District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  To the left, the distinct rapid-clatter of Cross’s weapon could be heard. Flicking his eyes left and seeing the immediate vicinity beyond the turnstiles clear of dead, Cade waved the rest of the team forward.

  Looking like a futuristic robot with strange ambient green lights for eyes, Cade stood shoulder to shoulder with Cross and Griff and stared into the darkness at the multitudes of closed doors and narrow halls leading off into the NSA’s inner sanctum. After orienting the floorplan he’d committed to memory by matching it with the distant bank of stainless-steel-skinned elevators, he quickly radioed back to Jedi One-One and Schriever to inform them that the team was going in. After hearing both Nash and Ari acknowledge the call, the transmission rendered garbled and barely decipherable because of the exotic anti-eavesdropping film applied to the building’s windows, he called Axe over from the center of the lobby where he’d been keeping watch on their six.

  “Nash was right,” he said, looking each man in the eye. “Comms are being disrupted by the building’s latent security features. Means we’re going to be on our own as soon as we get past the first checkpoint.” Raising his M4 vertically over his head, he climbed over the turnstile and struck out for a distant hall with the trio of silent, deadly men glued to his six.

  50th Satellite Space Wing TOC - Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Wearing her full uniform, cover and all, Major Freda Nash was sharing the short stage at the front of the TOC with Colonel Cornelius Shrill and President Valerie Clay. Standing stage right of the largest wall-mounted monitor in the low-ceilinged room, under the watchful gaze of two dozen airmen of the 50th Satellite Space Wing, the three had been watching the insertion at the NSA in real-time via a feed beamed down from one of the remaining Keyhole satellites temporarily parked in a geostationary orbit over Fort Meade, Maryland.

  While both the colonel and President had shown little obvious concern when Jedi One-One committed to a final approach of the NSA building, Nash had drawn in a deep breath and trapped it in her lungs as the Ghost Hawk—rendered tiny and jittery due to the satellite’s distance from Earth and its current optic setting—swooped in right-to-left and settled on a wide, Jersey-barrier-ringed tract of what appeared to have once been grass gracing the front of the massive state-of-the-art facility.

  After exhaling sharply, Nash had ordered an airman to zoom in tight on the hovering helicopter as the ant-sized Delta team exited the craft from the port-side and began their long sprint across the vehicle- and debris-strewn no-man’s land still occupied by a large number of Zs. After the feed sharpened and closed in she was able to see the sparkle of brass and licks of orange coming from the team’s weapons. She smiled inwardly as the tiny figures vectoring toward the helicopter toppled one after the other as the team engaged them on the way to the entry.

  Now just seconds removed from that entry, Nash was glued to the zoomed-in feed as Jedi One-One overflew the sea of gently undulating zombies that had become packed into a tight knot on the northernmost parking lot.

  Happy that Mr. Murphy hadn’t seen fit to intervene and screw up the insertion, Nash saw her mood tempered when approached by an airman with a grim look hanging on his face.

  “Be advised, Major,” he said, handing her a set of headphones. “Anvil Team is off comms. We are currently trying to reacquire.”

  As expected, Nash thought to herself as she shifted her gaze to President Clay, who was shifting her weight nervously from foot-to-foot.

  Wasting no time, Nash donned the headphones and adjusted her boom microphone. At first she heard deafening silence that went on for a few short seconds, but seemed to have lasted much longer. Finally, communication was reestablished and she heard Cade—using the call sign Anvil Actual—state that the unit was inside the target and on the move.

  Exhaling sharply for the second time in as many minutes, Nash noticed an analyst looking at her over the top of her large computer screen.

  “What is it?” Nash asked.

  “Two things,” the airman said, an unusual measure of concern in her voice. “Because of the way the NSA building was designed, communication with the team is going to remain spotty, at best.”

  Nash nodded.

  “Then there’s this.” The youthful airman’s jaw took a hard set as she tapped out a command on her keyboard. “It looks like an armored column is heading for D.C.”

  Before “D.C.” had crossed the analyst’s lips, a new image captured earlier by the satellite high above Fort Meade had materialized on the large wall-mounted monitor adjacent to the President.

  Clay stopped fidgeting. She glanced at the image then quickly turned to face Colonel Shrill. “Do we have assets operating in the area?”

  “Negative,” Shrill said. “We have a few armored vehicles scattered about a handful of nearby air bases. But not in the numbers to form a column that size.”

  “Throw it on Monitor One,” Nash said, her eyes already glued there.

  Two seconds later the image was splashed on the larger screen in full color.

  “When was this taken?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago,” answered the airman.

  “Enhance and zoom,” Nash said.

  While the airman was tapping at her keyboard, Nash heard Cade report that the power was out at ground level, but using NVGs they had already cleared the lobby, breached the security station, and were now pushing deeper into the building. “Damn it all,” Nash said under her breath. The analyst was right. Cade’s transmission had been scratchy, his words hard to understand before dropping off in volume at the tail end. Knowing that the team would soon be underneath the massive structure and unable to communicate with either their exfil bird or their eyes in the sky here at the TOC, she said a prayer for them all and turned her undivided attention to the long column of vehicles inching slowly along a Maryland state route.

  “Those aren’t ours,” Shrill said warily. “And they certainly didn’t arrive on our soil via airlift. Even with our limited ground based stations, we would have picked up the transports before they reached any viable airstrips in the area.”

  “I concur,” said Nash. “Except for the Jedi flight and refueling package, the skies east of here have been clear.”

  “Those pieces are Chinese,” Shrill observed. “But they’re heading away from the target building.”

  “Could our intel have been wrong?” the President asked.

  “Negative, Madam President,” Shrill said. “The prisoner could have been lying to the interrogation team.” He removed his cover and rubbed his bald head. “That’s unlikely, though. The documents Cade took off the dead PLA captain corroborate the prisoner’s statements.”

  “Maybe with the prisoner something was lost in translation?” the President proffered.

  Shaking his head vehemently, Shrill added, “Those PLA Special Forces boys know their English. It’s drilled into them from day one.”

  “After we got him to divulge the true goal of the Fort Meade mission, he stopped talking.” Nash turned and jabbed a finger at the air in front of the monitor. “That’s why I’m convinced this column has something to do with their interest in the NSA facility.”

  Shrill said, “If their mission is to get at the intel on those servers, why go to D.C. first? Especially with all the dead in that city.”

  “I don’t think we’re looking at all of their assets, here. That column had to have come from the flotilla we lost track of in the Atlantic. Besides”—Nash edged closer to the monitor and pointed to a number of the vehicles—“Those APCs are not amphibious. Therefore, they had to have been brought ashore by landing craft.”

  “This changes everything,” Shrill said.

  The President’s head was panning back and forth as she followed the conversation.

  Nash turned from the display and looked to her analyst. “Pull up everything you’ve archived since the Keyhole came on station.”

  “That’s only about thirty minutes’ worth of feed, Major.”

  “It’s
all we’ve got to go on,” Nash said. “Enlarge and backtrack south and east from where the column is now. I want every eyeball available searching waterways and shorelines for signs of PLA activity.”

  The President nodded her obvious approval and folded her arms across her chest.

  Nash looked to another airman. “Do we still have a presence in Dover?”

  “Limited,” the young airman acknowledged, absentmindedly stroking his dark five o’clock shadow with one hand.

  “Better than nothing,” Nash said, still under the watchful eye of the President, a full bird colonel and a half-dozen airmen wearing expectant looks and obviously awaiting new orders. “One of you get Colonel Frederick on the horn ASAP. If Kellen’s no longer with us, I want to speak to his successor.”

  One airman nodded and began the process of placing a call that, if Mr. Murphy was still behaving himself, would be routed to the red phone at Dover Air Force Base by way of one of the 50th Space Wing’s few remaining military-grade communications satellites.

  Chapter 54

  Dover AFB, Dover, Delaware

  “Sir, you sure you want the birds readied and pulled from the hangars?”

  Colonel Kellen Frederick regarded his most senior airman with a look that could freeze water.

  “That’s exactly what I said, Master Sergeant.” The base commander raised his binoculars and scrutinized the far fence line. Hardly practicing what he preached—let alone what the rules and regs called for—he had let himself go. His uniform was thrown together piecemeal and rumpled and creased. He wore a weeks’ old growth of facial hair and hadn’t had his hair cut since Z-Day plus twelve. He brushed a stray gray lock behind his ear and began to count the dead pressing against the outermost ring of fencing.

  “They have all worked so hard on their noise and light discipline,” Master Sergeant Michael Cassidy—a hard-working cog in the Dover AFB wheel—said in a respectful, almost pleading tone. “The men and women who are still here were instrumental in getting the biters to forget about us.”

  “Not these twenty-seven pusbags. They’re going to have to be dealt with before they attract friends.”

  “With all due respect, Colonel. If we launch even one sortie the Zs will be back in full force. As it stands, we barely have enough ammunition to save our asses and get out of here if they breach the wire.”

  “Believe me, I know.” The colonel removed his navy ball cap and set it on the desktop below the east-facing windows. He performed a four-point turn, stopping at each compass direction to peer out the sloped glass windows. While he felt it would be easy to suddenly become trapped in the control tower should the dead flood onto the base, it was the one place on the entire four-hundred-and-fifty-acre plat of land where he had yet to suffer one of his crippling anxiety attacks.

  “Send a team out to clear the fence,” said the colonel. And though there was no reason to expect anything different from his little band of survivors, he added, “Tell them to do it fast and quiet.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Cassidy picked up a radio handset and was about to issue the new orders. The first of which was still absolutely baffling to him, because they hadn’t conducted air operations out of Dover for weeks. There just wasn’t the fuel to do so. And secondly, the amount of dead the roar of a single jet engine would attract significantly dwarfed the relatively small number currently clutching the fence. So many so that the skeleton crew that was left would likely have to mount a hasty evacuation and leave one of the few remaining airstrips on the Eastern Seaboard to the undead scourge.

  “And Mike,” the colonel said, catching the airman before he reached the door. “This comes down from Colorado Springs. From Major Freda Nash via President Clay, no less. If it wasn’t important, she wouldn’t have ordered it. President Clay is a good woman. She’d never ask us to draw attention to ourselves if there was another option.”

  Holding the stairwell door open with a knee, the stocky, blond master sergeant asked, “So how do we keep the fences clear when the dead do come in the kind of numbers they did those first days?”

  “You’ll see,” Colonel Fredrick said cryptically. He pressed the Steiners to his face and glassed the northern perimeter. “You’ll see.”

  NSA Building 9, Fort Meade, Maryland

  The architectural stylings from the plaza fronting the NSA building were carried over into the lobby. Lots of wood, glass, and steel, the lines curved to mimic nature, had dominated there.

  Here at the far corner of the building, the designers had seemingly run out of imagination—or budgeted dollars. Square cubicles were the norm. Every few hundred feet there was a glass-enclosed, electromagnetically shielded room used for holding meetings in utmost secrecy.

  Time to try and hail Schriever, thought Cade, halting the team in front of an unmarked and nondescript steel door next to a similarly bland bank of elevators—the fourth such set since leaving the lobby and dozens of twice-dead Zs behind.

  Since sharing the last SITREP with Nash and Ari from just inside the front entry, the comms had been silent.

  Meeting Cross’s quizzical look, Cade said, “Schriever TOC, Anvil Actual. How copy?”

  Nothing. Not even a faint hiss of static to confirm his comms were still powered on.

  Cade moved a few feet down the hall. Standing over a female Z that he had dispatched moments earlier with a dagger to the temple, he looked at the ceiling—as if that would help the reception—and tried again.

  Still nothing.

  As anticipated, the team’s lifeline to the outside world was down. Not only could they not communicate with the TOC, Jedi One-One, or the two gen-3 Stealth Chinooks transporting their QRF force, they were off the grid visually as well. With no politicians crowding the situation room at the White House in order to get the ubiquitous I was there when photo for their wood-paneled office wall, and no JAG lawyers waiting in the wings to view the post-mission video footage in order to make sure the enemies’ feelings weren’t hurt, the miniature body cameras that Cade used to wear on high-profile Delta missions were deemed unnecessary. Which was a good thing. The fewer people Cade had to answer to, the better. The people that mattered to him at this very moment were the shooters stacked at his back and awaiting word on what lay behind the unmarked steel slab door.

  Standing there in the dark bowels of the seemingly dead building, Cade conceded to himself that there was nothing sexy about this part of the mission. There were no scientists to pluck from danger and spirit back to Schriever. There were no bad guys bent on world domination to bring to justice. And, fortunately, since the alternative would mean another one of his friends or loved ones had been harmed, no personal scores to settle as there had been with Pug, Robert Christian, and, to a lesser extent, the turncoat, former Navy SEAL, Ian Bishop.

  So, following the same protocol Tice had established at the Canadian research facility, he shrugged off his pack and from a side pocket extracted the lock-picking gun, a flexible fiber optic periscope, and its four-inch color display. He handed the latter two items to Cross, who promptly began mating the small parts.

  Momentarily taking his eyes off the far corridor, Axe peeked over Cross’s shoulder. “That gizmo see in the dark, too?”

  Griff stared daggers in the dark through his own NVGs. “Eyes on our six,” he reminded Axe.

  “Take it easy, mate. We’ll hear the slimy buggers coming before they see us anyway.”

  “It’s their eyesight that’s compromised,” Cade reminded. “Not their hearing. With the three hundred-or-so-person skeleton crew that was supposedly inside here when the place fell, one would expect more of them than we’ve already come across.”

  “Copy that,” Griff said. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed they’re not all behind this door.”

  Cross said nothing to that. Instead, aiming to find out, he forced the slender flexible fiber optic stalk under the door. As if the probe was hitting some type of an airlock seal, there was great resistance beyond the flush-to-the-floor door swee
p. However, after lubing the stalk with a few drops of gun oil from a tube taken from his pack, and going at the door near the bottom corner, the device made it past the jamb and the entire landing and two runs of stairs were showing up clearly and in full color on the little display.

  Dover AFB, Dover, Delaware

  The trio of A-10 Thunderbolt ground attack craft assigned to the 104th Fighter Squadron, now permanently relocated from Warfield Air National Guard Base, Maryland, had been gone less than twenty minutes when the Zs began arriving in droves. Colonel Fredrick watched the small knots of former human beings stagger from the trees north of the base and come up against the outermost ring of concertina-topped chain-link fencing. He panned right and paused with the binoculars trained on the Air Mobility Command Museum located almost due east of the base proper. A hundred or more dead were parading in from the nearby feeder road. They bounced off one another as they negotiated the car-width gap between the Jersey barriers placed there on Z-Day to deter waves of frantic civilians seeking refuge from the nightmare Dover had quickly become.

  The sheer crush of the combined weight of the arriving dead was bowing the fencing outward as the Zs in the rear of the pack forcibly funneled the ones at the head between the abandoned vehicles, breaking off mirrors and denting body panels along the way. As the dead marched blindly toward where the continual rumble from back-to-back-to-back take offs had originated, Colonel Frederick’s gaze was drawn to the steady opening and closing of their mouths. And though he couldn’t hear the eerie moans and rasps he knew were creating a sonic maelstrom down below, his imagination conjured up a spine-tingling soundtrack to go with the image. Hair on his arms standing to attention, he let the field glasses drop to his chest and scanned the skies with his naked eye.