War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

  “How dare you! Your orders were to remain on the fucking line and to keep…wait, who are you?” He had just seen Ross’ new silver bars, and he knew, sure as shit, that this dumb fuck wasn’t one of his own officers.

  “I’m Ross of Echo Company. We’re doing something different: we’re all going to fight from now on. No more hiding like little kiddies.”

  The captain’s eyes flashed. He thumped into Ross chest first, demanding, “Are you calling me a coward?”

  “No, I’m saying we all are. We have the enemy right in front of us and we are all hiding.” Below them the captain’s men were beginning to rip bullets into the dead. “Since you have a battle to win, I won’t keep you.” Ross pushed past the captain who sputtered curses after him. Ross jogged further down the stream for another two hundred yards to where the men were huddling behind bushes and trees. This time he didn’t slow down as he shot at the zombies. What would be the point? More useless arguing with frightened officers? Or maybe he’d get fragged; that was a clear possibility.

  There was, of course, another outburst of anger, but he was already on his way to the next company, where a dozen men whispered the same question at him: “Are we bugging out already?”

  “No, we’re staying put and fighting,” was always his answer. He only went a little further before deciding to head back. He’d been gone for nine minutes and it felt like an eternity. After tromping down to the water’s edge and killing a pair of zombies and causing another battle to erupt, he raced back towards his place in the line, fearing the worst. Had they already been overwhelmed? Or were they even now throwing their guns aside and running for Boston?

  With his head filled with these thoughts, he nearly ran into a group of men, three of whom held leveled guns. Was it going to be a good ol’ fashioned fragging or a nuisance arrest? he wondered.

  “That’s him,” one of them growled.

  “Yeah, it’s me. I’ve got a company in the thick of it, so if you guys don’t mind getting out of the way, that would be great.”

  A lieutenant colonel pushed to the front and stood with his hands on his hips. It seemed to Ross as if he were striking a pose like some sort of action figure or maybe a superhero; Ross had to suppress a smile. “Why don’t you tell me what in fuck’s sake you’re doing?” the colonel demanded. “Because it feels a whole lot like you’re trying to undermine our chances. We can shoot traitors, you know.”

  “I’m trying to win, sir.” Ross quickly told him his idea, adding, “I would’ve run it past my C.O. if I knew who that was and if I had the time, which I don’t. Actually, WE don’t have a lot of time. Boston is getting close.”

  “Like I don’t know that,” the colonel snapped. “I know perfectly well where Boston is, just like I know perfectly well what our ammo situation is. Did it ever occur to you that we were letting the men bug-out for a reason?” It had not occurred to him. Feeling stupid, he shook his head and mumbled an apology.

  The colonel made a rumbling sound in his throat at the barely heard, “Sorry.” His anger was cooling quickly. It was hard to stay mad at an officer who wanted to fight; it was their job after all. And the man was right. They had been fighting a war of attrition, giving up ground to gain time to reorganize, reinforce and resupply.

  It was a war within a war, and it was one they were losing. Boston was too close and its people were starting to panic. If that particular dam broke and they fled, there was no telling what would happen.

  He didn’t want to think about that and, thanks to Ross, he didn’t have time to. The storm of gunfire shaking the leaves from the trees told him he had to get to his C.P. and get control of the situation. With a final glance up and down the line where his entire battalion was engaged at once, he growled, “Alright. Get back to your company and know this, Ross, this isn’t over.”

  “Yes, sir.” As far as Ross was concerned it was. He had a hundred and twenty-two men depending on him and he had better things to do besides being threatened. With a quick nod to the captain, who looked as if he had just swallowed something oily, Ross jogged away. After a few hundred yards, he began asking the men battling along the river: “Echo Company? You guys Echo Company?” Most of the people he ran into didn’t know who they were attached to, which made sense since everything had been pure chaos for the last day and a half.

  Eventually, he found his men, fighting the dead to a stand-still, piling the river up with bodies. The heaps of corpses weren’t yet at the level of the muddy bank, which was a relief. “What do we need?” Ross yelled, marching behind his men, making sure he was seen and heard. There was nothing worse for a soldier’s moral than for his commanding officer to disappear when the fighting got thick.

  The expected calls for more ammo came quick; no soldier ever thought he had enough. Ross bellowed for his staff sergeants to get an accurate ammo count and while the four of them went from man to man, he hurried to the next company in line simply to see how they were faring. The last thing he wanted was for a breakthrough to occur fifty yards away and not know it. The men of Charlie Company were fighting hard with no quit in them.

  “So far, so good,” Ross muttered as he strode back. The ammo count averaged fifty-three rounds a man, which he knew meant something closer to seventy-five a man. With an unknown number of zombies attacking them, it was a dangerously low number. He sent one of his men running to the colonel with a count of forty-five per man and urgent demands for more. It was how the game was played.

  The ammo situation was bad, but what his men desperately needed was light. They could make every shot count if they just had enough…these thoughts were crossing through his mind when, at that exact moment, a blink of light caught his eye.

  Feeling excitement burst in his chest, Ross ran up the hill to stand on a stump, watching as shards of brilliant light blazed out into the forest. It was like nothing he had ever seen and, unfortunately, whatever the source of the light was, it wasn’t enough.

  2-3:22 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Yangtze River, China

  It was after four in the afternoon when Xu Jingxing finally crossed the bridge as part of a massive refugee caravan that encompassed over three million peasants. The bridge that passed from the city of Jiujiang was only two lanes and most people opted to make the semi-swim. It was either that or chance a change in the wind, which for now, was sending the radiation raining down to the southeast. There had been rumors of a storm pushing up out of the South China Sea and if that happened, they were all going to die horribly.

  To help the peasants cross through the river, ropes and buoys were strung somewhat haphazardly. There should have been three distinct lanes to cross; however, the engineer who had been tasked with setting it up had made excuses and fled while still in the initial stages. The workers, who were as equally frightened of the radiation, had sent out some buoys, connected a few ropes and left almost as fast.

  There were wide gaps, leaving the peasants a short swim across. Those who weren’t strong enough to swim with their belongings either left them behind or drowned. No one helped one way or the other and so far, nearly a thousand people had drowned.

  Xu wasn’t about to leave his heavy pack behind. Within it was his future: thirty-six pounds of looted gold. When he fled his home, the pack had been filled with clothes, some food and a laptop. He still had the food, though he hadn’t felt like eating real human food since he’d been attacked nearly four hours before.

  During those hours, he had convinced himself that the creature had been just a man suffering from radiation poisoning and not one of black-eyed demons. Those had all been nuked out of existence. Everyone knew that. The army had done what it had to and sacrifices had been made for the greater good. Xu clung to the idea. He was a middle-aged man with a bowl haircut, awful circulation that left him with swollen feet, a saggy belly and a tiny scratch on his calf. It was that scratch that scared him to no end.

  At least it had.

  Now, he was too angry to be afraid. He stom
ped along in a drug-controlled fury; the drugs coming from a tiny doctor, who like everyone else, was trying to hump his livelihood across half of China. Thinking he was a shrewd businessman, the doctor had demanded outrageous prices for the medicines he carried. When demand became too great, he started swapping his pills for pieces of jewelry, expensive watches and, of course, gold.

  When he saw Xu’s gold, he foolishly asked for a private meeting which was held behind a large, rusting silo.

  “With your gold and my drugs, I think you and I can come out of this like kings. How much do you have?” His eyes were so filled with greed that he failed to note how dark Xu’s had become. As the doctor was pawing through his pack, Xu picked up a rock and beat his brains in. For just a moment, he was overcome with a desire for something clean—the doctor’s blood.

  It looked so beautiful and red and delicious that his fingers were dipping into its warmth before he could stop himself. Drinking that blood would have been proof that he was one of them, and at that point, he had still been human enough to be disgusted by the thought.

  Since then he swallowed pain pills almost like they were candy. They kept his body and his mind going for many miles and many hours until he was fairly breathing out Com-cells. On the packed bridge alone, he managed to infect thirty-six people. When he crossed to the other side, he pushed through the crowd, infecting even more.

  Being so close to that much fresh blood was warping his mind. He could feel the all-consuming hunger overcoming him and he knew he had to get away before he did something terrible. But there was nothing on the other side of the bridge. The land was one rice-paddy after another. In the distance was a small town and like a lunatic, he ran, pushing through the crowd, thinking that if he could find an empty room in one of the buildings, he would lock himself in and ride out the madness.

  “The pills will help. Five at a time and I’ll be fine.” To get to the town, he knocked through a highway choked with fifty thousand people, leaving Com-cells swirling in his wake.

  The town was even more crowded than the highway. There were exhausted peasants everywhere. They were stretched out on the ground, their throats bare. Xu felt his pulse hammering violently throughout his body, but didn’t notice the drool dripping from both sides of his mouth. Somehow, he gathered enough strength to turn away and found himself heading to the river that flowed alongside the highway.

  There were docks and boats, but there were also soldiers guarding the way. That didn’t stop Xu. He forced his way to the gate, caught sight of the officer in charge and held out a gold bar. Once more the gleam of gold was blinding and Xu was allowed through the gate. Another bar got him on board a squat barge that was brimming with people. A third bar bought him a small cabin.

  In his short time on the dock, he had managed to infect thirteen people who would get on boats of their own, spreading the disease north to Nanjing, whose population of eight million had nearly doubled in the last two days. Xu would go on to Wuhan, in the heart of China.

  On the way, the story of his gold reached the captain of the vessel—he left Xu’s cabin with a gleaming bar of his own and a host of deadly Com-cells multiplying in his sinuses. He wasn’t Xu’s only visitor. After the captain, more than one woman came to visit him. Each were brutally killed, their blood drained and their pale, lifeless bodies hidden under a blanket next to his bed.

  The hot blood was wonderful and yet his hunger only grew until it was a raging beast that the tiny cabin couldn’t contain. It was dark when he came out to feed and in the dark, he ate his fill.

  3- 3:27 a.m.

  New Rochelle, New York

  There was one problem with using Thuy as the top person on the human ladder: she was almost too weak to break the glass. Especially since she was given a rock as her only tool. Laughably, it was thought that it would be quieter than a gun.

  Her first attempt ended with: GONG! Everyone winced as the sound carried through the night. She had barely scratched the window.

  General Axelrod growled, “Hit it harder, damn it.”

  “Wow, what a great idea,” Thuy muttered under her breath. Didn’t he understand that she could only hit it so hard before her hand went through and she cut herself to ribbons? Scrunching up her pretty face and holding her breath, she swung again with even worse results than her first attempt. The brick-sized rock smashed into the heavy glass, but not only didn’t break it, the brick made an even louder GONG!!! What was worse, the rock bounced out of her hands and went flying, nearly cracking Dave Carlton on the head.

  Now everyone was cursing. “Get her down!” the general groused.

  Thuy hadn’t liked climbing up, using the relatively soft limbs of the men as hand and foot holds, now getting down only seemed worse. Light as she was, she still feared she would accidentally pull down the entire ridiculous structure. “Just give me the rock,” she ordered.

  It was passed upward and she tried again, this time aiming only to crack the glass. From there she would expand the crack until it became a hole. It took seven loud hits before the glass finally came down in a sudden grey sheet of rain. By that time zombies were lurching in their direction.

  Axelrod was again less than helpful. “Get inside! Get in!” he cried, going so far as to point at the hole.

  What did he think she was going to do? Climb down? Jump for joy? She scrambled in, doing her best to keep away from the jagged glass sticking up here and there. Once inside, she found the building was unsettlingly dark; it was also as quiet as a tomb; just what she was hoping for.

  Keeping hold of the rock, she hurried through the company’s legal section where, despite this being the computer age, there was a surprising amount of paper lying about in thick stacks or neatly arranged in filing cabinets of which there seemed to be at least one per cubicle. These stood grim and shadowy, like metal sentinels.

  As she had no use for lawyers, she had never been in the legal section before. It was no matter. She knew the layout of the ten-story building with its central elevator bank and three staircases, and was soon in the east hall, jogging for the closest staircase where the dark was perfect in its blackness. Thuy paused for only a second, again listening for any sign of the dead.

  The silence was as pure as the darkness. Thuy descended down into it, counting the stairs until she reached the first floor. Just as she reached the stairwell door there were two quick gunshots from the front. With her heart in her throat, Thuy sprinted for the lobby. Another gunshot rang out before she got to the doors. She threw them open and saw four or five shadowy beasts lumbering across the parking lot.

  Anna almost bowled Thuy over trying to get inside. “Hold on!” Thuy said, pushing her back. “Someone needs to distract them, otherwise they’ll go for the door.” They all knew what would happen then—another battle they couldn’t afford to fight. “Who’s the fastest of you?” Thuy asked. It was a status that no one wanted to claim, and the younger men suddenly found the ground of great interest. She knew Carlton’s name, so she picked him out.

  “Me? I’m not the…” Next to Thuy, Axelrod frowned and, even in the dark, the expression carried enough force to cut his protest short. “What am I supposed to do? Just run around?”

  “Get them to follow you around the building and then sprint back here and we’ll let you in. Hurry! Go!”

  With something of a whine, Carlton jogged reluctantly toward the zombies, waving his arms and, as he did, the others scooted inside. General Axelrod did not bother to watch the sergeant. Time was getting away from him and he feared that the army that had been shoved into his lap was already unraveling. “Dr. Lee and you,” he said, sneering at Anna. “Get to work on the cure. You three.” He gestured to Katherine, Warrant Officer Tim Bryan, and Specialist Russell Hoskins, the other crew member. “Set up a defensive perimeter here on the first floor. Everyone else with me, including you, Miss Shaw.”

  He took the lead, heading for the stairs. Ten stories was a long climb for a sixty-three-year old man and eventually he w
aved the younger men ahead, gasping, “Communications first…I need to…know what’s…going on.” The last couple of flights were murderous and he had to wait a full minute at the top to catch his breath and to let his head stop spinning before he strode onto the floor.

  His team had chosen a south-facing office as the operations center and by the time he stepped through the door, the portable satellite was halfway ready, laptops were ginning up, and maps were being spread. His staff was trained for mobile warfare and would have everything up and ready in minutes.

  Data was already coming in. Axelrod, his bald head glistening with sweat, stared down at it in disbelief. “Why?” he whispered. They were all asking themselves the same vague question. “He’s moved all the air units. All of them. We’re screwed.” He was too shocked to even curse.

  “And look at the northern line,” a lieutenant colonel said, choking in indignation. “They’re being reallocated.”

  “Find out to where,” Axelrod ordered. He could see the redeploy symbol over the unit names as well as the colonel could. There were a lot of units with the same symbol. Unbelievably, many were holding the western section of the Zone. “He’s taking units out of the line in the middle of a damned fight!” It wasn’t unheard of as long as there were units to replace them; in this case it would take most of the day or even longer to get even the closest of the northern Guard units in place.

  The trouble didn’t end there.

  A few hours earlier, Axelrod had scraped together a smattering of odd units— engineers, medical companies, a cyber protection battalion, and even a tank maintenance company—they were supposed to have been airlifted into Boston to reinforce the badly mauled 101st. Instead, it had been re-tasked to help hold Long Island. To make matters worse, they weren’t flying. The units were currently marching a hundred and six miles from Lynchburg to Norfolk where they would board a boat.