The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (11 page)

Jaimee Lynn was in an abandoned building sucking the blood right from the carotid of a third grader. She frequently smacked her lips, and her breathing was hot and quick. Behind her, Misty pawed at her back.

“Mine,” Misty said. “Mine.”

“In a minute,” Jaimee Lynn answered, shrugging off the hand. She bent again and slurped noisily, uncaring of the effect it was having on the “girl.”

Misty had stopped being a real girl an hour after Jaimee Lynn had left McMillan. Jaimee had caught her on the way to school and had throttled her with hands that were like mechanized steel. When Misty stopped kicking, Jaimee Lynn had drunk until her belly sloshed. She then dragged the little girl corpse off to the abandoned building and buried her under rusting iron, thinking she would make a nice treat for later, but then Misty came alive.

For the most part she just laid there looking up at the partially stove-in roof, listening to the rain creep all through the building. When she could talk, she didn’t have much to say beyond her name.

Jaimee Lynn thought she was stupid and guessed that she was that way because she had died. But she did have her uses. She did whatever Jaimee Lynn told her. No questions asked. She was like a robot slave. The next girl was the same way and Jaimee Lynn figured this last one would be as well. It meant they could eat one of the big people pretty soon.

Even while she was eating, Jaimee Lynn’s belly growled at the thought.

Chaos vied with confusion as operational adjectives. As every military operations officer knows, both are, at least to some extent, built into military plans since neither can ever be fully weeded out. What was occurring around Poughkeepsie was an exaggeration on par with madness. Bluntly, it was being described as an exceptional cluster-fuck, and it was no wonder: there was no plan in place to call up an entire division in six hours. It was simply an impossibility.

When Governor Stimpson started growing anxious at the slow speed in which the call-up was progressing, General Collins had to remind him that during Hurricane Katrina, it had taken three days to put a single brigade in place, and they didn’t have zombies to worry about on that occasion.

One issue they were having was that a disconcerting number of guardsmen had failed to show up mostly due to CNN running the unfounded story that a massive Ebola outbreak was occurring in the Mid-Hudson area of upstate New York. Another issue that Collins was having difficulty overcoming was that the only major north/south highway in that part of the state ran right through the quarantine zone and thus was unusable. Traffic jams grew like tentacles to entangle most of the northeast. The logjam of cars ran a hundred miles or more in every direction. Logistics had broken down, reinforcements were stranded, half-formed companies sat idle on the side of the road and orders were being given by officers sitting in cars fifty miles from The Zone, and those orders were based on hours-old information, assumptions or just plain guesses instead of cold facts.

And yet, things were progressing, albeit erratically. Squads of soldiers were straggling in and were being sent straight through to the lines. Sometimes, they came loaded down with equipment, sometimes with just their empty weapons. One squad showed up in their dress uniforms thinking there was a surprise inspection underway.

Officers began to find their rhythm as their minds shifted out of the civilian mode and into the military, and right up until 8:58 a.m., the situation was at least somewhat manageable. The number of zombies was being described as “light” and, except for a few tragic incidents, the citizens were afraid and angry, but not violent. At 8:58, at the junction of Albany Post Road and Middlebush, just south of the town of Wappinger Falls, where a barrier of barbed wire had been erected to delineate the ‘zone’ from the free area, an incident occurred, making things a hundred times worse.

The “Middlebush Massacre” as it would become known, was started by accident. Tensions were wire-tight and the fear on both sides of the barricade was like an easily communicable disease, spreading from person to person until both sides were on a hair trigger. An incident was bound to happen and a teenaged boy named Cody Cullin was determined to record it. His desire was for YouTube fame and already he had recorded a dozen zombie sightings, though he was the first to admit that, so far, his videos were dark and grainy and not very good. However, what he uploaded at 9:07 a.m. would be seen by thirty million people by the end of the day.

The video was amateurish and very narrow in its scope. What it didn’t show were the hundreds of angry civilians pushing to get out of The Zone, edging, closer and closer to the flimsy and lightly manned barricade. The people screamed obscenities, they revved their engines, menacingly, and those with guns held them at the ready. They riled themselves into a fevered pitch so that they were practically frothing at the mouth and yet all the video showed was one man yell: “You can’t legally stop us.” The man held a cellphone in his hand and, as he yelled, he gestured at the soldiers with it. Tempers had been on the knife’s edge all morning with fear causing the mundane to appear monstrous.

One of the soldiers, sweat stinging his eyes and his protective mask clouding his vision, panicked at the sight of the man pointing what he thought was a gun and fired his weapon pointblank into the man’s chest. Guns came up from every direction, however because of the angle of the recording it looked as though the three soldiers and the two state troopers were firing unprovoked into a small group of unarmed people.

The gun battle that followed was brief. The troopers with their shotguns and the soldiers in their heavy MOPP gear got off a few shots and then went down in a blaze of blood and screams; of course, this aspect of the one-sided fight never made it onto YouTube. All anyone saw was the first twenty seconds, and it was enough to make Cody Cullin an internet star.

For the rest of America, the shit had hit the fan.

Over the course of the next three hours, the video would trigger a dozen gun battles between citizens and soldiers. Sometimes the people won and were able to surge out of The Zone. Sometimes the soldiers were forced to shoot into a mass of humanity until the mobs broke and fled back into The Zone.

The first Courtney Shaw heard about the shoot-out she was sitting in her chair, eyeing her map of the area, as a state trooper bleated uselessly in her ear. The chair felt welded to her ass. In fact, her ass was so numb from sitting for so many hours on end that she couldn’t tell where it ended and the chair began. The same went for the headset that was molded to Courtney’s skull. It felt like some sort of vestigial horn that had grown in upside down, curving down her cheek instead of rising into the air. She was tired but determined to make every effort to help the very weird situation. She had lied—necessary, white lies, she told herself. She had manipulated those in power—another necessity. Now, adrenaline was keeping her going when her body just wanted to lied down.

“I honestly don’t care how long you’ve been on duty,” she said, tiredly to the trooper out of Peekskill. “You will turn your cruiser around and get to Milton or you will be brought up on dereliction of duty charges. Those orders come from the Superintendent.” She paused and covered over the mike so she could speak with her partner. “Renee, have you heard anything from the Superintendent yet?” Courtney figured the man would have said something similar to the trooper, but wanted to cover her ass all the same.

Renee barely looked up from her board. “Not a freakin’ peep.”

Superintendent Ritz, on orders from the Governor himself, was supposed to be getting video proof of the zombies. He had left Albany at seven that morning and hadn’t been heard from since. He wouldn’t answer either his radio or his cell phone—it was more than a bit unnerving. In his absence and with the First Deputy Superintendent not up to speed, and the Assistant Deputy Superintendent a known jackass, Courtney was running the four thousand-man department. She was pulling troopers from every corner of the state to deal with the traffic and the zombies and the crazy quarantine zone and a thousand other things, including directing soldiers, many of whom were out in the middle of nowhere, too far for their radios to reach and without cell service for their phones.

Courtney’s mind was zipping along at a pace she didn’t think possible.

In a way, it was her Zone. Its shape was nothing like Governor Stimpson envisioned. He pictured a perfect circle with the Walton Facility as the epicenter. The real shape was somewhat like a paint-splatter. With the dwindling manpower she had to work with, it was far more economical
and
realistic to concentrate on certain areas that she deemed crucial to hold. In order to stop the spread of the zombies across the Hudson she had thrown in as many men as she could to hold the area around Highland. North of Poughkeepsie she had men spread out over miles of pretty farmland to keep Albany from being reached, but the most important area of all was to the south where three highways fed straight into New York City. The YouTube video was shot at the barricade at Interstate Nine, the central of the three highways.

“Holy shit!” cried Renee, suddenly. “Courtney you got to see this.” She shoved her Smart phone into Courtney’s face.

Twelve seconds later Courtney’s brown eyes flew open wide. “Where is this? We gotta find out where this is.”

They couldn’t tell by the video and so Courtney’s eight-woman task force had to drop everything and begin calling the one-hundred and forty cruisers in the area. They had only just begun when General Collins called demanding, “Have you seen the video?”

He understood the implications better than anyone. It was one thing for the National Guard to tell a frightened populace to stay indoors and that everything was going to be alright, it was another thing for them to be seen gunning down what looked like unarmed civilians. His adjutant had been given the video and he hadn’t wasted a second barging in on the General in the middle of a meeting with his brigade and battalion commanders.

“I’ll find out,” Courtney assured him. In her other ear, the state trooper was still there and still complaining. “I have a wife and children who live in Stone Creek,” the trooper whined. “They’re too close. I need to get to them before….”

“It’s eight miles beyond The Zone,” Courtney replied, tapping the map. Her own family had moved out to Buffalo a few years before and she had already sent out messages to her friends who lived nearby to get the hell out of Dodge. Really, if she had anyone to worry about it was herself. The trooper headquarters was on the Taconic State Parkway, only ten miles southwest of Poughkeepsie and only a mile from the Hillside Lake barricade—it was a little too close for comfort. And yet she couldn’t tell this unknown trooper that everything would be hunky-dory and then run herself.

“Listen, I’ll keep an ear out for anything weird going on around Stone Creek. In the meantime, get your ass to Milton. The troopers there have a hundred or so civilians trying to slip past.”

She cut the link and then groaned—it was all the rest she allowed herself before she joined the others and began calling the individual cruisers. Things were falling apart. People saw the video and now they feared the government as much as they did the zombies that were pressing from behind. When word of it spread, they took matters into their own hands. Fourteen troopers didn’t answer their radios when the dispatchers made their calls and others began to scream that they were under attack.

Courtney stood up and shouted to the women in the room: “Send me the coordinates of every trooper who doesn’t answer. We have to plug every hole.” It took thirty-six minutes to figure out they were screwed.

“I need more men,” she said, again tapping her computer screen, hoping that by some miracle more soldiers or troopers would get through the building traffic jams. She expanded the map hoping to see a river she could pull the men back to in order to strengthen their lines. When she did, she saw something peculiar. “Who are these guys at Poughquag?” On the map, twelve miles east of them was a marker indicating an army unit was loitering just south of the little town. “What’s M.B?”

Tanya Miller covered her mike and said: “You don’t want them. It’s just the army marching band and some cooks.”

“Do they have guns?” Courtney asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. She went on the army net and found the frequency for the 27
th
Brigade Support Battalion who were hunkered down far from the fight.

“I need to speak to the C.O. right now,” she demanded in clipped tones. So far, this new authoritative voice of hers had worked like a charm. This time it hit a snag and worse she was about to discover an entirely new problem.

The person who answered was quiet for a moment and said: “I’m Colonel Winthrop, I’m the officer in charge, and you are?”

“I’m General Collins’ assistant. I am going to appropriate some of your men. We have situations developing that require reinforcements.”

Winthrop was quiet again, before saying, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re not the General’s adjunct and you won’t be appropriating any of my men.”

Courtney tried clearing her throat as if she were startled that anyone would question her. “These are orders straight from the General. I am tasked with forming the quarantine perimeter. There is no higher priority than that. Now, I need to know how many soldiers you have available. I’ll even take the marching band.”

“Who are you again? You didn’t mention a name or a rank.”

“I’m with the office of the Governor of the State of New York. My name is Courtney Shaw.”

“You’re Ms Shaw? Finally! I’ve been cleaning up your messes for the last two hours.”

“My messes? What messes are you referring to?”

Colonel Winthrop laughed. “You have been sending the general’s soldiers all over the place, turning the perimeter into a mess. I’m still trying to find out who is where. I need you to know that this is going to stop right now. From here on, you are not to direct a single soldier. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I suppose, but I…you still need to move those men from Poughquag up to the line. They’re just sitting there doing nothing.”

The Colonel scoffed: “Wrong. They’re manning the line right now.”

Courtney made a face as though she was talking to a wayward three-year-old and asked, “How can that be? They’re twelve miles behind the furthest perimeter. I have the state police, in conjunction with men from Delta Company of the 1
st
Battalion holding a line stretching north to south on highway 82.”

“Highway 82? That can’t be right. That would mean they are technically in The Zone.” There was a pause and Courtney heard fingers tapping at a keyboard and then Winthrop came back on, seething: "Do you realize what you’ve done? Those men are in the infected area and must remain there. The perimeter is supposed to be twenty miles from Walton in every direction, those were the orders I received, and I’m sure you received the same ones.”