War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

  There’s no winning, either way. This had come from the same part of him that had said: Fuck it. And it was right. There was no way he could win, but that didn’t mean he had to just give up.

  Just like that, he could feel his hands again. “Alright, turning around now,” he lied with an amazingly calm voice. Instead of turning, his nimble fingers danced over the controls, hauling back on the throttle at the same time as hitting his air brake. Few people realize that an air brake is an actual thing. Most planes have a version of them, generally using relatively small flaps to create drag. The F-15’s brake is far more dramatic and obvious. It sits just behind the dual cockpit and is nothing more than a fifteen-foot long, spine-mounted length of titanium that juts up at an angle when deployed.

  It wasn’t easy to see in the dark, especially from directly behind. The F-16 was a mile behind the Eagle, which was far too close when the planes were traveling at 600 miles an hour. Six seconds separated them at that speed.

  In a blink, Alvarez cut his speed in half and then cut it again, by pulling the plane’s nose up. He was nearly at stall speed with the Falcon roaring up on him with Matt screaming like mad. Almost casually, Alvarez launched a pair of flares before jerking the plane to the right.

  The move was completely unexpected by the F-16 pilot. He knew that Alvarez was out of ammo for his Vulcan and that he had not gone up with a single air-to-air missile. Alvarez was essentially defenseless and the idea that he would do anything other than return to Langley with his tail between his legs was absurd. The only weapon Alvarez had left was his fifteen-ton aircraft, which seemed to come flying backwards at the Falcon. The flares shooting out of it made the F-16 pilot hesitate for a split second, just long enough for Alvarez to bank away.

  Cursing, the pilot of the F-16 slammed his jet to the left, thinking he would circle around with his smaller, more maneuverable jet, and come up behind the Eagle again, but he did not take into account certain factors.

  The F-16 was usually much lighter, which allowed for greater initial thrust, but his Falcon was loaded with missiles, 500-rounds of 20mm ammo, and a full tank of fuel, while the F-15 felt “zippy” under Alvarez’s hand. He could have hit the after burners and shot out of there at 1,800 miles an hour, which was 500 miles an hour faster than the F-16’s best rate of speed which only came at “altitude.”

  With that second radar lighting him up, Alvarez couldn’t do that. He had to stick close to the F-16. After that initial jerk to the right, he turned so hard to port that his load warning sensors began to beep in his ear. The beeping was unnecessary since he could feel the G-forces building up. Once more his hands went numb as his internal blood pressure couldn’t overcome the force that his aircraft was putting on his small frame.

  For just a second, he thought he was going to black out, then the F-16 swung upward, cutting in front of him before banking back the other way. It was a typical dogfight maneuver, something Alvarez had seen a hundred times.

  “What are you doing?” Matt demanded from his backseat. “No. Forget it. I’m punching out.”

  “Wait!” Alvarez yelled. “Look out the damned window first.” He took the Eagle through a slow barrel roll. They were over the top of the zombie army. “You see now?”

  Matt let out a stunned, “Yeah.”

  “I’ll let you know when you can punch us…shit! Where’d he go?” Alvarez had come out of the roll at a slight upward angle that the pilot of the F-16 exploited. He shot down and away, turning too fast for the Eagle, disappearing below him hidden by the dark and the background clutter.

  Almost immediately, there was a new tone in his ear—missile lock! “Countermeasures,” Alvarez ordered through gritted teeth as he lit off flares and turned as fast and as hard as he dared. Behind him, Matt’s first reaction had been to look for an incoming missile.

  “They launched!” the WSO cried.

  “Where? Damn it, Matt, where?”

  Matt finally tore his eyes from the bolt of flame racing at them, to look down at his instrument panel. “Eight o’clock high! Range five miles. Speed…shit 2,800!” The death that was hurling at them came in the form of an AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile; at Mach 4, it could easily outrace them and had a range of eighty miles to do so.

  “Counter!” Alvarez yelled, turning again and letting off more flares. Matt turned on the Eagle’s AN/ALQ-131—it was the bird’s electronic counter measures pod. Among other things, the ECM mimicked the radar echo bouncing off the Eagle, making it seem larger and closer so as to fool the incoming missile into blowing up early.

  The missile’s built-in computer brain was smarter than this and countered the countermeasure. When its radar image went off kilter, it switched to a command data link stream, picked up a circling drone’s heavier radar image pulse, and kept coming. Next, Alvarez released two canisters of chaff, waited for a three-second count before sitting the Eagle on its tail and blasting upwards.

  Matt turned around backwards in his chair and watched as the missile approached the snow shower made from thousands of aluminum bits swirling in the air.

  “Take it, bitch. Take it, bitch. Take the bait!” he whispered in a begging voice. The missile seemed to shudder as it passed through the chaff. Then it came on, even faster than before, its tail glowing brilliantly white. “It didn’t work! Three miles!”

  Cold realization struck Alvarez then: he couldn’t outrun the missile, and nor could he turn circles tight enough to avoid it. If by some chance he managed to make it miss, he would be a sitting duck for the next missile or the one after that. It dawned on him that his death was a foregone conclusion.

  “Fuck it,” he muttered and gunned the Eagle forward as fast as it could go. He was pinned to his seat as Matt began giving him the proximity of the missile in hundreds of meters, his voice growing higher and higher.

  “Do something, Stubbs!”

  Gently, Alvarez eased the bird upward on an easy arc. At three-thousand feet, he throttled down. “There’s only one thing we can do. Are you ready?”

  “Yeah,” Matt answered in a whisper, sounding as if he was at the whim of fate.

  Alvarez understood completely. Death was a very great possibility. They were currently traveling at 800 miles an hour. This was simply too fast to eject. It would be suicide. And if they did happen to live through the ejection, they still wouldn’t be safe. The defensive line of the 3rd ID was a mile away; they’d be landing in the very middle of a giant horde of zombies.

  “This is your fault, Stubby.”

  “Nope. I’m just a cog, Matt. I’m not going to take the blame for doing the right thing.”

  “Five-hundred meters and fuck you, Stubs. You could…oh, shit!” Matt’s cry was pure fear.

  Alvarez craned his head around and saw to his horror that the sky was impossibly filled with missiles. Dozens and dozens of sleek white darts, sixty feet long with blazing tails of white fire. Alvarez gaped, unable to comprehend the reason for such overkill on the part of the Air Force. Did they hate him that much?

  “Too bad for them,” he muttered. “They can only kill me once.” He pulled the ejection handle and there was an explosion of sound and wind that was so immense that his eardrums ruptured. He was struck by orange flames, invisible ice, and unbelievable shooting lights. His body was spun and bent and twisted by forces that it could not withstand, and the pain was so intense that his mind couldn’t handle it. Everything went mercifully black.

  He was dead before his parachute opened, and it was a ravaged, broken corpse that floated over the battlefield; a grim angel of death with exploded orbs for eyes, unable to bear witness, as the great mass of missiles descended out of the sky. They had never been meant for Tony Alvarez. They were meant for General Cannan, the 3rd Infantry Division and anyone else who had the temerity to stand up to the President.

  3-7:43 p.m.

  Grafton, Massachusetts

  As the day’s light fell along the line, a deeper fear set in and the same men who’
d been cracking jokes an hour before retreated into themselves, becoming smaller. The entire seventy mile line became stiff and brittle, and it seemed as though it would crumble at the least bit of pressure.

  No one believed that they could hold through the night. Things were just too wrong. The steady influx of new recruits was offset by the number of people who took to their heels and ran. There was a pervasive fear that the masks and the bleach weren’t working as a dozen men an hour began to rave and were sent to the rear for “treatment,” which everyone knew was just a bullet to the back of the head.

  The consensus was that there were too few real soldiers among them, not enough supplies, and no real plan to win. The time was ripe for someone to do something. Unfortunately, doing something meant risking everything. Lieutenant Colonel Ross knew this better than anyone. He was a wanted man. “I thought it would feel different knowing that the government was after you,” he remarked. “You know, maybe more terrifying or whatever.”

  “You get used to it,” Clarren replied. “But compared to this,” he waved a hand toward the horrid, stinking bog of corpses where hundreds of zombies were struggling toward them, “It’s not so bad.”

  “It’s annoying, is what it is,” Ross griped. He stood and stared out over the bog without seeing the shadowy creatures coming to kill him. “You know it won’t be enough to simply take down the division bigwigs. It’ll just bring the rest of the army down on our heads. Sure, maybe we can count on our battalion, but what about the brigade or even the rest of the division? Will they fight for us? Are they willing to go through this again?”

  Clarren insisted that they would.

  “But if they don’t, it’ll be just us,” Ross said. His regiment was the most ragged, the most ill-equipped and the worst supplied battalion in the entire Army of Southern New England. Despite this, it had been expected to hold the vital center of the line, and it would still have to, no matter the outcome of any internal fighting. That meant the head of the snake had to be lopped off in one quick blow, something that was practically impossible since the command post was guarded by a battalion of Marines, their fifty tanks, and a company of Army MPs.

  “Believe me, Ross, real soldiers hate what’s going on. Even that general you bitched at was disgusted by the political officer.”

  “Do you believe it enough to put your money where your mouth is?” Clarren had nothing to lose and said he did. “Good. Someone has to find out if we can count on the other battalions. Take a platoon with you and be careful.”

  Clarren felt like he was being fed to the wolves. “You know if they aren’t on board, they’ll try to arrest me. What happened to me being your ranger-rumper or whatever?”

  “It’s rump-ranger, and you’ll be fine as long as the platoon is with you.” Ross shooed him away. He lacked Clarren’s faith in his fellow commanding officers. All of them had lived through the nightmare of fighting one enemy while having another attacking from behind. He didn’t think they would do it again.

  Ross had another idea in mind to lop the head off the snake, one that was far easier. It was also cowardly and nothing short of dishonorable. The idea was so heinous that Ross didn’t want Clarren around as he tried to set it up; this was the real reason he had sent the ex-politician away on what felt like a fool’s errand.

  His plan was to perform a high-tech fragging. If he could somehow get a cruise missile to “stray” off course, he could end the threat to himself and relieve the army of its terrible leadership in one blow. Sergeant Ross never thought he would ever stoop so low—on the other hand, Colonel Ross had a thousand men counting on him, and with no hesitation, he dialed the sat-phone in the hope of getting a hold of Courtney Shaw. If anyone could make this happen, it was her. Unfortunately, the phone only rang and rang in his ear. It was a bitter disappointment.

  He would not be so easily defeated and tried to orchestrate the missile attack himself. The Navy claimed to be “out” of cruise missiles, while the Air Force said that its missions were now only coordinated through the White House.

  “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” Ross groused. “If you want to lose the war, that’s the best way.”

  “May I have your name and rank, sir? I will need them to properly denounce you.”

  It was more of a warning than a threat, and the airman was shocked when Ross laughed easily and gave up his name without worry. “Denounce away, and tell the President he can go fuck himself. Be a doll and use those exact words.” He hung up and brooded for a few minutes as his battalion began to fire into the oncoming zombies. A glance showed him that the main host was still some distance away. He still had time.

  “And there’s another way to skin a cat,” he told himself as he called up divisional artillery. Putting as much authority into his voice, he did everything he could to talk them into firing a mile short of the lines. After his third attempt, a political officer barked into the radio, “Who is this?”

  “Yo mama,” was Ross’ reply before he turned off the radio.

  “Really?” Clarren said. He had been standing there for some time. “Yo mama? You’re slipping, Ross. And what are you trying to do? Get them with friendly fire?”

  A shrug was all Ross was willing to commit to. “How’d your mission go?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

  “Poorly,” Clarren admitted. “Apparently we don’t stand a chance. We both know it would be easier if I turned myself in to the…”

  Ross cut him off. “Your ego is bigger than your ass and that’s saying something. This isn’t about you anymore. This is about all of us. They are a danger to all of us.”

  “That’s what I tried to tell them and they all agreed that the idea of throwing off the yoke of the political officers was completely necessary. But logic and truth were not strong enough factors to overcome fear.”

  The thin crackle of rifle fire began to pick up and Ross glanced toward it, if only to hide his disappointment. The dead were surging forward again. They were out there in the dark, their awful moans growing louder and louder. After days of this, Ross knew that they were coming in numbers that his men could handle.

  It was a different story a few miles south of them. The blaze of rifle fire became a roar that gradually drifted further and further eastward. “Fuck!” Ross knew the sound and what it meant: the line had fallen. In more of a habitual move rather than a considered one, he called division headquarters for an update, only to be told that he and his battalion were considered to be in open rebellion and that no answers, supplies or reinforcements were going to be given to him.

  “Then what the hell are we fighting for?” he demanded.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” was the snide reply.

  “Here’s what I know: you can go fuck yourself,” Ross barked into the radio before he hauled back and sent it spiraling into the black bog. “Did you hear that? Son of a bitch! Son of a mother-fucking bitch! I swear if I…”

  Behind them someone was crashing through the woods, hissing his name over and over. It was a moment before he realized it was in fact a girl and that she was calling out what he felt was closer to his true name: “Sergeant Ross? Hey, does anyone know where Sergeant Ross is?”

  Ross whistled her over and recognized the dark braids and the spray of freckles across the girl’s nose. It was Rita McCormick. She fell against a tree, gasping for breath and he felt an odd desire to hug her. Her youth, her sudden youth at that terrible moment, reminded him of his own. That he was only twenty-three had been forgotten in the endless battle. He had felt like some sort of craggy old man for the last couple of days.

  “I thought you had run off,” he said. That seemed rude and he quickly added, “I’m glad you didn’t, though.”

  “I didn’t run, but…” She pointed back the way she had come. “They’re sending the tanks. I was running messages for HQ and they made me go to the Marines. I wasn’t supposed to read the message but there were all these rumors about you and the Governor, and so I did. I
read the message. They’re sending the whole Marine army this way. I couldn’t find you at first and they’re…”

  She stopped as a distant rumble crept through the growing darkness. It was the sound of mechanical monsters coming for Ross and his men. “This is insane,” he said, feeling that aged weariness descend upon him again. “As if they don’t have anything better to do.” He was even crabbing like an old man.

  “Do you have a few minutes,” he asked her. “Can you run along the river and send my company commanders back here?”

  “Yeah. Anything for y…to help I mean.” Like a deer she shot away and Ross wasted moments staring after her.

  Clarren caught him staring and grinned. “Despite being so focused on men, I’m starting to think you’re not gay after all.”

  Ross was suddenly young again and felt heat creep into his ears. “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said, gruffly, fooling no one.

  Rita’s frightened urgency set a fire under everyone and in minutes Ross had six jumped-up captains huffing and puffing in front of him. “I’m afraid we’re fucked. I was just on the line with Division and it seems the entire battalion is now considered to be in a state of revolt.” He paused to let his company commanders stamp and curse. “Yeah, but it’s worse than that. You hear that? They’re sending that Marine battalion to arrest us.”

  Clarren raised a hand. “Maybe they’ll arrest us. With these political officers it might be shoot first and ask questions later, so we’re all in this now.”

  “Fuck ‘em,” the CO of Bravo Company spat. “I fuckin’ volunteered for this shit and as of now, I’m un-volunteering.” Heads bobbed, and all of them muttered, “Fuck ‘em,” in agreement.

  “I wish it was that easy,” Ross said. “These POs are on power trips. They’re not going to respect someone trying to pull a conscientious objector status this late in the game. They’re going to arrest the lot of us, shoot everyone E-5 and up as a warning, and then send everyone back to fight.”