No Easy Hope - 01 (37 page)

So far, so good.

 I turned around to see what Steve was doing. He crouched low and carried the box of grenades over to where I lay.

“How’s your throwing arm?” He asked, still grinning like a lunatic.

I shook my head and looked back down to the other end of the road. The center of the infected horde was ten yards past the building where we were hiding. All of their attention was riveted to the meals-on-wheels leading them out of town. Steve took a grenade out of the box and handed it to me.

“You know how to use one of these?” He asked.

I almost said no, but then I remembered that Gabriel
had
taught me how to use them. Grenades are pretty simple, really. Pull the pin, release the spoon, and throw the green ball of metal at the thing that you want to blow up. Take cover, wait for the explosion, and repeat as necessary. Steve didn’t wait for me, he pulled the pin and hurled his grenade directly into the center of the horde. I watched in horrid fascination as the little bomb detonated, sending a sphere of gore, blood, and severed limbs flying into the air. Before realizing what I was doing, I pulled the pin on my own grenade and did the same thing.

The undead following the trucks barely seemed to notice. They couldn’t tell which direction the bombs were coming from, and didn’t seem to care. I wondered if there was enough cognitive capacity left in their rotten brains for them to grasp what was happening to them. Steve put the box of grenades between us, and we lobbed bomb after bomb into the tightly packed mob of revenants. At some point, I realized that the both of us were giggling and snickering like a couple of schoolboys every time a grenade tore a hole in their ranks. As I did my grisly work, I vaguely wondered if I had the same crazed smile on my face that Steve did.

“Dude, this is so fucking freaky.” I said, struggling to hold back a bout of hysterical laughter.

“I know. I don’t know why I think it’s so funny when they blow up like that.” Steve laughed as he tossed another grenade.

When we had thrown all but five of the grenades, Steve tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at the sniper rifle slung across my back. I took it off and handed it to him, as well as the boxes of cartridges. Steve came up to a kneeling position and propped the sniper rifle on top of the false front. He flipped the lens covers off the scope and peered through it at the horde that was slowly moving away from us.

“How well does the suppressor on this thing work?” He asked.

“Pretty good.” I replied. “Let them get a hundred yards or so away before you open up. They shouldn’t be able to triangulate us from that range.”

Steve cast me a quizzical glance.

“What do you mean ‘triangulate us’?” He asked.

“The infected have some kind of weird ability that enhances their hearing. Didn’t you read a copy of that manual Bill passed around?”

“No, I haven’t gotten around to it yet.” Steve turned back to the scope and sighted through it.

“Well, you should. Assuming we get out of this alive, that is.”

Steve smiled as he swiveled the barrel from target to target.

“You worry too much. If worse comes to worse, we can shoot our way out of here.”

“I’d rather it not come to that.” I said.

We waited for a few minutes while the diversion trucks put some distance between our position and the horde. The grenades had not done as much damage as I had hoped they would. We had taken out a total of maybe twenty or thirty infected. More than twice that number were blown apart or knocked down by the blasts, but were still not out of commission. Several of them dragged shattered legs or stumps of ragged, bloody torsos behind them as they crawled in pursuit of the horde. I tapped Steve on the shoulder and pointed to them.

“Take the crippled ones out first, they’re the most dangerous.”

“How do you figure?” Steve asked, looking up from the scope.

“They’re low to the ground, the folks coming behind us might not see them. All it takes is one bite on the leg, and its game over.” I replied.

Steve thought about it for a moment, then nodded in agreement. He shifted his aim, and started eliminating the crawlers. If his accuracy was impressive with a battle rifle, then his work with the sniper rig was nearly superhuman. He went from target to target, painting the asphalt with their brains faster than I would have been able to from close range with my HK. The speed at which he could sight in and fire was quite a thing to behold.

While Steve went to work killing the infected, it occurred to me that I must have undergone some kind of drastic psychological change over the last few months. Before the outbreak, the sight of all that bloody carnage would have had me spewing my guts out. After everything I had seen and been through, even in that short amount of time, I had become inured to the sight of guts and gore. I wondered what else about me was going to change in the days to come. Steve interrupted my thoughts by touching me on the arm.

“Come on, let’s get to the truck and radio the sweep team.”

I stood up into a crouch and surveyed as much of the town as I could see. Steve had dispatched all of the crawlers, and I didn’t see any infected coming in our direction. The horde had split into two groups, and the closest of them were just disappearing over the hills to the south of us. Steve clipped the last five grenades to his tactical vest and slung the sniper rifle over his back. We left the empty grenade box on the roof and climbed down the ladder to the street below.

Steve switched to his M1A as I brought up my rifle and scanned around. We moved to the edge of the building to our right and checked both directions. The way was clear. We double-timed it to the truck and climbed in the cab. I picked up the radio and pressed the button to talk.

“This is Eric, everybody check in, over.”

Rick and Earl both responded at the same time. I told Rick to go first, and for God’s sake say ‘over’ when he was finished. Rick advised that he and Ethan were half a mile from town and would stay on the road for another two miles before doubling back. Earl gave a similar report. I was relieved to hear that the divided hordes were following the diversion team just like we had planned. I asked if they needed any assistance from us, and both drivers declined. I looked at Steve, and he shrugged.

“I know we planned for three trucks, but it looks like two is getting the job done just fine. Let’s just radio the sweep team, and help them clear the town.”

I agreed and keyed the radio. Once I had Cody and Stan inbound, I drove the truck back onto the main highway and waited for them in the Burger King parking lot. The undead that Ethan and I had shot were still strewn about the pavement, maggot ridden and rotting in the hot sun. The smell was terrible. Now that the fighting had died down, scores of vultures returned to feast on the dead flesh littering the highway. There must have been more than a hundred dead bodies, and pieces of bodies, in varying states of decay.

When Stan and Cody arrived, I got out of the truck and walked over to greet them. Stan was driving, and Cody stood in the back bracing himself against the roof. When Stan slowed his vehicle to a halt, Cody hopped down and surveyed the carnage around us.

“Jesus Christ.” He whispered.

His eyes went wide when he stepped out onto the highway and saw the mass of rotting corpses scattered down the road.

“We have to do something about all those dead bodies.” Cody said.

Stan got out of the truck and walked over to stand beside Cody. The normally stoic police officer paled noticeably as he took in the horror that had befallen Alexis. The ground in front of every building glittered with broken glass. Shattered windows gaped at us like empty eye sockets. Swarms of flies buzzed from corpse to corpse, and scattered before the flapping wings of vultures that tore bloody strips from the dead bodies. Burned out shells of buildings tottered at dangerous angles, threatening to fall at the slightest touch. Waist high grass and weeds choked the ground where the concrete and pavement didn’t cover it. Even those places had the beginnings of plants and trees sprouting up between the cracks, potholes, and crevices that no one was coming to repair.

“Come on, guys.” I said. “Cody’s right, let’s see if we can use the trucks to clear out all these corpses.”

Cody and Stan nodded slowly. Steve motioned toward the strip mall down the road from us.

“There’s a hardware store over there. Let’s search it for something we can use to move the bodies.”

“Good thinking. You guys take up firing positions outside the door, and I’ll see if I can draw out any creeps in there.” I said.

We walked over and formed a firing line in front of the store. Steve covered the door, while Cody and Stan watched our flanks. I took my crowbar from Steve and used it to bang loudly on the steel frame around the entrance. I peered through dusty glass into the dark interior looking for movement, and cursed myself for not remembering to bring a flashlight. After a minute or two went by with no sign of movement from inside, I tried to use the crowbar to break the lock. It was too strong. Stan suggested that I try breaking the hinges instead. After straining, grunting, and cursing, I finally managed to pry the door open. We stood outside and waited for a few moments. No undead appeared, so we went inside. I waited outside and guarded the exit while the other three cleared the hardware store. They did not find any infected inside, but they did find several large boxes of heavy blue tarps. I opened one of the boxes and nodded in satisfaction.

“These will do nicely. I’ll pull my truck around.” I said.

Stan and I were the biggest and physically strongest of the group, so we handled moving the bodies. I found a box of shop towels in the hardware store, and we tied them around our faces to ward off some of the stench as we worked. Cody and Steve kept watch as Stan and I rolled the bodies onto the tarps and dragged them into the middle of the highway. I could tell Stan was having a hard time keeping his revulsion in check. He struggled on manfully until one of the bodies we picked up fell apart. The leg Stan was pulling on came away at the hip with a crunch and a horrid sucking sound. The body fell to the ground, and its swollen stomach burst open spilling putrid entrails out onto the pavement. Stan dropped the leg, ran a few steps away, and heaved his guts out onto the ground. I didn’t blame him, I almost lost it myself.

We spent the better part of an hour clearing buildings and dragging corpses out into the street. Once we had used up all of the tarps, I hitched them to my truck’s winch by the anchor loops, and dragged them onto a wide lawn behind a small church at the southern end of town. Stan rode shotgun and helped me roll the bodies onto the grass. Once the first batch was clear, we folded the tarps up and put them in the back of the truck. Stan and I sat down on the tailgate for a few minutes to drink some water and catch our breath.

“Any particular reason you chose a church yard to dump the bodies?” Stan asked.

“It just seemed fitting.” I said. “If we can’t give them a proper burial, the least we can do is let them return to the Earth on hallowed ground.”

Stan’s face grew pensive, and he was silent for a while.

“Do you still believe in God?” He asked, staring out across the ruined town.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Before the outbreak I would have said yes, but now…”

Stan nodded. We got up and went back to work moving the dead. While clearing the storeroom of a Laundromat, Stan nearly got jumped by a couple of infected. Cody put them down with my Sig .22. They were a man and a woman, and both of them looked to be in their mid-thirties. They were both Asian, and I guessed that they owned the place before the outbreak. The woman had only a bite mark on one arm, but the man was missing most of his face, throat, and left shoulder. They must have barricaded themselves into the storeroom after the woman became infected. Sometime after that, she turned and went after the man trapped inside with her. They spent the next three months locked up together, unable to get out of the room. Stan checked their hands, and noticed that they wore matching wedding bands. I think he had tears in his eyes as he stood up, but I didn’t say anything. I knew how he felt.

The last place we cleared was Alan McMurray’s gun store. The scene was laid out exactly as Ethan had described it. I understood what Ethan meant when he said that the undead worked Alan over pretty badly. There wasn’t much left on the bones, and what we found was scattered around the room in pieces. We were a tired, sweat drenched, somber group of men by the time I radioed for Bill to bring in the moving trucks. The four of us climbed into the back of my Tundra and sat silently on the sidewalls as we waited for the others to arrive. Rick and Earl radioed in to let us know that they had ditched the creeps following them and were making their way back to town. Earl led his group of infected over the edge of a steep hill that descended into a creek. Rick drove his truck into a big cornfield and used a farm trail to get back to the road, leaving the horde behind. Even if the infected turned and pursued them back to town, it would be days before they reached us, being as far away as they were.