Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die

by Wandrey, Mark

She drove a bit more than a mile. Even before she got close, she could tell what it was. A helicopter’s tail rose out of a crumpled, smoldering hulk. As she got closer, she could read United States Marines on the tail.

  The ATV’s engine rumbled and shook as she slowly approached. She had no idea why the copter had crashed. As she got within a few yards, pulling her shirt up to cover her mouth to filter the smoke, she could see the structure of the craft was in better shape than she had first thought. It looked to her as though it had burned, rather than crashed. She looked at the side, and saw the ghost of the U.S. logo and what she thought were bullet holes. She turned to leave and saw the soldier.

  He was five feet away when she realized he was there. Momentarily confused, she squeezed the throttle of the ATV instead of the brake, and ran him down. “Shit!” she screamed as she knocked him back several yards before finding the brake and bringing the vehicle to a shuddering stop. The engine sputtered and died as she sat, eyes wide, staring at the man. “I’m so sorry,” she stammered finally, “are you okay?”

  “Help,” he said, laying on his back, one hand held up.

  Kathy hopped off the ATV and went to kneel next to him. Half his face was a black crisped mask of burns, blood dripping from the cracks. “Oh, my God,” she said and ran back to the ATV, returning with the first aid kit she’d packed. She opened it and examined the contents. Kathy couldn’t remember ever feeling more helpless in her life. “I-I don’t know what I can do,” she said.

  “Medical kit,” he breathed, “helicopter.”

  “It’s burned,” she told him. He held out a hand, struggled to focus, then managed to point. She followed his finger and saw a pile of gear. “Is that medical equipment?” He nodded weakly. She ran over and looked. A lot of it looked like guns, but one box had a red cross on the side. She grabbed it and ran back.

  For a moment, Kathy thought he was dead. She knelt and opened the box. Like a huge tackle box, it had dozens of compartments for pill vials, glass injectable vials, swabs, and any number of other things. It was a thousand times more confusing than the little first aid kit. “What do I do?” she asked.

  He gestured toward it, and she set it next to his head. He half rolled over, using his less-burned right hand to fumble through the box, pulled out a drawer, and removed a syringe.

  He lay back after the effort and breathed hard for a long moment as Kathy watched helplessly. He rolled back and began roughly pawing through the case again. He eventually pulled out a vial. But he’d spent his energy. He rolled back and lay there, breathing hard, eyes closed against the intense pain of his injuries.

  “You need me to inject this?” she asked. He gave her the barest of nods. She took the syringe and vial from him. She’d seen enough of this on TV to understand the basics. Removing the orange cap, she exposed the needle. A little metal tab covered the rubber stopper on the vial. She used a fingernail and pried it off. Careful to not stab herself, she inserted the needle into the vial, then stopped. “How much?” she asked. “I don’t know how much to give you!”

  “Three milliliters,” he managed.

  She looked at the needle, and pulled the plunger back until the amber liquid inside it reached the “3.” Then she grabbed his right arm, plunged the syringe into the thick muscle, and depressed the plunger. The soldier didn’t even twitch.

  Kathy tossed the spent syringe into the medical kit. She realized she didn’t know what she’d injected the man with, but it only took a few minutes for her to figure out it was a painkiller. His eyes fluttered open, and his breathing slowed. For the first time, he fully focused on her. “Thanks,” he said, weakly. “You have any water?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and went back to her ATV, returning with two bottles. She held one bottle while he drank, then opened the second for herself.

  “Thanks,” he said, after downing half the one-liter bottle.

  “What happened?” Kathy asked. When she’d returned to her bike, she’d come back with the GoPro as well. She set it to the side on its flexible stand, both her and the soldier in its view.

  “We were a medevac,” he explained, taking another drink of the lukewarm water, “supporting the Mexican military withdrawal north from the Monterrey area.”

  Kathy nodded and made mental notes. She had shot her original drone film north of Monterrey. So, the disturbance wasn’t just east of the city.

  “We spent almost a day leap frogging teams out of the combat zone. There were two firebases set up by the Mexicans. All kinds of firepower. One even had a minigun.”

  “What were they fighting?” Kathy asked.

  He turned his burned face to regard her coolly. “Motherfucking zombies.” A single laugh escaped her before she could stop it. He shook his head. “Call them whatever you want,” he said, and regarded the empty water bottle. She gave him a drink from her partial one, and he nodded his thanks. “Sick, infected, crazies, or zombies. Something happened in Monterrey, an outbreak. More than a million people, lady. You ever seen a million people on the move?”

  She thought about some of the marches and protests she’d covered as a reporter. Once, she saw a hundred thousand in Los Angeles, protesting for amnesty or some crap. It had seemed like a human wave. She couldn’t wrap her mind around a number ten times that size.

  “Most went east, toward Laredo,” he said. She nodded. She already knew that. “But a lot came this way. Maybe more than a hundred thousand. As they moved, they picked up more in each town. The infection was spreading. They hit those fire support bases like a tidal wave and overran them completely.” His good eye looked off to the east, and his head shook.

  “We were on the last relief flight out. We took as many men as we could. They threw gear aboard, and we lifted off as those things came over the defenses. The crews on the M2s and the minigun kept firing; the barrels were red hot. Some Air Force boys dropped in iron.” He sighed and took a drink. He was sweating profusely now, his breathing slowed. He put the bottle down. “Didn’t matter; nothing stopped them. We saw them overrun from above. They were still coming. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand? We didn’t know.” He looked at the burning remains of the chopper, then down at the ground.

  “What brought you down?”

  “One of the men who jumped aboard,” he said. “He was sick. Bitten, I think. We never found out. He went crazy, went for the pilot. Another guy, opened up with his carbine. Stupid. He got the crazy one, and half the instruments. The shots fucked the pilot up, but he still managed to get us down. Mostly.”

  He sat still for several minutes, breathing and sighing, once in a while. Beginning to put it together, Kathy spoke up. “How much morphine did you have me give you?”

  “Enough,” he breathed, sounding hoarse.

  “I wish I could do more.”

  “You can leave before those things get here,” he said, and nodded his head to the east. She could see the dust cloud. And was that rumbling? “There’s a crate, it says M240 on it. It’s a machine gun.”

  “I don’t know anything about guns,” she said.

  “Don’t matter, you’ll figure it out, or someone else will. There are other units out here.” He took a shuddering breath and closed his eyes. “Take some of the ammo, as much as that bike will haul. It says 7.62mm NATO on the cans. There are a few other boxes. Take them too.”

  “I don’t even know your name,” she said as he lay back and sighed again, struggling to take a breath with lungs paralyzed by the overdose of painkiller.

  “Eddy,” he managed at last, then he fell silent.

  She sat with him for another few minutes, his chest intermittently rising and falling. Then it fell and didn’t rise again. He was gone.

  Kathy touched his face, lightly at first, then with more assurance. She probed his wound, and there was no response. It was her turn to sigh as she got to her feet. She closed the box of medical supplies and carried it to her ATV trailer, then she went to the pile of things Eddy had pulled from the burning chopper, things
he’d given his life to rescue.

  The metallic cans with handles had different numbers on them. One said “CRTG 5.56mm,” and several more read “.50 CAL.” She moved those aside, then found a pair that said “7.62mm NATO,” just like he had said they would. They were heavy. She moved those, too. Next to the cans were several long crates. One was huge and said “Javelin.” She ignored that one. Another said “M4.” She ignored that one, too. The last one read “M240” along with lots of other terms she didn’t understand.

  She loaded the ammo cans with no difficulty. The box with the gun was another matter. She managed to drag it to the trailer, but couldn’t lift it in. Eventually, she figured out how to raise one end, and half lifted, half tipped it into the trailer. Almost a foot stuck out the back, but it was the best she could do. It was a considerable load for the little sheet metal trailer, but there was still room, so she grabbed a random crate without looking at what it said and wedged it in.

  Before she started up the ATV, Kathy opened the seat and removed her improvised air filter. Dust completely clogged the scarf, so she shook it out before stuffing it back in. When she started the bike, it ran a little better. She glanced back at Eddy’s body, lying next to the remains of the chopper. She thought she should do something, anything. But nothing came to mind, so she said a silent prayer and headed north.

  * * *

  Andrew drove away from the fire station. Coming down the runway were dozens of people. “Someone finally noticed a badly-landed jet?” he wondered aloud. As he got a better view of them through the blowing smoke, his interest began to turn to concern. Why no rescue trucks? Not even cars? These people were all on foot, and they weren’t organized; it was a mob. A shambling, ragged, bloody mob. “Oh, shit.”

  The nearest was less than 100 yards away, and he wished the M16 had a scope. Unfortunately, it had the old-style handle with iron sights. At 75 yards, he could see the blood stains on the clothes of the nearest people. They wore a mixture of uniforms, street clothes, and business suits, and all ran with their arms outstretched toward him. “Time to go,” he said, turning the truck around.

  He accelerated, giving the engine more gas as the horde began to cut him off. He could hear them, howling and gnashing their teeth, even over the roar of the engine. “Jesus!” he cried out as he began to realize his estimate was way off. There were well over 200 of them!

  The truck leaped off the edge of the tarmac and onto the soft grass, fishtailing at first, so he backed off on the accelerator. He was doing almost 50 mph. He estimated the distance to the perimeter fence and looked at the huge crowd pursuing him. He wasn’t going to be able to beat them to the fence.

  Andrew was under no illusion about what a human body could do to a car, even one as big and heavily built as the fire truck. A year ago, in Texas, he’d pulled over to help a trucker who’d hit a buck. The trucker had been going just over 70 mph when he hit the animal, which weighed no more than 75 pounds. The animal’s body had wedged against the engine block, having penetrated the chrome grill, radiator, and fan. Andrew was looking at hundreds of people, most of whom weighed over 200 pounds. If he slowed, he risked getting swarmed. He knew it took less than 20 people to flip a truck, even a big one like this. Lessons from the sandbox.

  He hit the brakes, cut hard to the right, and gave it some gas. The truck turned and spun in a power slide, sending great gouts of grass and dirt into the air. He headed back the way he’d come, then angled to the left, cutting behind an airport service shack. Apparently, whatever had affected all the people had also worked on their brains’ ability to act logically.

  Even with his creative reversal, several people in the rear of the group were fast enough to make him swerve around them. One dove at the speeding fire truck, a scream on his bloody lips that Andrew would always remember, just before his head hit the heavy, steel-reinforced rearview mirror on the passenger side with a SPRANG! Hair, bones, brains, and teeth splattered off the side window. He felt several more impacts as he cleared the crowd, steered back onto the much easier-to-navigate tarmac, and accelerated up to 100 miles per hour. He tried to forget the scene he’d just witnessed by taking pleasure in the acceleration of the powerful machine.

  He was halfway down the runway before he realized he didn’t have a plan. He had a big truck with a nearly full tank of diesel. He had a rifle and a bunch of magazines, not to mention three pistols and even more magazines, but he was more than 100 miles from the U.S. border, and the area swarmed with plague zombies, or whatever the fuck you called these crazy people. He swerved around a straggler who screamed and leaped at the truck; the beast possessed such a low center of gravity, the tires didn’t even squelch. He shelved his thoughts, for the moment, and concentrated on driving toward the terminal. At least, there might be more options there.

  The one thing his show at the end of the runway had done was bring out the crowds around the terminal. There were a dozen or so crazies scattered in the area. As soon as the fire truck roared into view, they turned and sprinted toward him. Andrew brought the truck to a stop on the taxiway, just off the intersection of the airport’s two main runways. To one side was a line of huge hangars for airline maintenance; to the other side was the terminal building. Further down, opposite where he’d left the stricken A380, and close to the last of the hangars, he could see two jumbo jets parked. He realized they must have been the two that followed him to Monterrey and turned toward them. There would be strength in numbers.

  As he got closer, he saw several things. First, the other pilots had done a much better job landing their craft. Second, the emergency ramps on both planes were down. And third, under both planes, there were hundreds more crazies. “Son of a bitch,” he cursed, and stopped 200 yards away.

  He could see a big fight under one of the inflatable ramps that hung limply from its mountings, where dozens of insane ex-passengers fought to climb up. It would be an impossible feat. In the doorway of one of the planes, he could see several more figures, no doubt trying to figure out how to get down and join the party.

  Hundreds of eyes turned at his appearance, and looked at him as the crowd grew silent. Andrew felt a shiver go up his spine; the way they acted reminded him of those damn dinosaur movies when the meat-eaters spotted lunch. A collective roar went up, and they came at him in a tidal rush.

  Andrew reached down and put the truck back in gear, his mind racing as he searched for options. Turning away, he noticed the people in the door of the A320, again. They weren’t reaching toward him like the others. They were waving!

  He spun the wheel and tore off toward the nearest hangar, the last in the line and farthest from the terminal, with hundreds of bloodthirsty creeps in hot pursuit. He glanced at his gas level to be safe. It hadn’t moved, and he drew some solace from that. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the fire truck suddenly developed engine trouble, or the fuel gauge broke.

  Once he’d pulled ahead another 100 yards and was only about 50 from the hangar, he turned hard right and stopped, hopping out with the M16 in hand. He flopped over the hood, using the hot metal as a gun rest, and drew a bead on the crazies at the head of the pack. He had an idea.

  They were fast. Frighteningly fast. Inhumanly fast! The first pair looked fit, maybe runners by profession or hobby. Were they going faster than normal? He clamped down on his impulse to jump back into the truck and drive screaming into the hills. Instead, he calmed his breathing, exhaled slower, flicked the safety off, and fired in one smooth motion.

  The range was about 150 meters. The distance was a bit long for iron sights, and the round winged off the tarmac, just behind the runner, in a puff of chips and sparks. The runner took no notice, and Andrew didn’t waste time to see if he’d scored a hit on another crazy farther behind. He looked at the elevation wheel, gave it three clicks, and rechecked his target. Bang! He could clearly see the round pass through the guy’s white polo shirt. The man stumbled and fell, rolled, and instantly regained his feet. Even from 100 y
ards, Andrew could see the blood spreading on the white shirt. The facial expression was unchanged, targeted rage and determination.

  “Fuck me,” Andrew said, his eyes wide, his breathing fast. He fired. Miss. He fired again. Hit, this time right in the center of the chest.

  The runner stumbled, his look confused, as if he couldn’t figure out what had happened. Then he stopped, took one more hesitant step as blood pumped energetically out of the chest wound, and fell face first onto the concrete.

  Andrew turned to the second leader, a woman. He swallowed. She was a dark-skinned Latina beauty, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that was partly undone. Remnants of tasteful makeup were still visible under the blood and gore on her face. The look on her face was the same, horror. He pulled the trigger.

  She was only 50 yards away. He knew this range, so he compensated for the excessive elevation he’d entered moments ago, to avoid losing time. The shot entered just below her nose, nearly making the top of her head explode. The beauty was gone, replaced with bloody pulp, and she crumpled into a bumping, sliding, rolling heap of dead flesh.

  As the crazies reached the body of the man he’d shot, they didn’t slow a beat. “Come on,” Andrew urged out loud, “you’re fucking zombies, stop for a goddamn snack!” He raised his gun. The second group, about ten strong, surged past the woman’s still twitching body, taking no notice whatsoever. “Fuck!” he cried out, thumb flipping the selector to full auto. He held the trigger, and worked it over the group.

  His survival course instructors, Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces, warned their students against the use of full auto. Modern Army M4 carbines didn’t have a full-auto selector anymore; a three-shot burst feature replaced it. Full-auto wasted ammo and served no purpose. Andrew completely forgot his training as fear took hold. He worked the gun side to side, ears ringing from the sharp muzzle reports. “Die! Won’t you just fucking die!?”

  He’d fired seven shots before switching to auto. The rifle went through the last 13 rounds in a second and a half, the bolt locking open. From the 13 rounds, three of the 10 crazies went down, wounded or dead.