Authors: Stephen Knight
“Maybe we ought to tell ‘em,” Rittenour said.
“Maybe you ought to sit back and enjoy the ride, troop. This vehicle is not stopping,” Gartrell said.
Ahead, a fire raged unabated as a fashionable Midtown West apartment building burned, filling the street with pungent, thick smoke the color of coal. Unarmed civilians stared at the Humvees as they tore past, but the dead hadn’t made it this far yet. Despite the uncontrolled fires, the uniformed soldiers manning the corners, the perpetual songs of sirens mixed with the throbbing basso beats of helicopter rotor blades, the residents of this part of New York City thought they were safe for the moment.
McDaniels shook his head. A moment was about all they had.
###
The dead hadn’t made it to Central Park yet, at least not in sufficient force. Still, the fair citizens of New York City had heard the helicopters, and they knew the jig was up. As the three Humvees roared through the park, armed soldiers and NYPD were using all the tools at their disposal to keep the citizens at bay. They were using non-lethal force, McDaniels saw. No one wanted a rising to occur here, not in the middle of an evacuation. Just a few members of the walking dead could spawn dozens of fellow walking corpses.
A television news van was off to one side of the intersection of the 72nd Street Transverse and East Drive. The Humvees were a mess, having driven over and through pretty much everything the dead could throw at them, and judging by the viscera smeared across the windows, McDaniels was certain the convoy was not a pretty sight. The TV cameras immediately swung in their direction, broadcasting the image out to millions.
The Humvees accelerated through the intersection and past the news crew without slowing down. They wound their way through the vast park that sat at the heart of one of Man’s greatest cities, a city that was slowly being consumed by a kind of nearly untreatable cancer.
And the only thing that kept it from being completely untreatable sat in a Humvee not more than three feet from one Cordell McDaniels, Major, United States Army Special Forces. Doctor Wolf Safire, the brilliant biochemist that had started the renowned pharmaceutical company InTerGen over two decades ago. McDaniels’ bosses said that Safire might have a cure, or a vaccine against whatever it was that caused those bitten by the dead from turning into one of them. And that was why he had been pulled out of his normal work at Army Special Operations Command and dispatched with First Sergeant David Gartrell to link up with Operational Detachment Alpha OMEN in New York City. He would oversee the rescue of the scientist and his thirty-something daughter, and ensure they were placed on a dedicated transport that waited for them in one small portion of Central Park’s Great Lawn. McDaniels hadn’t even thought to ask why him. Not only was it against the heritage of service he embraced—one did not question lawful orders, especially in the special operations community. And if there was a man who said he might be able to stop the rising tide of the dead, then McDaniels would run through an erupting volcano naked if that’s what it took to get him to deliver. And McDaniels had his own family to worry about. Though the Big Apple was the general nexus point in the United States, there were catastrophic infestations in Europe. No one knew exactly where it had started, but all indications seemed to point to somewhere inside Russia. McDaniels had been on the task force assigned to discover the outbreaks etiology. It seemed that someone had come across some long-forgotten relic of the Cold War and tampered with it. True or not, what had been released was first reported in Russia, and within weeks, Russia went dark. Satellites showed the legions of the dead moving across the nation, heading for both Europe and China. It was the double attack on capitalism the old Soviet guard might have dreamed of, but the soldiers had an entirely different perspective. They weren’t in it to destroy capitalism. They were in it to eat people, and it didn’t matter if those people were Russian, German, French, Polish, or Chinese.
The sky overhead was dark with smoke from gigantic fires. South of 14th Street, New York was an inferno, an intentional blaze started by the military in hopes that it would contain the army of the dead and prevent it from advancing north. And in a small measure, it was a successful gamble; even the dead couldn’t soldier on when all their flesh had been burned to a crisp and tendons and ligaments could no longer move muscle and bone. But there were gaps between the fires, gaps filled with soldiers and policemen that were being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the walking dead. There were tens of thousands of them in lower Manhattan, and they avoided the flames by using the subway tunnels, by massing at roadblocks in such numbers that they overwhelmed the defenders, and in some instances, by walking into the East and Hudson Rivers and walking upstream. McDaniels had heard reports on his way in that a group of the walking dead had emerged from the East River and was headed for the United Nations building. He had chuckled at that. Finally, something would devour the United Nations before it could envelop the world in leftist glory.
But the fires had also blackened the skies with thick smoke, smoke that was driven northward by the prevailing winds. This had curtailed aviation operations. Even though McDaniels’ convoy had a helicopter escort, it was by sheer chance that the proper flight crew from the 160
th
Special Operations Aviation Regiment had been in the area and was open to tasking. The pilots flew their small MH-6 Little Bird without doors and usually operated at an altitude of 40 feet above the deck, at night, in all weather, so flying in smoke wasn’t a show stopper for them. For the rest of the aviation community, however, the smoke was thick enough to hamper general aviation missions. That was why the assembly area at Central Park had been set up. VIPs and their dependents were to make it to the Park and, upon identity verification, they would board a helicopter or tiltrotor bound for greener pastures.
That was the idea, anyway. McDaniels looked out the window at the smoke-tinged afternoon and wondered just how many aircraft would wind up burying their noses in the dirt because their pilots couldn’t fly by instruments.
Shapes moved amidst the trees as the Humvee sped up East Drive. McDaniels straightened in his seat and looked out the gore-smudged window, trying to make sense of what he saw. Were those people, or...?
“Holy mother of God,” Gartrell said. “Freaking stiffs in Army BDUs!”
McDaniels felt a deep chill envelop him. “Call it in as a black flag actual. Leary, step on it. We’re out of time.”
“You got it, major.”
Excerpt:
LEFT WITH THE DEAD
A
Gathering Dead
Novella
By Stephen Knight
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055OGSOI
NEW YORK CITY
The dead were everywhere.
Gartrell sprinted through the darkened husk of New York City, the flare in his left hand sputtering and spitting as it slowly ran itself down. He felt its heat on his hand even through the heavy glove he wore. Ignoring the sensation, he ran through the night as fast as he could, weaving around abandoned cars and trucks. He avoided the sidewalk and kept to the street itself. The deserted vehicles served as a type of obstacle course, slowing down the tide of corpses that pursued him.
Just the same, it was only a matter of time until they caught him.
The flare sputtered its last, turning into just a glorified sparkler now. Gartrell flung it away. He juked to his right and slid on his ass across the hood of a taxi cab, firming his grip on the Atchisson AA-12 automatic shotgun that hung from his body by its patrol strap. He didn’t know how many rounds he had left, but it couldn’t be very many. Five? Six? Behind him, past the wall of stenches that pushed through the street after him, he heard the chatter of automatic gunfire. It was the Coast Guard ship’s .50 caliber machinegun, holding back the zeds in order for McDaniels and the others to get to safety. He wished them luck. They would need it.
And so did he.
As he ran past an abandoned UPS truck, a stench reached for him, its fingers curled into claws, its jaws spread wide to reveal a dry maw. But like most stenches it was slow, its movements sluggish and not particularly coordinated. Gartrell saved his ammunition and punched the ghoul in the face instead, knocking it onto its ass as he dashed past. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the rest of the zeds no longer pursued him; instead, they clustered around the smoking remains of the flare he had thrown away.
He slowed just a moment and watched the growing crowd through his night vision goggles. Sure enough, they gathered around the flare, shoving against each other, casting about in the darkness. It took Gartrell a moment to figure out what the story was. The zeds were so stupid they had focused their attention on the flare as he had run through the night, and now their unblinking eyes were glare-blind. They equated the flare with food—him—and they had no idea why he wasn’t where the flare lay.
Boy, these things really
are
stupid.
And then, as if to prove he wasn’t exactly a mental heavyweight himself, a zombie jumped onto Gartrell from behind. It bit down on his helmet, its teeth skidding across the fabric-covered Kevlar. Gartrell spun and lashed out with his left elbow, and the hard pad he wore there caught the zed right in the face with enough force to break its nose. While the ghoul felt no pain—Gartrell knew the stenches responded to nothing but their incessant hunger—the impact was enough to loosen its grip. Gartrell continued his spin while seizing one of the ghoul’s wrists with his left hand and pulled it free. The zombie fell into the street behind him, and Gartrell fired one round from his AA-12 into its face. The zed’s skull exploded like an overripe watermelon meeting its fate at a Gallagher show.
The shot captured the attention of the pack of zeds huddled around the flare, and with one collective moan, they surged toward him.
Crap.
Gartrell took off at a run again, heading down East 79th Street as fast as he could, weaving around the derelict cars and other debris that choked the street. The skies still flickered overhead as the artillery bombardment to the north continued unabated. The rangy first sergeant looked in that direction, and wondered if he should make for the Army forces there, or try and double back to the boat.
The boat,
he told himself.
He ran to the next intersection, moving as quickly as he could. More stenches flooded into the area, and Gartrell finally had to leave the relative cover of the street for the sidewalk. Concealed now only by darkness, he charged up East 79th Street to the intersection with York. He turned right and scurried up York Avenue. He knew the Coast Guard cutter
Escanaba
would likely sail north until it cleared Roosevelt Island, then turn to the right and head back for the Atlantic Ocean. If he could get to East 86th or East 87th streets, he might be able to hail it before it reversed its course.
He ran and ran, his lungs burning, his legs and feet aching. He avoided contact with the stenches wherever he could, and refrained from firing on them unless he was danger close and there was no other way. Smoke tinted the air as well; there were some fires burning somewhere nearby, but he couldn’t see them. Clinging to the shadows, he darted from block to block, and employed stealth and night vision as his primary weapons.
But all the streets east of York Avenue were chock full of the dead. They’d been attracted by the cutter’s weapons fire, and they now massed along the banks of the East River. It would be practically impossible to return to the riverfront undetected. Getting to the
Escanaba
was pretty much out the window.
Gartrell swore under his breath and conducted a quick perimeter check. A wave of zeds shambled up the street and sidewalk behind him, moving in his direction. They probably couldn’t see him, he decided, but they knew he was nearby. And in the dim recesses of whatever passed for their tiny little minds, they knew that time and numbers were on their side. More stenches swarmed down York Avenue from the north. Their numbers were much smaller than those to the south, but Gartrell still didn’t like the odds. They rolled down the wide avenue like a filthy tide.
Gartrell tried the doors of a shop, and then the door of an apartment building, but both were locked.
He had gone as far as he could. He couldn’t fight his way through to the north, south, or east—he didn’t have enough ammunition. He just as quickly discarded the notion of killing himself—things weren’t that dire yet, but he put a coda on that thought since it might eventually become an option he would have to consider. Only one thing was clear to him right now: He did not want to be eaten by the gathering dead, and that meant he had to get the hell out of Dodge, pronto.