Medora Wars (21 page)

Raff ducked as he waited for the bombs to go off, but then got back up after only hearing missiles firing off from the ships. The bombs bobbed up and down, swaying with the ocean tides.

Looking across the way with his binoculars, the Chinese continued to stand motionless as one of the Apache choppers made it past several airstrikes, and was now flying above their ships. It dropped one bomb into the water in between two of their destroyers and flew deeper amongst their other ships, where it dropped its last bomb. It then flew toward the coastline, unscathed from the U.S. missile attacks.

The other cargo chopper was finally hit after delivering all four of its bombs to the water and crashed down into a frigate ship, blasting through its top deck into the lower floors below, bringing down a large control tower. The other cargo ship had also dropped its last bomb and was attempting to pull away from the navy when a machine gunner caught its tail, causing it to spin in rapid circles, and crash down into the water.

Raff looked up, searching for the other Apaches that hadn’t been hit, wondering and cursing, when he heard a large eruption from the water below the ship. Peeking over the rail, he saw that the large metallic bomb in the water wasn’t a bomb at all. It had opened an outer shutter with several streams of liquid shooting into the air, quickly vaporizing into a fine mist.

“What…?” He got to his feet and grabbed his radio. “Admiral, what in the hell is going on?”

“I’m not quite sure, but I suggest,” he started coughing, “go and grab a gas mask now. All those bombs are making huge, huge clouds of gas that are coming up over my ship here.”

“Shit.” He dropped his radio. “Everybody, put on gasmasks!” Crewmen were running back and forth past him. One young girl began coughing uncontrollably and stumbled onto her hands and knees in front of him. “Hey, hey, come on.” Kneeling, he grabbed the girl by the arm, and helped her to her feet. “Where are the masks?” he yelled at her as another man fell down in front of him.

The girl lifted her arm and pointed at the floor, toward a slender compartment door that ran the length of a wall.

Covering his mouth with his hat, he inched toward the floorboard, and collapsed by the latch. Opening it, he found several rows of gasmasks and took them out, sprawling them across the deck as other crewman put them on. Quickly, he stuck his face into one of the masks, and pulled the straps around the back of his head. The girl next to him had fallen down, clutching a mask in her hands without moving. Reaching down, he pushed the mask to her face and pulled the straps around her head.

He stood up to the chaos that had erupted on the deck. Men and woman were running and screaming as a fog poured out onto the waters, in between the ships. It built upward as each of the bombs continued to gush out constant streams of the liquid vapor. Squinting his eyes, he could see the Chinese crews in the same frenzy as the same clouds enveloped them, with men falling from their ships. As he watched the same turmoil of men and woman clawing at their eyes and gasping on their ships, two words came into his mind:
set up.

He felt someone grabbing at his leg as the fog now rose up and over the edges of the ship’s deck. Looking down, the girl was attempting to get to her feet. Raff leaned in and propped her up against him, moving her back toward the door of the central command. He stopped when she thumped the side of her head into his shoulder and dug her nails into his back.

“Hey, hey, come on. Let’s get inside out of this shit,” he shouted, his voice echoing back to his ears from the mask over his face.

She then wrapped her arms around him in a bear hug and started to knock the front of her mask into the side of the chest.

“Hey, get off me!” he yelled, trying to free himself from her grasp. Grabbing her tightly gripped fingers from his side, he threw her down to the ground, and looked back at her.

Her mask had slid up to her forehead, exposing the bottom half of her face, which had erupted with blackened boils. A grayish liquid slowly oozed out of her mouth, carrying several of her loose teeth as it drip down her chin onto her uniform. She tried yelling out but only managed to stick out a bright red tongue that hung loosely at the corner of her mouth. Suddenly, her incisors chomped down quickly, nipping off the tip of her tongue as she howled out in pain.

Raff knowingly and unmistakably kicked her in the chest with his heel, and stood over her as she writhed in pain, clutching at his knees. Quickly, he brought his boot down squarely on her face, making her small frame jolt beneath him. He continued to pummel her head until he heard the back of her skull crunch against the deck and knew that it was safe to stop. Without looking back down at her, he turned quickly, knowing that she was only the first.

As he turned, someone fell into him, with another body collapsing from behind. Raff fell backward, tripping over the girl below him, and fell hard onto his back. Before he could see who was on top of him, he felt someone’s teeth sink deep into his Achilles tendon.

The sunlight around him dimmed as the fog came up, filling the ship deck with its airborne poison. He kicked and screamed as more crewmen piled on top of him, their long faces looking down, hysteric and craving.

Chapter Eighteen: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

With his eyes shut, Dave heard the humming from the tank intensify. His back vibrated against the wheel treads, which shook his body until the pulse released, and the humming stopped. He opened his eyes just as a wall of the infected collapsed at his feet from the EMP pulse. The mass of men, women, and children all fell simultaneously, falling over each other, and dropping like lumber. The hill leading up out of the crater was littered with motionless bodies that were within the radius of the pulse. He felt like he had just been dropped in the middle of a war on the moon.

“Michaels?” Dave yelled out, crawling to his knees, and clearing scattered limbs out of his path. “Where are you?”

“Up here.” He heard her yell from above and saw her standing on the tank treads with her EMP-57 rifle pointed in the air. “You can always just crawl on top of the tanks, man.” She scanned the crater. “Is Wang dead?”

“I don’t know, there are so many bodies…” Dave looked around the dead, pushing bodies away with his boot.

“Full forward out of this fucking crater!” Douglas yelled into their headsets. “Forward ground team! Who’s alive?”

Yen finally spoke up from the other side of the tank, “The last time I saw Wang he had a friend gnawing on his neck, the dude’s dead. I see Tripps and Michaels and….” He came around the front of the tank. “Oh, here’s Jacobs. Get up man!” Yen found Jacobs with his hands covering his ears, ducked under the front of the tank. “Hey! We’re moving out, get the fuck up!” He reached under and grabbed his arm, yanking him out from underneath.

“Let go!” Jacobs came crawling out as Michaels and Dave met them at the front of the tank. “A little last minute with that pulse, huh? Holy shit.” Jacobs got to his feet and looked at Dave. “Are we getting out of this hell hole of a ditch?”

“Forward team, start climbing!” Douglas yelled. “Next airstrike is coming up ahead of us in three minutes.”

“Move out!” Michaels yelled, nudging Dave with the butt of her rifle. She took off running up hill with her knees kicking up as she negotiated her way through the body parts. The rest of the forward team followed over the hundreds of strewn bodies.

Dave finally understood why they made them run through so many car tires during their training. Slipping on loose intestines and exposed muscle, he breathed deep as he followed the crew up the hill. The shock tanks from behind revved up their engines and jolted forward. The entire hill had become a muddy slush of human remains in front of them as they hiked.

In the middle shock tank, Stark had crammed himself into a back corner where he continually worked and honed calculations. He unknowingly muttered to himself about magnetic field vectors and the resistance of the average power line in Mexico, a detail of which he had absolutely no idea. The two soldiers manning the tank periodically looked back at him as they were adjusting their controls and following the convoy out of the crater.

This is idiotic
, he thought.
Complete science fiction
. He didn’t quite understand how he found himself stuffed into a gigantic shock tank heading into a city with twenty million of the infected dead slapping around outside, when he was in his cozy lab only twelve hours ago.
It’s Mayberry and Rambert turning more and more desperate, they have no clue what they’re doing any more.
He looked down at his satellite phone and dialed a number.

Rambert picked up. “Stark, are you at the power plant yet?”

“What?” he scoffed. “We just barely reached the city limits, and we are completely surrounded by the infected. It’s like we’re tunneling into earth, but instead of dirt, it’s human bodies. This is going to take forever. And I just…”

“What?”

“What the in hell are we even doing?” Stark asked.

“What do you mean?” Rambert let out a long breath.

“This idea is just so… I don’t know, it’s crazy, and the chances of it working are essentially zero.” Stark quieted down after he noticed the two drivers of the tank looking back at him.

“And you’re telling me this now?” Rambert said.

“Oh no, Larry, don’t give me this shit. I never told you this was going to work. You’re the one who jumped the gun on this whole thing. You just sent me down here without thinking twice about it. I’ve been saying we just need to detonate the nukes this whole time.”

“The conversation that you’re trying to have, you know the one where you’re telling me that this is crazy and we shouldn’t do it, that conversation can’t happen anymore because you’re already in one of those tanks, and you’re leading a squad into the most infested city on the planet. All I want to hear from you is that it either worked or that it didn’t. Do you understand that?”

“Fine, yes, whatever. I just hope you’re not relying on my dumb luck like last time.”

Rambert paused for a moment. “Do you love your country?”

“Larry, what the hell?” Stark said.

“Do you love this country?” Rambert repeated.

“Don’t give this cheesy bullshit right now.”

“I need to hear it,” Rambert said without humor.

“I’m in this metal coffin going straight into the heart of the army of the dead, aren’t I?”

Rambert sighed. “I’ve got to go. I have two entire naval fleets in Venezuela that just went into radio silence.”

“The hell? That’s like thousands of people.”

“As far as you know, the virus has never been airborne, right?”

“What? No, it’s only transmitted through blood or saliva.”

“Beckfield didn’t say anything to you about the virus being made airborne?”

“No. What is going on?”

“Not sure yet, just call me with updates.” Rambert hung up.

Before Stark could think about Venezuela, he felt the tank bounce up and down, and looked at the monitor that was connected to an outside camera. He saw fields of dead bodies leading up the hill out of the crater.
Well, at least the pulses are still working
, he thought.
God help us if the virus stops responding to it.

Outside, the forward ground team had made it up to the crater ridge that led toward the city. Dave saw a new wall of the horde that was at the edge of the previous tank pulse radius. The horde stumbled over those that had fallen in front of them. The tanks rolled up from behind the forward ground team, rupturing torsos, and crushing the heads of the fallen infected.

“Convoy come in, next airstrike coming in at our twelve, this time we’re going
around
the fucking infected crater trap,” Douglas erupted into everyone’s earpieces. Five seconds later, a loud crack with a delayed explosion shot up into the air a hundred yards in front of them, from the second airstrike. The same cloud of bodies and fire billowed into the air just as before. A fighter jet flew overhead and shot off into the dawn sky as the ground team continued forward at a jogging pace, breathing heavy through their gas masks.

The light from the explosion showed that the entire desert in front of them had become a muddy field of thousands of bodies. Slowly, the stench crept into their masks, but Dave was able to resist the urge to gag. His boots became heavier with a black sludge that he constantly rubbed off on the bodies as he waded through. All of his gear felt heavy from the fog of humidity that had settled around them.

Approaching the next airstrike crater, there were no longer whole bodies, but shredded muscle and open thoracic cavities mixed with blasted glass and torn clothing fabrics. “Convoy, we’re going due south of the crater,” Douglas said, prompting the forward ground team to bunch over on the left side of the crater ridge. Dave saw the same blast zone of billowing smoke as with the previous airstrike. The convoy inched around the edge of the crater, with the Bunny trailer bobbing up and down over the desert floor that had become carpeted with bodies.

“Tripps,” Michaels flickered into his radio, “did you ever think you’d ever be doing anything like this in your life?”

“I feel like we’ve seen so much shit already that jogging through a field of thousands of infected bodies hasn’t really fazed me,” Dave said.

“We’re not coming back out of this city,” she said flatly.

“I know.”

She didn’t respond, but stepped in front of him, hopping over an obese man whose legs had been gnawed off —only two femur bones stuck out from his hips.

Yen and Jacobs moved ahead of Dave, keeping their EMP-57s drawn and flashlights pointed ahead, continually scanning back and forth.

The convoy of five tanks wrapped around the blast crater with the flank and rear ground crews jogging along in silence, ignoring the blood sloshing in their boots.

Beyond the second crater they saw the next wave of the horde that was outside of the previous airstrike.

Once again, Douglas got on the radio preparing the convoy for an airstrike; the bombs smashed through the sky like lightening, clearing a new path for the convoy to proceed. For the next hour the ground teams sweated in their uniforms, ached from the weight of their gear, and suffocated beneath their masks.

Dave began to reduce human beings only to their mechanical parts: shoulder blades hold together the rotator cuffs, the stomach is actually underneath the sternum not below it, the liver is on the right side and the inside of someone’s abdominal cavity—it suddenly becomes bright green if you step on it too much. He learned that blood could take on a variety of shades from deep black to a pastel red depending on what it mixes with and where it dries. He watched Michaels with her head down, looking at the bodies beneath her, and wondered what she was thinking.

Another airstrike and another crater full of body parts and fire. The convoy continued into the city limits without becoming overwhelmed by a horde or having to use another pulse from a shock tank.

Dave saw Yen and Jacobs become bored as they deliberately stomped onto organs or kicked away severed heads like soccer balls.

“Would you assholes stop that shit?” Michaels annoyingly yelled over at them. Ignoring her, they continued kicking away at body parts as they jogged along. “Idiots,” she muttered, too exhausted to berate them more.

The convoy had finally made it past the desert outside the city and found what looked like the beginning of a city road. They swung along another crater ridge and bounced up and down on the scores of bodies that covered what was once a paved road.

“There are no roads in the city of the dead,” Michaels said solemnly, which went ignored by the front team. They jogged past what was once a gas station but had since been ripped apart in an explosion leaving the carport roof blasted upward, swaying precariously in the wind.

Dave saw several dilapidated apartment buildings a few blocks away that spilled over with bodies pumping out of every window and falling from the roofs.

“Convoy, I have some bad news. We will no longer be able to rely on the airstrikes to tunnel our way through into the city. If we start bombing around the buildings we’ll create too much rubble that will get in our way. We can’t have buildings suddenly collapsing on us either. After the next airstrike, it’s just the tanks, and us. Be ready, we can do this.” Douglas’ voice lost its typical hard-ass tone. “Remember, we must keep a two minute delay between tank pulses, or we risk getting swarmed. We cannot wait for all the tanks to recharge at once. Ground team, our success depends on you keeping the horde away inside each two minute interval…good luck.”

“Douglas is losing it. He sounds like a dad talking to his kids,” Michaels said, looking over her shoulder down an alleyway.

The last airstrike erupted down the street, throwing up several streetlights beyond the convoy, and scattering bodies into the air, smashing them into buildings. “Here we go, guys,” Dave said, checking and rechecking the battery life on his rifle.

“Shit, we need more front people. There’s only four of us here,” Yen complained, and then quickly pointed his rifle to the right after something caught his eye. “Those airstrikes aren’t doing shit this deep in. We’ve got movement by that water tower.” He clicked on his radio to Douglas. “Sir, we’re going to need a tank pulse right now. We’ve got enemy sighted at our three o’clock. I think we’re starting to get encircled now that we’re getting into the city.”

“Roger that, prepare for pulse,” Douglas responded, after which the tank behind them hummed into life, and released a pulse.

The front team looked toward the water tower as all of the infected fell to the ground.

“Targets destroyed,” Yen shot back to Douglas.

“We’re going to be picking up the pace,” Douglas said to the convoy as the tanks moved faster behind the front team. The convoy approached the blast zone of the last airstrike, which had left behind cracked open buses, and flipped cars. All the vehicles were bathed in the human remains; dripping with tissue and charred from the airstrike. Dave felt heat coming off the cinderblock buildings that weren’t destroyed from the bombing.

“Get through the rubble fast and start firing at will,” Douglas said.

The front team ran up through the concrete and glass debris of the street, stepping over fallen street lamps, and checking down alleys. There were stragglers of the infected that began to seep in, falling from buildings, and stumbling down the streets that were now suddenly vacant. Dave saw a stream of them filing in through an alley on his left and shot his EMP-57 in their direction. They dropped to the ground.