Mother Russia

Chapter Eighteen

The squad hurried down the street in a tight formation, Snyder in front, Darby and Hunk behind her, and Lambert and Okada bringing up the rear. They passed several stray zombies but didn’t bother to shoot them in an effort to conserve ammunition. As far as Hunk was concerned, they had already wasted too much taking out the crowd of zombies near the site of the crash, but it couldn’t be helped. After a brief period of panic bordering on a full meltdown, Okada had calmed down and now seemed to be doing okay. Lambert still looked a bit rattled as well, but Hunk supposed all of them were a bit rattled. They’d lost both Beckett and Campbell, not to mention the helicopter pilot Walters – and an entire load of innocent civilians. That stung Hunk more than the others.

For a brief second, Hunk thought he heard a voice behind them, possibly a woman’s voice calling for help, but just then Snyder suddenly raised her rifle and choked out, “Oh, Jesus!”

A zombie stumbled into view from around the side of a house. The flesh of its face had been entirely stripped away, leaving nothing but bloody bone, and its bare torso was covered in blood. Its abdomen had been ripped apart, leaving a gaping bloody hole through which loose coils of pink intestine swung like tassels. It turned its eyeless head in their direction and took another step.

“Keep going,” Darby ordered.

Snyder sucked in a breath. “God, I think I’m going to puke.”

“Don’t,” Hunk said. “Just ignore it.” If Snyder vomited, he figured that Okada and Lambert might follow suit. Snyder nodded and bit down on her lip to distract herself, and continued down the street. The squad left the ravaged zombie behind them. Hunk wasn’t that bothered by it. He had seen worse.

They made their way down another block to the main street at the next intersection. It was three lanes both ways, with a grass median divider. Half a dozen abandoned cars were parked at odd angles around the street. One of them was still running. The traffic lights overhead blinked yellow like a warning to stay away.

“Sir,” Snyder said, gesturing to their right.

There was a crowd of figures about two streets down, maybe two hundred yards away. Hunk couldn’t judge their number but was easily over one hundred.

Something near them moaned, making Snyder flinch. She spun around, aiming her rifle at the nearby cars. “Did you hear that?”

Hunk stepped a few paces down the sidewalk and peered between the cars. There was a zombie – a middle-aged woman in a dress shirt now soaked with blood – trapped underneath one of the wheels, its pelvis crushed. It groaned and reached futilely at him, as if it was asking for his help.

“It’s nothing,” he said, walking back to the squad. “Not a threat to us.”

Snyder breathed a sigh of relief and turned to Darby. “Sir, which way?”

Darby was looking at the map on the tablet. “Abdallah and Njagi should be located eight blocks to the northwest, directly diagonal to us. Once they cleared that neighborhood, they were to head west and establish a new perimeter,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Let’s continue down this street. With any luck, we’ll catch them before they –”

The distant sound of gunfire made him pick his head up and stash the tablet in one of his cargo pockets. “All right,” he said quickly, “let’s move.”

The squad double-timed it across the six empty lanes and down the street. More gunfire erupted up ahead, and they increased their pace. There was an auto garage to their left and some offices to the right with signs in Russian. Before they reached the next street, they were suddenly brought up short when a pair of zombies staggered into view.

More shots echoed down the street, and it was clear that it was from multiple guns. Hunk began to get a very bad feeling, but he kept it to himself for the moment. Darby drew his pistol and shot the two zombies in the head, dropping them both. As he returned the gun to its holster, three more zombies appeared down at the end of the street, and then two more close behind them.

“We could cut through here,” Snyder said, pointing at an alley between the garage and another building.

“No,” Darby replied, “We stay on the street. Take them down.”

Snyder nodded and took careful aim to shoot the zombies, dropping each one with a single round. Her own shots were drowned out by more streams of gunfire coming from nearby. Darby ordered them onward, although by now, Hunk was sure that all of them had the same bad feeling that he had. The squad continued ahead and turned at the next street, but almost as soon as they went around the corner, they had to come to a halt.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Snyder said.

The neighborhood was full of zombies. At first glance, Hunk figured there were at least three hundred of them. Men, women, children, and the elderly, all meandering around yards and stumbling across the street like a wild, disorganized mob. Some of them were bloody and gory, faces chewed up and throat torn out. Others looked relatively unscathed, nothing indicating they were infected except their pale skin and vacant expressions.

Hunk spotted a young man wearing the uniform for a fast food restaurant. Next to him was a little girl in a pink frilly dress, her blonde hair clotted with blood. Elsewhere in the crowd, there was a middle-aged man in a business suit, the lower half of his face completely gone. Next to him stood a young woman wearing just her underwear, without a mark on her.

Sporadic bursts of gunfire rang out from down the street. Most of the zombies were gathering in that direction, but a few of them had turned to see Darby’s squad and were slowly shambling towards them.

“This way,” Hunk said. “We go around them.”

No one argued with him. The squad hurried across a front lawn and between some houses, although Hunk knew that they were putting themselves in a dangerous position by doing so. They had no choice. By the sound of the gunfire up ahead, the other squads were in far worse shape. Thankfully it was nearly dawn now, and the sky had grown light. Darby took the lead and brought the squad through narrow back yards until they could see where all the shooting was coming from. They stopped at an old wooden fence and peered out at the nightmare two houses down.

There was a small blue house and it was completely surrounded. Dead zombies were all over, trampled by the others that came after them. From the squad’s vantage point, it didn’t appear that the zombies had managed to breach the house, but there were so many of them that he didn’t know how that was possible. Hunk didn’t see any dead soldiers among the corpses, but there had to be some.

Darby cupped his hand over his ear and shouted into his mike. “Squads Two and Three, report! This is Squad One! We are at your position!”

Hunk shouldered his rifle and drew his pistol. Snyder was crouched down at the corner of the wall, peering out at the mob of zombies. Some of them heard Darby yelling and began to come towards the squad. Hunk told Snyder to hold her fire and stepped out to shoot the zombies himself. He emptied the rest of the clip at the zombies in the crowd, taking out a few more, and then put in a new clip and returned the pistol to its holster.

“Repeat!” Darby yelled. “How many wounded?”

Snyder looked up at Hunk. “How can we possibly get them out of there? There’s too many hosts.”

“That’s why we brought grenades,” Hunk said.

Okada and Lambert opened fire at some zombies coming from the other side. By now, their position was compromised, as more and more zombies discovered their presence and began shuffling in their direction. In another minute they would have to retreat.

“They’ve lost three men,” Darby said quickly. “Right now they’re at the rear of the house. There are hosts inside, they broke through the front windows. The squads have barricaded the back porch, so that’s where we’ll make our move. Come on!”

Darby rushed out around the house into the back yard, taking out a few zombies with his rifle as the rest of them followed, weapons pointed in every direction. Snyder opened up with her rifle and blew away three zombies that got close. One of them was an old lady with curlers in her hair, another was a teenager wearing a shirt with Iron Man on it. Darby led them around a wooden fence and through another yard until they reached the house where the other squads were trapped.

“The squads will have to shoot their way out,” Darby said, “but we’re going to blow a hole through this crowd and make it easier for them.” He turned to Hunk. “Do you have any advice, Sergeant?”

“None,” Hunk said. “Let’s go.”

Lambert took half a dozen grenades and linked his fingers through all their pins at once. He looked at the rest of the squad and took a deep breath. With a yank of his hand, he pulled the pins, stood up and lobbed them all at once into the very center of the back yard, right in the middle of a crowd of zombies.

Everyone, even Hunk, ducked behind the fence and covered their ears as the grenades went off with a tremendous boom, shaking the ground and shattering nearby windows. The zombies closest to the blast were blown apart, limbs and chunks of bodies flying away. Chunks of flesh and body parts rained down like grisly hail. Zombies farther back went flying, spinning and cartwheeling through the air like acrobats. One of them landed right on top of the wooden fence, breaking its back as it landed. Hunk pulled out his pistol and shot the zombie in the head before it had time to even reach for them.

“Now!” Darby shouted, leading them around the fence, gun pressed against his shoulder. He opened fire on a crowd of dazed zombies at the rear side of the yard. There was a wide space right behind the house, but still too many zombies for the other squads to safely retreat.

Hunk and the others fanned out in a semicircle, opening up with their rifles and taking out as many zombies as they could see. The roar of gunfire was almost deafening, and the sight of so many zombies falling under the barrage of bullets made even Hunk sick to his stomach.

Twenty-four hours ago, all those zombies had been people with normal lives, with friends and families and jobs and hopes and dreams. None of that mattered now. The best they could do was put all of these tragic people out of their undead misery.

“Clear! Clear!” Darby called into his mike. “Go now!”

There was a crash from within the house and then the door on the back porch broke open and the surviving members of Squads Two and Three spilled out, guns blazing. Darby’s squad quickly used the opportunity to eject empty mags and snap new ones into place. They lost count of the number of zombies they’d killed, but there were always more coming, more than a hundred of them swarming hungrily around both sides of the house.

The squads ran through the yard, dodging the piles of corpses and the crater caused by the grenades, and made their way to the back fence. Darby’s squad provided cover as they climbed and jumped the fence, and then everyone retreated back through the next yard and through some trees to the next house and the street on the other side.

The other two squads totaled twelve soldiers, of which nine were left. They had only lost three, which could be considered a victory under the circumstances. The rest of them were low on ammunition and even lower on morale. Hunk noticed right away that one of them, a young man named Carlin, had a strip of cloth wrapped around his hand as a makeshift bandage.

“Thank God you showed up,” Captain Abdallah said, wiping his brow with his sleeve. He was a tall Egyptian a few years older than Hunk, with streaks of gray in his black hair. He looked at Darby’s squad and noticed they were also short a few people. “You’ve run into trouble as well?” he asked, his voice grave.

“Yes,” Darby said. “Our transport went down, with the pilot and a group of civilians on board. We also lost two men, Beckett and Campbell.”

Abdallah said, “We lost Hollis, Ortiz, and Captain Njagi.”

“Njagi?” Darby said, suddenly looking around. “What happened?”

“We encountered hosts almost as soon as we touched down,” Abdallah explained. “We found some survivors hiding in a house and got them evacuated just in time, but there were too many hosts and we had to take cover. Njagi and Hollis got separated from us and couldn’t make it back. The hosts got them. There was nothing we could do.”

“And Ortiz?”

“He died when the hosts broke into the house.”

Hunk said, “Have you had contact with any other creatures aside from second-stage hosts?”

Abdallah shook his head. “No, sir.”

“We did,” Darby explained. “We found one of the primary hosts. That’s what took our transport down. We need to avoid it at all costs.”

Hunk pointed at Carlin. “And what happened to you?”

Carlin met Hunk’s gaze for just a second and then looked away, clenching his bandaged fist.

Abdallah sighed and shook his head. “He was … he was bitten, sir.”

No one said anything at first, and then Hunk walked over and put his hand on Carlin’s shoulder in something approximating a fatherly gesture. “You can still fire your weapon?”

“Yes, sir,” Carlin said confidently.

“Then you’ll stay with us as long as possible.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

Darby looked past Hunk. They had put some distance between themselves and the oncoming horde of zombies, but that distance was getting smaller. “We should keep moving. We also need to find a way to call for evac.”

“Flares,” Abdallah said. “I told our pilot to look for flares.”

“All right, then,” Darby said. “Our mission still stands. We look for survivors and keep them safe until we can get them evacuated. Let’s go.”

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