His Name Was Zach

by Peter Martuneac

  After they were both exhausted from their training, Abby asked Zach if they could do a little dancing. Abby had done a few different types of dancing in the ‘Before Times’ and was very talented, especially at ballet. So while Zach would teach her to fight, she would teach Zach to dance. For the next half hour, until the sun went down, Abby was hard at work teaching Zach a folk dance, but he was rather clumsy on his feet and was slow to grasp what she was teaching. At one point, he stumbled and almost fell, but caught himself. “Shit,” he muttered.

  “Hey, language,” Abby said disapprovingly.

  “Sorry, Bug,” he replied. Whenever he swore Abby would remind him that she didn’t tolerate cursing in their home. He loved that about her, how she could still retain the innocence of childhood in such a bleak world. And so he tried his best to not curse, or at least not when she was within earshot.

  Abby just grinned and shook her head and then resumed her dance lesson. She liked dancing with Zach. He enjoyed it, too. It reminded him that just because the world was a dangerous place in which even little girls needed to know such unsavory things as knife fighting, there was still a time and a place for dancing.

  Once they were done, Abby went to her room to read her new magazine and wait for supper. She loved looking at the pictures in the magazines and reading about how people lived before the dead started walking the earth. She had still been a young child when the outbreaks started, and had moved around several times from Texas all the way up to Chicago during her childhood, and so did not know much about modern culture. There was an ad in the magazine for a special line of make-up, and Abby wished that she could try it. She wanted to look pretty like the lady shown in the ad.

  Meanwhile, Zach was sitting in one of the chairs at their small wooden table, listening to some music from his iPod, lost in his thoughts…

  The gunfight had been going on for almost half an hour now, and Sergeant Zach Davidson was running low on ammo. He was the squad leader for 2nd squad, 1st platoon, and today was supposed to be an easy day. They had been tasked with conducting a routine security patrol through this little, God-forsaken town in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. But one of the interpreters in his company was a mole, and had leaked information about this patrol to the local Taliban the day before it was scheduled to happen. Sergeant Davidson had protested several times against scheduling patrols so far in advance, even to his battalion commander’s face, but the lieutenant colonel had insisted upon it.

  So now Sergeant Davidson and his boys, twelve other Marines plus one Navy Corpsman, had been ambushed by a much larger force. The sergeant didn’t know it, but the enemy had brought dozens of trained insurgents to bear against the American Marines, and that was not including the almost entirely hostile civilian presence in the town that the Taliban had taken the liberty of arming for this attack. As it was, the Marines were pinned down in the middle of the town’s market by an enemy force that numbered almost three hundred, and they were taking fire from all directions. Three Marines were already dead, and five were wounded, but two of those five could still fight.

  Sergeant Davidson had been requesting mortar, artillery, and even air support since the very beginning, but the answer was always the same: too many civilians were in the area. “There are no civilians here! They’re all shooting at us!” he shouted back into the radio’s handset.

  “Calm down, 1-2. QRF is still escorting the battalion commander’s convoy, but they should be at your position in about twenty minutes, over,” was the response from the company headquarters.

  “What about the CASEVAC birds?”

  “Still too hot, 1-2. Just sit tight and wait for QRF.”

  “Tell them to hurry the fuck up!” Davidson shouted, and he shoved the handset back at his radio operator. A man with a rifle appeared on a rooftop down the street. Sergeant Davidson raised his M4 and fired two shots, both impacting the man in his chest.

  “What’d they say?” shouted Lance Corporal Ferrier, one of his team leaders.

  “QRF is still with the BC. ETA is twenty mikes!”

  “Fuck! You’re shittin’ me!”

  Sergeant Davidson just shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “RPG!” someone shouted. Everyone instinctively hit the deck and heard the WHOOOOOSH of the incoming rocket pass overhead. It exploded into a building behind the Marines, harming no one, but they could still feel the gut-punching concussion from the explosion.

  Immediately following the rocket-propelled grenade came loud, repeating thumps, like the sound of a heavy sledgehammer hitting a thick plank of wood over and over. It was a DShK, the Russian cousin to America’s M-2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun. It was about one hundred meters away, hidden inside a small, one-story mud hut. Sergeant Davidson and his Marines got low to the ground as the huge incoming rounds tore up the marketplace.

  “Adams! Prep the AT-4!” Davidson yelled to the Marine carrying an anti-tank rocket. “1-2! Increase your rates of fire! Conner, Ferrier, 203’s out, towards the DShK!” The Marines did as they were told as Davidson crawled forward a bit. “Russell, give me six seconds of the cyclic rate!” he shouted to his machine gunner, who was in the prone behind some cover, defending one of the avenues of approach single-handedly with the help of his M240B, a medium machine gun. His ammo man had been killed, so all of the extra ammo for the gun had just been set down next to him, but Davidson could see that all of the ammo cans were empty except for one.

  “Rocket prepped!” Adams yelled as the Marines’ gunfire suddenly picked up significantly.

  “Kill that fucker!” Davidson yelled as he motioned towards the DShK.

  With the enemy momentarily suppressed, except for the well-covered DShK, Adams ran out into the middle of the road, taking a knee just behind his squad’s position so as to not hit any of his guys with the rocket’s back-blast. Bullets hissed past him as the DShK gunner tried to bring Adams down, but he held his composure, aimed down the sights, and then fired the rocket. It burst from its tube and tore through the air as Adams dove back towards cover.

  There was a loud explosion, and the Marines gave a short but jubilant cheer as the entire building that the DShK had been hiding in was obliterated in a cloud of smoke and fire.

  “Good shit, Adams!” Davidson yelled over his shoulder. He then turned back to his machine gunner and yelled, “Russell! Ammo count!”

  “Seventy, at most!” Russell replied.

  “Fuck me,” said the sergeant. That machine gun was the only thing keeping them alive for this long, and once it was down the enemy would probably overrun them. All of his men were almost out of ammo for their rifles. And on top of that, they’d now used all of their M203 grenade launcher rounds, fired their lone AT-4 rocket, and had thrown all their hand grenades.

  Sergeant Davidson gave the command for his men to fix bayonets and then got on the radio again. “Lima Main, this is 1-2! It is fifty shades of fucked up out here! We need some goddamn support before we get into some World War I shit!” There was no response for a few seconds.

  “1-2, Main. I need a ‘no bullshit’ situation report. Can you guys possibly last another fifteen mikes?”

  “NEGATIVE! We are critically low on ammo and down to just half my men! We need support so we can get these casualties out!”

  The net was silent for just a moment, but it felt like an hour. Then a voice came over the radio and said, “1-2, this is Captain Butler. The BC is still denying you support on account of the civilian populace…but fuck him and his dreams of picking up Colonel. We’ve got mortars on-station here so spin up a fire mission for me and you’ll get your support.”

  “Roger, standby for that fire mission!” shouted Sergeant Davidson, who then gave the captain his ten-digit grid location, enemy strongpoints in the immediate vicinity, and recommended where he thought rounds would be best placed.

  “1-2, be advised that these rounds are going to bring a whole new meaning to the term ‘danger close’.”

  “I understand, sir!”


  “Roger, guns will be hot in one mike. Standby and take cover.”

  “Roger! 1-2 out!”

  Davidson then yelled to his Marines, “One mike! We got 81’s inbound in one mike!” Bullets hissed past his head as he said this, and he turned to see a man dashing across the street about fifty meters away, spraying and praying with an AK-47 as he ran. Davidson lifted his rifle and fired a round at the man, but as soon as the bullet left the barrel, the bolt locked back; his magazine was empty. He took a knee behind some cover so he could reload.

  He ejected the empty mag, but before he could grab a fresh one, an armed insurgent burst from an alleyway, no more than three feet in front of Davidson. The man looked wildly surprised to find himself face to face with the Americans, and he brought his gun up to shoot, but Davidson was already on him. The sergeant was not a huge man, being about average in both height and weight, but he was still more than a match for the young Afghan man in front of him.

  He tackled the man to the ground and then mounted him. With his left hand, he shoved the man’s head sideways and down into the sand. As the man struggled to get the Marine off of him, Davidson used his other hand to draw his KA-BAR and slam it into the man’s chest. He cried out with pain, but Davidson pulled the knife free and stabbed the man again, this time in the throat, killing him almost instantly.

  Davidson ran back to cover and retrieved his rifle. He slammed a fresh mag into the rifle and sent the bolt forward, chambering a round. “Last mag,” he reminded himself. They had to get out of there soon. He checked his watch: thirty seconds until mortars struck.

  Davidson looked around at what was left of his squad. Most of these guys were not even twenty yet. They were just kids, and while their friends back home were somewhere at college, discussing war and America’s presence in the Middle East, these kids were on the other side of the world fighting that war. They were far from home, far from their loved ones, and thus far, three of Davidson’s men would not be returning to those loved ones. The others fought desperately for life, clinging to every last thread of hope and courage that they could find within their hearts.

  They didn’t care about what the politicians did and what motivated them. They didn’t care about what the generals did and what motivated them. They cared only about what they themselves did, and what motivated them to serve in the toughest job of the nation’s toughest military branch. Most Marines, beneath their spirited, macho-man, warrior bravado, were idealists, and they wanted to help people; they wanted to change the world. And that’s why they were here, dying for what they believed in.

  Suddenly, Davidson felt a fiery pain in his left shoulder, and he was knocked to the ground. He looked down and saw a hole in his shoulder with blood seeping out of it. He’d been shot, but oddly enough it didn’t hurt too much. He started to roll over to his side so that he could stand back up.

  Ping! Davidson instantly recognized the sound of the spoon flying off of a hand grenade. He heard the thump from the grenade hitting the ground behind him, but he could not see where the lethal sphere of metal had rolled to. Any second now, it would explode and send red-hot shrapnel tearing through Davidson’s body. “Grenade!” someone shouted, and Davidson suddenly felt himself get tackled back to the ground. Lance Corporal Ferrier had knocked him down and put his body between the sergeant and the grenade, which had been less than ten feet away. Then the grenade detonated with a deafening WHUMP sound and Davidson felt like someone had hit him in the head with a sledgehammer, but otherwise he was unhurt. Ferrier however wasn’t moving.

  “Ferrier! Corpsman up!” Sergeant Davidson yelled, though his own voice sounded far away and distant. He could feel himself losing consciousness. “Incoming!” someone yelled. The next instant saw 81mm mortar rounds impact all around the market. The whole earth seemed to shake as debris and dust and human bodies flew everywhere as if sucked up by a tornado. And that was the last thing that Davidson remembered before blacking out.

  “Zach!” Abby said. She had called his name three times but he hadn’t heard her. Zach looked up suddenly to see Abby standing right next to him.

  “Yeah, Bug? What’s up?” he replied as he pulled the headphones out of his ears.

  “I was just thinking that, considering how smoothly things went today, we should celebrate.”

  Zach smiled. “That’s a great idea,” he said, and he walked over to some shelves on the far wall. He retrieved a small wooden crate and carried it back to the table. He set it down in front of Abby and pulled the lid off to reveal a small assortment of pop cans, six in total. Every once in a while, when something really good happened, he and Abby would split a can of pop to commemorate the occasion.

  “Which one should we drink?” he asked Abby.

  She scanned the different cans for a moment, and then pulled out a can of Barq’s root beer. “This one!” she said.

  “Good choice,” said Zach as Abby popped the top open. She took a sip and handed it to Zach, who also took a sip then passed it back to Abby. When the can was almost empty, Zach told Abby that she could have the rest.

  “Alright, what do you say we eat now?” he asked Abby. He got up and moved to a set of shelves full of food and selected two cans of bean and bacon soup. “Would you get me a pot, please?”

  “Yes, sir!” chirped Abby. She grabbed a medium sized pot that was sitting next to the fireplace and set it on the table. She started to open up the two cans and dump them into the pot while Zach went and got a fire going in the fireplace. Abby got a jug of water that sat next to the door and poured some of it into the pot. There was a small fresh-water stream nearby, and they always kept a couple of jugs full of that water for cooking or showering.

  Once the fire was blazing hotly, Zach moved an iron grate over the flames and set the pot that Abby had prepared on top of it. He took a long handled wooden spoon from one of the shelves and stirred the soup as it heated up. After five minutes or so, when the soup was starting to boil, Zach lifted the pan from the fire and carried it over to the table. He poured it into the two bowls Abby had set out (giving her a little bit more than he gave himself, as usual) and then sat down at the table to eat with Abby.

  They were quiet as they ate, as they usually were, save Abby’s remark that Zach should probably find a “Cooking for Dummies” book the next time they went into the city. He smirked and flicked her forehead playfully. They had finished eating and were in the process of clearing the table when Zach suddenly straightened up.

  “What-“ Abby started to say, but Zach shushed her. He moved carefully over to the window. He had long ago fixed thick, cotton curtains over them so that they could have light at night without being seen, and wooden shutters that could be barred to keep people (and zombies) out. He pointed at the fire and Abby understood. She quickly went over to the fireplace and threw a small, heavy blanket over the little fire, extinguishing it instantly.

  Now shrouded in darkness, Zach took one finger and gingerly pulled the curtain away from the window so that he could peek through the crack in between the wooden shutters, and what he saw made his heart sink: armed men advancing slowly towards the cottage, too many to count. He turned around and whispered, “We’re leaving.”

  Both were still dressed, so all they had to do was grab their bags and go. Zach grabbed his rifle and his pistol, Abby grabbed her pistol and her slingshot, stuffing the latter into her pack, threw her hat on her head, and in less than ten ticks of the second hand, they were ready to leave.

  In the back right corner of the cabin was a small trap door concealed by a false panel that could slide out. It was just barely big enough for Zach to squeeze through and it dropped down four feet into the ground. This opened up into a small underground tunnel that Zach and Abby had dug out long ago, when they had first found the cabin. It went thirty feet straight away from the cabin and opened up underneath a bush. Zach went first, and Abby followed close behind him, sliding the false panel back into place over her. Zach had to crawl on his stomach, dr
agging his pack behind him, but Abby could get by on her hands and knees.

  At the end of the tunnel, Zach stood up and slowly lifted the concealed trapdoor that led to the woods outside. The branches of the bush only made a slight swishing sound as the wooden door pushed through them. Zach drew his pistol then carefully lifted his head and looked around them. No one was near. Over by the cottage however, the armed men had formed a semi-circle around the front of it. Zach counted at least twenty.

  “All clear, stay quiet,” he whispered to Abby. He pulled himself out and then helped Abby out. The men by the house were shouting now, yelling at the occupants of the house to come out with their hands up. But they had no idea that the house was empty.

  Zach started to move away quietly, but Abby lingered for a few moments longer, looking at what used to be their home. She didn’t want to leave the only home she’d known for almost two years.

  Having gotten no response, the armed men now broke through the windows and, upon seeing the cabin abandoned, entered and started to loot the place. Abby could see them carrying all their food and water and other things out and dividing it amongst themselves. One man had the box of pop cans, and that made Abby sad. There was a sudden sound of breaking glass, and then a fire started to blaze inside the house. One of the armed men had thrown a Molotov cocktail into the now empty cabin, and they all were laughing as they watched it burn to the ground.

  “Come on, Abby. We have to leave,” Zach whispered. She turned around and saw Zach walking back to her, crouching down to avoid being seen.

  “Okay,” she whispered. She followed Zach closely as he led her into the dark night. Abby had to admit to herself that she was scared. That cabin had been her home for so long, a type of refuge for her, and now it was gone. She didn’t know where they would go or what they would do now. But she trusted Zach. He always knew what to do and he always provided for her. She took his hand in hers to reassure herself.