by John Holmes
Now, fifteen minutes after my call, from the open bomb bay doors spilled dozens of two thousand pound dumb bombs, falling in a steady stream towards the island. Each plane made several passes, laying a string of explosives from one end to the other, south to north. The heavy ordnance blasted huge craters into the bedrock, and an eruption of dirt and stone leapt high into the sky.
I took the controls from Brit and headed west, full speed. We skipped over the waves, and, behind us, the island shook and turned into a cloud of dust.
Brit sat next to me, helmet off and red hair whipping in the wind. “WE GOTTA GET DOC TO SOME MEDICAL CARE, ASAP!” she yelled over the concussion of the two thousand pound bombs pounding the island. “WHERE TO?”
“ISLE LE MOTT, AROUND THE NORTHWEST SIDE!” The S-2 had forwarded me some satellite recon photos, and there had seemed to be some settlements and fortifications on the island, although much smaller than on Grand Isle. I just hoped we got a better welcome than we had here.
I looked down at Doc. Red was bandaging his fingers where the nails had been torn off. Ziv sat in front of me, looking backwards, smoking a cigarette, watching the bombs fall. Hart was helping Red, handing him bandages while holding up an IV that ran into Doc’s arm. Ahmed looked out over the bow, scouting ahead.
For better or worse, the Lost Boys were together again. We sailed on into the falling darkness.
Chapter 99
Long minutes passed as the zodiac cut around the northeastern edge of Grand Isle, out of range of any snipers that might be hiding among the trees. The wind that blows perpetually across the northern end of Lake Champlain whistled eerily in the dark. Isle la Motte gradually came into view, or what I thought must be Isle la Motte; what looked like a concrete wall obscured the interior. If S2's recon photos were correct, there should be settlements there, and if so, that wall was a pretty good way of keeping anyone out. Still jumping on adrenaline, I worried maybe the General had controlled this place too.
I glanced back at Doc, lying across the inflatable seats just in front of Hart, who had one hand on the motor and the other holding up an IV bag. Doc looked like hell, and Brit, temporarily on nursing duty, looked up at me with eyes full of worry. I couldn't hear his breathing over the motor, but I could see even in the failing light that one side of his chest was rising out of sync with the other. If he didn't have a collapsed lung, he had at least three broken ribs on that side.
The remains of the Vermont Bridge loomed to our front, creating mini-rapids in the current flowing north towards the Richelieu River; the Vermont National Guard having blown the bridge when the Undead made it to northern New York before northern Vermont, in the vain hope of defending Burlington from that direction.
The lake was deceptively peaceful. Ziv was sitting just in front of me, facing the way we had come, watching in silence as secondary explosions from the JDAMs continued to eat whatever was left for it to eat on the island - South Hero, if I remembered right. North Hero was connected to it by a causeway. And if the General was as big an SOB as I thought, hopefully he would have placed explosives on that causeway as well. Maybe North Hero Island could avoid the pounding its sister just caught to the south. If not... I pushed away that line of thought and hunkered down next to Doc.
“How bad?” I shouted to him above the engine noise.
He just shook his head. He didn't have the breath to try and shout an answer to me. I placed a hand on his shoulder, not daring to squeeze reassurance for fear of hurting him worse. I turned instead towards Ziv, who pitched his cigarette into the lake and leaned his head back against the rubber sides.
Asking him if he was injured would be useless, but I looked him over. His face wasn't smashed in like Doc's, and I remembered from the fight that his arms and legs worked, at least; but I wouldn't put it past him to fight with broken bones. The way his left arm was socketed tight against his chest suggested a fracture of some kind. Whatever, we'd deal with his injuries when we got to Isle la Motte - if we were able to get any kind of help there, that is.
It was maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes from the southern end of Grand Isle to the remains of the causeway between Isle la Motte and the Alburgh Peninsula, but it felt a lot longer. When we got close enough to the peninsula, I had Hart cut the motor and we used the paddles. There was no sign of life anywhere, but the gap between the two wasn't more than two or three hundred meters, and I didn't want to alert anyone to our presence until we had to.
Up close, I could see that the wall was maybe twenty feet high and made of cinderblocks and cement. The exterior was incredibly smooth, even the cement between the cinderblock joints had been carefully set; the effect was of one flat, even surface. After a few seconds' staring at the thing in stupefaction, my brain kicked in and I realized that no zombie would be able to climb the wall. Pretty slick, no pun intended.
“Ahoy, the island!” I shouted when we were about fifty meters away. Behind me, Brit snickered. Two heads popped up from behind the wall, and one of them shouted to me.
“Qui est-il?” The voice switched to English. “Who are you?”
We’d heard rumors for several years that the Quebecois north had managed to remain organized, and it didn’t surprise me to hear French; it stood to reason they would want the Vermont farmland as much as we did, especially after the fall of Montreal. The Canadian Parliament had the city nuked, ostensibly to contain the plague up there. However, from the paranoid mutterings of the few survivors to make it south, after Toronto succumbed to the plague moving north from Buffalo and Niagara Falls, Quebec had tried to secede and seal up their own borders. It may have worked. Despite the destruction of their capital city, regular radio traffic could be heard from French news channels. Reportedly, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia remained zombie-free. Ottawa was now its own glowing lake of glass thanks to the Chinese, but the Frogs had evidently survived.
“United States Army! We have wounded here!” Hart had pulled out the flag we'd used down south at the ambush site and was waving it madly.
The two heads disappeared for a second, then a series of ropes were tossed over the wall and one of the men rappelled down easily, stopping just short of the water. Several more heads appeared over the edge of the wall. We paddled the boat over to him, and he shined a flashlight into each of our faces. The light paused on Doc.
“Is he bitten?” This man, for sure, was Quebecois, and it took a minute for me to understand him through the thick accent. Brit astonished me by rattling off a string of French to the man. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, he nodded and shouted back up to the others. A second man rappelled down with a collapsible stretcher, and after a minute or so we were able to wrestle it atop the Zodiac and carefully set Doc onto it. The stretcher was tied off and lifted to the parapet with a crude pulley system. The rest of us, even Ziv, were harnessed in and carefully lifted one at a time to the top of the wall. The two Frenchies remained below, attaching the boat to a series of lines before lifting it clear of the water, winching it into a makeshift gantry.
After I untied myself from the swiss seat, I looked around. Each of the local men was armed with a rifle, their pistol grips and butt stocks shiny from use. Radios beeped, the volume barely loud enough to register. The first man, the one to hail us, untied himself and stepped towards us. "What are you doing here?" His voice was not friendly, but neither was it openly hostile. I saw immediately that they had saved our lives, but didn't yet see a reason to keep us breathing.
“Do you work for the General?” I asked warily. He hawked in the back of his throat and spit over the wall.
“I guess not,” I murmured. “You see those explosions to the south?”
“Oui. We are not blind.”
“The General and his men are dead. The causeway block failed and the island has been attacked by zombies.”
He swore in French and yanked his radio off his shoulder, barking into it. The voice that came through the radio was American, and speaking English. “Do they have wounded?
”
“Oui.”
“Get the wounded to the doctor. Hold the others there. Five minutes.”
Brit and I glanced at each other. The man clipped the radio back in place and extended one hand to me. “I am Pierre.” He said. “We will get your wounded to our docteur. You wait here for Cassandra.”
“Who is Cassandra?” This could either get better or it could get worse, really fast. “I'm not letting you take my wounded away.”
Something in his expression softened. “We will care for them. Cassandra, she is one of you. Do not be afraid.” He touched the flag on Red's uniform. “We have been waiting for you Americans.”
We all shared wary glances. He wasn’t exactly clarifying the situation. A few minutes later a cart drew up, led by two horses of the same huge breed as those monsters we'd seen outside Schuylerville a year back. Belgian war horses, I think they were called. Doc's litter was carefully lowered, set perpendicular so that he was not lying directly in the cart, cushioning him from the worst of the jolting. “Ziv, go with him,” I ordered quietly. He might not admit to being wounded, but I wasn't going to let him stand up here with a broken arm, either. “No one is alone until I sort this out.” For once he didn't argue with me, just jumped down into the wagon and took a seat next to Doc. The driver clucked to the team and slapped them with the reins.
A trim woman of perhaps sixty was climbing the ladder to the parapet. In looking her way I saw that the entire wall, what I could see, anyway, had a deck, maybe four feet wide, running along the inside. When I'd climbed over, I'd seen that the wall was actually a type of permanent coffer dam: two separate walls of concrete blocks with tons of gravel fill between them. The wall was nearly three feet wide, a more permanent version of the HESCO barriers that had been everywhere in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Name,” she ordered when she reached us. She wore old-style Multicam pants, the ones with the knee pads sewn directly into the fabric, and the brown cotton undershirt.
“Sergeant First Class Nick Agostine, United States Army.”
Chapter 100
The woman searched my face intently. Pierre shone his flashlight in my face, not aggressively, but so she could take my measure.
“What just happened on Grand Isle?”
I gave her the short version, but before I could finish she turned to Pierre. “Get our boats to the junction between North and South Hero. Blow that bridge. Get on the radio and inform the North of what's happened and tell them to get to stations. Expect contact with the Undead before morning. Broadcast South that any survivors should head for the west shore, and to get in the water if zombies come at them. We'll pick them up in our boats. And tell that fucking pilot to get his ass back in the air and give us a proper recon!” She had to shout that last, because with a “Oui, oui, madame!” he'd already slid down the ladder and hauled ass to what looked like a guard shack a couple hundred meters away.
She turned back and surveyed my team. “Your wounded have been taken to my farm for treatment,” she informed me. “The rest of you will join them once another wagon has arrived. It will be maybe a half hour wait.”
I cut her off. “No offense, but who are you?”
She eyed me. “Before all this shit, I was Sergeant Major Cassandra McIntyre. Retired. Now I'm what you'd call the Mayor of Isle La Motte.”
My eyes narrowed. That name was familiar. “I think we’ve met.”
“If so, it was long ago. I don’t recognize your face or name. The plague broke out just as I was leaving Fort Detrick, my last duty station. Unless you were stationed with me at some point, I doubt we knew each other. And I remember every soldier who was ever under my command.”
I shook my head. “We probably didn’t, but I might have heard of you, if you were in Iraq or Afghanistan.” I hesitated a second. “Some people say the plague started in Detrick.”
She nodded once, crisply. “They would be correct.”
I leaned back, shocked at her casual answer. In the three years since the zombie outbreak, there had been a million theories to how it had happened. “So how did it start?”
“Madame, madame!” The shout came up from below. “General Dupúis!”
“Dammit,” she hissed, leaning over the side. “Tell him Allen is dead and our position is precarious. Tell him to continue mission but we cannot join him for three days. He will have to hold his own until then.”
“What the hell is going on?” I demanded.
She turned back to me. “Long story. I'll tell you in the morning.”
“You are aware of the call-up of retirees three years ago? You should be back on Active Duty right now, Sergeant Major. You're breaking the law by remaining here.”
“I hadn't heard, as a matter of fact.” I couldn't tell if she was lying or not. “But my duty is here and if the US government wants to retake New England in the next century, they'll be smart enough to leave me here. You said Allen is dead. How do you know?”
“We shot him in both legs and left him on the south side of the island. He's probably a zombie by now.”
Her face was unreadable in the darkness, which by now was total, the guards having switched off their flashlights and gone back to patrolling the deck, excepting one young trooper who stood at the Sergeant Major's left shoulder. Her bodyguard, I assumed.
“Good.” She managed a world of satisfaction in that one word. I relaxed. Whatever the whole story about her presence here, she wasn't connected to Allen and my wounded were getting treatment. She glanced over her shoulder. “Your ride is early.”
Sure enough, another wagon pulled by those giant horses had appeared. One by one my team climbed down and pulled themselves into it. Padded with straw, it wasn’t too bad even with the jolting. I pulled myself up towards the front, hooking one elbow over the front of the wagon, at her left side. The Sergeant Major drove, clucking gently at the team and occasionally slapping the reins against their backs. The rest of the guards we left behind, and I looked back to see them spreading along the wall to their original positions. Next to the Sergeant Major sat the young trooper. We jolted along the remains of a paved road for perhaps an hour, gradually turning away from the edge of the wall. “What is that?” I asked over the clopping hooves.
“A twenty-foot sea wall.” She replied over her shoulder. “In the days after New York City fell, people in the biggest towns in Vermont took the hint and started leaving in droves. Even though the locals knew we were here, most fled east and north. Only a couple hundred made their way to us, and most of them stayed in Grand Isle. There was a window of about four weeks between the zombie plague spreading north and their arrival in Burlington. We took advantage of that and looted every construction site we could find. Most looters were taking things they could cart away in sedans and SUVs. Since we are mostly farmers, we went in there with trucks and trailers. It took over two years, long after we had to start defending ourselves from the Undead, to steal enough cement blocks to circle the island, but now the wall is complete. We also excavated thirty-foot deep trenches into the lake bed. No one can reach us from the lake, unless they’ve got a Naval fleet.” This struck her companion as funny, somehow, and he laughed. I had to give her credit: it was no small feat to circle an island, however small, with that kind of defense. If nothing else, she could organize a work force.
“You know the Zs don’t like water. Was it worth the effort?”
She nodded. “There are worse things than Zombies in the world, as I’m sure you know, Sergeant.”
Eventually she pulled into a long driveway that snaked this way and that through a line of trees, dead-ending in a stable yard. There was a huge, three-story barn on one side, some sort of walled-off enclosure directly in front of the drive, and a third, smaller structure to the left. When I jumped off the back of the cart, I landed on cement. A glance at the constellations told me it was well on towards dawn, and in the growing light I could see the dark circles and haggard expressions of my team. None of us had slept in better than
thirty-six hours, and it was starting to catch up with us. Several young guys had come out from the barn and unhitched the team, leading them away. The Sergeant Major and her companion slung our packs over their shoulders. “This way,” she said. We followed her up.
It might have started life as a barn, and the horses might bed below us, but the top half of the structure had, at some point, been turned into living space. In a world where people lived badly and a bath was usually a dream, I could only be amazed that she had managed to maintain this place. It was clean – not just the half-assed clean you get by removing muddy boots at the door and maybe sweeping around with a broom made of twigs – but clean. I hadn’t seen anything like it outside Seattle. There was even a TV on the wall and a pool table near a tall bank of real windows on the opposite side of the room. I looked around. The space beneath stairs leading to the third floor was filled with books, facing a small kitchen that had, from the sound of it, a working refrigerator. She looked at my astonished face with amusement, and I hastily shut my trap. The others were just standing there, heads hanging, so dog-tired they couldn’t even drum up the enthusiasm to look around for themselves.
“You can sleep here tonight,” she said. “There are enough beds upstairs for you all. Do me a favor and strip out of your clothes, and we’ll have them clean in the morning.”
