Zombie Killers: HEAT

by John F. Holmes

  The second night, as we lay in the backyard with no fire, insects around us, jungle sounds coming from the swamp around behind us, a patrol passed us by going down the road. They were armed similarly to us, and wearing US Army uniforms, but they had no night vision, and we were able to scoot back into the swamp long before they came up to our position. Their hushed conversation was in Spanish, so I had no idea what they were saying. We held tight for more than an hour after they passed, in case a follow on patrol was waiting for anyone to reveal themselves, but nothing else happened for the rest of the night.

  The bodies from the ambush hadn’t told us much. The uniforms were worn and tattered, and had some kind of Velcro patch on them. It wasn’t the Mountain Republic guys; I knew their patch. Their uniforms had all said US ARMY on them, but that could have been left overs. Probably some local warlord or gang leader trying to bring some legitimacy to his rule, or maybe a local National Guard unit still active. We had run into all three before, and on this trip, I just wanted to avoid them. The problem, though, is that they were almost certainly going to be between us and the carrier, if not actively occupying it. I wasn’t sure about the later, because six thousand undead was a lot to take on.

  The second night, boredom had set in, and the inactivity was starting to make us all pick on each other. Brit and I had a “no sex on a mission” rule, but it was getting kinda difficult to watch her reading books on her kindle and looking so damn good. Matter of fact, Captain Lowenstein was looking pretty good too. She had been having some pretty earnest discussions with Obi, trying to teach him the basics of actually soldiering, and somehow Brit caught me looking once when she stood up and stretched. My wife slowly ran a finger across her throat, then went back to reading. She hadn’t even looked at me, just kept looking at her Kindle while she made the throat slitting gesture. I tried hard to pretend that Shona was just another soldier, but damn. I had always treated everyone the same, as long as they could pull their weight, but there was something about her that drew my eye. Some women did that to me; certainly Brit did, from the day I met her. No problem, soldier first, man and woman second. Bored sitting around? Let the games begin! Still, I wasn’t going to risk death by throat slitting, or even the appearance of favoritism, which might cause issues with the Team. Actively doing something? That would be insane in more ways than one.

  We left on the third night, when I was feeling better. Physically, not so much mentally. The death of Scott Orr weighed heavily on my mind; I was having a hard time putting it back into the “shit happens” category. Scott had been a good guy; awarded a Bronze Star in Panama, of all places, and doing OK in Seattle when the plague came. He had volunteered to go back in the Infantry and then the Scout Teams, participating with us in the raid on the false President’s hideout, for which he got a Distinguished Service Cross. All to catch it in the head because he didn’t have the heart to pull the trigger on a young girl. Well, I guess if you had to go, doing the decent thing wasn’t too bad a way.

  I just wanted this damn mission over, but we had a long way to go. Ziv, Shona, Brit and I had conferred during the day, and come up with a plan. Satellite feeds had shown no activity on the carrier deck yet, aside from Z’s walking around and occasionally falling off. The small bay where the thousand foot long ship had grounded was ringed by a private, upscale community, and somehow the ship had been driven over the sandbar that sheltered the bay. As a result, at low tide you could almost approach the side of the ship on foot. In fact, in one place, the bow actually hung over a pier or causeway. All this would could see from satellite intel and the UAV run the sub had sent out. What we didn’t know was how close the MR platoon was, and who was between us and the ship. The plan then called for us to infiltrate the housing community, occupy an OP, and keep watch. It could be up to a week for anything happened, but I hoped not. We were getting low on supplies already, and although we had scrounged some ammo off the dead ambushers, the short fire fight had consumed far more than we were comfortable with. Extra ammo and supplies were buried a back on the beach, but I didn’t want to go there until we tackled the carrier. The hard part of actually GETTING to the carrier was to get in without disturbing the undead and creating a shit storm. We couldn’t even kill any, because that might lead an enemy back to us. It was going to be hard, and I wasn’t sure we could actually do it.

  That night’s travel brought us up to a house just outside the gated community, and we settled in as best we could to wait through the day. I let Obi and Shona take first shift, while the rest of us got some sleep. We were all almost on a totally night shift sleep schedule now anyway. When my turn came, the first half of my shift, in later afternoon, was with Elam. I found him looking out a second story window, watching down the road, looking northward.

  “Hey Elam,” I said, sitting down next to him on a folding chair. He had his rifle balanced on some books, stacked on a small table. Around us lay the debris of a small girls’ room; pink walls, Barbie dolls, My Little Pony stickers. I almost laughed about it for a second, then felt sad, wondering what had happened to her. Probably one of the undead wandering out in the swamps on the other side of the highway, but I hoped not.

  “Colonel,” he answered, not taking his eye off the spotter scope.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked, being too lazy in the summer Florida heat to look myself. I had already done a perimeter walk, and would do so again in a few minutes.

  “Our friends have arrived at the carrier. I have been watching them try to attempt to board over the bow.”

  “WHAT?” I exclaimed, almost falling out of the chair I had tipped backwards. I scrabbled with my gear, trying to get out my binos.

  When I finally had them settled, I could make out ant like figures clustered on the end of the pier. There was some kind of barricade going up, to protect the pier from whatever might come out of the town at them. Even as I watched, several rocket assisted lines launched upwards and landed on the deck, and men started to swarm upwards, hand over hand.

  “Uh oh. Stupid fuckers.” I muttered, thinking of the noise. It was a race, how fast a man could climb eighty feet of rope, vs. how fast the undead on the carrier deck would be attracted to the noise of the lines landing on the deck. They would have been a lot better off building some kind of raft or using one of the derelict boats scattered around the harbor, and going in through one of the hangars. There were almost six THOUSAND undead between them and the nukes, never mind the fact that they were secured in a heavily armored compartment below the waterline.

  Sure enough, they started coming, one after another. Lurching, running figures, howling at the top of what remained of their lungs. The MR troops set up a firing line at the edge of the flight deck and opened up. I could hear the pops being carried across the water to us. Brave bastards. Even as we watched, a package was hoisted up the ropes, and I could barely make out a tripod mounted weapon being set up. They better hurry up, whatever it was; the individual riflemen were almost being reached by the undead, which had turned into a flood.

  What sounded like a long ripping chainsaw echoed across the water, and tongue of flame shot out of the mini-gun, at about head height. It chewed through the undead like a scythe through wheat. Head shots didn’t really matter, when you put a piece of lead every inch, at a height of five feet above the ground. It either caught them in the head and splattered their brains, or ripped their heads completely off. It was a good plan, even as a second gun was being winched up. With individual soldiers engaging the ones they missed, and the flight deck providing left and right limits of where the Z’s could go, it would work. They could sit there all day and mow down whatever crawled onto the deck.

  “Can you range that?” I asked Elam, who had moved from the spotter scope to the scope on his rifle, narrowing his field of view but increasing the magnification. He grunted, totally focused on estimating range and windage.

  “Take out the gunner,” I said, and picked up the spotter scope myself, eyeing the men on the
deck. Almost thirty seconds slipped by, and I was getting impatient as the next minigun slowly crawled up the ropes, when the suppressed rifle coughed.

  It was more than a thousand meters by my estimate, with a crosswind, and honestly, the M-14 wasn’t a dedicated sniper rifle. The round was very light for that kind of long range work, and the drop would be measured in feet, not inches. I would have been much more comfortable with him taking the shot with an unsuppressed Barrett .50, but you do what you need to do with what you have. I fully expected him to miss, but after a few seconds, the gunner’s leg flew out from under him as if someone had hit it with a baseball bat. The minigun barrel swung up into the air, tracing a blazing line of fire into the sky, and the crowd of undead surged forward. The rest was a massacre, with the dozen men on the deck, including the wounded gunner, being overwhelmed. We couldn’t hear it, though we could see it. I actually felt sorry for the poor bastards, for a second or two. At the end, two men actually jumped off the deck, eighty feet into the water, or one in the water and one onto the pier. They were followed by a half dozen undead, plunging headlong in their hunger.

  “Great shot!” I said, slapping Elam on the back. “I could never have made that.”

  “I take no joy in the death of a fellow man. It is as Allah wills it, nothing more.”

  “Well, aren’t you just a Debbie downer. Keep watch while I figure out our next move. I’ll take an easy win over a hard fight any day of the week.”

  Elam had switched back to the spotter scope after I put it down, and he asked, “Are we still going to infiltrate tonight, and set up an ambush for them?”

  “Sergeant Yasir, I think that one shot may have made our whole plan a lot easier.”

  I already had another plan in my head.

  Chapter 257

  Elam went downstairs half an hour later, to check the perimeter and send up Ziv, who was on next watch. I continued to watch the Mountain Republic guys, who were clustered at the end of the pier. The angle they were at, unable to see the deck, they probably didn’t even know what had happened to cause their plan to screw up.

  The way I figured it, they had planned to hose down the carrier deck, killing every Z that showed its head, and then wait several days for any undead attracted from the land to wander off. In the meantime, teams could using cutting torches to both block up passages and open up a direct line to the armory, and winch out a warhead. Or two. Or three. Now, with the loss of half their platoon, two of their heavy weapons, one horde on deck and another on the causeway, they were done.

  Ziv came up the stairs and sat down next to me with a grunt, putting his feet up on the window sill and lighting a cigar. The nasty smoke wafted over me, making me choke, and I asked him to put it out.

  “You know, Nick, I do not know what the red haired demon wench sees in you. You are such pussy sometimes.” He said it with a grin though, a rare smile. The cut on his forehead showed livid; he refused to wear a bandage, claiming he wanted a good scar out of it.

  “Pussy or not, she likes me anyway. I don’t question it.” Ziv and I had not always gotten along. We were teammates, more or less, but not good buddies. The former Serb Special Forces soldier existed on a much more elemental level than I did, caring little for the big picture, enjoyed killing, and seemed to have few emotions. I could count on one hand the number of times I seen him smile, and I had known him for six years.

  With an evil laugh, he said, “I think, after this mission, I kill you and take her.”

  I looked straight at him. He sat there with a huge grin on his face, the cigar, still burning, chomped in his teeth. Was he serious, or just fucking with me? His fingers tapped idly on the hilt of the fighting knife he had strapped to his belt. Turning back to the scope I said, “You can have her. She’ll cut your dick off faster than you can blink.”

  He laughed a low laugh and actually put out the cigar. “I will not have to kill you. Someday, your pussiness will get you killed. THEN I take red haired demon wench. Comfort her and show her what real man is like.”

  “Just be nice to my kids. Now, what do you think we should do next?”

  The smile gone from his face, Ziv listened as I updated him on the situation. After thinking for a few minutes, he said, “Leave them. We are supposed to secure the carrier, yes? What does that mean?”

  He had me on that one. “I’ve been questioning that since we got the order. How are eight,”

  “Seven,” he interrupted.

  “Seven,” I continued, “people supposed to secure a thousand foot long ship, with hundreds of compartments? Secure what? From who?”

  “Those shitheads,’ he said, gesturing towards the pier where the MR guys were still milling about. Then he raised his finger to his lips, making a shhh gesture, drew his pistol, leaned over the window, and fired twice, the slide making a snick snick sound and the small .22LR cartridges flickering out into the sunlight.

  “Roamer,” he said in explanation, then put his boots back up on the sill and lit his cigar again. “How about you just call airstrike down on MR shitheads?”

  “Nothing in range,” I answered. “The sub could maybe put a Tomahawk onto their position, but I don’t think the Navy would want to risk hitting that close to their precious carrier.”

  “That and you want to kill the traitor fuckers who tortured Brit.”

  “Don’t you?” I asked.

  “Why do you think I am here? Do you think I give shit about carrier? That and I want to fuck Lowenstein. Never screwed a Jew girl before. She has perfect tits.” Blunt, and to the point. That was Ziv.

  “That is true, but you better be careful there, brother. She is one tough ass woman.”

  He grinned and said, “I will romance her.”

  I burst out laughing. The image of Ziv giving flowers to the scarred woman with her purple hair was ridiculous.

  “What? You don’t think I know how to talk to women?” I was almost as amused at the hurt look on his face as I was at the very idea of him doing so.

  “Not really, no. I’ll give you some advice if you want.”

  He made a ‘humph’ sound, and crossed his arms. “Back to mission. Fuck the carrier, it is not going anywhere. How do we get to Strasser?”

  At that moment, everything changed. Coming over the wind was the moan of thousands of hell bound souls, in the form of a multitude of undead moving up the highway from the south, moving towards the sound of the gunfire, to the where the tracers had arched across the sky and been visible for miles.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Shit,” answered Ziv.

  Chapter 258

  The rest of the team were resting or sleeping downstairs; we had blocked up every window and doorway with plywood taken from a close-by unfinished building, and it took few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, I moved over to Brit and gently shook her. She woke up without a sound, but swung her pistol directly in my face. I had been expecting it, and used my hand to grab her wrist. Full awareness came onto her eye, and I whispered, “Horde. Upstairs.” She nodded and quietly gathered her pack and weapons, then moved to wake up Shona.

  Elam had been cleaning his rifle when I came down, and he woke Obi, who responded with a loud “WHAT?” making me curse the decision to bring the kid with us. We all sat still for a minute as a scratching sounded at the rear door in response to his exclamation. I drew my pistol and made my way through the kitchen to the doorway. Through the peephole, I saw the remains of an obese man raking its hands across the door, trying to pry its way into the house. All the sudden it stopped and sniffed the air. Well I don’t know about sniffed, because they don’t actually breathe, getting their oxygen from the bacteria coating their skin, but what else could I call it? It smelled me, that’s for sure. We stood like that for an endless moment, separated by an inch thick piece of wood and glass, and I thought about the words of the undead soldier back in New York. What was still alive in this thing? Fuck it. I stepped back and tapped once on the peep hole.
It immediately darkened, and I fired twice. The shadow vanished and a heavy THUD sounded from outside.

  Swapping magazines for a fresh one, I safed the gun and holstered it, then headed back to the living room. The team was fully awake and moving equipment upstairs, as quietly as they could, crowding into the two upstairs bedrooms. I grabbed Ziv’s pack and moved past them. Brit was last up, and she and Obi started prying up the steps of the stairs as they crossed each one, as quietly as they could.

  I went back to where Ziv was watching in the north facing bedroom. All around us in the yard, moaning figures shambled like a slow moving river, crashing through fences, falling into swimming pools, and pressing inexorably onward. There were hundreds of them in sight, maybe thousands. It would take hours to pass.

  This called for the utmost quiet on our part. We had sat out hordes before, but it was tough. Not the first hour, not even the second. Eventually, though, you have to sneeze. Or cough. Or piss, or shit. The human body isn’t a machine, and it was hot and humid in the July Florida heat. We had to drink water, and a lot of it, and even though we sweated a lot of it out, you had to piss eventually. I ordered everyone to lose their body armor, take off their tops, and unblouse their pants from their boots, to minimize the heat and sweating.

  We lay there as the sun rose to its height, and it got warmer and warmer. I watched the ongoing battle between the MR platoon and the undead, now streaming down the causeway. They had gotten the second minigun in action, and were using it to sweep the pier clear about once a minute. Working, so far.

  Two hours into it, Ryan spent the time re-bandaging his finger; he was fighting off a stubborn infection and I was worried about blood poisoning. He was eating painkillers and antibiotics like candy, and if he didn’t get medical attention in a few days, he might lose more than a finger.

  Elam had resumed cleaning his rifle; even though he had only fired one round, he stripped the entire thing down and was polishing and oiling each piece individually. Good man; your weapon was your life. He studiously ignored everyone, eventually getting up going to the other bedroom to unroll his prayer matt in the direction for destroyed Mecca.