by John Holmes
Donny, who had actually jumped into the river, was soon joined by a couple of others, and I looked them over as we did checks on our equipment. There were twelve all told. Tough-looking men, even two women, who had spent the last winter hacking out a living in an area that was rapidly turning back into a wilderness of ruined buildings and deserted fields. The biggest group was five guys, all ex-military, who were slowly looting Mechanicville of gold and silver. The rest, like Donny, were loners who enjoyed being away from society.
The leader of the Mechanicville crew, a burly former Marine named Jim Lock, came over to me, asking what was going on.
“Best I can tell, Jim, is that the lines are breached somewhere south of Poughkeepsie, and the Army is shitting a brick. Apparently all the Zs in NYC have gone apeshit.”
He nodded and scratched his chin. “Think that is going to cause any problems here?”
“Dunno. It seems to be only the NYC area, and between your crew and the rest of us, we’ve cleared everything out on this side of the river, up to the Saratoga radiation zone. That and patrols from Firebase Horse have pretty much tagged every Z in the local area.”
I knew what he was worried about. Brit, Joe and I had worked hard getting a crop in, and building the farm up into a defensible position. It could hold its own for a week or two, but more than that, we might have some surprises when we came home. If we came home.
“Well, if none of us make it back, here’s the grid coordinates of our haul. You’re welcome to it. Got about fifteen pounds of gold and almost forty-five of silver. Ton of diamonds and other jewelry, too.”
What they did was tough work, but they banked on it being rewarding, too. They went house to house, killing zombies and looting for jewelry to melt down into ingots, breaking into banks and pawn shops. Plan was to get enough to move to buy a ticket to England. Problem was, they had already lost three guys to zombie bites, and one to some guy holed up in his house with a ton of canned food and a shotgun. There had methodically cleared each house in Mechanicville, and planned to keep at it up and down the river.
“Much appreciated, Jim.”
He laughed, and said “Just don’t shoot me in the back to get it! If you miss I’ll beat you to death with that fake leg of yours, Army puke.”
“As if.”
The helo dropped down out of the sky into a cornfield that was slowly growing, knocking down the young plants in a blast of wash from the two rotors. Dammit, I thought, another crop wasted. Stupid pilot had completely ignored the orange panels laid in the empty field next to it.
The crew chief hopped out, and waved at us to board. First in went Red on his stretcher. He was awake, and pissed off that he was strapped into the stretcher.
“Untie me, Nick!”
“Sorry, Kid. We’re dropping you off at the Combat Support Hospital in Albany. We’ll see you in a week or less. Rest up so we can go rescue the team when we get back.”
He looked at the rest of the guys filing in. They were loaded for bear, extra ammo, two heavy machine guns, the tube of an M-224 60 millimeter mortar strapped to the back of one guy’s pack, the baseplate to another.
“What’s going on, Nick? Is this the militia? You guys look like you’re going to fight World War Five or something.”
“Or something. Lines are breached north of the City. They need all the help they can get.” Brit strapped in next to his stretcher and reached out and squeezed his hand.
“Don’t worry, Red. The guys on the team are either dead, or they’re not. We’ll go get them as soon as we kick some zombie ass.”
The turbine engines whined and we started to lift, spinning around and racing south, following the river. I climbed up front and yelled into the crew chief’s ear, asking what the hell was going on.
“I don’t know much!” he yelled back. CH-47s are incredibly loud. “Someone from USAMRIID sprayed something by airplane all over the city, supposed to kill the zombies. They went batshit crazy instead, crashed right into the T-barriers along I-84 and overwhelmed the light infantry. That was two days ago, and there are like a couple million moving up Route 9 and all the other routes out of the city.”
“So where are we going?”
“Drop off your casualty at the FOB, hot refuel, then we’re supposed to leave you off somewhere in Putnam County so you can interdict the horde and call artillery fire. Then we turn around and go get more militia.” When they did a hot refuel, the rotors would still be turning. That’s how short on time we were.
“You’re dropping us off BEHIND the battlelines?” Infuckingcredible.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find you a nice high place to fight from.”
“I need twenty minutes at the FOB to get more ammo.”
“We can give you fifteen, and that’s it. That’s how long it will take us to gas up.”
I nodded to him and went to sit next to Brit.
“What’s the deal?” she yelled into my ear.
“We’re screwed, Brit, and not in a good way.”
The helo thundered on down the river.
Chapter 88
Another helicopter, flying south down the river. Troops sleeping in the glow of the red lights, trying to get some rest before maybe the eternal sleep. I had done this a hundred times, but I couldn’t help but thinking of the last one down to New York City. Killeen was dead, and what was the name of the guy who broke his leg? Dresden, something like that. Different faces, but the same faces. So many gone.
We had picked up Specialist Esposito at Fort Orange, to round out the team. He was the only Regular Army soldier on the ride. After I had lost my leg in Denver, he had gone on a few missions with the team, but then had met a girl at the FEMA camp and had quit. He had met us at the LZ and thrown his gear on board without saying a word. He saw me looking at him, and held up his hand to show off a wedding ring.
“Dumbass!” I shouted to him over the road of the turbines. He smiled and flipped me the bird, and went back to reading a paperback copy of A Soldier of The Great War that I had lent to him last year.
We were being dropped on a hilltop just south of Interstate 84. I plotted the position on a 1:50,000 map I had grabbed at the FOB, marking Target Registration Points. If I could work it out, the Z horde would be channeled into a firesack by the terrain, steep valley walls rising up from a flat plain. The first waves had broken through, and Bradleys and Abrams were chewing through them. A second wave, far larger, coming up from the Bronx, was working its way up Route 9. Timing would be the key. If we could get into position before the horde left the valley and got a chance to disperse outside the Hudson Highlands, then we could use Firecracker rounds to devastate them.
It had been tried at the start of the apocalypse, artillery barrages on top of hordes, fired by the lone National Guard artillery battalion stationed in New York City. The shrapnel had ripped holes in their bodies, but usually failed to score a hit on Zs brains, and the howitzers quickly ran out of ammunition. Things were different now. There were three times as many guns, seventy-two 155mm Howitzers and a battalion of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems. Each gun had a thousand Firecracker rounds, each containing a thousand steel ball bearings, pre-stocked, and a US Navy cargo ship had been docked in Poughkeepsie, preparing for the clearing of New York City, with thousands of tons of munitions. On top of that, the Ready Brigade from the 82nd Airborne was being dropped to reinforce the lines of Task Force Liberty.
The crew chief came around and gave me a five minute warning, and we shook ourselves awake, checking on our gear and chambering rounds in our weapons. At the FOB, a pallet of ammunition, MREs, empty sandbags and water had been rolled on board, and we would drop that out as soon as we had secured the Landing Zone. The rear ramp dropped down, and we flared in for a landing.
Prior to our being dropped off on the hilltop, an artillery battery had dropped White Phosphorus onto it, burning off the trees and undergrowth. As we pulled in, the rotor wash sucked up the ashes and created a blinding swirl of dust and cinders. I
stepped off the ramp, and fell into space. The crew chief had misjudged the pitch of the hill, and the tail ramp was a good two feet off the ground.
I fell flat on my face, and my pack with the radio in it rode up and hit me in the back of the head, and I blacked out. When I came too, I was being half carried, half dragged across the LZ. The taste of ashes was in my mouth and stars danced crazily in my vision. They dumped me on the ground, and someone shone a flashlight in my face.
“No concussion. Pupils are OK. Wakey-wakey, Nick,” said Brit, and she slapped me across the face, then kissed me. Then she spat. “Ugh, you taste like shit.”
I sat up, and rubbed my face where my Night Vision Goggles had smashed me. I was bleeding slightly, but I flipped them back down and turned them on again. The darkness was replaced by the usual grainy green picture. I wished again for one of the monoculars I had in worn in Afghanistan, but the newer stuff was reserved for the Regular Army troopers.
I started to get to my feet, but Brit pushed me back down. I watched the team fan outward as the helo faded into the sky. They walked the entire hilltop, scanning for any zombies that might have been missed by the fires. Shouts of “CLEAR” rang out over the hill, and the team immediately got to work.
As we had discussed while waiting for the pickup in Stillwater, the very first thing to be done was to dig two-man fighting positions in a tight circle, with overhead cover. We were on a spur off the hilltop, almost a crag, with a high mountain behind us and an open, steep slope leading down to the highway, several hundred meters away. Hopefully we wouldn’t need the covered fighting positions, but if the Zs got too close, I would be calling artillery fire directly on top of us. Like they said, though, hope is not a plan. Whoever THEY were.
An hour passed, then two. My hands were getting raw from the shovel, and I was tired. My shoulders ached, and my head was hurting. Filling sandbags was a monotonous, mind-numbing task, and I was grateful when my turn came up on watch. I watched the road in the light of the predawn and saw figures shambling through the fog, ghostly figures. I motioned for Jim to come up.
“You have two suppressed rifles, right?” He nodded.
“Well, time to start a little interdiction.”
He spit a long stream of tobacco juice out of his mouth. ‘Well, I dunno. We’ve got, how many, a couple tens of thousands of zombies coming up this way, right? I don’t think wasting a couple here with rifle shots is going to make much of a difference.”
I thought about it, and then agreed with him.
“Finish the fighting positions, and then try to get some sleep. In about two hours I’m going to register the arty. Brit and I will stay on watch.”
“Can do, Chief.”
He went back and in a few minutes, Brit came to sit beside me.
“You know, Nick, this could go really, really bad, really, really quick.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’ve got some ropes rigged on the back face, we can climb up and evade if we have to.”
“Brit, if they notice us, this entire hill is going to be overrun.”
“Well, if that happens, don’t let them get me.”
“You didn’t have to come, you know” I said to her, and took her hand.
“As if I would let you screw this up all by yourself, Dumbass.”
We both sat and watched the sun rise over the hills in the east. Below us, hidden in a mist in the valley, the zombie moan carried faintly up to us.
Chapter 89
Four days. Sunrise on the fourth day. I was so tired that everything seemed to exist in slow motion. My eyes were raw from the caustic smoke caused by high explosive. Our sleep plan had gone to hell because the stream of zombies coming up the valley was nonstop. We had already beaten back six waves of undead that had made it past the artillery, and were running low on ammo. I had slept only a few hours over those past four days, and I felt shaky. When I held the binos to my face to adjust another volley, I had a hard time keeping them steady. I finally got them to focus onto a group of zombies climbing over stinking mounds of body parts and shattered corpses
“Alys, come over here and take the radio.” The kid was a homesteader from up river and the only one of us who had never done a tour overseas, besides Brit. He had done his three years after the war had run down, and didn’t want to go back active again. Just farm the land. Pretty steady in a fight so far, though. He got up from the parapet we had thrown up thirty meters down the hill. I handed the pack over to him and sat back down on the stump of a burned-out tree. Brit handed me a canteen and I swished some around in my mouth and spit it out. I took out some toothpaste and a brush and tried to scrub the foul taste out of my mouth. Ashes, dirt, the stink of rotting zombie flesh. I was so tired my body felt numb and hurting all over at the same time. I was too exhausted to even stand. I had to rest a while. I opened up an MRE and started to eat it cold, then looked at the label. Tuna with noodles. Ugh, this one hadn’t been on the menu for ten years. They must be getting seriously low on pre-war supply stocks to be dragging out this old stuff. I poured a whole bottle of Tabasco on it, trying to wake myself up and put some taste into it. I actually dozed off with the spoon in my hand and a mouthful of noodles. I woke with a start as a stray pellet from one of the artillery rounds zinged off the dirt next to me, but then I kept on chewing.
A few feet away rose three mounds of dirt. We had lost three men the night before when a zombie came down on us from behind, over the mountain. Our rear guard had fallen asleep, and it was inside the fighting position before either of them could react. One man had died instantly, the zombie tearing his head off. The other was bitten on the neck and had turned in a few seconds, coming raging at us in the dark with the first Z. Donny had seen them first and lit out at them with a yell, swinging his heavy sledgehammer handle. Another one of Jim’s crew had stumbled as he came at them, and both the Zs went after him in a pile. Donny smashed all three, fast and hard. Good for them they had died, because I would have shot one of them for falling asleep on guard. I had done it before.
We had buried our three and tossed the body of the first Z over the side of the cliff. Now I sat and looked at the graves, staring at them and trying to make my mind work. Brit sat next to me, put her head on my shoulder and fell instantly asleep. I eased her to the ground and let her sleep, then got up to look at the perimeter. In front of me, about 30 meters down the hill, the squad kept up a steady firing, knocking down Zs that were trying to climb the slope towards us. The closest corpse was lying across the rough rock wall we had built. Resupply came in yesterday, dropping water and ammo, and taking off one of the guys who had been throwing up and running a fever, and another who had dropped a rock while building the wall, smashing the small bones in his foot.
As I approached, Alys stood and fired a 40mm smoke grenade towards the road. It landed halfway between us and the mile-long smear of dead bodies and parts lining Route 9. Another wave of zombies, several thousand, had backed up against the ruins of the shopping center, and was scrambling to get over the rubble. Alys was talking an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle onto the target, using the smoke as a marker.
“Roger, target is two hundred meters two seven zero degrees from smoke.”
The pilot’s voice came back over the radio. “I copy, two hundred meters, two seven zero degrees. Stand by.” As I watched, the grey twin engine fighter jet flew over the valley from the north at about a thousand feet, getting eyes on the target. He banked around, disappearing over the hills, then started his run. They had been dropping five hundred-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions for us to cover while the artillery resupplied.
Staring at the plane coming in, something itched at the back of my mind. I was so tired that a cloud seemed to hang over my mind, and I couldn’t think straight. What was wrong? I looked down at Alys as he talked the pilot in.
Two hundred seventy degrees. I looked down at the smoke burning in the valley, and held up my hand to block the rising sun. Rising in the east, over the hills.<
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East. Ninety degrees from our position. The zombies were east of the smoke grenade. Ninety degrees. From the smoke. I tried to figure it out, and the truth burst on me like a flare.
“WAVE HIM OFF,WAVE HIM OFF!!” I screamed it at Alys, and he turned toward me, a puzzled look on his face. “What?” he yelled over the firing. We were all half-deaf from four days of constant gunfire and explosions. I could see the guys on the firing line, twenty meters away down slope, looking away from me. Only Esposito seemed to have heard. He looked at the plane, and then he started to dive behind the wall.
“EVERYBODY DOWN!” I yelled as loudly as I could, and threw myself backwards over a tree.
Chapter 90
My ears were ringing from the blast, and I felt blood pouring out of my nose. I sat up, and then fell back down when everything swam in circles in front of me. I took a minute to catch my breath and let everything steady, then slowly raised myself up again, pulling on the tree trunk to help myself back to a sitting position. I looked down at the firing line.
The bodies of four, no, five people were visible, not moving. Alys crawled towards me, away from a smoking crater, the radio on his back a ruin. The line of bunkers and the wall we had built, was smashed flat where it wasn’t upended. I saw another soldier, I think it was Esposito, though it was hard to tell, trying to stuff his guts back into his stomach. They lay scattered around him, and both his legs were gone. I couldn’t hear him, but I could see his mouth opening in a scream. I drew my pistol, held it balanced on the tree trunk, and shot him. Twice, in the head, from behind. He fell limp.
Next to me I could feel the concussion from gunshots. THUMP THUMP THUMP. I still couldn’t hear anything. I raised my rifle and pointed it drunkenly downhill, trying to focus on a target. Any target. I knew the zombies were still down there, and they would be attracted to the explosion.
A hand grabbed me by the carry strap on the back of my armor, and started pulling me up the hill, dragging my legs in the dirt. I still felt too wobbly to stand up, and I passed out again.
