by David Peters
“Lima Victor Seven, this is Gator One inbound air, state your position,” a voice crackled over the Battalion radio.
The harried answer came back over the radio, “Gator One, Lima Victor Seven, we are in the center of the city in the main mall parking lot. There is a line of burning vehicles to the north of our position. The center of our position is marked with green smoke! I repeat, friendlies are on green smoke! Hit the strip mall south of our marker!”
Cap-Cap’s driver looked up and over his shoulder as he spoke, “Sounds like they are losing it in there sir. Cap-Cap continued to scan the vacant street ahead and listen to the battalion net.
“Roger that Lima Victor Seven. Green is friendly. Coming in from the north, might want to get some cover I am dropping danger close.”
As Cap-Cap watched, the A-10 ground attack jet popped up on the far north side of town. The plane’s nose disappeared in a cloud of smoke and the massive chainsaw sound of its cannon reached out to Cap-Cap. As the aircraft reached the bottom of its dive two small objects dropped free from the wings and almost immediately separated into several hundred hand grenade sized bomblets. The mall was behind the cityscape from where they were, but the thunder was still unmistakable.
He lowered himself back down to the gun controls and spoke into the crew radio, “All right Peterson, let’s move.”
Switching over to the team net Cap-Cap hit the push to talk button, “Delta Mike, let’s rollout. Mike three, point, Mike four rear guard, the rest, pay attention, I don’t want you hammering civilians. Know your targets people! Out!”
The Bradley lurched forward as the convoy began picking its way through the wreckage of the city. The large desert tan tank in front of Cap-Caps vehicle was choosing to go over the smaller cars instead of around them. The closer they got to the center of the town the more obvious the signs of recent combat became. Burned out cars became smoldering cars until eventually they found vehicles and buildings still burning. They also started seeing the bodies. They were civilian for the most part but in some cases it was impossible to tell. There were also Corrupted. Hunters that had been torn apart by the heavy weapons fire littered the streets.
“Delta Mike, close it up, we’re getting close.”
The small platoon of armored vehicles closed up ranks and continued forward at a steady pace.
“Hey Cap, we got wounded up ahead!” The excited voice nearly yelled over the team radio.
“All stop, Mike Three send Michaels up here.” Cap-Cap stood up in the turret and looked through his field glasses. Roughly fifty yards ahead there was a fairly well burned soldier rolling slowly back and forth on the ground in obvious pain.
Michaels, their team medic, and two others arrived at the side of the APC. “Don’t take any chances. See if you can save him, if it looks like it we will pull forward and put him in my track. Check him first; if he is turned just end it, that’s orders.”
Michaels nodded and the three jogged towards the injured man. Cap watched through his binoculars. At this range it was like he was standing with the three. The medic knelt down and rolled the soldier onto his back. Michaels jumped up as if to run then was gone in a fountain of flame that consumed all three soldiers.
As Cap-Cap nearly dropped the binoculars the buildings to the sides of the platoon came alive with Corrupted. They flowed out of doors and windows like a moving carpet of death.
Dropping to the floor of the vehicle and pulling the hatch shut over them he nearly screamed into the team radio, “Seal it up, acquire and fire! Go! Go! Go!” They had driven directly into an ambush.
Weapons fire erupted from every track. Cap-Cap swung the massive twenty-five millimeter machine gun to the side and felt it’s comforting ‘thump – thump – thump’ as it sent its rounds through the surging crowd. The explosions were devastating and altogether too close, “Go Mike One, get us out of this choke point! We need to clear this area now!”
Cap felt the track jolt forward as Peterson floored it to get them clear. Over the roar of the turbine engines and guns he could hear and feel a massive explosion behind them, “Report in! What was that?”
He was answered by the screams of his rear guard tank crew over the radio before they were mercifully silenced by a second then third large explosion as the turret was blown completely off of the vehicle.
As they surged forward Cap spun the turret to face to the rear. Mike Four was blackened from tread to deck with the turret sitting upside down and burning next to the vehicle. The Corrupted continued to pursue but rapidly fell behind as the tracks accelerated.
The convoy shot through a narrow alley way that would lead to the main north-south road for Pendleton. As Cap-Cap looked through the gun sight he saw figures jumping from the roof tops above them. The armored vehicles were moving at nearly forty miles an hour now and the Corrupted attackers didn’t account for the speed. As he watched, the figures crashed into the pavement with a thunderous explosion. “That explains Mike Four.”
“Cap, I got the mall in sight, what do you want us to do?”
“Good question,” he thought to himself.
“Victor Lima, Delta Mike approaching from the south.”
“Delta Mike how many you got?”
Cap-Cap sighed to himself as the stress of loss began to pile up on him, “About thirty men total but we are coming in hot.”
“Copy that Delta Mike. They won’t leave the line of buildings behind you until night fall.”
Looking through the gun sight he could see the Corrupted giving up the chase and melting into the shadows of the surrounding buildings.
They entered the parking lot from the south and found the Oregon Guardsmen had pushed all of the cars into a semi wall surrounding their encampment. His small platoon rode to the center of it and Cap-Cap dismounted.
“Who is in charge here?” Cap said to a passing private.
“Judging by those bars I would say that would be you sir.” The private said as he saluted.
Cap closed his eyes and spoke slowly, “Private, if I wasn’t here, who would you say was in charge?”
“Uh, that would be Sergeant Williams, sir. He is over in that tent.” The private dropped his salute rapidly and made a retreat towards a row of sandbags.
Cap entered the tent and found a man nearly screaming into the radio.
“There is no way we can hold this town! Do you hear me at all? Our entire command is dead, I’m it! We are down to maybe fifty men and very low on ammunition. They will take us tonight if we stay!”
“I understand, but we have been ordered to hold that town!”
“Damn it! Are you hearing…” The sergeant nearly jumped out of his boots when Cap tapped him on the shoulder.
“What! Oh, sir, sorry, sir!” He dropped the hand mic as he saluted.
“At ease Sergeant. Is that command you are talking too?”
“I wish. It’s the jet jockeys. We can’t actually reach command anymore, sir.”
Cap took his helmet off and ran his hands through his short cropped hair. “So what you are telling me is we have no chain of command to report to, no way to resupply or reinforce, but we are supposed to hold this town. Do I have that right?”
“Yes sir.”
“What tactical reason exactly are we holding this town for?”
“This is supposed to be the rendezvous point for Idaho and Washington guard units, sir.”
“They ain’t comin’.” Cap picked up the mic and spoke into the battalion net, “Alright men, spread the word, we are heading south in three hours. This town is gone and so are we. Out.”
“How many people do you have Sergeant?”
“Sir, I have twenty seven combat and eighteen civilians.”
Cap-Cap closed his eyes. This was a platoon of over a hundred men two days ago. “Ok, get everyone on a vehicle and ready to go. In three hours we are getting the hell out of Dodge.”
“Sir, that puts us moving at dusk.”
“Then I stand corrected. We
move in one hour.”
Dylan listened in rapt fascination as Cap-Cap and the others relayed their stories.
One soldier was telling Niccole, “We entered into the town from two different sides. I was in an armored personnel carrier behind two heavies, I mean tanks. As the first tank turned on to the main drag a good dozen or so of these things ran up and pig piled onto the tank.”
A second soldier joined in, “Then the fuckers pop, just like that. Boom! Flaming guts everywhere. Smells like someone burned a pile of hair,” one of the soldiers was gesturing with his hands as he interrupted Cap-Cap.
“Like Gonzalez said, boom. Like human bags of napalm. Things were crawling out of the woodwork. We even had a few jump off of rooftops and land on trucks and people.”
The soldier who had returned after walking away started talking quietly, “I had a recon squad on the far side of town. We were moving down an alley when we saw a man down in the street. He was kinda rolling a little, holding his hand up in the air. I sat against the wall providing cover when the squad medic and one other went out to get him. When they reached him, he fucking blew up. Just like that. Whole thing was a trap. Johnson and Stewie just baked in front of me. I can’t get the screams out of my head.”
Cap-Cap sighed again. “We had a lot of reports of that. Saw one myself. Had another report of one of them walking up to a checkpoint with a blanket covering itself. They thought it was a refugee until it popped too. That wasn’t the worst of it. We didn’t know about the breath or fingernails then. Every aid station we had set up was crushed. What you see here is all that got out that afternoon. Once the Corrupted figured out that we were leaving they came at us from every direction.”
“What is the thing about fingernails?” Dylan asked. “We knew about the breath thing but I hadn’t heard about the fingers.”
“The breath comes pretty fast after an infection. We’ve seen it in as little as two minutes but sometimes it takes longer, maybe as long as an hour. The fingernails are one of the first major changes. The area under the nails will turn purple; looks like you smashed it with a hammer. The nail falls off not too long after that. Folks are turned before the nails fall off though. So if your nails are going dark, you are already turned, or will be very soon.”
“Turned?”
“We had a soldier get bit, but he didn’t tell anyone about it. We figured it out when he started smelling like road kill. So we tied his ass to a tree and watched him. Sounds cold, but he knew he was already dead. His name was Benson, good soldier. Sounds like what we did was cruel but it was actually his request. Anyway, the stink kept getting worse and he constantly complained about the burning. He started by saying it felt like his blood was on fire, but pretty soon he became pretty incoherent, babbling about shit that didn’t make any sense to us. About eight hours after the bite, he stopped making any noise at all, medic said he was dead. Obviously no one thought he was. Even though he was dead by all measures we had, he kept changing, getting blacker. He was hot as hell too. He was running a temperature of one hundred twelve degrees. It should have baked him. About two hours after Benson died, somethin’ else woke up. It didn’t look, act, or talk like Benson. It let out some crazy ass scream and I put a bullet through its head.”
“Holy crap,” whispered a wide eyed Dylan. “I’ve heard that scream a few times, chills me to the bone.”
Cap-Cap stood up to get a coffee refill, “we heard it a lot in Pendleton. It got to the point there where we didn’t even try to save people, we just couldn’t tell who was a good guy and who was a god-damned monster. By the time we left it had turned into a free for all. We were trying to get the word out to anyone who would listen that they needed to get the hell out.”
One of the other soldiers laughed, “It was so fucked up crazy. I tell you, I passed a guy carrying a TV, a big God-damned screen TV. I asked him, I said ‘dude, what the hell is there left to watch’? He just looked at me and kept on goin’.” Several of the soldiers laughed and shook their heads.
“We are heading to Denver now. Last call we received before command went dark was to have all forces meet in Denver. Guess they are going to try and carve something out there too.”
“How long have you been here?” Niccole asked.
“It’s been a little over a day. If you saw the A-10s, you saw our retreat. They were nuking anything that wasn’t camouflaged. There was an outlet mall in the center of town; whole damn thing was filled with those Corrupted things and our camp turned out to be nearly on top of them. We headed here and sent the location hoping any stragglers will make their way here. The plan is to wait for forty eight hours more then we depart.”
“You’re welcome to set up inside our perimeter, over by the tents if you want to. You will be able to get a good night’s sleep. We have four patrols out at all times and can give you what we like to call a decent breakfast in the morning. I would think your horses would be fine over on that slope.” He pointed to the gently sloping hill side about a hundred feet away.
“I think we will take you up on that. Neither one of us has gotten decent rest since this all started. A dozen heavily armed soldiers will go a long ways towards getting that rest.”
The group continued to talk for several hours. Niccole was curious about their former lives, where they came from and what condition their home was in when they left. Overall the story was pretty consistent. Every major town was infested, but no one had figured out what they were or where they came from.
When the next guard shift was gearing up and heading out Niccole and Dylan set their tent up and climbed inside. Both were sawing logs inside of five minutes and didn’t wake up until the next morning.
--3--
Niccole woke up first and quietly dressed before stepping out of the tent. The camp looked exactly like it did the previous night but with different people awake. She headed over to the camp fire to see what was being prepared.
She found a short but stocky woman mixing some yellow-white powder with water and greeted her with a smile.
“Mornin ma’am” the lady said.
“Please, no ‘ma’am’, Niccole is fine. Ma’am always makes me feel old.”
“No worries Niccole, it’s kind of a habit for us folks. My name is Jen, but most people here call me Whiskey.”
“Whiskey?”
“I’m a medic. It’s a military thing, just roll with it. Nod your head like you understand and move on.” she said smiling.
“So they have the medic cooking for everyone?” Niccole asked without having it sound like a sexist comment.
“Now before you go gettin’ all ‘power to the woman’ on me, keep this in mind. There isn’t one monkey in this outfit that is capable of boiling water if you handed them directions. I like my breakfast. I need my morning coffee. Need I’m saying, not want. These lunk-heads think the top of a coffee filter is the fill line. I take pride in making this dehydrated crap almost edible. With that said, you don’t by chance have any pepper do you?”
Niccole was laughing, “no, sorry. I have peanut butter and protein bars. Neither will go too far in making military grade powdered eggs more palatable.”
“You would be surprised. I’m pretty sure dirt would make some of this stuff taste better.”
A few of the other soldiers gathered over the next thirty minutes while they tried to work magic with what passed as food for government troops.
The two were laughing at a joke one of the soldiers told when Dylan walked up. He hugged and kissed Niccole “Morning Coco.”
“Morning Cowboy. You sleep ok?”
“Slept great, like a rock. Nice knowing someone with night vision goggles is sitting in a bush nearby with an automatic weapon.”
The soldier doing the standup act said “Good to know we are doing something for people. The last week hasn’t been really good for morale if you know what I mean.”
The next hour was spent talking and laughing as the morning crew tried to pretend they were eating anything
but powdered eggs and dried bacon.
Dylan looked at the dried bacon. “This is wrong on so many levels. I mean how do you do bacon wrong. I didn’t think it was possible.”
The group around the camp fire quieted down some as they got to the serious part of eating the morning breakfast.
Jokester nodded towards Dylan’s’ rifle leaning against the table, “We got spares if you want to upgrade. Not sure if you noticed, but it ain’t 1875 anymore.”
