I was stuck.
I couldn’t go up, because I would lose the element of surprise and probably get killed, and I couldn’t go down, either. But there was a little gap between two of the cars on the top row, and I ducked into that, facing outwards. I waited to see who would get to me first, the sniper or the zombie.
It was the sniper. He poked his head over the side, his face barely a foot above my waiting hands. I reached up, grabbed him by the back of the head, and yanked down as hard as I could. He came down the side of the wall like a snowball going downhill, picking up lose car parts as he hit the sides, trying to hold on, only to keep tumbling downward, right into the waiting arms of the zombie below us. The two of them hit hard, and both ended up on the ground.
I didn’t waste any time. I jumped over the top and picked up the sniper’s rifle. The sniper was fighting the zombie barehanded, and doing pretty well, until I shot them both.
Then I took up the sniper’s post. I looked through the scope and watched the battle taking place around the fountain. Ashcroft’s men, who had a reputation as the best private army in the Zone, were earning their stripes. I saw at least fifty of Nessel’s soldiers dead in the courtyard, and it looked like their advance was starting to break apart. Despite their numerical superiority, they just weren’t as well-disciplined, or as well-trained, as Ashcroft’s troops.
Ashcroft himself was leading the fight now. I saw him waving a machine gun over his head, yelling at his men to hold their positions.
I went to work on Nessel’s men, and as I started putting them down, one by one, I swept the scope across Ashcroft’s position. He stopped yelling long enough to look my way. All at once he realized it was me doing the firing now, and he gave me an exaggerated overhand salute.
The tide of the battle turned, and soon Nessel’s men broke ranks and ran. Ashcroft followed up their retreat, and his men carved the retreating enemy up into pockets, showing no mercy.
Gradually, the steady, thunderous roll of the battle faded, and all that was left was the occasional sporadic popping of small arms fire. Ashcroft’s men were still dealing with the infected, but those too were getting mopped up.
I could see the mood among Ashcroft’s men changing. They had won big, and now they knew it.
With nothing left to shoot at, I got down from the wall and went over to where I’d left Nessel to die. I tossed his body onto the hood of the Humvee and drove straight through the gates to the hotel.
I parked in front of the fountain.
Ashcroft’s men stopped their celebrations to watch me, and Ashcroft himself came over to see what was going on. He took one look at Nessel’s body and whistled. Then he looked at me and smiled.
Behind him, coming out of the hotel at a run, was Heather. She ran right past her father and straight into my arms.
Ashcroft came over to us. “You did real good,” he said, and offered me his hand.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I owe you big, Andrew.”
I shrugged.
In the background I heard Naylor giving orders to the men to start damage control. After he got the men moving, he came back to Ashcroft and gave a report. Ashcroft listened in silence, nodding his head, and when Naylor was finished, he gave him some more orders to relay to the troops.
Then he turned to me and said, “Andrew, it looks like we’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do.” He glanced down at Nessel. “And I seem to have inherited several new businesses. I’m going to need some good men to help me run them. You interested in a job?”
Heather was smiling.
“Uh, a job would be great,” I said.
“I heard a ‘but’ in there.”
“Well,” I said, “what I really want is a second date with your daughter.”
Flotsam & Jetsam
By Carrie Ryan
Carrie Ryan’s first novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth debuted to great acclaim when it was released in 2009. The sequel, The Dead-Tossed Waves, came out earlier this year, and the third volume, The Dark and Hollow Places, is due out in Spring 2011. Our next story shares the same milieu as her novels, but takes place several hundred years earlier. Another piece of Ryan’s zombie fiction appears in the anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns. Her love of zombies is all her fiancé JP’s fault. Since becoming infected with the zombie bug, she has begun converting her friends and family to her cause, much like a zombie would.