Apocalypse Of The Dead (2 page)

But this isn’t a bunch of uncles throwing rocks at troops up on the wall, Barnes thought. Those people are a viable threat. They have boats. They have boats in the water, for Christ’s sake. You guys are underestimating the situation.

Barnes reached forward to the control panel in front of the passenger seat and flipped the PA system power switch. Instantly, the air filled with a low, mournful moan that Barnes could feel in his chest and his gut.

He hated hearing that noise. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to block out the images of bodies festooned in the branches of fallen pecan trees, of people screaming for help in flooded attics, of his brother Jack getting pulled under the water by a nest of zombies they’d wandered into when they were less than two miles from safety. But it was no use. Sometimes the images were too powerful, too vivid, and when he opened his eyes, he had tears running down his face.

Barnes didn’t even hear the first shots. He heard a loud plunking sound, like a rock dropping into water next to his ear, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw a bullet hole in the fuselage.

Missed my head by six inches, he realized.

He heard another sound below him. Glancing down, he saw what appeared to be a faint laser beam between his shins. The bullet had pierced the lower section of the fuselage and entered the supports right below his seat. He had daylight pouring through the bullet hole.

“Quarter Four-One, they got a shooter on the ground!” Barnes heard the panic in his voice but couldn’t fight it.

“Take it easy,” Mama Bear answered.

More shots from below. Barnes could see the man doing the shooting, the bursts of white-orange light erupting from the muzzle of what appeared to be an AK-47.

“I’m hit,” Barnes said.

Instinctively, he pulled back on the stick and started to climb. He couldn’t see the Coast Guard Jayhawk that had moved into position above and behind him, but he heard the pilot’s angry shouts as he turned his aircraft to one side, narrowly avoiding the collision.

“Goddamn it, watch yourself, Quarter Four-One!” the pilot said.

Barnes’s Adam’s apple pumped up and down in his throat as he fought to get himself back under control. He scanned the airspace around him, then made a quick instrument check. Everything appeared to be holding steady.

Out of the corner of his eye, Barnes saw the Coast Guard Jayhawk rotate into position over the uncles below. Barnes could see several uncles shooting now, while farther off, people were jumping into the water and trying to climb aboard the shrimp boats.

“Kill that Mona, Quarter Four-One,” shouted one of the H-Boy pilots.

“Roger,” Barnes answered.

He leaned forward and killed the PA switch. But as he did, he saw a flash of movement that grabbed his attention. A man was kneeling in the shadows between a wrecked fishing boat and what appeared to be the rusted-out pilothouse from a tugboat. He had a long, skinny metal tube over his shoulder and he appeared to be zeroing in on the Jayhawk to Barnes’s right.

Barnes recognized it as an RPG and thought, Where in the hell did the uncles get an RPG? That’s impossible. Isn’t it?

Barnes glanced to his right and saw that the Jayhawk had rotated away from the shooters so that its gun crews could bring their 7.62-mm machine guns to bear on the targets.

“That guy’s got an RPG,” Barnes heard himself say. “Heads-up, Delta One-Six. That guy’s got an RPG. Clear out. Repeat, clear out!”

“Where?” the other pilot asked. “Where? What’s he standing next to?”

“Right there!” Barnes shouted futilely. He was pointing at the man, unable to find the words to describe his position amid all the rubble. It all looked the same.

“Where, damn it?”

But by then the man had fired. Barnes watched in horror as the rocket snaked up from the ground and slammed into the back of the Jayhawk, just forward of the rear rotor. The Jayhawk shuddered, like a man carrying a heavy pack that had shifted suddenly, and then the helicopter started spewing thick black smoke.

“Delta One-Six, I’m hit!”

“Fucker has an RPG!” shouted the other H-Boy pilot. He was moving his Jayhawk higher and orbiting counterclockwise to put his gun crews in position.

“Delta One-Six, she’s not responding.”

“Come on, Coleman,” said the other Jayhawk pilot. “Pull your PCLs off-line.”

“I’m losing it!”

Delta One-Six made two full rotations, wrapping itself in a black haze as it drifted toward a partially capsized super-freighter. As Barnes watched, the Jayhawk clipped the very top of the superstructure and hitched forward toward the ground in a dive. One of its gunners was holding onto his machine gun with one hand, the rest of him hanging out the door like a windsock in a stiff breeze. The pilot tried to level off the aircraft right before they hit, but only managed to snap the helicopter’s spine on impact.

A moment later, a thin plume of black smoke rose up from the wreck.

Then the radio exploded with activity. “He’s down, Echo Four-Three. Delta One-Six is down.”

“Get him some help over there. You got one moving!”

It was true. Barnes saw the pilot stumble out of the cockpit, his white helmet smoking. The man threw his helmet off and he fell into the water. When he bobbed back up to the surface he was holding a pistol in his hand.

“Oh, shit, Echo Four-Three, we got problems. I got infected moving into the area.”

“What direction?” asked Mama Bear.

“From the ten. I got a visual on thirteen of them.”

“Uh, Mama Bear,” said Faulks. “Ya’ll got a whole lot more than that. I got a visual on about forty or fifty over here at your two o’clock.”

“You want me to go down and extract your man?” Barnes asked.

“Negative, Quarter Four-One,” Mama Bear said. “Echo Three-Four, give me your status.”

“One second,” said the pilot. “We’re about to smoke out this RPG.”

A moment later, a steady stream of tracer rounds erupted from the Jayhawk’s gunners, slamming into the little pocket of debris beneath the tugboat’s pilothouse.

The shooting went on until the pilothouse collapsed.

“Echo Three-Four, RPG neutralized.”

“Your boy’s in deep shit over here, guys,” said Faulks.

Barnes rotated so he could see the downed pilot. The man was standing in the middle of a ring of zombies. The way he was standing, it was obvious he’d broken one of his legs, but the man fought bravely, placing his shots carefully, not rushing them.

“You guys gonna help him?” Faulks said.

“Roger that, Echo Three-four.”

The Jayhawk and the three other Dolphins moved into position, but Barnes could tell it was too late for the man on the ground even before the H-Boys started shooting. The man was pulled down below a sheet of corrugated tin by one of the zombies, and a moment later the water turned to blood where he had been standing.

“Echo Three-Four to Mama Bear, Delta One-Six has been compromised.”

A pause.

“Roger that, Echo Three-Four. Status report.”

Instinctively, Barnes swept the area, taking it all in. He saw the smoking helicopter, the zombies advancing through an endless plain of maritime debris, the uncles scrambling to escape the zombies, jumping into the channel and swimming for the boats. One of the boats had already made it a good fifty yards from the bank.

Echo Three-Four completed his status report. There was another pause while Mama Bear conferred with Papa Bear, and then Mama Bear gave the order that turned Barnes’s stomach.

“Smoke ’em all,” said Mama Bear. “Disable those boats and neutralize any targets in the water.”

A moment later, the air was alive with tracer rounds.

Barnes watched as the machine guns chewed up people and zombies and boats, and something inside him went numb.

Three miles to the east, on a small shrimp boat chugging quietly away from the darkened coastline, Robert Connelly heard the guns and saw the smoke columns rising up into the darkening sky.

“You okay, Bobby?” he said to his son.

The boy nodded into his shoulder and Robert hugged him.

Robert turned and looked over the faces of the forty refugees who had commandeered this boat with him. Several of them coughed. Half of them were sick with one kind of funk or another. Their faces were gray and gaunt, their eyes dull and languid in the darkness. They were all too tired, he realized, to understand just how lucky they were. The others had insisted on going to the main docks just above San Jacinto State Park, claiming there’d be more places to hide there. But Robert and his people had refused to go that route. They decided to take their chances, alone, down around Scott Bay. And now, as he listened to the explosions and the gunfire, it looked like that gamble was paying off.

He listened to the water lapping against the hull, to the steady droning thrum of the engines. He felt the wind buffeting his face.

He could feel the anxiety and the frustration and two years of living like an animal among the Houston ruins lifting from him. He took a deep breath, and though his chest hurt, it felt good to breathe air that didn’t taste like death and stale sweat and chemicals.

He squeezed Bobby again.

“I think we’re gonna make it,” he said.

“Bobby?”

A hard thud against the door.

“Bobby, let me see you. Bobby?”

Robert Connelly looked through a yellowed, grimy window, trying to catch a glimpse of his boy out there. He saw a few of the infected staggering around in the dark, trying to keep their balance as the boat pitched on the dark waves.

A hand crashed through the window and Robert stepped out of reach. The zombie groped for him, slicing its arm on the glass stuck in the frame. There was a time when seeing the zombie’s arm cut to ribbons like that would have made him vomit, all that blood. Now the arm was just something to avoid.

Robert got as close as he dared to the broken window. “Bobby, are you out there? Bobby?” Sometimes the infected remembered their names, responded to them. He had seen it happen before.

He waited.

There was another thud against the door, and this time something cracked.

“Bobby?”

He heard the infected moaning, the engines straining at three-quarters speed. The waves slapped against the hull.

He stepped over to the controls and looked out across the water. Far ahead, shimmering lights snaked across the horizon, sometimes visible, sometimes not, depending on the pitch of the bow over the waves. He thought for sure it was Florida. They had almost made it.

The thought took him back almost two years, to those lawless days after Hurricane Mardell. He remembered the rioting in the streets, the terrified confusion as nearly four million people scrambled to safety. Bloated, decaying corpses floated through the flooded streets. Starvation was rampant. Sanitation and medical services were nonexistent. Helicopters circled overhead for a few days after Mardell, picking up whomever they could, but there were so few helicopters, and so many to be rescued.

And then the infected rose up from the ruins.

At first, Robert believed they were bands of looters fighting with the authorities. He didn’t believe the reports of cannibalism. Paranoid hysteria, he called it. But then he saw the infected trying to get into the elementary school gym where he and Bobby and about a hundred others had been living. After that, he knew they were dealing with something more than looters.

He took Bobby on a desperate three-day trek north, and they made it as far as the quarantine walls, where they were turned back by soldiers and police standing behind barricades.

“We’re going to survive this,” he told his son. “I will keep you safe. I promise.”

He had said those words while they were sitting on the roof of a house less than half a mile from the wall, sharing a can of green beans they’d salvaged from the kitchen pantry. There was no silverware, none that they trusted the look of anyway, and they had to scoop out the food with their fingers. In the distance, they could see helicopter gunships sprinting over the walls. It was late evening, near dark, and they could hear the sporadic crackle of gunfire erupting all around them.

“It doesn’t matter, Dad.”

Robert Connelly looked at his son. The boy’s shoulders were drooped forward, the muscles in his face slack, like somebody had let the air out of him. “Bobby,” he said, “why would you say something like that? Of course it matters.”

There were two green beans floating in the bottom of the can. Robert offered them to Bobby.

The boy shook his head.

“There’s no point.”

“Bobby, please. It matters to me.”

The boy pointed at the wall. “Look at that, Dad. Look at those walls. Look at all those helicopters, all those soldiers. Think how fast they put all this up. They’re not ever going to let us go. They want us to die in here.”

Robert hardly knew what to say. Bobby was only thirteen years old, too young to think his life was valueless.

But he’d already noticed there were no gates in the quarantine wall.

He hoped they’d simply missed them.

They hadn’t.

For two years, Robert kept them alive, fighting the infected, rarely sleeping, scavenging for every meal. The struggle had carved a fierce resilience into his grain, a belief that his will alone was enough to sustain them against the cozy, narcotic warmth of nihilism.

With a small band of like-minded refugees, he found a serviceable boat in the flooded debris field of the Houston Ship Channel. There wasn’t a sailor among them, and yet they’d dodged the helicopters and slipped through the Coast Guard blockade undetected. For a glorious moment that first night, holding his boy, he’d believed they were really going to make it.

Now, he knew better.

One of the forty refugees on board the Sugar Jane was infected, and that first night, while they were at sea, he turned.

Robert Connelly was the only one left. He’d made a promise to his son and he’d almost kept it. He’d sought to escape the criminal injustice his government wrought upon him by locking him up inside the quarantine zone, and he’d almost succeeded.

But almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, he thought, smiling faintly at the memory of one of his father’s favorite expressions. And now the Sugar Jane was a plague bomb bound for some unsuspecting shore.