But after many weeks of inactivity, a helicopter had arrived from the USS Dwight D Eisenhower with orders for all of the SEALs on base to board it for evacuation. Once aboard ship, they had been briefed in full about what was going on in America and across the world. Almost every major population center in the world had been hit with the contagion, and much of the United States’ military had been rendered combat ineffective, the exception being most of the Navy’s ships that had been at sea at the start of the pandemic. The president was apparently on board the USS Ronald Reagan in the waters off the coast of Maryland.
“Well, D, it seems like the war on terror has been supplanted by the war on horror,” said teammate Petty Officer First Class Herman “Quacker” Werksman after they had exited their first briefing on the state of the world.
Grecich shrugged nonchalantly. “Taliban ... zombies ... I dunno, it seems like either way we’ve got a lot of killing to do.”
And now Grecich found himself floating down through the Autumn air above suburban Atlanta, his mission to determine if there was anyone working on a cure for what the Navy was officially calling the Zombie Plague. It was the first time in Grecich's fourteen years in the Navy anybody had bothered to name anything what it was, and Grecich was sure it was zombies after watching the video.
His feet touched the ground and he yanked on the control cords to his chute, braking to a halt and running a few feet to slow his momentum. He unclipped from the harness and let it drop to the ground, unslung his rifle and took a knee, quickly scanning the area while the rest of his team hit the deck behind him. A few seconds later, they reported in to him over his radio headset.
"Garbo, able."
"King, able."
"Quacker, able."
All were down and in position. He keyed his mic and spoke to mission control, "Motherlode, this is Kellogg, we're a go."
"Roger, Kellogg, proceed to objective."
Grecich made the smallest hand gesture and the team dispersed into a well-rehearsed formation, moving forward as naturally as cogs in a machine. They all knew they were in a new environment, a different threat envelope, and they knew they had no idea what the threat was capable of doing. It was a known unknown. Out there, everywhere, were infected humans - zombies - that intel said would attack them on sight. There were no known tactics to counter or prepare for.
The golf course hadn't been mowed in months and was overgrown and riddled with weeds. A yellow flag rippled in the breeze a hundred yards ahead of him, an easy nine-iron shot, Grecich figured. It was surreal.
"Contact left, 100 meters," Quacker's voice sounded in his headset and Grecich turned his head until he saw a teenage girl swaying on a street corner, drained of color and her chest covered in mucus. He lifted his rifle and looked at her through the 4X Day Scope.
"Weapons tight," Grecich said, watching the girl, her mouth deformed with what looked to be sharper, longer teeth. Her hair was a tangled mess and her skin was mottled gray.
She was someone's daughter. Had been someone's daughter. He had a daughter, somewhere in North Carolina with his wife and son. He hoped, still. The girl in his sights was maybe eighteen and acted as if strung out on drugs, just standing still, swaying, her sorority sweatshirt covered in grime. Grecich made a hand gesture and the team moved off away from the girl.
They moved cautiously into the street networks of Emory University, bounding in small moves and covering each other as they progressed. The college was deserted. There were car crashes in some of the intersections, evidence of a mad dash to get out of the area that had failed, utterly. Decomposed bodies filled the quadrangle as the team moved alongside it and past the Candler Library. Grecich paused the team and surveyed the dead: they were laid out as if awaiting removal, some still covered with blankets or weighted-down plastic sheeting. Most were bones covered with remnants of dried-out flesh and tattered clothing.
"Yo, Sandman, what the fuck happened here?" whispered into his headset.
Grecich looked over at Garbo and drew a slash across his neck. Garbo shrugged and nodded. Grecich stepped toward a row of the dead and looked down at them. College kids, he guessed. Probably penned up on campus to keep them safe and in one place while somebody somewhere figured out how to get them home.
And then one of the bodies ten yards to his right sat up and turned its head at him. Grecich almost startled. Almost. He took a half step back, training his M4 rifle on the figure. It was a young man, maybe twenty, covered in sputum and devoid of color, his body dehydrated to the point it reminded Grecich of photos he'd seen of World War Two German death camp victims. It stood up.
Grecich raised his rifle and sighted down on the ... creature. Grecich wasn't nervous, he was certain every man on his team also had the shot.
"Keep your eyes out, I've got this one," Grecich whispered into his microphone.
Grecich flitted his eyes around the area quickly, checking for other suddenly re-animated corpses. Nothing. He watched the young man stagger toward him, murmuring something under his breath.
And then a crossbow bolt pierced the man's skull and the zombie collapsed to the ground. Grecich dropped to a knee and turned toward the point from where the arrow had been shot, looking for the archer.
"We've got armed locals, be aware," Grecich said into his mic.
Just then a man in gray urban camouflage cargo pants and a black T-shirt dropped out of a tree at the edge of the quad and waved at Grecich to come toward him. Grecich pointed his weapon at him, but the man only waved at him and looked around the area nervously. Grecich figured he was a twentyish Asian man, probably Japanese, armed with a crossbow and a quiver of bolts.
"Keep frosty, I've got a civvy to deal with," Grecich said, standing and making his way quickly to the archer.
"I’m guessing you're not here to save us, so what are you here for?" the man said, pulling a bolt from his quiver and readying it in his crossbow.
"Not here to save you?" Grecich kept his rifle at the ready, but pointed downward. "Why do you say that?"
“You’re the third team of military I’ve seen come in and try to get to the CDC, and not one of them has tried to help any of us,” the man said. “So, you’re probably just another team trying to get something from inside the building.”
Grecich was irritated that he hadn’t been briefed about previous attempts, although it was possible command was unaware of what the people stateside had been doing while they had been at sea.
“Well, I’m not here to rescue you,” Grecich said, “you’re right about that. What happened to the other two teams you saw?”
The man shrugged. “No idea. But if they sent you guys here, they must’ve been killed by zombies before they got what they were looking for.”
Or after, Grecich thought, which pissed him off. Whatever intel he was supposed to get could now be anywhere.
“What the hell was that about?” Grecich said, nodding at the body with the quiver in its head.
"Saving you," the man said. "Wasn't sure if you guys knew what was out here and what to do about it."
Grecich glanced at his rifle.
"Not a good idea, man, gunshots are like dinner bells for zombies,” the man said, and stuck out his hand, “I’m Hideo Watanabe.”
Grecich looked at the hand for a second and back up at Hideo.
“You can call me ‘Sandman’,” Grecich said.
Hideo let out a short laugh. “Hey, just like-“
“Yeah, just like it,” Grecich said. “So, what can you tell me about these zombies?”
Hideo looked at the mass of corpses. “The fuckin’ zombies pull that one all the time. They put themselves somewhere where there's lots of real dead people hoping you won't notice, and then they get you when you're not paying attention. I was afraid you were going to shoot it, so you gave me no choice. I still gotta live here, so dealing with a couple of hundred extra undead in the area would’ve made that kinda difficult.
“And for whatever reason, the undead
seem to know there’s something important around here, so they haven’t gone and joined the super-group that’s downtown.”
Grecich nodded.
"We get lots of people coming in looking for the CDC," Hideo said. "They mostly get eaten by the zombies."
"Really? What's lots of people?"
Hideo shrugged. "Hard to say. I've seen a couple of dozen people in different-sized groups come in over the last few months. I guess they figure there must be someone working on a cure in there, but nobody can get in and nobody ever comes out."
It took some effort for Grecich to keep his composure to ask the next question. "What's the zombie situation like between here and there?"
Hideo shrugged. "There's thousands of them spread out across campus and in the nearby neighborhoods. Lots of 'em act dead like this dude was, but there's groups of twenty-to-a-hundred of them in pockets. You gotta be careful, the slow ones are real quiet and can sneak up on you. But the fast ones can come at you at a pretty good clip and get you before you know it if you don't have somewhere to get to pretty quickly. And you gotta pay attention to what they’re doing, because sometimes the slow walkers are trying to distract you from the fast ones, and sometimes it’s the other-way-around. You’ll figure it out after you’ve seen it a couple of times."
Grecich regarded Hideo for a moment and was impressed by the young man’s ability to suss out what appeared to be zombie tactics, such as they might be. "Anything else I should know?"
“You know you have to shoot them in the head, right? That’s the only thing that kills them,” Hideo asked.
Grecich nodded and patted Hideo on the shoulder. "Thanks for the help. Now, you get to wherever's safe and leave the rest to us."
Hideo's face clouded over. "You don't want my help?"
Grecich smiled in the most practiced, friendly way he knew. "You've already given it, Hideo. But we need to be just us."
Grecich moved away from Hideo and called his team in with a hand gesture.
"What's up?" Quacker asked.
Grecich told them what Hideo had told him, and they screwed suppressors onto their weapons. Grecich wondered how loud the sound had to be to attract attention and hoped he wouldn’t find out.
They moved slowly through the campus of Emory University, silent as ghosts, steering around the pockets of undead. The undead were everywhere, swaying in intersections or standing near the entrances to buildings. The team passed Sorority Village and crossed over Facilities Management Drive and halted in a copse of trees, each man assuming a well-rehearsed position. Grecich stared across the railroad tracks at an abandoned protective cordon set up by the Army. Up and down the railroad tracks were thousands of bodies reduced mostly to bone and dried flesh.
Grecich whispered into his mic, reminding the team about zombies hiding among the real dead, and sent Garbo and Quacker out to examine the checkpoint on the other side of the railway. Ten minutes later, the team was outside the headquarters for the Centers for Disease Control, a carpet of bodies spread across the streets and a nearby parking lot, evidence of a massive firefight at some point months ago.
A roll-down protective metal screen over the front doors had been exploded and peeled open. Grecich sagged inside: someone had already gotten in. He motioned to his team to enter the building, and Garbo and Quacker made their way quickly to the breach point, paused at the opening, and then disappeared inside.
Grecich turned to King. “Let’s go.”
Inside, Grecich turned on his night vision goggles and led the team into the lobby of the deserted building: a half-dozen bodies moldered on the floor, dead for maybe a week or two. Nearby, two more bodies with headshots lay in heaps, the corpses desiccated, the flesh flaking off their faces. Whoever had blown their way in here hadn’t made it any further than the lobby. The SEALs cleared the first floor room-by-room and then made their way back to the lobby. Grecich flipped his NVG goggles up and looked at his teammates in the half-light gloom, ignoring the bodies on the floor. He knew they were dead.
"Alright, King and I will head downstairs and clear each floor, you two go up and do the same. There's not going to be any people in here, but there might be an infected, so don't get complacent. Report in every ten minutes with a location update and scoop up anything and everything the higher-ups might think is useful intel," Grecich said. “We don’t want to miss something and have command send another team into this place.”
Going down, Grecich could tell the building had been abandoned, not evacuated. Files, paperwork, everything was still in place. Work stations were at rest, still with work to be done. The labs they checked were undamaged. Nobody had run rampant through them, or looted them. They were just ... empty. Whatever work had been done here had just ended.
"Sandman, I think you better check this," King said.
King was standing by a door in a hallway with rooms for patients. Or cells for subjects. Grecich couldn't know which.
"What is it?"
"There's a person in this room," King said. "Or a something."
Grecich walked over and looked through the window, his NVGs showing him a gaunt man standing in the far corner of the room, facing away from the door.
Grecich flipped up his goggles and toggled on a flashlight. The person in the room reacted to the light and turned and moved toward them, bouncing off the furniture on the way to the door. The infected man pressed his face against the reinforced glass and snarled. King gave Grecich a confused look about the person on the other side of the door. Grecich shrugged, looked around, and found the medical folder in the sleeve next to the door. He pulled it out and read the cover page.
PATIENT: HRISTO GRUEV
And beneath that: Preserve Patient At All Costs
Grecich shined the light in through the window. An emaciated man covered in blood and mucus swayed drunkenly, trying to maintain his balance, his skin taut and deathly gray, flaking in points where it bent around bone. Grecich read the cover page inside the folder and shook his head.
"Holy shit," Grecich said softly.
"What?" King asked.
Grecich laughed. It was a short, bitter laugh of disbelief. "The fucking government actually had the guy who started this whole plague in custody before this all started ... and it all started anyway."
"That guy?" King said, shining his own flashlight through the window of the door onto Gruev's face. He turned the beam through the room and saw that it had been totally upended, that nobody lived in the room in any normal sense. "Should we put him down?"
Grecich closed the folder and looked through the window. "No. Somebody somewhere probably needs him alive for tests or something. There has to be somebody on this planet working on curing this."
"Yeah, well, this was the place for that," King said. "And there's nobody doing anything here. Or in Europe or Asia, so far as we know."
"Yeah: so far as we know. And we already know nobody higher up really knows anything concrete, which is why we're here in the first place."
"So, what's the call?"
Grecich shrugged. "We take this folder, mark this location, and set up a passive defense line inside the hole in the exterior wall upstairs, marked so nobody gets curious and anybody who does gets dead. Someone up the chain gets to figure this problem out."
Just then there was a bang against the door. The two turned and shined their flashlights through the window and saw Gruev shoving his face against the door, a thin line of blood-tinged mucus dribbling out the right corner of his mouth. Gruev banged into the door again.
King smirked. "I think he wants a piece of us."
Topside, Grecich was glad to be in the sun. Dark didn't frighten or unnerve him. He spent so much of his professional life operating in it that it was always a welcome relief to be able to operate in the light of day. It was, almost, unnatural to be working in broad daylight and out in the open. Grecich updated Motherlode with the information he had gained and was told to move to the extraction point.
"Contact! Thi
rty-plus zulus on our right, 100 meters and moving toward us," Quacker said.
They all looked at the same time while also moving into new positions, each man finding a defensive location. Where had the zulus come from? How did they know Grecich and his team were there? He lifted his rifle and looked through the scope, moving it from zombie to zombie, barely pausing to notice the undead faces of the infected. He had long ago learned to turn off any feelings for the targets in his sight, he was just trying to see if he could sense something of the group dynamic, get a feeling for what three-dozen undead might be up to.
"Weapons free, but only shoot if you need to. We're moving to the extraction point, bounding overwatch," Grecich said. "I don't want to get bogged down plunking infecteds and wasting rounds we might need later.
"Quacker, King, move!"
Grecich lifted the rifle back up and looked through the scope again and wondered how zombies had managed to take over the world. And not just any world, but the modern world. Ethiopia, North Korea, anyplace in Central America, sure, zombies could take those places over with ease. But America? Europe? Places with advanced medical systems, omnipresent police forces and first-rate militaries? Afghanistan hadn’t had any zombies when he’d left it.
One of the zombies moved out from the group and turned its attention toward him and Garbo, its head lolling as if it were suddenly thinking while scanning them, figuring out something. Grecich looked through the scope and squeezed the trigger on his M-4. The head of the fortyish man dressed in pajamas spouted blood, his body collapsed in a heap just like any jihadi he'd taken down. Everything dies, even the dead.
"Garbo, let's move!"
They made the dash past Quacker and King and took up positions. Grecich scanned the area around them, waiting for the other two to bound past. He looked back at the pack of zombies following them and noticed they'd changed from a mob to a skirmish line, ragged and barely formed. He lifted his rifle and looked through the sight, panning it up and down the new formation.
"Sandman! We got two fast-movers running at us from two-o'clock," Garbo said loudly.
Grecich turned and took his eye out of the scope, finding the two skip-hopping undead coming at them from an oblique angle from the group. Weird. "Take 'em down, Garbo."
Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse Page 14