SurvivorZ: Grave Harbor

31

Denise took him by the hand. "You should stay here with them. You don't know—"

"We're not having this discussion, Dee," Lloyd growled. "I'm coming with you. That's all there is to it."

Denise scowled at him. "You are the most frustrating, aggravating man I've ever met."

He smiled. "I love you too."

***

Lloyd had to hand it to the army. Their constant state of readiness meant their forces were in position to face the enemy in less time than it would take him to drag his lazy ass out of bed in the morning.

In no time, they transformed the commercial district of Beacon Street into a battlefield. A pair of Abrams tanks, one carrying Lieutenant Kershaw, idled in the nearly empty parking lot of a StartMart outlet. Fire teams positioned outside the chain store hurriedly stacked sandbags for cover. Rows of snipers lined the surrounding rooftops. Mortar teams peppered front lawns. Armed soldiers, both the military and civilian variety, occupied virtually every other spot.

Colonel Hayes stood in the middle of the road at the forefront of his company. He stared at the army slowly marching towards them from the north end of the street. From his spot near the back, Lloyd gazed at the colonel's tense, motionless posture and wondered if the man had stopped breathing. He made mannequins look jittery.

"Fuck me," another armed civilian whispered nearby. Lloyd was glad to discover he wasn't the only one about ready to piss himself at the sizable horde bearing down on them.

The standoffs at Times Square and Pennsylvania Avenue during the initial days of the outbreak hadn't gone so well for the living. He couldn't imagine how tactics that had failed the military's superior numbers so spectacularly were now expected to work in their favor. He kept an eye peeled for Denise, just in case. If things got too bad, he'd grab her and run for it. No way was this going to be their Waterloo.

She was with her squad, guarding the right flank. Hayes charged them with protecting the soldiers huddled over their mortars. Artillery would provide the first salvo in this battle. God willing, it would be all the stopping power they'd need.

Lloyd wasn't sure what to expect. The similarities to Braveheart stopped once the enemy showed the pale whites of their eyes. Unlike Mel Gibson's character, Hayes skipped the entire rousing speech part of the drama and jumped straight to the issuing of orders.

A series of sharp pops clapped in Lloyd's eardrums. Seconds later, explosions engulfed the ranks of the dead. The artillery teams ran back and forth, tossing rounds into their mortars in a rapid-load barrage against the enemy's frontline. He couldn't see the effect it was having on the zombies for all the drifting smoke, but he had to assume it was nothing short of devastating.

Denise and her squad opened fire on a second threat emerging from the alley between a pair of tenement buildings. A handful of zombies from a nearby neighborhood lurched into view, drawn by their arrival and enticed by the sounds of warfare. Gunfire mowed them down like dying weeds.

Before coming here, Mueller provided every fighter with a thorough spritz of Z-Off. Watching the dead go down with looks of confusion, he realized that was the edge they didn't have in New York or those other cities. Without the scent of fresh meat urging them on, zombies had ceased to be a real threat. That was why Hayes allowed civilians to accompany them. This wasn't a battle. It was target practice.

Lloyd snickered, earning some curious glances from those around him. Now that he understood the colonel's thinking, he saw everything around him in a new light. Even the tanks that the army brought with them served a secondary purpose. That's why Hayes positioned them off to the side rather than moving them into attack position. They weren't here simply to provide support. The rattle of their engines was helping to lure the enemy.