Even Zombie Killers Need a Break zk-2

by John F. Holmes

I looked to my right and saw that the fire was consuming almost all of the rear of the aircraft and passenger compartment. The Plexiglas widows were melted, the doors charred and I could feel the intense heat of the JP8 flame, the passengers, were all dead, the business man and two of the women were squished and disfigured from the transmission caving through the cabin ceiling, there was a severed arm and someone’s intestines strewn about on the floor in a pool of blood. One of the men in the hurricane seat was decapitated and the man next to him was burning and split in half. The Asian dude sitting next to Slim had a shard metal sticking out of his neck and was bleeding out, he was alive, but not for much longer, perhaps another minute max; he was clutching his leg that was bleeding profusely from behind the knee where I could see his bone sticking through. He looked over at us and then slumped down in his chair.

  I was able to pull out Slim who was hacking and coughing. I ran around to Jackal’s door where I met the geezer pulling off the 240 from the mount. He looked at me and shouted “GET YOUR FUCKING BROTHER CAPTAIN I GOT THIS”.

  I opened up Jackal’s door and jettisoned it. He was bleeding from this shoulder and had taken several rounds to his chest plate. I cut away his seatbelts, and started to pull him out of the seat “SLIM GET THE WEAPONS OUT OF THE AIRCRAFT!! I’M OVER HERE PULLING OUT JACKAL”

  I got him out and dragged him away about 20 meters and set him up against a tree, where the crazy old guy had put Thompson. Slim came running over to me without weapons in hand the 240 slung around his waist, with a couple ammo cans. I saw Jim still circling overhead. “Pack his wounds, check Thompson and get ready for the Zs.” I sprinted back to the aircraft. It was still ablaze as I plugged into the ICS, and tried to push out on Guard on battery power

  “Jim, we’re alive, Jackals hit but coming around, Thompson is critical.” Nothing… what the fuck was I thinking!? The aircraft was on fire and all the antennas are fucking toast. I reached in the back grabbed Jackals and my GO Bag and ran back out to where Slim was working on Jackal and Thompson.

  The surviving civilian was already set up with the 240 conversion kit and everything… wtf!? I packed up jackal’s wound pretty good and the bleeding stopped, lucky for him his plate stopped the other rounds, but knocked him the fuck out. Thompson on the other hand was serious. He was bleeding from a gigantic gash on his leg. Slim was threw a tourniquet on, packed it out, and was working on a splint.

  “Hey Old timer! Any Zs coming our way?”

  “Negative sir, I hear them stirring though.”

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked him while trying to dress up Thompson.

  “Staff Sergeant Retired John Halaszynski. US ARMY and Nam ’73.”

  “I knew it!”

  “Don’t worry bro this ain’t the first time I’ve been shot down in a helicopter! HA HA HA HA!” The old coot was having a great time, from the look on his face. “Glad to have you aboard Ski, watch our six, man.”

  “Rodger that! Let those motherfuckers come on my way!” The old dude was really loving this shit. I mean seriously they say in NYC you see everything, well they weren’t kidding. I pulled out my CSEL radio and got Jim on the horn over UHF guard “Jim, you copy? We’re down, 2 injured, come down and get us dude”

  “Will do Lex, I have to kick these civis out man, or I won’t have the power.”

  “Bullshit! You have a half a tank of gas bro you can take 5 more people!!”

  “Rodger that, 64s are on the way btw bro.” he shot over the radio. We started across the field. Ski and I had jackal in a two man chair carry, and Slim was had Thompson over his shoulder.

  “Awesome glad to hear, we’re PZ posture you should be clear down man.” The radio cracked again, Buck said something but I couldn’t understand it. Jackal started coughing “New guys always fucking suck on the Radio” he mumbled with a pale smirk.

  “Zs incoming!” As if almost on queue a fucking horde of zombies started to make their way towards the crash site; Ski opened on the 240 and Slim and I started firing away. Jim was on short approach final but these motherfuckers were getting close. I could hear the identifiable gargle and growl of the zombies as they got closer.

  “LOADING!” Ski shouted, as he changed belts on the 240. I hit a chick in a jogging suit, and they waxed a dude in one of those foam hot dog suits you see people on the side of the road. Dropped some club rat looking thug and popped the face off of some Hipster looking dude.

  “Where fuck are we!? WHY ARE WE FUCKING SHOOTING?! FUCK WE CRASHED!!!” Jackal came out of his blacked out state, he freaked for a minute back pedaling in the dirt. “HOLY FUCK! Zs!!!” he said with great emphasis. “Can you stand?” I yelled over the sound of 240 fire. “YEAH I think so, he stumbled to his feet grabbed his suppressed UMP and started blasting Zs covering our Six. “LOADING”! I yelled as I slapped another fresh mag in my weapon.

  “BOOM MOTHER FUCKERS!!!” Jackal threw a frag grenade at deep in to encroaching horde, sending body parts flying everywhere. ”Last MAG!” Slim shouted, his weapon jammed on the first round “FUCK ME!!!” he shouted.

  I threw him mine “Here!” then transitioned to my M9. The zombies were within 20 meters of us. Jim swooped in, his door gunners blasting away cutting down the horde of Zs coming our way… “COME ON COME ON COME ON!!” He yelled over the deafening sound of the Black Hawk’s rotors. We loaded up Thompson, then Ski, Slim and I jumped on the aircraft the Zs were within 10 feet from the aircraft , we lifted off emptying out magazines on the horde. Jackal sent a burst through a terribly obese man, his stomach exploding onto the Z next to him. I unloaded my last magazine on a construction worker Z, the rounds punching through his hard hat that had somehow stayed on his head.

  “FUCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Ski yelled as we took off, blasting away at the mob below us. I looked down to see a severed hand wrapped around Ski’s ankle He shook it off, and lit a cigarette. He Looked at us and yelled “DAMN I MISS THIS SHIT!” I went up on headset , looked at Jim, who turned around and said “You alright?

  “Yeah….” I said out of breath. “I’m all right.” The rest of the flight was quiet, as we flew away from the central park the Apaches rolled in blasting 30mm and Rockets, then rolled out soon as we departed the park.

  I met Jackal at the Aid Station when we got back. His bed was in the hallway. “What the fuck are you doing in the hallway?” I asked

  “They kicked me out for slapping one of nurse’s asses” he said with his usual grin.

  “Just one?” I said with a smirk.

  “I got a few fractured ribs and a shallow GSW on the shoulder. Doc said it just missed an artery. Said I should be back and flying in a few weeks.”

  “Good to hear bro, take it a day at a time, do you remember what happened when we got hit?”

  “Nope, I just remember waking up and seeing that crazy guy in the blue shirt shooting fucking zombies and bleeding all over myself.” He paused for a minute looked down at this hospital bracelet and looked up at me with his serious Jackal face and said “Alex, I don’t ever want you to beat yourself up about what happened out there, you were able to put an aircraft down that was seriously fucked up. I don’t even know If I could have done the same. is Thompson Okay?”

  “Yeah, funny enough he was actually In better shape that we thought, he should be good to go in 2 weeks, Oh and hey. I know you’re not supposed to have theses either but whose knows, maybe it will help.”

  I cracked the top of a Sam Adams and handed it to him, put the others by his feet, raised my beer and said “Juambo!” which was “cheers” in Swahlili, meaning “brothers”. He smiled, klinked his beer and said “Juambo!”

  SCROUNGING

  by

  Will Shaffer

  Sacramento, California

  Day Date Month Year

  0900 Hours Local

  Jake moved quickly and quietly through the suburban terrain. He had left his team on the roof of a convenience store a couple blocks back. He was out to forage a bit for his team
and to also get a feel for the environment in the area. They had been inserted into the area to scout in preparation for a push to retake the agricultural area that the Sacramento Valley represented. The ability to grow more food would be a great relief to the American enclave that the Pacific Northwest had become. While the climate and terrain had made it naturally defensible, the growing season was restricted by the same. While surveillance of the area showed only moderate numbers of Zs, there had been a larger than normal presence of rogue survivor bands. Double-edged swords. Life was all about double-edged swords those days.

  For his little excursion, which would have pissed the Task Force CO off, Jake traveled light. His clothes were fairly basic. Baseball cap, tactical “bite shirt,” blue jeans, and hiking boots. Tyr Tactical “PICO” plate carrier, “war belt,” and his rifle rounded out his gear. The plate carrier and war belt were a hodge-podge of different color/camo pouches that resulted from the previous few years of adapting to the Z War. Multicam, coyote brown, black, and olive drab pouches were all present on his gear, though Multicam was the predominant camo. Multicam had just become the primary camouflage pattern at the time of the The Fall and was “Tacticool” with SWAT Teams around the country at the time.

  Wearing the plate carrier sucked. It was heavy. Front and rear ESAPI plates along with side plates came out to about twenty pounds of weight alone. The carrier, made of heavy Cordura nylon, weighed a couple more pounds. The pouches were weight. Then, the contents of the pouches added even more weight. Six rifle mags that each weighed a pound, two grenades that added another pound, a couple of smoke grenades, a heavy Strider fighting knife, medical kit, tactical radio, and other accoutrements of battle. While, some would argue that you could ditch the body armor in the time of zombies, the threat from the independent and rogue human groups threw a wrench into that concept. What good would the cool “bite suits” be if some hillbillie whacked you with a hundred year old .30-06?

  As Jake moved, his eyes tracked in a tried and true manner. He scanned his surroundings then the ground in front of him every few steps. Moving like a “ninja” would quickly cease if stepped on a noisy “tattle tale” like broken glass or if he ran a nail up through his boot. As he moved, he let his senses work. For someone who had used to live in the Sacramento area, the absolute silence was unreal. There was no sound of airlines in the pattern for Sac International, no trains, no cars on the freeways or city streets. There were very little bird sounds, though more than a few birds about. Even the birds had learned that sound attracted Zs like little else would. The silence was a good thing from a tactical stance. Most Zs were not quiet. They groaned, shuffled, dragged legs, bumped into things, and stumbled about like drunks. If a Z was on the trail of something living, it’s howl could be heard at some distance. That howl would attract other Zs and before long, a herd would be on a single-minded hunt for some poor soul, or even a squirrel, that had gotten the attention of the Z. It often took days for the zombies to cease their chase.

  In addition to the sound, Jake watched for movement. Some things moved naturally, like animals. People and Zs did not. Smell came into play. The Zs were really just pieces of slowly rotting meat, so they could be smelled at a distance at times. More than once, Jake had made the decision to bypass scouting a structure from the smell of death at the breach point. Either there were Zs inside or some purple-shirt-wearing church group had committed mass suicide. With all the horror Jake had seen in the previous few years, there were still things that bothered him to the soul. Dozens of healthy people drinking antifreeze in hopes that Jabba the Hutt would save their souls was one of those things.

  Dogs. Dogs were one of the things that Jake feared. Untold numbers of dogs had run loose during The Fall. Large packs of feral dogs, whose keen senses kept them clear of Z hordes, would roam the countryside. They attacked with a viciousness and sometimes in numbers that seemed unreal. The military had standing orders to waste any dog packs on sight.

  Focus! Jake snapped himself back into the moment. His mind had wandered as his body had droned on mechanically and instinctively. He found himself looking at a decent sized house that was relatively intact. No broken windows, no fire damage. He slowly moved around the perimeter of the house, which was a bit overgrown, but found little in the way of activity signs. He slowly made his way back to the front door and rapped softly on the door. He then took a knee and waited, watching “outboard” while he listened for sounds from the house. If a Z had been inside, the knock would have most likely sent the Z into a flurry of activity as it tried to find a way out of the house to the sound. After a few minutes with no sound, he slid his rifle around to his back. From his left side, he swept forward a pistol-gripped Remington 870 shotgun. The barrel had been sawed off just forward of the magazine tube, which made the gun very short. The shotgun was loaded with #4 birdshot, which was heavy enough to get through skull and tissue at close range but didn’t have the limited payload of heavier 00 buckshot.

  With the shotgun in his right hand, he tried the door with the left. Locked. He let the shotgun dangle on the attached bungee sling and fished a small lock pick kit from his PICO. A little squirt of gun lube into the barrel of the lock and a minute of work defeated the lock. He carefully returned the kit to his vest before he pushed the door open. The door creaked uncomfortably loudly had he pushed it open as far as it would go. He covered swept the muzzle of the shotgun everywhere he could see, but failed to find any lurking Zs in sight. After a quick scan about inside, he stepped into the house. Once inside, he stopped and listened for several moments. He then pushed the door shut.

  The house smelled old and dusty. It was a comforting smell that meant nothing had disturbed the house in some time. The house was dimly lit from the sunlight coming through the drapes of the various rooms. To counter the darkness, he pulled a Surefire R1 flashlight from his PICO and used it to light things up as he moved about. Four bedrooms, a large family/dining room, a kitchen, and a garage. All clear, but he stopped at the inner garage door. There was a sign posted on the door, addressed to “Sean,” that specifically said not to come out into the garage. The note said to read the note on the hall closet door.

  Jake moved back slowly to the closet. The note there told “Sean” that his mother loved him dearly and his step-father could not be prouder of how the little boy had grown into a man. The note said that they had decided to take their own lives in the garage than become monsters. The closet held the step-father’s old seabag which had some basics, the canned food with the furthest out expiration dates, a medical kit, some maps, and two boxes of shells for the step-father’s shotgun. The note encouraged Sean to head to his aunt’s house in the mountains and ride out the storm there.

  Jake pulled open the closet and found the seabag, closed up and intact. An over/under Browning double-barrel .12 gauge leaned up against the bag. He lifted the bag, which was fairly heavy from the canned foods it contained. The shotgun, fortunately, had a decent hunting sling on it. He carried those to the front door and set them down for a moment. His eyes tracked to the wall over and around the gas fireplace common of tract homes. Pictures. Pictures of a young single mother and her son. Pictures of a young boy and step-father on a fishing trip. Senior pictures and pictures of proud parents wearing matching college football jerseys with their son’s number. Sean and his parents. Jake turned and walked to the inner garage door.

  He pulled the door open, which resisted slightly due to old packing tape around the door. The step-father had obviously wanted to keep the smell of death out to the house. There was hardly any odor. A couple years of hot summers and cold winters had contributed to the decomposition and a bit of mummification to the bodies. They had their backs to the door and faced the main garage door. They were sitting in folding chairs, the kind that you would take and set up on the lawn to watch a football game. Close to each other, what appeared to be the husband had his arm around the shoulders of the wife. A large portrait of Sean, kneeling on a football field in his un
iform, was set up in front of the couple on a camping table. An empty wine bottle and two empty pill bottles sat on the table. They were wearing the jerseys with their son’s number. Jake closed and locked the door to the garage that had become a tomb. Jake stopped and picked up a writing tablet on the kitchen counter.

  A few minutes later, Jake made his way out of the house and back to the “stop-n-rob” that his team had set up on the roof of. Toby dropped a rope down the roof access hatch and hauled the seabag to the roof. Jake wearily climbed up the roof ladder, burdened by the weight of his armor and on his soul. Once he saw that Toby had closed and secured the roof access hatch, he pulled the hunting shotgun from his back. He nodded to Toby, who quickly opened the seabag and began to inventory it. Jake began to pull off his gear.

  “You took long enough.” Megan grumbled as she looked him over.

  “Yeah, but I brought you a gift.” Jake handed her the shotgun, to which her eyes lit up. She had wanted a shotgun for building clearing for some time, but had yet to get her hands on her own. She quickly scurried over to Chris, who had been standing watch. In exchange for taking part of his watch, Chris went to work cutting the hunting shotgun down to something a bit more tactical. Meg chirped happily about the weapon the entire time. In the meantime, Toby had discarded about half of the load of canned food, which was past its’ expiration dates. They were left with some soup, some canned chicken and canned tuna, and a variety of canned veggies. The big score was a bottle of Tabasco sauce in the bag.

  Meg, who now had a shortened over/under slung across her back, picked through the cans. She quickly went to work cooking a stew for the team. When she brought Jake his bowl of stew, she could tell that he was troubled, but had learned not to question her team leader. He was solid, but the weight of the world sometimes bore heavy on his shoulders. She sat next to him silently as he ate and fished her iPod from her BDU pants. She popped one ear bud into her right ear and one into Jake’s left before she started a playlist of music she knew he liked. He smiled modestly and tipped his spoon to her, silently thanking her for the meal. Once he finished, he settled back onto his makeshift bed of gear and covered his eyes with his hat, listening to the music and the quietly snoring woman beside him.