The North: A Zombie Novel by Sean Cummings Page A

seconds I was poking my head up through the hatch and gazing through the binoculars.
    “What the hell?” I whispered.
    It wasn’t the hundreds of creeps now stumbling and tripping along the riverbank behind Cruze that had worried Sid. It was the small front-end loader on an overpass about a thousand meters in front of us that was pushing smashed-up vehicles and human remains over the railing and directly into our path. I spun the turret left and right and saw the loader had built a wall of smashed up cars and trucks on the east side of the overpass.
    Then things went from bad to worse.
    Cruze’s panicked voice on the radio filled my ears.
“Ark Two contact, over!”
    I whipped the turret to the reverse position, just in time to hear the sharp clang of bullets ricocheting off the hull. Then Sid’s voice filled my headset.
    Sid’s head appeared through the crew commander’s hatch. “Holy mother, Dave! – They’re trying to create obstacles for us – they want to slow us down!”
    “That’s not the only thing they’re doing,” I shouted. “We’re taking fire!”
    I spun around to see Ark Two being chased by a rigged-up Brinks armored car with a ten-foot-long spiked I-beam welded to the front bumper. The makeshift tank barreled through the wall of creeps behind Cruze smashing them to grease under its wheels. A male figure dressed in coveralls and a hockey helmet with a face cage popped up from a hatch in the roof and hurled a flaming Molotov cocktail at Cruze’s vehicle, narrowly missing the rear end by a few feet. It exploded in a burst of orange light, spilling liquid fire across the tinder dry grass.
    “Cruze!” I shouted into the radio. “You’ve got someone on your tail.”
    The radio hissed loudly. “No shit, Sherlock! If we get hit with one of those fire bombs we’re screwed!”
    “Roger that!” I replied as I spun the turret around and cocked the .50 Caliber machine gun. “Hit the brakes and hold fast, Doug! We’ll give supporting fire to Cruze!”
    A series of well-aimed shots, like large hailstones hitting a tin roof, bounced off the lid of the turret and only thing on my mind besides providing support to Cruze was protecting the Jerry cans of diesel lashed onto the hull of our APC.
    I dove out of the turret and into the back of the carrier. Jo had awoken from her nap and gave me a worried look, but I didn’t have time to offer any reassurance.
    “He’s gaining on me!” Cruze’s panicked voice blared through my headset. “Give me the word, Dave, and I’ll open up the turret guns!”
    “Hold your fire!” I replied, as I climbed back into the crew commander’s hatch and peered through my periscope.
    “Holy shit!” Doug choked as a blinding flash filled my entire field of vision. The ground shook beneath us and the APC pitched sharply to the right as the blast from an exploding car swept over us like a rogue wave. I ground my knuckles into my eyes and within seconds my vision returned. I gazed up to see three men with hunting rifles in the kneeling position, their weapons aimed straight at us.
    “Dave, if they knock out our tires, we’re going to be SOL!” Doug shouted into the intercom.
    “They’re shooting at me, Dave!” Cruze barked. “And they’re going to try to ram us if they get enough speed going!”
    I looked over my shoulder at Jo, who was just about to peer out of the rear viewing port, and made my decision.
    “Weapons free!”
I roared.

10

A series of explosions ripped through the air. Shock waves smashed our carrier one after the other, rocking us inside like marbles in an empty tin can. I squinted through my periscope to see the three figures on the overpass tossing homemade bombs. One landed no more than ten feet from the nose of the APC and exploded, sending fragments of high-velocity shrapnel into the hull of our machine.
    “Sid!” I shouted into my microphone. “Two hundred meters, overpass, watch and shoot!”
    “On it!” Sid answered as the turret