Carnell, Thom - No Flesh Shall Be Spared

Ray Dog and Slider took the shots as a sign that it was Go Time and walked toward the front door with a deadly purpose. Slider took up a position to the side of the door and Ray Dog stopped once he got to the door mat.

"Should we knock?" The Dog said with an easy, wide grin.

Slider shook his head and laughed.

Ray Dog raised one of his size fifteen boots and kicked the door off of its hinges.

"Knock, knock!"

Just inside, coming out of the family room and into the foyer, was a reanimated woman. She looked roughly forty or so, hair tied tight at the back of her head in a haphazard bun. The front of her dress was torn and bloody. A large gash extended from her throat and angled down into her dress. From beneath the hem of her dress, an oily loop of intestine dragged forgotten behind her, leaving a deep crimson snail trail in its wake.

Suddenly, from behind the house, another series of gunshots were heard. By the sound of it, it was Masterson’s Bushmaster. The short staccato sound of pops was heard and then the echo trailed off across the valley. The dead woman turned, distracted by the sound.

The Dog gave a sharp whistle, dragging back the attention of the thing before him. For a second, they stood staring at one another and then the woman opened her mouth and bared her teeth. He fired a quick burst with the M-60 and obliterated both the dead woman and most of the hallway. Splinters of wood, stucco, and body parts were thrown violently into the air. When the smoke cleared, the place looked as if The Wild Bunch had been there.

"Clear!" Ray Dog shouted.

"Ya think?!?" Slider said still laughing.

From behind the house came the other’s responses.

"Clear!" shouted Masterson.

"Clear!" yelled A-Rab.

Slider entered the front door and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Ray Dog watched as he disappeared at the top of the staircase. Soon enough, a shotgun blast echoed through the building.

"Clear!" came Slider’s shout from upstairs.

Minutes later, the squad regrouped on the porch outside the shattered front door.

"Ok," Masterson said, running his hand over his sweaty scalp. "no one get comfortable. We have one more structure to check."

They all looked further up the small hill, which angled up twenty or so yards to the right and back of the house. It was there that the barn stood waiting.

"We do this just like we always do, Gentlemen" he said. "Secure the perimeter, and then we compromise the front door. Anything Dead moves, if it even so much as wiggles, cap it."

The men nodded and shouldered their weapons. As a group, they headed up toward the barn at a trot. The road was more dirt driveway than real road with deep furrows from a tractor’s tires cut into the hard ground. Years of repeated travel back and forth from the barn to the field had left some deep scars on the earth.

Several hundred yards away from the barn, Bruce detected more movement.

"I got a coupla more meatheads over here," he said. "One by the double doors at the front. One on the left."

Masterson raised a scarred pair of binoculars and aimed them toward the barn. In the lenses, he could see that the building was fairly large and painted in a stereotypical red with a set of double doors in the front. Above them was another set of doors with a winch suspended over it by a post. No doubt it was where they loaded hay and feed once upon a time. The building looked exactly like what it was: a barn. Even from this distance, the smell of straw was sweet and overpowering.

Standing in front of the doors were two more zombies: a man and a young girl. The guy was in his mid-fifties with gray hair and a severe beer belly. He was missing his left hand and forearm and there were huge, raking tears down his back. The girl was barely out of high school with short brown hair cut in a bob. She had no visible causes of death. Under the hot sun their skin appeared to be discolored with large blackened patches of flesh that looked bruised and rotting.

There was a slight family resemblance between the two. So much so that Lance thought maybe they’d once been Father and Daughter. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. Now, they were hungry, disease-ridden predators and they were about to have their heads aggressively ventilated.

That’s just the way things were.

The team headed up the roadway with eyes continuing to scour the landscape and their guns held up and at the ready. It wouldn’t do anybody any good if they became too focused on what lay in front of them and forgot all about what might be hidden in the brush to their left or right.

Once they’d gotten to within a dozen or so yards from the barn, the two zombies caught the squad’s scent on the wind. The man whirled around and snarled. He headed toward them at a speed that was faster than any of them thought possible. He had his weight and the fact that he was heading downhill on his side. No matter… one thing was clear.

The fat boy could run.

The girl stumbled along behind him like a retarded puppy. Her arms swayed back and forth like pendulums as she ran. From the look of things, she’d already followed him to the Gates of Hell and beyond. Following along behind him to go after a bit of food now was a given.

Bruce stepped forward and, without prompting, cut them down with the MP5. They both did a sort of herky-jerky dance as the spray of bullets tore through them and splintered the barn behind. Finally, several slugs slapped into the meat of their faces, blowing the tops and sides of their heads into the air like divots.

"Area clear, Sir!" Bruce said with a smirk as he dutifully stepped back in line.

"Good work, Son," Masterson said, patting the young man on the back. "We’ll need to recon the interior and get our asses on to the next homestead down the road."

The group walked over to the double barn doors together, stepping over the now still bodies of the fat guy and the girl, and noticed the padlock that had been put in place on the door just as it had been on the shed. Slider picked up the lock and jerked on it.

"Fuck," Slider exclaimed, letting it fall back in place with a sharp banging sound. "The place is locked up tight. Somebody had enough time to secure the joint before they took off."

"Or got themselves ate up," The Dog said under his breath.

"Maybe that was them up at the house," Lance suggested.

They all looked back at the farmhouse they’d just secured. From this distance, they could make out the shattered front door hanging from its hinges. A sudden breeze whistled through the eaves.

"Ah, who gives a fuck?" A-Rab said, sounding disgusted. He stepped forward and unceremoniously shot the lock off.

"What?" he said wryly and shrugged his shoulders. "None of yaz ever hear of the Gordian Knot?"

The pair of doors was thrown open and the group stepped back to give themselves some fighting room should anything be waiting just inside. Oddly, no livestock came running out. It appeared as if the barn were empty; inside lay nothing but the inky darkness. On both sides, stalls that looked as if they’d once housed horses or sheep or some other kind of livestock were lined up. The place smelled like sweet hay mixed with the rich odor of manure.

The men fanned out and secured each of the stalls one by one.

"Looks empty, Sarge," Lance said.

"Well, those dumbfucks outside were after something," Masterson said. "Slider, why don’t you take the Mossberg and check out the loft upstairs? The rest of you, check your magazines and reload."

"I’m on it," Slider said and he disappeared like a wraith into the shadows.

The squad pulled off their packs with a collective groan and set to swapping out their old magazines for fresh ones. No one had to tell them what it meant to be caught by The Dead with only a half-full weapon. Once the hardware was reloaded, they refilled their spent magazines from the ammo in their packs.