by Alex McHale
A tear rolled out of her good eye. The other one sat blankly, staring and lifeless. “I’m going to kill her, Nick. Soon.”
“Soon, Brit. I promise. Now let’s get out of here.”
We made our way out the door and down a long corridor. Several doors were set on each side, looking like cells, with an observation window set in each one. As we passed the first door, something crashed into it with a loud bang thump, making us jump back. I went over to the window and slid back the little door.
Inside, a zombie was backing up to rush at the door again. He was wearing shredded Army ACUs, with dried blood coating the pixelated surface. His lower jaw had been torn or cut off, and a large hole gaped where his larynx had been. Brit pushed me aside to get a look, just as it crashed into the door again.
“She cut his voice out. He was soldier. Look at his patch.” I peered in again, and saw what she was talking about. On his left sleeve was the Screaming Eagle of the 101 Airborne Division. The entire division has been wiped out to a man, after air assaulting in Washington, DC to evacuate critical government personnel. That was two years ago, in the middle of the chaos. Their Forward Arming and Refuel Point in Virginia had been overrun by panicked civilians trying to get onto the helicopters, stranding all three brigades at the barricades surrounding the Capitol. Doc had told me of being in the TOC in Manhattan, listening to the units drop off the net as they were overrun, one by one. I had heard from the other teams who scouted that area that they had come across piles of bones where they had sold their lives in a running gunfight against the millions of zombies who swarmed out of the cities on the eastern seaboard.
How Dr. Morano had gotten one of them out to the west coast, I didn’t want to know.
“Nick, we have to kill it. He was one of us, not some goddamned freakshow experiment!” She started to open the door, gripping the handle tightly. I pulled her off and further down the corridor. She struggled, and then let me pull her way.
It was the same at each of the doors we passed. The Zombie inside would charge the doorway as we went by. Each of them held a ragged, bloody, rotting form in the remains of an Army uniform, several of them with obvious wounds to their heads. Experiments.
The last door held the worst. Lying there, listlessly, was the remains of Specialist Mya, the medic who had been killed by nerve agent back at Firebase Castle in New York. Her body, which we had left on the island a few hours after she had been accidently killed, was bloated but still recognizable, pushing against the remains of her uniform. The Z which had been her crawled slowly across the floor toward the door, arms twitching and flailing as it dragged itself across the floor towards me.
“Holy fuck!” yelled Brit. This time I didn’t stop her as she flung open the cell door. The thing which had been our teammate seemed weak, not in control of itself, but its eyes still glowed that insane red. Brit walked over to it and stomped as hard as she could on the thing’s head, cracking its skull. It twitched once or twice, then lay still.
“Oh Girl, I am so sorry we left you out there in the rain. We didn’t know. We didn’t know. We thought you were dead.” Brit kneeled in front of the cooling corpse, ignoring the blood that soaked her jeans.
“She was dead.” We both started at the sound of Dr. Morano’s voice.
“All soldiers now sign a release authorizing the Army to use their bodies to best effect in order to combat the zombie plague. Don’t you know that? It’s a small clause, buried very deep in their draft papers, but oh, so useful to me.” She had a little smile on her face. Such a beautiful woman, and rotten to the core. “As a matter of fact, Ms. O’Neill, even your civilian contract with the Army has the clause. Do me a favor, please, and leave your body whole when you do get killed. Nick, please don’t shoot her in the head.”
She turned and walked out. Her bodyguards, who had been standing with guns drawn on us, followed her out and up the stairs.
When we got to the front of the building, Ahmed and Ziv were waiting, engaged in a staring match with an armed security detachment at the front doors. They waited until we had passed. Ziv made a gun out of his hand and pointed it at Dr. Morano, who had stopped behind some plexiglass security doors to watch us go, and mimed pulling the trigger. She smirked and bowed.
Chapter 24
We had to get out of town, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. We were TDY here at Fort Lewis to provide instruction to cadre but there was no way we were going to stick around in Dr. Morano’s turf. She could reach out and touch us anytime she wanted, and I didn’t know how long I could hold the team from going after her.
We pulled back in through the gate at JBLM just as my cell rang. It was the duty officer at the training unit. I pulled over and talked to him for a minute, then spoke to the team.
“Listen up, guys, I have to go to a punishment enforcement over at the Basic Training Unit. Doc, see what you can do with Brit’s eye. Ziv, you’re coming with me. None of us are going alone anywhere until we can get out of this place.”
I dropped them off at the Troop Medical Clinic, picked up my dress blues and drove over to the Basic Training Division on North Fort. I left my GSA car parked outside the Headquarters and went inside to find the duty officer who had called me.
“Nick, what is this punishment enforcement thing you speak of?”
“Well, I don’t know how they handled disciplinary action in the Serbian Army, but things are pretty strict here now.”
“In Serbian Army, sergeants would beat you if you talk back to them. We take care of trouble ourselves.”
“Yeah, well, you can do that in the US Army now, especially out in the wild. It didn’t use to be that way, before the Zombie Apocalypse. NCOs were pretty much stripped of their disciplinary power. Tell me, how did you handle sexual harassment?”
“Pah, no women in Serbian. Useless.”
“Yeah, well, don’t let Brit hear you say that.”
He considered for a minute, the muttered something under his breath that sounded like “she-devil.” I laughed and told him not to let her hear him say that, either. Then again, maybe she would take it as a compliment.
“Here on post, Universal Code of Military Justice is applied but it’s not like the old one. They changed it two years ago to allow corporal punishment. Two senior noncoms and a junior officer are allowed to decide punishment for a variety of charges if the soldier is found guilty by a majority of NCOs in his unit by secret ballot. Charges are read, evidence given, guilt decided and punishment administered the same day. The ones who decide the punishment can never be from the convicted unit. I got called in to sit on a punishment enforcement.”
“What did this soldier do?”
“Two of them. One for theft. Broke into a bunch of lockers at night, went through people’s wallets stealing new dollars. He was found guilty. Another NCO, a drill sergeant, was found guilty of aggravated sexual harassment.”
I changed into my dress blues and walked over to the table set up in the Company Orderly Room. A 2 lieutenant and a master sergeant were already sitting, going over the case notes. I introduced myself and then asked them what we had.
“OK, well, the private was found guilty of theft, breaking into soldiers’ lockers at night while he was on Firewatch. Someone caught him in the act.”
“So, no other witnesses? That’s a tough one, one person’s word against another.”
“No, we have a witness. The whole thing was caught on a monitor. That and the soldier that caught him beat the crap out of him with a garbage can when he tried to run for it. Dumbass.”
“Easy enough, then. Twenty lashes, reduction in rank, cut off of rations.” Every soldier in the military was given an extra allowance of ration cards to send home to his family. It was a way of keeping them happy, knowing they were doing something to help out their families, and provided them an extra enlistment bonus. Cutting them off would bring shame to his whole family, which was often more effective than physical punishment.
“Agreed. Now,
about the drill sergeant. This is his second time, but there was no proof the first time, or not enough, anyway. This time he was stupid enough to try his crap in front of two females. Actually put his hand on one of them, squeezed her ass. They reported him right away.”
“He’s gotta go” said the Master Sergeant.
I nodded my head. “Agreed. No room for that. We need every single gun we can get, and this tool is going to ruin unit effectiveness and cohesion.” I never understood that. You always got further with a woman by showing them respect than trying the old one out of a hundred likes it, so I’ll try grab-ass on a hundred and one women.
“OK,” said the LT. He turned to the first sergeant of the Basic Training Company, who had been standing by. “Top, have the company fall in to witness punishment.”
Outside was one of those constant drizzling rains that always seem to be happening at Ft. Lewis. The entire basic training company, some two hundred soldiers, had assembled in a box formation around a concrete pillar set in the pavement.
The first soldier was walked over to the post, had his cuffs attached to the post, and his platoon sergeant gave him a quick twenty lashes to a measured drum beat. Though we NCOs have the power once again to administer punishment, it has to be us who give it. After the tenth strike of the whip, blood started to run down the private’s back, but I’ll give him credit, the kid didn’t scream once. He would either turn into a great soldier or be out of the Army soon enough. Nobody likes a thief. He would be held back until his wounds had healed and he could be recycled into another class.
Next, the drill sergeant was brought out. He stood in front of the entire company and I walked over to him. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. No combat patch on his sleeve, no Combat Action Badge. I wondered where he had been hiding out the last two years.
“Sergeant Dwayne Owens, you have been found guilty of three counts of aggravated sexual harassment by a group of your peers, and you are a disgrace to the NCO Corps. Your punishment is to be the following.” At this, I reached out and removed his drill sergeant hat from his head and handed it to the Master Sergeant who stood next to me.
“You are hereby discharged from the Military Forces of the United States of America. Your service record will be sealed, and you will be barred from serving in any of said military forces. These soldiers are entrusted to your care and development, and you have betrayed that trust. In addition, your file will be marked for any future employer as discharged for sexual offense.”
As I spoke, I used my knife to cut off his rank and unit patches and let them fall to the floor.
“Mister Owens, you have one hour to leave this military installation. You will be provided transportation back to your home of record.”
I hated it, but it had to be done. It was one thing to mutually joke and smoke with female soldiers of equal rank out in the field. It was a whole other thing to be in a basic training environment and use your authority to take advantage of impressionable young women who were scared of that authority.
The first sergeant uncuffed him, and he walked away, head hanging down, in the direction of the Headquarters Building. The entire company watched him go. Not a few of the female soldiers had a smile on their faces.
While I was on my way back to the billets to meet up with the rest of the team and plan our way out of JBLM and Dr. Morano’s reach, my phone rang again. It was Doc.
“Listen up, Nick. We got orders for the entire team to fly out to Denver and join in the big push that III Corps has on, trying to take back the Denver metro area.”
“What the hell, that’s a straight-up Mech Infantry push! What use would we be there?” Then I thought back to what Morano said to us in the lab. Have a nice vacation in Denver, she had said.
“I know, but it does get us out of here. Either way, orders are orders.”
Chapter 25
We rode a troop train out of Seattle, headed for the front lines outside of Denver. Like all soldiers, we slept, played cards, got bored. I used the time to get to know our newest guy, Specialist Esposito.
“Not what you were expecting, was it? Heading to the front lines.”
“I’m getting out of the office, that’s all I give a crap about. I was turning into a zombie myself, doing admin shit all day. I spent half the time trying to get my stupid CAC reader to work. I mean, really, who is going to try to hack our networks now?”
“Nobody, but you know how the Army is. Once something is in place, it will never be taken away, only added to.” He seemed like a decent guy, and it would help that he had combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. Different fight, but experience was experience. We did the usual “where were you in `09, what FOB were you at, did you know so-and-so.” It was military guys’ way of sniffing each other’s butts, like two strange dogs getting to know each other.
As the train clattered over the mountains of Idaho and Wyoming, I thought about our problem with Dr. Morano. One way or another, I was glad to be out of her immediate reach. Payback would have to come, and it would be a showdown to the end. You can’t leave enemies like that, ones who were willing to kill without conscience, alive and able to strike at you. We would have to be very careful, though. This wasn’t some jumped-up jackass of an officer who had it coming and nobody around him cared less. I had read about some of her research and she was a big shot, a favorite of the powers that be. The fact we were on our way to the front lines was proof enough of that.
We rolled out onto the northern plains, sweltering in midsummer heat. Above us, regular flights of Kiowa Scout helicopters started to appear. One of the few things getting priority of manufacture was the small, lightweight observation copters. They could cover a lot of ground and ran regular patrols all over the countryside. Any figure or groups of figures that didn’t respond to interrogation with some sort of signal showing they were human was immediately engaged, either through a lightweight chaingun mounted on the nose, or rifle fire from the observer/sniper who rode alongside. They would land several hundred meters from the Z and hop out to take the headshot. Shooting accurately from a hovering helo was something you did in movies, not in real life. If it was a group, and they were advancing quickly, the team would do what was called a “skip and shoot;” landing, shooting, pulling back several hundred meters, then landing again. If things got out of hand, quick reaction rifle squads were scattered every seventy five miles or so, in remains of large towns, and could be there within a half an hour by Blackhawk or two hours by truck. A real horde of several hundred, or even more, would be led by the scout helo flashing lights and playing sound to attract them to a designated “kill zone” where troops had established permanent fighting positions and would be waiting for them. The kill zones were set up every hundred miles or so, depending on terrain features, and had preregistered artillery, deep ditches and palisades. They had been used a lot in the first year of the war to stabilize the Dakotas and cut down on the number of hordes wandering about. Now we held the northern Great Plains along the I-90 corridor. We had patrols as far south as Kansas and a mechanized infantry division sitting outside of Omaha shooting anything that stumbled out of that ruin. We also had four divisions getting ready for the push into Denver, one mechanized and three light infantry. In California, we were massing wheeled infantry in the mountains, getting ready to try and take back the Imperial Valley with all of its agricultural potential, and the Navy wanted San Francisco Harbor back. They were tired of being holed up in San Diego, and the Marines were itching to get into the fight, training constantly at their bases in Hawaii. The brief and bloody fight against the secessionists in Utah had devolved down to mopping up in the mountains, and the sensible people in Salt Lake City had thrown out the “Emergency Council of Elders” after they had vowed to fight the government “to the last saint.”
In the small picture, our picture, Third Corps (III Corps) had established a cordon around the greater Denver Metropolitan area and was preparing to take the city. The government needed the rail lines a
nd transportation infrastructure as a forward base for taking back the rest of the country, and there was talk of moving the capitol there after everything was cleaned out. For now, though, there were estimated to be close to a million undead gathered there. Our job was to first scout the airport.
“Why don’t we just drop a neutron bomb on it?” asked Red, who had been looking over my shoulder as I read the intel updates. “You know, just fry their asses, and leave the buildings standing and all that.”
“Tried it already, in Los Angeles. Didn’t work. Just left a bunch of pissed-off, radioactive zombies.”
“Damn. Well, what about, you know, carpet bombing it or something? Blow the hell out of them, leave a lot less for the Army to clean up. I know you won’t kill a lot of them that way, but it will sure mess up a bunch.”
“Won’t leave the buildings intact, and we need to take Denver so it can be reoccupied. The Air Force carpet bombed … where the hell was that?”
“Reno” chimed in Doc, who was pretending to sleep in the seat across from me.
“Yeah, Reno, Nevada. Pounded the whole place flat. Carpet bombs, fuel air explosives, Napalm, everything. All that, a small city, and it STILL took three weeks for a full division of troops to declare the place a hundred percent secure.”
“So, let me get this straight. We’re still scouts, right?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“And we’re going to scout an area we can’t bomb and has a million Zs in it?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Damn, White Man, I should have stayed on the reservation.”
I laughed. “Red, don’t worry, this will be a piece of cake compared to New York.”
Just then, the train hit a rough patch in the rails and my coffee jumped in my hand, spilling the hot liquid on my uniform. Damn, what a way to start.