The Gathering Dead (3 page)

As bullets snapped past McDaniels and Safire, the major pulled the older man along as if he were no more than a child. When one of the SF troops to his right suddenly went down, he forgot all about the high-value civilian in his left hand and released him, bringing his M4 around. The soldier screamed as two zombies slammed into him, taking him to the ground like a pair of NFL linebackers sacking a quarterback. The soldier got off a quick burst from his M4, but it was too low; the volley passed right through one zombie’s center of mass and did no substantial damage. McDaniels shouldered his own weapon and fired a single round through one zombie’s head. It dropped to the verdant green grass of the Great Lawn like a sack of potatoes, its dull eyes knocked askew by the impact. But the second zombie sank its teeth into the screaming soldier’s cheek even as he beat at it with his fists. His blood was bright and red in the diffused sunlight, a sudden splash of Technicolor in an otherwise black and white scene. McDaniels stared at it, transfixed for an instant, as the zombie ripped a huge chunk of flesh from the soldier’s face and chewed it hungrily, its face blank, expressionless, its rheumy eyes vacant and without any sign of intelligence. The corpse was wearing the remains of an expensive blue suit. Its white dress shirt was dappled with blood, and it had lost one expensive loafer. McDaniels had the impression the zombie had been a successful man in life.

The soldier continued to struggle beneath the zombie, and he jerked his M4 into position as the corpse spread its jaws wide for another bite. A burst of gunfire blasted its skull apart, and the soldier tossed the grotesquerie aside as it collapsed on top of him. He then reached up to his mangled cheek with one hand, and explored the ragged hole torn there with his fingertips.

“Oh Jesus,” Regina said, her voice small and barely audible above the din of combat and helicopters.

The soldier looked at her, then at her father. His molars were visible through the rent in his face.

“Can you help me?” he asked Safire, speaking as clearly as possible despite the wound.

Safire shook his head. “No. I’m sorry. No.”

The soldier’s face collapsed as a burst of bullets tore through his helmet and pulverized the skull beneath. McDaniels turned. Keith held his weapon at his shoulder. He walked toward the corpse, knelt, and pulled the rubber-edged dog tags from around its neck. He pocketed them, then rose to his feet and looked at McDaniels.

“Let’s go, we’re pretty close now,” he said, before resuming his jog. If he was at all remorseful, he did not allow it to show. McDaniels followed, tugging Safire along.

The two MH-60M Black Hawks were were surrounded by six ground security experts from the 160
^th
. Several bodies lay around the two aircraft, some in uniform, most in other dress. Not all were zombies.

“OMEN Team,” Keith told the first Night Stalker he came across. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “We’ve got two AMCITs that need to be hauled to MacArthur, on Long Island.”

“Took you guys long enough, chief. Are any of you injured? Have any of you been bitten?” The tall, rawboned sentry looked from person to person, his Heckler & Koch MP5 held in both hands.

“Negative. We’re all good,” Keith said.

The sentry spoke into his helmet’s boom microphone and waved them toward the waiting Black Hawks. Keith turned to McDaniels.

“Major, you go with the Safires in one ship,” he shouted over the roaring jet engines and slashing rotor blades. “You take your first sergeant and Leary and Rittenour. The rest of us will be in the second chopper. In case anything goes south, we’ll come in and extract you guys.”

“Roger that, chief.
Sine Pari
, huh?” McDaniels said, throwing in the Special Forces Latin motto of Without Equal. A ghost of a smile flickered across Keith’s face, then he pointed to the men he wanted to accompany him and led them toward the second helicopter.

“Let’s saddle up!” Gartrell shouted, and he pushed the Safires toward their Black Hawk. One of the crew chiefs helped them aboard and strapped them into the hard seats that ran the width of the helicopter’s troop compartment. Before returning to his own seat and the six-barreled M134 minigun mounted on an articulating cradle before it, he handed McDaniels a headset that was hardwired to the helicopter’s intercom system. McDaniels removed his headset and donned the new one.

“This is Major McDaniels,” he said.

“Major, this is Chief Warrant Officer Five Cox. We’ll be pulling pitch in just a moment, but I want to let you know that we’ll have to keep it at about 100 feet above ground. Our FLIR is messed up, and we can’t get it operational. Without that we can’t see through the smoke. So we’ll have to fly below the smoke layer. Understood?”

“Roger that, chief. Do whatever you need to do, this is your aircraft and we’re only along for the ride.”

“That guy with you—they say he might have a cure for this... this plague or whatever the hell it is. That true?”

“That’s what they say. Any more than that, I don’t know.” McDaniels turned and checked Safire’s safety harness. He then placed his own helmet on Safire’s head and drew the chin strap tight.

“Keep that on,” he said, shouting over the Black Hawk’s twin engines. He didn’t know if Safire heard him or not, but the scientist nodded, and that was good enough for McDaniels.

The security perimeter collapsed as the ground control personnel retreated to the helicopters and climbed aboard. The timing was unfortunate. As they mounted the helicopters, another incursion of zombies cut through the assemble area. McDaniels saw them coming, approaching the second helicopter that carried CW3 Keith and the rest of OMEN Team.

“Zeds to the right! Zeds to the right!” he shouted over the intercom while pulling his M4 into position. If he had to start shooting, he’d have to push the rifle past Safire and fill his lap with red-hot shell casings. He needn’t have worried; the crew chief leaned forward in his seat, grabbed his M134’s A-frame handles, and fired a burst at the oncoming zombies. They literally exploded as the salvo of rounds ripped through them. McDaniels saw one decapitated head bounce across the grass and come to a rest face-up. Like a scene from a cheap horror movie, the dull eyes still moved, and the mouth repeatedly opened and closed.

“We’re out of here!” the pilot said. He reached up to the overhead panel and fire-walled the engine condition levers. The Black Hawk’s twin turboshaft engines went from wail to a full-on scream as the helicopter’s main rotor picked up speed. The helicopter clawed its way into the air as the last of the security team threw themselves aboard. McDaniels watched as the second helicopter began to follow. As it grew light on its wheels, several shapes darted toward it from the left rear. The door gunner stood and spun his M134 to bear, but he couldn’t get it zeroed in time. Before McDaniels could do more than key his microphone button, the zombies threw themselves into the helicopter just as it lifted off. After a moment, its nose suddenly rose and tracked to the right before its main rotor lost thrust. The Black Hawk’s tail rotor disintegrated as it struck the ground, and the big helicopter rolled over and slammed back to the earth. Its rotors threw up sod and earth before they also fragmented. The helicopter spun around in a circle, and its tail boom fractured into three different pieces. It came to a sudden rest, and smoke rose from its engine cowlings.

In the tree line, a ragged line of figures shambled toward the downed aircraft. More zombies, coming in for the kill.

“We lost ROMEO Six-Two,” the pilot said over the intercom. “We’re a solo flight now, major.”

“Roger that,” McDaniels said. He looked at Gartrell, who returned his somber glance. The first sergeant’s rifle was between his legs, its butt planted against the helicopter deck between his boots. Beside him, Regina Safire had also seen the helicopter crash. Her gaze met McDaniels’, and for a moment she looked less like a hard-charging New York City professional and more like a frightened child. Her dark hair flew about her head, courtesy of the rotor wash that entered the troop compartment through the open doors.

McDaniels turned to Wolf Safire, who sat motionless beside him. His eyes were shut, and his jaw was set. McDaniels squeezed the smaller man’s wrist. Safire nodded slightly, but didn’t open his eyes. McDaniels faced forward, looking out through the canopy. He sat right behind the air crew, so he had a good view.

The smoke was dense and roiling as the sun edged closer to the western horizon, now to the helicopter’s tail. Other helicopters launched, and the MH-60M banked from side to side as its pilots threaded it through the pattern with a cool, almost mechanical proficiency that McDaniels found admirable. These were people who had just seen their wingman burn in, and there was little doubt what had happened to the flight crew and their passengers. The Black Hawk charged on, flying over the treetops of Central Park, just south of the city’s historic Metropolitan Museum of Art. McDaniels had visited the museum three years ago with his family on one hot, muggy summer day when the city had been besieged by seemingly never-ending thunderstorms. He had been impressed not just by the displays, but by the architecture of the museum itself. He wondered how it would fare in the near future, and he wondered if zombies were tearing through its corridors, hunting and killing. And in the process, swelling the ranks of their army.

The helicopter thundered on, staying as far below the smoke layer as possible. McDaniels was discomfited to see the pilots flew the big chopper directly down one of the streets (was it East 79th?), as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Buildings rose up on either side of the aircraft, and the major knew that the rotor tips had to be perilously close to making contact with cement and glass. The Black Hawk charged across Madison Avenue, clogged with traffic. Figures ran through the halted mass of cars and trucks and buses, and in some places, more figures gathered in what looked like free-for-all fights. They were zeds in the middle of feeding frenzies, and McDaniels suddenly remembered the woman standing outside his Humvee, begging for the soldiers to save her child.

My daughter, take my daughter!

He gritted his teeth and forced the memory away.

The helicopter continued on its eastbound track, rotors thumping, vibrating slightly as any odd-ass aircraft that flew like a helicopter would. They crossed the multiple lanes of Park Avenue, and it was similarly blocked, a city artery clogged with automobiles instead of placque. More smoke billowed, this time from a burning bus.

As the helicopter approached Lexington Avenue at sixty knots, something fell past the helicopter, startling the crew chief sitting in the right gunner seat. McDaniels didn’t have to see it perfectly to know what it was: a human shape. It had been a zombie, and it had tried to land on the helicopter.

“Climb out!” he said over the intercom. “The zeds, we saw them diving out of buildings to get to people—”

Something exploded above his head and the helicopter started bucking like some crazy carnival ride. Alarms went off, and McDaniels saw rotor alerts on the pilot’s multifunction displays. The helicopter dipped to the left as the pilots fought against it.

“We’re going in, make sure everyone’s strapped in!” the pilot shouted. “Mayday, mayday, mayday, ROMEO Six-One, twelve souls aboard—”

The pilot didn’t finish his transmission and the rotor blades scythed through a treetop at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 79th Street. The Black Hawk continued its apparently uncommanded left bank and turned up Lexington, slowing, its nose rising as the pilot fought to chop its airspeed and bring it into something approximating a hover. It seemed to be working, as McDaniels noticed the aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl, still crabbing to the left, but no longer flying along at almost 70 miles an hour. As the helicopter descended, both miniguns barked as their gunners fired on nearby targets.

Jesus, we can’t be landing here!
McDaniels thought.

The pilot resumed his mayday as he and the copilot fought to regain control over the Black Hawk. The alarms continued to sound, and as the aircraft lazily spun to the left, something fractured overhead like a thick bone. McDaniels saw the blurred remains of an entire rotor blade fly away from the aircraft and disintegrate as it smashed into the brick façade of a nearby office building, disappearing into a spreading cloud of shattered carbon fiber and broken glass. The pilot screamed something unintelligible over the intercom system as the helicopter flounced from side to side as if in some sort of mechanical epileptic seizure.

Then it rolled to the right and crashed into the traffic-choked street.

McDaniels curled up into a ball in his shock-absorbing seat as the helicopter slid across the rooftops of several cars, crushing them flat before it suddenly catapulted back into the air and rolled upright. The entire airframe lashed from side to side for an instant as if fighting to remain in the air. Both pilots wrestled with the cyclic and collective pitch sticks and managed to keep the aircraft right side up before it came back to earth, this time with its landing gear in the proper position. The wheels folded up as they were designed to do, absorbing a goodly amount of the G forces. McDaniels’ seat stroked, sliding along gas-filled struts, diminishing the remainder of the forces, and the major had just enough time to hug his knees up against his body armor. His head struck his kneepads with sufficient force to make him see stars for an instant as the wrecked MH-60M slid forward, tearing through automobiles as if they were as insubstantial as paper. The sound of metal being torn asunder was all McDaniels heard.

And then, the helicopter slammed into the back of a garbage truck. The pilot screamed as the right side of the cockpit imploded, driving the instrument panel into his armored seat and pinning him in place. The aircraft jerked to a halt, and the only sounds left were those of the engines winding down and the metronomic
beep-beep-beep
of an alarm.

An eerie buzzing filled McDaniels’ head. He slowly sat up in his seat and fumbled with his harness’s quick release, but couldn’t quite make it work. He looked to his right and saw Safire was still strapped to the seat beside him, leaning forward against his own harness. A trickle of blood ran from his thin nose, and his eyes were glassy, disoriented. McDaniels shook his head, trying to clear away the cobwebs.