The Farm - 05 Read online

  “Maybe he is,” Biggs agreed. “But our Marine pal is helping us out, so show some respect.” She reached into her pack and pulled out an MRE packet. It was chicken with noodles, in her estimation the worst field ration the military had ever created. A few weeks ago, she would have just pitched it or given it away. Now, the sturdy, tan-colored plastic wrapper practically contained a banquet. Biggs never expected the day would come when she would look forward to a Meal Rejected by Ethiopians, especially the reviled menu item #3. But here they were, and she and chicken with noodles were practically BFFs. She cut open the thick plastic liner with her knife and pulled out the bag’s contents as she settled down onto her haunches, spreading the culinary bonanza out before her. Across from her, Klein did much the same thing with his own MRE, as Powers ambled over to the open loft door and regarded the world outside.

  “Anybody want to trade me for my beef enchilada?” Klein asked.

  “You out of your mind?” Powers said. “Even the stenches won’t eat that.”

  “Powers, I’ll take first watch,” Biggs said. “My NVGs are just about out of power, so I might as well use them up now. You take second, and Klein, you get the last one. We don’t fire unless the barn’s been compromised. Hooah?”

  “Hooah,” Powers said, turning away from the door and reaching for his own pack. “Sounds good to me, Captain.”

  Biggs nodded and dug into her MRE.

  ~

  Biggs sat near the loft door and looked out at the night. A full moon loomed large in the sky, bathing the landscape below in a lambent, silver glow, bright enough to provide enough illumination to see by. A blessing, since she was on her last NVG battery, and wanted to conserve it for as long as possible. The farm house was dark and lifeless, still surrounded by a ring of bodies that were finally beginning to stink. Biggs regarded the farm house for a time, wondering what was going on inside its fortified walls. She had no doubt now that the corpse right outside the porch had been the lady of the house, and that she had gotten sick with the virus and died, only to reanimate shortly thereafter. Had she bitten someone before the sniper had put her down? The gunshot wounds to the body’s torso indicated there had been some sort of struggle, perhaps at close range. More than enough possibility that someone had a chunk taken out of them.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Unless the sniper had been bitten and turned before dawn, Biggs and her soldiers would have to move on. While the sniper had said he no longer killed the living, she wasn’t willing to risk it. Even though there were three of them and they stood a pretty fair chance of gaining entry—they still had some grenades, and they could just blow a hole through a wall—the sniper seemed to be a damn fine marksman. While it didn’t take a remarkable amount of skill to kill the shambling dead, there was always the possibility he was one of those magical shooters who could blow the nuts off a fly at a thousand meters. Biggs wasn’t interested in finding out just how good he truly was.

  Something moved in the silvery gloom. Biggs watched as a small shape stumbled over the bodies in the semi-darkness, picking its way across the corpses. Biggs zeroed in on the motion, and watched from her perch as a small child moved across the field. She raised her rifle and looked through the ACOG scope mounted to the top rail. The target wasn’t a child any longer, obviously—just another stench, making its way through the night. Through the 4x scope, Biggs watched the shambling cadaver turn its head toward the barn and regard the structure with lifeless eyes. She held her breath for a long moment, wondering if the corpse might be able to divine her presence in the darkened doorway. The stench stared at the barn, and not even a flicker of awareness crossed its pallid face. Its chin was blackened by a dried crust of gore, and it was missing most of its right hand. It stumbled a bit as it walked on, then abruptly stopped when gunfire sounded in the far distance. The zombie turned toward the noise and made a small, dry mewling sound in its throat, then began picking its way back across the field of human remains. It walked right past the house without even a parting glance. Again, gunfire cracked in the still night, probably over a mile away from the farm.

  Biggs watched the stench creep away, then glanced at her watch. It was time for her to rouse Powers, and she was looking forward to that. She was so exhausted that she felt jittery and vaguely nauseous, though she had her doubts that sleep would find her tonight.

  Something creaked behind her, and she turned. Powers had already crawled out of his fart sack, and was gathering his gear. He nodded to her in the darkness as he stalked toward the open loft door.

  “Okay, Captain. You’re relieved,” he said.

  “Did you sleep, Sergeant?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Powers strapped on his ACH, the Army’s Advanced Combat Helmet, which had replaced the fairly-despised PASGT helmet that Biggs had first strapped on in early 2002. Like a lot of soldiers, she’d been distrustful of the ACH, since it was smaller and didn’t provide as much cover for a trooper’s head, but the lighter weight and ability to add modular accessories to it made up for the reduced coverage. Powers dropped his AN/PVS-14 monocular night vision device over his right eye, and it powered up automatically.

  “Anything I should know about?” he asked.

  “Negative. Nothing to report. Stenches have been passing through the area, but they’re not stopping.”

  Powers grunted and sank to his haunches beside her, cradling his rifle. “Thought I heard gunfire.”

  “So did I. Not that close to us, but someone’s mixing it up. Probably attracting every stench in the state, too.”

  Powers looked outside through his monocle, then pushed it back on its mount. He looked at Biggs with his regular Mark One eyeballs. “You look like hell, ma’am. You’d better get some shut-eye, or you’ll be dead on your feet. Not a good thing, considering we’re going to have to hump out of here tomorrow.”

  “Roger that,” Biggs agreed. “Stay sharp, Powers.”

  “Born that way, Captain.”

  Biggs nodded and rose to her feet. Her back was stiff, and her ass felt half-numb from sitting in one place for so long. Powers slid into her position as soon as she vacated it and stared out into the moonlit night. Biggs eased her way toward her sleeping bag and slowly lowered herself into it. She didn’t zip it up, only pulled it over her after she had removed her ACH and ensured her rifle was secure beside her, leaning against her MOLLE pack. Klein was wrapped up in his own fart sack a few feet away, breathing soundlessly through his wide-open mouth. The kid was dead to the world, and Biggs envied him for that.

  As she lay back in the darkness, she fiddled with her wedding band for a moment. She’d stopped worrying about Paul over a week ago—he was either alive, or he wasn’t. If he’d made it to Fort Indiantown Gap, then she’d likely see him again. If he had been caught back at Fort Drum, where Biggs’s unit was stationed, then he was very probably dead. Paul Biggs had been a civilian contractor on post, a service manager with a company called DynCorp, not a battle-hardened light infantryman. Even though he was capable and resourceful, at the end of the day, he would depend on the lightfighters to protect him. And from what she had heard before the battalion communications net went down, Drum was in the process of being overrun by the stenches.

  At least we didn’t have kids, she thought, and she wondered then why such a sick sentiment would even rise to the surface, in full view of her mind’s eye.

  She didn’t have long to contemplate it. Before she knew it, sleep claimed her as its own.

  ~

  Black smoke curdled in the sky.

  Biggs looked down the expanse of the George Washington Bridge, where the Marine unit was fighting for its life, trying to repel the horde of stenches that threatened to overrun the motorized rifle regiment’s position. The din of combat rang loud in the air, and helicopters thumped overhead—gunships, Apaches from the Army, Cobras from the Marine Corps. They hovered over the Hudson on either side of the bridge, firing missiles into the stinking mass of necrotic flesh that had collected on the Har
lem side of the span. Through her field glasses, Biggs watched the Hellfires and 70-millimeter rockets with fourteen pound warheads slam into the tightly-packed putrid piles, burrowing deep inside them before detonating. She was too far away to make out all the finer details, but judging by the bodies—and disassociated body parts—that were blasted into the air, the gunship attack was probably one of the fiercest displays of firepower she had seen in her nearly ten year career as an officer in the United States Army.

  Then the rockets and missiles were gone. The Cobras had to turn back, as they’d been called in for the tactical air support mission before they could refuel, and now they needed to get some go-juice so they could continue the fight. The Apaches, much fatter and more well-fed, split up. Four of the ugly machines climbed into the sky and passed over the top of the bridge, settling down into positions to the north. The group of eight helicopters eased forward, the 30-millimeter chainguns in their belly sweeping from side to side as the gunners sitting in the nose of each aircraft zeroed the weapons. And then, the guns spoke, barking out round after round of high-explosive projectiles that slashed through flesh and shattered bone. This was the first time Biggs had ever seen Apaches use their guns in anger, and she was a bit disappointed she didn’t have a better view.

  But then, the gunships ran empty, and the chattering chainguns fell silent. Each Apache carried over nine hundred rounds in their magazines, and they had bled them dry in less than two minutes.

  And the dead continued to gather, clawing over the twitching remains of their fellows without even a pause to contemplate the firepower arrayed against them. The Marines poured it on, fighting danger close, practically face to face with the leading edge of the dead. Every shot had to count, and in order for it to count, it had to wind up in a stench’s skull. Biggs had met the Marines several times over the past few days; her company anchored the New Jersey side of the bridge’s upper level, while two other companies secured the lower level. In two hours, her company would be relieved; orders had come down that the bridge was going to be blown. The Air Force had the assets already in the area, standing by, ready to Mach-knock down from Massachusetts and take out every bridge. Manhattan would be completely isolated, which suited Biggs just fine. Half the city was already on fire, and anyone caught inside wasn’t going to make it out. She’d had the fear that her company might be ordered forward, to conduct search and rescue missions, but she’d heard that all the high-value targets had been evacuated by air from Central Park. The political leadership wasn’t about to risk the sons and daughters of America trying to save just ordinary citizens, now. The time for that had come and gone, and when she had heard from her battalion’s S3 that they were going to nuke the bridges and let New York burn, she’d breathed a silent sigh of relief.

  Distant explosions echoed from the far side of the bridge, and Biggs peered through her binoculars. The light was fading, as the sun had set over half an hour ago, but she could see the massive mounds of the dead surging toward the bridge. They were silhouetted against the fires that had sprouted up in Harlem a day earlier, and even though they were more than a mile distant, the surging tidal waves of rotting flesh still horrified her. The Marines were using grenades now, even though they were mostly ineffective against the stenches. She heard the tinny pop-pop-pop-pop of Squad Automatic Weapons then, as the leathernecks elected to use suppressive fires. Another useless tactic, and she knew the Marines were well aware of that, as well. Just the day before, her Marine counterpart on the Manhattan side had told her that the SAWs might not even be as useful as golf clubs. There was no suppressing the dead. You either took them down with a head shot, burned them to the ground, or bottled them up behind complex revetments. The dead knew no fear, so hitting them with full auto SAWs wasn’t going to bother them in the least. If anything, it just marked your position, and gave the stenches a clue where the fresh meat lay.

  Finally, Biggs lowered her field glasses. Her legs felt rubbery, and her mouth seemed too full of spit, as if she was about to puke her guts all over the Humvee’s hood. She looked around at the rest of the troops standing near her in the gloom, and she could see the fear in their eyes. Everyone knew what was going on “downtown,” at the far end of the GWB.

  The Marines were being overrun.

  And Fox Company was next.

  Biggs was awake without knowing it. Her heart pounded in her chest, and her uniform was stuck to her body, sodden with perspiration and stink. She blinked in the inky darkness, staring at a cobwebbed patchwork of rafters that loomed overhead, rafters that looked nothing like the superstructures that supported the George Washington Bridge. She had no idea where she was. Her eyes felt scratchy, and she couldn’t catch her breath—

  In the near distance, a firearm discharged.

  Biggs sat upright in her sleeping bag as she snapped back to the here and now. She was no longer commanding Fox Company at the “uptown” side of the George Washington Bridge. Now, she led a sergeant first class and a trooper so young that he probably didn’t need to shave more than twice a week, and the sum total of her unit’s assets could fit inside a single MOLLE backpack system. They were in a farm in western New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border…only one step ahead of the legions of the dead that had boiled out of the brackish waters of the Hudson River a few hours after the bridges had been blown.

  “Captain,” Powers said, from his position at the hay loft door.

  Biggs gathered her feet beneath her. Klein lay in his sleeping bag, snoring softly. Biggs snatched up her rifle and hurried over to where Powers waited. She squatted down beside him.

  “Gunfire from inside the house,” Powers said softly. He jerked his chin toward the farm house across the way, now a vague silhouette in the lightening gloom. Night had already faded away, and dawn was probably only minutes from making its grand entrance.

  Biggs couldn’t understand why Powers was still on watch. “Didn’t Klein—”

  “I let him sleep in, ma’am. I’m good to go.” He kept his eyes rooted on the farm house. “Something going on in there. Didn’t see any stenches get inside, so…”

  From the house, Biggs heard a distant shriek. Then another. A child?

  “Ah, listen, Captain…all that noise is going to attract the stenches, you know?” Powers said. “If a mob forms, we’ll never be able to get to that SUV…”

  Biggs figured it out. The soldiers needed to un-ass and get things squared away, before the hammer fell right on their heads.

  “Roger, let’s get down there. Klein! Get up!”

  Klein’s snoring hitched, and he struggled against his sleeping bag’s embrace as he tried to reach for his rifle, but he’d zippered himself inside. “I’m up! I’m up!” He finally managed to unzip his bag, and he snatched up his rifle, looking around the loft with panicked eyes as Biggs and Powers snatched up their gear. “Uh, something wrong?”

  ~

  The three soldiers emerged from the barn, assault rifles at ready. The day was steadily brightening as the sun threatened to pop up over the horizon. Several figures were already silhouetted against the growing smear of light: zombies. And as Biggs trotted toward the house, she saw that number was growing almost exponentially. There were already three of them standing in front of the house, looking up at it stupidly, pushing against the fortified porch walls, trying to find a way inside.

  “Oh, shit!” Klein whispered, and he drew to a stop, raising his rifle.

  “Hold your fire!” Biggs hissed. “We don’t have a lot of ammo left, so no firing until we have to!”

  “What about them?” Klein asked, not lowering his rifle.

  “We do it the old fashioned way,” Powers said. He slung his rifle and surged forward, pulling his knife from its sheath. He dashed forward and sank the blade into the back of one stench’s neck and viciously ripped the cutting edge to one side. The zombie fell to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Its mouth still moved and its dull eyes rolled around in their sockets, but i
ts limbs barely twitched. Powers had paralyzed the stench with one slash. He did the same thing to the second one as it slowly registered his presence, but by the time it had begun to turn to him, Powers was upon it, his blade doing its work in the blink of an eye. The third stench hissed as it shambled toward him, arms outstretched. Biggs pulled her own blade and grabbed the corpse by its natty collar and slammed her blade into its neck. Cutting through the gristle and cervical vertebrae was harder than she’d thought it would be, and the stench struggled against her. It was a man, bigger than she was, and she faltered as she tried to keep her feet beneath her. Powers reached over and grabbed the stench’s head with both hands, holding it immobile for a moment.

  “Do your thing, ma’am,” he said, staring into the ghoul’s soulless eyes.

  Biggs tore her knife through the thing’s neck with such force that she practically beheaded it.

  “More coming,” Klein said, still on his rifle. But he hadn’t fired yet, so Biggs took that to mean he was holding his panic at bay.

  “Plan?” Powers asked.

  Biggs regarded the house before them as Powers released the zombie. It collapsed to the dusty ground, foul-smelling ichor oozing from the horrific wound she had inflicted upon it. They still had to figure out how to get into the house, and as silently as possible—there was probably a stench inside, and making more noise than was necessary would attract its attention, as well as give the rest of the zombies in the neighborhood a heads-up that something was going down. She looked over her shoulder and saw more stenches moving down the road, their faces turned toward the farm. And across the field, more slowly stalked forward, already reaching for the soldiers, even though they were hundreds of feet away.

  Biggs looked up. The sniper’s window was still open.

  “I’m going in,” she told Powers. “You two set up with the SUV. Keep the stenches off it. Stay low, don’t draw any attention to yourselves until you have to.”