Crossbones (13 page)

Up yours!
Michael planted his hands again to thrust himself clear.
I can outrun her, and maybe she'll fall into—

Cold white fingers gripped his ankle from below and pulled. Michael let out a startled yelp and was ripped under into the inky depths.

January 12—Richmond

Someone was stroking his face, light fingertip touches against his cheek. Evan's eyelids fluttered, and he winced at the change from dark to light. He turned his head toward the touches, and now the fingertips brushed his nose. His head was heavy, and he opened his eyes wider. Two fingers tapped at his face, an index and a middle, both encrusted with blood. The middle finger was badly fractured, bent at a forty-five-degree angle with white bone sticking out of a torn knuckle.

Evan squeezed his eyes shut and then looked again, not sure how to put together what he was seeing. He realized he was still belted into the Seahawk's pilot's seat, but the angle was wrong, crooked, and he was hanging against his harness.
Suspended. Sideways.
He willed his brain to work. The cockpit was lying on its right side, and so he, in the left seat, was suspended over the co-pilot. Below him, a man in flight gear with a red-smeared helmet had been crushed against the starboard fuselage, the instrument panel folding inward and pinning his legs at the hips. The man's right arm was bent back
and lodged behind him, but his left arm was free, and it was this that reached up across the cockpit, fingertips barely able to touch Evan's cheek.

There was fresh blood on the left half of his friend's face, a growing splatter, and as he stared at it a drop of red hit the man's skin. Evan realized his nose was bleeding, dripping onto Gourd and driving the man crazy.
No, not a man, not anymore.

Half of Gourd's face had been caved in, but the left side remained intact, pale and bloodless, and a murky brown eye rolled in the socket, looking up at Evan. Gourd gasped, and his teeth came together with a sharp click.

Evan closed his eyes, and the broken finger trailed across his forehead.

What happened?
It came back quickly, the sight of the black ship hiding in the shadow of the bridge, a rear-facing gun firing at them, the Seahawk taking hits, going down, Evan unable to control it. He recalled an instant of seeing the ground rushing up at them, but he couldn't remember the impact.
Are we on fire?
His eyes snapped open.
No, just a smell of leaking fuel.

He wondered how long he had been hanging in this position. It was uncomfortable, and his face felt heavy from the blood collected there. With a groan he lifted his head, moving it away from the groping fingers. Gourd let out a frustrated whine.
How badly am I hurt?
Evan looked around, seeing that his side of the cockpit had not folded like Gourd's, and he could see his legs and wiggle his feet. His right arm was wedged against his side, the gloved hand caught on a harness buckle.
Good thing too, or else it would have been dangling down into Gourd's face.
He wiggled those fingers, found they worked, and pulled his arm loose. His left arm was free, but when he tried to move it, a sharp pain raced up its length.
Broken wrist.
Evan shifted as much as he could.
Back feels okay, neck sore but rotating, breathing fine. Tell me I got out of this with only a fractured wrist and a bloody nose.

But he wasn't out of this, he knew. He was still tangled in a downed chopper, hanging above a dead man, far from home. Drifters could be shuffling toward the crash site right now, he thought, but he was unable to see out of the spiderweb of fractured Plexiglas that had been the windscreen.

Another drop of blood smacked against Gourd's face, and the thing that had been his friend made a thick, huffing noise and pawed more frantically at Evan's face.

Think. What comes next?
He had to get out of the wreckage. An image of Vladimir came to him, a scene of the two of them sitting on crates in
Nimitz
's cavernous hangar deck, Navy zero-two parked in the background. Vlad loved his cigarettes, but he wouldn't smoke down here. The Russian was a fanatic about safety.

His mentor's voice spoke in Evan's head.
Listen to me carefully, Evanovich.
Evan always smiled when the man called him that. A Russian putting the -
ovich
at the end of a name made it a term of endearment.
You must understand that you are a
combat
pilot, and every time you leave this deck, no matter the reason, it is a
combat
mission. We are at war with the dead, yes? You must treat it as such. I will teach you combat survival. If your aircraft goes down over land, and you should somehow survive, you will be in enemy territory. This is no different than war in any other place. The enemy will seek to find your crash site, and this enemy does not take prisoners.

The Russian had delivered the message without his usual sarcasm, and Evan hadn't forgotten it. That talk was the beginning of Vlad's survival training, and he was both particular and impatient with the details. Evan was forced to know every piece of equipment he carried, why it was important and how it was to be used. Vlad drilled him relentlessly.

I need to get clear of the wreck and activate my locator beacon.
Evan unsnapped his helmet and took it off, hesitating for a moment before letting it drop onto his friend. Gourd grabbed it at once, pulled it to his mouth, and dragged his teeth across its surface, then
cast it aside and went back to reaching for Evan's face. Those fingertips were starting to annoy him now, and Evan batted the dead hand aside. It came right back.

“Cut it out!” he shouted. It felt better to be angry with Gourd. It covered up the sadness for his lost friend.

Evan was wearing a jumpsuit-style Nomex flight suit, designed as an antiexposure garment. On top of this was a waist-length, green flight jacket, and over it all was a bulky survival vest. How he had complained about this thing, covered in pouches and gear, adding weight and bulk and making him feel like he was wearing a fat suit.

Yes, it is a pain for your ass,
Vladimir had said.
And no matter
what
happens, you will never take it off. Not until your boots are back on the deck of this aircraft carrier.

First, he had to get out of his restraint harness. His left hand went to the pouch where the webbing cutter was secured, a flat, hooked tool made to slash through seat belts and parachute strands. His hand stopped as soon as he touched it.
What would happen if he cut himself free? Gravity would drop him right onto Gourd, and his co-pilot would put him in a headlock and chew off his ear.

He took a deep breath and reached his right hand beneath the vest, inside his flight jacket, until it found the butt of his Sig Sauer nine-millimeter.
I'm sorry, Gourd.
He pulled the weapon, batted the reaching arm aside once more, and fired a shot into Gourd's helmet. The arm dropped, and Gourd's head sagged to the side.

A moment later he had cut through the straps and was untangling himself from the co-pilot's seat and the twice-dead thing still belted into it. A glance into the rear troop compartment showed that it had been torn in half and flattened, leaving no exit that way. Instead he kicked out the broken windscreen in front of the co-pilot and climbed out, gripping his pistol and holding his broken wrist close to his body. It was throbbing, and the jolt of falling onto Gourd hadn't made it better.

Hiroshima.
That was the word that came to mind as Evan stood beside the Seahawk's wreckage and looked around. He remembered the photographs from textbooks in school: miles of destruction, piles of blackened rubble, and the burned trunk of an occasional tree. Everything was covered in black ash. He saw twisted metal skeletons that might have been fuel tanks or refinery structures, and to his right was a line of tanker cars that had detonated, their remaining carriages and wheels seared right to the rails. The only way he could tell this had been an industrial area in California was because it was marked as such on his map. Otherwise he might have been standing at the Hiroshima nuclear bomb detonation site on August 6, 1945.

Except then, the charcoal corpses had been frozen in death poses. Here, they were up and walking.

Evan saw them, only two at first and some distance off, but then he spotted three more moving in from the left, about a hundred yards off. They were hairless, sexless things without faces, crisped black and moving stiffly, pieces flaking off their bodies with each step. Why they didn't simply crumble to ash, Evan didn't know, but he sensed that no matter their condition, they would still be able to bite somehow, could still infect.

He withdrew a cell-phone-sized device in a hard, yellow plastic casing from a pouch on his survival vest, folded out the rubber antenna, and flipped the Activate switch. A blinking red light appeared on its face, and he tucked it back into the pouch, antenna protruding. The plastic-coated map showing their flight plan was still strapped to his right thigh, and he pulled it off, deciding his probable location. There, just north of the bridge and to the east, above Interstate 580, was Richmond's refinery and industrial sprawl.
Nimitz
was located twenty miles south, across the East Bay. He pulled a small compass from another pocket and took his bearings. The elevated concrete span of I-580 was to his south, and that would be his first waypoint.

A hollow moaning drifted across the charred terrain.

Holding his Sig and still cradling his wounded wrist, Evan looked back inside the chopper. Most of the aircraft had been torn away on impact and was nothing more than pieces scattered in who knew what direction. He wanted Gourd's M4, and the man's pack that would contain bottled water and snacks. He wanted the helicopter's first-aid kit. He found none of it.

Evan glanced at the approaching dead. There were no others in sight, but that could change. Ripping open another pouch on his vest, Evan pulled out a rolled length of fluorescent orange plastic, a signaling device that a Navy flier downed in water would use to show his position, clipping one end to his flotation vest and streaming the rest out across the surface. Using the survival knife attached to the vest's right shoulder, he cut a sufficient length of streamer and fashioned a sling for his broken wrist. The pressure came off at once, and he sighed.

Time to get moving.

He headed south, stepping carefully over cracked brick and cinder block as his boots kicked up a cloud of ash. A broken wrist he could deal with, but a broken ankle would be a death sentence.

Evan stopped suddenly, feeling foolish, and reached for the vest pouch containing his combat survival radio. Vlad would have cursed him blue for forgetting.

The flap was open, the pouch empty.

It had been there!
He remembered the weight. Evan turned back toward the Seahawk's fuselage, thinking it must have popped out during the crash. The nearest trio of drifters was less than fifty yards away.
Still time.
Back at the cockpit, he climbed through the open windscreen once more and started searching. It was difficult with only one hand, and not being able to see out the windows made him nervous. Every heartbeat was like the tick of a clock.

He looked in the space where his legs had been, under the pilot's seat, all around the dead co-pilot. Then he stared at where the
instrument panel had collapsed, crushing Gourd's legs and hips into its hollow. If the radio had bounced in there, then it was gone. He'd need power tools just to excavate the corpse enough to check, and he had neither the equipment nor the time. Evan was turning away when he stopped, wanting to scream at his own stupidity. Gourd had a vest too. He reached for the pouch, but saw that it, along with most of the man's right side, had been crushed and pinned under metal, including the place where Gourd's survival radio would have been.

Evan closed his eyes and took deep breaths, forcing himself to think. He still had time. Gourd wore a sidearm, and—no, he wore it on his right hip, and that was pinned as well. There would be other things he could use, though, and he reached for more pouch flaps.

A growl came from outside, and Evan scrambled back through the opening, bringing up the Sig. The trio was close now, but another creature covered in soot was limping along the side of the Seahawk. The charred skin of its face was peeled back to reveal gray bone and teeth, empty eye sockets, and something black and wet lurking behind them. It lunged. Evan stumbled backward and fell, the creature landing atop his legs, its skeletal fingers clawing at his groin. The teeth sank into his thigh—

—and bit into something metal.

Evan screamed and shoved the Sig against the top of its skull, pulling the trigger. The head disintegrated in pieces of bone and a tar-like substance that spattered across the front of the chopper.

Are those its brains?
Evan wanted to vomit.

A rustling noise came from his right, and Evan looked to see that not ten feet away, a black ball of a head was rising from the cinders, narrow shoulders following, nearly skeletal arms levering it out of the black powder. Teeth clicked as it tried to stand, and beyond it two more lifted themselves out of their camouflage, cinders sliding off their backs and heads.

Oh, Christ, they're under the ash.

He scrambled to his feet and started running south, now far less worried about a twisted or broken ankle, searching the ground ahead of him for hidden shapes. Behind him the trio and pair shifted direction to follow the running shape. The creatures climbing out of the ash did the same.

Evan forced himself to slow to a brisk walk and not to give in to panic, knowing even at that pace he was still faster than the opposition behind him. After a few minutes his breathing and heartbeat began to settle, and he suddenly realized that this was the first time he had been alone since the first two weeks of outbreak last summer. Since then he'd always been surrounded by people who cared about him. There had been terror, and many times he'd been convinced he was about to die, but he had known he wouldn't die alone. There would be someone there to mark his passing and ensure he didn't come back as something terrible. If he was pulled down by the dead out here in this wasteland, no one would ever know. Did they know he had crashed? If so, he might be dead to them already.