The colonel stabbed his index finger at the man who had just spoken. “You be quiet,” - another stab at the captain - “What don’t I know, Bill?”
“Sir, there’s a massive swarm of Fallen moving west. It started in the northeast, and has been steadily moving westward at about one mile per hour. It turned south when it hit Lake Michigan, then west again when it got past the tip of the lake. It destroys everything in its path, and picks up more Fallen as it moves.”
“We haven’t seen any swarm, Captain, and how would you know about it anyway? Your HQ is a few hundred miles west of here.”
The man shifted nervously. “May I reach into my flight suit for a sat-scan image?”
“Slowly.”
The pilot pulled out a folded piece of paper and passed it to the colonel. “Brooks was looking for you. He was adamant that we find you, but your captors kept slipping through his fingers. He took a platoon of regular Army to a big facility in rural Missouri, I flew one of the Blackhawks. We lost thirty men to the Fallen, but Brooks said that we needed to get to a satellite terminal to scan for that,” he pointed at the LAV, “and that when we found it, we could get you back.”
The colonel looked at Androwski again and Anna, Chris, Dallas, and Rick, who had come out of the LAV and were listening too. “When he was looking for you with the satellite, he noticed the swarm.”
“How many undead are in this swarm?” demanded Rick.
“Almost eight hundred thousand, near as we can tell. I can’t believe you didn’t see them.”
30
The Blackhawk hovered at thirty six hundred feet of altitude, just short of three miles behind the swarm. The machine was high enough that the creatures on the ground couldn’t hear the engines or rotors. Bourne had commandeered the vehicle and its pilot so he could view the vast horde of dead. The pilot’s cohorts were back by the LAV, under close guard by Androwski and the others, while Bourne, Seyfert, and Rick hitched a ride to inspect the walking tide of death.
Rick pointed out the starboard window and spoke into his headset. “What the hell is that black cloud?”
“Insects,” Schellenger, the pilot, replied. “They follow the Fallen in droves, it’s disgusting, but you can see the cloud two miles out from the ground on a clear day with flat terrain. They’re a good early warning system, but it hasn’t helped anyone yet.”
“What does that mean, it hasn’t helped?” Bourne asked as he looked at the swarm through binoculars.
“Only one of the small encampments we’ve seen has tried to bug out when the Fallen approach, and that one got caught in it. It’s three miles wide and two deep.”
“Wait, you’ve seen encampments?”
“Yes, sir, the more easterly you go, the more live people you find. Of course, the opposite is also true, there are more Fallen. The Triumvirate has absorbed several small camps, and we have tabs on several more. Anyway, whenever the cloud appears on the horizon, people in the camps hunker down and try to defend. Unfortunately, they have no idea the size of the swarm, and they inevitably get overrun.”
“Has Brooks tried to stop it?”
“There isn’t enough ordnance. We have the A10s, but we don’t have any more bombs. We tried strafing runs with the Warthog’s 30mm guns, but all that does is cut a line in the horde for a few seconds. There was a Hades bomb in an armory in South Dakota, but the men who went to get it never came back.”
“So what’s the plan, how are you going to stop them?”
“My guess is that we won’t. There have been plans to divert them, but each time we try, they end up just moving west again on the same path. It’s like they’re drawn west.”
The colonel turned to look at the pilot. “What is the track in relation to the stadium?”
“You mean in Lincoln? Dead on. They’ll reach HQ by the end of next week, and with the lack of any changes in direction, that’s where the brass thinks the Fallen are headed.”
“Jesus, all those people…”
“Are probably gonna die. Brooks and Recht are already prepared to leave with the capable fighters and most of the weaponry, but only the pilots and upper brass know. There simply aren’t enough vehicles to evac the civvies.”
“You son of a bitch,” fumed Seyfert. “How could you leave those people to die?”
Schellenger smirked. “I didn’t. I hand-picked my crew for this mission personally, and none of us have families back in Lincoln. Brooks and Recht would certainly kill any of our families should we desert. The point is, tomorrow at 0800, word is going to get out that there’s a swarm coming and that Recht is preparing to abandon his flock to the Fallen.” The pilot smiled wider. “That should go over like a shit sandwich.”
“What did you mean by desertion?” Bourne asked.
“Well, first off, Brooks came to me personally prior to lift off for this mission. He told me that you were a traitor, and if I found you I was to kill you immediately, you were not to be taken prisoner.” Bourne raised his eyebrows. “It’s true, sir. Most of the men suspect that Brooks is off his rocker, but that confirmed it for me. He ordered the assassination of the ranking military commander in the area,” Schellenger harrumphed, “as if. The men I picked for this mission are my friends and I trust them. I told them we would monitor the swarm until my guy in Lincoln spread the word about what was coming. He will also inform as many as he can about what Recht has been doing. Then we’re bugging out and heading north to Canada to fish and farm. None of that matters now.”
“Why not, soldier?”
“Because we’re out of gas.” Schellenger tapped the fuel indicator. “We’ve got enough for two hundred miles, and then this bird is six million bucks worth of scrap metal. Every airport and fuel depot within five hundred miles is either overrun, or has men loyal to Brooks guarding it. Not to mention that my crew and I seem to be prisoners. I guess what I’m saying is: Request permission to come aboard, sir?
“No room,” Seyfert said immediately.
“While I don’t share his enthusiasm, Captain, he’s right, we can’t fit you.”
Seyfert had his pistol in his lap. “Due respect, sir, I just don’t trust this Triumvirate douche.”
“Careful, sailor, I was a Triumvirate douche too.”
“Roger that, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Rick pointed out the window. “Is that the main body of it?”
“Negative, those are just stragglers.” The pilot pointed forward, about twenty degrees higher out the forward windscreen. “That’s the swarm.”
“Holy shit,” Seyfert and Rick whispered at the same time.
31
“You at least could have tried to get some folks out,” Seyfert told Schellenger as they packed a case of water and some MREs into the Blackhawk, “and fuck you for taking our food.”
“I didn’t take shit, your CO gave it to us. If you want to go back to Lincoln, I can get us most of the way in my bird, but then you get to deal with Brooks and his cronies. He’ll know what you’re about before you can ever spill the beans, and how is one man going to save ten thousand people? My helicopter will take ten at most, and that would be if I had any fuel, and if I don’t get shot on a whim, and if Brooks lets me take anyone. I’ve done plenty to redeem myself for working with those evil bastards.” Schellenger wiped his hands on his flight suit then folded his arms. “Fuck you and your insinuations that I could have helped. I did help. Go on, go back and get eaten. You’ll see how ridiculous your efforts are as the Fallen are chewing on you, or when you starve to death in a cell surrounded by them.”
Fifteen minutes later, Bourne was saluting the Blackhawk crew as they took off. To Seyfert’s amazement, the crew saluted back. The bird flew north, with two HK 416 battle rifles and two hundred rounds of ammunition in addition to the food and water. Before they left, the four men had been searched head to toe, and Stark and Androwski had disabled the helicopter’s radio.
“Too bad. Usin’ that chopper woulda gotten us ta Boston quicker if we had the gas.”
The colonel turned abruptly away from the departing aircraft. “Agreed Dallas, but it couldn’t carry us all and it
was
almost out of fuel. Saddle up, people, we leave in five.”
The group took a southerly track after they separated from the crew of the Blackhawk. Taking back roads and going overland as much as they could, there was still no way to avoid major populated areas after they turned north.
The mission team picked up a young guy named Bill in a dead town in southern Pennsylvania. He had been hiding in a food distribution warehouse, but was caught outside by a few dozen creatures when he made a break for a dentist’s office to pull one of his own teeth. The team had saved him just in the nick of time, and had almost shot him as he showed up disheveled with a bloody mouth after pulling a broken and rotten tooth. The reward for saving him was extreme, with all the food and water they could carry in the LAV and the Hummer. They were now pulling a small landscape trailer laden with all kinds of sustenance. Ramen noodles, packages of snack food, and boxes of juice drinks were now crammed against the inside hull of the LAV as they rumbled northeast.
They assisted an armed encampment under siege by the dead in Hillsdale, New York. The zombies had easily been destroyed using the LAV’s wheels, and Bourne had insisted that some of the food they were carrying on the trailer be left for the folks there. Bill had also decided to stay and help, as he wanted no part of travelling any further east after the folks in Hillsdale told them what they were in for. Anna asked Bill if he would take her new dog Joe with him. When everybody looked at her, she looked away. “Where we are going is no place for a puppy.”
Anna looked at the rear of the LAV as they drove away without Joe.
The dead were extremely prevalent as they got closer to their destination. The towns in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had fared no better than any other state they had come through, but these towns were full of homes jam packed together. Although many of the states the survivors had travelled through were larger in population, they were also significantly larger in area, which in turn would mean that the undead were spread out, or concentrated in the cities. Before the plague, Massachusetts was ranked twelfth in population, but forty-fifth in area, meaning that the potential for six million undead, all concentrated in a small locale was significant.
What really slowed the LAV down, though, was the traffic. There were tens of thousands of vehicles abandoned everywhere. It looked as if the entire state had tried to escape west, but were turned back by the same military type checkpoints the team had seen along the way. The citizens were turned back and died by the thousands, only to re-animate and come back to the blockades as dead people who made more dead people. Dead people who were still in the area.
It was decided that they would travel south, and hook north to avoid the majority of the populated suburbs west of Boston. South of Boston was less populated but still had the potential for huge numbers of walking dead inhabitants. They saw plenty. The roads were packed with abandoned vehicles, many with struggling forms inside. Many more had windows broken in and blood marks on the upholstery.
As the survivors got closer to the coast, the going got tougher. The LAV was able to negotiate areas that not many other vehicles could, but the Hummer was having real trouble. The vehicle was hampered by terrain and obstacles that the LAV could skirt, wade, or crush easily, and when they reached Braintree Massachusetts on Route Three, they had to abandon the Hummer. The numbers of dead were too significant to keep leaving the safety of the armored vehicles to move abandoned or wrecked cars. Anna was almost bitten when the group was shifting supplies from the trailer and the Hummer to the LAV, and half a dead woman pulled herself from under an abandoned tow truck. Now eleven rode in a vehicle designed for significantly fewer personnel.
The crew took back roads to Quincy Harbor, where they quickly appropriated a Sea Ray Sundancer 610 that had forty one hours of total usage on the engine display. The keys were in the ignition, and when Murray started it up, the fuel tanks were full.
Brilliance
was the name on the stern. Stenner limped into the living room and stared around in amazement. “This thing is better than any house I’ve ever been in.” The back door had been open and several cases of water were on the deck but they appeared to have had been there a while. There was no sign of anyone living, but the dead showed up in droves shortly after loading the boat with the remaining supplies they were carrying. The Sundancer started on the first turn of the key, and they cast off before the dead could get even moderately close.
The original team from Alcatraz stayed on the LAV except Seyfert and Dallas, who elected to join Bourne’s group of five on the boat. Stark drove the LAV down a boat ramp into Quincy Bay, chasing the Sea Ray. “I had no idea there were so many islands in Boston Harbor,” commented Stark as the LAV chugged slowly through the water.
Rick was looking at the port monitor from the passenger’s seat up front. “Yeah, there’s quite a few, but it looks like that one wasn’t spared.” He pointed toward one of the islands, the bridge that had spanned from east to west missing a large piece in the middle. Stumbling forms reached for the LAV from the beach, but they wouldn’t enter the water. “That must be Long Island, the bridge gives it away.”
“I thought Long Island was in New York?” Dallas said over the radio.
“This is a different Long Island…” Rick seem lost in thought. “Shit, Colonel, we should head northeast for a mile.”
“Negative, Rick, we’re too close to our mission objective to go on a foray.”
“Sir, there’s a fort on George’s Island, Fort Warren. It would be a perfect place for scared people from Boston to hide out, the place is huge with giant walls.”
“All the more reason to bypass it. I don’t want to get in a firefight with scared civvies looking to protect their assets, or have the LAV appropriated by anyone who appears friendly and then draws weapons on us.”
Rick acquiesced, admitting to himself that the colonel was probably right.
As they got closer to the city, evidence of the plague grew easy to distinguish. Several of the taller buildings that could be seen from the water were covered in scorch marks, dozens of their glass windows shattered or missing. Any smoke plumes had long since faded as the fires in the city burned out. As they moved past Logan Airport on their right, the bones of several aircraft were splayed at every angle on the tarmac. One seared fuselage was half in the water, its grisly inhabitants doomed to remain belted in until the seatbelts or the occupants themselves rotted enough for release.
The inner part of Boston Harbor was devoid of any type of ships other than the roof and upper deck of a submerged ferry boat. A lone zombie walked the deck like a trapped pirate. Unwilling to get its feet wet, it was ensnared by the waist-high railing on three sides and the harbor on the fourth. It stared at the LAV as it chugged past, its eyes full of iniquitous desire. It didn’t reach, but put its sodden hands on the railing
The route that the team had decided on would take them into the heart of the city by way of the Charles River. MIT was located immediately next to the river, and using the waterway to gain access seemed the safest way to progress. Rick’s ex-wife and the rest of the scientists were on the sixth floor of the Computer Sciences and Artificial Intelligence Laboratories building. Rick had been in there several times to visit his wife (when they were married), and he related to the group that because of the various projects going on in this particular building, security had been extensive. Heavy steel doors with both mechanical and electronic locks secured each floor. Just getting into the building prior to the plague took an act of God, even for an off-duty cop. It was the largest building on campus, and Rick told everyone that the architecture was…weird.
Boston was eerily quiet as the vehicles made their way up the Charles. Androwski was manning the turret in the LAV, and he noticed Seyfert come out on the deck of the
Brilliance
, rubbing his eyes and stretching. “You took a nap?” Androwski asked into his throat mic.
“Damn skippy. Still tired too. I could have slept another ten hours if we weren’t so close to the friggin’ AO.”
Androwski flashed his middle finger and Seyfert blew him a kiss in return.