The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  And this meant supplying them properly was nearly impossible. When the incredible variations in ammo type were factored in, things went right out the window. Allentown was nearly lost for want of .270 ammo. Four years previously the Savage Arms Company had run a promotion in Allentown for their .270 rifles and had sold hundreds. It seemed as if every other man was carrying a .270 and it wasn’t long before they all began to run out of ammunition.

  Many of the men had to turn their guns around and use them as clubs.

  Phillips didn’t think it was possible, but the coordination with the Air Force was even more chaotic. Without a central command on the Pennsylvania front, the Air Force was simply sending planes over the lines loaded for bear. If the pilots picked up a signal directing them to drop their payload at a given spot, they would. If not they would find the biggest mass of undead and drop what they had. For reasons unknown, certain areas hadn’t seen a plane all night, while in others they saw too many. Everything from North Wales to Hatfield was nothing but a smoking crater.

  The air situation was so out of control that when the first fleet of B52s rumbled overhead, everyone in the Burger King went to the windows and stared up, knowing that one minor mistake with those bad boys and not only seal their fate but also that of the entire country.

  “Colonel,” Phillips said quickly. “Get me anyone from the Air Force. I don’t care who, just someone.”

  Chapter 3

  1– 3:22 a.m.

  —Stockbridge, Massachusetts

  Ryan Deckard came to realize that the people of Massachusetts simply weren’t fucking around. They were protecting their borders with everything in their arsenal.

  The stolen balloon cruised like a giant soap bubble two hundred feet off the ground, heading on an easterly course that would take them just south of the town of Stockbridge. Deckard’s heart was in agony over leaving Thuy behind. He had hoped to land the balloon not far from the high school and go back for her, however, by the time he was able to shimmy up the very skinny anchor rope as it swung wildly over countless undead, he and Courtney Shaw were so high in the air that the zombies looked like nothing but moaning shadows.

  “Get us back down,” he had said, the moment he dropped into the wicker basket. Just at the moment, he had no idea how high they were. Courtney was staring at the burner contraption in confusion while he was gazing at his hands. They were red and raw.

  “I’m not sure how,” Courtney answered. “These controls, well, they’re not really controls exactly. I can turn this and that stops the gas.” She turned the valve all the way to the right and the flame heating the air shut off. “But other than that, I don’t think there’s much we can do until the air cools enough…” Courtney suddenly looked over the side of the basket and her face went white. “We’re still going up.” She sounded afraid, as if the balloon would continue to go up forever.

  Deckard had collapsed in the bottom of the basket and now he groaned his way to his feet. Like Courtney had, he squinted up at the controls, but couldn’t tell what was what. This close to the border, he was nervous about using a flashlight, but he had to chance it. It seemed logical that there had to be a way of raising and lowering the balloon that was more efficient than simply turning the gas on and off.

  He whisked the beam from his stubby Maglight all over the blower and the contraption that released the gas, however he didn’t see anything that would help. “This is ridiculous,” he said, tugging on the second valve. He knew already that it was the oxygen regulator and that it wouldn’t do anything, and he was right. “You would think that it…”

  “Make it go down!” Courtney suddenly gasped. She had sunk down into the basket, her fingers gripping the wicker. “Deckard, please, please, do something, just get us down.”

  “Are you afraid of heights…wait, never mind. It’ll be okay, Courtney. I just have to figure out how to make a hole in the…”

  “A hole!”

  She looked as though she was about to barf. “Okay, not a hole,” Deckard said, running his hand through his hair and gazing up again. He really didn’t know what to do about her. She was perfectly safe, unlike Thuy. “I’ll get us down, just stay right there and try not to think about it. I know, maybe you should just close your eyes and imagine yourself closer to the ground. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I can do that. Just be careful.” She scrunched her eyes down and Deckard turned back to the rational problem of putting a hole in the balloon so they could get back on the ground as fast as possible. They had been rising precipitously and now they were high enough into the atmosphere that the winds had picked up. From a gentle three miles an hour, they were now being pushed east at twelve.

  Deckard couldn’t tell how fast they were going but with the balloon canted to the side, he knew it wouldn’t be long before they were over the edge of the Zone and into Massachusetts, and if they weren’t careful they’d be halfway to the ocean before he got them down.

  Once more he shone the light overhead and this time he saw a rope that had been caught up in the risers. It went straight to the top of the canopy, but passed through a ring and was attached to a dozen smaller ropes. It was called a parachute valve and Deckard saw that it could only have one function. He climbed up onto the edge of the basket and snagged the rope. With one pull, it slid back the panels at the top of the canopy. The sensation of dropping was immediate and Courtney let out a little screech.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “Getting us down to the ground.” He was about to step back down when the view stopped him. They were nearing the edge of the Quarantine Zone; a half mile away a battle was raging and he saw that, at their rate of descent, with the wind at their backs, they were going to land in full view of hundreds of soldiers and thousands of zombies. And that wasn’t good.

  Deck pulled harder on the parachute valve and the wind began whistling through the rigging as they dropped. “We’re going to set down,” he told Courtney. “It’s going to be a little closer to the line than I wanted.”

  Courtney whimpered, still with her eyes shut. She felt as though she were coming unglued and didn’t understand it. She had never been afraid of heights before, or at least this afraid. Then again, she had never been this high before either. The highest she had ever been was the three-meter high dive at the pool in Poughkeepsie, and that had been one time. It had turned her legs to jelly and from then on, she had subconsciously avoided anything to do with heights.

  “Try not to worry,” Deckard said, reaching over and turning the burner to low. “We’ll touch down pretty softly. I’ll hit the burners right before we land. It’ll be the softest…” Something on the ground caught his attention. He saw what looked like four or five blinking lights which were quickly followed by new whistling sounds coming from the balloon.

  They were being shot at!

  His first impulse was to jump down into the basket and cower, only wicker wasn’t any sort of cover. He was just as vulnerable standing on the edge of the basket with a hundred-foot fall awaiting him.

  The balloon loomed. It was an immense target that would only get easier to hit, the closer to the ground they got and if they took too many more hits…he didn’t want to think about that.

  Immediately, he released the parachute valve and twisted the throttle wide open. A torrent of blue flame roared into the envelope, filling it once again and sending them skyward. But not fast enough. They were still being shot at and now pieces of wicker started blasting up, sending splinters everywhere.

  “What are you doing?” Courtney cried, somehow associating Deckard’s re-inflation of the balloon with the strange vibrations in the basket and the flying chunks of wicker. Then she saw holes start to appear in the canvas of the balloon. “Are they sh…hooting at us?”

  “Looks that way,” Deckard said and then calmly started to yank the ends of the knots that held the sandbags to the side of the basket. They seemed to fall for a long time before they thudded into th
e ground with the same sound a body would make, or so Courtney assumed.

  Courtney was just about at her limit. The thought of falling was nerve-shattering, the idea of heights was nauseating, and the very real possibility of one of the bullets striking the propane tank and catching the wicker on fire was so absolutely terrifying that she jumped up and screamed, “Don’t shoot! Oh, God, please stop!”

  Her scream was filled with such fear that no one could hear it and not be moved. The blinking ceased. Courtney stood at the rail breathing heavily, afraid to move for fear of putting her foot through the basket. With so many holes in it, she had no faith in the integrity of the wicker. She had less faith in the canvas. Looking up, she saw in the light of the blue flame a couple of dozen holes.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Stop, Deckard. That’s enough. We could…we could pop.”

  Pop? The dark hid the rolling of Deckard eyes. “Sure, let’s get this turned off. We wouldn’t want to chance popping a balloon of this size.” His real reason for turning off the flames was that it illuminated them, making them an even more obvious target. He glanced over the side and saw that they had climbed to about eight hundred feet.

  With the wind picking up and pushing them eastward again, he thought that if no one shot at them for another half-minute or so, they stood a good chance of getting away. But then what? He had left Thuy behind. It made him ill thinking about her. As frightened as Courtney was, Thuy had to be more so. Being in the Zone was a grinding experience and as they floated over the line and Deckard looked down, he felt a weight come off of him.

  They were over Massachusetts airspace now and he was free. For the first time in four days, he was free to go where he wanted, free to sleep deeply, and free to take a leak without having to look over his shoulder. He was free but not completely so. There was something about Thuy that drew his eyes back to the darkened land. He couldn’t leave her back there. He knew that if he left her, it would eat away at him.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, wishing he could be done with this entire business, but knowing that he couldn’t.

  “What is it?” Courtney asked. She still had a grip on the edge of the basket.

  “Nothing I just…” He stopped as he saw that he wasn’t quite as free as he had assumed. Although they were now a few hundred yards beyond the line and technically out of the Zone, they were being followed. A quarter mile off and far below were headlights moving slowly along a route parallel to theirs.

  Quickly, he reached up and turned the burner to full once more. If they were going to be subject to the winds, it was better to run where they were fastest.

  “Deck, what are you doing?” Courtney asked. “We can land now. Right? They can’t do anything to us. We made it.”

  “I think they can do anything they want to us,” he answered. “It’s not like getting on base in baseball. We’re not safe until no one’s after us. But we should be okay. If we get high enough, they’ll lose track of us in the dark.”

  Courtney could only nod, her eyes locked on the headlights as they tracked along with the balloon. At a thousand feet, the headlights began to look small. They were joined by two others and now a beam of light swept up. As if it were a laser beam, Courtney shrank down in the basket until only her eyes were level with the edge.

  Next to the beam were more of the blinking lights. The twinkling came slow and regular, telling Deckard that someone had a hunting rifle trained on them. It was a long shot to make and getting longer with every passing second. The bullets must have missed and soon the headlights were on the move again, trying to get closer.

  Deckard shut off the burner and crouched next to Courtney as they drifted in silence. The vehicles chasing them zigzagged around a few farms and then paused to use the searchlight again. It was an odd sensation watching the beam of light swinging back and forth. It reminded him of the black and white war movies he used to watch as a kid.

  The light eventually found them, however they had drifted over a wide swath of forest where the vehicles couldn’t follow.

  Courtney let out a long breath and then peeked over the side. “I-I never knew I was this afraid of heights. Isn’t that funny? I-I mean I never liked the idea of ladders but this, this is something else. Can we get lower, please?”

  “No problem.” Like a swashbuckler, he climbed up onto the edge of the airship and pulled on the parachute valve. He made sure to gently pull on it to keep her from freaking out. Once more the air started to whistle along the canvas. Underneath that noise was a rumble that began to build. It was horribly familiar and struck with a sudden fear, Deckard stood on the edge of the basket and watched as a creature, much like a modern dragon, roared suddenly out of the night, heading right at them.

  From its mouth came a gout of flame and then, before he knew whether or not he had been hit by the flying lead, it was a mile past him and turning on a gentle arc. It was an F15C Strike Eagle based out of Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod and two quick bursts from its M61 Vulcan Gatling gun had torn ragged holes through the canvas.

  Courtney began screaming, matching the screaming air as the balloon plummeted to the earth. They needed all the lift they could get, so Deckard shut the parachute valve and turned the burner on full blast. It lit up the sky and still they fell. He was simultaneously afraid that they were falling too fast and, as the Eagle banked over the Zone and came screaming back, not fast enough.

  There was no way they could withstand another burst from the Gatling gun, and there was no way they could stop it, either.

  Almost casually, the pilot swung wide before straightening for its next strafing run. He was five hundred feet up and this was, technically, an air-to-air combat kill—the pilot was itching to pull the trigger. With such an immense and easy target, he had eyeballed his first shot. This time, he had a beautiful thermal image. It was a bright fin of light against a black background and when he fired twice more, it went up in a great gout of flame.

  “Scratch one bogey,” he drawled.

  2—Taconic High School, New York

  Thuy froze on the couch, not knowing what to do. A man was coming towards her and she had an instinctive fear of him that echoed back through eons of human existence. As the bat clanked on the tile, coming closer and closer, she found that her fear was so great that she couldn’t move. Her one hope was that he would just keep going.

  There were a hundred doors in the building and yet he opened the door to Principal Claudia Steven’s office.

  “Oh, the fucking big mama’s office,” he said, standing in the doorway. The room was more shadow than fact and he didn’t see Thuy lying just ten feet to his right, but she saw him. It was difficult to look past the wooden bat, but when she tore her eyes from it, she saw a man who had hit his peak years ago.

  His brown hair was lank and thin, starting well back on his forehead. He had sallow skin, a gut that sagged over his belt and when he burped, she smelled rotten teeth and whiskey. At first, she thought he was wearing a green jumpsuit that was cinched around with a belt, however it wasn’t a jumpsuit, but a green uniform and not the sort of green that a soldier would wear.

  “Yes, Mrs. Stevens. No Mrs. Stevens. What the fuck kind of a name is Stevens for a girl, anyway? Stevens is a fucking boy’s name.” He went to the desk, plunked the bat down and sat down in the principal’s chair. He thought for a moment about putting his feet up, however that seemed like too much work. He drummed dirty nails on the surface of the desk and sneered, “What kinda secrets you got Ol’ Miss Claudia Stevens? You got some kiddie porn in here?” It was ugly wishful thinking on his part. He liked the girls young. He liked them small and weak. With a thrill in him, he went searching, opening drawers, rifling through them until he saw, with bitter disappointment, that they only contained files and notes on staff and students and budgets. It was all bullshit. Useless bullshit.

  His name was Jerry Weir. He was the custodian who had left the school unlocked two days before. During most of those previous
fifty-something hours he had either been drunk or high and the only reason he’d survived this long was that his mobile home sat on a parcel of land far out in the middle of nowhere.

  But now he was out of weed and like most addicts, he couldn’t function without a little something. Disappointed in the lack of kiddie porn, he was about to go to the locked filing cabinet against the wall where the most questionable confiscated items were kept.

  He stopped when he saw Thuy. Given their surroundings and his limited world view, she looked to him like a scared and quite defenseless little girl. “Oh, hey,” he said, his soft tone incongruous with the look on his face. He grinned like a fox eating a tendon off the bone. “You okay? All alone, huh? Don’t be afraid, it’s me, Mr. Weir. But, hey you can call me Jerry.”

  As he spoke, he came around the desk. Thuy sat up, quickly. She put out a hand. “And you may call me Doctor Lee,” she said, her voice pitched high.

  Jerry stopped abruptly. “Doctor? What, is that a joke? You aren’t a doc…” He saw her hair was jet black and that her eyes were wide and her cheek bones were arching and, she was beautiful. “You’re right, you’re not a student here. The only Asian chick who goes here is that Cho girl.”

  Thuy was quiet for some time, not knowing exactly what to say. “Yes, I’m not a student,” she said, sliding off the couch and easing away from Jerry, her hands out, wishing to God she had kept one of the empty guns.

  He liked how she started shaking when he placed his hand on the barrel of the bat. It made him feel strange and strong. He’d had fantasies that started just like this. “If you’re not a student, then what are you doing here? And why are you dressed like that? Are you trying to be sexy on purpose?”

  She looked down at herself and saw that the word “Juicy” was showing. She pulled the jacket closed and backed toward the door, saying, “No, of course not.”