Necrophobia 4 Read online

  Something was going on, only I didn’t know what. My knife hand trembled, a sort of whining sound came from deep in my throat. I felt dizzy, lightheaded. My stomach was roiling.

  “You…you little…bitch,” I managed through clenched teeth as sweat rolled down my face.

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  I couldn’t make myself slit her throat. I released her hair and not because I wanted to but because there was no strength left in my hand. The knife dropped from my other hand and I fell to my knees. The girl jumped off the bed and pressed herself into the corner.

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  My head felt like it was going to blow apart. There was an agony up there I could not think through. It was like a war was being fought in my skull and all I could do was sit there, shaking and sweating, drool running from my mouth.

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  “What? What? What…?” I muttered.

  Beautiful blue eyes. When you see them, you have to run. When you see them you have to escape.

  Yes, escape. Despite the pain and confusion, there was a very real, very strong desire in me to run away as fast as I could until I could get my head straight again. It was sort of a fear response, a flight response.

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  The words wouldn’t stop. I stood up and the pain faded a bit. I looked over at the girl. “You…you better hide,” I told her. “They’ll be coming…coming for you.”

  And she ran out the door.

  A few seconds later, I picked up my knife, sheathed it and grabbed my M4 off the bed. I still didn’t know what any of it was about or why it was so strong, but I had to get away. I had to get somewhere safe and I needed to do that right now.

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  I stumbled down the stairs and out of the house. I could hear traffic over my Icom, but I could not be sure who the people were speaking on it. I snatched it off my head and threw it. I didn’t want to hear anymore voices. I needed to be free. I needed to run. I needed to get away before they—and I didn’t really know who they were—found me.

  I stood out in the relatively fresh air.

  The Icom, you dummy. You need it.

  For some reason, I knew that I did. I picked it up and stuffed it into my ammo bag where I wouldn’t have to hear it. Maybe later, much later, I would put it back on.

  I heard voices shouting to me. Two men down the street. I took one look at them and I ran, I ran the other away as fast as I could with them in hot pursuit.

  They wouldn’t get me.

  I couldn’t let them get me…because…because of the…

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  BEAUTIFUL BLUE EYES

  I ran and ran until I could no longer hear them shouting or coming after me. I crawled through the wreckage of houses and over heaps of rubble. Dirty, dusty, sweating and scared, I found a set of steps leading down into a basement and went down there. The house above had been blown to kindling. I waited there in the semi-gloom, studying the shafts of dust-speckled light coming down the stairway. I sipped from my canteen. I took a piss. I smoked. I ate some crackers from an MRE pouch and spread jelly and peanut butter on them.

  Still, that fucking voice would not stop saying, beautiful blue eyes, and I thought I was going to scream if it didn’t stop tormenting me. It seemed to lessen after an hour or two. I took out the Icom and put it on, trying to get an idea of what KIA-4 was doing now. Were they hunting me or had they given up and returned to their original mission profile?

  But I knew Doc Feelgood.

  He wouldn’t just shrug his shoulders and say, Oh well, scratch another one. It wasn’t in his makeup. He’d want to know what went wrong just as I wanted to know what had gone wrong and what was still going wrong. I smoked and sipped from my canteen and wondered just what the hell I was doing or what I was going to do.

  I must have nodded off because when I woke a couple hours later the shadows were long. I stood up and stretched, ducking my head beneath pipes that were hanging from the ceiling like tree roots. I was starting to remember things that made no sense. If I thought about them too hard, I started getting a headache. But if I dismissed them outright, it started again: Beautiful blue eyes.

  Darkness found me still sitting there with no better idea of what the hell it was that I was supposed to do. There was nothing on the Icom so either Doc and the others were out of range or they had simply given up for the night.

  They’ll be back, I told myself. You know they’ll be back and you’ll be a hot target for them until they decide you’re dead or lost.

  I had never spent a night alone in the Main Street sector of Baneberry and I wasn’t too happy about it. Crazy ideas kept occurring to me. I could go out there and try and make my way back to the bunker…and Doc would probably shoot me for freaking out and breaking with unit discipline. I could go out there and try and escape the city. Just run until my head cleared and I was out in the country. Then I’d be out of harm’s way—KIA-4’s way—and I could sort things out. But I didn’t care for the idea. It was already heating up out there as it did most nights. I could hear people screaming or shouting from time to time. Lots of sporadic gunfire.

  It was deadly out there and I knew it.

  I had already decided I wasn’t going to risk linking back up with KIA-4. No fucking way. I didn’t know what was going on in my head, but I knew, somehow, that I was through with all that. The bottom line was I didn’t really like those people—something that had never really occurred to me before. I kept thinking about Zulu. She was the only one I would have called a friend and she was dead. Maybe, had we survived, the both of us would have been here in the cellar. I had a feeling she was ready to break with Doc, too.

  There was nothing to do, I figured, but wait for dawn.

  That was the safest course of action.

  Wait for dawn and listen to that voice saying, Beautiful blue eyes in my head and try to make sense out of all the strange questions that had never occurred to me before and wonder about all the faces I was seeing in my head that had no names. There were so many after a time that they crowded out my own thoughts.

  Using my ammo bag as a pillow, I stretched out holding onto my M4 and hoping I wouldn’t have to use it tonight. I was exhausted and I nodded off. I must have slept for hours. When I woke it was still dark and I heard my voice say, “Where do you think Sabelia is?”

  Then I went out again.

  THE HUNT

  When I finally came awake, it was full light. I was sore from sleeping on the concrete and it took awhile to work the chill and stiffness from my body. I ate some MREs and drank some water, repeating that name again and again under my breath, “Sabelia.”

  There was power in that name.

  It was a key to something.

  I would not let it go.

  Whatever it meant, it was getting stronger, it was getting closer. I could even concentrate on it without getting a headache. I was making progress…but to what, I just didn’t know.

  As I packed up my stuff and made ready to leave, the Icom crackled into life and I received a broken transmission: “Dog…Dog, you out there? We’re…a sweep for you, man. If you’re…just call out…just call out…”

  That was Scales’ voice. I realized then that I liked him in a way. Not the way I had liked Zulu, but he wasn’t too bad. He had his moments and we’d shared a lot of laughs together. I nearly hailed him…but, no, I wasn’t about to do that. KIA-4 had its marching orders and I was almost certain it would be to either bring me in as a corpse or as a prisoner.

  The broadcasts began to get clearer and I was almost certain they were moving in my direction. I got my gear together and my weapon in my hands and I crawled up the steps until my eyes were at ground level and I could see what was going on out there. I saw a couple zombies shambling down the street, moving away from me. A couple of dogs hunted through the rubble of a row of houses across the way that had fallen into themselves.

&
nbsp; Then I heard the sound of running feet.

  I saw two guys dressed in jungle camo fatigues come running through a partially-blocked alley. They were carrying M-16s and what looked like an RPG. They came so close that I could see the blood on their fatigues and the streaked filth on their faces. Their eyes were huge with fear.

  Then—

  WAAA-RUMP!

  There was a huge explosion a few streets over and the ground shook. Clouds of smoke and debris rose into the air. I could hear the fragments raining down like hailstones. Both of the men, well down the street by then, let out cheers and I heard no more of them. Insurgents. Guerrilla fighters. The thorn in the side of the bunker and the primary target of the KIA teams.

  Terrorists.

  And as I thought that, I heard a voice in my head say, “Terrorists? Well…only if you’re the target of their terror. To their friends they’re not terrorists, they’re freedom fighters.” I heard a peal of laughter coming from an audience. Some old TV show I had forgotten about? A stand-up comedian? So many things were activating in my brain my head practically hurt.

  “We got ‘em on the run,” Scales said over the Icom. “We’ll keep pushing.”

  Then Doc: “IED…the LAV took a good hit. Get those SOBs. I want ‘em.”

  There was some gunfire exchanged in the distance.

  “That’s three,” Mongol said. “Got two more trapped.”

  “Go at ‘em easy,” Doc Feelgood said.

  “Burn ‘em out,” a voice I didn’t recognize said which meant that there were new bodies in KIA-9.

  I heard another voice I didn’t recognize.

  I heard a chopper pass close by. I couldn’t see it, but I definitely heard it. This was a major mop-up operation. They were putting the squeeze on the insurgents and I was caught in the middle of the action. Not good. I had a feeling that I was now a freedom fighter whether I liked it or not. The new guys would kill me on sight. And I couldn’t be sure the old boys wouldn’t either.

  I slipped up the stairs and moved in the direction the insurgents had gone. I would stay on their trail as KIA stayed on mine, then I would cut back towards the west and get around them and out of the city. I hadn’t gone more than half a block when a few rounds tore up the real estate around me. I was being targeted. I ran in a zig-zagging pattern, more bullets following me, and dove through a hole in the wall of a crumbling brick building. A few more slugs hit the outer wall.

  Shit.

  Now I was in the fight whether I liked it or not.

  I clambered up a mountain of broken bricks and debris and I could hear more gunfire. Not the shooter who had targeted me, but KIA-9 out cleaning up. I could hear Mad Mike cracking away with his SAW. Zombies, insurgents, throwaways…hell, it could have been anything. I had to put some distance between me and them. The back wall of the building was blown apart like the front. I slid down the brick pile until I reached the aperture and slid through it into a little grassy courtyard and stopped dead there on my knees.

  A pair of zombies were busy dismembering a corpse that looked like it had been dead for days. The stench was horrible. They both looked over at me with those dead-white eyes, clots of gore dropping from their mouths. They instantly abandoned the body for fresher pickings.

  Damn things.

  Now I didn’t have a choice. I had to shoot and in doing so, I was pretty much going to telegraph my position. Fuck it. I didn’t have a choice. I drilled both of them and, right away, I heard the KIA boys calling in that they were in pursuit. Shit. I moved through the courtyard. The only way out was back the way I came unless I took an iron utility ladder that led up to the roof. It was about twelve feet off the ground but a pile of rubble solved that for me. I climbed up it and went up the ladder as fast as I could. If any shooters showed up, I was going to be a real easy target.

  I was almost to the top when I saw the chopper go zooming overhead. I saw its profile just fine—a fucking Kiowa Warrior—just as I saw its armament: a .50-cal machine gun and twin Hydra 70 rocket tubes. These were the sort that were used for close air support, pulverizing the enemy.

  And I was now the fucking enemy.

  The Kiowa made me think of LAV-25s and people on a road. I saw some of those same people in my mind in connection with a Kiowa scout chopper and an AT4 missile. What the hell was that about?

  No matter and no time.

  I reached the top of the ladder and was in for more disappointment. There was no roof to crawl on up there. There was nothing. There was only the wall. The rest of the building had collapsed into rubble. It was either back down or I took a chance and crept over the wall to the next building which looked intact. The top of the wall was about two feet wide and I had no way of knowing if my added weight would make the thing fall or not. I’d have to take the chance.

  More gunfire from the direction of the KIA boys got me moving. I got on top of the wall, telling myself not to look down. On my knees, I crept over the top. Now and again, bits of it crumbled away and once a section fell and I nearly went down. I kept moving. I went as carefully as I could, but I didn’t have much time. If that chopper passed overhead again, they were going to see me and a volley of .50-cal rounds would end my pain right there. I kept going until I reached the next building. Now the tricky part. The building was about six or seven feet above the height of the wall. Pressing my hands against it, I stood uneasily, fighting the vertigo that I felt.

  I heard the chopper.

  Jesus, it was coming in my direction.

  I jumped up and got my hands atop the ledge of the other building and scrambled up and over. Soon as I made it, I dropped to the flat roof on the other side and lay there, squeezed up against the ledge. The chopper came and passed. I didn’t hear it coming back and there was no chatter on the Icom about sighting an insurgent, so I was safe.

  I got up and ran across the rooftop.

  The bad news was that the next building over was down much lower. It would be a drop of twenty feet onto an inclined roof. Even I wasn’t that crazy in my desperation. There was a hatch leading down into the building, but it was locked which meant I’d have to blast it open and, again, telegraph my position.

  Bullshit.

  I had another plan.

  A fire escape. It was a drop of about ten feet from the rooftop. I made a quick scan to see if anyone was watching me or drawing a bead on me, then I climbed over the ledge and dropped. I hit the fire escape just fine, but the whole thing clanged and shook. I thought for a moment it would come right off the side of the building. I climbed down it to the next landing and then took the ladder down into an alley.

  I heard more explosions in the distance.

  The KIA boys were running into masses of zombies now and the Kiowa went into action, blasting away with its Hydra 70s. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!The ground shook with each impact. I saw black smoke rising above the rooftops behind me. Mongol was shrieking with excitement over the Icom. The zombie menace had been eradicated, according to Doc, and they were pushing ahead again. In my direction. I had to get somewhere where I could hide out as they passed and then double back. It was my only chance.

  I cut down the alley, climbing up and over a couple rusted cars that blocked the street, and darting to the next street of ruined buildings. I was being watched. I was almost certain of it. I climbed over a gutter and pushed through a doorway and something went thunk, thunk, thunk and I saw a grenade not three feet from me. I heard it sizzling. I jumped back through the doorway and dove for the gutter as it went off. BOOM! Dust and debris fell over me.

  I laid there with my M4 in my hands.

  I did not move.

  I did not do anything.

  Somebody was going to come and check on me and I had to be ready to cap them when they did. No soldier in the world threw a grenade and just left it at that. They would come for a quick BDA, Battle Damage Assessment, to see if their target was dead. I waited and soon enough, I heard footsteps coming…slow, careful. One of us was going to die and if I made
so much as a sound, it was going to be me. All it would take was another tossed grenade.

  I waited, tense and sweating.

  My adversary crept forward very carefully.

  That’s when I heard another sound. It was coming from farther down the gutter. I craned my head and looked. Christ, a zombie. About thirty feet from me, a little zombie boy was crawling in my direction on his hands and knees. He wasn’t moving fast, but he was moving and I was his target. There was so much fungus growing on him he almost looked like a small furry ape. It looked like he had been in some sort of a blast because most of his hair was burned away and his face was burnt nearly down to the skull. He had no eyes, but that didn’t seem to matter because he knew right where I was.

  If my adversary didn’t show soon, I was going to have to show my hand and cap the little deadhead.

  This was what they meant by being in-between a rock and a hard place.

  The zombie crawled closer.

  He was twenty feet away and closing.

  My adversary had paused as if he sensed something was amiss. Maybe he heard the zombie boy even though he was being very silent.

  C’mon, c’mon.

  The zombie boy was fifteen feet away. I could hear his teeth chattering, wanting to bite.

  My adversary was within feet of the gutter now.

  The zombie was ten feet from me now and I could see the drool hanging from his mouth.

  My adversary accidentally kicked a rock and that made the zombie boy turn his head in interest. My adversary saw him. He fired in panic, capping a few rounds into the air that completely missed his target. Then he zeroed in, blowing the zombie boy away. His head flew apart in a Technicolor eruption of brains and skull matter.

  My adversary, breathing hard, looked over the edge of the gutter and I saw the terror widen in his eyes right as my round punched into his forehead and he fell backwards.

  I climbed out and he was dead.

  Jesus, he looked like he was about fourteen.

  He was dressed in camo fatigue pants and work boots, a black Nike shirt. He carried an M4 like me. He had two extra mags and I tossed them in my ammo bag.