“I don’t give a rip if that man’s mommy didn’t breast feed him long enough. That crazy son of a gun is still a murderer no matter how you spin it... so what in the hell is a second look into his mind going to divulge, Missus Grayson?” Gaines asked in a tired sounding voice.
The two-way radio stayed silent for half a minute as the U-Haul’s tires hummed along the blacktop.
To Brook it sounded like Gaines wanted her to butt out and keep her hypothesis to herself. After all, who could blame him? Though it hadn’t, the stunt Brook had pulled sneaking onto the CH-47 amongst the chalk of Rangers could have ended badly. She became his problem then—and she was his problem now. But Brook had a stake in the game—she had lost her big brother and she owed it to Carl to call the general’s hand on the issue. “Cade told me Pug is not the only personality inhabiting that man’s mind. If Ted what’s-his-name notices a drastic change in Pug’s demeanor... or picks up on what Cade mentioned to me, then he might know a way to get him to talk. Maybe—if you pump the right pills into the man, you just might be rewarded with a lucid prisoner—one that you can properly interrogate.”
“You are going to owe me one Brooklyn Grayson. I will do this for you... I’ll do this because I know you aren’t crazy... are you?”
That’s two favors I owe the brass, she thought. Then as the Motorola went silent she glanced sideways at Wilson who had been hanging on every word, and exclaimed, “I can’t believe it. The general is on board...”
Shaking his head Wilson said, “I’d be excited but I’m lost... now I think it’s your turn to tell me the whole story.”
Brook recounted to Wilson everything that had happened between Pug’s release from quarantine until the soldiers in bunny suits found him bawling like a baby alone in his tent.
She omitted only two facts: that her brother Carl had been among the victims and that both the stocks of antiserum and the data used in its manufacture had been lost in the conflagration.
Shuddering with revulsion and trying to come to grips with the fact that he had been rubbing elbows with the psychopath, Wilson stated in a low voice, “Wow... he killed all those people and William in cold blood. That is so hard for me to believe... he didn’t seem like a deranged murderer.”
Brook tilted her head back until her helmet touched the seatback and stared at the stained headliner. After a mile or two of silence she said, “It’s a lot to process... but all of it was his doing. However, there may be more like him on the base. That’s why my husband and the others need to interrogate him further.”
Wilson, who was still paying more attention to Brook than the road, replied, “You know... I assumed both of the fires were accidental. Now I’m effin pissed that I didn’t notice the coincidence. I guess I was still tired and in shock from our run from Denver.”
“Pug and the fires that he set took us all by surprise... ” Brook said in a voice tinged with sadness.
Suddenly remembering that Ted probably hadn’t seen his partner since they all had been put in quarantine, Wilson blurted, “Oh man. When Ted finds out Pug killed William he’s going to tear him limb from limb. Ted’s a big bear of a guy...”
Trying to sound reassuring Brook added, “Don’t worry. Shrill and Nash will treat Ted with kid gloves... they will tell him everything he needs to know...”
“You mean after they use him—right?” Wilson stated, narrowing his eyes.
“Probably,” Brook conceded, looking away.
Chapter 19
Outbreak - Day 11
Grand Junction, Colorado
In the grand scheme of things, the city of Grand Junction, Colorado didn’t fully live up to its name. Established alongside the Colorado River, which received the smaller Gunnison River from the south, Grand Junction had been a crossroads for commerce between Utah and Colorado and a place to stop and resupply for wide-eyed expansionists heading to Nevada and beyond.
Compared to Denver and Colorado Springs, the city of sixty thousand people failed to peg the grand meter anywhere near the top of the scale. Although not Grand Canyon grand, or Grand Central Station grand, the city still spread out across a sizable plot of western Colorado.
To the north, Book Cliffs stood sentinel, while backstopping the western edge of Grand Junction, Colorado National Monument loomed. Painted red and orange by the mid-morning sun, the series of cliffs, canyons, and red rock mesas looked like they were transplanted from the surface of Mars; like arthritic fingers, huddles of gnarled Joshua trees probed skyward. Ari jinked the black helo around the taller specimens while diving in and out of the many weather-scoured arroyos. The SOAR (Special Operations Aviation Regiment) pilot was in total control of the helicopter, and seemed to have formed a symbiotic relationship with the Ghost Hawk dubbed Jedi One-One.
Ari halved his airspeed on approach to the city, and, in a gut wrenching maneuver, popped the helo to five hundred feet AGL (Above Ground Level) in order to survey the rapidly advancing sprawl through his smoked visor. After a drawn out whistle, he said, “That’s a bigger city than I was expecting. I sure as hell hope the Zs aren’t congregating anywhere near Grand Junction Regional.”
Craning his neck to see the ground through the port side glass, Tice added, “I’ve been in and out of most of the airports in the CONUS when I was assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force... took the grand tour just after the 9-11 attacks. Since then all of the airports have added pretty formidable fencing. The Department of Homeland Security and the FAA mandated the extra security measures to keep unwanted folk from sneaking in with deadly stuff.”
Ari couldn’t resist. “Yeah... like the genius underwear bomber. How’s that working out for you, Mister Sits to Pee?”
After hearing about the fall of Fort Bragg first-hand from Brook and the fall of Camp Williams similarly from Duncan, Cade had a hard time putting any faith in fencing. A few feet of chain-link topped with razor wire keeping out a small cadre of terrorists or drug smugglers maybe, but a thousand hungry, determined, and mindless ghouls, no fucking way. “Where is your secondary forage location if this one is no go?” he asked.
Durant consulted the flight computer, which was still being fed GPS (Global Positioning System) and other necessary navigation information from the series of GPS satellites controlled by the 50th Space Wing back at Schriever AFB. “Well sir,” Durant replied, “we’d have to probe further into Utah. Moab has a smaller airport and, more importantly, a much smaller population—about five thousand, give or take...”
“Moab... been there. The place has awesome slickrock tracks and microbeers... anyone bring a mountain bike?” Ari quipped.
“We aren’t on vacation, Night Stalker. We’re on safari,” Lopez said darkly.
For the interruption, Cade shot both men an annoyed look.
After the peanut gallery piped down, Durant continued. “The downside of the Moab facility is that it caters to general aviation only. The chance of us getting a full load of JP-8 at Canyonlands is a crap shoot at best.”
“Besides, from where we are now...” Ari did some calculations in his head and continued, “that’s about a two hundred and twenty mile round trip, and it looks like we would be backtracking to the south to boot. Even for this numb ass aviator that is a lot of flying for a whole lot of maybes.”
Cade chimed in. “I’m not comfortable with maybes. Since we don’t have eyes on Grand Junction Regional yet... why all the hypothesizing?”
“It’s what we do, Sir. Cover all the bases,” Durant replied.
“How bad can it be down there?” Tice asked.
Ari finessed the controls, making course corrections as a hot thermal updraft bounced the helo like a ship at sea. “Jesus Christ...” Ari cried. “Did the spook just say what I think he said? You never, ever, say jinxin’ words like that in my presence.”
Tice greeted the comment with a casual shrug of his shoulders.
As the Ghost Hawk rapidly cut the distance to the city, Cade tilted his neck in order to see through the cockp
it glass between Ari and Durant. Wisps of smoke curled into the air. The entire southernmost part of the city was obliterated; the conflagration, having already burned itself out, had left standing only the scorched shells of a handful of concrete structures. The metal streetlight standards and the few scattered trees that had somehow escaped the cleansing fire cast shadows over the soot-covered thoroughfares. Like alabaster soldiers trudging through a blackened battlefield, scattered groupings of zombies moved about on the ground.
“We are approaching the airport. It’ll be on the port side. I’m going to orbit once and set down quickly when we find what we need,” Ari said via the shipboard comms. “All eyes need to be on the lookout for a fueling station or a mobile fuel bowser.”
“We’re going to have to do a hot refueling. Meaning the pilot will not cut power. Since a fire would be very baaad I’m going to have to egress with the shooters,” Hicks added. “If we see any Zs roaming the grounds, one of you will have to stay on the mini-gun and the other three are going to have to watch my back while I work.”
Durant’s voice invaded the comms. “Don’t look now, but I think... the airfield is full of Zs.”
“OK, heads up gentlemen,” said Ari. “Make sure you watch yourselves around the tail rotor. Very important, at all costs keep the Zs away from our ride... the last thing I need is for one of those things to martyr itself into my tail rotor. Be advised—if that happens—we will all be walking home.”
Cade stole a look. The scene below started a dull ache in the pit of his stomach. It was the small dose of fear that always came along for the ride whenever he went into harm’s way.
“Hey Lucy, you’ve got some esplainin’ to do,” Ari deadpanned over the comms. “Looks like someone crashed the gate and left it wide open... literally.”
In order to let the operators come up with their game plan, Ari kept the bird close to the deck and moving at a crawl. As soon as the black helo crossed over the southwest corner of the airport, the walkers’ point of entry became evident.
Tice spotted the deep furrow in the black earth first. He cut in, “Wow... she came up waaay short. Must have been moving at a helluva clip too, judging by the dirt she plowed after the initial impact.”
The debris field started roughly one hundred yards before the crushed cyclone fence, where a piece of the plane’s landing gear, seemingly intact and with the wheels still attached, had become embedded in the churned up sod. The jetliner’s nearly unscathed tail section, emblazoned with the glossy scarlet and royal blue Delta Airlines logo, lay canted to one side, directly on the center line of the rubber-streaked runway. The majority of the jetliner’s burned out skeleton rested some four hundred yards farther and off to the right of Runway 11/29. Littering the distance between the site of impact and the scorched earth marking Delta 1221’s final resting place were jagged pieces of fuselage, greasy hunks of scorched human flesh, and fluttering in the oppressively hot desert air—hundreds of colorful fabric scraps and the ruptured pieces of luggage that once contained them.
“Shouldn’t they have at least foamed the runway?” asked Maddox, his visor partially obscuring his bewildered look.
“I’d be willing to bet the airport was closed and the emergency personnel had already vamoosed. There was nobody left to foam the runway when the heavy came in,” said Durant, pointing out the dayglow yellow emergency vehicles still parked next to an oversized aviation hangar directly adjacent to the rambling airport terminal.
“I concur,” Ari said solemnly as he circled a hundred feet above the blackened wreckage. “Poor bastard probably had no one in the tower to talk to, no one on the ground, and probably no glideslope to follow. As for the fire guys... if I were in their boots I would have gone home too. I woulda been looking for my family.” Ari spoke the last sentence in a small voice. Then, with a tear caressing his cheek, he thought how grateful he was for the flight helmet’s smoked visor.
“Eleven o’clock port side,” Durant intoned.
“I see them,” Ari grunted as he pulled heavy g’s nosing the near silent Jedi Ride around in a tight circle.
Cade also saw the two white tanker trucks, the words West Slope Aviation plastered in big red letters on their sides. The vehicles sat on the tarmac positioned in a manner that told Cade someone had recently refueled from them, and he silently prayed that they hadn’t already been sucked dry.
He made out dozens of unmoving zombies carpeting the ground in a rough semi-circle which extended from the near side of the tankers. He also noted the staggering walkers, which numbered no less than fifty, loitering dangerously close to the spot where Ari needed to set the Ghost Hawk down.
“It’s going to be tight,” Ari cautioned. “Hold on to your hats, ladies.”
“Switch me places,” Tice said to Hicks.
“Are you familiar...?”
Tice cut off Hicks before he could finish the interrogation. “I’m proficient with the Dillon mini. Shot the shit out of them in training... never got a chance to in combat though.”
Hicks relinquished the gun. “They’re pretty much idiot proofed,” he said while he unlatched the cabin door. “Use it only as a last resort. And remember... short bursts, short as in a fraction of a second short.”
“Copy that,” Tice said as he clicked on the safety strap, plugged his helmet into the nearest receptacle, and started reacquainting himself with the complex weapon system. Idiot proofed my ass. What the hell do I have to do to earn these guys’ respect?
Cade, Lopez and Maddox swapped their flight helmets for their smaller and much lighter tactical ballistic helmets.
In order to communicate with the Delta operators and act as another set of eyes while they were on the ground, Durant switched the onboard comms to match their frequency. “Mic check. How copy?” he said.
Cade flashed the co-pilot a thumbs up; Lopez and Maddox also followed suit.
Ari, who could now be heard in everyone’s helmets, said, “We’re good to go... wheels down in three mikes.”
As he unplugged from the bulkhead, and donned Tice’s tactical helmet, Hicks’s thumb hinged up indicating he was good to go.
Ari engaged the Ghost Hawk’s landing gear which locked into place with a solid clunk.
Hicks hauled open the starboard side door and immediately a superheated blast of gut churning stench invaded the helo. Riding the turbulent air, the sickly sweet smell of dead meat co-mingled with the chopper’s kerosene-tinged exhaust instantly triggered Tice’s gag reflex which in turn started an unstoppable chain reaction inside of him. As he fought to hold down the rising bile, his overactive salivary glands went to work only hastening the process.
Again the helo shimmied, buffeted by an invisible pillar of superheated desert air.
Sensing his stomach about to let go and acting purely on reflex, Tice made the mistake of poking his head into the slipstream where it was nearly ripped off due to the added weight of his flight helmet.
“What are you doing?” Hicks yelled. “We’ve got bags for that—”
Tice heard nothing but the throaty roar of rushing wind mixed with the subliminal hum of the main rotor before he vomited. The puke spewed from the CIA man’s mouth and entered the air vortex surrounding Jedi One-One. Instantly, bits of undigested spaghetti and meatball MRE, which now resembled an Orange Julius, were blasted right back into the cabin.
A look of disgust evident, Hicks methodically wiped the white bits of noodle and reddish-gray meat splatter from his face, and then dabbed at the particles clinging to the interior of the Ghost Hawk. “For fuck’s sake Spook, we’ve still got a long way to go... and now I’m wearing half the contents of your stomach.”
“Sorry,” Tice sheepishly announced to everyone aboard as he transferred oily spittle from the corner of his mouth to the back of his gloved hand.
As the runway unspooled below the helicopter, Cade shot a stern look, and then took a rare swipe at the CIA man. “Your shooting better impress me, Tice. In fact, if you want to l
ive this one down—then you’re really going to have to shine during this entire mission. Once a puker... always a puker,” he bellowed.
“I’ll second that,” Ari chimed in. “And if you don’t rise to the occasion, when we get back to Schriever we’ll get you a commemorative “Puker” patch that you can Velcro to your ACUs.”
More grunt than words, Tice said, “I’ll pass, but I will accept my ‘I saved Schriever by jury-rigging a few nukes,’ patch when we get back to base. Who knows... maybe you ballbreakers might still be in need of my expertise.” He shot a smart ass grin at Ari who was eyeballing him in the curved mirror atop the flight instruments. Then, looking ground ward, he powered up the electric mini-gun and tested its range of motion by panning it back and forth. Once he had a general idea of its coverage and blind spots, he flashed thumbs up to Hicks and said, “Good to go.”
Durant checked in with the communications shack back at Schriever, informing the officer monitoring the mission that Jedi One-One was going wheels down for a refuel. Then a nagging question struck him, Why hadn’t Major Nash responded to the situation report personally?
“Wheels down in one mike,” Ari said, alerting everyone aboard Jedi One-One. “Stay frosty. I’m taking two slow passes. Clear as many walkers from the tarmac as you can—and Tice—make sure you do not hit either one of those fuel trucks.”
No shit, Sherlock, Tice thought, wondering who hung the plank labeling him their personal whipping boy around his neck.
On the initial pass Cade succeeded in felling a dozen walkers and taking chunks out of several others. Give him a M249 SAW, he thought, and the numbers would be vastly different. Unfortunately, like the onboard mini-gun, a light machine gun with a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute, such as the SAW, wouldn’t be the weapon to use effectively around a few thousand gallons of JP-8—especially not from a platform in flight.
A Pound of Flesh: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 12
