Even Zombie Killers Get The Blues (Zombie Killer Blues) (7 page)

Chapter 16

“Nick, Empire Six is on the horn. He wants a
prisoner to interrogate.”

“Tell him I said to piss off.”

“Empire Six, this is Last Boys Three, our six
element says to piss off, over.”

I grabbed the hand mike from Doc. “You asshole.” He
laughed and told me he hadn’t transmitted. Everybody is a frigging joker.

Turns out before he launched this op, Colonel
Jackass wanted us to interrogate a prisoner. We had given him a pretty good
writeup of the situation. However, he didn’t want to
“launch on unconfirmed Intel
”.
His words. My words were “you big puss,” but I wasn’t stupid. I was going to
deal with him in my own time. I gave him the “Roger that” and started to plan.
We still had two hours of darkness left. I didn’t like the idea of snatching a
prisoner. It was dangerous, and I couldn’t figure out how we were going to do
it. Everyone was locked up tight in the jails or guarded in the fields. We had
already seen that the guards didn’t go anywhere alone, even when taking a dump,
when they were outside the prison. They only slacked off when they were behind
the walls. Getting one alive would be next to impossible. At the least, it
would involve some kind of fight, which would draw attention from even more
guards. As far as just “taking someone down” it’s not like the movies at all.
You don’t just sneak up on someone, tap them on the head, drag them away and
then wake them up with a gentle slap on the face. More likely than not, if you
hit someone hard enough to knock them out, you are going to fracture their
skull or at least cause a major concussion. Which, all and all, makes for a
useless prisoner. Since they never travelled alone outside the prison, we would
have to kill one to snatch the other. That would blow the element of surprise
for any attack tonight.
Jonesy ambled over after exchanging watch with Ahmed. “Nick, this isn’t going
to work. Ain’t no way we gonna get prisoners to question. They might screw off
up in the towers but outside the wire? Them bastards got their shit wired
tight.”
I shook my head. “Gotta agree with you, brother from another mother. Ain’t
going to happen.”  

We had already had two killed and one wounded on
this mission, so I did what any good subordinate does when confronted with
impossible orders from above with no relevance to the situation on the ground:
I ignored them.
We waited until daylight, then I called into Empire Six.
“Empire Six, this is Lost Boys, Over.”
I told him we had captured a prisoner, and before he expired, he told us that
yes, they were cannibals, and yes, they were in the prison, and no, he didn’t
know how many of them they were.

“What do you mean he didn’t know how
many of them there were?”

“Well, he died.”

“Did you get to question him first?”

“For a bit. He pretty much confirmed what we knew
already.” Damn, this jerk was making it hard to lie to him.

“
How did you get the information out of him?”
No way was I going to let that pinhead fulfill his dark fantasies by giving him
torture tales.
“Better you don’t know, if you get my meaning, over.”

“Roger that, Empire Six, out.”

God, he was an insufferable prick. Another FRAGO
came in from the S-3. If possible, they wanted us to secure the county jail. I
calculated up the odds. We had only seen guards in two of the towers there and
at the gate to the jail. That we could do. H Hour was at 0300. We moved out to
a better observation position so we could keep an eye on the jail and the
prison. It wouldn’t do for whoever was coming for the prison to get a surprise
if we could avoid it.
“Jonesy, quit that shit. Just kill it.” We had settled down on the edge of the
tree line. A Zombie with no legs was pulling its way toward us through the
forest. Its lower jaw was missing, probably a survivor of the Z wave that had
broken over the jail. Jonesy was baiting it, letting it get close then low
crawling to a different position.
“I’m just doing PT with my battle buddy here, Nick.” I could see his grin in
the moonlight.
“Just kill it already. Have a little bit of compassion. That was someone’s mom
once.”
“OK. You just one big bad teddy bear, Nick.” With that he pulled his .22 pistol
and popped two rounds into its head. The Z sank to the ground, the weird red
light in its eyes slowly fading.
At 0259, H-1, Ahmed lined his rifle up on the guard in the tower at the jail. I
lay next to him, watching through my NVGs and counting down quietly. 3, 2, 1.
At 0, all hell broke loose. Ahmed’s first shot dropped the guard in the tower.
At the same instant, a bolt of light shot into the truck parked in front of the
prison. It exploded with a dull CRUMP, lifting off its axels and landing a dozen
feet away, burning brightly. A Hellfire missile fired from an Apache miles way
had impacted at exactly 0300. From behind another hill, another Apache rose up
from where it had been waiting and started pumping 30mm chain gun rounds into
each of the towers in turn.
The Hellfire explosion had washed out my night vision goggles for a second. Ahmed’s
also, spoiling his shot at the second guard. I flipped off my NVGs but the jail
itself was still in darkness. I flipped them back down again and saw the other
guard sprinting for the building where the slaves were kept. Ahmed’s second
shot splintered the doorway next to him as he dove in. Three figures rushed out
from the guard shack at the gate to stare at the fireworks. The five of us rose.
In a steady walk, we advanced across the field towards the jail, shooting as we
went. All three fell before we were halfway there. As the last one went down,
we heard automatic gunfire and screams erupt from the slave barracks, and the
inside was lit up with a strobe light of gunfire.

We broke into a run, even as three CH-47s from the NY Army National Guard
thundered overhead. Two stopped over the prison courtyard and started spilling
troops from the back, fast roping into the courtyard. The third touched tail on
front of the prison gate and a heavily armed squad ran out the back. As soon as
the last man was clear they powered up and lifted to the back side of the
prison, probably droping off another squad to cover the back exits.
I saw all this out of the corner of my eye, but I stopped when I heard a .50
caliber open up. If you have ever shot a .50 or had one shot at you, you know
immediately what it is. A stream of tracers hammered into one of the Chinooks
dropping troops inside the prison yard and it immediately hauled ass away from
the courtyard, fire erupting from one engine and two guys dangling from the
ropes in the back. I stopped and stared for a second, watching it head south in
a trail of smoke and flame before hitting the ground, hard. One guy had hung
onto his rope and I watched him bounce off the ground with a bone-crunching
thud. The second Chinook let loose a stream of fire from a side mounted minigun
and something in the courtyard blew up in a flash, hidden by the thirty foot
walls. Gunfire started swelling in a rapid crescendo inside the walls as the
guys from the 108th Infantry went to work, routing out cannibals. The squad in
front of the gate hosed the opening with short bursts of suppressive fire from
a 240B machine gun. I started to run toward the downed chopper but Doc slapped
me back to reality by hitting my shoulder as he ran toward the jail. The gun
fire inside the slave barracks had changed to single shots, but the screams
went on.

Ahmed threw a flashbang through the open doorway. I
looked away, opened my mouth and cupped my hands over my ears. A second after
the grenade went off, my ears still ringing slightly, we piled through the
door.

Chapter 17

The scene before me was pure chaos. Pools of blood
ran out of jail cells. Two-thirds of the way down the corridor a figure was
turning towards us. I only caught a glimpse of him as I turned to scan my
sector, the right corner of the room. I was coming back around, lining up my
sights just as he fired. Doc fired back from over my shoulder as an enormous
hammer whacked me in my kevlar helmet. I fell to the floor, stars running crazy
circles in my eyes, and everything going double for a second before snapping
back into place. The rest of the team advanced down the corridor, scanning each
cell for potential hidden bad guys. Then I blacked out.

I came too with Doc kneeling over me, shining a
flashlight in my eyes. I immediately started to try to get back up but he
pushed me back down with a knee on my chest.
“Slow down there, Killer! Take a break and sit for a minute. You took a round
upside your helmet and got a pretty good whack. You’ve been unconscious for a
few minutes, started to get worried about you. We need to go check out the
slaves, see how many we can save. Here’s a souvenir for you.”
He handed me my helmet. On the top left side was a long, shattered groove. An
inch downward and it would have blown the top of my skull off. I felt really
weak for a good minute or two.

Jacob, standing guard at the door, waved in a figure
dressed in US Army Multicams. It took me a few seconds for my eyes to focus in
the glow of the chemlight he was carrying, but I recognized Captain Horatio
David, from C Company of the 2-108
^th
Infantry. I guessed it was his
guys who had raided the prison. Behind him, two medics hurried in, moving
towards the sounds of screaming and moaning coming from the jail cells.

“Hey Nick, you doing OK?”

“Yeah, Horatio. Took a round to the Kevlar, I’m a
bit jiggly right now. Don’t move around so much. How’s your boys?”

“Two dead, seven injured, one critical. The helo
going down was tough but they managed to get out of the bird after it hit,
before it went up. I’m going to have that jackass Colonel crawling up my ass
about losing a helo. And he’s going to be all over your shit for not telling him
there was a heavy automatic weapon in there.”

“Screw him. What were we supposed to do, crawl
inside the jail? Sorry about your guys.” I was pretty sure I would know them
but I would wait til later to find out their names. I didn’t need any more
grief right now.

“Such is war, Nick, such is war. I know you couldn’t
have gotten in there, and there should have been a predator over flight. Not
that we can get them anymore. We’ve got one of the 47s sitting down outside to
take off the refugees here once we do a full count and assess their medical
condition. Here, let me give you a hand up.” He pulled me to my feet, where I
stood a bit shakily for a second. Then I took a deep breath and walked out into
the night air, into a scene from hell.

A good quarter mile to the south of me was the
burning wreckage of the CH-47. No one came close because onboard ammunition was
starting to cook off, sending rounds through the air. To my left, the jail was
burning in several places, including the shattered towers. The devastated truck
at the front entrance had burned itself out except for the tires, but a cloud
of acrid smoke drifted off into the night. As I watched, one of the CH-47s
lifted from the courtyard and headed Southwest, back towards Albany, escorted
by one of the Apaches. There went most of Charlie Company, along with their
wounded. I hoped the wounded would make it.

Captain Davis came up next to me and watched it go,
and in a minute, Doc was standing next to us, and gave us an update.

“We have fourteen dead, another twelve wounded, forty-two
unwounded. Mostly women and children. Could have been worse, Nick.”

I knew he meant that it could have been worse if we
hadn’t rushed the barracks, but he knew it would eat at me that we hadn’t saved
them all.

“OK, Horatio, can your platoon organize the Evac? My
team has to be long gone from here before the Zombies come crawling toward the
sound of the gunfire.”

Captain
David and his RTO

“I’ll do you one better, Nick. It’s going to take a
few minutes to get organized. Have the bird give you a lift a couple miles
north, say to a mountaintop just outside Ft. Ann, where you can rest up for a
while.”
“Sounds good, Brother.” I followed Doc, Jonesy, Jacob and Ahmed into the back
of the chopper while Cpt. David conferred with the pilot. Once I sat down on
the canvas seat, I closed my eyes and immediately fell asleep.