This same sort of ‘look the other way’ attitude also occurred when she failed her P.T. test time and again. It was usually the running that got her and so her platoon sergeant let her do what they called an Alternative Aerobic Event which consisted of her walking for two and half miles. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded since the “event” had taken place on a warm day in March and part of the walk was uphill.
When there were complaints from the other soldiers, it was explained that since Ginny was a dental technician, she wasn’t going to be marching off to war anytime soon. It was unfortunate that she wasn’t a good dental tech, either. She had chosen the MOS because she figured that it would help her get a job in the “outside” world, only she hadn’t counted on the smell.
It was a bit of a shock to her just how badly a decayed tooth could stink. In fact, many of the people who came into the clinic had the most awful breath. After she had gagged one time too many, she was relegated to record keeping, which amounted to little more than fetching records and putting them back where they belonged in alphabetical order. About half the time, the “Ps” ended up with the “Rs” and the “Ns” were frequently interspaced with the “Ms.”
Ginny Kinna didn’t belong in the National Guard. She could only just manage her job as a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly. The other soldier didn’t think she could be trusted as a school crossing guard. To be blunt, most people thought she was possibly the worst soldier they had ever seen. In truth, she shouldn’t be blamed. She found herself sitting against a tree with her M16 across her lap, staring out into a zombie-filled night simply because political correctness was a greater force in government than was common sense.
She would have been drummed out ages ago were it not for the quotas that had to be filled. Not that there weren’t poor soldiers among the men. Far from it. In fact, there were half a dozen men who were on the line almost puking drunk, a number of them were balls-to-the wall high as could be, and others so scared they were on the verge of deserting.
And yet, Ginny was the very weakest link. She wasn’t “considering” running away at the first sign of a zombie, she was planning on it. She wasn’t even technically on the “line.” Her squad leader had sat her down in the middle of the field in front of her, crouched beside her and tried to explain what a listening post was; however the moment he left, she had backed away, fearing that she was too out in the open.
Now, sitting up on the edge of a forest, she couldn’t even see Sergeant McMullen who was supposed to be up and to her right, while PFC Garcia on her left was nothing but a distant orange glow as he chain-smoked Camels.
She was afraid and didn’t know what she would do if one of the zombies came her way. More than anyone, she knew she didn’t deserved that little badge they had pinned on her chest and now her life could hinge on being able to shoot straight. It was a terrible thought and one that made her want to pee so badly it was beginning to hurt.
At two in the morning, with clouds hanging low overhead, she couldn’t take it anymore and slipped away, back into the forest where the old growth was thick and the brambles and nettles kept catching her feet, tripping her up. There was so much dead timber that she feared she would either fall and break her neck or accidentally shoot herself.
Eventually she found a secluded spot and undid the buttons on her “camy-pants’ as she thought of them, and squatted. The relief was immediate and the flow like a river. She was just marking the fact that the bottom of her right boot was going to get pee on it when there came a crack of twigs somewhere in the forest in front of her. In an instant, her heartbeat revved, her mouth went cotton-dry and the flow of urine stopped immediately. Her bladder forgotten, she sat in her awkward, ungainly squat, listening as the sly noises came closer and closer.
Snap…crack…crunch—the noises were getting closer and louder. Ginny was frozen in the worst position possible, a puddle between her splayed feet, her pants down around her ankles, her heart whamming in her chest, her gun just out of reach.
Snap…crack…crunch. It was a zombie, she knew it. Her eyes were huge and wet, the only thing shining in the night. She was sure that they were like twin lamps bringing the monster right at her, and yet she couldn’t blink. She found it impossible to shut her eyes or move at all; she couldn’t even breathe.
Ginny felt frozen by her fear, petrified by it. She could picture herself still in mid-squat when the zombie found her. Snap…crack…crunch, so close now! So close that she couldn’t take it anymore.
With a garbled scream, Ginny jumped up and grabbed for her gun, her hands wooden and fumbling for the trigger. Thirty feet away there was a shadow creature—the zombie! It had to be one of them, and instinctively she felt the need to kill it. In spite of her horrible predicament, she actually felt like a real soldier as she hefted her gun up to her shoulder, sighted and pulled the trigger.
The trigger didn’t budge! For two wasted seconds she stood there with her pants around her ankles, staring at the gun, her mind a complete blank. She could think of nothing better than to press down harder on the trigger as if the reason the gun wasn’t blasting out lead was in the weakness of her finger.
She was still uselessly squeezing the trigger when the shadow moved. It was coming for her! A scream built up in the back of her throat and she was just about to throw away the gun so she could yank up her pants and book it out of there, when her thumb brushed against something on the side of the gun.
Just like that it clicked in her fear-addled mind what the problem was: she had left the gun on safe! With a sob, she flicked the lever to three-round burst and then started pulling the trigger. She had no idea how many times she fired, and she had no idea if she hit the creature.
All she could see were weird orange blobs and all she could hear was a ringing tone that blotted out everything else—the monster could have been three feet from her for all she knew. That thought spread panic through her until she was helpless against it. She ran—for all of two steps, before the pants around her ankles tripped her up and sent her sprawling.
With one hand scrambling for the dropped M16, and the other hitching up her camy-pants, she took off in a mad sprint through the dense forest, certain the beast was right on her tail. It felt as though the creature kept reaching out to grab her and she ran, bouncing back and forth as the trees snagged her clothes, torquing her around, changing the direction of her flight until she was going at right angles to where she thought she was going.
Finally, the strap of her gun got hung up on a branch and was ripped out of her hands. She only looked back for a second as a weird gobbling sound erupted from her throat and then she ran some more.
Who knows how far she would have run if a root sticking up out of the ground like a demon’s claw hadn’t tripped her up and sent her face first into the dirt. She was cut and bleeding, tears in rivers coursed along the lines of her cringing face. Her pants were down below her bottom and her pale ass was like a beacon.
Sergeant McMullen could see it from forty yards though he didn’t know what he was seeing until he came closer. He came creeping up, going from tree to tree, his heart going a mile a minute after his near miss. Three minutes before, the air, inches from his head had whispered to him with the passage of Ginny’s bullets and he was still shaking from it.
“Ginny?” he called. Everyone else was Private this or Sergeant that, but Ginny had always been Ginny. Even Captain Hauber had called her Ginny four hours earlier when he had whispered to McMullen: “Keep an eye on Ginny. Don’t let her get into trouble.”
McMullen was surprised it had taken this long for her to do something stupid. “Ginny? It’s okay. It’s Sergeant McMullen. You’re safe.”
“Sergeant M-McMullen? Where’s the za-za-zoombie? There was one chasing me. I-I heard it.”
He eased to the next tree, keeping it between them. He didn’t know that her M16 was lost somewhere in the forest. “That was just me. I was coming to check on you when you freaked out.”
�
�That was you?”
“Yeah,” he answered. She began blubbering, her face in the dirt, her white ass pointed up at the clouds. McMullen didn’t know what to do. Had this been any other soldier, he would have torn into him, screamed into his face, and, at a minimum, there would have been Article 15 charges pending.
But this was Ginny and the brass somewhere north of brigade level had made it clear that the 250th had a gender issue. The company was disproportionately male, to which Sergeant McMullen had only rolled his eyes. He wanted to scream: Of course it’s disproportionately male, It’s the Army!
Instead of screaming, he followed orders and that meant coddling dead weight such as Ginny instead of cutting her loose. “Hey, why don’t you pull up those pants of yours? There you go. Now we can talk like…”
A noise in the brush had him turning, rifle up, eyes squinting into the dark. Someone or something was coming their way. For a moment, his fear ramped up, and he gripped his M16 with too much force, causing the tip to wobble. “Get up,” he hissed to Ginny, who was only lying there trying to work the buttons on her pants.
She looked ready to bolt and McMullen wondered if he wouldn’t be far behind her; he was the first to admit that he wasn’t the hardest soldier in the unit and the internet videos of zombies eating people had him scared half to death. “Get behind me,” he whispered. For once, she was quick to obey an order and he felt her nails digging through his shirt.
The sound in the forest came closer and he was on the verge of shooting when someone whistled a double note. Immediately, he sagged with relief—zombies did not whistle. “Who is that?” McMullen asked, pitching his voice low.
“It’s Garcia and I have Orson with me. Is that you Sarge? Did you see one of them?”
McMullen shook off Ginny’s claws and hurried forward to explain the mishap, thankful that it was Ginny who had screwed up and not one of the other soldiers. Ginny could get away with murder and he didn’t think anything would come of the mishap.
He was wrong.
“Hey, where’s your weapon?” Garcia asked Ginny a moment later. They all gazed around, expecting to see the M16 lying in the dirt.
“I…I lost it,” she admitted. All three men groaned. A lost weapon was an infraction that ranked just short of mutiny in the army.
The sergeant was now closer to losing his temper than when he’d been getting shot at. After a steadying breath, he said: “We’ll find it, don’t worry.” They did find it, eventually. The black M16 blended perfectly with the black shadows of the black night and it was an hour before it was discovered when Garcia kicked it quite accidentally.
He knew the man-made sound of boot leather on plastic, and whispered: “Thank God,” as he lifted it out of a bush. “Got it,” he said in a whisper that was only slightly louder than the chatter of night insects all around them.
During the search, they had all snuck around doing their best to keep quiet since there was no telling if a zombie might show up. In fact, while the four of them had been searching, a lone zombie, black-eyed and grey-skinned, had wandered right down a dirt trail that McMullen was supposed to have been guarding.
Its name, before it had been a zombie, was Simon Moyer. Once a Sunday School teacher and an all-around good guy, he was now a diseased hunk of walking death afflicted with a perpetual hunger. He had been attracted to the sound of Ginny’s gun, but when the sound had ceased, his little zombie brain got lured on by a light that burned brightly in the dark night.
The light was miles away, but distance meant nothing to the creature and in three hours, it was eleven miles beyond the western edge of the zone. It strolled right down the main drag of a little town called Burlington, which was only a three hour walk to the New Jersey border.
Since Burlington had been deserted hours before, dead Simon just kept walking and walking and no one had a clue that the Zone had been breached once again.
2— The Connecticut Bubble
On the long sloping hill in front of him, things moved, in fact, to Specialist Jerome Evermore it seemed as if the hill were alive and undulating toward him. There were ten thousand bodies on the slope leading up the hill and many were still alive. They were chewed up, bullet-ridden, shredded creatures that could not possibly still be alive. And yet, they were, and worse, they were coming for him.
He had been at it all night long, not just fighting to hold the line but fighting for his very life. And now his ears rang and his hands were numb. He was exhausted and dulled from the endless battle. The world, running with blood and covered in diseased flesh, stunk of death, and fire, and the acid smell of spent gun powder.
What lay in front of him was a horror that he had trouble believing was real, while on either side of him men cried in the dark; they were going mad, their minds broken by fear and the insanity they had just witnessed.
Jerome felt as though his own madness wasn’t far off. “Just gotta make it until the sun comes up,” he whispered. For the last hour, if he had to speak it was in a whisper. They could hear if you were too loud and then they would come by the dozens, causing the fight to flare up again, hard and sharp.
No, Jerome kept very quiet and as still as possible. All around his feet were mounds of brass shell casings which made a strangely merry sound whenever he shifted his weight. He made sure not to move even though his legs were stiff as a corpse’s and his back made popping sounds whenever he bent or twisted.
The monsters acted as though they too had been stunned by the ferocity of the battle and the ear-shattering noise of the explosions and machine gun fire. They lolled in the soup of their dead comrades, recuperating and turning blacker by the second. In Jerome’s mind, this was what hell had to look like.
Twelve feet away a man suddenly spasmed, falling among his own piles of brass which tinkled a merry tune. “Cramp!” he hissed. “Jerome, I got a cramp. Help me.”
For a second, Jerome wondered if the man, Sergeant Daggins, a tank commander who acted as if he were naked without sixty-eight tons of metal wrapped around him, was looking for a massage or something equally strange, but then Jerome saw that the movement on the hill had shifted.
The beasts were coming for Daggins. They had heard the human sound and their hunger erupted. Some moaned, an awful sound, and some wailed a frightful sound that always made Jerome want to run away as fast as he could.
Those creatures that had healed enough to walk, pushed themselves up and staggered forward. Those that couldn’t walk, crawled. There were hundreds of them. Too many for Daggins to take on alone, even if he had been physically and mentally ready.
Jerome grabbed up his stash of six magazines and shifted left, hunkering low, until he was next to the whining sergeant. “Hush up, damn it,” he hissed. “You know they can hear you.”
“They’re coming! And my leg! Son of bitch!” He was desperately kneading the back of his thigh with both hands, a grimace that was half-pain and half-terror on his face.
Without regard for rank, Jerome grabbed the sergeant’s collar and pulled him close. “Keep whining and I’ll plug you myself. Now work out the muscle and I’ll take care of these. Just tell me you have some smoke?”
For a moment, the pain and terror was swept from Daggins' eyes as a dark look of suspicion gleamed there. No one knew how long they’d be able to hold out. No one knew when the line would suddenly cave, but everyone knew it would be every man for himself when it finally did.
At first, the helicopters had come one after another in long lines, filled with men and supplies, firing their guns until they went dry. But then the copters had stopped coming and the ammo dump had gradually shrunk. There were now twenty-two hundred people within the perimeter of what was being referred to as “the Connecticut Bubble” and the bullets were going fast. With supplies dwindling, the men had begun hoarding everything they could get their hands on and not just bullets, they also stashed food, water and grenades, especially smoke grenades, which tended to confuse the creatures.
Jerome had
two stashed beneath one of the piles of brass back at his battle station. “Do you want help, or not?” he asked. The closest beast was six yards away, stumbling upwards through the piles of dead.
Daggins nodded, desperately. “Yeah, I have two, but only use one, okay? Don’t waste it.” There was never any guarantee. Sometimes the wind took the smoke and blew it back in their faces, sometimes the smoke went straight up, caught by some unguessable vortex. The only answer when that happened was more bullets and more smoke.
“Just work that knot out quick,” Jerome replied and then centered the sights of his gun on the zombie’s chin. He aimed low because at this distance the round would “jump up” a good three inches when it left the barrel. He pulled the trigger and the beast flopped, black blood and gunk shooting out the back of its head.
As it slithered down among the rest of the dead, Jerome was already sighting on another. He wanted to wait until he saw the “whites of their eyes,” but there were just too many of them; he’d be overwhelmed if he went that route. He had to take the chance on wasting ammo, which to him was an unforgivable sin.
With a pull of the trigger he knocked another down and then another. His shoulder began to ache where the butt of his M4 banged into him for the five hundredth time that night.
The magazine emptied quickly and there were still an untold number of the monsters coming. Jerome’s fear, which had been on him all night, like stink on shit, began to ramp up. He cleared the edge of the hill of the zombies and then whispered: “Gimme the smoke!”
Daggins was still gripping his hamstring with two hands. He took one off long enough to toss over the grenade. Jerome didn’t waste a moment, pulling the tab and setting it nose first to point down the hill. In a second, plumes of dark smoke billowed out, covering the hill, hiding the monsters from sight.
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 3
