Before she could answer, Cannan said, “We’re broken. I don’t blame you and I don’t really blame the President. Blame doesn’t fix the problem. The only way to fix the problem is to move forward—together, as a unit. As one. I need you to do your job and when you really get down to it, there is only one fundamental reason you’re here.”
“To ensure that you don’t undermine the presidency.”
“Exactly. And what’s my fundamental job?”
Vertanen hesitated for a moment, unsure if this was a trick question. “To win,” she answered.
Now it was Cannan’s turn to hide a smile, though his would have been a rueful one. He didn’t know if they had a chance in hell of winning. He’d been following the events in China with particular attention and it had not come as a surprise to him that a static defense, no matter how spectacular the Grand Canal had been, would end in anything but failure.
But the fact that the nukes had not destroyed every last zombie, had hit home shockingly. Since the beginning of the apocalypse he had thought that if all else failed he could turn to a nuclear option. Now that seemed out the window and so was his complete confidence in his ability to actually win. But he would try. He would do everything in his power to win. It was the one reason he was a mile in front of his line, having a come to Jesus moment with his PO. Cannan needed the freedom to lead without everything being second-guessed along a chain of command that had no idea what the true tactical situation was.
“Exactly!” he cried. “My job is to win, and there’s only one way we can win this battle and that’s if I have a free hand. In war, seconds can mean the difference between victory and defeat. And you’ve seen how long decisions can take.”
“But the rules…”
“Damn the rules! If you trust yourself and your instincts, your superiors will as well. Watch.” His command vehicle was equipped with the latest tech in communications. With the punch of two buttons, he was able to reach a real three-star general, the 2nd Corps Commander, Lieutenant General Leonard.
“Sir, I have the enemy in front of me. My plan of battle is to destroy each and every one of them.”
General Leonard had seen his divisions pulled apart as much by politics as by the dead; he had everything riding on the 3rd ID. If they failed, the entire western theatre would crumble. A part of him wanted to urge caution, only this was Thomas Cannan he was talking to. Suggesting caution would have resulted in laughter.
“Do whatever it takes to destroy them,” Leonard said, heavily.
“I will, sir. I’ll show the world what a fully prepared and fully independent American infantry division can do. And it will be glorious!” He hung up and turned to Vertanen. “See how simple that was? Now trust yourself and trust me. You know that you don’t need to question every one of my orders. And you know I didn’t drag my ass all the way up here to lose. We’re here with the same purpose. Let’s bury the past and start fresh.”
He put out his hand, which in itself was a testament to how desperate he was to win.
She had been raised to distrust the military and that distrust had been deepened in college where she had delved into every conspiracy theory put forth. And yet, almost against her will, she shook the general’s hand. They had a common enemy that didn’t care one wit about ideology and fact-checkers, who was right four elections ago, and all the rest. Just then all of that felt like crap.
The handshake was strangely affectionate, especially since their common enemy was bearing down on them, eager to kill. It was affectionate because at that moment, they both remembered they were Americans first.
Chapter 14
1-1:09 p.m.
Grafton, Massachusetts
Lieutenant Colonel Troy Ross would have found General Cannan’s idea that a static defense was untenable somewhat funny, since the ragged, bearded Army of Southern New England had clung to the sickly Quinsigamond River with a grim tenacity.
Win or lose, the river would never recover. It was a horrid desolation that the men had christened the Black Bog. The entire western bank was no longer a bank at all. It was an alien landscape made up of blood-filled craters. Corpses and parts of corpses by the tens of thousand were half-sunk and scattered as far as the eye could see in the man-made black marsh. The very air had been tortured by explosions and was filled with a nasty, unwholesome smoke.
Through it, the men stared out on the once pretty landscape. Gone were the fields of flowers that reminded so many of the of English meadows. Gone were the red-painted barns and the sad willows.
“I hate this,” Clarren said to Ross. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the scene. The craters, like tremendous bowls, were half-filled with black sludge. Their sides were so slick with blood that they acted like traps from which the zombies couldn’t escape. Hundreds of the fiends were struggling in these pits and if ever one finally made it out, it would simply fall into the next. From a certain point of view, it was comical; no one laughed.
No one had the energy to laugh. For the time being, the battle had ended. With fake PO authorization numbers fed to him by Courtney Shaw, Ross had acted as the brigade’s fire support team and directed the division’s artillery with deadly precision. It was the only thing that kept the line from being overrun. But even with him using every available artillery shells within twenty miles, the fight had been a close one.
Many men had been down to their last few bullets before the tide turned and the wave of zombies had dried up. Exhausted, the soldiers fell asleep one by one. Ross had been in the middle of his own catnap when Clarren found him. He had come back from “Battalion Headquarters” a changed man. Not so much outwardly since he’d been quiet and drawn since coming to the line in the dark of the morning, but inwardly. It was one thing as Governor to order men to fight for their state and their families, knowing that many of them would die. It was quite another to do the killing personally.
It hurt. There was actual pain associated with executing a man, even one who was on the verge of changing over.
“Of course you hate this,” Ross mumbled, pulling his ACU coat up to his chin and trying to find a more comfortable spot among the bramble. “What’s there to like?”
“Nothing, I guess. Where am I supposed to be?” In the last few hours so much had changed that Clarren didn’t know where he’d left his squad.
Ross cracked an eye. “It would be great if you could find some ammo for us. Oh, and wake me when the horde comes back our way.”
Clarren squinted west at a column of smoke rising up in the distance. He could not have known it but the great mass undead was there, rampaging through the city of Worcester, four miles away.
A hundred or so patients hadn’t been evacuated from Saint Vincent Hospital and for the last seven hours they had remained hidden on the third floor, watched over by four nurses who had refused to abandon them. Unfortunately, this dedication and selflessness on the part of the nurses was being accidentally undermined by some of the patients. A handful of them, led by the youngest of the patients, a gritty, determined woman named Dana Miller, were trying to make a break for freedom by taking an ambulance.
From the very start, Dana had decided that she wasn’t going to be a victim in any of this. Full of piss and vinegar, she had gone south to defend her state, and for thirty hours, she had held her own, showing that she was as tough as any man. Then she’d been shot—pierced in all truth—by a huge hunk of depleted uranium, fired from the rotary canon of an A10 Thunderbolt. That same ugly plane had kept coming back time and again, looking as though it was breathing fire. It was low and slow, and everyone in sight shot at it. Lying there in a pool of blood, she could hear the whine of bullets bouncing off its thick titanium armor. In five passes, it had killed most of her company and sent the rest running.
Left for dead, it had taken her a day to crawl away from the border and now a day after that, she was sewn back together and barely able to walk. Her body felt like it was on the verge of coming apart, but she could think just fi
ne and knew that the hospital was not a safe haven. The clear fact was that unless the zombies had some sort of expiration date and simply died on their own, everyone in the hospital would eventually be killed and eaten.
Dana wasn’t going to go out that way. She would escape or die trying. With five others, none under seventy, they crept, and in Dana’s case crawled down to the emergency room, found an ambulance, and made a mad getaway.
Since she could barely sit up, the driving was left to a man named Gene. Gene was recuperating from both a heart attack and a stroke. He had purple blotches running up and down his arms and a mid-line catheter tunneled through his chest and into the jugular vein in the neck.
But damn if he wasn’t game. When the others held back, he stepped up.
In this case, although the mind was willing, the flesh was weak. The ambulance was something of a brute and far larger than anything Gene had driven in the last forty years. He misjudged how little room he had to work with and with a hellacious scream of metal, scraped the side of the bricked edge of the bay. The sound not only spooked a row of pigeons, which went winging away, it also caused every zombie within three blocks to turn and head their way.
“It’s okay, Gene,” Dana whispered, trying to reach over and pat his hand. “Just keep going. We can’t stop.”
He didn’t have his hearing-aids in and was already stopping. “Oh, boy, this is no good. I have to straighten out. I got to get the angle just right. I had a station wagon once that was like tis. Long as a…”
“For fuck’s sake, Gene!” another of the oldsters cried in thick Bostonian. “Yuh don’t even hafta back up. Just point the fuckin’ cah that way.” He pointed through the windshield, and when Gene followed his hand, the first thing he saw was a walking corpse.
“It’s one of them,” Gene said in a useless stage whisper. In life, the zombie had been something of a stunted man. At just a few inches over five foot he’d had to endure three decades of bullying. As a zombie, it was terrifying. It charged up onto the canted hood of the ambulance and clung there like a deranged vampire.
Useless screams broke out in the ambulance. “Drive,” Dana ordered. Gene did his best, which wasn’t very good. He could barely see because of the zombie and decided to overcorrect his steering to keep from hitting the side of the bay a second time. Instead he ran up a curb and over a row of bushes. They hadn’t been going very fast to begin with and now they were plowing along at a miserable four miles an hour.
Everyone was screaming the same thing: “Turn!” As though he were turning a tugboat, he went hand over fist and finally dropped down off the curb only to hit a car—his own car in fact. His wife had parked it near the emergency room four days before in the hope that Gene would be in and out of the hospital in time for her afternoon soaps.
It was just dawning on him that the 1999 Oldsmobile Cutlass was remarkably similar to his own, when the smallish zombie reared back a fist and starred the windshield.
“Christ almighty,” Gene swore in frightened amazement, his heart giving a painful lurch in his chest.
“Back up!” everyone screamed.
These things used to be second nature to him, now it took some concentrating, especially since his heart was tweaking him something fierce with each beat, and he had broken out in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the zombie. He peered down at the controls. The gear shifter was obvious, but where were the windshield wipers? Certainly getting smacked with windshield wipers would cream that monster’s corn. There were four rows of buttons and toggles and he stared at them with little comprehension.
Dana grit her teeth, reached over and pulled the gear into reverse. She felt something give deep inside of her and when she tried to sit back up, she found she couldn’t. Her strength left her and she slumped over the console.
“Go,” she told him, but he was only starting to turn the wheel, while the zombie was raining blows on the windshield. Finally, he put his foot on the gas and the ambulance slewed backwards in a long curve, there were repeated and heavy thumps under the tires, each causing the console to leap up into Dana’s chest. It pained her cruelly, and yet she did not regret it in the least.
We’re getting away, she told herself. They weren’t. Gene drove backwards in a wide, wide arc that took them in a complete half-circle and those thumps hadn’t been more curbs as Dana guessed, they had been zombies.
When Gene finally tore his eyes from the scene playing itself out through his side window he squinted down and found the brake. The ambulance stopped, jarring them all back and forth. The little angry zombie had been flung off at some point; it was the only good news. In front of them were hundreds more. Gene began clicking his dentures. It was the only sound in the ambulance.
“What is it?” Dana asked, afraid that she already knew the answer. No one would answer her and she had to fight a wave of ghastly internal pain to sit up. “Oh God,” she whispered at what was in front of them. “There’s so many.”
“Let us out!” one of the patients hissed banging the side of the ambulance.
“There’s a door next to you, Gladys,” Dana said. “Just pull the handle.” She watched them pile out the back of the ambulance and crawl into some of the same sort of bushes that Gene had destroyed. Dana glanced over at Gene. He was grey in the face and sweating. “if you’re going, you better hurry,” she told him.
He shook his head. “I’m having another heart attack. It feels like I’m dying. What about you?”
“I can’t run. I can’t hardly even sit up. There is something we should do. For them and for the others.” She pointed at the console to the toggle marked Siren. His eyes widened and then flicked away quickly. He was afraid of the zombies more than he had imagined he could be afraid of anything, and what she was suggesting could only end in the worst death imaginable. He didn’t know if he could do it.
She understood his fear. “Look.” She held up a scalpel she had taken from the crash-cart in her room. Next, she pulled aside a bandage on her upper chest. Beneath was a mid-line IV the same as his. “They said these go into my jugular. If I cut the tubes, it’ll probably take about thirty seconds to bleed out.”
Thirty seconds offered a glimmer of hope. If the windows and doors held up for that long, he’d be dead before he was even touched. “How far do you think we can get?”
“That’s up to you. Just don’t take your foot off the gas.”
“I won’t this time.” He nodded at her, glanced at the scalpel, and then stabbed his foot down on the gas. At the same time, she flipped the siren on. The ambulance seemed to scream as it tore forward. For good measure, she tripped the lights. They were bright even in the midday sun.
The zombies in front of them cringed, moments before Gene plowed over them. “Faster!” Dana said in a shaky yell.
He was going as fast as he could. The converging zombies acted as speed bumps, causing the ambulance to buck like a bull, and slew left and right as if the tires were running through oil slicks. At one point, he started to go into a skid and they almost went over on its side.
Gene had lived in the northeast all his life and he knew how to fix a skid and he turned into it. This slowed their pace even more, which wasn’t the worst thing since they were fast coming up on the ramp that led to the street. It curved down and around to the left.
“Hold on,” he said to Dana, taking the turn as fast as he dared—it wasn’t fast enough. At the bottom of the ramp was a mob of undead and there was nothing he could do but slam straight into them. He crushed the ones in front under his tires, and, as he did, the ambulance seemed to be climbing upward, and now the rear tires were spinning on rotting, grey flesh instead of concrete.
It killed their momentum as thoroughly as if they had run into pool of mud.
“Do it!” Gene cried in his tremoring old man’s voice, as hands and fists began to tear at the ambulance and slam its windows.
“No! Keep going,” she ordered.
He tried gunning the engine and hauli
ng the wheels back and forth. Too late, he remembered that the vehicle had four-wheel drive. It took him a full six seconds of squinting around to find the switch and by then the rear doors were flung open.
“Dana!” He turned to her and nearly caught the scalpel in the eye. She was already coming at his mid-line IV.
“Hold still!” Her hands were weak and her first attempt at cutting the tubes failed. Gene had to guide her hands and help her saw through the line. His blood gushed out of the tube, pouring down the front of his hospital gown and strangely, he felt grateful.
She tried to cut through her own line, but the tubing was too thick. Behind them, thirty of the beasts were shoving themselves simultaneously through the open backdoor—she made the mistake of looking back, which drained what little strength she had.
“Gene, help me.”
There’d be no help from Gene. His blood pressure was already bottoming out and he was gripped by what he thought was an odd malaise. Nothing seemed to matter and wasn’t that strange when there were terrifying monsters fighting through the back of the ambulance?
They went for Gene first. His bright, clean blood was a lure that they couldn’t resist. He was dragged out of his chair and pulled into the back and fought over. There was no struggle in him, or fear, or even much pain, except a dull echo as the fingers on his left hand were bitten off.
From the footwell of the passenger seat where she had slid in a last desperate attempt to hide, Dana heard him die and heard the beasts feasting on him. They would come for her next. Already the driver’s side window had shattered and long grey arms were reaching in for her.
“Damn,” she whispered, under the wail of the siren. She knew what she had to do and putting it off wouldn’t make it any easier. After a deep breath, she closed her eyes and slit her own throat. Dana Miller did it right. There was no hesitation, no cringing, no second chances. The scalpel sliced through her carotid artery and the blood came fast and hot.
War of the Undead Day 5 Page 19