Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (26 page)

“Sergeant, your orders are to
move
the car and then
get your butt to the rally point,” Cade replied sharply. “I don’t care how you
do it or if there are a dozen
demonios
crammed in that piece of tin.
Just make it happen.” Then, knowing how the mere sight of a festering, living
corpse got under the religious man’s skin, Cade made a conscious decision to
forgive the glaring example of insubordination. The muttering and thinking
aloud had become commonplace as of late, and for the most part everyone
involved had learned to ignore it. Besides, Cade thought to himself. Lopez had
already proven himself time and again and was far too valuable an operator to
let a couple of apocalypse-induced idiosyncrasies alienate him from the team.

“I’ve got three walkers on our right. Four o’clock,” said
Hicks. “Engaging.”

“Roger that,” said Cade. He kept his foot on the brake and
watched as Hicks prepared the optics atop Tice’s M4. After swinging the 3x
magnifier in place, he snugged the carbine to his shoulder, paused for a beat,
and dropped all three Zs in a calm, controlled manner. Three muffled shots,
spaced closely together, did the trick. Only three seconds gone, thought Cade
as he cut the wheel hard right and goosed the ailing engine, an action that was
met with an unusual vibration and yet another burst of white steam.

“You’re up next, Cross ... sure you can drive an
eighteen-wheeler?” Cade said, remembering his very own nearly failed attempt a
week ago. Bouncing the dirt-brown UPS rig like a juiced Impala had been
embarrassing to say the least. That he’d done it with Desantos sitting in the
cab next to him made it all the worse. With the memory of his late friend fresh
in his mind, he nosed the truck on a collision course with the humongous cab,
more determined than ever to get everyone home alive.

“Get me close,” Cross said.

Cade replied, “Roger that.”

“
Do not stop
,” added Cross, a touch of concern
evident in his voice. “Just slow. Bring the rigs flank-to-flank and I’ll jump
out.”

“And if you bust an ankle ... how are you gonna work the
clutch so you can shift through all those gears?”

“We are running out of time, Captain. So please ... just
slow down and I’ll jump,” Cross said, popping his head over top of the cab to
get a better view. “Besides, the rest of the walkers are on to us now. And real
soon they’re going to be coming at us thick from our twelve o’clock.”

“How many?” asked Cade.

“Too many to count,” Cross said at once. “Definitely too
many of them to take on toe-to-toe. Looks like the pilot was right ... the
window is closing on us.”

Cade grimaced and nodded. Then, still smarting from the
sting of the answer, took a quick mental inventory of their weapons and
ammunition. The latter of which they were already low on after having had to
fight their way out of the NBL in Winnipeg. They’d lost the other two M4s along
with his backpack and the satellite phone when the fuselage had ripped open
upon impact. With the dead moving in from all corners, there had been no time
to search the area around the crash site. He considered it a blessing they were
able to recover Tice’s body before fleeing. Hicks and Lopez had completely
burned through their spare magazines, meaning both of their M4s were out of the
fight. So that left them with the SCAR Cross had adopted as his own, and
however many magazines were left from the ones they’d taken off of Gaines’s
body. “Almost there,” Cade said as the gleaming semi loomed near.

Gripping the bed rail with one hand, Sig Sauer pistol in the
other, Cross planted a boot on the fender well and coiled his leg muscles,
preparing to make the leap.

“Didn’t think this little guy could push that big ‘ol Chevy,
didja, el Capitan? So instead you give me this clown car of death to deal
with,” Lopez muttered under his breath as he approached the car in a combat
crouch, pistol leading the way. Once he reached the car’s rear quarter panel,
he peered inside, keeping the ‘B’ pillar between the front and rear passenger
doors between him and the Zs.

There were purple-ringed bite marks up and down both arms of
the male demonio nearest him. He couldn’t miss the deep crack running
vertically from near the top of the glove box to the defroster vents where it
had beaten on the dash. And there was a haze with all the opacity of Vaseline
coating the windshield and side windows, everywhere the rotting cadavers could
reach.

Lopez went to a knee, craned his neck, and sized up the
undead woman. At some time in the past, blood had cascaded over its chin and
chest and then dried to black, obscuring whatever silly saying was on the tee
shirt. After determining there was nothing lurking in the backseat save for
stale Cheerios, tiny articles of clothing and the two car seats, Lopez
performed the sign of the cross over his body armor and wrenched open the
passenger door.

Instantly a swarm of small black insects fled the
overwhelming pong inside the car that started the contents of his
stomach—however little existed—on an involuntary upward journey.
No vomiting
for this hombre
, he told himself. And though he’d been nearly immune to the
untoward effects of the stench of carrion since the first days of the
apocalypse, the ripe nature of these two festering corpses nearly made a liar
out of him. Fighting the urge to vomit, he stepped back from the invisible wall
of stench and drew a bead between nose and brow. The black pistol roared two
times as he delivered a perfect double tap.

With nothing but open road around the compact, and flatland
around everything else, the tremendous noise from the closely-spaced blasts set
his ears to ringing.

Breathing through his mouth to keep the vomit at bay, he
ducked his head inside the car and peered past the destruction he’d caused. But
there was no way to avoid having to look at the gray matter and splintered
cranium that had peppered the female Z.

As he looked in, the creature hissed and strained and
bucked, causing more of the dead passenger’s scalp and brains to take flight,
further sullying the interior.
Must have turned quickly
, thought Lopez,
noticing the three-inch-length of jugular snaking from a fleshy crater on the
driver’s neck. He stuck the pistol across the male’s corpse and put two quick
shots through the female Z’s temple. He said a quick prayer for the twice-dead
duo and added a few words for whoever normally rode in the empty kiddie seats.
He closed the passenger door and looped around the back bumper, and happened to
glance down the interstate to see Hicks running towards him, arms pumping,
black combat boots beating the hot roadway. Behind Hicks, a number of Zs
littered the ground, sprawled out motionless in ever-widening pools of blood.
And to make matters worse, he could see at least two dozen more picking their
way slowly through the phalanx of blackened vehicles.

The driver’s door was locked, so he pushed in the
spiderwebbed glass with the reinforced plastic cap on his tactical elbow pad,
hooked an arm inside, and popped the door open. He reached across the leaking
corpse and poked the seatbelt release. The restraint reeled back of its own
accord before snagging on what was left of the Z’s face. Thankful he was
wearing two pairs of the purple surgical gloves Cade’s wife had given him, he
grabbed the corpse by the neck and yanked it out onto the roadway. Then,
anticipation mounting, stepped over the leaking corpse, literally slipped onto
the gore-covered seat, and reached blindly around the steering column. “We have
keys,” he blurted over the comms a beat later. “On the move,” he added after
the engine caught and he slipped the car into gear.

Hearing this bit of good news, Cade prayed out loud, asking
God for more of the same.

“He ain’t listening,” said Jasper in a funereal voice.
“Hasn’t been receptive to pleas of any kind for quite some time.”

Making no reply, Cade brought the Chevy to a near crawl
beside the beer truck and watched via the side mirror a surprising display of
agility as the tight-end-sized Cross vaulted fluidly from the pick-up, planted
both boots dead center on the big rig’s running board, and grabbed a chromed bar
affixed vertically head-high to him just aft of the driver’s door.

Impressive
, thought Cade as he cranked the wheel
left, and as insurance against Mister Murphy, who had been absent for an
inordinate amount of time, looped around behind the semi just in case Cross
couldn’t get it moving. Waiting for word either way, he looked left at the
Honda which Lopez had already parked on the grassy median.

 “The cab is clear but there are no keys.”

Cade’s heart sank. This was exactly what he’d been afraid
of. And the reason he’d parked behind the semi. If a strongman can make the
Guinness Book by pulling a 747 with his teeth, Cade reasoned, then pushing it
aside with Jasper’s truck shouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility.

“Think your truck can push that truck?” Cade asked Jasper.

The undertaker shook his head. “Negative,” he said. “No
way.”

Cade was about to call bullshit and give it a try when
Dover’s voice crackled in his ear bud, warning him that at the very least the
eighteen-wheeler and the Zulus at the east end had to go. And to further ramp
up the tension, he mentioned they were on final approach and counting down from
two minutes.

“The semi will be gone in ninety seconds,” Cade assured the
pilot.

“And the Zs?” asked the co-pilot.

“We’ll take care of those as well,” Cade responded. “Anvil
out.”

He jogged the transmission to the lowest available gear and
nudged the throttle. A groan, metallic in nature, emanated from the Chevy’s
front end where the bumper and grill met up with the semi-trailer. Simultaneously
two things happened: The eighteen-wheeler rumbled to life and began to slowly
pull away, and Cross said in his ear, “At Rawley they taught us more than just
how to protect the principal.”

***

While Cade had been conversing with the aircrew on the
Hercules, Cross had been busy.

In the span of two seconds the operator had taken a quick
glance inside, seeing if it was empty. Two more ticked by while he broke a
window and climbed into the vacant cab. A dozen more seconds were burned
searching the visor, glove box, and various cubbies looking for a hidden spare.
Upon finding nothing, he wasted no time bemoaning his bad luck. Instead, he
popped off the plastic shroud surrounding the inner workings of the steering
column—two more gone. Then he unceremoniously yanked a number of multi-colored
wires into a bar of sunlight where he could see them. They had been secured
together with some kind of thermal shrink-wrap and were connected by a group of
white plastic male-into-female couplings. Three more seconds were on the books
by the time he located the correct wires. Then another ten rolled by while he
stripped them using his multitool and touched them together.

He had broken into the truck and started it without a key in
a hair over thirty seconds. A hell of a feat if he were being measured against
a common car thief. Surely not the best time amongst his peers at the
JJRTC—(James J. Rowley Training Center) just outside of Washington D.C. where
he’d learned and perfected the fine art of Presidential protection—but hopefully
quick enough to move a bomb-laden vehicle from the path of a Presidential
motorcade if necessary. Which was exactly why he’d been taught how to hotwire
every kind of wheeled vehicle, and why he’d continued to perfect the particular
skillset even after the rigorous eighteen-week Special Agent Training Course
he’d endured at Rowley.

Thankfully Valerie Clay was at Schriever safe and sound, he
thought, working the clutch, gas, and the arms’ length shifter like he’d been
driving long haul his whole life. But the reality of the matter was that he and
the others were here, in harm’s way, with a large number of dead tightening
around them like a noose on a horse thief’s neck. Not to mention the added
pressure of the multi-ton mass of metal that looked about as aerodynamic as a
brick and much too plump to get airborne—let alone stay aloft—was relentlessly
bearing down on them from the east.

After getting the eighteen-wheeler hot-wired and moving,
Cross upshifted quickly, putting a head of steam behind the old Peterbilt
cab-over. He eyed the maroon minivan, upshifted and then glanced down at the
speedometer and saw the needle pass the thirty-miles-per-hour mark. Keeping the
static vehicle positioned off the right fender, he upshifted again.
Thirty-five.
Then in no time the eighteen wheeler’s speed surged past forty and there was no
turning back.

***

Inside the Chevy, Cade and Ari had watched, mouths ajar, as
the looming tailgate vibrated and the truck pulled smoothly away. With the
shrill whine of spooling gears fading, Cade turned the Chevy back into the
center of the interstate, looped around to the east, and steered straight for
Lopez; at the last instant, he jogged the wheel a degree and slowed to a crawl,
allowing the visibly-winded operator a chance to hook an arm on the bed and get
ahold of the tailgate. Feet moving as fast as his bulky boots would allow, the
stocky operator got a toe on the rear bumper and threw himself over the
tailgate.

“Good work, Lowrider ,” said Cade, looking into the mirror.

Flashing a thumbs up, Lopez said, “You are going to have to
pick up Hicks ... fool’s high school conditioning is long gone.” Then he spun
around on one knee, looked eastward at about a twenty degree angle to pick out
the gray speck on the horizon and said, “Better make it fast ... or Oil Can
Five-Five is going to land on our heads.”

In his ear, Cade heard the pilot say in his subtle Texan
drawl: “
So far so good, Anvil Actual. Wheels down in ninety seconds. Great
job, miracle worker.”