The Dead Come for Us

Chapter 3

The twelve-gauge blast ripped through the quiet backyard like thunder.

It caught the pointman at forty yards, a burst of heavy buckshot tearing through cotton and flesh, turning him on his spine as he collapsed into the dust. The others didn’t hesitate as they trampled over the falling corpse in a flailing, high-speed mêlée.

They spread no wider than a human width of bodies, fanning out toward the family in a flowing liquid wedge driven by pure kinetic momentum to bite, and to kill.

“Run! To the canal!” Mac bellowed as he rammed another shell into the chamber with an audible clack-clack.

A second blast tore open the throat of a degenerating teenager in a high school track uniform. The body hit the grass.

Mac remained in a crouched firing position providing cover while Lola grabbed Rose by the arm and sprinted toward the chain-link perimeter fence that bounded the property with the city's concrete drainage channels.

“Isaac! Move your ass!”

Lola screamed over her shoulder, his pistol raised as her eyes raked the sides of the lawn.

Isaac sprinted forward but his boots slipped on the damp morning grass and he went down on his side, his crowbar clattering across the lawn.

Twenty yards away a male infected, with an arm broken at an impossible angle dangling loose, saw the boy. He emitted a wet, rattling screech and changed direction, sprinting at the blind spot on Isaac's left side.

“Dad!” Isaac cried, scrambling backward on his elbows, his eyes wide with fear as the snarling face filled his vision.

Mac pivoted the shotgun but his internal tactical clock screamed: empty chamber.

No time to cycle it. He dropped the shotgun by the strap and drew his sidearm in a fluid, unthinking motion, pulling the trigger twice in rapid succession, the double tap drilling through the skull bone of the frontal lobe of the infected directly between his eyes.

His legs gave out immediately, the flailing corpse sliding across the grass and into Isaac's boots, wetting his denim jeans with dark, pressurized fluid.

“Get up!” Mac roared, sprinting backward, pistol extending to vaporize two more creatures that burst from the trees lining the yard. He grabbed Isaac by the collar of his denim jacket, and yanked him up in one violent motion.

“Get the bar, and move!”

They hit the chain-link fence at a sprint. Lola was already pushing the rusted pedestrian gate open that led out of the property’s subdivision easement and out into the enormous, concrete lined channel that cut twenty feet deep, gray scar across the verdant suburban landscape.

“Down the embankment, stay low!” Mac commanded, shoving Isaac through the gate first.

The family conflict spilled over as soon as their boots hit the steep, angled concrete of the ditch. Isaac turned to his father, his face flushed with a terrifying mixture of shock and humiliated rage; his hands trembled so badly he could barely hold his crowbar.

“You almost shot me!” Isaac screamed, his voice breaking, muffled by the sirens in the distance whose noise bounced off the concrete walls. “You’re treating us like targets! We could have stayed inside and hid!”

“Shut up, Isaac!”

Mac hissed, his voice low and lethal as he scanned the rim above them from the back of the canal wall. “Look up there, and tell me we could have hid from them.”

A shadow fell over the lip of the canal. Three infected reached the top of the concrete embankment they had just run down. They made no attempt to find a path or a ladder; they launched themselves over the side of the ditch.

They hit the concrete at shattering angles and tumbled like rag dolls before righting themselves, gnawing and clicking in their rapid, mechanical rhythm.

“They don’t feel pain, Isaac.” Lola said her voice tight as she pulled Rose behind her. She turned to Mac, her eyes burning with a fierce, maternal protective warning.

“Stop drilling him Mac. He's seventeen, not a soldier. We need a direction now.”

“We move south down the canal channel.” Mac said, his pulse settling. “The streets are clogged with gridlock and fire; the concrete runs straight under Route 286 to exit out into the industrial train yards, a two mile walk at most. Stick to your spacing.

Three paces apart.”

The concrete ditch was thick with stagnant air, the fetid odor of algae, rust, and the slight, metallic smell of blood drifting down from the street above.

The sound above them was a psychological nightmare; the vast expanse of sky was a theater of war with the constant, heavy rotor-wash of helicopters, distant explosions, and the muffled, monotonous scream of thousands of people being overwhelmed.

Every sound in the concrete chute bounced off the walls, making it seem that the horde was already right on top of them.

Rose walked in the center of the ditch, her hands clenched tightly in the fabric of Lola’s tactical vest, her eyes glued to the slick, wet concrete beneath her feet, tracking the flow of tiny rivulets of rainwater.

“Dad.” Rose whispered suddenly.

Mac stopped, raising a hand. He couldn't hear over the chaos roaring from the streets above, but he trusted Rose's senses.

“What is it, Rose?”

Mac whispered, sinking low.

“The water.” she said, pointing with a trembling finger at a puddle near the center of the concrete ditch. “The water’s going backwards.”

Mac looked down. The thin sheet of runoff water on the concrete was no longer trickling down the grade toward the river basin, but was beginning to reverse, rippling with increasing intensity as the ground began to vibrate from a low, seismic thrum emanating from the enormous, dark mouth of the concrete tunnel directly ahead.

From the pitch-black maw of the concrete tunnel, a solid, screaming wall of black sludge began to emerge, a torrent of human bodies rather than water; hundreds of infected that had been channeled from the city center down into the subterranean levels, pushed by the horde above into an unstoppable, shoving, sprinting tide of teeth, and claws that surged directly down the canal channel toward them.