Killing Country Music (Cities of the Dead) Page 2

either the shooter or zombie were moving, and all bets were off if both were.

  Chase pressed the walkie button, “Forget it, Gott, that’s more than we can deal with today. We’ll have to find something to raid on the way back.”

  “Okay, we’re coming back,” Gottlieb said.

  But he and Randy Mills didn’t come back. The group overstayed its agreed-upon wait time by ten minutes, certain that the two would make it back. After half-an-hour, most in the group were bordering on the fear that the zombies had somehow tracked them to where they waited. Chase looked around at the group, felt the nervous uncertainty of fear spreading through them. The world was quiet. Zombies were quiet.

  “Well, I’m going to go see if I can find out what happened to them,” Chase said.

  Barney Stilton sagged with disbelief. He was the fifty-four-year old regional manager for a shoppers club store chain, and it had been his idea to try to infiltrate the regional distribution center that was the target of the day’s operation. His idea meant he should go with Chase.

  “I’m with you,” Barney said, stepping off the ATV and walking over to Chase. “If they somehow got in the building, they might need my help getting out.”

  There was a long pause among the remaining men, each of them searching for a reason to step forward, for a reason not to. Nobody liked leaving the safety of the larger group and its envelope of firepower. Travis Cheadle nodded and stood up off the seat of his Arctic Cat TRV 700 and nodded at Cal Bosworth to move up to the driver’s position. Travis tapped the magazine of his FN P-90 machine gun.

  “We might need something with a little volume if we’re going to get them out of there,” Travis said.

  Chase shrugged at the rest of the group. “Alright, move off down the road to the next intersection, if it’s safe. We’ll be on the walkie, but listen for the calls, too.”

  The three men moved away from the little caravan, picking their way cautiously through the trees and undergrowth of the woods between Old Hickory Road and the distribution center. For whatever reason, zombies tended to stay near areas with buildings, avoiding wilderness. Not that the stretch of woods Chase, Travis and Barney were stepping through was wilderness; it was merely undeveloped land in suburban Nashville, waiting for someone to turn it into a housing development, shopping center or nature preserve. Half-way through they heard the low growling of the ATV engines as the rest of their party rode off to the next rally point.

  Barney gave Chase a quick glance, and Chase put his right pointer finger across his lips: stay quiet. They came to a stop on the edge of the woods and each man took a knee, weapon at the ready. Across an acre of asphalt behind a ten-foot high chain-link fence sat the regional distribution center. Milling around the loading dock were zombies, scores of them, some of them wearing the uniform of the chain store.

  “Didn’t you guys close down operations before the plague struck here?” Chase asked, scanning the landscape through his binoculars.

  “Yeah, why?” Barney asked.

  “There’s ten or twenty people down there wearing your store’s uniform,” Chase said, pausing his scan on a woman who had likely been in her twenties before turning undead, her long brown hair caked with grime, her red shirt torn and stained, her face ashen, the skin taut. She might have been pretty, once.

  “It was all volunteers at the end,” Barney said, “people who didn’t want to leave town or hide in their home were allowed to continue unloading trucks here. Corporate was pre-positioning items it thought would be useful once the plague lifted. But the plague moved quicker than anyone thought, so we never got to shut it down.”

  “Hey! Over there,” Travis said, pointing over the barrel of his machine gun down the line of trees toward a corner of the parking lot where a gaggle of zombies were gathered. “Up that tree.”

  Chase looked through the binoculars and saw Gottlieb tangled in the branches of a tree, a couple of feet above the outstretched arms of the undead. Chase scanned for Randy but couldn’t find him. Chase felt around his waist for his duck call, lifted it to his lips and let out a series of quacks while watching through the glasses. He could see Gottlieb perk up in the tree, his head turning, looking for the source of the duck call. The zombies noticed nothing. And then Chase dropped the duck call from his lips and opened his mouth in amazement.

  “Holy crap,” Chase said. “Tim McGraw is a zombie.”

  “What? Really?” Travis said, lifting his head and searching through the crowd of zombies at the foot of Gottlieb’s tree. At a hundred yards off, it was too far away to make out anyone distinct.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s him for sure,” Chase said, “He looks fresh, too. Must’ve only been turned recently.”

  “Probably was doing what we’re doing right now,” Barney said, “trying to get in the building for supplies.”

  Chase handed the binoculars to Barney and lifted his rifle to his shoulder, looking down through the scope and bringing the cross-hairs on to the head of the country music star. McGraw was dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, a camouflage Army jacket overtop. He had an empty holster on his right hip and his left arm dangled limply at his side, soaked through with blood at the shoulder.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s him alright,” Barney said.

  “Well, I’m going to blow his head off,” Chase said. “You two move through the tree line and get closer to them. I’ll fire a few rounds from here then move when they start coming for me. Then you two take the rest down, get Gottlieb and run like hell for Old Hickory Boulevard. Give me blow on the duck call when you’re in place.”

  While Barney and Travis moved through the woods, Chase kept his crosshairs sweeping through the crowd at the foot of the tree, counting seventeen walking dead. He also kept frequently checking everywhere else, making sure none of the zombies on the other side of the fence had made his position, and that there weren’t any soloists straggling through the woods near him. There was no fast-and-true rule to zombies: they could be anywhere and everywhere, and usually were. He heard the sound of a duck call and sighted back through is rifle, first acquiring Gottlieb in the tree, who had now seemed to gather in what amounted to a ready-crouch for jumping down. Chase blew his response through his duck call and saw relief flood through Gottlieb’s face as he finally allowed that the sounds were from rescuers and not fowl.

  Chase put his rifle's sight on Tim McGraw’s head and squeezed the trigger, the country singer’s head opening up in a burst of brain matter and atomized blood. Chase chambered another round and took aim at the next zombie, putting a round right through its left eye and splintering the former man’s skull. The rest of the zombies at the foot of the tree now all turned en masse and faced where Chase knelt in the underbrush. They began an exaggerated shuffle-stagger toward him, a gait that should’ve made people giggle at the drunkenness of the walkers, but instead instilled fear. Chase let loose with another round and frowned when he saw it hit the zombie's shoulder, only just causing it to stutter-step in response. He quickly realized he had to conserve his small amount of ammunition and began picking his way backward along the tree line.

  He stumbled over something and fell to the ground hard, rolled onto his side and stared at the mutilated body of Randy Mills. Without even a conscious thought, Chase raised the rifle above him as a self-defense move at whatever might be near when a woman in her 50s, a zombie, loomed over him. Blood spittle dripped down her broken chin. Her fingernails were chipped and worn to the quick, her gray skin worn to tatters and peeling from her face, exposing gums and teeth. She reached down for him and coincidentally tangled the rifle between her arms, twisting this way and that as if her hands were in a stockade. Blood dripped onto Chase’s shirt. The smell of her breath was foul.

  Chase jerked the rifle to the side and rolled quickly away from the undead woman. She lost her lost balance and fell to the ground on her hands and knees above his rifle. With a fluid movement Chase was up in a hunched over squat, pulling his curved Gurkha knife from its sheath. He brou
ght the blade up, changed his handhold on it and brought it down in an arc through the zombie’s neck, slicing it off. There was an eruption of blood from the exposed artery and the body collapsed to the ground. Chase turned quickly in place, scanning the area for more zombies creeping through the underbrush. Nothing. He wiped the knife on the back of the woman’s dress, sheathed it and picked his rifle up just as he heard the pounding footsteps of Barney, Travis and Gottlieb.

  Travis stopped, turned, and let out a staccato of fire from his P-90, a couple of micro-seconds of noise mixed with interjections of silence as Travis pressed and released the trigger in even, short bursts.

  “Nice move, Chase,” Gottlieb said. “Almost thought you were a goner.”

  Chase looked past them at the two zombies left of the little pack that had treed Gottlieb, sighted them through his rifle and took each down in quick succession.

  “Damn, Gott, I’m not gonna let some lame old lady walker take me out. I’d never live it down.”

  They all paused for a brief second to regard the body of Randy Mills, a friend who would become a zombie in the not-too-distant future. Barney holed Randy’s head with a shot from his pistol and then looked over his shoulder at the distribution center.

  “The ones by the loading dock are