Generation Kill zombie fic: The Moffatt Twp Bridge

[dira]

keerawa asked for Generation Kill zombie apocalypse AU, so I decided to plunk the guys down in my favorite zombie apocalypse: Mira Grant's Newsflesh Trilogy.

Which means they're all bloggers. :D


Gen. 565 words.
Nate was the editor in charge of twenty-two Recon bloggers: Bravo's Channel Two (Observe Everything. Admire Nothing.).


The Moffatt Twp Bridge

Everybody who blogged for the Reconnaissance group was kind of an Irwin. You had to be, to work for a guy who called himself Godfather and persisted in sending bloggers into the field in places no one else would go with cut-rate equipment and a mandate to do whatever they had to to get the story. Hell, Bravo's Channel One were all up poking around the edges of Alaska, a decade after it was officially surrendered. Nate expected to be posting them all to the Wall any day now, but they kept updating their blogs against all odds. Recon's bloggers were good enough to go into that kind of suicide mission and come out the other side most of the time. Nate was proud and perpetually terrified to be one of them.

Nate was the editor in charge of twenty-two Recon bloggers: Bravo's Channel Two (Observe Everything. Admire Nothing.). Tonight, for reasons understood only by Godfather--no matter how much Nate's boss pretended to get it--Channel Two had been sent in convoy in the dark to some nowhere place called Moffatt Township, where there had been four outbreaks in five days. Nate had done the math; there shouldn't be anybody left alive in Moffatt Township to get infected. In fact there shouldn't have been any left three days ago, which made outbreaks three and four kind of curious, and something probably better handled by the CDC or the military (the actual military, not just some token ridealong) than by five minimally-armored vehicles full of bloggers.

But four jeeps, one van, and twenty-two bloggers--plus his own little streak of Irwin, no matter that he was registered as a Newsie--was what Nate had, so that was what Nate was taking into Moffatt Township.

He also had a laptop with a fully-charged battery, Mike driving, and the auto-translated text of Baptista's latest blog post to try to review. Nate had no idea why Godfather had decided they should branch out into the Brazilian market, but Baptista's posts consistently got huge hits and even more hugely enthusiastic comment threads. Nate had long since given up trying to copy-edit them--Baptista assured him that that was how they did punctuation in his country and Nate had better things to do than try to verify that--but he did try to keep an eye on Baptista's tone. A certain amount of bitching about the insanity Godfather put them through in search of stories was expected, but if they went over the line it would be Nate's ass getting left out for bait.

The laptop jumped on his knees as the van made a sharp stop, and Nate slapped it shut and dropped it into the footwell, grabbing his NVGs and radio. "Two One, what the fuck."

"Two Actual," Brad came back, speaking as grammatically as he always wrote, "There is some sort of obstruction on the bridge. We are looking for a way around."

Behind Brad's calm voice, Nate could make out Captain Wright saying You realize this is a textbook ambush. Ray and Trombley and Walt's voices all overlapped as they insisted that Wright was a fucking idiot, it couldn't possibly be an ambush.

Then Brad spoke again, softly and evenly, as if he were whispering editorial advice into Nate's ear and not announcing on open comms that they were all epically, lethally fucked.

"There are zombies in the trees."

Comments

[petra]

Oh, no! They are in so, so much trouble.

And they're all Irwins, clearly.

[dira]

I mean, some of them are MORE Irwin than others (I think Trombley is convinced he can tame one of the zombies and make it a pet) but, yeah. They all are.

Of course, Nate will totally get them organized and turned around and save the day, because that is what he does. *g*

[springwoof]

I know *neither* of these too fandoms, but I read this anyway.

and now: eeek! scary cliffhanger ending!

...way to have me nervously glancing up at trees the rest of the day....

[dira]

Thanks!

And, to clarify several things:

a) by "in the trees" Brad means "among the trees"

b) in Generation Kill there is an incident where they are being told to enter a town called Muwaffaqiyah, in the dark, over a damaged bridge which has been blocked to create an ambush zone. Brad is the first to realize--observing it very calmly over his radio--that there are men in the trees around them.

A firefight ensues in which only one member of Second Platoon is injured, though Ray and, more successfully, Nate both get out of their Humvees to direct traffic in the midst of the firefight. Once Nate starts giving face-to-face driving directions, everyone withdraws safely.

So, really, our bloggers are going to be fine. :)