by John Holmes
The last time I had seen her had been just outside Buffalo. She had asked me to join her team of bio-researchers who were capturing zombies and experimenting on them. Her exact words were, I think, “collateral damage to civilians doesn’t matter. We have more important things to do.”
She smiled her sweet, evil smile at me.
“I heard your team tends to run into concentrations of infected on a regular basis. I have an experimental vaccine I want you to use the next time you encounter a large group of infected.”
“Are you sure? That doesn’t sound very evil.”
“You enjoy your job, Sergeant Agostine. I enjoy mine. How are we any different?”
I laughed. “You enjoy killing people and causing pain. I enjoy beating the enemy. I don’t enjoy killing.”
She gave me a blank look. Frigging sociopath.
“Enough with the verbal chit chat.” She handed me a bandolier of 40mm grenade rounds for the M-203.
“These have been modified with an aerosol spray containing a skin contact serum. If you fire it over a crowd of infected, it should work within a few minutes. Those who are fresh corpses may be cured. Those who have decomposed past the point where life is possible, or who suffered life threatening wounds in their initial infection, should just drop.”
Doc took them from her and looked them over. There were five of them.
“So what’s the catch? I don’t trust you, Ma’am. What if I refuse to do it?”
“Doctor. If you refuse, these two gentlemen will shoot you dead on the spot.” The bodyguards glanced at Doc and I, and I knew those guys would drill us through the head at a single word, probably a prearranged code mixed into a sentence so that we didn’t have time to react.
She had us, and there was nothing I could do about it. “What’s to stop us from just dumping them in the river after you leave?”
“There is a transponder in each one that will tell us time of firing, location, etc. I may be evil, Nick, but I’m not stupid. In fact, I’m actually a genius.”
“No, you’re actually a sociopath. OK, we’ll do your dirty work, Dr. Morano.”
“Please see that you do. I’d hate to have you killed.”
“I doubt that you would hate it.”
“No, you’re right, I’d probably record it and play it over and over.”
That was one crazy evil woman. She turned and walked back to the helo that was spinning up again. One of the Delta guys looked back and gave us a thumbs up. I gave him the finger.
Specialist Mya came up behind us. “What was that all about?”
Doc handed her the bandolier. “Go get yourself a different weapon with a 203 launcher on it. We need you to replace Jonesy’s firepower anyway. Then go practice with a half a dozen HE rounds into the river. Take Redshirt with you and have him show you what to do.”
She looked at the rounds in the belt. “What about these?”
“Those” I answered her, “are a potential cure for the infection. We’re going to fire it over a crowd of zombies and see what happens.”
Her eyes got wide. I could see her professional interest as a medic had been piqued.
“Coool!”
We were cleaning weapons an hour later when we heard a blood-curdling scream of agony carry across the island. Doc, Brit and I jumped up and ran as fast we could in the direction of where Mya and Redshirt had been lobbing 203 rounds into the river.
She lay on the ground, with Redshirt standing there ten feet away from her. We were the first to get there. Doc made to push past Red, but he tackled Doc and threw him to the ground.
“DOC, NO!” he yelled. “It’s poisoned! Nerve agent!”
Doc’s face went pale and he stood. The rest of us halted where we were.
Mya lay on the ground, twitching in agony. She had vomited and her back arched in spasms, her scream fading as her jaw opened and closed. Beside her a 203 round lay on the ground, one of the ones from the bandolier LTC Morano had given us.
Brit pulled her pistol from her leg holster and shot Mya through the heart, twice. She arched one last time and fell still.
“She said she wanted to check out the shells with the medicine in them, see how they worked. She took one out and I guess she handled it wrong or something. Next thing I knew, she staggered and yelled at me to run, said it was nerve gas and then said something like V, then she fell to the ground and started vomiting and she screamed once.” V meant VX, a nerve agent. As a medic, Mya knew what was happening to her.
He turned around and threw up in the bushes. I handed him a canteen. The Infantry guys showed up and Brit motioned them back. Doc filled them in and they filed away. This part of the island would remain off limits, along with her corpse. We wouldn’t even be able to bury her.
“She saved your life, Red. You would have been dead if you tried to help her.”
Doc came up. “VX nerve agent. Bad shit, Nick. Persistent oil-based. If we had fired that and it had misfired, or blown back at us, we could have all been wiped out. What the fuck were they thinking?”
“They were thinking they needed to do a field experiment, and they didn’t care who happened to get burnt in the process.”
I looked back at Mya lying dead in the moonlight. I would file a report back to JSOC, and I’m sure we would see Doctor Morano again. I had an urge to wrap my hands around her throat, but we would have to be very, very careful around her.
Chapter 47
“GO! GO! GO!” The back ramp was down before we hit the ground. A swirl of dust and ash obscured the LZ, lifted by the rotor wash of the other CH-47. The other Chinook had touched its back wheels down thirty seconds before us, dropping off two squads of infantry, then lifting back off. One more squad and a heavy weapons team filled the canvas seats in our chopper, along with the rest of the Lost Boys. As soon as the ramp touched, the guys filed out in two lines, breaking left and right to add to the perimeter. Then the heavy weapons team carried out their M-249 SAWs and the head-high tripods they were mounted on, along with crates of extra ammo. The infantrymen quickly started pushing debris into some kind of perimeter, unraveling concertina wire in a big loop around the front doors of the Home Depot and pounding stakes to hold it into the parking lot.
The heavy weapons team had four M-249s that they set up to cover likely areas of approach. Each light machine gun was mounted on a tripod which held the weapon roughly five and half feet off the ground, just about the average height of a zombie head. Yeah, aimed shots were better than automatic fire, but sweeping a packed mass of a zombie hoard with a couple hundred rounds a minute at head height, if you’ve got the ammo, can work wonders. The Infantry worked hard to push any moveable cars to create channels for zombies to be herded into and machine gunned. Already single shots were popping off from the Designated Marksmen teams, taking out a few Zs that were stumbling around on the road.
The doors of Home Depot were shattered, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Sometimes a closed storefront would hide a pack of zombies that had become trapped in the store. This one had been hit by looters, but I was pretty sure that we would be able to find everything we needed. I led the way in the stack, followed by Brit, Doc and Redshirt. We all carried shotguns for quick snapshots down the aisle. Ahmed stayed outside with the two Infantry guys we had picked up, Corporal Killeen and Specialist Desen, doing some very long range sniping.
We moved through the front of the store, coming up dry. That was the easiest part. The hard part would be going down through the aisles, with limited visibility, making noise stumbling over debris and trying to keep our footing. Stepping into the first aisle, we snapped on head-mounted and weapon-mounted flashlights. Even in bright daylight, the store was dark and gloomy. We could have used NVGs, but if you looked back at the bright sunlight at the front of the store they tended to blank out.
Down the center aisle, we split into two teams; Doc and Redshirt together in one and Brit and I in the other, and headed in separate directions. We would meet back in the front o
f the store after confirming ID.
Brit led the way, shotgun at the ready. The flashlights created a jumpy, dancing pattern of shadows, and my heart was pounding.
“Are you up to this?” I whispered as I noticed her favoring her leg that had been wounded a few weeks before.
“Suck it, Fat Boy” she whispered, without looking back at me. I grinned in the darkness. She was okay.
We had made it through the tools section, moving aisle by aisle. Brit poked a small periscope with a PVS-14 NVG attached to it around each corner, looking for the faint heat signatures a zombie gave off. Shining a light down the aisle could miss something hiding in shadows. Looking around one corner, she held up one hand, palm down, then two fingers, then a walking motion towards herself. Okay, two zombies, ambulatory, moving toward us. I brought my shotgun up to my shoulder and put my knee on her back to let her know I was ready.
As soon as I felt her move, I swung past her right and turned left down the aisle. My flashlight swept up the floor to center on the head of the right hand zombie and I fired twice. I heard Brit’s gun boom next to me at the same time. Her first shot spun the left hand zombie, the second shot taking off the back of its head. Mine was also down, but still trying to crawl forward with half its face blown off. I walked up and hit it in the head with the hammer I carried.
“CLEAR, two zulu down.”
“Roger, two zulu down” came Doc’s response over the radio.
We met back up at the front of the store, each team peeling off to get the assigned items, Brit pushing a shopping cart and me a pallet. Outside, the firing was picking up, going from occasional shots to almost continuous single shots. We ran down the aisles, throwing things we needed into the cart and onto the pallet while keeping an eye out for any Zs we might have missed.
“Do we have everything?” I asked, slightly out of breath from pushing the heavy cart as fast as possible.
“I need new mechanic’s gloves.”
I held up a pair in her size. “I grabbed you a pair. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Pink? I’m not wearing pink gloves.”
“They were the only thing in your size, sweetcheeks. You can die them when we get back to camp. Besides, pink looks good on you.” She gave me a dirty look, and we walked out into the bright sunlight, followed a minute later by Doc and Redshirt.
Outside it had evolved into a full-fledged firefight. Zs were piling up on the perimeter, climbing over bodies to get at the fresh meat shooting at them. The machine guns were hammering out a steady symphony of bursts, waiting for a cluster of Zs to show themselves over the pile. Brass lay all over the parking lot.
I grabbed the Infantry Platoon Leader where he was directing fire and shifting people and yelled in his ear.
“SIR, WE ARE GOOD TO GO!”
“ROGER THAT!” and he shouted for his platoon sergeant, making a whirling motion with his hand over his head. Then he popped smoke right in front of the pallets and shopping carts. While we waited for the birds, the team secured all the loose items in each pallet or cart with a tarp, duct taping them down heavily. Once on board, the crew chief would strap them down.
Now came the hard part: Withdrawing under pressure. As the helo set down, we joined the perimeter, firing along with the Infantry at the massive horde pouring out of the city of Newburgh. Next to me a young trooper panicked, trying to reload his magazine as a Z came straight at him. He dropped the weapon and turned to run but tripped on the broken pavement. I shot the Z coming at him, but another was right behind him. It grabbed his ankle and started to viciously bite on his leg, dragging him out of the perimeter. His scream was cut short as Redshirt put a burst into his chest. A stream of tracers from the machine guns tore through head level of the crowd of zombies, but a bullet caught another trooper in the back of the head as he stood up to swing his knocker at them. He fell forward on his face and lay still.
We shortened the line as each squad peeled back into the choppers. As the heavy weapons crew collapsed their tripods and ran into the last chopper, we followed them in. I counted off the whole team, getting a thumbs-up from each, then boarded myself. The last squad practically fell onto the ramp, getting a hand up from the guys already aboard.
As we lifted, zombies rushed the helos and the crew chief opened up with his minigun. A hundred rounds a second, and only a few fell to head shots. More fell from limbs being torn off.
We flew out over river. Across from me, a young kid stood up and staggered over to me.
“I HOPE IT WAS WORTH IT, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” he yelled at me. I guess one of the guys who had died was a friend.
“I DON’T KNOW IF IT WAS OR NOT!” That took the wind out of him, and he sat back down, tears running down his face.
Truth was, I didn’t know.
Chapter 47
The mood in the Infantry was ugly when we got back. They helped us unload our supplies, but little was said. The company commander called me, the platoon sergeant and the platoon leader aside and asked what had happened. When we got to the part about the two soldiers who had been lost, he said nothing but his eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched.
“I’m sorry about that, Sir. I know you guys were supporting us.” It sounded contrite, but I wasn’t sure what else to say. This was a new company, most of them new privates straight out of basic training at Joint Base Lewis-McCord outside Seattle.
He nodded. “It’s OK, Nick. You and I have both been around this fight long enough to know that people are going to die. They’re dead because of their own mistakes and lack of training.” At that, he looked hard at the platoon leader, who flushed red.
“Can’t always stop a man from panicking, Captain. It happens. Most of these kids have never dealt with a zombie horde. Hell, some of them might not have even seen one outside the rifle range at Basic Training. Isn’t that why you sent them with us on this scrounging raid in the first place? Two men dead, but it might save a lot of lives later.”
He was silent for a minute, then he nodded his head toward me. “I’m going to make sure none of them has a problem with supporting your team in the future.”
“Thanks, appreciate it.”
He walked away and climbed on top of some ammo crates that were sitting by the LZ. He waited until his guys had all stopped what they were doing and he had their attention.
“Listen up. We lost two soldiers today. Good guys. Dietrich and Coburn. They were friends of yours. They were your friends and my soldiers. I know you’re upset by what happened, but they are dead. Get that into your heads. This isn’t Call of Duty, and you don’t respawn. Soldiers die, and in this shitty war, some of you will die on almost every mission we go on. I hope not. I really, really do.” He paused for a second and took off his glasses, rubbing them on his T-shirt and then putting them back on.
“Just remember this about your buddies. They aren’t zombies, stumbling around in the dark with their souls trapped in a rotting body. Sergeant Agostine’s soldier did the right thing by shooting Coburn. If not, he would have been a danger to all of you if he had turned Z while inside the lines. He saved your lives. Don’t hold it against him, or the rest of his team. Your job is to go where you are told and kill what you see. You did that today, and I’m proud of you.” He paused for a minute to let that sink in, then he pointed back to me.
“Their job is to go alone, unsupported into infected territory, and get information so that more of you don’t die when we do assault into hostile territory. The information they bring back is worth more than its weight in gold. If they need our help, they will get it. What they do out there alone will save your lives.”
He jumped down and walked back toward the Command Post. I saluted him as he walked past. There are officers, and then there are leaders.
We spent the rest of the day packing everything onto two pallets. We had grabbed two of most things, because I had seen a chute failure often enough on cargo drops in Afghanistan, and if we lost one, I wanted back up. We would jump with as mu
ch ammo as we could carry and stack the pallets with them too.
At 1900 I headed over to the CP for a mission planning session. All the service reps were there, and a Lt. Commander was leading the briefing. He jumped right in.
“As you know, the Navy holds Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba as the only bases on this side of the Atlantic. Bermuda is still holding steady, but it’s 600 miles off the coast and doesn’t have the port facilities we need. We have a carrier strike group based out of Portsmouth, but we need a deep water port that can hold the whole fleet if necessary.” He used a laser pointer to illustrate each of the places he was talking about on a large map of the east coast.
“Naval Intelligence wants reconnaissance of each of the large ports on the East Coast. Yesterday we lost contact with a scout team in Philadelphia, presumed overrun. We also have teams set to go into Jacksonville, Florida, and Baltimore, Maryland tonight and tomorrow, respectively. ”
I interrupted him. “Sir, do you know what team that was? Who was in charge?”
“Let me check my notes. Um, JSOC IST 3. Doesn’t give any names.”
“Ok, thanks.” The Zombie Killers were Joint Special Operations Command Irregular Scout Team 1. I knew who led Team 3; in fact I knew all the guys on it. Correction, I had known all the guys on it.
He continued on. “We need your team to go check out the New York Container Terminal on Staten Island. The usual drill.” He tacked up a black and white photograph of the terminal, a wide open area with cargo cranes and warehouses.
“I’ve been there before” I said. “Back in ’04, prior to going to Iraq, to familiarize ourselves with container operations. Nice wide open space. For a minute I thought you were going to drop us into Manhattan.”
“We thought about it, right up until Team 3 disappeared.”
