by John Chapman
The next five minutes was an exercise in organized chaos. Alpha and Bravo teams were already geared up and ready to push out on their next missions, so they just got in their trucks and the MRAP and waited while Delta team and Kyle, Mark, Bones, and David got their gear on and did pre-combat checks. Delta team jumped in the MRAP with Alpha team, while the command group found seats in the M113. As they got settled they heard Ben come on the radio, “Knight TOC, Charlie One. The three vehicles pulled into Walmart and are shooting at the front doors and into the crowd outside.” They heard Chief Stone come on the air and say, “Knight TOC copies. Knight Six, launch.” Kyle said, “Knight Six copies. All teams, let’s roll.”
The four armored tactical vehicles roared out of the gate, leaving a knot of wives and families standing outside the kitchen, wondering what was going on.
*
JR was working his way through the miniature jungle that bordered the northwest corner of the Walmart parking lot, his Tikka Tac A1 sniper system in his hands. The rifle was heavier than usual because of the TNVC / FLIR PVS 27 clip-on night vision device that now sat in front of his optic. Kyle had issued him the night vision optic out of the vault saying, “No sense keeping this stuff locked up, and I don’t think anyone is going to need it for training anytime soon.”
JR was happy to have it now. Without it he would have been dependent on the ambient light of a 13% waning moon. With no man-made light anywhere in sight it was darker than the inside of a coal digger’s ass; and without the night vision he wouldn’t have been able to identify a target at 25 yards, much less across the massive parking lot of Walmart. JR reached a good spot on the reverse slope of a small drainage berm at the edge of the lot that was high enough to let him see over the sea of dead cars in the Walmart lot, and set his rifle down. He slowly took off his tripod and assault pack, laid them down next to his rifle, extended his bipod and got down in a prone position behind the gun.
He turned on the PVS 27 and gave his scope turret 0.2 mils of elevation to compensate for his known POI shift with the night vision optic. Getting behind the gun, he found the west entrance to Walmart in the optic, where he could see one of the raider’s trucks parked, and started to observe. He broadcast on the radio, “Charlie Sniper set, northwest edge of the parking lot.” After getting an acknowledgement from Ben, JR pulled his prized Swarovski rangefinding binos and ranged the building at 193 meters. After dialing another 0.6 mils of elevation to compensate for the range, JR started observing in earnest.
As he settled his optic’s reticle on the west entrance, he saw a guy in a coyote brown tactical vest and armed with an AK walk out of the doors, go to the truck, grab what looked like a 12 pack of beer, and return inside. Scanning the parking lot, JR counted at least 30 bodies on the ground that were not moving, and about the same number of people, running to the east, almost out of sight beyond the buildings bordering the lot on that side. The unmoving bodies were obviously the result of all the gunfire they had heard as they pulled up on the side street to the west of the property.
JR forced his humanity down and focused on the mission. He turned his focus to the east entrance to Walmart and noted two pickups were parked all akimbo just outside the doors. One of them was running and the headlights were on. He couldn’t tell if anyone was in the truck. He noticed all three of the trucks were newer, and wondered how they still ran. JR got on the radio and updated Ben on the situation as he saw it. Ben replied, “Roger. We are standing by for the other teams.”
*
Trent began picking up the radio traffic about Walmart as they crossed Sawburg Avenue on State Street. He listened to several transmissions, and while he could only hear Charlie team’s side of the conversation, he got the gist of the situation. He got on the radio and said, “Charlie One, Echo One. We are westbound on State Street at Sawburg. Do you want us to come in and set up from the east?” Trent heard Kyle break in and say, “Echo One, Knight Six. That’s affirmative. Set up in the Tractor Supply lot and keep out of sight of Walmart. Let me know when you are set. We are about three minutes out with three full teams.” Trent said, “Roger,” and told Ernesto to haul ass.
Chapter 13
Walmart
Alliance, OH
Billy had never been so excited in his entire 28 years on earth. When the lights went out, he was at work at the Nifty-Lube in Louisville, a small town between Alliance and Canton. Being in the oil change pit, he obviously noticed the power going out, but didn’t think much of it until he pulled out his smart phone to use the flashlight on it to get up the stairs. The damn thing was dead.
He made his way upstairs and looked outside, where he saw all of the cars on the road in front of the shop were sitting still. This is it! he thought. He knew what was going on and felt the almost sexual excitement growing inside him. He and his group of friends had talked for several years about the apocalypse or civil war or financial collapse they were sure was coming, and all of the fun they would have once it did.
But for once in their lives, Billy and his friends had actually done more than just talked. Billy and eight of his closest friends had grown up together, committed petty crimes together, fought together, beat up minorities together; and over the last seven years had graduated to making meth and selling it together. Billy was their leader.
Several years earlier, while in jail for one of his many drug arrests, Billy had read a post-apocalyptic book, and become fascinated by the thought of living in a time with no law, no rules, and no boundaries. The idea of being a warlord fascinated him. Soon he was reading everything he could find about the subject. He kept his passion to himself for a long time, since his friends ‘didn’t cotton to no book readin’; until one night when they were all at his single wide trailer, drinking beer and smoking weed, and a popular TV show about the zombie apocalypse came on TV.
They started talking about what they would do if the zombies came, and Billy was able to lead the conversation into what they would do if a big disaster happened. By the time they fell asleep, surrounded by the flotsam of a long night of drinking and smoking the hippy lettuce, Billy had convinced them they should all ‘get ready’. The group spent the next several months attending gun shows. Three of them could still legally buy guns, and they spent a lot of Billy’s meth dealing profits on SKS and AK pattern rifles, lots of magazines and ammo, pistols, and crossbows; and an assortment of Chinese knock-off tactical vests, survival knives, ninja stars, tomahawks, one blowgun and a ninja sword. They spent time in the woods near Billy’s trailer shooting their new guns and drinking beer.
Billy’s cousin Frank was a diesel mechanic, and helped Billy convert his truck and two of his friend’s trucks to non-electric diesel. Frank had stolen several crate motors from work, and he sold Billy three of them for $1000 and 12 ounces of his best sports-drink-bottle made methamphetamine. They did the work over a long 72-hour straight speed bender that ended with Frank getting arrested for possession when he went to the store to grab beer and got pulled over for a minor traffic violation.
Some of the guys asked Billy if they should be stockpiling food and such, and Billy said, “Nah. If something happens we will just go take over the Walmart in Alliance. We can use it for food, and as a base to start rapin’ and selling dope.” The group got even more excited about that idea.
As soon as he realized what was going on, Billy jumped in his truck and hauled ass. As he was looking in his rearview mirror at his boss who was standing in the driveway looking at him drive away, he felt and heard the truck hit something. He looked forward in time to see a man going under the front of his truck. Dumbass must have been standing in the middle of the road. Serves him right, Billy thought. He realized he was only two minutes into the end of the world and he’d already gotten to kill someone. Billy smiled and hooted.
When he arrived home, he saw both Ronnie and Bobbie’s trucks were in his yard. Damn, they hauled ass to beat me here, He thought. He jumped out of the truck and ran to the front door, flinging it ope
n and shouting, “It’s time to get our apocalypse on Bitches!” He was greeted with whoops and hollers from everyone in the living room. It turned out Ronnie and Bobbie had picked almost everyone up on the way to the trailer, along with several guys who weren’t in the core group but hung out from time to time. Of the group, only Billy and Bobbie had jobs, so it had been simple to snatch everyone on their way. As Billy asked where the last guy was, he came up the driveway on a bicycle. “Hot damn everyone is here!” Billy yelled.
The group spent the next few hours drinking beer, loading magazines, smoking some weed, and plotting their first move. Billy decided they would wait until dark to hit the Walmart. He figured they had time; in all of the post-apocalypse books he read it always took a few days for things to get crazy. In their celebration of the end of the world, they lost track of time. By the time they got geared up and ready to go, they were about 2 hours behind Billy’s schedule. The irony of them being late to the apocalypse was lost on them.
Before they left, Billy gave them his grand plan. “Alright, shut up and listen.” Billy started. “Grab all your guns and put all the ammo and beer in the trucks. We won’t be coming back here. We will convoy up to Alliance and stop at Walmart first. The security there is unarmed, and the cops in Alliance have probably already split to take care of their families. We will hunt them down later. The cops only have pistols and shotguns, so even if they are around we will f**k them up.”
Billy paused to imbibe some Keystone Light then continued, “When we get to Walmart, we will shoot our way in or use Bobbie’s truck to ram the doors. Once we get in, shoot all the men inside. Keep the bitches alive; we will have some fun tonight.” All the guys yelled their approval. They mounted up with two guys in the cab of each truck and everyone else is riding in the pickup beds.
On their way to Walmart they had to take a detour around a bunch of semi’s that were stalled out on Hwy 62, which forced them off the freeway and around the back way into Alliance. They never noticed the armored vehicles that ended up behind them.
When they tore into the Walmart parking lot, the truck headlights illuminated a big group of people hanging out near the doors. No one gave an order to start the massacre, but one of the guys in the back of the lead truck thought it would be fun to shoot into the crowd. Screw it he thought, No rules. He brought his prized AK to his shoulder and, bracing himself on the roof of the pickup, his magazine gouging huge rents in the paint as he rested it on the top of the truck, started firing randomly into the crowd as fast as he could pull the trigger. He was having a great time, and just wished he had spent the money on a bump stock. Others in the backs of the trucks joined in, figuring it was part of the plan.
Billy sped to the east doors of the store, slammed on the brakes and stopped. He left the truck running and jumped out, intent on getting into the store. The guys in the back of his truck were still shooting, so he ran around the front and rushed the big glass doors of the store. They were intact and when he tried pushing through them he bounced off of the locked doors. Looking down, he saw someone had wedged 2X4’s between the walls and the back edges of the doors, preventing them from being opened.
Billy was stymied for a second until one of his guys ran up next to him and started shooting the glass out of the door. Billy joined in and one magazine each later they were in. Billy turned and yelled at the guys in the truck, still focused on mowing down the crowd now running away from them, to get in the store. They stopped shooting and bailed out, joining him inside.
A couple of hours earlier, the Walmart manager, already in a panic over the large crowd outside, had sent all of the employees and customers still in the store to lock themselves in the break-room in the back of the store. After arming himself with a Mossberg shotgun from the sporting good section, an action he was sure was going to get him fired, he had hunkered down on top of the women’s fitting rooms located at about the center of the store, near the front. He was contemplating letting the crowd into the store to loot it, in an attempt to save his employees, when the gunfire started outside. He knew he was stuck.
The manager listened as Billy and his guys entered the east doors first, followed closely by the sound of them coming in the west side. He struggled to see anything in the cavernous, pitch-black store, and was able to track the intruders only by the sounds of their yelling to one another. The sound reminded him of the packs of jackals he had seen on the nature TV shows he watched with his kids.
Billy was kicking himself in the ass. FLASHLIGHTS! I didn’t plan on flashlights! Ran through his head on a loop. Ronnie had a cheap light on his AK, but he was on the west side of the building. Billy could see Ronnie’s light moving around, but it did him no good at all. He yelled at Ronnie to meet him in the middle, and jogged that way.
When they met up, Billy told him, “Get everyone over here. You will have to be the point man, none of us can see.” Ronnie shinned his light around and spotted some cheap keychain lights in the shelves by the registers, walked over and grabbed a handful off the hook. He also saw some rolls of electrical tape, and remembering some pictures he saw of the Navy Seals, he said to Billy, “Hey, just have everyone tape these lights to their guns.” Billy, initially pissed that Ronnie wasn’t listening to him, stopped for a second and let Ronnie’s idea pierce the weed-induced fog in his head. “Brilliant!” Billy exclaimed. They quickly distributed the lights and taped them to their guns. Now, they could go hunting.
The store manager watched all this from 30 feet away, and thought he was doomed. Figuring he was mere seconds from being discovered, he shifted his shotgun and pointed it at the group of men standing in front and slightly below him. Thinking only that he had to get as many of them as he could before they found his employees, he pulled the trigger once and promptly fell off the roof of the fitting rooms, and became entangled in a circular display of XXL flower print tank tops.
The shotgun blast caught the clumped group of would-be marauders completely unaware. One minute they were struggling to tape these little lights to their rifles and the next their world exploded. The store manager had loaded buckshot into the shotgun, and the 30 feet of separation had allowed for a pretty good spread. Pellets struck three of the men, one of them standing just to Billy’s left. All of them panicked and started shooting.
Most of the raiders oriented in the general direction the blast had come from before they fired; but at least two of them, one of them the wounded guy to Billy’s left, just started pulling the trigger of their rifles. By the time they stopped shooting, three more of them had been hit, this time by their own guys. Billy took 7.62X39 rounds to the left foot and left calf, and Bobbie had stopped a round the hard way behind his right ear, completely decapitating him.
Everything was silent for a couple of seconds, when the guy who had gone back out to get the beer from the truck came running up to the group, yelling his ass off. In the dim glow of the keychain lights he saw the carnage and promptly threw up, then dropped the beer and sprinted towards the west doors. The survivors of the dumbest gunfight of the apocalypse, so far anyway, took a minute to gather themselves, then began to re-group. Billy yelled, “Someone go get me some first aid stuff from the medicine isle!”
*
By the time the convoy from the FOB showed up, Ben had Charlie team set up in the ditch on the west side of the lot about 30 yards from the northwest corner of the building. When they arrived, Kyle had the vehicles drop Alpha team and the leadership group at Ben’s vehicles on the side street to the west. He directed the drivers and gunners of every vehicle with a belt fed mounted on it to stay in place and stage near the two driveways into the lot. Walmart was on a slight hill above State Street, making it impossible for people at the building to see down onto the road, a terrain advantage Kyle planned to maximize.
Kyle directed the vehicles carrying Bravo and Delta teams to drop their assaulters on the east side of the lot, and for those teams to link up with Echo team. He ordered the MRAP to stage at the bottom of the we
st driveway into the lot, and the M113 to stage at the bottom of the east side driveway. The driveways were so steep that the trucks could sit out of sight from the store until they were needed.
“This is going to be shady as hell bro.” Mark told Kyle, as they crouched in the reeds close to the northwest corner of the building. Kyle replied, “I know brother. There have got to be employees in there. This is going to suck.” Bones and David soon joined them. Mark got on the radio, “Delta One, Knight Five. Place your sniper and a security guy in the woods on the two / three corner (the southeast). Once they are set we need them to provide intel and squirter control.” Troy responded, “Roger, she’s moving.” Mark could visualize Kasey running in her gear, and again had to force down his emotions.
Mark thought for a second and keyed the mic again, “Charlie Sniper, you have sides one and four.” JR immediately responded, “Sniper set.” Mark replied, “Roger. Other elements hold what you got for a minute.” Kyle said, “So we have about 10 dongs (Mark was constantly coming up with different nicknames for bad guys, and ‘Dongs’ was his latest idea. Kyle liked it.) armed with long guns inside. They have already evinced their intent by shooting all these people in the parking lot. There are some number of unknowns, now hostages, inside the store and,” Kyle was interrupted by a heavy volley of gunfire from inside the store. He continued, “Shit. Ok, we need to assault. Anyone disagree?” Everyone shook their heads no.
“Ok,” Kyle continued, “Mark will lead Alpha and Charlie teams close to the west doors. Everyone stays dark (under night vision). Bravo, Delta and Echo will move to the rear of the store and figure out a good breach point close to the east end of the building.” Kyle paused to think, then continued, “Once they are set to breach, they initiate and you guys hit it from multiple breach points. All teams will move clockwise. I will fall in but stay towards the rear of your element Mark, so I can coordinate. When we breach, the M113 and MRAP pop up and cover the front. They will need to be careful of their fire towards the building, but as long as they avoid targeting the doors we should be fine. That wall should stop 7.62. What am I missing?” Kyle finished.