Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 (27 page)

“You have to get us out of here, Hayes. Tell me you have a
plan?”

“Oh, I do.”

“He always has a plan,” said the drone. “This
time, his plan has failed. I'm almost through to those drones.”

Hayes whispered. “She wouldn't say that unless she was
having trouble,” he said with a wink.

“Get ready to run,” he said, almost too quiet to hear.

Louder, he said, “Vicky has a hidden gun. It's going to cost
you some more men to come in and get us.”

“Oh, Douglas. You're such a terrible liar. As a man, you
wouldn't understand how absurd that statement was. She was patted
down. Her clothing wouldn't allow a pocket knife to be hidden, much
less a big bad gun. Care to try again?”

Hayes counted off with his fingers.

Three.

Two.

One finger, up to the drone.

He ran. She followed him along the central column between the long
rows of A/C units. They were going toward the far end and the landing
platform.

“It's going to be close,” Hayes shouted back to her.

“What is? What are we doing?”

“Just run!”

As if I have a choice.

They cleared the last unit and were in the open. For the moment
the air was clear of any air traffic. They hit the steps up to the
flat landing platform, hopping a small gate on the top step which
said: “Danger: Spinning Rotors” in mean lettering.

Hayes crouched just inside the gate. When she settled next to him,
they both looked back. The three drones on the other building were
still hovering in front of the exit doorway.

“One of the drones is down,” he said plainly.

Looking again, she'd been mistaken. The third drone was over
there, but it had landed, and its rotor was slowly spinning down.

“If she can't take control, all she has to do is turn them
off.”

A second drone was descending, too.

The two white drones still hovered high above. Hayes nodded to
them.

“They'll come down when given the orders. There's no way
they didn't see us run up here.”

Moments went by. She knew they'd be swooping in, and they had no
defenses up on the flat surface of the helipad.

6

The two drones above began moving their way. The little black
“talkie” joined them like a cattle dog driving the sheep.

A gust of air caught them from behind, nearly pushing Victoria
into the protective gate. A white helicopter had come in at high
speed from somewhere behind them, and it was angled up steeply as it
tried to rid itself of speed.

“Oh my God,” was all she could say as it bore down on
them.

In seconds the force diminished from tornado to gale force. Hayes
was up.

“Run!”

The helicopter had righted itself and made as if it was going to
land on the platform. She looked at the two smaller drone
helicopters, and they had closed half the distance.

She ran.

She recognized the helicopter. It was the same one Hayes used to
capture Grandma Marty, and later it was how he and Jane escaped
Riverside. Hayes leaped into the open back door. The skids bounced up
slightly, then came back down.

Hayes motioned for her to drop down, which she found odd, but his
face was so uncharacteristically serious she did as he indicated. As
she went down, he slid the door shut.

“Oh, shiitake!”

In one long second, a drone passed over her head, slammed into the
almost-closed door of the helicopter, and shattered into tiny bits.
Some of the debris bounced back at her, but the rotors tumbled with a
good bit of the engine mechanism to the back of the bigger copter.
Much of the rest of it deflected underneath.

The door slid back open while the pilot maneuvered to steady the
helicopter.

Hayes was frantically motioning her to come to him.

A quick look behind. The other white drone was close, but still
hovering.

On her feet, she felt the sting of something square in the middle
of her back. It caused her to stumble the last few feet, but she
caught herself on the side of the copter. Hayes reached down to pull
her in.

“Quick!” he shouted.

Another sting in her back.

She got her foot in the cabin.

Sting. She'd been hit again. This one pierced her right butt
cheek.

“Ow!”

The door slid shut, but the window was shattered, and the hole
exposed her to further harassment from the drone. She and Hayes both
fell to the floor.

“Go! We're in.”

The helicopter tilted to the right.

We made it.

“Hold on,” Hayes shouted. As if it needed to be said—

Something slammed into her door. A broken fan blade sailed above
her head and shattered the far side window, but didn't break through.
It and a mass of other debris came in through the left window and
piled up on the far side floor.

They'd crashed the other drone into the helicopter.

She hugged the aluminum floor as the pilot made a best effort to
get her to fall into every seat and door. When they finally steadied
to an even flight path, she was up against the broken rotor blade.
The smell of an electrical fire was strong in the compartment.
Several components of the broken drone were smoldering, but not on
fire.

A series of explosions rocked the aircraft. The pilot banked hard
to the left, giving them all a view of the mansion exploding almost
directly below. It was a big bomb—

Hans' mansion.

Hayes crawled to the front of the cabin, then tossed back a pair
of headphones for her. She planted them on her head as her stomach
lurched and she lifted off the floor—hovering for a fraction of
a second. The pilot had dipped the aircraft. She slid forward as she
returned to the floor, then clawed her way to a seat.

The wind blew through the broken door window, making the wind
noise intolerable until she had the 'phones on.

“Vicky, you there?”

She put the boom mic in front of her mouth. “Don't call me
Vicky,” she replied brusquely.

“You OK?”

“I'm alive.”

“Elsa sprung our trap! But we're being pursued by her
drones. We have to stay low and fast to avoid them.”

She wasn't able to argue. Glued as she was to her seat, she could
only see forward, into the cockpit. The pilot sat on the left—her
red hair was bracketed by her headphones, and Hayes sat on the right.
Each of them leaned with the changes in directions. Their flight path
seemed random and unsteady, which was probably their intention.

“Are we going to find Liam?”

Jane turned back to her, though her mirrored sunglasses hid her
expression. She wore a frown.

Hayes was the one to respond. “We have to get away for a
while. I'm sorry. Those drones were suicidal for us. Elsa was
suicidal for us.”

Silence for several seconds.

“Victoria. We have to find Grandma.” He handed back a
heavy clipboard with a pen attached to a metal chain. “Please.
Write it down. We'll take no chances of being overheard. Who knows
what kind of listening equipment is on that broken drone.” He
pointed to the pile of junk which had rolled all over the rear cabin
floor.

She sat with the clipboard on her lap. Thinking.

“I made a promise to Liam that I wouldn't leave without
telling him where I was going.” She spoke quietly, though it
was picked up in the comm system.

She ran the numbers, as Liam often joked. Could she be put down
somewhere, then sneak back into the camp? What if Liam never—

No! Liam is fine. Just like me.

Could they look for Liam from the helicopter? She admitted she had
no idea where to start in the city. The only information she had was
that he went to a railroad loading dock somewhere near downtown. That
left a lot of ground to search.

All while drones attempted suicide by slamming into them.

“Victoria. I know how you feel. Trust me. But we have to
clear this airspace. If they send a plane to fetch us, we'd have no
chance. You have to give us a destination.” Jane's voice was
soothing and made total sense.

I'm sorry Liam.

She judged that of all the bad options, Liam would want her to
protect his Grandma above all else. Hayes had shown her clear proof
he had a lead on the cure, and that it was all due to the blood he'd
drawn from her. It stood to reason that the next step was to work
with him get more samples humanely. Surely Grandma would cooperate if
it was all explained to her by someone who had seen the results, so
far.

Elsa was the x-factor. What if she told Hayes where to find
Grandma, and Elsa followed them in? What if this was all an elaborate
trap to get her to reveal her location? Hayes said he planned ahead,
and that Elsa planned even further ahead than he did.

She was gripped by indecision.

“Please. I can't keep flying in circles.”

Do what Liam would do.

He would have some suitably crafty plan that would get her where
she wanted to go, but wouldn't reveal the location of Grandma until
she could be sure of their intentions. Somehow, he'd been able to
protect the old woman through the Apocalypse, and now she had to do
the same.

I'm not going to betray her. "Don't trust anyone," is
what Liam would say.

With a long sigh, she picked up the pen and wrote her response.

She handed the board back to Hayes.

He turned back with a frown after looking at her answer but said
nothing. He handed it to Jane.

The helicopter turned south.

Nineteen days since the sirens.

John Jasper stood on the levee, engulfed in quiet admiration for
the army of undead crawling, walking, and running toward humanity’s
last refuge. Though Cairo, Illinois was far from the last
human-occupied town in the dying world, it was
his
town. The
men and women behind him had given him the keys to their fair
village, with the simple caveat he must help them survive. They
placed their trust in him, and this was the moment he decided he
would do everything in his still-considerable power to save it.

Twenty-four hours ago he'd been stripped of his command and
arrested by Elsa, then—though he didn't advertise it—he'd
been beaten up by the skulking woman. He was tossed into a watery
grave by her minions, but he clawed his way back to life, only to
discover she'd taken his battalion to points unknown. Yesterday he
spent his day organizing the civilians to defend their own town, but
today he'd gotten lucky when some of his unit returned. However, they
were pursued by the textbook definition of a horde. Now, standing
there, he had a few final minutes to prepare.

As he’d done many times before, he studied the layout of the
battlefield. Always searching for the advantage over an unpredictable
enemy.

The town of Cairo sat on a wedge of land that looked like a long
finger, pointing south. On the west, the Mississippi River streamed
fast and wide. On the east, the mighty Ohio did the same. He could
see both rivers from his position up on top of the east-west levee
that was now the northernmost berm—a wedding band at the base
of the finger—between the zombies and his people. Below the
levee, to the north, was the massive public works effort the locals
called “the ditch.” Elsa and her people had ordered the
construction, and the result was an impressive water-filled obstacle
that would be very difficult for the zombies to get across.

Looking back on those days, he recalled an innocent statement Elsa
made about the construction that only now made sense.

“This ditch project ought to keep the locals too busy to
revolt.”

It was the kind of thing a government employee might joke about,
but it had kept the locals very busy—and tired—at the
same time she was planning her own secretive projects. Even when she
ordered him to put his military units outside the levees so as to not
intimidate the locals, he didn’t see what she was really up to.
She’d tricked him. Tricked the whole town.

Now most of his defensive units had been ordered to the north to
support the Orwellian-named “Operation Renew America”
convoy, while he was left with nothing.

I do have the rebels.

The irony stuck him, even in the face of such pressing danger, and
he had to reconcile it all.

Elsa had been worried about rebellion for some reason. She put
those men and women to work digging and toiling in the hot sun. They
had no time for do much else. His military force was kept busy
fighting off the odd zombie rush, or planning for the larger battle
she assured him was coming. Then, it was her that ended up being the
rebel. She left in the middle of the night with his troops, and the
town became an open buffet for the zombies.

But some of his men came back. They disobeyed orders to return so
he could command them. Was he the traitor? Were they? And, strangely,
he didn’t know if Elsa was really a traitor. As a creature of
the chain of command, he felt strongly there had to be someone left
alive above them all. And if that person or persons had a grasp of
the bigger picture, his actions could be hobbling that effort. Any
general could appreciate that.

They shouldn’t have cut me out of the loop.

He turned to Colonel Vince Thompson as his anger flamed out. He
had no time, once his mind was made up, to dwell on the past. “I
need your tanks up on this levee, spaced out with a couple of hundred
yards between the two. You don’t have to worry about return
fire, so use the front of the levee to get the best angles. Sweep
what you can out there,” he pointed to the arriving horde, “but
try to focus on the thickest bunches. Our ammo isn’t endless.”

As he pointed to the eastern side of the levee, he gave
instructions for the Bradley’s and the Humvees. His goal was to
provide enough firepower along the levee that they could knock down
the bulk of the zombies before they reached the ditch. He had no
illusions about their fate if enough zombies stacked themselves into
that waterway. It would take tens of thousands of bodies to fill it
up, but there were many times that number advancing across the field.
They were still pouring over the distant interstate.