by Mark Wandrey
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said as he scanned the sky and quickly found the distinctive high-wing, rotary engine design of a Piper Cub lining up on the deck. He’d run like a lunatic for nothing. But just as he breathed a sigh of relief, he saw the deck crew beginning to raise the crash barricade. “Hey!” he yelled at the nearest red-dressed man, “what the hell are you doing?!”
“Orders,” the man replied.
“Who?” Andrew asked. The man pointed, and he ran back inside and up the stairs.
Andrew reached primary flight control, or Pri-Fly, as the Cub was lined up and slowing for approach. He pushed the door open without announcing himself and almost yelled.
“Drop the safety barrier!”
The Mini Boss spun around. “What are you doing here?”
“Sir!” Andrew exclaimed. “You’re about to waste that Cub.”
“Mister, we have about half our flight deck left. We tried to wave this guy off, but he wouldn’t go. I guess he figured since there’s a damn C-17 here, there’s room for more! So, if you don’t want him ramming that big bird in the ass—”
“Will you listen to me?” The Mini Boss’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but he let Andrew go on. “That guy flying the Cub knows what he’s doing to get it this far out here, and to survive with it in the first place. And, if you know what you’re doing, and I’m betting he does, you can land one of those in just a few hundred feet! If you put up the safety barrier, you’ll ruin the plane and possibly kill the pilot and passengers.”
The Mini Boss turned and looked at the approaching plane, grabbed a pair of binoculars and examined it. It almost seemed to be hanging still without moving. It was going very, very slow. The man chewed his lip.
“You sure about this?”
“Damned sure,” Andrew said.
“Then it’s on you,” the Mini Boss said and pressed the talk button. “On the flight deck, stow the barricade. I say again, stow the barricade.” Andrew could see them all look up at Pri-Fly with a look of consternation, then rush to do as ordered. Once the net went down, the Cub immediately began to move forward a little more quickly. Andrew nodded to himself; the pilot had been worried about the net.
It only took the crews a minute to stow the barricade, then the Piper Cub came cruising in like a car pulling into a drive-thru for a burger. Its huge balloon tires touched down with the tiniest of bumps, and the plane rolled to stop in less than 100 feet, leaving the supercarrier’s deck crew staring in shocked amazement.
“Told you,” Andrew said.
“Get the fuck out of my Pri-Fly,” the Mini Boss said, but there was humor in his voice.
Andrew ran back out of the island and onto the flight deck just as the deck hands were trying to figure out what to do with the plane. One of the fabric doors was locked open against the underside of the left wing and a man, who looked to be at least 70, was sitting half-out of the plane, arguing with one of the flight directors.
“Those other boats looked like they’d been beat to shit, son!” he was yelling over the sound of a helicopter spinning up not far away. “Then you went and put that damned net up, I liked to have had me a heart attack!” While he was talking, a trio of medical staff was examining him and helping his passengers out. The Cub was essentially a two-seater, but the elderly pilot had managed to stuff two adults and three young children in the back.
“I understand sir. We can’t promise anything about the plane, though. We don’t have room.” The older man cast a glance at the massive C-17 on the nose of the flight deck, wings hanging out dozens of feet over each side, then cocked an eyebrow back at the young officer.
“Sonny, if you can give my granddaughter and her family a place to stay, you can shove the bird into the drink, and I won’t feel sorry at all. It got us here alive.”
“Hell of a job, sir,” Andrew said as he approached. The older man eyed Andrew’s flight suit and lifted an eyebrow again.
“Lieutenant Tobin, is it? Well the last thing I expected to see on a flattop was a fellow Air Force flyer.”
“You’re Air Force too, sir?”
“You betcha, I few Douglas A-1s in Nam for AFSOC, mainly SAR missions.” Andrew nodded, his respect for the pilot growing considerably. Air Forces Special Operations Command, AFSOC, were all top-notch pilots. They were often minimally armed to extend their range in the search and rescue, SAR, of downed pilots. “Whatcha fly, son?”
“Used to fly F-35s mostly. My last job was that,” he said and hooked a thumb at the C-17.
“You don’t say?” the old guy said, giving Andrew a narrow-eyed appraisal. “That must have been some seriously steely-eyed flying, son.”
“I had a lot of help from the carrier.” He turned to the flight officer. “Can you tie this thing up under the C-17’s wing?”
“I don’t see why not,” the officer said, “but I’ll need to check with the skipper.”
“Let him know I’d like to keep it around. Considering what you’ve just seen of the flight characteristics, I bet you can understand why.” The man nodded and used his radio to call the senior command staff. “Sir,” Andrew said to the elderly pilot, “do you mind if I use this bird? I’d need you to teach me to fly her, of course.”
“Son, if you landed that flying whale on this postage stamp, I doubt there’s a damned thing about flying I can teach you.” The old flyer put out a hand. Andrew laughed and shook his hand. “Name’s Teddy, Teddy Kennedy.”
“Good to meet you. Let’s get your family settled in, and I’ll buy you a drink. One zoomie to another.” Andrew watched as Teddy was led below decks with his family by several deck hands, then he noticed something. About a mile away, a dozen ships had converged on two of the carriers. It was too far to tell, but he guessed it was the Carl Vinson and the George Washington. Both carriers were nearly worthless now for flight ops. The GW even had damage to its island, and the Carl Vinson had suffered a fire below decks.
There were at least a dozen ships around the carriers, several with cranes, and hundreds of lights illuminated the entire area. “What the hell is going on?” he wondered before heading below deck himself.
* * *
Near Tarpley, TX
The house and grounds looked like a swarm of African driver ants had been over it, and then elephants had trampled what was left. The former high-end synthetic wood siding was stripped in many places, revealing the extra-heavy wooden sheeting underneath. In a few places, you could even see Kevlar. Armored windows were cracked, door handles and railings were gone, ornamental flowers were ground into pulp, and the front porch sagged because two of the four supports were broken. An aluminum building nearby, which had once held gardening tools and a lawn tractor, was in utter ruin.
Watching the house and grounds for a time, you’d think there was no one alive, nor anyone who had been for many years. But that was not the case. If you watched for a few more minutes, you’d have noticed movement in a few secluded places, out of the hot Texas sun. A few of the infected were under the only remaining upright wall of the garden shed, a few in the carport with the obviously wrecked Jeep, and more in the garage. It looked like a couple were sleeping in Tim’s truck, still parked on the driveway. On the second-floor balcony, three of them were crouched, ripping pieces of flesh from one of their own and hungrily devouring them.
The monsters were down to squabbling over the last significant pieces of flesh, and they were so busy with their dining experience, they didn’t hear the lock to the balcony door release, or the heavy shutter-bolt slide back. The shatterproof heavy-duty doors slowly began to swing inward, inch-by-inch, until the opening was half a foot wide. It was just enough to allow a view of all three creatures. A black barrel slid out of the space. It was a wide shaft, thick, though the barrel itself was only .22 of an inch wide.
Phut! the gun spoke. It barely recoiled at all, and one of the three fell with a tiny hole through its forehead. The other two stopped, mouths dripping blood and bits of flesh, looking at
their fallen cohort. One of the two, a woman, growled. The gun spoke again, phut! and her left eye exploded. She fell to the filthy deck and spasmed. The last one made the association within his altered and strangely functioning mind and spun to the door.
Vance Cartwright steadied his grip as the last snarled at him through the gap. Just as the former human began to move toward Vance, he stroked the trigger, and the suppressed Ruger Mk III clacked, sending the subsonic round through the infected’s nasal passage and its brain. The man jerked as the light hollow point expanded in his brain and cracked against the back of his skull, but enough brain was left in the parts it was using to continue moving, so Vance fired twice more. The man fell face first onto the porch, were his blood continued to pump out for quite some time. Vance let his breath out with a shuddering wheeze.
“Good shooting,” Harry Ross said. From the big former Marine, that was high praise. “Good thing you had that suppressed .22 in storage.”
“Only wish I’d had more,” Vance admitted. “But at $200 each for the tax stamp on the suppressors alone, they were just too damned expensive.”
Harry held the door and watched as Vance stepped out on the porch, swinging the muzzle of the .22 around to cover all angles. The remains of the zombies’ meal made his stomach churn. It was a butcher’s shop after closing, or a scene from a vampire movie.
“We better get them off the porch,” Tim Price said behind them. He held an AR-15 SBR, or short barreled rifle. A thirty-round magazine was loaded and ready, just in case.
“Agreed,” Vance said and spoke into the boom mic he wore. “Balcony team to the bunker.”
“Go ahead team.” The voice was more than a little nervous. Ann Benedict, Vance’s wife, was in the bunker under the house with the other two women. She knew if anything went wrong up on the balcony, they were in just as much danger.
“We got them cleared,” Vance said.
“Oh, thank God.”
“We’re going to get the bodies over the side and be right down.” Tim opened a duffle bag and removed a Ziploc full of gear. There were elbow-length nitrile gloves, face masks, and a container full of alcohol-based wipes.
A few minutes later the three bodies rolled over the side, one after another, as Tim kept overwatch and used his own gloved hands to pitch bits of bone and a skull over the side. When the last body hit, it landed on a broken railing from the porch, launching it into the side of the house with a crash.
“Graunch!” a voice yelled, and everyone looked. From under one wall of the defunct garden shed, two infected stood up.
“Shit,” Vance said, sliding the gloves off and drawing the suppressed Ruger. He’d fired thousands of rounds from the weapon over the years. The ammo was a favorite for target practice. Vance reloaded the weapon with another mag and took careful aim. It was about 40 yards. He’d switched from the sub-sonic to standard.
“Tight shot at this range,” Harry said as Vance dropped into a Weaver stance and sighted.
“The advantage is, I don’t have to do quick kills,” he said and fired. With the standard ammo, the gun was louder, though still considerably less than an unsuppressed weapon. More like a cough than a grunt. Vance shot the first one three times, all non-lethal hits in his abdomen and leg. He shifted his aim to the man standing next to him. This one had begun to jog toward the house. He shot him three times as well, though had to fire five times to accomplish it. Two of those rounds hit him in the chest, the last one punched through the top of his skull, and he dropped in his tracks.
“What about him?” Tim asked and pointed at the first one. The guy staggered for a few feet and resumed walking toward the house. Blood flowed from his wounds, but he kept coming.
“Look at the amount of blood,” Harry said. “He won’t last long.”
“Just going to let him bleed out?” Tim asked. Vance just shrugged.
“Let’s go,” he said and turned to leave.
They were back in the bunker a few minutes later, locking the heavy metal doors behind them. Ann nearly leapt into his arms, looking him over to be sure he wasn’t hurt.
“Why do you keep doing that?” she demanded after giving him several kisses.
“Because if we don’t keep them down, they’ll do more damage until they eventually gain entrance,” he explained.
“Maybe seal an air vent,” Harry added.
“Get on the roof,” Tim agreed. “They’d tear some antennas down or something then. That’d be a worst-case scenario.” None of them wanted to think about losing their only remaining lifeline to the outside world, even if it was just barely functioning. The internet lines were buried, so Vance knew they had a connection, but the internet wasn’t working. The kill switch, long a legend among preppers, had turned out to be true.
The command center of the bunker, a wall of LED TV monitors displaying views from all over the property, was largely dark. Fully half of the screens were blank, having been shut off because their cameras no longer functioned, or their lines had been cut. Vance had turned each one off when the signal was lost to conserve power. So far, the solar panels on the roof continued to work well and provided sufficient power, and it was hard to believe only four days had passed since the swarm of infected had flooded over the property like a tsunami cresting over a breakwater.
“It’s just so dangerous,” Ann said and walked toward the single restroom. She was in there a lot, and that made Vance remember she was pregnant with his baby. He’d only found out a short time before the Delta plague had begun, and they’d tried to hunker down against it. No one had thought it would spread as fast as it did. No one had thought it would affect people the way it did. Especially how the infected would group together into swarms like army ants.
“Where were they going?” Belinda Ross asked. She was Harry’s wife; the two had shown up with Tim and Nicole Price when the pair arrived at the retreat they’d help build. The Rosses weren’t part of that partnership. They’d been friends with the Prices, and when things went sideways, they’d been invited. The Rosses had brought guns, supplies, and skills. Tim was a retired US Marine Corps Force Recon soldier, and Belinda was a trauma nurse. The working monitors had recorded the swarm as it arrived from Mexico and flowed north. “What do they want?”
“If what we keep finding is any indication, food,” Vance said. “They are like locusts.” Everyone nodded. They’d watched what’d happened during the main wave’s passage when the shed collapsed. It had contained cases of old freeze-dried foods. The infected didn’t show much intelligence. However, they could solve problems or understand simple concepts. The food containers had pictures on them, and that appeared to be enough. They’d torn into the packages with teeth and fingernails, devouring the freeze-dried foods in their raw state, not appearing to mind at all. Much of that brand had been only marginally edible even after being rehydrated.
“What are we going to do?” Nicole Price asked. She was feeding the dogs in their usual area. Up until yesterday, it had been a very smelly area. They’d had the dogs doing their business on spread out plastic tarps, and then were scraping it into empty five-gallon food buckets. Despite their best efforts, it was impossible to keep it completely sanitary. The whole bunker smelled like dog shit. The three dogs, Lexus (Vance’s mixed Doberman), and the Prices’ German Shepherds, Rock and Dewey, were just as miserable as everyone else.
“We wait them out,” Vance said. That statement would have drawn nods from the group only a few days ago. The retreat was well designed, armored and reinforced in just about every way.
Vance and the men went to the shower area and proceeded to go through decontamination. They’d done it every time they’d come in contact with the infected. When they were clean, the women had prepared a meal for the group. They sat quietly and ate while Vance spun the dial on his shortwave radio and found what he could get in the way of news.
“Any word from Lisa and Brad Hopkins?” he asked as he scanned. The women had been watching the radio while they took
care of the ‘problem’ upstairs.
“Nothing,” his wife said. Lisa and Brad were their last two members, and equal shareholders in the retreat’s stores. But they’d lived in Dallas, and Vance had never heard if they’d gotten out. Considering what the monitors showed, even if they got as close as the gate, he didn’t know how he’d get them in. He decided not to think about that for now.
Vance had a book full of frequencies preferred by other groups like his. It was easier to receive their intermittent signals than it was to transmit to them. Still, he’d managed contact with several over the last few days. Most were either hunkered down and keeping quiet, or under siege like his group. There were also dozens of individuals stuck in various places. More than a few in cities. Listening to those broadcasts was like an old radio horror show. Just last night he’d gotten an hour of clear broadcast from a woman in Dallas. She was broadcasting with a portable transmitter from the roof of the Bank of America building.
“I can see right down Main Street toward Dealey Plaza,” she’d said in a shaky voice. “They’re everywhere, wandering down the roads. Sometimes I hear a scream or a gunshot, and they’ll run off to chase whoever it is. The ones outside the roof are still there, beating on the door whenever they hear me. They’re so, so…patient. I watched them catch a dog last night, down on the street,” her anguished voice made them all look at their pets. Lexus whined, sensing their distress. “They ripped it to pieces and ate it while it screamed. It’s the end of the world.” They’d lost the signal after that and had never heard from her again.
Vance was having trouble finding anyone. Each day there were fewer and fewer channels. Range was considerably less during the day because of solar radiation, though there’d been several transmitters he could still get. Not now. As he ate he tried not to think about that woman’s last words. Then he heard a snatch of conversation and instantly switched to the micro-tuning nob. Everyone stopped eating and listened as he slowly resolved the carrier. It was a man in mid-sentence.