Shaun Harbinger - Lightning - Fighting the Living Dead

After a brief burst of muzzle flash and ear cracking bangs from the assault rifles, the zombies on this side of the wall lay unmoving in the grass.

“What now?” Jax asked no one in particular.

We were pinned here. If we left the safety of the wall, we would become targets for the shooter in the farmhouse.

My peripheral vision caught a movement in the darkness. I turned to glance into the field we were sitting in, and my heart began hammering.

Three figures were running toward us. In the starlight, I could just make out the camouflage pattern of their army uniforms.

“We need to move,” I said. “Hybrids.”

SAM AND TANYA turned their weapons on the hybrids, but as soon as they began firing, the hybrids dropped to the ground and came scuttling through the grass on all fours like spiders, presenting smaller targets. And they were crawling fast.

“We have to go over the wall,” I said. “The only safe place around here is that house.”

“There’s a guy in there trying to kill us,” Tanya reminded me.

“I’d rather face a human being with a gun than deal with… that,” I said, nodding at the approaching hybrids.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s go. We’re making a run for the farmhouse. Sam, lay down some cover fire.”

Sam leaned over the wall and fired a few rounds at the upstairs window of the house. “Go!” he shouted.

We scrambled over the wall, and sprinted for the farmhouse. As we ran, Tanya brought up her rifle and let off a few shots toward the window we had been targeted from. I heard glass shatter, and a startled cry, and wondered if the shooter in the house had been hit by glass shards, if not by Tanya’s bullet.

Sam caught up with us, breathing hard.

The farmhouse was built of stone, with double-glazed windows and a front door that looked like it was made of heavy wood. It wasn’t going to be easy to get inside. We ran around the back, and as we reached the corner of the house, I risked a glance over my shoulder.

The three hybrids were back on their feet, sprinting toward us.

“We don’t have much time,” I said to Tanya. My words were rushed as I gasped for air. I wasn’t built for running, but at least I had reached the farmhouse without stopping. There was once a time when I wouldn’t have been able to make that run. I’d be lying in the grass back there while the hybrids tore into me and ripped me apart.

The back door looked less heavy duty than the front, but it still looked sturdy enough to withstand being forced open.

“Fuck,” Sam said. “We can’t go through there.” He turned to face the advancing hybrids, the assault rifle raised so he could look along the sights.

Tanya aimed her rifle at the kitchen window and blew it to pieces, glass crashing everywhere. “Be careful,” she said as she climbed through. Jax followed and then I climbed in, wary of the deadly looking pieces of glass lying on the kitchen counter on the other side of the window.

Johnny and Sam followed quickly.

“They’ll follow us in here,” I said.

“That won’t matter,” Tanya said. She and Sam pointed their guns at the space where the window had once been. “They’ll have to come through that gap, and when they do, we’ll blast them.”

The first hybrid appeared, his yellow eyes filled with determination and hate. Both MP5s spat bullets, and the hybrid’s head jerked back, crimson blood gushing from its face.

The second hybrid appeared, clambering past the window frame, driven by a sense of rage far stronger than any sense of self-preservation. After the MP5s spoke a second time, the hybrid’s lifeless body slid heavily from the counter onto the kitchen floor and lay dead at our feet.

I wondered how strong the bloodlust must be in these monsters that it drove them to attack without any regard for their own lives.

A flurry of gunfire dispatched the third hybrid before it even managed to get through the broken window.

“Sam, find the stairs and cover them,” Tanya said. “There’s someone up there who wants us dead. The rest of you, help me move that table to cover the opening.”

We wrestled with a heavy wooden table that had been sitting in one corner of the kitchen and positioned it over the hole where the window had once been. By sliding the refrigerator across the floor and pushing it up against the table’s legs, we managed to press the table firmly in place, covering the gap.

There were still plenty of zombies out there, but we knew they didn’t have the basic intelligence of the hybrids; zombies would walk past that table-covered opening and not even think about trying to break in.

“Any trouble, Sam?” Tanya shouted out.

“Nothing,” he replied from somewhere in the house. “Whoever was shooting at us is holed up somewhere upstairs.”

We left the kitchen and walked along a hallway to where Sam was crouched at the foot of a flight of stairs, MP5 aimed at the landing above.

I glanced through a door into a living room. The house was furnished simply in a rustic manner, but looked comfortable. You would never know from the quiet atmosphere in the house that a zombie apocalypse was sweeping across the land outside.

Through the window, I saw some of the zombies pass by the house, nothing more than dark shapes in the night. I knew they would roam around out there until something else caught their attention and drew them away. They functioned on a very basic level, their actions controlled by the virus that infected their dead bodies. Their simple, dead minds had no reasoning power.

The people upstairs were another matter entirely. Armed, and presumably smart, they presented the greatest immediate danger to us.

I assumed there was more than one person up there, because the framed photographs on the mantelpiece in the living room showed a couple in their sixties, and whom I presumed to be two sons in their thirties.

That meant that there were potentially four armed people to deal with up there.

I told the others.

“Fuck ‘em,” Sam said. “We’ve probably got better firepower. I say we go up there and clear all the rooms.”

I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. When did we become a SWAT team? We were being sidetracked from what was important.

“Or we could just leave,” I said. “I saw a set of car keys hanging on the wall near the back door. We can take their car and get to Site Alpha Two much quicker. We aren’t here to murder people.”

“They shot at us,” Sam said.

“And who can blame them? They’re probably scared shitless, trying to protect their farm from zombies. Wouldn’t you shoot at trespassers if it was you?”

He shrugged. “I guess so.”

“What kind of car is it?” Tanya asked.

“I don’t know. The keys have the Volkswagen logo on them.”

Jax went into the living room and peered out of the window. “I don’t see any car out there, and there wasn’t one at the front of the house, either.”

I went back to the kitchen, grabbed the keys, and found a door that opened into a garage. It was neat, with tools hanging on the walls in ordered rows, a stack of tires in one corner, and a smell of oil and rubber in the air.

When I had first seen the VW keys, I had wondered if the car might be a Beetle, or something compact that we wouldn’t all fit into. I needn’t have worried; a metallic-blue Volkswagen California camper van sat in the garage.

The others appeared at the door.

Jax said, “Sweet.”

“I’ll drive,” Tanya said. “We need to get the garage door open.”

“It’s automatic,” I said. “There’s a remote opener in the van.”

Tanya climbed into the driver’s seat, with Sam next to her up front. The rest of us piled into the spacious rear area. Tanya hit the button on the remote and the garage door slid slowly upward to reveal a gravel driveway beyond and a dirt road beyond that.