Free 02 Flotilla of the Dead by David Forsyth Page A

seat. 
    “Did you really just cut Clint’s arm off?” Billy asked with his voice full of disbelief.
    “Yes, I did,” confirmed Scott.  “He got a zombie bite on his lower forearm, so I cut it off at the elbow.  We won’t know for a while if I got it off soon enough.  If the infection spread higher than that, he’ll still turn into a zombie and I’ll have to shoot him in the head.”  Scott’s voice was emotionless as he laid out the facts for them.  Meanwhile he had started the engine and was driving slowly across the bridge with Mark and the rest of the convoy trailing behind. 
    “I would have shot him in the head,” said Billy suddenly.
    Scott looked at his son and said, “If I didn’t think there was a chance to save him, that’s what I would have done too, Billy.  Or I probably would have given him a bullet for his gun, so he could shoot himself.  That’s what he wanted, by the way.  If the bite had been on his torso or near his head there wouldn’t have been any question about it, but I think that cutting off his arm did give him a slight chance,” Scott explained.  By then they had left the bridge and were driving across Terminal Island.  The Unified Reserve Center was only about a mile down the road.  The young men in the armored car remained silent.
    Scott watched as four Marines, including Sergeant Major O’Hara climbed through a hatch to sit on top of the Amtrac.  They aimed their rifles and started firing single shots in several directions.  Scott looked where they were shooting and saw a scattering of zombies running towards the convoy with reaching arms and gaping mouths.  One by one they took hits that either terminated or incapacitated them.  None of them got within fifty yards of the convoy.  Scott wished that those Marines had been the ones who opened the gate on the bridge.  They would have been ready to deal with the hornets’ nest on the other side.
    *****
                Captain McCloud directed USCGC Stratton up alongside the cutter pier at Coast Guard Station Los Angeles.  He saw a few zombies come running towards the ship, but he had men stationed at the rails to dispatch them with rifle fire.  A shore party of twenty armed men and four women were waiting for his order to disembark and make their way to the armory.   They would grab push carts from the dock along the way to carry weapons and ammunition back to the ship. 
                “Attention on deck!  This is the Captain.  Deploy the shore party,” ordered Captain McCloud over the ship’s loudspeaker.  “Marksmen to remain on deck and engage infected targets on sight.  Shore party’s objective is to recover weapons and ammunition from the station armory.  Special orders include self preservation.  To be specific, avoiding infection is a higher priority than recovering weapons.  Carry on!”
                The shore party leaped onto the pier from two boarding ladders and formed into two teams that moved swiftly up the dock towards the Fast Boat Basin.  They encountered a few zombies in ones and twos that were easily dispatched with rifle and shotgun fire.  The Coast Guardsmen moved purposefully towards the PACAREA Armory where the machine guns, rifles, side arms and ammunition stockpile for Pacific Area Coast Guard forces were kept.   No one aboard the Stratton had keys to the armory, but they did have a demolition team tasked with the job of getting the door open.
                The shore party moved past the grand old building that held the Coast Guard Ward Room and approached the armory within a minute.  Four more zombies tried to attack them and were stopped with bullets to the head.  The demolition team went to work immediately, placing shaped charges of C4 on the hinges and lock of the vault-like door to the armory.  A minute later everyone cleared back and the charges were detonated with satisfying effect.  When the smoke cleared they saw that