District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  Dregan’s fateful words as well as everything that had just happened in less than the blink of an eye registered to Duncan at the same point in time he was seeing the blonde nearly split in half by a short burst from the .50 caliber Browning.

  Unbeknownst to all who had witnessed the blonde’s body jerk violently, she was already dead before the first finger-thick slug tore through her stomach and blew a bowling-ball-sized plug of bone, muscle, and flesh from her upper back. Because a split second prior to Lev letting loose half a dozen rounds from the turret-mounted .50, Ray, roughly five hundred feet away, had reacted quicker, his Winchester Model 70 delivering the 190-grain hunk of lead that pierced the blonde’s sternum, shredded her beating heart, and causing that initial death spasm prior to the .50 slugs tearing into her.

  The sound of bullets impacting the Dodge met Duncan’s ears. “Get back there and see what you can do for Foley,” he bellowed, matting the accelerator, which started the wheels to spinning and a cloud of blue smoke swirling around the pickup’s bed.

  Without uttering a word, Tran punched out of his seatbelt and crawled over the seatback.

  Back at the brown lake house, Taryn exhaled sharply. Upon seeing the woman in yellow and the gun she was brandishing seemingly cease to exist—there one second, gone the next—she swung the scope away from the growing halo of pink mist and noted the armed rats scurrying from the gate to their vehicles. As she opened her mouth to report the development, to her horror she saw one of the women passing by Oliver drag something shiny across his exposed neck. “They’re running,” she blurted. Then, as an afterthought, though watered down on account she didn’t know the facts, she added, “One of them just did something awful to Oliver.”

  There was no verbal reply. Just muzzle flashes coming from the good guys to the left, then return fire lancing from the rifles of the two women who were just now rising up over the wall.

  Where’d you go, Lotta? thought Duncan, as outgoing tracer fire from the .50 cut the air over his wildly fishtailing Dodge.

  “He’s dead,” was the answer he got from Tran. Out of context, sure. But nonetheless heartbreaking, because Duncan was the one who, instead of having Foley stay behind with Wilson, Taryn, Peter, and Cleo, had caved and let him come along on this ill-planned affair.

  Suddenly the windshield in front of where Tran had been a few seconds ago took some more rounds, caved inward and began shedding pea-sized kernels of sharp-edged glass. Then fabric and foam exploded into the air as more bullets tore into the still-warm seat-back where Tran had been sitting.

  Hollering into the radio, Duncan directed Lev to engage the shooters on the wall.

  One step ahead of the barked order, Lev had delivered a second ten-round burst right after the first, hitting only the barrier’s concrete lip, which sent a cloud of gray dust swirling about the shooters and sending Adrian diving for cover.

  Seeing the wall absorb the rounds, Duncan stood on the brakes. As the truck came to a complete stop and was enveloped in a rolling cloud of tire smoke, in his mind’s eye he was imagining an aerial view of the houses, cul-de-sac, stocks, and their relation to each other. Determining that the stocks, and thus Oliver, were well to the right of the gate on wheels, he told Lev to rake the gate with the Ma Deuce.

  No sooner had Duncan asked than the .50 was punching holes clean through the gate to no great effect.

  One of the twins popped up and fired off a dozen rounds.

  Bullets pinging off the front of his truck, Duncan spoke into the radio in a voice devoid of the authoritarian timbre he’d used on Lev. “Dregan, I need you to put some rounds on the gate.”

  Dregan responded at once, letting loose a three-round volley from the grenade launcher that went choonka, choonka, choonka.

  There was a half-second of silence as seemingly everyone paused and waited with bated breath for the 40 mm rounds to cover the short distance and find their mark.

  In the back half of the drawn-out second the silence was erased when the grenades exploded against the gate in quick succession, causing Duncan to duck his head and miss the metal panels shearing apart and scattering on the ground inside the perimeter like a discarded poker hand. Duncan also missed seeing Dregan’s follow-on three-round-volley land among the fleeing vehicles, which started the fire whose smoke he saw when he finally rose up from the seat and peered over the dash, thanking God he hadn’t suffered the shrapnel wounds he’d been anticipating.

  Daymon came on over the group frequency. “Old Man, you’ve got a pair of rotters at your nine o’clock. They’re too close to engage.”

  Having been draped across the center console, there was no way for Duncan to have seen the pair of zombies as they emerged from behind the chain-link surrounding the nearby lot full of vehicles. With the trio of dull concussions still ringing in his ears, Daymon’s blurted warning went unheard.

  As Duncan rose up off the seat and looked ahead to assess the damage inflicted on the gate following the triple thunderclap that had sent him ducking for cover, a hunched-over female specimen reached through his partially open window and intertwined her gnarled fingers in his thinning gray hair.

  Keeping his foot on the brake, Duncan powered down the window with his left hand. Meanwhile, he hefted the Saiga from the seat with his right, jammed the semi-auto shotgun’s gaping muzzle against the beast’s neck and pulled the trigger—twice.

  The first deafening blast didn’t do much. The slug only succeeded in shredding dermis and flesh a few inches above her right clavicle before rocketing out the back a little misshapen and with barely half the kinetic energy as when it had struck.

  The second shot shell, however, was filled with nine high-caliber lead pellets. It was cycled into the chamber automatically by the escaping gasses created by the previous shot and discharged as soon as Duncan’s finger caressed the trigger the second time.

  Gotta thank Daymon for this new toy, thought Duncan as the newly released swarm of shot moving at thirteen-hundred-feet-per-second punished the creature’s face, half of the pellets finding brain and finishing what the slug had failed to do.

  Gone half-deaf from the double shotgun blasts, Tran rose up from the back seat with his face, neck, and jacket front streaked with Foley’s blood. Finding himself face-to-face with a young male first turn, and unsure what to do, he locked eyes with Duncan.

  “Power the window down and shoot the bastard,” Duncan instructed even as he was practicing advice contrary to his own by pulsing his window up.

  Hands shaking, Tran raised the Beretta level with the abomination’s head, which strangely was tilted dog-like and staring at him with eyes devoid of emotion, yet still harboring a spark of recognition.

  Seeing a split-second flash of his own nightmarish visage reflected back at him off the window glass, Tran instantly relived his long march surrounded by the dead leaving Jackson Hole. The mask of his own dried blood he had worn then had helped him blend in and walk among them. The same thing was happening now. So he used it to his advantage, pulsing his window down and pressing the muzzle into the demon’s left eye.

  Though not as loud as the shotgun, the 9mm’s report still roared inside the cab. As the spent shell pinged off the back of Duncan’s head, the gory blowback of blood coated the window outside and left a constellation of crimson dotting the white headliner directly above Tran’s head.

  Ears ringing mightily, Tran ran the window up and crawled over the shredded seatback, thankful to be alive.

  When Duncan shifted his gaze from the fallen corpses to the rearview and noticed the Humvees advancing on his position, barely thirty seconds had elapsed between the first salvo from the Ma Deuce and Tran earning the right to ride shotgun in his truck.

  After watching the Zs crumble beside the Dodge, Lev threw a few more rounds from the Browning at the point in space the gate used to reside.

  “Well I’ll be a sombitch,” Duncan said, shifting the rig into Drive. “Dregan put the hurt on the gate.”

  “And
the house is on fire,” Tran added.

  “So it is,” replied Duncan, craning to see through the nearly destroyed windshield. “Maybe we give Foley a Viking’s sendoff. He doesn’t have any kin.”

  “No.” Tran said insistently. “He must be buried on the hill. For me, the same when I go.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  Up ahead, the Humvee driven by Daymon charged through the destroyed opening, passing overtop the twisted metal sheets with a hellish racket.

  Falling in behind Dregan’s Humvee, Duncan started to think aloud. “I hope he checks his fire. Oliver is to the right.”

  No sooner had he said it than the radio crackled to life. “It’s mostly clear,” Daymon said. “The leader is down behind the scaffolding.”

  “Alive?”

  “Yeah,” Daymon replied. “But she’s got the same kind of injury Oliver had. Key word … had. Come on in. Lev is covering her and the squirters.” There was a brief moment of silence, then he was back on the open channel. “Lev wants to know if he can hose down the retreating vehicles.”

  “Negative,” Duncan said as he wheeled the Dodge slowly over the rent metal panels. “We’ve got their leader. That’s good enough.” Once inside, he saw the back gate and a number of pickup trucks speeding away, brake lights flaring as they slowed and turned onto an identical feeder road a quarter mile away. He shifted his gaze to the Humvees and noticed that they had been parked so that their weapons were covering the semicircle of homes.

  The radio in Duncan’s hand crackled to life again. “I see one of the lookalike girls,” said Gregory. “I will dismount and take her prisoner.”

  “Be careful,” Alexander Dregan said to the son recently spared a painful death to Omega. “Shoot her if she moves.”

  Pulling the Dodge to the curb next to the stocks, Duncan killed the engine and craned over his seatback. Foley was slumped sideways on the floor, staring straight up, mouth agape. The man’s white tee shirt, parka, and jeans were crimson. The rear seat was awash in blood and viscera and fine down feathers from his punctured parka. The bullet’s exit out his back had no doubt left a wound many times larger than the nickel-sized hole where it entered. Hearing the low rumble of the F-650’s V-10, Duncan gripped the wheel two-handed and banged his head against his own white knuckles. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he chanted as Jamie brought the truck to a halt just outside his window.

  Hearing the engine cut off, Duncan sat upright and shifted his gaze back to Oliver. Let it linger, resisting the urge to run headlong across the open ground to check the man’s neck for a pulse that his gut told him wasn’t there. Instead, he picked up the two-way radio set to 10-1 and began issuing orders. He tasked Daymon and Lev with clearing the homes of lingering bad guys … or gals, whatever the case may be.

  Since the Dregans were already securing the prisoners, Duncan sent Jamie out across the cul-de-sac to take up station near the newly discovered rear gate. Surely the dead had heard the gunfire and explosions and revving engines of the fleeing vehicles.

  Then Duncan looked into the rearview. Framed by the bent gate panels still attached to the crude set of wheels, he could see the upper story of the green house Ray had chosen to set up his overwatch. He thumbed the Talk key. “Ray … you there?”

  “Where am I gonna go?”

  Good point, thought Duncan. He said, “Sit tight and watch the road and gate for baddies and rotters. If all goes well, we will be by to get you shortly.”

  “I’m good,” Ray replied. “Found me a can of corned beef and hash.”

  Duncan regarded Tran with a raised brow. Pocketing the radio he said, “Why don’t you go and help keep watch at the front gate.”

  Tran looked at the Beretta in his hand for a second, then exited the truck.

  Duncan spent a moment alone in the truck steeling himself against what he feared was at the end of a short walk to the stocks. “Fuck it,” he said, throwing his door open.

  As an afterthought, he reached back inside the truck and snatched up his Stetson. Then, moving with purpose toward the pale form hanging limply from the medieval-looking torture device, he tugged the hat down low, adjusting the brim to hide the welling tears.

  Chapter 70

  After lifting off of Suitland Parkway, the Ghost Hawk with the Delta team aboard flew low and fast north by west, following the colorful river of static metal and glass on the eastbound Parkway all the way to its source: Washington D.C. The closer they got to the former seat of government, the more destruction and stalled-out vehicles and roaming packs of dead they overflew.

  “Two mikes to Target Bravo,” Ari called over the comms.

  Cade checked his weapon then peered out the port window. Below the helo, the traffic jam of death gave way to a vast cemetery strangely devoid of dead things aboveground. In seconds the grave markers and overgrown green expanse was lost from sight and a brown river was snaking away to the left.

  “That’s the Anacostia,” said Skipper. “It borders the District to the southwest and meets up with the Potomac near Ronald Reagan.”

  Leaning forward and craning his head, Cade was just able to make out where the two rivers intersected. And paralleling the Potomac, he saw the airport’s runways, which, from this distance, appeared as pale gray lines crisscrossing each other.

  “One mike,” Ari said as he cut airspeed and they passed over what remained of a six-lane concrete bridge spanning the Anacostia.

  “That was the Sousa,” said Cross.

  At once Axe began to whistle Stars and Stripes Forever.

  “Reminds me of Fourth of July fireworks,” Griff added. “I’m going to miss the beer and barbecues.”

  “They’re only postponed,” Cade said. “We’re coming back from this.”

  Skipper regarded Cade, but, as per usual, said nothing. He powered down the weapons bay door and gripped the mini by its vertical handles.

  Through the new opening in the fuselage, Cade could see the two Stealth Chinooks bobbing on pockets of turbulent air, but thanks to the skilled SOAR pilots, still flying in tight formation. Beyond the helos a number of Washington D.C.’s landmarks stood out against the foreboding autumn sky.

  Griff jacked a thumb over his shoulder. “Capitol building’s right over here. The dome has seen better days.”

  Cade cast his gaze across the cabin in time to see what was left of the top of the stylized, white dome pass by outside the window. Even blackened by fire it stood out in stark contrast to the ground clutter. He pulled up the contrasting mental images of the first days of the zombie apocalypse. Save for the three helicopters cutting the airspace over the District, the skies were as serene as he remembered Portland’s being after the 9/11 attacks. And unlike those crazy first days after the dead began to walk, in the whole of D.C., for as far as he could see, there were no buildings going up in flames. Not a lick of smoke sullied the crisp air.

  Conditions on the ground were far different today than those first days when unfathomable apocalyptic images were broadcast to the world on cable television. Gone were the crowds of frantic people fleeing the dead. Where military vehicles had been patrolling the streets, now only the dead could be seen, their movement minimal due to lack of stimuli and dropping temperatures.

  “Daylight is a dwindling commodity,” Ari said. “Those Rangers are raring to get into the fight. Might as well use them.”

  Cade said, “We’re out of Screamers. Might as well unleash my brethren.”

  “We’ve got a few of the indoor Screamers left,” Cross said.

  “We might need them inside Target Bravo.”

  “On station in thirty,” Ari called. “I’ll orbit. Infil is at your discretion, Anvil. The President wants her shopping list filled only if there’s a good chance of everyone coming home.”

  Cade didn’t like hearing the secondary mission framed that way. He was as passionate about it as Clay had been when she asked if it was a possibility. In fact, every man and woman in the TOC stood up and
clapped when she suggested it.

  “Give me one pass low and slow,” Cade said.

  “One?”

  “One,” Cade repeated. “Scrape the ground if you want. I don’t care.”

  “Port side,” Ari said, banking Jedi One-One and flying her right down Pennsylvania Avenue with the White House clearly visible between Ari and Haynes out the cockpit glass. A couple of seconds later Target Bravo was filling up the port-side glass, its exterior still blindingly white.

  “This is the back side where the research entrance is located,” Cade said. “Bring us around the building real slow.” He focused on the far corner of the Grecian-styled structure.

  Once the building’s west side scrolled by and the front façade came into view, Axe said, “Looks like the stumblers don’t fancy all the stairs.”

  Griff said, “The wily bastards are probably hiding in Sherwood Forest and waiting for us to come waltzing by.”

  The twenty-plus oversized columns dominating the front elevation did indeed offer a nice shadowy place to hide a lurker or ten. However, Cade let it be known that the public entrance had been moved to the corner of the place years ago due to ADA requirements. Which was a good thing, because the original set of bronze double-doors would probably have required explosives to breach from the outside. And with what looked to be hundreds of dead per square mile in the District, anything with more punch than a firecracker was sure to bring in large numbers of them from all around.

  “We’re going in there,” Cade said, pointing out the entrance on the final go-around. “Put us down in the fountain.”

  “Which fountain?” Ari asked.

  “The one with no water … just across Pennsylvania,” Cade said.

  “That’s the Navy memorial,” Cross said.

  “Correct,” said Cade, gesturing toward Target Bravo. “We’ll cross Pennsylvania and go west around the right side and enter through the southwest corner entrance. I’ll pop the lock …”

  “If it’s locked,” Axe said. “It’s not exactly the NSA.”