Down the Road: The Fall of Austin (30 page)

After the last man entered their vehicles,
the mob of thugs drove away with reckless abandon, crushing legs,
arms, torsos and skulls under their tires.

They were heading for the FEMA camp.

“All right, ladies. Let’s go,” Sgt. Arnold
said, standing.

A chunk of concrete block next to his head
was instantly pulverized into mist, spraying sand and pebbles
against his face.

He barked, “Down!”

Knight and Parcells hit the deck.

Parcells covered his head and exclaimed,
“What the hell was that?!”

“Another goddamn sniper,” Arnold said. He
scooted against the short wall and swiped the back of his hand
across his cheek to remove the grit.

Knight muttered, “
Snipers and Austin, man.
It’s like a bad joke
.” He looked over at his sergeant. “How
many enemies can we possibly have out there, Sarge?”

Arnold didn’t need to think about it for
long. He replied, “Rodriguez is unaccounted for—but he’s
heavy-duty. I’m guessing it’s the injun.”

“He ain’t too good, apparently,” Knight
said.

“He got the drop on us, so he’s good
enough.”

“What do we do?” Parcells asked.

“Personally, Parcells, what I’d love for
you
to do is learn to be chill,” Arnold said. “We’re close
to the Hummer. We can’t stop now. Move to the door, people. Stay
low.”

“And Noble?” Knight asked.

“We’ll pick her up. Get moving.”

The men crawled to the door, skimming their
bellies across the rooftop. Evening was waning, giving way to
twilight. On one side of the sky the sun radiated orange-red rays
and on the other side a scattering of stars were twinkling.

Arnold allowed his charges to pass through
the door first, then followed. They negotiated the ladder and hit
the ground floor.

Arnold had a choice: Lead his team back
through the store and go out the broken windows near the main
entrance, which was probably just what the sniper was hoping for,
or open the foreboding door at the end of the service hallway that
declared in large red lettering, ‘EMERGENCY EXIT. ALARM WILL SOUND
WHEN OPENED,’ and he knew that once the alarm sounded, the sniper
would know for certain they were no longer on the rooftop.

There was really no choice. He nodded toward
the door.

“You want me to try to disable it first,
Sarge?” Knight asked.

“Negative. Just go.”

At the other end of the hallway appeared the
Viral they had first seen standing by the new release rack, and
this time they got a clearer look at her face. She seemed to have
been a sweet girl in her living days, short blonde hair (that now
had specks of blood peppered throughout) and pale white skin. Hints
of blue were noticeable behind the infection-blurred eyes. Her
shirt was stained red with blood from her neck and shoulders where
she had received her fatal bite wound.

She had a DVD in her hands.

“Citizen Kane?” Parcells said.

“Oh, wow! The special edition,” Knight said.
There was a hint of envy in his voice. “Man, that just came out
last week.”

“For a Viral, she has good taste,” Sgt.
Arnold said.

A dark red hole popped open through the front
of the girl’s head. Parcells felt the zipping hum of a projectile
zip past his face, sounding like a dragonfly playing with a human
and challenging him to swat. Knight felt it zip just by his face,
too.

But Sgt. Arnold felt it even more.

His head popped back.

He fell to the floor.

“Holy fuck!” Knight screamed.

Realizing they had somehow exposed themselves
to the sniper, his legs froze while he tried to decide which way to
take cover. An instant later he grabbed Sgt. Arnold’s wrists and
dragged him with a yank to the emergency door. He pushed the door
open with his butt and continued shuffling backwards.

The resulting alarm was loud and
obnoxious.

He felt two more bullets whiz by.

Once they were all outside, Parcells slammed
the door shut behind them. He blurted in a panic, “Sniper’s in the
goddamn store! He knew we came down from the roof!”

Ghouls in the employee parking lot slowly
turned toward the men like the animatronic children stuck on
spinning posts on the
It’s A Small World
ride at
Disneyworld. Recognition lit up in their faces. They started to
approach. They were fifty strong, at least.

“Put me down,” Sgt. Arnold grumbled.

“Oh, shit,” Knight said. “You’re alive.”

He stood and flexed his legs. “Of course I’m
alive. Now you know why I always give you guys shit about keeping
your helmets on.”

Parcells looked at Sgt. Arnold’s helmet and
saw the bump where the bullet had ricocheted. It was right next to
another, similar indention. He realized then he had certainly
lucked upon the right man to tag along with. Moreover, he was
exhilarated he hadn’t been left leaderless.

“Wow, that’s some
Saving Private Ryan
shit there, Sergeant,” he said.

“Good movie,” Arnold replied.

Knight opened up his HK416 on the closest
Virals. But from somewhere else, another HK416 was heard.

“It’s Noble,” Arnold said. “She’s coming.
Careful with your shots.”

The team quickly followed the order, falling
to a knee and cautiously shooting into the ever encroaching Austin
dusk as they anticipated Noble’s arrival. For the three fireteam
members, it felt like an eternity. The zombies shuffled closer with
impatient strides, eager to eat. But even worse, they stank to high
heaven.

Noble marked her appearance with a yell that
surpassed even the wail of the alarm.

“Fire in the hole!”

The team huddled together near the wall of
the store, ignoring the door to the abandoned business in fear the
sniper within might still have it in his sights.

Then it happened. The blast from the hand
grenade burst several zombies into beefy and bloody pulps, shooting
millions of rays of blood, bone and sinew into the air. Creatures
not directly in the vicinity of the explosion were stabbed, diced
and slashed by the shrapnel from the device as well as the pavement
that was cracked and disassembled, creating a small, black-lined
crater. For creatures further back, the concussive force of the
blast ripped arms, legs, and even heads from the bodies. The
various limbs were sent flying, joining the muscles and organs of
the zombies that had been caught directly.

It provided more than enough of an
opportunity for Spc. Noble to rejoin her fireteam. “Miss me?”

“Where’d you get the pineapple?” Sgt. Arnold
asked.

“I snatched it from the Hummer,” she said.
“Those crooks are loaded, Sarge. They’ve got artillery out the
whazoo.”

Arnold nodded. “
And
Parcells’
classified failsafe.”

* * *

In the middle of the parking lot, barely
distinguishable from the walking dead scattered on all sides of
him, Talltree lowered his rifle. The view he had had stretched half
the parking lot, through a broken display window, through the shelf
and banner-lined interior of the video store, and into the employee
hallway in the back. And through all the obstructions and darkness
and ambiguity, he had had one opportunity at a headshot. He had
fired three times, but wasn’t sure of the outcome.

Virals were approaching curiously. One of
them about ten feet away took a couple of steps toward Talltree,
stopped, stared blankly for a moment, took two more steps, and
stopped again. Cognitions of hunger alternating with cognitions of
disinterest were probably testing the limits of its mental
capacity.

Talltree wasn’t going to push his luck. He
decided to return to the McDonald’s rooftop to see if he could
rediscover his quarry.

Once on the roof and settled in again, he
scoured the landscape until finally acknowledging that Sgt. Arnold
and his men had managed to elude him. So he shifted his focus to
the apartment complex. Events there were developing at an
accelerated rate.

9:35 PM

South Point Apartments

The ghostly hand of Night covered the land in
darkness, and the malevolent sky spit out a stack of clouds,
denying the south Austin cityscape a lot of light the glitter of
the feminine moon provided. Only the brightest of stars managed to
show through. Never had the night been more of a pall, more of a
coffin closing on its permanent resident than this one. South
Austin was slowly being filled with danger and woe like water
filling a fish tank. The land and its people were soon to be
drowned in it.

At the front gate of South Point Apartments,
Sleepy’s gang finished establishing a perimeter around his vehicle.
Zombies swarmed all around, reinvigorated by the arrival of such a
massive quantity of fresh meat, their ghastly bodies illuminated
under the concentrated glow of headlights and street lights.

Sleepy climbed up on top of the hood, put a
bullhorn to his mouth, and directed his voice toward the camp. Sgt.
Nickson and Spc. Garrison were still bound and strapped to the
vehicle, on display for the soldiers on the other side of the gate
to see.

Despite the remaining military presence, the
negotiations were far from formal.

Or articulate.

“
Ey
,” Sleepy said. “We want a lady and
child that’s in there. A mother and daughter. We’ll give you these
fuckers in trade.” Twin spotlights from the watchtowers immediately
swiveled and focused on him. He stretched his hand out toward the
bound soldiers behind him, reminiscent of an auctioneer showing
what was up for bid.

A shadowed military man in the tower
responded in a very rote manner, “You must relinquish all weapons
and enter the FEMA camp. You will be placed under the protection of
the United States military.”

“I think you’re not hearing me, holmes,”
Sleepy said. “We don’t
want
to get in there. We just want a
woman and child. We make a simple transaction.”

Knowing Sleepy was distracted, Sgt. Nickson
began twisting his hands inside the ropes that held them.

Following procedure, the military man
repeated the command. “You must relinquish all weapons and enter
the FEMA camp. You will be placed under the protection of the
United States military.”

“Listen to me,
pendejo
,” Sleepy
replied. “My friend wants his wife and daughter. In exchange you
get these two fuckers here. That’s the deal.
Muy
razonable
.”

“Enter the camp now,” the military man in the
tower said, voice unwavering, “or we will use deadly force.”

Neither side was much for negotiating. Both
only knew one method was effective in these times of death.

“Man, fuck these
putos
,” Sleepy said
in irritated disgust. He turned around and barked, “Snipers!”

The second syllable of the simple command had
not even faded into a distant echo before a hidden sniper fired a
shot that punched the military man in the mouth, busting his teeth
out. His tongue burst into a juicy pulp, and for a singular moment
the man could literally taste the hot lead of the bullet that was
now putting him to rest. It was a literal last supper of his own
flesh and blood. The bullet forever dismissed the man’s chances for
survival by cutting through the bone of his spine, severing the
nerve center, busting it into moist particles that showered the
booth and some of the people below in a red and gray haze. He
tumbled from the tower like a Play-Doh Mr. Bill, crashing to the
pavement in a clumsy heap, coming to rest in a twisted pile.

* * *

Watching through his scope, Talltree
whispered, “
Not bad
.”

* * *

As the assassinated military man’s rifle
clattered to the pavement, it discharged. The unintentional bullet
punched another soldier in the mouth, providing the exact same
final sensation the first man had experienced, only without so
great a fall.

The twitching body was in front of the gated
vehicle entrance—a very bad place to be considering that Sleepy’s
war wagon had revved its engine and was rolling forward. It
targeted the gated entrance with every intention of ramming it.

Seated on the custom hunting seats near the
front of the auspicious battering ram, Nickson and Garrison gritted
their teeth—Nickson more so than Garrison. Sleepy put the pedal to
the metal, stomping bodies of zombies as it approached the gate.
The bodies slapped up against the platform before the truck
swallowed them in the undercarriage. The tires of the vehicle
swallowed, chomped, and ground the undead into pulp with the
indiscriminate efficiency of a whale opening its mouth and
consuming everything around it.

Despite the crunchy speed bumps, the vehicle
still hit the gate with much more velocity than the gate could
withstand.

The heavy aluminum bars above the gate that
held the chain links in place might as well have been swung by the
hands of a rioter at Watts. When they broke free in the collision,
they swung directly into the heads of the two soldiers bound to the
vehicle, striking them smack in their faces. Nickson’s nose was
smashed and broken, while Garrison’s face was cracked and broken
just below his left eye. However, it wasn’t enough to knock either
of the soldiers unconscious—the pain was simply too much.

Unfortunately for Nickson and Garrison, it
wasn’t the end of it. As the forward motion of the vehicle busted
the gate open, the chain link fence ripped at the men’s faces like
a cheese grater. And though it only lasted a moment, the ripping
anguish felt like a lifetime.

The vehicle then moved flush against the
military-erected interior fence inside the apartment complex. With
studied precision, several cars made a barrier around Sleepy’s
vehicle, including the military Hummer. Sleepy and Nick jumped from
the protected vehicle and raced to the gate. Nick began snipping
away at the chain links below the barbed wire with a wire
cutter.