Irregular Scout Team One: The Complete Zombie Killer series

by John Holmes

  She burst out laughing at the expression on my face. “Don’t have a heart attack, old man! I still prefer the D, as you well know.”

  “Ziv was right, you are a pig.”

  “And you love me for it. Now come here and give me a kiss.” As I did I couldn’t help wondering about what she had just told me, until she whispered in my ear.

  “Don’t even think about it. I’ll cut your balls off.”

  Chapter 19

  The morning sun was just breaking as we pulled out of the remains of the town, headed down the highway. Sergeant Vely had managed to replaced the radiator on the Humvee with one scavenged from a truck, but she made no promises. The diesel engine rattled like it was on its deathbed, but as the miles passed, it stayed running. Brit drove and I sat in the TC seat. Red was up in the turret and Lt. Schwertig, the Air Force Navigator was behind Brit, feeding her directions. Behind me was the copilot, Captain Crossley, nervously fiddling with a rifle. She was making ME nervous, and I kept telling her to stop playing with it. I was going to take it away from her in a few minutes. CPL Bognaski sat facing backwards in a lawn chair, surrounded by our supplies. We had removed the back deck so he had a clear field of fire.

  Behind the Humvee was a battered minivan, the side doors stripped off and windshield smashed out. Ziv was driving, with Major Rhodes in the passenger seat. Doc Bailey rode behind them, along with Vely and the Air Force Master Sergeant. Stretched on the back seat was the Airman, who had been injured in the crash, and whose arm was showing dangerous signs of blood poisoning. Doc might have to cut it off later if we didn’t get some better meds soon. Making up the tail end of our small convoy was Sergeant Ripley, leaning on Kelly Hart’s SAW. We had taken off the back gate and strapped the SAW in so it could hang free, and hooked up the remaining three belts of ammo. He could work it with his one good hand.

  I was worried about a ton of things. We had a full tank of diesel for the truck, but less than a quarter tank of gas for the van, and that was full of crap from sitting so long. We had barely been able to get the battery to hold a charge after jumping it off the Humvee, and the tires were almost flat. We would have to hit a major town, or better yet, a Wal-Mart outside of town to get oil, an air pump, battery and fuel filters, maybe some ammo. Probably looted and burned out, but you would be amazed at the stuff people DIDN’T take. Pretty much they took food, drugs, weapons, that’s about it. The stuff you REALLY needed to survive they ignored. Camping gear, tires, oil, fishing rods, car parts, hell, even seeds, though sometimes those were eaten if people were starving.

  Task Force Bronco hadn’t made it this far eastward; the only cleared out area had been around the Air Bases in Omaha and a couple of transit points for barges moving up and down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. That meant that some towns would be looted, some would have survivors, and some would be full of undead, even after four years. We had almost a hundred and fifty miles to go, or more, before we hit the airbase in Omaha, and I wanted to go in there in the best possible condition. If we couldn’t find a suitable plane, there would be our rides all the way up into Canada and down back around to Buffalo. There was no way we were going to go through the populated areas around Chicago and Detroit.

  As we drove, Brit fiddled with the car stereo that Bognaski had wired onto the dashboard. She kept hitting the search button, and the numbers scrolled through the bands, never stopping.

  “Try AM” I said over the hum of the tires on the pavement. “More range.” She mouthed the word “dinosaur” but changed it, hitting the search button again. It flipped through and then stopped on a station. A loud, clear voice burst out of the speaker stuck to the dash.

  “AND THE LORD GOD SHALL REIGN JUDGEMENT DOWN UPON THE GODLESS PEOPLE OF AMERICA, ON THE WHORES AND CORRUPT POLITIICIANS WHO HAVE CREATED THIS PLAGUE OF DAMNED SOULS UPON THIS LAN*” It shut off as Brit took the radio, pulled the wires out, and threw it out the window with a scowl, to shatter on the pavement.

  “My dad was really into that shit. Don’t ask.” I knew better than to do so.

  The miles rolled along without incident. At one point, we had to stop while a small herd of buffalo wandered across the highway. They ignored the vehicles, but if we tried to push through they would easily crack the fiberglass Humvee and probably wreck the van. We used the opportunity to take a piss break and check the maps. Lt. Schwertig laid a roadmap out on the hood. “We’re coming up on Beatrice, Nebraska. Pretty big town, they probably have a Wal-Mart there.”

  “We’re going to have to go in slow, and just the truck. That means me, Brit, Ski, Vely, and Doc. Sergeant Ripley” I said when he started to object “you’re in charge till we get back, since Ziv is still recovering.” He nodded, accepting the face saving gesture. His arm was a liability, and he knew it.

  “Master Sergeant Dowling, you’re coming with us too. We need two men to stay with the truck while we gather supplies. Red in the turret, and you can drive. We might need a fast extraction.” The grizzled NCO just nodded, spitting some tobacco juice on the pavement.

  “Since I’m still pretty beat to shit, Brit is the tactical commander on this one. We move as a team, getting the supplies we need, and we don’t try to clear the entire store.” I hated clearing big box stores. There were way too many places to hide.

  Sergeant Vely spoke next. “Give me a shopping list of items we need in the next ten minutes, so we’re not wandering blindly up and down the aisles in the dark.”

  “Good point” said Brit. “How are we set for light?” Once you got past the front entrance, those places were dark as caves, even in the day time.

  “Batteries for one pair of NVG’s, and two flashlights. Couple of road flares” said Vely, who was our de-facto supply sergeant.

  “Ok” said Brit “Flashlights it is, let’s save the NVG’s for night shooting.”

  We spent a few minutes discussing how we would move through the store, based on the general layout of Wal-Mart’s all over the world. Entrance, turn left or right to pharmacy, loot that for medical supplies, move to automotive for oil, a tool set, air pump, empty gas cans, a manual fuel pump. On to camping for more flashlights, propane, a fat empty wish for ammo, whatever else we needed. Then over to the food side to see if there was any canned good left, and out the door.

  The buffalo had passed, so we remounted and continued on down the highway, searching for a good hide place for the van. We found a burnt out roadside diner and parked the van behind it.

  Before we left, I took Ziv and Ripley aside. “I don’t expect a lot of trouble, but we’ll be out of range of the radios. We may come back through here like a bat out of hell. Keep a good watch. If we’re NOT back in 24 hours, you’re on your own. Try to get back to New York and” the words caught a bit in my throat, thinking of Kelly Hart, lying dead on the street “take care of our kids.”

  “Gotcha, Boss” said Ripley. Ziv squeezed my hand once in a bone crushing grip and then turned away. I walked back to the Humvee, climbed in and made sure my leg straps were tight.

  “ROLLING!” said Dowling, and he put the truck in gear. We pulled back onto the highway and headed Northeast, to the town we could see on the distant horizon.

  Chapter 20

  Wal-Mart was where Wal-Mart would always be, in a shopping plaza outside the town, designed to suck the lifeblood out of downtown mom & pop businesses.

  “Hey Brit, do you think the people working at Wal-Mart even noticed when they were turned into zombies?”

  She was quiet for a minute, then said “I don’t get it.”

  “You know” I said. “Wal-Mart employees, zombies, get it?”

  “No, I don’t. Are you OK, Nick?” Brit turned to Doc and said “I think you should check Nick out before we get there. I know he hit his head pretty hard.”

  Doc, usually a pretty funny guy, had a serious look on his face. “Nick, do you have a headache? Sensitive to bright light?”

  “I’m fine! It was a joke! Get it? Wal-Mart, zombies?”

  T
hey both looked at each other, serious and straight faced. “Doc” said Brit “keep an eye on him, and if he starts to lose it in the middle of a fight, shoot him. Don’t hesitate. He could get bitten and turned and get us all killed. I love him, but I have to get home to my son.”

  “No problem. I’ve done it before.” He pulled his .38 out of a shoulder holster and made a great motion of checking the action and making sure it was loaded.

  “Jesus Christ, I’m FINE! It was a fucking JOKE.” I was getting pissed off.

  “The Nick Agostine I know doesn’t joke. Calm down your anger, honey. In your condition, you might burst a blood vessel.”

  “Yup” said Doc. “Aneurism” and he made a choking sound, held his head in his hands and fell forward. “Just like that” he said when he straightened up.

  “Actually, Nick, maybe you should be on overwatch. Sergeant Dowling, when we get within, say three hundred meters, pull over so we can drop the Sergeant Major off.”

  “Master Sergeant Dowling” I growled at the confused Air Force NCO who was driving. “Do NOT stop this truck.”

  “Ever?” he said. “What about Wal-Mart? Don’t we have to pick some things up there? Are you sure you’re OK? You’re not making much sense.”

  I banged my Kevlar down on the dashboard, getting really pissed off now. “IT WAS A FUCKING JOKE! “

  From up above, Red’s laughter could be heard over the sound of the Humvee tires on the road, and the rest of them burst out laughing. Brit was laughing so hard she told Dowling to pull over so she could pee. I looked out the window at the endless Nebraska plain so they couldn’t see me smile and called them all a pack of assholes.

  Wal-Mart was, like we had hoped, outside of town in a shopping center, and thankfully not on the other side from where we approached. In fact, it stood all by itself in its own parking lot, accompanied only by the burnt out shell of a Burger King. I saw the sign and all the sudden my mouth started to water. I would kill for a frigging Whopper with cheese. Putting the thought out of my mind, I used my binos to scan the front of the store.

  “Barricaded. Dowling, bring us around back, let’s see what the loading docks look like.” He did, describing a wide circle that brought us bumping through flattened fields of wheat. The front doors of Wal-Mart were covered by plywood, but I noticed down the bottom that there was a small hole in the corner of one of the boards. Early in the plague, survivors often barricaded themselves into bog box stores, thinking the supplies would last them forever. If they had here, then the whole place might be cleaned out by now and they probably moved on.

  Out back, there was a burned out tractor trailer, and a smashed shipping container, lying on its side with a set of rear wheels still attached. The container had spilled its contents, a whole bunch of sneakers, out on the ground four years ago.

  “Guess we aren’t going to sneak up on them” said Brit, and we all groaned. “What, Nick can make a joke, but I can’t?”

  We parked close to one of the loading docks, but off to one side, and I ordered Vely out. “Go rap on a door, and listen hard. Don’t expose your head to the doorway, because some people will fire right through the door.” Each of us took up position to be able to cover her retreat if a gunfight started.

  She nodded and used the butt of her rifle to knock on the door. The sheet metal echoed alarmingly, and she sat and listened. We all heard it at the same time, even over the tick of the cooling engine. The Zombie Howl started, sounding muffled and dim inside the building.

  “OK then, that answers that” I said, and we all got back in the truck.

  “What’s the plan, Chief?” said Vely. “We need whatever is in there.”

  I turned to Corporal Bognaski. “What do you think, young Padawan?”

  In a passable Yoda voice, he said “Front door pull open we should, yes.”

  “Very good, young Jedi. There is hope for you yet.”

  “If you go to the Dark Side, we can call you Darth Grandpa” he said and he pulled his shirt up and breathed through it in a passable imitation of Darth Vader. “BRIT, I AM OLD ENOUGH TO BE YOUR FATHER.”

  Even I laughed at that one.

  Chapter 21

  “So what are we doing?” asked Master Sergeant Dowling. For a zoomie, he was turning out OK.

  “What the Zombie Killers do best. Kill Zombies.”

  “OK, I guess I’m cool with that. I’m not much of a shot though.”

  “Don’t worry” said Brit. “You’re just going to be bait.”

  The startled look on his face was almost amusing. “OK. Wait, what?”

  “Don’t worry” Red chimed in. “I’ll be right there with you.”

  “But you can’t walk very fast with your foot.”

  “Pretty much” agreed Red. “We’re going to use the truck. The rest of the team will take up firing positions at a 90 degree angle off the entrance and engage the Z’s as we draw them out. In fact, that Burger King will make a good firing platform.”

  I agreed with Red’s assessment. Accuracy was a thousand times better when you were firing from a prone supported position, and we spent almost twenty minutes building supports for our weapons out of some sandbags; we had looted from a wrecked hardware store in the last town we were at. The simplest things, often overlooked, could save your life. With our suppressed weapons, hopefully they wouldn’t even notice us. The added safety of being up on the roof would help if the Z’s noticed us.

  Next we hooked up the winch on the front of the truck to the top of the plywood. The noise we made, after a few minutes, brought a pounding, howling horde of undead from inside the store. We ran the steel cable over the top of the truck and down through one of the clevises’ on the back, so they would be able to drive forward without the cable catching on an axle.

  The howling inside was growing even louder, and we were getting nervous. The plywood had started to shake as they undead threw themselves at it. “That’s a lot of fucking Z’s, Nick” said Brit, and I worked harder to find something to hook the cable up to. Finally I just threw it up and it caught on the lip of the wood. This had better work.

  We took up position at the ruined BK, sitting up in the remains of the roof, a large hole in the middle showing where the fire had burnt through, sending the heating/cooling unit crashing through to the floor below. Doc had remained in the Humvee, both to keep an eye on Reds’ foot, and to keep him safe. He was a critical asset to the team, and couldn’t be risked in a gunfight. At a signal from me, Dowling gunned the engine and the Humvee shot forward. The cable sprang tight, and with a screech of pulled nails, the entire barricade broke open, the cable flying free. Out poured a steady stream of undead, hundreds of them.

  “HOLY SHIT!” exclaimed all of us in unison. The entire town must have holed up in there, and somehow an infected had gotten in among them, turned the entire group. The horde charged past us, following the truck. Unlike many of the undead from the original plague, who had been exposed to four years of deteriorating outside weather, these had been in shelter for the whole time and moved FAST. “Steady, FIRE!” I said, and the four of us opened up. Brit, Bognaski and I dropped them with steady head shots, one per second. Vely had a harder time, and started missing more as she grew frustrated .

  “Take a break, calm down and choose your shots” I told her. She nodded and tried to settle down, shifting her position. As she did, the fire weakened roof groaned and moved underneath her, and she cried out as she fell, landing hard on top of a piece of burnt out machinery. Her ass impacted on a jagged piece of steel and she screamed even louder, and kept screaming, the metal sticking through her pants leg and bright red blood pooling around it, pulsing out.

  “FUCK!” said Bognaski, and he turned and tried to reach a hand down to the stricken Sergeant. The Zombie horde, down to about a hundred now, stopped and altered direction like a flock of birds, heading our way.

  “CEASE FIRE!” I yelled, and turned to help Ski. He started to jump down, then remembered that we had used the Hum
vee to get up on the roof in the first place. He turned to me with a stricken look on his face. “What do we do?”

  “Fuck it” I said and slid over the edge of the hole, falling a few feet once I let myself hang. I ignored Brit screaming at me, and grabbed the slight Hispanic woman by the harness, lifting her up and onto the machine that had broken her fall. I climbed up myself, just as the first undead crashed into the front of the building. With Brit holding his feet, Bognaski leaned as far over the edge of the hole as he dared and managed to snag Vely’s harness as I lifted her up, grunting with the effort. I couldn’t see Brit, but I assumed that she was holding onto his legs. By brute force he pulled her body back over the edge. Blood rained down and splattered in my face. I jumped back down and ran like all the fiends of hell were after me, which they were.

  Vaulting over the broken window sill and out into the parking lot, I was followed by the entire horde. I ran as fast as I could in the direction the Humvee had taken; I could see it in the distance, looping around to come back. An overwhelming stench of decay washed over me and a raking, claw-like hand hit my neck. I stumbled and fell, just as I heard the truck coming up. It smashed into the crowd of undead, running over some of them, and skidding through the pile of gore. Rolling onto my back, hunching my shoulders to keep my neck covered, and tried to fight off the thing on top of me. In life, it had been an enormously fat woman, and the thing was, like all undead, incredibly strong. It forced my arms away from me, and I was still weak from the beating I had taken three days ago. How the hell did I find always myself in these situations?

  The thing was crushing me, driving the breath out of me, when I finally worked my pistol free and shot it through the temple. Squirming my way out from under it, I stood up, covered in blood and filth. The truck had taken most of the undead’s focus, and it drove away again, Red screaming like mad to get their attention. I stumbled back to the Burger King, and Bognaski and Brit used two belts in a loop to haul me back up onto the roof, after I had pulled a chair over to stand on.