District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (9 page)

The Rangers, most with their eyes closed, some staring off
into space, didn’t let on if they had witnessed the exchange with Spielman or
not. And as the crew chief stalked around the shrouded bodies, saluting them as
he did, Cade put himself in their boots. He imagined that if he had just gone
through the same kind of hell these Rangers had, he’d also find little joy in diverting
to pick up what—just going on his black uniform and specialized gear—had to be
a CIA spook who’d gotten himself in too deep.

Burying their fallen was atop the to-do list, no doubt.
Followed closely by hot chow and some shut eye before the next battle waged against
an enemy that was now coming at them from all points of the compass.

So, with nothing to do on the four-hundred-mile flight but
let his senses soak up every bit of available intel, he craned over his
shoulder to watch the country awash with the colors of fall flash below the
low-flying chopper and listened in on the constant chatter between the pilots
up front and Schriever Air Force Base, presumably his first stop on what was
going to be a long trip Back East.

Oliver had remained rooted in place for three long minutes
before Daymon repeated his ultimatum. This time the words had come out slow and
even without a trace of anger.

The steady
tic … tic … tic
of the creature’s
splintered, blood-soiled nails drumming the glass off his right cheek was
sending tremors of fear coursing through Oliver’s body.

“Sink or swim,” Daymon repeated. Hoss was on his mind now.
The anger he’d felt after being trapped in the sweltering farmhouse attic in Hannah,
Utah was as well. He could hear the moans of the dead. The scratching of nails
digging into once ornate wallpaper and lathe and plaster. The home’s old bones
creaking under the weight of all those cold, jostling bodies. “Do it with the
knife.”

Without warning, in one fluid movement, Daymon leaned across
the seat, worked the door latch and put all of his weight and upper body
strength into one solid lunge that started the big creature on a clumsy arms-flailing
backpedal away from Oliver’s window.

“What the hell?” Oliver rasped, even as his seatbelt was
retracting over his shoulder and Daymon’s follow-through forearm shiver was
sliding him out the door.

“Sink or swim.”

Now on his knees on the roadway, Oliver heard the door suck
shut at his back and the pneumatic
thunk
of the door locks slamming
home.

“You’ll thank me for this later,” came Daymon’s muffled
voice through the glass at his back.

If I survive.

Having regained its already compromised balance, the long-dead
rotter fixed his unblinking eyes on a just-rising Oliver and found another gear
in its forward shuffle.

Bent at the waist, the folding knife held in front of him at
an upward angle, Oliver moved to his right and backpedaled to create a little separation
and some time to think.

Daymon rooted silently for Oliver as he and the dead thing did
a slow roundabout dance a dozen feet off his right shoulder. Slowly but surely
the monster was advancing and Oliver was checking his retreat, no doubt
steeling himself for a last stand.

Hand poised over the horn and ready to give a sharp
attention-getting blast should the rotter get the upper hand, Daymon craned to
follow the action in the side mirror. He truly wanted the man to survive the
encounter. To lay the first brick of the foundation he would need to survive going
forward. Hell, even the Kids were rising to the occasion. Why shouldn’t this crack
shot have to as well? After all, thought Daymon. As the saying goes: You’re
only as strong as your weakest link. And right now that link was being exposed
to the crucible necessary to strengthen it to the level of the others.

The anger he was feeling over Oliver’s reluctance to get his
hands dirty was in danger of growing to that of the hatred he felt toward the imbecile
of a lawyer who had gotten him and Cade trapped in the attic in Hannah.

“Come on, Oliver!” Daymon shouted. “Water them already!”

And he did. The lunge caught both Daymon and the undead man
flat-footed—the latter literally as the knife flashed on an upward arc and
became buried hilt deep in the thing’s right eye socket, displacing one clouded
blue eye and sending the atrophied corpse on a one-way trip to the gray, oil-streaked
asphalt.

In the cab Daymon did two things simultaneously. First he
let out the air trapped in his lungs. Then he honked out a little ditty to
voice his approval.

Seven short toots.

Shave and a haircut … two bits.

He unlocked Oliver’s door.

The door opened with a creak and Oliver slid into the seat.
Handing the knife back handle first, he said, “Thank you.”

“You don’t want to stab me with that thing? Give me the
Omega? Hell, I’d want to if I was you.”

Oliver shook his head. A slow side to side wag. “After
letting you all think I was some kind of mountain man gun-toting John J. Rambo
… I had it coming.”

“I was ready to save your ass if I had to,” Daymon admitted.
“Hand was on the horn. Big ol’ Bubba would have broken his neck to see the
cause. You could have gotten away from that lumbering rotter … no problem.”

Silence in the cab.

Daymon carefully cleaned his blade on a paper napkin. Tossing
the soiled item out the window, he said, “So how’d it feel?”

“Too real.”

“How so.”

“I looked him in the eyes first.”

Daymon clucked his tongue. “I made that same mistake early
on. Did it again recently when I killed a man up in Idaho. Put an arrow in his
throat and watched the light leave his eyes as he gargled his own blood.”

Oliver shuddered. “I’m not there yet. Can’t say I ever will
be.”

Daymon locked the doors, selected Drive, and started the
truck rolling east past the pair of quarry feeder roads. “Then this won’t be
the last time one of us snips your umbilical. Takes your training wheels off
and gives you a good downhill shove. Winds up your—”

“I get your drift,” Oliver said. “I aim to make you all
proud. Don’t worry.”

“I never worry,” Daymon replied, eyes on the two-lane. “I
cut the necessary firebreaks. Make sure the fire can’t jump the lines. Same
concept that was just on display here.”

“Like tough love,” Oliver stated, hands reeling in his
carbine’s sling.

Daymon shook his head, making the stunted dreads quiver.
“Nope. That was more like the old saying …
an ounce of prevention
—,” he
began.

Clicking his seatbelt home, Oliver finished, “—
is worth a
pound of cure
.”

“Bingo,” Daymon said, slowing the truck and taking them left
at the 39/16 juncture. “Now that that’s settled, get one of the others on the
horn and tell them not to shoot … it’s just us.”

Saying nothing, Oliver scooped up the Motorola two-way and
hailed the others.

Mostly out of respect for the dead, but also because he felt
like an interloper sitting in his relatively clean black uniform alongside the
battle-weary Rangers, Cade peered out the porthole window, dividing his
attention between the direction the watery sun was tracking behind the clouds
and the distant buttes scrolling by on the helo’s port side. During the first
few minutes of flight a handful of things he had been expecting to happen never
came to fruition. For one, after lifting off from the compound’s grass strip
the helo remained in low-level flight, gaining altitude only to clear the
tallest of trees or hillocks while following the Ogden River nearly due east—not
quite nap of the earth maneuvering, but damn close based on Cade’s experience.
The constant altitude and speed corrections surely weren’t good for fuel
consumption, but to keep the helicopter hidden from any hostile radar that may
be painting the skies along the flight path, the tactics were golden.

The flightpath itself was the second thing that had been
niggling at him. Whereas Colorado Springs was almost due southeast of the
compound, based on both the sun’s position—roughly eleven o’clock in relation to
the speeding craft’s nose—the first leg of the journey had them tacking
substantially more to the north. And further adding to the mystery, once the
helo reached the north/south running stripe of highway he knew to be 16, the
craft banked sharply to starboard causing the bodies on board—both living and
dead—to loll and strain against the restraints holding them in place.

The pilot held the new southerly course and kept their
altitude at what looked to Cade to be a constant five hundred feet above ground
level. Which at times caused the road below to seemingly rise up toward the
helo from where it followed the natural contours of the earth and then fall
back down and run flat and true where fenced-in fields and scrub-dotted range
dominated on both sides.

A short while after the banking turn, a two-story farmhouse
complete with a hulking red barn and tubular silo appeared below Cade’s
port-side vantage. And going off of second-hand descriptions of Ray and Helen’s
place, the structures, snaking dirt drive, and sloped grazing area, when all
taken into consideration, left him no doubt he was looking at the elderly
couple’s defunct alpaca ranch.

Shortly after the Thagon place was lost from view Cade felt
the craft slow considerably and list slowly to port, the unexpected maneuver pressing
him into his seat and causing some of the Rangers who weren’t sleeping to crane
around and look out windows of their own.

We’re going to buzz Bear River
, thought Cade. No
sooner had the words dissipated from his mind than they were spoken by the
pilot. He also heard Dregan and Judge Pomeroy’s names uttered in the same
breath as the air crew debated the merits and risks of the low fly-by meant
solely to add an exclamation mark to the message already delivered by Major
Freda Nash via satellite phone the day before.

Nash
, he thought.
You wily son-of-a-gun.
A
move like this was just her style.

The next-gen Chinook orbited above the Bear River compound,
scribing an elongated oval disturbance in the low-lying cloud cover.

Like the Rangers, all who were now alert and craning toward
the windows, Cade was pressing his nose to the Plexiglas and taking in
everything he could see on the ground. There was an orchard of skeletal trees
north of town, a dirt road cutting through their uniformly spaced ranks. Guard
towers, partially hidden behind the tallest of the trees, rose up from all four
corners of the makeshift cement wall ringing the entire enclave. Interspersed
between copses of small and medium-sized trees growing up inside the wall were
dozens of homes. Most sat on large plats of land and appeared to have been
built decades ago. The small pockets of one- and two-story dwellings on the northern
periphery were obviously of newer construction, most erected around circular
cul-de-sacs and facing each other, while others were laid out in a grid pattern
with narrow paved streets running neatly between them.

There were static vehicles parked here and there on the
streets and nearly every home had a vehicle or two nosed into the driveway
against closed garages.

West of town, the lengthening grass between the highway and
wall was host to dozens of Zs. A handful could be seen lurching along muddy
trails beaten into the low-lying pastures. Dozens more were pressing their
chests futilely against the wall ingeniously constructed from dozens of
twenty-foot-tall highway noise deterrent partitions. No way anything less than
a full-blown horde of thousands was getting inside those walls, he surmised. On
one hand he kind of envied the setup. It was like most of the forward operating
bases he’d occasionally run ops from in the ‘Stan, only supersized. However,
the walled-in town, blessed with good fields of fire and nicely elevated
platforms from which to engage enemies both dead and alive, was way too close
to the road for his liking. Against a determined sizable force composed of
armed breathers it would only be defensible if you had dedicated operators in
the towers and more shooters positioned in the upper stories of the tallest
homes near the walls.

Too many possible weak links amongst the reported two-hundred-plus
individuals calling the place home.

Midway through the first pass, people began filing out of
the homes and some of the businesses in the center of town. They stood on the
main drag, side streets and handful of muddy alleyways crisscrossing the older
part of Bear River.

Cade saw pale faces peering up expectantly. The helo’s faint
shadow rippled over the town center causing him to imagine what the former Salt
Lake County Circuit Court Judge the message was meant for must be thinking at
this very moment. Was he sitting in
chambers
in denial and trying to
decide how he was going to keep his hold on power? Or had he already done the
President’s bidding as relayed by Nash during the phone call and handed the
reins of town security back to Alexander Dregan?

While only time would tell on the latter, Cade knew the
message the menacing chopper’s eerily thwopping blades and deployed minigun
barrels delivered went a long way toward discouraging the Judge of attempting
the former.

After the second pass over Bear River, the helo dropped back
down to near nap of the earth flight and Cade heard the twin turbines overhead spool
up and begin whining like a pair of pissed-off banshees.

He watched the school bus blocking the town’s south entrance
grow smaller and eventually become a dull yellow pinprick bracketed by slate
gray squares the size of Lego bricks. Down below, the State Highway tracking
south rippled left and right and up and down like a roller coaster. Soon the
where
that this new course was taking them dawned on him, but not the
why
.
Which was nothing new in his line of work. For the real mission began
when
he reached Springs and had his butt in a seat in Nash’s office for the
pre-mission face-to-face she had requested via the video beamed to his laptop
days ago.

That she had been cryptic with her delivery when making the
request didn’t sit well with him. When taking into account the fact that the
entire overture for him to undertake another mission had come in the form of
packets of information not only encrypted by the 50th Space Wing’s computers
upon transmission, but also routed through one of the remaining super secure
military satellites before being beamed to the portable dish he’d attached to
his rugged laptop, sitting well was a bit of an understatement. In fact, he was
damn scared. For if what she had to tell him held the kind of dire information
making the face-to-face necessary, he knew said information would be nothing
less than life changing.
Or
—he thought to himself while focusing on a
string of static cars, their burned-out hulks contrasting sharply with the gray
stripe of road they looked to have been fused to—
potentially world-altering if
things could possibly get worse in my little corner of it
.