These Dead Lands: Immolation (31 page)

*

Stilley stopped firing
and sprinted for the Humvee. Once there, he climbed inside and began digging into the ammo cans. He fumbled with the cargo strap running through the ammo can lids. “Motherfucker, I hate these damn things!”

The mini-gun spoke only in short staccato bursts as the Hartman became more selective in his fire. “Stilley, whatever you’re doing, you had best unfuck yourself and get me some more ammo up here!” Hartman shouted.

Sweating like a pig beneath his helmet, Stilley managed to loosen the strap enough to get the slack necessary to unhook it from the floor ring. He pulled the free end through the ammo can lids, popped one open, and snatched a couple of linked belts of 7.62. Even though he had bitched about the job earlier in the day, Stilley was thankful that Guerra had made him and the rest of the team prep all the linked ammo for the .50 cal and the mini-gun in advance.

“Hold on!” Stilley shouted as he moved farther into the vehicle’s hot interior.

Hartman was standing on the platform in the center of the vehicle, his upper body protruding through the cupola’s hole in the roof. The flex chute that protected the ammunition as it flowed up to the gun from the ammo container ran up between Hartman’s feet.

“I’m linking the belts now, man!” Stilley opened the mini-gun’s ammo storage container and pulled out the remaining belt. There wasn’t much left for a weapon that had a maximum rate of fire of three to four thousand rounds per minute. Hartman had called for ammo just in time. Stilley struggled to link a new belt to the existing one, pausing only to wipe the sweat from his eyes. He could smell his own body odor rising up from inside his uniform.

Hartman stomped his feet on the platform. “Get a move on, Stilley!”

“All right, all right. Give me a second!” A full minute later, Stilley finally managed to get the new belt linked up. “Okay, gun up!”

The minigun roared back to life as Hartman jumped on the fun switch. There hadn’t been time to load the belt back into the ammunition container, so Stilley watched the belt feed for a few seconds. There was a chance the belt could kink up, and he wanted to make sure it was feeding okay. With the gun back up and Hartman shooting again and no sign of impending failure in sight, Stilley hurriedly linked the remaining belts so Hartman would have all the ammo he hoped he would need. Once he was done, he told Hartman he was clearing the Humvee. After grabbing his rifle, he jumped out, slammed the door behind him, and returned to his position just off the vehicle’s right fender.

The excavator mulcher was completely surrounded by reekers. The operator was spinning the mulcher head around in a circle, destroying anything that got in its way. Stilley thought it was an awesome sight, and he wished they’d had something like that with them back in New York. But as fast as the operator cut them down, the empty space filled back in with more bodies. Stilley shouldered his rifle and joined the rest of the soldiers in picking off any reekers that got too close to the excavator. Some of them had started climbing onto it, and Stilley hammered those attackers first. After all, if the excavator went down, no one would likely survive for very long.

The excavator operator stopped swinging the head and started driving again, rolling over the reekers. That stretch of Fisher Avenue was fairly open and straight, so the huge rig could move a bit, and the soldiers manning the OP could continue to provide supporting fires. The moving excavator was having an effect. The reekers were heading south, away from the OP and back toward the Interstate.

*

Hastings spoke into
his radio. “All Crusader elements, this is Crusader One One. Send SITREP when able. Over.”

Above him, Reader kept hammering at the dead with the .50 while the Humvee was parked.

Ballantine came back almost immediately. “This is Crusader One Seven. Still in contact. Break.” After a brief pause, Ballantine added, “Hostiles moving south along Fisher. Headcount is green. Ammo is yellow. Over.”

Hastings released his breath in a long rush. For the moment, all of his men were still good to go. Ammunition was getting to be a concern, though. Soon, people would start running out. They needed a resupply. “Roger that, Crusader One Seven. I’ll see if I can get you guys topped off. Out. War Eagle Six, this is Crusader One One. Over”

“Crusader One One, this is TOC. Send it. Over.”

“War Eagle Six, this is Crusader One One. Requesting ammo resupply ASAP to OP Two and along Biddle Drive. Request five-five-six, seven-six-two link, fifty cal and forty mike mike. How copy? Over.”

“Crusader One One, this is War Eagle Six. Good copy. Resupply en route in five mikes. Over.”

The reekers along Biddle Drive weren’t as concentrated as they were at OP Two, and Hastings knew he had the engineers to thank for that. Strung through the trees along the side of the road was barbed wire and razor wire at varying heights up to head level. As an obstacle, it wouldn’t be very effective against living enemy, but to the reekers who shambled along either unable to discern the wire or just ignorant of it, the tactic was working very well. The trees served as natural barricades that broke up the reeker swarms and caused them to spread out. Eventually, the corpses would blunder into the wire, and the strong, razor-studded strands stopped their advance cold.

That made it easy for the Quick Reaction Force to dispatch smaller elements while the majority of the force focused on the road junction along Biddle Drive. There, the soldiers were fighting a lighter version of what was happening at OP Two on Fisher Avenue. Reader had used the .50 to shoot the reekers stuck in the tree line barriers, and several of the trees were torn apart where the big machine-gun rounds had struck them. Some of them were cut in half, their fallen tops creating another ground obstacle that served to further impede the reekers’ movement.

“Crusader One Seven, this is Crusader One One. Over.”

Ballantine responded immediately. “Crusader One One, this is Crusader One Seven. Go. Over.”

“Crusader One Seven, what’s your situation?”

“Crusader One One, situation has calmed down. We’re cleaning up crawlers and a few squirters.”

Hastings looked down the road at the excavator. The operator had almost made it to the gas station on the corner of Fisher and Indiantown Gap Road. He was on the return trip, trundling along at a snail’s pace but still running over small groups of reekers. From time to time, the operator would lower the mulcher head and eradicate the dismembered reekers still crawling on the ground. The soldiers around the observation post were taking their time with picking off individual reekers that had managed to squirt through portions of the wire. The zombies were dropped before they could become a substantial threat, but the presence of the dead inside the wire still caused Hastings some heartburn.

“Headcount is green,” Ballantine said. “We’re redistributing ammo now. We’re gonna want to get replacements for the OP and the others down here as soon as we can. A few of them are looking a little crispy. The engineers will need to make repairs, as well. I’d get them down here now as a matter of fact, One One. Over.”

“Roger that, Crusader One Seven. Already on it. Reinforcements and engineers are on the way. Keep me advised of your situ, and let me know when you’re ready to RTB. Crusader One One, out.”

*

“You ever notice
how in books and movies they never show people stopping to do normal things?” Tharinger was brushing out the barrel of his M4.

Reader looked up from cleaning his weapon. “What the fuck are you rambling about now, Tharinger?”

“Dude, all that down time we had over in the box, I know you read a metric shit ton of books and watched every movie at least six times. You never noticed that they
never
show or talk about people doing normal, everyday, boring shit?”

Reader wasn’t particularly energized by the topic, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “Yeah, like what?”

“Like this, for example.” Tharinger pointed at the upper receiver of his rifle. “You ever see anyone cleaning a weapon or using FIREClean on one in an action movie? I mean, fuck, you rarely see a guy change a magazine or run a gun dry. Think about your favorite TV show. You ever see someone say, ‘Hey, pull the car over. I need to shit like a racehorse.’ And you sure as shit don’t see Mr. Muscle Action Guy cleaning his fucking weapons or loading magazines.”

“I gotta ask, is there a point to all this, Tharinger?”

“I’m just saying you never see that shit.”

“Yeah, that’s because no one wants to pay good money to read a book or see a movie of people like you and me taking a shit or sitting here cleaning our weapons. I think there’s an expression for that—it’s boring shit.”

“Yeah, I got that. But do you think civilians really think it’s like nonstop pew-pew, boom-bang, hot chicks sexing you up, and cool gadgets?”

Reader lowered the upper receiver of his M4 back into the lower and pushed the takedown pin back in place. “Tharinger, where does this shit come from? You stay awake at night thinking about this kind of stuff?”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Tharinger snapped. A couple of seconds later, he added, “Not every night, only sometimes.”

Both of them erupted in laughter.

“I do wish we actually had some of those gadgets they show in the movies, though,” Tharinger said wistfully. “Know what pisses me off about movies? How many times have you seen a guy look through a scope and the reticule inside of it has all kinds of electronic data feeds or some crazy fucking crosshair design that anyone who shoots knows doesn’t exist and is bullshit.”

“You know what, man? I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard you talk about anything other than pussy, movies, chow, taking a shit, and drinking.”

“So what? Drink, fight, fuck—a man has to have his priorities.” Tharinger looked around then leaned toward Reader, his tone suddenly conspiratorial. “Speaking of pussy… have you rubbed one out to Diana yet?”

Reader chuckled. “Dude, I don’t think there’s a guy here who hasn’t done that at least a few times already, except maybe Stilley, since he’s about as smart as a below-average bag of gravel.”

“I wonder if she’s a good fuck or a fish?”

Reader shrugged. “Good question, my man. My money’s on her being a straight-up freak. At least, that’s my fantasy, and I’m sticking to it.”

“No, to be accurate, it’s sticking to your happy sock.”

Reader threw his greasy weapon cleaning rag at Tharinger. “You better hope I don’t decide to use one of
your
socks, fuck knuckle.”

Tharinger looked horrified. “Dude, that’s not even funny!”

The conversation died down as both men concentrated on finishing their weapon cleaning. It was just another typical day in the life of a grunt, nothing anyone was ever likely to watch in a Hollywood movie.

*