Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (9 page)

Ari shot a sidelong glance at the pale cadaver that used to
be a living, breathing man. He reminisced over the countless hours he’d passed
shooting the breeze with Durant in the cockpit. A tear formed as he thought
about all of the scrapes they’d gotten into and out of all over the world.
Then, grasping the buckles holding him in place, he uttered a short prayer. He
figured when he released himself and succumbed to the pull of gravity, one of
two things would happen. Either he’d fall into the undead creature and get bit
and join him for a time in whatever purgatory the undead endured. Or he’d fall,
and somehow succeed in avoiding the creature’s snapping maw. Then he figured
he’d flip up the smoked visor and plunge the locked blade of his Leatherman
multi-tool into the Z’s eye socket.

Seconds away from punching free of the four-point harness and
letting fate run its course, he saw Lopez sprint in front of the helicopter.
Moving from right to left in a low crouch, holding a black tanto-style blade in
his right fist, the stocky operator was focused laser-like on something near
the fence line.

What the hell
, thought Ari as he watched Lopez weave and
bob through the gravestones and bodies until he was out of sight. Then, after a
few seconds or minutes had ticked by (Ari’s perception of time having been
skewed since the crash, so he wasn’t certain), he picked up a flash of movement
from the left.

But unfortunately the Z that used to be Durant had also
noticed the flash that was Lopez and instantly began to buck and flail against
the restraints. The hissing and moaning and clacking of teeth coming from below
rose to a crescendo as Lopez—weighted down by a camouflage-clad body held
firmly over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry—trudged slowly by.

“Shut the fuck up,” Ari bellowed as the sound of an
approaching vehicle helped drown him out. “You guys gonna get me out of here?”
he hollered to no one in particular. He craned his stiff neck all around,
searching for a friendly face, listening hard for a reply.

“Hang tight,” Hicks called back from his blind side.

Instantly a wave of relief hit Ari as he began to tick off
in his mind the names of the passengers and crew that he knew had survived: His
flight engineer Hicks, Captain Grayson, Sergeant Lopez, and Secret Service
agent Cross. However, the feeling of dread returned when he realized that he
hadn’t heard the general’s voice since Cade left to get the truck. So using the
logic of deduction, he came to the conclusion that the body Lopez recovered had
to be the spook named Tice.
Goddamnit
. Three dead because of him. The
urge to martyr himself alongside Durant returned—only this time, the desire was
a hundred times stronger than before. “I’m tired of hanging tight,” he called
back to no one in particular. He was about to punch out of the harness holding
him when the sound of brakes squealing met his ears. A tick later a pair of
black boots entered his side vision. They were quickly joined by two pairs of
tan combat boots. He looked up, as difficult and painful a task as it was, and
spied Cross, Hicks, and Lopez form up in front of him and begin conversing in
hushed tones. The look on their faces told him they were forming a plan to
extricate him and somehow find a way to honor his earlier request. They were
standing side by side, tallest to shortest. Cross, Hicks, and Lopez—left to
right, looking like something out of an old AT&T commercial. Absurdly, the
tagline
got bars
popped into Ari’s head. He embraced it, welcoming
anything and everything that would take his mind from the burden he was going
to carry with him for the rest of his days.

They stood there for a few seconds and then abruptly separated,
each trotting off and following a different point of the compass. When they
returned, each man was carrying something different. Cross had someone’s bloody
uniform blouse which he placed over Durant’s head and upper body. Before the
newly turned Z could brush it aside, Lopez and Hicks each placed a fairly large
piece of carbon fiber rotor blade atop the camouflaged ACU top. Lastly, Hicks
reached his gloved hand through the metal framework that once held cockpit
glass and gave Ari his Cold Steel blade. “However you want to do it ... it’s on
you, Warrant Officer Silver,” he said, turning his back and looking away.

***

Three minutes later

Looking at the bodies on the back of the truck was surreal
to say the least. Cade consulted his Suunto. Thirty minutes ago, give or take,
Tice had been bantering with Lopez and he, Captain Cade Grayson, had delivered
his first and last fist bump with a sitting general.

Tice’s slack face showed no signs of the terror he must have
endured the last few seconds he was alive. His helmet had been ripped from his
head and his neck was broken, the latter a certainty judging by the fact that the
man was lying chest down on the truck’s bed and his wide open, glazed-over eyes
were peering skyward.

The general on the other hand, Cade noted, had passed from
this life with a pain-filled grimace frozen on his face. His brow was furrowed,
his lips were pulled back over clenched teeth, and minus his body armor and blouse
top the cause of death was wholly evident. Between where his body armor had
stopped and his belt line there was a jagged, foot-long gash from which a fair
amount of his internal organs were protruding. Flies buzzed and settled. Took a
meal and flitted off.

Shifting his gaze from his deceased brothers-in-arms, he did
a quick scan of his surroundings.
Clear
, he thought to himself and was
about to verbalize the same to the others when something on the south horizon
caught his attention. Soft and hazy. Not quite roiling, but still clearly
visible, a gauzy curtain of fine, airborne dust was rising from the ground.

“We’ve got company,” Cade barked. “The Zs are on the gravel feeder
road now.”

“Copy that,” said Lopez. “We’re extricating Durant’s body now.
Wait one.”

“That’s about all you’ve got. Pulling around front,” Cade
said over the comms. He turned the ignition over, then let the idling engine
pull the truck forward. Keeping the same safe distance from the pooled aviation
gas, he cut a half-circle around the wreck and pulled abreast of the remainder
of his team. He caught Lopez’s eye and mouthed the words:
Burn it
.

In no time, with Jasper lending a hand, Hicks and Lopez had
placed Durant’s lifeless body in the back alongside the bodies of Tice and
Gaines.

Having a hell of a time moving around thanks to the
continuing numbness in his extremities, not to mention the pounding his body
took in the tumble from the seat in the Ghost Hawk, Ari slid his frame gently into
the truck’s cab.
Riding bitch
, he thought, fondly remembering the
ribbing Tice had taken so gracefully. Interrupting the moment, Jasper wedged in
tight next to him and slammed the door with a resonant bang. The truck jounced,
a kind of diagonal shimmy on its suspension, and then the horizon through the
windshield dipped slightly as Lopez, Cross, and Hicks, loaded down with their guns
and gear, piled in back and settled in amongst the fallen.

Cade heard a loud clang followed by a couple of hand slaps
on the sheet metal. He glanced at the mangled and canted side mirror and
registered a thumbs up from Lopez, who was sitting on the wheel well and
brandishing his M4. “Better hold on,” Cade shouted. “Ride’s going to get bumpy.”
He wheeled to the right, zippered the truck between a couple of headstones, and
then to complete the haphazard loop through the cemetery, hung a left on the
access road. The moment the bucking Chevy passed through the iron gate Cade hit
the brakes—a move that caught everyone but Lopez by surprise. Without stating
his intentions the stocky operator rose, engaged the 3x magnifier in front of
the Eotech 553 holographic sight on his rifle’s monolithic upper rail, spread
his feet incrementally, and then snugged the weapon to his shoulder. “Going
hot,” Lopez called out to no one in particular.

Literally
, Cade mused, a millisecond before the sergeant
opened fire. He watched Lopez methodically walk a half dozen rounds from right
to left down the length of the matte black fuselage.
Nothing
. Then Lopez
paused for a tick, , leaned in against the recoil, and as rapidly emptied the
mag at the point where the chopper met the glimmering fuel.. Sparks flashed as
the two dozen 5.56 rounds penetrated the chopper’s skin, leaving a snaking line
of dark holes just above the fractured hatch where the port wheel was stowed
away when retracted.

The explosion, though intended, was instantaneous and
violent. Two things happened simultaneously: Lopez yelled, “Go, go, go,” and was
slapped down from the superheated shockwave. Subsequently, heeding the words
piped into his ear bud, Cade pinned the accelerator to the floorboard. Meeting
Ari’s gaze, the Delta captain offered up a sheepish grin and shrugged a
shoulder. “If it gets us rescued, it was worth the risk.”

“Not if a cooked-off stray round finds your head or this
piece of crap’s gas tank,” stated Ari. “Where’d you get this
thing
?”

Reflecting in the rear view, seventy yards away, the
fireball had mushroomed, dwarfing the mature trees east of the wreck.

“She’s mine,” Jasper said in response to Ari’s query.

“And who’s this?” Ari said to Cade.

“Jasper,” he said. “While you were unconscious, he nearly incinerated
us.”

“How?”

“He was about to shoot Durant to put him out of his misery ...”

“How did you see me from where you were?” asked Jasper,
craning his head in order to look Cade in the eye.

“Saw you reflected in Ari’s visor. You’re a big guy ...pretty
hard to miss. Thanks for the help. By the way, the guy riding
bitch
is
Ari Silver.”

“Pleasure ... I think,” added Jasper.

Noticing the gold wedding band on the man’s ring finger,
Cade asked, “Where’s your family?”

“Buried them last week.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Cade. “Who were the folks in
the back of your truck?”

“Neighbors of mine ... they held out the longest.”

Cade took his eyes from the road. Asked, “You put them
down?”

Jasper nodded subtly then looked out his window.

“Do you intend on going back ... to your home?” asked Ari.

Jasper’s hand clenched around the butt of his pistol.
Knuckles going white he said, “I was thinking hard about joining them.”

“I’ve had similar thoughts since the crash,” Ari conceded.

With these two new revelations out in the open, Cade’s gaze
ran the bases, going from the road to the pistol in Jasper’s lap up to Ari’s
face and then back to the road. The round trip took three seconds at most but
left him only half of a heartbeat to mash the brakes and slew the truck
sideways, an unexpected but lifesaving maneuver that nearly pitched the rest of
the team onto the road.

“Oh my God,” stammered Jasper. “I’ve never seen so many of
them in one place.”

Save for the moaning wall of dead in front of them and the
low rumble from the roiling fire behind them, inside the cab it was deathly
silent.

Looking past Ari at the local, Cade blurted, “Which way?”

After a second Jasper said over the rattle clatter of the
Detroit V8, “Draper is to the right if you can get us to the road.”

Cade made a face. Flicked his gaze over his shoulder and
registered a snapshot in time. Sitting, back against the wheel well, legs across
Durant and his rifle propped between them, Hicks was looking neither at the
conflagration that used to be their ride, nor the monsters spread out across
the road and sallow fields to the left and right of it. Instead, he had a
thousand-yard stare fixed on the dead he was sharing space with. Cross,
however, stared back at Cade stoically, a calm look parked on his broad
features. And Lopez was looking at the rearview mirror and spinning his finger
in a lazy circle pointing towards the heavens—his way of saying:
Captain, we
need to be Oscar Mike—on the move—now.

***

Twelve miles away, north by east, Lieutenant Ben Dover
nudged the lumbering Hercules into a gradual left hand turn. With the first leg
of the search pattern completed, the new heading would have them skirt south
along the same route but five miles to the west so the crew in back could
effectively scan the new ground below for any sign of Jedi One-One or her crew.

In his headset, Dover overheard the radio chatter as Captain
Jensen back at the TOC instructed Major Ripley in One-Two to swing wide to the
southwest side of the base and land her Osprey on the far western edge of the
tarmac when she arrived. Presumably, the unorthodox landing pattern was to keep
the passengers from seeing the layout of the base and he guessed the final landing
spot had been chosen to keep her
cargo
away from prying eyes—civilian
and base personnel alike. Then, he figured, some kind of vehicle would be
waiting to immediately whisk them away on the final leg of their journey, their
ultimate destination no doubt more Gitmo than Club Med. And taking the earlier terrorist
attack on the base into consideration, Dover agreed wholeheartedly with whoever
made those decisions. However, in the hours since he’d attended the pre-mission
briefing, he’d been wondering how the Canadian citizens aboard the Osprey were
going to handle being shanghaied by their big brothers to the south. And if he
were in their shoes, he’d want to be given a goddamn good reason why he
shouldn’t be demanding and then receiving an immediate return to Winnipeg.
Real
flower leis would be a good start
, he thought to himself.
Maybe some
cold Molsons and a smoking fifty-five gallon drum full of BBQ beef brisket
.
Anything but being greeted by grim-faced soldiers on a hot tarmac and then the
mandatory fourteen-hour stay in solitary confinement that was sure to follow.
No
way to endear yourselves to the folks who might have the skills to replicate
the antiserum
, he thought.
No way indeed.