Medora Wars (22 page)

Michaels and Yen ran ahead as they saw a wall of them that were bumping on the opposite side of a chain-link fence. They collapsed from their pulses. The front of the convoy paused at a street intersection where Jacobs saw a clear wall of the horde only two blocks away that was moving in on them like an ocean wave.

“Oh fuck me, there are… thousands, just thousands right there…” The fear in his voice quivered through his dry mouth as the second shock tank released a pulse. A dozen rows of the dead fell to the ground, only to expose the next wave of the horde behind them that were out of range of the tank pulse.

“Front team, move to the three o'clock, we’re going that way!” Douglas yelled out.

Michaels and Dave ran out to the horde and fired their rifles, dropping dozens of the dead at a time, only for dozens more to crawl in from behind them. “One minute and fifteen until the next tank pulse. Keep them back. Flank teams, stay flank, do not move to the front, we need you right there. Rear team, report any movement when you see it.”

Michaels, Dave, Yen, and Jacobs lined up as the convoy turned the street corner to face the incoming horde. They started to fire at will as the horde dropped in front of them, with the next endless wave to move in from behind.

“We’re keeping about a hundred feet back as we move, sir,” Dave radioed to Douglas.

“Keep it up, thirty more seconds,” Douglas replied.

From the corner of his eye, Dave saw movement of the infected rounding a corner at their side. Swinging his rifle down, he grabbed a slender, cylindrical tube from his belt, and threw it as far as he could at them, which released a sudden flash of light with a pulse. He brought his rifle back up to the front assault as the infected at their flank fell to the ground from the grenade pulse.
They’re coming in on us
, he thought in the back of his mind,
circling back around and absorbing us within them.

“Tank Two, fire!” Douglas yelled out as another large pulse came from the convoy, wiping out another hundred feet of the horde that encircled them. “Two minutes starts now—rear team is reporting assaults from behind. We will be completely surrounded soon but will maintain clearance if we stay cool and keep our rhythm,” Douglas said.

The convoy pushed deeper through the city streets as daylight peeked over the eastern horizon behind them. The complete blackout of the city in front was beginning to wash away with the morning glow. Dave saw the downtown buildings in a constant flux of human beings streaming from every window. Freeway overpasses erupted with masses of infected people and completely covered the traffic jams that had been created during the initial outbreak. As the convoy continued sending pulses and paving their way over bodies, Dave turned a street corner, and looked down into a shallow valley that led to the center of the city. The entire valley was one unified and continuous swarm of the infected that had pooled over cars, buildings, and trees. He couldn’t make out any signs of the city structures beneath them; the dead had stacked on top so that they were heaped up over the small homes and power lines.

“It’s like a, like a gigantic heap of ants, you know? You know when they just start crawling over each other—like on a sidewalk crack?” Jacobs said while throwing a pulse grenade down the hill beneath them.

“Yeah, Jacobs, the analogy is pretty immediate to everyone,” Michaels said as she started down the hill, firing at the impending horde in front of them. “How’s everyone’s battery life? Any one need a change out?”

“Getting close, but I’ve got two more charge packs, so I’m good for a while,” Dave said as he followed behind her, being careful not to slip on the slick road around the bodies.

“I’ve got news for everyone,” Douglas said on the radio, “the power plant is almost directly in the middle of that sea of bodies that you’re looking at.”

“Eye of the storm,” Yen said quietly.

“Yen, you idiot, the eye of the storm is calm and quiet. We’re heading into the worst part of the entire city where they’ve all collected,” Michaels yelled at him.

“Whatever, let’s just do this!” he replied, attempting to muster the excitement he had when he first started combat training a year ago.

As the convoy went down the small hill, Dave saw that they now had become completely surrounded by the horde, on all sides. The five tank convoy was engulfed within a swarm of hundreds of thousands of infected bodies; each of them climbing, scratching, and following after the movement of the team’s footsteps and clanking sound of the treads of the tanks. Each alleyway, every yard and all buildings were bursting with the infected, which continually moved after them only to be knocked down by the EMPs that burst from the convoy at timed intervals. He felt like they were going deeper into a dark cave with only a single torch to guide them.

The convoy snaked in between cars and toppled buses. Surprisingly to Dave, it hadn’t appeared that a mass exodus of the city had happened all at once, but seemed more like a blitzkrieg of the infected that stopped everyone in their tracks.
Or maybe they just gave up
, he thought. As they came down the hill, the tanks continued their timed bursts, while all the ground teams fired their EMP-57s during the two-minute lapse. The entire convoy was in a continual shell of electromagnetic bursts, while the horde was kept at bay within a radius of a few hundred feet.

They turned a corner down a narrow street that was completely jammed with cars. “Captain,” Yen got on the radio, “I don’t think we can go down this way. There is no way around the traffic and bodies here.”

“Yen, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re in tanks. We’re going up and over!” Douglas yelled back. “Get your asses on top of those cars.”

Dave put his foot on the back bumper of a car and leapt onto the roof, with the rest of the front team following. They were in between a tank burst interval, and kept their rifles pointed out toward the end of the street, where they could see some movement. The roofs of all the crammed cars were littered with motionless bodies as the team moved forward from car to car. They jumped on the trunks, ran to the hoods, and then leapt to the next car. The first tank of the convoy rolled up a small car and completely crushed it beneath its weight as its treads lifted up and over to the next car. The line of shock tanks, the size of townhouses, moved over the cars and burrowed through heaps of bodies as they continued to release pulses.

With thirty seconds until the next shock tank burst, the ground teams fired continually ahead at the horde that approached at the end of the street. One by one, Douglas would report the casualties of the ground teams as their ranks began to thin. Steadily, the convoy inched its way over cars, and twisted onward toward the center of the shallow valley.

At one point, Dave realized that he hadn’t heard from Yen for a few minutes. “Hey, where the hell is Yen?”

“He got bit, so I shot him in the face,” Jacobs said tediously.

Dave didn’t reply and waited for Michaels to say something, but she only marched forward, pulling her trigger as she leapt up onto a car roof.

“I think we’re getting close to the power plant,” she said only loud enough for Dave to hear.

“Convoy, we are three quarters of a mile away from the power plant,” Douglas said into their radios.“We will approach the main building from the west end and aim at literally any large doors that we see. Front team, make sure to have C4 prepared to open up any gates or doors.”

The convoy sunk down into the writhing valley of moving bodies as the sun began to clear the eastern half of the sky, beating down on the ground team’s helmets. The stench of rotting bodies baked in the sun, permeating the air with acrid sweetness that filled their masks. They marched forward over bodies, exploded gas tanks, and every household object imaginable from lampshades to oven racks.

Inside the middle tank, Stark thought methodically, and began to see how the plan might work. He was meticulously double-checking field vector equations on the palm of his hand after all of his notepad space was filled up.
This can work
, he thought
. I actually think this might work if all the power lines have the right capacitance
. His confidence grew as he realized that maybe everything he had been able to accomplish up until this point wasn’t just his idiotic luck. He flipped on his radio. “Commander Douglas, how close are we to the power plant?”

“Sir, the front ground team has visualized it beyond a final row of neighborhood houses. I believe we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Please, stand by,” Douglas said.

“Very good, please let me know when I can get out of this tin can. We have a lot of work to do at that plant.”

“Yes, sir.”

*****

It wasn't till midday that the convoy finally reached the chain-linked gate of the power station, which was a cluster of low buildings that stretched over several city blocks. Long smoke stacks sprouted up from the plant and had ceased to pump vapors into the sky. Thousands of power lines clung to transformer arrays, spreading out from the power plant and feeding into the city.

The squad had managed to burrow their way through the heaps of the infected. The convoy was an empty island in the middle of a sea of the dead. The power station itself was stuffed full of writhing human bodies; spilling from windows and climbing up the concrete walls that enclosed a front parking lot.

"We're heading straight in until we see any access point into the building. Ground teams, report any entrance into the building whatsoever, and that will be our entry point," Douglas said.

The tanks blasted away with EMP pulses as Dave and Michaels approached the open gate that led into the parking lot. Stepping swiftly over bodies, they weaved through rows of cars, and led the convoy over to what Dave thought was a loading bay at the back end of the power plant. As he threw off a few more EMP grenades at a crowd, the tank convoy crushed cars and bodies behind them, until they all approached a row of double metal doors into the building that were left open at some point during the initial outbreak.

Stark’s radio garbled with Douglas’ voice. “Dr. Stark, we have arrived at the east end of the power station. It is safe for you to exit the tank and begin your preparations on the Bunny.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Stark crouched up from his seat and adjusted his pants up around his waist, checking his EMP-M9 sidearm that was clipped to his belt.
I guess we’re doing this
, he thought.

Outside the tank, the air was dry and the sun was above him, as Stark dropped down to the bloodied pavement below. "All right!" Stark yelled out to whoever was around him. "We need to start running a whole hell of a lot of cables out from the Bunny. No one attach any one cable to anything else. I will be doing all of that." He opened a large side door on the Bunny trailer, exposing an immense array of electronic inputs and consoles. "Okay, see all these cables here?" Stark started to unwind five-inch thick cables off of a large spool mounted inside the Bunny. "I've got them all hooked up here, so just take these cables, and start running them inside the building."

Dave and Michaels came around to the open doors of the Bunny and watched as Stark unraveled more cable.

“Here, here, take these,” Stark said, handing a few spools of thick cables to Michaels.

She stood motionless and stared at him. “You want me to take those?” she asked.

Stark looked up at her, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Yes! Of course, take these,” he said annoyed, dropping a spool at her feet.

“We just lost a lot of people getting into this hell hole while this guy sits in luxury in the middle of it,” Michaels said to Dave, but for everyone to hear.

“Michaels!” Douglas screamed, walking up to her.

“He just starts barking orders at us—” she continued.

“Michaels! Shut the fuck up, and go take those cables up to those doors!” Douglas screamed in her face.

Stark looked back at Michaels, with an empty expression, as she grabbed the cables up and walked off.

Douglas turned to Stark. "Dr. Stark, I will lead a team inside the building first with you from behind. We will need your... guidance once we are in the building."

"Well, I'm not sure I’ll know where I'm going either. Does, does anyone here speak Spanish?" Stark asked.

Douglas stared back at him. "Yes sir, I believe so."

"Is it possible we came all the way to this infected hole of millions of people in Mexico and no one here speaks or reads any Spanish?"

"It is possible, sir." Douglas looked back with a stone face.

"Holy shit. All right, let's just get going." Stark looked out of the corner of his eye at slow movement on the roof of the building.

Douglas barked out orders over the radio as several more men came out of the tanks and set up a perimeter around the convoy for defense.

Dave, Douglas, and a few others from the flank ground units met Michaels at the loading bay doors and looked into a dimly lit but vast building within. "Let's get in there," Douglas said and prodded Dave forward.

Dave stepped in, turning on a flashlight on the top of his rifle, which casted a white beam of light across dozens of rectangular boxes and several series of chain linked fences that ran along the walls. The room was wide and stretched for several hundred feet with running wires and metallic boxes housing electrical equipment. Dave looked up and saw two running pairs of catwalks suspended from the ceiling that connected to a stairwell, which led to a platform a few feet ahead.