Gnash (34 page)

They cleared the first room behind the tapestry by shooting the two guards who were stationed, stupidly, in direct line of sight from the doorway.  This must be the meeting chamber that the courier described.  It was huge, literally the size of a large convenience store, an underground convenience store where a secret fundamentalist terrorist organization lived, planned attacks and fucked little boys until they died.  Along the wall there were six doorways.  Presumably, five of them led to the private chambers of the Brotherhood’s leadership, but they had no information about the sixth door.

Wraith pointed to the door on the far left and signaled for a stack.  Then he pointed to Kestrel and four other men to each watch one of the other doors.  The first group stacked up and entered the room.  Kestrel flinched as shouting erupted from inside.  So far, the entire operation had been carried out in near-complete silence.  There was a loud thud from inside the open room and the offending terrorist was silent. 

The next two rooms were cleared simultaneously before any further noise was made.  As the group entered the fourth and fifth rooms, gunfire erupted and one of the lead men took a bullet through the face.  Everyone pulled back and they threw flash bangs into the room, then entered and cleared.  Kestrel knelt on the back of a very large Middle Easterner and violently jerked his arms backward, dislocating the prisoner’s shoulder in the process.  The man was so large that he had to link three flex cuffs together in order to bring his hands together.  Apparently, he took offense to laying in his bedmate’s blood, but Kestrel didn’t speak Jawa, so he wasn’t sure what he was blabbering about.

The sixth room was the communal bathroom, a hole in the ground with shit all over the floor where they’d missed as they straddled and crouched, then been too disgusting to clean up.  One of the operators dropped two grenades down the hole just in case.

They pushed and prodded their captives into the main room and kicked their knees out from under them.  The team medic came over to Kestrel and informed him that he was in charge.  Wraith was the man who’d been shot entering the last set of rooms.  The round had punched through his face, severed his spine and then ricocheted off of his helmet into the back of his head.

Kestrel cursed loudly and checked his watch.  It had been nineteen minutes since they’d entered the compound.  He keyed his mike and said, “Coach, our quarterback is down.  Field of play is clear.  The entire defensive line is secured.”

His radio cackled the response, “Acknowledged.”

“Alright, let’s get everything we can,” he said out loud to the group.  Into his headset he said, “Skyscraper, Kestrel.  How does it look out there?”

“Clear for now.  There is a goatherd about two thousand meters from your location, moving North.”

“Roger.  Keep up the good work.”

They left one man to guard the prisoners and the other nine searched the complex.  Amazingly, there were zero computers, cell phones, disks or thumb drives.  They did find about forty large handwritten ledgers which Kestrel assumed were important and stacked them up to take with them.  Other than that, there was nothing else beside fifty-six dead terrorists, five handcuffed bad guys and Wraith’s body.

“Hey K, this guy ain’t gonna be able to make that hike back with us,” one of the men said pointing at the fat man that Kestrel had handcuffed.

“Dave, go ask him if he can walk,” Kestrel told the team’s interpreter.

A few minutes later, he came back and said, “The fat guy says ‘You fuck goats’ and that he’s not walking anywhere.  Apparently, ‘Masters’ do not perform any acts of labor.”

Kestrel stormed over to the man and placed the barrel of his pistol against his head.  “Ask him again if he is willing to walk out of here Dave.”

A few seconds longer than Kestrel thought was necessary of back and forth between the two resulted in the interpreter saying, “Nope, he isn’t coming.  He said that he knows about the Geneva Convention and that we have to take care of him now that he’s a prisoner.  He demanded a bottle of water.”

Kestrel jerked the trigger and the man’s brains splattered across one of the other terrorists.  “Tell the rest of them that either they walk or they die.”

Dave relayed this and was answered quickly by the four remaining men.  “They say ok, they’re walking.”

“Good,” he replied.  “Alright people, we need to rig this place to blow, we’re leaving in ten minutes,” he said into his mike.

In response, his earphones buzzed, “Kestrel, the referees are scoring the game, don’t get a penalty.  Given the difficulty of the second half, it was acceptable to get rid of the Center, but we need the rest of Guards and Tackles to stay in the game.”

“Roger Coach,” he answered.  He hated these stupid football references, but you never knew who was listening and this was supposed to remain a secret op.  Recent past had shown that those sneaky Chinese were able to break even the most advanced communications signals that we had.

They slid Wraith’s body into a bag and carried him with them as they forced their prisoners out of the cave.  The sun was beginning to peek over the horizon, so they’d actually busted their timetable by a few minutes.  They were 1,500 meters away from the complex when Skyscraper and his team rejoined Kestrel’s assault element.  After shaking hands, Kestrel ordered his demo man to blow the C4 they’d placed everywhere inside.

He released the safety and pushed the detonate button on the key fob-sized transmitter.  It sent a message to the receiver, which was sitting in the entrance to the cave where it could receive a clear signal and relay back inside to the charges placed throughout the complex.  That initiated a series of explosions deep within the mountain.  Several seconds later they saw the exhaust flame of twin missiles fired from the Reaper drone overhead, followed by an even louder explosion as the top of the mountain was leveled and created an avalanche into the opposite valley.

“Let’s go back to base.  We’ve got beers to drink, Wraith to eulogize and terrorists to fuck up and interrogate.  Good job everybody,” Kestrel said as he turned towards their exfil point, roughly four miles away… as the crow flies.

FOURTEEN

04 September, 0923 hrs local

Shelbyville Municipal Airport

Shelbyville, Indiana

Grayson Donnelly and Bill Downs pulled up to the parking lot of the small municipal airport’s terminal.  They had to leave their men about a mile back, the damn Brits wouldn’t let the armed “vigilante” force near their headquarters.  While the two of them didn’t like it, they were resigned to it.  This was their fourth meeting with the British commander since their Army had moved in a little over three months ago. 

There still wasn’t any power, so Grayson had been told that in May, President Holmes made the announcement that the Indianapolis area would be quarantined and the Brits and Canadians were responsible for enforcing the quarantine.  Apparently, he’d relented to international pressure and allowed forces from outside the U.S. to operate on American soil.  There were even rumors that there were German troops on the East Coast, but those weren’t confirmed.

The two communities of Three Pillars Estates and Pecan Valley Village had joined forces against the zombie threat sometime around the same time as the decision was made to abandon the city.  Since they were inside the quarantine zone, they weren’t allowed to leave.  Everyone knew by now that direct contact with broken skin was a 100% infection rate, but no one knew how else the virus was transmitted so they weren’t taking any risks and those unlucky enough to be inside the quarantine zone were stuck.

The crop system that Jamie had helped create was nearing harvest and everyone was looking forward to fresh food instead of whatever canned food they could scavenge and the boxed meals the Brits had been dropping in for months now.  Even though their lives were hard, the men and women of the two communities were surviving and hoped one day to be authorized to leave the quarantined area.

Out of necessity, Grayson had teamed up with the strike force from Pecan Valley and they conducted regular sweeps into the city to kill as many zombies as they could.  It helped keep the areas immediately around the communities more free of the menace so the families could maintain some semblance of pre-outbreak life, such as taking walks and allowing the children to visit the playground. 

The system that Carrie Downs developed to withdraw a minimal distance and engage the zombies until they got too close and then repeat the move over and over worked brilliantly.  The zombies they had in Indianapolis were just your run of the mill shamblers who were pretty stupid, they didn’t have the advanced zombies, the ones who’d been in the primary infection wave, like D.C. did. 

When he’d first learned of the different types from Major General Clarke, the British commander of the quarantine zone, he’d been shocked.  He’d dealt with hundreds, maybe thousands of zombies by that time, but this was something new entirely.  The general told them that was why he was there.  The U.S. military was on the ropes because of these “super zombies,” they were rebounding he’d assured them, but they needed help and all of their forces were committed to the DelMarVa area.

The tide was turning back east because of some new type of weapon that the forces were using to incapacitate the zombies and then they would wipe up the remnants, but the general was unwilling to share that intelligence with the men from Indianapolis.  He did, however, provide them with updates on a monthly basis and food and ammo to sustain themselves, but until the D.C. mess was straightened out, the Brits were on orders only to quarantine the city and kill anyone or anything trying to escape.

As Grayson and Bill walked towards the entrance, they were handed a surgical mask and gloves.  Before they could put those on, they were each patted down by a British corporal wearing a full HAZMAT suit to ensure that they didn’t have any weapons.  Next, they went into a little tent next to the entryway and sat on camp stools as they were bathed in UV light for five minutes.  Finally, they put on their masks and gloves and were allowed to go inside the building for their monthly meeting.

Once inside, they saw two other men and two women who had been similarly disinfected already seated around a table.  Grayson waived to the group while Bill made conversation.  That they knew of, these six people represented the last known pockets of human occupation within the quarantined city of Indianapolis.  The other four communities had similar stories to theirs, but were too far apart to be mutually supportive like Grayson and Bill’s communities had been able to become.

“Major General Sir Ian Clarke, Commander of His Majesty’s Prince of Wales’ Division, please stand,” the Colour Sergeant manning the interior door said.

“We know who the hell he is already.  Damned Brits,” one of the men said as they all stood.

“Right then.  So you know who I am.  Good to know, that,” the general said as he walked in.  “Please, take your seats.”

“No disrespect sir, just sayin’ we don’t have to be so formal all the time,” the same man replied.

“Actually, I do.  It reminds you that I was placed in command of the quarantine of this city by your president.  Once we rid the area of these dreadful creatures and you are free to go, then we may possibly dispense with the formalities.

“So, now that we have that nasty bit of administration out of the way, let’s get down to business.  Does anyone need anything from me right now?”

“Yeah, we need to know when we’re gonna be allowed to leave the city,” Grayson said.  “We’ve been patient, but now that we know the rest of the States are safe and that it wasn’t a nationwide outbreak, we’re stuck in an area infested with zombies and we’d like to get out of here.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I please remind you that Indianapolis is currently a biological nightmare.  Even discounting the zombies, which obviously we cannot, the sheer amount of dead
things
lying around is enough to leave this city quarantined for three or four years during some type of cleanup.”  He held up his hands against the protests and continued, “I’m not advocating that approach for your people, but face it, you’ve killed a lot of these things and so have we.  They’ve been sitting out all summer long.  This place constantly smells of death and disease.  Even once we get the clearance to allow you to leave, or at least moved behind my line of troops for further observation, we’re going to have to burn millions of bodies and probably billions of dollars worth of structures and textiles.  There’s no telling the final cost to your nation.

“Your concerns are noted, I assure you,” the general remarked.  “However, until President Holmes allows for your release, you must remain in the city.  The United Kingdom has also provided our top scientists to assist your nation’s scientists to determine the status of this disease.  Until the proper clearances are developed and granted, however, I simply cannot allow you to leave.”

“What about pregnant women?” asked Chante, the woman from the southeast side’s Fourth Street Commons.  “We’ve got three women who are set to give birth in the next month or so.”  Grayson nodded his assent, he was especially interested in this as well since Jamie was about four months along with their child.

“The World Health Organization has provided us with a team of twenty doctors.  I will have my staff determine if any of them are obstetricians.  If that is the case we will send them to you when you call for assistance on the radios we’ve provided for you.  You will need to be prepared to deliver the babies yourself though since your communities are so far spread.”

As unstructured meetings tended to do, it went back and forth over several interrelated areas, but ultimately it was centered on two main topics: Zombies and the various requirements of the communities.  They needed more medical supplies and ammo, they always needed ammo.  Bill Downs’ initial assertion to Grayson that they had enough ammunition was grossly underestimated.  He’d based that assessment on years of fighting human beings in Vietnam, not against zombies, who could absorb literally a hundred rounds if you didn’t hit them in the brain.  Marksmanship, especially early on was not nearly what it needed to be, but those poor marksmen who were foolish enough to venture beyond neighborhood perimeters were long gone.