Left With the Dead (15 page)

Leary kept his eyes riveted on the street before him. “That may be, sir. But it sure is fun.”

McDaniels’ radio headset came alive. “Terminator Six, this is Two-Six, over.”

“Terminator Two-Six, this is Terminator Six, go ahead.”

“Six, keep on 58th
^.
Don’t turn toward Columbus Circle. That area was a mess before the quarantine, and it was being used as a staging area for the fire department before they were stood down. A lot of the tankers and ladder trucks were abandoned, I saw it on the flight in,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Walter Keith. He was the real commander of the Special Forces Operational Detachment, not McDaniels. McDaniels didn’t know Keith well, but he had immediately impressed upon the major and First Sergeant David Gartrell that he was a hard charger who wasn’t about to shrug off a mission.

“Roger Two-Six, good copy.” To Gartrell: “Verify that with top cover.”

Gartrell spoke into his headset’s boom microphone, talking directly to the pilots of the MH-6 Little Bird that paced the convoy from overhead. He listened to the response.

“Keith’s right. The Night Stalkers verify what he said, but it’s not their intention to send us that way. We’ll drive through the intersection of 58th and Eighth Avenue, then across Broadway. We turn north at Seventh Avenue and enter the park there.”

“Got that, Staff Sergeant Leary?” McDaniels asked.

“Hooah,” Leary said.

McDaniels relayed the information to CW3 Keith, who rode in the Humvee behind them. “If we get separated, take that route. Over.”

“Roger, Terminator Six. We’ll be with you, over.”

The convoy broke through the infested area and charged past a manned barricade. McDaniels was surprised to see two M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles mixed in amidst the M1114 Humvees. Army National Guard soldiers wearing full MOPP IV gear—the accoutrements a soldier would don in the event of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack—stared down at the three Humvees from atop their own vehicles.

“Poor bastards,” Gartrell said. “They feel safe because of the hardware, but it’s not going to help them.”

“Maybe we ought to tell ‘em,” Rittenour said.

“Maybe you ought to sit back and enjoy the ride, troop. This vehicle is not stopping,” Gartrell said.

Ahead, a fire raged unabated as a fashionable Midtown West apartment building burned, filling the street with pungent, thick smoke the color of coal. Unarmed civilians stared at the Humvees as they tore past, but the dead hadn’t made it this far yet. Despite the uncontrolled fires, the uniformed soldiers manning the corners, the perpetual songs of sirens mixed with the throbbing basso beats of helicopter rotor blades, the residents of this part of New York City thought they were safe for the moment.

McDaniels shook his head. A moment was about all they had.

###

The dead hadn’t made it to Central Park yet, at least not in sufficient force. Still, the fair citizens of New York City had heard the helicopters, and they knew the jig was up. As the three Humvees roared through the park, armed soldiers and NYPD were using all the tools at their disposal to keep the citizens at bay. They were using non-lethal force, McDaniels saw. No one wanted a rising to occur here, not in the middle of an evacuation. Just a few members of the walking dead could spawn dozens of fellow walking corpses.

A television news van was off to one side of the intersection of the 72nd Street Transverse and East Drive. The Humvees were a mess, having driven over and through pretty much everything the dead could throw at them, and judging by the viscera smeared across the windows, McDaniels was certain the convoy was not a pretty sight. The TV cameras immediately swung in their direction, broadcasting the image out to millions.

The Humvees accelerated through the intersection and past the news crew without slowing down. They wound their way through the vast park that sat at the heart of one of Man’s greatest cities, a city that was slowly being consumed by a kind of nearly untreatable cancer.

And the only thing that kept it from being completely untreatable sat in a Humvee not more than three feet from one Cordell McDaniels, Major, United States Army Special Forces. Doctor Wolf Safire, the brilliant biochemist that had started the renowned pharmaceutical company InTerGen over two decades ago. McDaniels’ bosses said that Safire might have a cure, or a vaccine against whatever it was that caused those bitten by the dead from turning into one of them. And that was why he had been pulled out of his normal work at Army Special Operations Command and dispatched with First Sergeant David Gartrell to link up with Operational Detachment Alpha OMEN in New York City. He would oversee the rescue of the scientist and his thirty-something daughter, and ensure they were placed on a dedicated transport that waited for them in one small portion of Central Park’s Great Lawn. McDaniels hadn’t even thought to ask why him. Not only was it against the heritage of service he embraced—one did not question lawful orders, especially in the special operations community. And if there was a man who said he might be able to stop the rising tide of the dead, then McDaniels would run through an erupting volcano naked if that’s what it took to get him to deliver. And McDaniels had his own family to worry about. Though the Big Apple was the general nexus point in the United States, there were catastrophic infestations in Europe. No one knew exactly where it had started, but all indications seemed to point to somewhere inside Russia. McDaniels had been on the task force assigned to discover the outbreaks etiology. It seemed that someone had come across some long-forgotten relic of the Cold War and tampered with it. True or not, what had been released was first reported in Russia, and within weeks, Russia went dark. Satellites showed the legions of the dead moving across the nation, heading for both Europe and China. It was the double attack on capitalism the old Soviet guard might have dreamed of, but the soldiers had an entirely different perspective. They weren’t in it to destroy capitalism. They were in it to eat people, and it didn’t matter if those people were Russian, German, French, Polish, or Chinese.

The sky overhead was dark with smoke from gigantic fires. South of 14th Street, New York was an inferno, an intentional blaze started by the military in hopes that it would contain the army of the dead and prevent it from advancing north. And in a small measure, it was a successful gamble; even the dead couldn’t soldier on when all their flesh had been burned to a crisp and tendons and ligaments could no longer move muscle and bone. But there were gaps between the fires, gaps filled with soldiers and policemen that were being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the walking dead. There were tens of thousands of them in lower Manhattan, and they avoided the flames by using the subway tunnels, by massing at roadblocks in such numbers that they overwhelmed the defenders, and in some instances, by walking into the East and Hudson Rivers and walking upstream. McDaniels had heard reports on his way in that a group of the walking dead had emerged from the East River and was headed for the United Nations building. He had chuckled at that. Finally, something would devour the United Nations before it could envelop the world in leftist glory.

But the fires had also blackened the skies with thick smoke, smoke that was driven northward by the prevailing winds. This had curtailed aviation operations. Even though McDaniels’ convoy had a helicopter escort, it was by sheer chance that the proper flight crew from the 160
^th
Special Operations Aviation Regiment had been in the area and was open to tasking. The pilots flew their small MH-6 Little Bird without doors and usually operated at an altitude of 40 feet above the deck, at night, in all weather, so flying in smoke wasn’t a show stopper for them. For the rest of the aviation community, however, the smoke was thick enough to hamper general aviation missions. That was why the assembly area at Central Park had been set up. VIPs and their dependents were to make it to the Park and, upon identity verification, they would board a helicopter or tiltrotor bound for greener pastures.

That was the idea, anyway. McDaniels looked out the window at the smoke-tinged afternoon and wondered just how many aircraft would wind up burying their noses in the dirt because their pilots couldn’t fly by instruments.

Shapes moved amidst the trees as the Humvee sped up East Drive. McDaniels straightened in his seat and looked out the gore-smudged window, trying to make sense of what he saw. Were those people, or...?

“Holy mother of God,” Gartrell said. “Freaking stiffs in Army BDUs!”

McDaniels felt a deep chill envelop him. “Call it in as a black flag actual. Leary, step on it. We’re out of time.”

“You got it, major.”

Excerpt:

CITY OF THE DAMNED

By Stephen Knight

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004Q3RIHK

PART ONE:

SEPULCHRE

[Prehistoric man] knew that life was uncertain and sometimes short, that death was inevitable and sometimes abrupt. Every time he set out for the hunt he was aware that some day...the end would come with a slash and an outpouring of blood. It is not difficult to understand why...he should have come to the conclusion not merely that blood was essential to life, but that it was the essence of life itself.

—A
NTHROPOLOGIST
R
EAY
T
ANNAHILL

CHAPTER 1

“Ellenshaw says he’s coming with us.”

Mark Acheson looked up from the map he had spread across the Humvee’s hood. Four rocks pinned it to the sheet metal, preventing the dry breeze from carrying it away. Julia McGuiness’s eyes were unreadable behind her dark sunglasses.

“Really.” Acheson wiped a hand across his forehead. It was damp with sweat, which wasn’t surprising, given that they were in the middle of Bumfuck, Arizona. “Did he say why he wants to violate the rules of engagement?”

“He just asked me to let you know he’s coming along,” Julia said.

Cecil Hayes grunted and shuffled his feet. Rivulets of sweat ran down his bald head, making his black skin glisten in the hot Arizona sunlight. “Man should be in the TOC, havin’ himself a stay-cation.”

Acheson pushed his sunglasses up on his thin nose, and glanced back at the big GMC RV that served as the team’s tactical operations center. The windows were tinted, so he couldn’t see anyone inside.

“I’ll talk with him,” he told Julia. “Sharon, you continue with the brief.”

Sharon Thompson nodded. “Roger that.”

“Acheson walked away from the Containment Team and headed for the RV. His boots kicked up dry dust that was snatched away by a breeze so arid it could have come from a hair dryer. A large German shepherd trotted across the desert, and it bounded toward Acheson when he separated from the group. His tongue lolled from one side of his mouth as he pranced about Acheson, sniffing and huffing. Acheson patted the dog’s head.

“Keep cool, Zeke,” he said.

Zeke huffed again, then bounded over to a nearby Saguaro cactus and baptized it with a stream of urine. As Acheson stepped into the RV’s shadow, the door opened.

“Hello, Mark.” Robert Ellenshaw stepped out of the RV. He wore the same dun-colored Army battle dress utilities as Acheson. He closed the door behind him and looked out across the desert, squinting against the harsh light. He slipped on his sunglasses.

“Did Julia give you my message?”

Acheson nodded. “Yeah. You’re not coming with us, Robert. It’s against the ROE.”

Ellenshaw smiled tightly and ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “I authored the rules of engagement, Mark. You don’t need to remind me of them.”

“Apparently I do. I lead the containment team in the field, while you stay behind and monitor things from the tactical operations center.” Acheson slapped the side of the RV with one hand. “Right here. You don’t go any further.”

“Things are different this time out.”

Acheson gritted his teeth and turned away. He watched Zeke prance around the desert before Nacho Delgado, his trainer, called to him. The German shepherd ran toward Nacho, bounding about like a huge puppy without a care in the world.

Acheson watched Ellenshaw from the corner of his eye. The older man looked out across the desert. Beneath the placid expression on his face, Acheson detected a core of tension.

“Helena can feel him, even with the sun high in the sky. Can you imagine just how powerful he must be, Mark? Even the strength of daylight doesn’t seem to weaken him any longer.”

“You’re not field personnel, Robert.”

“I’ve gone through all the weapons and tactics training.”

“That was years ago. I’m not going to risk a breakdown in unit cohesion. You’re staying here.”

Ellenshaw smiled grimly. “Osric is the big game here, Mark. He’s eluded us—
me
—for years now, taking a human here, a human there, growing his clan. We don’t know how many vampires Osric has spawned, but he’s had the time to organize a small army. It’s imperative that we bag him.”

Acheson snorted. “So at the end of the day, it’s all about you? Osric’s shown you up, so you want revenge?”

“I just want to ensure the job is done right.”

“And we can’t manage without you? Horseshit. If the tables were turned, would you let me go on the hump with you?”

“That’s enough!” Ellenshaw snapped. “I have my reasons. All I ask is that you respect them.”

“Don’t make me laugh!” Acheson fought to get his temper under control. He shot a glance at the rest of the team, still clustered around one of the Humvees. They all looked back at him, and Acheson knew they’d heard the harsh rebuke in Ellenshaw’s voice.

Ellenshaw faced Acheson directly, not intimidated by his greater height or his acrimonious demeanor. When he spoke, his voice was clear and crisp, as if he were lecturing a classroom.

“I’m the head of this division, Mark. In conjunction with Washington, I make the rules.” He smiled tightly. “You’ll have full tactical control, as always.”

Acheson turned away from Ellenshaw and punched the TRANSMIT button on the radio transceiver at his shoulder. “Team, this is Two-Six. Fall back to the TOC for turnout.” As the team members radioed their acknowledgments, Acheson put his hands on his hips and gazed out across the desert.