Zombie Killers: HEAT (9 page)

Chapter 254

We were in the shit. Another round cracked over my head, the supersonic CRACK of a high velocity rifle making me eat the dirt.

“OBI! GET THAT GODDAMNED GUN GOING NOW!” I yelled. He was lying ten feet to my right, cursing furiously while trying to clear a jammed cartridge. Beside him lay Ziv, his face a bloody mess. Brit pulled the pin out of a grenade, yelled “FRAG OUT!” and heaved it out of the ditch towards the other side of the road. I handed her another one, and she repeated the process, rewarded with a scream and cursing in Spanish. The volume of gunfire whipping over our heads increased, if that was possible. I could hear at least a half dozen M-4 rifles and a pretty big MG, either a 240 or an older M-60.

Ryan was lying next to Ziv, trying to see where he was hit, and the Serb pushed his hand away, jamming another magazine into his AK, and holding it over his head, emptying a full magazine. Obi sat with his back agisnt the ditch, cradling his machine gun, unmoving, looking scared shitless. Ziv had been on point, keeping an eye ahead, when something warned him, stopping us just as the command detonated mine erupted further down the road.

“SHONA! SCOTT!” I yelled to the two figures behind us returning fire over the road top. and when I had their attention, waved them around in a wide sweeping arc to our left. They immediately started low crawling along the ditch, headed up the road to where a bridge carried it over a stream through a culvert.

“Brit, go with them!” I told her.

Her eye flashed angrily and she told me to fuck off. “I’m not leaving you!”

“Goddamn it, that’s an order! MOVE YOUR ASS!”

I was hit, pretty bad. Whatever type of explosive had triggered the ambush had sent a piece of hot shrapnel into my shoulder, and another into my face. I could see it sticking out of my cheek, out of the corner of my eye, and it burned like hell. The one on in my left shoulder had turned my arm numb and useless, sending blood dripping down my sleeve. I hoped like hell it hadn’t hit an artery. 

Brit stuffed a pressure bandage up under my sleeve and then tied it off. Then she reached over and yanked the shrapnel out of my face, making me screamed in pain. “If you fucking bleed to death I’m going to kill you!” she yelled over the gunfire, then spun and followed after the other two. I started crawling in the opposite direction, passing Obi, Ryan and Ziv. As I did, I grabbed Obi.

“Come with me!” I yelled, and told Ryan and Ziv to hold there. “WATCH FOR A CHARGE!” We went another ten meters and I told Obi to stop and point the gun down the length of the ditch, parallel to the road. Even as I did, three figures jumped down from the road into the mud about fifty meters away, trying to do the same thing I had just sent my three guys to do, on the opposite end. Obi started firing, yelling at the top of his lungs, one long continuous stream of tracers that riddled them, knocking them down into the dirt. I smacked his helmet as hard as I could with my good hand to get him to take his finger off the trigger.

“WHAT THE FUCK! STOP FIRING!” I yelled at him.

“Sorry, Colonel, first time I ever killed a man!” he said, and then threw up on the gun. I stared at him in amazement. All that shit he talked.

“WATCH!” I said, and pointed down the ditch. Then I turned and started to crawl back to Ryan and Ziv. Ziv had a bandage over his eyes, and kept holding his AK over his head and firing bursts at intervals, covering the road. Ryan was doing the same when his weapon flew backwards, and he brought his hand down to stare stupidly at his missing pinky finger.

Yeah, we were in the shit indeed.

It was hard to track what was going on, since the ambushers were using M-4’s like we were, except for Ziv’s AK. I took my cell phone out of my pocket and secured it to the end of my rifle with a piece of tape, then hit “record” on the video function, sticking it up in the air for three seconds and then pulling it back down.

The video showed three attackers clustered around a machine gun that had been brought forward and set up at a turn of the road. It swept back and forth, covering the entire road top with sort, disciplined burst, about a hundred meters away. I could see muzzle flashes among the palm trees on the far side of the road. There was no sign of Elam, who had been forced off the road on the opposite side of us, far to the rear.

Crawling back to Ryan, who had put some duct tape over the stump of his finger, I motioned for him to shoot in the direction of the machine gun. He ignored his severed finger and opened up with his pistol. It was a .22, but some lead is better than none.

At that second, I heard a bust of fire, a roar of rifle fire punctuated by Brit’s shotgun sending out measured BOOMS! I also heard from behind me three flat CRACK CRACK CRACK sounds, an M-14 firing on single shot. The machine gun fell silent, but a blood curdling scream broke out from the other side of the road, accompanied by a whistle from the treeline ahead. The rifle fire stopped, and I peeked over the top of the road, to see several figures clad in ACU’s disappearing into the open fields to the east. Another CRACK and one fell down. The rest disappeared into a far tree line. The screaming continued, then died to a moaning sound. It was a woman. I hoped to God it wasn’t Brit.

Chapter 255

She was young, and pretty, in a thin, post war starved way. Hispanic, maybe eighteen years old. Blood poured out of her nose and mouth, thin streams that stained her ACU uniform and body armor. Just under the edge of her armor was a great big bloody hole, with some loops of intestine hanging out. It looked like she had taken a full load of buckshot from Brit’s twelve gauge.

The girl was gasping, crying and cursing in Spanish, trying to push her bowels back into the hole. We all stood around her, except for Ryan, who was busy trying to treat Scott. I let him keep going, though it was obvious from the hole just above his eyebrow, and the fact that half his head was missing, that my old friend was a gonner. His body still shook in reflexive spasms, but a wound like that to the head, without a dust off, was going to be fatal, every time. He made some inarticulate moans, but there was no life in them. The body just refused to accept what had happened to the brain. Thankfully he stopped twitching after a minute and lay still. Ryan cursed and threw the bandage down on the ground, even though he knew as well as I did from the start that it was hopeless.

Ten feet away Obi yelled, “Fuck, we gotta do something for her!” kneeling down on the bloody ground and pulling at his aide pouch. I shoved him aside, raised my rifle, and shot the girl in the head, just under the rim of her Kevlar. It was hard to keep steady aim because of my arm, and the round glanced off the rim, tumbling and shattering her face. 

“What the FUCK!” yelled Obi; the backsplash sending a few drops of blood to splatter across his face. He stood up and came at me, only to stop with Shona’s rifle pointed two inches from his nose.

“Stand down!” she said. “There was nothing anyone could have done for her. It was a mercy.” Obi turned away and started cursing, and for a second I thought he was going to swing at me. Instead, he just cursed more and started kicking one of the other corpses.

“Obi, go pull security with Elam. Shona, figure who these jokers were. Ryan, see to Ziv. Brit, help me with Scott.” I was shaken. We had broken the ambush, but Scotty Orr lay dead. His eyes were open in a surprised look, one that I had seen on the dead before. No one ever really expects it.

“He hesitated when he saw it was a woman. I had gotten one, and Shona the other, and Scott stopped when he saw it was a girl. She fired once. I was too late.” There were tears rolling down Brit’s face, but her voice was a quiet monotone.

I thought back to the nights we had sat around on the porch, Scott playing his guitar, singing simple Spanish love songs or fast past Mexican dances. He was a good man, and had saved more than one of our lives with his medical skills. Reaching down, I closed his eyes for the last time, then stood up. As I did, the world started to turn gray from the edges of my vision on inwards. “Brit …” I managed to say, then fell forward on my face.  

I woke up when Brit probed the shrapnel wound on my shoulder. “You are one lucky shit, husband. I managed to get it out. It would have been better if it was a bullet, the shrapnel tore its way through. You’re going to have a hell of a bruise.” She handed me a jagged, quarter inch piece of steel. “If it had hit an artery, you’d be dead as shit.”

“Is he going to make it?” asked Shona Lowenstein. In my hazy, weakened state, I struggled with thinking who was going to be in charge now.

“Yeah. Ryan is the same blood type, and Scott had two bottles of plasma in his pack. I’ve got an IV going, if we have to, I’ll take some of Ryan’s’. Don’t want to, the conditions here are pretty frigging dirty.”

I used my free hand to pull Brit close and croaked, “We gotta move. They might come back.”

“Five more minutes. I have to sew up Ziv’s face and Elam and Obi are stripping the dead of ammo.”

I let her go, satisfied. My shoulder was starting to burn like fire, but I waved Brit’s hand away when she started to break out a morphine injector. I had lost some blood, but Brit told me that it was more shock than anything that had made me faint. I think her exact words were, “You’re such a frigging crybaby.”

Ahead, in the distance, the great grey bulk of the carrier was turning blood red in the setting sun. It sat there, miles away, teasing me.

Chapter 256

It was three days later. Three agonizing days of waiting in the remains of a house just off the side of the highway. Three days waiting to see if my shoulder would heal, or develop one of those nasty tropical infections. It was covered in deep purple bruises, and stiff as hell, but I could move it. Both Ziv and I had deep cuts on our faces, mine on my cheek and his across his forehead, both sew shut and healing decently.

The second night, as we lay in the backyard with no fire, insects around us, jungle sounds coming from the swamp around behind us, a patrol passed us by going down the road. They were armed similarly to us, and wearing US Army uniforms, but they had no night vision, and we were able to scoot back into the swamp long before they came up to our position. Their hushed conversation was in Spanish, so I had no idea what they were saying. We held tight for more than an hour after they passed, in case a follow on patrol was waiting for anyone to reveal themselves, but nothing else happened for the rest of the night.

The bodies from the ambush hadn’t told us much. The uniforms were worn and tattered, and had some kind of Velcro patch on them. It wasn’t the Mountain Republic guys; I knew their patch. Their uniforms had all said US ARMY on them, but that could have been left overs. Probably some local warlord or gang leader trying to bring some legitimacy to his rule, or maybe a local National Guard unit still active. We had run into all three before, and on this trip, I just wanted to avoid them. The problem, though, is that they were almost certainly going to be between us and the carrier, if not actively occupying it. I wasn’t sure about the later, because six thousand undead was a lot to take on.

The second night, boredom had set in, and the inactivity was starting to make us all pick on each other. Brit and I had a “no sex on a mission” rule, but it was getting kinda difficult to watch her reading books on her kindle and looking so damn good. Matter of fact, Captain Lowenstein was looking pretty good too. She had been having some pretty earnest discussions with Obi, trying to teach him the basics of actually soldiering, and somehow Brit caught me looking once when she stood up and stretched. My wife slowly ran a finger across her throat, then went back to reading. She hadn’t even looked at me, just kept looking at her Kindle while she made the throat slitting gesture. I tried hard to pretend that Shona was just another soldier, but damn. I had always treated everyone the same, as long as they could pull their weight, but there was something about her that drew my eye. Some women did that to me; certainly Brit did, from the day I met her. No problem, soldier first, man and woman second. Bored sitting around? Let the games begin! Still, I wasn’t going to risk death by throat slitting, or even the appearance of favoritism, which might cause issues with the Team. Actively doing something? That would be insane in more ways than one.

We left on the third night, when I was feeling better. Physically, not so much mentally. The death of Scott Orr weighed heavily on my mind; I was having a hard time putting it back into the “shit happens” category. Scott had been a good guy; awarded a Bronze Star in Panama, of all places, and doing OK in Seattle when the plague came. He had volunteered to go back in the Infantry and then the Scout Teams, participating with us in the raid on the false President’s hideout, for which he got a Distinguished Service Cross. All to catch it in the head because he didn’t have the heart to pull the trigger on a young girl. Well, I guess if you had to go, doing the decent thing wasn’t too bad a way.

I just wanted this damn mission over, but we had a long way to go. Ziv, Shona, Brit and I had conferred during the day, and come up with a plan. Satellite feeds had shown no activity on the carrier deck yet, aside from Z’s walking around and occasionally falling off. The small bay where the thousand foot long ship had grounded was ringed by a private, upscale community, and somehow the ship had been driven over the sandbar that sheltered the bay. As a result, at low tide you could almost approach the side of the ship on foot. In fact, in one place, the bow actually hung over a pier or causeway. All this would could see from satellite intel and the UAV run the sub had sent out. What we didn’t know was how close the MR platoon was, and who was between us and the ship. The plan then called for us to infiltrate the housing community, occupy an OP, and keep watch. It could be up to a week for anything happened, but I hoped not. We were getting low on supplies already, and although we had scrounged some ammo off the dead ambushers, the short fire fight had consumed far more than we were comfortable with. Extra ammo and supplies were buried a back on the beach, but I didn’t want to go there until we tackled the carrier. The hard part of actually GETTING to the carrier was to get in without disturbing the undead and creating a shit storm. We couldn’t even kill any, because that might lead an enemy back to us. It was going to be hard, and I wasn’t sure we could actually do it.

That night’s travel brought us up to a house just outside the gated community, and we settled in as best we could to wait through the day. I let Obi and Shona take first shift, while the rest of us got some sleep. We were all almost on a totally night shift sleep schedule now anyway. When my turn came, the first half of my shift, in later afternoon, was with Elam. I found him looking out a second story window, watching down the road, looking northward.

“Hey Elam,” I said, sitting down next to him on a folding chair. He had his rifle balanced on some books, stacked on a small table. Around us lay the debris of a small girls’ room; pink walls, Barbie dolls, My Little Pony stickers. I almost laughed about it for a second, then felt sad, wondering what had happened to her. Probably one of the undead wandering out in the swamps on the other side of the highway, but I hoped not.

“Colonel,” he answered, not taking his eye off the spotter scope.

“What are you looking at?” I asked, being too lazy in the summer Florida heat to look myself. I had already done a perimeter walk, and would do so again in a few minutes.

“Our friends have arrived at the carrier. I have been watching them try to attempt to board over the bow.”

“WHAT?” I exclaimed, almost falling out of the chair I had tipped backwards. I scrabbled with my gear, trying to get out my binos.

When I finally had them settled, I could make out ant like figures clustered on the end of the pier. There was some kind of barricade going up, to protect the pier from whatever might come out of the town at them. Even as I watched, several rocket assisted lines launched upwards and landed on the deck, and men started to swarm upwards, hand over hand.

“Uh oh. Stupid fuckers.” I muttered, thinking of the noise. It was a race, how fast a man could climb eighty feet of rope, vs. how fast the undead on the carrier deck would be attracted to the noise of the lines landing on the deck. They would have been a lot better off building some kind of raft or using one of the derelict boats scattered around the harbor, and going in through one of the hangars. There were almost six THOUSAND undead between them and the nukes, never mind the fact that they were secured in a heavily armored compartment below the waterline.

Sure enough, they started coming, one after another. Lurching, running figures, howling at the top of what remained of their lungs. The MR troops set up a firing line at the edge of the flight deck and opened up. I could hear the pops being carried across the water to us. Brave bastards. Even as we watched, a package was hoisted up the ropes, and I could barely make out a tripod mounted weapon being set up. They better hurry up, whatever it was; the individual riflemen were almost being reached by the undead, which had turned into a flood. 

What sounded like a long ripping chainsaw echoed across the water, and tongue of flame shot out of the mini-gun, at about head height. It chewed through the undead like a scythe through wheat. Head shots didn’t really matter, when you put a piece of lead every inch, at a height of five feet above the ground. It either caught them in the head and splattered their brains, or ripped their heads completely off. It was a good plan, even as a second gun was being winched up. With individual soldiers engaging the ones they missed, and the flight deck providing left and right limits of where the Z’s could go, it would work. They could sit there all day and mow down whatever crawled onto the deck.

“Can you range that?” I asked Elam, who had moved from the spotter scope to the scope on his rifle, narrowing his field of view but increasing the magnification. He grunted, totally focused on estimating range and windage.

“Take out the gunner,” I said, and picked up the spotter scope myself, eyeing the men on the deck. Almost thirty seconds slipped by, and I was getting impatient as the next minigun slowly crawled up the ropes, when the suppressed rifle coughed.

It was more than a thousand meters by my estimate, with a crosswind, and honestly, the M-14 wasn’t a dedicated sniper rifle. The round was very light for that kind of long range work, and the drop would be measured in feet, not inches. I would have been much more comfortable with him taking the shot with an unsuppressed Barrett .50, but you do what you need to do with what you have. I fully expected him to miss, but after a few seconds, the gunner’s leg flew out from under him as if someone had hit it with a baseball bat. The minigun barrel swung up into the air, tracing a blazing line of fire into the sky, and the crowd of undead surged forward. The rest was a massacre, with the dozen men on the deck, including the wounded gunner, being overwhelmed. We couldn’t hear it, though we could see it.  I actually felt sorry for the poor bastards, for a second or two. At the end, two men actually jumped off the deck, eighty feet into the water, or one in the water and one onto the pier. They were followed by a half dozen undead, plunging headlong in their hunger.

“Great shot!” I said, slapping Elam on the back. “I could never have made that.”

“I take no joy in the death of a fellow man. It is as Allah wills it, nothing more.”

“Well, aren’t you just a Debbie downer. Keep watch while I figure out our next move. I’ll take an easy win over a hard fight any day of the week.”

Elam had switched back to the spotter scope after I put it down, and he asked, “Are we still going to infiltrate tonight, and set up an ambush for them?”

“Sergeant Yasir, I think that one shot may have made our whole plan a lot easier.”

I already had another plan in my head.