From his seat by the starboard window Cade saw the Chinooks come into view, flying in tight formation and gliding slow and low over the treetops. Vectoring in from the south, the two birds came within visual range of the convoy then suddenly parted ways.
As planned, Jedi One-Two banked west and came in low over the PLA convoy. After clearing the whip antenna atop a scorched desert-tan multi-wheeled personnel carrier near the head of the convoy, the hulking matte-black next-gen Chinook flew another thirty yards down the parkway, flared and settled softly on the only clear spot of blacktop in sight.
Out of sight around the slight bend roughly a quarter-mile west of where One-Two had just set down, Cade could see the mini-horde of Zs lured there by the recently deployed Screamers. The rotten mass was ten to twenty bodies deep and spread across all four lanes of oil-streaked blacktop.
Flicking his eyes right, Cade picked up One-Three just as she cleared the end of the convoy. He knew the Rangers aboard were finished tightening ruck straps and checking weapons and were chomping at the bit to deploy.
He watched the Chinook flare and hover a few feet off the deck, its wheels inches from the mangled Z corpses the passing Chinese convoy had left in its wake. Even with the ramp fully deployed, it looked to Cade as if the Bravo chalk of Rangers on One-Three were left with a three-foot drop to the road.
After watching the Rangers leap from One-Three and move into their blocking position on the east end of the kill zone, Cade’s thoughts shifted to his wife and daughter. He uttered a prayer for each—the first for Brook to stay strong, the second for Raven to be a pillar of support for her mom in his stead.
Ari’s voice snapped Cade back to the mission at hand. “Wheels down in five,” the aviator said over the shipwide comms.
Cade peered down through the window and saw the dashed yellow centerline of the mostly clear westbound lanes rushing up. Quickly, he went through the ritual of checking his M4’s magazine and chamber. Finding the rounds seated in the former and the latter empty—as expected—he charged a round and set the carbine to Safe.
“Four,” Ari called.
As Skipper started the port-side door on its rearward slide, Cade unhooked his safety harness and stomped his feet to get the blood flowing. And when he moved to the front of his seat and put some weight on his bad left ankle, he was pleasantly surprised to find that thanks to the Motrin in his system, it was virtually free of pain. Thank God for grunt candy.
“Three,” Ari called, never breaking cadence in his long, drawn-out count.
“Stay frosty,” Cade said, letting his gaze sweep across his cobbled-together Delta team. And though he had already gone over the mission details twice over the course of the recent refueling—once as the team had hatched the plan, and a second time when he had shared it over the comms with all three aircrews and the lieutenant and first sergeants who would be leading the Rangers—he ran over it one last time in bullet-point fashion. “We’re looking for WIAs, motorcycles, and backpacks full of data storage devices. Griff and Cross will head east and curl around the rear of the column, then work their way west toward the lead elements. Me and Axe will exfil and head west, toward the front of the column where we all meet up. Remember … don’t catch a bullet and don’t get bit.”
“Two,” Ari called.
Focusing his attention on Griff, Cade said, “We’ve got to locate those backpacks.” Swinging his gaze around the cabin, he finished with, “And watch your fire. We’ve got Rangers and helos at both ends of the parkway.”
Ari was calling out, “Wheels down,” just as the bird settled on a patch of bare pavement in a lane adjacent to the three Humvee-looking vehicles bringing up the rear of the column.
Before the subtle vibration of the shocks sucking up the helo’s weight could fully course through the ship’s airframe, Cade was out the door with Axe on his six. “Weapons free,” he called, fanning left while keeping his M4 trained on the soot-covered vehicles. After clearing the ship’s tail boom and wildly spinning tail rotor by a dozen feet, he took a knee and peered over his shoulder, seeing that Cross and Griff had already hurdled the guardrail and were nearing the end of the column.
The usual muffled whine and uncomfortable harmonic thwop, thwop of the spooling rotors pummeled Cade’s chest and lungs. Guarding against flying debris, he put his gloved hand over his nose and mouth and watched Jedi One-One rise slowly from the road, turn in place until its nose was pointing south, then rocket up and over the trees.
After One-One was out of sight, Cade brought up the TOC back at Schriever to alert them that his team was safely on the ground.
“Anvil Actual, Schriever TOC,” an anonymous airman replied. “Good copy. Good hunting.”
Cade said nothing. He flicked his carbine off of Safe, rose, and motioned for Axe to follow. With the stench of decay, cooked flesh, burning electrical, and jet exhaust assaulting his nose, he padded to the far guardrail and scrutinized the dirt on the shoulder.
Nothing.
He peered over the guardrail and let his gaze walk the shallow embankment and nearby tree line.
Still nothing. There were no tire tracks, motorcycle or otherwise.
Axe shook his head. “Nothing.”
Cade hailed Cross. “Anvil Two, Anvil Actual. Be advised. No joy on any trace of the PLA tangos. No bodies. No motorcycles. No backpacks.”
Immediately following their rapid egress from Jedi One-One, Cross and Griff had sprinted off to their right, keeping their helmeted heads ducked until they were clear of the helo’s whirring composite, carbon-fiber main rotor blades. A few seconds later they had already hurdled the Jersey barrier dividers, curled around the tail end of the convoy, and were beginning their east to west sweep while keeping close to the guardrail bordering the parkway to the north.
Now, after hearing Cade’s discouraging SITREP, Cross checked in with bad news of his own.
“Anvil Actual, Anvil Two. We’re at the midpoint. No joy to report here. Still searching. How copy?”
“Good copy,” Cade replied. “Proceed to rally point.”
Crabbing sideways, Cross kept his stubby MP7 trained on the spaces between the dozen-plus inert vehicles. As the two operators crept forward, Griff kept his gaze fixed on the rock face and nearby copse of trees beyond the guardrail.
Nearing the third vehicle from the front of the failed expeditionary force, Cross halted and took a knee. With the first two fingers of his left hand splayed into a V, he pointed to his eyes, then did the same in the direction of the nearby troop transport.
Understanding Cross had detected movement inside the vehicle he had pointed to, Griff nodded and joined him in the shadow of the looming troop transport.
On the opposite side of the PLA convoy, Cade was turned away from the guardrail and facing the carnage. He let his gaze roam the tangle of rent steel and charred flesh. Up close, the vehicles didn’t look like toys in a diorama as they had from the air. They were stopped in a ragged line, most of them facing away at different angles, having been destroyed in place when they had tried to flee the aerial attack. From a dozen feet away he could see the individual pocks and craters and paint missing on the armored vehicle’s outer skin. Each vehicle sported fist-sized gaping maws surrounded by jagged metal where 30mm shells had punched through them as if they were constructed of papier-mâché. The personnel who had tried to escape the gun runs had suffered the same fate as the vehicles. There were no tidy dime-sized entry wounds with blossoms of crimson surrounding them. No dead PLA soldiers were lying prostrate on the road and staring wide-eyed at the darkening sky. The destruction to anything organic had been utter and final. Bloody hunks of charred flesh were scattered around the rear guard APCs surviving the conflagration that had consumed the majority of the column.
Save for scraps of camouflage PLA uniforms and a couple of bullpup-style carbines lying on the road, only a severed hand and a right foot still in its knock-off combat boot was distinguishable to Cade. Nothing remotely resembling a human
body was left intact after catching one of the A-10’s massive bullets.
“Fuck all,” Axe said, staring down at the white leg bone protruding from the fire-singed leather boot. “Some of my mates were on the wrong end of one of those beasts over in the sandbox. Glad it wasn’t me.”
“News of those blue on blue instances hit all of us real hard.”
“Fog of war,” Axe responded. “These things happen.”
Then something did happen. A series of gunshots rang out from the front of the column.
Four total.
Closely spaced.
Then there was silence.
Chapter 67
Bear Lake
Though he heard the low growl of approaching engines, Daymon kept his eye pressed to the rubber cup affixed to the eyepiece. Still alone in the master bedroom and hunched over the spotting scope, he raised the Motorola to his lips and thumbed the Talk button. “How far out are you?”
“A few blocks,” Duncan answered, his familiar drawl strangely comforting to Daymon.
“Well, Old Man … you better think about gearing down or coasting in from there, because if I can hear you, chances are they can too.”
“How many are we talking about?”
Daymon made a quick sweep of the distant compound then returned to the attractive female guard the scope was originally trained on. It appeared that she was standing on some kind of scaffolding behind the cement noise barriers. And from the fifteen minutes he’d already spent watching her, Daymon knew her pattern of movement and every detail of her anatomy from the waist up.
Narrow in the face and wearing a ball cap that cast her focused blue eyes in shadow—much like the majority of the women survivors he had gotten to know since the event—this one looked as if she knew how to take care of herself. To add to his assumption, she paid zero attention to the dozen or so rotters trying unsuccessfully to scale the wall a few feet below her.
As the engine growl neared, Daymon continued to watch the forty-something woman he’d labeled Ingrid on account of her dirty blonde hair and chiseled Nordic features. On cue, Ingrid walked to one end of the contraption out of sight behind the wall and paused there to scrutinize the road and residential area beyond the compound’s southwest flank. He counted upward to ten and, sure enough, she was on the move in the other direction. If Ingrid had picked up the engines and their throaty exhaust burble nearly two miles east of her perch, she wasn’t acting like it. And if she was playing coy about it just in case someone was watching her, the performance she was putting on had him fooled.
Finally, after leaving Duncan hanging for twenty seconds or so, Daymon spoke into the two-way radio. “I count six women patrolling inside the perimeter. There’s also a female guard on the wall at my twelve o’clock who’s watching the road coming in from the southeast. There’s also another one who will now and again climb a ladder leaning against the far wall and take a look north toward Garden City.”
“Which way is the wind blowing?” Duncan asked.
“I’m watching from inside the house,” Daymon answered.
“We’re a block out. Any change in her demeanor?”
“She’s still pacing in my direction. And she hasn’t gone to the binoculars yet. If she has one, I haven’t seen her talk into a radio, either.”
“She doesn’t hear us,” Duncan said assuredly. “No way. No how.”
Still watching through the eyepiece, Daymon said, “And you know this, how?”
“Check the wind.”
Leaning away from the scope to see out the window, Daymon cast his gaze at the juvenile pines beside the house. A couple seconds passed before a gust bent the treetops in his general direction. “The wind’s coming at me,” he radioed back.
“Perfect,” said Duncan. “House is two-tone brown, correct?”
“Affirmative. Lev and Tran are waiting for you out front.”
“No,” Duncan said. “Tran is putting down a zombie all by himself. Lev is the one standing around.”
Daymon said nothing. He bent over and looked through the scope, hoping that Tran wasn’t going to get himself bit trying to prove he was something it was obvious he was not.
Ingrid had continued her routine and was again pacing away from him. Beyond the stocks where Oliver was still hanging limply, Daymon saw the other guard return and move the ladder away from the far wall and lay it flat in an unkempt yard in front of the middle house.
He also noticed a thin gray haze painting the air above the middle house. His first thought was that it was the result of a freshly lit cooking fire.
The engine sounds cut out. A few seconds later there was a muted rattle from the front storm door being hauled open. A beat after that the interior door creaked and loud voices and the clomping of boot soles on bare floor echoed up from downstairs.
Still, Ingrid kept up appearances.
On her way to the middle house, Ladder Guard stopped next to Oliver and checked him for a pulse. Five seconds elapsed, her face remaining placid throughout. There were no tells in her body language, either. When she finally moved on there was no change in her gait. And once she was gone from sight, Daymon still had no idea if Oliver was alive or dead.
Daymon heard booted feet scaling the stairs. There were also voices rising up, some familiar, others accented and hard to place. So he rose and fixed his gaze at the top of the stairs a dozen feet down the hall.
Duncan emerged from downstairs first, moving toward the master bedroom with purpose the second he set eyes on Daymon.
Dregan’s crew spilled from the stairway next. Alexander filled up the hall first. Barely visible behind him were sons Gregory and Peter. A few seconds passed then the fella named Cleo who Daymon had met the day before—short, fifty-something and missing a few teeth—summited the stairs ahead of the rest of the Eden crew.
“Gang’s all here,” Duncan said.
With twelve people crowded into the open room, the master suite felt anything but.
“We’ve got a dirty dozen,” said Daymon after a quick head count.
“I’m lucky thirteen,” gasped Ray, his knuckles white from throttling the dual handrails all the way to the second floor.
“What’s one more,” Daymon said, leading Duncan to the spotting scope.
“Looks like we’re between storm systems,” said Duncan. “While it’s not pissin’ rain, let’s set Hubble Junior here up on the deck so we don’t keep catchin’ this glare off the window.”
Seeing no reason to argue the point, Daymon shrugged and stepped aside.
Duncan hefted the spotting scope and waddled with it cradled in his arms to the deck, where he set it up underneath the jutting eave casting a sliver of shadow on the west-facing windows. Steady drips of water rolled off the front of the gutter above him, making soft patters on the wood decking underfoot. Some of the drips spattered his glasses and more found their way into his collar.
He spread the tripod legs a generous width apart and locked them into place. After spinning a hand crank to raise the scope so that he wouldn’t have to bend over too far to access the eyepiece, he cast a glance at the others behind the glass and gestured for them to join him on the deck.
Starting left, near the mouth of the cul-de-sac which was absolutely packed full of minivans, pickups, and two gray prison vans, he worked the scope slowly to his right, examining the redoubt’s layout while taking inventory of the handful of vehicles, U-Haul moving trucks and women milling about inside the perimeter.
Duncan felt a tap on his shoulder, followed by the stink of cigarettes as he sensed someone looming over him.
Taking his eye from the scope, Duncan looked sidelong to his right and saw only the lapels of Dregan’s parted duster and the man’s barrel chest from the sternum up.
“Hold yer horses, Paul Bunyan.”
“Please, let me look,” Dregan said, his accent not as thick as Duncan remembered it being immediately after Gregory had been attacked.
“Fine,” Duncan said. “
Knock yerself out.”
Without adjusting the tripod, Dregan bent way over and planted his face to the scope. After a minute spent panning the big lens over the grounds surrounding the cul-de-sac and beach fronting the half-dozen houses, he turned and stared at Duncan. Eyebrows furrowed, Dregan said, incredulous, “But they are all women. So we go now and save your friend.”
“Not so fast,” said Duncan. Brook’s all woman, and look what she did to you and your posse, was what he was thinking.
“Yes, fast.” Dregan stood up straight and backed away from the spotting scope, sharing the look of incredulity with the others.
Standing to the right of Dregan, Taryn and Jamie folded their arms and stared daggers his way.
“Helen would kick your ass with one arm tied behind her back. Brook too, for that matter,” Ray said, separating himself from the statement and the man who had spouted it.
Directing the question at Duncan, Dregan asked, “Who is the big woman with attitude?”
Having no idea whom Dregan was talking about, Duncan peered through the spotting scope, walking it over the compound in tiny increments. After suddenly going rigid, he rose up and regarded Dregan. “She is a big girl. And she’s definitely oozing attitude.”
Dregan fixed Duncan with an I told you so stare, then did the same to everyone else standing on the deck.
Duncan tracked the woman with the scope as she plodded over to the stocks. She was nearly as wide as she was tall. This anatomical fact led Duncan to label her “Little Lotta” after the rotund comic book character of the same name. And like the fictional Lotta, this woman’s legs also resembled twin tree trunks.
Lotta stopped directly in front of Oliver, leaned over and looked him in the face. The big woman began speaking to Glenda’s youngest, but she was facing away so making out any of the words by reading her lips was impossible. However, a pair of plain-Jane-looking women emerged from the direction of the cul-de-sac, zippered through the parked vehicles, and approached Lotta.
District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 39