Free Even Zombie Killers Can Die by John Holmes, Alexandra Grey Page A

for sure, was Quebecois, and it took a minute for me to understand him through the thick accent.
    Brit astonished me by rattling off a string of French to the man. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, he nodded and shouted back up to the others. A second man rappelled down with a collapsible stretcher, and after a minute or so we we re able to wrestle it atop the Zodiac and carefully set Doc onto it. The stretcher was tied off and lifted to the parapet with a crude pulley system. The rest of us, even Ziv, were harnessed in and carefully lifted one at a time to the top of the wall. The two Frenchies remained below, attaching the boat to a series of lines before lifting it clear of the water, winching it into a makeshift gantry.
    After I untied myself from the swiss seat, I looked around. Each of the local men was armed with a rifle, their pistol grips and butt stocks shiny from use. Radios beeped, the volume barely loud enough to register. The first man, the one to hail us, untied himself and stepped towards us. "What are you doing here?" His voice was not friendly, but neither was it openly hostile. I saw immediately that they had saved our lives, but didn't yet see a reason to keep us breathing.

“Do you work for the General?” I asked warily. He hawked in the back of his throat and spit over the wall.

“I guess not,” I murmured. “You see those explosions to the south?”

“Oui. We are not blind.”

“The General and his men are dead. The causeway block failed and the island has been attacked by zombies.”

He swore in French and yanked his radio off his shoulder, barking into it. The voice that came through the radio was American, and speaking English. “Do they have wounded?”

“Oui.”

“Get the wounded to the doctor. Hold the others there. Five minutes.”

Brit and I glanced at each other. The man clipped the radio back in place and extended one hand to me. “I am Pierre.” He said. “We will get your wounded to our docteur. You wait here for Cassandra.”

“Who is Cassandra?” This could either get better or it could get worse, really fast. “I'm not letting you take my wounded away.”

Something in his expression softened. “We will care for them. Cassandra, she is one of you. Do not be afraid.” He touched the flag on Red's uniform. “We have been waiting for you Americans.”

We all shared wary glances. He wasn’t exactly clarifying the situation. A few minutes later a cart drew up, led by two horses of the same huge breed as those monsters we'd seen outside Schuylerville a year back. Belgian war horses, I think they were called. Doc's litter was carefully lowered, set perpendicular so that he was not lying directly in the cart, cushioning him from the worst of the jolting. “Ziv, go with him,” I ordered quietly. He might not admit to being wounded, but I wasn't going to let him stand up here with a broken arm, either. “No one is alone until I sort this out.” For once he didn't argue with me, just jumped down into the wagon and took a seat next to Doc. The driver clucked to the team and slapped them with the reins.

A trim woman of perhaps sixty was climbing the ladder to the parapet. In looking her way I saw that the entire wall, what I could see, anyway, had a deck, maybe four feet wide, running along the inside. When I'd climbed over, I'd seen that the wall was actually a type of permanent coffer dam: two separate walls of concrete blocks with tons of gravel fill between them. The wall was nearly three feet wide, a more permanent version of the HESCO barriers that had been everywhere in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Name,” she ordered when she reached us. She wore old-style Multicam pants, the ones with the knee pads sewn directly into the fabric, and the brown cotton undershirt.

“Sergeant First Class Nick Agostine, United States Army.”

 

Chapter 19

The woman searched my face intently. Pierre shone his flashlight in my face, not aggressively, but so