gatheringdeadkindle

by Stephen Knight

  “Roger that,” McDaniels said. He looked at Gartrell, who returned his somber glance. The first sergeant’s rifle was between his legs, its butt planted against the helicopter deck between his boots. Beside him, Regina Safire had also seen the helicopter crash. Her gaze met McDaniels’, and for a moment she looked less like a hard-charging New York City professional and more like a frightened child. Her dark hair flew about her head, courtesy of the rotor wash that entered the troop compartment through the open doors.

  McDaniels turned to Wolf Safire, who sat motionless beside him. His eyes were shut, and his jaw was set. McDaniels squeezed the smaller man’s wrist. Safire nodded slightly, but didn’t open his eyes. McDaniels faced forward, looking out through the canopy. He sat right behind the air crew, so he had a good view.

  The smoke was dense and roiling as the sun edged closer to the western horizon, now to the helicopter’s tail. Other helicopters launched, and the MH-60M banked from side to side as its pilots threaded it through the pattern with a cool, almost mechanical proficiency that McDaniels found admirable. These were people who had just seen their wingman burn in, and there was little doubt what had happened to the flight crew and their passengers. The Black Hawk charged on, flying over the treetops of Central Park, just south of the city’s historic Metropolitan Museum of Art. McDaniels had visited the museum three years ago with his family on one hot, muggy summer day when the city had been besieged by seemingly never-ending thunderstorms. He had been impressed not just by the displays, but by the architecture of the museum itself. He wondered how it would fare in the near future, and he wondered if zombies were tearing through its corridors, hunting and killing. And in the process, swelling the ranks of their army.

  The helicopter thundered on, staying as far below the smoke layer as possible. McDaniels was discomfited to see the pilots flew the big chopper directly down one of the streets (was it East 79th?), as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Buildings rose up on either side of the aircraft, and the major knew that the rotor tips had to be perilously close to making contact with cement and glass. The Black Hawk charged across Madison Avenue, clogged with traffic. Figures ran through the halted mass of cars and trucks and buses, and in some places, more figures gathered in what looked like free-for-all fights. They were zeds in the middle of feeding frenzies, and McDaniels suddenly remembered the woman standing outside his Humvee, begging for the soldiers to save her child.

  My daughter, take my daughter!

  He gritted his teeth and forced the memory away.

  The helicopter continued on its eastbound track, rotors thumping, vibrating slightly as any odd-ass aircraft that flew like a helicopter would. They crossed the multiple lanes of Park Avenue, and it was similarly blocked, a city artery clogged with automobiles instead of placque. More smoke billowed, this time from a burning bus.

  As the helicopter approached Lexington Avenue at sixty knots, something fell past the helicopter, startling the crew chief sitting in the right gunner seat. McDaniels didn’t have to see it perfectly to know what it was: a human shape. It had been a zombie, and it had tried to land on the helicopter.

  “Climb out!” he said over the intercom. “The zeds, we saw them diving out of buildings to get to people—”

  Something exploded above his head and the helicopter started bucking like some crazy carnival ride. Alarms went off, and McDaniels saw rotor alerts on the pilot’s multifunction displays. The helicopter dipped to the left as the pilots fought against it.

  “We’re going in, make sure everyone’s strapped in!” the pilot shouted. “Mayday, mayday, mayday, ROMEO Six-One, twelve souls aboard—”

  The pilot didn’t finish his transmission and the rotor blades scythed through a treetop at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 79th Street. The Black Hawk continued its apparently uncommanded left bank and turned up Lexington, slowing, its nose rising as the pilot fought to chop its airspeed and bring it into something approximating a hover. It seemed to be working, as McDaniels noticed the aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl, still crabbing to the left, but no longer flying along at almost 70 miles an hour. As the helicopter descended, both miniguns barked as their gunners fired on nearby targets.

  Jesus, we can’t be landing here! McDaniels thought.

  The pilot resumed his mayday as he and the copilot fought to regain control over the Black Hawk. The alarms continued to sound, and as the aircraft lazily spun to the left, something fractured overhead like a thick bone. McDaniels saw the blurred remains of an entire rotor blade fly away from the aircraft and disintegrate as it smashed into the brick façade of a nearby office building, disappearing into a spreading cloud of shattered carbon fiber and broken glass. The pilot screamed something unintelligible over the intercom system as the helicopter flounced from side to side as if in some sort of mechanical epileptic seizure.

  Then it rolled to the right and crashed into the traffic-choked street.

  CHAPTER 3

  McDaniels curled up into a ball in his shock-absorbing seat as the helicopter slid across the rooftops of several cars, crushing them flat before it suddenly catapulted back into the air and rolled upright. The entire airframe lashed from side to side for an instant as if fighting to remain in the air. Both pilots wrestled with the cyclic and collective pitch sticks and managed to keep the aircraft right side up before it came back to earth, this time with its landing gear in the proper position. The wheels folded up as they were designed to do, absorbing a goodly amount of the G forces. McDaniels’ seat stroked, sliding along gas-filled struts, diminishing the remainder of the forces, and the major had just enough time to hug his knees up against his body armor. His head struck his kneepads with sufficient force to make him see stars for an instant as the wrecked MH-60M slid forward, tearing through automobiles as if they were as insubstantial as paper. The sound of metal being torn asunder was all McDaniels heard.

  And then, the helicopter slammed into the back of a garbage truck. The pilot screamed as the right side of the cockpit imploded, driving the instrument panel into his armored seat and pinning him in place. The aircraft jerked to a halt, and the only sounds left were those of the engines winding down and the metronomic beep-beep-beep of an alarm.

  An eerie buzzing filled McDaniels’ head. He slowly sat up in his seat and fumbled with his harness’s quick release, but couldn’t quite make it work. He looked to his right and saw Safire was still strapped to the seat beside him, leaning forward against his own harness. A trickle of blood ran from his thin nose, and his eyes were glassy, disoriented. McDaniels shook his head, trying to clear away the cobwebs.

  Something clattered to the floor of the helicopter, and he saw Gartrell slip out of his four-point safety harness. He grabbed onto the left gunner’s seat and pulled himself to his feet, standing bent over at the waist in the Black Hawk’s troop compartment. He looked at the door gunner in the seat before him, then sidestepped over to McDaniels.

  “I got this, sir,” he said, and he reached out and hit the quick release on McDaniels’ harness. McDaniels slipped to the floor and fell to his knees. The Black Hawk was tilted to the right, lying across the crumpled remains of abandoned cars. The rear of the garbage truck intruded into the right side of the cockpit. He saw no sign of the pilot inside the twisted mass of metal and plastic.

  The crew chief unstrapped himself and eased out from behind his now-useless M134 minigun. His visor was fractured, and he reached up and shoved it back under his SPH-5 helmet’s visor guard. He had a beefy face and a thick mustache, and his eyes were still sharp despite everything he had just gone through.

  “Who’s injured?” he asked, after glancing toward the destroyed cockpit. He grabbed McDaniels by the arm and looked at him. “Major, are you hurt?”

  McDaniels slogged to his feet as Gartrell and the crew chief held him steady against the incline. “I’m fine,” he told them. “Are we on fire? I smell smoke!”

  “The fuel tanks are self-sealing, rated to stand up to 23 mil
limeter fire,” the crew chief said. “You’re smelling transmission fluid burning up. The tranny box must’ve been sheared off the mount.” He looked past the seat Safire was still strapped into. “Ground control, you guys alive back there?”

  “Still here, but Jimenez is hurt,” was the reply. “His back’s all fucked up.”

  “Rittenour and Leary?” Gartrell asked as he turned to tend to Regina Safire. She looked stunned but unhurt.

  There was movement in the back of the compartment. “We’re good,” said Rittenour.

  In the front of the helicopter, the copilot stirred. He groaned and fumbled with his straps. The crew chief pushed between the door gunner seats and went to him.

  “Mr. Goggins? You all right, sir?”

  “I think I’m caught beneath the instrument panel.” The copilot looked around the aircraft and grimaced when he saw the devastation encasing the pilot’s station. “Is he...?”

  “He’s dead,” Gartrell said. He put his fingers against the neck of the man in the left gunner’s seat. “Door gunner’s dead, too.” He reached forward and pulled the dead man’s straps as tight as he could.

  “What are you doing?” the copilot asked as he shrugged out of his harness.

  “We need to get out of here,” Gartrell said. “We need to find someplace we can hole up in and call for an extraction.” He finished with the gunner and picked up McDaniels’ rifle from where it lay on the floor between the two gunnery seats. He handed it the major, and McDaniels checked it quickly.

  “He’s right, we do need to get the hell out of here,” he said. “Gartrell, see to Miss Safire.” McDaniels turned and looked at Wolf Safire critically. “Doctor Safire? Can you travel?”

  The older man wiped at the blood trickling from his nose. He pulled a handkerchief from inside his dark suit jacket and dabbed at his nostrils gingerly.

  “Yes, but where will we go?” he asked.

  “We’ll find that out in just a moment.” McDaniels unstrapped Safire and helped him to his feet. “We’ll have to go out the left side of the helicopter. The right side is blocked.” And he was right, the Black Hawk had come to a rest with its right side pressed against several cars.

  In the near distance, more gun fire rang out and helicopters buzzed through the area. There was a rending crash, and McDaniels knew another helicopter had gone down somewhere nearby. He found his tactical headset, slipped it on and switched to the common net. It was filled with urgent, overlapping radio calls. It was difficult to determine who was saying what.

  “Any station, this is Terminator Six, come in.” McDaniels transmitted while pulling Safire toward the left side of the helicopter. Gartrell preceded him and hopped out, then turned back to help Regina out of the wreckage. “This is Terminator Six. ROMEO Six-One is down on the hard on Lexington, just past East 79th. We need immediate evac, over.” He repeated the calls as he helped Safire step out of the open cargo door in the Black Hawk’s left side. Gartrell and Rittenour waited to help him navigate the crushed car and twisted landing gear assembly that was directly below the door. Regina looked up at her father with wide eyes, standing right behind them. Leary and the Night Stalker security crew had already exited the aircraft, and they provided overwatch cover, weapons oriented down either side of the street. Leary fired twice, and McDaniels saw a figure collapse to the ground.

  “We gotta boogie,” he said.

  As McDaniels clambered out of the wrecked helicopter, a voice crackled over his headset, barely discernable in the electrified chaos: “Terminator Six, this is Uniform Six... you read...”

  The transmission quality was horrible, but McDaniels knew that Uniform Six was the overall ground element commander at Central Park, a colonel from the 10th Mountain Division’s 87th Light Infantry. McDaniels pressed the earphone tighter against his right ear as Leary opened up again, this time joined by one of the Night Stalkers who released a full automatic burst downrange. Gartrell slapped the Night Stalker on the shoulder.

  “Semi only! Conserve your ammo, troop!”

  “Uniform Six, Terminator Six, we need immediate evac, over,” McDaniels said. He saw shapes climbing over the cars in the near distance, and he slapped Rittenour on the shoulder and pointed them out. Rittenour nodded and aimed his rifle at them but did not fire. McDaniels realized the Special Forces trooper was waiting for the zeds to get closer, so he could be certain to deliver head shots.

  “Terminator... Uniform Six... —ative on evac... overrun. I say again, we are overrun... all aircraft are...” The voice was drowned out by a fusillade of heavy weapons fire from somewhere inside the park, and McDaniels recognized the detonations as were from 70 millimeter rockets. Apparently, the Night Stalkers’ Little Bird gunships were going into overdrive and using all the munitions at their disposal. “... someplace high and hole up, we’ll try and...”

  The transmission was overwhelmed by a frantic, fragmented report from an infantry unit that was in close contact with the zombies. The report was indistinguishable, but over the sound of small arms fire, McDaniels heard total fear in the voice of the soldier trying to make the report, just one amidst dozens. It cut out suddenly. Was the unit overrun? McDaniels wondered. It didn’t matter, another frantic report filled its place, just as garbled and unintelligible as all the others.

  “Uniform Six, this is Terminator Six. Say again on status of evac, over.” Something moaned to McDaniels’ right, and he turned to see a small, ghoulish figure emerge from beneath a car. It had been a toddler, perhaps a three-year-old boy with straw-blond hair and an aquiline nose that resembled Regina’s. In life, the boy would have been almost beautiful, full of life and vitality. In death, it was anything but, its blue eyes open and unblinking, already marred by motes of dirt. The zombie was missing most of its right arm, and its movements were slow and imprecise as it hauled itself out from beneath the car and clambered to its feet. It wore dirty pajama bottoms, and the knees had already been worn through, exposing scraped flesh the color of alabaster beneath.

  McDaniels fired one round through its head as its moan turned to a hiss and it charged toward him. The bullet blasted through the top of the zed’s skull, removing it along with a good portion of the brain, splattering it across a nearby white BMW. The zombie was knocked back into the car, then fell to the street face-first. It did not move.

  Regina’s steely façade cracked suddenly. She shrieked and buried her face into her father’s shoulder.

  “Uniform Six, this is Terminator Six, come in, over!” McDaniels looked around the street. There were far too many hiding places for the zombies to stalk them, and down on the street, visibility was limited. Overhead, a Chinook hurtled past, disappearing in and out of the roiling black smoke that rose into the air.

  He heard nothing further from Uniform Six.

  McDaniels slapped the side of the helicopter. “Flight crew, are you guys coming out?”

  The copilot leaned out of his open doorway. The aircraft flown by the 160th always had their doors removed to increase visibility. “One of my fucking legs is trapped under the instrument panel,” he said. “And to top it off, I think it’s broken...”

  McDaniels swore and pulled himself up onto one of the cars the MH-60M lay across. He peered inside the cockpit, and for sure, the pilot’s right leg was pinned beneath the instrument panel overhang. If the entire console hadn’t been shifted back in the crash, he could have been simply crawled out the doorway to his left, but that wasn’t an option.

  “Can we lower the seat?” McDaniels asked.

  The crew chief was already trying that, pulling a control at the base of the pedestal and shoving down on the seat with all his weight. He shook his head.

  “Seat’s stroked all the way down. There’s no way to depress it further. I might be able to remove the back, but we’ll have to figure out a way to lift the panel off—oh shit!”

  The crew chief was yanked toward the right side of the cockpit. McDaniels leaned inside to see what was going on. He saw an arm had
reached out through the wreckage on that side, and fingers had grasped a handful of the crew chief’s flight suit.

  “Mr. Cox is still alive!” the crew chief shouted. He grabbed onto the pilot’s wrist.

  “No, he’s not!” McDaniels said. “Sergeant, stay away from that man, he’s not Cox anymore!”

  The crew chief hesitated, and when he did, the zombie sitting pinned inside the wreckage moaned and pulled again, this time harder. The crew chief made a strangled sound in his throat and ripped the hand off his flight suit. The arm flailed around blindly, trying to find its target again. The crew chief fell against the copilot’s seat and pulled his Beretta pistol from its holster.

  “Fucking shit,” he said, his voice barely more than a strangled whisper.

  “Sergeant, pay attention... help me figure out how we’re going to get your copilot out of this seat, all right?”

  “No time for that, major.” Gartrell’s voice was a flat deadpan. “Multiple targets inbound from both sides. We don’t have the manpower or ammunition to make a stand out here in the street.” McDaniels straightened and looked up and down the street. Gartrell was right. Dozens of figures shambled, ran, or crawled toward the crash site from the north and the south. More gunfire sounded from Central Park, but the sounds of helicopters were fading now. All the aircraft that had lifted off were on their way out.

  Glass exploded nearby as a ghoul crashed into a car. McDaniels looked up in time to see several more boiling out a window in a nearby apartment building. All of them reached for the humans in the street as they fell, as if they could grab them. All of them crashed to the street or sidewalk below, and all of them stirred after impact. Though bones had been broken and flesh shredded, the walking dead were still capable of movement... and they remained hungry.

  “But what about Mr. Goggins?” the crew chief asked. “We’ve got to get him out of here!”

  “Gartrell, take everyone into that office building there.” McDaniels pointed toward an office building at the corner of the street. Through its thick glass lobby doors, he saw the marbled lobby was empty. “People are still holed up in the apartments and residences, but the chances of people being in an office building are a hell of a lot less. And with less people—”