Marty worked the phones as if this was an election night. He firmly believed that the army would have no trouble containing the issue. For him it was fly-over country. From the lofty view of his Lear jet—it was government owned but he treated it as his own personal property—that part of the country always looked so empty, as if no one really lived there. He kept up a steady stream of calls, hoping to expand the power and the budget of FEMA so “This sort of thing can’t happen again!” Marty owed favors and turning FEMA into an outreach program of the government would go a long way to paying some of them off. Yes, it would mean another bloated, wasteful bureaucracy, but it also meant jobs for the right people and a slush fund that could be raided when campaign donations ran a little dry.
The Governor of Connecticut, Christine Warner was following the situation just west of her border with a wary eye. She had taken a cue from Vermont and had put her National Guardsman on alert. When she watched the canned footage of the President’s meeting, she wasn’t fooled, as was almost all of America, into thinking the border was secure. According to a map accompanying the meeting there were “elements” of six different infantry battalions on the border. That was completely true and yet many of these “elements” consisted of a squad or less and frequently the soldiers weren’t even in sight of one another.
Still, the Governor was nervous. She knew the President and she didn’t trust him. In his three years in office, the man had proved to be an expert in only two areas: self-aggrandizement and photo opportunities.
Despite the reassurances of the President, the Governor of the great state of Connecticut buzzed her secretary. “Carla, get me General Arnold, please.”
The alert went out rapidly and the men were primed, unfortunately, there weren’t all that many soldiers available. In all of Connecticut, there was but a single National Guard infantry battalion—eight hundred fighting men. This was supplemented by two companies of military police, two more medical companies, and two engineering companies, both of which excelled in bridging rivers but not in battling zombies. Finally, the force was augmented by four companies of state militia. They were ceremonial only, generally only called upon when a parade was scheduled, in fact, two of the companies were comprised of Horse Guards and many of the men showed up to formation with their lances ready!
They assembled quickly and the doors to their armories were flung wide. The Governor of Connecticut had no qualms about using heavy machine guns and even mortars to defend his borders. The men geared up; their trucks and Humvees were fueled and the first companies were ready to leave New London by four that afternoon; exceedingly fast by everyone’s estimation and yet by then the first zombies had already crossed the state line.
General Collins’ command post had been overrun while the President was flipping through his cue cards and trying to look “presidential” for the cameras an hour before.
Chapter 18
Into the Past
2:18 p.m.
Specialist Melvin Delray, a medic with the 427th Brigade Support Battalion was the first to spot the zombies. He’d been leaning back in his foxhole with his mask tilted back on his head, enjoying the sun on his face, when the first of them made its not-so-grand appearance. At a hundred yards, it looked just like a person. It reminded him of his father, being of about the same age and dressed for golf.
“Ah, shit,” Mel-Ray whispered. All his friends called him that and had since he was a boy. The physically closest friend to him just then was PFC Rogers who sat thirty yards away on the lip of his foxhole, doodling in the dirt with a stick. For them, the beginning of the apocalypse had been a dull affair. They had been rushed out to the eastern perimeter hours before, their heads filled with wild imaginings, their bodies weighted down with gear, and their lips beaded with sweat.
At first, it had been terrifying. Their foxholes were spaced a hundred feet apart and in many instances, the soldiers couldn’t see their nearest neighbors. All of them had expected great mobs of flesh-eating monsters to appear at any second and there had been a number of random shootings as panicked men fired at birds or shadows. Sometimes this set off a torrent of shooting from the men up and down the line.
But then the hours ticked away and many began to even doubt there were zombies at all.
“Someone got punked, big time,” PFC Rogers had said an hour before. He had slipped out of his foxhole to visit Mel-Ray and the two had chatted, neither wearing a mask and both with their MOPP coats opened wide because of the heat. A car’s engine had spooked Rogers into thinking their sergeant was coming around for another inspection and he had scurried back to his hole in the ground.
Now, fifteen minutes later, there was a zombie…and another…and more, emerging from the forest across from the line. Mel-Ray slunk down into his foxhole until only his eyes sat above the dirt. He hissed “Rogers!”
“What?” Rogers replied, in a bored voice. The single word was very loud; to Mel-Ray’s frightened mind, it almost seemed like he screamed it. Mel-Ray didn’t answer, he just pointed.
“Holy shit,” Rogers whispered and then slid down into his hole so that Mel-Ray couldn’t see him. When he came back up his mask covered his face and his coat was buttoned to the neck. His weapon was at the ready as well.
That seemed like a smart idea and Mel-Ray, his hands shaking like crazy, fumbled his mask on and then gloved and buttoned up. Next, he grabbed up his M16 that had spent the afternoon leaning against the side of the pit, and popped up like a jack-in-the box ready to spray bullets everywhere. The zombies were only halfway across the weed field in front of him; fifty yards away.
Mel-Ray was itching to start shooting. He had never been a marksman and had fired his weapon a total of six times in his two-year career in the National Guard: four times in basic training and then once in each of the successive years. He had barely qualified with the M16 and he had always told himself that he was a medic and a healer, not a dog soldier with more courage than brains.
Now, he was itching to start blasting away, even though, if her were honest with himself, he was scared shitless. The zombies were faster than he expected, charging across the field in an ugly, hunger induced quick-march. And worse than that was there just so many of them! He didn’t bother to count them, there were simply too many to put a number to and this was just the first wave. He could see the shadows in the forest shifting and the trees swaying and he could hear the snap of a thousand branches breaking under the steps of a thousand more zombies. He was close to pissing himself.
“Do I pop the smoke?” he asked PFC Rogers. He was louder now and his voice warbled in his fear. The zombies had sensed them, though how he didn’t know. It didn’t look like they could see. Their eyes were black as tar and looked gummed over, and yet they were undoubtedly heading right for the foxholes.
Rogers was way ahead of him. He held up a smoke grenade with two yellow lines on it; yellow meant enemy spotted. He pulled the pin and heaved the grenade at the onrushing zombies. It landed at their feet and began hissing out great plumes of a grey-yellow smoke. For Mel-Ray, the smoke was anticlimactic. What they needed were real grenades!
The zombies were momentarily distracted by the smoke; they paused, turned their heads with their noses in the air as if sniffing and then came on again. “Do we shoot?” Mel-Ray asked. He outranked Rogers and yet he was feeling distinctly “civilian” at the moment. Their orders were to shoot only if fired upon or attacked bodily. Right there with zombies…actual fucking zombies, heading right at him the orders seemed outrageously stupid. He couldn’t just sit there and wait until the zombies climbed down into his foxhole with him.
And what good was the foxhole anyhow?
Mel-Ray only then realized that the foxhole wasn’t any sort of protection. It would trap him and when the zombies came up they’d bury him alive in it under their disgusting bodies!
“Oh God!” he cried, losing all control. He threw the M16 out of the hole and tried to scramble up after it, only the mask gave him tunn
el vision and the rubber gloves were slick. He kept slipping down the side of it and with each successive attempt his panic threatened to overflow the tiny dam he had built for it in his mind. He had his back to the monsters and when someone up the line began shooting, he pictured the zombies right on top of him.
A scream broke from his throat as he flailed with his limbs. More by accident than design, his boot caught a root and he pushed himself out of the hole. The black gun was right there inches from his hand when he heard a thump behind him. Foolishly, he looked. One of the faster zombies had charged right up and had fallen into the foxhole. It was disgusting: black blood or snot drained from every orifice, half its face was eaten away as were the fingers on its left hand. They were nubs with black ends, like little burnt sausages.
With guns beginning to fire all around him, Mel-Ray turned his tunneled vision around to look for the fallen M16, and for a second, it seemed to have disappeared in the tall grass. His heart shot into his throat and again he flailed his limbs about, trying to come upon it by feel. First he found a stick, and then a rock, and then…there it was!
In a rush, he snatched it up and had the safety off and fired off three round bursts even before he had it aimed at anything. Six bullets went into the dirt at his feet before he brought the rifle to bear on the zombie in the pit. His first pull of the trigger sent bullets into the wall of the foxhole, the next three tore out the guts of the zombie and the third skipped over the mound of dirt.
The zombie in the pit shrugged off its crippling wounds and was still trying to get at Mel-Ray, but he wasn’t worried about that one anymore. It was the other zombies that were only steps away that had his complete attention. He “aimed” again, meaning he fired from the hip, and of the three bullets fired in the burst, one clipped the elbow of a zombie, which didn’t seem to notice. The next burst sent two slugs into the chest of another. It staggered but kept coming.
The next pull of the trigger did nothing at all. Their guard unit still used the old 20 round magazines and Mel-Ray was just realizing why the regular army had fazed them out: he’d run out of ammo after only six seconds.
Mel-Ray’s panic roared straight through his body right down to his fingers—they went stiff and unfeeling. Two seconds went by before he found the catch to release the spent magazine. It started to fall and, for just long enough to lose more precious seconds, he remembered his training, the main of which consisted of the idea to never to lose an item of military hardware since the cost would come out of his paycheck. He caught the magazine with his left hand and was trying to fumble it into his chest rig with wooden fingers but, no matter what, it wouldn’t slide into the little compartment with the others.
With a cry, that was half frustration and half gut-piercing fear, he threw the magazine away from him and, with the zombies almost within arm’s reach, he turned and fled.
It was no Olympic sprint. Weighed down as he was with so much gear, all he could manage was a stumbling trot. He was slowed even more because he was trying to load his gun at the same time. He also ran with his head half-turned back, because he was sure the zombies were right on his tail.
And they were. Dozens and dozens. The line of soldiers had barely slowed them down.
The zombies were relentless. They came on without tiring which was the opposite of Mel-Ray who was sucking in great gasps of air through the micro-filters of the claustrophobia inducing mask. After only a hundred yards, he was lightheaded from lack of oxygen and was beginning to stagger among the leaf-hidden logs and the mossy stones and the muddy ruts that were strewn across the forest floor. A trip and a stumble were followed by a low hanging tree limb snagging his mask and turning it forty degrees on his head, blinding him.
He screeched in fear, a breathless: “Huhayy!”
There was no getting the mask back on correctly, not with a fresh magazine in one hand and the M16 in the other. Without thinking, he tossed aside the full magazine, pulled off the mask, and threw that away as well. The clean, fresh, air sucking into his lungs was glorious and partially revived him, allowing him to keep ahead of the zombies until he burst into the staging area where General Collins had set up his Command Post.
After all the shooting and the smoke and the growling zombies, the Command Post was eerily quiet. When he had first marched through it at noon, there had been at least a hundred men in sight working on all manner of things, but now there were just a few MPs standing guard and some faces peeking nervously from some of the tents. Mel-Ray could hear voices from the tents; murmurs mostly but also sharp voices barking orders.
The closest MP was shaking and had been within a hair of shooting Mel-Ray when he first came rushing up. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked in a muffled voice. The MP was garbed properly in his MOPP gear and, for a second, Mel-Ray pitied him.
“Zombies!” Mel-Ray cried.
“How many?” the MP asked in fright.
Del-ray paused long enough to look back. There was no sign of his friend Rogers or any of the other medics who had been placed on the line. There were only zombies emerging from beneath the shadow of the trees.
“A lot,” was all he said. Along the edge of the clearing were a few dozen Humvees. He ran to the last in line and jumped in.
Before he could start it, the MP yelled, “Hey! You can’t leave. That’s desertion!”
“It sure as hell is,” he said and punched the starter. Mel-Ray gunned it out of there. He drove west until he hit the first black top going north. Without a single break, he drove straight to Canada, thinking he would find a place to hide up in the woods, thinking he would put as much distance between himself and anything that even remotely looked like a zombie.
Chapter 19
An End of Prison Time
3:33 p.m.
Chuck Singleton hadn’t been able to feel his hands for the last hour or so. He wasn’t really worried, however, at least not for himself. When Stephanie had rolled over and showed him her hands, he had to force a smile onto his lips. Her hands were black. He tried to tell himself that they were just a dark purple and that the unlit tent made them seem black, but he was afraid nonetheless.
“You’ll be fine, Darlin.” His reassurances had worked right up until the firing commenced. There had been shooting going on all day, however this was much, much closer. A few hundred yards at the most.
“We is fucked,” John Burke said. “Them fuck-all zombies are right on top of us.”
“Then maybe we should keep quiet,” Anna suggested. Both she and Eng hadn’t spoken much and every time they had, the others glared. They blamed Eng for starting the entire thing and they blamed her for the deaths of Deckard and Thuy. Anna couldn’t understand why they were mad at her. She had simply taken advantage of a situation that, in the end, had prolonged all their lives, except of course Dr. Lee’s and her goon of a boyfriend. But wasn’t that the way the cookie crumbled?
Burke wanted to ream her a good one, but she was right. Their chances were, as his daddy always said, of two varieties: slim and none. He bit his lip and listened as the sleepy camp came alive.
The officers who had been trying their damnedest to keep the perimeter secure, poured out of their tents to find that the section of the line closest to them had crumbled. Stouthearted, they put up what resistance they could, but the numbers facing them were too great and gradually they fell back to the line of Humvees.
It was too late for that, however. The undead were thick in the forest, going in every direction, some even curling around to come at the Command Post from behind. They were among the Humvees before anyone knew it. The officers fought their way back to the communication tent where they made a final stand.
All the movement outside the tent was confusing, and Stephanie, who thought the officers were leaving them behind whispered to the others: “We can’t let them go. We have to scream or something. If not it’ll just be us…alone.”
“They won’t save us,” Anna replied.
“Why not?” Stephani
e asked. Her words came out with a begging quality that she didn’t notice. She knew if the soldiers left, the zombies would come for them, next. Tied up as they were the idea was literally painful to her. There was a pain in her gut like she was trying to digest glass.
“They just won’t,” Anna hissed. “I wouldn’t come back if I was them and neither would any of you.”
“Don’t believe that mess of a girl. I would come back for you,” Chuck said to Stephanie. “Zombies or no zombies.”
Everyone heard and no one doubted it, not even Anna. “Then you’d be the only one,” she said. “Now, everyone shut up! We can still get lucky so, unless you’ve thought up a plan, keep quiet.”
Chuck could think of nothing that could get them out of the cords binding them. Like Burke, he had never been one to consider himself a cut above the average where smarts were concerned, but he had a good deal of native wisdom. Enough to know that they were screwed, six ways from Sunday.
The battle outside was hot and the sounds of the guns were loud, and yet the presence of the zombies was greater and their moans and growls muted the gunshots. They were everywhere. Some tripped over the ropes holding up the quarantine tent and others fell into its side. Most picked themselves up and left. Some hung around, sniffing the air, certain, in the pea-sized portion of their brain that was still functioning, that there was clean blood nearby.
Inside the tent, the shadows cast by these strays made them seem monstrously large. The prisoners lay on their sides, not daring to talk or even to move. Except for Dr. Wilson who was praying with his eyes closed. Burke stared in a wide-eyed silence and only the binding kept his hands from shaking in fright. Even Chuck was starting to get nervous. Bound as he was, there was no way he could fight. He was hogtied and helpless; in his mind it was no way to die…but then again, wasting away to a weak little nothing as the cancer ate him up from the inside wasn’t all that much better.
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