Kirk Allmond - What Zombies Fear - A Father's Quest

“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned about her ability to keep this up.

“I’ve killed about three hundred; I lost count about three kilometers up.” She said, “It might be closer to three-fifty.”

“Damn it, Leo!” John swore, “How am I supposed to catch up? That’s cheating!”

“I didn’t make the assignments, John,” Leo quipped. “But you’re not going to catch up anyways; I’ve been working on some new tricks.”

I reached down to Leo’s waist, and clicked her radio over to voice activated. “Leo, your mic is now hot, so you don’t have to push talk, if you’re using both hands. If you’re going to be attacking the flank, or the rear, we need to know so we don’t shoot you.”

“Got it, Tookes. This is kind of fun.” She took off again just as the first zombie head became visible over the rise. John wasted no time, even though this was three hundred yards, he aimed the rifle at almost a seventy degree angle upwards, lofting the bullet towards the zombie, using gravity to assist the trajectory. The zombie went down in a heap. For us, it had started.

A few seconds later, the first row appeared. John lofted six bullets up in the air in the same fashion, and removed his magazine. He had the mag out of the gun before the first zombie crumpled. As the next set came into view, he had all seven bullets replaced in his magazine, the mag replaced and the gun cocked. He was amazing to watch, we started to think this was going to be easy.

The next wave was about twice as many. He shot ten times, but before those were hit, there were more behind them. He shot the last twenty bullets of that magazine as fast as the gun would allow. I’m certain that all twenty bullets were in the air at the same time. He flipped his magazine around, reinserted it, and shot those thirty bullets without pause. He just might catch Leo; this was sixty shots, sixty dead zombies. There were way more than he could handle now. He removed that magazine and put it in his back pocket, pulling out a fresh pair of mags.

Zombies were solidly over the hill now, about two hundred yards away. Still too far for us. John stopped shooting, pulled out his emptied mag and started reloading it from bullets in his pocket. A hundred and fifty yards. He flipped the magazine around, reloading thirty rounds into that magazine in just a few seconds. He lifted his rifle to his shoulder.

“Wait for it. Thirty seconds.” He fired, emptying his magazine, hitting every zombie in the first two rows directly in the eye. Flipped the magazine, and dropped the two that were still coming after one small bullet to the eye.

“Fifteen more seconds.” Another thirty shots, he was moving the gun barrel at incredible speed, the tip of the muzzle actually blurring with the movement, the muzzle blasts seeming to be one long burst of fire from the tip. The last shot was a misfire, which he cleared by working the action back and forth several times.

“This bloody gun can’t handle the rate of fire. The action is heating up, causing bullets to fire when they’re injected into the chamber. I’m going to have to slow down.”

He pulled his pistols, and emptied both magazines into the oncoming crowd. That was thirty more dead zombies.

“One hundred and seventy eight, Leo!” he said into his throat mic, as he reloaded and holstered his pistols. Swinging his now slightly cooler .22 up to his shoulder, he began to fire cyclically, but more slowly.

“Fire!” he said. “Fire straight ahead, drive holes deep in their line, I’ll clean up your misses.”

“Four-eighty-five, John, you’re not gonna catch me!”

I watched Leo come flying down the west flank of the zeds, her kukri lopping off the heads of every one she could reach in her easily one hundred mile per hour pass down the line. Before the zombies could react, their heads were flying.

She stopped a few feet away and said “Five-ninety-two now!”

We all opened fire. When one fell, we shot the one behind it. We walked backward, trying to match their pace, keeping them roughly a hundred yards from us. They were slightly faster than us. John, true to his word, shot every one we missed, all along the front of the line. The corpses stacked up, and the zombies started stumbling as they tried to walk over the fallen corpses. It actually made it harder to hit them, resulting in more misses and completely ineffective wounds. Were they living people, they’d be taken out by those wounds, but the zombies paid them no mind. Unless you completely destroyed a limb, they made no notice of the damage.

Leo’s voice came across the radio. “I have good news; I’m up to six-forty-three.”

“Bloody hell, Leo! Nice work!” said John. “I have three-twenty-nine, I’m catching up. Front line, retreat to ammo station one, triple time, run!”

We ran for all we were worth back the last two hundred yards to the ammo station. I reach the pile, breathing heavily, struggling to control it. The problem with these extended campaigns is that they rely on physical training. Thus far I’d mostly made it on adrenaline. That was long gone, replaced with a gnawing in my gut. I put two boxes of .22 rounds into my backpack, and picked up my last four magazines. Everyone started reloading their empty mags as quickly as possible. John reloaded all of his; he now had six doubled magazines. My shoulder was starting to ache, even with the relatively small caliber gun, this many rounds was more than anyone was intended to shoot.

I managed to get four and a half of my doubled magazines reloaded before it was time to stand up and fire. We repeated that strategy, backing up, firing, backing up, firing, backing up, firing. We’d killed about five thousand zombies by the time we made it to the second ammunition dump.

“John, this could work!” I said happily.

“Guys,” Leo came over the radio. ”We’re in trouble. There are at least two more groups the same size as this one.”

37. Battle

“Leo, how are you holding up?”

“I’m fine, I could do this all day, I’m not even running that fast.” answered Leo.

“I need you to do a sweep around the perimeter of the house. I need to know if this is the entire force, or if they’re coming at us from multiple angles.”

“You got it; I’ll be back in about three minutes.”

“Leo, it’s at least five miles.”

“You’re right, maybe two and a half minutes.” And with that, she was off in a blur.

“My team, M-1, continue with the plan, increase fire. Empty your mags, and run to the next dump point. We’re halfway back to the property, and I have a pretty nasty idea on how to slow them down.”

I tossed my rifle and mags to John. “You’re better with them anyways; I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I ran back at a dead sprint to the four-wheeler that Bookbinder had the foresight to park at the second ammo dump. Up over the bank, I flew across a soybean field at the machine’s top speed, reaching the old Sykes farm. They were cattle ranchers. Drawing my sig, I fired twelve .40 round shots into the base of a barbed wire fence pole at the corner of their cattle field. This fence was over half a mile long. The fence post gave way with two kicks to the top, I grabbed it and ripped the barbed wire free of the next post down the line, pulling the staples out that held it in place. I wrapped the fence post and barbed wire around and through the rack on the back of the four-wheeler, and took off, dragging three long strands of barbed wire off the row of fence posts behind me.

The four-wheeler bogged down about two hundred feet from where I started.

“Dammit!” I swore, rocking the four-wheeler back and forth, twisting the throttle to full. The tires spun, then it lurched forward, pulling off several hundred feet of wire behind me.