“Everyone’s infected, Cord,” Jaworski said. “And people die every day in a place as big as Odessa. I don’t think there’s anything more nefarious to it than that, but do you think we’re at immediate risk?”
McDaniels shook his head. “Not just yet. Not from Odessa, anyway.” He pointed at the LED monitor on the wall. San Antonio was under siege. The National Guard units had either been overrun or pushed back, despite the constant bombardments launched by the Air Force against the formations of the dead. Artillery had even been sent south from Fort Hood to add some steel rain to the fray, but it hadn’t been terribly effective. Even neutralization fire was of very limited effect, as blast damage just didn’t stop the dead the same way it did the living.
“We’re looking at maybe five days until the first of the dead arrive in any numbers,” Haley said. “I think it’s a good idea giving the rest of the external security teams some time taking down the stenches. We should activate internal security as well, and make it a full-time occupation all around. My troops are ready to do something more than play Xbox and watch the engineers move dirt around.”
“I don’t disagree,” McDaniels said. “Sarmajor?”
“No dissent from me, sir. But I do want to point out the Rangers have been plenty busy securing the perimeter, as instructed. We’ve got some excellent choke points in the process of being set up, so if the dead head our way, we’ll be able to corral them into kill zones.”
“Sounds impressive,” Jaworski said with a smile.
“It’s not as clean as it sounds, sir,” Haley said. “A lot of troops are going to have to get their hands dirty disposing of the stenches once we’ve shot them. According to Cordell and the sergeant major, the rest of the stenches will just climb over the piles and keep coming, which means we have to figure out how we’re going to get rid of the piles. We don’t want to give them anything to hide behind, including mounds of dead zeds. Anything that disrupts our sight lines makes it more difficult to defend SPARTA.”
“The company president told me they have some pretty volatile acids around that they use on occasion,” Jaworski said. “Maybe we should check into that and see if they’d be of any use at breaking down the dead bodies. Hell, maybe when things get bad enough, we can flood one of the trenches with it. Let’s see how many of them can make it out of an acid bath.”
“There’s an idea,” McDaniels said. “We should probably look into that, sir. I don’t know how practical it would be, but any defensive solution is worth considering.”
“I’ll see to it.” Jaworski glanced at the monitor, which showed some of the city’s outer communities ablaze. Images of the dead stumbling across the runways at Lackland Air Force Base made his normally affable expression harden.
“You know lot of folks there?” McDaniels asked.
“Sure.” Jaworski didn’t seem to want to pursue that conversation. “If the zeds show up today, what’s our overall status? Are we good to go?”
“A lot of our planned modifications are underway, but none of them are fully completed,” McDaniels replied. “Sure, we’ve zeroed out fire lanes, and the Rangers have popped off a few practice rounds from their mortars to make sure they’re operational. Everyone is getting range time, and tons of munitions keep coming in, but we’re still short on a lot of items, like guard towers and hardened observation posts, and physical deterrents like Alaska and HESCO barriers. We’re way short on CONEX units to create the main walls. The trenches would slow them down, and the concertina wire will, too, but that’s about all it would do. If they show up right now, the only thing between us and them are our guns. And our guys will have to rest sometime, while the stenches will just keep on coming.”
“Add to that we haven’t received a lot of the requested gear,” Gartrell said. “The MRAPs won’t be here until tomorrow at the earliest, and the armored cav regiment hasn’t been fielded in our vicinity either.”
“But they’ll send some Apaches out our way in a day or so,” Major Carmody said. “They have longer legs than the Little Birds, and can carry a lot more in the way of payload. I know they don’t count for a whole lot, but it’s an additional presence.”
“The Apaches did fine by me in New York,” Gartrell said. “Especially the thirty mike-mike cannons. The stenches aren’t much of a threat if they’ve been blasted into twelve different pieces. But that was on a city street. The results might not be as spectacular out here in the big wild open.”
“So how long do we need before we can say SPARTA is fully configured, defensively?” Jaworski asked.
“At least another two weeks,” McDaniels said. “The supply chain from the east has been disrupted because there’s a sizeable movement of zeds marching to the west. Why, we don’t know. We don’t expect them to get here within a month or so, but they’re already making things more difficult for us.”
“And for the rest of the country,” Jaworski said. “Word from my command is that our guys back east are going down for the count, and hard. The Army’s sent several brigades against the dead outside of Fort Campbell, but they’re not having much of an effect. They’re stopping thousands of them, of course, but they need to be able to stop hundreds of thousands of them, and so far, they can’t.” Jaworski looked around the room. “So here’s the big question of the day. Can we stop hundreds of thousands of stenches when they show up on our doorstep looking for their next meal?”
“So long as we’re self-sufficient and can keep funneling the mass of their attacks into our selected kill zones, then yes. We can hold out,” McDaniels said. “Bull?”
“Agreed,” Colonel Haley said. “It won’t be easy, since most of our weapons won’t have the usual effect we’ve been trained to expect. But if we keep cool and keep hitting them in their heads, we’ll be all right.”
“Rawlings? Carmody?”
The commander of the Navy SEAL detachment and the officer in charge of the special operations aviators both responded affirmatively.
“Great,” Jaworski said. “And forgive me if I’m a big downer here, but didn’t you say the dead would start arriving in about five days or so?”
“That’s only an estimate,” McDaniels replied. “And it’s a very optimistic one. We have helicopters and unmanned aerial systems that can keep watch to our south, so we can make sure we know where the dead are. But San Antonio is over three hundred miles away. If the dead are going after meat, they’ll want to move on population centers, and the next one to the north is Austin.” Even as he said it, McDaniels felt a twinge in his chest. Was Lenny all right? Was he doing exactly what he’d been told? Was he on his way?
Then, he heard the sounds of Little Birds passing overhead. He looked at Jaworski. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll want to plug in for the fight.”
Jaworski nodded. “Roger that. You guys keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll go over status at twenty hundred.”
McDaniels picked up his HK rifle and walked to the battle command desk in the operations center. Even though it promised to be minor, he still wanted to listen in as the Special Forces troops went to guns on the zeds.
16
The battle for Fort Campbell wasn’t going in the Army’s favor.
Despite the presence of thousands of war-hardened soldiers, armored vehicles, helicopters, artillery, and an understanding of what the enemy wanted—to eat human beings—it was almost impossible to stem the advance of the dead as they streamed into Tennessee and Kentucky from the east. There were hundreds of thousands of stenches, and they were like cockroaches. They seemed to be everywhere, and they were damned hard to kill, despite the best efforts of the entire 101st Airborne Division.
Artillery and aviation assets reached out and touched the advancing army of zeds while it was still dozens of miles away. Multiple-launch rocket systems pounded the enemy’s advance elements with high-explosive munitions as the civilians fled; the first engagement occurred when the zeds approached Clarksville, Tennessee. The MLRS bombardment would have stopped
a conventional army dead in its tracks and caused soldiers to seek cover and armored units to button up and move out of the engagement area. The zeds merely moved through the field of fire like some mindless beast, and forward observers reported the mass of walking dead didn’t even seem to be aware of the bombardment. Even more chilling, the ones who lost limbs to the attack merely continued at a crawl as opposed to the usual shambling walk or loping run. The MLRS batteries continued firing for almost an entire day, until they ran out of munitions. But by that time, the artillery pieces had opened up, and tanks and infantry fighting vehicles had moved forward to engage the necromorphs directly. The artillery, the Army’s “King of Battle,” was as ineffective as the rocket systems had been.
Finally, one enterprising battery commander started firing smoke rounds. The dead’s advance slowed. It seemed that even the zeds needed to see where they were going, and the fields of white and gray smoke caused them to become disoriented. The zed advance folded up, and the tanks, IFVs, and attack helicopters swooped in, using their thermodynamic optics, which saw through the smoke as if it weren’t there. The zeds fell to the directed fires that hit them individually as opposed to as a single mass. In most instances, the rounds did not return the targets to death’s embrace, but they rendered them immobile and unable to continue to hunt, which was the next best thing. But with the ability to kill from a distance taken away, the Army troops were at a disadvantage. While the soldiers numbered in the thousands and were well supplied, disciplined, and organized, the dead outnumbered them by almost a thousand to one by the time they swept over Clarksville.
One enterprising M1A3 Abrams tank commander found that, while his vehicle’s weapons were mostly ineffective at stemming the tide, the tank itself was not. He ordered the tank’s driver to roll right over the advance echelons of the dead, and the results were quite successful. Soon, every tracked vehicle in the area was rolling over the corpses, crushing them flat, leaving in their wake shattered husks that leaked black gore. Still, there were too many.
The armored vehicles couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the stenches continued their march overland mostly unimpeded until they came upon the first sandbagged firing positions erected by the troops of the 101st Airborne Division. The troops hadn’t had the luxury of a long wait. By the time their commanding officers determined that Fort Campbell was at a great risk, the troops had to be recalled from other missions to defend the base and the thousands of civilians who had sought shelter inside the fort’s presumably impregnable defenses. But the dead were like no enemy the Army had ever fought, and their defenses were designed to keep living attackers at bay. The dead had no qualms about taking a few bullets, grenades, or even two-thousand-pound bombs. They merely existed to feed.
Despite their best efforts, the Airborne troops were pushed out of Clarksville and back into the southern half of Fort Campbell. Fighting from behind revetments and reinforced firing positions, the soldiers opened up on the zeds walking right into pre-ranged firing lanes. The firepower arrayed against the dead was awesome, and many a zombie fell to the ground, unable to continue. But for every one that fell, five more took its place. Soon, the zombies were climbing up the sandbagged positions. They ignored the firepower poured into them from close range and attacked the soldiers inside their fighting positions, overwhelming them in a series of swarm attacks.
Again and again, all but the most hardened positions fell to the horde, despite the crisscrossing helicopters and Air Force jets that hammered the necromorphs with a mix of precision and “dumb” weaponry. Those soldiers unable to retreat to another position met perhaps the worst fates imaginable.
The battle for Fort Campbell lasted six days. The military gave it back to the necromorphs as much as they could, saturating the enemy with withering firepower through layers of smoke and, wherever possible, white phosphorous munitions, which in heavy concentrations burned the necromorphs to the ground, reducing them to nothing more than smoldering smears.
Hour after hour, the Army was forced to collapse its perimeter and move it back to reconsolidate firepower. The military’s area of operations continually shrank, becoming smaller and smaller. Tent cities set up for the civilian evacuees were abandoned, sometimes without enough time to transport the evacuees to another location. The dead fell upon them like hungry wolves, and those not consumed in entirety rose to join the legions of the necromorphs.
By the fifth day, the defensive positions had shrunk to encompass only the Blanchfield Army Community Hospital, just across the border on the Tennessee side. The defenders were supplied by helicopter from bases in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio, until those operations needed to be relocated. Then, supplies came only from cargo airdrops. In most of the those cases, the Air Force cargo planes had to fly from bases in the Midwest, coming from as far west as Nebraska, Texas, and Oklahoma.
The air drops couldn’t keep up with the frantic pace, and other areas of the nation’s military and civilian infrastructure were equally threatened. On day six, the remaining commanders overseeing combat operations at Fort Campbell were told to bug out if they could.
They could not.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, most of the remaining munitions had been expended, and the necromorphs overwhelmed the fort’s last defenses.
***
The fall of Fort Campbell was barely mentioned on the news, as entire cities were being overrun by the necromorphs. Even if it had been given a fair amount of airtime, Earl Brown had more things to worry about than the disposition of an Army base a few hundred miles to the south. He and Zoe had made their way across the country toward Ohio in the rented SUV Regina Safire had arranged for them, and Earl had managed to buy a shotgun and several boxes of shells when they picked their way across upstate New York. They were hardly alone. Thousands of other frightened people were starting to migrate west as well, and there were times when Earl feared he wouldn’t be able to find more fuel for the car or food for them to eat. At his last fuel stop, he had filled a couple of two-and-a-half gallon containers with unleaded and put them in the trunk, then spent the next several hours worried that they might leak and cause an explosion as he drove down Interstate 90 through northern Pennsylvania. No such event came to pass, even when caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic outside of Erie. And it didn’t take long to see what the holdup was. Erie, Pennsylvania, was on fire.
They’re here, too, Earl thought.
“Daddy, where are we going to go?” Zoe had finally come out of the torpor that had descended upon her after the horrific events she had witnessed in New York City. She was hyperaware of everything and started at every unexpected movement on the road. Earl couldn’t blame her, but her constant state of high alert led to more than a few false alarms.
“We’re going to get off the highway as soon as we can and find our way to I-79,” he said. “We’ll follow dat down ’til we can find Interstate 80, and then we take dat into Ohio.”
“How long will it take?”
“Don’t know. Hush now, and try to relax.”
Three hours later, he found an off-ramp that dropped them into a mostly rural backdrop promising little in the way of zombie interaction. Unfortunately, Earl wasn’t the first to come up with the plan, and while traffic was a bit lighter than on the interstate, it was by no means smooth sailing. As Earl drove past the occasional broken-down vehicle, he saw more than a few hostile stares pointed in his direction. He wondered how long it would be until someone finally tried to take the car from them. Would they be shot? Could he shoot another human being in order to keep the vehicle and all it contained? He decided he could.
It took almost the entire night to make it to Interstate 79. Traffic finally thinned out, and even though they made good time, he was forced to abandon the highway early. He steered the car onto westbound Route 358.
“Daddy, where are we going?” Zoe asked, a tremor of panic in her voice.
“I need to get off the highway, baby. I’m dead tired, and I’m h
opin’ there’s a place up here where we can get some sleep.”
“No! Don’t stop!”
“I have to, baby.” Earl tried to keep his tone reasonable and reassuring. His nerves were frayed, and he noticed that even though they drove through mostly rural residential neighborhoods, traffic was thicker than it should have been at five in the morning.
“You have to trust me, Zoe,” he continued before she could argue. “Your old dad’s worn out. If I don’t find someplace to sleep soon, I’m gonna fall asleep behind the wheel, and then we’ll be in a whole lotta trouble. You get me?”
“Yes,” Zoe said after a long moment. “I wish I could drive, Daddy. Then you could sleep, and we could keep driving.”
“I know, hon. I know.”
***
They came upon a small town called Greenville. Earl drove around until he found what he was looking for, and he parked the car on the street.
“Where are we?”
“Come with me, sweetie. Jus’ keep cool, okay?”
He led her into a pawnshop where several overweight white men looked at him with blank eyes. They all looked related, with blunt noses and dark, porcine eyes that locked onto him and Zoe like a radar station locked onto an aircraft. All were armed with pistols on their belts, which they made no attempt to conceal. Earl didn’t know if Pennsylvania was an open carry state, but he figured the times had probably changed enough over the last few weeks that such a thing no longer mattered.
“Help you?” the man behind the counter asked. He was broad of shoulder and sported the largest belly. He also looked to be the oldest, with steel-gray hair and a deeply creased face. He wore black, horn-rimmed glasses that Earl hadn’t seen since the 1970s.
“I need a four-ten shotgun,” Earl said. “Youth-sized. For my daughter.”
The Rising Horde, Volume One Page 20