Books of the Dead (Book 3): Dead Man's Land (22 page)

Chapter 29

A Deadly Path

Let them come
, Anthony thought. 
I’ll be ready for them
. 

He picked up his assault rifle and pulled a small pack of grenades close. Anthony let his fingers do the talking and pressed a series of buttons on his control vest. He took a look out of one of the bus windows and saw Norman taking potshots into the woods. He also saw as Ryan’s soldiers snapped into action and start toward the north side of the building in the distance.

Now, what to do with Ryan?
he asked himself. He couldn’t let the rats have him. Ryan was his minion and his alone. His fingers moved to his vest control panel, and found the button for Ryan’s shock collar. Anthony’s index finger held poised above the button for nearly two seconds, but then he pressed it, holding it down. He hoped that Ryan was still within range. He had told his minions that the range was several miles, but that was a lie.  There were limits. He knew it didn’t matter. In twenty-four hours, the fail-safe would activate, and that would be that.

He spoke into his headset, “Norman, you need to resume your mortar bombardment.”

Norman quickly came back, saying, “Are you kidding me?  That sniper will take me out in a minute.”

With his free hand, Anthony started his fingers toward the control button for Norman’s shock collar, but pulled it back.  With Felix and Rex down for the count and Ryan captured, he was down to three human soldiers. Killing or incapacitating Norman would not be a prudent strategy at this time. That could wait for later, when he wiped out these damned rats.

“I need you in the woods, hunting that sniper then,” Anthony said.

“I’m a lot safer here with the trucks,” Norman responded.

“Oh, Norman….” Anthony said, and, this time, he did press the button for Norman’s shock collar.  Just a little tweak.  Norman yelped and then cursed.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said, “I’m going.”

Anthony let up on Ryan’s shock button. That should be enough to put him out of everyone’s misery. He did sigh, though. He hated losing the control vest.

The trail tightened down to little tunnels in places, but I was able to keep the ATV moving forward and making positive progress toward the ridge where all the Lord of the Dead’s vehicles were positioned. I only hoped that I could get there in time to spring my little surprise.

At several places on my ride, I was able to get glimpses through the trees back onto the field and back to The Manor. The third floor on the main building was blazing in full now, chilling me to my core.  We were losing our home again, a home we had fought, bled, and died for.  Something started to simmer down deep inside me, a slow, steady anger building. I could not let that happen. Not this time.  Not again.

The field in front of the main building was full of the armored zombies, and, from this distance, the undead looked like medieval knights about to start a siege on a castle. There were no dragons or fairy princesses inside, only the people I loved and cared about most in this world. 

When I made it to within a quarter mile of the ridge, I stopped and shut off the ATV. No use advertising my approach any more than I had to. I retrieved the RPG and the warheads and started working my way along the path as stealthily as I could, in spite of all the hardware I was toting. After a few minutes of hauling all the gear, I realized that stealth had to go out of the window, so I opted for speed. That, of course, increased the chances that someone up on the ridge would hear me, but damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead, getting there sooner rather than later trumped concealment.

I quickly learned just how heavy all this gear really was, and it gave me an admiration for Brandon. When I thought of him, though, I felt a dull ache in my soul. Despite knowing that he wasn’t the first, and wouldn’t be the last person we lost, the losses were taking their toll on me and everyone else. Each individual loss was like another cut in the exercise of death by a thousand cuts. Each one was painful and drew its amount of blood.  Eventually, it seemed that we would all bleed out if this continued.

Ultimately, I wondered how we would survive it, the endless fear, the losses of the people we loved, but matters of the moment forced me to push that down into that little black and thorny box in the back of my mind that I did my best to ignore. It was always there, a dim spotlight shining on it. One day, it would demand my attention, but it had to wait.

I found myself gasping for breath in the humid air under the canopy of trees.  A thin sheen of sweat popped out on my body, the exertion carrying all the extra weight, leaving me with that slimy feeling all over. I put one foot after the other and forged ahead.  After a few minutes, I saw the tops of the buses and one semi-trailer sticking slightly over the crest of the ridge, and I slowed from my labored sprint. Now, we had the moment of truth. How was I going to use this RPG?

I had never fired one in my life. Greg had taken all the warriors through drills, but none of us had fired one because we had only a precious few warheads.  Deep down, I knew there was a big difference between a demonstration and live-fire launch. My biggest hope was that my rockets would hit home. My biggest fear would be that it would go straight up into the air, come back down to earth right on top of me, and go off. This, on top of being ripped apart by armored zombies or shot by our attacker, just made the moment all that more fun.  Fear and doubt were not in short supply.

I was about to start my approach when someone yelled in my direction, “Hey, you there, stop where you are!”  The voice had a high-pitched nasal twang to it, and it wasn’t one I ever remembered hearing.

Now, I considered that request.  I’m carrying an RPG, intent on taking out a fleet of enemy attackers. Someone I don’t know yells at me and tells me to stop.  Should I stop?  Hell, no.

I ducked down and made a diagonal cut off the path and into the trees, running full out now. That is when my attacker finally showed some smarts and opened up on me. 

I heard the heavy report of his weapon as bullets whizzed past me and winged off the trunks of trees.  Leaves were shredded and fell to the ground like confetti. Woodland birds cried in surprise and fear, and a small flock shot out of the treetops, to the safety of the bright blue sky. It wasn’t the first time that I envied birds. 

Bullets continued to fly past me at a frightening rate, and I ran in a slight panic for about thirty seconds (being shot at will do that) before I gained my wits and realized that I was running away from my target.  Despite the chance of being shot, the imperative for me was taking out those trucks, and running in the opposite direction wasn’t getting me any closer to that goal. So I made a sharp cut to my left and started back in the direction of the ridge. 

Tree limbs whipped against my face, tearing small gouges in my flesh. I nearly went down after catching my feet on tree roots, but somehow I maintained an upright status and was back on course. That was, until I broke from the trees into a long wide meadow of knee high grass and daisies. The grass was soft and wet from the morning dew and smelled damp and musty. In the center of that meadow was the quaintest little fishing pond I had ever seen. For my life, it was just about to become the last thing I would ever see.

Bursting out of the trees, less than fifty feet away, was a tall beanpole of a man, carrying an assault rifle and a long, nasty scowl. It only took him a second to spot me and swivel his rifle my way.

“I told you to stop!” he shouted at me in an incensed tone, as if it were crazy for me to run away from someone who was trying to kill me. 

This man was not too bright. I knew that while I was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, there were times that shooting first and asking questions later was the best policy. So I drew my pistol, dropped the RPG and the bag with the warheads into the grass, fell to one knee, and squeezed off three quick shots. 

My marksmanship had improved over time, but mostly with a rifle.  With a handgun, I was bad, and while my shots didn’t drop him, they did get him to duck down and stop firing for the moment. 

I was roughly fifteen feet out of the woods and fifteen feet from the pond.  In other words, I was back in dead man’s land again. Only this setting bespoke of romantic picnics with your best girl at your side and not imminent death.

My attacker regained his courage and let loose with a barrage of bullets that ripped through the grass on my left side cutting my escape path back to the woods.  He tore off another round of shots, and I was forced to fall face first into the tall grass, and immediately I began rolling to the right.  I felt blades of grass falling down on me as I rolled over and over again. I also knew that sooner, rather than later, I was going to run out of land and end up in the pond. That wouldn’t work, since that would put me out in the open and fully exposed, not that grass was doing all that great of a job, but it was something.

I sensed the ground becoming wetter and muddier, and I ceased rolling. When I stopped, I peeked through the tall grass and saw the pond only a few feet away. Then came my newest dilemma.  My assailant had stopped firing for the moment, but there was no doubt in my mind that his rifle was aimed in my general direction and his finger, was, no doubt, again poised to fire off another round.

I had two choices, neither of which I liked very much. I could stay low and wait him out, hoping that he approached, and I could possibly fire through the grass and take him out. The fear told me that was the best way to go, but my somewhat intelligent voice told me that he’d probably just start firing in a deliberate manner in my direction, much like someone mowing the grass, and eventually mow
me
in half. He hadn’t shown a lot of smarts up to now, but it didn’t take an Einstein to know that he had a distinct advantage at a distance. 

My other choice was to pop-up in hopes I got the drop on him and take him out. That fearful little voice in the back of my head didn’t like that option, but I told it to shut the hell up. 

The once frightened birds returned to the trees around the meadow and started singing their happy little songs, but I could have been wrong about that. The songs may have been, “Who the hell is shooting up our peaceful little forest,” for all I knew.

I inched my body into a position to spring up and fire, feeling my already overtaxed muscles protesting, but I ignored them. I thought I heard the slightest bristling noise, as if someone was moving slowly through the grass and took that as my cue to pop-up and fire.

That was where things slowed down in my mind. I came up slowly, my left hand pushing me off the ground. I felt the itching from the little blades of grass as they tickled against the side of my face while I made my way up through the tall grass. My view brightened as I came up and the air was dry and sweet.  Nothing about the surroundings spoke of death.

I crested out of the grass and spotted my attacker. He had taken the middle ground in the realm of decisions and cut the distance between us down to twenty-five feet. The barrel of his rifle was aimed at where I had been and not where I was, near the edge of the pond, but it would be a millisecond before he snapped it toward me. 

Just as I started to bring up my gun, something snagged my wrist and stopped it dead. I took the quickest of peeks down and saw my hand tangled in a thick vine-like rope of grass. I yanked with all I had and then looked to see the barrel of his rifle only five degrees from reaching its target: me.

I wasn’t going to be able to get my gun up in time. In my mind’s eye, I saw his rifle barrel explode with flame as the bullets erupted from its end. I felt the punishing impact of each bullet hit my body and blow out the back, taking muscle and bone with it and painting the tall grass behind me with my blood. I also saw the zombies getting to my friends, and I saw the Lord of the Dead laughing as they tore into them.

All this played out in my little negative theater of the mind in those milliseconds before he fired on me. 

It was my good fortune that my mind only played previews of these ugly little movies, because the feature motion picture was cancelled as bullets tore through my attacker’s chest, sending a spray of blood into the air. His face locked into a grimace and then went slack as he pitched forward into the grass. I looked past the place he had just vacated and shifted my focus to spot Travis standing just at the tree line, leaning against a tree, his rifle still aimed at the place where my attacker had just stood.

Chapter 30

Battle Plans

Russell pulled out his walkie-talkie and spoke into it, “Jo, come in.  Jo, come in.”

He waited two seconds, anxious at every lost tick of the clock. They were to be the last vehicle out and had saved spots for Jo, Brother Ed, and Aaron. 

“This is Jo,” a voice responded.

“It’s time to pull out,” Russell said.

“Okay,” she said.

“Can you get Brother Ed and Aaron?”

“Brother Ed’s already with me. He came down when he ran out of grenades.”

“What about Aaron?” Russell asked.

A new voice came over the walkie-talkie this time. “This is Brother Ed. Aaron won’t come down from the second floor. The smoke is drifting down from the third floor, but he’s refusing.”

Kara stepped up next to Russell and put out a hand for the walkie-talkie. Russell handed it over.

“You need to convince him that he needs to come, and he needs to do it now!” she said as forcefully as she could.

“He’s not budging,” Brother Ed said. “He said with Brandon dead, there’s no use going on. I even tried to pull him from the room, but he threatened to shoot me.”

Kara looked to Russell, but he just shrugged. “Then, you need to get here fast. The back field is starting to fill with zombies.”

“We’re on our way,” Brother Ed said.

Travis dropped his aim and waved at me almost sheepishly. I expelled a huge sigh of relief and then ripped my hand free of the grass it had been tangled in. Travis came out of the tree line and moved toward me cautiously, looking side-to-side, his rifle at the ready.

“Thanks,” I shouted. 

“That guy has been chasing me for the last ten minutes or so, but then he must have seen you and changed his direction,” Travis said as he walked up to me. “I decided to follow him.”

“Well, I’m glad you did,” I said.  “Listen, we don’t have to time to talk.” I reached down into my pack, plucked out two grenades, and handed them over to Travis. “We need to get going.”

I retrieved the RPG and the pack of warheads.

“Where are we going?” Travis asked. 

“Here’s the deal,” I said.  “We need to take out those buses and the trucks. They have transmitters that allow the zombies to be controlled.”

“But if we take the transmitters out, that still leaves us with the zombies,” he said.

“Yeah, there’s that, but at least they won’t be on
his
side.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Russell’s Lord of the Dead. He and his henchmen, like the guy you just killed, are controlling the zombies.  Come on.”

We weaved in and out of the trees, making decent progress, but it didn’t seem fast enough. I knew there was a battle going on, and this little diversion had cost valuable time. The sound of gunfire carried across the field, but there were only a few shots.  That didn’t bode well for our friends back at The Manor, but I couldn’t deal with that.  My only hope was that they had escaped.

“What have you seen out here that I need to know about?” I asked.

“There are the two buses and three semi-trailers,” he said.  

“Three?”

“Yes, three, plus a dump truck with a trailer on the back.”

“That had to be for pulling the bulldozer,” I said.

I took a mental inventory of what we had on hand, and it didn’t seem to be enough.

“I have three warheads for the RPG, and you have only these grenades. How the hell are we supposed to know if we take out all their transmitters?” The question was mostly rhetorical. 

“We’ll do what we can,” he said, “Dad always said,
Pray about it
.”

“We’ll give that a try once we run out of weapons,” I said.

He frowned at me.

There was no more time to plan, only action. We approached the field at a slow jog, and I could see glimpses of zombies trudging toward our complex. When I looked westward, I saw all the vehicles sitting just over the ridge. The semi-trailers were in neat rows, facing away from the field, with the trucks’ ends pointed toward the field. Our attackers must have unloaded their undead cargo from those. These trucks were closer to the west woods than the other vehicles. The buses sat at a perpendicular angle to the ridge, leaving their sides open and exposed. One was sitting closer to the top of the ridge than the others. 

“Let’s switch,” I said, “you take the RPG launcher, and I’ll take the grenades.”

“No way,” he said, “you couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn.”

“I used to play baseball, you know,” I said.

“Did you ever start a game?” he asked and eyed me with a sideways glance. 

“Listen, the grenades require getting up close and personal. I’m the one that should do that.”

“And I’m the one with the better arm,
and
I have the grenades,” he said.

There really was no time to argue.

“Is there a better way to approach to them?” I asked.

“I think so,” he said as he took a long look at the ridge, “you can come in from the north, and I’ll make an arc to come at them from behind. I’ll need a little more time to get in position, but don’t wait on me if you can’t.”

“Let me know when you’re in position. Double click your walkie if you need to talk to me, and I’ll do the same.  Once you’re there, I’ll cover your approach if I can.”

“Okay,” was all he said, and then he jogged away along the tree line and away from me.  In a movie, we would have done a man-hug, a fist-pump, or something, but this was a real life movie at real time, and there was no time for any sentimentality.  Besides, I wasn’t in a sentimental mode. I was getting ready to kill some people.