Zombie Killers: Ice & Fire (4 page)

Chapter 10

The flare I had just tossed down the stairwell fell about five feet then bounced back. Below me, in its sputtering glare, the entire stairwell was blocked by corpses. They had been jammed packed against the door, and as they rotted over that horrible, hot summer, they had collapsed in on themselves. My guess is that the door had been locked from the inside, something I confirmed from the lock that Jonesy’s prybar had popped out of the wood inside the door frame.

We saw things like this a lot when entering towns and buildings that had succumbed to the Zombie Apocalypse. It wasn’t the Z”s that killed them, it was panic. If they had just kept their heads, maybe they could have figured out how to open the door and blockaded themselves on the roof until something else could be thought of. The smell wafting up from below confirmed something I had already suspected. There had been a serious fire down below, and all these people had packed in here and died of smoke inhalation. 

When I had stopped short, seeing what was below me, the rest of the guys had piled up behind me and actually tripped over each other. I backed out slowly to avoid them. Jonesy was laughing as Ahmed helped Hernandez get back to his feet. “Way to go, noob!”

“What’s up, Nick?” Doc asked. We circled the team to hold a conference.

“Stairs below is packed with corpses. Probably they holed up in the building, thinking the stone walls meant safety. Someone got careless with a flame and there was a major fire.”

“That doesn’t bode
well for us finding useable machinery here.”

“Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, we still have to get down.
Break out the ropes.”

We secured several ropes to the Air Conditioning units fixed to the roof, and dropped them over the sides, then snapped into rappelling harnesses. Jonesy and Doc went down first, going over the edge and down to the fourth floor windows. These they smashed out using a cloth over a baseball bat, to minimize the noise. I had sent these two down first, because pulling yourself in through a window isn’t like in the movies. You don’t just rappel down and swing in. More often than not, you’ll bounce off the window, or cut the hell out of yourself AND get stuck in the frames. Jonesy and Doc were the only two who had the brute strength to manhandle themselves quickly and quietly in through the windows. I waited while the
y scouted out the floor below us.

“Nick, looks like they tried to barricade the ground floor, like you thought. Bad fire. Everything is trashed.”

“OK, we’ll come down and move to a different part of the plant, get settled in for the night and I’ll send my report to higher. Judging from the rest of the town, this place is a wash.” As I talked to him, the snow had cleared and we looked out over devastation. Most of the town had burned down to the ground. Only brick buildings still stood, and chimneys.

Behind me I heard a commotion, then a yell. I turned in time to see Collaton catch a right hook across the face from Brit. He started to swing back at her, but Ahmed grabbed his arm, twisted it behind him, and dumped him on his ass in the snow. Brit was shaking the hand that she had punched him with, grimacing in pain. 

“Do not put your hands on her again, do you understand me?” Collaton winced as Ahmed lifted up on his arm.

“Sure, I get it, she’s your woman. You should have just said something.”

“My woman? No, she is a soldier. Like you. Like me.”

“OK, OK.”

I looked at Brit’s hand, which had already started to swell.

“Looks like you might have broken something. Next time, don’t use your hand. Use something harder. What happened?”

“I was getting my harness on, asked him to tighten the straps, and he used that as an excuse to squeeze my ass. Next time, I’m going to shoot him.”

“You have my permission. Think you can still use that hand to get down?”

“Yeah, I’ll be OK.”

I walked over to Collaton. “You heard her. Next time you play grab ass, she’ll shoot you.”

“I was just trying to have a little fun.” he mumbled.

“I don’t care. She’s your teammate, hands off.” He gave me a pissed off look, then reached down to shrug into his own harness. Hernandez stepped over to help him.

“Smooth move, bro.” I overheard him say. I wasn’t sure about the reply I heard, but it sounded like “Screw that Bitch”.

One day into the mission, and we already had problems. A possible broken hand and a definite attitude problem.

Chapter 11

We moved out slowly through the burnt out factory. Milling machines lay in rusted and slagged heaps. Only six months since the breakdown, and everything that the world had run on was falling apart. Of course, the fire didn’t help.

I put Collaton on point, and kept Brit towards the back. Problems between people in such a small unit were one of
leaders’ worst headaches.  Like a piece of sand in the gears of a machine, it will wear away until the whole works stop, usually violently. I couldn’t afford that; I would have to sit both Collaton and Brit down and talk to them. Later, when we had settled down for the night. Right now my main concern was getting a place to fort up, so we could check out the rest of the factory tomorrow in the day. I didn’t want lights to show, even in a snow storm.

We stopped a
t the fire exit of a stairwell. The door led out into a parking lot; across the street there was a row of sturdy brick row houses, ideal to spend the night in. We pushed open the door gently, but it still screeched a bit on the hinges. I cringed, but nodded to Collaton to move out into the steadily falling snow. Hernandez knelt just outside the doorway, scanning the buildings with an infra-red sensitive scope. Collaton moved about fifty meters, then Ahmed passed me. Reaching Collaton, he moved out another fifty meters. In this way, we crossed the parking lot, keeping each other separated if we happened to stumble across a Z. We would lose only one man, and have time to take them both out, but close enough that we could quickly form a coherent defense if attacked by a group. On the bad side, you were on your own if you did happen to run into one, oh well. Hopefully someone else would take them down for you, but grouping up to provide a base of fire had been a hard lesson to unlearn. I rolled up the rear of the column, joining them at the doorway to one of the houses.

“Hernandez
, Collaton, O’Neil, you stay here. Watch our six.” Brit shot me a dirty look, but tough crap. She would have to deal with it, and I was pretty sure neither of them would try anything stupid with her in the middle of clearing a house. I led the stack, shotgun at the ready. I had a suppressor the size of a coffee can screwed onto the front, and it would still make a loud coughing noise, but hopefully that wouldn’t carry over the snow. The rest of the guys carried their pistols down in the low ready.

The fear that always gripped me when we entered an unknown building was building up inside again. I felt Ahmed’s hand on my shoulder, and tried to push
the fear back down inside. No matter how many times I had done this, it always felt like a knot in my stomach. Inside could be anything, from a howling undead to a survivor pointing a shotgun back at me, to nothing at all. I flicked on the flashlight and reached over to check the lock. I would have preferred to be able to lock the door later once we had settled in, but this one was locked already. I raised the shotgun and fired directly into the deadbolt, blowing the door open, then stepped inside, into a dark hallway.

I knew that smell. Rotted, undead meat
. Undead. I covered my sector, sweeping the shotgun from left to right, but nothing showed. I didn’t have to say anything to the rest of the guys, they knew the smell as well as I did. A set of stairs let up to the right, and to my left, an entrance to a dining room. I kept the12 gauge pointed down the hall, and Ahmed aimed his pistol up the stairs. Jonesy stepped past me into the dining room, looking for the red glow from Zombie eyes. We worked our way around this way through the kitchen, the rear most man, Ahmed, keeping watch behind us, Jonesy and I alternating entering each room. Nothing in the kitchen, or a back bedroom. We moved back into the hallway, calling out softly to the rest of the team so they would know it was us.

Upstairs, the same thing. Nothing except three empty bedrooms, two of them decorated with the typical kid stuff. I started to relax, but then remembered we had to check the basement.

“Basement” said Ahmed, and I nodded. He wouldn’t forget. The guy was a machine; he never missed a step. Jonesy chuckled to himself.

“
Whooboy, I know how you love basements, Nick.”

“Suck it.”

“No thanks. I didn’t do it in prison, and I ain’t gonna do it now.”

I ignored him and moved on down the stairs
, waving Brit and the rest of the team in. The entrance to the basement was under the stairway, and I put my hand on the doorknob.

“Hey Boss, want me to go first?”

“No Hernandez, I got this. Get a little more experience under your belt, then you can be my guest.”  I was sweating under my mechanics gloves. For some reason, Undead always tried to hide in the basement. I just didn’t like them heading down into the darkness where anything could reach up from below. I would have killed to be able to throw a flashbang down the stairs, but I couldn’t, since we were trying to be quiet. Likewise for a magnesium flare, it could easily burn the house down. I compromised and cracked open a chem light, shook it, opened the door, then tossed it in. I quietly shut the door, counted to five slowly, then opened it.

The sickly green chem light gave illumination to three figures, hunched over the light, trying to figure out what it was. Or whatever Zombies do. When they heard the door open, they turned as one at the sound and launched themselves up the stairs at me.

I fired once, catching a fat adult male in the neck. The impact of the buckshot ripped half his neck away and spun him around onto the others. I madly pumped another shell and fired again, taking off the top of his head. A line of holes appeared in the drywall in front of me as Ahmed and Jonesy, hearing the loud COUGH from my gun, fired blindly into the basement. One of the Zs, a little girl, went down, a 9mm slug catching it in the side of the head, but the last, a gawky teenaged kid, rushed up the stairs at me. I fired again, blowing a hole in the Zs’ stomach, and tried to back up, but tripped on the top step, falling backwards, landing on my ass. The thing reached for my leg and grabbed hold with a grip of steel, trying to bite me. I kicked out as hard as I could with my other boot, but it didn’t let go. Shit shit shit. The pants leg of my cheap ass Army Combat Uniform ripped, and his hand slid off. Ahmed coolly placed his pistol next to my face and fired directly into the top of its head. I turned away just as he fired, avoiding getting any of the brain, bits of skull and gore that splashed back on my face into my mouth. My hearing was going to be crap.

“You know, hollow points are illegal under the Geneva Convention, right?” laughed Doc as I tried wipe off the gore from my uniform.
“Good thing none of that got in your mouth, or Ahmed’s next one would have been through YOUR head.” We were gathered in the kitchen, and had a propane lantern running, after putting heavy sheets over the windows.

I picked a piece of bone out of
the sleeve of my Gortex jacket and threw it on the floor. “Shut up. THAT is why I don’t like basements. Do me a favor, set up the Guard roster. I’m going to see if there is any water pressure, try and maybe clean some of this up, and get some sleep. Put me on for the two to three watch.” He left me there as I started on cleaning my shotgun.

Chapter 12

I woke up at a noise. I could hear snoring coming from Doc, who lay in his sleeping bag on the opposite side of the bed from me, his feet up by my head. Despite the cold, I only had my bag draped over me, as did Doc. Out in the
wild, there might not be any time to unzip yourself from the bag. I quietly slipped it off me, listened intently. There was a scuffling noise out in the hall, where, by my watch, 02:21, Collaton should be on guard. I also heard snoring coming from the hallway. The son of a bitch was asleep.

I reached out and shook Doc’s foot. He rolled out of bed, pistol at the ready, instantly awake.
There was a chemlight burning in the hallway, and I could see Collaton’s feet through the doorway. He was apparently sitting in a chair, snoring away. Doc looked at me, and I pointed to my ear, then pointed down. Noises, downstairs. He nodded, and I went to the doorway, staying low. To my right, Collaton kept snoring. I could hear faint music coming from is directon. Holy crap, the kid had earphones in! On my left, a bulky figure was slowly trying to make its way up the stairs, treading on the outside of the steps to keep them from squeeking.

As I raised my pistol to take a shot, the door to the next bedroom at the top of the stairs opened, and Hernandez stepped out, unarmed, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He was directly in my line of fire, and stopped when he saw the figure in the shadows at the top of the stairs.
I heard the twang of a crossbow, and Hernandez was driven backwards, up against the wall. As he started to slide down, I fired twice into the attackers’ center of mass, the suppressor only letting out a popping sound. He grunted and fell backwards down the stairs, knocking down another person coming up the stairs behind him.

Collaton woke with a start, and jumped up. “Holy Shit!” he yelled, and fired off a long ragged burst from his M-4 at the figure
s tumbling down the stairs. The gunfire was incredibly loud in the enclosed space, and my ears rang. Doc punched him as hard as he could, knocking him down. As he fell, I grabbed his rifle and yanked it from him. Now we were truly screwed. Every single zombie in a mile was going to come running. 

Downstairs a chorus of yells erupted, and Jones and Ahmed appeared in the doorways of the other bedrooms,
guns at the ready, Brit looking out from behind Ahmed. I heard the front door slam, and assumed the raiders had made their departure after finding us too hard to chew on.

“Doc, check Hernandez. Jones, tape that
fuckhead Collaton up. Ahmed, follow me downstairs. Brit, see if you can get up on the roof and see anything.”

As I passed Hernandez, he ga
ve a cough that splattered blood. Doc was right behind me, and I had to ignore Hernandez until we knew the downstairs was clear. Ahmed followed me down the stairs, both of us with the tactical lights on our pistols shining. As we passed the crumpled figure at the bottom of the stairs, I fired once into his head and once into his chest, just in case. We cleared the downstairs, finding nothing except the front door slightly ajar and snow tracked into the front hallway. As Ahmed went to shut it, an arrow slammed into the door, along with a shout that echoed clearly in the crystal clear night air. “Fucccckkkkk youuuuu, you government assholes!”  

“Ahmed, stay here and keep an eye on things. I’m going to check on Hernandez.” As I went back up, I stopped and examined the corpse on the floor. He was dressed in a heavy, soiled army surplus parka and dirty jeans. He had a cheap 9mm pistol strapped to his leg, and a few extra magazines in his pockets, along with some extra loose rounds. A heavy hunting crossbow lay on the floor next to him, and he still grasped an extra arrow in his dead ha
nd. Under his shirt was a police issue Kevlar vest. One of my shots had caught him in the throat, another in the side of his head, and his brains had slid out of the exit wound. Makeshift plastic armor covered his arms and legs, protection against zombie bites. I felt no sympathy for him or the rest of his crew. They could have come to us openly, and they would have been on an evac bird in the morning.

Upstairs, Doc stood over Hernandez, blood up to his elbows. As I got to there, Bri
t knelt and put a shirt over the kids’ sightless eyes. Jones stood over Collaton, who had duct tape securing his ankles and wrists, and a piece of tape over his mouth.

“We gotta move. That gunfire is going to bring every Z in town down on us, and there a bunch of
Reavers camped outside the front door. Pack up everything and be ready to go in five minutes.”

Brit stood up. “What about Hernandez body?”

“Leave him, nothing we can do about it. Take his dog tag, and mark his position in the GPS. Mortuary Affairs can recover his remains when we take back this shitty town.”  Doc nodded and broke the chain holding the ID tags, putting one in his pocket and placing the other in Hernandez’s mouth, then closing it gently.

Jonesy nodded down at
Colloton. “What about this piece of crap?”

I looked down at him. “You know the penalty for sleeping on guard.” Collaton’s eyes grew wide, and he started shaking his head violently back and forth, trying to speak behind the tape.