by P. J. Kelley
David said nothing as Al walked away. Impassively smoking a cigarette, he was doing his best Hector impersonation. Unfortunately, since nobody here had ever met Hector, it was a wasted effort.
The last of the gear was getting hauled up. Al was grateful now that the rest had stayed and were so willing to help. The soldiers would be able to focus on fighting as a lot of necessary odd jobs were performed by The Celtics and their friends.
The Captain stepped up for some final instructions. “The Zombies should be appearing over the eastern horizon within ten minutes. Everybody finish up, and chop that stairwell down that leads to the roof. They will eventually get inside the truck stop, but if the stairs are gone they might not be able to make it to the roof for a long time, if ever,” barked The Captain. The National Guard didn’t need or want a speech-they knew what was at stake. The plan was better than any of them could have come up with on short notice, and The Captain’s commands of tactics were already held in high regard by these men and women. It was he who had implemented the roving jeep idea that had stopped the first wave. Also, they were extremely grateful that most of the civilians were gone. All of them had either seen the aftermath or actual events involving Zombies and the unprepared, and they had no wish to see it again. Al’s idea had proven to be a strong morale builder.
“Let them come to us,” cried The Captain, when the hills began to seem to shimmer and move from all of the Zombies advancing towards them. The main contingent was walking up Highway 80, though a mass had already veered off towards the truck stop. The mortar squad starting firing, aiming so their shells would blast right in front of the pack moving down I-80 West. All fire would be concentrated on the lead Zombies so the whole horde of them would shift to attack the truck stop.
Al and David could see each other behind their makeshift chain link barricades, and when Al started his bulldozer, David followed suit. They represented an integral part of this operation, since the truck stop roof simply wasn’t high enough to prevent Zombies from stacking up and providing a rampart of dead bodies for the rest to climb up on. The 50 caliber guns mounted on the roof would prevent most of the bodies from getting closer than fifty yards, but even the few who made it through would start to accumulate. The Captain had shown Al some satellite footage of the approaching mass, and it had scared the hell out of him. The actual fighting was not particularly terrifying though. David had a good attitude for these proceedings, good in the sense that the true warrior must see himself as already dead.
Weirdly, this did begin to resemble a construction job, a project. The Celtics assigned themselves to keeping as many Zombies as possible off the bulldozers, since in sufficient numbers they were extremely strong and capable of toppling a bulldozer, especially a bulldozer balancing its way through drifts of bodies. Al also had a Colt 45 pistol, which he could use as needed. David had one as well, though Al didn’t even know if he had ever shot a gun before. Jerry and Dan were also providing some cover fire for the big bulldozers. The Captain had a good logistical awareness, and he had already seen how effective the bulldozers could be, so he did not begrudge the firepower. The Celtics and their friends had actually given the Guard another major morale boost-not being abandoned for dead by these survival minded strangers gave them a sort of secret hope, and The Captain sensed this. He knew their best chance for success was to work slowly and methodically, and that any kind of despair or panic would result in failure of their primary mission. What complicated matters was survival alone would not constitute victory, and death would not constitute defeat, if they were able to destroy enough of these things so the rest could be stopped at The Water Gap.
So the battle commenced, and while it seemed one sided, like a slaughter, every one there knew the second the tide turned the Zombies would be merciless and terrible. The mortars exploded rhythmically in front of the advancing horde along the highway, and this diverted most towards the truck stop, while the remainder was considerably slowed down. Sniper fire also focused on the westward leaders, punishing those members who were not already being drawn inexorably to the tiny truck stop. Within 50 yards of the building, Zombie bodies began to create a wall around the northern, southern, and eastern sides of the complex. The 50’s would have been enough, but they required reloading and cooling off eventually. The guns were mounted two to each side but the westward, which was deemed to require only one, but eventually the plan to keep one running while the other kept firing would falter, as the cycle went out of synch. This was when The Celtics would run to the side of the wall that was thus rendered vulnerable, and supplement with small arms, assault weapons, or shotguns. Jen and Jorge were quickly becoming experts at reloading, and when a Guard’s rifle jammed or one needed a break, they had begun to step into the breach as well, learning marksmanship as they went. Then, Al and David would rumble in, pushing the bodies away from the wall, creating piles within the natural containment barrier being formed by the 50 caliber guns.
“I don’t want to risk it yet, because there’s no need, but at some point we could start setting the piles on fire,” The Captain yelled into his Walkie Talkie. Al agreed, knowing what he meant. The dozers had a lot of fuel still in them, so any fires might spread to the bulldozers themselves. It was pointless to risk that until it was a last resort. The current system seemed to be working.
Indeed, the system was working well, and they could easily have handled another 50,000 Zombies with these methods, but the problem was simply the sheer numbers of them. The South American Fire Ant analogy came to mind again-if the Zombie attack had been sped up in time release photography, it would have looked like ocean waves attacking a sandcastle.
Surprisingly, helicopter deliveries of ammunition and supplies started coming in with increasing regularity. The Captain smiled. About ten miles away someone was watching them from the high mountains of The Delaware Water Gap, and they must have decided to get behind this operation. The hammer had been delayed, and the people in charge there must have figured out why.
With steady ammunition, hot coffee, and some extremely motivated assistance, this looked like a success already, even though it was still desperate. They were buying time, and not looking ahead to when their own time ran out.
The day wore on. Al and David had full tanks again, but their spare cans of diesel fuel were empty. They had about four hours left, but the Zombies did not show signs of abating. A few Marine helicopters appeared, and rained down 50 caliber fire on the fresh waves approaching the truck stop, but they hardly seemed to make a dent, and had to leave after an hour or so as their ammunition was depleted. Still, it was heartening to know that the small National Guard unit had some allies, and there was a noticeable decrease in the speed of the approaching Zombies, as they now had to traverse through piles of strewn bodies to get closer to the truck stop perimeter.
Al was already planning their escape from the bulldozers. He figured that once their fuel ran out, the flamethrowers could be brought into play, and they could flee to the truck stop walls through a shield of flames and covering fire. If the bodies stacked up as Al feared they would without the bulldozers to push them from the wall, Al figured the flamethrowers could also eliminate this threat as well. He wanted to put this off as long as possible, since although the truck stop was made of cinder blocks, there were many flammable components to the building, and he feared seeing the Zombies attacking using themselves as mobile torches, as he had witnessed several times in Afghanistan.
Over the hours, the novelty of fear wore off, and was replaced by the bone chilling tedium of slaughtering those which had been human but had somehow fallen from grace. Keisha and Dante sat on a couple of crates of bullets and surveyed the gothic splendor of the Zombie Army marching over the fallen.
“This is some off the hook surrealistic shit,” Dante reflected. “I’m looking back on all the times I ever sat around feeling sorry for myself, or getting obsessed over some triviality, and I can’t help but kind of loathe that person. I wish I never had
to see this, but I can’t help thinking there might be some good in all of it, at least for me.”
Keisha was smoking one of Al’s Luckys, and looking at the smoke as if grateful for any kind of obstructive haze. “I know what you mean, in the sense that this puts things into a larger perspective, if that is what you mean, but I’m not feeling it. This isn’t real to me, though I know it’s real, but it’s so crazy that I can’t make any kind of sane comparison to my previous life.”
“Maybe you just haven’t lived long enough,” chuckled Dante.
The two watched the pair of bulldozers circling. Over the hours, David had become more proficient, but Al was still the better driver. They were the only immediate distraction from the monotony. After finishing her smoke and taking a swig of hot coffee, Keisha picked a shotgun she had grown fond of and started taking pot shots at the Zombies lumbering near the bulldozers. She was getting better, and she had been halfway decent from the beginning. One commodity that wasn’t running low was 12 gauge shells, thanks to the helicopter deliveries. There were crates of them stacked in a corner, hulking ominously, as if their very presence was a prediction that in the end, it would all come down to shotguns in a roof fight.
“Look at these two. I have to hand it to David, he pictured what was going to happen pretty well. We would have been overrun by now if it wasn’t for them, I think, or at least we’d be watching bodies starting to stack up closer and closer.” Dante looked worried. “They have to be running low on fuel by now, and once they are out, it’s only a matter of time.”
“We could lower them some cans of diesel with a rope, and then just have everybody rain their fire all around the bulldozers so they could open the chain link long enough to take the cans in?” Keisha suggested.
“That’s actually a really good idea, but they have to be getting tired as well. I mean, I’m up. All I’m doing is walking around doing some odd jobs, loading guns, making coffee, doing some shooting when somebody needs a breather, but they are out there, man. They could get toppled if they stop, and these things are just a few feet from them, trying to get in. They are only safe as they long as their cab doesn’t get compromised. They have to be getting exhausted,” replied Dante. “I heard The Captain talking, and he says the best thing would be to bring them in about an hour before it starts getting dark, and then just fight all night and then get choppered out first thing in the morning. He’s been talking to the PA National Guard, and they say they are just about set up, so they won’t need us to take the heat off anymore. There’s just too many of these things for us to handle anyway. At some point, we’ll start being in the way.”
“How so?” Keisha wondered.
“They are lining up some heavy artillery, and we will be in the line of fire. They are going to light up everything for miles.”
“Bye bye trees,” Keisha said shortly, looking around at the mountains.
“The trees provide cover for the Zombies, I think is the logic.”
“What’s David’s deal?” Keisha said suddenly, changing the topic. “He was Mr. Apathy and then he volunteered for the most dangerous job.”
“He’s got issues,” Dante said. “He tried to kill himself a couple of times. He drinks a lot, so they tried him in rehab.”
“Well, what’s his deal, I mean, why is he screwed up?” Keisha pressed.
“Why are any of us screwed up?” asked Dante philosophically.
“True, but why do you suppose David is, in particular?” Keisha persisted.
“I’m not sure, and I don’t trust rehab rumors, but he might have lost a child.”
“What do you mean “lost”?” Keisha asked.
“I mean he had a kid that died of cancer or something, and that pushed him over the edge. Listen, you didn’t hear this from me, and I’m not even sure if it’s true.”
“Who told you this?” Keisha wanted to know.
“One of the counselors told me some stuff,” Dante replied.
Keisha speechlessly watched David relentlessly pushing Zombie bodies away from the wall with the bulldozer, chain smoking and wearing an immovable frown, both of which were uncharacteristic for him. She might have formulated an extremely profound response, one that summed up and encapsulated their entire experience in one pithy slogan. She might have, except for a sudden and unexpected occurrence.
Low lying jets suddenly flew by, extremely low and fast, and in their wake huge vents of flame seemed to open up wherever they had passed. In the tumult, she heard The Captain scream, and she heard in his voice the first sign of the fear he had seemed invulnerable to.
“Those Air Force idiots! Did they just drop napalm a hundred yards away from us?” The Captain was yelling, suddenly uncertain, as what had been a relatively tidy battlefield became ignited with flame, as shrieking Zombies scuttled hither and thither in blazes, igniting everything they touched.
Al’s voice sounded over the mike. “Give us some cover fire and throw over the rope ladder, we’re coming in.” As Al ran to help drag David out of his bulldozer, everyone on the roof rained down bullets all around them. Keisha grabbed the unsecured end of the rope ladder and prepared to toss it over the second the Al and David got close enough to the wall. When they got there, Al forced David to start climbing first, while he blasted away with his Colt. Just as Al started climbing, a flaming Zombie ran through the bullets and put Al in what could be best described as a bear hug. Keisha fought nausea as the smell of burning flesh rode through the air, and as she watched Al writhing and contorting in silent agony as the napalm covered Zombie locked him in a death grip.
They had to restrain David from climbing back down to get him. There wasn’t much left to save by that point anyway.
The Air Force jets roared by in exultation, seemingly oblivious to everything but the mass of flames and burning Zombies that for them signified success.
The truck stop caught on fire, but it didn’t matter. A line of helicopters came flying in with true military precision, picking up the survivors and flying back to the base set up on the high cliffs of The Water Gap. As the last of the helicopters took off, The Captain looked back at his burning victory. No Zombie had ever set foot on the roof, or ever would, as the unused ordinance ignited in one grand explosion.
On the helicopter’s radio, he could hear fragments of chatter as The Air Force took credit for stopping the Zombies. A bulldozer stopped the Zombies, The Captain thought. A bulldozer driven by some guy named Al.
When The Captain tried to get a positive I.D. on Al so he could get him a posthumous medal, there was no record of him in any military or civilian database. The only photo they had for the Facial Recognition software was a cell phone picture Keisha had taken of him, standing by the bus and smoking a cigarette. This still should have triggered dozens of hits, or it would have for anyone who had grown up in The States, as Al almost certainly had. Even the rehab had nothing. Al seemed to have paid in cash with a fake I.D.
The Intelligence Officer searching for the information told The Captain that it happened very infrequently but some people still fell through the cracks in our society, especially with all this mayhem, people like illegal aliens and other unregistered foreign nationals. Could he have been a foreign spy, sent to undermine confidence in our government, the Intelligence Officer wondered? As for being military, had anyone seen Al as much as fire a gun?
Saying anything was possible, The Captain snapped a very formal salute and got the hell away from him before he did something that would have landed him in the stockade. He told Jerry about it, who he had known for years.
“Up to this very second, I’d been hoping Al was lying or wrong about Afghanistan. Now I know he wasn’t. We would have fragged that Intelligence punk in Nam,” was all Jerry said.
Chapter Fourteen: Zombie Therapy In The Cloisters
The next day, a young girl watched as a large helicopter appeared out of the afternoon sky. She sat calmly, as if she had been expecting someone. There was a chill in the air, and he
r coatless shoulders shivered a little as the propellers created a cold breeze.
The large helicopter descended low enough over the herbal garden to allow David egress down the rope ladder, but high enough to avoid damaging the trees in the walled compound that was open to the sky at this point. David got out, and toward the heavy glass that encased the museum proper. The inner door was unlocked. Two armed men descended with him and began sweeping the place for residual Zombies.
Marie was sitting in a courtyard, smiling at them as they came perilously close to shooting her.
“Sorry, I must have given you a start. You must have seen my helicopter parked on the roof. It’s been so quiet here I completely lost track of time.” She had apparently been staring into the pool of water next to her. “There were a couple of those things. I wasn’t able to move them after I shot them. Maybe you big strong men could chuck them over the wall or something?”
The armed men looked at her as if she were an alien goddess materialized in this silent oasis. They complied with her wishes as best they could by stacking the bodies in a small room in the basement. They were afraid to open the door of the museum, since the helicopter had already attracted dozens of Zombies who were staggering through Fort Tryon Park to see what the commotion was all about.
“Are you here for your personal goals? I don’t know if that contest is still ongoing. If it is, I have probably been disqualified by now,” Marie giggled, a sound which seemed a little demented coming from her in this place.
“The contest is over, as far as I know. They’re all dead at the rehab, I think. I am here for my personal goal, because I promised Al I would complete it,” David said, speaking casually, as if Marie’s presence and demeanor were entirely explicable to him.