District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (28 page)

The banging on the door was loud and constant. Brook wiped a
strand of drool from the corner of her mouth and squinted against the harsh bar
of light infiltrating the curtains. Muttering at the caller to relax, she threw
the blanket off her legs and plucked the Glock from the built-in nightstand
beside the bed.

“Who’s there?”

The banging stopped and there was a brief silence before a
woman’s voice filtered through the door.

“Oliver is missing.”

“Glenda?” Brook called. She pulled the Glock’s slide back an
inch. As expected—the new gold standard in the apocalypse—a 9mm round was
already chambered.

The knob turned, but the door didn’t budge. “Open up.”

Glock leveled at the thin metal door, Brook repeated her
question.

The knob rattled again. It spun left and then back to the
right. “It’s Glenda … unlock the door.”

“Give me a minute.” Brook holstered the Glock and strapped
the belt around her waist. She slipped her feet into her boots and laced them
up. Lastly, she donned a medium-weight parka and stuck a hand in its left
pocket. Feeling the raised plastic teeth on the pair of thin flex cuffs inside,
she removed her empty hand from the pocket and zipped it shut.

Outside the RV, the majority of the survivors were standing
under the metal awning. Glenda was at the bottom of the steps, her face screwed
up with worry. Duncan was by her side. With the Saiga held loosely in hand,
white Stetson pulled low on his brow and tan Carhartt jacket zipped to the
neck, at first glance he resembled one of those stagecoach drivers from a
century and a half ago.

“What’s the matter?” Brook asked.

“Oliver has up and run off,” Duncan answered, eyes downcast.

“Wasn’t my fault,” Daymon said, showing both palms.

“I beg to differ,” Wilson said.

“We were
all
a little hard on him yesterday,” Lev
added.

While Daymon knew he wasn’t the only one in on the
trial-by-rotter Oliver had endured, he held his tongue on that matter. Instead,
wisely, lest he say something else he’d likely regret, he stalked off toward
his truck.

Duncan turned his body and tracked Daymon with his eyes.
“Where are
you
going?”

“To my truck.”

“He’s probably taking a walk in the woods,” said Lev.

Daymon shook his head. “I’ve got a good idea where he’s
going and how he’s getting there,” he said, and stalked off toward his Chevy
pickup.

“Wherever he’s going, he’s not driving,” Taryn called.
“Because I checked inside every vehicle in the motor pool, and they’re all
accounted for. And I know for a fact he’s not asleep in Dregan’s
eighteen-wheeler or the helicopter. I checked those, too. So where
could
he have gone to at night and on
foot
?” She said the last part looking at
the others and in a voice that inferred that even saying it out loud was
justification to be committed to the loony bin.

Brook was watching the round robin conversation with rapt
attention when it suddenly dawned on her Raven and Sasha hadn’t yet emerged from
their sleepover. Probably for the best, she thought. No way they’re joining an
outside-the-wire search party anyway.

Tran and Foley exited the woods nearby, both shaking their
heads. While Tran continued to the RV and chose an unclaimed camp chair, Foley
stopped in his tracks and blurted, “I want to be part of the search party.”

A V8 motor rumbled to life down by the motor pool. A tick
later Daymon pulled up close to the assembled survivors and brought his Chevy
to a lurching halt. The window powered down. As if he’d been reading the older
man’s mind, Daymon looked to Foley. “Get in,” he said. “Your longing for action
and adventure is about to be realized.” He looked to Lev next. “You and Jamie
coming?”

“You two can take the beast,” Brook told Jamie.

Taryn approached the Chevy. “You really think he just up and
left on foot?”

“No way,” Daymon answered, the truck shimmying as Foley
opened the door and slid across the seat. “He took Sasha’s bike. And he’s not
out on some early morning joy ride, either.”

“What makes you so sure?” Duncan asked.

Daymon leaned out his window and whispered, “Because his
gear is gone. All of it. The makeshift body armor, night vision goggles, and
that custom rifle of his, too.”

“I heard that,” Glenda said, rising from her chair.

Duncan looked up at the dark clouds forming overhead. His
jaw took a firm set. “So where do you think he went?”

“I figure we’ll find Sasha’s bike at the roadblock,” Daymon
said. “He’ll have crossed to the other side and taken one of the vehicles we
left there.”

“Why?” Glenda asked. “What did you do to him?”

“Called him on his bullshit,” Daymon said. “Your son froze
up as soon as we left the wire. Can’t be having that.” He went on, detailing
everything that had happened the day before between him and Oliver, leaving out
only the trip to the house.

“So he only traveled the PCT at night,” Lev said. “Makes
sense.”

“I say we quit jawin’ and find the kid,” Duncan drawled.

“I’ll get the truck,” Taryn said, leaving her gear with
Wilson.

Clutching Duncan’s arm tight, Glenda said, “I already lost
him once. I can’t bear to go back to the not knowing.”

Duncan fished the keys to the Dodge from a pocket. “I’m
going. The more time we waste, the colder the trail will get.”

 “I want to go,” Glenda demanded.

“Under no circumstances,” Duncan said, shaking his head. “I
don’t want to risk losing you, too.” He gave her a peck on the cheek, motioned
for Tran to follow, then strode off toward the motor pool.

An engine fired to life on the other side of the RV. As the
throaty rumble of the F-650’s V-10 filled the clearing, the radio in Brook’s
hand came alive with static. “The road’s clear,” Heidi said, her update
obviously meant for those going outside the wire.

“Roadblock first,” Daymon called, as Lev nosed the F-650
close to his bumper. Singling out Wilson, he added, “Be sure to bring along
extra ammunition and food. Because if the bike isn’t there, we’ll be heading
north into unknown territory.”

Northeast of Washington D.C.

Though the enemy radar that had painted the two Stealth
Chinooks had likely originated from some type of military vehicle traveling one
of the numerous highways and byways between Washington D.C. and the Delta
team’s target, needing to reach the loiter position without revealing
themselves to the enemy prohibited the heavily armed helos from turning back to
hunt down and kill the offending parties. So after taking precautionary evasive
maneuvers of their own, the co-pilot aboard Jedi One-Two had noted the
coordinates where the c-band radar waves had lit them up and passed the
information on to the TOC back at Schriever.

Nineteen Miles Southwest of Target Alpha

Still alive,
Cade thought, swallowing hard against
the rising tide of bile. Still feeling as if his stomach was lodged in his
throat due to Ari’s sudden dive to the deck, he met the adrenaline-charged
gazes of his teammates and flashed a thumbs-up. Anticipating Ari’s call of
ten
mikes out
, he bent over and made sure the Velcro straps on his new ankle
braces were tightened to the fullest. Satisfied, he sat up and stuck his thumbs
in his ballistic plate carrier to allow some air to circulate underneath. After
a few seconds of that, he patted his MOLLE gear, counting the extra magazines
for his M4 and smoothing the straps holding them in place. Next, he rattled
another twelve hundred milligrams worth of ibuprofen into a palm and swallowed
the pills sans water. Finally, out of respect for Lopez, who he guessed was in
post-op recovery by now, he capped off his egress preparations by performing
another sign of the cross over his chest.

“Ten mikes out,” Ari called over the comms.

Cade consulted his Suunto.
Right on time, Night Stalker.

Across the aisle, Cross was going through the motions of
checking the action on his MP7. Next, he checked the suppressor on the business
end of the submachinegun for tightness. On his chest were a trio of spare
magazines snugged into a MOLLE rig like Cade’s that also served as a carrier
for a number of ceramic ballistic plates. The thin, light-weight pieces of
armor rode in sleeves front and back and served to protect his vital organs,
spine, and neck from pistol and light-machine-gun rounds.

Already squared away gear wise, Griffin was sitting erect,
eyes closed, back pressing the fuselage and clutching the black HK 416 two-handed,
its stubby suppressor planted against the vibrating floor.

“You good to go?” Cade asked Axe.

Patting his highly modified M4, the SAS trooper merely
nodded and flashed a toothy grin.

Born ready
, thought Cade.

“Eight mikes,” Ari called.

This brought Skipper to life. The SOAR crew chief grabbed
his goody bag, unhooked the carabiner keeping it in place next to the door, and
set the olive green canvas bag on the cabin floor near his feet. Having already
gone over the process of arming the smaller, golf-ball-sized Screamers, he
brought out a dozen of the orange spheres and passed them around, dividing them
among the shooters. Next, he extracted four of the six remaining full-sized
Screamers and began prepping them for deployment.

Cade peered out his window and saw that down below the
devastation to northeastern Maryland was far worse than the satellite imagery
was capable of conveying. In person, as viewed from barely three hundred feet
above the skeletal trees, light standards, and multi-pitched rooftops, the
destruction was breathtaking. It looked as if not one commercial building had
escaped the widespread looting being reported on all of the cable news stations
on that fateful Saturday in July that had since come to be known as Z-Day.
Crumpled paper and fallen leaves had accumulated, filling up the street-facing
doorways, in places, knee-high to the walking dead.

One grocery store’s car-choked parking lot still held the
remnants of what looked to be hundreds of cardboard boxes. Having been exposed
to the elements for some time, the once three-dimensional objects had been
reduced to a morass of tan sludge pounded flat by the scores of zombies still
patrolling the lot.
Old habits die hard
, crossed Cade’s mind as the
areas of commerce gave way to a neighborhood he imagined once stood proud with
stately Colonial-style homes, churches, and schools.
Not so much now
. He
could look straight down into many of them lost to a conflagration that had
claimed what he estimated to be hundreds of structures once standing on the
twenty or so square blocks encompassing his bird’s eye view from south to
north.

The dead were everywhere. They were milling about side
streets in small knots. They traipsed across scorched walks and drives
bordering squares of blackened lawn. The cement foundations left standing were
no deterrent to the creatures that, following life-long conditioning or acting
on some snippet of buried memory, stood rooted in what used to be family rooms
or kitchens or dens, their pasty white faces standing out starkly against the
light-stealing sea of black as they gaped hungrily skyward at the passing black
helicopter.

A sprawling, two-story brick-and-cement building passed by
outside the port-side glass. The amber-tinted windows above ground level were
all intact. Old Glory hung limply from the pole out front. And hard to miss
from nearly any altitude, spelled out in huge, blocky red letters, the words
“Fairmont Heights” emblazoned one end zone of the adjacent football field.

“
School’s out forever
,” Axe sang, sounding nothing
like Alice Cooper.

“Any kids?” Cade asked.

Axe shook his head. “We were trying … I’m bloody well
grateful me swimmers were on strike. It’s hard enough knowing my lady is out
there somewhere trolling around as one of ‘em things. It’d be fuck all knowing
my offspring is doddering around with her. What about you, mate?”

“A girl. Raven’s twelve.”

With Cross and Griff looking on, Axe made a face. “You’re a
Poe fan?”

“Nothing to do with it,” Cade responded. “But she is a
handful.”

The helicopter slowed and bled speed. It swung wide left and
the tops of trees, buffeted by the rotor blast, bent and whipped the air near
the port-side windows as the lumbering craft passed them by.

“Bloody hard to get used to how quiet this whirlybird is
when she’s going slow and low,” Axe observed.

“Tenth time aboard her and it still makes me think she’s
falling out from underneath me,” Griff conceded. “Figure I’ll never get used to
it.”

 Skipper interrupted the conversation. “Six mikes out,” he
said, one hand on his boom mic, the other gripping the door handle to his left.
Without warning, he hauled the door open, letting in a blast of cold, carrion-
and jet-exhaust-tinged air.

“That’s what I can’t get used to,” Cross divulged. “Whole
world’s one big mass grave.”

“Screamer away,” Skipper called as he leaned out the door
and dropped one of the orange spheres in the center of the expansive parking
lot northwest of the target building. “Get your soccer on, rotters.”

“Football,” Axe said forcefully, drawing the word out. “And
don’t you forget that, Doctor Silence.”

Skipper primed the second Screamer and leaned hard against
his safety strap. Flipping Axe an awkward-looking bird with the hand gripping
the door frame, he let the device drop at the far end of the near empty expanse
of lined blacktop.

Without warning, the helo banked and wound around the
largest building on the sprawling campus. Ten seconds later Skipper was
dropping another pair of Screamers a thousand yards south of the target
building near the car-choked security entrance.

“Lock and load,” Ari said. “We’ll give the deaders five
mikes to find the screaming meemies and then we’re going in silent.”

While the rest of the team swapped their borrowed flight
helmets for their low-riding tactical items, Cade unplugged his headset from
the jack on the fuselage wall and reconnected it to his portable comms. He
looked forward and saw Ari working the stick while, presumably, Haynes was
cycling Jedi One-One’s radio to the usual ship to ground frequency.

A tick later the monotone query
Anvil Actual, Jedi Lead.
How copy?
sounded loud and clear in Cade’s headset.

“Good copy,” he replied to Haynes while going about
adjusting his boom mic and cinching his Kevlar brain bucket a little tighter.

“That woman hasn’t a creative bone in her body,” said Griff.
He gazed at Cade. “If my memory serves, the call signs were identical when we
went to La La Land to rescue her daughter. Isn’t that right … Anvil Actual?”

“That woman—,” Cade began.

Cross leaned in front of Griff and cut Cade off at the pass.
“Pay gruff Griff here no mind,” he interjected. “He’s just missing the teams.
Been a fish out of water for too long, that’s all.”

“Well tell Flipper there that he better lock it down,” Cade
growled. “Because we’re about to be in the thick of the shit.”

“Locked down,” Griff said, wearing a wide grin.

In his best deadpan, delivered as he flared the black
chopper to deposit another Screamer, Ari said, “Can’t we all just get along?”

“That’s the worst Rodney King you’ve ever done,” Haynes
said. “And Lord knows you’ve used that one before.”

“I concur,” Axe said. “Third one isn’t the charm, Ari. Your
standup routine as of late has been pure shite.”

“Guys, guys … take it out on the Zs,” Skipper said, tossing
the armed device out the door and into the midst of a sizeable, tightly packed
throng of dead.

At once Ari pulled pitch, taking the Ghost Hawk out of the
reach of the gnarled fingers. Clearing the nearby light standards, he said,
“Let the games begin,” and nosed the helo around to find a nice copse of trees
to hover behind and watch the undead soccer match ensue.