The Failed Coward (27 page)

“What the fuck are we going to do when none of the planes can fly?” Kate had asked the assembled group late one August night under the shadow of her plane’s enormous wing. “Swim home? They can kiss my dyke ass.” She swigged from her Bud Light and shook her head in disgust.

Kate’s opinion on the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell policy’ was more of a ‘deal with, or I’ll fist you’ policy. The military’s policy on Kate specifically was one of reluctant tolerance. She was a damn fine pilot. Everyone around her loved her. Kevin thought she was a hot shit.

Every one at that conversation that night had agreed with her. Things were not getting better fast enough, and morale on the sprawling airbase had slipped dramatically. No one wanted to be the first to suggest treason and steal a plane to leave, or even knew where to fly it to, but it was on everyone’s mind.

“We need to squirrel supplies away for us. Enough for everyone here to survive for some time in the event we need to be wheels up in 20 minutes.,” Kevin suggested. Murmurs of agreement issued from those gathered around.

Jaden nodded. “Parts, fuel, ammunition, weapons, MREs, comms gear, a shitload of medical supplies, batteries, anything we’d need on a long insertion. We’d need to assume we are never getting a resupply again after we take off. We all need to know that if we leave the wire like this, there’s no coming back inside it.”

Sobering thought. If they took a bird and flew the coop, there really was no going back. Reeves may not be able to bring a court martial against Kevin’s men, but he could see to it the still serving pilots and airmen were executed. The high price of high treason.

“No one says shit to anyone not sitting right here, right now. We take us and only us. We formulate an exit strategy to get off from the base, we quietly accumulate supplies that we need until then, and we have a few flight plans ready to go in the event our fuel level isn’t sufficient to make it to the States.” Kevin looked over at Becky playing with Shelby in the corner of the massive hangar. The child had taken to the environment like a champ, and having all the people around pulled Becky back to the real world again. He then looked to Harold, the British Marine who had been with them since their narrow escape from London back in June.

Harold rubbed the short hair on his head as everyone around aimed their attention at him. He looked around quizzically, wondering why they were looking at him. Eventually he smiled, “Oh I see. No one wants the black guy to come eh? Fucking Americunts.” He shook his head, sarcasm thick in the air.

Everyone laughed at his joke. It cut the tension in the echo filled hangar bay. Kevin addressed him, “Hal, you’re not American, this is your home. I guess I just expected you to stay behind. I don’t want to presume you’re gonna leave your home for this. With us. I think we all want you to know you’re more than welcome to come along. I'd love to have you.”

All those gathered added their two cents. Fitz even took the time to set his beer down and pat the Brit on his shoulders, showing his admiration for the young man. Fitz rarely sat a beer down that still had beer in it, and the immensity of the gesture was not lost on Kevin.

Hal looked over his shoulder at Fitz, then at everyone around thoughtfully. He reflected on the situation before responding with a sad smile, “Well. I used to fight for my Queen and Country. At least, that’s what I told everyone who had a higher rank than me. But we all know the real truth of it, yeah? We fight for the men and women who stand with us, beside us. It’s been a long time since I did anything for anyone but you blokes here. I was told to stand by your side and get my mission accomplished, and that's what I should do. My home is wherever we are now.”

“Here here brother.” Jaden bumped knuckles with the Marine, and the pact was fully formed. They’d ride together, or hang together.

Everyone nodded, and they started the secret process of being ready for their world to come crashing down, yet again. 

*****

The dam broke in late November when General Reeves decided to start thinning the herd. The pressing mass of rotting, dead flesh was moving some of the impossibly heavy Hesco and Jersey barriers, and folding the chain link fences over like paper. In preparation for the failure of the defenses, an inner perimeter was established around the airfield and the structures nearest to it. Sandbag and plywood walls were built, vehicles were flipped on their sides to create blockades, and additional fortifications erected. The engineers even went so far as to dig giant trenches across open areas in the hopes the undead would shamble straight forward, and plummet into the gaps cut in the earth. A second inner ring of guard towers was constructed as well to give the sniper teams a place to fall back to should the outer defenses fail. 

Reeves had an opulent Thanksgiving meal served to the survivors in the base’s confines, and the day following he ordered the triggers pulled. Once the snipers began to open fire into the tide of undeath ringing the base, it was as if the power was abruptly routed to the inside of the zombie minds, and the delicious, living flesh inside the walls of Mildenhall suddenly appeared to them. The snipers observing the dead through their high powered optics reported seeing a simultaneous expression cross the collective faces of the dead. All at once their visages lost the passive, blank looks they shared, and immediately registered an expression of betrayed fury and life strangling rage. 

It was exactly as if a veil had been lifted, and their infernal hunger returned with a vengeance. They surged inward in a stampede of raw, unrestrained evil the likes of which the world had never seen.

The outer wall of defenses held for nearly two weeks before they fell to the horde. The snipers worked in shifts around the clock, trying to cull them. They would shoot for two solid hours, switching out gun barrels as they overheated, and taking breaks to ice their black and blue shoulders. No one was left idle for long. Those unable to fire rifles were put to work repairing defenses as they failed, or building new defenses. For the first time since the planes left to bomb the cities of The United Kingdom, each aircraft sat on the tarmac, idling as their crews drew their handguns and rifles to beat back the bloody tide surging in to suffocate them. To drown them in teeth, and pain.

The outer walls were finally defeated when someone operating a heavy duty forklift made a minor mistake. He had been working for fourteen straight hours, and when he lifted the tines of his fork to gently set a small compact on its side near a weak portion of the gate, he’d lifted it just a bit too far, and the car precariously tipped over, smashing into the plywood sheets that’d been propped against a portion of the chain fence. 

Despite being a small car, its weight and momentum carried it through the thin wood as if it were so much tissue, and smashed the relatively flimsy chain free from the steel supports it had been attached to. The wretched mass on the other side stood still, clutching their knives, swords and implements of destruction as the car tumbled into them. The clatter of their metal weapons was drowned out by the sickening crunches of their bones under the wreckage.

In a desperate and suicidal attempt to plug the breech he’d just created, the forklift operator floored the pedal of his massive lift, and sent it into the gap. He was torn down from the seat of the lift screaming as the people around him fled for the inner security of the base. The gun towers observing the situation immediately opened fire, blowing the screaming airman’s head off before he was forced to experience the pain of having his flesh torn from his bones one bite at a time. His sacrifice was for naught. 

The warning klaxons began sounding the death knell of Mildenhall.

Kevin and his men were eating lunch with Kate and her flight crew in their ghetto-esque Hesco home off the airfield at the time. It was high noon, on a windy, mid-December cloudy day, and they were discussing the merits of the different MRE meals when the dreaded klaxon began blaring.

No one said a word as they exchanged glances. Kevin and Kate both reached for their stashed satellite phones to dial Jaden to see what he knew, wherever he was. Kate waved Kevin off as she dialed his number first.

Jaden answered after two rings, “Jaden here.” He sounded winded.

“This is Kate, what’s going on?” She bit her lip and looked at Kevin as she waited for his response.

“The wall was breached on the southwest side near the ball fields and the end of the runways. Large gap in the fence I guess. They’re in, and we’re responding to the towers over there to lend support.” Jaden huffed and puffed as he ran. 

Kate could hear the echoes of the gunfire nearby through the phone speaker. The reverberation coming from the real ear and the electronic speaker threw her off for a bit. “Is it bad, are we compromised? Or is this just scary?” Everyone else in the makeshift home/bunker was getting their kit on to go to war. Every gun might need to get in the fight.

“I dunno. I don’t have eyes on yet. I’ll advise. I’d get shit ready though just in case. Will advise in ten. I’m out.” And with that, he hung up the phone.

“His fire team is moving to the southwest to lend assistance. He’ll advise in ten. I’m fueling the bitch up anyway.” Kate got up to leave, but Kevin snagged her arm, stopping her.

“Get everything loaded. I got a bad feeling about this.” Kevin’s feelings were almost never wrong, and Kate had heard of his reputation as “Sergeant Nostradamus.” She nodded at him, and Kevin let her go.

Kevin’s men watched her team leave out of the heavy fabric door they’d put up. Fitz, Quan, Harold and Kyle all looked intently at their leader as he donned his white cap once more. Kevin realized they were all looking at him, and he took a deep breath, steadying his heartbeat. From outside they heard the distant rumble of thunder, and the heavy fabric roof of their shelter began to pitter-patter with swollen English raindrops. It was like the tears of God.

Kevin charged his M4, chambering a round. “Sounds like rain. Bring your big toes fellas. Let’s go push some turds down the drain.” 

*****

Jaden and his three fire team members had relocated to a high spot in the southwest corner of the airbase near the building that had previously served as the base’s post office. The engineers had bulldozed a swath of trees and dropped massive steel shipping containers down to create a makeshift barrier and elevated firing position. 

He and his men dropped to the prone firing position after climbing to the top of the now slick steel container, and within seconds they were sending accurate rounds through the increasingly heavy rain across the baseball fields into the skulls of the undead swarming around the hole in the fence. 

Jaden observed the situation through his optics. A few dozen still living souls were hoofing it across the large field in their general direction, evidently having failed to get into the abandoned vehicles left at the fence. He watched as they slipped repeatedly on the rain soaked grass, and struggled back to their feet.

“Keep those folks running clean, fuck the dead assholes at the perimeter,” Jaden told his men. Immediately they adjusted for the range and started picking off the undead nearest the fleeing people.

He carefully observed the wall as the hole’s edge slowly eroded and became larger under the streams of armed undead. The mystery of how they were still moving in the first place was lost on him as he pondered why the hell they were holding onto weapons, and not using them. Right before his eyes he watched three of the mangled dead toss the weapons aside and tackle a rain soaked uniformed airman to the ground. Jaden watched him mouth a scream from the distance as he was murdered by the savages. Why in the world would these things all pick up weapons, then discard them at the moment they should be used?

Jaden tested the wind with his shooter’s senses, and put the crosshairs on the dying airman’s skull. He sent the dying man’s brains all over the grey Jersey barrier, releasing him from his pain, and the curse of returning as one of his killers. The undead mauling him stopped their attack when he slumped lifelessly, and they turned to join the flood of their brethren pushing into Mildenhall.

Jaden’s earpiece crackled to life, “This is Lincoln tower two. We have a severe breach at our gate. Situation is FUBAR. All Lincoln towers are falling back to the inner perimeter wall. We’re being overrun.” Jaden didn’t know who was in any of the towers on Lincoln Road, but he knew it had to be bad for them to call out FUBAR and fallback already. He fired off a few more rounds into the host heading their way, and when he saw the running survivors get past their position, he reached for his satellite phone.

Normally men in his specific line of work would sacrifice themselves so that others may live. In fact, it was his unit motto. This was different. If they didn’t escape Mildenhall right here and right now, there would be no one here left to save.

It was time for him and his men to get the fuck out. Mildenhall was lost.

*****

“They’re on their way, hurry the fuck up!” Logan, the loadmaster of Kate’s MC-130 plane barked out to the men fueling it up. There was precious little time left.

From deep inside the MC-130’s cargo bay Kate yelled to Logan, “Two humvees are locked down right? We have all the supplies loaded in already?” 

“All but half of one pallet of ammo and food we had stashed in the back. We’ve got spare parts; fuel and everything else good to go as well. We’ll be heavier than I’d like, but we can work it.” Logan grunted as he walked past her, carrying crates of 5.56mm ammunition.

Kate nodded, observing the professionalism of her crew as they got the massive cargo plane ready to move. They could be wheels up in less than twenty minutes at this rate. She looked out the massive opening in the side of the hangar to the grey rain that was drenching the world. She wondered if the rain was God’s tears over their fate.

“Fan-fucking-tabulous.” She smiled glumly, and trotted over to the pallet Logan was moving into the belly of her big fat beast.