Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  Lamenting the fact that there was nothing he could do for the surrounded squad but pray, he turned the volume down and rested his helmet against the seatback, a move that earned him a wet sloppy Huddie kiss.

  “Thanks buddy. I needed that.” After giving the German Shepherd a much deserved scratch between the ears, he snatched his last can of Amp from the console, finished the tepid energy drink in one gulp, and chucked the empty on the floorboards. “Gotta stay frosty, boy.”

  In full agreement, Huddie added a clipped guttural growl of his own.

  “Let’s see where the enemy is.” He glanced at the BFT, noting the ever-present red inchworm of death had moved considerably northward. Then, with the reassuring knowledge that the horde was several miles away and the first contact of Operation Toll Booth likely an hour in the future, he closed his eyes and recited a prayer he’d memorized for just such an occasion.

  Chapter 25

  I-90 West of Draper

  Sitting behind the wheel, left ankle throbbing madly, Cade listened intently to the conversation between Cross and the flight engineer in the Hercules circling overhead. And in just a couple of minutes he overheard Dover relay to Cross all kinds of information pertinent to the hastily cobbled together rescue plan. Finally Dover wished Cross and the Delta team good luck, and signed off.

  Craning his head, Cade witnessed the Hercules perform an exaggerated wing waggle and break orbit. He twisted around in his seat and watched the Hercules fly off on a southbound heading.

  Seriously doubting the agent atop the van could hear him over the tinny screech of dead hands raking against the rusty hood and fenders, Cade asked, “Cross, did you by chance get all of that?”

  “Roger that. Did you forget I head up the President’s detail or something?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Cade shot back.

  “To do my job, you have to have a near photographic memory and possess a very high IQ,” Cross stated, sounding neither cocky nor full of himself. “I had to remember a lot of faces and a ton of operational details. Can’t be consulting notes with the big boss’s life on the line.”

  “Yeah ... stay frosty,” said Cade half-heartedly. “So what are you seeing now?”

  “Looks better from up here than it does from the back of the truck,” answered Cross over the comms.

  “No shit,” Lopez replied as he shot a pair of Zs in the head at point blank range. The haze of pink mist blossomed and drifted sideways before fading to nothing. “Madre,” cried the deeply religious operator. “They just keep coming.”

  “We’re almost home free,” answered Cade reassuringly. “Keep shooting them.”

  “I’m down to one mag and my sidearm.”

  “What about Tice’s ammo?”

  “Burned through his last two mags while you were arguing with Ari,” said Lopez.

  “I was lobbying,” Ari said sharply, shooting a glare through the back window. He swiveled his head forward, made eye contact with Jasper, and asked the question he supposed everyone aboard was dying to know. “How in God’s name did all of these cars end up stuck on the interstate here in Draper?”

  “Human nature I suppose,” said Jasper. “Before all of this we used to have the busiest Dairy Queen east of Rapid City and west of Sioux Falls. Hell, our two little gas stations did a brisk business too. People are creatures of habit, and with our little town sitting nearly halfway between two of the biggest cities in South Dakota, I gather it was just a natural place to stop and stretch, gas up, and get some fries and an ice cream cone to keep the kids happy.”

  Ari kept his gaze fixed on Jasper for a beat. “Doesn’t answer my question,” he finally said.

  “Right after the outbreak, just about the time the people on the East and West Coasts were looting and acting crazy, the bad elements in Rapid City and Sioux Falls jumped on the bandwagon.” He went silent for a beat. Made a face and swallowed hard. “And as if the zombie outbreaks broadcast on the news weren’t bad enough, the cities started burning. They were showing massive fires on the TV.”

  Ari noted the faraway look on the undertaker’s ruddy face, as if he were attempting to recall something pertinent to the conversation. “So these folks ended up in a place they knew,” he added, helping to fill in the blanks. “But Draper didn’t know them. Especially didn’t want them bringing their infected loved ones around.”

  “You hit the nail on the head, Ari. In a matter of hours both stations’ tanks were bone dry. Texaco first and then the Astro station. My good friend Bernie died defending his pumps ... bunch of animals. They looted the Thriftway after that.” Jasper pinched the bridge of his nose. Took a deep breath. “Sheriff got the guy who killed Bernie. Apprehended a few of the looters and then ran out of room in the jail. Then he set up a roadblock and started turning folks away. Some left their cars but most drove as far as the fumes in their tanks would take them ...”

  “Which wasn’t very far from the looks of things,” Ari said.

  Jasper nodded. “And then they walked,” he added quietly. “And they kept walking even after they got bit.”

  “The remnants of that same human nature I’d guess,” Ari stated.

  Jasper made no reply. Just stared straight ahead, ignoring the sneering ashen faces of the walking corpses.

  Suddenly the gunfire ceased, leaving only Jasper’s labored breathing to compete with the ticking engine and the fingernails of the dead scrabbling against the skin of the truck.

  With his back pressed firmly against the white van and the M4 pointing at his two o’clock, Hicks reached out with his left hand and rapped his knuckles on the back window. Once he had Cade’s attention, he spun his finger and raised his M4, a wisp of smoke curling from its muzzle. “I’m nearly winchester,” he bellowed. “We gotta go.”

  Just then a loud clang shivered the truck and the shocks compressed as Cross landed in the bed after having jumped down off the panel van. Simultaneously, Cade heard the man holler, “Go, go, go,” in his ear bud. He slipped the transmission into a gear meant for towing, probably last used well before the rattletrap had a quarter-million miles on the odometer. A time when the big V8 engine could still transfer all that horsepower in the form of torque down to the asphalt. Now, judging from the sounds coming from under the hood, he doubted the rig could drive its way out of a wet paper bag, let alone through a handful of determined Zs.

  But he gave it the old college try, and when the Chevy failed to deliver any kind of forward progress, slammed the rig into reverse and accelerated backward with as much speed as he could coax. Hands groped and metal screeched, and paint was traded as the two vehicles parted ways.

  “Go around the Zs and continue until you pass the next three vehicles,” said Cross. “Then you’ll see a silver compact, and just past it there’s a school bus and a red SUV with a bunch of crap piled on top ... the only clear passage is between the two. After splitting the bus and SUV, you have to move to the left and pass a yellow VW Bug ... but keep to its driver side. Then once you clear the VeeDub you move left to the breakdown lane and you’ll have a clear path for ... let’s call it a couple of hundred yards.”

  “Since I don’t possess a photographic memory like yours ... who is going to help me remember all of that?” asked Cade.

  “I’ve got your back,” answered Cross.

  “So ... what exactly happens after we pass the VW?” Lopez asked out of the blue, a touch of sarcasm to his voice.

  “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” answered Cross, who went on to explain in detail what the air crew in the Hercules was planning and what role each one of them had to play so everyone could get home to Schriever with a steady core temperature as close to ninety-eight-point-six as possible.

  Chapter 26

  Schriever AFB TOC

  Propelled on rubbery legs, Brook made her way to a chair and kept her eyes glued to monitor number three. Judging from the graininess of the image, she guessed the camera recording it was perched on a satellite in a
very high standoff orbit. The footage also lacked a sense of depth, which made it difficult to see details like dimension, angles, and direction. However, the unmoving bodies and black splotches of spilt blood painting the roadway were unmistakable. Cade and the boys have been busy, she thought, narrowing her eyes in order to read the scrolling and constantly changing series of monochrome letters and numbers at the bottom of the screen. But they told her nothing. In fact, they only added to the confusion of the constantly moving, vertigo-inducing, real-time feed.

  Then, catching her attention, the image on the vivid display abruptly refreshed. Everything was still in color but the distance from lens to ground seemed to have been cut in half. Consequently the truck now looked more like a Tonka than a Hot Wheel in size. And instead of jersey barriers she could see some kind of cable separating the two directions of travel on the four-lane highway. Then the new and improved resolution revealed a defined shadow falling behind the stationary pick-up. And though she was no detective, its mere presence told her the truck was heading west—towards the lowering sun. Suddenly a cold chill traced her spine as she realized there was much more movement on the roadway than she had previously noticed. Given away by defined shadows all their own, the slow-moving figures homed in on the truck from every point on the compass. Whether they’d been drawn in by the engine noise of the truck, the gunfire, or the airplane that had already buzzed the pick-up twice, she hadn’t a clue.

  Oblivious to the others in the room, she walked a few steps closer to the screen and tracked a path with her eyes from the pick-up down the onramp, where crushed bodies and severed limbs and glints of brass offered proof of the fight her husband and whoever was with him had already put up. She made a cursory inspection of the freeway and the road feeding it. More bodies. Then her eyes moved on to the crash site which was a smoldering dark spot in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. And though it was removed from the camera’s primary area of focus and grainier than the rest, she could still see dozens more corpses scattered near what had to be a graveyard fronting some type of church. She flicked her eyes back to the seemingly immobilized vehicle. Saw the bodies in greater detail. Stretched out, limbs askew, and still unmoving in the truck’s bed. Cade had to be hurting after a crash like that. She longed to comfort him. What are you doing, Cade? Where are you going? Suddenly she wished she were on the ground with him more than anything on earth. Fighting alongside him. She wanted to hear his voice again. Hear him say something. Offer up a clue as to what he was planning. She also wanted some insight into how the major planned to redeem herself and rescue the team before they were overrun. She shifted her gaze to Nash and Shrill, who had both donned headphones sprouting boom mikes with little black sponges positioned inches from their lips. And to add insult to injury, after being summoned to the TOC out of the blue, and having been lied to, she was now being ignored entirely.

  She cast scrutiny on the first monitor where the other rescue mission was playing out. A small black helicopter had just buzzed into the picture. Its guns were blazing, shiny shell casings spilling out and raining down on a group of soldiers arranged in a semi-circle, guns pointed out, muzzles winking white and yellow at the crush of walking corpses. Simultaneously, the helicopter slowed and made an exaggerated turn and the armored vehicle the soldiers were huddled atop rocked sideways, almost spilling them off. A thick bar of sun flared off the bulbous canopy as the helicopter settled into a hover directly over the frantic soldiers. Brook watched through the whirring rotor blades as half of the soldiers clambered onto the straight tubular landing gear she remembered hearing Cade call skids. Then, jiggling slightly under the newly added weight, the black helicopter shot straight up and whisked the lucky ones away. An identical helicopter moved in, gliding as if on ice, hovered above the remaining survivors and was still for a half second before buzzing off sans passengers. Then there was a flurry of movement, a strange commotion going on around the armored vehicle. Things are going sideways, Brook thought glumly.

  A low murmur filled the room.

  A quick look at the other monitor told her nothing had changed where Cade was concerned. Nothing she could do for him, so she rooted for the others—they needed it. While she’d looked away a Black Hawk, blades cutting a blurry arc, had moved in and was hovering over the surging dead. Then streaks of yellow and red, seemingly interconnected, blazed groundward, shredding into the dead. Dozens of Zs fell, but in seconds others took their place and were clambering over each other and grabbing and tugging at the remaining soldiers. And as Brook witnessed the Zs swarm overtop the MRAP, she prayed the doomed men would not have to suffer. It was all over in seconds. Death playing out in front of her eyes. Silent and exaggerated like some kind of old Charlie Chaplin film. Averting her eyes from the feeding frenzy, she glanced at monitor three, where the scene seemed to have been paused while she’d been watching brave men perish on the other. She’d had enough. Though part of her screamed to stay here and watch and root for Cade, she couldn’t. The state of limbo was killing her. Time to shift focus and move forward because right here and now, from some four hundred miles away, there was nothing she could do for Cade and she knew it. Furthermore, she was out of her element. An interloper. Shut out of the loop, and judging by the actions of Nash, Shrill, the President, and every single person in uniform in the stifling hot TOC, she might as well be invisible. So, in order to avoid another Faces of Death moment like the one she had just witnessed—especially one featuring her husband and the rest of the Delta operators who had already risked so much for the country—she rose from her chair and bolted for the door.

  The unsmiling Secret Service Agent, having already been spared a knee to the nuts twice today, instead received a laughable hockey check as Brook blazed by.

  Then, succumbing greatly to Newton’s applied law of physics, Brook bounced off the big man and redirected the unspent inertia—via her opposite shoulder—into the door’s horizontal push bar. Squinting against harsh light thrown from the fluorescent tubes, she stopped in the wide corridor and heard the door shut with a soft squelch punctuated by a solid click that seemed to say, You didn’t belong here anyway. Now stay out.

  But she didn’t want to show Airman Davis, who was most likely still waiting outside, that she’d been defeated. And going back to Raven knowing more than when they’d parted, but having nothing good to report, was out of the question. So she put her back to the wall and slid slowly to the floor. Extended her legs and bounced her head against the wall. Tap. Tap. Tap. Trying to knock some sense into her own head.

  Under the watchful gaze of Schriever’s finest from days gone by, Brook drew her knees up, planted her face in her hands, and listened for any kind of sound from the other side of the door that could possibly be interpreted as positive.

  Chapter 27

  South Dakota

  Before the flesh-eaters could close the noose any tighter, Cade urged the gearbox into drive, tromped the pedal, and wrenched the wheel right. The truck jumped forward under power and then shuddered like it was suddenly starved of gas. Instinctively Cade checked the gauge. Quarter tank. Easing off the accelerator stopped the lurching but brought on an unusual wheezing sound. Then, after letting off the throttle entirely, the ticking intensified and the idle started to fluctuate wildly. Quickly he diagnosed the death rattle for what it was—the kind of sound an engine makes under duress just before it throws a rod and blows a piston into a hundred-cylinder head-killing fragments. It was no kind of sound any of them needed to be hearing in the middle of nowhere surrounded by the living dead.

  “Sounds like a bad lifter,” said Jasper.

  Ari asked, “Checked the oil lately?”

  “No reason.”

  “Why not?” queried Ari.

  “Plenty more trucks just sittin’ around,” was Jasper’s monotone reply.

  “Well I hope this one doesn’t die yet,” Cade said under his breath. “It’s got more problems than a bad lifter and I don’t see plenty of suitable replacement
s in the vicinity.”

  Jasper made no reply. Remained stoic, seemingly unfazed by Cade’s obvious jab at his provincial nature. Then, as quickly as the engine started acting up, it settled back into a rough idle.

  Goosing the throttle, Cade said, “What do you think ... is she going to make it?”

  Once again Jasper said nothing. Simply stared a thousand yards into the distance, with the same type of flat affect worn by the condemned.

  A sharp elbow got Ari’s attention. Cade mouthed, “Watch him.”

  The simple fact that the man had recently lost his wife and two kids to Omega made him a liability. A strong candidate to snap from the pressure. Cade had seen it before—before and after the dead began to walk. The saying ‘You’re only as strong as your weakest link,’ came to mind. Over the years, remembering this simple truth had saved his life on more than one occasion. In fact the words had been drilled into his head, early, and often. First by every grim-faced instructor at boot camp. Then by his future peers during the lengthy training process required to be accepted into the Ranger family. And most recently, by his friend and mentor, the late General Mike Desantos, during nearly every waking moment Cade served with him on the Teams.

  Jogged by the thought of Mike and what his family must be going through, the realization that Brook and Raven must already know that he’d gone missing behind enemy lines hit him blindside like a three hundred and fifty pound nose tackle. What does Brook know? he thought. Was she even aware that Oil-Can made contact with us?

  Considering how quickly this could go tits-up, not to mention the fact that Brook and Major Nash had already butted heads—on more than one occasion—Cade figured there was no way in hell a woman as calculating as Nash would be stupid enough to bring Brook into the loop at this stage of the game. At the very least, out of respect for him, the major would probably play the CYA—cover your ass—card and inform Brook of the very minimum and then sugar coat it until more information came to light. But whatever the case, Brook was pretty good at reading between the lines. She’d intuitively know something was wrong the second the Osprey thundered over the base without the slower Ghost Hawk in tow. Then he pictured her big brown eyes and million dollar smile, and at that very moment the urge to be with her had never been stronger. Just the thought of his family so far away and how all of this would affect them should they get overrun by the dead set his guts to churning.