He started with the assault rifle, the M4, explaining the basic structure. She learned how to load a magazine, how to load the magazine into the rifle (“It is not a gun, lady.”) and how to arm it with the charging handle. Each magazine held thirty rounds, and the rifle had an effective range of five-hundred meters. She was shown where the spent brass was ejected, how to “safe” the weapon and eject an empty magazine, and how to switch from single shot semi-auto to a three round automatic burst. He told her full-auto was a waste of ammo, and told her if he ever caught her switched to “rock and roll” she would do pushups until her arms turned to Jell-O. She spent an hour “snapping in” with the unloaded rifle, as Postman showed her how to hold it, how to fit it into the hollow of her shoulder and where to rest her cheek. He taught her about safety, Lord how he went on about safety.
“Tell me about the scope.”
He shook his head in disgust. “That is a sight, an ACOG sight to be precise. It’s a combat sight designed for quick use.”
She looked through it. A pair of radiant green chevrons seemed to float in the air, points used to mark the target, and not unlike a video game. “Does it see in the dark?” He said it did not.
The M4 didn’t kick as much as she expected, and after the first magazine she barely noticed it at all. Postman put her right to work on targets in the street below, and she spent over two hours killing zombies. It was a total rush. She also learned that a head shot was not an easy thing to make, and Skye sent more than her share of bullets whining off pavement and brick buildings, or thunking harmlessly into chests and arms and legs, which didn’t bother the Tangos one bit.
“The human head is only about five-point-nine inches wide to begin with,” the sergeant explained. “The farther away from it you are, the smaller it gets.”
She missed a lot. She hit a lot of dead flesh to no effect. The kills, however, those were the real rush. Seeing one of the walking dead stiffen and collapse as one of her bullets found its mark, that puff of pink mist and grey matter that popped when her shot went where it was supposed to, that was worth every ache and pain.
“Understand that hitting a target from a stationary position is much different than from a vehicle-”
“Which is almost impossible,” Taylor added.
“-or while walking.”
She nodded at the sergeant. “I want to learn that, too.”
The soldiers looked at each other and laughed. “Well, Miss Dennison, I was kind of hoping we’d link up with our troops and get you someplace safe before we had to teach you the advanced stuff.”
Skye blushed. She didn’t want to be shipped off like some refugee. She wanted an M4 in her hands all the time, to be a hunter, not a victim.
Postman had worked with young soldiers for many years, not only at home but in both Afghanistan and Iraq. They were boys who had seen friends killed, whose childhood was quickly stripped away by the brutality of war. He saw something in the girl’s eyes he knew well, something he appreciated as a professional soldier, but also found a little sad. “Back to work.”
The late summer sun took its time going down, and they had enough light to use the assault rifle until around nine. Then the sergeant introduced her to the M24. “The fancy name for this is the M24E-XM2010. Got all that?”
“Not a bit of it.”
“Wise ass. Doesn’t matter, it’s just an improved variation of the basic M24 sniper rifle, very different from the M4.” And he was right. Everything about it was different; longer, heavier, harder to handle and with a completely different balance. It had a snap out bipod to keep it steady (“But a sandbag or a pack as a shooting platform is best.”) and carried only five, big .300 bullets in a stubby magazine. At the end was a long suppressor designed to reduce noise and flash, and keep the recoil manageable. This rifle did have a scope, Postman explained, and could be swapped out for another capable of night vision.
The sergeant went through all the same procedures as with the assault rifle, loading, proper grip and sighting, and more safety. In the last of the light he had her fire five rounds, and she discovered that it kicked like a bastard. She missed with three, grazed a hip which succeeded in spinning the corpse in a half circle, and blew off an arm with her last bullet. Not a head shot among them.
Postman spoke about curved trajectories, minute of angle, vectors and fractions of gravity, range, crosswinds and leading the target. It was an incomprehensible jumble, and not understanding made her angry since she had always thought of herself as a fast learner.
The sergeant saw her frustration. “Our snipers go to school for months just to learn the fundamentals. Don’t expect to pick it up in a couple of hours.”
That helped a little.
“Just remember some basics. The farther away from the target you are, the more the bullet drops, so the higher above the mark you have to aim. Fire a little bit in front of moving targets, where they’re going to be when the bullet gets there. The rest is Kentucky windage.”
“What?”
He smiled. “Guessing. Shooting and adjusting until you get it right.”
“Why didn’t you just say that first?”
“Because it burns through your ammo. Remember to steady your breathing, and let it out slowly as you fire. Don’t forget to relocate. That’s one of the most important lessons a sniper learns.”
Taylor was watching her face and saw her eyebrow go up. “Changing position after a couple of shots. The longer you stay put, the easier it is for your targets to find you. Movement equals life.”
They were words she would remember.
“But we’ve been shooting from the same place for hours,” she said. “They keep coming.”
Postman looked at the street. The fog didn’t reach this far in from the bay, and there was a half-moon above. It revealed hundreds of corpses congregating below, all facing the building from which they were shooting, steadily pressing forward. “Yeah, I noticed. They seem drawn to the gunfire.”
“So explain why that’s not bad, if movement is life.”
“Well, for one thing they can’t shoot back. And I don’t really think they’re smart enough to figure out how to get up here.” He gestured out at the town. “We didn’t see a single freak on a rooftop, did we? They’re more like cattle.” He snapped on the night scope and gave her back the rifle. This time Skye scored four hits, including a head shot. That one just disintegrated from the neck up.
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
“Yeah, holy shit,” Postman said, laughing. “At short range, with that caliber bullet, you could blow the head off a cow.”
Skye looked at the big rifle in her hands. Its power was humbling.
Now, as she stretched out on the poncho, her M4 loaded and resting beside her, she looked up at clouds tinted silver by moonlight, stars darting in and out of them high above. It was the same sky that had been there last night, but tonight the world it looked down upon was very, very different. Had it only been this morning when everything changed? Her mom and sister laughing on the grass in front of the dorm, dad grumbling good naturedly about carrying luggage… It felt like a lifetime had passed since then. Thoughts of her family finally carried her off to sleep.
At first she thought it was a nightmare.
An explosion. Snarling. Gunfire.
“Skye! Skye, get out!”
She came full awake. The dead surged through the rooftop door, which had been shredded by Taylor’s claymore, spilling out in a tumble, scrambling to their feet, still more pouring out behind them. Sgt. Postman was buried beneath thrashing shapes, his legs kicking as a dozen corpses tore at him. Taylor was ten feet away and on one knee, firing and dropping shapes in the doorway. Not enough of them.
“Move!” he screamed. “Skye, move, move!”
Bodies fell, only to have more stagger over them. Taylor dropped an empty magazine, reloaded and started firing again. “Get off the roof!” Snarling shapes slammed into him, bringing the young soldier down with an ang
ry yell. Teeth and hands tore at him, and in seconds his yelling turned to a thick gurgle.
Skye was on her feet. Postman had stopped moving, and she couldn’t even see Taylor under the pile of hungry fiends. More corpses stumbled through the door, looking around, spotting Skye. She snatched up her rifle and grabbed the pack she had been using as a pillow, racing across the roof and throwing it over the side. She threw the rifle strap around her neck as the dead pursued her towards the drop off.
With one hand she grabbed the arched top of the ladder and swung over, her sneakers slipping on the rungs and she hurried down. Arms shot down at her over the low wall, a fist catching some of her hair. She screamed and fought to pull free as another hand groped for a hold of its own. Skye gripped the sides of the ladder and swung her legs out, letting her full body weight drop. Hair came loose with a ripping sound, and she screamed as she clutched at the metal rungs, stopping her descent before she could free-fall. Moans came from above as she descended, feet moving fast.
The alley would be filled with the dead, she thought, standing and waiting for her. They would pull her off the ladder and tear her apart. When her feet hit the asphalt she spun, gripping the rifle and bringing it up quickly, determined to take as many with her as she could.
The alley was empty in both directions.
She found her pack and pulled it on, slinging the rifle strap properly around her neck as she had been shown, taking the weapon in both hands. At the top of the ladder, agitated shapes still clawed at the air. She wanted to go back up there, to kill the things attacking the men who had saved her life, knowing it was too late. Tears sprang into her eyes and she wiped at them savagely, shaking her head. No more, she told herself. Not me.
Skye put the rifle to her shoulder, switched off the safety, and jogged into the night.
FIFTEEN
Fresno
Air Lieutenant Vladimir Yurish was lean and tall, almost too tall to be a helicopter pilot, even in the Russian Federation. He kept his knobby head shaved bald, and with his flattened nose, broad lips and protruding ears, he looked like something from a medieval fairy tale. Something which lived under a bridge. His colleagues back home affectionately called him Kynnet, or troll.
It had never bothered him, and hadn’t kept Anya from loving him as a husband for fifteen years. Their three-year-old Lita had often taken his face in her small hands and said “handsome,” then kissed him on the forehead. Both were gone now, lost in an automobile accident four years ago, during a simple trip to buy groceries. It still hurt, and he thought about them every day. Seeing what the world had become, however, made him quietly grateful that they had not lived. Losing them was devastating, but he couldn’t imagine the pain of knowing they had turned into what was down there.
No, The Troll would never be one of the handsome faces on the recruiting posters. He was, however, an exceptional pilot, and that was why he was here in the U.S. The Federation was purchasing a hundred UH-60A Blackhawks, and Lt. Yurish and several others had been sent here to qualify as instructors for the new machines.
He liked the Blackhawk, liked the high quality with which it was manufactured and the relative ease of maintenance (at least compared to Russian birds.) He liked the U.S. even more, its prosperity and opportunity, the friendly people and smiling faces, the availability of anything a person could ever want. A week ago if someone had told him he would be flying over a U.S. city with a door gunner firing down into crowds of Americans, he would have said they were drunk or insane. But then, the shapes down there weren’t really Americans anymore, were they?
“Lieutenant, orbit right, got a cluster at three-o’clock.” The door gunner’s voice came through the intercom.
“Copy.” He worked the anti-torque pedals and the cyclic between his knees, and moved the helicopter into a slow orbit to the right. The machinegun mounted in the open right door chattered. Sixty-four feet long and seven feet wide, five tons unloaded, the Sikorsky UH-60 could carry eleven troops with full gear (more if it had to,) blast along at one-hundred-eighty-three mph, and had a ceiling of nineteen-thousand feet. It was a comfortable aircraft to fly, but despite the relaxed look on Vlad’s unfortunately-shaped face, it – like all helicopters – required constant control and correction, especially during combat operations. No one was shooting at him, but he was flying low over an urban area, and a mistake could put him and his crew on the ground in seconds. He had no desire to be down there.
“Get some, fuckers,” his gunner said, letting off short bursts.
Vlad’s co-pilot, an American (he was the only Russian) looked out the right window. “There’s more up the block, RJ. Coming around that school bus.”
Between bursts the gunner grunted, “Got it.”
Groundhog-7, the call sign for Vlad’s Blackhawk, was circling Thomas Jefferson High School in the suburbs of Fresno, the streets and buildings passing one-hundred feet beneath them. A late summer evening was coming on, the sky a riot of streaking pink clouds and skies fading through blue into navy and purple, a ten knot wind coming in from the distant Pacific. Vlad held a steady orbit as his gunner – he had only one, who shifted back and forth between the port and starboard weapons as needed – provided cover for the operation below. Groundhog-7 was the only bird assigned, the only one which could be spared. They actually had more aircraft than pilots, which was why Air Lieutenant Yurish had been given command of this ship.
“RJ,” the co-pilot said, a second lieutenant named Conroy, “you missed all the freaks and just lit up the bus.”
“It ain’t as easy as it looks,” RJ replied.
The co-pilot snorted. “Hell, didn’t you play video games?”
“You’re welcome to pop back here and take over the trigger, el-tee. I’ll sit up front and help the Mad Russian fly this pig.”
“Nyet!” Vladimir barked. “This is complex machinery and it requires more than a grammar school education, RJ. Lieutenant Conroy has already discovered this, much to his dismay.”
“Copy that,” RJ said, laughing. Conroy grinned as Vlad watched his instruments and kept the bird in a perfect, lazy right hand circle. The fenced football field of Thomas Jefferson was being used as a refugee collection point, and a single company of National Guardsmen was trying to maintain its perimeter, handle the civilians at the gate and protect the growing line of them stretching out well into the high school’s parking lot. It was a slow process, made so because every refugee had to be checked for bites before being allowed to enter. Those bitten were escorted off by MPs, and Vlad tried not to speculate on what happened to them. It was necessary, though. The same type of operation had been tried up and down the coast, and failure to check for bites, letting the infected inside the perimeter, had ended in disaster.
“Got a side street with lots of targets,” RJ called.
Vlad slowed and hovered for a moment while the gunner chopped into them, and then resumed his orbit.
Trucks waited in a row on the fifty yard line, and they would serve as transportation to get the refugees to Lemoore. Naval Air Station Lemoore was a much more secure facility, Vlad’s assigned base since the crisis began, and could handle the mass of fleeing civilians. At least it would put more secure fencing between them and the freaks, as the Americans had taken to calling them. The problem below was immediately obvious. A thousand people wandered and waited on the football field, with close to a thousand more lined up at the gates. There were only twenty trucks.
RJ was switching out ammo boxes in the back, and Conroy was on the radio relaying the status of the operation back to base. As twilight fell and a deepening gloom fell over the streets, the only way to distinguish live refugees from the dead was the speed of their movement. The National Guard had erected generator powered lights on the field – the only source of illumination in this part of blacked-out Fresno – and loudspeakers blared a repeating message that all civilians should immediately make their way to the high school. It was working to some extent, as fleeing people raced throug
h the streets from all directions, almost exclusively on foot since the roads were blocked by fields of abandoned cars. The problems was that the dead were drawn not only to the running figures, but to the sound of the loudspeakers as well.
The gunner’s M240 woke up as he unleashed long lines of tracer ammo down into the gloom. Several minutes later Vlad heard him curse. “Kynnet, we got a problem.” Vlad enjoyed the nickname, had taught it to his new comrades, and someone had even painted it on his flight helmet. “This isn’t doing a damn bit of good. The freaks aren’t going down.”
“Are you even hitting them?” Conroy asked. “I can barely see them down there.”
“Yes, sir, but it just chews them up. A few fall, maybe one in ten, but the rest just keep coming.”
“Stay on it,” Vlad ordered.
“Roger that.”
Both pilot and co-pilot could see that the gunner was right; the automatic fire was having minimal effect. On the ground, the guardsmen were engaging “leakers” that had made it through the Blackhawk’s suppression fire. There were plenty of them, coming down side streets and across parking lots, piling up against the football field’s fence. The civilians drew closer to the trucks as the vastly outnumbered guardsmen fired at the fence. At the main gates, panic erupted.
The line to get in was five to six people wide, and nearly fifty yards long, creeping forward imperceptibly as refugees were slowly cleared to enter. One platoon of guardsmen was strung out along its length on both sides, looking outwards. When slouching corpses began coming through the cars in the lot and closing on the line, and as rifle shots started to light off like strings of firecrackers, the refugee mass began to scream and push forward.
When the first of the undead blundered into the line and took down an elderly man, all remaining order disintegrated. People began shoving each other out of the way, trampling those unfortunate enough to fall. Hands gouged at faces and fists were thrown, and the shrieks of frightened children in their parent’s arms added to the chorus of fear.
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