HVZA (Book 3): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse [Project Decimation] Read online

  “Certain enough for us to trust our lives with it?” the Ranger asked, suspicious of anything that couldn’t be cocked and fired.

  “Dr. Devereaux was never wrong about such things!” Martha declared indignantly, displaying yet another side of her multiple personalities that was just a slightly more controlled version of her previous outburst.

  Pete then initiated a brief brainstorming session to see how best to utilize the limited SZP they had. After a slew of complex suggestions such as creating aerosols with laser-targeting, inert propellant dispensers, Cam interrupted and asked why they simply couldn’t put a drop on some gauze or cotton wrapped around the end of a yardstick?

  “Yeah, that could work, too,” Pete said with a bemused expression, realizing that they were sometimes all a little too smart for their own good.

  Martha would be in charge of the “pheromone wand,” and keep a plastic baggie over the treated gauze to protect it from the rain until it needed to be used. However, as she had never “been out in the field” before, there was considerable concern about her ability to handle this important assignment, but, as everyone else would be needed to fight, the task of wielding the wand fell to the emotionally unstable lab assistant. Everyone quietly prayed it would not prove to be a fatal mistake.

  The Ranger and Mad Max were first out of the door, and caught a faceful of wind-driven rain. Cam and Becks followed on either side of Martha, with Pete and Julian bringing up the rear. While the others were less than thrilled with the pelting drops of water, Becks found them to be oddly reassuring and helped her to focus. Her nerves were still far more fragile than she would ever admit, and the discomfort of the rain was a valuable distraction.

  Their route was initially relatively clear as they made their way to Fort Washington Avenue where they would start heading north, but there were plenty of mobile corpses ahead of them. Fortunately, as zombies possessed a general aversion to water, many kept themselves pressed against buildings and huddled in doorways to avoid the pouring rain. Also, for those who had switched more than a year ago, the blinding flashes of lightning played upon their sensitivity to bright light, and those zombies also sought some shelter or put their hands and arms in front of their faces.

  Anything that helped lower the number of zombies was welcomed, but of course, not even the nastiest thunderstorm could counteract the force of hunger. As soon as fresh meat passed by, these dripping wet, partially decayed figures staggered out of doorways and from under awnings to join in the pursuit of their potential meal.

  Max used Mama to deadly effect, but while his right hand swung the battle axe, he needed his left hand to hold over his mouth to stifle his maniacal laughter. He simply couldn’t control himself every time Mama sunk deep into a cranium—especially whenever bits of brain spilled out or an eye was cleaved from its socket.

  The Ranger’s weapon of choice was naturally the M9 bayonet attached to the end of his M4 rifle. While lacking the skull-splintering power of Mama, the bayonet thrust of the muscular Ranger had an equally devastating effect on flesh and bone. Sticky Pete used his homemade spear, Cam had a machete, and Becks had her favorite commando knife. Regardless of the personal choice of weapons, everyone was trying to move quickly and kill as quietly as possible to avoid drawing even bigger crowds.

  It was tempting to do an all-out sprint, but as they would be traveling over a mile, there was no way Julian and Martha would be able to keep up the pace over that distance. As it was, the two were already moving too slowly, prompting the Ranger to bark at them to hurry up and move their lazy asses, which was probably not the best strategy. Martha got flustered and dropped the wand, but fortunately it remained dry. Julian probably wet himself, but in the downpour, no one could tell for sure.

  For the length of two entire blocks, the group crawled along the street side of the continuous line of parked cars, as masses of zombies huddled in packs on the sidewalks under tattered construction and business awnings or the brick archways of apartment building entrances. To everyone’s credit, the broken glass and debris that cut their hands and knees was borne in stoic silence.

  Just past the intersection with 171st Street, about 50 zombies were trying to jam into a clear glass bus stop shelter designed for no more than a dozen people, and there was no way to pass them without being seen. In the middle of the intersection, there were several cars at odd angles in the street, creating something of a zigzagging bottleneck through which they would have to pass single-file, right into the crowd of zombies. The sidewalks were not a better option, as hundreds more still clung to the fronts of buildings on both sides of the street. As the group whispered ideas for their plan of attack—basically having five fighters rushing headlong into the mini-herd ten times their number—Becks had a better idea.

  “Thermopylae,” Becks said, to blank or puzzled expressions, and then continued. “You know, the Spartans, the Persians, the narrow pass?”

  “You mean like that movie 300?” Max asked. “Yeah, I saw that on Netflix. Remember that movie, Pete?”

  “Oh, that movie was awesome. You sure we didn’t rent that on DVD?” Pete responded, going completely off track.

  “Yes, yes, awesome movie,” Becks snapped, losing patience. “The point is, rather than us running into that crowd one at a time, why don’t we draw the crowd through that gap in the cars and bring them to us single file?”

  “Sounds like a plan, let’s go,” the Ranger said, jumping to his feet and sprinting toward the cars in the intersection.

  “Wait, what?” Cam said, surprised by the Ranger’s rash action. “Shit, I guess it’s go time.”

  The rest of the group hurried to join the Ranger and take up defensive positions crouched behind the cars. The key was to attract the attention of the zombies at the bus stop, without riling up all the others in the surrounding area. The Ranger accomplished that by throwing a broken bottle at a tall, male zombie in a suit, while softly saying, “Hey, asshole.”

  The tall zombie immediately headed their way, and after bouncing off a couple of fenders and bumpers, found the gap between the cars and stumbled through, right into the waiting bayonet of the Ranger. A stout female followed, only to fall to a devastating lateral blow from Mama that sent the top two inches of her skull and brains flying onto the windshield of a silver Toyota Prius. Cam and Becks easily handled the next pair, and then Pete joined in with his spear, as he secretly pretended to be the Spartan King Leonidas, with the six-pack abs, of course.

  “Clear these bodies to the side,” Becks ordered Julian and Martha, who seemed more than content to let everyone else do the dirty work.

  As the two timid members of the team dragged the grisly, bloody corpses out of the way to make room for more grisly, bloody corpses, the rest of the team took turns thinning the mini-herd. But after about twenty-five kills, the other natives on the street were getting restless and were starting to shamble off the sidewalks wherever they could squeeze through the lines of cars.

  “We’re running out of time!” Martha shouted, as she started to lose it.

  “Shut up and hold your position!” the Ranger yelled, but to no avail.

  Martha grabbed the yardstick with the pheromone gauze, yanked off the baggie, and headed through the gap toward the remaining crowd. A male zombie chef in a very soiled apron and hat had started to enter the gap, but when Martha thrust the gauze under his nose, he stopped, tilted his head and rolled his eyes as if he was tasting an exquisite French sauce, and actually took a few steps backward! Waving the yardstick in front of half a dozen more zombies, they passively turned and went back under the bus shelter.

  “Come on, move your lazy asses!” Martha screamed to the group, urging them forward with her free hand.

  “Well I’ll be damned!” the Ranger said in astonishment, as he was next through the gap, quickly followed by all the others.

  Martha swung the stick back and forth a few more times, just to make sure none of the zombies would follow, then replaced the plastic b
ag and rejoined the group. Everyone made sure to tell her she had done a great job, but she insisted all of the credit should go to Dr. Devereaux.

  The celebration ended quickly, however, as the wall of zombies ahead of them was much larger than anyone had ever encountered.

  Chapter 13

  Word of the massive herd coming up the Palisades Interstate Parkway spread rapidly through the communities of Tappan, Orangeburg, Sparkill, Piermont, and Palisades. Though the population was sparse, the residents were determined not to lose what they had fought so hard to regain once they began turning the tide of the apocalypse.

  Barricades of boulders, cars, furniture, logs, and fencing were piled up at all the entrance and exit ramps in southern Rockland County, in a “not in my backyard” mentality. Of course, that just meant that the herd would go farther north to the towns of Pearl River, Nanuet, and New City, so the people there also began barricading ramps and roads where zombies might wander off into their backyards.

  The Army and the local militias promptly knocked down all the hastily-constructed barricades, as they might need those access points to battle the herd with whatever strategy was finally decided upon. Everything was in an extreme state of confusion and panic, and no one was quite sure if it was even possible to combat the hundreds of thousands of zombies.

  Becks and her group stopped in their tracks as they wondered if this was as far as they could go. There was a small park on the northwest corner of the intersection, and for some reason it looked as if every zombie in the neighborhood was trying to get in. Perhaps some morsel of fresh meat was discovered in the park, which had sent the herd surging toward it.

  A low stone wall surrounded the park, and it was almost comical as the herd inexorably pushed forward and the front line of staggering corpses was flipped headfirst over the wall. Barely had that line struggled to their feet, when the next group of zombie acrobats came tumbling over the wall.

  However, at the sight of living, breathing, delicious humans, the tide turned. As the herd in the street lurched toward them, the crowd in the park started pushing to get out, and the line that had most recently gotten to their feet after falling over the wall, was now pushed back over it onto the sidewalk, to repeat the entire ridiculous process in reverse. But no one had the time or inclination to laugh—it would be suicide to take on this mass of undead humanity.

  “Right, right, right!” Sticky Pete shouted, as he motioned everyone to go east on 173rd Street.

  The first few hundred feet of this block were clear, as the smooth walls of the buildings on both sides were uninterrupted by doorways or recesses of any kind, not offering any shelter for the zombies. Up ahead were some gated alleys, but they moved quietly and quickly enough to not attract the attention of the shadowy figures lurking in their depths. Then on their left, was a schoolyard—a schoolyard filled with dozens of ragged little undead children.

  The entire team paused as one to stare in horror as these ravenous mini-zombies pressed their cheeks and hands against the chain link fence—the fence which once protected them in their joyful recess playtime, but now held them back from mercilessly falling upon the adults. Many of the children pressed so hard that decaying pieces of lips, noses, and fingertips were rubbed clean off and fell to the pavement in ghastly, little piles. A bright bolt of lightning and a rumbling clap of thunder jolted the group out of its state of shock, and they hurried on their way, although each one knew these were images they would never be able to entirely erase from their memories.

  Then, unfortunately, the relatively sparsely populated side street opened up onto the wide intersection of Broadway, and even wider herds stretching to the south and east as far as the eye could see. They would be going north, which didn’t have as many zombies, but before anyone could get too complacent, the Ranger reminded everyone, “Never leave a sizable force of the enemy in your rear.”

  Max snickered at the unintended, lewd, double entendre, but Pete shot him a sharp look and he clammed up.

  “We need a diversion or distraction to keep them from following us,” the Ranger continued. “If we run into any delays or impediments ahead, we will be trapped. Mission over.”

  “How about taking a page from the Becks’ School of Pyrotechnics?” Cam asked, pointing to a gas station just up ahead on the right, and referring to her scorched earth policy while trying to survive in the New Jersey suburbs.

  “There’s no power,” Julian said, as panic raised his voice at least an octave. “You won’t be able to pump out any gas.”

  “No need,” Cam responded, taking Julian by the arm and pulling him forward, afraid the young doctor was about to bolt. “We will use the storage tanks in the ground, but we will need something dry to start a fire. Look for clothing or papers, anything combustible.”

  As the team members all rushed for the gas station, they briefly stopped here and there to pick up scraps of cardboard and newspaper from under cars, and jammed them in their jackets to keep them dry. Martha found a weathered corpse in a doorway and tore off its clothes like a crazed sex maniac.

  Once under the awning of the gas station, Cam directed Pete and Max to handle stragglers, while Becks and the others tied all the refuse together in bundles with the clothing, and he and the Ranger tried to pry up the heavy, metal lid that covered the massive underground storage tank. Using a piece of pipe to finally pop the lid, the strong cloud of escaping petroleum fumes was encouraging. The Ranger tossed a glass bottle into the tank and the gratifying splashing sound indicated there was a still plenty of gasoline to create an effective diversion.

  “Hurry up, god damn it!” Max shouted, as he swung Mama back and forth amongst the skulls of the encroaching herd. “We can’t keep this up much longer.”

  Once the bundles of paper and cloth were assembled, Becks grabbed a bottle of 10W-30 oil from a rack and stabbed it with her commando knife. Then she drizzled the oil over the bundles to make sure they would burn well. She was fully prepared to stay behind and drop the flaming bundles in the storage tank, but Cam literally smacked the idea out of her with the swat to her butt.

  “You never could outrun me, Trues. Hell, no high school kid in the Hudson Valley, could,” he said with that maddening—and thoroughly charming—gloating tone and expression. “You all start clearing a path north and I’ll be right behind you.”

  Cam wanted the herd to get as close as possible, so if there was any kind of explosion along with the fire, it would maximize casualties. Becks whispered, “Don’t be stupid,” and then she and the rest of the team started jogging northward. Groups of half a dozen or more zombies were everywhere, and they fought when they had to, and just ran where they could. But with every step, Becks glanced over her shoulder to see if Cam was coming.

  Tense seconds ticked by and she was about to turn back, when finally, she saw Cam running like the track star he had been. But he was also yelling something and wildly waving his arms toward the ground.

  “Get down, take cover!” he shouted frantically, as the team members all threw themselves behind cars and trucks.

  Before Cam could shout his warning again, a thunderous sound—that Becks could only imagine was what an erupting volcano sounded like—shredded the air, a split second before a brilliant flash of crimson seemed to ignite the very atmosphere around them.

  The devastating explosion propelled Cam fifteen feet through the air, landing him face first in the blood and guts of a freshly-killed female zombie in lingerie and stiletto-heeled leather boots. But that was nothing compared to the gas station pumps, pavement, and office that launched straight up as if trying to achieve orbit. The blast eviscerated hundreds, if not thousands of the tightly-packed zombies, and leveled two, five-story brick buildings, a small white church, and several other buildings on the east side of the street behind the gas station.

  Across Broadway on the west side, the explosion compromised the structural integrity of a 12-story brick building enough that it began to creak and groan and sway. Then, a
lmost as if in slow motion, the startled team watched in amazement as it tipped over as a single unit, then shattered in a deafening shower of bricks as it slammed to the ground.

  If the gas station explosion, subsequent hellfire, and towering plume of smoke wasn’t enough of a distraction and deterrent to the thousands of zombies left in the herd, the impediment of a prone 12-story building damming the width of Broadway would keep anything from pursuing the team.

  When Becks and the Ranger ran back to help Cam to his feet, he just smiled awkwardly and said, “I guess there was more gasoline than I thought.”

  “That’s the understatement of the year!” Becks said, wanting to give him a hug, but deciding he was covered with way too much of a sticky, gooey zombie mess.

  The Armageddon-scale diversion—which blew out windows for several blocks—drew herds from all directions, including those in their path ahead. It was decided that rather than “swim upstream” through the approaching zombies, they instead would hunker down somewhere and wait until the herd passed.

  Trying several buildings on the block, they had to backtrack a bit before they found the doors to a magnificent old movie theater–turned-church were unlocked, and the team resumed their original formation to enter. The lobby was like an ornate palace, harking back to the golden age of motion pictures in the 1930s, when desperate people sought refuge from the brutal realities of the Great Depression. Now, these seven people sought refuge from the Great Apocalypse, and the splendor of their surroundings was in stark contrast to the blood and filth that covered them all.

  Someone, perhaps from the former congregation of the church, had crudely painted several signs on cardboard and propped them up on folding chairs by the entrance.

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” one sign read.