War of the Undead Day 5 Page 14

  He was within an inch of screaming every obscenity he knew into the handset when the sat-phone buzzed. Hoping that he’d be able to talk directly with the artillery support element, he snatched it up. “Division artillery,” he said, his voice cracking.

  “PO authorization 3275,” a woman said and then hung up.

  Ross knew something clandestine had just happened and he felt the hackles on the back of his neck rise. Am I being watched? he wondered. Or was it the radios? Were they bugged? He almost dropped the handset as if it was coated in poison.

  It didn’t matter, he realized. What mattered was laying down the smoke as fast as he could. “I have PO authorization number 3275,” he said into the handset. From there he fed the coordinates to the Fire Direction Center. He didn’t wait around for the distant thumping of the guns. He would have to act as his own forward observer, so he took both the SINCGARS unit and the sat-phone, and quickly walked away.

  At least this part of the military was working. Not thirty seconds later there came a single thump from miles to the rear. It was followed by a tearing sound and then a crumpled sort of explosion. Smoke erupted almost right on the river itself. With the soft wind, that was too close.

  “FCC, this Able 30, can you walk that west one-hundred meters?” Another thump, another tear through the air. “Perfect FDC. Fire for effect.”

  Sixteen rounds were all that could be allotted, forcing Ross to scurry around as fast as he could to make sure his men were resupplied with the meager stores available. He then sprayed down everyone until there were half-choking on the stench of bleach, and then had them hide again.

  Next, because he couldn’t trust his newly frocked XO, he had to pull his reserve company from the line without leaving any gaps and distribute the frightened newbies who had been filtering down to him. And lastly, he had to “relocate” the people who were overheard complaining about headaches or who were seen to be rubbing their temples or the like.

  The whispers concerning these people always got to him eventually. On average the battalion was losing eight people an hour, and somebody had to make the decision that would doom them. As acting C.O. Ross knew he couldn’t pass the buck.

  “Looking for Bravo,” he called out in a low voice as he went north up the line. When he finally found the company, he pulled aside the commander, a jumped-up sergeant like himself. “Who’s got the headache?”

  “Over by that leanin’ tree. The one sticking up out of the water. Don’t know the guy’s name. Careful, he started cursin’ like five minutes ago. I mean like real loud.”

  It was a bad sign and a dangerous situation. If the man got too loud, he might bring down the horde on them and Ross’ battalion had been bearing the brunt of the fighting for too many hours now to go on much longer. Ross hurried to the tree. With the smoke drifting over the cadavers and casting the sunlight in a green glow, everyone around the tree had something of an alien tinge.

  “You guys doing alright over here?” he asked mildly. Although they wore camouflage, none of them were real soldiers. They were an older group. All eyes shifted to a man who looked a bit like one of Ross’ uncles. His eyebrows pointed in and down, and his grey toothbrush mustache gave him both a peevish and a stodgy air. “Maybe you should come with me, sir.” Ross’ M4 was held loosely and at the same time ready to be yanked up at the least flinch.

  “Maybe you should fuck off.”

  That was telling, and Ross’ grip on his gun grew slightly tighter. He glanced to the others, all but one of whom averted their eyes. Ross chose the one that didn’t. “You. Help your friend to the rear for evaluation. Then get your ass back here, pronto.”

  “That’s not how you talk to your Governor,” Christopher Gore snapped. “Have a little respect.”

  Ross gave the “Governor” a closer look; he was different. His eyes were a bit brighter, his clothes newer and cleaner. His hair was fancy, unlike Ross’ high and tight. So this was Clarren. Ross wasn’t impressed. “Listen, jackass, he’s not my governor. Look at the patch.” He jabbed a thumb at the Screaming Eagle sewn on his shoulder. “I’m with the 101st and you’re the asshole that killed most of my division and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of others. And for what?”

  “To protect his people,” Gore shot back, heaving himself up. He squared his drooping shoulders, planted his flat feet and thrust his sagging belly into Ross.

  Never one to back down, Ross stood his ground and demanded, “By sacrificing the people of Connecticut and Rhode Island!”

  “They could have fought just like we did.”

  Their noses were so close to each other that they were practically fencing with them; Clarren put a hand between their faces. “Stop,” he said softly. They both took a step back, each glaring at the other. “Stop, both of you. Whoever I was and whatever I did yesterday doesn’t matter. Today I’m a soldier. If I have to apologize for anything, then I apologize. And if I have to make an act of contrition, then let this be it.”

  “Of course, sir,” Gore said. “Well said, well said.”

  Ross had to agree. It had been so well said that he felt an immediate guilt for having brought up the past in the first place and dropped his eyes. They fell on the infected man with the toothbrush mustache and darkening eyes. Seeing him caused the guilt to dry up.

  “You haven’t even scratched the surface of contrition, soldier.” To Ross, a civilian didn’t become a soldier just by putting on someone else’s uniform and picking up a gun. “To start, I want you to escort your friend to the rear and find the battalion head-quarters. You’ll take a turn working there.”

  “Headquarters?” Clarren started to argue. “I’m not here to push papers around. I’m here to…”

  Ross snapped his fingers in front of Clarren’s face. “A real soldier follows orders. Do as you’re told, Private. Besides, going to the rear and getting out of the smoke might just clear your head. The air is cleaner back there. Right?” This last, he had directed toward the infected man, who quickly agreed.

  Clarren swallowed his argument, shouldered his rifle and said, “Come on, Joe. It looks like we can best serve the war effort by wielding a three-hole punch.” He led Joe Kokolakis up the slope and through the clouds of smoke. Once on higher ground, the smoke dissipated, and he was surprised to see that the day was fine and clear. It was one of those mornings that made spring in Massachusetts perfect.

  The two walked, strolled really, up a hill to a pleasant suburban street where the homes had been properly maintained. The yards had recently been mown, the bushes were trimmed, and the trees shaped by years of exact pruning. The only thing wrong with what felt like a reunion with the world was the smell. The acrid smell of the smoke shells had hidden the fetid stench of thousands of corpses.

  Kokolakis didn’t seem to mind it, but Clarren felt like gagging. The smell did not get better as they followed signs to a white-trimmed house with a long driveway that ended at a basketball hoop.

  Directly beneath it, two men were arguing about oysters of all things. One was dressed in camo, the other looked overly warm in a heavy winter coat that hung down to his knees. They both wore blue masks and gloves.

  “Battalion headquarters?” Clarren asked.

  The oyster talk dried up in a second and the two eyed Clarren and Kokolakis suspiciously. “Yeah. Who’s who?”

  It was an odd question. “If that’s some sort of password code, I don’t know it. I’m supposed to work a shift here.”

  “And I’m clearin’ my fuckin’ head,” Kokolakis said, his Boston accent picking up suddenly.

  These answers seemed to suffice and the man with the heavy coat said, “Okay good. Let’s go inside, but first leave your weapons. It’s policy.” Once they had left their weapons leaning against the garage, the man pointed to the door with his left hand; his right was stuffed deep into the pocket of the heavy coat. It was then that Clarren felt a shiver of fear.

  When he hesitated, the man in the camouflage said, “Go,” with a h
ard tone to his voice.

  Clarren used to have nightmares just like this. Coming up as a Boston politician had meant meeting with some very unsavory types, and there had always been the possibility that some union thug would make a demand that he couldn’t answer to and then…

  “Go on. Inside.”

  Compared to the beautiful morning, the garage was dark, purposely so. There were black plastic bags covering the windows and more plastic underfoot. The air was saturated with a strange mixed aroma of motor oil and bleach.

  Clarren’s hands involuntarily raised to shoulder height as he stepped into the empty room. “I think this is a mistake. I want to fight. It’s why I came in the first place. Hey, are you listening?”

  One of the two men flicked on the overhead lights. These were a quartet of 400 watt bar-lights that caused Clarren to flinch from the brightness. He was about to go on when Kokolakis roared out, “Turn those fuckin’ things off!” He was hiding behind both hands, cringing in pain.

  “Step back,” the man with the heavy coat said to Clarren. The gun that had been in his pocket was out now. “Do we have a positive?” he asked his camouflaged friend.

  “We have a positive,” the other man replied, his voice tight and high, sounding as though he were trying to hold his breath and speak at the same time.

  The gun came up, pointing at the back of Kokolakis’ head.

  “Wait,” Clarren cried, suddenly realizing the truth about what was happening.

  “Wait for what?” the man in camo asked. “He’s not going to get any better. From here it just gets bad.”

  Clarren was both numb and dumb, unable to say anything. He had known Joe Kokolakis since high school. They were, in fact third cousins. Kokolakis had once laid down a thousand-dollar bribe to get Clarren out of some serious shit. Shit that would have derailed his political life.

  And yet, Clarren could do nothing but gape as his friend was shot in the head. The .25 caliber slug rattled around inside his head, killing him instantly, and he fell with a baleful thud onto the plastic-covered cement.

  “Get gloves and a mask, then wrap him up. We’ll help you bring him out back.”

  Clarren wore a slapped expression. His mouth was hanging open and when he spoke it felt like it was on a loose hinge. “What’s outside?”

  “The fire pit.”

  The ex-governor turned and vomited next to the corpse of his friend.

  2-9:42 a.m.

  Baltimore, Maryland

  “Uh, hold on there, Stubby. You just blew through eight-hundred feet.” The multirole F-15E Strike Eagle really hadn’t blown through anything. With its twin Pratt & Whitney engines at full thrust, it could climb at a rate of 50,000 feet a minute, but just then he was taking it easy, almost gliding.

  Tony “Stubby” Alvarez glanced at the altimeter. He was rising gently to two-thousand feet. “Okaaay,” he replied, drawing the word out. “I’m not seeing that.” The numbers registered on his brain, but they couldn’t replace the images that were haunting him.

  The blatant lie had his weapons systems officer frowning. He had four different methods to track the plane’s exact position in the air and they all read the same. “Are you certain? Everything’s in the green back here. Check your Sniper.”

  Tony didn’t bother checking his targeting pod. Instead, he looked out the side of his cockpit and wished he could climb even higher. Even from this height, the figures running for cover along the highway still looked too much like real people. Because they were people. He could no longer fool himself.

  On his last run, he had made the mistake of looking away from his instruments just as he had banked around. It was as if he had been looking through a telescope, and with perfect clarity he had seen a little girl. She wasn’t a monster or a zombie, or whatever the grunts on the ground were fighting. It was a little girl with a pink ribbon in her thick black hair. She had dark skin, which made her eyes seem huge. She was staring right up at Tony when his cluster munitions exploded in a vast brilliant light.

  He had murdered that little girl and countless others.

  “The Sniper’s bent,” he heard himself whisper and pushed the throttles forward. The engines roared, and he was thrust back in his seat.

  “Damn it, Stubby!” his weapons officer cried. “It’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. What are you doing? We are ten seconds from release. Eight. Stubby! Five…”

  Tony banked hard to his right, swinging north. In one ear, he had his WSO barking at him and in his other he had control demanding to know what was going on. “Tango Zero One,” Tony said, “this is Five Zero Five, I was spiked. Did you pick it up? Over.”

  Behind him, his WSO pulled away his mask and covered the mic with his hand. “We weren’t pinged because there aren’t any damned bogies out there, Stubbs. What’s going on, really?”

  “I-I heard it, I swear. The threat receiver just went off and I…” The excuse was the stuff a grade-schooler would attempt. “Maybe you’re probably right. I must’ve misheard. We’ll set up again. Or…or we could go back.”

  “With a full payload? Think that over for a second, Stubbs. It’s one thing to have a uh, I don’t know, a brain fart or whatever, but to skip a mission altogether? They’ll ground you at a minimum. At a minimum, Stubbs! They could arrest you, you know. They arrested General Stanimar and they classified his entire staff as nonessential. I heard they were bussed to the front an hour ago.”

  Tony had heard the same thing. “Yeah. Okay. It was a brain fart. You were right.” I just won’t look out the window, he thought to himself as he began to pull the big bird around. Of course, the moment he thought it, his eyes strayed to the right and he found himself looking down on Highway 1. There was a crowd on it. They weren’t running. In fact, they were barely walking.

  “Look!” he cried, feeling a mania grab him. It was like a jolt of caffeine. “Look at all of them. That’s who we should be bombing. Get it set up. Tango Zero One, this is Five Zero Five, we had a hiccup. Situation now normal. We have a visual on a large group of IPs heading southwest.”

  “Copy that Five Zero Five.”

  “Setting up a run.” Tony was almost out of his turn and had dropped down to eight hundred feet. This was the sort of fight that he would gladly be a part of. He turned on the Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod. He almost didn’t need it. His jet was cruising on a straight shot down the highway. Nothing could be simpler than a bombing run like this. And it was the right thing to do.

  “Negative Five Zero Five. Return on a south bound. Target, two-six miles out.”

  Tony felt his stomach lurch and his hands go numb. He was only twenty-six miles from a fresh murder scene and in an F-15E that was barely half a minute away. How many innocent people had he already killed? How many more would die?

  “None,” he whispered as he over-shot the densest mass of zombies he had yet seen. Once more he hauled the bird around.

  Behind him his WSO, First Lieutenant Matt Wolters covered the mic again. “They said negative, Stubby! Break off!”

  “Shut up, Matt!” he raged. “We’re doing this.” Tony took a deep breath before drawling into the radio, “Enemy targets in view, Tango Zero One. Will return south bound. Roger.”

  “Five Zero Five, you are not authorized to engage at this time. Continue to your objective.”

  The center of the horde was coming up quickly and Tony had to make a decision. Was he going to drop his bombs as ordered and be patted on the back for murder or would he disobey orders and be arrested?

  “Ten seconds,” his WSO growled.

  Again, numbness spread through his hands and crept up his arms. Before it got to his elbows, a woman broke in. “There are civilians within the mission’s bombing zone. Do not engage. You are not authorized.”

  “Who is this? Stay off the net. Disregard…”

  “Five Zero Five releasing!” The Eagle jumped a bit as the first CBU-87 combined effects munition dropped away. It immediately began to spin, releasing the 202
submunitions. Each of the yellow bomblets shot out so that when they landed, an entire section of the highway went up in flame and smoke.

  Knowing he would never be able to come around for a second pass, Tony kept pickling off the CBUs one after another, leaving behind a long path of destruction.

  “Holy fuck,” Matt whispered. He was turned in his seat, his head cranked all the way around, gaping at the thousands of burnt and dismembered bodies. As far as bombing runs went, this one was epic.

  “You heard that voice, right?” Tony asked him. “I told you there was a glitch. Tango Zero One, did you hear that?” He was sweating through his flight suit. “Was that authentic? It’s hard enough up here without distractions.”

  There was a squawk of static before the radio crackled again. “This is Tango Zero One. Disregard any intrusion from here on out.”

  From here on out? Tony wilted into his seat at these words. He would cling to the woman’s timely intervention and blame her for everything. She would keep him out of the stockade, at least for now. But what would he do on his next bombing run? Or the one after that?

  Chapter 11

  1-10:24 a.m.

  Weldon, New York

  Pretty much all the real monsters had dispersed, leaving only the broken ones, Jaimee Lynn Burke’s pack and the ugly Chinaman, who was a huge disappointment. He had stuffed himself silly with pills and was lying there with his mouth hanging open, showing a disgusting white tongue set in black gums.

  “He stink,” one of the half-eaten little girls grumbled.

  “How would y’all know?” Jaimee Lynn sniped. “Y’all don’t even have a nose.” The girl was missing an ear as well, though what that had to do with the price of gas Jaimee Lynn didn’t know. That had been one of her daddy’s favorite things to say. Somehow, everything had to do with the price of gas and given enough time John Burke could find the connection.

  If he had been there, her daddy would have sussed it out in no time. The building and grounds were strange to Jaimee Lynn. Not because of the destruction, of course, or the pools of black blood and the corpses scattered all about carpeted by clouds of buzzing flies three inches deep. No, all that was normal stuff to her demon mind.