Hurricane Dan (A Zombie Novel) (14 page)

Chapter 27

             
It's an ocean, was all Dan could think as the endless mass of zombies stumbled towards him.

The National Guardsmen all fired wildly, trying to keep the plethora of living dead at bay.

Zoey's mouth was agape as she stepped into the intersection. Waves of endless movement reflected in her pupils. She shook her head, seeming to snap herself out of whatever dark thought she was in.

"I'll go straight," she said. "You and Barns go help the guys to our right."

Dan nodded as she began walking towards the barricade on the opposite side of the street. Turning to his right, he wondered how in the hell they were supposed to help in any way that would influence anything. The pistol felt like a peashooter in his hand.

"I don't think I can take so many, Dan," said Barns as he eyed the barricade before them.

"No shit," said Dan. "Maybe we should just go break into the nearest bar. There is bound to be one somewhere around here."

Barns gave him a stern look. "Dis not the time fo' dat."

"You have got to be kidding me."

"I no kid. If dey break through den we gone die."

"Well, what do you want to try?" asked Dan. "Nothing we do is going to make a difference."

"Dis." Barns struggled with the pistol for a moment before getting it cocked. He pointed the gun out past the barricade and fired a bullet that winged a zombie in the shoulder.

A few of the National Guardsmen looked back to see who was shooting; none of them looked too happy with what they saw.

"What the hell!" one of them yelled before turning back towards the fray.

Dan had seen enough. If Barns wanted them to do something, he would do it.

"First off, we need a better angle," he said, walking over to the sidewalk.

The guardsmen were mostly in the center of the road, there was room on the sidewalk for them to get right up to the barricade. Dan observed that the zombies began to drop at about forty feet out. They kept thinning from that point on until they reached twenty feet; none of them crossed the twenty foot mark.

"Do you see that guy in the red shirt, the one missing his jaw?" Dan asked. Barns nodded. "Quick, try and pick him off before he gets taken out by one of the guardsmen."

Barns lifted his rifle, aimed with one eye and fired. The zombie’s throat exploded, painting the zombies behind it red. It kept walking until it was taken out by a guardsman's shot a few moments later.

"You missed," said Dan.

Barns frowned and tugged on his beard. "It ain't easy. You do it."

"Fine." Dan picked out a zombie and sighted in; he took a deep breath and pulled the trigger. A zombie three feet behind the one he was aiming at fell as it was struck in the head with his bullet.

"Nailed it," Dan said, ignoring the fact that he had in fact missed.

Barns licked his lips and began aiming again; three shots later he finally got one.

"Dis be way harder den just using duh baseball bat," he said, scratching the side of his head with the barrel of the gun.

Dan reached out and gently pointed his gun in a safer direction.

"I know what you mean, Barns, I don't think we have the right guns for the job. Let’s save our bullets until the zombies get a little closer."

Zoey must have come to a similar conclusion. She was standing back in the street, also not firing her weapon.

A half hour passed, the guardsmen never tired; nor did the zombies. They just kept coming and coming. At some point shortly after noon the zombies began to gain ground.

Dan first realized what was happening when one of the zombies successfully stumbled past a post office drop box on the sidewalk. The drop box was within fifteen feet of the barricade and no other zombie had made it that far.

A minute later another zombie made it as far as the drop box, a third one made it shortly after that. It was not long before the drop box became the new marker for where all the zombies fell.

Once the zombies started to reach the ten foot mark, Dan and Barns began shooting again. Dan missed some, Barns missed more. Luckily any missed shot were still at head level and would yield good results anyway.

"We are running out of ammo!" one of the guardsmen yelled.

Dan dropped his empty clip and loaded a fresh one. Barns fired a few more shots and did the same.

"We can't keep this up," said another guardsman.

The guardsman Dan thought was in charge took a break from shooting to look at the two others. "We are not going to be the first platoon to fall back, you got that?"

"Yes sir," the two men said in unison.

There were thirteen of them in total; they worked with a methodic cool in the face of such a massive threat. Dan and Barns on the other hand fired frantically and somewhat blindly.

Dan fired a shot and the chamber stayed cocked back. A bit of anger flared through him; he was out of bullets.

He wasn't the only one. Barns and two guardsmen also ran out with in the span of a minute.

The zombies reached the edge of the barricade and began to climb over, the first few getting tangled in the barbed wire.

Dan watched as the man he thought was the leader ran out of bullets. He expected the guy to yell for them to fall back, instead he whipped out a knife and brought it down through the skull of a zombie crawling over the barricade. He then sheathed the knife and pulled out a pistol that he continued to fire into the oncoming zombies.

That was when a walkie-talkie clipped to the guy’s belt began going off.

-This is Forty-third and Sixth, we've lost control over here. Third calvary is falling back—

"Alright, boys," said the leader. "We are gonna hold the line for another thirty seconds and then fall back."

Nobody objected.

Dan could see the other guardsmen a block down the road, fleeing deeper into the safe zone. A few seconds later the zombies came flooding through the intersection in pursuit. A few stumbled away from the flow of their comrades and began moving in Dan's direction. Although they were still a way off, if the guardsmen didn't fall back soon they would have to fight in three different directions. That wasn't good because they were about to lose control with just two directions.

Dan wound up and punched a zombie that had managed to get over the barricade unscathed. Barns helped him to stomp it to death after it fell to the ground.

"Okay, let's fall back!" called the lead guardsman.

Dan was caught off guard by the platoon’s reaction time; they were up and running before the guy had even finished the sentence. This left Barns and Dan alone as zombies began to pour over the barricade.

"Run!" Dan yelled, willing his worn out body into action.

His legs felt like rubber underneath him, it was as if somebody had strapped weights to his back. He did his best to ignore it and push on. All his exertions since the beginning of the outbreak were adding up. He was going to need a month to recover, if he ever survived that was.

Zoey was ahead of them, keeping pace with the back line of the guardsmen. Dan could hear the incessant moans creeping up behind him. They sent a shiver through him, pushing him to keep moving.

The pavement seemed to lag underneath him as his feet slapped against it. He knew it was only one block to the next barricade but it felt like miles. Barns kept pace with him and together they approached the line of cop cars blocking the road.

They were still fifty feet away when the guardsmen began leaping and sliding over the cars, to safety. They were thirty feet away when Zoey crawled across the hood of one of the cruisers. When they reached ten feet out, Dan looked up to see glass bottles that were on fire, flying over his head. Someone was throwing the Molotov cocktails.

When Dan reached the police cruisers he dove head first, landing on the hood and sliding across. Three or four hands grabbed and pulled him to safety. As soon as he was on the other side, the street erupted with the sound of gunfire. His ears rang with the sound of it.

Twenty police officers began to unload their pistols on the incoming horde. The guardsmen were also using up what was left of their ammo, while the firefighters continued to launch Molotov cocktails. There were men sniping from the windows, a few swinging axes at any zombie trying to climb over the hood of the cruisers, and some standing in the back, replenishing ammo when needed.

It was perhaps one of the loudest things Dan had ever experienced. The gunfire echoed off the surrounding buildings from both theirs and the other barricades that blocked the other streets leading to the library.

Looking back, Dan watched a guardsman lead a group of civilians around the corner of the library, trying to get them inside of the third and final barricade. They looked frightened, their faces were pale white as they stared in Dan's direction.

In front of him and forty feet past the barricade, the streets had erupted in flames. They licked up and down the buildings and burned any zombie that dared to walk through them. Bullets ripped through the zombies, killing any that made it far enough.

The servicemen and women looked strained; all their faces were tight, their teeth clenched. Everybody was giving hell and doing everything they could.

Still, the zombies came.

Chapter 28

             
Dan emptied a clip he had been handed. The momentum of repeatedly firing had pulled his aim upward; he had to fight to keep it down. He managed to take down six zombies before waiting for more ammunition. Zoey took her time as she fired, squaring her shoulders and keeping both eyes open. Barns stood there not shooting at all, waiting for the zombies to get close enough that he wouldn't miss; that would probably be when the barrel was touching their dead foreheads.

"What the hell are we gonna do?" one of the cops yelled. "What the fuck are we gonna do?"

"We are gonna keep shooting," responded one of the guardsmen.

"Zoey," said Dan.

"Not now Dan, I need to concentrate."

He watched her as she focused, firing off two shots. A bead of sweat rolled across her temple and down her jaw.

He could not help but feel disheartened; the pistols they all were using were very sloppy when compared to the guardsmen's rifles. Were there not twice as many men shooting, they would have had to fall back almost immediately. As it was, the guardsmen were running low on ammunition for their own pistols, guns that Dan had learned were called M-nines.

"Good shot!" Dan said to Zoey after she dropped three zombies with one bullet. She would have gotten four but the bullet did not have enough force and ended up lodging itself into the forehead of a very battered male zombie.

Zoey just turned and winked at him.

The streets were a wild blaze because of the Molotov cocktails; it did not stop the zombies, but it did slow them down. The heat coming from the fire, both the flaming bodies and the gas on the ground, raised the temperature in front of the barricade. Unfortunately those flames began to die as soon as the last bottle was thrown. After that, and without the flames dissolving them, the zombies began to make noticeable headway.

There were still a few people left to evacuate from the park when it came time to fall back. Dan was surprised when it happened; they were actually holding their own pretty well, and would have been able to for a good while longer. Apparently that was not the case for some of the other barricades.

It began in the streets farthest away, towards the end of the park. They were running low on ammunition and decided it would be safer to save what little they had for the final push. The servicemen and women all began the mad dash towards the last barricade. They screamed into multiple two-way radios, letting everybody else know what they were doing. Dan cursed, knowing it meant he was going to have to fall back as well. One step closer to death, he mused.

From his spot on the corner of the street, Dan could see pretty well around the library. He could see into Bryant Park and the streets behind it, to the few civilians who had yet to evacuate, and to the servicemen and women sprinting right past them.

The people in the park scrambled to keep up as the zombies came flooding out into the open space, their stumbling jog good enough to prey on the slow.

Dan watched and waited, wondering when his group was going to get the order to fall back. They couldn't do it too soon, they were closer to the final barricade and the zombies they were holding back would cut off the others before they could make it. If they waited too long, they would be cut off by the zombies that were chasing the others. If Dan had to choose one scenario, it would have been the former because the latter sounded like one hell of a bitch.

"We fall back on my mark," one of the guardsmen yelled over all the noise.

Everybody who had ammunition kept firing; they also kept one eye on the guardsmen. The zombies continued to fall like water at the edge of a waterfall, only the shots became slightly sloppier.

As the front line of zombies fell, they tripped up the second layer. The second layer would then stumble and fall under the next wave of bullets. This would cause the third layer to go down instead. Having been missed by a volley of bullets, the second layer of zombies would stand up and continue charging the barricade. Because of this strange pattern, they were able to make it much closer than any of the other zombies. Some even got close enough to touch the barricade, a few getting tangled in the barbed wire.

Dan was certain that during those times, when he could smell the zombies’ decaying breath because they were so close, that was when it was most frightening.

It took only a few seconds for the people behind the barricade to take care of this advancing wave, but in that time the other zombies were able to move up a few feet.

"Ready... mark!"

In a matter of seconds, they went from being thirty or forty people holding the barricade to a stampede of humans running for their lives. This time around, Dan made sure he was ready to keep up. In fact he had ended up somewhere in the middle of the pack, which caused a new concern to rise up inside of him. What if I trip and get stampeded to death?

The stragglers, the few civilians still in Bryant Park, had not moved fast enough and were being caught by the first of the zombies. They cried for help as chunks of their flesh were ripped away. It may have seemed cruel but everybody else ignored them and kept running.

Dan's group met headlong with the other groups as they passed the corner of the library; the timing had been precise. Behind them, the nearest zombie was trailing by at least forty yards. From there it was only a matter of crossing the front of the library and hopping the police cars at the front of the barricade.

The number of people drastically increased as they met with the other groups from the opposite side of the library. There were so many men and women that they began to bottleneck in front of the barricade, trying to find safe places to cross over where there was no barbed wire. That meant that they could only cross where the police cruisers had been parked.

Dan felt himself being pushed and shoved as the crowd around him began to panic. It took only seconds for him to lose sight of Barns and Zoey. Everybody was jockeying for position, the competition slowing them down even more. There were a few people that even began to throw punches. If something good didn’t happen fast, they weren't going to make it. There were too many people all trying to get in at once and the zombies were going to catch them because of it.

Dan yelled and began shoving forward. He was angry at how stupid they had been to let themselves get all bottled up like they had. They were beginning to panic, he sensed, the entire crowd was about to lose its head.

From somewhere inside of the barricade guns began to go off. They were followed by the familiar sound of skulls exploding and bodies hitting the pavement. That was when Dan heard something new—water. It was being sent out in two heavy streams from the fire trucks. The firemen held their hoses steady, pushing back the zombies as if they were killing a fire.

Dan felt himself move one step at a time as their massive group poured into the barricade. People dove over the police cruisers, sliding across the hood and tumbling down on the other side. Some were too slow and were shoved back down as the people behind landed on top of them.

"Dan!" He could hear Zoey yell as he climbed over the hood of one of the police cruisers at the front of the barricade.

For a moment he stared at the plow trucks and the way they angled towards the cop cars he was now crawling across. With a start he realized why the two cruisers had been parked at the mouth of the barricade. Before, Dan had thought it was because they had run out of sandbags and barbed wire. Now he realized it was because they were a gate of sorts, waiting for the right time to be smashed open.

"Zoey," he said as she jumped into his arms. She was shaking.

"I thought we were going to die," she said.

"Seems to be the feeling of choice these days."

"Hooo doggy," Barns bellowed as he crossed into the barricade. "Dey right behind me!"

Dan grabbed his hand and helped him across. "It's alright big guy, we got yah."

There were people all around them, all trying to help the rest of the people get into the barricade. They were doing a pretty good job; between them, the bullets and the fire hose, it looked like everyone was going to make it safely.

“Come on, help me get some more people in here,” said Dan, turning back toward the cruiser.

They turned and grabbed the first person they saw, a guy on the ground with a bloody nose. They helped pull him to his feet before reaching over the hood for the next person.

A few minutes later only the dead stood on the other side of the barricade. They stumbled up from every direction, their numbers being fed from every connecting street in the area; they poured in by the thousands.

Dan made sure he held Zoey tight and stuck close to Barns as they were ushered inside the library by a cop. The cop was a short blond guy who kept insisting that no civilians should be outside.

Dicky was close to the front doors when they walked in. He was directing a bunch of cops as they carried boxes of weapons and ammunition. Dan caught a glimpse of the weapons and was surprised to see that they were not police or army grade. They were shotguns, pistols of every shape and form, knives, blunt objects, and even Randy's swords; they were all the weapons that had been confiscated.

"Hey," Dan said as they passed. "I want my sword back."

Dicky stopped what he was doing to look at him; he seemed to think about it for a moment. "I need them."

"Not my problem, Dicky."

"Dan," Zoey whispered.

"If those things get in, it will be your problem, Dan," said Dicky.

Dan could feel anger and frustration broiling inside, threatening to spill out of him like a volcano at a science fair. "It doesn't matter what you do, those things are getting in here, and when they do I'm not gonna die unarmed. Now give me my fucking sword."

Dicky looked pissed, he turned and yanked a double-barrel shotgun from one of the boxes and tossed it to Dan. "It's filled with buckshot, don't blow your head off," he said and turned back to directing his cops.

Dan fumbled with the gun for a moment, trying to figure out how to check for bullets. He eventually figured it out and cracked the gun open. There were two shells in the chamber.

"Two bullets," Dan said.

Dicky walked up and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. "I could just toss you out to die. Be grateful you little shit."

"Fuck you, Dicky," said Dan.

Dicky gritted his teeth and shoved him before turning back to his men. "I need a few guys to start rounding up the civilians. I want them all inside the plow trucks and ready for transport within the next twenty minutes."

Dan wanted to protest some more but let it go. He silently cursed the piddly amount of ammunition he was given. If he had been given his sword like he had been promised, he wouldn't need any ammunition!

"I still got all my bullets, Dan," Barns said enthusiastically.

"That's real good, Barns," Dan said, doing a poor job of hiding the frustration in his voice. His shoulders slumped as he clicked the gun closed. He felt like a rat locked in a cage; the cat was near.

"Is we in trouble?" Barns asked.

"The proper word is fucked," said Dan. "We are fucked."