The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3

by Peter Meredith

  “For now, yes. But the 42nd hasn’t got their shit together, so we started a secondary line. No one crosses it. We’re sending people to Chappaqua. Someone said there’s a relief center there for you refugees. You need to go back to the 117 and take it northeast.”

  “But…” Anna began.

  “There ain’t no buts and there ain’t no getting through here. All the roads south are closed, and we have orders to shoot anyone trying to sneak around. So for your sake, don’t even try it.”

  A lie came quick from her lips: “Of course not. I wouldn’t dream of it. Thanks so much for all your help.” She gave the gruff men a little wave before she pulled Eng around for the long walk back to where they left the others. “We can’t go to Chappaqua,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “It’s too close. It’s way, way too close to the Zone, especially if the military is having issues.” Eng grunted something that sounded as though he agreed.

  The others agreed as well. They didn’t trust Anna and they loathed Eng, and yet, they had experienced the zombies firsthand. They knew they had to put as many miles as they could between them and the Quarantine Zone. They had talked about getting into Pennsylvania, but even that felt too close.

  “We can’t drive, so we walk,” Anna said. “The men back there said they were guarding every road, and there are a ton of roads out here. That probably means they aren’t guarding the forest. It looked like it was pretty thick to the east.”

  Going east seemed like a good idea and, at first, the forest was so thick they couldn’t see thirty yards in any one direction. It was close and hot. The air felt heavy in their lungs. The further south they went however, it grew more and more open until they reached the demarcation line of the “Second Line,” which happened to be Interstate 287.

  It was a hundred yards of wide open pavement that was being regularly patrolled by young men in a pair of pickup trucks. They tooled back and forth, guns hanging out of their windows, looking ready to run anyone or anything down.

  Everyone, except for Eng, appeared deflated at the sight of them. The group plopped to the ground in defeat while he stood with his hand against a tree and watched the road. Ten minutes went by and, while Anna and the others drank from water bottles, he stood there.

  “We can make it across,” he said, finally. “There’s a pattern. Every few minutes they are out of sight of that bend for a good twenty seconds. All we have to do is sneak down close and when they are out of sight we sprint across the road.”

  The group watched the next pass of vehicles closely and there was indeed a brief amount of time when they couldn’t be seen. It seemed very brief to the three dispatchers, who were all over thirty and soft individuals accustomed to sitting for eight hours stretches.

  “I don’t know if I can make it,” Renee whined.

  “Then you can stay here and die,” Eng snapped. “The rest of us will make it out alive. Unless anyone else wants to be left behind?”

  No one wanted to be left behind, not even Renee, who changed her tune and promised she would make it and begged to be given an opportunity to try. Eng wanted to tie her to a tree, but Anna convinced him to let her come along. She figured that she probably wasn’t all that much faster than Renee and if they were seen, the boys in the pickup truck would go after Renee first, giving Anna a few more seconds to hide or run.

  When they crept to the side of the road, they saw that crossing it was going to be harder than it looked—in addition to the hundred yard run, there were two eight foot tall chainlink fences that would have to be climbed.

  The four women looked at the fences in dread, but none of them said aloud what they were all thinking: We’re going to get caught for sure. Anna dragged her eyes from the fence and suggested: “Maybe we could climb this closer fence first and hide in the tall grass on one pass and cross the highway on the next.”

  “Women!” seethed Eng, with a roll of his eyes. “Fine, but I’ll leave your ass if we’re seen.”

  “Sure,” Anna said, eager to please—eager not to be left behind.

  With the group hidden just under the eaves of the forest, the trucks spun slowly by and when they disappeared from view, one going east, the other going west, the seven burst out of hiding and rushed the fence. Anna counted the seconds as she dug the toes of her new tennis shoes into the fence and pulled herself up.

  It wasn’t a large fence by any means, and yet it took seven seconds to mount the fence and three more to drop down on the other side. Anna and Renee were last and they both stared out across the hundred yards of open pavement with dread. They weren’t sprinters. It would take them close to fifteen seconds to cross the road and they’d be completely winded when they got to the other side. How would they get over the next fence?

  “Everyone down,” Eng hissed. “They’re coming back.”

  Anna could hear the trucks; she refused to pull her head up to watch them. What was the point? Fear ate at her heart and she tried in vain to steady her breathing as they waited.

  Snake-like, Eng watched the truck from the tall grass. “Ten seconds,” he said. “Five, four, three, two, now!”

  Anna leapt up and began running, pacing herself. In seconds, she was left behind as everyone else went at a full sprint. At the twelve second mark, Eng was at the fence while she had only just crossed the median. Two seconds later, she passed Renee who was dragging badly.

  Although Anna felt that she could make it most of the way to the top of the fence in the allotted time and probably wouldn’t be seen by the men in the trucks who would be a half mile away at that point, she was sure that Renee would never come close. And she was sure that if Renee tried, they would get caught for certain.

  Instead of attempting the fence, she tackled Renee just on the other side of the highway. “Don’t try it!” she gasped, hauling the woman back to a drainage ditch that ran along the side of the road.

  “Get down, damn it!” Eng said in a carrying whisper.

  Anna crawled into the ditch and began pulling up the grass around her. She threw handfuls of it onto her back in a desperate attempt to blend in. Renee imitated her.

  The returning trucks could now be heard. Their tires thrummed. Both women froze in place. They even held their breath as the trucks drew nearer and nearer from both directions—and then they drove past.

  “Oh God,” Renee groaned in a whimper.

  “Save your breath,” Anna shot back. “We still have to get over the fence.” In a minute, Eng began his count down and when he called out: “Now,” both women went at the fence like animals and cleared it with six seconds left.

  Renee stumbled into the forest and began to cry, while Anna beamed in triumph as she lay hidden in the old growth. When the trucks came and went once more, the group fled deeper into the forest, thinking that they were now safe.

  Again, they were so wrong.

  Many of the streets south of the second line were being patrolled as well. Rumors were flying around. People whispered that there were zombies in Newark and that the Governor of Connecticut had fled and that the southern portion of the Quarantine Zone was on the verge of collapse.

  The people in and around New York City were in a state of panic. They were hemmed in from all sides, with their backs to the sea. Most of the population of Manhattan fled to long Island, while those north of the Harlem River, the people of the Bronx, Yonkers, New Rochelle and Mount Vernon, set up their “Second Line” and decided they would fight for it.

  Fortunately for Anna’s group of seven, the citizens were untrained and ill-prepared. The further south the group crept, the further their vigilance waned. The little group kept off the main streets and didn’t dare try to steal a car. It was a twelve mile hike and somewhere along the way, Anna’s head began to pound.

  In spite of the danger to everyone around her, she kept it her little secret. Eng would kill her if he found out. He wouldn’t hesitate.

  And so she marched along with the others, her fear building with every mile. Sh
e decided that when the pain got bad enough, she would shoot Eng in the stomach and drive the others away. She would incapacitate him, but let him live simply so he could be the first person she ate when she turned into a zombie—it was what he deserved.

  She planned his death in minute detail and it was sometime before she realized her headache hadn’t progressed. It had been an hour and she wasn’t going mad from the pain. “Oh, thank God,” she whispered at the realization. Not even a minute later, she cursed. “God damn it!”

  They had reached the southern tip of the Bronx where the view south was open before them: Newark was in flames. The smoke from the fires turned the sky black. Closer, all along the waterfront there were terrific battles being fought over control of the Hudson River. There wasn’t a boat in sight.

  After a day of marching, they were just as trapped as when they had started.

  2—The White House

  The monitors in the situation room were plenty big; however, what they were trying to display was so immense that the president found himself squinting at the details and he wasn’t happy about it. He knew that squinting played hell with his wrinkles and made him look older. He could have put on his glasses, only they made him look even older than the wrinkles did.

  “You know what we need?” he asked, turning to Marty Aleman. “We need one of those giant floor maps like the Nazis had in all those movies. That way you can see everything at once. You know, where all our armies are and where the bad guys are. Seeing it like this…it’s not so good.”

  Marty didn’t think the largest map in the world would help him make heads or tails out of what was going on. “I’ll look into it, sir.”

  “Good, good because these maps are awful. And those symbols the army uses, I don’t get them.” He leaned in closer and spoke in a soft tone: “It’s almost like they’re trying to confuse me. Do you think that’s what they’re doing? Trying to confuse me? I wouldn’t put it past them, you know.”

  “I’m sure they’re not, sir. They gave you a briefing on what the symbols mean, complete with a visual key. You just have to match up the symbols to the display.”

  The president would like to, only the font used on the key was tiny, meaning he would have to squint even more. “Why don’t you just tell me what all this is about? Why does it look like we’re being invaded from Canada? And what are all the red circles? Why are there some here in Washington?”

  “Those forces coming down from the north are the different elements of the 10th Mountain Division, remember? And the red circles are sightings of Infected Persons,” Marty said. He had to force himself not to roll his eyes when the president drew in a sharp breath. “Don’t worry, sir. So far we have investigated over two hundred claims and not one outside of the Quarantine Zones has proven to be real. Usually, it’s just the homeless.”

  “Right, good, good,” the president replied with a little laugh of relief.

  Marty pushed his bland smile onto his face, before pointing at the biggest of the monitors. “Now, about the map. See those boxes with what looks like a ‘1’ on top? Each one represents a company of soldiers.”

  “There sure are a lot of them.”

  “Yes there are a lot,” Marty agreed. “But we are going to need more.”

  Now that the 10th Mountain had joined the fight, there were indeed many companies in the area of the Quarantine Zone, but that did not mean each had their full complement of soldiers. Many of the companies, especially on the southern and western borders were down to a few dozen men. Desertion accounted for most of the casualties, but a good number had been killed outright, or infected. There had been so many cases of infection that a number of battalions had created squads of executioners who walked along the lines, killing anyone suspected of having the virus, without mercy.

  “We need more soldiers…because of what’s happening in Jersey?” The president sounded like a child answering a teacher.

  “Exactly. It’s why we are calling up the Army Reserve and the National Guard.” Marty’s bland smile threatened to slip as he added: “And it’s why you authorized a limited Martial Law in the northeast.”

  Marty had no idea how Martial Law was going to be enforced. The entire state of New Jersey was a madhouse. During the last eight hours, the zombie population in Newark had exploded, boiling over into Jersey City, Union, Bayonne, Hoboken, Elizabeth, Paterson…the list went on and on, and would continue to go on and on, because no one was even attempting to stop the zombies in Jersey.

  Almost the entire population of the state—nine million people, according to the latest census—were attempting to flee along roads that had been snarled in traffic for the last twenty-four hours. The Governor of New Jersey hadn’t helped matters by assuming command of the New Jersey National Guard and demanding his forces double time it back from New York.

  With the roads clogged with abandoned vehicles, and virtually impassable, the New Jersey guard units were forced to walk. Urged on by desperate pleas, some companies completed heroic marches of forty miles in eight hours. Men and women fainted from exhaustion and others bled into their boots as they struggled to keep up.

  Under these conditions, unit integrity broke down and it was a ragged couple of thousand men who pushed over the final hills north of the city of Paterson and looked down on the pall of smoke from a thousand fires that hung over the ruin of the Garden State.

  At that point, many of the soldiers sat down and cried, refusing to go on. Others pushed forward, desperate to find their families in all the chaos.

  Officers tried to corral the soldiers to form a brigade, but they followed their own conscience. Those who stayed did so either because they were too tired to go on or too afraid. In the eyes of many, the fire and smoke and the frequent gunshots coming from Paterson were proof that the zombies were unstoppable.

  Fear was rampant among them. It was like a disease of the mind and when no one was watching, men began to slip away. A few at first, and then more and more, as a governor, who was in way over his tactical head, issued orders from Trenton that were based on hunches or hours old information.

  Sometimes he was overruled by his brigade commanders and sometimes he simply changed his mind. Exhausted men were sent here and there, sometimes backtracking minutes after arriving at their destination. Sometimes they arrived to find a town overrun by zombies and other times they found ghost towns where the air was silent and dead.

  New Jersey was a mass of confusion. There was no “line,” no “boundary of the zone” save for the borders of the state. Hundreds of people who’d been infected in Newark had fled along with everyone else. They went in all directions and now there were flareups everywhere.

  Thankfully, the Governor of Pennsylvania had defied orders from Washington. Taking a cue from Massachusetts, he had shut his borders like a steel trap and refused to allow his National Guard units out of the state. On top of that, he called on every able bodied man and woman who could shoulder a rifle to rush to the eastern border.

  His call to arms was answered with a fantastic turnout. Out of the nearly thirteen million people in the state, just over a million of them came to stand at the border. They were all needed. Two hundred miles had to be covered, which equaled to one person per linear foot of border.

  The situation was far worse in the east. Eighty percent of Connecticut had been lost to the zombies, Hartford was imploding and the 101st Airborne Division was being tested almost continuously. Sometimes the soldiers battled bands of men and women who had made the conscious decision to fight for their freedom. They chose to die in a hail of gunfire rather be torn apart by the zombies. And of course, the soldiers fought the zombies that showed up in ever increasing numbers.

  New York wasn’t in much better shape. The southern border of the Zone was being crushed under the weight of the zombies. Even with a handful of tanks and Apaches thrown into the mix, General Ed Stolberg of the 42nd Infantry Division had taken it upon himself to retreat.

  Knowing that he wo
uld be denied permission, he hadn’t even asked his boss, General Phillips. He had decided that if he was going to be fired so be it, but he wasn’t going to let his men get butchered for nothing. Because of the mayhem going on all over the northeast, he had only received a fifth of the supplies he’d been promised and now his men were running low on everything, especially bullets.

  Even with the retreat, the 42nd was pressed further and further south towards New York City, which he’d been told to hold at all costs. He would try, but he wouldn’t make promises.

  Explaining all of this to the president had Marty popping Tums every few minutes. It seemed to Marty that the “Big Man” was turning into a child as the day progressed. He had even whimpered: “Oh, God,” when one of the Pentagon flunkies stepped into the Situation Room to announce that China had unexpectedly launched three intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  General Heider had jumped up in shock at the officer’s announcement. The look of shock turned to one of utter disgust at the president’s whimper. He snarled to the flunky: “What’s their trajectory?”

  Speaking in clipped robotic tones, the officer recited: “The three missiles were launched from their fields in Xinjiang and at the moment they are heading east. By their launch signature, we know they are Dong Fengs. Each of which can carry a 2190 kilogram payload with a 3.3 megaton yield. Nominal range is 5,500 kilometers. This gives them sufficient range to strike targets as far away as Korea, Japan, and our American bases in the Pacific.”

  “They’re going to Shanghai,” Heider said, and sat back down, blowing out a long breath. “Okay, good…that’s to be expected, I guess. But they should have warned us.”

  “Good?” the president asked in sarcastic disbelief. “It’s not good that they’re using nukes. It means they’re losing and if they can’t stop the zombies, then how can we possibly do it?”