Chaos Theory: A Zombie Novel (13 page)

We said our thanks and left with one of the escorts. Actually, I could really use an escort right about now... Brunette, five-foot six, one-fifteen, sweet rack. You get the picture, but I digress.

It would be almost ten days at Keesler before bad things happened. Ten days of relative peace, with no running. The constant reminder of our adversary as it clawed at the fences was unnerving, but it was the first long stretch of time where I wasn’t absolutely terrified.

When the shit hit, it wasn’t the dead that started it, but they sure as shit finished it.

Texas Hold ‘em

Ship got sent to help the engineers. Kat got sent to the kitchens. I got sent to the southern Wall. The Wall was actually a wicked long, eight foot chain-link fence that encircled the entire facility. I’m sure you can see where this is going, and I was more than adamant that the colonel hear my gripes that this very type of barrier is the reason a whole bunch of people were converted to the enemy back in Tennessee.

They laughed at me. Fuckers laughed. They said everybody was aware that this was just a fence, but what could they do? I was all, “Hey, why don’t you reinforce it with something?” And they were like, “Dude, with what?” Sorry about the teen-speak right there, but I’ve been spending a lot of time with Kat lately. She’s a good kid, and more like my baby sister than my daughter if that makes any sense.

So my patrol on the southern Wall (that’s the last time I capitalize wall, it was in my written orders like that). My patrol was nothing short of excruciating. Me and five other guys walking for twelve hours and looking at marshland through the holes of a chain fence. Three soldiers and two civvies. Alvarez was one of the soldiers, and when we broke for lunch, we played cards. We would rotate a guy in and out every few hands and always keep an eye out for pus bags, of which there were few. We had to radio check in every twenty minutes.

Sometimes our lunches lasted a tad more than an hour, but hardly anybody came to check up on us ever. The stray Hummer would drive by and ask how we were doing and maybe drop off a case of water, and did we see anything, did we need an MRE or ammo.

Oh yeah, they gave me my guns back, but only while I was on patrol. That was cool of the colonel. (Still a Giants fan.)

You know I never considered myself a card player. I knew how to play, but believe it or not cards are frowned upon in the joint. You take a guy for ten cigarettes, or worse, lose and don’t have them, and you get shanked. I didn’t want to get killed for cigarettes, even if they are just like cash inside. I don’t even smoke. Anyway, I may not have been the best card player, but these guys I was with absolutely sucked. I’m talking bad. Initially we had nothing to play for, so we just played for fun. Then it was little pebbles and bottle caps. One of the Hummers drove by one day and a corporal got out and handed us a bag. There was almost three hundred thousand in cash in the bag. They had rescued some folks from a bank, and the cash was just sitting there. It was just paper now. I won that entire three hundred grand in less than two hours of play time.

A little aside: no matter how rich anybody ever got, I guarantee nobody ever really wiped their ass with hundreds more than once. Guaran-damn-tee. If you’re ever desperate, and trapped in bank or something, I’m telling you, don’t. Just don’t.

The bets graduated to bunk time, or best bunk, or who would have to stand watch while the other guys played. Cigarettes, booze, and other contraband. Then it turned to food. Desserts out of the MRE. Coffee out of the MRE. The whole MRE. You get the idea. Problem is, you can’t win everybody’s food for three weeks. It doesn’t work that way.

So I mentioned before that there were two civilians. Me and this guy North. Initially I liked the guy, I really did, but he began to get kind of pricky. You know, a real prick. He would say stupid shit, like calling Alvarez a job-stealing wetback, or telling me my M4 was slung wrong, and proceeding to put his hands on me to correct it. I’m not crazy about being touched.

Anyway, we’re playing cards while one of the soldiers, Cartier (not Carter, it was pronounced Car-tee-ay, like the jewelers, but no relation.), is watching for rotters. Alvarez and I are getting smoked by North, who usually sucks as bad as Alvarez. North already has all the desserts for three days and four whole MRE’s, and the other soldiers, Westbrook and Eastham, (no shit) are getting restless. I could see it going down, this arrogant prick was going to get lynched by his own group, but he was clueless. You just don’t fuck with a man’s life, and food was life. He didn’t see it or didn’t care. Being me, I decided that enough was enough, and went all in with my three hundred grand to shut this little fucker (actually he was fat as shit) up.

“Nope,” he says to me.

“Nope?”

“Nope. That shit is worthless, I wouldn’t even use it for toilet paper.” Stinger right there. Little did he know, I had already tried the hundred dollar TP thing, and I wholeheartedly agreed with his assessment.

“Fine then, what do you want?”

He looks me dead in the eyes and says, “Cat.”

I honestly had no idea what he meant, but Alvarez flipped the safety off of his weapon and it got real. I stood up looking for rotters, still unaware of what was transpiring less than two feet away. When I saw nothing of interest, my attention focused back on North. “What the hell are you talking about? What Cat?”

Alvarez stood too, his rifle pointed toward the ground. “He means Kat.”

I know this doesn’t make any sense, but when Alvarez said her name I knew immediately what this fat asshole was saying.

“Yeah,” he began, “that hot little number you’ve been banging. You got no right keeping that all to yourself. I want a taste, and all you have to do is win this bet and I’ll go to bed alone.”

The other two directions, East and West, stood as well. The only one sitting was North, and he could fucking stay there.

“Firstly, douche, Kat is my friend. That’s it you sick fuck, she’s like my kid sister.” He harrumphed and I continued, “That having been said, if you ever even look at her, shit if you even mention her name again, Christ himself won’t be able to keep me from ripping off your head and shitting down your neck.”

He stood and folded his arms. Then he got all snide and superior. “Well how about I tell Jessup about our little card—”

He didn’t get to finish because I kicked him in the balls. He doubled over and put a hand on the ground gasping.

“Tell him whatever you want, you fucking pedophile, what I said still stands. Go anywhere near her and I will fucking kill you. I’ll sleep great after too, you fat fuck.” I pushed him on his ass, kicked the bets and cards all over the place, and spun around to join Cartier on watch. Alvarez walked away with me.

“What the fuck was that abou…” began Cartier, and his eyes grew wide.

Aww shit.

I tried to spin around to face North, and I got all the way around before I heard two shots. One was North shooting at me, and the other was West, shooting him at point blank range with his Beretta. North’s bullet sailed right past my head, it sounded like a bee. West’s bullet hit North in the side, right below his armpit, and in less than one minute of choking and gurgling, we were down to two directions.

West kicked the .38 revolver away from North’s corpse, then shot the dead man between the eyes. “Sick bastard was gonna kill you dude.”

“Thanks.”

“All good.” West ejected the magazine and jacked the slide on his Beretta, ejecting a single bullet, which he caught in mid-air. He passed the weapon and his M4 over to East.

None of us knew what to do.

“Call it in,” said West and he sat down.

Three Hummers showed up in five minutes. Twelve soldiers, Jessup included, leapt from the vehicles and approached us. The colonel, his sidearm in his hand, looked at Alvarez. “Report!”

Alvarez showed no signs of fear when he told the colonel exactly what happened. Afterward, the colonel turned around, removed his cover, and ran his fingers through the stubble on his head. “Fuck!”

West stood. “Sir, I take full responsibility, I shot…”

“Save it, Corporal,” Jessup told him. “Tell it to the court martial. Round them all up and bring them to the stockade.”

They took my guns again and I was going to the stockade.

Prison. Armageddon was here and I was going to prison. At least something was going to be familiar.

Five Star Accommodations

So they separated us. They wanted to corroborate our stories, and didn’t want us in contact with each other until the trial was over. I was grilled for about six hours at different times, maybe two hours at most at once. Just like Boston PD, they kept trying me to get to change my story, but you can’t change the truth. Well, I guess that’s bullshit, all you gotta do is lie, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t, because as the age old adage tells us: The Truth Will Set You Free.

Yeah, that’s a load of bullshit too.

My exceptionally un-free ass was lounging on a cot in a cell when Kat and Ship showed up. The MPs and a county sheriff wouldn’t let them in my cell, but they brought my buddies chairs to sit on so we could talk through the bars. The cops watched Kat and Ship like hawks though. No files in birthday cakes.

“We heard what happened,” Kat told me and looked at her shoes. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re sorry? Why are you sorry?”

“Cuz it was my fault.”

“So a fat, sick bastard wants to have his way with my kid sister but it’s her fault. Huh. Didn’t take you for a dumbass, Kat.”

She smiled and cried at the same time, “Kid sister, huh?” She wiped her eyes.

“Yeah, never had one before. I kinda like it.”

Ship passed a note to one of my jailors, who read it before giving it back to Ship to give to me.

So now you make little girls cry. Well done.

I got pissed and looked at him, but Shrek had a grin on his face like he had had shit for breakfast. He was joking. A new thing for both of us, and that was worth the prison time.

“Yeah,” I said, “kids and would-be rapists.”

Kat looked up confused. “Alvarez said you didn’t shoot him.”

“I didn’t. I just thought that his balls needed a little adjustment, and my foot acted of its own accord.” I shrugged. “It happens. I stood to walk away and the bastard drew and fired on me, trying to shoot me in the back. Westbrook shot him. I’m both happy and sad, because I wish I was the one who blasted that prick, but at the same time I’m glad his fat fingers jerked the trigger and the shot went wide.”

One of the MPs snorted. “I wish I could have shot him too.”

“Me too,” said the sheriff from out in the hall.

Everybody knew what was going on, and if that was the case, what the hell was I doing on this side of the bars?

“Wait…
Alvarez
said? You went to see him before me?” I was a little hurt. Still manly as all Hell, but hurt.

“No, he came to find us. He told us what happened.”

“Wait… What? Alvarez is out?”

Kat looked at me weird. “Out of what?”

“Jail! Prison! He was set free? What the Hell am I doing in here then?”

Before she could answer, or Ship could write something disapproving, a little soldier showed up and passed a piece of paper to the big guard, who looked at it and produced a key, “Looks like you’re out too.” Kat and the Sasquatch moved over so the guard could let me out, and out he let me.

I stood tall as a free man, and Kat did the strangest thing, she jumped into my arms and hugged the shit out of me. Ship put his massive mitt on my shoulder and nodded in what looked like relief. That was weird too.

“We heard they might execute you guys,” Kat said, “we were scared.”

“You were, huh? Both of you?” I craned my neck to look up at the Yeti. Stinkeye, but it was half-hearted, and I shook it off.

I felt great.

So of course that was when the base alarms began to sound.

Night of the Living Dead

The group of us in the stockade all looked at each other. The sound was interior and low, as Jessup didn’t want the sound of giant, building mounted alarm klaxons screaming our location to all the damn zombies in Mississippi. As it turns out, the entire dead population of Biloxi was en route to our position with or without super loud WAH-WAH-WAH sounds.

Apparently, every person that could hold a weapon and didn’t have other orders was ordered to report to the walls, which as we all remember were fences anyway. My guns were handed back to me, and I raced with Ship, Kat, and the sheriff to our bunks. We found Alvarez and Cartier getting in a Hummer, and told him to wait for us while we got our shit. We were about a half mile from the nearest fence.

We got our stuff and the Hummer was still waiting, so we jumped in, the sheriff running off to find someone. We raced to the eastern wall, which was close to the main gate, and joined a whole bunch of other scared people. Some guy I had never seen before was quietly dishing out orders and told us to pick a spot and wait. He tried to send Kat back to be an ammo runner and I told him that not only was she a better shot than anybody else out here, but if he tried to make her move an inch from us Ship would eat him. He took one look at my towering buddy, nodded, and made a hasty escape to dish out more orders.

Then we waited.

Word got around that some satellite imagery had shown a sizeable force of infected on the way to our position, and that had been confirmed via helicopter. The pus bags were en route.

Quiet settled in and everybody hunkered down behind sandbag emplacements that had been put up for just such an occasion. There was one of those LAVs about fifty or so feet from us, and two of the Army Bradleys which I thought were tanks, but EVERYBODY told me they were fighting vehicles,
not
tanks. Hey, if it looks like a tank, and acts like a tank, it’s a fucking tank.

The vehicles weren’t running, but each had a bunch of people surrounding them and tending to stuff, and the LAV had an open hatch with a guy sticking out of it. The front gate, which had a bunch of trucks jamming the opening, was about a hundred yards to the left.

Two helicopters flew over us, and moved to the east. Maybe fifteen seconds later, they unleashed hell on the ground. Big explosions lifted into the air maybe a mile out in mushroom fire clouds, and those tracer bullet thingies spit from the sky into what I can only assume was a crowd of dead folks. Watching it was sublime. We couldn’t see the helicopters, but we could see the rockets and bullets and shit they were shooting. It looked like the ordnance was just materializing and heading down. Had the approaching force been alive, it wouldn’t have been for long.

The choppers flew back past us toward the base, probably out of ammo. A plane of some kind zoomed low over us, and a bunch of people pointed and said
warthog
, or just
hog
. I learned later what that meant, but I didn’t know at the time it was an A10 Thunderbolt. A mean-ass fucking aircraft designed to wreck tanks and other ground forces. The plane made a few passes, and this time the booms and explosions were way bigger, and we could actually feel the ground shake. What sounded like a giant zipper being zipped up came from the plane’s front gun on each pass too. It was beautiful, and when the craft flew back over us, we all cheered.

It was dark, but a full moon gave off tons of light so we weren’t blind. Fires in front of us from the bombs and rockets illuminated shadows moving in our direction, but they were still far off. Of course everybody was scared shitless and I thought I could smell the fear. Turns out it wasn’t the fear I smelled, it was the dead.

The stench became palpable. It had been weak, but it didn’t build gradually, it hit us like a wall. Four out of every ten people (not me) began to retch. Nothing came into view though, at least not for us. A single shot erupted from the tower closest to us, then one of the sniper spotters in the makeshift turret came over the comm net. “Contact front!” Spotters in the other towers began echoing the contact and the snipers engaged.

“Here they come!” screamed a woman in the tower closest to us. Somebody fired a flare and then three more, and then the sky was full of them, floating down to the ground. Everyone grew silent as the flares showed us what was coming. The quiet chatter ceased even if the snipers kept up their firing. The first flare drifted down into the midst of the oncoming swarm and lit them up like the proverbial Christmas tree. It didn’t feel like Christmas.

Thousands, tens of thousands of zombies were just outside the fences.

They had been quiet all the way up to us, but apparently the flares or the moon showed us to them as well as them to us, and they began that mournful moan, full of need and iniquity. As I’ve said before, you can’t describe it, you need to hear it for yourself. And we did. We all heard it, and we all knew we were going to die.

I looked at Kat and Ship. “Do either of you have any cookies?”

Kat looked at me, terrified, but the big guy dug into his vest and pulled out one of those little packages of three cookies, the chocolate chip ones with the yellow stripe on it. As he was opening the pack with his knife, gunfire erupted from the front gate area, and then it was chaos.

Some kind of heavy machine gun opened up from one of the towers, and then from another and another. People near us began to shoot, and the soldiers started screaming for them to hold their fire. I thought the soldiers were crazy, but with everybody shooting through the fence, eventually the rounds would tear it open.

I heard FOOM! FOOM! and about another fifty FOOMs, and shit on the other side of the fence, maybe a hundred yards out started blowing up.
Mortars
somebody yelled.

Some kind of officer was standing on bunch of stacked pallets and he was yelling over the moans, “Hold your fire! The mortars and heavy guns will take care of them! Hold your fire or you’ll take the fence down!” He was talking to the civilians and mixed military that were with us.

A huge boom sounded off to the left, and fire spewed from some kind of armored vehicle. The dead were swarming the gate.

They had also reached our section of fence, and still that guy on the pallet was screaming for us to hold our fire. The zombies at the front of the horde reached their fingers through the chain link, and many tried to bite it, breaking their teeth, but that didn’t last. All their buddies behind them were pushing, and the combined weight turned the vanguard into something resembling strawberry jam. Hundreds of faces and arms were diced into little cubes as their rotten flesh was pushed through the links. The fence, which had already been reinforced, buckled and collapsed in a half mile section almost immediately.

The Bradleys and the LAV raced forward, firing their guns. Body parts and goo flew into the air, and long swaths of infected simply ceased to exist as the guns turned them into a disgusting spray.

The douche on the pallets now screamed at us to fire at will.

And we did. We shot the fuck out of those pus bags, for all the good it did. We fired and fired. I had my M4, Kat had her hunting rifle, and Ship had his HK417. Several thousand other humans threw lead down range with anything that would throw it. My .223 put holes in heads, and I’m happy to say I got my fair share to drop. Ship’s big .308 rounds disintegrated heads with a splash. There was nothing left from the upper lip up. A guy in a red Mississippi State ball cap with a bulldog on it ran over to me and handed me several magazines for my M4 and then moved on down the line. Kat ran out of ammo for her rifle, and I noticed that others were calling for ammo too. People were running back and forth distributing magazines, then it turned to ammo cans, and eventually handfuls of rounds. When it got to the cans, the dead surged forward as people reloaded their magazines. Several people picked up mags from the dirt and refilled them. These were the folks whose weapons jammed first.

I heard a guy say “Fuck this,” and he chucked something into the dead ranks about a hundred feet away. It blew, and it took out several pus bags, but in the grand scheme it was useless. The LAV and one of the Bradleys ran out of ammo, and they began running into the walls of dead that were approaching. The other Bradley turned on its tracks and zoomed off back toward the base.

It was so incredibly loud with the weapons fire and the moans and the roaring in my ears, that I either didn’t hear the screams, or didn’t process what they were right away. Ship did. He grabbed me by the shoulder and I looked up at him. Way up. He spun me like a little girl would spin a doll (an exceptionally manly doll, with cut abs), and I could see that while we were dealing with our little portion of fence, the gate section had been totally overrun.

The dead had moved into our ranks from the left flank and were beginning to snack on the unfortunates that hadn’t moved with adequate speed. A wall of rot was coming at us from two directions, and that was enough for most of the defenders. In a nanosecond, ninety percent of the living humans, both military and civilian, turned and headed for the hills. Except we were in Mississippi, and there wasn’t a God damned hill to be had. It was a slaughter. We couldn’t move out fast enough. The guy on the pallets was screaming for us to hold the line, but there was no line to hold. He went down screaming, firing his pistol as his rifle ammo had been expended.

The ammo runners tried to supply us, but they ran into our retreat and then the dead that were hot on our heels, when the runners wouldn’t listen to us about what was behind.

I was holding Kat’s hand as I didn’t want to get separated in the bedlam. You can basically see the Shipster from space, so all I had to do was turn my head to find him. The three of us got to our Hummer and Cartier got there too, but the crowd tore him apart to get the truck. Not the dead, the living. They literally broke him into pieces as they trampled and kicked him when they threw him to the ground. There was so much fighting for the vehicle that it never got the chance to move before the swarm of dead got to it. Most of the dickheads that killed Cartier followed suit quickly. I hope it hurt.

The survivors fanned out and ran to wherever they thought they might be safe. I saw a helicopter take off, then another, then another. Planes were taking off from multiple runways too, until two of them collided and a huge fireball leapt into the sky. I guess nobody was manning the towers to tell them they were going to crash.

We got to the barracks and it was bedlam. Just like the last fenced-in place we were at where zombies invaded, people were tear-assing around, gathering ridiculous items, kids, old folks, and supplies. Several fights broke out, and by the time the three of us had our shit and were out the door, gunshots were coming from inside behind us.

We ran into Alvarez, and he didn’t seem to have anything better to do than come with us. He also had a ton of .223 ammo and an extra M4, which he passed to Kat. We ran toward the motor pool, as Ship’s plane was in the hangar, and the hangar was on fire.

I saw my first zombie since the fence, and it was pretty gruesome. It was beating the shit out of a very dead man in woodland fatigues on the ground, biting and punching, and you guessed it: it was a Runner. He heard us try to run by and decided that the dead guy wasn’t any more fun and gave chase. We ran, but before we turned the corner around a row of housing, I dared glance back to see our pursuer; it was the guy who had given me ammo a couple hours before. He still had his ball cap on.

“Wait,” I hissed. The Runner came around the corner too fast and slid a little further than he wanted to going on his ass. I used the time he was taking to right himself, and fire a round into his side. He clutched at it, but when he looked at me I could tell he was more pissed than hurt. It certainly wasn’t my intent to anger him, so I shot him in the face as he tried to stand.

Kid was like, twenty two.

Darkness would only be around for another hour or so, and we really liked the cover. We saw several zombies on the way to the motor pool, and when we got there, there were three vehicles left. Two Hummers and a big troop truck. Deuce and a half I believe, the kind with that canvas cover in the back, except this didn’t have one, just the little frame for it. One of the Hummers was on blocks, and the other was claimed as the woman who was getting her kids into it pointed a rifle at us when we approached. Apparently, she didn’t want to share the ride. Kat and I put our hands up in submission, but Alvarez and Ship wouldn’t do it. She aimed at Ship and Alvarez told her she could only get off one shot and she would be dead.

That seemed to fuel her and she tossed her rifle into the vehicle and got in. She sped off, her kids crying. She banged a left, and headed directly toward the front gate and ten thousand dead cannibals. We didn’t even have time to tell her before she was gone. I hope they made it.

“We’ve got to find Reynolds,” Alvarez said, and two dead folks sauntered into the vehicle bay. He drilled both of them, and the noise reverberated through the garage resoundingly.

“I like the sarge too,” I said, “But how the hell are we going to find him?”

Ship looked about for something, then walked to a small room and kicked open a big door like it was made out of hay, a bullet whizzing past his head fired from within. With a melon the size of a wide screen TV, I have no idea how the person in that room missed him.

Someone screamed in a scared voice, “Say something or I’ll fucking shoot you!”