Free Ace of Spades Chronicles : Book One by P.R.Sharp

the stock of his shotgun into his armpit and waited the few seconds for Yates and Zola to join him.
    Yates ran the full length of the subway and skidded to a halt on the foot bridge over the storm drain. With a quick look he counted thirty plus hostiles shuffling along the paths and tree lined alleyways; some of these were children with fading face paint, but most were adults, with the nearest approximately one hundred and fifty metres away. The effective killing range of his SA80 was around four hundred metres. He nodded to himself and calculated how long it would take the infected to reach the foot bridge at their present speed and figured they had five minutes tops before the shit well and truly hit the fan and things became F.U.B.A.R . He walked backwards until he was standing behind Xander and turned to see Zola stabbing one of the subway lights with his knife. Beyond him, moving through the trees, were thirty infected approaching from the direction of the supermarket, with another twenty or more filtering down the other visible paths towards their position. Another calculation now gave them less than three minutes before they would be blocked in on both sides of the subway.
    "This is a fantastic plan of yours. We're not going to last long if we stay here," he said with measured concern.
    Zola quickly glanced at the gaining horde and back towards Yates, then resumed probing the subway lights for a weak spot. There were six in all, three on opposing walls; each were above shoulder height, around three feet long, eight inches wide and made of heavy duty, shatter proof plastic. More than enough room to stash his share of the money. His first attempt got him nowhere, so he moved on to the panel in the middle of the subway. Again, his knife found no way in, so he crossed the passage and tried the other middle light. "What the fuck are you doing?" Yates insisted, but Zola ignored him and continued checking the remaining lights until he had tried them all.
    "Bollocks," he spat and turned to face Yates. Yates frowned, and using only facial expressions and a shrug of his shoulders, asked him again; what the fuck are you doing? From the corner of his eye, he saw Xander shooting from a crouched position. A shotgun cartridge pinged off the tiled subway wall and landed on the crud covered floor, spinning like a top.
    "A little help…" Xander said over the resonance of the blast.
    "Jesus H Christ," Yates cursed and raised his SA80. He flicked the rifle from full auto back to single shot and started to pick off the virulent wave with steady head shots. His training coerced him into firing double taps; both to the neck or mouth, severing the spine below the medulla. He calmed himself and tried to lower his adrenaline level, taking only one shot at a time to preserve as many 5.56 as possible. Xander stood and took a dozen steps forward, discharging shotgun rounds at neck height into an infected double act that had slipped through some snowberry brushes to the right. Faces and jaws got peppered with high impact pellets, and another blast removed the two heads simultaneously in a fountain of frayed meat. Xander saw something dark and spherical fly over his head and realised it was a grenade. He dove back into the subway entrance as the frag exploded sending dirt, twigs and infected body parts up into the air. He looked around to see Zola pulling the pin on another grenade and covered his ears as the second explosion tore through a group of infected in the middle ground, diminishing their numbers by at least half.
    "No time to piss about, boys", the Sergeant said as he pulled yet another pin and tossed it in the opposite direction, out toward the bridge spanning the storm drain. A number of infected face painted children were now within inches of the grenades killing zone. Yates and Xander squeezed their eyes shut and cupped their ears as the blast reverberated off the subway walls. When they looked up, the bridge seemed to hover for a few