Zombie Killers: Ice & Fire

by John Holmes

  “Nah, that’s a wash. We would have to cross too many bridges, which are choke points. Herkimer was a big city, probably more than a thousand undead in there. Hills cut off our escape routes.”

  “Agreed. The only plus is that it’s got the least amount of elevation change, so best time. Plus it goes close past Firebase Tillery.”

  “Which we’re not stopping at this time.” I ignored the dirty look from Jonesy.

  Doc traced his finger across the map. “OK, Option Two. Straight down the river, following the contours.”

  “Definitely out. No continuous roads, and in this weather, crossing a creek, we might have someone break through. Hypothermia is no joke.” Some of us were carrying almost a hundred pounds of weight.

  “Well, last option. We take the Thruway.”

  I thought about it. “Well, here’s the pluses. Wide open fields of fire. Even terrain, so less likely to have injuries. Likelihood of encountering Z’s is slim. Open areas for evac. The downside is elevation. There is one hell of a hill between here and there.”

  “And that is a problem how?”

  I looked over at Brit. “How is she going to handle it? That’s almost 30 clicks; say little less than 20 miles, with some serious uphill. She hasn’t rucked anywhere before except for a weeks’ training back at SAD. ”

  Doc looked over at her too. “Well, she either hacks it, or she doesn’t. She’s pulled her weight so far. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  “OK, Thruway it is, then.”

  We headed out cross country, walking around the remains of the town of Mohawk. In the distance, across the river, Herkimer was a burned out shell. I had done some research on google before we left, checking out what few news articles that existed. There had been a vicious battle at Little Falls, where a platoon of Army National Guardsmen had fought to the last man, running out of ammunition after holding for three days. They were swamped on both sides by a horde that has pressed in from Utica and one coming up the Mohawk Valley. The last Youtube video posted had shown hand to hand combat, uploaded by a reporter who had gone off the air a few seconds later. Herkimer itself had taken hundreds of tons of Napalm, and the river itself had burned for days.

  Now, the snow had covered all the burnt bones and charred timbers, and the landscape looked pristine in the cold air. On either side of the dirt road carved by countless tractors, corn stalks sat frozen, never harvested. We moved as quietly as we could, but the snow crunched under our boots. Thankfully we just had one hill to cross before we got to the Thruway, but as we crested the rise, the corn shook and a figure bounded out of the field about two feet from me. We all dropped on the spot, rifles at the ready. My adrenaline shot way up, and I got knocked over when a deer crashed into me. It bounded out over the road into the field on the other side, and I lay there looking up at the sky, my pack holding me to the ground. The entire team burst out laughing.

  “Hey there, turtle, want a hand up?” Jonesy reached down and pulled me up.

  “Bite me.”

  “Ohhh, a SNAPPING TURTLE, hahah!”

  We kept marching, reaching the Thruway by noon, and headed up into the hills. At one point, we had to rappel down over the edge of where a bridge had been taken out by a cruise missile and walk gingerly across the ice covering a stream. I hated crossing running water, since currents could leave pockets of thin ice. Then around and up the other side.

  All this expended a tremendous amount of energy. Moving over snow, climbing up and down ropes, carrying a hundred pounds of weapons, ammo, gear and supplies, trying to stay warm when we took breaks and the sweat cooled your body faster than you could keep up. We were wiped out by the time we had done ten miles, because we had to move slowly and cautiously, watching everywhere for zombies or other threats. In front of us, the road climbed up a huge hill.

  “Damn, I wanted to get over this before nightfall.” That time of year, it got dark very early, around 16:30. I had planned on us camping out in whatever remained of a rest stop on the Thruway, just over that big ass hill, but there was no way we would make it.

  “OK, lets’ find a place, somewhere off the road there has to be a house or something.”

  Brit came over to me, and said “That’s it?”

  “What do you mean, that’s it.”

  She blew out a steamy breath in the cold air. “This is a serious disappointment. We walk all day, no one gets shot, no zombies, no bad guys, my feet hurt and I have serious crotch burn from these stupid ninja underwear.”

  “That’s more than I needed to know. What’s your point?”

  “My point is, BORRRRRRIIIINNNNNGGGGG.”

  “Haha, welcome to being a soldier, Ms. O’Neil. Most of the time, it’s boring. Stupifyingly, maniacally boring.”

  “Well, then, my recruiter lied to me.”

  Jonesy burst out laughing. “Hey, Nick, you done lied to me too! Where’s my bonus?”

  “Suck it.”

  Chapter 16

  “That, my son, is a LOT of zombies.”

  “Agreed, and don’t call me son.”

  We lay on a bluff, overlooking St. Johnsville on the other side of the river, about five kilometers away. I watched through binoculars as Doc and Jonesy argued, their breath making clouds in the bitterly cold air. Ahmed and Brit faced away, watching our back.

  “Stop it, kids.”

  Jonesy smacked Doc on the leg and Doc punched him as hard as he could on the arm. Great, two muscle bound morons. “He started it.”

  “Be serious. I make, well, I dunno, more than a couple thousand undead milling around down there. Maybe a lot more than. They seem pretty riled up, too. Even at his distance I could see them moving around.

  Doc stopped punching Jonesy and held still. “Hey, did you hear that? Shhh” His hearing was always better than mine. We all lay still, concentrating. The wind shifted to the north, and carried the faint sound of gunshots to our ears. Individual shots, pop, pause, pop.

  Survivors. That explained the crowd of zombies. They had been holding out for six months, despite everything. Maybe they had been foraging in town and had been caught out, or the horde had come up on them living in the town. Either way, they were screwed.

  “Damn, sucks to be them. Ain’t no way anybody is going to get them out of there.”

  I whistled for Ahmed to come up, and he handed me his rifle with its powerful scope. I scanned the town, looking for the greatest concentration of Z’s. That’s where the survivors would be fighting. After a minute, I found it.

  They had taken a large, four story brick building and fortified it, blocking up the lower windows and doors. The zombies had piled up around the building, mounds of dead. It was a good fight, and as far as I could see, they were in no danger just yet. Still, the firing was few and far between. I could see a small figure lean over the roof parapet, dropping bricks down on them.

  “I see it. Just east of the center of town, old factory building” and I described the situation to them.

  Doc pushed a big glob of tobacco into his mouth and started chewing, his spit making a brown stain on the snow. I knew he only chewed when he was thinking. “We’re not going down there.”

  I nodded, then stiffened. I had scanned the scope over the windows. Taped to an upper floor window was a sign in big letters. SEND HELP. TRAPPED. MANY CHILDREN and a date four days ago.

  “Damn. Here, take a look. Top floor, right side. ” I handed Doc the rifle, and he gazed for a minute, then let his breath out in a low whistle. “That kinda changes things a little bit.”

  We slid back down the hill to where Brit was waiting, and I filled the team in, then got on the horn to Task Force Liberty Operations.

  I explained the situation to the S-3, he promised to call me back in a few minutes. While I waited, we planned out a course of action to rescue the civilians. I knew the Task Force had half a dozen heavy lift CH-47’s, one of which could easily carry forty unarmed people.

  The phone rang, and I answered, expecting the S-3 again. Inst
ead, I heard the voice of LTC MacDonald.

  “Agostine, the 3 tells me you have a large, concentrated target at St. Johnsville. I want you to call corrections for artillery fire.”

  I stared at the phone, dumbfounded. Maybe I hadn’t heard him right.

  “Excuse me? We’re supposed to be talking about rescuing civilians. What do you mean, corrections?”

  He sounded exasperated. “I mean, we are going to blow the shit out of a whole bunch of zombies. You said there were thousands there.”

  “Yeah, but what about the survivors?”

  “Alleged survivors. That could just be a trick to suck someone in. Your team just tangled with some of those vicious bastards a few days ago, lost some guys, if I remember right.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, you’re sitting back at the FOB, and I’m right here. It’s no trap. Send a bird in, we can have them out in a half an hour, then you can shoot the hell out of anything you want.”

  “Listen, Agostine, you goddamned cowboy. I have a shipment of those new BB rounds for the 155’s in Firebase Tillery, and this is the only chance we will get to test them out on such a target rich environment.”

  I held the phone away from my ear. This guy was off his rocker.

  “No, Sir, I will not call in corrections for artillery fire. Those are CIVILIANS out there. It is our JOB to protect and defend them!”

  “Sergeant, you WILL do as ordered, or I will have you goddamned COURT MARTIALLED! Do you hear me? If not, I am going to order the artillery to fire a Sweep and Zone on that whole town. In fact,” and I swear he paused for dramatic effect “that is EXACTLY what we are going to do.”

  “You SON OF A BITCH!” I yelled into the phone, but it had already gone dead. I ran back to my pack, where I had a SINCGARS FM radio, and punched in the Fire Support Channel. Dammit, I couldn’t remember the call sign over at the new Firebase.

  “Tillery Redlegs, this is Lost Boys, over.”

  “UNIDENTIFIED STATION, THIS IS SNOWMAN THREE NINER. SEND YOUR TRAFFIC.”

  Great.”Snowman three niner, this is Lost Boys Six. We are a scout team assigned to Task Force Liberty. Check with your operations NCO.”

  “ROGER, LOST BOYS. WAIT ONE.”

  I paced back and forth in the snow, the minutes ticking away.

  “GO AHEAD, LOST BOYS.”

  “Listen, there are civilians in St. Johnsville. Do NOT fire on the town. I say again, DO NOT FIRE.”

  “LOST BOYS, IS YOUR LOCATION IN OUR TARGET AREA, OVER?”

  “Negative, but there civilians in the area, over.”

  “ROGER, UNDERSTOOD, BUT LIBERTY SIX JUST GAVE US A DIRECT ORDER TO IGNORE YOUR TRAFFIC. SORRY. SNOWMAN THREE NINER OUT.”

  I felt more than heard the THUD THUD THUD THUD of a platoon of 155mm howitzers firing at that moment. I threw the handset on the ground and raced up the hill, just as the rounds started bursting over the town.

  Chapter 17

  We sat and watched through the clear winter air. The explosions came in bursts of four, mixing high explosive ground bursts with BB rounds cracking high up in the air. The BB rounds sent a shower of thousands of steel ball bearings down at the ground, like a shotgun canister. The rounds were the newest thing in our inventory, based on the old claymore mine. Very little shrapnel, but the idea was that the steel pellets would cover a wide area and hit a vital part of a Z’s brain.

  As I watched through the binos, I paid special attention to the building where the survivors had sheltered, wishing there was some way to warn them. The artillery started at one end of town and walked its way through, methodically destroying structures. A Sweep and Zone was calculated to cover every square foot of an area with shrapnel, and the four guns pounded the area. After several volleys, they had moved up to the building, and as I watched, a pair of HE shells detonated after plowing through the roof, blowing the windows out and partially collapsing the structure.

  “I can’t watch this anymore.” I handed the binos over to Brit, who lay next to me. She focused them for eyes, and then whistled.

  “Whoo boy. That’s some bad shit right there. How the hell did we ever lose the war if you could blow the crap out of everything?” Doc took the binos from Brit and started to explain.

  “Well, in the first place, even against regular troops, artillery is never going to kill everyone. Ever read that book, World War Z?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, they did get one thing right. Shrapnel doesn’t do much against zombies. Zips right through their dead flesh. You have to put the rounds down on the ground, so the concussion jellies their brains. That, and it takes a LOT of ammo, something we just didn’t have on the ground here in the states. Our stocks were really low from the wars in the Middle East.”

  Ahmed interrupted. “Fire, breaking out in town.”

  “Yeah, I see it” said Doc. He continued on.

  “So, yeah. At first they didn’t want to use Napalm, but like you saw back in Herkimer, eventually. Didn’t want to damage infrastructure, and there was hope that populations could be saved. Eventually civil order broke down and a lot of military units just melted away. Remember that, Nick?”

  I knew he was trying to distract me from what was going on below, but I kept seeing my daughters face in the children that I knew were dying down there. I just nodded to him and grunted.

  “Then we pulled back, set down a barrier in the passes over the Rockies, and cut the Pacific Northwest and Northern California off from the rest of the continent.”

  Brit scratched her armpit and rolled away from him, sitting up. She couldn’t watch anymore either, but she wanted to continue the conversation.

  “So what the hell has the government been doing for the last six months? The Army?”

  “Well, we have forty million people crammed into three states. Factories running full blast. Bases expanding like crazy, more than a million troops in training. We have the rail line from Boise to Green Bay open, and we cleared Buffalo. Scout teams like us are going around the country, securing important materials, contacting survivors.”

  Down below, the shelling had stopped. A pall of smoke hung over the town, and fires burned here and there. In the middle, a Stewarts shop burned like a torch, the gas tanks ruptured.

  “Damn, I was hoping to get some ice cream” said Ahmed. “I love Stewart’s ice cream”

  “When the hell did you ever get Stewarts ice cream in Guantanamo Bay?” asked Jonesy.

  Ahmed just smiled his inscrutable smile and said “It was a very long walk from Cuba to Buffalo.”

  “Yeah, well someday I want to hear about that escape from Gitmo.”

  Behind us, the radio in Jonesy’s pack squawked. “See what the hell they want. I don’t want to talk them.”

  After some conversation, Jonesy signed off. “They want us to go down there and get an effects report.”

  I looked out over the valley, watching the smoke rise.

  “Yeah, I guess we have to. What’s a few more undead to plow through, more or less?”

  Chapter 18

  We went at first light the next morning. The fires had burned out, but their heat had melted all the snow, and the water had refrozen, creating large sheets of ice in the street. We had to move cautiously, and several times one of us slipped on the ice, large packs dragging us down.

  Our objective, of course, was the brick building, or what was left of it. It hadn’t caught fire, but it was a wreck anyway. Glass crunched underfoot, shards lying mixed with the ice. We approached cautiously, but moved down the center of the street, avoiding the shattered doorways and windows on either side that might hide zombies. It left us open to snipers, but better the devil you know than the one you don’t.

  The undead lay all about, in scattered ones and twos. They were perforated with dozens of small holes all over their bodies. Several still moved, and we shot them as they crawled or stumbled towards us.

  “I’d say those BB rounds worked pretty damn well” said Doc.

  “Y
eah.” I kicked one to turn it over. A young woman, finally at rest. She almost looked peaceful; her clouded eyes still open, staring at nothing. The red glow had gone out. I reached down and closed her eyes.

  A shout brought me up short. “Doc, we got a survivor here!” Brit was bending over a figure that lay just outside the doorway of the brick building where we had seen the signs.

  “Perimeter!” I shouted, so that we didn’t all get in Doc’s way. Ahmed and Jonesy took up positions facing outward, and after a few seconds and a look from me, so did Brit.

  The man was bad off. A belt had been twisted around his leg, and beneath it half his calf was blown away. He had a puncture wound through and out on his neck, and the entry and exit wounds were swollen shut. Blood spilled from his mouth as he labored to breathe. Doc turned him over, looking for other wounds. The man was clad in the remains of an Army Combat Uniform, and a soiled patch on his sleeve represented the 53rd Troop Command, a New York Army National Guard command. His name tag said GUIDO, and he wore Staff Sergeant rank.

  “Hey, Sergeant. Wake up, brother.” I poured some water over his mouth, and his eyes flickered open, then they closed again. Doc shook his head.

  “He isn’t going to make it, Nick. Blood loss, shock. His heartbeat is weak and fading.”

  He woke up again, and whispered “Water.” I gave him some and he coughed up more blood, then started talking.

  “Guido. One Oh... One Oh Seventh MP’s. We held out. Waited for you. Heard you coming on the radio. The helicopters” he coughed “drew the zombies to this end of the valley. Caught us.” His eyes closed, but he reached up and grabbed me by the neck.

  “We … waited…for you… our kids … told them we … were rescued. You killed … them. Killed us.” With his last strength, he spit in my face. He let me go and fell back onto the concrete. Doc reached over and felt for a pulse.

  “He’s gone.”

  I sighed and stood up. Someone had a lot to pay for. This didn’t have to happen. I reached over and tore off the bloody velcro American Flag off his uniform and slipped it into my pocket.