The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  He took in a very long breath, as though a ten-minute lecture was about to spew out of his mouth. Eventually, he let it out in one long word, “Fiiine,” as if he were talking to a child instead of his newest Special Agent in Charge.

  “Good. I’m going to need tactical body armor for the five of us. Something very light weight, that includes arm, elbow, and wrist gear. I need the good masks, not that army crap. Latex gloves, flashlights, radios, and flash-bangs. Also, weaponry… what do you think? Daewoos?”

  “Automatic shotguns?” His look was one of disgust. “They’ll make a mess. Maybe you should go with M4 and try to be precise.”

  How precise could she afford to be, she wondered. The hospital was half burnt to the ground. It would be dark and dangerous, and there would be no telling what she would find there. Shotguns were perfect in that environment. “I want the Daewoos.”

  “I can’t guarantee them.”

  She didn’t like the way he had said that. “What can you guarantee?”

  He shrugged. “A week in isolation…if you survive.”

  Chapter 22

  1– 8:12 p.m.

  —Taconic Hills Central High School

  It was dark and quiet in the high school as Ryan Deckard eased the truck past. He hovered his foot over the gas, ready to gun it out of there at the first sign of trouble and the early night air practically shimmered with trouble. Next to him, Thuy seemed small and delicate, huddled in a heavy Carhartt duck coat; it was thick, tough and warm, yet she shivered.

  If asked, she would readily admit to being afraid. She had been running on luck for so long that common sense and the basic mathematics of statistics told her that it wouldn’t last. A coin could only come up heads so many times in a row, and when she hit tails…

  “There had been a boy here, earlier,” she warned as she watched for the least movement in the windows of the school. This was their fourth shot at finding a secure field to launch from and it hadn’t started auspiciously. Two miles back, they had slipped through a horde four or five thousand strong. They had swarmed the truck and it had been close.

  “I killed that kid,” Deckard said, wishing he could reach out and touch her leg to reassure her, but he needed both hands on the wheel. “And if there’s another kid, I’ll kill him, too. Try to relax. One more roll of the dice and we’ll be safe.”

  Another gambling metaphor. Thuy didn’t like it. In fact, she hated it. They weren’t supposed to need luck. She was smart…no, she was a genius. How was it that a genius was one of the last people still in the Zone? How on earth was it possible that she hadn’t been able to think of a way to get them out of there?

  For the last few hours as they waited on Courtney to figure something out from the safe side of the border, Thuy had racked her brains for an idea and had come up with absolutely nothing, or nothing they could possibly use. They didn’t have the time or equipment to tunnel under the border. And swimming up the few rivers that flowed through the zone was far too dangerous as they were undoubtedly contaminated with the Com-cells. Tanks, homemade or otherwise, might be able to punch a hole through a road block, but there were deep ditches along the entire border and in some cases, there were moats to contend with.

  This left flight as their only option and they didn’t have access to a plane and that left one very poor choice. The truck they were driving in was loaded with silk and wicker and had a colorful decal on the door with the words: Ray & Pearl’s Hot Air Balloon Rides—Open Sundays! written in a rounded rainbow font beneath.

  It was with a feeling of ominous deja vu that they had gone back to Ray and Pearl’s. They had stood with the setting sun painting the edges of the barn and the fields golden and for a moment everything seemed peaceful, but then there came long, long shadows, stretched out from the feet of so many zombies. Both of them wanted to turn back, only they didn’t have anywhere to turn back to, so they took the smallest of the hot air balloons. It wasn’t easy. Deckard worked alone, hauling the new balloon and all the fixings onto the truck and as he did, his heart was racing in fear for Thuy, who had run out of the barn on foot with nothing but a small butane torch to hold off the undead.

  There had been so many zombies at the farm; thousands of them. It seemed to her that they were somehow multiplying. It wasn’t possible and yet, she had been forced to set a thirty acre field on fire to distract them.

  She still smelled like smoke and wished she could roll the window down to air herself out. She couldn’t, however. They would be able to get at her too easily if she did. In the dark, her shaking hand wasn’t obvious as she picked up the mic and tried to contact Courtney once more. “Dispatch 6 this is Deck 1, please tell us the good news.”

  Forty miles away, sitting in a church belfry to get better range out of her radio, Courtney Shaw glanced down at her scanner, reluctant to pick it up. She didn’t have good news. She might have escaped a jail sentence or a quick and tidy execution, however she was far from safe. The specter of death still loomed, and not just along the southern Massachusetts border, where the fight had been raging hour after bloody hour and the smell was enough to make one dizzy and the corpses were piling up in horrible mounds.

  Worse than all that, her radio was alight with frantic calls for help within the border itself. The virus was on the move. Flying in the face of the doomsayers, there were only sporadic and short-lived outbreaks of the disease within the now teeming city of Webster. The refugees had put survival over every other consideration. Anyone showing the first hint of the virus was butchered on the spot and their flesh put to the torch, sometimes in a literal sense if combustibles were not available.

  The more dangerous outbreaks occurred in the west, where there weren’t execution squads or people ready with axes to kill their fellow man if they looked at them cross-eyed.

  Out in the western part of the state, the land was forest or farm and was generally empty year round. Most of the people who had lived out there had either fled east in terror two days before, or had gone to the New York border to fight. The line was thinly manned and there wasn’t a second one, so when some poor soul wandered away from the fight with a headache building into a migraine and their temper turning violent, there wasn’t anyone to notice, let alone to corral them up.

  The infected had hidden from the sun in some dusty old root cellar or in a garage beneath the rusting Ford Mustang their son had bought years before with the promise that they would fix it up, but never had. One black-eyed young woman had gone to her trailer home and with nowhere to hide from the hateful light, she had crawled between her mattress and box spring, like a piece of bacon in a BLT.

  Sunset seemed to summon these creatures from their holes and now Courtney watched them from her perch as they hunted.

  “Dispatch 6, come in, please.” Thuy sounded nervous and that in turn made Courtney nervous.

  “This is Dispatch 6, over.”

  “What’s the plan, Dispatch 6? We are ready to kick it off at any time.”

  The church Courtney and John Burke sat in was located in the town of Becket, a nothing of a burg that just happened to be equal distant from Pittsfield, Springfield and the empty fields in the very southwest corner of the state. She was monitoring every battle within two-hundred miles. Her plan was to take advantage of any breakthrough by the zombies and try to slip Thuy and Deckard in before the new lines could solidify.

  The problem, if it really was a problem, was that the lines were holding. The men were breaking but the lines were holding and all she had managed to do was put herself smack dab in the middle of zombie central. She could see two of them wandering around on the street below her. There had been others, twenty or thirty.

  John was sitting on a little ledge, spitting nasty brown fluid down on the ground between his knees. His clawed hammer was still in the loop of his jeans. In his hand was an aluminum bat; he was tapping the barrel in the palm of his hands. Other than the growing puddle of spit, he hadn’t been the least bit productive.

&n
bsp; Courtney had to give Thuy an answer, but the best she could up with was, “Hold in place, Deck 1,” she said.

  “We can’t hold,” Thuy answered in a tight whisper. “We’re getting low on fuel and ammo. We need to move. We’re going to implement plan A. You know, the same plan from yesterday?”

  Courtney knew. She would never forget that balloon ride, or the crash. On impulse, she glanced up at the sky, where the rumble of jets was constant. “Listen Deck 1. Can you hear that?” She paused with the radio send button held down. “They’re up there all the time.” It made no sense but now she was whispering as well. “They’ll see you. They have radar. It won’t matter if it’s night.”

  “I understand the mechanics of radar, Dispatch 6,” Thuy said. “But we are surrounded. They are everywhere. Is there a way to see if there is a lane through which we might travel? Or to create one since we are at the mercy of the elements?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Please stay put until I get back to you. Out.” She turned to John, who only shrugged and spat again, using the collar of his shirt to wipe his chin. “You’re a great help,” she grumbled.

  “Wut? Dr. Lee is what supposed to be the genius. Let her think sometin’ up. I’m more of a man of action, you know.”

  Courtney had seen him be both a man of action and a man who could run off when things got too hot. “I’m going to need you. Just in what way, I don’t know.” She had to think of something. She had to think of something. She had to think of some… “Damn it! This is impossible.”

  “Nuffin’s impossible,” John told her.

  She ground her teeth to keep from cursing at him. Though in truth, he was right. It was possible to clear a lane in the skies for a balloon. She’d just have to either get or fake proper authority. “And I’ve done that before.” She couldn’t do it from the belfry and she sure as hell couldn’t do it with the scanner. Its range wasn’t good enough.

  “If I’m going to do this, I’ll need a sat-phone or someplace with a big enough radio transmitter.”

  “Like a radio station?” John asked.

  Courtney was about to roll her eyes, when it struck her that it wasn’t a bad idea. A commercial radio station had more than enough power for what she needed. “Let’s go.” She grabbed the scanner and headed down the narrow stairs, first to the balcony and then to main floor. She hadn’t been a religious person before, but she was fast becoming one and sketched a quick sigh of the cross while facing the altar.

  John did the same, only left handed since he had the bat in his right. He followed her out to the Corvette and made a noise in his throat as she went to the driver’s side. He didn’t think it was right that a woman should drive when a man was around, especially when the car was as nice as this one was. Back in the day, he would have given his left nut to own a Corvette.

  “How you gonna tune the station?” he asked when they were both seated.

  “Don’t know.”

  “They ain’t gonna have no knobs like on a normal radio. It’s gonna be all digital and shit.”

  “Yeah,” Courtney answered, worry suddenly coming over her. She sped out of Becket on an easterly course, dodging the zombies, her headlights picking them out easily, now she began to slow.

  “You know wut else?” he asked, giving Courtney a sheepish look. “Them digital things, they all get them red lights an all. And you know we ain’t got no power. You know, we ain’t got no ‘lectricty.”

  Her foot came all the way off the pedal and the Corvette’s speed began to drop. John was right. The power had been off for two days now. The only people with any power was the military. “And the government,” she reminded herself, an overused plan starting to click within her. “And aren’t I with the government?”

  “No,” John told her.

  “We’re going to pretend, one more time,” she said, flicking on the dome light. It was weak and very yellow, making John look jaundiced. Courtney didn’t look much better, which meant they would have to make another stop. She found a little soda-shop, pharmacy combo and walked in, stepping on broken glass. The place had been partially looted, though it was mostly just the food and the schedule 1 narcotics that had been taken.

  John was pissed. “Fuckin’ junkies. My cancer’s eatin’ me up and those dumb shits just lookin’ to get high. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. There’s sometin’ wrong with people. Maybe this whole zombie mess is God’s way of clearin’ out the riff-raff. What do you think?”

  Courtney, who was facing a mirror with a small flashlight clamped between her teeth as she tried to re-tame the wild, bushy creature that sat atop her head, could only shrug.

  “Well, I think it is,” John said. “This world’s got too many useless folks just draggin’ ass through life. Not me. You know I used to work two jobs so I could care fer me an’ Jaimee Lynn? Yeah, I did. And she appreciated it, too. Jaimee Lynn knew her manners. She was gonna be sometin’ I knowed it.”

  Although she had finished forcing her hair back into its bun, Courtney kept the flashlight between her lips. Jaimee Lynn was possibly the most horrific monster in a world full of monsters. But John didn’t know that and there was no sense hurting him with the truth for nothing.

  John was leaned up against the open, and very empty, register staring at Courtney in a tired way. “I knowed it,” he whispered and then bent to look for better painkillers than the Tylenol he’d been dry swallowing for the last few hours. He found a loaded 12-gauge shotgun instead. “Ha!” With a flourish, he tossed away the hammer, scaring Courtney.

  “Sorry ‘bout that, but lookit what I found.” He showed her the walnut-stocked gun. “Ain’t she a beaut? This here is a thousand dollah gun.”

  “Boys and their guns. Just don’t hurt yourself with it.”

  “Hurt myself?” He seemed outraged at the idea. “I been huntin’ since I could walk! Hurt myself? That’s the most pre-posterous idear…oh, I see. You’s just funnin’ with me.”

  She had been making a little joke, however it was his reaction which was really funny. Even his hair had looked shocked and indignant. She laughed at him and felt better for it. Once more, she was going to put her head in the lion’s mouth and the stress of it had built lines of tension all across her body. The laughter was a release she had desperately needed.

  “Yeah, I was just funning. Come on.” They went back to the car, where she paused for a moment, thinking. “I’m going to be the assistant to the governor and you’re going to be a guy I’m using as a bodyguard. Don’t do any talking…”

  “Can’t I be, like an undercover cop? You know, like a narco cop and I saved you from these rampagin’ zombies?”

  “If anyone asks, sure, but until then zip your lip. The more either of us talks, the more likely we’ll blow our cover. We’ll tell them the balloon was a, uh, scheme cooked up by the governor to observe the lines.”

  John climbed into the Corvette and laughed, “That sounds exactly like them gov-mint boys. Ain’t none of them got a lick of sense.” That mentality was exactly what she was counting on.

  From her stint working communications for General Collins and the 42nd, she knew there was an air national guard base in Westfield which was only a few miles away. With the jets taking off and landing every other minute, she didn’t need a map to get there.

  Her first test came at the gate to the Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport. The checkpoint was quiet and dark and at first, she thought that it was abandoned, however there was a squad of security police lurking in the shadows. When she told them she was with the governor’s office, they demanded identification, something she hadn’t given a moment’s worth of thought about.

  “Identification? Now? With zombies running around inside the border?” Her voice had risen as though what they were asking was completely beyond the pale. “Are you serious?”

  There was one thing she knew about men and that was they didn’t like it when women got upset or loud. They never failed to ask, “Could you calm down, please?”

  I
t was almost always a mistake. “Calm down? Wow. I’m going to need to talk to your supervisor. Calm down…calm down my ass.” A few of the security police cast nervous glances back down the road and just like that, she knew what angle she was going to play. “How’s this for calming down?” She laid on the Corvette’s horn, blaring it into the night.

  “What the hell?” one of the guards cried.

  “Stop!” another hissed. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “This bitch is crazy!” whispered a third.

  They were all talking at once. Some pointed their guns and some held up their hands, palm out. She took her hand off the horn and leaned her head slightly out the window. “Your supervisor, please.”

  A captain was called. Courtney didn’t bother to introduce herself to the sharp-dressed man in Air Force blues when he arrived. She started right in. “There are zombies inside the border, did you know that?” He started to answer but she spoke over him. “Of course you did. The governor is alarmed about the situation and he’s sent me to try to find out the extent of the problem, what you plan to do about it, and why he wasn’t informed.”

  The captain lips had become two tight pink lines as he waited for Courtney to stop. When she finished speaking, he said, “Governor Clarren’s office was informed. Everyone was informed. What was your name, again?”

  A moment of indecision doomed any chance at a lie. “Courtney Shaw. Unfortunately, I lost my ID when I lost my ride. A few miles back, we were unexpectedly attacked…” John took that moment to clear his throat. Her smile dimmed, but by sheer will she was able to keep it from turning into a grimace. “And this young man was able to save me. I believe he was a police officer.”

  “Is that right?” the captain asked, with a raised eyebrow.

  “Yes, it is right. I’m going to need to talk to your commanding officer and inspect the security arrangements, not just for the base, but for the entire western sector. You have drone coverage, I assume?”