World of Ashes II (33 page)

Daniel found some food that had been flown in for the Prisoners, snagging a fresh apple and making his way back to the lean-to that had been set up for his men to rest under. The log he chose to sit on was next to some of the other enlisted men. He wasn’t supposed to sit with them, but there wasn’t exactly a designated section for officers.

“My brother is on one of those gangs.” A Soldier Daniel was sitting next to said. This was Pfc. Emilio Hanso, a generally quiet and good natured young man, he was maybe older than Daniel by a year or two. He was a good trooper and Daniel didn’t mind listening to him speak. “Robbed a gas station during the panic when Nogales was overrun.”

“Did you live in Nogales?” Daniel asked, offering the man a slice of his apple. 

“No, Sir. We lived in Flagstaff with our parents. He was in college, supposed to be a nurse.” Hanso sighed. “He should be here, with us. Not over there… being a slave.”

“So why’d he rob a gas station?” Sgt. Hudson and SSgt. Kemper both asked at roughly the same time. It was a rude question, but one that was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

“Because shit was going to hell and we needed food. You gotta remember, Sarn’t, the riots weren’t just in Nogales. There was the revival of the
Occupy
movement in New York and San Diego, the Race Riots in St. Louis and Las Angeles, Hurricane Gale Berman pounding New Orleans and Florida like a fat chick doing shots in an Alliance friendly bar come U-Day…” As Hanso recounted the mess that was America before the zombies, Daniel imagined what he’d say about the crimes he’d committed. Pulling a gun on a Federal Agent and then stealing his car had to be up there on the list of felonies that would land you on a chain gang. How was theft worse than anything he’d done?

“Shit, everyone stole stuff.” SSgt. Logan chimed in from across the tent. “How the hell else were we supposed to stay alive?”

Everyone concurred. “Just so happened Flagstaff Metro was in the area and caught him and some other guys from our neighborhood. Took ‘em all to jail, then they sent all the prisoners to another location while we had to fight our way across the country till the Army picked us up. I enlisted after that, and my Mom got a letter from him while I was in Basic, but it was just to say he was still alive. They don’t let the inmates call home no more.” Hanso sipped from a can of generic soda. “It just gets me that the only reason it was him and not me, was I was at home watching our Gran. If I’d just stood up faster when the guys came by, he’d be in this unit and I’d be in a jumpsuit.”

“Fuck that.” Daniel had to come up with some sort of inspirational word. He wasn’t the kind of leader that would want his men to sit around second guessing themselves. “We’re all exactly where we’re supposed to be, Mr. Hanso. Do you think your brother would have made all the same choices you did? What if he’d gone left instead of right, chosen the wrong house to hide in or the wrong car to steal, the wrong road to take? No, what happened to us all happened so that we’d be the ones in this uniform, so that we’d be the men behind the guns to take back America. Whatever strife or suffering we’ve endured it was so that we would be exactly where the Good Lord wanted us to be
right now
.”

“And those poor bastards, Sir?” Kemper gestured at the prisoners.

“Someone has to bury us when we’re dead.” Daniel said firmly. “It’s the difference between us than them.” He pointed to the mountain of corpses. “Besides, one day this will all be over and it’ll be our turn to put the guns down, pick up a hammer or shovel and rebuild. Personally, I look forward to the day I never again need my rifle. On that day I’m going to put it on top of my mantle, and for the rest of my life I’ll happily watch it rust.”

Chapter 15

Lincoln, North Dakota had been a quiet bedroom community just outside the former capitol of Bismarck since the it was developed out of farm land in 1977. In the early days of the plague the people living there had gathered hundreds of concrete road dividers, repurposing them as a wall to some great success. On one side of the wall was a functioning slice of Middle America preserved like a living museum, on the other was a panorama of a horde that must have been a half million thick on all sides. Vic had been trying to push down or climb over their wall for almost a year now. If they weren’t rescued soon it was estimated the sheer volume of bodies pressing on their barricade would collapse it within a month, and then they too would just be another grim statistic.

While still overhead Daniel watched the siege below with as much apprehension as determination. Their orders were to evacuate the survivors, plant the ground based version of the flechet bombs and leave the doors wide open on their way out. The epicenter of the blast would be a giant crater, yes, but the resulting wave of bouncing bombs thrown for a mile in every direction would spread out and cause more damage to flesh than structures. The idea was to reclaim this area after a few different strategies were deployed, one of which involved using AC130 Specter Gunships to wipe out the horde, and another to surround the area and use Regular Army troops to keep them from escaping, or wandering off at any rate. From one battle to the next the scale of the attacks were increasing parallel with media attention. This would be the largest single military engagement on American soil to date.

A reporter had been “embedded” with 1
st
VR in the months between Spearfish and the trip to Lincoln. Daniel didn’t trust him, but Sharp wouldn’t stop hobnobbing so he could get his name in the papers. Lots of officers made their careers by getting notoriety in the media. If you asked Daniel, Major Sharp was being foolish for pretending that ten times as many hadn’t lost their careers because of the same desire to be remembered by history. It was common knowledge through the ranks though, that many of the officers and generals the President had shamed in the last eight years were now either missing or known to be leading the Texans.

Daniel’s headset crackled. It was the reporter from
Mossy Stone Magazine
, “
Hey LT. You got a good feeling about this one?
”

The smile on the reporter’s face was made only more childish by the scraggly hipster face-pubes he might have called a beard. Daniel wanted to bust his oversized front teeth out. “Stay off the net.” He said in a sufficiently threatening tone. “I won’t warn you a second time.” The reporter must have thought he was joking, because he laughed it off and started snapping pictures of the men waiting to be dropped into the town. Like the true cuntwaffle he was, he used a flash bulb inside the darkened, red-lit chopper. The crew chief snatched the camera and launched it out his gun position without a word. The reporter tried to stop him, but SSgt. Kemper put a switchblade to their pest’s throat, and he finally let it go.

Circling twice just to get a lay of the landing area, the Chinook squadron, known only as the
Bastards
dropped their birds like stones straight to telephone-pole height and touched down feather soft in a crop field that had once been someone’s back yard. The survivors of Lincoln, North Dakota had doubled their original population of just under three thousand to nearly 6,500 since the plague. Multiple families occupying the same house out of necessity to leave some land open to plant crops, they’d learn as a miscellaneous fact. Every available space in the tiny hamlet of Bismarck was either used for crops, livestock or people. The kids didn’t even have a playground anymore, that was a pig-pen, but boredom certainly beat starvation.

Staff Sergeant Kemper and Daniel were the first two off the Chinook, a tradition Daniel had demanded they stick to for the morale of the troops. The other officers, except Captain Rambo, all adopted the same policy for the same reasons. They were the first off the transport, and the last back on. In front of them was a tired but excited looking Marine Gunnery Sergeant with a brassard that had the emblem of a colonel embroidered on it, stood at attention and called his assembled men to do the same. This wasn’t uncommon, the last surviving man wasn’t originally the highest ranking. In this case GySgt. Lampkin was a Reservist who’d lived in Lincoln to begin with. His unit was called up, but their assembly area had been overrun and the chain of command broke down from there. He and his brother gathered as many men as they could and decided to hold out until someone came for them.

The helicopters took off again, the noise they created drew every zombie away from the wall for the first time that the people could remember since the horde of Bismarck had discovered their town. With the pressure of the bodies relieved almost instantly, the wall actually sagged back outwards in places where the Vics had been the most heavily concentrated. Even as Major Sharp and GySgt. Lampkin went through the quick but also traditional ceremony of exchanging command, work crews were heading to the damaged areas without even being ordered to.

As complex and interwoven as the Lincoln society was, Sharp and his men weren’t exactly there to rescue it outright, and that really pissed some people off. They didn’t want to get on the helicopters or even on the armored semi-trucks that were inbound as the Chinooks drew away the hordes. It was a five hour drive from Spearfish to Lincoln, but that was pre-war. In maybe eight to ten hours the convoy would reach them, just enough time to pack what you needed and queue up to leave. The residents of Lincoln almost unanimously agreed that they weren’t going anywhere, though most were agreeable to the idea that children, the elderly and the sick should be evacuated. That wasn’t the plan, and Sharp put his foot down that everyone was leaving because nobody was going to survive the next plan it the stayed. Perhaps it was the way he said it, or perhaps it was because Lincoln’s survivors just couldn’t accept that the safest strategy for everyone was to just leave and let the military cleanse the area of the infection, but a woman in the front row of the crowd spat in Major Sharp’s face.

“My husband died defending this town, and I’ll die before I let his death be in vein!” She shouted, giving every gathered soldier the finger. One might have suspected she was a lone voice in the crowd, but more and more people started shouting the names of their fallen loved ones until Gunny Lampkin could calm them down. The people respected and listened to him, he could secure their cooperation, or as Daniel saw firsthand, insight a small riot.

“I’m sorry, Major, but we’re not leaving.” Gunny Lampkin said once the voices had quieted. He reached out and grabbed the flag he’d relinquished before.

Sharp used the inside of his cover to wipe away the snot as people in the crowd pulled the woman back out of sight. Making certain that the cameraman and his boss the “journalist” were still rolling footage, Major Sharp stuck to his decorum. “I understand your sentiments, Gunnery Sergeant, I really do. But the most effective weapon against the plague is also just as lethal to living people. Though your concrete walls are mighty, they won’t protect your people from this weapon.”

“Is it a nuke!?” Someone in the crowd shouted in horror.

Sharp was quick to dispel that rumor. Russia and China had both used nuclear weapons before international communication had fallen apart. The President promised the people he’d never do that on sovereign US soil, which was good because unlike in Russia they weren’t fighting irradiated zombies too. “No. Absolutely not. A nuclear weapon would destroy the infection, but it would also destroy everything in its blast radius and leave the epicenter as well as the nearby regions in the midst of a radioactive fallout we would not have the resources to clean up.” That was a pretty clear way of putting it, most people thought, but that didn’t make them feel better about the bouncing cluster bombs. It was likely every house or structure near the walls would suffer damage no matter how precise the weapons were, and they weren’t precise at all on that scale. The people of Lincoln decided they didn’t want the area around them bombed and threatened to rebel.

This was the part where Daniel felt truly uneasy about their mission for the first time. Most of the citizens were clearly armed, very few of them not carrying a handgun or rifle of some sort. If they turned hostile there was nothing 1
st
VR could do but recall the choppers and try to hold their ground. At this range, though, it would be a bloodbath on both sides. Captain Rambo ended up being the peacemaker when he quietly suggested to Major Sharp that they may not live long enough for the birds to return for them if he continued to antagonize the Lincolnites. Probably Rambo just wanted a delay so he could bang the fat soccer mom who put a cheap Hawaiian lay over his neck, but it was a crowd pleasing decision.

Agreeing, at long last, that he would at least make the call to Division Headquarters and request additional troops to protect the people while 1
st
VR stood its ground, but if Command said no he would force the people onto the busses if need be. It took an hour for a response, in which time the Chinooks had moved off because of low fuel, leaving the horde outside the walls looking bored and directionless. It was only a matter of time before their interest in the castle-town peaked again, but still that was enough time to put the entire company, besides the POGs* of the Headshed* platoon, on the wall with something like six times the amount of ammunition per man that was carried pre-war. The original defenders of the concrete bastions happily volunteered to act as relief and support troops for 1
st
VR, but few if any of them were needed, the machine had become well oiled.

Major Sharp was happy to give the order to open fire, what with a camera aimed at him, his only regret would be that he didn’t have an actual sabre to point at the enemy. Daniel liked the look of his machete and did exactly what Sharp wasn’t doing, slinging his own rifle over his shoulder and directing fire with a silver blade, glistening in the noon sun. For the entirety of the afternoon rifles chattered at walking corpses which fell by the hundreds and finally by the thousands. The original plan to just level the area would no longer be needed, which ruffled some feathers up top, but having a walled off outpost deep in Vic Territory was probably what Command had in mind anyhow. They just wanted to be the ones to build it so they could show the folks toiling for the war effort that their blood and sweat meant something. Of course it meant something, it meant everything, but they needed to see it made a difference. Maybe they’d build a new wall around the original and take pictures of it anyhow.