When there was enough clearance, Grey pulled out of the warehouse. Next to him, as always, was Deanna. She had a red cover over her flash light to minimize its light output. It was enough to see a map by. “Take your third right,” she told him.
“You sure you’re ok?” Grey asked. “You don’t seem yourself.”
Her mouth came open and hung there for a few moments before she shook her head. “It’s nothing.” Her hand stole to her belly. He reached for it and brushed her fingers, lightly. Hers was small and cool, his was rough and scarred.
Travis made a point of looking out the window until Deanna politely pushed Grey’s hand away. “Sorry, but it feels like you’re jinxing us,” she said in a husky voice. “Everything I love dies.”
“I understand, but when I get you to Colorado...” he left off and was gratified by her smile. “Ok, no more jinxes. Which turn is it?”
Their first stop was a hundred yards down from a strip mall. The first team, led by William Gates, slid out of the back of the bed and began to shamble to the side of the road. Their zombie technique was perfect.
Grey drove another two miles and stopped just down the street from a mall. Michael Gates, his nephew John and Veronica climbed down. Grey noted that Veronica was only iffy as a zombie, while Michael was little better. Worry for them began to creep up his throat.
“Damn, Michael, you’re going too straight,” he whispered to himself. “And Veronica, oh my Lord...”
Now it was Deanna’s turn to take his hand. “They’ll be fine. Trust them.”
As he was out of options he had no choice except to follow her advice, He watched them stump away for a few seconds and then he drove through the cluttered streets to his final destination: McConnell Air Force base.
He had never been there before, however it had that same feel to it as all military bases seemed to possess. Even dead as it was there was a quality to the air, as if he was coming home.
They parked in a low-rent neighborhood across from the airstrips and almost immediately ran into trouble. Zombies came piling out from the nearby houses. They were too close to pretend that they were zombies, and there were too many to fight. Grey drove in a big circle around the block and, when he got back to his beginning point, the zombies were far down the street and only just realizing their prey was now behind them.
By the time they reached the truck, Grey, Deanna, and Travis had slipped out of the neighborhood and were limping in the field toward the perimeter fencing. There weren’t just holes in the fencing, there were places where it had been ripped out of the ground and twisted as if by a giant.
“Tornado what prolly did this,” Travis said.
Grey grunted. He really didn’t care what had torn up the fence, he was just happy to have gotten through so easily. He had not relished a mile long ‘walk’ down to one of the gates; zombie walking wasn’t an easy thing to do.
They still had half a mile to go across the tarmac. “Spread out. Deanna in the middle. Travis on the right.” Slowly they trudged toward the nearest buildings which grey knew to be airplane hangars. On the way they passed a pair of A10 Thunderbolts. Affectionately known as the Warthog, they were the ugliest planes in the American arsenal. They were also tank killers and right handy when things were tough.
Grey paused next to one, considering the possibility of somehow removing the 30MM rotary cannon in the nose of the plane. It was a fantastic piece of weaponry that fired depleted uranium armor-piercing shells. With it, he could turn one of the five-ton trucks into scrap metal in a few seconds.
“But how would I stabilize it?” he asked himself, slapping the gun with his bare hand. It was a pipedream under the circumstances. What he really needed were some crew-serviced, heavy machine guns and maybe a few mortars and perhaps a TOW missile system thrown in for fun.
It was not to be. Four hours of searching through the ruins of the base left him nearly empty-handed. It appeared to have been plundered on more than one occasion and even the moldering corpses strewn here and there among the buildings had their pockets turned inside out.
The one item of interest came from a walking corpse that attacked Deanna, who was carrying what she thought was a particularly useful looking piece of equipment to Grey for inspection. The beast, in its camouflage, and under the cover of darkness surprised her by appearing suddenly at her side. She cursed and shoved the ‘weapon’—what turned out only to be a water cannon used to clean the planes—at the zombie, fending it off until Grey came up from behind and kicked its legs out from beneath it. He would have used his Ka-bar and sliced its spinal column where the skull sat on the vertebrae, however it was ‘wearing’ a helmet.
The helmet had slid back and was being held on by the chin strap which was tight across its throat. To kill it, Grey stepped on the thing’s head, pinning it to the perfectly flat cement of the hangar floor and punching the Ka-bar into its temple.
“Holy-moly that was close,” Deanna said in a frightened whisper.
“Maybe you should keep a better...” Grey stopped in mid-sentence. Something about the zombie had caught his eye. He knelt and turned the thing’s head to the side so that the front of the helmet was revealed. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said.
Deanna put her hands on her hips and said: “Talking about what? That thing nearly killed me.”
“Yeah,” Grey answered, though he did so more out of habit. He was too busy pulling a hunk of technology from the zombie’s helmet to really pay attention.
“What is it?” Deanna asked, no longer in the strident tones she’d been using.
He grinned, his white teeth glowing in the dim light. “If I’m not mistaken these are AN-20/PSQ enhanced night vision goggles.” He dug out his flashlight and, after cupping his hands around it, turned it on and studied the helmet-mounted device. “Oh yes, these are the dash twenties!”
Deanna shrugged. “Meaning what?”
He almost felt like a kid at Christmas. Excitedly, he blurted: “Meaning it’s a passive intensification and thermal imaging device! It uses both I2 and long wave infrared sensors. Oh, I hope the batteries haven’t started to corrode it.”
He began to work the old double A batteries out of the back of the device. As he did, Deanna pointed at what she’d been carrying. “I found that.”
Grey swung his flashlight at it. “That sprays water. They probably use it to clean the equipment.”
“Oh.”
“It’s fine,” he said quickly. “Keep looking. We’re bound to turn up more.” It turned out that this was an incorrect statement. All told they found six MREs, all Chicken-ala-King, twenty-tree rounds of ammo, the front end of the pressure washer and the AN/PSQ enhanced night vision goggles for which they did not have batteries.
And, they were late! They should’ve been back at the truck thirty minutes ago, but there had been too many stiffs about to move at anything more than a limp. Discouraged, they set off back across the tarmac which Grey saw had already begun to spring long cracks. In a few places weeds had sprung up and were flourishing. Before the apocalypse the airstrips had been immaculate, every inch of it being examined and cleaned on a daily basis
Now there are weeds, Grey thought to himself. It was depressing to realize that there was precious little remaining of the United States military. It had been, during his entire lifetime, the greatest force for good the world had ever known. With it, any country could’ve been conquered and subjugated, its people slain wholesale or sold into slavery; its riches plundered.
Only that had never happened. No gold was ever stolen, not one drop of oil misappropriated, no women were ever raped as a matter of policy. And when evil was done by individuals wearing the uniform of the United States, the perpetrators were severely dealt with.
This desire for righteousness was the ideal that Grey had served...and now it was crumbling away just as surely as the tarmac was being split by the power of time and weather.
Breaking his zombie-lurch, Grey knelt down and
began pulling the offending weeds. Travis watched with a smirk on his face, however Deanna came down beside Grey and helped. This little gesture had his heart stirring all the more.
“Tell me you plan on smoking all that,” Travis said. “I mean, why else are you wasting time with...”
Suddenly a sharp light cut across the night. It was a beam zipping out across the tarmac coming from almost directly in front of them!
Travis stared at it as it slowly swept the field from right to left, heading right for him. Grey jumped up and tackled him, pushing his face down into the tarmac. “No one move,” the captain ordered in a hiss, as the light swept over them. They were concealed by the tall grass that bordered the airstrip, but only barely. The light was inches above them.
The light went back and forth for a minute and then they heard voices talking and what was the unmistakable sound of a gun being dropped on the ground. This was followed by a low curse and then a whispered order to: “Shut up!”
With the light pointed away, Grey raised his head and scanned over the tips of the grass. He could see the dim shapes of men squatting just beyond the torn-up fence. There were possibly a dozen of them, spread out in a long line.
“Go back,” Grey whispered. He crawled backwards, keeping his head and ass as low to the ground as possible. Deanna tried to replicate the motion but could only scrape herself back, awkward and slow. Travis spun on his belly and low-crawled off the tarmac and into the deeper grass.
Grey led them down a steep grade and into a concrete drainage ditch. From there he lifted himself in a hunched position and scurried as fast as he could along the ditch. It was dry and sandy with little in it save the occasional jumble of bones of some poor long-dead airman.
They had left the men working the searchlight a hundred yards back, when there was a sudden crack of rifle fire. All three threw themselves down on the embankment; Grey was the only one who had his weapon up and pointed outward. His eyes were black but sharp. A single gunshot made no sense unless...
“They’re trying to make us give away our position,” he told them. “Don’t move.” He scrambled up the embankment and again raised up just high enough to see only it was too dark to see much of anything in any direction. A breeze shifted in his direction bringing with it the rich smell of lilac and the rumble of a truck’s engine.
A second truck engine sounded from the other direction
“Quick!” he ordered. He slid down the incline and then hurried up the other side. They were being hemmed in by the Duke’s men—it was the only logical conclusion. A second bit of logic suggested that, since the ditch was the only real hiding spot, it had to be abandoned right away.
He reached back and took Deanna’s hand, pulling her up the steep hill. Travis scrambled up on his own. “Oh God! We’re fucked,” he said in a panic.
“Possibly,” Grey replied—what more was there to say? Fear was a waste of time and energy.
The rumbling of one of the trucks stopped a distance away, while a second truck continued for a few hundred yards and then stopped as well. Grey could picture what was being arrayed against them: fifteen men per truck, strung out in a line of a quarter of a mile. They would, in all probability, advance into the field and catch the three renegades in the open as they tried to cross the next airstrip.
By turning north and hurrying down the drainage ditch as he had, Grey had put his little group directly in the center of a trap which was now closing in on them. He bit back a string of curses and tried to focus. Surviving meant understanding his enemy.
What were the Duke’s men thinking just then? On the macro level, they would be confident that they had the advantage in numbers. On the micro level each man would be nervous at best and downright scared at worst. These were not trained soldiers. They had never tasted combat save against the mindless, stumbling masses of undead. Being shot at in return was a whole other can of worms.
Because of that they would instinctively clump, leaving gaps in their line through which three very quiet and careful people could slip—if they were lucky. Grey’s first job was to maximize that luck.
He risked another look over the top of the grass. A second searchlight had been added to the first. It swept the land north of them, showing Grey more than it showed his adversaries. When the light panned wide, zipping by at the height of the tall grass, it showed an empty field. They weren’t advancing yet, meaning he had time to move.
“This way,” he said, leading them deeper into the trap. There was a metal culvert ahead where a stretch of concrete jutted toward the fence. The Duke’s men would be leery of the culvert. They would crimp in toward it, fearing that it would be the most likely place the renegades would hide. Their line would thin as extra men gravitated toward it; gaps would form approximately fifty yards on either side.
On their bellies they crawled through the grass which seemed to rustle loudly beneath them and yet nothing was louder than Travis’ panicked breathing. He was on the verge of hyperventilating and sounded like he had just sprinted a mile. Grey was just turning to tell him to calm down when guns started blasting the night.
All up and down the Duke’s lines men fired. Grey wasn’t fooled. He had long ago developed an ear for the direction of gunfire and, even though the air hissed inches over their heads with the passage of blazing hot lead, he knew they weren’t being targeted; the firing wasn’t concentrated.
Travis, who was on the verge of true panic, began to heave himself to his feet, obviously ready to run away. Grey didn’t blame him. Three million years of evolution had programmed the flight instinct into him and he was just following his nature. Grey and Deanna had the same instinct, however, Grey’s training and superior intelligence superseded the urge, while Deanna was able to overcome it through trust alone.
Her eyes had been on Grey from the moment they had first seen the light zip across the field. In her eyes he saw only trust. She had put herself in his hands, totally. Trust was another evolutionary trait that allowed humans to bond and form cohesive families and communities. Trust mitigated fear and this was why she wasn’t freaking out like Travis, who, even as Grey watched, began to climb to his feet, ready to flee like a spooked rabbit.
Grey was faster. He gathered his legs beneath him and, still in a squat, launched himself at Travis, tackling him before he could give away their position. Travis tried to fight Grey but there was no way. The soldier had arms like banded iron and his grip could not be overcome by the spastic energy of pure fright.
“Stop it,” Grey said, beneath the last echoes of gunfire. “They can’t see us unless you stand up. Trust me Travis, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a long time. Trust me and I’ll get you out of here in one piece.”
Over the course of the following minute, Travis calmed enough for Grey to push him on. They started to move not a second too soon. The next time Grey peeked his head up, he saw that the Duke’s men had started forward. They were moving with all the caution of men untrained for the task before them and if the night vision goggles in Grey’s pack had working batteries, he would’ve eaten those men alive.
“Quicker,” he hissed. They needed to move thirty yards in less than a minute for Grey to feel good about their position. Low-crawling wasn’t an easy thing to do under the best of circumstances. Neither Travis nor Deanna were experienced and, time and again, Grey muttered: “Get your ass down.” He knew, from experience, there was a tendency to lift up the longer one crawled. In this case they had about twenty inches of grass as their only cover. “Spread your body out,” he advised. “You’ll stay lower.”
When they had reached a spot that he could only hope would work, they hunkered down with their weapons at the ready, listening with fine-tuned ears to the crunching of grass that marked the enemy coming closer and closer.
Grey took his hand off his M4 to reach out and grip Travis’ shoulder, in what he hoped was a reassuring grip. He gave Deanna a rakish smile to let her know that he wasn’t worried in the least. In truth,
he was pretty sure they were going to die in the next few minutes. The Duke’s men had shifted toward the culvert just as he had expected, however someone had barked an order and the line had dressed itself, to a degree, so that the gap between the men was less than twenty yards.
Still, it was a dark night and the three of them were dressed in shredded rags that blended well with their surroundings. All they had to do was freeze in place and not breathe like a locomotive chugging up a sharp incline, which was exactly what Travis was doing.
The grip Grey had on Travis’ shoulder grew tighter the closer the approaching feet came. They were going to be found out for sure if Travis didn’t shut up. Then, Deanna reached over and put her index finger on Travis’ lips. It was like magic. Travis quieted. Even when the star-shadow of the man swept across their boots, Travis was like a mouse.
In a minute, the danger was thirty yards away and fading.
Travis let out a long breath. Grey did the same, only when he did it the breath was soundless. Now, all they had to do was keep still another minute before crawling forward and slightly to the right. They would lose their five-ton truck and have a long walk back to the warehouse, but given the circumstances it was a small loss.
The minute passed and Grey had just nodded to the others when a whistle blew and a voice began bawling: “Return! You missed them.”
Even Grey was shocked. They were screwed. Lights were sweeping all around them as if they were being directed by the devil himself. Grey could only wonder who it was after them.
Chapter 29
Jillybean/Eve
Two days earlier:
“...Three,” the Duke said, the gun in his hand as steady as if it had been welded to his flesh. Jillybean squinched up her face, ready for the bullet that would end her life. She hoped that the angels with their harps and their little round baby-bellies and their absurd wings would forgive her for all the bad things she had done. Her concept of heaven was ill-formed to say the least but one thing she knew for sure was that bad people didn’t go to heaven.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 33