Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (13 page)

The banging resumed without warning, the resonant rattle of
the rollup door’s many moving parts jolting Glenda right out of one nightmare
and into another. In her dream the dozen charred and eyeless corpses from the
Huntsville roadblock had arisen and begun chasing her. Led by the crispy blind
creature that was most certainly still waiting for her inside the convenience
store, the obsidian black monsters followed in lockstep precision like the
soldiers she presumed they once were. And belting out some crude military
cadence, whose only concern was ripping the flesh from her bones, they had
cornered her here and were succeeding in breaking down the door just before her
eyes snapped open.

Not far from the truth
, she thought as she scooted
sideways on the cool floor, putting some distance between herself and the
bulging garage door.

Then there was another tremendous crash prompting her to
stand up and crab around in the dark until she banged her knee against the
smooth curvature of the pick-up truck’s right front fender.

Trying to stifle a few curse words while concentrating on
not kicking any more of the spare parts scattered about the floor, Glenda felt
her way in the dark to the passenger door. Thumbed it open, climbed in, and
clicked it shut at her back. Kneeling where the passenger seat would be, she
reached over and felt the unforgiving hump of the transmission tunnel rising
vertically several inches above the floor pan. Tuning out the continuous racket,
she rested her upper body where the driver would normally sit and, with the
tunnel displacing several ribs and the rubber soles of her hikers flat against
the passenger’s side door, fell back into a deep sleep.

Dressing in the dark, Cade donned black combat fatigues. He
shrugged on his MultiCam plate carrier and cinched the cummerbund tight.
Slipped on the leather hand-me-down boots given to him by his former mentor and
current commander of FOB Bastion, Army Special Forces Major Greg Beeson.
Velcroed his knee and elbow pads into place and secured a half-dozen fully
loaded FDE (Flat Dark Earth) colored magazines for the M4 in the vertical
pouches on his chest.

He strapped the Glock 17 to his outside right leg in its
black drop-leg holster and left the Glock 19 behind for Raven to practice with.
The Gerber went on his belt next to his left hip. Lastly, he rose and grabbed
his M4 from its place by the jamb and snagged his tactical helmet—the NVGs
already attached—from a metal hook by the door.

In the pitch black he peered in the direction where he
imagined Brook’s sleeping form would be. Drawing in a deep breath of damp air
still laced with her scent, he blew a kiss and eased out into the equally dark
hallway.

He closed the door firmly and flicked on his Mini Mag-Lite
and, leading with the stark white beam, negotiated the warren to Daymon’s door and
knocked lightly while still on the move. He made his way to Duncan’s door and
rapped sharply. Paused for a tick and then delivered another staccato volley to
no result.

So he moved on through the security area, greeted Seth, and
retrieved the satellite phone and a two-way radio from the shelf. Poured himself
a cup of coffee and made sure Seth was clear that whoever was monitoring the CC
television feeds also needed to be on high alert for incoming calls on the other
Thuraya sat-phones. Cade shook Seth’s hand and squeezed past the chair facing
the bank of electronics. At the inner T he hooked left and found himself in
front of the quarters Lev, Jamie, and Chief shared. No need to knock. The door hung
open and the interior was dark. Figuring Chief was already manning the over
watch for the morning shift and the others were topside and chomping at the bit
for some action, Cade closed the door and headed back the way he’d come. He
couldn’t blame them for wanting to get a head start. After spending three weeks
prepping the compound for winter and working on beefing up the outer
fortifications, he wanted out of
Dodge
as well.

Once outside, Cade held the white foam cup in a two-handed
grip, savoring its warmth against his palms. He could see steam wafting up from
the cup and roiling clouds when he exhaled. He figured the temps had dropped
into the high thirties. Holding the cup under his nose, he inhaled the coffee’s
heady aroma and walked his gaze across the clearing.

The sky overhead was still a dark shade of purple and
scattered stars winked like diamonds on a swatch of velvet. To the east the sun
was just starting to take the edge off of night, the cusp of darkness there a
tie-dye of violet shot through with orange and yellow. In the inky gloom of the
forest canopy the birds were just getting started, their halfhearted warbles
floating above the clearing.

To Cade’s right the fire from the previous night was still
smoking. Thin gray tendrils curled up and then drifted south before getting
lost in the early morning fog hanging low around the clearing’s edge.

A hundred yards left of the fire pit was the Department of
Homeland Security Black Hawk, its navy and gold fuselage glazed with morning dew.
Cade noticed that someone had already removed the camouflage netting which was now
in a heap on the ground near the helo’s nose. A dozen feet to the right, Duncan
was crouched beside the helicopter’s port side wheel, no doubt checking it for
proper pressure or torquing down some nut or bolt there. Apparently finished,
Duncan rose and with some sort of tool in hand, walked swaybacked around the
helo’s nose and gingerly took a knee near the starboard side landing gear.
So
far, so good
, thought Cade as he started off towards the chopper. Save the
obvious effects of age combined with sleeping on a wafer-thin mattress, from
afar the aviator appeared
good to go
.

Cade sipped his coffee and started a slow walk through the dew
laden grass. Fifteen feet from the chopper the port side door slid open abruptly.
Inside, armed with carbines, and looking like they were ready to go to war, he
saw Daymon, Lev, and Jamie sitting on the bench seats. Obviously, the three had
consulted with each other beforehand. They were dressed identically: MultiCam
fatigues, MOLLE gear and plate carriers, plus tan surplus boots liberated from
the quarry. Rounding off their ensembles, each had a white foam cup of coffee identical
to the one Cade was holding.

Reacting to the rattle clatter sound of the door opening, Duncan
reappeared around the nose.

Cade halted, looked at the
Camo Triplets
, and said, “Larry,
Mo, and Curly got their morning Joe.” Then, ignoring the daggers being stared
his way, pivoted left and tongue-in-cheek addressed Duncan. “And how are you? Bright
eyed and bushy tailed this morning?”

“Never better,” Duncan lied. In fact, he’d never felt worse.
After Logan’s death he’d surpassed every previously established bottom and was
convinced he was rapidly closing with the eternal flames of hell. That he
hadn’t slept more than four hours in a stretch since late July only added to
his misery.

“Could of fooled me,” said Cade. “I’ve seen tree sloths with
more giddy up than you, Dunc.”

“I’m flying you to an undisclosed location ... not running a
marathon. The bird is ready as she’s gonna be,” he drawled. “Gimme your cup of
Joe and I’ll be
good to go
.”

The last three words made Cade smile. But that smile was
fleeting. His face and eyes hardened and all businesslike he questioned the
aviator about the Black Hawk’s air worthiness.

“She ain’t a Huey, that’s for sure,” conceded Duncan. “Duct
tape and chewing gum isn’t going to keep her flying. According to the manual she
needed a PMS check twenty flight hours ago.”

Daymon snorted and looked away. Which led to Lev losing it
and doubling over, his belly laugh echoing in the cabin.

Even Cade cracked a smile.

Shaking his head, Duncan said, “Juveniles.” He craned his
neck and looked at Jamie. “You gonna stand for that crap?”

Jamie said nothing.

Considering the things the young woman had seen and done
lately, Duncan wasn’t at all surprised that she’d ignored the acronym. Speaking
slowly for the benefit of the wiseacres, he said, “Preventative ... maintenance
... services.” Then he rounded the Black Hawk’s curved nose, calling back to
Cade, “Helmet up and strap in, Wyatt.”

Ignoring Duncan’s use of his nickname, Cade donned his
helmet and pointed Daymon to the port side seat. Said, “No time like the
present.”

“Urch’s not ready,” called Duncan, a trace of anger in his
voice.

“Who said he’s flying?” shot Cade. “You planning on having
an in-flight medical emergency ... Old Man?”

Making no reply, Duncan strapped himself into the right seat
and donned his flight helmet.

Daymon poked his head between the seats and, defending his
honor, said matter-of-factly, “You already pointed out the important gauges and
taught me how to plug in the waypoints. I used to bounce around in the bitch
seat aboard a little King Air calling fire retardant air drops ...
remember?
”
Then, silently chastising himself for not following through and hacking off
all
of his dreads, Daymon tucked the side hangers behind his ears and snugged on a flight
helmet.

“You did keep her pretty level last time you got stick
time,” Duncan said. “Go ahead. Get in and don’t touch
anything
unless I
say so.”

Cade passed Daymon the scrap of paper containing the
scrawled GPS coordinates then climbed aboard and slid the door shut behind him.
He looked around and chose a seat between Jamie and Lev where he could see both
Daymon and Duncan. Swapped helmets and plugged the cord into the overhead jack
and, taking into consideration the bird’s suspect maintenance record, strapped himself
in extra tight.

Clutching his M4 vertically between his knees with its
business end resting on the cabin floor, Cade said a quick prayer and crossed
himself. Sensing Jamie’s gaze on him, he looked up and right a degree and met
it.

“Thank you,” she said, barely audible over the whirring of a
starter located somewhere aft in the airframe.

The Black Hawk shuddered and then there was a low growl that
quickly built to a banshee-like whine. Saving his breath, Cade nodded at Jamie
then looked out the port window, above the tree tops, at the brightening
western sky.

No rest for the wicked
, thought Nash as she peeled
the foil from the bottle and rattled a 200-milligram caffeine pill into her
palm and, against the dire warnings on the bottle, washed it down with a big
gulp of tepid coffee.

She’d already spent most of the early evening hours in the
50th Space Wing’s TOC rooting for the dead as the Chinese tried time and again
to retrieve their helicopter from the horde that had surrounded and damaged its
tail rotor moments after it landed on shore in Norfolk. As Nash watched in
real-time the crew lasted all of four or five minutes inside before bolting
from the inert craft and being torn apart limb from limb by the dead. The folly
continued as the warships shelled a series of buildings a quarter mile distant,
likely just a diversion, then sent, one at a time, half a dozen landing parties
ashore only to suffer the same fate as their airborne comrades. After several
hours of this, without retrieving their fallen or the damaged helicopter, the
warships turned tail and steamed out of Norfolk Harbor.

The early morning hours were fraught with heartache as the
same satellite transmitted footage back to the TOC of an hours-long life and
death struggle between a platoon of Marines and the living dead that had them
easily outnumbered 100 to 1.

Though their objective was achieved and they’d fought their
way from their LZ in the rolling hills of Bluemont, Virginia, through throngs
of dead and into the top-secret fortified stronghold constructed beneath FEMA’s
Mount Weather complex, the man they had come to rescue, Vice Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Marine General Tommy (Two-Guns) McTiernan,
was in poor health. The Marine commander on the ground relayed to the TOC that
the sixty-five-year-old veteran of nearly every military action from Vietnam on
up to the previous wars in the desert had suffered a mild stroke two days prior
and was receiving medical attention.

Watching the Marines hustle the litter containing their top
man to a nearby grassy knoll and seeing them surround the living legend with an
outward facing phalanx brought Nash a modicum of hope that Two-Guns would live
to fight another day. There wasn’t a dry eye in the TOC as the muzzle flashes
continued lancing outward and the Zs kept falling in waves. It hadn’t been lost
on Nash at the time that thousands upon thousands of Americans, Confederate and
Union, had fallen during the battles for nearby Shenandoah Valley. And like
Stonewall Jackson who had held the area against numerically superior Union
forces nearly one hundred and fifty years before, President Clay was hoping the
ailing man they were bringing back to Schriever was well enough to devise a
strategy to turn the tide on the dead with a disparity in numbers far
outweighing those that Stonewall had faced.

The caffeine hit Nash like a mule kick as she reminisced
over the cheer that went up when the trio of Ospreys flared and landed and the
harried extraction commenced in real time.

“Chalk one up for the good guys,” she had said aloud at the
time. In fact, Two-Gun was the third high ranking official to be rescued as a
direct result of her brilliant idea in which she searched for the signals her satellites
never received in the days and weeks following Z-Day when the country went
mostly dark—figuratively and literally. Theory was most of the persons
essential to the continuity of government had been lulled into complacency due
to the sitting President’s initial waffling and indecision. That the living dead
had gotten such a quick foothold in the District of Columbia—causing the city
to fall that first weekend—made getting to nearby Joint Base Andrews in Maryland—let
alone relocating to the numerous pre-fortified bunkers scattered about the massively
populated eastern sea board—nearly impossible.

So with the help of her best and brightest, and armed with
the President’s password, they accessed the NSA’s supercomputers located
somewhere in the ten-thousand-square-foot labyrinth underneath Fort Meade,
fifteen miles south of Baltimore, Maryland. Stored digitally behind multiple
firewalls Nash found the conduit to terabytes of metadata collected from every
cell provider in the United States and abroad from the late nineties to present
day. Every benign call. Every drunk dial. Even accidental butt calls had been archived
and stamped with unique metadata pointing to when and where the call was
placed. The latter being the info Nash coveted. And the way it worked was that
every individual cell call went through the nearest tower, the phone first
pinging the apparatus affixed to the tower before bumping the signal to the overhead
telecommunications satellites that in milliseconds bounced the signal back down,
no matter the distance, to the cell tower nearest the call’s recipient.

While searching the metadata for cell pings from essential
high-ranking personnel, Nash got to thinking and those thoughts led directly to
the off-the-books mission about to launch a quarter mile away.

Zero-dark-thirty.
The time when most humans naturally
lower their guard. Complacency builds and alertness wanes.

She pictured the SOAR pilots readying their birds. Checking
the nuts and bolts and software pertinent to remaining airborne. Running
diagnostics checks and, hopefully, receiving the green light meaning
all systems
go.

An hour earlier the distant low rumble of the refueling
package consisting of a pair of KC-130 tankers taking to air rattled the
windows. She had noticed the pitch of the spinning props change as they bit
into the cold Colorado air as the planes banked and lumbered away south by
west.

The second package, due to launch any minute, would not make
a sound. At least not the kind that would travel from Whipper’s tarmacs to her
ears. So the only way she would ultimately know the mission was not scrubbed
would be by the continued silence of the two land-line telephones on her desk,
one red and one black.