MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD

SUBJECT: Hazard Company Duty Appointment Orders

1) Harold Monroe, Captain, 173rd Airborne BCT, Fort Carson Colorado, is hereby ordered to report for duty as Commanding Officer of Hazard Company, Special Operations Battalion

AUTHORITY

1) Captain Monroe is to transfer from current posting to Special Operations Battalion and assume duties of Commanding Officer of Hazard Company

2) Captain Monroe is authorized 10 days leave prior to deployment.

3) Further Orders upon Arrival…

* * *

Monroe crumpled the letter up and tossed it away in disgust. Hazard Company! How could they do this to him? Command of Hazard Company? Who would want it? Hazard Company was the dregs of the Army. Hazard Company got the nasty, dangerous jobs and was considered an expendable asset. That is why they were called a Hazard Company. It was practically a penal company. The worst offenders who hadn’t yet graduated to rape or murder were unceremoniously dumped there. Malcontents and thieves almost like Viking raiders of old. The men were known to be less than enthusiastic in their duties and had an unorthodox esprit de corps, as in none. There had been stories of some of the terrible shit that Hazard Company had been through, sustaining appalling casualty rates. They were in a way legends however, because the sheer Darwinian process of serving in Hazard Company ensured each man had brass balls the size of watermelons. They had the reputation of getting the job done, regardless of losses. (more…)

Clyde Thompson had been working as an orderly for only a month and a half when the outbreak burned through the hospital’s corridors like a fire made of flesh and teeth.

“What’s going on?” Mr. Perkins kept asking him.

“I told you I don’t know.”

“Well, God damn it, get me out of here!”

Mr. Perkins’ demand went without reply as Clyde was too distracted by the hellish scenes occurring through the open doorways of the rooms that flew by.

(more…)

Dying makes you stupid.

It has to, right? I mean, there’s no denying it.

That’s the only thought running through my head as I watch it fumble with the door handle with all the dexterity and grace of a mop. I should be screaming for my life, but I am just so shocked that I am still alive, at least for now, that I can’t help marveling at its incredible inefficiency. Its stiff, lumbering limbs. All it wants to do is eat me. And all that’s standing in its way is a single turn of the key I left dangling from the door of this hatchback in my desperate struggle to get inside alive.

(more…)

It was Valentine’s Day, and Yuri was returning the engagement ring he’d given his girlfriend three months ago.  In a show of discontent with his late nights away from home, she’d stopped wearing it.  He’d thought she’d been impulsive, but almost a month removed from her having taken off the ring, she still hadn’t softened.  If money didn’t matter, he would’ve held onto it, waited for his girlfriend to relent, but he had Mayor Hernandez coming aboard the Blue Line, and cash mattered.

(more…)

Betrayal, revenge and murder; lovely meaty sounding terms, eh? They’re such thrilling, blood dripping and juicy words that I’ve always loved, but only in fiction of course. I mean… I never thought, not for one second, that I’d ever become the central character in such a terrible story myself, but I have. And that’s the thought that runs through my mind as I move sneakily up behind Tommy O’Brien to push him over the edge of this high sea cliff. (more…)

The massive box of a building stood nestled in a wasteland of dirty cars, rotting corpses, and great bundles trash blowing about in the wind. Sam and Grace surveyed it from the edge of a forest several hundred meters out, Sam scanning for danger through binoculars while Ruck whined from around his knee.

“The dog is hungry again,” Sam said tersely.

“I got him.” (more…)

I

Within a week every person in Barrel County was either holed-up or dead… to some degree. Most of the Barnes family was of the former category. Shortly after graduating in 1969, Charles Barnes married his long-time sweetheart Barbara O’Day. They had reluctantly purchased an ancient house on the outskirts of the town of Lyons, New York. They didn’t want the seventy-five year-old “fixer-upper,” but it was the only thing they could afford at the time. (more…)

Jack Spencer stood at his window and watched the world crumble. High in his apartment, he could see across the city. In the distance, buildings burned – black smoke spiralling. Three days before, a plane had come down. A military jet or similar. Jack had heard the whine of its engines. He’d rushed to the window in time to see the impact. The explosion had been huge – akin to a small nuclear bomb. Jack guessed it had been carrying weapons, or that it had hit a gas station. Perhaps both. A mushroom cloud had bloomed high into the cloudless sky. Seconds later, the building had shaken as though in an earthquake. Jack had braced himself, sure his time was up, sure the foundations would give way and he’d plummet to his death, riding the floors as he took a theme-park ride to Hell. (more…)

1

We are three days out of the Bight of Biafra headed west. The trade winds favor Lady of Mercy and push us along at an easy 12 knots cutting a sharp wake through calm seas. I spend most of my time above decks as the autumn air retains a temperate nature infinitely preferable to the suffocating heat in the crew quarters and hold. I am not the only one, the crew, all 15 of them, are loathe to descend the ladders into the hold unless so ordered, and even then they grouse. Captain Machado runs the ship well, and though this is only my second trip as a First Mate, he conveys an air of authority below his otherwise easy manner. He’s pounded some brute of a deckhand into sniveling and bleeding more than once, but his violence is never excessive or gratuitous. I’ve shipped on other vessels where men were nailed to the deck or thrown to the sharks for the slightest infraction, though this brutality is generally reserved for Dutch traders and French privateers. (more…)

How did I meet Rosie? Well, it wasn’t under normal circumstances – the world being the way it is. It wasn’t through mutual friends for example, or in a nightclub or at a party. No, I met her in a romantic slime filled ditch. She was the one in the ditch, by the way. Not me. (more…)

Sequel to Part 4

“Which way I fly is Hell; myself, I am Hell;”

Kelly,

If you are reading this, one of two things has happened. Either Sachs has had me killed, or, I have been locked in the Shed. (more…)