by Bryan James
SIX
We dressed hurriedly, and grabbed our go bags, which had been packed for weeks. Larger backpacks full of gear and supplies waited for us, and we would transfer our meager personal belongings—really just trinkets and underwear at this point—when we suited up.
“Mike, I can’t leave not knowing…” she began, as she pulled the lace tight on her sneaker. I interrupted, know where she was going.
“Yes, you can. You know she is fine. She is somewhere in this building pouting, and we cannot miss this plane. You know that if they called this up early, it means there is something urgent about the flight or the schedule or something else went sideways and we have to adjust.”
I grabbed her arm gently as she walked past, locking eyes and lowering my voice.
“She will be fine. This is it, though. This is our chance. Not only to make a big goddamned dent in this plague, but to get to the West coast. To your daughter.”
She pulled her eyes away and nodded, clearly torn between the two directions. But she opened the door and waited for me to grab my bag and join her.
We ran down the hall to the supply locker in which we had been introduced to our gear the day before. We pulled on the equipment and stowed our gear in the larger bags. Our weapons were packed and placed next to the bags, and they disappeared with several NCO’s en route to the rooftop helipad. Captain Williams appeared at the door, unruffled and staring again at his ever present clipboard.
“What the hell,” said Kate, and I seconded the sentiment as I tried to untangle the thick cord attaching the earpiece to the collar of the jacket.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, knowing the answer before I finished.
“There was an… attack… on the forward operating base where the AC-130 was stationed. It had to get into the air early as a precaution. It was going to land again after the danger had been neutralized, but…” He trailed off, seeming to falter, searching for words to describe what had happened.
“How many?” I asked softly, standing up and settling the large machete on my hip, opposite the side arm on my right hand side.
“There were nearly three thousand men and women at the airfield, nearly a third of whom were refugees. Our plane got off half fueled, which is better than most. Several of the smaller planes have been redirected, and several more had to find alternative landing arrangements. They came at the airstrip from the only side that was not heavily fortified. Based on initial estimates, there were more than fifty thousand of them. They came out of nowhere. The reports stopped only ten minutes after the initial contact. It was a massacre.” His voice was still cold and detached.
This man had never been outside. I knew this. You couldn’t talk about the destruction and carnage these godless bastards left behind without emotion.
“Why wasn’t the last side fortified? Where did they attack from?” Kate asked as she shrugged her pack into place.
His voice remained even, but as we followed him out the door, he said almost too softly to pick up in the clatter of the hallway, “The lake. They came out of the damn lake.”
My head shot around at Kate and our eyes met. This was new.
“Captain, how…” But he interrupted.
“The general will brief you quickly on this, and on several other complications. Suffice to say we were not totally prepared for these circumstances and we are adjusting as best we can. Please, walk quickly.”
We covered the distance to the general’s office as quickly as we could, dodging carts of ammunition and food, and scurrying service members. He was quick to greet us as we came in, and got to business immediately.
“Here’s the situation. The plane is inbound, ETA is an hour twenty. That leaves you ten minutes before you take off. Our sniper team just took off, and is getting into position now, so you will have that cover if the weather allows. The drones are inbound, but they might not have time to do as thorough a job as we had hoped. We have boosted their payload somewhat to make them more attractive, but the biggest complications are that we have lost the cover of darkness, and that we have a massive problem with weather. And there ain’t jack shit I can do about either problem.”
“What’s the weather problem?” I was disturbed about operating in the daylight. The effects of the vaccine unnerved me, and it was outright painful to be in full sunlight.
“Fog,” he replied simply.
“Thick, unrelenting and soupy fog. It’s not a problem for the plane. They can land on instruments. But you folks are going to be totally on visual and unless it breaks, your sniper cover is going to be for shit. Worse, we can’t tell if the drones are having any effect. We are flying blind, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
“But if we can’t see them, they can’t see us either, right?”
He nodded once, but stared at us both.
“That’s true. But there are only four of you. There’s damn near a million of them. Only one of them has to get lucky.”
“General, I feel pretty good about guaranteeing that we will do our best to keep that from happening. I don’t intend to end up in the rotten belly of a corpse today. You can bank on it.”
“Good then. You’re ready to go.”
We moved quickly to the roof, where the door opened into a blindingly sunny day—a day that for anyone other than us might have been gloomy and gray. A thick soup of fog lay on the city, and the slowly turning rotor blades of the Blackhawk helicopter were barely visible to us as we approached from only fifty feet away.
The river, the city, and the skyline were all shrouded in mist. Below, through my thick sunglasses pulled over the top of my balaclava, I watched the creatures stir and mill about. I shivered involuntarily.
The only thing that made those things creepier was a nice thick layer of fog that lent them all that ‘fresh out of a nightmare’ special effect. It was never more apparent to me that earth was just a waiting room for them before the gates of hell.
Our weapons waited in the chopper, and we turned once more as the general stopped walking, raising his voice to be heard over the slowly increasing rotor blades.
“I was never one to put much stock in the usefulness of celebrities, Mr. McKnight. But I will say this—I think you might be able to pull this off. I wish you both well, and may God be with you both. Stay safe, and no pressure or anything, but… we’re all counting on you. We need to figure out how to beat this thing, and get back on our feet, and that means beating what’s inside you right now.”
He raised his hand and made a rotating gesture and the blades spun faster as the pilots responded to his order by spooling up the turbines.
“Godspeed!” he said, not turning around as he walked away into the mist, disappearing before he reached the access door.
We quickly strapped into the seats and donned the internal headsets over our balaclavas. Our two escorts, a pair of Rangers named Clifton and Rhodes—I wasn’t even sure which was which—sat on either side of the cabin. The smaller of the two men—Clifton, I thought—smiled largely and extended his hand.
“Glad to meet you, sir. Seen all your movies, and heard about some of your recent shit. Pleased to be in on this shit with you.” He blew a bubble in the chewing gum in his mouth, and licked the residue from his thick beard.
“Even if you are crazier than honey skivvies at a bee farm.”
A what? In a where?
I needed to get out more.
The large man, also sporting a thick beard, simply stared at us as the helo rose slowly from the roof, fog split by the blades and then quickly merging back together as we tilted forward with a lurch and moved toward what I could only assume was the river.
It was surreal, the sense of floating through white clouds with nothing above or below, when the whole time we knew exactly what awaited us below. Millions of creatures, bent on ripping the flesh from our bones and moving on to the next human being until no more of us were left.
My thoughts drifted to Ky, and I wished for her safety, and her sanity. W
e were all she knew, and now, just because of a fit of teenage acting out, she had missed seeing us off. I resigned myself to the fact that we would probably never see her again, but I felt comfortable in her safety. If anything in the world would survive, it was the building behind us.
As we passed a certain point over what was likely the river, we could see a faint glow of red and orange on the right hand side of the helicopter, and we knew it was the still-spewing gas pouring from the 14th Street bridge. Somewhere ahead of us was another still-burning fire, casting light and heat on a larger area on the other side of the river.
Beside me, Kate watched the pilots, grim faced and concentrated, as they stared at a heads-up display that gave them a readout of altitude and velocity. A GPS unit gave precise coordinates as they sought to locate a small landing spot on an abandoned island in the middle of a river covered in fog. I leaned back against the hard seat back and thanked god for the taxes I had paid to train these guys.
The chopper lurched once, then again, harder. The pilots moved their hands quickly on the controls and I looked to the sides, frantically, then back to Kate, who was audibly cursing softly under her breath. My eyes fell on the large man across from me who had not moved, nor spoken. Slowly, one eyelid came down and back up again in a slow-motion wink. Then he smiled.
“Done this before, have you?” I asked.
He just smiled and closed his eyes, as if sleeping.
“We were rotated back from Afghanistan right after this shit happened, man,” the slightly feral soldier said loudly, popping another bubble. “We’ve been in two helo crashes together. One pretty bad. Ain’t no thing, a run in the fog. Kinda relaxing actually.”
“You see these things there? In Afghanistan?”
He nodded, leaning forward.
“Just once. The shit had just started to break out, and we were all en route to the airport. Big camps around Kabul had broken down, and the Embassy was closing up. Just a huge shit-storm of people heading to the planes. When we got to the airport, we thought there was a riot. You know, people fighting for tickets, spots on the outbound flights, and all that.”
He blew a large bubble and slapped the larger man’s knee.
“Rhodesy here was riding shotgun in one of the Humvees when they figured out it wasn’t a riot.”
The man grunted once.
“Was it the virus?”
“Fuck an A, man! Come in on a flight an hour ago. They put the guy in a cell, but he had bitten a guard and those idiots didn’t know what to do about it. Long story short, the whole damn airport was SNAFU. We didn’t bother with suppression, we just blasted into the military side and loaded up. The Taliban fucks used it as an opportunity to take a shot at us. But the fuckers only succeeded in taking down the fencing between the tarmac and the road, so the deadheads just poured into the operations area. On the plus side, the Taliban didn’t realize what they had on their hands until it was too late—they thought the crowd at the airport was just a pro-Taliban rally. Stupid shits.”
“Everyone get out?”
He just looked at me and blew a bubble.
“Five thousand of us. Ten planes. Country going to shit. What do you think?”
I stared out the window as the rotor noise changed as we pitched back quickly, and suddenly trees were visible to either side. A plastic rod appeared no more than five meters from the open door, and green grass rose up to meet the belly of the machine. A slight thump announced our landing, and the two Rangers detached their harnesses and disappeared from the cabin, moving to secure the landing zone as one of the pilots turned.
“ETA on your next ride is about ten minutes, folks. Good luck.”
I nodded and spoke a brief thank you, following Kate from the cabin and stumbling slightly under the awkward weight of the large pack and the brighter light outside the helicopter. The larger soldier, Rhodes, stood next to the pole that I now recognized as a tee, and the chopper lifted off quickly from the green, buffeting us with strong currents of air and dirt.
Long grass covered the ground, unkempt and wild, and the trees were shaggy, retaining half of their normal load of foliage in the fall air, but the form of the golf course was clear. Kate followed Clifton as he checked his handheld GPS and nodded away from the small circle of slightly shorter grass.
“Stow your firearms,” said the large man beside me suddenly, hefting a large weapon with an impressive silencer. “If we see any geeks, I’ll take point. Quieter.”
Hard to argue with that logic, I thought, and slung my Pathfinder across my chest, pulling the machete instead.
In front of us, Kate had also pushed her Pathfinder aside in favor of the large blade, and we moved silently through the grass, the Rangers scanning the perimeter professionally.
As we passed through a small copse of trees, past an overturned golf cart with mildew creeping along its length, and onto another fairway, Clifton’s hand shot up into a fist, and we stopped. He motioned to the ground and we fell flat, the grass barely long enough to hide our profiles.
Ahead, a group of more than twenty creatures was shuffling past, all of them following the same course, parallel to our own, back the way we had come.
They had heard the chopper.
Behind me, I heard the slow, barely perceptible movement of what I knew was Rhodes keeping them in his sights. They moved as quickly as they could, an odd assortment of people—a groundskeeper and a firefighter among them, along with an assortment of suits and blue-collar attire—all fixated on the sound that had so recently dissipated. They slowed abruptly, as if realizing the noise was gone.
They were only twenty meters away, barely at the edge of the visibility limit. If they had moved only a few more meters, we could have left.
They stopped.
The creature closest to us turned its wizened, blood-caked face toward us slowly, large wasted eyes scanning slowly. I knew they didn’t see well. I knew they needed more than an outline of a body in the fog.
I hoped that I was right.
In the distance, there was a sudden change in the eerie silence. A dull buzzing intruded on the forced silence of the golf course, and a quiet “Fuck me” filtered into my ear. “The boat’s here.” Clifton’s voice was calm, and he switched to a louder voice.
“You have ‘em, Rhodesy?” The boat was getting louder. And it was approaching us from the other side. We were between the zombies and the river.
They lurched forward.
Toward us.
“You know I do.”
That was the final word. Heads just began popping.
There was no better way to describe it. There was a whisper from the Rangers’ rifles, then a plop. Then again. Then again. Twenty became fifteen, and fifteen dwindled to ten. They fell as fast as they could pull their triggers, arms moving their guns mechanically, as if they were robotic killing machines.
As the last five moved within range of my machete, I pushed forward and took the first through the neck. The blade barely vibrated as the head flipped over itself and fell to the ground, the mouth still clicking teeth together as it bit into the dirt.
My second backhand swipe was messier, and took the small, damaged woman in the cheek, cutting the lower half of her jaw loose from a face that had once been pretty.
Her head whipped sideways from the forced of the blow, then collapsed on her neck as the bullet from Rhodes’ gun snapped her head back suddenly. Her light summer dress, thickly crusted with a layer of gore and dirt, seemed nevertheless to float to the ground in slow motion. We turned quickly toward the sound of the small boat and ran.
My pack slammed heavily against my back as we moved through the fog, moisture condensing on my sunglasses and on my neck beneath the thick fabric of the protective suit, the sound of the river now loud in the mist, though seemingly muffled by the thick, opaque gray. Clifton had disappeared ahead, slightly outrunning Kate who was still well within the visibility range. Ahead, the unruly grass turned slowly into weeds and cattails, flow
ing down to a six-foot chain link fence, half buried in a thick, marshy mud and the lapping, thick water of the Potomac.
“River’s been rising slowly over the last few weeks,” said Clifton over the radio, even as he took a small torch from a cargo pocket and began cutting the metal. “Pumps underneath the city failed a while back, and the swamp’s been making a comeback.”
I remembered my American history enough to register what he was talking about.
D.C. had been built, somewhat foolishly, on a former swamp. Massive sets of pumps beneath the city and along the river helped keep the river at bay, and the swamp from making a triumphant comeback.
In some ways, it was fitting. Let the sulfurous, filthy mud retake a city that was utterly full of shit.
Kate stood at the edge of the weeds, feet from the water. She was staring into the distance, watching the single light from the small inflatable boat grow closer. I walked forward and stood beside her, staring at the approaching outline, which quickly materialized into a solid form with two standing bodies on board. Then I noticed that she wasn’t looking at the boat. She was staring several meters to the left.
“What are you looking for?” I asked, locking my eyes on the same location. A small ripple disturbed the water, but the fog continued to push across, the movement obscuring anything else.
She shook her head slightly, and I heard her breath heavily.
“Nothing I guess. I just thought I saw something. I’m just jumpy from being inside so long. And I’m worried about Ky.”
I put my hand on her shoulder and tried to meet her eyes, but through the thick sunglasses, all I could do is face her. She turned her head back toward me for a split second, and everything seemed to happen at once.
“Fence is down, let’s start mov — Shit! Mother f—-” The quick whisper of rounds being fired on semi-automatic stopped with a quick gurgling sound.
The sound of the inflatable boat scratching across the weeds almost obscured the heavy sound of a body sinking under the water in a thrashing of green and black. A weapon discharged in a silence puff of displaced air, and Rhodes’ large form was next to me, gun scanning the water as the two men on board the boat jumped down and toward the fence.