John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues

I held out my hand. “Welcome to the Zombie Killers, Ahmed. Screw me or any of us over and we’ll cut your balls off.” He looked me in the eye, nodded, and shook my hand.

That was more than two years ago, and at last count, we had had something like five hundred percent casualties, dead, zombied or wounded. Now, excepting Brit, we were down to the four of us who made the core of the team and she was out of action for a while. I kinda laughed to myself as I walked, thinking of an old pop culture reference.

Jonesy heard me and asked what I was laughing at. “Time for some more Redshirts, Jonesy.” I told him. Yeah, I felt every injury and death my team had suffered but sometimes, screw it, you just gotta laugh at death. Civilians, they never understood.

The Z jumped me out of a doorway. I was walking point as we made our way into Whitehall. I had done a quick peek around the corner, seen that it was clear down the street and moved forward. The doorway was on the edge of the building that I had just looked around, and the Z had been huddling in the doorway. It sprang up on me, immediately going for my throat and knocking my rifle out of my hands. I hunched my neck up in my collar, jammed my forearm into its mouth, and swept the legs out from under it. I landed with a nasty, bone snapping crash on top of it and started hammering the things’ head into the pavement. It bit down even harder on the woven Kevlar sleeve of my uniform jacket, pushing the steel strip sewn into the sleeve into the flesh of my arm with a bite like a steel trap. All that kept running through my head was don’t tear, don’t tear, don’t tear . My right hand was trying to reach for the hammer I wore slung on my belt and the weight of my pack was threatening to tip me over. I hunched down even further in my collar and turned my face away from the clawed fingers. One scratch and I was screwed. It might take a minute for the infection to get me, but Doc would have put a bullet in my head long before that. I gave up on the hammer and started scrabbling around for a rock or something on the street. I came up with a piece of broken asphalt and hammered it into the thing’s head over and over. It finally stopped moving but its jaws stayed locked on my arm. I pulled out my K-bar knife and worked it into the jaw, cutting away, careful not to get any of the body fluids on my exposed skin. It finally let go when I cut the tendons to the jaw and I rolled away, onto my pack, shaking like a frigging leaf.

A burning-hot brass cartridge casing spun through the air and landed in my collar as I lay there catching my breath, and I scrabbled to pull it out. I saw another fall to the ground in front of me and bounce off the pavement and looked up to see Doc standing there.

“A LITTLE HELP!” He stood next to me, had been there the whole time, firing methodical shots into a crowd of Zombies advancing up the street, a milling, chaotic mass. Ahmed and Jonesy faced the other way, firing back down the way we had come.

F’ing surrounded. I jumped up and joined Doc firing at the Zs, which were closing in quickly. More piled out of buildings on either side.

This was just the situation we tried to avoid, being run down by a horde of Zs in a town where anything could pop out at you. We had made it most of the way through town and were just a few hundred meters short of the canal lock, the end of our mission. That’s the way it always happens.

“ACTION RIGHT, MAKE FOR THE CANAL!” I yelled, and we all turned and concentrated our fire on the Zs between us and the water. As we fired, we ran at them. Every few shots we would connect with a skull and one would fall. Ten meters away from the closest ones, we dropped our weapons in their slings and pulled out our pistols, firing shots at their heads. Then we charged them, swinging our bats and steel rods and hammers as fast and as hard as we could. In a few seconds we were through them, dropping our Z knockers and hauling ass for the water, followed by a crowd of Zs charging after us. We gained a few yards and as we reached the edge of the canal, we dropped our packs, vaulted the low railing and dove straight into the water.

It closed over my head and I started to sink down. I reached the mud at the bottom and kicked upwards. My eyes were screwed shut. Deep water over my head terrifies the shit out of me. I broke the surface and tried to tread water before going down again. I crossed the canal in a series of bounds, pushing off the bottom to get air from the surface of the six foot deep water, gasping as much air as I could before sinking back down. I made it the fifty or so feet across the canal, getting more and more tired. I almost didn’t make it but a huge hand grabbed me and pulled me out of the water as I sank the last time, just short of the edge,. I lay there gasping for breath. Beside me, the guys were catching their breath too. Jonesy stood up and yelled across the water at the Zombies clustered at the edge of the canal.

“HEY YOU! SHITHEADS! THROW MY PACK OVER! I AIN’T FINISHED READING MY BOOK YET!”

We all burst out laughing. Jonesy looked hurt.

“What? I was reading World War Z . I wanted to know how that shit turned out.”

Damn. Our packs sat where we had grounded them. The zombies were tearing through them, infuriated by the smell of living humans on them. As we watched, they scattered our extra ammo, rations, clothes, everything.

“Jonesy, please tell me you still have the radio.”

He pulled it out of the frame that it rode in on the back of his plate carrier and turned it over. Water poured out of it. He saw the look on my face.

“Well, it might work once we dries it out, Nick.”

“Yeah, it might. OK, how are we doing for ammo?”

I was alright, with a dozen full magazines. Doc and Jonesy were down to three mags each and I quickly cross-loaded so we each had six. Ahmed had about two dozen rounds left for his sniper rifle. We each had about fifty rounds for our .22 pistols and each of us had an MRE and some water stuffed in our assault packs.

“Well, we’re alright on food and water for the next day. Ammo should be fine if we avoid getting in the shit like we just did. We have one more set of locks to check out and then we can call for EVAC. Let’s move a mile or so down the road and then take a break. Take turns trying to dry out your clothes, and cleaning weapons, fifty percent security. Half an hour each.”

The mile went quickly, but we ran into three Zs that had been attracted by the commotion on the other side of the canal. We shot them, cleanly, and, even if I had my camera anymore, I wouldn’t have bothered taking their pictures. Not worth the time and effort anymore. From here on out, it was finish the mission, nothing else. We settled down in a bunch of trees, just off the side of the road. Doc and I took first watch. Jonesy quickly set about stripping the radio after he had cleaned his weapon, drying each part as best he could and laying the circuit boards out in the sun. Then we switched off, and last thing I did was reassemble the radio and test it out.

“Empire Main, this is Lost Boys, radio check, over.”

I pictured the commo geeks sitting high on Prospect Mountain over Lake George, barricaded in their little fortress/van. They had been air mobiled in a few weeks ago to coordinate coms and provide retransmitting capability to any of the teams operating in the southern Adirondacks. Our SINCGARS backpack radios would never reach back to TF Liberty, so they relayed the signals of all the teams operating in the area via microwave transmitter, line of sight to the big tower at Fort Orange. I wouldn’t want their job; endless hours of boredom punctuated by terror when you had to go out of your armored van to service the antennas or take a dump, or run the 20 feet to your armored sleeping trailer.