A Time to Die (20 page)

The water was working, so he needed to deal with the possibility that he was covered in fallout. He returned to the showers, ignoring the slaughter and going to the other end. The hot water came out more warm than hot, but he didn’t care. He stripped out of his Nomex flight suit and hosed it down, watching gray dirt flow out of it. Then he washing himself head to toe, scrubbing every nook and cranny. There was some soap in a dispenser and shampoo as well. He washed three times before the water began to go completely cold. He washed his suit a second time then rang it out as best as he could before putting it back on.

Still wet of course, he returned to the kitchen and fished through the still warmer fridge. He found some kind of a casserole in the back and gave it the sniff test. It smelled okay, some kind of potato salad with pasta. He found a spoon and tried it. There was no meat, but it did have beans. It tasted fine so he ate a bowl of it, then went back to work.

Retrieving his crowbar, he went to the bathroom. Of the four bodies there, two hadn’t been firemen. He could see under the other bodies that they wore uniforms though. He used the bar to flip one of the other bodies off the pile. As the man rolled away, intestines spilled out like a bowl of noodles. He felt the casserole threatening to come back up and clamped down on his self-control. “That’s about enough of that, Mister!” he growled at himself.

The body out of the way he saw what he’d thought underneath. The other two were police, and they were in combat uniforms. “Bingo,” he said and pulled the first one out of the pile. His equipment belt was around his waist, service weapon still in place. A Beretta 92F, pretty much identical to the US military standard issue. No surprise since the US supplied much of the Mexican military with equipment. A magazine pouch held four extra mags. He checked them (all full) and the gun (same), then took the belt off.

He had to swallow and grit his teeth, reaching through the cold intestines to undo the belt. Then he was forced to wipe away gore to get it out of the belt loops. Breathing hard he retreated back to the shower and washed off his prize, keeping the gun clear of the water.

He adjusted the holster and strapped it on. The gun and magazines’ weight felt good around his waist. Crazies, sick nut jobs, whatever. He was the guy with the gun. Going back once more to the shower, he examined the other officer. His belt was similar, and thankfully gore free. He’s had half his neck chewed off instead. However, no gun in this case. Andrew took the four backup mags and wondered where the gun was. Come to think of it, he’d only found one scene of bloody ambush. Where had all these people been killed? And how had that one fireman managed to carry out a rampage of this magnitude?

Most of the station was as dark as a tomb. If he was going to play zombie hunter in the dark, he was using his flashlight. He didn’t like the two handed grip, on holding the flashlight under the gun with the other holding the gun. It never felt natural to him. Instead he scrounged in the equipment room until he found some duct tape and improvised a mount. It probably wouldn’t work for more than a few shots, but it was better than nothing. With the light more or less aiming in his sight picture, Andrew went back to searching with more confidence.

He quickly found the main attack point, and more. He came to a door he hadn’t opened and pulled it open. A police officer spun around, eyes wide in the light of Andrew’s gun. “Graaaah!” he yelled and lunged for Andrew.

“Shit!” Andrew barked and pulled the trigger, double actioning the automatic. The muzzle blast was a cannon’s roar in the confined space of the entry foyer of the firehouse. It was a perfect ambush point for anyone showing up for duty. The round caught the cop in the upper left shoulder, rocking him back and spraying the already blood soaked walls with a fresh coat.

“Get on the ground!” Andrew yelled, his training taking control. The cop just shook his head, seemingly oblivious to the trauma, and lunged, grabbing Andrew with his still working right hand and pulling him closer, jaws snapping. Andrew backpedaled, gun pinned between the cop and himself, and came up hard against the back wall of the hallway, his head smacking brick and setting off lights in the back of his eyes. Teeth were reaching for his face. Andrew pulled the trigger.

The hollow point round entered the officer’s chest just under the sternum, traveled upwards as it expanded, and blew out the back just between his second and third thoracic vertebrae, and took most of his heart with it. He grunted and let go, falling like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Switches and timers,” Andrew panted as he aimed the gun at the obviously dead cop. The brain and the heart were switches. Hit them and you turned the guy off. Other vital organs, large arteries were timers. It would kill, but they took time.

Andrew covered him for a minute as he stopped twitching, then gave him a kick in the head. When he was sure the guy was dead, he went around him and looked at where he’d been hiding. A perfect ambush spot all right. Maybe four meters by three, a small window on one side where a receptionist would sign you in. The cop had been standing to the side of the front door, waiting for fresh meat. He put the scenario together in his head.

First fireman turned, or whatever you called it. Then this first cop showed up. Looking at his body, Andrew could see several wounds. Bites are his arms. He’d fought off the fireman and hid, then he himself went over and joined in. As firemen arrived they were ambushed and dragged away for… what? Safekeeping? Then more cops showed up, the two he’d found in the shower. One of them had gotten his gun out. It was lying on the floor in the blood. Andrew picked it up and checked. Three rounds fired. Must have all been misses. The foyer was even more of a blood bath than the shower had been. Strangely, it didn’t bother him nearly as much.

Anyway, it was what was on the cop he’d just shot that interested him the most. He rolled the body over, still leery of those teeth, and checked out what he had on his back. A US-manufactured M-16 assault rifle. He got the sling off the man and examined it. An old A1 model with the handle on top and fixed rear stock. Not nearly as versatile as the A3 uppers with their picatinny rails and adjustable stocks, but still some serious firepower. His vest held six full twenty-round magazines, and there was one in the gun. All completely full.

He liberated the man of his vest. There was a couple holes in it and blood so he returned to the shower, removed the mags, and gave it the treatment. It seemed to him the water pressure was decreasing. Cleaned and wrung out, he donned the vest and adjusted it for size. Even with the multiple punctures, it remained serviceable. He loaded the rifle, locked it, and slung it. He’d have to look for a one-point harness instead of the shoulder sling.

Next he went back and examined the 92F in the blood on the floor, weighing his options. He decided finally to use tongs from the kitchen to get it and clean it in the sink. The dish soap worked just fine. Then he found some light machine oil in the equipment room, stripped and oiled it, then reassembled. Just like the other cops, the one he’d shot had four extra mags.

“Okay,” he said after he found a backpack in the equipment room, loaded all but four of the pistol mags into it and the extra two pistols. He stopped in the kitchen and threw in some food. Several cans of red beans with rice, canned chicken, tuna, and three packs of instant taco mix he found. The pack weighed about twenty-five pounds. If he’d had a Molle pack he would have taken double that, but this was a simple nylon job so he stopped there.

Returning to the bay he began to search around until he found a locker that held all the trucks keys. He went down the line of vehicles, weighing options until he settled on a utility truck that somewhat resembled a Humvee. “You stick with the familiar,” he said to the empty bay. The firefighter heard him and banged on the door some more.

Andrew went to the truck, #002, with the appropriate keys and jumped in. North American trucks were all pretty much the same. Keys in the ignition, turn to start, and it roared to life with a belch of diesel fumes. Then he remembered the door. “It’s always something,” he said.

There had to be a manual release, he figured. No way would the powered door open. He leaned his head out and examined the door. Several placards, all in Spanish, some with exclamation points and stuff all explained what he needed to do. He rolled his eyes, got back in, closed the door, dropped it in drive, and stomped on the gas.

The truck roared and, in a squeal of tire on polished concrete, leaped forward. He braced against the steering wheel, ready for a monumental impact. He’d just figured, what the fuck? If the truck was fucked up by the door, there were three more fire trucks and an ambulance. He was getting out of here one way or another. The door was one-sixteenth inch corrugated steel against three tons of truck that got up to fifteen miles per hour before hitting the door. After the barest hesitation, the door tore free from its wheeled track and peeled away like an orange skin.

“That was entirely too much fun,” he said as the truck roared down the short driveway to the tarmac. He turned right and headed for the A380. In the rear view mirror he could see the fireman lopping along after him as if he’d just stolen his car.

It took less than a minute to reach the plane. Nothing had changed. He drove under the wing, the truck designed to do just that, and came to a stop by the after access door. On the back of his truck were a number of ladders. Andrew released the clamps that held one in place and grunted at how heavy it was as he maneuvered it over next to the plane. A rope mechanism extended it up to twenty-five feet, more than enough to reach the hatch. But once it was in place he stopped. There was something else he needed to do first.

The firefighter was grunting and howling only a couple dozen meters away. He’d followed him all the way down the field. Andrew unslung the M-16, flipped the selector to single shot, and took aim. Crack! The 5.56mm round took the top off the firefighters’ head and he crashed face first, skidding to a halt just short of the firetruck. Flipping the gun back on safe, Andrew laid it across the hood of the firetruck and went back to the plane. In the back of his mind he marveled at how easy that was. He knew he’d killed before. Dozens? Hundreds? You dropped a JDAM on a building full of hajji, who knew how many went splat. But that was only the second man he’d ever shot. It was getting easier with each trigger pull.

He climbed the ladder and examined the latch. It was a complicated thing. Push here, extract handle, and turn counter clockwise. Caution, stay clear! He made sure the ladder was below of edge of the access, went down enough, and stretched up to release the handle.

There was a thump of locks releasing them a mechanical whine as motors began activating the door. He was glad he’d read the instructions, the door came up and out surprisingly fast. As the morning light shown into the galley service area, the first thing he saw was Dr. Abraham White turning to look at him.

“Hey Doc, are you—”

The doctor snarled at him, his face covered in blood and eyes wild. “Shit!” Andrew said and began to descend the ladder as quickly as he could. The good doctor took two steps and jumped down, arms outstretched, and landed roughly on Andrew’s shoulder, hands scrabbling at his neck but only managing to tangle in the ammo vest.

“Fuck,” Andrew cursed from the force of the impact as the doctor pivoted over him and continued downwards. But his hands were tangled in Andrew’s vest, and gravity was a bitch. Andrew threw himself forward against the ladder, but it wasn’t nearly enough angle.

“SHIT!” he screamed as the combined weight of the two men pulled them back, ladder and all, and hinged them down towards the ground.

He knew this wouldn’t be good. The doctor was trying to spin around and get at him. Andrew concentrated on holding onto the ladder and keeping the doctor behind him. The human body doesn’t make as good of a cushion for a violent impact as cartoons would have had you believe. The combined impact was a hammer blow to Andrew’s back, and his head snapped back to strike the ground. They hit and rebounded, rolling in a tangle of limbs and ladder for a couple meters. It was the second time Andrew had been banged in the back of the head in as many hours, and he was getting damned tired of it.

Somehow he ended up face down, on top of the ladder. One arm was under the ladder, which hurt like a mother fucker, and he was afraid his left wrist was broken. Worse, his right foot was stuck through the rungs of the ladder as well. “Well, this sucks,” he said and tried to extricate himself.

“Slaaark,” someone groaned. His head came around, eyes wide. The good doctor had also survived. He was only a meter away, and in somewhat worse condition. Blood leaked from his mouth and it looked like one eye had been gouged out somehow, but he was on hands and knees, and apparently hungry. “Ahhhhgr!” he said when his good eye spotted Andrew.

“Not my day,” he said as he struggled again to get out of the insane game of zombie twister he found himself in. Left arm ladder, right hand gun. Giving up on extracting his leg, he clawed at the holster, one of those ludicrous flap types. He unsnapped it and fumbled for the gun, just as the good doctor grabbed his free leg like it was a turkey drumstick and bit down.

Chapter 18

Sunday, April 22

Afternoon

Kathy Clifford had tried to tag along with the military in their westward retreat for a time. But after the third time soldiers on foot, their trucks out of fuel, tried to appropriate her ATV, she had abandoned that plan. Besides, when she’d last stopped to refuel and looked back to the east there was a dust cloud from north to south as far as she could see. She didn’t know what it was, only that the military was running from it. When soldiers ran, you ran too.

Before she lost her ATV and trailer she turned north the first opportunity she found. She knew from her GPS that she was many miles from where she’d come south originally. It didn’t matter, time was running out. The road was dirt but seemed well worn. As she looked back as she turned a truck full of soldiers was passing, its engine sounding rough. They looked upon her with forlorn expressions on their faces. One of their number was screaming and thrashing, restrained on the floor between them.

The area was a collection of washed out streambeds and intermittent low hills, so common for this area that it was impossible to tell one hill from another. It was like an old John Wayne movie cut into a continuous loop. She hoped she never saw a desert again for the rest of her life. As the sun climbed to its apex, the gas gauge hit bottom and she stopped. The second to last can emptied, it went into the trailer. She drank a warm sports drink and examined the eastern horizon. The dust cloud was closer. And she was exhausted. Her arms felt like they’d been beaten with rebar and she’d developed a cough from all the dust.

After driving for an hour she passed an old farmhouse. It was weatherbeaten, all the windows gone, and one corner of the roof missing. It was obvious no one had lived there for years so she only stopped for a moment. As she went around it, following the now much less used road, the skull of a long dead cow watched her. She wondered if that was all of her they’d find someday.

As the gas tank gauge fell past half, she came to a small building and, curious, she stopped. She also had to pee, thought that wasn’t very often when she was sweating as much as she was. The shed wasn’t locked and contained a few tools of unknown origin. So she picked a corner outside, dropped her shorts, and squatted, holding her panties forward and out of the way, and urinated in the dust. The ground drank her urine like it was ambrosia.

Afterwards she checked her GoPro camera and swapped out SD cards again. Unlike her other supplies, she had tons of those. Even running continuous recording at 1080, she hadn’t gone through half her cards. It was going to be a joy editing them. There was maybe a half hour of footage worth keeping. Most of that was the gas station, though the bike had missed most of the incident of the crazy Mexican officer.

Just to be safe she switched batteries as well then ate pretty much the last of her food. A protein bar, some jerky, and a bag of potato crisps. Washing it down with water this time. She glanced at her GPS and tried to figure how far to the United States. It looked to be seventy-five miles. Looking at the fuel gauge and her one five-gallon can of gas made her swallow nervously. With nothing more to do there, she got on the bike, her thighs felt like tenderized steak, and hit the starter. The engine cranked, coughed, but didn’t start.

“Oh no,” she whispered and tried again. This time it started for a second, labored, and died. She opened the gas tank and visually verified there was still fuel. Once the gauge had stuck and run the tank dry. No, there was still gas. She tried again. This time it didn’t even start. She got off and knelt in the dirt, examining the engine. It might as well have been an electron microscope; she would have known just as much about it. She reached out and touched a part, and burned the shit out of her fingers.

“Fuck me!” she cried out and danced around, sucking her fingertips and wiping away tears. “What the fuck was I thinking?!” she yelled to the desert afternoon. Now with two angry blisters on her fingertips, she squatted again and examine the contraption. There was a cylinder under the back seat with a cap on it. Checking carefully that it wasn’t hot, she unscrewed the cap. Inside was a rolled up piece of leather and a book. The leather contained tools, and the book was the manual. “Bingo!”

She scanned the book quickly and found what she wanted. ‘Trouble shooting’ it read. She found the section titled ‘Bike won’t start’ and went down the list. Gas? Yep. Key in ignition? Yep. Kill switch to run? How fucking stupid did they think people were? Check fuel filter. She made a face and passed that one. It would be more complicated than she was prepared to tackle. The next one was ‘Check air filter’. Ah, she thought. Then checked where it was. There was a little lever under the seat, when she activated it the seat conveniently opened like the lid on a box revealing even more machinery. “Oh my God,” she moaned and returned to the manual.

She eventually figured out what the filter was, released the latches, and removed it. She looked at the boxy thing that looked like it was made of cardboard and plastic. “Seems fine to me,” she said then examined how it was put together. It looked like it was molded in one piece. She looked down at the hole it was in and could see the pipe the book called the carburetor feed. It looked clean. Out of curiosity she reached over and hit the starter. The bike roared to life instantly. “Hey, yeah!” she cheered her inventiveness. “Problem solved.”

She glanced at the thing in her hand, then back at the compartment. Shrugged, and tossed it over her shoulder. She locked the seat back in place, hopped on, and drove off. An hour later she stopped to refill the tank with her last can. The engine was sputtering a bit and she thought back to the air cleaner she’d tossed into the desert. Opening the seat showed the opening to the carburetor full of dust. “Oh,” she said and made a face. Fishing into her bag she found a light scarf, wadded it up and stuffed it in the hole. It would have to do. She was about fifty miles from the border.

As she rode the engine continued to get rougher, though not as precipitously. The little road she followed was meandering east and west now, dodging arroyos and dry washes. The worst part was she couldn’t go as fast as before. When the throttle was opened past a certain point the engine started to miss and stall. She realized she’d made a critical mistake with the air cleaner.

As she forded a little dry stream and came up the other side she saw smoke ahead. It was black and lazily climbing into the sky. It reminded her of a car fire she’d seen a couple years ago in Atlanta. As she drove the bike she realized it was going to be off to the east from her path. As she drew abreast of it she stopped to think. The smoke column was consistent, slipping side to side and occasionally surging then reducing to a trickle. It was that same sooty black smoke you saw from a car fire.

“Damn it,” she grumbled as she considered her options. Either investigate or keep going that was pretty much it. She almost put the bike in gear to drive away. Instead she turned to the east.

It turned out to be a bit more than a mile, at least by her best estimate. Even before she got very close she could tell what it was. The crumpled tail of a helicopter rose out of a crumpled smoldering hulk. As she got closer she could read United States Marines on the tail.

The engine rumbled and shook as she slowly approached. She had no idea why the copter had crashed. As she got within a few yards, pulling her shirt up to cover her mouth from the smoke, she could see that the structure of the craft was in better shape than she had thought. It looked to her as though it had more likely burned instead of crashed. She looked at the half melted side, the ghost of the US logo there and possibly bullet holes. She turned to leave and ran right into a soldier.

“Help,” he said and held out a hand.

She was maybe five feet away when she realized he was there. In momentary confusion she squeezed the throttle instead of the brake, and ran him down. “Shit!” she screamed as he was knocked back several yards before she found the brake and brought the bike to a shuddering stop. The engine sputtered and died as she sat, eyes wide staring at the man. “I’m sorry,” she stammered finally, “are you okay?”

“Help,” was all he said again, staying on his back, one hand help up.

Kathy hopped off her bike and went to kneel next to him. Half his face was a black crisped mask of burns, blood dripping from the cracks. “Oh my God,” she said and ran back to the bike, returning with the first aid kit she’d packed. She opened it and examined its contents. Kathy didn’t remember ever feeling more helpless in her life. “I-I don’t know what I can do,” she said.

“Medical kit,” he breathed, “helicopter.”

“It’s burned,” she told him. He held out a hand, struggled to focus and then managed to point. She followed his finger and saw a pile of gear. “Is that medical equipment?” He nodded weakly. She ran over and looked. A lot of it looked like guns and boxes of guns, but one box had a red cross on the side. She grabbed it and ran back.

For a moment Kathy thought he was dead. She knelt and opened the box. Like a huge tackle box it had dozens of compartments for pill vials, glass injectable vials, swabs, and any number of other things. It was a thousand times worse than the little first aid kit. “What do I do?” she asked.

He gestured towards it and she sat it next to his head. He half rolled over, using his less burned right hand to fumble through the box, pulling out a drawer and removing a syringe.

He lay back after the effort and breathed hard for a long moment as Kathy watched, helplessly. He rolled back and began roughly pawing through it again. He eventually pulled out a vial. But his energy was spent. He rolled back and just lay there, breathing hard and eyes closed against the intense pain of his injuries.

“You need me to inject this?” she asked. The barest of nods. She took the syringe and vial from him. She’d seen enough of this on TV to understand the basics. Removing the orange cap exposed the needle. There was a little metal tab covered the rubber stopper on the vial. She used a fingernail and pried it off. Careful to not stab herself, she inserted the needle into the vial, then stopped. “How much?” she asked. “I don’t know how much to give you!”

“Three milliliters,” he managed.

She looked at the needle, and pulled the plunger back until there were 3 CCs of amber liquid inside, grabbed his right arm and without hesitation plunged it into the thick muscle then depressed the plunger. The soldier didn’t even twitch.

Kathy tossed the spent syringe into the medical kit. She realized she didn’t even know what she’d injected the man with. It only took a few minutes for her to realize it was a painkiller. His eyes fluttered open and his breathing slowed. For the first time he fully focused on her. “Thanks,” he said, still weakly. “You have any water?”

“Yeah,” she said and went back to her ATV, returning with two bottles. She opened one and handed it to him, and took the other herself.

“Thanks,” he said after downing half the one-liter bottle.

“What happened?” Kathy asked. When she’d returned to her bike, she’d come back with the GoPro from her bike as well. She sat it to the side on its flexible stand, both her and the soldier in its view.

“We were a medivac,” he explained, taking another drink of the lukewarm water. “Supporting the Mexican military withdrawal north from the Monterrey area.”

Kathy nodded and made mental notes. Her original drone film was north of Monterrey. The disturbance wasn’t just east of that city then.

“We spent almost a day leap frogging teams out of the combat zone. There were two firebases set up by the Mexicans. All kinds of firepower. One even had a minigun.”

“What were they fighting?” Kathy asked.

He turned his burned face to regard her coolly. “Mother fucking zombies.” A single laugh escaped her before she could stop herself. He shook his head. “Call them whatever you want,” he said and regarded the empty water bottle. She gave him her partial one and he nodded, taking another drink. “Sick, infected, crazies, or zombies. Something happened in Monterrey, some kind of an outbreak. More than a million people, lady. You ever seen a million people on the move?”

She thought about some of the marches and protests she’d covered as a reporter. Once a hundred thousand in Los Angeles, protesting for amnesty or some crap. It had seemed like a human wave. She couldn’t wrap her mind around a number ten times that size.

“Most went east, towards Laredo,” he said. She nodded. Of course she knew that. “But a lot came this way. Maybe more than a hundred thousand. As they moved, they picked up more in each town. This… infection was spreading. They hit those firebases like a surging tide, and went over them.” His good eye looked off to the east and his head shook.

“We were on the last relief flight out. We took as many men as we could. They threw gear aboard and we lifted off as those…things, came over the defenses. The crews on the M2s and the minigun just kept firing, their barrels were almost red hot. Some Air Force boys dropped in iron.” He sighed and took a drink. He was sweating profusely now, his breathing slowed. He put the bottle down. “Didn’t matter, nothing stopped them. We saw them over run from above. Still coming. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand? We didn’t know.” He looked at the burning remains of the chopper and then down at the ground.

“What brought you down?”

“One of the men that jumped aboard,” he said. “He was sick. Bitten, I think. We never found out. He went crazy, went for the pilot. Another guy, opened up with his carbine. Stupid. He got the crazy one, and half the instruments. The pilot was fucked up, but still managed to get us down. Mostly.”