Rocks crunched softly under Mike’s boots as he moved closer. “Looks clear on my side.”
“Same here.”
“Let’s split up. I’ll take the buildings this way, you search over there.”
“Got it.”
Mike leap-frogged around me while I swept the stalls closest to us. Finding them empty, I moved on to the next building, wincing at the noise my steps made in the loose, omnipresent gravel. The vegetation immediately around the stables had been worn away by hundreds of trampling hooves, with some of the prints still visible in the hard-packed dirt.
Definitely sheep.
The door to every stall was open. I spotted a line of old, washed out tracks heading westward, indicating whoever owned this place had let the animals go free. I admired his or her decision; if I had been in their place, and all hope was lost, I would have done the same thing. Better to let the critters take their chances in the wild than doom them to starvation or death at the hands of the infected. Maybe years from now people would be hunting wild sheep and raising them for wool. It was an interesting thought.
Just as I turned to walk to the shed at edge of the field, Mike let out a startled curse and I heard the muted crack of his carbine.
Then came the moans.
It started as one, then four or five, and then I lost count as more groaning answered, coming from a stable to my left. A pair of gray hands knocked aside the door of the shed I approached, followed by a gore-streaked old man in ragged clothes. He stumbled into the brightness of early morning, head swinging side to side, ears tilted toward the sky. More infected lurched out after him, also swiveling their heads.
In the space of seconds, where there had been peaceful silence, more than a dozen undead had appeared. In the field ahead of me, I saw more emerge from the tall growth, standing up unsteadily, looking dazed as if they had been sleeping. The sound of Mike’s rifle went from a slow trickle to a frenetic barrage.
“Caleb, fall back!”
I raised my rifle and fired without thinking, dropping the five infected closest to me. There was a grating, shuffling sound behind me, and I turned just in time for a ghoul to seize my arm and lunge at me. I let out a terrified yelp and pulled away, but the creature had a grip like steel. Its teeth snapped shut less than an inch from my bicep. With no time for a plan, I raised the barrel of my rifle and shoved it sideways into the ghoul’s mouth. It bit down on the hardened steel, teeth chipping and cracking from the pressure.
I let go of the gun just in time for the creature to start shaking its head back and forth like a dog and crack me across the temple with the stock. Stars danced in my vision as I dropped to one knee, drew my pistol, and fired a shot upward through its throat. Red and black mist erupted from the back of its head, the painful grip on my arm releasing instantly as the ghoul slumped to the ground.
I stood up and turned a quick circle, gun at the ready, legs rubbery from the blow to my head. Another ghoul had made it within four feet of me, arms outstretched, hissing like a pissed-off cobra. My first shot missed. Cursing, I backed up a few steps, centered my aim, and fired again. This time, it went down.
Boots pounded the dirt behind me, growing closer. I looked over my shoulder to see Mike sprinting toward me, rifle slung across his back, a short, slotted metal fencepost in his hands. At the end of the post was a rough, heavy-looking cylinder of dirt-crusted concrete.
Where the hell did he get that?
As I watched, he angled toward one of the undead closing in on me, raised the improvised weapon, screwed his heels into the ground, and swung it like a baseball bat. The concrete cylinder burst the walker’s skull open like a ripe melon, bone and brain fragments flying in one direction while the corpse fell in another.
“Caleb, come on!”
I had stopped moving and was staring at the corpse, its skull shattered, brain tumbling out, dirt sticking to the shriveled tissue. A large, fat fly circled down and landed among the mess, its wings buzzing as it walked excitedly over its feast. My feet felt leaden, vision gray and black around the edges, mind blank, disconnected, a numb tingling creeping up my face. Something constricted my chest, making my breath come in short, stuttering gasps. Mike yelled again, and when I didn’t respond, he slapped me across the cheek hard enough to make my eyes water.
“Wake up!”
I did, blinking against the pain. “Son of a bitch.”
He bent, picked up my rifle, and shoved it against my chest. “Take your gun, dammit.”
I grabbed it and brought it to my shoulder, muscle memory putting my hands in the proper places.
“Back to back,” Mike said. “We’ll shoot our way out of here.” He took a couple of seconds to raise the metal and concrete club over his head, take aim, and throw it like an axe. It spun end over end three times before striking a ghoul in the chest and knocking it to the ground. I heard ribs shatter from fifteen feet away.
Shaking the last of the fuzziness from my head, I adjusted my VCOG to its 1x setting, aimed, and began firing. My breathing was even now, hands steady, the trembling in my legs gone. I let fly ten rounds in ten seconds and dropped ten ghouls. Behind me, I heard the shuck, snap, and clack of Mike reloading.
We moved steadily toward the western field, keeping each other in our peripheral vision, checking our flanks and corners every few shots, dropping anything trying to angle in on us from the side. By the time I had burned through my first magazine, there were only fifteen or twenty walkers left standing. A minute later, they were all down.
Mike and I stood among the once-human wreckage, bodies strewn around us, spray patterns of coagulated blood and brain tissue contrasting sharply with the pale dirt under our feet. We gripped our rifles and looked around dazedly, hardly believing what just happened.
“We watched this place for a long time,” Mike said. “I saw nothing.”
“Neither did I.”
“Not a stir, not a peep, not a damn thing. They came out of nowhere.”
I looked at the stables and the fields beyond. “It’s like they were waiting for us.”
Mike thought a few seconds, then shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I talked to some of those soldiers from San Antonio. The things they told me are starting to make sense now.”
“Like what?”
“This one guy told me they don’t like sunlight, especially when it’s hot outside. Said if they can’t find food they look for shelter, or just kind of drop like they’re hibernating or something. Might explain why they’re more active at night.”
I thought of the ghouls emerging from the field and stables, faces confused, swaying and turning circles as though punch drunk, angling their heads to vector in on me. There was no way they could have known we were headed this way—we didn’t know we were headed this way—and none of the undead’s behavior thus far indicated they were intelligent enough to plan an ambush.
“I see your point. But it’s early morning, Mike. Why weren’t they out last night?”
“Maybe nothing worth eating came along in a while.”
“So you think they were sleeping?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what the man said. Your guess is as good as mine.” He removed the half-spent mag from his carbine and replaced it with a full one. “Think we got ‘em all?”
“Could be more in the fields. Crawlers.”
“Have to keep an eye out.”
I turned toward the Humvee. “Yes, we will.”
*****
It took us an hour to stack the bodies in one of the stables.
That done, we used shovels liberated from the tool shed to scrape the leftover gore into small piles, which we then carted away in a wheelbarrow and dumped out of sight in the fields. Last, we made makeshift brooms with bundles of grass and erased both our tracks and those of the undead.