A Pound of Flesh: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (9 page)

Brook felt a tingle of fear manifest in the
pit of her stomach. She received the folded note, promptly stuffing
it in her jeans pocket.

“Make sure you go to the armorer. Have him
clean and inspect that M4 of yours. Then go get some Multicam ACUs,
a rucksack, and MOLLE gear,” Shrill said as he paced over to the
photo of himself and the young pilot. “And hoard as many extra mags
as you can talk Lafayette into parting with.”

“I know what the ACUs are but you lost me on
the
Molly
... gear?” Brook said awkwardly.
If I’m going to
play Cade I had better learn the lingo,”
she thought.

“Stands for Modular, Light-weight, Load
bearing, Equipment, that’s military speak for the canvas webbing on
which you attach pouches to carry spare magazines and other gear.
There are other acronyms... but I’ll spare you,” Shrill intoned as
he traced a finger over the glass covering his son’s photo while
ostensibly wiping a nonexistent layer of dust away.

“Thanks again Colonel,” Brook said as she
approached the tall bald black man, her arms outstretched. “I’m so
sorry about your son.” Then standing on tip toes, she wrapped her
arms around his ribcage and gave him a baby bear hug.

“Yes... I am too,” the base commander
proffered as he covertly wiped a rare tear. “Now get along before I
change my mind... and don’t forget your rifle,” he added in a soft
but bass heavy voice.

Startled, Brook jumped an inch yet held the
embrace for another second as she took in the smiling face of the
fighter jock that had obviously made his dad proud.

***

Grayson Quarters

Instead of the dreaded talk she was going to
have with her daughter, Brook settled into the bunk beside Raven
and began reading aloud a chapter from the
Lucy Rose
book
she had scooped up from the lobby of the base commons.

Before delving ten pages into the precocious
fourth grader’s adventures and misadventures both mom and daughter
were sound asleep—the victims of a harrowing sleepless night and a
long sorrow filled day.

***

By the time Cade had finished getting his
lead-out in order it was nearly midnight. He had fully broken down,
cleaned, and oiled all of his weapons. His Gerber—the very blade
that had ended Mike Desantos’ life—received a thorough sharpening.
He clipped a pair of the newest generation NVDs to his tactical
helmet. Two M84 flash bangs and two M67 fragmentation grenades
found a home attached to his MOLLE rig. He checked and rechecked
his kit. Finally satisfied he was fully prepared for the upcoming
mission into the belly of the beast, he left the other operators
and flight crew to finish with their individual pre-mission
preparations.

Since there was no way of knowing who had
come onto the base during those first hectic days—good or bad—he
ratcheted his situational awareness meter up several notches. With
a Glock in one fist, he left the Cushman behind and traversed
Schriever’s darkened pathways on foot—alert and prepared.

***

Just hours after Mike’s passing, Cade had
started his own impromptu investigation; after his initial
interrogation of the killer who called himself Pug he would have
bet the naming rights to his yet-to-be-born child that he had not
acted alone. He was certain the killer had received help from
somebody else from within the base. Pug didn’t strike Cade as being
the sharpest tool in the shed. The man had proven to be crafty and
cunning but he was no Rhodes Scholar.

Cade had quickly ruled out the soldiers in
charge of processing and placing new arrivals in quarantine. Every
one of them had passed the sniff test. That they followed the wet
footsteps and took Francis into custody all but absolved them of
any guilt anyway. Cade scrutinized the newer arrivals first. He
interviewed the people who had entered Schriever with Francis and
quickly ruled them out. Next he focused on the survivors who had
entered Schriever during the initial days of the outbreak.

With Colonel Shrill’s help Cade had narrowed
down the number of civilians currently on base, excluding those
with military connections, to roughly two hundred.

“The refugees,” Shrill had said, “trickled in
at first. And then we experienced a huge surge coming between days
five and six of the Omega outbreak. Then there was a total dry
spell with less than ten of them trickling into Schriever between
days seven and the day our murderer arrived.”

Most of the survivors, having escaped the
violence in and around Colorado Springs twenty miles to the west of
Schriever, had shown up outside of the base with nothing but the
clothes on their backs. Unfortunately many of them were already
infected from bite wounds received during their flight to safety,
and sadly, those people were now buried in one of the many mass
graves outside of the wire.

With help from the base security personnel,
Shrill had started vetting the roughly two hundred civilians on
base, and since the government’s databases were no longer
accessible the work had been tedious.

Colonel Shrill then indicated it was all that
he could do just to organize the foraging parties alone. “People
have got to eat,” he’d said. His hands were more than full trying
to utilize the civilian volunteers based on their skills and
abilities, let alone determining who was trying to conceal their
real identity.

Cade returned to his billet as a new
twenty-four, complete with a whole new clean slate, started
counting down. That it was after midnight all but assured that his
family would be sleeping. He just hoped that when he got up to go
to the flight line for the pre-mission briefing Brook would also be
awake.

He inserted his key and then quietly opened
the outside door, taking every precaution
not
to wake the
slumbering duo inside. After the covert entry he tossed his beret
atop the metal table adjacent to the door, unknowingly sending the
handwritten note that Brook had left for him floating to the
floor.

Chapter 9

Outbreak - Day 11

Schriever AFB

Colorado Springs, Colorado

One hour before sunup and once again sleep
had proven elusive. Cade kept rehashing the Castle Rock mission in
his head. Was there any way he could have saved Mike? The simple
answer—no. Fate had intervened. “
When it’s your time, it’s your
time. The only thing you can do is prepare for the worst and hope
for the best.
” Those were Mike Desantos’ words, and Cade would
never forget them.

He ceased waiting for the Sandman and quietly
slipped out of bed. Except for the one good night of sleep since
leaving Portland, this current stretch of insomnia numbered in
double digits. He didn’t need a theoretical physicist like Stephen
Hawking to help him put two and two together to come to the
conclusion that this current stretch of sleep deprivation was
directly related to the walking dead. Hell, he had been able to
shut down immediately and power sleep for hours at a stretch in the
stifling heat of Iraq where bottled water nearly boiled. Or in the
bone numbing cold of the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan while
surrounded by fanatical killers who would cut off his head without
a second thought—no problem.

Yes, the common denominator was painfully
obvious. They were seemingly everywhere and there was nothing that
he could do about it.

So with his family still sound asleep in the
adjacent bunk, Cade took a seat on a wobbly Government Issue
folding chair, covered his bearded face with his hands and sat in
silence, jaw clenched, eyes closed. Then he began his pre-mission
ritual of stuffing the distractions of family and the state of the
world in which they were all struggling to survive, deep down
inside himself. For Cade, this mission was about righting a wrong.
Not just one wrong. Mike Desantos wasn’t the only casualty as a
direct result of Pug’s actions. The small percentage of the
population, not yet infected, might have eventually been saved when
Doctor Fuentes finally perfected his antidote. All that hope was
now forever lost. The doctor and all of his sticky notes, computer
files, thumb drives—everything lost in flames—thanks to Pug’s orgy
of murder and sabotage. Cade made no effort to lock away his
feelings concerning Mike’s murder. He wanted those emotions as
close to the surface as possible—accessible, fresh and crackling
through every nerve in his body—to be extinguished only when Mike’s
death was finally avenged.

Unfortunately, killing Pug would have to
wait. First and foremost on the agenda was finding the man
responsible for launching the human missile on his pointless
mission of death and destruction. One way or another, Cade thought,
Robert Christian was going to pay.

Shrugging away murderous thoughts, he took
one final glimpse at Brook and Raven. Asleep, Brook’s face was
bereft of the new granite set of her jaw. The old Brook stared at
him—the mommy Brook. Yes, Cade thought, with or without him she
would weather Omega just fine.

Raven, fully eclipsed behind her mom’s
blanket-clad form with her face buried between her mom’s shoulder
blades, still needed to be protected from Omega’s reality. Cade
supposed his daughter didn’t fully have a grasp of the odds that
were stacked against her. He shuddered at the thought of what the
future might look like for his Raven when she was grown. He closed
his mind to the staggering numbers the dead had on their side, and
the lopsided uphill battle humanity certainly faced. For now he had
a job to do.

Cade departed the Grayson quarters quietly
and took in a lungful of the crisp high desert air. Then he glanced
to the east, where the sky, as if ablaze, glowed like the inside of
an ironsmith’s forge. Finally he looked west where Pikes Peak and
the surrounding Rockies still huddled in black, not yet caressed by
the rising sun. He found it hard to believe surrounded by so much
beauty that just two nights ago nuclear devices had been detonated
less than fifty miles away.

Although the initial mushroom clouds hadn’t
been visible immediately following the two simultaneous explosions,
the debris thrown into the air lingered, and had been clearly
visible for hours. As it retreated eastward depositing radioactive
isotopes for tens of miles, it began to look like an aerial lava
flow.

Cade looked north and uttered a silent prayer
for any survivors caught downwind who had not only the walking dead
to worry about but also the slow painful death radiation poisoning
promised.

***

After a quick meal of sweet grits and four
cups of Schriever’s finest hot brown water, Cade used his captain’s
bars to requisition transportation. He then set out to collect the
operators that would be accompanying him to Jackson Hole.

Maddox and Lopez were up and ready when
Cade’s Cushman came to a halt outside their billet. Somehow their
internal clocks intuitively knew they were going down range.

Tice, on the other hand, took a little bit of
rousing to get up to speed.

Cade nixed the CIA man’s usual tropical
attire and ball cap. “Tactical chic is not good to go today,” he
told the spook before leaving him alone in the billet to get
squared away.

A few moments later Tice emerged, squinting
in the morning sun, tactical bag in one hand, M4 grasped in the
other. The sometimes impatient—often times surly—yet always
talkative CIA nuke specialist wasted no time before addressing
Cade. “Where are we going young Captain?”

“Best that we not discuss it in the open.
I’ll brief you when we get in the air.” Cade reached between his
feet and retrieved a padded black nylon bag big enough to
accommodate a seventeen pound bowling ball, then handed it over as
the CIA man took a seat.

“Don’t tell me... let me guess. We’re gonna
make some more big radioactive holes in terra firma... right?”

The Cushman started rolling. Cade was no
Desantos when it came to speed and cornering but he wasn’t Morgan
Freeman driving Miss Daisy either. He took his eyes off of the path
long enough to put everyone in peril and hollered to be heard over
the whirring rubber tires. “Just look in the bag and tell me you
know how to use the thing.”

Tice eyed the five thousand dollar digital
camera complete with Nikkor 200-400 mm telephoto zoom lens then
replied, “Nash briefed me. This was supposed to be used as a last
resort.”

“What’s your concern?” asked Cade.

Tice swallowed before answering. “I truly
hoped it wouldn’t come to this... because we’re
all
going to
take some major
rads
.” And as the word
rads
slipped
from his lips a ball of ice formed in his gut.

Cade stabbed the brake stopping short of the
flight line and jumped from the Cushman. He gripped his SCAR, then
handed Lopez, Maddox, and Tice their black kit bags before
retrieving his own. “Are you gentlemen good to go?” Cade asked.

Both Lopez and Maddox emitted a
“
Hooah
” as they stepped to the waiting Ghost Hawk.

“Are you sure you need me?” Tice countered.
“Because if you don’t... I can stay
right here
and up my rad
levels a little slower than you guys.” A crooked grin crossed the
CIA nuke specialist’s clean-shaven face.

“How about we drop you right on top of ground
zero? You can give us an up close assessment. Maybe even provide an
accurate body count. Or a
pieces of bodies
count,” Lopez
offered over his shoulder. Pushing the CIA man’s buttons was
becoming an equal opportunity, everyday occurrence for the
dwindling Delta unit.

Ignoring the ribbing, Tice replied, “I got my
Depends cinched tight and my Desert Eagle cocked and locked...
I’m good to go
.”

Cade approached the flight line still in awe
of the technological marvels sitting on the apron. After years of
riding around in the UH-60 Black Hawk, he wasn’t used to the Ghost
Hawk’s silhouette, let alone its capabilities, and was still taken
aback every time he saw one. The angular Jedi Rides crouched
menacingly on the tarmac, their matte black skin devouring the
light. Even static and powered down the GEN-3 helos looked like
they were moving along at Mach-one.