What Zombies Fear (Book 2): The Maxists (6 page)

“
Sir, yes sir!” the members of M5 replied in unison.

“
Good. Take the Ford Dually and the white F250. You know Tookes loves that white pickup, don’t wreck it. M5, you leave in five minutes, dismissed!”

“
M2, ready yourselves for homeland patrol. You leave when M4 gets back. Dismissed!”

When everyone was gone except Bookbinder’s own team, he continued with the orders.

“
M1. Our mission is two-fold. Command has directed us to recon the state police headquarters. They’ve also tasked us with keeping an eye out and being ready to back up any of the other teams as required. Our mission at the headquarters is to acquire police assets, vests, weapons, ammunition, communications equipment and vehicles.”

“
Men, The Four are heading to the propane depot. Their mission is to secure cooking fuel for Mrs. Tookes. They’ve got the most open area and they’re a little cocky. We’ll need to back them up if they get in over their heads.”

“
We leave in five minutes also. Get to it men, dismissed.”

Charlie headed quickly down to his room in the grooms cottage to gather his stuff. He’d taken the small one room cottage for himself. He let anyone to use his bathroom at almost any time, his door was never locked. Inside the small, cozy cottage he knelt down at his foot locker, unlocked it and retrieved his weapons. He almost never openly wore even a side arm on the property, both as a show of respect for the children in the area and to show that he was confident in their safety. He did carry a small frame 9mm handgun concealed in the rear waistband of his pants; he’d been carrying that weapon for 15 years and just didn’t feel right without it.

He strapped on his desert camo combat vest and slid in the armor plates. The chest strap for his HK g3 attached to D-rings on his vest. The H&K was .308 caliber carbine. It was almost as powerful as the rifle Tookes called Sammie and just as accurate at ranges out to a hundred yards. It had a collapsible stock which allowed it to be more effective indoors and an ACOG scope for faster target acquisition. Bookbinder carried six twenty round magazines in his combat vest plus one in the rifle, Charlie alone could handle a small horde of infected.

He walked out of his cottage ready to do violence. His men were there waiting for him, already sitting in the explorer. Charlie knew they’d be bringing additional vehicles home, so they were riding packed tightly for the fifteen miles up through town.

They arrived at the police station in no time, the place looked deserted. The building itself was steel, Dalton Reineer exited the front passenger side of the vehicle and advanced on the eight foot chain link and barbed wire fence. He pulled a large pair of collapsible bolt cutters from his pack and unfolded the handles out to their full twenty-four inches. These cutters were military issue and easily cut through the padlock that was holding the fence closed.

Reineer removed the chain, looped it through one side of the fence and opened the gate, motioning Hostetler to drive through. On the way to the police station, they’d discussed entry points, it seemed most logical to breach through the back door near the giant roll up doors. There were a dozen police cars parked inside the chain link fence; two of them were explorers with full bull bars and inside prisoner cages.

The team approached the rear door in a formation that they’d practiced in the yard on Charlie’s cabin door a hundred times. Hostetler, Reineer and Garrett on the handle side, Johnson on the hinge side. Charlie stepped forward with a large Halligan style pry-bar. He drove the forked end into the crack between the latch and the frame and pried out and right, sending the door flying open to the left.

Johnson caught the door, giving Charlie room to step to the side between Hostetler and Reineer to recover from the prying outside the line of fire from the room. Hostetler and Reineer stepped forward as Charlie was stepping between them in a well choreographed dance. Charlie holstered the Halligan and shouldered his rifle. The two underlings cleared the entry way. They started way back from the door, taking small sections of the room. They stepped up, each step towards the doorway giving them a larger view into the room. They knelt on either side of the door, as Charlie stepped through to clear the blind corner just inside the door.

“
Well done boys, that was textbook. Keep your wits about you. Garrett, tell me what you sense.”

“
Nothing has been in this room in a long time. No tracks in the dust. I don’t hear anything walking around, Sir,” said Garrett.

“
And what else Johnson?” Bookbinder quizzed the men. He never missed an opportunity to drive home their training.

“
I don’t see anything moving through the windows. I think we’re good.”

“
Dammit Johnson, use your nose.”

“
I can’t smell anything. My nose is stuffy,” replied Johnson.

“
You should quit smoking, it kills your senses. Would you smoke if it clouded your vision?” He asked again.

“
Yes, Sir.” Said Johnson, “I mean no Sir—I mean, I should quit, Sir. I would not smoke if it clouded my vision, Sir.”

“
Alright,” Bookbinder said. “I smell rotten meat. I smell stupid zombies in here. They’re not in this room, if they were that smell would have assaulted our noses, but they’re in here somewhere.”

Once the lesson was over they moved as a unit through the building clearing room by room. After the first room when it became clear that the building wasn’t full of infected, Charlie let his rifle hang and once again drew the halligan.

They’d come in via the police entrance, not the front door of the building. Charlie opened the door to the hallway and took a long smell. The stench of months old flesh was stronger in the hallway. Five steps down the hallway there were doors on the right and left. Charlie held up two fingers and then pointed to Reineer and himself. He pointed to Dalton, Hostetler and Johnson and pointed at the door across the hallway.

The team split into two groups and on Charlie’s mark each quietly turned the knob and opened their door. Charlie stepped into the gloomy room to see a corpse in a police uniform turn its head towards him. It was wearing glasses and still had its patrolman’s hat on. Its eyes locked on to him. They were milky and white but the hunger stood out in them. The creature walked forward into its desk and fell face-first onto a pile of folders. With the zombie bent over the desk like that, Charlie quickly closed the distance and lodged his halligan into its brain.

Reineer pulled an old office chair away and sent it rolling over towards a giant metal book case that ran the length of the side wall. The mostly empty shelves were painted the same beige color as everything else in the building. A few trophies, a couple awards and a family picture were the only things on the first half; Charlie noted a small selection of paperbacks filling about half of a single shelf towards the end of the room.

The two of them laid the patrolman down on the blue carpet-tiled floor and went to work. Reineer removed the utility belt from the officer, putting a Kimber 1911 frame .45 caliber pistol and four magazines into his backpack. Next he removed a pair of handcuffs from the rear pouch and slid a Maglite and collapsible baton off the belt, still in their holsters. The flashlight and baton and hand gun holster went into his pack.

Charlie poked its stomach with his finger.

“
Cheap body armor. This is the everyday wear stuff; it’ll stop a three-eighty, but won’t do anything for seven-six-two. Plus, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get the smell out.” Go check on the others, I’ll poke around here and see if there’s anything useful.

When Reineer was gone, Bookbinder set to work checking the man’s pockets. He found a set of keys in the front pocket. The keychain said “World’s Greatest Dad” and it held a house key and two car keys, one for a Toyota and one for a Chevrolet. Two keys were for Master Lock padlocks and the last key was to his handcuffs.

Charlie rolled the corpse over, removed the officer’s drivers license from his wallet, inserting it into his back pocket without even glancing at it.

Bookbinder stood up and walked into the hall. The rest of the team was there, ready to move on. “Be sure to take their keys and get their driver’s licenses. LEO’s often have sizable gun collections at home,” he said, using the common military slang for law enforcement officers.

There were three other doors in the hall, two other doors on the right led to empty restrooms. The third door at the end of the hall had long, narrow vertical glass windows, embedded with chicken wire.

“
That door up there will lead to the common area. We’re likely to see greater numbers of infected up there. Stay sharp, stay focused. Hand to hand wherever possible. Move forward on my signal.”

Bookbinder moved swiftly and silently, pressed against the wall until he was at the door. He peered through the window, exposing as little of himself as possible to anything that may be on the other side.

The room on the other side of the doors was the main lobby of the state police barracks. It took Bookbinder almost a full minute to count the walkers in there. They were all in a pack in the center of the room, facing inward. Men and women, inThe pack was, as a whole, swaying gently side to side. Each zombie had their arms spread, resting on the shoulder of the corpse beside them, their heads down, tucked into the smallest space possible. Charlie waved to his man to stay back and then crept back to them, pulling them backwards to the first room.

“
Alright, I counted fifty-two in the lobby. They’re huddled together in a tight group, standing in the middle of the room. There are two seating areas under the big windows in the front, but other than that, the room is mostly empty. I couldn’t see anything to the left, but I think that’s where the receptionist would be, probably behind some bullet proof glass.”

The four men with Charlie looked afraid. This was a major operation, bigger than anything they had experienced yet.

“
We won’t let you down, Sir,” said Dalton quietly.

“
Son, I’m not the least bit worried about that. We all keep our heads and remember our training; we’re going to walk out of this place feeling unstoppable. Here’s the plan.”

Charlie laid out the plan to the group. When everyone understood, the five of them cleared the rest of the building, leaving the huddle until the end. They moved as a unit, encountering only two undead, both of them dispatched via halligan soundlessly. When they got to the last room of the second hallway, Bookbinder pulled the men together.

“
Alright, silence from here out.” Charlie whispered. “This is the room where the receptionists sat. The end of this room has thick bullet proof glass, with a hole cut out for speaking through. The three of you stay here. Creep up on that glass, on your bellies if you have to, do not let them see you.”

Garrett, Hostetler and Johnson nodded their understanding.

When you hear Reineer and I firing, open fire through the speaking ports in that huge window. When they’re all down, Reineer and I will step in and finish any with our halligans, you three stay in your position and give us some cover.

Reineer and Bookbinder backtracked down the empty hallways to the first set of double doors, creeping the last ten feet sliding along the wall. The doors opened into the big room by a breaker bar. Bookbinder held up three fingers and pantomimed kicking the breaker bar.

Reineer nodded his acknowledgement and both men put their earplugs in. Bookbinder started the countdown. One finger, two fingers and on the third finger, both men kicked the doors open and opened fire. Bookbinder thumbed his weapon to single shot and aimed each bullet through the ACOG scope. That scope was designed to be fired with both eyes open, allowing him to acquire targets much faster than with a regular scope.

Reineer opened up on full auto, cutting the zombies down. According to their training, the four men with Bookbinder were to lay down rotating heavy suppression fire. Zombies had no fear, but if you put enough bullets into their spine, they did lose the ability to stand upright. A slow dragger was easier to handle than a walker. That bought time for Bookbinder to pick them off one by one with headshots.

At the end of the firing, the room was filled with the smell of gun smoke and the cluster of zombies was dead, shredded from the volume of bullets pumped into them. At the sound of the doors being kicked open, they wheeled around to be met a hail of bullets. Bookbinder only missed one shot, but silently chided himself for wasting that one bullet.

“
Great work, men. You’ve earned your combat stripes today,” said Charlie. “Let’s meet back at the first room”

When the other three arrived in the first room, Bookbinder handed out the orders for the second part of the mission. “Garrett, Hostetler, make your way to the roof and see how hard it will be to remove the radio tower, then report back. Reineer, you’re with me, we’re going looking for keys, guns, ammo and vests.”