Even Zombie Killers Get The Blues (Zombie Killer Blues) (9 page)

Chapter 22

Damn. Our packs sat where we had grounded them. The
zombies were tearing through them, infuriated by the smell of living humans on
them. As we watched, they scattered our extra ammo, rations, clothes,
everything.

“Jonesy, please tell me you still have the radio.”

He pulled it out of the frame that it rode in on the
back of his plate carrier and turned it over. Water poured out of it. He saw
the look on my face.

“Well, it might work once we dries it out, Nick.”

“Yeah, it might. OK, how are we doing for ammo?”

I was alright, with a dozen full magazines. Doc and
Jonesy were down to three mags each and I quickly cross-loaded so we each had
six. Ahmed had about two dozen rounds left for his sniper rifle. We each had
about fifty rounds for our .22 pistols and each of us had an MRE and some water
stuffed in our assault packs.

“Well, we’re alright on food and water for the next
day. Ammo should be fine if we avoid getting in the shit like we just did. We
have one more set of locks to check out and then we can call for EVAC. Let’s
move a mile or so down the road and then take a break. Take turns trying to dry
out your clothes, and cleaning weapons, fifty percent security. Half an hour
each.”

The mile went quickly, but we ran into three Zs that
had been attracted by the commotion on the other side of the canal. We shot
them, cleanly, and, even if I had my camera anymore, I wouldn’t have bothered
taking their pictures. Not worth the time and effort anymore. From here on out,
it was finish the mission, nothing else. We settled down in a bunch of trees,
just off the side of the road. Doc and I took first watch. Jonesy quickly set
about stripping the radio after he had cleaned his weapon, drying each part as best
he could and laying the circuit boards out in the sun. Then we switched off,
and last thing I did was reassemble the radio and test it out.

“Empire Main, this is Lost Boys, radio check, over.”

I pictured the commo geeks sitting high on Prospect
Mountain over Lake George, barricaded in their little fortress/van. They had
been air mobiled in a few weeks ago to coordinate coms and provide retransmitting
capability to any of the teams operating in the southern Adirondacks. Our
SINCGARS backpack radios would never reach back to TF Liberty, so they relayed
the signals of all the teams operating in the area via microwave transmitter,
line of sight to the big tower at Fort Orange. I wouldn’t want their job;
endless hours of boredom punctuated by terror when you had to go out of your
armored van to service the antennas or take a dump, or run the 20 feet to your
armored sleeping trailer.
“Lost Boys, we read you Licken’ Chicken, out.”
Great, the radio was
still working. I wasn’t looking forward to having to hump all the way back to
Fort Orange through Indian Country if we weren’t able to call in a helo for
evac. Another couple of hours and we were done, and we would be riding that
sweet chopper back to Fort Orange for mission debrief, and we would get to see
Brit again.

We moved out, single file, slowly threading our way
to the canal locks. I hated the end of missions because that’s when guys got
killed. You get slack, looking forward to what’s next; hot showers, good food,
getting laid. Drop your guard. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Yo, Jonesy, stay on your toes. Now isn’t the time
for slacking off.”

“Yo, Nick, shut the hell
up. I know what I’m doing. Man, you more nervous than an Infantryman at
a queer convention. Don’t know whether to run or join in.”

We made it to the locks without incident. The three
of them pulled guard while I checked out the machinery and looked at the gates.
These looked like they had been smashed with high explosives and lay twisted
open at each end. Weird, but nothing the Engineers couldn’t fix.

“OK, Boys, that’s it. Homeward bound!”

I rang up TF Liberty TOC and gave them my final
report, accompanied by pictures from my iPhone. I requested an EVAC as soon as
possible. That’s when LTC Jackass came on the horn.

“Lost Boys, what is your current food,
water and ammunition status, over?”

“Empire, we are at about one day of rations and twenty-five
percent on ammo. Maybe less, over.”

I waited for an acknowledgement. Nothing came.

“Empire, Empire, this is Lost Boys, over.” I
repeated this three times. No answer.

OK, sometimes commo goes down. America was still
pretty screwed up. A lot of crap we were using was dragged out of prepositioned
stores sitting on a ship off Diego Garcia or something. Not the newest, top of
the line stuff. Still, it was a little unsettling. I gathered the guys around.

“Here’s the situation. No coms, no helo. I trust
this guy, the TF Empire commander, as far as I can spit. What do you think?”

Doc advised that we wait for later tonight, see if
we could get commo up then. Ahmed had nothing to say. Jonesy was of the opinion
LTC Jackass was setting us up for failure.

“Nick, that sumbitch has had it out for you ever
since you countermanded that order he gave outside Saint Johnsville, when he
wanted to level that village with artillery and you were convinced that there
were civvies living there. You made him look bad, and this whole pissing in his
pants thing over at the prison. That dude don’t like you nothing at all.”

“Jonesy, he may be an asshole but he’s still an
Officer in the US Army. He can’t just leave us out here high and dry.”

“Wanna bet? I seen plenty of mothers like him in
prison. Always out for himself, and if you make them look bad, they gonna stick
a shiv in you fast as they can.”

“OK, well, we’ll try to call in tonight. Meanwhile,
let’s put some mileage between us and Whitehall, try to find a place to lay up
for the night.”

We had jogged a kilometer or so down the road when
we heard a ripping sound, followed by a POP, then a rumbling series of
explosions that knocked us all to the ground. Or it would have, if we hadn’t
all dove to the ground the second we heard the rocket coming in.

A Multiple Launch Rocket System, or at least the battery
at Fort Orange, fires the MGM-140A - Block I rocket. It has an unguided range
of roughly one hundred kilometers and carries almost a thousand antipersonnel
bomblettes, each about the size and explosive power of a hand grenade. The
explosions leveled the entire center of town, including the lock area where we
had been standing less than twenty minutes before.   

I stood up after a few minutes and looked at the
cloud of dust and smoke rising behind us.

“That sonofabitch.”

Chapter 23

We all stood, watching the dust settle. Well,
Jonesy, Doc and I stood and watched. Ahmed continued to scan the area.

“Pretty impressive, no?” asked Ahmed, though his
eyes never left the surrounding trees. “None of you have ever been on the wrong
side of American artillery before. You should try being in a cave while it
detonates directly overhead. I have seen men go insane.”

His comments shook us out of our stupor.

“OK, well, um, oh fuck,” I said.

“Yeah, that about sums it up, Nick. Where to now,
fearless leader?” Doc hunched down on the ground, pouring water into an MRE
heater.

“Well, I can think of one place we’re going to wind
up eventually.”

“Yep, back at Fort Orange.”

“It’s going to be a bitch to sneak in there.”

“We’re not going to sneak in there. We’re going to
walk in there in the middle of the night, just like we we’re coming back from a
mission. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. Meanwhile, we have to
get through the next couple of days. We have a few hours of daylight left. Our
first objective is to go back to the prison, see if there is anything we can scrounge
from there. At the least there has to be water, and we might be able to get
some useable ammo.”

“What about getting our packs back?”

“I doubt, after what just dropped down on them, we
would find anything useable. Plus, you know there is probably unexploded
ordnance lying around.”

“Agreed,” said Doc. “I lost my aide bag back there,
so I don’t feel like patching any of you up with my sewing kit. That and I’m
just getting dried out.”

We started down the road, in an airborne shuffle
that ate up the meters at a steady pace. I was tired, worn out by all we had
been through in the last two days, but I reached down inside myself and ignored
the blisters being generated by my wet boots, the burns I was getting in my
crotch from the wet uniforms pants chaffing my skin raw. I was on a mission,
now. One was to rescue Brit. The other was to deal with LTC Jackass. I didn’t
know if I even needed to do both. Brit was probably in no condition to be moved
from the hospital, and as far as she knew, the team was lost, cut off from
coms. Hell, Jackass or his ass-sucking Sergeant Major would probably feed her
some bullshit about us being overrun by Zombies in Whitehall. He was a sneak
and an asshole, but I don’t think he would have the stones to make Brit
disappear right out of the hospital so she was safe for now. I just hated her
thinking we were dead.

We spent that night up in the trees, slung in our
hammocks. We carried them in our assault packs because if you got separated
from the team, you would never be able to fortify, or even defend, an old house
by yourself. Up in a tree, you could hold out as long as you had ammo and
water, and if you were smart, move from tree-to-tree to give you running room.
Hell, even moving to a different branch on the far side of a tree and dropping
down might give you enough of a head start to outrun a zombie horde.

In the south, a column of smoke was highlighted by
the setting sun, matched by its twin to the north. The helo at the jail still
smoldered, and behind us, something had caught fire in Whitehall and burned
through the night.
 
Below us, a steady
stream of zombies, animated corpses of those killed in the jail battle,
stumbled on through the night, attracted by the fire on the horizon.

Ahmed tapped me on the leg and I awoke with a start,
but I didn’t move. In the stark brilliance of the full moon, I could see stream
of zombies had died down to a lone figure, limping along on a shattered leg. It
dragged the remains of a rope, entangled in military issue web gear.

“Do it!” I whispered, but the figure below us
stopped at even that quiet remark. It looked up, the eyes glowing a dull red,
and Ahmed’s pistol coughed twice. The figure crumpled to the ground. I waited
to see if anything else turned up and then drifted off to sleep again.

In the morning, there were no zombies around. We
climbed down and I went over to the corpse. As Ahmed and I had suspected last
night, it was an Infantryman, one of the those who’d been hanging off the tail
end of the helo as it crashed. His guys must have missed his body in the rush to
Evac. He must have still been alive but the zombies had gotten to him. We tried
never to leave a man behind unless it risked other lives, but, more important,
we tried not to leave a man to wake up undead. Every soldier who fell in
battle, bitten by a zombie, was given a round to the head. Horrible, gruesome,
but there was no way I wanted to become an undead, and we all felt the same
way.

I stripped him of ammo, which fortunately was for
our modified M-4s with the hot .22 long rounds, not regular .223 military issue
ammo, About one out of every three guys in a unit carried the newer,
rechambered rifles. Smoke grenade, flashbang, two frags. Water in a Camelbak
that we wouldn’t touch, in case it was contaminated. I pulled one of his dog
tags off his right boot and slipped it into my pocket. We spent the next hour
building a cairn of rocks over his body and set out on the road again. Rest in
peace, Brother.

Chapter 24

The next two days were a blur. A haze of encounters
with Zombies, lack of sleep, hunger, and pain. My feet were raw where my boots
had been wet. My extra socks were back in my ruck, somewhere in Whitehall, and
the pair I was wearing had holes in them. Doc had patched the blisters with
duct tape after they had burst, but the skin had started to slough off around
them. The others weren’t in much better shape. It was eighty kilometers from
Whitehall to Stillwater, where we would go to ground at the Combat Outpost.
Home for all of us most of the time except for Doc. He ran a clinic at Fort
Orange so he was back and forth a lot.

We needed time to refit and rest, and I was
completely focused on getting there. We had run out of water a few hours ago. The
summer sun was draining the sweat from our bodies. In a little while, we would
take a break to filter some river water, but for now, step, step, step. Each
time my left foot hit the ground, a bloody footprint was left behind. I knew
Jonesy, for one, was hurting just as bad, the pack on his back had rubbed two
bloody sores on his waist since the pack frame didn’t fit on his back .  

To pass the time and take my mind off the burning
pain in my feet, I asked Doc to tell me about the fighting at Seneca Army
Depot. Rumor of it had spread east through the little groups of survivors spread
throughout the state.

“Well, things started to get bad right around
September. The Guard was pulling out of the NYC area, and things were pretty
much falling apart all over. You remember that time, Nick.”

“Yeah, my unit got overrun just outside of Albany. I
think we could have held, but we had an absolute boneheaded chain of command.
No tactics, just RESCUE THE CIVILIANS! And STAND FAST TO THE LAST MAN! We got
outflanked by infected just coming down south from the `burbs, and our position
was a line across the Waterford Bridge, instead of a hedgehog on high ground
behind barriers. We were stacking them up like cordwood, trying to hold a lane
open for uninfected civilians, when all the sudden the guy next to me goes down
with a Z on his back. Then it turned into a madhouse.”

I had run. I admit it. The whole mess had turned
into a brawl, with hand-to-hand fighting and every man for himself. All I could
think about was my wife and kid, ten miles behind the lines. I ran to them like
I had never run before, and I was too late. I would never, ever forgive myself
for that.

“I remember that week. I wound up on a chopper
pulling troops out of Governor’s Island, just off Manhattan Island. Our unit
was the last one out Manhattan, just barely made it to the ferry pulling out of
the pier. I caught a CH-47 to Stewart Airbase, then a C-130 to Seneca Army
Depot. I had been awake for three days, just doing what I could for the guys
over and over.”

I stopped him for a second. “What do you mean, `for
the guys?’ You’re a medic. You of all people know once someone gets bitten
they’re done for.”

“Yeah, I euthanized more than a few of the guys who
were infected. Know what that’s like? Someone begging you to save them and you
stick them to take them out before they turn into a Z and go after you? Yeah,
dozens of those. What I was talking about, though, was the wounds from the
fighting.” Yeah, I knew what it was like. I’d done it myself. He knew that, but
I let him talk through it.

“What do you mean, the fighting?”

“Man, it was a battle. Thousands of civilians trying
to get off Manhattan, the bridges blocked with smashed cars, infected running
wild, tunnels flooded. Here we were holding onto the piers, trying to evacuate
as many civilians as possible, and they were storming the barricades. Remember
how NYC was pretty much “a gun-free zone?” Apparently not. Pistols, shotguns,
AKs, AR-15s, hell, even some heavy automatic weapons that some douchebag
Russian Mafia guys from Brighton Beach started opening up on us. I was treating
gunshot wounds left and right. It made Afghanistan look like a picnic. People
with the highest standard of living in the world fell the furthest, I guess,
when they realized their money wasn’t going to save them. In the end, we just
pulled out, firing into the crowd to keep them off the last boat.”

He shifted his ruck on his back, but kept talking.

“You know, Nick, guys like us, veterans, we all
knew
the world could go to shit at any moment. I actually feel bad for the civilians
who lived in a comfortable, peaceful world. They forgot how easily civilization
can fall apart and that the barbarians were waiting at the gates. Hell, take
away a man’s food and threaten his family and his survival, and he
is
the barbarian.”

I knew what he was talking about. After the general
collapse of the military units and police, the world had turned, in many places,
into a person-eat-person world. Small communities did better than the larger
ones, but unless your village was more than a day’s walk from an urban center,
you got overwhelmed with refugees trying to beat your doors down.

“So what happened at the Depot?”

“OK, so I get there on a C-130 and the engineers are
just finishing building the walls. Huge dirt berms, with a trench dug in front,
angled so people on top could fire down into a kill zone. Howitzers converted
into muzzle-loading shotguns, with charges and ball bearings piled in,
individual rifle positions every few feet. The north wall was about fourteen
kilometers, the south wall about eighteen. Right between Seneca Lake and Cayuga
Lake. The north wall was more heavily manned because we had refugees from
Rochester and Syracuse and zombies, all trying to climb the wall. The Guard had
pulled back behind the walls and scattered units from Fort Drum were flying in
by helo. Man, I heard there was a serious last stand by some Infantry guys at
the airfield at Drum, keeping Zs off the runway so that last C-130 full of dependents
could get out. You should have seen the parents, Nick. The shocked look on
their faces. The kids, they dealt with it, like kids do.”

“The day after I got there, this huge mob of
zombies, must have been thousands of them, came moaning right up toward the
north wall, chasing some civilians, maybe a hundred of them. I saw it from an
observation tower, maybe fifteen miles off, watched it through binos. I thought
we were done. We saw them coming, and next thing I knew, the loudspeaker is
yelling “INCOMING!” and “DOWN DOWN DOWN!”, and a C-130 flies over and drops
this huge, parachute-dragging bomb out the back deck, and WHAM! I swear to God
I thought it was a nuke. It wasn’t, it was one of those twenty-thousand pound bombs
they developed in the Gulf War. Just BAM! And everything was gone, refugees,
Zombies, everything. Later, I went out on a patrol to look for survivors and I
noticed more than a half dozen craters at various distances from the base.
Apparently they had done this more than once.”

Doc rucked on, lost in his thought. I could think of
a time or two myself when I had wished the Air Force had dropped a big-ass bomb
at my beck and call. Water under the bridge, though.

We turned the corner of River Road, and I noted how
our corn was coming in, growing in the field on our side of the river. I had
planted it a month ago, using precious diesel to run a scavenged tractor to
plant twenty acres. Green stubs were just showing up through the ground. I was
tired of eating canned food and stale MREs. Now if I could only get my hands on
a cow … foolish pipe dream. Most of the cows around here had died from
infections they got when the electric powered milking machines had shut down.
The rest had been eaten long ago.

As we moved past the edge of the tree line, what was
left of the house came into view. A small, faint column of smoke still twisted
into the sky.

Doc pulled up short next to me, followed by Ahmed
and Jonesy.

Ahmed spoke first. “JDAM, Joint Direct Attack
Monition, guided bomb, maybe about five hundred pounds. Probably delivered by
an F-18 off the USS Abraham Lincoln. Someone
really
does not like you,
Nick.”

I stood dumbfounded. The windmill that provided our
electricity still spun in the gentle wind, but the house itself was a mass of
lumber blown to Hell and gone.