by RW Krpoun
“No. At this point I don’t know what our options are, and given the train’s speed I’m not sure just how liable they are to shift. The Minnesota National Guard has a company combat team responding, but it is at least forty miles away by road.”
JD checked his watch. “Five ten. We’ve got a little more than an hour until sundown, and with the clouds and the trees it will get dark quick after that.”
“We’ve got four night vision units; I’ll carry one, and the other three go to JD, Dyson, and Chip. Dyson gets it for scouting, and Chip because he’s what passes for a medic in this outfit.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, dude.”
“Just remember who loves you.”
“I always do. She doesn’t look anything like you.”
Marv grinned. “All right, spread the word.”
At five twenty five Marv called the officers together again. “OK, we’re about a mile out, you can see we’re slowing down. The situation is much clearer and getting worse. The National Guard ran into a bunch of PETI demonstrators and lost some time; they’re thirty-odd minutes out so its all on us. It looks like a bunch who calls themselves The Family Against The New World Oppression, FATWO, got a herd of zeds moving and led them into the Center; apparently they’ve done this before. They’re a single outfit, fully independent, not that it really matters to us.”
“The Center’s perimeter has been breached and the security force isn’t doing very well. The Center’s director is leading the people out a rear gate and bringing them towards the train; its about half a mile of scrub woodlot between the Center and the rail line, assuming the people stick together and move in a straight line. The train is going to sound its horn periodically to guide them in.”
“And draw every zombie within ten miles,” Bear shook his head.
“Yeah.” Marv paused for a moment. “I’m going to lead a dismounted group to make contact with the refugees and direct them to the train, and to help slow pursuing zombies so they have time to load. This will be a volunteer-only mission. Those who do not volunteer will secure our part of the train.” He paused again. “I don’t need to tell you that it’s going to be hairy in the trees, so there’s no shame in staying put on the train.”
“I’m in.” For a second Chip couldn’t believe he had spoken aloud; he certainly hadn’t intended to. It was like that feeling you get when you stand on a high place and get an urge to jump.
“Me, too,” Brick said immediately.
“Yeah,” Bear nodded soberly.
Addison shrugged and gave a half-wave of acceptance.
“Once again we have no sword, no line in the dirt to cross,” Dyson shook his head. “We need more drama for this sort of thing.”
“There isn’t an ounce of common sense amongst us. Why aren’t we back in Texas getting rich like Herc?” JD sighed. “I just got done talking to a fourteen-year-old who is ready to go to war because the way the world is shaping up, and now I have to go get killed. Today has really sucked.”
“Speaking of which, they stay aboard along with Sylvia and Bambi,” Marv said. “This will be rough enough with experienced people. OK, any second thoughts on going?”
Chip had plenty, but whatever insane portion of his brain that made him volunteer was preventing him from voicing them. He wondered if on some level he was becoming suicidal.
“OK, JD, check to see who is willing to go and assign them to senior Badgers.”
“What if more than seven volunteer?”
“You, Dyson, and Bear will double up. Bear, tell the females and stay-behinds to mount a three-sixty defense from the cargo beds of the trucks; that’s about eight feet of height to work with. I’m going to notify Grase; by the time I get back it will be go time.”
“How many volunteered?” Marv asked as he crossed the ramp into the Gnomes’ car, Dirk Chambers in tow.
“All of them, including the girls,” JD said grimly. “We’ve sorted out the teams; you’ve got Sauron.”
“OK. Well, Mister Chambers has also volunteered.”
“Dirk,” the celebrity said calmly, his right thumb hooked through the sling of a Springfield M-1A SOCOM-16 rifle. “I’m proud to be a part of this.”
“We have to move fast.” The train was still slowing and over the sound of the wheels and rattling cars distant gunfire could be heard. “The Center is due east. We’ll move out in a skirmish line to my right, with JD at the far end, the south end. Hard Eight will be to my left, making up the north end of the line. The State Guard is moving people up to the boxcar roofs, and the DSR staff will coordinate getting refugees into the Amtrak cars. Dirk, you will go with Brick, we’re forming into fire teams. Any questions?’
“Yeah, how do I transfer out of this chicken outfit?” JD asked, raising a chuckle.
“Its been good working with you guys,” Addison said suddenly. “If, you know, we don’t all make it.”
Marv was shocked-he couldn’t recall Addison ever expressing a personal feeling before. “He’s right-I haven’t soldiered with better men.”
“Don’t get all gay about this,” Bear warned.
The Ranger laughed. “OK, lets go jack up some zombies.”
Colonel James Walters led Hard Eight into the tree line, his decked-out M-4 at the ready. He had deep misgivings about this entire business, but that bastard Burleson had just ignored his points and with that pompous phony Dirk Chambers standing there with his cameraman he couldn’t protest too much. It didn’t help that that primping ninny Grase had thought that going on foot into the trees was just a swell idea.
He loathed Burleson and his bungling crew of losers; that an idiot of that caliber could be jumped up into the officer corps and awarded the nation’s second-highest honor was just yet another example of the many failings of the US Army. That the cretin had turned his back on such an honor to lead a bunch of slackers and morons was an insult to every man who had ever served.
And to top it all off Chambers had decided to accompany the Yard Gnomes, as if that band of circus freaks had anything to offer. There wasn’t a man in Hard Eight who couldn’t bench one-fifty, and that was the minimum standard; every single one of his men had completed the Ranger, Special Forces Qualification, or entry SEAL Course. You couldn’t get better quality personnel than that.
The train was parked on a gentle curve, the front and rear bowing slightly to the east; trees pressed close to the drainage ditches on either side of the tracks. Up ahead was scattered firing, but visibility was limited to about fifty to seventy feet on the average; fortunately for them the leaves were gone from the branches.
“All right, guys, spread out on line,” Walters put a cheery note into his voice. “This is just a walk in the trees. When we make contact with the refugees, feel free to pick out your girlfriend for the night.”
That got a chuckle, and the operators shuffled into a skirmish line, but their interval was tight. Walters debated making them spread out more, and decided against it. It wasn’t really important.
He reminded himself that he had hand-picked these men, and that over half had served with him in Iraq or Afghanistan. Luke, for example, had been his driver in Iraq, and he had nearly his entire section from his last assignment in Afghanistan. He had coordinated logistics for psyops and civil affairs across the entire war-torn country and they had been through a half-dozen mortar attacks in that tour. Good, solid men who could bench plenty of iron was what carried the day.
The sound of bodies crashing through the brush up ahead brought the straggling line to a halt. “Stand easy guys, those are probably refugees.”
He was right: moments later individuals and families crashed into view, winded and staggering. “Keep going, head west!” Walters shouted cheerfully. “The train is a hundred yards behind us.” He repeated his exhortations as more groups emerged, these often better controlled and less winded. Some were arriving at an angle, having lost their bearings, assuming that they ever had any. He could hear more passing to the north and south of their p
osition, but didn’t concern himself with them. The rail line was impossible to miss if they kept going in any sort of westerly direction.
The refugees babbled a lot of nonsense but the Colonel and his men ignored it and waved them on. “Our job is to fight zombies,” Walters airily assured those who paused to ask for help, medical treatment, or water. “Keep heading west.”
Finally the last straggler limped past and Hard Eight resumed its advance. “Might as well wait for them here,” Walters said after they had covered another fifty yards and he noted that his operators were visibly slowing. “One spot is as good as another. Spread out on line, boys.”
The operators shuffled a few feet further apart. “Remind you of Iraq?” the Colonel grinned at Luke.
“Dunno, sir,” the blond ex-Ranger shrugged. “In Iraq we just drove around.”
“In a war zone,” Walters reminded him. “We’re all combat veterans.”
Luke stepped close and lowered his voice. “Sir…I never fired my weapon until the zombies. I mean, yeah, at the range and plinking, and that time you and I shot that camel, but never in anything like combat. None of the guys have. We’ve all shot zombies, but…not like this.”
The Colonel was shocked. “Hard Eight is an elite unit-we are not pulling back,” he said, keeping his voice down.
“No, sir, but maybe we should link up with the Yard Gnomes, protect our right flank and…”
“And what?”
Luke glanced around nervously. “Look, sir, those guys kill zombies with hammers. On the medium mission they pulled their targets out by just charging in guns blazing. We lured the zeds away.”
“Superior tactics and economy of force,” Walters said icily.
“Yes, sir, but this…this is toe-to-toe, sir. Infantry stuff.”
“Hold your ground, Luke.”
“Yes, sir.”
Up ahead they heard more bodies coming through the brush and then the zombie wail sounded to Walter’s far left, instantly picked up by a hundred throats all across their front.
“Weapons free!” Walters bellowed. “Fire at will!”
A volley crashed out and the firing quickly intensified as the infected came view. Walters shouldered his weapon and began dropping zeds, firing as calmly as he would have on the range. He kept close count of his shots just as he had been trained, and dropped the empty magazine from his weapon with a live round in the chamber. As he reloaded he was startled to see that the rest of the operators had drifted back a dozen paces and bunched up. “Spread out and get back on line!” he barked, and looking guilty his men reluctantly moved forward until a long burst on full auto from the north end of the line preceded a panicky “They’re flanking us! They’re coming from the north!”
Moments later the Colonel was facing the zombies alone.
“Five yards between fire teams,” Marv bellowed as the last refugees passed the Yard Gnomes. “Advance!”
They had entered the tree, each fire team trailing a line of narrow yellow plastic marking tape that they had salvaged somewhere and which had ended up in the junk box that every truck had; when the refugees had shown up the Gnomes had told them to follow the ribbon and kept moving deeper into the trees.
SkyGnome buzzed overhead, controlled by Sylvia; the local wi-fi wasn’t strong enough for him to have live feed, but she was on the CB with him, advising that there was a little gully or stream about twenty yards ahead running mostly north and south, and that was where he planned to make their stand. For some reason she kept sending the drone north, but that was a discussion for another time.
As they reached a little linear depression whose origin Marv couldn’t guess there was heavy gunfire to his left, north of their line, quickly tapering off. “I need you about twenty feet behind me and twenty to the north; watch for Hard Eight or zombies,” he advised Sauron.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get low, get prone, pass it on,” he called to his right and laid down on the leaf-covered, feet-torn ground, which was cold, damp, and redolent of mold. “Just another day in the Infantry,” he muttered. “Might be seeing you soon, Deb.”
The infected showed up moments later, coming through the trees at a purposeful shamble; they didn’t notice the prone Gnomes until just before they reached the east edge of the depression and a half-dozen weapons opened up, followed by the rest. The wailing cry went up across the breadth of the mob and the zombies plunged into the ditch without hesitation.
Marv shouldered his M-4 and opened fire, methodically dropping one infected after another.
Being prone made for more accurate shooting, and Dyson found that the press of the cold, damp earth was oddly comforting; he understood why Marv said that troops in a prone or prepared position would be less likely to break and withdraw.
Trying to cross the ditch was proving difficult for the zeds, all the more so because the growing number of inert corpses made the footing even more uncertain. As they slowed to navigate the slopes, which grew more soft and muddy as more feet traversed them, they became easier targets which only complicated the issues challenging the zombies.
Thankfully, the Georgian thought as he reloaded, the zeds headed straight for the sound of gunfire; humans would have circled and tried to flank the Gnomes, but the infected simply bored in for the bite.
It still wasn’t easy on the nerves because there were so many zeds that no matter how many you shot the mob seemed unchanged. It was like killing ants one at a time.
Bear’s radio clicked in his ear. “Six to all: withdraw on line twenty feet. They’re starting to spill around to the north-no danger, but its time to move.”
“OK, let’s move back twenty feet!” Bear bellowed, rolling to his feet, hearing Chip yelling to his right. “The refugees are heading for the train so there’s no point in holding here forever.”
“We could hold ‘em anywhere, anytime, Chief,” Michal ‘Gunner’ Gibbs grinned as he rolled to his feet, pale-faced but steady enough to affect bravado. The lean dark-haired Brownsville native got his nickname from his fondness for shooting and his deadly accuracy. He carried the AR-15 they had picked up at the safe-house in Oklahoma, tricked out with an ACOG scope, bipod, and adjustable stock.
“Yeah,” Scarface agreed. “We could wipe ‘em out.”
“Plenty of zeds in the world. Make sure you got all your magazines.” Bear blasted the skull of a zombie who had crossed the ditch and was shambling forward at best speed. “Let’s ease back nice and slow and show them how it’s done.”
Oil was cooking out of the wooden forearm of his carbine as Chip reloaded and he struggled to look calm for Chef’s sake. The Gnomes had pulled back three times, stopping each time to blaze away into the enemy ranks, dropping zombie after zombie, and withdrawing as the pressure built up; each time Chip felt like his stomach was going to explode and his brains were going to crawl out his ears as the infected kept shambling forward.
“Man, I’ve never seen so many of them,” Chef shook his head as he reloaded. “We’ve chopping them down and it’s like they don’t even notice.”
Chip put the red dot on a gray-faced white woman and squeezed the trigger, shifted to an equally ashen black man with dreadlocks and shot him in the forehead. “Chef, you know why the ground at the Little Big Horn was sticky?”
“No, Chief, why?”
“Because the Indians just kept coming.”
Chef fired twice, dropping the zombie with the second shot. “That was pretty sad, Chief.”
“Thanks, I’ll be here all week.”
The trees helped break up the zombie mob, as did its continual advance over corpses, but the infected pressed on with a machine-like mindless intensity, their numbers fed from a steady supply coming from the east, drawn by the train’s horn and the sound of the gunfire.
“How the hell many are there, sir?” Whiz wondered, stuffing shells into his pump shotgun. “This makes the grain elevator look like a Sunday picnic.”
“I don’t know, but we don’t have to
kill all of them, just withdraw safely,” JD shot a zombie in a golfer’s vest and plaid slacks, and then dropped an infected woman in a housedress. His heart was pounding like a kettledrum but he tried to keep a brave face while shooting and trying to watch in all four directions as once.
Upchuck, the third in his little fire team, said nothing, focusing on careful, aimed shooting.
“Now, the AK-series is indeed a fine weapon,” Dirk observed as he leaned against a tree to steady his aim. Dropping a zombie in a cashier’s smock, he glanced behind him. “But it is a weapon intended for mass combat by untrained troops. Now this M-1A SOCOM is Springfield’s refinement of the M-14, which itself is an evolutionary development of the M-1 Garand, without a doubt the finest infantry weapon of the mid-20th Century.” He smoothly dropped two zombies, the heavy .308 bullets causing spectacular skull trauma.
“The SOCOM, with its short barrel and lightweight stock, gives the shooter the fine handling of the modern assault weapon with the accuracy and punch of a battle rifle.” He picked off another zombie. “A warrior of your caliber needs to ensure that he matches himself to a weapon of equal value.”
“Thank you, sir,” Brick nodded respectfully before shooting an infected Native American wearing a plain shirt and jeans. “I will look at better weapons.”
“Good man.” Dirk dropped another zed. “How are you holding up, Timothy?”
“Just fine, sir,” Bad Dog checked to the rear and then shot another zombie. “We’re running out of trees, Chief.”
“Good. Get on train, really hurt them.”
The gunfire was drawing zombies in from the north, which, when coupled with the lack of gunfire convinced Marv that Hard Eight had bugged out. Fortunately, the zombies had trouble in the trees, becoming confused or uninterested if they could not acquire or maintain a target. The Ranger and Sauron were holding the north flank by trotting back and forth at a right angle to the firing line, sniping off zombies and breaking contact, playing a deadly game of hide and seek with the infected.