Obi sat quietly. I think the big guy was ashamed of how he had reacted on being woken up. If we had been out in the wild, it could have gotten us killed, easily. He wasn’t a bad soldier, but after the ambush a few days ago, his stories had completely dried up. The reality of Scott getting killed, and how easily he had mowed down the attackers with his machine gun, had sobered him and made him a thousand years older. It had been good for him, though it was a costly lesson.
Brit got up and sat down next to Shona, whispering quietly about girl shit. Ziv, who sat at the top of the stairs, looked over at the two of them and leered openly. Both were wearing army issue t-shirts with sports bras underneath, but with the heat and their sweat, it was quite obvious they were women. They saw him leering, and looked at each other, then kissed passionately, long and deep; Brit’s red ponytail contrasting with the dragon tattoo on Shona’s face. Both grinned shit eating grins and gave him the finger. I heard a choking sound and Obi went red. Ziv merely gave them the finger back and continued to stare. In fact, we all just stared as Brit slipped her hand up under Shona’s’ shirt and gently squeezed her breast, eliciting a soft moan from the infantry captain. Brit stood up and pulled Shona up with her, forcing her back against the wall, and dragging her shirt over her head, then bending down to lick the Captains’ exposed nipple. Then she took her own shirt and bra off, pushing her own breasts in to Shona’s, the sweat making them both glisten. The cross tattooed in red on Brit’s back was partially hidden by the dark haired girl wrapping her arm around Brit’s waist, her other hand slipping between the redheads’ legs…
“Nick, wake up.” Someone was gently shaking me and whispering in my ear.
“Huh? What?”
Brit was sitting next to me, shoveling the remains of an MRE into her mouth. She kicked me, hard, in the leg.
“What were you dreaming about? For once you had a smile on your face.”
“Uh, nothing.”
“Nothing my ass. You said ‘go for it, Brit’ and had a huge smile on your face, then said someone else’s name.”
“Uh, I was dreaming of being back home with you,” I muttered.
“Bullshit!” she said, with a grin on her face. She used her tongue to lick the MRE spoon clean, very slowly. Ugh.
Towards evening the horde attacking the MR had dwindled down to a few stragglers. The firing continued, though; they must have brought a shitload of ammo with them. I knew it wouldn’t be good enough. Eventually the undead would pile up higher than the traverse of the gun, and they would spill over the top. Then there was the horde that was still slowly moving past us.
“OK,” I said, as the last Z passed us by. “Gather round. Here’s what’s next.”
The team crowded into the bedroom and sprawled around, waiting. I looked at them, and took a deep breath.
“We have to go rescue them.”
Chapter 259
Ziv turned to Brit and said, “He has finally lost his mind, devil woman. I am leaving.” He started to collect his equipment.
Shona looked at him and said, “Leaving? What do you mean leaving?”
“I mean I am not going to get killed doing something so stupid.” He settled his tactical vest comfortably and shouldered his pack, picking up his AK. Captain Lowenstein also stood.
“Good, you are coming with me?” said Ziv.
In response, she drew her pistol and pointed it at him. “The Colonel said we’re going to rescue those people. I suggest you sit down and listen to what he has to say.”
The smile never left Brit’s face. She leaned over to me and whispered, “This is gonna be great! I wish I had popcorn!” I was a little more concerned. I knew Ziv would do exactly what he wanted to do, but once he heard me out, he’d probably go along with us. Shona, though was Regular Army through and through, and had a lot to learn about being on the Scouts and how we operated.
“Little girl,” Ziv said, a look of amusement on his face, “put that away or I will feed it to you, one bullet at a time.”
“Sit down.” She cocked the hammer back on her pistol; it wasn’t a .22LR like most of us carried, but a big old 1911 .45 automatic. It looked huge in her hands, but she held it competently in a two handed grip.
Ziv walked slowly forward, and Obi looked like he was going to try and do something about it. Both Elam and Ryan were motionless, just watching. I held up my hand to Obi, motioning him to stay put.
He kept advancing until the suppressor was an inch from his face, still looking impassive. Then he reached up and slowly pushed it to the side. Man, that dude was stone cold. A few pounds of pressure on the trigger, and he would have a hole almost a half inch wide in his face. Shona held rock steady and resisted his push. The gun did move, but maybe only an inch, until it pointed at his eye.
“Sit. The. Fuck. Down!” she said.
“I do not take orders from women. I come and go as I please, and right now, it pleases me to go. Now move.”
Shona slowly uncocked the hammer of her pistol, then slid it back into her leg holster. “Thank you,” said Ziv, and he made to move past her.
What happened next was so fast I almost missed it. When Captain Lowenstein first showed up at the farm I noticed, shaking her hand, that it was extremely callused. I had also seen her practicing various sets of movements in her off time, and when I asked her, she had told me that she had, at the age of sixteen, won a slot on the US Olympic martial arts team. Her specialty was Judo, which emphasized holds and grapples, but her training had been interrupted by the apocalypse. Currently, the Captain held a 5th dan Black Belt in Judo, and was a Krav Magna instructor, which, she said, she had found very useful in close combat with the undead. She had also asked me to not make a big deal out of it, which I hadn’t.
The result was that Ziv found himself facedown on the floor, with her on top, arm wrapped around his throat, slowly choking his air off, and his right arms painfully contorted behind his back. Instead of trying to get her off him, Ziv merely reached up with his free hand to grab her by the hair. Her short haircut gave him no grip, and his face started to turn red. Then he reached down to his belt and slipped his knife out of its sheath, and weakly tried to put the point up against her neck. She squeezed harder, and his eyes rolled back in his head, knife dropping to the floor.
Shona got up off him, her own face red with exertion. Brit slowly, quietly clapped, with a look of glee on her faceo. “Colonel, I’m sorry, but I won’t have troops disobey your orders,” said Shona. The dragon tattoo stood out strongly on her face, and under it I could see the white scars.
“As much as I appreciate the loyalty, Mary Sue, unfortunately, Major Zivcovic IS a civilian, and IS free to come and go as he pleases. As are Brit and Obi.”
Her face looked crestfallen, and she asked, “But why did you let me choke him out then?” She was honestly at a loss.
“Because,” I said, “I’ve wanted to do that myself, far too many times.”
Ziv sat up groggily, picked up his knife from the floor, and slid it back in its sheath. He glared at me, but I laughed and said, “Who’s the pussy now, Ziv? Got your ass kicked by a girl!”
“I did not want to hurt her,” he muttered, and stared daggers at Brit as she laughed out loud. I was worried that Ziv might get up and try it again with Shona, but he instead he picked up his pack and sat down next to her. She ignored him.
“Maybe I stay. I will hear your plan first,” he said, looking sideways at her with admiration on his face. She still ignored him, and I continued on with my interrupted briefing.
“OK, here’s the WHY. Like them or not, those guys up there are Americans. Maybe deluded, maybe rebels, and I’ll gladly kill them in one on one combat, but I’m not going to leave them to get massacred by the undead. I’m not going to leave them to that.”
I let it settle in, and Brit was the first one to ask a question. “What about Strasser and his dog? I’m going to kill him.”
“If he isn’t dead, then you can have both of them. But I’m n
ot leaving the ordinary Joes to get turned into undead.”
“I don’t get it,” said Obi. “One minute, you have Sergeant Yasir shoot one of them, and get a bunch slaughtered, and the next you want to save them. That seems kinda screwy to me.”
Ryan answered for me. “It’s like this. Our mission was to stop the Mountain Republic guys from securing a nuke from the carrier, and then to secure the carrier ourselves. Sergeant Yasir managed to do the first with one shot. There’s no way they are going to get onto that carrier now, with thousands of undead active aboard it, and thousands more cutting them off from their retreat. Their only hope was a quick in and out, and now they’re trapped.”
“OK, I see that,” said Obi. “But what about securing the carrier?”
“That’s a joke. It would take a company to clear all the compartments on that ship, and with a lot of explosives and you’d still take casualties.”
“So the mission is done,” I said, “and those guys out there are fellow human beings now instead of targets.”
“Except for Strasser and Harlan,” chimed in Brit.
“Except for those two,” I agreed.
Elam asked next. “So how do we GET there? There is a horde of undead between us and them.” As if to punctuate, his question, the minigun roared again.
I turned to Ryan and said, “How about it, Chief?”
He grinned and said, “Does a fish piss in the ocean?”
“Ziv?” I asked, “coming or going?”
He turned and looked at me, waved an irritated hand and went back to staring at Shona. She got up and muttered “creeper”, then sat back down on the other side of the room.
Chapter 260
One of the things that always bothered me about various shows about the Apocalypse on TV, or in books, was that, years after everything fell apart, the hero would just rig up some kind of siphon and suck gas out of the tanks in the ground. Then he would pour it into the nearest car and, zoom, off he goes into the distance!
Problem is, it doesn’t work like that. Gasoline after a few months degrades into a tacky, sticky volatile substance, which will screw up your car engine in nothing flat, if you can even get it to pour. That, and after a year or so, every battery made ever for a car will pretty much be dead, especially in northern climates. Tires will slowly flatten, rubber hoses and gaskets dry out, and so on. Hailstorms shatter windows. Trees fall on vehicles. Wildfires sweep through overgrown yards and destroy cars in garages. That’s why we scouts walked everywhere we went. We could count on our feet to get to where we needed to go.
The team slowly made its way through the remains of the town to what had to be an exclusive, private marina. We didn’t encounter any undead, making our way silently through the darkness. They had been drawn to the sounds of the firing like moths to a flame. The only ones we did see were pressed up against the glass, reaching hungrily for us, covered in mold after being locked in their houses for eight years. We ignored them and kept walking, sweating fiercely in the humid Florida night.
The marina was, as expected, empty of anything big enough to brave the open ocean. When things broke down, millions of people had taken to sea in boats, most to starve to death or succumb to exposure and storm. That wasn’t what we were looking for; as I said, gasoline or diesel would be impossible to find after all this time.
Ryan stopped at the dock entrances, and whispered “damnnnn!” In front of us, aluminum mast sticking out of the water and deck awash, was the wreck of a really large sailboat. “Shit, we could have used that,” he said. I smacked his shoulder to bring him back to reality.
Breaking into teams, we searched the marina for small rowboats and rope. We quickly found half a dozen that had served as tenders or small fishing boats. Three actually had full sets of oars, and under Ryan’s direction, we tied them together in a long line. Then I got into the lead boat with Ryan and Obi, and the rest of the team got into the next one.
The pull across the small bay took about fifteen minutes; the tides was coming in, helping us along towards the carrier. It loomed up out of the darkness like a giant monument to the folly of man. The waves lapping against its hull made a dull slapping sound, but it stood solidly, deeply grounded in the sand. It must have been a hell of a storm that pushed it up that far on the beach.
“If they don’t get this sucker out of her in less than a year, it’s going to be useless anyway,” said Ryan.
“Are you going to cry like a little bi-otch now?” asked Brit from the other boat, breathing heavily after her turn at the oars.
“Quiet!” I ordered. This was the hard part. We had to make our approach without getting shot to pieces. I was nervous as hell. Standing up in the boat, I waited until the gunfire died down again, and then yelled “STRASSER!” at the top of my lungs, cupping my hands around my mouth. We were about two hundred meters from them; far enough to give us a chance to get away if things went bad.
The firing dropped off, and a deep voice answered back. It was hard to hear them over the zombie howl. Through my night vision, I could see that they had created a wall of bodies on the causeway, almost twenty feet high. Pretty soon they would be shit out of luck; the minigun wouldn’t be able to traverse upward high enough. From the way their bursts had shortened, I figured they had to be getting low on ammo for the gun, too.
“STRASSER! IT’S AGOSTINE! I’M COMING IN!” We threw off the line connecting us to the string of boats. Ryan and Obi started pulling at the oars, and I sat in the front, holding’ Obi’s 240 balanced on the prow. If they opened up on us, I wanted to hit back as hard and as fast as possible. We could be walking, no, sailing into an ambush. The pucker factor got tighter and tighter as we got closer to the pier, and I jumped when several rifles cracked at once, almost pulling the trigger on the 240, but the rising moon had silhouetted two undead climbing over the pile, and the MR troops had taken them out.
One figure stood at the edge of the pier, waiting for me. “Strasser?” I called, and he answered back, “Agostine? Is that you?”
“Yes, and we’re going to save your men’s ass. How many do you have left?”
“Ten whole, not counting me, with one wounded,” he said. Statistic of Z fighting. Wounded by an undead, and you were pretty much a goner. Still, I had expected more.
I motioned for the guys to stop rowing, and we sat there in the swell. “I have two more rowboats. We can take you off, but unarmed, and you’ll be POW’s.”
I could hear the weariness in his voice as he answered. “Just get us the hell off this dock. We can work out the details later.”
“Fuck that. Give me your word as a soldier that you’ll surrender honorably.” I knew, from that stupid note he sent me, that a guy like him would stick to his word. So would I, but for different reasons.
“Is Ms. O’Neil with you? How can I trust her?”
“Not my problem. I’d say you have to hurry the fuck up and make a choice.” Down the pier the howl was getting louder, as the main horde that had passed us started making its way onto the causeway.
“OK, on my honor,” he said, with a note of resignation in his voice. I knew that he really HAD no choice. If he said no, his men would shove him in the water and someone else would take us up on my offer.
After that, it was tricky. We had to get them off without getting swamped by undead, so they retreated back to the boats in a steady firing line, even as the attack mounted. They left their one wounded man, who had taken an accidental shot it the lower back, propped up behind the minigun. He shook each man’s hand as they filed past; Strasser was last, and he stayed with him almost till it was too late. As each of the ten troops stepped into a rowboat, Brit covered them with her shotgun, making them throw their weapons into the water.
As we pulled against the current, straining to tow the two other boats filled with the battered soldiers of the Mountain Republic, the undead erupted over the top of the pile, falling into the water, screaming and howling, thousands of them. The minigun whirred into life i
n one long, sustained burst that probably used up the last of their ammo and melted the barrels. A white phosphorus grenade someone had set to a trip wire went off, and suddenly there was a thunderous explosion that rained pieces of bodies and equipment into the water.
“BURN YOU MOTHER FUCKERS!” someone in one of the other boats yelled in a drawn out Southern drawl, but it was tinged with exhaustion and grief. I knew how he felt.
Chapter 261
Dawn found us walking steadily back along the highway, with the Mountain Republic soldiers a dispirited group following behind us. They had no alternative; their nearest base was eight hundred miles or more northward, through jungle, swamps, and ruins. Along the way they would meet undead in their millions, wild animals, human predators, heat and thirst.
The march was tough; we had to constantly be on guard for an ambush like the one that had killed Scott Orr, and the heat was ridiculous. Brit limped along, her toenails not completely healed. Several times she had fallen back to walk alongside Harlan and glare at him. The man ignored her, just walking stolidly forward. She gave up after a while and rejoined us.
“Just want to say I appreciate what you did for us back there, Colonel. Most would have left us to die,” said Strasser, walking next to me. He ate up the miles with that easy Special Forces stride, while my prosthetic was starting to kill me. The heat and sweat were irritating the hell out of my stump.
“I’m human, and unlike you, I’m not a cruel bastard. Your troops didn’t deserve it. If it had been just you and Harlan, I would have left you there.”
“About what happened to your wife. It was a necessity, and as soon as I realized she didn’t have any information, I stopped Harlan. Not an easy thing to do, once he gets going. But then,” he said in his cultured, upper crust southern accent, “he’s not a gentleman or an officer, like you and me. A useful tool, like all enlisted.”
Zombie Killers (Book 7): HEAT Page 10