The Age of Zombies: Sergeant Jones (22 page)

Jones shot up and ran over to where the giant was being tied up. “We smoked three of these fucks,” Jones said. “One’s on the loose, and we’ve got one tied up here.”

Wimpy was finishing up a handcuff knot with the rope. Casper had pulled off the giant’s boots and was breaking its massive toes, which looked like overgrown plums, one by one with a rock. The zombie was still covered from head to toe in black fatigues. The monster moaned as his toes cracked beneath the crack of Casper’s rock.

Jones pulled out a hypodermic needle from his jacket, and jabbed it into the giant’s neck. “Thought this would come in handy,” he said. “Pure ketamine.”

“Hooah, Sarge,” Casper said, obviously impressed.

Just then another bang sounded. Jones hopped up and scanned the scene. He couldn’t detect any movement. Nothing that stood out. His depth perception and his ability to discern color patterns was top notch. From what he could tell, the bullet came from three o’clock. But there was nothing there.

“I’m gonna scope the perimeter,” Jones said.

“Get that mofo,” Casper said. “Man, I’m having so much fun. My ass should’ve joined the Marines.”

Wimpy slapped Casper across the face playfully. “Uncle Sam’s misguided children. It’s a shame.”

“Exactly my point,” Casper said. “If I was a Marine, I’d be on another level. No longer misguided American scum. The redheaded stepchild of Uncle Sam. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.”

Wimpy just shook his head and laughed to himself. The joke went way, way over Casper’s head. Wimpy respected the Marine Corps, but loved to poke fun at them.

Jones didn’t have time for the jokes. There was still a combatant on the loose. He could strike at anytime and from anywhere. The Sarge crept around the cabin like a fox. He was aware of everything around him. His nose twitched with the slightest movement of the wind through the trees. His respiration synced with the rhythms around him. If anything moved, he’d respond without thought, and with laser precision.

The crescent moon hung in the ink black sky like a shard of broken hope. Jones glanced at earth’s rocky, milk-white satellite. The monsters who were responsible will die, he vowed. Starting with the one that he was hunting.

He had made it around three corners of the cabin before he heard what he was dreading. A branch cracked, and leaves crumpled beneath a heavy boot. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that the giant had taken his first steps towards Wimpy and Casper. Jones rushed around the last corner of the cabin. The damage had already started. The zombie was hell bent on unleashing carnage on his team. The monster held Casper up high, almost as if he was sacrificing him to the moon, and broke Casper’s right forearm in half. It snapped with the ease of a human plucking a petal from a daisy.

The beast cracked Casper’s left foot next. Casper howled to the moon like a dying wolf. The pain shot through Casper’s limbs like a village idiot on a school rampage. It cared not for the bundles of nerves and veins that had been torn asunder. The idiot was Casper’s master now. It had become a tyrannical king in his nervous system.

Jones unleashed the fury of his rifle into the zombie’s guts. As he pummeled the monster, he spewed obscenities straight from his own gut. Jones slammed his body against the dead bulge of the giant. They both fell into the dirt.

Jones needed to claim his victory. He started by ripping off the freak’s balaclava and digging his thumb’s into the jaundice eyes of the monster. They popped out as two hard globs of meat. Jones continued to smash the freak’s nose until it was completely pulverized. He withdrew his knife and smashed its blade into the zombie’s right ear, until his skull was hacked up so bad that a grainy red liquid oozed out onto the ground.

Jones realized this liquid wasn’t from a brain. Several pudgy white worms wiggled out of the giant’s skull. Jones immediately put a stop to the revenge he was exacting on this zombie. He felt a tinge of guilt for what he had just done to the monster. He had the sudden urge to scoop up the worms and look at them closer.

Wimpy stepped in to put a stop to the madness. He wrapped his arms around the Sarge and pulled him off the dead beast. “We’re done here Sarge,” Wimpy said. His tone was somber and mournful. He hated these zombie fucks just as much as Jones. But they all had to fight to maintain their own humanity even amidst the savage consequences of their mission. Wimpy struggled to bring Jones to the ground. The Sarge finally gave up.

He had managed to grab hold of a few worms. He squeezed them tight in the small of his palm. They tickled his skin as they writhed around. Jones was torn. Half of him wanted to give up and never kill another one of these giants again. It was the same part of him that wanted to keep hold of the worms. The other half of him was in a state of pure rage. The two moods clashed, and a deep sadness overcame him.

“My damn Emma Jo,” Jones howled. He started to sob. “These monsters have my goddamn Emma Jo. What am I gonna do? My son, Junior. Where is he? I know he’s alive! Why can’t I hold my boy?”  

“Snap out of it, Sarge,” Wimpy said in an authoritative voice. “We’re going to get them back. Just don’t worry. Don’t fail me now, Sarge. We’ll find them.”

Wimpy was always the joker, the one who never took much seriously. But he stood strong now and put Jones in his place. There was too much at stake to be flirting with defeat.

Wimpy let go of Jones, and went to check on Casper. He wasn’t well.

“I’m dying,” Casper choked out. A look of surprise had swept across his face. His eyes were bulged out and his mouth wide open. “I’m gonna die in these mountains. I’m gonna die, Wimpy. Right here in these mountains.”

“Quit re
peating yourself,” Wimpy said. “You’ve got some broken bones. That’s it.”

Wimpy took off his shirt and tore it into strips. He tightly wound them around Casper’s broken bones to set them in place.

Casper was sweating buckets. He was ten shades paler than a ghost. “I’m gonna die right here. Just tell my kids I loved them. Watch… watch… me die.”

Wimpy slapped Casper across the face. “You’re being a little bitch,” he said. The whole situation reminded him of what went down back in Afghanistan. He didn’t save Big Boy, but Casper was going to be just fine. “Just buck up and swallow the pain. Shit, I thought you were a warrior.”

Jones snapped out of his melancholy. He was checking out the captive zombie as Wimpy tended to Casper. “Let’s get these two down the mountain,” the Sarge said. “We’ll drop Casper off at the hospital. Then it’s straight to El Sagrado’s.” Jones was shaky. He lit up a cigarette. “First we need to see what was in that cabin.”

Wimpy nodded. “Ay ay captain, my captain.”

Jones
 and Wimpy walked into the blown out front door of the cabin. The place was spartan. The giants must not have spent too much time at their base. Jones expected to come across human remains. He feared that he’d stumble on the bones of Emma Jo and Vanessa. Luckily, they didn’t find a single drop of human blood.

But what they did find was extremely helpful. Jones picked through a filing cabinet and came across a manilla folder with the words “Eugene Action” scrolled across its front with a black marker. He flipped the folder open and rifled through the documents inside. He stopped when his eyes caught the words
Emma Jo and Vanessa
printed on the page.

“Damn it, Wimpy,” Jones said. “I’ve found them.”

Wimpy rushed over to Jones and knelt down to take a look. “China?” Wimpy said. “Why China?”

“I don’t know,” Jones said. “But they were shipped to Beijing on the night of the kidnapping. They didn’t waste any time in getting them over there. And we’re not going to waste any more time, either.”

Wimpy nodded and patted Jones on the back. “We’re on the trail,” he said. “Next stop, Beijing.”

The two soldiers headed back outside. A sharp, cold wind rushed through the pines. The air was clear and crisp up in these mountains. The sky was big and bold. The moon hung in the sky as a brilliant white orb. Its light radiated out through the black sky, giving it a soft grey hue, and blanking out the full majesty of the Milky Way.

Jones looked up at the moon and cursed it. Poets, lovers, men throughout all times and places had looked up to the moon and given it praise. But Jones looked at that big, pocked rock as a blemish that rudely asserted itself in the open sky. There was nothing unique or beautiful about the moon. Not in comparison to the manifold wonder of the rest of the universe: the trillions of stars spread across trillions of galaxies. What wonder could really be found in this universe? More than what any human could ever dream possible.

Even his own feelings were lambasted. He stood above Casper’s body, readying his legs to scoop the fallen comrade up from the ground, and he second guessed this whole operation. What if he never came down to Los Angeles? Would Casper have come up here? Maybe, maybe not. What Jones knew for sure was that he led Casper and Wimpy on this mission. And he would lead them out.

They were safe, even with Casper being roughed up.  

“We’re killers, and we’re meant to be killed,” Casper said.

Jones lifted Casper up and looked his comrade in the eyes. “That’s the damn truth.”

For a moment, Jones questioned his own motivation. What if he gave up the search for Emma Jo and Vanessa? He figured that he could disappear into some backwater town in the desert, or maybe someplace out in the Great Plains, and become a carpenter or auto mechanic. He could change his name, rent an apartment above a barber’s shop, and just wash away his pain with hooch and chicks with low self-esteem.

Jones was on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Something about those worms caught him off guard and completely overtook his rational mind. He realized that he wasn’t really mourning the loss of his family anymore. Jones was struggling with himself. He was becoming conscious of the fact that this journey to find his family was much more than that. It was a quest that would transform him.

He wasn’t too worried about death or dismemberment. Casper’s fate seemed to have already been written long ago. He deserved what he got, Jones realized upon further inspection. Casper probably put a hundred men through the same thing. Casper would survive, but the healing process would be long.

And although Jones had killed, he always did so honorably. Or at least that’s what he believed. He wasn’t sure what, or who, his own demons were. He never felt the need for a shrink’s services. His upbringing was solid. Jones recognized that the war had scarred him, but through the years he had been able to compartmentalize his experiences by locking them in various chambers of his brain, and throwing away the keys.

Jones carried Casper’s body to the Jeep, and propped him up in the front seat. Jones hopped in the Jeep and pulled it up to where the zombie’s giant body was. Wimpy estimated that the monster weighed in at least eight hundred pounds, based on his height.

Jones hopped out of the Jeep and dug his hands beneath the giant’s body. Hundreds of worms covered his body now. Jones did everything in his power to ignore the crawlers. But he couldn’t. As the two soldiers attempted to lift and heave the sleeping giant into the back of the Jeep, Jones started to sweat and shake. His symptoms weren’t just physical, though. He was aware of a shift in his consciousness.

In the presence of the worms, the world seemed to open up to another dimension full of strange, horrific creatures. Jones couldn’t see them, but he could sense them. Whatever crept around in that other dimension wanted to consume Jones, to make him theirs, to eat him up and never spit him back to the world he knew. It was a world that expanded out into the far reaches of the universe, both seen and unseen.

It was frightening. Whatever these worms were doing to his mind felt inevitable. As if there was no escaping them. No turning back from this weird portal that he was stepping into. This was the demon that Jones was up against. At the same time Jones felt intimately connected to the worms, and to the world that they were opening up to him.

Wimpy picked up on the Sarge’s shift. “Hey, snap out of it,” Wimpy said. The two soldiers almost had the zombie in the Jeep. “Sarge, wake up.”

Jones didn’t pay any attention. He looked like a space cadet, but he had displayed incredible amount of strength. Jones hoisted the giant zombie into the Jeep almost single handedly. He didn’t snap out of his trance until the giant was secure in the back seat.

“You good?” Wimpy said.

Jones acted like nothing had happened, as if the roar of the worms had absolutely no effect on him. He pretended like he didn’t see that other world. “Yeah Wimps,” Jones said. He lit up a cigarette, and gave his grunt a wry smile. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

The ride down the mountain was rough. Wimpy sat in the back with the giant. Casper couldn’t stop moaning from pain. He cursed every god, enemy, devil, demon, and angel in the books. He begged Wimpy to put him out of his misery. Wimpy persistently talked him out of wanting to die.

The giant was out cold. The ketamine did the trick.

Jones was shaky from everything that had went down on the mountain. He chain smoked as he sped down the mountain as fast as he could. He couldn’t purge the worms from his brain, though. Their effect was still with him. Casper’s groans and pain were also starting to get on his nerves.

“What’s up with Casper?” Jones asked. “How’s he holding up?”