Hailey felt a lurch in her chest. Unless they stepped up the payload, these strikes were going to make so little difference to the size of the dead storm that it was almost pointless dropping them. But the way the dead were moving toward the blast made her think. She’d expected the explosion to get the attention of the ones in the immediate vicinity. Noise generally drew them. But, as it was playing out, hundreds or thousands of them, ones that had already moved far past the impact point, were turning back and heading straight for it.
It looked like ringing the dinner bell. A really big one.
“Tugboat Jack, Thunderchild.”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing? There is some serious distraction of the herd by the munition impact. They are really clumping up, a huge section of the herd reversing course.”
“Wait one, Thunderchild. We’re analyzing the feed now. Can you do a flyover and get us a better look?”
“Roger that.”
Hailey banked the plane again, arced closer to the impact zone, and then reduced her altitude, passing over three times while trying to aim the nose-cone camera on to the area. She could see it even more clearly now. Thousands of the dead were running full-tilt toward the spot where the bomb had hit, even though it took them backward and in the opposite direction to the main storm. They ran into the area and then stopped, piling up on top of one another, like they had gone there for some reason that now escaped them.
Whatever the numbheads’ thinking, or lack thereof, the explosion had proven much more compelling than whatever it was that urged them to follow their current path to the sea.
“Got that, Tugboat Jack?”
“Affirmative, Thunderchild. Stand by for next target grid reference.”
She didn’t have to wait very long. Ten seconds later, the radio buzzed again.
“Thunderchild, Tugboat Jack, we’re sending your next grid ref.”
Hailey glanced at the new target and frowned. It was the same spot, exactly where she had just struck. She mentally shrugged, banked a stomach-churning 180, and flew directly at the same grid square.
Target acquired, Hailey sent the second JDAM plummeting from the sky as she rocketed over the sprawl of already damaged buildings, and the massive clumping of the dead.
“Second munition away.”
She felt the impact. Not physically – she was already a half-mile away and banking around again when it happened – but her sense of timing was acute, and as the plane leveled off and soared toward the second blossoming explosion, she saw it happening once more. Again, thousands, maybe tens of thousands were breaking away from the edges of the new gap in the swarm and running, or stumbling, as fast as their dead legs could carry them, toward the now even deeper crater.
She had two more strikes before she was out of bombs, and then it would be down to missiles. Those were unlikely to have the same effect.
“Thunderchild, Tugboat Jack. We want you to move concentration of the remaining strikes to the front of the herd, but we’re having difficulty keeping up with its advance. Can you do a pass nearer to the beach front?”
“Affirmative.”
The plane jolted with thrumming power and turbulent air as Hailey turned 180 degrees and headed back out to sea. On her heads-up display, CIC had indicated a rough area that described a trajectory toward the JFK. She took the plane back out over the water, arced around, and then dipped, dropping out of the rough air, as the long line of abandoned beach-front hotels raced by again.
On the coast ahead, she saw a bridge clogged with vehicles, but ahead of that she noted a small lake that the swarm had just reached. Dark figures poured into the water and tumbled over one another. She painted the spot with a laser to read in its coordinates, thinking it would be easy to assess the damage of a strike on open ground, and started to come around again.
She was just about to pull up and regain altitude for the bomb run when she saw a different sort of movement. The main street that ran along the back of the row of hotels was reasonably clear, and still a few hundred yards from where the swarm was surging forward. Only a single group of cars blocked the road. And the view as she passed over was clear enough for her to see a single vehicle barreling along it, pursued by a crowd of fast-moving dead.
There were people alive down there.
And the bridge that they were heading for was blocked.
“Tugboat Jack, this is Thunderchild. Be advised that I just spotted a moving vehicle downtown. I repeat. A moving vehicle in the city. Unless one of the dead has gained a brain and remembered how to drive, we have survivors down there.”
Don’t Slow Down
Norfolk Avenue, Virginia Beach
It darted out from the shadows of the treeline and raced toward the side of the truck, almost making contact, almost latching on to the exhausted man holding on to the side of the vehicle. The man, a civilian survivor from a group that had by some strange turn of events fallen in with Second Lieutenant Wesley and his shore-patrol team, didn’t see it coming as he leaned out from the truck, aiming a pistol back down the road, toward the distant mass of dark figures that pursued them.
They had been followed for their entire high-speed drive down Norfolk Avenue, and the vaguely human shapes they could see relentlessly pursuing them in the distance never seemed to lose much ground. On foot, they somehow kept up with the truck that the survivors and Wesley’s men clung to, as it bounced across the broken, bumpy, and weed-riddled road like an off-road vehicle, rather than the civilian pickup it was. Sure, the truck was holding on, but it creaked in protest with every bump they bounced over, and the engine sounded like it was ready to burst its guts out.
No one, least of all Wesley, had expected the creatures to have penetrated so far into the city. But one man had seen it coming: Melvin, a Scottish sailor posted to the Kennedy in Britain and now bizarrely under the command of Wesley, an Englishman, for the duration of their crazy expedition to the Virginia Beach naval station. Vehicle patrol, shore patrol, it didn’t matter which and was all the same to him – it meant looking where you were going and where your weaknesses were, not at what you had left behind.
A sharp crack sounded as Melvin cranked off a round from his assault rifle and the nearest dead runner snapped backward in mid-sprint. The palsied figure somersaulted involuntarily, its upper body pulled backward by the bullet impact that took half its head off and sprayed a cloud of blackened blood across the road. Others ran straight over the top of it, not slowing nor taking notice. Pale, ragged creatures moving with a freakishly lurching gait but with a speed that defied biological reasoning, they spilled out from behind a row of prefab buildings and into the street.
But they were too slow this time. The truck, despite being overloaded with refugees and the sailors of Wesley’s crew, barreled along the broken road, swerving around debris, and left the dead pursuers eating a cloud of dust. The bristle of gun barrels from the back of the truck remained trained on the sprinting pursuers, but none fired now.
In the driver’s seat, Wesley gripped the steering wheel and stared at the road as sweat poured down his face. He could see an intersection in the distance with the debris of several smashed-up cars blocking a direct route across. And it was coming up fast. He had only seconds to adjust their bearing so that he wouldn’t have to slow down too much.
His mind felt like it was on fire. In the back of this truck was a group of Americans who had survived the apocalypse where so many millions hadn’t, and it was down to him, hands tight on the wheel, to somehow make sure they survived a little longer.
An hour ago, up in the observation tower on the naval station, he had been sure not a single human being was alive in the area, that this part of the U.S. was devoid of life, of anything at all with a heartbeat. Now they had made contact with proof that this wasn’t so, and this discovery prompted a hundred questions in Wesley’s mind – the first of which being, how many others might have survived?
They shot across t
he intersection, not slowing, even though Wesley’s stomach lurched at the dread thought of colliding with an oncoming vehicle. Of course he knew that no other vehicle would be moving on this road. There probably hadn’t been anyone along there for two years, but it didn’t override his natural terror of blasting through an intersection at full speed, his instinct to slow or stop or at least look both ways…
But they couldn’t slow down, and he swerved the truck around several abandoned cars before pulling back into the center of the road again. As the cars blurred by, Wesley noticed that the nearest had been burned out rather than simply left behind. And sitting there, inert, inside the charred remains of the metal frame, was a single blackened skeleton, barely recognizable as a human being. The image of it burned into Wesley’s mind and stayed longer than he preferred. The frozen grimace, the blackened and empty eye sockets…
Was that a better way to go? Would it be more merciful a death to burn than to be torn apart by a ravening crowd of the dead? Or, even worse, to be bitten and survive long enough to join them? No – to live was better.
Wesley battled to focus his thoughts, snapping his concentration away from the dreadful image. Ahead, the road was clear for a hundred yards or more, but further along were more signs of blockage. With every turn and every moment that ticked by, Wesley’s dread of seeing the way ahead completely closed off increased. He knew they could never beat the storm on foot.
“Tell me we’re nearly there!” he shouted, his voice only just carrying over the noise of the protesting engine and the howling wind. Thankfully, the ringing in his ears from the torrent of gunfire that had been the basis of his day so far was on hiatus, if only for the moment.
Behind him, leaning in through the broken rear window, the leader of the survivor group – a large man with a tattoo on his neck, whom Wesley had learned in the last few minutes was named Burns – shouted back.
“About two hundred yards, if I remember correctly! We should hit a crossing.”
Burns coughed twice, holding his chest and wincing, before going on. Wesley had no doubt the man had been injured during the mass brawl with the runners, and prayed he wasn’t infected. But that battle had been in close quarters, and it had been messy, so it was possible that at least one of the survivors wouldn’t be surviving much longer. They would just have to deal with that as it came.
“After that, bear south along Pacific Avenue for a mile or so! That should take us to the first of the lakes and the inlet.”
“To the boats?” said Wesley.
Burns nodded. “That’s the idea! There were a lot of them there at one time.”
In the passenger seat next to Wesley, Derwin held a wadded-up ball of cloth to his side, where blood still oozed from his gunshot wound. He held his pistol in his free hand, unable to both stem the flow of blood and wield his assault rifle. Wesley noticed how pale he was, and as though sensing his concern, Derwin turned and nodded gravely at him.
I’m still in the fight.
Wesley glanced in the rear-view mirror, craning to see past the heads of people crammed in the back. Behind them, less than a hundred yards away, the group of runners that had rushed the side of the car were slowly fading into the dust haze left by the truck. But behind them, far out but not far enough, Wesley could also see the heaving crowd that followed. They would have maybe three minutes, five at most, when they got to the lakes. Then the fast-moving front edge of the storm, the runners, would be on them.
He prayed the tattooed hard man in back knew what the hell he was talking about.
Because perhaps only a mile behind them was the great body of the storm itself, a writhing, rolling mass of bodies subsuming everything in its path. Occasionally, as the truck swerved around the road, Wesley thought he could make it out, but at that distance it was difficult to see any kind of detail. All he could see for sure was a wall of darkness, a massive plague of insects crawling their way across the empty city. Wesley doubted very much they would make contact with the storm itself.
Because if they didn’t move quickly enough, the runners out front would get them first.
Ahead of them now, and closing fast, Wesley saw a massive concrete building. In front of that, lying across the road and only leaving a gap that might just be wide enough for the truck to pass through, were the fallen remains of a system of traffic lights. Long metal poles half a foot thick had fallen into the street, smashing their lights across the blacktop. Bare wiring lay strewn among the scattering of plastic and glass, and underneath the far set of lights was a hatchback, crushed under the weight of a large chunk of concrete from the building.
The roadside building itself looked like it was collapsing in on itself, and what might once have been an entranceway was open to the sky, a gaping maw of broken masonry and twisted metal-reinforcement mesh, raw like an open wound. Wesley tried to ignore the burn marks, evidence of either a fire or some massive explosion, as they raced toward the intersection.
“This is it!” shouted Burns. “Go right!”
The tires screeched and spewed dust and gravel as Wesley turned while braking the truck down to almost a crawl. He swung them out wide and then back toward the gap between the fallen traffic lights, but even as the glass under the wheels crunched and splintered, he already knew that the gap wasn’t wide enough for them to get through. They stopped a foot from it.
“Damn,” Wesley said, his mind reeling as he tried to work out a way around, or a way through, but he couldn’t see it. The fallen lights on the left were a meter high of smashed and bent metal, and on the left, it was maybe only a foot high, but—
“Burns!”
“I’m here. Can you not get through?”
Options flashed through Wesley’s mind, none of them viable. He looked everywhere, but nothing new jumped out at him. Beside him in the passenger seat, Derwin leaned forward, also staring out, trying to find some kind of route for their exodus.
“We can’t go around,” Derwin said. “I don’t see a way. Not without going back on ourselves.”
He was right, and Wesley knew he was right. On the left, the sidewalk was blocked with the collapsed building. And on the right, a trio of cars had collided with a truck that was now nose deep in the lake, blocking access even to the grass verge and the raised walkway.
“Damn it!” said Wesley. “Can I go straight on?”
“No,” said Burns. “We can’t. When we were here last there was a building fallen on the main stretch, and if we go along the beach we won’t make it before they get here.”
“Where, then?” Wesley felt panic overtaking him in earnest now.
“Go through!” said Derwin. “The truck can handle it!”
Wesley stared at the fallen lights. No choice. There was no time for anything else.
Derwin slapped Wesley’s headrest. “Back up. Then floor it.”
Wesley slammed his fist into the dashboard, cursing, but then turned and shouted out the back window. “Everyone hold on tight – and keep your hands inside the truck!” He then took a deep breath, hoping he wasn’t making a serious error of judgment.
But there was nothing else for it.
Behind him, Burns had clocked the situation and realized what Wesley intended. “Oh shit… okay, but do it quick! We got critters a hundred yards and closing!”
Wesley glanced up in the rear-view, relieved to see weapons and limbs pulled back in, and heads disappearing from view, as his passengers hunkered down. He slammed the truck into reverse, rolled it back twenty yards, switched gears again, put his foot to the floor, and just hoped to hell Derwin was right.
Glass, dust, scraps of metal, and God knows what else flew under their wheels as the truck lurched forward and slammed into the tangle of street lights. Wesley was thrown forward, but still held on to the wheel and kept the truck powering forward. There was a screeching, tearing sound as metal scraped along the blacktop, ripping up tarmac and gouging a long wound into the surface of the road. But then, just as the truck felt like it
was on the verge of slowing and becoming hopelessly stuck, there was a wrenching of metal and they were off again, swerving right onto the wider road that led down to the lakes, the wreckage of the intersection left behind.
A cheer rose up from the back as they raced away, but it had to compete with the nails-on-blackboard shriek of a section of streetlight dragging along with them, before it broke off and tumbled away behind them.
Wesley checked the rear-view again, thinking that whoever tried to take this road next would actually have to get out and move the damned lights. But he soon forgot this as he clocked the dark line of predators that followed them. They were no longer a hundred yards back, but now forty, maybe fifty yards behind. He pushed the pedal down, trying to get their speed up, but with the weight of so many passengers, the truck just wouldn’t oblige.
It was then that he felt a pull on the steering wheel, hard to the right. He fought against it, straining and cursing the good luck that had now turned bad. A flat tire. It had to be. He knew it. The weight of hell was bearing down on them, hot breath on their necks, and this was what fate would throw into the mix, just to piss him off.
He leaned out the open window, looking down toward the front of the truck. Sparks flew from the wheel – or was it the wheel? No, the wheel was fine, but something had caught underneath the driver’s door. A large chunk of metal, almost certainly from the street-light, had pierced the bottom of the door and wedged in, and now dragged on the ground.
“Burns!”
“Yes!”
“Can you see what’s wedged in the door on my side? We’re dragging something!”
Painful seconds passed as Wesley struggled with the truck. It almost seemed as though the damn thing wanted to pull them off the road. He could see Burns’ shadow as the man tried to inspect the debris that clung to the undercarriage, but he could also see behind them where lurching figures were streaming across the ruined intersection, leaping over the downed light system without a moment’s pause. There were hundreds now, and at the speed they were moving, it would be a miracle if the damaged truck made it to the lakes before they were overrun.
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 5