The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what you think is legal or extra-fucking legal. You are running around using authority that was never granted to you. Do you know how much trouble you’re in? You’ll be lucky if you just get booted from the bureau. There’s talk of bringing you up on charges. Hell, my boss, the Executive Assistant Director, had to pull agents away from their assignments just to track you the fuck down.”

  So much for remaining calm. “I’ll make it easy for them to find me,” she said, her voice as cold as his was hot. “I’ve tracked Anna Holloway and Shuang Eng to the Roosevelt Hospital. That’s outside the Zone in case you were wondering.”

  The Associate Executive Assistant Director for National Security drew in a breath but was slow to release it. “Got-damn. When?”

  “Approximately two and half hours ago and they had access to a truck.”

  “But you tracked them to a hospital? We got to shut that place down. Tell me they aren’t busy.”

  The place wasn’t just packed with patients, it was overflowing and when she told him, he went on a rant that included a handful of “Got-damns” and other far more colorful language. Katherine couldn’t get a word in and before she knew it, he had hung up, but not before saying, “Secure the scene and wait for me.”

  “Got-damn,” she whispered. “How am I supposed to secure an entire hospital with just one soldier?”

  2—Hudson, New York

  They needed a police car. “Where are the cops when you need them?” Deckard said, yawning.

  Thuy yawned right after, her eyes dripping tears. She didn’t say anything and hadn’t said much since she had slid the deboning knife between Jerry Weir’s ribs. It had pierced his heart. She had stood, wiped away her prints from the knife, and then dropped it on his lifeless body. In silence, she had recovered the ridiculous “Juicy” shirt, put it on and begun searching the place.

  She gathered food and water, which made sense. The booze didn’t. She found four full bottles and sixteen partial bottles. Mostly it was whiskey but there was also some gin and vodka. Passive-faced she began pouring the alcohol around. “You never know,” was all she said when she lit a match from a half-empty book.

  The mobile home went up like a torch. Although destroying evidence was a waste of time in a land without a single cop left alive, Deckard understood what she was doing. Thuy had committed murder and the fire would put it behind her, at least legally. Getting over it mentally and emotionally was another thing altogether and from his experience, time was the only medicine.

  After covering up a murder, they ironically went in search of a police car. They needed a scanner to contact Courtney Shaw.

  It was a strange world driving through the middle of the Zone. With millions of infected people spreading out from the epicenter, the land seemed empty and yet there was an ominous, ever present feeling of being watched. Deckard couldn’t tell whether it was lone survivors staring out from their hiding spots, or zombies too torn up to walk, that were watching them, but they were definitely being watched as they drove the mostly empty roads.

  When they came to the first roadblock, Deckard slowed the RAV4. There were four state trooper cruisers lined up across the road. Two of them had been set on fire. They were blackened husks, their emergency lights melted into blobs on their roofs. The cruiser at the far-right end of the row had all its windows broken, including the front windshield which was starred to the point of being undrivable.

  The cruiser on the left only had the two passenger side windows broken into, but otherwise seemed perfectly fine. Deckard pulled up next to it and was about to get out when he felt Thuy’s hand on his arm. “Don’t,” she said, indicating the cruiser door with a lift of her chin. It was covered in what looked like black grease.

  “Com-cells, crap,” he said. He drove around the line of cars and kept heading west, pulling into the town of Hudson ten minutes later. Again, the quiet was strange and unnerving. Even the birds were quiet. They sat on telephone wires, silent and judging.

  “We’ll need masks and gloves,” Thuy said, her first sentence in an hour. “We should also consider gathering cleaning agents.”

  And guns, Deckard thought.

  Other than the fifty or sixty corpses rotting in the sun, it was a pretty little town situated right on the Hudson River. Looting had been minimal, so they were able to find quite a bit in the way of supplies, except for guns and ammo.

  They did find a police car with nearly a full tank of gas. The officer who had driven it was on the sidewalk a few feet away. He had his arms torn off. “Judging by the arterial spray, he was still alive when it happened,” Thuy remarked. She was trying to be cool and scientific, yet her face seemed stuck with a crooked smile plastered on it.

  “Let’s not worry how it happened. I’ll just check him for the keys.” Now it was Deckard’s turn to wear the crooked smile as he felt the man’s pockets. He half-wished he would come up empty. Hot-wiring a car took time, but at least you didn’t have to touch a diseased corpse.

  The keys were in the cop’s pocket, and after swallowing his gorge, Deckard fished them out. “Hold on,” Thuy said, bringing out a can of disinfectant and giving the keys and Deckard’s gloved hand a thorough spraying. “You should be good. We just have to…oh, his gun.” A black Taurus was lying in the gutter a few feet away. She gave it a healthy spraying and then checked the magazine. “Only two bullets left,” she said, sighing in disappointment. “Darn it.”

  “Darn it? Maybe you should cool your jets, missy. You’re starting to sound like a sailor on leave.” The joke fell flat. Thuy was so done in that she actually apologized. “No, it was a joke,” he told her. “Come on, let’s get out of here. This place is ugly.” The town, almost untouched by the apocalypse, was quaint, but the bodies just soured the whole effect.

  He hustled her into the cruiser, turned the thing around and never looked back. While he drove, she worked the police scanner, tuning into frequency 866.06250 as Courtney had told him to do. “Dispatch 6, can you hear me?” Thuy asked, holding the microphone in both hands as if she were praying to some electronic god. “Dispatch 6, this is Deck 1, over.”

  She repeated this for an hour as they drove into the rising sun. She repeated it until they saw zombies ahead of them, surging like a hating, hungry wave, pounding into the border between New York and Massachusetts where men and women stood their ground and fought back.

  “Dispatch, please come in,” Thuy begged, as she watched the explosions and the gunfire and the black bodies coming apart, as the wave got closer and closer. There was no response from Courtney. “What do we do?” Thuy finally asked when her voice began to fail.

  Deckard thought for a moment. “We wait to see who wins this battle. If the zombies win, they’ll fan out looking for clean blood. We might be able to slip through. We’ll find Courtney and head north to Canada. If our side wins…we’ll think of something else.”

  He parked the car two miles from the border, where they had excellent view of the battle and yet neither watched. They leaned into each other, smiled once and fell asleep, too exhausted to keep awake.

  Twenty-two miles away, Courtney Shaw was fast asleep as well. When she and Deckard went their separate ways, she had marched for two hours in a straight line, going east, trying to put as much space between her and the crash site as she could.

  She walked with her head cranked around, with the crazy fear that at any moment a truck with a bunch of toothless Harvard hillbillies would suddenly appear and chase her down.

  When she was stumbling with exhaustion and couldn’t go on, she found a very recently abandoned home off a lonely strip of road. There was still-warm coffee in the pot and cold milk in the refrigerator. She drank the milk, greedily and then helped herself to four fried eggs and toast.

  With a full belly, the demand for sleep came on her like a freight train, but she couldn’t let Deckard and Thuy down, so she drank the coffee black and went up to the second-floor bathroom, which was decorated wit
h cat figurines, cat wall paper and cat towels, and went about cleaning her many scratches and lacerations. Then she bathed in warmish water before poking about the house in an effort to make herself as presentable as possible.

  Courtney looked at herself in the mirror over the sink and didn’t much like what she saw. She decided to make herself look as presentable as possible if only for her own satisfaction. She couldn’t, she felt, go much further looking as though she had just been shot out of the sky by an F-15, or had been chased for hundreds of miles through the Zone by zombies, or had fought an all-night battle on a lonesome hill in western Connecticut.

  It took a lot of makeup for her to appear anything close to her old self, and even then, the effect would fade if she let her face sag from exhaustion. She would have to force a fake smile onto her face if she ran into someone.

  There were no cars in the driveway or garage, so she “borrowed” a bicycle and pedaled east a few miles before coming up on another house. Afraid of being shot for breaking and entering, she knocked for five minutes. She tried the door—it was locked, as were all the doors. The windows were locked as well, but she picked up a round do-it-yourself key in the form of a rock and let herself in through a back window.

  The house was divided by gender. The ground floor of the ranch style home, obviously belonged to a female with crocheted doilies, pinkish-mauve furniture, lots of throw pillows and family pictures. The basement was the male’s territory with an oversized television, a small fridge filled with beer, and a musty, nose-wrinkling smell. Courtney searched for a gun, but only found a few shotgun shells in the master bed room closet.

  It wasn’t a wasted stop, however. In the garage she discovered someone’s baby, snuggled under a tarp: a vintage ’57 Corvette. “Oh man,” she said, reverently touching the immaculately shinny red paint. “I can’t take this…it’d be like a sin, not just to God, either.”

  Taking a bike or a Jeep was sort of expected in an emergency, but this? A Corvette was just not an apocalyptic vehicle, but she had no other true option. Courtney found the keys, heaved up the garage door and got behind the wheel. With the interior so perfect, she had no doubt when she turned the key in the ignition that it would start right up, and it did. It purred like the biggest, happiest lion in the world and, with an odd guilty/euphoric feeling, she backed out into the street and once more headed east.

  On an open stretch of road on Route 23, she goosed the gas pedal and the fuel injected, 265 cubic inch V8 sent her rocketing forward, laughter in her throat, her worries and exhaustion, at least for that second, gone. When she glanced down at the speedometer, she saw she was zooming at over a hundred miles an hour.

  “It’s not mine,” she whispered, backing off the gas pedal until she was coasting along at a respectable fifty. Now that she had gotten that out of her system, she went in search of a radio. It didn’t take long even though this was the emptiest part of the state. She followed the sound of shooting southeast until she came to the battle for Springfield.

  The night before, after fighting nonstop for hours alone and unaided, the 82nd had finally failed in their mission of containing the undead city of Hartford. Out of it had burst millions of feral creatures, sending the last remnants of the division scattering in all directions. Some had gone north along the Connecticut River and had died in a short but violent fight with the Massachusetts National Guard, who were not just dug in, they were dialed in, well supplied and eager to defend their state, their homes and their families.

  That eagerness slowly faded when hundreds of thousands of monsters had come out of the dark and made for them next. Although the eagerness faded quickly, their determination held. They fought hard and in the last fourteen hours, they had only fallen back to I-57, two miles from the border. Because the battle against the 101st, forty miles to the east was sapping their reserves, a second fall back point was being readied along the Westfield River, a mile further back.

  Courtney, who knew nothing about the extent of that fight, felt strangely like an imposter as she tooled up to a city park in the shiny Corvette and watched as several filthy, exhausted women dug up the infield of a baseball diamond, filling sandbag after sandbag, taking the “sand” part of the word literally. They looked up at her, each glaring. Courtney was wearing a simple sweater of yellow over jeans that didn’t exactly fit; in her mind, she looked ridiculous. It made her wonder what sort of reception they would have given Thuy, who managed to make everything she wore both elegant and sexy.

  “Hi there,” she said, pleasantly, with a little wave as she got out of the car.

  “Hi yourself,” one of the women replied, with the harsh bray of a New Englander. “Grab a shovel and get to digging.”

  Courtney tried to ignore the woman’s tone and forced the smile to remain. “Actually, I’m looking for a police station.”

  Another woman chimed in, “Actually you’re looking for a hardware store, so you can get a fuckin’ shovel and start diggin’ like the rest of us.”

  The smile on Courtney’s face slipped into a grimace; she didn’t have the energy to deal with the likes of this sort of woman, who seemed like the kind of person who held down a barstool six nights a week, telling anyone who would listen how they should live their lives. “Thanks anyway,” Courtney said and turned back for the Corvette.

  “There’s one over on Montgomery,” a third woman told Courtney. Under the dirt and sweat Courtney could tell she was a young woman barely out of her teens. “Go back on Main and hang a left.”

  “Thanks,” Courtney said and then jogged back to the Corvette. She didn’t have time for the whining she was sure had begun behind her. To drown it out, she rumbled the Corvette to life and roared it in the direction suggested by the younger woman. She found the station easily. It was dark, empty and locked. There wasn’t a patrol car in sight—there was no one in sight, so she used a piece of cement to break in the front door.

  Although her reason for being there was to get a scanner, she felt naked without a gun, so her first order of business was to search for a weapon. The obvious place to begin was the station’s armory, only it was locked tight and no hunk of cement was going to break down the reinforced steel door.

  Still, she had options. From experience, she knew that many officers carried secondary weapons, while some even carried special “drop” weapons in case of accidental shootings. Going through the desks one by one she found two guns: a .38 and a squatty, little S&W P9. She took both. The .38 went into her back pocket and the P9, what everyone called “The Shield” though she didn’t know why, went into her front right.

  She then went in search of a portable scanner and had plenty to choose from. “Now let’s save the day,” she said and left the building. She took the Corvette back the way she had come, broadcasting as she went—but she was too early; Thuy and Deckard were just then setting Jerry Weir’s mobile home on fire. Still she didn’t know that and she broadcast: “Deck 1, this is Dispatch 6, over,” until she was blue in the face.

  The Corvette was so fast that she had zipped back to the western border where the fighting was crazy and still she hadn’t heard from them. Just like they would, twenty minutes later, she parked on a hill to increase the range of her scanner, and then just sat there, her eyes growing heavier and heavier.

  “I have to stay awake,” she whispered, a second before she slumped over and began to snore.

  “Dispatch 6, this is Deck 1, over,” the radio squelched, but she didn’t hear it. She was too far gone.

  3—Beiping, China

  The arguments had lasted for hours. Sometimes a member of China’s Politburo argued both sides of the same issue in the same long-winded, run-on sentence. It was all very useless and annoying to General Okini since they were arguing about whether to take half measures or token, face-saving measures.

  While the bickering continued, Okini sat in his chair, studying the footage from the reconnaissance planes. Some of the pictures were perfect while others had odd rainbow bl
obs obscuring parts of the image. It was the radiation from the bombs.

  Since the Chinese did not have the same technological capabilities as western countries, their recon planes had to fly much lower to get the same resolution. Six pilots were already puking blood from radiation poisoning. They’d be dead soon and Okini would have to send others to replace them. That was the way of things in China. People were expendable, planes were valuable, and information was priceless.

  He picked up his secure phone, dialed a number and spoke as soon as it was answered, “Send up the next two.” They were now tracking five of them, creatures that had somehow lived through the nuclear blasts. There were battles still raging all up and down the line, but all he cared about was the village of Xeuhen.

  One of the nuclear warheads had detonated right over the village and, impossible as it was, two miles away, one of the creatures had crawled out of the fire and now it was struggling west. The creature was none other than Truong Mai, but just then he was no longer Truong Mai.

  Truong Mai wasn’t even a memory in the creature’s miserable head.

  “Two miles from the blast point,” Okini said, comparing the pictures. “That’s the closest one.” He then went to the large map of China that hung in the chamber and imagined the Grand Canal as it ran from the Yangtze River in the north to the Qiantang River in the south. It was a hundred and twelve miles long.

  “We’ll need to secure both rivers.” The southern border along the Qiantang was short, barely forty-five miles, however the northern run was over a hundred and thirty. “Damn! We don’t have enough warheads.” Over the last ten years, China had been scaling back its nuclear arsenal and now they only had two-hundred and forty warheads. General Okini considered it an outrage.

  “Do you have something to add to this debate, Vice Chairman?” one of the minor members asked. He was part of the Finance Chairman’s faction. It had been a powerful faction, one that held considerable sway when the life of the country wasn’t on the line. Things had changed very quickly and suddenly Finance was grasping.