These Dead Lands: Immolation (20 page)

They parked in
front of a two-story brick building near the airfield. There were a few CH-47 Chinooks on the ramp, and inside one open hangar, Hastings could see what appeared to be a pair of older OH-58 Kiowas. Those were the only aircraft on the entire field, and that made him frown. He’d actually been hoping there would be a bigger aviation footprint available.

The building wasn’t tightly guarded, but there were armed soldiers. Hastings didn’t know whether they were regular Army or National Guard, but seeing them in relatively close proximity reminded him that he was unarmed, something he wanted to rectify in the short order.

They followed Chan into the building, which turned out to be a tactical operations center, where missions were planned and monitored. Even though he was a company-grade officer who had spent more time in the field than in the rear, Hastings immediately felt at home. The organization, the orderly chaos, and the hustle and bustle of the operations center spoke of all things Army. For a split second, he had a feeling that everything was going to work out in the end. Big Army was there, and it had all the tools to bring the fight to a successful close.

Except the enemy wasn’t the Soviets or the Iraqis or the mujis in Afghanistan. The enemy was the living dead, and nothing would end until all the reekers had been returned to the earth. There just wasn’t enough firepower in the nation to see to that. Hastings had witnessed more than one attempt.

Chan led them down a hallway and into a conference room. He pushed open the door, checked inside, then jerked his chin toward the room. “Have a seat. Colonel Victor will be with you in a few minutes.”

“How long can we expect to stay here, sir?” Ballantine asked, regarding the room beyond with a slightly suspicious expression.

“Until you’re either dismissed or given other duties, Sergeant,” Chan said.

“Hey, Chan. What gives?” Hastings asked. “It’s a fair question.”

Chan looked at Hastings. “I don’t know how long you’ll be here, Hastings. It’s not up to me.”

“You
should
have an idea,” Hastings pressed. “I mean, you’ve taken in other units before, right?”

“None from Task Force Manhattan,” Chan said. “I’m just guessing, but I’m going to presume the colonel’s going to want to talk to you guys for a bit longer than anyone else.”

Hastings stepped into the conference room. “Swell.” He beckoned Ballantine to follow, and the big NCO stepped inside.

Chan closed the door, leaving the two men alone. Hastings pulled one of the padded conference room chairs away from the long table and slipped inside its embrace. Other than a blank screen on the far wall, an easel with a huge pad of paper attached to it, and a Polycom teleconference system in the middle of the table, there was nothing more to be seen.

“Might as well take a load off, Carl,” he told Ballantine. “Let’s see where this goes.”

Ballantine stayed on his feet. “I’m a little anxious about my family, sir.”

“I know. But this is where we are.”

“Captain, we’re not safe here. I haven’t seen any kind of preparations that indicate these guys know what they’re up against. I mean, this is the National Guard—”

Hastings held up a hand. “Ballantine, I get it. I feel the same way. But we have no weapons, no vehicles, and no supplies—they confiscated everything. So I think we have to suck it up and wait it out. We need gear, and who knows? Maybe they’re going to actually listen to what we have to say.”

“And what
do
we have to say, sir?”

Hastings snorted. “That unless these guys start leaning forward in the foxhole something serious, then they’re next on the menu.”

*

Ten minutes later,
the door opened. Chan and the shortest colonel Hastings had ever seen stepped into the room. His nametape read
VICTOR
, and when Hastings got to his feet, he practically towered over the man. At just a hair under six feet, Hastings wasn’t exactly a giant in the Army, but compared to Colonel Victor, he was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Ballantine was Yao Ming. Hastings wondered idly if Victor had originally been a taller man before one parachute jump went bad, and a hard landing cost him a foot or so.

“As you were, gentlemen,” Victor said. He offered his hand first to Hastings and then to Ballantine. “I’m Colonel Victor, ground component commander here at Indiantown Gap. I understand you two lightfighters are probably all that’s left from TF Manhattan. Am I right?”

“I don’t know about that, sir,” Hastings said, “but we’re the only ones we know about, with the exception of the other troops who are with us.”

“What unit were you with, Hastings?”

“Company commander, Alpha Company, First Battalion, Eighty-Seventh Infantry, First Combat Team, sir.” He nodded toward Ballantine. “Sergeant First Class Ballantine was one of the senior NCOs in the headquarters element.”

“Okay. Let’s have a seat.” Victor slid into the chair at the head of the table, while Chan stayed by the door. The colonel opened the binder he had brought with him, and Hastings saw the AARs he and his men had filled out. Victor tapped the forms. “I went over them quickly before I came over. Haven’t done anything more than just scan for highlights, but it seems like you guys had a hell of a fight. You managed to make it all the way to Fort Drum?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But too late, I see,” Victor said. “Or, maybe, just late enough. You guys realize you probably would have run out of luck up there if things had still been in full swing, right?”

“The thought had crossed our minds, sir,” Ballantine answered. He gave Hastings a sidelong look, but Hastings ignored it.

Victor didn’t. “Sorry about your family, Hastings. If it’s been in question at all, we did not recover any dependents from Drum.”

Hastings didn’t say anything.

Victor drummed his fingers on the tabletop, as if wondering whether to pursue that line of conversation. He apparently elected to drop it. “All right, here’s the overall situation. Whatever happened, it started in the Middle East. Some variant of the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, or at least something that looked very similar. The CDC and USAMRIID were working on a cure, but it never panned out, as we can see. By the time we started fielding task forces to major metropolitan centers, it was already too late. I think echelons above reality could have been wiser about that, but it is what it is.

“We have about six thousand troops here, two brigades worth of manpower. Not everyone’s a shooter, but everyone’s getting trained to be the best infantryman they can be. We have some good post services folks who are working on fortifying the place as much as it can be. Indiantown Gap isn’t small, but we’re out in the middle of nowhere, so we have a little bit of time. We don’t know how many reekers are out there, but there are definitely more of them than there are of us, so we have to get our shit squared away.”

“How many reekers are we talking about, sir?” Hastings asked.

“From Allentown, about fifteen thousand. From Philly, about forty-five thousand. From New York… well, that one’s going to hurt. Over a million.”

“Jesus,” Ballantine said. “No offense, sir, but we have to get out of here.”

Victor cut his eyes over to the big NCO. “We’re not inexperienced here, Sergeant. We know what we’re up against, and we’re moving to counter the threat. Right now, we have attack helicopters hitting the reeker formations, breaking them up and holding them back.”

“You can’t kill them using helicopters, sir,” Hastings said. “You might be able to slow them down, but that’s about it. There’s only one thing that takes out a reeker.” He tapped his forehead. “A shot to the brain.”

“We know, Hastings. I was part of Task Force Philly, so I’ve had some experience with them. We know what has to be done, but we’re out in the middle of Pennsylvania with finite resources. We can only do so much. We know we can’t stop them, but we
can
slow them down long enough to finish our preparations. We can survive against the dead, if we’re quick about it.”

“And how far along are you in your preparations, sir?” Hastings asked.

Victor smiled humorlessly. “Not far enough, but we’re working around the clock on establishing a hardened perimeter. We’re also sending out hunter-killer teams to mop up the reekers in the area and to make contact with the remaining locals. We’re going to need every able-bodied person we can get, and since the military resources are pretty much tapped out, we’ll need to recruit the local citizenry.”

“Do you know anything about the rest of the country, sir?”

Victor sighed. “We’ve had intermittent contact with Fort Bragg. They were in a mother of a fight down there, but they’re still giving us irregular updates. No word from any other major commands, either civilian or military. Several communities and cities in the mountain states are doing the same thing we are, converting their towns and cities into fortresses. At the moment, there’s not much in the way of centralized command and control. The president hasn’t been heard from in over two weeks now, nor have we heard anything from his senior staff. Bragg is planning out a continuity of government scenario, and we actually have a role in that. It’s one reason why we can’t just abandon Indiantown Gap.”

“What role?”

Victor held up a hand. “We’ll get to that, Captain. I promise.”

Hastings nodded. “Okay, sir. But we
really
need to beef up the defenses, Colonel. Rows of concertina wire will slow the reekers down, but they won’t keep them out. We need to roll back the clock on this one. Dig trenches, build walls, make the post virtually inaccessible from the ground. I like the idea of harassing the reekers while they’re still far away, but that isn’t going to be enough, unless you’ve got a bunker full of thermobaric weapons.”

Victor shook his head. “We don’t.”

“Then you’re going to need to commit ground forces to take the fight to the reekers, sir.”

Victor leaned back in his chair, a dim smile flashing across his face. “And that, Captain, is why I’m talking to you.” He turned and waved at Chan. “Okay, let’s get the dog and pony show started.”

Chan nodded and opened the door. Several men filed into the room, presumably Colonel Victor’s staff. Some sat at the table, while others took seats arranged along the walls. Hastings found it all very familiar, a typical Battle Update Briefing. He had to remind himself that it wasn’t like all the other BUBs he had sat in on during his career. If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn the assembled troops filling the room were unaware that the rest of the world was quickly going to hell in a handbasket.

After everyone settled into their places, Colonel Victor went around the room, introducing the heads of each section and their senior NCOs. Hastings noticed that the staff wasn’t typical, and a sidelong glance at Ballantine confirmed he felt the same way. All the men were longer in the tooth than Hastings had seen in a while, at least since Afghanistan. A majority of them were clearly members of the Pennsylvania National Guard, and many sported combat patches. During the decade of war in the Middle East, the National Guard had been offered plenty of opportunities to play an active part on the ground and in the air. In fact, the Chinook pilots that had flown a lot of the missions for Hastings and his unit had been from a National Guard unit.

Clearly, the group had experience, which was a bit of good news to Hasting. But then the voice in his head reminded him that what they were facing far exceeded anything anyone had experienced or could even imagine. He could see that Ballantine was thinking the same thing. The people in that room, no matter what they may have experienced in the past, had no clue what was really out there and headed their way.

Hastings came out of his reverie as the S3 operations officer began to rattle off the current operations and what would be transpiring over the next forty-eight hours. The man activated the overhead projector, and a PowerPoint presentation appeared on the wall screen.

Hastings had to suppress a chuckle.
Here we are faced with the end of the fucking world, and a PowerPoint presentation is involved. Par for fucking course.

Hastings tuned out the S3 as he studied the projected quad chart. It had been a while since he had heard anything official on the disposition of the remnants of the US Military, let alone the US government.

A few hours ago, his major concerns were not getting bitten by a reeker while taking a shit, and taking care of his people until they could get somewhere relatively safe where they could catch their breath. So he was both relieved and bothered by the fact that it seemed to be business as usual in the military world. The familiarity was comforting initially, but the way they were templating the reekers like a normal enemy force and breaking things down on a PowerPoint slide was enough to make him want to start screaming. The zombies had overrun entire cities. They had demolished Fort Drum and killed his family. Even if only through sheer numbers alone, the hordes of reekers were a monolithic threat that stood positioned to overwhelm all defenses, and the men around him were talking about the dead as if they were an invading military formation.