Dead Surge (25 page)

“No answer for you, Colonel. Hate to see you wasted a quick march on a wild goose chase,” I said seriously.

“No trouble, Mr. Talon! The men need practicing things like that, cause you never know when it might be useful. Rapid deployment! That’s what killed the Romans. Couldn’t move fast enough. Not like this army!” Colonel Freeman was very sure of himself and his men, and I could see why they liked him. It was hard not to like a perpetual optimist.

Duncan reached into the van and pulled out a thick folder. He rummaged a bit, and then handed a highway map of Iowa to the Colonel. Freeman opened the map, found our location, and then began checking the area to the west of Ottumwa.

“Damn, damn, damn. Where the hell is Batavia?” Colonel Freeman was having difficulty finding the town. Obviously, it was important, since it would give us a good line of attack.

“Son of a bitch!” I yelled. “How? Somebody tell me how the hell they crossed the damn river in the middle of the night, right under the noses of a thousand men, and managed to stage an attack on a town fifteen miles away?”

Colonel Freeman winced, and I knew he felt responsible. The question was what were we going to do about it?

“Mount up, we gotta move. Colonel, follow if you can. Get to the Mississippi, and if you have to string your men out one per fifty yards, then do it. They will not get past us!” I jumped into the truck and quickly pulled away, the sound of Colonel Freeman shouting at his troops fading in the distance.

Sarah spoke up. “John, how was that possible?”

“I wish to hell I knew, babe. They’ve managed to get around us at every turn, and I have no idea how. They aren’t that smart, and there aren’t that many roads. So how are they doing it? What am I overlooking?” I was frustrated to the point of anger, and I was half hoping there was going to be some action at Batavia, because I needed to kill something.

Chapter 52

We sped along Route 34, dodging the worst of the potholes and tree branches. It took us a half hour, and we stopped on an overpass to look the situation over.

Batavia was a small town, and by all accounts, it looked like it should have been fairly left alone from the troubles. But this time the trouble came looking for it. I could see several pockets of zombies attacking a few homes, and a larger pocket attacking what looked like a town hall or something.

“Well, here we go again,” I said, putting the truck in gear and heading down the ramp. I drove quickly over the streets and headed right for one of the homes. I could see Charlie break away and head towards another.

I slowed down at the last moment and proceeded to plow over several zombies. They went under the tires with an oddly satisfying crunch. I drove around the house, mowing down the zombies I found, and driving over the ones that tried to get up after being hit. Sarah had her gun out and was ready to take on any that tried to hold on to the truck.

After about five minutes, I didn’t see any left, so I pulled away from the house and got out of the truck. Three zombies were out of the way when I hit the horde, and they immediately broke off their attack on the house to head in my direction. I stood there for a moment, and Sarah easily shot all three with her Ruger.

I shrugged and Sarah did the same. We went back to the truck and carefully got back inside. We would seriously need to clean it off when we had the chance. I drove over to where Charlie had broken off to see if they needed any help. Charlie had done the same thing I had, but there were more zombies on this side. Duncan was outside, slicing up Zs with abandon, while Charlie, Tommy, and Rebecca were a little more precise.

Charlie was stalking a zombie that had wandered off, an old man in faded pajamas. I wondered why he wasn’t trying to fight when I realized he was probably deaf. That threw a weird thought into my head. What did a zombie with Alzheimer’s do?

Tommy was taking on two of them, knocking one in the knees and bringing it down while he slammed the other in the head, killing it. The dead one fell on top of the animated one, and that one couldn’t get up, making it an easy target for Tommy. Rebecca was just finishing killing a teenage zombie, and squaring off with another.

There weren’t any left, so Sarah and I just watched for a bit. After another five minutes, they were finished, and came over to the truck.

“We’ve got about fifty people in here. Hold on, I have to get the boards away from the door.” We heard the sound of a screwdriver working screws out of the boards, and in a few minutes, we were looking at a lot of people streaming out of the house. They looked around at their fellow townspeople and several went over to possible relatives and knelt beside them.

The man who Duncan had been communicating with stepped out and shook our hands, but we couldn’t stay for pleasantries. There was another group of zombies we had to deal with, and that group was larger than these two combined.

Chapter 53

We moved to the center of town and saw about thirty zombies attacking what looked like the town hall. It was a building that was roughly square, but built low to the ground, so there were a lot of easily accessible windows. The trouble was the windows were such that you could only open then half way, and the people inside couldn’t effectively kill the zombies that were clamoring around the place. They had the tools to do it, from what I could see, but they didn’t have the room to swing. They did the next best thing, which was just to push the zombies away from getting into the windows. Trouble was, every time they pushed one away, another took its place.

We parked the vehicles and got out carefully. Several zombies noticed us, so it was just a matter of time before we were under attack. We couldn’t use our rifles, since the bullets had a really good chance of hitting a window and killing someone on the inside, which would kind of defeat the purpose.

“All right. Here they come. You want to take them on as a group or split up?” I asked, taking out my pickaxe. For this kind of crowd, I wanted one-shot stops and the pick always delivered.

Charlie looked the crowd over. “Let’s just charge them, and when we’ve hit the end of the first wave, regroup and do it again.”

“Last one to the zombies is a mangy stray!” I called out as we all ran towards the oncoming zombies. There was about ten of them that had split from the main group, and they were strung out in a ragged line as they advanced.

We ran right at them and Charlie was first in kills. He cut down a middle-aged woman who was lurching on a broken ankle, and Duncan was next with a kill on a tall zombie. He looked really cool doing it, as he jumped up and used his sword to hack the zombie’s head in half.

I walked right up to a man whose arms were covered in bites and tears, and smashed his head in without breaking stride. Sarah tripped up her zombie before killing it, and Rebecca finessed a knife stab right between the eyes of the one that confronted her.

Tommy had two come at him, and he slipped right between them both. When they turned and bumped into each other, they were confused enough to give him a second to shove his knife into the back of the head of one, then he kicked the other over and spiked its head as well.

Charlie killed another two, and I added one to my score as well. Duncan cut the legs off on another, and managed to lop its head off as it fell.

We killed the next group, and the next, and then spent the next few minutes going around and killing the zombies that were preoccupied with fighting the people inside the building. There was a moment when a person inside the building accidentally poked Tommy, but other than that, we had no injuries.

Once the people inside realized the danger was over, they came outside and looked over the carnage. There were a lot of sad moments, especially when people went over to their relatives and friends.

The man shook his head. “Not really sure. We’d gone to bed like we’d done for a while, and then suddenly there was a general alarm that we had zombies coming up from the south. Standard procedure was to retreat to the hall and we’d talk care of it from there.” He looked around. “Sure didn’t see this coming.”

“What time did they hit you?” I was curious to see how far ahead of us they were.

“Can’t say, maybe around two or three in the morning.” The man clearly wasn’t sure, but it did tell me that our little group had gotten ahead of us again and we were chasing their tails.

“All right, we’ll get out of your way. You have a lot to do.” I signaled to my crew and we met back at the rear of the pickup.

“They got hit early this morning, which makes sense if they got past us around midnight. If I was paranoid, I’d say these attacks were just meant to slow us down, but that’s giving a lot of credit to the zombies,” I said.

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Sarah said.

“What is?” Asked Rebecca, who was cleansing her weapon.

“Maybe we’re not giving them enough credit. If we treated them like they were fully functioning humans, then we’d stop being surprised at what they do and get down to stopping them.” Sarah replied.

I had to admit it made sense. “Well, then we need to figure out how they are traveling. Where’s that map?” I rummaged around, pulled out the map, and gave it to Tommy. “Here’s your job. Look at the map, check every spot we’ve had contact with the zombies, and then tell me what the connection is. What do they have in common?”

“Gee, that’s all?” Tommy asked, but he looked at the map with interest.

“What’s our next move?” Charlie asked.

“We won’t know for sure until they strike again, but we’ll head east, keeping an eye on getting home. The army shouldn’t be too far behind.”

Duncan piped up. “Actually, I just heard their chatter on the radio and they’re ahead of us. Colonel Freeman decided to keep moving and set up a block on the Mississippi. Nothing will get past him there, he swears it.”

I tried to believe him, but I knew unless we pinned down how they were traveling, we’ lose them again and again. My mind spun over the possibilities, and for some reason I thought back to the little iron balls we dug out of the feet of that little zombie. I had a hunch they were important, but I sure couldn’t figure out how.

Chapter 54

We left Batavia behind and sped down 34. Thirty miles later, we were on the south end of New London. Duncan reported a small outbreak there, but they had contained it pretty quickly, only losing one person. Apparently, that person had taken a walk by themselves and our friends set upon them. It had happened within the last hour, so we were catching up.

Fifteen miles brought us to the outskirts of Burlington, where we caught up with Colonel Freeman. He had placed his men all along the river, each one heavily armed and ready to go. They were about twenty yards apart, and covered a good distance. The trucks and vehicles had been used to block the road that crossed the Mississippi, and another group of men was sent north to cover the crossing at Muscatine. A third group was sent to Fort Madison to cover the crossing to the south, so there was no place for the zombies to go. Unless they got here ahead of Freeman, I didn’t see how we could miss them.