Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (54 page)

Cade asked, “What’d he do? Before all of this ... of
course.”

“He stopped being a team player a long time ago.” Cross
paused and folded the fabric over. “He was doing shady stuff over there trying
to establish contacts for after service. Stepped on a lot of toes.”

With the others now standing in a loose semi-circle and
listening in, Cade asked, “And?”

“Another member of his team took a couple in the back in the
kill house during training. Came out later it just happened to be the junior
shooter who dimed on him.”

Shaking his head, Cade stepped over the body and approached
Carson, who was unconscious and pretty pale. “And this one? I recognize him
from Nash’s briefing.”

Jamie stood up from where she’d been crouched in the corner
and said, “He killed Logan. And the fucker admitted he made Jordan jump to her
death from a hovering helicopter.”

Cade made his way over to Jamie and whispered something
while pointing over at Foley. She shook her head and continued talking rapidly
and gesturing towards the fallen man.

Lopez had opened his mouth to speak but then stopped
abruptly and held up a finger and walked off, apparently talking with someone
over his comms. Then he turned, his face slack and devoid of color as he called
across the room to Cade. “That was First Lieutenant Eckels,” he said in a low
voice. “Says we’ve got an empty quiver.”

Cade crunched across the field of broken glass and kneeled
over Carson. Thinking, he regarded the man for a moment and then looked up at
Lopez and asked, “How many?”

“Looks like only one.”

Game changer
, thought Cade. And though he didn’t let
it show, his mood went south in a millisecond.

Getting the drift of the ABC conversation, Daymon saw
himself into it and blurted out, “Only one. I broke
only
one bone ...
that’s an
only
situation. I
only
have one girlfriend ... that’s
an
only
situation. But one missing nuclear bomb doesn’t fall under the
only
category. Where in the
hell
is it?”

Trying to shush Daymon earned Duncan an angry glare.

Foley stepped forward and described to Lopez and Cade what
he saw earlier at the southwest gate. He included the tow truck in detail,
including the driver and the cargo.

Foley’s description of the man, compounded by the fact he
had dark hair and wore a red Cornhusker hat caused Cade to say to no one in
particular, “Elvis.”

Daymon frowned, then said with a certain amount of
reverence, “What’s the
King
have to do with this?”

“Smelling salt ... now,” Cade said to the medic, who was
attempting to keep Carson from dying on him. “And I need you to shoot him up
with epinephrine and stand back.”

Nodding and disregarding the fact that Cade carried no rank,
the medic got into his bag and administered the shot as if following a
superior’s orders.

Carson stirred almost immediately.

Sticking his entire hand into the gaping hole in Carson’s
crotch, Cade grabbed ahold of something down there and hissed, “Where is the
missing nuke?”

After a second, Carson’s eyes fluttered open. But he said
nothing.

Crunching the smelling salts between the two fingers of his
free hand, Cade waited a second for it to activate and then in one quick motion
jammed it deeply into Carson’s left nostril.

Still looking on from her spot in the corner near the
shattered window, Jamie thought,
that’s for Gus
.

Carson’s mouth moved, then quietly he asked, “What time is
it?”

Cade removed his helmet. Put it aside and then stuck a
finger into the bullet wound in Carson’s hip. He rooted around while Carson
squirmed until he found a nerve that caused the mercenary to pound the ground
with a fist and eventually shit himself. “Time for you to tell me where the
nuke is ...
now!
”

“What time is it?” repeated Carson, the stench of his own
excrement wafting up from the spreading puddle of watery brown fluid.

Lopez said, “Nine o’clock sharp.”

With an icy hand twisting his guts, Cade confirmed this on
his Suunto. “Why?” he hissed, probing the finger deeper, feeling bone grating
against bone through his tactical glove.

Eyelids fluttering, Carson said, “You’ll see.”

Cade cracked a second capsule. Rolled it in his fingers and
balanced out Carson’s nose by inserting it into the unobstructed nostril.

Wincing from the ammonia sting, Carson said, “Nine-eleven
... you’ll see.”

Chapter 88

The low timbre thrum of the idling engine combined with the
hydraulic whine of the tow apparatus as he lowered the device to the dirt was a
siren song for the passing dead. As he worked, the steady crunch of feet on
gravel drifted up from the winding road below.

He popped open the case and hinged the lid over. There, its
metallic skin throwing the light of the low moon, was the mother of all pay
back. Whether he could see them or not, he had to believe they were down there.
And they were all going to get a very rude awakening.

When he powered on the tablet, its soft glow illuminated his
face. He swiped the icon just as Bishop had demonstrated, bringing up a
benign-looking rectangle of numbers that hinted to none of the destructive
power that would be unleashed in just sixty short minutes. Couldn’t there have
been flames represented there? Like the ones oft painted on a custom hot rod.
Or some wicked looking barbed wire?
Anything
, he thought to himself,
to
make inputting the moronic four-digit code seem more ominous
.

He looked around for a subtle tell that he’d been made by
some night-vision-wielding soldier.
Nothing.

Finger hovering over the ten-digit keypad, a sudden tinge of
doubt fluttered like a single minuscule butterfly in his stomach. Was his sixth
sense telling him something? The desire to get even with the sleeping assholes
whose presence he could almost feel overpowered the obvious until all four
digits were inputted and a graphic reading
Armed
flashed up at him from
inside the box.

Elvis, you stupid fucker
, he thought. “Noooo!” he
screamed.

The dead, having just arrived, fanned out and took station,
eyeing him greedily, their bony fingers kneading the chain-link fence, making
it rattle.

That he’d been duped hit him like a sucker punch. And that
there were tens of thousands ... maybe even ten times that number of walking
dead converging on the ‘T’ from places distant dawned on him. He laughed
because he had become the world’s most lethal suicide bomber—and there was
nothing he could do about it.

Stupid fucker.
He had been conned. Every word of
Bishop’s and Carson’s good-cop bad-cop routine on the porch over beers rushed
back at him. Bishop, momentarily playing the bad cop, had chastised his
condition after no sleep and a day’s worth of work and said:
For this
mission to succeed tomorrow, we’re going to need a youthful Elvis to suit up
and show up
. Then Carson had piped up:
Blonde or brunette?
and he
was hooked.

“Shit! There are no fucking soldiers,” he bellowed, further
exciting the dead.
And that
, he thought,
explained the ridiculously
easy approach
. He was for all intents and purposes now an accidental martyr
in Bishop’s personal jihad against the dead, and there would be no squeaking
out of this fix. Nope, all of the Kamikaze pilots and the disaffected with a
grudge and a package truck full of TNT combined couldn’t hold a candle to the
damage this device was going to do—on the already dead. He spat on the ground
and cursed the dead as the fencing quaked and quivered under their pressing
weight.

Bemoaning the fact that he could have detonated the device outside
of McCall and taken Bishop and at least three or four dozen former military
pricks with him, he turned his thoughts to his family and how they had died.
Cold and alone in the waters of San Francisco Bay. Adjusting his Huskers ball
cap as a tear streamed down his cheek, he glanced down at the quickly scrolling
numbers on the timer. His watch indicated it was four minutes past nine
o’clock. Sensing his life slipping through his fingers and disgusted at himself
for not following through, he drew his pistol. It was loaded, that much he knew
for sure.

The muzzle was bitter in his mouth from the mixture of oil
and burnt gun powder. Twisting his wrist slightly, he bit down on the muzzle
and said sorry to his kin for the last time. The hammer, on line with his right
ear, made a mechanical click as it dropped, causing him to twitch ever so
slightly. The resulting detonation punched an opening the size of a softball in
his skull, taking his left eye and ear and everything connecting the two
sensory apparatus with it. Dermis and flesh and muscle splashed over the device
and, now deafened, he fell in a vertical heap, legs and arms kicking and pawing
at the dirt—autonomous functions created by the massive brain trauma.

But he wasn’t dead when the fence failed and the moaning
flesh eaters dug in with their cold probing digits. In seconds, his entrails
were spread out on the ground around him, one big sloppy dirty mess. His legs
and arms continued to twitch as he lived in intense silent agony with the timer
counting down to zero, with all of the bad deeds, of which there were many,
flashing before his remaining eye. He felt his body go cold at the three-minute
mark. With two minutes to go until detonation, he saw stars flitting behind his
lids as his mortal self passed and the Omega virus began working to bring him
back. His body convulsed, mostly from the meat being rent from his bones, as
the prions wormed their way to his brain. Luckily—or unluckily, depending upon
how you looked at it—Elvis turned quickly and would get to attend his second
death. Shrugging off his feeding brethren undead, newly turned Elvis rose on
unsteady feet. Then a single drop of crimson blood oozed from his shattered
orbital bone, traced the ridge of his powder-burned nose, and freefell to the device,
inexplicably splattering on the glass tablet where the timer now read
00:01:33—a full fifty-eight some odd minutes shy of those Bishop had promised.

Chapter 89

Cade’s Suunto read 21:09.
If the bomb is nearby
, he
thought sadly,
then I have two minutes to live and will never again hold
Raven and Brook
.
Or maybe
, he reasoned,
Elvis somehow transported
it to Schriever and in less than two minutes hundreds of good people will die a
horrible death
. Either way, sad as both scenarios would be, Carson was
going with him. Another pound of flesh excised from the Earth.
Or
, he
thought grimly.
Two minutes go by and nothing happens and the real
interrogation begins
. No matter what, Carson would never see another
sunrise.

A minute passed and nothing.

Though a cooling breeze flowed in off the lake, the air
inside still stank of fear-laced sweat and shit and drying blood.

Fifty more seconds became history and the room had grown so
quiet a pin hitting the floor could have as well been a cymbal crash.

Counting down the last ten seconds in his head, Cade
instinctively shifted his gaze from the lake’s rippling black waters to the
nearly identical-appearing blood-slickened floor tiles behind him.

Out of the blue, though the possibility of surviving a
danger close nuclear detonation with only flash blindness was remote,
Lieutenant Eckels—who had up until then remained on the sidelines—called out,
“Avert your eyes,
now!
”

After hitting one and ticking off a few more seconds to the
negative, Cade exhaled and opened his eyes. A half beat later, before craning
around, a flicker of light shone off the glassy crimson pool at his feet. And
amazingly, for a split second it seemed bright as the Ranger’s hand-held
spotlight had been as it refracted away and lit up the stainless steel
appliances. And like the nuclear detonation forty miles north of Schriever,
there was no initial sound. No explosive concussion. No muffled
Whoomph
.
Nothing.

Just a continuing flicker of white and orange over the
horizon north by west.

The entire episode from flicker to realization took three
seconds. After those three seconds, the room erupted in an explosion of
movement and excited chatter.

“Where was the detonation?” Lopez demanded.

“Wait one,” answered Lieutenant Eckels. Then, shaking his
head, he added. “Comms are all messed up.”

Lopez asked. “How long will they be down?”

“Minutes. Maybe an hour or more depending on the atmospheric
bounce,” answered the lieutenant. “We’ll be OK here ...
for now
. The
remaining devices are being loaded onto the Chinooks. The women who were found
in the rape house have agreed to come along to Schriever in the third helo.”

“And us?” Cade asked, looking at Lopez.

“You’ll be getting a ride to wherever you want with us on
Jedi One-One.”

“And Carson?”

“I’d call General Nash and clear it with her ... but the
comms are
down
.” He winked and made air quotes when he said ‘
down
.’
“At any rate, after hearing what your friend Jamie had to say about Bishop’s
operation, I wish we could bring that pendejo back from hell so you can send them
both back as bunk buddies.”

Smiling morbidly at the thought, Cade offered his hand and
said, “Thank you, Captain Lopez. I owe you one." Instantly regretting
saying that one three-letter word,
owe
, that was such an indicator of
character if followed through on—and had gotten him into so much trouble with
Brook in the past—he lowered his hand and returned Lowrider’s sharp salute.