John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Can Die

“Well, if none of us make it back, here’s the grid coordinates of our haul. You’re welcome to it. Got about fifteen pounds of gold and almost forty-five of silver. Ton of diamonds and other jewelry, too.”

What they did was tough work, but they banked on it being rewarding, too. They went house to house, killing zombies and looting for jewelry to melt down into ingots, breaking into banks and pawn shops. Plan was to get enough to move to buy a ticket to England. Problem was, they had already lost three guys to zombie bites, and one to some guy holed up in his house with a ton of canned food and a shotgun. There had methodically cleared each house in Mechanicville, and planned to keep at it up and down the river.

“Much appreciated, Jim.”

He laughed, and said “Just don’t shoot me in the back to get it! If you miss I’ll beat you to death with that fake leg of yours, Army puke.”

“As if.”

The helo dropped down out of the sky into a cornfield that was slowly growing, knocking down the young plants in a blast of wash from the two rotors. Dammit, I thought, another crop wasted. Stupid pilot had completely ignored the orange panels laid in the empty field next to it.

The crew chief hopped out, and waved at us to board. First in went Red on his stretcher. He was awake, and pissed off that he was strapped into the stretcher.

“Untie me, Nick!”

“Sorry, Kid. We’re dropping you off at the Combat Support Hospital in Albany. We’ll see you in a week or less. Rest up so we can go rescue the team when we get back.”

He looked at the rest of the guys filing in. They were loaded for bear, extra ammo, two heavy machine guns, the tube of an M-224 60 millimeter mortar strapped to the back of one guy’s pack, the baseplate to another.

“What’s going on, Nick? Is this the militia? You guys look like you’re going to fight World War Five or something.”

“Or something. Lines are breached north of the City. They need all the help they can get.” Brit strapped in next to his stretcher and reached out and squeezed his hand.

“Don’t worry, Red. The guys on the team are either dead, or they’re not. We’ll go get them as soon as we kick some zombie ass.”

The turbine engines whined and we started to lift, spinning around and racing south, following the river. I climbed up front and yelled into the crew chief’s ear, asking what the hell was going on.

“I don’t know much!” he yelled back. CH-47s are incredibly loud. “Someone from USAMRIID sprayed something by airplane all over the city, supposed to kill the zombies. They went batshit crazy instead, crashed right into the T-barriers along I-84 and overwhelmed the light infantry. That was two days ago, and there are like a couple million moving up Route 9 and all the other routes out of the city.”

“So where are we going?”

“Drop off your casualty at the FOB, hot refuel, then we’re supposed to leave you off somewhere in Putnam County so you can interdict the horde and call artillery fire. Then we turn around and go get more militia.” When they did a hot refuel, the rotors would still be turning. That’s how short on time we were.

“You’re dropping us off BEHIND the battlelines?” Infuckingcredible.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find you a nice high place to fight from.”

“I need twenty minutes at the FOB to get more ammo.”

“We can give you fifteen, and that’s it. That’s how long it will take us to gas up.”

I nodded to him and went to sit next to Brit.

“What’s the deal?” she yelled into my ear.

“We’re screwed, Brit, and not in a good way.”

The helo thundered on down the river.

Another helicopter, flying south down the river. Troops sleeping in the glow of the red lights, trying to get some rest before maybe the eternal sleep. I had done this a hundred times, but I couldn’t help but thinking of the last one down to New York City. Killeen was dead, and what was the name of the guy who broke his leg? Dresden, something like that. Different faces, but the same faces. So many gone.

We had picked up Specialist Esposito at Fort Orange, to round out the team. He was the only Regular Army soldier on the ride. After I had lost my leg in Denver, he had gone on a few missions with the team, but then had met a girl at the FEMA camp and had quit. He had met us at the LZ and thrown his gear on board without saying a word. He saw me looking at him, and held up his hand to show off a wedding ring.

“Dumbass!” I shouted to him over the road of the turbines. He smiled and flipped me the bird, and went back to reading a paperback copy of A Soldier of The Great War that I had lent to him last year.

We were being dropped on a hilltop just south of Interstate 84. I plotted the position on a 1:50,000 map I had grabbed at the FOB, marking Target Registration Points. If I could work it out, the Z horde would be channeled into a firesack by the terrain, steep valley walls rising up from a flat plain. The first waves had broken through, and Bradleys and Abrams were chewing through them. A second wave, far larger, coming up from the Bronx, was working its way up Route 9. Timing would be the key. If we could get into position before the horde left the valley and got a chance to disperse outside the Hudson Highlands, then we could use Firecracker rounds to devastate them.

It had been tried at the start of the apocalypse, artillery barrages on top of hordes, fired by the lone National Guard artillery battalion stationed in New York City. The shrapnel had ripped holes in their bodies, but usually failed to score a hit on Zs brains, and the howitzers quickly ran out of ammunition. Things were different now. There were three times as many guns, seventy-two 155mm Howitzers and a battalion of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems. Each gun had a thousand Firecracker rounds, each containing a thousand steel ball bearings, pre-stocked, and a US Navy cargo ship had been docked in Poughkeepsie, preparing for the clearing of New York City, with thousands of tons of munitions. On top of that, the Ready Brigade from the 82 ndAirborne was being dropped to reinforce the lines of Task Force Liberty.

The crew chief came around and gave me a five minute warning, and we shook ourselves awake, checking on our gear and chambering rounds in our weapons. At the FOB, a pallet of ammunition, MREs, empty sandbags and water had been rolled on board, and we would drop that out as soon as we had secured the Landing Zone. The rear ramp dropped down, and we flared in for a landing.

Prior to our being dropped off on the hilltop, an artillery battery had dropped White Phosphorus onto it, burning off the trees and undergrowth. As we pulled in, the rotor wash sucked up the ashes and created a blinding swirl of dust and cinders. I stepped off the ramp, and fell into space. The crew chief had misjudged the pitch of the hill, and the tail ramp was a good two feet off the ground.

I fell flat on my face, and my pack with the radio in it rode up and hit me in the back of the head, and I blacked out. When I came too, I was being half carried, half dragged across the LZ. The taste of ashes was in my mouth and stars danced crazily in my vision. They dumped me on the ground, and someone shone a flashlight in my face.

“No concussion. Pupils are OK. Wakey-wakey, Nick,” said Brit, and she slapped me across the face, then kissed me. Then she spat. “Ugh, you taste like shit.”

I sat up, and rubbed my face where my Night Vision Goggles had smashed me. I was bleeding slightly, but I flipped them back down and turned them on again. The darkness was replaced by the usual grainy green picture. I wished again for one of the monoculars I had in worn in Afghanistan, but the newer stuff was reserved for the Regular Army troopers.