John Holmes - Even Zombie Killers Get the Blues

“Keep it steady, guys. You’ve all done this before. Aim, Fire. Aim, Fire.”

Zombies were dropping, but not fast enough. It’s hard enough to shoot them in the head. At night, while they were moving, very tough. About every fifth shot went home, maybe less as they got closer and started running uphill at us.

They crashed into the front of the house and we started firing down into their heads. They were going down but I heard one of the windows smash open and they poured into the house. Behind me I heard Doc open up with his shotgun. Noise wasn’t an issue anymore with the screams.

“Hey, I can use a little help here!” he yelled. Jacob ran back from his window and started firing down into the crowd of Zs that were trying to claw their way up the remains of the staircase. Most fell into the basement but they were starting to pile up.

Outside, there was no movement. Inside, they were piling higher and higher. The rest of the team grabber their knockers and started smashing downward on the Zs trying to climb the pile. One arm reached up and grabbed Ski around the ankle, started to drag him down into the mess. I dropped my bat and grabbed his arm and pulled as hard as I could. Jacob grabbed his other arm and the two of us lifted him clear of the pile and back up onto the floor. Next to us, Brit fired a full magazine of fifty rounds into the crawling mass, knocking down the last one as it tried to pull itself onto our floor.

Silence, except for our ragged breathing. I heard weapons being reloaded, stood up. Sweat was pouring off me and I felt my hands starting to shake.

“Give me an OK!” In turn, each of the team members called out their last name, followed by an “OK!” except for Ski.

He sat there, looking at a rip in the leg of his uniform. Under the rip, teeth marks were outlined with a small welter of blood rising up.

“Oh, fuck my life,” he whispered.

Jacob grabbed Doc by the shoulder and almost pushed him into Ski. “Doc, check him out! Do something for him! Will a tourniquet work?”

He whipped out a quick tourney and tied it off around Ski’s leg, high up, then placed his shotgun above the wound and pulled the trigger, blowing off most of the leg just below the knee. The loud BOOM echoed in the house, almost drowned out by Ski’s scream. He fainted. Doc lit his hand torch and cauterized the leg to stop him from bleeding out, then started cutting away at the ragged flesh. Just after he finished, Ski woke up and grabbed at Doc, then started pulling at the wounded stump, causing the blood to flow again.

“Let it go, Doc. Just let me go. Payback is a bitch. I gave in once, just once when I was so damn hungry I couldn’t take it anymore. I ate part of man I killed in a fight. I couldn’t help it, I was starving. Just let me go, Brother.” His voice sank, and we all shrank back away from him, horrified by what he had just admitted to, that thing that we were all scared of doing when we were starving. Ski never told us what he was on the run from, just always had that haunted look in his eyes.

Doc stepped forward and stuck a needle in Ski. Ski’s eyes rolled back and his breath let out.

Just like that.

“Empire Hammer, Empire Hammer, this is Lost Boys, Fire Mission, over.”

“Lost Boys, this is Hammer, Fire Mission, out.”

“Suppression, over.”

“Suppression, out.”

“Grid, Kilo November seven niner eight three, niner four two zero, over”

“Grid, Kilo November seven niner eight three, niner two four zero, out.”

“I say again, Grid seven niner eight three, niner four two zero, over.”

“Grid seven niner eight three, niner four two zero, out.”

“Time on target 0920 hours, over.”

“Time on target 0920 hours, out.”

“Hammer, this is Lost Boys. Understand we want suppression along a five hundred meter line on either side of that grid, 5920 mils map north. Hammer everything east of the river, over.”

“Understood, Lost Boys. You want to perforate every Z east of the river along that line. We’ll get back to you if we can range that. Hammer out.”

Damn, but I loved professional artillerymen. We had given them an hour to work out their solutions, pre-fuse the BB rounds, and rehearse. Suppression, in this case, meant a couple of volleys of rounds fired along an azimuth, in this case running roughly along the route we needed to take to get to the railroad bridge. The rounds themselves were based on the old claymore anti-personnel mines. High explosive packed with thousands of ball bearings that detonated about thirty degrees up in the air. They were directional, meaning that the ball bearings would scatter in an arc downwards and out. Any Zs standing out in the open would catch a high velocity BB in the brain, hopefully, and it would clear our path. I wished we could have used this last night but arty rounds were at a premium, and I had coordinated this with the Battery Commander at Firebase Horse last week through e-mail.

“Lost Boys, this is Hammer. We can range that, but after this you are on your own. Mike Tango Oscar, Suppression, linear target, four guns two volleys, five iterations along line. Stand by for shot, over.”

“Mike Tango Oscar, Suppression, linear target, four guns, two volleys, five iterations along line. Standing by for shot, out.”

The Message To Observer told us how many guns would be firing what, and that enabled me to confirm they were shooting what I needed. Firebase Horse sat in an old field just north of Saratoga Springs, or what was left of it. The wide open parking field gave the Battery open, clear fields of fire and a solid base for their 155 M-777 howitzers to sit on. It also provided a place to run patrols, clean out Saratoga of anything useful and provide fire support to anywhere between Glens Falls and Albany. The sucky part was that it sat on the edge of the fallout from the reactor at the Navy Power School in Milton. It hadn’t suffered a total meltdown, but the area west of Saratoga and southeast across Saratoga Lake up to the river had taken some fallout. Most was washed away, which is why we were OK in Stillwater, but I trusted the Army NBC guys as far as I could throw them while wearing a MOPP suit.

At 0918, Hammer came back in the radio.

“Shot, over”

“Shot, out.” I answered. Meaning the Battery had fired.

“Let’s go!” I told the team, and we shouldered our packs. Behind us stood the farm house where we lost Ski. A trail of really dead Zombie corpses led from the river to the house and inside stank to high heaven. We had waited all night for more to come from the city, but with the break of dawn, nothing showed. We buried Ski in the back yard with a rough cross over his grave. While I was digging his grave with Jacob, the others took turns cranking the handheld generators which charged our radio and other electronic devices.

We started jogging downhill to where the Route 4 bridge crossed over the canal.

“Splash, over.”

“Splash, out.”

I motioned for the team to hit the ground. I trusted the artillery guys but I’ve seen too many rounds stray off target. A mistake on the gun line transposing numbers. A mislaid gun. The wrong charge. Plus, those BB’s came out of the rounds at a tremendous velocity and I didn’t need a ricochet wounding anyone.

The air just above the river erupted in sharp flashes of light and then a second later an ear-splitting CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK repeated. One platoon of four howitzers, two volleys, then they shifted fire, walking it up the line I had given them.

After a minute Hammer came back on the radio.

“Rounds Complete, over.”

“Rounds Complete, OUT.” And I stuffed the mike back into Jacob’s ruck.