There weren’t any and after PFC Austin took her clothes back from Thuy, the two slipped through the door of the tent and walked directly away from where gangs of angry and infected soldiers sneered up at the planes flying by. With their attention diverted, it was a perfect time for Thuy and the others to leave the tent and hurry to the meeting place, but just as she stepped out, she saw two men leave the command tent, they cringed at the sun, lifting bloody hands to shield their dark eyes.
Thuy knew them in an instant. They had been part of the pack that had beaten the innocent lieutenant to death.
Immediately, she ducked back through the door, only to run straight into Courtney who was trying to struggle a PRC-155 Manpack radio onto her back. For two agonizing seconds the two were framed in the doorway and Thuy’s long, silken black hair couldn’t be missed. The two men strode across the intervening forty yards with murder in their hearts. Pulling back the door, they charged in, only to come up short. Save for some radio equipment, the tent was empty.
“What the fuck?” one cursed, as he squinted into the corners of the tent. “I saw her. I swear I did.”
“She’s like a Chinese witch,” the other replied.
Thuy, Courtney and the two dispatchers had crawled out from beneath the back edge of the tent and were now hiding behind a Humvee—there was almost nowhere else to hide. The top of the hill was virtually bald. Save for the tents and the few Humvees, there were only six trees and a few low shrubs and it was too far to the western portion of the perimeter to run without being seen.
All they could do was hide behind the Humvee and hope that the two men would turn and look away for a minute. It didn’t happen. They went in circles, growing ever angrier as the sun beat down and the planes roared above. Five precious minutes went by before one of them thought to ask the people around the command tent if they had seen the “Chinese” girl.
Fingers pointed right at the Humvee. One of the dispatchers began cursing in a high, whiny voice. The other, April Lopez, shoved Thuy and hissed: “Don’t hide with us. They’re only after you.”
It was harsh but true, and Thuy might have stepped out from behind the Humvee were it not for a blue-tinted knife the size of Thuy’s forearm that one of the men held. The look in his eyes suggested he was dying to stick it in someone.
Thuy was almost paralyzed with fright. With tiny steps, she edged to the side of the Humvee and slowly put her hands in the air.
Courtney grabbed her and hissed: “Dr. Lee, no. Don’t do this.”
“I have to. April’s right.” She wished there was another way, but they were moments from all of them being discovered. They had no weapons or any way to fight, and Thuy knew that she was too slow to outrun soldiers as fit as these. After taking a deep, shaky breath, she stepped out from behind the Humvee. “I’m right here. I surrender.”
The man with the knife wore a wolf’s grin as he started forward. He had only taken three steps when suddenly there was a scream from across the camp. It was a woman’s scream of pure terror that caused everyone to turn. It would have been a perfect time to run, but Thuy was too stunned.
PFC Cindy Austin was being dragged into the center of the camp by her mop of brown hair. She could barely keep upright as a beefy soldier whose eyes were scarily dark hauled her right up to the command tent. “Colonel! Colonel!” he bellowed. “You were fucking right. There are traitors among us and they are planning to take over. This bitch tried to recruit me. She tried to get me to turn against us.”
Colonel O’Brian stepped out of his tent; there were smears of black gunk mixed with blood on his bald head. It looked as though he’d been trying to claw his own head open. “A traitor? Why is she still alive?” He had a Beretta stuffed into the waist of his pants. He took it out and shot Cindy in the stomach.
Thuy felt like the bullet had hit her instead of Cindy. “Oh, God!” she said, as Cindy grunted and staggered.
Cindy stood for only a moment before dropping to her knees, clutching herself, her face molded in a rictus of fear and pain, her blood, red and rich, bubbling up between her fingers. The sight of it caused many of the black-eyed soldiers to leer at her hungrily. She began to blubber in fear and agony.
The strength in Thuy’s legs gave out and she had to hold onto the hood of the Humvee to keep from falling over. She knew she’d be next. They would drag her out in front of everyone and shoot a huge hole in her guts. It would hurt in a way she had never been hurt before and yet, she knew she wouldn’t die, not right away. Gut-shots were a slow death. In fact, she’d still be in the process of dying when the Com-cells finally took over the hateful soldiers completely, and then she’d be eaten alive with no way to run or fight.
Picturing herself lying in the bloody dirt like that, helpless and praying to die, crushed her spirit and sapped the remains of her courage right out of her. Just like Cindy, she cried. Her fear was an avalanche inside of her and she quivered uncontrollably.
The colonel turned and saw her standing there. His look was pure evil. “Oh, please, no,” she whispered, as her bladder let go in a hot rush.
2—New York City
Lieutenant General Phillips, commander of the Eighteenth Airborne Corps stepped off the Gulf Stream G650, pausing to squint through the morning glare at the empty airport. Nothing moved. No planes spinning up their engines preparing for takeoff, no baggage handlers zipping their carts here and there, no self-important TSA security guards lazing about looking no more effective than a like number of mall cops.
The only plane in sight was the Gulf Stream, and the only people were the general’s staff, who looked about equally unnerved.
The quiet in the air was honestly haunting.
Every flight in and out of the northeast had been cancelled. Although New York City was officially free of the “Black-eyed Plague” as some people had begun calling it, no one put a whole lot of trust in what was “official” and what wasn’t. And it wasn’t just the northeast. Flights as far away as Dallas were taking off at fifteen percent capacity, and even in California most were only half-booked.
Phillips hadn’t seen the sky so empty since 9/11 and that had been a walk in the park compared to what was happening now.
The sky was actually too empty. “Where the hell’s my chopper?” he groused.
His adjunct, a lieutenant colonel, immediately made a call and a minute later said: “They’re going to be a little late, sir. Sorry, but they’re civilian contractors.”
The general grunted and squinted up at the sky again. It wasn’t surprising that they were going to be using civilian helicopters since he had spent half the night setting up the single largest air assault operation in history.
Without regard to any other factor, the president had demanded that the entire 101st Airborne Division be air-lifted in one tremendous move of a thousand miles. To make their refueling problems even greater, the helicopters were to fly in formation, making sure that all eight hundred helicopters passed over the largest of the east coast cities on the way. The president seemed either unaware, or maybe he just didn’t care that Phillips’ fuel situation was already, for want of a better word: broken.
Finding, allocating, and positioning the fuel took seven men, ten hour’s worth of work. As well, it had taken eleven men and thirteen hours to gather the prerequisite number of Blackhawk helicopters necessary for such a massive and ridiculous operation. Basically, there wasn’t a green helicopter east of the Rockies that wasn’t being used.
And this was on top of the 82nd’s parachute drop. Again, the logistics of dropping ten-thousand men on a dozen different LZs in the space of half an hour was mind-boggling. To start with, there weren’t enough parachutes packed and ready to go. All through the night, the chute riggers worked until their fingers bled and their eyes burned. On top of that, Phillips had to make sure there were enough C17s, and enough fuel, and enough ammo, and enough food, and enough of everything—all gathered, all at once.
Phillips hadn’t slept in two day
s. He dug both fists into the small of his back, grimacing as his vertebrae cracked in a long string of snaps. Then, as he had for the tenth time that morning, he checked a secured online app for the status of his fuel reserves.
The projections were way off and not in a good way. He was fourteen percent over the worst estimates, which wasn’t a surprise. There was absolutely zero efficiency in either of the two mega operations. As an example, the C17s had circled Pope Field for an hour in order to perfect formations that no one had practiced since World War 2, and the Blackhawks frequently came in to Fort Campbell with zip in their tanks.
For the president, it was all about optics. For General Phillips his job had become all about logistics, which to him was the very height of depressing.
Gone were the days when a general was a tactician first, a strategist second and a worrier over bread and bullets a distant third. General MacArthur’s landing at Inchon had been the last time a general had really influenced the outcome of an American war with tactical brilliance.
As overall commander, Phillips’ job was actually quite dull. It consisted of hours of paperwork, hours of tracking down snags in the planned logistics, and hours of finding the right people to yell at in order to get things moving again.
Phillips had never before complained about how monotonous and boring it all was, but he complained now. In his view, “this zombie business” was bad news. It was a guaranteed career killer. Secretly, he thought that General Collins had lucked out by dying on the field of battle with a gun in his hands. Had he lived, his life would have been hell.
The same hell that Phillips could look forward to.
There would be no glory in a victory, there’d be no parades and there sure as shit was not going to be any seven-figure book deals to make retiring easier. There would be congressional hearings and lawsuits and endless Monday morning quarterbacking by everyone and their mother about how they could have fought a vast and sprawling zombie horde better than a professional.
To make matters worse, Phillips had to deal with the politicians. He hated this facet of the job more than anything. Despite being the Commander in Chief, the president was the worst of a bad lot. He had no idea how the military operated. On paper there existed some eleven hundred military Blackhawks and the president figured that it wouldn’t be too difficult to get a bunch of pilots to fly the helicopters to Fort Campbell, pick up eleven men and go.
He had no idea that what he described would normally take weeks of planning.
“Here they come,” his adjunct said, pointing skyward. Five helicopters whup-whup-whupped into sight. They were an embarrassing hodgepodge of traffic copters. The general sighed; he would be traveling in Channel 7’s Eye In The Sky!
The five landed and Phillips had just started forward when his adjunct grabbed his shoulder and handed over a phone. “Excuse me, sir? It’s General Heider of the Joint Chiefs.”
“What the…” Phillips growled under his breath as he took the phone. He tried, and failed, to put a smile into his voice as he said, louder: “What can I do for you, sir.”
“Sorry to do this to you, Steve, but I’m going to need you to come back to Washington as soon as possible.”
Back to Washington? Phillips thought, What the fuck?
Hoping that he had heard Heider wrong, he trotted away from the copters and yelled into the phone: “Say again? Did you say come back? Sir, I have a parachute jump that’s happening any minute and an air assault operation that is already twenty-five minutes behind schedule.”
“Sorry, Steve. I really need to talk to you in person. There’s going to be a slight change in plans.”
That was a lie that Phillips saw right through. A slight change of plans could be discussed over the phone. A ridiculous change of plans, one that was likely going to be stupid as well as dangerous, was the type that had to be done in person.
Of course, I could be getting replaced, Phillips thought to himself. The idea had a lot of appeal. “I’ll get my team back on the jet in no time.”
“All I need is you. Leave them in place and have them execute the operations as planned. Nothing should be changed, at least officially.”
“And unofficially?” Phillips asked, digging for any hint of what could be coming. The flight back to Washington would take an hour and the briefing probably another hour. He had far too much to do to allow these hours to flit by uselessly. Heider hesitated before answering and Phillips added: “Sir, if there is to be a change of plans it would be a waste of time and resources for me to…”
Heider spat into the phone: “Just get your ass back here!”
3—Hartford, Connecticut
Christine Warner drummed her pink lacquered nails on the table, while her eyes never left the clock spinning its hands in useless circles. The minutes ticking by were irreplaceable.
A total of thirteen people sat around the table, each one with their heads cocked to the side, as if listening for a whisper, but only the steady tapping of Christine’s nails marred the tense silence that gripped the room
They waited on two things: the first was the president’s return call. It had been ten minutes since he had abruptly hung up on them.
The second thing they waited for was the sound of a gunshot. Nine minutes before, the governor had ordered the summary execution of Ruth Lundy. Speaking the words had been an awful thing for Christine, but then the Secretary of State had slid over a piece of paper. It had been blank.
“Write it down,” he had urged in a gentle voice. He had been a prosecuting attorney early in his career, and he had coerced more confessions using that soft voice than he ever had by screaming. He knew that one of humanity’s little quirks was that the guilty wanted to confess. Whether they whispered it to a fellow criminal when the lights were out for the night and the cell cold or they screamed it with a hundred-watt bulb beating into their faces, they always told someone.
And the truly guilty ones always relaxed once the words were out of their mouths and couldn’t be sucked back in. The Secretary of State had seen the signs a hundred times: the sighing, the dropping of the tensed-up shoulders, a gentle bobbing of the head and the little smile that played at the corner of their guilty mouths.
The governor wasn’t showing these signs. Her crime had not yet been committed. She pushed the paper away, and waited and waited, without looking anyone in the eye. Finally, there came a muffled bang. Only then did her shoulders drop, and she sighed the sigh of the guilty, and her head bobbed as if she were trying to convince herself that she had done the right thing in ordering the death of an old lady who hadn’t committed any crime.
The small smile was the one aspect that never showed itself. The likely reason was that, at the sound of the gunshot, she picked up the phone and dialed the White House, making the Secretary of State wonder if she had been afraid that the president would ask what the sound had been, forcing her to lie or confess a second time.
“The president understands your concerns and will call you back, Governor,” a snappish male voice intoned as soon as Christine explained who she was.
“He’ll have to call my cell, then, because I’m leaving Hartford.” She expected this to cause some sort of reaction, but it did not.
The man only said: “Let’s have that number.”
Christine wanted to go full-on prima donna on this unknown phone answering flunky and scream: Do you know who I am? Instead, with everyone watching, she bit the words back, despite their bitterness, and monotoned her number as a robot might.
“It seems the president is a busy man,” she told the room, setting the phone in its cradle. “Then again, so are we. If we are to move the seat of government, it has to be done with all possible secrecy or there will be rioting followed by a mass exodus. It has to be avoided at all costs.”
A sudden, mass exodus was a nightmare scenario. With the borders closed and every city in the state throwing up walls, where would a quarter of a million people go and who would take them in? How many of t
hem were infected? And how quickly would the infection spread?
If it spread to even ten percent of them it would cause the rest to panic and there would be war. At first it would be city against city as the people of Hartford would flee to nearby Mansfield and demand to be allowed to pass through their hastily constructed walls. When that was denied, what would the people of Hartford do with tens of thousands of zombies bearing down on them?
Christine knew that they would fight to get into Mansfield and she knew the fighting would spread as the infection spread and soon, fleeing to another city wouldn’t keep anyone safe and then the three million people of Connecticut would need to go somewhere else, such as Rhode Island, and then when that tiny state was overrun, they would go to Massachusetts because there was nowhere else to go. And they would go, not as beggars asking to be let in, they’d go as little more than a savage, barbarian horde.
It was why the president had to act. He had to change the location of the drop before it was too late.
“To keep the people from suspecting what’s happening, we will not be able to take everyone we wish with us. Each of you can bring your immediate family and one or two staff members,” Christine stated, bluntly.
Even blunter, the Secretary of State said, “I’m sorry, Governor, but that’s too many. We shouldn’t even take everyone at this very table.” He cast a dark eye at the commissioners of Consumer Protection, Corrections, and Higher Education.
“They’re coming with us,” Warner replied, coldly. “Not to disparage anyone, but I feel if someone were left behind, they’d talk and the talk would spread. We can’t have that.”
The Commissioner of Emergency Management raised a hand before she said, “We also have to take into account what we’re taking. No one should be allowed to take more than one suitcase. It can’t appear as though we are fleeing for good. And we will also need a plausible sounding reason for leaving. I think we should say that we are going to ‘inspect’ the other cities; their fortifications, and their stores of ammo and food.”
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 15