Eastern Front: Zombie Crusade IV (4 page)

Luk
e puffed out his chest. “Gracie’s Jewish; she knows that the woman submits to her husband. Even she can’t resist four thousand years of tradition.”

Jack again waited for Carter and David to finish laughing, pretty sure that he heard the old pilot chuckling along with the two younger men. “Andi’s not Jewish, but I’m gonna convert so I’ll be the boss of my house too.
One henpecked husband in our family is more than enough.”

As they all felt the chopper begin its descent
, the laughter subsided and the mood turned serious as the men contemplated the drop-off and the next phase of the plan.

CHAPTER 3

The landing site was an uninhabited flood plain on the Indiana bank of the Ohio just west of Louisville. Jack and the rest of the people involved with planning the d
efense against Barnes’ attack had agreed that the main advance north through Kentucky would lie west of the Cincinnati area. With the Appalachian foothills to the east and heavily populated metro areas to the north, Barnes would probably want to veer to the more open ground of central Kentucky as he moved toward Indiana.

Jack had earned his
Ph.D. in medieval warfare, but he loved American history as well. After looking over the U.S. atlas for a while he’d realized that this had all taken place before, in the maneuvers and battles of the Civil War. Barnes was moving a massive infantry force by foot through Tennessee and Kentucky. The same geographical features that had dictated the movements of the armies of the Union and Confederacy would almost certainly affect the host of infected heading north from Georgia.

Jack believed that Barnes would lead his army over the Tennessee River by way of the I-24 bridges in Chattanooga. If the Hoosier
s were lucky, some group of survivors would be based in that area, because the hunters would be funneled into very tight spaces in the city where a strong resistance might be able to slow or stop their advance. If that didn’t happen, which it almost certainly wouldn’t, the ghastly army would be free to head toward Nashville. Once past the Music City, Barnes could allow his forces to spread out and advance through northern Tennessee on a wide front.

The logical target at that point would be Fort Campbell, Kentucky, former home of the Army’s 101
st
Air Assault Division. The helicopter facilities on that base were extensive, and in spite of the fact that the military had spent all of its troops and munitions in the war against the infected, a conflict that ended in the annihilation of those human forces, fuel and parts should still be available. Jack just couldn’t believe that Fort Campbell wasn’t part of Barnes’ long-term plans to conquer North America. Nevertheless, the psychopath could leave that objective to his subordinates and push through the Bluegrass State as quickly as possible in order to move into Indiana where he could get at Jack and his people.

The key factor in predicting where Barnes would attempt to cross the Ohio River was the movement of the cattle herds he was using to feed the flesh-eaters as they advanced northward. If the hunters were his only concern
, the general should head directly toward Louisville and cross into Indiana there, but moving cattle through the city would be difficult and time-consuming. With that in mind, Jack believed that Barnes would avoid Louisville and head for the bridge just west of Brandenburg, Kentucky. The livestock could avoid any urban area by crossing at that point.

Another problem
Barnes would face in his attack on Jack’s settlement was the geography of southern Indiana. Much of the area between Louisville and Evansville was full of high hills and woods that stretched almost to Indianapolis. National and state forests were dotted with lakes and road-less stretches that would hamper the movements of any pre-modern military force. The best choice for the hunter-army, once across the Ohio, would be to head northeast into the flatlands of eastern Indiana. Once the flesh-eaters made it to that point, there would be nothing but a few small rivers between them and Fort Wayne.

And Fort Wayne wasn’t the only concern—back in Noble County, farmers from Utah and Indiana were
finishing up the harvest, now focusing on the hard seed corn needed for animal feed. Building up supplies of horses and livestock was also a priority out in the county. They were attempting to accomplish all of this with a minimal labor force, guarded by an even smaller security contingent, covering a substantial rural expanse. Still, thanks to the Battle of the Castle, and the mass routing of the infected at nearby Chain O’Lakes State Park, Noble County was relatively infected-free. That would certainly change if Barnes could find a way to march his massive hunter army into Northern Indiana; Fort Wayne would be his first target, but it wouldn’t be his last.  

Jack realized that he was building prediction upon presumption several times as he tried to determine Barnes’ march to the north, but with absolutely no information coming out of Tennessee and Kentucky
, he had to form some type of response to the threat. The safe play was the destruction of all the bridges over the Ohio River, and even though that was the plan, resources were extremely limited, and it would take time to wreck them all. He had to pick the most likely places where Barnes would move and act on his best guess; there was no other choice.

With two choppers still running from the three captured at the airport during the Battle of Fort Wayne
, there was transportation for a second mission. John and Tina Shea were leading a team of explosives experts and a structural engineer from the Mormon contingent in a second Blackhawk. John had been Jack’s platoon leader in Afghanistan, and his wife had been an Army MP who had already demonstrated her combat and leadership abilities since the outbreak began. Their mission was to fly directly onto the I-64 bridge east of Jack’s landing zone, and render every span over the Ohio between Louisville and Cincinnati unusable. Everyone had agreed that they were better off safe than sorry when it came to preventing Barnes from crossing the river with his hunter-army. Nobody believed that the general would lead his host of infected in any direction other than Indiana, but they were determined to prepare for the possibility.

Bridge-blowing was going to be a d
ifficult job for both teams since the river was spanned in more than thirty locations in Ohio and Indiana. There were fewer bridges leading from Kentucky into Illinois, but Jack strongly suspected that they would have to be destroyed as well. Some of the people at the settlement had claimed that blowing the bridges would hurt future economic growth once the war was won, but ultimately they’d accepted the opinion of Jack and the others who argued that victory on a continental, or even state-sized scale, seemed unlikely at this point in the conflict.

A mill
ion Mormons and other citizens of Utah had managed to secure the Salt Lake Valley through a fortunate combination of great leadership, favorable geography, and a fierce will to resist the hordes of infected in the weeks following the outbreak. Their leaders believed that several hundred thousand more Americans were surviving in the Rockies, but ultimately such a large group of people was going to have food-supply problems in the mountainous region. They would need the agriculturally blessed Midwest if they were to survive in the long term.

The main problem was that the folks
living in the American heartland, urban and rural, had likely been close to wiped out in the first few weeks of the outbreak. Jack’s group had survived because he and Carter had prepared for the possibility that the nightmare disease they witnessed in Afghanistan would begin to spread around the world. They’d spent substantial time and money building a huge castle-like home surrounded by a massive earthen berm. They successfully defended the fortress against thousands of infected, but eventually decided to relocate to the river-banks of Fort Wayne where they had more space to grow and better transportation options. They only knew of one other group of survivors in the region—that settlement was spread across a few islands in Lake Erie—though Jack and his followers were hopeful that other settlements were out there still undetected by Barnes and his phony government forces. The forbidding north woods of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota almost certainly held many other survivors, but their numbers would be small, and until hunger drove them south they were on their own.

The virus had arrived on U.S. shores in late May, and within a few weeks spread throughout North America. Millions of acres of corn, beans, and wheat had already been planted by the time the nation was overrun, and one of the first questions the Utah leaders had for Jack after radio contact was established in late August was if the Indiana settlement needed help with the harvest. The reality was that nobody in Indiana had given the harvest much thought, seeing as how they only had a few hundred survivors in their group and packs of hunters were still roaming the countryside at will. But after hearing the Mormons’ suggestion of opening
the old Union Pacific rail route to Chicago if Jack’s people could clear the CSX line into the Windy City, everyone was determined to make it happen.

In spite of some desperate fighting and heavy casualties, the railroad-link had been established. Soon after, grain and military advisors be
gan flowing west while medical supplies, fighters, and beef came east. Now, a limited harvest was taking place in northern Indiana fields protected by Mormon troops while combines were operated by surviving farmers. The alliance had been cemented in blood, and Jack knew that with western help, America had a chance of surviving the deadliest virus in history.

In his heart, Jack
believed that eventually the humans would win their war against the infected and resettle the best locations on the continent, but hoping to utilize existing infrastructure after they did so was a pipe-dream. Every major American metropolitan area had likely burned shortly after succumbing to the virus due to unmitigated natural gas explosions, electrical fires, and whatever else causes falling cities to incinerate. Roads and bridges still stood for the most part, but Jack knew that nature would quickly reclaim them without the constant maintenance a nation of hundreds of millions had once provided.

The history professor knew that in many ways the collapse of society had tossed the su
rvivors back to the 19
th
Century, at least as far as transportation was concerned. The rivers and Great Lakes would be critical to the success of the war and subsequent rebuilding efforts. The hunters were afraid of deep water, and the country was full of boats of every shape and size imaginable. From canoes to great barges, the rivers could be used to safely move people and goods throughout the eastern and middle parts of the nation. On the Great Lakes, tens of thousands of watercraft ranging from fishing boats to ocean-going freighters were sitting in ports just waiting for people to use them again. Jack was willing to save the bridges that could be kept without endangering his people, but with few exceptions, he would destroy the spans if they were of any potential use to the enemy. He would fight to keep the railroad bridges along the Union Pacific line, but beyond those he considered the structures expendable.

Jack felt the chopper land a split second before Todd barked, “Go, go, go!
”

The night was dark
and unseasonably cold, with a half-moon intermittently blocked by clouds. All of the soldiers, including the men in the cockpit, wore high-quality NVGs that allowed them to easily view the landing site as they approached. Neither Todd nor the pilot reported seeing any hunters before the men pulled off their headsets and jumped out, but Luke, Bobby, and Marcus immediately set up a defensive perimeter with their backs to the river. Jack, Carter, and David pulled out all of their gear as quickly as possible; the SOAR inflatable rafts and two bellows-style air pumps were the last items removed. Jack gave Todd a thumbs-up signal, and the Blackhawk lifted from the mud and headed toward the small hills at low speed.

As soon as the Blackhawk pilot reached the far edge of the flood plain
, he began executing slow turns above the trees that gradually took the helicopter further and further away from the drop-site. The men hoped that any hunters in the surrounding countryside would be attracted to the sound of the rotors and follow the chopper’s route inland. Also, the noise created by the Blackhawk would help mask any sounds Jack and his crew made as they inflated the watercraft and loaded them with gear.

Problems began when one of the pumps, which were
each operated by foot, inexplicably cracked open and would no longer hold air. The raft was about halfway filled when the pump died, leaving David to wait for the first boat to finish with nothing to do in the meantime but add his eyes to those keeping watch over the site. The sounds of the Blackhawk were fading when he heard a splash upstream, turning just in time to see a small pack of hunters trotting single-file along the bank of the river. He quickly estimated their numbers at seven, and then looked over to make sure that Luke, on the eastern edge of the three-man defensive perimeter, had heard the commotion as well.

Fighters all over the country had learned the hard way that close-combat with the hunters while wearing NVGs was downright perilous. In any sort of a scrum in which humans relied upon
hand-held weapons and their armor to protect them in close combat, there was a very real threat of having the goggles pulled off by a grasping flesh-eater, leading to momentary blindness. A moment of indecision was usually all the hunters needed to take a soldier down, and Carter had lost a number of seasoned veterans in the Chicago train yards when a large gathering of infected had managed to ambush them at close range. David decided to pull his goggles off, but noticed that Luke was keeping his on as he quickly strung his bow. For the moment the clouds had drifted away from the half-moon now glittering off the relatively calm river, so David planned to use the reflective surface of the water to silhouette the creatures as he took aim with the Trajicon sights on his silenced .22 pistol.