John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues

We approached Fort Edward the next morning after spending the night in some trees, slung in hammocks. Not a fun way to sleep but it kept the Zs away, and we couldn’t find a good house to hole up in before dark. Hopefully tonight we could sleep in a farmhouse I remembered from before the plague. We would have to put some miles on us, though, because I did not want to linger in the Glens Falls area. As it was, getting a good look at the rail bridge wasn’t going to be fun.

Creeping slowly forward toward the lock, weapons at the ready, I expected something similar to what we had seen in Schuylerville. The lock at Fort Miller, ten miles south, had been a wreck. The doors had been torn open by some violent flood of the Hudson sometime over the past few years. We had photographed it and moved on.

The southern lock to the Champlain Canal was an important one. From here, we could sail up to Lake Champlain, open up the mines in the Adirondacks again, farm the fertile lands of Vermont. It was all about reclaiming the country, one little slice at a time. Sure, the canals were old school, but they worked or were easy to make work again.

As we came up the road and turned a corner we could see that, at a distance, there were Zombies wandering around the lock area, scavenging through the bush for small animals. We could see maybe a few dozen and knew there were probably more that we didn’t. More than we could reliably take down before the howling started. Time to think a way to get them away from there.

I gathered the squad around me and explained the plan. “We’re going to have to do a runner.”

“Oh, hell no.”

“Oh, hell yes. Ahmed, your turn.” The only person exempted from the roster was Doc Hamilton. Our medic stayed with us at all times.

A runner was just that. One of us stripped down of all gear except a silenced .22 pistol, then took off like a bat out of hell through the Zombies, firing as he or she went, then hauled ass away from the rest of the team or some variation thereof. The idea was to get the Zombies to chase you, lead them into a blind alley or something, then cut back to the team. It was dangerous. Iinsane. And a huge frigging rush.

Ahmed took a minute to consult the map. We agreed on a place to meet if he wasn’t back in an hour, divided up his gear among the others. He kissed his rifle and handed it to Brit.

“Take this, you godless American whore, and guard it with your life.”

“I will, you son of a motherless camel turd,” she replied, and kissed him on the forehead.

Ahmed gave her a hug, knelt and said a quick prayer to Mecca, or to the radiation-filled crater that used to be Mecca. Then he took off running, straight through the crowd of Zombies, yelling “Allllllah Akbarrrrr!” at the top of his lungs and taking pot shots at them. We joined in with our suppressed rifles after they had turned to run after him, trying to cut down the odds, but stopped firing as soon as they blocked him from view. They disappeared down the road, moving at a fast jog, the ones that had functioning legs. Like I said, Zombies can move quickly when they have to.

Jacob and Jonesy quickly dispatched the two immobile Zs that were crawling off in the direction Ahmed had taken. We broke out the cameras and started photographing the canal lock doors, which were open, allowing a flow of water to come pouring out. That was good, because it meant the canal was still a through route, it hadn’t become blocked somewhere further upstream. The machinery was trashed, but mainly we were looking for structural damage.

We had been at it for twenty minutes when Ahmed came tearing ass around the corner back from the direction he had run, yelling at the top of his lungs and followed by several hundred Zombies. We immediately hit dirt, getting as out of sight as we could while the river of Zs hurtled by. We could smell the awful stench that always accompanied the dead. Next to me, Brit started to vomit, but I clasped a hand over her mouth. I would let her choke before I let her make a sound. She struggled a bit but swallowed it back down.

The last Z passed and we ran in the opposite direction. Time to put some distance between us and the crowd and fort up, if we could. Ahmed was on his own, and we would see him again. Oor not. He knew where to meet us.

We ran.

We ran. Uphill, away from the canal, heading for the woods and overgrown farmland. You can outrun a Zombie horde, but we had full packs on and the day was hot. We needed to get to a place to go to ground and wait for Ahmed. He had picked out a ruined house we could see on top of a hill about a mile away. Zs don’t like to go uphill,and I was pretty sure every zombie in Fort Edward was chasing Ahmed south down River Road.

We made it into the doorway of the house, stacking and clearing it. Jonesy kicked in the ruined door with his huge boot, or tried to. He rebounded off the steel door and started hopping up and down, cursing under his breath. I reached over and turned the knob on the door. Unlocked. I shot him a shit-eating grin and he gave me the finger.

We lined up, and Brit went in first, followed by Jacob, me, then Ski. Doc Hamilton and Jonesy stayed outside, covering our backs. We each piled in and swept our sectors, scanning the living room. Brit, the first one in, fired two quick shots into the figure sitting on the couch, and the skeletons’ head exploded into a cloud of dust.

“Whoops,” she muttered under her breath, then broke right with Jacob to continue to clear the ground floor. Ski and I went up the stairs checking each of the bedrooms. We didn’t need to surprise each other coming around a corner.

“CLEAR!” I yelled downstairs. “CLEAR” came back up to me. “Checking basement!” I heard the basement door kick open, then after a minute, “ALL CLEAR”.

“FORT UP!” I yelled, and Jonesy and Doc came in through the door. We grounded our rucks upstairs and each of us started ripping two by fours out of the walls. Doc took a battery-powered screw gun and started putting them up on the front door. He started laughing as he did it.

“What the hell is so funny?”

He laughed again. “It’s just like playing Black Ops, fighting zombies!” I laughed too, stupid idiots. I loved these guys.

Jonesy and Ski were hammering the stairs down, each wailing away with a sledge hammer, knocking out steps. If the doors or windows were breached, we would climb up a rope ladder to the upstairs. Trapped, but safe, and it always gave us time to think of something else.

When we had forted up as best we could, we settled down to wait for Ahmed or the Zs, whichever came first. Brit walked to the skeleton she had popped as we came in through the front door. She pushed the rusty shotgun away from the couch where it had fallen out of the skeleton’s, cold, dead hands, then sat down next to it.

“Sorry about that, Skeletor, but I couldn’t take any chances. It was either you or me, and I was faster. Better luck next time.” Then she put her feet up on the coffee table, closed her eyes, and went to sleep next to the shattered bones.

I went upstairs and built myself a snipers perch, looking downhill towards the lock. I figured it was about maybe eight hundred meters. I started picking off random Zs who were wandering around, excited by the noise of the chase, using Ahmed’s rifle. While doing so, I thought back to the wild, panicked nights of the plague. My Guard unit falling apart at the barricades, getting overwhelmed by the civilians trying to get out of the city, the Zs already mixing in with them. Me rushing back to my house to get my family and run. My wife coming at me in the kitchen, a hunk of our kid’s arm in her mouth, hands ripping at me like claws. I swung the butt of my rifle so hard I broke the plastic, and I kept swinging ’til the thing that had been my wife lay on the floor, a bloody pulp, and I ran. I don’t know how I made it through the following months but here I was, years later, letting thoughts of that night ruin my aim. I wiped away the tears and kept shooting, a steady fire that knocked down a good dozen before I got tired. Remembering did no good for anyone.