John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Can Die

“Yeah, but there is one thing I can do for them.”

I reached for the radio.

“Orion, this is Lost Boys. Execute Arc Light, Target AA 2375, over.”

“This is Orion. Roger, execute Arc Light, Target AA 2375, out.”

Three miles up, a mix of a half dozen B-52H and B-1B bombers had come back on station after carpet bombing a zombie horde outside Newburgh. They had been patrolling over the Adirondacks for the last two hours, ready to support combat operations anywhere in the Northeast. Scout teams had priority of fire if there were massed targets, and I had worked with these guys before. Two years ago, the team had extracted the navigator and copilot when one of the overworked, sixty years old B-52s had come apart midair, and their chutes had carried them down onto some flatland just outside Syracuse. Before we had left Albany, I had given a target list to the Air Liaison at the Task Force Headquarters.

Now, fifteen minutes after my call, from the open bomb bay doors spilled dozens of two thousand pound dumb bombs, falling in a steady stream towards the island. Each plane made several passes, laying a string of explosives from one end to the other, south to north. The heavy ordnance blasted huge craters into the bedrock, and an eruption of dirt and stone leapt high into the sky.

I took the controls from Brit and headed west, full speed. We skipped over the waves, and, behind us, the island shook and turned into a cloud of dust.

Brit sat next to me, helmet off and red hair whipping in the wind. “WE GOTTA GET DOC TO SOME MEDICAL CARE, ASAP!” she yelled over the concussion of the two thousand pound bombs pounding the island. “WHERE TO?”

“ISLE LE MOTT, AROUND THE NORTHWEST SIDE!” The S-2 had forwarded me some satellite recon photos, and there had seemed to be some settlements and fortifications on the island, although much smaller than on Grand Isle. I just hoped we got a better welcome than we had here.

I looked down at Doc. Red was bandaging his fingers where the nails had been torn off. Ziv sat in front of me, looking backwards, smoking a cigarette, watching the bombs fall. Hart was helping Red, handing him bandages while holding up an IV that ran into Doc’s arm. Ahmed looked out over the bow, scouting ahead.

For better or worse, the Lost Boys were together again. We sailed on into the falling darkness.

Long minutes passed as the zodiac cut around the northeastern edge of Grand Isle, out of range of any snipers that might be hiding among the trees. The wind that blows perpetually across the northern end of Lake Champlain whistled eerily in the dark. Isle la Motte gradually came into view, or what I thought must be Isle la Motte; what looked like a concrete wall obscured the interior. If S2’s recon photos were correct, there should be settlements there, and if so, that wall was a pretty good way of keeping anyone out. Still jumping on adrenaline, I worried maybe the General had controlled this place too.

I glanced back at Doc, lying across the inflatable seats just in front of Hart, who had one hand on the motor and the other holding up an IV bag. Doc looked like hell, and Brit, temporarily on nursing duty, looked up at me with eyes full of worry. I couldn’t hear his breathing over the motor, but I could see even in the failing light that one side of his chest was rising out of sync with the other. If he didn’t have a collapsed lung, he had at least three broken ribs on that side.

The remains of the Vermont Bridge loomed to our front, creating mini-rapids in the current flowing north towards the Richelieu River; the Vermont National Guard having blown the bridge when the Undead made it to northern New York before northern Vermont, in the vain hope of defending Burlington from that direction.

The lake was deceptively peaceful. Ziv was sitting just in front of me, facing the way we had come, watching in silence as secondary explosions from the JDAMs continued to eat whatever was left for it to eat on the island — South Hero, if I remembered right. North Hero was connected to it by a causeway. And if the General was as big an SOB as I thought, hopefully he would have placed explosives on that causeway as well. Maybe North Hero Island could avoid the pounding its sister just caught to the south. If not… I pushed away that line of thought and hunkered down next to Doc.

“How bad?” I shouted to him above the engine noise.

He just shook his head. He didn’t have the breath to try and shout an answer to me. I placed a hand on his shoulder, not daring to squeeze reassurance for fear of hurting him worse. I turned instead towards Ziv, who pitched his cigarette into the lake and leaned his head back against the rubber sides.

Asking him if he was injured would be useless, but I looked him over. His face wasn’t smashed in like Doc’s, and I remembered from the fight that his arms and legs worked, at least; but I wouldn’t put it past him to fight with broken bones. The way his left arm was socketed tight against his chest suggested a fracture of some kind. Whatever, we’d deal with his injuries when we got to Isle la Motte — if we were able to get any kind of help there, that is.

It was maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes from the southern end of Grand Isle to the remains of the causeway between Isle la Motte and the Alburgh Peninsula, but it felt a lot longer. When we got close enough to the peninsula, I had Hart cut the motor and we used the paddles. There was no sign of life anywhere, but the gap between the two wasn’t more than two or three hundred meters, and I didn’t want to alert anyone to our presence until we had to.

Up close, I could see that the wall was maybe twenty feet high and made of cinderblocks and cement. The exterior was incredibly smooth, even the cement between the cinderblock joints had been carefully set; the effect was of one flat, even surface. After a few seconds’ staring at the thing in stupefaction, my brain kicked in and I realized that no zombie would be able to climb the wall. Pretty slick, no pun intended.

“Ahoy, the island!” I shouted when we were about fifty meters away. Behind me, Brit snickered. Two heads popped up from behind the wall, and one of them shouted to me.

“Qui est-il?” The voice switched to English. “Who are you?”

We’d heard rumors for several years that the Quebecois north had managed to remain organized, and it didn’t surprise me to hear French; it stood to reason they would want the Vermont farmland as much as we did, especially after the fall of Montreal. The Canadian Parliament had the city nuked, ostensibly to contain the plague up there. However, from the paranoid mutterings of the few survivors to make it south, after Toronto succumbed to the plague moving north from Buffalo and Niagara Falls, Quebec had tried to secede and seal up their own borders. It may have worked. Despite the destruction of their capital city, regular radio traffic could be heard from French news channels. Reportedly, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia remained zombie-free. Ottawa was now its own glowing lake of glass thanks to the Chinese, but the Frogs had evidently survived.

“United States Army! We have wounded here!” Hart had pulled out the flag we’d used down south at the ambush site and was waving it madly.

The two heads disappeared for a second, then a series of ropes were tossed over the wall and one of the men rappelled down easily, stopping just short of the water. Several more heads appeared over the edge of the wall. We paddled the boat over to him, and he shined a flashlight into each of our faces. The light paused on Doc.