Read Run (Book 2): The Crossing for Free Online Page B

and handed him a double-click detonator. He nodded at Benotti, turned the striped door handle and pressed the yellow button. The ramp started to rise and Usher reached into one of the pockets of his tactical vest. He got a small package out and tossed it to his friend just as the ramp closed. Turning towards the other riders in the LAV, he noticed they were all looking at their shoes.
    “Godspeed, Benny,” Boone said through his throat mic, and the vehicles started to move forward.
    Benotti looked at the package that Usher had tossed him and smiled. He opened it, popped three huge pieces of grape bubble gum into his mouth, and leaned against the yellow gate near the guard house, watching his friends depart.
     
     
     
    “Don’t plow into them yet,” Boone told Stark, “let’s open up on them first to keep them off us for a while. I don’t want to gum up the wheels.”
    Usher climbed into the two man turret of LAV One and turned on the M242 Bushmaster chain gun system. It came on with a hum, and a small heads-up display came up over a green monochrome view screen. The things were sixty feet away when he asked permission to fire.
    Boone was also looking through a view screen. “Light ‘em up. Concentrate fire in the center and we’ll go through the three hole.” 
    Even with the headphones on, the cannon was incredibly loud. The twenty-five millimeter high explosive, incendiary rounds turned the vanguard of the living dead horde into a flaming mushy pulp in five-round bursts. After the second burst, half a thousand of the densely packed creatures were destroyed, or so damaged that they were useless, and there were small fires where the things’ clothing had begun to burn from the incendiaries. Everywhere the tracer rounds were sent, a column of dead exploded thirty deep in a straight line, the ones in the back falling like dominoes, and the first few unfortunates simply liquefying in a spray of gore and bone from the chest up.
    LAV Two had moved up on the port side of LAV One, and Seyfert also fired into the crowd. Short bursts with his light machine gun from the open turret blew off limbs and destroyed craniums. Many of the undead tried to rise after being knocked over only to be trampled down by their hungry brethren trying to reach the canned food in front of them. Seyfert wasted no time and kept firing at chests and heads.
    The vehicles gave deep diesel grunts and moved forward, the twenty-five millimeter firing to the front. LAV Two fell back in behind LAV One and they drove in a single column. Seyfert spun left and right in his turret and tried to take out anything that got too close, but there were so many creatures that the pocket created by the Bushmaster began to collapse, and some reached the sides of the LAVs. The uncoordinated and lumbering dead were immediately knocked away by the speed of the moving vehicles, and in a moment they were through the horde, one fast creature running after them. Seyfert sighted her and gave her a short burst of 5.56 rounds. She collapsed, and he got back inside and shut the turret hatch.
    There weren’t nine thousand undead as first surmised, but Seyfert did mental calculations to come up with about three thousand. More than half wouldn’t be getting up, but some on the ground still moved, and others were untouched. The mobile ones stumbled after the LAVs, or made their way in the other direction toward a sure meal; the sailor waiting patiently.
    Benotti watched them come, leaning against his gate and blowing bubbles between coughs. He harrumphed and shook his head, “Well this sucks.”
    They didn’t take long to reach him, maybe three minutes, and when he could make out individual men, women, and children he swore out loud and taunted them. “C’mon fuckers, come get some! You bitches like Italian food? I had a shitburger this morning, hope you like the taste of it!” As the first of the significantly smaller swarm, an older man with horrible wounds on his face