LZR-1143: Redemption

by Bryan James

  “Clear,” I muttered into the microphone, lingering by the doorway and staring at the bodies.

  It took them only moments, until I heard the footsteps approach behind me.

  “Jesus,” whispered Kate as she came into range.

  “What?” said Drexel, alert.

  “Colonel, it’s better not to see, but when your eyes adjust you’ll know. Where would the hydraulic fluid be stored?” I scanned the interior, seeing the door in the back that had been locked when I passed it before, but noticing the large lettering above it from this distance: ‘Avionics/Supplies: Authorized Personnel Only.’

  “Nevermind,” I said. “Kate, you want to keep watch? This is the only door. I’ll take the Colonel back to the supply room and check in with you in five minutes.”

  She nodded once, and I saw the pain in her eyes in a short glance. Every time she saw what this plague did—how it didn’t discriminate between adults and children—every time she saw the destruction up close, it was one more reminder that she wasn’t with her daughter.

  It was one more reminder to me that we had a bigger job to do after Seattle was finished.

  Drexel followed me as I began to walk across the quiet hangar, and I heard a softly whispered curse as his eyes adjusted enough to see the death around him.

  “What happened here?” he whispered, swallowing hard to push back the bile.

  I knew the feeling. Seemed like every day in this new world I was keeping the puke at bay.

  “Humanity,” I said shortly. “Terror, insanity, and love. All bundled together in a last grasp for life. All falling short.” I was muttering, somewhat. Slightly crazed by the sight of so many bodies of so many ages. He looked at me, confused.

  “Looks like they ran away from the terminal and holed up here,” I said, shortly, pushing a body away from the doorway to the supply room so the door could open out. Rapping on the thin metal twice with the tip of my bayonet, I waited to hear any response from inside.

  “How could they get in here? That’s a metal door.”

  I glanced at him, curious.

  “Those things are tenacious, Colonel. You ever been in a firefight or hand to hand with them?”

  The door stayed silent, and I counted off to twenty in my head.

  “No, we… I’ve seen what they can do a couple times. I’ve seen them mass together and I’ve taken a few herds out from the sky. The base yesterday was the closest I got.”

  Nothing from inside. I reached for the handle.

  “They’re persistent,” I said, realizing that the door was locked. Staring at the mechanism, I stepped back.

  “When they know there’s food in a building or a car or any damn thing, they will push and pull and claw away until the doors open or hell swallows them all. They’re like a Jenny Craig group meeting in a Krispy Kreme discount outlet… no matter how strong you are, you’re not going to stop them. It’s hardwired. Ingrained. They will eventually find a way to eat every damn thing inside.”

  I gripped the handle of the door, hoping that I didn’t have to resort to something more explosive. It was a simple mechanism with a small bolt inside—nothing heavy or reinforced. I took a breath and pulled down.

  The handle came free of the housing and rattled in my hand, trailing a wire and a bolt.

  “We’re in,” I said, pulling the door wide.

  The body fell into my arms as the door yawned open, arms flapping wildly and mangled head flopping onto my shoulder. Drexel stepped back, raising his crowbar. I stumbled once, off balance by the unexpected weight, until I found a grip and pushed, sending it back through the door into the dark room.

  I raised my weapon, pointing the wicked bayonet toward the empty space, and saying calmly.

  “Speaking of persistence,” I muttered, stepping forward and scanning.

  The body that had fallen on me was dead.

  Real dead, not dead-but-walking-around dead. I moved slowly until I was standing over the corpse. A pistol lay on the floor near the body, and I squatted down, examining the uniform. It was a TSA guard.

  Drexel walked in, looking down and then around. His eyes couldn’t distinguish movement or shapes in the intense dark inside the smaller room. No windows that I could see, and I stood up, making a quick loop of the room. No other doors, no other company.

  “Close the door and you can use a flashlight,” I said, pointedly looking away as he withdrew a light from his flight suit. I didn’t want to lose my night vision so quickly.

  “I need a couple minutes. It will be in here,” he said confidently as he began scanning the large shelves and racks of supplies.

  Kate’s voice popped into my ear suddenly.

  “We have some movement out here,” she said softly.

  “What kind?”

  “Looks like the alive kind. Cars, and some sporadic gunfire. Heading this way on the access road to the north. Can’t figure an ETA, but they’re getting louder slowly.”

  “Okay, we might be done here in a few. Had a little surprise.”

  “Living or dead?”

  “Dead,” I said, nudging the body. “Someone who was as useful in death as in life. Took care of himself while hiding in a closet listening to everyone else get torn open. Some of them probably still had their dangerous shoes on and their nail clippers in their pockets. Damn terrorists.”

  “Huh?”

  Right, she couldn’t see him.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Keep us in the loop, we’ll be out soon.”

  “Yeah, will do.”

  Drexel was true to his word, and found the ten-gallon drum within another two minutes. Kate was silent outside, and we pushed the door open and headed back outside.

  I could hear the popping sounds of gunfire as we emerged from the hangar, and Kate pointed as we joined her. I could see the outlines in the distance, with some vehicle movements and muzzle flashes.

  As soon as we emerged, Kate disappeared to ransack the hangar in search of sedatives that might help the shocked sailor, and soon radioed back.

  “Got it,” she said, voice relieved.

  I was surprised. I didn’t expect a hangar to have sedatives. I was sure we’d need to go into the terminal.

  “Seriously?”

  “All I need is something to put him down. His heart is working too hard, and he’s going to start grinding gears soon.”

  She came out of the hangar a moment later, holding up a pink bottle and smiling.

  “Benadryl?”

  “Might not seem potent, but four of these should calm him down nicely. And stop his post-nasal drip.”

  A large explosion tore through the random popping of gunfire, and the noises increased in frequency. The flame spouted into the sky, and I frowned.

  Kate tossed me the bottle, and jumped on top of a large baggage cart, peering over the shorter wall of an adjacent building. She motioned me to join her, and I climbed up, standing on the cab of the large truck, and looking off into the distance. The airport stood on higher ground, and our vantage point allowed a downhill view of a portion of town close to the premises. What I saw was disheartening.

  “Colonel, is the Western Army in control of Idaho?”

  He stared off, squinting.

  “Not exactly,” he said, “We’ve been working on getting aligned with some of the militia in this area that took the zombie apocalypse as a sign that the state of Idaho was destined to be the nation of Idaho, but we’re all fighting the same thing. We had some talks with their militia leaders, if you could call them that—really just figureheads for an anarchical cluster of gun nuts—but nothing productive. We just all agreed not to shoot at each other. Why?”

  “Because,” I said, squinting into the distance. “I think someone has reneged.”

  THIRTEEN

  The fast attack helicopters were fierce, and they were powerful.

  Hellfire missiles dropped from the sky as small arms fire tore through the night air. Cars that had been outfitted with large machine guns
and reinforced fronts and armored wheel wells exchanged gunfire with Bradleys and Humvees. The Army had the edge on weaponry. But they lacked the manpower.

  We watched from the roof of the hangar as the battle raged. We had taken the hydraulic fluid back and returned to watch the fighting.

  “What’s your status, Granger?” Drexel’s voice was flat, and his face betrayed his impatience.

  Rhodes cut in.

  “He’s in the middle of something that looks complicated. He said ten minutes.”

  A loud grumble from somewhere off microphone followed a loud pop and a crash. Then a loud curse.

  “Scratch that, make it twenty.”

  I turned back to the battle and stared as the tracers flew from the armored military vehicles, lighting the streets as figures shambled through the battle zone, getting cut down as they walked obliviously through the gunfire.

  “What the hell are they thinking?” I asked no one in particular.

  From our vantage point, we could see the Army units slowly backing into a defensive formation around a large compound nearly a half-mile from the airport. Drexel squinted in the direction of the battle, but Kate and I could see most of the movements. The militia had an overwhelming force of numbers, and with the dead mixed in, the military was slowly getting overwhelmed. The dead turned on both sides alike, but the military was forced into a defensive position, protecting something. The militia took losses, but from superior numbers with high mobility. It was clear that the military would soon be overrun.

  Fighters sprinted between firing positions, and several vehicles smoldered on the streets and in buildings where they had crashed.

  This is why we had been shot down.

  “Wasn’t there anything on the radio about this?” I asked, watching as a Cobra helicopter dove into a fray where a Humvee was pinned against the wall of a pharmacy, and strafed the attacking pickup truck with a heavy rain of metal. The men inside shattered, and the Humvee was abandoned as the fighters outside sprinted for cover behind their own lines.

  “Nothing,” he said. “But we don’t monitor the local bands, and if they didn’t have a strong enough transmitter, or their sat phone is down, or… shit, could have been a number of reasons.”

  “What about Seattle command? Shouldn’t they know of this?”

  He just frowned. “We checked in with them an hour ago. They didn’t give us a heads up or a divert order, so they must not know.”

  “Any idea what they’re fighting over?”

  “My guess?”

  I watched a helicopter spin out of the air and fall lopsided into the side of a five-story building marked with the call sign of a local radio station. The billboard on top bearing the handsome face of a local broadcaster fell on the chopper as it slid, flaming, down the face of the building.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “The train.”

  Kate turned around, making a face.

  “The train?”

  The pilot nodded, sitting down on the edge of the building.

  “There’s one way to travel in the west right now without worrying about blocked roads and fuel stops and unprotected airfields, and the Western army has control of it. We need it for fuel, food and water, hell, even heavy armor resupply—big loads that we can’t haul effectively by air—and we run it between secure facilities all throughout the west and mountains. From Boise, it stretches south and west, and from Seattle, we can get all the way to San Diego and the navy resupplies that are coming in there from all over the continent.”

  “But why are they attacking it if they want to use it? I’m assuming they want access to different areas of the country to get supplies, right? Doesn’t attacking the train make it difficult to use?”

  “My guess is that they’re making a play for a capture. They don’t want to damage the railways because they’re not sure they can fix them, so they’re trying to take the train in the station, and use it to get to Seattle or Portland or San Diego or any of the other cities up and down these lines. There’s a lot of country out here, and an armored train does a lot to open that up for you, especially as your army gets bigger and bigger and harder to control.”

  “Thank god for Amtrak, I guess,” I said, more amazed than anything else. A relic from the past—one that America had stopped putting money into a long time ago, while other nations rebuilt their railways and related infrastructure from the ground up—that relic from when we conquered the west so many years ago, was helping us do it again.

  “Colonel Drexel?” the copilot’s voice crackled in our ear buds.

  “Go ahead,” Drexel responded.

  “Granger says he’s done what he can on the leak, and we’ve finished the fluid replenishment. We need to check the lines, and do a pressure test.”

  “Okay, keep me posted.”

  “Copy that, sir. But there’s more. We just received a coded message from Seattle command. They ask that we render all possible assistance to Boise local en route. I advised that we were on station, and got the frequency for Boise’s command group. Do you want to patch through?”

  I looked at Kate as the information popped through our ear buds.

  I was torn, as I saw her look betray the same feeling. We should help them, because we could. But doing so risked the larger purpose at hand, because it risked our lives.

  “Colonel…”

  “Put me through,” he said, cutting me off.

  “This is Major Tom Gaffney,” a harried voice came through on the radio, the sound of gunfire clear and loud behind him. A large explosion in the distance was amplified through the open channel.

  “Major? This is Colonel Greg Drexel and we received information from Seattle command on your situation. We are prepared to assist with aerial support, do you copy?”

  Static took over the line for several seconds, then, “Copy that, Colonel. Much obliged. We are getting hit hard, and the train is still a good hour from being ready to go. We are evacuating a large number of civilians from town, and the militia hit us while we were engaged in transport ops. We need some more time.”

  “Copy that,” another large explosion made the Colonel flinch.

  I looked at Kate again.

  Civilians.

  Children.

  That changed everything.

  “Colonel, I don’t want to be a pest, but the faster you can render assistance, the better. One of your winged friends helped us take out a large herd of those things a couple days ago, but we’re seeing larger groups of stragglers coming through our lines right now. That means we’re close to another group. We can’t take another hit from them while we’re holding off the militia. We don’t have the ammo for it. If another herd gets here before we’re on the train, we’re goners.”

  Drexel’s voice was calm, and it was severe.

  “Major, as soon as I’m in the air, I will do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen. Drexel out.”

  FOURTEEN

  Ky was waiting for us when we got back to the plane.

  “What’s going on?” she asked us in an anxious tone. Romeo stood next to her, tail wagging anxiously, and a tennis ball dangling inappropriately from his slobbery mouth.

  “Nothing, we just need to do something on our way after we take off.” I kept my voice light, not wanting to worry her. But then I realized, if there was one person on this plane who would relish getting back into a fight, it would be her.

  “What are we doing?” she asked.

  “We’re going to help some kids out of a tight spot.”

  Her face relaxed, and she nodded at once in approval.

  Kate had already given the stricken young man his dose of Benadryl. He still lay curled up in the corner of the plane adjacent to the bulkhead of the flight deck. But he was finally sleeping, and I saw his chest rise and fall slowly.

  Drexel and his crew were furiously getting the plane ready to take off. Rhodes had stationed himself next to the window looking toward the main terminal. We had told him about the f
ight that was raging and he was eager to join the fray. He would be damned if some up-start militia in bumblefuck Idaho would rebel against the country he had lost his family to serve.

  He was staring intently out the window, eyes locked on to the distance, when his voice rose slightly.

  “What do you say about expediting our departure, friends?”

  I shot to the window, knowing what he was going to report. Outside the windows, the engines began to rumble. Then, the propellers started to turn.

  Rhodes was staring down at a portion of the interstate that ran past the airport towards the city—to where the battle raged now. Toward where fire shot into the sky, and flames and tracer rounds lit up a quiet evening.

  He was staring at a massive herd of creatures using the interstate as the fastest way to get to their dinner. And a large number of them had just separated from the herd, and were heading in our direction.

  “Colonel…” I began, but he interrupted me over the communication system, even as I felt the plane rumble forward and the engines grow louder as power was added to the throttle.

  “We’re outbound now, folks. Granger, let’s make sure all our toys are ready to be played with. We need to make some things go boom.”

  As the plane reached the runway, I was slammed back in my seat as power was added to the engines, and we began rocketing towards the end of the runway. A severe rattle shook the cabin as two engines on one side of the plane compensated for only one on the other.

  Granger moved quickly to the weapons as the plane shot into the air at a 40 degree angle, moving to the 25mm that had saved our asses in D.C. with its 7,000 rounds a minute ferocity.

  The plane leveled off, and I peered out the window. In the cockpit, Drexel had locked in to the frequency that the Boise command was using, and the raspy exchange of coordinates, calmly delivered in the midst of pure chaos on the ground, was unnerving.

  “Six five, on the ground.”

  “Copy, coming to station. Altitude check. Adjusting coordinates. Guns, status?”

  “Twenty-five is up, sir. Forty is loading. Half a mike to station, we’ll be ready.”

  “Copy that. Boise command, we are half a mike to station. Notify personnel of incoming, over.”