The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  Marty Aleman rubbed his temples. They were in the Situation Room, once again. It seemed to Marty Aleman that they practically lived in the damned place. He yawned behind a hand. “I see the top of the circular buildings, sure. They look the same, I guess. Maybe there were extenuating circum…”

  “Extenuating circumstances!” the President cried. “He told us three hours ago that Philadelphia would hold and look.” He poked the screen with a manicured nail. “The place is a ghost town, or a zombie town or whatever. There’s nothing alive there. When does he land?”

  “Soon,” Marty said climbing to his feet and stretching, his face grimacing as his soft muscles pulled tight. “I’ll go clear the lawn so that he can come straight here.”

  “Good,” the President said, his right knee bouncing up and down. “And go snoop out Heider. He’s going to have to find me a replacement general.”

  Only through years of practice was Marty able to keep his face frozen in its normal bland but pleasant expression. He didn’t trust his mouth and so only nodded. There was no way he was going to fire General Phillips. Phillips was holding the war effort together almost singlehandedly.

  He was a whirlwind of energy, moving units here and there, shifting supplies as needed and frequently before the need arose. In the last twenty-four hours, he had barely slept and yet he appeared to be just hitting his stride. It wasn’t Phillips’ fault that the men and women on the lines, the majority of them civilians, couldn’t withstand the assaults when they went on and on, hour after hour.

  When Marty left to forewarn both Phillips and Heider, the President stared back down at the map. “Can we make this interactive? I want to see where the units are and what their strength is. You know with bars. Like a bar graph?”

  “Uh, sir?” It was the same officer who had helped earlier. He spoke reluctantly. “That’s Google Earth. I can’t manipulate that program. We can place markers on the other program or on stills.”

  “I don’t like the other program. It’s too cluttered. There’s too many symbols on it. That’s the problem with you military types, you have to have all the bells and whistles. It’s why your fucking toilet seats cost seven hundred dollars.”

  The officer, trying to keep his face as neutral as possible, replied with a simple, “Yes sir.”

  Although the Situation Room could hold twenty people with ease, the President had made life so unbearable that there were only six people around the table; everyone else had found something better to do than to be berated, or listen to the man whine. Presently, other than the frequent “hmmms,” from the President as he studied the maps, the room was anxiously quiet. Everyone was waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. They’d been dropping all day.

  The President greeted General Phillips in this way: “Why the fuck do your toilet seats cost seven hundred dollars?”

  Phillips stopped in the doorway, his tall lean frame, was bent from weariness. Before answering, he eased himself into one of the soft, leather-bound chairs. He glanced up at the feeds and frowned. He knew about the extra Predator UAVs. Their presence had sapped four precious minutes of his day. Minutes were like gold to him and he didn’t have one to spare on useless Predators and even more useless questions.

  But this was the President and there were still a handful of people who thought that he still mattered. “If I answer your question, sir, it’ll take a minute and during that time somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred people will die. Perhaps we should deal with a more pertinent question.”

  “Are you going to dodge all my questions?” the President asked. “Or just the ones you find inconvenient, like why the fuck didn’t you tell me that Philadelphia was about to be lost?”

  “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know. From what I understand, someone hit the breaking point and ran. It started a chain reaction and,” he shrugged, gestured at the monitor and said, “that’s the consequence. It wasn’t foreseeable except to say that the same thing could happen anywhere along the line and at any time.”

  This hardly appeased the President. “So, you’re saying that shit happens and it’s not your fault?”

  That was surprisingly succinct. “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “You’re fired,” the President said, softly. He enjoyed the way the words rolled off his tongue. Out of habit, he added the usual boilerplate, “We have lost confidence in your ability to lead the troops. I understand that circumstances may not…”

  Phillips interrupted. “You know, everyone talks crap about how you are nothing but Marty’s butt-puppet. I kind of wish his hand was up your backside right this moment.” The President glared but said nothing. “If it was, you’d just sit there calmly when I told you that, no, I’m not fired.”

  “You are, too!”

  “Have you chosen my replacement? No? You’re just going to let the 7th Army sway in the wind until you find someone you can push around and then blame when everything falls to shit? That’ll take some time, a day at the least and by that time you’ll have zombies at the White House gates.”

  “Oh, don’t flatter yourself. I could find someone in ten minutes. All you military guys are the same. You’re all power hungry.”

  Phillips laughed. It was genuine, but he was too tired to carry on for long. When the laughter was down to a few chuckles, he pulled out his Sat-phone and dialed General Platnik, putting him on speaker phone. “Hey Milt, sorry to bother you, but I may be stepping down as C.O. of the 7th. Would you like the job? You would have to start pretty much right away.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Tell that moron to fuck off. While I got you on the phone, when can we get those big birds up here? The Vipers and the Hornets can only do so much and we got grey meat like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, thanks.” He hung up and dialed another number. “Let’s see what Ed Stolberg says. You remember him, he’s the guy who took over for General Collins of the 42nd. He’s got a salty tongue on him especially since his command has essentially been destroyed.”

  The President held up a hand. “Just stop. These guys won’t be right for the job anyway. They lack the proper temperament. What we need right at this moment in history is a true leader.”

  Phillips almost started laughing again. “I take it you mean yourself?” In answer, the President sat upright. The two men stared at each other until Phillips flat out said, “That is insane. It’s so insane that maybe we should be having this conversation in private. Maybe in a doctor’s office, on a couch. You could wear one of those sharp coats with the wraparound sleeves.”

  Just then, General Heider came in, took one look at the President and asked, “Did he fire you?” Phillips shrugged and Heider said, “Yeah, he does that. I think I’ve been fired twice so far. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I can’t find anyone to replace you.”

  “The two of you shut up right this instant!” the President shouted. “His job is not that hard. If Platnik needs something other than the Hornets and Vapors, then he’ll get it. Simple. And here, look.” He pointed at the Google Earth map. “If we’ve lost Philadelphia we should fall back to this line.” On the map was a line, what appeared to him like the curve of a shield, surrounding the northern part of Wilmington.

  Heider and Phillips shared a look. The line was nothing but the imaginary arc created by the state border between Delaware and Pennsylvania. It would be worse than useless for Phillips to drag his soldiers from prepared positions and send them to stand in empty fields. He was about to say so when Heider nodded suddenly and said, “We can do that. It’ll take time and I’m going to need General Phillips’s help. He knows the dispositions of his men better than I do.”

  Phillips felt like he had been knocked on the head by a board. He was wondering how on God’s green earth Heider could be saying this, when his old friend tipped him the smallest wink.

  A lot of bad things could be said of General Heider, and a lot of bad things were, but no one had ever called him a fool. Ten m
inutes earlier, Marty had found him snoozing against a potted plant in a West Wing corridor. “We have a problem with the President,” Marty had said.

  “No shit,” Heider responded without opening his eyes. “We’ve had a problem with the President. Are you just figuring that out?”

  “I think it’s worse, now. He’s not listening to me. He…he could be getting dangerous.”

  If Marty was finally admitting this out loud, then Heider knew they were in desperate trouble. He leaned his head back and snorted loudly, sucking back the boogers that had been coming on for the last day or so. He spat into the potted plant and stood. “He should be happy. We got those two terrorists, the 101st is safe…for the moment, and we saved New York, like he wanted. Things aren’t great but we might be getting a handle on it.”

  Marty was staring at the potted plant with a queer look on his face. Slowly, he dragged his eyes away from the dripping snot and answered. “He doesn’t think we saved New York. To him Manhattan is New York City and the rest is just, I don’t know, suburbs, I guess. And the rest…he’s taking the credit. ‘We’ didn’t capture Anna and Eng.”

  “Wait, does he think he caught them?” Heider was shocked, outraged, and a bit hopeful. One of the easiest ways to remove a sitting president was to prove mental instability.

  “No, he just thinks that they were captured because he ordered them to be captured. And the 101st was able to compel the surrender of the Massachusetts National Guard because he wanted it to happen. If we’re not careful, he’s going to try to assume direct command.”

  Heider and Marty had not always seen eye to eye, but just then, minutes before Phillips had landed they locked eyes and came to an agreement. “You’ll help me?” Heider asked.

  “Yes.” The treasonous word came whispering out of Marty’s mouth just as soft and gentle as a night breeze. “We have to make him think he’s in charge. Can you get those feeds he’s watching to loop?” Heider knew a man who could and nodded with a grin. Marty shook his head, fear making his stomach twist. “No, be careful. The President is getting paranoid. If you don’t act just like you’ve been acting, he’ll suspect.”

  “So, you’re saying, be a dick?”

  That’s exactly what Marty was saying. It’s why Heider had been so flippant about Phillips’s firing when he had walked into the Situation Room, feeling the perspiration collecting down the middle of his back.

  “You will have to postpone Phillips’s ‘firing’, of course,” Heider said.

  His use of air quotes around the word firing caused the President’s eyes to flash. “For now, and as long as he does exactly what I say. I won’t put up with anymore crap. He either kisses my ass or I kick his.” Phillips sat like a furious stone statue until Heider gave him a warning look.

  “Of course,” Phillips managed to spit out. “What are your first orders?” He had to actively bite his tongue which wanted to add: Mein Fuhrer.

  “I want every man, woman and child standing firm on that line,” the President said as Heider slumped a little in relief. “That arc will be where we make our stand. The zombies will go no further!” The President had stood when he said this. Now, he looked around. “Where’s Marty? I’m going to want to repeat that on T.V.”

  Heider did his best to shrug in pure innocent ignorance. “Probably taking a dump,” he said and nudged Phillips, flashing him a quick grin, hoping to play up the idea that they were just two military men flush with testosterone and vulgarity.

  It seemed to work as the President’s lips bent in disgust. “Right. While we wait, I want to be brought up to date on all of these units,” the President said, slipping around the table and getting in close to one of the monitors. “I need to know what you two know. What’s their supply situation? What are their casualties like, if they even have any? Like what’s this EX over these companies? I know the E means engineers. What’s the X? And why are there so many of them, and why aren’t they on the front lines?”

  Heider and Phillips shared a look. “They’re auxiliary teams. They’re small. I wouldn’t worry about them.”

  “Don’t worry?” the president asked, a green glint in his eye. “What are you keeping from me?”

  3—5:55 p.m.

  Boothwyn, Pennsylvania

  Sergeant Brent Garvey, the leader of the 13th EX Squad, readjusted his mask, and checked the seal by putting his gloved hands over the filter holes and sucking in a breath. He barely got a mouthful of air, which was good. Next, he pulled the hood over his head and velcroed it down. The jacket, a ridiculous yellow rain slicker, had been the closest thing to a bio-suit he could find.

  “Tape me,” he grunted to the man standing by the door. The two of them, menacing figures despite the canary yellow slickers, stood in someone’s first floor apartment. A single mom lived there judging by the fifty or so pictures of a woman and a little girl that hung, magnetized to the refrigerator. The place stank of bleach. With the rain outside bringing on an early evening, the apartment was dim, lit mostly by their two flashlights sitting on the counter.

  The man by the door, a sick-to-his-stomach private, had sweat trickling down the interior of his jacket. His insides were jello, and it took a lot to kneel in front of Garvey. He had a roll of grey duct tape that he used on Garvey’s ankles and wrists, not to bind them, but to seal them up.

  When he was done, Garvey wrapped him in the same manner and then to the private’s shock, Garvey held out the gun. “You need to practice. That last one was pathetic.”

  “I-I-I’d p-prefer not to,” the private said.

  “You told me you had a mom,” Garvey said, thrusting the .38 into the private’s hand. “You told me you had a mom and that you loved her and would do anything to protect her. Was that a lie?”

  Confused by the question, the private shook his head and then nodded, quickly. “It wasn’t a lie. I-I-I just can’t do this. These people weren’t hurting anyone. Th-they’re innocent.”

  The .38 was a small gun, and when they used it on one of them, it usually put a single hole in the skull without blasting through and making a diseased mess everywhere. Sergeant Garvey’s 9 mm Beretta seemed much larger as he pointed it at the private’s stomach. “Do you know what the penalty is for disobeying an order during wartime?” he asked.

  The private shook his head, his eyes looking like glass marbles behind his lenses.

  “Let this be a hint,” Garvey said, showing him the Beretta. In truth, summary executions hadn’t been carried out by the US Army against one of their own since the Civil War. So far that day, Garvey had killed twelve soldiers and thirty-seven civilians, all without a trial. He wouldn’t kill the private, however. The Beretta was only a threat. Killing the boy would be murder and so far, Garvey hadn’t murdered any person.

  Once someone became infected, they were no longer a person. They were something else.

  No, if the boy couldn’t do the job, he’d be sent to the front lines where the possibility of getting killed was ten times as likely and that was a shame.

  “Tell me right now,” Garvey said. “Are you going to be a standup guy, or what?” Reluctantly, the private nodded.

  Garvey gave his shoulder a manly squeeze. “Good, good. Okay, you have four of them to do. Don’t fuck around. One slug in the back of the head. Shoot ‘em and move on to the next. If a shot’s not clean, take a second, but don’t waste the ammo. Make your shots count.”

  The private didn’t reply, he only stood staring at the pistol in his gloved hands. “I need a yes or no, here,” Garvey demanded. “Can you can do this?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was all Garvey needed. He took the boy by the arm and marched him out into the grey, wet evening. The sound of the rain on his plastic hood was very loud. Still, he could hear both the sound of battle four blocks to the north of them and the screaming across the street at the elementary school, which was festooned with yellow police tape and placards with the skull and crossbones, the universal sign for poison.

&nb
sp; The screaming came from a young woman who was probably just barely old enough to buy a drink. Along with fourteen others, she was being offloaded from the back of a five-ton. Soldiers lined them up against a wall and went through a light check.

  A couple of them were obviously infected, their eyes very dark, but the girl and two others seemed normal enough. Garvey paused and watched as the flashlights were beamed into their eyes—they all flinched. He cursed under his breath and strode to the door to the gym and hammered on it.

  “It’s Sergeant Garvey. It’s time.” It was the top of the hour, killing time. The door was opened by a man in ancient MOPP gear, the sort that hadn’t been used since the eighties. His protective outfit was puffy and faded almost to grey, except the arms of it, which were a pale, near white color from the bleach.

  The gym had been cordoned off with sheets into a hundred little cubicles, forty of which were empty save for the smell—once again bleach. With his mask, Garvey couldn’t smell the bleach, but even just imagining it sent a spike into his head.

  The headache wasn’t new. It had been coming on for a while now and was the reason he was insisting that the private learn to stomach the killings. Garvey had a squirmy fear in him that it wouldn’t be long before someone would have to put a bullet in his brain, and when that happened he didn’t want whoever it was doing the killing to screw it up.

  He marched past the empty, bleach-smelling cubicles to the first that held a live creature. Normally, when presented with both a flashlight and a gun, they feared the beam more than the gun. This thing proved true to form. It turned and tried to push the light away with a hand.

  “What was your mother’s maiden name?” Garvey asked it.

  “M-My mother’s maiden name?” it repeated. Garvey did not answer. The advanced photosensitivity, which had been suggested by Dr. Lee as a diagnostic tool, had come through. This was definitely a thing. That really hadn’t been in question, but the uppity-ups had demanded a three-check process: on the line, off the truck and just before termination.