I let the team join in, shooting from behind the horde. Wasting ammo, but it had been a long day and they needed to blow off steam. Sometimes shooting things was the best way.
Half an hour later, a platoon of infantry was clearing the building below us. The rest of the dismounts in Mechanized Infantry Company were walking slowly through the pile of zombie bodies, firing individual head shots into any that showed movement. The guys downstairs advanced into each room behind plastic riot shields, forcing the zombies back, and the line behind them fired with pistols at the zombies’ heads.
“SERGEANT AGOSTINE, ALL CLEAR!!!” yelled the lead trooper as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
“COMING DOWN!”
Ziv refused a medical chopper, instead moving supported into the truck, where he climbed into the back seat. The rest of us loaded up and rolled out.
Red called down from the turret. “Sarge, this gun is screwed. The feed tray mechanism is jammed all to hell.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just cover things with your rifle, and keep your eyes open. There have got to be leakers from the infantry attack.”
“Roger, Chief.”
We rolled up the highway, back toward the forward line of TF Bronco. I was half dozing, listening to the road pass under the big treads of the truck tires and keeping my eyes open for any threat. I was tired and so was the rest of the crew, but sleep would have to wait.
“Oh shit!” yelled Brit, and I felt the truck start to tip off to one side. The road had crumbled underneath the weight of the truck, and we started to fall off the side down into a dry streambed. Flash floods over the past two years, without maintenance crews fixing the back fill, had undermined the blacktop.
I reached back and grabbed Red’s legs and pulled as hard as I could. We hadn’t had time to practice rollover drills, and I hoped Red remembered from Basic. He slid off the strap holding him up and fell inside just as we went completely over.
I don’t remember what happened next. I woke up to Red cutting my seatbelt. I fell out of the truck and onto him. The truck itself was lying on its roof, the wheels were still spinning, a cloud of dust settling around us.
Brit lay on the ground, unmoving. Red had pulled her out first. As he dragged me over next to her around the front of the truck, I screamed. My collar bone grated together and I felt like I was going to puke. The world swam in and out of my vision, going grey.
“Sarge, Brit seems OK, she’s just out cold, still breathing. There are bunch of Zs coming down the wash. I’m going to head them off. Doc is trying to rope down here, but the road edge is really crumbly.”
“O-OK. Something in my shoulder, it’s messed up. Give, give me my pistol.”
Red chambered a round and pressed my .22 into my left hand. Then he ran out of my field of vision. I heard him start to fire.
I think I passed out for a few seconds. When I woke up, three Zombies were coming around the back end of the truck. Damn, damn, damn. I raised the pistol and started snapping off shots. It was hard to aim, and my vision was blurry. I hit one in the head and it went down, but the other two came closer. One made it to Brit and I emptied the magazine into it. It fell backwards, away from her.
I felt an incredible pressure on my ankle, and then a hot, burning sensation. I looked down to see the last one, a little girl with her face rotted off, had bitten me just above the top of my boot. She kept biting, chewing her way into the muscle, her broken teeth sinking deeper. The pain was a red hot poker shooting up my leg.
Chapter 31
I screamed and reached down, swatting at the creature with the empty pistol. I could feel the infection burning into my leg. It was like a hot piece of steel, still glowing red, shoved into my leg.
The thing’s head exploded, and the round continued its flight to bury itself into the ground, carrying a trail of bloody red mist. I didn’t look to see where the shot had come from. I reached across my shoulder and tore the tourniquet off my body armor. Kicking the corpse of the zombie off me, I wrapped the tourniquet tightly around my leg, just below the knee and a few inches above the wound. I twisted it as hard as I could, feeling it cut into my leg. Then I ripped open the leg of my uniform.
A raw bite mark was in my calf, just above the top of my boot. Dammit all to Hell! It burned like someone was pouring raw alcohol on it. I let go of my leg and crawled over to Brit, who was still unconscious, and lay down with my head on her chest. Waves of nausea came over me and actually felt my eyes roll back into my head.
I woke up to a slap across my face.
“Nick, wake up,” said Ahmed. He slapped me again and I threw a wild punch at him. He sat back, easily avoiding it. He still kept his pistol trained straight at my head.
“He is awake. Not a Z yet, either.”
Doc leaned over me, blocking out the sun. “Nick, you got the TQ on in time, but you know what we’ve gotta do. I’ll make it as painless as possible. Here, bite on this.”
Ahmed gently put a canvas strap into my mouth. “Go for it,” I mumbled. How bad could it be? My leg felt numb already.
“OK, I can’t give you anything for the pain.”
I spit the canvas strap out and yelled “Just shut the hell up and do it!” I looked over at Brit, who was awake, sitting up against the side of the rolled over HUMVEE. She looked back at me, tears streaming down her face. I smiled.
“It’s just a flesh wound, Babe,” I said, and reached for her hand as Ahmed put the strap back into my mouth.
Good thing he did, too. Doc cut into the muscle of my calf with a razor blade, in a neat circle around the bone, slicing through ligaments and blood vessels. I bit down hard on the canvas strap, so hard I felt like my teeth would break. I screamed into it, a soul-wrenching scream I tried to keep inside of me, and squeezed Brit’s hand so hard I thought I would crush the bones.
“Almost there, Nick.” Doc reached a bloody hand out and Ahmed handed him a small, battery-powered Mikita grinding saw from his medkit. It whirred to life and I could feel the vibration as he cut into the bone. My leg was a dull throb that pounded up my body.
The last thing I saw was Doc lighting the torch he carried, bending over to cauterize the blood vessels. I felt the thud of the chopper blades as the MEDEVAC helo thundered down onto the road bed overhead, and smelled my burnt flesh. Before I passed out again, I heard Brit.
“Doc, tell me he’s going to make it.”
“He’ll live, if he doesn’t go into shock.”
She squeezed my hand and whispered in my ear, “Live, dammit.”
The world fell away from me, and I fell with it.
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All work copyrighted 2013 Think On Productions and John F. Holmes
THE WARTHOGS OF IRREGULAR SCOUT TEAM 5
by
Ryan Szimanski
Chapter 1
“You know what sucks about the zombie apocalypse?” I thought to myself as I walked alone through the rain. “No more comfort foods. I miss pretzels.”
I had just gotten out of my two days of quarantine after being flown by a variety of Navy and Air Force craft from Mid-Atlantic Command’s current area of operations near Baltimore back west to Seattle via Green Bay, Wisconsin, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and some field in Idaho. It was my first time in the Pacific Northwest and it had been raining ever since I jumped out of what I strongly suspect was a restored C-47 Skytrain.