Not quite sure how to work the thing, Sasha fiddled with the buttons.
Meanwhile, at the roadblock, Chief was peering through the scope and trying to make heads or tails of the bike and the rustling in the bushes next to it when the radio chimed in his pocket. He looked at Foley and shrugged. Propped the carbine against the bed and fished out the Motorola.
Chief thumbed the talk button. He whispered, “I can’t talk now. We have company at the block.”
Sasha asked, “What do you mean by ... company?”
As Chief came back on, Phillip’s voice also emanated from the speaker saying, “All clear at the entrance. How come Seth’s not answering?”
To which Sasha said, “He’s here. This is his radio. Bye, Phillip.”
After Phillip signed off Chief waited for a two-count and described the bicycle’s mysterious appearance and after a brief pause mentioned the movement in the underbrush.
Excitedly, Sasha said, “Do you see the person who was riding it?”
Still moving across the clearing, Brook, who had been listening in, tightened her grip on one corner of the sleeping bag and said incredulously, “Chief and Foley can play hide and seek with whoever it is later. I need them here five minutes ago.” She looked down at Raven and saw that her lips were pursed into a thin blue line. Shifted her gaze toward Sasha and said, “Hit that damn talk button and tell them to get back here ASAP. I have to load up the truck and leave. And when you’re done with that I need you to run ahead to the compound and get me the satellite phone.”
Trying her best to duplicate the urgency in Brook’s voice, Sasha depressed the Talk button and relayed the message. A tick later the gears were in motion and she was hightailing it to the compound.
At the roadblock
Chief turned the volume down and slipped the radio into his pocket. He whispered, “I think there is someone trying to hide in the bushes near the bike.”
“Or something,” said Foley, glassing the undergrowth near the bicycle.
In a rare display of humor, Chief replied, “Rotters don’t ride ... as far as I know. So I’ll give whoever or whatever is wearing those hikers a warning shot.”
“Brook said she needs us back at the compound ASAP.”
“If there’s a person over there we can’t just abandon them,” answered Chief as he snugged the carbine to his shoulder and sighted down the scope. “Besides, if we step on it we can be back there in three or four minutes with no one the wiser.”
Foley pressed a button on his watch that started the numbers on the stopwatch scrolling. He trained the binoculars on the road ahead and said, “What do you make of it?”
“Let’s find out.”
Foley nodded then trained the field-glasses on the scuffed leather hikers.
There was one single loud report from Chief’s carbine and a geyser of gravel erupted near the stationary pair of boots.
The sensation of tiny bits of asphalt shrapnel peppering the magazines taped to Glenda’s shins did little to warn her of what was coming next. However, the report rolling over her head left no doubt in her mind that somehow she had become the shooter’s target.
Two courses of action sprang to mind. One, she could burrow further into the underbrush and still risk taking a bullet, or worse, make too much noise and die at the hands and teeth of the moaning corpses crossing the bridge behind her. Or, number two, she could spring up and rely on the Glenda Glide to see her quickly and silently to the fallen trees on the far side of the road and then scramble over the jam to take her chances with the living, whomever they might be.
She winced as more debris pelted her and had made up her mind even before the second sharp report was echoing off the tree branches overhead.
One moment Chief was tracking the rifle to the right, preparing to make the next shot, and the next a gaunt and gray-haired thing was rising out of the foliage and before he could process what he was seeing it had risen to its feet and was standing erect, waving its arms mutely.
Foley asked, “Are those magazines taped around its arms and legs?”
“Question is,” Chef said incredulously, “what is it?”
Before Foley could answer to that the rotters were turning and starting off towards the gesticulating figure.
“It’s alive. And I think—
“It’s a woman,” said Chief, finishing Foley’s thought for him.
Remembering his ordeal walking among the dead from the road below Robert Christian’s mansion all the way to the Teton Pass, Tran blurted, “We have to save her.”
Chief nodded and said to Foley, “Grab your rifle. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
***
After a thirty-second volley, a changing of magazines, and then another spate of closely spaced single shots, a blue-gray gun smoke haze hung in the air, and the knot of walking dead were felled and in an unmoving tangle stretching across the bridge’s east end.
“Good shooting,” said Chief. “I stand corrected on my first impression of you.”
With a pair of binoculars pressed to his face, Tran announced, “It’s a woman.”
Foley looked through the scope atop his rifle and watched the woman mount the bike and pedal the distance to the blockage. She was lost from view for a tick; then he saw her haul her slight frame up on a horizontal tree and begin picking her way gingerly through the tangled mess of branches.
He looked at his stopwatch and said, “Three minutes gone.”
“She’ll be here in half that, the way she’s moving. Must be scared as heck.”
Foley said, “Let’s see. She probably just pedaled through that group of rotters that came up behind her. Then she comes upon our roadblock and you start shooting at her. Wouldn’t you be?”
“Good point,” said Chief.
Foley took his eye from the scope and spotted Tran moving across the fallen trees. He moved with an economy, picking and choosing handholds and places for his feet with care, but not wasting any time as he did so.
Chief tossed his rifle in the truck. He said, “I’ll go meet them in the woods and check her for bites. You fire up the truck.”
“Back in ten?”
“Call it five,” said Chief.
At the compound
Brook traded her corner of the sleeping bag to Sasha for the satellite phone and said to Taryn, “Take her to your quarters so you don’t have to deal with getting her past the clutter in the security container. I’ll be there in a few seconds.”
Nodding, Taryn disappeared into the gloom with Seth squeezing through the doorway right behind her. Bringing up the rear, both clutching a handful of sleeping bag, Wilson and Sasha negotiated the doorway and, once they’d cleared the threshold, Wilson reached back with one hand and pulled the door shut behind them.
Biting her knuckles, Brook cycled through the menus searching for the one labeled Contacts. “Come on. Come on. Come on,” she chanted until she spotted it. She chose the sub-menu labeled Compose Text Message and with the speed of a tween planning a sleepover her thumbs flew over the keys as she banged out a message for Cade. Without reviewing the inputted text she hit the Send button, pocketed the phone, and rushed into the compound with a full head of steam.
Chapter 45
Four minutes out from what was initially going to be objective number two, Ari said, “Nash couldn’t wrangle updated satellite imagery so here’s the bird’s eye view of Long Beach Naval Shipyards, also known as Terminal Island.” A moment later an image flashed up on the cabin monitor. And as they got closer to the manmade island he swung Jedi One-One wide right out to sea, leaving the black Osprey behind. A few seconds later Ari had the near silent stealth helo in a steady hover eight hundred feet over open water.
“Looks like the FEMA folks had the National Guard drop the bridges,” proffered Haynes.
Manning the FLIR controls, Ari zoomed in on the nearest fallen span and quipped, “Pardon the pun, but looks like somebody was forced to take extreme measures to keep the undead citiz
ens of Los Angeles at bay.”
A collective groan sounded in the passenger cabin.
Ignoring the quip and unable to see the full scope of the damage through the port window, Cade shifted his gaze to the monitor and watched as the camera zoomed out from the fractured concrete pilings and panned slowly left to right. The place looked deserted and, sure enough, as Ari had already alluded to, all three bridges—one coming in from the north, another from the east, and a third from south—had been reduced to rubble, the tons of concrete and rebar now sitting on the bay floor.
The camera zoomed in to the northwest corner of the operation where what looked like a couple of acres of once bare concrete, surrounded by a smattering of shipping containers and rust-streaked cranes on rails, had been covered completely by thousands of body bags, many of them containing reanimated corpses. South of the undulating sea of body bags were more dead bodies than Cade had seen in one place. Heaped two stories high and host to thousands of white seagulls, the monument to Omega’s ruthless efficiency was exponentially bigger than the mound of dead Americans he had come across near the coal plant at the junction to State Route 6 east of Salt Lake City. And hard as it was for him to wrap his mind around, there were even more corpses in the water here than there had been lodged against the spillway of the Flaming Gorge Dam in southern Utah. Of all the monuments to humanity’s suffering he had seen since Z-Day, this one, by far, troubled him most.
“No wonder they abandoned the place,” said Lasseigne, breaking a long silence. “Hell of a biohazard down there.”
“Not as bad as this one here,” said Ari over the comms. “’Cause these ones are still ambulatory.” The camera moved in its gimbal and zoomed in and focused on the far end of what remained of the east bridge once connecting the naval yard to the mainland. The crowd of flesh-eaters amassed there probably could have filled the mall in Washington D.C. ten times over. They were moving south and filling up both sides of the freeway, their bodies pressed close enough together to create the illusion that the whole lot of them were rippling like a human wave at a ball game, only on a much grander scale.
“Wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that thing,” said Cross. “That would swallow up the Pueblo horde.”
“Copy that,” said Cade. “Its mass is almost incomprehensible ... probably double the size of the Denver horde Lopez and the boys nuked at Castle Rock. I’d guess there’s one ... one point five million Zs down there, at least.”
Griffin added, “And that’s just a fraction of the population that used to call Los Angeles home.”
The men suddenly went silent and their stomachs and testicles relocated inside their bodies as the helicopter nosed down and their altitude and distance to the artificial island was quickly halved. A handful of seconds later, sending everyone’s anatomy in the opposite direction, Ari flared Jedi One-One hard and commenced a hover over the southwest portion of the yards bordered on two sides by water being beaten to a froth by hundreds of pasty white and horribly bloated reanimated corpses.
Back in the cabin Cade swallowed hard and took a calming breath. He glanced at the monitor and saw that what had initially looked like tiny multicolored Legos from their standoff distance were actually hundreds of intermodal shipping containers like the type the Eden compound was constructed of. And like the cranes and wheeled contraptions that moved the containers from the back of long-haul trucks to waiting ships, they were rust-streaked and showed lots of wear and tear. Stacked three high and several deep, they completely ringed the FEMA facility. And in the center of the castle-like walls, erected on what had to be several acres of flat ground crisscrossed by train tracks and marked up with numbers and letters that amounted to little more than longshoreman hieroglyphics to the layperson, were white semi-rigid tents too numerous to count. The first three rows of twelve abutting the seawall to the south were lined up precisely and looked to have been erected with care, most likely before the full scale of the outbreak was known. The next dozen or so rows had been thrown up hastily and stood in ragged formation, roofs sagging and door flaps waving lazily in the offshore breeze.
A pair of large recreational vehicles, the kind which snowbirds often traded their homes for in retirement—FEMA command centers, Cade guessed—were parked nose to tail near the southwestern corner of the seawall, extensions bulging from their sides. Nearby were a dozen smaller panel vans tagged with bold blue FEMA logos. Roughly fifty yards north of the tent city and inert command vehicles, surrounded by temporary chain-link fencing held in place by removable cement anchors, was a trio of FEMA COWs—Cell tower On Wheels. The COW trailers were hitched to identical white Peterbilt tractors and each had a telephone-pole-sized tower rising up through its roof. Sporting all kinds of shiny angular panels and cylinders all connected by wires and insulators, the tower looked like a giant-sized royal scepter minus the ubiquitous gilding and encrusted jewels.
Parked in a semicircle nose-to-nose near the COW trailers were three white Econoline style vans also with FEMA emblazoned in blue on their roofs and sides. Hitched to each van was a white windowless single-axle trailer, and connected to each trailer, umbilical-like by a thick black cable, was a white satellite dish the size of a backyard trampoline.
The ground from the command vehicles to the fencing surrounding the COW was littered with shell casings all glittering in the sun. And here and there among the tents and vehicles were dozens of Zs clothed mostly in civilian attire or still wearing their blue and white FEMA garb. And scattered amongst the herd were a number of soldiers who had died clad for all eternity in their MultiCam fatigues.
Most of the walking dead were covered in blood, theirs or others. The blood had dried to a glossy black and threw the sun as they moved about aimlessly. Even viewed from afar and relayed to a monitor in a hovering aircraft the defensive wounds to hands and arms, likely received during the frantic egress when ammo was low and tensions were running high, was clearly evident.
“This is the last known location of our target,” said Lopez, breaking the shroud of silence. “Z-Day plus five, I believe. These temporary cell sites known as COWs were still operable then. Same deal though ... the cell tower here did its part but the commercial communications sats didn’t relay the signal.”
“Or somebody jammed them,” said Griffin. “With all due respect, Sir. Z-Day plus five was a long time ago. The target could be anywhere. Palm Desert. Balboa Island. In one of those ... body bags.”
“We’re going on what we do know. We’re starting here because we know the facility was secure a week out. After that ... it’s highly likely that some survivors were relocated to other camps inland by helo. Also reports indicate that a larger number of civilians and essential government personnel were evacuated by sea.”
Incredulous, Griff said, “You’re telling me Nash was able to sweet talk President Clay into allowing this mission but couldn’t pull any strings between days one and five to get a lone chopper and team of shooters in here to secure the target?”
Lopez shook his head. He said, “She had her hands full moving satellites around D.C. searching for President Odero, who had gone dark. So proof of life for Nash amounts to only a handful of voice messages all stamped by the location services in the target’s phone as having originated from the USC area.”
Cross said, “Doesn’t explain why we’re starting here and not the target’s last known location.”
Cade said, “Lopez is working up to it.”
Griffin pressed, “So if there was an open line of communication, why wasn’t the target instructed to egress to a safe exfil point?”
“Sure the messages came in when the sats were still up,” answered Lopez. “But you’re going to have to ask Nash why she didn’t call back. You and I both know that from the get go cell lines were overloaded. Land lines were overloaded. The Iridium satellite array was overloaded.”
“I can sympathize,” said Cade. “I was in Nash’s shoes by day two. My phone was working sporadically. The messages I did ge
t out ... I had no idea if they’d been received or not. And I didn’t find out until days later.”
Ari broke in over the comms, “How’d Nash get a trace on the pings this far out from Z-day in the first place?”
“Being the computer whiz that she is, somehow she got ahold of a log of all of the cell tower pings in Southern California ... whether the calls serviced by the towers were received by the cellular sats and bounced to another cell tower somewhere in CONUS or not. I don’t know how she thought of this ... pretty brilliant if you ask me. She went through the pings that weren’t passed on ... or transmitted, if you will, by the carrier satellites until she located the target’s number which she found to have sent out numerous pings after the cellular communication sats went down.”
Lasseigne said, “So the target was here?” He pointed to the white mast below. “And the phone in question pinged off of that mobile tower?”
“Yes,” replied Lopez. “The pings start up north near USC and then the target’s phone pinged off of different towers in multiple locations, and if you connected the dots you’d find a straight line north to south from USC to here.” He paused for a tick. Then finished by saying, “And here is where they ceased.”
Cade looked at Lopez, then Lasseigne and finally Griffin and said, “First off, the target’s name is Nadia. Nash’s daughter was a senior at USC. Secondly, during the shit show that those first few days was there was continuity of government to worry about ... she oversaw President Odero’s rescue while D.C. was still going through its final death throes. And when that rescue went sideways she was the main person responsible for locating Speaker Valerie Clay. She sent Desantos and Lopez to the Greenbrier in West Virginia to secure our new president and bring her back to Springs. So, with all due respect, Griff, I think second guessing Nash at this point after we’ve all already volunteered to find Nadia is foolish.”
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 23
