The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (22 page)

Even with top priority given to his limousine, the streets of DC were so clogged with the rush hour traffic that Collins didn’t make it back to his Blackhawk until just after four.

The blades were already spooling up and this combined with the pinched look on his adjunct’s face, meant there was trouble, or rather, more trouble. “Is it a break out?” he asked after returning Lieutenant Colonel Victor’s salute.

“Yes.” The one word reply gripped Collins somewhere below the belt and squeezed until it hurt.

When Victor didn’t elaborate, the general demanded: “Well? Where? Is it the
Point
? A collapse of the line holding West Point would mean that New York City itself was threatened. There was no land to give up in that direction. Every mile south, the population doubled until the ten million-person city was reached.

Victor shook his head. “No sir. It was the eastern line. No one has heard from the command post in the last forty-five minutes. They just…poof went off the air. I sent a recon bird over twenty minutes ago. We don’t have stills or the video yet, but the word from the spotter is there isn’t anything down there but I.P.s wandering around.” I.P.s was the official shortened term for
infected persons
.

“Son of a bitch!” Collins seethed. “Get me a map, right now. And let’s get this bird in the air.” A fury over the wasted minutes he’d just spent trying to prop up a useless politician overcame him and he punched the side of the Blackhawk, his fist striking the metal inches from a hole where some disgruntled farmer had taken a shot at them. Whoever it was, he didn’t blame the man.

The commander of the 42
nd
Infantry Division took his spot in the copter and in a second, Victor had the tactical display on a computer screen that folded open. For over a minute, the general gazed, unseeing at the map, as the faces of the men he had left behind popped into his head: Lieutenant Colonel Runners, the division training officer and resident practical joker. It was a point of pride for Runners to put one over on Collins every time they went to the field on maneuvers. His executive officer, Colonel William Tate, who was also his best friend in and out of the division. Major Henry, the only other Cowboys’ fan in the state of New York. He lived down the street from Collins, and during football season, was a regular at his house.

“Shit, what’s Leslie going to say?” he whispered, now thinking about Henry’s pretty wife, the mother of his three children, one of whom was still in fucking diapers.

“Say again, sir?” the pilot asked through the headset. “What’s the destination?”

It took a few blinks for Collins to right his mind and bring him back to the urgent situation at hand. He wanted to say: the White House lawn. Though he had just come from a meeting with him, Collins wanted to get the President alone and scream into his fake-tanned face and demand that the situation be federalized. Given two more divisions, the use of his armor, and a shoot on sight order, he knew he could contain the infected persons easily.

“The command post,” he said into the mike and then switched it off. He knew it was a stupid order. It wasn’t a power failure that had caused the lack of communication, it was the zombies, and that meant the whole area and anything in it was contaminated, which meant it made no sense to go.

But he had to see for himself.

The pilot exchanged a look with his copilot and then went through his preflight checklist. He was lucky he kept his mouth shut this time. Collins was in no mood for the least insubordination. He turned to Victor. “Who’s in charge of the southern zone? I need to talk to him.”

“It’s Colonel Shackleford of the 27
th
and it’ll be just a minute. When we lost the command post, we lost our entire tactical data link system, severing our ability to communicate with many of the units. We’re flying blind so to speak.”

Blind, deaf, and dumb was no way to run an army,
Collins thought to himself. “Do what you can,” he said. The Blackhawk lifted off. It was a sensation he’d never get used to, akin to leaping into the air and not coming down again. It took a second for his stomach to settle back in place. Watching the city flash by below helped; it looked entirely normal. There was no sign of panic, there wasn’t the steady beat of rifles, or the sweaty nervous looks of soldiers waiting for the zombies. They were just people down below.

Then they were over the green of Maryland and Victor was in his ear: “Com-line two, sir.”

Collins hit the button and the muted whir of the engines was replaced by the static of a radio and the background noise of a battle. In his time, he had heard too many of those to think it was anything else. “Colonel Shackleford, this is General Collins, do you need to attend to your men or can you talk?”

“No sir, what you’re hearing is nothing. Just a few I.P.s. We had a hell of a lot more earlier and before that, it was the civilians. I’m sorry to say they did not recognize our legal authority to detain them within The Zone.”

“Casualties?”

“Sorry to say sir, heavy on both sides. We were taking sniper fire all afternoon and they were good. There’s a lot of ex-military living up in these hills and they are some good shooters. I’m not making excuses but my boys are fighting with what feels like anchors around their necks. When do you think we’ll get permission to relax the ROEs?”

“I’m working on it,” Collins said. “Now give me some numbers. I can’t go to the Governor with ‘heavy’ as an estimation of our casualties.” There was a pause and Collins waited, feeling his insides crimp up.

“One-hundred and thirteen KIA, two-hundred and eleven wounded.”

The crimped feeling grew so tight he couldn’t breathe. “One-hundred and thirteen killed?” His head spun. That was two months’ worth of deaths in Iraq.

“Yes, sir, it was sporting down here for quite a while. They kept probing and always had more men at the point of attack than we did. What’s more, we’re tied to the dirt. Our orders don’t allow for retreat or attack. It’s an unenviable position, but our boys are fighting with great skill. When can we expect reinforcements?”

“You haven’t been getting any?” Collins asked.

“We got some cooks and com guys, but no infantrymen. And they’ve been coming in drips and drabs. I need another two thousand men to hold this line properly.”

“I’ll, uh, see what I can do.” Collins glanced at his tactical display. It was a straight up mess with units so intermingled that it would take hours for someone to figure it out—but he didn’t have hours and he didn’t have any extra someones hanging around. “What about civilian casualties? Do you have any estimates?”

“According to a few of the pilots who’ve been around the block for a few years, they say we’re looking at fifteen, sixteen hundred.”

There was the pain again. It was like someone was cinching down his intestines with barbed wire. Sixteen-hundred dead civilians? They died for what? Because they were trapped in a land of zombies? If that number got out to the media, heads would roll. And that was just the southern border, what of the north? The battle around Kingston had been going on since that morning. How many more were dead on both sides up there?

This was what the President feared would stick to him. Someone would have to be responsible for so many deaths. The President had washed his hands of it and the governor of New York could say he tried his best to limit it by restricting the use of force, but what could Horace Collins say? I was following orders?

A part of him wanted to ask: Were the men adhering to the use of force guidelines? In other words, he wanted to put it on the soldiers.
They
got out of control.
They
didn’t follow his orders.
They
were the lawless ones.
They
are the guilty ones.

Collins cleared his throat. “I will see what I can do about reinforcements. You…you keep up the good work.”
Of killing civilians
, a nasty voice in his brain added, quietly.

“Sir? One more question. All of our communications have ceased with your command post. Are the rumors true that it was overrun? I don’t normally listen to rumors, especially from pilots, but we’re hanging out here in the dark. We’re tactically blind.”

There was that word again: blind. The 42
nd
Infantry Division was a body flailing around without a head. How was he going to fix this situation? All of his most experienced officers were dead and their millions of dollars’ worth of communications gear was sitting out in the middle of the forest probably covered in deadly germs. He would normally transfer his headquarters—which currently consisted of Lieutenant Colonel Victor and himself—to a brigade command, however there was no official CIC with the 27
th
. Their headquarters personnel were fighting alongside the infantrymen on the line, and their millions of dollars’ worth of equipment was lying forgotten alongside highways or tipped into jumbles when truck and helicopter room had been a premium moving men and ammo to the front.

The general was seeing his command disintegrate. “I’m on my way to the command post now and will let you know. Collins out.”

He sat shaking his head. Three hundred casualties out of how many? There was no way to know. How many had failed to show up for duty? How many had deserted? How many had been trapped when the lines had been arbitrarily moved back?

A sigh, similar to a death rattle, leaked out of him before he keyed his mike: “Colonel Victor, get me whoever is in charge around Kingston.”

It had been a battalion commander, either the 2
nd
or the 4
th
, he couldn’t remember which, but just before he had left for his meeting with the President, Colonel Montgomery Brigade Commander of the 50
th
had decided that since a few hundred of his New Jersey men had been helicoptered in, he should be the one to command them. Collins who didn’t have time to play:
whose was bigger
, between colonels, had agreed.

Everything being so hectic, he didn’t know if the change in command had occurred until Montgomery barked into the phone: “Who is this?”

“General Collins. Give me a situation report.”

Montgomery’s manner thawed quickly and he gave a report that was depressingly similar to Colonel Shackelford’s only with more deaths on both sides. The bright spot was that he was being regularly reinforced by both state troopers and his own soldiers who were being choppered in from New Jersey. What’s more, he had held the bridge.

The bad news, other than the deaths of so many men, women, and soldiers was that there had been a flare up behind the lines in a town called Pine Plains. It was fifteen miles due east of Kingston and should have been clean. Out of the blue, a man went crazy and attacked a family of four who had stopped for gas before heading to anywhere else—a favorite destination of most of the population of Pine Plains. Since the YouTube video had aired, the little town had dwindled to almost nothing. There were only three-hundred odd people left when the man started biting people.

Now those three-hundred people were in a quarantine bubble of their own. Some had tried to sneak out, but for the most part they kept themselves locked away, ready to shoot the first thing that knocked on their door.

“It means there’s a leak,” Collins said. “You need to maintain your portion of the lines better.”

“My portion? No disrespect sir, but my entire left wing is in the air. We lost contact with the next unit over about the time we lost contact with
your
headquarters company.”

Collins bristled at the suggestion that he was somehow responsible…but then he remembered how he had stripped that area in order to hold the bridge. “Be that as it may, I need you to start extending your lines east.”

“To where? Massachusetts?”

“Yes. I don’t have the manpower to do anything else.” In his mind, he heard himself say:
the people of Massachusetts are just going to have to take care of themselves
. It was annoyingly similar to what Governor Stimpson had said, only Collins didn’t have a choice anymore, not until the President either took control or forced the other governors to give up their men to the 42
nd
Infantry Division.

The President was doing neither of these things. He had his most important donor on Skype, because those bigwigs liked the personal touch. “We’re doing everything we can Mr. Hemsforth,” the President said. “You have nothing to worry about.” He wasn’t exactly lying. Marty had told him the same thing and that meant it was true for him.

He had yet to make any calls to the governors. They were on his to do list.

A minute later, without any prodding from anyone, the Governor of Massachusetts called up his own National Guard forces. His explicit orders: “They’re not to leave the state.”

And about the time, Collins’ Blackhawk was hovering over the remains of his command post, Rhode Island and its puny force did the same.

The sporty but very cramped Audi took Courtney Shaw, a German Shepherd, and the three soldiers on a tour of the quarantine zone. They drove north and discovered the killing fields south of Kingston where the townsfolk had battled against odds, fighting before and aft. Their bodies and the hundreds of zombie bodies, littered the turned up fields that hadn’t yet been sown with the summer crop of corn.

“Don’t slow down,” PFC Max Fowler said. Not all the zombies were dead; some were just then rising up with glittering black eyes, while many more were crawling over each other to get at them.

They headed west with the insane idea of trying to cross the bridge west of Poughkeepsie, but there were still too many zombies roaming the streets to make the attempt. They headed south along the Hudson River, hoping to find a boat, but there were none and either way, zombies floated. Trying the river looked like a sure death.

But that didn’t stop people from trying.

The population of pure blood humans within The Zone was less than one percent of what it had been the day before. Humans, by their actions, their words and their odor attracted zombies like flies to shit. Down below the road, on the banks of the river where the reeds grew high, Courtney could see a small group of humans trying to work a speedboat across the water. It had a good tall hull and a strong motor, however the operator was inept and had fouled the propeller in the partially submerged river grass.

The engine was groaning and kicking out a cloud of blue smoke. Around them pruney and water-logged zombies struggled against the slow current to get at them. There weren’t many, however. The group had chosen their launch sight well.

“Maybe we can hitch a ride,” Johnny said from the back seat.

“I like the safety of the car,” Will replied. “Besides I doubt the army forgot about this river. It’s probably strung with wire from end to end.”

Max gave a shrug. “Yeah, but look at the other side. I don’t see too many zombies.”

“Once we get across, we’ll be on foot, Max,” Will answered with a little whine to his voice. “Think about it, will you? We only have so much ammo. The way we burn through it we couldn’t take on more than twenty of them. I don’t mean to piss you off, but I…” A sharp bang from the river drew their attention back. There was more smoke enveloping the end of the boat, but the sound of the engine had cut off with the bang.

Courtney looked around, fearing they had been standing still too long. “I think God has decided things for us,” she said.

“God!” Will exclaimed, making a noise of dismissal.

She didn’t bother saying anything to Will. She had always believed in God but for the last day, a prayer had been on the tip of her tongue and in the back of her mind for every second of every minute. “Either way, we should see if they want to come with us.” She looked at Max when she said this; she didn’t really trust the other two. Johnny was a little too quick to agree to
anything
. There didn’t seem to be much going on upstairs with him. The other one, Will, though tall, sandy-haired and handsome, was also quick eyed and sweaty. He seemed to prefer any idea that was the safest at that particular moment without regard to the future.

“Yeah,” Max said. “The more the merrier.” He started to get out and Will grabbed his shoulder.

“Hold on, wait. They could be diseased. Did you ever think of that? Or they could be thieves.”

“Them?” Max asked with a little laugh. It was hard to believe the six people struggling with the boat were desperadoes. There was an elderly couple who looked to be in their seventies, gimping around, their joints stiff and their arms weak. Another pair were teenagers, a brother and sister. Max could tell by the way they clung to each other, unafraid to appear weak. The last two weren’t a couple. One was a striking blonde and the other a geek. Even from sixty feet away his odd mannerisms and even odder look was apparent.

He is going to be a pain
, Max thought just looking at him. He shrugged off Will’s hand. “It’ll be ok. I’ll check them out, but if you’re nervous you can come too and watch my back.”

Since that was slightly less safe than sitting in the car, Will shook his head. Courtney tried not to let her irritation show. “I’ll go with you,” she said to Max.

Sundance wanted to go racing off and he quivered with anticipation, but Courtney told him to “Heel,” and he fetched up against her thigh. They made their way down the embankment; it was slick with mud and the two held onto each other and watched their feet more than anything. When the ground leveled off they looked up to see three weapons pointed their way. The nerd, the old man and the teenage sister were each armed.

“We don’t have enough room on this boat, thank you,” the nerd said. Even Courtney had assigned him the title of ‘nerd’. He was skinny to the point of ill health, was in his late twenties but seemed older, wore glasses that were huge and years out of date, and had what looked to be perpetually greasy hair. “We don’t want to swamp it,” he added. There was little chance that would happen, Courtney saw. It was sturdy and had seating for eight and deck space for another six. There was plenty of room, but it was a moot point, the engine had seized.

“We were hoping you’d come with us, actually,” Max said. “I mean, you’re not still thinking about using that boat, are you? The engine’s busted.”

“We could paddle,” the nerd replied, his gun still pointing. The other two had lowered their weapons; the old man had stuck a revolver in the pocket of his coat with a shaking hand, while the girl, slim, with long straight brown hair and the dead-white skin common to upstate New Yorkers, sat the butt-end of a shotgun on the ground at her feet.

“Paddle?” Max asked. “Are you sure you want to do that? The river is three or four-hundred yards wide here, and for all you know the water is diseased. With all those zombies in it I don’t think I would touch it, not even with a paddle.”

“Thanks for your concern, but we got this,” the nerd replied.

The blonde woman spoke up: “Benjamin, why are you being such a dick? The man’s right. We can’t paddle across here, not with such a big boat, and I wouldn’t want to try in a smaller one. Maybe we should see where they’re going.”

Benjamin Olski gave her a stiff smile as if trying to appear less dick-ish. “Cheryl, I got this. Trust me ok? I got you this far and I’ll get you to safety but only if you trust me. This guy’s a soldier. I’m sorry but after what happened in Happy Valley I don’t think we can give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“What happened in Happy Valley?” Max asked. When he only received an incredulous look from Benjamin, Max protested: “I wasn’t in Happy Valley. I’ve never been there. We were in some place called Myers Corner. And for sure we didn’t…”

“We?” Benjamin demanded. He turned to Cheryl and smiled condescendingly. “There are more of them. Can’t you see, we can’t trust them? They could be…rapists.” This last he said in a whisper that everyone could hear.

“They’re not rapists,” Courtney said. “I’m proof of that. And I did find them in Myers Corner practically surrounded by zombies. There weren’t any dead humans, uh you know what I mean. They didn’t kill anyone. But if you want to stay, mister, and try to cross on that boat, go right ahead. If any of you others want to come with us, you’re welcome.”

“Where are you going?” the teenage girl asked, she was afraid, however the presence of Sundance seemed to calm her. She kept glancing down at him and he would thump his tail happily when she did.

Her brother, standing a few feet back, piped up: “Can we get out of the quarantine zone if we’re with the army? You know, can the soldier get us out?”

They all stared at Max for an answer. “Truthfully, I don’t know. I doubt it. We had our orders: absolutely no one was allowed to leave The Zone. Not cops or firemen or politicians or anyone. They never said anything about soldiers, but I get the feeling no one meant no one.”

“Then what good is he?” Benjamin asked the others.

“I think I want to take my chances with him,” Cheryl announced, tossing her blonde hair out of her eyes. “How many other soldiers are with you?” She started to climb down from the boat, but when Max told her there were only two more, she hesitated for a moment and then said: “I guess that’s better than nothing.” This made Benjamin blink.

The brother and sister gave each other a brief look that communicated all that was needed to be said between them and together they picked their way through the sucking mud at the river’s edge to come stand by Courtney. They both greeted Sundance before the two humans. “I’m Alivia and this is Jack,” the girl said. He was taller but clearly younger. They were both skittish and wore streaks on their cheeks where tears had cut through a film of dirt, and their eyes never stopped moving.

The old couple didn’t want to break ranks with Benjamin, they eyed Max darkly. “I would prefer the river,” the woman said. “The zombies aren’t that bad and…and they can’t get at us. We’re too high in the water. We can just float downstream until we’re out of The Zone.”

“That won’t work,” Max told her. “The army will have the river blocked somehow. Probably wire and rope.” The truth was they had chained thirteen barges end-to-end across a narrow point in the river and had sunk nets to a depth of fifteen feet below them. A dozen, smaller fishing boats worked the waters on The Zone side. The men in the boats, sealed head-to-toe in plastic protective wear, went about the endless and horrific task of pulling the zombies out of the water. They would be harpooned and dragged up on to the deck where a single shot to the head would finish them off. Then they’d be flung in the hold where later they would be fished out with a crane, dumped into a truck, which would trundle them off to the fire pit. The smell from the pit was enough to overpower a man.

“Maybe he’s right,” the old man said. “We should take our chances with him.”

His wife hissed: “They don’t give chances, do they?”

“Look,” Max said, holding his hands out to them. “I’m sorry about whatever happened to you, but not all soldiers are the same. It’s not like the movies, we’re not bloodthirsty murderers looking for any opportunity to kill.”

Benjamin folded his arms and wore a look of self-righteous accusation. “Is that right? Then why did a whole mess of soldiers start shooting a group of unarmed women and children? That’s what happened to their whole family. Soldiers just shot them down like dogs and why? Simply because they wanted to walk down a road. That’s what I would call bloodthirsty, and that’s why, Cheryl, we can’t trust them. Now get over here.”

“These aren’t those soldiers,” Courtney argued. “They’re in the same boat…so to speak, as all of us. They’re not going to be let out of The Zone, either. They’re going to have to sneak out just like the rest of us.”

“Or fight their way out,” Cheryl said. “You guys got guns. I mean really good guns. If we can get enough of us survivors together we could find a weak spot and blast our way out.”

Max grimaced at this idea. “I don’t know if I can do that. Those soldiers are just doing their jobs. I don’t know if I can kill them so easily.” The older couple both threw up their hands in anger and Benjamin looked as though he was on the verge of a tirade, so Max went on, quickly: “Also we don’t have the weaponry you think we do. All we have are a few M16s and maybe thirty rounds altogether. It’s not enough to try to slug it out with entrenched troops. And what if we did get out? Have you seen all the helicopters? They’d track us easily, call in more troops, and kill us. No, the only way out is to sneak out.”

Benjamin and the old couple exchanged looks in a silence that that wasn’t really silent. In the distance, there was the ever-present pop and crackle of gunfire and closer were the odd howls and moans of the undead. A few of them were slogging up out of the water, their feet sinking into the deep mud at the edge. They were harmlessly trapped and didn’t rate more than a flick of Jack’s nervous eyes.

“Ok,” Benjamin said, giving up.

Together with Benjamin, Max helped the older woman out of the boat and then they went to their cars: Benjamin and Cheryl in her odd Juke, the old couple in a 90s model Cadillac, which was the length of a sailboat, and the brother and sister in a fat, white Ford Windstar, the ultimate family minivan. There was red blood on the sliding back door. “Can someone ride with us?” Alivia asked. There was a begging tone to her voice that struck Max hard.

“Johnny, ride with the kids,” he ordered. “Keep them safe.”

That proved difficult especially as the girl insisted on driving. After hitting a curb, Johnny asked: “How old are you?”

“Seventeen…almost.”

“Oh jeeze,” he said miserably. They were traveling down the highway that ran on the east side of the river, looking to get lucky and find another boat or maybe another, better armed group who had an idea about what to do. They weren’t lucky. There were zombies everywhere, thankfully not in a huge numbers but in groups of ten, fifteen, twenty. Some strode down the road like they owned it, forcing the little caravan to bounce left and right, or run up on the shoulder. They also haunted the forest and would come surging out into the failing afternoon light.

Johnny was lathered in sweat and had done nothing to protect anyone. He had held fast to the “Oh Shit!” bar above the door and had licked his lips raw in his fear. The girl wasn’t a good driver, but she was better than the last car in the line. After having seen their family murdered, the old couple couldn’t bring themselves to trust the soldiers and so they had lingered in the rear, fearing a trap. The husband, Gary Reynolds, whose eyesight was failing him quicker than he could keep up with his prescriptions, had a few near misses with the zombies.