Brook scooped up her pack and on the way out the door called out over her shoulder, “Damn straight I did.”
M4 in hand, Cade turned on one crutch and said, “Load up. We’re oscar mike in five.”
Chapter 10
Four fucking hours, thought Elvis. Drive all night and then spend half an hour groveling for my life trying to prove I had no intention of following through on Robert Christian’s final orders. All while kissing that bastard’s boots and I’m allowed only four fucking hours of sleep. He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes and worked the controls. The blade lowered and bit into the earth. The diesel engine growled and black, dirty exhaust belched from the stack as the next phalanx of saplings and wrist-sized firs rolled under the breaking wave of rich topsoil.
In his peripheral vision he watched a pair of soldiers, clad in all black and toting like-colored carbines of some sort, pick their way to the clearing’s edge. They took their time stepping over clods of dirt and uprooted ferns and halted a couple of feet from where a newly arrived zombie stood gripping the stretched wire.
“Let’s see what you got,” muttered Elvis who, less than a week ago, had been ripping the faces of the infected off their skulls in order to get to their salivary glands. A means to an end, he’d thought at the time. Anything to kill the soldiers as they cowered safe and sound inside the wire at Schriever Air Force Base.
But that one went sideways on him. He’d only managed to set off a chain reaction outbreak in the civilian quarters. To which the fucking soldiers showed up with Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Humvees and overwhelming firepower. Cowards. Just like dropping the Oakland Bay Bridge into the drink to save San Francisco. Using maximum force against their own populace in order to save their own asses—cowards one and all. And in the end his escape from Schriever undetected had been made possible because of the soldiers’ unwillingness to clean up their own messes ... to do their own dirty work. Burial detail. He’d volunteered days before. A means to an end. Loading the infected onto Dead Sleds—massive earth moving dump trucks—and then sending them back, ashes to ashes and dirt to dirt, from whence they came. Nope ... nobody wanted to touch that task with a ten-foot pole. Not even the brave warriors. Going outside of the wire to bury the very folks he’d just infected, as much as killing his driver—the affable Private Mark Farnsworth—was also a means to an end. And if all went as planned, that end would be very profound and he’d finally strike a deadly blow to the heartless automatons who’d signed his family’s death warrant on that Bay Bridge nearly three weeks ago.
Wishing he had an energy drink or steaming cup of black coffee, or better yet a rail of something much stronger, chemically based and white, Elvis cast a quick glance at Bishop who was watching him through a pair of binoculars from the covered wraparound porch of the giant lake house.
So, just as he had done after volunteering as a driver for the Minot mission weeks ago, he put his head down and did what he was told. Two hours, he guessed. Two more hours and he’d have enough of the forest pushed back and the soil packed and grated smooth that he could relax. Maybe even sleep. He smiled at the thought of putting his head down and closing his eyes. But then remembered what Bishop had said: A plat inside the security perimeter sufficient in size to accommodate a number of helicopters. The muscular former Seal had also ordered him to make it a ‘flag lot,’ leaving room enough for a tractor trailer to back in and still remain under cover of the trees on the ‘pole part’ of the clearing. But Elvis had no idea what in the hell a flag lot was, let alone the pole part of a fucking flag lot. Plus he’d just arrived from his cross-country drive when the orders had been issued and had been much too tired to request clarification. So he’d nodded and forced his eyes to remain open and winged it—just as he was doing now.
He raised the blade by a few degrees and set the tractor to idling. Pictured a mental image of a flag flapping in the breeze. He looked left and then right. Which corner would the pole go on? He reached into a pocket. Came out with a poker chip he’d scooped off the ground outside an Indian Casino somewhere west of the Rockies. Left for heads, right for tails, he thought as he flipped the clay marker into the air. He caught it and slapped it on his thigh and removed his hand. Tails.
Right it is, he thought. One thousand worthless dollars’ worth of right. He clanked the dozer over to the spot where the chip decided he would start the next cut. Along the way he passed by the black-clad soldiers, who abruptly stopped hacking appendages from the oblivious flesh eater and flashed smiles and bloodied blades, as if to say Take a look at our handiwork.
And he did, stopping the dozer broadside. He feigned a conspiratorial smile and was caught off guard by the sharp pong wafting off the corpse. Crinkling his nose, he whispered his new mantra, “Means to an end.” Though he didn’t want to, he found himself compelled to set eyes on the poor creature. From the neck up the thing was nearly impossible to look at. Truly a ghastly sight, minus everything fleshy: nose, ears, lips, eyelids. The zombie had been rendered aerodynamically streamlined and now resembled a demonic version of the tortured soul depicted in Edvard Munch’s the Screamer. From the neck down was a different story. The sadists had hacked off the creature’s forearms, leaving it looking like some kind of battlefield casualty, straining against the fence, mouth opening and closing, waving its bloody stumps at its antagonists.
Elvis threw a half-assed salute at the men, sending them back to their macabre undertaking.
Then, now knowing precisely why he was cutting the pole part of the flag lot into the forest, he lowered the blade and resumed razing the earth.
Watching the action through a pair of binoculars from his post near the north gate, Jimmy Foley, a newly conscripted townie, said a small prayer that whoever was driving the tractor would accidentally run over the pair he’d taken to calling the Brothers Grimm.
Chapter 11
A handful of things Jamie knew for certain. The first, and hardest for her to admit, was that Logan was dead. Replaying the surreal scene in her head for the hundredth time, she heard the out-of-place mechanical buzzing of the egg-shaped helicopter as it flitted left to right. The black flash of metal and glass skimmed inches above the borrowed police Tahoe. Then, like an old film, jittery and slow in motion, she saw the needle antennas quiver spasmodically from the disturbed air and the black and white SUV start rocking subtly on its springs. A microsecond later, bullets were snapping the air around her and the two men responsible for the barrage had materialized from her right side near the trio of swaybacked sheds. To her left, Logan’s breath left his body, producing a drawn-out wheezy groan unlike anything she’d ever heard. Simultaneously, the fatal one-two punch registered in her side vision and she saw his black bowler hat go airborne. Instinctively her eyes tracked it as it tumbled slowly, then, a tick later, his feet followed his hat’s trajectory and he was pitched onto his back, bloody red blossoms breaking out on his tan fatigue top. Then, without warning, she felt a sharp pain in her knee and was bowled over and face down on the cool concrete, wedged between Logan’s inert body and Gus, who was by then flat on his back, gasping for breath, his frantic eyes seemingly begging her to run.
But she couldn’t. She struggled to move but the strap on her carbine had become twisted when she fell. She remembered feeling the weight of the rifle against her back, but face down with her arms pinned fast there was no way to fight back.
Everything had happened so quickly that her mind was still collating the intense bombardment of stimuli when a dark shadow rippled over Logan’s body and the light coming in through the roller doors was mostly blocked out.
The last thing she remembered before everything went black was the tempest of noise, the kerosene-tinged air and the metallic tang of Logan’s warm blood as it wet her cheek and soaked into her hair.
Sometime later she regained consciousness in a helicopter with a hood reeking of blood and fear-laced sweat cinched tightly over her head, her wrists bound together so tightly that she feared a double amputation m
ight be in her immediate future.
Next, the gravity of her situation hit her hard and fast like the bullets that had struck down the man she had grown to like and was beginning to love.
Remaining calm, she had taken immediate stock of her injuries, the worst of which had been a dull throbbing emanating from behind her left ear where she guessed the knockout blow had been delivered. From her right knee came the disconcerting sound of bone grating on bone. An injury sustained when Gus, acting heroically, had violently pushed her out of the line of fire.
Now, a sleepless night later, her brain felt like it was caroming around inside her skull and her knee was still noisy and swollen, yet remarkably could support her entire weight. Whether or not she could outrun her captors if the opportunity presented itself was a question that would have to be answered if, or when, the chance arose.
As the helicopter droned on, Jamie cocked her head towards the pilots up front and listened to their conversation, which was businesslike and spoken in a difficult-to-follow jargon. The only thing she was able to pick up on were references pertaining to their altitude and present airspeed and certain terrain features they were looking out for. Much to her chagrin, though she had hoped for some tidbit to slip, their conversation revealed nothing about where they were now, or where they were going.
After a few minutes of straight and level flight, the helicopter abruptly nosed down and banked right, dropping a big chunk of altitude in the process. Consequently the aggressive maneuver caught Jamie unaware and, when the craft finally righted, her head moved past center and thumped against the opposite bulkhead, further aggravating the concussion and resulting in an intense wave of nausea that set her salivary glands into overdrive.
“I’m about to throw up,” she croaked, her jaw beginning to lock. She tried some shallow breathing but the hot fetid air inside the hood only made matters worse. And though she could sense the man moving just inches to her right, he made no reply. So she doubled down. Made it personal by calling him by name. “Come on, Carson. What possible harm can I do to you? You think I’m going to open the door of a moving helicopter and run for it?” she asked, twisting her hooded head in his direction. He remained silent.
“I can’t even feel my fucking fingers.”
Still he made no reply.
She panned her head forward and called out loudly, hoping to be acknowledged by the pilots. “I need help back here. I’m going to be sick.”
Nothing. Just the rotor blades beating the air overhead.
Her jaw locked open and a flurry of tremors wracked her body. Deep in her esophagus she felt the first little acidic tickle, her body forewarning her of the rising tide of bile. Then her stomach clenched tight, involuntarily doubling her over. To her right, she heard a metallic snik that was instantly recognizable, causing her to tense further. She imagined a gleaming eight-inch blade locking into place. Then her mind began to jump the rails, conjuring up the wolfish glare of a man whose face she hadn’t yet seen. Breathe, she told herself. If they wanted you dead, Jamie, they would have left your bullet-riddled body back at the quarry alongside Logan and Gus.
Then something brushed her thigh, causing her to recoil and shrink against the helicopter’s cool metal skin. She felt the hood go tight around the crown of her head. She heard the rasp of rough burlap as her head was being pulled toward the center of the chopper—towards the man she’d overheard the pilots calling Carson. Then her mind messed with her again. Tried to convince her the blade was being dragged across her neck, so real she could almost feel the flesh parting as a mortal half-moon-shaped incision was opened up under her chin. Then the blood sluicing down her chest, hot and sticky and metallic to the nose. She waited for it. Welcomed it. Instead, the hood came off with an audible pop. And as quickly as she had embraced the thought of death, the stark terror of living the rest of her life in pain while suffering through every type of degradation returned to haunt her.
The greasy sack collapsed into a pile on her lap and, for a split second before the sun behind him became too intense, she saw Carson’s profile in her peripheral vision. We’re flying north, she thought just before closing her eyes.
“You puke anywhere but in that bag and you will find yourself flying under your own power,” he said, catching her wholly by surprise. His voice was gravelly and she wondered if he’d suffered some kind of injury to his vocal chords in the past. She wanted nothing more than to see her captor. To look into his eyes and gauge his resolve.
But she said nothing. Kept her lids sealed and fumbled to grasp the bag with numb hands. Then she felt Carson’s hand, rough and calloused, grip both forearms. Keeping her head bowed, she opened her eyes to slits and watched as he severed the plastic tie binding her wrists with a blade all of five inches long. Black and squared off at the tip—the Tanto-style lock-blade was a far cry from the shiny twelve-inch-long butcher’s model she had envisioned.
“Thank you,” she croaked, feeling blood course through the ulnar and radial arteries. And as the blood continued on into the veins and microscopic capillaries in her fingers, she welcomed the sensation of tens of thousands of invisible pins and needles jabbing her there all at once. Because, she reasoned, though it was probably just a figure of speech, if she ever got her hands around Carson’s neck, she hoped to feel the life slipping from him as she choked him to death.
Pushing the absurd fantasy from her thoughts, she opened her eyes incrementally and surreptitiously scanned her surroundings. At her feet on the floor of the helicopter were the black foot-locker-sized boxes she remembered seeing in the underground complex at the quarry. And also taken from the quarry compound, sitting on the fold-down seats with labels on their sides that read Simplot Idaho Potatoes, were a pair of sturdy cardboard boxes packed to overflowing with smaller rectangular boxes containing all different calibers of ammunition. She moved her gaze left by a degree, looked out the Plexiglas window and saw far below the terrain which appeared almost alpine, comprised more of jagged rock and forest than the desert terrain of Utah. She saw small hillocks and lush green pine trees standing out prominently among the ground clutter.
Shifting her gaze to the right, she carefully scrutinized Carson from the chest down. His belt looked to have been a military-issue item at one time; braces ran up and over his shoulders. The whole system was supporting a series of pouches bristling with tan polymer magazines, brass glinting from the top of one of them. His pants were khaki-colored and made of thick fabric with lots of pockets, the legs of which were tucked into his boot tops and bloused smartly. His boots were lug-soled, black leather, and laced tightly. The mud caking the waffle pattern looked identical to the stuff she’d seen at the quarry, ochre red and fine like talc. And giving away which hand he favored, a holster containing some kind of desert tan semi-auto pistol with heavily knurled grips rode low on his left thigh. For half a heartbeat Jamie thought about making a play for the weapon, then remembered what he’d said to her a second ago and decided that nothing about flying under her own power sounded appealing. Not to mention the fact that even if she succeeded in getting the weapon from the man—which was highly doubtful considering her physical condition—she’d still have the gunmen in the helicopters keeping pace with this one to deal with.
She closed her eyes and her thoughts turned to Jordan, whom she hadn’t seen since the previous day. The last thing she remembered was seeing the young woman sitting in the Tahoe, blonde hair whipping as her head followed the movements of the flitting helicopters. Lastly, before Logan and Gus were gunned down, the look of incredulity on the young woman’s face morphed into one of sheer terror.
With the horrible memories of the day freshly tilled, she hinged up, opened her eyes and in a low voice asked, “Why? Why did you have to kill them?”
He said nothing.
Risking retaliation, she looked at him full on and saw a compact man crackling with nervous energy. Noticeable at once on his cheek, red and ragged near the edges, was a trio of fresh scratch marks.
Then she sized him up, quickly deciding that the way he held himself—sitting ramrod straight with his feet planted on the deck a shoulder-width apart—meant he was definitely former military.
Shooting her a no-nonsense glare, he said, “Get a good look?”
She made no reply. Instead she drew the bag to her lips and faked a couple of dry heaves.
He fished a zip tie from a cargo pocket, fashioned it into a loose cuff and tossed it onto her lap. “Finish up ... then cuff yourself,” he said brusquely.
She spit into the sack. Looked up and said, “You going to answer my question?”
He stared at her. Seemed to be contemplating the question. His eyes were pale blue bordering on slate gray and bored into her with a thousand-yard stare. Suddenly Jamie felt like a mouse in a room full of cats. And worst of all, she found that she couldn’t break eye contact with the predator to her right. Then it struck her how Aryan his looks were—like she was in the presence of a Brown Shirt from Central Casting. High cheekbones and a squared-off jaw framed a once-aquiline nose that had obviously been broken in the past. The color of dirty straw, strands of his fine hair peeked out from under a tan ball cap sporting an embroidered caricature of a monkey brandishing a wicked-looking silenced weapon.
Suddenly she sensed his energy again. Only now it was less nervous ... more like a spring in a giant bear trap, under tremendous tension yet still keeping all of the deadly workings in place.
His eyes narrowed and he said, “I hate to be cliché but you and your friends were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just asking for trouble leaving that Black and White in plain sight.”
“They weren’t my friends,” she lied. “You could say it was a marriage of convenience. No way to survive out there without having any kind of numbers on your side.”
“Good ... ‘cause you’ll make new friends where we are going. And numbers—that won’t be a problem either.” He shut down and turned forward. Just like she wasn’t even there.
Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 5
