The Rising Horde, Volume Two by Stephen Knight

Author:Stephen Knight [Knight, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B007YT8UJI
Publisher: Ronin LLC
Published: 2012-04-28T06:00:00+00:00

***

Staff Sergeant Jorge Roche led his chalk through the interior gate and into the V-shaped kill zone that faced the zombies rolling in from the east. He and the rest of his nine-man element wore their SOICS gear, full Darth Vader mode. Ahead, the zombies amassed in the first trench, their moans and howls and hisses filling the air, countered by semi-automatic gunfire that Roche thought was remarkably restrained despite its lethality. If he’d been on the wall, he’d be rocking and rolling with everything he had.

“Ops, Chalk Two-Four. We’re approaching the second trench. Go ahead and lower the bridge. Over.”

“Roger that, Chalk Two-Four. Bridge is on its way down. Over.”

Roche led the way toward the slowly descending drawbridge, his gait a series of long lopes that covered ground quickly. The eastern horizon was brightening, and his night vision goggles were of little use. Pretty soon, he’d have to slip on his sunglasses, as the sun would strike him full in the face. The drawbridge fell into place and formed a wide avenue of reinforced plate steel that could support heavy construction equipment. The Rangers scurried across it quickly, and as soon as they were standing on the stretch of real estate that separated the two trenches, the drawbridge retracted into its upright position.

The stenches across the chasm went wild when they saw the Rangers. They lurched toward them, tumbling into the trench like carnivorous lemmings. They displayed not even an ounce of self-preservation, and that opened a big can of worry in Roche’s belly. Everything he’d been told was true. Those things would sacrifice themselves, go through any ordeal, to feed.

Movement to his right caught his eye. He turned and raised his weapon as one of the zeds made it across the undulating pile. It was a runner, one of those stenches still in good enough physical condition to move fast. It sprinted toward them, practically roaring, its eyes dull and vacant, its jaws spread wide. Its entire head disappeared a moment later as a big caliber weapon—probably one of the .50 cals some of the snipers used—blasted right through it. The headless corpse skidded across the packed desert earth.

“Okay, let’s roll,” Roche told his men. They moved northerly at a subdued pace, ensuring they stayed in view of the zombies coming through the wire. The pack of wailing dead followed, moving away from the massive pile up in the center of the first trench. The zeds marched right into the excavation, tumbling to its bottom, slamming into the jellified jet fuel and accelerants that made up the incendiary mixture at the bottom. Thousands of them. Roche heard them smash into it like rocks hitting deep mud. He drifted over to the edge of the trench even though he had been warned against doing so. He peered into its depths and saw the dead flailing, looking up at him with hungry faces, their teeth clicking together as if they were biting the air. The fall hadn’t bothered them, and the fumes from the incendiary cocktail didn’t seem to do much either.

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