John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Need a Break

“Nick, I can’t see out of my eye! She blinded me! ”

“You can’t see anything?”

“I can see perfectly out of one eye, but nothing out of the other.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No, not at all. I am going to kill that bitch!” She started up off the table, and I sat her back down.

“No, no you’re not. Listen to me, Brit. She could have killed us any time she wanted to. Made us disappear. I’ve seen it happen. Look around you.”

She did, and took in the medical equipment, the pile of rotting body parts on the floor, the Zombie head still snapping at us. It looked like some kind of medieval torture chamber. On the wall hung one those crappy inspirational posters.

I took her face in my hand and turned her good eye to me. She was furious and I had to stop her right here, right now. “Brit, listen to me. We have to move very, very carefully from here on out. We are on her turf. As long as we are in Seattle and around the big Army, we can’t do anything to her. Do you understand me?” She glared at me.

“Brit, you have got to understand. I swear to you, we will deal with her, someday, in our own way, but if we fight her here, we will lose, and I’m not losing anyone else if I can help it. Especially you.”

A tear rolled out of her good eye. The other one sat blankly, staring and lifeless. “I’m going to kill her, Nick. Soon.”

“Soon, Brit. I promise. Now let’s get out of here.”

We made our way out the door and down a long corridor. Several doors were set on each side, looking like cells, with an observation window set in each one. As we passed the first door, something crashed into it with a loud bang thump , making us jump back. I went over to the window and slid back the little door.

Inside, a zombie was backing up to rush at the door again. He was wearing shredded Army ACUs, with dried blood coating the pixelated surface. His lower jaw had been torn or cut off, and a large hole gaped where his larynx had been. Brit pushed me aside to get a look, just as it crashed into the door again.

“She cut his voice out. He was soldier. Look at his patch.” I peered in again, and saw what she was talking about. On his left sleeve was the Screaming Eagle of the 101 stAirborne Division. The entire division has been wiped out to a man, after air assaulting in Washington, DC to evacuate critical government personnel. That was two years ago, in the middle of the chaos. Their Forward Arming and Refuel Point in Virginia had been overrun by panicked civilians trying to get onto the helicopters, stranding all three brigades at the barricades surrounding the Capitol. Doc had told me of being in the TOC in Manhattan, listening to the units drop off the net as they were overrun, one by one. I had heard from the other teams who scouted that area that they had come across piles of bones where they had sold their lives in a running gunfight against the millions of zombies who swarmed out of the cities on the eastern seaboard.

How Dr. Morano had gotten one of them out to the west coast, I didn’t want to know.

“Nick, we have to kill it. He was one of us, not some goddamned freakshow experiment!” She started to open the door, gripping the handle tightly. I pulled her off and further down the corridor. She struggled, and then let me pull her way.

It was the same at each of the doors we passed. The Zombie inside would charge the doorway as we went by. Each of them held a ragged, bloody, rotting form in the remains of an Army uniform, several of them with obvious wounds to their heads. Experiments.

The last door held the worst. Lying there, listlessly, was the remains of Specialist Mya, the medic who had been killed by nerve agent back at Firebase Castle in New York. Her body, which we had left on the island a few hours after she had been accidently killed, was bloated but still recognizable, pushing against the remains of her uniform. The Z which had been her crawled slowly across the floor toward the door, arms twitching and flailing as it dragged itself across the floor towards me.

“ Holy fuck !” yelled Brit. This time I didn’t stop her as she flung open the cell door. The thing which had been our teammate seemed weak, not in control of itself, but its eyes still glowed that insane red. Brit walked over to it and stomped as hard as she could on the thing’s head, cracking its skull. It twitched once or twice, then lay still.

“Oh Girl, I am so sorry we left you out there in the rain. We didn’t know. We didn’t know. We thought you were dead.” Brit kneeled in front of the cooling corpse, ignoring the blood that soaked her jeans.

“She was dead.” We both started at the sound of Dr. Morano’s voice.

“All soldiers now sign a release authorizing the Army to use their bodies to best effect in order to combat the zombie plague. Don’t you know that? It’s a small clause, buried very deep in their draft papers, but oh, so useful to me.” She had a little smile on her face. Such a beautiful woman, and rotten to the core. “As a matter of fact, Ms. O’Neill, even your civilian contract with the Army has the clause. Do me a favor, please, and leave your body whole when you do get killed. Nick, please don’t shoot her in the head.”

She turned and walked out. Her bodyguards, who had been standing with guns drawn on us, followed her out and up the stairs.

When we got to the front of the building, Ahmed and Ziv were waiting, engaged in a staring match with an armed security detachment at the front doors. They waited until we had passed. Ziv made a gun out of his hand and pointed it at Dr. Morano, who had stopped behind some plexiglass security doors to watch us go, and mimed pulling the trigger. She smirked and bowed.

We had to get out of town, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. We were TDY here at Fort Lewis to provide instruction to cadre but there was no way we were going to stick around in Dr. Morano’s turf. She could reach out and touch us anytime she wanted, and I didn’t know how long I could hold the team from going after her.

We pulled back in through the gate at JBLM just as my cell rang. It was the duty officer at the training unit. I pulled over and talked to him for a minute, then spoke to the team.

“Listen up, guys, I have to go to a punishment enforcement over at the Basic Training Unit. Doc, see what you can do with Brit’s eye. Ziv, you’re coming with me. None of us are going alone anywhere until we can get out of this place.”

I dropped them off at the Troop Medical Clinic, picked up my dress blues and drove over to the Basic Training Division on North Fort. I left my GSA car parked outside the Headquarters and went inside to find the duty officer who had called me.

“Nick, what is this punishment enforcement thing you speak of?”

“Well, I don’t know how they handled disciplinary action in the Serbian Army, but things are pretty strict here now.”

“In Serbian Army, sergeants would beat you if you talk back to them. We take care of trouble ourselves.”

“Yeah, well, you can do that in the US Army now, especially out in the wild. It didn’t use to be that way, before the Zombie Apocalypse. NCOs were pretty much stripped of their disciplinary power. Tell me, how did you handle sexual harassment?”

“Pah, no women in Serbian. Useless.”

“Yeah, well, don’t let Brit hear you say that.”