The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  Anna’s eyes went wide as the force of the blow sent her head into the wall. It made a comically hollow sound. Now, Katherine went for the gun, one hand on the barrel, the other on Anna’s wrist. Against another woman, the struggle would have been a second from being over, however Anna was a feral creature, fast, shockingly strong and determined to live.

  The two grappled for the pistol just as Jennifer Jackson let loose with the M240. She couldn’t chance hitting Katherine, but Eng was an entirely different story. The Chinese agent had jumped back and was just ducking into the building. “Oh, no you don’t!” Jennifer cried and fired a five-second burst, stitching holes through the walls, missing him by the barest margin.

  She started in with another burst when Swan yelled into his mic, “Careful! That’s all the ammo we have.” She glanced at the hopper and was shocked to see they probably didn’t have more than twenty rounds left. If it ran out, they only had their pistols. They’d have to dismount and fight hand to hand. As brave as she was, Jennifer really didn’t want to do that.

  With so little ammo and without a proper target, the machine gun was basically useless, so Swan shot the helicopter up and leap-frogged it over the barn coming down just as Eng was about to make a break from the far side of the building. He scampered back inside as Jennifer shot a handful of 7.62mm rounds from the M240. With the rain and the wind tipping the Blackhawk back and forth as if it were perched on a see-saw, the M240 wasn’t the easiest gun to aim and the rounds passed harmlessly by—they were down to twelve rounds.

  Katherine had no idea what was happening with Eng and the Blackhawk. She had a grip on the gun with both hands, while Anna had one on the gun and the other snared in Katherine’s hair.

  Anna was yanking the hair with all her strength, turning Katherine’s head far to the side. Katherine was in such an awkward, twisted position that she could tell she was going to fall at any second, so she preemptively threw herself in the direction of the twist, adding momentum to the fall. The two hit the ground with Anna on top of her, but only for a brief second, then they were rolling in the mud.

  Now, it was the FBI agent who came up on top. Katherine let go of the gun with her left hand, threw her forearm across Anna’s neck and pressed down with all her weight, crushing the woman’s larynx, causing her pretty, blue eyes to bulge and her face to go red. Anna was seconds from blacking out. She let go of her Katherine’s hair and tried to claw at her face. Katherine only pressed down all the harder.

  “Drop the gun!” she screamed into Anna’s ear. “Drop it, now or I swear to God I will pry that gun out of your cold, dead fingers!”

  She meant it and Anna knew she meant it. The pain in her throat was becoming too much, and Anna opened her hand letting the gun fall from her fingers. Katherine didn’t let up on the pressure until she had secured the Beretta. She then slid off Anna, who lay there choking.

  “Roll over,” Katherine ordered. When Anna only continued to cough and splutter, Katherine jabbed the gun into the side of her head and repeated, “Roll the fuck over.” Anna stopped her dramatic coughing and complied. “Don’t move, stay face down. I will shoot you in the back if you try to run. Whatever laws you think are protecting you have been revoked by the President. Do you understand?”

  Although Anna nodded with all the sincerity she could fake, she was actually only a quarter of a second from hopping up and booking it out of there. She hadn’t given up just yet and all she needed was a simple distraction and she would be gone, because she completely believed Katherine. Civil protections had probably gone out the window, while torture and summary executions were, more than likely, the “in” thing.

  She watched as Katherine scrambled to where the other two guns were lying in the mud. They went into the waistband of her filthy slacks. “Eng!” she called. “Give up. You are surrounded.” The Special Agent then turned to Anna and snapped, “Get up. Clasp your hands in front of you, interlocking your fingers, and get over here.” Katherine wasn’t in the mood for backtalk and was seriously toying with the idea of putting a bullet in Anna’s leg on the grounds that it would make her more compliant and keep her from attempting to run.

  Also, she didn’t like the blonde bitch.

  As though she was a whipped dog, Anna complied, pushing the “Oh, woe is me,” act nearly too far. When she got to Katherine, the agent forced her into the aluminum wall face first, smearing mud on it. She then grabbed a thick hunk of Anna’s hair at the base of her skull, and jabbed the gun into her back, digging into her vertebrae.

  “Be cool,” Anna said. “I’m complying. I’m being good.”

  “Shut up,” Katherine hissed as she pulled Anna away from the wall and towards the open door, using her as a human shield. “Eng, don’t be stupid. You can still get out of this alive. We both know that the Blackhawk is equipped with a radio. It’ll be only a few minutes before there are a hundred more agents here.”

  The two women were at the door now. It was dark inside the barn and smelled of oiled machinery and moldering barley. It was a sickly combination. “Eng, I only need one of you alive,” Katherine said, her voice sounding flat and dull under the heavy thrum coming from the rain.

  “I have a vial of zombie blood!” Eng yelled, from off to the right. “I’ll break it open and contaminate every one of us if you don’t leave right this moment.”

  “Ooh scary,” Katherine said. “Do you really think we hadn’t thought about that? The Air Force is probably going to napalm a square mile around us already. If you break a vial, they’ll just do it with us still here. Do you like the sound of that?” This was no lie. The Assistant Director for National Security had made the suggestion on the chopper ride from the White House to Cyber Command where, supposedly, he was about to throw the entire weight of the FBI behind the hunt for Anna and Eng.

  Katherine hadn’t waited around to find out what that looked like. They had limited computer access, one chopper, a few dozen vehicles and only satellite phones as communication, the FBI was a shadow of its former self. It’s why she had jumped at the chance to take the Blackhawk.

  Eng was quiet, thinking hard. Anna didn’t need to think hard. Duplicity came second nature to her. “Like you said, you don’t really need him. You need me. I know how to make a cure for the Com-cells.”

  “That’s a lie!” Eng shouted. “She was nothing but a research assistant. All she knew how to do was take notes and flirt with the real doctors.”

  There was a cure? Excitement flared in Katherine, but like a shark at a poker table with a bunch of fish, she kept her face neutral. “Come out, Eng,” she said, her tone softer. She had won half the battle. She had captured Anna and Eng when no one else could have, now she had to turn their capture into something more than an exercise in retribution.

  He came out of the shadows holding a vial in one fist. Katherine aimed the Beretta at him. “Lay it down,” she commanded. When he put it on the ground, she pushed Anna into the building and had them both lay face down. As she frisked them, discovering another vial in Anna’s possession, she said, “Tell me about this cure.”

  2— Western Massachusetts

  The zombie wore the uniform of a national guardsman. The blouse and pants had been the usual mottled green, now it was mostly black, covered in Com-cells and zombie blood. The uniform was torn as well. The tears were far from precise. They had been made by teeth, many, many teeth.

  So many teeth that it was a bit of a surprise to Thuy that the zombie was in fact a zombie and not just another of the rotting corpses littering the forest. What was more of a surprise was that the zombie had been a woman.

  She was missing chunks of her face, large mouthfuls of her chest and arms, and most of her left hand, but that didn’t make her any less dangerous. Perhaps it made her more so. In life, the woman had been a fighter. The bodies of the “real” zombies surrounding her could attest to that. She had somehow killed seven of them before succumbing to the disease.

  “You smell so sweet,” she said, he
r black eyes, wet and shining, glittering like a beetle’s. “Let me have some of your blood. Just a taste. It’ll make me…the same again. I want to be like before. I need it.”

  Even though she had been fed upon so atrociously, the zombie was able to stand. She held a knife in her good right hand. It was the length of her forearm and black with blood.

  Thuy wanted to back away, in fact, she wanted to run away, but the jeans she had taken from the lost and found back in Taconic High were around her ankles. She would never be able to yank then up in time.

  She only had one other option, one which had worked for her before—she could urinate on herself. The undead seemed to find that as distasteful as the living and she had an entire bladder’s worth of urine on tap.

  There was one problem: if she lived, she would have to face Deckard, smelling like piss. The idea was revolting.

  All her life she had heard people using the phrase: I’d rather die than be caught wearing that or looking like this. Thuy had assumed this was hyperbole, but just then it was no exaggeration. She couldn’t bring herself to pee on herself.

  She couldn’t run and she wouldn’t befoul herself and so she had to find a different way to get out of the situation. She told the zombie woman, “You wouldn’t want me, I-I’m sick. I’m infected like you, but I sprayed myself with perfume. It was…” She tried to think of a perfume that had some sort of human scent, but since that wasn’t even a thing she drew a blank. “It…it’s that grandma smell,” she said, reaching for her jeans with one hand, steadying herself with the other. “You know the one?”

  The soldier shook her head. “I know your smell. I know your outside smell. What do you smell like on the inside?”

  “Stop!” Thuy said, raising her voice and putting out her free hand. The other was yanking at her jeans, which seemed stuck on something and wouldn’t come up. “Y-you just need to stop. This isn’t you, uh Ms…What’s your name? Your name tag is sort of covered.”

  “My name?” The question seemed to stymie the soldier, who looked down at her camouflaged blouse. When she did, Thuy grabbed for her pants and pulled them up. Now she could run, but before she could, Deckard pushed through the foliage. He held an M4 in his hands; it smelled of disinfectant.

  “Her name is Vance. Rebecca Vance,” he said.

  The soldier started nodding. “That’s right. That’s me. Or it was. I feel different now. I feel hungry and…and angry. And my head hurts. I took all the pain pills I could find, but my head still hurts.”

  “I bet,” Deckard replied. “We’ll make it better, but first can you tell me what happened? The line was pretty stable.”

  A nasty look crossed her disfigured face. “It was them.” She pointed up at the clouds. “It was those Air Force fucks. They destroyed all the radio things and we couldn’t talk to anyone, and motherfucker, if I could get my hands on one of them, I’d…”

  “Rebecca!” Deckard snapped. “Stay with me. Is there another line? Do you know if one was set up?”

  She glared hard at him, but then her beetle-like eyes glanced at the gun in his hands and her glare became a pout. “Yeah, there was another line. There’s always another fucking line. But I didn’t make it.” She turned and looked back toward the downed tent. “I tripped. I-I fucking tripped and something snapped in my leg and then they came and I fucking fought them and I fucking killed them!”

  Rebecca held up the knife, proudly. “I gutted them and I stabbed and stabbed, but that didn’t stop them, so I hacked off their heads while they ate me. It hurt, but I won. I fucking won.”

  “You did,” Deckard said, his voice sad. “You won. You should be proud.” He lifted the M4 and shot her between the eyes. When she toppled back, he sighed and eyed Thuy. “Are you going to pee, or what? We can’t stay for long.”

  Even though he turned away, it wasn’t easy for Thuy to squat down near the body of Rebecca Vance who had black blood dribbling out of her head. She was turned in such a way that, like the other heads, she seemed to be staring at Thuy. “Sorry,” she whispered. It seemed impolite to use the bathroom so close to the dead, but it was coming, no matter what.

  A minute later she sat in the cruiser with Deckard, who was pensive as he drove east. The sound of fighting was picking up, as were the numbers of undead that were flocking across the Massachusetts border. “I don’t know what I want to see when we get there,” he said. “Is it bad to want to see the line overrun?”

  “Yes,” Thuy answered.

  He nodded and rubbed a hand across the scruff on his chin. “It is wrong, I know it, but I’m tired. I’m tired of all of this. That lady back there? She was nice when she didn’t have to be.” He was quiet again until the sound of gunfire became very loud. They were on the same stretch of blacktop that Courtney had taken earlier that day. There was forest on either side, and there were zombies that outnumbered the trees. They would glance at the cruiser as it rumbled by. The ones with whole legs would chase after for a time before they forgot exactly why they were running.

  It was only three miles before they came to the next line. Thousands of civilians, who didn’t own guns, had taken up shovels to do their part. They had built up a huge mound on the eastern side of the Housatonic River. Bridges were destroyed and shallow areas were filled with rolls of concertina wire.

  Even without the hundreds of thousands of zombies, there was no getting through. “Now what?” Deckard asked.

  Thuy only shrugged, feeling the weight of despair and defeat. Then her eyes fell on the radio and for a few minutes hope surged as she turned it on and called, “Dispatch 6, please come in Dispatch 6,” on every channel. There was never an answer save for endless static. Not only was Courtney not broadcasting, no one was. The US military had wreaked so much havoc and destruction that no one within the Massachusetts border was talking to anyone else.

  It was a situation that couldn’t last much longer and Deckard wondered whether going east really was the best plan. In an attempt to save millions of refugees, the military was destroying the one bastion left in the northeast. It seemed obvious to him that when the border finally fell, it wouldn’t be just refugees streaming across, it would be the zombies as well.

  Chapter 17

  1– 3:17 p.m.

  —Worcester, Massachusetts

  Things could not get any hairier for Courtney Shaw. She was in a bright red Corvette racing through a green forest—a perfect target for the bombs that were falling all over the place. And there were missiles flying about. Some shot up from the ground in silver streaks, others were launched from the jets roaring overhead, and others just appeared out of the thin blue air.

  These last were the scariest. Who knew where they were coming from or who was controlling them. She had a sinking feeling in her gut that they were the “fire and forget” variety, which meant that Courtney was driving through what was essentially a gigantic game of Russian roulette.

  A missile could get her at any moment, however there were times when she felt extra vulnerable. Whenever she came to an intact bridge, her stomach would go queasy and her palms would grow so sweaty that she barely trusted her own steering, especially since she always gunned the ’vette across at top speed, her face screwed up, knowing that this was it, this was when the missile would get her.

  It seemed likely since half the bridges in the southern part of the state had been targeted. There were so many downed bridges that she had been forced far to the north. With each detour, her fear ramped up. Time was getting away from her. Without communications, a central leadership, and the ability to resupply themselves, the Massachusetts National Guard could only hold out for so long and she knew that if she wasn’t careful, she’d find herself once more trapped in a quarantine zone.

  The stupid civil war had to end quickly, and it had to end with a Massachusetts loss, something that the stiff-necked Bostonians had so far resisted with more determination than common sense.

  Courtney was on her way to change that. After her detour, she
raced south on a nothing of a little road that was of such minor consequence that it seemed to have been overlooked by everyone. There wasn’t even local traffic on it and whenever she came to a stop sign, she would blare her horn and race through. Its name went from Wachusett Street to Chapel Street and then to Holden Street without any obvious reason. Then it t-boned Grove Street and disappeared.

  “Left or right,” Courtney said, trying to decide which way to turn. Everything would have been easier if there was a sign that read: Army Headquarters This Way! She was in the northern fringe of Worcester and it was only a guess that there would be a commander of some sort nearby. The fighting to the south of the city, what had begun with an air assault attack on Auburn had turned into a battle of tremendous importance, if not size. Neither side could afford to send in nearly as many fighters as they wished they could. Both were being so hard pressed by the zombies surrounding them that the struggle for the border was a clash between companies of men instead of regiments or divisions.

  Still, there would be some sort of command center nearby. “It could be underground,” she mused. It made sense since the US Air Force could take it out with a single bomb—she assumed they had bombs of every size and strength.

  She was about to make a turn to the right, mostly because the map suggested that the city flared in that direction and she had a picture in her mind of an underground bunker smack dab in the middle of Worcester. But she didn’t take the right, at least not then. Next to the cherry-red Corvette, paper and trash suddenly began to kick up and fly in circles.

  There was only one reason for this focused spin of air and she torqued her head upwards at the window. Just off center of the front of the ‘vette and fifty feet above it was a black helicopter. It wasn’t a Blackhawk, it was an Apache—a gunship. The helicopter could have destroyed the car in three different ways and it could have done it in a blink.