Zombie Road , Simpson, A. [best authors to read TXT] 📗

Hollywood cursed and followed, his long leather trench coat flowing around him. There were no more battle lines, the terrified living and the keening undead were all mixed together, fighting and dying, tearing with teeth and cutting with blades. The pair from Lakota dove into the writhing mass of bodies, their guns spoke the language of death and they sent deader after deader crumpling to the ground with holes blown big in their heads. The fighting was frenzied and round after round exploded faces at point blank range. The pair spun, ducked, dodged and wove an intricate bullet ballet, their minds calm from a thousand hours of training. Black Locust Spitting with both guns killing to the front flowed to Kitten Comes Calling as she dropped to a knee and blasted jumpers from opposite sides. Hollywood twirled, always an inch out of their reach and killed with the surety that came from long hours of practice. Their hands knew the ways of war. Their fingers knew how to fight. They knew how to kill.

Their cacophony of gun blasting madness bought some of the sailors enough time. A few precious seconds that was the difference between life and death. Others went down under the gnashing teeth and tearing claws. The pair didn’t bother wasting breath urging them to hurry, they pumped lead into the undead, they splashed heads, they dodged leaping bodies and they killed until they ran out of reloads. Putrefying blood covered them both and by the time the slides locked back for the final time they had worked their way over to the train. They leaped for the catwalk, swung up the ladder and scrambled for the roof leaving the hungry faces and reaching arms behind.

The train jolted and started moving as they lay on the roof, gasping for air.

“That was dumb.” Hollywood finally said.

“Yeah.” Bridget agreed then laughed. Her hands shook now that it was over, now that the biting faces were ten feet below and couldn’t hurt her. “Pretty much.”

Hollywood sat up and looked back at the carnage, at the forty or fifty unmoving corpses they had cut down. That meant there were forty or fifty sailors that hadn’t gotten bitten. They were still alive and safe inside.

Maybe.

“We need to make sure nobody got bit.” Bridget said. “We can still lose a whole car if someone turns.”

“Hey, there’s the kid.” Hollywood said and pointed at a figure running along the top of the container wall. The undead followed his foot falls and half a hundred were joined by some of the horde streaming in from the streets.

They followed the path to see where he was headed and saw the gantry coming up quickly as they built up speed. Hollywood checked to make sure the rail car ramps were up then watched as the boy sprinted for the crane. It straddled the tracks so it could load and unload the trains and the containers were stacked up in lines around it. The containers were too far away for him to jump to the train, it was a twenty-foot gap, but if he got on the gantry, there was a set of tracks ran right underneath it.

“Wonder what happened to his bike?” Bridget asked when she saw what he was trying to do.

“Dunno.” Hollywood answered. “But if we’re going to pick him up, we’re on the wrong track.”

They rolled to their feet and ran along the tops of the rail cars to the front of the train.

“We gotta switch tracks!” Hollywood yelled as he slid down the ladder and cut through the lead engine.

He pointed at the kid running along the container tops and Gunny swore then hit the brakes to slow them down.

“Go!” he said. “Hurry before they get too deep and overrun us!”

Hollywood shoved through the door and grabbed the controls of the switching arm and ran it out. Bridget snagged a handful of magazines from the crate as she dashed and her bullets started dropping bodies. The machine guns still thundered as the boys continued to blow the undead off the tracks, only quieting long enough to swap out glowing red barrels. Fires and smoke poured up from the other side of the city and the dry screams of the undead surrounded them. The rotting corpses clawed at the train, threw themselves at it and tried to climb over the railing. Thousands poured into the port from the surrounding town and the big guns couldn’t cut them down fast enough. Hollywood was working blind, the undead were already forty deep in front of the decelerating train and he couldn’t see the tracks as the bodies tumbled and rolled. He guided it by instinct, felt it through the controls when the switcher slipped into the groove of the tracks and sliced through the bodies. Spilled blood and guts greased the rails and they slammed over easily. The train lurched as it made the turn way above the recommended speed and the dead tumbled higher and higher against the concertina wire strung on the railing.

Gunny throttled up hard, tried to kill as many as he could, ground them into the rails because he only had one chance to get it right and get on down the road. There wasn’t much track ahead of them, it only went a hundred yards past the gantry before it ended at the bump stop and he slammed the brakes to full and hit reverse. The steel wheels cut through the slimy bodies as over four hundred tons of diesel locomotives fought for traction and started sliding to a halt. They had to be fast, the number of undead kept increasing and when the train stopped to reverse, they were going to be swarmed. There were too many of them, the only safe place was going to be inside the train but Hollywood couldn’t switch the tracks back from there. He had to be on the deck or they’d be stuck on a short run of less than a half mile. End