Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  “We’re trying to slow them until our ground units are fully prepared to take them on.”

  Thinking about Raven now, Brook said slowly, “When will the horde arrive here?”

  Nash said nothing as more rockets left the pods of whatever was beaming back the unsteady silent images.

  Brook cleared her throat.

  “Sometime in the next couple of days. Good news is they aren’t irradiated. Bad news is there are twenty or thirty thousand of them following the survivors out of the burning city.”

  “And the Delta team?” asked Brook. Locking her gaze on monitor three, she watched the old footage as the tiny, rust-colored pick-up reversed from the shadows of an overpass and conducted an abrupt J turn. Then the vehicle paused as creatures plummeted from the overpass in front and behind it. Brook ignored the one-sided aerial assault playing out on the center monitor and stared and prayed and then prayed some more that Cade was in the truck, which stayed stopped for a long minute and then inexplicably motored up a freeway ramp already choked with walking dead.

  “Who is the pilot talking with on the ground?” asked Nash.

  “Anvil Actual,” replied the captain. “He says there are three casualties.”

  “Fast forward the sat feed to real time,” Nash said sharply. “And Captain, bring me a headset.”

  At first the call sign Anvil didn’t ring a bell. But Brook was certain she had heard the strange combination of code words before. Sometime in the not-so-distant past. Maybe Cade had uttered them during one of his frequent nightmares. Perhaps she’d heard someone use the call sign when she was on one of her ‘official’ yet ‘unofficial’ forays off the base. Then her hopes buoyed when she recalled Cade mentioning he’d been assigned the very same call sign on the recent snatch and grab mission to Jackson Hole. During an intimate moment he’d even elicited her help in trying to determine why Nash would want to refer to him as Anvil.

  Instantly she cast aside all previous worries and watched the footage cue to real time. Nash was pacing back and forth in front of the three displays, gesticulating with her hands, mouth going a mile a minute. Standing beside Colonel Shrill, President Clay suddenly seemed to be fully invested in the rescue.

  On monitor three the image zoomed in and showed the pick-up stopped next to a much larger white van. And standing atop that van was a person clad in all black, who appeared to be sighting down the barrel of some sort of rifle. Looking closer, Brook noticed a trio of prostrate bodies in the truck’s bed. And nearly lost in the van’s shadow were two more figures clothed in lighter-colored fatigues. Judging from the glittering projectiles raining to the blacktop, the two Delta soldiers were pouring a good volume of rifle fire into the wall of walking corpses to their six.

  Looking directly at Brook, Nash said matter-of-factly, “Cade is driving the truck.”

  After hearing, processing, and embracing the five spoken words, everything else Nash said was garbled as the part of Brook’s brain associated with feelings of joy flooded her entire body with endorphins. As if suffering a bad case of vertigo her head began to spin and her legs turned into a couple of overly-boiled noodles. Ignoring everything and everyone in the room, she succumbed to emotion and went to her knees, watching the fate of her family unfold on a nameless road somewhere between the Colorado border and Winnipeg. Suddenly she felt so close yet so far away. Like a ghost, ethereal and powerless. Watching from the sidelines, unable to say or do anything to affect the outcome of the drama playing out in front of her eyes.

  So she pulled a chair near, levered herself into the seat, and watched, helpless and detached, trying to maintain a modicum of hope that Cade was coming home to her and Raven.

  Chapter 24

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Sergeant First Class Larry Eckels cracked his door a few inches and took in a deep lungful of air heavy with the odor of carrion, freshly churned earth, and diesel exhaust. The resulting sensory bombardment instantly took him back to the ‘Stan, providing him a subliminal combat tingle though he was presently in little danger. Strange how the human brain is wired, he mused. Even more baffling to the veteran of multiple tours of duty in the Middle East was how what remained of that same mass of once-living gray matter could possess the Zs with such an intense drive and insatiable hunger for human flesh.

  He pressed the Steiners to his face, fine-tuned the wheel on the field glasses, and studied the foothills several miles off his right shoulder. Shaped by an ancient glacier grinding into them behind a billion pounds of brute force, the fingers of red earth snaked up hundreds of feet on both sides, forming a canyon split by a twisting steeply graded highway leading to the turn-of-the-century mining town called Manitou Springs.

  While Eckels had been watching the heavy earthmoving machinery tear up the quarter-mile stretch of I-25 in front of him, he’d heard on the tactical channel that a squad of 4th Infantry Division soldiers who had been conducting a door-to-door search and rescue operation west of Springs had apparently disturbed a nest of Zs and had been cut off from their MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) with the drivers still inside them. And as the squad leader had sheepishly admitted over the net, in front of God and everyone, his vehicles had been unable to intervene, thus forcing him to lead his dismounted squad into the basement garage of an adjacent building in order to seek refuge from the undead mob. On the bright side, he had added, his men had suffered no casualties. Yet, Eckels had thought as he listened to the exchange.

  Then, a few short minutes after the call had gone out requesting air support and an immediate extraction for the MRAP drivers and the embattled squad, Eckels spied a pair of Black Hawks cutting the air east to west, wicked-looking guns protruding ominously from their open doors, a sense of urgency evident in their haste. The Black Hawks were shadowed closely by two smaller AH-6 Little Birds, black and nimble and carrying a quartet of Hellfire missiles on one stubby wing and a tubular pod containing seven Hydra rockets on the other.

  Knowing second death was about to visit the Zs, Eckels smiled as he brought the Steiners to bear. Wavering perceptibly in the optics, rising and falling with his breathing, the distant cluster of unimpressive apartment buildings didn’t seem worthy candidates for a survivor to hole up in or likely objectives for any type of clearing operation. But orders were meant to be followed, and judging by the actions of his superiors these days, he surmised they were mostly deskbound paper-pushing weenies blindly out of touch with the hardcore realities outside the wire. If only I was in charge, thought Eckels, I’d be conducting razing operations instead. Give me a couple of HMEEs—High Mobility Engineer Excavators—and a handful of D-9 dozers, and this combat engineer will have the outskirts of Springs knocked down and Z free in no time.

  But seeing as how he was still a few pay grades below the President, who seemed to be calling all of the shots from the hip these days, he kept his eyes glued to the ongoing rescue op and waited expectantly for the first telltale signs of delivered ordnance. Softening up the target. The thought brought a broad smile to his face. Then, as if on cue, red smoke marking the location of the encircled squad wafted up and the smaller helos broke orbit, taking on a more aggressive, nose-down attitude.

  And as the Little Birds rolled in, the fact that he was commanding a large meaningful ground operation of his own hit him full force. He watched the first volley of Hydra rockets lance groundward, their motors burning yellow, and imagined the distinctive whooshing sound he’d heard up close a handful of times. Like breaking waves, the white smoke from the rockets curled through the second helo’s rotor wash as it moved in and hovered a short distance from where the crimson signal smoke was spreading. A tick later a Hellfire missile dropped from the hovering Little Bird and blurred towards the ground, jinking and course-correcting minutely as the operator in the helo guided it on to the target.

  A few seconds passed before the multiple reports traveled the distance and reached his ears. The Hydra rockets, which undoubtedly carried flechette warhea
ds that peppered the enemy with hundreds of small, razor-sharp projectiles, exploded with a rippled series of soft pops, sounding like a kid working a sheet of bubble wrap. The Hellfire’s eighteen-pound warhead, however, produced a wasp-like cloud of shrapnel and a bass heavy note, subtle and distant, like rolling thunder following a storm. Finally, Eckels observed the two slower-moving Black Hawks descend and troll back and forth for a couple of minutes, presumably engaging the Zs on the ground with their side-mounted mini-guns. Prepping the landing zone at six thousand rounds a minute, he thought as he witnessed plumes of ochre dust rise and mingle with the diminishing contrails from the rocket motors and the red smoke still rising skyward from somewhere between the squat buildings. While he sat there in the safety of his M-ATV with his explosive-sniffing German Shepherd Hudson by his side and a half-dozen soldiers from the 4th ID securing the perimeter nearby, Eckels suddenly felt sorry for the squad leader who had, for whatever reason—maybe fatigue caused by mission creep or perhaps a bit of bad intel—miscalculated the situation, and was now calling in danger close fire on top of himself.

  It is what it is, thought Eckels. His fate had been signed, sealed, and delivered by one hell of a similar poor decision made by a captain named Phelps. Why the captain insisted on riding around in a soft top Humvee instead of an armored M-ATV, a Stryker, or a Bradley Fighting Vehicle beat the hell out of him. Choosing a vehicle damn near one step up from a convertible over anything up-armored and high-clearance when travelling outside the wire was a JFK faux pas if he’d ever heard of one. Eckels shook his head in disgust. Just one bite is all it takes, he thought darkly. And that’s exactly what got Captain Phelps killed; an unfortunate event that led to Combat Engineer Sergeant First Class Larry Eckels being given the unenviable task of stopping the Pueblo horde in its tracks.

  Hell, bring it on, he’d thought at the time. He’d been making it up on the fly since Z-Day plus one anyway, so the instant battlefield promotion—minus the actual bump in rank and the ceremony and fist-pumping that came along with it—really meant little in the big scheme of things. Something he’d overheard a much younger and inexperienced sergeant say a day earlier, Here one day and gone the next, popped into his head. He didn’t subscribe to this kind of fatalistic thinking—never had. Nor was he prone to offering unsolicited advice. But at the time he’d gone ahead and broken his own rules, ripping the young sergeant—who coincidentally happened to be Captain Phelps’ driver—a gaping new asshole, punctuating the dressing down by telling the soldier that if he didn’t adapt to the new realities and improvise accordingly, he would be ‘gone the next.’ And he was. Apparently the captain’s soft top Hummer had been swarmed, and before help could arrive the Zs had wormed into the vehicle and ripped into the sergeant’s guts. Captain Phelps, as the evidence later suggested, had valiantly fought off the Zs with his sidearm until he was grievously wounded and down to his last two rounds, one of which he used to put down the sergeant who was close to reanimating—the other he pumped into his own brain to avoid the same fate.

  Here one day, eating a bullet the next. Hell of a way to go, thought Eckels, giving Hudson a thorough scratching behind the ears. “Chaos theory rules in the land of Mister Murphy, Huddie,” said Eckels. “And don’t you forget it.” The admonition was received with a tilt of the Shepherd’s head, and answered with a yelp which Eckels took to mean, in Huddie speak, ‘Understood.’

  It truly was a brave new world with a different set of rules, and that’s why he had been thrust into this position. Utilizing the best man for the job had suddenly become the gold standard. And in just a few short days that best man—Sergeant First Class Larry Eckels—had found that being on this side of the action was more to his liking. Sure, tooling around Indian country finding and disabling IEDs—Improvised Explosive Devices—responsible for killing and maiming so many of his brothers had been rewarding, and had helped save more than enough lives over there to justify the risk he’d shouldered upon re-upping. But during those two tours, he’d grown to abhor the cowardice shown by the enemy, a ragtag group of religious fanatics who favored roadside bombs and hit-and-run guerilla tactics to a fair fight. Thus, the prospect of toe-to-toe engagement with the enemy was exhilarating to say the least—for the Zs not only stood their ground—they shambled directly into the fray in pucker-inducing numbers.

  Taking on this horde, tens of thousands strong by most estimates, needed to be approached differently than the Denver mega-horde which was thought to have numbered somewhere north of half a million. Eckels concluded the only way to engage this horde would be surgically, like excising a malignant tumor, only on a much larger scale. But he didn’t have the luxury of using a couple of nukes—nor were there enough Zs to justify such an action. That the fallout from the Castle Rock event had dispersed to the north and east and had been beaten down by a lengthy rainstorm was attributed by most to just plain dumb luck. But Eckels liked to think it had been divine intervention, of which he could use a little right about now. So he decided to go another route and employ a tactic that had been used effectively elsewhere in the early days of the outbreak. But the first order of the day was to make sure the horde stayed together. A small handful of Zs—squirters as they were not so affectionately called—breaking away from the main body would trigger larger clusters into doing the same, setting off a chain reaction that would flood downtown Springs and eventually see Schriever to the east having to deal with numbers of the dead that hadn’t been seen since the first days of the outbreak. Therefore, in order to keep the aforementioned Pied Piper scenario from occurring, Eckels had deployed, for the lack of a better name, ‘squirter teams’ on either side of the freeway. For half of the day and the better part of twenty miles, the eight CROW-equipped M-ATVs shadowed the Zs like sheepdogs, keeping out of sight and only dismounting and engaging the stragglers with silenced weapons as a last resort.

  ***

  Eckels brought the field glasses up, snugged them in tight, and focused on a point far off in the distance where northbound 25 dipped underneath a westbound arterial leading into downtown Springs. Phase two of his plan would commence at this junction, and to ensure that the Zs played into his hand when they finally came into sight, he pre-positioned three teams operating M-ATVs equipped with remotely operated CROW systems—top-mounted belt-fed M240 light machine guns capable of delivering 7.62 mm lead at a rate of 950 rounds per minute. He gazed at the team deployed closest to his position. Settled and alert, their boxy M-ATV was backed up against the white cinderblock wall of a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts whose darkened neon Now Serving sign would never flare red again. Good to go.

  Then he panned right and scrutinized the second team; their M-ATV was parked, quiet and inert, a hundred yards to the west in the shadows of a dormant fast food joint whose yellow and red sign still proudly crowed the billions served by Ronald McDonald.

  Finally, he shifted his gaze up and locked onto a pair of silhouettes: a sniper and his spotter fresh from the ‘Stan. His eyes and ears, nestled amongst the ventilation equipment atop the McDonalds. And even as highly trained and disciplined as the combat-hardened shooters were, every once in a while Eckels would see one of the forms shift a little and a head would bob up and furtively scan the ground surrounding the building—a definite no-no in a hostile environment where the bad guys employed counter snipers who shot back. But that wasn’t the case here; Eckels had just witnessed firsthand the disconcerting affect the Zs had on even the coolest of individuals, who at this point in the operation, with their manned getaway vehicle a mere five foot vertical drop away, had a better chance of getting heatstroke than being eaten by a Z.

  Dropping the Steiners to the seat, he consulted the Blue Force Tracker display—a GPS-derived digital map of the area, showing all friendly forces in blue and all known enemy concentrations in red. He zoomed out in order to see all of his teams, which were represented by a blue icon labeled with their unique call sign. He gazed at the spiderweb of streets, focusing on the yellow pixelated stretc
h of I-25 splitting the screen vertically. He adjusted the crosshairs over a position to the south, toggled the zoom out key a couple of times, and as the screen fully refreshed what he saw there warranted an immediate double take. Represented by brilliant red pixels overlaying a large segment of I-25, the computer-generated zombie horde crept continually north towards his position, a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut he was about to meet head on.

  He noted the locations of his men and war-gamed the scenario in his mind one more time. When the dead reached his forward deployed M-ATVs, the crew would engage them with the turret-mounted 240s. Next, the drivers would bump their lightly-armored vehicles down the nearby embankments and onto the freeway, two at a time, and begin a series of low speed hit and run maneuvers designed to entice the dead and lead them north on the 25 to the prepared stretch of highway that—if all went as planned—would become their final resting place.

  Should have named this thing Operation Cattle Drive, he mused as he turned up the volume and listened to the ongoing rescue operation to the south and west of him. The pilots, who were alternating between calling out targets on the ground for the door gunners and offering up reassuring words to the men on the ground, sounded calm, cool, and collected. Every once in a while the squad leader on the ground would ask, in a clipped, almost frantic voice, for a situation report, which the Black Hawk pilots promptly delivered while painting a much rosier picture than the men on the ground most likely faced.