Even Zombie Killers Get The Blues (Zombie Killer Blues) (3 page)

Chapter 6
“Know what I’m pissed about?”
I sighed as we walked along the river road.
Here it comes
, I thought.
“I’m pissed that we’re never, ever going to go to the stars. This killed it.
Right here.” Brit gestured to the potholes in the road, the ruined house we
were walking slowly passed, eyes peeled for Zs.
“Why Brit, I didn’t even know you had such ambitions,” said Ski. Doc walked
past, made like he was tightening down the chinstrap on his helmet and hunched
his shoulders with an
oh no
look. Jonesy started whistling and
pretending to be interested in some flowers on the side of the road.
“Well, Ski, you don’t know shit about me. For example, what did I do before the
plague?”
“I dunno. College girl who banged football players?”
She stopped in midstride and smacked him as hard as she could upside his
Kevlar. “DAMN, BRIT, OW!”
“You’re right, but you deserved that anyway, jerk. I was an engineering major.
I was going to go to the
stars
. Or build in space, anyway. Do you
understand me? I was going to design space habitats. I wanted to design the
first habitation on the moon
. It’s all gone now,
Nick. All gone.

 She started crying, tears rolling down her cheeks,
and lengthened her stride.  Then she sat down in the road, screamed as loudly
as she could and started pounding on the pavement in front of her with her war
hammer. The guys walked around her, ignoring her screams and frustrated
pounding. After a few minutes, she stopped, slung the hammer over her back,
picked up her weapon and resumed the march.

“Hey babe, you OK?”

She looked at me. I knew her backstory. Living in a
college campus, in the ruins of Syracuse University. Doc and I had found her
holed up in a cafeteria, on one of our first scouts. Six months, living on
canned food and having the most god-awful amount of traps around her, drinking
rainwater from barrels on the roof. Going slowly crazy with no one to talk to,
dodging Zs every day to get wood for a fire. She had nearly taken my head off
with a baseball bat and Doc had needed to sedate her to get her calm enough to
talk to us. Even now, I wasn’t sure she had completely gotten over it.

“I’m OK. I just got to thinking, you know, about
before.”

“Keep that up, you
will
go crazy. You can’t
think about before. You know that.”

PTSD. Crazy. Traumatized. We all are, we all have it.
How can you watch the death of almost everyone you loved? OK, for most of us,
everyone
we loved? How can you watch civilization, or most of it, crumple around you in
a month and not go crazy? The Snap, we called it. For a minute, for half an
hour, whatever it took, sometimes you just grew so goddamned bitter and angry
and felt such a deep sense of loss you broke down and screamed at the world. 
For some, they broke and never came back. Walked off and were never seen
again.  Someone like Jacob, he went off into his own world of denial. Thinking
this whole thing was a dream. For others, like Jonesy and Ahmed, growing up in
the ghetto and in the middle of a war, life honestly wasn’t much different now.
Maybe better. They could shoot who they needed to shoot without repercussion,
and for the most part, no one cared what color your skin was or which side of
the war or city you’d been on. Just that you were alive.

Brit, she was the same story. I knew she had been a
straight 4.0 student. Smart as hell. All she cared about now was living life in
the right here and now, because the Zombie Apocalypse had stolen her future.
Like it had stolen everyone else’s.  

On point, Jacob held up his fist, dropped to one
knee, cut his hand sideways then pointed forward. People, not Zs. We all
dropped down and took up firing positions, a quick hasty ambush set up along
the road.
We heard them long before we saw them. Horses. HORSES. At least two, coming
along at a trot. No one had horses anymore, or more like no one used them for
transportation. If a horse got within a hundred meters of a Z, it bolted. Flat
out took off running like its ass was on fire, regardless of who or what was on
its back, and often ran until its heart burst from exhaustion. Back in the
secured zone, I heard, they still used them for farming, but out here they ran
in wild herds that were impossible to come near. They had gotten even wilder
and ran from humans, too, now. I would kill for a freaking horse to ride,
instead of walking.
“OK, time to earn my leader’s paycheck.” I stood up out of the grass and
stepped into the road, weapon pointed down but safety off.
“HALT.” I spoke forcefully, and the two enormous horses slowed but kept
plodding towards me until their riders could get a good look at me, then they were
reigned in. Two men sat astride them, shotguns pointed in my general direction,
threatening but not directly so. They looked like just about any post-plague
refugees---secondhand clothes, heavy leather jackets to keep off Zombie bites,
chaps to guard their legs from bites, heavy gloves. These guys were cleaner
than most, but damn, they smelled. Something I hadn’t smelled in a while. Yep,
these guys were farmers. Manure clung to their heavy rubber boots. Their noses
were immune to the smell, but it burned my nostrils as they got closer.  
“Mighty presumptuous of you to be telling us to halt on our own road. We’ve got
no tolerance for scavengers here. Though from the looks of you…” He eyed my uniform,
with the American flag, the black and red Z patch on my right shoulder and the
Task Force Liberty patch on my left shoulder. I saw his eyes read the “US ARMY”
stenciled on the front of my black armor.

“Your road? I thought this was a county road.”

The older one, a grey-haired dude with a scarred
face, laughed out loud. “Ha!  A scavenger with a sense of humor!”
“We’re not scavengers.” I lowered my weapon and put it back on safe. “Nick
Agostine, United States Army Irregular Scouts.”

“Irregular scouts?”
“Yessir. We work for the Army, but we aren’t actually in the Army.”

“Funny line of business. So, I suppose you’re just
scouting out here all by your lonesome? Good way to get killed.”

I whistled once, low, and the rest of the team stood
and stepped out onto the road.  Five of them stayed on guard, weapons pointing
out or back down the road. Jonesy stood next to me, M-4 looking like a toy in
his massive hands. What good that would do if the frigging huge horses decided
to trample his ass, I don’t know. The two horses were gigantic and stood rock
still. The riders seemed more taken aback than the horses but they recovered
quickly.

“I see,” said the older man, who introduced himself
as Dave. “Well, maybe the rest of the world is catching up with us. Knew it
would happen eventually. Hang tight while we dismount and talk for a spell.”
Dave, his brother Alan and their families lived on a fortified farm a mile
inland from the river. We had come across people like him before; tough farmers
who had busted their asses to fence off a couple of dozen acres, fortified
their houses and generally held their own. Farms that were a combination of
small fortress and house stood off in the fields, usually farther from. What was
unique about these guys was the horses. They didn’t even flinch when we came
near them, just flared their nostrils. The two of them were out on what he
called “Z patrol,” basically riding around a few miles from the farm, looking
for stray undead that might have stumbled their way.
“So what’s with the horses? How come they aren’t running screaming, actually
letting you ride them? How do they handle being around Zs?”
“They hate ‘em, but not like normal horses. I had a hobby horse farm, imported
these guys from Belgium. These two were bred for war. They were bred to carry a
man in full armor and they make a hell of a plow horse. You can ride them into
a crowd of Zs and they will stomp flat anything in their way.”
I eyed them enviously. To ride instead of walk!

“Are they for sale?”

“Not on your life, Sonny.” Alan leaned a little
closer to his shotgun and kept a wary eye on the rest of the team.

“OK, but can they breed? Do you have foals?”

“Ayup. Got four foals and a couple of yearlings on
the farm, another two on the way. Maybe we can do some horse trading, eh, Sonny?”
Dave seemed to find this uproariously funny and laughed out loud.

Brit stood stroking their noses while I called in to
LTC Jackass. His immediate response was for us to “seize the horses” when I
explained to them they were Belgian war horses, definitely not afraid of
Zombies. I told him to piss off, then suggested maybe we could buy them. After
his usual temper tantrum bullshit, we finally got him to agree to look into the
Army
contracting to buy horses from the farmers in
the future.
I could imagine the Colonel pissing all over himself with
happiness. The man who brought mobility to the army again! It would get him
promoted, for sure. I bet he was already walking around in his stupid Stetson
hat and spurs like some demented 19
^th
century Cavalryman.
 

“Sounds like a real winner you got for a boss, there,”
commented Dave as he spit some tobacco juice out on the road and climbed back
in the saddle. He had swapped Jonesy some fresh jerky from his saddlebags for a
can of dip.

“You have no idea. When time comes to actually trade
with him, make sure you have people watching your back. It’s all about him, and
what’s good for him.”

He nodded his head as Alan snapped at his reins and
started plodding off. “It always is with people like that, isn’t it?”

Chapter 7
I was hungry again, but I’m always hungry. Most people left alive in America
are always hungry. We have been for years.  Even when I get enough food, and I
usually do now, I’m still haunted by the ghost of hungry. That first two years,
when there was
no
food anywhere. Stores looted, farms trampled and
torched, refrigeration gone, no food distribution system, animals like deer and
cows hunted almost to extinction. I’ve eaten deer, possum, cat, dog, rat, mice,
woodchucks, pigeon, just about anything with meat on it except for humans. The Zs
were just an added burden. How many people got eaten by zombies because they had
to leave a safe hideout for food? Thousands. Millions, maybe. Hunger will drive
a man to do just about anything, including risking a zombie attack just to get
something to eat. Matter of fact, I think most of the ammo expended in the last
few years wasn’t aimed at Zs but at other people, fighting over food.
The animals were coming back, at least in our neck of the woods. Skunks were
filling a lot of empty positions in the food chain because no one wanted to
risk eating them and we had eaten all their predators. Having the Army around,
or what was left of it, pushing their way back up the Mohawk Valley gave us
regular access to MREs when we went on mission, and we always took more than we
would ever need to stock up. The Restored US Government was a fragile thing. We
all hedged our bets. I’m never going to starve again, not if I can help it.
Even now, everyone’s diet sucks. We don’t get enough of the things we need,
like fresh vegetables and vitamins. Another thing they got wrong in the movies.
Maybe on the way back we would stop at Dave’s farm and trade for some food
stuffs. I stopped and marked out their location in the battered Delorme Atlas
of New York that I carried in my ruck. It joined a host of other marks on that
page; safe houses, weapons caches, clean water, heavy Zombie infestations. This
had become my Bible.

We approached Fort Edward the next morning after
spending the night in some trees, slung in hammocks. Not a fun way to sleep but
it kept the Zs away, and we couldn’t find a good house to hole up in before
dark. Hopefully tonight we could sleep in a farmhouse I remembered from before the
plague. We would have to put some miles on us, though, because I did
not
want to linger in the Glens Falls area. As it was, getting a good look at the
rail bridge wasn’t going to be fun.

Creeping slowly forward toward the lock, weapons at
the ready, I expected something similar to what we had seen in Schuylerville.
The lock at Fort Miller, ten miles south, had been a wreck. The doors had been
torn open by some violent flood of the Hudson sometime over the past few years.
We had photographed it and moved on.

The southern lock to the Champlain Canal was an
important one. From here, we could sail up to Lake Champlain, open up the mines
in the Adirondacks again, farm the fertile lands of Vermont. It was all about
reclaiming the country, one little slice at a time. Sure, the canals were old
school, but they worked or were easy to make work again.

As we came up the road and turned a corner we could
see that, at a distance, there were Zombies wandering around the lock area,
scavenging through the bush for small animals. We could see maybe a few dozen
and knew there were probably more that we didn’t. More than we could reliably
take down before the howling started. Time to think a way to get them away from
there.
I gathered the squad around me and explained the plan. “We’re going to have to
do a runner.”

“Oh, hell no.”

“Oh, hell yes. Ahmed, your turn.” The only person
exempted from the roster was Doc Hamilton. Our medic stayed with us at all
times.

A runner was just that. One of us stripped down of
all gear except a silenced .22 pistol, then took off like a bat out of hell
through the Zombies, firing as he or she went, then hauled ass away from the
rest of the team or some variation thereof. The idea was to get the Zombies to
chase you, lead them into a blind alley or something, then cut back to the
team. It was dangerous. Iinsane. And a huge frigging rush.

Ahmed took a minute to consult the map. We agreed on
a place to meet if he wasn’t back in an hour, divided up his gear among the
others. He kissed his rifle and handed it to Brit.

“Take this, you godless American whore, and guard it
with your life.”

“I will, you son of a motherless camel turd,” she
replied, and kissed him on the forehead.

Ahmed gave her a hug, knelt and said a quick prayer
to Mecca, or to the radiation-filled crater that used to be Mecca. Then he took
off running, straight through the crowd of Zombies, yelling “Allllllah Akbarrrrr!”
at the top of his lungs and taking pot shots at them. We joined in with our suppressed
rifles after they had turned to run after him, trying to cut down the odds, but
stopped firing as soon as they blocked him from view. They disappeared down the
road, moving at a fast jog, the ones that had functioning legs. Like I said,
Zombies can move quickly when they have to.

Jacob and Jonesy quickly dispatched the two immobile
Zs that were crawling off in the direction Ahmed had taken. We broke out the
cameras and started photographing the canal lock doors, which were open,
allowing a flow of water to come pouring out. That was good, because it meant
the canal was still a through route, it hadn’t become blocked somewhere further
upstream. The machinery was trashed, but mainly we were looking for structural
damage.

We had been at it for twenty minutes when Ahmed came
tearing ass around the corner back from the direction he had run, yelling at
the top of his lungs and followed by several hundred Zombies. We immediately
hit dirt, getting as out of sight as we could while the river of Zs hurtled by.
We could smell the awful stench that always accompanied the dead. Next to me,
Brit started to vomit, but I clasped a hand over her mouth. I would let her
choke before I let her make a sound. She struggled a bit but swallowed it back
down.
The last Z passed and we ran in the opposite direction. Time to put some
distance between us and the crowd and fort up, if we could. Ahmed was on his
own, and we would see him again. Oor not. He knew where to meet us.
We ran.