The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  “Fuck you?” Eng asked. “Those are your last words? How American of you.” His finger touched the trigger and that was when a distant gunshot rang out. Eng lurched forward as the bullet struck him in the back, blasting through the pack he wore, going through both sides of the aluminum case that held the Com-cells and then burying itself in his Kevlar armor.

  It was a lot like being punched and nothing like being killed.

  2—The Walton Facility

  Deckard paused at the top of the stairs, his mind racing down every possible avenue that was left open to him. There weren’t many and in seconds he saw that he had only one chance at saving Thuy and it wasn’t in a gun battle with Eng, who not only wore body armor but who would also use Thuy as a human shield.

  And despite what Thuy had in mind, Deckard couldn’t simply wait until the little group left the fourth floor and then rush up the stairs and chase after them. Even if the zombies didn’t tear him apart while he waited, there was too much crap and clutter all over the place. He’d make too much noise and Eng would hear him coming from a mile away and set up an ambush.

  No, the only way to kill Eng was to get in front of him, set up an ambush of his own, and take him out with a headshot. There were only four or five hundred “problems” in the way of making that plan a reality, and each of those problems wanted to tear him apart and drink his blood.

  “If I’m going to die, I might as well take a few of these bastards with me,” Deckard said, and charged down into the zombies, firing his rifle with deadly precision. There were only a few of the beasts on the first set of stairs, but when he got to the next, he saw that the stairwell was flooded with them. They were like a wave of giant grey maggots undulating and writhing, crawling all over themselves in an effort to get up the stairs.

  Jaimee Lynn was in among the roaring throng. She was too short to get a good bead on, though in truth, Deckard probably wouldn’t have killed her even if he had a perfect shot. Her flashlight was the only source of light. Without it, he would be killed in seconds. With it, he could only hope for a few minutes. It was simple mathematics: he had seven or eight magazines left and he would need at least fifty in order to kill his way to the first floor.

  He figured he would have to settle on getting to the second floor, but he didn’t come close. The beasts were too many and too wild. They surged upwards at him as he strode down to meet them, firing his gun, raking it back and forth. In the enclosed area, he could hardly miss.

  Deckard could shoot faster than they could climb and it wasn’t long before he was walking on the backs of the dead, gritting his teeth and cursing in a long, low rumble. The corpses underfoot threw off his aim and the fight became a slog of black blood and flying lead.

  He battled to the third floor landing and, after rattling off an entire magazine, he squeezed through the door and tried to hold it closed with his body as he attempted to make sense of what was in front of him. There was no true third floor left. Although there were a few walls left standing, the great majority of it had fallen through to the second level. He was standing over a crater.

  “I’m so fucked,” he whispered. This was the last thing he had expected.

  Below him, among the charred ruins, were dozens of zombies. They rushed over to stare up at him. Their mindless rage was horrifying. They didn’t care who he was or what he stood for. All they cared about was destroying him completely.

  “Ya’ll trapped yor-sef, didn’t ya’ll, mister?” Jaimee Lynn asked from behind the door. “That there door don’t go nowheres.”

  She wasn’t wrong and his hope of sprinting to the next set of stairs and getting in front of Eng was dashed.

  This left him with two terrible options. He could scramble along what was left of the wall to a point about thirty yards to his left where the fire had burned through to the fourth floor. If he could climb up there, he had about a fifty-fifty chance of escaping, maybe down the outside of the building or perhaps by using a less zombie-filled stairwell. He’d be able to escape, however Thuy would be doomed.

  The other option was to tightrope across the top of the remains of the walls. If he could get to the other side of the building, he would find himself looking down on the front parking lot, and perhaps, if the timing was right, he would have a clear shot at Eng.

  The major flaw in this plan was that the hunks of walls did not stretch all the way across the building. He would be able to get about halfway before he’d be forced to leap down among the zombies and the piles of burnt crap. From there, he’d have to cheat death long enough to get to the front-facing part of the building, where one wall had fallen onto another, creating a little slope. It would be a very temporary refuge from the beasts and he could only pray that Eng would cross his sights during that time.

  Although he figured he had only a five percent chance of living through this second scenario, he took it without hesitation. It was his only chance at rescuing Thuy and perhaps of saving the world.

  Deckard, slung his rifle, took a deep breath and let go of the door which, immediately burst open. Zombies came pouring out like champagne from a bottle, most falling to the second floor, landing in an ever-growing pile. In seconds, the pile reached nearly to the ledge.

  Those that didn’t fall right away gaped as Deckard crossed along a two-foot wide section of flooring that hugged the intact outer wall of the building. The zombies charged after him, but each fell, while he made it to a little shelf that protruded from the wall. He had hoped it would be stable. It wasn’t. As soon as he took one step on the remains of the scorched carpet, he could feel everything beneath him begin to crumble.

  With a cry, he took two steps and threw himself across an open space, aiming for a length of standing wall. He didn’t quite make it and fell onto it chest first, with his boots scrambling along the face wall, while below him the zombies reached out to pull him down. One of his boots inadvertently caught on the head of a zombie and he was able to push himself.

  “Git him!” Jaimee Lynn screamed. She had fallen into the pile with the rest and had only just managed to scramble out from beneath it. Her cry of “Git him” had been a useless waste of breath since the zombies were already doing everything they could to get him. What wasn’t useless was the shining flashlight she held on him. It pushed back the gloom of the shadows just enough so he could see where to put his feet as he tiptoed along the five-inch wide path.

  Then he ran out of wall. There had to be three-hundred zombies on the second floor by then. Most were still extricating themselves from the massive pile beneath the stairwell door, however there was a swarm of them below him climbing the mounds and heaps, trying to get at him.

  There were more of the undead on the left side of the wall than on the right and so he took his rifle and blazed away at those on the right, chopping them down, creating the smallest hole in the crowd to leap into.

  He was already reloading as he dropped onto a desk and was firing again within a second: Bam! Bam! Bam! He unleashed the full thirty rounds, which gave him barely enough room to dash through. He charged for the sloping wall while black hands tore at his shirt and legs. Something caught him by the ankle and he fell, banging against a jutting machine that was huge and black—it was one of the cafeteria ovens. Having fallen through from the floor above, it was propped up on its side and there was a gap beneath it.

  Deckard crawled under the oven, forcing himself along what was little more than a jagged tunnel that tore at his clothes and his flesh. He had no idea if the tunnel even had an exit, but he pushed on, thrusting two-by-fours and drywall out of the way.

  Behind him zombies crawled after, scrabbling for his boots. He managed to stay ahead of the closest and when he emerged from the beneath the oven, he found that he had a clear shot at the sloping wall. Without hesitation, he raced for it and at the last second saw there was a huge crack in it running in a diagonal. All he could think was: I hope it’s fucking solid.

  He was halfway up when his right foot went throug
h the wall up to his knee. “Shit! Shit!” he hissed as he tried to pull his leg up, however the angle was strange and for a panicked moment he was stuck. When he looked back his heart quailed at what he saw. The bloodthirsty monsters, hundreds of them, were piling up around the wall. It was a sea of undead, tearing at each other, tearing at the wall and tearing at anything they could grasp to get at him.

  Never in his life had Deckard’s nerve failed him as it did right then—in his heart, he knew he was going to die.

  “Shit,” he said again, this time quietly. Reloading his M4 with his last magazine, he aimed the gun at the edge of the hole that had gobbled up his lower leg and fired three times. There was a sharp pain in the side of his knee, but he ignored it and used the butt of the M4 to make the hole bigger.

  His leg was bleeding, but then again so were his face and hands. He had to be infected. Strangely, this realization calmed him. His fight was over. His days of running for his life were through. He could be done with all of this.

  “But not just yet,” he said. Reaching up, he jabbed his fingers in the diagonal crack and pulled himself up, leaving a red smear behind. A second later, one of the zombies ran its black tongue over it. Deckard didn’t see. He had reached the top of the wall where it had stove in a window, and from there he saw four shadows standing in the parking lot.

  He brought up his rifle and sighted on the group, but which was which and who was who? It was midnight and very dark. At a hundred yards, the shadows were mere blobs. Any of them could be Eng. Any of them could be Thuy.

  Something grabbed his right boot and yanked him just as one of the blobs lifted something slim and black—it had to be a gun and the person holding it had to be Eng.

  Deckard kicked his foot, but the beast had too good of a hold and the next thing he knew, his foot was in the zombie’s mouth, and even though his boot was thick leather, there was a crushing pain. And now his other leg was grabbed around the calf and there was searing pain in his ankle.

  He tried to fight back, but more and more hands were dragging him down into the pile. “Fuck! No!” he seethed, going wild long enough to get one elbow up on the top of the wall. Bringing the M4 to his cheek, he aimed, however the zombies had him and dragged him down. He yelled in fury and strained with all his might to hold himself rigid and there was one split second where he had the M4 at arm’s length and his eye stared straight down the barrel from the back sight to the front—and Eng was his target. A mere blob.

  Deckard pulled the trigger and never in his life was his aim more true. And it never would be again.

  The 5.56 mm bullet rifled through the air and through Eng’s pack and into his Kevlar vest. He was thrown forward by the force of the blow and fell into Katherine, who was only just reacting. She went for his weapon knowing this was her one chance. In the dark, the struggle was awkward, uncertain and desperate. They wrestled for the gun, rolling around along the broken pavement, and although the two were equally well trained and similar in speed, gradually Eng’s greater strength became the deciding factor.

  He yanked the gun from her hands and stood over her ready to shoot, only right then they could hear one of the Blackhawk’s engines spooling up, running faster. “I’ll kill this one, you kill Thuy,” Eng said to Anna. “Or maybe do her in the guts. That’s what she deserve…” Eng had glanced back and when he saw Anna’s M4 pointed at him, his words dried up.

  Anna fired three times into his chest and this time the Kevlar didn’t stop the bullets. He fell back, staring at the sky with wide, shocked eyes. Anna then swung the gun around and pointed it at Thuy, who was so shocked by the shooting that she couldn’t breathe.

  “I’m not a bad guy,” Anna said. “Do you believe me?” Thuy was looking at a mass-murderer, she didn’t know what to say. “Tell me you believe me!” Anna ordered, her hand squeezing down on the trigger almost to the firing point.

  “I-I believe you,” Thuy said.

  Suddenly the bore of the gun dropped away and Anna smiled behind her mask. “Good, because I want to be friends. I want the two of us to save the world. We should get going.”

  Thuy’s legs were jello and her mind was empty, save for a single question that replayed itself over and over: Where’s Deckard? Where’s Deckard? She stared at the facility, not realizing that she was being dragged to the helicopter by a beaming Anna Holloway. Behind them, Katherine ran to catch up, not knowing what the hell had just happened, but just knowing she was lucky to be alive.

  A crew member tried to hoist Thuy in, but she stopped him and despite Axelrod yelling for her to get in the chopper, she looked back at the building one last time, hoping and praying that Deckard would suddenly come running out, waving an arm and smiling that serious smile of his. But he did not come out. The building and the things within it had swallowed him up.

  Epilogue

  The President leaned back in his three-thousand dollar, black leather swivel chair and gazed at the maps. He was in charge now. He was the Commander in Chief! He had broken the back of the coup and now he was the one making the decisions.

  There had been a moment where he thought his nerve would fail him, that without Marty Aleman he wouldn’t know what to say or do. The moment had passed quickly as he gave his first command: “Because the military can’t be trusted, from now on each unit from the company level on up will have political officers assigned to them. All decisions must first go through the political officers.”

  His new group of advisors, chosen exclusively from his own party, had given him the highest praise for the command. Puffed up almost to the point of strutting, he had next demanded that all new operations and troop movements be put on hold until the political officers were in place. It seemed logical since there was no way to know where the next rebellion would take place.

  This order, even more than the first, had led to outrage among the remaining generals, which in turn had led to a new round of arrests.

  On the Pennsylvania front, General Thomas Merriweather, the commander of the 28th Infantry Division, who was in the process of moving two infantry regiments and a militia regiment from the quiet northern part of the line to the heavily engaged southern part of the line near Philadelphia, ignored the order and was scheduled to be arrested.

  Knowing that the troop movements were vital to maintaining the line, Merriweather resisted the arrest order and he and most of his staff were killed in a drone strike ordered by the President.

  The new commander, a general pulled from behind a desk in the Pentagon, chose the sanctity of his own life over that of his men. The three regiments were stopped in place and as a result, Lancaster was overrun and all of eastern Pennsylvania was lost to the Susquehanna River. Both General Phillips and General Merriweather were blamed for the thousands who died.

  “They were heroes,” the President said when describing the event to the White House pool reporters. He proved he didn’t need Marty Aleman when he shed a tear on cue. “They lived as heroes and they died as heroes.” Actually, they died in the dark, abandoned by their government and surrounded by teaming hordes that ripped them to pieces in a bloody orgy of death—but that didn’t sound as good as the prepared speech.

  Once his midnight presser was complete, the President slid into his expensive chair in the Situation Room, ordered a cup of black coffee and a club sandwich, without the crusts, and sat back to ponder the war map…the real war map, not the bullshit map that Heider and Phillips and all the others had tried to pass off to keep him in the dark.

  The real war map showed the real danger, and the real danger wasn’t in losing eastern Pennsylvania, which, as far as he knew, held nothing of actual value outside his voting block in Philadelphia. And it wasn’t in Massachusetts where he was certain the entire notion of rebellion originated, as King George the Third undoubtedly could attest to.

  No, the real danger to the country was only forty-five miles away from the White House itself. Already the northern reaches of Maryland were being hit by the zombies, and th
ere wasn’t much holding them back besides a few measly rivers.

  “How many men do we have on this stretch of the Susquehanna?” He pointed to a length of the river that cut across northern Maryland.

  It took the junior officer ten minutes to hunt down the answer. “About three thousand. I know it doesn’t seem like a lot, but the river is almost four-hundred yards across at that point.”

  “I don’t care if it is ten miles across. Do you see how many of those…those zombies are on the other side?” The junior officer swallowed with a clicking sound and shook his head. “Then find out!” the President ordered.

  Another ten minutes went by before he could answer, “Two to three hundred thousand, sir.”

  The President had just taken a bite of his club sandwich. He chewed and then wiped his hands on his napkin before saying, “That’s my point. It’s a hundred to one odds. That’s unacceptable. Don’t you agree?” The junior officer swallowed again and then nodded. “Exactly,” the President said, “and here’s what we’re going to do about it: we’re going to bomb the living daylights out of them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want every bomber. I want every fighter and every missile and every UAV bombing the fuck out of those zombies. Is that clear? No exceptions.”

  It was an easy order to give while sitting in the climate controlled Situation Room on a three thousand dollar black leather chair, while eating a crustless club sandwich and sipping coffee.

  Sergeant Troy Ross of the 101st Airborne Division found the repercussions much harder to deal with. He’d been awake for the last forty-eight hours and fighting for his life for thirty-seven of those hours. In the face of an army of undead that dwarfed the remains of his division, he and his worn out men had already retreated three times since sundown.