Overland Zombie - a post apocalyptic thriller: Battlefield Z series

by Chris Lowry

  He launched from the back of a C-130 and deployed a textbook HALO insertion. It was just like in training.

  Cap landed in the LZ, and he zeroed in on the flashing blacklight on his backpack, dropping and rolling to scoop up his chute before it caught the wind and dragged him.

  Or worse. The flapping drew enemy eyes.

  But the LZ was on top of zombies. Or close enough. No one knew what drew them, other than noise, movement, maybe the CO2 they exhaled, like mosquitos.

  He was the first in line, and in a panic, he rolled his M4 on the short strap and opened up in three round bursts.

  It took out the first four, but four more were behind them, and four more behind those. A line of them, or herd, he had heard them called.

  They plowed into him, knocked him down.

  He could feel their sharp nails digging against his skin. He screamed as their rotten teeth bit into his fatigues.

  Momma didn’t raise a fool. Or perhaps she did, since he joined up with this man’s Army after the first of the zombies showed up. He joined because it was that or get drafted.

  Drafted dudes went over the wall first, or got put in shit details. Volunteers got to pick.

  He picked wearing a woven mesh skinsuit under his fatigues. His mom made it for him, a gift. She had worked in the garment district for years, and whatever skill she picked up, she carried home to create her own designs.

  This one looked like a dive suit, the skintight neck to toe underwater covers divers used to stay in the water longer, or avoid the sting of jellyfish.

  He used the suit to avoid infection.

  The zombies bit and bit, but they couldn’t penetrate. They gnawed on his fatigues, slobber, blood and ick covering the digicamo pattern. But he didn’t get infected.

  He got hurt though.

  The skin stopped their teeth and nails from reaching his skin and tearing it, but it didn’t stop the pressure of a bite. Hundreds of them covered his legs, his arms, his torso. A hundred sets of teeth clamping down on him, trying to tear, trying to rip.

  Failing. But he wasn’t sure how long.

  The gloves on his hand, the helmet on his head, the facemask, all in place, all doing their job of keeping him whole and safe. But the suit his momma gave him saved his life.

  He fired to clear an opening, switched to single shot and plopped a round into every head he could see. More towered over him, but it bought time.

  He shimmied and fought under the weight of the bodies on top of him, slithering out into the field.

  Alone. Captain Sharp and his squad gone.

  He couldn’t blame them. He would be gone too. Soon enough.

  More Zombies lumbered toward him, but he had time. Ten yards. Ten seconds or more the way they were moving.

  He slipped a fresh magazine off his belt, made it to his feet and began clearing a path toward the woods. One step, one shot. Blam. Blam. Blam.

  The trees would provide cover. The woods would give him a place to hide, room to breathe, gather, regroup.

  He made it.

  Sgt. Chen planted his back against the rough bark of a wide oak and fought down panic. The Z were still coming. Relentless.

  But he could face them, use the trees for cover. And lose them. That was the plan.

  He pushed off and shuffled through the darkness, the night vision goggles on his modified helmet lighting the way. They took ambient light from the stars, the sliver of moon and enhanced it. Not quite daylight, but not pitch either. A twilight green somewhere between.

  Enough to see a Z when it rounded a tree. Enough to watch the black gore spray from the back of its head.

  Chen jogged as well as he could. The bites on his legs were bruising, each step sent a lance of pain up toward his spine.

  He was alive, but hurt. The Z were able to do that much to him.

  Still, he kept going.

  Part of being in Cap’s unit was a never die attitude. They drilled in it, training the will as much as the body. Chen knew that the mind was designed to quit. It was an evolutionary factor.

  The brain didn’t want to burn through all the body’s resources, or push beyond forty percent. The brain evolved to keep a reserve in the tank.

  Chen trained to go beyond forty percent. Captain Sharp saw to it. He trained with the rest of the men to hit eighty, ninety percent.

  “If you’re organs aren’t failing, you’re not pushing hard enough,” the Captain said to them as they marched endless miles under two hundred-pound rucks.

  Chen knew why. They all did.

  If you could jog ten miles under two hundred pounds, then an eighty-pound pack felt easy.

  The secret was to just keep going.

  He did.

  He ran in the night, and the Z disappeared. But he didn’t stop. He oriented using the stars and the memory of the crash site from the briefing and tried to catch up with his squad.

  If not behind them, at least on a parallel course.

  He just needed to find a road and get out of the woods.

  The trees had done their work, served their purpose, but now it was time to play catch up.

  Besides, he had aspirin in his backpack and when he found the road, he planned to stop and take it.

  Aspirin, the thousand year old miracle drug, would help ease the pain of the bites.

  He saw an opening in the trees and sighed in relief. A road. Chen sped up, his jog turning into a slightly faster shuffle, as he thought of aspirin and his squad and the mission ahead to rescue the Chairman’s daughter.

  He reached the last tree and tried to catch himself before pitching over the edge of a ridge.

  He threw out a hand, fingers gripping the bark of a sapling. It crumbled under his hands and he fell over the edge of the ridge, bounced off a clay outcropping and landed in the churning narrow river.

  The current caught at him, carried him as he spluttered and dog paddled, the heavy weight of his fatigue and momma suit tried to pull him under.

  He didn’t know how far he went downriver before he made shallow water. His knees hit a sandbar in a bend, and he pulled himself from the water and collapsed in an exhausted heap.

  Chen crawled toward the shoreline, the brackish smell of dead fish and mud cloying even through his facemask. He reached the trees and stood on tired legs as he looked around.

  The dark sky was filling with clouds, masking the stars he had used for navigation.

  “Damn,” he muttered.

  He had no idea where he was.

  PAM

  A good leader rows the hoes, she scribbled on the lined pages of a fresh new notebook. She had found it on a shelf, the paper fresh and untouched, took it because it would make a good fire starter.

  Then she thought to record their journey and began making notes instead. A place to store her thoughts. A record of what they hoped to do.

  She didn’t know why, she snickered as she stared at the words on the page, crisp clean lines from her hand. Hoes the rows. Her father had never been a farmer, had never grown anything in his life except for the enmity of men who hated him.

  But he liked to use old sayings and short quotes sometimes, and how the row was one of them. She knew what it meant. Line things up and knock them down. Do the project in order. A building assembled on a poor foundation would rot and fall. Hoe the row.

  She supposed row the hoe would work too. Not literally, but line up the people and get them to pull together toward a common goal. Their own safety.

  The door behind her opened and Jacob stepped through. She caught a look from him and had a moment to wonder what it meant as he crossed the town hall floor and settled on the bench beside her.

  “They’re starting to get restless again,” he said.

  “You’re the leader,” she wanted to shout. “Control them. Talk them down.”

  But she kept her mouth shut instead. Took a breath. Closed the journal and tucked it into a backpack she had acquired for very meager personal belongings.

  “They
’re scared,” she said. “Trust me, I know that feeling.”

  “You have to talk to them.”

  “Why me?” she almost asked.

  Ready to shy away from the role he was thrusting on her. He was in charge of this community. He should be the one talking his people back from the ledge.

  She knew why he was asking. She had been scared. She was from the outside, from the old world safe from zombies and whatever new fresh hells that arose from this apocalypse.

  She had dated a Navy man in New York for a half year once. He had been a SEAL, he said, and there wasn’t much more he said about it. His name was Glen and he had told her once a phrase that stuck with her.

  In the absence of leadership, I will assume command until I am relieved of duty.

  Leadership. Command. Duty.

  Those were words that resonated with her, and she felt they had never been more necessary than now.

  Glen was gone, she assumed. Most of the SEAL’s too. Gone in the first and second lines of defense against a plague that swept the nation unchecked until her father assumed command.

  He stopped it. He saved the world. Or the US part of it anyway.

  She guessed she could save a small portion of the people. She was her father’s daughter.

  “I’ll speak with them,” she reached out and gripped his shoulder. Jacob turned his head and smiled at her, white teeth brilliant against his ebon skin.

  She could see wisps of gray in the hairs of his beard, the hint of silver at his temples beginning to thread their way out.

  A price, she though as she stood. The price of stepping up.

  “I’ve got your back,” he said and followed her through the town hall doors to the steps outside.

  BALLENTINE

  Those son of a bitches were trying to do an end run on him. Ballentine knew it. He could sense it, like a shark senses blood in the water or a bat pings off mosquitoes as it wings through the night.

  He could see it in the tight lines at the corner of their eyes in their smug little faces. See it in the way they looked at him. Watched him.

  “We’re not going to waste any more manpower on this,” the General said to the Chairman with an air of finality. “You just have to accept it. We’ve all lost someone in this event.”

  “Event?” Ballentine balked. He lunged his large frame out of the chair and bent over the table. Even though he lowered his voice, the other members of the ruling Council still felt like he was screaming.

  “You military types turned this virus loose on the rest of us, and if it wasn’t for my fast thinking and the hard work of a lot of people, we would be up to our asses in the dead. And now you’re going to sit there and tell me I just have to take it?”

  The General squirmed under the glare, and glanced around the others at the long conference table that held the leaders of the West Coast’s governing body.

  “The motion has been made,” he squeaked.

  Ballentine slammed the small of his fist against the cheap thin wood and interrupted him.

  “Get that Colonel in here,” he shouted, this time for real.

  The twin doors swung open to the conference room and three men marched into the room.

  The General stopped squirming and stared at the man in the middle. He was just over average height, black hair streaked with grey at the temple, sharp cheekbones standing under cruel eyes.

  “Who ordered you back from the wall?” he growled.

  “I did,” said Ballentine.

  He pushed back from the table, the executive leather chair spinning in slow lazy circles as it rolled across the floor.

  “You have no authority,” the General sputtered.

  He backpedaled as Ballentine lunged around the conference table and jerked him out of his seat by the lapels. Thin medals clinked and rattled as he yanked the General toward the windows.

  “Do you see that?”

  He jammed the General against the glass windows that looked out over the apocalyptic landscape of post Z Los Angeles. Every open space was occupied by trailers, tents and shantytowns, the haphazard result of taking in what was left of humanity when the zombie virus blazed through the country.

  The General couldn’t see, not with his face squished against the glass, but there was no way he planned to say that out loud. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. Ballentine’s smooth hands pressed against the back of his neck, making speech difficult.

  “I did that,” Ballentine breathed in his ear. “And if I say we’re going to go get my daughter, then you line up every last son of bitch out there who can carry a gun and you make a line to go get her.”

  He let go of the General and stepped back.

  The military man took a moment to adjust his jacket, shooting a glare at the Colonel dressed in BDU’s instead of more formal attire as befitting a recall to the Council, even if he was following the wrong orders.

  He’d have the man court martialed for being AWOL, the General snorted. He always considered him a trouble maker and now the Colonel had given him the ammunition he needed to sideline the man and remove him.

  “I make a motion,” the General started to say. It came out a squeak and he had to clear his throat. “I motion to suspend the Chairman pending a formal inquiry of his use of Council resources for personal gain.”

  The General smirked at Ballentine. The man had no friends among the people there. He waited for an ally to second the motion.

  Ballentine grabbed him by the rumpled lapels again and spun around. He pivoted like an Olympian throwing a hammer in the Decathalon and powered the General into the window.

  The glass cracked and splintered as the man bounced off and rebounded in a daze.

  Ballentine yanked him around again and this time sent him sailing through the damaged pane. The Council sat in stunned silence as the screaming of the General was lost after six stories down.

  The Chairman turned to the men and women sitting around the table and dusted off his hands.

  “Anyone else want to make a motion?” he asked.

  No one did.

  DAD

  We crammed everyone into the truck and made it six more miles along the road through the Ocala National Forest before the engine sputtered out of gas.

  “Did you forget to fill up?” Brian chided.

  “I was in charge of road snacks,” I answered.

  “Canned peas again,” he smiled.

  We exited and pushed it the side of the road. It might serve as an obstacle for anything chasing after us, or some poor soul could be cruising along and smack into the back of it if they weren’t paying attention.

  No need to add to the Z population if we could help it.

  “We’re hoofing it?” Brian didn’t sound too happy with the prospect.

  I couldn’t blame him. Hoofing with such a large group was problematic at best. We could only go as fast as the slowest member, and a couple of the new kids we picked up looked weak.

  Starved, I corrected myself. They looked malnourished, black smudges of sleep deprivation turning their pale faces into raccoon masks, gaunt cheeks and listless eyes.

  Hell, we weren’t much better off.

  I glanced at the useless gas cans on top of the Suburban. They would stay, but the empty packs and duffle bags inside the cab, I stuffed into one pack and put it on.

  Just in case we found food, and there was enough to carry with us.

  “Hoof on,” I told Brian, and let the Boy take point as we fell in step behind him.

  He knew what direction to go. We were still chasing the sun.

  SHARP

  They were right where Turner said they would be. Lined up and sitting in a row, dust covered and dirty, but otherwise looking like the perfect solution to a caravan problem.

  The gods of fate must have been laughing, because there was even a giant silver fuel tank on the edge of the first row, untouched and waiting to fill up every single tank on the bus, plus as many containers as Sharp could scrounge and bring bac
k. He would load the top down with red gas cans, strap them to the side if he had too.

  He didn’t do the math, but he knew hauling two dozen buses across the country where the grid was down would cost fuel and a lot of it.

  The gods were laughing too because some enterprising survivor had lured fifty or so Z into the fenced off building lot and locked the gates.