Judgment Day -03 by Arthur Bradley Page A

of asphalt leading toward Richmond Hill. After a moment, he saw them—a series of shadows moving among the jagged column of abandoned cars. At first, there were only a few indistinguishable shapes, but as he watched, their numbers quickly grew. Five—ten—twenty—fifty.
    Mason pulled Bowie back into the tree line a few feet and took a knee. As the crowd drew closer, he saw that the procession of shadows were actually people infected by the virus. They clustered together, shuffling stiff and bent over, hiding behind cars as they advanced up the on-ramp. There were so many that he soon lost count. As he watched them snake up the ramp, Mason was struck by how much they looked like an army of undead, seemingly mindless and set only on bloody violence.
    But he understood that this was not truly the case. They were not zombies; just poor souls infected by a mutating virus. Neither were they mindless. The group moved quietly and with purpose. They were also coordinated, staying in small clusters, rather than in a single mob. But what set them apart most from mindless, flesh-eating zombies were their tactics. They had drawn the attention of the soldiers to the off-ramp using the headlights and were now attempting to mount a sneak attack on the convoy.
    One thing that was not in question, however, was their violent intent. There was an electric charge to the air, a feeling that he had experienced many times when war was at hand. The strange sensation was not unique to Mason, as he had known many soldiers who claimed to feel it as well. Whether it was a natural sense of foreboding or something more extrasensory, he couldn’t say. What he did know was that a terrible battle was about to begin.
     
     
    Nakai carried a Steyr Aug A3, and Jeb an AK-47, as they worked their way down the steep slope covered in knee-high grass. They maintained a distance of about fifteen feet apart, both of them taking care to stay well outside the persistent shine of the bright headlights. As they got to the bottom of the slope, they split left and right. Jeb immediately sought cover behind a black Ford Crown Victoria that looked like it had once belonged to an FBI agent, while Nakai advanced to stand with his back against the brick wall of a convenience store.
    The sky was clear, and stars shone down like millions of shards of broken glass. Both men took several minutes to let their eyes adjust to the darkness. The air was cool and filled with enough humidity to make breathing noticeably more difficult.
    The vehicle with the bright headlights was still far enough away that Nakai couldn’t quite make it out. It was big. That much he could tell—a truck, maybe. His enemy would not be inside, but he would likely be close.
    He moved ahead carefully, watching out of the corner of his eye to keep pace with Jeb. They separated further and further as they advanced. By the time they got to within a few paces of the vehicle, they were coming at it from nearly ninety degrees apart, Jeb from the driver’s side and Nakai from the rear.
    The vehicle was a tow truck, heavy, with lots of torque. It could haul a car out of a ditch as easily as a parent might lift a toddler from the tub. The whole truck was canted to the left, the result of something heavy smashing into the driver’s side quarter panel. The bottom half of the door was crumpled so badly that Nakai doubted that it would even open. He advanced a little further to see the passenger-side door. It too was dented, and the window had been smashed in. Someone had obviously leaned in and flipped on the lights.
    Jeb shuffled up to the mangled driver’s side door and quickly popped up, muzzle first, to peek in through the window. It was empty. He stepped around to the rear of the vehicle, squatted down, and motioned to Nakai that no one was inside.
    Seeing Jeb’s all clear, Nakai turned to survey his surroundings. The street was filled with abandoned and broken-down vehicles, most of them crashed or skewed at