Books of the Dead (Book 3): Dead Man's Land (16 page)

She had her own Plan A and was executing it, as she closed her eyes and prayed.  When she opened them again, she seemed more confident, and I wished I had some of that. 

I turned and looked out of the hole again. The fog seemed more transparent than it had been, and I had no idea if that would work for or against us.

“Let’s go,” I said as I stepped through the hole and onto the grass, still moist from the morning dew. On any other day, it might have been nice to step out and take in some of the fresh morning air.

As soon as we got outside, we stabbed our pikes in the ground. I hoped we wouldn’t have to use them, but some little voice of truth buzzed around in the back of my brain, telling me that a pike was in my future. This world was becoming stranger by the minute. I fully expected a T-Rex to appear at any moment. That or a U.F.O.

The zombies looked worse, the closer I got to them.  Metal had been bolted, welded, and strapped onto their bodies anyway they could. Some had barbed wire wrapped impossibly tight around their arms and legs, holding the metal on with the barbs cutting into their grey undead flesh. Blood and other bodily fluids leaked around the metal and the attachments. 
Lovely
, was all I could think.

Some had wild, ragged pieces of metal attached to their hands, making them look like the claws of an ancient prehistoric creature. Others had smooth pieces of multi-colored metal attached to their torsos, making them look like some horrible, walking sandwich board advertisement. I can tell you, I didn’t want what they were selling.

The first zombie hit the metal cables, and not being a mental giant, it toppled over face first, clattering to the grass. Another one hit the cable and followed his armored buddy to the ground. Under different circumstances, it might have been funny, a modern zombie version of a Keystone cop movie. The two fallen zombies started to get back to their feet, but they struggled to do so, weighed down by all their armor.

They were tenacious bastards and made it back up to a standing position and then moved toward us at a slow shuffle. Too bad for them that they weren’t smart enough to look down at just above ground level to see another strand of metal cable lying ten feet ahead. The anticipation of getting a mouthful of our flesh, combined with whatever electronic compulsion their evil overlord was using to propel them forward, didn’t leave a lot of mental head room for watching for trip wires.

The first one hit the second cable and spilled forward onto the grass. It sunk its arm into the moist soil, nearly up the elbow. That one struggled mightily to free himself as the mud and muck held him in place.

“The tops of their heads!” Brandon yelled with some excitement.

I must have looked confused because he shot me a look of utter frustration.

“Look,” he said and aimed his rifle at fallen zombie, “they’re not armored.”

Holy shit
, I thought,
he’s right
. A weak spot and it was one that Brandon didn’t wait to exploit.  He pulled the trigger and ripped off several shots. The zombies were still a good twenty-five feet away. At that distance, it was hard to hit a moving target, but one of his bullets finally hit home, and the zombie’s head exploded. It collapsed in a heap just as another zombie tripped over the cable and fell on top of it. The newly felled, armored zombie floundered like a capsized turtle, trying to get back to its feet. I took aim with my rifle and planted a bullet through the top of its skull. It took me seven shots, though.

So far so good, but this wasn’t going to last. Two down and hundreds to go.

We actually weren’t at hundreds inside the fence. My quick estimate had around fifty. Around a dozen of those were making steady progress down the driveway, unfettered by our strands of cables. I had to hope that people inside would take care of them.

There were still many more zombies heading through the holes in the fence. I had no idea how many were out there. If that fence were breached any more, we would be in serious trouble. 

Brandon shot into the skulls of two more downed zombies, but when I went for one closer to me, my bullet ricocheted off the headpiece of metal bolted to the thing’s skull. Its head bounced around on its shoulder like a bobble head for a few seconds, but it pushed itself back to its feet and came forward, steadfast and relentless. Fortunately, it ran right into another span of cable and fell flat on its face again.
Poor zombie
, I thought. 

Brandon ripped off another burst of bullets, and two zombies left this plane of existence when a thought came to me. 

“We need to be careful with our ammo,” I shouted.  “We don’t have enough for all of them.”

He looked at me and nodded.  “Are we going to use the pikes?” he asked.

Like I knew? The pikes were his idea, but since I was in charge, I felt the decision went to me.  “Let’s give it a try.”   

“That means getting a hell of a lot closer to them than we are now,” he said.

“Yes, it will,” I replied and put the strap of my rifle across my shoulders and turned back around.  Just to be safe, we both kept our side arms at the ready with our holsters unstrapped.

“Let’s think of this as a proof of concept testing with the pikes,” I said. I had my serious doubts about them, but desperate times mean desperate measures.

He nodded and moved toward the pikes, with me following.  I plucked mine out of the wet soil. It came out of the ground with a wet sucking sound. I looked over as Brandon did the same. He looked a lot more confident than I did.  Then again, he was our weapons master and preferred his swords and other bladed weapons.  Me, I liked my ball bat, but I didn’t see it working against these armored bastards. 

It took a couple seconds to get used to the heft of the pike. It was heavily weighted toward its metal point, but after a couple practice jabs, I got used to its awkward balance.  Getting the damn thing into a moving target was going to take some doing.

Brandon, on the other hand, was off and running, heading up one of the safe lanes in the cables.  We had designed the web of cables in such a way that there was several clears path through them back to the buildings. These paths zig-zagged through the cables. For the zombies, it was like a maze though, and they still stuck to their “shortest-distance-between-two- points-is-a-straight-line strategy” and kept constantly falling and then struggling to get back up.   

A hail of gunshots came from the building, and I looked to see several zombies moving up the driveway. Rifle barrels stuck out windows and various holes in the building, firing on the approaching undead. The zombies shook off the impact of the bullets and faltered a little, but did not go down. Another volley of bullets came down on the zombies, and two fell from headshots, while two more toppled from leg wounds. Those two struggled to get back up on their good legs, but fell repeatedly and then began to crawl forward. They were not easily deterred. 

I cautiously moved up my own safe alleyway between the cables, approaching the zombies. It felt a hell of a lot better having them at a safe assured distance. Even though I had done a lot of up-close work with the undead in the past, these armored zombies seemed a lot more formidable. Still, like the fool I am, I continued on. 

A zombie spotted me and sped up, changing its course and heading straight for me.  It desperately reached for me with hands covered with jagged metal, but just as it closed the gap down to ten feet, it tripped over a strand of cable and went down on all fours. I quickly moved up and drew back my pike as I surveyed the top of the thing’s head for a weak point.  There was a gap on the crown between two pieces of metal, and I aimed for that. I put all I had into the jabbing motion. It was either dumb luck or some divine providence, but I struck right where I was aiming. The sharp point pierced through the thin flesh and through the thing’s skull, as if it were made out of hot butter. It dropped like a brick and slid off the end of my pike with a sickening, sucking sound and clanged against the ground. A thin line of reddish-black goo dripped off the point. An odor of wet decay permeated the air around the body as more of the goo oozed out of the puncture wound, like ketchup from a bottle. I had no intention of ever using that formula on my hot dogs. Not now, not ever.

Of course, I will probably never see another hot dog in my lifetime. That is if I lived long enough to have a lifetime.

I heard a grunt off to my left and looked to see Brandon yanking his pike from the top of the head of another fallen zombie. A jut of red gushed out of the zombie’s head and shot onto Brandon’s feet.

“Fucking gross,” he said. 

A clattering noise sounded in front of me, and I turned to see another zombie flailing around, face down, with its feet caught up on the cables. Unlike the others, this one had its head fully encased in what looked like sheet metal with no obvious openings. 

I looked to the metal end of my pike and then to the metal covering the zombies’ dome and did some calculating. This was going to take a lot of pounds per square inch of pressure, but I thought I could pierce the thing’s metal hide. I reared back with my pike and brought it forward in one fluid motion. The metal tip broke through the metal covering and buried deep into the zombie’s brain cavity.

Just for good measure, I jiggled the end in its skull for a couple of seconds.
Stirred, not shaken
came to mind. Just the opposite of James Bond, but I still had a license to kill.

I yanked my pike free just in time to avoid another zombie tripping and stumbling forward. Like most of the others, the top of its head was mostly exposed. I drove my pike home, sending it deep within the thing’s skull. It convulsed for a second, and this time, the reddish-black goo spewed out of its mouth.  This was
not
pleasant work.

“Take that, dead asshole,” Brandon yelled as he dispatched another one. 

A hail of bullets came from behind us. The zombies in the driveway had made it to the building and were trying to make their way inside. Several rifle barrels poked out of windows and holes as the people inside fired on the zombies. A handful of zombies fell, but most staggered from the bullets, their armor taking the impacts, and came, back toward the openings.

“Get back from the windows,” a voice shouted, and I looked up to see Aaron with half of his torso out the window. He had his hand pulled back, preparing to toss something down on the zombies. It took a few seconds, but the rifle barrels retracted inside.

“Fire in the hole,” Aaron yelled and tossed his payload down among the zombies.

Brandon and I ducked down just as the grenade exploded. I closed my eyes to protect myself against any debris, and when I opened them again, I saw parts of zombies strewn about in front of the wall. One stood up, missing an arm, and stumbled forward. It looked like someone had used a cheese grater on its face, pieces of torn flesh hanging down in several places.  Someone inside waited just long enough for it to get within range and shot it in the eye.

Another one, missing half its leg and with the other one hanging on by a few pieces of meat, dragged itself along toward the entrance. A shot rang out, and it dropped to the dirt, where it stopped moving entirely.

When I turned my attention back to approaching zombies, I saw a zombie in mid-fall, toppling right toward me. Instinctively, I whipped my pike up, and the thing fell onto its point, impaling it as the sharp end of the pike, pierced the thing’s metal hide. The impact knocked me back, and I pushed my end of the pike down to the ground, leaving that end sticking into the grass. Between its weight and momentum, the zombie continued to drive the pike into its chest as it worked its way down the pike’s shaft and towards me.

Its fingers whipped only an inch away from my face. Like the other one, it had jagged pieces of metal strapped onto its hand. Some sick bastard had really thought this through.

I yanked my pistol from my holster and brought it up as quickly as I could. I pulled the trigger and put a bullet right into the thing’s eye before it could make that last inch.  It slumped forward, all its undead life ebbing away, and fell off to my right in a heap with my pike still sticking into its chest. 

It took some effort, but I was able to roll it over and pull my pike fee. When I said,
effort
, I meant I had to stick a foot onto the zombie’s chest and yank hard to get the pike out of the thing’s chest.  I’m sure if someone saw me doing this, he might think he was watching a battle from the Middle Ages. I could see the commercial playing in my head with the announcer saying, “Tonight on the
History Channel
….”

“A little help over here,” Brandon shouted, and I jerked my head in his direction in time to see him in a dance of death with a zombie. Like my pike, his was also sticking into the chest of a zombie, but this one remained standing. They moved in a tight circle as the zombie swiped at him. Two more zombies steamed towards him, but, like the others, they paid no attention to the cables and did headers at the same time, after tripping over the cable.

I leapt over two cables and got to Brandon and his dance partner just as Brandon swished by me. 

“Pivot it, and put its back to me,” I said.

“That’s easier said than done,” he said, grunting with exertion.

“Just do it.”

It took some doing, and he had to go to one knee, but after a couple of jerking motions, he was able to get the things back to me. I pulled out my large hunting knife and reached around the zombie’s head to its face and pulled the blade back in a snapping motion and drove it deep into the thing’s eye socket. It went limp and slid off the end of the pike onto the ground.