Necrophobia - 01

by Jack Hamlyn

  The third cop kept coming.

  I shot him in the face, but it wasn’t a good shot. His lower jaw was blasted away and it was a ghoulish sight to see him coming on in his filthy, gore-clotted blues, nothing below his upper jaw but a squirming black tongue. With the second shot I dropped him.

  “Sorry,” Riley said, then she opened up on the others and we made them all into cold, unmoving corpses again.

  We leaped over them and got to the side door.

  Locked.

  “You don’t have a key do you?”

  Riley almost smiled, blowing the lock off with her CAR-15. As she did so, I saw another four zombies coming at us. And if we had waited five minutes, the four would have become fourteen and the fourteen would have become thirty. It was insane. But they would just keep coming and coming and I knew it. They would drown the world in their numbers.

  We got through the door, shut it, shoved a huge metal desk covered with dust and papers against it to keep the dead out.

  “What now?” I said.

  “In here,” Riley told me, going through an archway and into the garage itself which was huge and almost Romanesque with its high vaulted ceiling. It smelled of ancient gasoline and grease. There were dark oil stains on the concrete. I saw two pick-up trucks…and on the other side, the four Strykers. They were still there and what a sight they were. I stood silently, just admiring them, a hundred memories of the war flooding through me and making me almost dopy, a silly sort of half-grin on my face.

  “Are these the ones you wanted?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “If they’re in good shape, we’re golden.”

  Stryker Vehicle

  Type: Armored Fighting Vehicle

  Weight: 19 tons

  Length: 22 feet

  Operational Range: 312 miles

  Armor: 14.5 mm

  I approached them, noticing that three of them had their .50-cal machine guns and grenade launchers mounted. Both the .50-cals had ammo belts hanging from them and they were ready to rock. That’s exactly what I wanted to see. The fourth vehicle was the Stryker ATGM (Anti-Tank Guided Missile) variant. The launchers were armed with TOW missiles. That was more firepower than we needed.

  “If they turn over and we’ve got fuel, plenty of ammo, then there’s nowhere in the city we couldn’t go.”

  “Great,” Riley said, sighing, relieved that we had a chance of success now.

  “Do you know why they’re here?”

  “Not sure,” she said. “But I heard a rumor that if it got bad, that they would use these to put down the unfriendlies with.”

  TOW missiles? Apparently they were expecting real trouble.

  She shrugged. “That was one story. Another was that the military were hiding vehicles and ordinance around the city for emergencies.”

  It was kind of a surreal moment for me hooking back up with Strykers again. I remember when my ETS (Estimated Time of Separation) came around in Iraq. I’d ended up there for nearly eighteen months because of the Pentagon’s Stop-Loss program which wouldn’t let guys like me go home like they were supposed to—we called it the Back-Door Draft. But when that day finally came and my ETS was not changed for what felt like the fifth time, I remember feeling naked when they took my weapons from me, and oddly lonely when I was separated from my platoon and our Strykers.

  These are the things that ran through my head and if I hadn’t been daydreaming and maybe paying attention to my surroundings as I was trained to do, I would not have been caught unprepared when I was attacked. One of them had gotten in there and I didn’t know how, but he charged out at me from around the back of the second Stryker.

  He was on me before I could even hope to draw my weapon.

  It happened very fast.

  It took both Riley and I by surprise. It was a little boy, naked, his flesh ulcerated with gaping holes that his bones stuck through. His face was a pallid mask, his eyes like white marbles. He dove at me and I went down with him on top of me. He was hissing and gnashing his jaws, wanting nothing more than to sink his teeth in me. I held him away from me by the shoulders, his lips gone like so many of the others, his teeth bared, his head snapping from side to side. He wasn’t very strong, but he was motivated to feed on me and that added a little something extra…just a deranged, starving animal.

  Riley didn’t dare shoot with us being in such close proximity.

  Instead, she kicked him in the side of the head and he rolled off me. By the time I got to my knees and Riley drew her weapon he was already on me. He clawed at me and snapped at me. I side-stepped his lunge and caught him off balance. Before he could recover, I grabbed the hair on the back of his head and drove him into the armored plating of the Stryker again and again and again until his skull came apart, loose and sloppy under my fist, gore and brain matter leaking from his head.

  Then I got away from him and Riley drilled him with three rounds point blank and that finished him.

  “Thanks,” I said, panting.

  I heard Tuck yelling over the walkie-talkie and I got on there and told him it was cool, to get ready to drive in.

  “We got maybe fifteen of them out here circling around us,” he said. “Be ready to bust caps.”

  We went over to the big garage door. I unlocked it. “Ready?” I said.

  Riley had her weapon up in a shooting stance. She nodded.

  I gripped the hand-pull on the garage door and pushed it up with everything I had. It rode on tension springs so it did most of the work itself. The Jeep was a couple feet from the door. I gave it room and Tuck pulled it in. Riley and I dropped six zombies and hobbled a couple more, then I grabbed the rope and shut the door. And locked it. Safe and sound. For now.

  Tuck pulled the Jeep over by the pick-ups and Diane and he stepped out.

  I climbed up on the first Stryker and checked it out. It had power and a full tank of fuel so we were in good shape. In the back where an infantry squad of nine men would wait until it was time to deploy, I found more goodies. Six boxes of .50-cal ammo, an M240 Bravo 7.62mm machine gun and six boxes of ammo for it. I was glad to see the ammo boxes stored back there because in Iraq they were bolted to the outside of the vehicle and it meant you had to retrieve them under fire sometimes. I found some more MREs, probably left there by the crew, water, rain ponchos and tarps. I unwrapped the M240 and it was in nice shape. I was glad of that. It was intended as a squad gun that could be mounted outside at the back air guard hatch to provide covering fire for the troops when they deployed off the ramp. I had no intention of mounting it. We would use the .50-cal which could be operated from the Remote Weapons Station at the commander’s chair. That way we could keep a very low pro to and from the school.

  I went up front to the gunner’s station where the TC, Truck Commander, would sit. I turned on the screens and we still had satellite because the video mapping system was operational. Using the gunner’s screen, you could swing the .50-cal above in a 360° arc. There were also ten periscopes that would allow you to see in any direction. And if that failed, you could always stick your head up out of the TC hatch. I checked the .50-cal above. I did a complete inventory and systems check on the second, third, and fourth vehicles and we were in good shape. As an added incentive, I found that they all had AT4 anti-tank weapons. That gave us serious artillery if needed.

  “Well?” Tuck said.

  I smiled. “We’re ready to rock. Come aboard.”

  I dropped the ramp in the back of the first Stryker and gave my “squad” a guided tour.

  MOVEMENT TO CONTACT

  We rolled out thirty minutes later when I had drilled everyone on what they would need to do. I made sure everyone could drive the Stryker and use the .50-cal on the gunner’s screen and access the grenade launcher. There wasn’t that much to it, really. Like everything else in the Army, the Strykers were designed so that anyone could pretty much operate them. I took the driver’s seat and Tuck and Riley were at the gunner’s station, familiarizing themselves with it. She
knew the way over to the school very well but she navigated me using the mapping system which I think she got a kick out of. Generally, the TC was the commander, the senior guy and he sat at the gunner’s station, but we were real liberal as far as rank went.

  I pulled the Stryker out of the garage, stopping so the back end was only a foot or so from the garage door. Tuck climbed up out of the back air guard hatch, grabbed the bottom of the door and pulled it down. The springs did the rest, slamming it into place. We had already locked it so the deadheads didn’t get in there and mess with the other Strykers or the Jeep. We had every intention of coming back for them.

  The dead pushed in from the streets as I roared out there. I told Tuck and Riley not to waste ammo until we had to. Twenty or thirty zombies got in my way and I knocked them aside or rolled right over the top of them.

  The Strykers were really something and if you surfed the internet back in the Before Times (as I was now mentally referring to the good old pre-zombie days) then you would have seen plenty of trash being talked about how the Strykers were no good and the Army was wasting money on them. But for us, the guys who used them in the Sandbox, we had absolute faith in them. I’d seen Strykers get hit by IEDs. Sometimes they flew up in the air and sometimes they rolled, but the crews were usually intact outside of a few cuts and bruises. I always felt sorry for the guys in Humvees because those things were nothing but death traps. When an IED was detonated under them, it was a massacre. You’d find nothing but a burning frame and some blackened skeletons that had once been human beings. The Strykers, on the other hand, could usually take IEDs and hits from RPGs and still keep rolling. They had a steel shell surrounded by Kevlar with ceramic plates on the outside. The plates would take the blast and shatter and that was the beauty of it because the plates were replaceable. A couple hours after a good hit, the mechs would put new plates in place and you’d be rolling. The Stryker was eight-wheeled, four-wheel drive with eight-wheel drive optional. There wasn’t much they couldn’t go through.

  I knew the zombies never stood a chance.

  The real danger would be when we dropped the back ramp or climbed through one of the hatches and exposed ourselves. Other than that and barring an airstrike, our shit was pretty safe.

  We saw zombies everywhere. I was beginning to think there probably wasn’t a more dangerous place on earth than New York City, as far as the undead were concerned. I didn’t imagine LA or Chicago was any better and maybe there were worse cities, but what we saw was plenty. There were car pile-ups and wrecks, traffic jams of dead yellow cabs, lots of corpses and parts of them. Most of the wrecks we just plowed right through with the Stryker, but there were a few we had to go around. I saw entire neighborhoods that were bombed to rubble, others that were burned down to skeletal frameworks. Certain streets were riddled with bomb craters. I saw blackened LMTV deuce-and-a-half trucks and Humvees riddled with bullet holes. There had been battles fought and some of them must have been pretty damn intense.

  On West 225th, a zombie army filled the street and I was estimating that there were well over a hundred of them. They shambled right at the Stryker and I called out to Tuck that we were about to take contact.

  “Light their asses up,” I said.

  He got the zombies in the crosshairs on the screen and opened up with the .50-cal. The dead were torn literally in half and we drove straight through their wriggling remains and just kept going. Right before we hit the Major Deegan Expressway, two Humvees with mounted M240 Bravo squad guns came at us, opening up on us and, again, Tuck put the crosshairs on them and torn them apart. They were both smoldering with dead men hanging out of them as we passed. There’s nothing more devastating than the fifty.

  “What’d you make of that?” Tuck said.

  “It wasn’t the Army,” I said. “They wouldn’t come after a Stryker with nothing but a Bravo. They didn’t even have a recoilless on them. My guess is that they’re militia pukes.”

  “Roger that,” he said.

  West 225th became West Kingsbridge Road and then East Kingsbridge and I was pretty sure my crew was feeling what I was feeling by then: a mixture of fear and excitement and anxiety. I think if it hadn’t been for the fact that I had a son out there to take care of, it would have been pure adrenaline-charged excitement. As we neared our target, I found myself falling into old habits, reaching for my caffeine pills to give me the edge for combat just as I had in the old days.

  But we weren’t in the Sunni Triangle and this wasn’t Ambush Alley.

  Our enemies weren’t foreign insurgents or crazy Hajjis with AKs.

  This was a different sort of war. I had to keep that in mind and not fall into old patterns. I focused my mind and became increasingly aware of my surroundings. More of the same. Shattered buildings, burned neighborhoods, wrecked cars and sprawled corpses chewed down to skeletons. Wild dogs, carrion birds, zombies, and the stink of open graves. Same old, same old.

  I saw the armory in the distance and, like always, I thought it looked like something plucked from a European city with its spires and battlements. I saw twenty or thirty deadheads wandering around by it. Riley told me to hang a left and less than a minute later we passed the school. We went by it real slow so we could scope it out properly. I saw no signs that any of the ARM dipshits were hanging around. I saw a couple wrecked pick-ups in the courtyard but that was about it. The layout was exactly as she described it to us. The front gates were wide open and nearly torn from their hinges.

  There were zombies everywhere.

  I noticed with a passing chill that while most of them looked like they’d been just your average Joes and Janes in life, several were wearing camo fatigues and had probably been militia members.

  “There’s the alley on the right,” Riley said and the excitement in her voice was almost palpable.

  I guess I felt it, too.

  Sitting around in a defensive position all the time is not a good thing. It’s better to be on the offensive regardless of who—or what—your enemy is. Zombies got in the way and I knocked them down and aside, then, just as we’d planned, I brought the Stryker to a stop and backed into the alley so when we came out with the women we’d have a clear shot to the back ramp. We were about fifteen feet down from the entrance which would give Tuck a clear killzone. Right away, some of the dead came to investigate and he cut them down, giving the others something to chew on. It had already been decided that Riley and I would go after the women, so we got ready.

  We put fresh magazines in our CAR-15s, grabbed flashlights and taped them to the barrels with duct tape, and waited at the air guard hatch. We each carried a satchel around our shoulders with MREs, water, extra CAR-15 mags, and some basic first aid items. Ten or twelve zombies were coming down the alley and Tuck swung the .50-cal around and chopped them down.

  It was time to go.

  Diane wished us luck and we climbed out of the rear air guard hatch and hit the alley running. The trapdoor to the steam tunnels was just ahead and we had to wade through the gore of the zombie carcasses that Tuck had blasted apart.

  We got to the trapdoor which was iron rusted orange and we both began tugging on the ringbolt to lift the trap. It took some effort but we got it open just as six or seven of the dead moved in at us. Some of them were carrying crude clubs.

  “Get your ass down already, dude,” I heard Diane say over the walkie-talkie.

  Clicking on our lights, we descended into the darkness.

  TUNNEL RATS

  Once Riley was down the metal rungs, I joined her and let the trapdoor slam down. The thing weighed over a hundred pounds and when it clattered shut it echoed through the tunnel system. There was a latch on the inside, but we lacked a peg to put through the ring.

  Riley started searching around with her flashlight. “There’s a piece of metal here somewhere,” she said. “I had to work it free when we escaped.”

  Up in the alley I could hear the .50-cal barking. Several zombies thudded as they hit the top of the t
rapdoor.

  “Got it!” Riley said, holding up a piece of iron about the size of a pencil.

  I slid it through the loops, jamming it in place.

  Between it and the fifty, we had some security. Now on to phase two. The tunnel was unbelievably claustrophobic. It smelled dank and dusty. I could hear water dripping somewhere and the occasional furtive scratching of rats. As we moved forward, Riley in the lead, our lights threw distorted shadows of us against the crumbling brick walls. A thin stream of water ran down the center of the floor and it smelled like rust and buried things.

  “We’re still under the alley,” Riley said. “The tunnel is like an L, it’ll cut to the right in minute or so.”

  She was right. We came to the bend in the L and made it around the corner. I had been smelling something a little bit worse than old brickwork and standing water and now we saw why: a corpse. No, two…then three corpses. They were sprawled on the floor and one was leaning against the wall in a sitting position. All of them wore the fatigues of the militia which were not US-issue or UK like ours but more like four-color Russian shadow camouflage with bands of black, indigo, and light blue. Probably military surplus like ours. I couldn’t be sure what had killed them, not at first, but they were green with mold, their eyes rotted from their skulls.

  “We’re they here before?”

  Riley shook her head.

  “That means that the militia must have figured out the steam tunnels, too,” I said. “They must have come for the women.”