Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues zk-1 Read online

  “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.

  Chapter 10

  “Empire Hammer, Empire Hammer, this is Lost Boys, Fire Mission, over.”

  “Lost Boys, this is Hammer, Fire Mission, out.”

  “Suppression, over.”

  “Suppression, out.”

  “Grid, Kilo November seven niner eight three, niner four two zero, over”

  “Grid, Kilo November seven niner eight three, niner two four zero, out.”

  “I say again, Grid seven niner eight three, niner four two zero, over.”

  “Grid seven niner eight three, niner four two zero, out.”

  “Time on target 0920 hours, over.”

  “Time on target 0920 hours, out.”

  “Hammer, this is Lost Boys. Understand we want suppression along a five hundred meter line on either side of that grid, 5920 mils map north. Hammer everything east of the river, over.”

  “Understood, Lost Boys. You want to perforate every Z east of the river along that line. We’ll get back to you if we can range that. Hammer out.”

  Damn, but I loved professional artillerymen. We had given them an hour to work out their solutions, pre-fuse the BB rounds, and rehearse. Suppression, in this case, meant a couple of volleys of rounds fired along an azimuth, in this case running roughly along the route we needed to take to get to the railroad bridge. The rounds themselves were based on the old claymore anti-personnel mines. High explosive packed with thousands of ball bearings that detonated about thirty degrees up in the air. They were directional, meaning that the ball bearings would scatter in an arc downwards and out. Any Zs standing out in the open would catch a high velocity BB in the brain, hopefully, and it would clear our path. I wished we could have used this last night but arty rounds were at a premium, and I had coordinated this with the Battery Commander at Firebase Horse last week through e-mail.

  “Lost Boys, this is Hammer. We can range that, but after this you are on your own. Mike Tango Oscar, Suppression, linear target, four guns two volleys, five iterations along line. Stand by for shot, over.”

  “Mike Tango Oscar, Suppression, linear target, four guns, two volleys, five iterations along line. Standing by for shot, out.”

  The Message To Observer told us how many guns would be firing what, and that enabled me to confirm they were shooting what I needed. Firebase Horse sat in an old field just north of Saratoga Springs, or what was left of it. The wide open parking field gave the Battery open, clear fields of fire and a solid base for their 155 M-777 howitzers to sit on. It also provided a place to run patrols, clean out Saratoga of anything useful and provide fire support to anywhere between Glens Falls and Albany. The sucky part was that it sat on the edge of the fallout from the reactor at the Navy Power School in Milton. It hadn’t suffered a total meltdown, but the area west of Saratoga and southeast across Saratoga Lake up to the river had taken some fallout. Most was washed away, which is why we were OK in Stillwater, but I trusted the Army NBC guys as far as I could throw them while wearing a MOPP suit.

  At 0918, Hammer came back in the radio.

  “Shot, over”

  “Shot, out.” I answered. Meaning the Battery had fired.

  “Let’s go!” I told the team, and we shouldered our packs. Behind us stood the farm house where we lost Ski. A trail of really dead Zombie corpses led from the river to the house and inside stank to high heaven. We had waited all night for more to come from the city, but with the break of dawn, nothing showed. We buried Ski in the back yard with a rough cross over his grave. While I was digging his grave with Jacob, the others took turns cranking the handheld generators which charged our radio and other electronic devices.

  We started jogging downhill to where the Route 4 bridge crossed over
the canal.

  “Splash, over.”

  “Splash, out.”

  I motioned for the team to hit the ground. I trusted the artillery guys but I’ve seen too many rounds stray off target. A mistake on the gun line transposing numbers. A mislaid gun. The wrong charge. Plus, those BB’s came out of the rounds at a tremendous velocity and I didn’t need a ricochet wounding anyone.

  The air just above the river erupted in sharp flashes of light and then a second later an ear-splitting CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK repeated. One platoon of four howitzers, two volleys, then they shifted fire, walking it up the line I had given them.

  After a minute Hammer came back on the radio.

  “Rounds Complete, over.”

  “Rounds Complete, OUT.” And I stuffed the mike back into Jacob’s ruck.

  I waited till the rounds stopped cracking, then an additional 30 seconds.

  “GO GO GO” I yelled, and we ran, straight across the bridge and into the clouds of dust raised by the impact of thousands of high-velocity steel balls into brick buildings.

  Chapter 11

  We moved in bounding overwatch, one team walking, weapons at the ready, while the other rushed fifty meters. Then we switched. The walking team was the shooters, charged with hitting any Zs that were still standing or had been sheltered in houses during the bombardment.

  Route 4 ran through the center of the village. At one time it held shops and houses. Now, like so much of the rest of America, it was a ruin. You could tell a lot about a village by what kind of ruins were there. The older small towns held up the best, except where they had had natural gas utilities. Broken lines, storms bringing down still-live electrical lines, lightning, all combined to start massive fires that raged through whole towns and even cities. The older towns in the northeast, built before the advent of modern firefighting systems, had fared better; brick walls, slate roofs… but still, better was a relative term. Most of the cities and larger towns in America had burned to a crisp, fires raging out of control for weeks. The southwest, from what I had heard, was a ghost town.

  Everyone wore gloves and kneepads and had reinforced the knees of their uniforms because everywhere you went, there was smashed and broken glass. I don’t know why, but when the plague hit, it seemed like everyone must have gone on a rampage. Correction, everyone did go on a rampage. Looting and riots everywhere. To walk down any street in America was to listen to the sound of glass crunching underfoot. Most of had scars all over our hands from putting them down somewhere with broken plate glass. We had to be careful because even a small cut left untreated could lead to blood poisoning or tetanus. Two Missions ago we had lost a guy who had tried to tough it out when he stepped on a nail. He died in the base hospital a few months later. He died from asphyxia, his body broken and dislocated from the severity of the muscle spasms he endured.

  We almost made it to the first rail bridge before we came across any Zs. There had been a few in the street, mowed down by the artillery. There had been one big mass in the center of town. The Zs had been in the middle of tearing apart what remained of a person. What idiot had been dumb enough to walk through the middle of a town in broad daylight? Maybe it had something to do with the firefight we heard last night. A shattered AR-15 lay on the ground next to the bloody mess. The Zs were all down, perforated with dozens of holes. Bad for this guy, good for us. He had drawn the locals into the kill zone.

  We turned left onto the bridge. Once there, Brit broke out a four point rappelling harness and snapped into a thirty foot length of climbing rope. Doc and Jonesy, the biggest guys, launched her over the edge of the bridge, furiously snapping pictures, while the rest of us pulled security. She swung back and forth, trying to catch every angle, then yelled for them to pull her up. We repeated the process on the second bridge abutment, then started running back towards the canal lock.

  In the middle of Route 4, several Zs had stumbled out of houses, wandering in that hesitant way when they smelled a living person but weren’t sure if one was close. Each team took time to shoot them in the head, aimed steady shots while the other team ran their fifty meters. We knocked down three before I stopped and pulled out a thumper. I set the timer for twenty minutes, placed the little box on the ground, then kept running.

  Thumpers were little speakers hooked up to cheap MP3 players. Start it running, and depending on what track you pick, you get either an instant or set delay before it starts playing an obnoxious loud rock, rap, or otherwise bass-heavy, rhythmic tune. They were called thumpers after the way the worm riders had called the sandworms in that old sci-fi book Dune. The thumpers there were stakes with clappers set in to the sand, and their rhythmic thumping attracted the giant sand worms. Point is, the Zs would come running and stand around while the song played out, looking for the source of this evidence of living beings. Each of us carried two in our packs. They had saved our lives more than once.

  When we had gotten a good distance away but could still see where I dropped the Thumper, we all grounded our packs for a rest. Right on time, twenty minutes, 50 Cents’ “In da Club” started blaring. Heavy beat ringing out from the cheap speakers. They came swarming, milling around in a mass, trying to locate the source of the sound. Had to be more than a hundred by the time the song looped back and started playing again.

  I grabbed the mike from Jacob’s ruck. “Hammer, this Lost Boys, execute Fire Plan Bravo, over.”

  “Lost Boys, this is Hammer, Fire Plan Bravo, out.”

  I waited for shot and splash, and we watched BB rounds crack overhead, right on the spot I had planted the Thumper. Three volleys, landing on a pre-plotted grid. My GPS had told me where to drop the thumper, on coordinates I had worked out from Google Maps and shared with the artillery.

  We watched the Zs get cut down. Fighting Zs is easy, you just have to be smart about it. It’s when you fight stupid that you die.

  I yelled “I love it when a plan comes together!” and mimicked lighting a cigar.

  “Old Balls! You would remember that show,” shouted Brit at me, over the crump of the distant artillery.

  Chapter 12

  It wasn’t an ambush. More like what the Army calls “meeting engagement”. Basically, we bumped into each other.

  We were humping through the woods, avoiding Fort Ann, traveling on the east side of the river. We had our eyes peeled for Zombies, not for people. I think the sight of armed living people froze Jacob for a split second, but that was all it took. They opened fire, we opened fire and attempted to break contact, hauling ass backwards the way we came. Rounds were flying through the brush as each of us let off a magazine in the direction of our attackers and then peeled back ten meters. When the last person had burned a full mag, we tore off across an open field til we got to the next tree line, then grounded.

  “OK, give me a SITREP, everyone sound off.”

  “Jacob, I’m OK. I got zinged in the arm.” He was looking at a slight trace of blood where a round had scratched him. Doc was already checking him over.

  “Ahmed, I got two on the way back while you were all peeling back.” Ahmed had been at the rear of the column and had taken the time, as we rushed past him, each in turn, to drill two of the attackers.

  “How many?”

  “I saw at least a dozen.”

  Jonesy spoke up. ”Where the hell is Brit?”

  Then we heard her scream. Loud screams, cut off in mid screech. I tore off across the field, just as Doc wrapped me in a bear hug and tackled me to the ground. A shot zinged overhead, right where I had been running a second before.

  “Nick, NO! We are outnumbered and right now that will get you killed!” He held me tight despite all my struggles to get free, until I had calmed down. Meanwhile, Ahmed had boosted himself up into a huge oak tree, and was sighting with his binos, looking back the way we had come.

  “I see her. She is being carried… they have disappeared into the woods on the far side of the next field.”

  We moved cautiously to the sight of
the firefight. Three bodies lay there. One was dead, another was bleeding out, clutching his groin as his life drained out of a severed artery. He shuddered, then lay still. The last sat against a tree, a little further back, wheezing from a punctured lung, blood pooling in his lap as it ran out from under his dirty T-shirt.

  I approached the one up against the tree, slowly, my rifle pointed at his chest. I could hear him wheezing and he was getting paler by the second. A rusty revolver was held limply in his hand. I kicked it away. H gave no protest. He was fat, had a double chin. I knew what that meant. He was a cannibal. No one had that kind of access to fresh, fatty meat anymore in the wilds. No one except those who had crossed the line. He had prison tattoos on his hands. I knew by that where they had taken her, but I needed to know for sure before we committed to a course of action.

  “Doc, we need to question him. Help me.” I pushed the man over onto his side, the wounded side. Immediately, his breathing increased and he groaned. Doc waited for him to exhale before slapping a piece of MRE bag onto the wound and taping it up.

  I poked him in the head with my gun barrel until he showed some signs of consciousness. I wasn’t in the mood for being nice.

  “Wake up. Where are they taking her?”

  “Huh…. What? Hurts.”

  I nodded to Doc, and he gave him a shot of morphine. The mans’ face relaxed and he came back around a bit.

  “Your buddies. They captured one of our people. Carried her off. Where are they taking her?”

  “Fuck you. A female? Bet she’s going to taste good… when they’re done raping her,” he rasped.

  My eyes blazed over red, and I kicked him in the wounded lung as hard as I could, heard a rib snap. The man screamed in pain over the morphine.