“Outstanding. One other thing, have one Chinook and one of those Black Hawks ready to go on a trip every evening at eighteen hundred hours. We’ll be flying out data to another site on a daily basis, starting with tonight. I’d rather use the Black Hawks for that, if possible, but have a Chinook on standby just in case.”
“Yes, sir.” To add some additional deference to the statement, Billingsly saluted.
McDaniels returned the gesture and left the Night Stalkers to their own devices. He hadn’t come to the helicopter assembly area with the intention of kicking ass and taking names, but with the threat picture becoming a bit clearer, he wanted to ensure that everyone was on the same page. It bothered him that Billingsly didn’t get along well with others, but the man must have skills his commanders had valued, otherwise he wouldn’t be there. So long as he could ride herd on the rest of the aviators, it ultimately didn’t matter.
He tracked down Major Guardiola of the Corps of Engineers and gave him a quick rundown on what his next taskings were. “We’ll need to start fortifying the buildings next, once you’re done with the perimeter defenses. People will need places to fall back to in case the walls come down.”
“That’ll take some doing, Colonel. We’re running twenty-four-seven now. I’ll do whatever you ask, but it would help if we could get some more work crews in here,” Guardiola said.
“Don’t you have contractors available?”
“A lot of them have vanished, Colonel. They all have families, and the dead are coming. No one wants to be here when they do. I can’t say I blame them, but the contractors are running away like rabbits.”
McDaniels sighed. “All right. I’ll give Colonel Haley a pulse; maybe he can have some of his troops give your people a hand. I can’t promise they’ll be any good, but at least you’ll have bodies to move stuff around.”
“If that’s all we’ve got, that’s what we’ll use,” Guardiola said.
“Outstanding.” McDaniels turned to leave the emergency operations vehicle Guardiola used as his headquarters.
“Excuse me, Colonel?”
McDaniels turned back. “Yes?”
Guardiola sat behind his small desk and looked a little lost for a moment, but he snapped out of it quickly. “Uh, our headquarters in Dallas is closing up. I’ve put in requests for more men and equipment, but that’s probably not going to happen. Seems like the dead are cruising through Oklahoma, and they’re going to roll up on Dallas sometime in the next few days.”
“I know.”
“Colonel, my family lives in Arlington, a suburb in Dallas.”
McDaniels looked at Guardiola for a long moment. “Are you in touch with your family?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell them to load up and drive to New Mexico or Colorado or even Canada. Texas isn’t the place to be right now. If you need to do anything more than that, you need to talk to Colonel Jaworski. I’m not giving you permission to leave your post, Guardiola. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.” Guardiola didn’t look very happy about it, and McDaniels couldn’t blame him. He still felt guilty as he left the emergency operations vehicle. After all, he had his son with him.
***
“Looks like Hercules Six is looking for you, sir,” Haley’s senior NCO said as they toured the front gate area. Haley turned and saw McDaniels bounding up the metal ladder that had been welded to the interior side of the CONEX container Haley stood on. Haley frowned and checked his watch. They weren’t due to meet for another hour and forty-five minutes. Below, outside the front gates, television camera crews had gathered. They were trying to get interviews with the Rangers or the other troops, and Haley had already conveyed everyone was to keep their mouths shut. As he watched, a van extended its satellite antenna into the air. SPARTA was finally attracting attention, and a small crowd of onlookers and would-be refugees were waiting outside the concertina wire.
“Well, it saves me the trouble of looking him up. Let’s see what the Jedi Knight wants,” Haley said, using the slang for Army Special Forces.
McDaniels made it to the top of the CONEX container a few moments later. He regarded the gathering crowd at the outer gate. Three deep trenches separated the first gate and the berm on which the container had been set upon, and the concertina wire and Alaska barriers had been built to resemble a funnel; that way, attackers would be driven right into the kill zones that had been preregistered.
“What the hell is that all about?” McDaniels asked.
“The media has arrived,” Haley told him. “They want interviews, want to know our mission, want to know all about us and what we’re going to do when the zombies show up.”
“What have you told them, Bull?”
“Not a damned thing. I figure if the media found out about SPARTA, then it would only make things worse.” He pointed at the growing crowd that his Rangers were trying to control. “But the bigger thing is that some civilians are trying to gain access, which you’d mentioned would occur a few days ago. Well, you were right, and a lot of those folks are starting to get unruly. They want us to protect them, and they see the InTerGen folks coming in and not leaving. They want their slice of the pie.”
“Jaworski’s guidance is this: No civilians are to be permitted inside the complex after tomorrow. The stenches are on the way. And they number in the millions now, Bull.”
It took a long moment for that to register, but when it did, even Bull Haley felt a squirt of fear run through his body. “Millions, you said?”
“Millions,” McDaniels repeated.
“Those things can be killed only by a very specific attack—a round through the head—barring something miraculous happening, like the Air Force napalms them all at once. I gotta tell you, Cord, we don’t have the capability to fight off millions of those things. We’d need the entire Army for that.”
“We have what we have,” McDaniels said. “Jaworski’s working on getting us some more muscle. The 3rd ACR got mauled trying to defend Austin, so we might not get them to act as our outer boundary defense, after all. But we will have attack aviation in addition to our organic assets, for whatever good they’ll be.”
“So no armored cav regiment guarding the front door? Well… okay.” Haley didn’t like it, as it meant the Rangers would probably be throwing their lives away trying to defend an installation they couldn’t hold, but orders were orders. “What else?”
“We’ll need to harden the buildings themselves, since it appears we might need additional fallback areas. I told Guardiola that your boys would assist him, since his contractors are cutting out. I hope I didn’t overpromise?”
“We don’t have a lot of slack in the chain, but I can make it happen.”
“Keep your eye on Guardiola. His family’s in the line of fire, and he’s already hinted that he wants to boogie. I told him he would have to get permission from Jaworski, and he accepted that, but if his family is in danger, then he’ll do what he has to do.”
“Understood.” Haley looked toward the crowd in the distance. Only about fifty or sixty people were out there, not counting the media jackals, but ten of his troops were already tied up enforcing the zone. Traffic was thick on the highway, most of it moving slowly northward, toward Odessa and Midland. “On a related topic, what do we tell those poor souls out there? They need someplace to go.”
“Fort Hood is an emergency evac site. They should go there. And they should go there now. Pass that on to your troops so they can make that known. Fort Hood is open for business, but no one knows for how long.”
“Roger that,” Haley said. “Is there anything else?”
“Negative. Just keep leaning forward, Bull. It might look like a forlorn hope right now, but who knows what the future will bring.”
“Probably a lot of stenches,” Haley said.
22
The gymnasium was packed full of frightened people who had nowhere to go, and no time to get there even if they did. The power had failed the day before,
and the air inside the building was getting mighty ripe, especially since the water had gone out earlier in the day. The only lights available were from flashlights and battery-powered lanterns. Candles were forbidden due to the potential fire hazard. So over two thousand people sat in the stinking near-darkness almost shoulder to shoulder, many with weapons, most without. Earl Brown was happy to count himself in the armed group. Not that it mattered.
The dead had found them at nightfall.
The National Guard and Pennsylvania State Police that had been providing security for the evacuation site had tried to fight them off, but the zombies just kept coming. Sometimes in a horde, other times as a ragtag collection of individuals, but the stream had been constant and most unbroken. Earl had wanted to leave the second the first ones appeared, and he had even hustled Zoe out to the Pathfinder to do just that. He found the vehicle had been blocked in by other automobiles, and someone had siphoned almost all the gas from it. At first Earl wondered how that could have happened with all the cops and Guardsmen around, then it came to him. They’d done it themselves.
And in the near distance, Pittsburgh burned.
Earl and Zoe had no choice but to return to the high school gymnasium. By that time, the building was already packed solid, and it took them almost an hour to get back inside and thread their way through the crowd so they could get away from the doors. There were no windows in the gym, so when the doors were finally closed, total darkness reigned supreme, save for sparse islands of light. Gunfire crackled outside, and occasionally, an explosion tore through the air. The Guardsmen had hand grenades. One of them must have gone off close to the building because it shook and there was the sound of shattered glass falling.
“Those assholes just blew a hole in the plate glass windows outside,” someone muttered.
Shoulda bought me some of those night vision goggles, Earl thought. But for what reason? So he could watch the dead come in and start eating people?
He found a very small space beneath the collapsed bleachers against the wall. Earl figured they were electrically-driven, so there was no chance of them being extended any time soon. He put his hand in the gap and felt nothing other than cold wood and steel. He pushed Zoe toward it.
“Daddy, what?”
“I wantcha to get in there,” Earl said. “Take your shotgun and get in there, and don’t come out until I tell you to. Unnerstand me?”
“Daddy …” The plaintive whine in Zoe’s voice stabbed Earl in the heart. He touched her face as his eyes burned. Outside, the gunfire was becoming more sporadic. Engines started, and men shouted. Earl knew the National Guard was mounting up and moving out.
And he heard things picking their way across the glass-littered floor outside the gymnasium.
“Go on, baby. Get in there, and don’t come out until I tell you. All right?” Without waiting for an answer, he shoved Zoe toward the hole. She resisted at first, crying, but eventually she did as he asked and retreated inside the bleachers.
A pounding began on first one closed steel door, and then another. A collective shriek went through the crowd, and Earl damned them all. The last thing they should do was give any indication that there were live people in the building. The pounding at the doors redoubled, and Earl felt the mass of humanity in the gym push away from the entrances. People screamed as they were crushed against each other. Earl had a moment to prepare himself, and he pressed himself against the bleachers, his 12-gauge shotgun in one hand, his .22 caliber pistol in his belt.
“Zoe, hang on, baby. They’re trying to get in!”
And then Earl was crushed against the bleachers by the crowd. Effectively pinned in place, he could do nothing but just try to breathe. Zoe remained silent, but he couldn’t even draw enough breath to ask if she was all right.
Light suddenly flooded the gym when a door was forced open. Screams rang out, and gunfire crackled. Earl couldn’t see what was happening, but he’d been through it before. The dead were in the gymnasium, where thousands of defenseless people were trapped. Some of the refugees still had weapons, and they used them, but the zombies had mass and numbers on their side.
Earl could hear shrieks of pain and agony as the dead fell upon the refugees and fed, tearing people apart in a flurry of slashing teeth and nails. He smelled the coppery scent of blood, followed quickly by the stink of perforated bowels. The din was so loud that he couldn’t separate one sound from another; they all ran together in a horrible blend, a pounding cacophony that left him almost senseless, as if he were being physically beaten. He thought of his wife and eldest daughter, both dead in New York City, and mourned their loss anew. He mourned the coming death of his youngest, who was almost certainly going to meet her fate moments after he met his.
It took hours for the dead to make their way to Earl, and when the crush of bodies relaxed and he fell to the floor, he could glimpse their shambling, blood-covered silhouettes picking their way over fallen bodies, moving toward him. Earl firmed his grip on the shotgun and turned toward the small crevice in the bleachers where his daughter hid as the people around him fell before the advancing ghouls.
“Zoe! Can you hear me, baby?”
“Daddy!”
“Don’t come out until I tell you, baby! Daddy loves you!”
He didn’t have time to listen for her reply. The first of the dead reached for him.
Earl blew its head off with the shotgun, then did the same to the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that, until the shotgun was empty. He pulled the pistol from his belt and used that until the ammunition was gone, but the zombies kept pouring into the gym. Four of them attacked him at the same time, and he was torn asunder only feet from where his young daughter watched and wept.
***
“Doctor Safire? Regina?”
Regina looked up from her computer and was surprised to find McDaniels standing in the doorway to the small cubicle she used as a workspace. Another day was coming to a close; through the windows behind him, she saw the sun had already set, leaving a smear of yellow, orange, and red to bathe the desert in a diminishing glow.
“Hi. What’s up?”
McDaniels looked around, then pulled a chair from another cube and pushed it into hers. He pulled his rifle off his shoulder and placed it across his lap after he sat heavily in the chair. Their knees were only inches apart. The Special Forces officer looked haggard, and he looked at her unhappily for a long moment.
“Colonel, what is it?” Regina prompted.
“Pittsburgh fell overnight. And the refugee camp Earl and Zoe went to… well, it belongs to the dead now. There are no reported survivors.”
Regina looked at McDaniels for a long moment, digesting his words. She couldn’t quite get her head around it at first, but as the seconds ticked by, she felt the sorrow slowly start to fill her. The emotion was unexpected; she barely knew Earl and his daughter, but together they had survived the crucible of the dead in New York City. Regina had blithely presumed that the Browns would be able to handle any ordeals they might come across and had thought the camp they had found outside Pittsburgh would be safe. But the soft-spoken, almost painfully shy, yet resourceful janitor and his bright-eyed, intelligent daughter were…
“Are they dead?” Regina asked.
McDaniels sighed and crossed his arms. “Yeah. I think they have to be.”
She put her hands to her mouth. She thought she might sob, but to her surprise, nothing came out. The sadness continued to fill her, but she could contain it. It hadn’t turned to grief yet, though there was plenty of that to contend with. She still hadn’t had enough time to mourn the passing of her father, who had died only two blocks from the East River and the Coast Guard cutter that had been sent to rescue them. The Browns had deserved better; they had endured so much. That they had become just another statistic was horrible, and she knew the time would come when she would weep for them.
McDaniels looked as though he was taking it hard. Regina felt the pain radiating
from him, like waves of heat from a burning bonfire. His eyes were downcast, and when he unfolded his arms and grabbed his rifle again, she saw his fingers clenched it tight.
“It’s not your fault, you know,” she said.
He looked up at her and gave her a ghost of a smile. “I’m not that conceited. But the truth of the matter is, I could have made some waves and probably taken better care of them. I just… I don’t know. I guess I thought they’d be all right once they made it out of New York.” McDaniels rose to his feet and slung his rifle. He didn’t look at her. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know.”
“Colonel… Cordell.” Regina got up as well and put her arms around him. “It really isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you could have done.”
McDaniels stiffened at the contact at first, then slowly relaxed. He returned the embrace almost timidly. When he spoke, she heard the heartache in his voice.
“I could’ve done better. I could have. So many people are dead now. I should have taken a second and just done better.”
“You did exactly what you could. And you’re helping save the world, guy. This is what you need to do, and Earl and Zoe would have agreed with that.” She pulled back and looked into his face. He looked away from her, but she saw his eyes were watery. She put a hand on his cheek and turned his face back toward hers. “I was a total bitch to you when we first met, because I thought you were just another military muscle head. But I know you care, even about the ‘little people’ like Earl and Zoe Brown. Probably more than I ever did, if I want to admit to that. We can’t change what happened, so we just have to keep going. We don’t have any other choice. But you’re not responsible for what happened to them.”
McDaniels looked at her for a long moment, then nodded. “Thanks, Doctor.”
Regina smiled at him. “No problem, Colonel.”
23
“Dudes, check this shit out,” Roberson said.
The Rising Horde, Volume One (Sequel to The Gathering Dead ) Page 25
