Turning the steering wheel, Guerra nodded toward the straggler zombies. “Don’t worry, sir. I got this.”
“You do, huh?” Hastings asked.
“Yup.” Guerra lined the vehicle up and ran right over the jaywalking reekers, toppling them like bowling pins. The Humvee rocked from side to side as bodies bounced off the front bumper or got sucked down beneath the tires. Guerra cackled like a kid on a carnival ride.
“Stop fucking swerving!” Reader shouted over the intercom just as Guerra hit another reeker. The corpse’s putrid body folded up under the vehicle and banged along beneath the undercarriage for a few feet before it was ejected.
Guerra kept laughing as he lined up on the next reeker. “Hang on, it’s gonna get bumpy!”
“Reader, be careful with your fire!” Hastings called again.
“Hijo de puta, take that!” Guerra screamed as he sideswiped one zombie and drove over another. “I’ve wanted to do this for the longest time! You ever see those fuckers who walk out into the street without looking and just expect you to stop because they’re walking? Like, ‘I’m a pedestrian, so you have to stop for me’? I fucking hate those assholes!” Guerra accelerated and ran down another reeker.
*
“Stilley, pull over alongside the road here,” Ballantine ordered as Hastings’s Humvee accelerated away. “Hartman, lay down fire along the wire!”
Sergeant Hartman swung the cupola mounted to the top of the Humvee around as Stilley stomped on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a less than gentle stop. The sudden halt didn’t seem to bother Hartman. He began firing at the approaching reekers right away.
“What the fuck?” Ballantine shouted as he and the others piled out of the vehicle and began shooting at the closest reekers. He had been expecting to hear the thump-thump-thump of an MK19 from the Humvee’s cupola. Instead, he heard the buzzing roar of a minigun. He dropped a reeker that had been stumbling across the road in his general direction, popping two shots right into its face. Once he was satisfied the zombie wasn’t going to get up and make another pass at biting his ass, Ballantine looked over his shoulder.
Hartman was in the cupola, whooping it up as he slung an M-134 minigun by its A-frame grips. The weapon barked out a fusillade of 7.62 fire across the engagement area, chopping reekers into pieces.
Apparently, Sergeants Guerra and Hartman had been busy. Not only had they accomplished the tasks they had been given, they had upgraded their firepower situation. Ballantine wondered what else they had done and not told him about, and he made a mental note to circle back with the troops and ask when he had a chance. At the moment, he was glad for the surprise. Hartman was doing his best to lay down the three-thousand-rounds-per-minute rate of fire the gun was capable of in short, controlled bursts.
The engineers had done a good job at the checkpoint. They had built wire obstacles in depth and incorporated concrete Jersey barriers to help channelize and slow the reeker advance. Feeling no pain, the reekers just pushed one another into the obstacles, ignoring the razor wire that cut into their flesh like a knife through butter. The sheer volume wanting to move forward created an effect Ballantine had last seen at a rock concert. The bodies were piling up in an effort to surge forward, and Ballantine wasn’t sure how much longer portions of the wire obstacle would hold.
The Jersey barriers, meanwhile, were actually working pretty well at holding the reekers up long enough for the soldiers to pick them off. Hartman rained fire across the row of Jersey barriers, hosing the reekers with a head-high stream of bullets. But as fast as he could mow them down, the fallen were being replaced by more swarming up from behind. In some areas, the weight of all those zombies in the rear pushed the ones in front right over the barrier and into the wire obstacles on the other side. Ensnared in the ground-level wire, the reekers struggled to regain their footing and move forward. While several were held back by the remnants of their clothing and exposed gray flesh caught up in the wire, some managed to crawl forward. They made for easy targets, but there were so many of them that some of the soldiers had stopped taking the time to aim and were just spraying in that general direction.
Ballantine called out, “Well-aimed shots! Aim for their heads!”
The National Guardsmen looked worried, and the last thing Ballantine needed was for discipline to erode and the men to panic. He shouted words of encouragement as he fired into the reekers and handed out ammo magazines. Hartman’s minigun kept up a constant chatter as the soldiers changed magazines, so there were no significant breaks in the defensive fire.
But the corpses began to pile up around and in the wire. Other reekers were walking over the twice-dead bodies, and it wasn’t looking to Ballantine that they were going to stop coming.
To everyone’s surprise, the excavator mulcher’s pitch changed substantially. The operator had lifted the mulcher head out of the sea of reekers, and he was driving the vehicle off of the lowboy trailer, its widespread treads crunching over corpses. Heading deeper into the field of reekers, the excavator’s motion attracted the zombies, causing them to shuffle away from the weak spots on the wire. As they began to amass around the lumbering excavator, the machine’s operator again lowered the mulcher’s head and began liquefying reekers. The noise worked to attract even more ghouls, and they fearlessly marched toward it. The break in the assault on the wire obstacle gave the soldiers the opportunity to pick off those reekers caught in the wire.
Ballantine turned back toward the Humvee. Hartman elevated the mini-gun’s spinning barrels, shifting his fire so he could reach deeper into the rows of reekers in the field. Together, the mini-gun and the mulcher were making a difference.
Then, Hartman began reducing the minigun’s rate of fire. Oh, what the fuck? Ballantine reached for his radio’s PTT button.
Hartman’s voice came over the net before Ballantine could transmit. “Stilley, I need more ammo. Get over here, now!”
*
Stilley stopped firing and sprinted for the Humvee. Once there, he climbed inside and began digging into the ammo cans. He fumbled with the cargo strap running through the ammo can lids. “Motherfucker, I hate these damn things!”
The mini-gun spoke only in short staccato bursts as the Hartman became more selective in his fire. “Stilley, whatever you’re doing, you had best unfuck yourself and get me some more ammo up here!” Hartman shouted.
Sweating like a pig beneath his helmet, Stilley managed to loosen the strap enough to get the slack necessary to unhook it from the floor ring. He pulled the free end through the ammo can lids, popped one open, and snatched a couple of linked belts of 7.62. Even though he had bitched about the job earlier in the day, Stilley was thankful that Guerra had made him and the rest of the team prep all the linked ammo for the .50 cal and the mini-gun in advance.
“Hold on!” Stilley shouted as he moved farther into the vehicle’s hot interior.
Hartman was standing on the platform in the center of the vehicle, his upper body protruding through the cupola’s hole in the roof. The flex chute that protected the ammunition as it flowed up to the gun from the ammo container ran up between Hartman’s feet.
“I’m linking the belts now, man!” Stilley opened the mini-gun’s ammo storage container and pulled out the remaining belt. There wasn’t much left for a weapon that had a maximum rate of fire of three to four thousand rounds per minute. Hartman had called for ammo just in time. Stilley struggled to link a new belt to the existing one, pausing only to wipe the sweat from his eyes. He could smell his own body odor rising up from inside his uniform.
Hartman stomped his feet on the platform. “Get a move on, Stilley!”
“All right, all right. Give me a second!” A full minute later, Stilley finally managed to get the new belt linked up. “Okay, gun up!”
The minigun roared back to life as Hartman jumped on the fun switch. There hadn’t been time to load the belt back into the ammunition container, so Stilley watched the belt feed for a few seconds. There was a
chance the belt could kink up, and he wanted to make sure it was feeding okay. With the gun back up and Hartman shooting again and no sign of impending failure in sight, Stilley hurriedly linked the remaining belts so Hartman would have all the ammo he hoped he would need. Once he was done, he told Hartman he was clearing the Humvee. After grabbing his rifle, he jumped out, slammed the door behind him, and returned to his position just off the vehicle’s right fender.
The excavator mulcher was completely surrounded by reekers. The operator was spinning the mulcher head around in a circle, destroying anything that got in its way. Stilley thought it was an awesome sight, and he wished they’d had something like that with them back in New York. But as fast as the operator cut them down, the empty space filled back in with more bodies. Stilley shouldered his rifle and joined the rest of the soldiers in picking off any reekers that got too close to the excavator. Some of them had started climbing onto it, and Stilley hammered those attackers first. After all, if the excavator went down, no one would likely survive for very long.
The excavator operator stopped swinging the head and started driving again, rolling over the reekers. That stretch of Fisher Avenue was fairly open and straight, so the huge rig could move a bit, and the soldiers manning the OP could continue to provide supporting fires. The moving excavator was having an effect. The reekers were heading south, away from the OP and back toward the Interstate.
*
Hastings spoke into his radio. “All Crusader elements, this is Crusader One One. Send SITREP when able. Over.”
Above him, Reader kept hammering at the dead with the .50 while the Humvee was parked.
Ballantine came back almost immediately. “This is Crusader One Seven. Still in contact. Break.” After a brief pause, Ballantine added, “Hostiles moving south along Fisher. Headcount is green. Ammo is yellow. Over.”
Hastings released his breath in a long rush. For the moment, all of his men were still good to go. Ammunition was getting to be a concern, though. Soon, people would start running out. They needed a resupply. “Roger that, Crusader One Seven. I’ll see if I can get you guys topped off. Out. War Eagle Six, this is Crusader One One. Over”
“Crusader One One, this is TOC. Send it. Over.”
“War Eagle Six, this is Crusader One One. Requesting ammo resupply ASAP to OP Two and along Biddle Drive. Request five-five-six, seven-six-two link, fifty cal and forty mike mike. How copy? Over.”
“Crusader One One, this is War Eagle Six. Good copy. Resupply en route in five mikes. Over.”
The reekers along Biddle Drive weren’t as concentrated as they were at OP Two, and Hastings knew he had the engineers to thank for that. Strung through the trees along the side of the road was barbed wire and razor wire at varying heights up to head level. As an obstacle, it wouldn’t be very effective against living enemy, but to the reekers who shambled along either unable to discern the wire or just ignorant of it, the tactic was working very well. The trees served as natural barricades that broke up the reeker swarms and caused them to spread out. Eventually, the corpses would blunder into the wire, and the strong, razor-studded strands stopped their advance cold.
That made it easy for the Quick Reaction Force to dispatch smaller elements while the majority of the force focused on the road junction along Biddle Drive. There, the soldiers were fighting a lighter version of what was happening at OP Two on Fisher Avenue. Reader had used the .50 to shoot the reekers stuck in the tree line barriers, and several of the trees were torn apart where the big machine-gun rounds had struck them. Some of them were cut in half, their fallen tops creating another ground obstacle that served to further impede the reekers’ movement.
“Crusader One Seven, this is Crusader One One. Over.”
Ballantine responded immediately. “Crusader One One, this is Crusader One Seven. Go. Over.”
“Crusader One Seven, what’s your situation?”
“Crusader One One, situation has calmed down. We’re cleaning up crawlers and a few squirters.”
Hastings looked down the road at the excavator. The operator had almost made it to the gas station on the corner of Fisher and Indiantown Gap Road. He was on the return trip, trundling along at a snail’s pace but still running over small groups of reekers. From time to time, the operator would lower the mulcher head and eradicate the dismembered reekers still crawling on the ground. The soldiers around the observation post were taking their time with picking off individual reekers that had managed to squirt through portions of the wire. The zombies were dropped before they could become a substantial threat, but the presence of the dead inside the wire still caused Hastings some heartburn.
“Headcount is green,” Ballantine said. “We’re redistributing ammo now. We’re gonna want to get replacements for the OP and the others down here as soon as we can. A few of them are looking a little crispy. The engineers will need to make repairs, as well. I’d get them down here now as a matter of fact, One One. Over.”
“Roger that, Crusader One Seven. Already on it. Reinforcements and engineers are on the way. Keep me advised of your situ, and let me know when you’re ready to RTB. Crusader One One, out.”
*
“You ever notice how in books and movies they never show people stopping to do normal things?” Tharinger was brushing out the barrel of his M4.
Reader looked up from cleaning his weapon. “What the fuck are you rambling about now, Tharinger?”
“Dude, all that down time we had over in the box, I know you read a metric shit ton of books and watched every movie at least six times. You never noticed that they never show or talk about people doing normal, everyday, boring shit?”
Reader wasn’t particularly energized by the topic, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “Yeah, like what?”
“Like this, for example.” Tharinger pointed at the upper receiver of his rifle. “You ever see anyone cleaning a weapon or using FIREClean on one in an action movie? I mean, fuck, you rarely see a guy change a magazine or run a gun dry. Think about your favorite TV show. You ever see someone say, ‘Hey, pull the car over. I need to shit like a racehorse.’ And you sure as shit don’t see Mr. Muscle Action Guy cleaning his fucking weapons or loading magazines.”
“I gotta ask, is there a point to all this, Tharinger?”
“I’m just saying you never see that shit.”
“Yeah, that’s because no one wants to pay good money to read a book or see a movie of people like you and me taking a shit or sitting here cleaning our weapons. I think there’s an expression for that—it’s boring shit.”
“Yeah, I got that. But do you think civilians really think it’s like nonstop pew-pew, boom-bang, hot chicks sexing you up, and cool gadgets?”
Reader lowered the upper receiver of his M4 back into the lower and pushed the takedown pin back in place. “Tharinger, where does this shit come from? You stay awake at night thinking about this kind of stuff?”
“Fuck you, asshole,” Tharinger snapped. A couple of seconds later, he added, “Not every night, only sometimes.”
Both of them erupted in laughter.
“I do wish we actually had some of those gadgets they show in the movies, though,” Tharinger said wistfully. “Know what pisses me off about movies? How many times have you seen a guy look through a scope and the reticule inside of it has all kinds of electronic data feeds or some crazy fucking crosshair design that anyone who shoots knows doesn’t exist and is bullshit.”
“You know what, man? I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard you talk about anything other than pussy, movies, chow, taking a shit, and drinking.”
“So what? Drink, fight, fuck—a man has to have his priorities.” Tharinger looked around then leaned toward Reader, his tone suddenly conspiratorial. “Speaking of pussy… have you rubbed one out to Diana yet?”
Reader chuckled. “Dude, I don’t think there’s a guy here who hasn’t done that at least a few times already, except maybe Stilley, since he’s about as smart as a below-average bag of
gravel.”
“I wonder if she’s a good fuck or a fish?”
Reader shrugged. “Good question, my man. My money’s on her being a straight-up freak. At least, that’s my fantasy, and I’m sticking to it.”
“No, to be accurate, it’s sticking to your happy sock.”
Reader threw his greasy weapon cleaning rag at Tharinger. “You better hope I don’t decide to use one of your socks, fuck knuckle.”
Tharinger looked horrified. “Dude, that’s not even funny!”
The conversation died down as both men concentrated on finishing their weapon cleaning. It was just another typical day in the life of a grunt, nothing anyone was ever likely to watch in a Hollywood movie.
*
“Gentlemen, subject to your questions, that concludes my briefing,” Hastings said, concluding his hour-long briefing for Colonels Victor and Jarmusch, along with Senator Cornell. He had recounted the actions taken during the mission to the rail yard to secure the needed shipping containers that would be used to fortify Indiantown Gap’s defenses. Hastings had been a little surprised to find Cornell in the meeting.
After the introductions, Cornell had said, “Still climbing to glory, Captain?”
Hastings had responded, “It’s better than falling down the slope, sir,” and Cornell had nodded and smiled.
Colonel Victor cleared his throat. “Captain Hastings, are you sure you don’t want to send a reconnaissance team to the rail yard prior to launching the main body?”
Hastings shook his head. “No, sir. The Shadow will be on station prior to the main body’s kickoff, and we’ll have live video feed of the objective before we leave the wire. My fear is that if we drop a team in the yard prior to the main effort, the noise from the aircraft would attract unwanted attention and start the reekers moving in before the main body was even en route. Sending in a team via ground movement would have the same effect—we’d attract attention along the main route we’ve identified as the most suitable for ground infil. In my opinion, a coordinated ground and air movement to the objective, as I briefed, offers us the most options if Murphy shows up at any point in the operation. Having rotary wing assets in the air during all phases of the operation gives us additional firepower, as well as the means to get people out of a tight situation quickly if the need arises.”
These Dead Lands: Immolation Page 22
