Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  The Ranger said nothing to that. A few seconds passed as he walked around the vehicle. Finishing the lap, he returned to the window, the light flicked off and he said, “IR beacons ... nice touch, Grayson.”

  Cade said, “Didn’t want the SOAR boys in the Chinooks to open us up like a tin can.”

  The Ranger, a first sergeant whose name tape said Fleishman, turned and over his shoulder said, “Follow me in.”

  Cade followed behind the sergeant at a walking pace, then wheeled the Jeep up to the rear of the target house where he was met by a face he knew very well. “Lopez! How’s it hanging, amigo?”

  “Longer than yours, Wyatt.”

  The two men embraced. Cade noted the captain’s tabs on the smaller operator’s collar. “Captain Lopez. Has a nice ring to it. Congrats,” he said, nodding.

  Wearing a wide smile, Lopez crossed himself and pointed skyward.

  In full understanding, Cade gestured towards the lake house and asked, “Cross inside?”

  Still beaming, Lopez tilted his helmeted head in the same direction. “He’s in there ... prepping Bishop for his body bag.”

  Cade’s brows crowded together. “Prepping? I thought I only winged him.”

  “You’ll see. First I want to fill you in on the broken arrows. Man, Wyatt ... you were right. Where the G6 goes so goes Spartan. Funny thing is they thought they’d concealed the truck. But you and I both know there’s no hiding from a KH-12 and the keen eye of one of Nash’s determined imagery techs.”

  With the distant flames casting flickering shadows at their boots, both men said in unison, “Or Nash.”

  Smiling and shaking his head, Cade shifted his gaze to the olive-drab tractor-trailer. He let his eyes wander over the dozens of corpses, Spartan mercenaries who had fought hard but had ultimately paid the price for their betrayal. After the long pause, he said, “Bishop should have known he couldn’t hide that truck for long. Wonder why he even tried.”

  Lopez shrugged. “Hubris? That’s my best guess.” Then the smile returned. “You shoulda seen Nash, though. She was giddy as hell that you came through ... said she held you to your word.”

  Ignoring that, Cade asked, “Are the nukes inside?”

  Shaking his head side-to-side, Lopez conceded, “I don’t know. The Geiger counter thinks so. But we’ll have eyes on the inside in a couple of mikes.” He went on and was in the middle of bringing Cade up to speed on a couple of previous missions and the status of the Fuentes antiserum when a Chinook, drowning out their conversation, flew low and slow, passing directly overhead.

  Chapter 87

  From his seat in the thundering Spec-Ops-configured MH-47 Chinook being piloted by a highly skilled SOAR aviator, combat engineer and explosive ordnance expert Army First Lieutenant Larry Eckels peered out the port-side window as the lake below, black as polished obsidian, passed by slowly against the Chinook’s counterclockwise orbit. Through his NVGs he saw flames from the helicopters and wheeled vehicles burning near the north gate, casting ghostly clawlike shadows across the newly graded tract of land. And beyond the gate, no doubt drawn by the firefights and explosions and glowing an eerie green in his goggles was a spectral army of the dead, swaying back and forth as they marched nearer.

  Having had his fill of the destruction brought on by Delta’s lightning-fast sneak attack he shifted his gaze right as the pilot maneuvered on approach and instantly recognized the squat tractor still hitched to the squared-off trailer parked amongst the tall pines, its metal skin showing up a slightly lighter shade of green and contrasting against the darker forested backdrop.

  Near Eckels’ feet, Hudson, his German Shepherd trained in explosives detection, yawned and looked up expectantly.

  “Soon, boy,” said the recently promoted lieutenant as the MH-47 banked sharply and bisected the lake west to east on approach. Then over the comms he reminded the chalk of Army Rangers under his command of the sensitive nature of the cargo inside the trailer.

  The dual-rotor bird slowed and Eckels’s stomach visited his throat as the pilot flared and said, “Target is at our two-o’clock. Wheels down in five, four, three, two ...”

  At ‘one’ there was a soft hiss aft as the flight engineer actuated the hydraulics and started the rear ramp on its downward journey. A curl of wood smoke infiltrated the cabin first thing. “Go, go, go,” shouted a Ranger sergeant as the thirteen eager soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment poured forth, and like spokes on a wagon wheel each claimed his position, carbines locked and loaded—to a man fully ready to meet any resistance with the force necessary.

  With the sonic shriek of the twin turbines diminishing and fresh from turning the Pueblo horde away from Schriever, Eckels ducked his head and hustled down the ramp, Hudson at his heel.

  Instantly a barrage of different odors assaulted Eckels’s nose: jet exhaust, cordite, burning flesh, and the ever-present underlying stench of death—a harsh reminder of the new world in which he was living.

  After witnessing the twin-rotor behemoth glide in and settle neatly, Cade beckoned the four other men from the Jeep and over the diminishing turbine whine introduced them to Lopez one at a time. When he was finished, he turned and they all followed the stocky Delta captain into what he’d already described as a ‘charnel house.’

  Which it was, Cade quickly found after nearly slipping and falling in the Lake Erie-sized pool of blood painting the dining room floor. Lying prostrate in the coppery smelling fluid, his face already gone slack, was Ian Bishop, whose presence was infinitely smaller in death. Cade knelt and rolled the corpse to the left to inspect his handiwork. The entry wound between Bishop’s right bicep and scapula was torn open completely, a mess of jagged bone and cartilage. Up front, left of his sternum from Cade’s perspective, the exit wound sprouted a crimson and white bouquet of shredded flesh and feathery lung tissue. Strangely, Bishop’s left shirt sleeve had been cut off cleanly, revealing a fresh bloodless crater where a cantaloupe-sized oval of flesh had been excised from the shoulder. Finally, craning over, Cade rotated the corpse’s head and saw the ultimate cause of death—a second mouth smiling out at him, severed muscle and sinew and yellowed trachea glistening under the artificial light cast by Adam Cross’s head lamp.

  “Whatcha got there?” Cade said, trying to find a face behind the glare.

  Unfolding the blood-soaked length of camouflage fabric, Cross revealed his prize—or rather—Bishop’s posthumous punishment. There, cradled in his palms atop the blood-soaked fabric, was the missing plug of flesh, stark white, and tattooed on it permanently in black ink, a Budweiser—the SEAL symbol consisting of an eagle clutching in its claws a U.S. Navy-style anchor, trident, and flintlock pistol. “He never deserved it,” said the former Navy SEAL. “In my opinion he was never one of my brothers.”

  Cade asked, “What’d he do? Before all of this ... of course.”

  “He stopped being a team player a long time ago.” Cross paused and folded the fabric over. “He was doing shady stuff over there trying to establish contacts for after service. Stepped on a lot of toes.”

  With the others now standing in a loose semi-circle and listening in, Cade asked, “And?”

  “Another member of his team took a couple in the back in the kill house during training. Came out later it just happened to be the junior shooter who dimed on him.”

  Shaking his head, Cade stepped over the body and approached Carson, who was unconscious and pretty pale. “And this one? I recognize him from Nash’s briefing.”

  Jamie stood up from where she’d been crouched in the corner and said, “He killed Logan. And the fucker admitted he made Jordan jump to her death from a hovering helicopter.”

  Cade made his way over to Jamie and whispered something while pointing over at Foley. She shook her head and continued talking rapidly and gesturing towards the fallen man.

  Lopez had opened his mouth to speak but then stopped abruptly and held up a finger and walked off, apparently talking with someone over his comms. Then
he turned, his face slack and devoid of color as he called across the room to Cade. “That was First Lieutenant Eckels,” he said in a low voice. “Says we’ve got an empty quiver.”

  Cade crunched across the field of broken glass and kneeled over Carson. Thinking, he regarded the man for a moment and then looked up at Lopez and asked, “How many?”

  “Looks like only one.”

  Game changer, thought Cade. And though he didn’t let it show, his mood went south in a millisecond.

  Getting the drift of the ABC conversation, Daymon saw himself into it and blurted out, “Only one. I broke only one bone ... that’s an only situation. I only have one girlfriend ... that’s an only situation. But one missing nuclear bomb doesn’t fall under the only category. Where in the hell is it?”

  Trying to shush Daymon earned Duncan an angry glare.

  Foley stepped forward and described to Lopez and Cade what he saw earlier at the southwest gate. He included the tow truck in detail, including the driver and the cargo.

  Foley’s description of the man, compounded by the fact he had dark hair and wore a red Cornhusker hat caused Cade to say to no one in particular, “Elvis.”

  Daymon frowned, then said with a certain amount of reverence, “What’s the King have to do with this?”

  “Smelling salt ... now,” Cade said to the medic, who was attempting to keep Carson from dying on him. “And I need you to shoot him up with epinephrine and stand back.”

  Nodding and disregarding the fact that Cade carried no rank, the medic got into his bag and administered the shot as if following a superior’s orders.

  Carson stirred almost immediately.

  Sticking his entire hand into the gaping hole in Carson’s crotch, Cade grabbed ahold of something down there and hissed, “Where is the missing nuke?”

  After a second, Carson’s eyes fluttered open. But he said nothing.

  Crunching the smelling salts between the two fingers of his free hand, Cade waited a second for it to activate and then in one quick motion jammed it deeply into Carson’s left nostril.

  Still looking on from her spot in the corner near the shattered window, Jamie thought, that’s for Gus.

  Carson’s mouth moved, then quietly he asked, “What time is it?”

  Cade removed his helmet. Put it aside and then stuck a finger into the bullet wound in Carson’s hip. He rooted around while Carson squirmed until he found a nerve that caused the mercenary to pound the ground with a fist and eventually shit himself. “Time for you to tell me where the nuke is ... now!”

  “What time is it?” repeated Carson, the stench of his own excrement wafting up from the spreading puddle of watery brown fluid.

  Lopez said, “Nine o’clock sharp.”

  With an icy hand twisting his guts, Cade confirmed this on his Suunto. “Why?” he hissed, probing the finger deeper, feeling bone grating against bone through his tactical glove.

  Eyelids fluttering, Carson said, “You’ll see.”

  Cade cracked a second capsule. Rolled it in his fingers and balanced out Carson’s nose by inserting it into the unobstructed nostril.

  Wincing from the ammonia sting, Carson said, “Nine-eleven ... you’ll see.”

  Chapter 88

  The low timbre thrum of the idling engine combined with the hydraulic whine of the tow apparatus as he lowered the device to the dirt was a siren song for the passing dead. As he worked, the steady crunch of feet on gravel drifted up from the winding road below.

  He popped open the case and hinged the lid over. There, its metallic skin throwing the light of the low moon, was the mother of all pay back. Whether he could see them or not, he had to believe they were down there. And they were all going to get a very rude awakening.

  When he powered on the tablet, its soft glow illuminated his face. He swiped the icon just as Bishop had demonstrated, bringing up a benign-looking rectangle of numbers that hinted to none of the destructive power that would be unleashed in just sixty short minutes. Couldn’t there have been flames represented there? Like the ones oft painted on a custom hot rod. Or some wicked looking barbed wire? Anything, he thought to himself, to make inputting the moronic four-digit code seem more ominous.

  He looked around for a subtle tell that he’d been made by some night-vision-wielding soldier. Nothing.

  Finger hovering over the ten-digit keypad, a sudden tinge of doubt fluttered like a single minuscule butterfly in his stomach. Was his sixth sense telling him something? The desire to get even with the sleeping assholes whose presence he could almost feel overpowered the obvious until all four digits were inputted and a graphic reading Armed flashed up at him from inside the box.

  Elvis, you stupid fucker, he thought. “Noooo!” he screamed.

  The dead, having just arrived, fanned out and took station, eyeing him greedily, their bony fingers kneading the chain-link fence, making it rattle.

  That he’d been duped hit him like a sucker punch. And that there were tens of thousands ... maybe even ten times that number of walking dead converging on the ‘T’ from places distant dawned on him. He laughed because he had become the world’s most lethal suicide bomber—and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Stupid fucker. He had been conned. Every word of Bishop’s and Carson’s good-cop bad-cop routine on the porch over beers rushed back at him. Bishop, momentarily playing the bad cop, had chastised his condition after no sleep and a day’s worth of work and said: For this mission to succeed tomorrow, we’re going to need a youthful Elvis to suit up and show up. Then Carson had piped up: Blonde or brunette? and he was hooked.

  “Shit! There are no fucking soldiers,” he bellowed, further exciting the dead. And that, he thought, explained the ridiculously easy approach. He was for all intents and purposes now an accidental martyr in Bishop’s personal jihad against the dead, and there would be no squeaking out of this fix. Nope, all of the Kamikaze pilots and the disaffected with a grudge and a package truck full of TNT combined couldn’t hold a candle to the damage this device was going to do—on the already dead. He spat on the ground and cursed the dead as the fencing quaked and quivered under their pressing weight.

  Bemoaning the fact that he could have detonated the device outside of McCall and taken Bishop and at least three or four dozen former military pricks with him, he turned his thoughts to his family and how they had died. Cold and alone in the waters of San Francisco Bay. Adjusting his Huskers ball cap as a tear streamed down his cheek, he glanced down at the quickly scrolling numbers on the timer. His watch indicated it was four minutes past nine o’clock. Sensing his life slipping through his fingers and disgusted at himself for not following through, he drew his pistol. It was loaded, that much he knew for sure.

  The muzzle was bitter in his mouth from the mixture of oil and burnt gun powder. Twisting his wrist slightly, he bit down on the muzzle and said sorry to his kin for the last time. The hammer, on line with his right ear, made a mechanical click as it dropped, causing him to twitch ever so slightly. The resulting detonation punched an opening the size of a softball in his skull, taking his left eye and ear and everything connecting the two sensory apparatus with it. Dermis and flesh and muscle splashed over the device and, now deafened, he fell in a vertical heap, legs and arms kicking and pawing at the dirt—autonomous functions created by the massive brain trauma.

  But he wasn’t dead when the fence failed and the moaning flesh eaters dug in with their cold probing digits. In seconds, his entrails were spread out on the ground around him, one big sloppy dirty mess. His legs and arms continued to twitch as he lived in intense silent agony with the timer counting down to zero, with all of the bad deeds, of which there were many, flashing before his remaining eye. He felt his body go cold at the three-minute mark. With two minutes to go until detonation, he saw stars flitting behind his lids as his mortal self passed and the Omega virus began working to bring him back. His body convulsed, mostly from the meat being rent from his bones, as the prions wormed their way to h
is brain. Luckily—or unluckily, depending upon how you looked at it—Elvis turned quickly and would get to attend his second death. Shrugging off his feeding brethren undead, newly turned Elvis rose on unsteady feet. Then a single drop of crimson blood oozed from his shattered orbital bone, traced the ridge of his powder-burned nose, and freefell to the device, inexplicably splattering on the glass tablet where the timer now read 00:01:33—a full fifty-eight some odd minutes shy of those Bishop had promised.

  Chapter 89

  Cade’s Suunto read 21:09. If the bomb is nearby, he thought sadly, then I have two minutes to live and will never again hold Raven and Brook. Or maybe, he reasoned, Elvis somehow transported it to Schriever and in less than two minutes hundreds of good people will die a horrible death. Either way, sad as both scenarios would be, Carson was going with him. Another pound of flesh excised from the Earth. Or, he thought grimly. Two minutes go by and nothing happens and the real interrogation begins. No matter what, Carson would never see another sunrise.

  A minute passed and nothing.

  Though a cooling breeze flowed in off the lake, the air inside still stank of fear-laced sweat and shit and drying blood.

  Fifty more seconds became history and the room had grown so quiet a pin hitting the floor could have as well been a cymbal crash.

  Counting down the last ten seconds in his head, Cade instinctively shifted his gaze from the lake’s rippling black waters to the nearly identical-appearing blood-slickened floor tiles behind him.

  Out of the blue, though the possibility of surviving a danger close nuclear detonation with only flash blindness was remote, Lieutenant Eckels—who had up until then remained on the sidelines—called out, “Avert your eyes, now!”

  After hitting one and ticking off a few more seconds to the negative, Cade exhaled and opened his eyes. A half beat later, before craning around, a flicker of light shone off the glassy crimson pool at his feet. And amazingly, for a split second it seemed bright as the Ranger’s hand-held spotlight had been as it refracted away and lit up the stainless steel appliances. And like the nuclear detonation forty miles north of Schriever, there was no initial sound. No explosive concussion. No muffled Whoomph. Nothing.