Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (10 page)

As soon as Dover brought the Hercules out of the turn and
back to level flight, he spied a wispy finger of black snaking up from a copse
of trees far off in the distance. “I have a visual on the ground. Smoke plume at
one o’clock, approximately ten to twelve miles,” he said, informing his
co-pilot Second Lieutenant Norman Meredith as well as the folks monitoring the
search and rescue operation from the TOC back at Schriever. “Taking us closer
to investigate,” Dover stated. Next, he rattled off his new heading, current
altitude and airspeed for whoever was keeping tabs on him in the TOC, then, tempering
any kind of expectation, gently nudged the stick forward, keeping his eyes on
the drifting gray smudge on the horizon. And given the fact that on every
mission of the dozens he’d flown out of Schriever, every single one—without
fail—included the sighting of at least one out-of-control structure fire—sometimes
dozens—he doubted the smoke on the horizon had anything to do with the missing
helicopter.

***

A handful of minutes passed and nothing he saw was working
to change his mind. Probably a gas stove left on had finally touched off. Or a
faulty water heater. Or maybe someone was burning their dead; all plausible
explanations.

He leveled Oil Can Five-Five out at one thousand feet, keeping
the rising column of black smoke slightly off the plane’s nose on the starboard
side, throttled the engines back somewhat, and then began a final gradual
descent to five hundred feet.

Two minutes later Lieutenant Dover contacted Schriever. “Preparing
for our first pass. Maintaining five hundred feet AGL,” he stated, holding the
bird on a straight heading that would take them within an eighth of a mile of
the target. Close enough to get a good idea of the source yet still a big
enough buffer in order to avoid the swelling cloud. To his right Meredith
trained a pair of binoculars on the ground and after a couple of seconds described
the white church in detail. He panned the binoculars left and mentioned the cemetery
littered with dozens of presumably Omega-infected bodies.

“Do you have eyes on any kind of wreckage?” asked captain
Jensen who had been maintaining constant contact with Oil Can from the TOC back
at Schriever.

“Negative,” replied the co-pilot.

Someone’s burning bodies
, thought Dover.

“Wait one,” Meredith said excitedly as the plane’s right
wing dipped a few degrees to starboard. “Affirmative,” he said. “I can see an
impact zone and an extended debris field. The tail boom has separated and is
partially intact. I see the tail rotor disc and the forward swept horizontal
canards. I can say with high confidence that what I’m seeing
was
Jedi
One-One—”

Captain Jensen cut in. “Are there survivors?” she asked.

Dover banked the Hercules sharply and began a tight orbit of
the crash site.

Startled by the loud engine noise, the flock of birds still
feeding on the corpses took flight and the sky over the graveyard went dark but
soon cleared as the raptors dissipated and then lit on the fallow fields
bordering a nearby road.

“Negative,” replied Meredith as soon as the sky had cleared.
“The helo is fully engulfed and I am seeing secondary explosions on the ground.
How copy?”

“Solid copy, Oil Can,” Jensen intoned. “Zero survivors and
ongoing secondary explosions,” she repeated, presumably for the benefit of Nash
and whoever else was following the ongoing rescue efforts back at the TOC.

“Captain Jensen, we’ve got a full tank,” Dover said. “I want
to stay on station for a little while longer just in case.”

“Wait one,” replied Jensen.

In his mind’s eye, Dover imagined the paper-pilots and desk
jet-jockeys who made most of the decisions back at Schriever consulting their
actuarial tables and weighing the expenditure of JP-8 over the value of human
life. Always the pessimist when it came to higher ups making the right decision,
he held his breath and waited for a response.

***

Schriever TOC.

Glued to the largest monitor in the building, Nash bellowed,
“Where’s my sat feed?”

“In 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... feed coming online.”

“Thank you, Captain Jensen,” replied Nash, who appeared to
be calming down a bit.

Jensen said, “Zooming in,” and the specialist next to her
hit the appropriate key strokes and made it happen.

There was no steady pan or video game-like drama or silly
clicking sounds as an image grew larger in steps before finally filling up the
screen. This was instantaneous. A snap of color and the screen was dominated by
flames and the wreckage of what no one in the TOC doubted was the Ghost Hawk—or
rather what remained of it. Nothing but a melted lump of exotic black fiber and
pooling molten alloy.

The TOC went deathly quiet.

“Pan out,” said Nash. “I’ve seen enough.” The screen quickly
snapped out so far the downed chopper was lost in the ground clutter.

Nash looked over at Shrill who remained seated. He mouthed,
“I’m sorry,” and buried his face in his hands.

“Major Nash,” said the TOC controller Captain Jensen. “What
are your orders for Oil Can Five-Five?”

Nash said nothing. With a look of utter dejection on her
face she simply shook her head side-to-side.

***

Oil Can Five-Five.

After a long, uneasy minute of silence the radio crackled
back to life. “Negative,” Captain Jensen replied with a flat affect. “You are to
RTB at once.”

“Copy that,” said Dover. “Returning to base.” He looked over
at Meredith and mouthed, “Bullshit.” Then muted his microphone and said aloud,
“We owe it to them to go around one more time. Someone might have been thrown
clear or maybe survived the impact and crawled away.”

Taking his time while Dover flew the Hercules in an ever tightening
circle, Meredith trained his binoculars on the wreckage. Flames, orange and
red, leapt high, licking at the nearby trees. Thick oily smoke tendrils coiled
hundreds of feet heavenward. He panned the entire crash site, paying close
attention to the surrounding fencing and the two groves of trees on either
side. After a couple of minutes and three futile laps without seeing anything
moving on the church grounds except for a couple of walking dead and a large
flock of birds, he dropped the field glasses into his lap, looked over at Dover
and shook his head.

In response, Dover said, “Nothing?”

“Someone has been depositing their dead down there, but I
didn’t see anything to make me believe anyone walked away from that crash. No
clothing. No discarded weapons.”

“Gotta give them the benefit of the doubt,” said Dover. “I
know Ari would us if the tables were turned.”

“There were no survivors, Ben.”

Dover said, “Second Lieutenant, we’re staying on station for
five more minutes.”

There was another long uneasy silence and then Meredith
nodded his head in agreement.

Dover brought his mike back on line and said, “Copy that.
Oil Can Five-Five returning to base.” And then contradicting his last
transmission, continued scribing a wide circle in the sky while keeping the
white church with the rising steeple the center of attention.

Draper, South Dakota

“Take a right on 16 ... that’s the intersection dead ahead!”
Jasper bellowed over the roar of the overworked engine and the constant din of
flesh slapping the vehicle’s sides. “Then a few hundred feet and you’ll need to
take the next left. County Road 13 shoots to the south under the Interstate.”

Great number for an escape route
, thought Cade.
Lucky number thirteen
.

“There’s an exchange on the left goes up to the 90 that will
take you east to Sioux Falls. You probably don’t want to go that way.”

“From the exchange on 90, what major city lies to the west?”
Cade asked as he jerked the wheel hard left in order to miss a lumbering three-hundred-pounds
of undead American.

To keep from banging into Ari, Jasper held the grab bar near
his head in a white-knuckled death grip. “Rapid City,” he replied, looking past
Ari to meet Cade’s eyes. “It’s about a hundred and fifty miles. But I heard
it’s crawling with those things too.”

Having only been through there as a kid while on a family
driving trip to see Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills, the pertinent details
such as the city’s population and whatever intersecting thoroughfares that might
run through the area was unknown to Cade. “How many people lived in Rapid City
before the outbreaks, and which interstates connect with the 90?” he asked.

Like a carnie guessing someone’s weight or a contestant on
the Price is Right trying to decide how much a Caribbean cruise aboard the
Pacific Princess might set him back, Jasper looked up and away, obviously
concentrating very hard. “Give or take ... about seventy thousand souls,” he
said. “I’m a country boy so we didn’t get down that way very often, so I can’t
speak to which Interstates run south out of the city.”

“And to the east?”

“Sioux Falls,” replied Jasper. “But there are dozens of
cities just like Draper between here and there. And the Missouri is that way. And
a neighbor said the National Guard dropped the bridges to try and contain the
outbreak. That’s why I said it’d be best you avoid that route.”

“Ellsworth Air Force Base is just this side of Rapid City,”
added Ari. “We might find another helicopter or a fixed wing there. There’s
probably plenty of fuel as well. I think it’s worth a shot.”

Tightening his hold on the grab bar as Cade swerved the
truck around a couple of putrefied first turns, Jasper shook his head and said,
“It’s twenty miles this side of Rapid City.”

“Perfect.”

“You don’t understand, Ari,” said Jasper. “That still leaves
a hundred and thirty miles of I-90 for you to travel ... and the closer you get
to the big city, the more of these things will be on the road. And all of the
stalled cars too.”

Not good
, Cade thought as he fought with the truck’s
mushy suspension to keep the rig on the road. Simultaneously he jinked left and
right, dodging walking corpses, and tried to orient himself by picturing a
virtual map of the United States in his mind. He put an imaginary pin in
Pierre—the under-siege capitol they had overflown a couple of hours ago—the
same city that had just received an airdrop of much needed supplies thanks to
the highly motivated First Sergeant Whipper.

Clipping the man on the chin
, Cade thought to himself,
was the best thing I’ve done in ages
. It had felt good and just at the
time, but thinking back on it, he supposed he’d been a bit out of line. Still,
he wouldn’t take it back for anything. He could only hope the violently-delivered
message would continue to pay off in the form of a multiple aircraft search
party. Or at the very least, a tanker would be recalled to top off Jedi One-Two
so Major Ripley could return and conduct a thorough search. Furthermore, he
found comfort in knowing, with or without Whipper’s help, that the second Nash
realized how much time had elapsed since Ari’s last radio communication, a
search of some kind would be mounted—if one hadn’t been already.

But for now, survival was a second-to-second, one move at a
time affair. Continuing to map their current location in his head, he
visualized the flight path that was supposed to have taken them south by west
from Pierre directly over Draper and onward, overflying the bottom quarter of
South Dakota and a good chunk of flat, treeless, Nebraska prairie before finally
arriving at Colorado Springs which lay roughly four hundred miles southwest as
the crow flies.

Jasper’s confirmation that Sioux Falls was to the left and Rapid
City was off to the right meant that there would be large numbers of dead
trudging the 90 between the cities. Tens of thousands of them would be stretched
out over a hundred miles in small groups and bigger herds, Cade guessed, but thankfully
nothing comparable to the Denver mega-horde.

What to do?
he thought. Following the straight gray
ribbon of highway for any duration would be risky, while sheltering in place
awaiting rescue in the vicinity of the burning wreckage would be tantamount to
him signing all of their death warrants.

Then an alternative came to him. They would have to get from
Draper, South Dakota to Colorado Springs the same way he got from Camp Williams
to Hanna, Utah a few days after the outbreak—by following back roads, avoiding
the dead at all costs, and relying on a whole lot of luck. Sure it would be
risky—almost stupid, he supposed. To deviate from the area rescue craft would most
likely overfly went against every shred of training he’d absorbed.

“We’re going south. Cross country. Take back roads and
resupply along the way.”

“With all due respect, Captain,” Ari said. “We have got to
stay near the crash site.”

“We’ll be surrounded in minutes,” said Cade. “Hell, we’re
damn near surrounded now.”

Ari said, “You
really
think we can survive a five-hundred-mile
hump through Indian country?” He removed his sidearm from the horizontal
holster affixed to the front of his vest, ripped back the Velcro flap and
removed the survival radio that Cross had returned to him before boarding the
truck. He verified it was still on, and double checked to make sure it was
tuned to the proper
dust-off
frequency. “This is Jedi One-One requesting
dust-off at Draper, South Dakota. How copy?” He released the call button and
waited.
Nothing.
He tried again and still received only static. “This
thing is damaged. Probably made in China.”

“South it is. Which way, Jasper?”