War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

  Eng dug out another handful of pills. He had no idea what kind they were or what their strength was. His head wouldn’t stop pounding. “Yeah and that means they’re hiding. So how do we draw them out?” Since it was daylight, Jaimee Lynn didn’t think that anyone would come to rescue any of her pack if they started crying out. Even she thought they were hideous.

  Eng was trying to put himself in the shoes of someone hiding in a basement. “What would get me to come out?” They would definitely not come out for a black-eyed Asian man and a pack of monsters. “They’d have to want to come out. They wouldn’t come out for food. They probably still have food and water. But would they come out for gas? Or a ride?”

  A plan hatched, fully formed in his mind. People would come out if they thought there was a chance to escape the Zone. And yet, they would only go with someone they trusted. “Like the police.”

  He barked the kids back into the SUV and rushed back to the highway, guessing correctly that at the end of the jam he would find police cars. There were six of them, each riddled with bullets and splashed with old blood. They looked like wrecks, dented and smashed, but despite that, two of them were still drivable.

  Eng chose the bigger of the two, a suburban that had a bloated, fly-blown body sitting behind the wheel. He didn’t think twice about pulling it out and sitting in the still sticky seat. The pack sneered at the body, disliking even the thought of rancid meat.

  “What’s all these buttons do?” Jaimee Lynn asked, reaching for the control panel.

  “Don’t touch!” Eng swatted her hand away. He didn’t want to give themselves away too soon. Besides, he didn’t know. The words above each switch were terribly small and blurry. “First things first. We need to get into position.” That meant getting back into town, something that was oddly easy from this direction. Just before the highway, he found a little gas station/minimart combo and pulled in behind it.

  Picking up the radio mic, he started broadcasting on every channel. “Is anyone there? This is cruiser 16. Is anyone there? Over?”

  After twenty minutes of this, the pack got bored and left to pick over the store. Jaimee Lynn stayed behind, not trusting Eng. Her once blue eyes shot wide when they finally got a hit.

  “Hello? Is this the police?” a woman asked in a whisper.

  “The state police,” Eng corrected in the calmest voice he could manage. His hands were suddenly shaking. “We’re looking for survivors. How many of you are there?”

  “It’s just me and my kids. We’re in a house by the highway. We ran out of gas and my husband went for more, but that…that was two days ago and he never came back. He left…he left us and then the zombies came.”

  Eng’s stomach let out a growl that was so loud that he covered the mic with both hands. “Are there zombies out there?” he asked. She said there wasn’t and he smiled. “Good. Good. Now, where are you?”

  She read an address off a piece of mail and then went one step further and gave him directions. It was less than a minute away.

  “Be ready to run out when you see my lights,” he told her.

  “Okay, we will,” she answered with nearly the same level of excitement that he was feeling.

  He was so jazzed that he was reaching for the ignition when Jaimee Lynn smacked him in the back of the head. “Not without the others,” she said, sounding like a squeaky-voiced general. “Hey, you guys! Git on over here. We got one!”

  The pack piled into the Suburban, panting like dogs, their eyes wide and eager. Eng felt the same famished eagerness and knew he should’ve been trying to fight it. He was human, after all, and wasn’t he on his way to find Dr. Lee to stay that way?

  That had been the plan, but just then, the only thing he thought of when he pictured Dr. Lee was her elegant, bitable neck.

  He stomped down on the gas and hit the siren. Jaimee Lynn found the lights before she sat forward in her chair, her clawed hands gripping the dash, while behind them, the pack was howling along with the siren. It was just about the stupidest way to go in and Eng didn’t care a bit. He was beyond caring about anything other than feeding.

  The family of three came racing out of the house while Eng was still halfway down the block. The woman saw the wreck of a SUV and stopped in the middle of the yard, knowing deep in her heart that something wasn’t right. Just the fact that the cruiser was banged up wasn’t what had her backing away. It was how the vehicle was slewing down the road, veering left and right for no reason.

  She only had time to think: Is the driver drunk? before she saw Jaimee Lynn. The naked girl looked like she had just come crawling out of hell. Too late, the woman tried to grab her children’s hands and run up to the house. Eng drove the Suburban right up onto the lawn and before it even stopped, the pack was out and racing like jackals.

  The family was pulled down and eaten alive right on the porch with the perfect yellow sun beaming down on them.

  Chapter 16

  1-3:15 p.m.

  Newville, Pennsylvania

  General Cannan pulled the sat-phone from his ear and looked at it as if it had just bitten him. Slowly, he put it back up to his head. “Say again.” He was talking to a Lieutenant General…the new commander of the 2nd Corps. Supposedly that is. There had been a lot of weird shit going on with people impersonating generals and senators and governors.

  Cannan hoped to God this was the case.

  “General Leonard has been relieved of his command and arrested for refusing a direct order. This is Lieutenant General Boggs, we were on General Lunder’s staff together in Grafenwöhr.”

  “I remember,” Cannan answered, forcing a touch of fake liveliness into his voice. He remembered Boggs as an ass-kisser even back then. “I’m sorry to hear about Leonard. He’s a good man who knows the value of a free hand when it comes to his divisional commanders.”

  There was a lengthy pause before Boggs said, “He might have been a little too free. Your orders are changing. The 2nd Corps is no longer going to be standing on the defensive. The 3rd will be spearheading a drive to retake Pennsylvania.”

  Once more Cannan looked at the phone incredulously. “Sir, that’s not a possibility just yet. Maybe when we get those units up from Fort Stewart and Fort Hood, that will be a consideration, until then…”

  “Until then you will follow orders or be replaced,” Boggs barked. “My God, if this is how Leonard ran things, it’s no wonder he was arrested. Listen up, Cannan, the President has put up with as much shenanigans as he’s going to, so follow orders or you can join Leonard in prison. You will be attacking and you will follow my timetable. It’s as simple as that.”

  For a good half minute, Cannan was silent as he considered handing in his resignation. An attack at this point was outrageous. He had studied the lay of the land and, as far as he knew, there wasn’t any objective that was worth giving up the defensive position he and his men had worked so hard to hold. It meant that the attack was either about Boggs’ vanity—he probably had a train of reporters in tow and wanted to look like the “man,”—or he was getting political pressure to do “something.”

  Either way, an attack was stupid and Cannan knew that eventually he would come out and say it was stupid, though he was sure that he would use a great deal more colorful language than that. He would likely refuse and would be fired or worse. It would probably be worse.

  If a man like Leonard, a man who was as by the book as they came, could be jailed, then it would almost be a guarantee that Cannan would be as well. He knew his tongue and his pig-headedness would get him in trouble.

  At the same time, could he lay this squarely on his XO’s shoulders, knowing that Colonel Broadhurst was cut from the same cloth? Out of loyalty alone, it was almost a guarantee that he would laugh in Boggs’ face and a betting man could make a mint putting money on how much spit would fly. Broadhurst had a fiery temper which had served him well in battle, but could now get him arrested.

  It begged the question, who would Boggs bring in to lead
the division when he was arrested as well? It was another sure bet that Boggs would choose an outsider. How long would it take him to get up to speed? An infantry division was a very complex animal and it could take as long as a week to get adjusted properly, and if an attack was in the offing, they didn’t have minutes to spare let alone hours or days. And yet, it would most certainly be an outsider, probably a highly decorated paper-pusher like Boggs. It wouldn’t sit well with the team Cannan had melded into a single fighting unit; there’d be anger and animosity, and, in the end, it would be the GIs on the line who would suffer the most.

  Cannan loved his men too much to let them suffer or die without purpose.

  “I’m your man,” he said, softly, telling himself that he was not completely giving in. He looked at the move as buying time. “What’s the plan of attack?” He secretly prayed that they were looking for some sort of limited gain that everyone could point to and say, “We’re winning!” In his heart, he feared Boggs was about to unload such a pile of shit on him that it would test the limits of his composure, and he wasn’t disappointed.

  “I’ve uploaded the proposed plan of attack. It’s encrypted through LCMC because of all the hacking going on.” He sent a one-time code which allowed Cannan to open up the most bare-bones bit of assery he had ever seen. It might as well have been drawn in the dirt with a stick.

  “What am I looking at?” It was a map of Pennsylvania, that much was obvious. What didn’t make sense were the four colorful lines: one pointed up from Newville and was aimed at Harrisburg. Another ran from the dinky town of Blain and through Sherman’s Valley. The final two poked like horns away from the hills on Cannan’s flank.

  He stared at the map with a lip curled. “Is this a concept plan that you want me to turn into an actual operational order?” he asked, eventually. This wasn’t backyard football, after all. He understood that the arrows represented lines of attacks, but by what units? Were these regimental-sized attacks? How were they to be supported? What were the initial objectives? What were the time lines? What were the intelligence estimates of the zombie army in these areas? Had a reconnaissance, beyond the use of drones, been carried out? Where was the sustainment overlay? Were they going to receive proper air support for an actual attack?

  The greatest question, of course, was once these objectives were reached, what then? He had no doubt whatsoever that his tanks could punch a lane through the undead and drive to Harrisburg at which point his force would be surrounded.

  Boggs cleared his throat into the phone. “You’re going to have to do that on the fly. I would do it, but Leonard’s staff had to be replaced and my guys are still getting up to speed. Just a warning, we’re on a time crunch. The President is pushing for a sixteen-hundred kick-off time.”

  Cannan looked at his watch and felt a wave of shock wash over him. “An hour? No, that’s not even an hour! Sir, please. You know that we can’t prep an assault of this magnitude in an hour. I’d need eight hours at a minimum. Hell, it would take three just to draw up the operational orders.” And he’d have to do it while leading his division at the same time. “Jeeze-lou-fucking-wheeze,” he muttered in that semi-heard, under the breath way of his.

  “I didn’t say you had to be in Harrisburg at four!” Boggs snapped. “You just have to be on the move by then. Drive them back. That’s what the President wants. Our immediate goal is to retake the Susquehanna River.”

  “You want me to drive them back?” Cannan asked. He was too stunned for outrage. He could barely manage incredulity and it sounded like he was asking for the order to be repeated.

  Boggs answered with a simple: “Yes,” which had Cannan’s head wagging back and forth, his mouth hanging wide open. It was insane. The order was beyond stupid. There was so much wrong with it that Cannan didn’t know where to begin. He was just about to protest when Boggs said, “I’ll be choppering in to watch the initial attack and rest assured that the President is very keen about this. He’ll be watching the feeds.”

  Was that a warning?

  Just then Cannan felt a prickling on the back of his neck. He turned and saw Vertanen, grey in the face, her makeup looking as if it had been painted on an old, dusty manikin. With her were four men in black suits that he had never seen before. They were hard men with uncaring eyes.

  “Did you hear me, Cannan?”

  “Yes sir,” he answered in a whisper. “I heard you loud and clear.”

  2-3:28 p.m.

  Creech AFB, Nevada

  They were at war, but that was no reason to be late. The pilots had been flying nonstop for four hours and they both had to piss something wicked.

  “It’s your turn,” the lieutenant said, “and it’s been your turn for ten minutes. Are you just trying to run out the clock?”

  Captain Rodrigo “Slick” Del Arroz’s queen was trapped. He had brought her out too early and Lieutenant Schmidt had happily chased her into a corner. Perhaps worse than the loss of the queen, Del Arroz hadn’t had time to develop any other piece except a damned horse.

  “I’m not trying to run out the clock, I’m just in a situation.” He gestured at the screen in front of him. “I’m dealing with real hazards here.” His Sentinel the Midnight Runner was flying over Trenton which was still on fire, the smoke rising seven-hundred feet high in places. Schmidt’s Sentinel was buzzing over Allentown where pigeons were the only things he had to worry about.

  “Whoa, so scary. Maybe you should…”

  He broke off as two men in black suits and dark glasses walked into the squadron’s virtual cockpit. “Can I help you?” Del Arroz asked, glaring at them. They struck him as FBI and the FBI had no business interrupting pilots while they were in the middle of a mission.

  This was especially true when the UAV in question was the RQ-170. It wasn’t just a top-secret program, it was compartmentalized, meaning that only seven or eight people had access to the entire layout of the UAV. Even though he was the pilot, Del Arroz had no idea what the power plant in the RQ-170 was or what electronics were stored within its black body. He knew its ceiling, its weight, take-off and landing parameters, thrust-to-weight ratios and fuel consumption. Basically, he knew enough to fly it and that was all he needed to know.

  “Yes, you may help us,” the lead man said, cooly ignoring the glare. “Come to 20,000 feet and hold a steady northbound course.”

  Del Arroz shared a look with Schmidt before stabbing the button marked “radio.” It was really something of a secure intercom. “Control, can you explain why I have two junior G-men in my cockpit? And maybe send for Colonel Bell while you’re at it.”

  Like the cockpit, the control tower was virtual and located six doors down a stark white hallway. “The Colonel is aware of the situation, Slick.” The operator’s normally relaxed voice was pitched high. “The two men are authorized Yankee White. Follow their instructions without deviation.” This caused Del Arroz to freeze at the stick. Yankee White meant that their authorization had come directly from either the President or the Vice President.

  The lead agent smiled behind his dark glasses. “Like I said, come to 20,000 feet and hold a steady north-bound course. This will only take a minute.”

  It took fifteen minutes. “Think of it as a bug,” the agent said when Del Arroz asked what the man was attaching inside the instrument panel of the cockpit. “It’ll let us know exactly where these birds are. The President is getting tired of surprises and is going to do something about it.”

  “What surprises?” Del Arroz asked. “We are exactly where we are supposed to be.”

  “Actually, you’re not. You’re eighty-five miles off course. The good news is that it’s not your fault. If it were…” He glanced at his partner and shared another ice-cold smile. “Maybe let’s not think about that.”

  The two men left, going to the next cockpit. Schmidt waited until the door closed before he covered his mic and whispered, “That was messed up, Slick. I mean really messed up. This is billion-dollar equipment and that guy
just stuck a LoJack on it for fuck’s sake.”

  Del Arroz stuck a finger to his lips. It was possible that an actual bug had been installed as well as a virtual one. He cleared his throat and drawled in a close imitation to his own speaking voice, “Control, do you have a new heading for us?”

  “Slick, this is Control. Continue on your current heading. You’ll be going back to your previous hunting grounds. Someone’s been playing games with us.”

  “Affirmative. ETA eighteen minutes. We have enough fuel to stay on station for maybe two hours before we’re going to have to find a new home.”

  Control was quiet for a few minutes. “Negative, Slick. Saunter as needed until we get a tanker anchored. We’ll be on station until further notice.” The tower’s next call was to the temporary Air Operations Center that had been set up at JFK airport in Queens, requesting hanger space for the six Sentinels in the area as well as mid-air tanker support.

  Although the conversations that took place within the same building at Creech Air Force Base were sent over a secure line, the call to JFK was picked up by Major Palmburg at the R&K research facility.

  “A tanker is being scrambled and sent our way,” he stated in a choked voice. “It’s being anchored over Paramus.”

  Everyone opened the map windows on their computers to check exactly where Paramus was. It was far too close; only ten miles to the west. Someone let out a long: “Fuuuuck.” There was only one reason to have a flying fuel tanker loitering over a mostly deserted section of the Quarantine Zone.

  Eyes shot from computers and to the windows, where they scanned for movement. For the moment, the skies were clear.

  “Do we shut down?” the major asked. Just because they couldn’t see the Sentinels, or the Predators, or even the E-3s, it didn’t mean they weren’t nearby listening, probing, sensing every little electromagnetic pulse.

  “I can’t,” Colonel Taylor called out in a blaring voice. “I have nearly the entire 175th Infantry Regiment trapped in York, PA. I’m this close to getting a squadron of B1s on site.” He looked up and stared straight into General Axelrod’s eyes. “It’s eighteen planes, sir. You know what they can do. And you know what a full regiment could mean down there.”