War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

  They were a hit among the infantry men who cheered and laughed as half an acre at a time were mowed down with each shot.

  And still zombies got through by the thousands. At three hundred meters the fifty-caliber machine guns, firing in short bursts at head height, began to bring down their share; next were the M60s and M240s. And so on until at fifty meters the individual soldiers on the line got their turn.

  The thin crackle of the M4s and M16A4s reached the command post seconds later. “And that is our waltz,” Cannan said. “or at least the beginning of it. Logistics will be next and that’s always something that needs to be worked out on the fly. In practice situations we know the roads like the back of our hands and they’re always wide open. The reality is far different. Refugees clogging everything up; drivers getting lost or getting in accidents, bombs falling in the wrong places making craters. But it’ll work out, if you trust me, Vertanen.”

  She snuck a peek back at the monitor where the line soldiers were taking well-aimed measured shots. Some fired from behind cars or fences and in some cases, sitting on rockers on the front porches of houses. At the moment, everything seemed just as the general had said: controlled.

  “I trust you,” she said, causing a few eyebrows to shoot up among the political officers gathered near her. Like a mother duck, she shooed her flock away from the circle of command vehicles. “We will trust them, but we’ll also verify. Got it? We don’t have to challenge every order, just the ones that don’t make sense.”

  Vertanen released her minions, most of whom were under twenty-eight, to watch over men who had spent that long in uniform learning to command armies. They followed her command: trust but verify, and things moved along amazingly.

  While the howitzers kept up a steady drumbeat of background thunder, the jets rumbled overhead, coming in intervals that a man could set his watch by. When the tanks let off their canisters of grape shot, there was a crackle like a hundred firecrackers going off at once. The fifty-cals sounded like jackhammers, making the M4s sound like toys.

  Mixed in with this was the endless sound of trucks; the grinding of gears and growl of engines. The 3rd ID’s supply train was forty miles long and stretched to Hagerstown, Maryland where the little airport boasted a seven-thousand foot runway.

  Boeing C17s landed every five minutes, unloading 160,000 pounds of material per plane.

  As every logistics officer knew, this was where the real dance occurred. The timing, from the off-loading, to the refueling, to the next take off had to be precise. Any breakdown in the system could be the deciding factor in battle, especially when there was no expected let-up in the fight. There would be no time for anyone to stop and catch their breath, at least not in the foreseeable future.

  Thankfully, the support brigade’s political officer was suffering from a migraine and was out of the loop. This allowed for the entire division to be fully provided for, no questions asked. No questions included the Kentucky guard brigade.

  Cannan envied them. The brigade was headquartered just over the western hills in Blain, Pennsylvania and was tasked with holding Sherman’s Valley. It was wide open farm land bracketed on the north and south by steep wooded ridges. Their battle consisted mainly of destroying the spillage of zombies pouring across the Susquehanna River around Harrisburg.

  Whenever Cannan checked the drone feeds, it looked as though the Kentuckians were at the range getting in some practice, instead of fighting an actual battle.

  And that was alright. It would allow the guardsmen to gain a feel for battle in a semi-controlled atmosphere. Cannan figured that they would be primed in eight hours or so, at which point he would switch them into the main line of battle to give his men a rest.

  Even the engineer battalion had managed to pull their collective heads out of their asses and were in the process of creating a wonderfully straight fallback position. Bulldozers were, even then, flattening homesteads, silos and barns, while backhoes were digging a ditch three miles long across the valley.

  Everything was going so swimmingly that Cannan didn’t like it. He turned to his XO. “I don’t want to rain on everyone’s parade, but something is going to go wrong. Find out what. Find the weak link.”

  The XO had that same feeling, but try as he might, he couldn’t see any thread that was coming unraveled.

  His problem was that he wasn’t looking in the right location. The problem lay a hundred miles away in Washington DC. The President sat looking at some of the same drone feeds that Cannan was watching. He drummed his manicured fingers on the gleaming table top, his eyes flicking from one monitor to the next. He was antsy, although exactly why eluded him.

  According to the reports—the true reports, now—the lines seemed to have stabilized. Somehow Boston was hanging on, Long Island was being fortified and although upstate New York had been lost to the Mohawk River, no one cared about Albany anyway. Finally, and most importantly, Washington DC was safe at the cost of the total destruction of Baltimore and the quarter of a million people who’d been trapped there.

  Those people had been a sacrifice he’d been willing to make.

  Even the minor instances of rebellion had been reversed or were on the verge of being stomped out—supposedly. General what’s-his-name in Illinois was less than a day away from discovering what being on the receiving end of an angry American infantry division was like.

  The 4th ID out of Fort Carson Colorado had finally got on the move and had been pelting east. Springfield was only a slight detour. Once there, they were under orders to wipe out any opposition and arrest any surviving leaders. Easy-peasy. The President had been assured by all of his new military advisors that if there was a fight, it would be over in minutes.

  After what had happened in Massachusetts, he didn’t believe it. Those damned Bostonians had fought like devils, while his own soldiers had fought him almost as hard as they had fought the enemy. They were still fighting him. He knew it on a gut level. Why else would it take an infantry division…a mechanized infantry division, two days to go fewer than seven hundred miles? The 4th ID was dragging their feet. They were making excuses. General Cardenas claimed refugees and acts of sabotage were slowing him down and that, because they were picking up Guard and Reserve regiments as they steamed east, their logistics plan had gone out the window.

  The President didn’t give a damn about logistics. It was all mumbo jumbo, all smoke and mirrors designed to confuse him.

  “A trillion dollars a year and they can’t drive across three states!” he muttered. “They still don’t respect me.” That was the truth. He saw it in their eyes. With a snap of his fingers, his new Chief of Staff came running across the room where he’d been whispering with the generals in a little huddle. Plotting, no doubt, the President thought.

  “My patience is wearing thin, Matthew.”

  Dimalanta began nodding, though he didn’t know why exactly. He had learned the hard way not to throw out guesses. He waited, bobbing his head like an idiot until the President asked, “Where is Dr. Lee? Is she in custody yet?” Before Dimalanta could open his mouth, the President went on, “And where is Clarren? Has he been executed like I asked?”

  “We are working on…”

  “And why do I still see bombing runs being carried out in Pennsylvania? Is the Air Force going to tell me that their pilots got lost? Hmmm?”

  “I-I-I…”

  The President curled his lip and wished that he had a riding crop with him. He’d smack Dimalanta across the face with it. That would get his attention. “Get me General Berrymore, so I can ask him that very question.” The only answers that the Secretary of the Air Force could possibly offer would point to either insubordination or ineptness. Unless he tried to lie.

  “I’m also going to need a riding crop.”

  Dimalanta’s dark face went grey. “A riding crop, sir?”

  “Yes. A riding crop.” His hand itched to have one, to smack down on the gleaming desk: SWACK! That would get their attention. “
After that, find me a replacement for him. When I want the Air Force to bomb fucking Pennsylvania, I’ll ask them to bomb fucking Pennsylvania. Things are slipping already, Matthew. The political officers need to step it up.”

  Dimalanta began nodding again and wished he could stop. Nodding was a lie. The political officers had been a terrible idea. They were slowing everything down and making the lives of…

  “We’ll start with them,” the President said, jabbing an angry finger at the monitor which showed the tanks of the 3rd ID. They were just sitting there all in a row doing nothing. “They’re doing nothing, Matthew. Why? Why on earth did we drag them all the way from Georgia just so they could sit in a ragged line like that, doing nothing at all?”

  “We didn’t,” Dimalanta said. “They should be fighting, too.” It’s what the President wanted to hear. Or so he thought.

  “No, they shouldn’t be just fighting, they should be attacking!” God, how he wished he had a riding crop. “That had been my plan all along. Is anyone listening here?” He jumped up and went to the largest screen and slapped it with his open palm. “I said I wanted the 3rd and 4th Infantry Divisions to attack. You all said they were unstoppable. So, let’s see it! I want to send the zombies reeling back. Bam, bam, like the old one-two.”

  He walked to the center of the room and planted his hands on his hips. “I want to start actually winning for a change.”

  2- 2:41 p.m.

  North Highland, New York

  “What the ever-loving fuck is all this?” Eng hissed in his native Mandarin as he wiped black gunk from his black eyes.

  “Oinky-boinky chinking chonky,” Jaimee Lynn mimicked, making two of her pack break out in hideous reptilian giggles.

  He glared and she only grinned wickedly back at him. She wasn’t afraid of him; far from it. She ran her pack like a vile little Nazi and the last time he hit her, they attacked him with teeth and claws. It hadn’t hurt—he didn’t really feel pain anymore—but he did want to preserve his face. He was going to be saved and he didn’t want to look like a monster when he was.

  The glare he gave her really wasn’t all that different from the way his face was currently cast, anyway. The Com-cells had given him the headache to destroy all headaches. He had never felt this god-awful sick and yet, he had boundless energy. It seemed as though he could rip the steering wheel off the car if he wished. A good part of him wanted to.

  In front of them the highway, the six-lane highway, was jam-packed with cars. And they weren’t just on the street, there were cars, bumper to bumper on the shoulder and in the median, stretching out further than he could see. There was no way through.

  He smashed the steering wheel and started turning the SUV around. With all the trash and empty cars with their doors flung open, it wasn’t easy. More than once, the SUV was jolted as he smashed into things. The diseased little predators were flung about and that was good. It made him grin until he saw how black his gums were.

  “China, I hungy,” one of the kids remarked, tugging on his armored vest.

  “What’s new?” he asked. They were always hungry…and so was he. Never in his life had he ever been as hungry as he had been since he woke from his drug-induced coma. It wasn’t anything like a normal human hunger. It was an infernal desire that was beyond his control. The only reason he wasn’t feasting that very second was that there was no one around.

  A shudder of desire ran up his back and he gripped the wheel harder. “I’ll get better,” he said, once more in Mandarin.

  “Hey what’s all this ching-chong?” Jaimee Lynn demanded. “Speak American and find us somethin’ to eat.”

  “What we need to do is to find a way around this mess. Once we get to the facility, there’ll be…stuff to eat.”

  This wasn’t good enough for Jaimee Lynn and the pack. She clamped a hand on his arm, stared hard at him with her corrupt eyes and growled, “I says we’s hungry, Chinaman. Find us some food.” He glanced to his left just in time to see one of the more intact children slipping the gun from where he had stuck it between his seat and the door.

  The kids, little gruesome half-eaten things, were vile and horrible, and also smart, in a cunning, sinister way. And they were getting smarter. The more they healed, the more he saw that nasty glint grow behind their eyes.

  “Look, this is the Quarantine Zone. It’s empty. There’s no one here.”

  “Yeah, there is. Y’all cain’t smell that?” Jaimee Lynn closed her eyes and breathed deeply, her nostrils flaring wide. “They’s here. They’s hiding like rats, covering they’s smell with that white stuff.”

  Now that she had clued him in, he caught a whiff of something coppery. Just as she had, he breathed in deeply and smelled the earthy sweat of little children just off a baseball field. He smelled the wizened, rock-hard french fries under the back seats. He smelled the sharp copper smell of a woman in cycle. It was all ghostly and faint. They were the residual odors left behind by the people who had ridden in the SUV for years.

  Ghostly or not, his stomach twisted and his heart began to hammer. He was almost sick with the suddenness of his hunger. The SUV skidded to a stop as he rolled down the window and once more breathed deeply. On the surface there were two clashing aromas: the perfectly wonderful smells of a beautiful spring day, and the dreadful stench of decaying bodies.

  Three days before, North Highland had been the site of a bloody clash between those trying to keep containment of the Quarantine Zone and those trying to break out. The dead had been left to rot in the sun. Eng’s lip curled at the stench. It wasn’t fresh. It wasn’t clean.

  “You’re smelling the car,” he told the children.

  Jaimee Lynn shook her head, causing little flakes of old blood to rain down onto her bare shoulders. “No, we ain’t. They’s there. Y’all cun smell their fear.” The partial children all nodded, even the two that were nose-less; they snuffled through the holes in what used to be their faces.

  Eng tried again, sniffing the breeze. “There’s nothing, like I said before. We should…” He stopped in mid-explanation. Fear had its own smell. At a certain level, the emotive state of fear took on physical characteristics in individuals: increased heart rate, increased respirations, blood became more saturated with oxygen, the endocrine system opens up, specifically along the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. All of this gave off a certain maddening odor—and it was in the air.

  “You smell it now, China?” a little boy asked in a croaking voice. He was relatively intact. The only mark on him was an eight-inch gash across his throat where his mother had taken a kitchen knife and opened him up from ear to ear as the zombies tore down their front door. He had died and now he was alive and hungry.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, stepping out of the SUV. He turned in a circle, trying to get a bearing on the scent. It was everywhere, in every direction. As was the smell of bleach. It’s what Jaimee Lynn had meant by “white stuff.”

  “They’s hidin’ good,” she said, coming to stand next to him.

  For the moment, Dr. Lee and her cure was driven from Eng’s mind. “Get in. Maybe we can, uh, uh, uh.” He had a word on the tip of his tongue, but it wouldn’t come. With his two index fingers, he started pointing at a patch of nothing in front of his chest, making the same useless noise over and over as he struggled to find the word.

  “Mayhap y’all need more of them pills,” Jaimee Lynn suggested.

  He growled a mandarin curse at her and followed that up by snapping, “I don’t need any more pills. I just took some. What I need to do is…” He had been about to say feed which had such horrible animal overtones that he changed his wording. “I need to get something to eat.”

  “I hungy,” one of the pack agreed.

  Eng ignored her. The word he’d been searching for wouldn’t come to him so he gave up on it and instead concentrated on the concept it represented: triangulation. He drove back the way they’d come for half a mile and then had Jaimee Lynn get out. “Is the smell stronger?�
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  “A smidge,” she admitted.

  “What’s a smidge?”

  She held up finger and thumb a half in apart. “It’s what means teensy. How do y’all not know that word? Was you real dumb before?”

  “Just get in the car,” Eng griped, pushing her toward the SUV. Now he took the first right he could and drove another quarter of a mile. The scent of frightened human was just as strong, or just as weak. It was hard for either of them to tell. After circling as much of the town as they could, they hadn’t gotten any closer to finding either a person or a way around the traffic jam. All the roads seemed to lead to nowhere.

  “I hungy!” the same girl said, gripping her stomach with a hand that had only nubs for fingers. This got them all begging for food and growing angry.

  “Everyone shut up!” he seethed, raising a threatening fist. This only got them louder, making Eng’s head roar with hatred and pain. “Jaimee Lynn, shut them up so I can think.” They listened to her and quieted; however their sullen, angry looks didn’t leave, and Eng felt certain that if he didn’t get them something to eat soon, they would turn on him.

  With a moody sigh, he had to admit that going around in circles wasn’t working. He had to find a new way to get to them. “They’re hiding. They’re afraid. But they’re not running away. Why?”

  “Cuz we’d eat them,” Jaimee Lynn suggested, eagerly. She could picture a small crowd of survivors running away like frightened sheep, with her pack chasing, coming up right behind them, tripping them and lunging in to tear out throats and bellies.

  “Right.” Eng had been picturing pretty much the same thing and he found himself drooling. He shook his head to clear it, saying, “They are afraid to go on foot and they’re out of gas, so they can’t drive.”

  These were such obvious points that Jaimee Lynn began to frown again. “Yeah?” By this she meant: Yeah, go on.