Jason Campagna - White Ash on Bone - A Zombie Novel

"Put your arm around me,” Rex said. “I’m going to sit you in the back of the truck." He easily lifted her into the open cargo hatch of the SUV. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a familiar .38. "You dropped something," he said as he handed it to her. “What's her part in this?" Kimberly looked up at Rex and Alison with pleading tearful eyes.

"Mistress." Alison said. "She was in on it." Terror spread across Kimberly's face and her body convulsed in muffled sobs.

In the sky, the crows came cawing back across the cornfield with a dozen more of their brethren. "Ha ha ha," Mike laughed on the ground. "Did you see that?" "Did the birds tell you? They said the dead are coming. They’re coming to get you fuckers?"

Alison braced herself on the side of the vehicle with one hand and stood up facing Mike. In her left hand her thumb pulled the hammer back on the .38 special. "Mike," she said, "You really disappointed me on my birthday."

She squeezed the trigger and the gun jumped in her hand. Mike took the slug right in the face. His brains exploded out of the back of his head.

Rex pulled his .45 and clicked the safety off walking over to Mike's body. The heavy caliber round barked out louder than its little sister as he put another round in Mike's head.

He walked over to Kim, the girl continued to sob on the ground. "Alison says you're guilty," Rex stated. "We don’t have a lot of time, because your boy-toy over there was right. We’re not alone here, and those things are likely coming across the field right now. We've made a hell of racket with the guns, so they know right where to find you. I’m going to ask you a question, and I can’t stress enough that you be completely honest. Since your mouth is all tapped up, simple yes or no answers will do fine. Are you guilty?"

A wash of liquid streamed down Kimberly's face as she tightly closed her eyes, her head shook, "Yes."

Alison walked over to Kim with the gun in her hand and pointed it at Kimberly.

"You deserve it," Alison said. Alison then lowered the gun and kneeled down. "I think Kim and I can settle up later." She reached down and snapped the necklace Mike had placed on Kimberly's neck. "I have a feeling Carson bought this for me." She threw the necklace on Carson's dead corpse while Rex bent down and cut away the tape holding Kimberly.

Chapter Eleven

Eason closed the gate on the ramp behind him that led out to the seats of the East upper decks. Mike and his wife Helen were cut off from the press of people and lost on the level below.

The dead had pushed through three of the main gates and taken over the lower levels of the stadium. There were people still down there trying to climb to higher levels, but the dead outnumbered them. The dead had shattered the glass below him to the club level and decimated the people taking refuge there. There might still be people hiding in the luxury suites, assuming someone had the keys to open them up.

Eason pulled the slide on his shotgun open and pushed several cartridges into the magazine. Behind him, people scrambled up walkways to get into higher seats.

Three of the undead rounded the ramp and locked on to Eason standing on the other side of the gate. Eason pushed the breach of the shotgun closed and stuck the barrel through the metal bars of the gate. The closest zombie wore the uniform of a City of Pittsburgh Police Officer. The zombie was Mike Fennel.

Eason backed away from the gate as Mike scrambled up the ramp at him.

He depressed the button on his radio, "North side upper deck gate secure."

" This is South gate, we couldn't get it closed, there’re coming thr-," the message was cut short.

Ordinance screeched from overhead gunships as they unloaded on the undead.

"It won’t matter now," Eason said.

He walked over to the concrete balcony overlooking the baseball stadium across the parking lot. In the sky above him, his eyes caught the movement of a grey multi-engine jet at high altitude. Eason recognized the plane.

The first time he had seen it was in Mrs. Cooper's Social Studies class back in the 6th grade. Mrs. Cooper taught the class about the ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union. She assigned the class a project to write a paper about some aspect of the cold war. In the school library, Eason found a book on jet planes that the United States used. He flipped through the pages, but stopped and studied an unusual plan with eight engines and huge wings. The book called the plane a B-51 Stratofortress. The book told Eason that the plane carried large payloads of bombs or nuclear weapons.

Eason noticed that the sound of the gunships that had been trying to hold back the undead were no longer to be heard.

Across the parking lot the baseball stadium erupted into a towering inferno of flame and debris. The walls of the park collapsed outward and the shockwave ripped out in all directions. Vehicles in the parking lot blew into the air like dandelion seeds cast into the wind. Others were hurled like wrecking balls tearing into anything unfortunate enough to get in their path. At least one smashed through the glass into the club east section of the football stadium below him.

The shockwave reached out across the river and smashed into the glass barriers of the skyscrapers across the street. A waterfall of shards fell to the streets along the entire north edge of the Pittsburgh skyline.

A wall of brown powderized building material raced out from the blast. Eason dropped down behind a concrete wall as it washed over the building.

A heavy cloud of burnt chalk filled Eason's mouth and his ears screamed from the explosion. He put his hand to his mouth and coughed, but he only sucked in more dust. For several seconds the world was filled with silence, then the banging sound of debris as it fell from the air and hit the stadium.

Eason heard a chorus of screams from people above him in the upper deck seating as material rained down on them. Something large slammed into the upper deck shaking the entire side of the stadium. He caught a glimpse of a stadium seat from the ballpark falling past his outlook.

The light bank above the concession stand flickered and went out. In the distance, Eason heard air-raid sirens wind down as they lost power. Eason's radio crackled incoherently as multiple operators jammed each other's broadcasts.

He picked himself off the ground covered in grist and grime. He looked back at the gate holding the dead back on the ramp.

Mike Fennel's corpse was covered in a thick layer of dirt. The dust covered the zombie's eyes and it turned away from Eason. Mike walked in a new direction toward the sound of the blast and hit the waist-high concrete barrier of the ramp. Mike doubled over the barrier and fell over the edge to fall hundreds of feet to the gates below.

"The dust is blinding them," he said.

Eason grabbed his radio and squeezed, "The dust has blinded some of them; it’s sticking to their eyes. We have to make a break for it while we have a chance."

The radio waves remained jammed, but two soldiers ran up to him coming from the south gate. Behind them, gunfire rattled off and echoed down the level.

Eason waved at them, but they shouted at him before he could talk.

"They broke though behind us," said a soldier with a nametag of Hoover on his pocket.

"The dust is in their eyes, they can't see," Eason said.

"Then they must be following the gunfire," replied Hoover.

"It doesn't matter now," said the other soldier, her nametag read, Jones. "The radios are being jammed by the Air Force, and they just fucking bombed our guys over at the baseball field."

"You sure they can't see?" asked Hoover.

"Yeah," said Eason, "He looked past me and walked right over the edge. A lot of them have to be as blind as fucking bats right now."