Ch 4 - Clearing the Iron

Zombie War

The first one didn’t roar. They never did. It just let out a wet, rattling hiss as it dragged a useless right leg across the asphalt, its jaw unhinged and dripping dark, frozen slime onto the gravel.

“Movement, left flank!” Raych called out, her voice hard as iron.

She didn’t waste breath or ammunition. A clean, controlled double-tap from her rifle dropped the lead Walker before it cleared the ditch, the empty brass casing spinning through the cold air and pinging against the 4Runner’s fender.

Beside her, Tom racked his shotgun with a sharp, heavy clack-chack. The heavy buckshot took a second Walker dead in the chest, folding it backward over the guardrail like a broken doll.

“Keep pushing the bottleneck!” I yelled over the echoing crack of gunfire, keeping my weight balanced as I drew the Wilson Combat 1911 from the Safariland holster.

The workspace was tight between the rock wall and the jackknifed flatbed, leaving zero room for error. Three more Walkers spilled out from the timber line, drawn right into the kill zone by the lingering vibrations of the Peterbilt’s idling engine. I stepped out, squared my stance, and put two rounds into the center mass of the nearest one. The .45 ACP hit with a wet, authoritative thump that dropped it flat on its face. The second one came in fast, its grey, sunken eyes locked on my throat, but I caught it under the chin with a point-blank round that painted the pine needles behind it.

Up near the big rig, Earl had killed the Detroit diesel to cut the noise, plunging the gorge into an eerie, echoing silence that was instantly filled by the wet sliding of boots and ragged, animal breaths.

“Dad! Two more coming around the nose of the trailer!” Sarah shouted, her rifle tracking smoothly as she covered the right side.

Twelve-year-old Mikey was tucked low behind the Peterbilt’s massive front tire, holding his .410 shotgun tight to his shoulder, his eyes wide but his hands steady. He wasn’t crying, and he wasn’t hesitating. Out here, kids grew up on a schedule dictated by the dead.

“I got ‘em, Sarah!” Tom barked, stepping into the gap with his shotgun raised.

The fight lasted less than ninety seconds. That was all it ever took. In the old days, a firefight meant cover, suppression, and flanking maneuvers. Out here, it was an arithmetic problem: make every round count, keep the spacing clean, and don’t let a single drop of contaminated blood anywhere near your skin.

When the last Walker twitched and went still in the slush by the roadside, the gorge fell dead silent again except for the sound of our own breathing pluming white in the freezing air.

“Area clear,” Raych announced, dropping the magazine of her rifle to check her round count with practiced economy.

I holstered the Wilson 1911, the leather of the Safariland snapping securely over the hammer, and wiped a smear of cold sweat from my forehead.

“Good work, everyone,” I said, looking over toward the flatbed blocking our lane. “Tom, grab the tow strap from your bed. Let’s yank this scrap out of our way before the whole county decides to RSVP to the party.”

Earl climbed down from the high cab of the Peterbilt, cracking his knuckles and looking down at the pile of bodies with a grim, tight-lipped expression.

“Grok’s right,” Earl muttered, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. “They’re moving different. Like somebody’s pulling strings on a marionette.”

“Yeah,” I said, walking over to help rig the tow line to the jackknifed trailer. “And if they’re congregating this deep in the gorge, Knoxville isn’t going to be an abandoned ghost town. It’s going to be a hornet’s nest.”

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