Once Wilson arrived she gestured at the eighth of a former human being crawling near the centerline and watched with amusement as he flinched at the sight of it and made an instant course correction providing an ample buffer between him and the thing seemingly yanked from his nightmares. He formed up next to Brook, Beretta in hand, and asked, “How in God’s name is that thing’s arm still working?”
“The brain is still functioning and the still-connected spinal cord is delivering impulses to what’s left of it. Simple biology ... or science.”
Wilson said, “Or evil.”
Brook retraced Wilson’s steps and came at the oddity from behind and began raining blows with her M4’s collapsed buttstock to its lopsided skull. After the third resonant thunk the futile migration across the highway had ceased. But for good measure Brook jumped off the roadway and, with all of her weight in play, delivered a final vicious strike with her rifle that sent a shiver through her forearms and split the skull cleanly in two. As fluid and dribbles of brain matter spilled out onto the blacktop, she faced Wilson and said, “It’s done moving. Satisfied?”
Wilson’s jaw dropped open. Wide-eyed, he said, “Remind me never to piss you off.”
Brushing off the comment, Brook gestured at the open door. “Get in.” She pointed out the winch controls; all the while Wilson was eyeing Chief.
“Pay attention,” snapped Brook.
“Sorry,” he stammered.
“Don’t worry, he’s not going to turn any time soon,” she lied. Then she repeated what she’d said about the winch operation. Asked, “Got it?”
Wilson nodded. Pulled his boonie hat down tight over his ears. “You sure you can haul all that cable?”
“I watched you do it all by yourself at the Huntsville blockage.”
Wilson made a face. He said, “Good point.”
Before setting off, Brook patted the sat-phone in her roomy thigh pocket and then reached over and corralled the 40-channel CB and stowed it alongside. Handed Wilson her Glock and, figuring the horde wasn’t too far down the road, told him to hail Taryn on the two-way and have her guard the horn with her life.
This time, freeing the hook from the slot in the F-650’s bumper went easier than the first. She disengaged the tension and, holding onto the length of cable two-handed, hauled it over her shoulder and leaned forward in the direction of the bus. Legs pumping, she skirted the pile of formerly human detritus and, beginning to breathe hard, trudged past the bus’s yellow roof. With the stubby M4 banging against her back, she curled around the vehicle’s less-than-aerodynamic front end and dropped the cumbersome hook and cable to the road. She took a few more paces, propped her rifle against the greasy undercarriage, and slumped to the pavement, winded.
Sitting cross-legged and crying, she pulled out the handheld CB and reached Seth back at the compound. She asked about Raven and listened as Seth told her that the new arrival was a nurse. “Put her on,” Brook said.
There was a rustling and then distant voices followed by a metallic clang. She heard footsteps and another rustle as someone picked up the handheld unit.
The lady calling herself Glenda and professing to be a nurse back in the days before MRIs and CAT scans said that for the time being Raven was stable but showing no signs of improvement. Brook interrogated Glenda a little by asking her questions about diastolic pressure and O2 levels and then asked to speak to Seth again. When Seth came back on, Brook made sure Glenda had gone and asked him specifically what his gut was telling him. To which he said he was inclined to agree with the woman who, after all, said she was a nurse and, so far, seemed to carry herself as such. Semi-convinced but powerless to do anything to better Raven’s situation, Brook powered off the CB and was in the process of putting it away when she heard the scrabbling sound she knew all too well. Nails on sheet metal, she thought as she craned around, frantically looking for its source.
Seeing nothing and chalking the noises up to a lone Z trapped inside the bus, she went fishing for the sat-phone. Her fingers brushed the plastic and the sound came again, followed by a scratchy hiss, and before she could react the low hanging sun was blotted out.
The blow to her head nearly knocked her unconscious. She’d heard the sound many times before. Bone on bone. Skull to skull. Instantly stars swirled behind her eyes her head began to ache. Then something sharp was raking her neck and back as she struggled to rise. Her eyes flicked to her carbine and she reached for it. Her fingers brushed the textured fore grip but Murphy intervened and Newton’s law was enacted and the rifle slid away from her, the barrel carving an arc in the road grime and clattering to the ground out of reach.
Fighting tooth and nail, Brook got a hand behind her back and, clutching something wet and cold and altogether slimy, yanked on it, using every ounce of strength at her disposal.
Wilson took his eyes off of Chief, whose chest, thankfully, was still rising and falling. He shifted in his seat to see over the large side mirror and craned his head looking for movement or shadow or anything to point to Brook’s position in relation to the bus.
The sun was to the left and shining on the bus’s undercarriage, so there was no telltale shadow. Moreover, the bus was flat on its side, so seeing her feet moving about was out of the question.
So feeling a tingle worrying the base of his spine, Wilson grabbed the Glock and kicked open the door. In half a beat he was on the ground and running headlong for the bus, oblivious to his own safety.
In the Raptor, Taryn had spent the entire three or four minutes they’d been sitting there on the road trying to keep Sasha calm. The girl was backsliding, and Taryn was growing increasingly tired of her antics. One moment she was praying for a roll of duct tape to apply some over her future sister-in-law’s mouth and secure her wrists, and the next she was seeing Wilson out of the truck and sprinting towards the overturned bus.
“Stay here,” she barked, and was out the door before Sasha could come up with a snarky reply.
Ignoring anything in his way—blood and guts and bone, it didn’t even register in the moment—Wilson rounded the front of the bus, Glock leveled, a solid ten feet of spacing between him and the bumper. As his body cut the plane even with the bus’s undercarriage his gaze fell on Brook. She was sitting cross-legged and rocking back and forth with the sat-phone in her gloved hands. As he drew nearer he saw her rifle on the pavement a few feet beyond her. There was a crawler an arm’s reach away, its eyes gouged out and the back of its skull nothing but a pulped mess.
With the sun warming the right side of his face, Wilson approached the scene with caution. “Are you OK?” he asked.
Brook said nothing. She finished tapping something out on the keypad then looked up. There were tears in her eyes. She said, “How is Chief?”
Wilson kicked the half-corpse to make sure it was truly dead. And it was. There was no further movement. So he lowered the Glock and finally replied, “He’s not looking good.”
Brook sighed and said, “It’s all my fault, you know. I lied to him. And I lied to you. I lied because I didn’t want to lose Raven ... still don’t.”
“He likes Raven as much as any of us do. Plus ... he volunteered.” Wilson helped Brook to her feet. Saw the smudges on her shirt back. Thought it could be oil or blood. Curious, he asked worriedly, “What happened here?”
“The Z fell from above and nearly head-butted me unconscious. Then I snapped out of it and found myself in a life and death struggle.”
“And?”
“I’m fine.” She powered down the phone and it went into a pocket. “Let me finish what I started.”
She scooped up her carbine and handed it to Wilson. She said, “Watch my back.”
“How is your back?” he asked.
She said nothing. Instead, she knelt near the exposed front wheels, searching for something sturdy to anchor the cable to.
Below the gore-spattered front bumper she found a hook twice the size of her hand. After closer inspection she determined, based on
the way it was positioned and the size of the bolt securing it directly to the frame, that it was put there for exactly the purpose she intended on using it for. She wound the cable around the hook and clipped it to itself. She stood up and pulled it tight and gazed upon her handiwork.
Good to go.
Limping, Brook made her way to the F-650. She climbed in and saw Chief, who appeared to be in roughly the same condition as when she had left him. She retrieved her hat and saw his eyes move behind the closed lids. “Hang in there,” she said. “Give me one hour. Please.” She started the V10, put the transmission in Reverse, and disengaged the e-brake. Applying very little throttle, she inched the rig back until the cable straightened and hummed under tension.
Glock in hand and his head moving as if on a swivel, Wilson backed well away from the taut cable. In case it snapped, the last thing he wanted was to be cut in half and end up looking like the thing Brook had just beaten to a pulp.
Feeling resistance building, Brook pressed on the accelerator and the Ford belched gray exhaust. Ever so slowly the school bus began to move. It wasn’t sliding so much as it was pivoting on a point somewhere mid-chassis.
There was a tremendous groan of metal and then a voluminous grating noise as the nose moved a couple of feet. Seeing progress, Brook doubled down on the throttle and held the steering wheel as straight as humanly possible. She saw her efforts pay off when whatever had been creating the pivot point gave way and the bus spun another ninety degrees and started screeching across the blacktop tracking straightaway with the reversing F-650.
Waving both hands groundward as if he were fanning a stubborn campfire, Wilson bellowed, “Stop.”
Brook hit the brakes and watched the bus grind to a halt and the tension leave the cable. When she looked over at Wilson he was pointing north down 16 and hoofing it towards the now inert bus.
Taryn saw what Wilson was seeing. Unfortunately so did Sasha, and she started a new and unusually loud bitch session that started Max to growling.
While Taryn stared at the advancing herd of dead that had no doubt been patrolling nearby Woodruff, she tried to calm both the teen and the dog using an even voice and reassuring words.
But that wasn’t working so she said, “I’m about to backhand you, Sasha. Then when ... or if ... we get back to the compound I’m going to kick the crap out of you. And don’t think I’m not capable.” She stared into the rearview thinking: Gauntlet thrown.
Suddenly Sasha lost all her bluster. She sat back in her seat all of a sudden silent, her lip quivering rather perceptibly.
Taryn watched as Wilson unhooked the cable and straightened it out as it was reeling back into the housing somewhere behind the bumper. Seeing the herd nearing the intersection and even more undead tottering from the side streets and beyond, she leaned over the console and popped the door. “Old trick my dad taught me,” she said to herself. She started the engine and got her truck rolling slowly to the left and hit the brakes hard when Wilson was ten feet from the passenger door. Equal and opposite reaction was in play as the brakes grabbed and the well-oiled hinge gave, allowing Wilson’s door to open up right in front of him.
“Convenient,” he said as he leaped inside, out of breath. “Your dad teach you that one?”
“Duh,” said Sasha from behind.
In the F-650, Brook could barely tell that Chief was still breathing. He was, however, twitching, and that was a good a sign as any. It was an absence of both that she feared the most because then she figured there would only be a matter of seconds for her to pull over and uphold her promise to him.
She took a second to call ahead and alert Seth to have the gate cleared of dead and open on the outside chance Chief survived the drive there.
Northwest of Moab
With their final aerial refueling of the very long day in the books and the Herc and her aircrew, who were now owed multiple rounds of beers, droning away somewhere over the horizon to the east, the Ghost Hawk and Osprey, their rotors churning lazily, sat fifty yards apart on an expanse of flat weathered rock in the middle of nowhere, Utah.
Transferring Emily and Nadia, even with the IV still plugged into her arm, had gone off smoothly. As Cade watched the dual rotors pick up speed he wondered how the atmosphere aboard the Osprey was, taking into account that the dozen hard-charging Rangers who had been sitting on their thumbs this whole time had all basically just been given the job of babysitter.
He looked at Lasseigne’s still form under the flag and said a prayer for the man. Then he heard the low growl of the turbines change to a manic whine as they spooled up. Gazing out the window, he saw pebbles bouncing on the red rock and sand blowing away in sheets. Finally the rotor blades seemed to lose shape and merge into one solid black overhead disc. Taking advantage of the nearly empty cabin, he stretched his legs out and, though Raven had been on his mind for the last few hours, tried to relax for the rest of the flight—however long that might be.
Then, with timing that couldn’t have been better, Ari’s voice sounded in his headset saying, “Next stop Huntsville, Utah. Flight time one hour, give or take.” Then, a tick later, with timing that couldn’t have been worse, the sat-phone vibrated against his thigh. He retrieved it quickly and, hitting a random key, brought it to life. The text message was short but dire. Immediately Cade said, “Can you get me there any faster?”
Ari came back on. “I can shave a few minutes off with the right altitude and a tailwind.”
“Not good enough,” responded Cade. Then, knowing the bigger bird’s capabilities, if not the willingness of the aircrew to accommodate him, he went on, “How about the Osprey?”
“It’ll get you there in thirty mikes,” Ari said.
“I know it can. But will Ripley agree to take me?”
The Ghost’s turbines quieted a little and in turn her rotors began to slow. A tick later Ari said, “I’ll ask her. But I can’t guarantee you anything.”
By now a concerned look was on Lopez’s face and he was mouthing, “What’s up?”
Head craning forward, Griffin was doing his best to make heads or tails of Cade’s unusual request. He pantomimed smelling his pits as if his BO was pushing the Delta boy away.
Cade said nothing to Lopez’s query. He was already unbuckled and asking Griffin to hand over the kit containing all of his medical supplies.
Without a word Griffin thumbed the plastic quick release and handed it over.
Cade stuffed the remaining cylinders containing the Omega antiserum inside, zippered the bag, and clipped it around his waist. He patted Lasseigne’s leg. Then he looked at one of the few remaining members of SEAL Team 6 and said, “I owe you one, Griff.”
Carbine in one hand, rucksack in the other, Cade motioned for Skipper to help him with the door. In the next beat he was on the ground and running full on toward the Osprey and not looking back.
By the time he had drawn to within thirty yards of the black tiltrotor aircraft some kind of a decision must have been made. The rotor wash suddenly seemed less ferocious and the rear ramp on the big bird cracked open and started a merger with the slick red rock. Cade imagined one of two things happening. Either he’d been deemed crazy by his contemporaries in Jedi One-One and would be greeted by a few leveled rifles brandished by confused Rangers waiting with zip-ties to restrain him. Or he’d be welcomed aboard, no questions asked, and might just make it to the compound in time to deliver what he hoped to be life-saving measures.
In the end the latter had been the case. The ramp stopped at full open and the soldiers welcomed him. Within a matter of seconds, the girls, wearing confused looks on their faces, were being led back to the waiting Ghost Hawk by a pair of Rangers.
Cade buckled in and nodded to the loadmaster and then exchanged knowing looks with the remaining ten Rangers of the 75th. The same regiment he’d hailed from so long ago. And like him, they’d been conditioned to expect the unexpected. Hurry up and wait should have been the United States Army’s mantra. Not: Be all you
can be.
Chapter 70
Five minutes after negotiating the tight left turn onto State Route 39 West, and with the reverberations of palms slapping the doors a thing of the past, Brook was attacking the road like Danica Patrick—about thirty miles above the posted limit.
As the quarry entrance blazed by on the right, she hit a straightaway and between a break in the trees saw the blue and gold DHS chopper tracking for the compound on a more or less northwest heading.
After another five long minutes of negotiating the twists and turns and rollercoaster-like undulations of 39 at breakneck speed, the clearing and gentle arc of the two-lane near the compound’s hidden entrance came into view. And there beside the road was a head-high pile of unmoving Zs and a black Chevy pickup sitting broadside to their approach.
Behind the efforts of a gun-wielding Ichabod-Crane-looking form that could only be Phillip, the gate swung open, allowing both charging vehicles entrance to the feeder road.
Inside the compound, at the security desk, Seth watched the F-650 barreling toward the camera providing the feed gracing the top left corner of the monitor. Like a bull elephant charging through the Serengeti bush, the running boards and mirrors on the lead truck churned the just-turning leaves and thistle and reaching branches of the ground-hugging undergrowth into so much colorful mulch. And hot on the black Ford’s tail was the white Raptor, spewing a turbid contrail of like-colored foliage in its wake.
Over his shoulder, Seth hollered, “They’re back,” and returned his attention to the monitor. But this time he was staring at the panel on the monitor’s right lower corner showing the image of the clearing.
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 38