Brutal Planet: A Zombie Novel

by Sean P. Murphy

  The marines were everywhere. Some of these guys had been sitting on their asses for over two months and were ready to move. The distant pop, pop, pop, was getting further away by the minute. A nice Colonial style house was commandeered as the temp HQ. Dead zombies were already being piled up for incineration. Unloading next to us were special units, whose job according to BC was quarantine every secured house and business. These must be the guys I was told about.

  “Yo! This is old news. Let’s catch up with the first wave.” He slapped me on the back and like that, BC was off at a quick trot down the road, west I think. I was under the obviously false impression that we would be moving around in groups larger than two! I knew my shotgun was fully loaded and I had plenty of ammo, but no side arm. The road curved to our left with woods on the left and beachfront houses on the right. It was July and the foliage was in bloom, which meant that the woods were green and dense and we would have zero notice if attacked from the trees.

  “Hey, BC!” I bent over and grabbed my knees as I struggled to catch my breath. “We have too much camouflage on our flank, so let’s slow down and stick close to the cleared houses!”

  Two Humvees screamed by, both mounted with large automatic weapons. Third Wave?

  “No problemo.” He slightly bowed. “Age before beauty, you know what I mean?”

  Yes, BC, I fucking know what you mean. We kept up a very light jog and soon started to come across encounters that had happened maybe fifteen minutes ago with no clean-up crew disturbances. The bodies laid in various contorted positions; lots of bodies, like hundreds. After looking around, I noticed they weren’t as randomly sprinkled about as I had initially anticipated. The amount of bodies, sometimes three dozen or more, in relatively small compact groups was not all that unexpected. The same flocking behavior I saw in Maine. When we reached Lower Beach, the fighting was over. The military had set up a defensive position across a sandbar leading to the next objective. This means that everything behind me was, in theory, zombie-free.

  The sandbar really looked like a sandbar; a narrow strip of, well, sand. I didn’t think I would be near one so soon. Down its center is a two-lane road, connecting point A to point B. Including the beach, the line was roughly fifty yards across and chock full of motivated Marines. It wouldn’t take long before they were tested.

  BC and I made our way to the Rams Head Inn where we ran into some medic friends we had crashed with last night. We learned that, so far, the bite count is zero and the only KIA was some private from Alaska who had been hit by friendly fire. The front line was perhaps one hundred yards away and for the first ten minutes, we could occasionally hear a shot or two. Then all at once, it started to increase. BC noticed it at the same time I did. He decided we should hang around for the time being. Within minutes, the area started getting crowded and it sounded like things were really picking up. The pop, pop, pop, was now replaced by full-on automatic fire. Within five minutes, the fire was so constant that it almost made this wall of sound, punctuated by a couple of low booms every now and then. Like a moth to a flame, I left the aid station and climbed up on the roof of a truck to get a better look.

  The view was not great, but I did have a funky angle on our northern flank, just at the very end where the Marines met the sea, their natural environment. A moderate wind was blowing from the east, which kept my view clear of smoke. There had to be at least a couple thousand zombies already down. They were everywhere, like a moving carpet, and big explosions rocked further inland. The wind shifted again and I got a view of the zombie-controlled shoreline. More and more of the undead were going straight into and under the water. They went in tight groups like ice calving from a glacier. It didn’t appear to be an intentional effort to flank the marines, there were just way too many zombies, and not nearly enough places at the dinner table.

  “Let’s get closer.” It was BC. I jumped down and we made our way about twenty-five yards nearer to the front. I got lucky again and found an abandoned Ford F150 pushed off to the side of the road, which I climbed to get a better view of the slaughter. Being the gentleman he is, BC pointed out that I had some binoculars in my vest. There was now a visible death zone with areas literally knee deep in gore. Somewhere in the distance, Warren Zevon nods with approval. However, the zombies kept on coming. They would just run right into this no-zombie-land-of-lead-and-fire and have their bodies dismembered by a few rounds of fifty cal, at least in the movies it’s a fifty cal. The undead eventually had to jump over and wade through an ever-increasing field of offal. I could also look down the road to where it meets Little Rams Head and more open space. As I watched, an impossible horde converged at what was now becoming a bottleneck, as every zombie on the island wanted to get to us, and I had a nice view of the show, and what a show.

  After five more minutes of rapid-fire carnage, the amount of bodies and body parts did indeed start forming a formidable obstacle that the undead were finding more and more difficult to climb over. They eventually had to enter the water and actually try to outflank us. This slowed them down and the depth of the water limited where they could attack. So far, things were going about as well as anyone could expect. We had secured an easily defendable position, had enough ammo, and enough men. No problem, but they kept coming, more and more. No problem, Rams Island Drive would be more than adequate. The view over to Little Rams Head was a disquieting site. Oh, thank God. I have used the term disquieting in a real thinking process at least once in my life. I had no real clue on the crowd numbers, but based on my extensive knowledge of college football stadium capacities, i.e.: Alfond Stadium at UMaine holds ten thousand, my guess was that about ten thousand now lay in the bottleneck. Thousands more were coming. The horde was compressed together into a solid writhing mass that constantly bled fresh zombies onto the defenders. However, the wall was getting higher and it started taking on the characteristics of a forming wave. With enough numbers, it would overwhelm our defenses. I heard a couple of booms coming from somewhere out in the bay and a second later, Little Rams Head disappeared in fire. The concussions from the blast knocked me off the roof and I was viscerally reminded how hollow most of our organs are. It took me ten minutes to realize I wasn’t concussed and another ten to get back onto the roof, this time on my ass. When the smoke cleared, there were no more zombies, none. None wandering in to join the party, I couldn’t even see injured party goers. That’s it? Did we kill them all?

  And that was all. Over the course of the next two and a half hours, I saw only eighteen incidents where the zombie came out of the mountains of bodies to attack. About half appeared successful. None seemed to be coming from deeper in the island.

  BC found us a place to crash in the Inn. Every part ached from the fall, so I ate an early dinner, made notes in my tablet, and crashed. Sometime later, the rain started. I just assumed it’s another summer shower, but the heavens opened and poured, and poured, and then rained some more. This was the tail end of the Canadian front that was hoped would help reduce radiation levels. I assumed the sporadic booms were not thunder.

  June 28th

  It was around five a.m. and I had been dozing, thinking about the Vineyard and a house on the beach and a real life, when my brain registered that either the raining had stopped, or I had gone deaf. So I sat up, waking BC.

  “I guess it’s over,” I said to no one in particular, got up, and went to the bathroom. There was enough light to see myself in the mirror. God, have I aged. The little sprinkling of grey was now in full riot. There were wrinkles around my eyes. Oh well, the weight loss more than made up for the aging. Thinking about the Vineyard started the squirrels running. Thinking about the past, thinking about Liz.

  BC and I got breakfast with the other medics. Just as the last doughnut morsel entered my mouth, I saw Roland. He stopped by to tell us we were moving out. This was just the distraction I needed.

  “Good morning, John.”

  “Good morning, Roland. I am now a firm believer in the power of whining.
Thank you for getting me here.”

  “No problem, my friend, so now it’s mop up time. Intel indicates that all the carnival activity brought most of the zombies on the mainland to us.” Little Rams Head was taken in the night and we were moving into Shelter Island proper. The bad news was that the marines at Sag Harbor had been hit hard by unending waves of the undead. Casualties were high, as one medic told me, not in the hundreds.

  The journey in was in the back of the same F-150 I had stood on yesterday. Little Rams Head was a vision directly from the mind of Hieronymus Bosch. The landscape was blackened and torn apart. The dead were everywhere. The bodies stacked easily six feet deep. BC told me they used the island’s only snowplow to carve the road. High up in the skeletons of trees, dozens of corpses were impaled. All of the two dozen or so houses were just shells. There was no color other than black, brown, grey, and red. I could not see a single spot of green.

  Things got better as we moved onto the main island. By better, I mean it went from absolute carnage to just utter destruction. We were going to the southeast part of the island, the part with the Mashomack nature preserve. At our speed, this was going to take a while. Then it started to rain, again, which was fine with me, since I could see jack from my position.

  The rain stopped and the sun popped out right when we got to our destination; better, but now, damp and humid. The trip had been a breeze. We stopped a few times, some shots, but none from my truck. Everyone started to smoke from the wet khaki rapidly evaporating. We assembled near a barn on some estate that was once worth a gazillion dollars. We crossed an old stonewall into the next large field. This one was neat, as in not used for agriculture, probably horses. The grass, covered with thick dew, seemed to be razor-sharp trimmed and an amazing shade of deep forest green, a definite kick-ass place for a game of ultimate. You could hear gunfire all around us and see smoke in every direction. It was really hard to tell if we were in front or somewhere near the middle. Once everyone was over the wall, we were given ten minutes to piss, get some water, and reorganize. I was pleased to see that the order to keep all structures as intact as possible was being respected, since what we had just crossed could easily be two hundred years old. Then again, why the fuck should I care. I used the time to sit down, get my butt wet, prop my back up against the cool stones, and relax a bit. It felt good to be armed again and part of a team. I closed my eyes…

  “What the fuck?” Someone yelled. Pop, pop, pop, pop, “SHHIT!”

  I leapt up and clicked the safety off. In the field to the south, was supposed to be another well armed group; one of similar size, firepower and intent, but something had gone wrong and from our south, a massive block of undead emerged from the trees and slammed into our right flank. With all the chaos, I decided to stand my ground. There were far too many living in the way to use a shotgun effectively. Most of the other soldiers had fanned out into the field and were immediately heavily engaged. After an intense few minutes, the fighting started to die down as we regained control of our field. During the skirmish, I stayed out of the way and realized how stupid it was to bring a shotgun to a machine gun fight. Then I glanced over the wall into the field next to us, east. East was supposed to be free of zombies and our safe zone.

  The dead aren’t particularly smart, but they are annoyingly persistent, and yet again, here they come. I had no choice but to hope the wall would be adequate protection.

  “One. Two. Three. Shit, four!” I was yelling to myself at the top of my lungs, “Five, fuck, six. Seven. Eight. Reload!” I fired my last round and quickly moved to the rear, reloaded, and right back at the wall. I was now in front of maybe twenty zombies and I just unloaded on them; ten seconds of the real ‘Hand of God’ type carnage, clearing a small section directly in front of me and my partner, an apple tree. On my third reload, things were gradually slowing down and it took me going Bruce Campbell for maybe twenty seconds to run dry. I was now also getting some significant support from others who had noticed our less than favorable predicament.

  Our little group was now engaged on two fronts. Stonewalls, which we thought were protection, were actually pinning us in. Back at the wall, I took my time and tried to drop them as far away from me as possible, something to help prevent a full on speed run at me. Boy, did I ever need my Ruger. Fifth reload and I am officially running out of ammo, and nobody else is using a shotgun. Back at the wall, this time I am between two soldiers. I now wait and only take down the ones right on top of us. Why the hell aren’t we doing something? We can’t stay here forever.

  Right then, someone tapped me on the shoulder and yelled something in my ear. I think it was something like, we were moving west and I was to stay by the wall and defend our flank as we moved. Not a bad idea, and one I was more than willing to support, but I was almost out of ammo! Everyone moved quickly and with some semblance of order. I only went for those going over the wall. By the time we came to the inevitable next wall crossing, I was out and the only thing I had to fight with was now a club. We made it over and someone else took my place. With all haste, I made for whatever passed as the rear, which as it turns out was the other side of yet another field next to yet another relatively well preserved, Colonial Period, probably Native American made, field stonewall. There was much more firepower about, but it still looked like we were fighting on two fronts, south and east. More explosions off to the south, big ones, ground shakers. No one around me looks bitten or hurt, just out of breath and scared. I know I am, and all I have to defend myself with is a club. This sucks.

  As I caught my breath, BC came by. “That was fucking crazy, man! Oh, my God, did you see that shit? Did you see it, man! That was incredible! You know what I mean?” He dropped a bag onto my lap. “You might need these.”

  “Thanks, they have been known help. BC, I’m not bitten or anything, so don’t worry.” Nine rounds never went in so fast.

  “Why don’t you look military?” The guy next to me asked.

  “I’m not.” The world to the south of us erupted. “Shit. Here we go again.”

  I turned south. Don’t they ever stop? I guess not, what else were they going to do? They started to break through the forward lines. First, just a few, then bigger gaps, then the gaps turned outward on each other. Nobody in front of me was going to make it, and then all of a sudden, I was the front.

  “Get over the wall!” I screamed.

  Like the mid-forty year old guy that I am, I pulled a classic flounder move and partially destroyed the wall getting over. Here they come.

  “Hold the line. Get organized!” Someone yelled, Yeah, no shit.

  The mass was not nearly as thick as the last time, but I still had to wait till they got close, defend the wall.

  “Fire!” A very high-pitched voice yelled. At least three dozen zombies in almost ballet-like unison fell in front of me. Wow, that was effective.

  “Conserve ammo! Watch your target!” The line was coming together. I got a little girl as she flew over the wall. I never actually saw her. She just popped up in front of my barrel. The next was some guy in a plaid jacket who looked totally confused, as if he had just showed up and was wondering what the hell was going on. They kept coming. Reload number two, déjà vu, yet again! By now, I was in the zone and just focused on those who were an immediate threat to me. I made every shot count. They kept attacking, but never made it over. Half-way through my rounds, I was able to reload calmly. Just about then, the front started to wane and a couple more humongous explosions to the south. After five minutes, it was over.

  I got through another one, another attack, holy crap. We are on a fucking island! Where did they all come from? Man, I was tired. I just sat, looking at the ground, or should I say mud, and I concentrated on the droplets of sweat that rained from my forehead. I knew I was in a daze and probably in some form of shock. What the hell just happened? They weren’t really organized but… I could hear a thunderous roar off somewhere to my left. It was a combination of weapons fire and zombies. It wen
t on for what seemed like five or more minutes, and then slowly faded to the occasional automatic fire. I started to calm down and realized that someone was yelling at me. It was Roland.

  “Hi, Roland.”

  “John, are you okay? Where have you been? Have you been bit?”

  Oh, shit. It had never crossed my mind! I was quickly standing, ripping off clothing and examining every inch of my body. Oh, thank God, no bites or scratches, just sweat and mud. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said to no one in particular.

  Roland moved on and I started to re-dress. I looked down our ragged line. Now we are all Prime Time zombie fighters. Maybe a dozen guys down from me on my right was a medic talking to some dude. As I watch, I noticed that the guy he was talking to, more like yelling, just stared up into the sky. Other soldiers were looking his way, and nobody was saying a word. The guy stood up in front of the medic and said something, I could tell he was a marine and I thought I could see one bar on his collar, so I guess he was a lieutenant. He then walked out in front of the line, stood rock solid straight, turned to us and saluted. There was a large amount of blood on his shirt. After he saluted, he calmly walked through the line to about fifty yards behind us and looked to the sky. He then pulled his side arm, placed it under his chin, and fired. No hesitation. Holy crap. My God, could I do that? Could I be that strong? Another soldier stood, much further down the line, stepped forward, and saluted, walked to the body of the lieutenant, crossed himself and took his own life. There was then some commotion on my left, and this guy stood. I think he was a sailor. He had his helmet off and I thought there was no way he was of legal military age. Tears streamed down his face, a face that was pure determination. The medic and someone else was trying to talk to him. He just stepped forward and saluted. He came close to me as he walked to the two bodies lying in the grass. His breathing was fast and hard and his hands were shaking, and he did his duty. I knew that, the next time I encountered Captain Walker, I had to revise the estimate I gave him way back on the Kauffman. It just went way up.