After holding his breath for a good ninety seconds, Cade exhaled when he saw the lone survivor return to the opening with both hands grasping the rope and wearing the sling correctly.
Ari said, “I’m going to pull her out sideways.”
“Copy that,” said Skipper, his voice all business.
And Ari did just that. He sideslipped the helo gently to port and the woman had no choice but to step over the dagger-sharp shards of glass and into the void.
In less than a minute the woman, who identified herself as Emily, was in the cabin and drinking greedily from Griffin’s hydration pack.
***
Once the newest passenger was strapped into her seat, Ari pulled pitch, curled around to the west, and passed over the front of the apartment building. The four signature palm trees passed under the starboard side and Ari dropped them down over the pedestrian bridge, then nosed the helicopter south and west following just over the Interstate and backtracking the way they’d come.
A few seconds later they were orbiting Los Angeles Coliseum and Cade was watching the Osprey rise up slowly from the faded gridiron. He looked away and asked Griffin about the wound to his arm.
“I’ll live,” was all the SEAL offered up before going back to tending to the new passengers.
Finally, the Ghost Hawk made a sweeping right turn to the east and after a minute or two the Osprey had cleared the flag standards ringing the coliseum, was formed up off the starboard side and remained there while Ari lined up for the first of two aerial refuels necessary to see them from Los Angeles to Mack and eventually Schriever, and no doubt what was guaranteed to be one hell of a tearful reunion for the small Nash family.
Cade remained awake while both the Ghost Hawk and Osprey drank and then watched the Hercules disappear following a north by east heading. He shifted his gaze from the litter on the floor and got Lopez’s attention. He said unashamedly, “Wake me up just before we refuel again.”
Lopez nodded and smiled. Cade had no doubt the new captain was pleased after having saved an additional life, especially after having lost Sergeant Kelly ‘Lasagna’ Lasseigne to Omega via the smallest of bites.
Chapter 64
With the F-650 nosed in close to the two vehicles blocking the road and the engine idling away, burning copious amounts of precious fuel, Brook stayed in the driver’s seat, drumming her fingers on the wheel. Finally, after having come to some kind of decision, she killed the engine. Tapping out a final verse to whatever tune she’d been replicating she faced Chief, turned on her nurse’s charm, and convinced the obviously ailing man to stay in the truck and be their lookout.
She grabbed her carbine, popped the door open, and leaped down to the road. Covered the twenty feet to the jam with purposeful strides. Walked around the camouflage K5 Blazer, peering into the windows glazed with road grime and who knows what else. She noticed after finishing her loop that the two-door 4x4 was missing a headlight up front and there was dried blood and hair and scraps of flesh stuck to the grill. Seeing only camping gear and a couple of long guns inside the rig, she trudged back to the driver’s side and the body prostrate behind the bullet-riddled door.
She knelt next to the fourth person she’d killed to date, took a deep breath and rolled the corpse over. The body moved easier than she’d anticipated. However, a pile of greasy entrails spilled out onto the road, leaving her face-to-face with a dead man’s gaping abdominal cavity and the partially digested remnants of his final meal.
Fighting the urge to vomit, she tore her eyes from the damage the half-dozen bullets fired from her carbine had caused. She shifted her gaze to the upturned face, which had no kind of a calming effect on her gag reflex. To the contrary, it made her think of who he might have been. Made the kill personal. And much like Wilson and Taryn, the kid looked to have been in his late teens or very early twenties. His slim face was framed by a full head of wavy dark hair and similar colored sideburns working their way toward a merger with a week’s old growth of beard. Close set brown eyes, an aquiline nose, and thin lips seemed to point to some kind of Slavic descent way back.
The corpse was clad in blue jeans and wearing sturdy leather boots, laced up tight. A simple cotton long-sleeved shirt was blood-soaked and sticking to its pallid skin. For some reason the once white item was hiked up to his sternum. Maybe it caught on the shredded door panel when the kid collapsed vertically to the blacktop. She’d never know. But she would take the sight and smell of the dead man’s gutted torso to her grave. That was for sure.
“Wasn’t worth it ... was it?” mumbled Brook, closing his staring lifeless eyes with a practiced swipe of two fingers. “Lonely stretch of road and you couldn’t share.” Grabbing the corpse by the boots, she leaned back and lugged it to the ditch, leaving a slimy trail of guts and organs and streaks of bloody fecal matter.
Walking clear of the gory trail, Brook went around back of the camouflage rig and knelt by the corpse of what looked to have been a young woman in life. The parts pointed to it: small breasts and thin hips that child birth had yet to change. And judging by the long locks of dark hair, Brook guessed this corpse and the other had been related.
But there was no way to be certain. Like its dead friend, this corpse’s pockets were also empty. Moreover, Chief’s volley had erased its narrow face, leaving a half-moon-like chasm displaying gelatinous clumps of brain and all of the intricacies of the human body’s internal cranial structures.
Shivering with disgust, Brook relieved the corpse of the ballistic vest. Knocked it against the road, attempting to dislodge fleshy bits and shards of bone—some with hair and pale dermis still attached. Suddenly overwhelmed by the reality of what had just happened, Brook went to all fours and added the contents of her stomach to the detritus already painting the road.
While Brook moved the bodies, the Kids, staying true to their word, had gone about the grim task of wrapping Jenkins’s ruptured head with a patrolman’s jacket found in the back of the Tahoe. Then, working together, they managed to man-handle his two-hundred-plus pounds of dead weight to the Raptor and into its bed.
By the time Brook finished emptying everything in her stomach onto the road, the Kids had rounded up all of the useful gear and weapons and loaded it into the back of the F-650.
A few short minutes after the aggressors had initiated the deadly encounter, the Kids were back in the Raptor—waiting patiently. Business as usual.
Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and with a sadness welling up, Brook rose to standing and made the slow walk to the Blazer’s open door. She reached in and rattled the transmission into neutral. Hinged over and found the T-handle and popped the e-brake. Standing on the road, feet a shoulder’s width apart, she muscled the wheel, fighting against friction and tonnage and got the big tires moving to the right a few degrees. Still sweating from exertion and the late afternoon heat rising off the road, she hurried back to the F-650 and clambered aboard.
“All in a day’s work,” said Chief, “And just in time.” He pointed past the Blazer across undulating fields and foothills to a point far in the distance where a sliver of road dipped and rose back up. There, silhouetted against the blue-gray horizon, was a giant dust cloud created by what could only be a large contingent of dead which appeared to be bearing north on 16—straight for them.
She placed her carbine next to her, barrel to the floor. She sighed and said, “Can’t be that many of them on this lonely stretch of highway. Can there?”
Wisely, Chief made no reply as Brook fired up the motor, engaged the transmission, and popped the e-brake.
Only a gentle nudge from the Ford’s heavy-duty bumper was necessary to get the scavengers’ Blazer moving. A beat later gravity grabbed the smaller rig and it started a shallow turn towards the ditch, and Brook accelerated briskly through the newly created gap.
“A dirty job. But somebody had to do it,” said Brook as she watched the dead kids’ truck slow roll backwards into the ditch and lurch to a stop amidst a pu
ff of dust, the whip antennas vibrating madly. She kept the truck rolling slow until she saw the Raptor had successfully negotiated the narrow patch of blacktop flanked on one side by the inert Tahoe and on the other by the listing Blazer.
“Which ... the killing or the cleanup?” asked Chief, feeling the rig accelerate and nose into a right hand sweeper.
Brook returned her gaze to the road. “The killing,” she stated softly.
They skirted the west side of Woodruff and after a couple of blocks the overhead lines and power poles kept going straight and Main Street took a hard jog left and then became Highway 16 again. A short drive later the gray strip of two-lane curled right and there was a long straightaway hemmed in by fences bordering fields that pushed up against houses and outbuildings set way back. The scenery was occasionally split up on the left and right by gravel drives and the ubiquitous accoutrements of country living: tired-looking tractors and rusted-out cars. They saw a burn pile stacked high with charred skulls and knobby vertebra and gnarled limbs. Saw lone Zs traipsing the countryside here and there.
But the road was clear for the first couple of miles.
Out of the blue, Chief said, “Thanks for taking care of the girl. That was a girl ... right?”
Brook nodded. Thought about how there was nothing menacing about the pair—save for the fact that they’d fired on her and her friends first. She gripped the wheel tight one-handed and swiped some stray tears away with the other.
“I’m dying,” Chief said, his eyes locked on the low hills outside his window.
Brook drove in silence for a while. Finally, when the straightaway was coming up to a slight bend, she said, “I know. But you need to hold on. Don’t leave us before the miracle.”
Brow furrowed, he said, “What do you mean?”
“Just hang on. I remember you saying you never got sick. How you had the constitution of a bull elephant. Remember that?” She wiped another tear.
“I’m Percy Blackwing and I approved that message.” Chief saw Brook do a quick double take.
“That’s your real name?”
Nodding, he said, “Yeah. See why I preferred Chief?”
Brook smiled. “You have a valid point.”
“Percy was my granddad’s name.”
“Thanks for sharing that with me. But I was serious when I said hang on. Tap that fucking constitution, Chief.”
“Does this have something to do with the antiserum everybody was going on about right after you and Raven and Cade arrived?”
Keeping her eyes on the road, Brook nodded and, in a low voice, said, “Just hang on. Please.”
Chief pulled his right pants leg up. He showed Brook the pair of zip-ties he’d fashioned into a big loop. It was cinched down below his knee and the ragged scratches below it were blazing red. The rest of his leg, however, from the makeshift tourniquet on down, was turning a troubling shade of blue. With a granite set to his jaw, he said, “I’m one step ahead of you. Took care of it when you were chatting with the Kids. I figured it might help me make it back to the compound ... alive. I’ve got a special place where I plan to end it.”
Brook shook her head. She said, “The bite is below your right buttock.”
Inexplicably, he chuckled. “I got bit on the buttocks.” He said buttocks all nasally and Forrest-Gump-like.
Brook couldn’t smile at that. She just heard: I’ve got a special place where I plan to end it over-and-over and it made her think of the ending to Where the Red Fern Grows. Only that was about a boy losing his Irish Setter. This was different. She was on the verge of losing a gentle soul who she’d grown fond of these past few weeks. Not wanting to cry, she kept her eyes ahead and pedal pinned and dodged the trickle of walkers coming at them. A short while later, she slowed and negotiated a pair of wrecked cars and saw another roadblock off in the distance. Only this one wasn’t made of metal, glass, and rubber. And there were no warm bodies with trained weapons and shadowy ambitions.
This impediment to further forward travel was the distant movement responsible for the dust cloud Chief had pointed out just minutes ago. It consisted of cold flesh and bone. The weapons: tooth and nail. Shadowy or otherwise, there were no ambitions. Only an unstoppable drive and built-up lockstep momentum fueled by an insatiable hunger for human flesh. And there were thousands of them, shoulder to shoulder, still kicking up dust and grass seed as they came down off the rise nearly a mile distant.
Chief chuckled again and said, “So much for your lonely stretch of highway.”
Brook said nothing. She braked hard and whipped the truck into a quick left-hand one-eighty. Gravel was kicked up and pinged the slewing Raptor as the wheels on Chief’s side came dangerously close to entering the ditch beyond the shoulder on the southbound lane. But Brook powered through the turn and merely gestured to a startled Taryn and mouthed follow me as the two trucks passed side on.
Chapter 65
A little over an hour and roughly two hundred miles from east Los Angeles, Cade was awakened by loud voices. Keeping his eyes closed, he surreptitiously upped the volume on his head set and eavesdropped while Cross and Griff argued over which of the famous Las Vegas Rat Pack was the coolest. After a lengthy period of back and forth banter during which Cross proclaimed adamantly that Dean Martin was the shit and Griffin protested by saying that the warbling drunk couldn’t carry Sammy Davis Junior’s jock strap, a God-like voice boomed from the cabin speakers and Ari settled the affair by announcing Elvis Aaron Presley as the coolest of them all.
Groans filled the cabin and Haynes’s voice rode over them all as he scolded Ari for not knowing the Rat Pack from the Brat Pack.
Eyes still closed, Cade smiled and tried to tune out the verbal melee as it took a new tangent and the aircrew and team of operators began discussing the cinematic merits of Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, and finally The Breakfast Club. Cade nodded off after hearing Ari declare how much of a crush he had had on Molly Ringwald back in the day.
If Cade would have taken a peek before drifting off again he would have seen Nadia sitting on the fold-down seat next to Skipper, the IV bag now hooked to the superstructure overhead, tubes still delivering electrolytes into her arm.
And he would have gotten a morbid chuckle from the permanent look of incredulity projected by Emily, who, ninety minutes into the trip, was still coming to grips with having had the misfortune of being strapped into an uncomfortable seat beside an American-flag-draped dead body inside an aircraft that looked like it had been sent from outer space to rescue her.
But he hadn’t. He was asleep and blissfully unaware of the trials and tribulations faced by his better half, roughly four hundred miles away north by east as the crow flies.
Chapter 66
To create some distance from the horde, Brook quickly pushed the F-650 past sixty. With the Raptor keeping pace, she blasted north down 16 for nearly a mile and then braked violently and slewed the rig between a pair of nondescript wooden fence posts, choosing the drive based solely on how far off the road the cluster of buildings representing a modicum of shelter were located.
So as not to create a telltale cloud of dust for the monsters to follow, she kept the speed down as the truck lurched and bucked over the pitted dirt track.
Post and beam fencing, gnarled by time and weather, filed by slowly, left and right. Beyond the fence was a vast beaten-down pasture corralling the gnawed-on remains of dozens of some species of hooved creature. And caught in the patches of barbed thistle slowly retaking the land were softball-sized tufts of fine fur or wool in differing shades of brown and orange.
The radio in the console vibrated. Steering one-handed, Brook snatched it up, keyed to talk, and said, “What?”
“What? That’s all you’ve got? What are you getting us into is what I’d like to know,” wailed Wilson.
“It’s what I’m trying to get us out of, Wilson. Besides ... I’ve come this far. I’m not going back without the stuff I came for. After the herd passes, you can get the h
ell out of here if you like.”
“If the herd passes,” said Sasha in the background.
There was a second of silence on the open channel before Wilson said, “You saw what happened to Jenkins’s Tahoe. You dang well better hope they didn’t see us.”
“Even if they did, we put enough distance between us and them. We’ll lay low and let them pass,” Brook said. “After they do ... you can do what you want. Go back to the compound ... whatever suits you.”
Ignoring Brook’s offer, Wilson said, “I just hope whatever killed those animals in the field aren’t still here.”
Chief shook his head.
Brook said, “Chief says they’re gone. I’m hoping there’s no humans here.”
Again Chief shook his head.
Brook said nothing.
The truck crested a rise and lurched into a deep pothole and came out the other side with a slight side-to-side shimmy that quickly dissipated. Dead ahead was a dingy white turn-of-the-century farmhouse. The two-story swaybacked affair had a wraparound porch and a white picket railing partially obscuring a pair of wooden rocking chairs. Opposed diagonally, a hundred yards right of the house, was a brick-red barn connected to a towering metal silo. The doors were huge slabs of wood painted red with opposing white timbers marking each with a big X. The doors, which appeared to slide open horizontally from each other—likely on wheels riding inside a hidden overhead track—were secured with a pair of industrial-sized padlocks, their chromed cases gleaming mightily in the sun.
Breaking off from the unimproved approach to the house was a gently curved left-to-right drive, like a hand scythe minus the straight grip. A handful of trees, neither small nor large, lined the south side of the west-facing home. A mess of gravel was strewn about in front for parking on.
Behind the house, providing a natural barrier of sorts east and north, was a narrow winding river, its blue water making a constant lazy churn south to an inevitable merger with the Green River.
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 35
