Irregular Scout Team One: The Complete Zombie Killer series

by John Holmes

  That didn’t sit well with the crowd. One of them raised a hand. “What if we, you know, cut off an arm or leg or something?”

  “Are you willing to take that chance with the rest of your soldiers? In the middle of a zombie swarm? No. just shoot him. You will be doing him and your soldiers a favor.”

  We finally broke for lunch. It was going to be a very long day.

  Chapter 59

  When I woke up it was pitch black. I tried to sit up but a strap was across my chest and another held down my legs. I lay back as the incredible stench of zombie hit me. Rotting putrid meat smell, and I gagged, trying not to throw up.

  I lay there for several minutes, trying to figure out what was going on. I heard nothing. If there were Zs close by, if I smelled them that strongly, I should have heard them by now. I did hear something. Someone was breathing regularly, the deep breathing of sleep.

  Last thing I remembered, Brit and I had been eating dinner at the mess hall on North Fort Lewis When you find yourself in tough situation, the number one rule is to not panic.

  “Damn,” I muttered to myself. “No towel.”

  As I said that, I heard a door open in the darkness and bright lights flickered on, just as I closed my eyes. I blinked them open after giving myself time to adjust, then lifted my head to look around.

  To my left, strapped to a table just like I was, lay Brit, out cold. In front of me, accompanied by one of her goons, stood Dr. Morano.

  “Nice shiner you got there, Bro. Can’t say it helps your looks,” I said to the Delta Operator. His right eye and jaw were black and green where Ziv had punched him at the restaurant two days ago. He started toward me, but Morano put her hand up.

  “Sergeant Agostine, so glad to see you’re awake. Did you have a good sleep?” She smiled at me, but I could still see the red marks around her neck where Brit had tried to choke her. She started washing her hands leisurely at the sink.

  “I actually feel like crap. Nice place you have here.” It was a lab, with several other tables and, over in one corner, a pile of severed body parts, including a head that kept snapping its jaws. The red eyes stared at me. “Actually, I think you need a new housekeeper.”

  “I admire flippancy in the face of adverse conditions. Don’t worry, Nick, I’m not going to kill you. Or Ms. O’Neill, either. We live in civilized times, do we not?” She walked over to a cart with several instruments loaded into it, picked up a needle and a bottle, examined the contents and withdrew some clear liquid into the needle.

  She walked over to Brit. “For example, you’ve merely inconvenienced me. You haven’t killed anyone I love or who works for me, so why should I kill you, or any of your associates? Your little girlfriend here, however, did embarrass me at the restaurant the other night,” she said, wiping an alcohol swap around the corner of Brit’s right eye.

  “What about Specialist Mya? She’s dead because of you.”

  “Ah yes. Well, the nerve agent wouldn’t have worked on zombies anyway. It didn’t in the lab, but I thought it might in a field experiment. I can’t help it if your troops have no discipline, Sergeant.” She put on a pair of gloves.

  She stood with her back to me, and moved so I couldn’t see what she was doing. I kept straining my neck to see. She stepped back and threw the needle into a disposal chute.

  “Johanson, let’s go. Nick, before you swear revenge, or whatever your stupid moronic code of honor demands, remember this: I can get to you anywhere, any time. The Army needs me and my program, and they give me carte blanche to do whatever I want. I’ve arranged a nice little vacation for you and your friends in Denver. Please do have a good time.”

  “Revenge? For tying me and Brit up like this? This is all you’ve got?”

  “Oh, no. She’ll see what I’ve done. Or, should I say, she won’t.”

  “What did you do?”

  She laughed, and her bodyguard smirked. “Nick, never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line!” Then she unstrapped my arms and stepped away. The whole time, her goon kept his .45 rock-steady on my face. I didn’t move a muscle; I knew those Delta guys could shoot. She walked out, and he gave me a shit-eating grin as he backed out the doorway. “See you later, Sucker. You should watch what you eat.”

  The door clicked shut just as Brit started to wake. She groaned as I sat up and unbuckled my leg strap. I quickly ran to her table and unstrapped her, helping her sit up.

  “Nick, what the hell? Where are we?”

  “Dr. Morano’s lab, I think. Are you OK?”

  She nodded, went still, blinked a few times, put her hand over her right eye, moving it further away and then closer. She turned to me. I could see the bright blue of her eye had become dull and the pupil was cloudy.

  “Nick, I can’t see out of my eye! She blinded me!”

  Chapter 60

  “You can’t see anything?”

  “I can see perfectly out of one eye, but nothing out of the other.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No, not at all. I am going to kill that bitch!” She started up off the table, and I sat her back down.

  “No, no you’re not. Listen to me, Brit. She could have killed us any time she wanted to. Made us disappear. I’ve seen it happen. Look around you.”

  She did, and took in the medical equipment, the pile of rotting body parts on the floor, the Zombie head still snapping at us. It looked like some kind of medieval torture chamber. On the wall hung one those crappy inspirational posters.

  I took her face in my hand and turned her good eye to me. She was furious and I had to stop her right here, right now. “Brit, listen to me. We have to move very, very carefully from here on out. We are on her turf. As long as we are in Seattle and around the big Army, we can’t do anything to her. Do you understand me?” She glared at me.

  “Brit, you have got to understand. I swear to you, we will deal with her, someday, in our own way, but if we fight her here, we will lose, and I’m not losing anyone else if I can help it. Especially you.”

  A tear rolled out of her good eye. The other one sat blankly, staring and lifeless. “I’m going to kill her, Nick. Soon.”

  “Soon, Brit. I promise. Now let’s get out of here.”

  We made our way out the door and down a long corridor. Several doors were set on each side, looking like cells, with an observation window set in each one. As we passed the first door, something crashed into it with a loud bang thump, making us jump back. I went over to the window and slid back the little door.

  Inside, a zombie was backing up to rush at the door again. He was wearing shredded Army ACUs, with dried blood coating the pixelated surface. His lower jaw had been torn or cut off, and a large hole gaped where his larynx had been. Brit pushed me aside to get a look, just as it crashed into the door again.

  “She cut his voice out. He was soldier. Look at his patch.” I peered in again, and saw what she was talking about. On his left sleeve was the Screaming Eagle of the 101st Airborne Division. The entire division has been wiped out to a man, after air assaulting in Washington, DC to evacuate critical government personnel. That was two years ago, in the middle of the chaos. Their Forward Arming and Refuel Point in Virginia had been overrun by panicked civilians trying to get onto the helicopters, stranding all three brigades at the barricades surrounding the Capitol. Doc had told me of being in the TOC in Manhattan, listening to the units drop off the net as they were overrun, one by one. I had heard from the other teams who scouted that area that they had come across piles of bones where they had sold their lives in a running gunfight against the millions of zombies who swarmed out of the cities on the eastern seaboard.

  How Dr. Morano had gotten one of them out to the west coast, I didn’t want to know.

  “Nick, we have to kill it. He was one of us, not some goddamned freakshow experiment!” She started to open the door, gripping the handle tightly. I pulled her off and further down the corridor. She struggled, and then let me pull her way.

  I
t was the same at each of the doors we passed. The Zombie inside would charge the doorway as we went by. Each of them held a ragged, bloody, rotting form in the remains of an Army uniform, several of them with obvious wounds to their heads. Experiments.

  The last door held the worst. Lying there, listlessly, was the remains of Specialist Mya, our medic who had been killed by nerve agent back at Firebase Castle in New York. Her body, which we had left on the island a few hours after she had been accidently killed, was bloated but still recognizable, pushing against the remains of her uniform. The Z which had been her crawled slowly across the floor toward the door, arms twitching and flailing as it dragged itself across the floor towards me.

  “Holy fuck!” yelled Brit. This time I didn’t stop her as she flung open the cell door. The thing which had been our teammate seemed weak, not in control of itself, but its eyes still glowed that insane red. Brit walked over to it and stomped as hard as she could on the thing’s head, cracking its skull. It twitched once or twice, then lay still.

  “Oh Girl, I am so sorry we left you out there in the rain. We didn’t know. We didn’t know. We thought you were dead.” Brit kneeled in front of the cooling corpse, ignoring the blood that soaked her jeans, crying.

  “She was dead.” We both started at the sound of Dr. Morano’s voice.

  “All soldiers now sign a release authorizing the Army to use their bodies to best effect in order to combat the zombie plague. Don’t you know that? It’s a small clause, buried very deep in their draft papers, but oh, so useful to me.” She had a little smile on her face. Such a beautiful woman, and rotten to the core. “As a matter of fact, Ms. O’Neill, even your civilian contract with the Army has the clause. Do me a favor, please, and leave your body whole when you do get killed. Nick, please don’t shoot her in the head.”

  She turned and walked out. Her bodyguards, who had been standing with guns drawn on us, followed her out and up the stairs.

  When we got to the front of the building, Ahmed and Ziv were waiting, engaged in a staring match with an armed security detachment at the front doors. They waited until we had passed. Ziv made a gun out of his hand and pointed it at Dr. Morano’s bodyguard, who had stopped behind some plexiglass security doors to watch us go, and mimed pulling the trigger. Morano smirked and bowed.

  Chapter 61

  We had to get out of town, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. We were TDY here at Fort Lewis to provide instruction to cadre but there was no way we were going to stick around in Dr. Morano’s turf. She could reach out and touch us anytime she wanted, and I didn’t know how long I could hold the team from going after her.

  We pulled back in through the gate at JBLM just as my cell rang. It was the duty officer at the training unit. I pulled over and talked to him for a minute, then spoke to the team.

  “Listen up, guys, I have to go to a punishment enforcement over at the Basic Training Unit. Doc, see what you can do with Brit’s eye. Ziv, you’re coming with me. None of us are going alone anywhere until we can get out of this place.”

  I dropped them off at the Troop Medical Clinic, picked up my dress blues and drove over to the Basic Training Division on North Fort. I left my GSA car parked outside the Headquarters and went inside to find the duty officer who had called me.

  “Nick, what is this punishment enforcement thing you speak of?”

  “Well, I don’t know how they handled disciplinary action in the Serbian Army, but things are pretty strict here now.”

  “In Serbian Army, sergeants would beat you if you talk back to them. We take care of trouble ourselves.”

  “Yeah, well, you can do that in the US Army now, especially out in the wild. It didn’t use to be that way, before the Zombie Apocalypse. NCOs were pretty much stripped of their disciplinary power. Tell me, how did you handle sexual harassment?”

  “Pah, no women in Serbian Army. Useless.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t let Brit hear you say that.”

  He considered for a minute, the muttered something under his breath that sounded like “she-devil.” I laughed and told him not to let her hear him say that, either. Then again, maybe she would take it as a compliment.

  “Here on post, Universal Code of Military Justice is applied, but it’s not like the old one. They changed it two years ago to allow corporal punishment. Two senior noncoms and a junior officer are allowed to decide punishment for a variety of charges if the soldier is found guilty by a majority of NCOs in his unit by secret ballot. Charges are read, evidence given, guilt decided and punishment administered the same day. The ones who decide the punishment can never be from the convicted unit. I got called in to sit on a punishment enforcement.”

  “What did this soldier do?”

  “Two of them. One for theft. Broke into a bunch of lockers at night, went through people’s wallets stealing new dollars. He was found guilty. Another NCO, a drill sergeant, was found guilty of aggravated sexual harassment.”

  I changed into my dress blues and walked over to the table set up in the Company Orderly Room. A 2nd lieutenant and a Master Sergeant were already sitting, going over the case notes. I introduced myself and then asked them what we had.

  “OK, well, the private was found guilty of theft, breaking into soldiers’ lockers at night while he was on Firewatch. Someone caught him in the act.”

  “So, no other witnesses? That’s a tough one, one person’s word against another.”

  “No, we have a witness. The whole thing was caught on a monitor. That and the soldier that caught him beat the crap out of him with a garbage can when he tried to run for it. Dumbass.”

  “Easy enough, then. Twenty lashes, reduction in rank, cut off of rations.” Every soldier in the military was given an extra allowance of ration cards to send home to his family. It was a way of keeping them happy, knowing they were doing something to help out their families, and provided them an extra enlistment bonus. Cutting them off would bring shame to his whole family, which was often more effective than physical punishment.

  “Agreed. Now, about the drill sergeant. This is his second time, but there was no proof the first time, or not enough, anyway. This time he was stupid enough to try his crap in front of two females. Actually put his hand on one of them, squeezed her ass. They reported him right away.”

  “He’s gotta go” said the Master Sergeant.

  I nodded my head. “Agreed. No room for that. We need every single gun we can get, and this tool is going to ruin unit effectiveness and cohesion.” I never understood that. You always got further with a woman by showing them respect than trying the old one out of a hundred likes it, so I’ll try grab-ass on a hundred and one women.

  “OK,” said the LT. He turned to the first sergeant of the Basic Training Company, who had been standing by. “Top, have the company fall in to witness punishment.”

  Outside was one of those constant drizzling rains that always seem to be happening at Ft. Lewis. The entire basic training company, some two hundred soldiers, had assembled in a box formation around a concrete pillar set in the pavement.

  The first soldier was walked over to the post, had his cuffs attached to the post, and his platoon sergeant gave him a quick twenty lashes to a measured drum beat. Though we NCOs have the power once again to administer punishment, it has to be us who give it, because, in a way, it was our failure that had brought the private to this point. After the tenth strike of the whip, blood started to run down the private’s back, but I’ll give him credit, the kid didn’t scream once. He would either turn into a great soldier or be out of the Army soon enough. Nobody likes a thief. He would be held back until his wounds had healed and he could be recycled into another class.

  Next, the drill sergeant was brought out. He stood in front of the entire company and I walked over to him. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. No combat patch on his sleeve, no Combat Action Badge. I wondered where he had been hiding out the last two years, and how he had slipped past the requirement that all Drill Instructors
be combat veterans.

  “Sergeant Dwayne Owens, you have been found guilty of three counts of aggravated sexual harassment by a group of your peers, and you are a disgrace to the NCO Corps. Your punishment is to be the following.” At this, I reached out and removed his drill sergeant hat from his head and handed it to the Master Sergeant who stood next to me. He didn’t say anything, merely gave me a look that was more defiance than anything else.

  “You are hereby discharged from the Military Forces of the United States of America. Your service record will be sealed, and you will be barred from serving in any of said military forces. These soldiers are entrusted to your care and development, and you have betrayed that trust. In addition, your file will be marked for any future employer as discharged for sexual offense.”

  As I spoke, I used my knife to cut off his rank and unit patches and let them fall to the floor.

  “Mister Owens, you have one hour to leave this military installation. You will be provided transportation back to your home of record.”

  I hated it, but it had to be done. It was one thing to mutually joke and smoke with female soldiers of equal rank out in the field. It was a whole other thing to be in a basic training environment and use your authority to take advantage of impressionable young women who were scared of that authority.

  The First Sergeant uncuffed him, and he walked away, head hanging down, in the direction of the Headquarters Building. The entire company watched him go. Not a few of the female soldiers had a smile on their faces.

  While I was on my way back to the billets to meet up with the rest of the team and plan our way out of JBLM and Dr. Morano’s reach, my phone rang again. It was Doc.

  “Listen up, Nick. We got orders for the entire team to fly out to Denver and join in the big push that III Corps has on, trying to take back the Denver metro area.”