Still working slowly on ZK: Revolution Chapter 5 Below us, the crowd of zombies turned to the south in unison. They heard the approaching truck long before we did, and started to flow around the base of the tower like a rotting river. As they passed we took shots directly at their heads. Soon, only a few dozen corpses lay on the ground. The rest had moved towards the road, where one of our trucks briefly made an appearance. As soon they stopped, an armored window rolled down and two flashbangs came flying out. Then the truck turned around and hauled out of there. The grenades went off with an ear cracking WHAM WHAM, followed by two more down the road. The crowd of Z‘s tore off in pursuit, just as our second truck, with Brit driving, passed it coming the opposite way. She ran over one or two, but skirted the crowd and slid to a stop at the base of the tower. “What are you waiting for, a goddamned invitation?” yelled Brit, and we hustled down out of the tower and climbed up onto the back of the truck, Red giving me a hand up. Bognaski stood and fired at the Z’s who were starting back towards, laughing like a maniac as he shot. I reached down and slapped the top of his helmet and he turned and climbed on just as Brit threw the truck into gear again and took off. I crawled slowly over the mounds of equipment and ammunition and slid into the passenger seat. Ziv sat in the gunners’ turret, casually spinning the MK-19a2 around and giving Brit grief about her driving. He stopped when she reached over and pinched him on the inner thigh. He cursed her and started kicking at her head, despite her laughter. I ignored them and called up Captain Zarzicky in the other truck. “Cruncher Six, this is Lost Boys Seven, over.” “GO AHEAD, NICK” came back at me after two calls. “We have orders to head to Fort Orange and talk to Liberty Six. We have your Nasty element with us, over.” “YOU CAN KEEP HIM, OVER.” Bognaski, who had moved up to the divider between the cab and the truck, put on a hurt look. “Roger. Feel free to resupply at the house. I’ll call and let you know what’s going on, over.” “IF LIBERTY SIX WANTS TO TALK TO YOU, IT CAN’T BE ANYTHING GOOD, AND I’M GLAD I’M NOT YOU” he laughed through the airwaves. “Ours is not to wonder why. Lost Boys Seven out.” I hung the mike back on the radio and told Ziv and Brit to cut the crap. “Cut down Oakwood Avenue to Hoosick Street and head up to Fort Orange.” The main operating base for the Army was located at Albany Airport, occupying the former National Guard HQ. From there, hunter / killer patrols, foot, motorized and horse mounted, spread throughout the country side, eliminating undead town by town, street by street. This side of the river, east of the Hudson, was still pretty much a no-man’s land. Bands of survivors ad cannibals still roamed the hills between Troy and Southern Vermont, attacking anyone they thought they could get away with. “So what’s the deal, bossman?” asked Brit as she swerved to run over another zombie wandering the approaches of the Hoosick Street Bridge. “I don’t know. Colonel Scarletti wants to talk to me. Probably wants us to do some sneaky peeky shit for him.” Brit had a shit eating grin on her face, and was bouncing around in her seat, unable to contain herself. “OK, out with it, woman. Tell me.” Somehow, despite being isolated in on a farm in the middle of the river, twenty mile from the nearest civilization, she always seemed to know what was going on in the entire Northeast. Kept track of things back in the Federal Zone in the Pacific Northwest, too. “Remember that guy who stopped in last week, said he was trading up and down Route 22?” Ziv, who had couched down to listen, said “Yes, that smelly mountain man. Pig.” “Yeah, him. Well, he told me that there was a pretty big group of survivors living in a walled town. Berlin. You know it?” I did. Berlin, New York was, or had been, a small little hamlet at the crossroads of State Routes 22 and 2. It backed up against a high pass that lead over into Massachusetts. Like most of the rural areas in Upstate, the inhabitants had been cut off and left to fend to themselves when the Army and the Government had pulled out. “Yeah, I know it. Dinky little place, not even a Stewarts shop in the main road. Just a couple of buildings, the old Veteran’s Hall. No wall there that I know of.” “Well, turns out that they’re doing pretty well. The took a bunch of heavy machinery and built a wall around it, and gates at the road junction. Probably three, four hundred people living there now.” “Has the Army been out that way yet?” Brit almost bounced in her seat with glee. She loved giving out info in drips and drabs, and got a kick out of feeding us intel. “Three months ago, they politely told a cavalry patrol to PISS OFF. Said they didn’t need their help, thank you very much, except that they might trade for medicines. Rumor has it, though that the guy running the place used to be some government bigshot.” “So what does it have to do with us?” “Don’t you pay attention to ANYTHING? I swear, sometimes, I should have let the Zs in Syracuse eat you. Hellooooo, constitutional crisis? Acting President Taylor more like acting dictator Taylor?” “And I still fail to see what that has to do with us.” She just snorted and refused to say anything more. We pulled up to the barrier across the Hoosick Street Bridge. A skeleton in rotted Army camo lay slumped there, a bullet hole in the top of its head. Red hopped out of the back and unlocked the gate, covered by Bognaski. He made sure to wave to the cameras mounted there, so the guys back at Fort Orange knew who was coming through and didn’t shove a Hellfire missile up our asses. As we drove through, Brit leaned out the window and spit on the skeleton. They waved us onto the base, and Brit dropped me and Red off at the Headquarters building. Although we were both not currently on Active Duty, Redshirt and I retained our ranks as Army Reservists under the National Emergency Act. He had steadily moved up the ranks over the last few years, making Staff Sergeant, and I had just received an e-mail that I was now a Sergeant Major. I had deleted the email and gone on to other, more important things, like collecting eggs from our chicken. So it came as a bit of a surprise when the guard at the front desk handed us shiny new ID cards with our correct ranks on it, then used a DNA scanner to make sure we were who we said we were. Then they escorted us to an office on the third floor. There was only one man in the office, the Task Force Liberty Commander and acting Military Governor of the State Of New York, Colonel Anthony Scarletti. His burned face didn’t even crack a glimmer of a smile as he greeted us. He went right to business, as usual. “First off, what you see and hear in this room is not for anyone but your team. If word of this somehow gets out, I will have an SF team detached to hunt you all down. Understood?” We both nodded. Unlike the previous commander of TF Liberty, whose skeleton Brit had spit on going over the bridge, Scarletti was no fool. The man scared the shit out of me. He handed me a file, which I opened. The first thing that came out was a long range photo shot from overhead by some kind of UAV. It showed a heavily bearded man, face grainy in with poor resolution. He looked slightly familiar, though. Red spoke first. “That’s Vice President Epson. I thought … I thought he was missing in the evacuation from DC.” The Colonel stood up and paced back and forth behind his desk. I flipped to the next page, which showed a map of the Hoosick / Wallamosac River valleys. A red sharpie had circled the hamlet of Berlin. There were additional overhead recon shots showing a crude palisade and defensive positions. “Nick, how familiar are you with politics in the Federal Zone?” “Some. We haven’t been back there in more than a year. Last I heard, there were some pretty bad riots, and an extension of the National Emergency Act.” Scarletti stopped pacing, and leaned on his desk. “What if I were to tell you that Acting President Taylor has been quietly using his security forces to assassinate political opponents, and has no intention of allowing elections to be held?” “I’d say that was some bad shit. But what does that have to do with us out here in the East? Resettlement seems to be going OK, the zombie population is way down.” I was drawing conclusions in my own mind, but I wanted him to say it. “Taylor was number seventeen on the list of Presidential Succession. He was the Secretary of Homeland Security, and was only sworn in as Acting President until things sorted themselves out. Vice President Epson was number two. By all rights, he should be the President of the United States.” “Again, how is that our problem?” Here it comes, I thought. He tossed a data stick onto the desk. “On here is all the orders and maps you’ll need. I want your team to go into Berlin and bring him out. If you can’t bring him out willingly, then you are authorized to use force. I would prefer willingly. At final resort, to prevent him being used as a political pawn by other factions, you are authorized to terminate him.” I stood up and said “What a goddamned minute. We’re a scout team, not a hit squad. Go get some of your other black ops jokers to do this shit.” “I would if I could trust them, and I DON’T want him killed. I want him brought back here, alive, so he can resume his duties to his country. Your team is the best ones to do the job.” Red sat silently next to me, watching the clash of wills. I did NOT want to get involved with this political bullshit, and Scarletti knew it. He hit a button on his laptop and turned it around to face us. A video was playing, a grainy black and white feed from an infrared camera. “We were deleting files off our servers to make room, and someone came across this.” As I watched, a HUMVEE pulled up to what I recognized as the gate we had just come through on the Hoosick Street Bridge. Figures got out, and carried a body over to the top of the wall. My heart sank; I knew what this was. We had missed a camera, and the recording was of my team dumping a still living Colonel MacDonald, the last TF Liberty commander, into a crowd of zombies after he had tried to kill us two years ago. “Nick, what’s that?” asked Redshirt. “Something you have no need to know about.” Brit and I were the only team members left alive from that time. “OK, Colonel, you got me. We’ll play your little games. But if things go bad, and I expect they will, you better make sure we’re all dead.”
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 18:21:10 +0000
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