Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (14 page)

Glenda awoke but remained supine with her eyes still shut
tight. Her mind’s eye, however, snapped wide open. And she was certain, standing
within arm’s reach, only a flimsy pane of automotive glass and an unlocked door
between her and certain death, were a dozen hungry zombies. As her imagination took
the ball and ran, the listless horde advanced, moaning and hissing, one awkward
step at a time. Soon the wicked screech of cracked nails against sheet metal sounded
and she screamed and opened her eyes and craned around. There were no pale
leering faces pressed to the windows. So, chest still heaving, she hinged up
slowly, wincing from aches and pains resulting from a lifetime of never giving
up.

She peered over the dash, eyes narrowed against the light
spilling in around the edges of the battered and bowed rollup. The tagline from
a watchmaker came to mind:
Took a licking and kept on ticking
. Then she
noticed the nearest edge where the door had been forced from its tracks and saw
long vertical runners of dried blood.

She looked left and saw corrugated metal and signs on the
wall pointing to the brands of oil and air cleaners and long-life batteries the
garage’s former owner favored. Fram, STP, and Eveready—all familiar names that
brought back fond memories of her wannabe-gearhead husband. Grateful nothing
was waiting for her in the shadows there, she flicked her eyes to the rearview
and saw only a low workbench and on the wall a calendar still pinned to July
displaying a scantily clad girl and a shiny red roadster.
Far from the truth
,
thought Glenda. Based on her experiences she’d forever remember July for its
surprise gift of traffic snarls full of ordinary passenger cars and the living
corpses entombed inside of them.

She scooted over the transmission hump on her butt and
shouldered the door open. Stepped onto the concrete and shut the door behind
her, the resonant creak spurring more of the same hair-raising rasp of bone on
metal she’d slept through most of the night. With the renewed heaving of her
chest exasperating the stitch in her side, she looked dead ahead and it
suddenly dawned on her that the walking briquette was still inside the store
and had just been aroused by the noisy door hinge.

Out came the knitting needles and Glenda crept to the door.
She mounted the step and rose on her tiptoes. Put her face to the glass pane
but saw nothing on the other side. As she took a step back to think through her
options, whatever had slammed into the door a moment ago did so again and then
inexplicably the knob started rattling.

From her new vantage point a step down she saw only the top
of the creature’s head through the soot-streaked window. It was wavering back
and forth while the knob continued rotating slowly left and right in small
increments. With the prospect of the thing actually opening the door and
catching her flat-footed, Glenda decided to seize the initiative and turn the
tables on the persistent son of a gun. So, throwing caution to the wind, she
counted down from three, gripped the knob, and pulled the door towards her.

At once Kingsford stepped over the threshold, juddered
stiffly on the pair of steps, and collapsed in a vertical heap on the garage
floor.

Glenda forgot all about the needles in her hands. Focusing
solely on the blue sky showing between the roof joists, she held her breath and
waded through the cloud of gray dust roiling off the struggling creature. Fully
expecting a pair of hands to lock on to her lower extremities, she stepped over
its twitching legs and into the store and pulled the door closed, trapping it
in the garage.

She stood in the store, hands on knees, back pressed to the
door and, while catching her breath, looked the three points of the compass.
North, to her right, the rear parking lot was choked with burned hulks of cars
and trucks, but no walking dead. To the west, dead ahead past the aisles and
out the empty pane behind the check stand she could see a small group of dead
tottering away, a long hill climb ahead of them. And, much to her relief, the
parking lot in front of the store was empty as was the roadway beyond it. In
the distant field, however, she saw a pair of deer cautiously picking their way
through the grass, left to right.

Then the scratching resumed. She imagined the bony nubs
punching through the door and raking her back. Throwing a shiver, she turned
around and saw through the soot the white paint of the door from where the thing
had been relentlessly pawing at it. In addition to the vertical stripes there
were three rough circles. Two where her shoulders had rested against it. And
another oblong shape lower down where her backside had rubbed the black coating
off the metal surface.

Letting her conscience get the better of her, Glenda wet her
finger and scribed the words
Do Not Enter
on the door in three-inch-high
letters.

She listened hard for a moment and, hearing nothing moving
out of her line of sight, went back into character. Head cocked to one side,
she shuffled to the blown-out door, ducked clumsily under the push bar, and
stepped into the morning chill. Moving like a zombie, she turned her head left
ever so slowly and regarded her handiwork. Mombie, the three younger zombies
and the Deer Hunters lay in a heap, limbs askew, near the garage’s southeast
corner.

As Glenda scanned her surroundings for any signs of Van Man,
she heard two things simultaneously. From the grassy median there came a hollow
rasp and the crawler she’d first crossed paths with at the roadblock miles back
inched slowly hand over hand onto the blacktop. And, causing the deer in the
field to start and bolt for the forest edge, she heard the unmistakable noise
of rotor blades beating the air somewhere to the east.

As the Black Hawk got light on its wheels and wavered
slightly, Cade kept his eyes locked on the spot in the forest where the
compound’s hidden entrance would be. Then, as the chopper gained altitude and
it became apparent the noisy launch hadn’t drawn everyone topside, he shifted
his gaze to the familiar strip of SR-39 below his port side window. A tick
later, drawing his attention to the cockpit, Duncan’s voice sounded in his
helmet. “Where to, D-Boy?”

“Former—” said Cade over the comms.

There was a brief silence and Daymon looked over his right
shoulder, cocked his head as if saying:
I’m waiting
.

Weighing some kind of decision, Cade waited another beat
then said decisively, “Daymon, I want you to hold off on inputting those
coordinates until we top the tanks off.”

Duncan said, “Morgan County Muni, here we come.”

Cade felt the chopper start the bank to port and, deciding a
five-minute detour was in order, said, “Keep to the westerly heading.”

More statement than question, Duncan said, “You want me to
overfly Huntsville.”

Cade said, “For future reference only.”

“Nothing to see there, Cade,” added Jamie. “I’ve been. And
Eden, too. The fires drew the monsters from the compromised roadblock. Both towns
are pretty much rubble and ashes and overrun with crispy walking corpses.”

As the Black Hawk slipped back around to the previous
heading, Cade locked eyes with the fiery brunette and asked, “Did you make it
all the way to the Conex barricade at the pass?”

Jamie answered no by shaking her helmeted head. Then said, “I
was on foot. A little too far and too dangerous to go all by myself.”

Lev said, “Still. It wouldn’t hurt to give it a flyby. Like
you said ... for future reference.”

“I concur,” said Cade. “What’s the situation like on the
ground on your side, Lev?”

“Shit show, sir,” he said, accidentally slipping back into a
previous role from a previous war. A war against an enemy he’d found easy to
hate. And even easier to kill. The things pressing against Daymon’s felled
trees passing by down below, not so much. In fact, the walking dead, no matter how
far down the road of decay they’d travelled, were constant daily reminders of family
members who’d balked at leaving their homes in an already overrun Salt Lake
City. His mom, dad, older sister, brother-in-law, two nieces and a nephew—all gone.
Then inexplicably he heard Adam Duritz’s familiar raspy voice singing a
favorite and suddenly prescient lyric from a Counting Crows track. And the
unexpected gut punch came in the form of five words in the first verse reminding
him that all of his memories were now just films about ghosts.

“Are you all right?” asked Jamie, placing a gloved hand on
his thigh.

Lev jumped from the touch and strained forward against his belt.

Nodding toward the starboard window, Jamie mouthed, “What do
you see?”

Lev recovered and, without missing a beat, said, “Death and
more death. But Daymon’s roadblock was holding. I counted a couple of dozen
rotters hanging around. Easy enough to cull. And now we’re coming up on
Huntsville ... and more death—” His voice trailed off and his gaze shifted back
outside where he saw a lush forested hillside gliding past.

Cade peered out his window. Watched fallow fields and
scattered farmhouses and rusty vehicles and swaybacked outbuildings blip by.

Duncan made a fist. Offered it to Daymon and said, “Good
call on the roadblock, Urch.”

After reciprocating the bump with Duncan, Daymon leaned
forward, squinting to make something out in the glare below.

A minute later, with the shimmering reservoir filling up the
starboard side window, Cade said, “Huntsville is gone. Fire spared a few
commercial buildings down by the water. The docks as well, and looks like maybe
a block or two of houses on the high ground east of there.”

Steiners pressed to his face, Daymon added, “Looks like the
fire flushed out a few survivors. There’s half a dozen boats anchored off
shore. And we’ve got movement.”

The Black Hawk slowed and descended slightly. Then Duncan nosed
the bird left a few degrees and brought her back around perpendicular to the
reservoir.

“Yep ... one craft with five adults topside,” reported
Daymon. He watched the group rush to one side of the sailboat he guessed to be
a forty-footer, half of them waving white scraps of fabric. A couple of them
threw themselves to the deck as if rescue was imminent. He panned over the
other watercraft and added, “All of the other vessels appear abandoned.”

“Appear,” muttered Duncan into the comms. He fixed his gaze
on the water between the boats and the shore where hundreds of Zs, excited by the
now hovering chopper, had shifted their attention from the survivors in the
sailboat and were now looking expectantly skyward. The charred creatures created
a sharp contrast intermingling among scores of pale waterlogged bodies at the
water’s edge—some moving—most not. Having seen enough and knowing without
asking that there was no way to help the survivors without jeopardizing the
mission and the safety of everyone aboard, Duncan looked towards the pass and said,
“Delta ... you want to get a close-up of the barricade?”

Cade didn’t immediately answer. He fished his binoculars
from the ruck near his feet and trained them on the four-lane winding up into
the canyon to the west. He adjusted the focus ring and walked the field glasses
up while panning left and right in tight little increments. Spent a handful of
seconds scrutinizing something there, then, dropping the Steiners in his lap, said
abruptly, “No. I’ve seen enough to know that the breach has widened.”

“Rotters?”

“Hundreds ... if not a thousand or more have tumbled and
ended up at the bottom of the canyon. No threat from
them
...
yet
.”

Duncan nudged the stick left and forward. Responding to the
input, the Black Hawk turned hard on a dime and lost fifty feet of altitude
before leveling out and hammering south low to the water. Then, not really
wanting to hear the answer, he asked, “How many are there on the road?”

A heavy silence descended over the cabin.

Lev and Jamie traded worried looks.

The rotor blades continued chopping the crisp air overhead
as the reservoir’s silver surface gave way to land.

And, staring out the window at the verdant triple canopy
rushing by, Cade quietly said, “You don’t want to know.”

Glenda went still as a statue as the helicopter passed
overhead and continued onward, presumably, towards Huntsville without missing a
beat. With the imagery of the half-dozen black helicopters descending on the
mayor’s mansion, and the ensuing carnage still fresh on her mind, she said a
little prayer asking God to will whoever was in the noisy aircraft to ignore
her and keep on going. And, as if she had traded one threat for another, once the
helicopter was out of earshot, the crawler’s incessant peals were back.

Cursing herself for not putting it out of its misery when
she’d had the chance, she crossed the blacktop and stopped a foot shy of the
persistent creature. Out came one of the needles and she bent down and pushed
the sharpened aluminum into its temple, instantly stilling it. Wiping the shaft
on the robe’s sleeve she blinked away a tear, then put the needle away, and putting
one foot in front of the other, continued east on SR-39.

In order to better get a feel for what might be waiting for
them at the Morgan County Airport, Cade had Duncan keep the Black Hawk low and
slow and follow Old Trapper Road south, starting at its terminus with State
Route 39 near the banks of the Pineview Reservoir.

Almost immediately Cade could see that conditions on the ten-mile-long
stretch of mostly two-lane blacktop cutting through the Utah back country had
deteriorated exponentially since he’d last traversed it.

Three weeks ago, save for the freeway near the Morgan airport,
the road had been virtually free of Zs. But that was then and this was now and not
a mile blipped by where the road itself, and the open range it bordered, was
not dotted with roving bands of decaying corpses.

Five miles in and for the second time in as many minutes,
Cade said, “I’ve seen enough.”

Taking the cue, Duncan nudged the Black Hawk left a few
degrees and simultaneously increased the power and dipped her nose slightly. “What
do you think we’re going to find at the airport?” he asked.

And for the second time in six minutes, Cade uttered the
same five words, “You don’t want to know.” Only this time, like a wakeup call,
he delivered them slowly—all business.

Believing everyone’s fate on this rock was preordained from
birth, Duncan shrugged off the warning and said calmly into the shipwide comms,
“
Two mikes out.
”

There was a metallic snick from Jamie’s M4 as she pulled the
charging handle, chambering a round. Fully aware Cade and Lev were watching,
she slipped the Beretta from its drop leg holster, confirmed it too had a round
chambered, then
snicked
off the safety and snugged it home. Still
feeling eyes on her, she donned a helmet and comms and tucked some free strands
of her dark bangs in before cinching the chin strap. Finally, unable to control
herself, she looked coyly at Cade and Lev, winked, patted the tomahawk riding
on the other, then gave it a couple of sensual-looking strokes.

Swapping out the bulky flight helmet for his tactical bump
helmet, Cade leaned close and asked her, “Are you good to go?”

Forcing a half smile, Jamie leaned forward and, loud enough
to be heard over the thumping of the slowing rotors, replied, “Yep. I’m going
to
get some
.”

Smiling inwardly at the exchange, Lev followed Cade’s lead, swapping
his flight helmet for a comms set and a tan Kevlar item Cade had taken off the
dead National Guardsmen weeks ago. He tightened the chin strap then ejected the
magazine from his M4 and, performing an Eleven-Bravo ritual once practiced the
world over, tapped it against his palm to seat the rounds and then slapped it
back into the magwell where it seated with a satisfying click. Following the
other’s lead he charged his weapon, set the safety, and closed his eyes in preparation
for insertion into a very different type of hot landing zone. The kind he hated
most. Because here, though no one would be shooting at him, every threat on the
ground would be in his face and equally as deadly.
Tooth and nail deadly.
He shuddered at the forming visual, then, like a good soldier, flicked a mental
switch, banishing it from his mind.

“One mike,” called Duncan.

After adjusting the volume on his comms set, Cade looked up
and, mimicking a popular commercial from the old world, said, “Can you hear me
now?”

Getting the joke, Jamie smiled and nodded.

Nearly simultaneously, Lev, Daymon, and Duncan flashed a
thumbs up, the universal semaphore for
good to go
understood by men
going into battle the world over.

Daymon looked into the cabin and exchanged a knowing look
with Cade. Held it for a tick then swiveled forward and his voice came over the
comms describing the scene on the ground at the airport in great detail, not
one of them good.

Looking out his port side window, Cade saw one of the points
of entry the dead had utilized. A full five-foot run of the chain-link
surrounding the parking lot on the airport’s northwest corner had been laid flat,
and blades of brittle, browned grass poked through the diamond-shaped openings.
On either side of the breach, where the fencing was still attached to the
vertical posts, colorful scraps of fabric and what looked to Cade like tufts of
human hair were being windblown in the same direction as the day-glo windsock dancing
high up on a pole at the end of the nearby runway.

Swiveling his head left, Duncan retracted the smoked visor
and, through his orange-framed glasses, eyed his passengers. “Are we a go?” he
asked.

Matching Duncan’s gaze while trying mightily to ignore the colorful
specs , Cade bit his lip and nodded subtly.

In the left-hand seat, as he unplugged his helmet, Daymon
saw the rotters freeze in place. In the next instant, as Duncan brought the
Black Hawk in hot over the forty-foot-tall trees west of the single asphalt
landing strip, the multitude of marble-white faces looked skyward and panned a steady
arc, their dead eyes locked onto the noisily approaching metal contraption.

“
Kindness
, don’t fail me now,” said Daymon as he drew
his machete from its scabbard and placed it on his lap. His gloved hands went
to the harness release as volumes of dust were suddenly sent airborne by the
wildly spinning rotors.

Incredulous, Duncan simultaneously flared the helicopter and
said, “You named it?”

“Just now,” answered Daymon, grinning wickedly.

“But ... Kindness?”

“Yeah. You know ... as in killing them with—”

Over the comms, Jamie said, “Double entendre. I
like
it.”

Lev added, “Very original, I’ll give you that.”

Duncan shook his head, then intoned, “You know your job,
Urch?”

With a metallic click, Daymon was free of the belt and
reciting the mantra in a sing-song voice. “Keep the rotters from martyring
themselves with your tail rotor.”

“Correct,” said Duncan. “Take my shotgun ... I insist.”

After circling far and wide of the static fuel bowser and
finding a patch of grass free of dead and large enough to set the chopper down,
Duncan said, “Wheels down.”

Before the wheels were in the tall grass, Cade had yanked
the starboard door back in its tracks and had jumped out and was kneeling on
the tarmac, M4 sweeping to the south. A tick later he began engaging targets, careful
not to walk his fire too close to the tank truck holding their precious
aviation fuel.

The DHS chopper settled softly on the grass northeast of the
fuel bowser and, breaking every rule in the book, Duncan kept the turbines lit
and the rotors spooled up. In his side vision he saw Cade, Jamie and Daymon
burst out of the chopper near simultaneously and felt the hot blast of carrion-and jet-fuel-tainted air infiltrate the cabin. He saw Jamie peel left to assist
Cade in clearing a path between the chopper and bowser while Daymon disappeared
from view on his way to secure the area around the Black Hawk’s fragile tail
rotor.

Once Daymon reached his position on the starboard side of
the tail boom, he put the whirring and near invisible rotor disc at his back
and went to one knee. He crunched a round into the stubby combat shotgun and
heard Cade saying,
We will be in and out in five,
in his head.

But this wasn’t nearly the situation they’d encountered
refueling here weeks ago. This was much worse. A hasty headcount from the air
told him that there had to be hundreds of rotters spread out across the acres
of asphalt and unruly grass. And looking under the tail boom towards the failed
fencing he could see that dozens more, drawn by the Siren’s song of the noisy
Black Hawk, were streaming towards them on their left flank.

First things first, though. He leveled the pump gun at a
trio of presumably moaning creatures at his three o’clock position. With the
bowser in his left side vision and the deadly blades nearby on the right he let
loose, the storm of buckshot dissolving the first monster’s face.

Mouth formed in a silent O, the next Z, a young girl with puckered
bite wounds up and down her arms, came at him faster than the first.

Stepping forward to meet the threat, Daymon jacked another
round into the chamber and, with the utmost care, lined the sights up with the
bridge of the stumbling four-footer’s nose. A tactical move based on an
assumption that, if he knew Old Man as well as he thought he did, the next round
in the chamber was a slug.

Daymon held his fire until the Z was within a dozen feet. He
drew a breath and thought to himself,
The kid is already dead
. When he
finally pulled the trigger his gut feeling was validated when the single hunk
of lead found its mark where he’d been aiming and sheared off the top third of
the waifish corpse’s skull. The resulting kinetic energy snapped the body up
and back and through the drifting cloud of cerebral fluid and aerated brain
matter.

Before the girl’s corpse had time to bounce Daymon had
crunched another shell into the shotgun. Holding true to the
every-other-pattern,
the next shell was buckshot which didn’t have the time nor distance to spread
as it left the shotgun’s smooth bore barrel with tremendous velocity. Barely
the size of a basketball and only sixteen inches removed from the muzzle, the swarm
of tiny pellets struck the right two-thirds of the next rotter’s face leaving
behind only scraps of shredded flesh hanging from a crescent-shaped sliver of
skull. Barely attached at the neck, the hair-covered rind bobbed momentarily on
the stalk of exposed vertebrae until the final orders from its already compromised
brain reached its feet and the near headless corpse did the splits, collapsing
in place.

In the next heartbeat Daymon kept two more ambling corpses
away from the tail rotor, felling them one right after the other—slug to the
forehead and buckshot to the temple.

As the last one through the open door, and with Duncan
barking a reminder over the shipwide comms, Lev closed it at his back and went
into a combat crouch near the bird’s landing gear. He quickly got his bearings
and slow-walked toward his objective, head on a swivel and constantly firing
and reloading as he covered the distance to the gun-shaped nozzle lying flat on
the nearby tarmac. Halfway to the stretched-out length of hose, time seemed to
slow for him and three things happened simultaneously. To his left he saw Jamie
swiping at the encroaching dead, the tomahawk cutting a blurring arc, and a
look of utter disgust parked on her face. One by one, in the blink of an eye, she
caved a trio of faces in, the crunch of bone and thud of bodies impacting the
tarmac all but drowned out by the Black Hawk’s turbine whine. Then suddenly Cade
was crouched low and walking forward and firing by her side. A beat later he
had her rifle in his hands and appeared to be working on it.

Lev paused and looked over his left shoulder. Unexpectedly
he caught Cade’s eye then read his lips:
Failure to feed
then heard his
voice saying, “Go, go, go,” over the comms. With Cade’s admonition spurring him
to get the lead out, Lev did just that, emptying a half-dozen rounds into the
Zs in his path. He changed mags and picked his way through the fallen bodies.
slipping and sliding on clumps of brain and hair-covered skull along the way. He
charged the rifle then let it hang from its sling and snatched up the fuel
nozzle two-handed. With the hose draped over his shoulder and inadvertently dragging
his rifle’s muzzle through the pooling blood, he leaned forward and began
running towards the chopper where he saw Daymon standing amid a growing pile of
Z bodies and swinging a machete wildly one-handed.

In the couple of seconds it had taken Cade to clear Jamie’s
rifle of the misfed round, pull the charging handle and hand the M4 back to
her, a Z had risen to its knees from the tall grass, gotten ahold of his
hydration pack, and was climbing his body. In the next beat Cade was twisting around
and collapsing sideways with the thing’s cold hands groping for his neck.

On the way to the ground two things happened. First, without
looking or thinking, Cade reached for the dagger on his hip. Next he heard two pops
and the crackle of live rounds passing closely as the rotter’s shoulder
disintegrated into a horizontal fan of sinew and congealed blood which
momentarily blotted out the spinning blue sky.

Upon hitting the ground, Cade felt the water-filled bladder
strapped to his back mercifully cushion his fall and then, as the snarling
creature’s dead weight landed squarely atop him, the plate carrier and spare
magazines and M4 carbine still strapped to his chest provided a five-inch
buffer between his face and its snapping teeth.

Having missed the Z’s head by a less than a hand's width,
Jamie relinquished her rifle to gravity and charged hard towards the falling
tangle of flailing limbs.

Supine and nearly enveloped in long grass, Cade got the
dagger clear of the scabbard and rolled right to free up his left arm. A beat
later the Gerber was arcing up from his side, a deadly blur of matte black
clutched in his gloved hand. A fraction of a second later, pushing air in front
of it from the opposite side, a second glint of metal entered Cade’s peripheral.
Finally, all inside of the latter half of that same second, Cade’s blade
plunged upward through the triangle of soft flesh under the Z’s chin and the spiked
end of Jamie’s tomahawk embedded in its left temple with a wet
thunk
.

In one fluid movement Jamie released her tomahawk and kicked
the leaking corpse off of Cade, who had let go of his Gerber and was already
going for his Glock. “It’s dead,” she stated, helping him up with her free
hand. “Are you bit?”

Cade shook his head and got to his knees. Starting at the
Black Hawk, he walked his gaze around his immediate vicinity, nearly a full
three-sixty sweep.

Through the Black Hawk’s canopy he saw Duncan looking at him
expectantly, mouth opened wide as if he was about to shout a warning or maybe a
tidbit of what—usually already three sheets to the wind—he liked to call
sage
advice.