Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

No matter how impressive it had been, it meant Nicky was out of ammo.

Al was on my other side between me and Gonzales. Al’s .45 had the slide back in place, and I didn’t ask if he was locked and loaded; I knew he was. Let’s hear it for grabbing all the extra ammo we could carry.

I stepped back, letting them know they needed to cover me if they could, and both of them stepped up. I opened the flap of the bag I was carrying and Nicky was close enough to reach in and get his own fresh magazine. He swung his AR on its strap, slapped the magazine home, and we started to move up again.

Edward’s voice was in my earpiece. ‘I’m out!’

I dropped back, and Nicky and the others moved up to cover the gap. I had the AR magazines, just like Dev had most of the handgun rounds. I reached in the bag one-handed and had an extended magazine in my hand as Edward’s hand came into view. He took it like we were running a relay race and we’d made a smooth pass of the baton. He slammed it home, and I moved back out to the circle with him on one side and the freshly armed Nicky on the other.

Dev was finally up and shooting on the other side of Nicky. When we all survived I’d talk to him about how long it took him to orient himself, and we’d have to figure out some kind of training to prepare him and any other newer guards for the serious shit, but that was later. Tonight, right now, it was just shooting zombie heads, blowing shoulders away from bodies, or shooting their legs out from under them, anything to make them immobile and disarmed.

Most of the time in a firefight you are full of adrenaline, on hyper alert, but sometimes battle becomes a grind of horrific sameness. You begin to shoot without really thinking, your body is almost on automatic, because it’s just too much – too much noise, too many visuals, too much to see, hear, feel, from the sweat that begins to trickle inside your vest, to your hands actually aching from shooting so much. I’d have changed guns just to rest my hands, but the AR was the right tool for the job, and there was a lot of job to do. But when you go to that battle haze, it’s all distant, echoing in your gun-deafened ears, your body vibrating with the force of shooting, fighting, hitting when an enemy gets too close for anything else. It’s beyond survival mode; it’s mechanical, exhausting, with moments of breath-stealing terror sprinkled like chocolate chips in a cookie, reminding you how much you want to live and how much you have to make the other guy die to do that.

It’s in moments like this that mistakes can happen; you see a face and you just fire without processing that this new stranger wasn’t a soldier, but you’ve killed so many, and had so many people try to kill you in this one breathless, horrible fight, that it’s only later you think, Wait, did I miss something? Did I shoot a face that wasn’t trying to kill me? Until you have been that exhausted, that traumatized by sheer fighting, you can’t understand how such a thing can happen. It is inexplicable to most people, because you haven’t been there, and until you wade through bodies, hands grabbing at you, teeth snapping at you, trying to kill you with whatever weapons they have left, you don’t understand that there comes a point when everybody who isn’t ‘us’ is a ‘them,’ and you just shoot them.

If you’ve never reached that moment of battle haze, then you don’t understand what’s happening, which is why when the elevator doors opened behind us, and I knew Dev was back there, I turned away from the fight to check on him, because he was my responsibility, and that’s what you do when you bring a greenhorn to a slaughter fight.

It was SWAT in full gear, and I watched Dev bring his AR to bear on them. There wasn’t time to yell, and he likely wouldn’t have heard me anyway; our hearing was blasted at this point. I aimed in front of him, between them and him. It wasn’t even a conscious thought, it was see, act; even saying I reacted was too slow for what happened in my body, because it acted before my brain caught up to the rest of me.

It made the SWAT guys aim at me, so I held a hand up to show I was okay, but it made Dev startle and look back at me. I had a moment to see his eyes refocus, and then he watched SWAT spill out of the elevator and I knew he’d be all right. I turned back to shoot more zombies, but there was nothing standing in front of me. The hallway was full of wriggling bits and pieces, but nothing left that could run at us or do much except try to grab on to our feet with dismembered hands. It was the stuff of nightmares, but it wasn’t actively going to kill us, not anymore.

It was Yancey from the police station who pulled up his face protection enough to say, ‘Looks like we missed it.’ If I hadn’t been able to watch his lips move, I’d have never known what he was saying.

‘You haven’t missed it; we still have to burn the motherfuckers,’ I said.

‘You’ll set off the sprinklers, or burn the hospital down,’ he said.

‘Sprinklers, yes,’ I said. ‘Burn down, no.’

‘How?’ he asked, and he was nicely skeptical.

I grinned at him, with my face still covered in zombie bits and blood. Yancey didn’t flinch. ‘We’ll show you,’ I said.

He grinned back, eyes taking in the knee-deep pile of moving corpses around us. ‘I look forward to it.’

I liked Yancey; he was okay.

Normal phosphorus, or even thermite, grenades are designed to burn for a short time and then go out. They cause damage that would discourage vampires, ghouls, or even lycanthropes and humans, but not zombies. They don’t get scared, they don’t panic, they don’t give up because you hurt them, because it doesn’t hurt them. Scientists have tried to figure out how the nerve impulses keep zombies able to walk but not able to feel pain. If they could figure it out, then maybe they could use it as a way to get paralyzed humans walking, but so far it is a mystery, because once you’ve cut an arm off a body it should just lie there. They shouldn’t even flop around like cut-in-half snakes, because the human nervous system works differently, and zombies start out human.

The pile of body parts that SWAT had helped us gather into the middle of the hallway burned. They burned because we’d piled the European grenades all around them. They weren’t designed for a quick explosion and a quick burn like the American ones; they were meant to explode and cover whatever was near with fire. Fire that clung and continued to burn until there was no more flesh for it to eat.

Don’t picture orange flames like a fireplace; it’s white-hot flame, so bright that it will sear your retinas and steal your sight if you look too long. We’d warned everyone who had stayed not to stare. The heat was so intense it felt like it was shearing the skin off us, but we had the bodies in the pyre to compare to, and we weren’t close enough to the fire to have our skin sheared. We all stepped back anyway.

Yancey asked, ‘Do zombies always burn so bright?’

‘No, it’s the phosphorus,’ I said.

The smell of burning flesh isn’t always that bad; sometimes it just smells like cooking meat, but hair burning, and some of the internal organs that you normally remove before cooking a big piece of meat, that makes it smell … odd. It didn’t always smell bad, and zombies usually smelled better burning than not, so … I tried to remember, but either I was finally nose-deaf to the smell of rotting zombies or these hadn’t smelled bad. My zombies didn’t smell bad, even if they looked rotten. I’d had an older animator explain to me that the magic that called it from the grave made it not rot for a little bit, and it was the rotting that caused the odor.