Irregular Scout Team One: The Complete Zombie Killer series

by John Holmes

  Brit inched closer, but he shook his hand in her face. “Nuh uh, ginger. This isn’t just a deadman’s switch. It’s wired into my biometrics. If I die, the signal stops, and the satellite uplink puts out the word. BANG! And everything goes up in flames again. Only this time, there ain’t no going back.”

  She rolled her eyes, but didn’t move the shotgun an inch. “You have GOT to be shitting me. Who the fuck do you think you are, Doctor Evil?”

  While she had been talking, I took a long step forward and stopped. “Brit, when I say go, I want you to shoot him in the knee. Take off his leg. We can put a tourney on it and stop him from bleeding out.”

  “Gladly” she said, and lowered the shotgun towards his knee.

  “Now wait a minute” said Taylor, and he held his hands out in front of him in a gesture to ward off Brit. That was what I had hoped he would do. I dove forward and grabbed his hand holding the device in both of mine, and pulled him to the floor. He tried to let go but I squeezed as hard as I could forcing the fingers to stay together.

  “BRIT, DUCT TAPE!” I yelled, and she ripped some off the roll I carried on the back of my vest. She quickly wrapped it around his hand, allowing me to work my hands off as she rolled his up. The entire time he struggled and yelled, trying to free his hand, flailing at me with his free hand. One punch caught me in the corner of my eye, and I saw stars for a second, so I head butted him with my Kevlar, hard enough to break his nose. His yelling stopped and turned into cries of pain as he bled all over his thousand dollar suit.

  “What did you do that for? Now I can’t tape his mouth shut!”

  “Geez, give me a break, Brit. Secure him and let’s go.”

  I switched channels and called the RTO in Team Two, who had set up a SATCOM antenna outside for coms with whoever was in charge of the whole shitshow. “VIKING NINE, this is LOST BOYS SIX, EXCALIBER, OVER.”

  “LOST BOYS SIX, EXCALIBER. Passing traffic now, over.”

  “Roger, out.” I switched back to the company net and called the team leaders.

  “VIKING, SAMURAI, WARTHOG, this is LOST BOYS SIX. Target secured, initiating exfil now.”

  “VIKING, ROGER.”

  “SAMURAI, ROGER, hurry the fuck up, things are getting hot out here.”

  Nothing from Team Five down on the docks. They were only two hundred meters away, so the signal should have been getting through, despite the cinder block walls.

  “Samurai, can you see the dock area?”

  “Wait one” came back at me, punctuated by gunshots and yelling. “Negative, there’s too much smoke. Lot of firing still going on there.”

  “Roger, keep trying to raise them. We’re coming out.” Hopefully Ryan had called in the Marine QRF to help him, but I bet that wild bunch were just too stubborn to do so.

  SFC Ball and his guys had come up the stairs, and one of them threw Taylor over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Their medic was shoving curlex and tampons into Ziv’s wounds, and had another man squeezing an IV with Plasma into a vein. They placed him on a collapsing stretcher and manhandled him down the stairs.

  I went back to the breech in the wall, where the medics had set up a casualty collection point. Red sat there, smoking a cigarette while McWane worked on him. Red had a T and an M marked on his face “How is he, Doc?”

  “He’s going to lose his foot. Shrapnel up and down his leg, the foot is hanging on by a thread. I’ve done all I can for him here; he needs evac to a CASH.” He stopped when they brought Ziv down. The Serbian looked pale under the blood on his skin. Doc put his stethoscope to Ziv’s heart, and started pounding on his chest. “DON’T YOU DIE ON ME, FUCKER!” he yelled. I turned away, too sick in my heart to watch him.

  “OK, let’s move, people! We need to be out the front door in five minutes. That means all casualties mobile. Doc” I turned to look at him. He had stopped pounding on Ziv’s chest and was injecting him with something. He gave me a thumbs up and continued what he was doing. “Scratch that. Corporal Bognaski, take charge here and get everyone to the front door in five minutes.” He jumped to it and I made my way out to the front doors.

  The mellow sunlight of a Seattle summer seemed harsh after the darkness of the interior. We ducked out ad joined Captain Hideyoshi behind the smoking wreckage of their helo, which had crashed parallel to the front of the building. His team was actively engaging a line of shooters about a hundred meters down the road. Even as I came out, a Javelin missile leapt out of its launcher with a POP from the ejection charge. It seemed to hover in air for a second, then the rocket motor kicked in and it disappeared from sight. A few seconds later it detonated on the top of a Stryker APC that was burning but still firing its machine gun towards us. The vehicle burst into flame.

  “RINGO, GET SOME FIRE ON THOSE DISMOUNTS!” yelled Hideyoshi, and his mortar man, an old retread SPC who was a whiz with any ballistic weapon, started walking 60mm rounds along the line of troops who were trying to dig in.

  I grabbed the Captain by the shoulder as he stood to fire another burst from his M-4. “H, we gotta go! Start disengaging. We’re going to extract down the road to the docks, once we get to that turn” and I motioned to a curve in the road that hid the dock area “we’ll stop and lay down some suppressive fire. You break contact and haul ass.”

  “Can do, but the MK-19 is jammed, and I’m running low on ammo for the guns.”

  “Just do what you can!”

  He nodded and I slapped him on the back, then headed back inside. Just as I did, a round came whipping through a gap in the wreckage, and SPC Ringo fell over without a sound, his shirt splattering red as a heavy sniper’s bullet punched through his body armor.

  Ebling, his civilian scout that was working on the MK-19 grenade launcher, finally got the jam cleared. He slapped another belt of 40mm grenades into it, picked up the incredibly heavy weapon with its tripod, slammed into the ground just to the left of the downed helo, and sat down behind it.

  “LET ME” he yelled, cocking the bolt back “SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE!” He let fly with a continuous thumping sound, and explosions erupted all over the enemy positons. I ran back inside to meet Bognaski and the rest of Team Two carrying two litters and one body bag, and one acting president trussed up like a pig.

  “OK, let’s go. Pass to the left and hit the road.”

  We came outside and H yelled “COVERING FIRE!!!” Team Four poured it on, grenade launchers, machine guns and rifles. We ran as fast as we could toward the open road, trying to make it to the turn. We had almost gotten there when the first mortar rounds landed and cut us down like wheat.

  Chapter 28

  I hate mortars. I hated them in Afghanistan, and I hated them now. They decimated us. A battery just opened up on us, pouring multiple volleys as fast as they could. Not light things, either, vehicle mounted ones that just kept pouring it on. I lay there on the ground, out in the open with the rest, as concussions slammed me up and down off the ground. Thankfully, they weren’t set for airburst, only point detonating, or I don’t think I would be writing this now.

  An F-16 with US Air Force markings, not DHS, screamed overhead and dropped a cluster bomb onto something behind the tree line, and the mortars stopped falling. He arced away, then came back and did a gun run, pouring cannon rounds into the enemy positons. The firing stopped as the last of the DHS troops were shattered and started running.

  I lifted my head to see what remained of my team. Some sprawled figures started to rise, others didn’t. Red lay on the cot where he had been dropped, calmly still smoking a cigarette, while Hart was bandaging her own knee. Brit gritted her teeth and pulled a long, jagged splinter of steel out of her arm, then started cursing. I felt blood running down the back of my pants, and my uniform was ripped. I could stand, though, and I hurried over to Brit.

  “Are you Ok?”

  “DO I FUCKING LOOK OK TO YOU NICK?” She grimaced again and I put on a field dressing, wrapping it tight. Then I moved over to Ziv’s litter, and felt for a
pulse. Still there, thank God. Doc McWane was lying next to him, eyes open, a look of surprise on his face. “Shit, Waldo” I said, and reached over and closed his eyes.

  “Nick! NICK!” Brit yelled “We got a problem!”

  I went back to her as Team Four came up, carrying three bodies. Both the O’Neil brothers, dead, Ringo dead earlier, and several others wounded. Brit was kneeling over Acting President Taylor, trying to do CPR on him. I stopped her. A mortar round had sent shrapnel in one side of his neck and out the other, and he had bled out quickly.

  Damn.

  Brit sat back and looked at me. “Do you think he was serious? About the virus?”

  “Probably. Maybe. We can’t take the chance, though. Crazy fucking power hungry people. Come on, lets’ go.” We gathered up the dead, five all told, and the wounded. A limping, ragtag group that came around the bend and saw the docks where Team Five was supposed to be waiting for us.

  They were waiting, but they would never sail again. A pile of dead bodies surrounded the three Szimanskis, Ryan and his two cousins. Here and there slightly moving wounded DHS personnel were mixed in with the dead, almost a company’s worth of troopers. Thomas and Walb were in the boat, crumpled around a smashed pintle mounted 240B. Baublitz lay between the three cousins and the boat, locked in a death grip with another trooper, two others dead on the ground near them from her knife.

  “Shit. Shit. shit.” The dock area was supposed to have been lightly guarded. I sat down on the ground, looking at my friends dead bodies. Sat there and started to cry, great wracking sobs that tore out from inside. Around me, the rest of the scouts from all three teams stood in silence.

  Brit sat next to me and put her good arm around my shoulder, resting her shotgun on her knees. “Nick, it’s OK. They died fighting, it’s all we can ask for.”

  I stood up, having to aim my anger somewhere. “IT WAS SUPPOSED TO FUCKING BE ME WHO DIED HERE! DON’T YOU FUCKING GET IT! ME!” She turned white and stood, backing away from me.

  “No, Nick. You have to live. Don’t you get that? You have to live. Our son needs you. You have to live.” She started to cry herself, and I went down on one knee in the sand, ignoring the blood that ran to the see in a river from the pile of corpses.

  “Enough with the happy horseshit, can we get the hell out of here?” We both ignored Bognaski.

  I felt her hand lift my chin. “Look at me.” I couldn’t, I could only see the bodies lying around me. “Look at me, GodDAMMIT!” I looked up and I saw her grime smeared, beautiful face, blue eyes blazing, red hair coming loose from under her helmet.

  “If you die, I will die too. Inside. And our son will grow up, never knowing the man you are. Now get your shit together if you love us, and let’s get out of this hellhole.”

  I looked at her for a full minute. She stared back intensely, then leaned over and kissed me gently on the mouth. I tasted sweat and blood and gunpowder, and I felt life.

  “Fuck it.” I stood up and motioned for the RTO to come over. He handed me the handmike

  “SABRE, This is Lost Boys. Taylor is dead, and we have a problem. Need immediate extract.”

  Chapter 29

  We sat on the deck of the U.S.S. New York, twenty minutes later. I had told them all I knew about Taylor’s supposed plan to infect the world with the zombie virus again, but the Army had immediately dismissed it. I think the word the man on the other end of the radio had said was “Impossible Bullshit.”

  I ticked off the names of our dead in my head. Twelve of my friends. McWane, Williams, Kisner, both O’Neils, Ringo, all of Team Five. Almost everyone else was wounded in some way. We sprawled on the front deck, cleaning weapons and trying to wind down while our serious casualties were in surgery.

  The air battle had died a quick death, and the New York rode easy at anchor. The fighting in the distance as the armored column made its way into Seattle was picking up, and we could hear the explosions echoing around the Sound. A medic was stitching Brit’s arm; I had another one looking for shrapnel in my back as I lay full length on a stretcher. Red and Ziv were both undergoing surgery, and although Red would lose his foot, he would live. Ziv’s condition was too close to call.

  I noticed something different just as Brit started to speak. I made a motion to her, to be quiet. Something was happening.

  “What?” she said, then she noticed it too. Then the medics and all the other scouts lying or sitting on deck stopped talking. The firing, except for planes making runs, had died out. I knew they hadn’t reached the Federal Compound yet, and I wondered if maybe the DHS troops had surrendered when word of Acting President Taylor’s death got out.

  Then we heard it. The moan, rising to a howl in the wind. The firing erupted again, a frantic, ongoing frenzy that lasted for almost two minutes, then died off again as units expended all their ammo. It was a continuous, burning roar, punctuated by deep booms. When it stopped, we could all hear the howling moaning rage of millions of infected.

  A ships’ crewmember came running on deck, yelling “GET INSIDE, GET INSIDE!” I hopped up, my artificial leg not attached,, grabbed it and leaned on Brit, and we hustled through a hatchway. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a long, cylindrical object leap from the water, shed its covering, and light off a jet turbine engine, followed by another. I was the last man through the door and the squid slammed it tight and spun a wheel to lock it. The ship’s intercom burst into life. “ARMAGEDDON, ARMAGEDDON, PREPARE FOR NUCLEAR BLAST.” Brit and I looked at each other as the ships’ lights went to red battle conditions. I saw the fear in her eyes, and I knew it wasn’t for her or me. It was for our son, a continent away. It had been true.

  The plague was loose in the world again, and this time, there would be no stopping it.

  End of Volume IV, “ZOMBIE KILLERS, CIVIL WAR”

  Zombie Killers V: ENDGAME

  Prologue to Volume Five:

  Four years had passed since a rogue scientist, fearful of losing her job in a government shutdown, let loose on the earth a parasite that rapidly destroyed the thinking part of a human’s brain, turning them in ravenous “undead”. Civilization fell in a loud crash, brought low not only by the plague, but the breakdown in civil order and the supply chain that kept our millions fed.

  We survived. America survived. Mainly by using every weapon and munition in its fearsome arsenal; withdrawing into the Pacific Northwest and other redoubts scattered throughout the country, such as the one hastily constructed in upstate New York, at the Seneca Army Depot. The rest of the country fell into plague and barbarism and undead, but we survived.

  That’s where the teams started. The Irregular Scout Teams. Ours was the first, and we went ahead of the Army as it slowly battled to take back the rest of the country. A mix of civilians and veterans, scarce on training and equipment, but long on skills and guts, we lived in the wild, scouting infrastructure, locating survivors, recovering our history. Our casualty rates were over 100%, with fresh faces joining up and falling in a welter of blood, but we did our job so the troops could move forward.

  Then human greed, lust for power and madness had brought it all crashing down again. Nuclear fire burned where a new plague had been released by a madman, and civilization fell once more.

  This is the story of Irregular Scout Team One, the Lost Boys. A small part in a tragedy of epic proportions, the fall and rise, and fall again of the human race. Thirty years later, as I write it all down, the nightmares and the memories of friends lost and horrors endured come back to me as if it were yesterday.

  This is the story of what was, and what could have been.

  ~ Nick Agostine, Stillwater Island, year 30 P.A.

  Chapter 1

  We sat in a compartment of the ship, drained of color by the green Emergency Lighting that had blinked on. It made us look even more ghastly than we were. Blood, both our own and our enemies, coated us, looking black. Dirt, concrete dust, and gunpowder residue fought for every square inch of our skin and our torn and ripped unifo
rms and gear.

  The nukes had gone off a few minutes ago*, and the ship, the USS New York, was still under lockdown. I didn’t know crap about being on a Navy ship; all we could do was hope that the squids knew what they were doing. What we did know was that there had been one huge hammering when the closest nuke went off, probably over Tacoma, a series of lesser ones from Seattle and the various refugee camps scattered around the Federal Zone. About halfway through the regular lighting had gone out, replaced by the emergency lights, but I could still feel the throb of the engines through the deck as drove through Puget sound, headed for the Straights of Juan De Fuca.

  The Apocalypse had come again, and this time, it seemed, for good. The nukes that were going off were the SOP for the military when there was an outbreak of the Zombie Plague, but this had been deliberate. The acting President of the United States, a jumped up dictator that my scout team, with the backing of the rest of the US Military, had tried to arrest, spread a new version of the virus far and wide throughout the remaining population of the US, some forty million refugees living in the Pacific Northwest. Now the military was trying to control the new plague with nukes, and along the way decimating the manufacturing base that had allowed us to survive last time, by the skin of our teeth. Couldn’t say I blamed them, though. There was no way anyone would have the manpower to clear that many undead, and hold the territory.

  “Where too now, Nick?” asked Kelly Hart, the only other unwounded member of our team beside myself and Brit. The woman’s face was streaked with tears, crying for her husband, who was undergoing surgery, last I knew, to see if his foot could be saved.

  “We go home, Kelly. You, me, Brit, Ziv if he makes it, Red of course. Any of the other teams that want to go. We go home to our kids, back to New York.”