Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (17 page)

After hearing, processing, and embracing the five spoken
words, everything else Nash said was garbled as the part of Brook’s brain
associated with feelings of joy flooded her entire body with endorphins. As if
suffering a bad case of vertigo her head began to spin and her legs turned into
a couple of overly-boiled noodles. Ignoring everything and everyone in the room,
she succumbed to emotion and went to her knees, watching the fate of her family
unfold on a nameless road somewhere between the Colorado border and Winnipeg. Suddenly
she felt so close yet so far away. Like a ghost, ethereal and powerless.
Watching from the sidelines, unable to say or do anything to affect the outcome
of the drama playing out in front of her eyes.

So she pulled a chair near, levered herself into the seat,
and watched, helpless and detached, trying to maintain a modicum of hope that
Cade was coming home to her and Raven.

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Sergeant First Class Larry Eckels cracked his door a few
inches and took in a deep lungful of air heavy with the odor of carrion, freshly
churned earth, and diesel exhaust. The resulting sensory bombardment instantly
took him back to the ‘Stan, providing him a subliminal combat tingle though he
was presently in little danger.
Strange how the human brain is wired
, he
mused. Even more baffling to the veteran of multiple tours of duty in the Middle
East was how what remained of that same mass of once-living gray matter could possess
the Zs with such an intense drive and insatiable hunger for human flesh.

He pressed the Steiners to his face, fine-tuned the wheel on
the field glasses, and studied the foothills several miles off his right
shoulder. Shaped by an ancient glacier grinding into them behind a billion
pounds of brute force, the fingers of red earth snaked up hundreds of feet on
both sides, forming a canyon split by a twisting steeply graded highway leading
to the turn-of-the-century mining town called Manitou Springs.

While Eckels had been watching the heavy earthmoving
machinery tear up the quarter-mile stretch of I-25 in front of him, he’d heard on
the tactical channel that a squad of 4th Infantry Division soldiers who had been
conducting a door-to-door search and rescue operation west of Springs had apparently
disturbed a nest of Zs and had been cut off from their MRAPs (Mine Resistant
Ambush Protected vehicles) with the drivers still inside them. And as the squad
leader had sheepishly admitted over the net, in front of God and everyone, his
vehicles had been unable to intervene, thus forcing him to lead his dismounted squad
into the basement garage of an adjacent building in order to seek refuge from
the undead mob. On the bright side, he had added, his men had suffered no
casualties.
Yet
, Eckels had thought as he listened to the exchange.

Then, a few short minutes after the call had gone out requesting
air support and an immediate extraction for the MRAP drivers and the embattled squad,
Eckels spied a pair of Black Hawks cutting the air east to west, wicked-looking
guns protruding ominously from their open doors, a sense of urgency evident in
their haste. The Black Hawks were shadowed closely by two smaller AH-6 Little
Birds, black and nimble and carrying a quartet of Hellfire missiles on one
stubby wing and a tubular pod containing seven Hydra rockets on the other.

Knowing second death was about to visit the Zs, Eckels
smiled as he brought the Steiners to bear. Wavering perceptibly in the optics, rising
and falling with his breathing, the distant cluster of unimpressive apartment
buildings didn’t seem worthy candidates for a survivor to hole up in or likely
objectives for any type of clearing operation. But orders were meant to be followed,
and judging by the actions of his superiors these days, he surmised they were
mostly deskbound paper-pushing weenies blindly out of touch with the hardcore
realities outside the wire.
If only I was in charge
, thought Eckels,
I’d
be conducting razing operations instead. Give me a couple of HMEEs—High
Mobility Engineer Excavators—and a handful of D-9 dozers, and this combat
engineer will have the outskirts of Springs knocked down and Z free in no time
.

But seeing as how he was still a few pay grades below the President,
who seemed to be calling all of the shots from the hip these days, he kept his
eyes glued to the ongoing rescue op and waited expectantly for the first telltale
signs of delivered ordnance.
Softening up the target
. The thought brought
a broad smile to his face. Then, as if on cue, red smoke marking the location
of the encircled squad wafted up and the smaller helos broke orbit, taking on a
more aggressive, nose-down attitude.

And as the Little Birds rolled in, the fact that he was
commanding a large meaningful ground operation of his own hit him full force. He
watched the first volley of Hydra rockets lance groundward, their motors burning
yellow, and imagined the distinctive whooshing sound he’d heard up close a
handful of times. Like breaking waves, the white smoke from the rockets curled
through the second helo’s rotor wash as it moved in and hovered a short
distance from where the crimson signal smoke was spreading. A tick later a
Hellfire missile dropped from the hovering Little Bird and blurred towards the
ground, jinking and course-correcting minutely as the operator in the helo
guided it on to the target.

A few seconds passed before the multiple reports traveled
the distance and reached his ears. The Hydra rockets, which undoubtedly carried
flechette warheads that peppered the enemy with hundreds of small, razor-sharp
projectiles, exploded with a rippled series of soft pops, sounding like a kid
working a sheet of bubble wrap. The Hellfire’s eighteen-pound warhead, however,
produced a wasp-like cloud of shrapnel and a bass heavy note, subtle and
distant, like rolling thunder following a storm. Finally, Eckels observed the two
slower-moving Black Hawks descend and troll back and forth for a couple of
minutes, presumably engaging the Zs on the ground with their side-mounted mini-guns.
Prepping the landing zone at six thousand rounds a minute
, he thought as
he witnessed plumes of ochre dust rise and mingle with the diminishing contrails
from the rocket motors and the red smoke still rising skyward from somewhere
between the squat buildings. While he sat there in the safety of his M-ATV with
his explosive-sniffing German Shepherd Hudson by his side and a half-dozen
soldiers from the 4th ID securing the perimeter nearby, Eckels suddenly felt
sorry for the squad leader who had, for whatever reason—maybe fatigue caused by
mission creep or perhaps a bit of bad intel—miscalculated the situation, and
was now calling in
danger close
fire on top of himself.

It is what it is
, thought Eckels. His fate had been signed,
sealed, and delivered by one hell of a similar poor decision made by a captain named
Phelps. Why the captain insisted on riding around in a soft top Humvee instead of
an armored M-ATV, a Stryker, or a Bradley Fighting Vehicle beat the hell out of
him. Choosing a vehicle damn near one step up from a convertible over anything up-armored
and high-clearance when travelling outside the wire was a JFK faux pas if he’d
ever heard of one. Eckels shook his head in disgust.
Just one bite is all it
takes
, he thought darkly. And that’s exactly what got Captain Phelps killed;
an unfortunate event that led to Combat Engineer Sergeant First Class Larry
Eckels being given the unenviable task of stopping the Pueblo horde in its tracks.

Hell, bring it on
, he’d thought at the time. He’d
been making it up on the fly since Z-Day plus one anyway, so the instant
battlefield promotion—minus the actual bump in rank and the ceremony and
fist-pumping that came along with it—really meant little in the big scheme of
things. Something he’d overheard a much younger and inexperienced sergeant say
a day earlier,
Here one day and gone the next
, popped into his head. He didn’t
subscribe to this kind of fatalistic thinking—never had. Nor was he prone to
offering unsolicited advice. But at the time he’d gone ahead and broken his own
rules, ripping the young sergeant—who coincidentally happened to be Captain
Phelps’ driver—a gaping new asshole, punctuating the dressing down by telling the
soldier that if he didn’t
adapt
to the new realities and
improvise
accordingly, he
would
be ‘
gone the next
.’ And he was. Apparently
the captain’s soft top Hummer had been swarmed, and before help could arrive the
Zs had wormed into the vehicle and ripped into the sergeant’s guts. Captain Phelps,
as the evidence later suggested, had valiantly fought off the Zs with his
sidearm until he was grievously wounded and down to his last two rounds, one of
which he used to put down the sergeant who was close to reanimating—the other
he pumped into his own brain to avoid the same fate.

Here one day, eating a bullet the next. Hell of a way to
go
, thought Eckels, giving Hudson a thorough scratching behind the ears. “Chaos
theory rules in the land of Mister Murphy, Huddie,” said Eckels. “And don’t you
forget it.” The admonition was received with a tilt of the Shepherd’s head, and
answered with a yelp which Eckels took to mean, in Huddie speak, ‘
Understood
.’

It truly was a brave new world with a different set of rules,
and that’s why he had been thrust into this position. Utilizing the best man
for the job had suddenly become the gold standard. And in just a few short days
that best man—Sergeant First Class Larry Eckels—had found that being on this
side of the action was more to his liking. Sure, tooling around Indian country
finding and disabling IEDs—Improvised Explosive Devices—responsible for killing
and maiming so many of his brothers had been rewarding, and had helped save
more than enough lives over there to justify the risk he’d shouldered upon
re-upping. But during those two tours, he’d grown to abhor the cowardice shown
by the enemy, a ragtag group of religious fanatics who favored roadside bombs
and hit-and-run guerilla tactics to a fair fight. Thus, the prospect of toe-to-toe
engagement with the enemy was exhilarating to say the least—for the Zs not only
stood their ground—they shambled directly into the fray in pucker-inducing
numbers.

Taking on this horde, tens of thousands strong by most
estimates, needed to be approached differently than the Denver mega-horde which
was thought to have numbered somewhere north of half a million. Eckels
concluded the only way to engage this horde would be surgically, like excising
a malignant tumor, only on a much larger scale. But he didn’t have the
luxury
of using a couple of nukes—nor were there enough Zs to justify such an action.
That the fallout from the Castle Rock event had dispersed to the north and east
and had been beaten down by a lengthy rainstorm was attributed by most to just plain
dumb luck. But Eckels liked to think it had been divine intervention, of which he
could use a little right about now. So he decided to go another route and
employ a tactic that had been used effectively elsewhere in the early days of
the outbreak. But the first order of the day was to make sure the horde stayed
together. A small handful of Zs—squirters as they were not so affectionately
called—breaking away from the main body would trigger larger clusters into
doing the same, setting off a chain reaction that would flood downtown Springs
and eventually see Schriever to the east having to deal with numbers of the
dead that hadn’t been seen since the first days of the outbreak. Therefore, in order
to keep the aforementioned Pied Piper scenario from occurring, Eckels had
deployed, for the lack of a better name, ‘
squirter teams
’ on either side
of the freeway. For half of the day and the better part of twenty miles, the
eight CROW-equipped M-ATVs shadowed the Zs like sheepdogs, keeping out of sight
and only dismounting and engaging the stragglers with silenced weapons as a
last resort.

***

Eckels brought the field glasses up, snugged them in tight,
and focused on a point far off in the distance where northbound 25 dipped
underneath a westbound arterial leading into downtown Springs. Phase two of his
plan would commence at this junction, and to ensure that the Zs played into his
hand when they finally came into sight, he pre-positioned three teams operating
M-ATVs equipped with remotely operated CROW systems—top-mounted belt-fed M240
light machine guns capable of delivering 7.62 mm lead at a rate of 950 rounds
per minute. He gazed at the team deployed closest to his position. Settled and
alert, their boxy M-ATV was backed up against the white cinderblock wall of a
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts whose darkened neon
Now Serving
sign would never
flare red again.
Good to go.

Then he panned right and scrutinized the second team; their M-ATV
was parked, quiet and inert, a hundred yards to the west in the shadows of a
dormant fast food joint whose yellow and red sign still proudly crowed the
billions served by Ronald McDonald.

Finally, he shifted his gaze up and locked onto a pair of silhouettes:
a sniper and his spotter fresh from the ‘Stan. His
eyes and ears,
nestled amongst the ventilation equipment atop the McDonalds. And even as
highly trained and disciplined as the combat-hardened shooters were, every once
in a while Eckels would see one of the forms shift a little and a head would
bob up and furtively scan the ground surrounding the building—a definite no-no
in a hostile environment where the bad guys employed counter snipers who shot
back. But that wasn’t the case here; Eckels had just witnessed firsthand the
disconcerting affect the Zs had on even the coolest of individuals, who at this
point in the operation, with their manned getaway vehicle a mere five foot
vertical drop away, had a better chance of getting heatstroke than being eaten
by a Z.