Joshua Hoss had always wanted to fight in his dress uniform, when he heard the gunfire in the distance he thought for sure it was time for the boogaloo. He threw on his dress uniform, dusted off his army issue Stetson, strapped on his saber and .45, then headed out to die like a man.

The enemy he met wasn’t what he expected. Zombies, or something close enough that the difference didn’t matter. He almost got run over by a teenager driving a police car who told him that a sheriff was rallying men over eighteen to hold a line against the zombies.

He caught a ride to the sheriff's station with a family in time to tag along with a convoy to some kind of barricade made out of lawn furniture, cars, plywood, and generally anything laying around.

Although the enemy didn’t have guns, they were hard to kill and didn’t stop for anything besides a shot to the mouth or through the neck. He hadn’t seen any enemy this determined since the Tet Offensive. Every time they would lose half their number they would fall back, dragging any bodies with them. The next time they came back the bodies they carried off would be walking again.

They held, but a messenger on a dirt bike informed them that the barricades on parallel roads were fallen or pushed back. The sheriff decided to withdraw, but in Hoss’ experience that was the wrong move. These barricades were the only thing between the zombies and the millions of people in Houston. They needed to buy time for a larger force to organize.

Hoss couldn’t blame the man, police work doesn’t make you ready for war, so he took charge of the situation before it could get any more fubar.

After that sheriff left, the men who stayed with him recognized the awards on his uniform and what they meant. They said they didn’t have any problem following him as long as he didn’t try to put any of them on stupid details or give useless briefings.

The men were mostly army veterans with a few marines and sailors scattered in. Veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan, or a dozen other smaller conflicts, to him they were young men, some with horrific injures, more than a few were sporting artificial legs or hands, some had scars or burn marks covering their faces, but every one had eyes as hard as stone. Every one of them was thirsty for blood.

They didn’t look parade pretty, but being with them felt like coming home.

Hoss organized the men into teams, most were assigned to turning the barricade into a fort with walls on all sides.

When the fort walls started going up he conducted rounds with Sergeant Johnson who naturally fell in as his second, nobody complained more than good soldier should. He assigned people using the same caliber of ammo to the same sections of the walls. Dispatched a team of raiders to ‘requisition’ all the ammo they could get their hands on in an hour, that turned out to be two pickup trucks worth.

The next wave came when the fort was only partially completed, but liberal volumes of firepower drove the enemy off.

None of the following attacks were serious, he recognized the strategy if not the method used. Light attacks to keep them pinned, never fully committing their force, buying time while a larger force to assemble. It took a commander with an iron discipline and total disregard for the lives of his men to pull it off. But this enemy was some kind of technological horror, their soldiers already dead, their commanders uncaring enough to not even arm them with sticks or rocks.

Using the breaks between waves of zombies it took them hours to complete their fort. Dawson, a former navy Explosive Ordinance Disposal technician, started handing out party favors in the form of pipe bombs, nobody asked why he had so many.

When the next wave came out of the night, zombies silently sprinted at their fortifications from all directions, this was the real attack. Whoever had the boom box started playing an electric guitar solo version of the national anthem.

Dawson used his potato gun to rain thermite down on their ranks, targeting the largest figures and whenever the shield of bodies in the front was too thick it would be hosed with a flamethrower or pelted with pipe bombs till it disintegrated.

Johnson had an old m60 he found in the police evidence locker, it was held in reserve due to limited ammo, but when the press of bodies reached the wall he started laying the hate into them. The high caliber tore through dozens of bodies, partially disabling the zombies it didn’t outright kill.

Then the zombies were climbing at the walls, doing their best impression of a dog pile and letting the ones behind climb over them. There was constant gunfire, when the piles of zombies reached level with the top of the walls Hoss ordered the men to fall back to the center of the fort. They fell back as orderly as possible, but not without casualties. They were down to a dozen men, Hoss had his saber in one hand chopping heads off bodies that made it close, his 1911 was in his left hand putting holes in zombies throats. Then without warning the zombies froze in place for two heartbeats, all of them turned to face south and started sprinting that direction. The defenders quickly mopped up the ones still inside the fort, the tide of zombies left behind their dead, for once, and even left their partially disabled. The ones without legs or missing chunks of their spine were dragging themselves south.

The boom box guy started playing We are the Champions, it turns out his name was Sharp, but Hoss had him cut it off. They hadn't won, he knew the zombies had them dead to rights, there was just a higher priority threat for them to deal with. Hoss explained to his remaining men that they needed to support that threat or wait and let the zombies build up more strength before returning. A pair of volunteers climbed over the improvised fortifications and down the hill of zombies surrounding it to recover the tow truck left outside. They used it to open a section of wall so the trucks could drive out. It took minutes and the rest of them dragging bodies out of the way to make an entrance they could drive through. When they left they took every weapon and piece of ammo they cloud carry. Hoss collected IDs of the fallen, most died to blunt force, but at least one a had mechanical spider shoved in his mouth and it cooked his brain in seconds. Living and dead accounted for, a flamethrower was used to hose the walls down and deny the zombies a chance to reanimate the mound of dead.

They drove south, following a trail of limping, crawling, and stumbling zombies, every time they met one covered in disks they either let Olson, the maniac with the flamethrower, cook it or let Dawson hit it with thermite, but drove past them and kept moving south to the tune of War by Edwin Starr.

After a few minutes of driving, people's cell phones start going off, it looked like whatever was causing the communication blackout had lifted. Hoss tried to call the sheriff station to report their status, but of course, all circuits were busy.

Eventually the trail lead to a power station, Hoss got there in time to hear a gunshot and see arcs of neon light flashing from inside the power station.

The view of what was happening inside the station was blocked by a wall of hundreds of zombies all trying to climb over each other to get inside. It was obvious they were being electrocuted because as soon as one would reach the mass of bodies it would start convulsing. Then their heads, or mouths, would explode, Hoss ordered somebody to find and kill the breaker for the station.

Sharp and Johnson volunteered and rammed an suv through the fence on the back side of the station. They came to a sliding halt with the back end of his suv facing the breaker box. Johnson used a pair of bolt cutters Sharp brought to pop the lock off the box and flip the breakers off. By the time they had the power to the station off, the pile of zombies had started to smolder and the sky to the east was starting to show first light.

Hoss started barking out orders “Olson, torch this pile of bodies. Get me a perimeter half a block out, see if anyone nearby is alive and can tell us what happened.”

“Whoa there buddy! Cease fire.” Said a man wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, a load bearing belt, a pair of mirrored aviators, carrying an over under shotgun. As he climbed down the mound of bodies and into the headlights of the vehicles Hoss could see his feet and legs were badly burnt, there were burses covering his left forearm, but he walked up the lead vehicle with a stagger in every step. When he got close enough Hoss could make out a pair of crossed sabers on his chest with the words “scouts” underneath.

The man spoke with slightly slurred speech “its about time somebody showed up, I thought I would have to do all the work myself. Their ship is…. behind that pile of bodies… and.. I think I…” he then proceeded to vomit and collapse.

One of the team members with medical training rushed to the fallen man. The medic, a woman by the name of Smith, examined him and quickly checked his vitals.

He responded to the examination by moaning “if you aint cav you aint shit"

She rolled him over and checked his canteens, opening the half full one and smelling it. She took a swig and passed the canteen to Hoss, he caught a whiff of whisky from it and handed it back. “Drunk?” he asked

Smith nodded then sighed, “These are some nasty electrical burns, he might lose his legs, but he'll survive.”

Olson dragged a few bodies out of the way and behind them he could see some kind of silver object. Hoss sent a messenger to let the sheriff know what they found and ask for backup.

It was mid morning before a national guard convoy showed up with Bradley fighting vehicles, gun trucks, and a few trucks with supplies. Hoss briefed the convoy commander on the situation, gave them his address and phone number they could use to contact him. The man they found at the power station came around enough to give his name to Smith, then he was handed off to the national guard for a medivac.

Hoss gathered his men, they all agreed that this wasn’t over and whatever was going to happen next they would be better off together. They loaded into their vehicles and headed back to Hoss' home. They took showers, cleaned their weapons, and swapped stories over breakfast.

Most of them had similar stories, having grown disenfranchised with the military life, wounded and discharged, or forced to leave for the military version of office politics.

Between spare bedrooms, air mattress, and furniture, everyone had a place to sleep, but they barricaded the back door and took turns on watch at the front.

By the late afternoon the power, and thankfully air conditioning, came back on. They turned on the TV to check what the news was saying about the zombies and found out what was going on in the wider world.