“Stop!” he said as he brought the handgun's barrel down and placed it against the baby's head.
Charlie tried to veer to one side, shouting “No!” but the damage to his legs had caused him to lose some of his coordination and continued towards Max in an ungainly shuffle. Max fired into the baby's skull and tired to pull the gun up before the man hit him, he was not successful. Both men toppled into the living room and onto the coffee table, which broke under their weight.
Max felt himself get stabbed by one of the knives in the zombie's hands, in a daze he watched the other hand rise with a knife in it. His gun had been knocked from his hand and was laying three feet away at the base of the couch, Max couldn't see any other weapons close by and there was no one to save him as the zombie's blade descended.
Chapter 14
For the twelfth time in an hour Bill shook his head and tried to wake himself up. This was only a dream, only a bad, bad nightmare. Through the field ahead of him another figure came rushing out of the night. The moonlight was the only thing that made fighting in these conditions possible. Bill was on the edge of a field with his squad, he had, true to Wilke's word, been promoted to sergeant at the brief ceremony two days before when the soldiers graduated. Also true to his word Bill had raised up Ruben to act at his corporal. The old man had protested, just a bit too much in Bill's mind, but he took the job nonetheless. The squad had been called out once before their training was complete, there was an incident in the small city of Perry, IA. The military had roused them for action and they went house to house checking on all of the residents. Midway through clearing about half of their sector Wilkes had been called and told to move his men quickly towards the west edge of town and some trailer homes located there. Bill and the others had to search trailer by trailer and in the first two they found the undead waiting for them. After that bit of excitement the rest of the fifty homes had been empty. The squad returned to base at the end of the day and celebrated their victory with a few beers Ruben had scrounged up. Even John partook of the drink, which Bill didn't mind, old enough to kill meant old enough to drink a low alcohol beverage. The entire squad was dead tired from the adrenaline rushes they had gone through during the afternoon of searching house by house for zombies, by seven o'clock that evening they had passed out like overgrown children coming back from a play date.
That was four days ago, after graduating they had immediately been sent to Sioux City Iowa, this was not supposed to be their final destination, but just a brief stop on their way to the Lincoln Nebraska area. What they arrived to find was something out of a deranged nightmare. There were a half dozen bridges across the Missouri river between Nebraska and Iowa, Bill and 'his' squad were assigned to push across a rail road bridge and take up positions on the other side, shooting all zombies they encountered, no exceptions. The official briefing given by Lieutenant Jenkins was way too vague for Bill's liking, he and another squad were all the assets assigned to what the militia was calling an area of 'light activity'. The Lieutenant was younger that Bill by almost fifteen years and seemed new at his job. Talking this over with Ruben Bill discovered that this was often the case, Lieutenants didn't know what the hell they were doing when they started any more than Bill had the day he 'graduated' from training. Ruben did know that Jenkins was a regular army, not recently drafted or promoted, which implied that the man at least had more training than most of the men he commanded.
“New Lieutenants are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are getting. Most do okay if they have seasoned non commissioned officers to respectfully suggest a course of action to them.” Looking Bill over Ruben said, “So ours is screwed in that respected. But he might do okay. Just think of him as your boss and you are the supervisor over this 'department'. You can run the day to day stuff and let him worry about the bigger picture stuff. If he screws up too badly he will be replaced, probably demoted in this new world order or moved to be a rear echelon mother fucker, in charge of trucks or something. The army of my time didn't waste any resources.”
“So if I am the supervisor what does that make you?”
“Me? I am the eager young man training to take over your position and to show how much I want it, I keep this crew in line for you. You move up, I move up. Just like the business world. Of course it really isn't like that, the Army switched to promotion schedules and stuff during peace times. You know though, this is war and I might make it back to sergeant yet.” rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“Third time's a charm, right Ruben?”
“How did you know that? Goddamn, you can't keep a secret in this army, even after five fucking decades!”
They moved out around two o'clock in the afternoon and each man had bagged a zombie or two as they pushed into the fields along River View Drive, the other sergeant, Don Williams, was given the objective of clearing out a sports complex to the north of the rail road tracks and Bill was supposed to hold the tracks proper and scout into the fields to the south. The entire area immediately close to the river was not settled, but South Sioux City Nebraska was less than a mile away. As the sun went down a steady stream of refugees started moving towards them, most were alive, but a few were bitten and infected and fewer still were undead.
Bill asked many of the people moving why they hadn't left during the day and they told him they had been told to stay put earlier, but then the military moved in after sundown and told them to leave and head east into Iowa. This didn't make any sense to Bill so he called up to the Lieutenant to confirm it. Jenkins got back to him and said no such orders had been given by either the Iowa or Nebraskan national guard, but he was checking into it. That had been six hours ago. Now they could hear William's squad firing almost constantly and Bill's men were having a hard time differentiating living from dead as they came towards them across the fields. One thing that did make it easier was that most of the living carried some belongings with them, chances were if the person coming towards you was not carrying anything it was a zombie, or a 'zed' as the squad started calling them.
“Here sergeant.” said Ruben, offering him a packed sandwich. Bill took aim at the man rushing across the field and fired at his head, the thing went down, leaving him to hope it had been a zed.
“Where did you get…?” Bill asked Ruben, then shook his head, he didn't want to know. There was not a store in sight and these were not army rations. He took the sandwich and a diet soda that Ruben offered. “Thanks, you getting everyone fed?”
“Of course sergeant. We are the last to eat, feed the men first, that is my motto. I got one of the civilians to cross the tracks and bring us this stuff, enough for thirty guys, I said, he brought back fifteen sandwiches on the first load, but he looked a bit skittish when Don's squad started firing, I doubt he will be coming with that second load of food.”
Bill frowned, officially civilians were supposed to be told to move to the southern bridge on highway twenty about three miles downriver to cross, that way they could be inspected and allowed to cross. But sometimes they let a few people through. All of them had to pass Ruben or one of his cronies visual inspection, which meant stripping down naked as a jaybird to make sure they didn't have any bit marks on them. Those who protested could take the walk south, most didn't. Ruben had set up a tarp to offer the people some privacy from others in line and the soldiers who were nominally protecting them.