by Chris Lowry
BATTLEFIELD
Z
FLYOVER
ZOMBIE
By
CHRIS LOWRY
Copyright 2017 Grand Ozark Media
Orlando, FL 32707
All rights reserved
www.Chrislowrybooks.com
Follow me on Twitter @Lowrychris
E-Mail: [email protected]
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FLYOVER Z
No one knows how it started. Or if they do, they're not saying. The Fed's were building a wall at the Mexico border when it happened. Some smart bureaucrat shifted the resources over to California and moved the construction to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
It took eight days for a million workers to erect a fifteen-foot barrier and eight more to double it the entire length of the state.
They carried the steel plates up into the mountains and blocked off the middle.
A second wall went up along the Appalachian Trail. They were able to contain the outbreak in the middle.
Chicago was gone.
Canada had to fend for itself and the same for Mexico.
But the good old USA had the East, parts of the West and nothing in-between.
Nothing living anyway.
There were plenty of the dead.
1
LOS ANGELES -
"Have you heard from New York this morning?"
"DC protocol," the tech answered.
His job was simple. Monitor communications from the East, and surviving cities in California for indications of an outbreak.
A multichannel processor routed through airwave bands by the thousands, searching for chatter on cell phone traffic, radio broadcasts, and even CB radio lines. His role was to listen to the chatter and define anomalies.
Plus, do a daily check in with DC, NYC, and other major metro areas.
The daily check in served two purposes.
First, to reassure the people across the country that other survivors were still there after the dark of the night.
Second, to insure the survivors were following standard operating procedures in regards to staying healthy and alive.
"Go grab some shut eye," the supervisor patted him on the back.
Del Waters, the radio tech stood up from his station and stretched. Even then he kept his eyes on the blinking lights as they raced across the boards, blinking red and yellow until they hit on a channel.
Fast fingers were required to click on the green, so they could listen in, adjust the feed and monitor if needed.
His replacement, Bobby Shannon slid into the seat he vacated and went eyes up on the board.
Assured, Del slapped his shoulder and stepped away.
He wasn't sure how many times he blinked through the night, but his eyeballs felt like gritty balls of sand. No matter the count, it wasn't enough.
But they made it through a night without incident, which was a mark in the W column.
Incidents were always bad.
Three nights ago, LAPD responded to a domestic disturbance call. Turned out to be a fight where the woman stabbed her abusive husband, and didn't call for a body disposal unit because she didn't want to get in trouble.
At least that's what they pieced together.
They were both zombie by the time police arrived, and LA lost one of its boys in blue to a bite on the arm before others were able to put both Z down with headshots.
The Council had a rule.
Bring out your dead. Stab them in the head.
"Do you want to grab a cup of coffee?"
Del turned from his stretch and watched Jeri fight back a yawn with the back of her hand.
They had been working side by side since the advent of the virus, and he wanted to ask her out someday.
At first, he wasn't sure they would live that long, and even though he wanted to grab life by the throat and drink the nectar, it was more fun to live with the thought and ignore the action.
Jeri had been a student at UCLA.
Like most people who did not have specific skillset jobs, she was recruited to monitor the wall, monitor the drones, monitor the radio channels.
Just like Del.
If George Orwell envisioned 1984 with Zombies, this would be the world they lived in.
But they were safe.
"It will just keep me up," he couldn't bring himself to look into her perfect brown eyes.
And alive.
"Say yes, you fool," he screamed at himself.
The little voice inside his head pushing him to be brave. "She asked you out."
"Some other time then?"
She sounded hopeful.
Or did he imagine that.
"Sure."
"Help, please!"
Bobby Shannon clicked on the blinking green button to bring a young girl's voice up full.
"Please God, help me."
Shannon typed in a command code to record the audio, and sent a signal to the satellite to triangulate the position of the call.
"It's outside the wall," he called over his shoulder.
Del, Jeri and the supervisor moved to behind his chair. Del fought the urge to start issuing orders, since Bobby looked like he knew what he was doing.
Already a message was being sent to the Council, per SOP. Survivors outside rated their attention.
At the same time, more messages were sent off to DC and NYC.
Information inside the flyover zone was hard to come by, and meticulously documented when they did.
"This is Council Command," the supervisor lifted his headset and keyed into the channel. "Where are you?"
"I don't know," she sobbed across the speaker. "Our plane went down."
"Plane?" his eyebrow shot up as he glanced at Del.
No planes had been allowed to fly since the first outbreak was contained. Air travel spread the contagion too fast.
"We were coming from New York. Help me, please."
"Miss," said the supervisor. "Did you crash? Are you injured?"
"We had to land," she said. "The pilot died, and we went down somewhere. On a road."
"Got it," Bobby announced and pulled up an image on the computer screen. "Kansas."
"Are you in a secure location?"
"We locked the pilot in the cockpit. We can hear him in there. He's one of them."
"Miss," the supervisor scribbled instructions to Del and handed it to him. "Who are you? I'm letting the Council know your situation, but we need more information."
Del glanced at the note. It said, Get Ballantine.
"Tell my Dad," she sobbed.
"Who is your father?"
"He's Roger Ballantine."
Then she screamed and the radio went silent.
2
Roger Ballantine was not a man used to hearing the word no.
There were people who thought politicians ran the world, but Ballantine could explain to you with a veneer capped smile that money ran the world, and he who had the money was King.
It had always been so.
He was King of New York when he ran real estate deals that inflated property values into the billions, and he got out before that bubble burst.
He did the same in Los Angeles racking up another billion before it collapsed too.
He took government bailout money and used it to buy a Television Network, which made thirty-three billion dollars a year before the Zombie outbreak.
Ballantine was immensely impressed that he got his company a tax refund of over two hundre
d million dollars while making so much profit.
“Mr. Ballantine,” his assistant stood in the doorway to his penthouse office.
Her boss didn’t bother to look up from his expansive desk. It was the only piece of furniture in the office except for his plush leather chair.
The décor was a choice in minimalism, and an effort on Ballantine’s part to show that even though space was at a premium, he had a thousand square feet just for his desk.
“What?” he barked.
“The Council is calling a quorum.”
He didn’t put down his pen even though he wasn’t working on anything of importance at the moment.
Since the fall and the construction of the wall, the Council had voted to stop using television for entertainment and make it news and education twenty-four seven.
The news was about the safety and rebuilding efforts. The education was how to.
How to grow food.
How to filter rainwater.
How to compost waste, how to survive.
It was disgusting, he thought.
But at least he was in charge of it.
In charge of it all, and even if he had been voted down the first two times he brought it up, his associates had discovered a couple of pressure points he could push on a few members and the third time the vote would go his way.
He’d bring back entertainment to coddle the masses and take their minds off the flyover states.
He set the pen down in and coiled out of his seat.
The buttons on his Armani were made from ivory and he slipped the top two through the holes in his coat and brushed off imaginary lint.
Ballantine knew people respected authority with style and he wasn’t about to let the end of the world take that control from him.
“Take notes,” he snapped as he stepped past her.
She was new and he hadn’t bothered to learn her name.
His last assistant jumped off the roof of the building after a Council meeting where they learned a suburb of Denver had fallen.
One of the members said that was her hometown.
The one before that turned Z after being bitten.
It just didn’t pay to waste time learning about them if they were going to die.
He marched down the hallway and took the stairs down eighteen flights to the Council chamber.
He hated every step.
Normally, he would use the stairs to keep trim, but since the Council voted to restrict electrical use to essentials, they forced him to use them, and that pissed him off.
He heard the clatter of sensible shoes on the steps behind him.
“Good girl,” he muttered.
This one was good at taking orders.
He liked that.
Ballantine was a man who liked to give orders.
3
“Listen up,” Captain Seamus Sharp stepped through the door to the ready room and eyeballed his platoon. There were two fire teams in the room, twelve men comprised of six man squads.
They jumped to their feet and snapped to attention.
“Good,” he thought to himself. “Old timers were teaching the new meat.”
He moved to the front of the room and wished for a laptop. He knew it was a crutch from the before days, when mission briefings were conducted using PowerPoint presentations. But it was the way he had trained.
Now he had an overhead with a weak 30-watt lightbulb, which the men could barely see on a dust colored screen.
The new meat was the result of the death of a lot of old meat.
The Army took the brunt of the zombie assault during the initial outbreak.
“That’s not true,” he muttered as he turned to face the men.
The Marines were the ones who took it on the chin. Ten thousand men in Camp Pendleton turned loose to wreak hell on the zombies.
They camped on the outer edges of the town to enforce the just declared martial law, and the Z virus swept their encampment.
In twelve hours, they lost ninety percent of the fighting force because no one was sure what they were dealing with and the Marines didn’t fire on each other.
The Army didn’t fare much better.
Ft Irwin sent out tanks to man the borders, especially along Mexico and TJ to prevent an onslaught of Mexican Z from crossing.
“We’ve got new orders,” he told his men.
Five of them were conscripted from the streets of LA. Zero combat experience, little more than basic training in the National Guard, and even then, their military occupations were support services.
He needed killers and he got quartermasters.
“The HMFIC has declared from up on high that you are going for a plane ride.”
Their eyeballs swiveled on him hard, the weight of the stares making him wish for the laptop even more.
Few planes had been up since the virus started.
Those carried VIP government officials and dignitaries from other countries, if the scuttlebutt was true.
But no soldiers had been flown in almost a year.
“At 0300 today, a civilian craft went down in Kansas. It was a forced landing, not a crash. There was radio contact made with the survivors. Chairman Ballantine has declared a rescue operation and we are the lucky sons of bitches who get to go get them.”
He let them mutter then.
No one in the room had pulled wall duty either, but they knew what was on the other side.
But they had no idea what was left in the middle.
“Is this a Suicide Squad thing?” one of his men asked.
He was regular military, a giant of a man that somehow got the original name Bear from his DI and it stuck. It could have been his grizzly disposition or a bastardization of his surname, Barrington.
Either way the giant was from Sharp’s original squad, a combat survivor from the street clean ups in Compton and Long Beach.
“I think you mean Force 10 or something,” Javier nudged him.
Where Bear was tall and wide, Javi was rail thin and average.
“Mutt and Jeff,” Sharp interrupted them.
“Save that Roger and Ebert shit for downtime.”
“Who are Roger and Ebert?” Bear asked.
“Who are Mutt and Jeff?” Javi added.
A couple of fucking comedians.
He’d have to say something in private to them. He didn’t want the new guys getting any ideas about the way he ran a meeting.
But these two had saved his life a dozen times over, maybe more.
They could play at being funny if they wanted.
“This is not a kamikaze mission,” he smirked in their general direction and earned a grin of his own.
“Nobody dies. Nobody gets hurt. We parachute in so we don’t attract Z attention. Find the plane. Find the survivors. Call for extract.”
“Too easy,” said Bear.
“Sounds like it. Our LZ is tight. We know there is Z activity in the area because of the radio contact. And we’re flying in blind.”
One of several consequences of the zombie virus was how quickly they lost communications across the country.
It was a complication of domino errors. A tech turned Z wrecked keyboards or sent satellites into decaying orbits. Backup systems got overloaded. The center could not hold.
Sharp didn’t know the specifics of each break down, but he had to live with the results of it.
They couldn’t pull a satellite over the affected area to gather intelligence, so they were working with World War II type technology, at least when it came to that.
He looked at his Rolex Submariner watch, a relic of a bygone era that still worked.
“Kit up,” he ordered. “We travel ammo heavy in one hour.”
“Loaded for Bear?” Javi nudged his companion.
“Like a Pope in the woods,” Bear answered.
“Man, that don’t make any sense.”
Sharp left them to their ribbing and to get their gear together.
