Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 (8 page)

4

He ran for about ten minutes while the darkness fell. There were
no street lights or other electrical sources. He thought the darkness
would be an advantage against the crazy people who might shoot at
him, but it turned out to be a big liability for fending off zombies.

Almost without realizing it, he'd picked up a handful of runners.
Among all the other noises of the city, and his own footfalls, he
almost missed the sound of feet behind him. He kept to the middle of
the street, hoping to avoid tripwires or piles of human remains, but
a quick look back while running across an intersection let him make
out at least three or four people chasing him.

“I don't suppose you're alive, huh?”

No response.

Damn
.

He steadied himself. Forest Park was still miles away, and now he
had a fan club. The risk of falling or getting delayed in any way had
just become instantly deadly.

For a little while, he tried to tune them out. Just like any
number of track and cross country meets he'd endured. He wasn't a
contender in most of them, but he was a finisher. That was all that
mattered, most times.

A large search light peered down from a helicopter to his right,
as he cruised through the night.

Two jets flew very low, almost directly above his head. He
absently thought about bombs—he was on their flight path—but
resolved that if he was ever given time to think about bombs, he
probably wasn't being bombed.

Blocks ahead he watched as someone fired a machine gun—an
honest-to-god machine gun—as they sent the tracers skipping
across an intersection. The rounds danced from his left to his right.
A big spotlight at ground level illuminated the intersection for a
few seconds, then turned off.

He considered slowing down so he could avoid that cross street
until the shots were gone, but slow wasn't in his vocabulary. He
continued ahead, though it didn't look like the bullets were letting
up.

At the last intersection before the dangerous one, the attack
stopped. He picked up his pace, intending to get across in the lull.

Did they stop, or are they reloading?

That was the most important question on Earth.

When he arrived at the road, he looked both ways as he would on
any other run. A pair of Humvees were far down the road on his left.
Shockingly, both sat under powerful spotlights, almost like they
wanted to be seen. Each also aimed searchlights where they fired
their guns. They were two intersections down, and they each fired
down different roads. At that moment they weren't firing his way.

He sprinted. The cross street was huge—it felt like a
superhighway—and it took him an eternity to cross it. The
entire time he imagined the gunners changing their aim, so the
bullets came his way.

A tracer flashed in front of him.

He'd made it a little over half way, but the rounds started
passing in front of him.

The searchlight caught him in full view.

He threw himself down and lined himself up so his head faced the
guns. He didn't know if that was a bigger risk than spreading himself
out lengthwise, but it seemed to make sense. His head was turned so
he could see the runners behind him.

Five or six had tagged along. They were closer than he figured
they'd be.

Unlike him, they made no effort to get low. As the gunners up the
street noticed their rounds were making contact with something, both
gunners focused efforts on Liam's intersection. The runners stood out
in the glare of light.

The first zombie was halved, and he fell with a disgusting splash
to the pavement. He'd only made it a short ways across.

Liam used the distraction to claw his way toward a body that had
been shot earlier. It put something between him and the gun trucks,
though it would offer no protection if the bullets wanted him.

One gunner stopped, but the other swept the entire road again. It
brought down a second zombie, and when it hit, the tracers spun off
in odd directions. In the uneven light, Liam saw the woman get
shredded.

The second gunner started up again. His shots were short, so the
rounds hit the road between Liam and the Humvees, and the rounds
skipped over his intersection. Several skipped right over his head.
Some made funny sounds as they went by.

One of the runners made it all the way to Liam and tripped over
him as he lay there.

As was common with the zombies, it struck the ground with great
force, without using its arms to catch itself. The hollow slap of its
skull on the asphalt would have been funny in any other situation.
Now, not so much.

The zombie seemed to notice him as it struggled to get up. Instead
of finding its feet, it crawled toward Liam. It wore shorts and a
white tank top with bloody accents.

He struggled to get out the scissors.

Several more rounds whizzed right over the zombie.

“Just a little lower,” he shouted, knowing he wouldn't
be heard.

The gunfire stopped completely.

He propped himself up on his elbow, intending to prepare to fight
the crawler, and the gunfire resumed. Both guns angrily pounded the
intersection like it had killed the gunners' pet cat.

The zombie was unafraid. It closed the distance. The scissors felt
miserable in his hand, but he readied them.

At the last second, he gambled on another tactic.

Using his experience with squats, he got to his feet and then
sprang up.

The tracer rounds bounced and skipped wildly further down the
street, but he ignored the danger. As expected, the zombie got to his
feet as well.

All the better to grab my prey...

He dropped back down and tried to continue drag-crawling himself
across the street. His black suit jacket would be harder to see than
the man's white shirt. Or, he hoped that would be the case.

A repetitive thumping noise sounded from the zombie. It had been
struck several times in succession, but it stumbled after Liam. He
moved as fast as he could on his hands and knees, but figured if the
zombie caught him—it would bring the angry thumps with it.

More impacts.

He imagined a tracer flew underneath his chest as he was on his
hands and knees. Maybe it was the fear.

He picked up the speed like he was doing exercises with his track
team.

“Who can cross the intersection the fastest, without
standing and running? Go!”

In ten seconds he was across and had another corner of a building
between himself and the gunners. He got to his feet and looked back.

The pursuit had been wiped out. The zombie closest to him had huge
chunks removed from his chest, and one of his arms had been taken
clean off. His white shirt had turned sickly black, and blood poured
from a large hole in its head. It had taken the full force of an
untold number of machine gun rounds. And, it had almost made it.

The lights flicked off.

Liam waited for fifteen seconds and then peeked around the corner.
The Humvees were aiming their lights down other roads now.

Behind him, a couple of runner zombies came into the intersection,
saw the lights, then headed that direction. It was as if they'd been
following him but now had juicier targets.

Since they had lights on themselves, along with powerful weapons,
he allowed that he was glad the zombies were targeting someone else
for a change. If he wanted to get safe, getting to those guns might
be the right choice to survive the night, but that wasn't the
direction he was heading.

His journey westward continued.

5

He tried to guess how far he'd come since he'd left the Polar
Bears. With all the distractions and changes in directions, he
estimated he'd gone three or four miles. That left at least two to
go.

A twenty-minute run under ideal conditions.

He felt the dead weight of fatigue hit him hard. The combination
of the drain of adrenaline and the fall of night had him wishing he
could get off his feet and rest.

Push on!

The zombies were out there, but he kept moving fast enough they
couldn't see him. He thought there could be runners behind him, but
he couldn't be sure. His footfalls were stealthy compared to the
zombies, and if they were back there—he'd never assume they
weren't—they were very quiet.

More gunfire from every direction in the city. The chatter of the
machine guns was distinctive, but a thousand other guns were being
discharged over the urban landscape. Rarely, someone would shoot
close enough to worry him.

This city has lost its mind.

If he looked down the cross streets to his left, he'd often see
the tracers of the Humvees two blocks over. They skipped or arced to
the west in the same direction he was going. But they couldn't reach
him.

When he was only a couple blocks outside Forest Park, he saw the
dim lights of the medical towers ahead. They still used generators to
keep the places lit and functioning. They called to him.

“I'm here, Liam.”

“I'm coming, girlfriend,” he said to the darkness. The
reply was the ricochet of a bullet. It snapped somewhere close. That
got him to move from the middle of the road and approach more
cautiously.

As he closed the distance to the park, he became aware of where
all the gunfire was originating. It wasn't just all over the city. It
was a very specific point in the city. A perimeter, actually.

The boundary of the park was a combination of derelict cars,
parking barriers, and whatever junk people could stack in piles.
They'd filled the gap between buildings. It presented a formidable
barrier to keep the zombies out, assuming the defenders had
sufficient ammo and that the military wasn't instructed to bomb the
place to oblivion.

But the larger problem was that he was now on the outside, looking
in. Those gunshots were coming in his direction. The far side of a
big intersection was blocked by city buses, dump trucks, and other
large vehicles. A few men with spotlights walked on top, illuminating
the zombies in the street outside their position. Gunners would then
dispatch them. A ton of bodies littered the intersection.

They appeared to be using a similar tactic as the military down
the road. They were drawing in the zombies by using light, which gave
them clear shots at the easy targets. The biggest difference was the
caliber being used. No machine guns or tracer rounds, here.

Liam heard men and women yelling from across the street, but they
sounded as if they were on the other side of a wide river. The
zombies in the “river” between them kept him from yelling
out to them. In the darkness of night, anything could happen.

A jet screeched overhead.

Choppers whomped in the distance.

Always gunfire.

Amidst all the confusion, he felt something sting him on the back
of his shoulder. He reached back and froze.

A little helicopter drone hummed by, well overhead. It moved with
silent grace over the intersection, and he could hear the little
wisps of air as the drone tagged other zombies standing out there. It
didn't hurt to remove the little tag, and in the darkness he had no
way to know what color his was. All he could think about was that he
was now targeted for death.

A methodical cadence of gunfire erupted nearby. Four shots in a
row. He searched the intersection as it sounded as if it were coming
from that direction.

He saw it. It was on the next block. The little drone tank came
out through the glass frontage of a fast food chain store. With a
quick turn, it engaged some zombies on the parking lot, then headed
for the road.

He threw down the drone's tag. He briefly considered throwing it
into the flat, but couldn't say for sure if anyone still lived there.
It would be a terrible way to die—some kid throwing a killer
drone tracking device into your living room. One country music star
was enough responsibility for him…

He crawled along the base of the brick home, looking for a way
inside. It pained him to do it, but he needed a place to hole up
until the light of day. He'd never get across the intersection, or
the road, or the barrier, if he had to run out of the black of night
to do it.

But he wasn't going to sleep in the streets, either.

There was a tiny side window to the basement, as he hoped. The
home was very similar to Grandma Marty's. He had to push firmly with
the bottom of his shoes, but the lock was weak. He pushed the window
open and then slithered feet-first into the basement.

If there were survivors waiting down there—or zombies—he'd
take his chances with them, rather than deal with that tank drone
again. It continued to shoot at will in the night.

Please, just one night of safety.

It was rare for him to pray outright, but he was so tired he
pretty much forgot Grandma's rule never to pray for himself.

6

He fell asleep and dropped into a dream. It was a vividly bright
day in Grandma Marty's backyard. The grass was a lush green, and the
flower gardens were in full bloom. While he walked, he studied the
larger neighborhood. It took some time to process.

I know I'm dreaming. That's odd.

The small garage at the end of the lot was flattened. Every garage
and fence on the near side of the alleyway had been similarly
smashed. Several houses, including the one next to Grandma, had been
burnt to the ground. He made sure her home was OK, and to his relief,
it stood with resilience as it looked down on him.

The top level was Angie's apartment inside the two-story brick
building. So many memories flooded his mind, but he kept grounded by
remembering he was inside his dream. Being in this house, so much
like hers, probably jogged something in his memory.

“I'll avoid Angie's room like the plague,” he said
with laughter. He figured if he was dreaming, he might as well enjoy
it.