Army of the Damned (Sky Ghost #1)

by P. T. Dilloway

  Army of the Damned (Sky Ghost #1)

  By P.T. Dilloway

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  The first thing he has to do in the morning is go down to check the fences. That daily trip has helped him stay in shape for the last two years as it requires jogging a half-mile down a rocky trail. In the winter it gets a lot more difficult once the snow starts to fall. It slows them down, but it slows him down as well.

  Along the way he checks the various traps. The first six months he lived off of canned goods, but eventually he had gotten his fill of baked beans and decided to risk eating some of the wild game. So far he hasn’t felt any ill effects from this. He has managed to catch rabbits, deer, and even a wild boar once. This morning there’s a squirrel in one snare and a young bunny in another; he lets the rabbit go so it can get a little bigger. The dead squirrel he tucks into his knapsack and then continues on his way.

  When he gets within sight of the fence, he takes the knife from his belt. He has his service pistol on his hip, but he hasn’t needed to fire it in eighteen months. That was when he had cleared the last of the settlers out of the area.

  Like the traps, it’s a light morning around the fence. There aren’t any by the main gate, a stark contrast from when he first moved in and could hear them rattling the gate from the main house. The first one he finds after about two hundred yards. It’s a guy in a tattered flannel shirt and jeans. From the yellowed flesh and emaciated body, he has been wandering around for a while. It only takes one thrust of the knife in the man’s skull to end his wandering.

  The second is about a mile farther along. This one used to be a woman from the floral print dress and scraggly gray hair. Somehow she managed to get all the way up here in a pair of high heels. When the world first went to hell he hesitated to kill the women and children, but after two years it has become routine enough that he can dispatch her without a thought.

  The last one is wearing the remnants of a pilot’s jumpsuit, his face covered by a flight helmet and oxygen mask. Far more unusual than that is the note pinned to the jumpsuit. He can’t read the yellowed paper at first, not until the dead pilot gets closer to the fence. He nearly drops the knife in his hand to see the note is addressed to him.

  In spidery handwriting is written, “Hunter, we need you. Come to Snowcap Mountain CGS ASAP. GGG.”

  With the oxygen mask on, the dead pilot can’t bite him. That makes it easy for Hunter to reach through the bars of the fence to snatch the note. Almost as an afterthought he stabs the pilot in the chest. The pilot groans into the oxygen mask before toppling to the ground. That might not have killed him, but it should keep him from causing trouble for a while.

  Hunter examines the note closer; on the back is the letterhead of a Captain Alex Foley, commander of Snowcap Mountain Coast Guard Station. That’s about a hundred miles from here and about fifty miles southwest of Seattle. To get there would take all of his fuel and even then it might not be enough. Still, there’s no way he can deny the message was written by General Gray George; Hunter would know that handwriting anywhere.

  The pilot on the ground starts to flail around and groan. The pilot’s flight suit has patches for the Coast Guard search and rescue unit based out of Snowcap Mountain. General George must have found the guy at the station, pinned the note to him, and then set him loose as the world’s first Zombie-gram.

  Hunter shakes his head and then starts back up the trail.

  ***

  His first instinct is to head right out for Snowcap Mountain, but Hunter forces himself to wait. For one thing he has to make sure the helicopter that brought him here is still flight worthy. He has maintained it over the last two years, but he hasn’t actually taken it up in the air; that much noise would bring every zeeb for fifty miles to the gate.

  The little orange helicopter has sat in the barn for the last two years. He yanks off the tarp and then starts to examine it. As he works, he considers how long ago the general pinned that message to the dead Cost Guard pilot. It had to be a couple of months ago, but not too long or the paper would have disintegrated or torn off.

  Despite that, it’s entirely possible General George and whoever might be with him are dead by now. Even if Hunter gets to Snowcap Mountain, he might find only a bunch of zeebs there. It’s a horrible thought that he might have to finish off an undead version of the general. That would be like putting a bullet in his own father.

  And yet after two years without so much as hearing another living soul, he can’t help feeling a strong pull to go. This old hunting lodge he landed at had just about everything he could ask for: shelter, a supply of food, an unpolluted spring, and a fence to keep out intruders. What it didn’t have were other people. While no one had ever considered him a party animal, he hadn’t been a monk either. It would be worth the risk to see a familiar face again, to hear a familiar voice.

  After a couple of hours, he figures the helicopter is as ready as it will ever be. There’s a chain attached to the nose that he hooks to an old pick-up truck. The truck’s engine is about as loud as a B-52; any zeebs down the mountain will probably start to head his way. He has to gun the engine a couple of times to keep it from sputtering out. Only then can he put the old truck into gear. It grinds forward, struggling for a moment before the helicopter starts to move along with it.

  Hunter leaves the truck running and the chain on as he climbs into the helicopter’s cockpit. He hasn’t flown it in two years, but he instinctively knows which switches to flip and which buttons to press. The displays on the cockpit light up, everything coming back green—except the fuel gauge. That is nearly in the red, which had necessitated him stopping here two years ago. It had been either put down at the hunting lodge or risk a crash landing in a far less favorable location.

  He has to use up some of his precious fuel to get the helicopter’s rotors going. He revs the RPMs to make sure the thing doesn’t sputter or fly apart. No indicators come back red; by all accounts the helicopter is ready to go. He shuts it down, waiting for the rotors to stop before hopping out.

  There aren’t weather forecasts anymore, but the sky looks clear enough that it should be all right to leave the helicopter out for the night. He takes the chain off the nose and then pulls the pick-up up to the main building of the lodge. The truck backfires before the engine finally dies out. That will definitely bring some attention, in which case it’s good he won’t be here much longer.

  The main building of the lodge is a two-story log cabin with a half-dozen rooms. He has spent most of his time in the lobby with its enormous fireplace, cozy armchairs, and library of books. One of these books is an atlas that will come in handy since there are no working computers. He flips to the map of Washington and then finds Snowcap Mountain.

  Using a ruler and making mental calculations isn’t as precise as in the old days when you could ask Siri or Google to bring up a route, though he trusts his mental calculations as much as any computer. He makes sure to run it three times and then shakes his head. It’s going to be tight any way he slices it. A lot of it will depend on the weather tomorrow, especially the wind. If there’s a strong headwind, he could end up crashing into the Pacific Ocean. If the wind is more favorable, he should have enough fuel to spare.

  The other consideration is if he has to make any evasive maneuvers. So far as he knows the zeebs can’t fly, but there’s always the chance he might run into some desperate survivors or outright lunatics who might want to take a shot at him. Having to dodge flak or surface-to-air missiles would definitely leave him having to make a water landing.

  He goes through another round of calculations to determine how much he can take with him. If he does have to land i
n the ocean, he wants to have enough provisions to last a few days. Likewise if he makes it and there’s nothing on the base he can use. But he doesn’t want to bring so much that the helicopter is weighed down.

  After checking his mental numbers three more times, he decides on a case of canned goods, five gallons of water, a handful of ration bars, and his M4 assault rifle with a half-dozen extra clips. The latter will be necessary if he has to drop down into a nest of zeebs or runs into any of the living nutjobs out there.

  By the time he has finished gathering supplies and getting them on the helicopter it’s starting to get dark. He grabs a couple of logs from the pile on the side of the main building to get the fire hot enough to cook the squirrel he took from the snares this morning. When he first landed here, he had never eaten wild game of any sort. His first couple of attempts to cook what he caught ended in disaster when he couldn’t manage to skin and gut it properly. He almost choked to death on a bone one night while another time parasites had given him the runs for days. As with all things, he has learned thanks to necessity, to the point he can clean, gut, and cook the squirrel to perfection with little thought.

  If he’s lucky this will be his last squirrel for a while. There probably aren’t too many of them on Snowcap Mountain. Maybe General George will have some actual food there, chickens or pigs or maybe even some cow. He can’t remember the last time he had a steak, probably not since he left Okinawa.

  At the thought of Okinawa, he reaches into his pocket for his battered old wallet. The cash, credit cards, and discount cards he dumped long ago since they had become useless. He kept his military ID in case he ran into any other survivors.

  In one of the plastic sleeves that was supposed to be for credit cards, he has the picture of Misuko. She’s standing on the steps of a Japanese temple, wearing a silk kimono and holding an old-fashioned umbrella. The cherry blossoms are in full bloom around the temple, but her smile is far more vibrant.

  She gave the picture to him before his first combat mission; he had kept it taped to his instrument panel for the length of what would probably have been called World War III if it hadn’t ended after ten days and if there were anyone around to write and publish history books. That picture had kept him going sortie after sortie into enemy territory, always giving him a reason to come home—until the last time.

  He had landed in Okinawa after shooting down six Chinese Q5 fighters. At another time that might have been impressive, but he had long since stopped caring about the numbers. His entire life had become an endless cycle of sorties with occasional breaks for food and a couple of hours of sleep.

  He was on his way to the mess hall for at the time what he considered slop but which would now seem like ambrosia. As he crossed the runway, he saw her in her white nurse’s uniform, the same one she had been wearing when they first met. She was with the rest of the nurses, all of them with suitcases in hand.

  He raced over to her, nearly getting shot by a couple of jittery Japanese soldiers. Misuko shouted at them in Japanese until they stood down. She set down her suitcase and then took his hand to lead him to a quiet corner of the tarmac.

  “What’s going on? You’re leaving?”

  “I’m afraid I must, Hunter-san,” she said, her brown eyes turning watery. “They are calling all of us to the mainland. The situation there is very serious.”

  “You weren’t going to say goodbye?”

  “They told us to leave at once.” She looked down at her tiny feet in their white shoes. “I left a note for you. Perhaps that would have been better. Less painful for both of us.”

  “When will I see you again?”

  “I do not know. With the outbreak and the war it’s impossible to say.” She got on her toes to kiss his stunned lips. It was far too brief of a kiss to be their final one. “I will always love you, Hunter-san.”

  “I love you too,” he said. He kept hold of her hand as she started to walk away. Her hand gradually slipped away from his. He could only watch then as she crossed the tarmac to rejoin the other nurses. She picked up her suitcase and then turned to wave goodbye. He held up his hand, keeping it there even after she had gotten onto the plane.

  That was the last time he had seen her. The war had ended two days later when the Chinese government collapsed under the weight of the outbreak. Anyone left to write the history of the war might score it as a victory for the United States and its allies, if they too hadn’t collapsed days later.

  With the war over, Hunter had tried to find Misuko in Japan. Except by then the Japanese government had disbanded, leaving only chaos to reign. He had spent weeks searching anyway, until he found one of Misuko’s fellow nurses. The last time she had seen Misuko, they were fleeing a herd of zeebs in Yokohama. Misuko had stopped to help a little girl separated from her family while the other nurse left them behind.

  Hunter had gone to Yokohama to find it overrun with zeebs. He likely would have ended up dead—or undead—like Misuko if he hadn’t still been wearing his flight suit. There was a group of survivors at the airport but no one to pilot the 747 on the runway. Seeing Hunter in his flight suit, one of the survivors searching for a pilot had approached him. As much as he wanted to stay and look for Misuko, the chances of her being alive were remote while the two hundred people at the airport were very much alive and in desperate need of help.

  He had left her behind to fly back to America. It’s a decision he regrets every single night when he looks at her photo. As much as he regrets it, he knows a hundred times out of a hundred he would make the same decision. By now those two hundred people from the 747 are probably as dead—or undead—as she is, but at least he had given them a chance.

  With a sigh he shuts the wallet and then sets it aside until tomorrow morning, when he’ll leave this place. He’s not sure what he will find, but General George’s note has given him back a little of the hope he lost back in Yokohama.

  Chapter 2

  The helicopter appears untouched when Hunter goes out to it the next morning. The sun hasn’t reached the hunting lodge yet, but it shouldn’t be too much longer. In the meantime he uses what light there is to give the helicopter one last check. He didn’t hear any rain last night, nor did he hear anyone roaming around the lodge, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful in a situation like this. So far as he can tell, everything is in the green.

  The supplies are still in the back of the helicopter, strapped down to keep them from shifting too much during the flight. The only thing he has kept close at hand is the M4; it’s strapped into the co-pilot’s seat should he need it once he lands. He hopes it won’t come to that, but again it’s better to be prepared.

  He takes a last look at the hunting lodge before he cranks up the rotors. This is it. Once he leaves there is literally no coming back, at least not unless he finds a stash of fuel somewhere. The rotors come up as they did yesterday; he doesn’t hear anything that might indicate an imminent malfunction.

  Since the helicopter hasn’t taken off in two years, he’s careful to ease it into the air. He lets it hover about ten feet over the hunting lodge for a minute to make sure no warning lights come on. When everything continues to show green, he edges the helicopter away from the lodge.

  He swoops around to the front gate of the lodge; the trip takes seconds instead of nearly an hour. With all the noise from the helicopter in the last twenty-four hours he worried about a herd of zeebs storming the gate. There are only five of them at the main gate and a few others along the line. They look up at him, but there’s nothing they can do from down there.

  “See you, guys,” he mumbles and then brings the helicopter around to head out to sea.

  There isn’t an oxygen mask in the helicopter, so he has to keep it below five thousand feet so the air won’t get too thin. A higher altitude might help his fuel consumption and make him less visible from the ground, but none of that would matter if he passes out. His body is trained to handle high-G loads and thin atmospheres, but there’s no sense pus
hing it if he doesn’t need to.

  Despite sitting in a barn for two years, the helicopter flies as smoothly as when it came out of the factory. If he had the fuel he’d do a few loops or rolls just to enjoy the thrill of flying again. There’s nothing worse for a pilot than being grounded; it’s like a sailor being stuck in the middle of a desert. All things considered his time at the hunting lodge wasn’t bad, but there’s nothing better than being up in the sky, soaring over everything.

  His course keeps him well clear of Seattle, but as he nears the coast, he passes over a smaller town. There are plenty of zeebs roaming the streets; at least he assumes the figures shuffling aimlessly around are the undead and not survivors.

  On the roof of what had probably been a general store back at the turn of the 20th Century, someone waves frantically to him. Getting closer, he sees a woman with a little girl. Hunter curses under his breath. These are obviously survivors hoping for a ride, but with his fuel situation, there’s nothing he can do for them. He can’t hear what the woman shouts as he goes by, but he’s certain it’s not complimentary.

  He’s almost to the coast when he mutters, “Goddamn it.” Then he swings the helicopter around.

  The roof of the building is flat enough that he can touch down. The woman greets him by aiming a shotgun at the cockpit. He holds up one hand, the other taking off his straps. He eases the door open and then steps out.

  The woman is the first he has seen in two years; the shoulder-length black hair makes him think of Misuko, but her skin is pasty white from too much time hidden indoors and her eyes are a pale blue. If she didn’t have a little girl with her, Hunter might want to satisfy a burning desire. With the little girl standing protectively behind the woman and the shotgun in the woman’s hands, Hunter has to focus on far more urgent needs. “There’s no need for the gun,” he shouts over the noise of the rotors. He gestures to his flight suit. “My name is Major Hunter Hawking. I was in the Air Force.”