Medora Wars (18 page)

“Everybody listen up!” Douglas yelled out as dozens of squad members assembled around the middle shock tank. “The Air Force is almost done with their initial airstrikes on the city. As soon as we get the word, we are going to enter directly through the gates above us with five shock tanks. Two other SIO units will join us as we infiltrate the city. Alpha team members will be driving the tanks and charging the EMP emitters. All Beta team members will be on the ground alongside the front and flanks of the each tank corresponding to your specific squad. Beta teams must assume V formation around each tank to make sure their tank does not get compromised.

“As you have all observed, the infected are amassing into the several millions into a city that normally has a population of about one million. All of the infection from Mexico City has swept up north and has accumulated into Juárez. This is our final stand before the infection breaches the United States. We have to stop the infected right here, right now. We will be penetrating deep into the city limits, not just on the periphery. Now before any of you assholes starts wondering how we’re going to do that, I’m going to explain, so just shut the hell up before you even start.

“We will be doing coordinated EMP shock tank bursts as we advance into the city. Because each tank takes about eight minutes to charge, we will be staggering the bursts so that we have a pulse ready to go at every moment that we need it. We will not be stopping. Period. Does everyone get that?”

“Yes, sir!” the squads yelled out.

“Does everyone understand that no shock tank will be stopping at all?”

“Yes, sir!”

“There is no stopping. Repeat it back to me!”

“There is no stopping, sir!”

“The Air Force will be tracking our position and will be doing pinpoint bombings ahead of us, clearing a reasonable path for the tanks. Our target is twenty one miles inside of the city at a power plant.”

The squad broke out in a commotion. “Twenty one fucking miles?” Wang yelled out from the squad.

Jacobs grabbed his shoulder and swung him around. “Would you shut the hell up when the Captain is giving us orders?”

“It’s going to be like burrowing into the core of the Earth but through human bodies! Twenty one miles? How in the hell are we supposed to do that?” Wang took his helmet off and threw it on the ground. “We’re all fucking dead!”

“Wang!” Douglas leapt from the tank and crunched his boots onto small glass shards on the concrete. He walked straight up to Wang and put his fist directly into the middle of his nose, causing blood to gush forward. “I want you to walk out of here, you stupid piece of shit,” Douglas said.

“Sir…” Wang perched his face forward, gathering the flowing blood in between his two gloved hands. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Are you done, or are you going home?”

“I’m…” Wang looked down at the spots of blood that collected on the concrete in between his feet. “I’m done, sir.”

“We survived in Mexico City, and we will survive this. They don’t send Dr. Reginald Stark into a doomed mission,” Douglas said.

Dave looked up at Douglas, and then back at Michaels, who only responded with a confused smile. Every head of the squad looked up as the lower hatch on the shocker tank squeaked open and a single man pulled himself out. Dave was surprised at his stature; Dr. Stark was a much larger man than what he had seen on TV, with a barrel chest and wide shoulders. As Stark hoisted himself up, Dave finally saw a small gut popping over the belt of baggy Army fatigues.

Stark stood on the tank and took off his hat. “Thank you, Captain Douglas.” Stark looked out and saw the dozens of men and women that had assembled around the tank. Every eye was on him, including Douglas, a gigantic man whose expression was that of a child looking to his parent.

Stark continued. “I, I would like to impress onto you fine men and women the importance of our mission at hand. I understand from President Rambert himself that you are the best of the best, and that you have had world-class training in EMP weapons and with tactical strategy against the infected. I bring my congratulations and heartfelt gratitude from the President himself for the heroic effort and results from when many of you were in Mexico City.

“With regards to our task today, we are the first attack on the horde that lies just a few hundred feet away from us. We are only hours away from the horde breaching the United States borders. Our attack will be very precise and specific. Our destination: the city’s largest power plant, whose location is now set in all of your positioning devices. As Captain Douglas has stated, we will go as a convoy of shocker tanks. You may have noticed that attached to one of our shocker tanks is a large trailer that looks like some sort of gigantic double-A battery.” He paused to see how his joke landed and continued when he was met by total silence. “This trailer is our payload, and it is imperative that we get it to the power station. Your mission, the whole point that we are going in first, is to deliver that payload to that power station. My role will come once we get to the facility. Now, Captain Douglas,” he said turning to him, “will continue with the details, and we will be underway within the next ten minutes.”

Douglas turned to the squad. “The assault will be with five shock tanks rolling in a single file line. The battery-shaped trailer that Dr. Stark has referred to will have the code name ‘Bunny.’ The Bunny will be attached to the middle tank, being protected by two tanks in the front, and two tanks from behind. As we begin our advance, each tank will be on scheduled EMP bursts. Each burst from each individual tank will have sufficient radius to cover the entire convoy. As I mentioned before, each tank takes eight minutes to charge a pulse. At the moment we deploy, every tank will be charged, and ready to go. If we get swarmed all at once and fire all charges in immediate succession, then we would be shit out of luck for another eight minutes while all the tanks charge, making us sitting ducks if another wave of the horde comes against us.

“For this reason we will not, unless as an absolute last resort, be firing all pulses in rapid succession. Instead, one tank will fire, and we will wait no less than two minutes until the next tank fires. It is because of this two-minute lapse of EMP coverage that we have a ground crew of thirty men and women armed with EMP rifles. They will be providing front, flank, and rear coverage in between the tank bursts. If we can maintain the two minute gap in between shock tank bursts, we will always only be two minutes away from another pulse that will make all of the infected drop dead within a fifty yard radius.

“Now keep in mind that we will have constant but periodic airstrikes clearing a path for us as we penetrate the horde. In between the airstrikes and the shock tanks, the ground crew will probably not have to lift a fucking finger. Am I making sense?” he yelled out.

“Sir, yes, sir,” the squad chanted in unison.

“Then let’s start making our ground team. Raise your hands if you want to be the first ones to slice these motherfuckers in half! Don’t make me start making assignments.”

Dave turned and looked at Michaels, who was already ready for him with a smile.

She grabbed his hand and raised it above his head while raising her other arm up. “Right here, Captain!” she yelled.

“Tripps and Michaels! Who else? We need twenty eight more.” One by one, squad members slowly raised their hands, and then gained momentum with every hand in the crowd going up. Douglas picked out the rest by pointing and yelling, assigning them into one front team, two flanks to span the length of the five tanks, and one to follow from behind.

“I need to make absolutely sure that everyone understands this plan. Do any of you have questions?” Douglas asked.

“Sir, no sir.”

“Then let’s fucking roll!” Douglas looked at Stark and patted him on the shoulder. “Sir, we will have you in the middle tank, carrying the Bunny. You will not be exiting the tank until we are at the power plant. Do you understand?”

“Uh, yes, yes, that will be perfectly fine.” Stark put his camouflage hat on with an unintentional slant. “I’ll get right in. Ready to go when you are.” He turned from the squad and looked out the opposite direction, past the double chain-linked fence, and into Juárez. The sun laid low in the sky near the west, casting shadows from the downtown buildings over the city. There were no traffic lights flashing or cars inching through rush hour traffic. The city lay dim and rotting from within, ceased of all normal human activity, and replaced by the constant squirming of millions of the infected pushing into homes and spilling over freeway overpasses. They had hollowed out grocery stores and bored into parks, leaving mounds of bodies that had been torn apart too quickly for the virus to reanimate. Stark saw there was a leading edge of the infected horde as they began to take notice of the army that had amassed against them in El Paso.
Let’s see if this works
, he thought.

Dave studied Stark’s profile from below and wondered if it was either strategic planning of sheer panic that was running through his head.
It has to be one of the two
, he thought. He watched as the legendary man lowered himself down into the tank and closed the hatch. Suddenly, all five of the shock tanks burst into life and rocked back and forth as they assembled into a single line formation. Douglas’ voice flickered into Dave’s headset, shouting at the ground team to take their positions. Dave checked his rifle and moved toward the front of the tank line, with Michaels running up at his side.

Michaels hit him on the shoulder. “Of course he assigns me and you right to the front.”

“I saw that shit coming,” Dave said. They ran up a slanted aqueduct and through a heavily weeded area that got trampled by the tanks. The rest of the front team, Wang, Jacobs, and Yen joined them from the behind. They ran along the length of the shocker tank convoy as it mobilized and drove through a large open gate into the outer limits of Ciudad Juárez.

“You ready to die with these assholes?” Michaels yelled out for the three of them to hear.

Yen looked at her and very carefully replied, “We’re not going to die. We’ve got Dr. Stark riding with us. They wouldn’t send a national treasure into a suicide mission.”

“Oh, no, we’re dying all right,” Wang yelled while tripping on a stone. “And I can’t believe I’m dying with you idiots.”

“Shut up, Wang,” Michaels said.

“Oh yeah,” Wang said breathing heavy, “you can’t die yet till you get with your boy Tripps over there.”

Michaels looked over at Dave. “No, Tripps will be long dead before that could ever happen.”

Dave gave her an awkward smirk and looked ahead as the sunset flashed in between the downtown skyline. They continued running along the tank line until the convoy stopped in single file with their large, clam-shaped EMP arrays humming loudly. The cylindrical Bunny trailer was positioned in the middle of the five with ten squad members flanking each of its sides. The forward team finally made it to the front tank and positioned in a front facing V shape, with Wang taking the very front spot.

Douglas’ voice blared into the ears of the entire squad team. “Ground teams, finish assembling into your positions. Each tank team is prepping their generators, which are now fully charged for pulses. We will begin our assault in six minutes after an airstrike approximately two thousand feet at our twelve o’clock. As soon as you see the bomb flash, that’s when we move. Godspeed everyone.”

Dave looked ahead, over the shoulder of Wang, and could make out faint movement in the distance across the flat desert of Mexico. He saw the edge of the large crowd that meandered toward them.
The army of our living dead
, he thought. They stumbled and pushed toward the convoy at a constant pace, like a hurricane approaching the land with no means of stopping it.
We’re just the sandbags
, he thought.
Taking the brunt of the waves only to be swallowed up after
.

The horde inched closer, and Dave made out men in white shirts and ties, a mechanic in a one piece jumpsuit, women in shredded dresses, and children crawling between the thousands of rotting legs. There was no one person whose body was entirely whole; most had several missing limbs; some with most of their faces gone or their bellies eviscerated. Others crawled on their hands and knees, while at the same time an entire ceiling of bodies rode on the heads of the horde, until they stumbled off the edge to be absorbed once again into the mass.

Dave dropped a pair of goggles over his eyes, and was going to double check his rifle, but was paralyzed by the overwhelming stench of rotting bodies. The smell moved over them like a weather front, absorbing them in a suffocating fog.

Jacobs bent over and vomited, while Yen, and Wang frantically fitted their faces into the small gas masks from their packs.

“Gas masks, now!” Douglas yelled out.

Dave held his breath and fumbled through his pack, until Michaels came over and took it off the end of the bag, where Dave had forgotten that he tied the mask. He dropped his face into the mask and brought the rubber straps over the back of his head.

“Thanks,” he said through the muffled muzzle of the mask.

“Me and you are sticking together, okay?” Michaels said.

“Yeah, I’ll have your six.”

“No, no, if we get swarmed, clip your tether to my belt so we don’t get separated. We stand a better chance if we’re defending together.”