I’m going out. In the dark.
Alone.
There are no other trained guns here. It’s all on me.
Fuck.
MY GIRL
“Where did they all come from?”
Mark’s voice held a note of barely contained panic as the three of them looked down at the mass of undead filling the builder’s yard. Nate stared down miserably at his rifle and radio, lying at the foot of their precarious sanctuary. All he had was his Glock, with two spare magazines. At seventeen rounds each, it simply wasn’t enough for the task.
“Well, that’s the burning question, isn’t it?” murmured Nate.
Loadout wise, they could never have prepared for the horde that had poured into the yard, but Nate cursed himself for his rare complacency. There were rows of houses either side of the road further down, and small industrial units dotted further up, but even if they all emptied, it should not have generated a horde of this magnitude. Nate was having trouble grasping the sheer scale of the undead assembled below them, but even more difficulty in trying to understand the ‘how.’
Arriving mid-morning, they had cleared the offices and yard of any lingering undead after finding the gates open. There had been only four on the premises in total and a quick scan of the scene had revealed why. An accident with a forklift had crushed a worker’s leg under a fallen pallet, and with no emergency response coming as the world started to burn around them, the poor bastard had died from blood loss and shock. The evidence of blood-stained teeth, and another worker in a hi-vis vest shuffling around with a ragged chunk missing from his arm, told the old marine a clear story. The driver of the forklift had been next to the man, wracked with guilt at injuring his colleague, and the speed of the turn caught him unawares. Bitten, the man had retreated into the office where he likely turned after bleeding out, the vast rivers of blood signifying the likelihood of a brachial artery tear. Two people had been killed in the ensuing chaos of his reanimation and any other surviving employees had fled, some of them likely with bites to accelerate the spread of the menace. Nate and the others had put all four undead down with melee weapons to keep noise to a minimum.
The rest of the day had been largely uneventful, as the three of them worked to assemble everything Mark needed on to a flat-bed truck, emblazoned with the name and number of the wholesaler. The truck was fitted with a loader crane just behind the cab, combined with hydraulic stabilisers to deploy while in operation. Able to easily lift huge stacks of bricks, it would be a useful addition to their vehicles and finally allow them a means to move wood burners from nearby farmhouses into the lodge ready for winter. After hunting down the truck’s keys in the office, all they had to do was locate the materials and tools Mark needed for his planned projects, secure it to the truck, then Nate and Alicia would ride back in the pickup, and Mark would drive the loader truck. It would be a tight turn on the small country road through the gates of the lodge, but perfectly achievable. All in all, they’d had a positive day.
Until they didn’t.
It was around 4pm when they finished securing the last of the items to the truck. All three were tired, both from the mental drain of forever being on alert, and the back-breaking physical labour required in the loading. Then a single word from Alicia dragged their attention to the gate.
“Zombie.”
One appeared, then four, then ten, then thirty. Nate had muttered a curse for not checking the street more meticulously. Caught up in their work, they’d grown complacent as the day wore on.
With so many, the only option was to start shooting, and Nate gave the order, giving Mark and Alicia a baptism of fire. Anyone going beyond the gate had to carry a sidearm as backup on Nate’s insistence, so both carried Glocks at their hip and the two of them were armed with pump shotguns. Neither carried more than twenty shells though; six in the weapon, six on the barrel neatly lined up in sheaths, and a further eight in deep, easily accessible pockets. Both carried a seventeen-round Glock with one spare magazine. Any engagement expected to go beyond that meant that no amount of ammunition should justify them hanging around. If they needed more ammo than Nate had deemed necessary for a regular run beyond the gate, the situation demanded exfil with immediate effect. Mark and Alicia were not trained soldiers, so they needed to move.
But the only exit to the yard was quickly filling with undead.
Nate’s loadout was considerably more, with two spare magazines for his L85 at thirty rounds each and one primed in the weapon. All told, between them they had around two-hundred and fifty rounds between 5.56, 9mm, and 12-gauge buckshot. Nate could put consistent accurate fire downrange, but Alicia and Mark wouldn’t score a kill shot with every trigger pull. They were still novices. Even if they were crack shots, it still wasn’t enough.
As they started firing, it quickly became apparent that the thirty they could see were only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. More undead came piling in, slow and steady, lacking the purpose they had seen in the unliving wall blocking the central road through town a day earlier. However, despite their amble, they were relentless and densely packed. Within seconds of the shotguns booming and the steady whip-crack of Nate’s rifle on semi, the gateway was entirely obstructed and the undead oozed into the yard. There was no way of getting to the pickup, parked near the gate as it was, and the flatbed was perpendicular to the gate and needed fully turning before any escape could
