by John Holmes
“OK, but can they breed? Do you have foals?”
“Ayup. Got four foals and a couple of yearlings on the farm, another two on the way. Maybe we can do some horse trading, eh, Sonny?” Dave seemed to find this uproariously funny and laughed out loud.
Brit stood stroking their noses while I called in to LTC Jackass. His immediate response was for us to “seize the horses” when I explained to them they were Belgian war horses, definitely not afraid of Zombies. I told him to piss off and suggested maybe we could buy them. After his usual temper tantrum bullshit, we finally got him to agree to look into the Army contracting to buy horses from the farmers in the future. I could imagine the Colonel pissing all over himself with happiness. The man who brought mobility to the army again! It would get him promoted, for sure. I bet he was already walking around in his stupid Stetson hat and spurs like some demented 19th century Cavalryman.
“Sounds like a real winner you got for a boss, there,” commented Dave as he spit some tobacco juice out on the road and climbed back in the saddle. He had swapped Jonesy some fresh jerky from his saddlebags for a can of dip.
“You have no idea. When time comes to actually trade with him, make sure you have people watching your back. It’s all about him, and what’s good for him.”
He nodded his head as Alan snapped at his reins and started plodding off. “It always is with people like that, isn’t it?”
Chapter 32
I was hungry again, but I’m always hungry. Most people left alive in America are always hungry. We have been for years. Even when I get enough food, and I usually do now, I’m still haunted by the ghost of hungry. That first year, when there was no food anywhere. Stores looted, farms trampled and torched, refrigeration gone, no food distribution system, animals like deer and cows hunted almost to extinction. I’ve eaten deer, possum, cat, dog, rat, mice, woodchucks, pigeon, just about anything with meat on it except for humans. The Zs were just an added burden. How many people got eaten by zombies because they had to leave a safe hideout for food? Thousands. Millions, maybe. Hunger will drive a man to do just about anything, including risking a zombie attack just to get something to eat. Matter of fact, I think most of the ammo expended in the last few years wasn’t aimed at Zs but at other people, fighting over food.
The animals were coming back, at least in our neck of the woods. Skunks were filling a lot of empty positions in the food chain because no one wanted to risk eating them and we had eaten all their predators. Having the Army around, or what was left of it, pushing their way back up the Mohawk Valley gave us regular access to MREs when we went on mission, and we always took more than we would ever need to stock up. The Restored US Government was a fragile thing. We all hedged our bets. I’m never going to starve again, not if I can help it. Even now, everyone’s diet sucks. We don’t get enough of the things we need, like fresh vegetables and vitamins. Another thing they got wrong in the movies. Maybe on the way back we would stop at Dave’s farm and trade for some food stuffs. I stopped and marked out their location in the battered Delorme Atlas of New York that I carried in my ruck. It joined a host of other marks on that page; safe houses, weapons caches, clean water, heavy Zombie infestations. This had become my Bible.
We approached Fort Edward the next morning after spending the night in some trees, slung in hammocks. Not a fun way to sleep, but it kept the Zs away, and we couldn’t find a good house to hole up in before dark. Hopefully tonight we could sleep in a farmhouse I remembered from before the plague. We would have to put some miles on us, though, because I did not want to linger in the Glens Falls area. As it was, getting a good look at the rail bridge wasn’t going to be fun.
Creeping slowly forward toward the lock, weapons at the ready, I expected something similar to what we had seen in Schuylerville. The lock at Fort Miller, ten miles south, had been a wreck. The doors had been torn open by some violent flood of the Hudson sometime over the past few years. We had photographed it and moved on.
The southern lock to the Champlain Canal was an important one. From here, we could sail up to Lake Champlain, open up the mines in the Adirondacks again, farm the fertile lands of Vermont. It was all about reclaiming the country, one little slice at a time. Sure, the canals were old school, but they worked or were easy to make work again.
As we came up the road and turned a corner we could see that, at a distance, there were Zombies wandering around the lock area, scavenging through the bush for small animals. We could see maybe a few dozen and knew there were probably more that we didn’t. More than we could reliably take down before the howling started. Time to think a way to get them away from there.
I gathered the squad around me and explained the plan. “We’re going to have to do a runner.”
“Oh, hell no.”
“Oh, hell yes. Ahmed, your turn.” The only person exempted from the roster was Doc Hamilton. Our medic stayed with us at all times.
A runner was just that. One of us stripped down of all gear except a silenced .22 pistol and their survival kit, took off like a bat out of hell through the Zombies, firing as he or she went, then hauled ass away from the rest of the team or some variation thereof. The idea was to get the Zombies to chase you, lead them into a blind alley or something, then cut back to the team. It was dangerous. Insane. And a huge frigging rush.
Ahmed took a minute to consult the map. We agreed on a place to meet if he wasn’t back in an hour, divided up his gear among the others. He kissed his rifle and handed it to Brit.
“Take this, you godless American whore, and guard it with your life.”
“I will, you son of a motherless camel turd,” she replied, and kissed him on the forehead.
Ahmed gave her a hug, knelt and said a quick prayer to Mecca, or to the radiation-filled crater that used to be Mecca. Then he took off running, straight through the crowd of Zombies, yelling “Allllllah Akbarrrrr!” at the top of his lungs and taking pot shots at them. We joined in with our suppressed rifles after they had turned to run after him, trying to cut down the odds, but stopped firing as soon as they blocked him from view. They disappeared down the road, moving at a fast jog, the ones that had functioning legs. Like I said, Zombies can move quickly when they have to.
Jacob and Jonesy quickly dispatched the two immobile Zs that were crawling off in the direction Ahmed had taken. We broke out the cameras and started photographing the canal lock doors, which were open, allowing a flow of water to come pouring out. That was good, because it meant the canal was still a through route, it hadn’t become blocked somewhere further upstream. The machinery was trashed, but mainly we were looking for structural damage.
We had been at it for twenty minutes when Ahmed came tearing ass around the corner back from the direction he had run, yelling at the top of his lungs and followed by several hundred Zombies. We immediately hit dirt, getting as out of sight as we could while the river of Zs hurtled by. We could smell the awful stench that always accompanied the dead. Next to me, Brit started to vomit, but I clasped a hand over her mouth. I would let her choke before I let her make a sound. She struggled a bit but swallowed it back down.
The last Z passed and we ran in the opposite direction. Time to put some distance between us and the crowd and fort up, if we could. Ahmed was on his own, and we would see him again. Or not. He knew where to meet us.
We ran.
Chapter 33
We ran. Uphill, away from the canal, heading for the woods and overgrown farmland. You can outrun a Zombie horde, but we had full packs on and the day was hot. We needed to get to a place to go to ground and wait for Ahmed. He had picked out a ruined house we could see on top of a hill about a mile away. Zs don’t like to go uphill, and I was pretty sure every zombie in Fort Edward was chasing Ahmed south down River Road.
We made it into the doorway of the house, stacking in front of the doorway. Jonesy kicked in the ruined door with his huge boot, or tried to. He rebounded off the steel door and started hopping up and down, cursing under his
breath. I reached over and turned the knob on the door. Unlocked. I shot him a shit-eating grin and he gave me the finger.
We lined up, and Brit went in first, followed by Jacob, me, then Ski. Doc Hamilton and Jonesy stayed outside, covering our backs. We each piled in and swept our sectors, scanning the living room. Brit, the first one in, fired two quick shots into the figure sitting on the couch, and the skeletons’ head exploded into a cloud of dust.
“Whoops,” she muttered under her breath, then broke right with Jacob to continue to clear the ground floor. Ski and I went up the stairs checking each of the bedrooms. We didn’t need to surprise each other coming around a corner.
“CLEAR!” I yelled downstairs. “CLEAR” came back up to me. “Checking basement!” I heard the basement door kick open, then after a minute, “ALL CLEAR”.
“FORT UP!” I yelled, and Jonesy and Doc came in through the door. We grounded our rucks upstairs and each of us started ripping two by fours out of the walls. Doc took a battery-powered screw gun and started putting them up on the front door. He started laughing as he did it.
“What the hell is so funny?”
He laughed again. “It’s just like playing Black Ops, fighting zombies! I can hear the sounds in my head!” I laughed too, stupid idiots. I loved these guys.
Jonesy and Ski were hammering the stairs down, each wailing away with a sledge hammer, knocking out steps. If the doors or windows were breached, we would climb up a rope ladder to the upstairs. Trapped, but safe, and it always gave us time to think of something else.
When we had forted up as best we could, we settled down to wait for Ahmed or the Zs, whichever came first. Brit walked to the skeleton she had popped as we came in through the front door. She pushed the rusty shotgun away from the couch where it had fallen out of the skeleton’s, cold, dead hands, then sat down next to it.
“Sorry about that, Skeletor, but I couldn’t take any chances. It was either you or me, and I was faster. Better luck next time.” Then she put her feet up on the coffee table, closed her eyes, and went to sleep next to the shattered bones.
I went upstairs and built myself a snipers perch, looking downhill towards the lock. I figured it was about maybe eight hundred meters. I started picking off random Zs who were wandering around, excited by the noise of the chase, using Ahmed’s rifle. While doing so, I thought back to the wild, panicked nights of the plague. My Guard unit falling apart at the barricades, getting overwhelmed by the civilians trying to get out of the city, the Zs already mixing in with them. Me rushing back to my house to get my family and run. My wife coming at me in the kitchen, a hunk of our kid’s arm in her mouth, hands ripping at me like claws. I swung the butt of my rifle so hard I broke the plastic stock, and I kept swinging until the thing that had been my wife lay on the floor, a bloody pulp, and I ran. I don’t know how I made it through the following months but here I was, two years later, letting thoughts of that night ruin my aim. I wiped away the tears and kept shooting, a steady fire that knocked down a good dozen before I got tired. Remembering did no good for anyone.
Around dusk, Ahmed showed up, dripping wet. We had watched him through binos, pulling himself up out of the water at the edge of the river. Dangerous shit, that. You never knew what, exactly, was swimming or floating around there anymore. He immediately gave me a SITREP (Situation Report, to all you civilians), changed into dry clothes, then passed out on an upstairs bed. I typed up a report for Task Force Empire, attached the pictures from today, hooked my iPhone to the SINCGARS radio, and did that magic shit the commo guys had come up with. No cell towers? No problem! They ran it through our FM radios. Don’t ask me how they did it, but it worked.
I called the guys around. “Ahmed is done in so we have to stay here tonight. You know the drill. Two men on watch, staggered hours. Weapons loaded, on safe. I have the one to three watch, divide up the rest, Brit. Light and noise discipline.” They all answered in the affirmative.
Brit stayed behind while the others went to get something to eat out of their packs.
“Nick, I’m sorry about today, the vomiting. I’ve never had that happen before. It was just so freaking disgusting.”
“It happens. Get past it or you’re going to be off the scouts. I almost had to choke you to keep you quiet today. Understand? If you can’t hold it together around Zs then you are a risk to the whole team.”
She nodded her head. For once, she looked contrite. “I got it. I know what you gotta do what you gotta do. I’ll handle it.”
“You did a great job nailing Skeletor today, even if he already was dead. You’re a part of this team, Brit. Now go get some more sleep. I’m sure you’re beat. Before you do, though, remind everyone that Ahmed gets to sleep the night through.”
“Can do, Nick.” Then she leaned over and kissed me. I wiped my face with my sleeve and muttered “Ugh, girl germs!” just loud enough for her to hear me as she walked away. She shook her hips at me, slapped her ass and went into the bedroom.
We settled in for the short May night.
Chapter 34
The wind must have pushed the sounds to us. Way off in the distance, I heard the pop-pop-pop of a firefight going on. It seemed to be coming from the north, just a faint echo of gunfire. The rounds were sparing, like someone was trying to take head shots, but then they rose in a crescendo, faster and faster, followed by fully automatic fire. Then it stopped dead. If the wind hadn’t been blowing from the north, I doubt I would have even heard it.
Doc was sitting next to me on watch.
“Somebody just got overrun.”
“Ya think?” He had heard it too, and knew what the final burst of meant. You don’t use automatic weapons on zombies. Most of your rounds would be wasted zipping through their bodies. It was a panic burst; they were so close there was no time to aim, their hands were almost on you. “Where do you think?”
“I dunno. Not Glens Falls, the city is too close. Maybe Lake George. The mountains do some funny things with sound, carry it down through the valleys. Tells us one thing, though. There’re people out there.”
“There’s always people out there, Nick. No matter how bad things get, there are always survivors somewhere. Hell, you know we’ve been monitoring radio traffic from the north end of Lake Champlain. Apparently the frogs from Quebec are still around. And organized.”
“Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it. People like those farmers we met today. They were pretty friendly, but I worry about some of the hard cases we might meet. Make sure from here on out everyone is on their toes in regards to Zs and Mad Maxes.” “Mad Maxes” was our term for people who had turned to looting and killing of anything that got in their way in order to survive. Not really fair to the original Road Warrior, but that’s pop culture for you. They were called “Reavers”, too. The worst thing was to get caught by one of those groups that had gone cannibal. Think to yourself, oh no, not in America! Cannibals? I don’t care where you are. Get people hungry enough and some of them will start eating whatever, or whoever, they can find. In the years after the plague, there was hunger enough. If we caught them, we shot them on sight.
Then I heard another sound, much closer, that made me sit bolt upright, wide awake. Coming back up River Road, just starting to be visible in the NVGs, was the horde Ahmed had led away this afternoon. They had started back to their territories but they must have smelled us when the wind shifted to the north.
“Go wake everyone up, bring everything upstairs. It’s going to be a turkey shoot but it might get tight. There’re a lot of them.”
Doc climbed down the rope ladder and I settled down with the sniper rifle. Ahmed was better than me at this, and when he got up here, I would let him take over. I started a slow, steady round of shooting. By the time Ahmed put his hand on my back, my shoulder was sore and my eye hurt from straining at the night scope. There were a good twenty Zs cooling on the ground in a trail. That trail, though, pointed directly to us.
“Do we run?” asked Brit.
“
Not at night. Too big of a chance of us getting separated or someone twisting an ankle or breaking a leg. Nope, it’s fight night.”
We all settled down to our firing positions, smashing glass out of the upstairs windows. Knockers, something to beat in a Zombie’s head with, whatever was each person’s preference, stood stacked at the top of the ruined stairs.
The danger was twofold. First, this might be just the start of a swarm. The city of Glens Falls and its surrounding area held around thirty thousand people before the plague. Average actual turned-into-zombies rate was around sixty percent, though that could vary. It was dependent upon evacuation, how well the populace was armed, how many people died from being eaten versus reanimated. Figuring around half the Zombies from that population were still ambulatory, we might face nine thousand zombies, not the hundred or so coming at us now. And you thought math never did anyone any good. It made me freak out.
The second thing we were afraid of was enough of them would get into the house and swarm what was left of the stairs, to form a pile which could reach up to the second floor. That’s what the knockers were for. Hopefully not.
“Suppressors?” asked Ski. Suppressors wore out, another thing they never showed in the movies. The heat of the rounds being fired off wore out the sound-absorbing metal fibers inside. We had to choose quiet now versus quiet later. However, they did reduce the range and accuracy of our shots. The rifles we carried were military issued M-4 carbines, re-chambered for a hot copper jacketed .22 Long round, but they didn’t have a lot of range to start with. Thing is, with Zs, you don’t necessarily need heavy duty, hard hitting rounds. Accuracy was the word of the day, and the more ammo you could carry, the better.