We spent that night up in the trees, slung in our hammocks. We carried them in our assault packs because if you got separated from the team, you would never be able to fortify, or even defend, an old house by yourself. Up in a tree, you could hold out as long as you had ammo and water, and if you were smart, move from tree-to-tree to give you running room. Hell, even moving to a different branch on the far side of a tree and dropping down might give you enough of a head start to outrun a zombie horde.
In the south, a column of smoke was highlighted by the setting sun, matched by its twin to the north. The helo at the jail still smoldered, and behind us, something had caught fire in Whitehall and burned through the night. Below us, a steady stream of zombies, animated corpses of those killed in the jail battle, stumbled on through the night, attracted by the fire on the horizon.
Ahmed tapped me on the leg and I awoke with a start, but I didn’t move. In the stark brilliance of the full moon, I could see stream of zombies had died down to a lone figure, limping along on a shattered leg. It dragged the remains of a rope, entangled in military issue web gear.
“Do it!” I whispered, but the figure below us stopped at even that quiet remark. It looked up, the eyes glowing a dull red, and Ahmed’s pistol coughed twice. The figure crumpled to the ground. I waited to see if anything else turned up and then drifted off to sleep again.
In the morning, there were no zombies around. We climbed down and I went over to the corpse. As Ahmed and I had suspected last night, it was an Infantryman, one of the those who’d been hanging off the tail end of the helo as it crashed. His guys must have missed his body in the rush to Evac. He must have still been alive but the zombies had gotten to him. We tried never to leave a man behind unless it risked other lives, but, more important, we tried not to leave a man to wake up undead. Every soldier who fell in battle, bitten by a zombie, was given a round to the head. Horrible, gruesome, but there was no way I wanted to become an undead, and we all felt the same way.
I stripped him of ammo, which fortunately was for our modified M-4s with the hot .22 long rounds, not regular .223 military issue ammo, About one out of every three guys in a unit carried the newer, rechambered rifles. Smoke grenade, flashbang, two frags. Water in a Camelbak that we wouldn’t touch, in case it was contaminated. I pulled one of his dog tags off his right boot and slipped it into my pocket. We spent the next hour building a cairn of rocks over his body and set out on the road again. Rest in peace, Brother.
Chapter 24
The next two days were a blur. A haze of encounters with Zombies, lack of sleep, hunger, and pain. My feet were raw where my boots had been wet. My extra socks were back in my ruck, somewhere in Whitehall, and the pair I was wearing had holes in them. Doc had patched the blisters with duct tape after they had burst, but the skin had started to slough off around them. The others weren’t in much better shape. It was eighty kilometers from Whitehall to Stillwater, where we would go to ground at the Combat Outpost. Home for all of us most of the time except for Doc. He ran a clinic at Fort Orange so he was back and forth a lot.
We needed time to refit and rest, and I was completely focused on getting there. We had run out of water a few hours ago. The summer sun was draining the sweat from our bodies. In a little while, we would take a break to filter some river water, but for now, step, step, step. Each time my left foot hit the ground, a bloody footprint was left behind. I knew Jonesy, for one, was hurting just as bad, the pack on his back had rubbed two bloody sores on his waist since the pack frame didn’t fit on his back.
To pass the time and take my mind off the burning pain in my feet, I asked Doc to tell me about the fighting at Seneca Army Depot. Rumor of it had spread east through the little groups of survivors spread throughout the state.
“Well, things started to get bad right around September. The Guard was pulling out of the NYC area, and things were pretty much falling apart all over. You remember that time, Nick.”
“Yeah, my unit got overrun just outside of Albany. I think we could have held, but we had an absolute boneheaded chain of command. No tactics, just RESCUE THE CIVILIANS! And STAND FAST TO THE LAST MAN! We got outflanked by infected just coming down south from the ’burbs, and our position was a line across the Waterford Bridge, instead of a hedgehog on high ground behind barriers. We were stacking them up like cordwood, trying to hold a lane open for uninfected civilians, when all the sudden the guy next to me goes down with a Z on his back. Then it turned into a madhouse.”
I had run. I admit it. The whole mess had turned into a brawl, with hand-to-hand fighting and every man for himself. All I could think about was my wife and kid, ten miles behind the lines. I ran to them like I had never run before, and I was too late. I would never, ever forgive myself for that.
“I remember that week. I wound up on a chopper pulling troops out of Governor’s Island, just off Manhattan Island. Our unit was the last one out Manhattan, just barely made it to the ferry pulling out of the pier. I caught a CH-47 to Stewart Airbase, then a C-130 to Seneca Army Depot. I had been awake for three days, just doing what I could for the guys over and over.”
I stopped him for a second. “What do you mean, ‘for the guys?’ You’re a medic. You of all people know once someone gets bitten they’re done for.”
“Yeah, I euthanized more than a few of the guys who were infected. Know what that’s like? Someone begging you to save them and you stick them to take them out before they turn into a Z and go after you? Yeah, dozens of those. What I was talking about, though, was the wounds from the fighting.” Yeah, I knew what it was like. I’d done it myself. He knew that, but I let him talk through it.
“What do you mean, the fighting?”
“Man, it was a battle. Thousands of civilians trying to get off Manhattan, the bridges blocked with smashed cars, infected running wild, tunnels flooded. Here we were holding onto the piers, trying to evacuate as many civilians as possible, and they were storming the barricades. Remember how NYC was pretty much “a gun-free zone?” Apparently not. Pistols, shotguns, AKs, AR-15s, hell, even some heavy automatic weapons that some douchebag Russian Mafia guys from Brighton Beach started opening up on us. I was treating gunshot wounds left and right. It made Afghanistan look like a picnic. People with the highest standard of living in the world fell the furthest, I guess, when they realized their money wasn’t going to save them. In the end, we just pulled out, firing into the crowd to keep them off the last boat.”
He shifted his ruck on his back, but kept talking.
“You know, Nick, guys like us, veterans, we all knew the world could go to shit at any moment. I actually feel bad for the civilians who lived in a comfortable, peaceful world. They forgot how easily civilization can fall apart and that the barbarians were waiting at the gates. Hell, take away a man’s food and threaten his family and his survival, and he is the barbarian.”
I knew what he was talking about. After the general collapse of the military units and police, the world had turned, in many places, into a person-eat-person world. Small communities did better than the larger ones, but unless your village was more than a day’s walk from an urban center, you got overwhelmed with refugees trying to beat your doors down.
“So what happened at the Depot?”
“OK, so I get there on a C-130 and the engineers are just finishing building the walls. Huge dirt berms, with a trench dug in front, angled so people on top could fire down into a kill zone. Howitzers converted into muzzle-loading shotguns, with charges and ball bearings piled in, individual rifle positions every few feet. The north wall was about fourteen kilometers, the south wall about eighteen. Right between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake. The north wall was more heavily manned because we had refugees from Rochester and Syracuse and zombies, all trying to climb the wall. The Guard had pulled back behind the walls and scattered units from Fort Drum were flying in by helo. Man, I heard there was a serious last stand by some Infantry guys at the airfield at Drum, keeping Zs off the runway so that last C-130 full of dependents could get out. You should have seen the parents, Nick. The shocked look on their faces. The kids, they dealt with it, like kids do.”