Gnash

by Brian Parker

  “Nothing happened on the trip over.”

  “Something could’ve happened though. Look, give me the money you owe me or I’ll call the cops.”

  “We both know the cops are a lot busier than to respond to a call from a cabbie about his fare not paying the amount you’re charging. Here, take your damned money,” Grayson said throwing down three crisp one hundred dollar bills onto the lid of the center console between the two front seats.

  “Nice doin’ business with you pal,” the taxi driver yelled out the open window as Grayson got out.

  He walked into the lobby and quickly established that his luggage was still in his room and he was still being charged to his credit card since he never checked out and all of his things were still there. The manager told him that people came in all the time and rented rooms without the staff ever seeing them for weeks at a time, so it wasn’t exactly unusual for him to have gone missing for a week. Grayson was able to get the manager to refund a couple of the days and he assured him that he’d be checking out first thing in the morning as soon as he could get transportation lined up. Since the phone lines were down, the manager wrote him an old-fashioned carbon copy receipt and promised that once the credit card machine was back on line, he’d reverse any charges that Grayson hadn’t agreed to.

  Grayson walked back to his room and opened the door. He’d been beaten up, hospitalized, basically robbed by a cabbie and now overcharged for a crappy motel room. He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. First thing tomorrow he would walk down to the car rental office and explain to them that he couldn’t change the tire because of his broken arm and inform them of the vehicle’s location. Then, he’d rent another car and get the fuck out of Lawton, Oklahoma.

  ***

  23 April, 0457 hrs local

  The Pentagon

  Arlington, Virginia

  “They’re coming again, goddammit!” the Delta[10] sergeant yelled to his squad. The NCOIC[11] keyed his throat mike, “Jeff, it’s Hank, you’re free to engage.” The sniper gave a thumbs up and started picking off targets.

  The targets, once employees that worked at the Pentagon, shuffled forward at somewhere between a trot and a jog. Some of them had limbs missing, some had clothes, some didn’t. Most of them carried some type of club weapon. The members of the Army’s highly trained special operations unit had seen everything possible used as a weapon by these freaks including chair legs, construction hammers, broomsticks, even human arms.

  They were incredibly strong and each attack got a little more complex, almost as if they were learning and adjusting their tactics. The last attack, a little over an hour ago, had even been supported by rudimentary indirect fire. The freaks threw computers and telephones from the fifth floor towards their perimeter but since the courtyard was roughly 5 acres of land the larger items hadn’t made it anywhere near their positions. The snipers had been so distracted trying to shoot those freaks that the ones attacking on the ground were able to get extremely close and almost broke through the perimeter of concertina wire and courtyard trees that they’d blown with det cord[12], something they hadn’t been able to do since the first night when the teams were just learning how to fight them. It had taken most of that night to learn that the only thing that put them down for good was a shot directly in the brain, not a glancing blow to the head or face. Decapitation didn’t even work, it severed the head and killed the body, but the jaws continued to clamp down on anything that came near them.

  The combined Delta and SEAL teams had been fighting non-stop every night for five days now. It seemed like the freaks had an inexhaustible supply of personnel. Hundreds were killed in each attack and the bodies were piled up several feet deep in places. They’d been briefed that there could potentially be as many as 27,000 of them if all of the people working in the Pentagon on the day of the attack had been turned. Every night they ran dangerously low on ammo but their resupply came just on time to ensure they were prepared for the next night’s attacks.

  The teams had sent men into the building every day to try to find where they were coming from, but hadn’t been able to find where the freaks went. The initial sweep of the building on the first day of contact with them had been conducted by the chemical team that was still on site and being used as daytime security while the special ops teams rested. According to Sergeant Owens, the HAZMAT team’s highest ranking person since their officer had become infected, they hadn’t found more than a handful of bodies anywhere except in the lobby. Besides the freaks themselves, it was the strangest thing Hank had ever seen. They simply disappeared without a trace. As far as he knew, they’d searched every corridor and room. The obvious answer was that they were hiding in the crawl space, but the areas they’d been able to search hadn’t revealed anything there either.

  One way or another, they’d find out tonight where they were going. The tracking rounds that the team requested had finally been brought in on the resupply helo. They were one of the latest toys that Delta had. Tiny GPS transmitters were incorporated into a 7.62 mm round fired from the SCAR[13] rifle that the teams used. The rounds are ballistically similar to regular ball ammunition, but when it impacts with the target, the tracker only imbeds a few centimeters into the flesh and begins transmitting its location. They had different variations of the round that enabled the tracker to stick to harder targets, like vehicles, as well but they were going to use the ones approved for use against living targets. After they stuck a few of the freaks with trackers, they’d follow them to their hideout and blow them all up with C-4.

  Hank look down the close combat optics attached to the rail system on his rifle and aligned the dot with the rear crosshairs. He took a quick breath, paused, squeezed the trigger and watched the back of his target’s head explode. He rapidly picked another target in his sector and repeated the process. His teammates to either side of him did the same and he could hear the SEALs on the other side of the courtyard command post doing the same thing. As fast as they came, the freaks were dropping, mostly headless.

  The typical assault lasted about five or ten minutes and there was almost a military precision to the way the freaks were attacking. Doctor Collins, the scientist in charge here on the ground, believed that somehow the freaks, he called them automatons, retained use of their brains and that was why their attacks continued to become more complex as they learned. He hypothesized that their brains were basically wiped of memories when they changed and now they were building new ones. Hank had seen evidence recently that they were communicating with gestures and grunts and the scientist said that in and of itself illustrated that they were not zombies as some had originally thought. True, they were borderline dead in the traditional sense, but they were not mindless.

  Doctor Collins continued to experiment around the clock on the ones they’d captured and on the men that had turned after being bitten by a zombie. Some of those men had been Hank’s friends on the teams, but there was nothing left of the person they used to be. They didn’t show any level of response to anything the non-infected humans did to them. Even when Collins had tried to put them to sleep with different types of medication nothing happened, so he went ahead with experimenting on them while they were awake, if you could call them that. So far the only thing that really worked to kill them was to shoot them in the head and even then it didn’t always knock them out of the fight unless their brain was destroyed.

  The noncommissioned officer checked his watch. Six minutes so far. He keyed his mike again, “Jeff, switch to the GPS rounds. Hit those bastards throwing things from the fifth floor.”

  “Roger boss,” the sniper replied from his perch on the roof of the snack shop. He dropped the magazine and fired his remaining regular round at one of the infected. He picked up a tape-wrapped magazine from beside his coffee mug. He’d wrapped it in white sports tape to ensure he could feel the texture and didn’t accidently grab the wrong one in the dark.

  Jeff chambered a round and sighted in on one of the freaks lift
ing something over its head to throw down into the perimeter. He gently squeezed the trigger and saw the enemy stagger back and drop whatever it was holding. He saw it look left and right then bend down to pick up more crap to throw. “Hank, first target hit, didn’t even notice it has a tracker on it,” he said into his throat mike.

  “Good, use up all of ‘em in your magazine so we can be sure we get a good location on where they’re going. We’ll wipe out these fuckers once and for all.”

  After a few more minutes the attack abruptly ceased, as had all the others before it. Hank took a long swig from his canteen and then began checking his men. Everyone was fine so he walked to the other side of the snack shop. He verified with his SEAL counterpart that they were alright and that his men would be ready to assault at first light when the GPS should tell them where the freaks were going.

  ***

  Collins tapped his finger on the monitor. “You see they’ve all went down to the sub-basement and through the southwest wall. They must have concealed it somehow every time you went in there.” The computer monitor showed a 3D map of the Pentagon and a thirty or so red dots indicating a concentration of the infected men and women who’d been tagged with the GPS tracking bullets.

  “Immediately after the attack ended, they all went almost directly to here,” the computer technician tapped a finger on the monitor. “They left at almost exactly the same time and went through the wall…Wait a minute. What are they doing now? According to the schematics, they are outside any known portions of the building.”

  The scientist looked at the two commanders, “They’re trying to break out. We’ve been given the authority to stop that from happening at all costs. I need you to get in there and kill them all before this disease gets out into the general population.”

  “Got it sir, we’ve already got our plan together, we just needed a place to go,” Hank said. He turned to his men, “We leave in five minutes. Sub-Basement Two, Corridor Three. Delta will enter through the 1-2 doorway, Naval DEVGRU[14] will go through 5-6 corridor. Both teams will move to Echo ring on the first floor, then move to the sub-basement and sweep to the location. You all know what to do.”

  The two groups moved over to their areas and began re-checking their gear. They were extremely calm and collected for a group going into a situation that would likely result in several deaths due to the confined spaces, or worse, they could become infected and turn like the others in their teams that were bitten. There was no complaint, no worry, just acceptance and professionalism. They were literally the best troops that America had and they knew that they were the only ones keeping the entire country safe from this disease.

  As they moved out, the men from the hazardous material response team took up their positions on the perimeter and wished them luck. Hank and four of his men stacked up outside the breezeway leading to the doors. The breezeway was littered with glass from the shattered doors that had been repeatedly shot over the course of the week. The team moved quickly through the opening and spread out along the interior wall. The four corridors that led from this apex were covered by a Delta member and Hank squatted in the center of his group.

  When it was apparent that there weren’t any zombies around, he waved in the remainder of the team. They moved down Corridor One slowly and deliberately. They checked each room as they went by. “Trident has reached the stairwell,” the SEAL commander’s voice crackled into everyone’s earpiece. The group of Army operators made it to their assigned stairwell a few moments after the Navy group had. They cleared the stairs and began moving down. “Trident at Sub-Basement Two.”

  “Delta has reached Sub-Basement Two,” Hank radioed once they’d stepped from the stairwell to the sub-basement’s floor.

  An infrared light flashed from down the hallway indicating the SEALs’ position to Hank’s team. He flashed his IR light in response and saw the beam shoot down the corridor through his night vision goggles. The two teams closed on each other.

  “This is approximately where the GPS trackers say they disappeared through the west wall. Everyone start searching for an opening along this outer wall,” Hank said to the two groups over the throat mike and gesturing towards the wall.

  After less than two minutes of searching, one of the SEALs said he’d found the opening. Hank ran over with his demolitions sergeant. There was very little evidence that the wall panel had been taken off and then replaced. The Delta team leader gave a quick series of hand signals and the Army and Navy men stacked up on either side of the panel for rapid entry. The demolitions guys prepped several satchel charges and two members of the team quietly attached grappling hooks to the panel so they could pull it out of the way.

  Hank gave the ten second signal. The time came and they jerked the panel violently off the wall with a loud clang. The teams entered the hidden hallway ran headlong into a crowd of several hundred zombies milling around. Training took over and the men began firing into the crowds of freaks rapidly while slowly backing up towards the hole in the wall that they’d entered from. They continued firing long enough to clear a small perimeter around their immediate area and the demo team threw the satchel charges in both directions. “CLEAR!”

  The men pulled back through the opening and took cover along the wall. The engineers detonated the charges with a thunderous explosion. Dehydrated body parts and what appeared to be mud flew from the hole in the wall and hit the opposite side with a wet thud. They reentered the room and fired at the mass of creatures already beginning to re-form and move forward. The engineers repeated their mission again with the same results. In their frenzy to reach the humans, the infected Pentagon workers continued to charge into the wall of death created by the explosives and the operators’ personal weapons.

  The second set of explosions appeared to work sufficiently in creating a massive kill zone within the confined space. The Delta team entered through the open panel again prepared to defend themselves. Nothing moved with any real purpose in the new hallway. A couple of the operators fired quick shots into the heads of a few of the closer freaks that were still mobile but it was relatively quiet now.

  Hank looked to his left and saw that the passageway ended at a wall about 75 meters away. To the right the passageway stretched on farther than their lights could illuminate. “This corridor isn’t on any of the building schematics that we know about,” he said to no one in particular. “Three of you, go left, see if there’s something down that way that we can’t see. The rest of you, cover down towards the right. We’ve got them bottled up in here, they can’t get out now.”

  The three men quickly moved in the indicated direction, pausing only for the occasional head shot. The first guy reached the far wall and reached out and put his hand into a semi-soft wall made of moist dirt and rocks. “Hey Hank,” he said, “We’ve got an uncompleted tunnel on this end, looks pretty new.”

  “Alright, come on back,” Hank said over his throat mike. “The rest of you, make sure your mags are fresh, we’re working our way down this corridor to find out where the rest of them are.” He checked his small hand-held navigation system. “The GPS indicators say they are almost a mile that way,” he said while pointing down the tunnel to the right. “By the way they’re spread out, this hallway must widen out at some point.”

  The teams began the slow, methodical process of clearing the hallway. At first they didn’t encounter any live opposition other than enemies who’d been downed in their initial push into the hallway. After a few hundred meters, the tile floor gave way to a dirt floor and the cinder block walls faded away and were replaced by metal support brackets. This was some type of emergency escape tunnel or something that wasn’t completed yet, so it wouldn’t be annotated on the building’s blueprints yet, Hank thought.

  After about a quarter of a mile they began to see some of the freaks who were limping away into the darkness. Once they realized that they were illuminated by a light that hadn’t been there before, several of the retreating creatures turned and began
shuffling quickly back towards the soldiers. The combined Delta and SEAL operators dispatched this new threat before they had closed to within a hundred meters.

  This happened several more times, the soldiers caught up to a group of the enemy and a small portion would turn and fight. Hanks mind screamed to him, They’re fighting a goddamned delaying action! Out loud he said, “We’ve got to hurry up and get up to the main group, this doesn’t feel right.”

  “Nothing about this whole operation feels right, man,” Jeff, one the Delta team’s snipers, said.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Hank muttered and gestured for the teams to move forward quickly.

  They moved forward in relative silence after that. They finally came to an area where the hallway widened and the roof opened up. They spread out along either wall and shined their lights out towards the front. This new area was the rough beginning of some massive chamber that was uncompleted. There were several of the creatures along the far wall and they were quickly moving through a small circular hole in the dirt wall. One of the enemies looked at the soldiers and raised an undead arm towards them and grunted or tried to talk, they couldn’t tell which, and then went through the hole.

  “Did anyone else see that thing point at us just now?” one of the men said over the intercom.

  “We’ll figure it out later,” Hank said. “For right now, defend yourselves, there’s a whole bunch of them coming our way.”

  As he said it, hundreds of the creatures who’d abandoned their attempt to escape ran at the operators, intent on stopping their advance. They fired until all the remaining enemies were down and they could see the opening once more. After the firing stopped completely, Hank directed the teams to sweep and clear the entire cavern.

  As the men moved out, Hank examined the room. The cavern was gigantic, about thirty feet high and at least two hundred meters across. Maybe this wasn’t an escape route, he thought. Maybe it was going to be a secondary command center of some type. He’d been in a lot of the Joint Command Centers over the years and it certainly had the stadium-like look of one of the massive centers, where all the chairs faced gigantic computer screens.