Ridgetown: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel Page 16

  Helen couldn't help but feel flattered by the compliment, dismissing it for the moment.

  "We found these rifles in a farmhouse not far from the canal. They're Remington 700s, not too sure if the farmer was meant to have them but they're pretty sturdy rifles. These have extended magazines and can hold up to five bullets but I want you to load one at a time to get used to reloading."

  Helen gently took the rifle from him, surprised how much lighter it was than she was expecting it to be.

  "Okay, the safety's on so pull the bolt handle down and back like so..."

  Helen watched Tom and repeated his actions exactly, always conscious of where she was pointing the barrel, paranoid she was going to accidentally shoot someone inside the estate.

  Tom showed her how to load a bullet and ready it to fire, leaning the forestock on the wall in front of them.

  "The main thing I want you to concentrate on is your aiming. Use the scope. Look through it but don't put your eye right up against it, the recoil when you fire will make it hit you in the eye."

  The warning resonated with her and she began to panic she was going to blind herself as well as shoot herself. She tried to calm down and not let her mind wander, the last thing she wanted to do was stop listening because she was distracted.

  "The second thing I want you to do, which will help with the first thing, is control your breathing. This place is going to go crazy very soon, people are going to be shouting, screaming, fighting.... possibly even dying. Those creatures are going to be groaning and screeching and your heart will be going a hundred miles an hour. You know the score, I've heard how you held your own against the horde, that's what's kept you alive. The only thing is, when you're looking down a scope, you can't see all of that. You're going to have to keep your cool and rely on us to keep you safe while you shoot. Slow your breathing and hold your breath when you fire. Don't waste your shots, make every one count."

  Helen could feel her nerves building already, she didn't want to show herself up and definitely didn't want to let anyone down.

  "Once you've fired, pull the bolt back and it will spit the casing out for you."

  Helen pulled the bolt back and the loaded bullet dropped to the floor making a ringing noise with every bounce. Helen felt flushed with embarrassment.

  "Don't worry about it, you're getting nervous. Take these three bullets and have a practice now. Don't worry about noise because we're already expecting visitors."

  Helen took the bullets and instantly realised she didn't know what to do. It had seemed obvious when Tom was explaining everything but now she was left to do it herself, she couldn't remember the first step. While she tried to remember, she placed the bullets on the wall and looked out at something to target.

  "From here, you should be okay aiming at something about three hundred metres away. Try aiming for one of those green bins down the road, near the playground."

  Now she had something to aim for, it was time to load the rifle and Tom's instructions suddenly came back to her.

  She loaded the rifle confidently, each movement reminding her what to do next. She looked at Tom for reassurance that she had done it right to which he smiled and nodded. As she raised the rifle, she thought about resting it on the wall as Tom had done but decided against it when Tom didn't say anything. She quickly tensed her arms and compensated for the weight of the gun, resting it on her shoulder for support.

  "You're a natural." Tom commented.

  It dawned on Helen that Tom hadn't actually shown her how to hold the rifle and she hadn't made a conscious effort to pay attention when he had held it up explaining about the sight. It was similar to how she had held the paintball gun but the extra weight gave it more balance.

  She pointed the gun towards the bin and looked through the scope, closing her other eye. The magnification was a lot stronger than she was expecting and she wasn't sure what she was looking at, all she could see was darkness. She lowered the weapon and looked where she thought she was aiming. She looked through the scope, keeping her other eye open this time. Still seeing darkness, she moved the rifle slowly from side to side until she glimpsed something shining. She realised the darkness she was aiming at was a black car that had been abandoned behind the bin.

  Relieved that she wasn't looking in completely the wrong direction, she followed the edge of the car and found the green colour of the bin. Helen made a conscious effort to slow her breathing and tried to steady her shaking hands. She picked the largest part of the bin to fire at, using this opportunity to familiarise herself with how it feels to fire the rifle rather than concentrate on pinpoint accuracy. Tom's earlier warning of the scope recoiling into her face still played on her mind.

  She inhaled slowly through her nose and breathed out even slower through her mouth. She inhaled again, this time holding the breath in. She readied herself for the recoil as she was about to squeeze the trigger.

  "Don't let anything distract you."

  Helen physically jumped as Tom spoke loudly into her ear. She nearly fired off a shot accidentally, not really sure how she didn't. She lowered the rifle to find Tom grinning at her, she couldn't help but draw a comparison to how Mark grinned when he was teasing someone. Without saying anything she shouldered the rifle again and looked through the scope, this time seeing the green colour of the bin instantly. Tom spoke again, although she wasn't expecting him to speak again, Helen held her reserve and kept aiming.

  "Remember not to pu...."

  Before he could finish, Helen fired. The recoil not as powerful as she expected, maybe because she was so tensed in preparation for it, but it was enough for her to lose her target. She quickly found it again knowing that it would be important to do so when the horde arrived.

  She scanned the area around the bin, looking for a smaller target. She knew what to expect when she fired and felt like she could compensate for the recoil. She surveyed the area around the bin that was pushed up against a short brick wall. Next to the green bin was a larger recycle bin which was overflowing, bottles stuck out of the opening where people had convinced themselves that one more bottle would fit. When there was physically no more room to stuff empty bottle into the bottle bank, people had begun to line them up on top of the brick wall behind.

  Seeing the empty bottles lined up like at a shooting gallery gave Helen her next target. She lowered the rifle and reloaded, just as Tom had shown her. She raised the rifle again and picked a brown coloured wine bottle that stood between two clear bottles. Her arms were starting to ache from holding the rifle up so she took a moment to rest the rifle on the ledge in front of her. Doing so doubled the steadiness of the rifle and gave her arms some respite so she decided to keep the position to fire. She had kept the rifle pointing in the same general area and didn't take long to find the bottle again. She readied herself for any kind of sudden noise and began to slow her breathing. She held a breath in and fired.

  This time she forced herself to keep looking through the scope and, although she didn't see the bottle explode, she saw the two clear bottles still standing where they were and a definite gap in between them where the green bottle had sat.

  "Definitely a natural, it'll feel different shooting something that's living though."

  "Out of all the words I'd use to describe those things, I don't think living is one of them."

  "Fair point."

  "It's probably just beginner's luck."

  "Well if it is, don't waste it. We need all the luck we can get."

  Tom held up the third bullet. Helen hesitated as she reached out for it, she suddenly felt the pressure of responsibility. She took it from him and put it in her top pocket, Tom looked at her with surprise.

  "I don't want to waste any luck or bullets. I've got a feeling we're going to need them both."

  Satisfied with her answer, Tom smiled and nodded. He reached into the backpack at their feet and picked out a couple of boxes. He checked their contents and split them up on the table in front of them.
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  "When they get here, we're going for accuracy over speed. Take your time, ignore distractions and pick your shots. Firing wildly won't stop anything, we need headshots."

  Helen tried to calm herself down, she felt like trying to make herself calm down was making her feel more panicked. Breathing slowly seemed to be helping until she started to worry that she would make herself light headed and pass out.

  The groans started out as a faint hum. Tom was talking but Helen was trying to pinpoint the approaching sound. She looked past him and as far down the road as she could. She stared, unsure about what lay in the distance. After a few seconds she saw movement. It was brief and she thought she had imagined it until she saw it again. She had been concentrating on trying to spot the source of the noise so hard that she hadn't noticed the groans getting louder. She must have had a glazed look on her face because she suddenly became aware Tom was saying her name.

  "Helen? Helen? Are you okay?"

  Tom turned to look where she was looking and instantly saw what she was looking at.

  The horde moved as a wave, shambling slowly. Some figures looked like shadows, covered in dirt and blood, clothes tattered and torn. Helen looked through her scope and saw the horror magnified. The first couple of zombies she saw must have been close to the car bomb when it exploded, their faces and upper bodies as shredded as their clothes. Two were missing their arms whilst one was also missing a considerable chunk of its torso. As she surveyed some of the others, she noticed how close they were to the wall she had been shooting the bottle from. She lowered the rifle and looked around. A couple of the others were also surveying the approaching danger, either through their own rifles or using binoculars.

  "Anyone with a rifle, pick your shots and start thinning them out. Anyone with a bow, hold off until you have a better shot. We don't want anyone wasting ammo."

  Tom spoke with an authority that sounded like he faced this kind of situation all the time. Helen heard the first gunshot before she had even raised her rifle.

  "Take your time, be confident with your shots." Tom continued to give advice as he raised his own rifle.

  Helen chose a target from the front of the crowd, a young man who wore the remnants of a suit. She followed his movement for a few seconds, trying to anticipate where his head would be a second later but the erratic shambling made it nearly impossible. A gunshot from nearby was accompanied by a cloud of red next to the male zombie she was targeting. Despite trying to tense herself, she still jerked slightly and lost her target through the scope. She decided to pick a target that was a couple of rows back, crammed into the pack making their movements less random, pinned in place by the sheer number of other creatures. The tactic proved a better idea as Helen shot a slim female and long haired male zombie in quick succession. With the adrenaline she was currently feeling and the accompanying panic, Helen barely even gave a second thought to her feelings regarding shooting what used to be a living person.

  As she reloaded and raised the rifle again, Helen found herself shaking too much. It must have been noticeable because Tom addressed her in a calm voice.

  "Calm down."

  Helen took a few deep breaths. Being told to calm down when there are people all around you panicking, shooting guns and preparing to fight with a large group of flesh eating zombies is advice that could be considered harder to take than it sounds. She looked around at the activity surrounding her.

  Two men she didn't recognise were leaning large wooden beams against the gates to reinforce them and help fight against any force pushing them inwards. Tom was systematically finding a target and firing, calmly picking a bullet from the table in front when he needed to reload. A teenage boy was handing out sharp, heavy looking blades to everyone he could find. A couple looked like machetes but most looked like improvised weapons made from large scraps or cuts of metal that had been fastened or welded to a handle and sharpened to a deadly point.

  Helen saw Liz strapping something to her arms that looked like some kind of braces, thin metal and leather straps wrapped round her arms beneath the elbow and thicker metal tubes ran along her forearms. Helen was curious to know more but forced herself to get her head back into the fight at hand.

  She lined up another shot, an elderly lady unbalanced and hunched over, making her move forward slightly faster than some of the younger zombies. She fired and the bullet ripped straight through the old woman's head and struck the corpse behind her in the centre of the chest causing it to fall backwards and get trampled under the weight of the rest of the bodies.

  The crowd was significantly closer now and a group of archers had begun to join the fire. They consisted of a young man and two women, one looked a similar age to the man and dressed in a similar bohemian style hinting they could be in a relationship or at least be friends, the other woman was markedly older and used what Helen regarded as a more traditional bow. They fired independently, creating a constant stream of arrows hitting the crowd rather than an intermittent volley. The arrows that hit the zombies in the head immediately incapacitated them and they dropped to the floor instantly, any that hit them in the body did so with such force it would pin them to the zombie immediately behind them. The lack of coordination between the two zombies would send them tumbling over and they met the same fate as the zombie that had fallen to the ground because of Helen's bullet.

  Helen adjusted the scope and continued to fire into the crowd. Despite all the shots on target from her and everyone firing, the horde didn't appear to be diminishing. Rather than feel disheartened, it made Helen more determined. She tried to reload and fire faster but her accuracy began to suffer, she struck one zombie in the shoulder and another in his collarbone. She imagined Tom telling her to calm down and take her time but she looked at how close the zombies were to the wall and cursed herself for wasting two shots. Two more zombies that shouldn't still be walking. She grabbed another bullet and fumbled trying to reload quickly dropping it on the floor and, as she bent down to pick it up, the wall shook in front of her.

  Startled she stood back up quickly, looking for the source of the impact. She looked round at everyone on the wall, most of them continued to fire their bows and guns, others had begun to launch spears into the crowd with varying degrees of success. Tom peered over the wall to see what was below them.

  "It's one of those jumping ones, it's huge! It looks burned, like it got caught up in the car bomb."

  Helen dashed over and looked for herself, she stared at the thing that had taken a few steps backwards. It made eye contact with her and Helen's skin crawled as is scowled. Its skin was horribly burnt and its face looked skeletal compared to the rest of its body which looked like a skinned gorilla. She could see the muscle fibres expanding and contracting with every movement it made. Its shoulders were nearly the same size as its head and its arms looked strong enough to tear a human in half. Its legs looked solid and as it crouched, she dreaded to think how much power could be stored in them. It squatted and raised its arms into the air like a long jumper

  Seeing it preparing to jump, Tom quickly raised his rifle and fired at it. The bullet struck the Leaper in the forearm, peeling the flesh away between the wrist and elbow before being stopped by the thick muscle. The Leaper growled and stared straight at Tom who was quickly trying to reload. Helen felt frozen to the spot as she watched it turn its body and jump, throwing its momentum towards Tom. It was only then that it suddenly registered the thing was going to jump at her until Tom had got its attention.

  It connected with Tom and continued up for a few more feet before arching back down and landing inside the estate on top of Tom. The impact had killled him instantly, crushing his chest and his lifeless body now lay crumpled beneath the leaper, head turned towards Helen at an impossible angle. She looked into his vacant eyes and couldn't believe he was dead. Even though they had only just been introduced, Helen felt like there was a lot she was meant to learn from him. It felt wrong that he had died so suddenly especially as his action
s, attracting the attention of the leaper, had also saved her life.

  The creature immediately turned to face Helen again. She heard a scream and someone announced that a zombie had made it into the compound. It crouched, again ready to jump. Helen raised her rifle and fired without aiming properly, the empty click sounded like a judge's hammer coming down and delivering a sentence in court. Before she could reload, the Leaper jumped. Helen dropped onto her back instinctively, still holding the rifle but holding it up in a defensive fashion. The Leaper hit the wall where she was standing, knocking bricks loose with the flat of its hands as it tried to stop itself and one of its feet resting on the rifle that Helen held with both hands.

  Helen had her arms locked straight and held the rifle as tightly as possible. Despite most of the Leaper's weight resting on the wall, there was enough weight coming through its foot to require Helen to use all her strength to prevent the thing crushing her skull. The rifle began to warp and she thought it was going to snap before the Leaper ignored her completely and dropped down from the platform.

  Helen didn't care why it hadn't decided to kill her as she struggled to her feet, nearly falling as she put her weight on her arms to get up. Her joints protested and she wondered if she had torn any muscles in her arms. She discarded the rifle that was bent and completely useless and rushed to see what the Leaper was doing. Helen felt alarmed as she watched it staring at the beams that were supporting the gates as if it was analysing them.

  "Hey! It's going for the barricades!" Helen shouted to anyone who would listen.

  A man who had been firing a double barrel shotgun from above the wall next to the gates saw the Leaper and dropped down to face it. He looked scared as he ran over but shouted a battle cry to hide his intimidation and raised the gun. The Leaper swatted him with one of its huge arms like it was wafting away a bad smell. Its arm impacted the young man like a baseball bat and catapulted him against the brick wall. Blood spattered the wall, where his head struck it and his body crumpled, lifeless like a rag doll, to the floor.