Origins of the Outbreak (21 page)

One thing wa
s
certain
,
he couldn't stay in the truck with the zombie. He dove over the side and hit the gravel roughly with his shoulder. He regained his feet, but his shoulder hung limp and useless. His mind dimly told him that he'd dislocated it when he fell.

The creature stumbled over the side as well.
It landed in a heap of arms and legs before it unfolded itself and began to shamble towards him again.

Kenny was out of options.
He cast about until he found a softball-sized rock. It felt extremely heavy in his hand as he charged forward and smashed it into the creature's temple. The impact sent waves of pain through his injured shoulder.

The zombie stumbled and fell to its knees, then began to get up again.
“No you don't, you disgusting fucker!” he shouted and brought the rock down into the back of its head.

It pitched forward onto its chest and struggled to get up.
  Kenny fell to his knees and bashed the thing's head into a pulp. Blood and brain matter sprayed against his new hunting vest. He continued hitting the creature's head until the skull collapsed completely.

“Fuck you,” he mumbled and dropped the rock.
He sat back onto his feet and cried. Why had God allowed this to happen?

When he'd cried himself out, he went back to the truck and retrieved his rifle
.  He was rewarded with a wet sucking sound as the barrel dislodged from the soft tissue. He reloaded it and then hopped into the driver's seat. He'd washed the damn truck enough.

He drove in a semi-daze back to his hide site and quickly covered the truck with the specially made camouflage netting as
good as he could with his injured shoulder. After a few adjustments, he decided that it was the best that he could do for now, so he turned towards his new home.

Kenny stumbled to the door and pulled away the netting that helped to hide it from a distance.
He pounded three times and paused before slapping his hand one final time on the metal
.
Thirty-one, the day that he and Carol had been married.

When she opened the door, she gasped at his condition.
One arm hung loosely at his side and dark red splatters covered his face and chest.
“Oh my God!
Are you okay?”

He'd realized something during his fight.
He'd been one tiny misstep from death and it caused him reevaluate what he'd long considered a truth. Turns out, he'd been lying t
o
himself
,
things weren't that bad with Carol and she was, in fact, the perfect woman for him.

He fell inside and
she pulled the hatch closed behind him. “I love you, Carol… We can't go back outside for a long time. It's all gone. This is the end.”

The Engineers
, 8:43 a.m.

Thump, thump, thump. Thump, thump, thump
.
The Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles' 25mm Bushmaster autocannons spit devastation into the zombies surrounding the base. The large rounds split the creatures in half, but they continued to crawl towards the defenders even when they were missing their legs. The fuckers just kept coming.

Lieutenant Colonel Jose Quinones keyed the handset on his radio, “Ghos
t
Six, this is Trojan Horse Six, over.”

A young man answered the radio, “
This is Ghost Six Delta. Six Actual is monitoring, over.
”

The battalion commander's driver had been answering for him all night as he fought both his track and the battalion.
The Engineer hadn't ever viewed it as a slight, he knew the deal. 2–7 Cavalry, Ghost, was one of the premier units in the United States Army and they'd been sent outside the safety of the wire to try and clear some space around the base overnight.

The battalion's
Bradleys had crushed thousands of the creatures, their huge engines propelling the tracked metal giants, but over the hours of revving forward and backwards, one-by-one the behemoths had run out of fuel, even as they tried to maneuver away. As could be expected, the vehicles had been swarmed by the undead. The Ghost battalion had been forced to button up and wait for assistance for the last fourteen hours.

The remainder of the 1st Cavalry Division's 3rd
Greywolf Brigade had been called forward from their reserve position to do what they could to relieve the trapped cavalrymen. The brigade's Bradleys fired where they could, but Ghost's vehicles were so interspersed with the creatures that it became the individual Infantrymen, armed with M4s and sniper rifles, who bore the responsibility of picking off the creatures as they clamored across the armored vehicles. More needed to be done.

That's where the 8th Engineers came in.
Quinones' job was to try and burn the fuckers off. They'd broken out a modern version of the flame throwers that had been so effective in World War II and more recently in the caves of Afghanistan. The idea was that the flames would be hot enough to destroy the creatures’ brains, which seemed to be the only method of killing them. According to the manuals, the crews inside the Bradleys should be protected from the intense heat that the flamethrowers would produce. They were out of options and this was what the brigade commander had decided to go with.

“Tell Ghost Six that we're in position.
I need him to verify that all rounds for the coax are expended and not exposed.” The Bradley also had a coaxial mounted M240C machine gun that was slaved to the main gun and pointed wherever the turret was aimed so they could fire the smaller caliber 7.62 millimeter round instead of the giant Bushmaster. The bullets for the coax fed from inside out into the open air. They had the potential to detonate or explode from the heat of the flames that his soldiers were preparing to unleash.

An older, gruff voice answered back on the radio, “
Ghost Six here. Roger, we're black on ammo across the board. Honestly, we're in deeper shit than a convicted child molester in general population. We need you to unfuck us, buddy.
”

Colonel
Quinones chuckled at his friend's euphemism.  That crusty old bastard could always be counted on to come up with something inappropriate. “Okay, Ted. My Engineers will begin flaming in about two minutes. Good luck.”

“
Thanks, Jose. We're just waiting for the fireworks. Ghos
t
Six
,
out.
”

Once the flames began, they'd probably lose all communication with the soldiers inside the vehicles as the antennas
and soft metal wiring would melt. They wouldn't have any way of knowing if they were killing the men until they could crack open the vehicles and see what was left.

He turned towards the three company commanders who stood around the hood of his Humvee.
“Do it,” he ordered. The two men and one woman ran back towards their various company command posts. He'd brought them to his location to ensure that they knew the importance of what they were being asked to do. There were thirty Bradleysand fourtee
n
Abram
s
tanks out there – more than 200 soldiers. It was up to the Engineers to try and save their lives.

He walked a
round to the back of his up-armored Humvee and grasped the tire mounted on the back to pull himself up. His old joints protested, but he needed the extra height to see over the piles of bodies pressed against the fence. All along the line, soldiers stopped fighting and watched the Engineers as they clamored forward wearing heat-resistant suits. It was almost like something out of a movie.

Each soldier had ten-gallons of jellied fuel on their backs.
A blue flame spit from a propane bottle mounted under the flamethrowers barrel. This was the critical time; the finicky flamethrowers would either work brilliantly or be a huge bust. A soldier with a high-capacity fire extinguisher trailed behind each flamethrower in case there were any flare-ups or problems. The fuel wouldn't explode, but flames could potentially travel back inside the tank and kill the Engineer strapped to it as it burned.

Since flamethrowers weren't really part of the Army inventory anymore, every man and woman that carried one was a volunteer.
They'd been instructed to ensure that there was at least twenty feet between each flamethrowerand not to fire until everyone was on line
.
Quinones wa
s
paranoid that someone would start early and accidentally fire into a friendly. Once he saw that everyone was in position he shouted down to his driver who held the radio handset, “Tell them to commence firing!”

“Yes, sir,” the specialist replied and ducked back inside to make the call.

He could hear shouts and orders being yelled over the constant moans of the dead. First one, then another and finally all the flamethrowers began spitting their flames out in a wide arc towards the creatures. The flames flew forward and looked exactly like strings of lava as they fed through the barrel. The average gout of flame reached about a hundred feet and the zombies melted under the barrage.

They
stumbled around, their skin on fire as the crack and sizzle of burning flesh filled the air with greasy black smoke. The soldiers swept their liquid death back and forth in front of them to spread the destruction as wide as they could. Th
e
creatures
’
abdomens burst opened and spilled their intestines along the ground as the skin split from the heat. They continued to move about and tripped on their entrails as they hung from their bodies. The heat destroyed muscle, ligaments and tendons. Finally, the creatures began to collapse, no longer able to propel themselves forward while the flames continued to burn and char their bones.

They died by the thousands.

The jellied fuel dripped from the vehicles' armor as the creatures clinging to the sides and top were incinerated. Flames licked across the vehicles' rubber road wheels and track pads. They caught fire, melting off and adding to the poisonous clouds hanging low overhead.

“Alright, stop it.  L
et's see what we can do!” the Engineer battalion commander yelled down to his driver who relayed the command.

Infantrymen rushed forward and threw giant A-frame ladders over the fence.
The brigade's maintenance shop had hastily welded bars to the opposite side of the ladders, which would provide steps on both sides of the fence for the vehicle crewmen. Helicopter gunships swooped in low to fire into the crowd of zombies that hadn't been destroyed by the flames while the trapped cavalrymen escaped back into the safety of the perimeter.

Trojan Six watched as men rushed across the killing field and used the butts of their rifles to bang out the signal that it was safe to exit the vehicles.
He breathed a sigh of relief as men emerged from the steel and tungsten boxes and ran towards the ladders. “Holy shit, it's gonna work!” he shouted, unable to contain his excitement.

Within minutes, every vehicle had been emptied except two.
Infantrymen worked to open the hatches and then returned back to the fence without rescued crewmen.  Those crews hadn't survived the heat or the fumes and had to be abandoned. “Hurry!” he shouted as a mass of creatures stumbled their way past the smoking bones of other zombies.

One man heard him and turned to look.
He made the mistake of bringing his rifle around to fight and was swarmed by the creatures. In the morning's stillness the man's screams mingled with the reports from his rifle until he ran out of ammunition.

The ladders were successfully pulled back inside and a filthy, greasy older man wearing the flame retardant jumpsuit of a combat vehicle crewman stumbled over to
Quinones’Humvee
.
“Hey,you bastard
.
I see you're standing up there above all the shit that the rest of us have to wallow through,” Ghost Six called.

Jose sat down and then slid off the roof.
He gripped Ted's hand and the Ranger pulled him in hard for a hug, pounding him hard on the back. “Thank you, buddy. If it hadn't been for your soldiers, we would have died out there.”

They separated and Jose looked at his old friend.
“You look like hell.”

“I need about four fingers of bourbon times two.
Where's Greywolf Six?”

Quinones pointed towards the antenna farm two hundred meters to the rear.
“He's over there. I'll go over with you, let's go.”

When they arrived at the brigade command post, people were screaming orders and soldiers talked rapidly into radios.
It had been busy earlier when Jose had been in here to hatch the rescue scheme with the boss, but nothing like this.

“What's happening?” he asked the brigade operations officer.

“The zombies broke through over on the 3CR side. They just stopped reporting and the CG sent over a few helicopters to investigate. They were overrun. The base's perimeter has been breached!”

“Shit.”

“Goddamn right. Shit is an understatement.”

He turned to see Colonel Graves striding across the tent.
“Good job with the rescue, Jose. We're moving into the Comanche II neighborhood in five minutes. I need your men to be prepared to put up triple strand around the entire thing.”

He did some quick calculations.
“Sir, we only have enough concertina wire to secure about half that.”

“Do it then
.  We'll pull the residents into whatever perimeter we can establish. General Masters has ordered all units to move into the housing areas and defend them to the last man. This just got a whole lot worse, gentlemen.”

Ted and Jose looked at each other.
They were abandoning the base perimeter and would be making a last-ditch effort to defend the installation's population in the residential neighborhoods.  The tactical advantage of their long-range weapons would be negated.

Colonel Graves' voice boomed across the command post, “S-4!
Make sure all units have issued their bayonets.”