Gnash

by Brian Parker

“We’ve got several of these units back at Three Pillars. I’ll give you some of them if you come up with a different acronym or nickname for my group of guys besides the ‘TP’ that you currently use.”

  “Deal. We get out of this alive and I’ll call you whatever you want to be called,” she conceded.

  “Miss Downs, this is Prince of Wales’ base, over.”

  “Yes, this is Carrie Downs…um, over.”

  “Ma’am, we’ve got a platoon of AH1’s[29] in the air. Expect four helies in approximately five minutes. Please place the anti-fratricide panels you were given on the cab of your vehicles, over.”

  “Shit,” Carrie swore again. She yelled to each of the drivers to get the florescent orange and pink colored fabric out from wherever they’d stored them and on top of the trucks. Into the radio she said, “I understand. Thank you.”

  “Your quite welcome ma’am. I will continue to monitor this frequency and will relay any messages directly to the pilots for you, over.”

  Carrie called into her walkie to bring the three men from the front of the store back to her location. When they arrived, one of the men said, “We’ve got less than ten minutes before that mob gets here boss. We need to leave now!”

  They heard the steady thump of helicopter rotors coming from the east. “The cavalry is here to save the day Jake. I prefer to stay put and mop up any stragglers,” she said staring towards the approaching helicopters. “Besides, depending on what bombs they use, we’re probably safer on the backside of this building.”

  Indianapolis was now officially a war zone, Grayson thought as the four helicopters flew low overhead. From underneath, the birds looked exactly like the American Apaches that had swooped in and blasted away at the Taliban or al-Qaeda insurgents so many times during his multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  They hovered in a line a couple hundred feet off the ground facing north. Then, they each began to fire the little rockets that were mounted under the wings of each. This was probably just like going to a gunnery range for them since their targets couldn’t fire back. All they had to do was hold steady and rain death down onto the mob of zombies. The first couple rounds impacted towards the back of the crowd and the gunners adjusted until they were firing directly into the heart of the group.

  The men and women on the ground cheered for their allies in the sky. For once, the Brits weren’t an impediment on their likelihood of survival, they were the saviors, literally. Once they were out of rockets the gunners switched to the 30mm chain guns mounted under the nose of the helicopters. The barrels raked back and forth obliterating everything in front of them. Finally, they had exhausted their supplies of ammunition for their guns as well and they turned back to their base and were gone.

  The radio crackled as the same female Brit spoke, “Miss Downs, the pilots report that they are out of ammunition and are returning to base. They believe the crowd sufficiently dispersed so you may proceed back to your community, over.”

  “Please, tell them thank you for us. They saved our lives. So did you Prince of Wales’ Base. Thank you,” she answered back.

  “No worries ma’am. We’re here to help. Prince of Wales’ Base out.”

  Carrie threw down the handset and confirmed with Grayson that everyone was still accounted for. She ordered the drivers to take them back home and the little convoy sped around the corner towards Kentucky Avenue. When they got on the road the drivers swerved between lanes to hit zombies who’d somehow survived the onslaught and were still making their way towards the supermarket. There weren’t many.

  When they neared the closest point to where the mob had been engaged to the road, Carrie had the convoy stop and the men in the back of the trucks took out their frustration at abandoning half a store of food by shooting at crawling zombies. Most of the creatures were a pathetic mess of flesh, but unless the brain was destroyed they would keep coming so they fired away from the safety of the trucks until they were almost out of ammo. Someone shouted for them to save some for the journey home in case they encountered more trouble and the shooting quickly died down.

  As they headed towards their homes the undead who hadn’t been dispatched continued to writhe and crawl along.

  ***

  09 September, 0743 hrs local

  Military Decontamination and Infection Control Site #7

  Fauquier County, Virginia

  Doctor Collins stretched sleepily between pouring his coffee and mixing in the sugar and cream that he liked. He’d been up late reading through the latest issue of Binuclear Genetics Quarterly and was regretting it as he fumbled with the stir stick. There had been an impressive special section on Alexandria-Collins, the so-called zombie virus, with a lot of data stolen from the WHO database.

  Once he found a vaccine for Alex-C, he would have to file a complaint with the magazine and possibly even take legal action, but the author, Plagiarist! had given him a few ideas about how the virus-bacteria hybrid might react with other viruses or bacterium. He hadn’t explored the use of other pathogens to neutralize the virus and it was certainly worth the effort since nothing more traditional seemed to be working.

  He’d run a few calculations through the computer and fed some data into the program before he finally went to his cot to rest. It had been almost four hours since then, so hopefully the systems had returned a few possible combinations that he could begin trials with. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you looked at it, Alex-C only affected humans. Even chimpanzees were somehow naturally immune to it, so he’d requested death row prisoners for human trials. Due to the severity of the crisis, his request was amazingly granted and within twenty-four hours he had more than thirty prisoners housed in individual, airtight cells on site near his lab.

  Those prisoners had already helped his research tremendously. He’d immediately enclosed one of them in an airtight chamber with a chained up zombie. Hardly humane, but after two weeks of observation, he was able to determine with certainty that the disease that caused the zombie plague was not airborne. Just to be safe, he’d had the prisoner killed and left in the chamber to see if the dead corpse would reanimate like they did in the movies. Thankfully, this was yet another Hollywood legend that proved false.

  He’d filed his report immediately with General Reeves, the director of the Army’s Special Operations Biological Infections Containment Center, who filed it with the Army Chief of Staff, General Hargrove, who then filed the report with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Thompson, who presumably briefed the president. The doctor hadn’t heard if the president made any decisions yet, but wouldn’t be surprised with the multiple levels of bureaucracy if the report had gotten lost. He would ensure he sent it again before he left for the day, just in case.

  He yawned again and lazily clicked on the mouse button to wake his monitor from the energy saver mode. He started to take a sip of his coffee, but stopped with the cup raised halfway to his lips. Blinking in the lower left of his screen was a message from the computer modeling program that he ran overnight. He clicked on the icon to expand the message. It said there was a 95% probability that three different bacterial compounds might successfully counteract Alex-C.

  If a person actually contracted any of the three bacteria that were listed as possible counteragents, they stood a high probability of death. Not great alternatives if you weren’t worried about being infected by a zombie, but with the possibility of counteracting Alex-C, which had a 100% lethality rate, he was willing to bet that people were willing to risk it. One bacterium, C. tetani, was a neurotoxin that caused tetanus and lockjaw. The other two, K. kingie and Proteus spp., were known to cause urinary tract infections, kidney stones, pneumonia, endocarditis[30], osteomyelitis[31] and septicemia.

  He raised his eyebrows as he read that last word on his screen. Septicemia. While the computer recommended the bacteria that could cause septicemia as a counteragent to Alex-C, which contained a combination of viruses and the Septicemic Plague bacteria, he highly dou
bted it would actually work. However, the first bacteria, C. tetani, just may be what he was looking for. His mind wandered as he thought of the possibilities of using the bacteria to fight against the zombie disease.

  Finally, he realized he was still holding his coffee halfway to his mouth and set it down hastily before any of his laboratory assistants noticed how silly he looked. Then he snatched up a notebook and began to furiously scribble calculations. He forgot about being tired and his coffee turned cold as he worked out the possible formulas on his paper.

  He also forgot to re-send his findings that the virus was not airborne to General Reeves.

  FIFTEEN

  13 November, 0252 hrs local

  Delta Barracks, USASOC

  Quantico Marine Corps Base, Virginia

  Emory rolled over away from the doorway when she heard the key being inserted into the lock. It was better to pretend to sleep than to let him know she was awake. She never slept when Hank was on a mission, but instead of worrying him, she almost always acted as if she were asleep when he got to their quarters. Most of the time she actually ended up falling asleep by the time he was finally showered and relaxed enough for bed.

  Luckily, Hank’s Delta team was out on a mission the night the camp was overrun or they’d probably be dead as well. That included her since the only reason she’d been saved was Hank’s charge into the camp from outside the killing zone. The team medic was right about her feeling beat up after being blasted by the sonic pulse cannon. She couldn’t even get out of bed for three days because every muscle in her body was in agony, but that cannon was probably the only thing that saved her life so she was alright with the pain and discomfort.

  For a couple weeks the team had moved around from house to house and she stayed with them helping wherever she could. They finally settled on the Marine Corps base as a semi-permanent home and were given a building exclusively for USASOC[32] use. They used the bottom floor for office space and supplies and used the upper three floors as barracks space. Emory moved in with Hank into the tiny room and replaced the twin bed with a queen bed. It was crazy and didn’t make any sense, but then again, nothing did in this world.

  She’d finally been able to get in contact with her family in La Jolla once they settled in Quantico. They were shocked to hear from her, having already written her off as dead. Her father demanded that she return to California immediately, which reminded her why she’d moved completely across the country in the first place and promptly denied the older Perry. Her family was heartbroken that she decided to stay near such devastation. Her mother promised her that she’d visit once the travel restrictions were lifted since she wouldn’t come to them. That was almost five months ago and her relationship with her parents had since devolved back into their previous state of once a week phone calls.

  She thought less and less often of Grayson. The odds of him being alive were slim and even if he was, he would never return east. The city they’d shared was gone, infested with undead creatures. That secret had gotten out fairly quickly and the networks loved showing footage of former D.C. residents-turned zombies getting their brains blown out by our nation’s heroes. If he was alive, he thought her either dead or worse, undead.

  In fact, her inability to locate Grayson is what led her to her current career. In May, when she was really looking for him, there wasn’t an official way the survivors could contact relatives to let them know they were alright, so Emory had made that her mission once they’d settled in Quantico. She established a community website for survivors, family members and friends to locate each other or to mourn their loss.

  She’d been able to contact her insurance company and convince them that she was still alive, so her apartment’s rental insurance policy provided her with a large settlement payment for the total loss of everything she owned. She’d taken part of that money and purchased a computer and website address and began building a searchable database of victims and developed message boards where people could go and find information. Within a few weeks she had official government sponsorship with links directing people to her page for research and support.

  She tried to read all the messages at first, but it quickly became overwhelming once the word was out about her site so she’d enlisted the help of online moderators and finally had to hire a couple of real IT guys to assist with the technical aspect of managing hundreds of thousands of hits a day. She’d even rented a small office space just outside of the Marine Corps base to house her staff and the rapidly expanding computer systems.

  Besides the facts that her entire life had been vaporized by a nuclear blast, that she’d been the sole survivor of a zombie attack at a secure government installation, that her former fiancé was dead somewhere in the Midwest and that her current boyfriend spent his work days hunting zombies, she had a pretty normal life developing here in Virginia. Her website, Gone, But Never Forgotten: A Resource for Survivors, was almost constantly in her thoughts. It had started out as a simple tool for families and friends to track information on survivors, known deaths and missing persons from the DelMarVa area had now grown exponentially into a full-fledged business that was actually generating a lot of income from sponsorship and donations.

  Hank was trying to be quiet, but all the gear he carried made noise just the same. Little things like the metallic noise his rifle made as he rested it in the corner against the wall and the dull clunk as he unlatched the straps on his ballistic tactical vest so he could take it off and set it on the floor. She rolled over to face him. “Good hunting?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, did I wake you up?”

  “I was up late working on the site. I just laid down a few minutes ago,” she lied and sat up with her lower back resting on the pillows.

  “Okay. Um, well, yeah, we had a good day. More flying low on the Little Birds looking for Primaries,” he said. The main effort for the Special Forces and SEAL-type guys had switched from survival to the offensive. Now they actively sought out the Type One zombies on a daily basis, mainly by overflight with the small Special Operations helicopters known as “Little Birds” and then upon identification, they’d either take them out from the air or land and insert on the ground. The Regular Army and the Marines were responsible for the tightening of the noose around the entire DelMarVa region, which involved fighting the zombies as they encountered them, sanitizing and decontaminating the areas the zombies had been, and the slow, methodical clearing of every building, tunnel and structure. Their main enemies were the seemingly endless supply of Type Twos as the presence of Type Ones decreased with each successful mission by men like Hank and his teammates.

  “We killed three of them out in the open down near the old National Harbor. We landed to investigate, but didn’t find any more. It was definitely strange that they were together like that. Typically we only see one Primary at a time, like they’re territorial or something.”

  “But maybe it means we’ve really got them on the run and they’re trying to regroup,” she said enthusiastically.

  “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that,” he said as he shrugged out of the heavily padded long-sleeved shirt which helped to protect him against zombie bites. “Maybe we should try to focus on that area, see if we can turn anything up. Hell, we’ve got enough teams zigzagging all over the region just looking for targets of opportunity, maybe we can actually have a designated target for once. It’s frustrating because we don’t really have a strategy other than kill what we see, maybe my higher-ups will agree to me setting my team down and checking things out.”

  “It couldn’t hurt right? I mean there were three of them together and before that, it’s been months since you saw more than one with a group of Type Twos.”

  “Hell, it’s been even less recently. We’ve had a hard time finding any more of the Type Ones at all. Intelligence tells us that they believe there should be less than a hundred of those smart little bastards left.”

  “So this may really be the beginning of the end for them righ
t?”

  “I hope so. But it only takes one zombie, Type One or Two to re-infect and entire region, even the entire continent if it gets out of the quarantine zone. That’s why we’ve been so careful with the perimeter here and in Indianapolis. The main difference is that the Type Twos are too dumb to do anything but charge towards the sound of gunfire, but the Primaries, they’re likely to just hole up somewhere and let the ring of troops go past them, then start infecting people in the ‘cleared’ areas,” he said making quotation marks in the air.

  He finished getting undressed and put all of his clothes into a decontamination bag and placed them in the hallway. “Are you going to be awake long enough for me to take a shower? I really want to talk to you about something, but we’re only allowed to skip the field decon provided we bathe immediately upon return to the barracks.”

  “Yeah I know. It’s really late, but since I’m the boss, I can afford to sleep in a little bit and go in late. Get cleaned up and I’ll still be awake.”

  Hank came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and his toothbrush furiously scrubbing back and forth. He walked behind the wall locker that his clothes were stored in and reemerged wearing a pair of sleeping pants. He went to the bathroom and quickly finished brushing and hung up his towel.

  When he came out, Emory was yawning. “I’m sorry it’s so late, you but you know, the best hunting for these guys is the late afternoon and into the early morning.”

  “It’s ok, what did you want to talk about?” she asked.

  “I think that I’m ready to retire once this is over,” he said.

  “Wow, that just kind of came out of nowhere,” she said sitting up a little straighter.

  “I know. I hit twenty years last fall, so I’ve been eligible to retire for over a year, I just didn’t have the desire to hang it up like I do now. I mean, I love my job and I’ve had a great time serving my nation doing some really awesome shit in Delta, but I’m ready to settle down, maybe start a family…” he took her hand and knelt beside the bed.