Just a continuing flicker of white and orange over the horizon north by west.
The entire episode from flicker to realization took three seconds. After those three seconds, the room erupted in an explosion of movement and excited chatter.
“Where was the detonation?” Lopez demanded.
“Wait one,” answered Lieutenant Eckels. Then, shaking his head, he added. “Comms are all messed up.”
Lopez asked. “How long will they be down?”
“Minutes. Maybe an hour or more depending on the atmospheric bounce,” answered the lieutenant. “We’ll be OK here ... for now. The remaining devices are being loaded onto the Chinooks. The women who were found in the rape house have agreed to come along to Schriever in the third helo.”
“And us?” Cade asked, looking at Lopez.
“You’ll be getting a ride to wherever you want with us on Jedi One-One.”
“And Carson?”
“I’d call General Nash and clear it with her ... but the comms are down.” He winked and made air quotes when he said ‘down.’ “At any rate, after hearing what your friend Jamie had to say about Bishop’s operation, I wish we could bring that pendejo back from hell so you can send them both back as bunk buddies.”
Smiling morbidly at the thought, Cade offered his hand and said, “Thank you, Captain Lopez. I owe you one." Instantly regretting saying that one three-letter word, owe, that was such an indicator of character if followed through on—and had gotten him into so much trouble with Brook in the past—he lowered his hand and returned Lowrider’s sharp salute.
“You can take the man outta Delta—” said Lopez.
“—but you can’t take Delta out of the man,” finished Cade.
Seeing this, Cross called out across the room to the third member of the Delta team, a fully bearded operator the size of a small mountain. “Lasagna,” he said. “Help me get this sack of shit to our ride.” Then, grabbing a handful of Carson’s torn pants, he winked at Cade and said in a near perfect Schwarzenegger, “You’ll be back.”
Knowing full well the call of duty would once again whisper his name while simultaneously wishing for it never to happen again—for both Raven’s and Brook’s sake—Cade clapped Lev on the shoulder and, still favoring his ankle, put an arm around Daymon and together the three of them followed Duncan and Jamie to the waiting Ghost Hawk.
Chapter 90
As they walked towards the matte-black chopper with its lazily spinning rotor cutting the air, Duncan commented about how quiet it was. “I felt that black demon in my gut but had no idea what it was until it was too late.”
“That’s the point,” said Lopez behind a wry smile. “Wyatt could tell you some stories about our Jedi Ride.”
Duncan said, “I bet. But then he’d have to kill me, right?”
Lopez smiled and went about his business, readying the flight.
After watching an ecstatic Foley accept a hand up into the chopper, Duncan let Jamie take a seat ahead of him, then chose an open spot on the floor next to Carson’s prostrate form.
The bird was pretty crowded by the time the big bearded operator everyone called Lasagna boarded and shut the door behind him. Strange, thought Cade as he swapped out helmets and plugged the comms wire into a jack near his head. The operator across from him didn’t have Italian features, nor, judging by his muscular physique and slim waist, did Cade think the nickname derived from a penchant for that type of cuisine. So craning over covertly, he read the name on the man’s Multicam blouse: Lasseigne. He nodded and smiled while tightening his harness.
“Strap in and hang on,” warned Ari over the shipboard comms. Then he leaned back and repeated the ominous-sounding orders for the benefit of those not wearing a flight helmet. Finally he looked at Cade and added, “We’ve got us a celebrity flying Night Stalker Airways. Everyone give Wyatt a round of applause and please ... save your autograph requests until after we arrive back at Schriever.”
“So I’m being shanghaied,” said Cade playfully as he pressed a boot into Carson’s ribs, producing a long, drawn-out moan. Still alive ... good.
“Just yanking your chain,” replied Ari. “Where to?”
“Golf course. Northwest of the lake,” Cade said. He hinged at the waist and looked out the port side as the helo lifted smoothly from the makeshift landing zone. He saw the Chinooks already nosing off to the east, their insect-like silhouettes framed against the rising moon. Then the northeast gate drifted by and he noticed in the light of the still-burning fires the unchecked dead seemingly forming a step up with their bodies and the others behind them spilling over the gate.
As the burning structures and black glassy lake spun from Daymon’s view, they were replaced outside of the window by a gathering of dead, and he witnessed the same behavior Cade had just been privy to. He grabbed Lev’s attention and stabbed a finger groundward and mouthed, “Empirical evidence.”
Flying at an extremely low altitude, Ari buzzed the dormant water feature. Below, illuminated ghostly white by the rising moon, the Zs were still wading the waters, giving slow chase to the handful of geese unwilling to give up their habitat. Shimmering swirls marred the surface as predator and prey maintained the ongoing dance.
Ari broke in over the comms and said, “Next stop the eleventh hole. A difficult dog-leg right with ball-hungry traps on the left and flesh-hungry hazards surrounding the green.”
“Can you take us over the clubhouse first?” Cade said into the comms.
Ari said, “Roger that,” and the helo banked right and seconds later was orbiting a hundred feet above the grand building.
“Keep going,” said Cade sadly upon seeing the staggering mess below. Dressed in the same coveralls and sturdy work boots, but minus the golf hat and any semblance of life, the Z that had been Walter looked up lazily and opened its mouth, no doubt moaning at the mechanical thing flitting overhead.
After saying a prayer for the man who had offered them sanctuary and in a roundabout way the use of his vehicle, Cade pushed it from his mind and looked for the Black Hawk.
Still covered in netting, their ride was right where Duncan had parked it. Cade also confirmed visually the presence of a dozen Zs in the vicinity. He took the opportunity afforded by their altitude to scan several fairways surrounding their chopper and saw that they were also overrun by rotten shamblers. Going to have to work fast, he thought, quickly swapping helmets.
Announcing their imminent touchdown, the whine and thunk of the landing gear deploying sounded through the cabin. Then Ari began his countdown, all business.
On ‘one,’ clutching his M4 close, Cade thumped Lasagna on the chest and mouthed, “Thank you.” As the bird settled softly adjacent to the DHS Black Hawk, Cade stepped onto the brittle grass, went to a knee and flipped the NVGs over his eyes. Hearing the others running across the grass at his six, he shouldered his carbine and began picking off glowing green forms at distance.
With help from Lopez and his Delta team, in no time they had the netting rolled up and Carson was transferred, trussed and blindfolded, into the Black Hawk.
After the transfer and once Duncan had gotten the Black Hawk’s rotors spinning, Ari launched and orbited the area, Jedi One-One’s port-side minigun throwing a barrage of hot lead into the approaching Zs.
Five minutes after the transfer, Duncan had the DHS Black Hawk airborne and was holding a hover over the eleventh hole green with only the rising moon lighting the ground below.
Communications having just come back on line, Ari’s voice sounded over the comms. “Cade ... you owe me a detail for this bird. My customers say your man bled all over back there.”
“Copy that,” said Cade. “I’ll throw in the cash for the undercoating spray and a vanilla-scented tree for your mirror.” He looked right and saw a smile spread on Duncan’s green-tinged face.
After a long bout of laughter, Ari replied, “See you soon, Wyatt.” The comms went silent, and after spotting Ari give the Jedi Ride a little intent
ional waggle on axis, Cade watched the Ghost Hawk, shimmering a bright green in his goggles, turn hard south and climb away rapidly.
“Where to?” asked Duncan. “Knowing you, I think you’ve got something special planned for this Carson fella.”
Regarding Jamie through robotic-looking eyes, Cade said, “Think he needs a bath?”
Nodding and looking down at the golf course below, Jamie said, “Yeah. But go lower. I don’t want him to die from the impact like Jordan did.”
“Copy that,” said Duncan. “Get that lady some night vision goggles so she can enjoy the show.”
***
Duncan held the Black Hawk in a ragged hover thirty feet over the algae-filled water. The down blast from the rotors frothed the surface and did what the dead had been unable to: sent the geese away with a chorus of angry honking and a flurry of beating white feathers.
The kerosene-scented exhaust entered the cabin when Cade hauled open the door. He nodded at Jamie while Lev scooted the prostrate captive to the curled metal lip. Not realizing the significance of his words in golf parlance, Cade said, “You’ve got honors,” then shifted his gaze to the tiny mushroom-shaped cloud far, far away in the distance.
After yanking the scrap of saliva-soaked fabric and enduring a stream of whispered epithets from Carson’s maw, Jamie regarded his green-tinted features and said, “For Logan.” There was no hesitating. She rolled him off into space behind a firm nudge from her boot.
His scream pierced the night air for a two-count, then went silent.
After seeing the dead pile on and the whitecaps below turn a lighter shade of green from the warm blood, Jamie backed from the precipice and sat down hard, tears welling in her eyes.
Cade tore his gaze from the green glow over the horizon and saw Lev close the door. He waited until Jamie was strapped back into her seat between Lev and Daymon. Then he flashed a thumbs up to Duncan and said one word into the comms: Home.
Epilogue
In a fraction of a nanosecond, the detonation had produced temperatures rivaling those on the sun’s surface, instantly vaporizing Elvis, the device, the wrecker, and everything around him in a half a mile radius. Next a shockwave containing massive overpressures shot out to all points of the compass from ground zero, moving at a staggering speed. Then the roiling thermonuclear cloud sprouted and sucked a great deal of radioactive dust and debris skyward to forty thousand feet where it merged with the polar Jetstream and was carried far and wide east and north across broad swaths of Idaho and Montana.
On the ground from as far as the eye could see, if there had been a living soul to witness it, nothing moved atop the smooth glassed-over top soil.
On the periphery, dozens of miles northwest of ground zero, tens of thousands of dead migrating eastward from cities once high in populace were instantly blinded and irradiated and sent shambling away in clusters to all points of the compass.
West of Huntsville
In the dark of the Ogden Canyon Pass, the dead were arriving from the west in droves. And with each passing hour, hundreds of the walking corpses were being forced up and over the guard rail to the canyon floor below, where the ones that survived the fall started a slow crawling hunt for prey, oblivious of broken limbs or jutting bones or partial paralysis.
Meanwhile up at pass level, with each passing hour, their ranks no longer being thinned daily by the Huntsville bandits, the amassing dead were beginning to counter the weight of the stacked shipping containers, moving them a millimeter at a time behind each surge of newly arrived flesh and bone.
Oblivious to the ongoing battle between physics and insatiable hunger, the elderly full-sized male raccoon rattled out of the underbrush.
Quickly finding itself trapped among a forest of shuffling feet, a primeval spark flared deep in the coon’s plum-sized brain and the twenty-pound creature took blind flight east. After being bashed countless times by bony knees and sharp-edged shinbones, the coon unwittingly climbed up a cold cadaver’s back, where the contact of warm flesh and fur started a chain reaction of unimaginable proportions.
It was over in a matter of seconds, with the unlucky raccoon ending up in a dozen different pieces in a dozen distended stomachs.
But the ensuing melee the coon’s mad dash had started widened the eight-inch gap between container and guardrail, and the long-delayed undead diaspora east was underway.
###
Thanks for reading Warpath. Look for a new novel in the Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse series in late 2014. Please feel free to Friend Shawn Chesser on Facebook.
Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 41
