9.0 - Sanctum (18 page)

We’d been noticeably descending for a short while when Martin announced San Angelo was just ahead and we’d be on the ground at Goodfellow Air Force Base in ten minutes.  Unless the place was swarming with infected.

I looked out as Martin took the Black Hawk into a wide turn, well away from the runways.  His plan for safe landings back at Fort Hood, he’d told us, was to fly one wide circle to make sure the landing spot was safe and then to rush in at a steep angle, get the wheels on the ground, and kill the engines.  The tricky part, he told us, was to stay far enough away so as not to draw the infected to the landing zone, but not so far that he failed to see Whites that were lurking near where he wanted to touch down.

All of us kept a sharp eye out the window for Whites. 

The base lay at the southeast edge of town, and most of what lay past its southern and eastern fences were empty brown fields that stretched for miles.  A river cut through the southeast corner of San Angelo, separating the base and a few neighborhoods from the rest of the city.  That seemed like a good thing to me.  Though San Angelo wasn’t large, it had a population of maybe ninety thousand before the virus hit.  The river was a natural barrier that hopefully kept most of the Whites corralled in the center of San Angelo, well away from the base.

The base itself was small—two runways that crisscrossed forming an X surrounded on three sides by brown grass.  On the northern side of the X, between the runways, some hangars had been situated for maintaining and storing aircraft.  Most of that area was paved over and scattered with a few dozen aircraft—old and new planes and helicopters in no apparent order.  The western third of the base was covered with buildings.

I didn’t see a single White moving inside the base’s fence.  I did see the charred remains of a large plane in the center of a black smudge laid over the end of one runway and a single coyote, loping along without any interest in the noisy helicopter overhead.

Martin came over the intercom.  “I’m going to try and set it down by that big petroleum tank up on the north side. 

Murphy spotted it before me and pointed it out.

As the helicopter rushed toward the ground for its landing, Murphy pointed again and ran his finger along a line that followed a wide roadway running across the northern edge of the base.  “Look.”

I looked, didn’t see anything of interest, and shrugged.

He leaned in close.  “The fence.  It’s not down.  That’s good.”

I looked.  He was right.  A tall chain-link fence surrounded the base.  That meant the only Whites we had to worry about were the ones who’d been on the base the whole time and had managed to stay alive.  Maybe a few hundred at most.  Purely a guess but with the machine guns mounted on both sides of the helicopter and a good supply of ammunition onboard, a few hundred Whites would not be a problem.

Martin told us, “Hold on.” 

I didn’t, but should have.  The ground rushed up so quickly I thought that we were crashing.  My stomach felt light, and my feet tingled.  Martin swung the Black Hawk into an unexpected tight turn just after passing over a tall petroleum tank, dropped the final feet and slowed just before the helicopter sank gently down to the tarmac.

The wheels settled on the concrete and the rotors still spun noisily, blowing away every bit of loose debris nearby.  I noticed Martin didn’t cut the engine.

Murphy jumped out, as did Fritz and Jazz.  They were in charge of gassing us back up.  The trio ran toward one of the squat buildings adjacent to the fuel tank. 

Eve stayed on her gun, and I took Fritz’s seat because nobody else seemed eager to fill the vacancy.  Javendra sat where he’d been since we left College Station, looking outside, worry on his face.  Grace got out and stood nearby, scanning for movement.

We’d been on the ground for maybe two minutes.  We hadn’t yet pumped a drop of fuel into our tanks.  I was looking at the rotors spinning when I also noticed Grace tense and point.

I looked past the other helicopters on the ground between us and the hangars sitting nearer the intersection of the two runways.  Then it occurred to me what might have Grace concerned.  The helicopters I’d looked past bore no Air Force markings.  They were Army Black Hawks remarkably similar to ours.

Grace shouted at the others.  She was agitated about something.

Eve was swiveling her machine gun to point it past Grace. 

Uh, oh.

I’d missed something.  I looked again at the helicopters and then noticed movement on the other side.

Soldiers were running toward us.

Confusion.

The Army at an Air Force Base? Why not? The world
had
changed.

What would they do with Grace, Jazz, Murphy, and me? We were Whites.

I looked out the other side of the helicopter.  Maybe it was better not to stay and find out. 

Grace jumped into the Black Hawk and shouted, “We need to go!”  She bounded out the other side, yelling at Murphy, Jazz, and Fritz.

Seconds later, Martin shouted from the pilot's seat, "Survivor Army! That's them!"

I turned and took a hard look at the running men who'd crossed half the distance to us from the buildings.  They were armed.  They were sloppy, partially uniformed, and they were pointing their rifles at us.  "Oh, shit.”  I leaped to the other side of the helicopter, pointed through the window past the barrel of Eve's machine gun, and yelled, "Shoot or they'll kill us!"

Our helicopter’s engines blasted louder, and the sound of the spinning blades changed. 

Eve pulled the trigger as she swept the end of the barrel across the line of running soldiers.  Some dropped, some ran away, others fired back.

Grace had a rifle in hand by then and was shooting.  Fritz and Murphy dropped their hose and were running toward us.  I grabbed an M4 and started firing, not in hopes of hitting anything, but hoping the sound of rifle fire and bullets in the air would keep the Survivor Army thugs at bay until we could get airborne.

The helicopter’s metal skin pinged with bullet strikes. 

The blades started to spin in earnest, and I felt the helicopter come off the ground, taking its weight on the rotors.

Men were climbing into the helicopters across the tarmac.  Guns were firing everywhere.

Murphy, Jazz, and Fritz jumped in through the open door, as did Grace.  Eve yelled at Martin that we were all in, and Martin yelled into the intercom, "Hold on!"

The Black Hawk jumped into the air, shooting thirty or forty feet straight up in the span of a second or two, then it lurched and bucked.  Something had just gone terribly wrong.

The helicopter started to spin in a slow circle, and it angled and drifted away from the hangars, still gaining altitude, but slowly.

Knowing I was the wrong man on the machine gun, I tumbled out of the seat behind the gun, trying to keep my balance by grabbing onto anything attached to the floor, walls, or ceiling.  Fritz climbed over me, to get back behind his machine gun.  Somebody was yelling at everyone to get strapped in.  Javendra was scared out of his mind and trying to wrap himself in the smallest ball possible.  Good thing for him, he’d never unstrapped himself when we sat down.  Grace and Murphy got themselves into their seats, as did I.

Jazz was on the floor, on her belly, locking her legs around the seat legs and trying to aim a weapon. 

The helicopter lurched again, and I banged my head hard enough to knock me senseless for a moment.

We passed over the highway, maybe a hundred feet off the ground, rising, and spinning slowly out of control.

Out above the tarmac, I saw other helicopters in the air, and I saw yellow fire from weapons.  I braced myself and pointed an M4 and fired, depending on nothing but luck for hitting a target.

Eve and Fritz were firing the machine guns in turn as their side of the helicopter came around to face the Survivor Army assholes.  Martin urgently shouted words nobody understood in a tone that needed no words to let us all know we were in trouble.  That’s when I knew we were going to crash.

Tracer fire streaked the blue sky around us.

I spied a helicopter through an open door, and I fired.  It spun out of view, and I saw another.

In one moment I saw neighborhoods and shopping centers below us as our Black Hawk leaned.  In the next, I saw blue sky.  Whenever a helicopter came across my view, I pulled the trigger.  And they were getting closer each time I saw them.

One of the helicopters started to spew black smoke and spun out of control, and for half a second, I felt hope.  Then our Black Hawk erupted in sparks and pings followed immediately by a drop.  For a second, I was weightless, free-falling inside the crew compartment, lucky to be strapped to a seat, and then our helicopter stopped falling, and the press of the seat against my back pushed all the air out of my lungs.  Everybody was screaming, or cursing, or shouting, but firing when they could.

Our helicopter heaved sharply to one side, and down below us another helicopter was flying past.  I watched as a string of tracers flowed into the engines.  The helicopter burst into a ball of flame, black smoke, and spinning parts.  A pressure wave punched me as hard as a fist and a rush of heat singed past me.

Martin was screaming into the intercom again.  We were going down.  We were definitely going down.

We were still spinning and sinking closer and closer to the ground.

Other helicopters were in the air, one at a distance close enough that tracers sprayed through the air, going wild in our general direction.  But he was too far to hit us except by luck.  Two other helicopters were black dots against the blue sky back toward the base.

I realized then we’d come several miles though it seemed like we’d only been in the air for a few seconds.

Whites were in the street below.

Fritz still fired.  Eve was losing the contents of her stomach.  Everyone else was holding on, screaming, or praying.

The helicopter hit something solid, bounced and skidded, grinding and spinning as gravel flew into the air all around us.  I spotted a glimpse of a wall and a half spin later the helicopter smashed into the bricks, cockpit first.

We were down.  We’d stopped.  We were alive.  The rotor was tearing itself apart above us and flying away in pieces.  Smoke enveloped us as if catching up now that we’d stopped moving.

One of our engines was still running through a metallic grinding that squealed to a deafening screech.  Our peril was not yet over.

I unstrapped myself and jumped to my feet, lost my balance, and fell out.

It took a second for me to realize we’d crashed on the roof of a building.  The helicopter cockpit had rammed into the wall of a tier of the building that stood one story higher than the one we were on.

Dust and smoke were in a swirling cloud all around, obscuring everything.  Our engine was still shrieking.

I jumped back to my feet as Jazz tumbled out of the helicopter, bleeding from scrapes and cuts.  She fell to the ground, and I was at her side immediately.  "You okay?"

She nodded as blood flowed out of her mouth onto the flat roof we were standing on.

“Where’s your gun?”

She shook her head.

I looked into the helicopter. 

Murphy was out the other side, Grace was climbing out behind him.  Javendra was crawling out, scrambling for solid ground.  I looked toward the cockpit and saw Fritz leaning in.  I caught his eye.  "Get Martin."

Fritz shook his head.

Damn.

I picked a rifle up off the floor and tossed it out.  Boxes of ammunition, hand grenades, and canned food were scattered everywhere.  I dug through and found another rifle.  "Eve?” I called.

Fritz said, “I’ve got her.”

Something inside the engine shattered and a grinding shriek of tearing steel followed. 

I ducked and covered my head.  Instinct.  If the engine blew apart, a pair of bony hands over my skull weren’t likely to save me.

I found Jazz’s bow and tossed it out.

Fritz had Eve were piling out Murphy’s side of the aircraft.

I jumped away from the helicopter and glanced at the wall we’d smashed into—solid brick, no windows.  I looked at Murphy through the helicopter’s open door and yelled, “You got a door on that side?”

He couldn’t hear me.  He was busy getting everyone over there away from the helicopter.  I realized I should be doing the same.

I turned back to Jazz who'd just picked up her bow and stood.  I grabbed some rifles under one arm and grabbed her by the arm and started guiding her away.  "You okay?” I asked as we ran.  She had so much blood on her face I couldn't tell.

“Yes.”  Blood spattered out with her response.

Machine gun fire started raining down from above as a helicopter neared our crash site.  The dust and smoke that had been concealing us was starting to thin.  We needed to get inside before the assholes had a clear view of us.

Jazz and I rounded the tail rotor, giving it a wide berth, and ran to the farthest corner of the roof, as I looked over the tops of the rooftop air conditioning units for the rest of the group.  Through the smoke, I spotted them—all bloody, all running, Javendra with a limp.  They were headed for a door hanging partially open, showing darkness inside.

I bet myself the room or stairs inside were full of Whites, but it didn't matter.

“C’mon, Jazz.”  I pulled her and hoped she’d stay on her feet.

I saw the others get to the door well ahead of me.  In all the noise, I couldn’t hear whether shots were fired or whether people were screaming.  Everyone was swallowed by the dark inside and just disappeared.

When Jazz and I got to the door, we didn't slow, we tumbled into the stairwell as bullets raked the brick wall and steel door behind us.  We all but fell down the first flight of stairs to come to a stop at the first landing, the place where everyone else had paused to catch their breath and assess their wounds.

Once Murphy looked Jazz and me up and down, and determined we were strong enough to keep going, he pointed down the stairs, bounded halfway down the next flight, and told all of us, "We need to move."

More bullets hitting the wall outside underscored just how right he was. 

"Grab the rail,” I instructed, doing the same as I started down the steps on the next flight of stairs.  I stopped and waved everyone to hurry past.

I looked down into the stairwell and saw that the dim shadows turned black on the lower floors.  To Murphy, I said, “Take ‘em down one flight and we’ll get away from this side of the building.”

Murphy, with a rifle at his shoulder, aimed it downstairs and led at a cautious pace.