by J. W. Vohs
The devious soldiers waited outside the room for a few minutes after they arrived, listening carefully before slowly opening the door and finding a horror that stunned even their jaded minds. Somehow, President Brocktin was still alive, unable to move from the sofa he was lying on, and too weak to scream in spite of the fact that the creature who used to be his daughter was slowly devouring the fingers from his right hand. The president’s wife and oldest daughter were moaning and clawing at a bedroom door, obviously driven into a hungry frenzy by the smells and sounds coming from the living area.
Barnes wasted no time in walking over to the feasting zombie and putting a bullet into its brain. Once certain that it was truly dead, he kicked the corpse aside and leaned close to the president who was obviously trying to say something. Brocktin was mere seconds from succumbing to the virus, but General Barnes did hear him whisper, “Why?” several times in spite of the dying man’s failing respiration.
Barnes patted Brocktin on the shoulder and even managed to sound sincere when he replied, “To save the world, of course.” A well-placed bullet silenced the president, and two more took care of what had been the First Lady and her oldest child.
Peterson wiped his brow and started to reload his weapon as Barnes snapped a few photos. “Should we head for the chopper? We’ve got everything we need here.” He walked to the door and checked the hall in each direction. “There’s no way anyone could survive this—there won’t be any witnesses.”
“You’re right about that,” Barnes agreed as he shot Peterson in the back of his head, “no witnesses at all.”
Zombie Crusad e
Snapshot: Maine
Colonel Chien Longstreet, U.S. Army, Retired, stood with a group of security personnel on the mainland side of the bridge leading to Mount Desert Island from the coast of Maine. Just across the narrow waterway behind him lay one of the longtime playgrounds of many of America’s rich and famous, a group of whom were now paying big money to the private security company Chien had been recruited by after retiring from the Army. The colonel had been an easy mark for Red Eagle Incorporated following his promotion and reassignment to a staff position at Fort Bragg. Chien had spent over a decade moving between command positions in Afghanistan and Iraq, repeatedly leading his beloved Rangers into battle on various fronts in the War on Terror. A strange term, he thought to himself, as he stared at the line of vehicles stretching beyond the horizon as refugees found themselves at the end of the road in their attempt to flee true terror: monsters trying to eat them.
His voice had enthusiastically joined the chorus of the multitude of military and civilian leaders calling for armed intervention in nations supporting terrorist groups around the world in the days and weeks following the 9-11 attacks. He’d led his Rangers against the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, and Al Qaida cells, sometimes in countries America didn’t even admit to being in. Always his fighters had emerged victorious regardless of the enemies arrayed against them. He had lost men to death and injury, but the carnage they had inflicted before they fell was of a magnitude that was truly awe-inspiring. His Rangers, simply put, had killed everyone who dared stand against the United States as it sought to stop global terrorism.
The transfer to a desk job had been a dagger through his soul, even if it was accompanied by a promotion to full bird with a fast track to a brigadier’s star. He’d repeatedly told his superiors that he was completely satisfied with battalion-level combat positions, rank be damned. But that wasn’t how the system worked in the U.S. Army. Junior officers needed to add command assignments to their resumes, and in spite of Chien’s record of success, he simply didn’t have the political connections to fight off the bureaucrats forever.
At five-eleven and one hundred and ninety pounds of pure muscle backed by a true warrior’s spirit, Chien was the offspring of a South Vietnamese school teacher and a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant. Chein’s father had been a gung-ho soldier, a man raised to nearly worship the military history of the American South. He had eventually died heroically in some hopeless skirmish near the DMZ in 1966. The doomed young officer had actually fallen in love with, and promised to marry, a beautiful young woman from Saigon. He had written his parents back home in Georgia about his bride-to-be—an honorable, intelligent girl the idealistic young romantic believed to be his soulmate. He had given her a ring just before taking command of a platoon heading out to chase Viet Cong units harassing fire bases along the border. The young virgins celebrated their betrothal with one night of passion and starry-eyed planning for their future. Lieutenant Longstreet never knew his lover was with child. Seven months after her fiancé’s death, Kim Ly had sent a letter to his grieving father in America, informing him of the fact that in two months she would be giving birth to his son’s child.
The Longstreets knew the right people, and they arranged a visa for young Kim Ly. When the healthy baby boy was born in an Athens, Georgia, hospital, they had no doubt that their son had indeed left them a grandchild before his tragic demise. Chien’s mother had decided to stay in America, living with the Longstreet family until her English skills improved enough for her to attend the University of Georgia, where she earned a degree in nursing. Eventually she fell in love with and married an older doctor who loved both Kim Ly and her young son with a passion that never wavered as the toddler grew into a happy, athletic youth who loved to study military history. As high school graduation approached, the young man decided to attend Georgia State University on an ROTC scholarship. After accepting an officer’s commission with the Army infantry following graduation, Chien eventually passed airborne and Ranger schools with ease before beginning his career as a platoon commander with the 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea. The years since had passed quickly, full of excitement and glory, and a desk job to wind down his career was simply unacceptable. The choice to retire and join Red Eagle had been an easy one.
If Chien would have known what horror was about to be unleashed upon his beloved nation, as well as the rest of the world, he would have stayed with the Army, where he almost certainly would have been returned to a command position and ordered out to defend America against the monsters created by what most people now considered a zombie-virus. The name had seemed ludicrous when it first appeared on the internet, but in the weeks since the early outbreaks the results of the viral infection seemed to indicate that the name was horrifyingly accurate. The infected, for all intents and purposes, quickly “died” from an intense fever, only to be “resurrected” shortly thereafter as flesh-eating monsters with no connection to their former selves or even their humanity.
In the past few days, rumors had been floating around suggesting that the creatures were not in fact dead when they rose from their fevers and began to seek living flesh. None of that really mattered to Chien; his job was to keep the virus from gaining a foothold in the population of Mount Desert Island. In fact, the colonel strongly suspected that this wasn’t the first time the virus had affected his life. During his first command of a Ranger battalion in Afghanistan, a USAMRIID officer by the name of Barnes had somehow obtained an order that temporarily transferred two squads from Chien’s unit to the medical officer’s security team. The soldiers were only supposed to be keeping watch over a village infected with some type of deadly virus, so the colonel didn’t ask many questions or worry too much about the well-being of the men. Somehow, Barnes’ people had lost control of the situation, and a brutal fight in the mountains surrounding the village had taken the lives of most of Chien’s Rangers assigned to guard duty there. Marcus Goodwin had stolen a USAMRIID Hummer in the chaos of the evacuation before B-52s carpet-bombed the place, and he’d managed to pick up Carter Wilson and Barnes’ driver, a Ranger qualified sniper, from the ridgeline above the infected valley.
The young soldier Marcus and Carter had brought out with them was named Jack Smith, and he’d been working with Army intelligence in Kuwait before being assigned to Barnes. After losing sixteen Rangers, Chien kept the capable soldier
under his command and pushed the paperwork through to make it legal as soon as he found the time to do so. He remembered the USAMRIID colonel showing up at the Ranger battalion HQ a few weeks after the event, demanding to talk to Smith and Wilson in private. Maybe Barnes hadn’t realized that Goodwin had also escaped his clutches, but for whatever reason he only wanted to see Jack and Carter. The problem was that they hadn’t wanted to see Barnes, and they definitely didn’t want be alone with the guy. Chien had ordered a small tent with the flaps rolled up to be placed in an open area where every inch of the place could be observed by his best snipers. The Rangers took care of their own, and if Barnes or the Blackwater goons he brought along had made any threatening moves Chien had been determined to kill the lot of them and toss their corpses into a nearby ravine. In fact, after losing sixteen good men that he cared for deeply, he was hoping that the USAMRIID jerk-off would do something that would earn a bullet in the head.
Luckily for Barnes, he had seen fit to simply make some threats against the young soldiers about keeping quiet concerning the valley disaster. They readily agreed, and the medical officer quickly vacated what he must have sensed was an extremely hostile environment. Of course, Wilson and Smith had already told Chien everything that had happened during their temporary duty with USAMRIID. He hadn’t known what to think of the fantastic tale the traumatized Rangers told him, but now that the world was being devastated by a zombie virus that originated in Afghanistan their stories made a lot more sense. Jack Smith had fought with distinction for the next eighteen months, never uttering a word of protest when the Army used its stop-loss policy to extend his service an extra year. But when his enlistment period finally expired, the Ranger had quietly left the Army and Chien had gradually lost track of what had happened in the young man’s life. Eventually the Army found other postings for the colonel as well, and as the years passed he lost contact with Carter and Marcus too. He sincerely hoped that the young men had prepared for this day, and taken steps to survive what they must have known was an inevitable outbreak.
* * *
The Bar Harbor airport was filled with Lear jets and other private aircraft, which for the past week had been delivering obviously wealthy, influential people from all over the world to the island. They took up residence with rich friends, or occupied lavish estates that had been previously purchased and prepared for them. They kept company only with one another, but the scuttlebutt making the rounds was that the newcomers were members of the world’s banking elite, seeking asylum from the advancing virus. Some of the civilians were calling them the Illuminati, while others said they were members of the Bilderburg group.
Regardless of the rumors, Chien didn’t really care who was paying Red Eagle, he only concerned himself with the tasks to which he was assigned. He didn’t put much stock in the alleged influence of secret societies on the global economy—he’d seen too many people do too many horrible things for religious and ethnic reasons that had nothing to do with money. The past ten years had taught him that ideas sometimes trumped wealth, and the officer who forgot that fact in the War on Terror quickly got himself, or worse, his soldiers, killed or maimed. Chien believed that the simple truth about Mount Desert was that a group of rich people were convinced that they would be safe on the island if they had their own private security force keeping the rest of America on the mainland.
The first, most obvious place to stop refugees was the bridge which Red Eagle now had completely blocked and guarded. The span was a bit over one thousand meters long, a narrow route connecting Mount Desert with the rest of Maine. Chien had conducted this task with his normal efficiency and expediency, all the while knowing that closing the bridge would in no way stop any determined individual or small group from reaching the island. Over ten thousand people normally occupied the 108 square miles of Mount Desert, most of them living in small communities clustered along the shoreline. Much of the interior had long ago been organized into Arcadia National Park, a beautiful, forested region with few roads, and many excellent hiding places for anyone seeking to avoid detection from security personnel.
Nevertheless, the colonel knew that the forest wasn’t the main concern, despite the fact that it could potentially conceal hundreds of infected people hiding from authorities. No, the big problem for Chien and the rest of Red Eagle was the fact that Mount Desert was so close to the mainland, separated only by narrow waterways of less than two kilometers in most places. The local police were working with Red Eagle in an effort to keep the entire shoreline under constant surveillance, including the use of the most sophisticated night-vision devices in the world, but there simply weren’t enough people watching to do the job well. Sea kayaks, small boats, and even strong swimmers in wet suits could infiltrate the island if they were determined to do so, and from the number of angry people halted beyond the bridge roadblock, Chien suspected that more than a few desperate individuals would eventually try the water. The bottom line was that despite Red Eagle’s promises to its wealthy employers, Mount Desert could not be completely secured.
Late in the first week of the outbreak, and less than a day after the bridge had been blocked, Chien found himself watching President Brocktin’s televised address to a panicking nation, urging everyone to remain calm and stay in their homes until government authorities were able to contain the spread of the virus. Then, in what could only be described as a surrealistic moment of absolute shock, the retired Ranger colonel saw the president introduce USAMRIID’s top officer, an older-looking, but still shifty-eyed General Barnes. The medical officer echoed the president’s words of reassurance and caution, then answered reporters’ questions about the effects of the virus upon infected individuals and what the Army and CDC were doing about the problem. The tone Barnes used with the reporters was so sincere and caring that Chien had no doubts that the man was lying about everything he said; at that point he knew that the pandemic was going to get a lot worse than it was now. His suspicion was confirmed when the White House fell to a panicked mob being stampeded by a horde of ravenous zombies less than two days later.
When news of Washington’s collapse and the president’s evacuation reached the refugees camped near the bridge, the situation there rapidly deteriorated into a vicious gun-battle. The fight wasn’t as one-sided as Chien would have guessed, as virtually all of the civilians were armed, and more than a few understood basic small-unit combat tactics. A barrage of covering fire had kept the veteran Ranger from realizing that several well-trained snipers were at work beyond the front line of the attack, and three Red Eagle personnel were killed by head shots before Chien could get his people behind their sandbagged bunkers. The refugee fighters rushed the roadblock when they saw the security forces retreat, only to be met by a devastating explosion of Claymore-type mines as they closed on the Red Eagle position.
With dozens of killed and wounded civilians littering the pavement beyond the roadblock, Red Eagle forces had the time to bring forward two armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) that could withstand anything the refugees could throw at them. The presence of the AFVs effectively ended the battle, leaving Chien and the rest of his people to spend the remainder of the day watching and listening to the pitiful efforts to help the wounded civilians evacuate the scene. The Ranger colonel had fought in dozens of gunfights all over the world, but he’d never seen such human carnage so closely. The fact that the horribly mangled dead and dying were simply desperate American citizens trying to escape the spread of a deadly virus made the situation immeasurably worse for the veteran soldier who’d spent most of his life fighting for the safety and well-being of these very people. Finally Chien did the one thing he could do to help, ordering one of the armored vehicles forward to cover him as he moved close enough to the slaughter to toss three, well-stocked medical kits and several large water bottles to the wounded.
By nightfall the scene of the fight was quiet, and except for several corpses that nobody had come forward to claim, the area was emptied of refugees. When spot
ters with NVGs and thermal imaging devices informed him that they could detect no signs of life in the immediate area beyond the roadblock, Chien led a team forward to remove the dead and bury them in a nearby shallow grave. He’d searched the bodies for IDs and took some solace in the fact that he’d be able to tell survivors where their friends and loved ones were buried, but nothing could remove the growing cold spot in his heart. By the time Chien returned to the buildings Red Eagle was using to house its people, the former Ranger had decided he was on the wrong side in this fight. Part of him wanted to eat the barrel of his own sidearm, but he knew that was the coward’s way out. He finally decided that he had to find some way to atone for the sins he’d participated in on the bridge that morning.
He’d been at war for more than half of his adult life, and he knew that death wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to a soldier. The worst thing was being on the wrong side when two groups were trying to kill one another. Today he’d been taken by surprise when the shooting started, and he’d reacted automatically to protect the men under his command from an immediate threat. There hadn’t been time to consider the nature of that threat, and when he saw three of his people’s heads explode within seconds, he’d done what he was trained to do: keep his men alive by eliminating those trying to do them harm. But as he stood under a steaming shower that night, he realized that the refugees were probably just parents frantically trying to find a safe haven for their children. Seeking safety on an island was a good idea, as early reports indicated that the infected couldn’t swim and appeared to avoid all sizable bodies of water. But Mount Desert was already occupied, and at least some of the people living here were rich enough to hire two hundred Red Eagle operatives to keep other Americans away, even if it meant killing them in the process.