by J. F. Holmes
When men fight with their lives at stake, it’s brutal. There are no fancy martial arts strikes between average guys bent on killing each other, just grappling and choking, hitting where ever you can and hoping the other guy gives out first. It is the scariest shit I have ever been involved in.
I tried to get my rifle around to make a snap shot at him, but it went wild, just past him, and before I could correct my aim, he was on me. I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me; instead he swung his own gun, some kind of rifle, at my head. It hit my helmet and glanced aside, wrenching my neck with the chinstrap, and then I grabbed him around the waist and wrestled him to the ground.
What happened next, I don’t know. I don’t remember. I have a vague memory of bad beer breath and foul body odor, and hands wrapped around my throat, choking me. Next thing I do clearly recall was sitting with my back against the bridge wall, my M-4 smashed to pieces, and his head at my feet, skull misshapen and oozing brains and blood. He still breathed, but it was a warbling, choking sound. My whole leg was coated in blood, and I felt really tired. It seemed to take forever to get my pistol out of the holster, and when I tried to fire it uncocked, I didn’t have enough strength to pull the trigger. I fumbled with the hammer, locking it back, and shot him. And again, once more, to make me feel better. Then one more time.
Off in the distance, I heard that damned howling start again, but I just sat there, watching the dawn light grow, and presently fell fast asleep.
Chapter 16
I woke with the sun blazing overhead, sweltering in the July heat. My mouth was dry as hell and tasted of blood; I had somehow bitten my lip in the fight. My left eye was swollen shut, and when I tried to move, a bolt of pain shot up my leg, making me scream out loud.
Fumbling around at my shoulder, and trying not move too much, I found the tube for my camelback and sipped a little bit, swished it around in my mouth, and spit it out. Then I drank deeply, and splashed some water on my face, trying to wash off the blood that crusted my eye shut. Eventually I got it to open, and I whispered a silent prayer of thanks that I could still see out of it.
My leg was a different matter. Dried blood clotted the bandage and my pants leg, and flies had started settling on it. Last thing I needed was the infection those nasty shits carried, so I left the bandage on but splashed some water on it. There was no exit wound and I cursed. That would have to come out, and I felt around for the bullet, discovering a hard lump on the outside, back of my leg, with a massive bruise. I couldn’t determine the caliber; all I could be grateful for was that it hadn’t hit a major artery, or I would never have woken up.
I reloaded the pistol, regretting the extra rounds that I had fired into the dead attacker. The rifle was a loss, but I took the magazine and managed to work the bolt enough to get the chambered round out. Then I unseated them all, counted, and reloaded them, throwing out one that had a dent in the side. Next I looked for the shotgun; it was lying on the ground about fifteen feet away, and I had a dozen shells in my pockets.
First things first, threat analysis. Some howls sounded, but they were far away. I don’t know how I had made it through the night, but I wasn’t going to question it. In front of me was the body of the guy I had fought with, pale and leeched of blood, covered with flies. No threat, but his rifle was lying on the ground between us. I leaned over and reached out to get it, and I could barely move. Every muscle in my body screamed at me, and I fell back, exhausted. No action hero for me, I felt like I had been run over by a tank. With supreme effort, I shoved the pain aside, leaned forward again and managed to snag the barrel.
It was a Ruger Mini-14, and empty. That explained why he’d tried to hit me instead of shooting me, and I thanked the gods of war. My M-4 magazine wouldn’t fit, but I could fire the rounds through it. I cursed the stupid governor of NY and his idiot rule about ten round magazines as I thumbed them in, leaving the rest loose in my pocket.
I scanned around; my view was limited by bridge walls and abandoned cars. Directly in front of me were the bodies of the three men I had killed with the shotgun, swelling and bloating in the sun. Even as I looked, one moaned, built up gases escaping past his vocal chords, and for a panicked second I thought he was going to get up as an undead. I was in no way in shape to defend myself, and I sat with the rifle trained on the body for a few minutes.
Above them, still lying on the car hood, was the body of the girl. Her pants hung off one leg, and her shirt was yanked up, her face turned towards me. The eyes that I had closed were getting picked at by a crow, and hatred blazed up inside me. I actually sighted on him, but then thought better of wasting the bullet, never mind what the sound of the shot might have brought. Instead I took an expended cartridge and, grunting, threw it at the bird. It flew off with a squawk, then settled back on the roof, waiting. Overhead, turkey vultures soared in the thermals, and then dove downward. They were getting their fill.
I suddenly felt a huge need to piss, and take a crap. I could piss my pants, I’d done it before and it would dry soon enough, but I didn’t want to, and I sure enough didn’t want to shit myself with an open gunshot wound. Rolling on my good side, I unbuttoned my fly and pissed as far away from myself as I could, then staggered to a sitting position with my back against the side of the wall, and slid my pants down. I had TP in the canoe, but I also kept some napkins in my blouse pocket, and used them as best I could. Then I forced myself to stand, hauling myself up the wall.
My leg screamed, and I couldn’t put any weight on it. Dragging it along, I staggered in a lurch over to the closest wrecked car and fell onto the hood. Then I managed to reach the shotgun, and violated a cardinal rule of firearms handling, using a loaded weapon as a crutch.
It took me more than half an hour, and I was growing hungry and feeling a little faint, but I managed to search each of the dead bodies, except the dead girl. Her I pulled down off the hood, wrestled her pants back onto the stiff body, and pulled down her shirt. Then I cut a shirt off one of the dead men and placed it over her face. The others I left for the crows and vultures, after going through their stuff. My search yielded a small .380 automatic, good quality, with three rounds left, and a crappy Taurus 9mm. I took the rounds out of the Taurus and threw it in the river. A pack of M&Ms, covered in blood. I rinsed the package off and hungrily ripped it open, downing a handful and almost swallowing them whole.
The ammunition thing bothered me; in reality, gun fights used up a LOT of ammo for little result. I had been extremely lucky last night, having fired less than a dozen rounds, but a similar situation could easily have reached into the hundreds. I expected all the stores that might have ammo were picked clean; I’d have to start cracking every single house that had a “NO SAFE ACT” sign on its front lawn. That in itself was a risk, because any occupants left would probably be armed.
The other problem was the undead. They moved surprisingly fast, but in top shape, I could probably hold my own against a group with a baseball bat or some other kind of club. Like I was now, I probably couldn’t even club a baby seal to death. That meant guns, but I didn’t trust myself to make head shots even twenty five percent of the time, and hardly ever past ten meters with a pistol and fifty with a rifle, Hell, I was reflexively trained to shoot center mass, and that was going to be hard to get over. I didn’t have the thousands of rounds necessary to re-train muscle memory.
My canoe was stocked reasonably well with cans of food and water, and I hoped it was still there. I limped over to the bridge rail, and looked down. It was, but standing on the bank, milling around aimlessly, were several dozen vacant eyed, soulless corpses.
FML. Not cool at all. What the hell did they want? I couldn’t kill them all, short of a mini-nuke.
“Well, Nick, you’ve got something they don’t. Use your head, man.” I almost jumped at the voice, until I realized that it was me. Great, I was talking to myself now.
I was startled out of my reverie by the sound of an actual siren on the far bank, on the north side of the
river. A New York State police cruiser went screaming down the road, moving from west to east. I stood there, mouth open in shock, and the group of undead came charging up the ramp to the bridge, chasing it. So I dropped the shotgun, threw the Mini-14 as hard as I could over the bridge rail towards the river bank, cursed as I heard it splash, then followed with the shotgun. That crunched to the ground just past the rocks, and I slipped over the side, took a deep breath, and let go.
Chapter 17
Water isn’t soft, and equipment is heavy. Yes, everything falls at the same rate, but mass affects impact, too. I weighed, with body armor, ammo, water, and weapons, almost two hundred and fifty pounds, and I hit the water from twenty feet up like it was concrete. Then I hit the bottom, about four feet down. Thankfully it was soft mud, but it still hurt like a muther.
The double impact, as I expected, drove the breath out of me, and I struggled not to inhale. Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, I chanted, and crouched down on the bottom, then stood up, just far enough that my head stood out of the water. I looked around to assess, and then started struggling towards the canoe. As I moved, I felt around for the Mini-14, but no luck. It was probably buried in the mud that squished under my boots. I finally made it, struggled to roll into the canoe without tipping it, and fell in. I cut the rope holding it to the wall, and pushed out into the stream, letting it carry me away, and drying slowly in the sun.
I spent the rest of the day drifting downstream, occasionally using the paddle to keep myself mid channel. Finally I just let it drift over to the north bank, where I knew from fishing experience that it was deep right up to the edge, but there were also woods, so not likely to be anyone around. I tied off and stiffly clambered out of the canoe.
Now the hard part, my leg. It was throbbing, and had started bleeding again after my soak in the water. I was really concerned about infection, and had to do something about it. The pellet wound on my arm was healing well, but my bit lip annoyed the shit out of me, and my eye was swollen.
I tried hard to think about whether the bullet should come out, or if I could leave it in. I was going to assume that it had to come out, didn’t they do that on all the medical shows? OK, then, first things first. I tried hard to think of what to do for the wound, remembering the first aid that the medics had used on gunshot wounds in Afghanistan. I had been shot once before, an old .303 round that had gone in and out of my ass. That took more than a year of recuperation and physical therapy.
That’s the thing with getting shot. No matter where you get hit, it does damage. The smallest bullet will deliver hundreds of foot pounds of pressure to a very small impact area, and the bruising will be immense. The flesh actually acts like a gel, liquefying around the wound. If it’s not a full metal jacket, the round will flatten, shatter, expand, do any number of things. Even an FMJ will tumble if it hits a bone, especially high velocity rifle rounds. Bone fragments also act like shrapnel.
I had been lucky, but even so, I ran a good chance of dying from this small wound. There was no ER surgeon ready to patch me up, and no post op care. Bullets are not sanitary themselves, and they dragged in bits of cloth, bacteria, mud, whatever else was on your skin at the entry site. I had been soaked in river water, and I could only hope the bandage had kept out most of the nasty stuff. Plus, I had to stay mobile, at least until I found a place to hole up. People were going to be just as dangerous as undead, and I expected that soon we would see dog packs running the streets.
At the house that belonged to the old couple, I had cleaned them out of whatever medical supplies I could find, and had scored a full package of Augmentin and a bottle of pain killers. Some hydrogen peroxide, tampons that I’m sure the woman hadn’t used in years, and some maxi pads too. Contact lens solution for irrigating wounds. I eyed the bottle of Knob Creek alcohol that the old man had in his liquor cabinet. This was going to hurt like an absolute son of a bitch, but it had to be done. The leg was already getting stiff.
The water had washed most of the blood out, but the bandage was stuck to the wound. I was trying to decide which was going to hurt more, going after the bullet or taking the bandage off. Then I looked around at the ground and decided that trying to do it out here in the woods was too unsanitary. I was going to have to find a house.
There was a development just by Lock 7, about a mile up ahead. I got back in the canoe, and paddled slowly across, approaching slowly, the shotgun lying ready next to me. My leg was starting to hurt even more. I slid up to a dock, keeping my eyes open for any sign of habitation, living or dead.
Thing is, I didn’t want to use the shotgun, or a pistol. Gunshots would carry far across the water. I had no idea what got the undead going, and I was worried about the shitheads at the bridge last night. There was the sound of a car going by out front, and I hunkered down in the canoe until it passed.
Then I painfully lifted myself out of the canoe, grabbed my pack and the shotgun, and advanced towards the house, slowly, the leg hurting even more. This wasn’t working, I thought to myself, and just opened the back door. I put the pack down, along with the shotgun, and drew my pistol.
Clearing the house seemed to take forever in my condition, and, exhausted, I finally sat down on the couch. It was one story, with a pull-down stairway into the attic. That would do for a place to hide out, after fixing my leg. There was no food; whoever lived there had cleared it out. I locked both the front door and back door, then hurried before the sun set and I had no light to work with.
In the bathroom, I sat down on the toilet and elevated my leg. Then I laid out all the things I was going to need. Sharp kitchen knife, which I doused liberally with alcohol. Clean towels, maxi pads. First things first, the bullet. I cut a long, jagged hole in my pants; I wasn’t ready to take the bandage off the front. Then I washed the hell out of my hands with soap and water.
It had actually stopped just on the inside of the big tendon at the back of my leg, and I knew that I had to be really careful there. A damaged tendon would permanently lame me, and in this sucky new world, I’d be dead. I could just see the swollen lump if I twisted the leg, and an ugly bruise radiated out in a ring around it.
A maxi pad soaked in whiskey was good enough to clean the area I needed to cut, and I took a swig of it myself. Another maxi pad between my teeth, so I didn’t crush them with pain. Another swig of whiskey, while I sharpened the kitchen knife on a rock I had found outside. Then the cut.
Blood gushed out, a hematoma that had collected from the shockwave of the bullet, and I screamed into the pad. Then it drained out onto the floor, and immediately it felt better. I cut a little deeper, gasping at the sharp pain, until the tip of the knife touched the bullet. It had gone about half an inch in, and I felt like passing out. My vision actually did go grey around the edges for a bit, and I spit the pad out and chugged about three swallows of whiskey. I was going to be shit-faced when this was done.
I pushed hard on my leg, sideways from the bullet, and it slid out, to fall to the floor with a clunk. Leaning over, I picked it up, and it was as I thought, an FMJ .380 from the gun that was now in my pocket. There were bits of cloth from my uniform stuck to the nose, hopefully enough to account for all of it.
Next came the hard part. I let it drip blood onto the floor, and cut the bindings from around the bandage. Sterile saline solution allowed me to gently pull at the pad, but then it stuck fast. I counted, one, two, three, and pulled at the blood crusted cotton. I screamed so loud when it came off I was surprised that it didn’t attract every undead between here and Albany, and I started to pass out. Breathing rapidly, trying to stay conscious, I took the bottle of saline solution and soaked the wound area, slowly working my pants off my leg, then used the knife to cut the cloth away, leaving the wound exposed. I was cursing like the worst drill sergeant I had ever heard, trying to keep my mind off the pain.
The skin around the entrance hole was an ugly purple, fading to red. I washed and washed, getting all the blood out, and winced as the salt stu
ng it. Then I realized I had an actual hole right through my leg, and threw up all the whiskey I had just drank.
Now I wasn’t sure what to do. The bit of uniform cloth, and exposure to the river water, scared the crap out of me. I had seen guys die of infection weeks after roadside bombs had sent dirty shrapnel into their bodies. Nothing much I could do, I guess. I’d either be extremely lucky, or not. So far, I had no bones hit, tendons severed, or arteries torn. I was going to have to take my chances, but first…
I tilted the bottle of whiskey directly into the wound, letting it dribble into it and fill the hole. I screamed myself hoarse doing it, and I swear to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in anymore that I would rather be dragged through a pile of broken glass. I almost pissed myself it hurt so badly.
Leg twitching and shaking, I rinsed with the saline. And then repeated the entire process on the back of my leg. At this point I was panting, and everything in my vision was getting very small, so I stopped.
After about fifteen minutes of a steady drip drop of blood on the floor, I felt OK enough to place a maxi pad, smeared heavily with antibiotic ointment, over each wound, and bind them with a cut off piece of towel, making sure that they weren’t too tight. Then I washed down three antibiotics and some Motrin.
My next step was to get out of the filthy uniform, and I cut more of the pants leg away from the wounded area, then continued cutting until the pants slid down my other leg. I threw them in the tub of cold water, along with my uniform top and the nasty t-shirt I was wearing, and let them soak.