But unfortunately for Cade, he didn’t have the luxury of physically running this thing through even once—let alone multiple times until it was rote. So he did the second best thing: he visualized the route he’d take. He ran it a dozen times in his head before he was confident and ready to take the plunge—literally. Then he reran it a dozen more times—after all—the first step in this instance would be for him to get off the helo and on the ground in one piece and without further injury. Then all he needed to do was convince the dead into following him away from the wreck all without getting surrounded and eaten alive.
Piece of cake.
Chapter 7
Still reeling from the loss of Maddox, and lamenting the fact that they had been forced to leave his corpse on the tarmac at Grand Junction, the Delta team, to a man, had decided days earlier that they would leave no man behind—and though he had already turned—that pact also included Durant.
While Cade had been plotting his egress, inside the cabin Cross unbuckled Gaines and replaced his entrails, wrapping everything up with some kind of first-aid tape taken from the med kit. Then, with a little help from Lopez, they manhandled the general’s body into a sitting position.
Meanwhile Hicks busied himself preparing a makeshift sling out of high tensile nylon rope, the idea being that when Cade returned with the truck they would combine their muscle and use it to haul the general’s two-hundred-plus pounds of dead weight out of the helicopter.
“Any way I can help?” whispered Jasper who had wedged his considerable frame against the cockpit bulkhead, and up until then seemed content just listening and watching.
After stripping the backpack and MOLLE gear from the general’s body, Lopez liberated the seven full magazines and handed them across the cabin to Jasper. “Put these up top ... quietly,” he said. “And we’ll need his weapon.” He went through the motions of clearing the chamber and set the general’s SCAR carbine back on safe before passing it over to Jasper.
“So you are serious about taking the bodies with you?” asked the undertaker.
“We do not leave our fallen behind,” Lopez said sharply.
“And the infected one?” asked Jasper, furrowing his brow.
“We are going to move Heaven and Earth to bring Gaines and Tice home. And Durant goes too, if we can get him untangled,” replied Hicks, adding a no-nonsense look that ended Jasper’s line of questioning.
“Captain Grayson will be back in a few minutes and that’s when you come into play,” Cross said, tapping Jasper’s well-developed bicep.
Chapter 8
Crouched atop the helo, Cade counted seventeen Zs moaning and jostling for space, pressed two deep against the cockpit glass. Watching them, he could almost feel their hunger as they reached excitedly into the helo, bony fingers kneading the air, straining to grab ahold of Ari, who Cade guessed had to be shitting in his flight suit right about now.
“Fresh meat,” Cade bellowed as he rose. Then, to really get their attention, he waved his arms wildly and half walked, half limped towards the tail assembly, hollering at the top of his lungs. “Ding, ding, ding. Dinner time. Come and get it!” He continued hollering and carrying on loudly while inwardly hoping he wasn’t laying it on too thick. The last thing he wanted was for them to get overly excited and infuse some kind of extra pep into their normally slow step.
He went silent, stood hands on hips, and observed the Zs freeze in place. Then, predictably, their heads panned in unison and their rheumy eyes fixed on him. Good, he thought to himself, noticing that they had, at least for the moment, forgotten about Ari.
Next, in order to get them moving in his direction, he belted out a few choice expletives unbecoming of an officer. Mission accomplished, he thought as he watched the entire lot of them file around the Ghost Hawk’s undercarriage, dead eyes locked solely on him.
He paused and steadied himself with one hand on the upthrust rear canard, which, stabbing skyward, looked quite a bit like an Orca’s black dorsal fin. After stealing a final glance over his left shoulder, and seeing that the Zs had covered half the distance to his position, he shifted his gaze and studied the ground for a flat landing spot free of crash debris. Now or never, he told himself as he dipped his hips, stepped forward, and committed to the twelve-foot drop.
With the Zs crowding his peripheral vision on the left and the ground rushing at him from below, he concentrated hard on coming down on the ball of his right foot with his body canted at an easy angle. In theory, if performed correctly, he could then fold over and roll out without further injuring his left foot—or anything else for that matter. The technique, known as a paratrooper’s landing fall—or PLF—was taught to every airborne soldier before ever setting foot in an airplane.
The descent was rapid leaving him little time to shift on axis, let alone focus on his desired landing spot. But as luck would have it, Mister Murphy was occupied elsewhere. Three good men dead, Cade thought darkly. Apparently the damage here had already exceeded Murphy’s expectations, because, bum ankle and all, his landing was perfect. He barrel-rolled fluidly to the right, slowed himself midway with both palms flat to the earth, and sprang upright, slightly gimpy. Shifting his weight to his right leg, he adjusted the MP7 on its sling so that it dangled out of the way behind his back, and drew the Gerber combat dagger.
But before he could check his surroundings—let alone take that first step towards the church—Mister Murphy changed his mind. The carrion birds went deathly quiet as if they had been watching with bated breath, excited at the prospect of sharing in the fresh kill. A millisecond after he sprang up and the birds went mute, a subtle intermittent rasp of fabric chafing against fabric and the soft firework crackle of brittle grass underfoot reached his ears. He whipped around and found himself face-to-face with one of the monsters. At first he supposed it had unwittingly chased his silhouette as he walked the length of the tail boom. Then a shiver traced his spine when he realized it was likely that he was witnessing a bit of cunning at play; the fact that it had stalked him without making a sound was the biggest tell of all.
For a tick the monster stood stock still, shark-like eyes staring, seemingly sizing him up with a sort of quiet determination Cade had yet to see one of them exhibit. A good thing, because in its condition, the sight of the thing alone froze Cade for the duration.
Most of the Z’s skin had sloughed off, leaving tufts of hair and glistening muscle clinging to its bare skull. All of the soft fleshy bits were gone: ears, nose, cheeks, and lips, the loss of the latter leaving it with a devilish toothy grin.
After the split second staring contest, the decaying abomination raised its arms and attacked.
Ducking, Cade avoided the cold embrace, and countered with backhanded roundhouse that left the black dagger buried half a foot into the thing’s brain. He stepped aside, allowing the achingly-thin zombie to slide free from the steel, and watched it crumple to the ground, a tangle of bony arms and legs like something out of a wartime newsreel.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Cade thought as a claw-like hand, bony nubs trailing ribbons of flesh and sinew, flashed by an inch from his face. Instincts kicking in, he backpedaled and moved to his left under the tail boom while two hundred and fifty pounds of moaning flesh-eater plodded toward him.
Cade regarded its blood-spattered tee shirt swaying with each uneasy step and recited the words stitched across the chest, “World’s Greatest Grandpa.” Instantly he thought of Brook’s mother and father and the grisly details surrounding their final day on Earth.
“Sorry, sir,” Cade said in a low voice. Feeling a twinge of empathy usually reserved for the living, and with all one hundred and eighty pounds behind the thrust, he rocketed off his right foot, the Gerber accelerating towards Grandpa’s left eye socket. The point on the finely honed blade sliced through the fat layer surrounding the clouded eye, and glanced off the rigid orbital bone before finally penetrating the creature’s low functioning brain. He followed through with a sharp elb
ow strike to the right side of its mottled gray face, freeing the dagger and redirecting Grandpa’s forward motion left and away. As the plastic cap on Cade’s tactical elbow pad resonated from the delivered blow, his torso rotated on the follow through, saddling his left foot with the combined body weight of both he and his assailant.
Swallowing hard, he fought off the unexpected flood of nausea as the three bones making up his ankle balked at the maneuver. An explosion of white hot pain came next. Coursing up his left leg, the intense stimuli transited his sciatica and rippled like a fast-moving tsunami through his spine to a spot just behind his right eye, where he was certain a nasty little imp was fileting his optic nerve with a rusty razor blade. Normally 20/20, his vision suffered at the periphery, and as he fought the urge to pass out the world went soft around the edges; he could just barely make out the next echelon of creatures closing in doggedly, unstoppable and insatiable wraiths fading along with his eyesight.
Chapter 9
Schriever AFB
Annie leapt to her feet, nearly breaking her neck trying to acquire the source of the shrill screams carrying across the quarter-mile oval track.
Reacting instantly and instinctively, Brook snatched up her carbine and in one fluid motion jumped cat-like from the bleacher seat to the sun-baked ground. She took a few steps forward and then visibly relaxed upon realizing the spine-tingling sounds, which of late had mostly been associated with death and doom, were merely the by-product of a healthy game of tag. For Annie’s benefit she shouldered the M4 and scanned the foreground through the rifle’s optics.
“The twins are just playing tag. Everything’s OK,” she said. A few seconds slipped by and the screams turned into peals of laughter. Keeping her cheek to the stock and her eye close to the 3x magnifier, Brook swept the rifle from left to right along the fence line where she could see the monsters clutching the fence and Max jumping and snarling protecting his new sheep the only way he knew how.
“What do you see?” asked Annie, strain evident in her voice.
“The girls are playing. The Zs are still right where they’re supposed to be—on the other side of the fence. And it looks like Max thinks he’s the only thing standing between the girls and the Zs.”
Releasing the breath she’d been holding, Annie followed the action as her twins ducked and dodged through the lengthening grass, trying their best to elude their new friend Sasha, who was reaching and swiping and corralling nothing but air. Two against one, she thought. Good odds, but not great, considering her eight-year-old girls were still truly eight and hadn’t yet been forced to run for their lives. In fact, just after Mike’s passing, she’d made a solemn vow to herself to shield Sierra and Serena from the horrors of this new world for as long as humanly possible, even going so far as resisting the constant invites to “Learn the ins and outs of shooting,” as Brook had taken to calling her daily target practice on the living dead that lurked just outside the wire. Paper targets were one thing, Annie had decided after declining Brook’s first overture. But shooting something that used to be a human just wasn’t in her. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to force it upon her kids in order to condition them to the real world outside-the-wire.
Until she was certain there was no danger, Annie kept one eye glued on her kids in the foreground and the other on the gathered undead clutching the fence a dozen yards beyond. Finally, forcing a tight smile, she sat back down and shifted her gaze to Brook. Searching for something meaningful to say, she locked eyes with her friend, but came up empty. Then, like a crashing wave, the realization that she and Brook had spoken on but a handful of occasions since Mike’s passing hit her. And those conversations—centering mainly around the how’s and why’s of surviving the apocalypse, of which they each held widely differing opinions—were far from their normal shoot-the-shit types of chats about their men and kids. Something had changed between them. The feeling that she and Brook were growing apart had started as a barely perceptible twinge deep in the pit of her stomach the day she’d put her husband into the ground, and had been ever-present, growing like a widening chasm splitting the common ground between them ever since. It was nothing calculated on Brook’s part, of that Annie was certain. She supposed Brook’s metamorphosis was a by-product of some kind of innate defense mechanism triggered by Mike’s untimely death. Truth be told, both of them always thought it was going to happen to someone else’s husband, that the hand of fate would never touch their lives. But now that it had, and in such an intimate way, Annie was afraid their relationship would never be the same—if it survived at all.
Ignoring the uneasy silence that hung thick between her and Annie like some kind of invisible force field, Brook propped her rifle against the bleachers and watched with a widening smile as Raven whizzed by, one hand on the bars, four fingers thrust into the air indicating what lap she’d just completed. “Go girl,” Brook called out as her daughter rounded the far corner, pigtails flapping and the shimmering heat waves lending the impression that she was gliding over hot coals. Sure enough, the day had shaped up just like the last three or four, another scorcher to add to the record books. Why she had agreed to let Raven take her new metal steed for a spin under these conditions, during the hottest part of the day, escaped her. In hindsight, however, a little toughening up and acclimatizing the girl to the heat before their upcoming cross-country trip to Utah would do more good than harm. For there would be no 7-Elevens or Dairy Queens providing a plethora of cold drinks along the way. And rest areas with complimentary Styrofoam cups of piping-hot coffee provided by some fraternal order named after an eagle or an elk were a thing of the past. No, Brook thought. There’ll be nothing but unforgiving territory and God only knows how many Zs between us and sanctuary once we’re outside the wire.
“Come in for a pit stop, sweetie. You need to stay hydrated,” called Brook. Then she looked to the far end of the bleachers where Wilson and Taryn were crushed together presumably sharing thoughts and dreams about their new future. The blissful sight suddenly made Brook pine for her man’s return. She reached into her cargo pocket and rooted around until she felt the sharp edge of the death letter. She wanted nothing more than to rip the thing into a million pieces. Or burn it and pretend it had never existed. But superseding and dwarfing both of those kneejerk reactions to something that symbolized a possible outcome to the mission that she never wanted to face—yet was a risk that she knew came with the territory—was her desire to have the family back together for good.
As if she had been reading Brook’s thoughts, Annie asked, “When is Cade supposed to return?”
“Depends upon who you ask. Nash and the President led me to believe it would be a quick in and out. Half a day tops—”
“Are they ever?”
“No, and I’m fucking sick of it,” Brook spat. She collected her carbine and Raven’s rifle and jumped to the ground, her boots creating a puff of dust.
There was silence for a moment. Both women knew innately that they were going in two different directions, so neither made an attempt at small talk. They stood close but not too close and watched the twins playing for two or three long minutes.
“Let’s go, girls,” Annie hollered as she held the swaddled Mike Junior close and began walking away from the parade grounds and towards her quarters.
“Raven and Sasha,” Brook bellowed. “Time to shoot.”
“OK, Mom. Just a second,” Raven called out as she tackled one more lap.
“Now!” Brook added, raising her voice substantially. Then, without another glance in Annie’s direction, she strode toward the lovebirds, tapped Wilson on the shoulder and with an arch to her brow and a silent nod of her head, requested the pair to follow.
Chapter 10
Schriever AFB
The cheer that resonated inside the 50th Space Operations TOC—Tactical Operations Center—when Marine Aviator Major Loretta Ripley announced that her Osprey, call sign Jedi One-Two, was wheels up with the scientists safely aboard shook eve
ry flat panel monitor in the room on its stand.
Then, a handful of minutes later, when word came down that Jedi One-One—with General Gaines and all of the Delta customers safely aboard—was also wheels up, an equally rousing round of applause circled the TOC and the previous feeling of accomplishment and joy Nash had felt was trumped tenfold. And as the sound rippled into silence, Major Freda Nash smiled; she couldn’t remember ever having been this elated over one event in twenty years of running satellite overwatch over her Special Operations boys.
But seeing as how the possible fate of mankind hinged on rescuing and returning with enough brainpower to decipher the data contained on one tiny thumb drive, Nash expected nothing less than ecstatic jubilation from her young Air Force staff.
She, on the other hand, was reserving the right to celebrate at a later date. For the jury was still out whether the three scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory—Canada’s answer to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta—would be able to reverse engineer Sylvester Fuentes’s Omega antiserum. The possibility, she would tell anyone foolish enough to ask, was a longshot at best.
However, the fist pump President Valerie Clay delivered upon hearing the good news was going to go down in the history books—hopefully on the first page of a chapter telling how Omega was finally defeated and how the country had rid itself of the walking dead.
But that chapter in history had yet to be written. The helicopter carrying the Delta Force shooters was overdue to check in and couldn’t be hailed. The mood inside the computer-filled room had instantly crashed, going from a palpable air of hope and exuberance to an atmosphere akin to that of a wake—the only thing missing: the casket and the funeral dirge.
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