The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  “No, I don’t. A debate is the last thing any of us should be involved with. I’ll be ready when you’re done bickering.”

  This unsettled the other twenty-four members of the Politburo. They glared, they whispered, they pretended not to have heard. “We aren’t bickering,” someone growled. “We are exploring ideas.”

  “Yes, just as washer-women do,” Okini replied, standing. “Your ‘debate’ has centered around the use of a second release of nuclear arms. Some say six warheads and some say ten. Some say none. I say our only choice is to use all of them.”

  Some of the members laughed and some looked confused, while some waved their hands dismissively. None sided with him. Okini didn’t care. Each member could access the overhead projector but only when a senior member gave permission. Okini didn’t ask. He showed them a picture of the small figure of Truang Mai as seen from above. “This man crawled out of the rubble two miles south of the village Xeuhen. He is infected and he is heading west.”

  Within the factions, the members glanced at each other, looking for someone other than themselves to offer a solution. Some muttered. Okini let them go on, standing there placidly, hoping that they would understand the full ramifications of the picture.

  One of the General Secretary’s toadies asked, “How do we know he is infected? That is an assumption. I’m sure anyone who survived a nuclear blast would look like that. And where else would he head, but west.”

  “So frequently the answer to the question is within the question,” Okini said. “We know that he is infected because he survived a nuclear blast. And we also know he is infected, not because he is heading west, but because he is heading anywhere at all. He has walked straight through a zone of radiation that would have killed a normal man.”

  “Then we have lost,” said the Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. “If our greatest weapons cannot stop them, we have lost.”

  Okini stared at the man for so long that the secretary dropped his chin in embarrassment. Then Okini said, “We will lose only when we first lose the will to fight. I have not lost that will. Those of you who have lost the will, please stand up, so that I may denounce you.” No one dared to stand.

  “And do you have a plan, General Okini?” the General Secretary asked.

  “I do, but before I suggest it, I would like you to use the power of your position to limit debate on it to one hour. If we wait longer than that then no plan will work and we will indeed have lost.”

  The General Secretary’s face remained flat and blank; he would have made a frightening poker player. He had a very good guess what Okini’s plan entailed and could have offered it himself, but he played a far-reaching game. Okini was worried about what the next day would hold, while the General Secretary, with a true Chinese mentality, worried about ten years from then and a hundred years. He had to consider where his name would lie in the history books.

  Of course, he also had to wonder if there would even be history books in ten years if he didn’t act.

  “I so stipulate,” The General Secretary said. “Please inform us of your plan.”

  An hour later, it was decided by a near unanimous vote that they would unleash the county’s full nuclear might on their own soil.

  Chapter 11

  1– 10:23 a.m.

  —Auburn, Massachusetts

  With his face screwed up in a look of disbelief, Sergeant Troy Ross watched the last of the assault force being flown in by Blackhawks. There were civilians among the camouflaged troops. They had deer rifles as weapons and although they wore blue jeans and yellow slickers or black leather jackets, they had painted their faces green. They looked ridiculous.

  “What the fuck?” he whispered.

  Next to him was an infantry captain, the highest ranking man left alive. “They must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel,” he said.

  “What the hell are we supposed to do with them?” Ross asked. There were now five hundred air assault troops sitting on the junction of I-395 and the Massachusetts Turnpike. Their presence was bottling everything up for the Mass-boys, who were really in a shit position. Their supply lines had just tripled in length.

  “We’ll intersperse them with Delta and Echo companies,” the captain said, making sure not to look Ross in the face. “They’ll hold the flanks while Alpha, Bravo and Charlie forge the link-up with the main body pressing north.”

  Ross tried not to let his disappointment show. He had been given command of Alpha Company, which in his opinion wasn’t really a company at all. It was made up of the survivors of the initial assault. It was a patchwork company.

  Half of his men were hiders who hadn’t fired a single shot during the dawn battle. The other half, men like Ross, had put it all on the line. They had dug deep to find the last scraping of courage, and sometimes, when you went that deep you found yourself hitting the bottom where there was nothing left. You were empty. A number of his men had that look. The look basically said: I’ve done my part, now it’s someone else’s turn.

  This was why the captain wouldn’t look at him as he said, “Our initial objective is Federal Hill Road. Bravo and Charlie will move along the west side of the highway and you’ll take Alpha along the east. We move out in ten.” The captain clapped Ross on the shoulder as he walked away.

  When the officer was out of earshot, Ross closed his eyes and whispered, “Fuuuck,” in a long groan. Alpha company was in trouble. The fighting had been so tough that he had an E-5 named Henley leading one of his four platoons, and three overwhelmed E-4s leading the others.

  Ross went to each and told them what was happening. He didn’t like the looks in their eyes and some of these men were veterans who had fought in Iraq. Next, he gathered up his hundred-man company and gave them a look over. Perhaps worse than the thousand-yard stares were the few men who had sharp creases in their still clean uniforms. These soldiers he named “hiders.” He gathered up ten of these and went to the company commander of Echo Company and demanded a trade from the E-6 running the show.

  “I need some snipers,” he explained to the sergeant, who was more than willing to give up some of his civilians in exchange for real soldiers. Ross went to where the civilians were standing in throng, many of them chain-smoking and looking ready to piss themselves. “You boys here to fight?” demanded of the group.

  One of them answered with just the right amount of surliness, “What else would we be doing here?”

  That’s one, Ross thought to himself. “You, come stand over here and if you have any friends have them come too.” The man had two brothers, three cousins and six friends. They were an ill-tempered lot, and it was a shame that Ross had to leave two of the younger men behind.

  In a fight, he liked his men mean and ready to scrap. He just wished he had more time to prepare them for battle.

  With two squads of veterans leading the way, the company marched south and as they went, Ross gave the civilians a lightning quick lesson in tactics. He then split them up among the platoons. It wasn’t a minute later that the first shot rang out.

  From the start, the battle was complete chaos. As company commander, Ross had to lead his troops without getting killed in the process, something that didn’t seem likely as he was targeted over and over again. Pretty much whenever he bellowed orders he could expect to get at least five guns shooting his way.

  After a few minutes of near misses where the misses, were getting ever nearer, he took to crawling through the underbrush with what sounded like angry bees whipping by as he yelled to his men. There could be no doubt that he looked like an idiot, but he was alive and fighting the enemy and that was what counted.

  His 1st and 2nd platoons were deeply engaged, but his 3rd platoon was hunkered down fifty yards back and the 4th was even further back. He screamed himself hoarse to get them up and moving, but just as he managed to get the 3rd platoon into position on the line, he changed his mind, thinking that a real commander would try to flank the enemy instead
of sending men straight into a meat grinder.

  As quietly as he could, he shifted the 3rd platoon to the east. Almost immediately, it ran into an enemy force that was trying to flank them!

  The platoon found itself slugging it out toe to toe in a heavy forest where the cover was so dense that people were yards apart but still couldn’t seem to hit anything but branches and tree trunks. Afraid that he was losing whatever limited control over the battle he had, Ross crawled right into the thick of it. It seemed to be raining bark and snowing leaves, and there were thousands of those angry bees zipping by. He kept crawling, trying to find the edge of this new flank and before he knew it he found himself staring across a field. Although thick, the forest was not very deep or wide. Ross was on the sharp edge of it and saw that it bordered a farm.

  Right away he turned around and started hustling back to where he had left his 4th Platoon, hoping that if he acted first, he’d be able to send the platoon around the farm to get in behind his enemies.

  It might have worked, but the 4th started taking fire before they were halfway across the field and got stopped along an irrigation ditch. Soon enemy soldiers swung out wide, as well, only to find themselves huddled seventy yards away in their own ditch. To Ross, this part of the fight looked like a throwback to World War 1. It was trench warfare with a deadly no man’s land between that was being blasted by every caliber of bullet known to man.

  So far, Ross’s twenty minutes as company commander seemed to be a disaster. Alpha Company was stretched along a dangerously thin line and Ross could only hope that the Mass-boys were spread just as thin.

  There really was just one way to find out and that was to attack…again. He felt as if he had to, as if there was some sort of time limit to all of this. And, in a way, he was right. A storm of undead was brewing in Connecticut. It was as mindless as any natural storm and for the last few hours it had spun, slowly progressing into Rhode Island, and now it was moving north where millions of refugees were being protected by a force too weak to stop it.

  Sergeant Ross didn’t know this as a fact; it was in the air, however. That same air was being tortured by the sound of so many guns going off at once that Ross had to shake his head so he could think straight. He had to attack, but where? An attack across the open fields of the farm was insane on the face of it, while the fight in the thick forest was too fierce.

  The only place that seemed quiet was in the middle of the battle where they’d had made first contact with the enemy. It was as good a place as any. Stripping three squads from the 4th platoon that were uselessly cowering in the ditch, and one each from the first and second platoons, he designated this new force as the 5th platoon and led it straight through the center.

  “Here’s the plan,” he said, quietly to the nervous group of men, “You’re going to follow me and you’re not going to stop unless I stop.” It was a terrible plan but with no time, he couldn’t think of another.

  The land was lightly treed, sloping down toward the unseen enemy, and Ross decided that getting in close was his best, and perhaps only, hope. With the 5th behind him, spreading in an inverted V, he sprinted out of the thin cover and ran straight into a line of civilians who, only a week before, had been students in Cambridge.

  Ross charged into a crackle of rifle fire and the thunder of shotguns.

  The man next to Ross went down, catching a 12-gauge blast to the face from a distance of twenty feet. Before Ross could shoot, someone else had exacted revenge and the shotgun-wielding man went to his knees as his internal organs became external. The mess was sickening, but there was no time to think. Ross only knew he had to shoot, and shoot, and keep shooting because he was pretty certain he had blundered straight into what had to be the entire Massachusetts army.

  He fired and fired and almost couldn’t miss because there were so many targets. That’s how he had to think about the people he was shooting. To keep sane, he said to himself: Just knock down the targets. Just like at the range, just knock down the targets. Except he had never been to a firing range where the targets fired back. It seemed like there were a hundred guns pointed at him from every direction. White hot 30-30 rounds blazed within inches of his face and 5.56mm rounds hissed by from behind. He was going to die. It would be impossible not to.

  2—Three miles south of Woonsocket, Rhode Island

  The three million refugees who had fled eastern New York and Connecticut were cowering just south of the city of Webster. Unarmed, unfed and with little but the clothes on their backs, they awaited the outcome of the battle between the 101st and the Massachusetts National Guard.

  Save for a thin shell of soldiers, they were defenseless against the hordes of undead pressing up from the south.

  General Platnik turned the mission to saving them over to a colonel named Blaine Declan. Declan’s job was to bait the main host of zombies away from the refugees and to do this he only had a few hundred soldiers, a smattering of police and a thousand or so armed citizens to square off against the millions of undead. It was a suicide mission and there was no pretending otherwise.

  Seemingly without fear, Declan and his little force caused such a ruckus as to bring the entire enchilada down upon him. Then, using his men sparingly and skillfully, he retreated into Rhode Island and like a great spear, the numberless army of undead came after, aimed straight for the heart of the little state: Providence, a city of nearly two million people.

  Now, Declan had a new refugee problem and instead of running, he was forced to fight against overwhelming odds. He drove his weary men without let up, forcing them to make stand after stand always behind some barrier, whether natural or man-made, he didn’t care. All that mattered was stopping the horde long enough to allow the people of Providence to find a place of safety.

  The only way to do that was to sacrifice his men, making each life count to its fullest. They didn’t die in a single grand battle, they died slowly, valiantly resisting at every river crossing, at every stream, every highway. When their numbers began to dwindle too much, Colonel Declan dusted off a stratagem from antiquity: the redoubt. These were basically small battlefield fortifications that had to be conquered one by one.

  With no central control, the army of undead would converge on each so that the soldiers would look out on a veritable sea of corpses. The outcome of each of these minor battles was never in question—and there was never any escape. The men fought to the last, making not just every death count but every minute as well.

  Declan himself could have escaped by helicopter, but he chose to stay with his last thirty men. They made their stand in a three-story, brick farm house and for an hour they beat back wave after wave, but the numbers proved too great. When one wall of the house was torn down, it precipitated the final stand which ended soon after in a bloody orgy of feasting.

  Declan’s delaying tactics had allowed the refugees from Providence to flee, but they quickly found they had nowhere to go. Many before them had made their way to the thirty islands within Narragansett Bay, however by ten that morning the islands were no longer a haven. They were overcrowded and the people on them had turned savage to outsiders. Bridges had been thrown down and armed groups patrolled the shores, driving everyone away, even those that had swam out through the choppy waters.

  The rest of the refugees had only one place to possibly go and that was to Massachusetts, however, the border was still being held tight. In the hope that something would give, a large portion of the population of Rhode Island went northwest towards Webster where Sergeant Ross and a good chunk of the 101st were duking it out, trying to pry a hole in the border through which they could all escape.

  Almost none went east towards Fall River. Even if they could get through the border, where would they go from there? Cape Cod? Even among the people of Massachusetts, it was generally agreed that the Cape was a trap waiting to happen and was already mostly abandoned already.

  At least a million people went straight north to Woonsocket on the Mass border. T
here were a couple hundred soldiers among them, sixty or seventy police officers and a few armed citizens. Before the apocalypse, Rhode Island had the fourth lowest gun ownership per capita in the Union, barely twelve percent of the people owned guns. The vast majority of these had already died alongside Colonel Declan. Most of the rest had used their guns to gain access to the islands, where people with guns had been given precedence over everyone else, including women and children.

  Thus, it was a mob of a million beggars who hurried north to Woonsocket and the Massachusetts border where they came to a deep moat behind which was an earthen mole twenty feet high and fifty miles long. The mob went down on their hands and knees, tears in their eyes and begged to be allowed to cross. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. The national guardsman on the other side of the built-up line knew that there was only one sure way to keep their own families safe and their lands from being overrun.

  As hard at it was, they refused them entry and more than a few warning shots were fired. In a desperate attempt to protect their children, people held them out, pleading with the soldiers to take them. Sometimes they got too close to the ditch, which resulted in screams and guns fired into the ground at their feet or in the air over their heads.

  No one knew what to do, especially as the zombies drew closer and closer. In a mindless panic, the mob began to flow back and forth towards the border and then away again. Those at the edges who could hear the monsters coming ran away.

  Others wanted to follow, but then the screams of those being eaten alive echoed in the forests or along the empty streets of the nearby towns. The mob shrank inwards and began a collective moan that was perhaps the most eerie thing to happen in the past four days. A huge number of people moaning sounded like a wind of terror. It was horrible and maddening to hear, and in some places the men on the northern side of the border relented and let some children in.