Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (27 page)

Hoping the pilot was understating the time to touchdown,
Cade said, “Roger that,” and pointed the truck towards Hicks, who was moving
like his boots were made of lead, not leather. In a matter of seconds Cade had
covered the distance, but when he pulled alongside and stood on the brakes, the
Chevy’s radiator finally went Old Faithful

South Dakota

Aboard Oil Can Five-Five

Taking into consideration the elevation, pressure altitude,
current outside temperature, present wind direction, and Oil Can’s weight—which
was considerably less after the high flow fuel dump—the flight engineer aboard
the Hercules had been busy crunching numbers in order to work up the data
necessary for his pilot to nail a successful Max Effort Landing.

After consulting the data written out on a sheet of paper in
the flight engineer’s easy-to-read hand, Dover watched the altimeter slip
through one thousand feet AGL (Above Ground Level) and begin ticking down
towards five hundred feet AGL. About to perform one of the most difficult
maneuvers to pull off in the KC-130 platform, he strained against his straps,
testing them in advance of the looming rapid deceleration. That he wasn’t being
shot at in the process was a plus. That he could see too many Zs to count
slowly threading their way through the stationary vehicles at both ends of his
runway set the hairs on the back of his neck at attention.
Two birds with
one stone
, he thought as he looked through the portside glass and watched
the eighteen-wheeler pick up speed on a collision course with the last
remaining obstacle on his runway. And though his senses were overwhelmed by the
plane’s vibration and engine sound and the voices filtering in and out of his
headset, he knew the impact between the truck and the smaller vehicle had been
catastrophic. Glittering in the sun like some kind of an airburst firework, the
silent eruption of broken glass bloomed and fell to earth, then bounced and
skittered across the far lane. Next, the windowless shell of the van, its
chassis shortened by at least three feet, followed the rapidly-spreading carpet
of broken auto glass; after three full rotations across the black top, it
bounced down the shrub-covered embankment, finally stopping with its grimy
undercarriage pointing skyward.

Down on I-90, at the same time Hicks was being helped into
the back of the Chevy by Lopez, the explosive sound of breaking glass and
crumpling metal garnered Cade’s attention. He jerked his head around towards
the noise and then bellowed into the comms, urging Cross to bail out of the
runaway rig.
Too late
, he thought as the Peterbilt with Cross behind the
wheel pushed the minivan over the shoulder and into space.

Meanwhile, aboard the Peterbilt, Cross had just popped the
door latch when Cade’s voice sounded in his ear bud ordering him to bail out.
With no time to reply, he dove from the cab, catching a glimpse of the
speedometer on the way out.
Fifty miles per hour. Shit, this is going to
hurt,
he thought as everything seemed to slow to a crawl. Taking note of
every pebble and shard of gravel as the ground rushed up at him, he made a
conscious decision and whipped his head left, hoping his body would follow
suit. From the corner of his eye he registered the flash of chrome and paint as
the semi barreled over the edge. Then he hit the sloped hillside like a
missile, his right flank absorbing most of the impact. Instincts kicked in and
he pulled his arms and legs tight and rolled, letting his helmet, tactical
elbow, and knee pads take the brunt of the trauma as his speed bled off and he
came to a grinding halt, on his back, head downhill, bruised and dusty—but
alive.

He looked downhill; everything was topsy-turvy and upside
down. His eyes picked up and followed the furrow of churned earth and broken
bottles and dented cans, some still spewing geysers of foamy beer. His gaze
walked the glittering wet trail all the way to the tangled jumble of metal
where the tractor trailer had come to rest atop the newly flattened minivan.
And there, staring him straight in the face, rendered in white, red, and black
on the trailer’s rippled sheet metal was a giant-sized bottle of Budweiser
complete with golf-ball-sized beads of condensation. Suddenly reminded of how
thirsty he was, he fumbled for the spout on his hydration pack and took a long
pull. He dropped the spout and swished the water around in his mouth, letting
it linger there, allowing the dehydrated pores to hungrily absorb the liquid
for a second before swallowing. He ran his hands up and down his legs and
inspected his arms one at a time, fully expecting to find a fracture or three,
but discovered nothing obvious. Nothing bad enough to keep him from clawing his
way back up to the interstate. But before he started his ascent he needed to
get his wind back. He closed his eyes, breathing in and out, shallow breaths at
first, listening hard to his surroundings. His heart hammered against his
sternum, sending a tidal surge of blood flowing through his head, a whooshing
sound that was slowly subsiding. Then, two distinct and very familiar sounds
caught his attention—one more so than the other. From uphill and to the right
he heard the inbound Hercules—a welcoming noise that came across like the
incessant buzzing of an angry swarm of bees. While downhill and to the left
came the unmistakable, telltale sounds of the dead—the wanting dry rasp
indicative of a first turn, to be exact—and without looking, he could tell
there was more than one.

He rolled to his stomach, extended his left arm, and pushed
off the sloping ground. Beads of sweat exploded from his forehead and a cold
chill wracked his body as the initial surge of adrenaline started giving way to
pain. Craning his neck around a chest-high shrub, prickly against his cheek and
smelling like cat urine, he swept his eyes along the debris field and spotted
the offending parties.

But not before they had noticed him.

Downslope, a dozen feet away, a trio of first turns
navigated the shrubs which had been planted with little landscaping forethought
in a basic grid pattern at roughly three-foot intervals. Beyond the trio, he
spotted another dozen stumbling across the grassy median on the near side of
the road paralleling the interstate.

“This is Cross,” he said between labored breaths. “I’m OK,
and making my way back up to the interstate. How copy?”

Nothing.
There was no response. Then he realized he
hadn’t heard the usual click from the voice-activated throat mike. The
subliminal hiss of white noise usually present in the background was also
absent. He felt his right ear for the ear bud and found it missing, torn away
presumably from the impact or the subsequent two-second spin cycle he’d ridden
on the way down.
You’re on your own
, he said to himself. He stood nearly
erect, left foot planted on the downhill side, and though his right elbow and
shoulder throbbed with a low intensity pain that was getting worse by the
second, he aimed cross-body and double tapped the nearest of the three Zs in
the forehead. And as the near headless abomination slid downhill through the
remnants of its own brains, Cross sat down hard, dug both heels into the
hillside, and drew a bead on the first turn making most of the racket. That it
had recently made a meal of someone’s entrails was a foregone conclusion, made
all the more evident by the fact that its dirty blond hair was pasted to its
head with a shiny coating of congealed blood and assorted other bodily fluids.

Cross took a deep calming breath and pumped two .357 rounds
into its open mouth, rose to standing on shaky legs, and hustled uphill as fast
as his battered extremities would carry him.

***

No sooner than Lopez and Hicks were safely in the box-bed,
Cade had turned the wheel and accelerated. He looked through the sweeping turn
and watched the tail end of the trailer disappear from sight. “Cross, how
copy?” he said into the comms.
Nothing.
Nearing the point where the
truck left the road, he tried hailing the agent again and was met with silence
in his ear and the gnawing feeling that they would be burying yet another team
member alongside Desantos and Maddox.

Slewing the truck sideways and halting parallel on the
shoulder, Cade ordered Lopez to stand up and take a quick peek, stressing the
fact that the Hercules was on its final approach.

Suddenly his ear bud crackled to life. “Anvil Actual, how
copy?” said the disembodied voice.

Cade answered, “Solid copy, Oil Can Five-Five. Miracle
accomplished.”

“Roger that,” said Dover. “Better rally to the extraction
point. We will be wheels down and rolling out in less than one minute. And be
advised you have Zs entering my runway to the east.”

“Solid copy,” Cade replied. “We will take them out ASAP.
Anvil out.”

The truck rocked on its suspension as Lopez stood on the
wheel well in order to see down the hill.

“I see the truck,” said Lopez. “And it don’t look good,
Captain.”

“Do you see any signs of Cross?”

“Negative,” Lopez said at about the same instant
Cross—dust-covered from head to toe and limping like he’d been beaten—rose from
behind a shrub twenty feet downslope. “Disregard, Captain. I have eyes on
Cross.”

“Roger that,” Cade answered back. “Is he ambulatory?”

“Affirmative,” Lopez answered back.

“Just what I needed to hear. I need you and Hicks to help
him get up here on the double ... our freedom bird is forty-five seconds out.”
He looked past Ari and out Jasper’s window and saw the Hercules, nose down at
an impossible angle, its barn-door sized flaps which ran along two-thirds of
the wings’ trailing edges already deployed at a ninety-degree angle. His first
impression of the plummeting aircraft was that something wasn’t right. The
Hercules looked like a giant gray lawn dart about to spear the ground. But
while Cade gaped like a bystander at a fatal wreck, the Herc slowly nosed up
out of the dive, and landing gear wrapped with huge black tires that looked
like they could take a pounding sprouted from the nose and amidships.

“Captain, Hicks is not good to go,” said Lopez into the
comms. “He’s mumbling something about someone named Kylie. I think he has
snapped or something.”

“You’re on your own, Lopez.”

Without a word Lopez bounded from the truck and ran down the
embankment and disappeared from sight.

“What’s the matter, Hicks?” asked Cade, twisting around in
his seat in order to try and establish eye contact.

Silence.
The Ghost Hawk crew chief was sitting on the
wheel arch with his legs draped across the dead, eyes transfixed on something
in the far away distance.
A sudden onset of PTSD?
Cade wondered. If he
was correct, it was a long time coming, considering all they had been through
since Z-Day. At any rate, he concluded, Hicks was now no more useful than Jasper
had been at the onset of his episode, and considering their current predicament
there was nothing he or anybody else could do until they were all safely aboard
the Hercules. Then, splitting his time between watching the incoming bird and
casting looks back at Hicks, Cade ticked off the seconds in his head. And when
he reached ten he said, “We gotta go, Lopez. We need to be clear of the road.”
He cast his gaze right and saw movement to the east near where the Hercules
would be coming in. Looking like flocked Christmas trees and contrasting
dramatically against the sooty black wall of metal, the little summer camp
zombies were approaching at twice as fast a pace as the others. Then he looked
left and noticed a new group of Zs emerging from the nearby snarl of vehicles
in twos and threes, rapidly spreading out across the Interstate.

South Dakota

Aboard Oil Can Five-Five

Setting his gaze on the hundred-foot-wide swath of scorched
interstate, Dover noted the numerous burned-out automobiles and the looming
tractor-trailer rig that his tail would need to clear prior to setting the
Hercules down on the two-lane. Slowly he started bringing the flaps into play,
throttling back simultaneously, eyes flicking over the gauges and indicators.
He flipped a lever bringing the landing gear out of their housings, and when
the proper indicators lit up he said, “Gear down. Flaps full. Holding max
effort threshold.”

To Dover’s right, Meredith rattled off a few updates. He
stated the current wind speed which was almost nonexistent. Then his voice
changed timbre. Like he’d just been surprised, he said, “You’ve got Zs east
side on the inbound approach.”

“Roger that. I see them. Are those kids?”

“They were at one time,” intoned the co-pilot.

Dover went silent for half a heartbeat. Craned his head
trying to assess the situation, then said matter-of-factly, “Committing fully.”
And during that nanosecond in time when he’d made the final decision from which
there would be no return, he registered a snapshot of the scene in his mind.
Forty feet below the Hercules, the twisted and melted metal skeletons of what
used to be cars and trucks sat fused together, a black tangle of instantaneous
death by immolation. And just beyond the accident scene where the makeshift
runway began, a couple of dozen zombies, child-sized and seemingly painted
brilliant white, were frozen mid-stride. Then, the last thing that registered
before he flicked his eyes up were their pale, sneering faces flashing by under
the Herc’s nose.

On Interstate 90

“Anvil Actual. You have exactly
thirty-five
...
that’s
three
...
five
seconds to clear the runway,” said the
Herc’s co-pilot.

“Copy that,” said Cade as he witnessed Cross’s dust-coated
black helmet break the horizon. A tick later, Lopez, who was a half-head
shorter than the President’s security man, came into view. He had Cross’s left
arm draped over his shoulder and appeared to be helping to steady him more so
than actually bearing any body weight.

Making eye contact with Cade, Cross tapped his helmet over his
right ear and then drew a finger across his throat, combined gestures that
explained fully why the operator had gone radio silent.