The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (7 page)

This terrible scene was the opposite of what Jared had expected to find. His home was supposed to have been a sanctuary—his mom and dad were supposed to have been untouchable Gods into whose bosom he could always crawl for help. Jared, his expression frozen in a cardboard cutout of terror, went straight away to his mom’s room. Whenever he had a nightmare or was picked on at school that was where he would go.

He found the door unlocked, just as the kitchen door had been, and for the same reason: his mom was courting death, looking for an excuse to use the gun. Jared was just that excuse. He was a mess; his eyes bugged out, his hair was going everywhere, his clothes were torn, and there was a wild, almost unnatural look to him. He could barely speak.

“Mom,” he wheezed, when he saw her.

Karen put a bullet in his chest. Jared fell back to stare at the ceiling with a horrified look of puzzlement on his face. He lived long enough to hear a second gunshot. But for Jared, death was only temporary. Somewhere along the path from the treehouse to his mother’s bedroom door he had breathed in Com-cells which were multiplying like mad. When the night was deep he opened his eyes and, a few hours later, when the sun was beaming through the slats onto Thuy as she was lying next to Deckard and wondering about the future, Jared was strong enough to stand.

He ate briefly from the corpse in his parent’s bed, but the lack of hot blood bothered him as did the fact that his mother’s face was crooked. In fact, that angered him. He smacked her, bit her cheek, and then stood up chewing. He couldn’t understand the concept of ‘why’ but he wanted to. Just then there was a reason to all his hazy memories beyond the anger. There was a purpose to the hole in his chest and to the furious hunger in his gut. He strained hard to figure it out but his brain was mush and his only thought was: revenge.

Someone had done this to him and he was going to find out who and he was going to eat whoever it was. He longed to in an ugly perverse manner. He had an uncontrollable urge to drink from a spurting artery like it was a crazy straw. He wanted to suck the blood’s origin straight from the bone and he wanted to roll in the open chest cavity of a man whose heart was still beating. These desires were demanding, overpowering. He didn’t even try to fight them—what was the point? Revenge and thirst were the only points he understood.

And, lying in the sun in her bed, Thuy had no idea.

She had escaped certain death and figured she deserved these few minutes to herself, relaxing, perhaps for the first time in her life. She was even considering the idea of ‘brunch’ a meal that was quite foreign to her, when the phone rang.

Deckard’s dark eyes were open and staring at her, stopping her hand as it reached for the phone. “There is no law saying you have to answer that,” he said. There wasn’t a hint of sleep to him. He had gone from full on REM sleep to completely cognizant in half of a phone’s ring. “Think before you pick that up.”

The urgent ring meant only one thing and it wasn’t a call from her mother looking to discuss her love life for the umpteenth time, it wasn’t a telemarketer looking to sign her up for a chance to win a timeshare. No, the phone call had to do with the Com-cells and Walton. It meant an end to the ten minutes of ‘me’ time she had allowed herself.

Was it Doctor Kipling demanding an explanation? Was it the police…also demanding an explanation? Or was it the media with an already formed explanation looking for a sound bite? Or worst of all, was it one of the forty family members looking to assign guilt?

She picked up the phone, hoping for the first time to speak to a telemarketer, hoping to hear all about the timeshare opportunity that wouldn’t last much longer. “Doctor Lee?” It was a man’s voice and it was heavily mixed with authority and accusation.

“Yes?” she answered evenly.

“You and the others are to remain indoors until we arrive. Do not attempt to flee and…”

“Who is this?” she interrupted.

“As far as you’re concerned, this is the fucking government,” the man said. “You will comply with all instructions or risk a charge of treason on top of everything else. Do I need to tell you what the penalty is for treason?”

Thuy knew it was death…or at least that’s what it was the last time anyone had ever been charged with treason. It seemed that nowadays a person could commit all sorts of ‘treasonous’ activities and receive little more than a movie contract and maybe a slap on the wrist.

But things might have changed overnight. How many people had died at Walton? How many state troopers? How many CDC agents? She had no idea of the full scale of the calamity. If she had known, she would have run.

“I will comply,” she said.

The phone rang for Max Fowler at 5:47 in the morning. He cracked an eye for a fraction of a second and then shut it, somehow falling back to sleep before the phone rang again. “Shit,” he groaned.

The bleary, lump of pale flesh and wild bleached blonde hair next to him, muttered, “You aren’t going in this early. They always screw you on your overtime. Let it go to voicemail.”

“Yeah.” His wife was right. Max had worked for
Winston and Sons
long enough to know they were big when it came to the promise of extra pay for extra hours but very short when it came time for the checks to be written. Max was asleep two seconds after he hit the ‘ignore call’ button.

He was deep into REM sleep when the next call dragged him slowly into consciousness. The bleary lump that was his wife, Charlene, made an angry sound and said, “Just turn off your phone.”

“No shit,” he said, angry that his work was being so persistent, but when he picked up his phone it was oddly dark. It took a second ring from the cordless house phone to wake him to the fact that something was wrong. “It’s not mine,” he said, a sudden worry in his gut.

Charlene had a strange new fear as well. No one called the house phone at that time of the morning unless it was an emergency. With her body still coming awake, Charlene slapped around on the nightstand next to her side of the bed until she found her glasses. Because her hair was so long she had to swing her head back before she stuck the glasses to her face; she stared at the phone. “I don’t know who this is. 738-4161? Does that sound familiar?”

Max sat up. “4161? I don’t...no, I don’t think so. What’s the area code?”

Even with her glasses, she had to squint. “518. Where’s 518?”

“Albany, I think,” he said, relaxing. Neither of them had family in Albany. He reached out his hand for the phone but didn’t answer it. Just as his wife had, he squinted at the numbers. “You know what? It’s probably your brother Joe calling from a police station. He told me yesterday that he was heading upstate and you know what a lead-foot he is. If you want me to bail him out, it’s going to have to wait until morning. Real morning, I mean.”

The phone stopped ringing and went dark in his hand. The two of them waited in silence to see if there would be a message. When the little light started blinking, indicating someone had left a voicemail, Max made a face and thought to himself:
this had better be important
.

The voice in his ear spoke sharply: “PFC Fowler, you are instructed to report to your unit by zero-five-thirty hours. This is an emergency call up of the National Guard, authorized by Governor Stimpson. Failure to report for duty will result in disciplinary action.”

For a few seconds Max stared at the phone, that nervous feeling returning. “It wasn’t work,” he said to his wife. “That was my guard unit. They’re calling me up and,” he glanced over at the clock, “And I’m already late. That’s fucked. How can they expect me to be at the base at 5:30 when they don’t call me until 5:47?” He felt confused and with his brown hair going in every direction he looked it as well.

“Maybe it’s Joe, pulling a prank on you,” Charlene said, hopefully. She didn’t want to think what was happening if the call up was for real. Being married to a military man, even a part-time military man meant she lived with certain fears, and a call-up staged before the first light of day could only mean the shit had hit the fan and in a big way. The only thing that would justify it was a new war or maybe a natural disaster. Her mind went immediately to the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan; it wasn’t that far away. If it had melted down…

On the nightstand was the remote control for the TV; she flicked on CNN and the two of them stared at the screen. Two grim-faced reporters were taking turns making wild guesses concerning the call up of the New York State National Guard and what it had to do with a series of road closures in and around the town of Poughkeepsie, New York. They were in possession of very few facts but that didn’t stop them from shooting their mouths off; it didn’t even slow them down.

With great seriousness, they not only kicked around the idea of a terrorist attack, but also the more humdrum catastrophes that were possible: a chemical leak like the one that had killed three thousand people in Bhopal, India. Or a biological incident like the Ebola outbreak that was even then continuing, adding to the eleven thousand deaths currently reported, or a nuclear accident, like Chernobyl.

The talking heads went on and on in this serious manner before suddenly turning their frowns upside down as they switched topics to some celebrity who was acting as though she was the first person ever to be pregnant.

“Maybe it’s a flood,” Max suggested, hoping to calm his wife. He could see the ‘look’ gelling on her face. It was the look that came when she was just about to forbid him from doing something she didn’t approve of. “I have to go. If this is real and I don’t show up I could be looking at jail time.”

“You’re already late. Maybe you could say you didn’t get the call. At least wait until there’s some news.”

He couldn’t do that. He had made commitments and was a proud member of the National Guard, and yet he dragged his feet getting dressed in his BDUs, and made a full breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee instead of slurping down a bowl of Cheerios, he also stopped on the way to Cortlandt to get gas even though he had three-quarters of a tank in his Nissan Sentra.

Smelling the fuel had him thinking:
I hope it’s a chemical spill
. A chemical spill would mean a day spent sweating in his mask and MOPP 4 gear, but, as an infantryman, he wouldn’t likely be doing much more than handling crowd control or directing traffic or standing around bull-shitting. When it came to a chemical spill he wasn’t trained for much else.

It was close on seven before he finally reported for duty, and he wasn’t the only one dragging ass. Only half the company was there, lingering in front of the battalion headquarters. Most were puffing away on cheap Camels and looking up at the building, nervously. Max found the trio of men he usually hung with during drill weekends. One of them, Private Johnny Osgood, had his hacky-sack out and was toeing it into the air with little thumps.

“Did I miss formation?” Max asked.

Max’s best friend in the company, Will Pierce, had been chewing at the end of his thumb nail. He spat a crescent moon out into the dirt and shook his head. “Naw. It’s the usual, hurry up and wait.”

“It ain’t the usual,” Johnny said, bending to retrieve the fallen sack after he had bipped it off the side of his foot. “You saw Captain Ganes same as me. He wasn’t like his normal self. He was all twitchy like he had friggin bedbugs. Here you go, Max,” he added, tossing the sack in Max’s direction.

Max bounced it once on his knee and then grabbed it in midair. It was chilly so early in the morning and he wasn’t in the mood. “So what’s going on? The news was all over the place guessing this and that.”

“Terrorist attack,” Specialist Frank Maguire answered. “Fucking ragheads.”

“Yeah, fucking ragheads,” Johnny echoed. “Some guys were saying it’s an Anthrax attack or maybe like Ebola. Whatever it is, you know it’s got to be big otherwise why get our asses out here, right? Normal terrorism is for the FBI or the CIA, right? So this has to be big.”

“I’d say so,” Will agreed. “I just knew it was going to happen someday. I just knew they’d come back and start killing Americans again. If there was one thing about Iraq that was good, it was that we were killing them over there instead of them killing us over here. No one ever thinks about that. Man if I had a dime for every time one of them…” The appearance of Captain Ganes and First Sergeant Brad Coker shut Will’s mouth. The two men, both veterans who’d fought in Iraq, wore matching frowns as if they were concentrating on not shitting themselves.

“Fall in!” Coker barked.

The sergeants, what few were there, began growling out orders: “Move your asses” and “Forget the smokes!” and “Quit your bullshitting and form up.” and “Williams, stop being a shitheel and dress right for God’s sake.” As the four under-manned platoons formed ranks, Captain Ganes stood there shaking his head. His orders were crap, possibly the worst orders an officer could ever hear. What was being asked of him had him in a sweat, especially seeing how few men had responded to the emergency call-tree.

When the men had formed ranks and the platoon sergeants had received their reports, Coker turned to the captain and he too was shaking his head slightly. “Report,” Ganes said.

Coker snapped up a salute. “Ninety-six unaccounted for,” he replied, his voice, usually that of a giant’s was barely a whisper.

Captain Ganes, who was also the manager of the local Shop-Rite fifty weeks out of the year, swore, “Fuck.” It wasn’t even close to being the proper reply of an officer. After a deep breath, he returned the salute and said: “Post.” At this order, the sergeants filed to the rear and the platoon leaders: three second lieutenants and a first lieutenant came to stand in front of their perspective platoons.

For three minutes the captain kept the men of Delta Company, 1
st
Battalion of the 69
th
Infantry Regiment locked up at full attention. He simply didn’t know how to start. He had led men in battle; he’d been personally targeted by snipers; he’d felt the fantastic heat of an IED exploding thirty feet from him and had the scars and the Purple Heart to show for it. All that seemed like a walk in the park compared to explaining to his men that very soon they’d be killing their own countrymen, perhaps even their own relatives.

It wasn’t just a possibility, it was, sure-as-shit, going to happen and, when it did happen, what group of Americans was going to sit back and passively allow themselves to be trapped in a death circle with a rampaging horde of zombies banging down the door?

The term ‘zombie’ had been used by Colonel Merrell in his briefing simply because no other term fit. The official term was “Infected Persons” but everyone knew they were fucking zombies. The word
zombie
had popped right into Captain Ganes’ mind the second Merrell described them as persons afflicted with a virus that renders them into unthinking, cannibalistic, monsters that were impervious to pain, and damned near impossible to kill.

In the conference call, Merrell had gone on and on about them, but Ganes hadn’t paid much attention. He was trying to come to grips with the very notion of zombies walking around the fields and farms of rural New York. When the actual concept embedded itself in his psyche, he mulled over the problem as an Army officer should. His rifle company was the closest unit to Poughkeepsie and it would be up to him to maintain the current quarantine zone until more help arrived. His current command of a hundred and three men would be trying to hold back close to 50,000 men, women, and zombies.

The zombies, if that’s what they really were, would be the least of his problems. He’d seen enough movies to know they’d come on dumb and slow—it would be like target practice for his men. No, it would be the real people that would be a nightmare to deal with. These weren’t soft city folk. The people around these parts were not only heavily armed, they were also the direct descendants of the men who had given George the III so many problems. And it was going to be Delta Company playing the part of the Redcoats, denying the rights of a frightened and angry citizenry. His men, manning check points and firebreaks were going to be right out in the open; they’d be sitting ducks, again just as the Redcoats had been.

How many men with scoped hunting rifles were in the quarantine zone? Five thousand? Six? How many had grown up shooting deer and rabbit every season? How many could hit a man-sized target at three hundred yards? Too many for his tiny force to do much against, especially with the rules of engagement handed down from on high.

Captain Ganes sighed and said, “At ease,” again in a manner that wasn’t fully military in nature. He was a pale, thin-lipped man and looked like the grocer he was, especially when he bobbed up and down, going heel to toe as he talked. “Gentlemen, there has been an incident and now, your country and your state needs you. They need that same courage you have demonstrated time and again. They need that same devotion to duty and, now more than ever, they need that strict adherence to orders which has been drilled into every one of us, whether it was at Fort Benning or West Point.”

He paused for a breath that lingered as the men began to glance around. This was the first time they’d ever been lectured on the importance of obeying orders and they rightly interpreted their captain’s meaning: something extremely distasteful was coming.

“I’m sorry to say that there has been a rather large accident involving a highly contagious biological pathogen.” Again, he paused as the men began to groan and grumble.

“At ease that shit,” the First Sergeant snapped from the back of the formation.

“No, it’s alright,” Captain Ganes said. “The men have a right to be pissed off. Hell, I’m pissed off. I’d rather be back home in bed with my wife.”

“That makes two of us,” Specialist Will Pierce joked just loud enough so that the entire company heard. There was a burst of nervous laughter, again not proper for men in a military formation—and yet it served its purpose. They relaxed by the slightest degree. These men weren’t like regular Army soldiers who were accustomed to taking orders, not only on a daily basis, but on an hourly one as well. Ganes had to make sure they were in the right frame of mind for what he was going to ask of them.