Apocalypse Atlanta (29 page)

In the distance, maybe a quarter mile off, was the bridge across which 10th Street went above the interstate.  Just beyond that was a now familiar tangled mass of vehicles, including three semi trucks, that were twisted and overturned across and through a couple dozen smaller vehicles.

In the foreground he saw four humvees in a rough line abreast across the highway.  All of them had their reverse and brake lights lit, and two of the four were spitting fire from machine gun mounts.  There were figures riding in the open doors, or walking backwards between them, figures wearing BDUs, with rifles pressed to their shoulders.  The heavier vehicles that should have been accompanying the unit, trucks at least, were not in evidence.  Just the humvees.

Between the wrecked cars and the National Guard unit was a solid mass of zombies.  Peter couldn’t see how anyone could possibly use any other word to describe them.  It was the only one that fit.  How else would you describe a shuffling, shambling horde of people all staggering forward under the fire raking across them.  Humans, no matter how fevered or delirious or angry, would never take such punishment without shattering into a disorganized and demoralized mass that retreated or at least sought cover.

Not here, not the zombies.  They didn’t even seem to mind the bullets slamming into them.  They ignored all injury, old or new alike, as they pressed inexorably forward.  Most of the fire they were taking was 5.56mm, from the M-16s wielded by the Pappa Guardsmen.  The normally dependable rounds seemed to have almost no effect.  Zombies would flinch from an impact, rocking back under the energy of a hit, but never stopping.

There were two M-2s raking them, and at least those bullets were heavy enough to present something even zombies ‘noticed’.  If having arms and legs blown off, or taking repeated torso hits by the heavy rounds, and being knocked over qualified as something that needed to be ‘noticed’.

Peter wasn’t entirely sure it did; the zombies almost immediately started trying to get up after ‘noticing’ it.  The bullets and the subsequent damage they caused seemed to be nothing more than a minor irritant to the zombie horde.  He couldn’t even tell if they were bleeding; there sure weren’t the sprays of blood he knew would be present if a human mob were taking such fire.

Peter heard cursing, turned in automatic response to tell the Guardsmen to focus, then realized it wasn’t just them.  He had unconsciously joined them.  The scene was just that surreal.  He glanced around, expecting to see someone with a camera, but there wasn’t.

‘This is really happening’
a corner of his mind insisted. 
‘Buck the fuck up Marine’
.

“Okay, get ready.” Peter said, catching his headshake and turning it into a slow roll that looked like he was loosening his neck up.  He reached out and tapped the thigh of the Guardsman, well woman really, who had stood up behind the M-2 their humvee mounted.  She dropped into the center of the back bench seat and looked at him.  Her eyes were big and wide.  The flashes of gunfire behind him lit her face oddly.

“When you fire, keep your aim point low and the bursts small.” Peter said loudly, deliberately letting his tone drift into harshness.  She didn’t look like she was too eager, or too ready, to handle what was about to happen.  Peter was hoping a little command authority might snap her back to the task at hand.

“Sarge, they’re people.” she protested, sounding very unhappy.

Peter gave her a long look, considering what to say.  “Just watch your fucking line of fire.” he said after a few moments, abandoning any thought of something uplifting and motivational when he realized he couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound ridiculous.  “Last thing you want is to put rounds through a friendly.  Understand?”

She opened her mouth, hesitated, then nodded twice with short choppy movements.  She didn’t say anything further.  Peter gave her a brisk nod back, and she stood back up to man the mount.  He eyed the other two soldiers in the back but they didn’t look as disturbed as Vorees.

Facing forward, he saw they were nearly to the besieged Guard unit.  Glancing in the side mirror, he saw the distinctive headlights of the five ton trucks with them were swinging off to the side of the interstate, along with the ARV.  He grunted in approval; it got the bigger vehicles out of the way for the humvees to back up as they engaged, plus let the troops riding the trucks dismount and add their fire to the effort.

Bracing against the dashboard, Peter gripped his AR-15 tightly as the driver braked sharply about twenty feet behind the line of Pappa David vehicles.  Their humvee was slotted in between two of the others in front of him, Peter was pleased to see.  It was a good sign the driver knew to do that without having to be told.  But Peter turned and grabbed the man’s shoulder as the humvee came to a stop.

“When you back up, you fucking go easy or you’re gonna spill us out.”

“Got it sarge.” the Guardsman said quickly, glancing briefly at him before looking back forward with the aura of someone watching a gigantic wreck unfolding in slow motion; eager to not miss a single detail but afraid to watch.

Peter cranked the volume on the vehicle’s radio to near max, then opened the passenger door and put his right boot on the running board, pressing himself back against the door frame with his left.  He settled the AR-15 firmly in his hands, tight against the sling and his shoulder for good control.

He peered through the optical sight on his weapon at the approaching zombie horde.  He tried, he really tried, to just view the entire mass as one big target.  But, inevitably, his eye drifted to individual people in the crowd.  Zombies, he kept telling himself they were just zombies.  But as he adjusted his aim, his eye fell upon one woman who was the right age to be a typical college student.

Her Georgia Tech t-shirt was bloody and ripped, hanging off her by one shoulder and revealing a lot of skin.  If it weren’t for the blood it almost looked like the shirt was supposed to be worn that way.  She had been pretty, he noted almost immediately, as he took in the blonde hair and attractive features.

But now the eyes were fixed and hollow, her features slack and lifeless, skin pale higher up but mottled and bruised lower down.  And she was covered in a lot of blood.  She staggered forward with the other zombies, and as he watched she ignored a bullet impact high up on her left shoulder.  The wound did not bleed, merely opened up a hole that would have any normal person down on the ground screaming in pain.  She just kept pressing forward.

“Bravo Mary elements, be prepared to check your fire.” Captain Foreman said on the radio.  He was shouting, clearly trying to make sure he was heard by everyone despite the gunfire.  “Papa David will be maneuvering back to reload and grab a quick breath.”
Which would normally mean, Peter knew, they were going to let their weapons cool for a few moments.  Now, however . . . Peter didn’t begrudge the soldiers a minute to try and collect themselves.  This was an insane situation no one could have been fully prepared to deal with.

The humvees in front of them began backing up, some of them jerking a little as the drivers hit the gas too abruptly.  They all settled down before they became a hazard however, sliding in reverse past the newly arrived vehicles.  Behind, well in front of them really but headed in the same direction, came the dismounted Guardsmen.  They were turning and running to fall back from the encroaching zombies.  Those whose faces Peter could see clearly had no interest in being left alone in front.

Peter blinked and realized his aim had drifted away from the Georgia Tech student.  Swallowing, he deliberately didn’t try to find her again, and kept his gaze as unfocused as he could let it get and still be sure of where his rounds would go.  He didn’t need to see any actual details, didn’t want to see such things.  The mass was so big almost anything he fired would hit.

The last of the Papa vehicles and men made it past Peter’s unit, and the radio crackled again.  “Bravo, open fire.”  Peter flicked his selector switch to semi auto and squeezed the trigger.  The rifle rocked him slightly, surging back against his shoulder, but he controlled it with the ease of decades of practice.

Still refusing to pay attention to what he was aiming at, beyond ensuring his sights were on the shambling expanse of flesh that was slowly encroaching toward him, he had his second round on the way a second after the first, then the third.  The pattern of steady aimed fire, as aimed as he could make it without looking too closely anyway, was a trained instinct that he fell right into immediately.

He was waiting for it, expecting it without really knowing that he was, but he still flinched a little when the Browning opened up less than a foot from him.  The machine gun fired fifty caliber rounds that were capable of penetrating the engine block of most vehicles in the world.  Part of that was their size and weight, and the rest was the muzzle velocity they fired at.  Bottom line, the damn thing was loud when it went off.

Especially when you were next to it.  Now, as the Guardswoman manning it sent a long burst forward, the light and noise so close to him were enough to make him flinch involuntarily.  Vorees was sweeping the weapon from left to right in a tight arc about as wide as the humvee.  As Peter kept squeezing off shots of his own, he saw the heavy fifty caliber rounds ripping through the zombies in twos and threes.  The noise was incredible, and he kicked himself for not putting in his earplugs.

Peter had spent some time over the years researching the history of the Corps, somewhat out of a sense of duty and esprit de corps, but also out of interest and even curiosity.  A good part of that research had covered World War II and the often overlooked and incredibly bloody campaign the Corps had fought from island to island across the Pacific Ocean after Pearl Harbor.

During that war, repeatedly, the Japanese defenders of those islands had launched wave attacks into fixed positions covered by crew served weapons.  Some of those attacks had even succeeded, the enemy soldiers soaking up the fire of sometimes multiple machine guns that raked them with belt fed rounds until enough of their surviving brethren could overrun the positions.

When Peter had read such accounts, and then when he’d seen a Hollywood reenactment of some similar battle or another, he had marveled at the courage, and been thankful modern combatants had learned to not do stupid shit like that.  But the zombies were beyond anything that could reasonably be called smart, and showed signs of neither tactics nor self preservation.  They simply walked right into the fire of dozens of rifles, which was bad enough, but also the mounted machine guns.

As bad as that was, the worst part was that not all of them were even falling when hit, even when hit by one of the Brownings.  Getting hit was only a problem for one of the zombies if it fell, or was knocked, over.  Wounding seemed to be a non-issue, except where the wound involved a limb being lost.

In those cases, the zombies that were unable to stand because of having lost a leg or more rarely seeming to be unable to regain their feet without the use of an arm to prop themselves up while they rose merely began crawling.  Without a sound, without crying or panting or anything; they just walked and crawled forward steadily.  Hardly without pause.  They didn’t even seem to notice, or care, if other zombies walked on or tripped over them.

Lack of blood or not, the scene was beyond his worst nightmares.  None of his extensive prior combat experience had really prepared him for the sight of a shuffling mass of civilians that walked determinedly, unhurriedly, into such a hail of gunfire and didn’t seem to mind beyond the inconvenience of being knocked over or losing the use of a limb.  They weren’t even flinching, not even blinking, as the fire raked them over.

He started focusing on the horde again, involuntarily, as he struggled to come to grips with what he was seeing, as if his mind demanded confirmation that his decision to remain visually detached couldn’t provide.  When he started looking properly, what he saw was sickening.

There were people with gaping holes in their chests that were getting up and continuing forward, holes that you could see through, that had ribs and organs showing or spilling out of.  He saw arms blown off, and beyond a twisting from the impact, the person – the zombie – continued approaching.  And still, the entire time, without a sound, without a single cry of complaint or scream of pain.

It was unreal, and Peter realized the fire was slackening.  His left ear wasn’t cringing under a vicious assault of heavy rounds firing off nearly next to his head at about two a second.  Then he realized, to his shame, his own weapon was half lowered.  He covered by hitting the magazine release to let the mostly empty magazine drop out of the AR-15, fumbling at his ammunition pouch for a fresh one as he turned his head to the gunner on his left.

“Your orders are to fire that weapon!” he barked sharply.

Vorees looked at him, and now he saw she was in shock.  He grimaced as he got the new magazine seated with a click that was felt rather than heard, then reached over the roof of the humvee and grabbed her arm.

“Goddamnit, your buddies are here!  They need you.  Now fire that weapon!” he shouted.

“Sarge . . .” she stammered, and her eyes flicked past him to the zombies.

“Now!  I don’t care if you have to close your eyes to do it.  Just keep it level and in line with the vehicle and fire until we leapfrog back.”

She visibly swallowed, and flinched as he jerked the charging handle on his weapon.  Then, and Peter couldn’t believe she actually did it, she closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger, sort of waving the mount back and forth across about five inches of traverse.  He decided that was fine for the moment, and turned back forward, bringing his weapon back to his shoulder and resuming his own fire.