As they acquired their designated target, each peeled off and a small charge opened up the 18-foot long body of the cruise missile, ejecting 166 BLU-97 combined effects sub-munitions in a tight geometric pattern. These 3.4-pound soda can-size mini-bombs covered every square inch of two acres of land with high explosives and incendiary chemicals. The 77 TLAMs carried 12,782 of these sub-munitions that blanketed the 150 acres of land from the far western tip of the point in Mobile Bay, over the 300 yards to the Ferry landing dock, including the Fort itself, the beaches, and the outlying buildings with high explosive and shrapnel. With their bomblets expended, the cruise missiles nosedived into the earth below them, spraying rocket fuel and shards of its own aluminum and steel body into a giant fireball of its own, contributing to the nightmare.
With the heavy rain of fire whipping the ground in all directions, zombies were shredded to a degree that was unbelievable unless witnessed firsthand. The Horde of infected was caught, bracketed by the tornado of steel and Cyclotol explosives, then ground into a fine black mist before sizzling away to nothing in a cloud of zirconium thermite.
Bert saw firsthand the mist from the observation tower and yelled in satisfaction into it as bomblets rained around him, adding the SEAL to the firestorm’s debris. Occasionally small charred stumps of what were once torsos along with the occasional foot, hand or disembodied head littered the ground in a ghoulish debris field after the storm settled. With the vaporization of Bert and some 20,000 soulless creatures, the smell of decayed zombie flesh, cooked and sliced in a giant blender, then incinerated by the 12,859 near-simultaneous explosions hung heavy in the air like a rotten fog.
— | — | —
ChapteR 59
Billy stood in the reception line as the helicopter approached. The militiamen had spent all morning wandering around the field of gore, checking for any moving remains over which gasoline and a match were thrown. Only a handful of twitching infected was found hiding in the fort’s casemates when the inhabitants of Battery Duportail had opened the doors to inspect the damage. Oswald had the honor of killing the last one located, with an old naval cutlass from the fort’s museum of all things. Already, groups were preparing to go back up the fort road to Gulf Shores to retake the town.
Billy craned his head to the sky to see the giant grey helicopter come into view over the trees from the east. Larger than a school bus, the great beast came overhead, circled twice slowly, then came to a soft landing on the grass only yards from the impact zone of the TLAMs.
The long drooping rotors were still turning as the door slid open and a handful of khaki uniformed naval officers appeared, guarded by a quartet of camouflaged marines, armed with every portable weapon imaginable.
“Looks like you guys have some friends finally,” Billy called back to Theriot and his two buddies. Theriot flipped him the bird.
Wyatt, pointing at the helicopter’s tail, nudged Billy on his elbow. On it was written in black letters
USS Eisenhower
.
“I guess we know who Ike was,” the young man said. Thankfully, the first thing he had done on the
Fish Hawk
was use the ships shower stall.
One of the naval officers was speaking as he walked up to the group.
“I’m looking for Colonel Tucker.”
The Ringknocker raised his hand. “That would be me.”
The officer nodded. “That’s good. Admiral Emerson is really anxious to see you.”
“Timmy Emerson?”
From behind the navy man stepped a much older officer, in a plain khaki uniform but with the scrambled egg visor of a senior admiral on his head, “Good to see you, you old fart.”
The Ringknocker laughed and embraced the admiral. As the group walked into Billy’s relatively undamaged house, the two officers caught up on old Annapolis stories as if it was the only thing to talk about.
“Old Emmy was the Anchor of my class!” The Ringknocker said, and then explained that the anchor was the cadet who graduated at the bottom of the class and received a dollar bill from each of the other midshipmen on graduation day.
Billy played host to the group at his kitchen table as the admiral filled them in on world events. It was a sobering conversation and the charterboat captain found himself twitching and moving about the room trying to appear disinterested.
“Somebody set off a few nukes?” Stone asked.
“Yeah, you could say,” he paused, “as long as your idea of a few nukes is 600,” the admiral explained.
“Russia?”
“Well, not at first, see the Israelis and Iranians fired a couple at each other and then it escalated very rapidly. It was all over by dawn the next day.”
“Who started it?”
“Does it matter?” he shot a look and resumed. “Then after the Iranian-Israeli exchange the Pakistanis and Indians decided to join in. Our intelligence detachment is telling me from what they can piece together from communication intercepts and EAMs that a few got out of hand and landed in China. The Chinese, thinking it was Russia that had hit them, in turn hit Russia back. So Russia dropped a hundred SS-27 ICBMs on the largest cities in Asia all due to a case of mistaken identity. Not to let the opportunity to make the world glow in the dark slip by, we think North Korea sucker-punched both Seoul and Tokyo with small backpack nukes they apparently had infiltrated in years ago by agents.”
“At least we managed to stay out of it,” the Ringknocker said.
The Admiral sighed, and by his sigh, Billy knew the old colonel’s statement was a pipedream. He continued, “Some parts of the United States were hit by Russian nukes. They had a system code-named
Mertvaya Ruka
, or Dead Hand. It was automated and, to put it country simple, worked very well. It was set up to strike a number of what they felt to be key targets should their command grid go completely down. Even with all this warm and fuzziness after the Cold War ended the Russians never bothered to turn their old Soviet-era Doomsday revenge weapon off. The bastards never throw anything away.
“Ten road-mobile SS-25 ICBMs hit New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix and Houston along with the military hubs at Cheyenne Mountain, Norfolk, Fort Hood, and Offutt AFB. Another ten SS-25s took out the capitals of the major European NATO cities.”
Stone’s eyes went wide. “London? Paris?”
He nodded, “Yes, as well as Rome, Berlin, Madrid—the list goes on and on.”
“The President declared war with Russia over this, didn’t he?”
“Yes, we’ve been fighting a naval war with the Russia ships that were at sea when their country got overrun. The bastards are better than we gave them credit for.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“With almost all of Asia irradiated and a toxic cloud of epic proportions drifting over Europe and the Pacific. There is a diagonal line moving from St. Petersburg, Russia to Casablanca, Morocco, then to the Pacific and Indian oceans where we have found absolutely no radio or electronic communications. Africa is an irradiated wasteland populated by zombies. Southeast Asia seems to be holding together somewhat, and we were still picking up some scattered communications from Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore as late as last week. The radiation clouds are finally getting to them.
“Most of Europe is overrun and only Iceland and a large swath of Finland and Norway remain with live human inhabitants. The bad news is that Finland is fighting off an army of no less than five million Russian infected swarming towards Helsinki out of St. Petersburg.”
“So Scandinavia is okay?”
“Finland is holding its own but it’s hopeless as their civilians are dropping dead from radiation poisoning and fallout from hundreds of melted soviet-era reactors that scrammed after their operators gave up the ghost. November is mud month in Russia and it slowed down the borscht-reeking zombie Horde long enough for the Finns to mount a defense.
“The large metropolitan areas of southern Sweden and Norway were likewise infected but their militaries have remained intact and withdrew towards the sparsely inhabited arctic regions to the north. Long term they could hold out but our meteorology section is advising that within another three weeks the radiation cloud from Russia will make the rest of Scandinavia uninhabitable for the next few decades.
“The EUs Nordic Battlegroup with our help and what is left of the NATO air and naval assets have created an air and sea bridge from Trondheim and Narvik to Reykjavik in Iceland where nearly a quarter million refugees are crowded onto the island already. Iceland has become the ark of civilization.”
“Thank God, some good news.”
“That explains the TV news we got on the satellite,” Mack whispered to Billy.
“Except for the radiation cloud coming from Russia. Iceland will be uninhabitable by Christmas. The suicide rate there is tremendous.”
The crowd at the table grew silent. Every piece of good news traded off for twice as much bad news.
Finally, George, quiet until then, asked the big question, “So where do we fit in?”
The Admiral looked around to his two fellow officers. “This is the biggest piece of the US left. You have survived this long without our help while every other holdout fell to the infected. We aim to start over here. You have lots of space, fresh water, a food source, oil rigs nearby, a source of renewable energy, and a link to the mainland.”
“Is that why you saved us, because we are the last hope?”
“It was a perfect scenario. We tried to help every way we could without letting the Russians know you were here. We didn’t want to attract unwelcome attention to you. But now it looks like we have beaten them back enough to come home.”
“So we can expect some new faces in town?”
“Yes, bottom line is we need a US port for the combined fleet; winter is only a few weeks away.”
Billy quietly slipped out the back door to the porch and made his way to the ferry landing. There the
Fooly Involved
sat rocking slowly on the water of Mobile Bay. Wyatt and Mack had followed him out the door and Cat was making a beeline from the backyard away from her friends to catch up.
“Fishing trip, neighbor?” Ed asked as he looked over the calm bay.
Billy smiled. “Just going to see if the boat floats, why don’t you tag along? Looks like a long winter coming.”
As he did, a large fat seagull, his head grey and eyes black as coal, came to rest on the boat’s stern.
— | — | —
Christopher L Eger is a firearms instructor and security consultant to a federal government force protection contractor. He formerly worked in law enforcement and was a trainer for a fortune 100 telecommunications company among other journeys in life. Christopher has been writing nonfiction since 2005 and is a writer for
Mississippi Sportsman magazine, Warship International
and
Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine
with some 300 articles in print on military history, offshore game fishing, and naval events. While he has had several short stories published,
Last Stand on Zombie Island
is his first novel. You can follow him at his blog at: