Zombies! (Book 7): Still Standing

by Merritt, R. S.

  “How’s your aim?” Krantz asked indicating the rifle Tom had hanging off of his shoulder. When Tom had been pulled into flying around as part of the command team, he hadn’t been carrying a weapon. Krantz had ordered Tom to get himself some weapons and learn how to use them. Getting the training was the tricky part since ammunition didn’t grow on trees and firing guns made a lot of noise. The noise of course being something that would attract Zombies from miles around. Target practice was typically frowned upon.

  “Virtually it’s pretty good. I haven’t gotten too many chances to actually pull the trigger yet. Commander Forrest was nice enough to take the time to give me some lessons. I can basically look through the sight picture and control my breathing. I’m hoping if I do it just like he showed me that I’ll hit whatever’s trying to kill me.” Tom answered. It seemed Tom had also mastered the art of eavesdropping since he’d casually dropped the new title in front of Forrest’s name. That was fine with Krantz. He wanted to be surrounded by smart people who knew enough to keep their ears open and their mouths shut.

  “You got lessons from a marine on how to shoot a rifle so you should be good to go. Now I need you to circulate and learn how all of this communication gear’s setup. Figure out who the smartest people here are. You’re going to be in charge of them. I need this place to become a hub for all the information flowing through this part of the country. That includes south of us for logistics and north of us for the assault. Make sense?” Krantz was already moving before Tom had even had a chance to agree. It wasn’t like the poor guy had a choice.

  With everything in motion Krantz needed somewhere to sit down and think for a few minutes. Somewhere away from people expecting him to look competent. Somewhere no one was going to judge him when he poured a little something extra in his coffee cup. With that in mind he looked over at one of the base personnel who’d been hanging back waiting to see if he needed anything. It was the same soldier who’d brought him his coffee earlier. Krantz waved him over.

  “Do you know if quarters are available for myself and my men?” He asked.

  “Yes sir. We have quarters for you downstairs. I can take you down there now if you’d like?” The man asked uncertainly. Krantz nodded and asked him to lead the way.

  They went to the end of the rows of monitors to a door that opened into a small stairwell. The soldier explained there was an elevator as well, but they only used it when they needed to move large items or if they got a really large batch of supplies from the looters. As far as supplies went there was a platoon of looters nearby who worked with a few of the camps in this territory. One of their key functions was to keep the hub supplied with food, weapons, and any electronic parts that were requested. They typically came by once a month to drop off supplies. Trial and error had shown that was a long enough time between deliveries to avoid getting the Zombies used to them showing up.

  Krantz sat down on the rough wool blanket covering the twin sized bed in the officers’ quarters he’d been given. The room wasn’t fantastic but when he flipped the light switch on it worked and the air was nice and cool. There wasn’t any running water, but the large five-gallon jugs were filled up and ready to wash away his grime. He dismissed the soldier who’d escorted him down the stairs. He asked the two men from his security team who’d come down with him to wait by the door so he could send messages.

  “There’s also a working phone on the desk if you need to get in touch with anyone.” The soldier who’d escorted them down the stairs said when he overheard Krantz telling his guards he needed them to run messages for him. How quickly one forgot how convenient technology makes things.

  Krantz finally got everyone out of the room and the door shut. His coffee had gotten cold by that point, but the whiskey warmed it right back up. He sat down at the chair by the desk and idly played with the phone while sipping away at the whiskey flavored mixture he’d concocted. He envisioned the way he was hoping everything would play out. Forrest would head up to the FOB in North Carolina and sync up with the different groups already deployed up there. He’d be responsible for making the battlefield decisions that’d need to be made on the spot. Krantz would make sure Forrest was present at the battles and raids that were the most important to their overall strategy.

  He finished his cup of cowboy coffee and dispatched one of his guards to go get him another cup. The guard looked like he might be about to say something then thought better of it and left to look for the galley. Krantz sent the other guard to ask the base commandant to come down and meet with him. He wanted a less formal place to talk so that he could ask questions without the whole world listening in. The communications infrastructure was a big mystery to him. He needed a crash course in how it all worked. To that end he asked the guard to also ask Tom to come down.

  He had a video call with Sam he had to be ready for in a couple of hours, so he wanted to make sure he was fully prepped for it. If all went well, he’d be able to explain to her how he was going to remotely run the battle from the hub with Forrest acting as his boots on the ground. He knew a lot of their forces were already close to being within striking distance of their objectives. He planned on having Forrest and his team flying towards the first planned engagement immediately after he talked to Jenkins. He needed to know how to get in touch with Forrest once he landed. Things were getting really complicated really fast.

  He thought of all the men he’d dispatched to fight these battles. The settlements that’d be hit. Most of the settlements were just regular people trying to survive. Part of the plan was to treat North Carolina just like South Carolina and make an example of some of them. It was a tactic that’d worked well for them so far. The memory of dead children stacked on top of one another like a stack of firewood tugged at his consciousness. Not bothering to wait for the cup of coffee to make its way back to him he took a big swig of whiskey straight out of his flask.

  Chapter 7: Secrets Within Secrets

  Kyler tightened the laces wrapped around his combat boot. His ankle was throbbing painfully. Every step he took sent a little jolt of pain through his whole body. The entire time they’d spent plummeting towards the ground he’d wondered how Ritz would know where to safely land. The ground beneath them was too dark to make out any details. Kyler assumed Ritz had the coordinates for an open field programmed into his watch or a special military parachuting technique he was relying on to get them safely to the ground. They had some NVGs in their packs, but no one was wearing them yet. They were pretty valuable devices, and no one wanted to risk breaking a pair of them on impact.

  That advice may have changed if Ritz had bothered to mention he’d never actually done a HALO jump at night. They’d slammed into a tree going about a million miles per hour. It’d felt like bungee jumping through a briar patch while an angry major leaguer beat them with a baseball bat. Kyler had been very thankful for the thick clothes they’d worn to provide some protection from the cold at the high altitude they’d been jumping from. He’d also been lucky enough to have ended up on top of Ritz for most of the so-called landing. He’d basically ridden Ritz like a sled through the branches. He’d felt the jarring impact of hitting the ground transmitted to him through the poor guys body.

  “Good thing you spent so much time showing me how to land correctly.” Kyler whispered jokingly to Ritz. He was trying to lighten the mood, but he was also worried about Ritz. The guy had taken a serious beating on the way to the ground.

  “I didn’t think you were paying attention, so I just decided to let you land on me instead. Now shut up before you get us both eaten alive.” Answered a pissed off and hurting Ritz. He’d taken about ten times the abuse from the landing that Kyler had. The only part he actually remembered was wrapping his body around a tree branch. The tree branch had snapped in half when Kyler plowed into him from behind. It hadn’t been a small branch either. Judging by the pain in his chest the cracking sound he distinctly remembered hearing had been a combination of the branch and his ribs.
/>   Ritz knelt down to check a small map displayed faintly on a fancy special forces navigational tablet. It contained some sort of technological wizardry that didn’t require constant connectivity to the GPS. It could utilize the compass built into it when the GPS was not available. It wasn’t a common device. No one on their team had ever actually heard of it before they were each handed one by Chief Presly. It was a sign of how important this mission was to the men in charge. The tablets had some serious value now that all of the satellites were starting to slowly fall out of the sky. GPS still worked depending on the time of day and the device you were using but it was nowhere near as reliable or pervasive as it’d been before the apocalypse.

  Kyler watched quietly as Ritz fussed around with the device. Kyler hadn’t been issued one since he was going to be tied to Ritz. It was a ruggedized device, but the fall had managed to smash the glass anyway. Ritz turned it in a couple of different directions then seemed to find an angle that worked. He pressed hard on the touchscreen with his thumb and parts of the glass shattered even more. He gave up and started walking in what appeared to be a random direction. Kyler rushed to catch up.

  Ignoring the pain in his ankle he got close enough to whisper to Ritz.

  “You sure this is the right way?”

  “I wouldn’t call it sure so much as an educated guess. Right before we smashed into that tree, I think I saw the mountains over in this direction. If we walk this way a while and don’t run into anybody then we’ll flip on our comms to see if we can figure out where the hell everybody is. They should all be around here somewhere. With that kind of jump you tend to all end up in the same area.” Ritz explained. Kyler remembered that from the training Ritz had facilitated. It made sense. If you opened your chute when you were at a high altitude, then you could steer yourself up to about sixty miles from where you jumped. Since they’d been doing a low opening the whole team should’ve landed in a fairly small area.

  A few minutes later a low-pitched hooting sound alerted them that someone on their team was nearby. Unless it just happened to be an owl with laryngitis in a limb nearby. The hooting was horribly off-key. Chief Presley stepped out from behind a tree with his rifle pointed at the ground. He was wearing his night vision goggles.

  “Good. You made it. I was worried about the tandem piece of that jump. Has anyone ever done that before?” The chief asked idly.

  “Not that I know of chief. I pulled my chute a lot higher than you guys to make up for the extra weight, but we still hit way too hard. I think I busted a rib and Skippy here’s been limping since we landed.” Ritz replied.

  Kyler listened to the exchange with his mouth hanging wide open. What the hell were they talking about? No one had ever tried that before! Not trusting himself to open his mouth he settled for a hateful glare. The glare was completely lost to his companions since they were all wearing the bulky goggles.

  “Got it. Let’s go silent for now. Keep an eye out for the other guys and follow me.” The chief said. Ritz had shown him their busted tablet before shoving it deep in his pack. It was pretty much garbage now, but they couldn’t leave anything lying around in case anyone reported seeing the parachutists. Any soldier finding high tech navigational gear discarded in the woods while investigating reports of people parachuting would be able to connect the dots pretty quickly. Plus, it wasn’t like they could order another one of these tablets off Amazon. If they could possibly fix it then they should keep it.

  They’d only been moving a minute or two through the woods when the sound of someone screaming in pain brought them to a halt. Presly motioned for them to keep following him and quickly moved in the direction of the screaming. He stopped short when screeches began to be heard in the distance. He only paused for a moment though before resuming the trek through the woods towards the sounds of someone in extreme distress. He stopped again a few seconds later and pulled out a machete that’d been tightly strapped to his side. Kyler stepped around him to see what was going on. The chief held up a hand and signaled for him to stay. Feeling a bit like a dog being bossed around by its master Kyler stayed.

  Up ahead of them a figure was hunched over in the bushes. Chief Presly moved confidently towards the figure with the machete gripped tightly in his hand. Despite the order to stay in place Kyler and Ritz moved around until they could both see what was going on. Through the green tint of the NVGs they could make out one of their teammates lying on the ground. A small infected boy was squatted beside him methodically taking bites out of the man’s leg.

  Chief Presly moved in quietly behind the small Zombie and killed it with a single downward chop of his machete. The chief then knelt down beside the wounded man and appeared to be praying with him. All around them the cries of the infected on the hunt were shattering the quiet of the night. The chief walked back towards them looking shaken. He gruffly ordered them to follow him. Knowing the chief had just killed the wounded man to prevent him from turning they jogged along behind him with heavy hearts. Each of them knowing how easily it could’ve been them lying broken on the ground getting munched on by a little monster.

  Kyler struggled to control his breathing as they ran through the woods. He was imagining what it must’ve been like to hit the ground hard enough to get knocked out only to be woken up by the pain and terror of your flesh being ripped off. Soldiers who fought the infected on a regular basis knew that a bite was a death sentence. It was a common enough occurrence that a lot of them carried powerful drugs to kill themselves if needed. The chief had jabbed a large dose of morphine into the man on the ground as soon as he’d bent down to talk to him. Instead of going out in pain and terror the infected soldier had floated to his reward on a warm wave of sedatives.

  A glimpse of movement to his left was followed by additional sightings of Zombies tearing through the woods in the direction the screaming had come from. The screeching had tapered off once the screaming man had been silenced. Now it was just the occasional screech or grunt as the infected tried to figure out where the source of the noise had disappeared to. From past experience Kyler knew the Zombies would start meandering all over the place pretty soon. They’d eventually go into stasis or lie down for the night. If this’d happened on a routine patrol, they’d all hide and go silent for a couple of hours before continuing with the mission.

  This wasn’t a routine patrol. They’d all risked their lives to get here. There was a reason they’d made that insane jump out of the plane. That hadn’t been done for convenience. They’d done it since it was the fastest possible way to insert themselves unseen in proximity to where their intelligence pointed at the Senator maintaining his lair. They were in the middle of a gigantic state wildlife preserve in upstate Georgia. There should be a security bunker in the park somewhere. It had all the hallmarks of being one of the principal bunkers high level federal officials would’ve been expected to hunker down in if a major terrorist strike happened. In the event of a major world conflict it would’ve served the purpose of keeping the government alive as well.

  The bunkers location wasn’t general knowledge for obvious reasons. Chief Presly was the only one who knew this whole engagement was based around the recollections of a marine who’d been stationed to guard the entrance to the path leading to the bunker. Even the marine hadn’t had more than a foggy recollection of where the bunker sat in relation to the rest of the forest. He’d described it as a cabin with an elevator that took you down to a bunch of barracks and offices outfitted with all kinds of supplies and high-tech gear. It sounded like a preppers dreamhouse.

  It would be the perfect place for someone like the Senator to be holed up. The marine not knowing the exact position of the base was a standard security precaution. No matter how much you swore them to secrecy marines still liked to drink and impress girls. More valuable intel was routinely obtained by attractive young women than by all the hackers in the world combined. Tequila was a much more effective espionage tool than those little spy cameras you see in the spy movies.


  The marine hadn’t known the exact position, but he did know there was a parking lot about three miles away from the cabin. He was able to trace out the exact shape of the parking lot and provide some details like which way the mountains were in relation to the parking lot. The marine had walked patrols to the parking lot when the sun was coming up and going down. Given all that information along with an old topographical map of the area they’d been able to take a SWAG at where the bunker was probably located.

  A guess wasn’t good enough to start dropping precision bunker busting missiles though. Given the huge amount of tax dollars that would’ve been funneled into building something like the bunker it’d be a very well-constructed structure intended to take a pounding. Nothing short of a direct hit was going to have a chance of destroying it. They couldn’t hope to score a direct hit off the vague memories of a marine who hadn’t been to the area in almost six years. If they missed the Senator would abandon the building and never come back. This could very well be their one and only opportunity at taking him out.

  Chief Presly’s team was responsible for pinpointing the exact location of the base and guiding in a precision missile strike. A secondary objective if they could figure out how to do it was to verify that the Senator was actually at the base before calling in the strike. Finally, if they got the opportunity to take the Senator out themselves, they were requested to do so. It was understood they probably wouldn’t make it home if they were able to pull off assassinating the man themselves. Kyler personally was ok with that. He liked to think if he’d been put in a position to snipe Hitler, he’d have pulled the trigger with a smile.