"So we spent a restless night griping and getting what rest we could. I think all of us planned to take our vehicles and head out on our own when we reached town, most of us are from up and down the front range, maybe twenty percent are from down south where the unit is 'Officially' stationed, Texas and Oklahoma. My two guys, in the humvee were from Aurora, like me. We thought we'd scope the situation, get this Blake guy first, then head east to get our families. A humvee can hold eight easy, and we had a total of eight family members to go and find. Not a coincidence, but a stroke of luck that we were one of the 'short' vehicles. The plan was to go in rescue any civilians we could, take down as many zombies as we could, at least put a dent in their numbers and then get the hell out. We had tanks, a couple of the 'Interim Armored Vehicles', the newer ones, with the turreted twenty millimeter guns that can be slaved to take down aircraft, like on those navy ships, you catch that in the news a year or so back?"
Jack and Juan shook their heads 'no', Ted shrugged his shoulders and continued,
"Oh, that is a sight to see, works great with drones anyway and they have some anti-missile capabilities too. Anyway they mount a twenty millimeter 'main' gun, and an M2 fifty caliber machine gun, same gun we have on the humvee
Then they loaded us up with ammo, an extra quarter ton of the fity caliber rounds, three extra cases of belt fed twenty millimeter ammo for the IAVs and two cases of the hundred and five recoilless rifle high explosive rounds. Plus we had two fifty gallon drums of fuel and medical supplies. Not much fucking room in there with that garbage loaded up. No problem, we knew how to deal with excess. Heck it ain't like any of us were going to have docked pay or worry about a court-martial."
"So we climbed in our M1132 humvee, I was in command and I put Thompson on the turret with the old fifty caliber and Sanchez on shotgun. Thompson didn't have to be up and out for the ride, so we chatted about our plan on the way up from Larkspur. It would be cake to do a fade out and we wanted to go back to the base, there were no zombies there, we hadn't even seen one until we hit Castle Rock. Me and the boys only saw dead ones until we got into the Tech Center. Oh and we were the tail too, we rode about a klick behind the last vehicle with orders to call in if we saw anything creeping up our ass. Mostly we were supposed to be there for re-supply, something we would not need, I mean the zombies didn't even have guns and could not fight back, right? We were a wasted resource and fading to get our families would be no big deal, especially on the way back."
"Well when we hit Denver everything slowed way down, we had major, I am talking major crashes to content with, we were lucky to make four clicks an hour with all the moving we had to do, I guess the Major was not so stupid after all, to have brought up our heavy movers and equipment. We heard the gunfire at the front of the column before we saw any hordes of zombies, the scuttlebutt that came back to us was that the zombies were hiding in wrecks or on overpasses, or coming up the ramps at us when we stopped. I ordered Thompson into position, it should be a cake walk, the new lightweight cupolas are real effective against small arms and fragments and our enemy didn't even have guns. He wasn't worried, I wasn't worried. Still when that first mob came up the on ramp at us they made it all the way to the rear bumper before he stopped them. You ever see what a fifty caliber bullet does to a man? This gun can plow through cement walls about a foot thick with the armor piercing rounds, the standard rounds we were using don't have quite that penetrative power, but when they hit." the sergeant made a ka-plowing sound with his mouth while opening a fist with one hand, "when they hit, they make great big holes in things. Especially meaty things."
The zombies were not stopped though, they kept on coming over their dead, the slow rate we were moving kept the rain of bullets just beyond the back of the vehicle and then some of them hit us from the side. I was never happier to have Sanchez than yesterday, he knows how to work his AR-3. He muzzled it out of the firing port on his side and kept that clear and I used my pistol out of my side. Sanchez had to squirm into the back to shoot out of my side, he ended up staying there for the rest of the trip. Because he could hand Thompson ammo from there too."
Anyway by the time it ended we had burned up half our allotted fifty caliber rounds, and most of our small arms ammunition. The Major had us catch up to the tail and we got more small arms ammo out of an actual supply truck. He told us it was 'open' firing too, but not to waste ammo on things that were not heading towards us or were too far away to be a threat. We took extra small arms ammo, a triple load and I grabbed a rifle off the truck too. Normally the driver just carries their side arm, the army doesn't want a driver getting his crew killed because he is not paying attention to his job: driving. I took the rifle, just in case."
We had taken our first casualties then too, while we were fighting off the zombies at the rear, others had been bushwhacked all up and down the line. This was our first clue that someone was planning the attacks against us. I mean people just don't attack at the same time, unless they are ready to do so, this was not a case of 'Fred Zombie' hearing gunfire and coming over to join the fray, this was a case of three hundred and fifty 'Fred Zombies' waiting until they were given orders to run up the ramps and attack us. A lot of the guys were just in trucks, not even humvees, the trucks just had canvas walls and no guns mounted. They took it the worst we had maybe thirty left in body bags, all with a bullet into the brain, as most of them had come back during the fight, now if anyone died, we were to put a bullet in their brains first thing."
We made steady progress into town, the God damned radio station is in North East Denver, a rifle shot away from the Denver International Airport, by the afternoon we had made it to the station, we knew what was there, the 36th is an Aviation Brigade, which means it has helicopters, and it had done a few recon flights over the building, then they had come back and made strafing runs until it ran dry. They said there were a few left for us to mop up. They were wrong. The damned zombies just got under cover, or if they could not do that they just laid there pretending to be 'dead again', the details that can be seen from a helicopter are not that good for determining if a guy is faking it and just lying there or actually does have a head wound."
"I know where we were told to stop was a four way intersection, between two major thoroughfares, each four lanes, plus turn lanes, I am talking a lot of room there. And there were bodies everywhere, the helicopter had done its job well, even sawed off a street light, clean as butter, I know because I parked right under it. We had to drive over bodies to circle the wagons, nothing was moving. You ever see what a twenty millimeter round does to a building?" shrugging again, Ted said, "No? I suppose not. Anyway, for one thing calling a twenty millimeter shell a 'round' pretty much says it all. You know in the old world war two they had anti-tank guns that were that big? It is a round that used to be for taking out a fucking tank, and nowadays we run that size through machine guns on our helicopters, is that crazy or what? Anyway, you can just imagine what the surrounding buildings looked like, the bullets go through the walls, sometimes they collapse the building, sometimes they fly all the way out the other side and into the building beyond that. Sometime even through that other building. These rounds were fired from above so a lot of the angles were up to down, the streets were uneven and pocked, kind of puckered up, like Satan's mouth blowing raspberries at God."