HVZA (Book 3): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse [Project Decimation] Page 8

  “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial,” another proclaimed in dripping, blue paint.

  The third, and largest, sat in the middle and exclaimed, “God bless our immortal souls—now go kick some zombie ass!”

  “Amen to that!” the Ranger whispered, as they slowly circled the lobby to make sure it was secure. After they were certain nothing living or dead would sneak up on them, they dropped their gear and found some musty, but comfortable, chairs and couches on which to rest. Even though they hadn’t traveled very far, they had done a lot of killing in that short distance and it had already taken a toll.

  Becks’ knife-wielding arm was sore, and she was soaked in both rain and sweat. Her long hours in the lab had clearly left her out of fighting shape. Martha looked dazed and wild-eyed. Julian grabbed his knees and pulled them tight against his chest, and rocked slowly back and forth, trembling. Sticky Pete and Max sat in stoic silence, as dangerous supply runs for them had been a weekly occurrence. Cam and the Ranger actually looked as though they were enjoying themselves.

  After about ten minutes, Max cautiously approached the front doors, not wanting to draw any attention. He looked up and down Broadway to determine how many zombies had passed, and how many more were going to pass by their location. When he returned to the group to give his report, a sharp explosion ripped through the air, instinctively sending everyone to the floor. A few seconds later there was a second explosion, and third, and then a fourth, even louder than the first three.

  “Cars?” Becks asked, as they all looked at each other with puzzled expressions.

  A discussion ensued in which they decided that the spreading conflagration was consuming cars, and that any that had enough gas in their tanks were exploding. However, it was also possible that some of the destroyed buildings had sufficient natural gas left in their pipes to set off the last, and loudest, explosion.

  “I guess this is the diversion that keeps on giving!” Cam said proudly.

  A second later they all flinched as several more exploding automobiles splintered apart and sent shrapnel into the gathering crowds of zombies.

  It was an unusual phenomenon Becks had observed in New Jersey, when she set fire to cars and houses. The herds were attracted by the light and sounds, but when crowds pushed forward, those in front were helplessly shoved directly into the flames and immolated. But the fires she had set were nothing compared to the block-long blaze that threatened to spread unchecked, even in this driving rainstorm.

  “You always have to try to outdo me, don’t you?” Becks said smiling, as she tossed an empty water bottle at his grinning face.

  Max finally explained that within five or ten minutes, he estimated that the largest concentrations of zombies in the area would be to their south, pressing tightly against the collapsed brick building across the road, which itself was now ablaze.

  “The more of the stupid bastards who set themselves on fire, the better!” Max exclaimed, rubbing his Mama-swinging shoulder, which had seen more action today than in the last several months combined.

  The Ranger instructed everyone to have one of the granola bars they all carried, and to drink a bottle of water. Then he requested that Pete and Max refresh their memories about the terrain ahead and what to expect. He also strongly cautioned everyone to stick closely together, as the boat would not wait for stragglers.

  “OK,” he said, after the brief meeting, in the tone of a man who expected to be obeyed, “Gear up and let’s all get to the river in one piece.”

  The heat from the conflagration was palpable, even at this distance, as they stepped out onto the sidewalk. In fact, it was generating a steamy wind blowing north. The rain didn’t feel so cold anymore; it felt refreshing in that oppressive heat.

  The mass of zombies was now to their south and continued to move toward the flames, oblivious to the fact that they were about to be incinerated. That all-too-familiar stench of burning flesh was now competing with the smoking petroleum flames for most offensive odor. But the team was moving north, as fast as it could go, away from it all.

  Becks quickly lost track of the streets as they were constantly weaving east and west to avoid solid jams of cars and even more solid herds of zombies. For every block north, it seemed they had to go two or three blocks out of their way. Everyone was getting exhausted from the distance and constant hard fighting. The only good part was that Becks was too tired and too busy to have time to think about the situation—she was just reacting, which is exactly what she hoped would happen.

  “Fuck this!” Max finally said, barely able to raise Mama above his head anymore. “I’m getting us some wheels.”

  Max ran ahead to a city bus that was diagonally across both lanes of the street, and had its front end rammed into the side of a minivan. He paid no attention to the six or seven occupants stuck inside the minivan, weakly, but desperately, pounding their decaying fists against the windows trying to have their first meal since they all died and switched.

  The driver of the bus could not be so easily ignored, however, if Max wanted to commandeer the vehicle. He was more vigorous than the minivan occupants, as he had obviously had a substantial supply of extra fat before going zombie, as the hanging folds of now empty skin attested. The ZIPs had been feeding off that fat, waiting for the day for someone to release the bus driver from his seat belt. Max was happy to oblige, but only after cleaving the man’s skull almost in two.

  Tossing the body out the door to the pavement, Max then reached for the keys and crossed his fingers. Unfortunately, the battery was dead, but one of the Columbia students had designed a device that when inserted into the socket of an auxiliary power port actually jumpstarted the vehicle. Coaxing the transmission into first, Max pushed the minivan ahead until it fell over sideways and clear of his path. Next popping it into reverse, he burned rubber backing up to the rest of his team members. They all gladly piled into the bus and out of the rain, and away from the never-ending zombie packs.

  “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” Martha angrily mumbled under her breath as she plopped down into a seat, wiping the profuse sweat from her face.

  Max bit his tongue and didn’t dignify her remark with a response, as everyone knew damn well most of the streets were too clogged with abandoned cars to have any hope of getting very far. Still, even to catch a short break and drive a few blocks was a very welcome respite. Even Cam and the Ranger needed to catch their breaths.

  Progress was slow, as the massive city bus acted more like a plow shoving cars out of the way, but progress was steady nonetheless. Once or twice they had to take a side street detour, as even the mighty bus didn’t have the strength to push half a block of cars.

  It more than had enough strength, however, to mow down large numbers of zombies. In fact, Max went out of his way—and goosed the gas pedal in the process—to flatten somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 of the “ugly bastards” as he called one group he ran down, and then backed over, twice, just for good measure.

  They actually got a lot farther than they expected, but somewhere on Cabrini Boulevard near 190th Street their luck finally ran out. The narrow street was packed with cars and completely impassable. Trying to back out of the street also proved futile as several flat tires from all the debris made maneuvering next to impossible, and Max somehow managed to wedge the bus between a brick wall and a sanitation truck.

  “Sorry folks, last stop,” Max shouted. “Everybody out.”

  Fortunately, the zombie population appeared to be sparse here, but unfortunately, it was time to leave the streets and head west for the river. That meant that they would have to hop a wrought iron fence and go down a steep, wooded hill to the Henry Hudson Parkway below, which was thick with zombies in both the northbound and southbound sides. The Ranger got a call that the boat from West Point was about ten minutes out and he gave them the team’s current position, and where by the river they hoped to end up.

  Pete suggested that the boat should first go furt
her to the south, and make a lot of noise to draw off some of the vast horde. If that diversion could make even a small break in the line of ravenous killers, it could be a lifesaver.

  The river was just on the other side of the highway, and the highway was just at the bottom of the hill, which, thanks to all the rain had become a treacherous downhill slalom of mud. Martha promptly went down and slid face first into a tree. As Becks and Cam tried to help the dazed and bloodied woman to her feet, they both lost their footing. Becks slid fifteen feet into a fallen tree and had the wind knocked out of her. Cam managed to grab onto a sapling to stop his fall, but then the whole damn tree pulled right out of the soil. He careened backwards into a big oak and saw stars for a full minute after the impact.

  Julian was alternately screaming and cursing as he fell repeatedly. The Ranger couldn’t stay on his feet, either, and made a rude acquaintance with a couple of maple trees. Even Max, with the lowest center of gravity, tumbled several times, actually going completely head over heels into an old stump.

  “Everyone on your asses,” Pete shouted, realizing that trying to walk down the slippery slope was going to get someone seriously injured.

  Even with everyone trying to slide on their butts down the hill, it was dangerous business, and by the time they made it to level ground, all of them were winded, and not one of them wasn’t bloody and bruised. They weren’t in any shape to continue without a breather, so they huddled together behind a clump of trees, and out of sight of the mass of zombies on the Henry Hudson Parkway just a short distance in front of them. They sat in silence, except for their heavy breathing, and let the pouring rain wash the dirt from their wounds. Minutes ticked by, and finally that wonderful sound of the boat from West Point was heard roaring along the river. And what a boat!

  It had actually been a Coast Guard vessel—Defender class—but since no one had been left in the Coast Guard, the Army had appropriated a few of them from New York Harbor right before they blew the bridge. The Defender was capable of ripping through the water at over 50 miles-per-hour, and its .50 cal machine gun made its own statement for anyone wishing to challenge its authority. It would still take three hours to get to Albany, but what a way to travel! If they could all reach the boat, that is.

  The Defender skimmed across the water toward the proposed pickup point, and then veered right to hug the shore and make some noise, which it did quite effectively with an air horn. Immediately, zombies who had been milling about on the highway all turned en masse and headed south toward the blaring sound. The team would probably have to wait hours for the Henry Hudson Parkway to clear—hours they couldn’t waste—so they just would have to pick a thin spot or gap they hoped would open up with the uneven pace of the various zombies who were in all manner of decomposition.

  Some looked to have switched on day one of the infection, and had bits and pieces falling off of them as they staggered laboriously along. The majority was a bit “younger” and traveled better, although their general lack of food seemed to make them slower than the “country zombies.” Of course, no one wanted a fast zombie, but the team was hoping they would all move along a little more quickly.

  After waiting impatiently for about fifteen minutes, an opening began to appear in the northbound lane, which was closest to Becks’ group. The southbound side was still relatively congested, but the numbers had definitely diminished.

  “I think it’s now or never,” Becks concluded, once again sliding her commando knife out of its sheath.

  As they were all bloody and caked with mud, Julian suggested that they stagger slowly through the crowd and pretend to be zombies. Unfortunately, there was the problem of smelling like humans—or more accurately—not smelling like a zombie. The ZIPs pheromone on the gauze had become too diluted in the rain to be effective anymore, so they really had only one option to cross the highway—run as fast, and fight as hard, as they could.

  The Ranger quickly delineated the plan—run and fight across the northbound lanes of the highway, and then regroup in the wooded area in between the north and south lanes. There they would wait for another thin spot in the herd, and cross the southbound lanes. Regroup again in the woods between the southbound lanes and the railroad tracks, before the final push across the tracks, through the last line of trees, and head to the river. It sounded good; now they would just have to do it all while staying alive in the process.

  It didn’t seem possible, but the rain and wind suddenly increased in intensity. Water running into their eyes made it difficult to see, but if the humans were having trouble, it had to be much worse for the zombies, who were already visually challenged. Becks started to recall a fascinating study conducted by an ophthalmologist at West Point two months earlier that illustrated how ZIPs compromised human eyesight—indeed, all of our human senses. This mental journey was something Becks often did in times of great stress, as picturing charts, diagrams, and statistics helped her cope.

  So as her mind’s eye traced the slope of the red line on the chart which indicated the decrease of visual acuity vs. time in those test subjects who had switched between six to twelve months earlier, she drove her commando knife deep into the eye socket of a woman wearing a blouse made of a bright bird-patterned fabric.

  When she recounted the two columns of numbers detailing the raw data of the test results—and was that a standard deviation of 3.7 or 3.6, she wondered?—she was plunging her knife through the external acoustic meatus—the ear hole—of a large man in stained, yellow cycling shorts and a jersey, whom she had knocked to the pavement with a brutal, ligament-shattering kick to the junction between the femur and tibia—the side of the knee.

  Other facts and figures came to mind as she became a killing machine; rescuing Julian, not once, but three times, which in such a short span of distance was something of an achievement, being capable of getting himself into peril that many times.

  Cam dragged Martha along as he registered his own large number of kills, but his mind was always focused on the intimate details of how his machete sliced through muscles, tendons, and bones—how each sounded while being cut, and the deep, pungent smells of the blood and other fluids that subsequently gushed out. Everyone had their own way of dealing with killing.

  Fortunately, zombies usually favored pavement to the woods, but as the team regrouped and caught their breath 30 feet off the road, there were still a dozen or so stragglers, driven to try to get some shelter from the rain under the trees, that needed to be dispatched. Even the bayonet thrust of the Ranger was now labored, however, and exhaustion threatened to end their mission within sight of their objective.

  “I’m going to have to start shooting,” Max confessed, huffing and puffing, his face flushed and dripping in sweat and blood, “I just can’t swing my Mama anymore! Not one more skull!”

  Everyone agreed, it had to be pistols from here to the river, as aching muscles and extreme fatigue had left them all feeling like they had just gone 15 rounds with a heavyweight champ.

  “I don’t know if I have enough ammo, or enough strength to even use my guns,” Pete moaned, already running on fumes from his paddling marathon and lack of sleep.

  “We can’t stop now, we just can’t,” the Ranger said, but with less of his former commanding voice, and more as if he was trying to convince himself.

  “Maybe I can help with this,” Cam said, looking unusually sheepish.

  “What can you do?” Becks asked suspiciously.

  Reaching into one of his pockets, he pulled out a zip lock bag which had a bunch of little twisted bundles of something wrapped in what looked like that red, flimsy firecracker paper.

  “What are you going to do, try to scare them off with homemade firecrackers?” the Ranger snapped derisively.

  “Well, these are homemade firecrackers all right,” Cam said with a devilish grin, regaining a little swagger, “but they are for us. The Monk—a friend of mine—whipped these little babies up to give a quick boost in times of extreme danger. I don�
��t know what’s in them—and I probably don’t want to know—but you snort one of these and you could run head first through a cinderblock wall.”

  “If they get me through that wall of zombies, that’s good enough for me,” Martha declared, as she pulled one of The Monk’s firecrackers out of the bag and snorted it like a pro, much to everyone’s astonishment. “Oh! OH MY!”

  Martha’s eyes opened unnaturally wide, and she started rubbing her hands together so quickly it looked like she was trying to start a fire with them.

  “What the hell are you all waiting for!?” Martha shouted, looking every inch as though she was capable, and eager, to run through a wall.

  The Ranger and Max each quickly grabbed one of the red paper twists, and carefully unwrapped them while trying to shield the contents from the rain. A few deep, short snorts and they were also bug-eyed and raring to go.

  Becks hesitated, but not because she didn’t need the boost—it was because she had never snorted any sort of substance in her life, and she was embarrassed to admit it. Fortunately, Pete was first to confess the same thing, with Julian following. So there, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, surrounded by ravenous zombies, in the ruins of what was once the greatest city in the world, Cam had to give a brief demo on Drug Snorting 101.

  Becks wasn’t quite sure if it had been powdered lava or TNT she had just introduced into her nasal passages, but the top of her head suddenly felt like the lid of a pressure cooker, and she needed a way to let off steam. She also wasn’t exactly sure who shouted “Geronimo!”—it could have even been her, and it could have been all of them—as their team burst out of the woods, slashing and hacking and stabbing everything in sight.

  In the ensuing melee, Max slipped and fell on a slick pile of intestines he had just caused to spill out from a young man wearing a t-shirt with a peace symbol—a symbol which was now two semi-circles with a bloody, gaping hole in the middle. In his highly-altered state, Max found this all hilariously funny and didn’t seem particularly concerned that an unusually tall, well-built zombie with a very prominent jaw had knelt down and was about to sink his very large teeth into Max’s very exposed neck.