These Dead Lands: Immolation (49 page)

The MRAP’s horn blared, and the ramp rose on hydraulic servos until it clanged shut.

*

The drive to
the highway overpass was long, not from distance but because of all the stalled traffic that had been left behind, along with trees the Guard had felled in an attempt to block any zombie swarms from marching up the interstate and turning the Gap into an all-you-can-eat buffet in the early days after the chain of command had been broken.

Ballantine spent a lot of time pulling security, something as familiar to him as ironing a uniform or loading out his rucksack. Since the tractors hauling the lowboys couldn’t cross the other bridges over Swatara Creek, the interstate was the only avenue of attack, which meant some grunt work. He had floated the idea that they use the Chinooks to ferry the containers to their sites, but Hastings said the command group didn’t want to risk losing any more aircraft. They had already lost one during BOXCAR, and no one wanted to shoulder the weight of losing another. Ballantine could get behind that. CH-47s were worth their weight in gold.

Abandoned cars and trucks had to be pushed out of the way, and fallen trees had to be moved. All of that took hours, and for most of that time, the convoy sat motionless, a great big, fat target that invited attack. Ballantine was nervous. Though the occasional reeker would stumble toward the column—then get taken down well before it could become a direct threat—he was more concerned with raiders or homesteaders, like those that had engaged Guerra’s column during BOXCAR. Ballantine couldn’t fathom why someone would want to engage a well-armed military convoy, but someone had, and he worried that the same could happen to them. The last thing he wanted was to be involved in some sort of firefight. They weren’t in Iraq or Afghanistan, so if things went pear shaped, he’d be killing fellow Americans. As misguided as they might be, he didn’t want to have any part in such a thing. Life was precious, even more so lately, and he didn’t want to be put in a position where he had to snuff out any living person, even if it was a belly-crawling lowlife trying to inflict harm on the convoy. But if push came to shove, he had a family to get back to, which meant he’d shoulder his weapon and fire until the threat was neutralized.

Finally, the column made it to a stretch of highway where travel speed was pretty decent. The five-tons worked on clearing dead traffic out of the way, and Ballantine was able to remain in the MRAP’s air-conditioned interior. The troops from the 101st had finally stopped giving him the side eye, which suited him just fine. He was even able to doze a bit during the stretches where the MRAP could drive for a distance before braking to a halt.

“So, Ballantine,” the sergeant first class seated across from him said when the MRAP stumbled to a halt, “what happened in New York? How’d it go down?”

Ballantine opened his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“How did you guys manage to get out of there?”

Ballantine shrugged. “We were pulled off the line for a while, for rest and refit. By the time we got back into the swing of things, it was already too late. All of the guys in my company that went up to the George Washington Bridge got run over by the reekers pouring across. The captain ordered us to stand ready to retreat, and when the order never came, he took it upon himself to save what little was left of the company.”

“Wow. So he bugged out without orders?”

“No one abandoned their positions, Mahon. It was retreat or die. The fucking Air Force was supposed to take down the bridge three days before the barricades were overrun, but the civilian leadership developed a serious case of butt-hurt over it. No one wanted to pony up the money to rebuild it, I guess.” He shrugged. “They chose poorly.”

Mahon gave him a quirky smile. “
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
, right?”

“For a lawn dart, you’re a genius.” Lawn Dart was the appellation given to airborne troops, as their modus operandi was to jump out of airplanes over a battlefield and parachute into combat. Obviously, there were times when things didn’t work out, and a soldier would wind up plummeting to his death, thereby becoming a lawn dart.

Mahon leaned back in his seat. “How is it that you guys could be overrun? You have single points of advance. They had to come across a bridge to get at you, right?”

Ballantine shook his head. “Not exactly. There were bridges, tunnels, and the river itself. You know what happens when a reeker goes into the water? It’s not rotting, so it’s not bloated. It sinks. And once it hits the bottom, it just keeps on walking. We had thousands of those things walking across the bottom of the Hudson River, and before we knew it, they were in New Jersey. They couldn’t be contained, man. We were getting hit on all flanks.”

The images of legions of the dead—men, women, screaming children—clambering out of the Hudson and streaming across bridges and through tunnels played across Ballantine’s mind’s eye. Even through machine-gun fire and mortar bombardments, they kept coming, picking their way through the carcasses of their fellow dead without any regard for their own safety. He had seen plenty of determined fighting in southwest Asia. While the Taliban were mostly inefficient fighters, al Qaeda was not, and they’d fought like hell more than once against the 10th. But when things got too hot, even they suddenly forgot their desire to meet Allah and claim a host of virgin brides, and beat a retreat. Retreat was something that never occurred to the reekers. They just kept coming, and after days of combat, the men began to wear out and break down. The Army held out as long as it could, but facing down millions of combatants who could only be stopped by specific injuries to the brain was too much.
And here we are, setting up to do it again.

Ballantine decided to change the subject. “So how did it go down in Philly?”

Mahon sobered. “We were hands-off for the first month. Civilian agencies were handling everything. We were just there to help keep the highways and airport open. After a while, the emergency got to the point to where the locals and feds couldn’t hold everything together. Once we stepped in, things were already busting open, man. One week, we killed a thousand reekers and lost maybe a platoon. The next week, we mowed down around twenty thousand… and we lost a battalion. After that, things just blew up. We were fighting off mass attacks from those things as they walked up on us from every radial. We’d been oriented toward defending attacks from inside the city itself, but when the suburbs went dead, that’s when things got really fucked up. And then, we lost the airport—no way out, other than by road.”

McBride leaned forward in the backseat. “And driving through fifteen thousand deadheads was no fucking fun.”

Mahon nodded. “Even in force, it was tough. We had Bradleys up front, motoring right over them, but one threw a track trying to shove a semi out of our path, and it basically blocked the roadway. We had a shitty time trying to turn around while fighting off the reekers. Lost a lot of guys there.”

Ballantine nodded. “What about the Bradley guys?”

Mahon shrugged. “As far as I know, they’re still buttoned up. No way we could rescue them. Maybe the reekers left them alone after the rest of the column pulled away, and they got out of there on foot. Or maybe they’re still there.”

Ballantine grunted. Once the fuel ran out, a Bradley would become an oven in the summer heat.

“Then we started running low on fuel for the column,” Mahon continued. “Lost a shitload more people scavenging for diesel. We wound up abandoning half our shit and trying to make it up in civilian vehicles, but that didn’t work out very well, either.” He shifted on his seat. “We left with about thirty-five hundred guys. Only a little over two thousand made it to the Gap, all of them attrited along the way. It was a real shit-fest.”

Ballantine thought the 101st had gotten it easy, seeing as how his entire division had been mostly wiped out. It did explain some things, though. Victor’s troops were run out, and the colonel was probably still reeling under the losses his combat team had sustained. Ballantine was no social scientist or therapist, but he could understand why the composite units occupying Fort Indiantown Gap hadn’t been very resolute in fortifying the post. They were probably hoping the waves of the dead would pass them by, which was a suicidal mindset to adopt. No wonder they had been slagging Hastings—he was probably one of the only guys at the Gap who was trying to get things squared away. Ballantine sympathized completely. All he wanted to do was lie low with Kay and the boys, but he knew the only way that could ever become a reality was through a lot of back-breaking work and tedious planning.

Ballantine checked his watch. He and the rest of the troops in the MRAP had been off security for almost thirty minutes, which meant it was time to start their next rotation. “I guess it’s time to get back to it.”

None of the soldiers in the MRAP responded. Mahon was busy studying his boots, and McBride was scowling at nothing in particular.

Ballantine shifted his M4 on its sling and slapped one of Mahon’s kneepads. “Dude.”

Mahon raised his head and looked at Ballantine with haunted eyes. “Yeah. Let’s get back to it.”

*

Chief Warrant Officer
Two Darla Delaney sat behind two operators in Ground Control Station mounted on a Humvee, looking over their shoulders as the soldiers piloted the RQ-7B Shadow unmanned aerial vehicles through the sky. Because of the distance involved, both systems were flying high, one at eight thousand feet, the other at its theoretical service ceiling of fifteen thousand feet. If she’d wanted, Delaney could have pushed the higher unit out to sixty-eight miles from the Gap, but that would be risky. If something happened and the unit went down, it was very likely going to remain unrecovered. In the current world state, even fifty miles out was a stretch. The only way to recover a downed drone would be to fly a recovery team out in a Chinook, and since they’d already lost one of those, Delaney had no allusions as to what the answer would be if she were to ask to launch another CH-47F just to pick up a fallen drone.

As one of two Air Mission Planners, Delaney was responsible for twelve Shadow drones. Normally, she would only have oversight for four units, but two other Shadow platoons had fallen back to the Gap as the dead began overrunning positions, sending the military into full-on disarray. Not all the platoons were fully manned. A Shadow unit usually had twenty-two soldiers attached to it, but not one of the units had managed to make it to Fort Indiantown Gap with all hands. So Delaney had inherited a substantial amount of excess equipment but not enough troops to run all of them at the same time. While she had all the necessary operators, maintainers and ground-launch personnel were missing, which meant that the remaining soldiers had to fill in on tasks they were not specifically trained for. It was one thing to sit in an air-conditioned cube, looking at a video display while remote piloting an aircraft. It was entirely another to make sure the drones were fueled, lubricated, and ready to go with functional mission equipment packages. Delaney and her fellow AMP had been training regular soldiers and Pennsylvania Guardsmen on how to fulfill some of those tasks, but there just weren’t enough hours in a day to do that and still maintain the surveillance coverage the command group wanted. So she spent most of her days doing operations and several hours a night on training. To say she was exhausted would be an understatement.

That was why she was in one of the Ground Control Stations, instead of in the tactical operations center. In the TOC, people always wanted to talk to her, give her taskings, and modify previous orders. While that was to be expected—the Army was supposed to react nimbly to changes, after all—the fallout was that nothing was getting done. With only a few airframes flying at a time, the coverage was a bit light. And while the Shadows were robust machines overall, their little Wankel engines needed some TLC every now and then. If she flew every mission the command group wanted, they’d run out of the special synthetic oil the engines needed to stay lubricated. Therefore, eight of the Shadows were grounded, while four flew daytime missions. Those units would be retired at 1800 hours, and another four would be launched until 0200 hours. By that time, if she was lucky, Delaney would be racked out, but the plan called for two Shadows to fly the early morning missions, with two held back in reserve. When Delaney went back on duty at 0600, it would be time to start all over again.