The Apocalypse Crusade 2

by Peter Meredith

  Jerome’s finger went back to work. He leaned into his gun and the heat of it was appalling, and amazing and fantastic, all at once. There was almost no time to consider what a wonderful weapon he held. Zombies were all over the foxhole to his left. He swiveled the gun to the side and mowed them down, sending fountains of black blood into the air; it came down like rain.

  Then to the right were more screams; these were desperate and charged with elemental fear. He swung the M249 back around and commenced to chop the zombies down. There was no time to worry about headshots. The only thing that mattered was saving the men in the holes. At some point in the fighting, his weapon jammed; he cleared it without thinking. Seconds later the first of his ammo belts went dry. Like an automaton, he changed out the belt for the fresh one and then went on firing.

  With sixteen bullets left, he ran out of targets.

  “Wow,” he whispered when the noise of the shooting finally died away and the men began to look up with the realization that they had survived. A few had flashlights and they began to shine them around at the mangled corpses that lay in heaps. Many of the bodies still moved and some of the men began taking single shots to finish them off.

  Jerome couldn’t waste the ammo for such things and he knew he had to get back to Cori. A part of him was sure that the soldier had shit himself when he had left. But first, he went to the foxhole on his left and looked down at the two men he had saved. One was a deputy sheriff who had been using a shotgun to try to hold back the hordes, and the other was a combat engineer who had built his foxhole with a slide rule in mind. It was an exact rectangle. The two men were covered in the black blood, but no one seemed to care.

  “That was quite a fight,” Jerome said.

  “Was that you working the SAW?” the engineer asked. When Jerome nodded, he held out a hand for him to shake, but Jerome didn’t like the look of the blood on it and fiddled with his gun, pretending not to see it. The engineer didn’t seem to notice. He left the hand out as he babbled: “You really saved our bacon. I thought for sure we’d be killed. I mean…I mean they were all around us and my stupid gun kept jamming and John here with his shotgun had to reload, like every five seconds. It was a real mess, man. And then you opened up with your SAW and I swear I almost cried.” He grinned up at Jerome and the deputy grinned as well.

  Jerome soaked it in and would’ve stayed to hear more of the adulation that he felt he deserved, because after all, hadn’t he been a hero? Hadn’t he taken the bulls by the horns and laid that fucker out? But an approaching hummer cut in on it. He had to get back to Cori and he had to find more ammo for his weapon. They weren’t out of the woods yet…or so he hoped. He liked battle just as much as he thought he would.

  “Look, I’ve got to get going. You two have a good night.”

  “Hey wait,” the deputy called after him. “What’s your name? I want to know who I’m going to be buying a drink for when this is all done.”

  “Jerome Evermore,” was all he said. Had there been a sunset in the direction he was going he would have moseyed right on out of there feeling like the hero he was. Instead, there was only the black of night but he still felt his exit a good one.

  Feeling pride swell like a sunburst in his chest he went up to the trail and then headed back to his hole and his place in the line. When he got there, he found it deserted. He shook his head, thinking that Cori had chickened out, but then he noticed that the dirt from the hole was in back. It wasn’t their hole. Jerome had decided to mound the dirt from his hole ten feet in front as an added measure to slow the zombies down.

  This must have been Smitty and Bill’s hole. They were from one of the MP companies and he hadn’t known either of them before that night. Although they had seemed like stand-up guys, they had taken off. “Or were out there taking a dump in the woods,” he whispered. “Hey, Smitty? Bill?” He called into the dark. Nothing.

  “Pussies,” he muttered and then went to the next hole in line and found Cori messing in the bottom of the hole.

  “It’s deep enough,” Jerome said. “Hey, you were wrong about…”

  Cori looked back, but it wasn’t Cori in the hole. Even in the dark, Jerome could tell it was a zombie. Cori was what it was eating. “Da-fuck,” Jerome said in a small voice as he stepped back. The zombie tried to scramble out of the hole after him and Jerome shot it. He hadn’t even been consciously aware of what his hands were doing.

  The bullet took out its right eye, vaporizing it before tumbling into its black brain. It slithered back into the hole. Jerome stepped up to the edge and looked in to find Cori looking at him as blood gurgled up from a gaping wound at his neck. He tried to say something but this only caused the blood to bubble.

  Though he couldn’t speak, his eyes said everything. They accused him of desertion, of being AWOL, of leaving his buddy to die.

  “They needed me more,” Jerome told him. “That whole section of the line would’ve…” he had been pointing back the way he had come but then movement caught his eye. There were more zombies around him, a lot more. Thirty or forty were converging right on him. Again, his hands worked their magic and the M249 swung up. He fired in shorter bursts now, conserving his ammo, doing in two or three rounds what he had been doing with seven or eight.

  Even while his hands worked, he saw Cori out of the corner of his mouth, pleading something with silent lips. Was he asking to be rescued or put out of his misery? Or maybe he had a note for a loved one in his pocket? None of that mattered. Jerome wasn’t going back in that hole for all the money or glory on earth. He slowly backed away until he heard the snap of twigs behind him.

  There was relief at first but then he turned and saw that it was another zombie. How did it get back there? They should’ve only been coming from a single direction! The line has fallen. The thought just bloomed in his mind, taking it over completely. The line has fallen! They had lost. They were surrounded, overrun, dead.

  With the last of his bullets, he blasted out the face of the zombie…and then he was running for his life. His gear weighed him down and caught on trees and brushes. The Hammer of the Gods was the first to go; without bullets, it was useless. He let it fall. Next to go was his helmet which wouldn’t stay properly even on his head. It would slip in front of his eyes turning him blind, making the panic turn him crazy. It hit with a thud and a second later, it was tripped over by the onrushing zombies who were nearly as fast as he was.

  The mask went next, then his chest rig, and then his MOPP coat. Now he was faster and he blundered through the forest until he was on the trail that the Humvees had used. He stopped long enough to look both ways. No headlights were in view but there were others on the path. The ones sprinting were the humans—there were not many of them. He ran, angling towards the closest soldier. Jerome was almost up to him, when the man went down with a garbled scream.

  “Shit! My ankle, my ankle…”

  Jerome barely slowed. The hero in him was dead. There were no more visions of parades or medals in his mind anymore. Stopping to help the injured soldier would only get them both killed. This wasn’t Nazi Germany or Iraq where the distance to safety was measured in yards. If he stopped for that soldier, it could be miles before they found safety. And he was already winded.

  These were the excuses he used as he treated the fallen soldier as dead already and shied away. In seconds, there was the sound of firing in Jerome’s wake and then screams.

  “That was the right thing to do,” he gasped. “Anyone would’ve left him.” Saying the words didn’t seem to help with the sick feeling in his gut that had hit him the second the soldier had fallen. It persisted right up until he hit a two-lane black top, and then he felt a bizarre sense of relief as if the road represented some sort of safety. He stood on it for ten seconds turning his head back and forth and praying with all his might that a Humvee or a truck or anything would come by.

  Another scream, this one off to his right, had him running again. He ran up a treed hill on the other sid
e of the road and had made it halfway to the top when he heard a Humvee barreling up the road. Without hesitation, he turned and charged back down, waving his arms and screaming.

  He made it to the road just ahead of both the hummer and the wave of zombies. “Stop!” he screamed with the last of his breath. In his pounding heart, he knew that if it didn’t stop he’d be killed; there was no more strength in him to run. With that in mind, he stepped into the Humvee’s path. There was a screech of tires and Jerome found himself screwing his eyes closed and grimacing, expecting to be crushed under the machine, only he wasn’t, though it was a near thing. Pebbles sprayed across his boots and the heat of the engine washed over him, but the metal grill stopped just short.

  Jerome reached out a shaking hand and touched the hood as if to confirm that it was real and then he went around to the passenger side of the vehicle, always keeping his hands on it so as to keep it from simply evaporating back into the night. A window rolled down and a soldier was there. It seemed that he was talking however, no sound came out.

  “The line has fallen!” Jerome screamed into his face. “They’re everywhere! They’re…” Just then, the gunner standing in the turret started lighting up the night with the .50 cal. The sound was deafening and again the man in the passenger seat started moving his lips and gesticulating madly. When Jerome only stood there trying to puzzle out the motions of the man’s lips, the man grabbed him and yanked him close.

  “Get in!” he screamed into Jerome’s face before thrusting him toward the next door.

  The sound of the gun muted the second he jumped into the hummer and he was able to hear his own words: “The line is fallen.”

  “Shut up!” the man in the passenger seat yelled. He then flicked on a radio on the console. “Delta is crumbling. The line is ruptured in at least three spots. We can’t hold any longer.”

  Chapter 28

  Brittle Lines

  9:16 p.m.

  Seven miles away, General Collins heard the words as clear as a bell. They stung. The line was failing. The men were being reduced to fear-filled children in the face of the horde. He didn’t blame them. These weren’t other men they were fighting, men who knew reason and fear, these were monsters in league with the night and they didn’t need their teeth to kill. A simple touch would do the trick.

  This was what was causing his men to turn tail so easily.

  “Pull them back,” he said. He spoke with one of his liver-spotted hands resting across his eyes, feeling a weariness ache his bones. “Charlie and Echo will have to pull back as well. We can’t leave them hanging like that.”

  There were a number of ‘Yes sirs,’ but Collins wasn’t listening. He stood up—as far as he could in the cramped Command and Control Humvee—and went to the door to look up at the night sky. “Where are you? Damn it, where are you?” Dr. Lee’s supposed miracle was late and without it, his lines would continue to disintegrate under the constant grinding attack. And with the miracle? Maybe they could hold on…maybe.

  A ripple of confused gunfire erupted directly west of him. Every caliber he could think of was being shot. It was a strange and desperate sound, something he was becoming all too familiar with. His men would fire like mad for a few minutes and then run.

  How far this time, he wondered? The new battalion command post was seven miles back from the lines and it still seemed too close.

  Again, he glanced up at the sky. Except for the stars, it was all sorts of empty. “Please,” he whispered in prayer, before ducking back in. “Someone give me an ETA on those birds.”

  “We can’t, sir,” a lieutenant answered. “Our aviation company is on the line, fighting. I have a link with…let’s see...forty-six Blackhawks and six Chinooks only two of those are grounded for repairs. The rest of the Blackhawks are under brigade level control.”

  “Yeah, that’s great, but I wasn’t asking about our birds,” General Collins said as more gunfire sounded.

  The same lieutenant made a sound of annoyance in his throat. “We can’t talk to them either, not by radio at least. I can put a call into Otis if you want. It might take some time since they’re probably busy too.”

  Collins shook his head. Phone calls now would eat up too much time. The birds would either get there or not, and his men would either die horribly or not.

  Six miles away the Humvee Jerome Evermore was in, came to a stop. They were north of Danbury where the woods were beginning to thin and little gentlemen farms sat looking expensive and deserted.

  “Everyone out,” the driver barked. There were six men crammed in the vehicle and three more on top. Another Hummer pulled up behind theirs and an equal number of men tumbled out, each looking about with wide eyes. Although there hadn’t been a single shell fired, they were shell-shocked and none strayed far from the Humvees.

  “All right,” one of the soldiers said in a strident voice. He seemed unnecessarily loud as if the thunder of the .50 cal in his ear for so long had turned him old. “I need you men to spread out. You see that barn?” He pointed and everyone squinted at a building a few hundred yards away. It was only a smear of white in the dark. “I need the last man situated there. The rest of you fill in to this position.”

  No one moved.

  The barn seemed far away, and worse, whoever was stuck sitting in a hole in front of it would have no cover on their flank. Zombies could just curl up around him and take him from front and back.

  Jerome looked down at his boots; they were scuffed from the day’s adventures and he was just thinking that they would need a coat of polish before the next drill weekend, when the man who had been speaking—his rank, if he had any was lost in the dark—tapped him on the shoulder.

  “You. I want you to anchor the line.”

  “I—I would, I swear but I don’t even have a weapon.” He spread his arms to show everyone that he wasn’t just being a coward, though if any one asked where it was he didn’t know what he’d say. Every excuse that came to mind sounded like a shit-ton’s worth of cowardice.

  The soldier in charge turned to the next man: “You, step up. It’ll be fine. We’re going to fill in the line from there on.” The man whose shoulder had been slapped let his jaw drop and he looked around hoping to see some John Wayne hero-type step forward to claim his spot, but all the men there had seen the horror and they too looked down at their shoes or the grass or perhaps they toed a rock. None believed the promise that more men were coming.

  Each man was then picked to take a spot and they left, most with a deep breath and a stony look suggesting they were ready to fight. Jerome watched them go with an increasing sense of relief until the man in charge turned to him. “Here you go.”

  Jerome cocked his head like a quizzical dog. “Uh, here you go, what?” The second after he said this he noticed that the man was holding something out for him to take. It was a holstered pistol. “Oh…Uh, you want me to…uh take that?”

  He was trying to rein in the urge to add: You want me to fight zombies with a goddamned pistol? The idea was astounding to a man who had seen them up close. “Look, I would, but…”

  “Good,” the soldier said, shoving the weapon into Jerome’s hands. “You’re the anchor on this end of the line. Hold it as long as you can. I promise, we’re rounding up more men.”

  A second later, the Humvees were spitting dirt and roaring off into the night. Jerome squatted down next to a sap-dribbled pine tree with a string of curses whining out of his mouth in a high whisper. Forty feet away someone else was making the same noises and Jerome shushed him, afraid that he would attract attention. He could barely remember the big, manly feeling he’d had not too long before when he had killed so many of the fiends.

  Now, he knew only a heart-pounding fear. It grew in his ears and his hands shook. The night seemed to grow darker and darker and then there came sounds from the woods in front of him: the snap of branches, the crunch of leaves, the thump and skitter of rocks being kicked, and of course, the heavy ragged breathing of t
he zombies.

  Belatedly, he checked the pistol: a nine-millimeter Beretta. He counted his ammo and summed up the frightfully low number of forty-six rounds for the gun. Forty-six wouldn’t last him ten minutes in battle, but then the accusing face of Cori Deebs came to him complete with all the blood and the bubbles and the pain. It made Jerome rethink the number.

  He had forty-five bullets to work with. He would save one as a last resort.

  With the sounds picking up, he feared he wasn’t far from that moment. Sound traveled far in the night and it was some minutes before he saw the first shadows coming steadily on in a long wave. By then his fear had him almost hyperventilating, and he wasn’t the only one on the line feeling it.

  A man fifty yards to his right, hissed: “Oh fuck!” and shot his rifle. Other men fired as well, but Jerome couldn’t. He couldn’t waste one of his forty-five bullets shooting at shadows. With his puny gun, he’d have to wait until they were close…painfully close, and with the dark he feared to take a shot from further than ten feet. He clicked back the hammer as the other guns roared.

  But then there was screaming from in front of them. “Hey! Stop shooting, damn it! We’re human.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” the man closest to Jerome asked.

  The men in front grumbled and one answered: “Jeeze, we didn’t even know anyone was there. Now don’t shoot, we’re coming up.”

  “Wait, hold on!” someone cried. “How do we know you aren’t infected? How do we know you weren’t in The Zone and are trying to bust out?”

  There was a general cry of indignation and a sharp-voiced man came walking up, fearlessly. “Look jack-wads. We’re from the 643rd MP Company from right here in fucking Connecticut. Anyone want to check my ID? You’re welcome to.”