Chapter 47
Northeast of Washington D.C.
Though the enemy radar that had painted the two Stealth Chinooks had likely originated from some type of military vehicle traveling one of the numerous highways and byways between Washington D.C. and the Delta team’s target, needing to reach the loiter position without revealing themselves to the enemy prohibited the heavily armed helos from turning back to hunt down and kill the offending parties. So after taking precautionary evasive maneuvers of their own, the co-pilot aboard Jedi One-Two had noted the coordinates where the c-band radar waves had lit them up and passed the information on to the TOC back at Schriever.
Nineteen Miles Southwest of Target Alpha
Still alive, Cade thought, swallowing hard against the rising tide of bile. Still feeling as if his stomach was lodged in his throat due to Ari’s sudden dive to the deck, he met the adrenaline-charged gazes of his teammates and flashed a thumbs-up. Anticipating Ari’s call of ten mikes out, he bent over and made sure the Velcro straps on his new ankle braces were tightened to the fullest. Satisfied, he sat up and stuck his thumbs in his ballistic plate carrier to allow some air to circulate underneath. After a few seconds of that, he patted his MOLLE gear, counting the extra magazines for his M4 and smoothing the straps holding them in place. Next, he rattled another twelve hundred milligrams worth of ibuprofen into a palm and swallowed the pills sans water. Finally, out of respect for Lopez, who he guessed was in post-op recovery by now, he capped off his egress preparations by performing another sign of the cross over his chest.
“Ten mikes out,” Ari called over the comms.
Cade consulted his Suunto. Right on time, Night Stalker.
Across the aisle, Cross was going through the motions of checking the action on his MP7. Next, he checked the suppressor on the business end of the submachinegun for tightness. On his chest were a trio of spare magazines snugged into a MOLLE rig like Cade’s that also served as a carrier for a number of ceramic ballistic plates. The thin, light-weight pieces of armor rode in sleeves front and back and served to protect his vital organs, spine, and neck from pistol and light-machine-gun rounds.
Already squared away gear wise, Griffin was sitting erect, eyes closed, back pressing the fuselage and clutching the black HK 416 two-handed, its stubby suppressor planted against the vibrating floor.
“You good to go?” Cade asked Axe.
Patting his highly modified M4, the SAS trooper merely nodded and flashed a toothy grin.
Born ready, thought Cade.
“Eight mikes,” Ari called.
This brought Skipper to life. The SOAR crew chief grabbed his goody bag, unhooked the carabiner keeping it in place next to the door, and set the olive green canvas bag on the cabin floor near his feet. Having already gone over the process of arming the smaller, golf-ball-sized Screamers, he brought out a dozen of the orange spheres and passed them around, dividing them among the shooters. Next, he extracted four of the six remaining full-sized Screamers and began prepping them for deployment.
Cade peered out his window and saw that down below the devastation to northeastern Maryland was far worse than the satellite imagery was capable of conveying. In person, as viewed from barely three hundred feet above the skeletal trees, light standards, and multi-pitched rooftops, the destruction was breathtaking. It looked as if not one commercial building had escaped the widespread looting being reported on all of the cable news stations on that fateful Saturday in July that had since come to be known as Z-Day. Crumpled paper and fallen leaves had accumulated, filling up the street-facing doorways, in places, knee-high to the walking dead.
One grocery store’s car-choked parking lot still held the remnants of what looked to be hundreds of cardboard boxes. Having been exposed to the elements for some time, the once three-dimensional objects had been reduced to a morass of tan sludge pounded flat by the scores of zombies still patrolling the lot. Old habits die hard, crossed Cade’s mind as the areas of commerce gave way to a neighborhood he imagined once stood proud with stately Colonial-style homes, churches, and schools. Not so much now. He could look straight down into many of them lost to a conflagration that had claimed what he estimated to be hundreds of structures once standing on the twenty or so square blocks encompassing his bird’s eye view from south to north.
The dead were everywhere. They were milling about side streets in small knots. They traipsed across scorched walks and drives bordering squares of blackened lawn. The cement foundations left standing were no deterrent to the creatures that, following life-long conditioning or acting on some snippet of buried memory, stood rooted in what used to be family rooms or kitchens or dens, their pasty white faces standing out starkly against the light-stealing sea of black as they gaped hungrily skyward at the passing black helicopter.
A sprawling, two-story brick-and-cement building passed by outside the port-side glass. The amber-tinted windows above ground level were all intact. Old Glory hung limply from the pole out front. And hard to miss from nearly any altitude, spelled out in huge, blocky red letters, the words “Fairmont Heights” emblazoned one end zone of the adjacent football field.
“School’s out forever,” Axe sang, sounding nothing like Alice Cooper.
“Any kids?” Cade asked.
Axe shook his head. “We were trying … I’m bloody well grateful me swimmers were on strike. It’s hard enough knowing my lady is out there somewhere trolling around as one of ‘em things. It’d be fuck all knowing my offspring is doddering around with her. What about you, mate?”
“A girl. Raven’s twelve.”
With Cross and Griff looking on, Axe made a face. “You’re a Poe fan?”
“Nothing to do with it,” Cade responded. “But she is a handful.”
The helicopter slowed and bled speed. It swung wide left and the tops of trees, buffeted by the rotor blast, bent and whipped the air near the port-side windows as the lumbering craft passed them by.
“Bloody hard to get used to how quiet this whirlybird is when she’s going slow and low,” Axe observed.
“Tenth time aboard her and it still makes me think she’s falling out from underneath me,” Griff conceded. “Figure I’ll never get used to it.”
Skipper interrupted the conversation. “Six mikes out,” he said, one hand on his boom mic, the other gripping the door handle to his left. Without warning, he hauled the door open, letting in a blast of cold, carrion- and jet-exhaust-tinged air.
“That’s what I can’t get used to,” Cross divulged. “Whole world’s one big mass grave.”
“Screamer away,” Skipper called as he leaned out the door and dropped one of the orange spheres in the center of the expansive parking lot northwest of the target building. “Get your soccer on, rotters.”
“Football,” Axe said forcefully, drawing the word out. “And don’t you forget that, Doctor Silence.”
Skipper primed the second Screamer and leaned hard against his safety strap. Flipping Axe an awkward-looking bird with the hand gripping the door frame, he let the device drop at the far end of the near empty expanse of lined blacktop.
Without warning, the helo banked and wound around the largest building on the sprawling campus. Ten seconds later Skipper was dropping another pair of Screamers a thousand yards south of the target building near the car-choked security entrance.
“Lock and load,” Ari said. “We’ll give the deaders five mikes to find the screaming meemies and then we’re going in silent.”
While the rest of the team swapped their borrowed flight helmets for their low-riding tactical items, Cade unplugged his headset from the jack on the fuselage wall and reconnected it to his portable comms. He looked forward and saw Ari working the stick while, presumably, Haynes was cycling Jedi One-One’s radio to the usual ship to ground frequency.
A tick later the monotone query Anvil Actual, Jedi Lead. How copy? sounded loud and clear in Cade’s headset.
“Good copy,” he replied to Haynes while going abo
ut adjusting his boom mic and cinching his Kevlar brain bucket a little tighter.
“That woman hasn’t a creative bone in her body,” said Griff. He gazed at Cade. “If my memory serves, the call signs were identical when we went to La La Land to rescue her daughter. Isn’t that right … Anvil Actual?”
“That woman—,” Cade began.
Cross leaned in front of Griff and cut Cade off at the pass. “Pay gruff Griff here no mind,” he interjected. “He’s just missing the teams. Been a fish out of water for too long, that’s all.”
“Well tell Flipper there that he better lock it down,” Cade growled. “Because we’re about to be in the thick of the shit.”
“Locked down,” Griff said, wearing a wide grin.
In his best deadpan, delivered as he flared the black chopper to deposit another Screamer, Ari said, “Can’t we all just get along?”
“That’s the worst Rodney King you’ve ever done,” Haynes said. “And Lord knows you’ve used that one before.”
“I concur,” Axe said. “Third one isn’t the charm, Ari. Your standup routine as of late has been pure shite.”
“Guys, guys … take it out on the Zs,” Skipper said, tossing the armed device out the door and into the midst of a sizeable, tightly packed throng of dead.
At once Ari pulled pitch, taking the Ghost Hawk out of the reach of the gnarled fingers. Clearing the nearby light standards, he said, “Let the games begin,” and nosed the helo around to find a nice copse of trees to hover behind and watch the undead soccer match ensue.
Chapter 48
The rain was coming at Daymon sideways when he exited the warm Chevy—yet again—to open the main gate. He thought about having Foley get out into the worsening weather, but quickly decided that after the way he treated Oliver the day before, delegating the task to Jimmy would be seen as a major dick move. Perceptions aside, when it got right down to it, it just seemed logical he be the one after already enduring the driving rain at the middle gate to let the other three vehicles pass through.
Now, as he stood on 39 waiting for the rigs to cross the threshold one last time so that he could close the camouflaged main gate, the ramifications of his benevolent decision had become abundantly clear. His pants were soaked from mid-thigh down and beginning to feel as heavy and ungainly as his old firefighting turnout gear. And adding insult to injury, a steady trickle of water was wicking off his stocking cap and taking a direct route under his jacket collar, down his spine, and between his butt cheeks.
The saving grace, he thought as he closed and locked the gate, was that his well-oiled cork boots and Day-Glo parka he’d taken off the mannequin at the ski hill had kept him warm where it mattered most.
Planting his feet a shoulder’s width apart, he bent over by the driver’s door and shook his head vigorously in an attempt to wick the beaded water off his hat and the ends of his dreads protruding from underneath it. Feeling like a waterlogged dog, he climbed behind the Chevy’s wheel and led the four-vehicle convoy west, toward the fallen tree roadblock.
***
Five minutes had elapsed since getting back into the truck with Foley and still Daymon hadn’t said a word. He negotiated the final turn before the roadblock and saw that they had company. Where there were usually less than a half-dozen rotters that had met the impasse and remained there milling about the road, there were now more than a dozen. So he swung the truck into a wide one-eighty and parked it a good fifty yards from the zombies, while leaving enough room for the rest of the convoy to follow suit and park single file behind him.
Foley grabbed his carbine. “I’m going,” he insisted.
Daymon threw the transmission into Park and silenced the engine.
“No need to do it with that,” he said. “Reach back and grab me my bow.”
Foley unbuckled and twisted around in his seat. “I don’t see it.”
“Probably in the bed,” Daymon guessed. “Here, use this.” He unsheathed Kindness and handed the machete to Foley. “We save the bullets for the living.”
“Or a last stand against the dead,” added Foley.
Stepping to the road, Daymon said, “The man has a point.” He closed his door and peered over the bed rail and saw only gas cans, the Stihl chainsaw, a worn yellow tow strap, and his Kelty backpack, which, like him, was thoroughly soaked. “Fucker took it.”
“Your bow?”
“Yeah,” Daymon spat. “Thing never left this truck.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.” Daymon kicked the Chevy’s rear tire.
“Take this,” Foley said, handing the machete back. “I’ll use mine.” He took a long-bladed dagger from the sheath on his hip.
“That’ll do,” Daymon said, admiring Foley’s pig sticker. “Let’s get this over with.” He strode to the centerline, head bowed against the stinging rain which was showing no sign of letting up.
Doors on the other trucks hinged open and soon the group was assembled in the middle of 39, all armed with blades save for Jamie, who was brandishing her tomahawk.
It took the dead some time to get oriented to the newly arrived meat. A female had become inexplicably stuck to the fallen tree blocking the road and was snarling and marching in place, the jagged bough lodged in her exposed ribs not wanting to let go.
By the time the Eden survivors had halved the distance to the rotters, the rain had slackened off and the dead were spread out across the road, each one seemingly homing in on a different survivor. The waterlogged monsters were a mixture of first turns and fresh kills, the latter of which were weighted down in soaked cold weather gear and most likely had fallen victim to attack sometime before the recent snow event, when, like now, though the temperature was only in the mid-fifties, the Zs were still mobile enough to pose a threat in large numbers.
Taking the left flank, Jamie waded into the periphery, war hawk scything the air. Responsible for dropping two first turns of her own, she stepped over their frail unmoving bodies and began calling out to the others from behind, an act that slowed their march and started them stutter-stepping, unsure which one of the survivors to stalk.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Foley approached two rotters from behind and, one at a time, quickly sank his dagger to the hilt at the base of their necks, only a couple of seconds separating each surprise attack.
Even Wilson wetted his blade, but not without tripping over Taryn’s first kill of the day and finding himself draped by a rotting corpse and having to twist away from the snapping teeth while burying his knife blade in its eye socket.
When all was said and done, Daymon was standing among a quartet of headless, prostrate corpses whose blood was mixing with the rainwater and streaming in thick red rivulets to the nearby ditch.
“You’re cutting it too close, Wilson,” said Duncan from the far shoulder where he had already deposited his one and only kill, an awfully emaciated teenaged Z, likely a female from the looks of its tattered skin-tight denim shorts. “Watch what Taryn does. She doesn’t rush in.” He paused for a beat and regarded the others as they started off toward the wall of fallen trees. “Just let ‘em come to you,” he added, nearly whispering. “Measure their speed, then … boom!”—Wilson nearly jumped out of his boots—“you’ve got yerself a twice dead rotter. And you know what they say about rotters?”
Looking sheepish, Wilson shrugged.
“The only good rotter is a dead rotter. Don’t you forget that, Wilson.”
Cheeks nearly as red as his hair and thinking maybe Duncan had taken to the drink again, Wilson merely nodded in agreement. “I’ll reign in my enthusiasm,” he said, tongue firmly planted in cheek. Wiping away the putrid skin and flesh that had sloughed off the Z and soiled his jacket, he hustled to catch up with the others.
***
Ten minutes spent scouring the woods on either side of the road produced no bike, no Oliver, and no signs he had come this way. There were no new boot prints along the muddy trail west of the block, either. The
only indication that someone had transited it were the water-filled impressions, all eastbound, and, in Daymon’s opinion, all several days old.
“Nothing here,” Duncan called from the north side of 39.
Lev and Jamie were standing atop a fallen Douglas Fir. It was an amazing specimen, bigger around than any one of them could reach, and bristling with upthrust needless branches. One hand gripping a stunted bough for balance, Lev pressed a pair of Bushnell binoculars to his eyes and studied the narrow, cement bridge beyond the roadblock. “The vehicles are still there,” he said. “There are also thirty or so rotters.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, I see no sign of Oliver or the bike.”
“He went east, then,” Duncan stated confidently. Shotgun slung on a shoulder and banging his hip, he approached Daymon. “Any idea why our resident hiker would want to go east? His childhood home is in Huntsville.”
“The ski hill is there, too,” added Jamie. “I’ve never seen a couple of guys happier than when you two returned from your disappearing act.”
“They were high on pot,” Taryn said flatly.
Changing the subject, Daymon said, “I have a good idea where he went. Load up.”
Duncan leaned against the fallen timber. “Care to share?”
“Not really,” Daymon replied. “Just trust and follow.”
“Easier said than done,” Duncan replied. “Good thing for you that I’m easy like a Monday morning.” Humming the tune of the same name, he pushed off the tree with a guttural oomph and started a slow walk along the blood- and gore-slickened highway.
Chapter 49
Duncan watched with interest as Daymon pulled even with an ordinary-looking pasture gate. Since there had been no sign of Oliver’s passage at the quarry entrances—upper and lower—he highly doubted this side trip of Daymon’s was going to bear fruit. Just looking at the single-lane drive with its mohawk of tall grass growing between the two muddy ruts made him think it laughable that anyone would have a reason to go down the road Daymon was preparing to lead them.
District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 27