The Undead World (Book 1): The Apocalypse (10 page)

“
Is that your guy?” Slim asked. It was a joke that Eric didn't get until he saw the state of the man's face. There hadn't been much of it left even before the bullet had shattered it.

Still it wasn
't Yuri. “No, this guy is too fat. My guy was a rail. Can I get one of the soldiers to check his pockets? We need to collect everything.”

“
What everything?” Mathers asked with an edge to his voice. He raised his hands at the empty room. It was beautifully appointed; plush in every way, but clearly empty save for one raw smelling corpse.

“
Mother fucker,” Heddles griped opening up the closets and the drawers and finding nothing. Not even a stray sock. “We came all this way for one worthless zombie? What a fucking waste of time. And now we got to fight our way out again. Damn it!”

“
It's not a complete waste,” Slim said, kneeling down in front of the mini-fridge. “We got a stocked bar. Warm beer is better than no beer. Can we, Sir?”

“
Drink up,” Mathers replied. “Two drinks maximum. Doc you can watch the fucking door.”

A soldier tossed Eric a cell phone and said,
“It's as dead as this mission.” He then held up a driver's license. “Barry Ciccereli from Jersey City. There ain't no luggage here; probably coming to get in a quickie before the apocalypse hit. What an idiot.”

Eric took the license and went to the door to look out as the soldiers drank. He didn
't want to drink. He wanted to go back to the CDC, put on his lab coat and look important until the real scientists found a cure, or a vaccine, or a way to kill the monsters from afar. What he didn't want to do is go back down into those streets.

The squad sat about and drank, though they weren
't in the least as relaxed and composed as they tried to pass themselves off as. They knew as well as Eric that going out was going to be far worse than coming in.

“
We'll take the north exit onto 51st street,” Mathers told them, sipping at a tiny bottle of Jack and making a face with each sip. “A left will lead us to Park Ave and right across the street is where we want to go. The only problem is I'm not sure how to get to that exit.”

This didn
't sit well with the men, however no one knew any better than the lieutenant so when they had finished their drinks, the squad stood, checked their weapons and went back into the hall. Mathers lead them to the next corridor and tried the first staircase he came to. It was filled with stiffs. They went back to the one they had ascended and took it forty-one stories down to the second level.

“
This should get us to the lobby,” he explained, taking a moment to wipe the sweat from his face. “If anything happens, head north and find any way out. Remember, speed is our best defense.”

The door did lead to a concourse that was open enough to suggest that they could wind their way through restaurants and bars and little shops to the other side of the building. At first the way seemed promising, however their obvious humanity soon attracted the wrong attention. Stiffs, some still in a state of undress,
as if they has just been trying on new clothes came at them so that the squad had to sprint away.

This only drew more eyes and so within a minute the lieutenant had to fire his pistol twice to clear the way in front and then the day descended into mayhem and screams. Zombies came at a shambling run from every direction.

“Keep your three clear,” Slim advised. “I've got your six.”

“
What three?” Eric cried. He shot at a zombie's head, missed and shot a second time. This one hit and the beast collapsed down onto a gilded French chaise as if it had just had a very long day at the office and wanted to take a load off.

“
Yes. That's your three,” Slim yelled over the sound of the guns banging away. “You got your right. Smitty has your left, you see?”

“
Keep my...” Eric shot another stiff, this one through the neck, though it seemed to do the trick. “...My three clear.”

If it was only so easy. They came to a lounge spread across two levels and everywhere there were tables overturned and chairs knocked askance. And of course the place was
thick with zombies. Heddles just in front of Eric went down under a mass of them as his weapon took the wrong moment to jam. As the soldier went mad in fear, kicking and screaming at the stiffs, Eric shot two of them, but then his trigger bit on nothing. The scientist clawed at his pocket, desperate to get a new a magazine out, only before he could the stiffs were all over Heddles.

The
man screamed for help in a terrified voice, however his squad mates were fighting six separate battles and Eric only had the single pistol that he couldn't quite get working. His fumbling fingers did not possess the muscle memory of a real infantryman and he had to flee with the pistol in one hand and the magazine in the other, while Heddles screamed in such a way as to nearly crack Eric's mind.

He wasn
't the only one who fled, four others took to their heels with him and since Smitty and his M60 were nowhere to be seen, Eric threw off the bulky run of bullets that hung, chaffing from his neck. He did this while in a full sprint. There was no choice but to run. To stand and fight meant to stand and die.

Slim took the lead, running and shooting. Eric, in the back, fought against his gun until he finally got the clip in place and then when he pressed the little
“gizmo” and the bolt slid in place, he felt the greatest relief.

“
Grenade!” one of the men called and a mere second later an explosion blasted a gaping hole in the hordes to their right. Slim rushed through it only to have a grey arm reach out and grab the strap of his M16. The soldier yanked on it, desperate, but the zombie was too strong. Another soldier paused long enough to fire twice at the beast, only to be tackled from the side.

Eric ran by shooting his weapon haphazardly in the direction of the soldier, hoping to hit enough of the converging horde to give the man a moment to get to his feet. It didn
't work. It turned into a dog pile and there was no helping the man—Eric could see that he was already bit in at least five places. Still, with Heddles' dead screams running through his mind, Eric didn't think he could run away a second time and leave a man down, but then there was a wumping explosion right before his eyes and pieces of human and zombie went everywhere.

The soldier had blown himself up and by the act caused a suspension of the horrible battle as the remaining zombies paused long enough to ascertain who was human and who wasn
't. It gave Slim enough time to rush back and grab Eric. Of the other soldier there was nothing to be seen; it was just the two of them.

“
Come on! Now!” Slim cried as Eric looked around in a daze. “Make for the lobby.”

They leapt the low hedges marking the middle of Park Avenue and then fought their way into the lobby with guns blazing. Eric found that a shot to the center of a zombie
's chest would slow it considerably or even knock it down, and just then that was good enough for the moment. Their accuracy or their luck allowed them to gain the lobby and then the dark stairs beyond.

Then came a desperate fight to shut the door against the rushing zombies. It was a fight that they began to slowly lose as scabby arms kept the door from shutting. Slim was the stronger of the two and he threw his back against the door, saying,
“Go on. I'll hold them off.”

Now Eric was torn between fears: death here with Slim, or death alone in the dark stairs as the stiffs caught up with him.
“Like hell,” he said, getting an idea. He grabbed a grenade from the soldier's belt, pulled the reluctant pin and tossed in through the crack of the door. Eric expected to be blown off his feet by the explosion, but he barely felt more than a vibration as dozens of zombies absorbed the brunt of the blast.

“
Thanks,” Slim said, once he cleared the door and shut it firmly. The soldier then began to shake and this turned into a crying fit that Eric pretended not to notice. He wanted to cry as well. The mission he had fought to arrange had done little besides add misery to the world.

A week later General Fairchild watched from the safety of his command vehicle as what was left of his men gave up the city of Reading. They were dusty men and ragged in both a
ppearance and in mind, and the general wondered what exactly would happen if he got out of his armored humvee.

Would they frag him? Blow his ass to hell where it belonged? Did they blame him for the endless days of fighting, or the constant retreats? Or the wasted lives? Did they think that the moronic rules of engagement were his idea?

“I'd deserve it if they did,” he said to himself. None of this was his fault in the strictest sense, but it was clear that he had failed his men and his nation. Commonsense told him long ago to ignore the President's orders, only he had been a good little Nazi and went along with the buffoonery instead of doing the right thing.

His division had once been an almost perfect fighting force, trained and equipped with the world's most high-tech weapons
, but the “Rules” said: no mortars, no artillery, no tanks, no LAVs, no jets, no helicopters, no nothing. Without questioning his leaders, he had set aside millions of dollars worth of equipment, giving up every advantage in the process, and fought the hordes man to beast.

He still had his guns, however they had the numbers. From the urban agglomeration that was the New York area, it was estimated that twelve million stiffs had come at him. Yes he had guns, however he'd only been allocated just under three million bullets
. It didn't take a genius to see the math wasn't going to add up.

Reluctantly, he took his eyes from the men and scanned to the blue skies.
“Where the hell is he?” asked the general, again under his breath. His driver barely stirred, having grown used to the general mumbling to himself over the last two weeks as things had gone from bad to hellacious.

Then came the wump, wump, wump of the choppers blades.
“Here he comes. Inspection time.” He said this louder, an invitation for his driver to respond.

“
Gonna kiss his ass real good, Sir?” Sergeant Bower asked in his thick southern 'Bama' drawl. “You need some lip balm? We may be all out of grenades and fifty cal ammo and such, but we got cases of lip balm and I think this would be a good, heroic use for em.”

“
Fuck you Bower,” he said genially, stepping out of the humvee, and checking his gig line—out of habit only. He didn't give a rat's ass what the Secretary of Defense thought of his uniform, or really what the useless son of a bitch thought of anything.

“
Yes Sir,” Bower replied. The whipping rotors sent a storm of dust their way and they squinted into it. The sergeant yelled over the noise, “What do you think it's gonna be this time? They gonna make us read them zombies their Miranda rights before we shoot em?”

The general smirked at the comment, because sadly it wasn't so far-fetched with this administration, but when he heard the Secretary's actual request he went cold.

He wanted a hundred picked soldiers for a “secret” mission; this usually meant going to fetch a niece of the First Lady or some Hollywood starlet, however this was different. The men had been picked already.

“
What's so special about these men?” Fairchild asked, flipping through the hundred pages: each had a short bio of the soldier and a picture stapled to the top right. “I know some of these men are dead.”

“
Not according to the last casualty list you submitted,” the Secretary responded in his flat mid-western accent.

“
You may have noticed that I'm dealing with about ten million fucking zombies,” Fairchild replied, intentionally leaving off any honorific. As a favor to himself he had given up on paperwork altogether, and who was there to say otherwise? His boss, Lieutenant General John Hickey, and everyone else in the command structure was
no longer one of the living
, as it was being politely put—being
Dead
had too many meanings these days. “Hey, Bower,” he said. “They got you in here.”

“
That right?” Bower drawled. “They must want sumptin mighty important done.”

“
Yeah, that's right,” Fairchild remarked, his voice becoming fainter with each syllable. Bower was a good man, not an exceptional one. Why on earth had he been chosen for this secret mission? Something wasn't right about this, nor about the way the Secretary's politician's smile stayed fixed just so, and how the men on the list had only two things in common.

Everyone of them was from the deep south and everyone of them was...

“Mr. Secretary, this man is dead for certain,” Fairchild said holding up one of the pictures at random. “But I have a good replacement. That man right there. Bower, what's that soldier's name?”

Bower squinted at the soldier, a man with skin the color of molasses.
“That's Jackson. He a PFC, but he's a hell of a good guy, Sir. He's a shooter is what he is.”

“
No, not him,” the Secretary said, quickly. “Just the men on the list.”

“
That's what I thought,” Fairchild growled. “Bower go take a walk.” When the sergeant left, Fairchild looked long at the politician and then asked, “What's going on?”

“
It's need to know only,” the Secretary replied with a warning for the general in his eyes.

“
Then in that case, the men on this list...they're all dead. We don’t have what you’re looking for here. So sorry you had to come all the way up here for nothing.” The general began walking away and the politician grabbed him and pulled him close.

“
You of all people must see how bad it is from a military point of view. And you know we can't go on like this. Don’t you think it’s time for a change?” Their eyes met and a thousand words were conveyed with the look. The question had been a loaded gun, and the hundred white soldiers the bullets, and there was only one possible target.

“
The President is touring the front...what's left of it,” the Secretary said speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. “And he's going to need a security force that's been around the zombies, that knows the score, that knows how things have been and how they should've been.”

Fairchil
d took a step back and watched his men go by—they were so tired from the constant fighting that they looked a little like zombies themselves. It could have been different. The war could've been winnable at the very start. Now it probably wasn't even survivable except by a lucky few.

“
No. I’m not going to have you hang this on my men. And I don’t want anyone thinking this is about race. I'll do it,” he said, putting his hand on the butt of his gun and caressing it lightly.

The move wasn't lost on the Secretary.
“Are you sure? He'll have a security detail.”

“
Will I be able to carry my gun?” When the Secretary nodded, Fairchild added, “Then it'll be no problem.”

It wasn't.

Two days later, just behind the lines where his men lived and died, the secret service agents faced outward not seeing the danger that was so close. The President was twitchy and nervous at the proximity of so many zombies and was easily distracted. No one noticed as General Fairchild slid his pistol from his hip holster and used it to give his few remaining men a real fighting chance to at least save themselves.