White Ash on Bone: A Zombie Novel (5 page)

"Let’s drop some flares," Wilson said, "so we can flag some of these people down and find out what's going on."

Sulla asked the dealership employees if they knew anything.  They shook their heads no, but said that a number of people had driven down to the city to see what was going; none of them had come back. 

Sulla thanked them and then asked them to close shop.  "You guys should look in on your families.  Either head south, or go to the airport for safety.  I would ask that you folks stop at all the business south of here and any homes you see and encourage people to clear out."

None of them seemed thrilled about this, but they agreed to the request.  A few of them indicated that they had concealed carry permits or a rifle in their truck and offered to stay.

Wilson managed to pull a car over.  Two of its five occupants were injured. 

"You guys got to get out of here," the driver pleaded, "you can't stop them."

"Stop who?" Wilson said.

"I don’t know,” the driver said. “They’re like fucking zombies or something. They’re tearing apart anyone they get a hold of.  It’s fucking chaos down there.”

"What about the police?" Sulla said.

"Police... the only cop I saw was eating a little boy," the man said.

One of the vets shouted out, "We got walking wounded coming up the road."

"Shit that’s them, we just passed them up,” the driver said. “We’re getting the fuck out of here," the driver sped off without waiting for permission to go. 

Down the road four people limped toward the Penn Township force.  "Those people on foot look like they are injured," Wilson said.

"What about what the driver just said?" asked Sulla.

"Demented or on drugs,” Wilson said.  “I'm going to go down there and talk to these people.”

"What about the gunfire and smoke?" Sulla pointed out.

"I don’t like it one bit,” Wilson said, “but I refuse to believe, even for a second, anything that nut just said.”  At that, Wilson took off down the hill at a jog to the four injured people.  He stopped short of them.  He could see they were badly injured.   All four of them locked onto Wilson with their eyes. 

"Are you folks okay?" the retired Trooper asked.

They plodded toward him with no response.

"I asked, if you folks are okay?"  No response.  "If you need medical attention- I am an officer of the law, and you
will
respond."

The four kept coming. Wilson stepped back and pulled his firearm. Wilson fired a round in the air.  The four didn’t even flinch at the gunshot.

In all of Wilson's years in law enforcement, he had never seen anything like this; his hands started to shake.  He looked back to Sulla and his men, and he realized how far away they were and how close the four injured people were.  They seemed unnatural somehow.

A primal instinct in Wilson smelled death on the four.  For the first time in his life, Wilson decided he’d better run.  Even with adrenaline pumping through his system, the hill took its toll on Wilson's body.  He made it thirty feet up the hill when he felt the first stab of pain in his arm. 

Please god, not now, Wilson prayed to himself as the second stab of pain shot through him.  He fell to the ground and tried to grab at something to steady himself as he struggled for life.  The dead came on, desperate to finish what remained of Wilson.

"Go, go!" he heard someone scream; it was Sulla.

Sulla had been watching Wilson, and it dawned on him the man was having a heart attack while trying to run. 

Sulla charged down the hill with the riot shotgun.  The others were not prepared for the charge and were slow to follow.  Sulla could tell he was not going to reach Wilson in time.  The four people fell on the old trooper, but it was too late. Wilson was already dead.

Their attack only lasted a few seconds, until even in their diminished capacity, they could see Wilson was no longer of value.

"Back," Sulla ordered them.  They moved to embrace Sulla.  He fired the shotgun at the nearest zombie.  The blast knocked it over, and it rolled for a good fifteen feet down the hill. 

"What in hell were you thinking Su-" one of the vets yelled, but stopped when he saw the zombie getting back up.

Oh my god, Sulla thought, and he pumped a round into the next zombie.  The blast caught it dead center and blew a huge hole in its abdomen.  It fell over, but kept clawing forward leaving its lower half behind it.

He aimed higher on the next attacker and pulled the trigger.  The man's head blew apart in two different directions.   He didn’t get back up.

Sulla's volunteers took up a line on either side of him and opened fire on the remaining ghouls.  The barrage turned the zombies into chunks of flesh.

"Cease fire," Sulla ordered.  One of the creature's head lay intact, decapitated from the body.  Sulla watched its eyes track him as he moved closer to it.

"Do you guys see this shit?" Sulla asked the group standing around him.

"I’m seeing it," one of the dealership salesmen said. “This is fucked up."

The head of the ghoul tried to bite at Sulla as he drew near.  Sulla looked at the other body parts to see them unmoving.  "It's just like it's out of a mother fucking horror movie," Sulla said.  "New rule, head shots only." He looked down at the moving head, "Someone bag this freak show.  I imagine someone is going to win a Nobel Prize for studying this thing."

"What about officer Wilson, do you think he is going to turn into one of them?" one of the men asked.

Sulla looked at all the bodies.  "All these things came up the hill injured and mauled. Wilson died just before they got him from what I saw.  We won’t know for sure unless Wilson gets back up.  Let’s get back to the trucks and call this into the EOC.  They’re going to need to know about the head shots."  He looked down the hill, half a mile away, and he saw movement on the road.  Hundreds of shapes were at the bottom of the hill moving south in his direction.

"That’s a whole mess of trouble coming this way boss," one of the men said.

Sulla noticed a few of his guys were carrying rifles with mounted scopes. 

Bob Owen could see Sulla regarding him, and he nodded in understanding.  Even as a child Bob had been good with rifles.  When his number came up in the draft, the U.S. Army also learned of Bob's exceptional skills with a rifle.  Bob didn’t enjoy the killing, but he knew it helped protect the men he served with in Vietnam.  Bob let his thumb caress the stock on his .308 and introduced himself to Sulla.

Sulla's plan involved fighting a delaying action in stages.  Bob and a couple other guys, who were decent shots, would set up in the back of pickup trucks.  The trucks would drive down the road to decrease the distance to the hoard.  They would start to thin the undead on the road from the back of the trucks.  Every time the dead would get close enough, they would just drive the trucks back to a safe distance.

While this was occurring, the Road Department would be setting up the biggest roadblock they could manage.  A mile south of their location, Route 8 enters a big dip, where it goes over a creek.  The bridge could be barricaded with the Jersey Barriers.   The bridge marked the only place where the zombies heading south could be funneled and stopped. 

At that point Sulla would commit every gun he could round up to hold the zombies at the bridge.  If he couldn't hold, Sulla would continue to pull back in stages to the airport.  Hopefully by then, help would arrive.

There were other places east and west the zombies could get across the water, but the horde coming down the road needed to be slowed down.

All the while, other volunteers would try and evacuate as many people south to Pittsburgh, or to the Butler County Airport.

Sulla sent a couple of the guys that were with him to the Airport.  He wanted them to help out with securing the fenced in facility.  The gates needed locked down, and Sulla wanted to make sure he had people who saw what's coming securing those gates.  In the distance, Sulla heard the rotor pitch of a helicopter, and it sounded like it was headed in his direction.

###

Captain Rick Anderson, of the Pennsylvania National Guard, commanded the Reserve Center in Butler County.  The unit had been deployed to Afghanistan three months ago leaving behind only a few personnel to handle logistical issues and paperwork.  New recruits and soldiers rotating home, for whatever reason, would report in to the post off and on.

Captain Anderson, had completed two tours of Iraq in the regular army, and he retired to the Pennsylvania Guard unit as its senior stateside officer a month ago.  With the position would come a promotion to Major, but the paperwork had not been fully processed yet.

From the post, Captain Anderson listened as the County EOC lost cohesion with emergency responders in the field.  In his opinion, it was almost complete anarchy.

From what Captain Anderson could tell, the shit had really hit the fan in Butler.  He expected to get a call from the Governor’s office at any moment asking him to mobilize what personnel he could to help.

The good thing about guardsmen is when emergencies happen the men just report in on their own.  Many had already arrived, and were listening to the radio with Anderson.

If Anderson did get orders to move out, he would at least be at platoon strength.

The phone rang, but it didn’t come from the Governor’s office, it came from the VA hospital next door.  The call came from Joe Swanson; he was an administrator at the hospital. 

Joe was a portly fellow with thick black rimmed glasses.  Anderson had hung out with Joey just a couple of days ago.  They had gone down to one of the bars in Lyndora, and they enjoyed some brew and a couple of deep fried Twinkies.  While they were there, Anderson met several of the locals who were old chums with Joe.  They introduced Anderson to Joey’s official nickname, “Joey Bag of Donuts.”  Ever since then, Anderson automatically thought, “Joey Bag of Donuts,” when he came across Mr. Joe Swanson.

Anderson picked up the ringing phone on his desk, “This is Captain Anderson,” he said.

“Rick, it’s Joe, we need help,” the man on the other end of the phone wheezed.  “We have people tearing up the place and attacking my staff.  They killed one of my security officers-,” his sentence was interrupted by gunfire in the background.  “Shit, did you hear that?” Joe said.

“Joey,” Anderson said.  “Get somewhere safe, we’re on our way.”  The line had already gone dead.

###

The chopper Sulla heard turned out to be a news chopper for channel six.  When they saw the people with municipal equipment and guns, they decided to set down the chopper and get the story.  They landed right on Route 8 in front of the dealership.

A woman, followed by a cameraman, emerged from the chopper.  Peggy Davil had been shocked from the images her crew had taken from the air.  They had been trying to find a safe place to land in Butler for the past hour that would be close enough to the crisis to get on-location information.  They had swung by the Butler County Airport to refuel and learned Penn Township had an elected official directing operations just north of the airport on Route 8.

After taking off, it only took them a couple of minutes to find Sulla’s location.

Peggy got out of the news-chopper and asked a young man carrying some kind of machinegun where she could find Paul Sulla.  He grinned back at her and extended his hand.

“You’re looking at him, and I need your helicopter.”

“What did you have in mind?” Peggy asked.

“First, let me show you something,” Sulla said.

He led her to the back of a pickup truck and opened a cooler.  Peggy looked inside to see a severed head covered in blood.  Its eyes looked up at Peggy, and its mouth opened and closed.

“Holy shit,” Peggy said. “Fred, get this on camera,” she said to her cameraman.

Sulla then explained what he wanted.  “I need to see what’s coming at us from the air, and I need to see it firsthand.  If you want, while we are in the air, you can send your cameraman down the road to where our sharpshooters are. But I need to take your chopper up now.”

Peggy smelled news awards in her future.  “I think that sounds reasonable,” she said.

From the air, Sulla’s heart sank as he viewed his hometown of Butler.  The dead ravaged the city, and fires burned out of control.  Zombies surrounded buildings where the living struggled for survival.  Survivors waved franticly at the chopper from rooftops.  He observed muzzle flashes from every quarter of the city as people battled the undead.

An over-flight of the hospital showed that it too had been overrun by the ghouls.  On the roof of the hospital, a blond girl and a man in blue scrubs waved at the chopper.  The roof of the hospital had a landing pad designed for life-flight.

“Let’s pick them up,” Sulla directed.

###

Kimberly had been alone in the dark utility closet for what seemed like forever.

The zombies outside the door continued to try and beat their way in to get at her.  Their relentless and voiceless efforts nearly drove the young girl insane.  At first, she tried to remain silent thinking they might go away after a while.  Then she screamed for help. No one answered except the pounding on the door.  After hours of crying and praying, she discovered a steel ladder built on the back wall of the closet.  She climbed up in the dark.