“The day after I got there, this huge mob of zombies, must have been thousands of them, came moaning right up toward the north wall, chasing some civilians, maybe a hundred of them. I saw it from an observation tower, maybe fifteen miles off, watched it through binos. I thought we were done. We saw them coming, and next thing I knew, the loudspeaker is yelling “INCOMING!” and “DOWN DOWN DOWN!”, and a C-130 flies over and drops this huge, parachute-dragging bomb out the back deck, and WHAM! I swear to God I thought it was a nuke. It wasn’t, it was one of those twenty-thousand pound bombs they developed in the Gulf War. Just BAM! And everything was gone, refugees, Zombies, everything. Later, I went out on a patrol to look for survivors and I noticed more than a half dozen craters at various distances from the base. Apparently they had done this more than once.”
Doc rucked on, lost in his thought. I could think of a time or two myself when I had wished the Air Force had dropped a big-ass bomb at my beck and call. Water under the bridge, though.
We turned the corner of River Road, and I noted how our corn was coming in, growing in the field on our side of the river. I had planted it a month ago, using precious diesel to run a scavenged tractor to plant twenty acres. Green stubs were just showing up through the ground. I was tired of eating canned food and stale MREs. Now if I could only get my hands on a cow… foolish pipe dream. Most of the cows around here had died from infections they got when the electric powered milking machines had shut down. The rest had been eaten long ago.
As we moved past the edge of the tree line, what was left of the house came into view. A small, faint column of smoke still twisted into the sky.
Doc pulled up short next to me, followed by Ahmed and Jonesy.
Ahmed spoke first. “JDAM, Joint Direct Attack Monition, guided bomb, maybe about five hundred pounds. Probably delivered by an F-18 off the USS Abraham Lincoln. Someone really does not like you, Nick.”
I stood dumbfounded. The windmill that provided our electricity still spun in the gentle wind, but the house itself was a mass of lumber blown to Hell and gone.
Chapter 25
“Well, now what?” Jonesy stood kicking through the rubble, looking for his own stuff where his room had been. Everything was scattered and gone. Even the safe in the basement, where we had kept our extra weapons, hidden under the cement slab of the floor. I had thought that might be OK, but the crater extended past the basement, and water from the river had flooded into the crater.
“That asswipe is gonna pay, Nick. My entire collection of games is gone.” Jonesy held up the shattered remains of his Xbox.
I sat down on a rock, looking out over the river. I was tired. My feet hurt. My back hurt. I was worried about Brit. I wasn’t sure where to go next. Well, scratch that. I knew where to go next. I just wasn’t sure what the plan was. First things first, though.
“There’s nothing here for us, guys. You know what we have to do. First things first, though. We need rest and resupply. Time to head to the cache.”
We had spent last summer building an extra fortress, a “go to hell” meeting place about a mile away, built on the top of a knoll, deep in the woods. Cinderblock walls, parapet and a small cabin inside that could sleep six in bunks. Water supply from a hand pump-operated well, firewood stockpiled, enough food for a year, extra ammo we had been stealing every chance we got, replacement weapons that had been “destroyed or lost” on previous missions. The only way in was through a tunnel covered by a grating that had to be unlocked or an aluminum ladder buried in the wood a hundred meters away.
We made a way slowly through the woods, keeping an eye out for Zs that might have been attracted by the house being bombed. Only one, the remains of an incredibly fat woman, missing an arm. She came stumbling out of the woods, swinging her remaining arm at us. Jonesy swung his steel bar at the things’ head, yelling, “THAT’S FOR MY XBOX!”
Ahmed eyed him strangely. “She did not touch your Xbox!”
“I know, but I feel so much better now!”
While we rested at the fort, cleaning our weapons, Doc tending to the various small injuries that crop up after being in the field for a few days, I took stock of our situation and conferred with Ahmed. I sat with my feet propped up on a bench.
“Those are nasty weapons, Nick.” He made a motion of gagging. “Maybe you can march into the FOB and you can knock everyone dead from the smell of your nasty feet.”
“Haha, very funny.” I continued drawing out a plan of base in the dirt.
“The hard part, Nick, is we don’t really want to shoot our way into the base. As much as I used to enjoy fighting you Americans and the Taliban both, Allah has told me to kill Zombies. And bad guys, of course. Those silly Fobbits do not deserve to die because their commander is an ass.”
“I agreed, Ahmed. You’re forgetting something, though. No one knows we are dead. I doubt LTC Jackass is going to run around trumpeting he had us killed. In due course, I’m sure he’ll announce that we were “lost” or something, but I bet he gives it a week or two. So, we can just walk in the gate, but we will have to move fast.”
“No, that will not work, Nick. As soon as you come in the gate, the base commander will be notified. Then we will be up shit’s creek, because he will run, or have us arrested on some kind of made up charges. Somehow.”
“Well, if we can get in touch with Brit, I’m sure she can get us in somehow.”
I was waiting to hear from Brit. If we had gone off the net or gone missing, she was under orders to call us at 1000 hours each day on a predesignated freq. I hadn’t heard from her yet, but she could have been fed a line of crap by the Chain of Command. It had been almost two weeks since she had been wounded so I’m sure she was mobile around the hospital.
It took two more days to hear from her after we had set up an OE-254 antenna to extend the range of the radios.
“Blue this is Red, over.” That was her calling us. Nothing to give away anything, on the off chance anyone was listening. We were using the team colors from Halo.
“Red, go.”
“Blue, you were reported dead. SITREP, over.”
“Four pax OK, base gone. Break.”
“Need knock at Orange two days, over.”
I waited for her to figure it out. In two days, she would have to help us get into Fort Orange.
“Time, over”
“Fourteen, Moby, over”
“Fourteen, Moby out.”
OK, so it was cheesy code, but someone may have been listening. Our electronic warfare assets were stretched thin, mostly down in Mexico where the 82nd was fighting for the oil fields. I was more worried about someone at the commo shed overhearing Brit talking to us, so we kept it short and coded.