by John Holmes
“What do you mean, the fighting?”
“Man, it was a battle. Thousands of civilians trying to get off Manhattan, the bridges blocked with smashed cars, infected running wild, tunnels flooded. Here we were holding onto the piers, trying to evacuate as many civilians as possible, and they were storming the barricades. Remember how NYC was pretty much “a gun-free zone?” Apparently not. Pistols, shotguns, AKs, AR-15s, hell, even some heavy automatic weapons that some douchebag Russian Mafia guys from Brighton Beach started opening up on us. I was treating gunshot wounds left and right. It made Afghanistan look like a picnic. People with the highest standard of living in the world fell the furthest, I guess, when they realized their money wasn’t going to save them. In the end, we just pulled out, firing into the crowd to keep them off the last boat.”
He shifted his ruck on his back, but kept talking.
“You know, Nick, guys like us, veterans, we all knew the world could go to shit at any moment. I actually feel bad for the civilians who lived in a comfortable, peaceful world. They forgot how easily civilization can fall apart and that the barbarians were waiting at the gates. Hell, take away a man’s food and threaten his family and his survival, and he is the barbarian.”
I knew what he was talking about. After the general collapse of the military units and police, the world had turned, in many places, into a person-eat-person world. Small communities did better than the larger ones, but unless your village was more than a day’s walk from an urban center, you got overwhelmed with refugees trying to beat your doors down.
“So what happened at the Depot?”
“OK, so I get there to Seneca Army Depot on a C-130 and the engineers are just finishing building the walls. Huge dirt berms, with a trench dug in front, angled so people on top could fire down into a kill zone. Howitzers converted into muzzle-loading shotguns, with charges and ball bearings piled in, individual rifle positions every few feet. The north wall was about fourteen kilometers across, the south wall about eighteen. Right between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake. The north wall was more heavily manned because we had refugees from Rochester and Syracuse and zombies, all trying to climb the wall. The Guard had pulled back behind the walls and scattered units from Fort Drum were flying in by helo. Man, I heard there was a serious last stand by some Infantry guys at the airfield at Drum, keeping Zs off the runway so that last C-130 full of dependents could get out. You should have seen the parents, Nick. The shocked look on their faces. The kids, they dealt with it, like kids do.”
The day after I got there, this huge mob of zombies, must have been thousands of them, came moaning right up toward the north wall, chasing some civilians, maybe a hundred of them. I saw it from an observation tower, maybe fifteen miles off, watched it through binos. I thought we were done. We saw them coming, and next thing I knew, the loudspeaker is yelling “INCOMING!” and “DOWN DOWN DOWN!”, and a C-130 flies over and drops this huge, parachute-dragging bomb out the back deck, and WHAM! I swear to God I thought it was a nuke. It wasn’t, it was one of those twenty-thousand pound bombs they developed in the Gulf War. Just BAM! And everything was gone, refugees, Zombies, everything. Later, I went out on a patrol to look for survivors and I noticed more than a half dozen craters at various distances from the base. Apparently they had done this more than once.”
Doc rucked on, lost in his thought. I could think of a time or two myself when I had wished the Air Force had dropped a big-ass bomb at my beck and call. Water under the bridge, though.
We turned the corner of River Road, and I noted how our corn was coming in, growing in the field on our side of the river. I had planted it a month ago, using precious diesel to run a scavenged tractor to plant twenty acres. Green stubs were just showing up through the ground. I was tired of eating canned food and stale MREs. Now if I could only get my hands on a cow … foolish pipe dream. Most of the cows around here had died from infections they got when the electric powered milking machines had shut down. The rest had been eaten long ago.
As we moved past the edge of the tree line, what was left of the house came into view. A small, faint column of smoke still twisted into the sky. Doc pulled up short next to me, followed by Ahmed and Jonesy.
Ahmed spoke first. “JDAM, Joint Direct Attack Monition, guided bomb, maybe about five hundred pounds. Probably delivered by an F-18 off the USS Abraham Lincoln. Someone really does not like you, Nick.”
I stood dumbfounded. The windmill that provided our electricity still spun in the gentle wind, but the house itself was a mass of burnt lumber, blown to Hell and gone.
Chapter 50
“Well, now what?” Jonesy stood kicking through the rubble, looking for his own stuff where his room had been. Everything was scattered and gone. Even the safe in the basement, where we had kept our extra weapons, hidden under the cement slab of the floor. I had thought that might be OK, but the damage extended past the basement, and water from the river had flooded into the crater.
“That asswipe is gonna pay, Nick. My entire collection of games is gone.” Jonesy held up the shattered remains of his Xbox.
I sat down on a rock, looking out over the river. I was tired. My feet hurt. My back hurt. I was worried about Brit. I wasn’t sure where to go next. Well, scratch that. I knew where to go next. I just wasn’t sure what the plan was.
“There’s nothing here for us, guys. You know what we have to do. First things first, though. We need rest and resupply. Time to head to the cache.”
We had spent last summer building an extra fortress, a “go to hell” meeting place about a mile away, built on the top of a knoll, deep in the woods. Cinderblock walls, parapet and a small cabin inside that could sleep six in bunks. Water supply from a hand pump-operated well, firewood stockpiled, enough food for a year, extra ammo we had been stealing every chance we got, replacement weapons that had been “destroyed or lost” on previous missions. The only way in was through a tunnel covered by a grating that had to be unlocked or an aluminum ladder buried in the woods a hundred meters away.
We made a way slowly through the woods, keeping an eye out for Zs that might have been attracted by the house being bombed. Only one, the remains of an incredibly fat woman, missing an arm. She came stumbling out of the woods, swinging her remaining arm at us. Jonesy swung his steel bar at the things’ head, yelling, “THAT’S FOR MY XBOX!”
Ahmed eyed him strangely. “She did not touch your Xbox!”
“I know, but I feel so much better now!”
While we rested at the fort, cleaning our weapons, Doc tending to the various small injuries that crop up after being in the field for a few days, I took stock of our situation and conferred with Ahmed. I sat with my feet propped up on a bench.
“Those are nasty weapons, Nick.” He made a motion of gagging. “Maybe you can march into the FOB and you can knock everyone dead from the smell of your nasty feet.”
“Haha, very funny, towelhead. Your people aren’t exactly know for bathing, you know.” I continued drawing out a plan of base in the dirt.
“The hard part, Nick, is we don’t really want to shoot our way into the base. As much as I used to enjoy fighting you Americans and the Taliban both, Allah has told me to kill Zombies. And bad guys, of course. Those silly Fobbits do not deserve to die because their commander is an ass.”
“I agreed, Ahmed. You’re forgetting something, though. No one knows we are dead. I doubt LTC Jackass is going to run around trumpeting he had us killed. In due course, I’m sure he’ll announce that we were “lost” or something, but I bet he gives it a week or two. So, we can just walk in the gate, but we will have to move fast.”
“No, that will not work, Nick. As soon as you come in the gate, the base commander will be notified. Then we will be up shit’s creek, because he will run, or have us arrested on some kind of made up charges. Somehow.”
“Well, if we can get in touch with Brit, I’m sure she can get us in somehow.”
I was waiting to hear from Brit. If we had gone o
ff the net or gone missing, she was under orders to call us at 1000 hours each day on a predesignated freq. I hadn’t heard from her yet, but she could have been fed a line of crap by the Chain of Command. It had been almost two weeks since she had been wounded so I’m sure she was mobile around the hospital.
It took two more days to hear from her after we had set up an OE-254 antenna to extend the range of the radios.
“Blue this is Red, over.” That was her calling us. Nothing to give away anything, on the off chance anyone was listening. We were using the team colors from Halo.
“Red, go.”
“Blue, you were reported dead. SITREP, over.”
“Four pax OK, base gone. Break.”
“Need knock at Orange two days, over.”
I waited for her to figure it out. In two days, she would have to help us get into Fort Orange.
“Time, over”
“Fourteen, Moby, over”
“Fourteen, Moby out.”
OK, so it was cheesy code, but someone may have been listening. Our electronic warfare assets were stretched thin, mostly down in Mexico where the 82nd was fighting for the oil fields. I was more worried about someone at the commo shed overhearing Brit talking to us, so we kept it short and coded.
“Fourteen” meant “1400 hours,” or 2 PM. She would subtract twelve off of that to get the real time, or 2 AM. “Moby” meant “on the south side of the base”. I had stolen it shamelessly from the Moby song “Southside”. We had other code words for the cardinal directions, other things we memorized. I was just glad she was doing well enough to help us out, and she would be coming out with us one way or another.
That afternoon, we moved back down to the river. We hauled on steel cables that had been pegged to the river bottom in a shallow area and pulled two fourteen foot aluminum canoes from the riverbed, where we had sunk them with rocks. We flipped them over and cleaned out the mud and silt that had accumulated over the last few weeks while we were gone, then waited for night to descend on the river so we could start paddling downstream.
Chapter 51
Two days later found us lying in the mud of a drainage ditch. Overhead, the stars blazed away like nothing I had ever seen when the world was full of light. I watched the International Space Station trace a slow arc overhead, an endless coffin, and thought of Brit. I wondered if she would ever get to those stars.
Lying in drainage ditches in a post-Zombie world is hard to do, because you never know what is lying in the ditch with you. We all were tensed up, ready at any moment to grapple in a death grip with a zombie that had been hiding under the leaves. Fortunately the area had been cleared pretty well when the Army established Fort Orange. Still, it kinda made your balls crawl up inside of you as you crawled along, poking in front of you with your knife in one hand and your pistol in the other.
The Fort itself was located at Albany Airport, for use of the runway, and the center of the base was the former Joint Forces HQ of the New York National Guard, a modern, two story building. The glass had mostly been replaced by sandbags and a berm had been bulldozed around, with guard towers every hundred meters or so. Impressive, until you realized how understaffed Task Force Empire really was. The towers were often not even manned in the day time, just supplemented by a roving patrol. After the local area had been cleared, no one expected a zombie horde, and Firebase Mohawk, located ten miles westward, could easily lay down an effective barrage of BB rounds. Around it had been cleared a good field of fire for three hundred meters. Crossing it was going to be a problem, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with it until I came across this ditch. We had been inching our way through it for more than an hour, and we were now within a quick sprint of the berm. That last stretch was going to be a bitch, since it was just under a tower. What I was counting on was lax security and Brit. It had been more than six months since there had been any incident around the Fort, except for civilian survivors showing up at the gate every now and then. I had considered trying to disguise ourselves and talk our way onto the base, but we were too well-known. Instead, hopefully Brit was borrowing a little from the ancient Chinese military genius Sun Tzu: “All warfare is deception.”
At 0221, an orange fireball climbed up into the sky on the other side of the Airfield, followed by a thump that I felt in ground before I heard it. Alarms started wailing, and I knew that attention would be drawn there for the next twenty minutes or so. We waited past that time for everything to calm down. After an hour, the adrenaline from the explosion wore off and hopefully people got sleepy.
At 0325, we crawled slowly down the drainage ditch to where it ran up to the berm. I heard voices in the tower above us. Brit had come over to the base of the tower and was talking to the Fobbits on guard duty. Most likely, one was asleep at this time, worn out by trying to watch in the direction of the explosion, and the other was distracted by Brit. More likely, there was only one on duty anyway. We snipped our way through the barbed wire, threw a blanket over the concertina wire and rolled over the berm, Doc pulling the blanket after him. We crawled under a tent, one I knew contained spare supplies and had no one in it. After fifteen minutes or so, Brit joined us.
I wrapped her in a bear hug and started to squeeze. Damn, she felt good!
“Whoa, ow, ow, calm down there, Idiot! Surgery, gunshot, hellloooo!” I put her carefully down and kissed her full on the lips. She touched my unshaven face gently, then pushed me away and punched me as hard as she could in the gut, right under the plate of my body armor. I doubled over, and gasped out, “What the hell was that for?”
“For letting me get shot, you stupid ass. How does it fraking feel, huh?” The guys were laughing as I tried to catch my breath. “Did you like my little diversion? Rubber band around a grenade, put it inside a can of diesel fuel earlier today. Not bad timing wise, if I do say so myself.”
“What did you say to get the tower guard’s attention?”
“I told him I had the hots for him and made a date for when he gets off shift in the morning. `Cause, you know, I’m EASY! Hell, any piece of ass in this place could wrap this whole camp around her finger.”
After I recovered, we made our way casually through the tents to the Officers’ trailer park. No one paid attention to us in the dark. Doc and Ahmed had moved off to the motor pool to get us some transportation, and I expected them along any minute.
We stopped around the corner from the Jackasses’ trailer, and ducked down as a figure in PT uniform, two reflective belts and shower shoes came down the graveled walk, carrying a rifle and a towel and shining a flashlight on the ground in front of him. As he passed us, Jonesy’s arm shot out and hit him on the side of the head, knocking the figure out cold. Our old friend Sergeant Major Peters.
“Pray for the right things, and the Lord will hear you!” rumbled Jonesy, and he quickly stripped the SGM and left him lying butt-naked on the ground, hog-tied with duct tape over his mouth. “Thank you, Jesus, for happenstance! I hope the mosquitoes eat him alive.”
“Are you done messing around?” I asked. Jonesy laughed again. “After you, Nick.”
“Boys and their stupid games,” muttered Brit, but she spit on the still-unconscious figure anyway, and kicked him once, hard, with her combat boot, in the ribs.
We turned the corner, made sure the coast was clear, and were about to kick the door in when it opened. A young female soldier stepped out, kissed the Colonel, then walked away. I heard Brit mutter “rank climber” under her breath. The Colonel stood in the doorway watching her go, scratching himself. He went to shut the door, but a huge hand clad in a combat glove stopped it.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed, and then my arm wrapped around his neck in a sleeper hold. I choked him until he stopped struggling, and we taped his mouth, zip tied his hands and feet and threw an empty sandbag over his head. As we finished, Ahmed pulled up in a battered HUMVEE. We slung Jackass into the back, hid him under some tarps, and piled in.
At the front gate, we stopped for them to r
aise the barrier. No one ever stopped anyone leaving the base. The Sergeant of the Guard, an E-6 I knew pretty well, came over to me.
“Damn, Nick, I thought you guys were dead! Came by to pick up Brit, huh? Glad she’s out of the hospital.”
“As Mark Twain once said, reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated. We’re on our way south, start scouting for the push downriver.”
“Well, you guys be safe out there. Shoot ‘em in the head!”
“Always do, Sarge, always do!” Ahmed gunned the engine, Jonesy spun the turret around to face forward, and we rolled out the gate.
Chapter 52
We threaded our way down Route 7, swerving carefully around the wrecked cars. This stretch wasn’t too bad, since it ran from one populated area to another. No one was trying to get between those. The traffic jams were bad just outside the small towns, when people realized that the locals weren’t going to let them in or there was no gas for sale. Come into a valley in front of a small town and there would be a pile up like you wouldn’t believe. Many of the cars would have bullet holes in them too, where they tried to run the barricades the locals had set up. 90% of the time they had to deal with so many refuges that the locals ran out of ammo, and they couldn’t defend themselves when a horde of Zombies came through. If they did admit refugees, they quickly overwhelmed the resources of the town; anarchy set in with the same result. Only here or there were towns and villages able to put up a coherent defense and hold out, and even then many times starvation did them in, a year later. Twelve months after the plague started, ninety percent of the east coast was either infected or dead from violence and starvation.
Reaching the bridge over the Hudson where the highway turns into Hoosick Street, we arrived just as the sun was rising in the East. The sky was light above the hills, but down in the river valley, it was still covered in shadows. As we pulled up to the barricade that stretched across the bridge, Jonesy let loose with a burst from the 240B machine gun in the turret to call the Zombies, aiming it out over the water. The gunshots echoed through the dead city on either side of the river, and immediately on the other side of the barrier the Zombie moan started, first one, then more as they started to stumble toward the sound of the shots. All along the Hudson, all the way down the river to Newburgh, Army Engineers had built a barricade across each bridge, a ten foot high barrier that stretched across the width of the bridge. There was a lockable, heavy wooden gate that could be opened to let vehicles through, and a ladder on either side that would allow people to climb up and over. Sensors and cameras were embedded in the barrier to let the troops in the Operations center know if anyone was passing through. These walls were put up to keep the Zombies on the east side of the Hudson from crossing over to the west side and re-contaminating any cleared areas. The same was true for the bridges over the Mohawk River and just about any other major bridge. It was SOP for the Army when they went in to clear an area. Either build it, or blow it, and isolate an area. Zombies can cross water, but don’t like to, so rivers made a great barrier to them.