Strands of Sorrow (19 page)

CHAPTER 14

“Your daughter has showered herself with congratulations again, Captain,” General Brice said. “I’ll add mine.”

“It was certainly . . . riveting, ma’am,” Captain Smith said.

“Tanks seem to be an effective urban renewal system,” Brice said. “I’d prefer cluster bombs, but there are issues. Notably, getting the infected to . . . cluster.”

“That is the problem, yes, ma’am,” Steve said.

“You seem muted, Captain,” General Brice said. “Does that mean you don’t agree?”

“About tanks as an urban renewal program, ma’am?” Steve said. “No, I don’t, actually.”

“The Marines just did one hell of a job of clearance, Captain,” Brice said. “I was going to recommend you start focusing on getting M1s up and going despite my own background.”

“I’ll let them continue,” Steve said. “Until Colonel Hamilton has the conditions sufficient for the task force to move on. Far be it from me to harsh Faith’s vibe. But . . . have you discussed this with Commodore Montana, ma’am?”

“Just in passing,” Brice said. “We didn’t really discuss mission focus.”

“I suppose I could let him do the math, ma’am,” Steve said. “In one day a group of thirty-seven Marines in tracks were able to say ‘orange’ clear a five square mile area, ma’am. The total urban area of the United States, alone, is one hundred and six thousand, three hundred and eighty-six miles. That works out to twenty-one thousand, two hundred and seventy-seven days or fifty-eight years, ma’am. Assuming, of course, only one platoon of Marines. That ignores transportation issues, which are serious given the weight of M1s and the number of bridges that are destroyed or damaged. Coastal cities are accessible, clearly. But even the Mississippi is currently questionable as a route. What Faith did was . . . fun for values of fun. And certainly morale raising. However, tanks and troops in armored personnel carriers are not going to get the cities cleared in any reasonable time frame, ma’am.”

“What is, then, Captain?” Brice asked formally.

“Genocide, General,” Steve said, sighing. “Pure and simple genocide.”

“Are you ready to be specific, yet?” Brice asked. “You’ve indicated for some time you have a plan.”

“There is one item missing, yet, ma’am,” Steve said. “Well, two. One of them is some information I suspect Colonel Ellington will have in his remarkable brain. However, if you’d like the outline . . .”

“Please,” Brice said.

“It involves what I like to call Subedey bots, ma’am,” Steve said.

After Steve was done with the “brief outline” in no more than a few sentences, the general just looked at him for a long time.

“That is . . .” Brice said carefully. “My career, basically, has been thinking about ways to kill nations wholesale, Captain. And even
I
find that . . . cold as shit. Have you discussed this with anyone else?”

“Only General Montana, ma’am,” Steve said. “After he broke cover and on condition of silence. I’m aware that the plan would make me a bigger monster historically than Hitler. Right up there with the developer of the virus, ma’am. But it is much more efficient than driving around in a tank. However . . . morale-boosting that may be. We will drive around in tanks and APCs, eventually, ma’am. We’ll . . . clear major buildings. Get around to the remaining carriers. But only after the bots do their work.”

“It will still take a big force,” Brice said.

“Oh, enormous, ma’am,” Steve said. “At some point, we’ll stand the Army back up and that will be the main driver. And it will require lots of volunteers. I can’t really see conscription working in this environment. Cross that bridge when we come to it, ma’am. But it will work. With one more piece, we’ll be ready to start moving. And based on growth models . . . We should be able to clear the entire U.S. to, say, orangish yellow, maybe yellow, in five years. By which time we’ll be working on Europe and Asia. People are already freeing themselves in the north, ma’am, and using kinetic activity to drop the infected level even more. Drop the infected level to yellow, hell, to yellowish-orange, and people will extract themselves. And definitely drop things to yellow, at least in the U.S. Lots of guns, lots of people capable of and willing to use them. We’ll do it.”

* * *

“Gunny,” Nick said, shaking his boot. “There’s movement.”

“There’s always fucking movement, Nick,” retired Master Gunnery Sergeant James Robinson growled, taking his hand off the 1911 under his pillow.

“To be more precise, there’s music and what sounds like armor,” Nick said.

Robinson reached over, fumbled out a Marlboro Red, lit it with a Zippo that had the Globe and Anchor on the side, took two puffs, rolled over, sat up in his rack and put his feet on the floor. Oh-dark-thirty and his day had begun, God damnit. Waking up seemed to get harder and harder as he got older.

Back in the old days, soldiers used to say that when they retired they were going to buy a farm. It was so common it became the regular expression for dying: bought the farm. Robinson had grown up in rural Iowa. He knew how hard farm work was. The hell if he was going to bust his ass hauling bags of seed and picking rocks after thirty years in the Corps. He knew what he was going to do when he got out. Same damned thing he did for thirty years in: Logistics.

When—to the covert relief of Marine units all over the globe—he had retired, he looked around at Army/Navy stores. Like anyone who had an ounce of sense, he knew the world was a terrible place kept less terrible by much effort. If you were in a disaster, best possible place to be was sitting on a supply depot. Civilian equivalent was an “outdoors” or “Army/Navy” store. Pay for your supply depot by overcharging wannabes for cheap-ass tiger stripe made in Bangladesh out of finest, guaranteed-to-fall-apart-on-first-washing cotton, sell “disaster supply kits” at three hundred percent mark-up to idiots who thought the sky was falling when there was a hurricane, including corporate idiots—he’d made a
packet
off of that racket—and make sure your stock of critical items never fell below five years’ supply. Just like in the Corps. Fuck the line. They didn’t really
need
batteries. Night vision is for pussies. Let me tell you how it was back in the Old Corps. . . .

Ammo shortage? What ammo shortage? He had an FFL, and selling guns meant having plenty of ammo on hand. He bought all over the place, really got some cool ass shit in the nineties, and practiced a very strict program of “first in, keep most of it, let a
little
out especially if it was going out of date.” He still had some of that Czech armor-piercing he’d bought at auction in ’97 waaaay in the back. He’d been so miserly with his ammo, BATF finally insisted, with the rousing approval of OSHA and EPA, that he spend sixty-seven thousand one hundred and forty-eight dollars and seventy-three cents on a God-damned ammo vault. A God-damned “ammo vault.” Made him pay some bastard to build a magazine “to Federal specifications.” God-damned liberal Federal BATF assholes. Okay, so he had more ammo than Blount Island. Okay, so he was a certified holding point for civilian demolitions and if it all went off he’d take out the whole block. It still cost sixty-seven thousand one hundred and forty-eight dollars and seventy-three God-damned cents. Pissed him off.

Worst part? No matter
how
much ammo you had, there was
never
enough for a zombie apocalypse.

Good part was, a few of his regulars weren’t total asshats. So when it was clear that the worm Oroborus was turning, they’d got together and activated Zombie Plan Alpha. First, get out all the metal screening that the City of Greater Arlington in all its glory had insisted he could not install in the first place. Took one morning for that to go up. Started right after he didn’t turn around the “closed” sign. You want ammo? You want supplies? You want guns? Failure to prepare was preparing to fail. Fuck off. I’m bunkering up. Then plywood on top. Why plywood? Looked like they were just getting ready for a hurricane. More or less normal in Florida. What wasn’t normal was when the gunny called in a favor and a pallet of concertina turned up in the back parking lot. They waited till it was a for-real shit-storm for that. Took one afternoon to string the concertina on the top deck of the building. Fuck the zoning commission. If they didn’t like it, let ’em get a city inspector over and assess a fine. And zombies weren’t getting over the wire.

That’s when the families came in. Through the back. Some of the group had jobs they weren’t willing to just drop. Nick was a cop. He had to stay out. They knew that would mean the zombie plague might make its way in. Decision would be made later whether they were in or out.

Plague came in, anyway. Probably from Dolores Sims. She’d been a teacher and she got sick first. From the reports . . . could have been any of them, honestly. And if it was Dolores . . . She paid the price. That was when there were still “infected care centers” and they’d hit Dolores with a Taser before she could bite anyone, then evacced her.

But a lot of them got it. He’d gotten the flu. He’d gotten over the flu. He hadn’t turned. Shit was like that. Before he’d gotten the flu, he’d ordered everyone to rig up. Tie up that is. If they turned, that way thinking humans were in control. He hated that about zombie movies. People got bit or infected and nobody did
nothing
. Just sat around fucking crying like that ever did the world any good. And when things at the “infected care centers” went from bad to worse . . . They did what they had to do. Then Nick turned up when things just . . . toppled. They’d gotten him in using a ladder and just locked the fuck down.

They’d been locked down ever since. And the way things were going, the ladies who’d survived seemed hell bent on restoring the population. Not a one of them wasn’t pregnant.

“All right,” Robinson said, pulling on his wash-worn cammies and Altec tactical boots. “Let’s see what we got here.”

He got on some light battle rattle and took the ladder to the top deck. Sure enough, in the distance there was the sound of music, loud, and the rattle, rumble and squeal of tracks. You could barely hear the tracks over the music. There was also the occasional rattle of musketry.

“Amtracks,” the gunny said. “M1 too, sounds like. Got that extra rumble and no engine noise from the front.”

They’d seen the helos. They kept a top-watch twenty-four/seven. They’d even fired off flares to try to attract their attention. So far, the fuckers had failed to so much as waggle their rotors or whatever. This was probably the same group. But they’d never seen or heard the helos moving at night.

And these guys were blacked out. Sure as hell not for tactical reasons. The sound of the tracks reduced, they were slowing down. Then Nick jumped when there was a hellish, unholy,
Boom!
from up the road.
That
caused some light. A weird orange-purple glow.

“Heh, heh,” the gunny said. “That there was the main gun on the Abrams. Somebody done raided Blount Island. I guess that group that says it’s out of Gitmo.”

“What do we do if they’re not for real?” Nick said.

There’d been a lot of discussion of the radio reports. From the beginning, the radio waves had just been crazy. With no controlling authority anywhere to tell people they couldn’t broadcast, even before the Fall, anyone who could get ahold of a transmitter was broadcasting.

Just a month ago, what were alleged to be “U.S. Government” broadcasts started. There’d been other people saying they were the U.S. Government but mostly you could tell the crazy ones. These guys were more professional. One stated it was the “Voice of America in Exile,” another was “Devil Dog Radio,” which interspersed news and commentary with heavy metal and rap, and “Anchors Aweigh,” the Navy, which was mostly easy listening. All said they were broadcasting from Guantanamo, that there was a “continuity of government” in a secure facility in the U.S. and that there were plans to clear the U.S. mainland. But they also said they were keeping the plans confidential until action was taken. “To retake our nation and our world from the threat of the infected” as the VOA in Exile put it. “To render aid and comfort to the afflicted” was how Anchors Aweigh put it, pointing out that “afflicted” no longer meant “infected.” Or “Put a hurtin’ on the Gawd Damn Zombies” in the words of Devil Dog.

All three occasionally had discussed the formation of “Wolf Squadron” and notable actions. When the group in the store discussed the radio reports, which was most of the time, there being not much else to discuss, they’d all agreed that shit like clearing the
Voyage Under Stars
had to be double tough. And that the fuckers who ran Wolf Squadron were some serious dudes. Or chicks, in the case of the daughters of LantFleet, Shewolf and Seawolf. They never used the actual names of the people, just their handles.

Assuming it wasn’t all made up. Paranoia was a recognized survival trait in the group. Nobody was taking the reports at face value.

There’d been talk about plans for Jax. The group getting the Station up might be Wolf Squadron or might be pirates. Or it might be the Plague was the work of space aliens and they were taking over now. There were books like that . . . Could be . . .