Sever, p.18
Sever, page 18
Shawn rolled onto his back and brought his knees up to his chest. The pain in his body was excruciating and he felt the scabs in the creases of his asshole break open from the movement. Fresh blood poured down and pooled underneath him as his battered and broken ribs protested the pressure. He gritted his teeth to keep from crying out and slid his arms around his hips. The handcuffs scraped against his backside and tore away even more of the scabs, but he was able to work the cuffs up his thighs and finally, over his feet.
He lay on his back, panting at the exertion and a moment of doubt crept in. He wasn’t sure that he had the strength that it would take to struggle up the stairs. Then, the thought of Maria trussed up and violated came back into his mind and he sat up. The blood began to flow more freely into his arms since the pressure of the handcuffs behind his back had restricted it.
The former restaurant owner grimaced as the pins and needles in his arms combined with the pressure of his bodyweight on his butt. He gently pulled the tape away as quietly as he could, unwrapping his feet and gaining feeling in those as well. The tape ripped away the hair around his ankles, but he was beyond the threshold limit of pain and barely noticed it.
Once his feet were free, he massaged the blood back into them for several minutes before attempting to stand. He’d never been a martial artist or even particularly athletic so he wasn’t surprised when he couldn’t stand without scooting back against the wall and pushing himself upwards. Even then, Shawn had to take a few more moments to walk around the room in an attempt to regain the feeling in his feet.
He had no way of knowing what time of day it was since he was in the basement and there weren’t any windows in the room. If he went up the stairs and it was nighttime, then he may be able to kill the men in their sleep, but if it were daytime, the element of surprise would be the only advantage that he had. He couldn’t afford to wait, though. He was already weak and getting weaker with each passing moment.
He turned and placed his bound hands against the wall and began walking forward, following the wall until he came to a corner and turned. He ran the length of the second wall and came to another corner. On the third wall, he came to what he was seeking, the doorknob. He tried to turn the knob, but it was locked. He let out a slight grunt of frustration and dropped his hands. But then his mind began to think logically and further process the situation.
The men upstairs were likely occupying it as a matter of convenience due to its proximity to their elaborate trap at the grocery store. The previous residents, hopefully safely away, probably wouldn’t have put a lock on the outside of a door. He reached out, once again wrapping his hands around the locked handle. Then he traced the curve backward slightly and found the lock. A quick twist disengaged it and he cautiously opened the door.
The adjoining room wasn’t quite as dark as the one he’d been locked in because a small sliver of light shown underneath the door at the top of the basement stairs. The miniscule amount of illumination allowed him to discern the outline of furniture and some haphazardly piled boxes. He guessed that his cell was some type of storage closet and they’d pulled everything out so they could put him in there. He rifled through the room, mostly by feel, to determine if there were any weapons that he could use.
His hands eventually closed around the handle of a hockey stick. It was a little long and bulky, especially for a handcuffed man, but it would have to do. Shawn crept up the stairs, praying that they didn’t creak and give away his plan. What was his plan? He hadn’t thought much beyond going upstairs and start hitting people.
He paused. Should I be doing something different? he wondered. Could he wait for them to come down to the basement and whack them when they came down? There were at least two potential problems with that. They would have light with them, possibly blinding him and there was no evidence that they’d ever came down to the basement once they’d initially deposited him down there.
Once again, Shawn’s mind repeated the phrase that there was nothing that he could do about it. He’d just have to figure things out on the fly and adjust to the situation. He continued toward the top of the stairs and started to reach for the knob. Instead, he decided look through the crack along the bottom to see if anyone was outside. It would allow him to see some of the layout of the house and make it so he wasn’t totally blind when he opened the door and all the light from the first floor came flooding in.
He lowered himself painfully to the stairs and peered through the tiny opening between the bottom of the door and that landing. Nothing moved, in front of him, but he could see the deeply tanned foot of someone lying on the floor. He had to assume that was Maria. He listened as well as watched, but couldn’t hear anything, not even the woman’s breathing. Finally, he’d decided his eyesight had adjusted enough that he wouldn’t be blinded when he opened the door. If he could open the door.
This is it, he told himself. Now was the time. He turned the knob as quietly as he could and gently pushed open the door. The tiny squeak that the hinges made sounded like a banshee’s screech in the stillness of the house. He charged through, the element of surprise lost, and prepared to begin swinging the hockey stick.
*****
26 October, 1401 hrs local
Intermediate Staging Point Harrisburg
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Specialist Greeley stared straight ahead at his buddy Walker as he drove the M1A2 Abrams backward off of the low boy’s trailer. Walker wasn’t looking at Greeley; he was watching Sergeant Gilstrap, who was several meters behind and to the side of the tank acting as the ground guide. The sergeant’s arms were extended above his head so Specialist Walker could see him and follow his directions.
Between the two men on the ground, they passed the hand signals to the driver so he could unload the vehicle from the transport trailer. All the enlisted men were taught the skill during their initial armor training. The tank was too large to see over or to the rear, so a ground guide was needed behind the vehicle to pass the hand signals to the man up front, whom the driver could see by looking straight ahead.
They maneuvered Chaos Six off the truck and Mike Miranda watched as the massive vehicle lumbered into line with the remaining ten tanks from the company. One of the others—White Four, he thought—had an unnatural smoke bellowing from the engine and Mike hoped that they’d get at least a day of down time to perform maintenance on the sensitive vehicles. They were living on borrowed time with the tanks.
First Sergeant Jenkins walked up beside Mike and saluted. “Hey, sir. I just got back from talking to the sergeant major. You’re not gonna believe this shit.”
The commander turned to his senior noncommissioned officer. “What’s up, Top?” he asked.
“So you know that we’re going to defend this city for a while, right?”
“Yeah, they told us that over the radio. We’ll use the river as a choke point, spread wire as thick as possible on the bridges, that sort of stuff.”
“I still don’t agree with the decision to not drop the bridges. Seems like we could have held New York—or at least Long Island—if we would have dropped the bridges.”
“Command wants the bridges intact for when we counterattack.”
The first sergeant grunted and then the gruff old veteran said, “Guess who we’re linking up with here in Harrisburg.”
“I don’t know, one of the Army divisions? Maybe the First Infantry Division out of Fort Riley.”
“I wish that was the case, boss. The Army is staying put west of the mountains in the defensive belt that’s almost complete. We’re linking up with the Russians.”
Mike choked on the spit in his mouth when he sucked in a breath. “What?”
“Yeah, you heard me right, sir. We’re linking up with the Russians. Apparently, they parachuted a whole shitload of troops in on this side of the mountains to help fight the delay while we finish the defensive fortifications.”
“How the fuck are we supposed to work with the Russians? We don’t speak the same language.”
“I don’t trust ‘em to leave once we beat these things. That’s what I’m worried about,” First Sergeant Jenkins retorted. “I spent my first five years in the Army stationed in West Germany preparing to fight those fuckers when they came through the Fulda Gap. What are we doing letting them into our country?”
Mike thought about it for a moment. Besides the Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese—all countries that we’d fought wars with in the past century—the Russians had the next largest army in the world. Sure, the Cold War had seen the two nations square off against each other as enemies, but it had never come to fighting. He sure as hell didn’t agree with it, but the addition of professional military forces to the ragtag group of soldiers who were able to get to their units before the horde attacked and civilians who’d escaped getting killed had to be a good thing. Hadn’t the US accepted British and Canadian help during the first zombie war?
“I don’t know, Top. I think the Russians are risking a lot to put soldiers on the ground here in the US. I mean, this thing is isolated to the Americas right now, so what’s their motivation to send troops over here and reduce their potential forces to fight this thing in their own country?”
“I think we’re gonna have a fight on our hands on the back end of this thing, sir.”
“I hope not, but we’ll keep an eye out for them doing anything strange. Deal?”
“Well, if you tell me that we’re cooperating with the Ruskies, then I guess I got no choice but to listen to you. Let’s go liberate some vodka so we can make friends.”
“I’ll leave the scrounging up to you and the boys, First Sergeant. I’m gonna go over to the command post and see what the plan is.”
“Good luck with that, sir. I don’t know that they have any idea what the hell is happening any more than we do,” the older man replied. “I’ll break the news to the boys not to shoot the Russians the next time we move and then start kicking some ass to get this maintenance completed.”
“Thanks, Top,” Mike said and started walking toward the Tactical Operations Center, or the TOC as everyone called it. They typically jumped the TOC a couple of days ahead of the combat troops, got it set up and developed a plan for the defensive belt wherever they were.
One of the things that made Mike wonder about the zombies was that they seemed single-mindedly determined to attack the defenders instead of going around them. That showed some type of basic intelligence in them and gave credence to the claim that there was a super-zombie controlling the rest of them. That FBI guy told them about it before the fighting started in New York. He was so tired that he couldn’t remember the details, but it was something about a holdover from the first war and they were supposed to be on the lookout for a zombie that acted and looked differently than the others. He hadn’t seen anything but a lot of death and dismemberment.
Mike pulled aside the command post’s tent flap and was immediately assaulted by the heated air escaping from inside the TOC. Even after a ten-minute walk in the afternoon sun, it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the bright florescent lighting suspended from the crossbeams overhead. Once he was able to see clearly, he walked across to the operations section.
“Hey, Mike,” Lieutenant Colonel Grant, the 29th Infantry Division’s operations officer, said when he saw him walking up.
“Afternoon, sir,” he replied. Typically a division-level lieutenant colonel wouldn’t be on a first name basis with a company commander, but as the only remaining tank company that the 29th had, Mike was allowed to come in and speak directly to the G-3 whenever he needed to.
The 29th was in charge of the newly-created Joint Task Force East Coast, which now ran all operations east of the Appalachian Mountains for several reasons. The 18th Airborne Corps out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina would have been a logical choice, but they’d been given operational control of the southeast with the 3rd Infantry Division out of Georgia to create a line extending from the coast to the mountains in an effort to keep the creatures from moving south and flowing around the mountain obstacles. The 82nd Airborne Division had been on duty at The Wall when the creatures broke out and had been virtually wiped out. The same could be said of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, New York. They’d responded to the attack on the city and besides a few stragglers who told tales of their losses, the only time anyone saw the 10th Mountain patch was on zombies in the engagement area.
The 29th had learned early in the fighting not to allow themselves to get trapped in a static defense—that’s how the 10th had gotten overrun. They had tried to treat the zombie horde like a human enemy and stood to fight them, thinking that they’d give way to the significant firepower that the dismounted infantry division could bring to bear. The problem, obviously, was that the zombies were relentless; they didn’t care if their numbers were decimated. The bastards just continued to press forward and now most of those soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division were dead.
Movable defenses and delaying tactics like the strands of barbed wire were the key to defeating an enemy that had no sense of self-preservation. Mike’s tanks had helped to add an element of mobile firepower that the defenders east of the Appalachians sorely needed. As such, he’d gotten to know the division’s operations officer well during their long battle westwards.
“What can I do for you, Mike?” Colonel Grant asked.
“Just trying to get a run down on our mission here, the length of stay and follow up on a rumor about Russians, sir.”
“The Russian part is true. They jumped into our area of operations a couple of days ago. Hell, word barely reached us of their arrival before the first of the parachutes started appearing in the sky above the division headquarters. Most of ‘em are preparing a series of elaborate defenses east of the city near Carlisle. We’ve told them to keep it focused on a defense in depth and develop long-range kill boxes so they have time to reposition once the zombies get closer, but you never know with the Russians.
“You know, when I first came in the Army, they were still teaching us about Russian doctrine and the tactics that they used weren’t very different than those of the zombies. They would just throw lots of bodies at the problem until the enemy broke. Hell of a way to do business….”
The older man trailed off for a moment and then refocused on Mike. “As for staying here, I think we’re gonna try for three or four days. I know your tanks need some serious maintenance downtime, so I think I can give you two days, but keep in mind that everything depends on the enemy. We drove a long ways from Allentown, so they should take a few days before they can make it this far, but we know that their methods—I can’t justify calling what they do ‘tactics’—we know that their methods change all the time. Intel isn’t sure if that’s them adapting or they just do random-assed stuff.
“You had three questions. What was the other thing you wanted to know?”
Mike ran through the short list in his head and then replied, “Our mission, sir. What are we doing?”
“That’s right,” he said and poked at the air like he was checking off a list. “Mike, your boys are gonna have pretty much the same mission as always, set up a defensive support by fire position for the dismounted troops, kill as many of the zombies as you can and then—”
A large, far away explosion rumbled through the thin plastic-coated canvas of the tent.
“That’d be another MOAB that the Air Force dropped on the horde outside of Allentown,” the colonel said as he slapped his open hand on the operations map. “Let those fuckers recover from that!”
“We dropped a MOAB outside of the town?” Mike asked in disbelief. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or the MOAB, was also known as the Mother of All Bombs due to its massive 21,000-pound weight and the devastating effects that it caused on the battlefield. The MOAB wasn’t a nuclear weapon, but the extreme temperatures released by the thermobaric warhead destroyed everything within a mile of impact and the overpressure liquefied the internal organs of those unfortunate enough to be within a couple of miles of the point of impact, including the brain.
“Actually, we dropped three, two across the front of the zombie advance and that was the third one, right in the middle of the biggest horde. We have it running on a delayed loop up on KillTV if you want to watch it.”
Mike had seen enough KillTV, the military nickname for the live drone video feed, to last a lifetime, but he was genuinely interested in this episode. Those creatures had ruined his nation, destroyed New York City and wiped out most of the population of the East Coast. “Sure, which screen?” he asked the operations officer when he looked over to the three display monitors, all playing different KillTV “shows.”
“Middle one,” he replied and glanced over. “Looks like this is pre-detonation, the B1 is lining up for the first drop.”
Mike recognized the golf course that he’d fought so hard over. Sure enough, there was the disabled Blue Four tank with the cracked engine block. Tens of thousands of the zombies teamed across the open space, seemingly stalled in their attempt to find and kill their human enemies. The crosshairs centered directly on the Chaos Company tank and then they jumped upwards slightly before reacquiring the tank in the center.
“That would be the plane releasing that big mofo,” Colonel Grant said from beside him. “God, I can’t get enough of watching this video! You’ve been out there fighting them, so it’s gotta be awesome for you to see us wipe out such a large group at one time.”
Mike thought about Allentown, likely obliterated from the planet. Awesome wouldn’t have been the word that he would have used to describe it. “Uh, huh,” he replied noncommittally.
“You said that we’ve dropped three MOABs? Wonder why I didn’t hear the first two?” Mike asked. Even though he talked to the colonel, his eyes never left the monitor as the bomb fell lower toward his company’s vehicle.
