his rifle in one hand and steered towards the baseball building with the other. As he drove forward the zombies stuck behind the fences paced him, he noticed that some were going to be able to get out of the pen by bumbling their way through the dugouts on each side, but he didn't plan on sticking around long enough for them to catch him. As he pulled up to the only doorway he saw at the base of the building Bill cut the engine on the tractor. He immediately heard running footsteps to the left of him and swung the rifle around. Bill held his fire only for a split second, all the time it took him to recognize that the oncoming elderly man was not alive anymore. The old guy was wearing a faded gray shirt with boxing shorts and Bill's shot hit him right in the face smashing through his jaw and spraying pieces of yellow teeth over the ground behind him. The door opened and Bill pointed his rifle that direction.
“Don't shoot! Don't shoot please!” said the pale, bleary eyed soldier in fatigues as he slowly came through the door with his rifle barrel pointed down at the ground.
Bill looked him over and when no one else came out of the doorway he asked, “Is there anyone else?”
“No, uh, Sergeant.” said the young man looking at the stripes on Bill's sleeve.
“Where is Sergeant Williams?”
“He got killed when they ambushed us at the concession stand. There are some really fast zombies out there, we weren't expecting that.”
“What about your corporal….” Bill let the sentence drag off as he tried to remember the corporal's name.
“Tiller?”
“Yeah, Jim, right? Where is he?”
“He got it when we broke out of the concession stand to get here. He turned into one of them, I saw him following the guys with the mower and golf cart.”
“Get on the cart, I'll drive us to the concession stand.”
“There isn't anyone there! Three of the fools wouldn't break out with us and they got mobbed when we left.”
“Then we'll grab their tags and get back across the river.” Bill said as the soldier got onto the wagon behind him. “What is your name son?”
“Barry.”
“I'm Bill, ah, I mean 'Sergeant Carson'. You keep a look out and if you see anything we aren't outrunning you let me know or fire at it, or both.”
“There are zombies coming at us from the fields! I only have, like, ten bullets left.”
“The zombies are slow, worry about the fast ones. The packs there in the wagon are full of ammunition. Put in a fresh clip and reload your other ones. I'm going to get us out of here now at top speed, so hold on.”
Barry immediately did as ordered and Bill started the tractor and drove off at full throttle. The tractor was not designed to compete with a passenger vehicle, but it was designed to mow large swathes of grass as quickly as possible, so it could make a respectable twelve to fifteen miles an hour. Even at that slow speed it easily outdistanced the zombies coming towards them from the baseball fields, Bill was a little less tense as they drove out of the tight confines between the fences and bleachers and onto the open soccer fields. There were still thirty or forty zombies around and on top of the concession stand. Bill halted the tractor fifty feet from the building, cut the engine and said, “Barry start picking them off, there are not that many, go slow and get the ones closest to us.”
“Okay sarge.”
Both men started firing and steadily whittled away at the zombies numbers, being careful not to put the building behind any zombies they were firing at. Once they had shot all of the zombies they could get from their current position Bill drove a quarter circle around the building and they took care of the remaining slow moving zombies. The zombies were from a cross section of society; they shot everything from old men and women, to zombies as young as ten or twelve years old. Most of them were Caucasian and lightly dressed, a few still bore hideous wounds that were probably the cause of their deaths, but others were riddled with pock marks of rifle bullets.
“We really need shotguns for this kind of work.” Bill mumbled to himself as he hopped back on the tractor to slowly circle around the building to approach the main door.
The zombies from the baseball fields were about halfway to them when they stopped at the door, which would give them about three to five minutes by Bill's estimation.
“Sarge, more are coming in from the trees. That is what happened last time. How we got stuck here.”
“Barry we will be here less than three minutes, then we are driving out of here as fast as the tractor can take us.” speaking loudly in the direct of the concession stand Bill said, “Anyone alive in there?” He walked over to the door and had to step on the bodies of the dead to get there, they were not laying next to each other, there were too many of them, they had piled up around the doorway to a depth of two to three feet. Bill kept a close eye on the bodies he was stepping on, to make sure they would not start moving. Pounding on the door he said, “Open up!”
A weak voice replied, “Hold on.” Then there were sounds of stuff being removed from behind the door. Finally the door opened a crack and a dirty face looked out at him.
“Who are you?”
“Sergeant Carson, I've come to get you out of here.”
The door opened wider and Bill was able to see into the room a little better. The smell that hit him reminded him of a sewer and butcher shop combine, a slightly sweet, rotting smell.
“Phew, get out of there private and bring anyone else you have with you too.”
“It is just me and Joe now. The others are gone.”
“What is your name?'
“Glen Edwards.” the young man said dully.
“Get out of there Glen, now, and bring Joe with you.”
Glen turned and stumbled into the dimly lit interior then reached down and helped another man to his feet. Bill thought the other man might be wounded, but he did not appear to be, neither man picked up their rifles as they made their way to the doorway.
“No!” screamed Glen as he caught sight of the zombies slowly approaching from the baseball fields. If Bill had not been there to catch the door, the other man would have slammed it shut.
“Out! Now!” Shouted Bill into Glen's face. He grabbed the man by the shirt at the shoulder and pulled him out of the doorway, then pushed him towards the tractor, which was about thirty feet away from the door. Bill treated Joe with no more delicacy than he had Glen and soon both men were falling and stumbling over the dead to reach the tractor.
“C'mon sarge! We gotta go!” yelled Barry after getting the other two loaded up.
“You hold tight! I gotta go get the tags off the dead.” after saying that Bill ducked inside, pulling out his pen light as he did so. Walking around the small building he kept repeating 'Please, please, please!' to himself, hoping not to find John's body among those on the floor. There were only four bodies, three soldiers and one civilian and Bill was happy to see that John was not one of them. He grabbed the tags off of the soldiers and picked up the three rifles that were sitting on a counter not too far from the doorway, then got out of the building.
Outside Barry and Joe were restraining Glen, who was yelling and spitting at the other two, his screams were incoherent, but served to draw even more zombies towards them. Bill made his way to them and slapped the young man across the face, “Shut up Glen!”
The slap did nothing to the man except make him struggle more. Reluctantly Bill used more force to get the man to quiet down. A punch in the stomach quenched the screams long enough for Bill's words to get through to the man, “Shut up so I can drive us out of here, if you scream more of them will come. So shut up!”
All of the soldiers were looking at him, “Now sit down, Barry, Joe make sure your rifles are ready and fire at any zombies who get close, Barry you aim towards the front and right side, Joe, you aim towards the left and back.”
“What about me?” asked Glen weakly.
“You keep your goddamn pie hole shut and stop making problems. I came here to get you out, not to get killed.”
Bill jumped back on the tractor and sped off towards the access road that William's squad had cut through
