War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

  The wail of the siren did not let up and could be heard throughout the empty streets of Worcester. It called out to the undead and brought them flocking by the tens of thousands.

  Seeing them coming was the final straw for the nurses trapped in the hospital. Collectively, their nerve broke and they too tried to make a dash for freedom. Sadly, they fared worse. One of them owned a Jeep Wrangler and because of its four-wheel drive, it was chosen as the getaway car. It didn’t make it out of the parking lot. Compared to the ambulance, it was far too light and couldn’t generate the same momentum.

  The fourth zombie they hit nearly exploded the windshield. The safety glass held, even with half a body sticking through it. The fifth beast got caught up just under the grill and acted like a plow. The jeep no longer bounced over the dead, it built them up in front in a gory mound going slower and slower.

  Seconds later, the nurses abandoned their escape and reversed back to the hospital, chased by hundreds of monsters. They fled inside and ran up to the third floor where they were trapped along with their patients. It was obvious that they wouldn’t be trapped for long.

  The zombies that had been attacking the Quinsigamond River, an estimated one million of them, were drawn to the hospital by the siren and soon they were assaulting the building itself. Doors were torn apart, windows were shattered; even the walls and bricks were attacked.

  A Predator did a fly-by at one point and the pictures returned made even the toughest soldier shudder. Zombies buried the entire hospital. They looked like grey ants, undulating in a frenzied mound. Inside, the nurses did the only thing they could. Life support systems were shut off and mega-doses of drugs were given out like candy.

  2-1:30 p.m.

  The White House, Washington D.C.

  Trista Price broke before either Heider or Phillips. She was a dragged-out, sniveling mess, and when Heider had his toes smashed with a hammer, she fled.

  “For your sake, I’ll edit that out,” David Kazakoff said, pulling her into the next room. “Get yourself cleaned up before the President comes back. You know he hates weakness.”

  The President had changed a great deal in the last few days. Now, showing emotion, especially sympathy for those accused of treason, was considered a sign of affinity. If it went too far, collusion was thought to be a possibility. There was even talk of a double secret confederacy in which too little empathy would make one suspect.

  The laughable “Face Crimes” proposed by George Orwell in 1984, were no longer restricted to the realm of the fantastic. Everyone went about guarded, afraid that an errant smirk would be misconstrued.

  “You need to stop,” she whispered. “He’s confessed over and over. That’s all he’s been doing.”

  “Yeah, but not to the right crimes.” The President “knew” there was an overarching conspiracy with someone bigger than an ass-kissing nobody like Marty Aleman in charge. And because he “knew” it, proof had to be found. Heider, the old Secretary of Defense, seemed like the right villain but when Kazakoff suggested it, the President waved the idea off.

  There weren’t too many people higher on the totem pole than Heider, at least that made sense.

  “What about the Speaker of the House?” Kazakoff mused.

  “You can’t believe that!” Trista whispered. “She snuck out of town three days ago. Besides, she and the President go way back. They’re in the same party, in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last five years.”

  Kazakoff laughed, gently. “I think the concept of parties is out the window and I couldn’t be happier. All that in-fighting and hypocrisy made me sick.”

  “And this is better? He’s gone crazy or he’s getting there, and you’re helping by feeding his paranoia. You should know better. You heard their confessions the same as me. The three of them kept everyone out of the loop.”

  The CIA asset gazed down at the girl; her tears had turned her almost into a child in his eyes. “Who would you replace him with? Like you said, the Speaker’s bugged out. The Veep is even more of a pussy than the President. Do you want me to free Heider and let an admitted traitor take over the country? Trust me, once a general gets in power there’s no getting them out again short of a civil war.”

  A part of her knew that he was right on one level, but on every other level he was dead wrong.

  He reached out a hand to smooth down her blonde hair, saying, “No, we stick with the President. This is still America. If we win this thing, a president can be voted out. It’ll be expected.”

  Trista didn’t believe him, especially after Heider finally broke. It wasn’t the torture that finally made him sign the confession the President wanted. Kazakoff eventually conceded that in Phillips and Heider, he was dealing with men of honor who would gladly accept any pain to retain that honor…as long it was themselves was being tortured.

  When Kazakoff brought in their families, both broke immediately.

  “All three of them implicated the Vice President,” Kazakoff told the President, handing over the doctored video tapes and the signed confessions. His conversation with Trista had sprung the idea of using the VP as the scapegoat; the man was worthless otherwise.

  “I knew it!” the President cried, his hands curled into fists, veins bulging on his neck. He turned to the David Blaise, Director of the FBI. “Find him. Find him and arrest him. I want him taken alive.”

  Blaise stood like a statue for a long moment, his mind rebelling against what was being asked of him. He knew deep down that there was no way the VP was part of this.

  “Find him,” the President repeated. “Or I’ll find someone who will.” The threat was clear and Blaise left, his face blank.

  Kazakoff was thanked and then sent back into his torture chambers to extract more confessions; after all, there had been over eight hundred arrests so far and the number was growing by the hour, as the Political Officers began to feel their power.

  Not long after this, Trista Price, made-up once again, was pulled aside by the man she worked for—she still couldn’t remember his name or what her title was supposed to be. “I need you to do something important,” he whispered. She didn’t like how the sweat was beading up on his lip. “You’ve been working downstairs, right?” She nodded, already afraid of where this was going. “Good. Good. That’s good. You should be used to all this by now. I’m going to need you to, uh oversee the uh, the first three executions.”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “I already told the President and he’s uh please as punch. So, okay we’ll get this set up. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Even if she wanted to refuse, it was too late. The President was… “Please as punch,” she said in a strangled voice. Things, including executions, it seemed, were moving so quickly there was almost no time to even consider protesting.

  A judge read the confessions, signed off on the death warrants and, before Trista could even find a suitable location, a squad of soldiers had been assembled. They were all younger than Trista; they looked like boys playing dress-up and she wondered if they would really pull the triggers when the time came.

  If not, would she be blamed? Would she be suspected and arrested? Would she be next to one visited by Kazakoff?

  She knew better than to do anything except what was ordered. There had been other interns who had come to the White House with her. Since coming up from the lower floor, she had already seen two of them in handcuffs.

  Her mind was still spinning when Phillips, Heider and Marty Aleman were brought up. The two soldiers were bloody and bruised, but also defiant. Marty, although he seemed to have been hardly touched, whined, and cringed like an abused cur.

  Trista began to argue that she wasn’t ready and that she didn’t even have a location yet. Inside the White House seemed horribly disrespectful and outside on the grounds was distasteful. A few vans could be found, she was sure, and driven to some remote location; a rusting old warehouse, empty save for the sinister rats and the dust, sprang to mind.

&nbs
p; “It has to be now,” her boss said, thrusting a tripod with a video camera attached at her. “The President is going to announce the executions during the two o’clock presser.”

  Down the hall, a hundred year old crystal-faced clock showed that it was eighteen minutes before two. “Shouldn’t like a lawyer or someone from the Attorney General’s office be doing this?”

  Her boss had been somewhat handsome two days before. Now he was pinched and haggard. “You would think so, except most were either arrested or were fired for questioning the legality of this, so unless you want to join them, don’t screw this up.”

  He ducked away before she could ask him where he wanted her to carry out the killing. There was a lot of ducking away going on. No one wanted to be a part of it; Trista most of all. She didn’t have a choice.

  “It has to be close and it has to out of sight. If the press finds out and follows us…” She didn’t want to think about that. The only problem was that everything close to the White House was touristy. “But all the tourists have left!” Suddenly she knew where to go: The Smithsonian Museum. Many of the museums had below-ground galleries, and the closest of them, the Renwick, had a low basement. The year before, she’d been given a tour of the place by a randy guide who had hoped to score.

  “Follow me,” she ordered, handing over the tripod to one of the soldiers. Without looking at the prisoners, she set off through the West Wing in a rush. With his crushed toes, Heider couldn’t keep up. He hobbled along and any insistence at hurrying was laughed at.

  “Why on earth should I hurry?”

  Trista couldn’t think of a reason and so she ran ahead and yelled at the Secret Service agents gathered around the entrance until three black SUVs were brought around. It seemed like a waste since they only had a block and a half to travel. Time was against her. Eleven minutes left.

  They were at the Renwick with a few minutes to spare. The execution squad let themselves inside the museum as one of the bigger soldiers shouldered in the front door, setting off an alarm that went ignored. Heider had to be carried down the stairs and Marty dragged, weeping. Phillips went down with his head held high, almost scraping the low ceiling of the basement. It was cold place with damp brick walls and less light than she remembered. Trista seemed more afraid than anyone, except for Marty, of course.

  In the semi-dark Phillips face was carved by shadows so that he looked like his head belonged guarding a beach on Easter Island. “Your orders may be theoretically lawful,” he said, moving to the closest of the walls, “but the man who’s giving them is unhinged. Remember the 25th Amendment and do your duty.” Only Trista knew what the 25th Amendment was. She dropped her eyes, knowing that he was right and worrying that fear would keep everyone from doing the right thing. Fear certainly controlled her. She had her excuses: her youth, her sex, her physical weakness. It was her moral weakness which was the real issue, and she knew it.

  A check of her watch showed that she had only four minutes left. “I-I wish we had more time, you know, for last words or some sort of ceremony.”

  Heider was lifted to his feet. “Does it matter? Would any of you bother to remember what was said? Would you run the risk of recording it? I doubt it. You might as well just get it over with.”

  Marty Aleman had the opposite view of things and began to beg one of the soldiers who had a cigarette corked in his mouth. The soldier’s head was held rigidly back and he was sucking so deeply on the Marlboro that Trista could see the outlines of his skull through his lean flesh.

  “I’d like mine in the back of the head,” Phillips said. When Heider agreed, Phillips helped his friend down, before dropping to his knees. Marty had to be thrown forward where he sat cross-legged, his back bowed, his hands over his face.

  “I-I think a s-silent count of three should work,” Trista said, “like this.” She brought her hand down in a short chopping motion three times and on the last, shot a finger out.

  There were seven soldiers. One worked the camera, while the others brought their weapons up, two aiming at each of the prisoners. “Safeties off,” one said and they all checked their rifles.

  “Ready?” Trista asked. They nodded and she began her quick count-down. On the third stroke, the guns went off and blood flew.

  Two blocks away, a grim, solemn President stepped in front of his podium and sighed. “Before we get to the military briefing, I have to announce a grave situation that has been unfolding for the last few days. It saddens me to say that there has been a coup attempt made against my presidency by members of the military and led by the Vice President. Sadly, this entire, unfortunate situation was their brain child. These ‘zombies’ were a concoction developed by the military industrial complex.”

  A hundred questions were shouted at him at once. Rather than answering any of them, he said, “I have had the confessions of the three top conspirators emailed to each of you.” The President hid his smile as the reporters danced to his tune and quickly unlimbered laptops or pulled out cellphones. They read the confessions and, as with most people, the reporters believed almost everything set down in writing. Marty Aleman would have been so proud as the reporters began to look up, eager for more.

  Chapter 15

  1-2:11 p.m.

  Newville, Pennsylvania

  Major General Thomas Cannan orchestrated his own dance. He had great and terrible weapons at his disposal, and he had to hold back on the eager desire to unleash them all in one great outpouring of volcanic rage. No, he had to husband his resources.

  This war was one of attrition and if he had any chance of winning this particular battle, he had to make every shot count. His batteries of howitzers were twinned with small, hawk-sized battlefield drones that darted far in front of the lines searching out the largest concentrations of the dead. The positions were radioed to the howitzer crews and seconds later huge shells ripped through the sky overhead. The vast explosions tore great bloody swathes through the advancing zombie army.

  Next came the A10s and the Apaches, cutting across the open valley at angles, blasting lanes through the beasts and further chopping up the army.

  The gathered political officers watched the drone feeds, shook their heads and looked to Courtney Vertanen, who was sour-faced, her lips pursed as if she were sucking the seeds out of a lemon.

  Cannan, who saw the looks, growled in that undertone way of his, “Fucking nervous nellies.”

  “We’re not nervous,” Vertanen lied. “These tactics just don’t make sense.” She pointed at one of the battle progression monitors. “Wouldn’t it be smarter for those planes to cut across the front of the zombies? And the artillery is firing at parts of the zombie army that won’t be here for half an hour.”

  “That’s because in half an hour we’ll still want to be here and fighting,” he explained. “Remember, you were going to trust that I have a method to my madness? The warthogs and the gunships are doing exactly as I have asked them. We actually want to leave some of them unharmed. This division…our division, is a combined arms unit. We can engage and destroy the enemy coming and going, only as long as all the parts work together as a team and at their peak efficiency.”

  Cannan could see that although that sounded nice, none of the POs really believed it. They were all Washington ass-kissers, and their main goals had always been career advancement—they were self-oriented and couldn’t see past the tips of their noses.

  He tried again, “The idea is that if we purposefully allow some zombies through each zone of the battlefield, they’ll eventually hit the line in manageable numbers. We believe that the line will hold under the pressure of up to four thousand zombies per linear mile.”

  This admission had every one of the political officers glaring at Vertanen. “Four thousand at a time?” she asked, trying to keep up a casually brave appearance, and failing miserably. “That seems like way too many. Perhaps you should start with two-thousand.”

  “A little late for that, I think,” Cannan answered. The defensiv
e line bulged outward, almost in the exact center where a small community had been built up around Big Springs High School and Big Springs Middle School. The general had made sure to keep the monitors showing that section of the line turned away from the gaggle of political officers.

  Now he put it on the largest monitor and they all saw the zombies bearing down on this salient.

  “Have you ever seen a waltz?” he asked. “There’s all these dancers turning and spinning, and you’d think they go crashing into each other, but they don’t. This is just like a waltz. It’s all about control. Trust me, every soldier out there wants to just start blasting away. Our job is to control them, and by doing so, we control the battle.”

  He pointed to the screen where the soldiers were waiting pensively, many of them chain smoking cigarettes right down to the filters.

  When the beasts were seven hundred meters away, the mortars were cued and smaller explosions began to land among the undead. Although many were killed, the explosions had the added effect of causing eddies within the advancing army. Sometimes the undead would flock in towards where the explosion took place and at others they went in circles, chasing smoke.

  At five hundred meters, the tank commanders finally got their turn. From the start, they had wanted to unleash their steel monsters into the horde, knowing that the Abrams could not be stopped by a thousand of the creatures or even ten thousand. But they could be stopped, Cannan knew.

  “Go,” Cannan relayed to his armored units. Most people thought of the M1A2 Abrams as a tank killer, first and foremost, but it was also deadly against infantry. The usual antitank M829A2 round that could be fired at ranges of up to 3,000 meters had been left behind. The tanks only carried M1028 canister rounds, which were anti-personnel/anti-helicopter munition that were packed with over 1,000 tungsten balls. These turned mobs of zombies into a field of black goo with one blast.