Zombie Killers (Book 6): AMBUSH (Irregular Scout Team One)

by John F. Holmes

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. We got stuck in a refugee camp in NorCal, waiting to get processed into Oregon, for almost a year. I killed, lemme see,” and I felt her counting on her fingers “seven guys who tried to rape me, before the word got out not fuck with me or my family.”

  What do you say to that? Nothing. I just sat there and watched the dead Space Station arc overhead, and thought of Brit. We watched with our ears, listening for the crack of a twig or a change in the night sounds. The rest of the shift passed in comfortable silence, because we were the same people. Survivors.

  After another half hour, she got up and was replaced by Red. The Navajo sat down after I shuffled around, facing a new direction.

  “How’s the foot?”

  “Better than your leg” he answered, in his quiet way.

  “True” I answered. He was right. My stump had pretty much stopped changing shape, it had been four years since I lost my leg. Still, I often felt like it was still there.

  “Fuck it. Gives me an extra weapon to beat zombies with.”

  He laughed. “Who would have thought? Fraking zombies. I mean, come on, of all the things. Zombies.”

  “I know, right?” I felt a laugh come up from inside of me, and I worked hard to suppress it. I could feel Red shaking, and all of the sudden it burst out of me. Red joined me, and we laughed like a couple of kids who had just pulled off a prank, hands over our mouths to keep quiet.

  Lisa crawled over to us. “You two are fucking retarded, you know that?” she hissed.

  “Because … ZOMBIES!” I whispered, holding my hands about a foot apart, and we both burst out laughing again.

  “You’re going to get us killed, fucktards. Boys, I swear. She crawled back over the grass to her woobie and wrapped herself in it with another muted “Boys”.

  I spent the rest of the time off my shift reseating ammo, cleaning my rifle, checking my gear, then waking up the rest of the guys. We assembled in the darkness, and moved out quietly.

  An hour later, Red picked up his pace and came up beside me. We kept moving and he leaned in to talk to me. “Nick, we’re being followed. I caught a glimpse of two figures silhouetted against a puddle on the main road.”

  “Drop back and see if you can get a count. I’ll set up a hasty ambush two hundred meters, best place. Be careful.”

  He didn’t say anything, just dropped back and then sank to the ground. I wasn’t worried about Red; he had learned hunting and tracking in the high forests of the Navajo Reservation from his great grandfather. He would let them pass and then circle around to be out of the line of fire. I called over the team radio after we had moved to a burnt out trailer. We had been moving down parallel to the main route, and around a bend of the road I saw a good place for a hasty ambush.

  “Lt, here.” Simmons just nodded and lay down in a ditch on the side, pulling out the bipod legs of the M-249 SAW he carried. I put a claymore on the dirt road and unrolled the wire back twenty feet. As I did so, I heard clicks on the radio. One, two, three, until a total of twelve. An even dozen. Outnumbered, but I was sure that surprise and firepower would be on our side. Outside the civilized areas, ammunition had run out quickly. The millions of rounds that were stockpiled by gun owners for various reasons had been used up in a desperate bid for survival and food. We were loaded for bear, and had no hesitation to use it. Ski lay down next to Simmons to hand him ammo, if needed, and the rest of us faced at an angle back down the road, except for Lisa with her shotgun. She faced the rear, to watch our backs.

  Red came over the radio with a whispered “Cannibals, I can smell them. They have slaves, too.”

  I thought about popping a flare and trying to talk to them, but I had no mercy for cannibals, or slavers. I thought for second about the slaves, but put it out of my mind. They were probably better off; I knew how slaves were treated in this new world. Cannibals’ slaves were even worse, starved until they were skin and bones and then eaten. We didn’t have long to wait. In my NVG’s, I saw their point man come into view, followed a little further by their main body. I waited until the point man was only two feet in front of the claymore, and then hit the clacker.

  Chapter 213

  When a claymore goes off, it’s not like in the movies. In fact, very little of a firefight is like in the movies. For one, everything is incredibly loud. Louder than any movie theater could make it, so loud that your ears ring for hours afterwards and you have to yell to be heard. Explosions, gunshots, screams of dying men. That and it’s powerful. Seconds compressed into microseconds and stretched out to hours, and over in an instant. The smell, too. Cordite, sweat, piss from the either you or the guy next to you, later the smell of shit and burned meat as you move through the ambush area.

  I hammered down on the detonator and the directional mine went off, cutting the point man in half and ripping into the main group behind him. To my left, the 249 started spitting out five round bursts as it walked its way across the road. Fire, shift, Fire, shift, putting lead every few feet. I fired off thirty rounds into the crowd, holding the trigger on my M-4 until the bolt locked back. Reflex and training made the reload automatic, and I looked down my sight, taking aim at a figure that was still standing, wandering around dazed. Two thumps into my shoulder and he went down. I looked again, saw another man trying to crawl towards a ditch. I fired into his back until he went still, one tracer round intersecting with his head. Over the sounds of the gunfire, I heard a woman’s high pitched scream get cut short as Simmons fired another burst.

  I snagged a frag out of my vest, rolled to my side, ripped the tape off the spoon, pulled the pin, flipped the spoon, counted one, two and lobbed it overhand as far as I could. I frigging HATED grenades, but sometimes they were the best thing for the job. It went off with a flat CRACK in the ditch that I had aimed for, water absorbing most of the blast. Even so, shrapnel whined overhead, and I tried to crawl up into my helmet. Did. Not. Like. Grenades. The blast had been the signal for the ambush to stop; a hell of a lot better than trying to yell “cease fire”.

  The SAW went quiet, and so did Jackson’s rifle next to me, where he had been taking steady, aimed shots. “One” I called out, and it was followed in quick succession by “TWO” from Jackson, “THREE”, “FOUR” from Ski and Simmons, and then “FIVE” from Cappochi behind us. I heard the machine gun team slapping another two hundred round belt into the SAW and waited, changing out my own magazine with a fresh one.

  Night time noises took forever to return, but they slowly did. I watched the still shapes in front of us, looking for movement. Ten minutes. Twenty. One of them tried to slowly drag himself (herself?) across the road, going nowhere, trying to stuff their guts back into an open stomach cavity. He did it in silence, and stopped moving after a few minutes more. Another next to him, rolled around on the ground, moaning, and he kept it up.

  Finally I saw what I expected. With a quick jump, a dark shape leapt up and started to run, dragging a wounded leg, and Ski took off after him, followed by Simmons. The LT passed Bognaski and talked the man, bringing him down with a crunch onto the pavement. Ski also landed on top of him and quickly wrapped him in hundred mile per hour tape. They dragged him back over, not too gently.

  “Cap, let’s go. We can’t wait too long, any stray Z’s are gonna be making a beeline for this place.” I stood up and walked towards the dozen bodies, pulling out my .22 automatic and cocking it. Lisa walked next to me, thumbing the safety off her pump gun. A perfect ambush, and even then, it hadn’t killed everyone. They never do.

  The only one really moving ignored us, intent on trying to get up. He had been shot through the spine and his legs dragged behind him. I shot him in the back of the head, twice, and he fell still. Next to me I heard a quite “please no” in a woman’s voice, and then Cap’s shotgun boomed. We walked on down the line of bodies, checking equipment and clothing. As I expected, there were a few hunting rifles, two AR-15s that were beat to shit, a shotgun, several crossbows, and two heavy duty compound
hunting bows. One man was still breathing, gurgling through a holed lung. I shot him too, through his eye. I’m glad it was closed, so I didn’t have to see him staring at me in my nightmares. The smell was bad enough.

  Behind him, in the rear, were three bloody figures, emaciated and wearing chains made from bicycle lock cables. Each was fastened around the neck, in a tight choke collar that had left their skin bloody and raw. All three had gone down quickly, I hoped. In any case, they were almost skeletons, resembling pictures of the dead from Auschwitz. I felt my dinner start o rise in my throat, and I forced it back down, turning away.

  “That’s it, let’s go” I said, just as Red called over the radio, telling us he was coming in. His squat figure emerged from the bushes on the side of the road, wiping down a combat knife and sheathing it.

  “Got two that ran.”

  “Good deal. Move out, Lisa on point. Ski, you and Jackson take the prisoner in tow. If he runs, shoot him.” I was going to shoot him anyway; he had the filed teeth of someone who liked to eat his fellow human being.

  Chapter 214

  We made tracks, heading due east up into the mountains, taking a road instead of hoping fields. I didn’t want to leave a trail, and we needed to make speed. Ten minutes into it we had to duct tape our prisoners’ mouth shut. I felt sorta bad for Ski and Jackson, who had to hurry him along. The guy stank to high heaven. Why is it that so many people used the end of the world as an excuse to smell bad? All it took was some water and a rock to clean your clothes. He was full of lice, too.

  I called a halt after three hours, when the sky started to lighten in the east. We needed to hole up for the day, and I wanted to talk to our prisoner. If there was one group of scavengers operating around here, well and good. If there was a functioning community, well, they might not be too welcoming to us.

  The kitchen of the old house we were occupying, slightly off the main road, stank of rotten meat from the fridge, but I had grown used to that. Even after six years. Our prisoner sat across from me, duct taped to a chair. Staring at him, I wondered what had brought him to this fate; we were both survivors who had taken different paths. Maybe it was my military training and combat experience, I don’t know. Many civilians had survived also, and hadn’t done what he did.

  “You know we’re going to hang you, right? How old are you? Mid thirties? So you had a life before this,” I said, waving my hands to indicate the world around us. “family, maybe, good job in the City. Now look at you. Filed teeth, bad breath, you stink to high heaven.” He did, too. He had the malnutrition of someone who had been getting by on too much meat and not enough fruits and vegetables, but for him to have survived for this long as a cannibal, he had to be getting the right vitamins SOMEWHERE. No scurvy, no rickets, none of the other diseases. I wanted to know where he got the rest of his food from.

  Leaning over and ripping the duct tape off his face, I sat back and waited for him to stop cursing me. I really wished my old teammate Sasha Zivcovic was here to do this, because he probably would get a kick out of it. I didn’t like what I was about to do, but as team leader, it had to be done. Lt. Simmons sat on another chair, watching and learning, hopefully. Lisa sat on the counter, carving her initials or something into the Formica. She was ignoring the conversation completely, just watching the prisoner, waiting for him to make a go at escaping.

  “So let’s start. The usual questions. How many, where is your hideout, yadda yadda.”

  “Who the fuck are you that wants to know? Just some other jacked up douchebag raider. Fuck you.” He spat at me, but I was expecting it, and leaned back in the chair to avoid it. Lisa got up, pulled out her 9 mm, reversed it so that she was holding it by the barrel, and casually smashed him in the face with the grip. Even I winced as several teeth cracked. Then she kicked him hard in the leg, where a bullet had gone through the muscle of his calf. He screamed loudly, spitting blood. She sat back down and resumed carving on the countertop.

  “My name, Bob,” I said, flipping open his wallet and pulling out a battered NY state Drivers License, “is Sergeant Major Nick Agostine, Team Leader, Irregular Scout Team One, Joint Special Operations Command.” It was funny how many survivors carried around their wallets, relics of the past that they couldn’t let go of. This one held a drivers license, a couple of pictures, insurance card, and lo and behold, a military ID card!

  “Let me see” said Lt. Simmons, and I handed the ID card over to him. “Travis, Robert K, E-3, United States Army.” It had an expiration date for two years AFTER the plague, so he had been in when it started.

  “Even better, a cannibal AND a deserter. Didn’t you get the recall, PFC Travis? You know, from the Federal Government, ordering all past and present service members to report to the nearest FEMA camp? Five years ago? Or the amnesty declared last year, after the second plague?”

  He didn’t say anything, just sat there sullenly with blood coming out of his mouth. I slapped the table to get his attention, and said “Listen here, PFC Travis. You’ve got a choice. Fast or slow. Fast, and you tell us everything about the area, and we hang you, or shoot you. Slow, and Ms. Cappochi there beats the ever loving shit out of you, and THEN we shoot you, or hang you. Your choice.” I reached in a side pocket and pulled out a metal cigarette case, pulled out one, and put it in his mouth, then lit it. He sucked in gratefully. I didn’t smoke, but they came in handy as trading items.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “Always knew it would catch up to me someday, Sergeant Major. Damn that feels good!”

  I let him smoke it down to the end, then asked again. “Fast or slow?”

  “Fast. I’ll tell you everything. This life sucked anyway. Not much meat left around here anymore. Especially babies. The marrow is pretty damn sweet. ” I almost hit him for that, and for the bloody grin he smiled, showing his triangle shaped teeth. Lisa DID hit him, hard, knocking out several more teeth. I let her work him over for a full minute, finally telling her to stop when she actually started to unpassionately slice an ear off. Jesus, this girl could give Ziv a run for the money for scary shit.

  Still, I let her go on for as long as I did because I hated cannibals. We all did, but I think the reason we survivors did so much was because of how close we had all come to breaking that taboo and eating our fellow humans. After the breakdown of the supply chain, when Taco Bell or McDonalds didn’t have meal deals, and grocery stores weren’t sticking packages of steak in front of our fat American asses every day of the week, well, the only protein around, after the cats and dogs were roasted and picked clean, were other human beings. It happened. A lot. A general “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy had become accepted in the survivor population, especially after we had gotten back on our feet, but some had gone overboard and gotten to prefer the taste of “long pork”. Those people, if you can call them that, we shot on site, like we had done in our ambush last night.

  We left his corpse hanging from a telephone pole along the side of the road. I had given him the mercy of putting a ladder up the pole and kicking it out from under him, instead of letting him dance while the rope slowly strangled him. He swung there, neck broken, foul smelling from the shit in his pants. Around his neck hung a sign that read “Deserter, United States Army”. Like it or not, sooner or later, this part of the country was going to be resettled and become civilized again, and we had just given it a first taste.

  Chapter 215

  The next ten miles passed in a comfortable patrol, down the middle of Rt. 22 this time. I felt, and Red agreed with me, that we had probably destroyed the only real threat to us in the area last night, and I didn’t want to go stumbling into a stray Z like I had a few nights earlier.

  Jimmy Bognaski walked along side of me for a bit, busting my balls about whatever he could think of. He had always been like that, a wise ass joker, from the moment Red and I had saved his life outside of Troy. A Regular Army infantryman, Ski had spent the last six years fighting up and down the continent, but had finally hung up his spurs after getting
wounded in a battle out in the Midwest.* Although he was still a Staff Sergeant in the Reserves, and I had been pushing him to go to OCS, Ski contented himself with running trade up and down the Hudson River. He had come along on this scout with me because he was between cargos for a week or two.

  “You seem to be a bit more, I dunno, chill about wasting people, Nick. How’s your head?”

  I looked at him a bit sideways. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how’s your head?”

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “Cause two years ago, you almost tried to eat your pistol. Now you’re on a joyride through the countryside, killing Z’s and hanging cannibals, and it doesn’t seem to have bothered you in the slightest.”

  I shrugged and said “I always hated cannibals, and deserters even worse.”

  We kept walking along, and as we did I slowly spun in a three sixty circle, making sure everyone was paying attention to their surroundings. Just because we had apparently taken out the local bad guys, didn’t mean we needed to drop our guard.

  “Jimmy, I just don’t care anymore. I know Brit and the kids will be fine without me for a bit, and I really don’t give a shit about what happens to the rest of humanity, except my friends.”

  He spat some chew onto the ground, then asked, “So why are you out here?”

  Ahead of us, Lisa’s hand came up, and we all dropped down to one knee, scanning our sectors. After a few seconds, she waved us on and we continued walking.

  “Honestly, I missed it. You know how absolutely goddamned exciting a firefight is? I mean, I’m not looking to get killed, but we’re patrolling an area that sits between two major highways that are used by the Army and the Reclamation Corps. You know there’s no hordes waiting for us, air recon told us that. “