infected vs. Havoc team

It was a tidal surge of madness and murder.

Dozens of people came running, drawn by the screams from the woman Andrea had shot. The sounds they made were inhuman although they came from human throats. It was hard not to think of them as monsters, as things. They were people. Sick people.

Civilians.

We ran for a group of parked vehicles to use them as both a shelter and a choke point. The infected would have to squeeze in between the cars and golf carts in order to get us, and we would have the advantage of fewer numbers. We ran like hell and got there first.

Maberry, Jonathan. Rage: A Joe Ledger and Rogue Team International Novel (p. 276). (Function). Kindle Edition.
...

The infected rushed us, the first to reach us stumbling as the darts hit them and then being slammed into the vehicles by the wave of people behind. Even with the screams of rage we could hear the sharp, wet sounds of bones breaking and flesh bursting. I was behind an old Toyota Camry and the impact rocked it back with such force that two wheels lifted off the ground. Belle, Mun, and I were shoulder to shoulder, firing at them, and there was a change in tone of some of the screams as infected were crushed when the car dropped back down. A boy of about eleven crawled through the golf cart beside me and tried to stab Top with the jagged end of a broken boat oar, but Ho shot him. The boy vanished beneath a mass of seething bodies who crawled over him, smashing the frail body between seat and floor.

...

We raised our guns and shot them all.

We shot everyone on the town’s main street.

We dropped everyone who came at us. Everyone who ran, walked, crawled.

We did not discriminate for age or gender. Men and women, boys and girls. Babies and old folks. Our guns found them.

Maybe we should have felt better knowing that we were firing tranquilizers that would not kill them. Sure. Tell yourself that when you’re firing at a group of little kids, or a pregnant woman, or an old lady with rheumy eyes and little cloisonné kitty-cat pins on her sweater. We fired until our magazines were empty, then dropped the empties and swapped in fresh ones. And fired.

And fired.

...

As the darts hit, the raging people fell. Just like that. There was no struggle, no attempt to shake off the effects. They went down where they stood, weapons falling from slack fingers, eyelids fluttering shut, bodies sagging as the dreadful inner tensions were snapped off as if breakers were tripped inside their heads. We stood in a ragged line, a kind of half circle, with our backs to the wall of a crab shack, loading and firing. Covering for each other during reloads.

The Snellig dart guns’ range wasn’t great, but the effect was so fast that it didn’t matter, and we did not need to make accurate shots. No head shots, as with Seif al Din. The darts had to break the skin, and all of us were good enough shots to do that.

...

“On your left,” yelled Top, and I turned as a small pack of them came howling toward us. Nine of them, running together, each of them spattered with blood from the crimes they’d committed; all of them armed with pipes or wrenches or pieces of wood. One had a human arm—a woman’s, I think—that he brandished like a club. I wanted to kill him. More him than the others, even though it was obvious every one of this bunch had done awful things to their friends and neighbors. But the man waving the arm was emblematic of the deep horror of this, and the Killer in my head wanted to extinguish that, to erase it and the possibility of it from the tribal consciousness. To deny its potential and prevent such horrors from spreading like an infection.

I fired and tried to hold my ground, but they came fast. Flies were everywhere, drawn by the smell of blood in the air, and they crawled over my visor. They swarmed in the air, too small to be targets of our bullets or of the rage of the infected. Bunny and Belle moved to flank me and we took them all down. It felt obscene to do it so easily. Nine of them, three of us. Four seconds. I felt bile in my throat as if we’d slaughtered them.

...

The fight—if you could call something as one-sided as this a fight—went on, minute after endless minute. We began making our way through the town, sweating out our fear and horror as we walked beneath the unrelenting sun.

I saw sunlight through the throng and realized that the crowd was thinning. We were gaining the tactical edge here, despite their numbers. Within a couple of minutes the last of the closest ones were down, piled in heaps over their neighbors.

-Rage pg. 276-285, Kindle Edition