Even Zombie Killers Get The Blues (Zombie Killer Blues) (8 page)

Chapter 18

We never got off the ground. The rotors spun up,
then spun down. I woke up with a start, sensing the change in pitch. The crew
chief lowered the tail deck and motioned for everyone to get out, so I
unsnapped my harness, grabbed my ruck, and shuffled down the ramp.
Outside, a Blackhawk had just touched down. After the rotors stopped spinning,
two figures climbed down. Here came LTC Jackass with his faithful sidekick
Command Sergeant Major Peters, aka Poncho. They strode over with the Colonel
holding his Cavalry Stetson firmly on his head, as if the motionless helo would
blow it away. I’m surprised he didn’t have his spurs jingle- jangling. CSM
Peters was carrying an M-14 with more scopes, flashlights and targeting devices
than an M-1 tank. He aimed it this way and that, starting at every sound coming
out of the pre-dawn darkness. Twice he flagged me with his weapon, swinging it
in a wide arc that pretty much covered my whole team. We cringed backwards, as
we could see in the light of the burning chopper that his finger was on the
trigger.

Colonel Jackass stepped up to me and tried to stare
me down. I put my finger alongside my nose and blew snot out onto the ground in
front of him. He leaned forward and got two inches from my face, the firelight
making him look like some kind of red cherry tomato.

“Sergeant Major, arrest this man!” Peters started to
sling his weapon and reach for me. I stepped back and got ready to deliver a
full force punch to the Colonel’s face. Or his throat. I couldn’t decide which.
My arm was stopped by Doc, who had come up behind me.

“Arrest me? For what?”

“It was
your
negligence that got that helo
shot down tonight. I
ordered
you to get information on the prison.”

“What were we supposed to do, crawl over the walls? Keep
trying to take prisoners until we were dead?”

“You were too busy worry about your little whore to
do the job properly, Agostine!”

“You’re a piece of shit!” I lunged for him but Doc
and Jacob grabbed both my arms and wrestled me back. Then Peters finally got
around to unslinging his weapon. He had it halfway up before Ahmed had his
pistol pointed at his face from a few feet away. Jonesy had his pistol pointed
at the Colonel, in that stupid sideways gangbanger pose I had been trying to
break him of.

Captain David stepped in between us all, and put his
hands up, motioning for everyone to lower their weapons. CSM Peters didn’t
lower his rifle until Ahmed had put his pistol back into its holster. The Sergeant
Major was sweating like the pig he was. “Calm down, Gentlemen. We’re all on the
same side! Right, Nick? I’m sure the Colonel, once he gets eyes on the ground
situation, will understand the risk assessment on that kind of recon. Isn’t
that right, Sir?” said Captain David, interposing himself between us and the Colonel.
 
Jackass stared at Jonesy, who had a big, evil grin on his face. Then he
snapped out of it and started backing off to his helo. “Yes, sure Captain. I’ll
just do a flyby of the prison. Good job here. Get loaded up and get your men
out of here
.
”
“Piece of shit pissed his pants when I drew on him. Dumbass cracker.” Jonesy
laughed loud and hard.

Captain David ordered his guys to give us up some
ammunition for our rifles and some more clean water. “Nick, I suggest you and
your team start humping it out of here before he finds his courage again and
orders his crew chief to light you up with some machine gun fire for
insubordination.” Then the guys and the former slaves climbed into the CH-47
and rose into the sky, silhouetted against the faint dawn.

We jogged down the road for three miles, a slow
steady pace, even though we were all exhausted. I spotted a two-story building
on the side of the road. Around it was a ring of skeletons where a zombie wave
had fought to get into the building. We slow-walked through the ground floor,
clearing each room. When we got to the stairs, we found them hacked and
shattered, which was a pretty standard way of keeping zombies out during the
plague time. There were more skeletons clustered around the bottom. Most had
neat round holes in their skulls.
“Nice shooting,” muttered Ahmed, picking up a skull and examining it. Long
blonde hair still clung to it in patches. He put it back down gently.

Beside the stairs was a battered aluminum extension
ladder. It looked like it had fallen over instead of being placed down. Way I
figured it, someone was looting, used the ladder to get to the second floor,
and it fell. The noise from the ladder falling must have been like a dinner
gong for the local Z population.
“Shall we?” said Doc, with a motion to the ruined stairway, and he set the
ladder back up. We climbed up while Jonesy and Jacob stood guard below.
We found another skeleton lying on a couch in an upstairs office. This one was
clad in expensive Gortex hunting camouflage. The latest generation night vision
goggles hung around his neck and he had a full set of top-of-the-line body
armor. Across his chest lay a fancy tricked-out AR-15, the civilian version of
the M-16, with rails, scope, flashlight, handgrips, all the toys. The top of his
skull was missing and blood stained the wall behind the couch. There were a
couple of hundred brass casings and magazines on the floor of the window next
to the couch, piled around the top of the broken staircase. The bolt of the
weapon was locked to the rear on an empty magazine.
Saved one for himself. Better that than dying from thirst while the Zombies
waited for you outside. “All that fancy-shmancy gear and you died from being
stupid, Buddy. That’s what you get for working alone,” said Doc as pulled the
boots off the skeleton and tried them on, after pouring alcohol all over them.
“Nice fit! Just broken-in Bellevilles!” Yeah, the Army supply system sucked
that bad. Our uniforms were patched, boots worn-out, gear jury rigged. The one
thing that they could give us in quantity was ammo and weapons, which was good
enough, I guess.
The rest of the guys came upstairs. We pulled the ladder up after us and
settled down to get some rest. I logged into Facebook on my iPhone after Ahmed
got the radio set up and went to our secret Scouts group. I posted a long rant
about what an asswipe LTC Jackass was; then I showed the guys the picture Brit
had posted. She was sitting up in a hospital bed, making a stupid duck face and
flashing fake gang signs.
She was definitely going to be OK.

Chapter 19

1200 hours. I flipped on the speaker of the SINCGARS
and turned the volume up to be barely audible.

“Time for the news, boys.” Each day at 1200 hours,
the commo guys at Fort Orange rebroadcast the news. We ate it up like candy.

“… istening to the BBC World Broadcast.
The Royal Navy today intercepted a refugee fleet from Northern Russia when the
fleet tried to run the guard and avoid quarantine. HMS Sheffield was damaged by
a missile fired from a Russian destroyer. Casualties are unknown at this time.
The fleet was destroyed by a low-yield nuclear weapon. A statement issued by
the King’s spokesman affirmed England’s commitment to safeguarding the United
Kingdom from all threats.
”The Grand Committee of the House of Lords convened at Oxford again today to
hear the case against the King's prerogative powers and sidelining of
Parliament. In their thirteenth straight vote since the Emergency started, the
Lords overwhelming supported the continued exercise of His Majesty's war powers
as defined in the Constitution.

“In North America, elements of the US 82
^nd
Airborne seized control of the Bermudez oil field in southern Mexico in an
airborne assault. Heavy fighting was reported by our embedded correspondent in
a three-way battle between US forces, Mexican cartels and undead.”
“YEAH, GIT SOME, AIRBORNE!” yelled Doc, a former 82
^nd
paratrooper.

“Shut it, I’m trying to listen,” I told him.

“Shut it yourself, you dirty nasty leg.”

“… Japanese Defense Forces lost contact
with their last garrison on the main island of Honshu but have declared the
island of Shikoku to be cleared. Japan and Singapore remain the only parts of
Asia with a functioning government.” 
“This is the BBC World News.”
I clicked off the radio and thought about how many billions were dead, yet we
still fought on. Stubborn humanity, I guess. I never thought of quitting, even
at the worst of times. I guess the quitters were all dead by now.

We rested an entire day, cleaning weapons, taking
care of minor wounds, getting as cleaned up as we could. My head was still a bit
woozy after taking that round. And we were all starting to smell like ass after
a week in the field. Captain David had dropped off several cases of ammo, both
for the sniper rifle and our .22s. We had burned through more than I had wanted.
Loading magazines was a pain in the ass, but it had to be done. Click, click,
click.

Jacob sat down next to me later that evening. He had
his pistol in his hand and I assumed he had just finished cleaning it. I could
tell by the look on his face that he wanted to talk.

“Nick, that shit yesterday. In the prison cell
block.”

“Yeah, what about it, Jake?” I wasn’t sure where he
was going with this, but if the guy needed to talk, he needed to talk.

“I can’t get it out of my head. This is one hell of
a nightmare I’m in. I wish I could wake up.”

“Well, if you want to talk about it, how about you
put the pistol away first.”

He looked at it like he was seeing it for the first
time. “Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

Talking with Jacob was tough, because, even though
he performed well in the field, he really believed that he was in a dream. I
asked him once what he did before the plague and he had laughed. He told me he
was an accountant. Wife, two daughters, white picket fence around his house on
Long Island. I couldn’t square it with the dirty, unshaven gunslinger who sat
next to me. Then again, I don’t think he could square it with himself, either.

“I keep seeing all those women and kids, the ones we
didn’t get to in time. I close my eyes and there they are, right there. I can
smell the gun smoke from that guards’ rifle.”

“We all have a tough time dealing with it, Jacob.
It’s what makes us human.”

“What I can’t get over, Nick, is how real it seemed.
I know I’m in a dream. I
have
 to be in a dream. Otherwise, Jean and the
girls are dead. Or even worse, undead.”

We were treading on dangerous ground. I’ve seen guys
lose it in the field before, both in Afghanistan and here. One minute they’re
fine, and then
snap
, they break. The toughest guys out there. Everyone
has a breaking point. I think Jacob was approaching his.

He sat silently for a moment while I thought of how
to answer him, but before I could, he stood up.

“One way or another, Nick, it’s not a place I want
to be. Either I come out of this nightmare or the nightmare is real.”

“Maybe you need to talk to Doc, see if he can give
you something to help you sleep.” I started to get up, meaning to get Doc, but
he shook his head no and walked over to the ruined stairway. Before I could
stop him, Jacob had jumped down and run out the front door of the building. I
called for the others. We grabbed out gear and climbed down after him, but by
the time we got out the door, he was long gone. I stopped at the door and told
everyone to go back to bed. We would find him in the morning, or not. Most
likely not.

As we watched the sun rise at stand-to, we heard a
single shot echo through the woods.

We found him just down the road. Leaning with his
back against a tree, a picture of his wife and kids on his lap, his pistol
still in his hand. He had waited `til dawn so he could see them one more time.
The four of us dug him a deep grave, shouldered our packs and started walking.

“Hey Nick, you think Jacob is in a better place
now?” Jonesy dropped back as Doc replaced him on point and walked beside me. He
could tell I was in a foul mood. Three men killed, Brit wounded. This was a
tough mission and it was getting to me.

“I don’t know, J. Maybe this
is
a nightmare,
and he managed to get out of it. Lord knows I wish the old world would come
back.”

“I don’t. Old world, I got shit on by the man. Five years
in a state pen like that joint we just cracked, all because I beat the crap
outta some dude that raped my sister. I
like
this world, Nick. I am the
right hand of justice, and I can serve it out like jelly on a cracker. Just not
on
you
crackers. YEAH, I MEANT YOU, DOC, YOU CRACKER-ASS BIKER!”

Doc flipped him the finger over his shoulder, not
taking his eyes from where we were going. I actually smiled a little and Jonesy
dropped back to talk with Ahmed. I felt a little better.

Who knew, psychotherapy from an ex-con?

Chapter 20

We headed out down the railroad tracks, both for
survey and to keep off the roads. Walking down railroad tracks were a bitch
because the rail ties never seemed to land under your foot. It made for a more
tiring walk, but on either side of the grade was swamp and mud. It was hard
keeping on our toes with the sun beating down on us. When you hump a rucksack,
you sweat. I don’t care how hardcore you are, humping a ruck is hard work, and
we were soaked in sweat before we had gone a mile. So much for being clean.

As I walked slowly along the tracks, scanning my
sector for movement, my mind wandered. Half paid attention to what was going on
around me. It had to, or we would be dead.
The
other half thought back, remembered, dragged up conversations with people long
dead, replayed events in my mind. I tried not to think about before the plague.
Some things are too painful. Instead, my glance crossing over Jonesy’s pack as
I did a slow turn to walk backwards for a few meters, checking our six, I
thought of how the team had come together. 

It had been at the FEMA camp on Grand Island, just
west of Buffalo. The Feds and the Army were just gearing up for Task Force
Empire, and Doc and I had reported into the base, reactivated under Presidential
executive order to our old ranks. Everyone who ever served, up to age 65, was
reactivated and automatically made part of their old branch of service. In
theory, anyway. I had made contact with a small “clear and hold” unit that had
airdropped into the high ground just west of Schenectady. They had flown me,
along with a dozen others, to the Seneca Army Depot in the Finger Lakes. While
waiting for assignment, and starting to chafe under the usual Army chickenshit
rules, I had run into Doc, whom I knew from way back. Together we came up with
the idea for the scouts and pitched it to a Major we knew in the Infantry. We
resigned the next day and we were hired as Irregular Scouts. Next thing we
knew, we were on a UH-60, flying over the ruins of Buffalo on our way to the
camp on Grand Isle.

I stood in front of the ragged group of civilians
and looked them over. A sadistic-looking little man wearing a drill sergeant
hat was barking at them, trying to get them to stand in ranks, doing the usual
“YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW, MAGGOT” crap. Most of them looked at him with
contempt. These people were the survivors. They had lived through the plague
and everything after, volunteered to serve. Maybe some were there for three
hots and a cot, but I doubted it. They had carried the other ninety percent
milling around the FEMA camp who sat in their tents, relieved the government
had finally gotten there so they could kick back. Deadweight. I had seen them
as I walked through the camp, the vacant looks on their faces. The ones who had
been carried through the plague by the fighters. The same fighters who stood
before me in this group.

I stood for a minute, then whispered to Doc “Watch
the big black dude.” The sergeant had gotten in his face, or more like his
chest, and was yelling obscenities up at him, ending with “DO YOU HEAR ME,
BOY?” At which point, the black guy punched him as hard as he could in the
face. The sergeant went down for the count, flat on his back. The other around
them laughed, until they heard the rattle of bolts being drawn back and rounds
being chambered in the rifles of the Military Police team nearby.

“HOLD IT!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, and
walked forward to address the crowd. Doc knelt down and checked out the
sergeant, who was trying to sit up, holding his face. I told the Military
Police team to stand down, which they did, staring angrily at the group.
“My name, for those who care, is Sergeant First Class Nicholas Agostine. Just
so you know, the Army you just volunteered for isn’t the kinder, gentler Army
anymore. You, black guy, what’s your name?”

He stepped forward. “Jones. LeShaun Jones.”

“Well, Jonesy, you aren’t back on the block anymore.
Those guys” and I motioned to the three soldiers who were helping the Drill
Sergeant sit down on a bench, “will shoot you for something like that. Matter
of fact, they probably
are
going to shoot you, just as soon as I leave
here, to make an example out of you. I don’t have to explain to you how cheap
life is nowadays.”

Most of them acknowledged what I had said. Jones just
stood there and glared at me.

“Can you run? Or is that all just muscle?” I asked
him, poking him in the chest. Holy crap, this dude was big.

“Yeah, I can run. Bet yer ass.”

“Good, because I’m taking you with me.” I turned my
back to him and faced the crowd again.

“Like I said before, my name is SFC Agostine. This
is SFC Hamilton, my team medic. I’m recruiting a few volunteers to serve on my
scout team. Our job is to go out and be the eyes and ears of Task Force Empire,
the Army’s push back into New York State. It’s going to be dangerous as hell,
but we will be on our own, detached from the regular army bullshit, not even
part of the command. Our actual overhead is Joint Special Operations Command,
or JSOC. If you’re interested, Doc and I will be over here for the next few
minutes. Think about it.” I pointed at Jones. “You, come with me if you want to
live.”

We walked away, Jones following, and sat down on the
steps of ruined library building. A dozen people walked over to us and we
formed them in a line, interviewing each one. We had picked out six of them,
all tough, competent survivors, when a vaguely familiar, dusky-skinned man
stepped up to me.

“Name?”

“Ahmed.”

“Last name.”

“If I told you, will you torture me again, Nick
Agostine?”

I looked up from the laptop where I had been
punching in people’s names and shielded the sun from my eyes. I recognized him
at once. He had been on our capture list for months in Afghanistan, leading a band
of independent tribesmen who fought us and the Taliban with equal ferocity
whenever anyone trespassed into his valley. At one time, he had been a member
of the Taliban but had gone off on his own, disgusted by their attacks on
children. He had hated America with equal vehemence for an airstrike which had
killed two of his own children. We had him in custody once, but the last I
heard, he was in Guantanamo Bay Prison.

“Ahmed Yasir. What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I am signing up for your team.”

I closed my eyes for a minute. Doc stood next to me,
his pistol in hand. Ahmed stood calmly, arms folded. I opened my eyes and took
the man in. He was dressed in ragged street clothes, three days growth of beard.
Trying to blend in with the crowd. There were more than enough assholes who had
let the plague be an excuse to take out their racial prejudice against whatever
group they hated.

“I meant, what are you doing in America?”

“As for what I
was
doing in America, well, I
was guest of your prison system. The great Satan has fallen far lower than
anything I could have hoped to have done, and I actually like it here. I am
here, my country is gone, and Allah has given me an opportunity to slay demons.
I will never be able to go back to Afghanistan. There are plenty of demons to
slay here.”

I thought for a minute. Ahmed Yasir was one bad-ass
mofo and my company had spent months chasing him. I hadn’t really tortured him,
just beat the crap out of him when we finally caught him. Payback for the men I
had lost. Still, I had a lot of respect for the bastard. He fought fair, as
fair as anyone could fight in that dirty little war.

I held out my hand. “Welcome to the Zombie Killers,
Ahmed. Screw me or any of us over and we’ll cut your balls off.” He looked me
in the eye, nodded, and shook my hand.

That was more than two years ago, and at last count,
we had had something like five hundred percent casualties, dead, zombied or
wounded. Now, excepting Brit, we were down to the four of us who made the core
of the team and she was out of action for a while. I kinda laughed to myself as
I walked, thinking of an old pop culture reference.

Jonesy heard me and asked what I was laughing at.
“Time for some more Redshirts, Jonesy.” I told him. Yeah, I felt every injury
and death my team had suffered but sometimes, screw it, you just gotta laugh at
death. Civilians, they never understood.

Chapter 21

The Z jumped me out of a doorway. I was walking
point as we made our way into Whitehall. I had done a quick peek around the
corner, seen that it was clear down the street and moved forward. The doorway
was on the edge of the building that I had just looked around, and the Z had
been huddling in the doorway. It sprang up on me, immediately going for my
throat and knocking my rifle out of my hands. I hunched my neck up in my
collar, jammed my forearm into its mouth, and swept the legs out from under it.
I landed with a nasty, bone snapping crash on top of it and started hammering
the things’ head into the pavement. It bit down even harder on the woven Kevlar
sleeve of my uniform jacket, pushing the steel strip sewn into the sleeve into
the flesh of my arm with a bite like a steel trap. All that kept running
through my head was
don’t tear, don’t tear, don’t tear
. My right hand
was trying to reach for the hammer I wore slung on my belt and the weight of my
pack was threatening to tip me over. I hunched down even further in my collar
and turned my face away from the clawed fingers. One scratch and I was screwed.
It might take a minute for the infection to get me, but Doc would have put a
bullet in my head long before that. I gave up on the hammer and started
scrabbling around for a rock or something on the street. I came up with a piece
of broken asphalt and hammered it into the thing’s head over and over. It
finally stopped moving but its jaws stayed locked on my arm. I pulled out my
K-bar knife and worked it into the jaw, cutting away, careful not to get any of
the body fluids on my exposed skin. It finally let go when I cut the tendons to
the jaw and I rolled away, onto my pack, shaking like a frigging leaf.

A burning-hot brass cartridge casing spun through
the air and landed in my collar as I lay there catching my breath, and I
scrabbled to pull it out. I saw another fall to the ground in front of me and
bounce off the pavement and looked up to see Doc standing there.

“A LITTLE HELP!” He stood next to me, had been there
the whole time, firing methodical shots into a crowd of Zombies advancing up
the street, a milling, chaotic mass. Ahmed and Jonesy faced the other way,
firing back down the way we had come.

F’ing surrounded. I jumped up and joined Doc firing
at the Zs, which were closing in quickly. More piled out of buildings on either
side.

This was just the situation we tried to avoid, being
run down by a horde of Zs in a town where anything could pop out at you. We had
made it most of the way through town and were just a few hundred meters short
of the canal lock, the end of our mission. That’s the way it always happens.

“ACTION RIGHT, MAKE FOR THE CANAL!” I yelled, and we
all turned and concentrated our fire on the Zs between us and the water. As we
fired, we ran at them. Every few shots we would connect with a skull and one
would fall. Ten meters away from the closest ones, we dropped our weapons in
their slings and pulled out our pistols, firing shots at their heads. Then we
charged them, swinging our bats and steel rods and hammers as fast and as hard
as we could. In a few seconds we were through them, dropping our Z knockers and
hauling ass for the water, followed by a crowd of Zs charging after us. We
gained a few yards and as we reached the edge of the canal, we dropped our
packs, vaulted the low railing and dove straight into the water.

It closed over my head and I started to sink down. I
reached the mud at the bottom and kicked upwards. My eyes were screwed shut.
Deep water over my head terrifies the shit out of me. I broke the surface and
tried to tread water before going down again. I crossed the canal in a series
of bounds, pushing off the bottom to get air from the surface of the six foot
deep water, gasping as much air as I could before sinking back down. I made it
the fifty or so feet across the canal, getting more and more tired. I almost
didn’t make it but a huge hand grabbed me and pulled me out of the water as I
sank the last time, just short of the edge,. I lay there gasping for breath.
Beside me, the guys were catching their breath too. Jonesy stood up and yelled
across the water at the Zombies clustered at the edge of the canal.

“HEY YOU! SHITHEADS! THROW MY PACK OVER! I AIN’T
FINISHED READING MY BOOK YET!”

We all burst out laughing. Jonesy looked hurt.

“What? I was reading
World War Z
. I wanted to
know how that shit turned out.”