A slight smile crossed the boy’s damaged face and he began breathing deeply at once.
From down the hallway, toward the front lobby of the police station, Sallinger heard shouting as the rate of fire suddenly intensified. He stood just as there was a scream, followed by a long burst of fire from the squad automatic weapon. Next came the bellowing of his team’s top sergeant.
“C’mon,” the captain said to his RTO, and the two men took off at a run.
“I’m out!” Corn shouted.
Cribbs was still firing into the oncoming horde. “Pull another mag from my pouch,” he yelled, dropping a rotting housewife, then a snarling girl in Victoria’s Secret pajamas. A dozen others crossed the sidewalk and broke into a sickening, flopping gallop that carried them to the front doors. The master sergeant’s thumb snapped his rifle to full auto and he ripped off a left-to-right burst that popped heads and drilled slugs into dead flesh.
Then the wave hit them.
Half the ghouls slammed into the glass walls to either side of the doors, starring it with spider web cracks and smearing it with brown and yellow fluid. The rest poured into the opening, overwhelming Corn and bearing him to the tiled floor as he tried to insert his sergeant’s magazine into his M4. The kid shrieked as filthy nails and splintered teeth tore at his flesh. In seconds he was a thrashing shape beneath a dirty, writhing mass of bodies.
The master sergeant’s trigger clicked on an empty magazine, and he let the rifle fall against his chest on its strap, stumbling backward, yanking the tomahawk from where it hung on his pack. A yellowing corpse in a hospital gown moaned and clutched at his combat webbing, coming in with snapping teeth. Its thick reek washed over Cribbs, making him choke, and he swung the tomahawk, burying it in the creature’s face.
The head burst like a piece of rotten fruit, and Master Sergeant Oscar Cribbs was hit with a splash of brownish yellow tissue and fluid that blinded him, went up his nose, got into his mouth. The corpse sagged and Cribbs staggered away, still holding the tomahawk, unable to see as he pawed at his eyes.
“Top, get down!”
Cribbs reacted at once, dropping to the floor as Specialist Burke charged into the lobby, planting the butt of the SAW against a hip and spraying the doorway with automatic fire. Bodies and heads were shredded as he worked the weapon across the crowd less than ten feet away, blowing out glass and filling the air with a pus-colored mist. The gunner dipped his weapon and hosed down the creatures feeding on Corn, ensuring that at least one bullet found the dead private’s head. In seconds the doorway was choked with motionless bodies, and for the moment, nothing new came in from the parking lot.
Captain Sallinger and his RTO arrived moments later, the officer dropping to his knees beside his top sergeant, who was on all fours, retching. While Burke covered the door with the SAW, Sallinger produced saline solution from a pouch on his webbing and washed out the master sergeant’s eyes. Cribbs wiped at them furiously, snorting and taking an offered bottle of water, gargling and spitting. After a few moments he stood, gruffly announced that he was okay, then began checking on the other positions over his radio. Bracco, Rooker and Moore reported that they were still in contact, that new skinnies were showing up constantly and that they were almost out of ammo. The sergeant looked at his officer with bloodshot eyes.
“Get me Reno,” Sallinger told his RTO. Thirty seconds later he took the offered handset. “Reno base, this is Copperhead-Six.”
“Go, Copperhead-Six.”
“Be advised, we have reached the objective. Tophat has changed position. We will pursue and locate.”
There was a pause. “Copperhead-Six, stand by for the major.”
“Copperhead-Six out,” Sallinger said, clicking off. He told his RTO to switch channels and get him the helicopter. “Honey-One,” Sallinger said a moment later on a new frequency, “Copperhead returning to your position.”
There was no response. He called several more times, but Honey-One was not on the air.
“Pull everyone in, Top,” he said to Cribbs. “We’re out of here.”
A moan came from the rear of the lobby, and the Rangers turned to see Airman Pintero limping toward them, his mouth hanging open and his good eye a glazed a milky yellow.
Sallinger put him down with a single round.
THREE
The chopper was where they’d left it, but when Sallinger and his men returned to the little league field they found the motionless bodies of two dozen skinnies sprawled on the grass in a ragged circle around the aircraft. While the Rangers had been preparing to leave the police station, the air crew of Honey-One had been attacked. Both the co-pilot and the male door gunner were dead, and each man – now lying beside the bird wrapped in ponchos – had a fresh bullet wound to the forehead, administered by the pilot.
While his men reloaded their depleted supply of ammunition from the spare ammo cans they’d brought along in the chopper, the Ranger leader spoke with the pilot. “What’s left of his security team took the general north on foot,” Sallinger said. “They’re headed for Chico.”
“And you want to go after them,” the pilot said.
“It’s the mission.” Sallinger looked at the two covered bodies, then back at the pilot. “You still in?”
“It’s what we came for,” the aviator said. “By the way, command has been calling. The prick is demanding a situation report.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. I switched him off.”
Sallinger nodded. “Let’s get going, then.”
The fever hit Oscar Cribbs a few hours later. The Black Hawk had been cruising slowly at five hundred feet, working a grid search pattern back and forth with Route 70 as a center line at first, then Route 99, steadily moving northwest. Repeated calls to the general’s team, on the frequency they’d picked up in Reno, yielded no results. When Oscar started to slide into a feverish delirium, the helicopter pilot found a radish field full of dead crops and set the bird down not far from a farm house. The Rangers cleared the house, then moved the master sergeant inside. Burke and Rooker stayed near the Black Hawk to provide extra security, and the others took up position around the house.
Inside, the captain tended to his top sergeant, trying to make him comfortable and soothing his brow with a wet rag. He left the older man’s side only once, finding Corporal Bracco and reminding him to rotate the sentries to make sure everyone ate and got some sleep, including the air crew. Otherwise, he sat watch beside Cribbs, who moaned and tossed in an upstairs bedroom as the virus took charge.
Sallinger’s pistol rested on the nightstand, within easy reach.
Cribbs survived the Slow Burn, the biological phenomenon about which they’d heard, but never actually seen. At almost exactly twenty-four hours from time of exposure, Oscar Cribbs awoke. He was tired, dehydrated, and unable to speak in anything but a harsh whisper.
Captain Sallinger held them at the farm for another day, until he was certain Oscar was strong enough to move. The master sergeant growled at his commanding officer over the delay.
“Sir, I’m not okay with you compromising the mission because of me.”
Sallinger gave him a smile and tapped the twin bars on his collar. “Tough shit, Oscar.”
“It’s not right, sir. The general-”
“Is a lot less important to me,” Sallinger said, “than my top sergeant.” Oscar grouched for a day, Sallinger grinned at him, but there was no more discussion. When they got moving the next day, the men in the squad divided the senior NCO’s gear among them, so all Cribbs had to carry was his M4 and ammunition bandolier. When he groused at and tried to bully his men, all of them – including Rooker the newbie – smiled and suggested he take it up with their C.O.
“Hoo-ah,” Cribbs muttered, knowing he wouldn’t win.
The Black Hawk returned to its grid search. There were twenty-three miles between Oroville and Chico, and the general and his team might already be in the small city, or anywhere in between. Wi
thout radio contact it was a slow search, and the Rangers knew they could easily move past their target without knowing it. For Sallinger, that knowledge was especially stressful. The general was the sole reason they were here, and if they went back to Nevada without him, the loss of their Ranger and two air crewmen would have been for nothing. It was something that didn’t sit well with the officer, so he insisted on going slow and being thorough.
Some of the searching was done from the air, over open fields or places where the Black Hawk could easily be seen and heard. Often, however, Honey-One would set down on a road while the Rangers moved off on foot to investigate clusters of houses and farm buildings. The captain wanted Oscar to stay with the chopper, and received a polite but firm rejection. Sallinger briefly toyed with the idea of ordering him to stay, and although that might help the man recover faster, it wouldn’t help his morale, and so he relented. Cribbs soldiered on without complaint. He did allow the younger men to carry most of his gear, telling them that this had been his plan all along.
Two days after he was back on his feet and working with the squad, the master sergeant was bitten.
It was wearing rotting coveralls from a potato chip vendor, a decaying, emaciated creature with mottled olive and black skin. The reeking thing stumbled out of a clump of tall bushes, fell almost on top of the master sergeant, and sank its teeth into a gap between the man’s glove and uniform sleeve, breaking the skin. Oscar screamed obscenities at the dead thing and pounded its head flat with his helmet. Then the master sergeant began walking away from the squad, pulling his sidearm from the holster at his hip, bringing the muzzle up under his chin.
“Stand down, Sergeant!” Sallinger screamed, hurling himself at the older man and yanking the pistol out of his hand. Cribbs looked at him, his eyes wet, and slowly shook his head as he held up the bitten wrist.
Once again, they found an abandoned house and waited for Cribbs to die.
He didn’t, and they learned something about the Slow Burn that they hadn’t heard; survival created immunity.
Master Sergeant Cribbs’ voice did not get better, however, remaining a raspy grumble that caused him discomfort when he spoke. In addition, his complexion began to turn the color of pale ash as the pigment fled his body. Otherwise he appeared normal – aside from some headaches he tried to hide – and his strength returned.
The search continued, and regular contact with the dead took a toll on their remaining ammo. There was no sign of the general.
Eight days after the Black Hawk departed Nevada on its rescue mission into California, (and after eight days of ignoring Major Beeman’s increasingly nasty demands for a situation report) Captain Sallinger and his men located the general and the remains of his security team.
The Black Hawk landed in the parking lot of an out-of-business car dealer off Route 99 just south of Chico, and the Ranger team moved ahead on foot. They swept through a stretch of small businesses and houses that led up to the extreme southern end of the city, encountering nothing moving other than a housecat gone feral.
And then a freak wearing the green camouflage uniform of an Air Force security policeman stumbled from behind a garage and down a driveway toward them, growling and breaking into a gallop. The soldiers held their fire, conserving ammunition, and Sallinger put the thing down with his own tomahawk. Then they began a cautious search of the area.
They found three rotting skinnies in the backyard of an adjacent house, two adults and a child, all dressed as if for a summer picnic, as well as two more undead security policemen. All five creatures were quickly dispatched. Inside the house itself the Rangers found some military packs, weapons and signs that several people had been using the house as a camp. There was no sign of their radio.
The general was bumping around a back bedroom with glazed eyes and a slack expression, his throat bitten away and exposing a blackened trachea. Oscar Cribbs, no longer afraid of infection, took the general out himself.
Sallinger was bitter. What a goat screw this had been. His maps showed an open cluster of fields just north of their position, right at the southern edge of Chico, and he called Honey-One for a dust-off. Then he and his Rangers walked a short distance through a wooded area to reach the fields. The general’s dog tags were tucked in a chest pocket.
When Honey-One reported that it was two minutes out, Sallinger’s RTO moved into the field and popped a colored smoke grenade, pitching it into the landing zone. The other Rangers crouched at the tree-line, each man lost in his thoughts about the failed mission.
Just as the Black Hawk was about to touch down, the roar of an autocannon came from the far right, and the Rangers watched in horror as the aircraft was chopped out of the sky. Across the field, Sallinger saw the muzzle flash of a heavy weapon, and the words armored vehicle hit him. A second later a five foot length of severed rotor blade, moving at high speed, sliced through the air out on the field and cut his RTO completely in half at the chest. His backpack radio was sheared in two as well.
With their helicopter a fiery, crumpled wreck and enemy armor close on the right, the remaining Rangers turned to the woods and ran.
FOUR
“And then we met you,” Sallinger said. “You know the rest.” The captain waited while Oscar removed a large pot from the fireplace before adding another log to the flames. Behind him, the master sergeant carried the pot to a long, country-style dining room table where lit candles, plates and cutlery waited alongside bowls of canned vegetables. The great room of the sprawling country house was gloomy except for the dance of shadows and firelight on the walls.
Night had fallen, and outside sentries had been placed at the four corners of the house. A cold wind was blowing down from the Sierras, sweeping across this last stretch of farm country before the land gave way to forested foothills rising steeply from the valley floor. A three-quarter moon, darting in and out behind scudding clouds, aided the sentries in their vigil.
Skye Dennison perched on the arm of a leather sofa facing the fireplace, watching the Ranger captain. She wore black fatigue pants tucked into combat boots, a sweater and insulated black and gray jacket, and a combat harness of magazine pouches over top of it. Most of the pouches were empty. An M4 assault rifle hung across her chest on a strap. Her shaved head itched from several days of stubble, concealed beneath a black knit hat. Skye had decided to grow her hair out – not too long – to help keep her head warm.
Gray-skinned and blind in her patch-covered left eye – the results of surviving the Slow Burn – her angular, once-pretty face resembled the pallor of the things that now dominated the world, the creatures she hated so very much. In that gray face, and in the remaining eye, was a hardness that went far beyond her nineteen years.
“So now you’re caught up,” Sallinger said, spreading his hands and dropping into a chair beside the fire.
Skye nodded but thought, not hardly. She had a hundred questions, and Sallinger’s story hadn’t included how he and his men had come to be at the Facility in Reno, nothing about the place itself or even what was happening everywhere else in the country. Many questions. She wouldn’t ask, though, not right now. The captain’s expression said he was waiting to hear her story. She said nothing.
Instead, her attention was drawn to the Ranger master sergeant, and more specifically to the secondary weapon always carried slung on his back, a rifle now leaning in a corner. She’d been looking at it since joining up with these men two days ago. PFC Rooker, the one with the redneck drawl, carried one like it. They were different than the M4. The young soldier had seen her looking at it yesterday and told her it was an MK-17 SCAR, a battle rifle chambered for a heavier round than the M4. His SCAR had a forty-millimeter grenade launcher attached under the barrel.
Master Sergeant Cribbs carried and used an M4 as his primary weapon, and she hadn’t yet seen him use the SCAR. His variant was fitted with a large scope and a slender, foot-long flash suppressor.
A sniper’s weapon.
Skye looked
from the rifle to the man as he headed for the front door. The firelight made his ashen face appear ghastly and dead, as her own face must look to others.
But not to Carney. He hadn’t cared.
“I’m going to start rotating them in for chow,” the sergeant told his officer. Skye thought the sound of his raspy vocal chords was like sandpaper, and hearing it made her wet her lips and wish for a drink of water. She had sounded like that once, but her normal voice had eventually returned. Perhaps she’d let the sergeant know there was an end to it, and to the pain he obviously felt when he talked. Skye remembered that, too. It had made her keep her mouth shut more often than not.
“I’ll go, too,” Skye said, rising from the arm of the sofa. “I’ll take a post so they can eat in pairs.”
“Why don’t you sit,” Sallinger said, gesturing at the table. “Get some food in you.”
“Later.” Skye followed the master sergeant out the door.
Outside in the front yard, the older soldier and the college-girl-turned-sniper stood next to each other in the moonlight for a moment, not speaking. Oscar looked at her and shook his head just the slightest, frowning. Then he pointed toward a tree about a hundred feet out from the right front corner of the house. “Relieve Bracco,” he growled, then turned away and walked in the opposite direction.
Skye watched him go. Since they’d met, the man had barely acknowledged her, and anything he did say was clipped and abrupt, always accompanied by a scowl. None of that had anything to do with damaged vocal chords, she knew. She couldn’t say why he didn’t like her, would be damned if she’d ask, and decided it didn’t matter. She also decided in that moment that she’d keep the knowledge about his painful and gravelly voice returning to normal to herself.
Corporal Vincent Bracco was a large silhouette standing beside a thick, California Black Oak, facing away from the house. Though she tried to approach quietly, Bracco turned almost at once.
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 3