The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3

by Peter Meredith

  “I have a knife,” one of the men in the shadows said, his voice just as hard and emotionless as the long steel that glinted in his hands.

  “Yes,” O’Brian said, quieter now. His own yelling seemed to have made him woozy. “We can use a knife. I think that would be allowed under the circumstances.” He went for the knife, while the healthy officers shared looks of incredulity.

  “Sick,” Thuy whispered to the captain, and then jerked her head to indicate the colonel.

  “Huh?”

  “Sick!” she whispered louder.

  Before the captain could blink, O’Brian came hurrying back, the black gleam in his eyes matching the shine on the blade. “I was thinking of waterboarding her, but I like the idea of a knife. It’s perfect.We’ll use it to get the information out of her. We’ll cut it out.”

  “I-I thought you were looking to p-punish me,” Thuy said, her eyes so focused on the knife that everything around it seemed to fall away. To her, the steel floated in the air, getting closer and closer, and her stomach began to flutter and her throat grew tight.

  “Right, punish,” the colonel said, nodding in agreement. “To hurt her. I mean, I-I …we have to punish her to set an example. That’s right.”

  Thuy knew enough never to contradict anyone afflicted with the disease. It would only spark opposition. Her only option was to lead the colonel in the direction she wanted him to go and for her that direction was out of the tent.

  “If you wish to set an example, then it should be done in public so everyone can see.”

  The colonel jumped at the idea. “Yes, public.”

  “This is going too far,” the captain said, stepping between Thuy and the colonel. His heart was in the right place, but he wasn’t thinking. The colonel was on the edge of sanity where life and death were matters of whim. The knife was supposed to be for the hated woman, but the colonel couldn’t have people talking back to him. Anyone who did deserved punishment, and the knife was just begging to be used. He ripped the blade into the captain with such force that the tip projected half an inch out of the man’s back.

  The captain made a noise that was part gasp, part confused bleat—then he simply choked on the blood filling his lungs. There was a moment when everyone stood completely still and watched him drop to his knees, and then slowly collapse forward onto his face. The second he did, Colonel O’Brian tried to grab Thuy.

  She screamed and jumped away, but was far too slow, and O’Brian was able to snag the borrowed camouflage shirt that billowed around her. He pulled her in close, dragging her toward his other hand where the bloody piece of metal awaited to stake her just as it had the captain.

  3—Northern New Jersey

  The zombie that had been Simon Moyer tromped mindlessly along, searching for his next meal. Like all zombies, he was desperately hungry, endlessly so. The hunger drove him, it kept him moving even though he hadn’t had the slightest whiff of a human in hours.

  By the time the gaggle of C17s coalesced into one mighty formation and began its great sweep over every major city between Raleigh and Boston, Simon was deep into Northern New Jersey where the greenery was lush and the land dotted with lakes and ponds. It was a land of second homes, cabins, and little getaway properties, and with the Quarantine Zone so close, just across the border, it was almost completely empty.

  Other than the squirrels and birds and the occasional fox, the only things that moved in the placid countryside were Simon, a man named Donald Biggs, and a gentle, but thick fog that had blanketed the area all night. With the sun rising, the fog was gradually dissipating where it had settled in the hollers and stream beds and the folds in the land.

  The three: Simon, Donald and the fog happened to meet in one of these low areas where visibility suddenly dropped from sixty yards to five feet.

  Donald, who lived in Newark, two hours away, had been glued to his television for half of the previous day and, as things deteriorated, he had begun to worry about food, just like everyone else. He was not well provisioned because, after all, the Food Lion was just down the street and wasn’t it always simply stacked from floor to ceiling with food?

  The worry over food had him hurrying down the street and what he saw there made his stomach turn a flip: the store had become a mob scene. People were yelling and pushing each other and throwing punches. Even as he stood, watching with his mouth hanging slack, he saw one person stab another over the last can of tomato paste.

  That had sent him scurrying back home…back to his television and his mounting fear, which peaked when the talking heads on the 24-hour news channels reported on a number of delivery trucks that had been hijacked.

  A lack of food was a problem and his dad’s little fishing cabin up in the green part of Jersey was the solution. The place: rustic, dusty, and mouse infested was as stocked as a fallout shelter. Sure, some of the cans of beans were stamped with dates that suggested they had expired last century, but Donald was more of a beggar at this point.

  He knew he had no choice: he had to get that food, and so he set out for the cabin, thinking that it would take him a couple of hours. He hadn’t counted on the endless traffic. Luckily, he was going against the grain and after five hours he got what he needed and turned back, his Tercel crammed with six week’s worth of Spaghetti O’s, beef ravioli, baked beans and tuna.

  More luck seemed to be with him as he found a practically deserted back road and was able to pick up speed. He drove with a heavy foot and white knuckles. Just then, it wasn’t zombies that he feared. As far as he knew, they were all still a hundred miles away and safely holed up in the Quarantine Zone. What he feared was the desperation of his fellow man. He feared highway robbers. He feared a ruse and an ambush, and so he raced along at speeds that were about twenty miles an hour beyond reckless.

  He wasn’t going to stop for anything on the twisted little snake of a road—not even if he ran someone over.

  The Tercel, a blue streak in the green forest, was doing sixty when the road dipped and the fog was suddenly a cloud, dense as dragon breath. His foot came off the gas to hover over the brake, but he didn’t slow down because if there was ever going to be an ambush, it would be here and he wanted to be prepared.

  Still, he was caught off guard as Simon stepped directly into the path of the Tercel. Donald screeched and his brakes screeched; there was a thud and a thump, thump, thump sound as Simon smacked the grill, the windshield and bounced off the trunk. The car slewed to the right from the impact, but Donald somehow kept it on the road…and kept it going.

  “It was a trap,” he hissed, staring into the rear view mirror and seeing Simon climb to his feet; he blamed the fog for seeing the man as grey, and his shredded clothes he figured had been caused by being hit and thrown over the car. “Or he had ripped them up before jumping out at me.”

  Donald pictured the man as part thief and part stuntman. He’d heard of scams like that before. Someone “pretends” to get hit by a car and when the motorist pulls over, they get robbed and then stuffed in the trunk where they die a slow, suffocating death.

  “That’s not going to be me,” he said and then pegged the gas. His driving became even more reckless and he ended up skinning blue paint off the side of the Tercel more than once. He didn’t care. Survival was all that counted.

  An hour and half later, he slipped the Tercel into his garage to inspect the damage and, more importantly, to clean off any blood and incriminating evidence.

  Strangely, all he found were smears of black gunk on the hood. He gave them a quick sniff, and then made a face; the gunk smelled of death. “What the fuck?” he asked in quavering voice. The sight and smell of the gunk, as well as the subconscious idea that what he had hit hadn’t been a robber, had his stomach making nervous turns and so he cleaned the car meticulously and then cleaned himself even more so.

  But it was too late for Donald Biggs. He had snorted in the deadly spores with that one sniff, and an hour later, he lay in his basement screaming into an old
blanket that he was using to try to keep the light from burning out his mind.

  Soon his pain would give way to anger and that would be forgotten, drowned out by an all-consuming hunger.

  Chapter 7

  1—Shanghai, China

  General Hir Okini’s helicopter skimmed north, three hundred meters over the burned out remnants of what had been, not only the most populous city in China, but also in the entire world. Shanghai, once touted as the Pearl of the Orient, a beacon for all of Asia, had teemed with twenty-four million people, a number that could hardly be comprehended.

  They lived, crammed one on top of the other with almost no room to stretch, eking out their dull, slow lives. They ate, they slept, they worked like faceless drones, in the sprawling city that had all the personality of an anthill.

  Where once change had been slow and forced, now it was dynamic. Below Okini, all of Shanghai was on the move. It was a city of the dead and a city on the move.

  Even with the blue plastic hood of his bio-suit constantly slipping down to cover his eyes, General Okini had no problem seeing the corpses. They weren’t laid out and bleeding like proper corpses. No, they walked or stumbled or, if they didn’t have legs, they dragged themselves. They moved west, always west.

  They really couldn’t go in any other direction. Shanghai sat on a peninsula, jutting out into the East China Sea, and the infected, walking corpses didn’t seem to care for the water. This little thing had kept them from spreading out in a hundred directions.

  They went west and behind them were a thousand fires belching smoke into the sky as entire city blocks burned unchecked. If Okini had his way, he would have purposely turned the entire city into one big ash heap, but he was not the General Secretary and could not snap his fingers and have everything be as he commanded.

  Still, as a ranking member of the Party and the Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, he was able to read the “Most Secret” reports concerning the creatures. What had amazed him wasn’t their virility, it was just how quickly the disease spread. Unlike the rest of the twenty-five person Politburo, he had actually seen the infected creatures up close.

  One of his first acts, after he had been tasked with his new orders: Protect the City of Suzhou and Lands West, was to send commandos into Shanghai to snatch up infected individuals for study. Half the commando teams failed to return, but those that did brought back creatures that were more monster than man. Even chained to gurneys, they would hiss and gnash their teeth. One even tried to bite off its own hand to get at Okini.

  They were vile things, fit only to die in flames.

  He was only one of a few in the Politburo who held this opinion. Most of the others urged restraint and cried that more time was needed before Okini’s more drastic solutions were put in place. It has only been two days, they said. Let’s at least get a scientific point of view, they whined. Hundreds of scientists from every imaginable field had been flown in the night before to study the problem that the horrible creatures represented. The scientists talked about cures and vaccines, and one fool talked about rehabilitation for the infected.

  Okini knew better. Cures were a long-term solution to the disease; fire was the short-term solution and he was pretty sure that there was only time for the short term solution.

  Nothing was more obvious to him, especially from his current vantage point. He motioned the helicopter west and in minutes it was flying over the easternmost suburbs of Suzhou which had once been a suburb of Shanghai but had grown into a massive city in its own right.

  The leading edge of the zombie army had just crossed the S5, the main north-south highway. The streets crawled with the dead going here and there, hunting down anything remotely human to satisfy their lust for fresh blood.

  Unfortunately, Okini didn’t have the authority to call in airstrikes on his own cities. He had been given an order for containment only, not eradication. In his ice-cold heart, he knew that was a mistake. The westward march of the disease would sweep over Suzhou which had a population of over ten million people—ten million doomed people.

  At least here the Politburo had listened to reason.

  Once Okini had explained that he didn’t have the resources to move the necessary military assets into place to stop the zombies and to save the local population from the coming threat, it was decided that the people would remain in place. It was only logical. The roads west of Suzhou were narrow, sometimes only muddy tracks, and already the military traffic crept along making Okini’s logistical issues a nightmare. If ten million refugees were added to the mix, the roads would become fused with no one being able to go one way or the other.

  “Are the people of Suzhou just going to sit there and wait to be killed?” a party chief from the Jiangsu Province had leapt up to demand.

  “Of course not,” Okini had answered. “The people will work and they will fight and they will die.” He was solemn for a moment before he looked up with a fierce expression in his brown eyes. “Or would you rather that they run to Nanjing? And then when the demon-army comes to Nanjing, they can all run to Beijing. Where would you have them run to then? Would you like them to come here?” This had ended all discussion.

  Twenty hours earlier, the entire population of Suzhou had been forcibly pressed into labor gangs and set to work digging a ditch the length of the Suez canal, which they were told would stop the zombies. Okini had given them a day to complete the project. It was, of course, impossible. There was no way it could be done, but that was okay with Okini.

  He knew that the work would keep their minds focused and their feet from running. Soon, they were too tired to run and yes, it was true they would also be too tired to fight properly, but he had no expectations that they would prove to be anything but a speed bump to the steamrolling zombies.

  In his opinion, this was the beauty of China, the peasants knew their place. They knew that they were not special little snowflakes. They were only cogs in the machines. They were worker ants who lived to toil. They would sweat and break their backs and then they would die, doing their part in defense of the country.

  All that night and most of the next day, the peasants labored without pause. They cleared the land in a wide lane that ran from the Yangtze River in the north to Taihu Lake in the south. Those who had shovels, pick-axes or hoes dug until their hands blistered and bled, while those without watched until whipped to their hands and knees to scrape at the soil with rocks or sticks or anything they could find. They dug until the zombie army could be seen.

  The sight of the beasts was so horrid that some of the peasants tried to run away. Okini ordered his army to gun them down. They had been warned not to run.

  Even if they had been able to break out, they wouldn’t have gone far. In their wisdom, the Party had not put all their trust in the one giant ditch. Rightly fearing a break through by the zombies, they conscripted the entire population of the Jiangsu Province in order to build a second ditch forty miles to the west.

  This one was a proper ditch. When it was finished, it would be impressively deep and wide. On the eastern side, it would be strung with barbed wire and on the west, the earth would be built to heights of up to seventy feet in places.

  Every backhoe and bulldozer, shovel and pick within a hundred miles had been confiscated, and now the peasants of Jiangsu were tearing down everything in their path. When complete, in two day’s time, the ditch would be a modern marvel and yet Okini didn’t think that even it would stop the army of undead.

  Their numbers were unthinkable and the dreadful army would only grow after they consumed the citizens of Suzhou, who trembled behind their tiny ditch, clutching their sticks and shovels.

  That their pathetic line would fail was a foregone conclusion in Okini’s mind. What he needed was for the Politburo to see it fail. When they saw it crumble and when they saw how quickly the dead came back to life, he would demand proper airstrikes and he felt sure he would get them. He would create an inferno, a storm of fire that wo
uld scorch the land and incinerate everything, living and dead within twenty miles. Only then would China be safe.

  “How is the shot?” Okini asked into his microphone. “Do we need to get closer?” With him on the helicopter was a cameraman, also garbed in a head-to-toe blue bio suit. The man leaned out over the horde as it closed in on Suzhou.

  “No, sir,” he said, shaking his head frantically, which made an annoying plastic swishing sound in Okini’s receiver. “We are plenty close. Please. I have the ability to zoom in. I am getting everything from here.”

  Okini studied the man with a flat expression. “You had better,” was all Okini said, looking down at the incipient battle. On one side, the zombies, a great wiggling mass that covered the earth like a plague of locusts, swept forward in an unstoppable wave. They went on like that, stretching over the eastern horizon.

  On the other side were the peasants, ten million strong, lined up shoulder to shoulder in a great phalanx a hundred miles in length and a hundred feet in depth. The hardiest men stood in front, holding what weapons they had been able to scrounge, usually the same tools that they had used to hack out the shallow ditch. Behind them were slim teenage youths and middle-aged men with pot bellies and skinny arms. Behind these stood the women trying to shield their children and finally, in the last line, were the oldest among them: little toothless grannies and men bent over walking sticks.

  Behind all of this was the army, or at least that part of the army Okini had been able to hustle into position on such short notice. It was a force made up of elements of four different divisions making communications and the command structure a headache. On the plus side, Okini had two hundred tanks and armored personnel carriers available as well as three hundred artillery pieces already in position.