“You okay?” he asked. Before he knew it, she had buried her face in his chest. She sobbed and made blubbering noises. She clung to him and he was still trying to dislodge her when he heard his first zombie let out a long, low sound that sent a shiver right up his spine. The zombie wasn’t alone. The first hungry moan was accompanied by many more. How many, Milo had no idea, but the forest shook with the sound, and the passage of their feet was an immense crackling of leaves and snapping of twigs.
“Get off,” he said, reaching for his rifle.
She wouldn’t let go. He fired his gun right across her face. At first it was impossible to see what he was shooting at, but then the night was lit by flares which showed the forest in front of him crawling with the undead steadily coming forward.
He fired and his rifle, normally as loud as a cannon, was drowned out by the thunder of a thousand guns. A storm of lead flew, ripping into the creatures—they didn’t seem to care, they kept coming despite the horrible destruction wrought.
People began to scream. Some in terror, some trying to rally the line: “Aim for the head! We’ve got this! Stand your ground!”
The voices were drowned out when a pair of what looked like enormous grey dragons streaked overhead with a roar that swept all noise aside. A half-second after they passed, the hill just down from Milo erupted in ear-shattering explosions.
Some of the men and women cheered, others were too stunned and could only stare as the flames shot into the sky. Milo was too busy fighting to do anything else. When the dark descended upon him once again, he had to wait until the zombies closed within ten feet before he could shoot. To do otherwise meant a waste of ammo and he was running through it fast enough already.
More explosions and more flares. People were screaming and the zombies were stacked six deep in front of Milo. He and dozens of others stood on a long hill with a stack of felled trees before them slowing the zombies down. It was a good position and could have been held for some time except the zombies were massed too close and in the dark it was hard to tell friend from foe.
By accident, the next bombing run was directed on the hill itself and just as Milo stooped to reload the world around him went white and his head felt like it was turned inside out by the concussive force of the explosions.
Ginny had been huddled in a ball, and when the world erupted in flame and smoke and screams, she did the only thing she could think to do: she ran. Her flight was helter-skelter and the panic that poured off of her was a contagion that ate into the will of others. In no time, soldiers and civilians were pelting away as fast as they could.
Many of the civilians had been untried and unprepared, and their fear had ramped up beyond their control. The soldiers who ran were either like Ginny, ill-fitted for the demands of battle or they were the flip side of the coin. They were men and women who had braved the horrors of the undead for hours. They had fired and fired and fired their guns until their ears rang and their shoulders ached and their hearts trembled.
During the long night, their courage had slowly eroded and now, people were running and bombs were falling on the living and nothing seemed right. They ran, thinking that the whole line was pelting away.
Officers could not stop the retreat of so many. General Phillips’ staff received thirty calls in three minutes from up and down the line, everyone saying the same thing: The center has fallen!
Phillips didn’t need a radio to know his soldiers were in trouble. He had stepped out of his command post to watch the bombing runs and now he could see little figures sprinting across the road below him.
“Son of a bitch!” he shouted, hurling down a long dead cigar he’d been munching on. “Someone call off the Air Force! Are they fucking blind!” He went on a tirade that used up every curse word in his vocabulary.
When he paused to take a breath, a major raised a hand. “General Heider wants an update.”
Quieter, Phillips hissed: “Son of a bitch.” He took the phone and said: “This is Phillips.”
“Tell me the line is holding,” Heider answered. It almost sounded like an order to Phillips, as if he wasn’t looking for an update, but a lie.
“Can you repeat that, sir?”
Back in the Situation Room beneath the White House, where everything was in chaos and time seemed to be speeding up, Heider turned partially away from the president and repeated: “Tell me the line is holding.”
“I don’t know if I can say that in all honesty.”
Heider grinned as if he had just heard good news and then gave the president—the now wild-eyed and slightly unhinged president, a thumbs up. “Everything’s good, sir,” he said.
In his ear, Phillips said, “Things aren’t good. We just had the Air Force bomb the shit out of our own position. I have soldiers and civilians running away right now. The center of my line has just disintegrated and we don’t have a reserve force to plug the hole. I used the last of them twenty minutes ago. I don’t think we can hold…”
“Thanks for the report, Phillips,” Heider said interrupting. “Remember, hold that line at all costs, or…or, well never mind.” His voice was tweaked—the fear in it came through over the cell phone.
Phillips went suddenly cold. “Are they thinking nukes,” he asked, pitching his voice low and covering his mouth with his free hand.
The grin on Heider’s mouth broadened until he looked almost jovial. “Yes, of course. Thanks so much, ha-ha. I’ll look for another update in about thirty minutes.”
Heider hung up the phone on a stunned General Phillips. Then, like everyone else, his eyes slipped to Lieutenant Manzetti sitting in the corner. The man looked like he had taken a sweat-shower. The talk of nukes had flown around the table in the last few minutes after Anna Holloway played her final card in her bid to escape. Unexpectedly, she had ordered the pilot of the Blackhawk to set down in the middle of Baltimore—not Washington DC.
There wasn’t a drone within fifty miles and the moment the Blackhawk had landed, she and Eng had just ghosted out into the night taking their deadly vials with them.
The president lost it over this. He came unglued, shouting: “They’re out there with the virus! They’re out there! They could be anywhere. They could be making zombies left and right.” As this was patently obvious, no one said anything. This only set him off further. “Someone do something! Heider, get some of your men…no, get a lot of your men. We have to contain Baltimore before they can get out.”
The idea was absurd. “Sir, I don’t have the man power for that.”
The president’s eyes twitched suddenly as a thought struck him. “You would if we just used the nukes. Everyone knows we’re going to have to use them sooner or later.” The president said this blithely as if it had been discussed and agreed upon already.
It took the breath from Heider’s chest. When he could speak, he said: “We have to give my men a chance. Please.”
“One chance,” the president shot back. Marty tried to say something but for once, the president was his own man. “I said one chance. If the line falls once more, then…then that’s it. We drop the bombs.” Heider tried a second time to plead for his men, but the president only held up a single finger. “One chance.”
A hundred and sixty miles northeast, Phillips stood in the dark, staring down at where his men had been fighting, not just for their own lives, but for the life of the country. If nukes were dropped in thirty minutes, how many could he save?
“A mere handful. A few thousand.” He didn’t have the logistics to move any more out of harm’s way, not so quickly. “Fuck,” he whispered.
A colonel came up out of the dark to ask: “Do we fall back to the next line? I have brigade commanders looking for answers. They’re afraid of being flanked.”
“Fall back?” he asked as if the idea was new to him. “Do we have a choice?” It was a rhetorical question, one the colonel tried to answer only to be waved quiet by Phillips. “Yes. We will fall back. We need to move as fast as…” he stopped
as his ears caught the sound of a gun going full bore. He went to the lip of the hill and stared down into the dark where the flashes of a single gun could be seen.
Someone was still on the line, holding the center against all odds.
During the bombing run, Milo Kostas had been struck by a flying hunk of burning tree. The world had gone black and he had only just regained consciousness to find himself in his own special hell. Around him the forest was on fire, lighting up the bodies. There were dead bodies everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of them—at least he thought they were dead.
Some began to pick themselves up. Their moans seemed to awaken more, and soon the land before him was coming alive again. Without a thought of running away, Milo looked around for his Winchester, but it seemed to have evaporated with the explosion. He found instead Ginny’s M16.
It was a wonderful weapon, light and accurate. All alone in a scarred landscape, Milo held the center of a two-hundred mile line, firing one bullet at a time. The idea of running never entered his mind. He was there to fight. He was a son and a brother and a young uncle to a tiny baby. People depended on him to stand like a man.
Above him, higher on the hill, Phillips watched for long seconds as his flesh flared with goosebumps. “Who do we have to send down there? Do we have any medics? Clerks…anyone?”
“There’s just your staff up here,” the colonel answered. “Though, I think there’s part of a division HQ about a mile up the road. They were asking for fall back orders as well.”
How far could they go to escape nuclear weapons? Not far enough. “Tell them…” Phillips stopped in mid-sentence, thinking of General Horace Collins, who had died the night before in a vain attempt to save Connecticut. Could I do less with the entire country depending on this one fight? he asked himself.
The answer had to be no.
He turned to the colonel. “No one falls back. Tell them this is where we make our stand. We fight here and we might die here, but we don’t retreat. Make your calls and then gather everyone from the staff and order them to get down to the line as fast as possible. No exceptions.”
The colonel paled under the starlight, but ran off to do what he was told. For a few moments as the single gun kept up its lonely chatter, Phillips watched to make sure the colonel followed his orders, as he watched, he took out his cell phone and dialed Heider. “Sir, the line is going to hold. Do not send the nukes. I repeat, do not send the nukes.”
“Thank God,” Heider said, breathing out heavily into the phone. “Listen, Phillips, I’m going to need you to brief the president in person concerning the likelihood of holding…”
Phillips interrupted: “That’s going to have to wait. I don’t mean to be rude, but I have a battle to fight.” He hung up on his boss and grinned, feeling a sudden burden lifted from his soul. For too long he had kissed ass, doing whatever it took to further his career. That time was over. Now he would do whatever it took to win.
With a ringing shout, Phillips pulled the Beretta from its holster, jacked back the slide with a flourish and ran down the slope as his eighteen year old self would have.
He ran straight into battle and for the first time in many years he felt not only like a soldier, but like a warrior, and as a warrior, he would fight for his people, and he would die for them as well if that’s what it took.
The End
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading The Apocalypse Crusade, War of the Undead Day Three. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it. If so, I’d like to ask a favor: the review is the most practical and inexpensive form of advertisement an independent author has available in order to get his work known. If you could put a kind review on Amazon and your Facebook page, I would greatly appreciate it.
Peter Meredith
Now that you’re done with Crusade 3, you’re probably wondering what to read next. You could go with my Undead World novels that have, collectively over 2,000- five star reviews. A lot of people seem to like them. Or you might try my new series: The Gods of the Undead, but be forewarned: there is an obscene amount of blood spilled and skin flayed and love lost and all sorts of sadness. On the other hand there’s also heroes and heroines, bravery and sacrifice. And there’s adventure that spans the world as two people fight the undead from New York to darkest Africa.
As many stories do, it starts small with just one man.
The Edge of Hell
Gods of the Undead, A Post-Apocalyptic Epic
Prologue
Alex Wilson
Officer Alex Wilson had to pull his cruiser over. He didn’t need to, he had to. It didn’t matter that he was in the middle of a south bound lane on the FDR Drive. He had to see and he had to hear for himself what was happening.
He pulled over and cut the siren; the lights he left on, whipping around, cutting the night in blinding red and blue. At first all he heard was the insane babble of the dispatchers—in three years on the force he had never once heard fear in their voices. Normally, they spoke in lackluster tones that suggested they were bored to tears with their jobs.
Now, they were screaming into their mikes, ordering units from all over the city to converge on the bridges that spanned the East River, connecting Queens to Manhattan.
“What’s happening?” someone demanded over the radio. “Dispatch, say again, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know…I don’t know. I’m not supposed to tell, but…but they’re monsters, I think,” was the strange reply the unknown officer received.
Alex flicked off the radio and sat still with his head cocked. Even through the heavy glass, he could hear the pop, pop, pop of gunfire, only it wasn’t just: pop, pop, pop. It was a thousand pops going off all at once. Feeling a sudden churn in his guts, he climbed out of the cruiser and the sound of the battle assaulted him. He was a mile away with a wide river between him and the fire-fight and still the sound was frightfully urgent.
He didn’t rush off, however. The churning in his guts intensified, and only slowly he climbed back into the cruiser. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered and then stuck the car in gear. Gradually, he built up speed and far too soon for his liking, he was at the Queensboro Bridge and being directed to heel his cruiser in next to a row of forty others.
Even as he pulled in, another cruiser squeezed right up next to him and another pulled up next to that one. He slid out of the car feeling his stomach twist, going beyond churning; it was a curdling sensation that made him feel sick.
The officer in the next cruiser beat him out, rushing to pop his trunk. “What is it?” he asked as Alex reluctantly opened the trunk on his cruiser.
Alex couldn’t answer at first; the sound of the guns firing was now mingled with screams. So many screams. “I-I don’t know,” he said after taking a gulp of air.
“They said monsters,” another officer said, a little, fake laugh in his voice. It was a high, oddly girlish sound as if someone had a good hold of his balls and were giving them a healthy tweak.
Another officer, further down the row of cruisers was screaming: “Masks! Get your damn masks on! Come on, damn it!”
Masks meant there were germs in the air…zombie germs. The idea that just breathing could turn him into one of them was horrible and Alex dug in his trunk for his protective mask. It came in a pouch that he buckled around his waist. It took three tries to snap in place and as he struggled with the simple buckle, the sound of the firing came closer and the screams grew evermore urgent and loud. People were dying right on the bridge and yet Alex felt as though he was moving in slow motion. He couldn’t seem to get his feet moving despite then urgency in the air.
Some of the officers were pulling on their mask and others were hauling out shotguns or Colt M4s. Alex only had his 9mm Sig Sauer P226 and it felt altogether puny, certainly too puny to use against an army of undead.
He needed something bigger: a machine gun or a grenade launcher. Anything would be better than the pistol. “Hey,” he hissed to the officer who had pulled in next to
him. “You don’t happen to have a…”
Just then, someone turned him around and screamed in his face: “Get to the line! Hurry!”
Alex was pushed and shoved onto the bridge where his fellow officers were lined up. There were forty or fifty of them, all looking green, all sweating and scared. Alex was sure he looked just as terrified. His hands shook as he tried to check on his second magazine. It dropped, clinking on the cement. Frantically he scrambled for it. He was deathly afraid, but of what exactly, he didn’t know. He had no idea what they were facing and yet he was practically pissing himself.
Questions ran up and down the line: “What’s going on? What’s happening? What are they? Are they really zombies? Really?”
No one knew, but it wasn’t long before they found out.
The bridge stretched east toward Queens. Normally, a person could see across the half-mile span without a problem but just then, the far end couldn’t be seen. A swirling black cloud engulfed it. And it didn’t just hover over it, it advanced against a gentle westerly wind.
Within that unnatural black cloud were creatures masquerading as people. They shambled forward, bringing with them a horrid stench of decay. It was so bad that even the veterans of a hundred murder scenes ripped their masks out of their holders and pulled them on.
Gagging from the stench, Alex held his mask to his face, but didn’t put it on. The mask would cloud his vision and he needed to see what he was dealing with. Monsters was what the dispatcher had said. Seconds later, he saw that she had been wrong. These weren’t exactly monsters—they were zombies. They could be nothing else.
The creatures stumbling though the swirling darkness had been people at one time, only now they were the living dead. They were corpses somehow imbued with life. They limped along, dragging ropes of intestine and leaving long trails of blood and pus behind them. Their decayed and rotting flesh hung in ribbons off their bleached bones.
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 40