Well, I guess morale was OK. As the sun came up, I broke out the handy wipes and cleaned yesterday’s dust and sweat off of my face, armpits and crotch. Then I shaved with cold water, using my canteen cup and the truck mirror. Through the cab of the truck, I could see Redshirt applying camouflage to his face, making a series of vertical stripes from forehead to chin.
“Hey Red,” I called through the window “putting your war paint on?”
“Yes I am, Sergeant. Today is going to be bad shit. I can feel it in my bones.”
“OK, but just don’t get caught up in the irregular part of Irregular Scouts. You’re still a part of the Army, unlike Brit, Ahmed or Ziv.”
“I got you, Boss. I just have a bad feeling about today, and I want to go to war properly, if you know what I’m saying”
“Just keep your coup stick in your ruck sack, OK?”
“You got it. Coup don’t count on zombies, and I’m a Navajo, anyway. We ain’t the same, you know.”
I looked around and the guys were acting pretty serious. Ahmed had unrolled his prayer mat and was kneeling east, in the direction of the radioactive crater that was Mecca. Ziv was sharpening the large machete he wore strapped across his back. Hell, it wasn’t a machete, it was a small sword. Esposito worked on his new .22 magnum M4-a3, getting used to the action and practicing feeding the long stick magazine into the well. Doc was cleaning his shotgun and Brit sat on the roof of one of the trucks, staring at the sun coming up over the Great Plains. I watched her for a minute, her red hair gently moving in the faint morning breeze. She saw me looking and looked back at me, a small smile on her face.
“OK, let’s go! SP in five mikes, lock and load once we get outside the gate. Brit, you’re driving 06, with me as TC and Red on the gun. Tech Sergeant Ozturk, you will be riding on 05 with Ahmed driving, Doc as TC, and Ziv on the gun. Try not to touch anything. Espo, you are in 05, and you are Sergeant Ozturk’s personal bodyguard.”
Red climbed into the turret and I handed him up a can of ammo for the MK-19A2. He laid the belt of 40mm shotgun shells in the breech. The –A2 was a standard 40mm automatic grenade launcher. The shells, however, instead of being grenades, were oversized shotgun shells which fired about a hundred steel pellets in a killing range out about a hundred meters. It made the barrel useless for firing the grenades after a bunch of shells destroyed the rifling, but who needed grenades against zombies anyway? I was happy to have the extra firepower for once.
“Ugh, this thing moves like a pig with all that extra armor and the steel zombie catcher on the front.” Brit tested the brakes a few times, resulting in a jerky motion that threw Red around in the turret. He kicked her in the shoulder. “Hey, quit it, Squaw! That shit hurts!”
“Quit screwing around, let’s go.” I told her, then keyed the handmike on the radio as we rolled through the gap in the concertina wire at the front lines.
“Griffin Main, this is Lost Boys Six, SP this time, mark, over.” As I talked, I looked out the window. Hundreds of Abrams main battle tanks, their main guns replaced with short, stubby shotgun cannons, Bradley Scout armored personnel carriers, and the troop carriers, the real killers. Bradley chassis with the turrets removed, and even old M-113 APCs, all with a steel wall about three feet high welded around the top. The troops rode on them, firing over the sides, unreachable by any zombies and protected from potshots Reavers or other uncooperative civilians might take.
The radio crackled back right away. I appreciated a TOC that was awake at all hours. “This is Griffin Main. Lost Boys, SP 0542. Happy hunting, over.”
“Lost Boys, Roger out.”
Chapter 29
The highway was clear all the way to the airport. We occasionally caught a Z with our front bumper. OK, Brit occasionally swerved to catch a Z with the steel V on the front of the truck. By the time we pulled up to the airport fence, the front end was covered with dark splashes of zombie blood.
“You’re cleaning that off at the wash rack when we get back.” She stuck her tongue out at me as we bounced over a ditch, and she wound up biting it. “Serves you right,” I said.
We got onto the runway and hauled ass, pushing the trucks up as fast as they would go, braking to a hard stop in front of the tower facility. I had Brit drive into the front doors, smashing them aside, then pulling back. We parked one truck in front of the doors, blocking access.
“OK, you know the drill. Me, Doc, Brit and Donut, and Espo, we’re going in. Ahmed, you, Red and Ziv maintain the perimeter with the trucks. Keep 05 driving around so nothing sneaks up from behind the building.” Ahmed for long range shots at random Zs, Ziv on the 249 for suppressive fire and Red on the 19 for close-in action.
The tower offices were dark, only illuminated by the morning sunlight filtering through the dirty windows. I didn’t expect much Zombie activity in here because the airport would have shut down early in the collapse, and the employees would have fled. I was right; we encountered nothing. Still, by the time we got to the tower stairs, I was soaked in sweat from adrenaline that flooded through me each time we kicked a door open. Brit and I took turns being the first one through each door, and it got nerve racking. At one point, Brit actually fired at a life sized safety poster pinned to a wall. Three rounds of .22, two of them hitting right in the posterized Flight Attendant’s forehead.
“Great shot!” She looked sheepish. “You’re starting to make this a habit, you know” said Doc, laughing at her.
“Hey, better alive and feeling stupid than dead.”
I called back to Ahmed with all clear in answer to his query about the shots, and we moved up the stairwell of the tower. When we got to the top, the Air Force Sergeant went to work. He pulled out a large, heavy box from his ruck.
“What’s that?” asked Espo.
“Capacitor, with a built-in modulator. Gives me a few minutes of 120 volt AC. Allows me to check out the electronics, computers and stuff, see if they’re still working.”
“You mean like the radar and stuff?”
“No, the radar isn’t here at the airport. That gets run by a FAA regional center, can’t remember where the one is for this local area. No, all the info for the flight traffic controllers would be fed here by a data uplink from there. We’ll have to set up a mobile radar unit to run this field.”
Lights powered up around us, screens flickering to life. “Looking good, looking good,” he muttered under his breath.
“Uh, Nick?”
“Yeah, Doc?”
He was standing at the tower windows, looking westward through a pair of binos. I raised mine to look.
“Oh, damn.”
From around the terminal on the opposite side of the airport came several thousand zombies. Hundreds more streamed from around the edge of the building.
“I guess the recon flights missed that horde.”
“I guess so.”
Down below, Ahmed started firing at the horde but his hits were lost in the crowd. A long stream of tracers reached out and started slapping into the front, rounds skipping off the tarmac into them. A few fell, but like all unaimed, automatic fire, the hits were mostly wasted. Blowing holes through the undead didn’t stop them.
“Ahmed, get up here with those guys and blow the stairs!”
He didn’t answer, but the firing stopped. Then I heard one of the truck engines start again through the open tower window, and 06 raced out onto the runway. It moved down the front of the horde, and I heard the bang bang bang of the automatic shotgun.
“Ziv and Red took the truck, said they would buy us some time to rig explosives. I am coming up.” I acknowledged, but I knew what Zivkovic and Redshirt didn’t. Zombie crowds didn’t break in the face of heavy weapons. Red was too inexperienced, and Ziv had been fighting a running, hiding battle for the last two years on his own.