Free Even Zombie Killers Can Die by John Holmes, Alexandra Grey

York before northern Vermont, in the vain hope of defending Burlington from that direction.

The lake was deceptively peaceful. Ziv was sitting just in front of me, facing the way we had come, watching in silence as secondary explosions from the JDAMs continued to eat whatever was left for it to eat on the island - South Hero, if I remembered right. North Hero was connected to it by a causeway. And if the General was as big an SOB as I thought, hopefully he would have placed explosives on that causeway as well. Maybe North Hero Island could avoid the pounding its sister just caught to the south. If not... I pushed away that line of thought and hunkered down next to Doc.

“How bad?” I shouted to him above the engine noise.

He just shook his head. He didn't have the breath to try and shout an answer to me. I placed a hand on his shoulder, not daring to squeeze reassurance for fear of hurting him worse. I turned instead towards Ziv, who pitched his cigarette into the lake and leaned his head back against the rubber sides.
    Asking him if he was injured would be useless, but I looked him over. His face wasn't smashed in like Doc's, and I remembered from the fight that his arms and legs worked, at least; but I wouldn't put it past him to fight with broken bones. The way his left arm was socketed tight against his chest suggested a fracture of some kind. Whatever, we'd deal with his injuries when we got to Isle la Motte - if we were able to get any kind of help there, that is.

It was maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes from the southern end of Grand Isle to the remains of the causeway between Isle la Motte and the Alburgh Peninsula, but it felt a lot longer. When we got close enough to the peninsula, I had Hart cut the motor and we used the paddles. There was no sign of life anywhere, but the gap between the two wasn't more than two or three hundred meters, and I didn't want to alert anyone to our presence until we had to.
    Up close, I could see that the wall was maybe twenty feet high and made of cinderblocks and cement. The exterior was incredibly smooth, even the cement between the cinderblock joints had been carefully set; the effect was of one flat, even surface. After a few seconds' staring at the thing in stupefaction, my brain kicked in and I realized that no zombie would be able to climb the wall. Pretty slick, no pun intended.

“Ahoy, the island!” I shouted when we were about fifty meters away. Behind me, Brit snickered. Two heads popped up from behind the wall, and one of them shouted to me.

“Qui est-il?” The voice switched to English. “Who are you?”

We’d heard rumors for several years that the Quebecois north had managed to remain organized, and it didn’t surprise me to hear French; it stood to reason they would want the Vermont farmland as much as we did, especially after the fall of Montreal. The Canadian Parliament had the city nuked, ostensibly to contain the plague up there. However, from the paranoid mutterings of the few survivors to make it south, after Toronto succumbed to the plague moving north from Buffalo and Niagara Falls, Quebec had tried to secede and seal up their own borders. It may have worked. Despite the destruction of their capital city, regular radio traffic could be heard from French news channels. Reportedly, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia remained zombie-free. Ottawa was now its own glowing lake of glass thanks to the Chinese, but the Frogs had evidently survived.

“United States Army! We have wounded here!” Hart had pulled out the flag we'd used down south at the ambush site and was waving it madly.

The two heads disappeared for a second, then a series of ropes were tossed over the wall and one of the men rappelled down easily, stopping just short of the water. Several more heads appeared over the edge of the wall. We paddled the boat over to him, and he shined a flashlight into each of our faces. The light paused on Doc.

“Is he bitten?” This man,