by John Holmes
A burning-hot brass cartridge casing spun through the air and landed in my collar as I lay there catching my breath, and I scrabbled to pull it out. I saw another fall to the ground in front of me and bounce off the pavement and looked up to see Doc standing there.
“A LITTLE HELP!” He stood next to me, had been there the whole time, firing methodical shots into a crowd of Zombies advancing up the street, a milling, chaotic mass. Ahmed and Jonesy faced the other way, firing back down the way we had come.
F’ing surrounded. I jumped up and joined Doc firing at the Zs, which were closing in quickly. More piled out of buildings on either side.
This was just the situation we tried to avoid, being run down by a horde of Zs in a town where anything could pop out at you. We had made it most of the way through town and were just a few hundred meters short of the canal lock, the end of our mission. That’s the way it always happens.
“ACTION RIGHT, MAKE FOR THE CANAL!” I yelled, and we all turned and concentrated our fire on the Zs between us and the water. As we fired, we ran at them. Every few shots we would connect with a skull and one would fall. Ten meters away from the closest ones, we dropped our weapons in their slings and pulled out our pistols, firing shots at their heads. Then we charged them, swinging our bats and steel rods and hammers as fast and as hard as we could. In a few seconds we were through them, dropping our Z knockers and hauling ass for the water, followed by a crowd of Zs charging after us. We gained a few yards and as we reached the edge of the canal, we dropped our packs, vaulted the low railing, and dove straight into the water.
It closed over my head and I started to sink down. I reached the mud at the bottom and kicked upwards. My eyes were screwed shut. Deep water over my head terrifies the shit out of me. I broke the surface and tried to tread water before going down again. I crossed the canal in a series of bounds, pushing off the bottom to get air from the surface of the six foot deep water, gasping as much air as I could before sinking back down. I made it the fifty or so feet across the canal, getting more and more tired. I almost didn’t make it but a huge hand grabbed me and pulled me out of the water as I sank the last time, just short of the edge,. I lay there gasping for breath. Beside me, the guys were catching their breath too. Jonesy stood up and yelled across the water at the Zombies clustered at the edge of the canal.
“HEY YOU! SHITHEADS! THROW MY PACK OVER! I AIN’T FINISHED READING MY BOOK YET!”
We all burst out laughing. Jonesy looked hurt.
“What? I was reading World War Z. I wanted to know how that shit turned out.”
Chapter 47
Damn. Our packs sat where we had grounded them. The zombies were tearing through them, infuriated by the smell of living humans on them. As we watched, they scattered our extra ammo, rations, clothes, everything.
“Jonesy, please tell me you still have the radio.”
He pulled it out of the frame that it rode in on the back of his plate carrier and turned it over. Water poured out of it. He saw the look on my face.
“Well, it might work once we dries it out, Nick.”
“Yeah, it might. OK, how are we doing for ammo?”
I was alright, with a dozen full magazines. Doc and Jonesy were down to three mags each and I quickly cross-loaded so we each had six. Ahmed had about two dozen rounds left for his sniper rifle. We each had about fifty rounds for our .22 pistols and each of us had an MRE and some water stuffed in our assault packs.
“Well, we’re alright on food and water for the next day. Ammo should be fine if we avoid getting in the shit like we just did. We have one more set of locks to check out and then we can call for EVAC. Let’s move a mile or so down the road and then take a break. Take turns trying to dry out your clothes, and cleaning weapons, fifty percent security. Half an hour each.”
The mile went quickly, but we ran into three Zs that had been attracted by the commotion on the other side of the canal. We shot them, cleanly, and, even if I had my camera anymore, I wouldn’t have bothered taking their pictures. Not worth the time and effort.. From here on out, it was finish the mission, nothing else. We settled down in a bunch of trees, just off the side of the road. Doc and I took first watch. Jonesy quickly set about stripping the radio after he had cleaned his weapon, drying each part as best he could and laying the circuit boards out in the sun. Then we switched off, and last thing I did was reassemble the radio and test it out.
“Empire Main, this is Lost Boys, radio check, over.”
I pictured the commo geeks sitting high on Prospect Mountain over Lake George, barricaded in their little fortress/van. They had been air mobiled in a few weeks ago to coordinate coms and provide retransmitting capability to any of the teams operating in the southern Adirondacks. Our SINCGARS backpack radios would never reach back to TF Liberty, so they relayed the signals of all the teams operating in the area via microwave transmitter, line of sight to the big tower at Fort Orange. I wouldn’t want their job; endless hours of boredom punctuated by terror when you had to go out of your armored van to service the antennas or take a dump, or run the 20 feet to your armored sleeping trailer.
“Lost Boys, we read you Licken’ Chicken, out.” Great, the radio was still working. I wasn’t looking forward to having to hump all the way back to Fort Orange through Indian Country if we weren’t able to call in a helo for evac. Another couple of hours and we were done, and we would be riding that sweet chopper back to Fort Orange for mission debrief, and we would get to see Brit again.
We moved out, single file, slowly threading our way to the canal locks. I hated the end of missions because that’s when guys got killed. You get slack, looking forward to what’s next; hot showers, good food, getting laid. Drop your guard. I wasn’t going to let that happen.
“Yo, Jonesy, stay on your toes. Now isn’t the time for slacking off.”
“Yo, Nick, shut the hell up. I know what I’m doing. Man, you more nervous than an Infantryman at a queer convention. Don’t know whether to run or join in.”
We made it to the locks without incident. The three of them pulled guard while I checked out the machinery and looked at the gates. These looked like they had been smashed with high explosives and lay twisted open at each end. Weird, but nothing the Engineers couldn’t fix.
“OK, Boys, that’s it. Homeward bound!”
I rang up TF Liberty TOC and gave them my final report, accompanied by pictures from my iPhone. I requested an EVAC as soon as possible. That’s when LTC Jackass came on the horn.
“Lost Boys, what is your current food, water and ammunition status, over?”
“Empire, we are at about one day of rations and twenty-five percent on ammo. Maybe less, over.”
I waited for an acknowledgement. Nothing came.
“Empire, Empire, this is Lost Boys, over.” I repeated this three times. No answer.
OK, sometimes commo goes down. America was still pretty screwed up. A lot of crap we were using was dragged out of prepositioned stores sitting on a ship off Diego Garcia or something. Not the newest, top of the line stuff. Still, it was a little unsettling. I gathered the guys around.
“Here’s the situation. No coms, no helo. I trust this guy, the TF Empire commander, as far as I can spit. What do you think?”
Doc advised that we wait for later tonight, see if we could get commo up then. Ahmed had nothing to say. Jonesy was of the opinion LTC Jackass was setting us up for failure.
“Nick, that sumbitch has had it out for you ever since you countermanded that order he gave outside Saint Johnsville, when he wanted to level that village with artillery and you were convinced that there were civvies living there. You made him look bad, and this whole pissing in his pants thing over at the prison. That dude don’t like you nothing at all.”
“Jonesy, he may be an asshole but he’s still an Officer in the US Army. He can’t just leave us out here high and dry.”
“Wanna bet? I seen plenty of mothers like him in prison. Always out for himself, and if you make th
em look bad, they gonna stick a shiv in you fast as they can.”
“OK, well, we’ll try to call in tonight. Meanwhile, let’s put some mileage between us and Whitehall, try to find a place to lay up for the night.”
We had jogged a kilometer or so down the road when we heard a ripping sound, followed by a POP, then a rumbling series of explosions that knocked us all to the ground. Or it would have, if we hadn’t all dove to the ground the second we heard the rocket coming in.
A Multiple Launch Rocket System, or at least the battery at Fort Orange, fires the MGM-140A - Block I rocket. It has an unguided range of roughly one hundred kilometers and carries almost a thousand antipersonnel bomblettes, each about the size and explosive power of a hand grenade. The explosions leveled the entire center of town, including the lock area where we had been standing less than twenty minutes before.
I stood up after a few minutes and looked at the cloud of dust and smoke rising behind us.
“That sonofabitch.”
Chapter 48
We all stood, watching the dust settle. Well, Jonesy, Doc and I stood and watched. Ahmed continued to scan the area.
“Pretty impressive, no?” asked Ahmed, though his eyes never left the surrounding trees. “None of you have ever been on the wrong side of American artillery before. You should try being in a cave while it detonates directly overhead. I have seen men go insane.”
His comments shook us out of our stupor.
“OK, well, um, oh fuck,” I said.
“Yeah, that about sums it up, Nick. Where to now, fearless leader?” Doc hunched down on the ground, pouring water into an MRE heater.
“Well, I can think of one place we’re going to wind up eventually.”
“Yep, back at Fort Orange.”
“It’s going to be a bitch to sneak in there.”
“We’re not going to sneak in there. We’re going to walk in there in the middle of the night, just like we we’re coming back from a mission. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. Meanwhile, we have to get through the next couple of days. We have a few hours of daylight left. Our first objective is to go back to the prison, see if there is anything we can scrounge from there. At the least there has to be water, and we might be able to get some useable ammo.”
“What about getting our packs back?”
“I doubt, after what just dropped down on them, we would find anything useable. Plus, you know there is probably unexploded ordnance lying around.”
“Agreed,” said Doc. “I lost my aide bag back there, so I don’t feel like patching any of you up with my sewing kit. That and I’m just getting dried out.”
We started down the road, in an airborne shuffle that ate up the meters at a steady pace. I was tired, worn out by all we had been through in the last two days, but I reached down inside myself and ignored the blisters being generated by my wet boots, the burns I was getting in my crotch from the wet uniforms pants chaffing my skin raw. I was on a mission, now. One was to rescue Brit. The other was to deal with LTC Jackass. I didn’t know if I even needed to do both. Brit was probably in no condition to be moved from the hospital, and as far as she knew, the team was lost, cut off from coms. Hell, Jackass or his ass-sucking Sergeant Major would probably feed her some bullshit about us being overrun by Zombies in Whitehall. He was a sneak and an asshole, but I don’t think he would have the stones to make Brit disappear right out of the hospital, so she was safe for now. I just hated her thinking we were dead.
We spent that night up in the trees, slung in our hammocks. We carried them in our assault packs because if you got separated from the team, you would never be able to fortify, or even defend, an old house by yourself. Up in a tree, you could hold out as long as you had ammo and water, and if you were smart, move from tree-to-tree to give you running room. Hell, even moving to a different branch on the far side of a tree and dropping down might give you enough of a head start to outrun a zombie horde.
In the south, a column of smoke was highlighted by the setting sun, matched by its twin to the north. The helo at the jail still smoldered, and behind us, something had caught fire in Whitehall and burned through the night. Below us, a steady stream of zombies, animated corpses of those killed in the jail battle, stumbled on through the night, attracted by the fire on the horizon.
Ahmed tapped me on the leg and I awoke with a start, but I didn’t move. In the stark brilliance of the full moon, I could see stream of zombies had died down to a lone figure, limping along on a shattered leg. It dragged the remains of a rope, entangled in military issue web gear.
“Do it!” I whispered, but the figure below us stopped at even that quiet remark. It looked up, the eyes glowing a dull red, and Ahmed’s pistol coughed twice. The figure crumpled to the ground. I waited to see if anything else turned up and then drifted off to sleep again.
In the morning, there were no zombies around. We climbed down and I went over to the corpse. As Ahmed and I had suspected last night, it was an Infantryman, one of those who’d been hanging off the tail end of the helo as it crashed. His guys must have missed his body in the rush to Evac. He must have still been alive, but the zombies had gotten to him. We tried never to leave a man behind unless it risked other lives, but, more important, we tried not to leave a man to wake up undead. Every soldier who fell in battle, bitten by a zombie, was given a round to the head, even if we couldn’t recover his body. Horrible, gruesome, but there was no way I wanted to become an undead, and we all felt the same way.
I stripped him of ammo, which fortunately was for our modified M-4s with the hot .22 long rounds, not regular .223 military issue ammo, About one out of every three guys in a unit carried the newer, rechambered rifles. Smoke grenade, flash bang, two frags. Water in a Camelbak that we wouldn’t touch, in case it was contaminated. I pulled one of his dog tags off his right boot and slipped it into my pocket. We spent the next hour building a cairn of rocks over his body and set out on the road again. Rest in peace, Brother.
Chapter 49
The next two days were a blur. A haze of encounters with Zombies, lack of sleep, hunger, and pain. My feet were raw where my boots had been wet. My extra socks were back in my ruck, somewhere in Whitehall, and the pair I was wearing had holes in them. Doc had patched the blisters with duct tape after they had burst, but the skin had started to slough off around them. The others weren’t in much better shape. It was eighty kilometers from Whitehall to Stillwater, where we would go to ground at the Combat Outpost. Home for all of us most of the time except for Doc. He ran a clinic at Fort Orange so he was back and forth a lot.
We needed time to refit and rest, and I was completely focused on getting there. We had run out of water a few hours ago. The summer sun was draining the sweat from our bodies. In a little while, we would take a break to filter some river water, but for now, step, step, step. Each time my left foot hit the ground, a bloody footprint was left behind. I knew Jonesy, for one, was hurting just as bad; the pack on his back had rubbed two bloody sores on his waist, since the pack frame didn’t fit on his back .
To pass the time and take my mind off the burning pain in my feet, I asked Doc to tell me about the fighting at Seneca Army Depot. Rumor of it had spread east through the little groups of survivors spread throughout the state.
“Well, things started to get bad right around September. The Guard was pulling out of the NYC area, and things were pretty much falling apart all over. You remember that time, Nick.”
“Yeah, my unit got overrun just outside of Albany. I think we could have held, but we had an absolute boneheaded chain of command. No tactics, just RESCUE THE CIVILIANS! And STAND FAST TO THE LAST MAN! We got outflanked by infected just coming down south from the `burbs, and our position was a line across the Waterford Bridge, instead of a hedgehog on high ground behind barriers. We were stacking them up like cordwood, trying to hold a lane open for uninfected civilians to reach the airlift at the high school, when all the sudden the guy next to me goes down with a Z on his
back. Then it turned into a madhouse.”
I had run. I admit it. The whole mess had turned into a brawl, with hand-to-hand fighting and every man for himself. All I could think about was my wife and kid, ten miles behind the lines. I ran to them like I had never run before, and I was too late. I would never, ever forgive myself for that.
“I remember that week. I wound up on a chopper pulling troops out of Governors Island, just off Manhattan. Our unit was the last one out of the City, just barely made it to the ferry pulling out of the pier. I caught a CH-47 to Stewart Airbase, then a C-130 to Seneca Army Depot. I had been awake for three days, just doing what I could for the guys over and over.”
I stopped him for a second. “What do you mean, `for the guys?’ You’re a medic. You of all people know once someone gets bitten they’re done for.”
“Yeah, I euthanized more than a few of the guys who were infected. Know what that’s like? Someone begging you to save them and you stick them to take them out before they turn into a Z and go after you? Yeah, dozens of those. What I was talking about, though, was the wounds from the fighting.”
Yeah, I knew what it was like to kill a friend before he turned. I’d done it myself. He knew that, but I let him talk through it.
