Payload (21 page)

Brick’s shouting caught his attention; after smashing one more head he scampered up the rungs, hopping down onto the gravel as the Pole shoved the ladder away.

When he saw Dyson hop off the ladder Marv thumped the cab of the truck three times, hard, and heard the truck go into first gear.

They had brought aboard a young woman in her twenties carrying a girl around four and trailed by a boy around eight who was white-faced and staring, but not crying, although the hands holding his BB gun were bloodless from his grip, plus three adults. The latter were a heavyset black woman with a cloth shopping bag filled with what looked like statues, a black man her age holding a revolver and a ball cap, and a long lean white man of senior years in faded bib overalls and a tee shirt gone yellow with age, a red MACK gimme cap on his head. All five seemed stunned, moving like robots, eyes wide and staring. Dyson wondered how long they had been trapped in the cellar, and flinched at the thought.

“Stay in the middle so we can fight,” Marv bellowed to be heard over the shooting, gesturing downwards. The five woodenly huddled together.

The truck gave a double lurch and then they were in the street, rolling south, the main drag straight ahead. Zombies, attracted by gunfire and the engine were spilling out of the buildings and alleys ahead, but Marv was fine with that: they weren’t going to stop this truck.

Dyson grabbed his arm and pointed. “Air support!”

Turning, he saw a white helicopter with a blue horizontal stripe and a company logo closing on them, the left cargo door removed and a man cradling a belt-fed machinegun sitting in the open hatch. Marv thought the weapon was an M240, but he couldn’t be sure. The gunner was wearing an OD flight suit, but the Ranger doubted he was with the government. Stepping through the rescues, he grabbed Bear and pointed out the chopper. “Watch ‘em,” He yelled over the truck’s noise.

Bear had just gotten a look at the helicopter when the gunner opened fire, the tracers flashing down into the roadway and then the truck.

He heard Marv bellow to return fire as he got the hovering craft in his sights and opened fire, the AK recoiling easily into his shoulder. Around him everyone else opened up, firing for all they were worth, sparks flying from the white fuselage as rounds impacted.

In the course of his low-grade criminal career Bear had fought a lot of men, and cut one in self-defense, but he had never seriously attempted to take an (uninfected) human being’s life-he hadn’t even hunted, although one time he had shot a pit bull. But he found himself trying his absolute best to hit that gunner or the pilot and feeling no qualm at all. Being shot at, he discovered, cleared away a lot of moral inhibitions.

Gravel sprayed upward and incoming fire struck sprays of sparks off the sides of the dump bed, and someone was howling like a wolf behind him, but the biker kept his attention squarely on the sights and the helicopter.

After what seemed an eternity, but which must have been just a few seconds, his bolt locked back, indicating that his weapon was empty, and the helicopter swung away and accelerated rapidly, the gunner handing in his harness, possibly injured. Bear kept his eyes on it as he stuffed the empty magazine into his jacket and latched a full one in place.

As he released the bolt he realized the truck was slowing.

Marv released the M-4’s bolt on a fresh magazine and climbed onto the forward lip of the dump bed. “One, are you OK?”

The CB carried the shaken tone perfectly. “Six, yeah, I’m OK, but the truck isn’t.”

Standing, the Ranger could see that a perfectly straight row of bullet holes marched across the hood, each surrounded by a bright circle of bare metal dimpling inwards, and that    dark dots were popping out of the center two holes. “One, we’re losing oil. Just keep going until it seizes. Break, Six to Two, come in.”

“Two to Six, go ahead.”

“Two, proceed to Delta, I say again Delta. We’ve lost the truck.”

“I read Delta, Six.”

“All units, skip blue, I say again, skip blue.” Marv twisted the channel knob, and hopped back onto the gravel. One of the refugees was hit, but he couldn’t see who, just that both kids were unhurt.

They were lumbering across the main drag at about twenty miles an hour with a growing mob trailing them and even more entering the street ahead of them.

“We’re not going to clear the town,” he yelled over the howling and the laboring engine. “We’ll have to fight our way clear. When the truck dies we’ll hold here as long as we can, then go over the hood and fight our way out.” His men, his fellow Gnomes he mentally amended, were white-faced but still game.

He tossed the first aid kit, its pristine white plastic box looking surreal in their dirty environment, to the nearest civilian before turning to his position and shouldering the M-4.

The engine seized two blocks south of the main drag and they rolled to a stop; Chip cursed and kicked the firewall, but the truck wasn’t moving another foot. Cutting the ignition, he set the handbrake and lifted his cut-down to the windshield, having donned a pair of earmuff hearing protectors and safety goggles he had found in the cab. Covering his face with his other hand, he squeezed the trigger. The shot was like a bomb going off in the cab, and two-thirds of the windshield instantly became an opaque crystal sheet. Working the pump, he put the muzzle near the least damaged portion and fired again.

The windshield was transformed into a shower of tiny glass cubes and Chip found himself looking at a zombie struggling to climb the front bumper, a black man wearing a White Mound uniform shirt. Working the pump, he shot him square in the face, and then released his seatbelt. Discarding the ear muffs, he watched the zombies lurching down the street towards the truck and sighed. “Dude, this just isn’t my day.”

The Remington riot gun was awkward in the confines of the cab, but he got it up onto the dash and then, after taking a deep breath, heaved himself over the gear sift and into the passenger seat. Using the muffs he raked the remaining bits of safety glass from the windshield frame, and then shouldered the riot gun. “Dude, I’m from
Texas
,” he told the zombies gathering at the front bumper. “The Alamo is a
good
thing to us.”

Marv had fired two magazines at the zombies in the initial confrontation, one full magazine at the helicopter, and another at the zeds as they lurched south. As Chip had predicted the zombies couldn’t get into the truck, but that didn’t deter them in the slightest, nor had the two magazines he had fired into them since the engine seized. Loading his last magazine, he took stock: Addison was to his left, calmly firing his Mac-10. Brick faced the rear, firing his sidearm, while across the way Bear was firing his Mossberg while Dyson was drawing his Python from his shoulder holster.

Forcing himself to breathe deeply and think, Marv struggled to lift himself out of the immediate fight and look at the entire tactical picture. The zombies couldn’t get into the truck except over the hood, and Chip had that avenue closed despite using a pump-action shotgun, but their ammunition was finite, and zombies were still gimping up on all sides. With most of the long guns running out of ammunition, the number of zombies reaching the truck was soon going to exceed the number killed-in short, they were in a losing position.

“One, can you get onto the hood?”

“Yeah, if you cover.”

“Go.” Marv stepped up onto the top of the dump bed and began dropping zombies from the crowd in front of the truck. After shooting five he turned. “Brick, come up here!” He had to yell it four times before the Pole heard him over the shooting and joined him. “We’re getting ready to go-get on top of the cab and clear the street.”

When Chip had managed to squirm out onto the hood Marv hopped back down, going from Gnome to Gnome. “There’s too many-we’re going over the hood, get ready, and stick together.” He was gratified that none argued.

Kneeling by the woman with the kids, Mary Beth he hoped, he saw that the blood had been from overalls, who was now never going to feel pain again. “Get ready-we’re going over the hood and making a run for it-there’s too many coming to stay here.”

The woman nodded, bloody hands gripping the first aid kit.

Brick was firing Chip’s Glock, and between him and the husky Gnome they had drastically thinned the crowd. Marv joined in as Dyson scrambled up onto the cab and turned to hand up the kids. Brick and Marv moved down onto the sagging hood to make room, the Ranger swinging his empty M-4 onto his back and drawing his Colt.

He burned through two magazines, and leaned close to Chip as he reloaded, the pale-faced Gnome shoving shells into his hot Remington. “You stick with Mary Beth and her kids, make sure they keep up.”

“OK.” Chip looked over his shoulder, and saw that the black woman was climbing up onto the cab, apparently having abandoned her sacks.

Marv fired off two more magazines and holstered his Colt with the last magazine loaded; it was easy shooting at this range, fourteen zombies down in ten seconds or so, but he, Addison, and Chip were the only ones still shooting. Settling his shield into place, he pulled a road flare and ignited it. The zombies at the front bumper lurched backwards as he advancing, waving the burning flare like a lineman flagging a train.

Hopping down on top of corpses, he waited until Brick, shield and flare in hand, came down next to him. Chip and Addison were still firing, and someone tossed a couple lit flares to either side, but the zombies were less inhibited by flares on the ground, and they had little effect.

Then Dyson was with them, hammer in hand, and Bear joined a moment later. The black couple followed, and then Addison jumped down, Marv and Brick moving forward with each new arrival. Mary Beth hopped down, her daughter on her back, and helped her son down. The boy had lost his BB gun somewhere, but was still game.

Chip slid down, fired his cut-down shotgun twice and dropped it to hang on its sling. “Clear!”

“Let’s go,” Marv stepped forward and tossed the flare at a zombie, catching up his hammer. “Stick together, keep close.”

The shield helped immensely, he quickly found. If the zombies had grabbed at the shield itself it could have been ugly, but they were fixated on getting to grips with a human so it was easy to bat their clumsy efforts aside, opening them to a skull-breaching stroke from the hammer.

Once free of the carpet of the bodies in front of the truck Marv found they could maintain a normal walking pace, and as long as they did only the longer-infected and slightly faster zombies among those behind them could catch up. That still left those coming from the front and forward sides, but the Ranger was grateful for whatever advantages they could manage.

This must have been how the Romans felt, Marv guessed, when they were hacking their way through a horde of barbarians. Melee combat was tough, even though Brick had done excellent work on the hammers and shields, and he was sweating freely in the humid air after just a few kills, and gasping for air as they crossed onto the gravel of a county road roughly a city block from the truck.

Chip couldn’t believe he was cracking zombie skulls with a war hammer and using a shield like a crusading knight, but here he was. He should be paralyzed with fear and getting torn apart, but he had seen the little girl with her face buried between her mother’s shoulder blades, and something had reared up inside him. Something
strong
. All that was between that kid and horrible death was Chip Wilson, gamer slacker from Houston, and that was going to be enough if he had anything to say about it. Hundreds of hours of Skyrim, Fallout, and Far Cry on his Xbox hadn’t made him anything but fat and entertained, but today, on the street of this pissant Mississippi town, he was going to be a freakin’
hero
or die trying.

For the first time, Bear was grateful that the flu killed the young and infirm. Using the hammer was bad enough, even on zombies who collapsed without a noise when you hit them, but at least he wasn’t having to swing at kids. He was going to have nightmares about this for the rest of his life, but at least they weren’t kids. Former kids. Any sort of kids.

Brick punched the top spike of his hammer through the forehead of a fat woman in a Post Office uniform and moved forward a step, careful to stay on line with Marv. He was worried about Chip but could not afford the time to turn and check on him. His moving partner was a good boy, a little immature, but honest and willing. The Pole had not managed to make many friends since coming to America, but he counted Chip as one, and valued him. This fight would be good for Chip provided he survived-he needed some toughening up. Brick knew about tough; Poland after the Soviet filth had withdrawn had been a tough place and coming to America had been tough, but when things got tough, you got tougher. He slammed the chisel-spike into another skull and took another step forward.

Marv smashed another zombie down and staggered forward, looking for another foe. To his side he saw Brick looking about in a dazed manner, and it dawned on him that they had broken through. Hooking his hammer with his left thumb he pulled out his water bottle and held the cap in his teeth, rotating the bottle to unscrew it. Gulping the contents between deep gasping breaths, he discarded the empty container and gestured up the road.

“Keep going,” he gasped to Mary Beth and the black couple. “Help coming. Keep moving.”