Without the 7.62 ammo to fuel their most effective weapons, he had to think of alternatives.
The Humvees were all parked in the middle, belt-feeding their ammo in controlled bursts onto the far end of the bridge. It was the most vulnerable point of their defense, and worth every round they'd expended there. Belatedly, he wished he'd thought of a way to blow the bridge. If the zombies got in, they'd never need the road again anyway. But blowing a bridge—even with tanks—was not an easy proposition.
Over the course of the day more and more people showed up with the spears Chloe had provided. She was earning her keep. By the time the sun was nearing the horizon, there were hundreds of people on the levee nervously holding their makeshift spears. About an equal number of people stood below the levee—nearest the town. They appeared to be the young, infirm, or groups of women managing gaggles of children. He wanted to order them away from the tip of the spear but guessed they wouldn't dare leave their loved ones on the fighting line, no matter if it made sense or not.
He caught sight of his runner, Tyler, and called him over. “You've done excellent work out there, son. But I have a new challenge for you.” He pointed down into the town. “See those cars down there? We need them up here. Pointing toward the zombies. Once it turns dark, we need to maintain the light. Get it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, son. Good luck.”
He wondered if they could survive until nightfall, but they'd have to be prepared in case they did.
2
Before the darkness fell, he OK'd the use of the remaining canister rounds from each Abrams. The shotgun blasts were by far the deadliest and most effective single rounds in his arsenal, but he had precious few of them. Even the munitions truck only carried a few extras per tank. The rest of the spare rounds, as he feared, were for use against enemy armor. He still wasn't ready to waste those.
The canisters served one important purpose, though he didn't realize it at first. Because the Bradley was in its way, Alpha-2 had to fire into the crowd at angles, instead of directly forward. This created angular ridges of broken bodies, which served as funnels to keep the dead moving along those piles, instead of straight toward the ditch.
“Alpha-1. Use canister at a 45-degree angle—about 2 o'clock—into the crowd. Alpha-2, continue to fire at your ten o' clock. Wait for zombies to fill in the gaps, then fire again. Out.”
He didn't wait for the confirmation. They each turned their turrets in the required direction, and the murdering continued.
No, they're already dead. Never forget that.
The rounds went out and knocked down bodies like bowling pins. The tungsten balls of the shotgun-like shells traveled several hundred yards into the crowd until their energy was completely absorbed by the thick number of bodies. As instructed, the tanks would wait for the zombies to walk over their fallen brothers and sisters before unloading another one on them.
It was grisly. He almost couldn't watch as heads detached and bodies evaporated. But the consolation was that it created a wedge of a sort, painted into the crowd using dead bodies as the medium. If the zombies were a waterfall, tumbling down toward the ditch, the tanks had created an inverted V shape, which would deflect the follow-on zombies away from the central bridge.
He was mesmerized by the destruction when he snapped to attention.
“John, John, John. Tsk, tsk. Who gave you permission to use my toys?”
Elsa's smooth, feminine voice cut through the harsh gargle of boring sitreps and ammunition requests. And, he admitted, it scared him.
“John? I know you're there. I can see you sitting in your little truck.”
He looked up, knowing a drone had to be flying. He spied the toothpick-thin drone with its long, narrow wings high above. He waved.
“That's right. I'm up here. Always watching. And, John, I don't like what I'm seeing.”
He keyed his mic, knowing there was no point in ignoring her.
“What can I do for you, Elsa? I'm sort of busy here.” He figured the noise of gunfire would bleed through as his supporting evidence.
“I guess I should have known you'd survive. I should have shot you myself, then thrown you in that cesspool. No matter. That can be fixed. But I can't have you messing up my plans with your traitorous rebels.”
“We aren't rebels, ma'am; we're United States Army.”
“You were Army. Just like those men and women playing soldier up in St. Louis were citizens of this great country. Now you're all rebels.”
That navy man said St. Louis was crawling with Polar Bears—a euphemism for citizens who rose up against the government as part of the Patriot Snowball movement. Though he had no love for the movement or what they stood for, he didn't feel particularly offended to now be lumped in with them. If the government was run by Elsa and her minions, he figured "rebel" described him fairly well now.
When he didn't rise to her bait, she kept at it. “You know what that means, don't you? What does the United States of America do to traitors?”
“Promotes them, apparently.”
She laughed heartily. “Oh, John. I love your spirit. That must be the zombie perfume getting to you. No, give me a second and I'll tell you...”
He watched as the Abrams' continued to hammer at the zombies. They'd done an admirable job of laying down the hate in precisely the places he envisioned when he thought up the idea of channeling the dead. It would put more zombies on each end of the ditch, but less in the exact center—and the bridge.
In a minute Elsa came back on his channel. “Military time. Hard to judge these things. You know?”
He had no idea what she was talking about.
“OK, let's try this again.” She coughed openly as if to prepare for a speech. “What does the United—”
He caught the glint of metal as it fell from the sky, but it was only a fraction of a second, and on the edge of his vision. When he turned, an explosion ripped into the wayward Bradley nearest the ditch. The explosion was so powerful, it blew down several of the civilians on that end of the levee. He felt the lurch of the earth a moment after impact.
“Dammit!” Elsa complained. “I wanted that to be timed better. Maybe the next one,” she said with a laugh.
He was on his microphone in an instant, seeing this for what it was. He spoke in a calm voice.
“This is Warfighter actual. Alpha-1 and -2, disengage. I repeat, disengage. We are under attack from—”
Would they believe him if he said Air Force? Under attack from members of the same team? Could he explain the nuance of who was firing at them?
“—unknown elements.” It was a lame declaration.
“Move into the town. How copy?”
“Oh John. I hope you notice I didn't drop it on you. Did you? I hope so. It means you aren't a threat to me. Your military hardware is the real danger to me. Just thought you ought to know that.”
There was no time for personal vendettas. He looked at his deployment. The other Bradley was far down the levee, working things on that end. If he pulled everyone back, the end would come that much sooner. If he left them to die from the air, it would also end.
He had to preserve his forces. No matter the cost. If he couldn't kill zombies from the ideal spot on the levee, he would kill them from inside the town. From another town. From wherever he found himself.
Life was long and left many opportunities for the use of precious military equipment. These were his men. His tools. He was going to save them.
“Warfighter actual. All units, abandon the levee. Find cover in the town. Out.”
“Dear John,” she laughed, “it's not me, it's you. Run, run, run. I'm gonna find you.”
Don't you have better things to do?
He wondered about that as he abandoned his own Humvee and ran to the civilians standing out on the levee, looking confused and distracted by what just happened. It only took him a minute to listen to rumors that the zombies had a magical weapon now. One that could
obliterate a perfectly good armored fighting vehicle like it was nothing.
The crowd was a flight risk. It was up to him to calm it. He needed the civilians more than ever before. They all needed each other if they were to survive until tomorrow.
Somewhere above, he imagined, another 2,000-pound JDAM was waiting to pounce.
That thought stuck with him as night draped itself over the chaos.
Chapter 14: Jane
Victoria was jarred awake as a door slammed shut. In her groggy state, she observed how the helicopter tipped forward, and they began another ascent.
“Did we land?” she called out. Then, noticing Hayes was gone, she leaned so she could see outside.
A gigantic complex of steel and concrete structures filled the entire window view. White dust coated everything, like someone had shaken dirty powdered confectionery sugar from above.
“What is this place?”
“Biggest concrete plant in the world,” Jane called out from the pilot’s seat.
“You’re kidding,” she said in disbelief, though she couldn’t fathom how she could possibly know whether Jane was lying. Or that it mattered.
“But why did he get out. Why didn’t we?”
The craft banked to the left, and she saw down to the surface of the Mississippi River. They’d evidently not gone far off their course. When they stabilized again, several hundred feet up, Jane answered her.
“He said to tell you thanks, but that he can’t go to Cairo. Things are dangerous there, now.”
“Oh, but it’s OK for you and me?” The implication was that Jane was the man’s wife. Surely…
“He put me in charge of getting you to Cairo, then retrieving the old woman.”
“She has a name. It’s Marty,” she voiced into the mic for the internal comms.
“Yes. Marty. We’re going to rescue her.”
She didn’t know how to respond. Was a thank you in order, or was this all part of Hayes’ convoluted forward-thinking that he calls planning? What could possibly be more important at a concrete plant than in the city where the object of his testing had to be found?
Victoria sat back in her seat, finally giving up on watching where they were going. “You know, I don’t get you. What do you see in that guy?” she echoed his question from the security room. She didn’t expect a reply from her kinda-sort enemy, but she’d spent enough time with the man to feel a kinship of a sort with her. If she found him insufferable in just a few hours together, what must his wife think?
Jane laughed. “He’s not so bad, once you understand what motivates him.” She looked back at Victoria but didn’t elaborate.
“And, frankly, I didn’t have much choice.”
“He said something about arranged marriages...”
“Yeah, he likes to use that as an excuse, but that wasn’t really what brought us together. Or what keeps us together.”
“Because you know what motivates him?”
“Partly. He has changed since this crisis started, but for the better, actually. In the old days, he was consumed by his damned research. He was convinced he’d cure the world of Cancer. But when his priority shifted to...other goals, well, he became even more driven. I think once the plague was released, and he saw the effects, he started to relax.”
Victoria was stunned by the inappropriateness of her glib attitude but had nothing to say.
“Anyway, fixing the plague has become his driving force. But for once it's something I can directly help him with, which makes us a team again. It really feels good.”
Again, the impossibility of feeling good while the world burned was bone-jarringly insensitive to all those who had suffered because of the man. But, the whole thing forced her to look at her own relationship in another manner.
Was her relationship with Liam helped or hindered by the Zombie Apocalypse? Would she have a relationship, otherwise? Was it fair to ask questions she already knew the answers to?
They had a lot of bad times during their nightmare weeks on the run, but also some good ones. The first thing that popped in her head was that first innocent kiss behind the tree when they’d escaped St. Louis. She’d whispered in his ear that she was so glad they’d met, and that she was thankful he had rescued her. The sense of relief wasn’t just because they’d gotten out of the city filled with zombies, but that he made her forget the reason she’d left Colorado in the first place. It was one of the greatest feelings she’d experienced since leaving home.
She admitted the zombies had allowed some good things to happen. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that Hayes and his wife got to have a second chance, too.
“He still can be an ass,” Victoria said with finality.
“Oh, no question there,” Jane said with a chuckle. “But that ass is going to save the world. I firmly believe that with all my heart.”
“Don’t trust anyone.” Liam’s voice filled her mind. “You’re riding in a helicopter with the wife of the sneakiest man in America. Be careful.”
It didn’t feel like a trap, though she allowed anything was possible now that she was a prisoner inside the helicopter. She could fly her anywhere, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She had no weapons. No way to change the flow of the day.
Leaning to the window again, she watched for another thirty minutes as the chopper cruised over the countryside below. Except for the odd fire here or there, it was hard to tell anything had changed with the world. The country was still the country. Just a bunch of trees, same as before.
It all changed as they approached Cairo. She knew what to expect in terms of the big pile up of barges along the river, but she had no idea what to think of the standing room only crowd of zombies in the fields north of the town.
“Oh my God,” Victoria exclaimed into the mic.
Jane slowed the craft. “Looks like they had a hell of a fight last night,” she reported.
There were thousands of dead zombie bodies in the field. They’d been stacked up like dried leaves all along the ditch, and the waterway was solidly choked with bodies in several places. From high in the helicopter, it was hard to make out individuals in the crowd, but the moving mass appeared to flow over the bridges of the dead and then spread out again like ants from a mound.
“They’re still alive! There!” she shouted, though it was impossible for Jane to know where she pointed.
Pockets of defenders stood on the big pile of dirt behind the waterway. It appeared the dead had crossed and then gotten behind the defenders in several places. The tiny pockets of men and women lunged at the encroaching zombies when they got too close. But it was an impossible battle.
The zombies outnumbered them thousands to one.
2
“She’s down there, isn’t she?” Jane asked plainly.
Victoria had tried to throw them off the scent by pointing to the nearby town of Wickliffe, Kentucky. It was pretty much across the river from Cairo, and her plan was to land there and get a sense of whether this was truly a rescue or something more deadly for Grandma. She wasn’t going to risk her life until she knew.
But now, seeing the horde of zombies breaking through the defenses of the town, what choice did she have? Jane flew her over the middle of Cairo and seemed to slow down as if waiting for the answer. Victoria studied the landscape below, but couldn’t readily pick out where she’d left Grandma Marty in her temporary home.
There were no zombies running down the streets of the town, at least she didn’t see any from up in the sky, but that time was coming.
“Yes,” she said as she deflated. “But I don’t remember exactly which house we were in.”
“You have to try,” Jane replied.
She was on the cusp of picking a place to set the helicopter down when several plinks rattled off the outside of the copter. Jane banked hard to her right and made for the edge of town. Two more clangs—gunfire she realized—followed.
“They're shooting at us?” Victoria’s question was rhetorical.
“We’re walking?”
“No, we’re running,” Jane said while unhooking herself from the controls and radio equipment. In moments they both stood outside the damaged sliding door. With a conspiratorial grin, Jane removed a small panel which revealed a storage space inside the hull. She pulled out two black rifles and several magazines each. Victoria spied another rifle she left behind. It was much larger.
“That’s my baby,” Jane said with the pride of any new mother. “But she’s too heavy to carry so far.”
Then, pointing at the rifle she’d given to Victoria, she continued. “You aren’t going to shoot me with that, are you?” Her smile was soft, but her eyes were rocks.
“No. I can’t say I trust you, but right now we both want the same thing. To save Grandma from that wall of zombies.”
Jane handed her the magazines. “Keep these handy. We’re going to need them.” She took off at a jog.
Victoria, looking at the unlocked helicopter, spoke as she ran to catch up. “Aren’t you worried someone is going to steal your ride?”
“Eh, what are the odds of the finder being able to fly a helicopter? We’ll be fine.”
Victoria wasn’t sure. “We’ll be fine” was code for “I have no idea.” But there was no other choice. At least they weren’t bullet magnets on the ground.
Things became more chaotic as they crossed the fields on the Missouri side of the river and reached the narrow, two-lane bridge which linked their side with Illinois. Several people ran down the middle of the bridge—away from town. Women and children, mostly. The children were ushered with yells and screams to keep moving. All were on foot because some trucks had been parked in the middle of the span to block vehicle traffic.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 165