Even Zombie Killers Get The Blues (Zombie Killer Blues) (4 page)

Chapter 8
We ran. Uphill, away from the canal, heading for the woods and overgrown
farmland. You can outrun a Zombie horde, but we had full packs on and the day
was hot. We needed to get to a place to go to ground and wait for Ahmed. He had
picked out a ruined house we could see on top of a hill about a mile away. Zs
don’t like to go uphill,and I was pretty sure every zombie in Fort Edward was
chasing Ahmed south down River Road.
We made it into the doorway of the house, stacking and clearing it. Jonesy
kicked in the ruined door with his huge boot, or tried to. He rebounded off the
steel door and started hopping up and down, cursing under his breath. I reached
over and turned the knob on the door. Unlocked. I shot him a shit-eating grin
and he gave me the finger.

We lined up, and Brit went in first, followed by
Jacob, me, then Ski. Doc Hamilton and Jonesy stayed outside, covering our
backs. We each piled in and swept our sectors, scanning the living room.  Brit,
the first one in, fired two quick shots into the figure sitting on the couch,
and the skeletons’ head exploded into a cloud of dust.

“Whoops,” she muttered under her breath, then broke
right with Jacob to continue to clear the ground floor. Ski and I went up the
stairs checking each of the bedrooms. We didn’t need to surprise each other
coming around a corner.

“CLEAR!” I yelled downstairs. “CLEAR” came back up
to me. “Checking basement!” I heard the basement door kick open, then after a
minute, “ALL CLEAR”.

“FORT UP!”  I yelled, and Jonesy and Doc came in
through the door. We grounded our rucks upstairs and each of us started ripping
two by fours out of the walls. Doc took a battery-powered screw gun and started
putting them up on the front door. He started laughing as he did it.

“What the hell is so funny?”

He laughed again. “It’s just like playing Black Ops,
fighting zombies!” I laughed too, stupid idiots. I loved these guys.

Jonesy and Ski were hammering the stairs down, each
wailing away with a sledge hammer, knocking out steps. If the doors or windows
were breached, we would climb up a rope ladder to the upstairs. Trapped, but
safe, and it always gave us time to think of something else.

When we had forted up as best we could, we settled
down to wait for Ahmed or the Zs, whichever came first.  Brit walked to the
skeleton she had popped as we came in through the front door. She pushed the
rusty shotgun away from the couch where it had fallen out of the skeleton’s,
cold, dead hands, then sat down next to it.
“Sorry about that, Skeletor, but I couldn’t take any chances. It was either you
or me, and I was faster. Better luck next time.” Then she put her feet up on
the coffee table, closed her eyes, and went to sleep next to the shattered
bones.
I went upstairs and built myself a snipers perch, looking downhill towards the
lock. I figured it was about maybe eight hundred meters. I started picking off
random Zs who were wandering around, excited by the noise of the chase, using
Ahmed’s rifle. While doing so, I thought back to the wild, panicked nights of
the plague. My Guard unit falling apart at the barricades, getting overwhelmed
by the civilians trying to get out of the city, the Zs already mixing in with
them. Me rushing back to my house to get my family and run. My wife coming at
me in the kitchen, a hunk of our kid’s arm in her mouth, hands ripping at me
like claws. I swung the butt of my rifle so hard I broke the plastic, and I
kept swinging `til the thing that had been my wife lay on the floor, a bloody
pulp, and I ran. I don’t know how I made it through the following months but
here I was, years later, letting thoughts of that night ruin my aim. I wiped
away the tears and kept shooting, a steady fire that knocked down a good dozen
before I got tired. Remembering did no good for anyone.

Around dusk, Ahmed showed up, dripping wet. We had
watched him through binos, pulling himself up out of the water at the edge of
the river. Dangerous shit, that. You never knew what, exactly, was swimming or
floating around there anymore. He immediately gave me a SITREP (Situation
Report, to all you civilians), changed into dry clothes, then passed out on an
upstairs bed. I typed up a report for Task Force Empire, attached the pictures
from today, hooked my iPhone to the SINCGARS radio, and did that magic shit the
commo guys had come up with. No cell towers? No problem! They ran it through
our FM radios. Don’t ask me how they did it, but it worked.  

I called the guys around. “Ahmed is done in so we
have to stay here tonight. You know the drill. Two men on watch, staggered
hours. Weapons loaded, on safe. I have the one to three watch, divide up the
rest, Brit. Light and noise discipline.” They all answered in the affirmative.
Brit stayed behind while the others went to get something to eat out of their
packs.
“Nick, I’m sorry about today, the vomiting. I’ve never had that happen before.
It was just so freaking disgusting.”
“It happens. Get past it or you’re going to be off the scouts. I almost had to
choke you to keep you quiet today. Understand? If you can’t hold it together
around Zs then you are a risk to the whole team.”
She nodded her head. For once, she looked contrite. “I got it. I know what you
gotta do what you gotta do. I’ll handle it.”
“You did a great job nailing Skeletor today, even if he already was dead.
You’re a part of this team, Brit.  Now go get some more sleep. I’m sure you’re
beat. Before you do, though, remind everyone that Ahmed gets to sleep the night
through.”
“Can do, Nick.” Then she leaned over and kissed me full on the lips. I wiped my
face with my sleeve and muttered “Ugh, girl germs!” just loud enough for her to
hear me as she walked away. She shook her hips at me, slapped her ass and went
into the bedroom.
We settled in for the short May night.  

Checking
out the canal locks

Chapter 9

The must have pushed the sounds to us. Way off in
the distance, I heard the pop-pop-pop of a firefight going on. It seemed to be
coming from the north, just a faint echo of gunfire. The rounds were sparing,
like someone was trying to take head shots, but then they rose in a crescendo,
faster and faster, followed by fully automatic fire. Then it stopped dead. If
the wind hadn’t been blowing from the north, I doubt I would have even heard
it.

Doc was sitting next to me on watch. “Somebody just
got overrun.”

“Ya think?” He had heard it too, and knew what the
final burst of meant. You don’t use automatic weapons on zombies. Most of your
rounds would be wasted zipping through their bodies. It was a panic burst; they
were so close there was no time to aim, their hands were almost on you.

“Where do you think?”

“I dunno. Not Glens Falls, the city is too close.
Maybe Lake George. The mountains do some funny things with sound, carry it down
through the valleys. Tells us one thing, though. There’re people out there.”

“There’s always people out there, Nick. No matter
how bad things get, there are always survivors somewhere.  Hell, you know we’ve
been monitoring radio traffic from the north end of Lake Champlain. Apparently
the frogs from Quebec are still around. And organized.”
“Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it. People like those farmers we met today. They were
pretty friendly, but I worry about some of the hard cases we might meet. Make
sure from here on out everyone is on their toes in regards to Zs and Mad
Maxes.” “Mad Maxes” was our term for people who had turned to looting and
killing of anything that got in their way in order to survive. Not really fair
to the original Road Warrior, but that’s pop culture for you. The worst thing
was to get caught by one of those groups that had gone cannibal. Think to
yourself, oh no, not in America! Cannibals? I don’t care where you are. Get
people hungry enough and some of them will start eating whatever, or whoever,
they can find. In the years after the plague, there was hunger enough. If we
caught them, we shot them on sight.
Then I heard another sound, much closer, that made me sit bolt upright, wide
awake. Coming back up River Road, just starting to be visible in the NVGs, was
the horde Ahmed had led away this afternoon. They had started back to their
territories but they must have smelled us when the wind shifted to the north.

“Go wake everyone up, bring everything upstairs.
It’s going to be a turkey shoot but it might get tight. There’re a lot of
them.”
Doc climbed down the rope ladder and I settled down with the sniper rifle.
Ahmed was better than me at this, and when he got up here, I would let him take
over. I started a slow, steady round of shooting. By the time Ahmed put his
hand on my back, my shoulder was sore and my eye hurt from straining at the
night scope. There were a good twenty Zs cooling on the ground in a trail. That
trail, though, pointed directly to us.

“Do we run?” asked Brit.

“Not at night. Too big of a chance of us getting
separated or someone twisting an ankle or breaking a leg. Nope, it’s fight
night.”

We all settled down to our firing positions,
knocking glass out of the upstairs windows. Knockers, something to beat in a
Zombie’s head with, whatever was each person’s preference, stood stacked at the
top of the ruined stairs.

The danger was twofold. First, this was just the
start of a swarm. The city of Glens Falls and its surrounding area was a city
of around thirty thousand people before the plague. Average actual turned-into-zombies
rate was around sixty percent, though that could vary. It was dependent upon
evacuation, how well the populace was armed, how many people died from being
eaten versus reanimated. Figuring around half the Zombies from that population
were still ambulatory, we might face nine thousand zombies, not the hundred or
so coming at us now. And you thought math never did anyone any good. It made me
freak out.

The second thing we were afraid of was enough of
them would get into the house and swarm what was left of the stairs, to form a
pile which could reach up to the second floor. That’s what the knockers were
for. Hopefully not.

“Suppressors?” asked Ski. Suppressors wore out,
another thing they never showed in the movies. The heat of the rounds being
fired off wore out the sound-absorbing metal fibers inside. We had to choose
quiet now versus quiet later. However, they did reduce the range and accuracy
of our shots.  The rifles we carried were military issued M-4 carbines,
re-chambered for a hot copper jacketed .22 Long round, but they didn’t have a
lot of range to start with.
 
Thing is, with Zs,
you don’t necessarily need heavy duty, hard hitting rounds. Accuracy was the
word of the day, and the more ammo you could carry, the better.
“For now. We don’t need half the Z population of the Glens Falls metro area
coming down on us. Wind might carry the gunshot sounds anywhere. Just remember
to shoot high to compensate for the drop if you’re out past 100 meters. Better
yet, wait till you see the reds of their eyes. ”

“Ok, Chief.” 

We waited while Ahmed kept firing. In a few minutes,
the horde came in range of the rest of us and we opened up. The Zs finally got
worked up and started running toward the house. The scream started, that Zombie
scream that ran right through your teeth and made your gut tense up. Coming
from a hundred mutilated throats, it gave us all the chills and we started to
sweat.

“Keep it steady, guys. You’ve all done this before.
Aim, Fire. Aim, Fire.”
Zombies were dropping, but not fast enough. It’s hard enough to shoot them in
the head. At night, while they were moving, very tough. About every fifth shot
went home, maybe less as they got closer and started running uphill at us.

They crashed into the front of the house and we
started firing down into their heads. They were going down but I heard one of
the windows smash open and they poured into the house. Behind me I heard Doc
open up with his shotgun. Noise wasn’t an issue anymore with the screams.

“Hey, I can use a little help here!” he yelled.
Jacob ran back from his window and started firing down into the crowd of Zs
that were trying to claw their way up the remains of the staircase. Most fell
into the basement but they were starting to pile up.

Outside, there was no movement. Inside, they were
piling higher and higher. The rest of the team grabber their knockers and
started smashing downward on the Zs trying to climb the pile. One arm reached
up and grabbed Ski around the ankle, started to drag him down into the mess. I
dropped my bat and grabbed his arm and pulled as hard as I could. Jacob grabbed
his other arm and the two of us lifted him clear of the pile and back up onto
the floor. Next to us, Brit fired a full magazine of fifty rounds into the crawling
mass, knocking down the last one as it tried to pull itself onto our floor.

Silence, except for our ragged breathing. I heard
weapons being reloaded, stood up. Sweat was pouring off me and I felt my hands
starting to shake.
“Give me an OK!” In turn, each of the team members called out their last name,
followed by an “OK!” except for Ski.

He sat there, looking at a rip in the leg of his uniform.
Under the rip, teeth marks were outlined  with a small welter of blood rising
up.
“Oh, fuck my life,” he whispered.
Jacob grabbed Doc by the shoulder and almost pushed him into Ski. “Doc, check
him out! Do something for him! Will a tourniquet work?” 
He whipped out a quick tourney and tied it off around Ski’s leg, high up, then placed
his shotgun above the wound and pulled the trigger, blowing off most of the leg
just below the knee. The loud BOOM echoed in the house, almost drowned out by
Ski’s scream. He fainted. Doc lit his hand torch and cauterized the leg to stop
him from bleeding out, then started cutting away at the ragged flesh.  Just
after he finished, Ski woke up and grabbed at Doc, then started pulling at the
wounded stump, causing the blood to flow again.
“Let it go, Doc. Just let me go. Payback is a bitch. I gave in once, just once
when I was so damn hungry I couldn’t take it anymore. I ate part of man I
killed in a fight. I couldn’t help it, I was starving. Just let me go, Brother.” 
His voice sank, and we all shrank back away from him, horrified by what he had
just admitted to, that thing that we were all scared of doing when we were
starving. Ski never told us what he was on the run from, just always had that
haunted look in his eyes.

Doc stepped forward and stuck a needle in Ski. Ski’s
eyes rolled back and his breath let out.

Just like that.