The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  It tasted as if raw sewage had been mixed in with the water when it was, in reality, zombie blood he was drinking. Truong was finally infected and he was just starting to feel the madness closing in, when the first nuke went off and the world turned to soot and cinder.

  The pipe in which he’d been hiding shivered into pieces when the shock of the explosion rolled across the earth, turning the mantle of the earth’s crust fluid and causing the land to swell and crest like an ocean wave. The heat was beyond even his new zombie ability to withstand and once more he passed out.

  Now, half an hour later, he pushed his hand up through the debris and furiously clawed his way out of his premature grave and into a land of flame. He didn’t think it was possible, but seeing the afterglow of a nuclear bomb only made him angrier still. A scream tore from his throat. It was directed westward where everything was still beautiful and the land still green, and the people…the stupid, filthy peasants were still smiling and happy. Or so he guessed.

  They had done this to him. They had bombed him and buried him and burned him. “And they’ll pay,” he seethed in a rasping voice. Truong started forward to where the Grand Canal lay. Unopposed, he crossed it, walking on the heaped and burning backs of the corpses. He then marched through the litter of dead soldiers. As he did, he stared—none of them had faces left.

  When the nuke had gone off with the light of ten-thousand suns, a wall of fire, the real Great Wall of China, had washed over them and melted their features. Truong tried to laugh, however the air was poison and shriveled his lungs. He could no longer laugh or shout. He breathed as an asthmatic would, making a strident noise like a broken accordion.

  Still, he plodded on through fire and heat and radiation. His flesh blistered and ran with black ooze. Whatever hair that hadn’t burned away slid off his head like hot cheese. He was a horror to look upon, and if there had been anyone left alive, his appearance would have been enough to drive them insane.

  But there wasn’t anyone left alive, and there wasn’t anything left alive, either. Even the birds had been flash-fried in midair.

  Nothing lived, not even the zombies, except Truong that is and he was as black hearted and black-eyed as any of them had been. And he was hungry. He was maddeningly hungry. All he could think about besides the pain and the rage was his hunger as he set himself walking west into the heart of China, and unlike the millions of exhausted peasants who had been given an hour head start, Truong would never tire. He would walk for a year if that’s what it took.

  Hours later, the mindless beast that had once been Truong Mai had his first taste of clean human meat. It wouldn’t be his last.

  Chapter 2

  —2:06 a.m.

  Taconic Hills Central High School

  Once more, Dr. Thuy Lee edged to the window and eased herself into a half-squat so she could see above the sill. It was difficult to make out anything. The dark night was intense, only shadows layered on shadow, painted against the ground and the trees in the blackest of ink. Still she stared, her eyes squinting, hoping against hope that those natural shadows were all she was going to see.

  As she stared, she saw something move in the dark. It was man-shaped and walked slowly. They were still out there. The zombies.

  She hated that term: zombie. It was immature and tasteless and led to the impression that there was something supernatural about the people who had been infected with the tainted Com-cells.

  Thankfully, there wasn’t anything supernatural about them, which was a good thing since they were hard enough to kill without bringing anything magical into the mix. Not that she wanted to kill them, really. If she had the opportunity, she would cure them if she could. It was a distinct possibility. As far as she could tell, what was causing the personality changes and the hyper-aggression was the prodigious and unrestrained replication of the Com-Cells along the neural pathways.

  Despite this, there didn’t seem to be any actual cellular damage to the infected persons. All of the lower functions of the involuntary nervous system: breathing, digestion, heart rate, etc, had not been affected, which suggested that once the Com-cells were removed, a person’s brain would return to their previous mental state.

  She hoped.

  Of course, for her, utterly alone, completely defenseless and trapped in the Zone, it was all a rather moot point.

  Thuy had been left behind. Ryan Deckard and Courtney Shaw had sailed away in a hot air balloon three hours before and now Thuy was at a loss of what to do, exactly. She was stuck in the Zone, possibly forever. This wasn’t hyperbole either. She had tried every possible way to get out of the Zone and had failed time and again.

  It seemed to her that staying put was somewhat logical. It had to be better than kicking around in the Zone as she had been for the last couple of days. If she left the meager safety of the school, she might find other people who were just as stuck as she was, but more than likely she would take off in her borrowed RAV4 and either run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, or she would blunder into one of the larger groups of infected persons. If the latter happened, she would be pulled out of the vehicle and eaten alive, and if the former happened then she would be in pretty much the exact same position as she was now, except she’d be without the possibility of transportation.

  “Logically, staying put is the correct thing to do,” she stated clearly as if speaking to a room full of students.

  Although she proclaimed her motive for staying as “logical,” there was a childish part of her that was wholly illogical. That part of her held out the foolish hope that Deckard would come back for her. When that part of her spoke, it came out in a mumbled, “He should have been here by now.”

  It had been three hours since she had watched him float away, dangling from the bottom of a hot air balloon and in that time, she had worked out the relatively simple math involved: with an average wind speed of three and half miles an hour, the balloon had crossed into Massachusetts airspace one hour and forty-five minutes ago, and that was more than enough time to hike back for her.

  She pictured him striding along in that purposeful, long-legged way of his and thought: Maybe he stopped to get more ammunition. Was that wishful thinking on her part? She hoped not.

  With a sigh, she slipped back down from the window and stared at the black wedges on her feet. She’d been wearing them for most of the last day. They had been useful as part of a “disguise” to get into Hartford, but since then they’d been killing her feet. With a groan, she pulled them off and saw the blisters that had formed. Two were running clear fluid; it looked like her feet were crying.

  “Feels like it, too,” she said, forcing herself to stand back up. “He might come, and then again, he might not. If he doesn’t, I’m going to need different shoes.”

  In reality, Thuy needed a lot more than just new shoes to survive. She also needed a change of clothes, preferably something warmer and more rugged than the torn and stained blouse and slacks she had on. She would also need food, water, and shelter. “And somewhere to sleep.” She was dog tired and the more she thought about sleep, the harder it was for her to stay awake.

  “But first, I need a change of clothes.” She wanted to be prepared before sleeping, “just in case.”

  Finding a change of clothes wasn’t as difficult as she thought it would be, especially since everything was wide open.

  The high school had been evacuated two days before in the middle of classes as the situation in Poughkeepsie had deteriorated rapidly. With cell phones ringing nonstop from worried parents, there had been an atmosphere of panic among the students and teachers, and the school drained of people in minutes.

  Fear was so rampant that one teacher was almost run over as she tried to control the exodus from the parking lot in an orderly fashion.

  For the teens, once they were behind the wheel of their cars, the passing authority of one cardigan-wearing teacher was utterly disregarded and with wild abandon, they drove across the front lawn of the school and do
wn the sidewalks.

  The teachers and admin personnel were infected by the growing panic as well, and followed so closely on the heels of the students that, in one instance, a bus driver had tried to leave before his bus was full. As much as the students wanted to get home, they wouldn’t leave without their friends, neighbors and in many cases their siblings.

  When the driver wouldn’t wait, he was attacked by the students, who threw books and sharpened pencils at him, eventually forcing him off the bus. “Drive it yourself, you little shits,” he snarled and stomped away.

  Fifteen-year-old Coty Bill didn’t hesitate and jumped in the driver’s seat. He didn’t have either a driver’s license or a permit, but he’d been driving his daddy’s tractor since he was twelve and didn’t see all that much difference between the two machines.

  The bus driver hadn’t been the only one to leave in a hurry. The head custodian, a slovenly man who made fourteen dollars an hour, and who was maybe worth a third of that because he spent most of his time at the school “secretly” leering at the young girls, left even before Coty Bill. He locked the front doors behind the principal, walked directly through the school and was halfway to his aging Kia Sedona before he slowed and glanced back. It was part of his job to completely secure the school and there were six other exits that he hadn’t checked.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said to himself. It wasn’t the first time he had forgotten to lock the place down, though this was the first time he did it sober.

  It was his desire to get the hell out of there that allowed Thuy to get into the school at all. To her great relief, she had found a side door propped open by a rock.

  Now the lack of locked doors helped her again in her search for new clothes. She ghosted through the dark halls on bare feet, slipping into the main offices without any problem at all.

  And there, sitting in a big cardboard box labeled: Lost and Found, she discovered an entire heap of clothing. She picked up a shirt and her lip curled. The shirt was a rainbow of ugly stripes with a bubble caption that read: Got me some!

  “Got me some of what?” Thuy really didn’t want to know and tossed it aside and poked through the box some more. Everything was so childish that Thuy gave her filthy blouse a second look. After a trip through the Hartford sewers, it was disgusting. With a sigh, she stripped and began trying to piece together an outfit in the dark. Thankfully, because of her height, just a few inches over five foot, and her trim form, she was able to fit into almost everything, although there was not that much to choose from.

  Eventually, she found a blue top that had the word “Juicy” stretched tightly across her breasts, a pair of pink and silver sneakers, and blue jeans that were cut so uncomfortably low that she couldn’t bend half way over without showing her underwear. “Kids today,” she muttered and then went in search of a jacket or coat. She wasn’t just cold, she also didn’t like the idea of running across someone while wearing that shirt.

  There were no coats in the lost and found, so she went room to room until she managed to find a man’s sports coat hanging in a science lab. The coat really wasn’t all that sporty in her opinion. It was checkered in brown and a slightly lighter shade of brown, with leather elbow patches, and it smelled of chalk, which for a woman who had spent most of her life in school, was reassuring.

  She fell asleep in the principal’s office on a leather couch, wrapped in that coat, and for a time she felt safe. It wasn’t a zombie that woke her, it was the sound of someone thudding into lockers.

  “Fuuuck, thas loud.” The voice, a drunken muddle, had come from a man. A second later, came the unmistakable sound of a baseball bat being dropped. Thuy’s sense of security left her in that second. There were no actual laws within the Zone. There was only survival of the fittest, and everything was up for grabs for someone strong enough to take it and Thuy wasn’t strong enough to stop anyone from taking anything.

  2- Walnutport, Pennsylvania

  For the last two hours, the old man hadn’t been Lieutenant General Phillips, commanding officer of the newly created 7th Army, he had been a soldier, and an American, and a man defending his family, though his family was far away and scattered like most military families were.

  He and the thin, thin line of soldiers and scraped up civilians had made their stand along the Lehigh River, ten miles west of the New Jersey border. It had been a crazy mix of people who had fought in that deeply wooded river valley. Alongside the Pennsylvania National Guard were state patrolman and firemen, and there were also farmers and insurance salesmen, realtors and hairstylists. Three different fraternities had driven down from Penn State in a rolling caravan, and twenty-six members of Boy Scout Troop 41 out of Palmerton had biked twenty-three miles in order to fight.

  Phillips hadn’t bothered to ask any of the Boy Scouts if they had permission slips from their mothers. The smaller boys ran ammo, while the older ones took up their .243s and fired into the mass of undead just as the adults were doing, while above all of them jets came like clockwork lighting up the night with explosions and napalm.

  The line was long and dreadfully thin in places, sometimes just a few men were all there was between the deadly masses and the interior of the country, and for those two hours as the third day of the apocalypse became the fourth, the country had never been so close to utter annihilation. But gradually more people, men as well as women, came sliding down the line, filling in the thinner areas until Phillips decided he could take a step back.

  “Getting tired, old man?” Milo Musial asked. He had a headache thumping that felt worse than a rotten tooth, and it was making him nervous, because wasn’t that how the black-eyed plague began? A terrible headache, then inexplicable rage, and finally an unholy hunger for human flesh? Anxious about showing the least anger, he smiled up at the old man. It wasn’t a fake smile; Milo was also a soldier now and a foxhole camaraderie had built between the two.

  “Yes,” Phillips answered, in total honesty. “But there’ll be no rest for the wicked. Besides, I have some pull. I can get an M1A1 Abrams to replace me.”

  Milo glanced into the mass of dead creatures scattered in front of them before asking, “What’s that? Is that a tank or something?” When Phillips nodded, Milo asked, “Can I drive it?”

  Like a father who had no intention of following through, Phillips said, “We’ll see, maybe. Take care, Milo.”

  Slowly, with the sounds of battle growing dim behind him, Phillips made his way towards the rear where everything was so muted that he stuck a finger in his ear and gave it a wiggle. It had been years since he had fired a gun without ear protection and now he were hearing the world as if his head was in an invisible fishbowl.

  Even when he said to himself, “Where is everyone?” it sounded muffled. The command tent he had been using was deserted, forcing him to commandeer a Mercedes Benz that sat on the edge of the road leading into the town of Walnutport. Driving into town, he came across a leaderless mishmash of civilians and soldiers heading towards the sound of battle.

  “Where’s the C.P?” Phillips asked.

  A PFC jerked his thumb back the way he’d been walking. “At the Burger King, but don’t expect to get a Whopper or nothing. As usual the officers are bogarting all the good stuff.”

  “You can whine once you’ve done something to deserve a Whopper,” Philips snapped. His hearing was good enough to catch the bellyaching. “The line is only a half-mile away. Double time it.” The PFC didn’t need to see the three stars on the general’s collar to know he was mouthing off to the wrong guy.

  He gave a quick, “Yes, sir,” and jogged off, with his group following after.

  Phillips drove the rest of the way into town, cursing the private because all he could think about was a damned hamburger. He was thankful to see that the was shut down or he would have had to ask for a super-sized #6 and bitch about the wasted manpower, at the same time.

  The command post was practically empty. Phillip’s two-hour old order to “man the line” ha
d been obeyed to such an extent that there was a National Guard colonel, whom Phillips had never seen before, trying to direct the entire western flank of the 7th Army with only a skeleton crew of eight communications specialists. They were so busy and the situation so urgent that when Phillips entered the restaurant and a sergeant called the room to attention, only two others snapped to.

  “At ease,” Phillips said. “Back to work, please.”

  The colonel didn’t bother to introduce himself. He held out a blocky sat-phone to Phillips and said, “It’s General Heider. He’s looking for a sit-rep.”

  “Hell, I’m looking for a sit-rep,” Phillips said, with a snort. He took the phone and held it against his chest. “What’s the line look like? Are we holding?”

  “The Penn border is holding everywhere but Philadelphia. We thought that the city would hold longer than it did, but from what I gather, there are so many people fleeing that we can’t get reinforcements in. Also, the entire right flank is up in the air because of what’s happening in Jersey.” He didn’t need to explain the chaos of New Jersey. Civilization seemed to have died there practically overnight. It was a madhouse. People weren’t just fighting the zombies, they were killing each other left and right over food or weapons or shelter.

  Phillips thanked the colonel and then grunted into the phone, “How are you General Heider?”

  “Fucked,” Heider replied. “The President is going to want some good news when he wakes up or the nukes will fly.”

  “So, you’re saying I’ve got five hours to think up a lie? That shouldn’t be too hard. Listen, sir, I’ve got to get a handle on things here. I’ll call you right back.” It was three hours before he could even think about calling Heider back and, even then, he didn’t since he didn’t have good news to give the president.

  Despite the heroics of the individuals coming to the aid of their country, it wasn’t enough and worse, the influx of volunteers was sporadic, coming in spurts so that there were too many men in one area and too few in another. Usually even the local commanders couldn’t tell how many people they had on the line.