by J. F. Holmes
“Now what?” asked the aviator, “and who the hell are you?”
That stopped me cold, and I had to think about what he asked. Now what was obvious; we got the hell out of there. Who was I? That took some thought. All the things I had done over the last three months to survive, the killing, looting. Finally, I answered him.
“My name is,” I started to say, then drew myself up as straight as I could and saluted him. “My name is … Sergeant First Class Nicholas Agostine. And now, well, we’re going home … Sir.”
Chapter 19
As the helo lifted off the roof of the building we had taken refuge in, I sat in the canvas jump seat and watched the dead world fall away. Around me were the smells of hydraulic fluid, paint, and gunpowder. The crewman sat next to me, 240 swinging from straps, and he handed me a can of dip. I shook my head no and just watched the scenery go by.
After a few minutes, when I really realized I was back in the arms of that fickle mother of mine, the goddamned United States Army, I started to cry. At first it was just a trickle, but then huge sobs racked my body. The crewman pretended not to notice, and opposite me, Captain McHale feigned listening hard to the vehicle intercom. Around me were strapped down boxes and duffle bags of gear. I guess this flight had been down in Kingston, looting the armory.
It all smelled and looked wonderful, and I continued to cry, snot running down my face and into my beard. I wiped at it, and the crewman leaned over and yelled in my ear, “It’s OK! Everyone does when they come in from the wild!”
I smiled, my first one in three long, bloody months. We were heading back to FOB Seneca, our original destination on the day everything fell to shit. Apparently what remained of the New York Army and Air National Guard, and elements of the 10th MTN Division had fallen back there and dug in, and now they were being augmented by Regular Army troops flying in from out west. A rail link had been established between Boise and Green Bay, and regular shipping traffic was transiting the Great Lakes to Buffalo. Nationally, he said, forty million people were crammed into the new Federal Zone, consisting of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, parts of Montana, and southern British Columbia. One tenth of the United States population before the plague. The rest of the world was in as bad, or worse, shape.
All of this McHale had filled me in on as we waited, quietly, for one of the other helos in his unit to come get us. They came up from the south, circling Mechanicville until we popped green smoke, and hovered as we climbed in. I was so weak the crewman grabbed me by the Deadman’s strap on my plate carrier and lifted me into the cabin. The MRE I had devoured was rumbling through my guts, causing so much pain to my starved intestines that I was doubled over.
Now the sweet lullaby of the hammering rotors carried me, as if in a dream, through the air. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream, maybe I was just waking up. For three months, I had lost myself in a confusing, desperate effort to survive the fall of civilization. My thoughts went to the last person I had killed, a woman I had fought with over a can of frigging tomato sauce. She had attacked me, but I still burned with shame. With a supreme effort of will, I buried that part of me, the part that cared what I had done. From here on out, I would have to find a balance between being a hardass, and not losing myself as a person.
I had explained to McHale my status as, well, a deserter, and gave him the whole story about Major MacDonald, the checkpoint, and the hanging. When I mentioned MacDonald’s name, his eyebrows shot up, and he barked a laugh.
“What’s so funny,” I asked.
“It’s not funny haha, it’s like funny bitter funny. Guess who’s in charge of the maneuver elements of Task Force Liberty?”
“You’ve got to be shitting me. That moron?”
We both fell silent for a moment as some undead passed below the building, then he said, “That moron is now a Lieutenant Colonel, and has an armor company and two battalions of light infantry under him, as well as an Artillery battery. Until someone bigger shows up, he’s top dog, and as the Hero of The Mohawk, he’s got way too much cred.”
That puzzled me. The battlefield where the checkpoint had been was a massacre site; I had seen it myself. The ASV was gone, and I figured the MacDonald and his flunkies had taken off in it. “That’s bullshit!” I exclaimed. “I was there, it was a slaughter.”
“Yeah, well, I know that, and you know that, but the country needs heroes, and he has a good press agent.” He then told me that a general amnesty had been passed a month in, and I had nothing to worry about. “Just stay away from him. Go back to being a platoon sergeant or Forward Observer again.” I had nothing to say to that; the idea of a future was too much for me to comprehend at that moment.
Now, with the rotor blades hammering overhead and the engine whine cutting through my ear pro, I did think about it. What was I going to do? Fall back into some line unit until some dickhead set us up for a bloodbath? I had no faith in the men who had led us into such a horrible defeat. Pondering how to deal with it, I didn’t notice as we started to descend towards the Forward Operating Base.
Before we touched down, McHale reached up to his shoulder and tore off the subdued American flag he wore. He leaned forward and slapped it onto the Velcro on my dirty, torn plate carrier, and yelled, “WELCOME BACK, SOLDIER!”
Feeling a warm, stupid, shit eating grin spread across my face, I looked out at the beehive of activity drawing closer. Firing ranges, soldiers marching in formation, armored vehicles lined up in rows in their motor pools, and electricity shot through me. I leaned out into the cool, crisp October air and gave a yell of triumph.
I had survived.
Chapter 20
“Well hooooly[TR6] shit! Look what the cat dragged in!”
I had been taken to one of the old ammunition bunkers that served as shelters. Seneca Army Depot had been used up until the 1980s as a storage point for everything from small arms to nuclear weapons. Now, the hundreds of poured concrete structures had been put back into use for shelter from the oncoming winter.
The man who had made the remark stood in front of me, arms folded. He had the build of a dedicated weight lifter, and a ready grin. His shaved head contrasted with the two days of stubble and the blood on his army issue scrubs.
“Doc Hamilton. Mother of God, Rob, it’s good to see you!”
He came forward and grabbed me in a bear hug, squeezing me so hard I thought my ribs were going to break. “Put me down, you overly muscled freak!” I managed to squeeze out, and he did drop me, then pounded me on my back.
“It’s good to see you made it, brother, but you look like shit. Come on, time for an exam.” I had met Doc in Afghanistan; he had been running a clinic for the locals as part of a goodwill mission, and his Special Forces B-team had come under a Taliban attack. We had both saved each other’s lives in the subsequent twenty four hours. He had been the one to patch me up when I caught that old .303 round in my ass. I knew he was in the Guard someplace in Syracuse; it’s a small world, but we hadn’t seen each other since then.
“You too, brother. How did you make it here?”
He proceeded to tell me the story of his epic motorcycle ride through a horde of undead outside Syracuse, on his way to the evacuation of Manhattan, and then about the last three months of frantic defense and reorganization of the military forces.
“So now I run this clinic; it’s actually more like a full field hospital. We take jokers like you who come in from the wild and make sure you’re good to go.” He took me into a room that said “RECOVERY WARD” and sat me down on an exam table.
“Holy crap!” he exclaimed. “Who the hell dressed this bullet wound, a goddamned monkey with a butter knife?”
It was good to be back.
I spent the next week doing nothing but eating and sleeping. The first hot shower I took, I nearly cried again, and stood under the steaming water for what seemed like an hour. Then I shaved, and cut my own hair, first with scissors, then with a razor, leaving only a stubble. Bugs fell as I cut, and more dirt. Then
I took another shower, scrubbing furiously, and feeling like I would never get clean.
The uniform I got was worn and patched in several places, but it fit. I kept my boots, luxuriating in the feeling of clean socks. It was the little things, you know? At the end of the week, I was ordered to report to re-assignment, and I pulled Doc Hamilton aside.
“Rob, I’ve been thinking. Things are heating up around here, and they’re going to start pushing east.”
“Yeah, I’ve been told to start putting together a field kit,” he answered, motioning to where he had been packing several tough boxes with medical supplies.
“Well, let me ask. Most of these people are good soldiers, but they still have the same old ‘defeat the enemy with shock and maneuver’ mentality. I’ve been watching it.” I had sat in at the back of some briefing rooms, watching MacDonald teleconference with his bosses, who were headquartered at the port of Buffalo, next to a huge FEMA refugee camp.
What I had seen was someone who really didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and his bosses didn’t care. He talked of establishing bases of fire and maneuvering against the undead, and liberating cities.
“I know, I’ve seen it too,” said Rob. “What’s your question?”
I stood up and walked around the clinic, thinking, then said, “They’re operating without any intel. Concentrations of undead, what roads can support their tanks, where survivors are likely to be located. I mean, hell, we blew half the damn bridges in the state back in July.”
He waited patiently for me to get to the point, so I continued, “What if someone went out in front of the advance, scouted things out?”
“Special Forces, Rangers, and Long Range Recon are stretched real thin, brother. We’re a side show to the fighting in Mexico and the Midwest. That’s why we only have a brigade of troops here, when we could use a Corps.”
“I can’t believe you guys don’t have a single SF team working here,” I said.
Doc looked serious for once, and said, “We did. Up until last week. They rolled out of here armed to the teeth, three vics with MK-19s, Ma Deuces, 240s out the ass, and twelve guys carrying five billion rounds of ammo. Said they were going to ‘blaze through like they did in northern Iraq’ back in ’03. And that they would move so fast no zombies would touch them.”
I groaned, but I had to ask. “And?”
‘Well, I have the UAV feed on a stick if you want to watch it.”
I shook my head no. “How far did they make it?”
“Just outside Utica. Seemed like every single undead for a hundred miles came running at the sound of their engines, and the gunfire only drew more. They finally called in airstrikes on their own positions. I think their team leader is getting put in for the Medal of Honor. Posthumous, of course.”
“Doc, you’ve been out there. You know that the only way to survive is by stealth, and that means no driving anywhere, unless you have the muscle to back it up.”
“True story,” he answered. “I finally made it into Manhattan by walking down the East Side Highway to Battery Park, sneaking and peeking.”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” I said excitedly, getting into it. “They need men like me who have been out there, know the undead, and can operate in the wild.”
He pondered that for a minute, then said, “There aren’t enough guys like you in the military. Where would we find them?”
“Well,” I answered, “you for one.”
He laughed at that, then said, “Sure, I’m in. That makes two. Hardly enough.”
“I’m sure there’s other guys who have come in from the wild. That and there are some pretty tough civilians in some of those FEMA camps.”
“You’re going to have to get MacDonald to sign off on that.”
“Screw him. Do you still have contacts at Joint Special Operations Command? We can operate under their direction.” I was getting pumped up about this.
He stood up, as excited as I was. “Hell yes. We’ll have to go back to JBLM to talk to them, but we can stop in Buffalo along the way.”
“It would be like the scouts the army used to hire back in the Indian Wars.”
“Native American,” he corrected me.
“Bite me. I’ll call it ‘Irregular Scout Team One’. I’m sure the idea will catch on.”
We slipped aboard a UH-60 that was making a supply run from Seneca to Buffalo in the dead of night, not wanting to get messed with by some jackass Regular Army pinhead. It was easy, everyone in the transport knew who I was, and we had a blank pass from McHale, who had been promoted to Major and was now in command of the unit.
In Buffalo, our recruitment went well, and we picked up two men, civilians by the name of Jones and Yassir, but that’s something you know about already*. With another man, Sergeant Rabinowitz, we sped westward, to a meeting with a Colonel Scarletti from JSOC. Our plan had preliminary approval, and my mind was racing with ideas.
* See Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues on Amazon
Chapter 21
It was November, but the air above Southern California was warm, even at five thousand feet. The last time I had been here, years ago, LA had been covered with a haze of pollution. Now the dead, irradiated downtown of the city appeared to stand out crystal clear.
Four days into the plague, Los Angeles had taken a hit from a neutron bomb, a 1 kiloton warhead designed to maximize radiation and minimize blast damage. I guess the military had been trying to spare what they could and trying out whatever could be done to stop the undead. What they had gotten was a whole bunch of radioactive zombies stumbling around. Whatever animated them, it was tough as hell.
Now, the team was flying eastward from the deck of the U.S.S. Tarawa, a Navy amphibious assault ship. Our first mission, of course, was not to recon some important objective for the Marines to take and hold. They were doing that, headed for 29 Palms in their Ospreys to reestablish a military presence in SoCal.
Us? We were going to see if any of the wealthy, important people who lived above LA had managed to weather the storm of civilization falling. Favors owed to some high muckity-muck politician, I guess. I didn’t honestly give a crap one way or another about those spoiled little twats, but when someone hands you the ball as a test, you run with it and score a touchdown.
To prevent attracting undead with a helo landing, the five of us were jumping on a static line from the battered Huey. Doc, Rabbi, and I had all been to Jump School in our previous lives; Jones and Ahmed had not. A quick week long crash course had made them competent enough to jump from a stable platform. The Afghani merely uttered a short prayer to Allah when he jumped; Jonesy, despite his size, went screaming all the way down.
The helo slowed, approaching our target, and dropped down to a thousand feet. The blades of the old Huey made their characteristic thwopping sound, and I felt my stomach lurch as we fell. We scooted over to the doorway and stood on the skids while a crewman hooked up our static lines. I looked up, checking the line, gave it a tug, and then checked Doc’s on my left and Jones’ on my right. They did the same for me and each other, and we gave the thumbs up. Then the crewman raised his palm, fingers spread, and counted down, Five, Four, Three, Two, and on One, I jumped.
Freefall for an instant, then the shock of the chute opening. It wasn’t as bad as the slip stream from a C-5 or C-130 side doors, but it still hurt. Look up, see that the chute was filled properly, glance at the other team members, four plus me, then watch the horizon. Don’t look down. Screw that, I lifted my weapon in its sling on my chest and scanned for any figures on the football field of Berkley High School, but nothing.
I landed, as always, like a sack of potatoes, my cargo bag hitting a second before me. Unsnapping my harness, I let the chute blow away across the field in the light winds, and scanned for targets. Again, nothing.
The plan was to patrol down Mulholland Drive, investigating each mansion and house as we went. The area had been pretty well evacuated, so it was felt that the risk from the undead
was negligible[HJ7]. Easy for them to say from the depths of their nice cozy ship.
In the gear bag strapped onto my rucksack was over a thousand rounds of 5.56, and it was heavy as shit, over forty pounds. With that and food and water for three days, I was carrying almost a hundred. The suppressor on the end of my M-4 made the barrel heavier, and we had spent hours at the range learning to compensate, firing thousands of rounds, till it was reflex to lift, aim center face, and fire.
It was dawn, and we had a full day of movement ahead of us. Thankfully downhill, but if we encountered civilians, it might start to get a bit hectic. I was sure that any we met would want to go with us, but they would have to make their own way to the football field for evac.
The reasoning behind the thought that there might be survivors here was pretty much common sense. They had money, and access to security. There had been reports of Private Military Contractors arriving in the moneyed areas before everything fell apart. That was another threat; if they’ve been out of contact for three months, well, I expected to get fired on.
“Clear!” sounded from each team member over my headset, and I answered back. We advanced slowly past the school, seeing nothing, moving slowly under the weight of our packs. First thing to do was to find a secure patrol base, and fort up, and then we would move out from there.
The school bus building afforded us good fields of fire, and was big enough that we could move from one end to the other to get away from a horde. There was also an upper office that we could cut off access to, and we did, using torches and sledgehammers to destroy the metal stairway.
The five of us had wargamed this out through endless hours of bullshit sessions. How best to hide, to sneak and peek, without getting swarmed? Stealth, of course, but also diversion. That was the key, we decided. When it came down to it, the undead were really just animals. They showed some intelligence, and they were fast and relentless, but what had brought humanity out of the caves was using our brains.