John Holmes: Even Zombie Killers Can Die

I started to get to my feet, but Brit pushed me back down. I watched the team fan outward as the helo faded into the sky. They walked the entire hilltop, scanning for any zombies that might have been missed by the fires. Shouts of “CLEAR” rang out over the hill, and the team immediately got to work.

As we had discussed while waiting for the pickup in Stillwater, the very first thing to be done was to dig two-man fighting positions in a tight circle, with overhead cover. We were on a spur off the hilltop, almost a crag, with a high mountain behind us and an open, steep slope leading down to the highway, several hundred meters away. Hopefully we wouldn’t need the covered fighting positions, but if the Zs got too close, I would be calling artillery fire directly on top of us. Like they said, though, hope is not a plan. Whoever THEY were.

An hour passed, then two. My hands were getting raw from the shovel, and I was tired. My shoulders ached, and my head was hurting. Filling sandbags was a monotonous, mind-numbing task, and I was grateful when my turn came up on watch. I watched the road in the light of the predawn and saw figures shambling through the fog, ghostly figures. I motioned for Jim to come up.

“You have two suppressed rifles, right?” He nodded.

“Well, time to start a little interdiction.”

He spit a long stream of tobacco juice out of his mouth. ‘Well, I dunno. We’ve got, how many, a couple tens of thousands of zombies coming up this way, right? I don’t think wasting a couple here with rifle shots is going to make much of a difference.”

I thought about it, and then agreed with him.

“Finish the fighting positions, and then try to get some sleep. In about two hours I’m going to register the arty. Brit and I will stay on watch.”

“Can do, Chief.”

He went back and in a few minutes, Brit came to sit beside me.

“You know, Nick, this could go really, really bad, really, really quick.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’ve got some ropes rigged on the back face, we can climb up and evade if we have to.”

“Brit, if they notice us, this entire hill is going to be overrun.”

“Well, if that happens, don’t let them get me.”

“You didn’t have to come, you know” I said to her, and took her hand.

“As if I would let you screw this up all by yourself, Dumbass.”

We both sat and watched the sun rise over the hills in the east. Below us, hidden in a mist in the valley, the zombie moan carried faintly up to us.

Four days. Sunrise on the fourth day. I was so tired that everything seemed to exist in slow motion. My eyes were raw from the caustic smoke caused by high explosive. Our sleep plan had gone to hell because the stream of zombies coming up the valley was nonstop. We had already beaten back six waves of undead that had made it past the artillery, and were running low on ammo. I had slept only a few hours over those past four days, and I felt shaky. When I held the binos to my face to adjust another volley, I had a hard time keeping them steady. I finally got them to focus onto a group of zombies climbing over stinking mounds of body parts and shattered corpses

“Alys, come over here and take the radio.” The kid was a homesteader from up river and the only one of us who had never done a tour overseas, besides Brit. He had done his three years after the war had run down, and didn’t want to go back active again. Just farm the land. Pretty steady in a fight so far, though. He got up from the parapet we had thrown up thirty meters down the hill. I handed the pack over to him and sat back down on the stump of a burned-out tree. Brit handed me a canteen and I swished some around in my mouth and spit it out. I took out some toothpaste and a brush and tried to scrub the foul taste out of my mouth. Ashes, dirt, the stink of rotting zombie flesh. I was so tired my body felt numb and hurting all over at the same time. I was too exhausted to even stand. I had to rest a while. I opened up an MRE and started to eat it cold, then looked at the label. Tuna with noodles. Ugh, this one hadn’t been on the menu for ten years. They must be getting seriously low on pre-war supply stocks to be dragging out this old stuff. I poured a whole bottle of Tabasco on it, trying to wake myself up and put some taste into it. I actually dozed off with the spoon in my hand and a mouthful of noodles. I woke with a start as a stray pellet from one of the artillery rounds zinged off the dirt next to me, but then I kept on chewing.

A few feet away rose three mounds of dirt. We had lost three men the night before when a zombie came down on us from behind, over the mountain. Our rear guard had fallen asleep, and it was inside the fighting position before either of them could react. One man had died instantly, the zombie tearing his head off. The other was bitten on the neck and had turned in a few seconds, coming raging at us in the dark with the first Z. Donny had seen them first and lit out at them with a yell, swinging his heavy sledgehammer handle. Another one of Jim’s crew had stumbled as he came at them, and both the Zs went after him in a pile. Donny smashed all three, fast and hard. Good for them they had died, because I would have shot one of them for falling asleep on guard. I had done it before.

We had buried our three and tossed the body of the first Z over the side of the cliff. Now I sat and looked at the graves, staring at them and trying to make my mind work. Brit sat next to me, put her head on my shoulder and fell instantly asleep. I eased her to the ground and let her sleep, then got up to look at the perimeter. In front of me, about 30 meters down the hill, the squad kept up a steady firing, knocking down Zs that were trying to climb the slope towards us. The closest corpse was lying across the rough rock wall we had built. Resupply came in yesterday, dropping water and ammo, and taking off one of the guys who had been throwing up and running a fever, and another who had dropped a rock while building the wall, smashing the small bones in his foot.

As I approached, Alys stood and fired a 40mm smoke grenade towards the road. It landed halfway between us and the mile-long smear of dead bodies and parts lining Route 9. Another wave of zombies, several thousand, had backed up against the ruins of the shopping center, and was scrambling to get over the rubble. Alys was talking an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle onto the target, using the smoke as a marker.

“Roger, target is two hundred meters two seven zero degrees from smoke.”

The pilot’s voice came back over the radio. “I copy, two hundred meters, two seven zero degrees. Stand by.” As I watched, the grey twin engine fighter jet flew over the valley from the north at about a thousand feet, getting eyes on the target. He banked around, disappearing over the hills, then started his run. They had been dropping five hundred-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions for us to cover while the artillery resupplied.

Staring at the plane coming in, something itched at the back of my mind. I was so tired that a cloud seemed to hang over my mind, and I couldn’t think straight. What was wrong? I looked down at Alys as he talked the pilot in.

Two hundred seventy degrees. I looked down at the smoke burning in the valley, and held up my hand to block the rising sun. Rising in the east, over the hills.

East. Ninety degrees from our position. The zombies were east of the smoke grenade. Ninety degrees. From the smoke. I tried to figure it out, and the truth burst on me like a flare.

“WAVE HIM OFF,WAVE HIM OFF!!” I screamed it at Alys, and he turned toward me, a puzzled look on his face. “What?” he yelled over the firing. We were all half-deaf from four days of constant gunfire and explosions. I could see the guys on the firing line, twenty meters away down slope, looking away from me. Only Esposito seemed to have heard. He looked at the plane, and then he started to dive behind the wall.