Buildings not used or maintained since the collapse of infrastructure in a region known for snowfall were not brilliant places for thirty six men and women to hide from a hostile force, but they didn’t have a choice when the main waves from Spearfish finally found their way to the airfield position. Thus far the mission had been a complete failure, their task to clear and hold the airfield was simply not going to happen, but that they had a clear view of an entire valley and a temporarily safe position. Wasting this opportunity was just stupid, and Daniel was on the radio with a nearby artillery unit as soon as he got a clear view, but not before making certain all of his people were off the ground. Second, Third, and Headquarters Platoons had all suffered casualties in the last week, one from a traffic accident but still, Daniel was determined none of his people would die tonight.
As he finished the call for fire, Daniel popped his head over the ledge of the first hangar and made certain the airfield was densely packed enough for the artillery to make any real impact. It was indeed the perfect situation to test a new dispersal weapon that would allegedly put down a square meter of densely clustered bodies. Over the headset First platoon was ordered to secure their earplugs and standby for friendly incoming fire.
The first impact was a white phosphorus round that put up a huge plume of chalky smoke and lit the battlefield like a child’s nightmare. Daniel confirmed the coordinates and then in perhaps five or six seconds the Clyde Ice Airfield exploded from one end to the other, but not at ground level. In World War One the English attempted to use a newly developed mortar shell that was designed to destroy barbed wire. The reason the shell, and ultimately the attacks that hinged upon it, failed was partially because of failure of the mechanism to engage at three feet before impact, and in part because the shell could never have ripped apart wire without the atmosphere being as thick as water. In more recent times anti-personnel weapons separated at several hundred feet and exploded usually on impact, relying on shrapnel and the concussion to wound or kill someone. Zombies didn’t respond to pain, so shrapnel was almost useless at waste-level, and the shockwave of any explosion meant little to them unless they were almost point blank. New weapons, besides VR1, had been developed.
This new shell, designed only with Vic in mind, detonated not only once but almost a hundred times as a succession of rubber canisters were separated at five hundred feet into the air and would then bounce, break apart into yet smaller canisters, or explode at various altitudes to spray what amounted to lawn darts at fifty feet. The delayed reaction in explosion did just the trick at wiping out smaller areas at a time and then taking out the Vics shielded by their buddies on the second bounce.
The unfortunate side effect was one that would have accompanied traditional artillery shells, let alone one that was a daisy-chained explosion, the impacts would shake you so hard you could see your soul separate from your body as your heart skipped a beat and the air was frozen in your lungs. The rear of the building went first, ten men right off the bat were left writhing on the wreckage, probably in need of medical attention, but then Daniel’s hangar was next on gravity’s chopping block and soon he had his own mortality to worry about. The shells did their job, perhaps at danger close, but the bombs that barely bounced above ten feet had rained a hundred million steel spikes, or flechets down on the Vics. Only a dozen were visibly still standing, and most of those were on fire, fires which were spreading toward the buildings across the sea of bodies.
Holding on to a support beam that broke free with their section of the roof, Daniel and the men with him found themselves on a snowless sleigh ride from hell some fifty feet to the pavement inside the hangar. A few zombies and a couple smaller airplanes were crushed by the roof, but when it had all settled the battlefield was startlingly quiet. That or Daniel and everyone else had been made deaf by the shelling, but for a major conflict and turning point in the war the lack of shouts and moans of ghouls or the wounded was almost out of place.
While Daniel reported the devastation to higher SSgt. Kemper made his way through the fields of corpses, shooting a few here and there, until he found the other hangar. Daniel switched his radio from the satellite communications to the platoon’s internal net. Kemper reported two casualties, no fatalities from the other hangar, and with no fatalities and only a broken arm their side the mission was shaping up to be a resounding success on its accidental merits that they didn’t die.
On the flight home, after a secondary Bio-Removal team had been landed to clean up the area, Daniel turned on his “hard-cover” tablet and filed the report on the action. He finished it with a very directed sentence that highlighted that 1st Platoon, 1st Viral Recon had not only racked up a total kill count of more than twelve thousand Vics, but they’d suffered 0 Fatalities. True, the new artillery shells had finished the job, and Daniel gave the 10th Mountain’s artillery units much of credit for the final victory. However, he exulted the retro-tactics had been a “magnificent success” in distracting and drawing in zombies who would have otherwise swarmed a battle between Army Regulars and Rebels.
This time around, when the entire company got a day’s layover and could communicate with higher, Daniel learned he would indeed not be promoted to captain for the battle, which he expected. Another promotion would have been unwarranted in his mind, sort of like the first two, though if you asked the media he should be a General just like his mother right now. He’d rather eat rock salt in a desert than be like his mother, though. Major Sharp kept the unit from wandering too far from the Clyde Ice Field, but they were allowed to just sit and watch the orange jumpsuits clean up the mess they’d made for them. Seems prisoners who’d been incarcerated before the war were keeping themselves useful, and probably fed. The news wasn’t allowed to cover it anymore, not that they would ever speak ill of their chosen messianic president, but there was no one in the Cheyenne Complex that didn’t know about the Prisoner Labor-Pools. They only had one job, and that was to clean up dead bodies.
Daniel found some food that had been flown in for the Prisoners, snagging a fresh apple and making his way back to the lean-to that had been set up for his men to rest under. The log he chose to sit on was next to some of the other enlisted men. He wasn’t supposed to sit with them, but there wasn’t exactly a designated section for officers.
“My brother is on one of those gangs.” A Soldier Daniel was sitting next to said. This was Pfc. Emilio Hanso, a generally quiet and good natured young man, he was maybe older than Daniel by a year or two. He was a good trooper and Daniel didn’t mind listening to him speak. “Robbed a gas station during the panic when Nogales was overrun.”
“Did you live in Nogales?” Daniel asked, offering the man a slice of his apple.
“No, Sir. We lived in Flagstaff with our parents. He was in college, supposed to be a nurse.” Hanso sighed. “He should be here, with us. Not over there… being a slave.”
“So why’d he rob a gas station?” Sgt. Hudson and SSgt. Kemper both asked at roughly the same time. It was a rude question, but one that was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
“Because shit was going to hell and we needed food. You gotta remember, Sarn’t, the riots weren’t just in Nogales. There was the revival of the Occupy movement in New York and San Diego, the Race Riots in St. Louis and Las Angeles, Hurricane Gale Berman pounding New Orleans and Florida like a fat chick doing shots in an Alliance friendly bar come U-Day…” As Hanso recounted the mess that was America before the zombies, Daniel imagined what he’d say about the crimes he’d committed. Pulling a gun on a Federal Agent and then stealing his car had to be up there on the list of felonies that would land you on a chain gang. How was theft worse than anything he’d done?
“Shit, everyone stole stuff.” SSgt. Logan chimed in from across the tent. “How the hell else were we supposed to stay alive?”
Everyone concurred. “Just so happened Flagstaff Metro was in the area and caught him and some other guys from our neighborhood. Took ‘em all to jail, then they
sent all the prisoners to another location while we had to fight our way across the country till the Army picked us up. I enlisted after that, and my Mom got a letter from him while I was in Basic, but it was just to say he was still alive. They don’t let the inmates call home no more.” Hanso sipped from a can of generic soda. “It just gets me that the only reason it was him and not me, was I was at home watching our Gran. If I’d just stood up faster when the guys came by, he’d be in this unit and I’d be in a jumpsuit.”
“Fuck that.” Daniel had to come up with some sort of inspirational word. He wasn’t the kind of leader that would want his men to sit around second guessing themselves. “We’re all exactly where we’re supposed to be, Mr. Hanso. Do you think your brother would have made all the same choices you did? What if he’d gone left instead of right, chosen the wrong house to hide in or the wrong car to steal, the wrong road to take? No, what happened to us all happened so that we’d be the ones in this uniform, so that we’d be the men behind the guns to take back America. Whatever strife or suffering we’ve endured it was so that we would be exactly where the Good Lord wanted us to be right now.”
“And those poor bastards, Sir?” Kemper gestured at the prisoners.
“Someone has to bury us when we’re dead.” Daniel said firmly. “It’s the difference between us than them.” He pointed to the mountain of corpses. “Besides, one day this will all be over and it’ll be our turn to put the guns down, pick up a hammer or shovel and rebuild. Personally, I look forward to the day I never again need my rifle. On that day I’m going to put it on top of my mantle, and for the rest of my life I’ll happily watch it rust.”
Chapter 15
Lincoln, North Dakota had been a quiet bedroom community just outside the former capitol of Bismarck since the it was developed out of farm land in 1977. In the early days of the plague the people living there had gathered hundreds of concrete road dividers, repurposing them as a wall to some great success. On one side of the wall was a functioning slice of Middle America preserved like a living museum, on the other was a panorama of a horde that must have been a half million thick on all sides. Vic had been trying to push down or climb over their wall for almost a year now. If they weren’t rescued soon it was estimated the sheer volume of bodies pressing on their barricade would collapse it within a month, and then they too would just be another grim statistic.
While still overhead Daniel watched the siege below with as much apprehension as determination. Their orders were to evacuate the survivors, plant the ground based version of the flechet bombs and leave the doors wide open on their way out. The epicenter of the blast would be a giant crater, yes, but the resulting wave of bouncing bombs thrown for a mile in every direction would spread out and cause more damage to flesh than structures. The idea was to reclaim this area after a few different strategies were deployed, one of which involved using AC130 Specter Gunships to wipe out the horde, and another to surround the area and use Regular Army troops to keep them from escaping, or wandering off at any rate. From one battle to the next the scale of the attacks were increasing parallel with media attention. This would be the largest single military engagement on American soil to date.
A reporter had been “embedded” with 1st VR in the months between Spearfish and the trip to Lincoln. Daniel didn’t trust him, but Sharp wouldn’t stop hobnobbing so he could get his name in the papers. Lots of officers made their careers by getting notoriety in the media. If you asked Daniel, Major Sharp was being foolish for pretending that ten times as many hadn’t lost their careers because of the same desire to be remembered by history. It was common knowledge through the ranks though, that many of the officers and generals the President had shamed in the last eight years were now either missing or known to be leading the Texans.
Daniel’s headset crackled. It was the reporter from Mossy Stone Magazine, “Hey LT. You got a good feeling about this one?”
The smile on the reporter’s face was made only more childish by the scraggly hipster face-pubes he might have called a beard. Daniel wanted to bust his oversized front teeth out. “Stay off the net.” He said in a sufficiently threatening tone. “I won’t warn you a second time.” The reporter must have thought he was joking, because he laughed it off and started snapping pictures of the men waiting to be dropped into the town. Like the true cuntwaffle he was, he used a flash bulb inside the darkened, red-lit chopper. The crew chief snatched the camera and launched it out his gun position without a word. The reporter tried to stop him, but SSgt. Kemper put a switchblade to their pest’s throat, and he finally let it go.
Circling twice just to get a lay of the landing area, the Chinook squadron, known only as the Bastards dropped their birds like stones straight to telephone-pole height and touched down feather soft in a crop field that had once been someone’s back yard. The survivors of Lincoln, North Dakota had doubled their original population of just under three thousand to nearly 6,500 since the plague. Multiple families occupying the same house out of necessity to leave some land open to plant crops, they’d learn as a miscellaneous fact. Every available space in the tiny hamlet of Bismarck was either used for crops, livestock or people. The kids didn’t even have a playground anymore, that was a pig-pen, but boredom certainly beat starvation.
Staff Sergeant Kemper and Daniel were the first two off the Chinook, a tradition Daniel had demanded they stick to for the morale of the troops. The other officers, except Captain Rambo, all adopted the same policy for the same reasons. They were the first off the transport, and the last back on. In front of them was a tired but excited looking Marine Gunnery Sergeant with a brassard that had the emblem of a colonel embroidered on it, stood at attention and called his assembled men to do the same. This wasn’t uncommon, the last surviving man wasn’t originally the highest ranking. In this case GySgt. Lampkin was a Reservist who’d lived in Lincoln to begin with. His unit was called up, but their assembly area had been overrun and the chain of command broke down from there. He and his brother gathered as many men as they could and decided to hold out until someone came for them.
The helicopters took off again, the noise they created drew every zombie away from the wall for the first time that the people could remember since the horde of Bismarck had discovered their town. With the pressure of the bodies relieved almost instantly, the wall actually sagged back outwards in places where the Vics had been the most heavily concentrated. Even as Major Sharp and GySgt. Lampkin went through the quick but also traditional ceremony of exchanging command, work crews were heading to the damaged areas without even being ordered to.
As complex and interwoven as the Lincoln society was, Sharp and his men weren’t exactly there to rescue it outright, and that really pissed some people off. They didn’t want to get on the helicopters or even on the armored semi-trucks that were inbound as the Chinooks drew away the hordes. It was a five hour drive from Spearfish to Lincoln, but that was pre-war. In maybe eight to ten hours the convoy would reach them, just enough time to pack what you needed and queue up to leave. The residents of Lincoln almost unanimously agreed that they weren’t going anywhere, though most were agreeable to the idea that children, the elderly and the sick should be evacuated. That wasn’t the plan, and Sharp put his foot down that everyone was leaving because nobody was going to survive the next plan it the stayed. Perhaps it was the way he said it, or perhaps it was because Lincoln’s survivors just couldn’t accept that the safest strategy for everyone was to just leave and let the military cleanse the area of the infection, but a woman in the front row of the crowd spat in Major Sharp’s face.
“My husband died defending this town, and I’ll die before I let his death be in vein!” She shouted, giving every gathered soldier the finger. One might have suspected she was a lone voice in the crowd, but more and more people started shouting the names of their fallen loved ones until Gunny Lampkin could calm them down. The people respected and listened to him, he could secure their cooperation, or as Daniel saw firsthand, insight
a small riot.
“I’m sorry, Major, but we’re not leaving.” Gunny Lampkin said once the voices had quieted. He reached out and grabbed the flag he’d relinquished before.
Sharp used the inside of his cover to wipe away the snot as people in the crowd pulled the woman back out of sight. Making certain that the cameraman and his boss the “journalist” were still rolling footage, Major Sharp stuck to his decorum. “I understand your sentiments, Gunnery Sergeant, I really do. But the most effective weapon against the plague is also just as lethal to living people. Though your concrete walls are mighty, they won’t protect your people from this weapon.”
“Is it a nuke!?” Someone in the crowd shouted in horror.
Sharp was quick to dispel that rumor. Russia and China had both used nuclear weapons before international communication had fallen apart. The President promised the people he’d never do that on sovereign US soil, which was good because unlike in Russia they weren’t fighting irradiated zombies too. “No. Absolutely not. A nuclear weapon would destroy the infection, but it would also destroy everything in its blast radius and leave the epicenter as well as the nearby regions in the midst of a radioactive fallout we would not have the resources to clean up.” That was a pretty clear way of putting it, most people thought, but that didn’t make them feel better about the bouncing cluster bombs. It was likely every house or structure near the walls would suffer damage no matter how precise the weapons were, and they weren’t precise at all on that scale. The people of Lincoln decided they didn’t want the area around them bombed and threatened to rebel.
This was the part where Daniel felt truly uneasy about their mission for the first time. Most of the citizens were clearly armed, very few of them not carrying a handgun or rifle of some sort. If they turned hostile there was nothing 1st VR could do but recall the choppers and try to hold their ground. At this range, though, it would be a bloodbath on both sides. Captain Rambo ended up being the peacemaker when he quietly suggested to Major Sharp that they may not live long enough for the birds to return for them if he continued to antagonize the Lincolnites. Probably Rambo just wanted a delay so he could bang the fat soccer mom who put a cheap Hawaiian lay over his neck, but it was a crowd pleasing decision.
World of Ashes II Page 25
