Wells raised his battle rifle, took aim, and fired one perfectly placed round directly into the former-man's chest. A big hole blasted open there, and was followed by a geyser of gooey blackened blood.
The result? The fat guy stumbled backwards, wobbled, and then approached once again, moving slightly more slowly than the lava stream pursuing Wells through the jungle.
He paused for a second, recalling a battle a few months previous when he had thought he was under attack by oversized spiders. Those creatures had reacted in a similar fashion, absorbing the bullets but not dying.
It turned out that those eight-legged fiends had survived rifle fire by virtue of being phantasms, illusions projected into his mind by a creature comprised of psychic energy.
Wells shook his head to chase away the memories of the Red Rock mission. He had already faced a legion of undead here on Tioga Island — they were no illusion. No, the walking corpses could be felled by bullets, if the weak spot could be found.
Once again he fired, this time aiming for the head. Everything above the man's pasty white eyes disintegrated; a dome of flesh and blood spun in the air and then landed on the dirt road like a Comanche warrior's trophy. What remained of the head rocked back, then forward, then back again as if held in place by a spring.
But the creature did not stop.
As the zombie thing closed to about ten yards in front and the lava closed to within a quarter mile behind, Wells decided to dispense with the surgical approach. He worked the trigger on his rifle repeatedly, still firing in single-shot mode but doing so as fast as his finger allowed.
Bullets smashed into the creature one after another, a few going wide but most finding their mark on its abdomen, neck, arms, and legs. Body parts fell off and Wells had the distinct feeling of being a gardener trimming a bush.
The creature dropped to the ground as a series of bullets severed the muscles working its legs. After a pause, the thing crawled at Jupiter, leaving a track of black, red, and yellow behind.
"What the fuck? Why don't you just die? Where do I have to hit you?"
The battle last night had taught him that these things could be put down, but their off switch was not always in the same place. Here he had nearly torn everything off the damned thing, leaving a badly disfigured torso, yet it still tried to wriggle across the dirt to attack.
He switched to fully-automatic fire and pulled the trigger.
Click.
In his frustration he had lost track of his ammunition count.
The creature crawled a little closer.
Wells felt his utility belt for another magazine and found nothing.
The creature came within three feet, dragging itself across the dirt like a worm with arms. Behind him the lava approached at a similar speed.
Jupiter Wells actually felt a pang of panic … then his fingers found his last magazine, stuck in a thigh rig.
"Jesus Christ, God damn it," he muttered to himself and pushed the magazine into place just as one of the zombie's hands — missing most fingers — thumped against his boot.
Wells took a step back and said, "All right, let's try this shit again."
His battle rifle opened up at close range with a furious volley of fully automatic fire. A waste of ammunition, yes, but Wells did not care. In fact, he could have easily walked around the torn-apart, squirming torso and left it for the lava, but he very much wanted to finish off the thing, maybe because his predicament had made his choices irrelevant. Except for this one. He could finish off this monster on his terms. In contrast, he could not shoot the lava.
One of the many bullets blasted into the corpse finally did the trick. The creature stopped moving, as if all power had been cut. Of course, it was little more than bags of jelly hanging from broken and smashed bones at that point. Yet Wells did see a whole lot of strands, like strings or thin vines, weaving through the mushy pile. They did not look human, but then again the entire mess no longer resembled a human being, either.
He stood for a second with his gun barrel smoking, nearly mesmerized by what had just happened.
I found it, Wells thought. I found your fucking off switch.
But he had no time to celebrate. A fresh blast of heat — like a wave of burning air — blew in from behind and kicked-started him into action. The pause to confront the walking corpses had allowed the magma flow time to catch up. Now it came along the road like a thick rolling blob of orange and yellow with crusty patches of black.
Jupiter Wells slung his weapon and moved again, this time in a fast jog, racing through the thickening fog of ash and smoke while following the road east. He passed two more structures that had faced the invaders' torch, one burned to a smoldering pile of charcoaled beams, another fully engulfed.
As he moved he realized he no longer heard the rumble of jet fighters, possibly due to the sound of burning jungle but more likely because they had moved off. Yet the very fact that they had come in the first place meant naval assets neared the island.
Finally the canopy of cover gave way and the land opened up into a long upwards-sloping stretch of rocky grassland. The road diverted to the right and downward en route to a beach house. He eschewed that path and took the rocks, sensing an opportunity in the elevation.
As Wells rounded the crest of a rocky mound he saw a sight that stopped him dead in his tracks. If he had had any saliva left he would have swallowed, but it seemed as if the heat and exertion had robbed his body of all moisture.
The Pacific dominated the horizon; gentle waves rolled in to a beach on the far side of another slope. Between Wells and the Pacific was a stretch of land that stood like a stage overlooking the ocean. No doubt islanders had come here often to watch the sun rise.
Islanders gathered there now, in fact, but they would be witnessing no sunrise. Wells had come upon the makings of a mass grave, although no attempt had been made to hide the bodies; the soil here was far too rocky for digging.
The corpses lay about haphazardly, some on their sides, others on their backs, some on their bellies. Wells spied a teenaged girl with bright red hair and glassy eyes staring blankly at the sky. He saw a tall man with glasses lying crooked on a sharp nose, his cargo shorts and golf shirt tainted with black singe marks, suggesting a close encounter with fire. Next to that man lay a younger woman face down, part of her tennis skirt showing similar signs of fire damage.
All told he counted fifteen dead souls gathered on that outcropping above the beach.
None of them moved; these were not zombies. As he cautiously approached, Wells searched for bullet wounds. The sight looked similar to a massacre he had witnessed in an Afghanistan village after the Taliban had accused the elders of collaboration.
However, the only signs of physical trauma came in the form of burns. A few of the bodies displayed second-degree burns to their faces and hands, a few had suffered only minor marks to their arms and legs. None of the injuries appeared life-threatening.
He knelt and examined the body of a middle-aged black man whom he recognized to be a musician or comedian … he had seen the face on TV at some point in the past. Wells undertook a closer inspection of this man and, again, found only burns.
After several minutes of consideration he settled on the cause of death as most likely asphyxiation or poisoning. He had heard that volcanoes released all manner of gases that could kill; he just wondered if that was what had done in these people, or if that was merely how it was supposed to look.