The Apocalypse

Chapter 16

Major General Fairchild

Reading, Pennsylvania



A week later General Fairchild watched from the safety of his command vehicle as what was left of his men gave up the city of Reading. They were dusty men and ragged in both appearance and in mind, and the general wondered what exactly would happen if he got out of his armored humvee.

Would they frag him? Blow his ass to hell where it belonged? Did they blame him for the endless days of fighting, or the constant retreats? Or the wasted lives? Did they think that the moronic rules of engagement were his idea?

“I'd deserve it if they did,” he said to himself. None of this was his fault in the strictest sense, but it was clear that he had failed his men and his nation. Commonsense told him long ago to ignore the President's orders, only he had been a good little Nazi and went along with the buffoonery instead of doing the right thing.

His division had once been an almost perfect fighting force, trained and equipped with the world's most high-tech weapons, but the “Rules” said: no mortars, no artillery, no tanks, no LAVs, no jets, no helicopters, no nothing. Without questioning his leaders, he had set aside millions of dollars worth of equipment, giving up every advantage in the process, and fought the hordes man to beast.

He still had his guns, however they had the numbers. From the urban agglomeration that was the New York area, it was estimated that twelve million stiffs had come at him. Yes he had guns, however he'd only been allocated just under three million bullets. It didn't take a genius to see the math wasn't going to add up.

Reluctantly, he took his eyes from the men and scanned to the blue skies. “Where the hell is he?” asked the general, again under his breath. His driver barely stirred, having grown used to the general mumbling to himself over the last two weeks as things had gone from bad to hellacious.

Then came the wump, wump, wump of the choppers blades. “Here he comes. Inspection time.” He said this louder, an invitation for his driver to respond.

“Gonna kiss his ass real good, Sir?” Sergeant Bower asked in his thick southern 'Bama' drawl. “You need some lip balm? We may be all out of grenades and fifty cal ammo and such, but we got cases of lip balm and I think this would be a good, heroic use for em.”

“F*ck you Bower,” he said genially, stepping out of the humvee, and checking his gig line—out of habit only. He didn't give a rat's ass what the Secretary of Defense thought of his uniform, or really what the useless son of a bitch thought of anything.

“Yes Sir,” Bower replied. The whipping rotors sent a storm of dust their way and they squinted into it. The sergeant yelled over the noise, “What do you think it's gonna be this time? They gonna make us read them zombies their Miranda rights before we shoot em?”

The general smirked at the comment, because sadly it wasn't so far-fetched with this administration, but when he heard the Secretary's actual request he went cold.

He wanted a hundred picked soldiers for a “secret” mission; this usually meant going to fetch a niece of the First Lady or some Hollywood starlet, however this was different. The men had been picked already.

“What's so special about these men?” Fairchild asked, flipping through the hundred pages: each had a short bio of the soldier and a picture stapled to the top right. “I know some of these men are dead.”

“Not according to the last casualty list you submitted,” the Secretary responded in his flat mid-western accent.

“You may have noticed that I'm dealing with about ten million f*cking zombies,” Fairchild replied, intentionally leaving off any honorific. As a favor to himself he had given up on paperwork altogether, and who was there to say otherwise? His boss, Lieutenant General John Hickey, and everyone else in the command structure was no longer one of the living, as it was being politely put—being Dead had too many meanings these days. “Hey, Bower,” he said. “They got you in here.”

“That right?” Bower drawled. “They must want sumptin mighty important done.”

“Yeah, that's right,” Fairchild remarked, his voice becoming fainter with each syllable. Bower was a good man, not an exceptional one. Why on earth had he been chosen for this secret mission? Something wasn't right about this, nor about the way the Secretary's politician's smile stayed fixed just so, and how the men on the list had only two things in common.

Everyone of them was from the deep south and everyone of them was...

“Mr. Secretary, this man is dead for certain,” Fairchild said holding up one of the pictures at random. “But I have a good replacement. That man right there. Bower, what's that soldier's name?”

Bower squinted at the soldier, a man with skin the color of molasses. “That's Jackson. He a PFC, but he's a hell of a good guy, Sir. He's a shooter is what he is.”

“No, not him,” the Secretary said, quickly. “Just the men on the list.”

“That's what I thought,” Fairchild growled. “Bower go take a walk.” When the sergeant left, Fairchild looked long at the politician and then asked, “What's going on?”

“It's need to know only,” the Secretary replied with a warning for the general in his eyes.


“Then in that case, the men on this list...they're all dead. We don’t have what you’re looking for here. So sorry you had to come all the way up here for nothing.” The general began walking away and the politician grabbed him and pulled him close.

“You of all people must see how bad it is from a military point of view. And you know we can't go on like this. Don’t you think it’s time for a change?” Their eyes met and a thousand words were conveyed with the look. The question had been a loaded gun, and the hundred white soldiers the bullets, and there was only one possible target.

“The President is touring the front...what's left of it,” the Secretary said speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. “And he's going to need a security force that's been around the zombies, that knows the score, that knows how things have been and how they should've been.”

Fairchild took a step back and watched his men go by—they were so tired from the constant fighting that they looked a little like zombies themselves. It could have been different. The war could've been winnable at the very start. Now it probably wasn't even survivable except by a lucky few.

“No. I’m not going to have you hang this on my men. And I don’t want anyone thinking this is about race. I'll do it,” he said, putting his hand on the butt of his gun and caressing it lightly.

The move wasn't lost on the Secretary. “Are you sure? He'll have a security detail.”

“Will I be able to carry my gun?” When the Secretary nodded, Fairchild added, “Then it'll be no problem.”

It wasn't.

Two days later, just behind the lines where his men lived and died, the secret service agents faced outward not seeing the danger that was so close. The President was twitchy and nervous at the proximity of so many zombies and was easily distracted. No one noticed as General Fairchild slid his pistol from his hip holster and used it to give his few remaining men a real fighting chance to at least save themselves.