Free The North: A Zombie Novel by Sean Cummings

throw it over yourself so that nobody can see you. And don’t spill any on you, okay?”
    She nodded. “What if it’s number two?”
    “Do you have to go number two?” I asked, hoping like hell her answer was going to be no.
    She shook her head. “I went before we left the army.”
    “Armory,” I corrected. “Good then. And Jo, that was a really smart thing to ask me. I’m sorry I didn’t think about it before we left.”
    She kissed me on my right cheek and gave me another hug. “That’s why you have me here – to help you think about stuff you never thought about. I’m going to go back to my spot now.”
    I lifted her around the turret cage. “And don’t stick your hands outside the firing ports, Jo. I mean it!”
    “Okay, David!” she shouted as she crawled back over the ammunition case and into her corner.
    Doug Manybears emitted a loud grunt from his driver’s compartment. “That was real sweet, Dave. I’m getting all misty over here.”
    I smacked him on the back of his helmet and peered into my periscope. “She’s eight,” I said, as I looked down on the river. “I can’t even conceive of how all this is registering in her … oh, my God. This can’t be real!”
    I thought six months of battling the living dead had prepared me for anything but clearly I was wrong on that account. The river was full of bloated bodies. Some were decomposed beyond recognition, their bony limbs reaching skyward to a God that had forsaken them, while others were fresh kills. Their torn corpses reanimated, only to find themselves swept away by the rushing current.
    And this was where we were going to cross the river.
    Sid Toomey’s voice squawked in my headset. “I wonder where they’re all coming from.”
    I pressed the talk button. “Somewhere … everywhere. The city, the outskirts … Cochrane and the foothills. Maybe they thought that creeps couldn’t swim and they used the river as an escape route.”
    “Yeah well they didn’t make it, did they?” said Doug Manybears.
    I clenched my jaw tightly as Ark Two’s nose appeared out of the corner of my eye. The trim vane, a six-foot-long sheet of armor, slid up from beneath the nose, so I reached over and pulled the switch for ours. I could hear the hydraulic pump inside the engine panel humming away as the trim vane popped up, blocking my view.
    “Okay, Sid,” I shouted into my microphone. “You’re navigating – I can’t see past the trim. Please get us across in one piece!”
    The turret spun to the twelve o’clock position. “I’m on it.  Doug! The forward slope is about forty degrees – take it down at crawl speed.”
    The nose of the carrier pitched sharply. I held on tight and glanced back at the rest of the crew. Dawson peered out of her firing port as Jo dug her feet into the crew seat to keep herself from sliding forward. In seconds we’d leveled off, a sign we were in the cold water of the Bow River. At this point Dawson closed her firing port, choosing instead to sit quietly, her eyes staring blankly at the floor of the carrier. The look on her face speaking volumes, too. She’d seen what I’d seen only moments earlier.
    “There’s so many of them,” she said. “They’re all dead – everybody is freaking dead!”
    I looked back at Kate and gave her a slight nod. “Keep it together, Kate. Can you do that?”
    “I’ll try,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her combat shirt.
    “Good,” I replied. “Take a look out the back and see where Ark Two is.”
    She scrambled to the viewing ports on the rear doors and peered out to the rear of the carrier. “Cruze is in the water – about fifty feet behind us.”
    “Right on!” I shouted. Just then, Sid Toomey’s voice flooded my headset.
    “Hang tight – we’re going out of the water in about ten seconds and then we’re going to head up the river bank. Doug, lower your trim vane – my job is done.”
    I spun my periscope back to the twelve o’clock