Zombie Killers: HIghwire

Chapter 1
The LMTV ground across the potholes of the deserted road, slowly making its way down Route 40. We had forded the Tomahannock creek, making our way around the debris field from the downed bridge. Thankfully, the bridge over the Hoosick River, and its high deep gorge, was still intact. Once that was down, getting south to Troy, well, we would be back to using boats on the river. The ride was bumpy, and after a while, my leg was starting to ache where my prosthetic joined up below the knee. It was times like this when I missed Doc the most.
“How about you take it easy there, cowgirl.” I told Brit as she spun the wheel around, swerving to avoid an abandoned mini-van.
“How about you shut up, old man!” Brit turned to me for a second and flashed me a smile, and stomped on the gas. We hit another pothole, and I heard Red curse out loud as his kidneys impacted on the turret ring.
“SORRRY!” yelled Brit.
Red looked down and grinned. “Next time, I kick you in the head.” Red’s wife, Jenny Hart, our demo expert, was back at the farm with our son Nate and their daughter Mya, both less than a year old. I had insisted that Brit stay home, but I might as well have been talking to myself for all the attention she paid me.
We were heading down to a cell tower located off Oakwood Avenue. Four years after the Zombie Apocalypse, the Army controlled a corridor through the Mohawk Valley and down the Hudson. Trains were running, and FEMA was resettling towns. Outside the corridor, though, most major cities and towns were still infested with thousands and thousands of undead. We had all been vaccinated, so we had no fear of being turned, but a bite was a bite, and getting your throat ripped out was kind of permanent also. The real danger we faced was the random ambush or gunshots from bands of survivors that lurked outside of the land patrolled by the Federal Army. Most of them knew to stay far away from our farmstead, but we were heading into unknown territory.
Behind us, another LMTV, the modern version of the Army’s 5 – Ton truck, followed. It was being driven by Ziv, the only other surviving member of our team. Riding shotgun was an old friend, Gunnery Sergeant (Retired) Jim Lock. Jim had been with a shoot and loot crew, taking gold out of the ruins of Mechanicville, but had stuck around when the rest of his guys departed to England. Perched up in the turret, manning the M-240B machine gun was a new soldier, Specialist Jimmy Woods. On the back of the trucks were climbing equipment, a 5 kilowatt generator, and a loud speaker setup. The plan was to get to a cell phone tower, rig up the loudspeakers as high as we could go, power up the generator, set a recording on time delay, and haul ass. Then, after a day or so, the Air Force would come in and bomb the ever loving shit out of all the zombies that had gathered, attracted by the sound of the siren. There was also an Infantry Fire Team from Task Force Liberty, commanded by a young Captain who had been assigned this mission. They were riding in the back of our LMTV, which had been turned into a gun truck, just like we did in Iraq. Sheet metal welded to the sides, crude gun port cut into the steel.
Technically, Captain Zarzicky was in command of this little joyride, but he had shown up at our door three days ago, looking for help. He had been given two men and the sound equipment and been told to “go do it.” He knew me from way back, and, to be honest, I missed getting back out into the field, into the fight. It had been a year and a half since the end of the plague, a year and a half after that final, devastating firefight had killed Doc and Ahmed. When Zarzicky had shown up at the door, Brit said nothing, just put our son down and started packing. I guess she missed it too. So now here we were, rolling down the cracked pavement of what had once been a quiet, rural area of upstate New York. A simple plan to do some easy Z killing.
 
Chapter 2
We saw it, or more to the point, we didn’t see it, long before we got to it. The target cell phone tower, located high on a hill a mile outside of Troy proper, had fallen sometime in the last three years. We drove past the wreckage and moved on to our secondary option, much closer to inhabited (more like infested) areas.
I got on the radio to Captain Zarzicky. “Just a heads up, Sir. Make sure your guys are weapons tight. Any loud noises from here on out are going to attract the wrong kind of attention, over.”
“Roger. This isn’t our first rodeo. Out.”
OK, maybe I deserved that. The Captain was a good guy and his squad was experienced; the Lost boys might be the baddest scout team in town, but they had been fighting for more than three years nonstop, while we specialized in hiding out.
We pulled the trucks up to the cell phone tower, parking them back to back to give us a clear 360 degree field of fire. The tower Itself rose several hundred feet up in the air, far above the surrounding trees. We quickly unassed the trucks, with the turret gunners remaining on overwatch. Captain Z’s team took up more perimeter security, and I had my guys start unloading the speaker equipment and the generators. Brit set to work getting them hooked up to the power cables that ran to the broadcasting unit. I grabbed a safety harness and started slipping my legs through it.
“Where do you think you’re going, old man?” asked Redshirt, as he slipped into his own harness.
“Top of the tower, injun. This is white mans’magic, not smoke signals. You wouldn’t know how to work it.”
“Hah, Ill race you to the top. Even give you a ten second lead.”
I grunted “I don’t need a lead because of my leg. Works fine!”
He laughed at me. “I’m not giving you a lead because of your leg, I’m giving you a lead because of your age.” I threw a heavy coil of speaker wire at him, and he grabbed it on the fly. Both of us started up the tower, rising steadily, pausing to clip and unclip each other’s safety line as we went.
I paused about halfway up, just as we cleared the tops of the trees, and looked around. Below me, I could see (and hear) Brit cursing at the generator, a huge monstrous old 5kw that had probably seen service in Vietnam. AS I watched, she pulled the starter cord again and fell backwards with the force of her pull. One of the infantry guys came over to help her, and I distinctly heard her tell him to Fuck Off. I grinned and looked out across the Hudson Valley.
To the west, hills rose up from our position, framing quiet suburbs and the remains of farms, the further out you went. I turned east to look back over the valley. In the distance, a C-17 lumbered into Albany Airport, delivering fresh troops for the clearing operations, returning to Seattle with electronics and weapons looted from the ruins. An AC-130 gunship was a speck in the far distance circling endlessly. As I watched, a stream of tracer rounds, made silent by the distance, connected the plane to the ground. Somewhere below, I knew, a group of infantry and armor were cleaning up one of the small towns along the river, prior to resettlement.
Below me, on the other side of the trees, the ruins of Troy spread out. Many of the brick buildings still stood, or at least their walls did. Most were gutted by the fires that had swept through almost all of the cities. Their walls still stood, but roofs we caved in and windows shattered. The glass in the streets glittered in the sunlight, despite four years of dust on them. I could see the Green Island bridge, the barricades still up and monitored from Fort Orange. A few undead were collected there, as usual. Others moved through the streets, shambling around, looking for someone to eat.
Our objective today was to attract as many undead as we could to this point, and have the Air Force come in with a Fuel Air explosive, and whatever else they had on hand, and blow the crap out of them. It made the task of cleaning out a heavily populated area much easier, and I knew that the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to seize and hold the lock at the Troy Dam.
Redshirt brought me back to reality, tapping my shoulder. “Hey, Chief, time to get to work.” I nodded and unsnapped a pulley form my tactical vest, securing it by a chain and snaplink to the tower. I yelled down to Ziv to hook up the speakers, and Red began playing out speaker wire from the spool, lowering it down to the ground.
 
Chapter 3
By the time we had the whole system rigged up, the sun had climbed directly overhead, and I was sweating my ass off. Yes, the world’s average temperature had dropped due to the ash from the major cities burning, but a hot, humid upstate NY summer day would always be that. Thank God for my gloves and my safety harness, or else I would have had a hard time hanging on a hundred feet up in the air. As it was, I didn’t like heights anyway, and I kept my eyes focused on hooking up the speakers.
I yelled down to the guy working the generator, one of the Infantrymen, and told him to fire it up. He pulled on the starter cord a few times until the generator chugged into life.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Deep heavy bass thundered out of the speakers, the opening notes of “Rhyming & Stealing “ by The Beastie Boys shaking the whole tower and causing Red to lose his grip on the support struts. He fell backwards and outwards, but his safety harness caught him before he fell more than five feet.
“SHUT IT OFF! SHUT IT OFF!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. The guy down below looked up and yelled back “WHAT?”
The deep BOOM BOOM BOOM continued to sound, so I pulled my leatherman out and quickly clipped the speakerwires, cutting the sound off in mid BOOM. All was quiet for a second, and I listened carefully.
Nothing. No, wait. I heard it start, coming to us on the west wind. The zombie howl. I climbed down a rung and helped Red get a hold of the tower again, and told him “We have to get the fuck down, right now.” He listened for a second and heard it too.
“Holy shit! There is like, ten thousand zombies in Troy!”
“Yeah, and they’re all headed this way.” I could see movement staartign in the houses just to the west of us, figures pouring out into the streets. They began to filter into the trees that were between us and the city.
“CAPTAIN Z! SADDLE UP! HORDE ON THE WAY!!!!!” I yelled down, and started climbing as fast as I could, almost sliding down the tower. Above me, Red had stopped.
“What the fuck are you doing? Get your ass down here!”
A look of panic came across his usually stoic bronze features. “I can’t! My Safety harness is caught!”
“Cut yourself loose!”
“I can’t! I lost my knife when I fell!” He struggled with the harness, trying to unsnap it. Almost impossible when there was tension on it. I started climbing back up to reach him. Below me, a shot rang out, then another, then a full volley. I felt the tower shake and looked down. Brit was starting to climb up to help me.
“GET OF HERE, NOW! That’s an order!” She shook her head and continued to climb, then looked at the undead spilling out of the woodline. Brit jumped back to the ground, rolled, and came up shooting, then sprinted for the cab of the nearest LMTV.
I heard Captain Zarzicky yell “FALL BACK!” and his squad retreated back to the trucks, bounding backwards so that one fire team was always engaging Z’s. The climbed up into the bed of the truck and the turret gunner started to hammer out the song of his people on the 240, but the fat machine gun rounds merely tore holes through the reanimated bodies. A few dropped, but the gun, up in the turret, was the wrong angle for sweeping at head height.
Both trucks’s engines started at almost the same time, and the hauled ass away from the tower. One of the infantry had been pulled down in the retreat, and he fell under a pile of bodies. As we watched helplessly, he managed to clear a circle around him. He stood, uniform ripped, splashed with blood. He held his standard infantry smasher, a length of oak topped with a steel knob, designed to crush zombie skulls.
He looked upward, and at that moment, our eyes locked. Then he stepped back and held up his smasher in front of him like some Roman in the arena. Red leaned into his harness and opened up with his rifles, steady headshots. I joined him, trying to create a path to the tower.
“RUN, YOU DUMBASS!” I yelled down, and run he did. He shouldered his way through the crowd of Z’s, their ragged nails scraping across his body armor and Kevlar sleeves, trying to pull him down. One tangled his legs and he went down, just as Red put a burst through the zombie’s head. The soldier got up again and vaulted up onto the tower and started climbing.
He reached us a minute later, trying hard to catch his breath. He looped his arm around a rung of the ladder, and held out his other for me to shake.
“Corporal Jimmy Bognaski. Thanks, Sarge, I owe you my life.”
“You and everyone else. Don’t worry about it. Nick Agostine, and this here is Sergeant Angelo Redshirt.”
“Redshirt? Really?” and the guy burst out laughing. Red scowled at him and started counting his ammo.
“Well, this is another mess fine we’ve gotten in. Why does this shit always happen to us?” asked Red, but I really don’t think he wanted an answer.
I looked down again. Around the base of the tower shambled hundreds of zombies. Their glowing red eyes occasionally glanced upwards towards us, but I knew they relied far more on hearing than sight. They were looking for the source of the loud, crashing sounds that had come out of the stupid fraking speakers.
“Well, we have about three days to hang out here, until they wander off. How are you set for ammo?”
Red thought, then said “Standard loadout, five hundred, no, four hundred and fifty or so .22 caliber long rounds. “
“Me too.” We each carried a modified M-4 that fired .22 caliber rifle shells. Not hot loads like 5.57mm standard military rifle rounds, but enough to punch a hole in a Z’s skull, and we could carry a LOT more of them.
“Suppressors aren’t going to last all five hundred rounds” said Red.
“And there are more than a thousand down there. Way more.”
We both hung in our harnesses, swinging gently in the breeze of a late summer afternoon. Bognaski had looped snapped himself onto the ladder with a carabineer, and he said nothing, contemplating the close call he had just had.
“Well then. “ I said.
“Yes. Well then” answered Red.