ZNIPER: A Sniper’s Journey Through The Apocalypse.

by Ward III, C.

  Nothing was moving. With his ears ringing, he couldn’t tell if the other Grays were still attempting to climb over or not. Keeping his muzzle elevated and pointing at the top of the wall using only the death grip of his right hand, Grumpy reached for a full magazine with his shaky left, did a quick reload, then pocketed the almost-empty mag in his back pocket.

  Still breathing heavily and with his heart threatening to beat out of his chest, Grumpy sensed a quickly approaching presence behind him…

  WOLF PACK

  Family. Loyalty. Lethality.

  Victor was pleasantly surprised as he sprinted up Main Street and saw that the Quick Reaction Force was already outside the HQ building, frantically doing gear checks.

  “On me!” he commanded as he sprinted past them, heading toward the northern section of the defensive wall. He was so eager to find out what had happened that it wasn’t until halfway there that he realized he was only armed with his holstered pistol and a couple of spare mags. Luckily he had the QRF team as backup—the team that was quickly falling behind by a good one hundred yards. He wanted to yell at them to hurry up, but they were carrying a heavy equipment load-out while he was stuck carrying only a pistol.

  Victor slowed down just a tad to catch his breath and calm his thoughts while QRF closed the gap. If he’d heard just one shot, he would’ve predicted that a wall watchman had negligently discharged a firearm by accident or maybe shot a deer, but hearing that many shots in rapid succession was an obvious sign of contact.

  The only thing worse than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire. For that reason, as the QRF was getting close to Guard Post 4, Victor called out, “Green. green, green,” which was their brevity code for incoming friendlies ready to be assigned a task.

  “Green here!” was reported back to the QRF as they approached the ladder to the base of the guard post. “That way, about halfway to GP5. Grumpy took contact.”

  With that report, the QRF changed directions and took off without hesitation.

  There had been only one volley of shots fired. So either the watchman was dead or he had successfully suppressed the threat and was now jacked up on adrenaline. Either way, Victor didn’t want to run into a bad situation blindly. Victor commanded half the QRF to push out, away from the wall, and provide flank security. He was not running now but walking at an alerted fast pace with his pistol drawn at a low ready position.

  A couple of hundred yards down the trail, Victor called out, “Green, green, green.”

  In the near distance, a “Yellow, yellow, yellow,” was shouted back, which eased Victors nerves. Yellow was a caution signal, meaning the person was OK but in an unsecured situation. If “Red” had been the reply, it meant a known active threat was in the immediate area, which would change tactics drastically.

  Throughout military history, there had always been some sort of “challenge and password,” words that could be rotated daily for a guard to identify friendlies from foes. The problems were that either higher echelon would often not pass down the daily codes to the lower echelon, the sentries would forget the code words six hours into a mind-numbing guard shift, or the turds would straight-out not care enough to learn them. The TDF’s unique color-code system was not as secure, which could easily be manipulated by hostile forces, but it was considerably easier to remember and had a dual tactical purpose.

  Victor slowed his pace, and about halfway there, he gave the green call again. This was to ease the mind of the link-up person to avoid fratricide and also let Victor know the link-up person’s exact location, like playing the game Marco Polo in the dark. This communication also worked very well inside urban areas, when everyone had nervous trigger fingers.

  On approach, there was barely enough ambient light left in the evening sky to make out the shapes of Grumpy the watchman and a monstrous Gray lying facedown in the dirt.

  “QRF, push out a twenty-five-yard perimeter on this location. Eyes up, guns out,” Victor commanded. “Grumpy, what happened here?”

  Rolling down Route 55, relieved to be alive and in a moving vehicle for the first time in months, Kevin busted out into another posttraumatic laughing fit in the back of the Hummer. “Holy crap, that was a close one! Great work with that machine gun, Lieutenant. Did you see those thugs diving off the bridge? That was magnificent!”

  Kevin’s laughter quickly faded as the loud, roaring engine sputtered, rattled, and then went quiet as they quickly decelerated. Stephan had to double-grip the steering wheel, fighting against the lack of power, steering to force the wheels to turn. She steered toward a down-sloping gravel driveway, rolling to a stop near a dark farmhouse roughly seven miles from the highway’s crossroads.

  “Shit!” Stephan cried out. “I knew we couldn’t be that lucky to make it to town tonight. We need to hurry up and clear that house. It’s already dark!”

  “Lt., you and Gaylen watch the outside; Stephan and I will clear and prep the house. I wonder if we could push the Hummer around back. It’ll draw a lot of attention once the sun comes up.”

  Victor pulled Grumpy off wall-watch duty for the night. The Lake City town council, mayor, and sheriff were waiting for them as they came walking back into town. Gathering at the pavilion, once again, Victor had Grumpy retell his story, which he did in extraordinary detail. He talked fast and nervously; he was either excited from his near-death encounter or because he was speaking directly to the town’s policy makers.

  “Did you say that there were multiple Grays and they helped lift one over the wall?” asked Mrs. Cloud.

  “I was on the interior, ma’am, so I can’t say for sure. But the noises I heard, yeah, it sounded like that’s what happened. I don’t know if it got over deliberately with help or was just lucky,” Grumpy said, nervously ringing his hands.

  “Thank you, Grumpy. Take the rest of the night off and get some rest.” Victor shook his hand and patted him on his back. The sheriff told him that he had saved many lives tonight. As he was walking away toward the TDF HQ building, Victor continued, “Two concerns to immediately address: One, either the Grays are getting smarter or are starting to work together. Both are scary scenarios. Either way, we need to make border-defense improvements. Two, reports of Gray activity close to town are getting more frequent. It’s time to address how to clear them away.”

  Luckily, Stanly was absent—there was no one there to say anything counterproductive. The rest of the attendees all nodded their heads in agreement.

  “Victor, start putting together ideas on how we can lure them away from town,” the mayor said. “Raymond, can you start working on low resource–big-impact fortifications for the wall? Our labor power is getting thin. Start with easier, smaller improvements first. And lastly, I think we are ready to transmit. We’ll broadcast right after the BBN news report on the same channel and again in the morning right at sunup. With luck, someone besides our little town is also listening to BBN.”

  “For the record, I still feel it’s a bad idea, but you’re the boss,” Victor said.

  “I concur; we should fortify the wall first, because you’re going to get a lot more than helpless grandmas at the gate as soon as you announce the location of an organized community,” Raymond agreed.

  “We’ve waited long enough. We’ve relocated all the locals in the area that we could. Nobody else knows of our safe haven or your services,” concluded the mayor.

  Victor returned home to find his boys in the den, curled up on the couch and rocking chair, reading books around a homemade mason-jar candle fueled by Crazy Chad’s corn whiskey. They must have heard the earlier gunshots as well, because they each had their rifles and gear propped up next to the front door ready to go.

  “Everything OK?” Michael asked.

  “Yeah, a Gray hopped the wall. Luckily, a guard was there to take care of it. But we need to go thin the herd again and draw them away from town. Are you boys up for another black op?” Victor asked and was met with nods all around.

  The four snuck
out of town through the northern gate, heading for their most successful purging sites. They had been out here killing Grays for the past couple of weeks, yet the security incidents seemed to be getting more frequent. Apparently they were not killing enough Grays, but perhaps after tonight’s close call at the wall, the town council would finally sanction these types of culling operations, making them a daily duty. Until then, Victor knew that for security and safety, it had to be done quietly.

  Victor certainly wanted to try Raymond’s squealing-raccoon bait trick, but tonight he didn’t have the time to trap one. Tonight, they were going to attempt a new technique by playing a pulsating, high-frequency tone on a working portable tape player. The tone was outside the human audio frequency range, though Mrs. Cloud reported the Grays could still hear it. To aid in luring them in, Victor sprayed the radio player with a healthy dose of cologne to attract the Grays.

  At this hunting site, they used a technique called “wolf packing.” Michael was in the hayloft of a towering red barn a couple hundred yards away at the end of the road. Curtis was barricaded in the second-story bedroom of a house a few doors down. Zavier and Victor were camped in a small room that must have previously belonged to a young girl. Zavier seemed more distraught being trapped inside a pink room filled with dolls than by the horde of infectious death they were luring into combat.

  Ten minutes was their Standard Operating Procedure. From the time they split to the time Curtis would toss a Molotov cocktail, igniting the tire- and pallet stack and illuminating the bait area. While they waited, their minds began to wander.

  Victor still held on to hope that Erica had survived and someday they would meet again. Whenever the kids would ask about her, his heart swelled and ached at the same time. He knew the odds, but he wasn’t quite ready to accept the most plausible outcome. With each passing day, the cruel, likely reality was harder to ignore…

  Curtis was thinking of better ways to dispatch Grays in bulk. Having bodies out here in the dark pulling triggers was too dangerous and too slow. Last week, they had flooded a small street section with gasoline; the idea was to lure a bunch of Grays into the kill zone, then light them all on fire. Unfortunately, the Grays smelled the fuel and didn’t even get close. Someday, Curtis wanted to trap a Gray horde between a couple of shipping containers and then run them over with a steamroller. Yeah…

  Michael inspected the rudimentary range card that he’d drawn on the barnwood the first time they’d used this hide site. He checked his ammo placement, confirming his rifle was loaded and his scope elevation was adjusted for two hundred yards. Settling into a comfortable shooting position, he began making plans for tomorrow. Michael was going to tie up a net—that he alone had constructed out of twine—to the soccer goalposts at the community park, then beg the farmers to help him round up the fenced-in goats that grazed on the soccer field. There’d been a few younger boys in town talking trash about having superstar ball-handling skills, which they had yet to demonstrate. It was time for Michael to give them a lesson…

  Zavier got situated on the top bunk next to his dad, still cringing over being in a pink princess room. Every touch of the girly bed linen felt like boiling acid to his skin. Soon his thoughts drifted to cookies. Chocolate-chip cookies. Chewy and soft. Warm. Right out of the heat box at the old diner with a cup of fresh milk. If they didn’t have chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin would do, or peanut-butter crunch or—

  The tire stack in the middle of the street engulfed in flames. The high-frequency recording must have worked, because there was a large group of Grays already gathered. Time to wolf pack.

  The concept behind wolf packing was to deliver a constant flow of offensive precision fire from multiple dispersed, concealed positions while maximizing angles to prevent enemy’s use of cover. It also prevented the enemy from being able to pinpoint the wolf pack’s exact locations for a counterattack—if the technique was performed aggressively enough.

  When engaging, only one sniper position would attack at a time. The shooter would empty their magazine as accurately as possible. Then the next position would immediately do the same while the other guns cooled their barrels, reloaded, and gained some situational awareness, avoiding tunnel vision inside their scopes’ field of view, fix their shooting positions or if they needed to relocate, they could do so with covering fire.

  They were hidden well within the shadows of their hide sites while using suppressors, but if a hide site got compromised, the other two sniper positions could easily give fire support or cause a secondary diversion as the Grays converged. This was a very effective tactic to use on both enemy forces and Grays alike, causing mass amounts of battlefield confusion and enemy casualties.

  They all took turns crumpling and stacking lifeless infected bodies around the slowly fading fire; even in the pink princess room, little Zavier, using a Barbie pillow as a front support on a wooden bunkbed railing, removed one diseased threat after another. While Victor spotted targets for Zavier, he studied the swarm’s reactions and patterns. The individual Gray acted confused and jittery, wanting to escape from the unknown threat that was killing its companions, yet it was drawn to the mysterious sound and odor.

  Victor wished he had some sort of electronic night-vision devices to help him scan the area, preferably mounted to a weapon. But they didn’t. Shooting precision rifles at night took some getting used to, but his boys were getting better. Observing wind patterns and spotting bullet trace were nearly impossible. But there were plenty of low-light techniques that allowed standard rifles with daytime scopes to be used at night. The hardest obstacle to overcome was finding the center of the black crosshairs in the dark; having an illuminated reticle helped tremendously. Of course, that reticle illumination needed to be dialed as far down as possible to avoid washing out the eye’s natural night-vision sensitivity, which could take up to half an hour to regain.

  Having the natural illumination of a full moon could help visibility a great deal—that is, if the cloud cover would cooperate. But even with a full moon, good equipment was needed. Inside a riflescope are several lenses that light bends and refracts before passing through the pupil to the photoreceptors in the back of the eye’s retina. Highly polished lenses with an expensive coating would help prevent the loss of light transmission as it passed through each of these lenses. This was one reason why scope clarity came at a huge price tag back when people could go shopping for such things.

  Different low-light techniques had different obstacles to overcome. Temporarily lit targets—from a lightning bolt, for example, or flashing lights—were not too bad if the target was stationary. But if it’s in motion, the shooter must gauge the target’s speed, then estimate where it’ll be during the next quick lightning burst, and the sniper has to be quick on the trigger. A backlit target, like the Grays gathered between the roaring tire fire and Victor’s hide site, are silhouetted perfectly. The creatures are simple to see and track; the hardest part with backlit targets is centering a black reticle on a darkened shadowy profile.

  A front-lit target, like the Grays on the far side of the blaze, for the most part, is no different than shooting in daytime. Although the dancing flames cast wavy shadows over the landscape, making a stationary target appear to sway. An inexperienced shooter may mistakenly lead a motionless target.

  Victor’s wolf pack would continue the culling until the tire firelight diminished or until they were out of rifle ammo. The carbine and pistol ammo were reserved for the walk home. Even with Raymond’s generous stockpile of ammo he’d brought to town, ammo supplies were getting low. Tonight, in their hide sites, they each consciously collected all the empty brass shell casings to be reloaded at a later time.

  Late into the night, the four drowsy members of the covert Eradicating Team strolled back through town, not expecting to find anyone but TDF guards. If anyone were to ask what they were doing out past curfew, an “outer perimeter patrol” was their rehearsed cover story. The little wolf pack was almost to the safety
of their cozy blue Victorian home, where warm, comfortable beds called for them, when Art came rushing down the street. “You’re not going to believe this!” Art said excitedly out of breath. “You have a mission!”

  Between meeting Gaylen and hearing all her enlightening stories, Lt. Murphy’s riveting stories of Africa and Camp Grayling, and then the occasional informative BBN news broadcast, Kevin was becoming addicted to fresh information from the outside world. Secretly Stephan was, too, which was why she subtly got excited when Kevin pulled the portable HAM radio out of his backpack, unwrapped the waterproofing baggy and turned it on.

  He fumbled around for a while, scanning through the channels, always coming back to the known BBN frequency. He paced back and forth in the darkened living room of the farmhouse, searching for the perfect spot that would receive a signal better than anywhere else. Eventually, a weak voice broke through the static.

  “This is WGON, broadcasting from Lake City, Missaukee County, Michigan. Latitude +44.482147, longitude -85.178525. We are a community that can provide security, shelter, clean water, short-range transportation, and minor medical treatment. We are low on food provisions, but I say again we have ample security. If you would like to be a member of our hardworking and growing community, we can assist you. You do not need to suffer these dark times alone. We will broadcast at sunup and sundown every day, but we are always listening. This is WGON, broadcasting from Lake City. Out.”