Zombie Killers (Book 8): Bad Company

by John F. Holmes

  The stairwells were dark, dank places, and when we forced open the emergency door, a musty, rotten smell came up at us, along with a rush of air. That meant at least one of the doors to the lower floors was open. Boz lit a flare and dropped it down the middle well, and we all leaned over and watched for movement as it fell.

  “I saw something, about ten flights down,” said Cabrejo l.

  “Good eyes, kid. Let’s go,” said Brit, and she led the way with her shotgun at the ready. I pulled rear guard, walking down the steps backward, being careful where I placed my foot, my ankle starting to throb. Time for some Motrin and water.

  I heard Brit’s gun cough once, then twice in rapid succession, but didn’t take my eyes off our back. “Watch,” said McHale, and I looked behind me to see what was left of two no longer undead corpses. I stepped carefully around them and continued my backwards decent.

  After about ten flights, Ziv relieved me, and I fell in behind Brit, weapon trained over her shoulder. We made it another eleven floors before we found the open doorway. A faint light could be seen, the day getting started at last.

  “OK, let’s recon this floor. We’re close enough to the ground now that we can either go out the side or down an elevator, though I hate to lose the ropes. I want to secure this floor, and we’re all going to take the day off.”

  “What about Ryan, though?” asked Brit.

  ‘”He’s either dead, or he can hold out another day. Nick is right, we should wait for dark again,” answered Ziv. He had never really liked Ryan Szimanski, claiming that he ‘talked too much’.

  “We’ve all been through a lot in the last few hours, and if we stay put, maybe any armed looters will investigate the crash and move on.”

  “Maybe not,” said Boz. “If they can get past the undead, they’ll count the bodies and know someone is still around. We should move out now.”

  “Maybe, but this isn’t a democracy. I think that a wait will do us best, and if any reavers or looters want to tangle with us, well, better they come to us than we go to them.”

  We moved out into the hallway, and cleared each room, finding nothing except cubicles and office furniture. Doc and Cabrejo stayed in the hallway, and we finally found a nice conference room to ground our stuff in.

  “Boz, make up a guard roster. We do alternating hours, like we discussed back at the farm. Put me in the middle.”

  “Got it.” He quickly assigned people to two hour shifts, so that everyone got at least three hours rest. After we had left Florida, Boz had decided to accept the recall, and now wore Master Sergeant stripes on his Multicam uniform. I couldn’t get him to wear the Scout’s grey beret, though. He was working out well as an NCOIC for the team, and the one whom I had felt might give us the biggest problem, Ziv, seemed to respect the older man’s fighting skills. Well, I THOUGHT he was older than Ziv, but I had no idea how old the former Serbian Special Forces officer was.

  Chapter 286

  The windows looked out onto Fifth Avenue, and I sat leaning up against one, afraid to untie my boot and look at my ankle, which was starting to throb. For all I knew, it would swell up and I wouldn’t be able to get it on again.

  “You need to get Doc to look at that,” said Brit as she sat down next to me.

  “Whatever. Give me some motrin.” She did and I washed down 1600 milligrams. Then we sat looking out the window as the sunlight crept its way into the canyons of Manhattan.

  If you didn’t look too hard, you could almost see the vibrant, alive city that I had known growing up. I half expected to hear the honking of car horns and the wail of an NYPD siren, but it was deathly still, the silence broken only by a hawk screeching high overhead.

  “How are you doing?” Brit asked me. I looked over at her, at her red hair growing back in and that fierce blue eye. She also wore an eyepatch; this one had a skull and crossbones on it.

  “That eye patch isn’t regulation, you know.”

  She laughed, and said “Screw your regulations. I’m a civilian, remember?”

  “Like you ever let me forget. How do you think the team is shaping up this time?”

  She pondered for a minute. “I think we’ll be OK. I don’t know where you scrounged up that old reprobate Boz, but he’s got tons of experience and a great attitude. The new Doc seems alright, and that kid, Cabrejo has got some spark to him. Whether he can handle himself in a fight, well…”

  “Yeah, you never know till it happens. Still, if he wasn’t tough, he’d be dead,” I said, waving my hand at the silent city around us. “Like all the rest of the billions.”

  “What about, well, you, Ziv, and Shona?” My question was a bit hesitant. If there was one thing I hated, it was how personal relationships affect teamwork.

  “What about them?” she answered innocently, while licking applesauce off her MRE spoon in an extremely suggestive manner, using her tongue to get every last bit.

  “Stop trying to distract me, woman. Is everything cool between the three of you?”

  She looked right at me and said, “Between the four of us, you mean? Ziv and I weren’t playing kissy face in Florida while I was supposed to be dead.”

  “I already told you, she kissed ME!”

  “I think the lady doth protest too much.”

  “I’m no lady, Brit.”

  “Neither am I, and if I thought for one second that you kissed her back, you’d be singing soprano.”

  “So you trust me?”

  She sighed and dug into her Tuna with Noodles. The stuff was twenty years old if it was a day, but we were kinda running low on them.

  “Nick, people do things when stressed and lonely that they wouldn’t otherwise. She’s a good looking woman, and I’m actually kinda surprised that you DIDN’T. Hell, I might have myself in a different time.”

  She pointed the spoon at me when she saw the grin on my face. “You’re a pig, and get that thought out of your head. My POINT, husband, is that, despite your thinking you’re goddamned Captain America…”

  “Colonel America to you, civilian!”

  “Whatever. You’re human, just like everyone else. And a good man, and I do trust you. Her, I’m going to throw off the roof if she even looks at you sideways.”

  “Might be tough, she’s a black belt.”

  “I’ve got a spoon, I’m not worried. It’s Ziv who should be worried,” she said, nodding over at where he and Lowenstein sat sharing their own MREs.

  “Oh no. I thought she was set on that First Sergeant in Florida! She hates Ziv!”

  “There is a very fine line between love and hate, dummy. She aims to rule that man.”

  “Like you rule me?”

  “Not even close,” she said, giving me a quick kiss and getting up to talk to Specialist Swan.

  Team dynamics are a tricky thing, especially when there were women involved. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade any of the women who had fought (and died) with the scouts for any guy. Individually, they were each and every one stellar soldiers. But the complications they could bring sometimes made my head spin. As I was thinking these thoughts, I caught Shona looking at me, sort of guiltily, and I gave her a thumbs up.

  Brit came back with Doc and an ace bandage and ordered me to take my boot off. I sighed and did what she asked. While Doc checked my ankle, Boz and I discussed the mission parameters.

  Our old teammate, Ryan Szymanski, and the Warthogs of Irregular Scout Team Five were working with the Reclamation and Technology corps, or “Rec & Tec”, as they were known. He had been escorting a convoy uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to recover paintings and various other priceless artifacts. In fact, they were supposed to be establishing a fortified LZ in the park behind the museum, to facilitate removal by air or convoy.

  Along the way, just at the edge of the park, the convoy had been hit by a serious ambush that cut it in half. Ryan’s truck had been in the lead, and of their three escort HUMVEES, only one had been able to make it back to the FOB at Battery Park, and they
didn’t have much to go on. A UAV had been sent to check the area out, and one of the front HUMVEES was unaccounted for. The three cargo trucks were burned hulks and bodies from the Rec & Tec unit still lay in the street, being eaten by stray dogs.

  Early in the war, apocalypse, whatever, looting had been indiscriminate, more survival than anything. When Task Force Liberty had rolled into town, before the second plague, one of the first priorities had been clearing undead and rescuing civilians. Little thought was given to protecting the vast amount of history and works of art that lay in cities all around the country, and a thriving black market had sprung up in the surviving countries.

  The second plague had pretty much put a stop to it, but two years later, it was starting again, and we had made New York a prime place by clearing out so many of the undead. There were still thousands of them, but that was better than millions.

  When reports of the ambush had filtered back to JSOC(Z) higher command for the Irregular Scout Teams, now located at Stewart Air Base, the commanding general, an old friend, had called and given the mission to The Lost Boys. “Nick, I know IST-One got pretty battered down in Florida, but this is one of your own. Ryan Szymanski's unit got hit hard, probably by a merc company looting the city. Find their location, and we’ll hammer them with a full company attack. Your secondary will be to secure the Metropolitan Museum.”

  “Supporting assets?” I had asked, knowing that there were none.

  “Nothing. We can give you one helo for insert and extract, but the fighting in DC is still chewing everything up. You’ll stage out of Governor’s Island.”

  So here we were, no helo, two casualties already, and the time plan screwed to hell. Typical.

  Chapter 287

  “Alex, what brought down the bird?” asked Brit as we sat and discussed what to do next.

  “I think, but I can’t be sure, that we took a round from something heavy, at least a fifty.”

  Ziv called from across the room, “I saw RPG smoke trail before we crash.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked.

  “No one asked. What does it matter? We crashed, and we already know there is heavy shit going on here in city, yes? It will not make aircraft fly again.”

  Sometimes, I want to choke him, I swear. From the look that Colonel McHale gave him, I thought he did, too. Sometimes Ziv can be a bit too fatalistic.

  “So the plan is, once it gets dark, we hit the ambush site and see what we can find. If Ryan made it, he’ll know that we’ll come looking for him and his guys. We mark the site and wait close by. If any bad guys come, we follow them back to their base. I bet you a hundred bucks they’re actually set up around the museum someplace, looting it.”

  “Kind of hard to hide an operation like that from a UAV,” said Shona, who had come over to join in the discussion.

  “Not really. If you get into the museum itself, there are loading docks to stage in, and you can just open a garage someplace to hide your trucks in until everything is ready. Then a quick run down to the docks. There’s a lot of freighter traffic going up and down the Hudson nowadays.”

  We all looked at Boz. “What, exactly, did you do before we found you on the beach?” asked Shona.

  “I was a pirate, looting the Spanish Main for God and Country and good Queen Bess. In other words, none of your business.”

  We all laughed, and I said, “OK, that’s it then, rest up, we roll out at twenty one hundred. Pass the word to Elam and O’whatshisname.”

  “Cabrejo l,” said Brit.

  “Yeah him too.”

  We bedded down, and I tried to grab some sleep before my shift on guard, which came all too soon. My first hour was with Doc Swan, and we spent the time with me getting to know her a little better.

  She was older than I thought, at first, just this side of thirty, and she told me she had been a brand spanking new nurse when the Apocalypse happened. She had been living in Portland, Oregon, inside the Federal Zone, and working on an Army base as a civilian nurse when the second plague broke out. Six months ago, she had volunteered for the Army to get out of one of the resettlement camps outside Albany.

  “I don’t have to tell you what some of those places can be like.”

  “No,” I agreed. “You don’t.”

  “So what about you? I’ve heard plenty of stories about the Scouts. You’re all famous, but what I want to know is, why?”

  “Why what?” I was talking with her, but that didn’t stop me from listening for a dragging foot or a live person sneaking up through the stair well.

  “Why do you keep going out? I know you and Ms. O’Neil have kids back on your farm.”

  I shrugged. “Hard to explain. If you ask Brit, she would say I’m some kinda super patriot, too much in love with the idea of America. Maybe she’s right, I don’t know. This time, though, we’re here to find a friend. Plus, nobody steps on a church in my town!”

  She looked at me blankly, and I said, “Old movie reference, never mind.”

  “What about the others, though? What makes them come out?”

  “Well, I’ll give you a run down. Shona because she is in love with the Army. And me, a little I guess. Or what she thinks I am. Brit is here because she is my partner in everything, and feels like I need her to watch my back, and we love each other.”

  “That’s pretty obvious,” she laughed, but a bit wistfully.

  “Yeah, well, she stole my soul. Ziv is here,” I continued, “because he has this weird relationship with Brit. I don’t know what it is, but the two of them seem to understand each other in some strange way. Boz is here because he was bored, and missed the camaraderie. Cabrejo is here because he doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into, Elam is paying off a life debt to his father, and you’re here because Uncle Sam told you to be here.”

  “Got that right. I asked to work in the Combat Support Hospital.”

  I laughed, saying, “You should have asked to be assigned to a Scout Team, you would have wound up at the ‘Cash’!”

  I liked Swan. She had a good attitude, which is important in a medic. Whether she would hold up well under fire remained to be seen.

  “Are we going to see a lot of undead?” she asked. “I mean, this is New York City, right? There should be millions here.”

  “You would think so, but probably not. Way back in Z+4, the army tried out some kind of aerial vaccination spray or something. All it did was piss them off and drive them crazy, and they came swarming out like ants when you kick a hill. We spent days just bombing the shit out of them.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yeah, me, Brit, Ziv. Bunch of other guys. Lost a good man to a 500 lb. bomb that got dropped in the wrong place.”

  I sat there for a moment, remembering Esposito, who had just gotten married. His wife and son now lived at our farm. I started when I felt her hand on my knee, breaking my reverie. It wasn’t a sexy touch, just a reassuring one.

  “We’ve all lost a lot of people. It will stop, someday,” she said.

  “I hope so. I surely hope so.” And I did, I really did.

  Chapter 288

  We started out as soon as it was full dark, Ziv in the lead, followed by Boz, then me and Brit. Doc and Cabrejo followed by McHale, held back, and Shona took up the rear. We moved slowly, Night Vision on, keeping one eye on the street, one eye up on the buildings, one eye on the ground. In other words, our heads were on a swivel.

  Urban combat is just about the toughest type of fighting you can have. Threats can come from three hundred and sixty degrees around and three sixty above and below. Whenever we can, in cities, the Army welded manhole covers shut, and put chains across the entrances to buildings. It would hold back a zombie, or alert you, but there were more deadly threats around, seeing what happened to Szymanski's convoy.

  As the sun went down, I conducted Pre-Combat Checks and Pre-Combat Inspections. Even though many of us had worked and fought together for years, it took only one mistake to get you or som
eone else killed.

  “Remember, gloves on at all times, sleeves down, kneepads up. When you take a knee, be careful, there is going to be broken glass and sharp rusty metal everywhere. Every step has to be measured. Watch out for potholes. Rally is two blocks left of our direction of travel. If we get ambushed, you can’t go wrong by shooting back. If you get separated, head for the rally point, even if we’re not in a fight. We will come and get you. If everything REALLY goes to shit, we will meet up at the 69th Infantry armory on Lexington Avenue. There’s an electronic lock on the south side, solar powered, if it hasn’t been broken into. The code is seven six niner two. There’s emergency supplies and ammo, 5.56 and .22 LR, same code for the electronic lock. Do NOT drink any of the water here in the city, unless you decon it first.”

  There was more, including rehearsals of actions in case of different scenarios. Ambush, meeting contact, undead horde, us getting the drop on some bad guys, etc.

  “Just remember. We’re Scouts. I do NOT want to get into a knock-down, drag out fight with anyone. We get hit, we run, regroup, and go around! Got it?”

  Private mercenary companies had sprung up almost as soon as the plague started, hiring themselves out to clear areas of undead, protect villages and convoys, and sometimes do some real damage. They got paid in gold, ammo, food and slaves. The good ones I could work with. The bad ones, well, we fought them often enough. They would cut and run when things went bad, so shock and firepower were the first response. Hit them hard enough, and they would break contact. Like we would, too.

  Lately they had turned to looting, and selling on the black market, works of art and priceless artifacts. The government troops of the Reclamation & Technology Corps were always shorthanded, and often showed up at a site that had already been looted. Intel had said that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was still intact, secured by the Airborne on year Z+1, but abandoned when the second plague hit.

  Now we had about thirty blocks to go up Fifth Avenue. Our weapons were silenced, and I wasn’t too worried about the undead. Only a few had shown up around the wrecked helicopter, and Elam had taken them out before the sun set. The wreckage had been completely burned, and both bodies were ash.