The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (27 page)

She had replied with a faint
: I understand
.

“You tried? That’s not good enough,” Deckard said. “Here you are pretending to be the Chief of Staff to the Governor, why don’t you do that again in order to help us?”

“Because there is no helping us,” she answered. Courtney had been up for two straight days and now her exhaustion was making her apathetic. “The army won’t help us. No one will help us. We can help others, however, and I plan on doing that until….until…you know.” She flipped open the book and was about to start searching for the next call on her list when Deckard grabbed it up. He was going to throw it across the room when an odd sound, almost like a gong being struck, echoed throughout the building. This was followed a moment later by Stephanie backing out of the room she’d been in. She had an M16 pointed toward the sound.

“Fix this!” Deckard bellowed, not at Courtney, but at Thuy.

“What am I supposed to do?” she yelled after him. Even though he heard her, he didn’t look back.

He ran to where Stephanie was standing. She was shaking so badly that the gun jittered in her hand. The
gong
sound came again. He knew what the sound was and it didn’t make sense. It was the sound of someone throwing a heavy rock at the glass. But these were zombies. The two concepts did not go hand in hand, and he was still standing there in puzzlement when Chuck, Burke, and Pemberton came hurrying up; the lieutenant with a set of keys. “What the hell is that?” Pemberton asked. Everyone knew what the sound was and yet no one bothered to answer him.

“I heard voices,” Stephanie said, her voice as jittery as the gun in her hands. “They were right on the other side of the window. They were talking.” She jumped as the window
gonged
again.

They were talking? The first thing Deckard thought of was Von Braun. He had somehow retained enough of his mind to talk and to work the elevators. It had made him ten times more dangerous than the average zombie. A locked door wouldn’t stop someone like him. “Ok, we have to abandon this side of the building. The window will go soon and this door just won’t hold. But before we go, I need all the desks and cabinets and whatever is in these offices pulled out and moved into the main part of the building.” There was another door that led to the main section. He hoped to barricade it so that when that door failed as well, and he knew it would, they’d be able to gain more time for whatever plan Thuy was concocting.

He had boundless faith in her intelligence.

She, on the other hand, knew her limitations, not the least which was the lack of anything useful to work with. They had weapons, enough for each to shoulder a rifle or a pistol, and they had enough ammo to kill a thousand of the infected persons, just so long as no one missed, and they had enough cars and enough gas to drive in circles for an hour…but they had no way to get to the vehicles without a major battle and, if they could get to them, they had nowhere to go that was any safer than the building they were currently in.

“We need helicopters, Courtney, enough for thirty one people…”

“Thirty one plus Sundance,” Courtney said, interrupting.

Thuy tried to smile away the interruption. “Yes, and Sundance. But how do we do this? Can you speak for the Governor again?”

“I’ve tried. I’ve even contacted individual pilots and they won’t do it unless given a direct order from their commanding officer, and yes I’ve tried going to him, but he won’t allow it without a direct order from General Collins.”

“Ok what about…” Thuy paused as the window finally shattered. Everyone glanced up and from the other wing a few of the state troopers came running. “See what Deckard needs,” she ordered them. She then turned back to Courtney. “What about tanks? The army has them in abundance, correct?”

“Yes, but they aren’t allowed to use them, and they’re not allowed to come into The Zone either.”

Thuy’s patience was wearing not just thin, it was on the sheer side of see-through. Down the hall came crashes of a louder nature as if the zombies were actually inside the building. She guessed that they were. “Fine, let me talk to General Collins.” Courtney opened her mouth to try to dissuade her, but saw that there wasn’t anything that could change the doctor’s mind. She dialed up the frequency and handed over the headset.

“Courtney, do you have my flares yet?” Collins asked right away. “Things are getting dicey out here.”

“And they’re getting extra dicey over here, sir,” Thuy answered right back. “But to answer your question, I do have your flares available, and I can have planes over your positions in forty minutes.” Courtney began waving her hands franticly as if to say that wasn’t possible. Thuy turned her back on the woman. “However if my demands aren’t met you won’t see a single candle.”

“Who is this?” Collins demanded. “This is a restricted net.”

“My name is Dr. Thuy Lee. I am the creator of the Com-cells. I am with Courtney Shaw and a number of other people, including John Burke, a man who happens to be immune to the disease and whose blood may be worth a thousand helicopters. As well, I have here the two individuals who were responsible for sabotaging my work. It is imperative that they be interrogated. We are currently under attack and are in need of immediate rescue.”

Collins was quiet for a time before saying: “I’m sorry but I can’t. The risks to the general public are far too great. We just can’t let anyone out of The Zone.”

“We would of course, submit to a voluntary quarantine period outside The Zone. We would be of no danger.” This wasn’t even close to being true and she knew it. There was no telling how many things could go wrong—the list was nearly endless.

“No, now put me on with Courtney.”

“You are declining America’s best chance at understanding and perhaps controlling the disease. That seems like an ill-conceived answer, however, let me sweeten the pot. I will deliver the flares on station in thirty minutes if you say yes, and if you don’t, I’ll fold this shop up. Your communications will go straight to hell and you won’t have anything to see by. When your lines crumble, I believe that will present a greater danger to America than we ever could.”

Collins pounded the desk in front of him. “Listen, lady that is not how these things work. There are lives at…” he blinked suddenly as the radio transmission suddenly cut out. “Hey! Lady? Courtney?” There was nothing but static coming through. “Son of a bitch!”

He hopped up and stepped out of the C&C tent and stared west where the night crackled and banged with gunfire and the sky lit with hot white light here, and there, as flares were popped over the lines. They had flares, but not many, not nearly enough to last the night. They had even fewer night vision devices; it was the bane of being a National Guard unit, they were constantly using old equipment and, because of the lack of funds, when things broke down, they were rarely replaced.

“Fuck,” Collins whispered, as an explosion lit up the night. He headed back into the tent and keyed the radio: “Ok let’s make a deal, but I have stipulations of my own.”

The mechanic’s name was Cori Deebs. He had floated through high school as directionless as a butterfly and only graduated by the skin of his teeth. After high school, his prospects of finding a career or a path through life seemed just as unlikely, so, along with a friend, he joined the National Guard. There were many perks and not much responsibility: one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer.

As he had only been in the unit for six months, he had not yet had to do his two weeks. Everyone said it was fun and, as of the day before, he had looked forward to it. But that was back when it was light out and people weren’t trying to eat his face off. Just then, sitting in the second ditch he’d dug that night he swore he was going to quit just as soon as they let him. A strong part of him wanted to just up and sneak away in the dark, only there were rumors flowing along the line that “they” were shooting deserters.

With guns going off left and right, front and back, he firmly believed it.

“What the fuck am I doing here?” he whispered.

In the hole with him was Specialist Jerome Evermore, a soldier who had been distinctly unhappy going on maneuvers once a year—he wanted to do it year round and if had not been for the fact that he had a very cush job as a buyer’s assistant in a sporting goods store he would have joined the regular army long before.

“Pissing yourself,” he said in answer to Cori’s rhetorical whine. “You gotta grow a pair.” Jerome had sweaty palms and his back was drenched, but he was more excited than anything else. He told himself that he was built for combat; it was why he had practically begged to be an infantryman.

“Easy for you to say,” Cori hissed. He had been relieved when the lines had been pulled back and consolidated, but he wasn’t exactly happy with his Rambo-wannabe partner.

Jerome shrugged. He was sitting hunkered down behind a M249 light machine gun with one two-hundred round belt in the feeder and another sitting in a can just to his left. He wanted more, however, a five-ton truck toting about a million such rounds had broken down outside New Haven and hadn’t been seen since. Jerome had many snide remarks about the abilities of the battalion’s mechanics.

“At least we know enough to bring extra batteries,” Cori shot back, referencing the night vision goggles perched uselessly on the top of Jerome’s helmet. The batteries had died two hours before and there had only been a few spares left, either that or people had hoarded them—no one wanted to be without when the shit hit the fan, which was right where Jerome found himself. Lucky for him he had the
Hammer of the Gods
which was what he had named his machine gun.

“How do we know that’s true?” Jerome asked. “That five-ton might have had a battery issue, as far as we know. So don’t go…” A sudden barrage of gunfire off to their right clamped his lips shut. It seemed to go on and on. Then came screams.

They were almost literally bloodcurdling. Cori felt his stomach tumble over on itself and his bowels turn to water. He was quite sure he was going to shit himself right there.

“I should do something,” Jerome said, taking the extra ammo and wrapping it across his shoulders.

“What?” Cori cried. He grabbed Jerome with fear-driven strength, pinning him back to the side of the foxhole. “You can’t leave. That’s abandoning your post or going AWOL. You can’t.”

Jerome threw Cori off of him. “Keep your hands off me you fuckin’ pussy. There are men dying over there and all we’ve been doing is sitting here wasting our time.” Cori, in his fear grabbed Jerome’s feet as he was leaving the hole, causing him to trip and go face first in the dirt. Cursing, Jerome scrambled around for his gear and then, after flipping Cori off, began to pick his way through the forest, but just then, there was a roar of engines that came blasting through the woods. A pair of Humvees mounting .50 caliber machine guns raced by traveling along the dirt path that linked the foxholes.

Seconds later the heavy thum-thum-thum of the .50 cals erupted like chained thunder. The firing went on for a full minute, during which time, Jerome stood transfixed by the sound. There was so much power to it that he felt a rush of adrenaline shoot through his system. Unfortunately, it was short-lived. The guns stopped and the two hummers roared off to another location to fight another battle.

“Son of a bitch!” Jerome seethed. “This is your fault, you dick.”

“I saved you,” Cori answered, petulantly.

“What? That’s the dumbest thing in the world.” Jerome pouted as he slid back into the foxhole.

Cori kept his distance at the far end of the hole. “I saved you twice. Once from getting an Article 15 for leaving your post and another from getting run over. Those hummers would’ve squished you with how fast they were going.”

Jerome made a sound of dismissal and then set both elbows on the edge of the hole, looking like a first grader who had just been sent to the principal’s office. He sat like this, brooding and pissy, for over half an hour when there came another storm of fire.

“Don’t,” Cori said.

“It’s a hundred yards away. You’ll be fine, and don’t you even think about touching me. I will break that ugly face of yours, I swear.”

He looked like he meant it and so Cori remained on his side of the four foot long trench. “What about waiting on the hummers?” It was a begging sort of question. The hummers could be heard miles away, their .50 cals sounding soft and echoey with the distance. Jerome snorted in answer to the question and lifted first his gun and then himself out of the hole.

“You’ll be fine, Cori. You got Smitty and Bill right there by that tree and over there are a couple of state troopers. I bet they shot a lot of people in their time.” He hitched the M249’s strap over his shoulder and said as he jogged away: “Wish me luck.”

Jerome felt as though he needed it. He’d been craving combat ever since he was six-years-old when he had watched the events of 9/11 play out on his TV. From that day on, he had wanted to bring the
Hammer of the Gods
down on the enemies of America, both foreign and domestic. He had never figured “domestic” would mean zombies, but he was more of a beggar than a chooser at this point and he would take what he could get when it came to combat.

Decked out as he was in his normal BDUs with the thick MOPP gear over it, and with the two-hundred rounds slung across him and the bulk of the twenty-five pound machine gun cradled in his arms, and his mask thumping against his leg and his chest rig and his canteen and miniature bible, and everything else a soldier carried, he could barely make jogging speed. He was huffing and puffing up the trail with sweat trickling from under his helmet. Still, he was determined to get into the action and he ran the distance of two football fields in a minute and a half.

The sound of battle drew him on. It was a desperate affair. Hundreds of undead came streaming through the woods rushing up with frightening, hungry eagerness at a point in the lines guarded by seven men. They fired their weapons and screamed for help. The soldiers and police in the neighboring foxholes sometimes sent one of their number to help and sometimes they didn’t. All told, thirteen men lit up the night in flashes as they shot at the barely visible zombies.

Flares could have made a difference, but there were so few of them left that the squad leader radioing for help had been told to: “Hold on, you’re on the list.”

Jerome waddled through the trees until he came to a point between two foxholes that sat twenty yards apart. There was a downed tree that stood between him and the horde; he plunked the M249 down on it, flicked off the safety and began firing at anything that moved. In the dark, lit only by the blinking lights of the guns, there was no telling friend from foe. And yet he felt safe in his assumptions of what he was shooting at since he had positioned himself parallel to the other soldiers.

It seemed unlikely that one would be in front of him but, after firing for a minute and cutting down thirty or more zombies, one managed to get within a few feet of him. Like the rest, he gave it a quarter-second squeeze and sent eight bullets ripping into its chest. It was thrown back by the force, hitting a tree so hard that it looked as though its head came off. Something round came rolling down a little incline toward Jerome.

It was a soldier’s helmet and thankfully, there wasn’t a head inside it. “What the fuck?” he cried, staring first at the helmet and then at the ugly shadows advancing toward him relentlessly. A sudden reluctance held his trigger finger from its job. Who was out there? Seemingly, from all around him, both front and back were human sounds: curses and yells, screams: some of pain, some from men giving orders. Jerome began to worry that in the dark he’d been turned around and was now firing the wrong way!

“Hey you guys!” he yelled, adding to the din and confusion of battle. “Which way are we supposed to…”

His words were cut off as a brilliant light lit the sky above them—the last of the flares burst into life and hung like a great star in the night sky. Jerome squinted against the glare and saw the zombies properly for the first time. Among them were a few soldiers, their faces chewed off and their uniforms shredded. They were as horrible as the rest.

Jerome’s finger went back to work. He leaned into his gun and the heat of it was appalling, and amazing and fantastic, all at once. There was almost no time to consider what a wonderful weapon he held. Zombies were all over the foxhole to his left. He swiveled the gun to the side and mowed them down, sending fountains of black blood into the air; it came down like rain.

Then to the right were more screams; these were desperate and charged with elemental fear. He swung the M249 back around and commenced to chop the zombies down. There was no time to worry about headshots. The only thing that mattered was saving the men in the holes. At some point in the fighting, his weapon jammed; he cleared it without thinking. Seconds later the first of his ammo belts went dry. Like an automaton, he changed out the belt for the fresh one and then went on firing.

With sixteen bullets left, he ran out of targets.

“Wow,” he whispered when the noise of the shooting finally died away and the men began to look up with the realization that they had survived. A few had flashlights and they began to shine them around at the mangled corpses that lay in heaps. Many of the bodies still moved and some of the men began taking single shots to finish them off.

Jerome couldn’t waste the ammo for such things and he knew he had to get back to Cori. A part of him was sure that the soldier had shit himself when he had left. But first, he went to the foxhole on his left and looked down at the two men he had saved. One was a deputy sheriff who had been using a shotgun to try to hold back the hordes, and the other was a combat engineer who had built his foxhole with a slide rule in mind. It was an exact rectangle. The two men were covered in the black blood, but no one seemed to care.

“That was quite a fight,” Jerome said.

“Was that you working the SAW?” the engineer asked. When Jerome nodded, he held out a hand for him to shake, but Jerome didn’t like the look of the blood on it and fiddled with his gun, pretending not to see it. The engineer didn’t seem to notice. He left the hand out as he babbled: “You really saved our bacon. I thought for sure we’d be killed. I mean…I mean they were all around us and my stupid gun kept jamming and John here with his shotgun had to reload, like every five seconds. It was a real mess, man. And then you opened up with your SAW and I swear I almost cried.” He grinned up at Jerome and the deputy grinned as well.

Jerome soaked it in and would’ve stayed to hear more of the adulation that he felt he deserved, because after all, hadn’t he been a hero? Hadn’t he taken the bulls by the horns and laid that fucker out? But an approaching hummer cut in on it. He had to get back to Cori and he had to find more ammo for his weapon. They weren’t out of the woods yet…or so he hoped. He liked battle just as much as he thought he would.

“Look, I’ve got to get going. You two have a good night.”

“Hey wait,” the deputy called after him. “What’s your name? I want to know who I’m going to be buying a drink for when this is all done.”

“Jerome Evermore,” was all he said. Had there been a sunset in the direction he was going he would have moseyed right on out of there feeling like the hero he was. Instead, there was only the black of night but he still felt his exit a good one.

Feeling pride swell like a sunburst in his chest he went up to the trail and then headed back to his hole and his place in the line. When he got there, he found it deserted. He shook his head, thinking that Cori had chickened out, but then he noticed that the dirt from the hole was in back. It wasn’t their hole. Jerome had decided to mound the dirt from his hole ten feet in front as an added measure to slow the zombies down.

This must have been Smitty and Bill’s hole. They were from one of the MP companies and he hadn’t known either of them before that night. Although they had seemed like stand-up guys, they had taken off. “Or were out there taking a dump in the woods,” he whispered. “Hey, Smitty? Bill?” He called into the dark. Nothing.

“Pussies,” he muttered and then went to the next hole in line and found Cori messing in the bottom of the hole.

“It’s deep enough,” Jerome said. “Hey, you were wrong about…”

Cori looked back, but it wasn’t Cori in the hole. Even in the dark, Jerome could tell it was a zombie. Cori was what it was eating. “Da-fuck,” Jerome said in a small voice as he stepped back. The zombie tried to scramble out of the hole after him and Jerome shot it. He hadn’t even been consciously aware of what his hands were doing.