John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues

Around dusk, Ahmed showed up, dripping wet. We had watched him through binos, pulling himself up out of the water at the edge of the river. Dangerous shit, that. You never knew what, exactly, was swimming or floating around there anymore. He immediately gave me a SITREP (Situation Report, to all you civilians), changed into dry clothes, then passed out on an upstairs bed. I typed up a report for Task Force Empire, attached the pictures from today, hooked my iPhone to the SINCGARS radio, and did that magic shit the commo guys had come up with. No cell towers? No problem! They ran it through our FM radios. Don’t ask me how they did it, but it worked.

I called the guys around. “Ahmed is done in so we have to stay here tonight. You know the drill. Two men on watch, staggered hours. Weapons loaded, on safe. I have the one to three watch, divide up the rest, Brit. Light and noise discipline.” They all answered in the affirmative.

Brit stayed behind while the others went to get something to eat out of their packs.

“Nick, I’m sorry about today, the vomiting. I’ve never had that happen before. It was just so freaking disgusting.”

“It happens. Get past it or you’re going to be off the scouts. I almost had to choke you to keep you quiet today. Understand? If you can’t hold it together around Zs then you are a risk to the whole team.”

She nodded her head. For once, she looked contrite. “I got it. I know what you gotta do what you gotta do. I’ll handle it.”

“You did a great job nailing Skeletor today, even if he already was dead. You’re a part of this team, Brit. Now go get some more sleep. I’m sure you’re beat. Before you do, though, remind everyone that Ahmed gets to sleep the night through.”

“Can do, Nick.” Then she leaned over and kissed me full on the lips. I wiped my face with my sleeve and muttered “Ugh, girl germs!” just loud enough for her to hear me as she walked away. She shook her hips at me, slapped her ass and went into the bedroom.

We settled in for the short May night.

The must have pushed the sounds to us. Way off in the distance, I heard the pop-pop-pop of a firefight going on. It seemed to be coming from the north, just a faint echo of gunfire. The rounds were sparing, like someone was trying to take head shots, but then they rose in a crescendo, faster and faster, followed by fully automatic fire. Then it stopped dead. If the wind hadn’t been blowing from the north, I doubt I would have even heard it.

Doc was sitting next to me on watch. “Somebody just got overrun.”

“Ya think?” He had heard it too, and knew what the final burst of meant. You don’t use automatic weapons on zombies. Most of your rounds would be wasted zipping through their bodies. It was a panic burst; they were so close there was no time to aim, their hands were almost on you.

“Where do you think?”

“I dunno. Not Glens Falls, the city is too close. Maybe Lake George. The mountains do some funny things with sound, carry it down through the valleys. Tells us one thing, though. There’re people out there.”

“There’s always people out there, Nick. No matter how bad things get, there are always survivors somewhere. Hell, you know we’ve been monitoring radio traffic from the north end of Lake Champlain. Apparently the frogs from Quebec are still around. And organized.”

“Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it. People like those farmers we met today. They were pretty friendly, but I worry about some of the hard cases we might meet. Make sure from here on out everyone is on their toes in regards to Zs and Mad Maxes.” “Mad Maxes” was our term for people who had turned to looting and killing of anything that got in their way in order to survive. Not really fair to the original Road Warrior, but that’s pop culture for you. The worst thing was to get caught by one of those groups that had gone cannibal. Think to yourself, oh no, not in America! Cannibals? I don’t care where you are. Get people hungry enough and some of them will start eating whatever, or whoever, they can find. In the years after the plague, there was hunger enough. If we caught them, we shot them on sight.

Then I heard another sound, much closer, that made me sit bolt upright, wide awake. Coming back up River Road, just starting to be visible in the NVGs, was the horde Ahmed had led away this afternoon. They had started back to their territories but they must have smelled us when the wind shifted to the north.

“Go wake everyone up, bring everything upstairs. It’s going to be a turkey shoot but it might get tight. There’re a lot of them.”

Doc climbed down the rope ladder and I settled down with the sniper rifle. Ahmed was better than me at this, and when he got up here, I would let him take over. I started a slow, steady round of shooting. By the time Ahmed put his hand on my back, my shoulder was sore and my eye hurt from straining at the night scope. There were a good twenty Zs cooling on the ground in a trail. That trail, though, pointed directly to us.

“Do we run?” asked Brit.

“Not at night. Too big of a chance of us getting separated or someone twisting an ankle or breaking a leg. Nope, it’s fight night.”

We all settled down to our firing positions, knocking glass out of the upstairs windows. Knockers, something to beat in a Zombie’s head with, whatever was each person’s preference, stood stacked at the top of the ruined stairs.

The danger was twofold. First, this was just the start of a swarm. The city of Glens Falls and its surrounding area was a city of around thirty thousand people before the plague. Average actual turned-into-zombies rate was around sixty percent, though that could vary. It was dependent upon evacuation, how well the populace was armed, how many people died from being eaten versus reanimated. Figuring around half the Zombies from that population were still ambulatory, we might face nine thousand zombies, not the hundred or so coming at us now. And you thought math never did anyone any good. It made me freak out.

The second thing we were afraid of was enough of them would get into the house and swarm what was left of the stairs, to form a pile which could reach up to the second floor. That’s what the knockers were for. Hopefully not.

“Suppressors?” asked Ski. Suppressors wore out, another thing they never showed in the movies. The heat of the rounds being fired off wore out the sound-absorbing metal fibers inside. We had to choose quiet now versus quiet later. However, they did reduce the range and accuracy of our shots. The rifles we carried were military issued M-4 carbines, re-chambered for a hot copper jacketed .22 Long round, but they didn’t have a lot of range to start with. Thing is, with Zs, you don’t necessarily need heavy duty, hard hitting rounds. Accuracy was the word of the day, and the more ammo you could carry, the better.

“For now. We don’t need half the Z population of the Glens Falls metro area coming down on us. Wind might carry the gunshot sounds anywhere. Just remember to shoot high to compensate for the drop if you’re out past 100 meters. Better yet, wait till you see the reds of their eyes. ”

“Ok, Chief.”

We waited while Ahmed kept firing. In a few minutes, the horde came in range of the rest of us and we opened up. The Zs finally got worked up and started running toward the house. The scream started, that Zombie scream that ran right through your teeth and made your gut tense up. Coming from a hundred mutilated throats, it gave us all the chills and we started to sweat.