District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  By the time Cade had opened his eyes for good—an hour and a half after leaving Bastion, according to his Suunto—the Ghost Hawk had already skirted a number of peaks, overflown lush green national forests and was once again flying low level on an easterly heading that he figured would take them through a pass in the southern tip of the Rocky Mountain Range and eventually deliver them to Colorado Springs.

  Returning his attention to the cabin, Cade saw Skipper still parked by the minigun. The crew chief’s visor was retracted and his eyes were constantly on the move, probing the scrolling terrain with an intensity dulled by neither time nor distance. Across the aisle from Skipper, Cross and Lopez were both awake. Apparently sensing him stir, the operators perked up and both flashed him a thumbs-up.

  “Getting close,” Skipper said. “Keep your eyes peeled, gentlemen. Springs ain’t what she used to be.”

  Hearing this, Cade rubbed his eyes and stretched his arms toward the cabin roof. Feeling the dull ache returning to his left ankle despite the new Danners and athletic braces, he fished into a pocket and brought out the half-full bottle of Ibuprofen. Vitamin M, he thought. Said to cure a grunt of everything from sore muscles to a sucking chest wound. Knowing full well Brook wouldn’t approve of him exceeding the maximum recommended dosage, he still rattled six of the tiny Motrin into his palm and swallowed them dry. Seeing Lopez watching him hawklike, he capped the bottle and lobbed it across the cabin to him.

  “Turnaround should be quick,” Ari said over the comms. “Whipper is going to top us up with everything we need.”

  “I’ll make doubly sure we get a full complement of flares,” Skipper intoned. “And a full loadout for the mini.”

  “Copy that,” Ari said, “I never doubted you, Skip. You keep talking so much and we’re going to have to think up a new handle for you.”

  Cade studied Skipper while digging into his own memory for the crew chief’s current nickname. Suddenly, in his mind’s eye he was back outside the Three Palms in Los Angeles and clambering aboard the Ghost Hawk with Zs closing in from all sides. Soon to be the very fortunate recipient of a lifesaving exfil, he recalled how the minigun’s electric motor whined as shells spilled onto the hot pavement. He remembered seeing Skipper then, filling up the door, visor covering his eyes, jaw with a granite set to it. No words accompanied the crew chief’s death dealing. For that matter, the man had spoken sparingly the entire ride to and from Los Angeles. Then Cade remembered Ari calling the man Doctor Silence. Fitting then, that was for damn sure. Now, however, not so much.

  “President Clay, Colonel Shrill, Major Nash, and one of the newly appointed Joint Chiefs will be waiting in the TOC for you gentlemen,” Ari said, breaking Cade’s train of thought. “There will be a Cushman and driver waiting for you three when we arrive.”

  Airman Davis, no doubt, thought Cade.

  “After the briefing I suggest you all grab some chow,” continued Ari. “Whipper and his crew are going to give Elvira a quick once-over, so I gather you’ll have an hour, give or take, to get squared away.”

  “Copy that,” Lopez said. “Sounds to me like you’re saying we have time for a four-course meal and then a quick round of golf.”

  “Only nine holes,” Haynes shot. “You set foot on the back nine and you’re walking to the District.”

  Cross whistled. “Washington D.C. My old stomping grounds. I. Can’t. Wait.”

  Remembering the mission to the White House to collect the football containing the codes to the United States’ nuclear arsenal, Lopez shivered and said, “She’s not the senorita you used to know, mi amigo. All of the snakes are dead and walking upright now.”

  “Once a zombie, always a zombie,” Ari quipped. “Speaking of Zs. We’re crossing the Continental Divide. Keep your eyes peeled, fellas. The walkers are real thick on the east side of the Rockies. They seem to collect in pockets and then get stalled out for a while when they hit the wall so to speak. You might even see a mega horde ranging around the east slope.”

  Cade asked, “So the megas aren’t sticking to the roads like they were early on?”

  “Damn things aren’t as predictable in their travels as they once were.”

  Explains their prolonged absence from the state route from Woodruff to Bear River and beyond, Cade thought. He said, “What about Springs? Are the lights really on?”

  Ari chuckled as the helicopter slowed and yawed right to negotiate a treed canyon leading up to a massive peak. “You’ll see, Wyatt. You’ll see.”

  Staring out his window at the Douglas Firs whipping by at danger-close range, Cross said, “I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. How many survivors call Springs home now?”

  Again, Haynes broke in. “A few thousand if you count all of the soldiers taking R and R between combat deployments.”

  Between combat deployments, thought Cade, dumbstruck. Though he longed to know more about what changes had taken place in the days and weeks since he’d been gone from Schriever, he decided to wait and see it with his own eyes from the air. There was also that sit-down requested by Nash herself during which he figured he could mine her for dirt on all of the particulars that he could think of between now and then.

  At the top of the peak, Ari nudged the nose over hard and skimmed the treetops and rock-covered mountain flank with just feet separating the tree tops from the helo’s smooth underbelly. After a few seconds traveling at that nose down pitch Cade felt his body pressed down into his seat as the helo leveled out and its forward momentum increased greatly.

  “Thank you for flying Night Stalker Airways,” Ari said over the comms. “Jedi One-One will be wheels down at Schriever Air Force Base whenever in the hell we get there. The current temperature on the ground is nippy with periods of intermittent rain and sleet expected during your stay.”

  “No golf,” Cross muttered.

  “No sunbathing,” Lopez quipped.

  “I need to visit the armorer,” Cade said soberly.

  “Don’t be a buzzkill, Wyatt,” Ari barked over the comms. “While we’re en route there will be plenty of time to load mags and oil your piece.”

  Everyone aboard chuckled at that.

  “We need to focus on the mission. The farther east we go, the more Zs there will be. Just saying a certain level of frostiness needs to be attained and then maintained.”

  “We don’t even know why President Clay wants us to go back to D.C. yet. It could be a cakewalk mission like the Long Beach—.” Ari drew a sharp breath. Recalling that the Delta team had lost a shooter there to a freak Z bite, he instantly regretted the comment. The soldier had been a real solid shooter named Lasseigne. New to the team, he got swarmed and didn’t realize he was dead until they were airborne. Still, that was no reason to forget the man, Ari thought. There was no excuse ever to forget any of the dozens of good men he knew who had fallen to Omega since the dead began to walk. But there was a tiny silver lining to Kelly “Lasagna” Lasseigne’s death. For unlike Maddox’s death at the hands of the Zs back at Grand Junction Regional, Lasagna was buried back at Schriever, not MIA somewhere in the middle of the Colorado high desert.

  “Yeah, right,” Cade answered, “a cakewalk. In case you forgot … a soldier died there. A good man named Lasseigne. It’s going to be nothing of the sort. We all saw the same satellite footage of the area in and around D.C. … didn’t we?”

  Heads nodded all around.

  “I take back what I said about Long Beach. And no slight was intended.” There was a moment of strained silence as the helo popped up and rode over the uneven top of a copse of trees. “However, in my defense,” Ari continued, the craft now back to level flight, “what I meant to say and failed miserably is that this one is going to be nothing like the last six missions Nash has sent us on. There’s a good chance we’re going to have air cover.”

  “Predators from Creech?” Cade asked.

  “Nope,” Ari said. “The long knives are coming out. Take my word for it.”

  Lopez grimaced and
grabbed for his stomach. “From where?” he asked, the sudden, sharp pain beginning to subside.

  “A-10s owned the skies over the MWTC for hours,” Ari said. “Those Marine aviators chewed up the PLA armor real good.”

  “What about aerial refueling?” Cade said, the memory of two dangerous hot-refuels conducted on a Z-choked runway in Grand Junction still fresh in his mind. And though he had already reconciled Hicks’ death, he again relived the haunting vision of his fellow Delta operator falling in total silence before disappearing under the crushing tangle of dozens of ravenous dead.

  “A given, now,” Ari answered.

  Cade shifted in his seat to look groundward. Seeing a road suddenly appear along their flight path, he said, “Has Whipper really gotten his act together? Or is he still patching his birds together with bubblegum and bailing wire?”

  “Don’t you worry,” Ari said behind a soft chuckle. “The fear of God you placed in that man is still firmly rooted. I’m convinced he sees your face and that wicked dagger of yours every time he hears that a Night Stalker bird is comin’ a callin’.”

  Cross nodded.

  Lopez smirked, then nodded. “It’s kind of funny seeing a man of his rank jump as high as he does. Hell, he even cleans the windows and kicks the tires before we head out.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised that after the man sees you he ups the ante. I bet he’ll go full on Oil Can Henry Premium Service and haul a vacuum inside this bird and tidy her up—”

  “Hey Wyatt,” Ari said, “see if you can scare Whipper into cleaning the inside of all the windows. Then tell him we’re not leaving until you see a Vanillorama air freshener tree hanging from my rearview mirror.”

  “I hate vanilla,” proffered Haynes. “Strippers smell like vanilla. My ex-wife started stripping a couple of months before she left me. I hate glitter, too. She brought it home on her vanilla-body-spray-smelling-self every night.” He chuckled sadly at the thought.

  “I’m learning more and more about you every day, Haynes,” Ari said. “Narrowed it down to boxers yesterday.”

  “And we learned that Haynes is a boob man the day before that,” Skipper stated glibly.

  An incoming call from Schriever’s TOC (Tactical Operations Center) interrupted the banter.

  Cade listened to the female voice in his ear tell Jedi One-One and any other air assets on the net to be on the lookout for an enemy patrol spotted by a group of survivors passing through Pueblo the day before.

  “How many PLA?’ Ari asked, even as he was autonomously taking an evasive maneuver by quickly halving the Ghost Hawk’s altitude.

  Sensing the craft dip, Cade began to relive the bird strike and consequent crash that killed friends and left one of the gen-3 Jedi rides a smoldering wreck in a church graveyard outside of Draper, South Dakota. The verdant ground cover was rushing up and then the window was filled with a scrub-dotted expanse of flat land shot with all the colors one usually associated with the planet Mars: reds and oranges set in a patchwork fashion held together by veins of mineral a strange, muted ochre-yellow.

  “Two armed personnel riding motorcycles,” said the disembodied voice.

  Risking a tongue-lashing from the aircraft commander, Cade asked, “Were they both men and were they wearing uniforms?”

  “Schriever, Jedi One-One,” Ari said, his voice a little strained. “That’s one of my Delta Boys talking over the open channel. Wyatt’s a captain, so I trust he’s good to be in the loop on this matter.”

  The Schriever controller—a captain herself—drew a sharp breath that registered loud and clear in everyone’s headsets. “Negative, Captain Grayson. But that’s about all the detail we could ferret out of the couple who reported seeing them.”

  Changing their tactics, Cade thought before saying, “Thank you, Captain Jensen. Good to hear your voice again.”

  “Enough back patting,” Ari said. Then, as the comms went deathly silent, two things wholly unexpected happened. First, a shrill electronic tone indicating the helo’s sensors had just detected a missile launch filled the cabin and sounded in everyone’s headsets. Next, as Ari banked One-One hard to port, the distinctive staccato whooshing of multiple countermeasure flares popping aft and underfoot reverberated through the cabin.

  A fraction of a second after the Ghost Hawk began taking evasive maneuvers, Lopez groaned once and doubled over as far as his safety harness would allow.

  Chapter 26

  After a cursory search for the person or persons using the rectory as an observation post turned up nothing, the group moved west across the expanse of grass between the church and priest’s residence.

  “Come on,” Oliver urged. “We gotta see what’s inside the church. I bet there’s a ton of canned food and stuff in there.”

  “He’s got a point,” Lev said. “People in small towns like this had a little more time to prepare for the infected onslaught than the poor bastards in and around Salt Lake.”

  “Or Denver,” Wilson added.

  “Grand Junction wasn’t pretty, either,” Taryn said. “I watched all of the videos posted to my Facebook by all my friends.” She swallowed hard then added, “And those posts stopped going up real quick. Still had them saved though. In a way they kept me going while I waited in that airport office. Gave me hope … resolve. If I didn’t get out of there, who was going to tell their story? Remember them going forward?” Her words trailed off and she began to sob.

  Wilson drew her in and held her tight as Daymon stopped before the church stairs, looking up at the stained glass windows and peeling paint. The doors were sturdy and looked as if they had been shut tight by the last person to leave—or perhaps, more troubling, by those still closed up inside. On the door was a sign that read SERVICES CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  Face screwed up as if he was working on solving a big dilemma in his head, Daymon placed one foot on the cement stairs.

  Sidling up next Daymon, Oliver read the sign aloud then looked sidelong at his tormentor. “What are you afraid of?” he asked, his tone imparting a hint of accusation.

  Those five words—or perhaps what they implied—set off a chain reaction in Daymon that had been arrested since he first set eyes on the attic access panel in the house next door.

  “I’m afraid of nothing,” he hissed, staring daggers at the shorter man. Speaking real low and slow, he added, “I just don’t like enclosed spaces. That’s all. End of story.”

  Oliver raised his hands and backed away. “Sorry, man. We’ve put exactly zero cans of food in our trucks. Our supply run isn’t looking too good. Just saying, though. Plus, I bet there’s really high ceilings inside the church.”

  “And effing spiders,” Taryn said.

  Sitting on the sidewalk, his stub tail thumping a hollow rhythm, Max growled, seemingly in agreement with Taryn that the only good spiders were of the deceased variety.

  Jamie placed a reassuring hand on the younger woman’s tatted arm. “I’ll stomp ‘em for you.” She smiled and cast her gaze down the road towards where they had left their trucks. “We’ve got rotters,” she whispered, her smile fading and the war tomahawk suddenly appearing in her gloved hand.

  Instinctively, all heads swiveled to see half a dozen emaciated first turns of indeterminable gender approaching from the west.

  “They don’t see us,” Daymon said, crouching down by the stairs.

  “Yet,” Lev added, going to a knee beside a dirty Pontiac ravaged by rust and plastered with dried-on leaves.

  Then, almost in unison, everyone who was still standing made themselves small and looked for cover.

  Max scurried under the nearest car.

  Oliver slipped behind the hedges bracketing the stairs.

  Using the tall grass on the parking strip as a blind, Taryn and Wilson both went to one knee on the sidewalk.

  As soon as Jamie had spotted the dead things shuffling uphill toward them, swaying and lurching and mainly keeping to the center of the street, she had uttered the warni
ng and also gone to ground next to the Pontiac.

  Now, a couple of seconds later, Jamie was duck-walking past Lev, one hand tracing the side of the Pontiac, the other moving the tomahawk in a slow and menacing clockwise circle. She made it to the car’s A-pillar and was about to rise up and deal with the interlopers when, over the long, gently sloping hood, she witnessed the rotters inexplicably perform a clumsy left-hand turn and strike off to the north, hissing and moaning, the lot of them in full-on hunt mode.

  “Let them go,” Daymon said as he rose and watched the procession cut in front of the trucks. He scaled the steps hesitantly and tracked their movement along the near side of the body shop until they were lost from sight.

  “Think they’re following our bleeder?” Lev asked.

  “Could be a dog,” Taryn said quietly, craning under the car to get a look at Max. “If it is, our guy doesn’t seem concerned.”

  Wilson climbed the stairs. He braced himself by placing a hand on Daymon’s shoulder then extended fully, craning to see for himself. “They’re gone now. Doubt it was a dog,” he stated. “I haven’t seen one since we left Bastion.”

  “You have a point,” she answered. “Are we checking the church out or not?”

  Sweeping Taryn aside with one arm, Lev scaled the steps and formed up behind Wilson, carbine readied, the previous altercation seemingly forgotten.

  Without warning the others, Daymon pounded on the dark wood panel inset into one of the massive doors.

  Meanwhile a thin finger of clouds scudded in front of the sun, casting a dark shadow over the church and causing the stained glass windows, which a moment prior had shone with all the colors of the rainbow, to take on a dark foreboding shade of gray.

  Seeing the all-purpose weatherproof carpeting at his feet suddenly bathed in shadow, Daymon whipped around and, half-expecting to see another spiked tree trunk barreling for his head, shot a wide-eyed glance skyward.