That navy man said St. Louis was crawling with Polar Bears—a euphemism for citizens who rose up against the government as part of the Patriot Snowball movement. Though he had no love for the movement or what they stood for, he didn't feel particularly offended to now be lumped in with them. If the government was run by Elsa and her minions, he figured "rebel" described him fairly well now.
When he didn't rise to her bait, she kept at it. “You know what that means, don't you? What does the United States of America do to traitors?”
“Promotes them, apparently.”
She laughed heartily. “Oh, John. I love your spirit. That must be the zombie perfume getting to you. No, give me a second and I'll tell you...”
He watched as the Abrams' continued to hammer at the zombies. They'd done an admirable job of laying down the hate in precisely the places he envisioned when he thought up the idea of channeling the dead. It would put more zombies on each end of the ditch, but less in the exact center—and the bridge.
In a minute Elsa came back on his channel. “Military time. Hard to judge these things. You know?”
He had no idea what she was talking about.
“OK, let's try this again.” She coughed openly as if to prepare for a speech. “What does the United—”
He caught the glint of metal as it fell from the sky, but it was only a fraction of a second, and on the edge of his vision. When he turned, an explosion ripped into the wayward Bradley nearest the ditch. The explosion was so powerful, it blew down several of the civilians on that end of the levee. He felt the lurch of the earth a moment after impact.
“Dammit!” Elsa complained. “I wanted that to be timed better. Maybe the next one,” she said with a laugh.
He was on his microphone in an instant, seeing this for what it was. He spoke in a calm voice.
“This is Warfighter actual. Alpha-1 and -2, disengage. I repeat, disengage. We are under attack from—”
Would they believe him if he said Air Force? Under attack from members of the same team? Could he explain the nuance of who was firing at them?
“—unknown elements.” It was a lame declaration.
“Move into the town. How copy?”
“Oh John. I hope you notice I didn't drop it on you. Did you? I hope so. It means you aren't a threat to me. Your military hardware is the real danger to me. Just thought you ought to know that.”
There was no time for personal vendettas. He looked at his deployment. The other Bradley was far down the levee, working things on that end. If he pulled everyone back, the end would come that much sooner. If he left them to die from the air, it would also end.
He had to preserve his forces. No matter the cost. If he couldn't kill zombies from the ideal spot on the levee, he would kill them from inside the town. From another town. From wherever he found himself.
Life was long and left many opportunities for the use of precious military equipment. These were his men. His tools. He was going to save them.
“Warfighter actual. All units, abandon the levee. Find cover in the town. Out.”
“Dear John,” she laughed, “it's not me, it's you. Run, run, run. I'm gonna find you.”
Don't you have better things to do?
He wondered about that as he abandoned his own Humvee and ran to the civilians standing out on the levee, looking confused and distracted by what just happened. It only took him a minute to listen to rumors that the zombies had a magical weapon now. One that could obliterate a perfectly good armored fighting vehicle like it was nothing.
The crowd was a flight risk. It was up to him to calm it. He needed the civilians more than ever before. They all needed each other if they were to survive until tomorrow.
Somewhere above, he imagined, another 2,000-pound JDAM was waiting to pounce.
That thought stuck with him as night draped itself over the chaos.
Chapter 14: Jane
Victoria was jarred awake as a door slammed shut. In her groggy state, she observed how the helicopter tipped forward, and they began another ascent.
“Did we land?” she called out. Then, noticing Hayes was gone, she leaned so she could see outside.
A gigantic complex of steel and concrete structures filled the entire window view. White dust coated everything, like someone had shaken dirty powdered confectionery sugar from above.
“What is this place?”
“Biggest concrete plant in the world,” Jane called out from the pilot’s seat.
“You’re kidding,” she said in disbelief, though she couldn’t fathom how she could possibly know whether Jane was lying. Or that it mattered.
“But why did he get out. Why didn’t we?”
The craft banked to the left, and she saw down to the surface of the Mississippi River. They’d evidently not gone far off their course. When they stabilized again, several hundred feet up, Jane answered her.
“He said to tell you thanks, but that he can’t go to Cairo. Things are dangerous there, now.”
“Oh, but it’s OK for you and me?” The implication was that Jane was the man’s wife. Surely…
“He put me in charge of getting you to Cairo, then retrieving the old woman.”
“She has a name. It’s Marty,” she voiced into the mic for the internal comms.
“Yes. Marty. We’re going to rescue her.”
She didn’t know how to respond. Was a thank you in order, or was this all part of Hayes’ convoluted forward-thinking that he calls planning? What could possibly be more important at a concrete plant than in the city where the object of his testing had to be found?
Victoria sat back in her seat, finally giving up on watching where they were going. “You know, I don’t get you. What do you see in that guy?” she echoed his question from the security room. She didn’t expect a reply from her kinda-sort enemy, but she’d spent enough time with the man to feel a kinship of a sort with her. If she found him insufferable in just a few hours together, what must his wife think?
Jane laughed. “He’s not so bad, once you understand what motivates him.” She looked back at Victoria but didn’t elaborate.
“And, frankly, I didn’t have much choice.”
“He said something about arranged marriages...”
“Yeah, he likes to use that as an excuse, but that wasn’t really what brought us together. Or what keeps us together.”
“Because you know what motivates him?”
“Partly. He has changed since this crisis started, but for the better, actually. In the old days, he was consumed by his damned research. He was convinced he’d cure the world of Cancer. But when his priority shifted to...other goals, well, he became even more driven. I think once the plague was released, and he saw the effects, he started to relax.”
Victoria was stunned by the inappropriateness of her glib attitude but had nothing to say.
“Anyway, fixing the plague has become his driving force. But for once it's something I can directly help him with, which makes us a team again. It really feels good.”
Again, the impossibility of feeling good while the world burned was bone-jarringly insensitive to all those who had suffered because of the man. But, the whole thing forced her to look at her own relationship in another manner.
Was her relationship with Liam helped or hindered by the Zombie Apocalypse? Would she have a relationship, otherwise? Was it fair to ask questions she already knew the answers to?
They had a lot of bad times during their nightmare weeks on the run, but also some good ones. The first thing that popped in her head was that first innocent kiss behind the tree when they’d escaped St. Louis. She’d whispered in his ear that she was so glad they’d met, and that she was thankful he had rescued her. The sense of relief wasn’t just because they’d gotten out of the city filled with zombies, but that he made her forget the reason she’d left Colorado in the first place. It was one of the greatest feelings she’d experienced since leaving home.
She admitted the zombies had
allowed some good things to happen. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that Hayes and his wife got to have a second chance, too.
“He still can be an ass,” Victoria said with finality.
“Oh, no question there,” Jane said with a chuckle. “But that ass is going to save the world. I firmly believe that with all my heart.”
“Don’t trust anyone.” Liam’s voice filled her mind. “You’re riding in a helicopter with the wife of the sneakiest man in America. Be careful.”
It didn’t feel like a trap, though she allowed anything was possible now that she was a prisoner inside the helicopter. She could fly her anywhere, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She had no weapons. No way to change the flow of the day.
Leaning to the window again, she watched for another thirty minutes as the chopper cruised over the countryside below. Except for the odd fire here or there, it was hard to tell anything had changed with the world. The country was still the country. Just a bunch of trees, same as before.
It all changed as they approached Cairo. She knew what to expect in terms of the big pile up of barges along the river, but she had no idea what to think of the standing room only crowd of zombies in the fields north of the town.
“Oh my God,” Victoria exclaimed into the mic.
Jane slowed the craft. “Looks like they had a hell of a fight last night,” she reported.
There were thousands of dead zombie bodies in the field. They’d been stacked up like dried leaves all along the ditch, and the waterway was solidly choked with bodies in several places. From high in the helicopter, it was hard to make out individuals in the crowd, but the moving mass appeared to flow over the bridges of the dead and then spread out again like ants from a mound.
“They’re still alive! There!” she shouted, though it was impossible for Jane to know where she pointed.
Pockets of defenders stood on the big pile of dirt behind the waterway. It appeared the dead had crossed and then gotten behind the defenders in several places. The tiny pockets of men and women lunged at the encroaching zombies when they got too close. But it was an impossible battle.
The zombies outnumbered them thousands to one.
2
“She’s down there, isn’t she?” Jane asked plainly.
Victoria had tried to throw them off the scent by pointing to the nearby town of Wickliffe, Kentucky. It was pretty much across the river from Cairo, and her plan was to land there and get a sense of whether this was truly a rescue or something more deadly for Grandma. She wasn’t going to risk her life until she knew.
But now, seeing the horde of zombies breaking through the defenses of the town, what choice did she have? Jane flew her over the middle of Cairo and seemed to slow down as if waiting for the answer. Victoria studied the landscape below, but couldn’t readily pick out where she’d left Grandma Marty in her temporary home.
There were no zombies running down the streets of the town, at least she didn’t see any from up in the sky, but that time was coming.
“Yes,” she said as she deflated. “But I don’t remember exactly which house we were in.”
“You have to try,” Jane said, as if it were totally obvious.
She was on the cusp of picking a place to set the helicopter down when several plinks rattled off the outside of the copter. Jane banked hard to her right and made for the edge of town. Two more clangs—gunfire she realized—followed.
“They're shooting at us?” Victoria’s question was rhetorical.
They re-crossed the Mississippi and banked for a landing. She watched a huge dust storm far across the flat Missouri farmland for the few moments she faced that direction. Soon they touched down in the treeline across the river from Cairo. Jane explained the helicopter would be hidden from trigger-happy townsfolk, but would be close enough they could get back before the town itself collapsed.
“We’re walking?”
“No, we’re running,” Jane said while unhooking herself from the controls and radio equipment. In moments they both stood outside the damaged sliding door. With a conspiratorial grin, Jane removed a small panel which revealed a storage space inside the hull. She pulled out two black rifles and several magazines each. Victoria spied another rifle she left behind. It was much larger.
“That’s my baby,” Jane said with the pride of any new mother. “But she’s too heavy to carry so far.”
Then, pointing at the rifle she’d given to Victoria, she continued. “You aren’t going to shoot me with that, are you?” Her smile was soft, but her eyes were rocks.
“No. I can’t say I trust you, but right now we both want the same thing. To save Grandma from that wall of zombies.”
Jane handed her the magazines. “Keep these handy. We’re going to need them.” She took off at a jog.
Victoria, looking at the unlocked helicopter, spoke as she ran to catch up. “Aren’t you worried someone is going to steal your ride?”
“Eh, what are the odds of the finder being able to fly a helicopter? We’ll be fine.”
Victoria wasn’t sure. “We’ll be fine” was code for “I have no idea.” But there was no other choice. At least they weren’t bullet magnets on the ground.
Things became more chaotic as they crossed the fields on the Missouri side of the river and reached the narrow, two-lane bridge which linked their side with Illinois. Several people ran down the middle of the bridge—away from town. Women and children, mostly. The children were ushered with yells and screams to keep moving. Often they were crying madly—young and old kids.
Crossing the old bridge gave them a look below. The brown river was choked with barges. There were more than she could count. It was almost possible to walk from one side of the great river to the other...they were piled up that badly. Cairo had taken capturing the runaways to a whole new level.
A giant plane came in over the bridge low, and slow. She recognized it from their many earlier encounters. A V-22 Osprey. It swooped in above the town then tilted its wings as it descended—changing from plane mode to helicopter mode. It went behind some trees in the foreground of her view, so she didn’t know where it went down. She assumed it was part of the evacuation effort and was glad to see it.
Distracted by the plane, that’s when she saw a group of people walking a ramp onto a single barge near the middle of the river. It was hooked to a lone towboat, like they were preparing to depart. The people on the move appeared to be elderly, and that was all she needed.
“There! Those people. We have to check that out.”
Jane, when she saw where she was looking, held out her rifle so she could look through the scope. After a moment’s worry that the other woman was going to shoot down at the people, she realized what she was doing and used her own scope in the same fashion. Sure enough, they were elderly.
“Why are they walking to that boat?” Jane asked.
“I don’t know. But if they're as old as I think they are, we have to assume Grandma is down there somewhere. And we have to hurry!” The people were close to their getaway boat, and no one appeared to be following them. They’d walked across several adjoining barges which were lashed together—she had experience jumping over such boats—and it wouldn’t take them long to get inside the last one.
“All right. It’s worth a look.”
Dang right, it is.
3
They had no incidents getting over the long bridge, past a group of men organizing a roadblock at the far end, or getting down to the floating parking lot of barges. The one they sought was still moored to the others as they approached. They had weapons drawn.
“What are we going to do if there are guards?”
“What makes you think they’ll have guards?” Jane asked, with apparent skepticism.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that every time I walk into one of these situations, someone points a gun in my face? Ringing any bells?”
“That was one time,” Jane said with an attempt to lighten the mood.
; Victoria was angry but kept it inside. The rifle in her hands was her insurance card, this time.
“After you,” she motioned to Jane.
The barge was one of the big ones. About two hundred feet long and fifty across. It was covered by a long series of metallic toppers, so she couldn’t see what was inside the hold. The elderly people had gone in on one side, where there were steps. On the far end, the barge had some tall antennas and a large satellite dish sitting on the open deck. That was curious enough to warrant checking out the boat, as no other barge she’d seen had such accoutrements.
Jane didn’t hesitate, though she gripped her rifle tightly, and held it to her face as she moved closer to the steps to go down into the hold.
Victoria studied the towboat at the other end. The windows of the bridge wrapped all the way around the superstructure of that ship, so the captain could see the entire river, but she couldn’t tell if anyone was watching them from inside.
I’m sure this is all just a friendly checkup.
The stairs down were made of fresh wood like they’d been built for this one thing. She followed Jane, who’d gone the ten or so feet to the bottom. She stepped off so Victoria could stand next to her.
The people she’d seen earlier stood nearby as a group. They looked scared and tired. One or two had taken seats against the metal wall of the hull. The lighting was dim, but white LED lights lined the floor everywhere she looked.
When they got close to them, they lowered their rifles.
And old man met them as they neared. “We surrender.” Some chuckles followed from the others. If Liam were here, he’d criticize them for surrendering. He’d want them all to be armed, so two girls wouldn’t have the drop on them.
“Sorry, what is this place?”
“Can’t you see? It’s a hospital?” the old man answered.
Victoria looked again. She’d been so focused on the threat posed by the unarmed people; she didn’t see the rest of the interior. It was two hundred linear feet of beds. Each bed had a light hanging down from above it, though only a few beds had patients in them.
Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 Page 24