Even Zombie Killers Can Die

Chapter I

It never fails.

Specialist Redshirt felt the rumbling in his guts, about ten minutes after he had eaten his lunch MRE. Could be the water, could be the food itself. Good water and unspoiled food were getting hard to come by, almost three years after the Zombie Apocalypse had pretty much trounced Western Civilization.

The rest of the team sat finishing their meal.  Doc and Ziv picked idly at their MRE’s, the summer heat making it hard to eat. Red was standing watch, along with Ahmed, but he had to go. He motioned to Sergeant Toshi, who was stretching her legs.

“Sarge, I gotta hit the treeline. Take over for me.”

She grunted and climbed to her feet, tossing her rucksack onto her back and shouldering her rifle. Beside her, the big Swedish guy, Svenson, levered himself up off the ground. No one went anywhere alone.

They were taking a break in small clearing, just off the remains of Route 9, north of Ticonderoga. To the east, Lake Champlain stretched out, a broad sheet of water reflecting the summer sun. Their canoes lay drawn up on the shore where they had stopped at sunrise. The team was heading north to see what remained of the Air National Guard unit at Burlington Airport, and then to check the locks at the end of the lake where the Richelieu River wound its way down to the Saint Lawrence.  They had stopped for the day just north of Port Henry on the New York side of the river.

“Oh crap” muttered Red under his breath, and he dashed for the trees, setting his rifle down, dropping his pants, and barely making it before his guts exploded. Coming up behind him, he heard Svenson starting to laugh.

“That’s what you get for picking a number eleven, Red!” he started laughing again, but it was cut off with a choking sound. Red saw the feathers of an arrow sprout from the big mans’ neck, just above his body armor. He fell to the ground, grabbing at the arrow, a stunned look on his face, then spilled forward, choking.

Red scrambled to pull up his pants, yelling “AMBUSH” at the top of his lungs, and dove for his rifle. He grabbed it just as burst of shots dug into the ground where he had been squatting. Recovering his footing he ran as hard as he could through the woods, away from the gunfire that had erupted between him and the rest of the team.  He dove over a fallen tree, and then started to scramble around to the right, trying to get back in the clearing where the team was.

After a few minutes, he could see through the trees. Two dozen figures in a haphazard collection of camouflage and carrying an assortment of weapons, everything from M-4’s to shotguns, had rushed the area, and a squad of them was moving towards where Svenson lay. He noted that they moved in covering fire teams, cautiously advancing.

Sergeant Toshi lay out in the open, an arrow sticking out of her face, her feet drumming on the ground. Ziv was buried under a pile of bodies, swinging his big combat knife. As Red watched, someone hit him on the back of the head with the butt of a rifle, and he fell to the ground. Ahmed was nowhere to be seen, and one man stood with a pistol to Doc’s head.  Even as he watched, Doc let out a yell.

“Red, RUN!”

Specialist Eugene Redshirt, Irregular Scout Team One, United States Army, ran. Before he did, though, he fired a long burst from his suppressed carbine at the squad moving towards Svenson’s body. He saw one fall before he turned and ran deeper into the woods, deeper into the mountains surrounding the lake. Deeper into Zombie Territory.

Chapter 2

As he ran, he heard gunfire behind him, and then a red hot poker zipped through his leg, and he stumbled and fell heavily on his face. His rifle flew out of his hands as he tried to stop his fall. Behind him he heard yelling as the ambushers started off in pursuit.

Redshirt got up again, holding onto his thigh, squeezing it tight to try and stop the blood flow. It hurt, but it felt more numb than anything else. He limped deeper into the forest.

The sounds of pursuit died off, and then he heard one voice calling to him.

“Hey, you’re gonna die out there, and I ain’t wastin none of my men comin to get you. I knows yer wounded, and unarmed. I hope you got enough sense to kill yourself before you get eaten!”

He risked a look back and saw the squad heading back to the ambush site. One of them held his rifle in his hands. Damn. His pack, all his extra ammo, food, everything was back at the sight, as well as the rest of his team.

First things first, his leg. The smell of blood and the sound of gunshots would draw any zombies, even though they had stopped at a deserted stretch of shoreline. He ripped open the leg of his pants and looked at the wound. A shot had creased the muscle, tearing out a bunch of skin and flesh. It hurt like hell but he wasn’t going to bleed to death. He pulled out a field dressing and wrapped it around his leg.

Redshirt started crawling back to the campsite, but flanked around to the left, where he could get a good view. A big motor boat had pulled up the shore, and the team was being hustled onto the boat. He counted more than twenty of the reavers. They had stripped Sergeant Toshi’s body, but it didn’t seem like they were going to eat her. As he watched, one put his boot on her head and pulled out the arrow. Doc was already on the boat. Ziv must have been unconscious, because they threw him into the bow like a sack of potatoes. The boat backed out of the shore after about half of the Reavers had climbed aboard, then headed north up the lake. The rest melted into the woods, moving as a disciplined squad.

He climbed slowly onto a high rock, and waited. One hour. Two. Three.  The whole morning passed before he saw the stay behind ambush. Three of them walked out of the trees, and used an axe to smash holes in the canoes drawn up on shore.  Then they walked back into woods, following a trail that ran northwards along the shoreline.

His leg was starting to hurt, and he was hungry. The nearest safety he knew of was a hundred miles south, through wrecked civilization and hordes of zombies. Redshirt checked over his inventory. A silenced .22 automatic, 450 rounds of .22 Magnum ammo, and his survival kit strapped around his waist. It contained a hammock, 50 feet of line, lighter, some spare food, Poncho, extra five shot .22 revolver, signal mirror, iodine tablets, and a multi-tool.  

He slid slowly down the rock, pistol in hand, favoring his wounded leg, and made his way to the campsite, carefully skirting the perimeter, trying to make sure no one else was around. Finding no one, he made his way in, careful to avoid the naked body of Sergeant Toshi. There was nothing left on the ground except some expended brass and some MRE wrappers. He quickly ripped them completely open and licked off whatever food was remaining inside.

“Got you! Knew you were somewhere out there!” He heard the safety flicking off a weapon, and raised his hands, and slowly turned around. In front of him stood a figure camouflaged in a set of old army BDU’s, wearing body armor and holding a pump shotgun pointed at him from about fifteen feet away.

“Drop the weapon and start walking” The reaver motioned with the shotgun barrel. “Captain is going to be happ…” As he started to swing the barrel back towards him, Red dropped his hands and dove to one side, firing his pistol as fast as he could. The shotgun boomed and his left arm stung, but he kept firing until the slide locked back. He stood up and walked over to the man lying on the ground, who was clutching at his neck. As he watched, he coughed blood out of his mouth, then shuddered and went still. Red kicked the shotgun aside, and started stripping the body of everything useable. Then he picked up the shotgun, ejecting the spent shell.

He looked the corpse over one last time. “You white people … you talk too much.”

Chapter 3

The tractor caught on another rock, heaved up by the winter frosts. I jumped down, careful to land on my good leg, and stumped over to it. The prosthetic on my right leg, a blade of carbon fiber, was good, but the stump was still raw and painful sometimes, and I didn’t want to irritate it.

Joe had already brought the four-wheeler up, and I helped him lift the rock into the small trailer. It joined the others that would be dumped at the edge of the field, helping fix the rock wall built by farmers around 200 years ago. We were raising it high enough that a random zombie couldn’t tumble into the field. Three years later, and they were still thick on the ground in the ruins of the towns up and down this stretch of the Hudson River, despite our “cleaning” trips we went on once a week.  The field I was working was east of our little island fortress, and I was desperate to get some honest to God corn and wheat growing. Brit was doing pretty well with the garden.

“OK, Joe, let’s call it quits for the day.” He grunted in agreement, and waited until I had secured my rifle on the ATV and hopped on. Then he twisted the throttle, and we headed back to the bridge. Joe was an extra hand who I had hired, a guy who had had enough of the FEMA camp in Albany. Didn’t say much, worked hard, and lived in a room in the old farmhouse. He was saving his New Dollars pay so that he could homestead somewhere properly, with a new wife. Hopefully somewhere close by. He was a good man to have around.

We pulled up to the gate on the bridge, and I got down to open up the heavy barrier. As I did, out of habit, I looked over to the canal, just checking to see what might have washed down river. Zombies occasionally, starting to rot once the water immersion killed the parasite. More often live ones who had just fallen in, and were still snapping and trying to climb out. Those I shot once in the head.

This time, I stopped and looked hard. Drawn up on shore, next to the ruins of our old house, was a canoe. Someone was onshore. I tapped Joe on the shoulder, and he jumped down next to me, readying his old lever action Winchester.  I called quietly to Brit over the radio, keying the mike in a two tap alarm. Back at the house, her Motorola would beep twice, giving her the “come quick, be armed” signal. Not that Brit went anywhere unarmed anyway.

I sent Joe off to the left, to flank anyone who might be moving up the left side of the small island. I moved downshore, toward the canoe, first tightening the straps that held my leg in place. I approached steadily, looking over the site of my M-4, ready to fire a quick burst. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joe come around the side of the old house foundation, and he gave me a quick “all clear” sign. We moved together towards the canoe.

On the other side of it lay a figure, clad in the rags of an Army Multicam uniform. Rough bandages were around his leg and his arm, and he lay sprawled facedown in the mud. I dropped my rifle in its sling and ran to him, rolling him over.

Specialist Redshirt was dirty, bloody, and chewed to hell. His ammunition pouches were empty, and his .22 pistol lay on the ground next to him, slide locked back. I checked his pulse and breathing. He was alive, but felt hot to the touch.

“Brit, this is Nick. Red is here, I found him next to a canoe on the old island. He’s wounded.” I checked his forehead, it was burning hot to the touch. 

“Do you need me there?”

“Negative, we’ll bring him in on the 4 wheeler. He’s got a bad fever, looks like multiple gunshot wounds, infected bites. Get the Medkit out, antibiotics, IV, everything.”

Reds’ eyes opened a little.

“Red, it’s me. It’s Nick. You’re safe.”

He whispered, and I had to lean forward to catch it. “Doc, Ziv, Ahmed, team captured.”

“It’s OK, brother, we got you. We’ll take care of it. Just hang on.” He squeezed my hand, then fell limp in my arms. I lifted him onto the trailer, and we started back. I left Joe to close the gate.

Chapter 4

I sat looking at a map of Lake Champlain, lit by the kerosene lantern hanging in the kitchen. Brit sat across from me, cleaning her rifle. Joe was out in the tower, pulling first watch, keeping an eye open for any zombies or raiders that might be approaching under cover of the darkness.  On the kitchen counter, a SINCGARS radio was tuned to the Fire Support Net at Firebase Horse, just outside Saratoga. Through long practice, I had learned to keep half an ear out for our call sign. It had been quite a while since anyone had called “Lost Boys” on the radio. I was out of the scouting business, for good, I had thought.

Red’s team, consisting of him, Master Sergeant “Doc Hamilton”, Sergeant Toshi, and couple of civilian scouts, including our old friends Ziv and Ahmed, had stopped by the farm last week on their way north. Doc had filled me in what was happening, Army wise. We had a satellite dish that fed us the news through the internet, and I had kept in regular touch with them on Facebook, while I recuperated from getting my foot pretty much hacked off.

“Well” said Doc, after he had checked on my stump “Task Force Liberty has been held up just south Poughkeepsie, pretty much at the I-84 line. I think they’re run out of fuel and manpower, and are consolidating. The radiation from Indian Point has pretty much held off operating on the east side of the river, anyway. They took a LOT of casualties in Newburgh and Pough-town. The Marines cleared Staten Island, are turning it into a giant Jarhead / Squid base. “

Apparently the consolidation had freed up the team to go north and check out the canal links to Montreal. They had only stayed one night, pulling out in their canoes the next night under cover of darkness.  Almost the same mission we had last year, except further north.

As I looked over the map, I reached down and idly scratched between Rockets’ ears. He got up, stuck his head out the small flap cut in the door, smelled the wind for zombies, then came back to sit on my feet. Brit finished assembling her rifle, snapping it shut and then doing a functions check. Then she pulled out her pistol and started breaking that down. I could tell something was bothering her, so I asked.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” she said. “Red mentioned Port Henry when he woke up before. That’s a lot of travel on that leg.”

“First off, we’re not going anywhere until Red is up for it. Give him 4 or 5 days, I think he’ll be back on his feet. The kids is tough.”  She nodded in agreement, but I could see her starting to object again. I held up my hand.

“Brit, I’m not an action adventure hero. My leg is gone, and my stump hurts like a bitch sometimes. We live forty miles from the nearest medical care, and I know an infection can be the death of me. I’m not friggin superman.”

“Well, you are in bed.”  She placed her hands over her face and made an “OM NOM NOM” sound.

I laughed. “You’re still a pig, honey.”

“There is a reason I won’t let you keep sheep here on the farm, Nick. I don’t want you to stray.”

I threw an oily gun rag at her.

“Seriously, though, I’m going to call in a favor. If we walked or canoed it, it would take us a week to get up there. We need that time for Red to recuperate. I’m going to call FOB Orange, and see if we can get a ride.” Last I knew, Major McHale was still commanding the Aeromedical UH-60 company at the Forward Operating Base. Hopefully he could give us a ride.

“That, and we need intel. Someone in the S-2 might be able to give us some information on groups operating out of the Lake Champlain area. I know that they’ve picked up radio traffic and done over flights. It doesn’t do us any good to go in blind. Plus, we need to know if there are any zombie hordes moving around there.”

She got up and came around to give me a kiss on the forehead. “Only because it’s our friends.”

“Of course.” I wanted out of the game as much as she did.  

Chapter 5

One thing about the Army, you never know when it was going to through you a curveball. I wasn’t expecting the one we got an hour later.

“Lost Boys, this is Orange Main, over.”

I got up from the table, where I had been cleaning my own weapons. Brit was upstairs checking on Red, and I was about to pack it in for the night. The call from the Operations TOC at Fort Orange came as a complete surprise. It was being relayed through the retrans station at Firebase Horse. 

““Lost Boys, this is Orange Main, over.”

“Orange Main, this is Lost Boys, over.”

“Lost Boys, this is Liberty actual, over”

Damn. The Task Force Liberty commander was on the horn.

“This is Lost Boys six, send your traffic, over.”

“Nick, I am recalling you to active duty, along with any other inactive members of your team.”

I stared at the handmike. WTF, over? Recalled to active duty?

“Liberty Main, this is Lost Boys Six. Say again, over.”

“You heard me, Nick. Get your shit together, get Brit, and get every goddamned settler you can. All hell has broken loose along the line. A Chinook will be at your place at 1900 hours tomorrow. Bring enough gear for a week.”

“Roger, be advised. India Sierra Tango One is missing, believed captured outside Burlington. We have one WIA from the team here, over.”

“Understood. Figured as much when they dropped off the net. Bring him along, he’ll get medical care at the CSH. See you tomorrow. Liberty Actual out.”

Damn, what the hell was that all about? I called upstairs to Brit, asking her to come down. Then I got on the radio again and switched over to what we called the “local” band.

Within a ten mile radius, up and down the river, people who were tired of living on government handouts and working the fields around Albany for FEMA had struck a deal with the Army. They were given radios, guns, ammo, seeds and equipment, and one day’s assistance from a platoon setting up a defensible position, preferably at a useable farm. In return, they were on call to assist against any attacks and provide manpower to the Army when asked. So far, there were an even dozen loners, and two families, who had taken up the offer, and we often hooked up with them to “clear” the local area of zombies. Our place acted as a trading post for them. Most were ex-military who didn’t care to deal with the government any more than they had to.

Everyone was supposed to tune in for net call at 2100 hours each night, to check in. Three weeks ago, one of them, a tough old guy named Salk, had missed his call. Several of us had made for his place at first light, moving up the river to an old farmstead just south of Schuylerville. We had found a pile of dead zombies around the farm, but one had gotten him in the end, and Brit shot him through the eye as he stumbled towards us, dragging his half eaten leg.

At 2059, I keyed the handmike, waited a second, and then initiated the netcall. When everyone had answered up in order, I got down to business.

“All stations, the army is calling in their chips. I need you all here no later than 1700 tomorrow with a weeks worth of gear and ammo. “

A chorus of curses broke out over the radio, most along the line of “Fuck the army”. I waited them out, then got back on.

“They helped you when you needed it. Now it’s payback time, and your fields can wait a week, break.”

“Jablonski and Smith, you are excused. I know you have families that need taking care off. See you all at 1700 tomorrow. “

I wasn’t going to break up any families again, but if Task Force Liberty was calling in the Reserves, it was serious. I flicked on Fox News as Brit came down the stairs. We caught the tail end of the hourly  newscast, and I recognized the location on the video. Thousands of reanimated corpses were streaming down route 9, overwhelming the barricades at I-84. As I watched, the footage switched over to a shot of a cruise missile slamming into the center span of the Tappan Zee Bridge, 20 miles north of New York City. Hundreds of bodies fell into the middle of the river.

“Damn” said Brit.

“Damn” I agreed with her.

Chapter 6

The news wasn’t any better the next morning. I had powered up the generator to supplement our batteries, and left the TV on all morning. I tried to pick apart details on what was happening, but all that I got out of it was that there was a shit storm of zombies heading north out of NYC. Apparently something had stirred them up, but the Army wasn’t saying. As I watched, the Verrazano Bridge fell into Lower New York Harbor, dropped by the Marines defending Staten Island. Another couple of billion New Dollars down the drain.

Red was still knocked out, helped along I’m pretty sure by something Brit had given him. We had carried the kid downstairs, and he lay strapped to a folding stretcher. Our packs were sitting by the door, weapons sitting on top of them, and I was adjusting the straps on my leg when we heard Joe call out to someone. It was obviously someone he knew, or he would have challenged them. This sounded more like a greeting than a warning.

The first one I saw was the last one I wanted to see. I actually didn’t see him first, I smelled him. Donny the Butcher.  We never could find out his last name. The guy stunk to high heaven, and never, ever washed. He claimed that the smell kept the zombies off of him, and he was still crusted with blood from the last clearing trip we had been on.

“OUT!” yelled Brit. “Get your nasty ass out of my house. Go jump in the river, before I throw you in. I’m not riding or fighting next to your nasty ass.” He stopped dead in the doorway, and beat a hasty retreat. Donny was terrified of Brit for some reason. I sighed, got up, and shot Brit a look. She shrugged her shoulders and made a “What?” gesture with her hands. I shook my head and walked out.

Donny, who had actually jumped into the river, was soon joined by a couple of others, and I looked them over as we did checks on our equipment. There were an even dozen. Tough looking men, even two women, who had spent the last winter hacking out a living in an area that was rapidly turning back into a wilderness of ruined buildings and deserted fields. The biggest group were five guys, all ex-military, who were slowly looting Mechanicville of gold and silver. The rest, like Donny, were loners who enjoyed being away from society.

The leader of the Mechanicville crew, a burly former Marine named Jim Lock, came over to me, asking what was going on.

“Best I can tell, Jim, is that the lines are breached somewhere south of Poughkeepsie, and the Army is shitting a brick. Apparently all the Zs in NYC have gone apeshit.”

He nodded and scratched his chin. “Think that is going to cause any problems here?”

“Dunno. It seems to be only the NYC area, and between your crew and the rest of us, we’ve cleared everything out on this side of the river, up to the Saratoga radiation zone. That and patrols from Firebase Horse have pretty much tagged every Z in the local area.”

I knew what he was worried about. Brit, Joe and I had worked hard getting a crop in, and building the farm up into a defensible position. It could hold its own for a week or two, but more than that, we might have some surprises when we came home. If we came home.

“Well, if none of us make it back, here’s the grid coordinates of our haul. You’re welcome to it. Got about 15 pounds of gold and almost 45 of silver. Ton of diamonds and other jewelry too.”

What they did was tough work, but they banked on it being rewarding, too. They went house to house, killing zombies and looting for jewelry to melt down into ingots. Plan was to get enough to move to buy a ticket to England. Problem was, they had already lost three guys to zombie bites, and one to some guy holed up in his house with a ton of canned food and a shotgun. There had methodically cleared each house in Mechanicville, and planned to keep at it up and down the river.

“Much appreciated, Jim.”

He laughed, and said “Just don’t shoot me in the back to get it! If you miss I’ll beat you to death with that fake leg of yours, Army puke.”

“As if.”

The helo dropped down out of the sky into a cornfield that was slowly growing, knocking down the young plants in a blast of wash from the two rotors. Dammit, I thought, another crop wasted. Stupid pilot had completely ignored the orange panels laid in the empty field next to it.

The crew chief hopped out, and waved at us to board. First in went Red on his stretcher. He was awake, and pissed off that he was strapped into the stretcher.

“Untie me, Nick!”

“Sorry kid. We’re dropping you off at the Combat Support Hospital in Albany. We’ll see you in a week or less. Rest up so we can go rescue the team when we get back.”

He looked at the rest of the guys filing in. They were loaded for bear, extra ammo, two heavy machine guns, the tube of an M-224 60 millimeter mortar strapped to the back of one guy’s pack, the baseplate to another.

“What’s going on, Nick? Is this the militia? You guys look like you’re going to fight World War Five or something.”

“Or something. Lines are breached north of the City. They need all the help they can get.” Brit strapped in next to his stretcher and reached out and squeezed his hand.

“Don’t worry, Red. The guys on the team are either dead, or they’re not. We’ll go get them as soon as we kick some zombie ass.”

The turbine engines whined and we started to lift, spinning around and racing south, following the river. I climbed up front and yelled into the crew chief’s ear, asking what the hell was going on.

“I don’t know much!” he yelled back. CH-47’s are incredibly loud. “Someone from USAMRIID sprayed something by airplane all over the city, supposed to kill the zombies. They went batshit crazy instead, crashed right into the T-barriers along I-84 and overwhelmed the light infantry. That was two days ago, and there are like a couple million moving up Route 9 and all the other routes out of the city.”

“So where are we going?”

“Drop off your casualty at the FOB, hot refuel, then we’re supposed to drop you off somewhere in Putnam County so you can interdict the horde and call artillery fire. Then we turn around and go get more militia.”

“You’re dropping us off BEHIND the battlelines?” Infuckingcredible.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find you a nice high place to fight from.”

“I need 20 minutes at the FOB to get more ammo.”

“We can give you fifteen, and that’s it. That’s how long it will take us to gas up.”

I nodded to him and went to sit next to Brit.

“What’s the deal?” she yelled into my ear.

“We’re screwed, Brit, and not in a good way.”

The helo thundered on down the river.   

Chapter 7

Another helicopter, flying south down the river. Troops sleeping in the glow of the red lights, trying to get some rest before maybe the eternal sleep. I had done this a hundred times, but I couldn’t help but thinking of the last one down to New York City. Killeen was dead, and what was the name of the guy who broke his leg? Dresden, something like that. Different faces, but the same faces. So many gone.

We had picked up Specialist Esposito at Fort Orange, to round out the team. He was the only Regular Army soldier on the ride. After I had lost my leg in Denver, he had gone on a few missions with the team, but then had met a girl at the FEMA camp and had quit. He had met us at the LZ, and thrown his gear on board without saying a word. He saw me looking at him, and held up his hand to show off a wedding ring.

“Dumbass!” I shouted to him over the road of the turbines. He smiled and flipped me the bird, and went back to reading a paperback copy of A Soldier of The Great War that I had lent to him last year.    

We were being dropped on a hilltop just south of Interstate 84. I plotted the position on a 1:50,000 map I had grabbed at the FOB, marking Target Registration Points. If I could work it out, the Z horde would be channeled into a firesack by the terrain, steep valley walls rising up from a flat plain. The first waves had broken through, and Bradleys and Abrams were chewing through them. A second wave, far larger, coming up from the Bronx, was working its way up Route 9. Timing would be the key. If we could get into position before the horde left the valley and got a chance to disperse outside the Hudson Highlands, then we could use Firecracker rounds to devastate them.

It had been tried at the start of the apocalypse, artillery barrages on top of hordes, fired by the lone National Guard artillery battalion stationed in New York City. The shrapnel had ripped holes in their bodies, but usually failed to score a hit on Zs brains, and the howitzers quickly ran out of ammunition. Things were different now. There were three times as many guns, seventy two 155mm howitzers and a battalion of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems. Each gun had a thousand Firecracker rounds pre stocked, and a US Navy cargo ship had been docked in Poughkeepsie, preparing for the clearing of New York City, with thousands of tons of munitions. On top of that, the Ready Brigade from the 82^nd Airborne was being dropped to reinforce the lines of Task Force Liberty.

The crew chief came around and gave me a 5 minute warning, and we shook ourselves awake, checking on our gear and chambering rounds in our weapons. At the FOB, a pallet of ammunition, MRE’s, empty sandbags and water had been rolled on board, and we would drop that out as soon as we had secured the Landing Zone. The rear ramp dropped down, and we flared in for a landing.

Prior to our being dropped off on the hilltop, an artillery battery had dropped White Phosphorus onto it, burning off the trees and undergrowth. As we pulled in, the rotor wash sucked up the ashes and created a blinding swirl of dust and cinders. I stepped off the ramp, and fell into space. The crew chief had misjudged the pitch of the hill, and the tail ramp was a good two feet off the ground.

I fell flat on my face, and my pack with the radio in it rode up and hit me in the back of the head, and I blacked out. When I came too, I was being half carried, half dragged across the LZ. The taste of ashes was in my mouth and stars danced crazily in my vision. They dumped me on the ground, and someone shone a flashlight in my face.

“No concussion. Pupils are OK. Wakee Wakee, Nick” said Brit, and she slapped me across the face, then kissed me. Then she spat.

“Ugh, you taste like shit.”

I sat up, and rubbed my face where my Night Vision Goggles had smashed me. I was bleeding slightly, but I flipped them back down and turned them on again. The darkness was replaced by the usual grainy green picture. I wished again for one of the monoculars I had in worn in Afghanistan, but the newer stuff was reserved for the Regular Army troopers.

I started to get to my feet, but Brit pushed me back down. I watched the team fan outward as the helo faded into the sky. They walked the entire hilltop, scanning for any zombies that might have been missed by the fires. Shouts of “CLEAR” rang out over the hill, and the team immediately got to work.

As we had discussed while waiting for the pickup in Stillwater, the very first thing to be done was to dig two man fighting positions in a tight circle, with overhead cover. We were on a spur off the hilltop, almost a crag, with a high mountain behind us and an open, steep slope leading down to the highway, several hundred meters away. Hopefully we wouldn’t need the covered fighting positons, but if the Zs got too close, I would be calling artillery fire directly on top of us. Like they said, though, hope is not a plan. Whoever THEY were.

An hour passed, then two. My hands were getting raw from the shovel, and I was tired. My shoulders ached, and my head was hurting. Filling sandbags was a monotonous, mind numbing task, and I was grateful when my turn came up on watch. I watched the road in the light of the predawn and saw figures shambling through the fog, ghostly figures. I motioned for Jim to come up.

“You have two suppressed rifles, right?” He nodded.

“Well, time to start a little interdiction.”

He spit a long stream of tobacco juice out of his mouth. ‘Well, I dunno. We’ve got, how many, a couple tens of thousands of zombies coming up this way, right? I don’t think wasting a couple here with rifle shots is going to make much of a difference.” 

I thought about it, and then agreed with him.

“Finish the fighting positions, and then try to get some sleep. In about two hours I’m going to register the arty. Brit and I will stay on watch.”

“Can do, chief.”

He went back and in a few minutes, Brit came to sit beside me.

“You know, Nick, this could go really really bad, really, really quick.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’ve got some ropes rigged on the back face, we can climb up and evade if we have to.”

“Brit, if they notice us, this entire hill is going to be over run.”

“Well, if that happens, don’t let them get me.”

“You didn’t have to come, you know” I said to her, and took her hand.

“As if I would let you screw this up all by yourself, dumbass.”

We both sat and watched the sun rise over the hills in the east. Below us, hidden in a mist in the valley, the zombie moan carried faintly up to us. 

Chapter 8

Four days. Sunrise on the fourth day. I was so tired that everything seemed to exist in slow motion. My eyes were raw from the caustic smoke caused by high explosive. I had slept only a few hours over those past four days, and I felt shaky. When I held the binos to my face to adjust another volley onto a group of zombies climbing over stinking mounds of  body parts and shattered corpses, I had a hard time keeping them steady.

“Alys, come over here and take the radio.” The kid was a homesteader from up river and the only one of us who had never done a tour overseas, besides Brit.  He had done his three years after the war had run down, and didn’t want to go back active again. Just farm the land.  Pretty steady in a fight so far, though. He got up from the parapet we had thrown up 30 meters down the hill. I handed the pack over to him and sat back down on the stump of a burned out tree. Brit handed me a canteen and I swished some around in my mouth and spit it out. I took out some toothpaste and a brush, and tried to scrub the foul taste out of my mouth. Ashes, dirt, the stink of rotting zombie flesh. I was so tired my body felt numb and hurting all over at the same time. I was too exhausted to even stand. I had to rest a while. I opened up an MRE and started to eat it cold, then looked at the label. Tuna with noodles. Ugh, this one hadn’t been on the menu for ten years. They must be getting seriously low on pre-war supply stocks to be dragging out this old stuff. I poured a whole bottle of tabasoco on it, trying to wake myself up and put some taste into it. I actually dozed off with the spoon in my hand and a mouthful of noodles. I woke with a start as a stray pellet from one of the artillery rounds zinged off the dirt next to me. Then I kept on chewing.

A few feet away rose three mounds of dirt. We had lost three men the night before, when a zombie came down on us from behind, over the mountain. Our rear guard had fallen asleep, and it was inside the fighting position before either of them could react. One man had died instantly, the zombie tearing his head off. The other had gotten bitten on the neck, and had turned in a few seconds, coming raging at us in the dark with the first Z. Donny had seen them first, and lit out at them with a yell, swinging his heavy sledgehammer handle. Another one of Jim’s crew had stumbled as he came at them, and both the Zs went after him in a pile. Donny smashed all three, fast and hard. Good for them that they had died, because I would have shot one of them for falling asleep on guard. I had done it before.

We had buried our three, and tossed the body of the first Z over the side of the cliff. Now I sat and looked at the graves, staring at them and trying to make my mind work. Brit sat next to me, put her head on my shoulder, and fell instantly asleep. I eased her to the ground and let her sleep, then got up to look at the perimeter. In front of me, about 30 meters down the hill, the squad kept up a steady firing, knocking down Zs that were trying to climb the slope towards us. The closest corpse was lying across the rough rock wall we had built. Resupply came in yesterday, dropping water and ammo, and taking off one of the guys who had been throwing up and running a fever, and another who had dropped a rock while building the wall, smashing the small bones in his foot. .

As I approached, Alys stood and fired a 40mm smoke grenade towards the road. It landed halfway between us and the mile long smear of dead bodies and parts lining Route 9. Another wave of zombies, several thousand, had backed up against the ruins of the shopping center, and were scrambling to get over the rubble. He was talking an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle onto the target, using the smoke as a marker.

“Roger, target is two zero zero meters two seven zero degrees from smoke.”

The pilots’ voice came back over the radio. “I copy , two zero zero meters, two seven zero degrees. Stand by.” As I watched, the grey, twin engine fighter jet flew over the valley from the north at about a thousand feet, getting eyes on the target. He banked around, disappearing over the hills, and then started his run. They had been dropping 500 pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions for us to cover while the artillery resupplied.

Staring at the plane coming in, something itched at the back of my mind. I was so tired that a cloud seemed to hang over my mind, and I couldn’t think straight. What was wrong? I looked down at Alys as he talked the pilot in.

Two Hundred Seventy degrees. I looked down at the smoke burning in the valley, and held up my hand to block the rising sun. Rising in the east, over the hills.

East. 90 degrees from our position. The zombies were east of the smoke grenade. Ninety degrees. From the smoke. I tried to figure it out, and the truth burst on me like a flare.

“WAVE HIM OFF,WAVE HIM OFF!!” I screamed it at Alys, and he turned toward me, a puzzled look on his face. “What?” he yelled over the firing. We were all half deaf from four days of constant gunfire and explosions. I could see the guys on the firing line, 20 meters away down slope, looking away from me. Only Esposito seemed to have heard. He looked at the plane, and then he started to dive behind the wall.

“EVERYBODY DOWN!” I yelled as hard as I could, and threw myself backwards over a tree.

Chapter 9

My ears were ringing from the blast, and I felt blood pouring out of my nose. I sat up, and then fell back down when everything swam in circles in front of me. I took a minute to catch my breath and let everything steady, then slowly raised myself up again, pulling on the tree truck to help myself back to a sitting position. Then I looked down at the firing line.

The bodies of four, no, five people were visible, not moving. Alys crawled towards me, away from a smoking crater, the radio on his back a ruin. The line of bunkers, and the wall we had built, was smashed flat where it wasn’t upended. I saw another soldier, I think it was Esposito, though it was hard to tell, trying to stuff his guts back into his stomach. They lay scattered around him, and both his legs were gone. I couldn’t hear him, but I could see his mouth opening in a scream. I drew my pistol, held it balanced on the tree trunk, and shot him. Twice, in the head, from behind. He fell limp.

Next to me I could feel the concussion from gunshots. THUMP THUMP THUMP. I still couldn’t hear anything. I raised my rifle and pointed it drunkenly downhill, trying to focus on a target. Any target. I knew the zombies were still down there, and they would be attracted to the explosion.

A hand grabbed me by the carry strap on the back of my armor, and started pulling me up the hill, dragging my legs in the dirt. I still felt too wobbly to stand up, and I passed out again.

When I woke, Brit was again shining a flashlight in my eyes.

“Damn, Nick, you gotta stop beating up your head. Twice in four days. I think you have a concussion this time. Not that there is anything to hurt up there. Good thing you had your vest on.” She held up a jagged piece of shrapnel which had apparently torn its’ way through several layers of kevlar before glancing off the ceramic plate on my back. Her voice, which I could barely hear, sounded tinny and robotic.

“What, what about the squad?” She shook her head.

“Seven dead, one wounded. We have four effectives, not counting you.”

“Zombies. Coming.” I wanted to vomit. Not a good sign.

“Final Protective Fire, the arty is beating the shit out of them and making a wall of steel in front of us. Evac will be here in fifteen mikes. We’re being relieved by a platoon from the 82^nd. Maybe I can get a phone number from one of those cheesedicks, what do you think?”

She smiled at me, but I could tell she was worried. The smile didn’t reach her eyes, and she kept waving away some red hair the slipped out of her helmet.

“Esposito. I shot him.”

“Good thing, too. The Z’s made it to the wall, he would have been torn up by them. He was dead anyway, Nick.”

“Help me up.”

She did and I looked downhill. I could barely hear the artillery, but I felt it through the earth, a continuous vibration. As I watched, rounds continued to burst like clockwork, one every 30 seconds, walking their way back and forth across the foot of the hill. Jim Lock sat with our spare radio, calling corrections for the arty hitting the valley floor. He gave me a thumbs up and turned back to the radio. Behind him, seven bodies were laid out in a row, covered by poncho liners. I stared at them, wishing them to move, but they never would.

Dear Mrs. Esposito,

I know you and your husband John were only married for a few days, and I’m sorry that the time you had with him was so short. I was against him going on this mission, but he was a fine soldier, and he knew the risks involved. I don’t think I could have stopped him if I tried.

I was his leader on this and many other dangerous operations, and his death is my responsibility. I don’t know if I could have done anything differently, but I wish that he were alive and home with you. He was my soldier, my friend, and my brother. He saved my life in Denver, and if I could trade mine for his, I would have. Your husband fought for four days straight, through numerous attacks, and died on the firing line. His death was quick, and merciful, if there can be such a thing. He was never turned into an undead.

I know these words are small comfort, but he will be missed by all of his team mates. If you ever need anything, please do not hesitate to ask.

Sincerely,

Sergeant First Class Nicholas F. Agostine

JSOC (Z) – Irregular Scout Team One

Chapter 10

They say the only thing that drops from the sky is birdshit and assholes, but I could have kissed the assholes that were falling from it now. Well, almost. OK, I wouldn’t have kissed them, but I WAS happy to see them.

The artillery fire had stopped for a few minutes, clearing the airspace, and a C-130 roared overhead, the familiar red tail markings of the guys from Scotia. Two sticks of paratroopers exited out of the side doors, ten in each. One figure fell quickly, his static line failing to open his main chute. They were jumping low to stay concentrated on the drop zone, an open field off to the north of our hill. The falling soldier tried to get his reserve chute open, but hit the ground with a sickening, bone crunching thud we could hear up on the hill.

“Damn.” said Brit. “They better start making new equipment, cause those chutes are wearing out. Lotta other stuff, too.”

The Airborne formed square, raised shields, and advanced up the hill, smashing down the several zombies who stood in their path, saving ammo. As they made their way into our position, their Platoon Sergeant ambled over to me and sat down with an exhausted sigh.

“Hey Nick. Don’t get up.”

“I won’t, Cody. Watched your guy eat dirt. He a loss?”

The grizzled Sergeant First Class looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, and his uniform was crusted with dried blood and brains.

“Yeah. Happens almost every third drop now. Too many jumps, worn out chutes. Tired guys, inexperienced kids packing their own chutes. That was our Lieutenant. No big loss.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice on the dirt, and leered at Brit.

She threw out her hip and stood at parade pretty. “Not if you were the last pervert on earth, Cody.”

“I’m pretty sure YOU’LL be the last pervert on earth, Brit.” She blew him a kiss.

I rolled my eyes. “Get a room, you two. Before you do, tell me what’s going on.”

He sat down on an ammo crate and started picking at his nails with a bayonet, trying to get the blood out from under his fingernails. He watched his squad leaders directing the troopers, who were shoring up the defenses.

“Well. As you can see,” and he gestured to the grime on his WWII style paratrooper jumpsuit, “we have been a little bit busy. That there twenty…”

“Nineteen” interjected Brit.

He glared at her. “Nineteen. Shut it, pucker lips. Like I said, NINETEEN fine airborne troopers are the remains of the company that parachuted onto the Interstate -84 / Taconic State Parkway interchange a week ago when this shit sandwich started. Three hours ago we were relieved by a company of M1A5 tanks who went charging right up the Taconic, grinding their way over the mass of bodies we had piled up, including our own dead.” A thoughtful looked passed over his face, then he started laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, you know the Taconic Parkway right there, right? Where it heads into the hills, going south to the city? Real narrow, two lanes on each side, steep drop offs?”

I nodded. “Yeah, been that way many times.”

“So this Cavalry Captain goes charging past riding out the hatch, yelling GET OUT OF THE WAY CRUNCHIES, firing that 120mm shotgun round, BOOM BOOM BOOM and letting his fifty cal rip, screaming GARRY OWEN AND GLORY and, get this, his driver can’t see the edge of the road bed and throws a track, and the whole thing spins around and rolls off down the embankment, must have fell about 30 feet. Last I saw of him they were using an M-88 to try and lift one side of the tank enough to let the crew climb out of the loader’s hatch. I could hear him yelling at them from inside to hurry the hell up. The rest of his company just kept charging down the road.”

We all laughed. Every branch of the services had its heroes and idiots. It seemed like the new crop of jackasses, most of which had been wiped out in the Apocalypse, were alive and growing well.

He put the stock of his M-14 on the ground and used it to lever himself off the ammo crate. “Your evac is coming in. Pulling your wounded out, only. They’re bringing wounded off an Observation Post over by Bear Mountain Bridge. We need the rest of your effectives. Brit, you go too.”

“No shit, Sherlock. As if I would want to be stuck on this hill with you uneducated philistines.”   

“How you put up with her, Nick, I dunno.”

“I hit the jackpot with this one, Cody. Maybe someday I’ll have Doctor Morano clone her and send you one. Brit 2.0. Maybe some bigger boobs.”

He made a two fingered “avert evil” sign at me and shuddered. “No thanks, keep that demon away from me. You know this was her fault, right?”

“What do you mean? Doctor Morano?”

“Yeah, her crew sprayed some kind of chemical all over the City. It was supposed to sedate the Zombies, make it easier for us to sweep in and take them out. My unit was waiting at Stewart to drop into Central Park. Instead, well…” and he made a sweeping gesture to the valley floor. Another horde was moving up the valley, thousands of rotted voices howling blood red rage.

“Gotta go, got some neo-killing to do.” Then he turned, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled at his men.

“HEY YOU APES, YOU WANNA LIVE FOREVER? GET DOWN THERE AND KILL SOME ZOMBIES! AIRBORNE, ADVANCE!”

They slung their M-4’s over their backs, pulled out pistols with high capacity magazines, locked shields, and advanced downhill to meet the horde, chanting “MER-IK-A! MER-IK-A!” as they advanced in lockstep. Cody winked at me, slapped Brit’s ass, ducked under her return punch, and ran downhill to join his men.

Chapter 11

The ride back to Combat Out Post Thor took about 20 minutes, and the thudding of the rotor blades didn’t do my head any good. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but every time I nodded off, Brit reached over and slapped me.

“Not till you get checked out by the Doctors, no sleepy time for you!” she yelled in my ear. Then she would go back to swinging her legs out the open door of the helo. After the fifth time she smacked me, I gave up and watched the landscape pass beneath me.

The highways, both lanes, were jammed packed solid with car wreckage heading north, out of the city. Two years of weather had flattened tires and started weeds growing through cracks in the pavement. Sooner rather than later, the road itself would be unusable to anything except four wheel drive. Down the center lane the engineers had cleared a path, using a crane welded onto a wrecker to make way for supply trucks. Lone figures wandered on the side of the roadway, random zombies who couldn’t leave the place where they had died. The supply convoys made sport of shooting at them as they drove past.

Occasional columns of smoke rose from deserted villages, showing where salvage teams were burning off contaminated oil supplies to prevent them from leaching into the ground water. The teams went through and stripped every piece of electronics, precious metals, and manufactured items that were still useable. Then they burned everything that might cause havoc in the environment.

The helo flared onto the pad at COP Thor, and we stumbled out while they hot refueled, rotors still turning. We headed over to the Field Hospital, following the stretchers carrying the other wounded.. Despite Brits’ protests, I was checked out as OK for limited duty, and released.

“Where to now, oh fearless leader?”

“Showers, then hot food, then the S-2 for some intel on the northern end of Lake Champlain.” Nothing beats a hot shower after being in the field, let me tell you. About halfway through, Brit slipped into the shower trailer, locked the door, and none of your damned business.

On the way down last week, I had shot a quick request to the Task Force Liberty intelligence officer, or S-2. I needed all the information that he had in Northern Vermont /New York and Lake Champlain. He delivered it to me in a slim folder, with the added comment of “not much”.

INTSUM

NORTHERN LAKE CHAMPLAIN AREA OF OPERATIONS

Signals Intelligence has indicated surviving human populations in the area of Grand Isle, showing level of organization of 5M on the survivor index, meaning some official government agency remaining, suspected military. No response to repeated radio query.

Two authorized over flights of local area and limited satellite reconnaissance has indicated substantive fortification of Isle La Motte and Grand Isle. Bridges in area have all been destroyed. Heat sources indicate active motor vehicle traffic and a population of 400 and 1000, respective. Powered Maritime traffic has been observed in the form of small boats in satellite reconnaissance.

JSOC (Z) – IST ONE was dispatched on XXXXXXXX to attempt contact and assessment of survivors. Contact was lost with team on D + 5. No further attempt has been made to contact due to insufficient personnel and assets. 

I handed it to Brit and she read it quickly, then handed it back.

“So, not much to go on. It does tally with what Red told us.”

“Yeah, and I’m going to have to call in some favors to get support for us going up there. We need a helo to get us close, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to operate so far out in the wild without some kind of fire support.”

I gave the report back to the S-2, and asked him to forward anything else he came up with. Then we went to get some sleep. I fell deep, despite the cannons firing a hundred meters away.

Chapter 12

“BATTLE STATIONS!”

Brit yelled it full in my ear, the alert word we used for “get your armor on, grab your weapon, and MOVE”. I rolled off my cot, slid my boots on, grabbed my armor in one hand and my rifle in the other, and ran out of the tent as fast as I could.

I stopped, now at least half awake, in the middle of the dusty street, holding onto my rifle and armor, one boot falling off, wearing a t-shirt and boxers, blinking in the bright sun, looking for a threat. Support soldiers walked past, giving me strange looks.  

Turning around, I saw Brit standing in the doorway of the tent, one hand clapped over her mouth, trying not to laugh out loud. She gave up and fell to the ground, holding her stomach and laughing so hard that her eye was watering.

“Very fucking funny, hardy har har. Payback is a bitch, and so are you.” I stepped over her and back into the darkness of the tent to get fully dressed.

“I think I peed myself.”

“Serves you right.”

Later that day, we droned northward on a C-130. The canvas seats along the sides were, as usual, uncomfortable, and I was happy it was short ride. The cargo bay was filled with stretchers, but there weren’t a lot of wounded, all told, from the operation. When you were fighting zombies, you either avoided getting wounded, or you were dead. Several of the guys on the plane were gunshot wounds, but most were burns. In a battle, especially one against a raving horde of Zs that have breached your line, friendly fire isn’t always, like the old saying goes. It happens, more than people want to admit, and the Army had been pretty liberal with using napalm this time. When the Apocalypse happened, weapons that tended to cause a lot of destruction, like napalm or cluster bombs, weren’t used for fear of “damaging civilian infrastructure.” That all changed, of course, but by then it was too late. I remember that Boston took a nuke, right around Day 10 of the plague. Too much, too late. Not that I minded Fenway and the Red Sox getting nuked. 

The first thing I had to do was tell Mrs. Esposito she was a widow. She handled it better than I thought she would. I had done casualty assistance during the Iraq War, and I hated it. As a Senior NCO, it wasn’t up to us to tell the families. That was a job for an officer. I worked with them, helped them deal with the Army paperwork, the funeral arrangements, the shock that finally hit when reality settled in. In some ways it was worse. The families were always so damn nice to me, and I was wearing the uniform of an organization which had, for better or worse, sent someone they loved to get killed. Mrs. Esposito was different, though. I handed her the letter I had written, but she just shook her head, squared her shoulders, and turned away from me. I guess we had all seen too much death in the last two years for it to shock anyone anymore.

Next we went to the hospital to pick up Red. He didn’t say much, just climbed into the HUMVEE Brit had borrowed, and rode back to the JSOC liaison office with us.

The officer on duty, a Special Forces Captain who I knew from way back, rolled his eyes when he saw me come in, and muttered “oh shit” under his breath.

“I’m going to cut to the chase, Captain Mueller. My team is missing, and we’re going to go find them. I need transportation and supplies for the three of us.”

“Nick, you know that the IST’s are expendable.”

“Maybe to you, but not to me. Besides, you owe Doc your life.” He didn’t like being reminded of that. Along the side of his neck was a jagged scar where a zombie had ripped through the skin, nicking his jugular at the evacuation of Manhattan. Doc has sewn it up before it completely ruptured.

“I can get you supplies, ammo, but there are no birds heading north. We can’t afford to spare any aircraft until the fighting is done in the City.”

“That could take weeks.” He shrugged his shoulders, and I knew that we weren’t going to get anywhere else with him.

“Brit, you and Red go draw enough supplies for two weeks in the field. Make sure you pick up a lase r designator, too. I have to go see someone.”

That someone was our old friend, Major McHale. I had seen an Evac UH-60 sitting on the runway when we came in, being worked on at the old National Guard Aviation Facility. I was hoping that he would be there, making sure it got back into the fight as soon as possible. He liked to fly the broken ones, bringing them back up to get fixed. I guess he figured that the best pilot could handle the worst aircraft. I found him hunkered down inside the engine compartment, alongside a crusty old warrant who looked like he had been fixing helos since Korea.

“Well, this bird will be back up by tonight. I was planning on taking it straight back, but I suppose I could get disoriented and fly north instead of south. No one will notice anyway. It’s not like there is a war going on here at Fort Orange or anything.”

“Great, we’ll meet you here around 2300.”

Chapter 13

The helo set us down in a clearing two miles south of where the team had been ambushed, just as dawn was breaking. In addition to myself, Brit and Red, we had three good guys from IST-7, the Dark Knights. They had been refitting after a scout into Northeastern Pennsylvania, heading down the I-88 corridor to see if there were any coal mines still in workable condition. They had lost half their team just outside Scranton to a bridge collapse under their HUMVEE, sending three of them down into a river.

Their team leader, Captain Buswarry, was a good friend, but I wasn’t going to miss his NCO, Master Sergeant Collins. I was actually glad that it had been him that took a 70 foot drop into the Susquehanna River. He had always been a dick, and we had gotten into a fist fight in a bar in Bermuda when he wouldn’t leave Brit alone. Too bad about the other guys, though. Buswarry was an immigrant from Nigeria who had made good in the US, going Special Forces. He was on one of the last flights out of Ghana, where his SF team had been training locals in a nasty fight against Islamist extremists. He had joined the Irregular Scouts when we recruiting up in Maine, at the Navy base. His two guys, both civilians, I didn’t know, but he assured me they were good in a fight. A redheaded guy named McCross and a woman that at first I first took to be a man. She was built like a brick shithouse.

When we had met them at the OPS center, Brit had kneeled in front of her and called her “Lady Brianne”. The woman, whose real name was Hart, looked at her like she was an idiot.

“Ignore her. She thinks you’re some character from Game of Thrones.”

The look she gave Brit wasn’t exactly friendly. I’m sure she was a bit touchy about her size.

“Get up, you little twit, before I squeeze your head so hard it pops.”

“Nick, I think I love her. Can I keep her?”

She called her Lady Brianne until later that day, as we were loading magazines. Hart put a friendly arm around Brits’ neck, and then proceeded to put her in a choke hold that Brit almost passed out from. Brit gasped out “Uncle!” and the woman let her drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Red was laughing his ass off. When she had recovered her breath, Brit started to complain to me, but I told her that if she couldn’t take it, she shouldn’t dish it out.

“Maybe you should go apologize to her, too.”

Since then, she had ignored the big blonde woman. I did notice that Red spent an inordinate amount of time talking to her. Good for him. McCross was a quiet guy who did his job without saying much.

Now he was walking point, along with Red, who was trying to recognize landmarks. Soon enough, we came to the site. A canoe was still sitting on the shore, half swamped, and spent cartridge brass gleamed in the morning sun. While the team pulled security, Brit and I scoured the site, looking for something in particular. I quickly found the bones of Segeant Toshi, mauled and scattered by wild animals, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.

We found it after ten minutes, tied to a tree. A strip of brown uniform T-shirt, unnoticeable unless you knew to look for it. On the end was one knot.

“Red, you saw Ziv and Doc after the ambush, right?”

He thought hard about it. “Yeah, both were in the boats but I thought that maybe Ahmed was down or unconscious.”

“Nope.” I showed him the strip of T-shirt, and called Captain Buswarry over.

“Hey Glen, one of my guys is alive, or was after the ambush. You remember Ahmed?”

“Yeah, that sneaky Pashtun on your team. Hell of a shot.”

“This is a message from him. He knew we would come after them.”

“So how do we find him?”

“We don’t. He finds us.”

He did, just as the sun set. We had pulled back outside the clearing, and set up a perimeter on a small knoll. Probably the same one Red had watched the campsite from.

I was watching the site, wishing for full dark so I could turn my NVG’s on. I heard a slight rustle off to my left, and I turned to look in that direction. I found myself staring down the barrel of Ahmed’s Dragonov. He has slipped past our rear security and gotten within five feet of me before I heard anything, and then probably because he wanted me to.

Then we both heard the quiet “snick” of a weapon being taken off safe. Ahmed whispered to the figure that stood over him.

“Godless American whore, at least let me pray to Allah before you kill me.”

“OH MY GOD AHMED!” she whispered back loudly, and body tackled him. At least she had the presence of mind to put the safety back on before she did it.

“GET OFF ME, WOMAN! COVER YOURSELF!”

When Brit helped him up to a kneeling position, Captain Buswarry had come over, leaving Red and his two others to pull security. A quick, quiet conversation followed.

“Nick, there is a squad sized element advancing down the trail from the north. I am assuming they heard the sound of your helicopter, and that they are hoping to ambush you as they did to our team last month. I have been following them since this morning, and I moved ahead of them to warn you. We have about twenty minutes before they get here.”

I quickly thought about it. Our forces would be about equal size, but they knew the terrain and could move faster. We had the advantage of surprise, though, because we knew about them, and they only suspected us.

“How good are they?”

“Nick, they are infantry. American Infantry. Mountain soldiers, from the Vermont National Guard. Many combat veterans, and survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse. They are good. I did not see any Night Vision Equipment, though, and their weapons are a mix. One Squad Automatic Weapon, but I think they are short on ammunition. The gunner only had M-4 magazines on him, no 200 round boxes, and there was a 30 round magazine inserted.” I didn’t ask him how he knew who they were, just assumed that one of their soldiers had disappeared in the prior month while Ahmed was living in the forest. We trumped them on firepower, too, since we had armed ourselves heavy based on the initial ambush. McCross carried an M-240B machine gun and we had two 40mm grenade launchers.

“Shit. I don’t want to kill our own. Until we get this sorted out, though, I guess we’re going to have to do what we have to do. If they ask for surrender, though, we give it. I want prisoners. Besides, I have a plan. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

Chapter 14

I sat in the darkness, watching their lead scout approach through my NVG’s. This was going to be tricky, a pretty slick piece of timing.

In the center of the clearing sat a military issue flashlight, turned on. It was shining on an American Flag that Brit had had stuffed in her pack, suspended from a stick in the ground. I knew that Ziv and Doc had talked. They had no reason not to. So the Vermonters, for want of a better name, had to know that the U.S. Army was back in town. I’m sure whomever was running the show was thinking long and hard about what to do now. They had ignored repeated radio calls for survivors, but real live soldiers were a different story.

As I watched the figure of the lead scout stop outside the circle of light, he held up a hand, and  his squad fanned out in a line behind him. A figure rose up from the ground beside him where Ahmed had lain in wait, and a brief struggle ensued, followed by Ahmed getting up and moving away. The scout laid on the ground for a minute, then crawled back towards his squad.

Captain Buswarry watched with me. “So, now we wait.”

“Yep, the hardest part.” We waited for about 15 minutes, then I took off the NVG’s, slung my rifle behind my back, and walked forward into the light. I was freaking out. In the next few seconds, my life could be over. If they rejected our terms, I would get shot.

“I just want to talk” I yelled into the darkness. “Send out your senior man!” I held my hands palm up, in a gesture of peace.

Stepping into the circle of light, a figure clad in old style BDU’s, slowly walked forward, dropping down his M-4 as he approached.

“Son of a bitch. Nick Agostine.”

“Danny Westbrook. I’ll be damned.”

I held out my hand, and he pulled me into a bear hug. “Damn,” I said “I haven’t seen you since you got blown out of your HUMVEE in Mosul!” He stepped back and held up his left hand, showing me that it was missing three fingers.

“Cool!” I said. “Check this out, zombie bite!” and I rolled up my pants leg to show him the carbon fiber leg.

We both turned and waved our teams in, and they eyed each other warily in the dim light, pointedly not aiming at each other. I wondered which one of them had killed Svenson and Toshi, but I had to put that aside if we were to have a chance in hell of pulling this off.

Danny pulled up a log to sit on while we talked, and he gave us the down low on what was happening on this end of the lake.

“Well, first off, let me tell you, I wasn’t in charge of the patrol that ambushed your guys. Not that I would have done anything differently, I just don’t want you to hold that against me.” I nodded. “Your two guys are in the lockup on Grand Isle. That’s all I’m going to say until you understand the situation there.”

“Go ahead. We all have a story to tell.”

“It’s like this. You guys are the first ones we’ve seen in what, three years, from the Federal Government?”

“So far as I know, but there is satellite news, and the internet is still up in some places. You HAD to know that there was still a functioning government in Seattle. ”

“ Yeah, well, Seattle is a long way from here, and us Green Mountain Boys have always been an independent lot. The Regular Army cut and ran once things fell apart in New York, and we had to deal with a horde that came up from Quebec and Montreal. The Vermont Guard, well, we blew the bridges to Grand Isle and hunkered down.”

I told him how we had done something similar in New York, with the creation of the giant base at Seneca Army Depot in the Finger Lakes. It only made sense.

“Well that first winter was an ever loving bitch. We had maybe ten thousand refugees crammed onto that island. The Adjutant General, Major General Allen, he declares martial law on the island. That went over like yelling fire in a theater. We killed a LOT of civilians, Nick. Ain’t something I’m proud of. We ran out of food around March the following year.”

“So then what happened? Did you…” I left the question about cannibalism unspoken.

“No, none of us military guys did. The General made sure we, the military, got fed first. The civilians, well, we told them they could like it or leave. Most of them did, left. We’re down to about nine hundred civilians and about a hundred military all told.”

“Why are you telling me all this? Giving me all your numbers?”

“Because I don’t like the way things are run there. The General, well, a decent guy at the start, but all this power stuff has gone to his head. You know me, I don’t have much patience for being bossed around. Never did. That’s why I was still an E-6 when I got blown out of the service. That and he’s got some real nasty people backing him up.”

I thought about it for a minute. “Still, I don’t see what business it is of ours. I have to tell you, Danny, we just came back this way to get our people. The US Cavalry isn’t going to come galloping in here to save anyone anytime soon. We have enough problems with NYC.”

“I know that, Nick. Listen, you and I both know the zombie threat is way down, and the time for martial law is done. Last month, though, some civilians got together a delegation, asking General Allen to step down and hand civilian control of things back to civilians, and concentrate on military matters.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Yeah, well, thing is, I guess the General, and some of the people around him, disagree. He hung four of them for sedition, as he called it.”

“So?”

“What do you mean, so?”

“I mean, what does this have to do with us?”

“Listen, Nick. We swore an oath. You did. I did. Against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

“Seems like I’ve been keeping my oath. What about you?”

“Well, this hanging the civilians was the last straw for me. Yes, we killed civies when they tried to storm the food warehouse. Times were tough. It was either that, or everyone went under. Now, though? Some of the guys have been talking to your two that we captured, and now they KNOW that things have to change.”

I glanced around at the half dozen Guardsmen who were on the other side of the light. “What about them?”

“Do you really think I would be stupid enough to go out on a patrol with people that weren’t loyal to me?”

Chapter 15

We had left Danny and his patrol to make their way back to Grand Isle, and we returned to where we had ditched our zodiac boat. As I worked with Red to set up the outboard motor, and Buswarry and  Hart loaded our extra supplies, Brit talked with me.

“Do you trust him? Believe his BS story?”

“What makes you think its BS?”

“Come on, Nick, I wasn’t born yesterday, and you get all teary eyed around your old Army buddies. It’s like this big blind spot you run into.”

Locking down the engine, I hooked up the gas line feed and then turned to her.

“Look, Brit, all I want to do is get Doc and Ziv back.”

She laughed at me. “Bullshit, Nick. I know you. Deep down inside, there is this little guy running around in a Captain America outfit, screaming to get let out. You WANT to rescue those civilians. Power hungry jerks are like your archnemesis. I could draw a freaking comic strip about you.”

Red chimed in. “Yeah, kemosabe, maybe you’ll get your own action adventure series someday.”

“Stupid racist Indian.”

“Native American. Get it right, pale face.”

Hart looked at all of us like we were crazy. “Do you all always act like this?”

Brit turned to her and yelled “Look out, it’s Jamie Lanister! The Kingslayer! Run, Lady Brianne!”

“I told you to knock that shit off, twerp.”

“Yeah, Brit, lay off her.” Red flushed, but he stood up and squared off with Brit.

“Wait. Oh My God. Red, Lady Brianne, OH MY GOD I’MSOHAPPYFORYOU!!!” He took a swing at her and Brit ran away, laughing. “I’m going to give you a step stool as a wedding gift!”

“I’m going to kill her” said Hart, but she was blushing too.  

Right then, everything went to shit. Like it always does. We had gotten so wrapped up in the details of dealing with the Vermonters that we had forgotten about what the real war was, fighting zombies. We were reminded in a harsh way.

It was a small horde, about thirty or so. Nothing we couldn’t have handled on a good day, but today was not a good day. McCross was on guard, but he was distracted by the conversation between Brit and Hart. The first zombie latched onto his leg as he stepped around a wrecked minivan, looking back towards us. It shouldn’t have happened. McCross was an experienced scout, had been on dozens of missions, and there was no reason for him to die, but he did. So did Captain Buswarry, trying to come to his rescue, charging directly into the horde.

It was a mad house, and we wound up getting away by running full tilt in the opposite direction while the Zs scrabbled around McCross and Buswarry. They tore them apart, eating their intestines while they were alive, trying to rip open their heads to get at the brains. We didn’t even have time to kill them ourselves. Red had to drag Hart away, and she screamed as her friends died, horribly.

“RALLY AT THE END OF THE BRIDGE!” I yelled as we crossed over a set of train tracks being held out of the water by a causeway, maybe 5 feet off the water. I reached the end and spun, firing into the horde as fast as I could aim, barely missing the others as they ran past me. Red, who had been carrying the 240B while McCross walked point, flopped down beside me, extended the bipod legs and yelled “FEED ME!” Brit crashed down beside him and started passing linked ammo into the gun. It started barking in short, controlled sweeps, arching through head height about fifty meters away, blowing holes through the zombies, catching some in their heads, knocking others down by severing limbs.

Ahmed kneeled beside them, emptying the magazine of the Dragonov, one aimed round per second. Two out of three dropped zombies with head shots, a regular, steady rhythm. Once I had caught my breath and the red dot on my sight stopped jumping around, I started to add to the carnage. In the end, it came down to one last Z falling onto the water, shot through the head by Hart with her pistol. It fell into the water, and we were left with the smell of cordite and rotting flesh.

It was over in less than two minutes, but it should have never happened in the first place. I stood over what remained of McCross and Buswarry, the later crawling towards me with that red glare in his eyes, one arm dragging it slowly in an effort to get at living flesh and eat. The sig

ht of him made me want to scream and vomit at the same time. I reached over my shoulder, drew my mace, and smashed his head in.

We got back to the boat, secured the area, and I sat down looking over the water. My hands were shaking, and I held them between my legs to make them stop. Brit sat down next to me and watched me for a second.

“Brit, I don’t know that I can do this anymore.” I held up my hand to show her.  She grabbed it and squeezed it hard, let go.

“Nick, you can quit. Anytime. I love Doc and, well, I sorta like Ziv, but I am NOT going to lose you.”

I knew what she meant. An American general in World War II supposed that a man only had so much courage to draw from, a limited reservoir. I wondered if I was reaching mine. Three years of non-stop warfare, before that three combat tours overseas, losing my wife and kid, losing my leg.

“Brit, I’m not going to let he guys down. We HAVE to go get them. I swear to you, though, that this is it. I’m done. I’m not leaving the farm again.”

She nodded, looking off into the distance with her good eye. “Well, no, Nick. There is one more thing we are going to have to do.”

“Kill Doctor Morano.”

“Kill DoctorMorano.” I looked over where Hart was crying while Red stood watch over her, one hand on her shoulder, watching the woods for more zombies. “But I’m not going to lose any more people. Swear to God.”

“Nick, baby, you can’t control that. This is war. People die. Our friends, family, buddies. They die. I might die. You might. Meanwhile, we have got to LIVE. Snap out of it, fearless leader.” She reached over and caressed my cheek gently, then slapped me hard on the inside of my leg. It stung like hell, and I got her message.

“OK, let’s saddle up!” We piled our rucksacks into the bottom of the zodiac, started the motor, and headed out across the lake. Across the water, the Green Mountains of Vermont looked down on us; just another war party, like a thousand others they impassively watched in the last three hundred years. 

Chapter 16

“So how do we do this?”  asked Red.

“We go in flag flying. We’re the US Army, and I’m betting they won’t shoot at us if we’re representing the Army.”

Red shook his head, “I think your reasoning is wrong, Nick. I think if you go in there flag flying, some of these rednecks are going to shoot at you just because they think you’re a jack booted Federal gubermint thug who is gonna take them their guns.”

“Seriously? Why would I do that? Take their guns after surviving the Zombie Apocalypse?”

“There ain’t no explaining crazy, Nick.”   

Brit was trailing her hand in the wake of the boat, but she watched Hart, who was sitting up in the bow. I knew she was watching to see if she was going to break. Ahmed steered the boat, keeping the throttle low. We were in no rush to get there, and there were some small waves that we hopped over. I just sat back and enjoyed being out on the lake, a chance to let my guard down a bit.

Red was right. Any way we played it, we were outsiders who were going to upset whatever power balance existed on the island. In my experience dealing with survivors, they tended to resent us showing up. Anger that the Federal Government had failed them in the Zombie Apocalypse, or just a tendency to resent authority anyway. This was the first time, though, that we had dealt with such a large group, and one that had somewhat legitimate authority.

We heard them long before we saw them. A long causeway extended from the mainland to the island, probably part of an old railway. I had been this way before, on a fishing trip, and I knew that there was a break in the causeway that you could run your boat through. More like, there used to be a break. Now there was a bridge, and just before that, a large wall extending 30 feet up in the air, completely blocking the road.

Trailing off southward down the causeway were zombies. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Seemingly as one, they turned to the sound of our motor. All howling in symphony, but staying away from the water. Ahmed cut the engine and we drifted slowly about a hundred feet off shore.

“Holy Crap” said Ahmed. “That must be every single zombie in the Burlington area.”

“Ya think? Frigging rocket scientist, this one.”

Hart scanned the barrier and the bridge behind it with a pair of binoculars. I saw her stop and, then lean forward, trying to get a better look.

“Ahmed, can you bring us around the back side of the barrier?” she asked.

“Paddles, everyone. No need to get them any more worked than they are already.” We broke out the oars and started pulling around.

“Yep, I thought so.” Hart handed me the binos.

“What am I looking for?”

“Look at the base of the barrier. There are charges set around the whole thing. Looks like construction demolitions, the kind used to take down derelict buildings.”

“Are they set to blow the bridge?”

“Nope, if they go, they’ll take down the barrier only.”

Brit couldn’t resist. “And how do you know all this, Lady Brianne?”

“Because, miss wiseass, while you were getting stoned and laid in college, I was defusing IED’s in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

For once, Brit was speechless. Hart went back to studying the barrier, and Red passed Ahmed a five New Dollar note, mouthing “I told you so.”

She put the binos down. “I can’t figure it. Blowing the charges would eliminate the barrier completely. I can see if the wired the bridge, but the barrier …”

“It’s a threat” said Ahmed. “Your General is holding this over his people’s heads. Maybe not overtly, but if push came to shove, he could always use the threat of these zombies to justify Martial Law. If you look closely, you will find a radio receiver hooked to a detonator. His military forces probably have a fortress that can resist even the whole horde, with high walls. In the event of revolt by the civilians, they hole up, blow the barrier, and the civilians are done. Probably have an escape route too. Boats, most likely.”

I nodded. “So much for the job of the military being to protect and defend civilians.”

Hart turned to me. “Do you want me to disable it?”

“Can you do without setting it off, one hundred percent guaranteed?”

She thought about it for a minute, studying it again with the binos. Finally she answered with a flat “No”.

“Odds are, it’s rigged. Not to blow, but there are probably anti-personnel mines all over the place.”

“OK, well, that settles that. Let’s get away from here and go talk to the mad man.”

Chapter 17

“Ok, Ahmed, you’re out. Red, you’re his spotter. Lay low and watch for my signal. This could go bad pretty quick.” We slowed the boat, and they slipped over the side into the water, weapons and packs balanced on two inflated inner tubes.

We had left them on the empty, northern part of the causeway. Hopefully the watchers on the shore hadn’t noticed us slow down. It left them no avenue of retreat, which I wasn’t comfortable with, but they both took inflatable life vests so they could take to the water if necessary.

“If we’re not back in twenty four hours, then Hart will come get you with the boat. Do hourly radio checks with Liberty Main, and call in the hammer if things go bad. Level that.” I pointed to a building which crouched on the shore, surrounded by Texas barriers, ten foot high slabs of concrete. From it flew the Vermont State Flag, and underneath that flew the yellow Gasden “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. Through the binoculars I had counted three guards standing on a platform inside the wall.

“Time to poke the dragon” said Brit, and she, Hart and I headed out in the Zodiac, towards a dock that stretched out into the water. The half mile passed quickly, and as we pulled up, we could see a reception committee waiting for us. A half dozen soldiers, backed by a .50 caliber heavy machine gun. Hart kept her MK-19, mounted on a pintle in the boat, trained on the machine gun crew. They tracked us all the way in, until we pulled up to the dock. I climbed up the ladder onto the dock, and Brit backed the boat away, idling about 100 meters off shore.

I stepped forward and saluted the two star General Officer standing in front of me. He was a short, compact man, wearing full battle rattle, and he had an intense, blue eyed stare. He glared at me for a moment, and then quickly returned my salute, seemingly out of habit more than anything. Behind him, four bodies hung from a makeshift gibbet, swaying gently in the breeze. No quick deaths, those. Instead of dropping them and breaking their necks, a quick death, these scumbags had pulled them up, leaving them up to strangle. I tried hard to hide the look of disgust on my face, but the man standing in front of me saw it. His expression hardened. 

 “Sergeant. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and for men with hearts of iron.”

 “Save me the speech, General. Next you’re going to say you’re a sheepdog, guarding the flock from wolves.”

We stood that way for what seemed like an eternity, and was probably no more than fifteen seconds. Behind him stood a man wearing full Colonel rank, and two guys from what I figured were his brute squad. They were both over six foot, and muscle bound. I ignored them, and looked at Danny Westbrook, who brought up the rear. He nodded to me.

The General broke the silence.

“Staff Sergeant Westbrook here tells me that you are with the Regular Army, some kind of scout team. I’d like to see some credentials, please. And a copy of your orders.”

Seriously? Orders? What planet was this guy living on?

“Ah, General, the only thing I can show you is my old ID card. In case you haven’t noticed, things have been a bit squirrely over the last few years. I have no written orders. In fact, I’m just here to get my men.  I understand they have been your guests over the last few weeks.”

“Um, guests, no, not actually. They are prisoners, on trial for murdering several of my men.” He waved his hand, and  Ziv and Doc were escorted out of the gate of the fortress.. Actually, Ziv walked out under his own power, in handcuffs, but Doc was dragged out by two men and dumped at my feet. The guards went back inside the gate, and I knelt down to him.

“Hey Nick” Doc managed to whisper. “You’re late.” His face was a mass of bruises, and there were cigarette burns on his arms. No fingernails on his right hand. “I never said shit.”

I looked up at the General. “Am I supposed to be impressed? I’ve seen worse in Afghanistan. What, exactly, is your point?”

“My point is, Sergeant, that I am the law here. This is the Sovereign State of Vermont, and we are no longer a part of the United States. If there even is such a thing, which I doubt.”

This wasn’t going to work. I had seen it before, leaders who let power go to their heads. Little warlords who wanted to set up their own little kingdoms. I despised them. Still, I had to try.

“General, let me explain something to you. Right now the US Army is fighting a massive brawl down by New York City. Last year we retook Denver. Next year we will be taking back Northern California. We seized the oil fields in Mexico. It may take a year, or two, or even three years, but the Feds will be here. You are sitting on top of a vital transit route and shipping line, once we get the canals back in order. Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, we settled the whole secession thing more than a century ago.”

He stared at me, glaring, then walked past me, looking out at the lake. The Colonel, who I assumed was his Chief of Staff, walked over to him, and talked to him quietly. After a minute, I broke into their conversation.

“General, regardless, you and all of your troops were recalled to Active Duty three years ago. I know you have radios and you heard the broadcast. Right now, you and all your men are in a state of rebellion against the United States. I can’t hold your men responsible, because, for all I know, they think they are acting under legitimate orders, but you, as their commander, are liable. I’m giving you one chance. Stand down, turn over control of the island to the civilian population, and things can go back to normal. I won’t say anything about what happened before we made contact. This is a fight that you cannot win.”

He turned to me. The Colonel put his hand on his shoulder but he shrugged it off.   

“My men know full well what they are doing.You have a lot of balls, Sergeant, I’ll give you that. It’s going to need an extra strong rope to hang you. We fought, all by ourselves, and survived. Where the hell were you and your precious Federal Government? No, we don’t need you. As far as those civilians, you’re whining about, bunch of useless sheep who got us into this mess in the first place.”

He took a deep breath and shook his head. “No, the time for those things have passed. The US was rotting a long time before the Zombie Apocalypse, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let myself be ruled by a bunch of liberal retards. You’re just another one of those New Army touchy feely punks, coming here with a bunch of women to back you up. In fact, it will feel GOOD to hang you. Your friends, too.”

 “Then, Sir, I have no option but to place you under arrest for rebellion, treason, and murder. You’ll be coming with us, back to Albany.” I placed my hand on the stock of my rifle, but I kept my eyes on Danny, wondering which way he was going to jump. 

Danny stepped forward. “Sir, it’s time to let it go. Turn it over. What you did, hanging those civilians, was wrong. Nick is giving you an option. Please take it, before things get worse.”

“Sergeant Westbrook, your opinion is noted. Corporal, please arrest him, and Sergeant Agostine, also.”

One of the Brute Squad reached out to grab Danny, and all hell broke loose. Time seemed to slow down and speed up at the same time.

Danny leveled his M-4 and pointed it at the Corporal. “Stand down!” he yelled.

The Colonel pulled out his pistol and fired at Danny, catching him in the neck in a spray of blood.

Danny spun around and fired a full auto burst toward him, emptying his magazine before he fell, and rounds tore through the General’s legs, hurling him down to the ground.

The first Guard brought his pistol up to fire at me, and his head exploded in a pink mist from a sniper round fired by Ahmed.

 Ziv hit the other guard on the side of his face with his handcuffs, and then started wrestling with him, trying to choke him, slamming his head against the ground and cursing at him in harsh Serbian.   

The .50 caliber started hammering, but Hart was faster on the trigger, and a string of 40mm grenade rounds slammed into the sandbagged position, chewing through the bags and striking the gun, silencing it.

Brit slammed the boat into high gear towards the dock.

As he fired, the Colonel grabbed a Motorola two way on his harness and hit the transmit button. A muffled BOOM rolled over the water. I shot him through the head and he fell to the ground.

Doc rolled over and kicked the guard struggling with Ziv in the head, stunning him.

The three guards on the wall had been dropped in as many seconds by Ahmed after he shot the guard.

I ran over to Danny, pulling a field bandage off my kit and pressing it to his neck. Blood was everywhere. He had been hit in an artery, and was bleeding out quickly. I pressed my hand over the wound, but it kept squirting out. Not again. Just like that kid on the barge.

“DOC,HELP ME!’ Doc crawled over, helped by Ziv, and pulled my hands off Danny’s neck.

“He’s dead, Nick. Let him go. We have to get out of here.” He was right; the flow of blood had stopped. Danny’s eyed had glazed over. I reached up and pushed his eyelids closed. Then, with a ripping sound, I pulled the velcro American Flag off my uniform sleeve and put it on Danny’s chest.

“All enemies, foreign and domestic. You did good, brother.” Then I stood up and helped Ziv carry Doc down to where Brit had pulled up to the dock.  

As we passed the General, he tried to drag his pistol out of the holster and aim it at me. I kicked it away, then tied tourniquets around  his legs. Each had a bullet hole through them, one in his thigh and the other through his kneecap.   

“Help me!” he moaned.

“Fuck you, you traitor, I hope the zombies take a long time eating you. You swore an oath to your country and your state, and you broke both.”  Then I kicked him in the wounded kneecap and he screamed.

“That was for Danny. And this is for Doc” and I kicked him again. He screamed even louder.

I started back towards the island, and Brit shouted at me. “Nick, where the hell are you going?”

I yelled back. “I have to warn the civilians!” As I spoke, a UH-60 rose from the back side of the island, and thundered off in the direction of Isle Le Motte. An air raid siren started sounding. I looked over to the right, and saw that the zombies were swarming down the causeway. I stopped, turned around, and ran back towards the boat. I guess they knew now.

As I ran down the dock, a crowd of civilians appeared, running for the gate to the fortress. Before they got there, it slammed shut, and a stream of tracers reached out into the crowd, chewing through their bodies. The crowd broke and ran, but the zombies were in among them, biting and clawing.

Hart had cast off the line holding the boat to the dock , and Brit yelled at me “Let’s go, you fat old slug!”. I fell more than I jumped, landing on Ziv, who cursed me in Serbian. We pulled away and raced back over the water to where we had left Red and Ahmed. The spot where they had been was swarming with a nonstop stream of animated corpses, heading onto the island, but we picked up the two of them floating on their inner tubes, kicking hard away from the causeway.

“Hart, can you blow that bridge?”

“How much C-4 do you have?” Brit handed her a brick, about a pound or so. “Oh hell yeah, that will work.”

She slipped over the side onto an inner tube and paddled over to the bridge. We backed off another hundred meters while she worked, packing the C-4 under one of the bridge pilings. As she did so, Zombies were reaching down to grab at her. One got a hold of her hair, and she coolly fired her pistol straight up into the zombie until it let go, then finished what she was doing. I guess she had gotten over the shock of seeing her team mates killed, and was back to being a smooth operator.

When she got back to the boat, I nodded to Ahmed. He leaned forward with his rifle resting on the bow, and fired. A puff of dirt shot up just above the C-4. When Red snickered, he muttered “damn waves” and fired again.

The C-4 exploded with a dull crump, and the bridge shattered into a million pieces, throwing wood and concrete into the air. The rush of zombies stopped short, some falling into the water, the volume of their howl kicking up a notch and carrying across the waves.

“Whoohoo, Hart! Put Red on your shoulders, and I’m going to call you Master-Blaster instead of Lady Brianne!” She ignored her, and we watched as the pieces fell down into the water.

“You know several thousand got onto the island. Those civilians are dead” said Ahmed.

“Yeah, but there is one thing I can do for them.”

I reached for the radio.

“Orion, this is Lost Boys. Execute Arc Light, Target AA 2375, over.”

“This is Orion. Roger, execute Arc Light, Target AA 2375, out.”

Three miles up, a mix of a half dozen B-52H and B-1B bombers had come back on station after carpet bombing a zombie horde outside Newburgh. They had been patrolling over the Adirondacks for the last two hours, ready to support combat operations anywhere in the Northeast. Scout teams had priority of fire if there were massed targets, and I had worked with these guys before. Two years ago, the team had extracted the Navigator and Co-Pilot when one of the overworked, sixty years old B-52’s had come apart in mid-air, and their chutes had carried them down onto some flatland just outside Syracuse. Before we had left Albany, I had given a target list to the Air Liaison at the Task Force Headquarters.

Now, fifteen minutes after my call, from the open bomb bay doors spilled dozens of two thousand pound dumb bombs, falling in a steady stream towards the island. Each plane made several passes, laying a string of explosives from one end to the other, South to North. The heavy ordinance blasted huge craters into the bedrock, and an eruption of dirt and stone leapt high into the sky.   

 I took the controls from Brit, and headed West, full speed. We skipped over the waves, and behind us, the island shook and turned into a cloud of dust.

Brit sat next to me, helmet off and red hair whipping in the wind. “WE GOTTA GET DOC TO SOME MEDICAL CARE, ASAP!” she yelled over the concussion of the two thousand pound bombs pounding the island. “WHERE TO?”

“ISLE LE MOTT, AROUND THE NORTHWEST SIDE!”  The S-2 had forwarded me some satellite recon photos, and there had seemed to be some settlements and fortifications on the island, although much smaller than on Grand Isle. I just hoped we got a better welcome than we had here.

I looked down Doc; Red was bandaging his fingers where the nails had been torn off. Ziv sat in front of me, looking backwards, smoking a cigarette, watching the bombs fall. Hart was helping Red, handing him bandages while holding up an IV that ran into Doc’s arm. Ahmed looked out over the bow, scouting ahead.

For better or worse, the Lost Boys were together again. We sailed on into the falling darkness.

END, PART I

Chapter 18

Long minutes passed as the zodiac cut around the northeastern edge of Grand Isle, out of range of any snipers that might be hiding among the trees. The wind that blows perpetually across the northern end of Lake Champlain whistled eerily in the dark. Isle la Motte gradually came into view, or what I thought must be Isle la Motte; what looked like a concrete wall obscured the interior. If S2's recon photos were correct, there should be settlements there, and if so, that wall was a pretty good way of keeping anyone out. Still jumping on adrenaline, I worried that maybe the General had controlled this place too. I glanced back at Doc, lying across the inflatable seats just in front of Hart, who had one hand on the motor and the other holding aloft an IV bag. Doc looked like hell, and Brit, temporarily on nursing duty, looked up at me with eyes full of worry. I couldn't hear his breathing over the motor, but I could see even in the failing light that one side of his chest was rising out of sync with the other. If he didn't have a collapsed lung, he had at least three broken ribs on that side. The remains of the Vermont Bridge loomed to our front, creating mini-rapids in the current flowing north towards the Richelieu River; the Vermont National Guard had blown the bridge when the undead made it to northern New York before northern Vermont, in the vain hope of defending Burlington from that direction.

The lake was deceptively peaceful. Ziv was sitting just in front of me, facing the way we had come, watching in silence as secondary explosions from the JDAMs continued to eat whatever was left for it to eat on the island - South Hero, if I remembered right. North Hero was connected to it by a causeway, and if the General was as big an SOB as I thought, hopefully he would have placed explosives on that causeway as well. Maybe North Hero could avoid the pounding its sister just caught to the south. If not... I pushed away that line of thought and hunkered down next to Doc.

“How bad?” I shouted to him above the engine noise.

He just shook his head. He didn't have the breath to try and shout an answer to me. I placed a hand on his shoulder, not daring to squeeze reassurance for fear of hurting him worse. I turned instead towards Ziv, who pitched his cigarette into the lake and leaned his head back against the rubber side. Asking him if he was injured would be useless, but I looked him over. His face wasn't smashed in like Doc's, and I remembered from the fight that his arms and legs worked, at least; but I wouldn't put it past him to fight with broken bones, and the way his left arm was socketed tight against his chest suggested a fracture of some kind. Whatever, we'd deal with his injuries when we got to Isle la Motte - if we were able to get any kind of help there, that is.

It was maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes from the southern end of Grand Isle to the remains of the causeway between Isle la Motte and the Alburgh peninsula, but it felt a lot longer. When we got close enough to the peninsula, I had Hart cut the motor and we used the paddles. There was no sign of life anywhere, but the gap between the two wasn't more than two or three hundred meters, and I didn't want to alert anyone to our presence until we had to. Up close, I could see that the wall was maybe 20 feet high and made of cinderblocks and cement. The exterior was incredibly smooth, even the cement between the cinderblock joints had been carefully set: the effect was of one flat, even surface. After a few seconds' staring at the thing in stupefaction, my brain kicked in and I realized that no zombie would be able to climb the wall. Pretty slick, no pun intended.

“Ahoy the island!” I shouted when we were about fifty meters away. Behind me, Brit snickered. Two heads popped up from behind the wall, and one of them shouted to me.

“Qui est-il?” The voice switched to English. “Who are you?”

We’d heard rumors for several years that the Quebecois north had managed to remain organized, and it didn’t surprise me to hear French; it stood to reason they would want the Vermont farmland as much as we did, especially after the fall of Montreal. The Canadian Parliament had had the city nuked, ostensibly to contain the plague up there but, from the paranoid mutterings of the few survivors to make it south, because after Toronto succumbed to the plague moving north from Buffalo and Niagara Falls, Quebec had tried to secede and seal up their own borders. It may have worked: despite the destruction of their capital city, regular radio traffic could be heard from French news channels, and reportedly Newfoundland and Nova Scotia remained zombie-free. Ottawa was now its own glowing lake of glass thanks to the Chinese, but the Frogs had evidently survived.

“United States Army! We have wounded here!” Hart had pulled out that flag we'd used down south at the ambush site and was waving it madly.

The two heads disappeared for a second, then a series of ropes were tossed over the wall and one of the men rappelled down easily, stopping just short of the water. Several more heads appeared over the edge of the wall. We paddled the boat over to him, and he shined a flashlight into each of our faces. The light paused on Doc.

“Is he bitten?” This man, for sure, was Quebecois, and it took a minute for me to understand him through the thick accent.

Brit astonished me by rattling off a string of French to the man. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, he nodded and shouted back up to the others. A second man rappelled down with a collapsible stretcher, and after a minute or so we were able to wrestle it atop the zodiac and carefully set Doc onto it. The stretcher was tied off and lifted to the parapet with a crude pulley system. The rest of us, even Ziv, were harnessed in and carefully lifted one at a time to the top of the wall. The two Frenchies remained below, attaching the zodiac to a series of lines before lifting it clear of the water, winching it into a makeshift gantry. It remained on the other side of the wall, but lifted 30 feet above the water.

After I untied myself from the swiss seat, I looked around. Each of the local men was armed with a rifle, their pistol grips and butt stocks shiny from use. Radios beeped, the volume barely loud enough to register. The first man, the one to hail us, untied himself and stepped towards us. "What are you doing here?" His voice was not friendly, but neither was it openly hostile. I saw immediately that they had saved our lives, but didn't yet see a reason to keep us breathing.

“Do you work for the General?” I asked warily. He hawked in the back of his throat and spit over the wall.

“I guess not,” I murmured. “You see those explosions to the south?”

“Oui. We are not blind.”

“The General and his men are dead. The causeway block failed and the island has been attacked by zombies.”

He swore in French and yanked his radio off his shoulder, barking into it. The voice that came through the radio was American, and speaking English. “Do they have wounded?”

“Oui.”

“Get the wounded to the doctor. Hold the others there. Five minutes.”

Brit and I glanced at each other. The man clipped the radio back in place and extended one hand to me. “I am Pierre.” He said. “We will get your wounded to our docteur. You wait here for Cassandra.”

“Who is Cassandra?” This could either get better or it could get worse, really fast. “I'm not letting you take my wounded away.”

Something in his expression softened. “We will care for them. Cassandra - she is one of you. Do not be afraid.” He touched the flag on Red's uniform. “We have been waiting for you.”

We all shared wary glances. He wasn’t exactly clarifying the situation. A few minutes later a cart drew up, led by two horses of the same huge breed as those monsters we'd seen outside Schuylerville a year back. Belgian war horses, I think they were called. Doc's litter was carefully lowered, set perpendicular so that he was not lying directly in the cart, cushioning him from the worst of the jolting. “Ziv, go with him.” I ordered quietly. He might not admit to being wounded, but I wasn't going to let him stand up here with a broken arm, either. “No one is alone until I sort this out.” For once he didn't argue with me, just jumped down into the wagon and took a seat next to Doc. The driver clucked to the team and slapped them with the reins.

A trim woman of perhaps sixty was climbing the ladder to the parapet. In looking her way I saw that the entire wall - what I could see, anyway - had a deck, maybe four feet wide, running the inside. When I'd climbed over, I'd seen that the wall was actually a type of permanent coffer dam: two separate walls of concrete blocks with tons of gravel fill between them. The wall was nearly three feet wide, a more permanent version of the HESCO barriers that had been so ubiquitous in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Name.” She ordered when she reached us. She wore old-style Multicam pants, the ones with the knee pads sewn directly into the fabric, and the brown cotton undershirt.

“Sergeant First Class Nick Agostine, United States Army.”

Chapter 19

The woman searched my face minutely. Pierre shone his flashlight in my face, not aggressively, but so she could take my measure.

“What just happened on Grand Isle?”

I gave her the short version, but before I could finish she turned to Pierre. “Get our boats to the junction between North and South Hero. Blow that bridge. Get on the radio and inform the North of what's happened and tell them to get to stations. Expect contact with the dead before morning. Broadcast South that any survivors should head for the west shore, and to get in the water if zombies come at them. We'll pick them up in our boats. And tell that fucking pilot to get his ass back in the air and give us a proper recon!” She had to shout that last, because with a “Oui, oui, madame!” he'd already slid down the ladder and hauled ass to what looked like a guard shack a couple hundred meters away.

She turned back and surveyed my team. “Your wounded have been taken to my farm for treatment.” She informed me. “The rest of you will join them once another wagon has arrived. It will be maybe a half hour wait.”

I cut her off. “No offense, but who are you?”

She eyed me. “Before all this shit, I was Sergeant Major Cassandra McIntyre. Retired. Now I'm what you'd call the Mayor of Isle La Motte.”

My eyes narrowed. That name was familiar. “I think we’ve met.”

“If so, it was long ago. I don’t recognize your face or name. The plague broke out just as I was leaving Fort Detrick, my last duty station. Unless you were stationed with me at some point, I doubt we knew each other. And I remember every soldier who was ever under my command.”

I shook my head. “We probably didn’t, but I might have heard of you, if you were in Iraq or Afghanistan.” I hesitated a second.

“Some people say the plague started in Detrick.”

She nodded once, crisply. “They would be correct.”

I leaned back, shocked at her casual answer. In the three years since the zombie outbreak, there had been a million theories to how it had happened. “So how did it start?”

“Madame, madame!” The shout came up from below. “General Dupúis!”

“Dammit.” She hissed, leaning over the side. “Tell him Allen is dead and our position is precarious. Tell him to continue mission but we cannot join him for three days. He will have to hold his own until then.”

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded.

She turned back to me. “Long story. I'll tell you in the morning.”

“You are aware of the call-up of retirees three years ago? You should be back on Active Duty right now, Sergeant Major. You're breaking the law by remaining here.”

“I hadn't heard, as a matter of fact.” I couldn't tell if she was lying or not. “But my duty is here and if the U.S. government wants to retake New England in the next century, they'll be smart enough to leave me here. You said Allen is dead. How do you know?”

“We shot him in both legs and left him on the south side of the island. He's probably zombied by now.”

Her face was unreadable in the darkness, which by now was total, the guards having switched off their flashlights and gone back to patrolling the deck, excepting one young trooper who stood at the Sergeant Major's left shoulder. Her bodyguard, I assumed.

“Good.” She managed a world of satisfaction in that one word.
I relaxed. Whatever the whole story about her presence here, she wasn't connected to Allen and my wounded were getting treatment. She glanced over her shoulder. “Your ride is early.”

Sure enough, another wagon pulled by those giant horses had appeared. One by one my team climbed down and pulled themselves into it. Padded with straw, it wasn’t too bad even with the jolting. I pulled myself up towards the front, hooking one elbow over the front of the wagon, at her left side. The Sergeant Major drove, clucking gently at the team and occasionally slapping the reins against their backs. The rest of the guards we left behind, and I looked back to see them spreading along the wall to their original positions. Next to the Sergeant Major sat the young trooper. We jolted along the remains of a paved road for perhaps an hour, gradually turning away from the edge of the wall. “What is that?” I asked over the clopping hooves.

“A twenty-foot sea wall.” She replied over her shoulder. “In the days after New York City fell, people in the bigger towns in Vermont took the hint and started leaving in droves. Even though the locals knew we were here, most fled east and north. Only a couple hundred made their way to us, and most of them stayed in Grand Isle. There was a window of about four weeks between the zombie plague spreading north and their arrival in Burlington. We took advantage of that and looted every construction site we could find. Most looters were taking things they could cart away in sedans and SUVs. Since we are mostly farmers, we went in there with trucks and trailers. It took over two years, long after we had to start defending ourselves from the dead, to steal enough cement blocks to circle the island, but now the wall is complete. We also excavated thirty-foot deep trenches into the lake bed. No one can reach us from the lake, unless they’ve got a Naval fleet.” This struck her companion as funny, somehow, and he laughed. I had to give her credit: it was no small feat to circle an island, however small, with that kind of defense. If nothing else, she could organize a work force.

“You know the Z’s don’t like water. Was it worth the effort?”

She nodded. “There are worse things than Zombies in the world, as I’m sure you know, Sergeant.”

Eventually she pulled into a long driveway that snaked this way and that through a lane of trees, dead-ending in a stable yard. There was a huge, three-story barn on one side, some sort of walled-off enclosure directly in front of the drive, and a third, smaller structure to the left. When I jumped off the back of the cart, I landed on cement. A glance at the constellations told me it was well on towards dawn, and in the growing light I could see the dark circles and haggard expressions of my team. None of us had slept in better than thirty-six hours, and it was starting to catch up with us. Several young men had come out from the barn and unhitched the team, leading them away. The Sergeant Major and her companion slung our packs over their shoulders. “This way,” She said. We followed her up.

It might have started life as a barn, and the horses might bed below us, but the top half of the structure had, at some point, been turned into living space. In a world where people lived badly and a bath was usually a dream, I could only be amazed that she had managed to maintain this place. It was clean – not just the half-assed clean you get by removing muddy boots at the door and maybe sweeping around with a broom made of twigs – but clean. I hadn’t seen anything like it outside Seattle. There was even a TV on the wall and a pool table near a tall bank of real windows on the opposite side of the room. I looked around. The space beneath stairs leading to the third floor was filled with books, facing a small kitchen that had, from the sound of it, a working refrigerator. She looked at my cow-face with amusement, and I hastily shut my trap. The others were just standing there, heads hanging, so dog-tired they couldn’t even drum up the enthusiasm to look around for themselves.

“You can sleep here tonight,” she said. “There are enough beds upstairs for you all. Do me a favor and strip out of your clothes, and we’ll have them clean in the morning.”

I just blinked at her, stupidly. The combination of a week’s poor sleep, high-alert while teasing out Westbrook’s squad, then a two-hour adrenaline rush escaping a pack of zombies, cost me. Seeing this place was my limit. It was all I could do to stand upright with my eyes open. Processing information was out the fucking window. For a half second, I thought maybe I was really dead and this was just one messed-up stop in purgatory. By the time I understood what she was saying, she was already heading downstairs and the others were stumbling their way upstairs. It was Brit’s hand in mine, pulling me towards the stairs, that got me moving at all.

Twenty minutes later, I tossed our combined uniforms into the hallway – truly glad the reeking mess wasn’t in the same room as me – and passed out next to Brit where she lay, dead to the world, on the double bed upstairs. If they were going to kill us in the morning, I didn’t give a shit about it tonight.

Chapter 20

Around 4 AM, Red shook me awake for my watch. I got up groggily, and he slipped down the hallway into Harts room. Good for him, I thought. Good for them both. The hour of my watch passed slowly, and I was close to nodding off again when Brit stumbled out to relieve me. Even though we seemed safe, we could never let our guard down. I had spent that hour pacing the hallway, worrying about Doc and Ziv. Hopefully they were being treated well, but I wasn’t going to go stumbling around an armed camp at zero dark thirty to find them. I fell back asleep almost instantly, once I was sureBrit was awake and ready for watch.
I actually woke up to the sound of Brit’s “Holy shit would you look at that!” as she stood naked at the window, nose mashed against the glass, looking down.

I scrubbed sleep from my eyes and caught sight of her. “You’re probably giving those farm hands a cheap thrill standing there like that.”

She either didn’t hear me or, more likely, didn’t care. We might love each other and all that sappy-happy crap, but she still enjoyed giving total strangers awkward hard-ons. “Get over here and check this out.” Less of a hedonist than her, I wrapped the sheet around myself before stepping up beside her. I glanced down and immediately saw what had caught her interest.

At 3 am, the place had seemed like a farm. At a quarter past eleven in the morning, I could see that it was. The walled enclosure I had spotted earlier was at least an acre in size and filled with raised beds of vegetables. This late in the season, it was a riot of green. Between the garden and the barn, outside the wall and almost directly beneath us, I could see the curve of greenhouse glass beneath a deck off the second story. A walk to the window against the east wall showed me the smaller barn and beyond it, at least twenty acres of pasture in which a herd of beef cattle were grazing, four or five of those giant horses mixed in with them. The thought of a steak filled my mouth with saliva. A couple of cows, a different breed to the cattle, were grazing in a separate pasture but mooing at the huge bull bellowing at them from the other side of the electrified fence. Brit was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet like a three-year-old, although the effect was quite different in the nude. “Look at that orchard!” She squealed, pointing out her window. Sure enough, long rows of fruit trees stretched out past the garden.

“Where are we?” I wondered.

She shook her head in wonder. “I don’t know, but I can die happy now. Fuck the Army, I’m not leaving this place ever again.”

I just shook my head. A glance outside the door showed me that the Sergeant Major hadn’t been kidding the night before: clean, folded uniforms were waiting outside each door. After a long shower and the delight of toilet paper (seriously, you have no idea how important toilet paper is post-zombie-apocalypse. None of those movie directors got that right), my team assembled in the main room on the second floor. None of the people I had seen the night before were to be found, but there were scrambled eggs, fresh bread, butter, and a toaster sitting on the kitchen counter when we arrived, and Doc’s medical bag was neatly unpacked and laid out inspection-style on the coffee table. That reminded me that neither he nor Ziv were anywhere in the building, but after I caught sight of the Sergeant Major’s Wall of Pride that Red was examining – the long lines of military guidons and other goodbye-plaques that most soldiers end up with after a couple decades of Army work – or used to, back when places that made that useless shit still existed – I figured she was legit enough I could trust they weren’t buried in shallow graves somewhere. From my vantage on the insanely-comfortable leather couch, I spotted at least half a dozen deployment-related shadow boxes and twice that many from various Army posts. It seemed the Sergeant Major and her husband, from the look of the name plates, had been stationed almost everywhere.

The rest of our packs were resting neatly in a line along the wall. I could tell at a glance that they had all been searched, but when I went through mine I found everything was there. “Nothing about this place makes sense.” I said as I repacked.

“What do you mean?” Brit and Hart had set up the pool table and a sharp crack echoed through the room when Hart broke the triangle, at least three balls – two solid, one striped – landing in the pockets.

“Look around. I haven’t seen any place like this since the plague hit. We’ve got two ex-military with nine deployments between them living on a farm with more food than I’ve seen in years, at least four farmhands, herds of cattle, horses, you name it – surrounded by a sea wall of all fucking things, and zombies on either side of the mainland. What sort of crazy shit is this?”

“The dead are walking the skin of the earth, Sergeant. This place is no stranger than the rest of reality.” Her voice, crisp and clear, cut across the noise from the pool corner. Brit paused halfway through her shot, the white ball landing in the center pocket, unnoticed. Hart straightened up, leaning her pool cue against the window, and opened her mouth to say something, but Ahmed beat her to it.

Whatever you can say about our resident terrorist, he’s not a woman-hater. For all that he and Brit call each other names, more than once he’s risked his life to save hers, so maybe I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when he stepped towards the Sergeant Major and bowed from the waist, placing one hand over his heart in the Afghan gesture of respect. She smiled at him, the lines in her face softening. “Ahmed Yassir.” She said, returning his bow. “You are the absolute last person I ever expected to see here.”

“I am glad to see that you have survived, Sergeant Major. You were a worthy adversary.” He replied.

She chuckled, then seeing our confusion, explained. “I met Ahmed Yassir near Kandahar in 2004. I was with the 82d then, a battalion Sergeant Major at the time.” She nodded at Ahmed. “He was a frustrating opponent. It wasn’t until I finally sat down with the locals in his area that I learned why. We pulled back some of our COPs off his land, because I had a hunch we could trust him to take out the Taliban without our involvement. He proved me right – and shocked us all when he met with me at a meeting of the local headmen to negotiate a treaty that spared our soldiers’ lives while killing all the Taliban that came close.”

Ahmed nodded. “The agreement worked while you were there. When you left, your replacements were, how do you say…less accommodating.”

She sighed. “I was afraid of that. From the bottom of my soul, Ahmed, I did what I could to convince them to trust you. But old habits die hard, and my replacement had just come from the invasion of Iraq. He was too stupid to listen.”

Ahmed nodded. “We learned that. It is what drove me into the hills – and why Nick there sent me to Guantanamo three years later.”

Her glance towards me then was more of a glare. “You don’t acquit yourself well by doing that, Sergeant Agostine.”

"Water under the bridge, Sergeant Major. They kill us, we kill them."

"Typical Combat Arms mentality."

I scowled, crossing my arms. I couldn’t say why, but the old woman made me nervous. "Ahmed an I have worked it out. ”

She did not rise to that, simply shook her head. She glanced around the room. “We searched your bags to see who you are, and to ensure you had nothing dangerous to us. You are clearly military, or most of you are –” She eyed Brit for a second. “– but I saw no unit markings beyond the tags on your uniform. What unit are you assigned to?"

“We’re Irregular Scouts. Technically we’re not in the Army at all, though for Big Army’s purposes we fall under JSOC.”

She nodded slowly. “Your two Soldiers are at my house, a few hundred meters from here. They are both doing fine, although Master Sergeant Hamilton needs some time to recuperate. The General was not a gentle host.”

“Thank you.” I could not hide the relief in my voice at knowing they were still alive.

“We were able to recover sixty-eight people from South Hero.” She said after a moment, moving over to the kitchen to clean up our mess from breakfast. We followed her, Brit and Red snagging the chairs on the opposite side of the bar.

“There were a thousand people on that island,” Red said hoarsely.

“We hope that more were able to make it to North Hero before the bridge was blown. I have heard reports that some of the residents there went south to see if they could find more survivors. Hopefully we’ll find more.” She scraped the leftover food into the sink and stacked the plates into the dishwasher as she spoke. “As for Allen, I met that son of a bitch when we first bought land up here, ten years ago. He was the head of the Vermont National Guard – he lived on Grand Isle and heard, probably through our land agent, that we were both military. He tried talking me into transferring over once I dropped my retirement papers. I wasn’t interested. I could tell the man had an ego, but even I hadn’t expected him to turn into a tinpot Hitler so quickly. I think I was blinded by my belief that someone with that many years of military service wouldn’t forget his obligations to the American people so easily.” She shrugged.

“He’d blocked off the highway leading from the mainland onto South Hero – you saw that. But he sent his people out in forays to what’s left of Burlington in order to pick up supplies. We do the same thing, but we move by boat, so we land south of the city, away from his scouts. He knew about us, of course, and we had to give him a third of our harvest every year just to keep him away. Had he only ground troops, I would have told him to go to hell, but he had air support and was perfectly capable of killing everyone and simply taking over the land. So I negotiated with the bastard.”

“Only sixty-eight? Sixty-eight?” I persisted, taking notes on my iPhone.

Her mouth compressed into a thin line. “You saw what those JDAMs did, Sergeant. You ordered them, did you not? I am surprised so many survived. We’d blown our bridge when the plague reached Burlington – one of my men stole six pounds of C4 from a construction site, but none of us had much experience with demolitions – I was in electronic warfare before I got promoted to Command Sergeant Major, so I had no experience with the stuff. We packed three pounds on either side of the causeway over a 100 meter distance.” I winced. Six pounds of C4 would have taken care of that causeway and probably everything around it for half a kilometer. She grinned outright at my reaction. “It destroyed the entire causeway and dug a crater sixty feet into the bed of the lake. We’d bricked up the entrance to the island, so most of the debris hit that instead of us behind it, but we had to rebuild the wall afterwards. You could have seen that plume from southern New York, I imagine.

“We’ve informed North Hero that we’ve blown the causeway to their south, so at least our sister island is safe.” Her eyes darkened. I felt myself start to sweat as I imagined the scene, and was grateful I had not been there. “But we had so little time. My men reached the bridge an hour before the first zombies came crawling out of what was left from your bombs. The few dozen survivors jumped into the water, and they saved as many as they could, but some were too afraid to risk it. I finally had to order my troops to fire on the crowd at the edge of the lake, because dying is better than – than that.” She was silent for a minute, then gave a little shake of her head and looked at us. “Grand Isle is finished. We’ll start looting tonight – I want their ammunition stores and equipment, and we got incredibly lucky: two of his pilots fled with full crews and UH-60s. We’ve parked the birds on one of our open spaces, since we don’t have anything like a parking lot on the island. The pilots will help distract any surviving zombies while we find what we can find to salvage. I suspect it won’t take long.”

“Then what?” Red asked, his hands clenched together as he listened.

“We’ll burn the island. It’s the only way to clear the zombies off of it, and I want that land. The soils are better there, and it gives us more breathing room. I don’t expect, after your little display, that consolidation will be much of a problem. And with three islands, we’ll be able to hold out indefinitely.”

“That’s might not work.” I said. “The government is going to want the land too, and our job was to figure out how useable is was for a base in this area.”

“The Army will have nothing to collect but ashes.” She said simply. “And I don’t think they’re coming; they are, after all, the ones who just turned it to glass.”

Chapter 21

We were all silenced. With the bombing of South Hero and the death of Allen, that was one problem solved. I didn’t like the idea of some wannabe-dictator controlling innocent civilians – it reminded me too much of what LTC Jackass McDonald would have done if he’d had a chance – but at the same time, it was sickening to realize that a thousand people were now dead. They’d survived four years of this shit, and thanks to one man’s blind ego they were gone. Even Brit was subdued. Hart had her head bent over her entwined hands, maybe praying. Red was staring out the windows, and Ahmed was studying the Sergeant Major with his usual closed-in look, expression unreadable. The Sergeant Major was looking at me, one old NCO giving another the time to absorb what she’d said.

I finally sighed. “Well, this mission is over.”

She nodded slowly, studying me. “To be frank,” She said. “I’ve been wondering how you managed to continue as a scout missing one foot.”

Brit stirred. “We’re supposed to be retired.” She replied, glaring at me. “But those asshats down at Fort Orange wanted to collect on a debt.”

I scowled at her. Normally she knew better than to criticize me in front of the team. “We’re here because Doc was here. I don’t leave anyone behind. After this, we’re out for good.”

“Stay here instead.” The Sergeant Major suggested gently. “I’ve got six hundred and forty two lives to worry about – more, now, depending on how many are on North Hero – and I could use a few more people to patrol the walls and help with the defense. Your training is priceless, even if you don’t know this end of the lake. If nothing else, you could teach our younger ones to dodge zombies and help us when we have to make supply runs.” I hesitated. What we’d seen from our window upstairs this morning had been encouraging, but there was more to this place than one farm. She might be doing fine, but what of the other people living here? Perhaps she was no better than the General, another little dictator making a play for our sympathies. Six well-trained soldiers would give her one hell of an advantage. She must have read what I was thinking, for she straightened up. “If you doubt me, come outside. There’s more to see here.”

She led us over a dirt path from the courtyard through a little grove of trees to the main house. It was a one-story building, almost rambling in its many corners and rounded edges. An elegant deck with a round seating area dug four feet into the ground sat off the back of the house. A firepit in the center was stacked with birch wood. A grill and brick oven had been built into one wall. Climbing the stairs, we followed her into a spacious kitchen, all clean stainless steel and dark wood cabinets. Again, the sheer cleanliness of the place struck me more than anything. It was like being in the world before the plague hit, as if the world in which the rest of us existed had not touched this place. I had to remind myself that if I looked past the trees, I’d see the seawall protecting the island from external attack not a quarter mile away.
We trailed her towards a bedroom in the back, past an impressive wine collection. Brit had the grace not to just grab a bottle, but I saw her eyeing them. Cassandra opened a door and ushered us through.

Doc and Ziv were lying on military-issue cots, Doc with two IVs in his arm and a bandage around his ribs. His uniform had been recently cleaned, the jacket hanging on a nail above his head. His color had come back and he had clearly had a good night’s sleep. Ziv, in no more than his boxers, had one arm behind his head and was staring at the ceiling, but he got up and came to greet us when we walked in. Brit did the unthinkable by giving him a hug, although she was careful about it once she saw the bruising on his abdomen and back. His left arm was in a cast. On the other side of the room, a man in his mid-fifties was staring into the eyepiece of a microscope. I looked around. The room might not have been the island’s hospital, but I got the impression that it was the first place anyone injured found themselves. A row of shelves held glass bottles and random instruments, including scalpels soaking in some kind of solution. A stethoscope hung from a nail under the shelves, and those lights doctors used to look in your eyes and throat sprouted from a mason jar. It was a clean and serviceable room, if decidedly rustic. The chairs against one wall were all home-made, clunky but looking like they could hold the fattest person with no trouble – not that there were many fat people around these days.

The doctor stood to greet us, offering his hand. “My name is Alexander Brundage.” He said politely.

We clustered in the center of the room. “We need to take blood samples from all of you.” She told us. “It’s just our policy. Doctor Brundage did the same to the refugees we recovered last night, before we sent them to stay with families throughout the island. It won’t take long.”

The others glanced at me but I shrugged. What would a blood sample hurt, and it wasn’t as if they’d actually see anything. The doc pulled a sterile lancet from a sealed package for each of us and pricked our fingertips. He squeezed a drop onto a slide, labeled each one carefully, then sat down before the microscope. I walked over to Doc and looked him over. After a moment, Cassandra joined me at his side. “He was beaten pretty badly,” She said, including the others who had taken seats after giving the doctor their blood samples. “The fingernails on his right hand were pulled out, probably with pliers. They may or may not grow back, so he will have to be very careful for a while. No broken bones, although he’s got a couple of cracked ribs. We aren’t sure if his eye orbit is broken, but it will be a few days before the swelling goes down and he can see out of that eye again. He’s not going to be able to eat solid food for about a week, just to save his jaw the trouble. One molar might be cracked. There’s a dentist on North Hero we’ll try to bring over to check the rest of his mouth. I’m hoping he won’t need that tooth pulled.” Doc woke up as she described his injuries, and gave me a thumbs-up.

She nodded at Ziv. “This one was luckier. His elbow bone is fractured but we put a smaller cast on it so he can use the arm. That shouldn’t keep you guys here more than a couple of weeks. He won’t say, but I think they beat him with a metal pipe. No lacerated organs or internal bleeding, but his spleen is enlarged and there may be some damage to his liver. No vodka for you, soldat.”

Ziv scowled at her. “Vojnik. I am Serbian, not Russian.”

The Sergeant Major’s expression did not change, but I sensed some disdain in her tone when she replied. “Perhaps I should have guessed. I knew that accent reeked from someplace familiar.”

“What is that supposed to mean, woman?” Ziv started up from his bed, reaching for the big knife strapped to his pack.

Before it broke out into violence, Brundage leaned back and smiled at us. “None of you are infected.” He said. “Although I’m sure you knew that. I can say that you all could use a few good meals and some rest.” I nodded. MREs did not a fat man make, and we were all on the edge of malnutrition. I was secretly hoping some of the vegetables in her garden would be ripe enough to eat, because I was sick of MRE #11, the Sammich. Man cannot live on spam alone.

The Sergeant Major tapped my arm. “Hamilton and the other one can rest here for a while. I doubt they’re up for dancing. But if you would like, I can show you the rest of Isle La Motte.”

Chapter 22

Sure enough, we got a tour of the island, although from horseback. The only one of us to ride competently was Ahmed, and even he was intimidated by the horses when the two young men from last night brought them out. “They’re Shire horses,” She told us as she easily swung up into the saddle. “About the same size as Clydesdales, those big horses you used to see in the beer commercials. They eat everything they can reach, but they don’t balk at the sight of zombies and I’ve trained them to fight. Their height means the rider is more protected from attack, although a horde would bring horse and rider down easily enough.”

Uncomfortable though it turned out to be, I did bask in the luxury of riding instead of walking. My prosthesis wouldn’t fit in the stirrup, but I found I could ride a half-assed sort of sidesaddle when the jolting got too rough, and I didn’t mind Brit’s teasing too much after she fell off twice. “You could sell these to the Army,” I pointed out when we stopped for lunch at the home of another farmer on the north side of the island. “It would be the difference between life and death for scouts.”

The farmer, a big bear of a man with the proverbial farmer’s tan, guffawed loudly as he left the table for his plowing. The farmer’s wife, a lady who looked older than she probably was, shook her head and followed her husband out. “These horses are bred for war, that’s true.” The Sergeant Major explained. “They might do you good when it comes to scout-work, but they aren’t easy to care for. You’d spend half your time just searching for grazing, and frankly we don’t have enough to lose. If it wasn’t for the fact that Burlington was mostly empty when the infection reached it, we wouldn’t have enough gas to run our tractors. Eventually we’ll run out, even if we can resupply from South Hero, which I doubt. In two years, we’ll be out of fuel. These horses don’t breed every year, and we need them for the plow and for clearing fields. We won’t sell them, and we’ll fight to keep them.”

I shrugged. “Oh well. It was worth asking.”

She grinned. “It was sheer luck that we have them. If my husband hadn’t retired before me, we wouldn’t have had time to build up the farm and bring in the horses before the plague hit. He spent the last five years of my career up here.”

“Is he that man, Pierre?”

She shook her head, her smile fading. “He died of cancer three years ago. He was halfway through chemo when the plague hit.”

“I’m sorry.” Brit spoke up, the first words she’d said all morning. Her sympathy was real enough, but it was so rare for her to express genuine emotion that even I glanced at her askance.

The Sergeant Major shrugged. “The last months were easier without the drugs and radiation. He said there wasn’t too much pain, but he was tired all the time. I do miss him, but I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to realize how bad things would get.”

“What were the first couple of years like here?” Hart asked as we remounted and carefully turned the horses back south.

“We didn’t starve, I can tell you.” She was at ease on the back of the big gelding, a red roan whose size dwarfed her as a rider on his back. She swayed with the horse’s gait, comfortable on what was essentially a half-ton of solid muscle. “Most of the island had been farmland in the past, and once the community realized what was happening, and what would happen if we got overrun by refugees, it was easy to organize everyone. Bryan – my husband – and I didn’t have much trouble with that. It was lean, the first winter, but between foraging expeditions in what was left of Burlington and Champlain in New York, we made it through. Eating badly for six months convinced everyone else to clear their own land, get together to clear marginal land and acreage that belonged to people off-island. The next fall, we had a surplus, and no one has starved. Even with that third handed over to General Asshole, we’ve done fine.”

She wasn’t kidding. What had struck me from the first person I saw that morning was that everyone here was healthy. It wasn’t the stick-thin barely-surviving that my team and I looked like even on a diet of MREs, and it wasn’t the almost-obesity you saw among cannibals surviving on an exclusively meat diet. Everyone here had real muscle, the strength that came from eating well and working hard. As we trotted past well-tended fields and over the one bridge, spanning a wide creek whose sides were carefully brick-lined, I was impressed again at the strength of will it took to organize an entire community in the face of overwhelming odds and succeed, especially in a world where the normal rules had gone out the window when the dead started hunting the living. I suspected, looking at her upright back, it cost her more than she would admit to keep six hundred people working together, particularly with zombies not more than two or three miles off-shore, the last military presence gone. Whatever her feelings about the General, I knew in my gut that he had still supplied them with security, even if it cost more food than they had wanted to give.

But she wasn’t a dictator either. Anyone could see that. The men and women working in the fields waved and called out when they saw her astride the horse, and she waved back. More than once she enlisted us to help a farmer pull a stuck machine out of the mud. Kids chased after us as we trotted down the road, and when she checked on the guards along the wall in the late afternoon, they spoke to her with real respect. Everywhere you looked, her hand was on the community, and it was a hand they evidently welcomed. Brit pushed her horse up next to mine as we waited while the Sergeant Major spoke with those guards, perched on the wood scaffolding that placed them just high enough they could sprawl out in the prone, their bodies protected by the wall, and snipe anything they could see with minimal danger. “We should stay here,” She said softly, her knee touching mine. “We could live here, Nick. No more fighting, no more starving, no more nothing. This place is paradise compared to what we’ve been through.”

“What about the Army? What about all the Soldiers we’ve supported for the last four years? Major Flynn down in Fort Orange is still waiting for our report.”

She gritted her teeth. “We did our part, Nick. And she’s right, she needs more people. Six hundred isn’t enough, this place has to be at least thirty square miles to farm, fortify, and patrol. Six more who can train dozens is a godsend to her, you can see that.”

“Let me think about it.” I cut her off as she opened her mouth to argue. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying we may not be able to ride off into the sunset just yet.” She grimaced but shifted her horse away as the older woman trotted back to us.

Later that evening, I saw what the woman had meant by surplus. She led us back to the main house to check again on Doc and Ziv but also to gather up supper, and Brit damn near swooned when she went into the pantry and saw floor-to-ceiling shelves of canned food. Our resident vegetarian started crying as she looked over the long lines of every vegetable and fruit you can imagine, all pickled or canned or piled in baskets. We all stood there in stunned silence for a while, I don’t mind telling you, because it was more food than any of us had seen since before the plague. “You weren’t kidding,” I said softly. Brit had already snagged a bag of dried apple slices and was alternating them with a huge potato that she simply bit right into, making grunting noises of appreciation.

The Sergeant Major shook her head, her expression a mixture of amusement and exasperation at Brit’s antics. Red was busy destroying a can of what looked like sliced peppers, and the only one who seemed determined to keep his hands to himself was Ahmed, his arms folded as he stared in mute fascination at a jar of diced tomatoes. His favorite, I knew; his wife, long ago, would make him a dish of stewed tomatoes on his birthday, or he had once told us on a long-range patrol. I hadn’t eaten a fresh tomato in three years. 

Our host just shook her head. “Grab whatever you want – within reason – and I’ll start on dinner.” We needed no encouragement, and presented her with twelve different vegetables and six bags of various dried fruit. We followed her like ducklings back to the barn, and to our absolute delight found Pierre grilling steaks on the second-story deck. She had Red spear the vegetables onto sticks for grilling, and after a whispered word from me, cooked a dish of stewed tomatoes with curry sauce for Ahmed. He did not say a word when she set the bowl in front of him, but the hidden expression in his eyes told me his undying loyalty had switched to her. Traitor.

Doc was carried upstairs on a litter and was able to join us at the table, although an IV bag was hooked over a nail on the wall and Brundage gave him some sort of broth to sip, so he could at least feel like he was part of the celebration. Ziv’s arm was in a sling but he took to the steak with uncivilized gusto. There was nothing said for at least an hour, but we all ate as we never had before, not even in Seattle. Everything was fresh, except the meat, which had been frozen immediately after slaughter and tasted like the cow was still mooing downstairs. Nothing I ever ate before that night, not even before, tasted like that food. The Sergeant Major ate sparingly, although her companion went through his steak with the same enthusiasm we did. Brit had commandeered the largest bowl in the kitchen and was rapidly destroying the biggest salad I’ve ever seen. When we finally sat back, full, the table was almost empty, the sink was full of empty jars, and I had had to remove my belt. Red let out a long, loud, appreciative belch, apologizing sheepishly when the Sergeant Major gave him a dirty look.

An awkward silence fell. Pierre stood, and Brundage excused himself after adjusting Doc’s IV. Pierre said something in French that we didn’t understand, but it seemed to be friendly. We all gave him a short wave before he went inside to clean up. I saw Brit and then Ahmed glance my way, and I gave in to their stares. “You said last night that you know how the plague hit.”

Three empty wine bottles cluttered the center of the table; her collection in the main house was impressive, and even though I had preferred Jack Daniels back in the old world, it wasn’t bad. She lifted her glass and swirled the red liquid around before draining it. “I did say that,” She admitted as she carefully set the glass back on the table. “Perhaps a better question would be: do you want to know what I know? You won’t forget it, and I may not be doing you any favors by telling you.”

Chapter 23

It was Brit who broke the silence, and in her haunted expression I saw the girl Doc and I had rescued from the remains of Syracuse years before. “I was going to the stars, lady. I was the top of my class in Engineering, I was a week out from an internship at NASA when the zombies showed up. I want to know what stole my future.”

The two women shared a long, considering glance. I thought that perhaps the Sergeant Major, a woman who had somehow retained the vestiges of real elegance despite the dirt under her fingernails and the world-weary expression that creased her forehead, was the kind of woman Brit would have become, if the world were sane and God paying attention. Finally the older woman nodded.

“If you insist. My last assignment, as I told you last night, Sergeant Agostine, was at Fort Detrick. By then I was twenty-six years into the Army, and I’d gone as far as I could, even among Sergeant Majors. I had no intention of continuing, and the only logical assignment left for me would be at Division level. But I had dropped my retirement packet after Bryan was diagnosed with brain cancer, our dreams of building a farm here to potter around gone along with his health. For the last nine months, ticking down to the day I’d leave, they asked me to run the Inspector General’s Office. Hardly a glamorous assignment, and not the one I should have gotten, but by then the only thing a bad NCOER could do was give me a paper cut.” Doc and I chuckled, Doc’s ending with a wince as he curled one arm around his ribs.

“Detrick was the home of the Army’s bioweapons program, despite all denials of it, and at my level I knew the basics of what was going on. There was an entire complex beneath the fort, something like six or seven stories below the surface. Supposedly it was capable of containing any virus that might have been accidentally released. Containment levels and eradication protocols so complex I don’t think any one person could have understood them all. I think that’s why what happened is so horrifying to contemplate: the release of the ‘reanimation’ plague was intentional.”

We sat in stunned silence for a long moment. “No. Fucking. Way.” Red finally whispered hoarsely. “How could someone do that – on purpose? Who would even think of that?”

“This woman should never have been employed by the U.S. military. She should have been killed at birth.” The Sergeant Major said softly, with venom.

I knew the name, I spoke it at the same time she did. “Doctor Morano.”

I felt her glance pierce me. “You know her?”

“She did this.” Brit lifted the damned pirate eye patch I had never been able to break her of using, and the Sergeant Major leaned forward to examine the white eyeball, the iris so clouded it was almost invisible.

“That looks like her work.” She settled back into her chair. “You know, a question a lot of people asked after World War Two was how Mengele could get away with his work. Everyone wanted to know if the times made the man, or if the man took advantage of the times. You could ask the same question about her. Her reputation on post was such that everyone referred to her as ‘Doctor Moreau’. I suspect she took it as a complement.”

“She’s a fucking psycho.” I said hoarsely. My wife’s face flashed in my mind. Our daughter’s arm in her hands, the splash of blood across her torso, the red eyes. I had married her with so much love and hope for the future, our daughter’s birth had been the best day of our lives, and thanks to one mass murderer all that was gone. I loved Brit, but there was nothing I wouldn’t trade, not even her, to have my family back. My old life and the old world back.

“She’s a sociopath for certain. I never understood why no one suspected her after the parasite was released, but I suppose in the general chaos no one got around to asking questions, and if she’s popped back up on the government’s radar, as she seems to have done, they may not care so long as she appears to be making progress towards a cure.”

“She’s based out of Seattle now, but she hops around the country. She’s got two Delta goons for bodyguards.” I told her.

Our host nodded slowly. “That’s enough to keep her in funding, and to give her whatever guinea pigs she wants.”

Ahmed leaned forward. “Tell us about the beginning, please.”

The wind had died, and just as she opened her mouth, the faint zombie howl echoed across the water. We all jerked upright, reacting on instinct to the sound, but our host only turned her head slightly, as if to hear better. She raised one hand to keep us in our seats. “What you’re hearing is Chazy, New York. The wind drops in early evening and you can sometimes hear it across the water. We’re safe here.” Pierre stepped back out on the porch to listen himself, his shotgun strapped across his back. “The wall is fully guarded in the evening, and there is no way across the water. You’re safe.” The sun was almost fully down, the sky a pale lavender in the west, fading to deep indigo. The moon was still new, and the stars blazed. Above our heads the Milky Way splashed rich and bright, and Brit sighed softly as she looked at it. The Sergeant Major continued her story, and slowly we all felt the chill of her words take hold.

“Even as IG, I had no influence or authority over the complex beneath us. It was administered by DARPA, I think in conjunction with JSOC, and it was made clear to me that the limits of my authority ended at the surface. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn. All I really cared about was counting down the days until I could get back here and be with Bryan for the last half of his chemotherapy. My stepson was up here with him, but he had his own life as a photographer in Florida and we knew he would be flying back south as soon as I left the military. There had been persistent reports that soldiers were disappearing from Detrick, and I had noticed on the local news that the number of homeless in surrounding cities was also dropping. There was no explanation for it, but many were of the opinion that it had something to do with Detrick. The base was gradually developing a rather sinister reputation. I’m a practical woman, but even I began to suspect. I asked around among the other Sergeants Major on post – there’s nothing to match the E-9 mafia, I can tell you – and finally one of them admitted that the disappearances had started about the time Moreau arrived.

“Finally, she snatched the wrong soldier: my NOCIC at IG. Before, she’d been careful to take soldiers already known as trouble-makers, choosing the drug abusers, recently-chaptered troops, or those who were most likely to be reported as AWOL. But I knew Staff Sergeant Roberts, and he was utterly dedicated to the Army. Not married, no children, he had nothing but the Army, and he worshipped it. Now I was pissed. It was one thing to hear rumors, but another thing to take one of my soldiers, steal him out of his own apartment, and experiment on him.” Even now, years later, I saw the NCO come out in her face, the old rage that someone had hurt one of her people. No NCO worth their stripes took the misuse of a subordinate by someone else – anyone else – lightly. “I confronted the Sergeant Major who supervised the bioweapons complex. We knew each other from Iraq, Harold Schumaker. He had balls, let me tell you. When Hasan Akbar fragged those two tents, Harry apprehended him in flip-flops and PTs. Get Harry drunk, and he’d tell you he clotheslined the little bastard as he ran between two tents after tossing his last grenade. Harry wasn’t scared of anything. Mortars, IEDs, suicide bombers, you name it: everyone and everything that tried to kill him failed. But when I confronted him about Roberts, he begged me to let it go. Begged me.” She shook her head, incredulous.

“Why the fuck should I let it go, Harry? She took my troop for her experiments. He’s not a lab rat, for Christ’s sake.’

“But I looked in his face and I saw real fear, the kind of fear that keeps a man up at night. I saw a terrified child staring back at me. ‘You have to let this go, Cassie.’ He said. ‘I’m sorry about your troop but you have to believe me, he’s beyond your help now.’

“Not much frightens me, but the sight of this huge, hulking man scared out of his wits, scared me. ‘What did she do to him, Harry? Why won’t you tell me?’

“He could only shake his head. ‘You don’t want to know, Cassie. I swear to God you don’t want to know.’

“’We have to stop her, Harry. Whatever she’s doing, you have to stop it. If there’s protocols, ways to seal her and her little Nazi scientists in there, you have to hit that button. How many victims is it this year alone? The cops are saying three hundred homeless are missing. If I go through the MPs’ records, how many more victims will I find?’

“He wouldn’t answer me. He just shook his head and told me to leave. I guess the best thing about that conversation – the only good to come out of it, for me at least – is that I confronted him the day after my retirement party. It was Friday, and I had cleared out my quarters that morning. I had ridden to post on my Harley, my truck parked at a hotel near Catoctin Mountain Park. I climb, you know, and I wanted to climb that one before I left for home. Since I lived off-post, the bitch didn’t know that I was already moved out and miles away. I drove back to the hotel, tired and pissed-off, after dark. I figured I’d climb the mountain the next morning, then be on the road by 1500 or so. Instead, I got a call around 1 am. It was Harry.”

Chapter 24

We sat in silence, unable to turn away. I realized dimly that the island was pitch-black around us, all lights doused, and that eerie howling a gruesome accompaniment to what I already, in my heart of hearts, knew she would say. Her face was pinched with old pain. “He was terrified, crying with fear. I could hear a pounding on a door somewhere in the background, with that same scream we hear right now. I could barely hear him. “’Get out of your house!” He cried to me. “For God’s sake, you have to run! She’s sending them after you.”

“’Who, Harry?’ I shouted down the phone. ‘Who is she sending? What is that noise?’

“’It’s too late for me.’ He sucked in a huge, sobbing breath and spoke as calmly as he could. ‘I’m so sorry, I should have done what you asked, and long before this. It’s all my fault.’ I could hear him loading a pistol in the background, and he came back on the line. ‘Forgive me, old girl. I hope you’re right, and God forgives all sins, because what’s about to happen is on my head.’

“’Harry!’ I yelled at him. ‘Don’t!’

“’I have to. You don’t know what will happen to me otherwise.’

“The gunshot was loud on the phone, louder than I expected. I heard the phone drop, and then the sound of the door smashing in and a howling noise. It sounded like his office was being torn apart. Then the phone went dead.” The expression of bitter grief on her face gave me the shudders. She wasn’t just telling us this; she was reliving it.

“I didn’t know what he’d been screaming about, and I had no idea what that noise had been. But I’ve learned, over the years, to trust my gut. Better, I knew to trust him. I packed my bag, turned in the hotel key, and got the hell out of there. I didn’t know how much time I had, so I ditched the trailer with my motorcycle in the parking lot and left in the truck. I was on the road twenty minutes after his phone call. I called Bryan and my stepson answered. I told him I was on my way back north and he needed to keep one eye on the news. I turned on NPR, and less than an hour later the first reports came in. I set my speedometer for 90 miles an hour and drove without stopping for eight hours, taking back roads. I got here in less than twelve hours. By then the infection had spread to Baltimore and D.C. The island had a meeting in the schoolhouse, and I told them what I knew. We started planning the wall that night. Two of our people are general contractors, so we took all of our trucks to their sites and loaded up as much construction material as we could fit, load after load for eighteen hours straight. After that, it was only about a month and a half before the plague reached Burlington. We’ve been walled up here ever since.”

“Fuck me, that’s hideous.” Doc said hoarsely.

She leaned forward and speared each of us with her intense gaze. Pierre had lit candles after the sun fell and it was in their flickering light that she stared us down. “Doctor Morano condemned our entire world to satisfy her ego. I don’t think she released the zombies because I started asking questions. Harry had told me a few days before I confronted him that the funding was going to get cut in the bioweapons program. The staff were subject to the same furlough as every other DA civilian. Morano released her test subjects because she didn’t want to lose her job.” She leaned back, bitter. “Six and a half billion people are either dead or in some grotesque half-dead limbo because one woman wanted to play God at her own whim and get paid to do it.”

“It can’t be that simple.” Red protested. “There’s no way she could do something that horrible just to keep her job.”

“Hitler became Hitler because he couldn’t get into art school.” Brit said grimly. “Sometimes it is that simple, Injun.”

“And the Army is still paying her.” I breathed. “She’s been crisscrossing the country, testing ‘cure’ after ‘cure’. It must all be an act.”

“Remember the VX nerve agent that killed Mya?” Brit reminded me. “She probably did it as much in the hopes of killing us as to see if it worked on the Zs.”

“She’s a sadist.” Doc said. “She gets off on inflicting pain. It must be a wet dream, to wake up every day and know she made this world.”

“I’m going to kill her.” I said simply, my wife’s face hovering again in my mind. “I’m going to wrap my hands around her throat and choke her to death slowly.”

“Get in line.” Brit said grimly.

Hart stood up and leaned over in the Sergeant Major’s face. “Goddamn YOU to hell. You could have called it in, could have stopped it at the start. You ran. You fucking coward.” She slapped the Sergeant Major hard across the face, knocking her out of her chair, then ran from the room, tears streaming down her face. Red got up and followed her out.

“I suppose I deserve that. Not that it would have made any difference. You know how fast it spreads.” She rubbed her face where the imprint of Hart’s big hand was turning red.  “Still, she’s right.”

Ahmed broke the uncomfortable silence that followed. “So, now what?”

Chapter 25                                                              

Outside the room there was a large crash, followed by a gunshot. Then the door burst in, and we were staring down the barrel of an old Thompson submachine gun.  The .45 caliber barrel looked like a train tunnel, and it was pointed directly at me. Behind it stood Pierre, glaring at all of the team. Behind him, on the floor, I could see Hart buried under a pile of bodies, and Red was slumped on the floor, blood running from his forehead, smoking .22 still clutched in his hand. One of the islanders sat next to him on the floor, holding his arm where, I learned later, Red’s shot had cut a groove out of the muscle.

The Sergeant Majors’ voice rang out like a pistol shot. “STOP!” Ahmed immediately lifted his gun into the air; it had had appeared in the instant Pierre had kicked the door in. Pierre looked over at McIntyre. “Madame, are you alright? We saw the woman strike you, on the camera, and got here as fast as we could. I had to hit the Indian with my gun stock.”

“I’m fine, Pierre. A misunderstanding among old soldiers, that is all.”  He stepped back, lowering his gun but still eyeing us warily. Brit rushed into the hall, where Pierre’s men were getting up off the prone figure of Hart. She kneeled in front of Red and lifted his eyelid, checking his pupils, then gave me a thumbs up sign. Despite the blood running from her own split lip, Hart knelt next to her and started pressing a bandage to his forehead. 

I let out the breath I didn’t realize I had been holding. Pierre’s finger had been on the trigger, and my stomach was a knot. Damn, that was close. He would have swept the whole room with .45 caliber slugs. Ahmed may have gotten him, but not before he had me and maybe someone else. I was getting too old for this crap. I waved my hand in a stand down sign to the team.

“You have very loyal people, Sergeant Major McIntyre.”

She looked at Ahmed, putting his pistol back in its holster, then at Ziv, who was placing a steak knife back down on the table. He had had it held back over his shoulder, about to throw it at Pierre.  “So do you, Sergeant First Class Agostine.”

“Well, I’m glad that didn’t end badly. Though I think Red is going to have a bit of a headache in the morning. “

“I will have Doctor Brundage keep an eye on him. After all, we all know how important Specialist Redshirt is, don’t we?” She raised her eyebrows at me.

I looked at Doc. He looked back, understanding my thoughts exactly. She knew about Redshirts’ immunity to the Zombie Infection, and Doc understood the look I had given him. If the next minute didn’t go well, Doc would give the word for the team to kill everyone in the room, and anyone in the way as we got the hell out of Dodge. I tensed up, and my voice turned cold.

“I don’t know what you‘re talking about, Sergeant Major.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Nick. We ran blood tests on everyone.  Brundage told me before dinner. I congratulate you on keeping him safe from the authorities for so long.”

I knew what this meant to her. If they took Red and turned him over to Doctor Morano, the island’s safety was assured. Weapons, ammo, food. Whatever they wanted.  I studied her lined face for a moment, noticing the creases around her eyes, and I took a chance.

“Thanks. I trust you will keep our secret.” She looked back at me, and her face broke into the smile that I had seen worn into her eyes. No one who smiled and laughed often enough that it wore into the lines in their face could be evil. Hard, yes, but not evil.   

“Of course. I would see Morano in hell before I turned over anyone to her experiments. I would suggest that after SHE is dead, you allow us to send our sample of his blood into the government. We can say it was from one of our islanders who died from an accident. Drowned, unfortunately, his body never revcovered.”

“Sounds like a plan! Now, let’s see what we can do about getting your people some supplies. Do you have a length of road that a C-130 can land on?”

She motioned to Pierre, who jumped at the chance to leave the room. I turned to the former Serbian Special Forces soldier sitting next to me. “Ziv, can you go with him? You know what we need. And please don’t kill him. Make nice with the Frenchman.”

“He has more balls than any Frenchman I have ever seen” growled Ziv.

“I am NOT French! I am Quebecois!”  

Brit walked back into the room, followed by Hart, who was holding a bandage to her own face. The Sergeant major looked at her, and was about to say something, but I broke in first.

“Hart, the next time you act without orders, you are off this team and on your own in the wilderness. Had we been in a combat situation and you had done something so foolish, I would have shot you myself. You put the whole team in jeopardy by antagonizing our host, and I’d like you to apologize to her. Now.”

Hart looked at me for a second, then she turned to McIntyre. “I’m sorry, Sergeant Major. It’s just that, well, I lost everything.”

“Apology accepted. We all did, and we’re all a little crazy these days.”

Doc whispered to me “She should see Brit in action if she wants to see crazy” followed by a sharp “OW!” as Brit smacked his damaged hand with a plate.