LZR-1143: Redemption (2 page)

TWO

It was a long walk to the General’s office, and my mind was racing.

They had found an airplane and a crew and, more importantly, a runway. That was all that mattered. A strip of blasted concrete long enough to lift off in an airplane that had enough fuel to reach the secure airfield in Seattle. That was it. That was all we needed.

Beside me, Ky whistled as she absently tossed Romeo the ball, heedless of the serious people in tactical gear she was passing. Kate walked slightly ahead, her voice soft and concerned, voicing the questions I had let lie.

“I wonder which airfield it is. It couldn’t be National, we would have heard about it. Andrews has no possibility of being secure—it’s just chain link and barbed wire. There are corpses all over the field, we saw the pictures. And BWI is a steaming mess. Wreckage everywhere.”

She trailed off, lost in thought.

I just wanted a ride. At this point, I didn’t care who it was with. I’d ride naked on a pissed off porcupine with jock itch and a sore tooth if it got me to Seattle.

We reached the General’s deceptively unassuming office and Kate grabbed Ky’s arm as she tried to enter first. The teenager’s face was passive and cloyingly surprised, as if unaware of why she had been stopped.

“You know what we discussed,” Kate said, and I nodded as sternly as I could without cracking a smile. Ky’s eyes remained large and innocent.

“What? I just want to listen,” she argued, but Kate was on to the scheme.

“Yeah, I’ve heard it before. You’re not going with us, and you know it. Take a walk and we’ll meet you for lunch.”

Ky’s mild manner evaporated instantly, and her voice took on an edge.

“And I told
you
, I’m old enough. You’re not my parents, and you can’t tell me what to do. These assholes don’t care about me, and you’re going to leave me here to rot? Surrounded by millions of these pus-filled gas bags?” Kate’s grip was solid, and Ky gave up, shaking off Kate’s hold and backing out into the hallway.

“Fine, I’ll skip the meeting,” she said, voice dripping with acid as she started down the hall.

“But you can’t keep me from coming. I’ll find a way.” Her last sentence drifted back as she turned the corner and out of sight, the stubby tail of her constant companion disappearing with her.

Kate looked at me and I rubbed my eyes, groaning slightly.

“She’s just a kid,” I said, not knowing what else to offer. I had never had kids, never been around kids, never even changed a diaper. I didn’t have anything to offer. Those were my pearls of wisdom. I was on empty.

“She’s going to get herself hurt,” said Kate sharply, passing me into the office as the General’s aide reached the doorway.

“He’s ready for you now,” said the small officious man, quick with his motions and eager to shut the door behind us.

“Good, well… at ease, then,” I said smartly, clapping the man on the shoulder and walking toward the inner office, a space filled with maps and charts laid neatly across every square inch of horizontal space. Circles and squares and highlighters and pens and every damn cartographic tool known to man was strewn across the precisely laid out papers, and the man standing over the tables looked tired. His movements were slow, but precise, and he gestured to us to join him at the table, as he flipped a large map over and pointed at a red outline, drawn jaggedly around a piece of land surrounded by a river on three sides, and bearing the unmistakable angled runways of a large airport.

National airport.

Two miles away.

This couldn’t be it.

“This is it,” he said wearily, sitting down heavily in a thick wooden chair. His hand pointed unerringly at the map. “This is the solution.”

Those things were everywhere at National. We had been watching them for weeks, hoping that they’d clear.

Impossible.

My cheeks reddened as my blood pressure shot up.

I stared at him, then the map. I couldn’t control my anger and frustration.

“Are you telling me that we’ve been sitting on our hands with our thumbs up our asses to the second knuckle for three weeks only to use the runway—the only runway in the whole wide, zombie-ridden world, I might add, that we can see from the
bloody roof
? That we are going to somehow take the time and spend the manpower to retake the whole damn airport,
now
? How the hell long is that going to take? A month?”

He just stared as I felt Kate take my arm gently.

“No, Mr. McKnight,” he said, emphasizing the “Mister” as if emphasizing who was in control. “I’m not telling you that we will be retaking the airport. I just said we’d be using the runway. Now, do I have your kind permission to explain what the hell we’re doing, or would you like to go off half-cocked and whole-assed again? Because I have better things to do with my time.”

I shook my head slowly and gestured to the map, as if giving him permission. My ears were ringing with the sudden surge of emotion.

I really needed to examine my head. The anger issues were starting to pop up when my blood pressure rose.

He stared at me for several long seconds before looking back at the map. “We can’t retake anything this close to the Pentagon, and we can’t retake anything as far as Dulles, BWI, or Andrews. We can’t airlift enough resources to make a stand, and we can’t get through millions of these things outside our gates. Our fighter-bombers and helos are all staging from Navy vessels and some secure short runways in the mountains, and they can support our ground troops, but they can’t project the force we need to retake territory. Not here, not in an urban environment. The short story is that we’re not taking D.C. back for a long while. So. How do we get anyone out of here on a heavy lift?”

Air whistled through the vents in the ceiling, ruffling the pages of the paper maps. A highlighter, disturbed by the movement, rolled slowly across the closest map until the General’s hand came down on it. He continued.

“We could try to evac you on a helo, but we’ve talked about this. The fuel needed to get you to a secure long runway is prohibitive. We just don’t control anything close enough. We could try a series of short hops to get you to the closest runway, but we don’t control sufficient fuel reserves at the necessary intervals. And we can get a plane here with enough gas to get you to Seattle, but we can’t get you to the plane. That about sums it up, right?”

We nodded, having heard this story before.

I hoped the ending was going to be new today, because the last few iterations had been for shit.

“So we’re going to use their own instincts against them. We’ve been using sonic buoys on a trial run in certain cities in the Midwest, trying to clear out big hordes that mass up. We drop the buoys into an empty space, and wait for them to cluster. Then we drop some napalm and ordnance and wait for the bonfire. High explosives are acceptable but slow, but napalm… that burns nicely. Coats the little shits in high temperature crap until they melt to the ground.”

“We’re going to try to lure the horde away from the Pentagon? How are we going to get enough napalm to burn more than a million of them? And how does that help us get on an airplane?” I stared at the map, wondering at how close the runway actually was. It looked closer than a mile from where I stood in that moment. Five minutes at a dead run.

No pun intended.

Kate removed her hand from my arm and leaned forward, head bent over the map.

“We’re not going to burn them,” said Kate softly. “We’re going to herd them.”

The General slowly raised his hand to his face and smiled as he placed his finger next to his nose.

“That, Doctor, is the plan.”

THREE

Drones.

Synonymous before the apocalypse for everything that was wrong with the modern world. Autonomous killing. Faceless violence. Detached elimination of life from an isolated control room.

All true.

But now, those mindless little bastards had a real use: herding zombies.

“There are too many of them to fight through, you know that,” he rose and walked around the table, looking at me and then at Kate. “Bombs just damage them, and we don’t have enough bullets for the job. Napalm would probably set the actual runway on fire, and we can’t risk that. But noise. Noise still makes them jump.”

I stared at the dotted lines on the map, taking in the scene.

“Helos attract them. Planes attract them. They know—they have learned, in some primal way—that these noises are like a dinner bell. They herd together, and they attack. In the kind of numbers we’re dealing with out there… well, suffice to say, that’s a slight fucking problem.”

“But how are we going to hide the noise of a…” I stopped, realizing I didn’t know what kind of plane we would use.

“We’re going to use an AC-130—not traditional for a cargo run, but it’s the best option we have right now. They’re good on short runways, and have some firepower on board for contingencies.”

“But silent they ain’t,” I said.

He nodded.

“We’re going to bank on those shambling sacks of meat being slower than an airplane. There are several smaller herds apart from the one outside. One of them is at National, and that’s the one we’re focusing on. We’re going to push them away from the runway using multiple drones, all fitted with loudspeakers and amplifiers; they’re going to be projecting human sounds—babies crying, laughter, music, and old political ads—and fly slowly from east to west. They loop out of sight, then do it again. We’re going to push them from National as far west as we can get them, then we’re going to land the plane low and fast from the east. You’re going to leave the Pentagon one hour prior to landing by helo, where you’ll be dropped here,” he pointed to a red circle on the map—a location on the southern tip of a golf course that had been part of the Tidal Basin National Park.

“We have a coastie crew in a quiet inflatable craft that will pick you up from the LZ and take you by boat to the end of the runway. You will make your way to the opposite end of the runway with sniper support from a crew that will be placed on the control tower by helo 12 hours before the op, and you will wait for your ride. Timing will be crucial, but we believe this is our best option. The AC-130 operators are the best in the business, and they have made these types of quick runs repeatedly in Afghanistan and Iraq.” He leaned back, eyes serious.

“But you will encounter resistance on the tarmac. We know from observing these things that they don’t all follow the herds. Some of them just linger, or work in smaller groups. You will need to be prepared.”

I laughed, despite myself.

“Yeah, general. All due respect, but we’ve had some practice. We’ll be fine. I assume the helo to boat exercise is about the noise, right? If we dropped into National on a helo, the drones wouldn’t pull the zeds away. They would come right back. If we fly north away from the building, double back to the island, and then sneak up on the runway, we avoid that problem. Right?” I asked, turning to the General.

He nodded curtly.

“But we know there are more herds out there, what about those? I know the ones here and at National are the closest, but we ran into several more in the District and in Maryland. Do we know there aren’t any in the park?”

He pointed at the map again, pinpointing a location near Andrews, another near Route 50, and yet another in the northern suburbs of the District.

“We get satellite recon every 95 minutes in these coordinates. Right now, these are the largest groups in the area, and they are at minimum safe distances. We’ll continue to monitor until the departure time, but right now we look good. But remember, we don’t have any reliable intel on these things and their relationship with water. We know it doesn’t kill ‘em, but we don’t know how much of a barrier it is. It’ll slow ‘em, that much we know. So we go with this plan unless we have evidence to the contrary.”

His face stayed serious, and he looked to Kate and back to me.

“Any questions?”

Kate’s eyes were intent and she paused. “General, what’s on the other end of this ride? In Seattle, I mean. How are we doing out there?”

He nodded once and leaned over the table, searching for another set of maps.

“Our communication has been pretty consistent with the Western Army—sorry, that’s what we’re divided into for simplicity’s sake. We’re Eastern division, Southern division is working out of Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, and Northern division is in Michigan. Florida and everything south of Atlanta is a write off right now. We tried to organize a barricade strategy in those areas, using I-10 as a makeshift wall, but it was too much. The creatures out of Atlanta and Jacksonville took it down fast. But we have really solid pockets of military, militia and civilian resistance in the lower population centers in the Midwest and Plains states. The President is currently working out of NORAD, and she’s doing a damn lick of great work out there. We thought we were lost for a few weeks, but we’re getting there. And this vaccine is going to put us over the top.” He blinked, realizing he had digressed.

“I’m sorry. Western command is working from SeaTac, so we know we don’t have a problem with landing sites. The bulk of the forces from Fort Lewis that were called into Seattle for suppression withdrew into SeaTac, and some fast-thinking Corps of Engineers folks and Seabees started work immediately after the outbreak moving cargo containers from the port into the airport. They realized really damn quickly that security was going to be a heavy lift after the infection got moving, and they managed to put up a damn good wall of solid steel within sixteen hours. Took over a highway, secured the airport and started working. There are now more than thirty thousand troops on the ground, from as far as California, Idaho and Canada. They have a fully operational runway, resupply and ammo dump, and helo base, and they are effectively moving heavy armor in the area. You will arrive at SeaTac and work your way into the city from there.”

I nodded, impressed. The type of losses that they must have sustained in setting a containment perimeter around the airport must have been massive. But they were now sitting secure in their own fortress of metal boxes. I liked it. It was creative. But more importantly, it was effective.

“Have we heard anything more from the facility at UW? Any intel at all?”

There was a brief silence, and he shook his head.

“Only thing we have is aerial surveillance that indicates that the campus is overrun. But we knew that. The facility is underground. It’s not a DOD facility, though, so we didn’t equip the comms hardware, just the electronic materials in their office. That’s why they’re out. It was a civilian shop, and they spared no expense on security and containment measures to ensure no diseases got out and no thieves got in. But they stuck their commo equipment on the roof and when that got knocked out, and the power and phone hard lines were cut, they were on their own.”

“We’ve heard this before,” I said to Kate, putting my hand on her arm as she stared toward the interior windows looking out into the inner courtyard. A single tree, leafless and untended, flinched briefly in a breeze.

We had heard the analysis before. No contact with the Doctor or his people since the outage. He had intel on the vaccine, and he was working toward a solution. Then, the comms went down.

Since the last time they talked to him, he could have left.

He could have died.

He could still be walking around that hospital.

“When do we leave?” asked Kate, leaning forward in anticipation. I knew she was ready to go. This was her ride to her daughter. She wouldn’t miss the flight. She would be on that airplane or she would die trying.

He gestured to his aide, who brought him a packet of paperwork. “We’re going under cover of darkness. The sniper team lifts off tomorrow morning, and you are in the air at twenty thirty-five tomorrow night.”

He handed us the thick packets of information. Maps, codes, and briefing materials peaked out from the heavy pile of paper.

Despite my eagerness, I was still somewhat shocked that it was happening so fast. It gave us a day to prepare and supply and try to find some ropes that were strong enough to tie down the precocious kid and her dog.

“See Captain Williams here before you leave, and he’ll give you a schedule for the next thirty-six hours. You will have a few meetings to hash out the details, and the flight crew will want to talk to you. The Coasties will rendezvous with you from one of their ships in the river, and we’ll make sure you’re at the coordinates on time.” He turned away and then snapped his fingers suddenly, as if remembering something.

“One more thing. We have some gear for you folks that I think you’ll appreciate. We’ve been working up some prototype body armor for our new… tactical environment, if you will. Just finished up the first batch. I think Captain Williams will see you to the supply locker to try it on.” He smiled slightly and turned around to continue working.

“I think you’ll find that it is an appropriate upgrade to a Navy flight suit or jeans and a tee shirt.”

Kate shot me a curious glance as she passed by, grabbing my hand as she led me to the hallway.

“Finally,” she breathed heavily, as we fell in line behind Williams, who moved quickly, as if eager to be rid of us. I stared at his rigid back, absently wondering if he had actually fought any of these things—if any of these people had fought any of these things.

“I know. True military shit, right? Wait then hurry up. What the hell are we going to tell Ky? Kid’s gonna go ape when she finds out we’re gettin’ out of Dodge tomorrow for parts unknown.”

I worried suddenly about her—and the dog, I guess—and an absurd thought briefly touched my mind, but I discarded it just as quickly. There was no place for a kid where we were going. I didn’t kid myself into thinking we were destined for long lives, especially if they couldn’t sort out the nasty cocktail in our blood, and it wasn’t the kind of mission you took a young girl on—even one as hardened as Ky.

“She’ll understand. Eventually.” Kate seemed unconvinced, and I didn’t argue the point. There was no good way to deal with it.

I was all for ignoring problems. That had never ended poorly, ever, right?

Williams stopped suddenly in front of a thick interior door and swiped a card through a small box on the doorframe. Punching in a quick numerical code, he waited for the short chirp of electronic permission before pulling the heavy door inward and we followed him into a long, narrow room lined with racks, hooks and storage bins. Weapons lined one side of the room, but it was the clothing hanging in front of us that got our attention.

Kate’s smile was large, and genuine.

She was an excited schoolgirl with a new Trapper Keeper in one hand and a bottle of hard cider in the other.

I had to admit. She had her reasons.