Zombie Killers: HEAT (6 page)

Chapter 247

Team building takes a lot of work, and you can’t just throw together a bunch of individuals and expect them to function smoothly. I knew we were going out again, just not where or when, so I started back to basics training, and grabbed a few more people to go with us.

When you build a team, there are a lot of things to take into consideration. The more personnel, the bigger footprint you leave. Thing is, though, you have to have enough persons to adequately distribute gear, cover watches, and most importantly, provide enough firepower to get you out of a jam. Six seemed to be the best number I had worked out over the years, easily splitable into two or three man teams, enough people to be able to carry one or two casualties, but small enough that we could move through any environment.

I sat on the porch and thought about each person we would take. Me, Brit of course. Nothing would stop her from going. Captain Lowenstein, or Shona, as I was trying to think of her. She would make a good all-around fighter, and if necessary, could command the team if something happened to us. Ziv, of course, though I was a bit worried how his attitude towards women would work with Shona. He did respect a woman who could fight, and she was all that. That left two.

Red would go if I asked him, but ever since he had been wounded two years ago, catching shrapnel in his foot, his movement had been a little slower. Post Apocalypse, medical rehab facilities were a bit limited, and he had had a bit of a rough time of it on our short scout last summer. Plus, we needed someone back here to keep an eye on things. I mentally scratched his name off the list, though I would take him if he really wanted to go. Red was a good man in a fight, and after working together for almost seven years, we knew each other’s move without question.

That left two slots open. I could bring Scott Orr as a medic; the former paratrooper had worked well with us, and his team had been hit hard by the ambush in DC. In fact, he was the only one still combat capable, and I knew his guilt was eating him up inside. Either him or Scott Ball, but he was busy rebuilding the teams in Maryland.

That left one, and I knew that had to go to Ryan Szimanski. Ryan was a water rat, a civilian who had been part of the scouts since very soon after I formed them; he and his brother had fought all up and down the eastern seaboard until Will was killed in the Second Plague. Team Five, The Warthogs, had been wiped out assaulting the false President’s compound, and again Ryan had lost his whole team in DC. I really thought hard about it, because I knew that soldiers are superstitious people, and I didn’t want anyone to have a feeling of him being a Jonah, someone who got other skilled and brought bad luck. I didn’t believe it, but morale is a trick thing.

I was lost in my musings when one of the soldiers from the infantry platoon, which was still camped outside the farm, came walking up. He was a medium sized, dark skinned Middle Eastern man, in his mid-twenties, wearing sergeant’s stripes on his body armor. He came up to me, M-14 slung over his back, and saluted. There was something vaguely familiar to him, but I put it off to the soldiers having been outside the farm for a month now. I returned the salute, and he did something curious.

Slinging the rifle around to his front, he squatted down on his legs, a distinctly Afghani custom that I had seen many times, and proceeded to study me for a minute. My feeling of familiarity grew even stronger, and I glanced at his name tape. It said in block letters above his rank, “YASIR”. I read it and was struck dumb.

“I know you,” I said.

“Strange are the ways of Allah, that he should bring me to your doorstep, and my father’s grave, Nicholas Agostine.”

I suddenly felt very naked, him sitting there with his rifle vaguely pointed at me, and my pistol securely holstered. The last time I had seen this man was almost fifteen years ago, on a hillside village high in the Afghan mountains. He had been a boy then, and he had hurled rocks at me as my men had hauled his father, Ahmed Yasir, back to our FOB for interrogation.

Behind me, through the screen door, Brit said, “Your father would have been proud to see the man you have grown into, Elam.”

At that, his eyebrows rose. “You know who I am, Ms. O’Neil?”

She laughed. “Of course I do. Your father spoke of you often, and told me how he wished to return home. Impossible, of course, with things the way they were.”

He bowed his head, and then said, “I came to America with the evacuation flights of the military from Kandahar. I was twenty by then, and fought my way onto the plane, posing as an Afghan Army soldier in a captured uniform. No one questioned me in the madness, and when we landed in Seattle, I volunteered for the American Army. I am a citizen now. As you know, my father never let anyone know about his presence on your team lest he wind up in jail again, so I had no idea he had survived.”

“So,” I said, tentatively. “You’re not here to kill me? Last time I saw you, you cracked my head with a rock.”

He grinned, showing white teeth behind his beard. “It was a good throw, was it not?”

“Bled like a bitch. You aren’t mad at me for hauling your dad off?”

“No. That war is over, and before he was taken away for the last time, my father spoke of the respect you showed him as an enemy. Then, of course, I have read your book, after he died. He was your friend.”

“Yes. We owed each other our lives, many times over.”

He bowed his head again as a sign of respect, then stood. “Colonel, I have permission from my unit to serve TDY with your team, IST-1. If you need a good sniper, I am your man.”

“Of course. Let me see to your orders, and I’ll have you transferred by tomorrow.”

He saluted again, and then asked to see his father’s grave. I yelled into the house for Nate to show him, and the two went off together to the back of the house where Ahmed and Doc Hamilton were buried.

Brit watched him go with a bit of a longing look on her face. “He’s kinda cute, you know. This works out perfectly. You bring a home a hottie to piss me off, you old goat, and I get blessed with a good looking hunk of a man. Fair trade!”

Ugh, she loved to take a shot at me sometimes, just to keep me on my toes. “I did NOT sign on Shona to have another hot woman on the team!”

“Oh, it’s ‘Shona’ now, not Captain Lowenstein?” she said, arching her eyebrow.

“Gimme a break, Brit. He’s way too young for you anyway.”

“Oh sweet husband of mine,” she said, with an evil smile, “he’s only two years younger than me, old man. Have fun sleeping on the couch tonight.”

And then we were seven.

Chapter 248             

The eighth man showed up the first day we started training, jumping off one of the last barges to come through the canal. Apparently he liked the sound of gunfire, so he jumped ship and came strolling up to where we were practicing clearing houses.

In the years since the apocalypse, the canal system in NY had once again become a vital transportation system. Boats were cheaper to build than railroad engines and box cars, and it was a lot easier to maintain the locks than miles of railway. The barges themselves, though, still had to travel through some pretty bad areas; hijacking by looters was a common problem. As a result, young guys who hadn’t been scooped up by the military often rode shotgun on the barges. We had a lot of traffic come down from the burnt out areas of Quebec, with precious metals and tech salvage, and heading back with food supplies. 

He came walking up and stood watching for a few minutes. I was observing Shona and Elam on the three gun range, hitting pop up targets with pistol, carbine and shotgun, and I didn’t notice him standing behind me until he snorted in laughter at the woman fumbling with the unfamiliar shotgun. She was an expert with the 9mm and the M-4, but hadn’t ever had call to use a shotgun since basic. I turned to look at whomever had made the noise, but slowly; anyone dangerous wouldn’t have gotten this far onto the farm without an alert from the infantry guys or my own security team.

“Think you can do better?” I asked, recognizing him from the boats. I had seen him around before, but never talked to him. The kid was a giant standing next to me, well over six foot. The AR-15 he had slung in a tactical rig looked like a pee shooter in his hands.

“Sure can,” he drawled. “Mind if I do?”

“Be my guest,” I motioned, and gestured to the weapons rack. “You are…?”

“Obadiah Weatherson. But you can call me Obi.” With that, he walked over to the rack and pulled out a 12 gauge pump, checked it over, and fed shells into the breach, then put a loaded 9mm pistol in his belt. Lowenstein, who had finished the course in an acceptable time, eyed him suspiciously. Elam Yasir just stood aside, not having had his chance to go yet. The two had been avoiding each other as much as possible, and I wondered if we were going to have a problem between a Jew and a Muslim. I hoped not. It was bad enough that Ziv only tolerated Yasir because he had grudging respect for his father when he was alive. The Serb pretty much ignored Lowenstein. He stood with an evil grin on his face, holding a stopwatch. The man rarely smiled, and I think he wanted the kid to fall flat on his face. Three gun is a tough training event, and we worked extensively on it, increasing the difficulty until it was second nature.

The course is started with a carbine or any long rifle, whatever your preference, engaging the targets until the magazine runs dry. Then you let your weapon fall on its sling, grab the shotgun, and continue to engage, repeating with a pistol. Time penalties are given for missed shots; in our case, it was center head shots or nothing. We also switched up weapons from time to time, or practiced magazine changes on the fly instead of switching weapons. Our course had up to fifty targets and was almost a hundred meters long. Running it out full bore was exhausting, and I had the guys do it again and again, both individual and as two man sections. We were working up to a full team exercise, burning through ammo like it was going out of style. I wanted us to be ready for whatever came our way.  

Obi, as he called himself, took off like a bat out of hell. I’ve been in many, many combat situations, and this kid was like watching Derek Jeter field a line drive over to first base, back when we still had baseball. He was halfway down the course, with twenty rounds expended, before he registered his first miss, and his second round hit dead center. Ziv’s grin faded and turned into a scowl as the kid came trotting back, scoring a forty nine out of fifty, with fifty two rounds expended. He hardly seemed out of breath.

“Sorry about the last one. I’m not as good with the pistol as I am with a rifle. Hard to make my hands fit into an M-9. Next time, if you let me use my large frame .44 revolver, I’ll do better.”

“Kid,” I said, “do you need a job?”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d ask, Colonel. I’ve been riding boats since the ice broke, and I’m tired of it.” He grinned a wide, open disarming grin, and I felt myself warming up to him, despite his bit of cockiness.

“Consider yourself hired. Go up to the house and see Ms. O’Neil, tell him you’re our new machine gunner.”

His face fell when he realized that I was serious. “But, I thought, you know, since I’m so good, I could …”

“Could what? Everyone on this team can shoot. Brit is even better than you with a shotgun and a pistol, and despite your size, I’m pretty sure Ziv could eat you for lunch in hand to hand. Shona has seen more combat in the last year than a scout will see in a decade, and Elam can hit a squirrel at a thousand yards. No, we all work together, and I need a machine gunner.”

“But,” he almost spluttered, “What good is that going to do against undead?”

“Used properly, at the correct height, it can do a shitload of good, and Zed isn’t the only thing we go up against. So if you want to roll with us, you do what I say. Is that a problem?”

He seemed to think about it for a minute, and then his face lit up again. “Nope! I guess.”

“Good. You aren’t that smart are you?” I asked, smiling to let the edge off.

“Smart as I need to be. I’m still alive,” he answered, but grinned back at me.

“Good. After you see Ms. O’Neil and sign your contract, Major Zivcovic here will see how good you are at hand to hand combat. Try not to hurt, him, he’s getting slow in his old age.” Ziv glared at me and muttered some kind of Serbian curse, but Lowenstein and Yasir were both smiling. There’s lots of ways to build a team.

At that moment, the radio crackled to life.
“Lost Boys, this is Rattlesnake Six. We need your Six element and your medic to come over to OP One ASAP, Over.”

“Do you need a nine line, over? And security status?” I asked back, meaning a medical evacuation. In an emergency, unlike most, I could get a MEDEVAC out of Albany. Rank has its privileges.

“Negative, no threat and no medevac, but you gotta see this shit, over.”

“Roger that, on my way.” I jumped on the four wheeler and told Shona to go up to the house and get Brit and Scott, our medic. Then, not waiting for them to move, I peeled out, followed by Ziv on his own four wheeler. Obi and Elam started jogging, double time. Observation Post One was at the bridge over the canal, only two hundred meters north of us, and I made it there over the field in less than a minute, only stopping to unlatch and then relatch the gate across the causeway leading to the island.

When we got there, Lt. Kilas, the infantry platoon leader, stood with two of his men, Ryan, and my two private security contractors who ran OP One. In front of them, on the ground, lay a hog tied figure, writing and moaning. I could smell the undead before I even hopped off the quad.

“What’s up, Lt? Why haven’t you put it down yet?” He said nothing, just gestured to the thing. I approached cautiously, rifle up on my shoulder; undead were very strong, and I had seen them smash down a wooden door before. I didn’t want to think what would happen if the flex cuffs broke.

The thing had been a middle aged man; not one of the original infected, who were usually a shambling mess by now, eight years later. This one had probably come from the second plague, two years ago. It wore the remains of an Army uniform, one of the new ones designed for Z combat. As I approached, red dot directly on its head, ready to pull the trigger, it twisted around and glared at me, red eyes glowing. I expected the howl to start, that grating, annoying howl that they used to call each other to feed. If it did, I was going to plug it for sure.

Instead, what I heard sent a streak of fear and cold right through my body. Out of its mouth came a dry, hissing rattle and …

“Helllllpppppppp meeeeeeeeeeeee pleassseeeeeee killlllll meeee…”