The Apocalypse Crusade 2

by Peter Meredith

  The mechanic, Cori Deebs hadn’t died in the foxhole after Jerome left him. He had shoved his fist up into the hole in his neck where the zombie had chewed right to his jugular and then he had rolled over, letting his weight apply the needed pressure to stop the bleeding. More than the pain, fear had his waking mind in an iron grip and he would have blubbered or cried out with every branch snapping in the forest, and every moan from a passing zombie, but thankfully, he had fallen unconscious from blood loss.

  In the hour he lay there, the Com-cells worked their magic. When the Coast Guard planes, punching flares out into the sky, woke him, he was no longer afraid. He was angry. He was stone-cold fucking furious that he’d been left behind by Jerome and abandoned by the entire army. And he was angry over the lights searing his eyes. He squinted and threw an arm over his face when the planes roared overhead.

  “Mother fuckers!” he seethed, growing angrier with every pass.

  When he was able to, he stood. His went light-headed and had to grab the side of the hole to keep from falling. The world spun before his eyes, but not only did he remain standing, he was also able to climb out of his foxhole dragging his M16behind him. Hate drove him beyond the normal physical limits of his body. Hate propelled his legs and made him ignore the pain—not the pain in his neck, he barely felt that, but the pain in his head. Every step felt like someone was stabbing his brain with a barbeque fork.

  But even that was nothing compared to the all-consuming hate. As he walked, he planed what he would do when he found Jerome…oh, the things he would do to him! At first he mapped out all the horrid and torturous things he would do, however gradually, he came to realize that what he really wanted to do was to eat Jerome. Slowly, of course so that when the hot, fresh blood, pumped into his mouth, Jerome would still be alive and he would be screaming.

  “Mmmm,” Cori murmured, picturing it. Unbeknownst to him, he was feeling something new: lust. This corrupt lust had a component of sexuality to it, a small component to be sure as the rest was the purest evil. Cori wanted to cause pain with every fiber of his body.

  Picturing it, he ate up the miles walking with growing eagerness to the sound of the guns. Above, the night sky had grown dark, as the Coast Guard had slowly shifted their flights eastward. As Cori trudged along there were others in the dark with him. Among them were half-mad soldiers with black eyes, their blood steeped in Com-cells and turning septic. Both Cori and the pure zombies ignored them. If one got too close, Cori would sneer and clutch their weapon closer to their chest.

  At this point, Cori wasn’t exactly sure how to work the M16. In the hour he had been plodding along, it had become a puzzle, just like math or remembering what his mom looked like. Things were becoming distinctly hazy in his mind. They were murky but clearly so. His boots were a fine example. He could see the laces and he knew he should have been able to tie them but for the life of him, he wouldn’t have been able to even if someone had put a gun to his head.

  And the canteen sloshing at his hip. The sound of it was maddening. Somewhere along the line, he had pulled it out and stared at it. The lid was supposed to come off, he knew that, only how did it come off? How did it go? Was there a button? A lever? A switch? He bit at the top, gouging grooves in the plastic with his teeth and still it wouldn’t budge. His thirst became over-powering, driving his feet faster and faster.

  When next he thought about the canteen, it was gone. It had been in his hand, then somehow it had disappeared. His thirst raged through him; it was all he could think about besides the anger, of course. He was furious and thirsty and so in need of clean blood that he wanted to scream in frustration. The sound coming from his wounded throat was a poor substitute for the real thing.

  He drew in a deep breath for a proper scream, only just then a helicopter flew by. From its side door what looked like a line of fire blazed. Bark and splinters from the trees all around Cori flew up into the air while the ground puffed dirt and grew small holes with amazing rapidity. Next to him, a stinking woman in the ragged remains of pink pajamas came apart, spraying him with black blood and greying flesh.

  Belatedly, he came to the conclusion: I’m being shot at!

  Now his fury was uncontained. It was a wild beast within him and only his subconscious mind was left to control his body. Up came the M16.

  The Blackhawk was like a shadow painted on the night’s sky. It had come charging up to unload its compliment of soldiers but because there was no dedicated ground control for the command post’s LZ, and there were two other copters trying to land, the pilot was forced to pull back. The pilot was in no rush and couldn’t believe he was in any real danger. With his door gunners blasting at the target-rich environment, he kept the bird hovering twenty feet over the tree line with its nose pointed toward the landing zone.

  Cori emptied a full thirty round clip into the Blackhawk. Most of the bullets tinked harmlessly off its metal hide. One bullet rapped off the door gunner’s helmet, sounding and feeling as though someone had come up behind him and had given his helmet a hearty smack with a ballpeen hammer. Another skipped off the glass next to the copilot’s right ear. He gave a jerk of shock and stared at the mark it had made on the bullet resistant glass. “What the hell?” he exclaimed loudly.

  The pilot leaned over to see what had riled his friend and was struck by flying lead just at the corner of his right eye. The last bullet to leave Cori’s weapon had taken a path through the air that could only have been guided by the evil intentions of the devil. It sizzled through the open side door, passed beneath the gunner’s left ear as he started in surprise from his helmet having been hit. The bullet then blazed between a passenger seat and the frame of the gunship, a space three inches wide, before hitting the pilot who was out of position to be protected by his reinforced chair.

  He was not killed by the bullet, nor was he killed by the subsequent crash. He was killed when the zombies ate him, trapped in his chair and screaming deliciously.

  Helicopters, far more than planes, are delicate instruments. When the bullet blasted off the bone at the corner of his eye, the pilot spasmed, yanking back hard on the cyclic, the joystick-like controller that sat between his knees. Immediately, the gunship pitched back, its nose begging for the sky.

  The co-pilot turned from the window to see the pilot shooting blood in an arc onto the instrument panel. Then as the Blackhawk canted back, he stared at his instruments in confusion. He lost three seconds and by that time, the tail rudder was dipping amongst the trees. There was a loud “crack” and then the Blackhawk began spinning in its pitch. It looked like a monstrous ballerina up on its toes, pirouetting in the night. There was no coming back from this. The copilot shoved the cyclic down, but just then, the pilot still fighting to do his job and save his craft, did the same and together they slewed the great machine straight into the ground.

  The zombies rushed forward in a mass, they swarmed the smoking wreckage and ate their fill of the fourteen men on board who were too stunned or injured to defend themselves. Cori, driven by his maddening hunger hurried to the crash site but was too late. There was a bank of zombies fifty deep as he got to the wreckage. Grunting with the effort, he threw aside those in front, one by one, but, by the time he got to the feast, the blood was cooling and the hearts that sent it pulsing in that slow erotic way were now all stopped. The interior of the Blackhawk was a scene straight out of hell: blood, both black and red covered every inch of it. There were pieces and parts of humans everywhere and the remaining bodies were so badly mauled that most of them appeared to have been turned inside out. Their empty skins hung limp off the chairs like dirty clothes flung about a college dorm.

  “Mother fucker,” Cori growled. His stomach growled louder. There was a splash of red on the door and he took his finger to it—cold. It made him want to gag.

  He cursed again and then his eyes fell on another black rifle. He grabbed it without checking to see if it was loaded. Such things were simply beyond him now. The gun killed things
, that’s all he knew. Along with a thousand others, he turned from the Blackhawk and again headed for the hated lights.

  The crash of the helicopter went unremarked upon by the soldiers fighting a quarter mile away on the hill’s edge. They saw it twist ugly in the sky, saw the flash as it struck the earth and heard the odd, rubber warble of a three-hundred-pound metal blade flying through the air after it had snapped off the machine, but they had other things to worry about, chiefly ten thousand monsters trying to kill them. The great din and rumble of gunfire, as well as the lights from the Humvees and trucks acted as beacons, drawing every zombie from miles around. They came stumbling from all directions of the compass save for due east where a corridor of freedom led to a straight shot to the city of Hartford and her million citizens.

  With a horrible death swarming up in the thousands toward them, the men and women on the hill displayed a courage unequalled on any battlefield. With grim determination, they struggled against the terrific odds and fought until they were ankle deep in hot brass from the spent rounds of their weapons. Yet courage alone was no guarantee of victory especially when their flanks were turned and they could see the undead closing in to cut them off. It made it nearly impossible to concentrate on the ones in front.

  “On the right!” yelled Lieutenant Colonel O’Brian. “We got them on our right. Give me volunteers to shore up our flank. You, you, you,” he said, picking men all around Jerome, leaving him feeling extremely lonely and friendless though he hadn’t known any of the men who had been around him. Just then, he had the first inkling of worry creeping in over the soldier’s bravado that he had wrapped himself in ever since General Collins had given his short “rah-rah” speech earlier.

  He worried because he knew this was how all the other lines had fallen; they had been too few to hurl back the zombies.

  Taking a deep breath, he began firing again, but not a second later, his M4 made a metallic “chunk” sound, indicating it had run dry. His practiced hands slapped a new magazine in place. There were only three more on the ground next to him; he could shoot through that in minutes.

  “Ammo!” he cried. He wasn’t the only one. Up and down the line the cry came at short intervals. A woman came huffing up, pulling behind her a child’s red wagon filled with full thirty round magazines. She handed him four and then looked around; the nearest fighter was fifteen feet away. “What happened to everyone?” She had wide eyes and the magazines had clinked together when she had handed them over. She was afraid the men were deserting, Jerome guessed. She was afraid she would come back with more ammo and there would be no one left but the zombies.

  “Extending the line,” he answered, trying to sound nonchalant; had this been a man he would’ve only grunted as a reply. Instead, he added: “Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.” He could only hope it would be. A pair of dead-heads were struggling up the slope. He took another breath and made to show off by knocking these two down the hill to add to the other forty he had already killed. But then his breath cut short. Two, he could handle. Ten, he could handle if they didn’t come all at once.

  Beyond the pair was what looked like a battalion of them. It was hard to see in the dark and at first, it looked as if the land was swaying like the sea, but it was a mass of zombies marching in close order. A few thousand of them.

  “I’m going to need more ammo,” he whispered, feeling the saliva turn to dust in his mouth.

  “I can give you two more and that’s if you promise not to tell any…” As she spoke, Jerome reached over and pulled the wagon over, spilling all the magazines into a sliding steel heap. “Hey! These aren’t just for you,” she cried.

  He grabbed her hand as she started to pick them up again. “Stop! Look.” He pointed with his rifle at the tremendous moving shadow. “I’m going to need help. Tell the general. Tell him I’m going to need help right away. Tell him to send anything he has.” She was already backing away, her fear well beyond the big-eyed stage, now. Jerome pulled her close to him and yelled in her face: “Don’t you fucking run away! Go tell the general right now.”

  “Yes. Ok.” Her name was Cindy Austen and she was a medic—the most useless MOS on the battlefield that day. If a soldier was wounded by a zombie then he was shit out of luck, and if they were shot by friendly fire then they kept on fighting in place. Where else could they go? The surgeons were all on the lines like everyone else. The cry of Medic! had not been heard on the hilltop that night and Austen wouldn’t have come running if she had heard it; ammo bearer was a far more important job right then.

  She ran for the Command and Control Humvee and Jerome watched her until she was at its open door. He then turned and at a range of thirteen feet, sent the two dead-heads flopping backwards. They rolled like bowling pins all the way to the bottom of the hill to fetch up against the others. Very quickly, they were trampled under thousands of feet as the shadow advanced, moving onto the hill.

  Austen found Collins staring with red eyes at a computer screen. He and his small staff had been working feverishly and without rest, racing to concentrate troops on the hilltop before his second command post of the day was overwhelmed. Tired soldiers, retreating from the sundered lines, were implored to hurry to rejoin the others with Collins hinting strongly that if they didn’t, they would be trapped in The Zone forever. This got them moving beyond the point of exhaustion and kept them barely in front of the zombies chasing after. Despite being weighed down with their gear, some of the men had road marched twelve miles in two hours. Those who fell behind were eaten, their screams causing the survivors to choke on their tears as they pressed on until the point of collapse.

  As they came straggling up, Collins sent them onto the line as fast as he could, extending the perimeter over and over again. The zombies continually overlapped his flanks, bending them back until the line became “U” shaped with only a few hundred yards separating the sides. He was in danger of being surrounded and cut off.

  “Sir!” Austen cried. “There…there are zombies coming.”

  This wasn’t exactly helpful information, they had been coming nonstop all day. Too tired to raise his voice at the asinine statement, he calmly asked: “Where’s the problem, Austen?”

  She pointed straight west, the one area of the line he expected to be the easiest to hold because of the steepness of the hill. Normally, he might have blown her off; she was just a private, after all, however he had seen her running ammo. She had to have seen every part of the line as well as her share of the zombies. A few wouldn’t have had her this rattled.

  “How many?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. A thousand? Maybe more. It’s the biggest horde I’ve seen.”

  “Get back to work; we’re going to need all the ammo you can carry.” He turned from her and asked: “Captain Dell, what’s our reserve situation?”

  “Just us, sir,” he said, waving an arm at the men around the Humvees. “The northern line was almost flanked again. It’s downhill on that side and they flow like water.”

  “Shit,” Collins swore under his breath. After his earlier experience he was loathe to lose even a single man from the headquarters company, but a thousand of them? A thousand zombies at any point in the line would rupture it with ease. “Here’s what you’re going to do, get your ass to the edge of the hill and get me an estimate of the numbers there. And you had better run. Hendry! Where are the damned Apaches?”

  “Anyone’s best guess, sir. We can’t use satellite phones to connect with helicopter pilots and I don’t know what frequencies they’re on. They aren’t normally part of our force structure, sorry, sir.”

  “What about Courtney Shaw? Any word on her?” He had sent the first Blackhawk to her location 90 minutes before. By all reckoning, it should have been back.

  “None. No one is picking up.”

  Collins’s teeth gritted at this and he bit back another curse. “What about…”

  Captain Dell rushed inside, cutting him off. “We have to r
etreat! There’s too many of them. A thousand, easily, bearing right down on the front of the hill.”

  “There will be no retreat,” Collins replied, evenly. A retreat would mean the collapse of the lines, his men would be crushed from three sides and only a very fortunate few would escape. Once again, he was forced to use poorly trained and equipped weekend warriors. He had only this smattering of men and women from the headquarters company to stand in the breach. There were maybe twenty of them in and around the various Humvees. Most were over forty, a few were straight up fat, and one was six months pregnant; she looked like she was smuggling a soccer ball under her shirt. But at least she had shown up, not everyone had.

  “We have to fight,” he said, smacking one hand into the other. “Get your weapons and get out on the line. All of you, except you,” he said to the pregnant woman. “You will be in charge of communications. Get the Governor of Connecticut on the phone. Tell her the center will not hold. She is to fortify her cities as best as she can. Then call the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tell them that I will resign effective at midnight if the situation is not federalized by the President.”

  The Humvee was quiet for a span of three seconds and then Collins roared: “Well? What is everyone waiting for? Get moving!” The soldiers went in every direction, grabbing up M16s that were in many cases as old as they were. A few attempted to put on their masks. “No masks,” ordered Collins. So far, every soldier had complained bitterly about the masks, all saying it was preferable to risk exposure rather than greatly increasing the chance of being eaten alive because of poor shooting.

  They dropped the masks and then began checking their ammo situation. They were being too slow. “Everyone out!” Collins yelled. He too picked up a rifle. He supposed it was the pregnant soldier’s and he hoped to God she wouldn’t have a need for it. Just in case, he handed over his Beretta and said the same sexist thing Jerome had earlier. “It’ll be alright.”

  She looked at the gun and turned green. “No thank you, sir. I can’t.” She touched her belly.