“Yep ... one craft with five adults topside,” reported Daymon. He watched the group rush to one side of the sailboat he guessed to be a forty-footer, half of them waving white scraps of fabric. A couple of them threw themselves to the deck as if rescue was imminent. He panned over the other watercraft and added, “All of the other vessels appear abandoned.”
“Appear,” muttered Duncan into the comms. He fixed his gaze on the water between the boats and the shore where hundreds of Zs, excited by the now hovering chopper, had shifted their attention from the survivors in the sailboat and were now looking expectantly skyward. The charred creatures created a sharp contrast intermingling among scores of pale waterlogged bodies at the water’s edge—some moving—most not. Having seen enough and knowing without asking that there was no way to help the survivors without jeopardizing the mission and the safety of everyone aboard, Duncan looked towards the pass and said, “Delta ... you want to get a close-up of the barricade?”
Cade didn’t immediately answer. He fished his binoculars from the ruck near his feet and trained them on the four-lane winding up into the canyon to the west. He adjusted the focus ring and walked the field glasses up while panning left and right in tight little increments. Spent a handful of seconds scrutinizing something there, then, dropping the Steiners in his lap, said abruptly, “No. I’ve seen enough to know that the breach has widened.”
“Rotters?”
“Hundreds ... if not a thousand or more have tumbled and ended up at the bottom of the canyon. No threat from them ... yet.”
Duncan nudged the stick left and forward. Responding to the input, the Black Hawk turned hard on a dime and lost fifty feet of altitude before leveling out and hammering south low to the water. Then, not really wanting to hear the answer, he asked, “How many are there on the road?”
A heavy silence descended over the cabin.
Lev and Jamie traded worried looks.
The rotor blades continued chopping the crisp air overhead as the reservoir’s silver surface gave way to land.
And, staring out the window at the verdant triple canopy rushing by, Cade quietly said, “You don’t want to know.”
Glenda went still as a statue as the helicopter passed overhead and continued onward, presumably, towards Huntsville without missing a beat. With the imagery of the half-dozen black helicopters descending on the mayor’s mansion, and the ensuing carnage still fresh on her mind, she said a little prayer asking God to will whoever was in the noisy aircraft to ignore her and keep on going. And, as if she had traded one threat for another, once the helicopter was out of earshot, the crawler’s incessant peals were back.
Cursing herself for not putting it out of its misery when she’d had the chance, she crossed the blacktop and stopped a foot shy of the persistent creature. Out came one of the needles and she bent down and pushed the sharpened aluminum into its temple, instantly stilling it. Wiping the shaft on the robe’s sleeve she blinked away a tear, then put the needle away, and putting one foot in front of the other, continued east on SR-39.
Chapter 31
In order to better get a feel for what might be waiting for them at the Morgan County Airport, Cade had Duncan keep the Black Hawk low and slow and follow Old Trapper Road south, starting at its terminus with State Route 39 near the banks of the Pineview Reservoir.
Almost immediately Cade could see that conditions on the ten-mile-long stretch of mostly two-lane blacktop cutting through the Utah back country had deteriorated exponentially since he’d last traversed it.
Three weeks ago, save for the freeway near the Morgan airport, the road had been virtually free of Zs. But that was then and this was now and not a mile blipped by where the road itself, and the open range it bordered, was not dotted with roving bands of decaying corpses.
Five miles in and for the second time in as many minutes, Cade said, “I’ve seen enough.”
Taking the cue, Duncan nudged the Black Hawk left a few degrees and simultaneously increased the power and dipped her nose slightly. “What do you think we’re going to find at the airport?” he asked.
And for the second time in six minutes, Cade uttered the same five words, “You don’t want to know.” Only this time, like a wakeup call, he delivered them slowly—all business.
Believing everyone’s fate on this rock was preordained from birth, Duncan shrugged off the warning and said calmly into the shipwide comms, “Two mikes out.”
There was a metallic snick from Jamie’s M4 as she pulled the charging handle, chambering a round. Fully aware Cade and Lev were watching, she slipped the Beretta from its drop leg holster, confirmed it too had a round chambered, then snicked off the safety and snugged it home. Still feeling eyes on her, she donned a helmet and comms and tucked some free strands of her dark bangs in before cinching the chin strap. Finally, unable to control herself, she looked coyly at Cade and Lev, winked, patted the tomahawk riding on the other, then gave it a couple of sensual-looking strokes.
Swapping out the bulky flight helmet for his tactical bump helmet, Cade leaned close and asked her, “Are you good to go?”
Forcing a half smile, Jamie leaned forward and, loud enough to be heard over the thumping of the slowing rotors, replied, “Yep. I’m going to get some.”
Smiling inwardly at the exchange, Lev followed Cade’s lead, swapping his flight helmet for a comms set and a tan Kevlar item Cade had taken off the dead National Guardsmen weeks ago. He tightened the chin strap then ejected the magazine from his M4 and, performing an Eleven-Bravo ritual once practiced the world over, tapped it against his palm to seat the rounds and then slapped it back into the magwell where it seated with a satisfying click. Following the other’s lead he charged his weapon, set the safety, and closed his eyes in preparation for insertion into a very different type of hot landing zone. The kind he hated most. Because here, though no one would be shooting at him, every threat on the ground would be in his face and equally as deadly. Tooth and nail deadly. He shuddered at the forming visual, then, like a good soldier, flicked a mental switch, banishing it from his mind.
“One mike,” called Duncan.
After adjusting the volume on his comms set, Cade looked up and, mimicking a popular commercial from the old world, said, “Can you hear me now?”
Getting the joke, Jamie smiled and nodded.
Nearly simultaneously, Lev, Daymon, and Duncan flashed a thumbs up, the universal semaphore for good to go understood by men going into battle the world over.
Daymon looked into the cabin and exchanged a knowing look with Cade. Held it for a tick then swiveled forward and his voice came over the comms describing the scene on the ground at the airport in great detail, not one of them good.
Looking out his port side window, Cade saw one of the points of entry the dead had utilized. A full five-foot run of the chain-link surrounding the parking lot on the airport’s northwest corner had been laid flat, and blades of brittle, browned grass poked through the diamond-shaped openings. On either side of the breach, where the fencing was still attached to the vertical posts, colorful scraps of fabric and what looked to Cade like tufts of human hair were being windblown in the same direction as the day-glo windsock dancing high up on a pole at the end of the nearby runway.
Swiveling his head left, Duncan retracted the smoked visor and, through his orange-framed glasses, eyed his passengers. “Are we a go?” he asked.
Matching Duncan’s gaze while trying mightily to ignore the colorful specs , Cade bit his lip and nodded subtly.
In the left-hand seat, as he unplugged his helmet, Daymon saw the rotters freeze in place. In the next instant, as Duncan brought the Black Hawk in hot over the forty-foot-tall trees west of the single asphalt landing strip, the multitude of marble-white faces looked skyward and panned a steady arc, their dead eyes locked onto the noisily approaching metal contraption.
“Kindness, don’t fail me now,” said Daymon as he drew his machete from its scabbard and placed it on his lap. His gloved ha
nds went to the harness release as volumes of dust were suddenly sent airborne by the wildly spinning rotors.
Incredulous, Duncan simultaneously flared the helicopter and said, “You named it?”
“Just now,” answered Daymon, grinning wickedly.
“But ... Kindness?”
“Yeah. You know ... as in killing them with—”
Over the comms, Jamie said, “Double entendre. I like it.”
Lev added, “Very original, I’ll give you that.”
Duncan shook his head, then intoned, “You know your job, Urch?”
With a metallic click, Daymon was free of the belt and reciting the mantra in a sing-song voice. “Keep the rotters from martyring themselves with your tail rotor.”
“Correct,” said Duncan. “Take my shotgun ... I insist.”
After circling far and wide of the static fuel bowser and finding a patch of grass free of dead and large enough to set the chopper down, Duncan said, “Wheels down.”
Before the wheels were in the tall grass, Cade had yanked the starboard door back in its tracks and had jumped out and was kneeling on the tarmac, M4 sweeping to the south. A tick later he began engaging targets, careful not to walk his fire too close to the tank truck holding their precious aviation fuel.
The DHS chopper settled softly on the grass northeast of the fuel bowser and, breaking every rule in the book, Duncan kept the turbines lit and the rotors spooled up. In his side vision he saw Cade, Jamie and Daymon burst out of the chopper near simultaneously and felt the hot blast of carrion-and jet-fuel-tainted air infiltrate the cabin. He saw Jamie peel left to assist Cade in clearing a path between the chopper and bowser while Daymon disappeared from view on his way to secure the area around the Black Hawk’s fragile tail rotor.
Once Daymon reached his position on the starboard side of the tail boom, he put the whirring and near invisible rotor disc at his back and went to one knee. He crunched a round into the stubby combat shotgun and heard Cade saying, We will be in and out in five, in his head.
But this wasn’t nearly the situation they’d encountered refueling here weeks ago. This was much worse. A hasty headcount from the air told him that there had to be hundreds of rotters spread out across the acres of asphalt and unruly grass. And looking under the tail boom towards the failed fencing he could see that dozens more, drawn by the Siren’s song of the noisy Black Hawk, were streaming towards them on their left flank.
First things first, though. He leveled the pump gun at a trio of presumably moaning creatures at his three o’clock position. With the bowser in his left side vision and the deadly blades nearby on the right he let loose, the storm of buckshot dissolving the first monster’s face.
Mouth formed in a silent O, the next Z, a young girl with puckered bite wounds up and down her arms, came at him faster than the first.
Stepping forward to meet the threat, Daymon jacked another round into the chamber and, with the utmost care, lined the sights up with the bridge of the stumbling four-footer’s nose. A tactical move based on an assumption that, if he knew Old Man as well as he thought he did, the next round in the chamber was a slug.
Daymon held his fire until the Z was within a dozen feet. He drew a breath and thought to himself, The kid is already dead. When he finally pulled the trigger his gut feeling was validated when the single hunk of lead found its mark where he’d been aiming and sheared off the top third of the waifish corpse’s skull. The resulting kinetic energy snapped the body up and back and through the drifting cloud of cerebral fluid and aerated brain matter.
Before the girl’s corpse had time to bounce Daymon had crunched another shell into the shotgun. Holding true to the every-other-pattern, the next shell was buckshot which didn’t have the time nor distance to spread as it left the shotgun’s smooth bore barrel with tremendous velocity. Barely the size of a basketball and only sixteen inches removed from the muzzle, the swarm of tiny pellets struck the right two-thirds of the next rotter’s face leaving behind only scraps of shredded flesh hanging from a crescent-shaped sliver of skull. Barely attached at the neck, the hair-covered rind bobbed momentarily on the stalk of exposed vertebrae until the final orders from its already compromised brain reached its feet and the near headless corpse did the splits, collapsing in place.
In the next heartbeat Daymon kept two more ambling corpses away from the tail rotor, felling them one right after the other—slug to the forehead and buckshot to the temple.
As the last one through the open door, and with Duncan barking a reminder over the shipwide comms, Lev closed it at his back and went into a combat crouch near the bird’s landing gear. He quickly got his bearings and slow-walked toward his objective, head on a swivel and constantly firing and reloading as he covered the distance to the gun-shaped nozzle lying flat on the nearby tarmac. Halfway to the stretched-out length of hose, time seemed to slow for him and three things happened simultaneously. To his left he saw Jamie swiping at the encroaching dead, the tomahawk cutting a blurring arc, and a look of utter disgust parked on her face. One by one, in the blink of an eye, she caved a trio of faces in, the crunch of bone and thud of bodies impacting the tarmac all but drowned out by the Black Hawk’s turbine whine. Then suddenly Cade was crouched low and walking forward and firing by her side. A beat later he had her rifle in his hands and appeared to be working on it.
Lev paused and looked over his left shoulder. Unexpectedly he caught Cade’s eye then read his lips: Failure to feed then heard his voice saying, “Go, go, go,” over the comms. With Cade’s admonition spurring him to get the lead out, Lev did just that, emptying a half-dozen rounds into the Zs in his path. He changed mags and picked his way through the fallen bodies. slipping and sliding on clumps of brain and hair-covered skull along the way. He charged the rifle then let it hang from its sling and snatched up the fuel nozzle two-handed. With the hose draped over his shoulder and inadvertently dragging his rifle’s muzzle through the pooling blood, he leaned forward and began running towards the chopper where he saw Daymon standing amid a growing pile of Z bodies and swinging a machete wildly one-handed.
In the couple of seconds it had taken Cade to clear Jamie’s rifle of the misfed round, pull the charging handle and hand the M4 back to her, a Z had risen to its knees from the tall grass, gotten ahold of his hydration pack, and was climbing his body. In the next beat Cade was twisting around and collapsing sideways with the thing’s cold hands groping for his neck.
On the way to the ground two things happened. First, without looking or thinking, Cade reached for the dagger on his hip. Next he heard two pops and the crackle of live rounds passing closely as the rotter’s shoulder disintegrated into a horizontal fan of sinew and congealed blood which momentarily blotted out the spinning blue sky.
Upon hitting the ground, Cade felt the water-filled bladder strapped to his back mercifully cushion his fall and then, as the snarling creature’s dead weight landed squarely atop him, the plate carrier and spare magazines and M4 carbine still strapped to his chest provided a five-inch buffer between his face and its snapping teeth.
Having missed the Z’s head by a less than a hand's width, Jamie relinquished her rifle to gravity and charged hard towards the falling tangle of flailing limbs.
Supine and nearly enveloped in long grass, Cade got the dagger clear of the scabbard and rolled right to free up his left arm. A beat later the Gerber was arcing up from his side, a deadly blur of matte black clutched in his gloved hand. A fraction of a second later, pushing air in front of it from the opposite side, a second glint of metal entered Cade’s peripheral. Finally, all inside of the latter half of that same second, Cade’s blade plunged upward through the triangle of soft flesh under the Z’s chin and the spiked end of Jamie’s tomahawk embedded in its left temple with a wet thunk.
In one fluid movement Jamie released her tomahawk and kicked the leaking corpse off of Cade, who had let go of his Gerber and was already going for his Glock. “It’s dead,” she stated, helping him up with h
er free hand. “Are you bit?”
Cade shook his head and got to his knees. Starting at the Black Hawk, he walked his gaze around his immediate vicinity, nearly a full three-sixty sweep.
Through the Black Hawk’s canopy he saw Duncan looking at him expectantly, mouth opened wide as if he was about to shout a warning or maybe a tidbit of what—usually already three sheets to the wind—he liked to call sage advice.
Expecting the former, Cade continued his visual sweep and noted the handful of walking dead vectoring toward the cockpit from the east.
He grabbed his M4’s grip and got to his feet and saw that Lev was nearly to the bird, the fuel hose spooled out dozens of feet behind him. Then, finishing the revolution, Cade spotted another dozen Zs emerging from the right side of the bowser. So he tapped Jamie on the shoulder, pointed towards the first turns looping around the chopper’s nose, and said, “Do them first ... but be careful not to hit our ride.” And as he sprinted away from her, he registered a vague nod, a half-turn, then the rifle swinging up and snugging tight to her shoulder.
Cade reached the bowser and, starting at the top, tapped its rounded flank with the buttstock of his M4. The initial hollow report sounded to the halfway point and remained unchanged another twelve inches past that when finally his steady taps returned a heavy noise with a slight ringing to it. Grimacing, he said, “I’ve got a third of a tank here, Duncan.”
“We better let her drink until she’s full.”
“Copy that,” replied Lev as he inserted the nozzle. “Commencing hot refuel.”
Cade looked towards the tail rotor and saw the shotgun still slung over Daymon’s shoulder. Saw the man tense and lash out with the machete and drop a rail-thin female Z dangerously close to the whirring vertical rotor disc. Then, as the upper half of the thing’s head spun a lazy arc away from the blades, Cade looked away and over the fuel bowser’s hood and watched Jamie walking rifle fire into the moaning throng.
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 14
