“Give the orders,” one of the girls said, looking up at me. “You in commander now. So give the orders.”
I rubbed my cheek furiously as I looked around. There was a Virgin Megastore on the southern side of the park. I remembered going there when I was last inNew York and I seemed to recall it only had a couple of entrances. It would take time, though, to get inside and barricade the place. Time we didn’t have if we couldn’t stop thesexaaraan. “Shoot for the legs,” I suggested, “if they can’t walk…” But of course riot cops would be wearing body armor too.
The horde of the dead coming up Fourteenth were still getting closer. The former riot cops were maybe fifty yards away.
“Give the orders,” the girl insisted. I stood there as still as a block of stone without a thought in my head.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Seventeen
The dead riot police were only forty yards away. We could see them clearly now-their padded armor, their helmets with their clear plastic visors showing the cyanotic skin underneath. They moved haltingly as if their muscles had stiffened to pliability of dry wood. Their feet slipped along the ground, looking for equilibrium that seemed in short supply.
“They won’t stop,”Gary told me. “They won’t ever stop.”
I hardly needed the information. Ifiyah, the wounded commander of the child soldiers who surrounded me had made the mistake of treating the walking dead like any other enemy force. She had tried to rout them with sustained gunfire from a defensible point. She had thought theywould stop, if you gave them a good enough reason. For that mistake she'd been bitten by one of the dead and now she could barely maintain consciousness. Which somehow meant that I was in charge, even if I'd never fired a gun before in my life.
Ayaan fired again and split open a cop’s boot. He stumbled and nearly fell but it didn’t take him down. The one vulnerable part of his body-his head-was covered by a helmet that the relatively slow round of an AK-47 couldn’t penetrate.
I knew that better than anyone. It might as well have been one of the problems I’d had to solve back when I was getting my training from the UN. At seven hundred and ten meters per second, roughly twice the speed of sound at sea level on a sunny day the bullets could impose a great deal of force on those helmets but it would be dispersed by the mesh of Kevlar ballistic fibers lining the helmet. The kind of thing a UN weapon inspector would be expected to know. Whether the target was alive or undead had not been one of the variables we’d ever needed to take into account.
At the west side of the park-our exposed flank, as it were-I heard a shout and looked over to see one of the girls waving at me. I’d sent her there to scout the opposition and the signal meant that we had a horde-a veritable army of the undead-crossing Sixth Avenue, no more than two avenue blocks away from our position. At their standard walking speed of three miles per hour (standardliving human walking speed is four miles per hour but the dead tend to drag their feet) that gave us at most ten minutes before we were overrun. Maybe-maybe-we could fight off the ex-riot cops when we engaged them at close quarters but doing so would take time, time we didn’t have.
I had nothing to fall back on at that point except my training and so I kept doing the numbers in my head. It didn’t matter how pointless my calculations might be.
The ex-police were only thirty yards away when I finally snapped out of it. The girls kept shooting-pointlessly. They weren’t prepared for this, not mentally. They were still fighting a guerilla war. Guerilla tactics require an opponent capable of rational decisions. These were animals: no, animals can learn from their mistakes. Only machines persist in the face of their own certain destruction. These were machines we were facing, not people.