The Romero Strain

by Alan, TS

  He began a recitation on the Stryker ICV’s specs, and when he started to explain the variants—apparently there were ten—I interrupted him and asked why we needed the vehicle. Was it because it looked really cool?

  He said, “The ICV has a shoot-on-the-move Protector Remote Weapon Station, with a universal soft mount cradle, which can mount either a M2 .50-cailiber machine gun, MK19 grenade launcher, or MK240 7.62mm machine gun that is operated from inside the vehicle. It is also armed with four M6 smoke grenade launchers. It has the ability to carry nine-man infantry, the CBRN Warfare system—that’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear—keeps the crew compartment airtight and positively pressured, the fuel tanks are externally mounted and designed to blow away from the hull in the event of explosion, and the tires are of a special design so they can run flat.”

  He continued excitedly, sparing little detail in regard to the vehicle’s description, pointing out its exterior features. He informed us that the armor provides integral all-round 14.5mm protection against machine gun rounds, mortar and artillery fragments, though I doubted the living dead would be shooting at us.

  Of course, there was Bub in Day of the Dead who was able to shoot a machine gun; I hoped that was just a movie.

  The ‘cage’ of slat armor, which surrounded the vehicle, roughly eighteen inches from the main body, was designed to disable the high-explosive anti-tank warhead of a RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) by squeezing the angled sides of the metal nose cone and shorting out the conductors between the detonator at the tip and the explosive charge at the back.

  He concluded with the armor being constructed of components of ballistic steel and appliqué panels of lightweight ceramic/composite armor, with additional undercarriage protection against landmines and small arms.

  “That’s why we need one,” he said, ending his sales pitch.

  I agreed with him that he made a strong argument, but the fact remained that no one knew how to drive it.

  “It should be easy to drive, just like a Cadillac!”

  “Looks more like two Cadillacs,” I told him. “Like a two Cadillac ESVs end-to-end, since the Stryker is twenty-two feet long, nine feet wide, and nine feet tall.”

  He questioned me. “I guess you missed the show Anatomy of a Stryker on the Military Channel?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Did they give driving instructions?”

  “Actually, one of the drivers said it was just like driving a Cadillac, except you have three periscopes and an AN/VAS-5 Driver’s Vision Enhancer for navigation instead of looking through a windshield. Then there are the seven periscopes and the thermal imager display with video camera the vehicle commander has. Or the port if you want to stick your head out.”

  I conceded, on the condition that he had thirty minutes to figure out how to operate it, or we’d all be crammed into the Humvee together, with Joe and him sitting in the back on the floor. I wasn’t sure who was happier with my decision, Sam with his truck to play with, or Joe who wanted to be the gunner.

  By the time Sam managed to get the two vehicles up and running, and being barely able to navigate the Stryker using a monitor—he refused to use the view hatch to look out of—it was two in the afternoon.

  Our presence attracted several undead. They were gaunt, their skin stretched tight, and their motion slow and confused. It was easy for David to eliminate the stumbling, befuddled walking corpses before they got within one block of our position. It was his way of testing out the machine gun mounted on top of the Humvee; David was my gunner. The Stryker had been actually easier to repair than the Humvee, and it was more stealthful in the noise-producing department; the Stryker was nearly silent. The Humvee sputtered, choked and then roared to life, churning out billows of black smoke. The noise was loud enough to literally wake the dead, and as we pulled away from the building, David thought he saw several undead running toward us, but the Stryker was blocking his way. As we rounded the corner he could no longer see their location. He swore to me, as he stood perched in his gun turret that he saw them, and I had no doubt that he did; however, I questioned his visual observation to their reported hurried approach. David again affirmed that they were running.

  There was only one place we had time to go to and it was the place which held the highest priority, the 69th Regiment Armory that lies on the west side of Lexington Avenue between East 25th and 26th Streets. The armory was last utilized as a functioning military base during 9/11, where it served as a supply depot and for logistic support. Though it still functioned as an army reserve facility, it was largely utilized as an event space.

  If it were anything like the days following the attack on the World Trade Center, the armory would have been secured along with the surrounding area with barriers and a heavily armed military presence. During the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy, it had been a restricted area with high security, and if you lived in the zone that had been cordoned off and you didn’t have identification proving you lived within the borders, you weren’t getting in.

  II. Life without People

  We drove down Park Avenue at a moderate pace. I expected to find cars blocking the roadway, but there were no civilian vehicles on the road, and the only military vehicles we saw were the Humvees that guarded the exit and entries to the Murray Hill Tunnel.

  Park Avenue was not as heavily littered with bodies as I expected, not to say there weren’t corpses. Parts of the avenue were flooded, for there were no city workers to clear the debris from the sewer drains, and no city engineers to make repairs to waterline breaks. A few buildings had become burnt out shells. Fires had run rampant without the FDNY to put out the blazes. New York City had begun to look like a war zone.

  I thought about all that was gone, all the things I enjoyed, like the carousel at Central Park, the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, all in a state of motionless decay. Then there was food—the foods I enjoyed. No more fresh raspberries or cherries… no more Ben & Jerry’s cherry vanilla ice cream, or Heath Bar Crunch. No more Cap’n Crunch, Rice Crispies, or Grape Nuts cereals; the rats and mice had most likely devoured those. Organic milk chocolate––I wanted a bar of Green & Blacks Organic milk chocolate, with or without toffee.

  I spotted a UD––UD was the designation Sam had given the undeads as he watched them from the GCC command center––near the intersection of 32nd Street on the northbound side of the street. It was lumbering near the crosswalk of the meridian. It was slow in its approach onto the street. A moment after we passed I heard an explosion. I looked in my rear view mirror only to see that Joe must have been trying out his new gun, but had missed his target and blown apart one of the planters, which lined the center of the meridian. At 30th Street I crossed over onto the other side of Park Avenue.

  As I slowed my approach to the intersection of 26th Street, I could see that the entrance had been barricaded by a tall chain link fence, preventing vehicle traffic. I pulled up slightly south of the intersection, allowing room for the Stryker to pull up behind us. There was barbwire on top of the gating and along the buildings that stretched down the street on the southern side and long the Park Avenue side. I stepped out of our vehicle. David, from his gun perch, kept careful watch of the surrounding area as I made my approach to the barricade.

  I was amazed at the depth of security that had been established. Long concrete barriers, accompanied with twelve-foot fencing, had been extended across the street and secured onto the adjacent buildings, topped with razor wire. There was one small gate that led onto the side street, which was for pedestrian use only, but it had been pulled off its top hinges and bent outward toward the street. Its padlock was still secured to the anchoring poles, but the large bent section certainly could have allowed the living dead to climb through. There were two Humvees with mounted machine guns. As I peered down the block, I could see a small tanker truck and more fencing. I stood transfixed at the end of the block where I could clearly see the fencing had been torn down.

  For some reason
I remembered a quote from South Park. Officer Barbrady, from the episode “Chickenlover”. It was the line about moving along, because there was nothing to see.

  I missed that show. I wanted to retrieve the DVDs from my home.

  It was time to move along.

  As we passed 25th Street it was the same––no vehicle access, only pedestrian with two Humvees guarding the fenced off street entrance. We continued south to 23rd Street where we turned left and then left again, heading north on Lexington. We immediately saw military vehicles partially blocking the avenue at 24th Street. The army had set up what appeared to be a checkpoint. We passed in between them, which led us to concrete barricades and fencing across the road. I slowed down as we approached; there were many bodies near the perimeter. I wasn’t sure if they had been the living or the undead. It was mass carnage. We were forced to stop our vehicle before we could get to the corner and walk to the armory. There were hundreds of bodies stacked up along the perimeter of the fencing, one atop another like someone had intended to make a wall out of the dead bodies. At some points the corpses were nearly chest high. There were more bodies inside.

  There had been initial armed checkpoints at both ends of Lexington Avenue at the approaches from 24th and 27th Streets, with a secondary inner defensive perimeter at the intersections of 25th and 26th Streets utilizing Strykers. The infantry carrier vehicles, strategically placed inside the perimeter to prevent unwanted and unauthorized access, didn’t stop the hordes of undead from breeching the large Lexington Avenue security gates used for vehicle access. The concrete barriers, which secured the tall chain link fencing and barbwire, had been torn apart. The gates were completely ripped from their mountings and lay bent and twisted on the ground.

  Large holes in the ground riddled the street as we made our way behind the twisted and toppled fencing. Sam said it looked like grenades had been used. Bodies were everywhere, too many to count. Dismembered bodies were scattered around, torn apart from grenades and machine gun fire. A cursory scan, as we made our way through the once highly secured area, showed that the bullet-riddled corpses were those who had become the living dead. The dismembered were mainly soldiers.

  Once formidable, strategically placed weapon systems inside the defense perimeter had been useless against the raging undead. Light medium tactical vehicles for moving troops and cargo, Humvees equipped with heavy caliber weapons, and Strykers for easy maneuverability in close and urban terrain, would one day become the relics of the past in man’s final battle of survival, all standing as a ghastly memorial to the destruction of the human race, silent and as motionless as the corpses that surrounded them. All were reminders of the mass carnage that we had escaped.

  There was the odd scattered M-16 with and without grenade launchers, a pistol still gripped tightly in a hand of a dismembered arm, different varieties of heavier caliber machine guns, one still upright behind a make-shift sand bag bunker mixed in with the dead, and a soldier still clutching the trigger handle of his flamethrower.

  Sam pointed out a sixty kilowatt tactical quiet generator, enclosed in a cage of fencing. It had run out of fuel. Four diesel powered light towers with telescoping masts had been strategically placed to provide maximum situational awareness for the success and safety of the base. There was also an Oshkosh HEMTT (Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck) fuel tanker that could store twenty five hundred gallons of diesel or aviation fuel, used to refuel tactical vehicles and helicopters in forward locations. The words, FLAMMABLE and NO SMOKING WITH 50 FEET were stenciled on each side of the tanker in flat black and green camouflage lettering against its camouflaged colored paint scheme. The Army had been deployed there for the long haul.

  There was a ramp overspread with bodies, covering the stairway leading up to the entrance of the armory; many of them lay charred and burnt. The foul smell of scorched, rotting flesh still hung heavy in the air. Since the facility had no loading dock, and the freight/vehicle elevator on the 26th Street side of the building was far too small to accommodate any vehicle larger than a Humvee, I assumed the ramp was used to load in whatever was needed for their long-term engagement.

  I felt uneasy as we made our way up the incline, stepping on and over the shot down and burnt corpses that blocked the way to the large wooden doors that loomed on the other side of the shadowy vestibule. The wrought iron gate that once stood across the entrance to the antechamber had been ripped from its hinges. The ramp had been pushed partly onto the sidewalk. Before we made it to the archway, I could clearly see heavy scoring of mostly vertical lines running down the exterior of the doors; they were fingernail marks. The doors were ajar, so perhaps the undead had breached the interior, and that was why the armory had a feel of abandonment and doom hanging over it.

  I wasn’t sure about attempting to open the door. A sense of dread came over me.

  What lay beyond the door, the undead, transmutes, or just more poor souls that had succumbed to a painful prolonged death? I wish I had brought Max, but the girls felt safe with him, even though Kermit had stayed behind. Next time they’d have to suffer. I needed and wanted my dog at my side.

  I was the idiot that would have to pull back the doors, for it was my intention to find our next place of sanctuary. The underground base, as safe as it was from the outside world, was impractical. Eventually our food would run out and our fuel supply would be expended. Without the necessary means to generate electricity, the pumps that removed the ground and rainwater that constantly seeped in from the bedrock would eventually fail. The facility was also a dismal place and a constant reminder of where the end of the world began. The lack of natural light was depressing and was a great cause of our group’s low moral. Exposure to the dangers of the outside world was a risk, but it was nearing the point of which there was no alternative left.

  I was feet from the doorway. “Okay, boys, cover my ass.” I pulled back the right door and quickly stepped back. The heavy door swung slowly open. There was nothing but dead bodies and the putrid smell of rotting flesh.

  I had never been inside the armory and had only once walked by when the door had been opened. I didn’t remember a secondary set of stairs, a second landing, and another pair of heavy oak doors beyond the first barrier.

  There was another ramp. It had been pushed out of the way, and lay in a diagonal position across the fourteen steps, which lead up to the massive arched entry. As we cautiously approached the second set of doors, we saw a modern steel door that was painted black to our left. On the wall to the right were a telephone box and a key card swipe pad. A camera was above the doorway.

  We were near the top of the staircase when David let out a blood-curdling scream of shock. A rotting hand grabbed his ankle. The undead creature was pulling itself out from under another body to get to David.

  David quickly rotated and smashed the undead’s skull in with his boot. Its grip released.

  “Fuck!” he said, exclaiming his shock and anger. “God, damn. I almost shit a Pinto.”

  “Hey,” I replied, “you all right?”

  “Yeah. Shit. Nearly lost control of the pucker valve.”

  As we made it to the landing, I looked up at the security camera. It would be inoperative if they had no power. Then I realized, the odds of anyone living being behind the doors were slim. The generator was down. If the troops were still alive, surely they would send soldiers out to refuel and restart it, not just for comfort, but for practicality. They needed to power whatever communications system they had inside. And with the undead mostly expired, wouldn’t they have re-secured the compound, fortifying it against unknown enemies? And surely someone would notice us approaching the entranceway.

  I turned the knob but it did not rotate. I tugged on it anyways; it was locked.

  We looked at each other, and then David pounded on the door. I turned to my comrades, “I don’t think anyone’s alive. If they were they would have restarted the generator and secured the perimeter.”

  “You think they’re a
ll dead?” David asked.

  “Undead is more like it.”

  “Or worse,” Joe grimly added, “Transmutes!”

  “Joe, I think if any turned into transmutes they’d have figured out how to get out. They’re not like the brain-dead undead.”

  “How are we going to get in? We can blow it open!” Joe enthusiastically volunteered.

  “Hold on there, Slick Sleeve. If you blow it up, I may not be able to fix it so it can’t be breached again,” Sam announced. “The hinges are in the inside so we can’t burn them off, but maybe we could punch a hole in the center, run a steel bar through it and pull it off with the Stryker.”

  “Excuse you Private Schmuckatelli, but you want to rip the doors off! Explain to me how that is better than—”

  “Hey, hey, Professor Chaos and General Disarray, we’re not going to destroy anything unless I know we can repair it,” I told them. “Tomorrow we’ll bring an acetylene torch and have a go at the metal door.”

  I looked out to the late afternoon sky. The sun was starting its decline. The day seemed to have slipped away and there were still things that needed to be done. “It’s mid-afternoon and this armory isn’t going anywhere. Check the tanker and see if there is any fuel in it. If it has fuel, pull the vehicles up and fill ’em. We should also salvage anything useful lying around. Sam, you and Joe on the tanker. David and I’ll do a perimeter sweep. And don’t forget, there’s UDs still out here. Okay?”

  Everyone nodded in acknowledgement, and then was off.

  As we made our way down 25th Street toward Park Avenue, David and I watched as the Stryker moved into the compound. Seeing the vehicle roll over the bodies was as majestic as a Panzer VI Tiger tank rolling over an African sand dune. Sam had been right. We truly needed the Stryker.

  There wasn’t much along the cross street to see or scavenge, just dead bodies, both soldiers and the undead, and a few rifles, which we didn’t need. As we approached the end of the building, my eyes caught the exit door to the southwest corner, which was ajar. It was barely away from its doorframe, but it was open. A sinking feeling came to my stomach. I held out my arm and as I did David ran into it, lightly tapping his chest. I motioned with an outstretched index finger. There were two flights of steps leading to the exit door. The first set was facing the opposite way from which we had come. At the top was a landing. The next set of stairs went the opposite direction, up to another landing, which lead to a doorway. I listened as we approached the top of the stairway. I couldn’t hear anything from within. I paused for a moment, and then reached for the handle. I grasped it and paused again. I let it go. I motioned David to retreat.