by Gunther, Cy
“A month maybe?” Boylan said. “He was some reservist from Minnesota, didn’t even know what the deck was. Or even what the underground is.”
Gunny shook his head. “It’s bad enough when they throw the enlisted in who have no training. It’s pretty much murder, though, when they send the officers in like that.”
Boylan nodded.
“Mason,” Gunny said.
The sergeant walked over. “Yeah?”
“Find the Corporal a weapon, make sure he has a couple of rounds, too. Pair him up with Gordon. When he’s squared away let me know and we’ll get this fucking carnival back on the road.”
“Aye aye, Gunny.”
“Welcome aboard,” Gunny said, and walked back to the rest of the Marines.
“What’s your name, Corporal?” the sergeant asked
“Boylan, Sergeant.”
“I’m Mason, don’t worry too much about the Sergeant unless you hear my, ‘you’re fucked’ voice.”
“Okay,” Boylan smiled.
“Come on. I’ve got a carbine, maybe thirty rounds too. Did you hear about how they can hear and smell us?”
Boylan nodded. “Yeah. Not too happy about that.”
“Nobody is, kid. Anyway,” Mason motioned to a Lance Corporal who came over with some ammo and a weapon. “Here you go, and this is Gordon.”
A puppy popped its head out of Gordon’s shirt.
“What the fuck?!” Boylan laughed.
“What?” Gordon asked, handing over the weapon and ammo. “Don’t you like dogs?”
“Like’em? Hell, I love the damned things. Better than most people I know. Just didn’t expect to see a puppy sticking its head out of an infantryman’s shirt.”
Mason grinned. “Looks like you two are going to get along just fine, Gordon.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Gordon said, petting the puppy’s head. “At least you didn’t pair me up with an asshole this time.”
Gunnery Sergeant Warren B. Jones
Jones made sure that the column kept a steady pace, and only occasionally did they run into one of the dead. When they did it was taken care of quickly and quietly. A few times they could hear the dead following along behind them, and Mason broke off alone each time, returning a short while later cleaning his K-bar. Cox and Bennett were on make shift stretchers, and everyone took turns carrying them. The miles passed by slowly, and it wasn’t until about the third mile in that they found the that the tanks had turned off of the main road, and had started following what looked like a rough farm road off towards the east.
Jones and his column found an abandoned Korean truck on the side of the road, in its bed 50 gallon drums similar to those that had started the whole mess in the warehouse. Jones waved the Marines away from the vehicle. No need to mess with that stuff, especially after seeing what the direct results of contact with it –
A heavy, fetid spray hit them, and Jones realized that someone was spraying them.
Pivoting on his heel, the liquid burning as it hit him, Jones drew his .45 and put a single round into the head of the North Korean who had been hiding amongst the barrels. As the man collapsed the sound of the shot echoed off of the trees.
Somewhere nearby a moan started, and was picked up by a second, then a third, and it continued, multiplying in the darkness. The sound of shuffling and shambling joined the moaning, and shapes started to appear in the moonlight.
“Fuck,” Jones swore. “Let’s go, hurry up and push it down the road. We’ve got to find that armor if we can.”
The men switched positions at the stretchers, both Bennett and Cox coughing, trying to wipe the liquid off of their faces. The others did the same, Jones leading the way down the road.
A dead Marine wearing a tanker’s jacket stumbled out in front of him, neck twisted awkwardly, arms outstretched.
This is not good, Jones thought as he smashed the dead man’s temple in, causing him to collapse. Others appeared, and he beat them down as well. Along the length of the short column he could hear the others fighting, too, the thump of rifle butts and bayonets into flesh, the heavier, wet sound of Mason using his K-bar with deadly proficiency.
And Jones kept the column moving, forcing it to continue although it was under constant assault by the living dead.
Ahead of him the woods opened partially and he finally caught sight of the tanks, the machines formed into a triangle, and Jones’ heart skipped a beat.
The dead milled around the tanks, and the ground around the armor was churned up as though a giant madman with a hoe had hacked the earth to pieces. The remains of men were everywhere, weapons broken and scattered, bodies strewn about. This was nothing new, though, not for Jones. He had seen far worse in the Pacific, on Tarawa with Mason. Guadalcanal with the Old Man. But he’d never seen dead men dragging themselves along with one arm, their lower halves missing. Never had he seen the dead feasting upon others.
As he stepped out into the open, his Marines spreading out around him, the wind shifted and carried the smell of Jones and his Marines to the scene of carnage before them.
The dead who weren’t eating turned, and started towards them.
Sergeant Jack C. Mason
This is unfucking believable, Mason thought. “Weapons, Gunny?” he asked.
Gunny nodded. “Might as well. They already know that we’re here. Let’s go, boys. Make your way toward the tanks. A little cover is better than none, and maybe it’ll slow the fucks down a little bit.”
Mason handed his rounds to Quinn, who nodded. Mason took a deep breath, saying, “Stretchers, behind me.”
With Quinn beside him, Mason started directly towards the tanks. Quinn picked off those moving faster than the others, and Mason used his K-bar on a mother and child rising up from a male that they had been eating. On the edge of his vision he could Gunny leading Gordon and Boylan, the men spreading out to destroy the dead, each movement the Marines made precise and pure, incarnations of Death upon the field of battle.
Damn this is fucked, Mason thought, cutting through the face of a Captain, the man’s helmet and part of his skull spinning off into the moonlight. Stepping over the corpse, Mason continued on.
As they drew closer to the armor Mason could see the dead and the undead within the protection of the triangle.
They were nearly all Marines, only a few of them gooks.
“Quinn, you and the others protect the stretcher cases up here against the first tank,” Mason said. “I’ll be in the perimeter, cleaning them out.”
“Aye aye, Sergeant,” Quinn said, and spread the word to the rest of the group. Mason moved forward, climbing up over the rear of the tank, killing off an undead tanker that was feasting on another in the starlight.
Once in the perimeter Mason settled his back against the tank, ignoring the moaning sound which threatened to drown his sanity. Instead he looked at the walking dead, who started to come towards him. Mason shook out his arms, shrugged his shoulders, dried his palms on his fatigues, and waited.
It only took the dead a few minutes to realize that he was there, and they came at him as they arrived, in ones and twos. He took each of them down, crushing heads and cutting through necks. The bodies splashed him, their gore joining with the juice that the other gook had doused him with. But Mason kept his back to the tank, and he kept putting them down.
The bodies started piling up around him, and soon he realized that someone was cutting through them from the rear.
Gunny and Gordon, and the new kid Boylan, finished off the last few, and the four of them found themselves standing ankle deep in dark blood, the dead carpeting the ground. Outside of their Marines, nothing was moving.
“Get Bennett and Cox inside this perimeter,” Gunny said to Quinn. “When they’re squared away, Mason, I want you and Quinn on weapons and ammo detail. The rest of us, we’re going to police this area of every body part and start building up the tanks with them.” Gunny looked hard at everyone. “I don’t care how fucking disgusting
it is, we need some sort of wall to keep another wave of these things away from us. If it’s quiet out there when we finish in here, we’ll start dragging corpses from the field to form a primary wall in front of the armor. Understood?”
Everyone nodded.
Gunny turned to Mason. “Okay, Mason, let’s get this show on the road. I want to have some sort of decent protection when the next wave hits.”
“Will it, Gunny?” Liskow asked.
“Of course it will,” Gunny answered, looking at the young private, “we’re Marines, and we’re always in the shit.”
Corporal Robert E. Boylan
Boylan had a tough time moving the bodies. Not because they were nasty, disgusting things, but because he knew most of the men. Hell, he’d gone to school with more than a few of them, and the senior NCOs were all men that he’d admired.
Now they were all dead. Some of them eaten, and some of them twice dead.
He was exhausted, but knew that he wouldn’t sleep. Couldn’t sleep. He’d have nightmares forever if he even made it out of the fucking place. After the area cleanup they had to go into the tanks and finish off whatever was in there. And all three had had at least one, sometimes two Marines in their bellies. Dead friends ready and willing to eat him.
The situation was completely, and totally fucked up.
Gordon came over and sat down beside him, holding the puppy in one hand and a couple of C rations in the other. He handed one to Boylan.
“Thanks.”
“Sure,” Gordon said, putting the puppy on the ground. The dog trotted over to the tank, cocked its leg and pissed. Gordon chuckled.
“Guess he’s not worried about all this shit,” Boylan said, opening the ration. He frowned at the mystery meal, but his stomach growled and reminded him of just how hungry he really was.
“Naw, he seems to be pretty good about it all,” Gordon said, digging into his own meal. “This is some pretty crazy shit though.”
“Too much for me,” Boylan said. “Starting to wonder if it isn’t some sort of really bad dream.”
“It’s not,” Gordon said.
“How do you know?”
“You wouldn’t have anyone as fantastic as me in a dream.”
“That sounds like a true statement,” Boylan laughed, shaking his head. He forced himself to start eating. “And it has to be real.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I smell too bad for it not to be.”
“Yeah,” Gordon agreed, “we do smell pretty badly. I’m looking forward to a shower.”
“Fuckin’ right,” Boylan sighed. The puppy wandered back to them, turned around a couple of times, bit its tail, and laid down between them, tucking its nose under a back paw. “I’ve been sprayed with shit before and I didn’t smell this bad.”
“Well, it could be worse,” Gordon said.
“How’s that?”
“We could be doggies doing the bugout boogie,” he laughed.
Boylan nodded, chuckling. “True. I didn’t think of that. Imagine being with an Army unit when this shit went down?”
“We’d all be dead. Too many of those boys had it easy doing garrison duty with the Japs. They all got soft.”
“Well,” Boylan said, “I wouldn’t mind a little soft right now.”
“I’d love a lot of soft right now,” Gordon sighed. “A nice, beautiful soft girl. Maybe two or three of them, just to make sure that I’m doing it all right.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad, either,” Boylan said. “Not at all.”
Gunnery Sergeant Warren B. Jones
The ammunition situation, since the whole snafu had first begun, was finally looking good. They even had two weapons per man in case of jams and weapon malfunctions. Water and C rations had been found, and they had a secure, if nasty, perimeter with an exterior wall as well.
Jones nodded to himself, completely and utterly convinced that something was going to go desperately wrong soon.
It’s the way it always happened. That was just life.
To the east the sun was just beginning to rise, the light illuminating the horizon. The earth still shook from the continuous fire of the artillery and armor somewhere nearby. Corsairs could be heard, and dimly seen. How many missions those pilots had flown Jones could only imagine, but he’d sure love to see them overhead at some point, burning a path to safety for them.
“Gunny,” Mason said.
“Fuck, Mason,” Jones said, trying not to jump, “you just about scared the shit out of me.”
The man grinned. “Sorry about that, Gunny. Just wanted to let you know that I walked the perimeter. Killed four that I found out there, but that’s it. Do you think that there are more?”
“Of course,” Gunny said, looking back into the small, safe area. Ellery and Liskow tended to Bennett and Cox while the rest would start to nod off, then jerk awake.
Too many nightmares, and not from the combat.
His men were exhausted, and Jones knew that they should all be sleeping, regardless of how much combat they had seen. But no, he knew that it was the living dead, the eating of the living that kept them awake. Some of them might collapse soon from sheer exhaustion, but they couldn’t sleep voluntarily.
“Gunny,” Mason said.
“Yeah?”
“You ever hear about anything like this?”
“Just rumor, really,” Jones said. “I had a Gunny who served in Haiti. He’d get a mean drunk on sometimes and sit me down, tell me about the dead coming back to life down there. I thought that the jungle had gotten to him, but,” Jones shrugged, looked around and shook his head. “Turns out my old Gunny was right.”
Jones looked at Mason. “What about you, you hear anything?”
Mason nodded. “When I was with the 4th in China. Word came out of a few of villages in the next province that the dead were coming back. People in the city put it down to ignorance, but I did see a whole fucking battalion rousted and sent out there in the wee dark of the morning.”
“Rumors and stories, Mason. Rumors and stories,” Jones sighed. “They’re killing us now.”
Mason nodded in agreement. “What’s the plan now, Gunny?”
“We wait. See what dawn brings. Maybe that’ll help the boys, let them get some rest finally.”
“I wouldn’t mind sleeping myself,” Mason said softly. “Don’t think that’ll happen. Not unless I’m blind drunk.”
“We make it out of this I’ll pick up a bottle of Black Label,” Jones chuckled, “just to celebrate an end to this shit.”
“Sounds good to me, Gunny – ”
A scream interrupted him and both of the men turned to face the sound. It came from Liskow, whose throat was being torn open by Cox. Quinn was silently pounding on Bennett’s head with his fist as Bennett bit deeply into his leg. Ellery panicked and fired off two quick rounds.
The first finished off Quinn, the second Bennett.
“God damn it, Ellery!” Mason shouted, starting towards the private.
Ellery stared at him, then fired three more quick rounds. One into Liskow’s shocked face, a second into Cox’s open mouth, and the third when he placed the muzzle against his own temple.
Mason froze where he was. Jones worked his jaw, but could say nothing for a moment.
“Gordon, Boylan,” he finally managed, “strip them of their gear and add them to the wall.”
The two men nodded, getting up to carry out their orders. The puppy got up as well, wagging his tail and yipping at the Marines as they went about their grim task.
Lance Corporal Jacob M. Gordon
When he and Boylan had finished dragging the bodies up to the wall and adding them to it, Gordon had opened another C ration to feed the puppy. It licked his hand happily before burying his snout into the food and eating noisily.
Gordon smiled at the dog and pulled on his tail playfully.
The puppy gave a small bark and a happy growl, nipped at Gordon’s hand, and went back to eating.
“I can hear them,” Boylan said softly.
Gordon cocked his head to one side and listened. Sure enough, just faintly, he heard the moan of the dead on the wind. They must have heard the pistol shots. The sound would bring them closer, however many of them had heard the noise. It was like a living dead party line.
He grinned at the idea.
“What?” Boylan asked.
“Nothin’,” Gordon said. “Just like that dog, that’s all.”
“He is a good dog. What are you going to name him?”
“Lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Cause the little fuck was lucky that he didn’t get eaten, weren’t you, Lucky?”
Lucky wagged his tail and Boylan laughed.
“Sounds like a good name to me.”
“I thought so.” Gordon gave the dog another pat. “Will you help me with something, Boylan?”
“What do you need, mac?”
“We need to make sure that Lucky doesn’t get eaten by those fuckers.”
“I’ll take care of it, if we have to.”
Gordon nodded. “Thanks.”
“Not a problem. I don’t want to see the little guy eaten either.”
Sergeant Jack C. Mason
Mason climbed out of the last tank, his nose dead to the smell of death which had filled the vehicle, and which surrounded them.
“Any luck at all?” Jones asked.
“Nothing,” Mason said. “I tried a few channels, but nothing. Either the damned things are dead, or they just won’t respond,” he scratched the back of his head, “and I’m going to go with the ‘we’re being fucked’ vote, Gunny.”
“Yeah. Someone should have been looking for us. We’re hours behind, and the flyboys are still cruising overhead. Someone should have fucking heard us, and someone sure as hell should have come for us at this point.” Jones shook his head. “This is just a complete fucking, Mason.”
Mason nodded, looking over at Boylan and Gordon, each maybe nineteen or twenty, playing with that damned puppy in the early morning light.
