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Travis helped Calhoun off the bike and onto the elevator. “Didn’t know where you got off to. ”

“Got a lot of them moving out of town, then double-backed and got past the traps right when the tanks blew. ” Rune climbed off his motorcycle and lifted his shotgun calmly to blow the head off an approaching zombie.

“Gotta leave you here, Charlain,” he said to the bike and climbed onto the elevator. “Sorry, babe. ”

Jack caught up and leaped onto the elevator just as it began to lift. Jason went down on his knees to hold onto the dog.

Travis and Rune began to calmly fire at anything that staggered out of the smoke as they were lifted back into the safety of the fort.

Just as they reached the top, a shift in the wind blew much of the smoke away from the fort. Jason looked over the wide expanse of land and saw that a lot of the zombies were moving off away from the town. The fire had spooked them. Once they were moving in one direction, they kept going.

What remained was a large number of zombies still approaching and moving into the kill zone.

“We’re clear,” Travis said as they reached the top of the wall as Katie grabbed up Jason to hug him.

“No one is bitten? Right?” Katie ran her hands over Jason’s arms.

“No, we’re good. Promise,” Jason answered.

Calhoun reluctantly let Reggie check him for bites. “Damn things smell to high heaven, don’t they?”

Reggie, trying hard not to smell the old man, nodded. ‘Oh, yeah.

Katie watched anxiously as Travis and Rune were checked for bites. The moans of the zombies grew louder as they drew ever closer to the fort.

Cleared of any bites, Travis kissed his wife as Rune heaved his bag of grenades over his shoulder.

“Time to get to work,” Rune said.

Together, Travis and Katie looked out over the wide expanse of land before the fort. It was filled with the shambling dead.

“They’re here,” Travis whispered.

Within seconds the catapults began to creak and moan, then sling their heavy loads into the air and down on the zombies.

The war began…

Chapter 35

1. The War

It is common knowledge that war is hell. But what is also not so well known is that war is surreal. Hyper-reality often mixes with moments of feeling oddly disconnected from reality. A sense of fragility wrapped up in a feeling of invincibility. Nothing about it makes sense. Nothing about it registers fully in the human senses.

The morning air was filled with the creaking of catapults showering the undead with their loads of discarded junk. The sharp twang of the massive crossbows was followed by the hissing whistle of twenty arrows splitting through the air in a gentle arch only to slam into the battered, mangled bodies of the dead. The sudden whoosh of the gas jets being activated out on the field below, then the loud bang as they ignited, was followed by the intense wail of the zombies on fire.

The smell was unbelievable. Charred flesh. Rotting flesh. Fire. Human sweat and fear.

From the massive crossbows to the catapults to the gunmen, everyone had a section of the area lying before the fort which they were responsible for. Target zones were erected along the wall with colored paint. If something crossed into your zone, you fired. It was easy. Yet there was swearing and screams of anger as something undead and rotting would pass out of the zone just before a toilet smashed right where it had been standing or the ground was skewered with twenty arrows instead of the shambling dead.

Juan activated the traps on Nerit’s command. The fire jet traps, the quick drying cement traps, the stake traps. He listened and obeyed. He never saw the shuffling family of four complete with a toddler get stuck in the quick drying cement and flail about uselessly until the snipers shot off their heads. He didn’t see the former nurse with both arms missing ignite into a torch as a gas jet went off. Nor the zombified firemen get skewered on the stake traps. But he would hear “Good job” from Nerit and smile with satisfaction.

Katie worked with feverish intensity loading up her crossbow, then waiting for something to move into her zone. Every time the shambling dead went down under the hail of her arrows, she would grin fiercely and reload. More than once she felt Jenni’s presence nearby and it pushed her to keep going even when the heat and the smell seemed overwhelming.

“This is for Ken, fuckers,” Lenore said further down the wall as her crossbow split zombies apart pouring their putrid innards onto the ground. She would pump her fist in the air then reload to do it all over again.

Jason helped man the slingshot. The teenagers launched Molotov cocktails with startling accuracy at the undead. They all wore t-shirts with the words “For Roger” written on them with a sharpie pen. Jason’s read on the back: “For my Mom. ”

Rune ran across rooftops to gun down anything trying to come up the side streets. Most of the traps had already gone off with zombies dangling from the razor wire. He took out anything that stirred down the side streets.