Books of the Dead (Book 3): Dead Man's Land (25 page)

Conflicting emotions boiled within me.  On one hand, my heart nearly broke as I watched the little girl suffer.  On the other, I wanted to kill the son of a bitch inflicting all this pain on her.  Anger won out as I pulled up my pistol and fired on the bus.  The side windows shattered inward, sending glass flying around the interior like tiny bits of shrapnel.   

I barely saw what happened next as my rage nearly blinded me, but Travis started his sprint forward. It was like a macabre football game as he came at a small pack of the undead.  He cut to the left and started in a wide arc, drawing the zombies away from the bus. 

I continued to fire, hoping to draw all attention to me.  The bad thing about getting all that attention is that it seemed to excite the undead on their way to me.

Travis reached the apex of his arc and made a quick cut, angling toward the small boy on his side of the bus.  I looked back to the girl and found that she lay still on the ground.  I hoped that she was still alive.  The other boy on my side of the bus just stood locked in place, crying.  His tears cut into me like a knife.

Travis dodged the outstretched hands of two zombies, made another quick cut, followed by a fantastic spin move and was on the glide path to the child.  I stopped to reload and when I looked up, the little girl stirred, her arm patting the ground next to her. 

The three zombies coming my way closed the gap and had it down to thirty feet.  I was running out of time.  I could try to take them out with my pistol, but wasn’t sure my bullets would pass through their metal hides.  I knew I had another warhead, but I was holding that back to take out the bus.  

I was reaching a failsafe point as the zombies hit the twenty feet mark.  They were too close for the rocket launcher.  I knelt down and rummaged in my backpack as I watched both the zombies and Travis.  He was closing on the kid. 

My hands felt past the last warhead and found one of the two remaining grenades I still had.  I yanked it out, pulled the pin, and tossed it at the approaching zombies, and then back pedaled as fast I could. 

Two seconds into my brief retreat, the grenade went off and the three zombies were caught up in the blast, fire and smoke enveloping them.  After the cloud of smoke lifted, the picture revealed the broken bodies of the three zombies, missing limbs, heads, and huge hunks of their bodies, taking them out of action.  That was three down and hundreds more to go, so the victory was short lived as the numbers worked against us.  Still, I had a slight breather away from imminent death. 

I looked through the smoke and saw Travis dodge around the last two zombies and then swoop down on the child.  He snatched the boy up and made a little half circle turn, starting back toward the field and away from the bus.  His trip back was going to be more treacherous, as he had to dodge the zombies again, only this time, he was carrying a sixty pound child in his arms.

He made it look effortless, as he sped away with the child hanging limply in his arms.  He had closed on the first zombie when the bomb in the child’s backpack went off. 

Chapter 34

Revising the Final Act

With his finger still on the detonation button, Anthony wondered how they liked his little surprise. 

He knew their Achilles heel.  He knew, they wouldn’t be able to resist saving the children.  He knew, they wouldn’t be able to risk killing even one of them to take him out.

A sense of utter satisfaction swelled within him as he knew that he would win, because he had no sense of sentimentality and no one to make him vulnerable.  The bond that held them together as a group was their weak link.  They would risk anything for each other, while he saw anyone as expendable.  Love was weakness.  Friendship was a vulnerability. 

One down, one to go
, he thought and turned his attention to their last man in the field.  

One moment, Travis and the child were there and the next they were gone, replaced by an explosion of fire and fury.  A dark plume of smoke lifted off from the point of the explosion and what I saw nearly made me vomit.  With the zombies that I had just blown up, much of their bodies were still intact, but there was almost nothing left of Travis and the child.  There was only the faint smudge of red against the blackened hole in the ground where they had once been.

It felt like someone had cored out everything essential inside me as my legs felt weak and I began to stumble.  I couldn’t get enough oxygen to my brain and my head felt light.  My vision began to tunnel down to blackness with pinpricks of color at the edges, blue and yellow, as I went to one knee.  My hands alternately tingled and felt numb as my pistol tumbled loose and fell to the ground.  Any sound around me seemed to drop in volume and became mushy and indistinct, as if someone had literally sucked the sounds around me out of the air.

I don’t know how long this lasted.  I sensed movement both in front of me and behind, but they seemed remote, as if in another plane of existence.  A distant voice in the recess of my consciousness told me I need to get moving, but I couldn’t get my body to react to any of it.  It was if an “Out of Order” sign had suddenly gone up over my head.  All my systems were shutting down, the signals stopping and the lights dimming.  Any thoughts of the rest of my friends on the run became distant memories, receding away like faded images in an old dusty photo album.

Blackness swirled around me as I felt my head bow down and I was certain that those seconds would be my last on the earth.  Surrender seemed to be the best and only option.  The cost of going on was too much.  There was no need to go on, we had lost.  It was better to give up and move on the next world, where all this pain and suffering was nothing but vapor and ancient memories. 

I’m certain that I
would
have given up, but someone couldn’t keep their damn mouth shut. 

“Now, you see why you will lose.”

The voice seemed to be coming from a million miles away and I wasn’t sure it registered fully in my mind, but it must have.

“You are weak, while
I
am strong.  My soldiers are legion and they will sweep over your people and you will beg for your lives, but there will be no mercy.”  The voice came from the walkie-talkie, still in my pocket and it broadcast loud and clear.

My systems slowly came back online, power streamed through cables and wires that spanned my body.  My fists clenched and I felt my fingernails bite into palms.  A pounding pulse of blood surged into my temple, and where my vision had been nearly black, it was now red. 

I reached down and picked up my pistol and used my other hand to retrieve the walkie-talkie.  I heard the clattering and moans of zombies behind me, but I didn’t turn to look as I focused completely on the remaining bus.

“Ahhh, I see you moving,” the voice said.  “What do you think you’re going to do?  You were one against hundreds.  Your time is over and my legion’s time has come.”

I brought the walkie-talkie up to my mouth and keyed the talk button.  “Talk is cheap, you son of a bitch.  I’m coming for you and you’re about to see how ruthless I can be.”

I tossed the walkie-talkie onto the ground, picked up the pack, RPG, and gun, and took one step toward the bus.

“That’s it,” the voice over the walkie-talkie said, “make it easy on me.  Come and die.”

I stepped back, brought up my right foot, and smashed it down on the walkie-talkie with such force that it broke into a thousand little pieces.  To complete my performance, I twisted my foot on the walkie-talkie, grinding it into the dirt.  (I wondered if the Academy was polishing a statue for me.  I mean that was grade A macho acting.)

That’s when reality slapped me in the face.  In front of me were a dozen or so armored zombies, ready to rip me to pieces.  An utterly ruthless madman was going to do anything he could to kill me.  Top it off with the fact that the lives of two frightened children also lay in my hands, along with the fate of everyone I loved.  To say that the odds were stacked against me was a dramatic understatement, but when the chips fell, I had no other choice.  I had to take this mad bastard out or else all was lost.

No pressure.  None
at all
.

So, there was no giving up.  There was no running.  There was no alternative.  I had to kill this guy anyway I could.  It would come down to the reality of whether I could live with myself for the choice I was going to have to make. 

I reached into my pack, retrieved the final warhead, and quickly mounted it into the RPG launcher.  The warhead clicked into place.  I brought the launcher up and started aiming at the bus.  Armored zombies shambled toward me, blocking my aim, but I shifted my footing and got a clear view on the bus.  The problem was that wherever I aimed, the madman inside the bus repositioned the two kids, each of them yelping in pain.  I didn’t have a shot that wouldn’t kill one or both of them, and he knew it.  This was the genius and ruthlessness of his plan -- he used our humanity against us.

The zombies were closing quickly on me, both in front of me and behind, and my window was narrowing.  If I didn’t pull the trigger soon, I’d have no choice.  I would die and whoever was still at The Manor would probably die with me. 

My mind weighed the consequences. The lives of whoever was left at The Manor, people I’d lived and fought beside, versus the lives of two children I’d never met and that would probably be dead soon, no matter what I did.   It was a cold and dark equation, and one that seemed easy on its face, but one that tortured me no matter what decision I made.

I closed my eyes and desperately sent a blast heavenward for any sort of inspiration.  Usually, in the past, before the advent of zombies, these requests were horribly self-serving. 

“
Please, God, help me to get a measly single and drive in this run.
” 

“
God, please save my bacon, and please make sure that grinding noise coming from the engine of my dad’s car isn’t because I forgot to check the oil like he told me.
”

“
Oka,y God, help me not to look like a total doofus in front of these hot cheerleaders
.” 

Those were always met with total silence and maybe even a distant and dismissive chuckle, but this request came back with an image of something I’d rather not to have had to re-live.  It was an image of Greg, literally on his death bed. He was looking up to me and saying through gritted teeth that I was to take over leadership in case he didn’t make it.  Despite my protests, he said I was the best choice because I thought “
outside the box
.”  And that was it in terms of divine inspiration.  A quick and dreadful glimpse into my friend’s death.

But it
did
work.  Well, sort of.  At least it got me motivated.

Up until that moment, the Lord of the Dead had set the ground rules.  He held the cards.  But I now knew that I had more power than I gave myself.   It was time for me to throw a curveball into the situation, I just had to know which direction and at what speed.

The zombies between me and the bus cut the distance down to only twenty feet in front of me, making them too close for the RPG.   The ones coming up from behind me were still a good fifty feet away. 

So, I dropped the RPG launcher from my shoulder and reached in my pack again, until my hand fell on my last grenade.  I pulled it free, yanked the pin, and, in one continuous motion, threw it into the midst of the on-coming zombies, hoping that none of the shrapnel would hit the kids.  Of course, I didn’t take into account that any of it could hit me.

Three seconds after it left my hand, it exploded into the middle of the on-coming zombies.  While bullets had trouble with their new armored shells, grenades definitely didn’t.  The ones directly in the blast radius took the brunt of it and were blown to pieces.  The ones outside that direct blast radius were either missing limbs or knocked to the ground with what was left of their shriveled brains scrambled. 

I picked up the RPG launcher and looked for the best approach path.  It seemed that the best way was the simplest -- a straight line to the bus.  I started through the smoke cloud, using it as a screen to mask my approach as I ran forward.  Of course, that meant running directly toward the two kids who were human bombs, but I had to take them out of the equation somehow.  Or, at the least, minimize their effectiveness.

I made it to the pile of undead taken out by the grenade, trying not to choke on the smoke, and avoiding falling over the body parts.  It wasn’t easy as arms, legs, and torsos lay strewn about like broken Transformers action figures.  Only these action figures were undead and not robotic.  It was like a macabre game of hopscotch as I jumped between the pieces and parts.

When I broke through the cloud, I found myself only fifteen feet away from the bus.  One of the children, a little girl in dirty jeans and a dark hoodie sweatshirt also sporting the telltale backpack filled with explosives, stood near the front of the bus, next to the entry doors.  The other child, a boy with dark hair in a filthy track suit, lay huddled in a pile on the ground near the back tire of the bus, cowering from the explosion. 

I had to ask myself if the madman inside the bus thought they were too close to the bus to detonate the bombs in their backpacks.  If the explosion that took out Travis was any indication, then I would say, “Yes.”  But he was the only one who knew.

There was no time to take a full assessment as I saw the zombies starting to recover out of the corner eye.  They rose out of the thin cover of smoke, like people waking up from sleep. 

To keep the man on the bus back on his toes, I pulled out my pistol and fired spaced shots at the windows as I ran toward the boy.  The windows shattered inward and I thought I caught the glimpse of a figure ducking down, but I couldn’t be sure.  As I approached the boy, he started to crawl away from me.  I saw stark terror in his face and it was like a dagger to my heart. 

I didn’t have a lot of time, but I knelt down beside him and said, “Hey, hey, you don’t need to be afraid of me.  I’m a friend.”  I put my pistol away and let the RPG launcher dangle at my side. 

He stopped, just under the overhang of the bus, and looked back me, tears streaming down his cheeks.  He looked to be about seven and had those exaggeratedly large eyes that some children have.  These eyes seemed to say, “It’s hopeless.  I’m dead.  You’re dead.  We’re all dead.”

“I can help you,” I said, holding out a hand.  I took a chance and added, “I can get you free from the bad man, I promise.”

His eyes flashed just a sliver of hope and he hesitated.

“You can trust me, but I need your help,” I said.  Each second I spent there seemed like hours.  I could only surmise that what was keeping me alive was the fact that I was so close to the bus, the man inside couldn’t get an angle on me with a gun, and I was also too close to detonate the explosives in the boy’s backpack. 

I don’t know if it was my suggestive sales technique or whether he saw the truth in what I said, but he extended a hand toward mine. I grabbed it and pulled him close, hugging him tight. 

“I’m not going to let that man hurt you anymore, but you need to be brave,” I said. “Can you be brave?”

He looked up to my face and slowly nodded his head. 

“Do you know what’s in your backpack?”

His face broke a little, but he got it under control and nodded his head.

“Can we take it off of you?”

This time he shook his head violently from side to side and said, “No, he said it will go off if we try.”  The fear swept over him like a wave and his eyes filled with tears of terror.

“No, no, no,” I said softly. “Don’t you cry.  I’m going to take care of this backpack, but you can’t run away or else….”  I let that hang in the air, not wanting to complete my sentence.  “You need to stay close to me, okay?”

“Okay,” he said in a tiny voice.

“We need to get your friend and we need to get on the bus.”

He started shaking his head side-to-side.

“It’s the only way,” I said, reaching and taking his chin in my hand, stopping his head from shaking.  “If you run, it will be bad.”

He looked into my eyes, asking for anything else, but despite his fear, I could see a penetrating intelligence behind his eyes that knew the truth.  He nodded his head again.