Chapter Eighteen

"Can we cut through the top to see inside?" I asked, staring down at the semi-truck.

Grady looked over his shoulder and nodded. "We will in a few. Watch the horde carefully. See how they're walking up to it and stopping? Those are shufflers. Runners would try to claw their way inside and apes would look for an alternate way in. Since no lives are in danger, we can wait and see if whatever is luring the shufflers will lure some of the other types, too."

As soon as the words came out of his mouth, a pack of runners appeared from around the neighboring building and sprinted toward the truck. Carver shouldered his rifle and I did the same, since the others had their hands full with driving.

Sniping zombies from the back of a hoverbike wasn't easy, even if Grady held the vehicle as steady as I could have wished. I missed and hit more shufflers than runners, eliciting a round of teasing from the rest of the squad. Doc was the only one who didn't join in. He had his mind on other things and proved it by saying, "If we can get the truck free from traffic, we can drive it around and use this to lure out every zombie in the city."

As Carver picked off the last runner and we lowered our weapons, Sergeant James spoke over the comms. "Overwatch to Doc. Negative. How are your rads looking? Over."

Doc's expression turned stony. "Doc to Overwatch. No blip on the gauges. If that was a joke, I recommend an MRI, stat. Over."

"Overwatch to White. Intelligence tracked the license plate. You're looking at an unmarked waste disposal truck with approximately twenty drums on board. Do not let the horde break containment. Repeat. Do not let horde break containment. And don't you dare move that vehicle from where it is or let it be hit with a stray round. As much as I'd love to drive it down the street and round up every infected in the city, we can not risk a spill. I'm sending squad two to back you up. You are green lit to clear the field for hazmat. Over."

"Did that mean what I think?" I asked as White gave orders for us to park on a neighboring rooftop.

Grady nodded and turned the hoverbike to follow the others. "Thousands of trucks travel across the country with radioactive waste every year. They take it out to the desert and bury it deep in sanctioned vaults. This one must have already been en route when the outbreak started. We need to clear the horde so a team can come in and detach the trailer. Then they'll airlift it out of here."

"Why do you think the zombies want it?" I asked as we parked the hoverbike and joined the rest of the squad on the edge of a roof overlooking the street. "Won't radiation kill the host and the parasite with it?"

White shook her head. "It won't kill them immediately. Give them cancer maybe. What do you think, Doc?"

Doc grimaced. "I think your assessment is spot-on, only I think these bastards want cancer. We know so little about the parasite, there's no telling what it might be able to do with a cancerous growth. It could be the equivalent of stem cells for them. Or maybe they have some way of transfusing the energy and using it as a replacement for physical nourishment. There's really no way to tell unless we want to sit and wait to see what happens."

"Overwatch to Doc. Negative. Your mission is to clear the horde so hazmat can approach. Over."

"You heard him, boys," White said with a lopsided grin.

"Hi-Ho," Crazy and Grady said in unison as they shouldered their rifles.

Following their lead, I shouldered my own rifle and started shooting. No one wanted to be the one to hit the truck with a stray bullet, so we aimed for those in the back row and began whittling down the numbers.

We were barely more than a third of the way through when the other squad showed up in the form of three more hoverbikes carrying both a driver and a passenger. They dropped the passengers off on the roof of the truck itself, then flew over to take up position on a rooftop across from us. After that, it was a bloodbath. The soldiers on the truck cleared out those closest to it with shotgun blasts while the rest of us kept targeting the back rows.

As the numbers lowered with gut-wrenching speed, I shifted my focus to picking off new zombies as they came into view, using them to practice my distance shooting. For most of them, it took two and sometimes three bullets before I could drop them. In a few cases, I was lucky and managed in only one.

Grady, my presumptive mentor, showed me how to reload when I ran out of bullets. White complimented me on not wasting ammo. She seemed impressed at my willingness to actual aim before firing. Carver offered a few pointers that made my distance accuracy improve until I was only missing one shot out of three.

"Squeeze the trigger, don't pull it. These are moving targets, so aim where they're going to be in the split second after you shoot. Don't chase your targets, either, or you'll end up shooting at their heels and making them look like action heroes. If you find yourself doing that, stop immediately. Remember the recoil is going to make your muzzle jump, so don't waste a bullet trying to fire again until you re-aim properly."

It was mostly stuff I already knew thanks to Hollywood, but hearing it again with a rifle in my hands made a difference in how I processed it. I wasn't certain how long we were on the rooftop and everyone else took turns piping in with pointers, but eventually the only movement on the street came from the soldiers on the trailer itself. Hazmat was given clearance to come in and I knew right away they weren't ours—the helicopters were painted with green camouflage instead of matte black. Four men repelled out of it and swarmed over the trailer like spiders. The soldiers on the trailer's roof jumped off onto a neighboring vehicle then used more abandoned vehicles as a road to get clear.

Less than two minutes later, the helicopter lifted the trailer off the ground and took off with it. I tried not to stare at the blood splattered across the base. Zombies, I reminded myself. The blood was from people who were already dead. I was simply putting zombies out of their misery, not killing humans.

It wasn't much comfort.

As we returned to the hoverbikes and lifted off to return to our regularly scheduled mission, I had a million questions circling in my head. Were zombies swarming every power plant on the East Coast? Was there a plan of how to stop them if they did? What were we going to do if zombies managed to get their hands on some radiation? Were they going to turn into super-zombies? Mutant zombies? Zombie overlords? Did we actually have a chance of winning this or were we simply delaying the inevitable?

I didn't actually ask any of those questions. Much like the noticeable lack of zombie children, I knew there wouldn't be any good answers, assuming there were any answers at all. It was much easier to face what was directly in front of us and leave the bigger picture to people with the stomach to handle it. No doubt, people with rank and experience were already being informed of this change in horde activity and they were making the necessary moves to counter it. Or so I hoped.