The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead Read online

  The Apocalypse Crusade 4

  War of the Undead Day 4

  A Zombie Tale by Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2017

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

  The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

  The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9

  The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10

  The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

  The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

  Pen(Novella)

  A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

  The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)

  The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)

  The Drawer(Short Story)

  The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)

  The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

  Forward

  This is the story of the fourth day of the apocalypse as seen from the perspective of those who fought on the front lines of the Quarantine Zone and by those who were trapped within. Although there are easily ten-thousand stories from that time, few give us as full an understanding of the dire nature of the emergency as those depicted within these pages.

  I have assembled a short list of the pertinent individuals mentioned within and they are as follows:

  Dr. Thuy Lee—Lead researcher at the R & K Pharmaceuticals Walton facility. Using the innovative and inadequately tested Combination Cell Therapy, she discovered a cure for cancer, however her work was sabotaged resulting in the subsequent apocalypse. She is currently on the FBI’s most-wanted list and stranded in the Quarantine Zone.

  Ryan Deckard—One-time security chief at the Walton facility, now a desperate survivor trying to find a way to save Dr. Lee. Not only is he in love with her, he believes she is humanity’s last hope.

  Anna Holloway—As a front, Anna worked as a research assistant at the Walton facility. In truth, she was a corporate spy for a competing pharmaceutical company. She is in possession of a stolen vial of Com-cells and, after blackmailing her way out of the Quarantine Zone, she is on the run from the FBI in Baltimore, Maryland.

  Lieutenant Eng of the People’s Republic of China—Eng is a spy and saboteur. In his undercover role as a research assistant, he made changes to the Com-cells which had worldwide repercussions. Along with Anna, he is on the run from the FBI in Baltimore, Maryland

  John Burke—A cancer patient who received only sterile water during the Com-cell trial. He believes that he is immune to the deadly effects of the Com-cells and is desperately trying to stay alive long enough to find his daughter.

  Courtney Shaw—A state trooper dispatcher who oversaw the initial quarantine zone around Walton. She has used her guile to keep the disease from spreading.

  PFC Max Fowler—Once a soldier in the 42nd Infantry Division, he is now simply one of many thousands struggling to survive on the wrong side of the line.

  Marty Aleman—Chief of Staff of the President of the United States. He sees himself as a “king maker,” and runs the country using the president as a figurehead.

  Jaimee Lynn Burke—Aged eight, she is the daughter of John Burke and the first person to escape the quarantine zone. She is thought to be partially immune to the Com-cells. She has become a deadly, unfeeling, sweet little killer, living and feeding in Hartford, Connecticut.

  General Mark Phillips—Commanding Officer of the newly created 7th Army. He is simultaneously fighting three wars: one against the zombies, a second against the Massachusetts National Guard, and lastly, against the President of the United States.

  Chapter 1 The Fourth Day

  1– Midnight—Shanghai, China

  China’s Communist Party called it “The single greatest engineering project in the history of mankind,” and had proudly dubbed it the Grand Canal. However, the canal was neither a canal and nor was it grand. It was in fact nothing more than a very long ditch. It was true that where the ditch ran up to the Yangtze River, it had filled partially with river water and was a great muddy mess, but three miles of linear bog did not make it a canal.

  Although not grand, it was impressive in its length and breadth, but, what was more impressive to most analysts, was the tenaciousness with which it had been built. In just seventy-two hours, a hundred and twelve mile long canyon had been hacked across the face of China.

  Tens of millions of peasants had torn at the ground with whatever implements they could find. The lucky ones had shovels, but most used sticks or broken boards or even silverware. Ten-story apartment buildings, what the Party had named “Family share units” were demolished in hours. Wrecking balls were still swinging overhead when a flood of men, women and children swarmed in like ants to grab whatever they could carry.

  During the three-day construction of the canal, thousands were injured and killed. The dead were carried off as if they were just another hunk of debris, while the wounded were expected to crawl out of the way, preferably someplace where their screams and moans wouldn’t be heard. It was considered impolite to hang around while waiting to die.

  The hive mentality of the Chinese served the party well. The Grand Canal was finished not an hour before the horde struck.

  At first, the horde was not much of a horde. The millions of zombies didn’t sweep across the land in one great wave as the nervous politicians, the frightened soldiers and the terrified peasants had expected. Instead, they came in dribs and drabs; a dozen here, a thousand there. And from across the hundred-yard wide ditch, the zombies didn’t seem nearly as frightening as everyone thought they’d be.

  For the most part, they looked like drunks in bloody rags. They would stagger and stumble through the piles of refuse and the mounds of dirt on the eastern side of the ditch before falling the seventy feet to the bottom. Some died from the fall, their heads splitting open like rotten coconuts, but most would only break a leg or an arm or a neck. Even the most injured of them would eventually start to crawl across to get at the waiting regiments. They didn’t get far. To the delight of everyone, the amped-up soldiers riddled the zombies with bullets before they got close to the other side.

  There was a great deal of cheering as if these minor victories were significant in any way.

  General Okini, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commissi
on, was one of only a handful of people who knew better. The horde’s true size, an estimated thirty-two million zombies, was a state secret that would fly in the face of the “official” count of three million. For reasons unknown to Okini, three million zombies was considered a palatable number and, supposedly, any more and the will of the people to fight would disintegrate.

  For a time, the true horde, a vast sea of undead, was held back at the expense of crippling the nation’s ability to defend itself from foreign threats. Every one of the three thousand aircraft in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force had been flying around the clock for the last three days. Transport planes made endless runs, hauling every size of bomb in the inventory to the five airfields ringing the Grand Canal. The fighters and the bombers flew sortie after sortie, taking off so loaded down that they frequently scraped the trees at the end of the runways.

  They would drop their payloads and fire their bullets into the advancing millions of undead and the carnage was unimaginable—headless bodies, pools and rivers of blood, brains splattered like old cottage cheese everywhere—and yet, Okini, who watched from his circling jet, grew more pensive with each passing hour.

  More than half of his planes were obsolete holdovers from the seventies and eighties, and were piloted by men who had, for the last five years, flown the minimum number of hours to retain their flight status, and not a minute more. It showed in the fourteen crashes, the countless near collisions and the lack of precision when unguided weaponry was used.

  What was shockingly worse than the piloting were the ordinance mishaps. A surprising number of bombs fell uselessly among the undead, having either been duds or left unarmed by ground crews who were both overworked and not properly trained for the sort of intensity demanded of them. It was embarrassing to Okini.

  What enraged him, however was when a thousand-pound bomb fell from a forklift in a staging facility and exploded, setting off a chain reaction that sent a mushroom cloud half a mile into the air. The warehouse was vaporized, a hundred tons of ordinance lost, six planes put out of action and two runways damaged. There were also many deaths, but these did not concern Okini much. He screamed down the chain of command, uselessly venting his anger. No one had a second to spare for corrective action.

  Although the Air Force was doing everything it could, airpower alone couldn’t stop the horde, and on the fourth day of the apocalypse, the forward edge of the great horde of undead made its way through the rain of fire and metal. The dribs and drabs slowly built up so that tens of thousands would come in mass assaults, striking the ditch in dozens of different places at a time.

  Okini attempted to break up the larger assaults with swarms of attack helicopters. Although the Z-10s and Z-19s were primarily antitank platforms, their nose-mounted 30mm autocannons turned the undead into mulch, but still the creatures surged into the ditch in terrifying numbers.

  Opposing them were twenty-six million exhausted peasants, armed with an assortment of scrounged-up weapons, most of which were the same tools they’d used for digging. They were desperately afraid and even with the threat of immediate execution for running away hanging over their heads, Okini knew that they would break eventually. To reinforce them, he had managed to move the better part of the 12th and 21st Armies into position; twenty infantry divisions all told. On paper it was impressive sounding, and some in the politburo began making assumptions of victory.

  Down on the ground, where the fear was palpable and the chaos unimaginable, there was nothing impressive about the soldiers. They fell into place on the line and frequently passed out from a brutal march that had few equals in all of history. Carrying seventy-pound loads, the soldiers had marched day and night from distances sometimes up to two hundred miles away.

  Yes, Okini knew better than to talk about victory. Twenty divisions, minus tanks and APCs which had to be left behind because the roads were fused with endless traffic, amounted to about two-hundred thousand men and, as he had to spread them dangerously thin across the entire line. It was not a lot, especially when he held back a tenth of the number to be used as a fast-reacting reserve unit to shore up any weak point in the line.

  Within six hours of initial contact, Okini was forced to send in his first reserve detachment at a nothing of a village called Xiawei. The ditch there had filled completely with wriggling bodies and stiffening corpses, and now the black-eyed fiends could walk across the bloody bridge.

  Panic set in as the ammunition began to run out, and the soldiers and peasants came face to face with the undead for the first time. It was pure horror to see the zombies coming on relentlessly, bleeding from a dozen bullet holes or missing huge chunks of flesh. In no time, a rumor swept up and down the line that they were unkillable demons. Some people tried to run away and were shot down, but more often than not, those who reached their breaking point would simply cower uselessly as the creatures bore down upon them.

  The battalion-sized reserve force that Okini sent arrived just in time and managed to stem the tide through a furious expenditure of ammunition, and the line held.

  There was no time for congratulations. Twenty-six minutes later, Okini had to send in a second force at another spot, and then a third, and so on. Within three hours, there were so many points in his line that were on the verge of being overrun that he had used up the last of his reserves.

  “I am no longer a general,” he told his assistant, the moment he had sent in his last unit. “I am only a spectator, now.”

  What he saw made him physically sick. From a height of a thousand feet, the CRJ200 flew down the length of what had been an immense ditch and, from the safety of his private jet, he saw the true scope of what his people were facing. The numbers of undead, even after so many bombs had been dropped on them were still mind-boggling. Okini stared with his mouth hanging slack.

  At the Yangtze, he ordered the pilot back along the ditch and he forced himself to look down and confront the inevitability of the situation. “Evacuate the peasants from here to Xeuhen,” he ordered.

  The order lacked substance and direction, and his assistant paused before relaying it down the chain of command. “Evacuate them to where, sir?”

  “West,” Okini said, simply.

  “But there won’t be enough men to fight,” his assistant replied, skating right over the edge of insubordination.

  For a moment, Okini felt a blinding fury that he had never known before. If there had been a screen door on the jet, he would have tossed his assistant out of it. The fury subsided as fast as it had come. “Give the order and then I’m going to need to speak to General Fenghe.”

  Okini’s assistant, a young colonel with a flair for organization and precise attention to detail, wilted in his chair. “General Fenghe,” he said, as if the name belonged to Dizang himself, the ruler of the ten hells. He swallowed and tried to come to grips with the order. “General Fenghe…Commanding General of the Strategic Rocket Force.”

  “Yes,” Okini said, his eyes straying back to the window. “It’s the only way.”

  The three DF-16 Dongfeng ballistic missiles with their nuclear payloads were launched sixty-three minutes later.

  2–1:59 a.m.

  Truong Mai woke slowly, cracking one crusted-over eye, but seeing nothing. Everything was dreadfully black. It was so black that under any other circumstances, Truong would have been frightened down to his core. He was too angry to be frightened. Though what he was angry about, he didn’t know. He was just angry. Furiously angry. It was as if there was a fire inside his skull, burning along every neuron.

  Groaning, he tried to sit up, only he could not. It felt as though a heavy blanket, one that weighed hundreds of pounds covered him from head to toe. “Tsao de…” His snarled curse was shoved back down his throat as dirt poured into his mouth. He didn’t question the dirt or why he was under it. That part of his brain was ash.

  A few days before, Truong had been a shoe salesman. He owned a musty little hole in the wall shop that smelled of leather
and feet. It was so small that he couldn’t afford to carry too much of a variety, and so he sold sandals and office shoes, both in only two colors, brown and black.

  Officially, he’d been in the city of Xuancheng to visit one of his of cousins, which he did twice a month. Unofficially, he was there to purchase shoes at the city morgues. Once the blood was washed off the shoes and they were newly shined, no one cared where they came from, or so Truong assumed. He never advertised where his supplier was located.

  That was the old Truong. Somehow, that man had managed, through a combination of deception, determination and amazing luck, to stay just two steps ahead of the rampaging horde of undead streaming out of Shanghai. For three days, he had run from them. Now, nearing exhaustion, he stumbled up to a low rise overlooking the newly dug Grand Canal and saw the army deployed across from him.

  Truong’s skinny legs quivered and his heart sank. Even though he hadn’t been infected at that point, he knew they would never let him pass.

  And so, caught between a horde of undead and the full might of the Chinese Army, he had done the only thing possible: he crawled into a cement pipe to hide. The walking corpses came soon after. Truong’s only view was row after endless row of stumbling feet. Many were only bleeding stumps, yet he also saw many still wore their shoes and he wondered briefly at the fortune walking by. How much were all those shoes worth?

  The bombers came next, and the ear-splitting explosions knocked all thought of shoes out of his head.

  The heat and the smoke became too much to bear and Truong fainted. When he woke, it was to the sound of gunfire, torrents of gunfire that nothing could possibly live through. Still the zombies came. Hours went by and Truong grew terribly thirsty—thirsty enough to drink the foul, brackish water creeping down the pipe.