Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse

by Nicholas Ryan

  “Christ! Max, run!”

  Rhonda spun on her heel and broke into a wild terrified sprint for the helicopter. There was a high-pitched scream in her throat. Max watched her flee, stunned and incredulous. He started to shout abuse, but the words died on his lips. The ghoul rose from its crouch and bounded across the park. The awry angle of the discarded camera caught the moment of gruesome horror and broadcast it into almost two million Australian homes. As shocked viewers watched in mesmerized, revolted fascination, the infected beast launched itself at Max Winslow. The weight of impact dragged the journalist to his knees like a gazelle brought down by a hunting lion. He fell screaming and twisting. He rolled onto his back. The zombie lunged for his neck, sinking its rotting teeth into soft flesh. Warm hot blood from a severed artery gushed into the air like a geyser. Winslow screamed. It was a shrill, reedy sound of naked terror.

  The ghoul crouched on Winslow’s chest and buried its gnashing jaws into the journalist’s face.

  Max Winslow died on national television, screaming in gruesome agony.

  Rhonda sensed danger an instant before another howling ghoul burst from the trees and cut off her retreat to the helicopter. The infected zombie had once been a young woman. She was wrapped in the filthy rags of a dress that had been spattered with dried blood. Her left arm hung loose from its shoulder socket. Rhonda screamed and darted away, running blindly through a dense wall of ferns… running away from the helicopter.

  Jimmy flung himself at the open passenger door of the chopper just as the Malaysian pilot began to haul on the collective control. The helicopter leaped off the ground, tilting as it lurched drunkenly to the left. Jimmy threw himself in through the door. The helicopter screwed around on its axis as the pilot wrestled for control. The engine howled and the rotors thrashed at the air. The helicopter shot skyward then suddenly flipped onto its back. It crashed into the trees and the blades of the rotors shattered into a thousand flying pieces of shrapnel. Jimmy was flung through the chopper’s shattered canopy by the impact and died in a mangled tangle of blood. The pilot lived just long enough to see a dozen infected emerge from the surrounding bushes. He died as they tore at his body, the fetid stench of their breath hot on his face.

  *

  Rhonda crashed through a wall of undergrowth and found herself at the top of a rise with the forest sloping sharply away below her. She heard the ghoul somewhere close behind, then saw a flash of its snarling face. She cried out in alarm and started down the hill, running with reckless terror.

  Within fifty yards she had lost sight of the ghoul in the dense undergrowth, and she stopped to listen. Then she saw movement to her left, and realized with a stab of raw fear that it had circled wide to set a trap for her.

  She turned and ran right, directly away from the danger, and almost immediately realized that there was more than one of the undead monsters following her. She was being hunted.

  Panic spurred her and put fresh life into her legs. She burst through a bush and ducked her head beneath low-hanging vines. The air was stifling and furnace-like. She felt her lungs burning. She leaped a fallen log but landed awkwardly. She stumbled and rolled, flailing her arms to break her fall and came up on her knees, shaken and sobbing. Her jeans were torn and the denim soaked with blood from a deep cut. Rhonda clamped her hand over the wound and grimaced. She sobbed aloud. One of the ghouls had seen her trip. It charged towards her, baying like a wild dog.

  Rhonda staggered to her feet and whirled away, trying to put distance between herself and the demented ghoul. It had been incensed into a wailing frenzy. She heard it crashing though the undergrowth behind her like a bulldozer, drawing inexorably closer. She ran on, blind with terror, her legs rubbery and weak, her breath rasping in her throat.

  The lush tropical rainforest gave way suddenly to hedgerows of dense thorn bushes that crowded her into a labyrinth of narrow winding passages. She ran doubled-over, following haphazard twists and turns until the shrubbery grew so thick that she was enveloped in disorientating semi-darkness. Razor-sharp barbs slashed her cheeks and arms, and snagged at her blouse like plucking fingers. She stopped, hunched and panting, trying to stifle the rasps of her own ragged breathing and to see through the blur of tears that smudged her vision.

  Her hair had come down from its bun and hung in sweat-plastered tendrils over her forehead. She scraped it away from her face with the back of her bleeding hands, then shivered with a paroxysm of feverish fear.

  Over the sound of her breathing, the encircling forest seemed eerily silent. She turned in a slow circle, her eyes huge and darting. With her hands she felt like a blind woman at the press of twisted hedgerow. Her fingers found a gap and she lunged for it.

  The ghoul was waiting for her, crouched on its haunches like a scavenging hyena. It pounced.

  Rhonda cried out and instinctively threw up her hands to protect herself. The vile loathsome creature bounded, hunch-shouldered, and knocked her to the leaf-covered ground. Then a second ghoul emerged into the small clearing. It squatted obscenely and watched the killing with flat snakelike eyes.

  The attacking ghoul snarled like a wild dog. Rhonda lay sprawled on her back, thrashing her legs wildly, her hands snatching at the ground for some kind of makeshift weapon to defend herself. The zombie’s jaw unhinged and hung wide open, its swollen black tongue licking at the air as if it could taste the woman’s fear.

  Rhonda screamed.

  The infected ghoul lunged for her, driven insane by madness.

  The impact of the attack crushed the last of the air from Rhonda’s lungs and knocked her senseless. For a moment she blacked out. When her vision came swirling back, she saw the hideous beast’s rotting face just inches away from hers. Rhonda tried to turn her head away but could not. Great waves of pain crashed over her until she became aware at last that she was being eaten alive. She felt something tugging at one of her legs, and then greedy hands clawed into the soft pale flesh of her stomach. A white-hot spike of agony exploded behind her eyes before her gruesome death.

  ‘BOUNTIFUL TIGRESS’ CRUISE SHIP

  DALIAN HARBOR

  The venue was different, but the faces were all the same Tong Ge reflected as he stood to address the Politburo. The conference room on Deck Five of the cruise ship was veiled in a blue haze of cigarette smoke.

  The members of the Politburo were seated on either side of the long conference table with President Xiang at one end and Minister Yi Dan at the other. Tong noticed the faces of the old men gathered around him; they were creased and rumpled with fatigue.

  “Welcome,” he began simply. “I have been asked to present an update of the progress being made to evacuate the mainland. I present the following information for your consideration.

  “The last of the private aircraft flights landed at Dalian Zhoushuizi International Airport thirty minutes ago. Our final esteemed guests should arrive within minutes. Once they are boarded, the ship’s complement will be complete. All of the other cruise ships, as you are aware, were loaded with their passengers yesterday. Those vessels now stand outside the harbor with the armada of assembled freighters and converted commercial craft.

  “There are still eighteen vessels inside the harbor waiting to be loaded. As per strict agreement, none of the workers or soldiers selected for berths on those ships will be over the age of forty-five, or under the age of six. This strict policy has been enforced for every ship that now stands at sea awaiting sailing orders. Only in the case of the luxury vessels has the age limitation not been applied. This measure ensures that no one taken aboard will be an unnecessary burden on our medical facilities or food supplies, and that all will be able to contribute to our survival as a nation.”

  It had been seen as a cruel but necessary decision. Young babies and the elderly were not considered for the armada. Over fifty percent of the selected survivors were soldiers, with the rest being young women of good age and men with educations and essential skills. Practical needs had superseded compassion – e
xcept for the wealthy and the ruling class.

  “The North Sea Fleet is approaching,” Tong Ge went on. “Warships will soon join the flotilla for protection. There are three tugboats and a harbor pilot standing by to guide our ship out through the heads of Dalian Harbor. All that is required is the order.”

  “You may alert the tugboats, Tong,” President Xiang waved his arm. “I want to be away from the harbor and on the open sea as soon as the last of our passengers arrive.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Yi Dan watched the briefing with the cunning, appraising eyes of a fox from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. Finally the wily old man spoke.

  “Tong Ge, on behalf of the Politburo and the people of China, I would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to you. It is only through your idea and your dedication that we now all stand here, and that China still survives.”

  Yi Dan stood up and began to applaud. One by one the other members of the Politburo rose to their feet. President Xiang joined them so the sound of their clapping became a thunderous tribute.

  Tong Ge blushed, and then wept tears of humble gratitude.

  STATE DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS

  WASHINGTON

  Virginia Clayton’s office was on the seventh-floor of the Harry S. Truman building in a suite lined with portraits of her predecessors and patrolled by watchful guards of Diplomatic Security Service officers.

  The office was really two separate areas: a grand outer office for receiving visitors, and a smaller, private area paneled in northern cherrywood that contained a large desk, several chairs, and a small couch. An ante-room through a discreet internal door concealed a small serviceable kitchen and bathroom.

  On the polished stinkwood desk were three phones with direct lines to the White House, the Pentagon and the C.I.A.

  The phone to the White House rang, the sound somehow discreet, as if reflecting the solemnity of the caller.

  Virginia was in the small kitchen. She came back into the office wiping her hands on a paper towel. She snatched up the phone on the third ring.

  “Mr. President?”

  “Virginia. I’m sorry for calling at this hour,” Patrick Austin’s voice sounded raw and scratchy.

  “Not at all, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State dismissed any imposition. “I was just fixing myself a light snack.”

  “Is it something you can eat on the run?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Because I need you to fly to Brussels. Tonight.”

  “Of course, sir,” Virginia didn’t need to ask why. A memo had crossed her desk an hour earlier. In truth, she had been anticipating a Presidential summons. “You want me to attend the NATO meeting?”

  “Yes,” the President said. “France has convened an emergency meeting in accordance with Article Four of the treaty, and I don’t want to leave this for our Ambassador to NATO to handle on his own. He’s still new to the job and wet behind the ears. He doesn’t know the key players well enough. I want you there to manage our side of things personally.”

  “Certainly, sir. I can leave tonight and be in Belgium tomorrow.” SecState understood the gravity of the situation. NATO had only convened a handful of such emergency meetings in its entire seventy-years of existence.

  “Let France lead the way on this Virginia, but be sure to press our views on the issue. The only way Western Europe can survive the spread of the Plague is by uniting together to fight as a cohesive force. Let them know that American troops stationed in Europe are committed to fighting alongside them, but that we can’t get more men across the Atlantic in time.”

  “You’re not ordering an immediate withdrawal of all our soldiers who are in the path of the infection, sir?”

  “No,” the President said. “There’s no time to evacuate the bases and equipment… so we might as well put a political spin on the situation. Officially, America is standing firm with our European allies.”

  Because we don’t have any other choice, Virginia filled in the words the President had left unsaid.

  “I understand, Mr. President. I’ll do my best, but you know what the Europeans are like. Their self-interests and ideological divides can make them difficult to deal with…”

  “That’s why France has to take the reins on this, Virginia. The push for a united front has to come from within their own ranks. It’s their survival at stake.”

  “Okay. Understood. I’ll push from the shadows.”

  “Good,” the President’s voice crackled over the secure line. “There is a plane already waiting for you on the tarmac at Andrews.”

  *

  The Secretary of State’s motorcade rolled through the streets of Andrews Air Force Base in the small hours after midnight, passing hangars and guard booths lit by floodlights, before finally emerging onto a vast concrete runway.

  At the end of the tarmac hunched the huge hulking bulk of a blue and white Air Force Boeing 757.

  A flight attendant stood waiting in the doorway as Virginia Clayton entered the aircraft. The woman took the Secretary of State’s coat with a professional smile.

  Inside the aircraft, to her left, Air Force personnel were squeezed into a small cabin filled with banks of computer and communication equipment. Beyond them, the pilots were going through final checks. Virginia strode down a narrow hallway on the right that led to her personal compartment. She set her briefcase down on the small desk and eyed the pullout couch for a moment. The temptation to throw herself down and relax was almost overpowering. She picked up one of the phones on her desk instead and dialed a secure number in Belgium.

  Brussels was nine hours ahead of Washington. It was just after 9 a.m. in the morning when the American Ambassador to NATO answered his phone.

  Virginia and the man spoke briefly while throughout the plane, staff and crew prepared for takeoff.

  Beyond the walls of her private compartment was the main cabin area of the aircraft, divided into separate sections for staff, security, and the Washington press corps. The media section of the plane was empty; this trip to Brussels had been hastily arranged, and the press were deliberately being excluded.

  The front area of the cabin, by contrast, was a hive of bustling activity and murmured business-like voices.

  Two tables, each with four leather chairs facing each other, dominated this area of the aircraft, and resembled the seating in some luxury train carriages. At one of the tables, State Department Foreign Service officers were setting up everything needed to establish a travelling office in the air, including links to the Operations Center. On the table opposite, three high-level State Department diplomats in dark suits were working on their laptops amidst a pile of thick briefing books.

  Shortly after midnight, the aircraft hurtled down the runway and began clawing its way into the dark star-filled sky.

  ZAMIIN-UUD BORDER CROSSING POINT

  MONGOLIA-CHINA BORDER

  “This is really not so strange for us,” Colonel Morozov said in stilted English, his voice a metallic echo through the headphones. In the background, the monotonous beat of the Mi-171SH’s rotors was numbing. “Russia had many, many thousands of troops stationed throughout Mongolia up until the end of the nineteen-eighties.”

  Nathan Power nodded his head and glanced out through one of the circular porthole windows that ran the length of the transport helicopter’s cabin. All he could see to the edge of the horizon was flat brown terrain – a dustbowl of Gobi Desert.

  “The Mongolians and the Chinese? They were never very good friends,” the Russian Colonel confided. “So we had many soldiers here in case of war. But Gorbachev changed this. The Chinese wanted us out of Mongolia and Gorbachev – he agreed. Now,” the Colonel shrugged as though the ways of world politics were beyond his understanding and interest, “we come back again because there is no more Chinese, eh?” The Colonel nudged the American in the ribs with his elbow and gave a ruthless smirk.

  Power didn’t laugh.

  The Russian Colonel
flashed a callous smile full of bad teeth, and then turned to glance over his shoulder at the rest of the troops that were being ferried southwards. They were logistics men; none of them carried weapons. Morozov grunted and sucked in a breath. The beat of the helicopter’s rotors changed in pitch and then they were descending.

  Nathan Power frowned and shot another puzzled glance out through the porthole as the ground rose quickly up to meet the helicopter’s landing gear. He could see neat rows of large canvas tents, a dozen trucks and a swarm of uniformed men. Then a thick veil of swirling brown dust enveloped the view. He pulled the headphone mic close to his mouth and spoke urgently to the colonel.

  “Is this the frontline?” he pointed down. “Are we landing at the border?”

  The Russian Colonel looked bemused. “Nyet,” he said. Then he saw the fury and frustration begin to simmer in the eyes of the American, and he went on in a heavily accented rush, repeating words that sounded like they had been memorized from a prepared script. “The Russian Government is not willing to take you to the battlefront, Mr. Power. We understand your special emissary status with the American President and NATO Command. For that reason the General has decided you cannot be permitted beyond our field headquarters position. You may report your observations from here. You will find everything you need including all necessary technology and communication facilities inside the tents.”

  Power snatched off the headphones and instantly regretted it. The sound inside the huge Russian helicopter was a piercing roar. He felt his hands clench into fists and there was a lump of bitter indignation in the back of his throat. He sat, fuming, until the helicopter landed and the clamor of the rotors slowly wound down in the dust of the Mongolian desert.