The Apocalypse

Chapter 10

Dade County, Florida



The men of the 504th of the 82nd Airborne Division were the “ready brigade” in October, meaning they had to be prepared to deploy anywhere in the world with eighteen hours notice. Who knew the deployment would be to Florida and who knew they'd be fighting their own countrymen?

Certainly not Private First Class Marshall Peters. He had enlisted with the express purpose of going overseas and fighting America's enemies, not figuring that the Iraq war would end so quickly. By every news account the war was going horribly and then come 2009 it just ended and somehow we had won.

Quite the opposite was true in Afghanistan. It was the quiet war for so long, but then we made a promise to leave and it flared up—just not for PFC Peters. Somehow he just missed a deployment by the first Brigade Combat team and ended up sitting around Fort Bragg bored to tears.

But then they got the call.

“Miami?” he had groused. “What the hell's in Miami?”

No one knew, and though they all joked about fighting alligators and toothless hillbillies, it grew serious when they were given a full combat load. And when they waddled, as only paratroopers do when carting sixty extra pounds around with them, onto the C-17 with their chutes on their backs it got serious indeed.

PFC Peters' unit dropped along a twenty-mile stretch of Okeechobee Road and was told to form one continuous line and not to let anyone across it. The orders were of such a vague nature that on that first day they didn't know which way to face. By the third day they had things worked out and they faced east toward the lights of the city, and on the fourth evening, they began to turn back their first stragglers.

“You don't understand,” a man said in a pleading voice. “The dead have risen. They're walking around eating people!”

They shooed him away, but he was replaced by others who said the same sorts of things and soon rumors went up and down the line like fire before the wind. Peters had the second guard shift on the sixth night of their deployment and he had never been more afraid.

In the dark things moved and whispered and rifle fire broke out occasionally. Mostly it was one sided with dug in paratroopers firing blindly at imagined monsters, however twice fire was returned and Peters hunkered down when that happened. Near the end of his shift screaming began, running across the night air to freeze his bones. It was about a hundred yards away and then came more rifle fire a long pop, pop, pop and then silence.

Even after his shift Peters didn't sleep a wink that night. Gradually it came to be that guards were needed more in the daytime than at night since very few could sleep when the sun sank and the night came alive and the guns flicked little flashes of light.

On the eighth day the line went through a major shift. Rumor had it that huge sections of the line south of the city had been overrun. Men were shifted southward and their lines were stretched thinly. On the tenth day it happened again. This time whole companies were yanked to fill gaps that had sprung up and the men around him were further away. That day Peters shot his first zombie.

It was near evening when the thing came stumbling right at his foxhole. Not knowing what it was exactly, Peters stood to show the woman that he had a gun. “Go back!” he yelled. “This is a restricted area. You can't come through here.” The woman didn't listen and kept on coming and so Peters fired a warning shot.

“You're going to have to shoot her,” a friend said from the next foxhole as the woman neared. “But don't worry. It won't matter much, since she's already dead.”

“Shoot her quick!” a sergeant called from two foxholes down. “She's got the disease!”

This did it for Peters. He brought the M16 to his shoulder aimed for center mass and fired a single round. The grey-skinned woman went down and no one said a word, while Peters felt the immediate weight of guilt, which vanished in a flash as she got back up again.

“What the f*ck?” Peters swore. “I hit her. I hit her square in the chest!” Quickly he brought the gun up, flicked the selector switch to 3-round burst and put three more into her. When she got up a second time at least ten of the soldiers in the foxholes around him fired on her, and this time she stayed down.

When the story of the woman made its way up and down the line, the fear among the soldiers grew to such a degree that gunfire became the norm that night. Anything that moved was shot at: leaves and birds sometimes, people at others and zombies when they came their way. But mostly bullets were fired at imaginary enemies and by the thirteenth day many soldiers were low on ammo and what was left had to be distributed among them.

“When are we going to be resupplied?” Peters asked his sergeant. This earned him a shrug. “And what about artillery? Shouldn't we have some mortars at least?”

“Nope,” the buck sergeant answered. “Rules of engagement: no artillery, no air power. If you can't identify what you're shooting at then you can't shoot.”

“But you can't tell what they are until they're right up on us!”

The sergeant spat in the dirt and said, “Yup. It's nothing new, Peters. Iraq was worse. We couldn't shoot at the terrorists until they shot at us first. That was messed up.”

Peters slumped, depressed, thinking the situation couldn't get worse, and yet they hadn't really been put to an actual test.

That came the following night when a plague of zombies crossed the open field to their front. Now it was a battle, though thankfully it was one sided and rarely did the stiffs get within ten feet of the lines and no one was injured. Despite that, the victory was costly. The unit had been resupplied earlier so that each man had two-hundred rounds, however since the soldiers clung to their training and fired center mass, riddling the bodies that came ever closer, they went through ammunition at a prodigious rate.

Peters had only eleven rounds left when a group of a hundred men, women and children came across the open flat the next day. They were a good sixty yards down the line, and his sergeant picked out a few men to bolster that section, Peters among them.

The people wouldn't stop, and they were real people, too. They came on, crying and begging for help and when they were not thirty feet away the sergeant had to shoot the leader when he wouldn't listen to reason. Now the rest finally stopped and a long argument ensued, with neither side refusing to budge.

This led to a very strange situation. The people basically made camp right in front of the soldiers who could do nothing to stop them. They were still there the next morning. All day they sat huddled or they went up and down the lines of soldiers begging for food or water. The men were under strict orders not to give them a thing, yet many did.

The people had lived all in one apartment building and had shared their food among themselves until the last scrap was gone—then they were forced out onto the streets where the zombies had been growing in number. The creatures came out of every nook and cranny after them and the people fled, leaving the old and the sick to be feasted on.

For the most part they were weaponless, though a few carried rakes or hoes or large sticks. Each had a bag upon their back carrying little besides an extra change of clothes and maybe a photo album. It was dreadfully sad and Peters was among those who tossed them food.

The situation lasted only another two days. The line had been thinned again and Peters had a hole all to himself, something that would have unnerved him beyond belief except for the fact that he had his own family parked twenty feet in front of him. For the last day and a half he had given over most of his MREs and in return they were his early warning system.


Just before midnight the young girl with them whispered, “They're some right there.”

Peters had been blinking trying to fight sleep when the words came and now he stood up, peering into the dark. A scream rent the night and then gunfire; this was off to the right, and everyone looked that way, even the girl. It was a mistake that would cost her. By the time she glanced back, zombies came lurching out of the dark. They were faster than they should've been and although the family got up and ran, the girl was clawed down and smothered beneath a pack of the foul beasts, yet despite that she screamed and screamed.

There were many screams just then. The family screamed and ran toward Peters and he tried to shoot around them, which only meant he wasted ammo. And then they were past him and a zombie was right there only feet away; he shot instinctively and holed the beast through the neck. And then another came with mouth wide to bite and this he shot through the forehead. To his right and left gunfire blazed.

He could only stare for a moment and then he had two more to deal with. As he was standing slightly higher than they were, he shot them both in the head at point blank range, yet this was unplanned. Another moved to his right and he aimed and pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

“I'm out of ammo!” he yelled to his friend Murphy in the next hole.

Murphy said nothing. In front of his hole was a gang of zombies going down one after another with gaping wounds, until a clawed hand grabbed the gun barrel and pulled Murphy forward. Peters ran to help, but he was snagged around the ankle and down he went. It was the zombie he had shot through the neck. Black blood dribbled from the hole, however the creature didn't seemed fazed in the least by the huge wound. It reared its head and bit through Peters' camouflaged pants and tore a chunk out of his calf.

The pain was like fire and the soldier went wild kicking with his free leg until the zombie let go. And then he was up and hobbling away uncaring that he had left his gun, and his post, and his buddies to die. He ran until the fever brought him down and then later he rose again and turned back, remembering only one thing. He remembered where the humans were.