“I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this,” Hollywood said and slapped in another mag, trying to drop a body with each round sent down range.
Me, too, Gunny thought, but didn’t have time to answer. The backside of the building had hidden the majority of the zeds. There had been twice as many hidden from view and now they were running and stumbling around the church, mindlessly chasing the noise. The streets were filled with them, the houses were starting to get surrounded, and over the constant pounding of the guns, he heard the first window shatter. They were prepared to deal with a thousand, even two thousand undead, but not three or four thousand. They didn’t have enough ammo and they couldn’t cut the numbers down fast enough to prevent them from ramping up and through the windows. He shifted his fire over to the broken window and the grasping hands two stories below Bridget. He was dropping bodies, but it was futile. There were just too many and all he was doing was making a mushy ramp for the mob surging forward. He concentrated back toward the center of the street, she still had two barricaded doors between her and the horde. They should hold. Once the zeds were inside, they couldn’t muster up a lot of force against the doors, as long as they weren’t at the end of a hallway.
Other windows were starting to break, everyone’s ears were attuned to the sound, picking it up despite the constant barrage of gunfire. It was a defense going down. It meant that death was clawing its way closer. Griz splashed hundreds more heads before his ammo ran out. There were at least a thousand dead bodies splayed out in the street, crushed underfoot and hidden by the masses still moving, still running, still trying to get into the houses.
Gunny ran out of full magazines and ripped open the ammo can to start reloading. The stripper clips made it fast and clean and by the time he’d replenished his mags, the gunfire from the others had become sporadic. There was enough left in the can for one more refill, but then he’d be down to his pistols. They weren’t in trouble, not yet, but they would be. Griz switched over to his M-4 and after the thunder of the machine gun, it sounded tiny and weak. The plinking of a toy. It still cut them down and every time he pulled the trigger, a body slumped to the ground.
Gunny heard the windows break below him and leaned over the railing of the widow’s walk to look, he saw hundreds packed against the house, climbing over each other to get in. Hollywood was concentrating his fire on them, taking them out, but they kept coming. The piles of dead outside the houses were ten deep and they couldn’t shoot them fast enough to stop them from pouring in through a dozen broken windows. They tried, all of them covering the swarming mobs, but it was futile. Bridget’s shoulder ached from the constant bucking of the gun, her eyes stung from the thick gunpowder smoke filling the room. Liquefying rotten guts and spoiled blood splashed into the overgrown grass, poisoning it. The stench filled the air and made it past the daubs of coconut or peppermint ointment under their noses.
The zeds weren’t strong and were no longer very fast. They’d been dead for months, their skin hung loose and muscles sagged. The run from St. Louis had left a lot of them with feet worn down to the bone: a shell of a human that nearly anyone could kill by itself. But their sheer numbers made them a formidable opponent, they just kept coming and coming, never stopping, never resting, and never tiring. Gunny heard them trying to crash through the door of the walk. It was at the end of a short hallway and they had plenty of leverage to smash against it. He hadn’t expected them to break through the other door so fast, he’d had it jammed shut with a couple of dressers dragged from bedrooms. They must have smashed right through the drywall, bypassing his barrier entirely. The widow’s walk door wouldn’t hold, not against a hundred bodies pressing against it. He stuffed his full mags back in his vest, grabbed the ammo can, and ran to the end of the walk where it ended at the back of the tall rounded cupola. He set the can on the railing and started filling his empty mags as fast as he could, one eye on the door, waiting for it to smash open. It did and he snatched the last of the stripper clips, cramming them into his cargo pockets then hopped up on the rail, scrambling for the witches hat roof. He was glad it was shingled and not tin, he never would have been able to climb up, it was so steep. He needed a harness and some rope, that would make life a little easier, but he didn’t have anything like that. They hadn’t expected the back of the church to be hiding so many of the undead. Big mistake. He wrapped an arm around the lightning rod at the center of the peaked roof, pulled on it to test its strength. Solid. It would do. He tossed his Molle vest over it, then looped his belt through the side strap. After double checking the buckles, he stood and put his weight against it, tentatively at first, but it felt solid. He took a step down the roof so the pressure was against the base of the pole, leaned toward the edge, and then shouldered his rifle. There was a lot more killing to be done.
Bridget and Hollywood were
