“Lost Boys 6, this is Empire 6. What happened to your engineer, over.”
“Bitten by a zombie, we had to neutralize him, over.”
“Way to fail on the job, Lost Boys 6. I’ll make sure you write his wife, over.” God, that man was a prick.
“Can do, Empire 6. Are we going to get another asset? Over.”
“Negative, no air assets available. Continue Mission, Lost Boys. Out.”
Had to get the last word in. Jerk. I stuffed the hand mike back in Syzmanskis’ rucksack and turned off the SINCGARS radio.
“I think you two should kiss when next time you meet. Just give him a big, wet sloppy kiss.” called Brit over her shoulder as she moved to take up point. “Give him a reach-around.”
“Such a pig.” I muttered.
“OINK OINK!” she called back. We moved out down the broken road.
Chapter 5
We stood over the Route 4 bridge and watched the water flow underneath. It was clear, clearer than I had ever seen it before. Clear and toxic. Not as bad as downstream, but there was a sheen of oil slick across the top. Millions of gallons of heating oil, industrial chemicals, toxins released by houses decaying. The engineers testing the water figured it would be close to a hundred years before it was drinkable. The streams draining into the Hudson were almost as bad. Who would have thought clean water would have been an issue after the Zombie Apocalypse? Another thing the movies got wrong. We knew of one good well on the east side of the river, a mile south of here. A hand pump into a deep well, but in a few years the ground water would be contaminated by rusting gas tanks and underground oil tanks. From here on out we would have to hump our water, which is heavy as shit. On a hot spring day in Upstate NY, humid as hell, humping seventy pounds in a pack, you wind up soaked to the bone with sweat in about ten minutes.
Jonesy and Hamilton stood pissing into the river.
“Damn, Jonesy, This water is cold.”
“Deep, too. You can’t play jokes like that on a brother, Doc!”
Brit rolled her eyes at both of them. “Boys.”
I took point, walking down the west side to the lock. We ran into two Zs stumbling down the main road. The first went down from a head shot from my rifle. The second was walking away, upwind from us. Brit took her out with a shot to the back of the head and we stepped around the still-twitching corpse. Doc flipped the first over and took a picture of her face for the National Database. It would go in the missing file, where the software would try to match her face. Not much, but it sometimes answered survivors’ questions. Maybe a one in a hundred got photographed, and one in ten of those got ID’ed. Better than nothing, I guess.
A quick note about our rifles: They’re standard, Army issue M-4s that have been rechambered to take a .22 caliber Long Rifle round, with a bit more charge than a regular .22 LR. Instead of the usual combat load of 180 or so .227 rounds in a regular M-4 load-out, we each carry 600 rounds of .22 Longs in 50 round magazines. We could also use them in our pistols and if we have to, we could use scavenged .22 rounds. It’s impossible to find any .227 rounds anywhere but .22’s are still pretty common in the ruins of sporting goods stores and gun shops. One thing you need when fighting zombies is ammo, and plenty of it. No one is that good to hit a Z in the head every shot, and, especially in combat, it is more like 3 or 4 rounds before you put one through their heads. Another thing they got wrong in the movies.
We heard the howling long before we got there. It grew slowly with each step we took. It seemed to sink right down through our teeth into our bones. The Zombie Moan.
Jonesy stepped up to the edge first and looked over.
“Hollllllyyyyyy shit, Nick, come get a look at this.”
I tapped Ahmed on the shoulder and he took my sector, looking back down the road. I walked over to the edge of the canal lock and looked into the water ten feet below. It was filled with Zs, floating, standing on top of each other, clawing at the concrete wall. The doors of the lock were closed and they had wandered in there from the town. Hundreds of them. Packed in, rotting, bloating. They saw us and started in a surge towards us, piling on top of each other, pushing each other down into the water. Jonesy started popping them in the head with his pistol but I told him to stop and not waste ammo.
“Damn, Nick, this shit creeps me out. What are going to do about this?” I noticed his accent had gotten softer and he was more serious, like it always did when we were discussing a fight.
“Leave it. Take pictures of the canal doors, check out the pump house and the electric machinery, get pics of everything, spray the crap out of the electrical system with the silicone. We gotta keep the stuff in working order but the Zs are going to be Lieutenant Colonel Jackass’s problem.”
“Do you want to open the doors? Let this shit drift into the river?”
“Fuck no. Do that and when we get back to the COP in Stillwater they’re going to be crawling all over the wall. We’re upstream. They can’t swim but they can wash up.”
He shook his head and spit on the Zs trying to climb at us. “Didn’t think of that. This here city boy can’t get directions straight, you know me.”
I walked back to the guys, picked my ruck up off the ground and rummaged for my Nikon.
“Hey Nick, check it out!” Brit pointed and we caught sight of a bald eagle soaring high overhead. The wildlife was coming back strong but I hope it didn’t eat too many of the fish from the river.
“No doubt, the plague was a good thing and bad thing. Make the best and drive on.”
Brit bumped fists with me. “Make the best and drive on.”
Chapter 6
“Know what I’m pissed about?”
I sighed as we walked along the river road. Here it comes, I thought.
“I’m pissed that we’re never, ever going to go to the stars. This killed it. Right here.” Brit gestured to the potholes in the road, the ruined house we were walking slowly passed, eyes peeled for Zs.
“Why Brit, I didn’t even know you had such ambitions,” said Ski. Doc walked past, made like he was tightening down the chinstrap on his helmet and hunched his shoulders with an oh no look. Jonesy started whistling and pretending to be interested in some flowers on the side of the road.
“Well, Ski, you don’t know shit about me. For example, what did I do before the plague?”
“I dunno. College girl who banged football players?”
She stopped in midstride and smacked him as hard as she could upside his Kevlar. “DAMN, BRIT, OW!”
“You’re right, but you deserved that anyway, jerk. I was an engineering major. I was going to go to the stars. Or build in space, anyway. Do you understand me? I was going to design space habitats. I wanted to design the first habitation on the moon. It’s all gone now, Nick. All gone.
She started crying, tears rolling down her cheeks, and lengthened her stride. Then she sat down in the road, screamed as loudly as she could and started pounding on the pavement in front of her with her war hammer. The guys walked around her, ignoring her screams and frustrated pounding. After a few minutes, she stopped, slung the hammer over her back, picked up her weapon and resumed the march.
“Hey babe, you OK?”
She looked at me. I knew her backstory. Living in a college campus, in the ruins of Syracuse University. Doc and I had found her holed up in a cafeteria, on one of our first scouts. Six months, living on canned food and having the most god-awful amount of traps around her, drinking rainwater from barrels on the roof. Going slowly crazy with no one to talk to, dodging Zs every day to get wood for a fire. She had nearly taken my head off with a baseball bat and Doc had needed to sedate her to get her calm enough to talk to us. Even now, I wasn’t sure she had completely gotten over it.