Marshall, who had always favored a shotgun found two new Banelli m4 semi automatic short barrel pistol grip models. I had no doubt he was strong enough to fire them from each hand. We were like kids in a candy store, loading up carts with everything useful. We filled the SUV’s up with as much as we could, before we chained the doors and threw on a combination padlock we’d found up at the register.
Even Leo picked up a rifle. She’d been working with John and decided she wanted a Ruger 10/22. The ammunition was light. A full thirty round magazine weighed less than ten bullet’s for my 30.06. The rifle was a perfect fit for her. We managed to find a shoulder strap with a quick release that held the rifle tight to her back when she was running and allowed the slack to swing it up to her shoulder with the flip of a buckle. Between that and the 9mm pistols she had strapped to her thighs and her curved short swords, she was the image of re-death.
At least if we didn’t have matching trucks, we all had matching gear on. Full jungle digital camouflage cargo pants, boots, shirts, vests, jackets and hats. The pattern was dark green squares, with lighter greens and khaki colors, designed to blend in to any type of jungle environment. We cleared and checked all of our new fire arms, loaded magazines and attached red-dot hand grips to our new 9mm pistols. Marshall had grabbed some face black, the last thing we did was paint our faces as we entered Germantown, MD.
I chuckled to myself as we pulled up to a payphone, four mismatched SUV’s. A man in full camouflage gear loaded for war jumped out, slung a black assault rifle on his back, flipped through the yellow pages, tore a sheet out and jumped back into the SUV in less than thirty seconds. It was the only way we could figure out where to find a greyhound station in Germantown without the internet.
Chapter 9
Greyhound
Dalton got back in the front seat of Charlie’s green ford explorer, holding the yellow pages half page ad for the local greyhound station. It turns out we weren’t very far from the station.
Thank god GPS still worked. We’d all wondered how long our Garmins and Tom Tom’s would continue to work. Following the voice on the Garmin we turned left onto south Main Street in Germantown, where we were to continue for three miles.
Charlie was in the lead, followed by Marshall, Leo and I and John, Dalton and Garrett filling out the rear guard truck. Less than half a block after making our turn, just enough distance for all three trucks to get straightened out on the road, Charlie came to a stop.
We stopped right behind him on his bumper and John pulled right up on our bumper. Someone in Charlie’s SUV leaned out the back passenger side window and started firing his pistol. Marshall and I lept out of our truck and scrambled on the hood, where we saw an amazing sight. A wave of zombies was coming straight towards us, filling both lanes, walking in a solid mass between the parked cars on the side of the road. There was a little room along the sidewalks on the far sides of the parked cars, but the restaurants and bars along this street had fenced off most of the sidewalk, there wasn’t any room to drive on the sidewalks, even if they could get past the solid wall of parked cars.
I’d had a lot of practice guessing numbers of zombies with the assault on the manor house, from the headlights of the trucks, this looked to be about a quarter of each of those waves, somewhere around twelve hundred zombies packing the street.
“
Vic, if you’re going to remember how to do that wave of zombie destruction thing, now would be a good time. We’re gonna burn a lot of ammunition on this many zeds.”
“
Sorry bro, I got nothin’. I have no idea how I could have killed all those zombies.”
The first of them were almost to Charlie’s truck. There was no time to get in and back up.
“
Dismount!” I yelled before opening fire with my H&K. For my first thirty rounds I went full auto, mowing them down to give the ones behind something to trip and stumble over. It worked as a great delaying tactic before. I was hoping that it worked again.
John climbed onto the roof of his truck with a pistol in each hand. I have no idea why he mounted laser handgrips on them; I guess in case one of us used them, he certainly didn’t need them. The gun smoke and lasers made for a cool effect though; watching him shoot was like watching one of those laser light shows. He never actually stopped moving to shoot, the lasers on his guns swept the crowd and then a line of bullet’s hit. Even from this distance, you could tell he was hindered by the slow recycle time of the 9mm’s.
He holstered his 9mm’s as he changed the magazines, a ballet of movement like I’ve never seen. He flipped the H&K assault rifle around, thumbed the selector to full auto and killed thirty zombies. I believe if it weren’t for magazine capacity issues, he could have killed all 3000 of these zombies by himself before the rest of us could fire. What he did do was buy a little time. Enough time for Marshall to get of the truck and walk over to a parked Mercedes 500 SL convertible. He picked it up by the bumper and threw it into the herd of oncoming zombies, grinding them into a smear on the ground. The car slid along on its hood and windshield struts, knocking zombies down like they were pins in a bowling lane.
My coat whipped around me as Leo blew by, swords ready. She followed in the wake of the sports car, swirling dervish style, like a tornado of death blazing through the storm of zombies. She was moving so quickly that she literally disappeared. The only way to see her was to watch zombies fall over headless. I looked back at M1, realizing that except Bookbinder, they’d never seen us fight. Even Charlie hadn’t seen the full effects of what we could do. The men of M1 were just standing there, weapons ready, watching.
They were afraid to fire with Leo in the middle and now Marshall was wading in with a shotgun in each hand. He used them like clubs, occasionally swinging one around and firing buck shot into a zed, before twirling it back around and smashing another zombie with the hard wood stock. I tossed my three H&K mags to john, who was now firing his second set of 9mm pistols, the first set cooling in their holsters. I kept an eye out for any supers and a general idea of the tide of the battle.
Watching Leo was a joy, she was sometimes a little clumsy at normal speed, but at her velocity, she was the epitome of grace. She was brutal, almost feline in her movements. She used all of her limbs, leaping from corpse to corpse, hand-springing and cart-wheeling. Then, something amazing happened. She disappeared in a cloud of black smoke, reappearing several dozen feet further down the road. She poofed again and appeared above a zombie, driving her swords downward into its skull before disappearing again and reappearing over several more. I could watch her learning. I could see ideas flashing across her eyes, ways to use this new ability for maximum damage. She quickly learned she could stay hovering this way, teleporting herself above them, falling a few feet, then teleporting again before she hit the ground.
She appeared next to me, kissed me on the cheek and then was off again. I’m not sure she was any faster at killing this way, but it sure looked like fun. She flew upwards above the buildings leaving a series of black swirls in the air, before falling straight down in a dive. She teleported herself away just before she impacted the pavement; narrowly avoiding a smashed skull.
I looked over at John as he took aim at a street sign. His bullet hit the street sign and either split, or a chunk of street sign flew off, but he killed three zombies with that one bullet. He started pointing his guns wildly, shooting crazy angles, dropping multiple zombies with every bullet. Marshall, not to be outdone, bent down and picked up a manhole cover and threw it at neck level, decapitating an entire line of zombies.
“
Tookes, Contact rear!” shouted Charlie. Once again I was grateful for his training; I was standing here all cocky watching us decimate this huge horde of zombies, while a small group came up on us from the rear.
I’d given all my H&K magazines to John, leaving me with two 9mm pistols. I drew one and adjusted to a two handed stance and started methodically popping off rounds. Each of Charlie’s men did the same, kneeling with their H&K assault rifles shouldered, in single shot mode. In between rounds, I picked a fairly fresh looking corpse and focused my will on it. Its intentions were clear, one foot in front of the other, get to the humans, grab them and eat. Just like every other stupid walking corpse. I made it pick the most random choices I could and it started bucking back and forth in some uncoordinated dance. I refocused and gave it a new task. Kill the zombie beside you. Reach for the head, twist it off. The zombie stuttered and I felt a vibration in my head. Once again I focused entirely on that zombie. His eyes were glowing the same blue color as Max’s aura, as he reached over and twisted the head off the shambler beside him.
“
Drop the head then step on it.”
I commanded.
The disembodied zombie head fell to the ground and rolled about a foot before getting stuck on a bit of spine. My zombie stepped forward and then stepped down on the head, crushing it as it fell backward, smashing its own skull on the pavement. Instantly, the zingy feeling in the back of my head stopped, as I no longer had a connection to that corpse.
In fairly short order, we’d killed the small group of shamblers from the rear. I turned to check on my friends and found them mopping up the last of that group.
Just as the last few zombies fell, a tall skinny blonde in a short skirt and fitted white oxford shirt landed softly behind Bookbinder. She put her hand on his neck. I saw the shadow bite him. I focused all my will on making her step back. She looked me right in the eye and winked as she leaned in to his neck and bit him. I let out a scream; John turned around and fired three shots at the woman. She and Bookbinder disappeared in a hail of smoke and bullet’s.
“
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” I yelled.
About a minute later, my radio crackled, “Victor Tookes, is that you?” asked a female voice with a deep southern accent over the radio.
“
Who is this?” I demanded.
“
My name is Trina. I have your friend Charlie here with me. He was quite delicious. Thanks for making it so easy for me to find you. Are you so stupid that you don’t know every time you use your abilities it broadcasts your position to any of us nearby? When your brother threw that car, I felt it from three miles away. When Leo started teleporting all over the place we could feel that. John and his bullet tricks, but the icing on the cake was you taking over one of our soldiers? Its possible Laura felt that in Australia. You’d better hope she didn’t, she’s pretty pissed off at you.”
“
Trina, why don’t you come down here and talk to me face to face?” I asked. Anger replaced the shock of the murder of Bookbinder. I knew I would mourn him tomorrow, but there was work to do tonight and going home crying wouldn’t honor his memory.
“
I’m not that stupid Tookes. You’re a tough one to kill; I don’t think I could do it by myself. But we’ll get to you. You can’t hide forever.”
“
Trina, I promise I won’t kill you,” I said. She was stalling. I knew she was waiting on Charlie to turn into a zombie, trying to even the odds. I couldn’t let that happen to my friend.
“
John, Leo, if she reappears, you have to take out Charlie. I’ll keep her busy talking, but he knows everything about us. Hell, he designed half of our defenses.”
I sent to them.
I wasn’t sure how Charlie’s men would react. None of us were trained soldiers; none of us were prepared to handle any of this. I fought down memories of Charlie and me laughing at various points along our friendship, pushed them into a corner of my mind and held them there with anger at Sherry for taking him from us.
Trina appeared at my feet, but Bookbinder was nowhere to be seen. She dropped his radio at my feet.
“
Tookes, you’ve been a thorn in our sides for too long. If you keep this up, Laura is going to come down on you like a ton of bricks and even you aren’t powerful enough to stop her. It’s a shame, too. You’re kind of cute. You’d make a nice pet.”
“
What do you want from me Trina? Your people are trying to wipe out my family, my people and my home. You’re committing genocide, what for?”
“
You humans, you think you’re so important. My race has been around for a hundred million years. Your bodies fit us perfectly; you were designed to host us. You’re a tool for us, like you would use a car. And, it turns out, you’re also very tasty, but that’s just an added perk.” Trina said.
“
You are wrong though, we don’t want to wipe all of you out. We have to keep some of you alive to breed new bodies for us. This planet is our version of an auto factory. We just have a few minor details left to work out,” she said.
I stood there calmly. I couldn’t believe she was talking this much. We learned more in that one conversation than we knew all the way up until then.