The last time I had seen her had been just outside Buffalo. She had asked me to join her team of bio-researchers who were capturing zombies and experimenting on them. Her exact words were, I think, “collateral damage to civilians doesn’t matter. We have more important things to do.”
She smiled her sweet, evil smile at me.
“I heard your team tends to run into concentrations of infected on a regular basis. I have an experimental vaccine I want you to use the next time you encounter a large group of infected.”
“Are you sure? That doesn’t sound very evil.”
“You enjoy your job, Sergeant Agostine. I enjoy mine. How are we any different?”
I laughed. “You enjoy killing people and causing pain. I enjoy beating the enemy. I don’t enjoy killing.”
She gave me a blank look. Frigging sociopath.
“Enough with the verbal chit chat.” She handed me a bandolier of 40mm grenade rounds for the M-203.
“These have been modified with an aerosol spray containing a skin contact serum. If you fire it over a crowd of infected, it should work within a few minutes. Those who are fresh corpses may be cured. Those who have decomposed past the point where life is possible, or who suffered life threatening wounds in their initial infection, should just drop.”
Doc took them from her and looked them over. There were five of them.
“So what’s the catch? I don’t trust you, Ma’am. What if I refuse to do it?”
“Doctor. If you refuse, these two gentlemen will shoot you dead on the spot.” The bodyguards glanced at Doc and I, and I knew those guys would drill us through the head at a single word, probably a prearranged code mixed into a sentence so that we didn’t have time to react.
She had us, and there was nothing I could do about it. “What’s to stop us from just dumping them in the river after you leave?”
“There is a transponder in each one that will tell us time of firing, location, etc. I may be evil, Nick, but I’m not stupid. In fact, I’m actually a genius.”
“No, you’re actually a sociopath. OK, we’ll do your dirty work, Dr. Morano.”
“Please see that you do. I’d hate to have you killed.”
“I doubt that you would hate it.”
“No, you’re right, I’d probably record it and play it over and over.”
That was one crazy evil woman. She turned and walked back to the helo that was spinning up again. One of the Delta guys looked back and gave us a thumbs up. I gave him the finger.
Specialist Mya came up behind us. “What was that all about?”
Doc handed her the bandolier. “Go get yourself a different weapon with a 203 launcher on it. We need you to replace Jonesy’s firepower anyway. Then go practice with a half a dozen HE rounds into the river. Take Redshirt with you and have him show you what to do.”
She looked at the rounds in the belt. “What about these?”
“Those” I answered her, “are a potential cure for the infection. We’re going to fire it over a crowd of zombies and see what happens.”
Her eyes got wide. I could see her professional interest as a medic had been piqued.
“Coool!”
We were cleaning weapons an hour later when we heard a blood-curdling scream of agony carry across the island. Doc, Brit and I jumped up and ran as fast we could in the direction of where Mya and Redshirt had been lobbing 203 rounds into the river.
She lay on the ground, with Redshirt standing there ten feet away from her. We were the first to get there. Doc made to push past him, but he tackled Doc and threw him to the ground.
“DOC, NO!” he yelled. “It’s poisoned! Nerve agent!”
Doc’s face went pale and he stood. The rest of us halted where we were.
Mya lay on the ground, twitching in agony. She had vomited and her back arched in spasms, her scream fading as her jaw opened and closed. Beside her a 203 round lay on the ground, one of the ones from the bandolier LTC Morano had given us.
Brit pulled her pistol from her leg holster and shot Mya through the heart, twice. She arched one last time and fell still.
“She said she wanted to check out the shells with the medicine in them, see how they worked. She took one out and I guess she handled it wrong or something. Next thing I knew, she staggered and yelled at me to run, said it was nerve gas and then said something like V, then she fell to the ground and started vomiting and she screamed once.” V meant VX, a nerve agent. As a medic, Mya knew what was happening to her.
He turned around and threw up in the bushes. I handed him a canteen. The Infantry guys showed up and Brit motioned them back. Doc filled them in and they filed away. This part of the island would remain off limits, along with her corpse. We wouldn’t even be able to bury her.
“She saved your life, Red. You would have been dead if you tried to help her.”
Doc came up. “VX nerve agent. Bad shit, Nick. Persistent oil-based. If we had fired that and it had misfired, or blown back at us, we could have all been wiped out. What the fuck were they thinking?”
“They were thinking they needed to do a field experiment, and they didn’t care who happened to get burnt in the process.”
I looked back at Mya lying dead in the moonlight. I would file a report back to JSOC, and I’m sure we would see LTC Morano again. I had an urge to wrap my hands around her throat, but we would have to be very, very careful around her.
Chapter 9
“GO! GO! GO!” The back ramp was down before we hit the ground. A swirl of dust and ash obscured the LZ, lifted by the rotor wash of the other CH-47. The Chinook had touched its back wheels down sixty seconds before us, dropping off two squads of infantry, then lifting back off. One more squad and a heavy weapons team filled the canvas seats in our chopper, along with the rest of the Zombie Killers. As soon as the ramp touched, the guys filed out in two lines, breaking left and right to add to the perimeter. Then the heavy weapons team carried out their M-249 SAWs and the head-high tripods they were mounted on, along with crates of extra ammo. The infantrymen quickly started pushing debris into some kind of perimeter, unraveling concertina wire in a big loop around the front doors of the Home Depot and pounding stakes to hold it into the parking lot.
The heavy weapons team had four M-249s that they set up to cover likely areas of approach. Each light machine gun was mounted on a tripod which held the weapon roughly five and half feet off the ground, just about the average height of a zombie head. Yeah, aimed shots were better than automatic fire, but sweeping a packed mass of a zombie hoard with a couple hundred rounds a minute at head height, if you’ve got the ammo, can work wonders. The Infantry worked hard to push any moveable cars to create channels for zombies to be herded into and machine gunned. Already single shots were popping off from the Designated Marksmen teams, taking out a few Zs that were stumbling around on the road.
The doors of Home Depot were shattered, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Sometimes a closed storefront would hide a pack of zombies that had become trapped in the store. This one had been hit by looters, but I was pretty sure that we would be able to find everything we needed. I led the way in the stack, followed by Brit, Doc and Redshirt. We all carried shotguns for quick snapshots down the aisle. Ahmed stayed outside with the two Infantry guys we had picked up, Corporal Killeen and Specialist Desen, doing some very long range sniping.
We moved through the front of the store, coming up dry. That was the easiest part. The hard part would be going down through the aisles, with limited visibility, making noise stumbling over debris and trying to keep our footing. Stepping into the first aisle, we snapped on head-mounted and weapon-mounted flashlights. Even in bright daylight, the store was dark and gloomy. We could have used NVGs but if you looked back at the bright sunlight at the front of the store they tended to blank out.