Chapter Twelve

"Let's introduce you to your squad," he said as he escorted us back to the front of the bus. "There's six people to a squad. Our platoon has three squads and two full-time support personnel. Support includes me and a D-Nav. I'm called Overwatch on the comms and I'll be your liaison with other troops on the ground. D-Nav will be the GPS in your ear. The rest of your squad is made up of two Marines, an Army Ranger, and a medical officer with less combat training than it appears the two of you have. Try not to get him killed."

He stopped next to the booths at the front of the bus and handed us off to the guys lounging there with a quick, "They're all yours."

I summed up the quartet in two words, "Holy fuck." On one side, a burly man and a woman with matching shaved heads were cuddled up like kids on a first date, despite the woman having enough hardened muscles on show to promise instant death to anyone who crossed her. Across from them sat a man with a normal haircut, but twice as much muscle as everyone else. Next to him was a tall, whipcord man who didn't fit into the group at all. He might have been in uniform, but everything about him screamed civilian doctor.

"I'm one of the Marines," the whipcord said, staring up at me with silver eyes. My expression must have been startled, because he added, "No, I didn't read your mind. It's a common mistake." He pointed at the beefy, shaved-head man across from him. "That's Doc Martin. Don't make a joke about his name. Next to him is Sergeant Jennifer White, the other Marine. I'm Marine Sergeant Samuel Carver and next to me is Army Sergeant Gavin Grady."

I glanced at Hanson once more, who surprised me by smiling. "That's an awful lot of Sergeants. I hope you don't expect us to use your titles. We're shit recruits and I'm getting tired of calling everyone the same thing. So far, the only one who hasn't been a Sergeant is the Commander."

Grady, the only man whose identity I'd guessed right, snorted out a laugh. "That's fine. Not all of us should be Sergeants anyway. Anyone with prior service got bumped when we signed on with Zed. I barely made Corporal a few weeks before the outbreak."

"We're a mixed bag anyway and formality went to shit the minute the dead started rising," the woman added. She offered them a handshake. "Call me White. You can call them Doc, Crazy, and Sleepy."

"I don't remember Crazy being one of the dwarves," I commented as they scooted over so we could join them at the table. I noticed all of them had silver eyes except for Doc.

The Army Ranger, Grady, winked at me. "Nice, we bagged a smart one. You'd be surprised how many people don't catch on. Do you want to be Dopey, Grumpy, or Happy?"

Hanson chucked a thumb at me. "He can be Grumpy and I'll be Happy. We're a matched set like that. I'm guessing you killed Sneezy because he was sick? Good riddance."

Everyone laughed, except the whipcord man, Carver, who pouted. "Damn. There goes my go-to joke."

Getting to know the quartet was interesting. Although they had a few years and a lot more experience on us, none of them treated us like kids or talked down to us. I sensed they actually saw us as equals despite our lack of formal training. They commiserated with me when I explained how I ended up in military school and they got angry on our behalf when Hanson explained how we'd been abandoned.

"We'll call it in and make sure someone pays for leaving you," White promised. In that instant, I knew why we were being tagged as fictional dwarves. She was the squad leader, hands down, and everyone was willing to follow her whether her commands were official or not.

Then it got to the hard part where we told them about the final attack. What followed was an intense round of questioning that ended when White vaulted out of the booth and left the bus.

"She's going to call it in now instead of later," Carver explained. "There are other forces sweeping the quarantine zone for stray zombies, but a pocket as big as yours needs to be cleared out by a Zed team to minimize the risks. Keep going, though. What happened after you were bitten?"

We told them how I changed and Hanson told them about his two days of scavenging. Our plan to go East and hide among the dead, and maybe help survivors escape in the process, met with approval by the soldiers and a whistle of appreciation from Doc.

"I don't know if I'd have had the guts, if I'd been in your shoes," Doc admitted as he surreptitiously inspected my wounded ear. "Sure, you're invisible to zombies, but what about people? A regular guy with a sniper rifle sees you on a thermal scope and you'd have been a goner. Lich aren't cold-blooded like zombies, but you have a much lower core body temperature than the average human. It'd have been easy to mistake you for one of them from a distance."

So we explained about the cop car and the riot gear we'd scavenged. Again, we were praised for taking the time to think ahead.

"Are you going to run away once we're across the river?" Carver asked suddenly. "I wouldn't blame you if you did, but it'd be nice to have some warning so I know to watch my own back."

It startled me and, for once, I didn't look to Hanson for an answer. "No," I replied. "There's nowhere to go. If we stick with you guys, there's hope of this eventually ending. If we're on our own, it won't. We'd have to run forever."

"I won't run without telling you first," Hanson said, drawing every eye toward him. "It'd be a shitty thing to do, but I still have a lot of questions. You can't tell me the creation of a unit like this one is normal. It should have taken months to reach this point, yet you're already here on the front lines with exactly the type of mobile encampment you need to succeed only two weeks after the start of the outbreak? This is way too organized for our government to be behind it."

I refrained from rolling my eyes and I'm glad I didn't when Doc leaned forward with his head bobbing in fervent agreement. "I know," he said, lowering his voice. "That's almost why I didn't sign on, too. It's like they had a plan and knew exactly what to do."

"It's because we did, dipshits," Grady replied in a gruff tone. "Military Intelligence has plans for everything from dinosaur clones to alien invasions. As soon as the media comes up with a crazy way our country could come to harm, we plan how to stop it. Usually, it's a mental exercise in tactical planning, but these types of off-the-wall scenarios occasionally prove themselves useful in discovering new avenues of approaching more realistic threats. The zombie outbreak is one that was used a lot, so we had plenty of practice with it before it became reality."

"Yup," Carver added with a sleepy, almost drugged-looking smile. "And you know how the government loves it's paperwork, so everything was written down. For some people, it became an unofficial badge of honor to get your idea included in the Zombie Response Manifest. The damn thing has been refined over the years until it became a well-oiled machine. Everything we're doing is following it almost page-by-page. So far, the only snags are the lich, infection rate, and the virus itself. We were expecting a disease rather than a parasite."

"And the plans are actually being followed because the military is currently in charge rather than civilians," Grady added. "All bets were off as soon as martial law was declared. The President ordered the Joint Chiefs to restore order and that's exactly what we did. Eventually, there will be hell to pay because of the hard-line methods we're using, but at least people will still be around to bitch."

"New York makes up forty percent of the US population. We already lost half the country with losing just the one state," Carver commented. "I'm not sure if you're aware, but we bombarded it when thermal sweeps showed zero signs of uninfected life and Canada took out Toronto the same way. Mexico City also got bombed, but no one is taking responsibility for it."

"I thought this Unit was created to keep nukes from being dropped," I commented. "That's what the Commander said."

"He wasn't wrong, but nukes aren't the only bombs we have and this Company was formed after everyone got their shots off to take out the worst infected areas across the globe." Carver emphasized the word Company to correct my wording and he went on to give us a lesson in terminology. "The six of us make a squad. We combine with another two squads to form a platoon. There are meant to be four squads to each of the six platoons in this Company, although we're running light at the moment. The Commander wanted to leave room for us to pick up more lich along the way. Our Company and five others are part of a Battalion. Five Battalions make a Brigade and there are four Brigades in the Zed Division."

Doc leaned over to me and said, "That's all fancy talk for Zed having about ten thousand people assigned to zombie hunting."

"It's not as impressive when you put it that way," Hanson replied. "Ten thousand spread across the country? How is that supposed to work? There are millions of zombies out there by now."

"We're frontline scouts," Grady explained. "Regular Corps can deal with shufflers and haul them to the closest incinerators or crematoriums. It's our job to go in and clear out the bigger threats—knock out brains and legs on runners and apes to slow them down, try to get a count of what our people will be walking into, and evacuating survivors, if we find any. It's also our job to report any changes in horde activity. The longer this goes on, the more chance the parasite might evolve. We have the best chance of surviving an encounter like that and reporting it."

"What about finding the source?" I asked. "Has there been any headway on figuring out where this came from? Was it engineered in a lab or was it natural?"