Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (11 page)

“I still think Ellsworth is the answer,” pressed Ari.

Shaking his head, Cade replied, “Too many dead between here
and there.” Suddenly he eased off of the pedal. “Hang on,” he blurted a second before
the rig passed over the raised railroad tracks that just happened to run
parallel to the interstate. Hitting the crossing at the speed they were
traveling launched the truck, putting a few inches of daylight between its
tires and the ground. Then, upon landing, the three men in the cab bounced into
each other like ball bearings in a kinetic sculpture. The men in back, however—dead
and alive alike—fared much worse, going weightless momentarily before coming
back down with a series of hollow clunks followed by the discordant clatter of
gunmetal and the shrill squeaking of springs that had lost their temper long
ago. “Sorry,” Cade called out. “Saw it at the last moment. Couldn’t be helped.”

Rubber squealed as he hauled the Chevy into a hard right turn,
taking them onto a two-lane splitting the tracks and the 90. Gazing past Ari,
Cade hitched a brow and looked a question at Jasper that said:
Tell me where
to turn next
.

“Next left is State Route 13 South,” Jasper announced. Then,
as if he had mulled through their options utilizing the same thought process as
the Delta operator, he told Cade in no uncertain terms to stay away from the 90
and continue driving straight.

Hearing this, Ari shook his head but said nothing.

With the low sun glancing off the dirty windshield making it
difficult to see the road ahead, let alone the sign indicating where he needed
to turn, Cade decided to roll down his window and stick his head into the
slipstream.

“Turn here,” hollered Jasper.

The balding tires chirped trying to maintain their tenuous
purchase as Cade pulled his head inside and guided the truck into a hard left
at the intersection. He stole a look over his shoulder at the black smoke
roiling from the burning wreckage and couldn’t help noticing the telltale
flashes of rounds cooking off. From experience, he knew that lead cutting the
air unexpectedly and indiscriminately was nearly always a losing proposition.
No
kind of place for anyone to be near
, he thought.

“We’re so fucked,” Ari bellowed. “If you
do not
turn
onto the 90 here we are as good as dead.” And since he didn’t have a throat
mike, and there was a great deal of competing ambient noise as well as a
quarter-inch of rear window glass between the cab and the bed, his words, and
the worry inflected in them, were lost on everyone save Jasper to his right and
Cade to his left.

Caught in a moment of indecision, Cade stood on the brakes
and brought the truck to a jarring halt. Listening to the grating tick of a bad
lifter, Cade cupped his chin with a gloved hand and tapped the fingers of his
other hand on the steering wheel. He stroked his goatee and watched the dead
amble around the arcing stretch of oil-stained blacktop leading up to the eastbound
freeway. “You have fifteen seconds, Night Stalker. Sell the interstate option to
me,” he said sharply.

In the back, unaware why the truck had stopped so abruptly, Agent
Cross got his feet underneath him and popped up to scan their surroundings. He placed
the SCAR rifle he’d taken off of Gaines over the truck’s roof, flicked its
selector to fire, and about shit himself when he saw the predicament they were
in.
Make up your mind, Delta
, he thought to himself. To the left and
right of the freeway underpass, dozens of walking dead were making their way
from the elevated roadway via their respective off-ramps. Eastbound. Westbound.
Do Not Enter. None of the signs meant a thing to the hungry Zs. They were
fixated on two things: the sight and sound of the Ghost Hawk and its remaining
ammunition firing off in the distance. And the new attraction —the decrepit, idling
truck which was full of meat, obviously closer, and quickly becoming a much
stronger draw. Then, without warning, rotten creatures began raining down around
them from the overpass overhead.

With his hands kneading the wheel at the proper ten-and-two,
Cade closed his eyes and let his chin hit his chest. He remained that way for a
handful of seconds, during which Ari and Jasper watched his head rock side-to-side.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that he was mentally working on some
kind of equation in which life and death were more than just random variables.
He was making some kind of decision, that much was clear.

Too many deaths on my watch
, Cade thought. Too many walking
dead on the freeway to make it the logical escape route, and judging from the
unmistakable sound of meat slamming to the roadway in front, the monsters must
be hurling themselves off of the I-90. In his mind’s eye he relived the wave of
Zs pouring from the shattered skywalk at the NML in Canada and the cacophony
from hell that it had produced. He snapped his eyes open and was not surprised
to see what his other senses had already confirmed. In addition to the falling
forms and the broken shapes crawling and scrabbling and painting the gray road
with crimson blood and who knows what else, there was a sizable contingent of
Zs about to block their path ahead. Like a single cell organism, the river of
flesh and bone marched the gently curving arc that would put them on a
collision course with the idling truck.

Agent Cross tapped the sheet metal over Cade’s head. “Better
do something,” he said into the comms. “We’ve got Zs raining from above.” Then,
trying hard to ignore the heavy thuds and rifle-shot-like cracks from flesh and
bone impacting concrete, he looked beyond the heavy shadow cast by the overhead
stretch of I-90 and spied two very large knots of walking dead filing off the
other pair of freeway ramps. “I now have eyes on sixty-plus Zulus inbound from
the south at twelve o’clock.”

“Roger that,” Cade said back.

“Permission to fire?” Lopez called out, as he had already followed
Cross’s lead and had his M4 lined up, bracketing the northbound dead in his
crosshairs.

Cade’s terse reply, “Wait one,” sounded immediately in his ear
bud. Nonplussed, Lopez hinged over and shot an impatient look through the
truck’s rear window at the inside of the crowded cab where an animated
discussion was currently underway. Then he shifted his gaze to Cross, who remained
stoic and solely focused on the building mass of moaning walkers threatening to
surround them. Disregarding the reek of death thick on the air and an overwhelming
impulse to empty his carbine into the dead, Lopez performed the sign of the
cross over his body armor and prayed for his acting commander to come to some
kind of decision. He peered through his weapon’s optics and targeted a
tottering female first turn, centering the floating red pip between its staring
eyes.
Better do something quick, Wyatt
, he thought, taking up a few pounds
of trigger pull.

Suddenly the distinctive rapid clatter of a weapon’s bolt
opening and closing, coupled with the telltale whispers of subsonic lead
leaving a suppressor, drew their attention to the rear where Hicks was engaging
a cluster of Zs that were
danger close
. The brassy tinkle of spent
shells added to the lethal soundtrack as he steadily swept the beefy-looking barrel
in a flat left to right arc. “Couldn’t wait, Captain,” Hicks stated over the
comms as the constant accurate fire from the business end of his M4 created a slow
motion aerial display of bone and brain. Simultaneously, smoke drifting from
the carbine’s hot barrel, he slapped a new mag in the well, chambered a round,
and called out, “I’ve got our six cleared ... for now.”

In utter disbelief that they were sitting in an idling
vehicle in the middle of the road with dead raining down a few yards in front
and behind them, Ari finished explaining to Cade why they
must
back up
and risk the westbound freeway and the large numbers of dead they were likely
to encounter there.

Cade nodded and yanked down on the shifter. “Hold on,” he
ordered as the transmission caught and the truck lurched sharply in reverse,
bouncing up and over half a dozen rotted bodies and grinding them into the street.
He worked the gas, brake, and transmission in a finely-choreographed sequence to
put the rig into a not-so-graceful low speed bootlegger’s reverse; when the truck
finished the J turn and came to a complete stop, they found themselves facing
the Z-choked westbound onramp.

With a firm set to his jaw, Cade levered the transmission
out of reverse and into drive. He looked his friend in the eye, paused a beat,
and said, “Are you sure of this, Ari?”

“Positive. Just get us past the Zs on the ramp and the rest
will be manageable,” Ari said, displaying an air of confidence unbefitting a
man who had just crashed a multi-million dollar top-secret helicopter, killing
three in the process.

“Roger that,” Cade said, while in his ear Lopez’s voice was urging
him to drive.

But before he could comply, a house-sized shadow flitted by,
causing a good number of the monsters to look skyward, lose their already
compromised balance, and fall to the roadway like dominos. A half second later
the blue sky was blocked by a swiftly moving mass producing a deafening noise
that was instantly recognizable to everyone but Jasper.

Schriever AFB

Grayson Billet

Having just stepped out of the shower, dripping wet and
naked, Brook heard the screech of rubber on asphalt and a tick later the telling
cough and sputter of a Cushman’s engine dying to silence. She snatched a towel
off the hook near her head, wrapped it around herself, and padded towards the
window to see who had come calling. But before she could make two wet footprints
across the floor, someone was banging loudly on the front door.

“Give me a second,” she hollered.

After returning recently from giving Wilson, Sasha, and
Taryn a primer on firearm safety followed by a hands on, live fire introduction
to her M4 and Raven’s Ruger 10-22, she had wanted nothing more than to lay on
her cool bunk in the dark and await Cade’s return. Now, more than a little
irritated, she donned a black tee shirt, stepped into a pair of Cade’s shorts that
fell well below her knees, and wrapped the damp towel turban-like around her
head. Tucking the loose end in, she crept to the door, peeled the heavy curtain
aside, and peeked out.
Airman Davis,
she thought to herself
. What the
hell does he want?
A millisecond after the question popped into her mind, an
icy fist gut-punched her as she remembered Cade’s death letter.
No, no, no
,
she chanted in her head. Suddenly she felt like she was on the summit of Mount
Hood at 11,237 feet, in thin air, with someone sitting on her chest. Trying to
head off the rising anxiety attack she bent at the waist and sought to relax
her diaphragm.
No help
. “Raven,” she rasped. There was no answer. The
girl had ridden her bike hard for the better part of an hour, making seventeen
laps around the jogging track, which when added up amounted to four and one
quarter miles. Raven was sound asleep and snoring atop the four bunk beds she
called
Raven Island
.

After a long sixty seconds, finally composed and breathing
somewhat normally, Brook unlocked the door and stepped into the afternoon
sunlight. She looked at Airman Davis, who was one of the few people on the base
whom she’d gotten to know fairly well during the past week, yet without the
comforting heft of the M4 clutched in her newly-calloused hands, she still felt
somewhat naked and vulnerable.
Stay frosty
, she heard Cade whisper in
her head as she waited for Davis to deliver the bad news.

But he said nothing. Instead, he broke eye contact, tilted
his head and smiled.

Brook followed his gaze and spotted Raven, face pressed to
the glass, mugging at the airman. “Spit it out, Davis,” she said sharply. “What
happened to my husband?”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he said, wearing a sincere Sergeant
Schulz look on his face. “I don’t know anything.”

Brook didn’t believe him, but did notice that he held her
gaze. In her experience, most liars usually looked away. But he didn’t shift or
shuffle or fidget and, most importantly, maintained direct eye-to-eye contact.
By all outward appearances he was telling the truth—but Brook’s gut still led
her to believe the opposite.

Again she looked over her shoulder and saw that Raven was no
longer peering through the window. Fearing the inquisitive twelve-year-old was
preparing to join the party, Brook reached behind her, grasped the door handle
firmly, and leaned forward with all her weight so it wouldn’t budge even if she
tried. “I don’t believe you,” she whispered. “Not for a second.”

Davis sighed, looked at the ground, and shook his head. “I’ve
been ordered to say nothing.”

“That I believe,” she admitted. “Then who do I thank for the
pleasure of your company?”

“Major Nash. She ordered me to come and get you.”

“Are we going to her office?”

“No. She’s at the TOC ... I mean the command center,” Davis said.
He removed his cover and wiped his brow. “It’s hot, Ma’am. Can we go now?” He
replaced his hat and squared it away and then shot her a look that said:
I
won’t be leaving without you
.

Taking just enough time to convey the message that she was
the one in charge, Brook uncoiled the towel from her head, tousled her damp
hair, and said, “I’ll need five minutes. You’ll have to wait out here.”

After consulting his watch, Davis nodded and mouthed, “Five
minutes.” And as he watched Brook go back inside and close the door, he
wondered to himself how she was going to take the bad news. Would she calmly
accept the facts and melt down later in private? Or would she instantly attack
the major, the President, or both for goading her husband into accepting the
ill-fated mission?