by John Holmes
“And whatnot? What the eff are you now, Shakespeare?” Again, with the sarcasm when I’m trying to hold forth on a serious subject. The firelight played across the smart-alecky grin on her face, the shadows mixing with the dust we all had on us from today’s patrol.
She turned to Jacob, who sat with his back to the fire, watching the stars through the hole in the roof of the old farmhouse. “Jake, in this dream you’re having, why don’t we have toilet paper?”
He ignored her, knowing better than to engage Brit when she was in one of her moods, and kept staring at the stars. I knew what he was watching for. The Space Station, passing overhead, beautiful and dead.
“Leave him alone, Brit. He’s pulled his weight so far on this patrol.”
“It just creeps me out. I mean, why does he get to hide in unreality and I am stuck dealing with reality?”
“You creep me out. A vegetarian zombie slayer. Disgusting. Jake can’t help what’s going on in his head. You being retarded and not eating meat is a sick lifestyle choice. By the way, that MRE cracker you just ate is made from used animal byproducts.” To emphasize it, I took a big bite out of the squirrel that I had been roasting on the fire. She shot me a disgusted look and continued to wolf down her hummus.
Jake turned back to the fire. “How can I explain what goes on in my dream? Someday I’m going to wake up and who knows if I’ll even remember this? I think I’m in a coma, and I’m not going to ever wake up. In which case, Brit, you’re stuck with me.”
Brit stared at him for a minute. Jake had joined the patrol yesterday in Waterford, dumped on us by the FEMA idiots. He seemed OK, had been on the ball so far, but every now and then he just got a spacey look.
“Jake, you really believe this is just a dream.”
“Yup.”
“Really? I have to sit here and watch some grubby pig gnaw on a squirrel because you’re dreaming it? How about you dream me back to college or something, where I can be getting laid by some football player on nice clean sheets? With fluffy pillows all around and nice silk things to wear instead of a nasty five day-old uniform?”
Jake sighed. “It’s like this, Britney. People don’t rise from the dead. It’s impossible. Can’t happen. Once you are dead, you’re dead. So I’m dreaming this. Or more like I’m having a nightmare. Maybe I was in a car accident or something. I dunno. Hopefully I wake up soon, my wife will be snoring next to me in bed and my kids will be fighting downstairs over the TV. This is just a really long-ass nightmare.”
People lost everything. I lost my family. My wife, my daughter. Hell, I had to beat my wife’s head in with my rifle butt when she came after me, blazing red Zombie eyes, trying to bite my head off. Millions, billions have died, and now we’re living in some Mad Max kinda freaky world. This is just Jacob’s way of dealing with it without going totally insane. He really thinks he’s dreaming this whole thing. What I’m worried about is that at some crucial moment, he’s going to realize this isn’t a dream and lose it right then and there. I might have to put a bullet in him then, because this is not the world I would want to wake up to.
“I got yer reality right here, Jacob.” With that, Brit leaned to one side and let one rip.
“Careful doing that close to the fire. You’ll get burned.”
“Haha, pig.”
“OK, Jacob. You’re on the next watch, two hours with Brit relieving Jonesy one hour from now. You know the Zs might come. If they do, you know the rules. Wake one other person; and try to take them out silently. We don’t need to have some howling screaming shit waking up every Z in the neighborhood. Come on, Brit, I know this is a safe house, but let’s check the basement one more time before lights out.”
Jacob went through the routine of checking his gear. As a scout, your gear stays next to you or on you at all times, even in a safehouse. We stand guard with our packs on our backs because you never, ever know when things are going to go to shit and you will have to run for it. Then your ass is out in the wilderness, with help dozens, maybe hundreds of miles away, zombies and cannibals roaming the woods and deserted towns, and nothing to save yourself except what you have on you. I’ve been there, alone in the dark. It’s damned scary. Hammock, rope, water filter, two MREs, extra ammo, compass, multi-tool, poncho, lighter, small .22 caliber revolver, signal flare, all carried in an extra pack around our waist. All fit into a small pack that you didn’t touch unless you really needed it. They can and will save your life.
Brit ran the crank on her light and I flicked the safety off my M-4. Her job, behind me, was to keep the light where I needed it. She might be a vegetarian smartass with a sex drive like a Mack truck, but she was my partner.. We headed down the stairs to the basement.
I had called this a “safehouse” and hopefully it was. To us a safehouse was usually an old stone farmhouse which we had used before. Whenever we got a chance, we pulled stone from the second floor and bricked up the windows. The front door was barricaded lumber ripped from the walls, overlapped and hammered into place. Upstairs, there were two coiled ropes for making a quick getaway, one with a grapnel hook we could use to catch into a nearby tree. We could hold out here for as long as our water lasted, but once a Z showed up, they started screaming and more and more would come from miles around. The Army actually ran missions where they would fort up in a place like this, bring in pallets of ammo, spend days shooting everything that showed up and then clear out by helo. They did that when they wanted to clear an area for “resettlement” or needed to salvage something from a nearby site.
Not for us Scouts. We walked by day to objectives we were told to check out. We lived outside the wire in our own fortresses. Ours was in Stillwater, on an island in the Hudson River. We had barricaded the two bridges and lived in the house on the island between them. Zs don’t like the water. They can’t swim but they do fall in the water sometimes and get dragged along the bottom by the current, washing up somewhere downstream. To guard against that we’ve built a six foot- high wall around the house, and we’re trying to grow our own food. Nothing like the Fobbits that lived in the Army base downriver or the pogs that lived (existed?) in the FEMA camps outside Buffalo, working the fields.
Last time were we were in this particular house was about two months ago, scouting upriver to see what remained of the hydroelectric plant in Glens Falls. Our mission this time was to check the locks on the canal system and report back to the Army Engineers on them. We had cleared this place, taking it in a quick rush through the door just before sunset, when the Zs were least active. I had killed two with my shotgun on the second floor. I was just relaxing and shoving shells into the magazine when one had jumped on me from the hole in the roof. That was when I pissed my pants. Brit would never let me forget it. She about knocked both our heads off with the baseball bat and had kept a gun on me for more than an hour to see if I had been infected. I laugh about it now, but right then? It had literally scared the piss out of me.
The stairs creaked as we walked down. In the movies, this was the time when they would build up suspense, and let me tell you, they were spot-on right. I had that twist in my gut that made me feel like I wanted to puke and I was sweating my ass off. It didn’t go away until we had cased out the whole basement. We’d found nothing there except two old skeletons, which I knew were there from last time. We ignored them, since the real dead held no terror for us anymore.
Chapter 28
Brit shook me awake at 2 AM for my watch. “Get up, squirrel breath,” she whispered, then stuck her tongue in my ear. I almost jumped out of the sleeping bag. It was frigging cold as shit despite being early May, and I jogged around for a bit to get warm. There ain’t nothing like having to get out of a warm sleeping bag on a cold night. I grabbed my boots out of the bottom of the bag and pulled them on, then my armor. I checked my rifle and chewed on some Skittles. “Gah, that was disgusting! Forget toilet paper, obviously you’re missing Q-tips, too.” Brit spat loudly on the floor.
“Goddamn. I frackin’ hat
e you sometimes. I really, really do.” She gave me the finger and crawled into my sleeping bag. I grabbed my gear and headed up the stairs, joining Ahmed on watch. He filled me in with a mumbled “not much,” and handed over the NVGs. Then he leaned over and picked up the sniper rifle, turned the scope back on and settled down on the bipod.
I scanned the area from the rooftop. The infrared sensor picked up a few hot spots, way in the distance. I called spottings out to Ahmed. 3 o’clock, 800 meters or so. We had the ranges pretty well sited from the last time we were up here, but I didn’t expect much. We had cleared out quite a few the last time, but you could still smell the stench lingering. They give off heat, too. Not as much as a live body, but whatever it is that animates them, it makes the muscles work, and that generates heat. Another thing the movies got wrong.
Ahmed shifted his scope over to the right, then started muttering under his breath.
“Allllaaaaahhhhhhhaakkkkbaarrrrrrrr allllaaaaaahhhhhaaakkkkkbaaaarrrr.” Shit just freaked me out, and I had told him time and again to not do that around me. Reminded me of all those Haji terrorist videos you used to see of them shooting at us over in the desert, and I could still here the echoes of that call being yelled at me when we duked it out in Fallujah. I asked him about it once, why he was here in America.
“Nick, yes, you were the Great Satan. Infidels. I fought you in Afghanistan. I fought the Taliban, also, to protect my people. Then this happened, the demons from hell. Allah has sent me here to America to kill demons, instead of infidels. God is great, and it is as he wills it.” Great, I have a muj sniper on my team who might slit my throat one night. Apparently he had managed to escape from prison in Guantanamo Bay when the plague started, made his way across Cuba alone and gotten to Florida. That was all he would say about it. There weren’t any sides anymore other than living versus dead. We had been on more than a dozen scouts together and he was a damn good shot with the rifle. He pretends he wasn’t trying to kill me ten years ago, I pretend I wasn’t chasing his ass all over the mountains of the ‘Stan ten years ago. We both agreed that was all just bullshit now.
POP! Suppressed, of course. A shot on a night like tonight would bring the Zs running. Ahmed picked up the empty brass and slipped it in his pocket when it had cooled. In the NVGs I watched the hot spot burst into a glowing mist, and the figure dropped. “So what’s your view on taking down Zs like this in the middle of the night? Allah OK with that? It bothers me sometimes, you know? Once they were someone’s mother, kid, whatever. At night, through the scope, they look like people. “
“Nick, they are dead. I am only releasing their souls to go to Heaven. It is Allah’s work.” With that, there was another POP! A figure I hadn’t seen, off to the left, tumbled up and backwards from behind a bush where it had been hiding for the night, knocked over by the impact of the round in its chest. I watched as it started to get back up and waited for the Z scream to start. Another muted POP and the figure fell down, with a hot splash through the head.
“I had to smoke that one out, as you Americans say. Hiding in the brush.”
Another thing the movies got wrong. Zs are smart. Not people-smart, but maybe like monkey-smart. Apparently the infection destroyed their higher order brain functions, and, having no heartbeat, they can’t process things all that fast but they have an animal instinct. They go to ground, hide out, wait in ambush. Territorial, too. Ninety percent of Zs will stay within two miles or so of where they died, unless another one starts screaming. That’s why towns and cities are such a bad idea. You can find yourself facing a horde within five minutes, `cause those suckers can run when they get pumped up. One on one, I can out run any zombie, but holy shit, you do not want to trip and twist your ankle. As for the other ten percent, they wander around like lost souls, always moaning. They are what make things so dangerous on a patrol through open country. You never, ever know when you’re going to bump into a solitary Z, and have it attack or start moaning, drawing more to you.
We waited the rest of Ahmed’s shift but nothing else showed up. Just a pack of wild dogs that was, thankfully, south of our position. We watched them plow into a herd of deer, taking one down and then fighting over the kill. Stray dogs scare me almost as much as Zs do. What’s that, you say? Call me a puss to be scared by a dog? Hell yes. These aren’t your friendly golden retrievers or yappy little shits you want to kick like a football. This is the Rottweiler or pitbull that fought its way to the top of the pack when its trailer park meth dealer/owner turned Z and it got loose in the wild. I love dogs, and Rocket slept by the front door of the house, always half-awake, listening for Zs. A pack of strays though? Nuh-uh.
Jones came up for the last hour of my watch, letting Ahmed get another hour of sleep. Then we conducted Stand –to, everyone a hundred percent up, waiting for the sun to rise. It’s a hard, hard world we live in, if you can call it living.
Chapter 29
“So, the night before we left the FOB, I hooked up with this zoomie guy from that C-130 that came in…”“You is a female manwhore, you know that, right, Brit?” We were walking slowly down the east side of the Hudson River, on our way to Fort Edward. The west side of the river was a no-go, fallout from the Knolls Atomic Power Lab semi-meltdown. It was probably safe, but the river made a good line not cross until you were north of Schuylerville. Our objective for the day was the south end of the Champlain Canal and the railroad bridge over the Hudson. The Army Corps of Engineers weenie huffed and puffed behind me, carrying too much gear. His problem, not ours. It made for a slow march, though.
“I’m just living life because I’m alive, Jonesy. So anyways…” and she rolled her eyes at him “…remember how China was saying it was the West’s plague, and they were going to shut their borders? Punishment for our decadent lifestyle and all that shit?”
When the plague started and things in America were going to hell, China was crowing about how they had sealed their borders and were sitting pretty, with not a single case, and how the world was going to quarantine North America. They had nuked London, Moscow and any other government that might stand in their way and were rampaging through central Asia, conquering all the gold mines and oil fields in Eastern Siberia. Their cyber attack on the US military command and control on the second week of the plague had wrecked our nuclear response forces, disabled every launcher we had. They sat back and took on anyone who argued with them. They had landed forces in Central America after the US Navy had pulled out of Hawai’i to reinforce the Pacific Northwest and had actually started building a wall across Panama to keep Zs out of the Canal. Then the plague broke out in Europe after a refugee ship from Mexico crashed ashore in France, Europe went to hell and China started slaughtering anyone who came near their borders. Then, a few weeks after that, all of the sudden China fell off the air.
“So check it out. This guy, he’s a C-130 pilot now, but before, he flew B-2 bombers. No shit, they loaded up a whole crate of zombies on, like, a dozen B-2, stealthed their way through Chinese radar and just air-dropped them over the biggest cities. He said he almost got shot down `cause he had to go low and slow, bay doors open while the Zs went dropping out of the bomb racks. They dropped ‘em right in the rivers with water-soluble ropes around them. One, two days later, a couple of Zs drag themselves out of the river and start biting the shit out of the little yellow fuckers. Instant chaos! Recon flights say the whole place is a massive battleground now.”
“Damn, man, that some dirty shit,” said Jonesy, then laughed so hard his gold teeth showed. Frigging gangbanger would laugh at something like that.
“That just doesn’t seem right. I mean, that’s a crime against humanity.” The Engineer contractor spoke up through his heavy breathing, sweat pouring down his face.
“Man, that ain’t no different shit than them chinks dropping nukes on all them cities just because America was down and out, and not watchin’ over everyone else no mo’. Just like back in the `hood, you get a chance to kick your enemy, you go do it.”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem, right.”
“Sheeeyit, Socrates, it’s just the way of the world. People been fightin’ forever, and unlike your lily-white, suburb livin’ ass, I seen it my whole life.”
Conversations like this took up most of the march. We were soldiers, and it’s what soldiers do, telling stories and talking smack to each other. We broke for lunch at noon, out in the middle of a field with good observation. Three on watch, three eating. The Engineer didn’t count. He was there for a job only, and he knew it. The six of us were a team and he wasn’t on it. The smoke from MRE heaters soon rose above the circle, and I sat back on a rock to enjoy the spring sunshine, casually assessing everyone in the group.
Brit, eyeing the Engineer like he was a piece of fresh meat, wondering if he was worth anything in the sack. She stood guard but would glance back at him every now and then. Ahmed, cleaning his weapons like he did every stop. Legacy of living in that dust-ridden shithole they called the Middle East. Jonesy, picking his nose and flinging it at Ahmed, trying, and failing, to piss him off. Doc Hamilton, that big bald ex-biker who was our medic, stood with his back to me, watching towards the river. Syzmanski, the newest guy, who had shown up at the river fort one day a month ago on the run from the FEMA camp outside Albany. We didn’t ask what he did to get him on the run and he never told us. Jacob, watching the road, lost in his own private hell.