Chương 69: Chapter 66 The Horde

I jumped into the driver's seat and floored the accelerator the second everyone was inside. Using every bit of the driving skill I'd learned during my years on the police force, I sped the van down the highway, zipping around abandoned and wrecked vehicles. I yelled back to the team, "Make sure all your weapons are loaded with fresh mags, and get ready for battle as soon as we get there!" I handed my AR to Joe in the passenger seat along with a fresh magazine.

"Load it for me." He slammed the mag home and handed it back. With a thought, I summoned the rifle directly back into my inventory ring. The drive to the dungeon had taken about thirty minutes, but the drive back took barely half that time despite the choked roads. When we pulled down the street from the school, my chest tightened. It looked like thousands of people were swarming the parking lot.

They were throwing themselves at the building, trying to force their way through the main office doors, the double gate by the big gym, and the gym's front entrance. The only thing holding the doors from shattering was a stroke of luck from the old world. Before the collapse, the school district had covered all the exposed front windows and glass doors in a product called Clear Armor—a binary adhesive film that, when pressed together, created a near-impenetrable surface.

As we screamed closer, I yelled back to Alex, "When we hit the lot, I'm running as many of these fuckers over as possible right up to the front office doors. You start putting a wall up around the van and the entrance while we jump out and clear the area. Understand?" Glancing in the rear-view mirror, I saw Alex white-knuckling the egg wrapped in its blanket, trying his absolute best to keep it safe as the van bounced and rocked at high speed. He looked up, caught my eye in the mirror, and nodded.

"The rest of you, get ready to jump out the second I stop. Clear?"

"Yeah, got it," came the immediate chorus from the back. Of course they got it. They were military, and all three had advanced training. Even my son. I had to keep reminding myself of that—Mike wasn't just my boy anymore. He was a veteran with tactical training. It was just hard to see him as anything other than one of my babies. Even Alex, barely old enough to be considered an adult, had proven to be more capable than any nineteen-year-old had a right to be. But right now, none of that mattered.

Our family was inside, and they needed help. Coming into the parking lot from the south, I kicked my door open and wedged my leg against it, bracing it open with everything I had. I barreled into the horde at forty miles per hour, the heavy cargo van pushing dozens of bodies out of the way and crushing even more beneath the tires. The pressure against my leg from the pinned door was immense, but I needed to clear a physical buffer zone for when we stopped.

Just as we reached the front office building, I whipped the wheel west, slammed on the brakes, and slid the van directly in front of the main doors. Without a single word spoken, the van doors flew open. Joe vanished out the passenger side, Pete and Alex tumbled out the sliding door, and Mike threw open the rear doors. Instantly, the air shattered with gunfire from all sides of the vehicle.

Even though our rifles were strictly semi-automatic, the sheer speed of our trigger fingers—supercharged by our upgraded Dexterity stats—made the firing line sound completely automatic. I marveled at how fluid the movements felt. The moment a rifle went dry, my hands moved on pure muscle memory: the spent mag was pulled, vanished directly into my storage ring, and a fresh one was slotted into the magazine well in less than a second.

My shooting glasses made target acquisition effortless, projecting a crisp reticle over the targets the moment I trained my weapon on them. Not that it was strictly necessary at this distance with my high Dexterity; the horde had only been partially cleared by my rampaging vehicle, and the empty space was quickly being choked by more shambling dead. We dropped them head-shot after head-shot, maintaining a clean perimeter around the van while Alex focused on his magic.

"BACK!" Joe yelled. I spun around and saw the thorny barrier was almost complete. The team had collapsed back toward the front of the van, forming a tight firing line. I stored my AR in my ring, summoned my sword into my grip, and channeled my stats.

"CLEAVING!" I roared. Swinging with the full weight of my upgraded Strength, the blade whistled through the air, striking a half-dozen zombies with a single, massive arc and sending their broken bodies crashing into the crowd behind them. I stepped to my right, taking off another half-dozen heads with a brutal backhand swing. Joe rushed forward, slamming his heavy shield into two incoming lines and sending them flying backward to topple even more of the crowd.

I spun and sprinted backward behind Joe's cover as the opening in the brambles grew smaller and smaller. Joe delivered two more crushing shield-bashes to clear the gap, and then the heavy wall of thorns snapped shut, sealing us inside. I turned toward the school's double doors. Through the reinforced glass, I could see Isadora frantically undoing the locks and tossing aside a couple of folding chairs she'd wedged between the fire escape bars.

She was fully decked out in the tactical gear I'd given her the night we secured the campus, a sidearm strapped to her hip and her AR slung tight across her chest. Behind her, Travis and Jace were hunched over the secretaries' desks, their fingers flying over drone controllers as they monitored the scope of the horde from the air. The moment the last of us slipped inside, we threw the heavy bars back into place, securing the doors. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere.

Support the author by seeking out the original. I stepped forward, catching Isadora in a fierce hug.

"Are you okay?" She nodded quickly, catching her breath.

"Where's your mother?" I asked, letting her go.

"She's just out back behind the main office, helping at the double gate."

"Okay, good. You stay here and watch the front entrance. Alex's wall should buy us about an hour, but keep an eye out in case they try to tear through it. If they do, hit me up on the radio." She gave me a relieved smile and nodded again. I winked at her.

"Love you." Turning toward the back of the office, I passed Travis and Jace at the desks.

"You boys doing alright?" Both nodded, confirming they were secure.

"Good. I'm going to check on your mother. I'll be right back for an update." Before I could even take another step, the back door burst open. Denise ran into the room and slammed into me so hard it nearly took me off my feet. Honestly, if I hadn't recently leveled up my Strength and Constitution, she probably would have knocked me flat on my back.

"Hey, baby," I whispered into her ear, wrapping my arms tight around her.

"Are you okay? You hurt?" She shook her head against my neck, letting out a barely audible, "No."

"What about the rest of the people? Any injuries? Casualties?" Again, she shook her head. Confused, I pulled back slightly.

"Then what's wrong, baby? Why all this?" Denise abruptly jerked her head up, tears still trailing down her cheeks, but her eyes were suddenly flashing with pure, unadulterated anger.

"WHY?" she demanded, bringing her hand down in a sharp slap against my arm.

"You've been gone all day without contacting me once! Doing god knows what in some dank dungeon! And then zombies—freaking zombies attack us, and I can't get a hold of you!" I immediately threw my hands up in mock surrender.

"Okay, okay, that's fair. But in my defense, we were really, really deep in the dungeon. We didn't get a single bar of signal until we stepped back outside."

"Mmm-hmm," she muttered, crossing her arms and drilling me with a deeply judgmental, classic textbook stink-eye. From the desks behind us, a couple of muffled snickers broke the silence. I shot a look over my shoulder at Travis and Jace, a small grin tugging at my own mouth.

"Shut it, you two." Turning back to Denise, I cleared my throat.

"Okay, so what exactly are we dealing with here?"

"We're not really sure," she sighed, her posture softening.

"Everything was going about as normal as it could since we got here. I was in the main kitchen wrapping up leftovers from dinner when people started screaming. I ran outside and saw the guards pointing down the street. Sure enough, there was a damn army of zombies walking our way. Thankfully, they're not the running kind. We had enough time for the guards and the volunteers to secure all the gates before the main mass hit the perimeter.

A few guards have used their rifles, but mostly we've just been hitting them with clubs or stabbing them through the fences with spears and swords. We don't have enough steel to go around, so people have been rotating out when they get tired."

"Well, we've got plenty of weapons to pass out now," I said, thinking of the sheer volume of loot we'd hauled back.

"Where are my mom and Frank?"

"They're over in the big gym foyer," she replied.

"They're with that Tony guy and a few others, keeping the double doors reinforced."

"Okay, good," I said. Just then, Joe and Zack walked back into the main office, their expressions heavy as they joined Denise and me.

"Something isn't right about this, Derrick," Joe said without preamble.

"You mean besides the thousands of dead guys trying to cave our doors in?" I asked.

"Yeah," Joe replied, leaning in.

"There has to be at least a couple thousand out there, but they're completely focused on this specific side of the school. Basically just the southwest corner of the property."

"Well, isn't that where the majority of our people are set up right now?" I pointed out.

"Not necessarily," Zack countered.

"We have scouts watching the gates and the fence line all the way around the property. They've reported that the zombies looked right at them, but they didn't even try to turn or attack. They just ignored our people completely and kept shuffling straight toward this corner."

"Like they're concentrating only on certain areas and trying to force a breakthrough," I murmured, staring thoughtfully at the wall. Joe grimaced.

"Or like they're being concentrated." I let out a long, heavy sigh. All I could say was, "Crap. Alright, what's our next step?"

"Well," Joe began, "I think you need to go slot that dungeon core we just busted our asses for and get some actual defenses online. While you do that, we'll organize some proper kill teams and start making a serious dent in those numbers."

"Agreed," I said.

"Let's gather the dungeon team behind the main office and dump every scrap of weapons and armor we looted. The kill teams get first pick for gear, then the main defense teams. Whatever's left over goes to anyone else who wants a weapon. We have at least forty full sets of Kobold armor in the inventory." I unbuckled the leather pauldrons, greaves, and bracers I'd been wearing through the dungeon crawl and handed them straight to Zack.

"Aren't you going to need these?" Zack asked, catching the armor.

"I'll be fine with my tactical vest and helmet. The front-line guys on the fence need the extra plating more than I do." Mike and Alex walked into the room just in time to catch the tail end of the conversation. Seeing me strip my gear, Mike immediately started unbuckling his armor too.

"Alex," I said, turning to the younger boy.

"Give your brother your tactical vest and helmet since you're keeping your special set items. Do you have any more health or stamina potions left in your system shop?"

"I have a few, but I'm running low," Alex replied.

"Okay," I said, pulling two health potions and three stamina potions out of my own stash and setting them down on the desk.

"Go grab whatever else you can after you dump your Kobold loot out back. Split the potions up as evenly as you can, and give them to Zack to distribute to the kill teams." Once the rest of the Kobold weapons and armor were cleared out of my storage ring and piled safely behind the office building, I turned away from the rush of prep work. I walked down the short hallway, stepped into the principal's office, and approached the console.

Taking a breath, I pulled out the heavy crystal core we'd earned and slotted it firmly into Novus' control panel.