At 0918, Hammer came back in the radio.
“Shot, over”
“Shot, out.” I answered. Meaning the Battery had fired.
“Let’s go!” I told the team, and we shouldered our packs. Behind us stood the farm house where we lost Ski. A trail of really dead Zombie corpses led from the river to the house and inside stank to high heaven. We had waited all night for more to come from the city, but with the break of dawn, nothing showed. We buried Ski in the back yard with a rough cross over his grave. While I was digging his grave with Jacob, the others took turns cranking the handheld generators which charged our radio and other electronic devices.
We started jogging downhill to where the Route 4 bridge crossed over the canal.
“Splash, over.”
“Splash, out.”
I motioned for the team to hit the ground. I trusted the artillery guys but I’ve seen too many rounds stray off target. A mistake on the gun line transposing numbers. A mislaid gun. The wrong charge. Plus, those BB’s came out of the rounds at a tremendous velocity and I didn’t need a ricochet wounding anyone.
The air just above the river erupted in sharp flashes of light and then a second later an ear-splitting CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK repeated. One platoon of four howitzers, two volleys, then they shifted fire, walking it up the line I had given them.
After a minute Hammer came back on the radio.
“Rounds Complete, over.”
“Rounds Complete, OUT.” And I stuffed the mike back into Jacob’s ruck.
I waited till the rounds stopped cracking, then an additional 30 seconds.
“GO GO GO” I yelled, and we ran, straight across the bridge and into the clouds of dust raised by the impact of thousands of high-velocity steel balls into brick buildings.
Chapter 11
We moved in bounding overwatch, one team walking, weapons at the ready, while the other rushed fifty meters. Then we switched. The walking team was the shooters, charged with hitting any Zs that were still standing or had been sheltered in houses during the bombardment.
Route 4 ran through the center of the village. At one time it held shops and houses. Now, like so much of the rest of America, it was a ruin. You could tell a lot about a village by what kind of ruins were there. The older small towns held up the best, except where they had had natural gas utilities. Broken lines, storms bringing down still-live electrical lines, lightning, all combined to start massive fires that raged through whole towns and even cities. The older towns in the northeast, built before the advent of modern firefighting systems, had fared better; brick walls, slate roofs… but still, better was a relative term. Most of the cities and larger towns in America had burned to a crisp, fires raging out of control for weeks. The southwest, from what I had heard, was a ghost town.
Everyone wore gloves and kneepads and had reinforced the knees of their uniforms because everywhere you went, there was smashed and broken glass. I don’t know why, but when the plague hit, it seemed like everyone must have gone on a rampage. Correction, everyone did go on a rampage. Looting and riots everywhere. To walk down any street in America was to listen to the sound of glass crunching underfoot. Most of had scars all over our hands from putting them down somewhere with broken plate glass. We had to be careful because even a small cut left untreated could lead to blood poisoning or tetanus. Two Missions ago we had lost a guy who had tried to tough it out when he stepped on a nail. He died in the base hospital a few months later. He died from asphyxia, his body broken and dislocated from the severity of the muscle spasms he endured.
We almost made it to the first rail bridge before we came across any Zs. There had been a few in the street, mowed down by the artillery. There had been one big mass in the center of town. The Zs had been in the middle of tearing apart what remained of a person. What idiot had been dumb enough to walk through the middle of a town in broad daylight? Maybe it had something to do with the firefight we heard last night. A shattered AR-15 lay on the ground next to the bloody mess. The Zs were all down, perforated with dozens of holes. Bad for this guy, good for us. He had drawn the locals into the kill zone.
We turned left onto the bridge. Once there, Brit broke out a four point rappelling harness and snapped into a thirty foot length of climbing rope. Doc and Jonesy, the biggest guys, launched her over the edge of the bridge, furiously snapping pictures, while the rest of us pulled security. She swung back and forth, trying to catch every angle, then yelled for them to pull her up. We repeated the process on the second bridge abutment, then started running back towards the canal lock.
In the middle of Route 4, several Zs had stumbled out of houses, wandering in that hesitant way when they smelled a living person but weren’t sure if one was close. Each team took time to shoot them in the head, aimed steady shots while the other team ran their fifty meters. We knocked down three before I stopped and pulled out a thumper. I set the timer for twenty minutes, placed the little box on the ground, then kept running.
Thumpers were little speakers hooked up to cheap MP3 players. Start it running, and depending on what track you pick, you get either an instant or set delay before it starts playing an obnoxious loud rock, rap, or otherwise bass-heavy, rhythmic tune. They were called thumpers after the way the worm riders had called the sandworms in that old sci-fi book Dune. The thumpers there were stakes with clappers set in to the sand, and their rhythmic thumping attracted the giant sand worms. Point is, the Zs would come running and stand around while the song played out, looking for the source of this evidence of living beings. Each of us carried two in our packs. They had saved our lives more than once.
When we had gotten a good distance away but could still see where I dropped the Thumper, we all grounded our packs for a rest. Right on time, twenty minutes, 50 Cents’ “In da Club” started blaring. Heavy beat ringing out from the cheap speakers. They came swarming, milling around in a mass, trying to locate the source of the sound. Had to be more than a hundred by the time the song looped back and started playing again.
I grabbed the mike from Jacob’s ruck. “Hammer, this Lost Boys, execute Fire Plan Bravo, over.”
“Lost Boys, this is Hammer, Fire Plan Bravo, out.”
I waited for shot and splash, and we watched BB rounds crack overhead, right on the spot I had planted the Thumper. Three volleys, landing on a pre-plotted grid. My GPS had told me where to drop the thumper, on coordinates I had worked out from Google Maps and shared with the artillery.
We watched the Zs get cut down. Fighting Zs is easy, you just have to be smart about it. It’s when you fight stupid that you die.
I yelled “I love it when a plan comes together!” and mimicked lighting a cigar.
“Old Balls! You would remember that show,” shouted Brit at me, over the crump of the distant artillery.
Chapter 12
It wasn’t an ambush. More like what the Army calls “meeting engagement”. Basically, we bumped into each other.
We were humping through the woods, avoiding Fort Ann, traveling on the east side of the river. We had our eyes peeled for Zombies, not for people. I think the sight of armed living people froze Jacob for a split second, but that was all it took. They opened fire, we opened fire and attempted to break contact, hauling ass backwards the way we came. Rounds were flying through the brush as each of us let off a magazine in the direction of our attackers and then peeled back ten meters. When the last person had burned a full mag, we tore off across an open field til we got to the next tree line, then grounded.