Sever, p.2
Sever, page 2
So far, he’d kept his promise to Allyson’s mother and called her every week. It was important to both of their healing processes, although he felt like she helped him more than he could ever support her. Asher still held the belief that his insistence that she not go on that final mission to New York was what made her even more determined to go. Mrs. Harper assured him repeatedly that her daughter would have gone regardless of his involvement, but Asher blamed himself anyways. Over the months, they discussed everything under the sun and the last time that he called, they even had an entire conversation without mentioning Allyson. His shrink called it growth.
The engine of Asher’s truck roared as he climbed the steep hill that led to his short driveway. Much to his neighbor Rachel’s delight, he still ran the hill shirtless every other morning to stay in shape. He saw her working in her flower garden, likely trying to get them to bloom one last time before the fall weather hit, so he tapped the horn a couple of times when he drove by. She turned and waved, dirt falling from her gardening gloves. He waved back and pulled into his driveway.
He’d barely stepped out of his truck when she called over, “Hi, Asher. How was class?”
“Hey, Rachel,” he replied as he leaned over and picked up his backpack. “It was okay. I’m just ready to get on with it and actually start taking some classes for my major, you know?”
She’d taken off her gloves and walked across her yard onto his driveway. “Oh, I know what you mean. Jim used to get so frustrated when he had to take all of those prerequisites.”
He noticed a pained look on her face. It had been a while since he’d seen Jim, but he’d never said anything to Rachel since it wasn’t his any of his business. Instead, he placed the backpack on his shoulder and changed the subject, “How is your husband by the way?”
“Good… He’s up in New York for a few weeks. His company is doing a new software release and so all the field reps are up there for training.”
“Oh okay,” he said. Then since it seemed safe enough, he continued, “No wonder I hadn’t seen him in a while.”
“Yeah.” She sucked in a ragged breath and continued, “He’s been up there for a while.”
Asher started to ask her if she was alright—she certainly seemed a little off recently—but again, he hadn’t survived so long in the Special Operations community by sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. “Do you need anything? Maybe some help in the yard?”
She crossed her arms over her flat stomach. “No, I’m okay with the yard. But I have been getting pretty lonely,” she stated through lidded eyes. “Maybe you could come over to watch a movie later.”
And that’s my cue to go inside. “I’m sorry to hear that, Rachel. I’m sure Jim will be home soon though,” Asher replied and stepped toward his house. Rachel Robertson had made it evident since the day that he moved in next door that she was willing to engage in a little extramarital action with him. Asher had been a lot of things over his lifetime, but no one had ever mistaken him for an adulterer.
She nodded her head curtly and asked, “Would you like to come over for dinner tonight? I can make a pot roast.”
“Sorry, Rachel, but I have plans for tonight,” he lied.
“Oh… Are you seeing someone again?”
Out of necessity, he hadn’t told his neighbors that Allyson had been in the FBI and was killed in the line of duty last summer. It only would have made them ask questions about how they’d met and that could potentially have led to them figuring out that he was a retired CIA operator. It had been easier to say that they’d broken up and that was why she wasn’t around anymore. “No. We have a study session at the library for my Algebra class. We have a test tomorrow.”
“Well maybe after you’re done studying you could stop by for a glass of wine.”
“I’d love to, but I want to get to sleep early for the test. I’m an old man and I need my sleep.”
Rachel laughed and placed a hand on his arm. “Old man! You’re what, thirty-five maybe forty?” she asked.
“I turned fifty almost two weeks ago,” Asher replied, allowing his neighbor’s hand to linger on his arm. He didn’t intend to let her advances go anywhere, but he was also aware that he walked a fine line with his friend’s emotions. There was obviously something going on with her. The body language and looks of sadness that had crossed her face a few times told him more than she would have believed. He just really didn’t feel like dealing with her problems while he tried to work through his own emotional roller coaster.
“No you didn’t!”
“Yup, sure did. Boomer and I celebrated with an extra-long walk on the nature trail and then we each had an ice cream cone.”
She smiled at him and let her hand drop. “Well, you sure don’t look it… Okay then, I guess I’ll get back to my flowers. Good luck on your test tomorrow!”
“Thank you, Rachel. I’ll see you later.” Asher took the opportunity to go inside and climbed the stairs up to his house. He inserted the key in his door and turned around. His neighbor still stood on the driveway watching him with a little sad smile on her face. It made her look closer to his age than her actual age of thirty-six. He waved and went inside, where he was immediately attacked.
He fell to the floor playfully while his puppy, Boomer, rolled on top of him. Asher had finally given in to his desire to get a dog after Allyson died. He’d wanted one for a long time, but wasn’t sure if he was ready for the type of commitment that an animal would need, but Allyson had taught him that he was capable of love and that somewhere, buried deep inside all those years of death and hatred, there was still a caring man inside. Besides Mrs. Harper’s fellowship, Boomer had been a godsend in helping to put his life back together again.
Boomer was a Boxer. She had the typical reddish-brown, or fawn, with a white chest and black around her muzzle. The breeder that he’d purchased her from had already docked her tail when she was only a few days old, otherwise Asher would have left her tail the natural length. Other than potty training, he enjoyed every minute that he got to spend with the dog. She was still too young to go on real runs with him, so they went on walks together through the woods around their home.
“Alright, you crazy little jerk!” he laughed after a moment of wrestling with her on the floor. “Let’s see what the damage is today.”
It seemed like she made it her mission to chew up something new every day even though she had tons of toys. He’d thought about crate training her, but settled on installing a pet door to the back yard instead. He’d been forced to stay in enclosed spaces during his time on the Teams and with the Agency. As an instructor at the Agency’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) course, Asher had submitted a lot of students to the sensory deprivation training. Neither experience made him keen on the idea of putting his dog through that type of existence on a daily basis.
As a result of that decision, his old ratty—but extremely comfortable—furniture was even more abused and he’d learned early that he had to hide every cord in the house carefully or else Boomer thought they were something for her to chew on. It helped him to return to the minimalist type of living that he’d kept for most of his life. Somehow, in the two years since he’d retired from the Agency, he’d developed an appetite for random crap that just sat around the house; stuff that he’d never wanted while he was active. Boomer’s incessant puppy-chewing had curbed that desire quickly.
Asher walked through the house; nothing seemed torn up and there weren’t any messes on the floor. He reached down and scratched the dog’s head behind her ears and said, “That’s three days in a row, girl. Are you growing up on me?”
He went back into the living room and sat on the couch where Boomer jumped up and laid her head on his lap. He picked up the remote and turned the television on. “Looks like we have to go find someplace to hang out for a couple of hours tonight,” he said to the dog. “Or else Rachel will know that I lied to her about having plans.”
Boomer closed her eyes and he flipped through the channels until he came to a documentary about Operation Just Cause, the US invasion of Panama in 1989. After a few minutes, he snorted in derision of all the so-called “experts” and “eyewitnesses to history” who’d allegedly been there and talked about their perceptions of the strategic goals of the operation. Like a damned private in the Army knew anything about the United States’ National and Strategic strategy. He’d swum ashore from a submarine ten miles off shore three weeks before the Army or Marine Corps troops got there. His team operated completely alone, destroying targets and making it look like mechanical failures or simple accidents so as not to overtly alert the Panamanian Defense Forces that an invasion was imminent. The conventional forces would have easily defeated the banana republic’s forces, but the low loss of life—on both sides—was attributed to the efforts of the SEALs who’d made sure that the anti-aircraft batteries and troop transports were unusable to the Panamanians.
After ten minutes of that garbage, he changed the channel again. As he scrolled through the channels, something caught his eye and he went back to the previous channel. It was one of the twenty-four-hour news networks. The reporter talked into the camera and the image behind him showed an aerial view of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The entire area surrounding the building swarmed with zombies.
*****
19 September, 1527 hrs local
Hoosick Falls Armory
Hoosick Falls, New York
“Alright, let’s get these babies loaded so we can go kick some ass!” the company first sergeant shouted at the men in his company. They’d already driven the company’s M1A2 Abrams tanks from the motorpool in the back of the old armory and lined them up on the street for transport. It was more than 190 miles from the small town of Hoosick Falls on the eastern New York border down to New York City where they’d been ordered to reposition for defense of the city. That was too far for them to drive under their own power at any type of real speed, so they were being loaded up on semi-trailers for the trip.
The company’s tanks were an amazing application of modern military engineering—even if they weren’t the newest model that the Active Army used—that had no near competitor in foreign militaries worldwide. They were the perfect piece of offensive gear, designed for fighting in wide, open spaces with lots of maneuver area, but they also made a formidable defensive obstacle under the right conditions. The most perfect condition imaginable for a tanker in a defensive position would be against an unarmed enemy that charged blindly into incoming fire. Fortunately, the zombies terrorizing eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York did just that.
Mike laughed to himself when he thought about the fact that his unit was moving out to fight against zombies. His company, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 101st Cavalry Regiment, part of the 42nd Infantry Division—the Rainbow Division—was headquartered in the small town of Hoosick Falls, New York. The Regiment had inactivated in 2006, but after the nuclear attack on Washington and the zombie outbreak there, they were reactivated as a contingency response force. Captain Michael Miranda had jumped at the opportunity to command the unit, so he quit his job as an investment broker and moved his family from New York City to Hoosick Falls to start a new way of life.
The community was only three miles from the Vermont border and twelve from Massachusetts, so they were almost as far east that a person could go in the state of New York. Since they were so far from everything else, it would take a while to get his men and equipment transported down to the city, where they were expected to defend the approaches and keep the bulk of the state’s population as safe as possible until they could be evacuated.
The governor had decided to defend the bridges and tunnels into the city with the state’s only National Guard tank battalion. They’d been given a shitty mission, but the tanks would be supported by infantry and the New York City Police Department. They were to hold on as long as possible while the city was evacuated through the air and by sea. Overland travel was considered too risky and all outbound ground traffic from New York was closed off in an effort to keep the roads clear so the trucks hauling tanks from out of town could drive faster toward the disaster area.
Alpha Company and the Battalion Headquarters Company were stationed on Staten Island. Their job was to secure the three bridges leading from New Jersey where the creatures were likely to arrive first. The governor ordered the evacuation of Staten Island northeast to Brooklyn over the Verrazano Bridge, where the Alpha and Headquarters companies would retreat if needed. They would have to make their stand at the Narrows and not let anything past them into the city so the main evacuation could be completed.
The rest of the battalion would secure the remaining bridges and tunnels leading into the city. Delta Company was headquartered in Newburg, only ninety miles to the north of New York, so they were ordered to cross the Hudson and travel the farthest south out of the three outlying companies to the Holland Tunnel. Mike’s Charlie Company was the next closest to the city in Hoosick Falls, so they’d be transported to defend the Lincoln Tunnel. Finally, the regiment’s Bravo Company was stationed all the way up north in Troy by the state capital, so they were being sent to the most northerly entrance to the city, the George Washington Bridge.
Each company had three platoons, Red, White and Blue. The platoons consisted of four tanks each, plus a headquarters element of two tanks. That gave the companies the capability to lay in interlocking and overlapping fields of fire to cover the entrances to the city with fourteen tanks. They’d been told that if even one of the creatures got past them, it could begin infecting everyone behind their position, so there were infantrymen and police in defensive lines behind them to catch any that made it through.
The idea that zombies were moving steadily north from Washington was absurd. So far, they’d decimated the city where he was born and raised. Philadelphia looked to be a total loss and now it appeared that the numbers of the creatures had swollen to massive proportions. What was even crazier was that the infestation seemed to be coming directly for the city, not deviating too far west from their original course, which is why the governor decided to defend the city at choke points instead of the wide, open areas to the west of the Hudson River. It made Mike think that the horde had set its sights on New York City and would stop at nothing to get to it. But that’s crazy; they’re just mindless monsters who travel wherever the moment takes them… Right?
Some FBI bigwig named Alistair Reston gave a secret briefing to all of the company commanders. Reston had been in charge of the mission to rescue the Constitution last spring, so he’d knew a thing or two about the zombies. He discussed the horde’s unwavering groupthink; once they set their minds to do something, they would keep trying it until they either succeeded or failed. Reston used the example of a group in Baltimore that tracked and trapped one of his agents and how they used their bodies to pile on top of one another to get around the fact that they couldn’t negotiate a set of stairs individually.
The FBI had given then some valuable pointers about the creatures’ capabilities that the soldiers were desperately in need of. First off, the only way to kill the bastards was to shoot them in the head. Second, the damn things could swim, but likely wouldn’t if there was a bridge or tunnel that they could use. He sent them satellite video clips of the zombies swimming across Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as they went after a person who’d become trapped behind The Wall somehow.
The last thing he left them with was to watch out for zombies who looked different than any of the others. There were still some of the original zombies from the Pentagon infestation alive behind The Wall. It was believed that they retained enough brain capacity to think and could plan or react to actions in real time. It was likely that these “Type Ones” as Reston called them were how the zombies were able to escape and then sneak all the way to Philadelphia without being seen. He said that they were relatively easy to spot because of their parchment-like skin and if any of those were seen, they were to expend every effort to kill it. Humanity couldn’t afford to let any Type Ones escape. Point noted.
Philadelphia. Mike’s parents lived there and they’d called him four nights ago, warning him to get his family as far away from the east coast as possible. He’d laughed at his father’s early Halloween jokes, but the elder Miranda had quickly made him realize that he was serious. Before Mike called the battalion commander with a threat warning, he booked a flight for his wife and two daughters to Honolulu the next morning. Better safe than sorry.
That was the last time that he heard from either of his parents. He’d tried repeatedly over the last several days to reach them as the company prepared for movement southward, but hadn’t been able to get through. All the cell phone lines were jammed with people trying to make phone calls and the land lines went directly to an error message. He assumed that the phone lines had gotten severed somehow down south of the city where there was no way to get them fixed.
“Hey, sir. BC’s on the phone,” the company first sergeant growled from a few feet away. He must have been inside and made his way down here, Mike thought. The grumpy old noncommissioned officer had been outside yelling at the soldiers a few minutes ago, how the hell can that guy be in so many places at once?
“Thanks, Top,” Mike replied and turned away from his spot checks on the vehicles to go inside. He only knew how to be in one place at a time so he’d have to hurry to avoid keeping the battalion commander waiting. He looked up toward the old National Guard Armory as he jogged down the long line of tanks and tracked medical vehicles.
The Hoosick Falls Armory building had been built in the 1880s and was on the National Register of Historic Places. With the exception of the two circular turrets flanking the building, the two-story red brick structure might have been mistaken for a church. Interestingly, the two towers were different from each other. Mike never could figure out why the one to the right of the main entrance was two stories tall and had a conical roof, while the one on the left had three floors with the classic crenelated parapet that so many people identified with medieval castles.
