Necrophobia - 01 Read online

But it was a lie. Ricki was high strung. That should come as no surprise, but she definitely was not fond of the dark and the battery of nightlights at our house could testify to that. Soon as the lights went out, she grabbed a hold of me and even when they came back on she was not letting go.

  “Even with the juice out,” Tuck told her, “they can’t get in. No worries, okay?” He grinned. “Trust me, the only thing you got to worry about in the dark is me.”

  Ricki let out a nervous laugh. “Oh shut up.”

  And how I wished that were true.

  Tuck broke into his bourbon stock and we all had a few sips, even Ricki who wasn’t much of a drinker. It tasted good and it helped us all relax and unwind. We chatted about what we might do to thin the herds again and Tuck suggested the best thing would be to burn them out. How we might do that, he did not say.

  After a period of silence, he said, “All right, Booky. Time to spill your guts. We all know you’ve had something on your mind since day one, so give.”

  Had it been that apparent? Ricki squeezed my hand as if to let me know it was okay to unburden myself. I looked around and they were all watching me and I felt like the victim of a conspiracy. Like I was the only one left out of some joke.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

  So I told them about the sandbox.

  THE SANDBOX

  We were stationed at an FOB (Forward Operating Base) called Howard just outside of Samarra for much of the time I was in Iraq. Being the platoon sergeant, I was the first one Lieutenant Steakely would shake out of slumber when something was coming down. And one summer night, he did just that. O-dark-thirty and he’s shaking me awake.

  “We’re rolling in an hour,” he said. “We’re taking out three Strykers to provide security for a raiding party up north. Get your squads ready.”

  The raiding party, as it turned out, was not a couple infantry platoons like usual but a shadowy group known as Task Force 121 who would be rolling in Hummers. Like the Marine Recon group known as the Nightcrawlers that I mentioned earlier, Task Force 121 was another of those spooky hunter/killer teams that generated lots of wild tales. The 121 boys were a group of hitters from Delta Force and the Navy SEALs, plus an assortment of spooks from the CIA’s Special Activities Division (SAD). We were to provide an armed escort for them and direct fire support at a village about ten clicks to the north that was not given a name, only a map coordinate. When word got around that we were going out with an elite commando unit, the boys all got excited. This was big. This was the real thing. This was the kind of shit you told stories about when you were seventy years old hanging out with the other old timers. Yep, I’ll never forget that raid me and Delta and the SEALs were on. I saved their asses that day. All my grunts were wired. They were carrying themselves with an erect bearing I hadn’t seen in months. I knew that in every one of their heads they were playing out secret missions from every war movie they’d ever seen.

  So was I.

  We had strict orders that no matter what came down we were not allowed to leave the Strykers for any reason. We were to stay mounted to provide fire support for 121. They would direct fire. We only had to shoot. That deflated a lot of my boys who thought they’d be kicking in doors with Delta and the SEALs.

  “This sucks, man,” Corporal Denning said. “I always wanted to be in Delta Force.”

  “Well, you can show us your shit today,” I told him. “If you do good, they’ll probably hire you on the spot.”

  “No shit?”

  Denny, as we called him, was easy-going, funny, and loveable, but unbearably naïve. They were all so young. I think that’s what bothered me the most. They were just kids. Hell, I wasn’t yet thirty, but I’d already put in six years in the regular Army and four years in the Guards by that point. I’m not saying I was some well-seasoned sage, but compared to the eighteen- and nineteen-year olds I served with I was practically Father Time.

  Anyway, we turned out in full battle kit and our OP orders were cut, so we rolled out of the motor pool and into the box, which is what we called the field. Two Hummers pulled out in front of us and led the way to the mystery village. It was easy rolling all the way. Sgt. Warez was on the M240 machine gun in the rear air-guard hatch of my vehicle. Denny was poking out of the hatch next to him with an M4 carbine in the AG position, Assistant Gunner. My driver was Ron Baker, a Spec 4 from Alabama. As vehicle commander, I was the gunner on the .50-cal. machine gun which I operated remotely so I didn’t get my head blasted off if we got into the shit. My crew was tight and battle-tested. I didn’t know what we were coming into, but if we took contact I knew we’d give better than we got.

  In the back, we had three Army counterintel agents and a spooky NCO who was a real hardass. The counterintel guys didn’t surprise me, not with Task Force 121 being involved, but the NCO had me concerned. He was a 74 Delta, a chemical and biological warfare specialist, an NBC guy. I didn’t like that. What I liked even less was that he and the counterintel guys were wearing black Tyvek biohazard suits that were self-contained with Racal hoods, oxygen and blowers.

  What the hell exactly were we going into?

  I got on the comm with Lt. Steakely and told him my concerns. “Are we at risk of contamination, sir?”

  “None. The teams are wearing biogear just as a precaution,” he told me. “As long as we stay mounted and do what we’re told we’re in absolutely no danger.”

  I liked Steakely. For an officer he was okay. I wanted to trust him. I had to trust him, but I just wasn’t comfortable with the set-up and neither were the rest of the boys. But, as they say, orders is orders, so on we went. We were moving north along the Tigris, up towards the apex of the Sunni Triangle. We passed through a few scrub villages with donkeys walking around, broken down rusted cars parked in front of dirty hovels, livestock in the streets. Same old, same old. After about two hours we approached the target, our AOA, Area of Operations.

  “This is the shit even for Iraq,” Denny said.

  “Roger that,” Baker said.

  “Charlie Mike,” Steakely said to them, meaning Continue Mission.

  What we saw ahead of us was a narrow lane blown apart by immense bomb craters. The buildings to either side were riddled with bullet holes and shell impacts. Many of them were nothing but rubble. Shells casings winked in the headlights of the Strykers. There was debris everywhere, cars and trucks burnt and blasted, some of them flipped over or split right in half. There had been some serious action here at some point. We scanned our lights around and motes of dust drifted in them like deep-sea silt. There was a mosque at the turn of the avenue, but it looked mostly gutted like it had taken a direct hit from a rocket.

  Nothing moved.

  Nothing stirred.

  There was no life here. This was a ghost town long-abandoned and I had to wonder why we had come all this way to look at an empty village. It was hot and we were sweating in our BDUs. There wasn’t so much as a breeze. The lieutenant said that 121 wanted our Strykers in interlocking blocking positions so that nothing or nobody could make a run from the avenue.

  “Who’s gonna run from here?” Denny said. “Ghosts?”

  I could hear Warez and him chatting over the intercom and I knew they were nervous. Baker and I were enclosed in the cab. We studied that dead city by video screen and periscope; we weren’t hanging out the back end staring it in the face. I was receiving similar chatter from the other Strykers. The boys were spooked.

  Using the thermal camera, I looked for heat signatures and got nothing.

  I was going to mention that fact to the lieutenant, but that’s when I got the word to drop the gate so the counterintel guys and that NBC sergeant could get out of the back. I saw them come around the front of the Strykers. They had their hoods on now and I could hear the hiss of their breathing apparatuses. The 121 guys joined them and they were similarly outfitted. They carried weapons of a sort I’d never seen before. And they all had stout tanks strapped to their b
acks with hoses that led to gun assemblies in their hands.

  “Hell’s that shit?” Baker said. “Flamethrower?”

  “Don’t look like it.”

  “You wanna let us in on this,” I said to Lt. Steakely over the comm.

  “You know what I do,” he said.

  So I waited and kept an eye out. It was getting hot in the Stryker and Baker kept pulling off his Kevlar CVC helmet to mop sweat from his head.

  We watched the raiding party pick their way carefully down the street, the 121 guys moving out front with the sort of precision you only saw in the elite squads. They fanned out in a way that made me think they weren’t worried about incoming because a good burst of machine gun fire could have dropped half of them in a single sweep. No, they weren’t worried about shooters. But they were being very vigilant about something.

  But what?

  The counterintel people and the NCO hung back, waiting. They did not move an inch until the 121 troopers motioned them forward. Then they broke up into teams, four troopers and one counterintel guy per team. The NBC sergeant followed the lead group up the avenue and into the mosque.

  Again, we waited.

  “This is spooky,” Denny said over the comm.

  That was a good word for it. Waiting there was like waiting in a graveyard at the stroke of midnight to see what might come crawling out of the graves around you. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. I was all for getting this over and out and done with. The avenue was crawling with shadows, they seemed to be everywhere. Sometimes, on the periscope I’d catch a glimpse of a manlike shape pulling back into the darkness. But it was my imagination. It had to be my imagination.

  “I wish they’d get it done with,” Warez said.

  “Embrace the suck,” Denny told him which means, basically, that the situation is bad and isn’t going to get better so man up and deal with it.

  As we approached the twenty minute mark, gunfire rang out.

  I couldn’t tell from where. Suddenly rounds were popping everywhere and I could see muzzle flashes from empty windows and doorways. The counterintel people came running out and the 121 boys were right behind them, shooting into open doors. They were capping rounds in every direction. I saw two of the troopers toss grenades behind them as they ran. The chatter over the comm got wild and frenetic.

  “Get ready,” the lieutenant told us.

  For what?

  I was scanning with the thermal camera but I was only picking up the heat signatures of the Task Force 121 people and their counterintel flunkies. The lead squad came bolting hell-for-leather from the mosque and that’s when I saw eight or ten individuals come walking out after them. They put out no thermal signatures. It made no sense. They were dressed in black with red-checkered scarves over their faces which was about as close to a real uniform as the Jihadis had. They were hardcore extremists and I knew it…but something wasn’t right.

  In fact, something was extremely wrong.

  The way they moved.

  The way they acted.

  They weren’t running around shouting like your ordinary Johnny Jihads, emptying clips from their AKs at you. No, these Ali Babas had no guns. They were coming after the 121 elements with their bare fucking hands!

  I saw three or four of them move in on a trooper.

  He busted some caps into them to drive them back then he pulled up the gun that was hooked to the tank on his back. I expected to see a gout of fire come out of the end but it was like some kind of foam, white gushing foam.

  I zeroed in on it with my periscope.

  “What the fuck?” I heard Denny say.

  The foam struck one of the unknown individuals—I wasn’t ready at that point to call them ECs, Enemy Combatants—and what I saw then made my mouth hang open. The individual whirled around, clawing at himself…then he dropped to the ground, smoking and sizzling. I saw something rising from that foamy goo and steam: a polished white skeleton. There was something like acid in those tanks.

  I watched three or four other 121 troopers lay down a defensive cordon of the stuff.

  I watched the attacking individuals liquefy when they got trapped in it.

  By then the counterintel people had run past our position and we lowered the gates and they climbed into the Strykers. The 121 troopers fought a rear guard action, pushing their attackers back and then running to beat hell. As one of them passed my Stryker, he shouted: “LIGHT ‘EM UP! LIGHT ‘EM UP! LIGHT THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS UP!”

  I zeroed in on a group that came shambling forward, I put the crosshairs on them. They moved with a weird, jerky sort of gait like the way a puppet might walk. I opened up and cut them in half with the .50-cal. They went down…but they did not stop moving. Parts of them were trying to crawl away. I kept shooting, zeroing in packs of them and putting them down. But they just kept coming, pouring out of those buildings, swarming like ants, creeping ever forward to our position.

  By then, of course, the .50s on the other Strykers were in action and there were tracer rounds flying like hail down the mouth of the avenue. The Assistant gunners were banging away with their M4s and the gunners were hosing down anything that moved with their M240s.

  Right then, Lt. Steakely’s vehicle let loose with a TOW missile that zipped right down the avenue and punched into the mosque. There was a resounding explosion, a flash of light that nearly blinded me in the darkness, and rubble was flying through the air.

  “THEY’RE STILL COMING!” I heard Denny shouting. “THERE’S FUCKING HAJJIS EVERYWHERE! THEY’RE CLUSTERING! THEY AIN’T FUCKING DYING…DO YOU HEAR ME? THOSE HAJJIS AIN’T FUCKING DYING!”

  And by then we all saw it.

  We were ripping them apart with 7.62 from the 240s, .50-cal., and grenades, but it wasn’t stopping them. We were cutting them down, slicing them like a little girl going after her paper dolls with a scissors, but it wasn’t enough. Parts of them still moved. Torsos crept forward. Armless things slithered through the rubble. Men perforated with bullet holes pressed in at us. I kept rocking the fifty, putting them down again and again.

  “THE HEADS YOU DUMB FUCKS!” one of the 121 guys screeched over the comm. “AIM FOR THE HEADS! BLOW THEIR FUCKING HEADS OFF!”

  Sure, why not? We started doing just that and then they were going down and staying down. Another TOW missile took out the façade of a building and buried ten or fifteen of them alive (?) in a mountain of debris. We lit them up and greased them in numbers.

  “COME ON, HAJJI!” Denny was shouting. “GET SOME! GET SOME! COME AND GET SOME, YOU FUCKING RAGHEADS!”

  They kept coming and the lieutenant cut the order to pull back.

  The Hummers were already pulling away and the Strykers followed. Mine was the last still in blocking position and we were still capping away. I was seeing our Johnny Jihads real close and personal by then. I saw the way they looked. I saw the bones sticking out of them. I saw their biting mouths and oozing, putrescent faces. I knew. I knew what they were. We all knew what they fucking were, but we weren’t saying it.

  As we pulled away I saw a figure come walking out of the stirred-up dust and debris and smoke: the NCO. I’d forgotten about him and so had everyone else. He came strolling out and I saw that he was wounded, his Tyvek suit ripped open from throat to crotch. His viscera was bulging out like pink snakes.

  “Lieutenant!” I called over the comm. “That NCO…he’s still back there! Request permission to evac his ass out of there!”

  “Denied!”

  “What?”

  “DENIED!” and this time it wasn’t Steakely but one of the 121 hitters. “YOU HEAR ME, TROOP? DENIED!”

  “But he’s wounded!”

  “HE AIN’T FUCKING WOUNDED! HE’S DEAD! HE’S THE WALKING DEAD!” he ripped on me. “PUT HIM DOWN! GREASE THAT MOTHERFUCKER! LIGHT HIM UP! LIGHT HIS ASS UP!”

  As Baker pulled us away over the rubble, I was bounced all over the damn place and I had a hell of a time getting my crosshairs on him. No matter. Warez took his head off with s
ustained fire from the M240. “WOOO-HOOOO!” he kept screaming. WOOOO-HOOOO!!!”

  He kept hosing the NCO down and keeping him on his feet, dancing like a puppet, until the barrel of his 240 melted from the heat and even then he was trying to shoot, just out of his fucking head. I came out of the hatch and it took both me and Denny to pry his fingers off the gun. Our Stryker joined up with the others which were redlining out of there as fast as they could travel. Denny and I almost got thrown free as we held onto Warez, trying to snap him out of it.

  “YA-HAHAHAHA!” he shrieked. “WOOO-HOOO! LIGHT ‘EM UP, BROS! LIGHT THEM RAGHEAD ALI BABA HAJJI BABY-KILLING MOTHERFUCKERS UP! LIGHT…’EM…UUUUUPPPP!!!”

  Within about thirty seconds we found out why it was important to evac our asses out of there: a trio of F-15 Strike Eagles came screaming across the sky and dumped napalm on the village. They made run after run at it until the village was invisible, just engulfed in a cauldron of fire that lit up the horizon and reflected red on the low-hanging clouds.

  What happened then?

  We were debriefed, made to sign the Official Secrets Act, and told to keep our mouths shut because what we had seen was classified and one word of it could mean twenty years solitary confinement at a federal prison. So I never spoke of it. A few months later I received an email. I don’t know who sent it and I wisely deleted it ASAP. It said, basically, that we had encountered a village that had been infected by something called Necrovirus. I can quote it from memory: FYI: What you saw in Et Ukhbar that night was the result of something known as the Necrovirus. It is an infective organism that reanimates the dead and turns them cannibalistic. Its origin is unimportant. Thought you’d like to know. Don’t bother replying to this for this address no longer exists. Delete this and forget it. Knowledge of the above will put you behind bars for a long time. Pleasant dreams. That was it. Who sent it? I don’t know. The 121 boys? I couldn’t imagine SEALs or Delta Force or CIA/SAD operators spilling state secrets. One of the counterintel people? I don’t know and I don’t want to know.