“She ain’t a Huey, that’s for sure,” conceded Duncan. “Duct tape and chewing gum isn’t going to keep her flying. According to the manual she needed a PMS check twenty flight hours ago.”
Daymon snorted and looked away. Which led to Lev losing it and doubling over, his belly laugh echoing in the cabin.
Even Cade cracked a smile.
Shaking his head, Duncan said, “Juveniles.” He craned his neck and looked at Jamie. “You gonna stand for that crap?”
Jamie said nothing.
Considering the things the young woman had seen and done lately, Duncan wasn’t at all surprised that she’d ignored the acronym. Speaking slowly for the benefit of the wiseacres, he said, “Preventative ... maintenance ... services.” Then he rounded the Black Hawk’s curved nose, calling back to Cade, “Helmet up and strap in, Wyatt.”
Ignoring Duncan’s use of his nickname, Cade donned his helmet and pointed Daymon to the port side seat. Said, “No time like the present.”
“Urch’s not ready,” called Duncan, a trace of anger in his voice.
“Who said he’s flying?” shot Cade. “You planning on having an in-flight medical emergency ... Old Man?”
Making no reply, Duncan strapped himself into the right seat and donned his flight helmet.
Daymon poked his head between the seats and, defending his honor, said matter-of-factly, “You already pointed out the important gauges and taught me how to plug in the waypoints. I used to bounce around in the bitch seat aboard a little King Air calling fire retardant air drops ... remember?” Then, silently chastising himself for not following through and hacking off all of his dreads, Daymon tucked the side hangers behind his ears and snugged on a flight helmet.
“You did keep her pretty level last time you got stick time,” Duncan said. “Go ahead. Get in and don’t touch anything unless I say so.”
Cade passed Daymon the scrap of paper containing the scrawled GPS coordinates then climbed aboard and slid the door shut behind him. He looked around and chose a seat between Jamie and Lev where he could see both Daymon and Duncan. Swapped helmets and plugged the cord into the overhead jack and, taking into consideration the bird’s suspect maintenance record, strapped himself in extra tight.
Clutching his M4 vertically between his knees with its business end resting on the cabin floor, Cade said a quick prayer and crossed himself. Sensing Jamie’s gaze on him, he looked up and right a degree and met it.
“Thank you,” she said, barely audible over the whirring of a starter located somewhere aft in the airframe.
The Black Hawk shuddered and then there was a low growl that quickly built to a banshee-like whine. Saving his breath, Cade nodded at Jamie then looked out the port window, above the tree tops, at the brightening western sky.
Chapter 28
No rest for the wicked, thought Nash as she peeled the foil from the bottle and rattled a 200-milligram caffeine pill into her palm and, against the dire warnings on the bottle, washed it down with a big gulp of tepid coffee.
She’d already spent most of the early evening hours in the 50th Space Wing’s TOC rooting for the dead as the Chinese tried time and again to retrieve their helicopter from the horde that had surrounded and damaged its tail rotor moments after it landed on shore in Norfolk. As Nash watched in real-time the crew lasted all of four or five minutes inside before bolting from the inert craft and being torn apart limb from limb by the dead. The folly continued as the warships shelled a series of buildings a quarter mile distant, likely just a diversion, then sent, one at a time, half a dozen landing parties ashore only to suffer the same fate as their airborne comrades. After several hours of this, without retrieving their fallen or the damaged helicopter, the warships turned tail and steamed out of Norfolk Harbor.
The early morning hours were fraught with heartache as the same satellite transmitted footage back to the TOC of an hours-long life and death struggle between a platoon of Marines and the living dead that had them easily outnumbered 100 to 1.
Though their objective was achieved and they’d fought their way from their LZ in the rolling hills of Bluemont, Virginia, through throngs of dead and into the top-secret fortified stronghold constructed beneath FEMA’s Mount Weather complex, the man they had come to rescue, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Marine General Tommy (Two-Guns) McTiernan, was in poor health. The Marine commander on the ground relayed to the TOC that the sixty-five-year-old veteran of nearly every military action from Vietnam on up to the previous wars in the desert had suffered a mild stroke two days prior and was receiving medical attention.
Watching the Marines hustle the litter containing their top man to a nearby grassy knoll and seeing them surround the living legend with an outward facing phalanx brought Nash a modicum of hope that Two-Guns would live to fight another day. There wasn’t a dry eye in the TOC as the muzzle flashes continued lancing outward and the Zs kept falling in waves. It hadn’t been lost on Nash at the time that thousands upon thousands of Americans, Confederate and Union, had fallen during the battles for nearby Shenandoah Valley. And like Stonewall Jackson who had held the area against numerically superior Union forces nearly one hundred and fifty years before, President Clay was hoping the ailing man they were bringing back to Schriever was well enough to devise a strategy to turn the tide on the dead with a disparity in numbers far outweighing those that Stonewall had faced.
The caffeine hit Nash like a mule kick as she reminisced over the cheer that went up when the trio of Ospreys flared and landed and the harried extraction commenced in real time.
“Chalk one up for the good guys,” she had said aloud at the time. In fact, Two-Gun was the third high ranking official to be rescued as a direct result of her brilliant idea in which she searched for the signals her satellites never received in the days and weeks following Z-Day when the country went mostly dark—figuratively and literally. Theory was most of the persons essential to the continuity of government had been lulled into complacency due to the sitting President’s initial waffling and indecision. That the living dead had gotten such a quick foothold in the District of Columbia—causing the city to fall that first weekend—made getting to nearby Joint Base Andrews in Maryland—let alone relocating to the numerous pre-fortified bunkers scattered about the massively populated eastern sea board—nearly impossible.
So with the help of her best and brightest, and armed with the President’s password, they accessed the NSA’s supercomputers located somewhere in the ten-thousand-square-foot labyrinth underneath Fort Meade, fifteen miles south of Baltimore, Maryland. Stored digitally behind multiple firewalls Nash found the conduit to terabytes of metadata collected from every cell provider in the United States and abroad from the late nineties to present day. Every benign call. Every drunk dial. Even accidental butt calls had been archived and stamped with unique metadata pointing to when and where the call was placed. The latter being the info Nash coveted. And the way it worked was that every individual cell call went through the nearest tower, the phone first pinging the apparatus affixed to the tower before bumping the signal to the overhead telecommunications satellites that in milliseconds bounced the signal back down, no matter the distance, to the cell tower nearest the call’s recipient.
While searching the metadata for cell pings from essential high-ranking personnel, Nash got to thinking and those thoughts led directly to the off-the-books mission about to launch a quarter mile away.
Zero-dark-thirty. The time when most humans naturally lower their guard. Complacency builds and alertness wanes.
She pictured the SOAR pilots readying their birds. Checking the nuts and bolts and software pertinent to remaining airborne. Running diagnostics checks and, hopefully, receiving the green light meaning all systems go.
An hour earlier the distant low rumble of the refueling package consisting of a pair of KC-130 tankers taking to air rattled the windows. She had noticed the pitch of the spinning props change as they bit into the cold Colo
rado air as the planes banked and lumbered away south by west.
The second package, due to launch any minute, would not make a sound. At least not the kind that would travel from Whipper’s tarmacs to her ears. So the only way she would ultimately know the mission was not scrubbed would be by the continued silence of the two land-line telephones on her desk, one red and one black.
Chapter 29
Glenda awoke but remained supine with her eyes still shut tight. Her mind’s eye, however, snapped wide open. And she was certain, standing within arm’s reach, only a flimsy pane of automotive glass and an unlocked door between her and certain death, were a dozen hungry zombies. As her imagination took the ball and ran, the listless horde advanced, moaning and hissing, one awkward step at a time. Soon the wicked screech of cracked nails against sheet metal sounded and she screamed and opened her eyes and craned around. There were no pale leering faces pressed to the windows. So, chest still heaving, she hinged up slowly, wincing from aches and pains resulting from a lifetime of never giving up.
She peered over the dash, eyes narrowed against the light spilling in around the edges of the battered and bowed rollup. The tagline from a watchmaker came to mind: Took a licking and kept on ticking. Then she noticed the nearest edge where the door had been forced from its tracks and saw long vertical runners of dried blood.
She looked left and saw corrugated metal and signs on the wall pointing to the brands of oil and air cleaners and long-life batteries the garage’s former owner favored. Fram, STP, and Eveready—all familiar names that brought back fond memories of her wannabe-gearhead husband. Grateful nothing was waiting for her in the shadows there, she flicked her eyes to the rearview and saw only a low workbench and on the wall a calendar still pinned to July displaying a scantily clad girl and a shiny red roadster. Far from the truth, thought Glenda. Based on her experiences she’d forever remember July for its surprise gift of traffic snarls full of ordinary passenger cars and the living corpses entombed inside of them.
She scooted over the transmission hump on her butt and shouldered the door open. Stepped onto the concrete and shut the door behind her, the resonant creak spurring more of the same hair-raising rasp of bone on metal she’d slept through most of the night. With the renewed heaving of her chest exasperating the stitch in her side, she looked dead ahead and it suddenly dawned on her that the walking briquette was still inside the store and had just been aroused by the noisy door hinge.
Out came the knitting needles and Glenda crept to the door. She mounted the step and rose on her tiptoes. Put her face to the glass pane but saw nothing on the other side. As she took a step back to think through her options, whatever had slammed into the door a moment ago did so again and then inexplicably the knob started rattling.
From her new vantage point a step down she saw only the top of the creature’s head through the soot-streaked window. It was wavering back and forth while the knob continued rotating slowly left and right in small increments. With the prospect of the thing actually opening the door and catching her flat-footed, Glenda decided to seize the initiative and turn the tables on the persistent son of a gun. So, throwing caution to the wind, she counted down from three, gripped the knob, and pulled the door towards her.
At once Kingsford stepped over the threshold, juddered stiffly on the pair of steps, and collapsed in a vertical heap on the garage floor.
Glenda forgot all about the needles in her hands. Focusing solely on the blue sky showing between the roof joists, she held her breath and waded through the cloud of gray dust roiling off the struggling creature. Fully expecting a pair of hands to lock on to her lower extremities, she stepped over its twitching legs and into the store and pulled the door closed, trapping it in the garage.
She stood in the store, hands on knees, back pressed to the door and, while catching her breath, looked the three points of the compass. North, to her right, the rear parking lot was choked with burned hulks of cars and trucks, but no walking dead. To the west, dead ahead past the aisles and out the empty pane behind the check stand she could see a small group of dead tottering away, a long hill climb ahead of them. And, much to her relief, the parking lot in front of the store was empty as was the roadway beyond it. In the distant field, however, she saw a pair of deer cautiously picking their way through the grass, left to right.
Then the scratching resumed. She imagined the bony nubs punching through the door and raking her back. Throwing a shiver, she turned around and saw through the soot the white paint of the door from where the thing had been relentlessly pawing at it. In addition to the vertical stripes there were three rough circles. Two where her shoulders had rested against it. And another oblong shape lower down where her backside had rubbed the black coating off the metal surface.
Letting her conscience get the better of her, Glenda wet her finger and scribed the words Do Not Enter on the door in three-inch-high letters.
She listened hard for a moment and, hearing nothing moving out of her line of sight, went back into character. Head cocked to one side, she shuffled to the blown-out door, ducked clumsily under the push bar, and stepped into the morning chill. Moving like a zombie, she turned her head left ever so slowly and regarded her handiwork. Mombie, the three younger zombies and the Deer Hunters lay in a heap, limbs askew, near the garage’s southeast corner.
As Glenda scanned her surroundings for any signs of Van Man, she heard two things simultaneously. From the grassy median there came a hollow rasp and the crawler she’d first crossed paths with at the roadblock miles back inched slowly hand over hand onto the blacktop. And, causing the deer in the field to start and bolt for the forest edge, she heard the unmistakable noise of rotor blades beating the air somewhere to the east.
Chapter 30
As the Black Hawk got light on its wheels and wavered slightly, Cade kept his eyes locked on the spot in the forest where the compound’s hidden entrance would be. Then, as the chopper gained altitude and it became apparent the noisy launch hadn’t drawn everyone topside, he shifted his gaze to the familiar strip of SR-39 below his port side window. A tick later, drawing his attention to the cockpit, Duncan’s voice sounded in his helmet. “Where to, D-Boy?”
“Former—” said Cade over the comms.
There was a brief silence and Daymon looked over his right shoulder, cocked his head as if saying: I’m waiting.
Weighing some kind of decision, Cade waited another beat then said decisively, “Daymon, I want you to hold off on inputting those coordinates until we top the tanks off.”
Duncan said, “Morgan County Muni, here we come.”
Cade felt the chopper start the bank to port and, deciding a five-minute detour was in order, said, “Keep to the westerly heading.”
More statement than question, Duncan said, “You want me to overfly Huntsville.”
Cade said, “For future reference only.”
“Nothing to see there, Cade,” added Jamie. “I’ve been. And Eden, too. The fires drew the monsters from the compromised roadblock. Both towns are pretty much rubble and ashes and overrun with crispy walking corpses.”
As the Black Hawk slipped back around to the previous heading, Cade locked eyes with the fiery brunette and asked, “Did you make it all the way to the Conex barricade at the pass?”
Jamie answered no by shaking her helmeted head. Then said, “I was on foot. A little too far and too dangerous to go all by myself.”
Lev said, “Still. It wouldn’t hurt to give it a flyby. Like you said ... for future reference.”
“I concur,” said Cade. “What’s the situation like on the ground on your side, Lev?”
“Shit show, sir,” he said, accidentally slipping back into a previous role from a previous war. A war against an enemy he’d found easy to hate. And even easier to kill. The things pressing against Daymon’s felled trees passing by down below, not so much. In fact, the walking dead, no matter how far down the road of decay they’d travelled, were constant daily reminders of fam
ily members who’d balked at leaving their homes in an already overrun Salt Lake City. His mom, dad, older sister, brother-in-law, two nieces and a nephew—all gone. Then inexplicably he heard Adam Duritz’s familiar raspy voice singing a favorite and suddenly prescient lyric from a Counting Crows track. And the unexpected gut punch came in the form of five words in the first verse reminding him that all of his memories were now just films about ghosts.
“Are you all right?” asked Jamie, placing a gloved hand on his thigh.
Lev jumped from the touch and strained forward against his belt.
Nodding toward the starboard window, Jamie mouthed, “What do you see?”
Lev recovered and, without missing a beat, said, “Death and more death. But Daymon’s roadblock was holding. I counted a couple of dozen rotters hanging around. Easy enough to cull. And now we’re coming up on Huntsville ... and more death—” His voice trailed off and his gaze shifted back outside where he saw a lush forested hillside gliding past.
Cade peered out his window. Watched fallow fields and scattered farmhouses and rusty vehicles and swaybacked outbuildings blip by.
Duncan made a fist. Offered it to Daymon and said, “Good call on the roadblock, Urch.”
After reciprocating the bump with Duncan, Daymon leaned forward, squinting to make something out in the glare below.
A minute later, with the shimmering reservoir filling up the starboard side window, Cade said, “Huntsville is gone. Fire spared a few commercial buildings down by the water. The docks as well, and looks like maybe a block or two of houses on the high ground east of there.”
Steiners pressed to his face, Daymon added, “Looks like the fire flushed out a few survivors. There’s half a dozen boats anchored off shore. And we’ve got movement.”
The Black Hawk slowed and descended slightly. Then Duncan nosed the bird left a few degrees and brought her back around perpendicular to the reservoir.
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 13