The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  Courtney froze behind the wheel. To her, the Apache appeared less of a machine built by the hand of man and more like a giant metal insect. She had never seen anything so terrifyingly alien in all her life.

  Two incongruous urges gripped her. The first was to flee, screaming, pushing the Corvette at its top speed. The second urge was to hide, only the Corvette was too flashy to disappear and, despite the oversized engine, too slow to escape. Of course, to try either would only draw attention to herself, but to try neither and just sit there seemed to be the height of stupidity.

  “What would Thuy do?” The question just popped out of her mouth and strangely, it focused Courtney and an idea struck her: knowing Thuy, she would try to flee and hide at the same time. “Just be like her. Be cool.” She took the right, waving to the pilot as she turned. “Keep smiling, keep smiling, keep…” The Apache turned in midair, its multitude of rockets hanging from its stubby wings pointed at her.

  “Shit.” The feeling coursing through her was vaguely familiar. It was similar to how she used to feel as a teen when a cop would pull out of whatever hiding spot they had burrowed themselves into and creep up behind her. This was the same but about a million times worse.

  Courtney was freaking out. She had no idea what to do. Her brain had hit vapor lock and she just kept driving, making sure to stay beneath the posted speed limit. She found it of utmost importance to keep her hands at ten and two, and by golly, she used her turn signals, nearly giving herself a stroke worrying when exactly she should click them on.

  When she looked up again, the Apache was no longer hanging on her right as it had been. It had disappeared. She didn’t trust it and for another few minutes, she drove with all the precision she could manage. When she saw a sign for the Hadwen Arboretum, she took a left. She didn’t know what an arboretum was, she only knew that there were about a zillion trees there and she figured she could hide from the helicopter beneath them.

  Stopping the Corvette and then turning off the engine wasn’t enough. Courtney got out of the car, or to be more honest, she snuck out, looking fearfully up at the ceiling of leaves and branches high above her. The sound of jets was a constant background grumble but she couldn’t hear anything of the Apache. Had it been a secret stealth chopper? Was it up there on “whisper” mode? She didn’t know if that was a real thing outside of science fiction, but she wasn’t going to take chances.

  “I’ll give it five minutes,” she said, getting back into the Corvette. Out of habit, she checked her look in the mirror and did a double take. She was covered in a sheen of sweat and her normally bushy brown hair was lank. Beneath the sweat, she was pale and a twitch was jumping under her left eye. A quick survey showed that she had wet rings under her arms and around the collar of her shirt. Even the crack of her ass felt distinctly damp. Her hands were shaking.

  “Get a hold of yourself, it was just a helicopter.” It wasn’t a secret that she had been afraid a great deal of the time over the last few days, but it was supposed to be different now. She was supposed to be on the safe side of the lines for once, and the idea that death could reach out and get her, even here, had done a number on her subconscious. Her heart was still going like a rabbit’s.

  Cortney didn’t need to ask what Thuy would do in this situation because it would never happen. Thuy had always looked so collected, so cool with fire and zombies and bullets going everywhere that Courtney assumed she would have been unfazed by the Apache death machine. “But I’m not her,” Courtney whispered and felt herself hit a wall, one in which giving up was a viable option. She pictured herself going north in the Corvette—it was a fine car to run away in.

  “But then what?” The quick answer: I’ll need a warmer coat, had her shaking her head. “No, if the border falls, then Boston falls and if Boston falls then we lose the entire northeast.” It would add another twenty or thirty million zombies to the current number, which in Courtney’s mind, was astronomical. It would be an unstoppable army if Boston fell. Canada would be no refuge.

  Without another word, Courtney climbed back into the Corvette. The time for whining and self-doubt was over. She drove out of the arboretum and didn’t look back and only once glanced upwards. If the Apache was still there and wanted to kill her, it would be able to do so and Courtney couldn’t have stopped it.

  She needed to find the headquarters of the Massachusetts National Guard, but first she had to transform herself from the pathetic, sweaty creature that stared out from the mirror. The day before, Thuy had made the transformation from urine-smelling refugee to “Assistant to the Governor” with a simple change of clothes. Courtney didn’t think her transformation would be so easy. Thankfully, Worcester had its fair share of high end boutiques and salons, usually in very close proximity to one another and all it took to gain entrance was the tire iron from the trunk of the ‘vette.

  The streets were deserted; no one heard the breaking glass.

  Finding a sharp lady’s suit was a snap. Unlike Thuy who wore a size that somehow ranged into negative numbers, Courtney was a respectable size four and never had a problem finding outfits in her size. Shoes were found two doors down: black pumps to go with the black pant suit. She then crossed the street to a salon, tapped on the door for thirty seconds, before bashing her way in.

  “Hair first,” she muttered, dragging a mirror to the large front window in order to capture all the light she could. Not that it mattered all that much. She didn’t have time for anything fancy. She wet down the untamed bush and then grunted and pulled it into a bun which was so tight it felt spring-loaded. One sneeze and it would explode in a brown mess.

  Finally, she did more than just cover up the stress and exhaustion sagging her skin, she painted on an entirely new face. It had been her luck in life that she had always been pretty enough to go with a minimalist, “natural” look when applying makeup. Just then she went heavy on everything.

  It felt like she was priming a car before painting it as she went with two coats of foundation. She then darkened and thickened her eyebrows, next she nearly put out an eye as she went scandalously heavy on the mascara. Finally, she lacquered her lips a fine and glistening deep red.

  “Ugh,” she said, when she looked herself up and down in a floor to ceiling mirror. Although she had “prettied” herself up, conforming to the current standards of beauty, she didn’t particularly care for the transformation she had wrought. She didn’t look like herself. “But that’s the point, I guess,” she said, and then marched through the broken door and back out to the Corvette. “I’m no longer Courtney Shaw one time state trooper dispatcher. I’m Eva…uh, Mansetti, assistant to the governor, here on important business.”

  Now, all she had to do was find the head honcho and convince him that the governor was giving up.

  “Should be easy,” she joked. “All I have to do is follow the sound of the guns.” She raced straight south toward Auburn, where the 101st’s landing zone was being counterattacked by men in hunting camo, and women wearing ratty jeans and old long sleeve shirts—their “gardening” clothes.

  No one stopped Courtney and she was able to drive right up to the battle and, if she’d had a death wish, she could have driven right into it. She stopped two hundred yards away on a little rise. In the shiny red Corvette, she was the perfect target but perhaps because the car was so oddly out of place, no one took a shot at it, not even the F-16 that suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

  The pilot had a bombing run set up and was ready to take out the building that housed the EZ Pass Massachusetts Service Center, where some rebels were causing a ruckus. He didn’t think anyone would miss the service center or the fees and penalties it collected. “I’ve been wanting to bomb one of those toll plazas, but this’ll do,” he said to himself.

  With the AA defenses as stiff as they were, he had all of two seconds to engage his target, but then his eyes fell on the red Corvette and lingered on it as his mind tried to understand what it could possibly be doing there on the
edge of battle. A second went by, as did his chance to drop on the service center. He turned for the Corvette with no intention of blowing it up; he was only curious.

  From Courtney’s perspective, she saw a deadly sharp jet bearing right at her and for a moment, her new persona wilted and when it rocketed past, shaking the ‘vette, she found herself shaking as well. She whipped the car around in a flash and raced out of there, her head going back and forth. She needed to find the command post asap.

  What she found instead was a wounded boy of about fifteen. Courtney turned and pulled up next to him as he limped along a side road. “You okay?” she asked. “You need a ride?”

  His eyes weren’t right. They were wide and dry. He didn’t blink as he looked at Courtney and the ‘vette. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Get in,” she said, hopping out and assisting the boy around the long nose of the car. “What’s your name?”

  There was a long pause before he answered, “Jason Bernard. I got shot. And there were bombs.” His unblinking eyes looked down at his right leg, which had left a red smear on the leather seat. “I didn’t run this time…and there were bombs,” he said again.

  “I bet,” Courtney said. “Say, do you know where the command…never mind. Do you know where the med tent is? Did they tell you to go someplace to have your leg checked?”

  He pointed straight forward. Afraid that any jostling would hurt him, Courtney gently goosed the Corvette on. The road bent north and came to a parking lot of a bowling alley. There were a few Humvees and trucks in the lot, but there wasn’t room for much more. In the center of the lot, someone had laid out white sheets in the form of a giant cross.

  Outside the bowling alley doors were fifteen or sixteen soldiers and civilians. Some were bleeding and some were just bloody. Courtney addressed one of the latter ones. “I have a wounded boy here. It’s his leg. It looks bad.”

  The bloody ones were medics and two hurried to the Corvette and lifted Jason out and laid him down on the asphalt among shards of old beer bottles and the butts of cigarettes. Not two feet away from the boy’s head was what might have been vomit or someone’s spilled casserole. Working quickly, they cut away his pants and exposed a skinny leg. There was a fist-sized hunk of his thigh missing and although it bled continuously in what looked like a red waterfall, the medics didn’t seem overly concerned.

  “There were bombs,” Jason whispered.

  “Oh yeah?” one of the medics asked. “Did those bombs get you anywhere else?”

  Before he could answer, Courtney said, “I need to find the command tent. It’s urgent. I’m with the governor.”

  One of the medics jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “They’re inside. Go to the left past the shoe rental. They’re in the bar.”

  Courtney thanked him as she jumped up, heading for the door. She paused with her hand on the pull handle. “Do you happen to know his name? The general in charge, that is?”

  The two medics looked at each other, their faces screwed into “thinking” looks. One finally said, “It’s Axelrod, I think. He’s the bald one. I mean it looks like he spent time shining that fuck…sorry, ma’am, I mean that freaking dome of his.”

  Once more she turned to the door handle, but the other medic stopped her. “Can you tell us what’s going on? No one knows anything. Are we winning?”

  The true answer was that both sides were losing simply by fighting, but it wasn’t something she could say to the people in the fight. “We’re reaching a compromise that will benefit both sides and make us stronger. So, yeah, we’re winning.” They smiled at this and once more she turned to the door. This time she stopped herself.

  “Do either of you guys know the governor’s name?” They shared another look, this time mingling suspicion in with their confusion. “It’s for polling purposes,” Courtney added quickly. “Normally, I’m with, uh, public relations and we are always looking to find out what the governor’s name recognition numbers are.”

  One of the medics looked disgusted over the idea that the governor was worrying about name recognition in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Thankfully the other came out of his confusion with an answer. “Is it Clarren?”

  Courtney didn’t have any idea. The second medic nodded to the answer but still didn’t look happy at the question. “Okay thanks,” Courtney said and then pointed at the injured boy. “You guys are doing a great job and the governor thanks you as well.”

  Leaving them to attend Jason, she breezed into the bowling alley. She had never been to this bowling alley, but she could have made her way around it blindfolded. For eight years as a teenager, she had belonged to a Thursday night league and from her experience the allies were all the same.

  Only, this one was different.

  There were soldiers everywhere. Hundreds and hundreds, all rushing around or working furiously or lying in pools of blood. The bowling alley was both a command center and a hospital. Even Courtney knew that was against the rules of warfare.

  She turned towards the bar and nearly ran into a surgeon who was moving from patient to patient. His blue gown was no longer blue. It was glistening red and she did her best to dodge out of his way. A man who had just stepped from the bar smirked. There was a heavy dose of contempt in the smirk. Courtney understood. Here they were fighting a war to keep their land free of the zombie plague and she was worried about her outfit. He had a right to his contempt and a part of her wanted to explain that she wasn’t really like that.

  A smarter part of her told her to shut the hell up. She had spent time to look the part of a privileged, prima donna, it only made sense to act like one as well. “Do you see something funny?” she asked the soldier—officer, really. He wore the gold cluster of a major on his camouflaged shirt.

  “I see something ridiculous,” he shot back.

  She riled in hot anger, but she forced her response to be cool. “If you are talking about a bunch of useless junior officers kissing a general’s ass, I see it, too.” He glared and she felt the sweat in the crack of her ass, again. It’s okay, she told herself. That was a perfect response. She had dealt with enough of Governor Stimpson’s toadies to know they sounded just like that: in awe of their own imagined and inflated importance in the world.

  Ignoring his glare, she said, “I need to speak to General Axelrod. I’m with the governor’s office.”

  “I’ll see if he’s available,” the major said.

  When he ducked back into the bar, Courtney practically fell against the wall, her legs wobbling and the sweaty feeling creeping up from her ass was now all the way down her back. This was a dangerous game she was playing. If they found out who she was and what she was trying to do, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that they would take her out to the parking lot, force her to her knees next to the vomit and the yet to be triaged soldiers, and shoot her in the back of the head.

  From their point of view they were on a spiritual and physical crusade to maintain the purity of their people, and she flew in the face of that. She was as much of an enemy as the soldiers in the 101st, and the pilots who bombed them relentlessly, and the zombies who never stopped.

  Courtney was still trying to gather herself when the major popped his head back out. “It’ll be a half hour or so,” he said, with an insincere smile.

  This wasn’t her first time around the block. She knew that a half hour could mean forty-five minutes or sixty, or even a hundred and sixty minutes. What it most certainly did not mean was thirty minutes.

  “No,” she told him, hoping that her voice wasn’t quivering. “That w-will not do. I-I need to see the general, now. This is by order of the Governor.”

  “You have your orders and I have mine.”

  There wasn’t a real door that led into the bar. Someone had tacked a sheet over it and now the major disappeared behind it. “Son of a bitch,” she hissed. It was just a sheet, but she had to screw her courage up to the breaking point before she could pull it back and step into the room.
The major hadn’t gone far inside, a bare inch or two, and he was much more of an impediment than the sheet was.

  Courtney was small and when he twisted to the right to snarl, “You can’t come…” she slid to her left and strode quickly into the room. They had turned the bar area into a dozen work stations. The tables, with their old water rings and the gum stuck beneath were now heaped with maps and piles of paper.

  Although the room was dim, she saw that for the most part it was an all-boys club. The only two women there besides Courtney were relegated to a far corner table. Both were writing on yellow notepads, while around them was a low hum of voices. There were seven or eight conversations going on at once, but they all ceased and everyone looked up when the major grabbed Courtney by the back of her jacket and spun her around and started to manhandle her back to the sheeted door opening.

  “I’m with the Governor’s office!” Courtney yelled. “I have a message for General Axelrod!”

  “Wait!” Major General Mark Axelrod snapped, staring so hard at the officer that Courtney could hear him gulp. A second later, he let go. This was supposed to be her cue to give her message, but Courtney was somewhat mesmerized by the general and his dark eyes. There was a strength of personality behind them that was far beyond the average. “Well? Out with it.”

  “It’s supposed to be for your ears only.”

  “Fuck that,” Axelrod stated. “Spit it out or get out.”

  Courtney took a deep breath, but with those eyes drilling into her, and an entire room full of high-ranking officers staring at her, she felt like a fawn surrounded by a pack of wolves. “W-We’re s-surrendering.”

  The room exploded in an uproar. It was such a violent reaction that Courtney took a step back, nudging into the major. He had a stunned look on his face as though he couldn’t decide whether to be happy or not. The general was definitely not happy.