District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (34 page)

Cocking his head, Griff said, “I thought I was clear about
water and its propensity to conduct electricity.”

Cade cast a cursory glance at the walls and ceiling. He
picked up something different here. Whereas the dimensions of the doorway,
stair runs and landings were the same here as they were sixty-some-odd feet
overhead at the main level entry, the texture on the cured cement was
different. Though still constructed from poured concrete that was no doubt
reinforced with rebar, there were imprints from the plywood sheeting molds as
well as coarse spots showing where pebbles and a few larger quarter-sized river
rocks protruded from the poorly finished surfaces. Everything about the work
here was much different than the fine craftsmanship exhibited from the main
floor stairway on down to Sub Level 1. He figured the same tight-lipped
government contractors had done the work on both the original basement and this
new, deeper addition. But going by the unusual techniques employed here,
different crews must have worked each project. Easier to keep the new additions
secret by compartmentalizing the task, he guessed.

Whatever the reasons for staggering crews, clearly the
construction of this stop-gap facility had been rushed. Whether the haste had
been spurred on by delays of the yet to be finished mega-data storage facility—strangely
enough, before the dead began to walk, slated to go in near Camp Williams in
Draper, Utah—or whispers of a whistleblower spy working inside the NSA here at
Fort Meade, Cade hadn’t a clue and didn’t want to venture a guess. What he did
know, however, was that this annex was finished a year ago and he had a job to
do now. Water-cooling pipes and machinery and electricity were things the
Chinese wouldn’t waste time fretting over, therefore he couldn’t afford to
either.

Having finally come to a hard-fought conclusion, Cade looked
each man in the eye, starting with Cross and finishing with Griff. “We better
stay frosty and shoot straight and true then, men.” He flicked the M4’s
selector to Fire, the sharp click audible to all. “Weapons free,” he said, a
granite set to his jaw.

More soft thuds against the door.

Suddenly the backup lighting went out, casting the well into
darkness. A tick later it flickered, then remained on, again bathing the stairs
in a muted veil of golden light.

“You don’t want to scope the door first?” Cross asked
soberly.

Having moved away from the door, Axe was now staring daggers
at the wall-mounted light fixture.

Sounding as if the dead were scraping the paint off the door
from top to bottom, the noise of fingernails raking metal reverberated up and
down the cramped stairwell.

Ignoring the nerve-jangling racket, Cade said, “We’ve got to
go in no matter what. Axe, you retreat to the next landing and cover us. Griff,
get my back on the landing here.” He paused for a second, thinking. “Cross, dig
out a mini-Screamer. I’ll open the door and you throw for the end zone.”

“Copy that,” Cross and Griff said in unison.

Incredulous, the SAS man said, “You don’t even want to know
how many of the buggers are in there beforehand?”

Cade said nothing. Instead, to indicate that he’d made up
his mind on the matter, he took the pass card from his pocket and tapped it
against his palm while Cross went about preparing for deployment a
golf-ball-sized mini-Screamer.

The F-650 was crawling along at walking speed when its front
bumper met the jostling throng of snarling zombies head on.

Thirty to forty my ass
, Jamie thought, taking in the
sight. Then, shouting so the others to be heard through the open rear slider,
she said, “Looks like we’ve got
seventy
or
eighty
rotters up
here.” After a split second’s contemplation, with the Zs’ pale, bony hands
already groping the bumper and hood and fenders up front, she added nervously,
“That’s like …
twenty
for each of you to put down.”

“We got this,” Taryn shouted back, her Tanto already in
hand.

In the left wing mirror Jamie saw a glint of metal as
Taryn’s blade flashed out and down and disappeared into the nearest zombie’s
eye socket. Imagining the grate of metal on bone, she saw the young, newly bobbed
brunette’s arm and weapon draw back and the Z fall to the road, twice dead, and
about to meet the Ford’s oversized rear tire.

One down,
thought Foley, as he watched the action
with rapt attention through the Bushnells. Rotters number two, three, and four
crashed to the road in heaps of jutting elbows and knees as he stood rooted in
the bed of the Raptor, his elbows planted firmly on the flat of the roof.

“Get some,” he crowed. After taking a quick second to look
all around his own position and seeing nothing living or undead in the
vicinity, he pressed the binoculars back to his eyes and glassed the area all
around the rest of the group, adding extra attention to their fore where
triple-strand barbed wire fences lined the road on both sides. Concentrating on
keeping the image steady, he scrutinized the ochre earthen berm to the left of
the group.
Nothing but old tire tracks on the soft shoulder there.
Swinging his gaze to the pasture on the right, the things there that caught his
interest were the feeding birds, a small copse of trees beyond the raptors,
and, a number of yards west of the trees, the galvanized culvert running
underneath the muddy road feeding the nearby state route.

Seeing nothing pointing to an ambush, Foley depressed the
Motorola’s Talk button and relayed the positive news to the others.

Inside the slow-moving Dodge, Duncan heard Foley’s report,
the good news not nearly enough to loosen the knot in his stomach. Damn if he
couldn’t relax when facing substantial numbers of the dead—at least not without
his old friend Jack Daniels.

At the moment Foley’s voice leapt from the radio’s tiny
speaker the knot of walkers began spilling around the F-650’s squared-off rear
bumper.

As he reached blindly for the Saiga semi-auto shotgun, he
witnessed Daymon cull two monsters with a pair of lightning-quick downward
chops of his machete. By the time Duncan’s hand had found the shotgun’s polymer
stock, three more rotters were out of the fight. One having fallen when Taryn
reached down from the truck’s bed and thrust her blade into the child-sized
shambler’s brain, and two more that were sent crashing to the road vertically,
victim to Lev’s superior knife work.

Meanwhile, on the passenger side behind Taryn, it looked to
Duncan as if Wilson was having trouble timing his knife strikes. As the Ford
continued rolling through the crush of bodies, the ones nearest the redhead
were being repelled by the rig’s mass, which in turn had a domino effect on the
rest causing them to fall even further away from his substantial reach.

Seeing the dead being repulsed by the Ford, some of them
swiping clumsily as it left them behind while others were sent tumbling
headlong into the roadside ditch, Duncan took his hand off the shotgun and
snatched up the radio. “Jamie,” he said. “You’ve got to slow down a bit. I know
it’s counterintuitive, but you need to ride the brakes and allow the things to
surround the truck.” He let up on the Talk button.

Jamie made no reply. Instead, up ahead, the Ford’s brake
lights flared red and its forward motion slowed considerably.

That a girl,
thought Duncan, easing up on the pedal
to match her speed, which was hovering just south of five miles per hour.

On his knees in the right rear corner of the F-650’s bed,
Lev felt the truck slow and suddenly he was facing a target-rich environment.
Reciting every cuss word learned in the Army, all of them directed at the
rotting flesh eaters less than a yard to his fore, he began to thrust his Cold
Steel blade into the pale faces leering back at him.

Wilson called out triumphantly from the other side. “I
finally got one.”

“Six more to go if you want to catch up with me,” Daymon
said, his machete cleaving deeply into a Z’s cranial bone.

“Shit, that’s seven for you now,” Wilson said over the
sucking sound as he wiggled his knife free of a first turn’s leaking eye
socket.

“Less talking, Wilson,” said Lev, as there came an awful
pop
and
crunch
from the Ford’s left rear tire jouncing over something
organic.

Taking Lev’s advice to heart, Wilson pursed his lips into a
thin white line, grabbed a handful of one ghoul’s greasy hair, and drove his
knife hilt deep into one of its wildly roving eyes.

Duncan watched the dead dropping to the road at a much
faster pace. In less than thirty seconds, by his estimation, the number of dead
had been cut in half. And considering the battering the Ford had taken from the
flailing arms and sheer weight of the bodies pressing in on it, even without
Taryn at the wheel, it had never wavered from the slow steady course he’d asked
for. “Good job,” he said into the Motorola. “You kids have found a rhythm. Keep
it up for just a bit longer.”

“A bit longer” turned out to be an additional twenty
seconds. After which the rotters numbered no more than thirty.

“Stop her right there on the centerline,” Duncan drawled,
steering the Dodge to the shoulder to keep from running over the amassed
corpses.

Amazingly, the push-back he’d expected from Jamie over being
ordered to stop with close to half of the rotters still assaulting the truck
never materialized. Instead, as before, the brake lights flared red and the
Ford stopped completely.

In the F-650, with the remaining dead enveloping the truck,
Jamie stared straight ahead, drumming her fingers on the wheel. As soon as the
first pale palm slapped the glass near her head, she closed her eyes and said a
little prayer for Oliver, asking that wherever he was, he wasn’t suffering.
Then she flashed back to her own time spent in captivity at the hands of Ian
Bishop and his right-hand man, Carson. As if she was watching old jittery film
reel footage, she saw Jordan’s shocked expression as Bishop’s men dragged them
from the shot-up garage at the upper quarry. Clear as day, though the traumatic
event was weeks in the past, she heard Jordan calling for help as a dirty, burlap
hood was pulled over her head and she was shoved into a waiting helicopter.

It was the last time she had seen the young woman alive.

She threw a shudder. Not from the keen of fingernails raking
the door by her leg. Not from the imagined picture in her mind of the contorted
faces of the undead things trying to get to her. Nor was she shaken by the idea
that whoever had left the crumbs for them to follow may be waiting for them at
Bear Lake with more people and firepower than eight people could handle.

Nope.

None of the above.

Jamie was, in her own way, processing the fact that the
night before, around the campfire, she may have set eyes on Oliver for the
final time. She took little solace from the knowledge that
the crazies from
the North
—as Ray and Helen had called the nameless and faceless
antagonists—didn’t appear to have a single helicopter, let alone a fleet of
them. Because if what they had already proven they were capable of doing was
their worst, then being thrown from a helicopter like Jordan had been would
probably be a better fate for Oliver than the former. God, it killed her
thinking about how hard a hit Glenda was going to take if she was right in her
assumption.

With the non-stop screech of fingernails raking both of the
truck’s flanks already driving her close to madness, Jamie pushed the bad
thoughts away and opened her eyes to see one particularly tenacious rotter
making out with the glass inches from her face. On the brink of pulsing her
window down and unloading the Beretta into Casanova to silence the incessant
clicking of his teeth on the clouded side glass, she had a sudden epiphany that
gave her pause.

Out of sight was easy. Just close your eyes again.

Out of mind, not so much. At least not until she powered on
the stereo and two things happened. First, the LCD display lit up with a soft
red glow. Then, completely drowning out all the myriad noises produced by the
zombies’ all-out assault on the truck, a long dead rapper began spitting rhymes
about New York, high priced hos and a lifestyle filled with bling and
champagne.

A millisecond after the first stanza faded, the bass line
dropped and she was receiving a butt massage from what seemed like a dozen
speakers hidden from sight directly underneath the front seat.

A cursory glance at the jamb and sweep told Cade that this
door was different than the one they had used to access the maintenance
stairwell from the main floor hallway.

Cross kneeled down and pried at the bottom edge with his
knife. Shaking his head, he said, “There’s no room for the device.”

“I have an idea,” Cade said, fishing the pass card from his
pocket. He ran through what he expected from each man, then turned back and
waved the card in front of the gray panel where a handle should have been.

The pass card worked on the first try. As with the main
level door, there was a soft click when the bolt gave way. However, unlike the
door three levels up, when Cade pushed in on this one, as if a seal had been
broken, there was an audible hiss followed at once by a blast of cool air heavy
with the reek of death and decay.

A little more pressure from his shoulder told Cade that
there were dead things pressing their rotten flesh against the other side.

“Like we discussed,” Cade said, his eyes locked on Cross.

Cross nodded, then began counting down from three.

Shoulder and palms planted against the door, Cade counted
down with Cross.

At
two
, Griff let his rifle hang from its sling and
placed his gloved hands on the door a few inches to the right of Cade’s.

On
one
, using every ounce of strength at their
disposal, Cade and Griff leaned into the door, bulling it inward a few inches.

Instantly, a gnarled hand shot through the opening. The
crooked, pale fingers scrabbled around the door’s edge dangerously close to
Cade’s face. In the next beat Cross hurled the armed Screamer sidearm through
the narrow opening, clearing the reaching hands by mere inches.

“You call that a Hail Mary,” Griff said between grunts
brought on by keeping pressure on the door.

M4 held at a low ready, Axe called down from his perch
midway up the stairs. “Again with the football reference?”

Beaded sweat was forming on Griff’s brow. “Says the bloke
not
shoring up the offensive line. Trade me places?” he said, only half-joking.

The half-dozen bony hands probing the opening were now
joined by a single pallid face. As the thing worked its left cheek past the
door’s edge, its teeth clicked and clacked and a low steady hiss emanated from
deep down in its chest.

“Give me five more seconds, Griff,” Cade bellowed.

“Doing my best.”

At ten seconds the Screamer remained silent.

At eleven, still nothing. No recorded screams of a long-dead
woman came from within the DCC.

No sooner had Cade looked to Griff and ordered him to
prepare a second device than the first came alive with the same high-pitched
wail the larger unit had emitted inside the Ghost Hawk. Though the
mini-Screamer was a fraction of the size as the ones deployed to keep the
hordes busy upstairs, this little sucker packed a sonic punch—especially in the
enclosed, low-ceilinged room.

The second the Screamer went
live
, the resistance on
the door disappeared and Newton’s Law was in full effect.

The only thing halting
the equal and opposite reaction
part and saving the door from swinging completely inward at great speed and
spilling Cade and Griff into a room full of hungry Zs was Cross springing to
action.

Unbeknownst to the two off-balance operators, after hurling
the device Cross had slipped one gloved hand over the door’s top edge. And as
the cool metal slab suddenly went light against Cade and Griff’s combined
weight, Cross had reacted by shooting his arm between the two operators and
grabbing a fistful of Cade’s MultiCam blouse.

As Cross pulled Cade and Griff away from the door, he stole
a quick glance at the ceiling inside the DCC. And in that snapshot in time what
he saw validated Griff’s earlier warning. Where there should have been
drop-down ceiling tiles, he saw pipes of all different sizes crisscrossing the
ceiling left to right. And intertwined with the larger conduits like spaghetti
noodles on a fork, smaller hoses wormed in and out of every available crevice.

“Griff’s correct,” Cross stated calmly as the door slammed
shut, severing four fingers off the lone Z that hadn’t gone after the Screamer.
“The cooling apparatus is overhead.”

Taking a chance, Cade passed the card in front of the jamb
and cracked the door an inch. When no clammy appendages tested the opening, he
said, “Griff,” and stabbed a thumb over his head.

Griff looked at the ceiling through the sliver. “Gentlemen,
we cannot afford to have
any
stray rounds go high.”

Cross looked to Axe on the stairs. “Can you see what the Zs
are doing?”

“Can’t see past the computer cases, mate.”

“We’ll give them a minute,” Cade said, closing the door and
shutting out the all-too-real screams.

***

The minute passed by slowly.

The Screamer didn’t falter.

And the dead didn’t resume their assault on the door.

Cade used the pass card again and, after taking a cursory
glance through the cracked door and finding nothing obstructing its swing on
the opposite side, he nudged it slowly across the threshold. He padded a few
feet into the dimly lit room and paused at the head of the center aisle, which
was one of four running lengthwise between four identical banks of computers, their
cases dark red—almost burgundy—and emblazoned at eye level with the CRAY RS
logo. After a quick computation, Cade determined that thirty-two of the
foot-wide, rectangular items were packed into the front third of the oblong
room. Head-high to him and arranged side-by-side like soldiers standing to
attention, each row consisting of eight computers looked to measure about
thirty feet from front to back.

Though the steadily humming electronics ran hot, the
temperature here was on par with the outside world—fifty-five degrees or so,
Cade guessed. Underfoot, the once-white floors were dirtied by prints left
behind by bare feet, most of them muddy, some red with blood. The walls were
also white and smudged with handprints and splotches of bodily fluids transferred
there by the restless Zs.

Immediately after pouring into the DCC single file, gun
barrels leading the way, Axe peeled off left, heading for the aisle furthest
away from the door. Meanwhile, Cross and Griff went right, each hooking a left
down an aisle of their own, Cross moving in a combat crouch up the one next to
Cade’s, while Griff hustled between the row of computers near the far wall.

Suddenly the Screamer went silent and the guttural sounds of
the dead rose over the hum of computers.

Broadcast over the comms, Cade heard Axe say, “Contact,”
which was followed near instantaneously by suppressed gunfire and the tinkle of
brass dancing across the tile floor.

In the next half-beat both Cross and Griff were calling out
that they were also engaging the dead.

They’re aware of us
, Cade thought, his gut clenching.
In his mind’s eye, he saw an overhead view of the room: Axe on his far left
flank, moving and firing. Then, based on the distinctive sound of the
suppressed MP7 echoing off the ceiling to his immediate right, Cross working
his way between his row of CRAY computers. Finally, bookending the team on the
far right, judging by the satisfying hammering of the HK’s short stroke
piston—clearly audible over the suppressed reports from the lead it was spitting—he
saw Griff dealing second death to the Zs in his sector.

“Contact center,” he called, a tick after the Screamer—no
doubt jostled to life by one of the dead things—resumed blaring from the center
of the room. At the end of his row of computers, Cade saw the periphery of an
undead scrum which consisted of at least a dozen Zs pig-piled atop each other
and digging for the noise emitter at the bottom of the crush.

As Cade heel and toed it between the CRAY cases full of red
and green lights blinking incessantly behind rectangular panes of clear glass,
he began picking off the dead in his path, one carefully measured double-tap at
a time.

Acrid gun smoke filled the air around his head while,
propelled by his new Danner boots, spent brass skittered and jumped about the
mud-streaked floor ahead of his steady advance.

Nearing the last computer in the bank with the room opening
wide in front of him, time seemed to slow for Cade. All at once he heard
Cross’s MP7 go silent.
Changing mags
, he guessed. Then the steady
clatter of Griff’s weapon ceased and in his headset he heard the operator
declare his zone clear of Zs.

No word came from Axe, just the steady, comforting chug of a
suppressed M4 coming from the far left.

After dropping a pair of Zs to the floor in a bony,
ashen-skinned heap, Cade changed mags and charged his M4.

Axe’s M4 went mute and he called his side clear.

Cade stopped short of the waist-high swarm of Zs that had
been lured away from the door by the siren’s call of the Screamer. Targeting
only the heads clearly visible in the squirming organic mass, he stilled the
three Zs nearest him. As he shifted aim looking for clean shots, two things
happened, one right after the other. First, an emaciated female zombie pushed
up off the floor and fixed its milky eyes on him. Reacting instantly, he
caressed the trigger twice. The initial bullet punched through the Z’s septum,
sending her balding head hinging backward. Speeding along at almost three
thousand feet per second, bullet number two was supposed to have punched out
the thing’s right eye, finishing the job the first lead missile started.
Instead, the second round of Cade’s carefully aimed double-tap caromed off the
pale white expanse of the monster’s forehead. A millisecond later, its
trajectory irrevocably altered, the 62-grain hunk of screaming lead was
swallowed up by the tangle of pipes running across the ceiling twenty-five feet
behind the female Z. After entering the overhead warren, the bullet must have
ricocheted, because it made a sound like a smith’s hammer striking hot metal.

Astonishingly, the errant bullet didn’t have an immediate
negative effect.

Circling away from the scrum, Cade looked left and saw Axe
cease firing for a split second and gape upward at the pipes. To Cade’s right,
Cross emerged from the computers, stepping over bodies and changing his
magazine. On the far side of Cross, Griff was already standing before the last
CRAY tower in his row. A table had been pulled away from the nearby wall. All
of the items that looked to have been on the table now lay on the floor: Papers
spilled out of manila folders. Sharpie pens and legal pads containing notes
jotted down in a sloppy hand. A leather-bound logbook of some sort, its pages
ripped and muddy, was propped up against the wall.

Snaking across the table were dozens of multicolored wires
in various gauges. Tracing the wires with his eye, Cade saw that they spilled
off the side of the table, ran across the floor and climbed the nearest CRAY to
which they were still connected.

Wearing a pained look, Griff said, “The effin Chicoms beat
us to it.”

Cade cursed under his breath. He stared daggers at the
tangle of wires, not so much pissed at any one person, but mostly at Mr. Murphy
for the mechanical problems grounding the helo that in a roundabout way allowed
the enemy to get here first.

“We’ve got a leak,” Cross said, gesturing to the floor
twenty-five feet to his fore.

“It won’t be requiring a Dutch girl,” Axe said, trying to
lighten the mood.

Watching the water turn into a steady stream, the initial
puddle already doubling to kiddie-pool-size, Cade reminded the team to stay
clear lest they get a dose of the kind of voltage Old Sparky of death row fame
used to administer.

“We still have a job to do,” Griff said, shrugging off his
pack. He dove in and came out with bricks of C4 and detonators to set it off.

“Make it quick,” Cade implored. He pointed to the floor by
the table where muddy boot prints with a familiar lug pattern were interspersed
with the morass tracked in by the Zs. “They might still be close. If they are,
we’ll catch them.”

Just off of Cade’s left shoulder a second hose near the
initial leak let loose a new stream of liquid. It was thicker than water and
began to pool a dozen feet from the CRAY tower Griff was rigging with
explosives.

“Watch yourselves,” Axe said, returning from collecting the
Screamer from beneath the twice-dead Zs. “We now have two pipes engaged in a
pissing contest.”

For a long moment there was no reply, only the rustling of
Griff’s MultiCam fatigues as he worked quickly to wire the explosives.

The liquid from the second leak swirled and mixed with the
blood and mud on the floor as it spread and merged with the first puddle,
creating a wide morass creeping dangerously close to the electronics.

“Finished,” Griff said, as he shrugged his nearly empty pack
on and scooped up his rifle.

“This way,” Cade ordered, eyes sweeping the floor as he
skirted the creeping liquid and followed the retreating boot prints deeper into
the vast room.

Though the dead had trooped this way recently, the
Chicom-patterned boot prints stood out and were easy to follow. They led to an
open door at the far corner of the underutilized room.

On the wall inside the hallway Cade saw vague shadows
undulating eerily.

He stopped underneath a wall-mounted emergency lamp, looked
to Griff and asked, “Time until detonation?”

“Ten minutes,” Griff answered.

Cade glanced at his watch, noting the time.

“Cutting it damn close,” Axe said.

For the first time since entering the building, Cade
consulted the floorplan Nash had provided. He checked the compass on his Suunto
then scrutinized the map for a few seconds, turning it this way and that before
refolding it and stowing it in a pocket.