Six Feet From Hell (Book 6): End Game

by Joseph A. Coley

  The world went into slow motion. The Chinook – which was barely off the ground – was none the wiser. Without thinking, Joe ran to the ramp of the chopper, frantically beating on the back of it, trying to get someone’s attention. While he couldn’t rule out hallucinating the whole thing, there was the terrifying premise that it was all real, that the tank was indeed still working and ready to fire.

  CW4 Hawkins swung the CH-47 to his right, straightening up the big helicopter and making sure they had plenty of room. No sense in clipping the treetops after such a successful rescue. Hawkins leveled off about fifty feet of the ground. That’s when he saw the man on the ground frantically waving at him. The man on the ground kept pointing back towards town to the hulking wrecks of the two M1 Abrams. That’s when it hit him.

  Oh shit…

  Angel and the others didn’t see what he saw.

  On top of the tank was a wounded Andrew Wyatt, bloody, beaten, and near death. At the bottom of the hill, with his dying breath, Wyatt fired the last 105mm round left in the Abrams.

  “Sabot up. On the way…” Wyatt croaked out.

  A flash of fire shot forth from the Abrams. An instant later, the CH-47 Chinook blew apart like a giant firework, exploding about twenty feet off the ground. The half-dozen people who were within fifty feet of it were blown away from the blast.

  Joe flew backwards, slamming into the ground, mangled metal and miscellaneous parts of the chopper flying in all directions around him. The heat from the exploded Chinook was immense. He tried to lift his head up, but the immeasurable weight of fleeting consciousness was too much. Within another few seconds, the lights went out.

  * * *

  The world slowly started to come back into being. Joe couldn’t tell how long he’d been knocked out, but it wasn’t long. Every part of his body was in pain. The slightest movement sent white-hot shards of pain nearly everywhere. Blurry and dazed, he brought his hands to his face, not entirely sure they would be there when he did. Fortunately, they were. He moved his legs, again, not sure that everything would still be in place. Ten fingers and presumably ten toes greeted him back.

  Slowly rolling over, nearly unable to pick himself up, Joe made an active effort to get up. There were still zombies at the bottom of the hill, and the massive explosion was likely to draw the ones that were left to a central location, and he was that central location. As his vision came back into focus, one thing was for certain.

  There were at least twenty-five people dead.

  Way to save the day, genius.

  Then Joe remembered who was supposed to be around him. Angel, Keith, Curtis, Kody, Captain White…

  And Rick.

  Shakily, Joe got to his feet. Stumbling forward, he tried to find people. While the wreckage of the Chinook had landed roughly a hundred feet away, they were still not out of danger. Shambling around, Joe looked for his friends. Within a few seconds, he noticed two bodies lying on top of one another.

  It was Rick and Angel.

  “No! No! No! Goddammit, no!” Joe screamed at the top of his lungs.

  Rick was lying face-down on top of Angel, who was lying on her back. Both looked to be unconscious. Joe ran as much as his legs would let him, falling over debris and his own feet as he tried to get to them.

  Beneath Rick, Angel stirred.

  Joe dropped to his knees by his wife and son. Remembering his long-dormant EMS training, he slowly rolled Rick over, being careful not to manipulate Rick’s neck. God only knows what could be wrong with him. As Joe gingerly rolled him over, the extent of his injuries became apparent. Angel moaned and tried to move.

  “Careful. You all right?” Joe asked Angel.

  “I…I think so…give me a minute, will ya…” Angel croaked out.

  Joe looked back to Rick. “Oh God. Son…”

  Rick was close to death. Despite his other unknown injuries, there was one significant one that was going to kill him. He was going to die, and it wasn’t going to be long. Through Rick’s left eye was a large shard of metal that had pierced all the way through into his brain. Synapses were still firing in his brain, but what was coming out of his mouth was not intelligible. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth and onto his shirt.

  “Rickey…oh God. What…?” words failed him. Joe couldn’t adequately process what was going on with his only child. Eighteen was too young to die. Hell, any age was too young to die. There was always unfinished business at death that was known only to the person experiencing it. Just like time, it was relative to the man or woman it was happening to.

  “Dad…Mom wants you to…school. I’m gonna stay at Grandma’s house. Love you, Dad,” Rick said. Whatever memories were surfacing were from before the apocalypse, before all the torturous memories of death and destruction. They would be Rick’s last. Rick slowly exhaled, all the air from his lungs slowly leaking out.

  Wind whipped around Joe as he held the lifeless body of his only child. He wouldn’t have noticed, but T-Wolf and the UH-1Y had landed behind him, against the pilot’s better judgement. The people on the ground needed help. If that meant landing and scooping them up under fire, then so be it.

  Joe couldn’t react to his son dying. Words didn’t come, tears didn’t flow, he was simply frozen in place, unable to process what was happening. He gently laid Rick’s body down. Joe stayed on his knees, oblivious to the world around him. He didn’t hear Angel yelling for him, he didn’t see the droves of zombies wandering up the hill, he simply looked to the sky for answers, trying to get God to explain something to him.

  Why me? Why me, you bastard?

  His heart hurt. Sorrow and anguish combined into a traumatic combination the likes of which he might not ever recover from. As he looked back to the ground, another body lay just down the hill. The sight of another dead friend brought him back into reality with a jolt.

  It was Captain White. His bottom half was missing just below the waist. Curtis, Keith, and Kody were nowhere to be found, blown away and possibly apart by the massive explosion. There was no plausible explanation why Joe and Angel were alive other than pure, unadulterated luck.

  Someone pulled at the back of his shirt. Joe slowly turned to see a man in a flight suit and helmet standing behind him. With a glassy stare and his mouth agape, Joe didn’t move, nor was he able to.

  “Let’s go, buddy! We ain’t got all day!” Logan Moore yelled. He reached under Joe’s arms and dragged him to the still-running UH-1Y. Angel was already seated in the chopper, crying and attempting to get buckled. Logan dragged Joe to the chopper and stood him up.

  “In you go, cowboy!”

  Logan shoved Joe into the UH-1Y and closed the door. They were already running low on fuel and their extra supply had just exploded right in front of them. They would be lucky to make it back to Fort Bragg with what they had left. Luck had kept them alive, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  Luck never does.

  EPILOGUE

  Larry woke up.

  The LMTV blast had knocked him into a plate glass window, shattering it all around him. His back and legs were cut all to shit. His right ankle was injured, his ears were ringing, and his vision was blurry, but he was alive.

  Paige and his boys were not.

  And he wouldn’t be for long.

  As he got to his feet, he saw the damage that the blast had done, as well as the three lifeless bodies that it created. His two sons were relatively unscathed. They simply looked as if they had fallen asleep, but they were never to wake up. Paige lay dead at his feet, the back of her head crushed from being violently thrown at the brick doorway behind them. Larry stood, dazed.

  Something broke inside him.

  He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. Something primal took over as he stared at the lifeless bodies of his family. His hands turned to fists, his mind turned to killing. Someone was going to pay for this. Someone was going to be held accountable for the deaths of his family.

  A little over a quarter-mile away, the UH-1Y took off w
ithout him. He watched as the chopper gained altitude and disappeared from sight in just a few short seconds. His friends, the people that he had saved, lived with, and taken care of had left him with nothing and no one.

  Fifty feet away, the walkers had made it up the steps and were slowly but surely making their way towards him. Larry grabbed the only thing that he could use as a weapon, a section of wrought iron that had come loose from the railing beside him. He wrestled the iron from its holdings, a white-knuckle grip holding the bar.

  With anger in his heart and tears in his eyes, Larry stalked forward, stepping over the dead bodies of his family. There was no room for mourning their deaths. He wanted justice for their deaths, but he would settle for revenge instead.

  I will avenge you…

  * * *

  Three other men near the hospital awoke to the same scene. The chopper had taken off, leaving them behind. Curtis, Keith, and Kody had all been blown away by the explosion, flung into overgrown bushes nearly fifty feet away from the point of impact.

  Kody was the first to get to his feet and, like those before him, had difficulty standing. With an eardrum burst and debris in his eyes, he couldn’t see or hear very well. What he could see was disturbing and drove a spike of pure fear straight through his heart. There were dozens of zombies less than a hundred feet away. And there was one about twenty feet away.

  It was half of Captain White.

  The bottom half of the officer-turned-mercenary-turned-friend was slowly crawling towards Kody, leaving a bloody path of entrails behind him. Like a bloody slug, he crept forward, snarling and drooling. Although Kody did not know White that well, he pitied the man. Anyone who was willing to turn against those he knew to be part of the solution and not part of the problem had his respect. Ultimately, it led to his current state, but at least he could be a zombie with a little bit of humanity left.

  Wait, wasn’t Captain White vaccinated? Kody thought.

  As Kody stared at the half-captain, a hand landed on his shoulder. He damn near shot the person it was attached to. As he spun around, he drew his .45. Curtis stood behind of him, holding up an injured but alive Keith.

  “Jesus, Curtis! You scared the shit out of me! Is he all right?” Kody yelled, nodding to Keith’s semi-lifeless body.

  “Yeah, brother, he’ll live, but not much longer if we don’t get the hell out of here!” Curtis replied. Keith’s head lolled from one side to the other, barely conscious. Kody’s sixth sense told him that Keith could have serious injuries, especially if not treated. Internal bleeding was very common in blast injuries, especially to hollow organs.

  Kody looked around for a moment, and spotted something of use. Parked just outside of the blast zone was the LMTV that had remained unscathed. Kody reached under Keith’s other arm, helping Curtis steady their injured cohort. Kody pointed to the LMTV, turning Curtis and Keith towards it.

  “Come on. We can take the truck and get the hell out of here!” Kody said.

  Curtis limped along beside the only two people left in Tazewell. “They left us, Kody. They took off without us. I don’t know why, but I sure would like to find out.”

  “So would I, Curtis. So would I,” Kody responded.

  They quickly half-dragged Keith to the LMTV and pulled him inside. The third seat in the back of the truck wasn’t big enough for him to lay down, but it was better than leaving him in the canvas-covered rear of the truck. Kody sat in the passenger’s seat, while Curtis assumed driving duties.

  Curtis fired up the engine. “We got three-quarters of a tank and they’re headed to North Carolina. How far you think we’ll make it?”

  Kody exhaled forcefully. There were a hundred undead walkers coming up the hill towards them, clogging up a substantial portion of the road.

  “I don’t know, but anywhere is better than here. Hit it.”

  * * *

  While the remaining citizens of Tazewell were trying to escape, one its chief citizens and oft-used leader laid on the floor of the UH-1Y nicknamed “T-Wolf.” He was alive…barely. Angel was alive and crying. Tazewell was gone, taken back by the undead, much like the rest of the country. As Joe lay there, he pondered his next move.

  Jumping out of the chopper without a parachute seemed like a viable option.

  He’d lost his son, his friends, and the stable life that he’d worked so hard for. Starting off at the bottom was something that he was accustomed to, but not something he tolerated well. With the lack of available supplies, he would have to once again rely on survival instinct.

  With nothing else to do, Joe cried.

  He cried for the people he’d lost. Images of Ronnie, Chris, Rick, Jamie, and a dozen others came flooding into his mind. If only he’d been able to take out Wyatt in Alabama ten years ago, nothing like this would have happened. The middle of a hurricane, a horde of undead, and a generally low IQ on all things apocalypse had doomed him. Now, he had all the knowledge to save himself in the post-apocalyptic world and no one to impart that knowledge to anymore.

  He bawled, unable to control his emotions. Death, death, and more death.

  Get used to it, buddy. There’s more where that came from.

  Joe couldn’t think of anything positive. Angel was alive, his only saving grace, and she had to witness the death of his only son. It was something that would scar them the rest of their lives. The world was unfixable. He needed a problem to fix. That would put things into perspective. All he needed was something to happen, some kind of problem that needed a solution.

  It didn’t take long to find one.

  Joe managed to get up from the metal floor of the UH-1Y and sit against the bench behind him. Angel had stopped crying long enough to notice he’d gotten himself upright. She wiped away tears and slid over to him, leaning her head against his chest.

  “What are we going to do?” Angel asked.

  Joe wiped away his own tears. “I don’t know, babe. I don’t know.”

  “Do you think we did everything we could? There were so many of them! We couldn’t get everyone out of there!” Angel said, starting to cry again.

  “Shh, babe. We’ll have plenty of time to dwell on the things we could have done, believe me. This isn’t something that’s going to go away. We just have to hold on to what we’ve got, and we have each other,” Joe said, gently stroking her hair.

  The chopper started descending, the strange, weightless feeling in Joe’s gut told him that. There’s no way in hell that we’re there already, he thought. Ducking down and moving forward, he went toward the cockpit and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. Logan, the pilot, looked back and handed Joe another headset, which he put on.

  “We landing already?” Joe asked.

  “Not exactly. I thought we had more fuel to work with. Fact of the matter is that Brooklyn – the Chinook – had the extra fuel on board when it went down. Our plan was to refuel after we picked up your people. Without it, well…we aren’t gonna make it much longer.”

  As if on cue, the engine sputtered.

  “Dammit. Get back in there and strap in. Best case scenario is that I have to do an autorotation before we…shit!” Logan said.

  The engine sputtered one more time, then died.

  They were still over two hundred feet in the air.

  As Joe sat down, he pulled his harness over himself, and instructed Angel to do the same. As Logan aimed the nose of the chopper up, the severity of the situation hit home. An autorotation meant that they would have to flare right before hitting the ground. The maneuver was a little easier to do when higher up, but with the ground quickly approaching, the difficulty of the autorotation landing was going to be multiplied.

  Beneath them, he spotted an open area. There were trees all around, but in the center of the wooded area was a grassy spot big enough to land the chopper, if he could get the landing just right.

  Logan waited until the last possible second to flare, pulling the nose up. As he did, he misjudged a section of trees to his rear, clipping
them with the tail rotor. The big UH-1Y groaned as the trees smacked the tail, sending the nose back forward. As Logan tried desperately to straighten them out, he knew he didn’t have time to correct it. He steeled himself for the collision.

  “Brace for impact!” Logan yelled.

  Two seconds later, the chopper hit the ground.

  Hard.

  TO BE CONTINUED…

  Read on for a free sample of Living Dead

  Chapter 1

  They slam their fists against the walls and the doors, and they slash their hands on the broken glass when they punch through the windows. But they are dead so they don’t feel it, and they are hungry so they won’t stop. The noise is a barrage. It’s an endless hailstorm on a tin roof. Day in and day out, the dead sense the flesh of the living and pound themselves into paste trying to get a piece of it.

  For weeks, the six of them listen as the song drones on and on and on. All rhythm, no melody. A song you can keep a beat to, but not one you can hum or sing. Through nameless, generic days and through longer nights. Double bass and toms, pounding through every thought of every moment of every day.

  When Calgary’s power grid goes down, Scott and Cooper head to the basement where there are stacks of long two by fours. Scott cuts them with an old wood saw. Cooper holds the wood still with his feet. They burn smooth, yellow, perfectly-sized bricks of wood in the fireplace and huddle around the scented candles Scott’s mom has been collecting since before Scott was born. At night, they look out at the empty hole in the horizon where the Calgary skyline used to be, now dotted with fire lights.

  The candles fill the air with vanilla and honeydew. With sarsaparilla and lilacs and roses. With cloves and cinnamon and earth. The smoke fills the sky with the crisp smell of burning pine. These smells are fragile reminders of the past. And like the past, they wither and die moments after entering the new world.

  The smell of dead people overpowers everything. It’s not that sickly sweet bullshit they describe in books. It’s a heavy, primal thing that grabs you by the throat and forces you to breathe through your teeth. It’s as though your body instinctively knows there’s something horrid in the air and refuses to draw it into your lungs. The smell demands attention. It commands it.