District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (12 page)

A handful of minutes after the Stealth Chinook pulled out of
the slow menacing orbit over Bear River, Cade knew there was no way Colorado
Springs was its next destination. For one thing, the sun remained in relatively
the same position as it had been since the first course correction that saw
them follow 16 and ultimately arrive over the small town. Albeit sitting a
little higher in the sky, the sun was still parked off the helo’s port side at
roughly eleven o’ clock to the nose and barely showing through the veil of high
clouds. That they were heading mostly south now versus southeast was a given.
That the Rangers and crew chief didn’t seem concerned they weren’t tracking on
more of an easterly heading led Cade to believe the waypoints had been set in
long ago and the place they’d ultimately be landing was familiar to everyone aboard.

***

Now, forty-five minutes later, the helo, call sign Nomad
One-One, a nugget of info Cade had gleaned from eavesdropping on the pilot’s
chatter, was bleeding both altitude and airspeed.

Even as the ground rushed by outside the window at a
dizzying clip, the rotor noise and turbine whine seemed to have diminished. On
the sage-dotted tan and ochre desert floor, cacti, tumbleweeds, and scattered islands
of upthrust, snow-crusted red rock blipped by. Now and again on a distant road paralleling
their flight path, the sun glinting off dusty chrome and glass would draw
Cade’s attention to colorful knots of stalled-out cars. Some were small
caravans piled high with worldly goods and most likely had been stranded due to
mechanical failure or lack of fuel. Others were victims to major pileups, the vehicles
involved forever locked in embraces of twisted metal or burned to shells where
they had come to rest. With first responders suffering the brunt of the
casualties those first hours of the outbreak, it came as no surprise to Cade
that nobody had come with tanker trucks full of water and brandishing jaws of
life to extricate the victims—some of which still sat inside, dim silhouettes
thrashing around in reaction to the passing helo.

Cade had been transfixed on the scenery outside his window
and was caught completely unaware when the bottom suddenly fell out from under
him. One second there was gravity pressing him into his fold-down seat. In the
next—having just learned the hard way that the desert floor was actually the
top of a red rock mesa—he found himself momentarily weightless with the horizon
outside seeming to rear up as the helicopter dove over the unseen precipice.

Collecting his stomach from his throat, Cade swallowed hard
and swept his gaze around the cabin just as the helo leveled and turned hard to
starboard. Unlike the sudden drop, the turn came as one fluid motion that had the
crew chief and everyone aboard pressed hard into their seats.

“Gonna puke?” mouthed Spielman.

Cade didn’t afford him the satisfaction of an answer. No way
he was earning a
puker
patch today. If Ari throwing him around in the
Ghost Hawk hadn’t earned him one, there was nothing the Night Stalker pilot at
the controls of this exotic craft could do to make him succumb.

After wiping the bead of sweat from his upper lip, Cade
craned around and resumed watching the dead world blip by. A tick later the
pilot said, “Bastion Actual, Nomad One-One … how copy?”

Bastion replied at once. “Good copy, Nomad. Bastion Actual
requesting a SITREP.”

“Bastion Actual, we are conducting a standoff flyby of GJR
and will continue west. Incoming with two KIA. Clear us a spot at the table.”

Simultaneously, there was silence in Cade’s flight helmet
and off the port side a small city he recognized came into view. Just like he
remembered it from before: whole neighborhoods on its periphery were completely
razed by fire. Grand Junction Regional—a place both he and Taryn knew all too
well—sat silent and somber off the craft’s nose. On the near side of the
medium-sized airport, throngs of zombies—just clusters of small black dots from
this distance—patrolled the runways and tarmacs with impunity.

A different voice sounded in Cade’s helmet: “
I’m picking
up zero heat signatures
.” Cade assumed it to be the co-pilot in the
left-hand seat operating an infrared camera and relaying his observation to the
pilot in the right-hand seat. And he had a good idea why the low-level flight
was necessary, even this close to a United States military outpost. Though the
Chinese Special Forces scouts he had come across in Huntsville had been
infected, it wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility that there were more of
them out there who may be armed with FN-6 MANPADs (Man Portable Air-Defense Systems),
China’s newest lightweight shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Similar to
the U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles the Afghani Mujahedeen employed against
Russia’s heavily armored MI-24 Hind helicopters with such ruthless efficiency,
the FN-6 packed more than enough punch to knock down this bird. So if
low-level-flight and the occasional stomach-churning maneuver associated with
it was deemed necessary to stave off even the most remote possibility of facing
one of the lethal weapons, Cade was all for it.

“
Copy that
,” came the reply in Cade’s headset from
some soldier in charge back at Forward Observation Base Bastion. The voice was
gravelly and accented, therefore not his old friend and mentor Greg Beeson, who
last he heard was still in charge of the lonely outpost.

Minutes after giving Grand Junction Regional the promised
flyby, Nomad One-One overflew the small unincorporated town of Loma and continued
on a die-straight westerly heading that saw the dead towns of Loma, Fruita, and
Mack, Colorado slide by underneath the helo.

Nearly straddling the border with Utah and a short drive
from FOB Bastion, Mack was where he and the Kids had liberated the Ford Raptor
from the vehicle lift inside the 4x4 shop. Mack was also where Cade had come
across the two-story Craftsman so closely resembling his childhood home back in
Portland. The long dormant memories that brief in and out had dredged up had
stuck with him for some time. And though from where he sat he couldn’t pick out
the particular house that had momentarily transported him back to a time before
all of this madness had begun, he knew the place was down there somewhere, just
as he had left it: quiet, dark, and longing for the family whose uneaten
breakfast still sat forlornly on the table nestled in the little eating nook.

With the melancholy from revisiting that day still wending
its way through his head and heart, FOB Bastion—formerly Mack Mesa Municipal Airport—was
creeping into view at the forward edge of his small window.

No longer a lonely and hastily thrown together outpost,
Bastion’s south side had swallowed up untold acres of flat land and now
bordered Interstate 70, the four-lane running east all the way to Colorado, Springs
and west all the way to Cove Fort, Utah.

Seeing the surprise in Cade’s narrowed eyes, or perhaps
having seen countless other returnees gape at the changes, Sergeant Spielman
said, “She’s come a long way, hasn’t she.”

Cade looked the length of the helo, nodded, and flashed a
quick thumbs-up.

The crew chief was right. Once a postage-stamp-parcel of
land—by airport standards—Bastion now rivaled GJR in both size and complexity.
Judging by the aircraft and support vehicles scattered about the base
periphery, the place probably had the ability to sustain round-the-clock combat
operations if needs be.

The Rangers’ body language told Cade they’d already
been-there and done that where FOB Bastion was concerned. The ones who were
still awake remained stoic—holding that thousand-yard stare Cade was all too
familiar with on whatever they’d been looking at when Spielman offered up his
inane observation.
Small talk
. Cade despised it, for the most part.
There was a time and place, but not here with two dead Rangers lying on the
cabin floor.

Still, to a man, the Ranger chalk didn’t seem fazed.

So Cade saw no reason to share his bitter feelings about the
matter with the SOAR load master. Which was a good thing. Because the unease
over being kept in the dark by Nash was beginning to push at the edges of the
vacuum in his mind where he kept all of those type of emotions bottled up. And
the second that seal got breached, the offending party was going to wish they
hadn’t gone there.

The helo suddenly popped over a stand of trees and buzzed a
football-field-sized grave containing thousands of grotesquely twisted corpses.

Cade crossed himself and returned his gaze to the looming
base. The closer the helicopter got, the taller the fence surrounding Bastion seemed.
Might have been the extra rolls of razor wire added to the top that gave the
illusion, but Cade couldn’t be certain. One other thing that stood out starkly
since he’d been here last was the addition of a half-dozen
real
guard
towers. The sturdy twenty-foot-tall items had taken the place of the sheet-plywood
and two-by-four treehouse-gone-wrong-looking jobs that Beeson’s boys had thrown
up in haste around the tiny airstrip those first days.

To be honest, the place now had the look and feel of some of
the more secure FOBs Cade had had the displeasure of passing time in during his
multiple stints in the Sandbox.

In his ear, Cade heard the same gravelly voice give
directions on where to land to the SOAR pilots up front.

In response, Nomad One-One swung around the east entrance,
overflew the interstate and entered the base airspace from the south, low and
slow. Splitting the two perimeter guard towers like a goalpost, the helo’s flat
underbelly cleared the top roll of razor wire, flared, and Cade heard the muted
sounds of something mechanical at work underfoot. Next there was a series of
thunks
immediately followed by a slight ripple through the cabin floor as the
bird’s tricycle-style landing gear locked into place. Then, running strangely
quiet, the helo covered the next hundred yards to the designated landing pad at
a slow, level crawl barely a dozen feet off the cement apron.

This kind of approach was far different from how Ari would
have brought them in. However, Cade had a feeling the sudden reduction in
airspeed was to keep the craft’s rotor wash from sandblasting the contingent of
soldiers he knew must be waiting for them. And he concluded after mulling it
over for half a beat, the sudden halving of the engine and rotor noise was a
direct result of the bigger helo sharing the same blade design and turbine
exhaust routing technologies as the smaller Ghost Hawk.

Fifty yards from the flight line, the ochre, dust-covered
ground gave way to black asphalt marked by painted symbols and numbers whose
meaning only an aviator could fully grasp.

Then the pilot changed course starboard a few degrees and
the welcoming party Cade had imagined came into view outside his window. Standing
shoulder-to-shoulder to an Army chaplain and just beyond the reach of the
wind-whipped haze was his old friend and commander of FOB Bastion, Major Greg
Beeson. Both men wore Army-issue MultiCam fatigues, the only difference being
that the man of the cloth actually had the sacred cloth draping his shoulders. Beeson
had one hand clamped down on his cover, while the chaplain wore nothing on his
bald head, but both of his hands were currently employed at keeping the camouflage
stole from whipping his face.

Behind and to the right of the major and chaplain was a
group of soldiers clad in the same fatigues and also standing at attention, no
doubt an honor detail hastily assembled for the morbid task of whisking the
fallen Rangers from the arriving bird to receive their last rights and then a
proper burial.

Just as the helicopter settled softly on its gear atop a
bright yellow circle and rolled forward a couple of yards, Cade picked out a
particular shape sitting amongst the lined-up helicopters behind the welcoming
party. It was angular and black and seemed to devour the sun’s rays rather than
reflect them.

Simultaneously the hulking craft he was in came to a
complete halt and the turbines spooled down, rendering the rotor blades whisper-quiet.
A tick later, getting the attention of all aboard, a hydraulic hiss filled the
cabin and the rear ramp parted from the airframe, letting in a wide bar of
white sunlight and a gut-churning blast of heated air tinged with kerosene and
the sickly-sweet stench of rotting bodies.

Cade waited for the honor guard to come aboard. Once the
flag-draped bodies were removed from the cabin floor, the rest of the Rangers,
who to a man were moving like the walking dead, filed out into the light with
hands clutching weapons and full rucksacks weighting them down.

The last man in the procession, a blond staff sergeant with
a bull neck and a wide angular face, stopped for a tick and regarded the man in
black.

Lips set into a thin line, Cade merely held the man’s gaze.
He’d been there before and most certainly would be sometime in the coming days.
There were no words he could offer the Ranger that would help the man reconcile
whatever he had recently gone through, so he remained silent and seated.

The crew chief came forward with Cade’s duffle bag and
dropped it on the seat next to him.

After what amounted to a two-second staring contest, the
Ranger shuffled off into the square of light and disappeared from view.

The crew chief followed the Ranger aft and returned with
Cade’s ruck and weapon. Placing the gear on the seat, he asked, “What’s in the
jock bag?”

Cade said nothing. He had hoped to keep anybody from seeing
what Daymon had gone out of his way to procure for him.

“Understood,” Spielman intoned. “Beeson knows you’re here,
but won’t be able to receive you. Your ride is hot. She’s number four down the
flight line.”