“OK, Sir, that was a pretty boneheaded thing you did back there.” I walked next to him and waited for him to argue with me, but he didn’t get a chance to answer. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, as our point man, Cappochi, stopped in her tracks.
The ambush had been laid with precision, and we didn’t have a chance. Lisa, on point, was hurled backward at the same time I heard the bark of a heavy caliber hunting rifle. The next second, something smashed into my prosthetic, sending me spinning onto the ground. I landed face up, and quickly rolled to my side and fired off a whole magazine in the direction I thought the rifle shot had come from. Bullets started to whine and spark off the broken pavement in front of me, and my asshole tried to crawl up into my helmet. Return gunfire barked loudly in my ear, quickly deafening me.
Taking a second to assess the situation, I looked around. So far Lisa had been the only one hit; she lay either lifeless or stunned about twenty meters in front of me. The rest of the team were returning fire in several directions. Most of the rounds were going over our heads in a withering crossfire. Typical amateurs, shooting high.
“GRENADES!” I yelled as loud as I could, and hurled a smoke canister, hard as I could, just as a round WHANGED off my helmet. The next instant, a searing, red hot poker of pain ripped through my shoulder, a ragged piece of hot steel from one our own grenades ripping through my skin. I looked over to see a chunk of meat gone from the muscle, and starred dumbfounded at it for a full second. Then several frag grenades went off simultaneously, and a pair of boots went running past me in the direction of the incoming fire.
Standard Operational Procedure in case of an ambush is one of two things. Either you attempt to break contact and peel off, coming back the way you came, or you assault THROUGH in an attempt to break up the ambush momentum and maybe even defeat the attackers. I glanced up again to see Jimmy Bognaski dragging Lisa Cappochi back down the road by the dead man’s strap on her body armor. The boots I had seen running past me were Jacksons’, and he, followed by Simmons and Red, were charging into the teeth of the ambush. I tried to get up to follow them, but my artificial leg collapsed under me, spilling me back onto the road.
A strong gust of wind of wind blew the smoke clear of the scene momentarily, and I started taking aimed, measured shots at the attackers, who I could only see by muzzle flashes. My three men were briefly silhouetted by the setting sun as they crashed into the tree line, firing like madmen. It did them no good.
Jackson was cut down, even as he fired a long burst into a machine gun team that I just saw under a fallen log. The gunners were flung away from what looked like a 240B by the impact of his heavy AK-47 rounds, but an unseen rifle cracked and Jackson fell, shot through the head. I shifted aim and fired again, catching another man full in the chest as he rose to meet Simmons’ charge. A grenade went off and hurled Simmons to the ground like a rag doll.
Red, with his disabled foot, had fallen behind in the charge and he came to a full stop when he saw both Jackson and Simmons go down. He reversed direction and ran straight back at me, stopping to try and help me up. Leg shattered and feeling light headed from the blood pouring from my shoulder and dripping onto the road, I wasn’t conscious that the firing had stopped. My only thought that kept going through my head was that I wasn’t going to get to run my hand through Brit’s flaming red hair ever again, or hear my kids’ laughter as they played by the river.
“DROP IT!” screamed a voice in front of us, and I looked up to see half a dozen men, armed to the teeth, pointing their weapons at us. I was having a hard enough time holding my rifle as it was, and I let it drop in its sling. I heard Red’s rifle drop too, and then everything went kinda fuzzy and I fell to the ground. Fade to black.
Chapter 219
When you wake up from a beating, you don’t really “wake up” like after a night’s sleep. You kind of drift in and out, gradually coming to the conclusion that actually being awake is going to be really painful, and you try to hide from it. I put it off as long as I could, but finally the aches and pains dragged me back to reality.
I was in jail. Well, probably more like a holding cell at the local Podunk Sherriff’s office. I quickly discovered that I was handcuffed to the bed, and I hurt all over. My shoulder, which had a fresh white bandage on it, hurt like hell, and my ribs, holy crap. I wheezed as I tried to sit up. Hopefully none were broken, but shit that hurt.
I half expected to see Red in the cell next to me, but it was empty. What I did see was a guard sitting on a chair outside the cell, shotgun sitting propped up while he leaned back and read a magazine.
“Well now, you look like shit,” he said, in a not unkindly manner.
“Feel like shit,” I answered, but it came out more as a croak. My throat was severely dry. Taking off his gun belt and slinging it across the back of the chair, the guard took a bottle of water from the table next to him and opened the cell door. I took it gratefully and sipped at it.
“How long was I out?” I asked, once my voice came back.
He took the empty bottle back and said “None of my business. I’m just here to keep an eye on you, and to let Captain Burns know when you’re awake.” He picked up a Motorola radio that was clipped to his pocket and keyed it.
“Jimmy, this is Rich, down at the jail. The prisoner is awake.” Something unintelligible came back over, and he scowled at it. “Of course I haven’t said shit to him.” Clipping it back to his belt, he turned around to me.
“Captain Burns will be down to see you in a bit, Sergeant Major. Till then, how about we just let the questions wait, OK? I don’t want any trouble. Man’s got to get by in the world.”
I could see that he was scared shitless of whomever “Captain Burns” was. Fair enough. I need some time to get my stuff together. I ran a functions check on myself. My shoulder hurt, but seemed to have been well taken care of. The bandage was clean, and I could see the marks of an IV needle on my arm. I guess they actually had a doctor, since I probably had been given some blood, or at least fluids. My ribs hurt, and so did my cheekbone, where someone had kicked my face. My left eye was still swollen, though I could see through it. My prosthetic leg was gone, but I knew that already, remembering how the bullet had smashed into it. So much for escape, though. I wasn’t going to hop my way out of captivity.
My musings were interrupted by an outside door opening and then closing. Into the cell walked a man wearing what I recognized were the remains of a New York State Corrections uniform, with the shiny two bars of a captain on his collar. Where the patches would normally be nothing showed. He wasn’t a big man, and there was grey in his hair and in his mustache, but he looked hard as hell.
“Captain Burns, I presume?”
He grunted and took a chair, turned it around backwards and sat down, leaning on the backrest and gazing at me.
Finally, after a full minute of contemplation, he spoke. “Sergeant Major Nicholas Agostine, of the famed Irregular Scout Team One. Where’s your wife? Ms. O’Neil?”
“Probably back home cursing up a storm at me. She wasn’t exactly happy about me going on this little recon.”
“Ah, the married life. Tried it myself, three times. Finally gave up. Cigarette?” he offered, and when I shook my head no, he lit it and put it in his own mouth, then blew the smoke in my face. Asshole.
“So, Sergeant Major, what, exactly, am I going to do with you? Way I see it, I’ve got a few choices.” He held out thick, blunt fingers and counted off.
“One, I can turn you and your friends back to the Feds and we can write it all off as a misunderstanding. I trade with the soldiers down on I-684 often enough, I could have you all there in a day.” He shook his head, said “Somehow I don’t think that will work. Too much blood under the bridge, as they say.”
“Two, I could just kill you, bury your body, and act all sweet and innocent when the Regular Army comes looking for you, like I know they will. Loyalty and no man left behind bullshit. Probably my smartest choice, but I have to
answer to my own people. Do you have any idea how many men we lost in that ambush?”
“A few, I hope” I answered, and cursed myself for even letting that ambush happen. We had let our guard down, and if it hadn’t been for Lisa’s warning, we would all be dead.
He scowled at me and said “I lost four killed and three wounded. Your boys put up a hell of a fight, and we got two more wounded going after the ones that got away.”
I grinned inwardly at myself. That meant that Jimmy and Lisa had gotten away, if she was still alive.
“Three, and this is what my people want to do. They appreciate a good fighting man, and to be honest, we don’t like screwing with white folks. So here’s my offer. You join up, your Indian friend gets to live as a slave, and we hang the nigger to keep my people happy. Hell, if you want, send for your wife and kids, and they can come live down here with their own kind.”
I stared at him, then laughed. “You know this is the twenty first century, right? We don’t run around hanging blacks anymore.”
“Correction,” he said. “It WAS the twenty first century. The plague changed all that. Now it’s more like the eighteenth century out there.”
He paused to drag on his cigarette. “Listen, Nick. Can I call you that? I used to be like you, all educated and loving my fellow Americans. Then I became a prison guard at Ossining. Worked my way up to Captain. Know what I saw? Scum. All of them, for what they truly were. Niggers, Spics, mongrels. All polluting the white race.”
I let him ramble on, having heard it all before. Maybe I could play along with him until something better came along. He saw my look of boredom on my face and said “Well, maybe you’ll change your ideas when you see how good it is to be a white man here. First things first though, let’s get you up and about. We’ll talk more tomorrow.” He stubbed out the cigarette and walked out the door.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to draw information out of the guard, Rich, but he said nothing, just kept reading his Guns & Ammo magazine. My only other visitor was a woman who pulled out my catheter, none too gently, and gave me some pain killers. The night passed slowly, and I kept waking up, bothered by the handcuff on my wrist, till I finally fell into a deep, dream free sleep.
Chapter 220
The next day, I woke early in the dawn twilight, and needed to take a piss. I was still handcuffed to the bed, so I yelled for the guard, who was snoring in his chair. It was a different one, not Rich, and this guy looked slower than Thomas the Tank Engine, and was built like it, too. Six foot four and full of muscles, as they used to say.
“No funny stuff” he grumbled as he opened the cage door.
“Just need to take a piss. Is the latrine working in here? You guys got running water?”
He looked at me through bleary eyes. “Of course we got running water. This ain’t no piss ant place.” He unlocked the door, and the stench he gave off told me that running water didn’t really seem to mean a lot to him.
I noted the fact that they apparently DID have running water. It meant a pretty good level of organization to have gotten that back online. Probably from a gravity feed tank up on a hill. I picked up a crutch that someone had put in the cell for me, and made a bad show of stumping over to the bathroom.
I lost my leg a few years ago to a bite from a zombie. A late buddy of mine, Doc Hamilton, had performed an emergency amputation in the field, just below my knee, and saved my life. In the time since, I had learned to get around pretty well on just one, even though I had the best prosthetic the army could give me. Never knew when you might not have one anymore, and I was damned if I would let that stop me. I did, however, make a big show of being clumsy without it.
In the bathroom, I took time to wash my face and give myself a bitch bath, just to feel a little better. I was wearing a pair of old shorts and a T-shirt that said “The CPL Thog NCO Club”. I guess someone in this gang was ex-military. I made another note of that. Ex-corrections officers, ex-military. I didn’t feel so bad about the ambush now, though I was pissed that Jackson was killed. He was a good guy. Apparently Simmons had survived, from Burn’s reference to hanging, and I guess Ski and Cappochi had gotten away. Maybe she had taken that rifle round in the chest; a heavy enough caliber round will shatter the ceramic plate and give you a hell of a bruise while knocking you flat.
The guard was waiting for me when I came out, with orders to bring me up to see the Captain. The sun had started to flood the area with light, and I blinked as we started out of the jail. When I could see, the first thing I made out was a typical main street from any American town in the northeast. Most of the windows were boarded up, but I expected that. Glass had really taking a beating during the ZA. The streets were clean, though. In fact, as I watched, two black men wearing ankle chains come along, picking up trash. They avoided looking at me, and as they walked past, my guard gave one a smack on the side of the head.
I ignored it, but it was hard to do. No one else seemed up and moving around yet in the small village, but I could see some people working out in a corn field, all black, with an overseer armed with a shotgun. I felt some weird time shift, like I had landed in some southern plantation two hundred years ago.
Captain Burns held court in the local diner, I heard a generator running, probably powered by corn alcohol, and the smell of cooking eggs and bacon drove me crazy. I was starving, but I hadn’t realized it until the aroma hit me. Bacon Bacon Bacon.
Burns was seated in a both with another man, and he dismissed my guard and waved for me to sit down. “Sergeant Major, this is Sergeant Martin, my right hand man.”
“Can’t say I’m pleased to meet you, Martin,” I said as another black man slid a plate of bacon and eggs in front of me.
The beefy, overweight Martin laughed and said, in a deep Bronx accent, “Can’t say I blame you.” He proceeded to shovel another plate of food into his mouth, crumbs falling as he rushed things onto his fork.
“Are you wondering how I know your name, Nick?” asked Burns. “Sorry, no orange juice. Apocalypse and all that.”
“Well” I said, tearing into my own plate. “I’m assuming you got my ID card, or my dog tags, and probably, since you have electricity and what looks like some satellite sets, you watched that stupid reality TV show my wife talked me into.”
Martin actually stopped eating and laughed. “That show was GREAT! Tell me, that time you guys were in Burlington checking out the Air Base, did you really make that shot with a pistol from two hundred meters?”
“Pure luck” I said. “Nobody can shoot like that on purpose. They hyped it up for the show.”
Burns coughed, interrupting. “No more fangirl shit, Martin. Let’s talk business. Have you thought about your choices? We have a pretty good set up here. The darkies do all the work, and we live like kings. You could be a valuable asset to us.”
I paused to drink some apple juice, then said “What about the Feds? Things are running pretty well in Albany, and you know they won’t ignore good land like this.”
Burns leaned back and contemplated me. Martin, for all his joviality, had a hard glint in his eye when he said “The Feds can go fuck off. They’re going to have enough problems soon that we won’t have to worry about them for more than a few years. The United States is dead, soldier boy.”
“Not while I’m still alive, it’s not.” I countered, just as hard in my tone.
Burns leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “Listen, Nick. Let me tell you a little story. The guys you see around here are all my coworkers from the prison. When the world went to shit six years ago, know what we did? We took every gun and round of ammo we had, shot every one of those scumbags in their cells, except for some of the white guys who weren’t trash or dope addicts, and lit out for this place. Then we held it against the horde that came up the valley. Like I said, all full of niggers and spics and who knows what else. Took in all the decent white people we could find, and got some captives to work the corn fields for us. Now we got about a h
undred people here who have a good life. You can join us, and have that same good life, or you can disappear. Your choice.” He sat back and lit another cigarette, again blowing the smoke in my face.
“How about” I said, ignoring the smoke, “you let me and the rest of my team go, and you let all the blacks go, and I don’t come back here with an infantry company and smash your little slave kingdom into paste? Because if you don’t, you are going to be in a world of shit.”
He laughed at that. “Define a world of shit, please.”
I took another sip of my drink, then said “A world of shit is a pissed off redhead who will steal your soul before she kills you.”
“I’m not worried about your wife. How is she even going to know you were here? As far as the two of your people that got away, they left two very heavy blood trails into the mountains, headed east towards Massachusetts. They’re both dead.”
I thought about it for a minute, then said “With all due respect, Captain Burns, fuck off and die.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say. Goddamned Captain America, aren’t you?” He turned to his aide and said “Throw this piece of shit in the basement until he comes around to our point of view. Put the Indian in the fields, but give him a good work over first. Don’t break anything. Hang the nigger where the good Sergeant Major can see him.”
Chapter 221
Burns got up and walked out of the diner, leaving me there with Martin. The only other person in the diner was the old black man, who pretended we weren’t there. I glanced over at the crutch, leaning up against the table, and wondered to myself if I could brain the former corrections officer sitting across from me. He sat there with that shit eating grin on his face, and placed a taser on the table between us. He didn’t take his hand off of it.
Zombie Killers (Book 6): AMBUSH (Irregular Scout Team One) Page 4