“And yet no better options are forthcoming. Like you said about contingency plans, if all we have left are bad options, isn’t this the least bad option?”
“I’m not ready to—”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Shh. Do you hear that?”
“Do I hear what?”
Annie opened the curtain and looked down the southern end of Main.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. Then she was out the front door before Ed could even ask what was happening.
He stumbled to his feet, a whole lot more dizzy than he probably should have been prior to facing off a zombie horde. He grabbed the baseball bat that had only recently brained a local celebrity and staggered to the front, wishing he had time to grab a butcher’s knife or something. Not that he knew what to do with one in a combat situation.
He was at the door when he heard what sounded like a woman screaming. It wasn’t Annie. It sounded a little like Beth, but it wasn’t her either.
He stepped outside. Joanne’s Diner had one of those old-fashioned front porches, with wood benches for people to sit at and watch the town drive by. It was a quaint touch that almost demanded the road in front of it be composed of dirt and only used by horse-drawn carriages.
Annie was standing at the edge of the steps leading to the sidewalk that ran along Main. A modest horde of zombies was amassed along the curb in neat double-rows, ready for her to make a move.
She was ignoring them, because up the road a camper was creeping toward them. The screaming sound was coming from the camper.
“Who is that?” Ed asked.
“Not sure, but look.”
She was pointing to the townspeople closest to the camper. They were stumbling about like drunken zombies, no longer fully in control of their limbs.
“That’s brilliant,” Ed said. “They found a frequency that disrupts the zombies somehow. This could give us an opening.”
“An opening? How about a ride?”
She took her first step off the porch. The zombies in line ahead of them took a counteraction, meaning to surround her. But then their synchrony came apart like a loose string pulled out of a sweater, as the trailer reached the front of the diner.
Ed was about to say all sorts of things about how they didn’t even know who was driving or whether they were friendly, when Annie spotted someone she recognized on the roof.
“HEY CORPORAL!” she shouted. “CAN A GIRL GET A LIFT?”
IT WAS no longer possible to tell who was a zombie and who wasn’t.
At first, it was pretty easy. There were the zombies on the other side of the fence, who were clearly undead creatures who recently unburied themselves from the cemetery over the hill. They responded well to head shots, and stayed down without a fuss. Dill could have dealt with their kind all night.
The soldier-zombies were an entirely different matter, but even then—at first—it wasn’t too hard to draw the line. The ‘dead’ was made up of soldiers who had recently been sleeping in the barracks, just like Vogel was. And also like Vogel, they carried themselves with a singular determination to kill.
Dill ended up reflecting on this particular point during a quiet moment. Hank only went murder-happy after being interrupted in his task—whatever the hell that was—while on this night everyone hopped out of bed and went bonkers immediately. No weird are you? questions from these guys.
The implication was obvious. The ship’s coming after us, he thought.
The best way to tell the men under the control of the ship apart from the ones who weren’t was to see who had a gun and who didn’t, because it turned out weapons training wasn’t a part of the zombie combat manual. This should have made it a whole lot easier to resolve the attack as quickly as Dill and Wen had at the fence. But no matter how well you train a person, for the most part they’re not going to be ready to shoot down half of everyone they know, whether those people are technically already dead or not.
This was another thing Dill spent a lot of time wondering during the free moments when it made more sense to hide and be quiet and hold his breath. Were they dead or not? If there was a way to make the ship stop doing whatever it was doing to them—and there wasn’t even a second when anybody reviewing this situation considered it the fault of anything other than the spaceship—would the men just…wake up and be okay?
It was both a compelling and a terrible question, because every armed soldier, at one point or another, shot a zombie in self-defense. It was nice to think the blame for the death rested squarely with the aliens (or whatever was in the ship) but it was still the bullet that did the damage.
Soldiers weren’t supposed to think like that. But when the enemy was the same guy you just played poker with the day before, or ate with that evening, or shot hoops with last week… there wasn’t any kind of training to prep you for that. A guy would have to be psycho to be ready to dive into that kind of situation feet-first, and the army was supposed to keep an eye out for that kind of crazy.
This was how things got out of hand so fast. The guys with the guns hesitated in using them too often, and ended up overrun. That was only the second-worst thing about it. The worst was, unless they were torn apart completely, they ended up as the more-traditionally-deceased kind of zombie, just adding to the army of the enemy.
By the time Dill found a corner near the motor pool in which to hide, it was literally impossible to tell who was who. Everyone had on fatigues, and the guy you were standing next to a minute earlier might be the dead version of that same guy, and you wouldn’t know until he came at you.
He could still hear the occasional gunshot, shouted command, and cry for help. There were small pockets of living soldiers out there in the night—the base’s lights had been out for an hour—but Dill was about as likely to hook up with one of those pockets, as he was to learn how to fly.
It made a lot more sense to grab one of the armored Humvees and drive out.
He’d been watching mini-hordes of zombies stumble through the motor yard for twenty minutes. They didn’t seem to distinguish the vehicle from the buildings, or the buildings for trees. Their ability to identify a moving person as a threat was about the best they could do, and the upshot was that none of them appeared to care that there was a car just sitting there and waiting for someone to take it.
Swallowing every bit of courage he had left, Dill slipped his rifle under the jacket beneath his left arm, and stood.
Running to the Humvee would have been a mistake. It was only twenty yards, but the zombies reacted to running. Instead, he walked, slowly, his arm dangling to conceal the gun, his breathing as slow as he could make it without blacking out.
There were at least a dozen of them in the open space. He assumed they were communicating with each other silently somehow—their attacks were coordinated yet they never spoke—so if one got close he would probably recognize Dill as not being One Of Them. He tried to meander in such a way as to prevent that from happening.
It was just about the most terrifying thing he’d done on a night full of pretty terrifying things. Probably the worst part was when he realized he was looking at Corporal Wen from twenty feet away. Wen was clearly deceased because living people didn’t tend to walk like that with a broken collarbone. Just as clearly, the dead didn’t retain any memories the living held, because Wen looked right past him.
When he got to the door of the Humvee he stood motionless for about fifteen seconds before slowly… slowly… trying the door latch. It was unlocked. This was, in truth, only a minor bit of good fortune because the window was down. More important was the question of where the ignition key was.
Normally, keys were left in the vehicles parked in the pool, which was just good practice on a base where any one of them might need to commission a vehicle. But just because that was the practice didn’t mean that in this instance the key was actually there. On a day when the world wasn’t ending, this would’ve meant only a temporary inconvenience, because there were more Humvees at the other end of the yard to choose from. But that was pretty far away in the zombie base world, and once he opened the door he’d be letting everyone around know he wasn’t one of them, so sprinting the yard wasn’t going to end well.