The Dealer of Hope_Adrian's March_Part 1

by Chris Philbrook

  “I got the fucking mosque!” Glen said over the comms to Thomas.

  Thomas scanned ahead as Glen’s words came to him, and he saw a duo of living men with AK-47s step around a corner and into the street. They raised their weapons and opened fire at the humvee. The fresh rounds struck the front of the vehicle with vicious intensity, walking up the hood and into the windshield, pock marking it the heavy bullet resistant glass.

  “Contact front!” Thomas yelled, pressing the pedal even further into the floorboard.

  Glen rotated the turret to the forward position as he heard the incoming metal jacketed rounds spank off the heavy steel of his turret. Filled with purpose and lacking any real thought about his own safety he brought the gun’s lethal aim onto the doorframe where one of the men was attempting to take cover. Sadly, the building couldn’t stand up to the withering power of his heavy machine gun, and the rounds he poured at the enemy punched through it, eradicating the threat’s life and crumbling the building on top of the puddle that was his corpse. It took only another moment for Glen to start punching holes into the other building across the street where the second shooter attempted to hide. Neither SEAL saw whether or not the second local died, but as the building toppled down, it was hard to imagine anyone could have survived Glen’s onslaught.

  The men left the town to die and they moved on with their young passenger. As they made camp in a draw in a nearby valley, neither man gave the village or the men they killed in it a second thought.

  In the bright and crisp early morning Thomas sat alone on watch. He’d slept the first shift of the night and had taken over for Glen a couple hours prior to the dawn’s first appearance on the mountainous horizon. Glen and Rasa slept under the truck on meager bedding on the ground, and he moved about the area they were parked. They’d placed the truck behind the lone remaining wall of an isolated building near a vertical valley wall. The purpose of the building was long since lost. They were obscured from the road by the wall and a sloping hill on one side, and the walls of the world on the other. It wasn’t the best place, but it served them well that night. Thomas rested in the driver’s seat of the humvee and dug out the radio on impulse. They hadn’t put the new batteries in it yet, and the complete lack of attention to that detail suddenly bothered him. They’d gone so long without any hope of radio contact both sailors had forgotten about ever hearing any new radio contact. Thomas got the battery in the radio and got it fired up as the low hanging, thin clouds burnt away above.

  He crossed his fingers and transmitted a brief and completely unprofessional message over the channel, “This is Bent-Over One to anyone listening. Anyone still give a fuck out there?”

  Clearly not the best way to announce his presence, but decorum was something he and Glen had been lacking for some time.

  “Copy that Bent-Over One, we have you five by five. Please identify yourself,” a friendly voice responded. Thomas heard a solid amount of cheer and surprise in the voice. He felt training suddenly kick in, and he fired off his team’s actual call sign, and gave them a quick status update. It felt so alien to him to be back in the structure of the military machine. It wasn’t long before a higher ranking officer took over the radio.

  “Punisher this is Lieutenant Colonel Fallon, I’m what passes for the boss here now. Sure is nice to hear we’ve still got some ass-kickers alive and kicking ass out there. How’s life in the Wild West for you right now? I’m told you’re two strong with a wounded local?”

  “Roger that sir. We’re making our way to Kandahar right now for the airbase. We’d no idea whether or not anyone was there, but if any friendly forces were still out and about…”

  “Solid. As best we can tell, we’re the Alamo right now. You’re the first voices in the Wild West we’ve heard in days. Where you headed in from?” The Colonel asked. Thomas liked the strange officer based just on the way he said the word Alamo. Long and drawn out, like he’d watched too many John Wayne movies late at night.

  “We’re headed in from FOB Forrestal. Shit show, sir. Looked like someone inside went bat shit crazy or got bitten or something. Looked ugly.” Thomas heard Glen stir under the truck and crouched down to grin at him. Glen listened intently to the radio traffic with ears freshly awakened.

  “You know we had a couple trucks arrive from there about eight or nine days ago. They said they were collapsing onto us because they were running out of food. We felt it was odd when they only came in with four guys. We let ‘em in and after asking a few hard questions, they drew down on our forces here and we had a firefight with them. They all died and we lost four of our own. Fucking pathetic.”

  The two SEALs cringed. The tale made sense. Bad apples make bad applesauce.

  “But I’m glad you two and a half all are safe and sound-ish.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Thomas said back. “What’s the road to the airbase look like? Any chance we’ll just be able to drive up and in easily? Do we have any air assets that can provide assistance?”

  “No air, no ass. This is Afghanistan son; nothing we do here is easy.” The Colonel said.

  “That’s fine too sir, we’re SEALs. Everything is easy if we try hard enough.”

  “Good attitude. Well let’s see. We’ve got about thirty, maybe forty thousand dead locals milling about the base walls, give or take a few thousand. But let’s face it; we haven’t really counted ‘em lately. The Taliban, God bless their evil souls; have continued their version of Allah’s work despite the presence of so many of their dead buddies walking around. We’d really hoped they’d shift gears and work on putting their fellow nationals into the ground, but that ain’t happening. Fucking miserable pricks. They’ve been attacking us almost daily this week, probing to find a soft spot on the wall to get in here. So far no luck on their part, but there aren’t a whole lot of us here to hold them off should they get a little lucky. Dumb fucks will probably let the whole city in here too when they make a hole in the wall.”

  “Sounds shitty. How many are we sir? If you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Well I’d prefer not to say exact numbers over the air, scrambled frequencies or not, but we’ve got enough to fill one of the two remaining planes here right now, and when we gather enough to fill the second plane, we are getting the fuck out of here.” The Colonel sounded very excited.

  “You performing a rearguard op?” Thomas asked, looking about for anything approaching their position.

  “More or less. We’re a placeholder. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines with no reason to go home. We’re keeping the base up and running while our forces across the country return to us. We want to bring everyone home. You know, leave no man behind.”

  Thomas looked at Glen as the Colonel talked. Glen looked away. “I understand that,” Thomas said.

  “We’re waiting another fifty days or so, then one way or the other, our plane is taking off. Our plan is to head to Ramstein Germany.”

  “Solid. Maybe from there we can head home. Maybe by then this will all be sorted out and over.”

  “Fat fucking chance, Punisher. We haven’t heard anything from Germany in a long time, and that means things are bad there, and if things are bad there…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well that’s a whole different shit storm. Today’s problem is getting you inside my wire. We’ve had the best and brightest here working on a plan this whole time, and we got a pretty mediocre idea.”

  “Ideas are good.”

  “Sure are. These things are stupid as shit you see, and they respond to noise and light like moths. They’re real dumb. You make enough noise, or cause a large commotion, they flock to it. We’ve done this a couple times to move them about, so this should work out again for us. We’re gonna take some bullhorns to one area of the base and make loud like two redneck cousins drunk on Keystone and fucking in a trailer on July fourth. It’ll be epic. That should draw in a big old crowd from where you’ll enter the base, and God willing, you’ll be able to drive right up to th
e gate and right on in.”

  “God willing eh?” Thomas said, his voice full of sarcasm.

  “Yeah you bet. We’ll be back to you in a few minutes with more details. In the meantime, get your shit together, and get ready to drive like you’ve never driven before, sailor.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  Glen and Thomas shook hands with glee, and they proceeded to get their shit together.

  The route to the airbase entry unfurled like a plate of spilled spaghetti. The radio controllers routed them around known IED locations, and hot spots of zombies that weren’t moving to the noise the soldiers were making. It seemed no matter how loud or obnoxious the soldiers in the airbase were some groups of the dead refused to acknowledge them. Thomas wondered if God was on their side or not. He probably had better things to pay attention to.

  The trick to the entire trek to the base was to move the truck quietly. When moving briskly the diesel motor made quite a racket. That noise would cancel out the work bringing the undead away, so Thomas had to drive very slowly. It also meant that they couldn’t use the massive heavy machine gun. If they had to shoot anything, the two men would need to resort to using their M4 weapons with the suppressors affixed. Glen took his spot in the turret behind the fifty holding onto his much smaller M4A1, and feeling a little silly. It felt to him like cleaning a house with a toothbrush while the maid watched holding a vacuum cleaner. He’d get the job done with the smaller weapon, but there was a significantly better option available right in front of him.

  Thomas kept the vehicle moving at a steady ten miles an hour, looking to both sides with an intense feeling of badness deep in his core. It pained him to move so slowly in such an urban environment, especially one so overrun with threats. SEALs always moved fast, and never alone. To be in a single vehicle with no secondary means of escape quite simply scared the hell out of him. He knew Glen felt the same way.

  Both could hear the radio traffic on the channels between the forces inside the airbase. As the crowd of undead gathered en masse at the location where they were making the noise the security forces selectively were engaging. It seemed to Thomas that ammunition wasn’t a huge concern, but it also seemed like a huge waste of rounds to simply shoot at the enormous amount of zombies. Thomas thought they would be better served if the base defense forces lobbed a handful of heavy mortar rounds into the throngs of the dead instead. They might not be 100% lethal on the tough undead, but the explosions and concussive forces would certainly render many of them unable to move. He shrugged and felt thankful for all they were doing.

  “Kandahar according to your map we are at the two klick point. We’ve got a left, two rights and a left remaining to get home to you,” Thomas said, looking down briefly at the map he’d jotted notes on. It was a rough map but it had worked so far.

  “Copy that, Punisher. All seems well on our end, continue as normal.”

  “We’re on it,” Thomas replied, eyes alert and looking for threats. He felt a strange tugging at his sleeve and he looked over at Rasa. She was looking up at him, her eyes filled with urgency. When Thomas met her gaze she looked and pointed out the windshield towards a crack between two buildings. It might’ve been an alley, were it thicker. Blocking the edge of the alley was an ancient Mercedes truck, and it kept a wall of struggling undead out of the street. If they figured out how to crawl underneath it…

  “Glen you see that Mercedes truck at two o’clock?” Thomas asked over their personal channel.

  “Yep. Holy fuck. It looks like a fucking dam about to break. I got it.” Glen shouldered his M4 and put the tiny red dot in his holographic sight on a forehead, and timed the shot with Thomas’ driving. Behind the roughed-up German vehicle his target’s skull popped open louder than the report of the gun. The body fell to the ground, but stuck on the trunk. He repeated the process as the humvee approached and drove by the packed alley. As they passed it he held his fire, fairly certain the threat the alley posed had been dealt with.

  No one saw the man hidden in shadow, crouched behind a counter in a store across the street holding the rocket propelled grenade. The hiss and squeal of the RPG round registered only scantly in the ears of the SEALs as it blitzed into the front of the humvee, caving in the driver’s side wheel, ripping the hood off like tissue paper, shattering the thick ballistic glass, and almost tipping the truck over onto its roof. Fortunately the girth and weight of the steel on the turret kept the truck on its three remaining wheels.

  The explosion only a few feet from where Thomas sat deafened him. The ringing in his ears overwhelmed his ability to hear anything, but his vestigial memory told him where the attack had come from. Unable to think, his body did what he had trained it to do. The driver’s side door was already ajar from the frame of the humvee being ripped apart by the RPG’s attack, so he grabbed his weapon and jammed it out of the space in the door frame and sprayed suppressed 5.56 millimeter rounds on full-auto where he thought the shot had come from. He emptied a magazine in what felt like a heartbeat and slapped a new one in before the empty landed in his lap. He did this without looking at the weapon, or his magazine pouches; his eyes were looking through the busted glass of his door for the movement of the man that had done this to him, and just as his second magazine went dry and was falling out the weapon he saw the man running through a hole in the side of the building, carrying the empty RPG. Thomas shouldered the door of the humvee open and had his sidearm up and firing before the man could find cover. The SEAL watched as two of his six pistol rounds found their fleshy target, and sent their victim down into the rubble violently. He holstered his pistol and slapped a new magazine into his M4A1.

  He hollered to Glen but couldn’t hear his own voice. As he scanned the surroundings for the inevitable other attackers he turned and looked to the turret where he saw Glen up and firing in the other direction. Glen’s cheek was covered in dark blood below his helmet, but he was shooting accurately and didn’t appear to be down for the count. Thomas spun back to his sector to ensure they’d make it though this just as two more men began firing down on them from the second story of the narrow boulevard of destruction.

  Thomas felt a javelin of pain stab through his right calf and he was dropped to a knee. I’m hit. Fuck I’m hit.

  From his knee he propelled his body backwards under the rear end of the tipped up humvee, giving him a modicum of cover. When his body came to a stop he opened up on the windows where he took fire from and returned suppressing fire. He couldn’t see anything firing back at him, but he continued to squeeze off suppressed rounds that mushroomed into the stone of the building harmlessly. He watched a dozen of his rounds pockmark the frames of the windows accurately, but then the barrels of the attacker’s weapons poked over and started their horrible return fire anyway. His suppressed fire simply wasn’t scary enough to keep their heads down. He cursed the quieter weapon they were using to void attention.

  From above him he saw and felt the frame of the humvee rumble. It rocked with a rhythm that could only be one thing; the Ma Deuce in Glen’s hands. Thomas’ eyes refocused on the window frames as Glen’s fire obliterated the upper floor of the Kandahar building. Bricks and wall fell off the side of the building as the massive slugs rendered the structure bare. The M4A1 might not have scared them, but the M2 ended them. Thomas got to his good foot after a few seconds. He assessed his right calf and saw there was a gouge running from knee to ankle nearly the width of his finger and a few inches deep. The heavy round had torn the flesh from his shin but not destroyed the bone, miraculously. The fat muscle of his calf flopped around loosely, barely connected, but the leg worked somewhat. He felt he could walk, but the pain would be incredible. His hearing started the journey back to him as he turned to Glen.

  Glen had a gash on his temple that was as long as a cup of coffee was wide. White bone of his skill poked through the cut and he grinned the whole time. The two men exchanged words neither could hear until their ears recovered enough for them to actually communica
te.

  “You’re all fucked up dude,” Glen said, pointing down to the bloody leg Thomas limped on.

  Thomas hissed in pain. “Join the fucking club, cunt. Your wife is gonna be pissed at me I let you get ugly on this deployment. She’ll never forgive me.”

  Glen grinned, “How’s our little girl?”

  Thomas was jolted by the fact he’d forgotten about her, especially in the wake that she’d just pointed out the threat of the undead right before the attack. Thomas hopped around on his good leg and leaned into the cabin of the humvee with a smile. What he saw rotted his soul in an instant. Little Rasa had been hit by something sharp that had been moving very fast. The object had struck her midway between her brow and her hairline, and it had peeled the top half of her head off. Her bright blue eyes, now lifeless and swollen nearly shut looked at Thomas. Rasa was empty.

  He stood up out of the vehicle as the wetness cascaded down his cheeks. Glen saw his friend’s face and felt the emotion flow out of him, regardless of any self control. Both men were full of anger, and sadness.

  Thomas leaned back into the vehicle, keeping his eyes well away from Rasa’s corpse. He grabbed the handset of the truck’s radio, “This is Punisher, we have been attacked by insurgent forces and are no longer combat effective or mobile. One KIA. We need a hand here, Kandahar.” Thomas dropped to the ground as the pain flared up larger and larger in his leg, threatening to overtake his will to stay conscious. He grabbed his pack and dug out the medical gear to address his injury.