When There's No More room In Hell: A Zombie Novel (17 page)

“Fuck
it. Put your foot down, Ian, we have to try and push through. Use your guns to try and clear us a path. We’ll be right behind you doing the same.”

Ian’s vehicle lurched forward
and began to gather speed as he blazed away with the gun in the turret. He fired directly ahead and into the crowd and Marcus and Stu fired left and right, trying to keep the mass of infected at bay.

Over the roar of the guns they could hear the crowd. The loud constant hum of the moans with individual wails and cries from the dead.
They all surged toward the moving SUVs with no consideration for the damage that the vehicles and guns were doing as they tore through the crowd. They were completely focused on reaching the vehicles.

Many did
reach them, only to be slammed out of the way as the bumpers smashed into them, or they were dragged underneath and chewed up by the heavy armoured wheels. Some sprinted at the sides of the trucks and bounced off, rebounding back into the crowd or to the ground.

Marcus lo
oked down as he fired into them. They were just a seething mass of blackened, foul-smelling, growling figures and couldn’t be recognised as being in anyway human. He saw no features in their faces, just the gaping mouths and swollen blistered skin. They attacked relentlessly and some literally exploded on impact with the vehicles as the bumpers pierced the skin and caused the gasses and entrails to escape from their rotten, bloated bodies.

The heavy armour of the vehicles was impenetrable and there was no way that the crowd could get through it. But Marcus feared that enough of them could get in front and underneath to cause the team to lose momentum and traction on the road surface.

“Keep going. Don’t let them slow us down,” he yelled. “We get stuck here and we’re fucked!”

The last of the rounds on the belt of ammunition fed through his gun and then stopped. Quickly and without thou
ght, through years of practice, he lifted the top cover, cleared the feed tray and placed in a fresh belt of two hundred from the ammunition tray. He slammed the top cover back down, gave it a tap with his fist and pulled the cocking leaver back to feed the first of the link and belted rounds into the machinegun. In all, it took just a few seconds and he was soon staring down through the sight again firing at the attacking mass of diseased faces.

With ringing ears
, and the fast rhythmic crackling of the gun as it shuddered against his shoulder and vibrated through his body, he watched as body after body fell. Sweat was dripping into his eyes making them sting and blurring his vision, but he couldn’t afford to wipe them clear. He had to keep up the rate of fire.

He could
hear the other guns firing, and in his peripheral vision he could see Stu’s vehicle as it swayed and rocked over the piles of bodies that it crushed beneath its wheels. His own SUV was doing the same. Marcus was being jolted and tussled around in the gun turret and, on a few occasions, his rounds flew in to the air as he clung to the gun for balance and the barrel was forced upward.

The SUV
s struggled, pushing hard against the weight of the crowd. Ian was ploughing ahead and leaving a trail of smashed and twisted bodies in his wake. Though for every walking corpse they lay to rest, another soon took its place and filled the gaps as they clambered to reach the men in the trucks. They pulled and pushed and tore at each other in their determination to reach their prize, only to be cut down or crushed under the wheels once they reached it.

The air was thick with the stink of the dead and the cordite and smoke of
the hundreds of rounds fired into them. Bodies collapsed all around as hot 7.62 mm sized pieces of metal spat from the machineguns and punched through them. Limbs and entrails covered the ground like a thick repulsive swamp, with the broken bodies of the dead mixed in as the feet of the others stepped on them and trampled them beneath.

Sini had his foot pressed down hard on the accelerator but the vehicle was slowing. They were losing momentum. The wheels were losing traction even though
they were in four wheel drive. The sheer mass and weight of the crowd that filled the wake of Ian’s vehicle was straining the engine to its limit. Bodies and limbs were clogging up the wheels and the drive shaft and they were reduced to a crawl. All the time, more and more of the relentless shambling creatures attacked the convoy.

Marcus noticed the loss in momentum and screamed down through the turret, “Sini, put your fucking foot down, get us outta here.”

“This is as good as it gets, Marcus. There's just too many of them under the wheels.”

Sini was steering the vehicle left and right
, trying to shift the piles of corpses from underneath and gain just a moment of traction on the road in the hope that they could then gain power. It was no use; the ground was too soft and fluid.

Marcus never let up his rate of fire. He felt panic rising within him. The thought of being slowed to a halt and stranded in a sea of rotting walking corpses that
wanted to do nothing other than tear him apart and eat him, filled him with terror. It occurred to him that many other teams could have succumbed to the same kind of onslaught and were either overwhelmed or even trapped and surrounded, unable to move from their vehicles.

He stole a glance to the left and saw that Ian was almost clear with his truck
and swerving through the thinner edges of the crowd. Between Marcus and Ian though, was a swarm of grotesque heads and faces and arms, crammed shoulder to shoulder, surging toward them. They were coming from every direction, spilling out from buildings and the streets and alleys that ran between them.

He
heard Ian’s voice through his earpiece. “Stu, Marcus is pretty much dead in the water. I’ll do what I can from here to clear the path for you, but you're gonna need to close up and ram him forward.”

“Roger that
, Ian. We’re struggling ourselves. The ground is thick with the fuckers,” Stu replied.

Marcus looked to his right, and through the crowd he saw the upper part of Stu’s SUV rocking as though on a choppy
sea. To Marcus, it looked like there were thousands of the infected between their vehicles, but Stu was approaching at a steady speed. Yan was aiming his bumper straight for the rear of Sini and Marcus’ vehicle.

Ian was laying down a tremendous weight of fire
into Marcus and Stu’s path. The butt of the machinegun pounded into his shoulder as the belted ammunition rattled through the feed tray and into the chamber. Below his feet, the pile of link and used cases grew rapidly, creating a slag heap of brass and steel. His fire never let up and his barrel was beginning to smoulder and glow red with the heat of thousands of rounds thundering through it.

Stu gripped the edge of the turret as the vehicle made contact with the rear of Marcus’ SUV
, causing them to jolt hard and bounce about in their positions. Without letting up on the pedal, Yan pushed the SUV to its limit. The engine screamed with the effort and threatened to burst, but the vehicle kept on going, the wheels spinning and gripping in turn and they began to make headway.

Rounds began to whizz down th
e sides of Marcus and Stu’s SUVs as Ian concentrated his fire to the left and right of the line of advance. Red tracer rounds whipped through the air with their loud cracks and dozens of bodies continued to drop on both sides of the road.

The progress was slow and the ammunition stored in the turrets was dwindling fast, but
all three vehicles were making progress with Ian’s pushing forward and Marcus and Stu almost clear of the tightly packed crowd.

Finally
in the clear, the wheels gripped the hard dry tarmac and the engines roared as the gears changed. The filth-coated SUVs raced away from the scene as the dead vainly staggered after them.

A few kilometres further along
, Marcus, heart still pounding in his chest, called a halt on an open stretch of road that was flanked by open wasteland and provided them with good all around visibility. Marcus, Stu and Ian dismounted while the drivers stayed behind their wheels in case of the need for a quick bug out.

The first thing needed to be done was to restock and reload the
machineguns in the turrets with ammunition. Thousands of rounds had been fired and the depleted supplies stored within the ammunition bins, directly below and inside the turrets, were replenished from the crates in the rear of the vehicles amongst the other supplies and stores.

The SUV
s looked like they had been driven through an abattoir. Smears of what looked to Marcus like grease and rotten chicken skin, covered the side of the vehicle in long streaks as the dead had attacked and been brushed aside by the heavy trucks. Thick dark smears of congealed and coagulated blood were splattered over the windows and doors. Around what was left of the cracked mirrors and door hinges, chunks of flesh and cloth were caught as they had been torn from their owners by the momentum.

At the front
, around the grill and engine bay and in the wheel arches was a tangled mess of hands and feet. Even a mangled head was caught between the wheel and the steering arm. Slivers of green, brown, and deep red putrefying meat covered the bumper and already the flies were starting to swarm.

The stench
hit Marcus, and without warning he projectile vomited all over the hood of his SUV, adding to the already stomach churning mix. He couldn’t control it; it came from his mouth and his nose and the more he tried to hold it in, the more violently it forced its way out. The whole content of his stomach was sprayed over the noxious soup of body parts and gore as his driver, Sini, sat watching from behind the wheel, cringing and grimacing with every new addition of gory artwork added to the surface of the hood.

“Thank you
, Marcus, and once you're finished, could you do a shit on the windshield for me please?” Sini was grinning, waving at him from inside. “It’s not quite disgusting enough for me yet.”

Marcus couldn’t speak
. He tried to look up as he staggered to the edge of the road with watering eyes and raised a thumb to Sini as another bout of dry-heaving shot through him making him convulse. It took him a couple of minutes to regain control of himself. Once composed, wiping strings of bile and snot from his face, he set about checking along the opposite side for damage. With no damage found, and an empty stomach, he climbed back into the passenger seat.

Sini offered him a bar of chocolate.

They were moving again and approaching another built-up area within a few minutes. A car screeched to a halt as it shot out from a side street and stopped just in time to avoid being hit side-on by Ian’s vehicle. The driver looked up in horror, expecting the machineguns to rattle and turn his car in to a perforated tea bag. If the turrets had been manned, no doubt Ian would have done so. As it was, the Iraqi behind the wheel of the civilian car thanked his lucky stars and reversed back allowing the rest of the call sign to pass.

Stu watched in his rear view mirror as the car then fol
lowed in their wake, keeping its distance.

“That vehicle is following us up
, Marcus.”

“No worries
, Stu,” Marcus replied. “Just keep an eye on him and let me know if he looks like he's closing up.”

The streets in that area seemed untouched by th
e chaos of the rest of the city. None of the buildings appeared to be damaged by fires and there was a lack of infected, or anyone else for that matter.

F
urther along they ran into a makeshift barrier spanning the width of the road made from cars and concrete blocks that were known as T-Walls. In the narrow gap in between, Ian could see that rolls of barbed wire that blocked their route. Jim slowed to a halt and Ian began to speak into the radio but was cut short by the appearance of two men emerging from a building to the right.

Ian’s eyes grew wide as he saw the
Rocket Propelled Grenade Launchers that they carried, “RPG right!” he screamed into the handset and Jim slammed the SUV into reverse. The rest of the team followed suit, but Stu’s vehicle then halted.

“RPG rear,” w
as heard over the radio.

The civilian car that Ian had nearly T-boned had followed, stopped fifty metres bac
k, and the driver had stepped into the street carrying a launcher of his own. There was nowhere for Marcus and his men to manoeuvre to and there was a split second pause as they expected the rockets to punch into them. Nothing happened.

All three Iraqi
s were in perfect firing positions, yet they held their fire. They had caught the team off guard. The turrets were unmanned and everyone knew that if there was any movement to use the machineguns, the Iraqis could fire their armour piercing rockets into the three SUVs before they got their first rounds off.

One stepped forward and lowered his launcher. He waved a hand to the other two, who then relaxed their grip, but kept them pointed in the direction of Marcus and his team.

“We do not wish to fight you.” The accent was strong Arabic, but the English was near perfect. “But please, do not try to use your machineguns or we will have to fire. I want to speak with you.”

Marcus spoke in
to his radio, “Lads, don’t make any move toward the turrets, but be ready to debus at the first sign of trouble. Ian, Jim and Sini take the two on the right. Stu, you and Yan take out the bloke to the rear. I'm gonna get out and see what this cunt wants.”