Hunter can’t help smiling. He had only been a child when the X-29 project had been mothballed, but his father had given him a die-cast version to keep in his room with the rest of his collection. That collection is long gone and yet now here’s the genuine article in front of him. “This is how you sweeten the pot, isn’t it, sir?”
“I figured you’d fly any of these buckets of bolts, but that’s like having da Vinci paint velvet Elvises.”
“You realize this isn’t a combat aircraft, don’t you, sir?”
“That will be for you to figure out. I can’t think of anyone better.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll give it my best.”
“I’m sure you will, son. Now, let me show you around the rest of the base.”
There’s a control tower that also includes the general’s office and a conference room euphemistically called “the war room” that is little more than a whiteboard, a rectangular Formica table, and a half-dozen flimsy plastic chairs. There is a map tacked up on the wall that lets Hunter see Snowcap Mountain in relation to Crystal Harbor. With a full tank of fuel it shouldn’t be too hard to get there and back; the real problem will be to extract Casey without being overwhelmed by the zeebs.
As if sensing his thoughts, Polly whines, “When are you going to get Mommy?”
“Soon, honey,” Hunter says. He turns to the general. “You have some quarters for her?”
“Sure. We can put them in the old barracks. I’ll show you the way.”
The barracks aren’t very far away. It’s a squat cinderblock cube that could be an apartment building or dorm in a real city. Bars have been welded over the windows and the doors have been reinforced to keep out the undead. “You have any problems with the zeebs here?”
“We did early on. Eventually we cleaned out the island. The hardest ones were up on the mountain,” the general says. He motions to the conical mountain for which the island is named. “We took the helo up there with a couple of guys with rifles. It was like hunting deer back in Texas, except higher up.”
General George leads them up a staircase with telescoping barricades that can be secured in case of a zombie incursion. They go up to the third floor, down to the end. There’s a padlock the general opens with a key from a ring on his belt. He shoves the door open to a room that is pretty much like a college dorm with a couple of bunks, a writing desk, and a dresser. “I know it’s not much, but it has to be safer than where you’ve probably been staying.”
“I hate it,” Polly whines. “I want Mommy.”
“We’re going to get her soon enough,” Hunter says. “Right, General?”
“We sure are, sweet pea. I’ve got my two best zeeb hunters on the way. You can take the Sea Stallion. Probably safer than the one you came in on.”
“Thank you, sir,” Hunter says. He sets Polly down on the lower bunk. “You have to stay here until I get back with your mom, OK?”
“I don’t wanna stay here.”
“I know, but where we’re going is dangerous. You could get hurt.”
“We have a few other kids about her age,” General George says. He looks down to grin at Polly. “How’d you like to meet them?”
“No.”
“I think the general has a good idea,” Hunter says. “It will only be a few hours, until we get back with your mom.”
Polly considers it a moment and then huffs. “Fine.”
They go back down the hallway, down to the second floor. The general taps on the door to 205. From the squeals and giggling inside, it’s no surprise to find three young children and a harried-looking woman. “Hello, General.”
“Hello, Janet. I’ve got a new one for you. Her name’s Polly. She just arrived with Major Hawking.”
Janet turns to Hunter and her cheeks actually redden. She’s quick to focus her attention on the little girl. She flashes a bright, condescending smile. “Hi there, Polly! I’m Miss Brown, but you can call me Janet.”
“Hi,” Polly mumbles.
“You want to play some fun games with the other kids?”
“No.”
Hunter pats the girl on the back. “It’ll be all right, honey. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of fun until we get back with your mom.”
The little girl doesn’t look convinced, but she lets Janet guide her into the room. Hunter sighs with relief once the door is closed. “I never saw you as the paternal type,” General George says. “Especially not looking like that.”
“I think she sees me as the lesser of two evils,” Hunter says. Then they start back towards the tarmac to get the rescue mission underway.
***
JP and the other Sabre fly cover while Hunter and General George pilot the Sea Stallion back to Crystal Harbor. The Sea Stallion is a workhorse helicopter from the ‘60s, long before Hunter was even born. It doesn’t fly as smoothly as the helicopter he came in on, but it has a bigger fuel tank and a sturdier fuselage should they run into trouble.
In the passenger compartment are two hard-looking guys with beards longer than Hunter’s at the moment. General George introduced them as the Pearson Brothers, a couple of avid hunters from Oklahoma who had become snipers in Afghanistan before returning home to hunt zeebs. They have said about one word apiece, which the general assured Hunter was normal.
While they fly over the ocean, Hunter tells General George about his escape from Yokohama and then ending up at the hunting lodge. He finally asks, “How did you know I’d be in the Pacific Northwest?”
“I heard from one of the people you flew home from Japan. He mentioned you were heading north. It just seemed like a good bet. Seems like I hit the jackpot. Course it sounds like you had it pretty cozy up there the last two years. I’m surprised no one else tried to claim it.”
“It wasn’t very easy to spot. I almost missed it myself.”
“You probably could have stuck there a lot longer without any problem.”
“Probably. But I missed this.” Hunter pats the steering wheel of the Sea Stallion. “Couldn’t do any flying at that lodge.”
“God should have given you a pair of wings,” General George says. “Never ran into anyone else more suited to being up here.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Not even your father.”
Hunter only nods. His father had flown F-16s in the first Iraq war and then in Kosovo. A Serbian anti-aircraft shell had ended his flying career. Two months after being forced behind a desk, Colonel Hawking had died from a stroke. He had been buried with honors in Arlington and so far as Hunter knew, his father was still there.
The town of Crystal Harbor comes into view. Hunter sweeps in low, doing a wide arc to get a good look at the situation. His worst fear is realized when he sees the horde of zeebs gathered around the building Casey and Polly had been occupying. It’s his fault for leading them there; all the noise from the helicopter had lured them like the Pied Piper’s flute.
“She’s probably still in there,” General George says.
“I hope so,” Hunter says. He drops the Sea Stallion down on the roof; he hopes the supports on the roof are strong enough to hold the helicopter. “I’m going to pop the smoke in case she did move her position.”
“I’ll have the boys give you some cover,” the general says. He uses the microphone in his headset to talk with the Pearson Brothers. Hunter doesn’t wait to hear the conversation; he opens the cockpit door to rush onto the roof.
He sets off the smoke bomb, tossing it to the end of the roof. A pillar of red smoke rises into the air. If Casey moved to one of the nearby buildings, she should see it. That is if she didn’t already hear the helicopter when it came in. But this should tell her that it’s him.
As the smoke continues to rise, he draws his service pistol and then starts down the stairs. The supplies he left for her are gone, including the M4. With any luck she hasn’t run through all of the clips yet. On the stairway he calls her name. “It’s Hunter! The pilot from earlier. I got Polly to safety. We’re here to take
you back with us.”
He doesn’t hear an answer. On the upper floor of the building he starts searching through an old apartment. In the living room he finds the jugs of water and cans of food he left with Casey. The machine gun isn’t there. Maybe she took it with her to another building and left the rest to retrieve later.
He searches the rest of the apartment, but doesn’t find anything. He starts downstairs, keeping the pistol in front of him in case there are any zeebs down there. As he suspected earlier, the ground floor was an old-style general store. Most of the shelves have only dust on them, but there are still a few things like pet supplies that aren’t necessary in this new world. Casey and Polly were probably using the rest of the goods up in the apartment. For all he knows they might have owned the place before everything went to pieces.
The horde of zeebs is banging on the boarded-up windows and front door. At first he thinks it’s because they can hear the helicopter upstairs or that they might smell him. Then he sees the spot of blood on the floor about the size of one of his boots. There’s no way to know whose blood it is, but he has a pretty good idea.
His theory is supported by the M4 he finds lying by the front door. Casey must have dropped the weapon before they got her. Except if the zeebs got her, why is the store still secure? There doesn’t seem any way they could have gotten in; if they had they would have flooded the place by now.
Another theory is that she did it herself, figuring she would never see her daughter again. But searching the whole place again, he still can’t find a body. There’s no trail of blood either to indicate she might have shot herself, gone upstairs, and then flung herself to the waiting undead. For that theory to work she would have had to shoot herself and then had the wherewithal to bind the wound, climb upstairs, and then jump into a crowd of ravenous zombies. He doesn’t like that either.
On the stairway back up, he sees a crude drawing of a bird with a pentagram behind it. The drawing is dark red; Hunter touches it with one finger to find the paint is still tacky. No, not paint: blood. If he could check, it would probably match the blood downstairs, which in turn would probably match Casey’s blood.
The last pieces fall into place once he tells General George what he found. “That mark is the Seabird gang’s. I was telling you earlier they take captives. The men they use for laborers. The women—” The general’s voice trails off, but his pained expression tells Hunter everything.
“Where would they take her?”
“She’ll probably end up in their main camp in Seattle. How long she stays there I can’t say. I’m sorry, Hunter.”
“We’re going to get her back,” Hunter says.
“Hunter—”
“We’re going to get her back,” he says again. He doesn’t know how he’s going to manage it, but he’s going to find a way. He made a promise to Casey and her daughter and he intends to keep it.
Chapter 4
There is one other aircraft in the Snowcap Mountain air force General George didn’t show off as part of the tour. That’s because it’s an old seaplane, a “flying boat” that flew rescue missions before there were helicopters. As an Air Force pilot Hunter never had the chance to fly one even in the simulator, but the controls aren’t much different than a normal prop-driven airplane.
The best thing about the seaplane is that it can fly a lot lower than a normal airplane. The ocean is relatively calm, so Hunter skims the seaplane less than fifty feet off the waves, minimizing the craft’s radar signature—if there are any radars still operational and being monitored. Anyone watching will probably think they’re a boat out looking for safe harbor.
“This plan is crazy,” JP says from the co-pilot seat.
“Then why’d you volunteer to come?”
“Wouldn’t want you to get killed on your first day back.”
Hunter had visited Seattle a lot when his father was stationed at McChord Air Force Base to the south. It has never looked as strange as it does now, most of the city dark. The Space Needle is one of the only buildings lit up; it looks as if someone has wrapped it in Christmas lights, multicolored lights blinking every few seconds.
“That’s where they’re holed up?”
“That’s where the top guys hang out. The slave camps are in the baseball and football stadiums.”
“Is that where they take everyone or just the men?”
“The men and the women they don’t want for…servicing.”
“The other women they take to the hotels?”
“Yup. There are five of them. She might be at any of them. Sorry, buddy.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I shouldn’t have left her.”
“You barely made it to the base as it was. Another passenger and we would have been fishing you out of the ocean.”
“That would have been better.”
“So long as you made it. You’re a good pilot, Hunter, but that don’t mean shit to the sharks and whatnot out there. Some guys say there are even zeebs down there. Guys from shipwrecks and submarines and all that.”
Hunter wants to say this is impossible, but then the whole concept of zombies sounded impossible until the outbreak. Until then it had been a subject for horror movies, but once he had seen his first zeeb in Las Vegas he had changed his mind. Then it had become all too real.
He had been on R&R in Vegas with JP and Max Benjamin, an Israeli pilot who had come over as part of an exchange program. There had been reports of dead people coming back to life; one such report had cancelled the Thunderbirds demonstration in Salt Lake, which had given Hunter and JP some unexpected leave time. They had decided to spend that time introducing Max to Sin City.
They were at Caesar’s Palace, Hunter up ten thousand at the blackjack table, when they had their first run-in with the undead. As Hunter calculated whether to hit on a sixteen, there came a woman’s scream. He got to his feet, assuming it was a waitress being accosted by a customer who didn’t understand no meant no.
Except it wasn’t just some drunk asshole with grabby hands. There were about a half-dozen of them in white jumpsuits or black leather, all sporting black pompadours. From later reports, a trucker had passed out behind the wheel and taken out the Elvis impersonators, who unlike the genuine article rose from the dead to wreak havoc.
Seeing the zeebs, most people in the casino didn’t take them seriously. This was Las Vegas, a city teeming with Elvis impersonators of every stripe, so why not zombie Elvises? The joke stopped being funny when a Comeback Special Elvis took a bite out of a woman’s arm.
With that, a panicked stampede began. Since he was on leave, Hunter didn’t have his gun, nor did JP or Max. They didn’t even have any knives on them. Yet Hunter would be damned if he would run away like the civilians.
He grabbed the first weapon that was handy, which turned out to be one of the long poles used to collect losses from the craps table. “What the hell are you doing?” JP called after him.
“You guys try to keep the civvies from stomping each other to death,” Hunter said. Then he started out towards the rampaging undead Elvises. He swung the pole at the nearest one, the end of it shattering across the pompadour of a chubby, jumpsuited Elvis. The Elvis growled, showing off white teeth stained with blood.
The good thing about shattering the end of the pole was the end had become sharp. Hunter brought the pole around to jam the sharpened end into the white jumpsuit, about where the man’s heart should be. He growled and then dropped to his knees. He remained clawing and biting on the ground, but for the moment he was out of the fight.
A gold suited Elvis tried to grab him from behind, but Hunter managed to duck and then punch the zombie in the stomach. That staggered the zeeb, but it only bought Hunter a few seconds. At the time he hadn’t understood what he was fighting, though it was soon apparent that just hitting these guys wouldn’t be enough.
Another white jumpsuited Elvis was going to grab him when the zombie went flying back. A figure in a Hawaiian shirt whirled
around too fast for Hunter to see him. It wasn’t long until he had knocked all of the zombies back enough to give Hunter some breathing room.
Only then did Hunter recognize Max Benjamin in the gaudy Hawaiian shirt he had picked up on his way to Nevada. Max helped him up to his feet. “You didn’t tell us you were a ninja,” JP said as they started to fall back towards the blackjack tables.
“It’s krav maga. I can teach you sometime.”
“Maybe later,” Hunter said. They had for the moment delayed the zombie Elvises enough for the casino to clear out except for a couple of security guards. Hunter flashed them his military ID. “We’ve got to stop those guys before they can get out onto the street.”
“What the hell are those things?” one security guy asked.
“I’m not sure, but they don’t seem like normal Elvis impersonators,” JP said. “You boys got anything besides those Tasers?”
“Afraid not.”
“Where’s the nearest kitchen?” Hunter asked. The security guards led them into a kitchen, where they had their pick of knives and cleavers. Hunter took one of each, holding the cleaver in his hand while keeping a butcher knife in his belt.
They didn’t have to go looking for the zombies; the Elvises had followed them into a hallway. As the one with the most hand-to-hand combat training, Max took charge. “Stay close, but not in each other’s way. Go for the vital organs.”
Max, JP, and Hunter took the lead with the security guards hanging back; Max euphemistically called them the reserves. The rent-a-cops were trained to collar drunks, shoplifters, and cheaters, not crazed cannibals, which is how they were thought of at the time. Like most undead early on, it was thought maybe these guys had gotten hold of some bad drugs or something.
“Here we go,” Max said. The three pilots charged forward, brandishing their weapons. Hunter hadn’t spent a lot of time training with edged weapons—certainly not a meat cleaver—so he tried to take a cue from Max. The Israeli pilot smashed his cleaver into the skull of one Elvis, yanked it out, and then slashed the neck of another.
Army of the Damned (Sky Ghost #1) Page 3