Detective Darrell Earnest had seen much but nothing like that. He looked at his partner and said, “Kelvin? You ready man?” They bumped fists – they’d learned through hard experience that a good cop had to own the space and these two had worked together before. They jumped out of the car, pistols drawn, pumped up and believing themselves to be genuinely bad.
They were actually. But they learned quickly that command presence punctuated with shouted instructions failed to intimidate these creatures, these freakish men or whatever they were. Both detectives were torn to pieces by the Zs just after sternly hollering, “Get on the ground.” They never fired a shot.
Another officer was badly bitten in the shoulder and chest; he was writhing on the grass in front of Blackman’s neighbor’s house. One of the younger cops was busily freaking out behind her unmarked vehicle blubbering “No no no!” The mangled policeman had been riding shotgun with her and had seemed like a decent fellow.
Policemen are trained to view deadly force as the Last Resort. Blackman had told them to come in ‘hot’ but they just couldn’t quite bring themselves to shoot ‘suspects’ without giving them a chance to give up. They were past that now. The surviving detectives started shooting like their lives depended on it – which of course they did.
Many of their rounds missed, hitting houses with a ‘bap’ as opposed to the ‘smack’ of a round hitting flesh. The Zs were shrieking, several neighbors screaming in terror plus one fearless idiot with a cell phone was recording, and everything seemed to be happening at once.
“Horatio! Where have you been? What the hell is this? What is going on?” La Tasha Blackman threw her arms around him – forgetting she still clutched a smoking shotgun and she very nearly cracked his skull.
It took him a moment to clear his head. “Damn…” he said.
She continued, “And you Veronica Blackman! I demand to know…”
Alice interrupted, “Mrs. Blackman – no time for that. Are you loaded?” She formed the four of them into a semi-circle in front of the door. She keyed her radio, “Alice to Posse Gunfighter One units – now is the time – the cops are getting over-run – Larry get it done.” She fired a burst from her submachine gun at the zombie like creature stalking towards them, knocking it off its feet and destroying its knees. Ronnie took the head shot with her shotgun.
La Tasha followed that with a round of buckshot. “Alice – I just wanted to say I’m so very sorry about your parents…”
“Thanks Mrs. B,” as she slammed a new magazine into her MP5. Ronnie handed her mother a handful of shotgun shells and just about that moment the intensity of the shooting seemed to double or triple. Alice’s Posse had arrived on the scene.
The shooting soon died away to an occasional desultory pop as someone put yet another bullet into some Z’s shattered cranium. The surviving cops looked at the Posse in wonder – they’d just been saved by the people they had left their office this morning to arrest. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet.
The badly bitten officer chose that moment to literally spring to his feet making the most awful sounds – the bites had been so savage that they actually penetrated his ribcage to puncture his left lung. The Posse raised their guns; the cops raised theirs in response to protect their officer.
Alice hollered, “Posse - hold your fire – back away from it. They need to see this.”
His name had been Detective Matthew Bracken. Matt was long gone however and his corpse was shaking with rage as it clumsily gained control of its legs and twisted its head around towards the other officers who were shouting, “Matt, whoa, just calm down. The ambulance is on the way.” Bracken’s corpse twisted its face into something that vaguely resembled a smile but was totally devoid of humor. Then it seemed almost to chuckle, a horrible, breathy, gurgling sound that no one there would ever forget.
It was the sound of a corpse, laughing.
The re-animated cadaver soon figured out how to make its body function – at least enough for what it wanted to do next: which was to get to those warm bodies and rip them to pieces!
Blackman shouted, “Stay back – I don’t think that’s Matt anymore.” He was correct. The thing ran towards one of the automobiles parked along the curb, scuttled over it, grabbed a startled detective by her shoulders and tore out her throat with his teeth – then ripped off one of her flailing arms while swinging her body into the side of a nearby home. It held the woman’s arm up like some Viking horn of mead and let the blood drip over its face, turned and croaked triumphantly at the sky.
A hail of bullets from the surviving cops and Alice’s people took poor Bracken’s remains apart in a storm of flying bits and pieces. It was over.
Captain Blackman looked around in dismay, “I thought there were supposed to be twenty of these things – I only see what, seven bodies – how could seven freaks do all this?”
“Veronica – stay with your mom.” Blackman took charge of the various police and emergency types converging on the scene. Alice’s Posse stood discretely on the sidelines, weapons pointing towards the ground. Ambulances were arriving, sirens going strong – paramedics shocked by the shattered corpses in the street.
Blackman keyed his phone to a private number, “Steve, Director – I’ve met with Alice…we need to talk.”
#
Pete Norvel
Director Harper himself took Sgt Major Jean-Pierre “Pete” Norvel over to the Roswell Police Station HQ of E Company, 1 Battalion, Georgia State Defense Force “Whispering Death.” The first battalion of several to bear the “Whispering Death” distinction. Harper had put this battalion together originally from State Defense Force people and qualified civilians willing to go full time, heavy on veterans. Until very recently, what was now ‘E’ Company had been a vigilante gang known as Alice’s Posse.
Norvel was known to Director Harper who was always on the lookout for ‘Club’ members – men or woman who had actually seen what he had seen in Iraq. Men he could trust. Norvel was one of those men.
Norvel himself had encountered the first of the known re-animates in Iraq, when he was part of the relief column sent to check up on Colonel Stephan Harper’s overdue 11th Engineers. He what was easy to see what had delayed them. Colonel Harper had held nothing back – making sure Norvel and his team saw it all. It was grotesque – the little town – utterly trashed, everyone dead, the bodies savaged as if hurting them mattered a lot to somebody – but who the hell had slaughtered these people?
Several of the re-animates had been shot to pieces near the center of town but once put down they just looked like very badly messed up human beings. Unless they had enough face left for a good look. Those weren’t human beings.
Sgt Major Norvel had witnessed the raging things trapped in the nightmare Asylum near the center of town. Norvel didn’t need a rocket scientist to tell him what they were. He watched as Harper’s engineers blasted that cursed place to atoms, and then blasted it again, just to be sure.
Like all but the least imaginative of the soldiers, Norvel never quite looked at things the same after that. These dead things were such horrors that just knowing they actually existed could be a serious blow to mental health – anxiety treatment was prevalent among the veterans from Harper’s Battalion when they returned to Georgia despite the fact that they engaged in very little contact with insurgents.
Norvel however, disdained the chill pills and sucked it up. War was enough for him, or had been so far.
Director Harper’s smile was warmer than usual – he looked Norvel in the eye, “Pete – how have you been my friend?”
Norvel respected the eccentric Director but had lost the capacity for the satisfaction that seeing an old comrade should bring him, all he could think was, “We’re together again, and that means it’s beginning again.” Pete’s honest eyes betrayed his mouth’s attempt at good humor, “Not bad sir, always good to be back in Georgia.”
Harper knew better. Pete Norvel had seen happier days.
While de
ployed the following year after Iraq in the mountains of Afghanistan, Pete was sent home on emergency leave. His teenage daughter had been killed in a traffic accident – a stupid thing really…but there are no do overs in this miserable life. Somebody’s brakes didn’t function quite right in the rain and that was the end of his daughter’s story.
As often happens after a family tragedy like the death of a child, his marriage fell apart soon after and he was left alone. Just Pete Norvel and his war. It was enough for a while but war starts to wear on a man after a time – no matter how experienced the man. It came home when he realized that he really didn’t much care if he took a round or not. Soldiers, with their gut knowledge of battle arithmetic, know that’s when you take a step back.
He decided what he wanted really was to be home in Georgia so he retired from the regulars, and because he didn’t feel right if he didn’t wear a uniform at least some of the time, Pete joined up with the Georgia National Guard who were always looking for experienced NCOs.
With fine irony he had shortly ended up deployed again for another six months; this time with the Guard, but it wasn’t too demanding and he was now home in Georgia at last. The Guard, receiving high level orders, transferred him to the State Defense Force and Alice’s Posse in particular.
“Pete I mean no reflection on your ancestry, but you will be filling the slot of executive officer which normally requires the rank of 1st Lieutenant.” Norvel replied by looking at Harper as if he had lost his mind. “Not to worry – I can fill that slot with a solid Sgt Major – just so you know the offer is on the table.”
#
The Posse was being reorganized as a State Defense Force tactical recon company – at the Roswell police station which sort of redlined the irony meter. Sgt Major Norvel was to help with the transition from civilian militia / vigilante team to a recon company for a light infantry battalion. Captain Alice had been putting everything together and her organizational skills and capacity for work were awesome – more than anyone had any right to expect. It seemed to keep her focused – she needed activity to keep from thinking too much about her former life, her parents…
Even the new guys from the existing SDF already loved her. She didn’t consciously do anything to win this loyalty – and that may have been part of it. They knew she’d stood up and fought those things face to face and put them down– and that meant a lot.
Alice had talked Harper into allowing her to retain much of her original setup – two tactical (‘gunfighter’) platoons and an intel (‘spook’) platoon. He added a third tactical platoon of experienced SDF types and planted some observers in her intel platoon to learn all they could.
Harper planned on motorizing the company but instead of the cars and SUVs they’d been using he was thinking ‘technicals;’ pickup trucks with heavy weapons mounted in the truck bed. They’d been effective in Somalia – for the other side. He was looking for a blue print – it could be a long war.
The Director was in new territory – the thought of this mess escalating into a full scale war between the living and the savage dead could no longer be ignored – he was looking for what worked– not what had worked before. What Alice had been doing worked.
Captain Alice as she was now called by most had demonstrated that she had another useful ability: a natural talent for delivering controlled violence.
Harper, Blackman, a few aides and Pete Norvel stalked through the improvised training area where young men and women in brand new black coveralls were moving equipment stores, cleaning weapons, or working with the more experienced SDF types to synch posse radios up with military frequencies and incorporate new sets. The spookier types were working at computer consoles. It appeared that some were just getting to know each other and swapping stories.
Norvel stopped and took a hard look at that sad faced young girl he saw sitting at a desk with an MP5 submachine gun on her shoulder, concentrating on a laptop screen – For a moment it was if he saw his daughter there, so vulnerable, at risk all over again; and he was outraged. “Get her out of here! What are you people thinking of? Not again!”
Everyone got quiet.
Only Alice saw the tear on his cheek and the sadness in his eyes. She dropped her machine pistol on her desk and ran over to hug him and began to weep. "I know. They got my Daddy!" Now he was weeping too. Everyone was very quiet.
Director Harper looked over at Norvel, saying nothing, held out his hand and offered him the Whispering Death Patch - with a skull and a finger in the universal sign for 'shsssss.' Pete grabbed it and then hugged Alice...
Harper thought, “This could work...”
Vera Selvedge
Governor “Black Vera” Selvedge was smoldering inwardly as she watched everyone’s favorite National Guard Engineers complete the inelegant but practical wire barriers around the Georgia Governor’s Mansion and the outlying gardens. “Surely we could have stopped this somehow, before it got here – all that warning…”
The mansion, outbuildings, and its beautifully sculpted and carefully tiered gardens were now providing shelter for refugees from the unrest in South Atlanta as well as locals from the surrounding upscale neighborhoods.
Vera thought sadly, “No human beings are partying in Buckhead tonight.”
There was only a sliver of moon but lots of bright lights created a landscape which was almost like day, yet wasn’t, and the shadows weren’t right.
The smell of a lot of people close together mixed with the thick almost vegetative heaviness of late spring Georgia humidity. There was a metallic hint in the air of all the tools in use. The honeysuckle was sweet but cloying. She could smell the comfortable odor of food cooking in the huge pots and ovens set up in and behind the main buildings.
There was another smell as well – just a hint – a sour, fishy kind of odor. It reminded her of when a squirrel had died in her attic.
The governor watched her late son’s former National Guard comrades turning this beautiful Georgia neighborhood into a battle camp, and with all the enthusiasm she could ask for. The carefully textured lawns and gardens no longer mattered to her – that was for tomorrow – if there was to be a tomorrow.
The Engineers kept working like the well trained specialists they were, despite that it was after all, close to midnight. They would work on until it was as secure as they could make it. She watched as they started to setup the Claymore mines twenty feet in front of the fencing and elevated up high enough to tear heads off – she’d given her approval for their internal tactical deployment in the second part of 2006 after the first outbreaks were recorded in Africa and Turkey. Getting it approved in the legislature was simple enough, when the next outbreaks were documented in South America.
The Governor knew better than anyone that without the warnings the 11th Engineers had brought home from Iraq in 2003 – that Georgia would have had a very slim chance of surviving this nightmare. Tonight they were still on the job, protecting Georgians.
The other companies of the 11th Engineers were equally engaged helping to secure other refugee collection sites and the defense in Norcross under Enrique Dave Martinez – another one of Stephan Harper’s old friends.
Regardless of aesthetics, she had authorized all the barriers to danger that she could around the refugees from South Atlanta and Buckhead. Many of them were children; squalling relentlessly. All of them, adults and children alike; frightened, exhausted and stressed out – some much more than others.
GEMA Medical teams were dispensing first aide, checking for bites and dispensing chill pills by the handful. Food was being served at long tables; tents were being setup and more cots moved into the mansion. It was slowly quieting down into a sort of a controlled frenzy.
Most just didn’t understand the sheer ferocity of the Zs yet so the governor had her boys prepare for what she thought would be the worst possible case. If she had done any less… those people would have had to pay the price for it.
Somebody or a lot of somebodies wer
e coming up from the south in a hurry. Drone reports relayed from her Roswell HQ showed creatures that looked barely human - much worse than just rioters. Somehow there seemed to be more of them than there should be; way too many of them.
Already there were areas of the city of Atlanta deemed unsafe – people were moved out, often under attack by shrieking ghouls - then National Guard soldiers, police and Armed Citizens moved in. This was going on all over the place – constant sounds of shooting, the cacophony of pop pop, pop pop as dozens of Georgians spat double taps at the creatures from the locally produced Kalashnikov knock offs, GK-47s. The M-4s of the Guard and police seemed disproportionately loud – and it was much louder if you were up front with them. All the shooting made a stink and gave the air a sort of static electric feel like lightning had hit nearby.
All Things Zombie: Chronology of the Apocalypse Page 17