Books of the Dead (Book 3): Dead Man's Land (17 page)

“This isn’t going to work,” I said.  “There’s too many of them. Even if they trip and we take them out one at a time, there are just way too many of them. Once they get past these cables, we’ll be swarmed.”

“What do we do then?” he asked.

“Pull back inside, and try to hold them off,” I said as I watched the two closest zombies regain their feet. “If we can’t, then we will have to run.”

“Fuck that,” he said.

“If all of them get through the fence and we can’t find a way to stop them, it might come to that.”

“Over my dead body.” 

A churning, low mechanical growl came out of the fog, and we both stopped. The growl rolled through the fog, long and menacingly deep, getting closer by the second.  
              “What the hell is that?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“What?”

“It sounds like a tank.”

“Oh, shit.”

The growl got louder. Brandon brought up his rifle and sent a spray of bullets into the faces of the dynamic dead duo headed our way. Most of the bullets bounced ineffectually off the armor, but with the amount of shots he fired and with just the simple law of averages, a couple would have to find a soft spot and did. The undead pair fell backwards, but as in the past, ten more zombies took their place. Even more unsettling, the growling mechanical sound grew ominously louder.

We waited in breathless anticipation for about five more seconds, when a dark shape appeared in the fog, rattling our way. It gradually took form and looked like a large, dark rectangle rumbling our way. It broke out of the fog, and while it wasn’t a tank, it didn’t ease my fear all that much.

Eighty thousand pounds of bulldozer steamed down the gently sloping hill toward the fence. Trailing behind this behemoth was a line of obedient zombies. It was as if they were ready to get that first place in at the free open house of the new all-you-can-eat buffet. The line was so long that it disappeared into the fog.

This was not good.

“Time to pull back,” Brandon said.

Chapter 24
Reversal of Fortune

Rex powered the bulldozer forward, reveling in the immense power of this brute of a machine. It was like a child’s dream come true. Move over Bob the Builder; here comes Rex the Destroyer.

Rex saw the main building through the thinning fog and even spied several of their opponents out in the field between the fence and the building. They were using spears of some sort on the zombies.  He had to nod his head in admiration at their guts, but thought that they were a stupid as hell. There’s no way he’d try to take on these armored beasts in hand-to-hand combat. . 

This grudging admiration wasn’t going to stop him from killing them. If Anthony wanted them gone, Rex saw it as his job to take care of them, and he didn’t plan to be pretty about it.

He pushed the bulldozer to ramming speed and chugged it forward on a collision course for the fence. The rambling pace of the bulldozer seemed a perfect complement to the armored undead soldiers as they followed along in their customary shuffle.  It reminded Rex of his favorite World War II movies.  He was the tank driver, and they were the foot soldiers.

Just for good measure, Rex brought up his AK-47 and sent a spray of bullets at the two retreating men. He knew at his current distance, it was like spraying a garden hose at them, but he thought,
What the hell?
  At least it would keep them on their toes. 

The fence came up fast, so he dropped the rifle and concentrated on the task at hand, which was busting the biggest hole he could in the fence. It was a simple task, and he had the perfect tool for the job.

The bulldozer hit the fence, and speed wasn’t the deciding factor, bulk was.  The fence went down as if it were made of balsa wood, the metal pickets snapping into pieces and spreading across the field like pickup sticks.  Rex kept the bulldozer churning forward for about twenty feet before he brought the beast to a stop.  He knew he could have kept going, but why get his hands too dirty when he had an army to do his work? His fingers danced across his control keypad, and the zombies started to move through the gaping hole in the fence.

Still, he had his individual part to play. Rex reached down and picked up the RPG Anthony had given him and took aim. J
ust about ground level would do
, he thought.  He’d put in a nice opening for the soldiers to stroll through and get acquainted with the ‘
lovely
’ people inside.

He watched the two men running for the building and timed his shot to intercept their path back to safety. They were just about home when he pressed the launch button; the warhead sped away in a flash of streaking light. A second later, the front of the building exploded, sending a plume of smoke into the air. 

Before the smoke could dissipate, Rex found himself caught in a shower of bullets.  He ducked down as the bullets pinged off the tough metal skin of the bulldozer.  He grabbed the controls and brought the shovel up, making it a very effective shield. 

As the people in the building continued to fire on him, Rex smiled as the bullets bounced harmlessly off the shovel. He watched the zombies stream past him and down the driveway, toward the new entrance he had just made in the building with his RPG. The clock was ticking down on the people at the Manor, and they didn’t even know it.

Brandon had a slight lead on me, despite carrying all his weapons and the RPG.  We were just about to the building when a hissing noise came from behind us.  I turned to see when something whizzed past me, and a second later, I was bathed in a field of blinding white. A black wall slammed down on the light, shutting it off completely and utterly.

Then, I saw horses. Lots of horses. All my mind could do was ask, “Where the hell did all these horses comes from?”

It took another few seconds for me to realize that I was no longer in reality, but had been whisked away to one of my all-expenses paid, vision vacations. I could just imagine the advertisement for these visions.  “Tired of that bothersome reality, then why not take a trip to the land of visions where you get to experience cryptic and sometimes frightening things.”  It wasn’t a great sales pitch, but I never had any control of them, including when they came and what they were about.  I’d had bring up a complaint with the program manager someday.  If I survived.

Men were riding the horses. They wore dark uniforms and carried guns. They were stampeding towards me, but I wasn’t really there with them, so I wasn’t concerned. How I knew this, I wasn’t sure, but my perspective had a dream-like quality to it, reminiscent of some of my most vivid visions. 

Then, I tried to guess why God was sending me a vision of horses while we were under attack, but there was no guessing what God was doing, so why try?  It was better just to let the show play out. Tickets were free. 

Then again, it could be that my brain was so jumbled from what had just happened that it was making up its own movie. Why I cast horses in this picture was beyond me, if that were the case.

The men on the horses began firing at something over my shoulder. I turned and saw Indians (Native Americans for the enlightened) firing back from among a small set of teepees.  There weren’t a lot of Indians, but they were defending their people, and I knew they would do whatever they had to do to fend off the attackers. I saw women and children running away from the battle, heading for a grouping of tall pine trees. 

A uniformed horseman cut around the teepees and made a beeline for the women and the children, firing on the retreating Indians. Something in me was horrified, but despite my revulsion, I continued to watch. A male from the tribe broke from the group of defenders and took aim on the lone horseman. He fired, but his shots went wild, and the rider furiously continued on toward the frightened women and children. The tribesman redirected his aim, and the next thing I saw was the horse toppling over, sending the rider in a violent spill. The rider went still. The Indian had shot the horse out from the under him.

The women and children safely continued their run for the woods, but as for the rest of the story, the scene faded away, and I was left with blackness. 

Well, blackness and confusion. That’s standard operating procedure with these visions – show me something horrific and let me figure it out.  I had no idea what the takeaway was from this vision, but God was almost never direct in His communications with me. I had learned to live with this.

The blackness started to ebb away, and I found myself looking up into a slate gray sky as flat as an endless wall.  I was back in reality, and something in me wished I could have stayed with my vision. That nagging something told me that no matter how ghastly my vision was, reality was going to be so much worse.

That reality swept over me whether I wanted it or not, the sheer weight of it nearly bowled me over. The last two things I remembered were a streak of light whizzing past me accompanied by a violent hissing sound. That was followed by an explosion that lifted me off my feet and tossed me in the air like a child’s play thing, carelessly discarded. 

I lost time for a while. For how long, I wasn’t really sure. It was as if someone had just spliced a vital part of my life away. One minute, I was running, and the next I was sitting up with an insistent buzzing in my ears.

I sat there staring blankly at a huge smoking hole in the front of the Manor’s main building, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how it got there. 

No, that hole just wasn’t going to work at all. It was going to be hell to fix, but I knew Travis would figure it out. He was good that way.

My thoughts circled around themselves like this for several seconds, trying to sort out this incongruous picture, until I turned my head slightly and a pair legs appeared in my periphery.  They seemed twisted at an unnatural angle. Making this new picture even more disturbing was the copious amounts of blood covering his pants. 

“Joel!” someone shouted from miles away, but I couldn’t make myself pay attention to it.  My focus was on those damn legs and all that blood. It couldn’t be a good thing. 

“Joel! Get up!” someone yelled, and it was more distinct this time, but my eyes were still drawn to the legs.

A small inner voiced called out to me, “
Don’t look at the legs. Don’t look.
”

But I continued to look, despite that frightened inner voice. I made it worse by shifting my view up the legs and to the torso and head. There wasn’t a lot left of that part of the body.  Something had torn into it and shredded much of it. I saw bits of broken rib bones with muscles exposed in a way that they never were intended to be seen. 

It only took a couple of seconds to realize who the bones belonged to. Brandon had been running with me, back to the main building, and then we weren’t running anymore. I was sitting up, and he wasn’t.

A burst of bullets tore through the air, but the sound was mushy, as if it were being filtered through water. I jerked my head up to see someone sticking most of his body out of a second floor window. It was Aaron, and he was firing over my head at something.  He fired without restraint, and his face was contorted into primal fury. In my current state, he seemed as if he were right there in front of me, but also distant and almost as if he weren’t truly real.

“Joel, you have to get up,” the voice called, and there was real pain in it. 

I turned to the source of the voice and saw Jo standing outside the front door of the main building, beckoning to me with her arm, a plaintive expression on her face. 

“You have to get up, Joel,” she screamed. “They’re coming.”

Whatever was making her this frightened I really didn’t want to know, but my perspective took that moment to skew and warp as if reality had been broken and was now repairing itself right before my eyes. There was a loud whooshing sound in my ears, and it was as if someone had hit my reset button as reality slammed fully down on me like Thor’s mighty hammer.  I was fully present, in the here and now, as some say. There wasn’t a lot of comfort in that, but like it or not, that is where I was.

An acrid smoke swirled around my feet and assaulted my nostrils, almost causing me to choke. I swiveled my head and looked over my shoulder at the field behind me.  It wasn’t a pretty picture. An army of armored zombies, set against the opaque background of fog, streamed through the massive hole the bulldozer had torn in the fence. They were controlled by some sort of external force, with most of them headed down the driveway, circumventing the web of metal cables. They would be on the building and inside in a matter of minutes. 

The bulldozer operator returned Aaron’s fire, forcing Aaron to pull back inside. People started firing at the zombies from the guard stations on the third floor. I’m not sure how many people we had up there, but they were firing at a punishing rate, trying to take down some of the attackers. Sadly, their bullets bounced off most of the zombies’ armored shells, and very few of the undead fell. 

Relentless as zombies always were, they continued on, their clanking and clattering sounds mixed in with their moans and grunts in an unholy symphony of sound. The only thing different this time, other than their armored shells, was that they were being compelled to come at us by someone: a grand puppet master pulling the strings of death, with his army ready to crush, kill, and destroy.

I hadn’t even met this guy, but he wanted to kill me and everyone else I cared for. What made it worse was that I could see no way to stop him and his army, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to try. 

I got to my feet and started back toward the main building, as Jo fired past me.