He pointed again southwest. “That place is going to be the busiest spot on the planet for a while, and we’re going to have our hands full. Because it will be very noisy out there, and those people aren’t going to be focusing on us, they’re going to have to look after their own welfare.”
“The deads are going to come out of the boonies,” Ron said.
“Absolutely.”
“And we’ll have to hold fast.”
“What you saw yesterday from that single jet coming in and putting down…that’s nothing. There will be at least a couple of dozen flights in and out of Douglas to Houston. Fuel. Parts. People. All manner of material is going to arrive and leave and arrive again. We’re going to have to fight again, because I have seen satellite reconnaissance of what lurks in those forests and along those weed-choked streets and roads in all of those towns around us. And it’s not pretty.”
“So. What? We batten down the hatches? Wait it out?”
“I wish it was going to be that easy. But the fact of the matter is that we’re going to have to end up taking the battle to the enemy. And we won’t be able to count on our new arrivals for any help. Not now. Not for a while. It’s going to seem like they’re an awful liability with nothing give back to us. But we’ll just have to deal with it until they can throw in with the rest of us.”
“How long do we have before the shit hits the fan?”
“I think the fan blades are already sticky,” he smiled. “But I will be speaking to someone. Out there at Douglas. But I figure we’ll have a few more days before more jets come roaring in. A few more days to relax a little bit and to stock everything we’ll need to stand our ground and keep our city.”
With that, Ron retrieved his rifle, put the sling over his shoulder, and marched to the door. “I’ll be getting back home, then,” he said.
“And I’ll be in touch with you,” the Colonel said.
Ron nodded and vanished down the hallway.
NEXT
As he’d figured, the rumble of the jet engines had meant that the monsters that dwelled out of sight in the wilderness beyond Charlotte had come calling. The first place they’d been drawn had been the airport, of course. But the staccato rattle of automatic gunfire had erupted from that quarter, followed by the growl of other engines that soon joined the spitting of lead.
Ron had ordered Jean and Oliver to remain indoors while he viewed the action that was, for now, confined to the newly cleared and operational Charlotte-Douglas Airport. Through the powerful lenses of his finest binoculars, he was watching the forming battle from the secure perch of their rooftop redoubt.
The first thing he’d noticed in the morning light was that the enormous C5 transport was painted a dull flat green. All markings of the US armed forces—from any of the branches—had either been removed, or had never been present. From what he did know, the only versions of that jet that were operational were all property of one or the other of the branches of the US military. So this one had either been taken from one of those branches, or had been in private hands. Or perhaps it belonged to one of the civilian arms of the government—either the CIA or DIA. Ron pulled the binoculars from his face and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Hell, the ideas and suspicions made it all too bothersome to ponder.
What he needed to do was pay attention to what was going on.
During the night, while men had obviously worked through the dark hours, guided by generated lamps that he could see standing on tripods all over the tarmac, the newly arrived forces had been quite busy. There were armored personnel carriers—three of them—and two giant vehicles that he realized were Abrams tanks. Even those were absent any markings that labeled them as property of the Army or Marines. They were all just painted that same flat desert camouflage. There weren’t even any identifying numerals or letters to differentiate one from the other.
Off to the east of the C5 transport, there was a house-sized oblong of what appeared to be something made wholly of steel. Using the figures that he could see scurrying around the thing, it was roughly fifty or sixty feet long and twenty feet wide, perhaps fifteen feet tall. It was on a trailer with stout wheels. Ron could even see a large semi sitting idle nearby, and he didn’t need a rocket scientist to tell him that the heavy truck was going to soon be pulling whatever was on that trailer.
While the men had worked in the temporary electric lamps, the deaders had come filtering out of the wilderness as Ron had known they would. But they’d been prepared for that. Whoever these jokers were, the Colonel had told them what to expect and they had come loaded for bear.
The airport was all but smothered by an army of rot on its north side. And a mindless pincer movement had gone into motion; the classic flanking maneuvers of the dead. Of course there were no tactics involved on behalf of the zombies—they were merely like a river of stinking water that pushed until it met resistance and then parted to flow around the blockage until that poisonous stream met again at some further point. It wasn’t measured and it wasn’t considered, but it was surely effective against the living. Cutter had long since lost count of the number of times he’d seen people overtaken by the mindless simplicity of it.
As he put the lenses back to his face, Ron was glad that he’d talked Jean and Oliver into remaining inside. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but he didn’t like what he was witnessing and he didn’t want to them to watch what was going on if it went against those people who were now holding the airport against the dead hordes that had assembled there. Seeing the inexorable tide flow around the major block of buildings to converge on the makeshift strongpoint of the big jet and its disgorged cargo, Ron felt that he could all but hear and smell the stalking mass that heaved itself toward the pristine lines of the winged vehicle.
He feared the worst.
Realizing that the initial reactions had been just preliminary movements by what he now saw were soldiers, Ron went to one of the chairs he kept at his reloading station and pulled it close to the wall that surrounded the roof. Seated, he leaned forward until his elbows were on the concrete parapet and settled in for the show.
**
Ron heard the door to the blockhouse open. He sighed. Oh, well, he thought.
“We’re not going to stay cooped up in there,” Jean said. Ron could hear the determination in her voice and realized that it would be pointless to argue.
“We want to see what’s happening,” Oliver joined in.
And before Ron could so much as give in, he watched as the two pulled up chairs beside him. Jean soon had the 200-power telescope on its tripod set up between them—son and mother in all but blood—and they were sharing it, offering the eyepiece as each got a good look at the action that was taking place a few miles away.
“Why aren’t they shooting?” Oliver asked.
Bringing the binoculars to his eyes, Ron watched the situation and thought about what he was seeing. The C5-A was obviously the center of the little world. Whatever it was that was in the giant metal box on the trailer, it was clearly not of concern to the assembling groups of men that had been coughed out of the transport. It was the jet that was in the middle of it all. And from what Ron could see, if there was a race to escape, it would have to be inside that great airframe. From what little he did know of it, the thing was armored as heavily as a flying aircraft could be. He doubted even ten thousand of the deaders could climb up to the various entrances and portals on the jet and break in. Worst case, those men had a relatively safe spot to hide.
Assuming, of course, they were prepared to wait out a multitude of flesh-hungry monsters agitated to the point of insanity by the sight of prey. As everyone knew, in the right circumstances with nowhere else to go and nothing else to distract them, the damned things could wait for weeks before moving off in their weird, haphazard way. People could starve or die of thirst without finding the opportunity to escape from such a situation or fight their ways out. Ron had also seen just such a thing happen too many times to recount.<
br />
“The dead are closing in on them.” It was Jean this time. Her voice, though, was almost unemotional. And Ron could tell that she was genuinely unconcerned with the welfare of the soldiers they were watching. Ron looked her way to make sure.
Catching his eye, Jean shrugged. Oliver noticed the exchange and laughed.
“Mom isn’t scared for those fellows,” he said. “Those guys didn’t come all of the way here just to end up as zombie food! You watch. They’re going to kick some ass. Just wait and see!” Oliver took the moment to gain possession of the telescope and brought the lens to his right eye.
“Look!” he exclaimed.
Ron and Jean almost felt the vibration of the report.
One of the Abrams tanks had suddenly opened up. The shell wasn’t what Ron had expected, though. Instead of suddenly landing with a fiery impact, it spat some kind of concussion grenade, he figured, because as soon as it struck amidst the surging mob of dead things there was another, delayed explosion.
“Jesus,” Cutter said. As he watched, zombies scattered in all directions, flung into gooey bits of rotten flesh. There was suddenly a vast circle of ruined guts and limbs. He was reminded of photos he’d seen of flattened forests in the wake of the Tunguska Event he’d read of in textbooks. Trees had been knocked down in radial patterns from a central blast point. However, instead of trees, he was looking upon the wrecked bodies of the walking dead.
The other tank then took the opportunity to fire in the opposite direction, and the same results were apparent. The dead were like rotted pudding that was sent scattering about, as when one tosses a rock into a pit of thick mud. Round after round followed, and as fast as the shells cleared the field, the masses of the emerging dead filled the void.
“Think they’ll run out of ammo before the zombies run out of bodies?” It was Jean’s turn to peer through the telescope. “They’re really making hash out of them. I think they actually know what they’re doing,” she added.
Focusing on the vehicles, Ron scanned the battle to see what the assembled people were doing. He watched as two armored personnel carriers chugged along to join each of the thanks, flanking them and stopping well back of the bigger vehicles, but prepared to do something. He wasn’t sure what, but they were very definitely getting ready to take part in the action.
“What are those other ones doings?” Oliver said. He had raced back to the blockhouse and now had his own binoculars. And they really were Oliver’s—he’d brought them from the house when they’d gone back to scavenge a few things he said he wanted. He’d taken those binoculars, but had left the photos of his biological parents. In a strange way, that had heartened Ron and made him feel important.
“Yeah. What are those?” Jean had also taken note of them.
“Not sure what model, but some kind of personnel carrier,” Ron said. “Different vehicle from anything I’ve seen in the magazines I’ve got in the house,” he told them. Ever since he’d been working with Dale, Ron had been trying to improve his knowledge of military hardware. The terms he often heard between the Colonel and his folk at the hospital and forward stations were sometimes beyond his grasp. It was all military jargon and he didn’t want to show his ignorance by asking too many stupid questions. It was better to just educate himself.
“Oh my gosh! Look at that!” Oliver was excited, but Ron didn’t need to be prodded to watch. He had seen it happen.
“Flame throwers,” Jean all but yelled. “Those aren’t personnel carriers! They’re flame throwers!”
Streams of fire seemed to leap out of turrets that Ron had not noticed until they were lit by the red and orange flames. The stuff arced into the approaching mobs of dead folk and landed amidst them, turning the flesh and fat and bone and tattered clothing into torches that went up like dry kindling.
“Not flamethrowers,” Ron said, his voice low and almost down to a whisper. “That shit is napalm.” He watched as the arcs of heated gelatin spewed in controlled angles to land in the midst of the approaching monsters, turning them into vast lines of burning forms. The only time Ron had ever heard a zombie call out or scream in anything approaching fear was when they were on fire. Turning his ear toward the airport, he realized that it was not his imagination that he could, indeed, hear screaming.
And in that instant he realized that the men on that tarmac had nothing, really to fear.
It was the zombies who were facing the final curtain.
But just beneath the relief he felt for those assembled soldiers, he was feeling an itch of fear for what all of this was going to mean for everyone in Charlotte. What did the Colonel and his airborne allies have in mind?
Just what the hell was going on?
Cutter stood. “I need to talk to the Colonel,” he said.
“Yes, that might be a good idea,” Jean agreed.
NEXT
Ron had loaded for bear before he left. Oliver had insisted on coming with him and although he didn’t like it, he had caved and decided to let the boy come along. He could never forget that the child had been pretty much a feral character for some time, and there was no way either he or Jean could keep him from getting out of the building if he really wanted to follow Ron.
So along he came. Better to have him along for the quick journey than to worry that Oliver would be out on his own, facing who knew what.
On the ground floor, they had hardly locked the steel door behind them before there was a rasping groan as a deader came staggering toward them from the corner to the north. And it was quickly followed by a second. Both had been men, their clothes all but gone, their flesh scored by a the cuts of a thousand grasping branches as they’d journeyed over miles of forest and farm to finally find their ways to the city.
“Those damned jets,” Ron told Oliver. “We’ll be clearing this crap for days. Maybe weeks.” He pointed to the nearest zombie and Oliver took his cue.
The boy pulled his .22 Beretta semi-auto and took aim. The way Oliver worked the gun, the casual observer would have figured his movements were haphazard and not on target. But when the sound of the shot cracked across the spaces around them, a blossom of black blood and white bits of skull blossomed on the doomed thing’s withered forehead and it went to the concrete without another sound. Ron smiled and nodded, giving the boy free reign to take out the next one, which he did with another flawless shot that was probably more accurately delivered than any Ron might have taken.
“I’m impressed,” he told Oliver as the kid flipped the safety and holstered the gun.
Oliver smiled back at him. They looked around, saw no other danger, and headed toward the hospital compound and the Colonel.
*
“I’ll be goddamned,” Lieber whispered. Fate was in his favor as She had always been. He was convinced of that now. He paused to pop one more amphetamine into his mouth and chased it with a chug of ice water from his thermos. “No sooner do I set myself up than my patsy appears.”
He had the .50 caliber assembled on its tripod. He was on the first floor of the Trust Tower. On the corner facing toward his idiot rival. Lieber had hoped that he’d catch Dale and the current apple of Jean’s eye together and eliminate them both, but if it was just that bastard, Cutter, then that was a start. He’d get the other one when he could.
The sniper rifle was resting on the top of an office cubicle that was just behind the welcome desk behind which some pretty young secretary had once sat, greeting each supplicant who came into the building to see the men in the high tower. He had very carefully carried in bags of earth that he’d piled around in an effective formation, invisible from the street. And he’d even had time to remove the top pane of glass from the big foyer before daybreak. It had been a lot easier than he’d feared, the panes having proved to be lighter than he’d thought. When he pulled the trigger, there would be no shattering of glass to warn anyone exactly where the shot originated. They might suspect, but if he had a companion, he wouldn’t figure it out until it was far too late.
Stan lay prone and made himself relax. Even though the speed was coursing through him, making his heart pump erratically, he was able to calm himself. His senses were at peak performance. Colors leaped at him. Green lettering on the sign across the street where a jeweler had once sold diamonds and gold. A bit of desiccated white newspaper pin-wheeled across the pavement like tumbleweed. Somewhere a blue jay called out, screeching its anger or joy at the cool morning air and the blue sky above, the sun not yet having crept into the deep valley of the city’s concrete canyons. Now it was time for action. He reached over and pulled on his ear protection. He didn’t want to screw up his ears. There was going to be some serious reverb in that ground-floor space.
He could smell his own sweat, though. Sour. He’d not slept for two days, working to get his gun in place to take care of the man who stood between him and his wife-to-be. Once Cutter was gone, she would be his. The whole city and everything would be his now. He controlled the information and the IT. Without him, everything would fall apart. No matter what, that was his trump card and everyone knew it. Everyone knew it.
Sniffing, he could scent something particularly earthy coming from one of the sandbags he’d cobbled together. So he pushed it aside with his elbow and almost missed the first sign of movement from the street.
He held his breath and looked. Yes. A figure coming his way. Alive. Not a dead shambler. No. Not one figure, but two. It was the boy. Cutter had brought the boy with him. That was even better than taking the Colonel out! The Colonel was no rival for him, but the child was a distraction. Like a male lion who took over another male’s pride, Lieber had to eliminate the other lion’s cubs. And replace them with his own. Because that’s what Stanley Lieber was: a lion!
The Coalition: Part III 2% Solution Of The Dead (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 3) Page 5