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

by John F. Holmes

  “Try it. I’ll shoot first.” He was right; with my ribs feeling like they did, I could barely move.

  Not moving his hand off the taser, Martin spoke. “Do you know why I joined corrections, Nicky boy?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, just continued right on. “I joined because I’m a sadist. Not a sociopath, an actually gosh darned sadist. I get off on pain.”

  He took out a cigarette and lit it. What was with all these guys and their smoking? “Shit’s bad for you, you know,” I said.

  “Whatever. So like I was saying, I’m a sadist. I like pain. Know how many men I killed in the cooler? Seven. Know how many I killed outside of jail? Twenty three. Fags. No one misses them, and it’s great breaking a man and hearing him scream. Think I can break you, Nick? I’d sure like to try.” That shit eating grin never left his face. I wanted to beat it in. He saw the look on my face and grinned even wider.

  “Unfortunately, Burnsie likes you. Got a weakness for great white warrior heroes or something. You should have seen him watching your reality show. Never missed it; he was so pissed when the second plague broke out and you disappeared.”

  Then he reached over and jabbed his lit cigarette onto the top of my hand where it rested on the table. I jumped back and fell out of the booth, howling in pain. I’d rather be shot than burned; it was one of my greatest fears.

  Martin stood up and hit me with the taser, that goddamned grin still on his face. The needles punctured my shirt and he hit the trigger, laughing. A bolt of fire shot through me and I screamed, kept screaming until the pain stopped. I lay there on the floor twitching, grinding my teeth. After a minute I could speak, and I growled out “I’m going to hear YOU scream, mother fucker.”

  He hit the trigger again and through the pain I heard him say “If I had a dollar for everyone that said that, I’d have, let me see, THIRTY!” and he laughed again, a merciless high pitched giggle.

  What seemed like an eternity later, I lay on the floor, exhausted. Martin stood over me and kicked my once in the ribs, sending a shooting pain up my side and forcing me to gasp for air. Two men came in and picked me up by the shoulders.

  “Put him in the basement, chain him up. Bread and water. I’ll be down to see him tomorrow.” He got in my face, holding the stub of the cigarette close to my face. For a second I thought he was actually going to put it out in my eye, and I shrank back from the heat.

  “Yep, that’s what I wanted to see. Fear. Put him away, gentlemen, and be rough about it.”

  They were. I was dragged across the street to a building that looked like it used to be a bank. No electricity here, it was dark inside. They lit flashlights and cuffed my hands behind my back. Then they shoved me down the stairs. I barely managed to roll without breaking my neck, but my ribs were screaming in pain when I landed at the bottom. The door above shut with a boom and total darkness fell.

  Chapter 222

  I don’t remember much of the next few days. I’m not even sure how many days there were, because they only brought me out to torture me. I spent my time trying to fight off rats that were coming at me, trying to get at the bread I devoured. I’ll take rats in a basement any day; it was better than being locked in there with a zombie.

  I’ll give Martin one thing. He was as sadistic as he said he was. After three sessions with him, I was ready to give him the keys to Fort Knox. Every man breaks, and I broke fast, because I wanted to. Fuck it, he wanted to hear me scream? I screamed like a little girl. He didn’t want to know anything from me, he just wanted to break my will, and I let him. Not right away, or he would have known I was giving in to him too easily. Nor did I drag it out, because I didn’t trust his holding back just because Burns wanted me alive and uncrippled. A guy like Martin enjoyed what he did too much. I had seen it in the Middle East, often enough.

  The first session consisted of the taser again, and that old tried and true method of hooking up a field phone and some wires. He spent an indeterminable amount of time shocking the shit out of me, only stopping when the doctor made him stop, so he could listen to my heart. I had been carried upstairs to the main floor of the bank, and strapped into a chair that had been placed under a shaft of sunlight from a window that had the plywood removed.

  The doctor turned out to be a Pakistani man, about my age, He said nothing to me, didn’t look at me, only took my vitals and told Martin when I was recovered enough to go on again. I tried to look him in the eye, but he seemed to be completely beaten down, and the scars that showed under the sleeves of his coat showed horrible burns that looked like they were done with a blowtorch. Apparently he had also been subject to Martin’s sadism.

  The second time, after I had been thrown back in the darkness again with a bottle of water and some rough baked bread, consisted of pulling off finger nails from my left hand. He started with my pinkie, and I screamed like a son of a bitch. OK, time to make him stop before he actually physically damaged me to the point where I couldn’t function. So I begged.

  I’m not going to go into exactly what I said, but I wept like a kid who just lost her puppy. I begged him to take me to see Burns. Martin scowled, the maniacal smile leaving his face, and took the pliers and ripped off another nail. That time I screamed as loud as I could, because it really. Fucking. Hurt. Even the doctor, who had said nothing, winced at my scream.

  “Such a pussy. I know guys who lasted for weeks, and here you are collapsing into a shivering pile of shit.” Martin spit on me, then gestured for his two goons to carry me back downstairs. They did so roughly, and the door shut me into the blackness again, and I huddled on the concrete floor, trying to stay warm. Just a few more days, if I could hold on.

  The next session seemed to be just perfunctory torture; Martin’s heart didn’t seem to be in it if he couldn’t actually kill me. He beat me for only a few minutes, opening up a vicious cut over my eye, and letting the blood run freely. I endured it, pretending to cower before him. After a short while, he stopped and turned away from me.

  “OK, take him over to Burns. Tough guy. Whatever.” He seemed almost disgusted and let down. I said nothing, merely whimpered when he raised his hand to me. If he wanted me to think I was broken, let him.

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee half dragged me, half carried me over to the main house where Burns held court. They threw me on the ground in front of the steps, and I managed to roll over and look up into the sky. It dazzled me for a bit, after being in the darkness for so long, but then eyes gradually adjusted, and I found what I was looking for.

  High in the sky, almost unnoticeable, a small dot circled in a racetrack pattern over the town.

  Chapter 223

  A shadow loomed over me as I lay on the ground, blocking out my view of the Predator UAV circling overhead at ten thousand feet. I was so tempted to wave for the camera; instead what I did do was sprawl out full length on the ground. This was so the operators back at Hancock Air Force Base in Syracuse could see that I was missing a leg. They had to be looking at each of the settlements in the area; I had coordinated with an Air Force Command Master Chief I knew to have them seek out our unit once a day, homing in an IR strobe we lit every couple of hours. Once it had stopped, I’m sure they would have been scouring the valley for us. Bognaski had the strobe in his pack; if they had gotten away and managed to remain stationary for more than two days, a UH-60 with a small QRF would have gone in after them.

  Which didn’t help me, right now. It did make me feel damn good inside, knowing that SOMEONE was looking for me. If they caught a glimpse of me, or even focused on this town, I knew that help would be on the way, sooner or later. Combat forces were stretched very thin, maintaining order in the camps and playing hunter/seeker with the remaining undead hordes, but I had friends in high places. Then a shadow fell over me, blocking my view.

  Ben Burns stood there, with a look of triumph on his face. “I knew he’d break you. He always does. Hopefully not permanently, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Come one, let me show y
ou around. Can you walk?”

  I tried to give him my best “Are you an idiot?” look, and pointed to my leg.

  “Oh yeah, that. Well, lemme see. REDSHIRT, YOU LAZY INJUN! GO GET YOUR BOSS A CRUTCH! PRONTO, TONTO!” He burst out laughing. Crazy fuck.

  I sat up and glanced over. Red was there, with chains around his ankles. He looked like he had been severely beaten too, and his chain extended to a staple driven into the wall of the house. He merely glowered at Burns and didn’t say anything.

  “Looks like someone needs another beating” said Burns, and he raised a riding crop in his hand.

  “I can get up!” I interrupted him, and he held out his hand to help me up. One of his flunkies produced a crutch from inside the house, and Burns dragged me down the street for a tour of his white paradise.

  Hanging from a street light was the corpse of Lt. Simmons, dead for what looked like a week. He swung gently in the breeze, and Burns reached over and pushed on his feet, sending the corpse swinging.

  The former corrections officer promptly launched into a monolog. “What you see here, Nick, is how things should be. People need to know their proper place in society. Things all went to shit back in the 1960’s, when Civil Rights became such a big thing. I think the blacks were happier before then. I mean, look at how they wrecked the inner cities afterwards. And the increase in the prison population?” He rambled on with his diatribe, taken word for word from white supremacist sites. I used the time to actually look at what was around us.

  The village had, like most upstate NY villages, sat at a cross roads, this one of Rt. 22 and one of the county routes that wound their way up over the mountains into Massachusetts. The surrounding countryside had been filled with McMansions, carved from centuries old farms and sold to people who spent two hours each way commuting to the City. Those people were long gone, either fled or dead, and the countryside was quickly becoming overgrown.

  Tractor trailers and shipping containers had been used to build a wall around the center part of town, to keep out the undead. He saw me looking and volunteered more information. “Right there, yep, we had a hell of a time with undead who came up from the City about four years ago. We heard the reports over the satellite TV, and we built this wall in nothing flat. Had the devil of the time getting rid of them; but we haven’t had a sighting in more than a year now.”

  I noted the gaps in the wall where makeshift timber had fallen loose, The residents didn’t seem much inclined to keeping up on things. I said as much.

  “Well, you know, work like that is what the niggers is for, and sometimes we get tired of motivating them. I’m getting old, got some tendonitis in my wrist, so the whip doesn’t crack as hard.” He actually laughed at his own attempt at a joke. Then he sobered up when we came to the wall itself and he unlocked a heavy duty steel door set inside of it. I followed him outside to see a long field set with growing corn. Several chained black men and women were weeding the rows.

  “Look, Nick” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “I know this is pretty tough for you to take in. But look at all you’ve given up for the government, and what has it given you? How many of your friends have died?”

  The more I moved, the worse the pain was getting for me. My ribs were on fire; all my muscles hurt from the electric shocks, and I was getting a chill despite the warm summer air. “A lot,” I answered him “More than I like to think about.”

  “Well, I can use a military expert here. You see our defenses, cobbled together. You could have a good life here; live like a king. Or I can still kill you,” he said shaking his head, seeming almost regretful. Burns whistled loudly and motioned for one of the slaves to come over.

  She was tall and pretty, like one of those Somali supermodels, and had a sly smile on her face, dressed rather skimpily, even for the July heat. “Hi, soldier boy!” she said in a husky voice, then wrapped her arm around Burns’ waist.

  “You can have her, or bring your wife down here. Or have them both. Like I said, Nick, you could be a king here. No more humping a rucksack over miles and miles for a cheap paycheck and a missing leg. Minister of Defense for a kingdom.” He waved at the surrounding hills, and gestured south, towards where the City lay.

  I looked at him for a minute, the pain growing worse. He started to lose focus, my eyes watering. “So” I said, wheezing as a cough took me “I work with you. What about when the Feds show up here?”

  “I think your President Epson is going to have more on his hands than our little valley soon enough.”

  “What,” I wheezed, the pain coming over me in waves now “do you mean?”

  “I mean” he laughed “that he’s pissed off the wrong people.”

  He was swimming in and out of focus now, and there was now six people standing in front of me. I picked the one in the middle and made the best effort I could.

  “In that case, he’ll need me, and you” I coughed, spitting up blood “can go fuck yourself.” The world swam around me and the sun spun in the sky, and I remembered nothing else.

  Chapter 224

  I had one lucid moment, I think. Even in my sickened state, I was attuned to the sounds around me, and I heard a plane passing overhead. That was no big deal, there was regular traffic from Albany to Providence. This plane was a multiengine turboprop, high up, and as I listened, the engines throttled down. It held for a bit, then throttled back up again, gaining speed. In my mind, as I had done myself a hundred times before, I saw armed, helmeted and masked figures rushing out the back of a C-130 ramp, leaping out into the air. I don’t know, maybe I imagined it the sounds. I had imagined a lot as I had gotten worse and worse. I was chained to a tree, without food or water, the manacles cutting into my wrists, and I was slowly getting sicker by the hour. Fever and coughing wracked my body, and Martin had spent the afternoon beating the shit out of me with a thin branch. My shoulder ached deeply, and when I bumped the shrapnel would against the tree, I almost passed out from agony.

  “Nick, baby, wake up.” Something gentle shook me, trying to reach through the fevered haze I had been slipping in and out of, for who knew how long.

  “Go away Brit I wanna sleep,” I mumbled, tasting more blood in my mouth, not really awake.

  The shaking persisted, and someone lifted my eye and shone a red flashlight directly in it. I tried to slap it away, but I was very weak and thirsty. Whoever it was lifted a little bit of water to my lips and I sipped greedily, which turned into a wheezing, coughing fit. My lungs felt like they were on fire, as did my ribs, and the red light spun crazily.

  “Whoa, slow down there, dumbass,” said the voice, a little more clearly. “This is what you get for not listening to me.”

  “Brit?” In the dim glow of the light I could barely make out a face hovering above me. It was covered in dark camo paint, but one blue eye shone at me, a tear slowly gathering in the corner. The other was covered by a leather patch.

  She bent over and kissed me gently on the forehead. “Of course it’s me, dipshit. Who else is going to come get your sorry ass?”

  “Brit!” hissed another voice in the darkness. “We gotta go! They might be here any second.”

  “Calm your tits, Billy. He’s in no shape to move. Pneumonia, and it looks like his ribs are all fucked up; he’s got a shit load of bruises. When I catch the fucker that did this …”

  At that moment, light erupted all around us, bright blinding light from arc lamps set in the trees. From the darkness outside the circle of light came the sound of weapons being flicked off safe. I heard Martin laughing, and Burns said “What are you going to do when you catch me, Ms. O’Neil? Nothing. Now you and your companion put your weapons down on the floor. That’s right, skid them over here. Martin, pick them up. The rest of you, do NOT lower your guard. These are very dangerous people.”

  “I’m going to cut your dick off and make you eat it, is what I’m going to do to you, whoever the fuck you are.”

  “Nice. I see you are as much of a bitch as the s
tories make you out to be.”

  “You have no idea” said Brit, for it WAS her. I managed to get a hand up to block the glare from the lights, and I saw her and Sergeant First Class Billy “Balls” Ball standing in front of me with their hands high in the air, facing Burns, Martin and a couple of their crew. All had guns pointed directly at the three of us.

  As I watched, Martin walked forward and, with that shit eating grin on his face, punched Brit as hard as he could in the stomach, followed by a left to her face. She fell to the ground gasping, and Billy jumped, landing a hammer blow on the side of Martin’s head. Bill is a strong, powerfully built guy, and the ex –corrections officer was knocked off his feet. From ten feet away, Burns leveled a police issue .38 and fired once, the bullet smashing into Ball’s leg as he followed through the punch with a kick to Martin’s side. Billy fell to the ground, howling, and I struggled with my chains, all sickness gone, trying to get to Brit.

  Martin stood up and proceeded to launch a series of vicious kicks at Ball as he lay on the ground. Balls grabbed him by the leg and, despite his wound, dragged Martin to the ground, pounding on his face as hard as he could. I swear I heard teeth breaking, and blood flew. Brit was gasping for air, and Burns came over to Brit as I struggled to free myself, putting the pistol to her head.

  “Stop now or Ms. O’Neil gets the next bullet in her head,” he said, and Balls stopped, dropping an unconscious Martin onto the ground. “Tie up Ms. O’Neil, put her in a cell, chain the other one to the tree. Tomorrow morning we can have some entertainment. I’m going to like having a taste of redhead myself.” He made a kissing gesture to Brit, who seemed stunned. The guards grabbed her roughly, and dragged her off into the darkness. They chained Billy next to me. He was moaning now, but I was glad to see that there wasn’t a ton of blood on the ground. A .38 revolver round is pretty powerful; but hopefully it hadn’t hit a bone or an artery.