Free The Age of Zombies: Sergeant Jones by B. Rockow Page A

ground and rushed a soldier who flanked him to the right. Chris got onto the soldier’s back and attempted a choke hold while fumbling around with the rifle. He managed to get a burst of fire off, but the rounds went straight into the ground.
    The soldier quickly subdued Chris. Without any orders or hesitation the soldier took Chris’s head into his hands and jerked it as hard as he could. The snap crippled Chris instantly. Savannah was ravaged by her lover’s death. She dug her hands into the asphalt, breaking her nails, and wailed into the blue Kansas sky.
    “Silence wench,” Grantha said. “We’re not going to kill you now. But we are taking the kids. We’ve got orders to keep them alive.”
    This was the final straw. Savannah wasn’t going to give up anything else. She clenched her fists and gritted her teeth. “I’m not leaving my son,” she said. “There’s nothing that will take me from my son.”
    The campers on the bus were still peering out through the windows. They had seen everything. They were an audience to bloody drama of a nature that nobody had seen on the soil of the United States of America. Only a couple kids cried. Most just watched in awe. None of them thought ahead about what was in store for them. The drama of it all completely enraptured their minds. The violence blunted their emotions.
    Grantha walked along the bus and tapped the windows. As he walked the kids ducked down to avoid his stare, his wrath. “You won’t have to worry about these kids Savannah,” he said. “We’ll take good care of them now.”
    Savannah stood on the black asphalt with witchy eyes and a scowl. She breathed in and out rhythmically. Each breath built upon the one before until her gut started to emit this guttural growl. The growl built its pitch into a scream. She screamed and screamed until her throat couldn’t handle anymore.
    Two soldiers subdued her and carried her to a Humvee. Once there they placed a chloroform soaked rag over her nose and mouth. She was out in short time. Another soldier came to inspect her body. He fiddled around in one of the Humvee’s compartments and brought an envelope. He tapped it a couple of times, and dug into it. The soldier pulled out a white worm and rested it beneath Savannah’s nose. It poked around her left nostril, and wiggled its way inside, disappearing into the the dark cavern.
    It wasn’t long before a Sikorsky CH-53E Super Stallion transport helicopter arrived on the scene. The soldiers loaded the children onto the chopper and evacuated. The whole operation, from spike strip to evacuation, was over within thirty minutes.
    Unbeknownst to the soldiers, there was a witness to everything that had transpired. A Mexican farmhand happened to be walking out in an adjacent corn field when he first heard Jacob’s bloody cries. The farmhand ducked in the cornfield and watched it all go down. After the soldiers evacuated, he was the first to come across what had transpired on the hot Kansas asphalt that morning. He neglected to report it to authorities out of fear of his own legal status in the United States. But he had photographic evidence of everything.
    Twenty minutes later a station wagon carrying a vacationing family from Wisconsin hit the spike strip. The father pulled the vehicle over and told everybody to get out. The teenage son saw the bus up ahead and went up to investigate. His first reaction to the bloody scene was to purge his guts.
    He explored the bus and found nothing but empty lunch pails. A sad reminder of the innocence that was once on board. He walked back to his family, who were moaning about the Kansas heat and the endless cornfields. The boy was shaking. His face was blank and white as a ghost. He stuttered what he had just saw.
    It was another hour before federal authorities arrived. They closed off the small rural highway to any and all traffic. They reported the incident back to headquarters in D.C. They scoured the area for witnesses, but