The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (3 page)

The man stumbled into Benjamin’s arms and suddenly gone was any sign of the monster—the man’s eyes were very blue and the gums of his mouth nice and pink. He had been covered in someone else’s blood but now there was a hole in him and his own red blood was coursing out.

“Why?” he asked in a soft, confused voice.

“I…I…” Benjamin couldn’t spit anything else out, and it didn’t matter. The man died right there. His head fell back to hang loose and long as if a lynch mob had gotten him and not the cowardly bullet shot by a cowardly man.

“Oh, jeeze!” Benjamin moaned and then dropped the corpse onto the street where its head smacked against the pavement sounding like a fallen coconut. “Oh jeeze!” Benjamin said again, this time feeling his dinner rise up into the back of his throat.

He thought for sure he’d throw up, but when he bent at the waist he saw movement off the side of the road. There were real zombies coming out of a grove of hemlock. Further back were others, mere silhouettes but they were zombies, Benjamin knew.

There were so many.

Forgetting the man he’d just murdered and the acid of vomit in his mouth, Benjamin ran for the Juke, making it just ahead of the first creature.

“Go! Get out of here,” he yelled, his voice creeping over the edge of hysteria. Cheryl started to head down the road toward the police cars, but he grabbed her wrist. “No, not that way. Just…just turn around. We can’t get out this way.”

When she made the turn, she drove over the leg of the man Benjamin had shot. He could hear bones break like snapping twigs. This time he did throw up and because of the zombies all around them, he didn’t dare roll down the window. He puked in Cheryl’s backseat.

General Collins of the 42
nd
hated to be kept waiting, and this was especially so when the fate of the country had been thrust into his lap. The last thing he needed was to be cooling his heels in the Governor’s mansion while the night went to shit and the zombies multiplied and swarmed like locusts.

According to his watch, he began his meeting with Governor Stimpson at 03:41. It wasn’t a long meeting. They were in the same room for all of six seconds, just long enough to shake hands.

Stimpson was the living embodiment of a politician: he wore a beautifully tailored, dark blue suit, was soft-skinned, tanned, smooth and glib, full of empty but pretty sounding words; he had a wide toothy grin and was a good hand-shaker—in other words, a complete fake.

He had breezed into the room with that phony smile cemented in place, gave the general a firm shake of the hand and said: “I’ll be right with you, General. I have some things to take care of.” He started to walk away but turned swiftly, catching Collins wiping his hand on his BDUs; there had been something decidedly slimy about touching the politician. Stimpson pretended as though he hadn’t seen. “Make yourself at home. The kitchens are open if you’re hungry.”

Kitchens? How many were there? “No, thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” Stimpson said, giving a second, even brighter, professional smile and hurrying away.

General Collins stood for a moment wondering what could be more important than a city the size of Poughkeepsie being destroyed. With a weary shake of his head, he settled himself down on the plush leather couch and took out the smart phone he barely understood. The logistics of calling up a division sprawled over six states was daunting; there were plans in place, however they read like a repair manual for the space station. He had a tiny PDF version on his phone; it was a thousand pages long and the wording was hell on his aging blue eyes.

An hour later, he was still seated on the couch and still staring at the phone. He yawned for the hundredth time and there were tears dripping from the corner of those tired eyes when the Governor re-emerged, still sporting the slick-as-oil smile despite the hour. He offered a second, over-warm handshake and started walking the general back the way he’d come.

“I’m frankly a little surprised you’re here,” the Governor said. “Why aren’t you—what’s the word—marshalling your men?”

“I have people for that,” Collins assured, not realizing the division call-chains were riddled with old and unused numbers and that the entire process was well behind schedule. “My job entails a broader spectrum. I have to oversee the entire situation, from the lines of battle to logistics. I also have to deal with politicians.”

The Governor gave him a new smile, he seemed to have a hundred of them in his back pocket that he could whip out at a moment’s notice. He pointed the general to a chair opposite his desk. It was a magnificent beast of a desk, a vast expanse of Honduran hardwood, but far too big for one man, even a man with the ego of Stimpson.

“Ahh, yes,” he said around the smile. “I bet you dread the politicians.”

“I dread the waste of time,” Collins answered, curtly. “In battle, and let me be perfectly clear here, we are in a battle, minutes or seconds can be pivotal.”

“And yet isn’t the motto of the army hurry up and wait?”

Governor Stimpson’s smile was now at its widest; Collins wanted to rip it off his face and stomp it under his boot heel. “I don’t have time to wait and neither do my men. I need
shoot on sight
orders,” he said bluntly. Stimpson’s smile began to unravel. Collins went on: “These…these infected persons are far too contagious and more deadly than I realized. They’re like something out of a movie or a nightmare. I’ve seen them, Governor; I’ve seen them up close. You have no idea what they’re like. We need to kill them and we need to kill them at a distance.”

The Governor’s smile had warped into a grimace and even that was crumbling. He stood abruptly. “I have to see…I mean I have a, uh, another meeting. Can you wait here for a moment?”

Collins leaned back, his face a mixture of shock and anger. “Hold on. You can’t possibly have another meeting as important as this one. I have men preparing…”

“I’ll be just a moment.” He left the general spluttering to go stand in the hallway. It was an important hallway, all stiff and dark with mahogany walls. It was too dark in his opinion. It was heavy, and gloomy and very foreboding. It was an important hallway that led to his important office where all the important decisions were made.

“Fuck,” Stimpson said in a whisper, before fleeing from the hall and the office and the important decisions. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the damned place.

Making important decisions wasn’t the reason he’d run for the position of governor. He wasn’t governor because of some puritanical calling. He wasn’t there because of the “public good”, either. He was governor because it had been a way for him to fulfill his potential. He was, after all, better and greater than everyone else—the title and the position proved it. He was governor because he was important. People deferred to him; some practically bowed to him, and they all came crawling on their hands and knees, begging when they wanted something.

All except that damned general. No, he was all stiff and righteous and… “There’s no way this is happening,” Stimpson said, as the general’s request echoed in his ears.
Shoot on sight.
“What the fuck is that? Who asks that?”

It was one thing when some freaked-out police dispatcher made ridiculous claims of zombies in their midst—regardless of whether the claims were at least partially corroborated by the superintendent of the State Police—but now a general as well? Had the lot of them been sniffing glue together?

Yes, he was sure
something
had happened out at the Walton facility, something horrific. Airborne PCP, or that crazy new drug: bathsalts; someone had probably poisoned the water with it, or maybe they had put heroin in the hash browns. It had to be something that made sense. But zombies? No way! It wasn’t possible. In fact, a part of him had agreed to call up the 42
nd
just to prove, if only to himself, that it was impossible.

General Collins wasn’t supposed to side with the crazies. He was supposed to be the adult in the room. But that was out the window now.
Shoot on sight
…the words kept on whispering in his ear like a skipping record.

In a patter of patent leather, Stimpson fled to a sitting room where his staff had waited in an uncomfortable silence. The Governor burst in, throwing his hands in the air. “He wants
shoot on sight
orders. Can you believe that?”

The six staffers and two guests were silent, each glancing around to see who would speak first. Offering opinions was the quickest way to having one’s career ruined—bad advice was remembered long after good advice had been appropriated by the Governor as his own.

Eventually, Jennifer Gilmore, Stimpson’s chief of staff, said in a quiet voice: “Don’t do it. These are your constituents, Bob. If you start killing them…I don’t know if they’ll forgive you.”

“You mean when they’re dead?” Andy Rizz, the Superintendent of the New York State Troopers asked. He laughed at his own joke; it was a dry, humorless sound. When no one joined in, he cleared his throat, making the knuckle of cartilage in his neck leap.

Jennifer gave him a scathing look. “I mean their relatives and their friends and everyone who sees the Governor on TV giving the execution orders.”

“And if he doesn’t give the orders?” Rizz demanded. “My troopers are dying like flies out there and it’ll be the same with the army!”

The man from Health and Human Services, Jerome something, Stimpson could never remember what, shook his head. “The army has much better guns. They have tanks. As far as I know, zombies can’t take down a tank.”

“He can’t authorize tanks,” Jennifer replied, talking about Stimpson as if he wasn’t there. “And for the same reason. Tanks and rockets and machine guns all kill indiscriminately. We can’t let this catastrophe be used an excuse to feed the military industrial complex. Remember, Bob, your voters are not big on the army and they voted you in to help put a stop to all this military spending.”

“You’ll look weak,” Rizz countered. “And if this gets out of control, you’ll be blamed.”

“No, the army will be,” Jennifer countered. “We’ll be able to spin it so you won’t be touched, Bob, but just as long as you aren’t seen as the trigger man.”

Rizz leapt to his feet. “This is ridiculous! If half the state gets eaten alive no one can spin you out of that.”

Jennifer, looking completely unruffled, folded her hands in her lap and said, “I can. You forget I was working for the mayor during Hurricane Katrina. Practically that whole stinking city was destroyed, but because of me, he came away smelling like roses. The trick is to pin it on someone else and just keep hammering it home. You see, Bob, it’s all about the optics and if you give these fascist orders to shoot on sight, it’ll be you who gets pinned.”

That was the winning argument.

They had gone on for a while longer. Jerome something had stuttered out a bunch of scientific sounding poppy-cock about the virility of the disease and its communicability and some nobody from the Department of Transportation had blah-blahed on about something called a panic-jam that could grip the entire state, but what Stimpson only really cared about were the optics.

How was he going to be perceived? That’s what mattered.

He nodded wisely as the conversation progressed and smiled when appropriate, his tanned face showing easy laugh lines that always had the voters thinking he was such an amiable, likable fellow. A guy you could have a beer with, that is if he actually drank beer, which he did only as county fairs when he needed to be seen as a ‘man of the people’.

He couldn’t be seen as the guy who murdered his own citizens.

“Thank you for your input,” he said, still showing that winning, confident smile as a hundred miles south of him a housewife named Janice Tate barricaded herself in her bathroom.

Janice was done screaming. When her husband had torn out their son’s throat with his teeth something in her voice-box had just plain ripped in mid-scream.

Since then she couldn’t even talk, not that there was anything to say. Joe had turned into one of the things…one of the demons roaming the streets in the town of Pleasant Valley, New York, a ten-minute drive from Poughkeepsie. Joe was a monster.

Janice threw her weight against the bathroom door just as Joe attacked it. The wood shuddered with the violence and all Janice could think about was Joe’s teeth. They were white in his dark mouth and so long and so sharp. She hadn’t had time to count them but now there seemed to be so many more than he once had.

Teeth, teeth, teeth.

She was going to be eaten alive. Janice Tate stretched out one arm for the medicine cabinet, hoping to God there were enough pills to kill her before the teeth got her.

The door thudded again and again. It was shaking; she was shaking. There was a sharp
crack
from it just as she grabbed the first bottle—Joe’s statin meds for his cholesterol. She flicked off the lid and chugged the twenty remaining pills, chewing them and, in her fear, not tasting the bitter medicine. The next bottle she grabbed was a half-finished bottle of Tylenol with codeine.

“Yes,” she whispered and then down the hatch went sixteen pills. Now a huge fracture split the door. Joe put an eye to the crack and it was just as black as the ace of spades. “No, no, no!” she said reaching for the next bottle.

Janice didn’t want to die like Mrs. Donner from across the street. She had gone on and on, wailing in horrendous pain as she was eaten. Two doors down, the Olson’s son, Freddy, had let out blood-curdling screams for twenty long minutes. His problem was he kept escaping, jumping up and running for his life, but he was always dragged down again. It was a problem because he wouldn’t die. Janice knew what was best.

A white bottle of aspirin went down her gullet next and, as Joe smashed through a panel of the door, she washed it down with nearly a half a cup of cough syrup. She wanted to overdose. She wanted to go out quietly, however fate wasn’t so kind. Joe got through the door when she was two fisting bottles of who knew what.

He went for the soft skin of her stomach, his teeth slicing in as though she was made of cream cheese. She vomited an ugly goop of purple mess onto the top of his head and then she found her voice again and let out a reedy scream. She cried for help and she cried out to die.

A hundred miles away Governor Stimpson was oblivious. He sat back down behind his desk and looked at the general and secretly disliked him, although he didn’t know why.

General Collins was stiff in his chair.
Like a fucking board
, Stimpson thought. And when he nodded, the Governor was sure he heard the metallic creak of stiff-ass metal. He was like a robot and should be treated like one. “Your request to shoot on sight is denied,” Stimpson said, picking the tiniest piece of lint off of his suit coat. “Your men will fire their weapons if they are attacked by someone with a gun. Do you understand? Do not fire unless fired upon. That strategy worked in Iraq, it damned better work in America.”