by Hetzer, Paul
Heinlich veered sharply left, driving westbound in the eastbound lanes and dodging the scatterings of abandoned vehicles as he raced away from the swarms. When they reached Lee Highway and slammed a left onto the four-lane road, the chasing swarms were lost to sight behind them. They were circling back in the general direction of the Kroger in a wide arc that would take them to the staging area which was a National Guard’s Overseas Mission Support (OMS) Annex off of Village Drive. The OMS Annex was literally on the other side of a couple acre patch of dense timber behind the grocery store. Too close to the hostiles, Heinlich thought, although at least it was a fenced-in secure area with a building built like a bunker where they could resupply their dwindling ammo. The OMS building had been designated as a mission staging area for this operation. It also acted as an forward operating base for many of the 29th’s tactical operations against the hordes. If the Gypsy Hill location was compromised, they could always retreat to here. On the downside, there were two swarms bedding down in dens very close to the compound, the same two swarms that were now as stirred up as a nest of mad hornets.
He turned into the small macadam road that led to the gate of the OMS annex, driving slower now, trying to keep the sound of the Humvee to a lower volume and not broadcast their position to the enemy. He drove past an elongated commercial livestock barn where the inhabitants’ carcasses lay scattered in piles of bleached-white bone and torn hides where they had been slaughtered and eaten by the crazies early in the pandemic. Heinlich pulled into the entryway of the annex in front of the single-story windowless white bunker-like building with an adjoining parking lot surrounded by fencing topped with multiple coils of razor-wire. Another fenced parking area off to the left of the facility containing military vehicles was separated by a non-secured parking lot adjacent to the front of the stone building. Carroll jumped out, grabbing the keys for the gate from the glove compartment, and rushed up to the chain-link gate, unlocked it, and promptly threw it open while Nantz covered him with the .50. Heinlich drove through the open gate into the parking area filled with a variety of National Guard military vehicles and shut down the engine.
Through the ringing in their ears they heard the mad chorus of sound from the voices of thousands of crazies. The way the noise carried through the forest and echoed off the buildings it sounded as if the wild racket was emanating from all around them. After hurriedly relocking the gate, Carroll strode to the doors of the white building and unlocked them, throwing them open.
“Gypsy Hill Mobile, this is Dogwood Two. We are at the staging area waiting your arrival. What is your ETA, over?” Heinlich asked into his mic.
He heard Hernandez’s steady, calm voice reply that they were fifteen minutes out and then ask for an update on the situation in their area of operation.
While the request was coming over his headset he swiveled in his seat and called out to his M2 gunner. “Nantz, get a SAW up on the roof. Take Carroll and Benton and set a perimeter on the top. Resupply on your way up and grab a couple of cans for the fifty when you come back out!”
“Roger, Sergeant!” Nantz jumped from the Humvee and headed for the building with Benton a few steps behind covering their retreat. She’s making a great soldier. Heinlich thought to himself as she disappeared through the door.
He keyed his mic again to reply to the Corporal’s situation request. “Gypsy Hill Mobile, this is Dogwood Two. We are secure in the compound. Large force of hostiles to the north and east that may be converging on this position. We are setting up a defensive perimeter.”
“Roger Dogwood Two. ETA now ten Mikes. What is Dogwood One’s status, over?”
“Gypsy Hill Mobile, we’ve had no contact with Dogwood One. Their position at the target area was compromised, over.”
“Roger Dogwood Two. Keep the gate clear for us. Out.” The channel went silent. Keeping the mobile headset on his head, the Sergeant grabbed his M4 rifle and exited the Humvee. He looked at the fencing and frowned. “If that swarm wants in here they’ll come through that like a hot knife through warm butter,” he muttered quietly to himself, feeling like a caged lamb waiting for the lions to arrive. At least this lamb has teeth, he thought grimly, clutching his weapon tightly. He walked over to the gate and waited for the Stryker to arrive as he planned in his head the hopeful rescue of Dogwood One, or at least, body recoveries. Like the Marines, they wouldn’t leave anyone behind if at all possible.
Jeremy was sitting on the cold steel ramp of the idling Stryker throwing a ball made from a rag tied in knots out into the parking lot where Jumper was happily chasing it down and retrieving it for another throw. The dog was content to play this game forever it seemed.
Sarah sat on one of the bench seats in the vehicle reading a paperback while Reese snoozed on the opposite bench, an unlit stogie protruding from his lips.
The radio crackled to life. Sarah sat upright stiffly and adjusted her headset. She looked over at Reese. “That’s Hernandez, a situation is developing at Dogwood Hill!”
Jeremy and Reese both slid on their headsets to listen to the radio traffic.
The Stryker and crew were acting as sort of a Quick Reaction Force fire team in case Dogwood mission encountered any problems. It appeared that those problems had materialized, like they always do for any mission plan after the first contact with the enemy, no matter how well the operation was devised.
Jeremy threw the rag-ball away one last time and grabbed his rifle from where it leaned against the ramp and slung it over his head and shoulder. He patted the pockets of his cargo pants to reassure himself that he had plenty of full magazines for his M4 pattern rifle. His 9mm was strapped to his side, but the suppressed .22 was on his bunk with his pack. He surmised that he wouldn’t need either for this mission.
“Stay!” he ordered Jumper when the dog returned with the rag ball. The dog sat down behind the ramp and forlornly eyed the boy as he entered the vehicle.
“What are you doing?” Sarah asked. Behind her Reese was climbing into the commander seat and energizing the .50-cal remote firing system.
“I’m coming with you.”
Sarah shook her head. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I’m not asking,” Jeremy replied sharply, steel in his eyes. He sat down hard on the bench seat next to her.
“Look,” she said earnestly to him, “the situation out there is deteriorating rapidly. It’s going to get really messy and really dangerous.”
He smiled up at her. “I’ve been doing dangerous for the last three months, I can handle myself.” He also wanted to go along to protect her. He imagined that he was her knight in shining armor, although he kept that fantasy to himself.
“We’re rolling!” Hernandez informed them over the radio after getting the all-clear/go from Murchison, who was on watch on the armory’s roof.
“Damn it, Jeremy!” Sarah stood up and hit the button to raise the ramp. When it was locked tight, she exited out a back hatch and ran around the front of the Stryker to open the gate. Jeremy swiftly crawled up to the driver’s cockpit behind Hernandez’s seat to watch the forward looking monitor. Being ten years old had its advantages; allowing him to go where most of the others couldn’t dream of fitting.
Hernandez gazed back at him with a half-smile as he grabbed hold of the back of her seat to pull himself into a sitting position. “I guess you’re coming, kid?”
He had to shove her M4 rifle to the side of the hell-hole to make more room for his butt while he nodded his head and he locked eyes with her, waiting for a challenge.
“Just note I advised against it. Stay out of the way unless we’re engaging the crazies and then make sure you’re shooting at them and not any of us!” She turned back around and drove the Stryker through the gate as it opened. “Now get your ass back into the back and hold on!”
Sarah reentered the Stryker after locking the gate and the armored vehicle left the secured compound to the care of Pickeral and Murchison.
The Stryker set
off on the shortest route possible. Hernandez had the area’s map committed to memory and drove the 8-wheeled vehicle like a madwoman through housing developments, across lawns and fields and down side streets in the most direct route possible to get to the OMS staging area. The engine hiccupped once which gave her pause, then continued purring like a kitten. She made a mental note to have Carroll do a diagnostic run-through on the engine when this shit was over today.
The Stryker was two minutes out when Heinlich heard a static-filled transmission over his headset. He cupped his hand over the earpiece to block out the banshee howls of the crazies and listened again.
“Dogwood Two, this is Dogwood One. Do you copy, over?” It was Shavers’ voice, barely above a whisper.
Holy shit! Heinlich thought to himself. They’re alive!
“This is Dogwood Two. I copy, over.” He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice.
There was some more static and the first part of the transmission was garbled, “… haven’t breached… interior, but … all over us. Over.” The reply was again in a whisper.
“Dogwood One, hold tight. Relief is on the way. Keep this frequency open.”
He heard a double squelch as the First Sergeant keyed his mike twice in reply that the message was received.
Across a scrub-field to his left he heard the racing diesel motor of the Stryker approaching and then between two distant houses the vehicle bounded into view, kicking up a plume of dust as it sped toward his location. He undid the chain from around the fence and slid the gate open silently on its rollers.
What a beautiful sight, he thought to himself as the armored transport vehicle motored through the gate and ground to a halt behind the Humvee. Heinlich threw the gate shut behind them and wrapped the chain back around to secure it.
The rear hatch of the Stryker opened and Sarah stepped out, followed by Reese and to Heinlich’s surprise, the boy. Corporal Hernandez came around from the front after climbing out of the driver’s cockpit.
“What’s the plan, Sergeant?” Hernandez asked, walking up to him.
“Did you hear Dogwood One’s transmission?”
“Yeah, I copied it.”
Heinlich rubbed his hand over his sparse blond beard and was about to reply when their headsets came alive with PFC Carroll’s voice. “We have hostiles in sight. Fifty meters to the west and one hundred meters to our northwest and closing. They ain’t excited yet, however, they’re steadily moving this way.”
“Don’t engage and stay down,” Heinlich ordered, his mind racing to put together a plan to get them out of the developing situation. The heat was turning up on the cook pot they were in and he needed to get them the hell out without putting them into the fire.
“Okay, we’re gonna have ourselves a complete Charlie Foxtrot on our hands if they detect us in here. We gotta act fast.” He looked at Sarah. “I want you and the boy to play pied piper for us.” He quickly laid out his plan and threw the keys for the Humvee to the girl.
He then addressed Jeremy. “You’re going to be her door gunner and keep her safe. Make sure those things follow you.”
Jeremy nodded and replied in his most grown-up voice. “Don’t worry, Sergeant, I’ll look after her.”
Hernandez winked at the Sergeant, indicating her approval of his idea for getting the teenager and kid out of there.
“Go! Now!” he ordered as he ran to the gate to open it. Already the first of the crazies were in sight.
Sarah started the Humvee, swung it in a tight U-turn around the Stryker, and shot out of the gate. Jeremy’s head poked up behind the open window of the passenger door with his rifle pointing out the window. When they reached the street they raced across the pavement to the field that the Stryker had taken on its way in. As soon as they were in the field, Sarah honked the horn repeatedly and Jeremy took several potshots back at the growing swarm.
It was as if someone instantly injected them with a pure dose of high quality methamphetamine. The front ranks let out a chorus of growls and garbled screams and sprinted toward the sound. At once the whole swarm moved in concert with the leaders.
Heinlich, Reese, and Hernandez hurriedly raced into the Stryker as the Humvee shot away. Reese resumed his seat at the commander’s station and watched the action through the remote cameras while keeping the .50 cal. trained toward the gate. The Sergeant and the Corporal stood through one of the hatches and scrutinized the scene with their eyes barely showing above the deck hatch as the living mass swarmed down and around the compound at speeds that seemed humanly impossible. They were so thick a gnat couldn’t have squeezed its ass between them.
“Look!” Hernandez whispered in his ear, nodding out toward the other fenced-in lot that held a plethora of Army vehicles that would have been destined for overseas action. The swarm hit the fence like a giant steamroller in their single-minded raging quest to get to the noise that was driving them into a rabid foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy.
The fence collapsed inward without resistance as the swarm plowed through and around it, obscuring the large lot with their numbers. A carpet of living tissue swarmed over the entirety of the lot, smothering every vehicle and each other as they clambered over everything in their way in their mad pursuit of the distant Humvee.
The opposite fence along the road frontage of the lot suffered the same fate and crashed noisily to the ground, disappearing under their massed bodies.
The bunker-like building of the OMS Annex stood between the remainder of the squad and the swarm, forcing the crazies to veer around parallel to the fence line as they raced like one impenetrable storming mass along it, keeping that fence from suffering the same fate by the mob as the one the defenders had seen flattened a moment ago.
Sarah stopped honking the horn when the swarm was approximately fifty meters back. “Hold on!” she called to Jeremy as she depressed the accelerator and the Humvee leaped forward, throwing up a cloud of dirt and dust as it sped across the dry field. The plan was to constantly keep ahead of the crazies, stopping intermittently to sound the horn and steer them in the direction she wanted them to go. Hopefully that would be away from the trapped squad and out of the path of their retreat to Gypsy Hill.
She detected butterflies of fear stirring in the pit of her stomach but also an exhilarating excitement; a heightened awareness that she usually only experienced during an orgasm. She had been in plenty of engagements with these things before, though never with such an overpowering force as the one that was moving like an unstoppable ocean tide behind her. She glanced over at Jeremy and saw the big grin on his face. He felt the same thrill of excitement from it too, she surmised. He saw her looking at him and winked at her. She winked back with a smile. She felt invincible and knew he felt the same way. They were kindred spirits, untouchable! She laughed out loud as they drove through an overgrown yard, barely avoiding a rusting swing set, and Jeremy laughed along with her.
The horde followed in its mad lust for blood.
The Sergeant, Hernandez, and Reese watched from the safety of the Stryker as the swarm flowing past the annex slowed to a trickle of individuals, mostly those sick, hurt or elderly. Many lingered in place, confused or exhausted, as the adrenaline rush wore off.
Several crazies were at the gate, peering through the links as if searching for them, snapping their teeth and giving warning growls when they bumped into each other. Their bloodshot eyes gave them the demonic appearance of the possessed.
“Carroll,” Heinlich whispered into his mic, or at least what passed for a whisper with his bearish voice, “this is Sergeant Heinlich, over.”
“Copy, over.”
“Do you still have eyes on the main body of hostiles, over?”
“Roger, Sergeant. Trailing edge is about half a klick to the northwest.”
“Copy. Let me know when they are OOS.” Once the swarm was out of sight, they could engage the stragglers without fear of the main body doubling back on them.
“Wilco, out,” Carroll’s voi
ce crackled over his headset.
“Reese, when I give the word I want that 50 ready to rock. Hernandez, get up front and ready to start this thing on my go and get us close to the gate so we can exfiltrate,” the Sergeant whispered his orders then ducked into the interior of the Stryker. Hernandez lifted herself out of the hatch and crab-crawled, keeping the remote weapons system bundle between her and the creatures until she reached the driver’s hatch and dropped through into the cockpit without being seen by the watching crazies.
Reese looked bemused. “Sergeant, if I fire the fifty through that fence we are going to compromise its integrity.”
Heinlich nodded. “Hold your fire until we’re through, unless circumstances dictate otherwise.”
After a few minutes Carroll came back over the radio. “Sergeant, main body of hostiles is OOS.”
“Roger. Bring the team down. We’re popping smoke.”
“Corporal,” he ordered Hernandez over the radio, “as soon as you see the team exit the building fire this thing up and head toward the gate.”
Hernandez gave a brief nod of understanding and the comms went quiet.
“Reese, when she starts it up, be ready with that 50.”
Sergeant Heinlich un-dogged the hatch adjacent to the one he had been standing in and stood ready to throw it open so that the squad could rapidly assume a defensive line of fire when they entered the Stryker and clear the area around the gate.
Within a minute the door to the building burst open and the two men and the woman rushed from the entryway, rifles shouldered and bogged down with green metal containers of spare ammo and mags that they carried in a run toward the Stryker.
After opening the top hatch the Sergeant ducked back inside and immediately threw open the Stryker’s rear infantry hatch and jumped out, holding it open for them to pile in.
“Defensive fire positions!” He slammed the hatch shut and rushed to the fence.
