disturbance
between the mackerel slingers and the shark hunters. It usually ended with me
throwing the whole gang of tattooed muscle bound shark thugs out of the park,
energy drinks and all. As I readied for my next swing I felt a pang of regret
that some of those shaved head construction thugs weren’t here now. With a few
hammers or crowbars those punks could really help out with this crowd of death.

I quickly discovered that one blow
to the head usually wasn’t enough to end these miserable creatures existence. I
found myself swinging two, three, sometimes four times before they would drop.
I was mentality admonishing myself not to chop wood. Take aim, wind up, swing
hard and fast, and aim for six inches behind the target. Martial arts
instructors discovered that if the target is visualized six inches past where
it really was, attackers could hit things noticeably harder. I had already
proven this point four times when I remembered to breathe.

That’s the other irritating thing
that human physiology habitually does in a fight. We hold our breath. We clench
up and forget to breathe. I always taught my officers to
kiai
.
A
kee-i
is an audible exhale right at the moment of
impact.
More oxygen in, more CO2 out.
The louder and
more forcefully you
kiai
the more power you pack so
long as you time it right. Think Bruce Lee on this one.

I was sounding more like an injured
buffalo as I cracked open the skull of an elderly man in a cowboy hat. I hit
him on the top of the skull with a two handed downward strike that dropped him
in one hit as I backed up and readied for the next one I saw that his cowboy
had was stuck to the end of my baton. I whipped the baton around and smacked it
onto the railing of the pier. As soon as I made impact I pulled back and down.
The whitish sweat stained hat plopped off the end of the baton and disappeared
into the murky waves below.

I sensed the approach of yet
another zombie and spun around with a high backhanded swing. I caught him just
above the ear with a glancing blow. His head snapped to the right and popped
against his shoulder but he kept coming. He reached out and grabbed the strap
of my AR-15. I panicked. The thing was useless to me now. Every time I swung
the empty gun would flop around on its strap and interfere with the blow. I
shrugged out of the strap and let the gun drop to the deck. I took two steps
back and with a primal scream I went in for a jab. With two hands on the shaft
of the baton I used my entire upper body to slam the small ball shaped end of
the baton into the monsters forehead. There was a wet sloppy sounding pop and I
found that my baton had punctured the skull and was imbedded six to eight
inches into this guy’s braincase. I pivoted and took a step back. With both
hands I yanked the baton backwards. To my horror, instead of coming free of the
skull it pulled the body with it. As he fell forward, his shoulder hit my thigh
and knocked me off balance. I pulled my baton out at the moment he impacted me
and felt dread as I fell backwards.

My worst fear in a fight has always
been going to the ground. If I allowed my momentum to carry me, I could roll
through the fall and come up fighting but I worried that the corpse of my most
recent victim might impede my progress. With one opponent, there are tactical
advantages to getting in close. But this was different. This was an army of
hungry dead people with a one-track mind. The ground was the grave.

Luck was with me and I rolled all
the way over my left shoulder and came up into a squatting position. Three more
zombies came forward over the corpse at my feet as I leaped up and backed away.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the end of the pier was only 10 feet or so
away.

Time was running out. I might be
able to dispatch the three but then I was going to have to jump. There were no
more options. The one on my left reached for my neck. Instinctively I raised my
right hand, and stepping to the right, I caught his arm at the wrist and
smoothly rotated into an arm bar take down maneuver. He lost his balance. I
brought my left hand up to his shoulder and with a heave spun him into two
more. With a push, I knocked the three of them over in a writhing pile of
putrid flesh. I stepped back and then swung my baton down onto the head of the
nearest one. I felt the skull give and then stepped back yet again. The three
on the ground began to sort themselves out in a morbid slow motion dance.

The crowd behind them was starting
to move in. I lost hope at the sea of snarling heads disappearing in the murky
blackness. I backed into the corner of the rail.
End of the
road.
Nowhere to run.
No bullets left. My arms
felt like numb noodles from all the swinging. With a half sob half exhale I
jumped up onto the rail. I took one last look at the wall of death that was
slowly creeping towards, turned around, tucked my baton under my arm and
unsnapped the buckle on my gun belt and pulled it out to the side. From a
decade of post shift habit I pulled the belt as my left hand instinctively
unsnapped each of the leather keepers that fused the gun belt to my pants belt.
The fifteen pounds of leather and tools fell from my hand, flopped onto the
railing, hung there for a half a second and then slowly slid over and fell to
ocean below with a loud splash. I still had my baton. There were only three or
four feet
between me and the first of them, at this point
.
I figured I would take one last swing and then leap clear.

There I was. Standing on the
handrail of the pier swinging my Asp like I was harvesting wheat. There was a
lot of splatter and bits of scalp hanging from the end of baton. My arms were
numb. Back and forth, up and down. I was just about to leap backwards into the
cold ocean below when I heard… no felt a roar of man made power; the throbbing
“
whump-whump
” of a rotor. It was a deep visceral
feeling as rotor blades whipped round and round beating the air. A bass sound
so low that you felt it in the marrow of your ribs long before you heard it.

I turned and looked up into the
inky black sky. A dark monstrous bird was descending from out of the clouds. It
behaved like a helicopter but it was no helicopter. I had had several
opportunities to ride in helicopters. They always looked like they were
precariously hanging in the sky seconds away from plummeting to earth in a
shriek of metal and petroleum fed flames. If I ever thought helicopters had a
tenuous grip on flight, this thing looked nothing less then miraculous. It was
a tilt-rotor, half airplane half helicopter. Its stubby wings rotated the twin
turbo props from horizontal flight to vertical flight. It had a long cigar
shaped body the size of a city bus. With the back end facing me its twin tail
just visible above the rear ramp I noticed a reddish glow emanating from within
the crafts body.

My exhausted brain was just
catching up to what I was seeing and putting together the connection between
red light and night vision and how tactical that was when I heard a sound like
the fabric of space being ripped apart. At the same moment a brilliant white
flame leapt out of the craft’s backend. Hot angry air whipped past my head as I
put the clues together and realized there was some sort of weapon firing. I
could see a large multi-barrel gun mounted on the end of the load ramp. The
barrels were spinning with an audible electric whirr and thousands of glistening
brass shell casings were raining down into the water below. I turned as the
ripping noise grew louder and louder and great misty clouds of blood and gore
where blossoming in columns along the length of the pier. The weapons operator
was slowly working his way up and down the pier, back and forth. Bodies were
dropping left and right in a heap. I almost fell off the railing and then
awkwardly flopped forward onto the deck of the pier. I could smell the acrid
stench of gunpowder and watched as the large brass shells tinkled on the pier
around me. The noise resonated and my skull throbbed in pain.

Then came the ropes. They dropped
from either side of the craft and armed soldiers, dressed in black, dropped
rapidly to the pier. As they hit the deck they fanned out, un-slung their
weapons and began to methodically walk down the pier dispatching the putrid
dead. Soon one was walking towards me. I turn and looked up. He was tall and he
had the look of a man who had the musculature you get from doing work, not
sculpted in front of a mirror but earned by doing hard, back-breaking work. He
had a rough angular face. He looked down at me and shouted something
unintelligible. I just looked in confusion up at him. He turned, looking down
the pier toward the carnage, and spit sunflower seeds off to the side. He then
turned back and shouted again “YOU OKAY?”

While I was escorted to an already
cleared corner, the mop-up crew continued their progress down the pier in a
blur of progress. At one point someone produced a chain saw and cut rails from
the end of the pier and dumped them over the side. I was guided, half dragged
away from the end of the pier and soon we were clear for the tilt rotor to come
down. It landed on the pier in a cloud of mist and spray.
 
More soldiers exited the craft. Two
came towards me with duffel bags slung over their shoulders. They looked like
medics with clear plastic face shields that cinched tight around their necks.