by Rick Chesler
23.
Washington, D.C.
From his position inside the M1A1 tank, Major Casey Remington surveyed the devastation on Pennsylvania Avenue on a monitor displaying a live video feed of what transpired outside. He’d never seen anything like it, that was for sure. A full-on war zone raged on U.S. soil—in the U.S. capital city, no less. Unbelievable.
Yet his monitor didn’t lie. The pain-addled screams of his soldiers didn’t lie. The firefight raging outside the White House fence didn’t lie. Most of all, the hellish menagerie of prehistoric animals with their cohort of zombie-like humanoids Did Not Lie.
For just a moment he thought of his daughter, of Olivia who hadn’t even been named a few short days ago. He thought of his wife, thought of the millions of Americans glued together with the common emotion of fear. Not since 9/11 had so many the world over been focused on the same thing, but he knew this was it, this was different. This was potentially the End of Everything.
He didn’t know what he, just one fighter, could do, but he had to try. He ordered the tank gunner to launch another mortar at the T. rex loose on the avenue. The 120mm smoothbore projectile impacted on its shoulders, exploding and severing the head so badly that it flopped loose against the body although the creature continued to walk about. “Again!” he rallied his gunner. The second shot hit the rib cage and detonated, blasting the head off completely; it dropped from the body to the street where it lay with its yellow eyes open, gnashing its ridiculously long teeth at a passing military truck.
An entire convoy of armored vehicles currently blasted away at an army of zombies all intent on breaching the White House fence. They didn’t have the ability to free climb it, but once enough of them had been killed so that the bodies were piling up, the still living zombies were able to use the corpses as a crude step ladder. One zombie managed to jump from the top of the pile to reach the fence’s top crossbar, one of the spikes passing through its wrist. From there, it pulled itself up while the shooters riddled its body with lead.
“Tell those guys to go for the head! The head!” Remington snarled into his radio from inside the tank.
The adjustment was made, but not before that particular zombie earned the distinction of being the first of the undead to land on the White House lawn before its cranium was shattered by a Marine’s armor-piercing round and it dropped dead, once and for all, on one of the most heavily guarded properties on the planet.
It would not be the last.
Remington ordered the tank to start rolling again. It made him nervous to remain stationary for more than a few minutes. He scanned the digital data map and tried to analyze all the intel and the rush of data scrolling on his screen. Orders and counter-orders, a confusing, rapidly changing list of priorities. The sheer speed with which everything had gone so wrong had been dizzying. A series of staccato beeps was heard in the tank and the communications operator tapped Remington on the shoulder.
“Delta Team reporting in that Bravo has fallen back. They couldn’t hold the Washington Monument, sir. They were overrun, numerous casualties and many of them are now…” The operator hesitated, apparently seeking the right words.
“Are now what, soldier?” Remington regretted asking as soon as he did. He knew, and shouldn’t have made the poor soldier speak it aloud, but maybe the truth would harden his resolve.
“Are now part of the opposition, sir.” He took a breath, then regained his composure, and gave an update that Remington hadn’t heard before. “Prelim reports indicate that the newly infected dead don’t have the coordination abilities of those in the initial waves. Medical teams report that some of the dissected field specimens indicate circuitry components that the newly dead won’t have, but they’re still…zombies, for lack of a better word, sir, that spread the contagion.”
Circuitry. Jesus, then this is all directed, a massive terrorist attack of pure calculated evil. Remington fought off a wave of nausea. Every time he thought he was making an inch of progress, he found out that they had just lost a mile. He tapped a monitor that currently displayed diagnostic information about the tank.
“Do we have drones in the sky?”
The operator nodded.
“Patch me in the video feed from it, can you?”
“Will do, sir.” He set about completing the task while Remington turned and peered into the viewer, adjusting its optics for a direct view of the tank’s immediate surroundings. It had infrared sensors for night time, but he certainly didn’t need that option now. Zombies were everywhere, including, he noticed with a taste of bile in his throat, some of whom only minutes earlier had been his own fellow marines.
He heard a screech and turned his attention to the sky, where a pterodactyl zoomed in low over the White House fence with a zombie rider on its back. One of the tank’s gunners took a strafing run at it but missed, and the ptero deposited its undead payload deep onto the White House property from a few feet above ground.
“Major, sir! I’ve got that drone feed up now.”
Remington shifted his attention to the monitor that showed an aerial view of the greater D.C. environs, and felt his breath catch.
It was unfathomable, the number of undead and dinosaurs, and the organization with which they moved—marched—on the capital. This wasn’t a mere army, it was an invasion force from another world. Reminiscent of medieval warfare tactics, a boxy phalanx of perhaps a thousand zombie soldiers, flanked on all sides and in the air by a squadron of reanimated dinosaurs, made its way toward the Capitol Building.
One of his officers alerted him to the monitor that visualized the environment just outside the tank. “Sir, more pterodactyls, incoming!”
Remington broke away from the scope. “Where are the remaining Apaches?” He had seen from the support logs that additional air support had been ordered thirty minutes earlier.
“On the way, sir. I see one of them on the way now.”
“One? Where are the others?”
“Diverted to the main force at the Monument, sir, or…lost in battle already.”
Remington eyeballed the live feed again. Before today, he didn’t think it was possible for any living thing to give an Apache trouble, but as he watched two pteros launch themselves—apparently with deliberation—into the main rotor assembly of the helicopter, he changed his mind. The chopper exploded over the White House itself, raining flaming debris onto the roof of the presidential residence.
“Goddamn it!”
The two surviving pteros flew across the White House lawn, over the fence and out over the tank, where strafing fire shot one of them down. It landed in a crumpled heap of shattered bones and torn membranes on the street. The other ptero managed to avoid fire and hit the ground running, where two zombies jumped atop its back. Then it took off again, turning back over the fence toward the White House. When it neared the porch of the historic building, it came in low and its riders dropped off onto the ground, where they fanned out in opposite directions around the house.
The ptero was cut down on the ground by automatic weapons fire from the White House roof. The reprieve didn’t last long, however, for alarmed shouts soon warned Remington of a new aerial attack.
“More pterodactyls, inbound—high and fast!”
“Mortars, strafing runs, fire at will. Hit ‘em with everything we got!” Remington balled his hands into tight fists while he consulted a radar screen depicting the six new targets approaching the White House. Then, on the video feed, he watched as an object fell from one of the pteros. It was small, but it gave Remington a big chill.
“Take cover! Possible bombardment.”
Outside, a scuba-tank-sized canister fell from one of the pteros into a military staging area on Pennsylvania Avenue. The object exploded and soldiers nearby were cut down, hit by shrapnel.
“Bomb!” came the report over the radio from the staging area commander.
Remington watched in disbelief as five more of the bombs were dropped by the other winged reptiles. �
�More incoming!” he shouted in reply.
The pteros were all shot down but it was too late. Their deadly payloads dropped and multiple explosions rocked the famous street, releasing a storm of metal fragments into the soldiers and emergency personnel who fronted the White House.
“Multiple friendlies down, casualties confirmed,” came the initial report.
But that was not the worst of it.
Minutes later, while still reeling from the attack and while Remington and his tank crew were busy pounding at distant targets and softening up the army of approaching zombies, the first of the dead soldiers rose from the ground.
Remington again had to doubt his senses. “These marines…they weren’t bitten. They’ve only been dead for a few minutes, How is this possible?”
The operator beside him took a look. “Sir…I don’t know! I’ve had them in visual the whole time.”
“Those frag bombs…” said the radar tech, “they must have been already infected with the contagion.”
The words hung there with all of the smoke in the air above the tank. The notion was uncomfortable as hell.
“Biological warfare,” Remington muttered. Before he could say anything else, a new scene of bloody carnage unfolded on the live feed. The newly dead soldiers began biting those charged with tending to the dead and wounded, turning on their own so fast the medics couldn’t even react. By the time the others realized it and began fighting back, it was too late. It only took a single bite to spread the prion infection. Soon, many more soldiers were dead men walking, right in the midst of the defenders who now had to contend with the external attack as well as internal. The newly initiated zombies were not under remote control influence, but were deadly free-ranging disease agents all the same.
A new directive came over the radio, addressed specifically to Major Remington: get to the Capitol Building and defend it before it falls.
With great regret, Remington took a last look at the soldiers taking messy chunks of meat from their associates—mindless, primal, beyond animalistic—and gave the orders to his men to move the tank out.
24.
Airborne en route to Atlanta, Georgia
Somewhere over Virginia, the pilot began to shows signs that he was undergoing the transformation. Oddly, the first clue was a slight change in the pitch of his voice. It became higher, more nasally, perhaps due to the constricting of his throat and arteries. Alex noticed it when the airman was calling out over the radio trying without success to reach a still-functioning air traffic control tower. Then his movements became noticeably sloth-like, more labored. He was slower to reach his arm out to adjust controls. His arm wound had worsened, too, developing a disturbing yellowish bruising pattern that oozed a clear goopy substance.
Definitely took longer to change after a bite than it did after death from a bite. If the host was still alive, apparently the immune resistance gave the victim some time at least, before succumbing.
Alex pointed the captain’s change out to Veronica, who leaned over and whispered into his ear. “You got this, right?”
“I can fly it, just not that sure I can stick the landing. But this guy’s not going to last much longer, so we either force him to land now or we take him out and hope I can figure out how to land later.”
Veronica thought about this while her right hand crept along her thigh to the snap catch on her knife sheath. “If we land now, we’d have to figure out a new way to get all the way to Atlanta.”
Alex had no counter to that. He had no idea how the rest of the East Coast (or hell, the entire country, for that matter) fared, but he certainly didn’t relish the thought of travelling hundreds of miles through conditions like those they’d experienced for only a few of those miles.
With the barest whisper of steel sliding against leather, Veronica removed the KA-BAR fixed blade knife from its sheath.
Alex eyed the familiar-looking blade. “You still have that thing?”
“Souvenir from our island vacation,” she said, flashing on a mental highlight reel of violent attacks that she quickly suppressed. It was time for a new assault. She shot Alex a look that said, Be ready.
The pilot began jerking his head up and down in a strange series of rapid movements. His radio erupted with a reply from the ground. As he reached for the transmitter, missing it and randomly swiping at a cluster of switches, Veronica sprung. She placed her blade where she knew it had to go in order to be effective—upward through the neck, inside the jawbone and directly into the brain cavity. Instantly, the brand new zombie had the life snuffed out of it. It slumped in the seat, blood dumping from its gaping neck and head wound as Veronica withdrew her knife. She wiped it quickly on the seat and returned it to its sheath.
The plane started to veer sharply to one side as the dead zombie slumped onto the steering column.
“Alex!”
He reached forward and tossed the former pilot into the passenger seat, and then he climbed over into the cockpit, taking the dead man’s spot. He gripped the controls and leveled out the aircraft. “Can we eject this guy?” he called back to Veronica. “Don’t really need a dead zombie co-pilot.” She also moved up front.
“Put your belt on first,” Alex cautioned. She did so and then she propped the corpse against the passenger-side door while Alex concentrated on flying the plane and familiarizing himself as best he could with the controls.
“Where’s the latch on this thing?” Alex explained to her how it works and then told her he was holding the plane steady, ready when she was. Veronica hauled the body atop her lap and gripped the door latch with one hand.
“What are we flying over? Don’t want to hit anybody with a dead zombie.”
“Just a bunch of farmland. As good as it’s going to get. You might hit a horse or something.”
“Yippie ki-yay.”
With a grunt, Veronica shoved the door open with an elbow and hauled the body across her lap. She gave it a good shove and sent it out, a skydiving zombie corpse. Veronica heaved the door shut and fell back into her seat, winded from the effort.
Alex looked down from his door window and spotted the undead cadaver-bomb, now a mere speck in the sky. Then he checked his compass heading and saw that he had gotten off course, and corrected for it.
“Back on track for Atlanta.”
“So what about landing this thing when we get there?”
“Thanks, I was trying not to think about it.”
“Is this really all that different from the planes—Cessnas and Sandpipers, right—that you know how to fly?”
Alex surveyed the instrument panel with a frown. “Afraid so.”
Then the radio crackled with staticky voices. Veronica held her ear closer to the speaker, straining to hear the intermittent transmission.
“Sounds like other pilots asking which airports are still open with services…where are we now, do you know?” She looked out the window with a furrowed brow.
“North Carolina. We’ll be in Georgia soon, and then Atlanta won’t be far.”
Veronica continued to scan the radio channels while Alex flew. They heard a few snatches of conversation here and there, but all in all, Alex remarked, the air bands were uncharacteristically silent. The next hour went in relative silence, neither of them speaking, knowing it still wasn’t the time, and nothing else—dwelling on what had happened or speculating on things they couldn’t verify—mattered. Veronica continued to tune in the frequencies, however, and as they crossed over the Georgia state line she got one to come in clear that featured a robotic, male voice.
“…residents and visitors advised to seek shelter immediately. The following cities have been designated as Temporary Shelter Zones: Chattanooga, Greenville, Athens, Dothan…”
The emergency bulletin droned on with a long list of smaller, inland cities.
“I don’t hear Atlanta on the list.” Veronica turned the volume down as the message began to repeat.
“Probably means that the major cities ha
ve been lost and the military and National Guard are now trying to save the second tier cities.”
“Great.”
Alex glanced out the windshield at the ground below, where structures became more numerous as they approached the greater Atlanta area.
“It’s okay. We just have to get down there, near the CDC Headquarters building, and then we need to find this doctor…?”
“Arcadia Grey. Get her, along with her research materials. Hopefully she’ll have herself and everything ready for extraction.”
“And hopefully I can land this thing.”
Suddenly Veronica heard something of interest and turned the radio back up.
“…underground NORAD facility near Cheyenne, Wyoming, one of the possible locations for a new seat of government, along with Cabinet members, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and leading science and technology experts. Once again, the White House has fallen, the president’s condition is unknown, but the core operating government, we have been assured, including successor arrangements, are secure in a highly defensible underground bunker, possibly at a Wyoming NORAD facility, or perhaps at Raven Rock, Pennsylvania. There are many rumors flying around right now, but unfortunately, no word from leadership…that is desperately needed right now to calm what remains of this nation. Until then, stand ready, find shelter and sanctuary where you can, and…”
Veronica snorted. “Highly defensible my ass! There’s no such thing as highly defensible against these things.”
“Do you really think the president is down? The first zombie president?”
“I don’t know. I can’t think about it.”
“Wait, listen!” Alex turned up the radio as new information poured from the speaker.
“…D.C. has been overrun, has fallen…Repeat: the government in Washington, D.C. has fallen, including the White House and the Capitol Building. Other major cities have also gone dark: New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago… Incoming reports also have a battle raging now in Los Angeles. It was thought that the west coast might be safer…”
