LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (55 page)

She grabbed her rifle and shoved the door open against the closest creature, sending it back and off the edge and giving her room to maneuver her gun.

She took out three more in quick succession, sending them cartwheeling back off the machine and to the ground. The fifth came around from where it had been slamming its stupid face against the glass of the opposite side of the cab, and she fired two rounds into its bloodied maw. It collapsed on the back of the vehicle like a bag of dead cats.

The first creature that she had sent sprawling to the ground was rising clumsily, trying to gain its footing in the mess of entrails and blood that the grinding attachment had left behind. She pulled the rifle to her shoulder and squeezed off a single round, taking it in the nose and sending it to the ground for good.

Her noise had gotten the attention of the group at the mill and the group outside the fence, and both collections were now focusing on her. It was expected. She glanced at the sheet again and shook her head.

“No way. Not gonna do it,” she muttered, and jumped down carefully, dodging the thicker pools of viscera and making her way to the front of the Grinder, where the chain was attached to a manually operated winch.
 

Releasing enough slack in the line that she could pull it to the ground in front of her, she removed a huge metal spike and a thick, heavy iron mallet from where they were duct taped to the front of the Grinder. She glanced at the crowd milling at the gate, trying to squeeze one creature in at a time through the narrow gap.
 

The gate bulged slightly with the increased slack, but she moved quickly, putting the thick spike through a link in the chain and driving it deeply into the rocky soil until all four feet were buried in the ground. She gave it an experimental tug and nodded in satisfaction. Then she hit the release on the winch, allowing the rest of the chain to drop to the ground and freeing her lovely chariot for more clean-up work near the mill.
 

The group from the top of the hill were streaming down now in droves, almost half of the small herd coming toward the new fresh meat. She was the most vulnerable they’d come across in the last few weeks, and they were so very hungry.
 

But vulnerability could be an illusion. These assholes were going to have to wait.

She hopped up again, kicking the corpses from the side of the machine as she did so, regaining the cab of her Grinder, and turning the huge machine toward the mill, the long boom arm of death rotating slowly toward the approaching zeds.
 

The herd was paying attention to her now in force, peeling away from the wall and doors, where the power of their concerted efforts were making dents in the metal sheeting.

Yanking hard on the control levers, she brought the mulching attachment up and around, like a wrecking ball through a field of lollipops. She felt the satisfying crunch and watched the soft tissue and flesh of the front ranks disappear. Behind the initial wave, hundreds still pressed against the building, but they were thinning as more gravitated toward what they imagined to be an easier meal.

There were at least a hundred of the creatures now virtually within reach and she slowed the huge machine to a stop and let them come to her. She realized if she got too close, she would defeat the purpose of drawing them off.

As the next cohort approached, she swung the arm again, enjoying watching the ponderous, heavy head of the attachment swing across her view, spraying blood and brain across the driveway. Grunting as a head flew from a spindly little body and slammed into her windshield, she absently turned on the windshield wipers to remove the smear of thick, black blood.

“Better to be the windshield than the bug, I guess,” she muttered, bringing the attachment around to her left and picking off three more creatures that had flanked the machine.
 

To her right, at least a dozen were shambling in, angling for her other side. She stayed with the momentum of the weapon and traversed the rest of the range until she had circled through, taking the group from the right and plowing the mulcher through the heads and torsos of ten more. Because they refused to line up nicely, several slipped through that barrage and made it to the treads of the Grinder before several single shots from Ethan’s position above collapsed the bodies against the metal hull of the machine. She waved once in thanks and focused on the group still coming hard from the front.

In five minutes of steadily moving the attachment from left to right and back again, she had created a pile of bloody stumps and detached arms, legs, torsos and liquefied heads. Bone chunks lay everywhere, and the driveway ran inches deep in blood and viscera. To her left, a femur had actually been driven into the soft dirt, the hip bone clear and white in the faint, ash-clouded sun.

Kate grimaced as she worked, barely keeping down the vomit that perennially threatened to overtake her dry mouth. Her hands, though, were steady and calm.

More than two hundred of the fearless, mindless creatures had met their second death at the end of her machine. And this death, unlike their first ones, was definitely sticking.

It was as she was finally adjusting her position, putting the Grinder into reverse to buy herself a little more distance from the pile of body parts and gore that sat within her mulching arm’s reach, that the first bullet pinged off the metal hide outside.

“Hey, watch it,” she muttered, looking at Ethan, who was gesturing wildly from his elevated perch, pointing behind Kate toward the road. Another shot hit the back of the machine and she ducked instinctively, turning in the directly Ethan was motioning.

“Oh, fucking hell,” Kate said, a jolt of fear and anger surging through her body. Through the blood-spattered rear window of her cab, she could clearly make out the arrival of the Rhino, its huge plow attachment covered in gore and chunks of clothing. Behind it, the two Hummers had fanned out to either side and the fifty cals were even now training themselves on the last of the undead outside the gate.

Starr had returned.

Kate slammed her fist against the controls in front of her, and brought the Grinder back up against the straggling first rank of the approaching dead. Rhi and Ethan in their elevated positions had taken cover, moving down and away from where the larger guns of Starr’s force could find them. Behind her, she heard the fifty cals start firing, and she knew they were turning the last fifty of those creatures into bloody mulch.

Then they’d take the gates, then they’d be inside.

Kate cursed her luck and her damnable, no good, rotten timing, that she had to be in that place at that time, to meet with that group, to travel with them, to reveal herself.
 

She worked the controls furiously, her mind whirling in anger and frustration, knowing that Starr’s return would slow her down even more. That she was again being delayed from her daughter by this maniac. That she was again being separated from those she loved by those she hated.

Her hands started to tremble on the controls and she forced back a tear.

Her little girl. The little girl that had laughed so loudly when her belly was raspberried. The little girl that used to fall asleep with strands of Kate’s hair in her hand. The little girl who so loved to play with animals, and who reveled in the sound of country music.

She was alone and she was without her mother. The thought that she was dead or … worse … didn’t enter her consciousness. All she knew was that she was here, and Liz was there, and she had to act. She couldn’t be confined again.
 

Suddenly, Starr wasn’t just some existential threat. Suddenly, the children inside this mill weren’t just refugees trying to find a new world, a new life somewhere safe.
 

Starr was an evil that needed to be removed. She was standing between Kate and her daughter. And she was threatening children just like Liz—children that had to be protected.

An explosion echoed across the lawn as the front gates parted in a twisting of metal and fire. The chain holding them shut snapped and recoiled, clattering uselessly on the ground as Starr’s vehicles revved their engines and moved forward. The zombies in front of her turned around at the sound and the movement, at it captured their attention long enough for her to slam the mulching attachment hard to the left, locking it in place in a slow counterclockwise circle, and jump up. Her rifle in one hand, the long blade of a machete in the other.

Starr was not to be endured. No longer. It ended now.

With that, as the mulching attachment began whirling in a circle through the surrounding undead, she flew to the door, and out of the cab.

It was time to end this.

Have you ever noticed that it always takes you, like, half the time to return home than it felt like it took to get where you were going—particularly if you didn’t know where you were going?
 

Like you expect it to take thirty minutes, and it does, but it
feels
like longer? And then going home, you think it will feel the same, but it doesn’t? It feels shorter?
 

Both trips are 30 minutes, but one felt so much longer because you didn’t know where you were going?

Yeah, well, that didn’t apply here.
 

It felt like I had been on my way home for a long, long goddamned time.
 

No, this was more like one of those dreams where you really, really wanted to haul ass, but your legs felt like they were covered in jelly. Your heart is pounding, your eyes wild, but your brain can’t send signals fast enough and your legs are just a couple of unresponsive sticks.
 

That’s what it was like as I navigated through the undead, hoping not to have my secret identity revealed.

After making my way away from the herd, I started to tack slowly back toward the mill, taking the slow way through the woods at a glacial shuffle. Although the herd had thinned, even deep into the forest there were still multiple stragglers. And I knew that if one figured me out—by sight, or scent or movement—that would be it. The sheer volume out here would be enough to end my little jaunt permanently.

Thankfully, the land was flat and the forest fairly thin and clear. No thick underbrush, and even a random criss-cross of different small access and cabin roads that I passed over. Once, I fell hard into a ditch. But apparently that was par for the zombie course, as my friends around me didn’t flinch. I didn’t have to fake the clumsiness of my ultimate recovery, as the pain from my nose was still slightly blurring my vision.

Squinting into the sun, I finally reached the main road that led to the mill. I had taken the hypotenuse of the triangle, cutting through the large forest to the south of the mill, and coming out close to where I had begun. But it was still another mile or so to the front gate.

In the distance, the angry volcanoes continued their barrage of fire and brimstone, and the ash plume thickened suddenly as some unknown terrestrial force stirred beneath the surface of the planet. Ash, previously clouding the atmosphere above, was again beginning to fall on the ground like a thin coating of snow.

The highway was laid out ahead, sparsely populated in this section with cars. Only a few lay crookedly parked or crash along the route.

It was a random intuition that saved me, as I began walking up the road toward the mill.
 

An urge to remain hidden among the trees that lined the right side of the highway. A memory of Starr’s last MacArthur-esque promise to return.
 

I entered the thin cover and began to jog through the trees, careful not to twist an ankle as I leapt over roots and bushes. Then I heard it.
 

The scrape of metal hitting concrete and the revving of large engines. It would have been too late had I been on the highway, but here I was between two large evergreens and I dove to the ground, wrinkling my nose at my canvas blood-spattered garb.
 

The large bus machine—Kate had called it a Rhino—moved past, its plow attachment pushing aside the straggling remnants of the herd; behind it, both humvees with gunners in each turret followed. A line of trucks and SUVs brought up the rear, each with at least one gunner visible.
 

It didn’t take a soldier to realize: they were in attack formation.
 

And they were on their way back to the mill.

To Kate.

As the last vehicle passed, I shrugged out of the disgusting sheet I had relied on for stealth among the undead and flew through the woods. A mile had never seemed so far.

***

Leaping carefully from the rear of the Grinder, Kate watched as the herd—their attention split now between her, the mill, and the front gate—milled confusedly.
 

She picked her route and tensed, waiting for the next pass of the mulching attachment, which was locked in a circular pattern, simply orbiting the parked vehicle. Its unearthly destructive whine was louder here, and at the last minute, as she saw a dozen creatures come barreling toward her exposed position, she remembered to cover up.
 

The grinding, sawing head blasted into the group, taking them at shoulder level. Some, it hit directly. Others, it dealt glancing—but no less mortal and destructive—blows.
 

Regardless, as it crashed through, she pounced, now covered in remnants of blood and viscera as it sprayed out from the machine’s teeth.
 

Several creatures were still standing, arms torn off at the elbows or chests gouged deeply. She didn’t even pause. Her rifle bouncing where she had secured it in a single point harness on her chest, she instead pressed her lips together and swung her machete, taking heads off at a full run.
 

She barely felt the vibration in her arm as she bolted forward, toward Starr’s approaching convoy.