“What the hell is so funny?”
He laughed again. “It’s just like playing Black Ops, fighting zombies!” I laughed too, stupid idiots. I loved these guys.
Jonesy and Ski were hammering the stairs down, each wailing away with a sledge hammer, knocking out steps. If the doors or windows were breached, we would climb up a rope ladder to the upstairs. Trapped, but safe, and it always gave us time to think of something else.
When we had forted up as best we could, we settled down to wait for Ahmed or the Zs, whichever came first. Brit walked to the skeleton she had popped as we came in through the front door. She pushed the rusty shotgun away from the couch where it had fallen out of the skeleton’s, cold, dead hands, then sat down next to it.
“Sorry about that, Skeletor, but I couldn’t take any chances. It was either you or me, and I was faster. Better luck next time.” Then she put her feet up on the coffee table, closed her eyes, and went to sleep next to the shattered bones.
I went upstairs and built myself a snipers perch, looking downhill towards the lock. I figured it was about maybe eight hundred meters. I started picking off random Zs who were wandering around, excited by the noise of the chase, using Ahmed’s rifle. While doing so, I thought back to the wild, panicked nights of the plague. My Guard unit falling apart at the barricades, getting overwhelmed by the civilians trying to get out of the city, the Zs already mixing in with them. Me rushing back to my house to get my family and run. My wife coming at me in the kitchen, a hunk of our kid’s arm in her mouth, hands ripping at me like claws. I swung the butt of my rifle so hard I broke the plastic, and I kept swinging ’til the thing that had been my wife lay on the floor, a bloody pulp, and I ran. I don’t know how I made it through the following months but here I was, years later, letting thoughts of that night ruin my aim. I wiped away the tears and kept shooting, a steady fire that knocked down a good dozen before I got tired. Remembering did no good for anyone.
Around dusk, Ahmed showed up, dripping wet. We had watched him through binos, pulling himself up out of the water at the edge of the river. Dangerous shit, that. You never knew what, exactly, was swimming or floating around there anymore. He immediately gave me a SITREP (Situation Report, to all you civilians), changed into dry clothes, then passed out on an upstairs bed. I typed up a report for Task Force Empire, attached the pictures from today, hooked my iPhone to the SINCGARS radio, and did that magic shit the commo guys had come up with. No cell towers? No problem! They ran it through our FM radios. Don’t ask me how they did it, but it worked.
I called the guys around. “Ahmed is done in so we have to stay here tonight. You know the drill. Two men on watch, staggered hours. Weapons loaded, on safe. I have the one to three watch, divide up the rest, Brit. Light and noise discipline.” They all answered in the affirmative.
Brit stayed behind while the others went to get something to eat out of their packs.
“Nick, I’m sorry about today, the vomiting. I’ve never had that happen before. It was just so freaking disgusting.”
“It happens. Get past it or you’re going to be off the scouts. I almost had to choke you to keep you quiet today. Understand? If you can’t hold it together around Zs then you are a risk to the whole team.”
She nodded her head. For once, she looked contrite. “I got it. I know what you gotta do what you gotta do. I’ll handle it.”
“You did a great job nailing Skeletor today, even if he already was dead. You’re a part of this team, Brit. Now go get some more sleep. I’m sure you’re beat. Before you do, though, remind everyone that Ahmed gets to sleep the night through.”
“Can do, Nick.” Then she leaned over and kissed me full on the lips. I wiped my face with my sleeve and muttered “Ugh, girl germs!” just loud enough for her to hear me as she walked away. She shook her hips at me, slapped her ass and went into the bedroom.
We settled in for the short May night.
Chapter 9
The must have pushed the sounds to us. Way off in the distance, I heard the pop-pop-pop of a firefight going on. It seemed to be coming from the north, just a faint echo of gunfire. The rounds were sparing, like someone was trying to take head shots, but then they rose in a crescendo, faster and faster, followed by fully automatic fire. Then it stopped dead. If the wind hadn’t been blowing from the north, I doubt I would have even heard it.
Doc was sitting next to me on watch. “Somebody just got overrun.”
“Ya think?” He had heard it too, and knew what the final burst of meant. You don’t use automatic weapons on zombies. Most of your rounds would be wasted zipping through their bodies. It was a panic burst; they were so close there was no time to aim, their hands were almost on you.
“Where do you think?”
“I dunno. Not Glens Falls, the city is too close. Maybe Lake George. The mountains do some funny things with sound, carry it down through the valleys. Tells us one thing, though. There’re people out there.”
“There’s always people out there, Nick. No matter how bad things get, there are always survivors somewhere. Hell, you know we’ve been monitoring radio traffic from the north end of Lake Champlain. Apparently the frogs from Quebec are still around. And organized.”
“Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it. People like those farmers we met today. They were pretty friendly, but I worry about some of the hard cases we might meet. Make sure from here on out everyone is on their toes in regards to Zs and Mad Maxes.” “Mad Maxes” was our term for people who had turned to looting and killing of anything that got in their way in order to survive. Not really fair to the original Road Warrior, but that’s pop culture for you. The worst thing was to get caught by one of those groups that had gone cannibal. Think to yourself, oh no, not in America! Cannibals? I don’t care where you are. Get people hungry enough and some of them will start eating whatever, or whoever, they can find. In the years after the plague, there was hunger enough. If we caught them, we shot them on sight.
Then I heard another sound, much closer, that made me sit bolt upright, wide awake. Coming back up River Road, just starting to be visible in the NVGs, was the horde Ahmed had led away this afternoon. They had started back to their territories but they must have smelled us when the wind shifted to the north.
“Go wake everyone up, bring everything upstairs. It’s going to be a turkey shoot but it might get tight. There’re a lot of them.”
Doc climbed down the rope ladder and I settled down with the sniper rifle. Ahmed was better than me at this, and when he got up here, I would let him take over. I started a slow, steady round of shooting. By the time Ahmed put his hand on my back, my shoulder was sore and my eye hurt from straining at the night scope. There were a good twenty Zs cooling on the ground in a trail. That trail, though, pointed directly to us.
“Do we run?” asked Brit.
“Not at night. Too big of a chance of us getting separated or someone twisting an ankle or breaking a leg. Nope, it’s fight night.”
We all settled down to our firing positions, knocking glass out of the upstairs windows. Knockers, something to beat in a Zombie’s head with, whatever was each person’s preference, stood stacked at the top of the ruined stairs.
The danger was twofold. First, this was just the start of a swarm. The city of Glens Falls and its surrounding area was a city of around thirty thousand people before the plague. Average actual turned-into-zombies rate was around sixty percent, though that could vary. It was dependent upon evacuation, how well the populace was armed, how many people died from being eaten versus reanimated. Figuring around half the Zombies from that population were still ambulatory, we might face nine thousand zombies, not the hundred or so coming at us now. And you thought math never did anyone any good. It made me freak out.