The Failed Coward

by Chris Philbrook

  Kevin came back to reality when he realized Reeves was addressing him directly again. “Shit I’m sorry General. I was spacing out. What’d you say again?”

  Reeve’s eyes flared open in a fresh batch of fury at Kevin. His lips trembled as he tried to find the words to properly express his newfound fury over being ignored while he was on his soapbox. On the cots around the two sparring men Quan, Fitz, Harold and Kyle watched on, trying to contain their laughter. Reeves caught on that he was the butt of their joke, and after releasing a rather substantial and rather impressive string of colorful profanity, he stormed out of the converted office the men shared together.

  After a few awkward moments of stifled laughter, the men busted out with thick, raucous guffaws. Boys will be boys after all.

  Even when you’ve long since been out of the actual military, fucking with the chain of command never gets old. Kevin watched his men laugh, and rested his head into the flattened pillow and tried to get some sleep. It had been a hell of a trip back from Manchester.

  *****

  Kevin was in a conversation he didn’t remember starting.

  “Look sir, there’s no need to apologize. We knew what we were getting into when we enlisted. We knew what we were getting into when we signed the contract with WPG too. Dying was always a possibility, and you couldn’t have known what was going to happen that day. Let it go Kevin. Let it go.” Kevin listened to the bloody faced young Marine in his dress blues. Dimly Kevin realized that Nate was dead, but still talking to him somehow.

  Kevin couldn’t figure out where the hell this conversation was being held. It seemed to him like they were standing in a white room filled with warm, white light. He thought he made out the shape of a small round table behind the two Marines, but he too confused to make heads or tails of what was going on. Was this a dream? Was everything that had happened all a dream? Would Kevin wake up in his bed back in south Boston, or wherever it was he had been sent on a contract for WPG?

  Corey, the other dead Marine that had served on Kevin’s protection detail in Jerusalem back in June was standing next to Nate and shared the same bloody face. Corey had the same vaguely chipper demeanor, despite being dead. “Yeah Kevin relax. Besides, shit is about to get thick for you, and you need to be on motherfucking point if Quan, Fitz and Kyle are gonna make it out this time. There won’t be much time when it happens. Plus there’s Alan’s family to think about too. Little Shelby.”

  What in the holy fuck were they talking about? Kevin tried to ask them, but his mouth felt like it was filled with sand. He forced his lungs to fill with air to speak, but when he tried to talk, nothing happened. It was like treading water in an ocean of confused silence.

  Nate and Corey looked at each other and laughed. They adjusted their brilliant white covers with equally snow white dress gloves. Kevin suddenly realized that even bloodied and dead, they were handsome, and still exuded the quiet confidence that made him put them on his team in the first place.

  Suddenly Corey’s dress saber appeared in his hands, and he swung it to attention at his shoulder, presenting it to Kevin in some unfamiliar ritual. Kevin tried to ask him why he was acting weird with the sword, but again his mouth came up empty of words. The soft white light of the dreamscape surrounding them made the polished steel of the sword gleam with inner radiance. Kevin was transfixed by the sword as Corey swung it around deftly, and slid it into the scabbard with practiced precision. Even sheathed Kevin could feel the restrained power of the weapon. A faint glow emanated from the scabbard, teasing at the potential of the blade within. Corey patted the hilt of the sword intently three times. The three men were silent for an eternity before one of them spoke again.

  Nate was the one who broke the ethereal silence. “Time for you to go boss. Oh yeah, remember man, the rule of three. We were supposed to tell you that. Don’t forget. Rule of three Kevin. It’s very important. Be strong for Shelby. Give her and Becky our love.” Nate patted Kevin on the shoulder three times as Kevin tried to ask what the fuck the rule of three meant.

  He was so lost.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Kevin’s eyes snapped open in the dark office where his men slept aside him soundly. His arms were tucked above his head and under his pillow where his Glock was. His fingers slid around the grip as he tried to see where the tapping on his shoulder came from in the pitch black room.

  Above his head he saw the white light of the flood lamps swing left and right from the roof. Even without pointing directly at them the lights were powerful enough to illuminate the office, and Kevin saw there was no one in the room with them.

  His bizarre dream came back to him in a familiar wave, and his heart rate settled down. “All a dream buddy, all a dream,” he muttered to himself under his breath. Kevin sat up on the edge of his squeaky cot, resting his bare feet on the cool tile and he realized that he was covered in a thin film of salty sweat. He felt a bead of it trickle down the center of his chest between his chest hairs. He had been lying with nothing on top of him, and he felt it was odd to be so warm as to sweat that bad. This was England in early autumn, not Abu Dhabi in summer. Maybe he was getting a case of the shits he thought. Fresh air would help.

  Kevin tugged his trousers on and slid the Glock into the ever present thigh holster. He didn’t bother putting a heavier shirt on over his tank top. It was late enough, and anyone who felt like giving him shit about it could suck his cock.

  Kevin noticed Hal wasn’t in his bed, and made sure the rest of his men were all safe and sound in the dark room. He slipped out into the hall, and wandered to the stairwell to get to the roof. The roof was his escape at night.

  When he pushed through the fire door at the top of the stairwell onto the squat, old office building they lived in, he inhaled deeply of the early August English air. There had been a light rain recently, and the dampness clung to the nighttime like a comforting blanket. The air had a rich volume to it, and it cleared his mind as he stood there, head tilted back, letting it flush his lungs of the stuffy air from the building.

  “Fancy meeting you here old man.” Kevin heard a familiar British voice call out to him. He looked over and saw Harold standing ten paces away holding a pair of NVGs at chest height. The dark-skinned man smiled, and Kevin saw the gleam of his pearly white teeth in the faint moonlight.

  Kevin smiled back at his adopted operator and walked over, looking out at the far perimeter of the base, beyond the wire, and into the no man’s land of south east England.

  “Up late huh? What’s got you out and about?” Kevin fished a pack of cigarettes out of a pants pocket and fired the cancerous rod up with a flick of his old Zippo. Old habits die hard he thought as he tugged his lungs full of the rich smoke.

  “I heard one of the sniper teams talking when I was shutting off me radio earlier. There’s a lot of strange movement on the barrier and at the gates. Wanted to check it out myself.” The heavy flood lights had extinguished and the world was dark again. Hal held up the NVGs to his eyes and scoped out the distant wall of Hesco barriers.

  “Strange movement? Is that a fucking joke? Anytime the dead stand back up, and move around and shit, that’s the pure dictionary defin-fuckin-ition of strange movement Hal. You gotta present something really fucking bizarre to classify as strange movement nowadays.” Kevin laughed at his own joke as he exhaled the smoke.

  Harold didn’t respond at all, he just stared out over the barrier at the darkness in the distance. Kevin saw him swallow hard, and lower the night vision device. “We need to get to one of the sniper teams mate. If what I think I just saw is really happening out there, then we are bloody well fucked. What’s the expression you like so much? A real toe pusher?”

  Kevin had never seen Hal nervous. That made him nervous.

  *****

  “Are you guys seeing this on your ends?” One of the special operations snipers asked into his small throat microphone, talking to some other shooter/spotter team somewhere else on the massive airbase. There could
be fifty or more of these shooter/spotter teams out there, spread out to watch for events on the wire.

  Mildenhall housed something like 15 or 16 thousand people normally, and had enough people inside its walls and fences now to classify itself as a city. Even more people called it home now. They’d let locals in, especially the ones that worked on the base, or were friends with service members on the base. The base’s population had swollen by a few thousand more at the very least.

  Kevin couldn’t hear the responses the spotter got in his earpiece. He resorted to watching the operator hold his hand to his ear and nod. Reading his body language told Kevin everything he needed to know. Something “strange” was indeed afoot out in the wilds, on the edge of the base.

  The shooter member of the team in the tower Harold and Kevin had ascended to the top of was laying flat on his stomach on the floor. He had the heavy barrel of his rifle aimed at a slot cut in the wall of the tower. Conventional sniper wisdom always told the shooter to remain far inside their hide so the barrel wasn’t visible, and just like Kevin’s smoking, old habits die hard. The shooter looked over his shoulder and Kevin recognized him as Ethan, one of the PJ’s that had rolled out to Manchester with them. The two exchanged greetings quietly.

  “You wanna see this?” Ethan asked Kevin, pointing to the night vision optics on the rifle. “It’s pretty fucked up man.”

  Kevin didn’t even reply. He dropped to his chest immediately next to Ethan and the man slid over so Kevin could get behind the assassin’s tool. Kevin shouldered the weapon and through his right eye, the pitch black world took on a toxic green light.

  The technology that brought light to the dark did so with a green effect. The night through the scope was the color of neon green, dark forests, limes, and clovers. It took some adjusting to truly “see” the world in those colors, but a soldier with his experience took to the NVG world like a fish would to water.

  Kevin panned left and right at a spot in the fence where the base hadn’t done sufficient improvements or repairs yet. The only thing keeping the undead out of the base at that particular location was a chain link fence and the accurate shooting of the teams in a trio of hastily built towers just like this one.

  The less fortified gap in the wall around the base was shoulder to shoulder with the undead. Mildenhall was far enough away from any large population center that the amount of undead that trickled to the base was manageable. The shooters took down large groups of them when they got out of hand, and for the most part, there had been no issues.

  This was disturbing to Ethan, Kevin, and Harold for two reasons. Kevin listened to Ethan as he narrated Kevin’s thoughts, “Shit Kev, we’ve never seen so many here before. The other teams are saying it’s just as thick at every point around base. They started showing up a couple hours ago, right around 0330 or so. ”

  Kevin’s mind flashed back to Nate and Corey in his dream just minutes before.

  The rule of three.

  “Any chance it was about 0333?” Kevin asked.

  “Yeah actually. Right about then. Not like we were looking at our watches exactly when it happened, but yeah. We don’t know how they got so close with all of us watching. I mean it’s like they fucking turned invisible or something, or someone pulled the wool over our eyes with super secret technology or magic or whatever to sneak ‘em up. Romulan cloaking devices, or the Predator, or Gandalf or some shit.” Ethan laughed nervously.

  Kevin didn’t.

  Ethan’s last observation chilled the veteran straight to his bones. “But can you see what they’re carrying? All of them? Each and every last one of the motherfuckers?”

  Kevin looked through the scope and nodded silently, not wanting to say it aloud.

  Each of the undead Kevin could see were carrying knives, swords, machetes, sickles, and a whole assortment of bladed weapons. The dead held the weapons in limp, uninterested hands, oblivious to the value of the tools they clutched.

  “I mean how the hell did they figure out how to use weapons all of a sudden? It’s fucking creepy Kevin. Makes my damn blood run cold.” Ethan shivered in the warm English night.

  All Kevin could see was Corey’s dress saber gleaming in the white room of his dream in his mind’s eye.

  *****

  The relative calm of August and September gave way to a nightmare straight from the depths of Hell in October and November.

  Through the cold, rainy autumn Mildenhall endured an epic siege of the dead.

  General Reeves’ immediate response to the sudden appearance of thousands of the dead was to observe, and do nothing. As the first few days wore on, it became apparent the undead were behaving like never before. Each held a bladed weapon in its right hand just as Kevin had seen. All of the dead stood at the gates and makeshift fences, barriers and walls impassively, even when the living came into their view. Previously the murderous dead would surge forward when the living appeared, scratching and biting through the fences, but they stopped that. It appeared as if the undead had a strategy, and it was one of terrible patience.

  The initial time of the encroachment continued on until the base was surrounded by a full legion of the damned. The undead stacked themselves a hundred deep in every direction, creating a moat of shuffling, putrid flesh. Opening the gates of the airbase to leave, or to allow others to come in became an impossible dream. The only way to come and go was via aircraft. The bombing sorties leaving the base left constantly all day and night under the watchful vigil of the wretched army standing mysteriously idle so close by.

  Kevin and his team had gently removed themselves from the childcare building late in September when it became apparent things were not going to go well for the residents of RAF Mildenhall. Kevin searched far and wide on the base for old friends, and friends of friends who could pull strings to get them a more secure place to live. Eventually they sacrificed peace and quiet for safety by moving into a ramshackle home made of Hesco barriers, 2x4s, plywood, and canvas near the tarmac and next to the hangars for the MC-130 transport aircraft.

  Kevin searched out an MC-130 flight crew that was acquaintances of Jaden and Ethan. Kevin desperately needed a plan B, and immediately he knew they were it. The flight crew was led by the pretty and feisty 32 year old Captain Kate Haskett, and just like Kevin and his men, she and her crew wanted a plan B.

  Kate, Jaden, and Kevin’s teams worked together to ensure that if the airfield was overrun, or the proper opportunity presented itself, they were able to leave. Normally Kate and her crew transported special operations forces and supplies around the world, but her sorties were largely changed to ferrying cargo about England. Mostly she shuttled ammunition and ordnance. Jaden’s men were considerably busier because of the base’s security needs and overwhelming amount of military aircraft flying at the time. Jaden’s men were often tasked to the Combat Search and Rescue teams in the event planes went down, and they frequently did. Parts were becoming harder and harder to obtain for the aging planes and helicopters. Every flight was considered high risk now.

  “What the fuck are we going to do when none of the planes can fly?” Kate had asked the assembled group late one August night under the shadow of her plane’s enormous wing. “Swim home? They can kiss my dyke ass.” She swigged from her Bud Light and shook her head in disgust.

  Kate’s opinion on the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell policy’ was more of a ‘deal with, or I’ll fist you’ policy. The military’s policy on Kate specifically was one of reluctant tolerance. She was a damn fine pilot. Everyone around her loved her. Kevin thought she was a hot shit.

  Every one at that conversation that night had agreed with her. Things were not getting better fast enough, and morale on the sprawling airbase had slipped dramatically. No one wanted to be the first to suggest treason and steal a plane to leave, or even knew where to fly it to, but it was on everyone’s mind.

  “We need to squirrel supplies away for us. Enough for everyone here to survive for some time in the event w
e need to be wheels up in 20 minutes.,” Kevin suggested. Murmurs of agreement issued from those gathered around.

  Jaden nodded. “Parts, fuel, ammunition, weapons, MREs, comms gear, a shitload of medical supplies, batteries, anything we’d need on a long insertion. We’d need to assume we are never getting a resupply again after we take off. We all need to know that if we leave the wire like this, there’s no coming back inside it.”

  Sobering thought. If they took a bird and flew the coop, there really was no going back. Reeves may not be able to bring a court martial against Kevin’s men, but he could see to it the still serving pilots and airmen were executed. The high price of high treason.

  “No one says shit to anyone not sitting right here, right now. We take us and only us. We formulate an exit strategy to get off from the base, we quietly accumulate supplies that we need until then, and we have a few flight plans ready to go in the event our fuel level isn’t sufficient to make it to the States.” Kevin looked over at Becky playing with Shelby in the corner of the massive hangar. The child had taken to the environment like a champ, and having all the people around pulled Becky back to the real world again. He then looked to Harold, the British Marine who had been with them since their narrow escape from London back in June.

  Harold rubbed the short hair on his head as everyone around aimed their attention at him. He looked around quizzically, wondering why they were looking at him. Eventually he smiled, “Oh I see. No one wants the black guy to come eh? Fucking Americunts.” He shook his head, sarcasm thick in the air.

  Everyone laughed at his joke. It cut the tension in the echo filled hangar bay. Kevin addressed him, “Hal, you’re not American, this is your home. I guess I just expected you to stay behind. I don’t want to presume you’re gonna leave your home for this. With us. I think we all want you to know you’re more than welcome to come along. I'd love to have you.”