Even Zombie Killers Get The Blues (Zombie Killer Blues) Read Free Page B

when next time you meet. Just give him a big, wet
sloppy kiss.” called Brit over her shoulder as she moved to take up point.
“Give him a reach-around.”
    “Such a pig.” I muttered.
    “OINK OINK!” she called back. We moved out down the
broken road.

 
     
    Chapter 5 We stood over the Route 4 bridge and watched the water flow underneath. It was
clear, clearer than I had ever seen it before. Clear and toxic. Not as bad as
downstream, but there was a sheen of oil slick across the top. Millions of
gallons of heating oil, industrial chemicals, toxins released by houses
decaying. The engineers testing the water figured it would be close to a
hundred years before it was drinkable. The streams draining into the Hudson
were almost as bad. Who would have thought clean water would have been an issue
after the Zombie Apocalypse? Another thing the movies got wrong. We knew of one
good well on the east side of the river, a mile south of here. A hand pump into
a deep well, but in a few years the ground water would be contaminated by
rusting gas tanks and underground oil tanks. From here on out we would have to
hump our water, which is heavy as shit. On a hot spring day in Upstate NY,
humid as hell, humping seventy pounds in a pack, you wind up soaked to the bone
with sweat in about ten minutes.
    Jonesy and Hamilton stood pissing into the river.  
    “Damn, Jonesy, This water is cold.”
    “Deep, too. You can’t play jokes like that on a
brother, Doc!”
    Brit rolled her eyes at both of them. “Boys.”
    I took point, walking down the west side to the
lock. We ran into two Zs stumbling down the main road. The first went down from
a head shot from my rifle. The second was walking away, upwind from us. Brit
took her out with a shot to the back of the head and we stepped around the
still-twitching corpse. Doc flipped the first over and took a picture of her
face for the National Database. It would go in the missing file, where the
software would try to match her face. Not much, but it sometimes answered
survivors’ questions. Maybe a one in a hundred got photographed, and one in ten
of those got ID’ed. Better than nothing, I guess.
     
     
     
     
     
     

     
    A quick note about our rifles: They’re
standard, Army issue M-4s that have been rechambered to take a .22 caliber Long
Rifle round, with a bit more charge than a regular .22 LR. Instead of the usual
combat load of 180 or so .227 rounds in a regular M-4 load-out, we each carry 600
rounds of .22 Longs in 50 round magazines. We could also use them in our
pistols and if we have to, we could use scavenged .22 rounds. It’s impossible
to find any .227 rounds anywhere but .22’s are still pretty common in the ruins
of sporting goods stores and gun shops. One thing you need when
fighting zombies is ammo, and plenty of it. No one is that good to hit a Z in
the head every shot, and, especially in combat, it is more like 3 or 4 rounds
before you put one through their heads. Another thing they got wrong in the
movies.  
    ~ N.A. We heard the howling long before we got there. It grew slowly with each step we
took. It seemed to sink right down through our teeth into our bones. The Zombie
Moan.
    Jonesy stepped up to the edge first and looked over.
    “Hollllllyyyyyy shit, Nick, come get a look at
this.”
    I tapped Ahmed on the shoulder and he took my sector,
looking back down the road. I walked over to the edge of the canal lock and
looked into the water ten feet below. It was filled with Zs, floating, standing
on top of each other, clawing at the concrete wall. The doors of the lock were
closed and they had wandered in there from the town. Hundreds of them. Packed
in, rotting, bloating. They saw us and started in a surge towards us, piling on
top of each other, pushing each other down into the water. Jonesy started
popping them in the head with his pistol but I told him to stop and not waste
ammo.
    “Damn, Nick, this shit creeps me out. What are going
to do about this?” I