Undead (11 page)

Temporarily in the clear, Tom raced the truck across the field, while many of the ghouls followed after, staggering slowly but in relentless pursuit of their objective. Ben aimed and fired several shots cocking and firing in rapid succession—and wasting ammunition, actually—as most of his shots missed as the truck jounced over the ruts in the grassy field, but one creature went down, with half its skull blown completely away.

The others continued to follow after the old truck, as it screeched to a halt in front of the gas pumps and the shed, and Tom and Ben leaped out. Still more attackers were approaching, several parties of them now making their way across the field. Tom fumbled with the key to the locked pumps. Ben shoved him back, hurriedly aimed the gun and fired, blowing the lock to pieces. Gas spurted all over the place, as Ben handed the torch to Tom so he would have some means of protecting himself—he had left his crowbar in the truck.

Her eyes wide with fear, Judy stared through the windshield, first at Tom, then out into the field, as the creatures continued to advance. Several of them were less than thirty yards away.

Gas still spurting, Tom crammed the nozzle into the mouth of the gas tank and his torch fell from his hands onto the gasoline-soaked ground. Tongues of flame leaped up—and set fire to the truck.

The rear fender was burning. Ben saw it out of the corner of his eye as he crouched and leveled off with his weapon and fired. An approaching attacker went down but got back up again, a gaping hole in its chest, just below the neck.

In force of numbers, the attackers continued to advance.

Tom stared at the truck as the flames began to lick and spread. Ben stared, too, momentarily—he did not know what to do. Then he wheeled and yelled, as Tom leaped into the flaming truck and it lurched and skidded across the field, plowing down some of the attackers in its way. Tom wanted to get the truck away from the gas pumps, to prevent them from exploding. Ben yelled again, but to no avail, as the flaming truck sped away, driven by the panicked Tom—Judy scared speechless beside him in the front seat.

Several of the things were upon Ben. He thrashed and pounded at them with the torch and gun. Figuring that Tom was lost, he knew he had to try and fight his own way back to the house.

Ben succeeded in setting fire to two of the ghouls that were attacking him and beating a third one to the ground.

He ran, swinging the torch and gun, spinning in all directions so as not to be brought down from behind. The stench of the ghouls alone was almost overpowering as mobs of them threatened to close in and tear him apart.

From inside the house, Harry had been able to see only pieces of the action, although he kept darting back and forth from door to window, squinting through the barricades, trying to make sure of what was going on outside. From his point of view the escape attempt seemed to have met with total doom—and if so, he wanted to lock the front door and run into the basement and barricade it.

Harry saw the truck catch fire—and saw Tom drive it away. As for Ben, he appeared to be overwhelmed. Harry ran to another window.

The truck, almost completely in flames, was speeding away from the house, toward a small rise. Eerily, it was lighting up its own path as it lurched and bounced along in the otherwise pitch-black field. Suddenly it screeched to a halt. Harry could see a figure, that of Tom, crawling out of the driver’s side and trying to help Judy get out, too. Then—an overpowering blast. The truck exploded violently, the noise and flames shattering the night.

In the midst of his struggles with the ghouls, Ben looked up and shuddered as he realized what had happened to Judy and Tom. The flames from the exploded truck helped him to see his way clear to fight a little nearer to the house. With powerful, desperate blows from his torch and gun, Ben continued to beat back his attackers in a life-or-death attempt to gain safety.

Several ghouls were at the front door, trying to beat their way into the house. From inside, Harry was in complete terror. Finally, heedless of anybody’s plight but his own, he panicked and bolted for the cellar.

But Ben had slugged his way through the attackers on the porch—and now he was pounding for admission at the front door. Spinning, with a powerful lunge he kicked the last attacker off the porch; in the rebound he ploughed his shoulder against the door; it crashed open and Ben burst through in time to catch Harry at the cellar door.

But there was no time to redress Harry. Ben turned frantically to re-boarding the door as his eyes met Harry’s for an instant and they both fell to work—as if Harry thought he could maintain some vestige of respect in Ben’s eyes by pitching in and helping now.

They managed to get the door boarded up. The house was temporarily safe.

They turned and looked at each other, Harry shaking with fear, sweat streaming from his face. Both men knew what was coming—and Ben’s fist crashed against Harry’s face even as he was attempting to back away.

Harry was driven back, one punch after another, until Ben cornered him and slammed him against the wall and held him there, staring into his face. Ben spat his words out, each word punctuated by an additional slam of Harry against the wall.

“You…rotten…goddamn…next…time…you do something…like that…I’ll drag you outside and feed…you…to those things!”

Ben slammed him one final time, and he slid down the wall and crumpled on the floor, his face bruised and his nose streaming with blood.

Ben moved to the cellar door.

“Come on up! It’s us…It’s all over…Tom and Judy are dead!”

He pivoted, hurled himself across the room to a window, and saw the ghouls moving closer to the house. Despite his exhaustion, he shuddered.

What on earth were they going to do now?

By midnight, Sheriff McClellan and his men had established the camp where they intended to bed down for the night. They had kept on the march until the sun sank low enough to make it impossible to go any farther, then on McClellan’s command they had pitched camp in an open field where any approaching aggressors would be easy to spot because of the absence of concealing foliage; to make doubly sure the place was secure from attack, they had posted guards and established a periphery of defense.

Luckily, the night was warm and without any threat of rain. Most of the men had blankets and sleeping bags but there were very few tents. The posse had been organized in too big a hurry, and a lot of its members were inexperienced and did not have the proper gear for living in the woods; in addition to the normally difficult problems of feeding and supplying a posse of forty or fifty men, there had been a myriad of pesky complaints common to novices—like poison ivy and blistered feet.

Through it all, McClellan had alternately bullied and pampered the men, to keep them on the move in a disciplined fashion, combing the rural areas in search of those who might require aid or rescue—until nightfall made it unwise to try to proceed any further. Then, reluctantly, the gruff sheriff had given the order to pitch camp and had supervised the establishment of it and the maintenance of proper defenses.

The men were tired. But the warmth of the campfires and smell of hot coffee went a long way toward reviving their flagging spirits; and, not too long after midnight a van arrived loaded down with box lunches for all the men so they would not have to bed down hungry. Candles and Coleman lanterns burned in various parts of the camp, giving it from a distance a rustic but cheerful look, and here and there a card game got started despite the fact that they all knew they’d have to break camp and be on the move without any breakfast, come dawn.

McClellan sat by himself just outside his tent, listening to the murmur of surrounding voices and the occasional rattle of a fork or spoon or a heavier piece of equipment. His maps were spread out on a field table in front of him, lighted by an overhanging lantern with a buzzing circle of gnats and other insects that intermittently annoyed McClellan by flying into his face. He was impatient to finish with the maps so he could extinguish the lantern and turn in for the night.

With his red pencil, he made a mark on the spot he knew to be his position—fifteen miles north of a little town called Willard. Still farther north, for a stretch of several miles, there were scattered farmhouses and a tiny village or two where the inhabitants were relatively isolated and presumed to be in dire need of help, although the status of any of the families in the area still to be combed by McClellan’s posse was largely a matter of speculation, because of the communications breakdown that had occurred in the early stages of the emergency.

The county had been divided into sectors, each sector to be patrolled by a combination of posse volunteers and National Guard troops. The objectives were to reestablish communications in areas where lines were down or power stations were out of commission; to bring safety and law and order to villages and larger communities, where order was threatened not only by marauding ghouls but by looters and rapists taking advantage of the chaos created by the emergency; and to send rescue parties out into rural or remote areas, where people could be trapped in their homes with no way of defending themselves adequately or calling for help.

McClellan’s sector happened to be a particularly dangerous one. In addition to the normal number of recently dead from hospitals, morgues and funeral homes, a bus full of people—the driver frightened by several of the dead things suddenly appearing in front of him as he rounded a curve—had crashed through a guard rail and over an embankment, killing everyone on board, presumably, but when McClellan’s posse found the bus there were only a few ghouls wandering around aimlessly, and these were gunned down and burned. One of them, with several shattered rib bones protruding through the front of its chest, was wearing a bus driver’s uniform; and from that McClellan was pretty certain of what had happened to the other people. Long before the offficial announcement was made public, McClellan and his men, working hard out in the endangered areas, knew that the aggressors were dead humans and that anyone who died was likely to become an aggressor. Although many of the men carried knives and machetes to protect themselves against wounds and contamination, their procedure was to avoid tangling with the flesh-eaters at close range, by gunning them down at a distance; then, by making use of meat-hooks, they would drag the dead things to a pile, soak them with gasoline, and set fire to them. Anyone who had touched a meat-hook, or anything suspected of having been in contact with a ghoul, would wash his hands with plenty of soap and water and afterward in a solution of alcohol. It was not known whether or not these measures would be totally effective, but they had seemed to be so far—and nobody could think of what else to do, under the circumstances.

As McClellan had stated earlier in his news interview, his posse had suffered no losses and no casualties in the eight hours or so that it had been in the field.

By splitting up into squads at times, they had managed to cover quite a number of isolated farmhouses during the hard day’s trek, and had rescued some and had found some dead—with the flesh picked from their bodies. They had also gunned down quite a few, when it could be seen that they were no longer dead—or human.

Now, with a day’s experience behind him, the sheriff had the means to gauge and evaluate the task that lay before him; and looking on the map at the territory that remained to be combed, he figured he could do it in three or four more days, by pushing the men hard. He hated to push men—but he was good at it, and there were situations, like this one, where it was absolutely necessary; a lot of lives might depend on just how quickly the posse was able to get to them.

As McClellan slapped at a gnat that had lighted on his forehead, a heavy shadow fell across his map table and he looked up to see his deputy, George Henderson.

George was a strong, wiry man of medium height, wearing hunting clothes that looked well-worn and fitted his body the way that clothes will do when they are used to the body that is wearing them. He unslung his rifle and scratched the stubble of beard on his chin.

“You’re standing in my light,” McClellan said gruffly, his head tilted downward as though to continue scrutinizing his map.

George gave a snort, which was intended to pass as a laugh, and stepped aside, disappointed that he could not think of a wisecrack to hurl back at McClellan. Instead, he said, “I checked the guards. Five of the bastards were asleep.”

“You’re kidding,” McClellan said, shoving himself away from his map table as though he would stomp out and crucify the five men.

“Yep,” George said.

He meant, yep, he was kidding. He chuckled, and this time McClellan was the one who merely snorted.

“All the guards are posted,” George said. “I made them take black coffee to stay awake.”

“If any of those things get into this camp with these men in sleeping bags—”

“A lot of them are keeping pistols in their sleeping bags with them. And the ones that don’t have pistols are keeping their rifles or machetes close by.”

“We ought to keep the fires going,” McClellan said. “Tell the next change of guards to keep feeding the fires all night.”

“Okay,” George said. “But I already thought of it. I was going to tell them anyway.”

McClellan snorted, as though George couldn’t possibly think of such a concept on his own.

“You’re just pissed off because you didn’t think of it first,” George said, and he pulled up a field chair and sat down a few feet from the table. “Am I sitting in your light?” he asked, with a tone of mock sarcasm.

“Why don’t you go get yourself a cup of coffee?” was McClellan’s only reply—as though he was suggesting it merely to get rid of George.

“Did you get any?” George asked.

“Nope. I don’t want it to keep me awake.”

“You’re gonna be snoozing like a big panda bear, while these men are standing watch and I’m out half the night checking the guards.”

“If you were capable of the brain work, I’d hand it over to you,” McClellan said, kidding. “Then you’d be the one to sleep. As it is, I’ve got to keep my mind fresh so this organization doesn’t fall to pieces.”

“Hah! That’s a good one!” George exclaimed. “If it wasn’t for me doin’ the shit-work, these men would all be playin’ cards or shootin’ marbles—”

“I want everybody out of their sacks at four-thirty,” McClellan broke in, in a serious tone.

“What?”

“Four-thirty. We’ve got to break camp and be on the move soon as we can see to navigate. Any time we spend screwin’ around could mean somebody else dead.”

“How much you figure on doin’ tomorrow?”

“I got ten farmhouses I’d like to cover before noon. You can take a look at the map and see which ones. If we get that far, we’ll break for lunch. We can radio ahead and let them know where we’re gonna be.”

George bent over the map and peered at it. The farmhouses that the sheriff intended to cover, marked in red, were back off a road shown on the map as a two-lane blacktop. The field where the posse was presently camped lay about two or three miles south of the blacktop road, and they had been marching in its direction all the previous day, advancing generally toward it with digressions as squads of men branched out in flanking movements to cover scattered dwellings before returning to the main body of the posse.

McClellan lit a cigarette and dragged on it, while George scrutinized their previous route and sized up the one that lay ahead.

The last house in their anticipated line of march was the old Miller farm, where Mrs. Miller—if she was still alive—lived with her grandson, Jimmy, a boy eleven years old.

“We ought to send out a separate patrol to get to this place,” George said, pointing to the red X that marked the Miller farm on McClellan’s map. “I know Mrs. Miller. She’d be pretty helpless. She and her grandson are all alone out there.”

“We should be there before noon,” McClellan said. “If they ain’t dead already, they should be all right.”

“I’m going to get me some coffee,” George said. “Then I’m gonna rustle the second round of guards out of their sacks.”