Even Zombie Killers Get The Blues (Zombie Killer Blues) (5 page)

Chapter 10
“Empire Hammer, Empire Hammer, this is Lost Boys, Fire Mission, over.”

“Lost Boys, this is Hammer, Fire
Mission, out.”

“Suppression, over.”

“Suppression, out.”

“Grid, Kilo November seven niner eight three, niner
four two zero, over”

“Grid, Kilo November seven niner eight
three, niner two four zero, out.”

“I say again, Grid seven niner eight three, niner
four two zero, over.”

“Grid seven niner eight three, niner
four two zero, out.”

“Time on target 0920 hours, over.”

“Time on target 0920 hours, out.”

“Hammer, this is Lost Boys. Understand we want
suppression along a five hundred meter line on either side of that grid,
5920
mils map
north. Hammer everything east of the river, over.”

“Understood, Lost Boys. You want to
perforate every Z east of the river along that line. We’ll get back to you if
we can range that. Hammer out.”

Damn, but I loved professional artillerymen. We had
given them an hour to work out their solutions, pre-fuse the BB rounds, and
rehearse. Suppression, in this case, meant a couple of volleys of rounds fired
along an azimuth, in this case running roughly along the route we needed to
take to get to the railroad bridge. The rounds themselves were based on the old
claymore anti-personnel mines. High explosive packed with thousands of ball
bearings that detonated about thirty degrees up in the air. They were
directional, meaning that the ball bearings would scatter in an arc downwards
and out. Any Zs standing out in the open would catch a high velocity BB in the
brain, hopefully, and it would clear our path. I wished we could have used this
last night but arty rounds were at a premium, and I had coordinated this with
the Battery Commander at Firebase Horse last week through e-mail.
“Lost Boys, this is Hammer. We can range that, but after this you are on your
own. Mike Tango Oscar, Suppression, linear target, four guns two volleys, five
iterations along line. Stand by for shot, over.”
“Mike Tango Oscar, Suppression, linear target, four guns, two volleys, five
iterations along line. Standing by for shot, out.”
The Message To Observer told us how many guns would be firing what, and that enabled
me to confirm they were shooting what I needed. Firebase Horse sat in an old
field just north of Saratoga Springs, or what was left of it. The wide open
parking field gave the Battery open, clear fields of fire and a solid base for
their 155 M-777 howitzers to sit on. It also provided a place to run patrols,
clean out Saratoga of anything useful and provide fire support to anywhere
between Glens Falls and Albany. The sucky part was that it sat on the edge of
the fallout from the reactor at the Navy Power School in Milton. It hadn’t suffered
a total meltdown, but the area west of Saratoga and southeast across Saratoga
Lake up to the river had taken some fallout. Most was washed away, which is why
we were OK in Stillwater, but I trusted the Army NBC guys as far as I could
throw them while wearing a MOPP suit.

At 0918, Hammer came back in the radio.

“Shot, over”

“Shot, out.” I answered. Meaning the Battery had
fired.

“Let’s go!” I told the team, and we shouldered our
packs. Behind us stood the farm house where we lost Ski. A trail of really dead
Zombie corpses led from the river to the house and inside stank to high heaven.
We had waited all night for more to come from the city, but with the break of
dawn, nothing showed. We buried Ski in the back yard with a rough cross over
his grave. While I was digging his grave with Jacob, the others took turns
cranking the handheld generators which charged our radio and other electronic
devices.

We started jogging downhill to where the Route 4
bridge crossed over the canal.
“Splash, over.”
“Splash, out.”
I motioned for the team to hit the ground. I trusted the artillery guys but
I’ve seen too many rounds stray off target. A mistake on the gun line
transposing numbers. A mislaid gun. The wrong charge. Plus, those BB’s came out
of the rounds at a tremendous velocity and I didn’t need a ricochet wounding
anyone.
The air just above the river erupted in sharp flashes of light and then a
second later an ear-splitting CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK repeated. One platoon of
four howitzers, two volleys, then they shifted fire, walking it up the line I
had given them.

After a minute Hammer came back on the radio.
“Rounds Complete, over.”
“Rounds Complete, OUT.” And I stuffed the mike back into Jacob’s ruck.
I waited till the rounds stopped cracking, then an additional 30 seconds.
“GO GO GO” I yelled, and we ran, straight across the bridge and into the clouds
of dust raised by the impact of thousands of high-velocity steel balls into
brick buildings.

Chapter 11

We moved in bounding overwatch, one team walking,
weapons at the ready, while the other rushed fifty meters. Then we switched.
The walking team was the shooters, charged with hitting any Zs that were still
standing or had been sheltered in houses during the bombardment.

Route 4 ran through the center of the village. At
one time it held shops and houses. Now, like so much of the rest of America, it
was a ruin. You could tell a lot about a village by what kind of ruins were
there. The older small towns held up the best, except where they had had
natural gas utilities. Broken lines, storms bringing down still-live electrical
lines, lightning, all combined to start massive fires that raged through whole
towns and even cities. The older towns in the northeast, built before the
advent of modern firefighting systems, had fared better; brick walls, slate
roofs … but still, better was a relative term. Most of the cities and larger
towns in America had burned to a crisp, fires raging out of control for weeks. The
southwest, from what I had heard, was a ghost town.

Everyone wore gloves and kneepads and had reinforced
the knees of their uniforms because everywhere you went, there was smashed and
broken glass. I don’t know why, but when the plague hit, it seemed like
everyone must have gone on a rampage. Correction, everyone
did
go on a
rampage. Looting and riots everywhere. To walk down any street in America was
to listen to the sound of glass crunching underfoot. Most of had scars all over
our hands from putting them down somewhere with broken plate glass. We had to
be careful because even a small cut left untreated could lead to blood
poisoning or tetanus. Two Missions ago we had lost a guy who had tried to tough
it out when he stepped on a nail. He died in the base hospital a few
months
later
. He died from
asphyxia, his body broken and dislocated from the severity of the muscle spasms
he endured.

We almost made it to the first rail bridge before we
came across any Zs. There had been a few in the street, mowed down by the
artillery. There had been one big mass in the center of town. The Zs had been
in the middle of tearing apart what remained of a person. What idiot had been
dumb enough to walk through the middle of a town in broad daylight? Maybe it
had something to do with the firefight we heard last night. A shattered AR-15
lay on the ground next to the bloody mess. The Zs were all down, perforated
with dozens of holes. Bad for this guy, good for us. He had drawn the locals
into the kill zone.

We turned left onto the bridge. Once there, Brit
broke out a four point rappelling harness and snapped into a thirty foot length
of climbing rope. Doc and Jonesy, the biggest guys, launched her over the edge
of the bridge, furiously snapping pictures, while the rest of us pulled
security. She swung back and forth, trying to catch every angle, then yelled
for them to pull her up. We repeated the process on the second bridge abutment,
then started running back towards the canal lock.

In the middle of Route 4, several Zs had stumbled
out of houses, wandering in that hesitant way when they smelled a living person
but weren’t sure if one was close. Each team took time to shoot them in the
head, aimed steady shots while the other team ran their fifty meters. We
knocked down three before I stopped and pulled out a thumper. I set the timer
for twenty minutes, placed the little box on the ground, then kept running.

Thumpers were little speakers hooked up to cheap MP3
players. Start it running, and depending on what track you pick, you get either
an instant or set delay before it starts playing an obnoxious loud rock, rap,
or otherwise bass-heavy, rhythmic tune. They were called thumpers after the way
the worm riders had called the sandworms in that old sci-fi book
Dune
.
The thumpers there were stakes with clappers set in to the sand, and their rhythmic
thumping attracted the giant sand worms. Point is, the Zs would come running
and stand around while the song played out, looking for the source of this
evidence of living beings. Each of us carried two in our packs. They had saved our
lives more than once.

When we had gotten a good distance away but could
still see where I dropped the Thumper, we all grounded our packs for a rest.
Right on time, twenty minutes, 50 Cents’ “In da Club” started blaring. Heavy
beat ringing out from the cheap speakers. They came swarming, milling around in
a mass, trying to locate the source of the sound. Had to be more than a hundred
by the time the song looped back and started playing again.

I grabbed the mike from Jacob’s ruck. “Hammer, this
Lost Boys, execute Fire Plan Bravo, over.”
“Lost Boys, this is Hammer, Fire Plan Bravo, out.”
I waited for shot and splash, and we watched BB rounds crack overhead, right on
the spot I had planted the Thumper. Three volleys, landing on a pre-plotted
grid. My GPS had told me where to drop the thumper, on coordinates I had worked
out from Google Maps and shared with the artillery.

We watched the Zs get cut down. Fighting Zs is easy,
you just have to be smart about it. It’s when you fight stupid that you die.

I yelled “I love it when a plan comes together!” and
mimicked lighting a cigar.

“Old Balls! You would remember that show,” shouted
Brit at me, over the crump of the distant artillery.

Chapter 12

It wasn’t an ambush. More like what the Army calls
“meeting engagement”. Basically, we bumped into each other.

We were humping through the woods, avoiding Fort
Ann, traveling on the east side of the river. We had our eyes peeled for
Zombies, not for people. I think the sight of armed living people froze Jacob for
a split second, but that was all it took. They opened fire, we opened fire and attempted
to break contact, hauling ass backwards the way we came. Rounds were flying
through the brush as each of us let off a magazine in the direction of our
attackers and then peeled back ten meters. When the last person had burned a
full mag, we tore off across an open field til we got to the next tree line,
then grounded.

“OK, give me a SITREP, everyone sound off.”

“Jacob, I’m OK. I got zinged in the arm.” He was
looking at a slight trace of blood where a round had scratched him. Doc was
already checking him over.

“Ahmed, I got two on the way back while you were all
peeling back.” Ahmed had been at the rear of the column and had taken the time,
as we rushed past him, each in turn, to drill two of the attackers.

“How many?”

“I saw at least a dozen.”

Jonesy spoke up. ”Where the hell is Brit?”

Then we heard her scream. Loud screams, cut off in
mid screech. I tore off across the field, just as Doc wrapped me in a bear hug
and tackled me to the ground. A shot zinged overhead, right where I had been
running a second before.

“Nick, NO! We are outnumbered and right now that
will get you killed!” He held me tight despite all my struggles to get free,
until I had calmed down. Meanwhile, Ahmed had boosted himself up into a huge
oak tree, and was sighting with his binos, looking back the way we had come.
“I see her. She is being carried … they have disappeared into the woods on the
far side of the next field.”

We moved cautiously to the sight of the firefight. Three bodies lay there. One
was dead, another was bleeding out, clutching his groin as his life drained out
of a severed artery. He shuddered, then lay still. The last sat against a tree,
a little further back, wheezing from a punctured lung, blood pooling in his lap
as it ran out from under his dirty T-shirt.

I approached the one up against the tree, slowly, my
rifle pointed at his chest. I could hear him wheezing and he was getting paler
by the second. A rusty revolver was held limply in his hand. I kicked it away.
H gave no protest. He was fat, had a double chin. I knew what that meant. He
was a cannibal. No one had that kind of access to fresh, fatty meat anymore in
the wilds. No one except those who had crossed the line. He had prison tattoos
on his hands. I knew by that where they had taken her, but I needed to
know
for sure before we committed to a course of action
.

“Doc, we need to question him. Help me.” I pushed
the man over onto his side, the wounded side. Immediately, his breathing
increased and he groaned. Doc waited for him to exhale before slapping a piece
of MRE bag onto the wound and taping it up.

I poked him in the head with my gun barrel until he
showed some signs of consciousness. I wasn’t in the mood for being nice.

“Wake up. Where are they taking her?”
“Huh …. What?  Hurts.”

I nodded to Doc, and he gave him a shot of morphine.
The mans’ face relaxed and he came back around a bit.

“Your buddies. They captured one of our people.
Carried her off. Where are they taking her?”
“Fuck you. A female?  Bet she’s going to taste good … when they’re done raping
her,” he rasped.
My eyes blazed over red, and I kicked him in the wounded lung as hard as I
could, heard a rib snap. The man screamed in pain over the morphine.
“You’re going to die, and you can do it hard or easy. Tell me, and it’s easy.
Don’t, and it will be hard. Your choice.”
The man tried to catch his breath. Doc grabbed my arm and pulled me aside.
“Nick, chill out. You’re going to kill this guy.”

“Doc, he’s a fucking cannibal. I
am
going to
kill him. We don’t have time to play games here. If we can catch them before
they get wherever they are going we have a good chance of getting her back.
Otherwise, she’s dead, if she isn’t already. His life isn’t worth hers.”

The man was coughing up blood now. I walked over and
whacked the butt of my rifle across his nose. He cried out in pain and started
cursing me again.

“AHMED, COME OVER HERE!”
“Listen, shitbag. Ahmed was a torturer for the Taliban.” Standing behind the
man, Ahmed’s eyes shot up. He had been no such thing. I ignored him. “He is
going to fuck up your last hours on earth so bad you will beg me for death. Doc
here can keep you alive for hours while Ahmed rips you apart. Tell me, and it’s
quick and easy, I
might
even let you live. Don’t and he goes to work.”

“OK, the p-prison.” He started gasping for air and
bleeding from the mouth again.

“Great Meadows?”

He nodded his head.

Damn. Great Meadows was a few miles north of here, a
New York State maximum security prison. We had to get to her before they got
there or we would never see her again.

“Let’s go!” I yelled, and I ran. Ahmed passed me, on
point.

We left the wounded man on the ground. I let him
live. The Zombies would not.