The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  2—9:51 p.m.

  Monterey, Massachusetts

  As always, Specialist Philip Strassle felt queasy before a jump. He never admitted it and never would, not even under torture. He was an Army Ranger after all, and Army Rangers were not afraid of jumping out of airplanes…perfectly good, perfectly sound airplanes.

  It just didn’t happen.

  And that’s why he wore the fake grin and it was why he hoped nobody would notice the sweat trickling from beneath his helmet. Fighting rag-heads in the ‘Stan, that he could handle. Mowing down Zs hadn’t been a problem so far.

  But jumping out of planes? Big problem.

  “One minute!” the jump master bellowed over the endless roar of the engines and the rushing of the wind. In one minute Strassle would be on the ground, fighting for his life, and he’d be a happy soldier once again.

  “Please bless me, Lord,” he whispered to himself. During every jump, Strassle was the most religious man in the world; after the jumps was another story. Not that he was a bad guy, he was just a guy who liked his beer and his women, even on Sunday mornings.

  The minute passed in a heart-racing blur; the light above the door went green and the stick was moving forward, shuffling under the weight of their gear—then he was out the door, his body tight and tucked, his hands gripping his reserve.

  Although, technically, it was a combat jump, they were jumping at fifteen-hundred feet and a reserve shoot made sense. Specialist Strassle fell to the end of his tether-line and his chute deployed with a strenuous jerk, snapping him back, just as it was supposed to. As he did with every jump, he practically moaned, “Oh, thank God,” as he looked up at the canopy of his parachute and saw that silk of it was wide and round, the lines were straight and nothing was fouled up.

  Once assured that a quick death had been avoided, he released the tether holding his ruck and his weapon, and the two dropped to dangle fifteen feet below him. Now, all he had to worry about was the landing. Normally, he was just a bit nervous as the ground rushed up at him. Had this been a practice jump and he got hurt, he would simply call over a medic and get an ambulance ride off the DZ, perhaps even giving a little wave to his squad mates, knowing they’d be rucking it half the night while he was, hopefully, chatting up a nurse.

  But there were no ambulances on this DZ and if he sprained an ankle, well he didn’t want to think about that, not here, not surrounded as they were about to be by countless zombies.

  And as far as drop zones went, this was barely one in Strassle’s opinion. He had dropped on ten mile long DZs, and one mile long DZs, but this particular patch of ground was not much larger than a football field. The aerial photos made it look like an open field, green and pleasant. He hoped it was a field lettuce or spinach or something equally soft, but when he hit with all the grace of a two hundred pound bag of cement being thrown from a second floor window, he discovered that there was nothing soft at all about the field.

  He had no idea what sort of hell-plants he had landed in, he only knew that they were constructed of thorns and thistles and every manner of barb.

  “What the fuck?” he hissed, pulling a branch of something evil away from his face.

  Thirty feet away was a billow of green silk and from the center of it came: “Fuuuuck! Who is that? Is that you Strassle? Y’all stole my fuckin’ air.” By that he meant that Strassle had slipped beneath him during the descent. It was a paratrooper’s equivalent of having the carpet pulled out from under them, though about a thousand times more dangerous.

  Strassle sat up, disconnecting his rig. “Don’t fucking blame me. I can’t see who’s above me. You know that.” Strassle felt for the tether hooked to the belt of the rig and followed it to his ruck and M4. In a second, the ruck was on his back and the M4 was switched to fire.

  “Can you walk?” he asked, PFC Chuck Murray’s. He knew Murray’s voice. He had the deep, deep twang only found in the hollers of West Virginia.

  “I kin walk,” Murray grumbled. “You knew I went out ahind you. Y’all coulda slipped right.”

  “And you could have slipped in any fucking direction you wanted,” Strassle shot back. “Are you up? We got to move out.” They trained to up and move after hitting dirt, and getting to the rally point as quickly as possible, not that it would take very long. The DZ was so small that Strassle could see the rally point: a silver-topped silo sitting due west.

  The two soldiers moved out and were quickly joined by twelve others, marching with their rifles at the ready and their nerves keyed up. They kept close to each other, each man straining to see into the dark, expecting the attack to happen at any moment.

  No attack came, and Strassle whispered another prayer of thanks. Their night was going to be bad enough without it starting off prematurely. From the rally point, the group marched a quarter mile into “town.” The town of Monterey consisted of four little businesses, a library, a post office, the town clerk’s office, the fire department, and fifteen or so homes.

  They stopped in front of the post office. It was here that they were supposed to put into motion their small part of Dr. Lee’s plan.

  “I don’t like it,” someone said. “It’s too small.”

  “And too, I don’t know, cramped?” Strassle added. “Where are our fields of fire?”

  “But it’s brick,” Murray said, reaching out a fist and thumping the wall. “Ain’t no Zs gonna get in.”

  “Zs aren’t going to get in through the walls of any of these buildings,” Strassle shot back. “It’s the doors and windows that we have to worry about.”

  Lieutenant King, the ranking officer, didn’t like the building, either. It felt like a trap ready to slam shut on them. “Yeah, it’s fubar. We’ll set up over there.” Across the street and half a block over was a two-story house. Unlike the post office, the house had lots of windows. Too many windows in some of the rangers’ mumbled opinions. They’d be vulnerable.

  “Quit your bitching!” King snapped. “We all knew this could go one way or the other. At least with the house we’ll be able to dish it out, and we have a second floor to retreat to if needed.” In the dark, someone snorted over the words: if needed. It was a foregone conclusion that retreat was definitely going to be needed.

  King led them across the street to the house, which was as empty as the rest of the town. It was locked up tight as well, which wasn’t much of a problem. They wanted the doors intact, but the windows were another story. They went in through a living room window and right away King began assigning spots.

  Strassle and Murray were given primo spots, or so they thought. Strassle had a family room window to cover. Its only view was of the side of the detached garage, while Murray had the laundry room window.

  “I got my field of fire all set,” Murray said, dropping his ruck and fishing out his extra magazines. They each carried twelve, thirty-round magazines, two MREs, two quarts of water, surgical masks, latex gloves, bleach and the “special equipment” that was key to Dr. Lee’s plan. What he carried wasn’t all that special in his opinion. “I got me some batteries,” he called out, his voice carrying in the dark house. He had jumped in twenty pounds of D batteries. “Who needs ‘em?”

  “I need eight of them,” Strassle said, setting up the machine that he had leapt out of the plane with. When the wires were run to the different parts of the house and all was ready, he stacked his own magazines on the window sill and then, as quietly as he could, tapped out the glass.

  King went around the house, handing out LED flashlights and checking every position. He stopped next to Strassle and clapped him on the shoulder. “Once Bannon’s off the roof, we’ll be good to go. You ready?”

  “I was born ready, LT.”

  “That’s what I want to hear. Look, when the shit goes down, I want to hear a lot of chatter. If things get too hot, I want to know about it before the situation gets out of hand.” Strassle said he would and King clapped him a second time. He then pointed at the machine. “What’s in it?”r />
  Strassle grinned. “A surprise.”

  Minutes later, Sergeant Bannon came off the roof with a small gadget in his hands. He called out: “Strassle, do you want to start, or should I?”

  “I’ll go,” Strassle answered and then looked down at the controls. Although the machine was somewhat archaic, the controls were obvious. He pressed the “go” button and waited, listening as it spooled up and then jerked as the machine blared: At first I was afraid, I was petrified… Gloria Gaynor’s soulful voice blasted out of the speakers of the boom box Strassle had jumped in. The thing was the size of a small suitcase.

  “What?” Murray yelled over the music blaring from the speakers they had set up around the house. “What the ever-lovin’ fuck is that?”

  Strassle was about to answer when Bannon hit his remote and the house was suddenly lit up by spinning blue and white lights. “It’s a party!” Strassle hollered. “Everyone disco!” He started dancing, and was joined by half the team, who all sang along with Gloria as she belted out I will survive:

  Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side

  But then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong

  And I grew strong

  And I learned how to get along

  And so, you’re back

  From outer space…

  Murray shook his head. “Outer space? What the fuck kind of lyrics is that? You know what woulda been better than this disco shit? Some Garth. I mean we’re goin’ inta battle and this is what y’all pick? That’s some dumb-ass shit.”

  Strassle didn’t think it was bad at all. The woman was singing about surviving after all. And the next song of the “Sick Seventies” CD was Eye of the Tiger and who didn’t love that song? He was just thinking about fast-forwarding the CD when someone yelled out.

  “I got movement!”

  In a flash, the dancers went to their windows. Since Strassle’s view was so limited, he slid to the next room which looked out on the street and sure enough, lit by the swirling strobes, were dark, straggly figures heading towards then. “Shit,” he whispered.

  Dr. Lee’s plan to rid the interior of the state of zombies had been simple: if the military lacked the resources to go hunt the beasts, then the beasts would have to hunt them. There were fourteen teams of rangers scattered around the western part of the state and they were all set up with similar equipment.

  Strassle was still staring when King came up behind him. “Back to your post. You’ll get all the action you can handle in a few minutes.” He wasn’t wrong. The lights and the music brought every zombie within miles right to them. “Masks on! Masks on!” King yelled over Gloria. “Wait until they get close! Don’t fire until you see the blacks of their eyes.”

  The first rifle went off seconds later. After that it was a mad free for all. Guns were going off all over the house drowning out the music. At first, Strassle had nothing to shoot at and so he reached over to crank the CD player to its maximum. When he looked up again, there was a ragged, limping, human-shaped demon coming from around the side of the garage.

  True to his training, Strassle plugged the beast between the eyes at ten paces. More followed after this first one, thousands more. They started to pile up in mounds, especially along the front of the house, where the windows took up most of the east-facing wall.

  Someone started to panic as the zombies attacked not just the windows, but also the walls and the doors of the house. “There’s too many! There’s too many!” he cried as the house shook. King raced to calm the man down.

  Who’s going to calm me down? Strassle wondered as a hole appeared in the wall three feet from the window. At first it was small, barely large enough for the grey fingers to reach in and tear at the dry wall. It didn’t take long before it was big enough to fit a head.

  One of the creatures ripped the flesh from its own face pushing its head into the hole. Strassle calmly pivoted and fired, killing the thing. It slumped there, the head still in the hole.

  Second later, King was back. “Hey, I want to…” The sight of the dead zombie in the wall stopped him. “What the fuck, Strassle? It looks like you mounted that head. Like it was a big game trophy or something.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty gnarly. Did you need anything? You had that: I’m about to give you a fucked-up order sort of look.”

  “Oh, right. You need to change the music. Who is this? The Bee Gees? They suck balls, okay? No one likes them, not even the fucking Zs.”

  He wasn’t wrong. How Deep is Your Love was not an anthem that lent itself to battling the undead. Strassle fired his M4 twice more, changed out his magazine and then went to the next song which was something equally slow and mushy. He kept going until he hit pay-dirt with some Styxx.

  Then he went back to firing his gun. The range was almost point blank now. He had built up a drift of corpses in front of the window which he couldn’t shoot past. His only option was to wait for them to fall on this side before shooting them. It wasn’t long before the dead were mounded up at the level of the sill and the creatures that were still moving could sliver inside.

  He had no choice except to back up, further and further, dragging his ruck along with him. A new hole appeared next to the head and it wasn’t long before it was big enough for some disgusting thing to stick its head into the opening. Strassle shot it, but failed to kill it, or even to slow it down. The bullet hit the zombie just below the nose.

  “Shit,” Strassle said and fired again, hitting the thing in the lower part of the forehead, which, unbelievably, still didn’t kill it. A bad spin had sent the bullet blasting into the creature’s sinuses, where it lodged, doing zero harm. Strassle went to fire again, but his magazine was empty.

  Automatically, he went through the simple steps to replace it and, as he did, he counted the empty mags he had tossed to the side. Including the latest, there were seven. “Shit,” he cursed once more, wondering how on earth he had already fired over two hundred rounds. For a moment, he felt hot panic well inside of him, but then the zombie he had already shot twice tore open the wall. Because of the studs, it wasn’t a wide hole; not quite two feet. Still, it was big enough for the monster to try to push into the room.

  Strassle walked up to it and shot it from three inches away. It fell in the opening as another tried to crawl over it. He shot that one as well.

  Time seemed to fall away as he methodically fired until there were six more holes in the wall and he had gone through two more magazines. “I’m getting low on ammo!”

  “Who isn’t,” Lieutenant King said, handing over only a single magazine. “We’re retreating upstairs before these stupid fucks pull the house down with us still inside.”

  The retreat was slow and deliberate so that no one was left behind. There were two stairs and the duty of guarding the smaller back stair fell to Strassle and Murray. They did not position themselves at the top. They stood three risers from the bottom and took turns firing. Gradually they were forced back and up and up and up until the stairs were simply clogged with the monsters and nothing could come up and nothing could go down. The same had happened with the main stairs and now they were trapped.

  “I got fifty-two rounds left,” Murray said, thumbing bullets into his palm. “How many y’all got?” Strassle told him forty-three and Murray gave him five from his stash. “That ‘bout makes us even.”

  The two friends shared a long look before Strassle asked, “What do think? Will the LT let us just chill in here?”

  Murray shook his head. “There ain’t no chance.” He was right. Their mission was one of extermination, not survival.

  “We’re going out over the porch,” King said. “And we’ll keep moving until either they’re dead or we’re dead.” He was a brave man and led the way out a second floor window. One ranger hesitated and he was pushed back. Strassle was the fifth man through the window and watched as the LT dropped to the ground. He was attacked immediately.

  “To the ground!” King cried, firin
g his M4 all around. “Don’t get trapped up there!” Another man hesitated and Strassle took his place, dropping to his stomach, letting his feet dangle for a moment and then dropping almost on top of a zombie. They were both surprised, but Strassle recovered quicker and shot it from such close range that black blood rained down on him.

  Strassle fired three more times and then looked around. He saw that the LT was swarmed and there were zombies attacking the legs of some of the dangling rangers, and more of the beasts charging from the house. Strassle ran to King and blasted away the zombies who had brought him down, he then stuck out a hand to help him up and when the LT gripped his, Strassle knew something was wrong. King had two fingers bitten from his left hand.

  “Are you…” Strassle began then stopped as he saw the extent of King’s injuries. His armor and helmet had saved his vital organs, but it looked as though a rabid pitbull had gotten to his face. It took Strassle a few moments to realize that King was going to die.

  Before he could think of anything to say, King shouted, “To me! Face out, face out!”

  Only nine of them made it to the LT and two of them had also been bit. Of the others, some were being torn apart by the zombies and some were still stranded on the roof. King led a charge against the swarming zombies in a desperate attempt, not to save the fallen soldiers but to put them out of their misery.

  One man was still strong enough to fight. One man was screaming mad. One was blind, his eyes ripped from their sockets. King shot these last two without comment. There was no time to even say: sorry. He took their ammo as the battle raged around him.

  Strassle started out fighting next to Murray, however the battle was utter chaos. Half the time he was shooting the zombies that were within arm’s reach. The other half the time, they were even closer than that. He was covered in black blood and his shoulder ached from the constant thump of his M4.

  Oddly, his greatest fear during this part of the fight was of tripping. One of his fellow rangers had fallen a minute before and had died under a pile of undead. They had tried to help him, but the zombies came on in wave after wave and they were forced to retreat with the sound of the man’s screams in their ears.