White Ash on Bone: A Zombie Novel (21 page)

"Put your arm around me,” Rex said. “I’m going to sit you in the back of the truck."  He easily lifted her into the open cargo hatch of the SUV.  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a familiar .38.  "You dropped something," he said as he handed it to her. “What's her part in this?"  Kimberly looked up at Rex and Alison with pleading tearful eyes.

"Mistress." Alison said.  "She was in on it."  Terror spread across Kimberly's face and her body convulsed in muffled sobs. 

In the sky, the crows came cawing back across the cornfield with a dozen more of their brethren.  "Ha ha ha," Mike laughed on the ground.  "Did you see that?"  "Did the birds tell you?  They said the dead are coming. They’re coming to get you fuckers?"

Alison braced herself on the side of the vehicle with one hand and stood up facing Mike.  In her left hand her thumb pulled the hammer back on the .38 special. "Mike," she said, "You really disappointed me on my birthday."

She squeezed the trigger and the gun jumped in her hand.  Mike took the slug right in the face.  His brains exploded out of the back of his head.

Rex pulled his .45 and clicked the safety off walking over to Mike's body.  The heavy caliber round barked out louder than its little sister as he put another round in Mike's head.

He walked over to Kim, the girl continued to sob on the ground.  "Alison says you're guilty," Rex stated.  "We don’t have a lot of time, because your boy-toy over there was right.  We’re not alone here, and those things are likely coming across the field right now.  We've made a hell of racket with the guns, so they know right where to find you.  I’m going to ask you a question, and I can’t stress enough that you be completely honest.  Since your mouth is all tapped up, simple yes or no answers will do fine.  Are you guilty?"

A wash of liquid streamed down Kimberly's face as she tightly closed her eyes, her head shook, "Yes."

Alison walked over to Kim with the gun in her hand and pointed it at Kimberly.

"You deserve it," Alison said.  Alison then lowered the gun and kneeled down.  "I think Kim and I can settle up later."  She reached down and snapped the necklace Mike had placed on Kimberly's neck.  "I have a feeling Carson bought this for me."  She threw the necklace on Carson's dead corpse while Rex bent down and cut away the tape holding Kimberly.

Chapter Eleven

Eason closed the gate on the ramp behind him that led out to the seats of the East upper decks.  Mike and his wife Helen were cut off from the press of people and lost on the level below.

The dead had pushed through three of the main gates and taken over the lower levels of the stadium.  There were people still down there trying to climb to higher levels, but the dead outnumbered them.  The dead had shattered the glass below him to the club level and decimated the people taking refuge there.  There might still be people hiding in the luxury suites, assuming someone had the keys to open them up.

Eason pulled the slide on his shotgun open and pushed several cartridges into the magazine.  Behind him, people scrambled up walkways to get into higher seats. 

Three of the undead rounded the ramp and locked on to Eason standing on the other side of the gate. Eason pushed the breach of the shotgun closed and stuck the barrel through the metal bars of the gate. The closest zombie wore the uniform of a City of Pittsburgh Police Officer.  The zombie was Mike Fennel.

Eason backed away from the gate as Mike scrambled up the ramp at him.

He depressed the button on his radio, "North side upper deck gate secure."

"
This is South gate, we couldn't get it closed, there’re coming thr-,"
the message was cut short.

Ordinance screeched from overhead gunships as they unloaded on the undead.

"It won’t matter now," Eason said.

He walked over to the concrete balcony overlooking the baseball stadium across the parking lot.  In the sky above him, his eyes caught the movement of a grey multi-engine jet at high altitude.  Eason recognized the plane.

The first time he had seen it was in Mrs. Cooper's Social Studies class back in the 6th grade.  Mrs. Cooper taught the class about the ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union.  She assigned the class a project to write a paper about some aspect of the cold war.  In the school library, Eason found a book on jet planes that the United States used.  He flipped through the pages, but stopped and studied an unusual plan with eight engines and huge wings.  The book called the plane a B-51 Stratofortress.  The book told Eason that the plane carried large payloads of bombs or nuclear weapons.

Eason noticed that the sound of the gunships that had been trying to hold back the undead were no longer to be heard.

Across the parking lot the baseball stadium erupted into a towering inferno of flame and debris.  The walls of the park collapsed outward and the shockwave ripped out in all directions.  Vehicles in the parking lot blew into the air like dandelion seeds cast into the wind.  Others were hurled like wrecking balls tearing into anything unfortunate enough to get in their path.  At least one smashed through the glass into the club east section of the football stadium below him.

The shockwave reached out across the river and smashed into the glass barriers of the skyscrapers across the street.  A waterfall of shards fell to the streets along the entire north edge of the Pittsburgh skyline.

A wall of brown powderized building material raced out from the blast. Eason dropped down behind a concrete wall as it washed over the building.

A heavy cloud of burnt chalk filled Eason's mouth and his ears screamed from the explosion.  He put his hand to his mouth and coughed, but he only sucked in more dust.  For several seconds the world was filled with silence, then the banging sound of debris as it fell from the air and hit the stadium.

Eason heard a chorus of screams from people above him in the upper deck seating as material rained down on them.  Something large slammed into the upper deck shaking the entire side of the stadium.  He caught a glimpse of a stadium seat from the ballpark falling past his outlook.

The light bank above the concession stand flickered and went out.  In the distance, Eason heard air-raid sirens wind down as they lost power.  Eason's radio crackled incoherently as multiple operators jammed each other's broadcasts.

He picked himself off the ground covered in grist and grime.  He looked back at the gate holding the dead back on the ramp.

Mike Fennel's corpse was covered in a thick layer of dirt.  The dust covered the zombie's eyes and it turned away from Eason.  Mike walked in a new direction toward the sound of the blast and hit the waist-high concrete barrier of the ramp.  Mike doubled over the barrier and fell over the edge to fall hundreds of feet to the gates below.

"The dust is blinding them," he said.

Eason grabbed his radio and squeezed, "The dust has blinded some of them; it’s sticking to their eyes.  We have to make a break for it while we have a chance."

The radio waves remained jammed, but two soldiers ran up to him coming from the south gate.  Behind them, gunfire rattled off and echoed down the level.

Eason waved at them, but they shouted at him before he could talk.

"They broke though behind us," said a soldier with a nametag of Hoover on his pocket.

"The dust is in their eyes, they can't see," Eason said.

"Then they must be following the gunfire," replied Hoover.

"It doesn't matter now," said the other soldier, her nametag read, Jones.  "The radios are being jammed by the Air Force, and they just fucking bombed our guys over at the baseball field."

"You sure they can't see?" asked Hoover.

"Yeah," said Eason, "He looked past me and walked right over the edge.  A lot of them have to be as blind as fucking bats right now."

"I say we make run for it," said Jones.

"What about everyone else?" asked Hoover.

"I don’t hear gunfire from back there," Eason said.

"Yeah," said Jones, "that’s bad news."  "What do we want to do about the civilians on the deck above us?"

"How are we going to explain to a thousand people to keep their mouths shut?" Hoover replied.

"We can’t," Eason said.  He knew he would regret this later. "And I don’t think there are enough of us left to stop this.

"No way man," Hoover said, "I took an oath.”

"How are you going to fulfill that oath by ending up getting killed here?" Jones said.

"I can’t make it alone," Eason said. "But the three of us just might have a shot."

"Ok, say we make it out, then where to?" Hoover said while clearing his M-16.

"Those C-130s are coming from 911th at Pittsburgh International," Jones said.  "If we can make it there, we should be alright."

"That’s 15 miles away," Eason said.

"Then I hope you had a good breakfast,” Jones said, “cause your about to burn some calories.”

###

Captain Rick Anderson slammed his radio headset against the metal bulkhead of the Command Stryker.  Outside the front window of the Stryker, Anderson noticed the yellow of school buses lined up inside the airport.

“They’re out of their minds,” Anderson said.  “We can’t bomb our own people.”

“And our orders?” asked Sergeant Ryan Winters.

Anderson picked up the printout of the orders he had received from Division; they were not marked with a signature.

“Captain Anderson,”
he read,
“As of 1400 hours, martial law has been declared across the continental United States.  You are hereby ordered to abandon all refugees after eliminating all wounded.  You will link up with additional guard forces at the Beaver Falls Reserve Center by 2100 tonight.”

Anderson crumpled the printout, “Someone orders a massacre of civilians and doesn’t have the courage to put their name to it.  Sergeant, I have no intention of following what I consider to be illegal orders.”  

“Sir,” Winters said, “I think the Air Force is jamming communication south of us; it’s all garbled down there now.”

“Have we heard anything else from the C-130s that were ordered to break off from Pittsburgh?” Anderson said.

“Negative,” Winters replied. “The last transmission I heard 15 minutes ago ordered them out of the way to make room for the B-52’s run.  The Hercules’ pilots seemed pretty pissed and asked for confirmation twice.”

“Get me those pilots as soon as the jamming quits,” Anderson ordered.  “I don’t care what it-.”  The noise of a large plane stopped Anderson in mid-sentence.  He turned around and looked out the open back ramp of the Stryker.  Out of view, Anderson heard the screech of tires hitting the runway and the engines of the plane throttle back.  A camouflaged green C-130 raced past his view as it feathered its props to slow down.

“Belay that Winters,” Anderson said. “In fact, go radio silent.”

The C-130 slowed to a crawl near the end of the runway and turned a right U-turn on to the taxiway.  The props of the plane re-throttled giving it the momentum to carry down the lane.  People moved out of the plane’s way well in advance of its approach.  It cruised past the hanger and administration building and moved to the end of the taxiway as if it was about to realign at the end of the runway for take-off.  Instead, the plane shut down at the end of the taxiway.

Anderson’s Stryker rolled to a stop as the back cargo hatch of the Hercules opened, and its pilot walked down the ramp.

“Major Sam Warren,” the pilot said as Anderson exchanged salutes with him.

“Captain Rick Anderson. Sir, can I assume you are having radio troubles that you would need to land.”

“Let’s be blunt here, Captain,” Major Warren said. “We just bombed our own people, both military and civilians alike.  I refused to move my plane, and my co-pilot was ordered by coded message to subdue me and take over the mission.  He complied with his order long enough to move the plane out of harm’s way then turned command back over to me.  Our Air Police have orders to arrest us the moment we land back at the 911
^th
.  I am afraid that under the circumstances my crew may be shot on sight.  Considering that you are in the same boat as the people that were just bombed in Pittsburgh, I’d rather surrender to you, Captain.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that Sir,” Anderson said.  “I have orders to quit this post and abandon the civilians.  I was also instructed to kill anyone injured regardless of circumstances.  I have no intention of following those orders, Sir.”

“Then what do you suggest, Captain?” Major Warren said.

“They’re going to line us up with a firing squad for sure Sir,” Anderson said. “We might as well make it a conspiracy.  What about the rest of your squadron?”

“Grounded,” said Warren, “They headed home and have been ordered to re-fuel, re-arm, and stand by.  We can decrypt through the jamming and we heard that there are some problems at the airside of the civilian terminal at Pittsburgh International.  Supposedly, a few of the infected made it through security before they expired.  The terminal is teaming with the undead.  What’s your status here?

“Stable,” Anderson said.  “The local government managed to get organized and form a militia to deal with the immediate problems.  With what we brought them we could hold out here for months.  The problem is we are concerned about what is going to happen to the nuke reactor to the West of us if things go from completely fucked, to no chance of survival fucked.  By the way, that’s a nice plane you’ve got there.  How many people does it hold?”