Radio transmissions were raging with warnings coming from the airport. The voices were strained but so far composed and without the panic that would have been present from civilians.
“General Martinez,” Dale said. “I’m here now. At the Trust Tower.”
A strange face appeared on one of the smaller monitors. Unlike the voice Cutter had heard before, this man was unknown to him. Some military officer who had never been on any broadcast that Ron could recall. “They’re in the tens of thousands, Dale!” The voice remained cool. “I thought we’d have better intelligence on this than what you provided us, Colonel!”
Dale peered at a larger screen on the opposite wall. It was a live transmission from a geostationary satellite that they’d painstakingly maneuvered over Charlotte in fits and starts, almost depleting its supply of propellant. The eye-in-the-sky wouldn’t likely be useful for much longer, but for now it was invaluable.
Leaning toward the flat screen, he watched the real-time images of the area around the airport. Through the leafless trees, he could see that masses of dead marching inexorably toward the buildings and the runways. As the general had said, they were definitely in the tens of thousands. Already the vanguards of the enormous migration of deaders had infiltrated the city proper. If he took the time to go to the windows, he would now see them in their hundreds stalking the city streets. He could only hope that the inhabitants of the city would weather this particular storm.
“You have the same view of the situation as I do, General,” the Colonel said. His voice was even, cool. It would do no good at all to grow excited at this point. “Hold your ground. The fences to your east should hold, so keep your forces front and center. Burn anything that comes at you from the west. The concourse to the north will keep them at bay, so you really only have one front deal with,” he added.
There was a moment of silence from the General. Dale knew that the officer was calculating their odds and even considering the probability for a breakout.
“How much longer before air cover arrives?” Dale asked.
At the airport, the General turned his head, slightly. “Five minutes,” the superior office informed him. “Six, tops. Just hold fast. And watch.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Oliver’s boy’s voice piped up. “Are the jets coming? Some of those fighter jets?”
“No, son,” Dale informed him, turning briefly to smile again. “Not jets. It would be hard to operate effectively and target specifically with the firepower of a jet.” He shrugged. “Well, maybe if we just used the Warthogs. But we can’t afford to waste that kind of weapon for this situation.”
“What then?” the boy asked.
That was when the sound that none of them had heard for a very long time came thump-thumping even through the windows and walls of the Trust Tower. No one had to ask and no one had to feel any sense of mystery.
“Copters,” Jean whispered.
Dale nodded. “Apaches and Blackhawks.” A smiled cracked his face. “They’ll come in and clear out the worst of this mess. I used to say that if we’d used mass attacks of helicopter gunships on this plague when it first got out of hand, then we would never have ended up in this position.” He glared at the screens, seeing the first of the helicopters coming into view of the outlying cameras. “But no one would listen to an old British sapper like me,” he whispered.
**
On the streets the helicopters zeroed in on the black clots of the swarming dead that had made their ways beyond the airport and down the wide streets and freeways toward the city center. Their computer guidance systems were all working to perfection. Guns were loaded, hellfire missiles primed and ready. In a battle line, they swarmed in like enormous dark beetles bearing down on fresh victims.
“Why didn’t we hear these arrive with the jets?” Cutter was curious.
“They didn’t fly in on their own,” Dale told him. “They were on one of the Galaxy flights. The folk out there at Douglas unpacked them and assembled them out there.”
“Will it be enough?” Jean said, leaning in close to look at one of the screens that briefly showed a pair of Blackhawks flying past its location, the copters obviously coming in lower, losing altitude in a calculated way.
The Colonel nodded. “These airmen have been at this for most of the past year. These people—all of them out there at Douglas—they’ve been leap-frogging from one airbase and airport to another, coming here. To us. This is where they’re going to set up shop. This is why we’ve all been working so hard to try to put things back together.” His smile broke into a grin as he looked at the copters advancing on the city. “You’ll see.”
Within seconds, the Blackhawks swooped in low, just above the tops of the buildings. They opened up.
Rounds began to strike into the hearts of moving crowds of dead things. They could all hear the guns going off, whirring with machine precision. The screens showed the sight to them, flesh scattering in vast, black arcs of rot and stench. Each wad of steel plowed in the midst of the implacable masses of shambling monstrosities and turned a dozen of the things into final pools and heaps of unmoving, soggy matter.
Above the city, the line of aircraft slowed and altered its shape and became first a vast arc and then an advancing team of individual machines peeling off to target independent groups of the undead. The roar of their rotors attracted the dim, hungry things, forced them to advance in the direction of their own final destiny so that the guns didn’t even have to search them out.
Apache helicopters hovered, stationary, and the gunners fired into the crawling, moaning masses of the dead. Arms and legs were soon spinning in huge fountains of gore. Skulls splintered, the contents spraying in every direction. Torsos filled with putrid guts were blown to tiny, rotten droplets of poisonous gore.
“It’s like this everywhere they go,” Dale told them all. “The Apaches and Blackhawks take to the skies and they mow these monsters down. They take them out and afterwards the only thing left to do is to gather up the garbage and the guts and purify the area with open pits and fire.”
“Jesus,” Ron said. “Nothing can stand up to that. Nothing.” He watched as entire crowds of the things were reduced to motionless mats of goo.
“When nothing can shoot back, nothing can be done to stop us,” the Colonel agreed.
In less than an hour, it was all over. The helicopters flew about the city and they heard an occasional burst of gunfire from those powerful cannons, and the huff of a missile or two. But in far less time that they would have suspected, the whirring blades had turned back toward the airport and they were going back to their base.
“That’s all for today,” Dale assured them, standing and turning to address his six companions in this most important of spaces. “Tomorrow it’s all mopping up.”
“What about more of them?” Jean pointed toward the airport which none of them could see. “They’re still going to come for us.”
Dale nodded. “They’ll still come. But fewer every day. That was the worst of it. It’s the same everywhere we perform this exercise. The force arrives, secures the perimeter, brings in the weapons and man-power. The zombies hear and see and smell and come out of the surrounding territory to kill them. And…well, you just saw what happens.”
“What happens when they run out of ammo?” She said it.
“So far…that hasn’t happened,” he assured her. “For now, it’s a waiting game. We establish ourselves. We rebuild. And we outwait them. They’re dead. They fall apart. They break down. Yes, they deteriorate slowly, but far faster than we.” He smiled again, but more to himself than to the others. “And then…we win.”
NEXT
The convoy rolled into the city center the next day.
“Why can’t we go see?” Oliver asked.
“We will. Just not right this minute,” Cutter told him.
From their vantage point, they watched the line of vehicles rumbling down the highway. There were armored personnel carriers, one of
them the type that was equipped to dispense a stream of napalm. And a new contingent of Humvees, most of them armored and sporting heavy guns. In addition, they saw a number of vans and a large diesel bus.
“Did they bring all of those with them?” Jean was amazed. None of them had seen so many working vehicles in over two years.
“Those C5-As carry a lot of stuff, Jean.” They had watched the enormous jets taking off and returning. One trip each which accounted for four heavy loads from wherever they had been hoarding the materiel that had made the final journey to Charlotte.
“Why don’t they fly the jets?” Oliver was curious. No one had seen the fighter jets take to the air after their initial arrival. The Blackhawk and Apache helicopters had gone airborne several times since, taking out the deaders that had marched on the city since the arrival of the newcomers. But of the fighter jets there had been no more sign.
“I think it’s because they can’t afford to fly them too much, Oliver,” Ron told the boy.
“I don’t understand. Nobody needs money anymore. They don’t need to be able to afford anything.”
Cutter laughed. “That’s not what I mean. Not exactly.” He paused to watch as the convoy left the inner belt and came down a long concrete exit ramp and into the city. The vanguard was less than two miles away. “When I say that they can’t afford it, what I mean is that they have only so much jet fuel and so many spare parts and they can’t just keep them flying all of the time. A fighter jet is a very complicated machine and it takes a lot of fuel and a tremendous amount of maintenance. A whole team of guys to work on it and all sorts of parts that fail or wear out every time it flies. You can’t just take it up any time you feel like it.”
“Oh,” Oliver said. “I see. That makes sense.”
“I suspect we won’t see them very often. Maybe every now and again.”
“Or maybe we won’t ever see them again,” Oliver stated. “Maybe they’ll just keep them in the hangar.”
Cutter shook his head. “No, son. I doubt that. They didn’t bring them all the way here just to have them sit in a big, dry building gathering dust.”
They watched as the line of vehicles slowly made its way into the middle of the city. There was a lot of noise, but not quite so much as they had all feared. A few straggling deaders appeared from the shadows, creeping through the cold air in the bright of day. An occasional gunshot rang out and echoes from the buildings as the creepy things were taken down. Compared to what had happened before, this was nothing. The dead army was all but eliminated.
When the last of the convoy pulled in and the motors were shut down, Cutter delivered his verdict.
“Okay,” he said. “We can go look, now. The Colonel is down there and he said he’d look for us.”
They soon descended the nine floors to street level and locked the place up tight behind them.
**
When they arrived, the engines were still ticking lightly. There was the stink of diesel in the chilly breeze. Overhead, the sky was again clear and blue. The APCs were still manned as they came into the square in front of the Trust Tower. Soldiers were standing around their vehicles, not quite at attention, but alert. These men were not like Ron and Jean and the Colonel and his local militia. These fellows were professional soldiers with fine equipment and good uniforms that they hadn’t been forced to scrounge from abandoned houses and leaking shops and armories open to the elements and crawling with the living dead. These soldiers were the real deal and were intimidating.
The family stood at the corner across from the Tower and observed. Other people had some to see, drawn by the noise and by the announcement that these people had arrived and that things were about to change. Soon, the intersection was filled with people—more people than Jean or Ron or Oliver had seen in a very long time. There were thousands of warm, living, breathing humans standing in the street and sitting on the curbs and sidewalks watching this new event.
“Look,” Oliver said. “Street lights are on.”
Sure enough, Ron noticed. All along the avenue in front of Trust Tower there were lights gleaming on lampposts. He hadn’t noticed it because the sun was so bright. But Oliver had seen it right off. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Dale told me that they’d hooked up that portable plant they brought with them. He said it would produce enough juice to run that tower from basement to penthouse and have plenty to spare. He wasn’t lying.”
“Let’s get closer,” Oliver suggested. “I want to see that tank.”
“It’s not a tank, son.” Jean allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led forward by Oliver. “It’s an APC. An armored personnel carrier.”
“Well, whatever it is, it looks like a tank.”
Jean just laughed and followed her tow-headed boy.
Ron walked along, lagging behind them a few meters, observing the vehicles and watching the soldiers. Lots of soldiers. He was beginning to wonder how many people had arrived. What was it that Dale had told him? How many hundreds? And of those, how many were soldiers and pilots? He was taking a good, hard look at all of that firepower.
Most of the crowd was holding back, in awe of this show of technology and of such precise dress. None of the soldiers looked as if their uniforms had been worn to pieces. Boots were fresh and polished. Shirts and pants were clean. The guns gleamed in the sun. Their skin was unblemished and hair scrubbed and dry, free of oil. These people had been pampered, had not suffered quite the hardship the rest of them had faced.
Out of habit, Ron kept looking around, searching for the appearance of some dead thing looking to kill and eat him. Or for another forager to club him on the back of the skull and steal his stuff. It was a habit, and a good one that he hoped he would never break. Peering to his right, he noticed that a couple of soldiers standing atop one of the APCs appeared to be agitated. They were talking to one another and they were just far enough that he could tell what they were saying. One had poked the other one in the shoulder to get his attention. Some whispered exchanges between them and now they were pointing and laughing. One hooted. Ron followed the line of his pointing finger and looked, hoping that he wouldn’t find that a deader had appeared in the midst of the crowd.
Turning, he saw what the soldier was so agitated to spy.
It was Jean.
He looked at her. Although she had not done anything to draw attention to herself, she was achingly beautiful. As he’d told her in all honesty, she was as perfect a woman as he had ever seen. Jean would have been a beauty in any world. Now, in this one, she stood out like a gleaming sunlit gem among the clods of red clay. There was a quick, sharp whistle. He looked back. The soldier who had first spotted Jean was alerting the rest of his brothers in camouflage.
For the first time, Ron caught some of their words.
“Look at the tits and ass on that one.”
“I’d fuck her till my dick was bloody.”
“I’d kill for a piece of that ass.”
Ron made his way quickly across the space that separated him from his wife and son. He did his best not to move too fast and make a jealous spectacle of himself. As he got to them, he put out a hand and placed it on Jean’s shoulder, looking at her golden hair, noting that she was tense, realizing that she’d heard at least of what the soldiers had said about her.
“Come on,” Ron said. “We’ve seen enough.”
“Yes,” Jean agreed. “Maybe we can come back later and find out what they’re going to do here.”
They took a few steps, Oliver following obediently. Suddenly, Ron felt a hard grip on his shoulder. “Wait there,” the voiced told him. He turned quickly.
It was Colonel Dale.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. I…I didn’t recognize your voice.” Cutter was telling the truth. He didn’t want to admit it, but the ice he’d felt in his guts at the sight and sound of the strangers’ reaction to seeing Jean had filled him with both rage and dread. He hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings. Now he had succumbed
to a weakness he’d avoided for so long. He’d become dependent on his new family.
“You’re right to not want to be here right now,” he told them. “But let me walk with you for a moment, Ron. We can talk about things.”
Jean didn’t need another cue. “Oliver and I will walk ahead while you guys follow us,” she told them. And they picked up the pace, leaving a distance that provided privacy to the two men.
“You were right,” Cutter said. “It’s just like you told me it would be.”
“Son. These…people…are going to put things back the way they were before. Not exactly, but close. Worse, probably.”
They continued along the street. Ron’s eyes kept glancing left and right. He turned now and again to check his back. The soldiers at the Tower were still looking their way, watching Jean.
“Have you ever studied history? Roman Empire? Sparta?”
Ron shook his head. “Not really. A little. In junior college. I was a clerk, Colonel. Sales. I…”
Dale patted him on the shoulder and laughed. “That’s okay, Ron. What I mean to say is that these people who are among us now…they’re going to bring back some of those old ways. And not couched in language promising democracy or a republic. They’re going back to basics, as I told you. They have now the access they need to property, to documents. When it all boils down to it, these people like to be able to point to something official. To laws that give them the right to do what they have done and what they are about to do.”
Cutter stopped walking and looked into the Colonel’s face. He would see both worry and determination there. “What is it, exactly, that they want to do.”
“They’re going to make slaves of you. Of you. Jean. Oliver. They’re going to make slaves and servants out of everyone here in Charlotte. All of the people who have gathered here and who have worked to clear the city of the trash and the dangers. The men and women who police the streets to keep them safe; and the doctors and nurses who toil in the hospital; and the engineers and tradesmen who are building and wiring and plumbing these structures. They’re all going to be slaves.
The Coalition: Part III 2% Solution Of The Dead (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 3) Page 10