She tested the knob and it turned freely. Seeing Chief emerge from the far door, she waited to catch his eye then pointed at the door and mouthed, “Rotter inside.”
Chief stood nearby, rifle trained on the door, as Brook pushed it inward and stepped aside.
He said, “Clear,” then lowered his rifle and covered his nose with his free hand.
Brook walked through the wall of stench and felt bile rising in her throat when she saw what was making the noise.
An arm’s length to her left, standing half a head over the top of its crib, was a withered and cadaverous undead toddler. A girl. Maybe two or three at the most. An electrical cord was knotted tightly around the thing’s wrist-thin neck. One dainty bicep was wrapped with a crude gauze and tape bandage. Blood had soaked through and dried to black in a perfect oval. A bite, thought Brook.
Chief said, “Looks like she was bitten first.”
Reacting to Chief’s voice, the thing bared its teeth and hissed and, reaching for the source, slammed its tiny frame against the headboard.
“I’m sure Mommy did her best,” said Brook as the squeaking she had heard from downstairs started up again and quickly rose in tempo and volume. She walked to the center of what looked like a break room for the owner or staff—probably one and the same. There was a kitchen table near the window and on top of it was a microwave and a salt and pepper shaker. Tea packets were stuffed into a large paper cup. There were wooden stir sticks and creamer and sugar. One of the four chairs was missing from the table.
The little Z, now with both pale hands wrapped around the bars, was shaking the drop-down crib gate, which produced a shrill nonstop metal on metal peal.
Then, coming from the front of the long room behind the large piece of fabric dividing it into two equal parts, the other noise intensified.
Standing in the middle of some kind of macabre orchestra of the dead, with the incessant rattling on her left and the nerve-jangling squeaking to her right, and a good idea of what was beyond the divider, Brook took a handful of burgundy fabric in one hand and said, “I’ll pull. You cover.”
Nodding, Chief raised his carbine and took a few steps to his left to better the angle.
With its little feet slipping on the slickened bedding, the undead toddler hissed and strained and somehow got both arms hooked over the rail.
Brook yanked the curtain back and her initial expectation was shattered. Time seemed to slow and again the radio in her pocket vibrated. In the next second her salivary glands went into overdrive, flooding her mouth with a bitter acidic taste and she fell to her knees, willing the rising tide of bile down. Breathing hard through her mouth, she looked at Chief and said, “This could have been me ... and Raven.”
Suddenly she was reliving Myrtle Beach. Her mother and father were zombies. Mom was stalking her down the hall. Then a horn blaring in the parking lot behind the building snapped her back.
Chief said, “We need to get moving. There’s nothing for us here.”
Brook keyed the radio and said, “Grow a pair and handle them, Wilson. I’ve got a couple of things to take care of.” She released the Talk button and pocketed the radio.
Outside, the Raptor’s horn blipped once.
“You sure you want to?”
Rising up from the floor, Brook shot Chief a look that said: Don’t go there. Then she cast her gaze on the young brunette woman who had obviously not been privy to the rules of the new world. The missing dining chair was lying on its side a yard distant. On the floor next to it was the white panel that had been removed from the drop-down ceiling overhead. The writhing corpse was hanging from a nylon rope knotted around its alabaster neck and, judging by the nonstop squeaking, secured to a loose ceiling joist somewhere up there in the gloom.
Partially stuck in the bodily fluids that had pooled and dried under the dangling flesh eater was a single sheet of white paper, folded in half.
Brook crouched and took the paper between two fingers and unfolded it carefully.
Chief saw her eyes moving back and forth, reading something. Then she looked up at him and, tears welling in her eyes, said, “Her name is Carol. The little girl is Mia.”
“Was,” said Chief. “Let me have your pistol.” He held his hand out to receive the suppressed Glock.
The horn blared again. Urgent sounding. Three sharp reports.
Chief pointed toward the stairs. Framed by dark hair which was perpetually pulled back into a tight ponytail, his ruddy tanned face showed no emotion. No fear. No apprehension. Nothing. He said, “Go. Now.”
Brook shook her head. Drew the Glock and checked the chamber. Seeing the glint of fat brass, she let the slide snap back and raised her gun arm. With her free hand she spun the twitching corpse around a few degrees and, with the Glock’s suppressor hovering inches from the base of its skull, squeezed off two quick shots. Instantly a spritz of congealed blood and other viscous fluid spattered the ceiling tiles in two wide overlapping arcs. A millisecond later a cloud of aerated gray matter burst from the ruptured skull and joined the roiling dust motes riding the once still air. On the back side of the initial second the weapon’s dual coughs had toured the room and receded to nothingness and the oak wood flooring was receiving a fine misting of both. Chest heaving under the bulky MOLLE gear, Brook strode the length of the room and, sensing a little more of her humanity slipping away, grabbed a tuft of Mia’s wispy straw-colored hair, forced her face down onto the soiled mattress, and in one quick motion drew her hand back and put two rounds behind the undead girl’s tiny button of an ear.
With tears flowing fully down her cheeks and awash in a feeling of foreboding from not finding the supplies necessary to save her own daughter, Brook followed Chief out of the building, wary of what awaited them.
Chapter 53
In his mind’s eye, Cade pictured Nadia tooling her little white Miata down the L.A. side streets, confused and terrified and trying to get to one of the promised FEMA safe havens mentioned in the looping radio broadcasts that had initially instructed everyone to shelter in place.
He imagined her skirting the freeway south with nothing but her cell phone and a desire to be reunited with her mom.
He supposed seeing the bridges out and coming to the realization that all overland access to Terminal Island was gone must have been a hell of a gut punch. And how the feeling of dread upon seeing the freeway under attack, or, more than likely, stumbling across the aftermath, must have been monumental for someone her age to fathom.
Enduring all of this knowing the power and position her mom held. The unfettered access to spy satellites and secure phones and high-level government officials—yet nobody had contacted her or come to her rescue.
What a knockout blow that must have been.
Then he put himself in her shoes and instantly came to the conclusion that if this apple fell anywhere within a mile’s radius of the tree that was Freda Nash, the young woman was sheltering in place somewhere familiar. The one place she could eventually be found if her mom mounted a search. And that place loomed just three blocks to the west.
He looked beyond the curving ramp, over the bobbing heads of the walking dead at the V-shaped apartment building, and felt in his gut that she was still alive.
The first salvo of gunfire lanced from Lopez’s carbine. Pumping suppressed rounds into the dead two at a time, he advanced down the narrow ramp, stepping over the leaking bodies until he had expended thirty rounds and the carbine’s bolt locked open. “Next,” he said into the comms. Standing aside, the stubby suppressor still smoking, he raised the barrel and changed mags.
Cross squeezed past Lopez and took up where he left off. The dead were falling and rolling down the widening ramp. A pair dropped side-by-side, semi-upright and limbs akimbo, blocking the team’s passage. Improvising on the fly, Cross halted and kicked them onto their backs and then padded across their prostrate forms.
Bringing up the rear, Cade kept one eye on Griffin and the other on their six. He n
oticed the SEAL’s dressing was completely blood-soaked and asked, “How’s the arm?”
Grimacing from the pain of raising his arm, Griffin flashed a thumbs up and hung his upper torso over the cement rail and started raining lead down on the dead from above.
Inside the hovering Ghost Hawk two hundred feet above a cluster of small two-story homes north of the insertion point, Ari looked on with a healthy dose of apprehension. Though this was a sticky situation since the dead had gotten wind of the team, there was nothing he could do. The bird’s minigun wasn’t suited for the kind of help the team could use. For one, the noise would only draw more dead to the AO (Area of Operations). Secondly, the term ‘danger close’ in this situation was a hell of an understatement. The dead were nearly draping themselves on the advancing team. But such was the nature of CQB (Close Quarters Battle). And the chalk of rangers swooping in aboard the noisy Osprey would only add to the confusion. They were along at Nash’s behest solely as insurance should the cobbled-together team find themselves trapped in a building like the Four Palms where a rooftop extraction was not an option. So he held the steady hover and drew his own little crowd of Zs.
***
The fight from the pedestrian walk to the east/west street leading to the Four Palms lasted five minutes during which Haynes was watching from the helicopter and calling out targets and threats for the team. Twice it looked as if the dead had them surrounded. Once when the team reached the base of the ramp, when Haynes did his best smooth talking to dissuade the door gunner from entering the fight as the team had to resort to a mad minute of gunfire to break contact. And then again half a block from the apartment building where finally he could take it no longer and bellowed, “Guns free,” to his crew chief.
“That’s danger close,” Ari replied. “Disregard. We’ve got a different set of rules now, Haynes. Those things aren’t firing back. So close has a different definition to the guys on the ground.”
Then Cade’s voice filled the comms, urging the team to turn and follow him.
“Hold fire until they break,” Ari said. “One quick burst is all. That should give them the buffer they need.”
The crew chief on the minigun acknowledged with a quick, “Copy that.”
Keeping the front of the Four Palms in sight, Cade broke for the corner at a dead sprint. He didn’t look back. Didn’t need to. The sound of boots and breathing and the subtle rustle of gear and fabric told him the others were with him.
Then another sound filled the air. A friendly sound comforting to any foot soldier in harm’s way. The chainsaw-like ripping noise lasted less than a second. Then hot shell casings were pinging and bouncing off the cul-de-sac’s circle of blacktop a block off of his left shoulder. He thought: There’s the dinner bell.
Once the Dillon fell silent, Ari sideslipped the helo two blocks east, dumped altitude until the helo was just above the pedestrian bridge, and then descended another twenty feet. Keeping Jedi One-One just below the lip of the manmade concrete canyon, he flew over top of the jammed up vehicles for a block or two. A handful of seconds after pouring a hundred and fifty 7.62 mm NATO rounds into the throng of Zs, the stealth helicopter had skimmed the inert vehicles and risen from cover and was holding a steady hover.
To Ari, from the helo’s right seat roughly a block southeast and a hundred feet above the rear roofline of the Four Palms, the place looked entirely deserted.
The sun and sky and tops of nearby palms were reflected in the windows on the southeast wing. On the other wing, displayed in the mostly westward-facing glass, was a snapshot of the neighborhood and, rising above it, the azure Pacific Ocean. And as if the city was under some kind of a mandatory blackout order every window on every floor of the Four Palms was drawn tight.
“Nobody’s home,” cracked Ari.
“Except for the dead,” echoed Haynes.
“I think we’re going to make a good team, Haynes.”
“As if I have a choice,” answered the big African American.
Ari smiled. He said, “Good restraint back there, Doctor Silence.”
Haynes said, “Boom. I think we have a nickname for the quiet sergeant.”
“Let’s go with Doctor. Or Doc for short,” Ari said. “What do you think ... you like the sound of that, Doc?”
Sergeant James Skipper’s eyes narrowed behind the smoked visor. Then, still gripping the minigun and with Lasseigne’s corpse his only company, he nodded subtly, but said nothing.
High-stepping through the tangle of Zs littering the sidewalk took Cade right back to basic training. Only this wasn’t a phalanx of old sun-hardened automobile tires where a misstep meant at best a little hurt pride or at worst a twisted ankle or knee. No, these were dangerous bio hazards with blown-apart skulls and broken bones protruding from previous damage. One scrape from a green stick fracture and it was antiserum time for the unfortunate victim. And so far Cade didn’t like the odds of survival Fuentes’s concoction offered. The cooling corpse in the helicopter above was deadly proof enough.
He led the team along the front of the Palms the way they’d come for half a block and, with the pedestrian bridge two blocks dead ahead, took the next right. They moved south for another block, passing by a picket of palms on the left and a wall of manicured shrubs growing up next to the apartment building’s east-facing wall which rose more than a hundred feet skyward on their right.
“Wait one,” said Lopez. “I need to check something.”
Cade raised a closed fist and came to a halt and went down to one knee. He looked up and noticed the Four Palm’s metal fire escape twisting back and forth on itself all the way to the top floor.
Filing that bit of info away for later, he looked left past Cross and Griffin, who had their backs to the shaped shrubs and the barrels of their suppressed carbines pointing out at opposite angles.
A few feet beyond the SEALs, Lopez was leaning between the bushes with only his legs and backside visible.
Curious, Cade did the same and found himself peering through decorative holes designed into the cement block supports and into the Four Palms’s underground garage. There in the gloom he saw a game-changing sight that buoyed his hopes and, short of proof of life, all but backed up his gut feeling.
“There’s a white Miata in the garage here,” said Lopez. “Has to be Nadia’s.”
“Can’t be too many white Miata’s in Southern California ... can there?” answered Cade, tongue-in-cheek.
Ignoring the quip, Lopez said, “There’s a few more vehicles.” He paused for a second. Drew a breath and went on, “And a mess of demonios.”
Either the building has been compromised entirely and the things got down there through an open stairway, thought Cade. Or if the garage entrance is gated, which, presumably, it would be, then hopefully someone left it open. Cade hoped for the latter, because if it was gated and that gate was down and locked, figuring a way to breach it and then secure it behind them once they were inside might prove to be a deal breaker.
Still running the contingencies through his head, Cade started off at a trot past the shrubs. When the foliage abruptly ended and the building angled away to the right and a low cement wall bordering the outside parking lot became his only cover, he went into a low-combat crouch and hurried a dozen yards farther to the corner, where, again, he went to one knee and raised a closed fist. A moment later three pairs of boots scuffed to a stop on the sidewalk behind him and the team came to a stop. Given the shit storm they’d gone through covering the first three blocks of the incursion, that they hadn’t encountered a walking corpse for an entire city block was refreshing as hell—but not long-lived.
Feeling the sweat pouring down his back and pockets of liquid pooling against his chest underneath his body armor, Cade peeked around the corner, looked the length of the low wall bordering the lot’s south side, and saw a dozen dead things looking skyward. Following their gaze, he saw the Ghost Hawk, silent, black, and menacing. It was partially blocking out the sun and hoverin
g parallel to the building with the starboard minigun deployed and covering the team’s approach.
“I count thirteen Zs southwest of your position,” announced Haynes. “I repeat, one-three Zulus to your southwest. The Zulus you just broke contact with are now turning the corner at your six o’clock.”
“Copy that,” said Cade. “I have the point now.”
“Do we have an Anvil Actual sighting?” said Ari over the comms.
Cade said nothing to that. He snugged his carbine to his shoulder and, looking over the barrel, rounded the corner low of profile and searching for targets.
Leading the team quick and quiet westbound, Cade slowed to a walk once he was within ten yards of the dead. He put his finger on the trigger and, with the others at his back, started dealing out lethal double-taps. And the dead didn’t know what had hit them. They fell vertically. The first five in a jumbled heap, their near naked bodies intertwined in second death. The next half-dozen went down in succession, like dominos, as they turned to face the advancing footfalls. With audible pops their heads exploded one after the other and Cade stepped over their prone forms and did the final two—execution style—two rounds each from behind as he rushed by them. In fifteen short seconds all thirteen rotters littered the sidewalk and parking lot entrance, their heads caved in from thirteen unlucky pairs of rapidly decelerating and tumbling 62 grain hardball.
Lopez, Cross, and Griffin rushed through the open gate in a tight knot and, as planned, Cade stopped underneath it and jumped and grabbed ahold of its sharp metal lower lip. As the other three continued running down the ramp there was a strobe light effect on the walls and low ceiling from their weapons discharging.
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 29