The colonel crawled up to a window for a direct view of the street. His shoulder bumped a table next to an armchair. He grabbed the framed pictures on the table before they crashed to the floor. A wry smile came over his face. In one photograph, a stern-faced Marine from the ’50s looked straight into the camera. He and three of his buddies were posed next to a milepost that read “Pyongyang, 115.”
The Colonel was struck by the irony of the situation. A Korean War vet. As a young man, that bastard traveled thousands of miles to kill my countrymen. Fifty years later, I’m here in his house to kill Americans on their home turf.
He looked up and saw a group of the looters headed for the house where Hong and his men were hiding. Hong noticed that they were all black, Latino, and Asian. The colonel didn’t care about their skin color. They were all his enemies.
One of the men pointed to the house and shouted, “Hey, Luis, go to the house on the corner with Randy and Joseph. Charlie, Fernando, and I’ll take care of this one. Everyone else can go to—”
A hail of bullets from Hong’s AK-74 hit the guy squarely in the sternum and sent him flying backward as if he’d been punched by a giant fist. The guy next to him opened his eyes wide in disbelief. Another burst of fire blew away his head. Splinters of bone and blood splattered in every direction.
The rest of the men became frightened. Some raised their weapons, looking around for the shooters. Others fired blindly, and a few turned and ran.
Nothing they did made any difference. The North Koreans were excellent shots and they had formed a perfect enfilade. Shots from every direction mowed down the entire looting party. The shooting lasted only a few seconds. When it was over, the smell of gunpowder and blood hung in the air. Ten bodies in camouflage fatigues lay sprawled on the dusty road.
Hong leapt through the window, barking orders. He knew his men would stick as close as his shadow anywhere he went. At the other end of town, the sergeant’s group had sprung into action. Their automatic rifles sounded like a giant typewriter.
Hong ran down the sidewalk, blood pounding in his temples. “Get to the trucks!” he barked to the other squad as his group ran toward the boarded-up grocery store. He knew there were seven or eight looters still in there.
When Hong was about a hundred feet from the store, three figures appeared in the doorway. Two of them had their rifles slung across their backs and were loaded down with large cardboard boxes of food. The third guy, a bald tattooed giant, held his M16 loosely in one hand and a bag of food in the other.
“What’s all the damn racket?” the bald man shouted. “You trying to attract all the damn Undead? What the fuck!”
Hong let out a war cry and started running, firing from the hip. Bullets pierced the bald guy’s chest and he spun around like a top. The other men dropped their boxes and grabbed their weapons, but they died before they got off a single shot.
Not breaking stride, Hong and two of his men leapt over the bodies and stationed themselves on either side of the door. At Hong’s signal, they tossed three grenades into the room and took cover.
The explosion blew out the glass and ripped the boards off the store’s windows. A man missing a hand and screaming in pain, his bloody uniform in tatters, stumbled out the door. He tripped over the bald guy’s body, tumbled down the stairs, and lay motionless.
Gunshots rang out all over town. Hong’s second group had gotten the jump on the men loading the trucks, and had taken them out. The helots had finally realized living beings were attacking them, and were trying to get organized to return fire.
Two Undead—an old woman and a woman of indeterminate age—stumbled out of one of the houses into the middle of the fray. Fungus had completely eaten off their faces, reducing them to macabre skulls. And judging from the way they lurched around, their brains were probably being eaten away too.
Bullets from one side stopped the younger woman in her tracks, but by some miracle, the old woman reached the middle of the road intact. Oblivious to the shoot-out, she focused her attention on a helot too busy reloading his M16 to notice her.
The Undead lunged at the soldier with a roar. The man had just enough time to raise the butt of his gun and smash the monster’s face. Blood and broken teeth flew out of the old woman’s mouth and she staggered back. The helot fired two shots at her head. He jumped to his feet, but even before the Undead’s body stopped twitching, a half a dozen bullets tore into his chest.
A huge explosion echoed through the streets. Hong’s men had thrown explosives into the helots’ tanks and blown them up. They were now a smoldering heap.
“No!” Hong yelled. “Don’t blow them up! We need them!”
In the heat of the moment, Hong stood up. A couple of bullets drove into the wooden wall above his head, raining splinters down on him. Cursing under his breath, Hong ducked behind a Ford pickup with flat tires. Another explosion shook the ground, sending a truck flying.
“Do not throw grenades. I repeat: do not throw grenades!” Hong shouted into his walkie-talkie, hoping the other group could hear him over the shooting. The explosions suddenly stopped. Either someone had heard his order or they’d run out of grenades.
The surviving helots kept shooting as they slowly retreated into a house at the end of the street and tried to mount a resistance. They outnumbered the Koreans, but they didn’t pose a serious threat. These men and women had no military training. Battling small groups of Undead was one thing. Facing elite soldiers was a different story, as the bodies littering the street proved. Outgunned and outwitted, their resistance crumbled by the minute.
A white sheet appeared through one of the shattered windows in the house where the helots had taken refuge. Hong ordered his men to stop shooting.
“We’re coming out!” shouted a hoarse voice. “Don’t shoot, damn it! We surrender!”
Two men and three women filed through the door. One of the men was wincing in pain and holding his bloodied right arm. A bullet had shattered his right shoulder. He’ll never use that arm again, Hong thought.
“Drop your weapons!” shouted the colonel in his careful English. “Hands on your head!”
The frightened helots obeyed immediately. A couple of Hong’s men frisked them for concealed weapons, then forced them to kneel against a wall. The attack had been a complete success. Forty bodies were starting to draw flies. Only one of Hong’s men had been injured when a bullet grazed his leg.
The colonel observed that one of the women prisoners had pissed herself. She must’ve been terrified that they were going to rape her. In other circumstances, Hong would have allowed that. He’d done that himself on more than one occasion. Rape was a very powerful psychological weapon. He could make even the most tight-lipped woman sing like a bird. It all depended on how brutally and how frequently they raped her.
Unfortunately there was no time for that, though their captives didn’t know that. They’d apply the exact dose of terror they needed and not one drop less. Hong was a master at that.
At the end of the row were the two surviving men, the one with the useless arm and a black guy with huge, tattooed arms. Hong noticed that the man had a bandage around his bicep and one on his calf. Fresh wounds. Interesting.
“What’s your name?” Hong asked.
“I’ll be damned! You’re Chinese soldiers! Or Vietnamese or somethin’. What the hell’re you doing in our country, man?”
Hong stared at him with dead eyes. The soldier bravely tried to meet the colonel’s eyes, but he had to look away.