Six Feet From Hell: Crisis (3 page)

CHAPTER 2

Ogre wasn’
t exactly doing his best rollercoaster ride, but Joe thought he was still trying to get Rick riled up a little bit. He had been diving in and out of different elevations since they left Camp Dawson. It wasn’t the smoothest ride for the rest of them, either. Joe heard him laugh more than once over the comms as they continued their way towards Beckley. Whatever he was doing, he was apparently having one hell of a time carrying it out. The back of the chopper was spacious for the time being, but if Ogre kept insisting on reenacting
Apocalypse Now
then it was going to be populated with vomit from more than one of them soon.

“Ogre, even us out a little bit, I wanna take a look out and do a little recon.
Swing by Charleston,” Joe said.

He
really didn't give a shit about looking at Charleston or any of its undead denizens, but at least he could get Ogre to calm his shit down. The sky was looking especially gray; the weatherman had not given any weather updates for a few days, but the Stephen Hawking-sounding voice that came across the NOAA channel that they monitored had mentioned a hell of a snowstorm. The storm would start sooner than they wanted, either way. Snow slows down everything, and the ZBRA unit was no exception.

When it snows around Camp
Dawson, they don’t do a goddamned thing.

The weather had taken out one of their
choppers on more than one occasion in the past, and they didn't take any chances losing another. If they got a call and didn't think that they could make it through the air, then they could at least take some ground vehicles. They had several Humvees and a couple of the LMTVs that were left over from the West Virginia National Guard. They would go damn near anywhere, just not nearly as fast as the Yankee would. The team did as much as they could with what they had, but they were severely limited sometimes. They did not like leaving people stranded, but when you can’t call 911, shit happens.

Ogre was nice enough to stop his sh
enanigans for long enough for Joe to get some recon on Charleston. They hadn’t made a concerted effort to try to make it back there since it had been such a populated area, but they wanted to. As far as Joe knew, it was the only capital city that had not had the pleasure of being nuked in the early days of the apocalypse. Joe carried a Geiger counter in the chopper, and every team had at least one team member with one. There was no radiation in Charleston. It had been checked out several times, with the Geiger not making any noise.

Ogre
flew within a few miles of the capitol building, the gold-flaked dome not exactly glimmering anymore. In better days, people would say that all the gold in West Virginia was on top of that dome, and if that was true then the wild, wonderful state had slipped considerably. The little gold that did flash off the dome did look beautiful, though.

Once Joe
looked away from the shiny gold, he saw that there were literally thousands of zombies still milling about in the city. Only now, it looked as if there were considerably less of them since the last time the team had passed over it.

Joe
pointed the throng of zombies out to Rick, who had never seen Charleston before.               “Check this out, Rick. We’ve been over Charleston a couple of times, and it looks like there are quite a few less zombies down there than usual. Any thoughts on why?”

Rick moved over and looked out the side of the
Yankee. He studied the landscape below and looked back and forth over the teeming masses of undead. He looked back at Joe and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe since they aren’t irradiated they are finally dying off – for good. They have to start breaking down and rotting away permanently at some point, don’t they?”

“You would think so, but I haven’t seen any of ‘em just lie down and croak out.
If they would, we would be out of a job.” Joe laughed heartily as he responded to Rick.

Rick chuckled and sat back.
It warmed Joe’s heart to see him in such a good mood; he had almost forgotten what it was like to see Rick cheerful. He was eighteen now and had grown up so fast that Joe hardly recognized him. He had lost about twenty pounds since the last time he had seen him, almost eight months ago, all of it replaced with lean muscle. He looked good, a little rugged-looking and appearing a bit older than eighteen, but it served him well. Every member of the team looked about five or ten years older than they would have liked. Surviving an apocalypse did that to you. Jamie was now full on gray-haired, and Joe was starting to get more gray up top than in his beard. Chris had the salt-and-pepper look going on. Balboa was the only one of them that did not look like he needed to be considering retirement.

Rick
was well suited to the life that he was now going to be forced to live. Out in the sticks, it took a lot out of you just to make it day-to-day. He seemed a little disinterested about Charleston; in the old days if a kid saw a real zombie he would have shit his pants. Nowadays it was the norm, not the exception.

Ogre ke
yed up the radio and informed them that they were fifteen minutes out from Beckley, but he was unable to raise them on the radio. It was no secret that communications was a haphazard thing, but it unnerved Joe nonetheless. They were lucky still to be able to receive the weather reports that they were getting; the satellite orbits were degraded and most of them were no longer working. Unfortunately, their communications were through UHF radios that had decent sound to them, but you had to be within range. If they had better VHF systems or a lower frequency to go to they could get longer range, but shoddier clarity.

Most of their
backup in the area worked off several different channels, but Ogre said after scanning several that he was unable to get anybody. Joe was not overly concerned; bad communications was something they had gotten used to. He told Ogre to relay the information back to Curtis at Dawson. They had not told Curtis that they were taking a detour over Charleston, as it was not in a direct line with their destination in Beckley. However, they liked being over an area where they could still land the chopper in an emergency, and Charleston had an airport.

Rick’s nervous tapping of his leg was t
emporarily back in session as they neared Beckley and still had no radio contact with Beckley’s ZBRA team. It was always in the back of their minds that even the ZBRA units could be overrun; they’d lost plenty in the past due to that very reason. At one point, they’d had four to five units per state, but now they were down to only two or three. Lack of preparedness and the elements had taken over as many units as the undead had.

They
had not had any calls for help recently. Aside from their last mission near the Ohio River, the area remained quiet. The ZBRA unit that was camped outside Cincinnati had some trouble with a paramilitary group that tried to take over their camp by force, and had called Joe and his team to assist. They managed to take out about three-quarters of the marauders before they split. Several dozen of the wannabe soldiers had tried to take shots at the Yankee before Joe’s crew opened up with the GAU-17/A miniguns and tore them up worse than the undead did. The noise attracted more zombies to the area, and what the chopper didn't take care of, the dead did. No matter how well you planned, you had to take into effect the fact that they still ruled.

Ogre continued towards Beckley
and the closer they got, the more the uneasiness set in. They still were not able to connect with anyone on the ground in Beckley. They kept going towards their target area, despite the graying skies and impending snow. It seemed that their weatherman was spot on again. The skies were the color of set-in snow, and it did not look like it was going to be a fun next few days. Beckley came into sight and, almost immediately, they realized that there was something wrong.

Very wrong.
 

The Beckley encampment was at the Raleigh County Memorial Airport
, and a popular destination for the team to stop and refuel the last year or two due to their commercial-size tanks. The fuel was not as good as it had been because it was not meant to withstand being left for as long as it had. They were able to keep it useable with some additives that they had collected over the past few years, thanks in large part to taking over several military bases and raiding the last of the useful stuff. All of their armory runs over the years netted them more than just guns and ammo.

They
were just above the airport when Ogre hovered over, showing them what they had been afraid of. The Beckley camp had been overrun by the undead – recently. Fires burned, and the area was riddled with destroyed buildings that had not been that way the last time they had been there – about three months ago.

Joe’s heart sank.
He knew several of the guys from there, and had actually known a few from before the world went to shit from his time at the Beckley MEPS (military entrance and processing station). They were very able-bodied country boys that fared better than most at the apocalyptic scenario, and it was not like them to be overrun by the living dead. They had tolerated no instances where the undead made it past their sentries and into their compound. How had they gotten by now?

“Set us down over by the tanks, Ogre.
That way we can at least see what’s coming. I wanna take a look around while you refuel.”

“Roger.
I wonder what the hell happened here,” Ogre crackled back over the radio.

“I have no idea, but
I'm gonna find out if I can.” Joe knew that the rest of the guys wanted to know what went down too. It was hard to make friends, and even harder to make friends with people that you trusted. The Beckley crew were extremely reliable, and damn good at what they did.

As they
circled back around to a decent landing spot near the fuel tanks, Joe spotted someone waving them down on the ground. He looked to be a guy named Wagner that Joe recognized. He had been a star football player in college at WVU when the world had ended, and somehow ended up on the other end of the state visiting some family when the dead began to rise. He was a nice enough guy, but definitely had the mindset of a linebacker when it came to killing zombies. On their last mission together, he’d run headlong into a group and had tackled three at once. A good man to have on your side, if a little overly enthusiastic.

Wag
ner was flailing his arms violently as they got about forty feet away from landing. “What the fuck is Wagner’s problem? Doesn’t he want us to help? If he doesn’t move his ass soon I’m gonna just land on his damn head!” Ogre cursed as he fought with the controls on the bird, trying his damndest not to have to land on Wagner's head.

The
boy finally got the picture that Ogre was not fucking around and moved out of the way, glaring at the chopper the whole time. Ogre slid the chopper over a little more and set it down. Joe didn't even get the chance to open the doors when Wagner flung one open.

“WE NEED TO GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE NOW!”
Wagner screamed over the sound of the engine as it wound down. The team all filed out and Joe grabbed the big linebacker by the elbow, guiding him away from the chopper and the rotors. He did as he was directed; there wasn’t a rank system in the ZBRA units, but he knew that Joe was in charge of the Camp Dawson crew and he did not hesitate to do what he asked.

“What the hell happened here, Wagner?
I thought you guys were good to go on ammo and supplies for six months or more. Why did you get overrun?”

It wasn’t until then that Joe
noticed the fear on his face. Wagner was part Cherokee and did not fear any other man, and yet here he was looking like his mom just caught him having sex with the dog.

“I don’t know what happened.
These guys just came out of the woodwork, shooting the place up with all kinds of military-grade shit. They had Bradleys and .50 cal guns and a whole bunch of weaponry designed to fuck our shit up. They ran over the fences and just wasted our ass while we were sleeping. The only guys that made it were me and another fellow named Duke, and he’s dead now.”

“Who was it?
Was it the paramilitary guys from Cincinnati?” Joe asked as they walked towards what was left of one of the airplane hangars. Joe needed to get the skids to pull the chopper around to the tanks.

“No, I don’t think it was them.
These guys looked like straight-up military – uniforms and everything. They had more firepower than we could handle even if we had been ready for ‘em. I didn't hear much of what they said, but Duke said that they all answered to one guy – they called him the Captain.”

“
The Captain? Captain who?” Chris asked as they walked out of the hangar with the skid.

“I don’t know.
Just Captain as far as he heard,” Wagner said, still looking around to see if the coast was clear.

“Why the hell are you so paranoid, Wagner?
How long ago did he come here?” Joe asked as he got to the chopper with the skids. Ogre got his sizeable frame out of the Yankee and took the skid to get it ready. Balboa and Jamie assisted him while Joe pulled Wagner off to the side.

“He was here about an hour or so ago.
I don’t really know what time it was, I just tried to get to a weapon, but before I could, he had killed off almost everybody so I just hid. I was hoping that y'all would show up soon. I knew that y’all were comin’ so I just waited it out. I wasn’t tryin’ to wave y’all off, I was seein’ if we could get goin’ fast so we could catch up with whoever this is and whoop his ass!” Wagner’s face flushed as he told Joe about his encounter. Joe could see the big guy was pissed off and wanted revenge, but they had a job to do and it was hard to tell where this mysterious ‘Captain’ was headed or how big his group was.