Part 20 Calling All Zombies - Revised

Off to my right the leader of the Hunters' head exploded as I cocked the hammer back on the pistol that was resting against the 2nd in command's chin. Practically everything froze in place. The two guys flanking us with shotguns were probably too scared to breathe. The one I could see out of the corner of my eye made the mistake of twisting his body towards us. He was probably turning to see who got hit when a row of three bullet holes appeared in his t-shirt followed by three spurts of blood out his back. The sound of the shots were just behind the appearance of the holes. It was James that fired his weapon, the shot-gunner's body fell back, dead on the spot. I glanced over my shoulder to see the other shot-gun toting hunter get hit with a round to his skull and knew it had to have been from Frank's .45, as the hole left behind was practically non-existent from the amount of skull that had disappeared from the back of the poor guy's head.

I pressed the barrel of the gun against the guy's chin harder making him raise it up but he stayed rigid, obviously wanting to live, his hands splayed out to his sides and fingers spread open wide. I wasn't trying to talk tough but it came out of me that way, “I guess you realize now who is in charge. You better tell your guys to hold their fire or you're gonna be joining the ones on the ground.” The man's eyes widen further (if that were possible) and his mouth gaped as if trying to speak. I eased up on the pressure of the barrel against his chin and he swallowed hard then spoke loudly, his eyes rolling over to our right (his left?), “H-hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

I took a chance and looked up past the guard rail and saw that a number of the hunters had already gathered and were either already pointing their weapons down at us or frozen mid-way. Seems that they heard but not all of them obeyed. One of them was taking decisive aim at me and was cut down by a shot in the throat from Maggie. From my vantage point I couldn't rightly tell but it seemed that another guy behind him went down also as Maggie's bullet passed through the first and hit them. I grabbed the man's attention by snarling at him. “As you can see we're using high powered rounds and we don't miss. Tell your guys to stand down or they'll all get it and I won't be so patient with you anymore.” The man this time literally quivered where he stood and turned his head and shouted out. “Dammit I said hold your fire! You wanna get all of us killed?” A glance above us showed me that they didn't want to die as their weapons lowered and they took a step back from the guard rail.

I imagined that Maggie now got up to one knee and was still aiming her rifle at the group by the guard rail. James was doing likewise. Frank I could only envision him holding his .45 at the nearest target, the guy I was holding on to. I thought fast trying to figure out a proposal that would benefit (mostly us) the two groups. As I was about to speak, another rifle shot rang out. But it didn't come from Maggie or James. The shot was farther away from the sound of it, so it had to have been from their sniper. I found it a miracle that my head didn't explode already. Perhaps our position in the ditch and the hunters gathered above us blocked his shot.
Ok, so, what was he shooting at. I discovered I wished that somethings were best left unknown.

The air was still all around us. The hunter group gathered at the guard rail now ignored us and were looking around, some frantically. Suddenly one of them pointed to something down the freeway and screamed, “Geeks!!”

The look that the number two guy and I gave each other would've been comical, in other circumstances. I took the gun away from his head and pointed up the slope towards his men, “Go!” I shouted at him.

He froze there for a second and then started tearing ass up the slope, slipping and grabbing hands full of weeds as he went. I did likewise up the hill towards my group. Gunfire began ringing out, first sporadically then in greater volume. I heard over the din, the growling of zombies as they charged. The Hunter group was too packed in to be effective and they tried to scatter Mid-way up the hill, I heard a scream and turned around and saw one go down behind a wrecked car under the weight of three zombies. That was enough for me and I continued on up until I passed the tree line where Maggie, James and Frank stood waiting. They looked torn between wanting to shoot the zombies as they pass beneath us and staying silent. Hunters or not, those guys were still human beings and didn't deserve the deaths that they were about to experience. I ducked down behind some low hanging branch and saw that there were lots of zombies. It was hard to say how many, but more than the first group that caused us to take cover in the weeds. They were thick in between the cars and my vantage point gave me the view of the end of the herd. It was pretty large. I didn't take the time to ponder where they might've come from. I do know, from observation, at a distance that herds tend to pick up stragglers here and there along their chosen route, thus increasing their size.

The gunfire that mowed the first herd down must've attracted this herd. We could hear the screams becoming more numerous and the gunfire not quite so. The sniper's rifle barked pretty often though, and zombie after zombie went down, but not enough. From where I was watching I could see that some of the hunters were forced to go hand to hand and lose terribly. Some had large machetes and were putting them to good use, but the sheer numbers overwhelmed them as well. We could also see that the zombies fell upon the fresh bodies of the ones that we shot. Basically a zombie feast was being enacted right before our eyes, as hunter after hunter went down under the onslaught.

I turned to look at Maggie, whose hand was over her mouth in horror, James stood beside her his rifle swinging in short arcs trying to find a target until Maggie's hand reached up and gently pulled the barrel down. He looked at his mother, confused. She signed briefly to him, then turned to watch the carnage below begin to peter out. Frank dropped to his knees, his .45 sitting in his lap. His mouth moved in soundless words. I looked down the hill again and saw that at least three hunters had gathered together in the middle of the corral our trucks were in, to form a triangle and were firing at groups of zombies as they approached. One of them bolted and weaved through the cars and tried to vault over the guardrail but his foot caught face-planting him and he went down screaming, his leg bent at an unnatural angle, as his body tumbled down the slope to the ditch. One of the other survivors turned to scream a curse at the fallen man, but his timing was bad as a large zombie reached him and bit into his face and neck. He screamed horribly when a large piece of flesh was torn off, and another zombie reached him and finally took him down. The last man was now swinging his now useless rifle by the barrel wildly left and right, trying to knock back the zombies approaching him. But he was wild with panic and his blows were weak and ineffective, whenever they connected. We could hear him yelling for help.

He took one last swing before a zombie caught it and reflexively grabbed on to the stock. In a freak occurrence the zombie managed to get it's fingers wrapped around the trigger guard and the gun went off one last time, into the chest of the man swinging it. He went down and was consumed. My eyes went to the man down in the ditch who still laid there screaming like a stuck pig as he tried to crawl towards the same patch of weeds and vines we hid under not more than a half hour ago. If he'd been quiet he'd probably would've survived, but his screams of pain attracted the last part of the herd and they climbed over the guard rail and stumbled and fell down the slope to him. The Hunter's screams reached a higher pitch for only a few moments until finally and mercifully, for us, silenced.



 Frank finally turned away, his back against the tree and he sat down in shock. He looked at us, his face horror stricken. His mouth moved before finally he found his voice. “I, I never thought at how horrible they actually were, until seeing them in action,” he began. “So many of them. We must be just outside of St. Louis and they've cleaned the city out.” I nodded, “yeah, one on one or one by one they're not too bad, but get them in a herd like that and they're virtually unstoppable.” I holstered my weapon. “We got damned lucky today.” I finished. Frank nodded, but his face was grim. “If we hadn't gone up this hill and hid in these trees...” he didn't finish the sentence.

“NO!” I heard James shouting. I turned and he was in a rage. He held his automatic weapon tightly against his chest and was shaking his head backing away from his mother. Maggie was signing furiously at him and repeatedly holding out her hand for the weapon. Her own was slung over her shoulder. James continued to back away slowly and then held the rifle in one hand signing back just as vehemently and pointing down the hillside. Maggie shook her head at him and signed back. I was at a complete loss. I turned to Frank who scowled at his grandson for this open display of disobedience. Frank saw the confusion in my eyes.

“He won't give up his weapon, though his mother is ordering him to.” he explained. “Well hell, I can see that much, but what's ... why?” Frank's face took on an order of calm. He seemed confident that Maggie could take care of her own son without his intervention. For the moment. I guessed he was waiting for the right time to assert his own authority. “Maggie?” he asked. She didn't respond at first. “Sargent!” Frank's voice was now in authoritative mode. She spun on her heel and stood at attention for a moment before realizing she actually didn't have to. As a good soldier, she recognized the voice of authority where/when given. “I want to take the gun from James because of what we were discussing about him earlier. It's in his eyes, you can see it. He wants to go down and start slaughtering zombies.”
The horror of the idea hit me, this kid was now in blood-lust and wanted to vent it out. I'm sure he was feeling frustrated that he couldn't kill more. Before Frank or I could respond I caught a movement behind her. “Maggie!”

She seemed to guess what he was doing and bent at the knees throwing one foot out behind her, effectively tripping her son to fall flat on his face. She spun and was on him before he could recover. Expertly she reached out and grabbed one of his flailing arms and managed to wrest it behind him in a restraining hold. The boy fiercely held on to his weapon and tried to stretch his arm out away from them to prevent it from being taken, his feet kicked wildly as his mother leaned forward and put her knee against the small of his back, pinning him to the spot. Frank moved around me and stomped his foot on James' hand holding the gun hard and pinned it there too. James gasped silently and remained still. Frank's face was full of regret at what he had to do to his grandson.

He knelt down and rested his hands, one still holding the .45, on his knee and looked down at the struggling boy until he stopped and looked up. Frank started signing in short, I guess you could say clipped words. I waited for one of them to translate but neither did. Their attention was to the boy. I took a step backwards and turned around and sought out the M-16 I left against the tree I was hiding behind. I picked it up and checked the loads, mainly for something to do while this family took care of their personal crisis. One thing for sure, signing did have it's benefits as they didn't attract any attention from the zombies below us, still feasting. James' shout of rebellion seemed to go unnoticed. Which was a good thing.

I moved cautiously down to the first row of trees and sat behind a large maple to observe the zombies for a bit. Every now and again the sniper fired upon a walker and hit their target. With so much food at hand the zombies didn't even bother to look up and investigate the noise. The only ones I could see were the ones in the ditch, tearing apart the body of the broken leg hunter and the ones opposite of the guard rail feeding upon the bodies laying there. Every once in a while from behind a car I could see a zombie pop up with a piece of flesh in it's mouth and hands gnawing on it, as another pushed it aside to get some. All of the hunters, except the sniper were gone, dead.

They made a mistake that I noted, of gathering together after their first zombie massacre and didn't realize that there could be another group not too far from the ones they killed. I think we were responsible for throwing a wrench into their normal routine. Slaughter zombies, clean up and move-on. Only they didn't anticipate our taking them by surprise and effectively knocking out their core leadership which, again, they became mistakenly dependent upon and lost sight of the dangerous possibility of other zombie herds nearby. The ones that killed the Hunters must've been very close indeed to arrive so quickly. Two herds that comparatively close to one another was something that I hadn't seen before. Something to note and remember.

I imagined that a lot of them came a running towards the first gunshots. Well, running as zombies could run. Either way, for us, we got very lucky indeed. Had we hung around down below that larger group would've surely over-ran us and we'd been zombie fodder. I hung my head down, suddenly very tired and depressed. I prayed that this “Wildfire” place we were headed to would give us a place of safety. If we ever got to it.