Their boots clanged off the metal as they rushed up the ramp. It wobbled slightly as they moved, and Walt had a brief image of falling off the side of it into the waiting arms of dozens of Annies. Whiteside and Brown reached the top of the wall and then began firing off rounds. The rifles they had liberated from the security room of the Nike campus were all army surplus M4's that had been outfitted with suppressors. They weren't silent like in the movies, but they were quiet enough to keep the Annies around the campus from being alerted.
As he watched, Brown and Whiteside let their rifles drop to their sides, and they inched to the left and right, standing on top of the wall itself. They ejected their spent magazines and put them in their pockets to be reloaded later. As they slammed home new magazines, Allen and Gregg sprinted up the ramp, their own rifles held at the ready. Then they too began taking shots at the dead.
Walt licked his lips. It was almost time for him to do something. He jumped as Rudy gave him a reassuring pat on the arm. He had to keep himself from lashing out at Rudy, then Tejada was hissing at them to move. One-by-one, they jogged up the ramp and dropped down on the other side. Allen and Gregg were already over, then went Masterson, then Day, then came his turn. He ran up the right half of the ramp, his stomach flipping each time the ramp wobbled under his weight. Perhaps they could get the Nike eggheads to put some rails on the side.
Then he was at the top of the wall. He only had a second to see Allen, Gregg, Masterson, and Day fanning out, their rifles expelling gas and spent shell casings as they shuffled forward, their heads cocked to the side as they took aim at the heads of the Annies around them. He dropped into a sea of carnage–– twisted bodies, fallen however gravity had decided they should fall. He landed on the dead, waiting for them to reach out for him, but they were truly dead this time. He unslung his rifle, trying to remember his own training. He held it up to his face, cocking his head to peer down the sight and take aim at one of the Annies. He moved away from the wall, stepping gingerly over the corpses, careful of heeding Tejada's warning to avoid twisting an ankle. Then he joined the circle of soldiers.
Bodies fell left and right, and the air smelled of cordite. Then they were crunching through the snow, listening as a wave of groans went up from the dead. "Double-time it," Tejada said, loud enough for every man to hear over the groans and the not at all quiet pops of suppressed M4s.
They rushed forward, jogging in the snow. A half-mile of suburban thoroughfare stretched ahead of them, lined with stalled vehicles in various conditions of disrepair. Occasionally, they would pause and take out pockets of the dead that Tejada deemed too risky to push through. These pauses took no more than a few seconds, but with each one of those seconds, the horde of the dead that trailed them grew closer. Time was important here. Tejada had told them all that much. The goal was to get out, run to the store, check it out, grab some food if they could, and get back as fast as possible. If the dead that followed caught up to them quick enough, they could find themselves trapped in the grocery store. But if they were quick, they could grab the food, see what they could see, and get back before the wall repopulated itself with the dead. That was the hope anyway.
Walt took aim with his rifle and watched in fascination as the bullet he fired popped an Annie's head like a melon. Bits of gore showered the snow around the slumping thing's feet, turning the snow red. Anyone want a snow cone? he thought.
He ran forward, the snow making his months of training in the compound seem inadequate. He heard Rudy gasping for air behind him, and he hoped he wasn't having another of his asthma attacks. He had lost a lot of weight over the last few months, but he wasn't what anyone would consider in shape. Walt crossed his fingers that the big man had brought his asthma inhaler.
Ahead of him, he watched Epps and Whiteside clear a group of four Annies with no hesitation. They sprinted down the road, avoiding the tall underbrush growing in the ditches on either side. Nature had begun to reclaim the land. The road, with its shambling dead and abandoned cars, offered the quickest means of moving. For a while, they had tried to get a semi-truck they had found on the compound up and functional, but by the time they got the battery jumped and the tires filled with air, they realized that the damn thing was so low on gas that it was really just a one-way ticket on wheels.
They crested a rise and came to an intersection. The stoplights hung like dark eyes over the snow-covered pavement. A Popeye's Chicken restaurant sat dead on one corner, while a sign for Les Schwab Tire Center rose into the sky across the street. They hoofed it across the street. Despite there being absolutely no call for it, Walt still couldn't help but look both ways as he followed the others through the intersection, as if a speeding car was going to sneak up on them at any moment and plow into them. They slid down a small
