Left With The Dead

street, black ichor shooting from the ragged stump of its neck.

Jaden continued screaming and thrashed on Gartrell’s back despite his bonds. Behind them, the two hovering Apaches opened up again as more zeds came around the corner of Second Avenue and East 86th Street. Even though they were hundreds of feet away, the roar of their chainguns was loud, even for Gartrell, who wore hearing protectors beneath his radio headset. For Jaden and Jolie, who only had cotton balls in their ears, it must have been ten times worse. The zombies disappeared into spreading explosions of body parts, asphalt from the street, and chunks of concrete and glass blown out of nearby building facades. The Apaches’ cannons were fearsome weapons, but they were a little too imprecise for Gartrell’s taste at the moment, which was why they were classified as ‘area suppression weapons’-the guns kicked so hard that even the Apache itself rocked from side to side when firing.

Behind him, he heard Jolie’s shotgun go off, and he looked over his shoulder. The zeds from the apartment building were free now, and they streamed into the street behind them. One of them-a runner-had taken off after Jolie, and she had dropped it with a blast from the.410. She hadn’t killed it, however; the ghoul thrashed about on the ground, kicking the asphalt with its feet while flailing its hands in the air. Gartrell hadn’t seen that kind of activity before; apparently, the zeds could be knocked down for the count by a severe enough head injury.

“Jolie, run!” Gartrell shouted. “Let the gunships take care of those things!” As he spoke, he waved to the hovering Apaches and pointed at the dozen or so zeds streaming toward them. The attack helicopters did as instructed, and a moment later, 30mm rounds were slashing through the zombies. Even as they were being cut down, the ghouls never gave any indication they knew they were under attack. They only had eyes for Gartrell, Jaden, and Jolie, and they continued to pursue them even after their legs had been blown into ribbons and their torsos disemboweled by the high explosive dual purpose rounds.

As they drew nearer to the cloud of dense black smoke that blew down Second Avenue, Gartrell slowed. Jaden had stopped struggling now, and he sagged against the first sergeant’s back. Blood ran from his wrists where the plastic ties had pierced his flesh, and his struggles had only served to turn scrapes into ragged tears. Jolie stayed close behind them, and she fired her shotgun once again as a ghoul emerged from a shattered storefront-the Starbucks she and Gartrell had met in hours earlier.

“Uh, Terminator. This is Summit. Top cover says you’re getting within sixty meters of the Second Avenue engagement area, and they can’t suppress the zeds without maybe hitting you as well. What do you want to do? Over.”

Gartrell looked at the intersection ahead and gauged that the smoke just wasn’t heavy enough to adequately shield them. In fact, as he watched, several zombies strolled right through it. One of them was on fire. When they saw the humans, they hurried toward them as fast as their dead limbs could propel them. Gartrell checked behind him, and saw two other zeds were making their way up the sidewalk; an overhang prevented the Apache gunners from getting a visual on them, so they were unable to fire. One of the zombies crawled. The other hobbled.

“Jolie, shoot those things in the head once they’re within twenty feet. Shoot the walker first, then wait for the crawler.”

“All right.”

“Summit, Terminator. I want the Apaches to use rockets on Second Avenue. I want them to light up the entire intersection and give us enough cover to make it into the subway without being detected. Can they do that for us right away? Over.”

“Your call, Terminator. Stand by.”

Gartrell raised the AA-12 and went to guns on the closest zombie, blasting its skull into fragments. It sank to the street like an empty plastic bag. Behind it, the ghoul that was on fire suddenly collapsed as well; the flames had consumed so much tissue that it couldn’t walk any longer. Behind him, Jolie’s shotgun cracked once. As Gartrell waited for the rest of the zombies ahead to get closer, he pulled his pistol and thumbed off the safety. Holding it in both hands, he carefully dispatched all the oncoming zeds with perfectly-placed headshots.

Five rounds out of the pistol, two out of the shotty.

“Terminator, Summit. Party in ten seconds, top cover recommends you pull back immediately while they do their thing, over.”

Gartrell holstered his pistol and grabbed Jolie as she sighted on the zombie crawling up 86th Street. He ran back the way they had come, dragging her along behind. She squeaked as they passed the zombie crawling in the street and it reached out for her with one filthy hand. Flies buzzed around the dirty, bloodstained corpse.

“Where are we going? The subway station is back there!” Jolie said.

Her question was answered from above when a hissing roar cut through the air. Gartrell looked up to see one of the Apaches surrounded momentarily by flame and smoke as 2.75-inch rockets spat from the outboard pods slung beneath the attack helicopter’s stubby wings. The rockets flew for less than a second before they slammed into the intersection at speeds approaching 400 miles an hour. They detonated the instant the point-contact fuses at the tip of each warhead made contact with something solid, and 17 pounds of high explosives ripped at dead flesh, automotive sheet metal, asphalt, and concrete again and again. Windows shattered and the faces of every building on the block cracked and crazed as each explosion yielded a strong shock wave that ripped through the intersection. Gartrell spun around and faced the devastation, not because he wanted to see it, but because he wanted to shield Jaden from any debris which might come hurtling their way.

The attack ended after just a few seconds, and the first helicopter super-elevated, climbing away at full power as the second Apache slid into its firing position. Thirty-eight high explosive rockets had laid the intersection to waste, and Gartrell looked up to see flames leaping almost a hundred feet into the air, flames that gave off voluminous clouds of thick, black smoke. Even from more than a hundred feet away, he felt the heat of the blaze on his body. The single Apache had done more damage in its attack than the main gun of the Coast Guard cutter Escanaba had during a similar attack Gartrell had witnessed the night before.

But through the inferno, zombies still moved. They walked through the flames and the dense smoke as if the conflagration didn’t exist. Some of them were almost shredded from shrapnel and the effects of the explosions; others were blackened by the heat or actually aflame themselves. Many finally stumbled and collapsed, cooked by the fantastic heat, but others continued marching on, heading toward Gartrell and the others.

“Dave!”

Jolie’s voice was distant, far away. Gartrell turned and looked behind them. More zombies advanced up 86th Street, coming in from the east, doubtless lured in by the hovering helicopters and explosions.

And then the second Apache unleashed its salvo of rockets, and the firestorm in the intersection doubled, then trebled. The shock waves raced down the street, flattening the zeds that had managed to survive the first attack. Jaden had screamed himself hoarse by now, and Gartrell grabbed one of his hands in a vain attempt to calm him. There was just no way that was happening. Gartrell thought it would be a miracle if the poor kid would be able to calm down in several weeks. The Apache hovering in the sky behind them actually drifted backwards. Gartrell grabbed Jolie’s hand and pulled her to her feet.

“Come on, we gotta go now! That Apache, he’s lining up on the zeds coming from the east, and we need to get out of here!”

“But what about the fire?” she asked, pointing to the raging inferno that waited for them in the intersection. The heat and flames were so intense that even the zombies hadn’t survived it; they were blackened husks of sizzling, necrotic flesh lying strewn about. Those that still moved were so badly damaged that they were no longer a top threat.

Those closing in from the rear were a different story.

“Well, if we stay, we’ll be in his zone of fire, and that’s going to be a hell of a lot worse!” Gartrell indicated the Apache, which had now repositioned itself. Over the river, another attack helicopter banked in and took position above and behind the first. “Come on!”

Without waiting for her to agree, he yanked her after him and ran like hell toward the intersection. As he did, he pulled a bottle of water from one of his cargo pockets and opened it. He doused Jaden’s head with a liberal amount of liquid, then splashed the remainder on his face and BDUs and tossed the container to the gutter. He heard Jolie do the same, using one of the water bottles strapped to the side of the backpack.

At a hundred meters from the intersection, the air was noticeably hot.

At fifty meters, it was scalding, and Gartrell was happy he had splashed water all over himself and Jaden.