Zombie Killers: Ice & Fire

by John Holmes

  I stood up to leave. “Bullshit. We ALWAYS come back to base camp for resupply. It gives the guys a break from constantly watching for Z’s. Maybe YOU should come outside the wire with us sometime, see how nerve racking it is.” MacDonald started spluttering, his face turning red, and Doc put his hand on my arm.

  Major Flynn jumped in to make peace with us. “Nick, for now, lets’ just do Little Falls and Saint Johnsville. Then we can reassess from there. We’re setting up a Forward Area Refueling Point and a Firebase at Little Falls, and we need to know what’s on the other side of the pass. Sir, does that sound OK?”

  MacDonald glared at me for a full minute, then turned away, motioning for Major Flynn to continue the briefing.

  Doc leaned over to me and whispered “No frigging way. Half the team is brand spanking new. I’m not staying out there.”

  “Agreed. I’ll get with Flynn. Saint Johnsville and no farther. I’ll work it out with Flynn.”

  Chapter 9

  We boarded the CH-47 in the soft grey light before dawn, strapping in under the green cabin lights. As Brit strapped in next to me, I turned her weapon outside down, placing the muzzle down on the floor.

  “Keep it away from your chin!” I yelled in her ear. She pulled an earplug out and yelled back “WHY?”

  “In case we crash. The force of your chin hitting the rifle will break your neck!”

  “Really! COOL!”

  I shook my head as we powered up off the ground, nose tilting forward. We gained altitude and forward motion, and sped down the river.

  Ahead of us, an AH-64 helo ran down the river, pausing every now and then to halt, spin in place, and fire a burst of rounds at groups of zombie shambling on the highway. I watched in my NVG’s as the rounds tore through a group, exploding on contact, splashing zombie flesh over the highway. Headshots didn’t mean much when the body is shattered into a hundred pieces. I plugged a set of headphones into the crew circuit, and listened to the pilots talk back and forth.

  “HELLBOY TRAIL, THIS IS HELLBOY LEAD. GOT A LARGE GROUP ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF I-90. WE’RE GOING TO STAY AND ENGAGE.”

  “ROGER THAT, WE’LL WAIT.”

  “CAS COMING IN HOT, CLEAR THE AO IN THIRTY SECONDS”

  “ROGER, STARTING RUN NOW.”

  As I watched, the Apache broke left, catching the rising sun as it rose over the mountains. A steam of tracer rounds went ripping into the darkness that still lay on the ground, followed by rockets pounding the target area. The Apache rolled out and stood back to let the Close Air Support birds come in.

  Brit grabbed my arm and screamed in my ear. “THAT’S GODAMNED BEAUTIFUL!” Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. I knew what she meant, knew what she was feeling. We had been knocked down, kicked back almost to the edge, and the military was fighting back, finally taking the offensive. Not like our bullshit wars in the Middle East, where our hands were tied. Now we were fighting an enemy where we had to throw every piece of ordnance in the inventory to survive; our only consideration was saving civilians.

  A flight of A-10 Ground Attack planes screamed overhead, then tipped over and opened up with their cannons. They powered in, guns making that awesome BRAPPPPPPP, ripping up the ground in the ruins of Utica, scattering bodies all over. The creeping dawn slowly lit the open area where thousands of undead had concentrated, for whatever reason they had. Who knew why the Zombies did what they did? I was just glad they set themselves up for such an easy target. On their next run, the Warthogs flew low and slow, releasing half a dozen cluster bombs from the hard points on their wings. The canisters split open a hundred feet from the ground, throwing out hundreds of grenades, each of which detonated with a dull thud that I could feel over the thumping of the helicopter’s rotors.

  The trick to fighting zombies was to get them in the open, and pound them with high explosives. People don’t understand what HE does to human bodies. The shrapnel, ordinarily the killer in an artillery shell, didn’t make much of difference to a Z. The hot metal just zipped through their bodies, leaving ragged holes, but not usually hitting their vital brain. Enough High Explosive, though, brains jellied, flesh was ripped off bones, arms, legs blown off. Maybe not a killer, but an immobile zombie is only a threat to someone looking for a Darwin Award. We drew them out where we could, identified hordes, called in artillery and the Air Force dropped tons of bombs on them.

  When the dust from the explosions had become too much to identify targets, the Apache rotated back east and took the lead again, following the Mohawk River as it wound its way through the valley. We were coming up on Ilion, just shy of the pass by Little Falls when we dipped down for our first fake insertion.

  Z’s are drawn to sound. Their eyes, quickly scratched and scored by lack of lubrication, are less than useless when it comes to tracking things. Bring enough noise and vibration, however, and they will come running. Our plan was to fake an insertion, along with the Apache, having the helos hover in one spot for around ten minutes, drawing whatever remained of the Z population out of Ilion. Analysis of trends indicated that around twenty five percent of any Pre-Apocalypse population actively survived as mobile undead, or so the intel weenies said. Our own observations seemed to confirm that.

  Hovering over a clearing about two miles west of town, the thud of rotors quickly drew a crowd of several hundred undead. The door gunner on our helo started burning through cases of ammo, the big .50 caliber rounds on his M-2 chewing off hunks of flesh, blowing off limbs. Like I said, head shots are best, but when a round a half an inch wide, moving at more than a thousand feet per second, hits a shoulder, hip, leg, whatever, that limb is coming off. Brit watched wide eyed, laughing so loud I almost heard her over the rotor wash. The woman was crazy.

  After a few minutes, we lifted straight up to a couple hundred feet and dashed eastward, the Apache saying there to keep their attention. The Blackhawk flared onto the roof of the factory, and we scrambled out, landing in the snow that had accumulated over the last couple months. The helo barely stopped before turning north and meeting up with the Apache again in a different spot, drawing the Z’s away from the building again.

  There was a doorway on the roof, leading to a set of stairs. Ordinarily these were emergency exits, locked from the inside. Jonesy took out his huge crowbar and inserted it into the doorframe. Myself, Hernandez, Collaton, and Ahmed stacked on the side of the doorway, pistols held down and ready to clear the stairway. We used pistols, because the lower velocity rounds would power into the concrete of a cinder block after going through a zombie, where a high velocity rifle used in a confined space like that could lead to a dangerous ricochet. The 5.56 millimeter rounds in the M-4 were notorious for going directly through a body if it didn’t hit bone. I was in the lead, and instead of a pistol, I carried a pump 12 gauge shotgun.

  I felt Hernandez place his hand on my shoulder, giving it a squeeze, the “ready” signal. Since batteries for our Night Vision Goggle were in short supply, I lit a magnesium flare and held it smoking in my hand. Jonesy put his weight into the pry bar, and the door popped open. I threw the flare down the stairwell and followed it in.

  Chapter 10

  The flare I had just tossed down the stairwell fell about five feet then bounced back. Below me, in its sputtering glare, the entire stairwell was blocked by corpses. They had been jammed packed against the door, and as they rotted over that horrible, hot summer, they had collapsed in on themselves. My guess is that the door had been locked from the inside, something I confirmed from the lock that Jonesy’s prybar had popped out of the wood inside the door frame.

  We saw things like this a lot when entering towns and buildings that had succumbed to the Zombie Apocalypse. It wasn’t the Z”s that killed them, it was panic. If they had just kept their heads, maybe they could have figured out how to open the door and blockaded themselves on the roof until something else could be thought of. The smell wafting up from below confirmed something I had already suspected. There had been a serious fire down belo
w, and all these people had packed in here and died of smoke inhalation.

  When I had stopped short, seeing what was below me, the rest of the guys had piled up behind me and actually tripped over each other. I backed out slowly to avoid them. Jonesy was laughing as Ahmed helped Hernandez get back to his feet. “Way to go, noob!”

  “What’s up, Nick?” Doc asked. We circled the team to hold a conference.

  “Stairs below is packed with corpses. Probably they holed up in the building, thinking the stone walls meant safety. Someone got careless with a flame and there was a major fire.”

  “That doesn’t bode well for us finding useable machinery here.”

  “Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, we still have to get down. Break out the ropes.”

  We secured several ropes to the Air Conditioning units fixed to the roof, and dropped them over the sides, then snapped into rappelling harnesses. Jonesy and Doc went down first, going over the edge and down to the fourth floor windows. These they smashed out using a cloth over a baseball bat, to minimize the noise. I had sent these two down first, because pulling yourself in through a window isn’t like in the movies. You don’t just rappel down and swing in. More often than not, you’ll bounce off the window, or cut the hell out of yourself AND get stuck in the frames. Jonesy and Doc were the only two who had the brute strength to manhandle themselves quickly and quietly in through the windows. I waited while they scouted out the floor below us.

  “Nick, looks like they tried to barricade the ground floor, like you thought. Bad fire. Everything is trashed.”

  “OK, we’ll come down and move to a different part of the plant, get settled in for the night and I’ll send my report to higher. Judging from the rest of the town, this place is a wash.” As I talked to him, the snow had cleared and we looked out over devastation. Most of the town had burned down to the ground. Only brick buildings still stood, and chimneys.

  Behind me I heard a commotion, then a yell. I turned in time to see Collaton catch a right hook across the face from Brit. He started to swing back at her, but Ahmed grabbed his arm, twisted it behind him, and dumped him on his ass in the snow. Brit was shaking the hand that she had punched him with, grimacing in pain.

  “Do not put your hands on her again, do you understand me?” Collaton winced as Ahmed lifted up on his arm.

  “Sure, I get it, she’s your woman. You should have just said something.”

  “My woman? No, she is a soldier. Like you. Like me.”

  “OK, OK.”

  I looked at Brit’s hand, which had already started to swell.

  “Looks like you might have broken something. Next time, don’t use your hand. Use something harder. What happened?”

  “I was getting my harness on, asked him to tighten the straps, and he used that as an excuse to squeeze my ass. Next time, I’m going to shoot him.”

  “You have my permission. Think you can still use that hand to get down?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be OK.”

  I walked over to Collaton. “You heard her. Next time you play grab ass, she’ll shoot you.”

  “I was just trying to have a little fun.” he mumbled.

  “I don’t care. She’s your teammate, hands off.” He gave me a pissed off look, then reached down to shrug into his own harness. Hernandez stepped over to help him.

  “Smooth move, bro.” I overheard him say. I wasn’t sure about the reply I heard, but it sounded like “Screw that Bitch”.

  One day into the mission, and we already had problems. A possible broken hand and a definite attitude problem.

  Chapter 11

  We moved out slowly through the burnt out factory. Milling machines lay in rusted and slagged heaps. Only six months since the breakdown, and everything that the world had run on was falling apart. Of course, the fire didn’t help.

  I put Collaton on point, and kept Brit towards the back. Problems between people in such a small unit were one of leaders’ worst headaches. Like a piece of sand in the gears of a machine, it will wear away until the whole works stop, usually violently. I couldn’t afford that; I would have to sit both Collaton and Brit down and talk to them. Later, when we had settled down for the night. Right now my main concern was getting a place to fort up, so we could check out the rest of the factory tomorrow in the day. I didn’t want lights to show, even in a snow storm.

  We stopped at the fire exit of a stairwell. The door led out into a parking lot; across the street there was a row of sturdy brick row houses, ideal to spend the night in. We pushed open the door gently, but it still screeched a bit on the hinges. I cringed, but nodded to Collaton to move out into the steadily falling snow. Hernandez knelt just outside the doorway, scanning the buildings with an infra-red sensitive scope. Collaton moved about fifty meters, then Ahmed passed me. Reaching Collaton, he moved out another fifty meters. In this way, we crossed the parking lot, keeping each other separated if we happened to stumble across a Z. We would lose only one man, and have time to take them both out, but close enough that we could quickly form a coherent defense if attacked by a group. On the bad side, you were on your own if you did happen to run into one, oh well. Hopefully someone else would take them down for you, but grouping up to provide a base of fire had been a hard lesson to unlearn. I rolled up the rear of the column, joining them at the doorway to one of the houses.

  “Hernandez, Collaton, O’Neil, you stay here. Watch our six.” Brit shot me a dirty look, but tough crap. She would have to deal with it, and I was pretty sure neither of them would try anything stupid with her in the middle of clearing a house. I led the stack, shotgun at the ready. I had a suppressor the size of a coffee can screwed onto the front, and it would still make a loud coughing noise, but hopefully that wouldn’t carry over the snow. The rest of the guys carried their pistols down in the low ready.

  The fear that always gripped me when we entered an unknown building was building up inside again. I felt Ahmed’s hand on my shoulder, and tried to push the fear back down inside. No matter how many times I had done this, it always felt like a knot in my stomach. Inside could be anything, from a howling undead to a survivor pointing a shotgun back at me, to nothing at all. I flicked on the flashlight and reached over to check the lock. I would have preferred to be able to lock the door later once we had settled in, but this one was locked already. I raised the shotgun and fired directly into the deadbolt, blowing the door open, then stepped inside, into a dark hallway.

  I knew that smell. Rotted, undead meat. Undead. I covered my sector, sweeping the shotgun from left to right, but nothing showed. I didn’t have to say anything to the rest of the guys, they knew the smell as well as I did. A set of stairs let up to the right, and to my left, an entrance to a dining room. I kept the12 gauge pointed down the hall, and Ahmed aimed his pistol up the stairs. Jonesy stepped past me into the dining room, looking for the red glow from Zombie eyes. We worked our way around this way through the kitchen, the rear most man, Ahmed, keeping watch behind us, Jonesy and I alternating entering each room. Nothing in the kitchen, or a back bedroom. We moved back into the hallway, calling out softly to the rest of the team so they would know it was us.

  Upstairs, the same thing. Nothing except three empty bedrooms, two of them decorated with the typical kid stuff. I started to relax, but then remembered we had to check the basement.

  “Basement” said Ahmed, and I nodded. He wouldn’t forget. The guy was a machine; he never missed a step. Jonesy chuckled to himself.

  “Whooboy, I know how you love basements, Nick.”

  “Suck it.”

  “No thanks. I didn’t do it in prison, and I ain’t gonna do it now.”

  I ignored him and moved on down the stairs, waving Brit and the rest of the team in. The entrance to the basement was under the stairway, and I put my hand on the doorknob.

  “Hey Boss, want me to go first?”

  “No Hernandez, I got this. Get a little more experience under your belt, then you can be my guest.” I was sweating under my mechani
cs gloves. For some reason, Undead always tried to hide in the basement. I just didn’t like them heading down into the darkness where anything could reach up from below. I would have killed to be able to throw a flashbang down the stairs, but I couldn’t, since we were trying to be quiet. Likewise for a magnesium flare, it could easily burn the house down. I compromised and cracked open a chem light, shook it, opened the door, then tossed it in. I quietly shut the door, counted to five slowly, then opened it.

  The sickly green chem light gave illumination to three figures, hunched over the light, trying to figure out what it was. Or whatever Zombies do. When they heard the door open, they turned as one at the sound and launched themselves up the stairs at me.

  I fired once, catching a fat adult male in the neck. The impact of the buckshot ripped half his neck away and spun him around onto the others. I madly pumped another shell and fired again, taking off the top of his head. A line of holes appeared in the drywall in front of me as Ahmed and Jonesy, hearing the loud COUGH from my gun, fired blindly into the basement. One of the Zs, a little girl, went down, a 9mm slug catching it in the side of the head, but the last, a gawky teenaged kid, rushed up the stairs at me. I fired again, blowing a hole in the Zs’ stomach, and tried to back up, but tripped on the top step, falling backwards, landing on my ass. The thing reached for my leg and grabbed hold with a grip of steel, trying to bite me. I kicked out as hard as I could with my other boot, but it didn’t let go. Shit shit shit. The pants leg of my cheap ass Army Combat Uniform ripped, and his hand slid off. Ahmed coolly placed his pistol next to my face and fired directly into the top of its head. I turned away just as he fired, avoiding getting any of the brain, bits of skull and gore that splashed back on my face into my mouth. My hearing was going to be crap.

  “You know, hollow points are illegal under the Geneva Convention, right?” laughed Doc as I tried wipe off the gore from my uniform. “Good thing none of that got in your mouth, or Ahmed’s next one would have been through YOUR head.” We were gathered in the kitchen, and had a propane lantern running, after putting heavy sheets over the windows.