Lockey vs. the Apocalypse by Meadows, Carl (love novels in english .TXT) 📗

As he turned to get back to the truck in a flurry of arms and legs, I squeezed off a second round, taking him low in the back. Pretty sure I hit the kidney and he went down like a half-ton sack of shit. He didn’t move.

Well, not immediately anyway.

There were shouts and cries from the back of the truck. The QRF wasn’t the elite, thank fuck. They were expecting to just put more boots on the ground and be directed against the lone gunman terrorising them. Instead, they got a lunatic amateur (though a quick study) that had no idea what she was doing. Plus, they weren’t that far away.

They knew I was ahead of them somewhere, seeing as how the first round had gone through the windscreen. I kept my head down, wincing, as one guy looped his machine pistol over the top of the cab and just let out a random unsighted spray. I wasn’t worried, because he was shooting so high and I was flat on my belly, but still, that rattle of gunfire gave me a shiver. Flashback central to Shooty in his sniper perch; being under fire is no fun. Knowing someone is trying to actively kill you with high speed lead is an arse twitcher.

There was lots of shouting, lots of screaming down their radio that they were taking fire, and I muttered a bit of profanity to myself. The last thing I needed was QRF revision two coming down the road, adding even more bodies to the fight, so I had to take Nate’s plan and displace. I couldn’t get an angle on them all cowering behind the truck, so I had to move. First thing first though, keep their heads down.

I switched the rifle to burst, sending two volleys downrange at them, the bullets raking the cab and one side of the truck. Nate wasn’t fucking kidding; that muzzle ride is a bitch, and I won’t be doing that again if I can help it. I couldn’t aim for shit. I did, however, get the bit of luck I needed when the two guys I’d put down… awakened.

The one on the floor with a hole in his kidney twitched and started to rise, while the inside of the cab suddenly filled with screaming, as the driver reanimated and pounced on the passenger, who had been crouching in the footwell to avoid being shot. A spray of crimson painted the inside of the cab, the screams chilling, as the driver ravaged his buddy in the tiny confines of the truck. Nasty. Three down.

The first guy I dropped rose silently to full height, completely unseen. I think the guy who shot over the top of the cab must have jumped down behind the tail with the rest of them after unloading, so five of them were crouched round the truck’s rear, otherwise No Kidney would have been spotted immediately.

Instead, he shambled towards the truck’s rear, drawn to their panicked jabbering and one poor bastard saw the monster too late. As he peeped around the back of the truck, his intent to try and spy my position, his face collapsed in horror as he found his undead comrade only feet away. Before he could raise an alarm or bring a weapon to bear, the thing peeled back its lips and accelerated as they do in that last moment of ravenous hate. The zombie fell on him, mouth tearing at flesh.

Now, when a zombie suddenly appears in a pack of you, I’m pretty sure your fight or flight mode kicks in and you work on instinct. Seeing a hungry undead suddenly pounce on one of them, the other four reflexively scattered. I switched back to semi and lined up the sight on one guy raising his shotgun to put the monster down, but I squeezed the trigger before he could fire, aiming for centre mass. My shot was off, it was too low, but it ripped right through where his appendix should be. He dropped, screaming in agony, the sound jarring my ears.

It’s far easier to kill an undead. They just go down silently. They don’t scream for their mothers or beg for help from their so-called friends. They don’t weep and plead and wail.

This was quickly turning into carnage. When shit hits the fan with undead, it goes from zero to sixty in “holy shit.” In their panic to get away from, and deal with, the undead, I was briefly forgotten. The two in the cab were dead… well… undead. The Man with No Kidney had clearly savaged another, I’d scrambled the guts of another man.

Three of them were left, and they broke for it.

I’m not proud of what I did next, but it was the only way. Our job was to thin the herd and as they thundered up that bumpy road in terror, I took aim at one man’s back, breathed in and out, and at the end of the exhale, squeezed the trigger.

A bullet cut through his back. Where it hit, I was certain it was a death blow, doubtless suffering some spectacular ballistic trauma to a lung.

I took pot shots at the other two, but they went high or wide. I’m not good at distance shooting yet. Lots more practice needed, I think.

The savaged man had no relief, utterly murdered by the zombie with no kidney, and the two of them fell on the man I’d gutted with a bullet. Honestly, it was probably a mercy. I always read that gut wounds can be agonising and slow. I’d rather put down a zombie than a screaming man begging for help, or mercy.

It went very quiet, save for the echo of Nate’s distant gun battle and the wet grinding of flesh between undead teeth.

Rising from my little hidey hole, I took steady aim as I combat-walked towards the truck. The two roamers turned towards me, but I had plenty of space and time to take aim and pop their melons. Then