Deadfall: Hunters (25 page)

In the matter of one month, the residents of Sunny Pointe, that is the military and all the survivors that had made their way there, had managed to build a seventeen mile wall around the entire city. That is what it was now, a city. The wall was between twelve and eighteen feet high, made mostly out of sand and dirt, with a barricade on the outer side of the wall and a gentle slope on the inside. It had done its job easily for a while now. From inside of these walls, anyone could feel safe. Patrols roamed the tops of the wall to make sure stragglers didn’t manage to make it over. As of a few days ago, there had been no stragglers. Then, a large horde had started pouring through the swamps and thick woods of the southern tip of the state and attempting to scale the walls. The soldiers and other volunteers had worked around the clock to keep the zombies off of the walls, and all had gone well for a few days, until the undead bodies started to pile up.

The job changed then. Not only did they have to kill zombies, but prevent them from piling up and creating their own ramp to the top of the wall. What was worse about this horde was that, as Evan described it, they acted differently from other hordes. It reminded him of Carolina Beach, except, at a slower pace. That night, thousands of zombies had poured onto that little sliver of land in a matter of hours. Here, it had been going on for days. They just appeared, organized, if that was possible.

When he said that, I knew it was time for us to sit down with whomever ran Sunny Pointe and go into more details about Haiti. I thought they needed to know. Turned out, I needed to know about Benson.

I want to start by saying that Evan gave me a whole bunch of reports and newspapers clippings to help me catch up. I spent a bit of time reading through them this morning as we waited for the council members to come together. I put all the clippings back after the entry where I think they mostly happened. I’m not one hundred percent sure of that though.

My first impression was, well, to be impressed. I had always envisioned that a large group of survivors, like at Sunny Pointe, would eventually start to take their world back. Maybe I was just proud that Evan had used that simple pike tactic we had used so many months ago. And to read that it actually worked, with, well, some modifications, made me feel good. Or smart. Both really. So what had gone wrong? Evan wouldn’t say until the council members were all together.

We entered the room on board of the aircraft carrier. The council was made up of three military men and three non-military survivors. A seventh woman sat in, but only represented the tower cities. That was a welcome word to hear, but I would have to catch up on them later. Lastly, the Admiral was here too. He was kind of a tie breaker for any major decision that came up, but usually stayed out of everything else. It appeared to be a good system. Of course, when survival was the main focus of concern, it was easy to agree.

It was probably a good thing most of them still remembered me, and in a good way. It appeared that more and more survivors were coming to Sunny Pointe, and some had been causing trouble. Some had been trying to create their own little fiefs within the makeshift city and for the first time, crime was becoming an issue. The ordeal to deal with the troublemakers had left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Newcomers, therefore, were being looked down a bit.

I began by going over everything since we had sailed out of the cape. I explained, in just a few details, why we had sailed to Haiti. I gave a few brief recounts of Miami and Cuba, but spent most of the time detailing Haiti, especially the zombies, the fort lunatic and our battle there. Reluctantly, I went into my drug induced visions and my own little zombie army. I half expected them to break out into laughter, or at the very least, utter disbelief. Instead, they nodded in surprised acknowledgement.

Piles and piles of papers were set in front of me. I tried going through them a bit. They were reports from the battle from many different officers and private reports from soldiers and volunteers. It was clearly reading material for many days and nights. Instead, the council members allowed Evan to retell the battle, as he had been there and had been instrumental in their survival that day.

I listened intently, and had to have Evan help me tonight too, so that I could write it down

The Hunter groups were having a great deal of success throughout the countryside, as I could have predicted. Organized human beings could easily destroy the chaotic zombie hordes. They had rescued many people and helped found many new tower cities for these survivors. Many smaller Hunter units were stationed all over eastern North Carolina, ready to strike out against a zombie horde. The military had helicopters it used to go between the towers with speed and they had even managed to get several train lines up to connect the cities, all of them defended by small Hunter groups.

About two weeks ago, one of these units that was posted at the Eastover tower, spotted a zombie horde coming down interstate 95. It was the practice to wait to determine the size of the horde before taking action. If it was small enough, the local unit would engage. If not, the local unit would scout, while a large Hunter group would coordinate, move in, and destroy the horde. Made sense. The really large Hunter groups had trucks and rode all over the place in caravans. They could reach most places in a matter of a few hours hauling hundreds, if not a few thousand men and women, along with their war machines, or elephants, as they called them.

So the Eastover unit radioed it in: there was a rather large horde rolling down the interstate. That was really good news, because the interstates proved to be really good killing grounds for the Hunter groups. The stupid undead loved nothing more than to walk on nice wide highways, and would often times refuse to go off the highway in order to fight, instead, funneling into the Hunter lines. The Hunter groups loved it because it was less work, and that usually meant far less casualties on their part.

So at first, as they are telling me the story to that point, everyone in the room is calm; the tone was business-like. Then, the tone changed. Evan’s unit was not the first on scene. Instead, one of the larger units arrived just south of Fayetteville and began to roll up the zombies. One solid line of pike wielding soldiers pushed their undead foe north, trampling over their bodies as they pushed north. Meanwhile, the Eastover unit scouted and kept reporting in that the zombie horde was miles, if not tens of miles long. This was one of the largest hordes they had seen. The work, as they called it, was going to go through the night, if not more. That’s when Evan’s unit got called in. They would rotate with the first unit so that they could work non-stop.

For two days without ceasing, the two Hunter units continued marching north on the interstate, twenty miles north of Fayetteville and past a small town called Dunn. It was hot, humid work; tiring, exhausting, but steady and safe. The only casualties were due to the heat and sun, not the zombies. In the end, this was exactly what the Hunter groups were looking for. They were getting rid of thousands of zombies.

The mood changed in the council room. That was because the battle changed. The Eastover unit kept reporting that the flow of zombies was not slowing down. In fact, a steady flow of the undead were coming down both Interstate 95 and Interstate 40. These two highways crossed each other in a town called Benson. The two groups were just south of the town, when, around seven in the morning, that third day, the zombie’s stopped. The groups were completely taken by surprise. It was unlike anything the zombies had ever done. The creatures had always hungered to destroy humans. Never had any single person there that day seen any zombie, anywhere, stop and stand still when a human was in front of them. But if that surprised them, what happened next shocked them to their core.

The zombies began spilling out the sides of the highway, through the ditch and into the fields nearby. While unusual, that wasn’t entirely surprising. What was shocking was that they zombies were marching in unison. They were in lines, or blocks, or units, and moving together in these groups. Now I know they weren’t surprised when I told them my part of the story.

It took them a while to understand what was happening, just like it had to us. To their credit, the two Hunter groups did not panic. Evan’s unit had been on rest when the change occurred, and he was able to wake them up and move them up to the line and the two units immediately dropped back and formed a U shaped line, spilling out into the ditch and fields as well to deploy in front of this new formation. The zombies began attacking again, but this time in unison, with more determination, ferocity and speed.

For the first time since the survivors had formed these groups, they lost men and women.

The remaining two large Hunter groups were just arriving that morning. They were going to completely relieve the first two groups and take over. Instead, all four groups had to deploy. The battle waged for hours with the Hunter groups holding their own despite being vastly outnumbered. The top of the U formation began bending inwards, but the Hunter groups were able to hold mostly because the piles of undead formed a natural wall the humans could use to their advantage. On the left flank though, Evan’s unit was getting hit the hardest. The zombie horde kept spilling out mostly in that direction, but none of the other three Hunter groups could disengage from their place in the line to help them.

Sometime around ten thirty that morning, four helicopters arrived at the battle. Their initial report from what they saw up in the skies was daunting. The zombie horde was tens of miles both north on Interstate 95 and west on Interstate 40. With Evan’s command, rockets were fired at the intersection overpass between the two interstates. It wouldn’t stop the flow entirely, but it did end up slowing it down quite a bit.

No one knows for sure who noticed it first, but Evan claims it was Chris. The teenager had proven himself very good with a rifle and had become one of the lookouts for Evan’s hunter group. After nearly two hours of fighting, Chris came running to Evan. The lookouts could use their rifles to pick off stragglers, but rarely fired a shot. Instead they just kept an eye on the battlefield from a higher vantage, usually one of the transport trucks. Evan’s group had taken it a step further and rigged up one of the trucks to have a tower. It could be cranked up to add twenty feet to the truck itself. Chris would spend his battles in there and call out what he saw from his radio.

Chris had seen them. The humans walking with the zombies. They were well behind the front lines of the undead, which is why no one had noticed them down on the ground, but Chris hadn’t been fooled. Not only were they holding rifles, they were dressed in black, almost like a uniform. When the boy had spotted them, he tried radioing Evan, but there was something wrong. So he came down from his makeshift tower and rushed around until he found Evan and dragged him back up the tower so that he could see.

Evan was confused. Who wouldn’t be? I remember how lost we were back in Haiti when we were fighting zombies and for a small moment, we thought the zombies had learned how to use guns. Evan figured it out really quick though. Someone was using the zombies to fight. At that time, he didn’t have the luxury to think about who this new enemy was. But it was clear they were an enemy.

On the right, the human line suddenly broke when the zombies, and their shepherds, made a sudden and numerous push. Evan retold the moment, and even now, I could sense the panic in his words. But, he held on. He gave out a new set of instructions: take out the Sheppard’s. Chris went scrambling up his tower, found his first target, and fired. The result was almost immediate. Not only did he kill the guy, but the zombies directly in front of him suddenly lost all cohesion. The wave of zombies was dispersed by some unseen object. Shots rang off from all the other snipers. The new enemies didn’t waste any time, and began to return fire, but the snipers were better equipped to hit targets than their enemy was to hit the snipers in their towers.

On the right, the line was breaking though, but Evan was able to use the confusion to pull some of his own men off and move them over to help stem to breakout. At that time as well, the helicopters came roaring back, firing rockets into the zombie ocean. While not really effective at killing the undead, it did cause shockwaves that disrupted their movement. It was also a huge morale boost. The men and women cheered loudly as undead body parts rained from the sky, and managed to hold the line on the right side.

I talked to Chris about what he saw there, early today. The kid really has grown up a lot in just a few months. Losing your sister and having a rifle put into your hands will do that. But what he told me about the battle was that, at the moment he was going to fire that first shot, he hesitated for a moment. He had no problem killing a zombie. Nearly everyone we knew had gotten over that. But there he was, staring down the scope of his rifle, looking at a living, breathing, human being. “I hit him right in the head, too,” he described. He knew it had to be done. It was clear they were an enemy, but he hadn’t liked doing it. I was happy to hear that. When you started to have no remorse killing a live human, then I’d have to worry.

Back at the battle, the unit leaders quickly convened and after more reports came in that the flow of zombies down the interstates was just too much, they ordered a retreat. The helicopters would continue to rain down their fire in order to put holes in the zombie lines and allow the hunter groups to pull back, get in their trucks and drive south on the interstate and get out of that predicament. It’s possible they might have been able to hold their own, but there were too many new elements to the battle that they needed to regroup and understand what they were facing.