Irregular Scout Team One: The Complete Zombie Killer series

by John Holmes

  “What was it, Nick?” she asked, drowsily.

  “Nothing, Brit. Somebody else’s problem now. Go back to sleep. We have fields to plow tomorrow, and corn to plant.” She muttered a sleepy “OK” and pulled the baby closer to her. He squirmed a bit but stayed asleep.

  Somewhere, far off in the distance, on the other side of the river, a zombie howled, faint in the wind.

  End of Volume III , “EVEN ZOMBIE KILLERS CAN DIE”

  The Grunts

  by

  Specialist George Roy

  Contributing Author

  Corporal Phineas Thog

  It was hot in the cockpit, despite the air streaming past at almost a hundred miles per hour. Flying up and behind the other UH-60 in the flight, the pilot could see the hot engine exhaust of the lead Blackhawk being blown downward by the rotor wash. The turbulence shook the bird, and he ignored the warning lights on the dashboard.

  “Goddamned missing spare parts” he said into the headset when the copilot tapped the lights. “Can’t get a replacement until we get back to the Fort Orange, and there isn’t any at FOB Castle. We should be OK this flight.” He went back to concentrating on following the path of the Hudson River as it passed beneath them.

  In the back, Staff Sergeant Mowers ripped off another piece of green hundred mile per hour tape and wrapped it around a hydraulic line that was leaking purplish orange fluid. He grinned at the trooper who sat on the canvas seat next to him, who looked like he was ready to puke. “Kid can’t be more than seventeen years old” he thought to himself.

  The trooper, Private Henry Boudreaux, gripped the stock of his M-4, pointed down on the floor, and prayed a silent prayer with his eyes open. The crew chief held up his hand with one finger. One minute out, oh Jesus Christ save us. The helo tilted to the right, and the crewman on the other side opened up with his 240B machine gun as they circle the landing zone. With a flare they came down on the cracked pavement of the parking lot, and his squad leader, Sergeant Ramirez, punched him hard on the shoulder and yelled “GO GO GO!” in his ear. He unsnapped the crossed seat belts and grabbed the rucksack full of extra magazines for their rifles, then jumped to the ground, turned left, ran 5 paces and down, scanning for targets.

  Sergeant Ramirez fell to the ground next to him as the Blackhawk increased power and lifted off, nose pointing back up river. Ramirez was yelling into his headset, giving a situation report to the company commander back in the TOC at FOB Castle. He glanced around, counting off the squad. One, two, three, six total plus him. They had hit the ground short of a full squad, as usual. He stood and pumped his fist towards the target building, then fell into the middle of the column as they rushed the front doors of the four story apartment building.

  “Team one, GO!” he yelled, and the first team crashed through the yawning front door, clearing the lobby. One shot rang out as the second man in fired into a zombie that came down the stairway. The remains of the obese woman crashed to the floor.

  “Up the stairs, to the roof!” They knew what to do, but his command reinforced the urgency. Boots pounded up the stairwell. As he passed the bloated corpse, Private Boudreaux vomited onto the boots of the man in front of him. Team One stayed behind, watching out of the doorway.

  “Thanks, you asshole noob!” yelled Specialist Schride, glaring back at him over his shoulder as they hit the second flight of stairs. By the third landing, they were all out of breath. 75 pounds of ammo, water and food on their backs, plus a survival kit around their waist, weapon, and the extra ammo many of them carried in bags. That combined with the short rations everyone in America had been living on for two years combined to make them more tired than they should be. When they got to the top, one of them collapsed on the tarred blacktop, chest heaving, face red with exertion. PFC Johnson, the only woman on their squad.

  “GET THE F UP!” yelled Ramirez, kicking the prone soldier until she rose to her feet. The others were already scanning their sectors, looking out over the tops of their ACOG sites.

  “I GOT MOVEMENT. IT’S THEM!” PFC Johnson, on her second mission with the squad, was as keyed up as Boudreaux, and her voice cracked as she yelled it.

  Ramirez barked at them “Make sure you ID your target! Remember what we came for!” He leaned over the parapet of the roof, and yelled into a bullhorn.

  “CIVILIANS, MAKE FOR THE FRONT DOOR. RUN!”

  A group of a half dozen civilians, dressed in ragged clothes and armed with a variety of makeshift weapons, ran toward the front of the building as fast as they could. Behind them, rotting figures started lurching quickly towards them.

  Johnson open fire without orders from Ramirez, and her first shot hit one of the lagging civilians in the hip, sending him sprawling to the ground. He fell with a screech, and before he could rise, the zombies ripped him apart.

  “God you stupid puta!” yelled Ramirez, and he smacked Johnson hard across the helmet, yelled “RUN” over the edge of the parapet, then started firing at the zombies. Downstairs, as the refugees cleared the door, Team One , the more experienced, disciplined fire squad, opened up, a rolling crackle of shots that started dropping zombies. More appeared at the edge of the woods, and the team rolled back from the doorway to follow the civilians up the stairway. They left a tiki bomb on a trip wire in the looby, set to spread a thousand steel pellets at head height. It detonated with a muffled BOOM as they rounded the second landing.

  The civilians huddled on the roof as second team fired at a measured pace into the horde crossing the parking lot. POP POP POP.

  First team took up a position over the stairwell, shooting downward into the zombies that were climbing the stairs. In a minute, the pile had grown so great that it blocked the stairway.

  Ramirez popped orange smoke into the center of the roof, and the first Blackhawk thundered down, sucking the smoke into the updraft. It hovered over the roof and the crew chief hopped out and started hustling the civilians onto the bird. The last one in, a tough looking bastard with a crooked leg and scars on his face, looked around to make sure his group was all in, then hopped on himself, riding the edge like he had done it before.

  The second helo dropped down onto the roof as the first circled around, firing into the horde. First squad piled into the open doors then turned and kept firing at the zombies that burst through the doorway of the stairs. Second squad fell back from the roof top to board the other side of the helo.

  Boudreaux reached over and grabbed Specialist Schride by the carry strap on his body armor as he tried to clamber onto the UH-60. Rotting arms grabbed at him, and he howled in pain as jagged, rotten teeth tore through his leg. “Let me go you stupid fuck!” he yelled at Boudreaux and threw his weight back against the strap, breaking it free from Boudreaux’s grasp. The helo rose above Schride as he fell to the roof, and started swinging his rifle at the Zs clutching at him.

  Ramirez grabbed the gunner and yelled in his ear, pointing at the roof as they spiraled away. The gunner nodded and opened up with a long burst of fire that shredded Schride as he stood.

  When they touched down at FOB Castle twenty minutes later, a medical team had already moved the refugees off the landing pad. Ramirez jumped out of the helo, and walked across the pad, then slammed his helmet on the ground, screaming curses in Spanish. Johnson grounded her gear and slumped off towards the tents.

  Corporal Snow, First Fire Team Leader, lit a cigarette and put it in Boudreaux ‘s shaking hands. “Welcome to the Wild Wild East, noob. You did OK. Not great, but OK. You’ll get better, but it’s gonna get worse.”

  A note to my readers:

  Zombie Killers was supposed to end with three books, and as result, I had no plans to continue after Doctor Morano was dealt with. Nick and Brit and the rest of the guys were supposed to ride off into the sunset. However, the fans of IST-One kept demanding another book. I finished writing Mage Corps, and realized I actually missed writing about the Scouts. So, out came “Zombie Killers: Civil War and Zombie Killers: Endgame”.

>   I don’t think there will be any more IST-1 books after this, but maybe the torch will pass to a new generation. Meanwhile, read on!

  Prologue:

  Four years after the Undead virus / parasite infected the world, civilization struggles on. The United States lives, with forty million people crammed into the Pacific Northwest, living in squalid refugee camps. Army units have made inroads into the ruins of the rest of America, working on clearing the major cities.

  Outside America, England survived, as did other island nations. The survivors are struggling back to their feet, fighting a long, exhaustive campaign to regain the Japanese Islands and Europe.

  On an island in the Hudson River, thirty miles north of the nearest Army outpost, several families have homesteaded. Mixed military and civilian, planting crops and salvaging the land they are survivors of the Army’s elite scout teams. Children are born, old friends mourned, rivers run clean and corn grows in the ruins.

  The fight, though, still goes on...

  Chapter 1

  The LMTV ground across the potholes of the deserted road, slowly making its way down Route 40. We had forded the Tomhannock creek, making our way around the debris field from the downed bridge. Thankfully, the bridge over the Hoosick River, and its high deep gorge, was still intact. Once that was down, getting south to Troy, well, we would be back to using boats on the river. The ride was bumpy, and after a while, my leg was starting to ache where my prosthetic joined up below the knee. It was times like this when I missed Doc the most. The guy had a way of treating my stump that made the prosthetic ride that much easier.

  “How about you take it easy there, cowgirl.” I told Brit as she spun the wheel around, swerving to avoid an abandoned mini-van.

  “How about you shut up, old man!” Brit turned to me for a second and flashed me a smile, and stomped on the gas. We hit another pothole, and I heard Red curse out loud as his kidneys impacted on the turret ring.

  “SORRRY!” yelled Brit.

  Red looked down and grinned. “Next time, I kick you in the head.” Red’s wife, Jenny Hart, our demo expert, was back at the farm with our son Nate and their daughter Mya, both less than a year old. I had insisted that Brit stay home; I might as well have been talking to myself for all the attention she paid me.

  We were heading down to a cell tower located off Oakwood Avenue. Four years after the Zombie Apocalypse, the Army controlled a corridor through the Mohawk Valley and down the Hudson. Trains were running, and FEMA was resettling towns. Outside the corridor, though, most major cities and towns were still infested with thousands and thousands of undead. We had all been vaccinated, so we had no fear of being turned, but a bite was a bite, and getting your throat ripped out was kind of permanent also. The real danger we faced was the random ambush or gunshots from bands of survivors that lurked outside of the land patrolled by the Federal Army. Most of them knew to stay far away from our farmstead, but we were heading into unknown territory.

  Behind us, another LMTV, the modern version of the Army’s 5 – Ton truck, followed. It was being driven by Ziv, the only other surviving member of our team. Riding shotgun was an old friend, Gunnery Sergeant (Retired) Jim Lock. Jim had been with a shoot and loot crew, taking gold out of the ruins of Mechanicville, but had stuck around when the rest of his guys departed to England. Perched up in the turret, manning the M-240B machine gun was a new soldier, Specialist Jimmy Woods. On the back of the trucks were climbing equipment, a 5 kilowatt generator, and a loud speaker setup. The plan was to get to a cell phone tower, rig up the loudspeakers as high as we could go, power up the generator, set a recording on time delay, and haul ass. Then, after a day or so, the Air Force would come in and bomb the ever loving shit out of all the zombies that had gathered, attracted by the sound of the siren. There was also an Infantry Fire Team from Task Force Liberty, commanded by a young Captain who had been assigned this mission. They were riding in the back of our LMTV, which had been turned into a gun truck, just like we did in Iraq. Sheet metal welded to the sides, crude gun port cut into the steel.

  Technically, Captain Zarzicky was in command of this little joyride, but he had shown up at our door three days ago, looking for help. He had been given two men and the sound equipment and been told to “go do it.” He knew me from way back, and, to be honest, I missed getting back out into the field, into the fight. It had been a year and a half since the end of the plague, a year and a half after that final, devastating firefight had killed Doc and Ahmed. When Zarzicky had shown up at the door, Brit said nothing, just put our son down and started packing. I guess she missed it too. So now here we were, rolling down the cracked pavement of what had once been a quiet, rural area of upstate New York. A simple plan to do some easy Z killing.

  Chapter 2

  We saw it, or more to the point, we didn’t see it, long before we got to it. The target cell phone tower, located high on a hill a mile outside of Troy proper, had fallen sometime in the last few years. We drove past the wreckage and moved on to our secondary option, much closer to inhabited (more like infested) areas. I got on the radio to Captain Zarzicky. “Just a heads up, Sir. Make sure your guys are weapons tight. Any loud noises from here on out are going to attract the wrong kind of attention, over.”

  “Roger. This isn’t our first rodeo. Out.”

  OK, maybe I deserved that. The Captain was a good guy and his squad was experienced; the Lost boys might be the baddest scout team in town, but they had been fighting for more than three years nonstop, while we specialized in hiding out.

  We pulled the trucks up to the cell phone tower, parking them back to back to give us a clear 360 degree field of fire. The tower Itself rose several hundred feet up in the air, far above the surrounding trees. We quickly unassed the trucks, with the turret gunners remaining on overwatch. Captain Z’s team took up more perimeter security, and I had my guys start unloading the speaker equipment and the generators. Brit set to work getting them hooked up to the power cables that ran to the broadcasting unit. I grabbed a safety harness and started slipping my legs through it.

  “Where do you think you’re going, old man?” asked Redshirt, as he slipped into his own harness.

  “Top of the tower, injun. This is white mans magic, not smoke signals. You wouldn’t know how to work it.”

  “Hah, I'll race you to the top. Even give you a ten second lead.”

  I grunted “I don’t need a lead because of my leg. Works fine!”

  He laughed at me. “I’m not giving you a lead because of your leg; I’m giving you a lead because of your age.” I threw a heavy coil of speaker wire at him, and he grabbed it on the fly. Both of us started up the tower, rising steadily, pausing to clip and unclip each other’s safety line as we went.

  I paused about halfway up, just as we cleared the tops of the trees, and looked around. Below me, I could see (and hear) Brit cursing at the generator, a huge monstrous old 5kw that had probably seen service in Vietnam. As I watched, she pulled the starter cord again and fell backwards with the force of her pull. One of the infantry guys came over to help her, and I distinctly heard her tell him to Fuck Off. I grinned and looked out across the Hudson Valley.

  To the west, hills rose up from our position, framing quiet suburbs and the remains of farms, the further out you went. I turned east to look back over the valley. In the distance, a C-17 lumbered into Albany Airport, delivering fresh troops for the clearing operations, returning to Seattle with electronics and weapons looted from the ruins. An AC-130 gunship was a speck in the far distance circling endlessly. As I watched, a stream of tracer rounds, made silent by the distance, connected the plane to the ground. Somewhere below, I knew, a group of infantry and armor were cleaning up one of the small towns along the river, prior to resettlement.

  Below me, on the other side of the trees, the ruins of Troy spread out. Many of the brick buildings still stood, or at least their walls did. Most were gutted by the fires that had swept through almost all of the cities. Their walls still stoo
d, but roofs we caved in and windows shattered. The glass in the streets glittered in the sunlight, despite four years of dust on them. I could see the Green Island bridge, the barricades still up and monitored from Fort Orange. A few undead were collected there, as usual. Others moved through the streets, shambling around, looking for someone to eat.

  Our objective today was to attract as many undead as we could to this point and have the Air Force come in with a Fuel Air explosive, and whatever else they had on hand, and blow the crap out of them. It made the task of cleaning out a heavily populated area much easier, and I knew that the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to seize and hold the lock at the Troy Dam.

  Redshirt brought me back to reality, tapping my shoulder. “Hey, Chief, time to get to work.” I nodded and unsnapped a pulley from my tactical vest, securing it by a chain and snap link to the tower. I yelled down to Ziv to hook up the speakers, and Red began playing out speaker wire from the spool, lowering it down to the ground.

  Chapter 3

  By the time we had the whole system rigged up, the sun had climbed directly overhead, and I was sweating my ass off. Yes, the world’s average temperature had dropped due to the ash from the major cities burning, but a hot, humid upstate NY summer day would always be that. Thank God for my gloves and my safety harness, or else I would have had a hard time hanging on a hundred feet up in the air. As it was, I didn’t like heights anyway, and I kept my eyes focused on hooking up the speakers.

  I yelled down to the guy working the generator, one of the Infantrymen, and told him to fire it up. He pulled on the starter cord a few times until the generator chugged into life.

  BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

  Deep heavy bass thundered out of the speakers, the opening notes of “Rhyming & Stealing “ by The Beastie Boys shaking the whole tower and causing Red to lose his grip on the support struts. He fell backwards and outwards, but his safety harness caught him before he fell more than five feet.