HVZA (Book 3): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse [Project Decimation]

by Zimmermann, Linda

  Flinging the girl aside like a rag doll, Becks tugged hard on the rope to make sure it would hold her weight. Taking a deep breath, she took a “leap of faith” and swung her left leg over the column. Dropping several feet with a gasp, the rope finally caught and held. The crevice was about the width of the space beneath a bed, but less than two feet deep. It was filled with feathery little roots, smelly fungus, trickling water, and dense spider webs, but as Becks wedged herself into it, it felt as comforting as a king-sized bed in a luxury hotel. The instant her head and body cleared the surface of the cliff face, three more adult zombies fell right in front of her. Before Becks could tell the pilot she was okay, it was like the floodgates suddenly opened and a steady stream of zombies started dropping over the cliff.

  Some hit the column of rock before bouncing off, and some hung onto the column for a moment before several of his or her companions knocked him off, and others fell straight down—headfirst, feet first, or spiraling. A few that fell feet first and facing the cliff looked at Becks as they passed with blank stares, having no clue that they were about two seconds away from being splattered on the boulders below.

  It was very cramped quarters standing wedged into the crevice in the rock, but Becks was able to reach her radio and let the pilot know that she was safe, and never before in her life did she appreciate how relative a term could be in its meaning. The pilot responded that there was nothing he could do right now, but he would land at the Exit 5 depot and be on call for the moment he could help.

  Becks thought back to that magical weekend she and Cam had spent at Niagara Falls soon after they had met, where she was to realize for the first time in her life that she was in love. When they actually left their hotel room, they did some sightseeing and had donned those silly plastic ponchos and gone into a tunnel that opened behind the falls. The sound and power of the water crashing down in front of them was something Becks would never forget, and she thought she would never experience anything like it again.

  Now Niagara was eclipsed by the cascade of zombies pouring over the cliff in an ever-widening line of self–destruction. This sound of countless bodies hurtling down to be smashed and broken on the rocks below was indescribable and nauseating, and Becks tried to be clinical about it to deal with the horror.

  “Skull. Skull. Tibia. Rib cage,” she said out loud as if playing some grotesque form of Bingo, trying to guess which bones were shattering by their sound. But the attempt at a distraction didn’t last long, as soon so many bodies were falling at once that all of the snapping, crunching, and cracking melded together in what sounded like the world’s largest demolition derby with nonstop high-speed collisions between hundreds and hundreds of cars.

  After a while she just shut her eyes to it all and put her hands over her ears. This was the outcome she had planned and prayed for—the bulk of the herd heading towards the cliff and being pushed over the edge, doing to themselves what the Army, volunteers, and PDZs couldn’t hope to do during weeks of battle. But now that she was witnessing their demise up close and personal, and she could see their faces and hear their bones splintering, Becks couldn’t help but think back to the people that they were—the parents, spouses, co-workers, friends, lovers, and enemies that lived in all of the houses, drove all of those cars, and ate in all the restaurants that now were dark and empty.

  Becks was trapped in a scene out of hell that even Dante couldn’t imagine, and after a couple of hours, she feared it might drive her mad. Then over the din of the pounding bodies and blasting boat horns, her radio crackled with a burst of static. After another crackle of static, a voice broke in.

  “Commander Truesdale, this is Combat Headquarters. Are you okay?” someone asked awkwardly, realizing the stupidity of such a question to a woman wedged into a cliff covered in falling zombies—something everyone in West Point was watching, thanks to Henry’s drone feed.

  “Just peachy, thanks for asking,” Becks replied, glad to hear another living being.

  “Wanted to let you know that Cam just contacted us. He’s still surrounded, but safe inside the truck. We did inform him of your situation, and he wanted us to…well…to play a song for you,” the soldier said, sounding even more awkward. “It took a while to find it, but we have it if you want to hear it.”

  It must be a love song or something inspirational, or maybe the song they played at our wedding for our first dance, Becks thought, and told the soldier to proceed.

  There were several seconds of silence, two more bursts of static, and then some music and lyrics she couldn’t place started blasting. It was some sort of 1980s dance music, which wasn’t something either of them ever listened to, but it soon became clear as the singing female duo belted out the refrain to the ridiculous song.

  “It’s raining men! Hallelujah, it’s raining men!”

  The tremendous stress, tension, and fear of her predicament suddenly vanished, at least for a few minutes, and Becks began laughing so hard that if she wasn’t so tightly packed into a rock crevice she would have fallen to her knees.

  By the time that the silly hit song by the Weather Girls had finished, Becks had tears streaming down her cheeks and her lungs actually hurt from the unrestrained laughter. When she was finally able to talk, she asked headquarters to relay a message to Cam, who had once again known exactly what to do to give her the renewed strength and resolve to go on.

  “Tell Cam he’s an asshole…and that’s why I love him.”

  As darkness fell, the base of the cliff was deep with bodies stretching along hundreds of yards of shoreline. Most of the smashed zombies rolled off into the water so that a steady line of battered corpses was now floating down the river toward the George Washington Bridge—back where they came from—looking very much like thousands of pieces of twisted driftwood.

  The people in the boats continued making a racket, and had even started a second group farther south, hoping to entice the section of the herd that had done an about-face to head toward the river. The Snowplow Division, as HQ was calling them, had finally stopped their retreat and had used the trucks, and anything else they could find, to block the PIP and “encourage” that part of the herd to the east to another section of cliff that would also be an excellent location for zombies to push one another to their final death.

  Along the way, the troops had come upon the home of Joanna Gilchrist, who came out of her house and gasped in wonder at so many living, breathing humans. She had thought for a very long time that she was the last person on earth. She also felt more dead than the zombies that threatened her. At the sight of so many people—more than she had seen since the start of quarantine—Joanna fell to her knees and sobbed until she passed out. One of the female soldiers, who had twisted an ankle, volunteered to stay with the woman in her house, and her friends promised to return for them soon—which was another of those very relative terms in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.

  On the Western Front, Captain Lennox and his troops were catching some rest. The melee between the western section of the herd and the PDZs continued unabated. It seemed as though a PDZ would rather kill than eat, which was an unexpected benefit. The number of mounds of bodies, and those zombies eating them, kept growing at an impressive rate. HQ had asked if they should be creating more PDZs, but Lennox advised them to hold off and see what the morning’s light revealed. After all, even if the herd was totally eliminated, there would still be a lot of PDZs to deal with, as well, and they were the biggest and strongest of them all.

  The best news was from Margo and Sticky Pete’s divisions on the northern perimeter. As it became harder and harder for the zombies trying to push forward, because of all the bodies on the ground, they started filtering to the east, along the same paths as their companions who were currently falling over the cliff. It started with just a handful, but as had often been seen with the “herd mentality” of the ZIPs, the majority of them suddenly, and simultaneously, turned as a unit.

  While it was still light, Command
HQ had estimated the northern section to be between 70,000 and 80,000 strong, and everyone was very impressed that they were able to come up with this number. What no one realized was that they arrived at this calculation by recalling the crowd size at the Army Black Knights football home games at Michie Stadium at West Point, which had a capacity of 38,000. Using Henry’s drone imagery, the general staff figured the northern section to contain about twice that number of people.

  It was wonderful news that this huge threat to the Hudson Valley might continue to destroy itself. There were two people, however, who weren’t completely thrilled. Cam was still stuck in the overturned ice cream truck. Now that it was dark, even if there was a break or opening it wouldn’t be safe, given that he wouldn’t be able to see or run. And now that the capacity of two Army-Navy games was also headed his way, he would just have to lay low and whisper occasional messages to HQ to be relayed to Becks. As bad as he had it, though, he had five-star accommodations compared to the hell she was enduring.

  “I just want to get off my feet for a few minutes!” Becks shouted in pain and frustration.

  Every muscle burned and ached, and her legs were cramping after so many hours of standing wedged into the crevice. She wasn’t even able to stretch her arm or leg outside of her craggy nook as any one of the countless falling bodies could cause her serious injury. She had managed to reach for her canteen and an energy bar, but the past ordeals in New York City and Albany, not to mention the long hours in the lab, had taken their toll and she just wanted to sleep.

  At times of great stress and discomfort—which Becks had decided had happened way too often in recent years—her mind often did not settle on thoughts that helped her situation. As an example, for a solid twenty minutes she recalled every detail of the paper she had once read on the physiological and psychological effects of “Positional Torture,” basically where prisoners were forced to remain standing for days at a time. Pain became excruciating, delirium and hallucinations were common, and ultimately, if taken to its cruel and inevitable conclusion, the victim would succumb to circulatory failure.

  Realizing she was not thinking the most productive thoughts, she requested that HQ keep contacting her and try to keep her mind occupied. Around midnight, a steady stream of well-wishes began being patched through to her from friends and coworkers from West Point, Cam’s compound, Fort Ace, and troops in the field. They really helped her to focus and fight through the pain—and growing feeling of claustrophobia. The drainpipe in which she had spent that winter night was spacious by comparison, although she was glad to have spiders this time instead of rats.

  The best medicine was from Phil, who had been sleeping on and off in that same chair in HQ. The private he initially bothered was off duty, but the replacement was still feeding him updates. When he heard that Becks needed distractions, he ran back to the lab and returned with a stack of status updates and problems that needed solving.

  Science was both Rebecca Truesdale’s refuge and purpose in life. Challenged by equations, puzzled by anomalous data, and fixated on stats and results, she was transported from her tiny, rock prison to a place where her brain was free and her pain was forgotten. Phil was always impressed with Becks’ mind, but to hear it perform so flawlessly under such horrendous conditions was a privilege to behold.

  Dawn over the Hudson River was a beautiful sight—what Becks could see of it through falling corpses. A short time before sunrise, there had been a brief, blessed, period where no bodies fell past her. Theoretically, she could have been extracted during that time—if the helicopter was already in the air, and if they knew for sure how long the zombie-free window would be. Unfortunately, Becks had waited a couple of minutes before calling HQ to make sure it was a real break, and then by the time the helicopter pilot was lifting off from the Exit 5 depot the “Hudson River Falls” had resumed its gruesome cascade of bodies over the cliff. At least Becks had taken the opportunity to stretch her stiff arms and legs.

  She had even taken a great risk and held on tightly to the rope so she could tilt her body backwards out of the crevice for a minute. The resulting rush of blood to her head made everything spin and her ears pound, but it felt so good to upend herself for even a short time.

  She would have loved to remain upside down for a little bit longer, but the crack of branches and the shuffle of feet overhead signaled that another wave of lemming zombies was headed her way. There was a moment of panic when she went to pull herself upright and her arms felt like jello, but adrenaline pumped her into overdrive and she was safely wedged back into her crevice before the leading edge of this latest section was being pushed off the cliff.

  Henry and his drone team were back in action with the first light, and Becks was thrilled to hear that the ice cream truck might be in the clear within two or three hours. More good news came when Henry reported that the southern section of the herd had reached the edge of the palisades a couple of miles to the south and, with the unstoppable force of tens of thousands of zombies drawn by the sounds in the river, had just begun pushing one another over the cliff.

  Small splinter groups of several hundreds, or even a thousand or so zombies, had wandered off into New Jersey, which could seriously inhibit efforts there, but Project Decimation had been battle tested and proven effective, and the rules of engagement from here on out would be rewritten. Perhaps it was the beginning of the end of the apocalypse in the Hudson Valley and surrounding regions?

  Chapter 18

  Command HQ didn’t know that so many people were still alive in the Northeast, and in good fighting shape, as individuals and small communities scattered from Pennsylvania to Maine were converging on West Point by the thousands. There were even a lot of people coming down from Canada, with one group saying they would rather face a zombie megaherd than another brutal Canadian winter.

  One couldn’t help wondering if this cohesion and determination had been exhibited after quarantine, that maybe the worst of the apocalypse could have been averted. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, and your average accountant, student, sales clerk, and factory worker didn’t know squat back then about survival and fighting. It only took a matter of weeks for civilization to completely collapse, but years for people to be forged in the fire of desperation and learn how to rise up and take back what they had lost.

  Deciding to strike while the iron was hot and when adequate personnel was available, these waves of volunteers were immediately sent out to the Exit 5 depot to be deployed into the field wherever they were most needed. Many of them were shocked to see all of the orange-haired PDZs attacking their fellow zombies, but it gave everyone hope that the human race was no longer fighting a losing battle—or fighting alone.

  There was an unfortunate incident where a young teen from Vermont—who may have consumed way too much liquid courage—didn’t fully comprehend the nature of the PDZs and thought he could put one on a leash and use it like an attack dog. The boy’s screams quickly became unintelligible gurgling, and then there was silence, as his “pet PDZ” tore into his throat and was quickly joined by several other regular zombies who were getting their first taste of fresh meat in ages.

  At the start of infection, the sight of a young boy being eviscerated would have been completely demoralizing and sent the general population running to hide. But anyone left standing at this point had witnessed and experienced so many horrors that “one drunken idiot’s death” wasn’t going to stop them.

  Captain Lennox quickly welcomed and integrated these fresh troops into his forces and knew right where to send them for maximum effect. Margo and Sticky Pete kind of looked at each other with a “now what are we supposed to do?” expression, as they had suddenly become senior field commanders, but they somehow managed to wing it. Reinforcements had no way to reach the Snowplow Division, but their small numbers were holding their own and just letting zombie nature take its course as the herd marched onward to the cliff.

  As the sun rose, the temperature did, as well
, and by midmorning it was already an unusually hot day. That heat made Becks extra sleepy and she fought to keep her eyes open. Twice, she nodded off for a few seconds, but managed to catch herself before falling out of the crevice. Her shoulder did take a glancing blow from a falling body when she leaned too far out the third time she fell asleep, and that snapped her back to full wakefulness for a while, but the struggle with fatigue, dehydration, and pain was quickly wearing her down.

  “Don’t know…how much longer…I can take this,” she radioed to HQ as she fought the impulse to just give up.

  “Oh, don’t be such a crybaby,” came the response from an all-too familiar voice.

  “Cam, you’re safe!?” Becks yelled, feeling life returning to her numbed limbs.

  “Cameron Everett has left the ice cream truck!” he announced, and then explained how Sticky Pete had taken an impressive force of 2,000 volunteers and cleared a path through the remnants of the trailing edge of the herd to reach his position. They were stretchering him back to the road where—against his wishes—they would be taking him to West Point.

  “Uh…I wish I could say they were on their way to get you,” he said with some hesitation, “but the herd is still pretty thick.”

  “Tell them not to risk all those people just for me. I used to pull all-nighters in the ER, filled with gangbangers and crazy people, so I guess I can manage watching a zombie waterfall for a little bit longer.”

  Several more hours of torture ensued as Becks did everything she could to battle the extreme heat, her cramping muscles, and sheer exhaustion, but even Phil’s equations stopped helping as her mind began to wander. The instant she was unable to calculate the square root of 173, Phil informed the commanding general that they had to do something ASAP!