Spearhead: They’re almost forming the shape of—
Stallion: It’s not almost. It’s perfect, it’s too perfect a shape—
Spearhead: All right. This is—Uh, Command, this is Spearhead, do you read me? We, uh, I don’t believe what I’m seeing here, but we are observing a crowd of Zulus less than a kilometer outside of the target area and they are standing, uh, they are standing in the shape of a human penis. I repeat, the Zulus have organized themselves into a perfect shape of a human penis in an open field below us. We are looking at this with our own eyes.
Stallion: They are not Zulus.
30 Seconds Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
We stood there, in the field, shivering in the rain, in the shape of the dick John had formed us into. Dr. Marconi was to one side of me, looking disapproving. Amy was in my arms, her eyes turned upward, rain bouncing off her glasses. She was praying.
The cargo plane growled toward us, swooping lower, so low that I wondered how the thing expected to escape its own explosion.
Amy closed her eyes and buried her face in my chest and said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“It’s turning! Look!”
The hulking plane banked, making a gentle turn in the sky and veering away from the town. We nervously watched it humming off into the distance, making a wide circle to head back the way it came.
A cheer went up in the crowd around us. There were five planes in the formation, and we watched as one after another they peeled off and circled back.
Falconer walked up and said, “I just want to say right now that this is the stupidest shit I’ve ever been involved in.”
John said, “Hey, you don’t have to like our methods, but you can’t argue with the result. Everything turned out okay, right?”
10 Seconds Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
Amy said, “Why isn’t that plane turning back?”
The trailing plane in the formation was not, in fact, changing its course. It growled straight through the air, swooping right over us. The crowd all watched it glide into the distance, heading toward the part of town that had become home to the quarantine.
The plane swooped lower and lower in the sky, as if it was going to attempt a landing. Only it was not slowing down, it was speeding up. It released its payload, following the bombs down until both bombs and plane met the earth. A silent, black plume instantly appeared in the distance, the boom reaching us two full seconds later. The detonation would be heard two states away.
We were too far away to realize it at the time, but both buildings of the old Ffirth Asylum had been reduced to a crater full of thousands of tons of shattered concrete and brick. All of it was cooking in a furnace fueled by aviation fuel, floorboards, old furniture and tons of other flammable debris that would still be smoldering ten days later. Somewhere, at the bottom of it all, rooms full of malformed inmates were vaporized in a fraction of a second. In the old administrative building next door, a single basement room full of computers and gigabytes of incriminating data on hard drives, all melted into a bubbling, black stew.
The Soy Sauce, Redux
John said, “Now there’s a shitty bomber pilot.”
The rain was starting to let up. I took a deep breath of morning air and said, “The town is still there, Tennet. You played your hand, and you lost—wait, where is he?”
Falconer said, “Oh, son of a bitch!”
The blue pickup, which Tennet had apparently stolen while we were all standing in the shape of a dong and waiting to die, was barreling north up the highway.
I said, “Who cares? He’s going to run smack into the Army’s cordon. Hopefully they’ll arrest his stupid ass.”
But Falconer was already sprinting toward the monster truck. He was damned if he was going to let somebody else get his collar after all this. I was about to bid him good hunting, when John brushed past me and jumped into the passenger seat. And then Amy was running toward the truck and I realized that nobody else was going to be happy until they saw a proper end to this. I ran and jumped into the backseat, my shoe dragging on pavement as the truck almost took off without me.
The sight of the Army’s airtight cordon operation instantly ruined every zombie movie for me. These people weren’t stupid. Strategy was their
Thus, there was not a single soldier visible, not a single exposed face or neck available to be bitten and zombified. Instead, there was a row of armored vehicles full of soldiers—Bradley Fighting Vehicles, I would later learn—arranged in a formation that would give them clear shots from their gun ports and from the turrets mounted at the top of each vehicle. They sat well back from concrete barricades that would stop any suicide vehicles in their tracks. Coils of razor wire were strung along the ground on both sides of the barrier. A horde of five thousand zombies—even fast zombies—could rush the formation and they would be easily blown to pieces by a crisscross hail of large-caliber rounds. These men were told they were staring into the ravenous maw of a zombie outbreak, and they were prepared to mow that shit down like dead grass.
After having followed him the five miles across the Dead Zone, we thought Tennet’s truck was going to just keep going and plow right into that green wall of death, at which point I assumed he would find his weight in lead rushing through his windshield at the speed of sound. Was this a suicide-by-armored-vehicle? For what, just to spite Falconer? Goddamn this guy was a dick.
Instead, Tennet’s truck skidded to a stop short of the barbed wire. We stopped behind him, watching. Tennet jumped out, and walked toward the soldiers, waving his arms in the air. It wasn’t like he was signaling surrender, it was more like he was waving them away, screaming and pointing and acting like a crazy person.
Then, he was tackled and ripped to pieces by a monster in a black space suit.
I said, “Well, that worked out.”
We all watched Tennet’s well-deserved and awesomely ironic death, when we heard the first thud of heavy machine guns erupt from the line of vehicles ahead.
To our right, descending down from the water tower construction site, was a nightmare horde of shambling, malformed, infected REPER personnel. They crawled and howled and shrieked and sprouted snapping appendages. Then it hit me that this was, in fact, Tennet’s dying plan. Tennet had thrown his personal horde of infected at the army cordon, giving them their zombie apocalypse, and every reason in the world to unleash hell on the city beyond, regardless of what one airplane pilot claimed he saw.
I screamed, “GET US OUT OF HERE!”
The infected were washing in from our right, swarming toward us and the line of armored vehicles in front of us. More and more of the vehicles were going weapons free on the horde, the turrets and machine guns punching fire and lead into the air.
