The Dead Come for Us

Chapter 7

The noise from the mouth of the tunnel consumed their cries.

As Mac and Lola shoved them down the sloping concrete incline toward the sound of the roaring tunnel mouth Isaac and Rose screamed out.

Mac let his shotgun drop. He grabbed the chain-link fence post on top with his left hand and flung himself down. The ball sockets on his arm joints cried out at the strain as he snatched upIsaac’s hoodie just in time.

Lola’s survival instinct kicked into overdrive thanks to her primal terror, and she leaped out flat onto the sloped concrete, her boot wedged in a crack while her fingers wrapped around Rosie’s wrist.

"Pull!"

Mac shouted. His neck muscles bulged as if they would burst through his skin.

With a shared, agonizing heave, they managed to wrench the two teenagers back up the forty-five-degree incline just as the first of the sprinty hoard poured out of the tunnel. They did not bother climbing the walls, the forward motion was too strong.

The crowd surged ahead and smashed against the opposite concrete wall of the channel with a crunch of bone and fractured skulls as bodies behind them piled into them.

They trampled the fallen into a mangled pile as they continued.

"Keep pulling! Don't look!"

Lola rasped pulling Rosie over the steel lip of the retaining wall back into the train yard.

They collapsed onto the loose gravel, wheezing deeply while the freezing stagnant stench of the tunnel belched into the air around them like a volcano. Below, in the canal it had become a river of dead-men.

Thousand upon thousand of frantically sprinty bodies crammed into the narrow concrete channel rushing toward the southern industrial limits at a breakneck pace.

They had escaped that specific danger, but something inside the family’s minds finally broke.

"We are no longer running blindly!"

Lola spat at Mac, aiming the heavy iron crowbar right at his chest. "Look at them, Mac! If we were ten seconds late those kids would be floating down that ditch with the rest of the walking dead! You have no plan and your reaction time is pushing us into the mouth of the meat grinder!"

"My reactions just saved your throat from being ripped out twenty yards back!" Mac roared back, his eyes blazing directly into hers. The icy discipline of the squad leader cracked, revealing a father’s raw, frayed nerves. "This damn map changes minute by minute Lola.

Building a static defensive position in a collapsing sector just gets you surrounded and eaten. My only goal is keeping us moving at maximum velocity away from that crap!"

"You aren't a squad leader anymore, Dad!" Isaac yelled at both his parents. His face was bright red. "Stop treating us like soldiers who take your commands! You were calling me a liability before this! I helped mom just then with this bar and you still act like I am a mistake you have to fix!"

"Back off, Isaac,"

Mac snarled, balling his fist at his side.

"No! You have this crazy obsession with just surviving that you are willing to crush us to do it! Rosie hasn't said a word since we left the kitchen! Look at her!"

Mac turned. Rosie was sitting on a rusty steel rail tie.

Her arms were wrapped so tight around herself she looked like she would explode and she was barely breathing, making a quick mechanical clicking noise in her throat. She wasn't even looking at the two of them fighting; her wide, dilated eyes were locked on the sky in the south.

"Rosie,"

Mac whispered, his rage dissolving, leaving a hollow dread in his voice.

"They're dropping them," Rosie whispered, her voice hollow as if it were not her own. "The big birds. They're dropping the boxes."

Mac’s eyes snapped up to the sky in the south above the naval weapons station where he spotted a flight of four C-130 Hercules cargo planes slipping through the low-lying clouds. They weren't landing; they were performing a heavy air drop over the facility.

They carried massive palletized cargo containers attached to static-line parachutes.

Then the horrific reality of the air drop became apparent.

Two of the main parachutes had become entangled in a crosswind and the two huge, multi-ton cargo containers had sailed completely off course and were traveling north over the industrial train yards.

"Down!" Mac screamed, shoving Lola and Isaac onto the gravel ballast behind him with his hands grabbing both of their jackets.

The first cargo container struck the rail yard dead center three hundred yards out with a deafening boom that made the tracks buckle and launched a shower of gravel and rusted metal into the air around them.

The reinforced steel container split its welded seams from top to bottom on impact.

It did not contain army rations or ammunition.

Inside the container had been used as a mobile quarantine isolation unit in the city center.

At that point the metal ripped apart a condensed hyper-mass of the infected thousands inside the pressurized, unlit box vomited into the air like spilled oil from a ruptured tanker.

They were fresh and healthy and utterly enraged at the long duration spent trapped in the dark.

The worst part was, the second container was still dropping.

Mac ducked his head up and his eyes followed the giant shadows as they scoured the yard.

The lines snapped overhead and Mac and his family watched as the multi-ton steel box hurtled down at terminal velocity directly at them, aimed at the center of the concrete canal wall where they lay pinned beneath the sky.