The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  The air assault force had battled to a point just a mile north of Webster. Their right flank was on the French River and their left was on the main highway, I-395. For the most part, the battle field consisted of a quaint little homes and baseball fields where little leaguers had once jousted with ball and bat.

  Now, the captain wanted Ross’s company to attack across the French River. It wasn’t the biggest river, only thirty or forty yards wide with heavy forest on the other side—the perfect place to hide half the Massachusetts National Guard. All it would take is one guy with a machine gun to kill half of his company.

  “Um,” Ross said and then paused. “How, uh, how deep is that river?”

  “Probably not very,” was Captain Spencer’s casual reply. “It’ll be okay. I asked for some air support. We should have three or four F-16s coming in about ten minutes.”

  Ross’s mouth came open. “Ten minutes? Ten minutes? Why the hell are they coming in ten minutes…sir?” He was on the edge of insubordination and it was hard for him to care since he was going to be dead in ten minutes.

  Spencer put his face right into Ross’s so that they were nose to nose. “Because the fucking zombies are this close to breaking through!” he screamed, holding two fingers an inch apart. “And what the fuck do you think will happen then? Huh? We all die, that’s what. So, get your fucking men ready to jump off the second those fast movers swing by.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ross said, quietly.

  He turned to leave, but Spencer stopped him. The captain had three smoke grenades in his hands. “Let them go in ten and, uh, I’m sorry.” He wasn’t sorry about screaming in Ross’s face; that came with the uniform. He was sorry for what he was asking Ross to do.

  Ross didn’t have time for apologies. He raced out of the bank and ran down the middle of the street, listening to the whine of bullets as they skipped off the pavement at his feet or just behind him. The cars all along the street had their windows shot out as he passed. All of this formed a backdrop. His mind was somewhere else.

  Under the best of conditions, a river crossing mid-battle was fraught with complications. So many things had to be considered: where were the suppressing teams going to be set up? How many men would go in the initial wave? Would they establish a toe-hold or would they try to drive inland? Who was coordinating with the artillery? Where was the JTAC? Sleeping again instead of directing the close air support like he was supposed to? Did they have the supplies for an assault? Did they have supplies for a sustained assault once across? And how would they be resupplied once over? Would engineers set up pontoons or would a bridge be seized down river?

  All of this breezed in and out of Ross’s head without gaining any traction. None of that mattered. He had no artillery and the only forward air control he had were the three smoke grenades. There were hardly any supplies and they would find none on the other side except for what they stripped from the dead.

  The only real question that Ross was thinking about was: Could everyone swim?

  “Fuck,” he said when he got back to his little neck of the woods. One of his platoon leaders tried to ask him what was going on, but Ross didn’t have time. He pushed through the underbrush until he got to the river’s edge. At this particular stretch, there was a built-up mound of earth of about four feet in height on which sat a set of train tracks.

  “That’s good,” he whispered. The mound would provide cover. It would mean some sort of surprise.

  That surprise would get them ten yards into the water. The river was thirty-five yards across, meaning the final twenty-five yards would be made under fire. Twenty-five yards was nothing when one was in swimming trunks. It was a little more difficult when fully clothed. With a rifle in one hand, a helmet, boots and armored vest, it was a challenge that would take at least two minutes,

  “Fuck,” he said again and then walked back into the woods. “Gather everyone up,” he said to the platoon leader. “Everyone. I need…” He heard a new rumble in the air and realized that he had forgotten to check his watch when Captain Spencer had told him the air strikes would be in ten minutes. He checked it now. “Shit. It’s been three minutes, maybe four. We’ll go with four and that means we have six minutes left.”

  “Six minutes to what, Sarge?” one of his soldiers asked. “You don’t look so good.”

  Ross touched his face with a dirty hand. “It’s, um, nothing. I need you to drop everything. Keep your helmet, your rifle and all the ammo. Everything else goes in a pile. Let’s go!”

  When his company was gathered and stripped down to the bare minimum, he divided them into three groups. “In three minutes, I’m taking group one across the river. Groups two and three will provide suppression.” As he spoke the men swore and groaned. He ignored them. “The moment we’re across, group two will go. Then group three. We will spread out and establish a firm beachhead.” He checked his watch once more. He had two minutes…or one, or three; he really didn’t know.

  “Let’s go,” he growled. A few of the men in group one glanced around, but when a specialist followed after Ross, they all fell in line. He had chosen thirty for the first group. He spaced them five feet apart, giving the men on the ends one of the smoke bombs and when he guessed the time was right, he pulled the pin on his and tossed it over the embankment.

  Blue smoke plumed upward and almost immediately drew rifle fire from across the river. The other two grenades were tossed next and, as his company huddled, every one of them looked up, waiting…waiting…waiting.

  When the two F-16s streaked past at tree-top level with a roar of engines so vast that it threatened to split Ross’s head. He stuffed his fingers in his ears. Many others did as well, but those that didn’t were deafened as the cluster bombs opened up and rained death on the land across the water.

  The river was not so wide that the explosions didn’t affect the Heavy Weapons Company. The air was sucked out their lungs and then, seconds later, it rushed back at them only it came back superheated and in a violent angry wave, like the storm of an angry god. The world shook and the water frothed.

  Ross felt his body lift from the ground before he was slammed back down. His head rang from the explosions and only one thought was able to muddle through: he had to go, now! before the enemy recovered. He stood on wobbling legs as he screamed for his men to get up. “Now! Now! Into the water!” He was the first into the river and he was the first to discover that the bed of it was mud. It grabbed his boot and held him. It was a fight to free that first foot. Then he was slogging through waist-deep water that quickly turned to chest-deep water, and then the water was over his head and he was struggling to stay afloat as a machine gun started to rattle on the other side.

  The river danced and leapt as bullets skipped across its surface. The little, evil splashes were everywhere, there were so many that it felt like it was raining death. Ross figured that if he got hit, he wouldn’t even feel it. It would be bang-dead, that quickly. Only just then, the specialist who had been first to come after him had his left ear shot off.

  “Shit! Oh, shit!” the specialist screeched, trying to swim and clutch his ear at the same time. He lost his rifle and then lost the top of his head as a second bullet struck him quarter on, just above the temple.

  Ross moaned as if he’d been shot. There was nothing he could do for the specialist or the others who were wounded. There was really nothing he could do for himself, either. He could only swim with his clothes sticking to him and his boots weighing him down like little anchors, and the M4 banging his helmet with every spastic stroke.

  Gasping, his face screwed up in fear, his left foot suddenly hit something sturdy beneath him. It was a log with branches jutting up to his left. He’d actually been trying to avoid the branches, but now he saw he could use them to get across faster. He kicked with his legs and dragged himself from branch to branch until he felt the mud under his boots.

  He could have stood if he wished to die. Instead, he slithered forward like a pollywog and we
nt up onto the bank.

  Eagerly, he unslung his rifle and looked for a target, however there was so much underbrush that at first, he couldn’t see anything but green and more green. He could hear just fine. There were seven or eight people shooting at his men. While in the water, he would have thought it was a hundred.

  Still their aim had been dreadfully accurate and he needed to silence them. He crawled through the bog and the brush until he caught a glimpse of movement. It was a man in a ghillie suit. Had he stayed still, he would have been invisible—now he was obvious and Ross killed him with one burst.

  Before he could congratulate himself, what looked like a living bush turned and fired at him. It was another person in a ghillie suit. He had a deer rifle and his first shot missed by an inch. He jacked back the bolt, but before he could ram it home, Ross shot him as well.

  Then more of his men were on the bank and squirming up. “Cross! Everyone cross!” Ross yelled over the sound of the firefight.

  Someone ran and Ross took a shot and thought that he had been on target as the person fell, however the person was up again in a flash, running and jumping, acting strangely. He’s panicking, Ross thought. He was sure that his company was on the verge of another breakthrough and so he jumped up as well. He didn’t get far as he was confronted with an alien appearing landscape of marshes, bomb craters, fire, smoke and body parts flung here and there.

  “Don’t stop!” he screamed and plunged into this dreadful new world. The battle for him was a fight against the environment as much as it was against the militia. He crawled from a downed tree trunk, to a newly formed pit that was filling with a mixture of blood and mud. He fired his rifle at anything that was remotely human and with each passing minute, he looked less human himself.

  Ross was slicked head to toe in bog shit, but he kept going, leading his men, knowing that there would soon be farms and fields, knowing that his was a just cause, knowing that even if he died, he would have done his duty. They had forced the river. In no time, the rest of the company would be across and then the battalion would follow.

  They were winning.

  It was the last thought that went through his head before Ross low-crawled through a bush and slid down an embankment. When he looked up, he was surrounded by at least thirty men…and women…and children, all with guns pointing at him. Behind the guns were the harsh, angry faces of simple Americans, defending their lives and their lands.

  He had no wish to hurt them, and even less of a wish to die at their hands, but that didn’t seem likely. He was an exhausted, sitting target, and he wasn’t even sure how much ammo he had left, or if his M4 was empty.

  “I…was… doing my…duty,” he rasped out.

  “Uh-huh,” one of the older mean said. “And we were doing ours.” He sighed, wearily and scratched in his mud-caked hair. “Man, I hate to do this.”

  Here it comes, Ross thought. They were about to shoot him; he was so exhausted that he almost didn’t care. Had they been Russians or the Red Chinese, he would have tried to get one or two of them before he died, but they were Americans and he only slumped, turning to look at a sparkle of shining brass from a spent shell casing.

  “Do what you got to do,” he told them.

  “Alright,” the man said in low voice. “We surrender.”

  2—Webster, Massachusetts

  The word went out quickly: Surrender in place. Do not give up your weapons. Maintain the lines at all costs. It was an odd set of directives and Courtney Shaw feared that there would be bad blood between the army and the Massachusetts National Guard, however the threat of the coming zombies was great enough to overcome most of the friction. Company by company stopped shooting and the two sides came together with more confusion than animosity.

  Courtney also feared what would happen to her when it was discovered the part she had played in the surrender of an army that was still full of fight. She had to get out of there as fast as she could. “Okay, I should be getting back to Boston,” she told General Axelrod. “I’m sure you got this from here.”

  “Wrong,” he snapped. “Sorry, but you’re going to miss your afternoon tea and scones. I need someone in authority who speaks for the governor. Someone who isn’t one of them egg-headed, intellectual pussies out of Cambridge. Wait, did you go to Harvard?”

  She had a year and a half of community college under her belt; a far cry from Harvard. “No, uh, I went to, uh, Boston College,” she lied.

  “Oh, good school. My third son went there.”

  Courtney would have to take the general’s word for it that it was a good school. It had been the first college that had popped into her head, probably because she had just mentioned Boston. The only thing she knew about Boston College was that Doug Flutie had gone there. Her father had been a big Flutie fan; thought he was an absolute wizard with a football.

  “Small world,” Courtney replied and then tried to change the conversation back. “Look, I can’t speak for the governor on everything. I-I don’t have that authority.”

  “Then fake it,” Axelrod ordered. “We have some tough shit to work out very quickly and I don’t have time to waste waiting on Clarren to send out someone else. Besides, you seem to have had more experience with the infected than most…unless you weren’t telling the truth before.”

  “I know too much about them,” she assured the general.

  That seemed to please him and he took her by the arm. “We’ll take your car, those Air Force pukes might not have gotten the word. Do you mind if I drive? That baby is a classic.” She nodded, hoping that he wouldn’t ask too many questions about the Corvette, because she didn’t have any answers. He grinned but it didn’t last more than a second as he bawled, “Lipcomb! Get the maps. Stevens, bring the sat-phone and get the damned door for the lady.”

  A lieutenant colonel rushed to hold the door open for Courtney and before she knew it she was in the Corvette with the general, while a handful of senior officers followed at a discreet distance in a hummer.

  “We’re going to need to set up an internment camp,” Axelrod said, taking a turn, looping away from the main battlefield around Webster. “Those Connecticut fucks aren’t going to like it, but that’s on them. They could have defended their border, but instead they chose to hole-up in their cities. Morons. So, where do you think? Up by Quabbin Reservoir?”

  She didn’t know where that was; she started to give him a shrug, but his glare stopped her. If she didn’t know where it was, that meant it wasn’t close. “No, it’s too far.”

  Axelrod snorted. “It’s just a little over twenty miles. What’s far about that? Hell, if they can walk across Connecticut, then they can walk to Quabbin. It’ll be perfect, the peninsula that sticks out into the middle of the reservoir should hold them.”

  “It’s not how far the walk is,” Courtney said, contradicting herself. “It’s that there will be leakers. They’re not going to want to go to an internment camp and they’re going to run at the first opportunity.”

  “And they’ll be shot at the first opportunity,” Axelrod replied. “Speaking of which, we’re going to need to set up execution squads. When you talk to Clarren use a different term. Maybe something like: contaminated individual suppression team. Or use whatever you want, just don’t have the word execution in the name.” Courtney nodded, hating the very idea but understanding the need. She was glad that she wouldn’t have anything to do with the execution squad, other than finding a way not to be one of their victims, that is.

  “I’ll, uh, uh think of something,” she spat out, doing her best not to choke on the words.

  “We’ll also need some way to detect the infected individuals before they become a threat. You said you were with the scientist who made this thing? Can you get a hold of her?”

  At first Courtney wanted to lie about that as well; there was some danger in talking to Thuy with the general around, but at the same time, thousands of lives could be saved if Thuy could come up with a way of spotting the infe
cted before they became dangerous or contagious.

  “I would, but the radios don’t seem to work.”

  Axelrod grunted. “Tell me about it. I didn’t know we were so far along with E.W.” Courtney gave him a look and he explained, “Electronic warfare. Jamming radios, electromagnetic interference, that sort of thing. The Russians have a device called a Borisoglebsk-2. From what I heard, it’s a bitch, but we must have something even better.”

  Courtney leaned over and turned on the police scanner and tried: “Deck 1 this is Dispatch 6, come in.”

  A few seconds passed and she was about to repeat herself when Thuy came over the radio: “Ms. Shaw?” Thuy’s voice was cool, the two words clipped as if she were a diplomat who was practiced at masking her true intention. Courtney breathed a quick sigh of relief. That Thuy answered on that particular frequency and to those call signs meant Deckard had, against enormous odds, somehow found her.

  “Yes, I’m here with General Axelrod of the Massachusetts National Guard,” Courtney said, speaking very quickly, her nerves running high. A slip of either her tongue or Thuy’s would be disastrous. “As I told you earlier, the governor was keen to see the war end and I think we are close to that goal.”

  “That is good,” Thuy answered, still cool, but now she was guarded.

  “It is,” Courtney agreed. “We are going to get the two of you out of there, that’s a promise the governor will keep, but I have a question for you while we set that up.”

  Courtney paused to let that sink in. When Thuy didn’t reply, Courtney asked, “Is there a way to detect the infected individuals before they become a threat?” As Courtney knew she would, Thuy didn’t answer until she had an answer. After thirty seconds, Axelrod grew impatient and muttered something about useless eggheads.

  Eventually, Thuy spoke, “Without access to a lab or instruments of any sorts, the best I can suggest is to try using flashlights.”