Gnash (21 page)

“Shit, I’d forgotten about that,” Hank said.  “Doctor, remember that part in my report about the creature who seemed to direct the others to attack us so it could escape?”

“Yes.  I’ve went over your report several times and I find that part disturbing.  That’s why I asked you if they seemed like they were running in fear or if they were conducting a sort of tactical withdrawal to save their troops, if you will.”

General Reeves rubbed his temples, “So you think these things are communicating somehow, that there’s one that’s in charge and you think they’re using coordinated tactics?”

“Sir, that’s roughly how I described it in my after action report when the creatures escaped from the Pentagon.  They were definitely using some type of rudimentary tactics.  They would attack us just a little bit differently each time, trying different formations and actions.  It turned out that their short little probing attacks were really just to keep us busy and pinned in the courtyard until they could dig their way out.”

“Well boys, this just got a lot more complicated with the addition of a second “variety” of zombies and these things showing communication skills.  I’ve got to tell General Thompson these developments right away so he can inform the president.”  The general stood up signifying that the meeting was over, “And Collins, I’ve given your request on that Air Force fellow some thought.  You can tell Colton that he’s allowed out of solitary, but he is in no way allowed to leave the decontamination facility.  He may be the only chance we have to cure this.”

The remaining two members of Delta 378 jumped to their feet and saluted.  The general rushed out of the conference room without even acknowledging that they were there.

***

06 May, 0007 hrs local

Mount Weather 

Fauquier County, Virginia
 

“Well that changes things a bit, doesn’t it?” President Holmes asked. 

“Yes sir.  The behavior was in an earlier report, but apparently it was overlooked.”

“Who the hell overlooked it Pete?  That’s a pretty damned big omission,” President Holmes asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“Sir, apparently the person who made the report wasn’t sure that the zombie had gestured towards them and that the others had reacted, so it was discounted as the soldier trying to attribute human characteristics to these things by one of our analysts.”

“Look, I don’t care if it’s coming from the goddamned janitor, if there’s some type of intelligence on these fucking creatures, I want to know about it.  This may be the biggest threat our nation has ever faced and I am not going to let this ship go down because we didn’t pay attention to all the available intel.  Do you gentlemen understand me?”

The president’s defense counsel all nodded their heads in agreement.  “I’ve seen damned zombie movies people.  If we don’t get this situation contained fast, it’s going to get out of control,” the president continued. 

“Did you see the video that came out on the internet yesterday?  Those damn terrorists are actually praising the French for ‘saving humanity’ from the infidels’ medical experiment,” he said as he made quotation marks in the air.  “So not only did they cause the situation, now they’re claiming the bigger, more destructive attack was the only way to save the population of the Earth.  Why can’t we have these guys’ marketing team?  I want our troops surrounding the city to begin moving in and closing the net to wipe out these zombies.  Have we got our troops out of Afghanistan yet?” he asked looking at the Chairman.

“Sir, the first of our light units should be back this evening.  My last update was two hours ago, we had approximately 2,000 troops in transit over the Atlantic.  We’re in the process of consolidating every piece of rolling stock at Bagram Airbase and at Kandahar to be lifted out.”

“Good.  Those first troops back go directly into the line around the city.  How fast can we get more troops in here?”

“Sir, we can expect about 3,500 troops a day for the first week, that’s roughly a brigade a day from the installations within driving distance, and then it drops significantly as we have to fly out our equipment as well,” the Chairman responded again.   

“Alright, keep our boys moving.  We can’t afford for the UN to step in here and decide they want to place troops on our soil to take care of this.  What else have you got?” 

“The First Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas retook Fort Sill, but they lost, let’s see,” the general shuffled through some papers laid out in front of him.  “They suffered over 2,200 casualties because of the artillery the militia captured and used against our troops, of those 819 were killed.  Final death toll from the militia attack on Sill is not in yet but reports say there are well over 4,000 bodies of soldiers, mostly trainees killed when their barracks were bombed.  Looks like several of the barracks had been destroyed while the trainees were asleep. 

“At Fort Riley, the ousted First Infantry Division was able to retake the installation.  The fighting wasn’t as severe there, but they still suffered 576 casualties between initially losing the base and the counterattack.  Right now the death toll stands at over 158 for that division…”

“Jesus, Pete.  Anything else from that issue?” the president asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“No sir.  Once we finalize securing those two installations, we can put another 15,000 troops into the fight here in D.C.  But as it stands we’ve currently got about 35,000 troops surrounding the destruction zone from all of the services.  We had to expand beyond just securing the city, sir,” the general explained.  “We had to re-set our perimeter to include a much wider area because there have been reports of zombies behind our initial formations.  Still no reports of anything outside of the radiation death zone, but we’ve decided to pull back and encompass the entire DelMarVa
[18]
area.  After we get fully in place, we’ll be ready to begin closing the loop and filling behind them with the inbound troops.  We can’t afford for a single one of those things to survive our sweep so we’re going to leave troops in each position and close slowly.  As more troops arrive we want to set up concentric rings and keep going until we clear the city.”

“Sounds like a solid plan to me.  We just need all the troops we can get.  Okay Rob, your turn,” the president said.  “What’s the status of the civil unrest?”

Robert Griffith, previously the Director of the FBI, but recently promoted to the Secretary of Homeland Security when the former secretary could not be found in time to be evacuated, cleared his throat and spread out a few pieces of paper in front of him on the table.  “Sir, the situation continues to be grim in most areas of the country.  As General Thompson told you, we’ve been able to retake control of the military installations that we’d lost, but at a significant loss of life.

“The cities are starting to get back under control as the police and National Guard work together.  It’s slow going, but we’re also seeing a rising number of average citizens who are fighting back against their local gangs then turning over control of the area to the law enforcement officials once they’re able to make it into the area.”

“Christ, I knew our administration and congress was unpopular, but I had no idea that it would boil over like this, especially in such a short period of time…” the president said as his thoughts drifted and he shook his head.

“Sir, it’s not all bad.  We’ve secured Atlanta and with those militias being wiped out in Kansas and Oklahoma, we believe the large organized groups that had been training and planning for a collapse of society during the end of the world in December 2012 are gone.  Now it’s a street battle with the gangs, something the cops have been doing for decades…”

“Yeah, but on a hell of a lot larger scale,” the Chief of Staff cut in.

“Now John, let the man finish,” the president admonished him.  He held up his hands in a gesture of apology.

The secretary glared at the president’s Chief of Staff.  “As I was saying, the police have been fighting these gangs on the streets for decades, with varying degrees of violence.  Now they are going at it full force and taking them out.  It’s been a bloodbath sir, but we’re getting the country back together.  One major question remains though sir, will the people who’ve formed groups to keep themselves safe be punished as criminals?”

“Let me make myself clear gentlemen,” the president said solemnly.  “We cannot afford to lose this nation to either the zombie threat or the civil unrest.  The citizens that are defending themselves, their families and their homes
are not
criminals.  Hell, they’re heroes.  Obviously, when everything is sorted out, there may be some who’ve went too far and they’ll be dealt with.  This isn’t the goddamned apocalypse and I’m not going to let the memory of Allan Gosebeck or my current presidency be tarnished by this.  We will persevere and we will take this country back. 
On our own
,” he emphasized. 

“We can’t let the United Nations put troops on our soil.  We need to get this resolved very quickly before the Security Council decides to take matters into their own hands.  You all remember Libya and Syria a couple of years ago.  It’s a little different since we’re not facing a cohesive group of rebels looking to overthrow the government, but those monkey-fuckers at the UN have been looking for ways to become the supreme force in the world and this would be a perfect excuse for them to come in here and demonstrate their power.”

The president looked around the table, “Do I make myself clear?  We need to resolve these issues now.”

TWELVE

09 May, 0939 hrs local

Three Pillars Estates

Indianapolis, Indiana

A week had passed since Grayson was rescued at the pizza shop.  In that time he’d helped the neighborhood watch set up a defensive perimeter, conduct two attacks to clear out a gang near the area and had almost been killed by a crazed drug addict with a screwdriver during a separate raid of a house that a bunch of drug dealers were staying in. 

A few days ago, he thought he would stay to help bury D.J. and be on his way, but when he saw that the local townspeople could benefit from his experience as a combat leader he decided to stay and help them temporarily.  They were good people but the men, and a few women, who made up the subdivision’s protection force didn’t know anything about tactics.  Several had been in the military many years before, but none of them had been in combat units and every one of them had been in the service between the war years.

Sam, the man who went inside and rescued Grayson at the pizzeria had been a radioman.  His wife, Gretchen, was a military police officer when they met and they both got out after their first enlistment.  Justin had been a truck driver and was now an animal control officer.  Even Curtis, the semi-official leader of the group, had been a fixed-wing aircraft refueler in the Navy before he became a financial planner.  They’d gotten some rudimentary instruction in Basic Training, seen plenty of action movies and knew just enough to get themselves killed, but they didn’t have any idea about how to really conduct an operation.

Grayson saw immediately that the neighborhood needed help to shore up their defenses against outside threats.  The entire subdivision of over 500 hundred houses was completely surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall with only three entrances to worry about.  He’d had vans and SUVs driven across two of the gaps in the fence so they could be moved for access and egress, and he semi-permanently sealed the third, unneeded exit with several rows of disabled vehicles and barbed wire.  At regular intervals, they parked vehicles along the wall to act as platforms so the defenders could see over the top of their fortifications and he had volunteers patrolling the fence with small walkie-talkies scrounged from kids’ playsets.

It wasn’t much, but he felt that he was helping these people in the only way he could.  They’d saved his life, opened their homes for him and given him food and shelter, it was the least that he could do to pass on his knowledge to them.  Originally, his plan had been to head back east to determine if Emory was still alive, but he knew she wasn’t.  A few independent radio stations had begun to broadcast again and it was clear that Washington D.C. had been at the epicenter of the nuclear attack and no one survived.  Emory lived and worked downtown, with no car to get away, even if there’d been any warning.  There was simply no way she’d survived.

So, he stayed to help.  He didn’t harbor any illusions about staying after the country was put back together, but for the immediate future, he had a decent place to stay with good people who needed his assistance and he felt like he was making a difference.

After the defensive perimeter was set, the group went after the immediate threats of the roving gangs and then the potential problem spot of the drug house.  The three operations had all gone better than he could have hoped and so far, only one member of the team had been seriously wounded.  He only hoped the National Guard or the police would show up soon because it was only a matter of time before somebody got killed.

In theory, he was against vigilantism, but it certainly had practical applications in the world they were facing.  He’d gladly helped with the marauding gangs, but he was initially against the raid on the dealer’s house.  The townspeople eventually won him over by telling him the place was a known drug hotspot for years and the local law enforcement from before the blast hadn’t been able to do anything about it.  They were afraid that when the drug stash ran out, those people would seek out new ways to get high, which included the needed prescription medications of the “rich” people in the Three Pillars Estates.

When they’d arrived at the run-down house, Grayson had noticed a large white catering van crashed into a tree out front.  That by itself wasn’t abnormal with all the anarchy around the area, but the van was actually from a bakery right around the corner from where he and Emory shared an apartment in Alexandria.  He’d peeked inside the van, to make sure it was clear, but no one was hiding inside.  The inside was an absolute disgusting mess with slime and gore over everything.