Apocalypse Of The Dead (5 page)

Back in its heyday, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency patrolled the 2,000 miles of borderland between the United States and Mexico. Of the agency’s 11,000 agents, more than 9,500 of them worked along that 2,000-mile stretch of desert. They hunted drug dealers and illegal aliens with a huge array of tools, everything from satellite imagery and publicly accessible webcams to helicopters, horses, and plain old-fashioned shoe leather. Even still, the border had more holes in it than a fishing net.

In comparison, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority only has a wall of some 1,100 miles to patrol. The wall stretches from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Brownsville, Texas, paralleling the freeway system wherever possible to aid in the supply and reinforcement of problem areas. The GRQA keeps this stretch of metal fencing and sentry towers and barbed wire secure with just over 10,000 agents, most of them former CBP and National Guardsmen and cops. They are aided at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and in Mexico by federal troops.

Yet despite their numerical advantage over the old U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, their job is infinitely harder. Nobody in the old CBP thought too much of it that a steady stream of illegals got through the border every day. They just shrugged and went on with life. But the GRQA can’t afford to let even a single zombie through its line. That would spell disaster. The pressure is high; the price of failure is apocalyptic.

Their job terrifies me. These guys are frequently posted outside of major metropolitan areas where the zombie populations are thickest. Day and night, they have to listen to that constant moaning. They have to stand by and listen to the plaintive cries for help from the Unincorporated Civilian Casualties, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority’s official designation for the people who were unable to make it out of the quarantine zone before the walls were put up and were sealed inside with the zombies. Hearing all that noise for just a few weeks is demoralizing. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hear it every single day for months and years at a time.

Even worse, I can’t imagine what it would be like to grow used to hearing it.

It is little wonder that so many of the GRQA go AWOL at least once or twice a year. Or that they are never punished for it when they do. Most don’t even get their pay docked.

And it’s no wonder that the leading cause of death among GRQA agents is suicide.

Actually, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often than it does…

From the copilot’s chair of a Schweizer 300 helicopter, Ben Richardson looked out across the flooded ruins of southeast Houston. They were at two hundred feet, skimming over what had once been wide-open cattle-grazing land. It was under twenty feet of water these days. Here and there, he could see the top of an oil derrick just below the surface. Dead trees poked skeletal fingers up through the water. Every once in a while, they’d pass over a perfectly round metal island, the remains of oil tanks. Dawn was spreading over the flooded landscape, dappling the water with reds and yellows and liquid pools of copper.

“Looks pretty, don’t it?” Michael Barnes said.

“Amazing,” Richardson said. They were talking through the intercom system built into their flight helmets, but even then they had to nearly yell at each other to hear over the noise the little helicopter made.

“All those colors you see…”

“Yeah?”

“That’s oil in the water. Most of this area is so thick with it you’ll be able to see a film over the water come midday.”

Nice, Richardson thought.

This area had once been the hub of the oil and gas industry in the United States. Now, all of it was gone. It was no wonder that gas had gone to more than twelve dollars a gallon in the last two years.

“You see many people down in this area?” Richardson asked.

“You talking about uncles or zombies?”

“Either.”

“You see dead bodies every once in a while. You know, floaters. Hardly ever seen anybody alive, though. The water’s too deep.”

Richardson stole a sideways glance at Michael Barnes, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority pilot who had been assigned to fly him around for the next two weeks. Barnes was a former Houston Police officer, and he still looked the part. He wore a blue flight suit with a black tactical vest over that, his sidearm worn in a jackass rig under his left armpit. He was thirty-eight, tall, lean. He never seemed to smile.

Richardson had a knack for understanding people. It was why he was so good at writing about how people dealt with disasters. But Barnes was a tough nut to crack. He answered all of Richardson’s questions, even the personal ones, with plainspoken ease. But even still, Richardson sensed a hard grain of meanness in the man that was like a warning not to get too close.

“Hang tight,” Barnes said. “I’m gonna swing us around and head north toward downtown. I want to show it to you while it’s still at high tide so you can see the Hand.”

“What’s the Hand?”

“That’s what we call the shape made by the floodplain. Due to elevation and runoff and the tides and all that stuff, the outline of the flooded areas changes throughout the day. If you catch it during high tide, the waters look like an outstretched hand about to grab downtown.”

“You’re joking?” Richardson said.

“Nope. You’ll see it right away.”

“How come I’ve never heard that before?”

Barnes shrugged. “The powers that be don’t like to make a big deal of it. We have a bad enough time with treasure hunters trying to sneak in. I guess they figure it would make our job even harder if we become some kind of tourist attraction.”

Richardson nodded.

After a moment, Richardson said, “I was going to ask you about the treasure hunters. What do you think makes people want to risk sneaking in through the quarantine? Is there really that much worth stealing in here?”

“I guess so. You think about it, really, there’s probably a fortune down there. I mean, all our banks and museums and jewelry stores and all that. Those places weren’t cleaned out before the storms, and as far as I know they weren’t cleaned out afterward. Not with the infected roaming the streets. And with the economy being what it is, can you really blame people for wanting to risk busting the quarantine for some potentially huge profits?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Hell, even in good times, just the rumor of treasure is enough for some folks.”

Richardson looked down again. They were passing over some kind of refinery now, pipes and trucks and mangled debris visible through the water.

“You’re not thinking of going in with some of the treasure hunters, are you?”

Richardson smiled sheepishly. He was never very good at concealing what he was thinking.

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“Well, don’t think about it too hard,” Barnes said. “I mean, you’re a nice guy and all, but if I see you trying to come through the quarantine wall some night, I’ll shoot you in the head, same as anybody else.”

He said it breezily enough, but there was still something there that made it pretty plain he wasn’t joking.

“Point taken,” Richardson said.

The helicopter’s engine hiccupped and they lost altitude momentarily as Barnes wrestled with the controls.

Richardson’s stomach went halfway up his throat.

“What the hell was that?”

“Nothing to it,” Barnes said. His voice was glassy smooth. “These old Schweizers, they’re finicky.”

“Are we okay?”

“Yeah, we’re fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Richardson looked doubtful. The helicopter ride was scarier than he thought it would be, and it occurred to him that it wouldn’t take more than a strong wind to hurl the thing to the ground.

“Where’d these bullet holes come from?”

Barnes glanced at the holes. “The uncles.”

“They shoot at you?”

“Sometimes.”

Richardson groaned. “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“It’s no big deal,” Barnes said. “Here, look down over there. I want you to see this. Whenever I come through here, I always try find some dolphins.”

“Dolphins?”

Barnes pointed through the cockpit bubble to the water below. Richardson leaned over to see. They were flying over what had once been I-45, the street lamps and overhead road signs just poking up through the water. Barnes dropped the altitude even lower and cut their airspeed to a crawl. From a height of some sixty feet or so, Richardson could look through the fairly clear water and see the cars and debris down at road level.

“You see ’em?” Barnes said.

Richardson scanned the water for a long moment before he saw what Barnes was trying to show him. There were dolphins down there, three of them. They were headed northbound, toward downtown, paralleling the freeway below them. Richardson guessed the water was between fifteen and twenty feet deep, just deep enough for the animals to skim over the roofs of the sunken cars and still stay submerged. They almost looked like motorcycles zipping through traffic.

“That’s amazing.”

“Yeah,” Barnes agreed. “There aren’t many perks to this job, but that’s one of ’em.”

Richardson watched the dolphins until they finally turned off and swam into the deeper water east of town. They were getting closer to Houston proper now and seeing larger and larger buildings, the ground-level floors flooded to the ceilings.

Richardson crinkled his nose. “Hey, you smell that?”

Barnes looked aft and cursed under his breath.

Richardson turned around in his seat, as much as his seat belt would allow, and saw a long, thick cloud of brown smoke trailing out behind them.

“Holy shit, are we on fire?”

“No, we’re not on fire,” Barnes said. He sounded annoyed. “The smoke is brown. We’re burning oil. The smoke from a fire would be dark black.”

Barnes turned back to his controls and started checking gauges.

“Are we going down?”

“We’re fine,” he said, a bit peevishly. “Just keep quiet and don’t touch anything.”

Barnes keyed his radio and said, “Quarter Four-One to Dispatch.”

“Go ahead, Quarter Four-One,” said a woman’s voice.

“Quarter Four-One, we’re losing oil pressure. I’m smoking pretty bad. I’m gonna try to get us back to Katy Field.”

There was a pause on the dispatcher’s end that Richardson didn’t much like.

“Ten-four,” the dispatcher said at last. “What’s your location, Quarter Four-One?”

“Quarter Four-One, we’re over Bay Area Boulevard and El Camino Real. You have any other units in the area?”

“Negative, Quarter Four-One.”

There was a pause on Barnes’s end that Richardson liked even less than the dispatcher’s.

“Ten-four,” Barnes said.

“Quarter Four-One, be advised. I have Katy Field standing by for your approach.”

“Ten-four,” Barnes said.

Richardson watched Barnes’s hands flying over the controls. He had no idea what the pilot was doing, but he could tell plain enough that they were in some serious trouble.

“Officer Barnes?”

“Shut up.”

Several tense moments went by. Barnes continued to work the controls. A terrible acid fear spread through Richardson’s gut as the engine continued to sputter and smoke. Despite Barnes’s best efforts, they were losing altitude and their airspeed was slipping.

The engine sputtered once more, and smoke began to pour into the cockpit. Warning lights lit up all across the control panel.

“Quarter Four-One, we’re going down. Repeat, we’re going down. Coming up on El Dorado and Galveston Road.”

Richardson didn’t hear a reply. The helicopter shook beneath him, and the next moment they were going down way too fast, coming up on a large grouping of trees and some overhead power lines.

“Hang on,” Barnes said.

They hit the water with a hard smack that knocked the air from Richardson’s lungs and threw his whole world forward like he was caught on the crest of a wave. The blades of the helicopter’s props struck the water with a series of loud slaps before they snapped completely free of the fuselage. The control panel sparked, and for a moment there was so much smoke that Richardson couldn’t see.

Then water started to pour over his legs.

He screamed.

He felt hands groping at his chest. He tried batting them away, but couldn’t. “Stop it,” Barnes ordered him. “I’m trying to get you loose.”

And a moment later, Richardson felt himself coming out of his seat, strong arms pulling him across the cockpit of the helicopter and into cold water that came up to his waist. He coughed and tried to rub the acrid smoke from his eyes. The water in his mouth tasted nasty, oily.

“Are you okay?” Barnes asked.

Gradually, Richardson’s vision cleared. He looked at the officer and nodded.

Barnes turned on the helicopter and then punched it. “Fucking piece of shit,” he said. “Goddamn worthless fucking piece of shit.”

Richardson was still too stunned to take in the fact that he had just lived through a helicopter crash. It was all he could do to stand on his own two feet.

Barnes, meanwhile, was digging through the cockpit for the emergency kit and his AR-15. He came up with an orange backpack and two rifles. He came over to Richardson and stuck one of the rifles into his hands.

“You know how to use that?”

Richardson took hold of the rifle, gripping it like they’d taught him in the army twenty years earlier.

He nodded.

“Good,” Barnes said. “Because we’re about to have company.”

Only then did Richardson get a sense of their surroundings. They had landed in what looked like a grocery store parking lot. He could see the tops of cars and trucks just rising above the water. Off to their right was a subdivision, the houses sagging in on themselves, empty black holes where the windows and doors had been.

There was movement all around them.

The noise of the crash, he thought. It’ll be like a beacon for the infected.

Ragged shapes that hardly looked like people anymore stumbled into the water from the subdivision, filling the air with the sounds of their splashing and their moaning.

He looked down at the gun in his hands, then at Barnes.