The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  The question concerning the maiden name had only been a distraction. The private should have used that moment to fire the pistol. It had been the perfect set up: the thing had been turned away and was too worried about trying to answer the question correctly to care about the little pistol in the private’s hand.

  However, he did not shoot. He had seen Garvey do this enough to have known what to do. Garvey grabbed him and pulled him closer, hissing, “Do it!”

  The thing turned its black eyes into the light. The hate radiating from them was obvious now. It should have been enough for the private.

  “It’s you or him,” Garvey said, holding the Beretta high enough so that it couldn’t be missed. The private choked back a sob.

  “Don’t do it,” the thing growled, trying to sit up. Its shackled hands like claws were stretched out at the private. There was so little of the man left within the monster that Garvey had no idea what more the private needed in order to pull the trigger. The .38 came up, but the hand that held it shook. The barrel twitched all over the place. Its black bore seeming to hypnotize the thing with the black eyes. It watched it, matching the twitch.

  Garvey knew what was going to happen even before the private finally pulled the trigger. The hand jerked the shot, the barrel rose and the bullet plowed a divot across the top of the thing’s head. It fell back with a scream of rage.

  “Plug it again, you idiot!” Garvey raged as the private only stood there, his eyes huge behind the goggled lenses.

  The private fired twice more. The first poked a bloodless hole in the thing’s cheek beneath its left eye, the second went through the eye itself, shutting it forever. It crumpled back, its black-gummed mouth gaped open.

  “Okay, that wasn’t bad for a first ti…” Garvey began, however just then the private started to gag violently, working the contents of his stomach up the back of his throat. He was about to puke and reached for his mask. “No! Get outside!”

  He didn’t make it, but it was close. Twenty feet from the doors he lifted the mask slightly and vomited over and over. He left a trail all the way out the door. “Asshole,” Garvey muttered. The private was going to get off easy. He would end up in quarantine for eight hours, while Garvey would have to keep up the killings, unless the headache got worse and it already was.

  Sitting on the hardwood floor, still hot to the touch, was the .38. He picked it up and checked the load. Three shots left. He would have to be perfect. The next cubicle held a woman with wild eyes and tattoos up the sides of her throat—Chinese characters. She was the kind of girl Garvey would have humped and dumped the week before.

  “Please, don’t,” she whispered. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I’m just checking your eyes again,” Garvey said. “The other guy next door was infected and dangerous. I’m pretty sure you’re okay.” He flicked the flashlight on and felt a quick stab of pain. “Oh, shit,” he whispered to himself.

  The woman didn’t hear. She was straining to keep her eyes open and fixed, staring straight ahead. Reluctantly, Garvey shined the light more fully into her face.

  She started to shake, her mouth pulled into a grimace. She was panting with the effort to appear normal. She was one of them. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” he asked her.

  “Ringwald,” she answered quickly. After what she had heard from the next cubicle, she was ready with the answer. “Like Molly Ringwald, but her name was Beth. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Garvey answered, suddenly completely undone. His head was thumping and the light felt like shards of glass in his eyes. He could no longer deny it, he and this woman were the same. They were both demons now and they both deserved the death that was coming to them. He could picture his body being thrown on the funeral pyre next to hers.

  “My mom’s last name was Jensen, but I don’t think it matters anymore.” He flicked off the light and put the pistol in the pocket of his yellow slicker. With a long sigh, he pulled off the protective mask.

  The woman stared at his face in wonder. “You’re a man? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell what, or…or who, or…wait, does this mean you’re not going to kill me?”

  “I don’t think so,” he told her. “I think I just want to sit for a while and not think about any of this. Do you mind if I sit with you?”

  The fear faded from her dark eyes and what replaced it was an image of the disease. She was sick and would turn into the demon soon. He would kill her before she became dangerous, but for now he just wanted a few minutes of peace and she did as well. When he put out a hand, she took it, and together, they sat in the darkened gymnasium listening to the rattle of battle and, every once in a while, the thrum of jets. Their last minutes weren’t perfect, but they weren’t alone, and they weren’t afraid.

  Chapter 20

  1– 6:13 p.m.

  —Webster, Massachusetts

  Here it was two hours later and Courtney Shaw was still picking glass out of her hair and clothing. The Corvette’s window had disintegrated, covering her in tiny cubes and flakes and shards of glass. She had screamed as she was pulled out of the car and had begged for mercy as she was thrust to her knees in front of a thousand battle weary soldiers.

  In her spotless pantsuit and with her clean hair spun up in a perfectly tight bun, Courtney seemed completely out of place, and no one knew what to think of her or the sudden anger from the generals.

  General Platnik was outraged that Axelrod was choosing that moment to conduct an execution. It wasn’t just insulting, Platnik assumed that Axelrod was trying to undermine him as he transitioned from enemy to leader of the Massachusetts National Guard.

  In a god-like voice that rang over the battlefield, Platnik had ordered Courtney’s release, but General Axelrod, furious at having been betrayed by Courtney, refused. He stood, one hand on his service pistol, his bald head gleaming even as the sun started to dip in the west.

  Guns that had been pointed down or slung on shoulders were suddenly pointing everywhere. A minute before the Civil War had ended, but it seemed about ready to flare up again when one of the weary citizen-soldiers who had taken up his rifle to defend his state came forward, cursing.

  “What the fuck?” he asked, part in fury, part in pure amazement over what he was seeing. “What the holy fuck do you guys think you’re doing?” His name was Andy Liebling and he had been fighting the zombies for so many hours that when guns were turned on him, they didn’t scare him in the least.

  Despite having absolutely zero rank, Andy went right up the lieutenant colonel, shoved his gun away and stood, shielding Courtney. “I don’t care what she did, this is not happening.” He refused to move no matter who screamed at him. Others joined him in protecting her and gradually, Axelrod’s temper subsided.

  “Arrest her then,” he said to the lieutenant colonel. “She’ll get what’s coming to her. Chances are she’ll get eaten alive in jail.” In his heart, he knew that she had fucked them.

  Her hands were cuffed in front of her and she was led away under guard to a little hill overlooking the border. No one talked to her and no one looked at her. For the next two hours, she watched the largest foot race in history. The zombies were coming and anyone who didn’t get through the lines in time would be turned away.

  What was left of the 101st, jogging in company-sized formations, came through first. After so much heavy fighting, they were hoping for some sort of a break, only Platnik didn’t trust the nervous-looking militiamen and he had them take up front line positions.

  After them came the masses of civilians. There were over a million of them and there was no way to tell if any of them were infected and there was no time to find out. In a tremendous mob that stretched across both north and south bound lanes of I-395, the median between, both shoulders and the forest for a mile on either side, they surged forward, running, jogging, and limping at their fastest possible speed. They ran like the very dead were after them.

  Dr. Lee’s idea of using lights to spo
t early cases of the disease was put into place about an hour into the influx. Someone set up spotlights at head height and beamed them into the crowd. They were sharply bright, however the people were warned to stare straight ahead and not to grimace or close their eyes. A few people were pulled out of line. They were tested again and some returned, while others were dragged out into the forest and shot.

  Behind the civilians came the rear guard, a stout thousand or so men and women who had put their lives on the line so the rest could escape. They were hard pressed and Courtney could see the flashes of battle through the distant trees. Their leader broke off and ran up the empty highway to where the ditches were dug deep and the mounds of earth and rock resembled battlements with barbed wire strung out in triple lines.

  “Clear a way for us to get in!” he screamed.

  The men on the walls would not look at the man and they pretended not to have heard. Five minutes earlier, there had been yet another loud argument between the generals. Like titans they had nearly come to blows over the fate of the rear guard.

  General Axelrod steadfastly refused to allow them through the lines, saying that the possibility of them being infected was too great.

  General Platnik, although he claimed to be in charge and had the rank to make that claim, was in a weak position with tensions running sky high between the two armies. He was forced to tell the desperate man that he and his men would have to “make a run for it.”

  “Pardon my French, sir,” the officer, a filthy, exhausted major said, “but where the fuck should we run to exactly?”

  Normally, Platnik would have torn into the man for having the temerity to talk to him in such a manner, but this was a special case. “For now, go southwest on Route 197 and then south on Route 171. The recon photos show the way is pretty clear for about ten miles. After that, I’ll let you know. I’m going to try to set you up with some transport to a place called Block Island, it’s right off the coast.” Platnik guessed the chances of them making it all the way across the state of Connecticut to be about one in ten, and the chance of getting a ride even less than that.

  But he had to give his men hope.

  It was all he could give him.

  The major hurried back to his men and soon the sound of battle dwindled to nothing as the rear guard ran away. Most of the men on the wall wished they could run as well. The rumors were that in about thirty minutes the wall would likely be the most dangerous place on the planet. According to the recon photos, there was a veritable typhoon of zombies making their way from the massacre at Woonsocket.

  In the CP, Platnik and Axelrod stared at the photos in silence. They looked up briefly into each other’s eyes, saw the fear there and then looked away again.

  “What’s the estimate?” Platnik asked his S2.

  “Two and a half million,” the intelligence officer replied in a dry, soft voice, as if he were a doctor and he was telling Platnik that he had terminal cancer. “Maybe more; maybe less, but not much less.”

  “It could be worse,” Platnik said. The fact was that he counted himself lucky. To Milt Platnik, it was obvious why General Axelrod had resisted as strenuously as he had: he had been hoping that the coming zombie horde would dash itself to pieces on the 101st and its one million refugees. He had been hoping to use their deaths as a buffer to save Massachusetts.

  It would have been temporary, at best. The undead had not been appeased or sated in anyway after tearing through the trapped civilians just south of Woonsocket. The people there had fought and died in a heroic last stand that had done little to slow down the hellish army. The Massachusetts border guard just north of the doomed city, having fought off the civilians in a cruel, selfish, and absolutely necessary battle, were almost out of ammunition and could not have been able to stop the horde had it not been for an engineering student named Autumn Dempsey.

  With people already fleeing around her, Autumn stood over a map, not looking for a place to run to for safety; no, if the border fell there would be no safety anywhere. That was just a fact. She was looking at the watershed around Woonsocket, which was dominated by the Blackstone River.

  Most people would have thought “dominated” to be a strange word to use in conjunction with the Blackstone River. It was little more than a deep stream with an average width of only twenty-five feet. But if one could take a step back and see how the Blackstone had looked historically, then the word made more sense.

  Autumn saw that the Blackstone of the present would never stop so many zombies, however the Blackstone of a hundred years ago could. What was more, she saw how she could make the past a present day reality. Frantically, she ran to the command post, where a private standing guard outside the tent held up a hand. “You’re going need to stop. No one gets in without permission.”

  Under one arm was the rolled up map. “This is my permission,” she said, tapping it and marching right past the soldier before he could even think to stop her. There were three men and three women in the tent discussing how they were going to retreat, and to where, and what sort of chances they had of making it.

  “You’re not going to retreat,” she told them as she laid out the map. She was a bit of a pixie, barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet. She was used to tall people gazing down at her as the six of them were. “You’re going to blow up these three dams and you’re going to turn the Blackstone into the Mississippi.” She pointed out the millions of gallons of water being held back by the dams. “It shouldn’t be that hard.”

  The colonel in charge of that particular section of the defensive line ignored his own chain of command and called the Air Force, the same Air Force that was making bombing runs against his men. Yes, technically they were at war and yet the need was so great and the repercussions of failure were so obvious that, for a time, the war was set aside.

  The dams were demolished each in turn. The first two were blasted into rubble by four F-15 Strike Eagles, each carrying a 5,000 pound GBU-28s. The guided bunker busters could penetrate twenty feet of reinforced concrete. Two bombs per dam was a bit of overkill, but nothing compared to what took out the larger of the three dams.

  Forty-five minutes after the F-15s roared by shaking the earth with their engines and their bombs, a B-2 bomber streaked overhead at fifteen thousand feet. Four minutes earlier it had released a 30,000 pound GBU-57A, what was affectionately called the Big Blu.

  The Big Blu was the largest non-nuclear ordinance in the Air Force inventory. When it took out the Harris Pond dam, turning it into just so much dust, the tremor created by the explosion could be felt twelve miles away and the black cloud that loomed hundreds of feet in the air over the hole in the earth where the dam had been, looked so much like a nuclear mushroom cloud that a new panic swept the war torn state.

  As Autumn predicted, the Blackstone flooded its banks, becoming a raging torrent that turned aside the zombie army, giving the people of Massachusetts a much needed breather. It was a short lived reprieve. The zombies went west, heading back the way they had come, drawn by the sound of the battle between the 101st and the Massachusetts National Guard.

  And now from her vantage on the hill, Courtney Shaw could see them coming. At first, it looked like a far off grey haze was slowly creeping across the landscape. Then, as they got closer, it looked like a wriggling mass of grey insects. At half a mile, there was no mistaking the horde climbing over each other to get at the soldiers and civilians. The sight of them made her want to run.

  “Hey, weren’t they going to find me a jail?” she asked the guard. He was watching the undead carpeting the earth with a slack jaw. “I think they talked about Boston, or maybe the Philippines, ha-ha.”

  “Shut up,” he said without looking in her direction.

  Her hands were beginning to shake, making the metal cuffs clink. She didn’t notice. She was too preoccupied with the horde. There were so many of them that many of the smaller trees were simply disappearing beneath them. Somehow, the trees were being engulfed
.

  “I-I think we should get out of here. I-I mean, you should lock me up far away or uncuff me. At least uncuff me.”

  The two soldiers turned long enough from the mesmerizing image to glare at her. There was hate in their eyes. For some reason they blamed her for this. She opened her mouth, but whether she was going to profess her innocence, or apologize, she really didn’t know, and she wasn’t given the chance.

  One of the soldiers grabbed the black suit coat she wore and threw her down to her knees. “Shut the fuck up,” he snarled into her ear. “No one cares about you or what you want.”

  “I bet the general has forgotten all about her,” the other said with a quick look around and his hand on the butt of his pistol. “And no one cares, like you said.”

  Courtney’s eyes went round and she held up her cuffed hands, pleading with them this time. “Don’t. Just don’t. I’m not worth a bullet. I can’t hurt anyone.”

  The soldiers locked eyes again and the first shrugged. “We could just chain her hands around the tree. You heard what Axelrod said: chances are she’ll be eaten alive. I think it would be justice if we chai…”

  A roar from the east startled the three of them as a flight of F-18 Super Hornets whipped by. The roar was followed by a rippling explosion. Fire and smoke obliterated the view. More jets screeched overhead. The soldiers tracked the grey streaks and had their breath stolen when more explosions shook the air.

  Far higher flew a string of monstrous birds with tremendous wingspans and belly-loads of bombs, and those bellies were massive. When they opened up and the wind howled and the automated belts began to trundle the thousand-pound bombs forward, the two soldiers gaped. The altitude fuses set the bombs off a hundred feet above the ground to maximize the destruction. Each exploded above the zombies like a small supernova, shocking the senses.

  The dullest among the people on the wall could only stare, dumbfounded as a searing light struck them like a physical force and even from a quarter of a mile away, the heat from the bombs washed over the soldiers. That inferno was carried on a crazy, chaotic wind from hell. It stank of death and sulphur. The two soldiers on the hill, along with almost everyone else, cowered before it.