The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t want that, I guess.” Hers was half-filled while his ran to the top. “Cheers.” He lifted his mug and pushed hers towards her. She took a sip and tried her best not to make a scene, but she had never been a big drinker and straight gin from a dirty mug was enough to send her into a coughing fit.

  Instead of getting mad, Jerry laughed and slammed an open hand down on the formica counter over and over again. “What a lightweight! Hell, this is the good stuff. I got some real hooch that’ll knock you on your ass. Try again.”

  Her only hope was that he would get drunk faster than she did. With his head start, it was a possibility. Before she raised her mug, she said, “Show me how it’s done.”

  “Sure thing,” he said, and drank off half his mug off. “Your turn and you better not waste any. Like I said, this is the good stuff.”

  The good stuff had a small raft of green-grey mold floating on top. She fished it out and tried to grin at him. The grin was all grimace and his face darkened at the sight of it. “Cheers,” she said and took a large sip. It’s just medicine. It’s just medicine, she tried to tell herself. It tasted like gasoline and she coughed and spluttered.

  This time Jerry was not amused. “It’s just never like it is in the movies. In the movies, a little, skinny thing like you can always drink big guys under the table. And you always got skinny bitches like you knocking out full grown men with a single punch. That shit never happens. You don’t believe me?”

  He had turned menacing again and Thuy shrank back, holding the mug, hoping it would keep him from hitting her. “I-I believe you.”

  “Go ahead and take a poke at me. Go ahead. Punch me right in the face. Knock me out if you can.” Jerry presented the side of his face, his jaw jutting. She knew better than to try. Even if he let her hit him, it would accomplish nothing but angering him more.

  “I think you’re right,” she told him, making a show of sipping from her mug. “Those sorts of movies are stupid.” She almost added: And women are stupid, too, which was clearly what he thought. It was his manner of thinking, clearly, but he wouldn’t be fooled into thinking it was hers. “I actually like, uh, romantic movies, if you know what I mean.”

  He straightened, his face still twisted by anger. “Of course, I know what romantic movies are. Everyone knows what the hell they are.”

  “No, I mean romantic movies. You know, erotic movies. Do you have anything like that here? It gets a person in the mood.” This was another lie. Her hope was that in his eagerness, he would duck into a back room to search for a stash of porn and then she would run. He didn’t, however.

  The angry look disappeared to be replaced by a leer. “Oh yeah? You like that? What else you like? You like to be tied up? I betcha do.”

  Thuy thought that she had been afraid before, but it was nothing compared to the fear racing through her now. “T-Tied? I’m not into that sort of thing. I was hoping that you had…”

  “I don’t really care what you were hoping,” Jerry said, bringing one hand into her hair again and yanking her head back. “I saw that movie Fifty Shades of Grey that all the teachers were whispering and giggling about. According to that movie, all you women want is for a man to make you do things that you wouldn’t otherwise consider, like being tied up or whipped. You ever been whipped?”

  Thuy was trembling so uncontrollably now that she couldn’t form words and nor could she stop Jerry as he propelled her towards the back of the mobile home to a bedroom. It hardly seemed possible to Thuy that the bed with its never been washed sheets was the foulest thing in the mobile home. “Kneel,” he commanded.

  She knelt.

  2- I-395 Just South of Auburn, Massachusetts

  As Dr. Thuy Lee panted in fear, watching Jerry Weir pull the leather belt from around his waist, Sergeant Troy Ross found himself pinned down next to the cement median separating the north and south lanes of I-395. He seemed to be in some sort of magic bubble where the bullets zipping past just couldn’t seem to reach him, though everyone else around him was dying.

  His safe spot wouldn’t last. All it would take was someone to shift a few feet in one direction or another and then he would be as dead as PFC Jake Monnens, who was sprawled and unmoving an arm’s length away.

  Ross was in a state of shock. The woods across from him were roaring with gunfire, while very little was being returned. Two hundred troops landed in the space of a minute. It had seemed to be a picture-perfect insertion. Now, three minutes later, most of them were dead. The air assault operation had been perfect; the ambush even more so.

  Hoping that the grass was greener on the other side of the waist-high median, Ross heaved himself over and squatted down, pointing his M4 out. Almost immediately, bullets reached out to take his life. They were like darting fireflies which meant someone was working a machine-gun and they were aiming for him. For the briefest moment, Ross missed the zombies. At least they had to come within arm’s reach to kill him.

  Then he forgot everything as his training took over. Before he knew it, his M4 was at his shoulder and he was aiming through the scope—there was the gunner partially hidden behind the black M240 and the fire spitting from it. With the tracer rounds zipping past him, Ross felt as though he were stuck in a video game as he started returning fire in short bursts.

  He had always been a dead-eye shot and the gunner went down in a second. Another man wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket with the Patriots emblem stitched on it tried to take his place. Ross shot him as well. Then, like an automaton, he twisted his trunk slightly and took aim at others. He fired with precision until his M4 ran dry.

  By the time he reloaded, a matter of seconds only, someone new had manned the M240 and out of the corner of his eye, he saw its 7.62mm rounds chewing up the cement divider to his right. Chips and splinters and dust were going everywhere, especially in his direction. There was no time for counter fire. Ross dove forward, flattening himself as the rounds streaked overhead. He didn’t remain in place. That was the quickest way to get killed.

  Low crawling with his face in the grass, he made his way into a shallow drainage ditch that ran between the lanes. It was just deep enough for him to raise his head a few inches without it getting shot off.

  A few others had made it into the ditch as well. Some had crawled like Sergeant Ross and some had rolled there, lifeless and leaking blood into the brackish water at the bottom of the gulley. “What the fuck?” Ross screamed at the others further down the line. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement and its meaning was twofold: We’re all going to die! and Holy fuck, we’re going to die!

  A few of the handful of men left whimpered in reply, one answered, “I don’t know! Fuck!”

  Another man, lying still with his head cocked at an ugly angle, seemed to be throwing his voice without moving his lips. Ross heard, “Say again Raid-One. We’re not picking you up. Say again. You have Opfor where?”

  Ross crawled to the soldier, knowing he’d find him dead. He was after the radio the man carried. Grabbing it, he shouted into the mic, “We’ve landed in a hot LZ! Say again, the LZ is hot as fuck! We got bad guys east and west of us. They were waiting on us.”

  A few seconds went by with Ross waiting expectantly. Finally, the radio crackled to life. “We now have real-time visuals, Raid-One. Pop smoke.” Although Ross was decked head to toe in his battle rattle: helmet, tactical vest, ruck, and all the rest, he didn’t have a smoke grenade. Quickly he searched the body of the dead comm guy and found a grenade with a green marking. He tossed it onto the highway to his front.

  “I see green,” the voice on the other end of the radio said.

  “Affirmative. What sort of inbound action can we expect?”

  Another pause, then, “A squad of Apaches; ETA one minute. Hold on, Raid-One. Wait, we have a second identifier. Green smoke to the west of the first. We’re going to need you to authenticate. Pop smoke again.”

  Ross lifted up a few inches and saw the smoke. He also saw a platoon-s
ized body of men moving at a diagonal to the highway. “Get your asses up!” he yelled to the few cowering soldiers who were left alive. “We got bad guys at our ten o’clock trying to flank us. Up! Up! Up!” He led by example, firing a full magazine into the enemy.

  When he ducked back down, he wasn’t done yelling. “I am not going to pop more smoke, you dumb shit! You dropped us on the damned highway five minutes ago and we’re still there. Clearly, the bad guys have the same comm equipment we have, so if I pop yellow smoke they will, too.”

  “Affirmative Raid-One. We have your position marked as…” Ross didn’t hear the rest. A flight of Apaches seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. They fired off a salvo of Hydra-70 rockets and although none of the Apaches seemed to be focused on the ditch, Ross wasn’t taking any chances. He hunkered down, squinting, as the birds came in low and slow, wanting to maximize the damage done by adding their nose-mounted 30mm chain guns to the carnage.

  It seemed like nothing could live through that much destructive firepower, however, just then missiles began to streak upwards. The enemy had Stinger antiaircraft launchers—a lot of them. The Apaches were hit from every side and despite their tough hides, not one escaped and now the air was filled with spinning blades of death that struck friend and foe alike.

  “Stingers!” Ross was screaming into the radio. “They’ve got Stingers all over the fucking place! At least twenty, and they’re situated all around us.”

  Two hundred miles away, General Phillips commanding officer of the 7th Army, was listening to the battle as if he were sitting in his doctor’s office being told that he had cancer. “Shit,” he whispered. “They have Stingers. They have Sting…what the fuck? Of course, they have Stingers. They are us.”

  He glanced up at his map. It aged him every time he did so. The President would be woken from his fucking beauty sleep at any moment and he would want good news. And they all knew that if he didn’t get it, he would do something stupid. If there was one thing that could be counted on in all this God-forsaken mess was that the old man was always up for a bit idiocy.

  And there wasn’t much in the way of good news. The line was, for the most part, holding. But it was thin. Oh God, was it thin. In some places it was as thin as the skin of a soap bubble. Any little pressure and it would pop, and then all hell would break out, starting with nukes.

  Phillips couldn’t tell the president that he had lost, in the space of a day, not only the 82nd Airborne Division, but the 101st as well. That was the sort of thing that could get Boston nuked. And Philadelphia. And half of Pennsylvania.

  They needed that breakthrough. They needed it desperately. Combining his force with the hard-nosed crowd in Massachusetts was the only way they would be able to hold the northeast. Then Phillips would be free to concentrate on holding the western and southern sectors of the Zone. It was the only path to victory that he could see.

  He picked up the phone and dialed in General Platnik. “Send in the next wave.”

  “No, the LZ is too hot. It’s going to need to be softened up first. I’m calling in some fast movers, but they were all configured for air superiority. It’ll take some time.”

  “Send them in the next fucking wave, Platnik, and if you say ‘no’ to me again, I’ll send you in as well.”

  “Then go ahead and send me,” Platnik said, easily. “They have our comm frequencies and can hear everything we say. If we go in, it’ll be suicide. Do you know how many men we lost on that last assault? The drones show a hundred and fifty-four bodies and that doesn’t include the losses among the Apache pilots. So no, I won’t be sending in the next wave, unless that consists of just me. Should I get a chopper spooled up?”

  Platnik’s tone was infuriating and so was his limited tactical and strategic viewpoint. “Get them all spooled up, damnit. If they have access to your communications then, for fuck’s sake, tell them the LZ is being moved.”

  The commanding officer of the 101st groaned at failing to see the obvious. “Shit, right. Sorry.” He hung up.

  Phillips gazed down at the phone and then back up at the big map. He was overdue in giving his boss, General Heider, his report. “He’s going to have to wait a little longer.”

  Chapter 8

  1– 7:03 a.m.

  —Fort Meade, Maryland

  At about the same time the President was woken up by a gentle knock on his door by his Chief of Staff, Marty Aleman, who had a servant with him carrying a tray of tea and coffee cakes, Special Agent Katherine Pennock was pulling into the parking lot at Fort Meade.

  Among other agencies within the facility, it was the home of the Headquarters of the United States Cyber Command. Forty hours earlier when it was decided that cyber attacks were the absolute least of anyone’s concerns, the Governor of Maryland had breezed in with a phalanx of officials and had commandeered the building, its personnel and all of its equipment. There had been a general outcry, but the governor had the backing of Marty Aleman, who wanted an extra layer of defense between him and the zombies. Since Marty spoke for the President even when the President was sleeping, it was a done deal.

  From then on, the assets of Cyber Command had been used exclusively to monitor and control every street, avenue, bridge, river and sewer pipe along the northern portion of the Maryland State line as well as the entire eastern coastline. It was a tremendous undertaking involving thousands of police officers, state troopers, soldiers and civilians, hundreds of linked radios, six repositioned satellites, fifty unmanned drones and whatever boats they could steal from the naval reserve and the Coast Guard.

  After the city of Baltimore was placed on complete lockdown, it was added to the Command’s scope of responsibility, but since they were tapped out, Marty snapped his fingers and sent in the FBI and five companies of federalized Virginian guardsmen.

  The Virginians were spread thin, untrained for what was being asked of them, and unfamiliar with the city; Katherine figured that there had to be holes. She also figured that Eng or Anna would try to find those holes and exploit them.

  The building that held Cyber Command was one of the most imposing buildings she had ever seen. Twenty stories of cold, black glass. It was the sort of government building that when you looked at it you just knew “they” were doing something illegal inside: wiretapping, unauthorized surveillance…torture, maybe.

  Once inside, Katherine had the opposite feeling. It was bedlam. People went in every direction, many with lost looks on their faces; there were shouted arguments going on in unseen offices; and the security arrangements, once an impressive obstacle course of guards and full body scanners and secret codes, were now empty. Katherine bypassed the unmanned scanners and proceeded to a reception desk where eight women were taking who knew how many simultaneous calls.

  Even though nobody asked, she held up her FBI I.D. card. One of the women pointed to a sign which read: FBI 16th floor. There were a dozen signs just like it.

  Katherine shook her head and waited until the woman, a harried fifty-something with layered bags under her eyes, finished her phone call. “16th floor,” she said right away. “The elevators are just to your right.”

  “No, hold on,” Katherine said. “I want to talk to whoever’s in charge of this operation. I’m supposed to be briefing the President pretty soon.” This came out smoothly, since as far as she knew it was the still the truth.

  The woman chuckled and shook her head. “The FBI is in charge of the FBI. Cyber Command is in charge of Cyber Command. The NSA is in charge of the NSA. You get it?”

  “No, I don’t,” Katherine replied, feeling that lost look everyone seemed to be wearing start to creep onto her face. “This is supposed to be a joint operation. Who’s in overall command? And what happened to security?”

  The woman leaned over the desk and Katherine leaned in close to her. “It’s a cluster-fuck,” the woman said. “I don’t normally use words like that, but in this case, it’s true. This Baltimore business has thrown everyone for a loop and I can’t r
eally tell you who’s in charge of anything. No one knows. Not even the military. The Virginians won’t listen to the Marylanders. And the regular army won’t listen to the national guardsman. And all the spook alphabet agencies won’t listen to anyone.” She leaned even closer and whispered, “There have been actual fist-fights, can you believe it?”

  Katherine didn’t want to believe it, not with so much at stake. “And the security?”

  “Someone came through and took them to man the lines, but if I was a wagering woman I’d say more than half took off. There are roadblocks two miles away. Two miles.” She looked ill at the very idea.

  Katherine leaned back to look at the different signs. With her specialty being cyber crime, she decided to go straight to Cyber Command. She certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone in the FBI not since she was sort of AWOL. She thanked the woman, who was already taking another two calls and went to the third floor.

  Everything here was humming along with far greater efficiency. For the most part the people who worked here were soldiers, used to taking orders. These were their offices and their equipment. It was their mission that was now completely different.

  Katherine wandered among offices trying to find anyone who was willing to talk, but everyone was too busy to talk to a FBI agent. A captain walked by while she was going in circles. He was in his mid-forties, but hard as a rock. He glared as she explained why she was there. His name tag read John Questore and he was obviously unimpressed by her. “You are going to debrief the President on Cyber Command?”

  “I work for the cyber criminal unit in the FBI,” she explained. When he only lifted a skeptical eyebrow, she added, “What can I say, he likes them young and blonde. It’s stupid and embarrassing, but what can you do?”

  Questore grunted. “I heard that about him. It’s embarrassing to have a lecherous hound in the White House. I didn’t vote for him. And why on earth would he have a fed debrief him on our activities? This is a military operation and that should…”