Even Zombie Killers Can Die (4 page)

Chapter 11

The ride back to Combat
OutPost Thor took about 20 minutes, and the thudding of the rotor blades didn’t do my head any good. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but every time I nodded off, Brit reached over and slapped me.

“Not
`til you get checked out by the doctors, no sleepy time for you!” she yelled in my ear. Then she would go back to swinging her legs out the open door of the helo. After the fifth time she smacked me, I gave up and watched the landscape pass beneath me.

The highways, both lanes, were jam packed solid with car wreckage heading north, out of the city. Two years of weather had flattened tires and started weeds growing through cracks in the pavement.
Sooner rather than later, the road itself would be unusable to anything except four wheel drive. Down the center lane the engineers had cleared a path, using a crane welded onto a wrecker to make way for supply trucks. Lone figures wandered on the side of the roadway, random zombies who couldn’t leave the place where they had died. The supply convoys made sport of shooting at them as they drove past.

Occasional columns of smoke rose from deserted villages, showing where salvage teams were burning off contaminated oil supplies
to prevent them from leaching into the ground water. The teams went through and stripped every piece of electronics, precious metals, and manufactured items that were still useable. Then they burned everything that might cause havoc in the environment.

The helo
flared onto the pad at COP Thor, and we stumbled out while they hot refueled, rotors still turning. We headed over to the Field Hospital, following the stretchers carrying the other wounded.. Despite Brits’ protests, I was checked out as OK for limited duty, and released.

“
Where to now, Oh Fearless Leader?”

“
Showers, then hot food, then the S-2 for some intel on the northern end of Lake Champlain.” Nothing beats a hot shower after being in the field, let me tell you. About halfway through, Brit slipped into the shower trailer, locked the door, and none of your damned business.

On the way down last week, I had shot a quick request to the Task Force Liberty intelligence officer, or S-2.
I needed all the information that he had in Northern Vermont/New York and Lake Champlain. He delivered it to me in a slim folder, with the added comment of “not much.”

INTSUM

NORTHERN LAKE CHAMPLAIN AREA OF OPERATIONS

Signals Intelligence has indicated surviving human populations in the area of Grand Isle, showing level of organization of 5M on the survivor index, meaning some official government agency remaining, suspected military.
No response to repeated radio query.

Two authorized over flights of local area and limited satellite
reconnaissance have indicated substantive fortification of Isle La Motte and Grand Isle. Bridges in area have all been destroyed. Heat sources indicate active motor vehicle traffic and a population of 400 and 1000, respective. Powered Maritime traffic has been observed in the form of small boats in satellite reconnaissance.

JSOC (Z) – IST ONE was dispatched on XXXXXXXX to attempt contact and assessment of survivors. Contact was lost with team on D + 5. No further attempt has been made to contact due to insufficient personnel and assets.
 
I handed it to Brit and she read it quickly, then handed it back.

“So, not much to go on.
It does tally with what Red told us.”

“Yeah, and I’m going to have to call in some favors to get support for us going up there. We need a helo to get us close, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to operate so far out in the wild without some kind of fire support.”

I gave the report back to the S-2, and asked him to forward anything else he came up with. Then we went to get some sleep. I fell deep, despite the cannons firing a hundred meters away.

Chapter 12

“BATTLE STATIONS!”

Brit yelled it full in my ear, the alert word we used for
“get your armor on, grab your weapon, and MOVE!” I rolled off my cot, slid my boots on, grabbed my armor in one hand and my rifle in the other, and ran out of the tent as fast as I could.

I stopped, now at least half awake, in the middle of the dusty street, holding onto my rifle and armor, one boot falling off, wearing a t-shirt and boxers, blinking in the bright sun, looking for a threat. Support soldiers walked past, giving me strange looks.

Turning around, I saw Brit standing in the doorway of the tent, one hand clapped over her mouth, trying not to laugh out loud. She gave up and fell to the ground, holding her stomach and laughing so hard that her eye was watering.

“Very fucking funny, hardy har har. Payback is a bitch, and so are you.” I stepped over her and back into the darkness of the tent to get fully dressed.

“I think I peed myself.”

“Serves you right.”

Later that day, we droned northward on a C-130. The canvas seats along the sides were, as usual, uncomfortable, and I was happy it was short ride. The cargo bay was filled with stretchers, but there weren’t a lot of wounded, all told, from the operation. When you were fighting zombies, you either avoided getting wounded or you were dead. Several of the guys on the plane were gunshot wounds, but most were burns. In a battle, especially one against a raving horde of
Zs that have breached your line, friendly fire isn’t always, like the old saying goes. It happens, more than people want to admit, and the Army had been pretty liberal with using napalm this time. When the Apocalypse happened, weapons that tended to cause a lot of destruction, like napalm or cluster bombs, weren’t used for fear of “damaging civilian infrastructure.” That all changed, of course, but by then it was too late. I remember that Boston took a nuke, right around Day 10 of the plague. Too much, too late. Not that I minded Fenway and the Red Sox getting nuked. 

The first thing I had to do was tell Mrs. Esposito she was a widow. She handled it better than I thought she would. I had done casualty assistance during the Iraq War, and I hated it. As a Senior NCO, it wasn’t up to us to tell the families. That was a job for an officer. I worked with them, helped them deal with the Army paperwork, the funeral arrangements, the shock that finally hit when reality settled in.
In some ways it was worse. The families were always so damn nice to me, and I was wearing the uniform of an organization which had, for better or worse, sent someone they loved to get killed. Mrs. Esposito was different, though. I handed her the letter I had written, but she just shook her head, squared her shoulders, and turned away from me. I guess we had all seen too much death in the last two years for it to shock anyone anymore.

Next we went to the hospital to pick up Red. He didn’t say
much, just climbed into the HUMVEE Brit had borrowed, and rode back to the JSOC liaison office with us.

The officer on duty, a Special Forces Captain who I knew from way back, rolled his eyes when he saw me come in, and muttered “oh
, shit” under his breath.

“I’m going to cut to the chase, Captain Mueller. My team is missing, and we’re going to go find them. I need transportation and supplies for the three of us.
”

“Nick, you know that the ISTs are expendable.”

“Maybe to you, but not to me. Besides, you owe Doc your life.” He didn’t like being reminded of that. Along the side of his neck was a jagged scar where a zombie had ripped through the skin, nicking his jugular at the evacuation of Manhattan. Doc had sewn it up before it completely ruptured.

“I can get you supplies, ammo, but there are no birds heading north. We can’t afford to spare any aircraft until the fighting is done in the City.”

“That could take weeks.” He shrugged his shoulders, and I knew that we weren’t going to get anywhere else with him.

“Brit, you and Red go draw enough supplies for two weeks in the field. Make sure you pick up a laser designator, too.
I have to go see someone.”

That someone was our old friend, Major McHale. I had seen an Evac UH-60 sitting on the runway when we came in, being worked on at the old National Guard Avi
ation Facility. I was hoping he would be there, making sure it got back into the fight as soon as possible. He liked to fly the broken ones, bringing them back up to get fixed. I guess he figured that the best pilot could handle the worst aircraft. I found him hunkered down inside the engine compartment, alongside a crusty old warrant who looked like he had been fixing helos since Korea.

“Well, this bird will be back up by tonight. I was planning on taking it straight back, but I suppose I could get disoriented and fly north instead of south. No one will notice anyway. It’s not like there is a war going on here at Fort Orange or anything.”

“Great, we’ll meet you here around 2300.”

Chapter 13

The helo set us down in a clearing two miles south of wh
ere the team had been ambushed, just as dawn was breaking. In addition to Brit, Red and me, we had three good guys from IST-7, the Dark Knights. They had been refitting after a scout into Northeastern Pennsylvania, heading down the I-88 corridor to see if there were any coal mines still in working condition. They had lost half their team just outside Scranton to a bridge collapse under their HUMVEE, sending three of them down into a river.

Their team leader, Captain
Buswarry, was a good friend, but I wasn’t going to miss his NCO, Master Sergeant Collins. I was actually glad it had been him that took a seventy foot drop into the Susquehanna River. He had always been a dick, and we had gotten into a fist fight in a bar in Bermuda when he wouldn’t leave Brit alone. Too bad about the other guys, though. Buswarry was an immigrant from Nigeria who had made good in the US, going Special Forces. He was on one of the last flights out of Ghana, where his SF team had been training locals in a nasty fight against Islamist extremists. He had joined the Irregular Scouts when we were recruiting up in Maine at the Navy base. His two guys, both civilians I didn’t know, but he assured me they were good in a fight. A redheaded guy named McCross and a woman I first took to be a man. She was built like a brick shithouse.

When we had met them at the OPS center, Brit had kneeled in front of her and called her “Lady Brianne
.” The woman, whose real name was Hart, looked at her like she was an idiot.

“Ignore her. She thinks you’re some character from
Game of Thrones
.”

The look she gave Brit wasn’t exactly friendly. I’m sure she was a bit touchy about her size.

“Get up, you little twit, before I squeeze your head so hard it pops.”

“Nick, I think I love her. Can I keep her?”

She called her Lady Brianne until later that day, as we were loading magazines. Hart put a friendly arm around Brits’ neck, then proceeded to put her in a choke hold that Brit almost passed out from. Brit gasped out “Uncle!” and the woman let her drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Red was laughing his ass off. When she had recovered her breath, Brit started to complain to me, but I told her that if she couldn’t take it, she shouldn’t dish it out.

“Maybe you should go apologize to her, too.”

Since then, she had ignored the big blonde woman. I did notice that Red spent an inordinate amount of time talking to her. Good for him. McCross was a quiet guy who did his job without saying much.

Now he was walking point, along with Red, who was trying to recognize landmarks. Soon enough, we came to the site. A canoe was still sitting on the
shore, half swamped, and spent cartridge brass gleamed in the morning sun. While the team pulled security, Brit and I scoured the site, looking for something in particular. I quickly found the bones of Segeant Toshi, mauled and scattered by wild animals, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.

We found it after ten minutes, tied to a tree.
A strip of brown uniform T-shirt, unnoticeable unless you knew to look for it. On the end was one knot.

“Red, you saw
Ziv and Doc after the ambush, right?”

He thought hard about it. “Yeah, both were in the boats but I thought maybe Ahmed was down or unconscious.”

“Nope.” I showed him the strip of T-shirt, and called Captain Buswarry over.

“Hey Glen, one of my guys is alive, or was after the ambush. You remember Ahmed?”

“Yeah, that sneaky Pashtun on your team. Hell of a shot.”

“This is
a message from him. He knew we would come after them.”

“So how do we find him?”

“We don’t. He finds us.”

He did, just as the sun set. We had
pulled back outside the clearing and set up a perimeter on a small knoll. Probably the same one from where Red had watched the campsite.

I was watching the site, wishing for full dark so I could turn my NVGs on. I heard a slight rustle off to my left, and I turned to look in that direction. I found myself staring down the barrel of Ahmed’s
Dragonov. He had slipped past our rear security and gotten within five feet of me before I heard anything, and then probably because he wanted me to.

Then we both heard the quiet “snick” of a weapon being taken off safe. Ahmed whispered to the figure that stood over him.

“Godless American whore, at least let me pray to Allah before you kill me.”

“OH MY GOD AHMED!” she whispered back loudly, and body tackled him. At least she had the presence of mind to put the safety back on before she did it.

“GET OFF ME, WOMAN! COVER YOURSELF!”

When Brit helped him up to a kneeling position, Captain
Buswarry had come over, leaving Red and his two others to pull security. A quick, quiet conversation followed.

“Nick, there is a squad sized element advancing down the trail from the north. I am assuming the
y heard the sound of your helicopter and are hoping to ambush you as they did to our team last month. I have been following them since this morning, and I moved ahead of them to warn you. We have about twenty minutes before they get here.”

I quickly thought about it. Our forces would be about equal size, but they knew the terrain and could move faster.
We had the advantage of surprise, though, because we knew about them, and they only suspected us.

“How good are they?”

“Nick, they are Infantry. American Infantry. Mountain soldiers, from the Vermont National Guard. Many combat veterans and survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse. They are good. I did not see any night vision equipment, though, and their weapons are a mix. One squad automatic weapon, but I think they are short on ammunition. The gunner only had M-4 magazines on him, no 200 round boxes, and there was a 30 round magazine inserted.” I didn’t ask him how he knew who they were, just assumed that one of their soldiers had disappeared in the prior month while Ahmed was living in the forest. We trumped them on firepower, too, since we had armed ourselves heavy based on the initial ambush. McCross carried an M-240B machine gun and we had two 40mm grenade launchers.

“Shit. I don’t want to kill our own. Until we get this
sorted out, though, I guess we’re going to have to do what we have to do. If they ask for surrender, though, we give it. I want prisoners. Besides, I have a plan. Here’s what we’re going to do.”