From the soldiers around them, Hank hastily gathered the components he needed to fashion a homemade bomb. It was going to take most of their ammo, but he hoped it would be worth it. “Any volunteers for the distraction?” he asked without looking up from his work.
“I’ll do it, sir,” Ben said, stepping forward.
Grant started to protest, but Hank somehow sensed it and cut him off. “Good on you, boy. If any of us make it out of this Godforsaken town alive, I swear your sacrifice will be remembered.”
When Hank was ready, Ben lowered a rope over the west edge and climbed down to hang just above the reach of the creatures, screaming and taunting them with his dangling legs. The dead swarmed beneath him in a frenzy, and more and more drifted around the building to converge beneath the young private.
Hank lit the fuse on his bomb and tossed it into the street on the eastern side. Another rope followed quickly after it, even before the explosion came. The roof shook—Ben, unable to hold on, fell into the grasping arms of the dead, and on the other side of the roof, men slid down the rope to the now mostly cleared street below them. Those who hit the ground first took potshots at the closest dead to buy time for the others. Then as a whole, the remnants of the platoon ran towards the edge of town and the cover of the trees.
Inside the jail, Wayne and two other men were using the last of their ammo on the dead. The things flung themselves over and over into the cells, stretching their arms between the iron bars. One of the other two soldiers had already been scratched, but Wayne was waiting till the last possible second to put him down. He wanted as many of the dead sent back to Hell as he could manage.
When the explosion hit the street outside and shook the building, it caught Wayne and the others off-guard. The soldier who wasn’t wounded careened into the hands of the dead, and Wayne saw them tear open his throat. Blood sprayed into the air.
The explosion weakened the building’s structure just enough for the cell door to give way under the mass of bodies ramming against it.
A rotting hand grabbed Wayne’s face and shoved its fingers into his eyes. He shouted in the face of death, fighting even as he fell.
As the men from the roof neared the edge of town, their legs pumping beneath them and their breath coming in ragged gasps, they saw movement in the trees. A flood of small figures emerged to meet them.
“Sweet Jesus!” someone cried out. “They’re just children!”
More than three dozen orphans stood between the men and their hope of survival. They were all dead.
“Keep moving!” Hank ordered. “Fight through them!”
The soldiers and the children collided in a running brawl. To Grant’s right, a child grabbed a man by the thigh and sent him sprawling. Before he even had a chance to scream, the children climbed all over him, tearing him apart with their tiny hands.
A young girl, who must have been no older than twelve when she died, dropped the doll she’d been cradling and reached out for Grant as maggots swam in the gray flesh of her contorted face. She growled, baring red-stained teeth, and Grant shot her in the head with his Colt. He didn’t take time to watch her body fall.
“This way!” someone shouted, and Grant changed his course to follow the sound of the voice.
Four
Grant collapsed on the ground of a small clearing in the woods, his muscles burning from being pushed past their limits.
“I think we’ve lost them for the moment,” Hank said as he and the other four survivors finally came to a stop.
“About damn time,” Clint spat and dropped to the ground, checking his rifle. They had been on the run for nearly two hours and were exhausted.
“We can’t stay here long,” Sam said.
“I know,” Hank agreed. He rested his weight against the trunk of a tree. “We’re never going to make it to the rally point. It’s too far, especially since we just backtracked away from it to stay alive.”
“This mission has gone all to Hell.” Clint loaded his last rounds into his rifle. “I vote we hightail it home while we still can.”
“There has to be some farmsteads in these parts,” Sam thought aloud. “It’s possible we could find some horses left alive while we head east. Make the trip a lot faster.”
Hank nodded. “That settles it then. Let’s get going before we have company.”
Grant wearily pushed himself to his feet as the exhausted men got back on the move. “Anybody got anything to eat?” he asked.
Hank handed him a hard biscuit from the pouch on his belt. “Go easy on it. There may not be anything else for a while.”
Grant thanked him for the food and nearly shattered his teeth on it. Stale or not, he had to admit the bread tasted wonderful. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, and his body needed something if he was going to keep moving. He cursed himself for spending far too much time behind his desk at Harper’s.
“Wait!” Clint said suddenly. “I think I know where we’re at. We passed this area on the march in. If I’m right, there should be a farm not too far from here to the north.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Hank asked. “Lead us to it.”
The farm was a large one. Fields of corn and wheat rustled in the wind as the men approached its barn. The horse inside had long ago starved to death, and flies buzzed over their remains. The house was empty as well, but at least they’d found a place to take shelter for the night. After a quick raid of the house’s pantry for a cold supper, they opted to stay in the barn despite the smell, sleeping high above the floor in the hayloft.
At the crack of dawn, they looted the last of the edible food for breakfast, then set out eastward once more. They found the road their regiment had marched in on and followed it towards the Mississippi River and the army’s beachhead. It seemed like every other hour of the long trek, they could hear the howls of the dead in the distance. Sometimes the cries came from behind them; other times they came from ahead—the men had no choice but to continue on.
“We must have pissed them off,” Clint said. “They weren’t this far east as we came in.”
“Or maybe other squads have already retreated to the beachhead along this road and the dead followed them,” Grant pointed out. “Either way, it was just a matter of time until they headed east. That’s why we were sent here, to stop them before they did. It’s what a disease does; it spreads.”
“Holy shit!” Clint exclaimed. A supply wagon sat in the middle of the road ahead of them. Two horses were harnessed to it, very much alive, though in poor shape and clearly spooked. Bodies covered the road around the wagon, and an overturned Gatling gun lay in the wagon’s bed; a soldier’s body was propped against it, rotting in the heat of the sun.
Clint broke into a run for the wagon.
“Clint!” Hank shouted, but the private didn’t even slow down.
As he reached the wagon, the soldier on the Gatling snarled and sprung at him. It wrestled him to the ground, and with jagged fingernails it slashed his cheek.
The others advanced more cautiously with Hank in the lead, checking bodies as they went.
“God help me!” Clint wailed, managing to roll out from underneath the dead man’s assault. He drew his Colt and jammed the barrel against the man’s forehead.
At the sound of the shot, the woods around the road roared to life with the hungry cries of the dead.
“Get the horses loose!” Hank barked, swinging to meet the corpse of a farmer that charged at him from the trees. Hank put a shot into its chest to slow the thing down, then put a second round into its face. The farmer hit the gravel road with a thud.