by John Holmes
I leaned back to talk to Captain Crossley, yelling over the sound of the radial tires on the cracked pavement. We had a brief conversation about building radio sets, and what we would need to look for to be able to talk to any aircraft.
The conversation came to an abrupt halt as Red stood on the brakes, throwing us all against our seat belts. We had just started across a bridge over one of the countless gullies that crossed the plains, and what had looked like a broken down, rusty pickup suddenly leapt into life and blocked the road at the far end of the bridge. Red immediately shifted into reverse, just as a similar wreck, ignored as we drove past, shot into position to block both lanes of the exit. On the bed of the pickup in front of us, I saw the snout of what could only be a Javelin anti tank missile lift itself from under a trap, the gunner keeping down behind the bed, only exposed enough to target us.
“STOP!” I yelled into the radio, loud enough for Red to hear. He hit the brakes, just as a figure stepped out from behind the pickup truck. It was carrying a large white flag made from what looked like a pillow case. Other figures appeared looking over the hood, heavily armed.
“Ziv” I called over the radio “what’s behind us?” He had been riding in the van, and he quickly answered.
“Totally blocked, no way out even if we blow that piece of shit. About five armed men.”
I thought quick and answered “OK, hold fast. Let’s see what they want.”
Up in the turret Bognaski racked a 40mm grenade into the launcher. I slapped his leg and yelled “Hold your fire! I’m going to talk to them. I want to see if we can get out of this with as little bloodshed as possible. Brit, let’s go.” She glanced at me from the back seat, a look of “have you gone crazy” on her face, but picked up her shotgun and walked forward with me.
The man standing halfway down the bridge was accompanied by two others. All three wore US Army uniforms, but that meant nothing nowadays. I studied their faces, trying to see intentions.
“Well, now” said the man in front “what have we got here?” He didn’t look like the usual scumbag reaver who preyed on the weak in this new world, but looks could fool.
“What we have here is a bit of a standoff. If you light us up, well, some of you, maybe a lot of you, are going to die, and you won’t get anything from us. So I think you should just move aside and let us on our way.”
He ignored me, looking steadily at Brit. She grew uncomfortable under his gaze, and her shotgun, held at the low ready, edged upward to face in the general area of his crotch. “Keep looking, asshole, and no matter what happens, your balls go first.”
He glanced back at me, then down at where my prosthetic showed through a rip in my uniform. “I know you!” he exclaimed, and reached forward to grab my hand. Brit’s shotgun came up and I leveled my M-4, taking a step back.
“No, sorry, wait I meant, hey guys, do you know who this is?” he said, turning to the other two men next to him. “It’s fucking BRIT O’NEIL and NICK AGOSTINE! From the reality show!” He stepped forward and took my hand, eagerly shaking it as I lowered my weapon. A look of disgust passed over Brit’s face as she lowered her shotgun, muttering “that stupid show” and the man turned and yelled to his people behind the truck “STAND DOWN!”
“Man, are we glad to see you! Staff Sergeant Tony Olaes, Second Battalion, Third Special Forces Group” he said, pointing to himself. The other man in uniform stepped forward and said “Staff Sergeant Goodwin. I’m the Doc around here.”
“What the hell are you guys doing way the fuck out here in the middle of nowhere? Didn’t you all get the recall order?” I asked, giving the OK signal to the trucks and waving them forward.
“Hearts and minds, Sergeant Major! Our A Team was broken up all over this area in two man teams, teaching survivors how to defend themselves and reconstruct. We heard the recall order a month ago, but we have a pretty good thing going in a town about ten miles from here, over a hundred people, and it didn’t feel right to just abandon them.”
“Well, damn, we are glad to see you. It’s been a hell of a week. We’ve lost some people, crash landed about fifty miles from here in a C-130 a couple of days ago. We could use some rest.”
As we approached the truck barricade, it moved out of the way and turned off, becoming a rusted hulk again. The Javelin launcher I had seen turned out to be empty, used only as a bluff. The rifles and machine guns were real enough though. The SF guys and their band of armed farmers led us to a corral behind a small hill, where a dozen horses were penned.
“Follow us into town” said SSG Olaes, and we proceeded down the highway until they took a left turn and the buildings of a typical Midwestern town came into view, surrounded by a dirt berm and ditch.
“Welcome to Smallville” cracked Doc Goodwin as they rode alongside the Humvee.
"I don’t care what you call it" said Brit "as long as you have hot showers."
Chapter 25
Before we went into the town, I asked SSG Olaes for a minute with my team. He nodded and went on ahead we pulled the vehicles off to one side, pulling off to the side of the road We all dismounted as the dozen or so farmers passed us, giving the team a once over. If their gaze lingered on the women with us for a bit, we pretended not to notice.
For my part, I took a good look at them as they went past. Although their equipment wasn’t standard, with everything from AR-15’s to AK-47’s and SKS rifles, each wore a BDU shirt, the old Army woodland camouflage, with a homemade patch on it. It showed, in green and black, an ear of corn standing upright, something I recognized as a symbol of the Nebraska National Guard. That meant the SF guys had been doing a good job, giving these people some motivation and the idea of being something bigger. They looked tough too, their faces hard and creased. Two of them were women, and they looked as rugged as the men. None of us said anything until the last one had passed. Without asking, the team formed around me as I sat on the hood of the Humvee. Bognaski sat up in the turret, slowly rotating as he kept watch.
“Listen up” I said “we got sloppy back there at the bridge. The van was following way too close behind the truck, and we should never have gotten both vehicles trapped like that.” I looked hard at Ziv, who had been riding in the van. I was furious with him for making that mistake, and ordinarily I would have talked to him about it in private, but we had no time for that. He stared back at me, no expression on his face. Major Rhodes, who was standing next to him, looked back and forth between us, but I ignored her, as did Ziv. Brit, though, leaned on the hood of the truck and watched them both.
“We’ve had a long, hard couple of days. Lost some good people, and I know we’re all tired. This place looks like a godsend, and maybe they will have a radio that we can use to whistle up a bird and get us the fuck back home. However, we can’t let our guard down. No splitting the team up, maintain guard shifts, and keep on your toes. The ammunition we carry, the Mark – 19, our rifles, all of it would make a huge difference to these people, and not for nothing, if I were them, I’d be thinking along the same lines. So let’s stay on the ball, rest and refit, and assume that in a day or so we will move on out. Got it?”
There were a couple of replies, and I was sure everyone heard me, though I didn’t know if they agreed with me. I got down and said to Ziv “Walk with me a minute.” He followed me out into the field, out of earshot from everyone else as they mounted up, then stood with his arms folded, waiting for me to speak.
“Sasha, listen to me. I need you. I trust you more than anyone here, except Red and Brit. More than that, I trust you to do the right thing in a tough situation.” I wasn’t sure I was getting through to him; he just looked at me impassively, his blue eyes hardly blinking.
“You KNOW you fucked up with the van. We have a bunch of kids along with us, and that could have ended very, very badly. Look,” I said “I know how you felt when I was losing it last month, out by Petersburg. What would you have done if I had put us all at permanent risk?”
“Probably” he a
lmost smiled as he said it “knifed you in your sleep. Then your she-devil woman, too, or she would kill me.”
“Yeah, you probably would have” I almost smiled back “but I was more hoping that you would have cut slingload and took off. I’m glad you didn’t. You have travelled and fought with us for a few years now, and I’m glad of that. We’ve saved each other’s life a bunch of times, and I NEED you to stay sharp for me.”
“Like you stayed sharp for Kelly Hart?”
That rocked me back like he had punched me. “I .. I don’t remember what happened.” It was true, I DIDN’T remember it, and I had been wracking my brain trying to as the long miles played out, not sure if I DID want to.
He grunted and took a minute to light a cigarette, pulling in the unfiltered smoke and exhaling it through his nose, then spoke. “Cheap shot, as you Americans say. I will do what you ask, Nick. Stay sharp. Keep my eyes open. But I am my own man, and I do what is good for me.”
“I’m just concerned that your attention is focused on Major Rhodes, and not getting home. I’d like her to ride with us from here on out, if we have to get on the road again, till we get home” I said, and got the reaction that I expected.
“Home?” he laughed bitterly. “Home was Serbia. It is gone. Home was my family in New York City. They are dead. I have no home. Do what you want.” He flicked his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it, then turned and walked away.
I sighed and followed him back to the truck and climbed in. Brit, driving, looked over at me, questioning. I shook my head, mouthed the word “later” and she put the truck in drive, heading for the entrance.
The town was typical of the small settlements that had managed to make it through the first plague. Before the Zombie Apocalypse, they had been dying farm towns, the younger kids moving away to the cities. Then they had become havens for survivors, the tough older farmers teaching the forgotten skills that were needed to survive in this cruel new world. Machine repair, converting gasoline engines to grain alcohol, animal husbandry. Smallville had another name on the map, I’m sure, but if that’s what they called it, Smallville is what it was now. We rolled up to a gate made from shipping containers stacked together, and as we waited, the one in front of us lifted upwards on a counter balance. Good engineering, I noted, since it didn’t matter if they had power or not. These guys were planning ahead.
The entire town itself was surrounded by a trench and a ten foot high wall, pushed up by bulldozers in what would look like, from the air, a star shaped pattern. This gave the defenders overlapping fields of fire and killing grounds. On the point of each star, protected by sandbags, stood a steel spring catapult, capable, I’m sure, of putting a steel rod through an engine block at a few hundred meters. There were a couple of other torsion powered killing machines glimpsed behind the walls, as well as a few machine guns.
As we pulled in, Brit scanned the crowd, peering anxiously at faces. “Who are you looking for?” I asked over the rattle of the diesel engine.
“Creepy dude with an eye patch” she said and burst out laughing.
Chapter 26
The next day, feeling a thousand times better after sleeping in a bed and getting a shower, we met the with local leadership, in the courtyard behind the Town Hall. It consisted, as I learned through introductions, of the Mayor, a small, wizened old woman named Jane Olsen; the Chief of Police, Nick Horton; Staff Sergeant Olaes; a Family Practitioner named Doctor Goldman, and the actual commander of the local militia / town defense force, an Army Reserve Officer, Captain Freeman.
I had brought with me Red, Major Rhodes, and Master Sergeant Dowling, leaving Sergeant Riley and Ziv in charge of finding us quarters and seeing to the maintenance on the vehicles and weapons. Brit was still sleeping after wearing me out last night. Doc Bailey had immediately teamed up with Doc Goodwin, and the two had headed over to the town’s small clinic to talk shop. Doc had already been filling the other medic with the location of the Wal-mart we had looted, since it carried far more supplies than we needed.
“First things first” I said “I’d like to thank you for your hospitality, letting armed strangers into your town, in times like this.”
Major Olsen smiled, showing white dentures. “We all trust Sergeant Olaes judgment, Colonel Agostine.”
“I prefer Sergeant Major, Ma’am” I said, trying to be respectful. The Mayor was pushing ninety if not past it, and she looked like a tough old broad.
“Sergeant Major, then. What are your plans, son?”
“Well” I said, “If you have a working radio, we would like to call up for a ride if we can. I’m not sure if you know what’s been going on in the outside world, but things have gone a bit to shit, pardon my language.”
She laughed, a dry rasp, and said “Son, the first time I heard the word ‘shit’ was when my daddy got laid off in the Great Depression. We have listened to the radio reports, and we got a message asking us to come to New York. Continue.”
“Myself and my wife, and Sergeant First Class Redshirt here” I said, motioning to Red “have children waiting for us back in New York. We want to get home, but there are millions of undead between here and there. We were hoping to make it to an airfield with a functioning aircraft. Major Rhodes is a pilot.”
Captain Freeman spoke next, giving us a run down on the tactical situation. “Fat chance on that. Between here and, I’m assuming Offutt Air Base, there is pretty damn huge horde of undead. I know that Offutt was supporting Task Force Bronco, but they were overrun five times in the last two years. The planes attracted the undead. With the new plague, well, they went off the air a month ago and we’ve heard nothing since. Same with Task Force Bronco operating to our west.”
“You won’t” said Red. “The entire Task Force was infected with the second plague.”
There was quiet for a moment as they all took that in, then SSG Olaes spoke. “We heard the recall order, but didn’t know it was that bad. So you’re saying that there is NO military presence outside New York anymore?”
“Maybe” I said. “I’m sure small units are operating here and there, but …”
“Well” said the Mayor “we can’t just up and pick up the whole town and go to New York. We have over five hundred people living here and working the fields. This is our home, after all, Mister Agostine, and we’ve worked hard to keep it going the last couple of years.”
“I don’t expect you to, ma’am. If we can get in touch with our higher, let them know you’re here, maybe weapons and supplies can be brought out to you on whatever plane comes to get us. After all, President Epson kind of owes us some favors.”
“That would help” said Captain Freeman. He was an older man, retired for a few years before the plague hit, but he wore his uniform starched with shined boots. “The two Special Forces Sergeants here have been doing a hell of a job helping us get organized, but we could definitely use more weapons and ammo.”
“Well, the first question, then, is do you have a working radio? SatCom, or even shortwave?”
“Better than that” said Olaes. He threw me a phone, which I tried to catch, but dropped on the bricks. I picked it up, thankfully it still seemed to work. “Iridium Satellite phone. Call anywhere in the world with it. We used it to keep in touch with JSOC(Z) until they dropped off the net a month ago. We got the recall order over shortwave, in the clear.”
My face lit up. I had used them before in Afghanistan, and this was perfect. “Just give me a minute, will you?” I said, and then proceeded to punch in a phone number from memory. It was picked up almost immediately.
“Major General Scarletti. Who is this?” Obviously he didn’t recognize the incoming number.
“It’s General now, is it? Aren’t we getting a bit big for our britches?”
There was silence for a second as his lightning quick mind analyzed the situation, then he said “Agostine, it’s about goddamned time you checked in. Where the fuck are you? Is your team with you?”
I felt a pang of lo
ss over his question. “Most of them. We lost Staff Sergeant Hart and Sergeant Arroyo – Wilson.”
“Damn” he growled into the phone. “Well, never mind that. We’ve had SAR out looking for you for a week. Was that your little gang that was involved in that shoot out at the Wal-mart outside Beatrice, Nebraska? We’ve had a Predator watching the whole area since your plane went down. Where the fuck are you?” he asked again.
“Before we get into that, I want to get something straight. We are DONE. No more missions, games, blue falcon bullshit, anything. WE, and I mean the team, are retiring.”
“Agostine, don’t piss me off, there is a LOT of work to be done. If you had any idea what a clusterfuck this whol..” His words were cut off as I hung up on him. I called back in five minutes, exchanging small talk with the Mayor to keep my temper on check.
“Are you ready to talk? I asked, picturing the burn scars on his face showing a livid red.
“OK, you are retired. Done. Now where are you?”
“If you go back on your word, I’m going to send Zivcovic after you. If that fails, I’m going to send SFC Redshirt. His wife is dead, you know, and he had to blame someone.”
Scarletti growled into the phone “OK. Now, what do you want?”
“I want a C-130 with enough weapons to outfit a light infantry battalion and a full years’ worth of ammo. Delivered to” and I read off an eight digit grid to him that Olaes had handed to me.
“Three days” he said, and hung up the phone.
“Well, that went better than expected” I said.
Chapter 27
Turns out we didn’t have three days. We had less than one.
