Something was different about the horde, though, and Freedom couldn’t put his finger on what.
The wall guards fired into the crowd with their motley collection of weapons. Rifles scavenged from personal collections or motion-picture armories. A dreadlocked man he recognized as Makana was trying to keep them organized, but there was an air of desperation around the guards. One of them swung his rifle like a baseball bat and clubbed a thin figure off the platform. The guard turned and swung again. The blow was wild, but it caught his next target in the side of the head and tipped it back off the wall.
The guard was scared. Now that Freedom was on top of the wall, he could see that all the guards were scared. He wasn’t sure what had them so spooked. He drew his massive sidearm, a modified AA-12 shotgun that had been cut down to a pistol for his huge hands. The armorer had nicknamed it Lady Liberty. His gaze went down to the horde again.
Some of the exes were moving quicker than the others. They ran at the Big Wall and lunged up. They grabbed handholds and kicked with their feet, pulling themselves up the barrier. A handful of exes had turned their attention to Freedom as he landed. Behind their dead eyes, Legion glared out at the giant officer.
Over the years, the people of Los Angeles had developed methods and procedures for dealing with the undead. The mindless exes were still a threat, but it was a contained threat. One they had lots of practice with.
Legion had changed everything. The exes were pawns for him to control. He could slip from zombie to zombie, using them as his puppets. They could be his eyes and ears. Or his hands and teeth. He made them smart. He made them unpredictable.
Freedom pulled back his boot and kicked a climbing ex just as its head rose above the top of the wall. The dead man flew back into the crowd. It took Freedom’s mind a moment to register what he’d just seen, and then he realized what had caused the panic.
Most of the exes storming the Big Wall were wearing helmets.
Several of them wore motorcycle helmets with Lexan visors. A few looked like SWAT or National Guard issue. Freedom saw a few football helmets and hard hats. Even a few gleaming bicycle helmets, useless as they were.
Killing exes had always been a numbers game. Legion had shifted the numbers more in his favor and shaken the guards in the process. Their practiced methods and procedures were crumbling. They were hesitating and second-guessing shots.
Freedom had to restore morale and get their fire focused before things fell apart. The Big Wall was on the edge of being overwhelmed. The attack was spread across a section almost forty feet long and, from the look of it, another twenty or thirty around the corner. Legion had at least four hundred exes under his control. Half a dozen civilians to defend seventy feet of ground against a few hundred opponents.
Not great odds.
A dead man wearing a red construction helmet climbed onto the platform. Its fingernails clawed at the wooden platform. Freedom stomped on one of the hands and took the ex’s head off with another kick.
Makana and another noticed him and he saw their shoulders relax. The sheriff’s star and his Army uniform still had that effect on people.
“Take your time,” ordered Freedom. His voice bellowed out of his barrel chest, louder than the sound of teeth and rifle reports. He stabbed a thick finger at the horde. “Make them count.” To accent his words, Lady Liberty roared and threw two more dead things back from the wall. At close range a twelve-gauge round packed enough raw force to shatter a Kevlar helmet and the skull inside it.
The panicked shooting slowed. A dead man with a biker helmet staggered back and fell. One in National Guard headgear stumbled from a shot, then threw itself back at the wall. A figure in a football helmet dropped with a bullet in its eye.
More of the exes fell, but more of them reached the wall. A dead woman made it to the platform, but a guard smashed her off with a baseball bat. Another withered hand slapped onto the platform. Captain Freedom grabbed it by the wrist and pushed it away. The ex, a dead man in an Oxford shirt, fell back into the horde and was crushed under dozens of feet. Freedom turned and cracked Lady Liberty’s muzzle across the jaw of a teenage boy with a batting helmet and a bloody Atari T-shirt. The dead thing staggered back from the blow and vanished over the edge.
Captain Freedom shouted a few quick orders and got the guards spaced out to cover more area. “All units,” he called over the radio, “this is Six. We have a major incursion at the northwest corner of the Big Wall. Request immediate assistance.”
At least two people replied, but their words were drowned out by another burst from Lady Liberty. One of the rounds shattered a bicycle helmet and pulped the skull beneath it. The ex dropped and vanished into the tide of dead things below. Two of the others he hit struggled back to their feet.
The guard closest to him, a rail-thin woman with gray-streaked hair, paused to reload her rifle. It was an old M1, and Freedom was impressed by how fast she loaded the magazine without pinching her thumb. She brought it back up just in time to shoot a chalk-skinned man in the face. The round took a chunk out of the Lexan visor of the ex’s helmet and knocked it back off the Big Wall.
A dead body threw itself up onto the platform a few feet away and struggled to its feet. Freedom took four quick steps and clotheslined it with a sweep of his massive arm. The ex pin-wheeled back off the wall.
Another
