Part 26 (1/2)
”There's a lot of them,” David said. He grabbed a rifle leaning between the seats and prepared to fire.
In front of them, Private Brooks wasn't driving. Instead he was firing into the wave of infected that was now fanning out toward them from the road and trees.
”d.a.m.n it, drive!” Abbott shouted, and reluctantly waited for the doctor and Brooks to turn around.
”They're behind us!” Shaun screamed. They shot glances backward to see their escape route being closed off by a wall of infected zombies, lurching, shambling, and moving closer to the two Jeeps. But what gave them reason to pause was not so much the now too terribly familiar vision of sick humans hungry for flesh, but the awkwardly out-of-place vehicle that led the group behind them. In front of the ma.s.s of gore-smeared infected an Army Jeep drove at a jerky pace, stopping and moving, stopping and moving, as if the driver were having trouble with the manual transmission, just barely pulling it off.
”Holy s.h.i.+t, they're driving.” Abbott stared, incredulous.
”And shooting,” David added, as the road beside the car was raked with bullets.
”The h.e.l.l did they get guns?”
One zombie wore the tattered remains of an Army uniform sans sleeves. He kept pulling on the rifle strap of the rifle held solidly in the hands of the infected walking beside him.
”I'm guessing whatever soldiers were sent to the camp earlier didn't get a happy reception,” David said, ducking at each new gunshot.
”f.u.c.k,” Abbott grabbed the rifle from David's grip and fired off a few rounds, picking off a handful of infected in the process. Those behind the fallen simply stepped on or over the fallen zombies and continued toward them.
Brooks and Dr. Robbins ran back to them and piled into their Jeep. Robbins climbed stiffly into the back and wedged in next to Dejah. Brooks launched himself into the bed of the rear cargo area through the open back of the Jeep.
”Safety in numbers,” Brooks said.
Abbott laughed grimly. ”Are you seeing the same s.h.i.+tstorm I'm seeing here? Cause we ain't got any f.u.c.king numbers. Our a.s.ses are zombie food.”
Shaun clung to Dejah's arm.
The infected surrounded them from every direction. Brooks and Abbot fired, but there weren't enough bullets to kill them all. David gripped a pistol and joined the firefight, but again, for every zombie he killed, three more appeared behind it. When the magazines were empty, there wasn't any time to reload. Premature night fell upon them, as all remaining daylight was blocked by the awful visions grasping hands ripping open the doors, gnas.h.i.+ng teeth, open sores, tattered flesh. Hands grabbed them, pulling their clothes, their limbs, their hair. Their screams and shouts rose over the grunts and moans of the zombie crowd. Shaun was pulled away from Dejah by a mult.i.tude of hands.
”Dejah! Dejah!” he shrieked, fighting, kicking, hitting whatever he could connect with, but there were too many of them.
”Shaun!” Dejah called. She couldn't see where he was through the wall of infected humanity. So many of them. She felt smothered. Suffocated. The smell of them was awful, like sweat-damp rotting meat smeared with feces. ”Shaun! David,” she choked.
”Dejah!” David shouted from somewhere a few feet away.
”I'm over here, still by the Jeep,” she yelled in reply. ”Where's Shaun?” Terror filled her voice. The kind of terror only reflected in the voice of a mother who has lost her child. She clawed and fought the mobs of hands holding her. She became an enraged animal, letting loose all of her fear and rage in a furious attack. It kept them at bay, but she was not released. She kicked, hit, yanked, leaped, and jumped, trying to see over their heads, trying to see where they'd taken Shaun.
She didn't hear him shouting anymore.
G.o.d no. Please G.o.d, please....
A car horn sounded, long and loud, and every one of the infected monsters froze where they stood. They seemed fearful to even breathe. The car horn stopped. It had come from the zombie-driven Jeep.
”What are you doing?” a raspy voice shouted over the heads of the crowd. ”You were told not to harm them.”
Low murmurs buzzed through the foul-smelling crowd. A few reluctantly glanced at the infected person standing beside them as if they'd just awakened from a confusing dream in a place they'd never seen.
The hands tightened their grips on her arm as Dejah strained against them, still looking for Shaun.
”Shaun? Shaun!” she shouted.
”Silence, woman,” the rasping voice commanded. She could see an infected man in a blue plaid s.h.i.+rt, standing on the seat of the Jeep he was driving. He was the one talking to them. Infected, and driving ... and talking. Giving orders.
”Do what he says, Dejah,” David said. A zombie near him slugged him in the stomach. David doubled over, holding his gut still healing from the knife wound. He wheezed as the wind was knocked out of him. From what she could see of his face, pain seared him, but the infected clinging to him didn't release their holds. They've organized, she thought, not willing to contemplate what that meant just yet.
”Silence!” Blue s.h.i.+rt said again. The infected man giving orders climbed from the Jeep and went to the road. The ma.s.s of zombies parted for him like water for a shark's fin. As the mob split for the man to pa.s.s, a puddle of blood and organs staining the road came into view.
Dejah gasped. As the zombies continued to step aside, Shaun's torso, torn and gutted, glistening under the rays of dying sunlight, lay splayed in plain sight. Arms wrenched from sockets. Blood pumping from the stump of his neck where his head once was. Intestines coiled out over the road like gray skinless snakes, torn free from the lower half of his body. s.h.i.+t fell from the shorn ends in brown clumps into the red-black blood on the asphalt. Not far from the ma.s.s of gore lay a leg, a section of blood-slick bone stripped of its flesh where a thigh used to be. And on its foot, below the blue jeaned knee, was a s.h.i.+ning black boot, courtesy of the U.S. government.
The dawning realization of what she saw spread slowly from the core of her spine to an awful place deep within.
”Shaun!” Dejah screamed hysterically. ”No! No-you-f.u.c.king-didn't-you-G.o.dd.a.m.n-monsters-NO!” In a berserker rage, she thrashed and flailed against the hands that held her. David shouted for her to stop. She didn't care. Tears filmed her eyes, flowed to the ground. She was a wailing mess of rage as she flung herself against her captors, struggling to reach Shaun's remains. They closed in around her. She heard their growls and moans but she cursed them and screamed louder, as if her fury was a scalding power in itself, and she could destroy them all, see them ripped to shreds, see them torn limb from limb, see their guts slithering from their rotten carca.s.ses and make it all happen from the sheer force of her screams, wrenched as they were from the deepest pit of pain and grief.
They crowded her. Their sheer ma.s.s finally restrained her completely. A fetid, filthy hand clamped over Dejah's mouth, silencing her shouts into m.u.f.fled mews. She slumped to the road, sobbing.
A few infected crouched around the scattered parts of Shaun's corpse, eating in an animalistic frenzy.
”Stop,” Blue s.h.i.+rt said.
”Hungry,” someone said in a sound that was more grunt than word.
”Bal Shem commands to bring them to the farm,” Blue s.h.i.+rt said in his stilted tone of authority. He awkwardly held a rifle, military issue, in his right hand. The left hand, which he used to steady the weapon, had twisted fingers, as if they'd been broken.
The huddled group continued devouring Shaun's remains.
Blue s.h.i.+rt raised the rifle, leveled it. It kicked in his hands as it fired. Three of the defiant infected fell over, splas.h.i.+ng into the pile of carnage. ”I said stop.”
The others backed away, but there was reluctance and grumblings against the leader. There were more infected wis.h.i.+ng to eat than were wis.h.i.+ng to obey the man in the blue s.h.i.+rt. As if visibly struck by a surprise solution, and out of apparent fear that the horde was growing more feral and would turn on him as well as the healthy, Blue s.h.i.+rt stood straighter as he offered them a compromise: ”Eat this woman and finish the boy. The rest will be taken to Bal Shem.”
David sprang into action. He'd been docile long enough that the sudden move caught the infected by surprise and he ripped his right arm free. He swung a punch at his nearest captor, but his liberation was short lived. He was immediately subdued by a dozen growling zombies. ”Dejah!” he yelled, voice taut with anguish.
Dejah was numb. She hung from the arms of her captors, head bowed. Certainly Selah was dead. Shaun was dead. Soon, she would watch David die as well. If only she could die once and for all ... no, no you can't give up.
They descended upon her, ripping and tearing. Blocking the pain from her mind, she watched the swaying tops of the thick pines and the autumn sky growing darker, a deep lavender that would give way to a purple-black night. A flock of geese, black, like dots of embroidery st.i.tched upon the dove-gray sky, moved in a ripple of motion in front of soft wisps of cotton clouds. A sharp pang snapped her from her daydream. Instinct willed her to fight.
You can't give up. Not now. Not yet.
It was impossible to say where the energy came from, but it was there just the same. She threw her full weight backward to escape. Her shoes slipped in the wetness of her own blood, and she expected to hit the pavement hard, but she fell back into a zombie embrace. She struggled.
An infected zombie rent the soft skin of her abdomen as another attacker bit hard into her neck with broken, ragged teeth. Blood spurted from her throat. Dejah fought, but her strength was waning. She felt herself opened up. Strangely enough, although she'd wished for death, she realized, now that it was imminent, she didn't want to die.