by J. F. Holmes
“Trust me, Sarge, I don’t want to do this,” said the MP next to me, a female SPC. “I don’t know what’s going on, but the Major already had my CO shot for refusing to obey orders. I gotta do what I gotta do.”
The other MP was clumsily trying to tie a noose out of a length of cable, and grunting with frustration. “Screw that,” he said “I’m going to enjoy this. Cowards running from battle, pieces of shit are all they are.”
His hands were occupied, so I turned and smashed my forehead into her face, breaking her nose in a shower of blood with an audible crunching noise. She yelled and fell backwards; any hit to the nose is extremely painful and incapacitating, and I ran straight at the other one, bowling him over in a linebacker’s hit. We both fell to the ground, and I struggled to get up with my hands cuffed. Thank God they were cuffed in front of me; if they had been behind my back, I would have been screwed.
Rising to my feet first, I kicked him hard in the head as he rose to his knees, and he fell to the ground again. Then I ran as hard as I could for the river, expecting to be shot in the back at any second. When it didn’t come, I looked back over my shoulder. The guy was out cold, and the female was sitting there on the ground, blood streaming from her nose. Well, shit, I guess they didn’t make MPs as tough as they used too. Thank God for political correctness.
Turning around, I ran back at her. She saw me coming, and started struggling to free her pistol from a cross draw holster in her vest. She got it out and fumbled it, dropping it on the ground as I got closer, screaming like a madman. Staring at me like a deer caught in headlights, she picked the gun up again, pointed it at me, closed her eyes, and started emptying the magazine, hands shaking like crazy. Poor kid, she had probably never been in combat before; she looked like she was frigging twelve years old. When I saw her close her eyes, I zigged left and the rounds passed by me, except for the last one, which tugged at my sleeve. The pistol clicked empty and she opened her eyes, just as I kicked her in the head, too. She went down like a sack of potatoes.
On the other side of the tent, screams and that goddamned, soul rending howl started, and a deafening volley of machine gun and rifle fire started. I fumbled with the handcuff keys at her belt, trying desperately to twist my hands and unlock them, till finally one snapped free. Ignoring the other one around my left wrist, I grabbed the empty pistol, shoved it in my own empty holster, and took her full magazines. Then I went back to the other guy, who had gotten woozily to his knees. Getting kicked in the head was no joke, and usually led to some serious injury.
“Hang me, will you, fucker?” I yelled at him, and whipped the handcuffs across his face. And again. And again, putting all my rage into it. His face was bloody and he was lying on the ground, raising his hands in a feeble gesture to ward me off. I spit on him and kicked him in the ribs, then stripped him of his pistol and ammo, too. Behind me, the screams and gunshots were rising in volume, and civilians and some soldiers, weaponless, started to stream through the roadblock.
I started to run for the river, but then stopped, and looked back at the battle. For a brief second, a war raged inside of me. It was my duty to join the battle, but the rage against the injustice against me boiled up inside. Instead, I saluted the flag of our falling country one more time as it flew in the air from a HUMVEE whip antenna, and turned to run for the river.
Part II
Chapter 14
It took about a week for the world to die. I spent the nights in a canoe tied up to the shore, either to a dock or an overhanging tree, as I slowly made my way first east down the Mohawk, then north against the current of the Hudson.
The first three days I held fast; my stolen canoe was stocked with canned food, water and toilet paper that I had stolen from a locked house on the side of the river. My right arm ached where I had taken a pellet from a shotgun, breaking into the back of a closed convenience store. It had gone in, torn up some muscle just under the skin, and gone back out. I had put three rounds into the man shooting at me, but left the store unlooted, disgusted with myself. It had been pure reflex, but still, a man was dead.
He joined a growing toll. Dead bodies floated downstream, so many I lost count, and I made sure I stayed out of the filthy water, idly watching the carp feed on them. From the shore, gunfire rang out intermittently, finally fading off, till there were only occasional shots off in the distance.
Each day, I sat in the bushes of a seasonal island; during the spring, it was probably under water. Only twice did the undead show up on shore, and I hammered each to the ground with a baseball bat. They moved slower after being immersed in water, and the second night, I found a pair of binoculars in an abandoned HUMVEE at the checkpoint. The battlefield was littered with hundreds of bodies, mostly civilians, and all the military vehicles except the ASV were still there. I looked for the bodies of Petruncio and Opel, but didn’t find them. I also got a rifle with a smashed handguard and about fifty rounds of ammo. 100 MPH tape fixed the handguard, and I used a precious dozen rounds to zero it. I wanted more, but the undead showed up within ten minutes of me getting there, and I ran for my life, barely making it to the canoe.
By the second day, the sirens had stopped. No cop cars or fire engines, and tall columns of smoke rose up high in the clear blue sky, including a massive one to the southeast that I suspected was either the storage tanks or a train load of fuel oil at the Port. That one burned for two days.
The planes overhead dwindled and stopped, most heading west high up in the atmosphere, leaving contrails. Then the afternoon of the second day, I saw a combat air patrol appear overhead, and watched a 747 go down with an AMRAAM air to air missile blowing off a wing. That happened twice more, and the civilian planes disappeared. The Air Force jets followed soon after.
High on a bluff downriver a house sat isolated, with a long stairway going up from the dock. After the planes were shot down, I took a chance and crossed the river at dusk, tying up to the dock and carefully making my way up the stairway. I had picked this one because it was hidden and hopefully there weren’t any undead around. I’d deal with the owners as peacefully as I could, but approached the back door with rifle slung and pistol out. I avoided it and went instead to a window, and used a pry bar to pop the lock and slide it upward. The house was deathly quiet as I slid my way in.
The reason for the silence was upstairs. An older couple sat on a couch, looking out over the river, watching the sunset. They looked frail and very old, the woman with her head leaning on her husband’s shoulder. His head lay back on the couch, and I realized he was dead.
“Ma’am?” I said, holstering the pistol, but keeping my hand on it.
She looked at me with clouded eyes, and feebly lifted her head up. “Can you get me a glass of water?” she begged and I did so. She sipped gratefully and motioned to a bottle of pills on the couch. “Please,” she asked, and I opened the cap for her. She shook out more than a dozen pills, and I did nothing to stop her.
“He’s dead, Ma’am” I said gently.
“I know. I felt him slip away last night. His heart, I think, but in the end, he had seemed to revert to some other place. He fought in the war, you know. With Patton’s Third Army. Earned a Silver Star, wounded three times. I think what we saw happening killed him. He loved this country.”
“I know how he felt. I was a soldier too.” I did know, it hurt deeply inside.
“You’re still a soldier. Go fight. I’ll be fine.” She took the pills and put them in her mouth, one by one, asking me for more water halfway through. I got it for her, and watched her slowly fall unconscious, her husband’s hand clutched in hers. After a few minutes her breathing dwindled, then stopped.
I laid them together on the couch, the husband stiff with rigor, then covered them with a handmade quilt, and proceeded to my objective. A desktop PC sat nearby, gently glowing, and I crossed my fingers, hoping for no password. CTRL ALT DELETE, and the Windows desktop appeared.
I was tempted, so tempted, to go to Facebook and lo
ok at pictures of my family, but I didn’t. It was too raw, too soon. Instead I went to the major news pages. I could only find one newspaper site still functioning, the Seattle Times.
“PLAGUE SPREADING OVER EAST COAST. MARTIAL LAW DECLARED. GOVERNMENT EVACUATING TO SEATTLE. 101ST AIRBORNE OVERUN OUTSIDE DC BY REFUGEES. NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONSIDERED. PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT BOTH MISSING.”
The article was long on headlines and short on information. It pretty much seemed that the world was going to shit, and the government had declared a “safe zone” in the Pacific Northwest.
Internationally, outbreaks were reported in every major city in Europe, South America, and the Middle East. China had closed its borders, and a major shooting war had erupted between the US and China over the Taiwanese Strait. Casualties were heavy on both sides, and nuclear weapons had been used by China close to the capitals of three major countries, apparently as warning shots not to interfere.
I switched to YouTube, and watched a video of a column of buses getting overwhelmed outside the campus of Syracuse University. Undead pulled screaming college students from the coaches and ate them raw. There was a zoomed in shot of a girl getting bitten on the leg, running way with a chunk of meat ripped out, bleeding profusely. She fell, then got up, and attacked another person, biting furiously. A cop blew her head off, and was set on by the guy he had just saved.
The video ended with an “oh shit” and a brief glimpse of a pretty red headed student with a crazy grin on her face before it cut out. I was struck by how bright her blue eyes were, and went back and played it again. It had been posted by #crazyred, but there were no others from her, and I idly wondered if she had made it.
Another video showed F-16s dropping napalm on a narrow choke point I recognized as being around Herkimer, New York. Abrams tanks were firing canister rounds, but the thousands of undead came running through the fire and overwhelmed the sparse defenses, leaving the tanks helpless without infantry support. They reversed track, spun around, crushing the living and the dead into paste, and tore off westward. The video rose into the air, and I recognized the POV as being from a helicopter taking off. Behind the horde, stalled traffic stretched to the horizon, and what seemed like tens of thousands of figures milled about.
As I had been watching videos, night had fallen, but suddenly the sky was lit by a brilliant, distant flash way to the east. It slowly faded; I learned later that Boston had just disappeared in a burst of nuclear fission. It was bright enough to light the night sky more than two hundred miles away. It had been three days since the first reports of the plague; I’m surprised they waited that long.
Time to go; I didn’t want to be trapped here. Looting the house produced a good backpack, a 12-gauge pump shotgun, and fifty rounds of buck. I took as much non-perishable food as I could carry, wrapping the cans in towels to keep them from making noise, and a spare can opener. I also found the old man’s medals in a frame on the fireplace, along with a tattered set of Staff Sergeant’s stripes.
I took them out of the frame and placed them on the blanket covering the old couple, then went out to the garage, pistol in hand, alert for undead. There was a can of gas for a lawnmower, and I spread it liberally around the living room, laying a trail out onto the deck.
As I paddled away, the flames rose up into the night, consuming the past, and lighting a bleak future.
Chapter 15
The next day the power went out, and the rest of civilization died. I drifted slowly downstream in the night, keeping low, cursing at the gnats that hung over the river. Here and there, isolated bright spots were lit, automatic emergency generators that would also shut down in a week or so, cars rushing here and there. The gunfire started again, but in a desultory manner. I had seen people moving around, and undead also. Now, though, they came out of their houses, packing their terrified families into their cars and heading west, like the emergency broadcasts had told them to. Their food at hand had run out, and panic really set in.
As I drifted, slowly dipping my paddle every now and then, I approached the Rexford Bridge. A string of cars, lights on, were backed up for a quarter mile. I heard screams, and then a gunshot, and a body fell over the bridge, landing fairly close with a splash. I pulled my poncho, with branches stuck through it, over my head and lay down, letting the current take me. Then I heard another scream, a young woman, and harsh male voices. Then more gunshots, a full-scale fire fight between long guns on one side and pistols on the other, ending with a death scream and more harsh laughter.
As I passed under the bridge, two more bodies fell. I didn’t move, just bumped against the abutment and then swirled away. Then I heard the young girl screaming again, trailing off into quiet sobs. I gritted my teeth and tried hard to push it to the back of my mind.
When I had drifted about fifty meters further, I risked looking back from under the poncho. The headlights highlighted a woman, more like a girl, spread out on the hood of a car, held down by two men while another went at her.
Nope. Not on my watch.
I slipped the paddle into the water, and guided myself onto the southern bank of the river, the Schenectady side. There was a low, stone wall, and I tied the canoe off and stepped into the mud. Slinging the M-4 over my back, I took one pistol, racking a round into the shotgun as quietly as I could and placing another in the tube. Then I climbed over the stone and walked quietly along the grass, choosing my steps carefully.
They had no sentry. No one watching the back side. They were just looting cars and killing people, four of them working their way down the line, hauling terrified people out, stabbing them to death. Three were still at the girl, who was silent now. The closest ones, the rapists, were a mixed bunch, two black guys and a white guy. Equal opportunity. One still had on a yellow orange jumpsuit with ACCF INMATE stenciled on the back. Another, the one raping the girl, wore the remains of an army uniform, and my blood boiled. The criminal was what he was, but the soldier…
The wrecking squad was a hundred meters away now, and most of the people had run as they approached. They were outside pistol range, but close enough for the M-4. I would deal with them later.
“You know,” I thought to myself, “you’re probably going to die here. You’re not some superhero avenger, just a dude.” “So be it,” I answered myself.
I had crept to within ten meters, using stopped cars for cover. Thirty feet, with a good shotgun, the spread will be a little bigger than a hand’s width. They aren’t like in the movies, where the hero fires a shotgun in the general direction of the bad guy and he gets thrown backwards. No, you still had to aim the damn things and hit someone in a vital spot.
This is also the time in the movies when the hero stands and says “HEY!” to get their attention. Like I said, I was no hero. I peeked over the hood of a car, maneuvering around so that I could see all three, aimed the shotgun barrel at the one on the left, and fired.
He did go down, the buckshot ripping into his upper left back, probably pulping his heart. The force of the impact spun him around, and I shifted to the one on the right, the jump-suited criminal, and fired again. He had started to turn, and the shot caught him high up on the shoulder, driving into his neck. The prisoner grabbed his throat and fell to the ground, kicking and choking.
Rapist soldier tried to stop what he was doing, grabbing at his ACU pants. He dropped to do so just as I fired again, and the buckshot flew over his head. I ran forward, around the car, pumping another round in, and slipped and fell in a puddle of blood. Wild shots from a pistol in the hands of the half-naked man sparked the concrete around me, then a hammer hit my leg, just above and to the outside of my knee, and another one smashed into my SAPI plate. I lined up along the ground and blew his foot off, and then fired again into his body as he dropped in front of me, and then once more into his face, obliterating it.
My leg felt like fire, and I used the shotgun like a crutch, hauling myself off the ground, and stumbling around the car. She was still sprawled out on the hood,
eyes open and neck canted at an odd angle, staring into eternity. Maybe all of fourteen years old. I closed her eyes just as the first bullet spanged into the radiator.
Shouts sounded down the bridge, and then more rifle fire. Bullets shattered the windshield next to me, punching crazy spider web holes in the glass, so I dropped the shotty and unslung the M-4. They were running at me, and this I knew how to do.
One round, center mass, just like at the range. Shadows backlit by car headlights. The first one dropped. Another, miss, reengaged, hit. He didn’t go down, shitty ass 5.56 round, just kept coming forward, lifting his AK knock-off and firing on full auto. His first rounds whistled overhead, then climbed even higher. I ignored them, time slowing, and fired again, the bullet sparking off the rifle and into his face, and he fell screaming.
The other two went to cover, firing along the sides of cars and underneath them. My leg felt numb and a quick glance downward showed a red stain on my pants. I fired several more rounds, then crouched down, taking the time to carefully wrap an army issue pressure bandage around it. The shots had stopped, and the only sounds were the wounded man screaming, and yells back and forth between the two men, only fifty meters away now. Then one more shot, and the screaming man stopped. So much for loyalty among criminals.
“HEY!” yelled one. “How about you join us? You pretty good with a gun, yo!”
“FUCK OFF!” I yelled back, and started sliding myself along the ground, using the dead bodies as cover. I made it all the way the way to the left side of the bridge, and got my feet under me.
“Come on, dude, world is over, it’s time to have some fun!” He was talking to cover the movement of his buddy, with his voice coming from the right. That meant scumbag number two was on the left. I stood up from behind the cover of a prone motorcycle and there he was, crouched down, about ten meters away. He looked directly at me, an “oh shit” expression on his face, and I fired, four rounds that punched him down to the ground. Then my leg collapsed under my weight, and I fell down again, just as scumbag one screamed and came running at me.
