“It’ll take them three days to get there,” Axelrod muttered. “This is insane. We…we need to stop this.” Without any help, he didn’t see how the line around Boston would hold and if it fell, not only would millions die, it would spell disaster for the rest of New England.
He turned to Courtney. “Can you get on the phone with the governors of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. Tell them that if they don’t send everything they have to help in Massachusetts they’ll be doomed. You should call Canada as well. Their border’s going to be wide open in a matter of hours.”
“What do you want me to do about this mixed bag near Lynchburg?” Colonel Taylor asked.
Axelrod rubbed his bald head back and forth for a few seconds before shrugging. “The only thing we can do; we turn them around. That goes with all of them. I don’t care if they’ve marched for the last three hours straight, I want every unit back where they were. Tell their C.O.s that until they hear differently from my own mouth, I’m running the 7th Army, not the President.”
Chapter 5
1-4:03 a.m.
Grafton, Massachusetts
Four hundred yards from where First Lieutenant Ross’ Echo Company was killing the dead with grim efficiency, stoically waiting until the creatures were right on top of them before pulling their triggers, a half dozen lights blazed into the face of Governor Clarren and thirty-two other high-ranking members of his staff and his party.
Most of them looked ridiculous. For the most part, it appeared as though they were getting ready for an early morning duck hunt. The rest wore green garbage bags from head to toe, duct-taped at the wrists, ankles and neck. They might have looked more ridiculous than the rest, at the same time, many of the nearby soldiers stared enviously. The only items they had in the way of protection were handkerchiefs and strips of cloth which they wound around their faces.
The officious and frightened group was surprisingly well armed. Clarren, in his last act as Governor, had relieved the security staff of their weapons and dismissed them. With every camera left in the state rolling, and radio stations broadcasting, he had closed the State House, saying, “I am being arrested for treason because of the part I played in trying to protect my state. The punishment for this is death. I say that if my life is forfeit, I cannot see a better death than one given in service to my family and to the people of Massachusetts. I will not cower in some closet or try running away. I would rather die fighting our common enemy than in front of a firing squad. But if the President still wants to arrest me, let him come in person. He’ll find me on the front lines.”
There had been a good deal of cheering from the crowd. Word spread of what was happening and, as Clarren took questions from the press, unexpected volunteers began to trickle in. It hurt his heart to see how young they were. The twenty-year-olds were bad enough, but some couldn’t have been more than fifteen.
Christopher Gore, wearing a camouflage uniform like he would a suit, and sweating through it as if he had run a marathon, whispered, “We can’t take the kids. How do we know if they even have permission from their parents?”
“I don’t think that matters now. If the children want to fight for their families and their state, I will not stop them.”
This was caught by one of the news crews who announced that Clarren was leading a “Children’s Crusade.” For some reason this sparked even more of a surge in volunteers and before long, the ex-Governor was leading a three thousand strong army across the state. Trucks and cars were gathered in a huge caravan and the whole thing moved west down the Massachusetts turnpike, lights blazing, and horns blaring so that there was a parade-like atmosphere to it.
They found the desperate “Army of Southern New England,” east of Worcester, something that killed the manic euphoria. Without air support, the strategic city had fallen an hour before and now the army of undead was practically on the front steps of Boston. For the moment, the only things holding back the main horde was the exhausted, half-panicked army of men and boys.
The panic would have been worse if the ragged army knew what sort of chaos was going on behind the lines. An hour before, a flight of Blackhawks had swooped down, not to strafe the zombies or to bring reinforcements, but to land a swarm of FBI agents. General Milt Platnik, as well as his entire staff, were arrested, shackled and whisked away to answer for their “crimes.” Replacing them were fourteen generals from the Pentagon, who had been picked almost at random. They felt like they had been thrown into a blender. Still, they were professionals and the ranking officer sorted out the positions among his staff and they went to work trying to regain control of what felt like a lost cause.
As professional as they were, the forty “political” officers that accompanied them by order of the president were not.
None of the political officers had any military training at all; they were party officials, mainly junior staffers from the White House or Congress. Most of them had degrees in political science or environmental studies. They were worse than useless.
They had been told about the coup attempt against the president and warned not to trust anyone in green. The best among them were surly and suspicious. The worst were puffed up with self-importance, reminding anyone who looked at them sideways how they had the power to arrest anyone they pleased for treason. It was a very real threat and it cowed hardened officers who allowed themselves to be bullied.
Orders from on high had to be filtered down through these political officers and the worst among them frequently added their own spin, perceiving themselves to be Napoleons in training. Many also displayed aggressively possessive attitudes. Supplies were not to be shared with other units, they were to be hoarded. The same was true of reinforcements. Although the center was in no danger, nearly half of Clarren’s young recruits were positioned there, uselessly crouching in the forest behind a six-mile long lake while the horde split and spilled over the far edges.
None of the political officers that he ran into knew what to do with Clarren. Since he had come to the front line to die, he laughed in the face of threats of arrest.
On his own, Clarren followed the sound of the gunfire along the Quinsigamond River. At least a thousand of the children came with him, but most of these were again nabbed by units along the way and barely a hundred reached the point of attack.
It hurt Clarren’s heart to watch the teens go into the line, taking timid steps, looking ready to run at any second. He wouldn’t have blamed them if they had. They just seemed too damned young to fight and for a moment, he doubted himself and the wisdom of bringing them. Then the hollowed-eyed veterans on the line began to thank him, some practically in tears.
“If they want to fight, we’ll take ‘em,” was the prevailing wisdom.
Luckily, there were no political officers below the battalion level and so common sense prevailed. The kids were buddied with an adult and when there was time, quick instructions were given: “Whatever you do, don’t waste ammo! Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire. Never fire from behind someone. And no matter what happens, don’t panic.”
Clarren’s staff could have used some of those instructions. None of them were vets and, in keeping with the prevailing politics of the state, they’d all been virulently anti-gun a week before. Still, they and the newspeople were welcomed—at first. Clarren’s media entourage had started with the same nine stations that had covered his speech in Boston, but as he had gotten closer to the actual fighting, they had dropped off one by one. Unsurprisingly, by the time he reached the front lines, only two stations were still with him. The little group consisted of six very nervous people who walked in a huddle.
The glaring lights for the cameras provided a welcome relief. The soldiers could finally see what they were shooting at and in no time, they had cleared the river in front of them.
A cheer went up and Clarren and his staff were thumped on the shoulder and high-fived until their hands hurt. Another wave of the dead were dispatched with the same alacr
ity and the men began to clown for the cameras, feeling they had reached some sort of turning point. They were still congratulating themselves when a thunderous roar swept the far bank.
The cameras had been on Clarren, who had fought with everyone else, but was still more politician than soldier. He paled at the sound and took a step back. Someone yelled for the lights to be pointed across the river and when they were, they saw that the forest seemed to have disappeared under a great shadowy mass that roiled and screeched. This was the true zombie army and it made the stoutest men quail.
“Keep the lights on them!” the battalion commander ordered at the top of his lungs. “Where’s the reserve company? Captain Tate! Get your men on the line this instant. Mackon! Break out the 240s.”
“What about the mortars?” Mackon asked, his unblinking eyes staring in horror at what lay across the river. “If ever there was a time to use them, I think it’s now.”
The commander nodded. “Yeah. Might as well give them everything.” Mackron hurried off, screaming over the growing gunfire. It wasn’t going to be enough. Nowhere close to enough, in fact. The commander dialed his boss, the brigade C.O. and calmly told him that he had “the entire goddamned zombie army right in his damned lap,” and then begged him to send every available man his way before it was too late.
The political officer attached to the brigade HQ heard the panic in the lieutenant colonel’s voice and jumped when the first of the high-explosive mortar rounds began to explode among the undead.
Sitting on the hood of a Stryker, looking unmoved by the urgency of the situation, was the brigade commander, Colonel Welling a lean, hunk of gristle with an iron-grey flattop. “Well?”
“What do you mean? What do we do?” the political officer asked. She was inside the command vehicle and had no intention of getting out.
“That’s what I asked you. Do we throw in our reserves?”
Her eyes went to the map, which was crawling with symbols. “I-I can’t make that sort of decision. It has to come from higher up.” He glared at her until she reached for her sat-phone. She hated his judging eyes and she rolled up her window to make her call. Her boss was with the division H.Q. and he couldn’t authorize the use of reserves either and the call was passed on again.
The moment Welling heard her talking, he whispered to his executive officer, “Get something moving, now. We can’t have penetration so close to the water barrier. We staked everything on holding it.”
His XO was a hard veteran of both Gulf Wars and knew the danger posed as well as his CO, and yet he went cold and shifted his grey eyes toward the back of the vehicle at the request. “But…”
Welling glared the man into silence. Just giving the order had been a court-martial offense. “I’m willing to risk it. If they come for me, I’ll pull a Clarren and head for the lines. What about you?”
“Yes, sir.”
The XO put in the call to the haggard third battalion and ordered them back into battle. It was a two-minute conversation that was secretly monitored and recorded by the US Army Intelligence and Security Command.
The operator hearing the conversation sighed and turned to the strident political officer. “We have another one.”
2–4:14 a.m.
Washington D.C.
Despite the early hour, the atmosphere thrummed in the White House, turning the air electric. Normally, there was an air of quiet reserve about the building, then again normally the place was filled with senior staffers, Cabinet members and other high-ranking officials who knew the proper etiquette. These had either been fired, forced to quit, run off, or arrested.
As he didn’t know who he could trust, the President had decided to get rid of the whole shebang.
For the most part, the chaos that was expected from this “massacre”, as it was being called, did not materialize. Most of the cabinet-level departments had ceased operations two days before. Those that remained fully operational, such as the Department of Homeland Security, had a staggering amount of “upper management” and when the top layer was skimmed away, there were plenty of people ready to fill the void.
It was only the Department of Defense where things were horribly scattered. Had it not been for the President’s interference, the situation would have been wrangled into some sort of order by then.
The war…the entire war, was a cluster-fuck of epic proportions. The only real good news was that the President had gone to bed. The moment he had, Matthew Dimalanta loosened the thin black tie he wore. His wife had told him it made him look like Malcom X, but a palatable Malcom X, one that white people would approve of. He was no Malcom X. Dimalanta was weak and the tie felt like it was strangling him. He had been the President’s campaign manager and when Marty Aleman—and everyone he was associated with—had been arrested, Dimalanta had been ordered into the position of Chief of Staff.
He knew going in that it would be a thankless job, but he had no real idea just how bad it would be.
An undercurrent of paranoia rang through the White House, making everyone extra vigilant to carry out orders to the letter with absolutely no deviation. Exhausted troops who had gone the last two days without sleep, and in many cases without food, were ordered to shift hundreds of miles. The Air Force was being asked to relocate hundreds of planes to bases that couldn’t handle the influx—hundred million-dollar fighters were being pushed out into the fields to make room for billion-dollar bombers.
No one had the guts to say anything. After the arrest of General Phillips, a number of generals tried to make a stand and were immediately arrested as well. Things became far worse when the interrogations began. The President wanted answers quickly, and after the FBI couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stoop to using torture, the CIA was called in.
The few officers on duty at that time of the morning were not the cloak and dagger types. They were analysts who knew nothing about torture and frankly didn’t want to know. They rushed out of Langley, regardless, made threats, only to be laughed at by General Phillips and General Haider. Marty couldn’t tell the difference and, in a haze of tears and sweat, spilled everything, explaining how it was only a three-person cabal and that they had the President’s and the country’s best interests in mind.
This wasn’t good enough for the President. “I want the truth!” he had screamed into Marty’s face three hours before. Marty had only cried harder.
Now, the heavyweights from the CIA were arriving. The first were the senior deputy directors with sleep in their eyes, who were there, not as interrogators, but to find out what the hell was going on. They also needed to make sure everyone knew that the CIA never tortured anyone—especially Americans.
Dimalanta knew that wouldn’t fly. The President knew certain things for a fact, whether or not they were a fact at all. In his mind, half of everything the CIA did involved torture and, if they weren’t going to torture for him, it could only mean they were against him. Dimalanta tried to convey this without actually saying it, hinting that the arrests would begin at the top.
“How many arrests have been made so far?” the Deputy Director of the Office of Advanced Analytics asked in something of a choked whisper. He was drab, balding and pudging in the middle, someone the eyes rarely lingered on. In other words, he was the perfect spook.
“Over eight hundred.”
The deputy swayed in place. “But I only work in analytics. Did you get my assessment of the Chinese situation? Did the President see that? Did you see the estimate of a Russian nuclear strike on China? That was what my team has been…”
Dimalanta’s dark scowl interrupted him. “We need confessions! If you guys can’t do it, get one of your agents here asap, and I do mean asap. If the President wakes up and finds out you haven’t been cooperating, then I won’t be able to help you.”
It was because of this conversation that David Kazakoff was now in the White House striding past the beautiful oil paintings and the magnificent marble busts and the finely carved crown molding. Although Dimalan
ta had expressly demanded a CIA agent, he was not one. The CIA did not have “agents.” They had officers and in some cases operatives. Kazakoff was neither of these, either. He was an asset, one that did not like the idea of being paraded around in the damned White House. It put a damper on one’s ability to remain incognito.
Technically, he did not work for the CIA. His paychecks came from a well-connected law firm that funneled money to various people for various reasons, all the while skimming a bit off the top for themselves. No one in the law firm had ever met Kazakoff and had no idea what he did, which was perfect for all involved.
His escort through the building was twenty-four-year old Trista Price, a young intern: pretty, thin, blonde, who had found herself promoted in the course of the night and was now assistant undersecretary of…something. She couldn’t remember the title that had been thrown at her and she had been too shocked to ask for it to be repeated. She didn’t even know exactly who she was working for; she only knew that it was the greatest honor she could think of.
This honor was sullied by having to be anywhere near Kazakoff. He was slightly taller than average, but far stronger, hiding the bulk of his muscles beneath his over-sized jacket. It was impossible to hide his scarred-over knuckles. He was handsome in a way that Trista tried not to notice: dark wavy hair, penetrating eyes, a firm jaw.
“Where is the subject?” His voice was soft, accentless, cold.
Trista wouldn’t look at him as she answered, “Beneath the west wing.” Visiting the labyrinth of rooms beneath the White House had been a thrill the first time she had been there; now she was feeling ill. Five of the rooms had been turned into makeshift cells, which had been bad enough. In a few minutes they were going to be torture chambers.
“Are the kitchens down there, too?” Her chin turned slightly towards him—was he going to eat before he tortured them? The idea was off-putting. She wished that was the case. “I’m going to need some equipment,” he added, making her blanch.
War of the Undead Day 5 Page 7