The two men sat in silence for a long time, each absorbed in their thoughts. Finally, Miles mused, “Did it make it easier, knowing why it happened?”
“Not so much. There’s still a world full of the infected. We’ve still got loved ones we’ll never see again.”
“It’s just weird, I guess. We went back and forth for so long over what they were, zombies, you know. It wasn’t like we had current events to talk about, you know?” Miles laughed. “One guy I know was sure that they were voodoo zombies, and he almost got into a fistfight with someone who thought it was part of the Rapture.” He shrugged. “Maybe knowing would have been better. We still would have been helpless, but it wouldn’t have all felt so futile.”
“They are just . . . animated dead flesh. They’re puppets — meat machines. There’s no greater story behind it, other than the insanity of the people who created and spread the plague. No, the real story is about you and the rest of your people. You guys endured. So much of the rest of the world just gave into fear or terror, but you fought back. You weathered the storm. I can’t even fathom what those early days were like for you folks.”
“Why? Was it so different for you and your people?”
“You know, it’s funny,” Ross remarked. “I mean, we heard the stories about the flu. The situation in Crimea was such a disaster that the initial outbreak was just a blip on our radar. We were so concerned about the Russians kicking off another world war that we didn’t realize things were already on the brink. Hell, when the second stage began we thought the Russians had escalated things with some kind of nerve gas. How about you?”
“Not what I would have expected, I guess,” Miles said. “Things never came to a complete stop, but it kind of sputtered. It got hard to find stuff in the grocery stores, a lot of businesses were short-handed. Lots of doom and gloom in the press but people just lowered their heads and went on with their business.” He huffed a short bark of laughter. “It was easy to ignore when the infection was just a lot of people laid up in the hospital or images on the screen. After Z-Day, not so much.”
“That was the make or break moment,” Ross agreed. “I know a lot of hard-core guys who saw it and just . . . locked up. They weren’t mentally prepared for something out of a horror movie.” He shrugged. “Some of them came out of it, some didn’t make it.”
“Right. Same thing with some of our people, I guess. You can . . . What was that?” Miles got onto his feet and looked around. He’d heard a strange noise, and it came again — the distant concussion of something hard on metal. Beside him, Ross abandoned his relaxed pose and stood as well. The noise came again, and Miles turned his head to look across the span between the two buildings. “It’s over there,” he said, pointing toward the helipad. He wasn’t the only one who’d heard it; two members of the helicopter crew scrambled around on the opposite roof with a frantic air.
Ross got on his radio and said, “Whiskey, Hatchet. Status report, over.” He fell silent, then cursed. Now there were three figures on the opposite roof; one had been behind the helicopter. “No helmets — they’re not receiving.” The other men clustered near the door that Castillo had welded shut earlier. The sound repeated, and the three men reacted as though electrocuted. Without hesitating, they sprinted back across the roof toward the helicopter.
“Shit,” Miles whispered. “They’re at the door, aren’t they?”
“It’s got to hold,” Ross muttered. “Solid steel, welding bead all around? No way in hell they can crack that.”
Foraker and Janacek stepped up beside the two of them, curious what the fuss was about. Ross jerked his head toward the maintenance shack. “Chief, Brian, rear guard. Listen up for anything out of the ordinary.”
“Aye, sir,” the Chief said, and the two men trailed backward.
“There’s a dogleg in the stairs on this building. You have to turn almost immediately after entering the stairwell. How about over there?” Ross jerked his chin at the other building. The aircrew had buttoned up inside of the helicopter, and the rotors were beginning to turn as they fired up the engines.
“Straight shot from the landing below,” Miles said. “But it’s a damn staircase. How could they get enough of a head of steam to . . .”
With a final crash, the fire door on the opposite building jerked part of the way open. The weld held for the most part, but the force was pushing the door frame out of the surrounding block wall. Chunks of concrete splintered off and danced on the roof. “Mother of God,” Ross whispered. “How many are there?”
The block wall gave up the ghost, and the entire door frame slammed into the roof. Almost immediately, what Miles could only describe as a sheer torrent of gray flesh poured out onto the roof. Literal piles of zombies crawled over the roof and each other with one destination in mind.
“They’re so fast,” Miles whispered, “Why are they so damn fast?” They must have filled the stairway from floor to ceiling. They enveloped the chopper from the surface of the roof to just below the rotors. Even as the whine of the turbines raised in pitch he could hear the squealing of metal and the cracking of safety glass under the pressure.
“Come on, baby,” Ross said. “Fly, fly fly.”
The rotors faded into one continuous blur as the Black Hawk’s engines screamed under the load. The helicopter began to lift from the helipad. The uppermost zombies who pounded on the sides began to fall as the surface of the airframe shifted beneath them. The mass beneath the chopper surged as one, as though it were a single organism rather than hundreds — maybe even thousands — of individuals.
The surge came up under the helicopter’s nose, and the rise accelerated sharply. The tail began to dip toward the helipad, and Ross cursed.
Miles didn’t know who was at the controls, but he reacted with smooth precision. The helicopter pivoted forty-five degrees and the rise steadied into a more even horizontal plane. It was still slow going — he couldn’t make out the bottom half of the helicopter through the tidal wave of gray flesh that tried to rip it out of the sky — but it crept up, inch by inch, rotors straining.
At once, the mass beneath the chopper parted, hundreds of arms releasing their grip, and the chopper bucked. This is what Vir had seen, Miles realized, and he tried to imagine the terror the other man must have felt as the encroaching horde lapped at his heels.
The helicopter lurched, and Miles’ breath caught in his throat. Staccato impacts of bone on metal sounded across the gap between the buildings. A fresh torrent of the dead had erupted from the stairway. They sprinted up the ramp formed by the bodies of their brethren and launched into the side of the chopper. A few went too high and the rotors dismembered them, but most stayed low enough. The repeated strikes pushed the chopper to the side. He realized that the Black Hawk was no longer rising, but the effect of the repeated impacts combined to push the vehicle across the roof.
“Shit, no, no no no!” Ross shouted.
The outside edge of the horde had reached the lip of the roof, and they began to trickle over, lemming-like. Some lost their grips on the helicopter and plummeted to the ground below. Most of them did not.
The helicopter began to tilt. The turbines screamed in a last ditch effort, but the fall of the helicopter accelerated as the rotors went from horizontal to vertical. At one moment it was hanging in midair; in the next, it had inverted and headed toward the ground. Ross grabbed Miles and pulled him down behind the knee wall. “Everybody down!”
The initial impact of the helicopter wasn’t much; a subdued thump accompanied by the sound of crumpling metal. Miles could only imagine what it looked like, but his imagination went blank at the thunderclap of the explosion. He didn’t know how full the fuel tanks had been, but even empty the fumes would have been explosive. Who knew how much fuel remained in the welding rig? The combined blasts vibrated the building for a long moment, and after all was still, he became aware of the pounding of his own heart.
Ross eased his grip on Miles and the two men straightene
d. A thick, twisting cloud of black smoke rose from the still-burning wreckage at the base of the opposite building. Miles stared at what had once promised to be their ride home, then raised his eyes to look at the roof across the way.
The mob was no longer as frenetic as they had been, and they trickled back into the staircase to a destination that Miles felt he could guess.
No need to hurry, right fellas? We aren’t going anywhere, after all.
There’d been an old guy in the outfit by the name of Deacon who’d been the go-to guy for anything and everything explosive. When he’d started working his way up the ranks, Dantzler had worked a few jobs with the old man. He’d paid enough attention to pick up a few things by osmosis, but the old fart never, ever shut the hell up. Ivan figured if he was going to talk anyway, he might as well steer the conversation toward something more interesting. Deac was like a walking Wikipedia of explosives. If he had access to commercial or military grade stuff he knew how to use just enough to get the job done without overkill. One time their supply contact had gotten caught up in a prostitution sting and time was of the essence. The old man had walked into a hardware store and in a few hours had improvised explosives ready to go — all from the contents of a few shopping bags.
“It’s just chemistry, kid,” the old man had explained. The conversation was concurrent to Deac’s slow, careful assembly of the pipe bomb Dantzler was going to conceal under the seat of a dirty judge’s convertible. “Exothermic reaction. Any damn fool can get shit to blow up. Takes someone smart to keep it under some appearance of control.”
“Appearance of control?” Dantzler questioned, curious.
“Entropy rules the world, son. Nothing remains static. Time wears us all down, one way or another. Chemical compounds like this, in a way they’re an affront to nature. They’re mixtures of things that never would have come together on their own. So they don’t like being together — over time, they’ll change states, become less stable and more volatile. So a smart bomber, he doesn’t keep a stash on hand, be makes what he needs as he needs it. Anything else is a shortcut to launching your house into the moon. Now, your high-end stuff, your RDX, that’s a beautiful thing. Nice and stable, you can light the shit on fire and it won’t explode on you. But it’s laced with chemicals that the man can use to trace its origin, so that’s out. But it is what it is. At least we don’t have to mess with dynamite.”
“Why’s that?”
“Dynamite, in the old days, had tons of nitro in it, and that stuff sweated like you wouldn’t believe. The guy who taught me screwed up and dropped a couple old sticks . . . Boom, see you later, guy.”
Not long after that job, the BATFE rolled Deacon up in a sting when he went to buy from one of his suppliers who’d turned state’s evidence. Unfortunately for him, his penchant for talking was well known. As soon as word got out that ol’ Deacon was behind bars, he’d become a problem rather than an asset. He’d breathed out his last on the tile floor of a shower room in lockup with a toothbrush shiv lodged in his kidney.
Post Z-Day, Dantzler didn’t have to worry about a reputation for being chatty or the long arm of the law. Among the more interesting things Buck had discovered had been the contents of the demolitions locker at a nearby rock quarry. They’d stashed most of it off site — it wasn’t like you could hide a few hundred pounds of explosives under your bunk — and never reported the find to the rest of the community. But Ivan always kept a little bit around, replenishing it every so often as Buck used it to access secured areas in warehouses, gun safes, and the like.
In retrospect, it was amazing that no one had ever questioned the sheer quantity of gear that Buck had been able to provide. If they’d known the extent of what he’d been holding back it would have blown their minds.
It had been a good run, Dantzler reflected. But all good things must come to an end.
He didn’t need much of the Semtex for what he intended; the fuel tanks weren’t fenced, so could place the bomb right against one. He did need some shrapnel, though, and he molded a fist-sized chunk of explosive into a length of cast-iron pipe. When he detonated the bomb, hot shards of the pipe would punch into the thin-skinned fuel tanks and spill hundreds of gallons of fuel before it caught fire as well.
Dantzler had always loved fireworks, and this one promised to be cooler than most.
Lloyd was right, of course. With the loss of the vast majority of their fuel supplies, the community wouldn’t be able to haul loads of soybeans to the bio-diesel plant, much less plant and harvest them. More than likely he was sentencing nearly 200 men, women, and children to slow death by starvation. The gardens and greenhouses only provided so much. If they didn’t have the large amounts of feed required to raise cattle, the community’s only source of protein when the meat ran out were the canned goods. When winter arrived, they’d have to rely on food stores, which would run out fast with the loss of half of their potential supplies. Without the industrial farming methods made possible with machinery, there was no way to feed so many people just on produce with their small amount of secure acreage.
He doubted it would get that far. Starving people would get desperate long before that. In a way, his bomb would kill them all, just not at the time of the explosion. He considered that aspect again and shrugged. Heck with them. They deserved it for not being smart enough to spread out their critical supplies.
Dantzler screwed on the first end cap. This was the easy part; the next was trickier, despite all the practice and instruction he’d had.
Unfortunately, he was out of wireless detonators. This was going to be old school — a spool of wire with a hand-crank activator. That meant the crawling feeling in his stomach was only partly diminished as he fed the detonator wires through the second end cap. He nestled the detonator down into the Semtex and twisted the final end cap onto the pipe. He had to stabilize the wires as he did so, lest he twist them and tear them out of the detonator.
In the depths of the culvert, he heard the sound of movement.
Dantzler froze and cocked his head to one side. He listened for the span of a dozen heartbeats but heard nothing more than the sound of his own breathing.
He licked his lips and set the pipe bomb down on the work bench. With one hand he reached down and grabbed one of the small electric lanterns he used to light up the work area.
The cooking equipment sat further inside of the culvert, shrouded on either end with heavy, translucent plastic tarps. This kept the acrid emissions of the cooking process somewhat contained until it could trickle out. To shield the work lights in the interior, they’d hung heavy, wool blankets on the outside end of the culvert. He drew the first plastic tarp aside and panned the light across the tarp on the other end. Dantzler tried to stare through it to the rear of the pipe as he waited, but the noise did not repeat. The interior was empty, and all he could make out through the plastic were unmoving shadows. He licked his lips and shrugged. Jumping at ghosts.
He leaned back over the workbench and finished assembling the pipe bomb. He taped over the exposed ends of the wire and wrapped the excess length around the body of the bomb. Once it was in place, he would connect the ends of the wire spool to the detonator, reel it out as he got behind cover, and set it off with a quick crank. No fuss, no muss, and the distraction should be big enough for him and his boys to make their break for it.
Again, the noise, and Dantzler stiffened.
This time, he realized his mistake. Sound echoed strangely within the confines of the culvert. What had caught his attention came not from the rear, but from the front. He set the bomb back onto the desk and brought his hand down to his waist to reassure himself that his sidearm was still there. The pistol, an M9 Beretta from a fallen National Guard roadblock, lacked a threaded barrel for a suppressor. It was loud, but it had fifteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.
He stepped over to the blanket and listened for a moment. The noise did not repeat. With a frown, he drew the covering aside and looke
d out.
To his credit, Dantzler didn’t flinch. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered.
A dozen or more whip-thin figures at the end of the culvert obscured his view. The cannibals stood and stared back at him with unblinking gray eyes as Dantzler swallowed.
He hadn’t been this close to them in years, and the first thing that struck him was the lack of smell. In the beginning, blood and voided waste smeared the cannibals, but time and exposure to the elements had washed them clean. There was little left to mark them as having once been human. Though they varied in height they were essentially identical in appearance — naked and gaunt, with thick, dark scars lining their patchy, leprous skin.
Well, shit. This is going to mess up the schedule a bit. Maybe I can disassemble the workbench, start crushing heads with a table leg or something . . .
Dantzler froze.
One of the cannibals lowered its head and almost seemed to be studying the gate latch. After the span of a few heartbeats, it raised its head and stared at him.
The thing didn’t have any lips left to speak of, but Dantzler could have sworn that the death’s head grin widened. It raised an emaciated arm and extended a finger.
Tink, tink, tink. With a slow tympanic rhythm, it tapped the finger along one of the bars. With each tap, it lowered its hand until it rested atop the hoop of the locking mechanism. Slowly, it drew its arm back and opened the slide bolt.
He realized with a start that there was a hot warmth trickling down one leg of his slacks. He’d pissed himself in sheer terror. Dantzler opened his mouth to scream but all he could manage was a gasped “Huh, huh.” He clutched at his pistol with fingers that had turned nerveless and clumsy.
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