Zombie Killers: Ice & Fire (13 page)

Chapter 12

Out of the dust and smoke stepped the guy in the black duster, pistol hanging low down at his side. He walked slowly up to us, eyes scanning around the area. He walked up to me, nodded to Doc, and stuck his gun back in his belt.

“Gunslinger, have you seen Flagg?”

“No, we lost him in the confusion. Just want to warn you, in a few minutes, this place is going to be turned in to a cinder. Helo takes eight,
there’s only seven of us.”

He seemed to think about it for a few seconds.  A look of longing showed on his face, but he shook his head.

“I have to follow Flagg where ever he goes.”

“In a few minutes, he’ll be toast. He isn’t going anywhere.”

“Regardless, I have my duty, just as you have yours. Maybe we’ll ride together in another life. Good luck, gunslinger.” He held out his mutilated hand, and I shook it.

“Nick. Nick Agostine.”

“Roland. Roland Deschaine.” With, he strode off into the camp.

Brit looked at him go. “Frigging wackos. Both of them.”

Red handed me the handset to the radio. In the distance, I we watched the surviving HUMVEE from the patrol charge across the square, mowing running people down and bumping over bodies. They knew what was going to happen, and were trying to get out. It seemed like they would, but a steel barrier shot out of the ground, closing the gate. They hit it at about forty miles per hour and stopped dead. A horde of Z’s came howling after them. The gunner let loose a wild burst from his machine gun, blowing bloody holes in bodies, but they still came on. The gun jammed and he pulled out his pistol, firing until the slide locked back. He might as well have been spitting into a wave. They swarmed him and tore him apart. None of us moved; our survival now depended on staying out of the way.

“LOST BOYS, THIS IS WARBIRD, FIVE MINUTES OUT.”

“Roger, Warbird, be advised, LZ may be hot.”

“UNDERSTOOD, LOST BOYS. MACGUIRE RIG
EXTRACTION. MARK SMOKE, OVER.”

Ziv pulled the pin in a red smoke grenade, flipped off the spoon, and tossed it between us and the horde. It started billowing out, blocking the massacre in the square from view. An MH-60 Special Operations helo popped over the fence, the rotor wash sucking up the smoke into a giant swirl, and held at a hover thirty feet up. Two ropes bundles fell out, one from each side.
Machine gun fire started raking the crowds on the other side of the smoke. The pilot wasn’t going to risk his multimillion dollar, rare post apocalypse aircraft by setting it down into chaos.

“HOOK UP!” yelled Doc. One each rope were four slings that clipped around a person’s chest. I slung mine under my arms and turned to check Red’s sling, making sure it was tight. He checked Ziv’s, and Ziv checked mine. On the other sling, the rest of the team did the same. The crew
chief leaned out, saw that we were ready to go, and the rope tightened and heaved us up in the air.

Below us the camp was a madhouse. Tents were burning, and people ran
in every direction, being chased by undead. Gunshots echoed, and a mob was pressing at the front gate. Steel barriers had blocked their exit, and they were trying to knock down a section of fence. As we rose, I closed my eyes. Thousands of men, women and children. All dead because of me.

We spun in our harnesses as the chopper turned east, dipped
its nose, and poured on the power.   

Chapter 13

As we flew, twisting in the wind, I could faintly hear Brit screaming and yelling over the thud of the rotor blades. I craned my neck to try and see what was wrong, but the wind tore at my vision and I could only get occasional glimpses of he
r. Nothing I could do about it till we hit the ground.

We flew steady on for ten minutes, then swung around a road cut. The pilot set the ropes down on the ground, and we unsnapped as he landed and powered down. The crew ran past us, pointing to a ditch on the side of the road, with the side of the hill between us and the camp, twenty kilometers away. I put my hands over my ears, opened my mouth and squeezed my eyes shut.

The flash, twenty clicks away, burned through my eyelids like a giant flashbulb, even though the hill was in the way. When the first shockwave hit, it came through the ground. We were bounced two feet off the ground. Then the blast wave came thundering over the hill, first rushing past us as a hot wind, then come back the other way as the mushroom cloud sucked in air to feed itself.

The camps were built on ten feet of concrete
to prevent fallout, and the nukes were set for a low airbusts to maximize the heat scorching everything. The only way to be sure was to kill it with fire. The camps themselves were downwind and miles from any kind of civilization. Any Z’s that escaped and made their way into the country side would be hunted down by air patrols with radiation detectors. They would be glowing white hot on any scanner.

When the wind had died down, I crawled over to Brit. I was worried that she had caught a stray round as we were leaving the camp, and in our rush to seek cover I hadn’t had time to check on her. I put my hand on her shoulder as she sat up, covered in muck from the drainage ditch.

“Hey, are you OK? What was all the screaming about?  Are you hit anywhere?” I started to look her over for bleeding, but she pushed my hands away and started rubbing her chest.

“My
goddamned boob got caught in the sling, and it was pinching the whole fucking way here. Mother of God that shit hurt!”

The team laughed, as behind us, the face of Shiva, the Destroyer, lifted itself into the skies.

Epilogue  

Three months later

We stood on the shoreline of our island in the Hudson River, thirty miles north of Albany. Canoes were tied up the dock, and the team was loading lashing gear and extra ammo into them.

Doc shouldered his aide bag and his Second in Command, Staff Sergeant Toshi, handed him his M-4.

“Sure you don’t want to go with us? Just a quick trip up river to Burlington. Easy vacation.”

I shook my head. “Nope. We’re done, Doc. Gonna dig some dirt, grow some corn.”

“And make babies!” said Brit.

“Well, practice, at least” I said.

It was true. I was done. The nightmares still came, but at least my hands had stopped shaking. I needed peace, and quiet. I had been fighting for more than two years, first in survival mode, then by order of that fickle parent, the military. We needed to settle down, to start over.

I would miss it, though. These were my friends, my brothers, going in harms’ way, and I felt guilty. Had I really done enough? I felt the phantom pain where my leg used to be, that itch that I could never scratch. Yeah, it was never enough, but sometimes you just had to call it quits.

“If you need anything, call us, and we WILL come and get you. It might take some time, but
you know we’ll be there. Even if it’s just to pop you in the head after you’ve turned Z.”

“I expect nothing less, brother.” He picked me up in a bear hug and squeezed the breath out of me.

“Put me down, you moronic biker retard.”

Brit slapped the back of my head. “That’s not politically correct, probie!”

Doc laughed and followed Toshi out to the last canoe. They shoved off and started paddling upstream, cutting a wake through the sheen of oil on it.

“Well, let’s go plant some corn.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Classified: secret

After action report:

Operation CHARIOT

Prepared by: Irregular Scout Team 5 (The Warthogs)

Authors:

Ryan
Szimanski, IST -5 Commander

Ethan
Szimanski, Team Medic

William
Szimanski, Team Marksman

Chapter 1

RYAN

They were coming at me from both sides; three of them; two on my right, and one on my left. I shouldered the carbine and fired a round into the nearest walker’s chest, causing it to crumple over for a few seconds, before it recovered and began to move towards me again.

The crowd gasped.

“The round imparts enough, um, kinetic energy into the target to buy you a little more, uh time…”

One of the remaining zombies grabbed me from behind as I tried to remember my lines. I shrugged off its grasp, spun, and slammed the wood stock of the carbine as hard as I could. There was an audible crunch, and the corpse stumbled backwards a fair distance before it began to recover. I turned to the other side, where the other two zombies were almost on top of me, shouldered the carbine, and fired two quick shots, killing both before I turned and executed the third zombie, which had almost regained its balance.

The crowded cheered.

I still couldn’t remember the spiel I was supposed to give, so I held the carbine over my head like that kid from
Red Dawn
and said “The very newest weapon design in home defense, the Springfield Self-Defense Carbine. It’s rugged, reliable, small… um, easy to operate, comes with an integrated scope, and, um, deadly effective. It comes with ambidextrous controls and is chambered for, um, let’s see.” I hit the mag release and deftly caught the drum magazine as it dropped, then slung the gun over my shoulder, and removed a round from the magazine. It was the last round. “Chambered in… um, well, it looks like .45, but I seem to remember that it can be chambered in a number of pistol calibers. It looks like it probably holds fifty rounds, but this one only had five in it. Clearly the guys from Springfield thought that would be enough for me. For more information about this weapon and how to buy one, talk to a consultant from Springfield Armory today. I think he is set up next to the stage.”

I turned and walked off the stage as the crowd applauded. The cleanup crew was removing the corpses as the next act came out.

“Forget your lines again?” asked Sgt. Rachelle Elsea, the PR person assigned to help me with these shows.

“Yeah, you know it’s kinda hard to remember stuff like that when you’re surrounded by zombies.” I explained agitatedly.

“They had their teeth and fingernails removed. We even cleaned them up so they didn’t smell as bad. We can’t have you throwing up all over the stage like you did last time. Anyway, here is your script for the next performance. Make sure you know it this time; there won’t be any zombies up there for you to kill as you collect your thoughts.”

I took the stack of papers from her and walked further backstage to review them. This show was in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The island was pretty well secured, and there was a large American population here. Now the Provisional government wanted to get them back to U.S. soil, and back behind the war effort. Since the war bonds drive they had me doing in Seattle wasn’t much of a success (who buys war bonds anymore?), they sent the show on the road to places where Americans had started to settle down again.

During the “great fall”, thousands of Americans had migrated north to try and escape the plague. Some made it, and were allowed to stay in the relative safety of Halifax. Others came by boat. The Navy and Coast Guard managed to evacuate a decent number of people from North Eastern cities, especially children.

One of the famous accounts was how the crew of the
Constitution
, which is still a commissioned Navy ship with a small Navy crew, and some base personnel from the Coast Guard Yard in Boston managed to load the ship with school kids from the area and set the handful of sails they had, and sailed the ship all the way to Halifax. She’s still here; I got a tour of her before the show started, and the crew has taken immaculate care of her. Who would have thought that a warship built in 1797 would still be in fighting shape, over 200 years after she won fame in the War of 1812?

I began to read over the script, and one part in particular caught my eye. It read, “Would everyone please stand up? Now everyone over the age of 60 please sit down, everyone under the age of 18 please sit down, and everyone with conditions which preclude them from military service please sit down. Now look around. These are the people who are not doing their part for the war effort; these people are content to stand here safely while their country is fighting for its survival…”

I ran over to Sgt. Elsea. “I can’t get up there and read this!”

“You’re supposed to memorize it, not read it.”

“That’s not what I mean. Have you looked at what this says?”

“No, the Lieutenant just told me to give it to you.” she said, referring to Lt. Dimick.

“It’s a God dammed trick to guilt kids into enlisting. If the LT wants to read it, he can, but I’m not going to.”

“But that’s why we’re here; you have to read it.”

“I’m not. Tell the lieutenant I accidentally ingested zombie blood during the Springfield demonstration, and you had to put me down.”

“You can’t just walk away; you’re helping the war effort!”

“Not like this I’m not.”

“You’ll be court martialed for desertion; besides, where do you think you’ll go? Everyone knows who you are, you can’t just blend in. I don’t like this assignment any more than you do, but we have to do our part.”

“They can’t court martial me, I’m a civilian.” I said as I turned and left.

Actually, it is still pretty unclear what I am. I was a civilian who managed to hole up on a farm until the military came back to the Wild East. Then I was on one of the Joint Special Operations Command Irregular Scout Teams. I rose to command IST-5; now I’m doing PR stunts. I don’t know if I’m military or not, but I’m pretty sure they would find a way to put me on trial if I left.

What does it matter? There’s no way I was going to guilt trip a bunch of kids into joining the Army. I got back to my trailer, took off my OD jacket, and pealed the Velcro patches off. I had one for Zombie Combat Command, one that said Zombie Hunter, an IST5 patch, a zombie combat tab, and my name tape on it. I left the American flag patch on the shoulder. Then I grabbed my big ALICE pack that I used as a bug out bag, and was already packed and ready to go. I walked out the door.

Not more than five minutes later, Lt. Dimick was screaming into my radio that I had to come back or he would personally shoot me for desertion. I patted the 1911A1 tucked into a concealed holster on my hip and smiled to myself. “I would like to see him try.” I thought to myself, as I turned off the radio.

I stopped at a pub by the waterfront, sat down, and pulled out my laptop. I logged onto the IST5 Facebook group, which had been inactive since the team more or less disbanded after the Fort McHenry disaster, and left a quick message. Then I walked up to bartender and asked, “Do you have any pretzels?”

He shook his head no, and I settled for a Coke that turned out to be pretty watered down.

I returned to the table where I had left my bag, and there was a small, hard bodied guy sitting there waiting for me.

“You look like you’re running away from something, mate.” He said.