Zombie Spring's Trooper Tyree

By Chris Okusako

Zombie Spring's Trooper Tyree is the first sequel to Zombie Spring published in 2012. This sequel continues the perilous adventures of Trooper Tyree and Hettie Younger from the first book's Chapter XII: First Blood LA. In that chapter, two veteran infantrymen were cut off from their unit and trapped in a Motel 6 by a large number of Undead. This was shortly before the H-Bomb was dropped on San Diego and the devastating mega earthquake that followed. These two soldiers, Trooper Tyree and Hettie Younger must survive the ravenous hunger of the Undead and live through the firestorm of man-made and natural disasters that completely destroy LA, while gathering together small bands of trapped infantrymen to rescue some school children just back from a field trip. ZSTT also continues the story of Lieutenant Shasta Maddy and her surviving gun crews that were forced to flee from Fire Base Indio in ZS Chapter XIV, Saga: The Song of Roland. You will discover a little bit more about the crooked politician Ben Arnold and his crusade against Trooper Tyree and his eventual election to the US Senate. Chris, Cowboy Buck Smiley Bellew, General Cartwright Jones, Albie Lincoln and Admiral Dewey round out this cast of interesting characters from the first book. There are many new and interesting characters introduced to ZSTT such as the elite soldiers Bluto, Chopper, Jericho, China and Pig Pen who will appear again in the second and final sequel due out in 2013. The final sequel will be called Zombie Spring's Roland Thomas Type IV, and it will feature Colonel Roland Thomas who was infected and killed in book one. Thomas becomes a Zombie trooper, but one with special abilities: A first of his kind and a game changer in the war against the Dead.

To help people decide whether or not they might enjoy this book, I offer a profiler. I’ve never seen it done before on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Here goes! ZS’s Trooper Tyree is a Zombie Lite version of the Zombie genre. Yes, it has plenty of gore and huge battles, but much of it is meant to be funny, and much of it is meant to teach a little history. It is not a dour world-view of what would happen. The content is centered around happy, upbeat young people, who think they can win out against all odds and maybe make a better life for themselves. If you like happy stories with a little romance interspersed with lots of military blood and guts, then you’re in the right place. So who might or might not enjoy this book? Fans of the movie, The Road, or the TV series, Walking Dead, might consider looking elsewhere for their entertainment because those shows are sad with a world view that all is lost and nothing will ever be the same again. If you liked Zombieland with Woody Harrelson, Abraham Lincoln vs. the Zombies, or Warm Bodies then you are more likely to have a nice evening pouring through these pages. Bruce Campbell, Woody Harrelson, and Brendan Fraser could be characters in this book. Matt Damon, Christian Bale, and Viggo Mortenson are great actors, but I think they’d pass on an offer to star in my series. For youngsters: Mild cursing, but no foul language or nudity. Bloody death and combat situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Okusako
• Release date: Jan 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310225420

Chris Okusako

I enjoyed writing the Zombie Spring Series, although I found the experience very difficult. For a guy like myself, 400,000 words is probably more words than I speak in several years, and maybe that’s why these books took three years to finish. I guess I can’t write any faster than I speak!Why did I write a Zombie series?I wrote a Zombie book as my first because they make a great enemy and they're just plain scary. Most of the Undead books I have read were great, right up until the ending! Why is that? Because many authors tend to kill off all of their loveable characters in horrible ways. So I wrote this series with a different intent. Most of my heroes and heroines survive, and you readers out there will feel more like laughing and cheering at the end than taking a cup of hemlock at bedtime. My main characters are wholesome types that people can look up to. Foul language and characters with emotional baggage must find homes in other people's books. Dogs are not allowed to die. (LOL)But why did I feel the need to write at all?The reason is, the characters in my books are all family members. It's my way of leaving my children and grand children an heirloom that they will want to read now and through the years. I call my books Heirloom Books, and some day after I'm long gone, I expect my great great grandchildren to ask their dads and moms, "Did you and great great grandpa and grandma really fight Zombies?"How cool is that?The other reason I chose to write was that I wanted to bring a little joy into people's lives. I firmly believe that if a person can do something that brings some cheer into the lives of other people, then he should. We're only here for so long, and it's nice to give back to all the people that have had to put up with us for all these years.The series, after Zombie Spring's Roland Thomas Type IV, will probably not continue. The reviews over at Amazon have been very good, and I love the fan mail, but a number of factors may send me into early retirement. First, I will be a grandfather for the second time, this March 2014. My family and the new little ones need me more than I could ever imagine. Only grandpa can change the diapers it seems, and it's hard to write between changings! Secondly, writing is not a very healthy hobby unless you can force yourself to leave the keyboard now and then to exercise and eat properly. I didn't, and I was rewarded with a small stroke. So my doctor and I view authoring with a small amount of trepidation now. Better I should be fixated on golf than typing, although far more dangerous for other golfers. Lastly, I really need to learn to type with more than two fingers.My hobbies are golf, historical fiction, westerns, shooting, opera, first person computer games, baseball card collecting, riding motorcycles, and I played ball for 20 years. My favorite authors are: Zane Grey, Louis L’Anour, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doc EE Smith, Bernard Cornwell, and Sam Barone. My favorite saying: A teacher is like a candle, consuming himself to light the way for others (straight from Leave it to Beaver). I retired as a 4th grade teacher, by the way.I reply to all email and am thankful for reviews... good ones that is. My email address is: [e-mail]

Book preview

Zombie Spring’s

Trooper Tyree

A First Sequel

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By

Chris Okusako

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ISBN: 9781310225420

Title: Zombie Spring's Trooper Tyree

Smashwords Edition

Other books in the series

Zombie Spring’s Trooper Tyree

Copyright 2013 by Chris Okusako

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of my imagination or are used fictitiously. Resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Resemblance to actual events and places is wholly coincidental.

DEDICATION

To my wonderful family. My wife and I are blessed.

To Aria, my unborn grandchild due in March

& Wyatt who is almost two.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Shauna Okusako for proofreading my manuscript and Rita Okusako for supplying all of the artwork!

Special thanks to my wife for watching our grandson, Wyatt, while I spent my time typing.

Table of Contents

Preface: Please Read

Chapter 1 (Excerpt)- The Face of the Enemy

Chapter 2 (Excerpt)- First Blood LA

Hettie Younger’s Dilemma – The story begins here

Chapter 3 : Even in Time of War

Chapter 4 : Yo Ho Blow the Man Down

Chapter 5 : A Change of Orders

Chapter 6 : Beauty and the Beast

Chapter 7 : Bluto

Two Hours Later

Chapter 8 :And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

Five Hours Later

Chapter 9 : The Great Escape

Chapter 10 : Island in the Sky

Chapter 11 : The Nightmare on Elm Street

Chapter 12 : Bugging Out

Chapter 13 : The Next Step

Chapter 14 : Mister Spuds

Chapter 15 : When All Hell Broke Loose

Chapter 16 : An Officer and a Gentleman

Chapter 17 : Epilog

Chapter 18 : Interview With the Author

Preface

Important! Please Read

Zombie Spring is the novel from which the Trooper Tyree sequel originates, and it is the novel from which all other sequels will be rooted. In the original novel, many of the soldiers in the Battle for LA went missing and were presumed killed in action. I intentionally left out what happened to them for good reason.

ZS was approximately 143,000 words by the time I finished, which is about 400 pages in a 6x9 book. If I had written in as much depth as I should have, I could have renamed Zombie Spring and called it the Encyclopedia of Events Leading Up to the Battle of Joyous Gard. The book would have been unprintable, and I think I would have given up on the project as too unwieldy. The solution, therefore, was to leave some loose ends for later while I completed the main story.

Each sequel to Zombie Spring will take one of those loose ends and tie it off. My guess is that the ZS series will probably total 300,000 to 400,000 words in three volumes.

In this first sequel to Zombie Spring, I describe Trooper Tyree’s and Pfc. Hettie Younger’s story following the disastrous battle at the Motel 6 in LA. If you read ZS, then you will remember that they were cut off from their unit. Since all my readers are geniuses, there is no doubt in my mind that you want to know what happened to them. Trooper Tyree tells the story of their survival over the next five days, and also chronicles the escape from the Firebase Indio disaster.

The first chapter of this sequel tells about the characteristics of certain kinds of Zombies and is taken straight from the novel Zombie Spring, Chapter VI, The Face Of The Enemy. All sequels will begin with this chapter for the convenience of new readers unfamiliar with the series and the types of Zombies that populate its pages.

The second chapter is excerpted from the same book and describes how Tyree and Younger were cut off from I-Corps. This excerpt comes from Chapter XII, First Blood. The new material begins at the end of the excerpt and is titled "Hettie Younger’s Dilemma."

Fans of the book Zombie Spring may want to know if Trooper Tyree is written differently than the original Zombie Spring. The answer is, yes. Zombie Spring was written as a family heirloom book, and features family, relatives, and close friends! So that particular book was really two books. One book is written very lightheartedly and is campy and humorous with a little horror mixed in. The other book is combat oriented with touches of tragedy, camp, and humor. When you put the two halves together, you have a novel with a split personality.

Trooper Tyree is not intended to be an heirloom book, so this book is more mainstream than the first and is written with a more consistent soul than Zombie Spring. The fighting scenes are similar to the ones in ZS, downright brutal at times with lots of humorous dialogue, but it is also a romance story. I wrote Trooper Tyree for you readers, whereas I wrote Zombie Spring for my daughters and grandson and wife.

There’ll be one more sequel after this one, possibly a short novelette involving Colonel Roland Thomas. He also was reported missing in ZS, and his tale will be quite a challenge to write since he was turned into a Type IV IED. There are a lot of ways I can go with that story. I tend to want to give him the full book he deserves.

After I write the third sequel, I will probably take a long rest from writing… maybe for the rest of my life. Being an author is fun, but it is time consuming, and I hear there will be a second grandchild next year! 63 year old grandpas babysitting two babies have no business writing books. Mostly they should take naps whenever the opportunity arises. So we’ll see.

These stories are for your enjoyment, and have served as a hobby for me. I hope you enjoy this novel!

Chapter 1

Excerpted from Zombie Spring Chapter VI

Early Morning, March 4th

I-Corps HQ Near Buttonwillow

The Face of the Enemy

The tent was a large affair for it contained all of the officers from the commanding general down to the lowliest 2nd lieutenants for an entire army corps, which in military parlance is two or more divisions. I-Corps or phonetically ‘eye core’ was about to receive a briefing from Lt. Christopherson on IED’s.

Staunch men and a few women in starched uniforms sat in their seats and wondered what was to be said to them. The majors through colonels, popularly known as the Farts and Darts, occupied the traditional front rows while lowly second lieutenants commanded the rear echelon. Scarred, stern leathery faces followed the movements of General Jones and carefully studied the curves of Lieutenant Christopherson as she waited her turn to speak.

General Jones knew that none of his officers would take a discussion about Zombies seriously, so he prefaced Cindy’s address by pledging his word that the danger to the United States was real, and that the Living Dead were the reason why the President of the United States declared a national state of emergency and mobilized the armed forces. He also told the astonished assembly of combat veteran officers that they would soon have to fight and destroy an army of Zombies that might number into the hundreds of thousands or more. He waited a moment to let that sink in.

As he looked at the dumbfounded faces before him he said, "I know that speaking of an army of Zombies stretches my credibility to the limit, but I assure you on my honor as an officer and gentleman that it is the truth. Soon we must engage an army of Zombies in combat and defeat them. No, I take that back. In this case we must use the Russian military doctrine to describe our military posture, as annihilate them is a better term than defeat them. There will be no prisoners in this war. Either the Zombies will all die or we will."

Beyond the tent, soldiers grouped around the loudspeakers to hear the address. They scratched their heads and stared at one another questioningly. A few made Zombie jokes or clever witticisms, but most of the rank and file sat or stood riveted to the spot, waiting to hear what they were up against. Not a few thought it was an early April Fools’ gag.

"And now I present to you, First Lieutenant Cynthia Christopherson, who as recently as yesterday, briefed the White House on the Zombie or IED contagion. Your survival and the survival of your men may depend on what you learn from her so please attend her closely.

Lieutenant, you have the floor. Please keep to the areas that deal with battlefield survival. At the end, there will be a brief question and answer period.

Cindy positioned herself decorously behind the podium and launched into her briefing. "When we use the word IED, the letters stand for Infected and Essentially Dead. The Acronym IED can be interchangeably used with the word Zombie, Infecteds, or the phrase ‘the Living Dead’.

"As soldiers, the most important thing you need to know is how to kill your enemy. You might think that putting down an Undead is easy, but it is not. An IED can only be killed in three ways. One is through a wound to the brain or the spinal cord. Most commonly that can be done with a bullet. A second way is to deny it red meat and sunlight for a prolonged length of time. Doing so will starve it to death or weaken it. A third way is immersion in seawater or fresh water. An IED falling into one or the other, and providing it cannot resurface, will slowly rot away over time, much like sunken ships will rust away on the ocean floor.

"Shooting an IED in the legs or the stomach or heart is a waste of time and a waste of ammunition. Not only will the IED continue its attack on you, over time its wounds will heal completely.

Remember this! When fighting these monsters, your best chance of survival is aiming your weapons at their heads, good marksmanship, and keeping your distance. The advantage is yours all the way up until they are within arms length, or you run out of ammunition.

Looking at her audience, she could see many officers nodding their heads in acknowledgement. Outside, the men who would wield the rifles tried to imagine hitting a moving head in the heat of battle as the heads bobbed up and down and side-to-side. It was doable, but for shots to strike home with any sort of consistency, the enemy would have to be engaged at close quarters. That meant more danger to the infantry. It also meant that each trooper would have to carry more ammunition, and that would take away some of their advantage in speed and agility.

"Now I would like to touch upon innate strengths and weaknesses of the IED’s. Let me be clear on this. Zombies have many strengths and several significant weaknesses. On the strength side, an IED only needs to scratch you or bite you to turn one of you into one of them, and that will happen between minutes and one day of your becoming infected. Put another way, if you are wounded by one of them, you are most likely dead. The Chinese military found that 100% of those bitten Turn. If scratched, about 75% of you will not incur the change, but you will have to be quarantined to await your fate."

A trooper leaning against a Humvee blurted out, That really sucks! I’ll tell you one thing right now. When we go in, I’m wearing heavy winter gear, flak jacket, goggles, and helmet. If I can find a radiation suit I’ll wear that too!

Also on the strength side, continued Christopherson, "is numbers. The enemy will almost always outnumber you soldiers because there are millions of citizens and each one is a potential Zombie. If not rescued and taken to a place of safety, then logically, all trapped but surviving citizens will become IED’s over time. The Zombies will root them out of their hiding places, or they are forced to surface by hunger and thirst. You already know there are more than ten million residents on the other side of these mountains.

"In regards to physical skills, they have almost none except for exceptional hearing. Chinese researches felt that IED’s might, I say again might, be able to detect line of sight heat signatures from as far away as fifty feet. IED’s cannot hop, skip, or run. At best they are poor climbers. They can move at a moderate walk indefinitely, but even if you were wounded, you could probably stay ahead of them. They cannot swim and seem to avoid the water.

"More weaknesses. IED’s have almost no intelligence that we know of. Instead of deliberate thought, we believe they have an instinct to kill and devour their enemies. Who are their enemies? Their enemies are warm-blooded animals. Non-human warm-blooded animals may be eaten or killed but cannot carry or spread the infection. That is fortunate for us."

PFC Ronnie Largent hugged her puppy and Bradley FV mascot, Shinpuu and crooned, You hear that? You hear that? You can’t get infected, you lucky dog. Ohhh we wuv you so much! Shinpuu in Japanese meant something along the lines of Wind of the Gods, but many who shared the same vehicle with her thought Farting Wind far more appropriate.

"There are three types of IED’s. Type I’s were China’s first attempt at creating the super soldier. A Type I is your standard Zombie. There are more of them than any other because they are more likely to wound you than kill you since they are slow and clumsy. They are most dangerous en masse, where like pack animals, they will surround and drag you down.

"The Type II IED is on a higher evolutionary plane than the Type I. Type II’s retain some knowledge of who or what they were before they were Turned. They can be especially dangerous because they can pick things up and use them. For example, a Type II IED who was a police officer might just pull his gun out and shoot you. He won’t be able to aim very well, but he will instinctively pull the trigger and reload as long as he has the bullets to do so. In numbers, there are quite a few Type II’s out there, but not nearly so many as the Type I’s since their kill ratio is higher than their wound ratio.

The Type III is the most dangerous of all. The Type III Zombie has all the failings of the others but it has two strengths that make it extremely dangerous. It has stealth, and it has two emotions that we are aware of. One is rage and the other is a rudimentary sense of self-preservation. Except by accident, you will not find a Type III walking head-on into your gunfire. Instead you will find them in a closet, under a pile of leaves, behind a bed, in caves, or any place where it is hard to see. Rage, on the other hand, makes them tenacious. Once on your trail, a Type III will try to finish you off or infect you. As the most successful Zombie killers, there are fewest of them because most of the people they stalk, they catch and kill. Maybe as many as 10% will be Type III’s.

This is what we know about T1’s, T2’s, and T3’s at the present. Doubtless we will learn more about them in the future. Most of my research was done while I was being chased through the streets of China, so my data is far from conclusive. Be ready for anything, is my best advice to you.

*

Sergeant Arch Adams sat in the turret of his M2 Bradley and called down to the driver known as the Genius. What’s 10% of ten million?

One million you hydrferbia war dawg. How’d you ever make sergeant, anyhoo?

*

You have a question, Colonel? asked Cindy.

Yes, I would like to know why in hell, Zombies eat humans?

I can explain that in a limited way, Colonel, answered the lieutenant. "The answer is that IED’s do not need to eat humans. They do so because the Chinese scientists tried to make killing as basic to an IED’s life as eating and sleeping. The radioactive serums, far beyond my understanding to explain, were injected into the first generation creatures we now call IED’s. Something went wrong and the lines between killing for pleasure and eating to live blurred to eating your enemy for pleasure that you killed so that you could live. If you were a computer programmer, you could simply say that the programming went awry, and instead of getting ABCD, you got ACDB with all the resulting glitches.

You will note from color photographs that will be handed to you later, that Zombies have milky white eyes. That is because in their changed state, they are photosynthetic, meaning that IED’s share some of the properties of plants as well as animals. As long as the sun shines, they can generate their own food from within their bodies, and like plants, some and maybe all injuries can regenerate. The Chinese have speculated that IED’s can see infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. Not only that, the colors that we see in common with them appear more vibrant to them than to us.

*

A group of soldiers lounging back against the door of a Humvee began to horse around, and Corporal July Jones busted out, Hey Chicky, I think they’re talking about your sister in there. She must be photosynthetic to be that big around.

She’s pregnant you ninny! grunted Pfc. Betty Carter. She was known to her friends as Little Bits.

Pfc. Lukas Hammerstein japed, Did you say ninny or nanny, Bits? Looks more nanny than ninny to me. His huge frame shook with laughter, while Jones took aim and chucked dirty underwear at him.

*

"Three more things that you must know. Contagion pills. marked appropriately with a Z, will soon arrive from our medical facilities back east. It is absolutely imperative that every one of you takes these pills because it will not be long before the Zombie Contagion becomes an airborne threat. If you take the pill, you will be immune to it. If you do not, you have a better than 50-50 chance of becoming infected early on and an additional 25% chance of being infected over time. Number two on the list is that all of the dead that you encounter must be shot in the head, as they too will eventually rise. Lastly, and this is most important. I mentioned three types of IED’s. In theory, there is a Type IV. The scientists that created the serums felt that some of the Type III’s might evolve into the ultimate hunter-killers that were first envisioned. This means a Zombie smarter than you are, who has twice and maybe thrice your strength and agility. This super soldier will not need food to live and can regenerate damaged tissue. That is only the beginning of what we suspect its powers may be."

Cindy wagged her finger at the seated officers as though she was disciplining an unruly class. She cautioned, "Should you meet such a Zombie, you must bend every effort to take it alive so that we can study it."

The tent’s canvas walls began to vibrate as 50,000 rank and file simultaneously and vociferously voiced their opinions in regards to Christopherson’s final statement. Within the tent there were slight shakes of the head and hidden smiles, but military decorum prevailed amongst the officer class, barely.

General Jones hastened to the podium to thank and dismiss the LT. He addressed his officers and said, "I want to be on I-5 south in three hours.

End Excerpt

T.O.C.

Chapter 2

Excerpted from Chapter XII of the novel Zombie Spring

Early Afternoon of March 5th

First Blood LA

Lieutenant Grace, come in. Lieutenant Grace, do you copy? This is Colonel Roland Thomas. Come in.

Sir, Grace here, copy loud and clear.

Lieutenant, send a squad down to support the forward recon unit. Find out what’s going on and report back. Over.

*

Sergeant Walker! hailed Lieutenant Grace.

Walker jogged over to his lieutenant, Sir?

Got a job for you, Lenny. Take your squad forward and find out what happened to our forward recon team. The LT held out a map and pointed a finger. Their last reported position was grid D-8. You heard the shooting, of course?

Yes, sir. I did. I take it there’s been no radio communication since?

That’s correct, Sergeant Walker. No heroics, Len. Just find out what happened, support the recon team if needed, and get back to me on the radio for further instructions. And sergeant, you’ve got dried blood all over your face.

Grace reached into his back pocket and handed over a damp rag. None of it’s yours, I hope?

Thank you, sir. It’s not mine. Lenny did not explain, and Grace was unwilling to pry.

*

Thirty minutes later, the ten-man squad leapfrogged its way down a freeway ramp and found the remains of several men in battered army fatigues. There was no sign of life.

*

For Sergeant Lenny Walker, this single awful morning had given him a lifetime’s worth of pain. He had done and seen things that would have been unthinkable just twenty-four hours ago.

He and his men had been shooting the dead for hours, and the sights, sounds, and smells were lingering in his mind like a festering wound. Would he ever be able to sit down and eat a peaceful meal again without seeing brains, brains, brains? But the worst was the family of four they had found. Two of them were still alive but far beyond medical help, even were it available. The corpsman took a look at the father and young son, and at Walker’s questioning glance, he shook his head and walked away. Lenny had been given very clear-cut orders for situations like this, and now he had to carry them out.

Father and son were so pathetically grateful to be rescued. "Rescued… What an awful joke!"

Lenny could have ordered someone else to do the nasty job, but he simply couldn’t. A good leader doesn’t dodge the unpalatable jobs and heap them on someone else’s shoulders. So Walker drew his pistol and chose Trooper Tyree to do the dad while he did the young boy.

Poor Tyree, scarred beyond redemption from his many killings while serving in Special Ops. One more for him would be duck soup. He was a dealer of death, and treated death like a business. No matter how bad things got, the cold blooded Tyree could always be counted on to do his duty.

Best damn soldier in the army, mused the sergeant.

What’s your name, young man? asked Len kindly. The car door was open and he knelt beside the belted child. Someone had covered the little five year-old’s body with a green T-shirt to conceal his festering wounds.

Bobby, came the weak reply, but there was the spark of a little smile on his lips… and a pink froth on his lips.

The sergeant saw Tyree moving behind the father; his weapon was drawn. He was positioning himself so that when they fired, the bullets passing through the heads would not become a danger to themselves.

Well, Bobby, soon we shall see you well again. The pain will be all gone. You… you like candy, don’t you? From the corner of his eye, he saw Tyree’s nod and his icy stare. A shiver ran down Walker’s spine, and he forced back the tears that were so close to falling.

The sergeant gently brushed away a maggot on the boy’s neck, unwrapped a Butterscotch candy, and slipped it into the boy’s mouth. The father looked back from his seat and smiled through his pain.

Ummm, Bobby’s face came alive.

Lenny forced a genuine smile onto his face and said one word, "Tyree!"

*

And now Sergeant Walker found himself kneeling beside the scene of a short but furious battle, one in which his side lost. There had been four men in the recon unit, and Len was mentally trying to reassemble the scattered body parts to see if there were any survivors. It was a tough job because mixed in, were IED body parts, and who can tell the difference? An arm is an arm; a leg is a leg. Finally he gave up in disgust, deciding that there were at least two dead soldiers, probably three, and an outside chance of four.

Pretty easy to see what happened here, stated Walker. The point man was picked off coming around the corner where the street crosses beneath the bottom of the ramp. The Z’s were grouped under the freeway ramp waiting, and maybe more were behind that abandoned semi. Type III’s? Likely!

There had definitely been a Type II involved because there was a meat cleaver stuck in the PRC.

Trooper Tyree spat. Spitting was a language for him, and how he did it, the volume, the force, and what he hit with it spoke volumes to the discerning man or woman. In this case, Lenny took the casual arc as mostly agreement with what he said and maybe disdain for the recon boys, since the glob landed in a puddle of their blood.

"When the point man didn’t come back, the other three troopers came willy-nilly around the corner in a group and were attacked on at least two, maybe three sides. They was overwhelmed by a... significant force of mixed IED’s," came the slow backwoods drawl. The big man’s face showed his rank disapproval.

Sloppy soldierin’! declared Tyree. Getcha killed every time. There’s only one thing worryin’ me.

Go on, spill it, Troop.

Wal, four men weighs roughly seven hundred pounds. It took us nigh on forty-five minutes to get here. How many IED’s would it take to swaller that much beef in so little time? pondered Tyree.

Walker’s mouth was open, and he held his breath before exhaling. Point well taken, Ty.

Bring up the radio, Jonesy, ordered Walker.

Jonesy hid his eyes when he brought the unit forward, and Walker noticed the man’s odd behavior right away.

Curious, thought Len, and then awareness shot through him. The whole squad was acting a little distant. Of course, he accused himself bitterly. I’m a baby killer now!

He snatched at the receiver, but the image of brains is what he saw.

Walker to Grace, Walker to Grace, come in.

This is Grace, what’s the sit, Lenny?