The Zombie Letters (35 page)

II

              They were sitting in the ATV on the outskirts of the city. The cold sweat underneath Darin Miles’ mask fogged up the glass. His hands were trembling so badly, that he could barely tie his shoes. There wasn’t enough extract left to put on themselves. Darin had used up all of it to make LYNN004. If it failed, they wouldn’t just go home and get back to the drawing board. If they failed, they were dead.

              The powers that be didn’t want Doctor Miles, as big as asset as he was, to join in the party. Not only did he insist, but he refused to do any further research unless he went with them. Another condition of his continued work was to allow his fellow survivors Dennis, Ana and Victoria to travel with the team going after the Archies in Japan. The brass reluctantly accepted. They didn’t want any of them going out on that operation for some reason. Darin understood, he supposed . . . but just the fact he had to threaten the government and say he would halt his work just so Dennis, Ana and Vic could go was a little strange.

After two days of firearm training out in the field, the boys taught Darin how to use an M-16. He would be following behind them, flanked by three men with guns bigger than themselves. They would be alright, but reports stated that there were potentially millions of the dead walking around in the city. Even from a mile out of the downtown area of Arlington, they could all see them. They filled the streets. They just wandered around, their eyes focused on nothing. Some were standing still, snarling like rabid dogs and their eyes scanning the army of the undead before them. It was Teel’s idea to hike to the attack position, which was only two blocks outside of the city. There was a promotional advertising company there that was only one-story high. Two men would make it to the roof, five would stay around the building, while Darin and General Teel stood between the building and the ATV. It was a short run to the big green can on wheels, but those things seem to swarm out of nowhere. Even if there is nothing else around . . . with all the lacking intelligent brain activity they had, they were dead silent. When it came to them and a prey that didn’t see them coming, the prey was already dead. No need to make a sound. The infected could be as silent as the grave where they once slept.

              The men hiked the mile nearly crouched over the entire time. Darin’s back was already killing him. The thick Kevlar armor, the gas masks and heavy boots were a hell of an outfit to run around in. Those damn guns weren’t the lightest things in the world, either. Darin felt sorry for the guys with the fucking shoulder-cannons. “
Now, you just stick right by me,
” Teel whispered to Darin as they neared the building. There were scattered zeds everywhere, but most seemed to be concentrated to the downtown area. There was no sense in drawing a crowd. During the briefing made on the ride to the city, one of the team leaders said that the smoke grenades are extremely loud, so if nothing worked, they had to haul ass and quick. There wasn’t near enough ammunition, even on the ATV, to get them all. Darin watched in awe at how these men moved. It was amazing. They looked like they had rehearsed the movements in this very spot for years. He knew for a fact that they didn’t practice this once. Back at the bunker, Teel picked the team and they just fucking left. That was it.

“
What are these guys?
” Darin said to Teel who was getting down on his stomach in the tall grass beside the empty highway.

             
“Three of them are SEALS. One is a former Green Beret from back in my day and the rest are Rangers. Some badass motherfuckers, lemme tell ya. Get down. Bad fucking time to be spotted.
”

              It seemed like they were laying down in that tall, brown grass for hours. Shit . . . it could have only been fifteen minutes. Darin had never been in situations like these, not like the hardened veterans that were watching his ass. He was a trained pony. These men were mustangs; the real deal. If someone had told him even two years ago that on this day he would be hunkered on his stomach with full battle-dress on . . . in the mud next to a five-star General with an M-16 in his hands, he would have told that person they were crazy. It gave him a new appreciation for what the men and women did overseas back when America was still a country. It wasn’t anymore. Now, it was as twisted, destroyed and discarded as the trash that blew through the streets and the cars that were now beginning to rust outside.

              One of the men on the roof fired a shot above his head when Teel gave the order over the small earpiece everybody had wired into their masks. Darin could even see it from his vantage point. The mass of the filthy, stinking dead were walking towards the building and toward the sound that echoed through the mostly deserted city streets. It was like looking at the aftermath of a brutal war. Arms, legs and picked-off bones were all over the place. Half-torsos hung out of broken windshields on the highway. People who jumped from high-rise buildings to escape being eaten alive were on sidewalks; their extremities mangled and twisted. Darin’s eye caught sight of a man who had hung himself from a streetlamp. He dangled low . . . his feet about head-level to anyone walking below. The zeds had eaten off both of his feet at the ankles. He swayed lightly in the breeze. Some kind of morbid wind-chime now. Poor man. To escape the fate that had more than likely befallen everyone he knew, he willingly broke his own neck, leaving himself to the bipedal vultures that now owned the world.

              As the infected walked toward the building, one of them caught sight of one of the men peering around the outer wall. Then, the others saw him.

              They all started running.

              They piled out of every conceivable space from as far as four blocks away. They smashed through shop windows, lurched out of alleyways and crawled out of vehicles. The ones that couldn’t walk, the ones that were missing legs or lower torsos, simply lay on the ground with their eyes fixed on the masked men. They hissed like pissed-off snakes and barred their rancid teeth. It was so strange how they looked . . . how much a human being could turn out looking so much like some kind of animal. The only thing that convinced Darin Miles that there was ever any humanity in them was simply the fact that they walked upright. Hell, most of them didn’t even have faces. The majority of them had been partially devoured when they succumbed to the effects of Lynn. When they turned, the infected simply stopped eating them for whatever reason. No matter the if’s. It was time to watch and pray.

              Teel stood straight up and barked the order. The two men on the roof tossed the gas canisters down into the crowd that was running toward them. The ones on the ground had opened fire, sending bullets through the heads of the stragglers that were already wandering around the area. They took the fire and fell to the ground, only to slowly get back up with odd moans and continue to try and reach the building. One of them got hit in the neck. Its head nearly came off and was hanging by nothing but tissue against its back. It still kept coming. The canisters exploded loudly, sending the echo straight into Doctor Miles’ ears. It must have sounded ungodly up close. He had no idea how
loud
those smoke bombs were. About as loud as a grenade. The thick, white gas that looked like any early morning fog wafted through the air and straight into the crowd of the rushing dead. Doctor Miles and General Teel both stood, waiting for it to happen.

              They kept running. They were now about one city block away from the exposed men.

              “Fuck! It didn’t work! Get them
OUTTA THERE!
” Darin shouted.

              “Pull back, you hear me? Pull back! Get the fuck out of there!” Teel screamed and grabbed Doctor Miles by the thick outer body vest. He turned with Darin in tow to run to the APV, when Darin tore himself away and out of the outer body armor.

              “They’re not gonna make it! We can’t just leave them!”

              “Miles! You are with me right now, so I am giving you an order! They know how to get out of shit like this and if they can’t, they knew what they were getting into. We can’t go back for them!”

              Darin Miles broke free of the General’s grasp and ran toward the building with his rifle held in front of him.

              “Goddamnit, Miles!” General Teel ran to the APV and opened the cargo hatch where the men would load themselves in. Through the thick smoke that was now covering the entire building, Darin could see nothing. It looked like it was engulfed in a cloud. As Darin neared the building, he ran into the fog of white. A figure was right in front of him with its arms outstretched. Its gangrenous fingers reached out for him, nearly touching him. Darin screamed and raised the weapon to fire. When his finger found the trigger, the thing stopped walking and stood there for a second before exploding from the waist up. The reaction was more violent than anything he’d seen. Everything inside of the thing exploded outward, sending all of its putrid, rotting guts right in Doctor Miles’ direction. The legs went less than five seconds later. The explosion was so fierce that he was nearly knocked over when one of its arms hit his mask, nearly knocking it off his face.

              In rapid succession, he could hear the wet popping sounds of the others exploding from the inside. It sounded like someone planted an M-80 inside of a watermelon. The most sickening splattering sound escaped them as their insides were thrown around as if they were tossed into a juicer. One by one, the effects of the canisters spread through the crowd. The sounds of the explosions were louder than the incoherent cheers over the radio. The General called everybody out of the area as they stood and watched with their masks off at a safe distance. The infected simply stopped where they were and popped like balloons. The entire bodies exploded, leaving nothing but chunks of them no bigger than golf balls. They were nearly vaporized. Quite a lot of blood, sinew, pieces of bone and tissue were violently spraying everywhere, landing on the others and spreading it throughout the entire crowd. Within minutes, they were all dead.

              “The city’s gonna need one hell of a power washer. I can see some spray two floors up! Man, those fuckers go, don’t they? Hardly anything left at all,” one of the older SEALS said with a grin.

              “Back in the APV. We need to get back to the bunker. Gotta get on the horn with the others and tell them we are ready to go. How many canisters did you use?” General Teel said.

              “One, boss. Just one. Jesus Christ, this can really do it, huh? If one can do all
that
, imagine what a handful of those things can do.”

              For the first time since the day Darin met the General, as well as all of the other guys, Teel smiled. Some of those men had known Teel for upwards of twenty some-odd years and had never seen it. He was as sharp, concentrated and tough as they come. But today, he smiled. Turning to Doctor Miles with a hearty handshake, he collected himself and put on that stern face of his. For a moment though, he wasn’t a General anymore. He was a human being . . . a human being who was finally shown a ray of hope. “Well, then . . . let us go find out, gentlemen.”

III

              He was on the roof of a nearby building, watching the team with an old pair of binoculars. When that little teargas bomb hit the ground and that thick, white smoke wafted out of that little thing, the view from up there was something to behold. From the front of the crowd all the way to the back, one by one, those things suffered the most glorious of full-body explosions. Nothing was left of them. Just little strands of shit that stuck to everything. He could even hear the nasty pop sounds thirteen stories up. Shit turned them into fucking soup. It was all over the street, probably ankle-deep. “Good job, boys . . .” he whispered to himself. The men loaded all of them back into one of those huge armored trucks that the Army uses and they sped away, no doubt heading to whatever safe rock the military was hiding under. They were all dead now . . . well, dead
again
, anyway. That nice little new weapon they had, though, was pretty nice. No coming back from that.
No sense hanging around here,
he thought as he walked to the stairway that led down to the street.
Things to do . . . people to see.

IV

             
“This is how it is gonna go. As all of you know, the supply runs have gone off without a hitch. The Lynn bombs are working and due to the extensive briefings we have given to the remaining governments, there are no friendly casualties. As we speak, the supplies given to the countries we have been in contact with will be launching their own defenses immediately. The drops we have made for survivors in major cities with instructions on how to use the canisters will undoubtedly prove to be effective in ridding ourselves of this horrible mistake. The whole of the remaining American military force and its volunteers, aside from the few of you here, will be dispatched out and will not come back until every single city in this country is clear. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen. We have all but won.” The President addressed the few remaining people inside the bunker. The whole facility was empty now. The few survivors with children were all in their living areas. With every single one of them, one parent stayed behind while the other volunteered. The level of help that they got was astounding. The human race had been taken from them . . . and now they were all going to take it back. The general consensus was the same. It wasn’t just the military’s job. It was the entire human race preventing its own destruction. Even the scientists elected to go out and clear the cities. Dennis Jackson, Victoria Rains, Darin Miles and Ana Garner stood with their twenty-man team of the military elite, most of them officers, while the President of a nearly deceased country addressed them. “Everyone has been cooperative for the most part, however . . . the Japanese government claims that they have successfully quarantined the outbreak and had done so successfully days afterwards. Various sources I have sent in indicate that this is not the case. Their remaining military have shut off a small, one-mile perimeter space around an area of Mount Fuji, where the Archies were first discovered. It seems that they either found out or knew from the get-go the repellent effect the plants have on the infected. The Japanese have not allowed anyone into their airspace. Planes from all over the world, including four of our own bombers have been shot down. I have been in contact with their leaders, attempting to negotiate a way to enter the country to assist them. They have not only denied this, but threatened retaliation if anyone even attempts to get near them. I personally believe the jig is up, ladies and gentlemen. They know that we are planning on going there to destroy what is left of those plants. This is something that absolutely
must
be done no matter what. Despite my reservations, the four survivors along with Doctor Miles have volunteered to go with my handpicked team to make sure those plants are destroyed.”