John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues

Doc rucked on, lost in his thought. I could think of a time or two myself when I had wished the Air Force had dropped a big-ass bomb at my beck and call. Water under the bridge, though.

We turned the corner of River Road, and I noted how our corn was coming in, growing in the field on our side of the river. I had planted it a month ago, using precious diesel to run a scavenged tractor to plant twenty acres. Green stubs were just showing up through the ground. I was tired of eating canned food and stale MREs. Now if I could only get my hands on a cow… foolish pipe dream. Most of the cows around here had died from infections they got when the electric powered milking machines had shut down. The rest had been eaten long ago.

As we moved past the edge of the tree line, what was left of the house came into view. A small, faint column of smoke still twisted into the sky.

Doc pulled up short next to me, followed by Ahmed and Jonesy.

Ahmed spoke first. “JDAM, Joint Direct Attack Monition, guided bomb, maybe about five hundred pounds. Probably delivered by an F-18 off the USS Abraham Lincoln. Someone really does not like you, Nick.”

I stood dumbfounded. The windmill that provided our electricity still spun in the gentle wind, but the house itself was a mass of lumber blown to Hell and gone.

“Well, now what?” Jonesy stood kicking through the rubble, looking for his own stuff where his room had been. Everything was scattered and gone. Even the safe in the basement, where we had kept our extra weapons, hidden under the cement slab of the floor. I had thought that might be OK, but the crater extended past the basement, and water from the river had flooded into the crater.

“That asswipe is gonna pay, Nick. My entire collection of games is gone.” Jonesy held up the shattered remains of his Xbox.

I sat down on a rock, looking out over the river. I was tired. My feet hurt. My back hurt. I was worried about Brit. I wasn’t sure where to go next. Well, scratch that. I knew where to go next. I just wasn’t sure what the plan was. First things first, though.

“There’s nothing here for us, guys. You know what we have to do. First things first, though. We need rest and resupply. Time to head to the cache.”

We had spent last summer building an extra fortress, a “go to hell” meeting place about a mile away, built on the top of a knoll, deep in the woods. Cinderblock walls, parapet and a small cabin inside that could sleep six in bunks. Water supply from a hand pump-operated well, firewood stockpiled, enough food for a year, extra ammo we had been stealing every chance we got, replacement weapons that had been “destroyed or lost” on previous missions. The only way in was through a tunnel covered by a grating that had to be unlocked or an aluminum ladder buried in the wood a hundred meters away.

We made a way slowly through the woods, keeping an eye out for Zs that might have been attracted by the house being bombed. Only one, the remains of an incredibly fat woman, missing an arm. She came stumbling out of the woods, swinging her remaining arm at us. Jonesy swung his steel bar at the things’ head, yelling, “THAT’S FOR MY XBOX!”

Ahmed eyed him strangely. “She did not touch your Xbox!”

“I know, but I feel so much better now!”

While we rested at the fort, cleaning our weapons, Doc tending to the various small injuries that crop up after being in the field for a few days, I took stock of our situation and conferred with Ahmed. I sat with my feet propped up on a bench.

“Those are nasty weapons, Nick.” He made a motion of gagging. “Maybe you can march into the FOB and you can knock everyone dead from the smell of your nasty feet.”

“Haha, very funny.” I continued drawing out a plan of base in the dirt.

“The hard part, Nick, is we don’t really want to shoot our way into the base. As much as I used to enjoy fighting you Americans and the Taliban both, Allah has told me to kill Zombies. And bad guys, of course. Those silly Fobbits do not deserve to die because their commander is an ass.”

“I agreed, Ahmed. You’re forgetting something, though. No one knows we are dead. I doubt LTC Jackass is going to run around trumpeting he had us killed. In due course, I’m sure he’ll announce that we were “lost” or something, but I bet he gives it a week or two. So, we can just walk in the gate, but we will have to move fast.”

“No, that will not work, Nick. As soon as you come in the gate, the base commander will be notified. Then we will be up shit’s creek, because he will run, or have us arrested on some kind of made up charges. Somehow.”

“Well, if we can get in touch with Brit, I’m sure she can get us in somehow.”

I was waiting to hear from Brit. If we had gone off the net or gone missing, she was under orders to call us at 1000 hours each day on a predesignated freq. I hadn’t heard from her yet, but she could have been fed a line of crap by the Chain of Command. It had been almost two weeks since she had been wounded so I’m sure she was mobile around the hospital.

It took two more days to hear from her after we had set up an OE-254 antenna to extend the range of the radios.

“Blue this is Red, over.” That was her calling us. Nothing to give away anything, on the off chance anyone was listening. We were using the team colors from Halo.

“Red, go.”

“Blue, you were reported dead. SITREP, over.”

“Four pax OK, base gone. Break.”

“Need knock at Orange two days, over.”

I waited for her to figure it out. In two days, she would have to help us get into Fort Orange.

“ Time, over”

“Fourteen, Moby, over”

“Fourteen, Moby out.”

OK, so it was cheesy code, but someone may have been listening. Our electronic warfare assets were stretched thin, mostly down in Mexico where the 82 ndwas fighting for the oil fields. I was more worried about someone at the commo shed overhearing Brit talking to us, so we kept it short and coded.

“Fourteen” meant “1400 hours,” or 2 PM. She would subtract twelve off of that to get the real time, or 2 AM. “Moby” meant “on the south side of the base”. I had stolen it shamelessly from the Moby song “Southside”. We had other code words for the cardinal directions, other things we memorized. I was just glad she was doing well enough to help us out, and she would be coming out with us one way or another.

That afternoon, we moved back down to the river. Two of us each hauled on steel cables that had been pegged to the river bottom in a shallow area and pulled two fourteen foot aluminum canoes from the riverbed, where we had sunk them with rocks. We flipped them over and cleaned out the mud and silt that had accumulated over the last few weeks while we were gone, then waited for night to descend on the river so we could start paddling downstream.

Two days later found us lying in the mud of a drainage ditch. Overhead, the stars blazed away like nothing I had ever seen when the world was full of light. I watched the International Space Station trace a slow arc overhead, an endless coffin, and thought of Brit. I wondered if she would ever get to those stars.

Lying in drainage ditches in a post-Zombie world is hard to do, because you never know what is lying in the ditch with you. We all were tensed up, ready at any moment to grapple in a death grip with a zombie that had been hiding under the leaves. Fortunately the area had been cleared pretty well when the Army established Fort Orange. Still, it kinda made your balls crawl up inside of you as you crawled along, poking in front of you with your knife in one hand and your pistol in the other.