The Farm - 05 by Stephen Knight Read Free Book Online

THE FARM
    by Stephen Knight
    © 2013 by Stephen Knight
     
    The farm house was surrounded by bodies.
    From her vantage point atop the small hill that overlooked the farm and the gentle rolling countryside that surrounded it, Biggs could see the house had been converted into a poor man’s fortress. The doors and windows had been either boarded up or hidden behind sand bags that looked pretty damned heavy. Even the wraparound porch that adorned the structure had been walled off, turned into another defensive element. In between the sand bags and lumber that had been erected to cover the porch, she could see cut outs. Nothing too big, just enough to accommodate the barrel of a weapon. Sniper positions. Murder holes.
    Tilting her field glasses upward slightly, she examined the home’s second story. Many of the windows there were boarded up as well, though a few were still exposed, uncluttered by any sort of defense. While she couldn’t see through them—curtains were drawn across most, and in the two that weren’t, the darkness inside hid whomever might be looking out—she knew why the windows were open. So the people inside would have unencumbered fields of fire when they needed to defend the place.
    As she watched, another stench slowly shambled toward the farm house. The structure was visible from the road, and Biggs had noticed that structures like the bright white farm house below could attract their attention. Even though the stenches were dead, zed apparently still had an eye for the finer things. Especially when those things might contain fresh meat. She focused her attention on the zombie for a moment, peering down at it through her Army-issue binoculars. It moved along at a slow pace, due to the remarkable damage that had been done to one of its legs. Through the filthy, shredded blue jeans it wore, Biggs saw its thigh had been pretty fairly butchered. The femur had been laid bare in places, and the stringy mass of muscle and sinew that had been left behind no longer possessed the ability to deliver reliable motive power to the remainder of the limb. A living person would have been in excruciating pain. A stench didn’t even realize it had been damaged.
    The walking corpse jerked then, as half its skull disintegrated into a gooey, ichor-laced mess. The ghoul fell to its knees, then slammed to the ground face-first as a tinny, distant-sounding retort barely registered with her ears. The sniper in the farm house had dropped another zombie.
    “Hey, Captain. You realize you’re silhouetted against the sky?”
    Biggs didn’t glance down at Sergeant First Class Eugene Powers. Both he and the kid, Specialist Leo Klein, were lying on their bellies in the tall grass that covered the hill. She didn’t need to look down to make sure they were still there. She could smell them easily enough, or at least, she thought she did. It was more than possible that the stink of sweat and grime that filled her nostrils came from herself. Her Army Combat Uniform was covered with filth, some of it desiccated gore from several stenches she’d had to kill at almost zero range.
    “I know, Sergeant. I want him to see me.”
    “Whoever’s in that house has a sniper rifle with a can on it, ma’am. And he’s a dead-eye.”
    “He’s only shooting the stenches, Powell.”
    “You want to give him the opportunity to tap a live person, Captain?”
    Biggs finally lowered her field glasses and slipped them back into the pouch on her hip. She looked down at the two men. Powell was facing the farm, while Klein was oriented in the other direction, covering their rear. Powell had his M4 assault rifle trained on the house below, and he peered through the 4x scope mounted to the rifle’s upper Picatinny rail. Biggs took a moment to wipe the sweat that was building beneath the brim of her Advanced Combat Helmet. This far from the coast, the fall day was still hot, with temperatures in the low 70s even though the sun was within an hour of kissing