“Very fucking funny, hardy har har. Payback is a bitch, and so are you.” I stepped over her and back into the darkness of the tent to get fully dressed.
“I think I peed myself.”
“Serves you right.”
Later that day, we droned northward on a C-130. The canvas seats along the sides were, as usual, uncomfortable, and I was happy it was short ride. The cargo bay was filled with stretchers, but there weren’t a lot of wounded, all told, from the operation. When you were fighting zombies, you either avoided getting wounded or you were dead. Several of the guys on the plane were gunshot wounds, but most were burns. In a battle, especially one against a raving horde of Zs that have breached your line, friendly fire isn’t always, like the old saying goes. It happens, more than people want to admit, and the Army had been pretty liberal with using napalm this time. When the Apocalypse happened, weapons that tended to cause a lot of destruction, like napalm or cluster bombs, weren’t used for fear of “damaging civilian infrastructure.” That all changed, of course, but by then it was too late. I remember that Boston took a nuke, right around Day 10 of the plague. Too much, too late. Not that I minded Fenway and the Red Sox getting nuked.
The first thing I had to do was tell Mrs. Esposito she was a widow. She handled it better than I thought she would. I had done casualty assistance during the Iraq War, and I hated it. As a Senior NCO, it wasn’t up to us to tell the families. That was a job for an officer. I worked with them, helped them deal with the Army paperwork, the funeral arrangements, the shock that finally hit when reality settled in. In some ways it was worse. The families were always so damn nice to me, and I was wearing the uniform of an organization which had, for better or worse, sent someone they loved to get killed. Mrs. Esposito was different, though. I handed her the letter I had written, but she just shook her head, squared her shoulders, and turned away from me. I guess we had all seen too much death in the last two years for it to shock anyone anymore.
Next we went to the hospital to pick up Red. He didn’t say much, just climbed into the HUMVEE Brit had borrowed, and rode back to the JSOC liaison office with us.
The officer on duty, a Special Forces Captain who I knew from way back, rolled his eyes when he saw me come in, and muttered “oh, shit” under his breath.
“I’m going to cut to the chase, Captain Mueller. My team is missing, and we’re going to go find them. I need transportation and supplies for the three of us.”
“Nick, you know that the ISTs are expendable.”
“Maybe to you, but not to me. Besides, you owe Doc your life.” He didn’t like being reminded of that. Along the side of his neck was a jagged scar where a zombie had ripped through the skin, nicking his jugular at the evacuation of Manhattan. Doc had sewn it up before it completely ruptured.
“I can get you supplies, ammo, but there are no birds heading north. We can’t afford to spare any aircraft until the fighting is done in the City.”
“That could take weeks.” He shrugged his shoulders, and I knew that we weren’t going to get anywhere else with him.
“Brit, you and Red go draw enough supplies for two weeks in the field. Make sure you pick up a laser designator, too. I have to go see someone.”
That someone was our old friend, Major McHale. I had seen an Evac UH-60 sitting on the runway when we came in, being worked on at the old National Guard Aviation Facility. I was hoping he would be there, making sure it got back into the fight as soon as possible. He liked to fly the broken ones, bringing them back up to get fixed. I guess he figured that the best pilot could handle the worst aircraft. I found him hunkered down inside the engine compartment, alongside a crusty old warrant who looked like he had been fixing helos since Korea.
“Well, this bird will be back up by tonight. I was planning on taking it straight back, but I suppose I could get disoriented and fly north instead of south. No one will notice anyway. It’s not like there is a war going on here at Fort Orange or anything.”
“Great, we’ll meet you here around 2300.”
Chapter 13
The helo set us down in a clearing two miles south of where the team had been ambushed, just as dawn was breaking. In addition to Brit, Red and me, we had three good guys from IST-7, the Dark Knights. They had been refitting after a scout into Northeastern Pennsylvania, heading down the I-88 corridor to see if there were any coal mines still in working condition. They had lost half their team just outside Scranton to a bridge collapse under their HUMVEE, sending three of them down into a river.
Their team leader, Captain Buswarry, was a good friend, but I wasn’t going to miss his NCO, Master Sergeant Collins. I was actually glad it had been him that took a seventy foot drop into the Susquehanna River. He had always been a dick, and we had gotten into a fist fight in a bar in Bermuda when he wouldn’t leave Brit alone. Too bad about the other guys, though. Buswarry was an immigrant from Nigeria who had made good in the US, going Special Forces. He was on one of the last flights out of Ghana, where his SF team had been training locals in a nasty fight against Islamist extremists. He had joined the Irregular Scouts when we were recruiting up in Maine at the Navy base. His two guys, both civilians I didn’t know, but he assured me they were good in a fight. A redheaded guy named McCross and a woman I first took to be a man. She was built like a brick shithouse.
When we had met them at the OPS center, Brit had kneeled in front of her and called her “Lady Brianne.” The woman, whose real name was Hart, looked at her like she was an idiot.
“Ignore her. She thinks you’re some character from Game of Thrones.”
The look she gave Brit wasn’t exactly friendly. I’m sure she was a bit touchy about her size.
“Get up, you little twit, before I squeeze your head so hard it pops.”
“Nick, I think I love her. Can I keep her?”
She called her Lady Brianne until later that day, as we were loading magazines. Hart put a friendly arm around Brits’ neck, then proceeded to put her in a choke hold that Brit almost passed out from. Brit gasped out “Uncle!” and the woman let her drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Red was laughing his ass off. When she had recovered her breath, Brit started to complain to me, but I told her that if she couldn’t take it, she shouldn’t dish it out.
“Maybe you should go apologize to her, too.”
Since then, she had ignored the big blonde woman. I did notice that Red spent an inordinate amount of time talking to her. Good for him. McCross was a quiet guy who did his job without saying much.
Now he was walking point, along with Red, who was trying to recognize landmarks. Soon enough, we came to the site. A canoe was still sitting on the shore, half swamped, and spent cartridge brass gleamed in the morning sun. While the team pulled security, Brit and I scoured the site, looking for something in particular. I quickly found the bones of Segeant Toshi, mauled and scattered by wild animals, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.
We found it after ten minutes, tied to a tree. A strip of brown uniform T-shirt, unnoticeable unless you knew to look for it. On the end was one knot.
“Red, you saw Ziv and Doc after the ambush, right?”
He thought hard about it. “Yeah, both were in the boats but I thought maybe Ahmed was down or unconscious.”
“Nope.” I showed him the strip of T-shirt, and called Captain Buswarry over.
“Hey Glen, one of my guys is alive, or was after the ambush. You remember Ahmed?”