by John Holmes
“The fighting down in Mexico in the oil fields took up a lot of the production priority, and the chemicals used to produce the high explosive are in short supply. We can fire regular shrapnel rounds all day long, but you know they don’t do much against Zs.”
So, as usual, off again on our own. We did have one attachment, an Air Force sergeant who specialized in Flight Operations. He walked up to the team as I was reading the Operations Order.
“Uh, hi, my name is Sergeant Ozturk. Call sign “Wizard.” I'm looking for some Special Operations guys, uh, IST-1 or something. Have you seen them?”
He was talking to Brit, who had taken to wearing a red bandanna around her head. Said it made her look more like a pirate with her eye patch. I was ignoring it until we actually rolled out of the base.
“Well, looks like you found us. What are you, some kinda general or something with all those stripes on your arm?”
“Uh, no, I’m just a Technical Sergeant.”
“Well, OK, are you like one of those PJs? A parajumper? Air Force Special Forces?” He was getting a little red in the face, because as she questioned him, Brit poked him in his rather large stomach several times.
“Um, well, no. You see, I know how to run airports. I’m supposed to go with you guys to check out the airport.”
She turned to face Red. “Hey Red, do we have a trailer we can use to haul Mister Dunkin Donuts here out to the airport?”
I stepped up, and told Brit to cut the crap. “Welcome to the Lost Boys, Tech Sergeant. Soon as we get you checked out on the weapons on the turrets, you’re free to stow your gear in the back.”
“Uh, I dunno, I’ve never fired any kind of automatic weapon. I think I might just get in your way.”
Brit rolled her eyes, and I shot her a dirty look. The rest of the guys pretended to be busy. “Well, how about that M-4 you’re carrying. Can you use it?”
“What, this?” he said and slung it off his shoulder, sweeping it around in a wide arc that flagged most of the team, holding it by the grip with his finger on the trigger. It had a magazine in, too. I smacked the weapon down toward the ground before Ziv could buttstroke him. He looked very embarrassed.
“Well, uh, I fired it a few times in Basic Training. At least a whole magazine. They don’t give much ammo to us Air Force guys since the Army needs it.”
“Don’t worry about it!” I said, with a forced grin. After all, it wasn’t this guy’s fault. Like everyone else, he went where the military told him.
“Tell you what, Brother Zoomie Guy. You just ride in back and let us do the shooting. I assume you know how to do your job?”
A look of relief passed over his face. “Yeah, sure, airports I know.”
Chapter 65
I lay there on the hood of the HUMVEE, trying to get some sleep, wrapped up in my poncho liner. Tomorrow was going to be a big day, and we had to get up at 0500. I stared up at the stars in the clear, high plains air, and tried to force myself to sleep, but it eluded me again. I could take the Ambien Doc kept in his medkit but I hated it. It never felt like sleep then, just like a period of blackness, and I woke up even more tired.
When I finally did drift off to sleep, the dream started again. I was standing in the kitchen of my old house, dressed in full combat gear, my rifle slung over my shoulder. Outside the window I could see a horde of zombies pressing against the glass. There was no sound in the dream; there never was. It just happened over and over in the same way. I reached for my daughter, who was playing on the kitchen floor. Just as I did she crawled away from me. Always she crawled away, and I could never pick her up. What happened next in the dream was almost a repeat of what really happened that day, except that day I never got to see my daughter.
I looked up, and my wife stood there, blood dripping down her face, a large gash ripped open in her neck, blood splattered down her side. In her hand was our daughter’s leg, still wearing a pink sock. She reached for me, and in the dream, I wanted to go to her. It was such a powerful urge that I could never resist it, and I always woke with a jump as she bit down on my shoulder.
In reality, I had moved faster than that. I had swung the stock of my M-16 as hard as I could at her head, and kept swinging until her head was a bloody pulp and the plastic rifle had shattered apart in my hands.
Tonight was no different. I dreamed the dream again, and woke with a start just as the predawn light was filtering into the sky. I looked at my watch, 04:23, and tried to wrap myself a little deeper in the poncho liner. Thirty-seven minutes of sleep was thirty-seven minutes of sleep, any old soldier knows that, but I was afraid of drifting off into the nightmare again.
On the roof of the truck, Brit lay wrapped in the green half of a Gortex sleeping bag. I listened to her moving around restlessly. She probably had her own nightmares to deal with, too. A year spent living on the deserted campus, dodging zombies, scrounging for food. I knew she had been a architecture and aerospace dual major, smart as hell, and I wondered if she would ever shed her new, post-apocalypse persona of a “live life to the fullest, devil may care” hedonist. Probably not; there was no going back to our old lives. Still, I looked forward to the day when we could put our guns down, I could pick up a hammer and a saw again, and maybe build a new life with Brit.
A muffled ripping sound came from the top of the truck, and Red, who was lying on the other side of the turret, made a puking sound. “OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT SMELL?”
Brit laughed and said, “That, ladies and gentlemen, is why they call it a fart sack!”
Ziv, who was sitting watch on top of the other truck, laughed out of the fading darkness. “You are pig, Woman, but I like you.”
“OK, screw it,” I said, looking at my watch again. 04:37. “Everyone up, thirty minutes to shit, shower and shave.” Muffled groans sounded from inside the cab of the HUMVEE, where Ahmed was curled around the doghouse radio mount. I have no idea how he slept like that. Esposito came back from his roving patrol. Ziv shook Doc in his sleeping bag on the other hood, then jumped down and kicked the little pup tent the Air Force guy had set up. “Time to make donuts, Fat Boy!” he yelled inside the tent flap, and laughed at the cursing that came back at him.
Brit called across to the other truck as she brushed her red hair out and tied it up in a ponytail. “Time to make the donuts, you damn foreigner. Get it right.”
Well, I guess morale was OK. As the sun came up, I broke out the handy wipes and cleaned yesterday’s dust and sweat off of my face, armpits and crotch. Then I shaved with cold water, using my canteen cup and the truck mirror. Through the cab of the truck, I could see Redshirt applying camouflage to his face, making a series of vertical stripes from forehead to chin.
“Hey Red,” I called through the window “putting your war paint on?”
“Yes I am, Sergeant. Today is going to be bad shit. I can feel it in my bones.”
“OK, but just don’t get caught up in the irregular part of Irregular Scouts. You’re still a part of the Army, unlike Brit, Ahmed or Ziv.”
“I got you, Boss. I just have a bad feeling about today, and I want to go to war properly, if you know what I’m saying”
“Just keep your coup stick in your ruck sack, OK?”
“You got it. Coup don’t count on zombies, and I’m a Navajo, anyway. We ain’t the same, you know.”
I looked around and the guys were acting pretty serious. Ahmed had unrolled his prayer mat and was kneeling east, in the direction of the radioactive crater that was Mecca. Ziv was sharpening the large knife he wore strapped across his back. Hell, it wasn’t a knife, it was a small sword. Esposito worked on his new .22 magnum M4-a3, getting used to the action and practicing feeding the long stick magazine into the well. Doc was cleaning his shotgun and Brit sat on the roof of one of the trucks, staring at the sun coming up over the Great Plains. I watched her for a minute, a strand of her red hair gently moving in the faint morning breeze. She saw me looking and looked back at me, a small smile on her face.
; “OK, let’s go! SP in five mikes, lock and load once we get outside the gate. Brit, you’re driving 06, with me as TC and Red on the gun. Tech Sergeant Ozturk, you will be riding on 05 with Ahmed driving, Doc as TC, and Ziv on the gun. Try not to touch anything. Espo, you are in 05, and you are Sergeant Ozturk’s personal bodyguard.”
Red climbed into the turret and I handed him up a can of ammo for the MK-19A2. He laid the belt of 40mm shotgun shells in the breech. The –A2 was a standard 40mm automatic grenade launcher. The shells, however, instead of being grenades, were oversized shotgun shells which fired about a hundred steel pellets in a killing range out about a hundred meters. It made the barrel useless for firing the grenades after a bunch of shells destroyed the rifling, but who needed grenades against zombies anyway? I was happy to have the extra firepower for once.
“Ugh, this thing moves like a pig with all that extra armor and the steel zombie catcher on the front.” Brit tested the brakes a few times, resulting in a jerky motion that threw Red around in the turret. He kicked her in the shoulder. “Hey, quit it, Squaw! That shit hurts!”
“Quit screwing around, let’s go.” I told her, then keyed the handmike on the radio as we rolled through the gap in the concertina wire at the front lines.
“Griffin Main, this is Lost Boys Six, SP this time, mark, over.” As I talked, I looked out the window. Hundreds of Abrams main battle tanks, their main guns replaced with short, stubby shotgun cannons, Bradley Scout armored personnel carriers, and the troop carriers, the real killers. Bradley chassis with the turrets removed, and even old M-113 APCs, all with a steel wall about three feet high welded around the top. The troops rode on them, firing over the sides, unreachable by any zombies and protected from potshots Reavers or other uncooperative civilians might take.
The radio crackled back right away. I appreciated a TOC that was awake at all hours. “This is Griffin Main. Lost Boys, SP 0542. Happy hunting, over.”
“Lost Boys, Roger out.”
Chapter 66
The highway was clear all the way to the airport. We occasionally caught a Z with our front bumper. OK, Brit occasionally swerved to catch a Z with the steel V on the front of the truck. By the time we pulled up to the airport fence, the front end was covered with dark splashes of zombie blood.
“You’re cleaning that off at the wash rack when we get back.” She stuck her tongue out at me as we bounced over a ditch, and she wound up biting it. “Serves you right,” I said.
We got onto the runway and hauled ass, pushing the trucks up as fast as they would go, braking to a hard stop in front of the tower facility. I had Brit drive into the front doors, smashing them aside, then pulling back. We parked one truck in front of the doors, blocking access.
“OK, you know the drill. Me, Doc, Brit and Donut, and Espo, we’re going in. Ahmed, you, Red and Ziv maintain the perimeter with the trucks. Keep 05 driving around so nothing sneaks up from behind the building.” Ahmed for long range shots at random Zs, Ziv on the 249 for suppressive fire and Red on the 19 for close-in action.
The tower offices were dark, only illuminated by the morning sunlight filtering through the dirty windows. I didn’t expect much Zombie activity in here because the airport would have shut down early in the collapse, and the employees would have fled. I was right; we encountered nothing. Still, by the time we got to the tower stairs, I was soaked in sweat from adrenaline that flooded through me each time we kicked a door open. Brit and I took turns being the first one through each door, and it got nerve racking. At one point, Brit actually fired at a life sized safety poster pinned to a wall. Three rounds of .22, two of them hitting right in the posterized Flight Attendant’s forehead.
“Great shot!” She looked sheepish. “You’re starting to make this a habit, you know” said Doc, laughing at her.
“Hey, better alive and feeling stupid than dead.”
I called back to Ahmed with all clear in answer to his query about the shots, and we moved up the stairwell of the tower. When we got to the top, the Air Force Sergeant went to work. He pulled out a large, heavy box from his ruck.
“What’s that?” asked Espo.
“Capacitor, with a built-in modulator. Gives me a few minutes of 120 volt AC. Allows me to check out the electronics, computers and stuff, see if they’re still working.”
“You mean like the radar and stuff?”
“No, the radar isn’t here at the airport. That gets run by a FAA regional center, can’t remember where the one is for this local area. No, all the info for the flight traffic controllers would be fed here by a data uplink from there. We’ll have to set up a mobile radar unit to run this field.”
Lights powered up around us, screens flickering to life. “Looking good, looking good,” he muttered under his breath.
“Uh, Nick?”
“Yeah, Doc?”
He was standing at the tower windows, looking westward through a pair of binos. I raised mine to look.
“Oh, damn.”
From around the terminal on the opposite side of the airport came several thousand zombies. Hundreds more streamed from around the edge of the building.
“I guess the recon flights missed that horde.”
“I guess so.”
Down below, Ahmed started firing at the horde but his hits were lost in the crowd. A long stream of tracers reached out and started slapping into the front, rounds skipping off the tarmac into them. A few fell, but like all unaimed, automatic fire, the hits were mostly wasted. Blowing holes through the undead didn’t stop them.
“Ahmed, get up here with those guys and blow the stairs!”
He didn’t answer, but the firing stopped. Then I heard one of the truck engines start again through the open tower window, and 06 raced out onto the runway. It moved down the front of the horde, and I heard the bang bang bang of the automatic shotgun.
“Ziv and Red took the truck, said they would buy us some time to rig explosives. I am coming up.” I acknowledged, but I knew what Zivkovic and Redshirt didn’t. Zombie crowds didn’t break in the face of heavy weapons. Red was too inexperienced, and Ziv had been fighting a running, hiding battle for the last two years on his own.
“06, get your ass back here.”
“Little busy right now, Nick!” came back Red, over the firing of the gun. I did see the truck start back, though, as the crowd of undead flowed past it, despite the dozens mowed down by the gunfire and smashed under the truck. They quickly outdistanced the Zs and skidded to a stop in front of 05, adding a further blockage to the doorway. I couldn’t see what happened after that, but the gun started firing again.
“Nick, I need a few seconds more to set this charge!” yelled Ahmed up the stairway. Then Redshirt piled into the room and fell to the floor.
“Where the fuck is Ziv?” I yelled at him.
“He stayed to cover us!” He was out of breath and crying.
“Goddammit! Ziv, get your ass up here!” I yelled into my headset.
“My country. It is gone.” And his next words were drowned out by the zombie howl and the firing of the gun. “ … will give you time. Ahmed, you heathen bastard blow the stairs!” Then a long string of curses in Serbian and the gun fired nonstop.
Screw that, I wasn’t going to lose another team member. I looked over the windowsill as the firing stopped and shifted to single shots from Ziv’s 9 millimeter.
“Ziv, drop in the turret, now!” He had drawn his knife and was hacking at the arms reaching for him as he stood on the roof. They were climbing onto the hood and over the pile of parts from the Zs he had shot down already. He stood there swinging the knife with a mad look of battle rage on his face. As I watched, he kicked one more in the face as it lurched onto the roof, then dove face first into the turret opening.
I yelled to the team. “Grenades, on three!” On the count of three we threw them over the edge in front of the parked vehicles. Brit held hers a bit to cook it off. Five grenades went off, four on the ground, one in the air. The crowd of Zombie
s were knocked back by the shrapnel and concussion, and the sharp explosions rocked the uparmored HUMVEES, bursting tires, knocking off a sideview mirror and scoring the windows.
I yelled into the radio as we poured fire into the quickly recovering Zs. “Ziv, out of the turret, across to the other one and drop through, then out the side door into the building!” I saw him struggle out of the turret and crawl across the roof, then roll off into the gap between the trucks. I had hoped he would be able to jump it. Then I saw the side door open on 05, and he struggled in. Ahmed appeared on the other side of the truck, pulling open the door and grabbing Ziv by the strap on his body armor. He pulled him across the back seats and out the door. As he dragged him in, I saw a streak of blood left on the ground.
“Red, Espo, go get him, let Ahmed blow the stairs. Doc, get the kit, he’s wounded.” Doc was already opening up his medkit. The two others charged out the door and down the stairs. They returned with Ziv, blood running down his leg and onto the floor, just as the demo charge went off and wrecked the landing below. Doc set to work immediately, first checking for other wounds, then cutting open his pants leg.
I knelt next to him. “No more hero shit. We thought you were dead, Brother.”
“I thought I was dead too. For a while I felt like it. Ah, dammit, that hurts!” Another Serbian curse as Doc pulled a piece of grenade shrapnel from his upper calf.
Brit jumped up. “That was mine! Mine went off in the air, how frigging cool! Must have gone through the turret opening and hit you in the leg! Can I keep that?”
He glared at her. “If you were daughter I would beat you with belt. Impudent wench.” He threw the bloody piece of metal to her.
“YES!” She took it off the floor and put it in the extra grenade pouch where she kept her “mission souvenirs.”
I sat down, opened up an MRE and started to heat it. That whole episode had left me drained.
“Sergeant Ozturk, what’s the deal with the equipment? Is the airport OK?”
