Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (15 page)

Expecting the former, Cade continued his visual sweep and
noted the handful of walking dead vectoring toward the cockpit from the east.

He grabbed his M4’s grip and got to his feet and saw that Lev
was nearly to the bird, the fuel hose spooled out dozens of feet behind him. Then,
finishing the revolution, Cade spotted another dozen Zs emerging from the right
side of the bowser. So he tapped Jamie on the shoulder, pointed towards the
first turns looping around the chopper’s nose, and said, “Do them first ... but
be careful not to hit our ride.” And as he sprinted away from her, he
registered a vague nod, a half-turn, then the rifle swinging up and snugging
tight to her shoulder.

Cade reached the bowser and, starting at the top, tapped its
rounded flank with the buttstock of his M4. The initial hollow report sounded
to the halfway point and remained unchanged another twelve inches past that when
finally his steady taps returned a heavy noise with a slight ringing to it.
Grimacing, he said, “I’ve got a third of a tank here, Duncan.”

“We better let her drink until she’s full.”

“Copy that,” replied Lev as he inserted the nozzle. “Commencing
hot refuel.”

Cade looked towards the tail rotor and saw the shotgun still
slung over Daymon’s shoulder. Saw the man tense and lash out with the machete
and drop a rail-thin female Z dangerously close to the whirring vertical rotor
disc. Then, as the upper half of the thing’s head spun a lazy arc away from the
blades, Cade looked away and over the fuel bowser’s hood and watched Jamie
walking rifle fire into the moaning throng.

He glanced at his Suunto and saw that two long minutes had
slipped into the past since the Black Hawk’s wheels hit the tarmac. The first
minute was burned surviving the sneak attack by the lurker in the grass. Another
one slipped by as he simultaneously checked the fuel level and watched Lev plug
the hose into the chopper.

The next three minutes would prove to be a hairball wrapped
inside of a shitstorm. While the fuel surged into the Black Hawk, he was on one
knee firing and reloading, burning through three magazines in the process. Two
minutes had passed and ninety rounds were down range by the time he looked away
from the fallen corpses of fifty or sixty formerly fellow Americans and heard Duncan
say over the comms, “Launching in one mike.”

He didn’t have to be told twice. Cade rose and trudged
through the tall grass. He tapped Jamie’s shoulder and said, “We’re done here,
now.” Unmoved, Jamie said nothing and continued firing. So, dodging hot spent
brass, Cade walked behind her from right-to-left and tapped her other shoulder.
Still no response. She kept on firing head high and the rotters kept crumpling
in vertical heaps. One. Two. Then three in rapid succession. Covering his mic,
Cade gripped her shoulder firmly and, bellowing near her ear, said, “Cease your
firing ...
now!
”

Her body went rigid at his touch. Then a second later she
raised the smoking carbine and flicked the selector to safe. Turning, she
flashed him the look a kid gives a parent when he or she doesn’t want to leave someplace
special like Disneyland or the Ringling Brothers Circus. Even before the
exchange, Cade could tell by her body language and the imagined English she was
putting on each shot that she was having a hell of a lot of fun killing them. To
Jamie this was her E-Ticket and invitation to share the center ring with the
lions all rolled up into one, and to Cade it was apparent that she was
visualizing Ian Bishop’s face on every one of the rotters.

After dragging Jamie’s mind from the fray, Cade watched
their six as he hustled alongside her on the way back to the Black Hawk where they
met Daymon at the open door just as Lev had finished the hot refuel and was
placing the nozzle on the tarmac.

Cade helped Jamie board ahead of Lev then backed up against
the vibrating chopper’s warm fuselage. He let Daymon pass in front of him then
sighted down the M4 and emptied the last eight rounds from the magazine into
the nearest walking corpses before clambering aboard, slightly winded and
stinking of gunpowder and death.

Daymon looped around in front of the cockpit and hauled open
the port side door, passed the shotgun back to a waiting hand and leapt in.
Wasting no time, he shrugged on his belt and plugged in his helmet. Finally,
out of breath, he looked at Duncan and said, “The tail is clear. But you’ve
only got about a ten-second buffer until the next wave.”

“Copy that,” said Duncan as the turbine whine reached a
crescendo and the grass on the helo’s starboard side flattened into a large
semicircle under the intense downdraft created by the four composite Nomex-and Kevlar-wrapped rotor blades.

Feeling the bird get light on the gear, Duncan pulled pitch
and applied a little pedal, spinning them a few degrees left as the ground
dropped away. Hovering there for a second, nose pointed due east, he surveyed the
carnage that hadn’t been fully evident from his vantage point on the ground.

Crushing strange forms into the grass, dozens of bodies with
limbs askew were arrayed like spokes on a wheel between the edge of the tarmac where
the helo had initially set down and the fuel bowser roughly twenty yards to the
south.

In smaller groups of twos and threes to packs numbering a
dozen or more, the zombies kept coming in from the east where Duncan presumed
there was another breach in the fence.

“Yep,” he said nudging the stick forward. “Good thing the
bowser was already half empty. ‘Cause I don’t think anybody with a pulse will
be setting down here again anytime soon.”

Cade removed his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow.
Took off his clear ballistic glasses and gloves and then rubbed both eyes with
the back of his hands.

“Here,” Jamie said. “Let me help you.” She reached across
the cabin and raked her fingers through both sideburns.

Bits and pieces of flesh and bone rained to the cabin floor,
the latter skittering away toward the starboard door as Duncan banked the helo
in that direction.

Seeing the morning sun swing past the port windows, Cade sat
back and thanked Jamie for saving his ass at the airport. He donned a flight
helmet, secured the chin strap, then more to prove a point than chastise, asked
her when she’d last disassembled and cleaned her carbine.

She shrugged, a blank look on her face.

He said, “The correct answer is: Immediately after I
finished shooting it the last time.”

Across the cabin Lev nodded his approval.

Daymon piped in. He said, “That’s why I kind of like the bow
and the blade. Little maintenance necessary.”

Lev smiled at that.

Both responses—verbal and visual—earned each of the meddlers
a middle finger from Jamie.

Lost in thoughts of Raven and Brook, Cade pulled his rucksack
near and rooted around and came out with a handful of shiny new 5.56 rounds. He
asked Jamie for her empty mags and quickly reloaded her three and then the four
he had emptied into the Zs. Finished, he snugged his four into their slots on
his chest, Velcroed them in place and, with Jamie watching his every move,
stuffed her mags into his cargo pockets.

“What the?” she mouthed.

Sitting back, he closed his eyes and said, “You’ll see.”

***

Forty-five minutes had gone by when Daymon said over the shipwide
comms, “We’re almost to the waypoint coordinates.”

Looking out his starboard side glass, Lev saw nothing but
reddish-orange earth, tumble weeds, and low scrub.

Jamie opened her eyes, lolled her head left and peered out
the opposite side. There she saw much of the same rushing by her window until
the helo neared the canyon rim and slowed considerably. Down below a river
snaked north to south through a nameless burg. And in the slow-flowing water
she saw scores of zombies sloshing around in the shallows, heads down and
stalking fish, she presumed. Still more creatures were trapped in the brush at
the river’s edge, their ashen limbs beating the water to a white froth.
Abutting the river on both sides was a triangle of green hemmed in by cliffs on
three sides: west, north, and east. On the periphery of town there were mostly single
family homes on treed lots. The businesses she could make out were clustered on
both sides of a two-block stretch in the center of town. For some reason most
of the homes near the main thoroughfare through town looked like they had been
imploded, with roofs mostly intact, but the walls reduced to splintered two by fours,
dislodged siding and powdery scraps of fractured drywall.

As if frozen mid-scatter from something or somebody, a
couple of dozen inert vehicles littered the narrow side streets. Some were opened
up like sardine tins and others were burned to metal and sitting on warped
rims. All of the cars and trucks and SUVs sported gaping holes in their upward-facing
sheet metal and had been stopped dead in their tracks heading north, away from
the distant Interstate.

West of the town center a giant U.S. flag flew over a steel
frame building full of windows and ringed on three sides by empty parking
spaces. On the street in front of the building with the flag that Jamie had
pegged for the town’s post office, a handful of decaying bodies lay in death
poses here and there, Rorschach-like lakes of blood dried to black ringing each
and every one of them.

She imagined death coming from above and realized the
destruction she was looking at was identical to what the rangers had wrought on
Bishop’s men and his lakeside redoubt.

At the lake there had been smoking wreckage of fleeing SUVs
with immolated bodies hanging from shattered windows and crispy getaway drivers
with their hands still clutching what remained of the steering wheels. And like
the destroyed houses here, dozens of camouflage-clad corpses had been sprawled outside
of the two lakeside houses that had burned down around whoever had been stupid
enough to mount a last stand from within them. All together what she saw then
and what she was looking at now left no doubt in her mind that highly trained soldiers
did this too. In the next instant an icy chill traced her spine and she wondered
how long she would last if she ever came up against a similar fighting force.

Just as the creatures below heard the helicopter and lifted
their gaze skyward, Jamie shoved the
what-ifs
from her mind and directed
her attention farther east where impressive rock formations running
perpendicular to the Black Hawk’s flight path rose up hundreds of feet from the
desert floor.

“Hate to have to raft that white water,” quipped Daymon.

Cade didn’t need to sneak a peek to know what the man was
referring to. Everything had been imprinted indelibly during the
thunder run
down the Interstate weeks earlier. Combat had a way of doing that to him. And knowing
firsthand from Beeson’s own generalized accounting of the operation that cleansed
Green River of the two-legged vermin who had poked the hornets’ nest one time
too many, he resumed his meditation. Unless his old mentor had softened with
age or the SF soldiers under his command had for some reason pulled their
punches—which based on previous experience, Cade deemed highly unlikely—everything
he’d already imagined in his mind’s eye would correlate perfectly with what the
others were seeing.

Certainly there had been no warning. No offer to surrender
would have been extended. It just wasn’t Beeson’s style. He’d earned the
reputation of being a straight shooter for two reasons. First, there was no
marksman with a better record than him during that first war in the desert. And
secondly, he didn’t pussyfoot around. Wrong him and he was shooting straight
for the legs to make you beg for mercy or straight for the head to put you down
for good. No winning of hearts and minds happened in Green River. Based on what
Cade had seen, and Beeson had warned prior, the city was a cesspool before the
failed attack on he and the Kids exposed the bandits’ real agenda. Therefore
Beeson’s boys would have snuck in under cover of night and, through direct
violence of action, and using night vision and silenced weapons to their
advantage, sniped the sentries and patrols first before using standoff weapons to
destroy any buildings deemed too dangerous to breach and/or clear on foot. No quarter
would have been given and no stone left unturned. Lastly, before leaving in a
flurry of beating rotor blades and roiling dust—exactly opposite a manner in
which they’d arrived—for reasons both tactical and to send a message to anyone
else who thought brutality and rape and stealing would be tolerated, the bodies
would be allowed to lay where they fell for the buzzards and every single one
of the bandit’s vehicles would be left sitting on rims with their tires slashed
or burned to the ground. Definitely the tactic Cade would have employed if he were
in charge. More dramatic than cleaning things up. Like a warning, but with a double
exclamation mark.

But he hadn’t been in control of anything for quite some
time. Hadn’t led men into harm’s way for nearly a month. Nor would he be in
control of much more going forward.

Duncan’s low, drawn-out whistling jogged Cade’s mind to the present.
Then the aviator commented about the
shit show
that had taken place on
the ground below. Reiterating that
he wouldn’t wish an ass whipping like
that on his worst enemy
.

Cade smiled but said nothing.

A tick later Duncan was business as usual and, in a skeptic’s
voice, wondering aloud if the GPS coordinates Urch inputted were accurate. Then
he said calmly, “Wheels down ... two minutes.”

Still preparing himself mentally for the next part of the
mission, Cade said nothing.

Sounding equal measures confused and exasperated, Daymon
said, “Two minutes?”

Hearing this, Cade opened his eyes and saw Lev unbuckling his
harness and readying his tactical helmet. A half-beat later, on the other side
of Lev, Jamie was out of her seatbelt and readying her ruck. On the latter half
of the same heartbeat she was gripping her M4 two-handed and looking a question
at Cade that said:
What about my magazines?