Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  “Let him try,” the marshal said.

  “Their technology is really impressive,” I said, and then ticked off all of the things I’d seen. The ships. The strange aircraft. The Cerulean Order.

  “And he also said,” I added, “that they have the ability to destroy our ships in orbit.”

  Burnham frowned.

  “But there’s hope,” I said cheerfully. “The Californians have pledged their support to fight the zombies. Ten thousand men fully equipped. They’re deploying now to augment our positions.”

  “They are not to be trusted,” he snapped.

  “They’re the only other ones willing to fight for this planet!” I retorted. “No one else from the Cascadia Republic wants to die for this world.”

  The marshal’s face was stoic on the camera. He didn’t move and said nothing. I began to wonder if the connection was frozen, but then he spoke.

  “What do they want from us?” he asked.

  “They want the border to be established at the Rogue River. They want open trade with Cascadia. And they want Able-Victor abandoned.”

  “Out of the question,” Burnham said. “It requires the Senate to ratify a treaty and to vacate a law. You can’t make that agreement.”

  “I didn’t,” I replied. “I said I’d forward it to you.”

  He paused again.

  “I’ll relay their requests to the Senate,” he said, “but it will take some time, even under an urgent session. Time you don’t have.”

  “The Californians are deploying now,” I responded, “in a show of good faith.”

  “You’re not the only one with good news,” Burnham said. “As you know, we don’t have a standing army, but every current and former Fleet officer has training in basic warfare. A call for volunteers went out through the Fleet and across the Republic. Nearly four thousand volunteers have signed up to join your defense of Cascadia. They’ll be arriving on Prometheus in the next two days. Prometheus will be staying on station with the Halberd task force in orbit. I’m sending you the contact details for Admiral Hamilton, the task force leader. You can coordinate your strategy with him.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I replied, humbly.

  “I’ll stay in contact with you as best as I can,” he said, “but messaging with the tachyon network out of commission is difficult. With the current alignment of the planets, it takes thirteen minutes for a message to reach Mars directly, where I’ll be at Senate, discussing your treaty with the Californians and the possible threat of the Kergueleni. Halberd can transmit to Luna, which can forward to Tharsis.

  “Anything else, sir?”

  “Good hunting, Commander Faustus.”

  FORMATIONS

  The dropship touched down just east of Magic Valley a kilometer from the river. The local volunteers had set up a camp on a small hillock with a commanding view of the surrounding area. The rest of the crew began unloading more crates and supplies from the ship.

  I approached the cluster of canvas tents and a woman in sage-colored digital camouflage came running toward me. At first I didn’t recognize her at a distance and with her hair pulled up into a ponytail.

  “Pax!” she shouted.

  Rebekah threw her arms around me and kissed me.

  “Well look at you!” I said, picking her up and hugging her tightly.

  “I missed you, so much,” she cooed. “Come on, you’ve got to come meet Jonah.”

  “Jonah?”

  “He’s of the house of Abraham, of the tribe of Esau. He’s leading the local army.”

  She grabbed my hand and led me to the large tent, throwing the flap aside. A tall young man with a thick beard stood at a table, looking at a combination of local hand-drawn maps and digital displays provided by the Cascadians.

  “Is this the man you’ve told me so much about?” Jonah asked.

  “Jonah, this is Pax Faustus, Commander of the Cascadian Forces on Earth.”

  “You’re really young,” he noted, looking me up and down.

  “Age doesn’t mean anything,” I replied.

  “So what news do you have for me?” he asked, unimpressed.

  “We’ve got several starships in orbit ready to provide bombardment,” I said. “Two thousand Cascadian enhanced-form volunteers will be arriving today with their equipment. Another four thousand Californian Guardsmen will be here shortly thereafter. Along with the two thousand volunteers that you have, that’s just over eight thousand. And if your people have constructed the defenses—”

  “We’ve built six trenches with berms behind them,” he pointed on the hand-drawn maps, “over a half kilometer each with two hundred yards between them.”

  The trenches weren’t designed to be fought from, but to act as a pit that the zombies would have to climb into, then be shot from the berms above. I doubted any of them were deep enough to hold all the creatures that were rushing our way.

  “Excellent. How have your people been doing with the new equipment?”

  “They’re good enough with aiming,” he scowled, “but the force of the rifles is always a bit surprising. We’ve built these bipod stands for them, and we’ll fire from prone. Should help with accuracy at range.”

  “The guns were designed for robotic bodies with more strength and better balance to wield them,” I acknowledged.

  “I’m not going to lie,” he said sternly, “I don’t like working with you. I’m grateful for the supplies and weapons, but we’ve never been able to trust the robots.”

  “I’m not a robot,” I replied. Rebekah grabbed my hand.

  He looked at her with a glance that lingered and made me uncomfortable.

  “Our job is just to hold the zombies at the river,” I reminded him. “We need to cluster them on the far side, and then our ships will open up with their big orbital cannons.”

  “I’m still unclear what that is,” he said, ashamedly.

  I explained how the magnetically-accelerated cannon basically throws a two-ton bullet at 30,000 kilometers per hour, leaving a kilometer-wide crater. He still looked confused.

  I picked up a rock from the dirt floor of the tent, and dropped it into the dirt. The dust puffed up in a cloud around the impact.

  “Like that,” I pointed, “but much bigger.”

  He nodded approvingly.

  A low rumbling and rhythmic thumping sound could be heard in the distance. We walked outside and saw dozens of black shapes rising over the hills behind us.

  “The Californians are early,” I smiled.

  The big field to the north was their predetermined landing site. The thundering of the flying machines was terrifying, and the other locals were visibly upset by their arrival. These were helicopters of a relatively ancient design, but obviously updated and well-maintained. The doors of the copters opened and armed men started spilling out. One of them began walking toward our encampment, and I started walking toward him.

  “I’m Captain MacDonald, C-Company Commander, 2nd Battalion, 1st Californian Division,” he said, saluting.

  I returned his salute. I felt like I was getting better at this.

  “I’m Commander Faustus, Cascadian Forces, and this is Rebekah Daniel and Jonah Esau, who is the commander of the local forces.”

  They both protested at the truncation of their names. Apparently the announcement of the house and tribe is a matter of pride for them. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  I led the captain to the large tent.

  “The divisional commander, Colonel Kelly, is at Green River with the bulk of our forces. The battalion commander, Major Christensen, will be here soon. We had to adjust the numbers to balance out our defense of Hoover Dam, so we only have three thousand here. The reserve force is being held in the camp at Old Salt Lake if they’re needed anywhere else.”

  I frowned. We’d be down to seven thousand here. Green River would have four thousand Californians and two thousand Cascadian enhanced forms. Per my agreement with Colonel Kelly, the Hoover Dam defense would ha
ve three thousand Californians and a few hundred biologic Cascadians.

  “I would have liked the reserve force deployed,” I grumbled.

  “Then they wouldn’t be a reserve,” Captain MacDonald commented dryly.

  “I was at Colorado Springs,” I said sternly. “Seven thousand might not be enough.”

  “Maybe not,” he agreed. “The government is concerned about leaving our southern territories exposed. We sent a detachment to Taos and found the Kingdom destroyed. Hardly any corpses or blood, but there had definitely been a struggle. The Horde may be pushing on the southern front and we need to be able to respond quickly.”

  “We’ll deal with them later,” I surmised, receiving grunts of approval from the room.

  “On the positive side,” I added, “we’ve gotten aerial reconnaissance showing that our strategy has worked. Only a few small groups have moved east across the Rockies along the old I-70 corridor, and they’ll be mopped up by some modified dropships. Mostly, they’ve been funneling north and northwest. They’re going right where we’re wanting them to be.”

  “I won’t keep you any longer, Commander,” the captain said politely. I’m going to go continue preparations for the arrival of the rest of my team.”

  “Thanks for being here,” I replied, as he grasped and shook my hand.

  “Proud to be doing my duty,” he smiled, then snapped a salute and left.

  The stream of helicopters kept arriving over the hills throughout the day. The sun started getting low in the western sky when the first Cascadian dropships started entering the atmosphere.

  The thunderclaps continued in rapid succession. Dozens and dozens of the ships touched down, disgorged their cargo, and returned skyward. This continued well into the evening.

  I was in the tent with Major Christensen, Jonah, and Captain Holland, a Cascadia Fleet officer sent to help coordinate the battalion of enhanced forms. One of our communications staff came running into the command tent and yelled:

  “First contact on the line!”

  Holland had brought a large wall-sized display with him, which showed reconnaissance being beamed down from Penitent Man. The infrared imagery showed the thousands of small blue dots which represented the warm human bodies, then a black expanse of the river, and the white dots of the hot-blooded zombies. There were only a couple of them, but zooming out showed hundreds and thousands more drawn out along a two-hundred kilometer line.

  “There’s…so many….” gulped Jonah.

  The first and second trench forces had been the only ones to fire. Every few minutes, they’d take down another small group, but more kept appearing.

  “Halberd calculates two hundred thousand coming this way, and another hundred and fifty headed toward the Green River,” Holland reported.

  I pointed to the map. “If we can hold them into a cluster on the east side of Big River, the task force already has the coordinates to hit them.”

  “Based on their current concentration and rates of approach, they’ll reach maximum concentration in fourteen hours,” Holland announced.

  “Then it’s going to be a long night,” Christensen noted.

  Holland touched his earpiece. “Visual recon confirms only drudges and runners among the dead zombies so far. No hulks, no ghouls.”

  And so it went for hours. Reports coming in from scouts and starships. The highly disciplined Californians relieved the excited and less disciplined locals after four hours of contact on the line. The Cascadians hadn’t entered direct combat, but their chance was coming: the late watch, from 0200 to 0600, would be theirs.

  We slowly whittled the zombie forces down. Instead of the mad rush of a half-million monsters and the ensuing chaos at Cheyenne Mountain, this slow trickle was almost boring. Only a few creatures had even made it to the river, and none had made it across. Our orbital recon nonetheless showed that the wide swath of small zombie groups scattered across the northern plains was condensing here at this spot. We just had to wait.

  Captain Holland reported that the task force had to move to a higher orbit to avoid some meteorites, and we’d lose resolution of data and the ability for orbital strikes for four hours. My stomach sank a bit, but the four hours might not make too much of a difference.

  The trickle of combat continued and increased slightly. On one particularly large push, a group of zombies crossed the river and were shot down fifty meters from the first trench. The Californians, exhausted from their journey and the constant direct contact, swapped out with the Cascadian enhanced forms. The robots’ precision sensors and inability to get tired made them perfect for the long, dark night.

  Jonah, Major Christensen, and a few others in the command tent shuffled off to get some sleep. Even Rebekah curled up in a dusty corner and closed her eyes.

  Then suddenly, the zombies just stopped coming. They began to cluster about half a kilometer away from the river’s edge: too close for orbital guns and just far enough that only the designated snipers could reach out into the horde.

  “What do you suppose they’re waiting for?” asked Captain MacDonald.

  “I wish we had better aerial recon,” I said, rubbing my bleary eyes.

  “I can send up a helicopter,” he said, “with a scout team. Go drop some grenades on them, open up with the minigun, harass them, and force them to move.”

  “That’s a fantastic idea,” I said. I wish that we had some kind of designated attack aircraft, but the modified transports would have to be enough.

  “It’ll be up in two-zero minutes,” he commented.

  Twenty minutes later, the Californians’ chopper flew over the horde and relayed pictures back to us on the screen. Thousands of zombies were now gathered along the highway, just on the other side of the river.

  “Trucks approaching,” the pilot reported back.

  We watched on a variety of display screens as a small convoy bumped along the decrepit highway to the north of the Horde.

  The helicopter swooped low and opened up with the minigun. The first truck exploded into flames. The remaining dozen or so scattered to either side of the highway. A rat-tat-tat-tat noise pulsed in the distance.

  “Taking ground fire,” the pilot said surprised. “They have an anti-air gun mounted on that flatbed.”

  Captain MacDonald cursed. “How do they have guns?”

  “We’ve been hit,” reported the helicopter pilot. “Evasive maneuvers. Heading back to base.”

  “This doesn’t make a damn bit of sense,” Major Christensen shouted, coming back into the tent. “We’re talking about zombies here.”

  “Can we use the orbital guns yet?” MacDonald said.

  “No,” I replied. “We’re still eighty-plus minutes from a firing solution. And even if we could, we haven’t reached peak concentration yet. If we hit them now, and in the wrong place, we’ll probably scare them off and lose the chance to take them all out. We need to bottle them up.”

  “Whoever’s in those trucks,” Christensen said, “is worth paying a visit.”

  “The Reverend is probably there,” I surmised. “He likes to lead from behind. Doesn’t get his own hands dirty.”

  “Then that’s a priority,” the Major replied. “We’re going to put up a strike force. It’ll take twenty to thirty minutes to get fire teams aboard the choppers…but we need to take him out.”

  A loud roaring started coming from the east side of the river. Thousands upon thousands of zombies were screaming. Rebekah woke up and came over to the group.

  “We might not have thirty minutes,” Holland scowled.

  “We need to last eighty,” I replied. “We don’t have a choice. I’ll recognize the Reverend if I see him. I need to go with your strike team.”

  Christensen shook his head, “You’re the commander of this defense. You’re needed here.”

  “I’m pretty sure you guys can do this without me,” I argued.

  “Out of the question,” he reiterated.

  “I’ll go,” Rebekah ann
ounced. “I’ll never forget that face.”

  I looked into her stern face and said, “No.”

  “Excuse me?” she laughed.

  “If anything ever happened to you,” I pulled her close and whispered.

  “Nothing will happen to me,” she breathed into my ear. “I love you. Everyone needs to do their part.”

  She kissed my cheek and squeezed my hand.

  “Major,” she said.

  “Head to the LZ and see Captain Tansy,” he replied. “She’s coordinating the air ops.”

  “Yes, sir.” Rebekah smiled, grabbed her gun, and scurried out of the tent, shooting one last glance over her shoulder as the tent flap swung closed.

  “Contact again,” one of the Californian radio operators said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “The whole line, sir,” he said, his face pale.

  The sound of gunfire erupted all along the line as the Horde moved across the river. A few of the heavy artillery guns that the Californians had brought erupted from a kilometer behind us. The shells splashed into the water and blasted zombie guts and mud into the air, but still the horde kept moving forward and made physical contact with the first line—the Cascadians still on the front.

  “We’re still seventy minutes from an orbital solution and sixty from peak concentration,” Holland reported.

  “Taking casualties on the line,” an aide announced from the adjoining tent. “Minor so far, but increasing.”

  “Wake up the locals and get them down there,” Christensen said.

  The thundering of the helicopters taking off gave me a little bit of hope, until I realized Rebekah was aboard. She called with her helmet-mounted video link.

  “I figured y’all would wanna see this,” she said.

  I transferred her video feed up to one of the screens by flicking the call from my digibook screen toward one of the large displays.

  We could see the shuddering, rattling interior of the helicopter, and her gun across her lap—and the blank faces of a dozen Californian special forces readying themselves to be dropped into hell.

  Sparks flew through the cabin and she screamed.

  “Taking ground fire. I think it’s a fifty cal,” the pilot yelled over the radio.