By the last breath of the fourth winds blow
By the last breath of the fourth winds blow
Better raise your ears
The sound of hooves knocks at your door
Lock up your wife and children now
It's time to wield the blade
For now you have got some company
As we walked out towards the path I took point. With our weapons at the low ready we all filed towards the on ramp of the freeway, about 20 feet apart, both so we couldn't get ambushed and killed off all at once by a small group of infected and so we couldn't get raked by machinegun fire if anyone was stupid enough to shoot at us. It had been known to happen.
A cool breeze hit me in the face from the direction of the freeway and I could smell it; decay. Rotting flesh was always a bad sign when looking for routes of advance, but we really had no choice. It was either move through a compacted suburban area, potentially full of infected. Or we could hit a freeway full of junked cars. The way I saw it, we were fucked either way.
The Horsemen are drawing nearer
On the leather steeds they ride
They have come to take your life
On through the dead of night
With the four Horsemen ride
or choose your fate and die
We passed through the rest area and straight onto the on ramp of the freeway. The rest area was standard, nothing special except for a few cars that had been abandoned. As we walked up the on ramp, I heard a blood curdling screech come from behind us and I whipped around just in time to see a half a infected crawling from the window of one of the abandoned cars. One of the older civilians dropped to a knee and fired,"
"BLAATBLAATBLAAT" his weapons roared out 3 shots, with only one hitting its mark in the infected persons head, blowing it into two neat pieces. The body just slumped down halfway out the window, various kinds of goo dripping from what remained of its skull.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" I roared out towards the man who fired, "YOU WILL KEEP YOUR WEAPON ON SEMI AND ONLY FIRE WHEN YOU HAVE A CLEAN SHOT!" The man just looked at me dumbly and I saw his thumb flick, presumably to put the weapon back on semi.
I also heard a few other clicks, signaling that almost everyone in the group but me had their weapons on something other than semi. I shook my head and continued on the on ramp, straining past the sound of footfalls behind me for any sound that the infected were nearby.
So far, so good; one infected down roughly 100,000 in the area to go. I only had about 390 rounds.
This could turn out badly.
You have been dying since the day
You were born
You know it has all been planned
The quartet of deliverance rides
A sinner once a sinner twice
No need for confession now
Cause now you have got the fight of your life
I came up the on ramp first and swore at the sight I saw. A veritable maze of burnt out cars and various other vehicles littered the freeway making it seem like a losing proposition to even try to make it through. If even an eighth of the vehicles littering the freeway had infected still seat belted into them we would be outnumbered an easy five to one.
"Shit….the guy who's supposed to guide us, get up here to me!" I said to the people behind me. I heard rapid footfalls and saw the kids face out of the corner of my eye and I said to him,
"So where's this stadium?"
The kid pointed off into the distance, and I could vaguely make it out over the next hump of the freeway. Assuredly though, the freeway went right by the damn thing, and it was in fact a stadium. A rather large stadium by the looks of it.
"That's the stadium there. It's huge man. They held the Super bowl there last year and still have seats left over." The kid was right. Last years Super bowl had well over 10,000 attendees not including the teams and their people. The thing was massive on a scale unlike anything I had ever seen. I had missed last years Super bowl because I was in Iraq at the time doing some contract work for Blackwater USA….who coincidentally is still my employer in a sense.
"What about all this shit? How far off is the stadium?" I asked the kid once again,
"It's closer than I thought. Only just over the hump and about 400 or so yards down the freeway" I nodded and patted his shoulder. Then got up and started moving again with my tail following me like little ducks. No dispersion, no nothing; just a solid line of scared and armed people about to move through a potential deathtrap.
A moving fucking buffet line.
The Horsemen are drawing nearer
On the leather steeds they ride
They have come to take your life
On through the dead of night
With the four Horsemen ride
or choose your fate and die
I kept walking until I got to the first jumble of cars; I dropped to a knee and had the men form up in a wedge formation, 5 on each side of me making a shallow v shape going from one side of the freeway to the other. The most secure formation I could think of in terms of separation. In these times during a combat mission where a high likelihood of contact was present, dispersion was key to getting at least one man out alive. No one could understand that 4 well trained and well armed troopers could hold off a horde of zombies indefinitely if they had ammo and good fortifications.
People kept treating this threat as a human thing, something that could be beaten simply by shooting it enough. This simply was not true. You could pump round after round into an infected chest, and unless you scored a spinal cord hit and caused it to become quadriplegic, there was no way you could neutralize the threat with just center mass shots. It had to be a clean headshot or all you would get is wasted ammo, which in this day and age was a bad thing to do.
I had to make a decision as to how to approach this death maze. I could try to make a path with Raven Six's miniguns, but that would eat up ammo I might need later. I simply knelt there for a moment and looked back at the horizon. Roughly an hour and fifteen minutes till sundown. If we slugged through it without help, we could be in this maze for an hour of more, clearing every car one by one to make sure we weren't going to get eaten when out backs were turned.
I sighed and bit the bullet. We had to clear the path or at least try to.
"Raven Six, this is Sorrow, we have a request to make." I spoke into my headset. Nothing but crackling static for a moment, then the voice of Raven Six's pilot, Erich Roehmer came up on the net,
"Sorrow, this is Raven Six, I'm listening" he sounded exhausted. Which made sense; the man had been flying for the 160th SOAR for over 10 years, and his Blackhawk had flown well over 1000 hours since the Fall began.
"I need you guys to hit the freeway heading towards the stadium and clear a path through the cars as best you can with your miniguns and rockets if they won't demolish the freeway."
A few moments passed by and I heard a helicopter coming in from behind us, to our west. It must have been the helo, because as soon as it got within roughly a half mile of us I heard the stitching of Minigun fire and saw rockets flying. They hit the left side of the freeway, blowing cars out of the way and breaking the retaining walls to all hell, but not even coming close to hitting us.
I looked to the left to make sure everyone was still with us, and saw two of the guys on the far left with their faces down on the concrete, looking like a fifties era Nuclear explosion drill. I chuckled slightly and walked over to the two men and crouched down between them, about 10 feet from me to either one of the guys.
"Raise your heads guys," they did so, "We now have a clear path to the stadium. Let's move! Double Columns with me in front and in between the two columns!"
They formed up quickly which showed me they were learning. As soon as the formation was moving, Raven Six buzzed overhead and I got a radio transmission,
"I've got to head back to base and refuel, rearm. Be back in five. Raven Six out."
I grimaced at this. No air support, no recon, no extraction for five minutes, maybe longer.
"Fuck." I said aloud. This earned me a few 'Huh?' from in the ranks, but I just shook my head and continued forward on the freeway, 100 yards till the hump was over, and then another 400 yards to the Stadium off ramp for trucks.
I made sure to keep well clear of the pile of cars to my right.
Time
has taken its toll on you
The lines that crack your face
Famine
Your body it has torn through
Withered in every place
Pestilence
For what you have had to endure
And what you have put others through
Death
Deliverance for you for sure
There is nothing you can do
We kept walking, and I looked over the side of the freeway into the city. All I saw was hell. Even the sky was red. There were pools of blood on the street below us. There were even a few bodies of people who had jumped off the freeway in a vain attempt to get away from the infected. It had been only two weeks since Columbus fell, and already the bodies were desiccated and torn by animals. Buildings that hadn't been shattered by artillery and air bombardment were boarded up with various signs painted on the sides, most of which said
"HELP US" in big, bold red letters.
I almost felt bad for the poor bastards that had most assuredly died of dehydration or infection.
Nothing but a hell…and to think, this had all been a pristine, clean, well fed and run city two weeks before.
May Odin help us.
So gather round young warriors now
and saddle up your steeds
Killing scores with demon swords
Now is the death of doers of wrong
Swing the judgment hammer down
Safely inside armor blood guts and sweat
As we kept walking, all I could hear was the sound of wind blowing towards us from the stadium, and I could smell the acrid chemicals in tires. There must have been a lot of them burning at once because the smell was strong and the smoke column was a lot bigger than I had originally thought. As the sound of soft footfalls behind me lulled me into a false sense of security, I heard it;
The scream of an infected.
My mind went into overdrive and I dropped to a knee and started scanning in front for anything, any movement and it would stop. My EOTech 552 REVf kicked on when I flicked my weapon to semi, and the red target reticule swam into focus.
Another scream, this time it sounded like a pack of them, moving fast towards us, but I had no idea where from because of all the cars and concrete directing the sound from all directions.
"Raj Sighn! Raj Sighn!" came the call from one of the civilians who I didn't know. At first I was surprised he knew what that meant, then I just followed suit and got into the square formation with my back turned inwards. My sector of fire was still down the freeway towards the Stadium, and then I heard it again, another screech of the infected.
"Keep your weapons on semi men; take shots only when they come within 100 meters!" I yelled out.
"Roger!" Came the cry in unison from the other 10 men. I suddenly felt a surge of pride that these guys could be professional under such duress.
Then they came. At least 25, if not more from where we had just came. I had no idea where they had come from, but they were literally sprinting at us with everything their decaying and mutilated bodies could. I heard the first shot and whipped around to see one of the infected drop motionless. Part of its head gone.
"Good shot trooper!" I cried as I raised my rifle and placed the dot on one of the infected heads, 'BLAM' my shot roared out and I had switched to the next one before the first one had dropped. Snap shooting and CQB were my specialties and strengths when I was part of Delta, and had played a huge part in my hiring at Blackwater.
More shots rang out and I saw rounds hitting into the crowd, impacting the chests and necks of infected,
"Aim higher! Headshots only men!" I roared out over the noise of the infected and gunfire. It only took one time to yell that and infected bodies started dropping, heads torn in half or completely gone.
"More tangos from the rear Dan!" I heard yelled from next to me, I felt the heat of a gun firing and felt a shell hit my leg. I proceeded to whip around to see another 10 or so infected rushing us from the rear along the cleared path.
My mind went into automatic and my training kicked in. I was snapping off shots every second or so, each time scoring a kill on one of the infected. 28 seconds later I had emptied my magazine and yelled,
"LOADING!"
I heard a scream to my right and looked; an infected had worked his way to the top of a SUV and was preparing to leap down on us. I drew my Mk23 and snapped two shots off with it one handed, the recoil jerked my hand hard and the rounds impacted dead in the chest of the infected. Unphased he leapt down onto me and was trying to get at my neck. I rammed my pistol into its mouth just as it landed on me and pulled the trigger, taking the things head off.
As I pushed the body off me heard another cry of "LOADING!" come from behind me. I reloaded my rifle and tore the charging handle back, whipping around again as I did so. I started engaging targets left and right, dropping each of them with one or two rounds to the head. These things were starting to get within 25 meters of us, a no go zone.
That showed when I heard a spurt of burst fire coming from one of the SWAT guys. His shots were missing badly, and I could tell he was panicking. I patted him on the shoulder hard and held up one finger to signify I wanted him to be shooting semi only. He returned the gesture, but not with the same finger. I frowned at him and drew an HEI (High Explosive Incendiary) grenade from the grenade pouch attached to my vest.
I pulled the pin and let fly, watching the small cylinder disappear into the crowd.
"KABOOOOM" the explosion rocked the bridge and sent body parts and flaming debris flying in all directions, effectively clearing our path of retreat.
I turned back to the way we needed to go and watched as the last of the infected in that sector dropped, a bullet clean through it's head.
"Sweet. No time to reload men; just get up because we have got to move as quickly as possible to the stadium." I said this when I saw the men reloading their weapons and starting to relax a little.
"Also remember men, its single shot only unless I say go loud. Anyone who wastes ammo is zombie food, and that's a promise" With that, I took off down the freeway at a good speed.
"If you HAVE to reload, do it while you're moving!"
The Horsemen are drawing nearer
On the leather steeds they ride
They have come to take your life
On through the dead of night
With the four Horsemen ride
or choose your fate and die
"Raven Six, this is Sorrow." I said into my headset while I ran.
"Sorrow, this is Raven Six, go ahead" came the reply.
"I need you to inspect the Stadium area and see if there is ANY way we can get exfiltrated from that place. Either in a parking lot or in the stadium itself, over." I said breathlessly into the mic.
"Roger that Sorrow, I'm on it. Raven Six out."
I just kept running, not even listening for infected, not even caring about if there were survivors anymore. We had just been engaged by over 40 infected in less than five minutes.
This was looking to be bad. I only hoped those civilians and SWAT guys held out.
I've never hoped for anything before in my life.