These Dead Lands: Immolation (51 page)

“Hey, I can’t help it if I sweat, Sergeant,” Stilley said. “It’s hot as a Turkish bathhouse out here!”

“I won’t ask how you know anything about Turkish bathhouses, Stilley. But if you get any riper, you’re going to be classified as a biological hazard. I just wish the dead were put off by your pits, then I’d hang you at the end of this bridge and watch the reekers try to run all the way back to New York.”

“You know, Sergeant G, this is making for a very hostile work environment,” Stilley said.

“Tell me about it. Okay, guys, let’s get to work.”

*

Colonel David Victor
watched the display on the TOC wall as the Shadow mission planner walked him and the rest of the command staff through their findings. What he saw horrified him, and he knew it was only the tip of the iceberg. The horde picking its way down Interstate 87 was the biggest element of the dead he’d seen since bugging out of Philadelphia weeks ago. Conservative estimates put the count at around fifty to seventy-five thousand reekers, and their average speed of advance was three miles per hour. More were paralleling the interstate, wending their way through the woods on either side and moving through the small towns and residential communities that dotted the landscape. Their numbers were so vast that when they came across a fortified house or office building that contained live human beings, the corpses just tore the structure apart as if peeling back a banana to get at the soft flesh that cowered inside.

Fear wasn’t foreign to Victor. He was no coward; he was a seasoned soldier who had seen combat. When people started shooting, fear was a natural reaction, though in his past it had always been suborned by his training and discipline. He had seen his way through the hot spots, and while surviving hostile action led to soul-searching later, Victor had managed to get through all those engagements with his limbs and wits intact. While the danger had been real, Victor managed to convince himself that he hadn’t been in any overwhelming jeopardy.

More burdensome was when men under his command made the ultimate sacrifice. Trying to console a fallen soldier’s family with hollow platitudes after sending that soldier directly into harm’s way was something that had never been easy. Killing enemy combatants, while not pleasant, was nothing compared to watching people you knew get killed. And Victor had seen more of that in the past months than he had witnessed during the previous twenty-five years of his career.

He had lost almost half his brigade combat team, trying to stabilize the city of Philadelphia. While the scope of his unit’s duties were narrowly defined, there hadn’t been a lot for them to do in the initial weeks of their deployment. Civilian agencies were in charge, and Victor’s brigade basically had been logistics support: providing trucks and security for humanitarian relief missions, fortifying positions, and securing the airport and major highways. Once the evacuations began, things became more complex, less controlled. The city government began to implode, even as FEMA resources made their way into the zone. The National Guard troops that had been supplementing the Philadelphia police and fire departments had to step up and get directly involved in “pacification” efforts, and Victor’s brigade supported those citizen-soldier elements directly. That was the last instance in which things were normal.

As a regular duty soldier, Victor was not unfamiliar with military operations in support of civilian organizations. But almost overnight, the scope of the mission had changed from pushing and pulling supplies to the Guard to active suppression of enemy formations. That the formations were legions of the dead emerging from not only the city of Philadelphia but the surrounding suburbs was disconcerting, to say the least. Also, the areas around Victor’s home post, Fort Campbell, were also falling to the dead. Communications with the 101st Airborne Division’s senior command elements began to fail. With that came the atypical disconnection from the strategic picture. As a colonel, Victor was on the low end of the totem pole when it came to being informed of what was happening in the big picture, but as commander of one of the divisional combat teams, he was used to getting a pulse every now and then. The long lapses in communications left him in the dark and contributed to the dissolution of morale among his troops.

For the first time that he could remember, desertion became a problem. All of his battalions reported troops abandoning their positions, not because they feared the advancing dead but because they had no idea what was happening to their families. Victor understood. The desertions galled him, but expecting a soldier to maintain his post while his family was under direct attack was a tall order. Of course, he had issued those exact orders, reminding his commanders to impress upon their troops that full penalties for desertion would be enacted in accordance to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It hadn’t helped. The world was coming to an end, and one of the first victims was fear of the UCMJ.

But when the dead finally surged forth, overwhelming the remnants of the local police and National Guard, Victor found that the desertion rate was suddenly the least of his worries. In the days before that final attack, Victor had been slowly relocating units away from the city’s center. His primary objective, in absence of guidance from higher up in the chain of command, was to maintain control over the airport and the approaches to Interstate 76. The uninfected civilian population that could still take flight would need access to both areas, and so would the brigade combat team. Victor had already determined that military air transport was out of the question, as resupply and evacuation flights, even for military medical emergencies, were becoming more and more erratic. The scope of the epidemic had exceeded the eastern half of the nation.

Victor was ostensibly on his own, which meant the brigade was his to maneuver as he saw fit. With no word from divisional or even corps command, Victor had to start making some unpleasant choices. The brigade could stay and fight, while trying to provide as much cover for the retreating civilians as possible. They would have to dig in and deny the reekers access to the airport and interstate. But from what his troops in the field told him, stopping to fight was a recipe for disaster. The lion’s share of the brigade’s units were caught between two elements of zombies, those emerging from Philadelphia and heading south toward the airport, and those roaming in from the townships to the west, which mostly ranged east and north. Both masses threatened Victor’s objectives.

Thousands of reekers had begun migrating south from the poorer neighborhoods in north Philly. By the time they made it to the more well-to-do portions of the city’s south side, they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Thousands more were stumbling out of Collingwood, Sharon Hill, and Darby, where they were engaged by two battalions holding the line at Bartram Avenue, a boulevard that ran roughly north to south along the airport’s westernmost flank. Recon units farther into the suburbs had dropped out of the tactical picture, overwhelmed and trapped before they could retreat. Victor had sent Black Hawks out to extract them, but the helicopters couldn’t land without being overcome by the swarming dead.

After a consultation with his senior staff, Victor decided to hold the airport and highway for a week. Traffic on nearby Interstate 95 had come to a standstill due to multiple accidents and a huge fire that raged near the waterfront when a liquid natural gas tanker had exploded, incinerating a huge swath of traffic on the highway. Another inferno raged to the north, where the Sunoco fuel refinery was ablaze only a half a mile from Interstate 76. Flaming fuel poured into the Schuylkill River, turning it into a gigantic serpent of fire. Secondary detonations at the refinery threatened the possibility of the brigade using I-76 as an escape route, and poisonous gases emitted by the conflagration wound up killing even more people in the surrounding vicinity.

Victor didn’t have a week. He didn’t even have a day.

His National Guard counterparts told him that Indiantown Gap was still operational, so that was their next destination. The reekers continued to attack, walking through fields of fire and overwhelming defensive revetments, all while ignoring mortar and even artillery fire. Only heavy armor and large transport vehicles could move through the swarming dead, and Victor ordered the unit’s remaining armored personnel carriers and five-ton trucks to lead the advance. The 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, pulled out.

Pushing the brigade up Interstate 76 had been a hard slog. The retreat was one of the most emotionally arduous odysseys Victor had ever embarked upon. Even though Fort Indiantown Gap was less than a hundred miles away, the brigade had to fight almost the entire distance. When the unit—or what was left of it—finally arrived at the National Guard training center, the men were demoralized and dispirited. And when he learned that almost sixty percent of the brigade’s personnel had been lost, Victor joined their ranks. Every man had his breaking point, and losing over two thousand six hundred soldiers under his command in a single engagement was Victor’s. So upon reaching the Gap, Victor took the time to try to ensure his remaining men received rest, refit, and medical care. There were already more than twenty-five hundred National Guard troops at the Gap, and more showed up each day, falling back from their assigned positions after they were overrun. Regular Army units came in as well, though the senior-most officer to report in was a lieutenant colonel presiding over a relatively intact cavalry squadron from Fort Riley, Kansas. The 1st Squadron, 4th Infantry Division had been supporting sustainment operations outside of Baltimore. The lieutenant colonel’s report of the destruction that had occurred in the Baltimore-Washington area was strikingly similar to what had happened elsewhere in the nation. As far as Victor was concerned, the Gap was essentially cut off from the rest of the nation’s military, aside from occasional stragglers that would appear at the gates.

Colonel Jarmusch looked to Victor to provide security and to plan the next steps against the campaign against the dead. Normally, Victor would have jumped through a thousand hoops to meet that kind of challenge. But after losing so much of his brigade in so little time, David Victor was worn out. All drive to excel had been stripped from him like a reeker ripping flesh from a bone. The plans he made were defensive in nature, starting with felling trees and establishing checkpoints and decontamination zones—nothing too strenuous, nothing that his weakened troops couldn’t deliver. It wasn’t until the lightfighters from Fort Drum had arrived that he had been galvanized into action. When Captain Hastings offered a plan to further secure the post and grab those trains, Victor was more than happy to let him do it.

The success of the missions rallied everyone’s spirits. While Operation BOXCAR wasn’t a huge effort, it had taken up almost all of the Gap’s available manpower. The post had all the containers it could get, along with some rather interesting weaponry from the naval facility. More civilians had been brought inside the fence. Victor felt a resurging sense of vitality creeping into him, and he allowed his morale to be buoyed by the successful events. For a moment, Victor had thought that things might actually work out. Even though all they had done was secure some trains, containers, weapons, and distressed civilians, the troops at the Gap had pulled off a high-stakes operation. Their success had filled everyone with a renewed sense of faith, and even Victor had allowed himself to become entranced by it.

But the reekers were coming.

The brigade S-2, a sharp-faced major named Bonneville, pointed at the screen. “We don’t have a full count at the moment, but we’re thinking this is a pretty major element. We have the ability to repel them for a time, but any munitions we use now, we’re going to miss later. And this just could be an advance element. We should move one of the Shadows closer to the I-78 barricade and launch from there.”

“Maybe we should send out a Chinook,” Jarmusch said. “It would be faster, and we could cover more ground. It wouldn’t have the same kind of fidelity that a Shadow would provide, but we could at least get a better idea of what’s heading our way.”

“Why a Chinook?” asked Lieutenant Colonel Gavas, the commander of the Cavalry squadron from Fort Riley. “I saw there are a couple of Kiowas in one of the hangars. Can’t we just use those? They’re scout birds, after all.”

Jarmusch shook his head. “Those were in tear-down for a full phase maintenance cycle. They need spares installed that we don’t have on post. Bell Textron was supposed to be sending them to us, but they never made it because of the emergency.”

“How far past the replacement times are they?” Gavas asked. “I mean, if they’re borderline or just a little beyond, we can still use them, right? It’s not like there’s a specific tolerance we have to adhere to.”

“It’s not exactly an easy thing to do, slapping a helicopter together after it’s been pulled apart. Lots of safety checks have to be made, including test flights and substantial inspections. Believe me, Colonel, it’s going to be easier to send out a Chinook.” Jarmusch looked over at Victor. “Dave? What’s your take on this?”