RIZEN: Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse Read Free Page B

battle. 
    Jacqueline circled one finger in the air high above
her head.  A little over twenty separate electric motors started up, humming
and whining.  Jacqueline wondered how old the youngest of the barbarians who
had burned Rome to the ground had been.  How old the youngest French Resistance
fighter in 1942 had been.  She wondered if the entire world didn’t have
bloodlust in their hearts at birth.  She pulled her bandana up around her
mouth, and jerked her arm forward to make what was essentially a spearhead. 
    She took off, her small army of fighters behind
her. 
    They rounded the main mound of sand they’d covered
behind, and spread out, doing their best to keep enough spacing so that they
could aid each other, but far enough away so that they wouldn’t blast sand in
their friends’ faces. Either that, or become easy targets for explosives. 
    Those who had scoped rifles, like Sara, stopped in
front of the gates about ten yards back.  The rest of the group dismounted
closer. 
    Jacqueline rushed forward towards the great
patchwork metal gate.  Four went west along the fencing and four went east.
Once they had spaced out far enough apart they would go to work with the wire
cutters.  She fumbled with the satchel at her waist, digging furiously at the
sand below the gate.  She put the plastic explosives right where the two halves
of the gate met and then rushed over to the fencing with the rest of her
assault squad. 
    She thought about how it would have been preferable
to place the brick of explosives at one of the supports for the gate, but the
thing was a flimsy patchwork of scrap metal.  What had kept people at bay and
inside were mostly the White Fist militia and their guns.  Peeking through the
fence at the brickwork guard station and homes, she could see no soldiers at
all.  The place looked like a ghost town section of nineteenth century living
picked up and dropped into the desert two hundred years later.  Retreating back
to cover she fished out the radio from her bag, nodded at the raider now
standing closest to the gate, and clicked the knob on top. 
    The gate blew in with a boom that shook Jacqueline’s
vision.  Just as the smoke began to clear, shots flew in from the sharpshooters
outside. There were screams.  There was sporadic gunfire close by, and then the
action was all distant again, save for shouting.  The men and women who’d cut
the fence were already in with compact weapons and sidearms, moving quickly and
hitting with keen accuracy. 
    The sharpshooters had isolated themselves after the
zombie plague hit.  They had kept themselves alive with calm accuracy and
distant marksmanship.  They’d had to be dragged from their nests to join the
rest in many cases.  In a way, it probably made the violence less real for some
of them.  Look through the scope, point, aim, pull the trigger.  It was like a
video game, though not that many of those were played anymore. 
    The ones striking through the fence, cutting
throats, shooting up close with homemade silencers on their weapons, they had
been the ones who ran when the dead first rose up.  They seemed to never stop
running, never resting in one place.  They moved and they stayed ahead of the
undead and the bandits and the consequences of what they’d done.  They were the
ones with baseball bats, fire axes and crowbars strapped to their backs no
matter what.  These were the ones who struck like lightning. 
    Then there were the soldiers.  The ones who had
played conventional survivor.  They made shelters and fortified daily.  They
made raids for sake of supplies and ammunition.  They sought out the last dregs
of humanity and did their best to help each other.  They killed just to get
along.  They were not the kind who usually went after the bad guys where they
lived.  Jacqueline was one of these, and as she shouldered her shotgun and
turned through the smoldering wreckage of the gate, she did her best to silence
the part