Although Jaime had already killed in order to survive, she derived no pleasure in pulling the trigger on a living person. She aimed for the A-pillar to account for the Land Cruiser’s forward movement, steadied her breathing like Logan had taught her, and squeezed off three closely-spaced shots.
The first 5.56 hardball slug passed through the driver’s neck, severing his carotid, and then shattered the passenger window. The second round missed altogether. Her third bullet was a little low. It snapped his clavicle, then caromed downward and burrowed deep into the driver’s left lung. Mortally wounded, the man’s hands automatically went to his neck, and all control of the vehicle was lost. His foot inadvertently floored the accelerator, sending the big SUV plowing through two lengths of barbed wire before becoming wedged between two stately firs.
“Hold your fire,” Duncan barked into the two-way. He snatched up his field glasses. Gonna be a hell of a cleanup, he thought as he scrutinized the burning and leaking vehicles. The orange motorcycle was also ablaze, the intense heat fusing its aerodynamic fairing to the pavement.
Duncan got on the radio and asked the group for a consensus on what their next move should be. He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but when the fella started cutting the fence the line had been crossed. Duncan truly felt he had been left with no other choice.
Upon Gus’s insistence, the group stayed in place for another thirty minutes; by then when nothing had moved, they opened fire on the handful of flesh eaters that remained in and around the kill zone. When that was done, Chief and Gus set off to track down the small number of rotters that found their way onto the property.
Duncan walked the road while keeping a good distance from the black Land Cruiser that was now sitting on bare rims in a pool of molten rubber.
“Mr. Winters... wait up,” Lev called out. “I want to talk.”
Slowing his pace, Duncan ran a hand through his thinning hair, Suddenly he felt at least a hundred years old. He looked at the row of bodies. A bunch of misguided men who had drawn their final breaths just minutes ago. He removed his glasses, plucked his handkerchief from a pocket, and wiped the cordite from the lenses.
“Yeah Lev, what’s up?” Duncan asked.
“I think we just created a larger problem.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I looked at the dead guys. I only recognized a couple of them from the attack on your neighbor’s place.”
Duncan donned his glasses and gave Lev’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Well, that’s a couple of them that aren’t going to bother us again. And the rest are dead by association. I had a feeling that Chance wasn’t going to be the last sacrificial lamb sent our way”—he gestured towards the corpses, then went on—“and those inept fools lying there alongside him pretty much proves my point.”
There was a moment of silence.
Duncan watched Lev scan the bodies, maybe trying to come to some type of a conclusion. “Spit it out, Lev,” he finally said. "What are you getting at?”
“There were a lot of hard-looking individuals down at the Gudsons. I’ve seen those kind of folks use some of the same kind of tactics in the sandbox. Send invalids, the infirm... even kids to do their dirty work. Soften the target so to speak. Then the hardcore jihadis join the fight... the kind that possess a modicum of discipline, not just the usual spray-and-pray type of jihadist.”
“I would have to agree. We haven’t seen their A game by a long shot.” Duncan paused to collate his thoughts. “So we let them have Huntsville and Eden for that matter. We block the road and bolster our defenses. Then we take the helo up and go on a real foraging mission.”
“That brings me to my last question,” Lev said with a tilt to his head. “Who made you boss?”
Duncan shrugged. “If you had any better ideas you shoulda spoken up.”
“Didn’t need to,” replied Lev.
A fusillade of gunfire rang out, then echoed into silence.
Duncan didn’t acknowledge the sharp reports. “And why is that?” he asked. He let his arms fall to his sides and leaned against the silver Toyota.
“Because, without a Bradley fighting vehicle at my disposal, that’s the same way I would have set up that ambush.” He paused before he asked the burning question. “Where’d you learn that skill set?”
“Contrary to popular belief, Uncle Sam’s sent fellas off to other wars,” Duncan said. He looked away, remembering the fallen, and wondered how it was that he was still on this earth. “And just recently I found myself on the wrong end of a similar ambush outside of Boise. That one didn’t end well for a few of the survivors in our group.”
“Sorry to dredge that up,” said Lev. “And as far as my boss comment... no worries on my part. As far as the rotters go... they are going to be a problem for us for a long time to come, but the good thing is they’re somewhat predictable. It’s the humans I’m worried about, and you and I both know this is only one battle in the coming war between the remaining.” He turned to walk away, but Duncan grabbed his shoulder once again.
“I’m not trying to step on anyone’s toes. As far as I am concerned, we are all equals here. But we are all going to have to sit down and decide how we want to proceed.”
“What do you mean by proceed?”
“If we are ever going to enjoy any sense of security in our little neck of the woods, we will have to go on the offensive.”
“Understood,” Lev said.
“Lots of work still to be done here,” Duncan said, changing the subject.
“Hopefully the fellas holding down the compound will save us a couple of warm ones.”
The men shared a laugh and went back to work cleaning up their little stretch of 39.
Schriever AFB
The sun warming her face, Brook stretched out on a folding chaise lounge she had pilfered from the Family Resources building.
Raven was blazing around the cement walkways on her new mountain bike. She would zip by and rattle off the newest lap to her mom, then disappear from view and reappear from between another of the Quonset huts moments later, logging yet another notch in her belt.
“Twenty-three, pretty impressive!” called Brook as Raven blurred by with Max close behind.
She turned the white rose over in her hands and wished she knew what tomorrow was going to throw at her. It was after noon, and she had already tried to hunt down Wilson and the others and come up short. No matter. They would learn soon enough that today was a no go. ‘Circumstances that were out of her control’ is what she would tell them. Not a lie but not necessarily the whole truth either. Since the kids were not on a need to know basis, this didn’t trouble Brook at all. With the terrorists still on the loose, Shrill had kept the base on lockdown.
Nobody was going anywhere , Brook thought glumly. The thriving metropolis that Schriever was not, more than assured her that she’d bump into the others sooner or later.
Chapter 64
Outbreak - Day 16
National Microbiology Laboratory
Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada
As Cade picked his way along the blood-slickened layer of rotting corpses, every step he made forward caused the bodies to shift and slide atop one another. He paused equidistant to both landings with one boot grinding into a dead woman’s neck and the other planted firmly on a first turn’s bloated stomach. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Lopez enter the stairway behind the group. The stocky operator pulled his NVGs over his eyes and eased the door shut, enclosing them all in the tomb-like stairwell.
The civilians’ frightened luminous eyes stared back at Cade, and one by one green beams lanced the air as Cross, Tice, and Lopez toggled on their lasers. And as Cade stood in the dark, tamping down his own rising fear, he toggled on his own laser and regarded the dead Zs underneath his boots.
Rendered in green by the NVGs, slack masks of death stared up at him like nightmares from a Boris Karloff flick. Hands frozen in death, skeletal and grotesque, seemed to be clawing at him from u
nder the mass. And the stench, a thousand times worse now that the dead had been draining onto the stairs for several minutes, set his salivary glands off. With acidic fluids assaulting his throat and nose he swallowed, fighting off the urge to puke. Then a hand clapped his shoulder, mercifully returning his runaway mind to the task at hand.
Cade switched the M4 to his right hand and used the wall to steady himself as he leaped to the landing. He hit the cement like he’d been taught in basic training, letting his knees compress to absorb the energy of his hundred and eighty pounds, but when his boots made contact with the accumulated slurry of blood and bile his forward momentum brought him down to all fours.
With fluids dripping from his knee pads and the off hand which he had used to arrest his fall slickened with who knows what, he finally regained his balance and scrambled to his feet. One more flight, he told himself wearily as the footfalls from below grew louder and closer. Keeping his head near to the floor, he craned his neck around the handrail and eyeballed the next flight down, where he spotted a large number of zombies clambering towards him.
He turned and used hand signals to silently warn Cross, who in turn signaled Tice and Lopez of the impending contact.
With the possibility of having to scramble over another mound of rotting Zs looking more and more certain, Cade was determined to drop as many of them as he could as far down the stairs as possible. He picked the closest one of the Zs and painted its forehead with the laser. He calmed his breath and sent two 5.56 rounds tumbling into the monster’s brain, which in turn pitched it heels over head into the undead mass below. He shifted his aim right and punched out a flesh eater’s eyes with one impressive double-tap.
The mournful moans and hissing started a heartbeat later, and then increased in intensity after the second staccato volley from his M4.
Determined to get everyone out of the stairwell alive, Cade pushed forward, firing as he went. Over the constant softened reports of his suppressed carbine, he started to hear new sounds that let him know the strobe light effect of his muzzle flash, combined with the darkened claustrophobic confines of the stairwell, had begun to take a toll on the survivors. There was crying and whimpering and he could clearly make out more than one voice praying openly and loudly.
Standing three stairs up and to the right of Cade, Cross had leaned over the railing and was engaging the rear echelon of the undead throng. White-hot flashes lanced from his MP7 as he swept its laser overtop of the Zs, raking them right to left with 4.6x30mm dome shredders.
Cade looked up and right as he changed magazines and thought: Good shooting, Agent Cross. In the green glow he could also see the three scientists arm in arm and kneeling on the stairs behind the big-boned Secret Service agent. He shifted his gaze behind them and noticed that Tice and Lopez had successfully kept the civilians moving, and they too were nearing the landing.
“Let’s move,” Cade bellowed as he seated a new magazine, let the bolt fly forward, and worked his way further downstairs. When he made the final landing it was littered with spent brass and dead Zs. The door in front of him had a plastic sign embossed with a big letter M, and protruding below it were a series of bumps that he presumed spelled out mezzanine in braille.
He fired half a magazine—fifteen shells—blindly down the stairs into the dead, hoping that a few found their mark.
He heard Brook’s voice in his head saying, “Lift with your knees,” as he reached down and hauled a cold corpse from in front of the door and sent it tumbling into the moaning Zs below. He tried the door handle. Locked.
“Back up a few stairs,” he called out to Cross, who was swapping out for a fresh magazine.
There was no time to bring Tice forward to scope the door, he reasoned. Nor was there time to pick the lock. So he improvised. He backed up so that he was at an oblique angle to the door. He put the laser dot an inch to the right of the brushed metal handle and then fired a single round where he presumed the locking mechanism engaged the jamb. He tried the handle. Still locked. The single shot had had no effect. So he took a step back and quickly squeezed off two more shots and was rewarded with a few slivers of light and a quarter-inch of give to the door near the bolt.
A guttural moan drew his attention away from the door to the flesh eaters on the stairs. A rowdy mop of black hair appeared first, and then a pallid forehead bobbed to and fro as its eerie green eyes darted about in the dark searching in vain for some sort of prey.
The laser sliced the air and the dot wavered between the Zs eyes for a tick before Cade caressed the trigger and sealed the deal. The thing’s head snapped back from the impact and green flecks of bone and liquefied brain erupted rearward, peppering the wall behind it. Cade drained his magazine at more bobbing heads, slammed a new one in the well and charged a round, all in seemingly the same motion. Then, with a buffer of fallen Zs slowing down the column, he reared back and delivered a powerful kick to the door. With the resulting vibration still shivering his bones, the door flew open and he burst from the dark and into the wide open mezzanine full of windows and glorious sunshine. He recovered his balance, flipped his NVGs up, and took in the full scope of the loft built within an atrium.
Fifty yards to the fore, quad escalators that he guessed normally brought people up from the ground level were unmoving. As he watched, two Zs filed between the closely-spaced rubber handholds and stepped clumsily from the metal treads and onto the cement mezzanine level terrace. Seeing this, and fearing more were on the way, likely drawn by the gunfire and his door kicking, Cade looked around for the sky bridge.
Tice emerged from the stairway, followed closely by Cross and his charges. As soon as Lopez exited, he turned and planted his back against the gunshot door, slid down onto his haunches, and wedged his combat dagger between the door’s bottom and the floor, effectively locking the creatures inside—he hoped.
As Cade moved forward, he studied the entrance to the glass sky bridge which branched off to the right thirty feet from him. There didn’t seem to be a gate or anything else that would keep them from crossing over to the parking lot side. Whether the other end was locked or not would remain to be seen. And if it was locked, and couldn’t be picked, no problem, Cade thought. That’s what he’d brought det cord for.
Behind him, a semicircle of walking dead, likely drawn by the door banging open and then slamming shut again, had rounded the corner and flanked the group on the left, catching them unaware.
One of the civilians, a mousy-looking redhead who looked to be in her late twenties, was caught in their clutches before anyone had a chance to react.
Tice brought his rifle to bear first, but not before he witnessed, simultaneously, the woman’s throat being torn out and Andy bravely and inexplicably inserting himself into the melee.
Tice fired a dozen rounds into the Zs that were feeding on her supine body and then ended her suffering with one shot to her temple. Blood, ten shades brighter than her hair, instantly began to pool around her head as the rest of the dead largely ignored the living and pounced on her still-twitching body.
Andy unleashed a war cry and delivered a kick to the nearest of the creatures that did nothing but draw its interest. In seconds he was taken down by a handful of the snarling beasts. His shrill screams resonated off the glass ceiling above him as Lopez emptied a full magazine into the pig pile, making sure to walk a few into the would-be hero’s clean-shaven head.
Cade shook his head in disbelief. He couldn’t believe, how, in just a handful of seconds he had witnessed Mister Murphy—of Murphy’s Law fame—throw a ninety-five mile-per-hour fastball at his chin. “We’re about to be surrounded,” he warned his team. Then he called for exfil. “Jedi One-One, how copy?”
“Gaines here,” the general calmly replied.
“I need air support on station,” Cade said. He let his M4 hang from its sling and drew the Glock 17, then dropped a number of Zs that had angled between the group and the sky bridge.
“Roger that. One-Two is two mikes ou
t.”
Somewhat relieved at the much needed good news, Cade waved to get Cross’s attention, called him and the others forward, and then started off at a slow trot towards the sky bridge. Keeping his head on a swivel, he reestablished comms with Gaines. “We are going to shoot our way out of here, cross the road via the sky bridge, and somehow get to the entryway. The road running between the guard shack and the sky bridge, I believe, is the safest place for the exfil,” said Cade as he dropped a couple more Zs at the top of the escalator.
“I concur,” stated Gaines. Then Ari’s voice crackled in Cade’s earpiece. “Anvil Actual. This is Ari in One-One. I will have no problem putting my bird down there. But with those trees lining the drive there’s no way One-Two can pull it off right there. Those two rotors give the Osprey a helluva wingspan. How copy?”
“Roger that,” said Cade. “I’ll take care of the trees. Just give me a couple of mikes to get down there, then watch our flanks with the mini-gun. I’ll pop purple smoke when the LZ is prepped.”
“Copy that,” Ari replied as he wondered what the hell the brash operator had up his sleeve.
Gaines’s voice edged in over the comms. “Anvil Actual, do you have the HVTs with you?”
“Yes Sir. We have three high value targets and sixteen others.”
“Sixteen others?” Gaines said incredulously. “If you can’t clear an LZ big enough for One-Two, then you must be prepared to leave them.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Cade saw that Tice was handling the monsters to his left flank, and Cross and Lopez were busy ushering the civilians away from the feeding frenzy and towards the sky bridge.
“I’m not leaving them behind,” Cade said sharply. He went into a combat crouch and rounded the corner with the Glock held in a two-handed grip. He stared down the triangular-shaped glass walkway—except for two Zs about twenty feet in front of him, it was clear the rest of the way to the elevator on the far end.
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