The Undead World (Book 1): The Apocalypse (5 page)

The men of the 504
th
of the 82
nd
Airborne Division were the “ready brigade” in October, meaning they had to be prepared to deploy anywhere in the world with eighteen hours notice. Who knew the deployment would be to Florida and who knew they'd be fighting their own countrymen?

Certainly not Private First Class Marshall Peters. He had enlisted with the express purpose of going overseas and fighting America
's enemies, not figuring that the Iraq war would end so quickly. By every news account the war was going horribly and then come 2009 it just ended and somehow we had won.

Quite the opposite was true in Afghanistan. It was the quiet war for so long, but then we made a promise to leave and it flared up—just not for PFC Peters. Somehow he just missed a deployment by the first Brigade Combat team and ended up sitting around Fort Bragg bored to tears.

But then they got the call.

“
Miami?” he had groused. “What the hell's in Miami?”

No one knew, and though they all joked about fighting alligators and toothless hillbillies, it grew serious when they were given a full combat load. And when they waddled
, as only paratroopers do when carting sixty extra pounds around with them, onto the C-17 with their chutes on their backs it got serious indeed.

PFC Peters
' unit dropped along a twenty-mile stretch of Okeechobee Road and was told to form one continuous line and not to let anyone across it. The orders were of such a vague nature that on that first day they didn't know which way to face. By the third day they had things worked out and they faced east toward the lights of the city, and on the fourth evening, they began to turn back their first stragglers.

“
You don't understand,” a man said in a pleading voice. “The dead have risen. They're walking around eating people!”

They shooed him away, but he was replaced by others who said the same sorts of things and soon rumors went up and down the line like fire before the wind. Peters had the second guard shift on the sixth night of their deployment and he had never been more afraid.

In the dark things moved and whispered and rifle fire broke out occasionally. Mostly it was one sided with dug in paratroopers firing blindly at imagined monsters, however twice fire was returned and Peters hunkered down when that happened. Near the end of his shift screaming began, running across the night air to freeze his bones. It was about a hundred yards away and then came more rifle fire a long pop, pop, pop and then silence.

Even after his shift Peters didn
't sleep a wink that night. Gradually it came to be that guards were needed more in the daytime than at night since very few could sleep when the sun sank and the night came alive and the guns flicked little flashes of light.

On the eighth day the line went through a major shift. Rumor had it that huge sections of the line south of the city had been overrun. Men were shifted southward and their lines were stretched thinly. On the tenth day it happened again. This time whole companies were yanked to fill gaps that had sprung up and the men around him were further away. That day Peters shot his first zombie.

It was near evening when the thing came stumbling right at his foxhole. Not knowing what it was exactly, Peters stood to show the woman that he had a gun. “Go back!” he yelled. “This is a restricted area. You can't come through here.” The woman didn't listen and kept on coming and so Peters fired a warning shot.

“
You're going to have to shoot her,” a friend said from the next foxhole as the woman neared. “But don't worry. It won't matter much, since she's already dead.”

“
Shoot her quick!” a sergeant called from two foxholes down. “She's got the disease!”

This did it for Peters. He brought the M16 to his shoulder aimed for center mass and fired a single round. The
grey-skinned woman went down and no one said a word, while Peters felt the immediate weight of guilt, which vanished in a flash as she got back up again.

“
What the fuck?” Peters swore. “I hit her. I hit her square in the chest!” Quickly he brought the gun up, flicked the selector switch to 3-round burst and put three more into her. When she got up a second time at least ten of the soldiers in the foxholes around him fired on her, and this time she stayed down.

When the story of the woman made its way up and down the line, the fear among the soldiers grew to such a degree that
gunfire became the norm that night. Anything that moved was shot at: leaves and birds sometimes, people at others and zombies when they came their way. But mostly bullets were fired at imaginary enemies and by the thirteenth day many soldiers were low on ammo and what was left had to be distributed among them.

“
When are we going to be resupplied?” Peters asked his sergeant. This earned him a shrug. “And what about artillery? Shouldn't we have some mortars at least?”

“
Nope,” the buck sergeant answered. “Rules of engagement: no artillery, no air power. If you can't identify what you're shooting at then you can't shoot.”

“
But you can't tell what they are until they're right up on us!”

The sergeant s
pat in the dirt and said, “Yup. It's nothing new, Peters. Iraq was worse. We couldn't shoot at the terrorists until they shot at us first. That was messed up.”

Peters slumped, depressed, thinking the situation couldn't get worse, and yet
they hadn't really been put to an actual test.

That came the following night when a plague of zombies crossed the open field to their front. Now it was a battle, though thankfully it was one sided and rarely did the stiffs get within ten feet of the lines and no one was injured. Despite that, the victory was costly. The unit had been resupplied
earlier so that each man had two-hundred rounds, however since the soldiers clung to their training and fired center mass, riddling the bodies that came ever closer, they went through ammunition at a prodigious rate.

Peters had only eleven rounds left when a group of
a hundred men, women and children came across the open flat the next day. They were a good sixty yards down the line, and his sergeant picked out a few men to bolster that section, Peters among them.

The people wouldn
't stop, and they were real people, too. They came on, crying and begging for help and when they were not thirty feet away the sergeant had to shoot the leader when he wouldn't listen to reason. Now the rest finally stopped and a long argument ensued, with neither side refusing to budge.

This led to a very strange situation. The people basically made camp right in front of the soldiers who could do nothing to stop them. They were still there the next morning. All day they sat huddled or they went up and down the lines of soldiers begging for food or water. The men were under strict orders not to give them a thing, yet many did.

The people had lived all in one apartment building and had shared their food among themselves until the last scrap was gone—then they were forced out onto the streets where the zombies had been growing in number. The creatures came out of every nook and cranny after them and the people fled, leaving the old and the sick to be feasted on.

For the most part they were weaponless, though a few carried rakes or hoes or large sticks. Each had a bag upon their back carrying little besides an extra change of clothes and maybe a photo album. It was dreadfully sad and Peters was among those who tossed them food.

The situation lasted only another two days. The line had been thinned again and Peters had a hole all to himself, something that would have unnerved him beyond belief except for the fact that he had his own family parked twenty feet in front of him. For the last day and a half he had given over most of his MREs and in return they were his early warning system.

Just before midnight the young girl with them whispered,
“They're some right there.”

Peters had been blinking trying to fight sleep when the words came and now he stood up, peering into the dark. A scream rent t
he night and then gunfire; this was off to the right, and everyone looked that way, even the girl. It was a mistake that would cost her. By the time she glanced back, zombies came lurching out of the dark. They were faster than they should've been and although the family got up and ran, the girl was clawed down and smothered beneath a pack of the foul beasts, yet despite that she screamed and screamed.

There were many screams just then. The family screamed and ran toward Peters and he tried to shoot around
them, which only meant he wasted ammo. And then they were past him and a zombie was right there only feet away; he shot instinctively and holed the beast through the neck. And then another came with mouth wide to bite and this he shot through the forehead. To his right and left gunfire blazed.

He could only stare for a moment and then he had two more to deal with. As he was standing slightly higher than they were, he shot them both in the head at point blank range, yet this was unplanned. Another moved to his right and he aimed and pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

“I'm out of ammo!” he yelled to his friend Murphy in the next hole.

Murphy said nothing. In front of his hole was a gang of zombies going down one after another with gaping wounds, until a clawed hand grabbed the gun barrel and pulled Murphy forward. Peters ran to help, but he was snagged around the ankle and down he went. It was the zombie he had shot through the neck. Black blood dribbled from the hole, however
the creature didn't seemed fazed in the least by the huge wound. It reared its head and bit through Peters' camouflaged pants and tore a chunk out of his calf.

The pain was like fire and the soldier went wild kicking with his free leg until the zombie let go. And then he was up and hobbling away uncaring that he had left his gun, and his post, and his buddies to die. He ran until the fever brought him down and then later he rose again and turned back, remembering only one thing. He remembered where the humans were.

After meeting the President and playing the part of personal servant to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who had practically moved into the CDC, it should've been nothing for Eric to speak to a simple two star general.

It wasn
't.

Major General Fairchild wasn
't an easy man for anyone one to speak to even under normal conditions. He kept Eric waiting half the morning on the hard wood benches outside his improvised headquarters. The 10th Mountain Division had its base of operations set up in the municipal building in the town of Phillipsburg, which sat right on the border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It would've made more strategic sense to have his base two miles further west across the Delaware River, but there was the morale factor to consider. It would've been difficult on the men to give up New Jersey completely after losing so much ground already.

It had certainly done a number on Eric
's morale to learn where the lines had been pulled back to. “What happened to holding the Hudson?” he asked his driver. After a chopper ride from Atlanta to Camp David, he had been given a lift in a hard-topped humvee to meet with the commander of the 10th.

The soldier had only shrugged at the question.

Now as the hours slipped by he couldn't even get that much out of the officers whisking past. Finally he grabbed the first man to come out of the general's staff office. “I have orders from the Secretary of Health and Human Services to see General Fairchild,” he said to the man. “I demand to see him.” Though his tone had been commanding, almost to the point of being imperious, the man, a full bird colonel only made a noise of dismissal and flicked his hand over his shoulder as he walked away.

“
He's in there. Go on in.”

“
Does that mean I can just go in? Really?” Eric asked, however the colonel was already out of earshot.

Summoning his courage he pushed open a door and slipped into what had at one time been a courtroom. In a way it still was. Now General Fairchild, sitting in the judge
's seat, presided—he glared at Eric as the officer who had been speaking faltered at the interruption.

“
Who the hell are you?” Fairchild demanded.

Eric had been about to sit in the back row but now he straightened and introduced himself,
“Eric Reidy of the CDC with orders from the Secretary of Health and Human Services.”

“
First, I don't take orders from that bitch. Second...what's with that get up?”

Over his
three-piece suit, Eric wore a dun colored flak jacket and upon his head, sitting crooked, was a helmet—supposedly it was one size fits all, however it made his skull feel like a clapper in a bell. “I was told this was regulation,” he said defensively.

“
I'm sure it is at the CDC,” the general mocked. “Out here, if a stiff gets close enough to bite you on the head, you're a dead man anyways. But hey, if they start planting IEDs or tossing grenades you'll be the safest one of us all.” This brought on a chuckle from the assembled officers. Red-faced and angry, Eric began to protest, but the general slammed his hand down growling, “Shut your damned mouth. I'll get to you when I get to you.”

Eric dropped onto the bench and steamed in an angry silence, though at the same time he slipped the helmet off and undid the
heavy flak jacket as unobtrusively as possible. As he did he cursed his boss under his breath. Eric had asked for a gun and had been given the stupid heavy outfit instead.

With nothing better to do, he listened to brigade commander after brigade commander beg for more ammunition, more fuel, more food, more reinforcements, and really just more of everything.

The general seemed like a single mom trying to satisfy a dozen bickering children. “We can detach the 186
th
support battalion from the 3rd brigade...”

“
With all due respect, Sir,” the 4th Brigade commander said. “Is that the Vermont Guard unit you keep pushing on everyone? The one with the God damned rainbow patch? No, sorry. The 3rd can keep them. I can't supply my own men, and now you want to give me a bunch of guys who are just a waste ammo? Those guys can't fight a lick.”

“
Maybe if you tried a different strategy,” 1st Brigade suggested. “The men I find doubtful I use in other ways: I have them run ammo or dig trenches. I even have them construct little forts out of logs or cars. They give the men a base to rally around. Sort of like redoubts back in the day. I'm just saying someone carted these guys from Vermont to Denver and then out here, we might as well use them.”

4th Brigade blew out loudly.
“Well you're lucky you can. You still have actual neighborhoods and actual houses to funnel the stiffs at you. Me? I got a hundred miles of open rolling land north of New York City to cover. If you can do the math I got 40 men per mile to guard the Q-zone. It's not nearly enough, especially when you realize we're fighting both zombies and civilians. A fort will just leave the men inside stranded when we pull back.”

“
I don't want them either,” 2nd Brigade added. “There as bad as those Air Force pukes you tried to give us. They eat up my supplies and half the time they run off at the first hint of trouble.”

“
Then how about this, we make another attempt to retake Fort Dix,” 1st Brigade put out. “We can re-establish it as the forward supply point for the Northeastern Theater of Operations. Just think of all the stores we had to abandon, there's enough fuel and ammo to last us weeks. And there are actual tanks and Strykers there. I say fuck the rules of engagement. Give me five or six companies of infantry and I'll solve our logistics issue and gives us some fire power to boot.”

4th Brigade
threw down his pen and scoffed, “And lose the country in the process. We can't afford to give up even one man on the lines and you want six hundred? That's absurd. What we need more than supplies are real soldiers who can fight. And not more of these damned REMFs! The last reinforcements I received were laundry specialists. What am I going to do with a bunch of guys whose main training have been in laundry services? I tell you they weren't worth a shit. What we need are 11 bang-bangs.”

“
Bang-bangs?” Eric snorted. He thought he was whispering it in a mocking tone that no one would hear, however the room had quieted just at that moment and all eyes shifted his way. The general looked on him as if he were a previously undiscovered form of moron.

“
11 Bang-bang is slang for the MOS designator 11 Bravo,” he explained. “An infantry man. A man trained to fight. What did you say you do again?”

“
I'm a scientist,” Eric said, stretching the truth.

“
Look, we have a scientist in our midst,” the general declared. “Why don't we put aside the defense of our fine country and deal with you?” Fairchild was no fool. He had seen that his colonels had been on a verge of a brawl and had decided to use Eric's intrusion to diffuse the situation.

“
Ok, good,” Eric said, standing once again. “As I mentioned I have been sent by the Secretary of Health and Human Services...”

“
Whom I don't answer to,” Fairchild reminded Eric.

Eric could only shrug at this, not knowing where in the chain of command a cabinet level appointee ranked.
“She has the full faith of the President, and on this I think she is speaking for him,” he said. He came forward with a manila envelope and pulled from it a picture. “This is Yuri Petrovich, he was the managing supervisor of the Scientific and Technical Institute for Microbiology located in Stepnagorsk, Russia. According to new reports, it is believed that the virus might have come from there.”

“
And?” the general asked at Eric's pause.

“
And the CIA has just found out that he took a leave of absence from the lab just four days before the first known outbreak of the virus. This may be coincidental, however he also showed up in New York three days before the Atlantic Princess docked in Miami with its deadly cargo.” Eric paused again, for questions. The general only tapped his pencil angrily on the wood of his table. “And he may have been in contact with terrorists,” Eric said in a rush. Silence seemed to fill the room at the end of each of his sentences and it made him distinctly uneasy. “Supposedly he came into a lot of money suddenly.”

“
That's it?” Fairchild asked, looking at his gathered colonels as if he had missed something. “A scientist leaves Russia and comes here? Why on earth should I care?”

“
Yes...I mean there's more,” Eric stammered. The general was so much more of a force than the president that Eric felt his mind scattering to the wind. “Yuri was in charge of the chemical and biological warfare component of the lab. It was a Biopreparat facility. You must know what that is. It's where they prepared for germ warfare, and really it doesn't take a genius to see that his sudden moves coupled with his new found money,
and
the outbreak of a virus isn't coincidental.”

The 4th Brigade commander seemed confused.
“And therefore what? Are we supposed to find this guy and arrest him? Or shoot him?” When Eric began to nod, the colonel threw his hands in the air and cried, “We can't even find the Vice president!”

“
It won't be like that, we know where he was staying,” Eric replied. “He was at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan.”

“
In New York?” General Fairchild asked in surprise. He then barked out a derisive laugh as the colonels whispered among themselves, none too quietly, with the word
moron
being more clearly pronounced than any other.

Eric grew angry.
“You don't seem too concerned with finding an opportunity that may help us develop a vaccine. The president might want to be made aware of this.” Eric thought his implied threat would have some impact on the general, but he was wrong.

Fairchild glared under bushy brows and growled,
“Do you think I give a rat's ass what this President thinks? Mister
Good war—Bad war
? Mister getting a damned Peace prize for just showing up? Hell the fuck no! If he had spent even a tenth of the time studying war than he did in protesting it, he would know that even asking about a mission into New York City is idiotic as all hell. Fuck, even a Harvard educated dipshit such as yourself knows that there isn't anyone left alive in New York.”

“
Maybe not,” Eric said in a small voice; he was pale from the general's tirade. “Maybe he is dead...probably he is, but that doesn't matter; we still have to try. We might find a clue to his present whereabouts, or perhaps notes on the virus, however the main reason for this mission is that he may have had an actual vaccine on him! This is the why we have to go.”

“
We?” the general was quick to pounce. “Finally someone in the administration that's showing some balls. Good for you, Doc. Too bad I can't spare any men. Try the Navy. Them pukes aren't doing nothing but sitting out in the ocean wasting fuel. Don't worry, they have helicopters. They'll take you right in and out. You'll be safe and sound.”

“
No, Sir, you don't understand, I can't go with you,” Eric said quickly. “I'm not authorized to go...and we tried the Navy. They said they were short fuel as well. With all the ports being in the Q-zones, they can't refit or refuel properly. At least that's what they say.”

“
They're a damned bunch of cowards is what they are,” the general groused. He then sighed out the word: “Damn. Fine we'll do the job just like we do everything else around here.” He glanced to a colonel that had been relatively quiet. “Teddy, it's time for that aviation brigade of yours to finally do something besides taxiing politicians all over the damned country. Scare up a Blackhawk and see that the good Doc here gets a weapon.”

“
But...” Eric began, however a bushy eyebrow and a hard blue eye shut him up quick.

“
You're going, Doc,” the general ordered. “We could come across all sorts of crap, and so I'm thinking we need an expert on site. And that's you.”

“
I'm not. Not really.” Eric wasn't an expert in any field, but there was no gainsaying the general when he had made up his mind. Though Eric did try, however all of his excuses only caused the general to take him by the scruff of the neck and push him out the door.

“
Teddy, if he keeps up the whining,” Fairchild said to his Combat Aviation Brigade commander. “You have my leave to toss him from the chopper when the mission is complete.”

“
With pleasure, Sir.”