Crusade (Eden Book 2) Read online

  Bear cleaved a zombie in half. As its upper body slipped off the hood, he cut off the gas to the chainsaw and laid it on the seat. In his ears Ozzy and Sabbath were singing about a man who had traveled time for his species only to be turned to steel.

  The lightning flashed. Bear and Nadjia stood, revealed to the aggregation of zombies who let off a massive howl. The fight renewed. He fired out one Glock then the second. The furor and appetite of the undead drove them to their own destruction.

  Nadjia emptied the Commando and took up a second identical assault rifle, dropping zombies as he turned around and retrieved a crate of hand grenades. He took them up two at a time, pulling cotter pins, letting the spoons fly, and throwing them overhand as deep into the crowd as he could.

  The grenades detonated, their blasts muffled by the multitude of bodies. Each explosion flashed briefly and powerfully, rivaling the lightning in intensity, temporarily opening up a brief gap amidst the horde—a gap that was quickly filled by the press of new bodies. Bear threw the grenades as far as he could. After he had cocked his arm back thirty or more times the crate was emptied.

  There were gaps in the throng now that were not being filled as quickly as before. This was cause for optimism in Nadjia’s mind.

  “I want you to take the child and wait in the truck.” Bear indicated the Chevy as he reloaded and holstered the Glocks. “Give me those, please.”

  She handed him the two freshly loaded Commando assault rifles, which he slung muzzle down in opposite directions over his back. He gathered up three bandoliers of ammunition and shouldered them.

  She drew her 9mm and picked up the bundle. Its blankets were somewhat wet from the rain.

  Bear left the saddle bags where they were and stepped over the front seat into the back of the Hummer, taking up a flame thrower that laid in the trunk. He slung the three-tank backpack harness over one shoulder and gripped the strap with one leathered hand. He fired it up and doused the zombies that had gathered around the driver’s side of the SUV. They dropped and burned and a couple tottered off alight, wailing.

  “Go.”

  She opened the driver’s side passenger door and made for the Chevy, stepping over the dead.

  As Bear fought his way to the town—flame thrower jetting liquid fire, flares ablaze, the barrels of his assault rifles glowing red, knives buried in the undead—time passed but he was unaware, caught up in his battle against the zombie masses.

  The lightning flashed and the thunder rumbled and the clouds above were as equally unforgiving as the day before.

  …you can hide in the sun till you see the light. Holy Diver was playing on his iPod.

  Nadjia secured Bear’s charge in the Chevy and returned to the mound of bodies stacked shoulder high in some parts. She watched her step and mounted it, reaching its apex. The tide of zombies had turned their backs from the bridge and was intent on the cracks and muzzle flashes licking out into the downpour some distance beyond, as Bear moved through them. She shouldered the Commando and fired, bringing zombies down. Dozens then hundreds of them turned to face her, aware of another human behind them, reaching for her. The more agile ones attempted to scale the dead barrier but to no avail. She shot them down where they stood.

  Thunder crashed and a sheet of fire burst ahead on the street under the feet of several zombies who wailed and went up like dry kindling, even in this rain. Lightning reached down from the sky in a zigzag pattern. Bear spied a figure on the rooftop of the building across from him—a wild man garmented in rags, hair and beard wiry and frizzed. In each hand he held a Molotov cocktail, which he hurled down upon the undead crowds. The man was screaming at the top of his lungs but Bear could not make out what he said over the rain and thunder and moans.

  The closest building to him was a three-story residential which he fought his way towards. He thrust and jabbed with the knives, driving them through faces and the sides of heads. A booker bursting from the mass launched itself forward and latched onto his shoulders. Bear brought the knife in his right hand down through the top of the creature’s head. Wide-eyed, the thing dropped from him.

  Flames burst ahead on the street as the wild man launched bottle after bottle of gasoline into the hordes.

  Bear reached the building and brought a thirteen-inch hatchet hammer up into play. Part hatchet, part hammer, part pry bar, he swung it left and right. The three inch hatchet blade and flat hammer side slayed undead. He plunged the pry bar end through skulls.

  The ground-floor windows were all broken out and there was no sign of life from within the building. The door was closed but not boarded up. He tried the handle and found it locked. He stepped back, aware that a ring of zombies closed in on him. He drove a booted foot through the knob and the door flew open, the frame splintering.

  The interior was dark. He entered a vestibule with mail boxes, some of which stood open, empty. Addressed envelopes lay scattered about his feet. He turned and looked out at the street. When the lightning flashed he saw the zombies in their multitudes inching towards the building. Above them, on the roof of the building across the street, the wild-man continued to scream, unheard amidst the rain and thunder. He threw chunks of concrete and roofing tiles down onto the zombies below.

  Bear turned and moved farther into the building. Ignoring a hallway that led to some apartments, he mounted dust-enshrouded stairs. As he reached the second floor landing, he could hear the first zombies entering below, coming for him. Apparently there were none up here, or if there were they were behind closed doors. He didn’t wait around to find out. He continued to the third floor landing and mounted the stairs to the roof.

  A door gave way to the roof, which was deserted. Rain water had pooled in spots about the flat tar. The building next to this was two stories in height. Bear didn’t have to worry about zombies from that direction. When the lightning came he saw the wild man across the way had disappeared. He also saw none of the roofs appeared to have any zombies on them, which would mean all the undead in the town were below on the street and working their way up the stairwell towards him.

  He considered his options. The door to the roof opened up five feet from a thigh-high barrier, beyond which yawned empty air: a three story drop. He stood in the doorway and looked down the stairs. He could hear them but couldn’t see them yet. He laid down the hatchet hammer, removed the splatter mask and uncapped a canteen of water, drinking deeply. He poured some more of the water out onto his face, squinting his good eye, shaking his head. The rain fell around him.

  …what you gonna be, what you gonna be brother, Zero the hero…

  Nadjia fired out all the ammunition for her Commando and returned to the Chevy for another bandolier. She couldn’t hear Bear firing anymore but figured things had moved to hand to hand combat. She remounted the wall of dead and found the zombies still waiting for her below. In another set of circumstances she could have felt pity for them, but they had taken so much from her. They had taken everything that had ever meant anything to her. In place of sympathy she felt a form of apathy—curiously detached as she sighted and fired, felling them in scads.

  When she’d fired out the ammunition for the M16 A2 she tossed the weapon aside and picked up the nozzle for the M2 flamethrower she’d lugged onto the mountain with her. She worked the igniter trigger on the front grip and the firing trigger on the rear grip. The nitrogen propellant spit a stream of flaming petrol a hundred feet deep into the crowd at the rate of a half gallon per second. The zombies were cremated where they stood. Torched and shrieking, some pitched from the bridge to burn alongside the banks of the river below. Others squirmed around in the conflagration, melted lumps of undead flesh dropping off their bodies.

  When the flamethrower was tapped out Nadjia kicked the tank backpack away from her, down the mound of undead bodies, and drew one of the 9mms she wore. She fired down into the zombies and emptied the clip. They gawked up at her, mouths agape, until each caught a round in the skull and collapsed. After she’d gone thro
ugh all the magazines for the pistol she holstered it and turned, intent on the truck, but the bodies beneath her shifted and she lost her footing, slipping. She fell onto her hip and sliding down the undead towards the Chevy, aware of a previously unseen zombie barring her path.

  She scrambled to her feet and stood face to chest with the largest beast she’d yet encountered. She decided it must have been a football player or Samoan wrestler in life. It was well over six and a half feet tall and nearly half of that across. The zombie growled and clasped her shoulders with two massive hands, pulling her towards it. Its mouth cracked open revealing rotted, jagged teeth and a hot breath stinking of the grave. Its hair was a frizzy afro encrusted with dirt and brambles.

  Her instincts fought her impulse to pull away from the beast. Instead she wrapped her legs around it under the shoulders, torquing her body, her weight and momentum enough that the scissor sweep dragged the clumsy creature forward off its own feet, pitching it down face first. Before it could crash on top of her she rolled to the side. The monster landed inches away. One of her gloved hands went to its quivering throat, holding its masticating jaws back from her person. Her other hand went to her lower back, returning wrapped around a Benchmade 175 CBK backup blade. She drove the dagger-style blade through the creatures face repeatedly, plunging it rapid-fire into the thing’s eye sockets and cheeks until it ceased moving.

  She turned over and another thing was on her, flinging itself from the pile of the dead. Ghastly and grievously injured, its lower legs had been blasted off. Its champing jaws went right for her face guard, but she gripped it by the wrists. Dropping the benchmade knife, she swung her torso around, planted the soles of her feet in the crooks of its elbows and pushed it back, controlling the creature’s spastic paroxysms from a spider guard position. She waited for her opening and let go with one hand, her balled fist cracking it above the ear. The stunned creature collapsed. It lay struggling atop the mound of bodies. Not taking any chances, she retrieved the CBK blade and thrust it repeatedly through the thing’s head.

  She turned over and got to her feet. Another zombie staggered her way from several yards distant. Nadjia shook herself off and met it in the rain, stabbing the CBK’s beveled blade through the skull case at the temple.

  …why do you have to die to be a hero? Rob Halford was singing. It’s a shame a legend begins as its end…

  When the first zombies reached the bottom of the stairs and spotted Bear, lightning backlit the gargantuan man. They hissed and moaned with desire and proceeded up the stairs towards him. He affixed the splatter mask and waited until the lead zombie reached the top of the stairs. He cracked it over the head with the hatchet hammer and yanked it forward before it could drop in the doorway, thrusting it out over the roof’s wall, into the void.

  The undead moved sluggishly and, one by one as they cleared the doorway, he battered them about their skulls and pushed them from the roof. He worked like this for some time while the lighting flashed, thunder boomed as if the storm were directly overhead. A mound of bodies piled up three stories below. And the zombies continued to come, packing themselves into the landings and stairwells. Their bodies were pressed so tightly together movement became impossible at times for several of them. The ones in the forefront found their craniums fractured and were launched into free fall.

  The building now thronged with undead, Bear yanked the pin out of a thermite grenade and tossed it down the stairs. He turned his back and walked towards the roof’s lip where it adjoined the next building. The detonation immolated untold numbers of zombies on the third floor. The flames caught and spread fast amidst the tight-pressed bodies and walls, creating a nascent inferno. There were muffled wails from within the apartments as Bear hang-dropped to the roof of the two story building next door. He kicked the roof door in and walked down two flights of stairs to the front door which opened out onto the street.

  Zombies massed there turned and confronted him. He clobbered the closest one over the head, then returned to the roof of this building, waiting as they poured in from the street in scores. Patiently he drummed the hatchet hammer into the palm of one hand. The building next door was engulfed in flames which would soon spread to this one. He watched water drip from the lip of the doorway and listened to the rain about him. Quiet Riot covering Slade implored him to cum on feel the noize. Again, when the zombies reached the roof of this building he drubbed them over the head and flung them below.

  There was a series of bright explosions from up the street, back in the direction of the bridge. He knew Nadjia had reloaded the M202A1 and unleashed its hell on the crowds of undead.

  With a splintering crash the roof of the burning building next to him collapsed inwards. Bear took this as a signal to hurl another thermite grenade into the building on which he stood. As the zombies burned, flames lighting up the dark, fire battling rain and darkness for dominance, he knocked out the glass of a window in the next building and repeated the process of luring the undead into it then immolating them in droves.

  Nadjia spent a second night in the Chevy. Bear locked himself on the roof of a building the next block over. He sat in the rain. An entire block burned as he rested. In the morning when he woke, the rain had quenched the flames and was gone.

  Superstructural steel beams reached towards the sky. Bear looked down into a street teeming with zombies. There were significantly fewer this morning. The sky yawned grey overhead.

  He considered enticing them into this building and destroying them much like the ones from the previous day but decided against it. Instead he met them on the street in battle and dispatched them with hatchet hammer, knives, and his hands.

  Nadjia had reloaded all her magazines and weapons and stood on the mountain of dead. In the distance she saw Bear cutting a deadly swath among those that remained. She joined the fray with the M-85, sniping on the zombies from afar. The rifle fire was clear and piercing with the storm passed over, and a number of zombies turned and started towards her. She racked the bolt and fired and reloaded and fired until she was out of ammunition.

  She hefted the twenty-six pound M202A1 to her right shoulder and fired out four M74 rockets in quick succession. As hordes of zombies melted where they stood, she reloaded the incendiary launcher with the last four-rocket clip. She fired these final rockets into the crowds of zombies on the main street, cutting through the town, then laid the launcher on the mounds of undead atop which she perched.

  She drew her pistols and climbed down, striding over the cadavers and adding to their number as she closed with zombies, firing only when she could not miss. She stayed clear of the areas where the M235 warheads had detonated. Circles of melted flesh and asphalt from the road bubbled as the thickened pyrotechnic agent burned. The stink of it was noxious, poisonous.

  Many of the buildings in the town evidenced structural damage, having fallen into decay given time and disrepair. Some were boarded up. Bear had torched an entire block. Stores and buildings were charred and gutted.

  Eventually she met Bear in the street and he nodded his splatter-masked head to her. She wondered how many zombies had perished in the burnt down block of buildings and stores. She passed him a Commando and shouldered her own. They stood back to back and fired out bandoliers of ammunition until the zombies had dwindled. Human survivors from the town joined them on the street.

  The rag-clad man from the roofs reached them first. He ran down the road to where Bear and Nadjia stood, passing a few undead stragglers late to the slaughter. He gripped a gore-spattered club. Zombies reached for him and groaned but he avoided their arms and came to an abrupt halt before Bear, his club held loosely.

  Nadjia had a 9mm by her side.

  The man stared at Bear in awe, as if in recognition of something beyond words. Bear looked at him, past the rags clinging to his wasted frame, beyond the mane of dirty white hair, into the eyes burning with lunacy and revelation that signaled a deeper verisimilitude only hinted at. Some measure of clarity in their deran
gement. He recognized something within those eyes, and went back to thumbing shells into magazines.

  There was a scream from up the street. A group of survivors, little more than skeletons themselves, had emerged from a building and fought three zombies with hammers and screwdrivers. One of them, a man, had been bitten on the shoulder and lay in the street.

  Nadjia and Bear, trailed by the wild man, walked to them, skirting around and over corpses. The wounded man lay bleeding out atop zombie bodies. There was no clear part of the street to rest him on. The others stood around him with no clue what to do. They were panting and one looked semi-catonic. Nadjia eyed these newcomers warily. Bear stood over the wounded man as he removed his splatter mask, looking down on him as the guy gurgled and died.

  Before he could turn into a zombie, Bear fired a single round from the Commando through his brain.

  Nadjia stared at the survivors and they at her. Everyone was quiet for some time. Soon thereafter, Bear stepped over and through the dead with the enfolded child clutched to his chest, the mace in his right hand dripping blood, saddle bags slung over his broad shoulders. He wound his way through the carnage as survivors in the town came in their twos and threes. Nadjia waited for them on the road.