Allegiance

by Shawn Chesser

  Tice blanched immediately.

  Cade could see the Spook’s eyes searching for a safe place to deposit a stomach’s worth of MRE. Then he smiled at the recollection of the former CIA man earning his Puker Patch over Grand Junction Airport just days ago. Keep the door closed, he thought to himself. Another whirlwind of regurgitated spaghetti was the last thing he wanted to experience. As he turned his eyes forward and peered between Ari and Durant, he noticed the looming canyon of trees, their skeletal branches reaching for the helo’s skin on both sides.

  “Splitting the goalposts,” were the last words the occupants of the Ghost Hawk heard from Ari.

  As Cade kept his eyes glued to the cockpit glass between the pilots’ heads, the ground suddenly tilted up at him and was black as night. The speeding craft juddered as a handful of thunderous impacts rocked the fuselage and cockpit glass.

  Simultaneously, Durant said matter-of-factly, “Bird strike,” and Cade heard the turbines above and behind his head make an out-of-place sound—a groaning dirge as an eight-pound black bird was sucked through the baffled intake shroud and into the titanium and magnesium blades spinning at 15,000 revolutions per minute.

  The impact with the ground was unlike anything Cade had ever experienced. He felt the butt stock on his M4 spear him in the gut and steal his wind. In his peripheral vision he saw an angel or cherub flash by. Then something resembling the Washington monument, tilted at a crazy angle, vanished into dust before his eyes. In one brief snippet of time he saw pallid corpses—wearing slack faces of men, women, and children—glide by outside the port window.

  Fighting the unloading G-forces, he turned his head by a degree and witnessed Gaines seemingly fold in half, his flight helmet arcing down towards the helo’s buckled floor. To his right, someone’s arms and legs chopped at the air, weightless, like a bronco rider being thrown from his mount. His ruck levitated before his eyes, and then a slipstream of carrion-scented air blasted him and a cacophony of sounds assailed his ears: human voices crying out, carbon fiber shredding the earth, and metal groaning somewhere behind and below him.

  Then the all-too-familiar copper smell of spilt blood commingled with the caustic odor of burning electrical hit his nose.

  All of this sensory bombardment was followed immediately by silence and darkness.

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  Thanks for reading Allegiance. Look for Book 6: Mortal, the forthcoming novel in the Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse series in December of 2013. Please Friend Shawn Chesser on Facebook.