“It looked like those folks on the sailboat were in big trouble,” Jamie said. “You know ... the way they were jumping up and down ... waving at us.”
Lev said, “They were just reacting that way because of the helicopter’s markings.”
“What do you mean?”
“They thought we were an arm of the government finally coming to their rescue.”
“DHS,” she said, nodding. “Department of Homeland Security. Some security they provided.”
“You see Cade’s point, though? There really was no way we could have picked up all of them.”
“It just sucks,” Jamie said. She brushed some dirt off her carbine’s bolt carrier group then paused and looked up, adding, “And it sucks how Cade scolded me in front of you and Daymon.”
“He was right. You’ve got to keep your weapon clean.”
The two-way radio sitting on the blanket amidst the rifle parts and spare magazines came to life. It buzzed on as both Lev and Jamie stared at it.
“You get it.”
Shaking his head, Lev said, “No. You.”
And she did. She snatched it up, said, “Jamie.”
She nodded as Daymon told them they were needed at the hangars. “What for?” she asked.
He said, “Bring Lev. It’ll be fun.”
Grumbling, she set the radio down and went back to reassembling the carbine.
A short walk away from the single-wide, inside a much smaller hangar than the ones at Schriever, Daymon was sitting on a plastic chair, bending its legs back and forth as he craned around doing his best to watch the techs and learn a little about the DHS Black Hawk without getting in the way.
Thinking about the trap he’d just baited, he smiled and put the radio away in his pocket.
Four hundred yards east of the row of hangars, inside a building once used as a waiting area for outbound travelers but now converted to a sort of base PX, Duncan was all alone and sniffing around for something with a little more of a kick than watery coffee or a Rip It energy drink.
He walked the aisles, which consisted of a couple of rows of opened cardboard boxes that no one had seen fit to cut the tops off. There were energy bars and applesauce in single-serve squeeze containers and Slim Jims jerky sticks and processed cheese and crackers, but no booze. Seeing as how the zombie apocalypse had rendered paper money good for only two things—burning and wiping—Duncan figured anyone shopping here was operating on the honor system. So he took a couple of each. Left with a wide enough variety to share with Jamie and Lev with a few leftovers earmarked for Sasha and Raven. He mined some Snickers bars and M&Ms from another row of boxes, stuffed his pockets and exited the building.
He stood outside, trying to get his bearings while lamenting the fact that his buzz was wearing off and the shakes were close behind.
A staccato burst of gunfire, presumably coming from the distant front gate, gave him something to orient from. He took a left tack and after a few minute walk was in front of the nondescript cement block building Beeson called headquarters.
He loitered outside the door, his hands beginning to tremor, until the tractor-beam-like pull of the bottle of Scotch he’d spotted behind the major’s desk overrode the last scintilla of willpower in his body.
Four hundred feet above Staircase National Monument, inside the speeding Ghost Hawk, Cade burned the minutes of uneasy silence looking out the starboard side window. Suddenly some movement on the desert floor caught his eye and he shifted forward and craned his neck. He saw a shadow far ahead and right of their position and it was keeping steady pace with the Ghost Hawk’s shadow, which was riding along the broken ground a little ahead and right of the outer edge of the helicopter’s whirring rotor disc.
He was about to mention to Lopez that the black Osprey was forming up on their port side when Griffin picked up where he’d left off.
The Navy SEAL said, “In an act of desperation, with their carriers already on the way to the bottom and their frigates and destroyers burning ... someone in the Russian or Chinese fleet got skittish and made a calculated decision. At least that’s what our sub’s XO assumed. Hell, communications had already been spotty since the EMP airbursts, and he said he couldn’t get permission to pop a nuke even if he wanted to. By that time I guess President Odero, his cabinet and the Joint Chiefs had all gone dark. There was no government. So the bastards launched from a nearby sub. The sonar operator pegged it for what it was and the entire boat went silent. Like we were all attending a funeral ... only the poor bastards weren’t dead yet. We heard the airburst nuke that took out the entire Fifth fleet ... fifteen, twenty thousand sailors, airmen, Marines. Heard the blast two hundred feet deep. Didn’t even need an acoustic listening device to hear the hulls popping when they hit crush depth. Thank God we didn’t hear any screaming when they were on their way to the bottom.”
Cade asked, “Did you guys get the other sub?”
“Yeah. Took about an hour of running silent before they made a mistake.”
Lasseigne asked, “The Texas torpedoed them?”
“The cocky bastards went to periscope depth. Just as they were nearing the surface, we let go a couple of Mk-48 torpedoes that were on the money. Broke the Akula’s back. The commie bastards got the longest ride possible ... all the way from spitting distance with the horizon to the ocean floor. That one, though,” Griffin said, nodding. “Wish I would have been listening in when it hit crush depth and imploded.” He went silent and looked towards the cabin floor.
“Don’t mess with Texas,” Ari said over the comms.
Cade peered past him and out the window. Everything was a red blur. He heard the SEAL draw a breath and then the man said in a funeral voice, “It would’ve been satisfying hearing them suffer. Softened the loss of my platoon. Jolly, Cog, Diesel, Snip, Stewie, and Cooper ... I wouldn’t have traded three subs full of Russian sailors for a hair on any one of their heads.”
Cross gave his old friend a squeeze on the shoulder. “If they come anywhere near the CONUS we’ll deal out some payback for them.”
Sitting back, Cade thought how heavy a burden the news of the loss of an entire carrier battle group and all of the supporting ships must have been for the new President Valerie Clay, Nash, and Shrill while they already had their hands full dealing with traitorous snakes on American soil. Wouldn’t have wished that kind of pressure on anyone. And that they’d kept their cards close to their vest even when China’s hunter killer satellites were attacking the International Space Station caused Cade’s analytical brain to wonder what else they knew and weren’t letting on.
Chapter 37
Eight miles east of the garage, her feet and ankles throbbing like she’d just been hobbled by Annie Wilkes, the specks of flesh and blood and dermis clinging to Glenda’s body started attracting unwanted guests. Treating her like a native in a National Geographic documentary, the greedy insects lit on her face, nosed around her unblinking eyes, and crawled into her nostrils and mouth without remorse. Before long Glenda was host to an undulating green and black carpet of hungrily feeding common houseflies. And though she looked and smelled like one of the dead, and her winged passengers were undoubtedly exposing her to all of their diseases, the myriad of six decades’ worth of accumulated aches and pains was telling her different. With each new step the pain radiating from the soles of her feet had her convinced that this was what it must feel like to have a belt sander loaded with forty grit paper taken to them. Not one pass, but several, until the once pink pads there were gone and, like the exposed innards of a Grand piano, she imagined she would be able to see the tendons and metatarsals stretching and retracting with each pain-filled step.
Keep going, Glenda, she told herself, praying the endorphins—Mother Nature’s answer to pain—would continue building and eventually bring on the euphoria she remembered from her days as a world class cross-country runner.
But something better fell in her lap before she’d reached that necessary plateau of pain. She saw t
he glint of sun off of chrome to her left. Saw whitewall tires and the red outline of a bike frame propped against a stately pine. She slowed her gait ever so slightly to allow the collection of charred and bloated creatures to overtake her.
Keeping her eyes locked on the ham-sized hunk of pink uncooked flesh jiggling on the nearest creature’s backside, she continued shaving off steps until the lurching cadaver was a few paces beyond the gravel drive in the pine’s long shadow.
Keep going, you bastards. Don’t look back. Nothing to see here, she thought to herself as if those words would have any effect on the pack of dead or the ultimate outcome of her next move. She figured one of two things would happen. Either bare buttocks walker would see her deviate from the State Route and turn and follow suit, the primeval part of its brain fooled into thinking prey must be nearby. Or the train wreck would be none the wiser and continue slogging ahead with the others until its oozing butt literally calved off and met the roadway with a wet resonant slap.
Time would tell. Six more steps. She could almost hear the power tool’s whine and smell the caustic stench of abraded flesh. Four. Three. Two. And one. Inadvertently her left turn became more of an about face than the dumb shuffle she was aiming for, which resulted in a sharp squelch as a handful of gravel shifted under her hiker. She knew a millisecond later that she was in trouble and, like dominos falling, this sudden revelation started the familiar cold blast in her gut that radiated to her limbs, mercifully delivering some of the comfort she’d been praying for.
Alerted by the out of place sound, bare buttocks walker and his two crisped friends performed wooden, near-simultaneous pirouettes and stalked her way, their low mournful moans preceding them.
Get a move on, Glenda. They’re gaining.
Heeding her inner voice and with the hair on her neck standing at attention, Glenda straightened up and set her arms and legs to pumping, leaving a cloud of pissed-off insects swirling and diving in her wake. Though she was certain her socks were one fine bloodied mess by now, she started into a slow jog that, as the moans and grunts of her pursuers intensified, became a frantic uphill slog.
From the turnoff to the house the drive was fairly steep and rutted by parallel tire tracks. For every hard-earned ten yards Glenda covered the dead managed only two or three steps, and by the time she could clearly see the object of her attention she figured she had maybe a minute or two before the zombies caught up with her.
Though it didn’t dawn on Glenda at first, the house, which was set back in the trees and partially hidden by shrubs growing out of control, was well known to her. She’d had a friend named Violet who had lived with her husband in the dilapidated two-story affair until his passing some years before and the pull of family drew her back east.
Many a raucous game of Bunko had taken place behind the darkened picture window staring down on her. And many a bottle of wine had been uncorked there as well. At first the camaraderie and gossip had been just what Glenda needed. Later on it was just the wine. Then, after one too many game nights when she didn’t stop when the dice did, she found she’d worn her welcome out.
After her self-inflicted ouster from Bunko, game night continued at home and she drank alone and unencumbered by social mores while Louie worked graveyard at his plant job in Ogden.
Violet’s husband died the next summer and by autumn she was also gone, the home up for sale and a U-Haul hitched to the old Caprice. Not much had changed at Violet’s place, though. The siding showing through the bushes was still a shade of blue, chalky and fading from the accumulative effect of past winters and new owners who cared more about slinging paint on stretched canvas than on their new place. Priorities, thought Glenda. The screen on the front door was closed and the Huntsville Times had piled up on the stoop, unread, a week’s worth at least. Newly installed stained glass windows flanked the door, and in the other windows Violet’s God-awful olive green velveteen curtains had been replaced by those horizontal aluminum things that screamed modern and were hard to keep dusted.
Nosed in at an angle on the oil-stained cement pad was the kind of boxy foreign station wagon favored by the artistic set in Ogden. On the back tailgate, below the oversized window, were dozens of stickers attesting to some of the places the young couple who’d bought Violet’s house had ventured. Mixed in among the colorful tributes to Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, and Bryce Canyon was a who’s who of stickers giving voice to activist groups whose social values fell farther to the left of Glenda’s—much farther.
Watching the dead over her shoulder, she misjudged the distance and bounced off the Volvo’s passenger-side quarter panel at as near to a full sprint as her shredded feet—and partial suit of magazine armor—would allow. Knitting needles in hand, her heart in her throat and a sheen of sweat wetting her face, she paused to catch her breath.
Leaning on the car, hands on knees and with her chest heaving uncontrollably, she glanced left and saw the doors to the small swaybacked garage at the rear of the property hanging wide open. Save for the cobwebs strung between the rafters, a recycling bin full of newspaper, and an old-fashioned push mower leaning against the back wall, the structure was empty. However, Glenda quickly ruled it out as a place to hide due to the suspect-looking hinges and handful of vertical planks missing from the outward opening doors.
The house was looking better and better with each passing second. The blinds in the rear-facing windows were all closed. On the side of the house the small bay window above the kitchen sink where Violet had sprung her failed intervention so many years ago held a trio of houseplants, their leaves browned and drooping in defeat. She craned left and saw no movement behind the dining room’s large plate window.
Her breath returning, Glenda limped to the side gate and looked the length of the house and spotted the trio of corpses twenty yards distant and struggling mightily to navigate the uneven pitted tracks and raised hump of grass running down the center of them. In an almost comical manner, the zombie with half its ass falling off would straddle the center ridge then step into a rut and stagger forward a short distance and repeat the move in the opposite direction in a kind of perpetual motion, zigging and zagging in front of the other two rotters.
Blinking the stinging drops of sweat from her eyes, Glenda tore off the bathrobe and tossed it on the ground. Served your purpose. Then, with her flight instinct winning out over the idea of spending another night alone with the nightmares inside her head and the hungering dead lingering outside, she looped around the car’s squared-off front end and snatched up the bike by its red vinyl grips. Grunting, she lifted the heavy art-deco-inspired behemoth and pointed the front wheel towards the State Route fifty yards downhill and felt her stomach sink when she saw that the rest of the staggering pus bags were coming to the dinner party.
Without checking the tires for pressure or even looking to see if the thing had a chain, she straddled the red rust bucket and, while hoping the pendulum of good fortune was still on her side, planted one aching foot on a pedal and pushed off downhill.
As the nearly flat front tire bounced over rocks the size of baseballs and was tugged left and right, Glenda focused on keeping her butt centered on the spring-cushioned seat, the bike tracking straight with only one hand on the bars and her eyes fixed on the closest zombie.
With the front wheel juddering in the right side rut Glenda saw the wobbling cadaver step over the center ridge and simultaneously applied the rear brake, leveled the knitting needle like a jousting stick, and plunged it inches deep into the moving target’s left eye socket.
Instantly there was a sharp pain in her wrist and before she could release the needle it was ripped violently from her hand. Then, dangerously close to putting the bike on its side, she regained control with both hands, rode up on the center ridge and pedaled hard for three full revolutions. At the last moment, with the other two walkers taking slow telegraphed swipes for her head, she bent low over the bars and, with the grass threatening to hang up in the spokes and cha
in, passed right between the moaning ghouls with no room to spare.
She sat up and, with the wind buffeting her face and the drying sweat giving her a chill, nosed the rattle trap off the ridge and back into the right side rut.
Total time elapsed from mounting the bike and reaching the bottom of the hill, Glenda guessed, was no more than ten seconds, but probably closer to five. Ducking low to the bike when the drive connected with the State Route, she leaned left and zippered through the ragged knot of walking corpses while letting loose with a guttural war whoop.
With her victory peal hanging in the air, she angled the bike left on the smooth blacktop and never looked back.
Eden Compound
Raven walked her mountain bike through the tangled grass near the compound’s hidden entrance and waited in the shade at the forest’s edge while Sasha fetched hers.
“You’re going to have a big advantage over me,” said Sasha. Then, referring to the antiquated, battered and rusty piece of work she was pushing, added, “This thing is a tank.”
“Well you’re bigger and stronger than me,” countered Raven, crossing her arms. “I should get a head start.”
“Not going to happen,” said Sasha with a flip of her hair. “Bragging rights are at stake. And I like to brag.”
Raven thought: Yes you do. And then some. Parroting something she’d heard uttered by her mom, or dad, or perhaps both, she said, “It would probably level the playing field if you filled your designer handbags with rocks and put one on each arm.”
Shaking her head, Sasha threw a leg over her bike, pushed off and, in a move some would call cheating, hollered, “Go,” when she was already a couple of yards ahead of Raven.
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 19
