Irregular Scout Team One: The Complete Zombie Killer series

by John Holmes

  “I’m not going to ask any of you to do it, I’ll go” I said. “Get ready to provide me some covering fire and pull my ass out if necessary. You and I are going to have a little talk, later, Corporal. Here’s the plan.”

  I managed to find something white in the mule’s pack, happily chomping grass where we had tethered her. Some packing from one of the aide bags. I tied it on the end of my rifle and slowly advanced forward towards the hidden position.

  I had gone ten meters past where we had first stopped, and a burst of machine gun fire ripped over my head into the trees, from another bunker I hadn’t spotted on my right.

  Chapter 11

  “STOP RIGHT THERE. DROP THE WEAPON.”

  I let it fall in its sling, but kept my hands up in the air.

  “MOVE FORWARD.”

  I stepped hesitantly forward, wondering If they had any mines planted. I guessed they did, because a moment later, the voice called again, telling me not to step off the center line of the road.

  As I got closer to the bunker, a figure in a ghilee suit raised up off the ground, holding a pretty damn big .45 pistol in his hand. “OK, stop there. Left hand, drop the magazine, cycle the bolt.” I did as he said, pressing the magazine release and pulling back the charging handle on my M-4 to send a live round spinning through the air. I raised my hand back up.

  “OK, Talk. Who are you, what are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing. My name is Sergeant Major Nick Agostine, Irregular Scout Team One, Joint Special Operations Command, assigned to Task Force Liberty. Maybe you’ve heard them shooting the shit out of everything between Albany and NYC? Sound has to reach all the way up here, even in the boonies.”

  “Yeah” he said “we know who they are. We have scouts out too, and one of your Calvary patrols stopped in last week. Figured it was only matter of time before they came back. “

  I looked him in the eye, and lowered my hands down, relaxed, and folded them across my rifle as nonthreatening as possible. “OK, so you know who we are, who are you and what are you doing guarding this road? Last I checked, it was still a free country.”

  He snorted some barely controlled laughter. “If it wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t just be strolling around here la-da-di-da. Sergeant Ridley, Petersburgh Self Defense force. Formerly United States Army, 82nd Airborne. We’ve hunted this place clean of zombies, from Hoosick Falls to Stephentown, Pittstown to Petersburgh Pass.”

  “I guess that explains why we haven’t seen a one this whole trip. Good job.”

  He seemed to warm to that for a second, but then scowled. “So what are you doing here, Agostine?”

  I ignored the insult of not using my rank. “I’m scouting. Its’ what scout teams do.”

  He glanced around suspiciously at that and I wondered if I had blown it. “So where’s the rest of your team?”

  “Did you hear a big firefight yesterday? West of here on Route 2?”

  “Yeah we figured that Clancy had caught someone. Fucking cannibals.”

  “Yeah, well, I got separated during the fight, so I figured better to lop around back to Route 7. If you know they were cannibals, why didn’t you take them on?”

  “None of your damn business” he said. Not enough troops to do so, I thought. Either that or low on ammo.

  “Enough talking. You can come along with me, nice and easy” he said, raising the .45 “or you can …urk”. He stopped talking when the razor edge of Ziv’s knife pressed itself up against his throat.

  “It’s Sergeant Major Agostine, Sergeant Ripley. I’ll take that, thank you.” I reached out and took the .45 out of his hand. He let go easily, not wanting to move at all while the cold steel pressed against his jugular.

  “How many?” I asked Brit, who appeared from around a bunker, leading a dejected looking man in hunting camouflage and full battle rattle.

  “Four, like you thought. Red caught the one up on the left flank, hiding under his poncho to get out of the rain. We swept around back and caught this one and his assistant gunner, who is missing some of his teeth. He took a swing at me. Sorry about that, but you know how Ziv is. The rest of the bunkers were empty.”

  I turned back to Sergeant Ripley, who Ziv had . “How about you call your right flank security in?” I handed him back the .45, butt first. “We’re not here to kill anyone, Sergeant. Like I said, were just scouting.”

  He put it back in his holster with an angry look on his face, then turned to our prisoner. “Good fucking job, Bob.” The man, well, kid more like, hung his head.

  “Let him go, and Brit, go see what you can do for the guy’s teeth. Sergeant Ripley, let’s talk. I’d like to know more about Petersburgh.”

  He studied me for a minute, then sat down on a nearby stump. “I shouldn’t tell you shit.”

  “Why? Loyalty to your town? Come on, Ripley. You guys have done well for the last few years, but things are moving along out there in the big world. We have control of the whole Hudson Valley, down to New York City and up to Lake Champlain. Do you really think the Army is going to let every two bit dictator claim his little kingdom? Just last year I watched the Air Force level an entire ISLAND. “

  “He’s no two bit dictator! You don’t know anything about him!” His eyes blazed with anger.

  “Yes actually. Vice President Epson.”

  A startled look came across his face, and he started to grab at his pistol. Ziv’s iron hand grabbed his wrist and shoved the gun back in its holster. With his other hand he pushed him back down on the stump.

  “Calm down. We aren’t here to hurt him. We’re here to save him.” So I lied, a little bit.

  Chapter 12

  In the end, we had to wait while Ripley sent a runner down to Petersburgh. He explained that he couldn’t leave his post unguarded. It was another six miles to town, which was nothing in a car, but a good hour each way on foot, if he ran. Thankfully they had a four wheeler gassed up and ready to go.

  Brit broke out an MRE’s and handed them to Ripley and his two Privates. They all grabbed at them greedily. “Ain’t had nothing but corn, some pork, corn and more corn for two years.” As he waited for it to heat up, he hungrily poured the entire salt packet into his mouth and washed it down with water from a camelback. The other two did the same. Salt had become a rarity this far inland, and many survivors show signs of incipient Hyponatremia, low blood sodium. That and vitamin deficiencies.

  Bognaski and Red had gone off on a random patrol to make sure we didn’t have anyone, or anything, sneaking up on us. Hart and Ziv watched either end of the road, while Brit and I questioned the men from the PSDF, as they liked to call themselves.

  “Not much to tell, really” said Ripley, between mouthfuls of tortellini. “When everything went to shit, I had just ETS’d from the Army. Two tours in Afghanistan, doing stupid shit, were enough for me.”

  “I was there in ’06 and again in ’08. Nothing ever changes in that shithole, does it?”

  Ripley laughed. “Nope! I hope they’re all zombies now, not that anyone would know the difference. “

  “So how did you wind up here? And how did you all survive?”

  He broke open a pack of Skittles, and poured the entire thing into his mouth, and immediately started to choke. Brit hit him on the back and he spewed half of them out of his mouth and onto the ground. A look of panic appeared on his face and he started picking the ground, brushing off the dirt and cramming them back in his mouth. He stopped when Brit and I both started laughing.

  “Don’t worry about it, brother. We’ve both been where you have. Matter of fact, I lived on squirrels and mice for a few months.” I gave him a hand up and he sat down and began eating more slowly. When he was done, he went on with his story.

  “I got out of the Army, no shit, two days before the Apocalypse broke out. I had JUST pulled into Hoosick Falls, and was crashing at my brothers’ place before I started to look for a job. Not that here was any around here. Make a long story short, though, after t
he first couple of weeks, the whole village of Hoosick Falls fell to pieces, with people raiding farms and fighting over food. Never mind the frigging Z’s. I don’t even think I saw one that first month, until one stumbled up the road from Bennington and infected everyone who didn’t run the fuck away as fast as they could. I wound up in Petersburg, heading south on 22. I don’t even know where I was going, just doing the Airborne Shuffle to somewhere else.”

  He paused to remember, and we let him be. Silences like that were common in survivors, as we dredged up memories that wanted to stay hidden.

  “So anyway, I come down 22, and bam, I almost walk into a concrete wall set right across the highway, about twenty feet high between two rock cuts. The guys manning the wall wee squared the hell away. That’s how I found myself in the PSDF.”

  “And Vice President Epson was running it?”

  He shook his head. “No, not running the Defense Force. He ran the whole town. You know his background, right?”

  “Yeah” I said “two tours in Iraq, one as a Brigade Commander in the 82nd Airborne.”

  Ripley nodded. “He had the whole town, all the farmers from the surrounding hills, EVERYONE, on a war footing. The twenty foot high wall in the north? Easy as pie, maybe 75 feet long. They had another one in between Berlin and Petersburgh that was nearly four hundred meters long. Made out of Texas barriers. There’s a concrete plant a few miles south of town, and he put people to work. Sent out recovery teams to gather fuel, stored food. Anyone who didn’t work got put outside the wall. We were ready when winter came, but before that, there was the battle of the horde. Man that was bad shit. Firearms, bow and arrows, motherfucking CATAPULTS. There was hundreds, coming up the road from Pittsfield. We retreated back up the pass into the side of the mountain, taking everything we could with us, supply wise, and fell back behind a wall we had already built across the pass.”

  “What good would a catapult do against zombies?” asked Brit.

  “Fuck zombies, man, these were PEOPLE. Hundreds of them. We told them the road was closed, told them to move on, and some dude who had organized them convinced them to try to take the town. Hell, we even offered to help them pass by and settle in Hoosick Falls or Bennington. All they saw was safety and meat.”

  “Cannibals?”

  A shiver went through him. “Yeah, cannibals. For the two months before, they had been rampaging up from, I dunno, down by the city, up to here. Eating whole villages.” He paused, but continued.

  “What finally broke them was the napalm. We started wasting fuel, sending 55 gallon drums of jellied gas into them and flaming arrows after it. Some real Medieval shit. That’s where I got this.”

  He rolled up his sleeve to show an ugly burn scar that had eaten into his biceps. His left arm looked withered and weak, which explained him using a pistol only. Injuries like that were more common nowadays, with medical care almost non-existent.

  “You’re lucky you’re not dead. Infection could have killed you” said Brit.

  “Luckily we have two doctors in town, and we had raided Bennington Hospital first thing. The Colonel doesn’t fuck around.”

  “Vice President” I corrected.

  “You call him what you want. I call him Colonel. But don’t get him wrong. He’s not a dictator. We elected him Mayor after the horde fight. His term runs through next year, and he’s not going to run again. Told me himself.”

  I bet, I said quietly to myself. I had seen it way too many times in the past four years. Civilian authority disappeared, and people turned to a strong man for leadership. Tribalism at its best. Problem was, once the immediate crisis was past, they never liked to give up power.

  “So how is the town set now? How many people?” I remembered Petersburgh as being no more than a dozen scattered houses at the road junction.

  “Well, we lost about a quarter by the end of the first winter. Old people, kids. Starved to death. Then a traveler we allowed in last year brought typhoid in, and our water supply got infected. Asshole crapped in our water supply. Before that was figured out, we lost another quarter. We’re down to about two hundred people now.”

  I whistled. “That’s pretty damn good. Makes you all the biggest town this side of Albany. How many have you got in the PSDF? How are you doing for weapons?”

  He started to answer then caught himself. “I’ve probably told you too much already. How about we wait here until word gets back on what to do with you? Thanks for the MRE.”

  In the distance we heard a diesel truck engine climbing the steep road back up from town. Sergeant Ripley stood up and said “Guess we’re going to find out.”

  Chapter 13

  The truck stopped out of sight, and I called Red and Ziv back in. Hart fell in to join us, but I kept Bognaski watching our back. Things were going well, but none of us trusted that to mean the rest of this would be smooth.

  A group of about twenty men and women, clad in various camouflage schemes, appeared out of the woods on either side of the road. All of them moved expertly, scanning sectors of fire and trusting each other to catch what they didn’t see. At a hand signal from their leader, they spread out around us and enveloped the area we standing on, Most faced outward, pulling security. The leader, and what I assumed was his sergeant, walked steadily towards us, weapons slung at their sides.

  “Looks like the A Team is here. Kinda cute, too” said Brit.

  I muttered under my breath “Hello, we’re married!” and walked forward to meet them. She was right about one thing, though. These were the top guys, this whole outfit. Probably their Quick Reaction Force, kept in town to respond to threats in any direction. If there were only two hundred people in the town, I figured this would be the bulk of their professional full time fighting force. Probably everyone else in town was armed, though.

  The men in front of me looked tough and competent. The older one, wearing Master Sergeant rank, was a tall Hispanic guy. His name tape read RAMIREZ. The other one, wearing, as I expected, Captains rank, was named Houseman. They both had a homemade patch on their right shoulder that said PSDF. Curiously, something I had noted on Ripley, they also wore a subdued American flag. Most times, when strongmen set themselves up in their little towns, they go out of their way to dissociate their followers with the past, attempt to set up a sense of isolation.

  I offered my hand and said “Sergeant Major Nick Agostine, United States Army.” He made no motion to take my hand, and I let it drop. “Brittany O’Neil, Civilian Scout, Staff Sergeants Kelly Hart and Angelo Redshirt, US Army, and Shasha Zivkovic, Civilian Scout. “I introduced each of the team in turn. Giving people names makes it harder, even for a fraction of a second, for someone to pull the trigger on them.

  The Captain looked at me for a minute, then grunted. “Captain John Houseman and Master Sergeant Manuel Ramirez. Petersburgh Self Defense Force.”

  “Well, now that we’ve got that out of the way, what’s next, Captain?”

  The next moments were crucial. He could, if he ordered it, try to take us. They could, and we all knew it. Our guns and ammunition would be a treasure trove for them. However, he also knew, from the Cavalry patrol that had come and gone a few months ago, that we were probably backed by the weight of an entire mechanized infantry task force.

  “Well” he said, in a southern drawl that seemed out of place here in New York “Y’all turn your guns over to us and we take you down to see Colonel Epson.” He made a small hand signal, and half the soldiers around us turned to face inwards, towards us.

  Brit burst out in a peal of laughter that surprised all of us. She laughed so hard she had to lean on me and hold her stomach. I tried to ignore it, but she kept on going, tears streaming from her eyes.

  “Oh, Jesus, oh, that hurts my bullet scar. Please” she gasped “make him stop, Nick. Make him stop! Hahahah, turn your guns over to us! Please save me from stupid officers! hahaha”

  Captain Houseman started to look a little embarrassed, and even Master Sergeant Ramirez had a ghos
t of a smile on his face.

  “A don’t see what the hell is funny, Miss!”

  “Probably” I interjected “the fact that if you TRIED to take our guns from us, you’d be dead. And about half your Defense Force. You’d get us, sure, but the next gag of cannibals or horde of undead will walk all over your precious town without you there to defend it.”

  I let him chew on that for a minute. Ramirez leaned over and whispered something to his boss.

  “OK” he said “I see your point. We’re all Americans here, there’s no need to get hasty. Times are a changing, I guess. Do I have it on your word of honor that you won’t attack us? Because if yo do, I’ll take you down first.”

  “Of course. We’re not here to kill anyone. We could easily have killed your outpost here and moved on, but we didn’t.”

  Another hand signal and the group peeled back towards the road. Three of them remained behind to replace Sergeant Ripley and his two guys. I was getting the feeling that Ripley was going to be in the doghouse for a while, and the one Ziv had punched looked a little worse for wear.

  We waited for Bognaski to come up, and then the entire group set out east down the overgrown, cracked pavement. It had been four years since any maintenance, and weed and winter had been hard on the pavement. As we walked, try as I might to keep focus, my thoughts started wander. Our new found captor / friends pulled security as we walked in the middle, so I could actually relax for a minute. I watched Brit as she walked in front of me, trying to see something sexy under her body armor and baggy uniform. Not happening.

  Instead I thought about the Country. America. The United States, such as it was. Forty million people crammed into Vancouver, Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Utah and Idaho. A few fortress towns, scattered military bases in the interior and on the coast. The military had cleared the western states north of Interstate 80. Put down rebellions in Utah, Vermont and Virginia. Opened a corridor, Green Bay to Buffalo to Albany to New York City, so ships from England could offload and move freight through the country.