The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  Charlie’s face was twisted in anger and confusion. “I don’t get it. Y’all saying ‘we this’ and ‘we that’ but y’all keep pointin’ them guns our way. Are we supposed to be on the same team in this? I-I don’t know about that. The news people say they’s shootin’ people at these checkpoints. I think we’ll have to pass, sorry. Me and the missus do wish you well, however.”

  Eng laughed, his gun never wavering. “You aren’t getting a choice.”

  “No,” Anna said. “No, hold on. They have a choice. You see, we’re going to try to get past the check points by claiming an emergency. Now, I can shoot the missus in the belly or she can fake a heart attack. Which will it be?”

  Charlie and Leticia looked at each other in horror. Charlie started to stammer, “But…but we aren’t the…the…”

  Eng advanced on the pair, his gun pointed at Leticia’s midsection. “Choose or I will choose for you.”

  The China-man wasn’t playing around, Charlie saw. He had the darkest, most evil eyes Charlie had ever seen and the thought of his Leticia in any pain was enough to cause him to fold. “Don’t hurt her. We’ll…we’ll do what you want.”

  Anna beamed. “Excellent! Now, I’ll play your concerned daughter. He will play my husband; call him Scott. And you two will try to look just like you look now, scared. It’ll be perfect.”

  Chapter 6

  1– 5:36 a.m.

  —The Massachusetts Border

  As everyone knew, the boys from Massachusetts weren’t playing around. It had been over two hundred years since Bunker Hill and the siege of Boston, and in that time Massachusetts had become associated with high taxes, the Boston Red Sox and the scandal-plagued Kennedys.

  They were known for their high-brow Harvard elites, the complete whiteness of Cape Cod and the crusty upper-crust hanging around Martha’s Vineyard. But they weren’t all soft. Through their veins ran a pugnaciousness that few outside of Southie ever displayed on a day to day basis. For better or for worse, that fighting spirit was out now for all to see.

  The refugees fleeing Connecticut had run into it first hand and now the border between the two states was littered with corpses. The zombies had experienced it as well. A terrific two-day battle had been raging along the Konkapot River in the south-west corner of the state and despite the frightening numbers arrayed against the men and women dug into the hills on the northern side of the river, they had held their own.

  Not only was it their stubborn refusal to give up an inch of land that helped them maintain their lines it was also the simple fact that the rules of engagement set down by the President had been utterly ignored by everyone right from the very start. Uncaring what the airheads in Washington thought, the soldiers and the citizen warriors had used everything in their arsenal: tanks, APCs, machine guns, napalm, and bombers. So many artillery rounds had been fired that it sometimes felt that night had been turned into day and the earth was crumbling all around them.

  And yet, that battle was nothing compared to the full-on war being waged along a twenty-mile front from Putnam, Connecticut to Providence, Rhode Island. On one side was General Milt Platnik, commanding officer of what he called the Army of Southern New England. It consisted mainly of the 101st Airborne Division, the shattered remains of the Connecticut National Guard, a handful of MP and engineering companies from Rhode Island and about a hundred thousand civilians carrying every sort of weapon imaginable.

  On the other side were twice as many Bostonians backed up by National Guard units including the 181st Infantry Regiment, the oldest combat regiment in the army, and the 101st Field Artillery Regiment.

  Over the last twenty hours, Platnik had shown amazing skill in saving his Army from destruction. His western flank had been under constant attack from millions of zombies and he was forced into an endless retreat as the beasts came in waves, threatening to envelope his command over and over again. His men were constantly on the edge of panic, and yet he never wavered once. With cool deliberation, he shifted his units back and forth, never allowing them to get beyond their tactical depth and always keeping a line of retreat open.

  But he could not fall back forever, especially when his left flank crossed into Rhode Island. His men were well in hand, however the masses of refugees fleeing in all directions made resupply, communications and maneuvering exceedingly difficult. Platnik made his mark by overcoming all of this, and had he been able to slip into Massachusetts, his army could only have strengthened the border.

  Instead, the people of Massachusetts pointed their guns at his men and told them to: “Go fuck yourselves.” Platnik got on the phone with his counterpart across the state line and the two solved nothing by shouting at each other. Then he got on the phone with General Phillips, who squinted at his map and cursed.

  “What about going south towards the ocean?” Phillips asked. “Can you shift towards Bristol? I bet you can hold out there for some time.”

  Platnik had seen this “opportunity” hours before. Bristol sat on a peninsula with a two-mile wide neck. There would be no room for anything but a slugging match and if his men couldn’t hold, he would be forced to retreat to Aquidneck Island along a two-lane bridge that would be packed end to end with refugees.

  The crossing would be hell and when he got to the other side, what would he do then? Including the civilians, there’d be over three million people on an island seven miles long and three at its widest. They’d run out of fresh water in two days and out of food in one. And where would they all live? He could cram maybe a quarter of a million people into the current houses and the rest would have to sleep in the dirt until “something” could be done. That something could be weeks if not months away.

  When he explained this to Phillips, the commander of the 7th Army said, “I’ll talk to the President.” It was a tense hour before Phillips called back, asking in what was basically a conspiratorial whisper, “Can you punch through the border?”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “The governor of the fucked-up state of Massachusetts just told the President to kiss his ass. He’s not letting anyone in no matter what. The President wants to teach them a lesson. Normally, he’s an idiot but I don’t see any other way to save all those people.”

  Platnik pulled the phone away and stared at in disbelief. Phillips was talking about starting a civil war in the middle of an apocalypse. Slowly, he brought the phone back to his face and said, “They’re very heavy in artillery and armor. I’m going to need air superiority, bomber support and my Apaches. But…but are we really going to do this? We’ll be killing our own people.”

  Phillips made a choking sound and then said, still in his whisper, “I’ll call you back.” Forty minutes later, dozens of telephone pole-sized Tomahawk cruise missiles streaking overhead marked the beginning of the Second American Civil War. The Tomahawks were followed across the border by a squad of F/A-18E/F Super Hornets carrying HARM packages and acting as “Wild Weasels.”

  The cruise missiles went for the airports. Each missile contained a hundred and sixty-six submunitions that rained down on the runways, cratering them, making them useless. The mission of the Wild Weasels was to knock out radar and they were very effective. With a ninety-mile range on their AGM-88s, the Weasels launched their missiles within seconds of crossing into Massachusetts airspace and then turned for home on afterburner, blue shock diamonds glowing in their wake.

  Home for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornets was USS Harry S Truman, a Nimitz class super carrier operating a hundred miles off the Atlantic Seaboard.

  With two successive attacks coming from the east, it should have been no surprise that the next would come from another direction. From the south, a flight of F-22 stealth fighters ghosted through the night, looking for targets, their pilots furious at the people of Massachusetts and ready to vent their anger on the first blip to show up on their passive weapons guidance systems.

  It wasn’t long before three Massachusetts Air National Guard F-15s were obliterated, an
d from then on, the United States owned the sky. B2s and B1s roared into the predawn light, raining bombs all along the state line, knocking out tanks and turning batteries of artillery into little more than piles of rubble and bloody bone.

  If Platnik had the time for more “softening up” the attack that followed would have been something of a cakewalk. As it was, the zombies were pressing too closely from the south plus the panicking refugees were making the battle unbearable.

  He planned to make the civil war a quick one. He would attack from two directions, straight up the middle at a town called Webster and at the same time he would use practically the last of his fuel reserves dropping an air assault force behind the lines—the way he envisioned it, they could be in Worcester in an hour, splitting the state directly in half and allowing the refugees room to run to safety.

  At a quarter of six, General Platnik began the ground attack on Webster with a hodgepodge of units which had been pulled from every section of the line that wasn’t neck deep in the undead. Five minutes later, the first units of the airborne assault took off.

  With the heat of the downwash rushing over him, Sergeant Troy Ross climbed into the UH-60 Black Hawk and all he could feel was relief. The zombies had been a running horror that no amount of training could have prepared him for. But this was different. He would be facing real people and although he thought it was the most fucked up thing in the world that he would be fighting his own countrymen, at least he could understand them.

  They would bleed, they would cry and they would die. This was the sort of war that he had trained for. In a way, it was natural.

  “Push in! Push in!” one of the crewman yelled over the thrumming of the twin General Electric turboshaft engines. “We’re going in heavy. It’ll be a quick trip, so get cozy. Cheek to cheek, damn it!” Their destination was the town of Auburn. They were going to land smack dab at the junction of I-90 and I-395, a few miles south of Worcester. They would hold until relieved, which they had been told would be two hours at the most.

  Ross knew that when the army said two hours it normally meant six, however in this case, he didn’t think so. The situation was getting desperate. The Navy and the Air Force had given the Mass-boys a good drubbing and he guessed that they would take to their heels as soon as the assault began. Just in case, there were civilians waiting in the forest; they constituted the next wave in the air assault. Ross could see them smoking their cigarettes and checking their guns. To tell them apart from the Mass-boys, they had white triangles taped to their backs and silver duct tape banded around their arms. Even from a distance, they seemed afraid.

  Afraid or not, they were better than nothing.

  “Let’s get fired up, Bulldogs!” someone yelled, as the last of the soldiers were crammed aboard and the engines really started to throttle up. There was a general growling of the men and a few echoes of “Bulldogs!”

  Ross only swallowed and tried to look tough. He had started to get the shakes, which for him was normal, just like it was normal for his stomach to turn a flip when the Blackhawk elevatored straight up into the air. They didn’t go far along the vertical plane, which meant they’d be flying nap of the earth at a hundred and sixty miles an hour.

  He swallowed again, knowing his stomach was in for a tough time. Sure enough, they picked up a head of speed, shooting over a lake and dropping down so that the water was whipped up by their passing. Ross looked down, thinking that if he reached out with his M4 he could have grazed the surface.

  Then they bounced up as if they had hit an invisible ramp, flying over a line of trees and then dropping down again. Now there were hills rising up on either side of them. He could see people looking down at them! A second bounce over more trees and someone yelled, “Now that’s hedge-hopping!”

  More water below them and to the east the sky was turning pink. “Shit,” Ross cursed. “Come on, let’s get there already.” He wasn’t the only one eyeing the coming dawn with trepidation. In the dark, the Blackhawks were amazingly hard to see. Sure, they could be heard, but whoever had painted these birds knew their business. In the daylight, it was a whole other story. They stood out like big fat targets.

  The pilot must have felt the same way because Ross was suddenly rocked back by a burst of acceleration. The choppers were no longer worrying so much about hugging the earth; they were racing the coming of the sun.

  The Blackhawk beat the light by seconds. They were cutting along the land at an angle to the highway and so Ross saw their LZ for the first time just as the bird pitched upwards slightly and decelerated so quickly it was as if the Blackhawk had an airbrake. Then they thumped to the ground.

  Ross was out in a flash, the wash so hot it was almost blistering. Around him, the highway was a strange combination of light and dark. He could see the pavement and the dividing wall just fine, but everything else was only slowly morphing from shadow to fact. That meant he’d be morphing into a target in seconds. He ran in a hunch, his full battle rattle bouncing and shifting all over his body, his lungs billowing despite the short sprint because, that’s the way it always was. Every time he came off a Blackhawk, he was keyed up and pumping adrenaline, ready to fight.

  Making it to the short cement wall, he paused to look back at his squad. They were huddled in a line like a bunch of bullet magnets. “Spread out, damn it!” he bellowed, grabbing PFC Jake Monnens by the shoulder and thrusting him away. His hand was still on Jake’s arm when there was a heavy thud. Ross could feel the thud run through his fingers.

  Then Monnens was falling back, his legs unbuckling, a look of shock on his face. Ross felt his own face gripped by the same look and it was only when Monnens hit the ground that he snapped out of his shock. “Incoming! We’re taking fire!” His adrenaline was a force within him; with one hand, he fired down the highway in the general direction of the shooter and with the other, he pulled two-hundred pounds of grunt closer to the dividing wall.

  “You okay, Monnens?” Ross asked, again working in an ambidextrous manner: M4 trained outward with his right hand, while his left swept over the soldier’s chest. He felt the hole in the kevlar before he felt the blood welling up. Monnens began to gurgle. “Fuck!” Ross cried. “Medic! I need a medic over…”

  He stopped as he saw a twinkling of light from the roof of an adjacent building. “Two o’clock! I got incoming fire at our two o’clock!” Ignoring the blood on his fingers, he brought up his M4 and fired in three bursts before yelling, “Miller get that SAW rocking on that rooftop!”

  Ross fired again. He could have sworn that he had only pulled the trigger a couple of times but as his M4 was empty, it had to have been more. He reached for a spare mag and that was when he realized that Miller wasn’t working his SAW. Looking back, he saw his light machine gunner slumped on the side of the highway, unmoving. And he wasn’t the only one.

  Tiggly and Ryan were flat out on their backs, staring at the brightening sky with empty eyes. Private Gibson was in a ball clutching his stomach and DeBerg was only recognizable by his red hair; he no longer had a face. There were bodies scattered everywhere. Further away, the Blackhawks were big crows slowly retreating while closer, chips of cements were kicking up all around him.

  They had landed in an ambush and no one was getting out alive.

  2-Ryan Deckard

  It turned out that sneaking either into or out of the Zone was basically impossible, at least on the Massachusetts side. Whoever was running the defensive line knew what they were doing. Generally, the line zagged away from the heavier forested area, but when it couldn’t be helped, the trees had been chopped down to build stockade walls, with the result that there were wide open fields of fire.

  They even had drones flying over the lines so that the commanding officer of each section knew precisely what was happening and where. All except the officer in charge of the section northwest of Alford. Her name was Rebecca Vance and she was a warrant officer in the Massachusetts National Guard with only six months under her belt. She h
ad been a JAG officer, a military lawyer.

  A warrant officer was still an officer of sorts and was rank enough to give her command of a section and she had done well enough to earn the respect of the soldiers and civilians fighting for her.

  After two hours of hunting for a way across the line, Deckard finally gave up on the idea of sneaking. There was a chance they would shoot him without asking a single question. Just then, Deckard was too tired to care. He had been going at it for too long and he was starting to get frazzled.

  He felt like walking right up to the soldiers on the line and asking to be let through, only there would be questions and there was still the possibility of immediate execution. With a long, weary sigh, he moved to a quiet point in the line and went looking for someone in charge.

  It wasn’t difficult. The sound of laughter and the good-natured ribbing common to soldiers drew him to a clearing where he found thirty or so men and women. Some were racked out, snoring away, some were eating, some were talking and some were gazing off into space with a haunted look in the depths of their eyes.

  Deckard guessed that if he came back two hours from then, he’d still find them staring.

  “Excuse me,” he said, walking past one of the staring men and toward the lively part of the group. They were a motley bunch: young and old, male and female, soldiers and civilians. They were unified in one respect, however. He could see suspicion written on their faces.

  “What happened to you?” a middle-aged man asked. He looked as though he belonged in slippers in front of a fire, not out in the woods with a deer rifle across his knees.

  “What didn’t happen to me?” Deckard replied, with a soft laugh. He had survived fires and falls, disease and gun battles, and zombies of course. Thousands and thousands of zombies. “Are you in charge?”

  Another man, young with piercing eyes, scratched at a shock of thick brown hair on his head. “The woman in charge is right down that trail,” he said, getting to his feet.