Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (16 page)

With no visible display of emotion, the stony-faced mountain
bent his elbow and said a few hushed words into a microphone secreted somewhere
in his sleeve. He went silent for a tick and then nodded, listening to a string
of orders coming through his earpiece, Brook supposed. She craned her head to
see around the barrel-chested specimen and noticed a somber-looking affair. Heads
were bowed. A few people were fixed intently on something taking place on the
monitors on the room’s far wall. Most everyone had lines of worry etched on
their stark features. With goose bumps forming on her arms, and half expecting
a funeral hymn to emanate from the speakers inset in the drop down ceiling, she
turned back to face the agent.

“Identification,” the Golem finally said in a voice with a
deeper register than Colonel Shrill and James Earl Jones combined.

Brook made no reply. Clearly agitated, she shook her head in
an exaggerated manner.

“Name?”

“Brooklyn Grayson,” she said, peering defiantly into the eyes
she couldn’t see but knew were there, somewhere, sizing her up from behind the
dark lenses.

Upon hearing her name, the man’s head tilted down a degree, and
he looked at her through the paper-thin sliver between the top rim of his
shades and the chiseled ridge of his Cro-Magnon-like brow.

Noticing some kind of recognition and perhaps a split second
of deliberation betrayed by a subtle squinting of his eyes, Brook held his gaze
and the thin thread of hope that she wouldn’t have to go the knee-to-the-groin
route to get past him.

After what seemed like half a lifetime, the Secret Service
agent seemed to have made his decision, and shifting his weight nearly imperceptibly
from one foot to the other, he pivoted with an ease that belied his size and
waved her on by.

He recognized my name
, Brook noted as she side-stepped
into the dimly lit space.
Or most likely the latter half I took from Cade
thirteen years ago
, she conceded, as a cold chill of anticipation traced
her spine.

Nash watched Brook as she entered the room. As the woman
stood near the outermost ring of desks, seemingly on the edge of commitment,
Nash tried to read the petite woman’s body language.

But there were no dead giveaways. No tells as to the woman’s
demeanor. She appeared calm and relaxed. Nash expected nothing less. So she stepped
from behind the lectern where she had been watching the action on the trio of
screens. Moving with no sense of urgency, the equally petite major navigated
the pair of stairs, sidestepped a tangle of wires, and moved slowly in Brook’s
direction.

After taking a few tentative steps into the busy TOC, Brook
stopped and made a calculated decision to go nowhere near the President and
force the major to come to her.
Keep her on the defensive
, she thought.

Finally, after a couple of minutes, Nash had wound her way between
the desks and was standing a foot away, hand extended, expecting a reciprocal
handshake.

Fighting an almost irresistible urge to plant an elbow on
the woman’s chin, Brook ignored the overture and said icily, “Why am I here?”

A noticeable shudder rocked Nash. She let her arm fall to
her side and said quietly, “Because I didn’t want you to hear secondhand
through the base grapevine what I’m about to tell you. That’s why I had Davis
bring you here.” Visibly shaken, Nash steadied herself on the chair back in
front of her, swallowed hard, and went on. “The helicopter that General Gaines,
your husband, and six other men were aboard has gone missing.”

Brook’s face blanched. She shook her head side-to-side.
“What do you mean,
missing
. As in misplaced ... or did it
crash
?”

Save the steady percussion of fingers working keyboards and
the soft chirp from the hard drives inside the multitude of computers, the room
was suddenly a vacuum of sound.

Time seemed to stand still for Brook. Her attention was
drawn to one screen in particular. A grainy, moving image featuring a rising
column of thick black smoke was bracketed in the center, and whatever was filming
it seemed to be creeping closer ever so slowly.

“There has been no distress signal as of yet, and up until a
couple of minutes ago we have had no visual confirmation of wreckage on the
ground.”

“What the hell is that,” blurted Brook, pointing a finger at
the large center screen.

“The pilot on station thinks it’s a burning house. Says he’s
seen more than he can count. I’ve got hope,” Nash lied. “If anyone can bring
the team home in one piece once they’re wheels up, it’s Ari Silver.”

“What if they crashed?” blurted Brook.

“I’m not going to go there,” said Nash as the lies piled up.

“So if that’s not a crash site. And those aren’t rotor
blades, and that black ‘T’ there isn’t the tail section, then
that
...”
she pointed to the huge flat panel on the right near where the President stood
rooted, staring intently, following the action. “Then
that
isn’t another
mega horde approaching from somewhere that looks eerily similar to the desert
and clogged freeway system south of Springs.” Putting one hand on her hip, she
turned and stared daggers at the major.

Nash remained silent.

“Looks like Clay gives more of a shit about whatever she’s
watching than the burning house that you’ve apparently already ruled out as my
husband and his team’s final resting place.”

Still, Nash didn’t reply. She looked away and seemed to be
trying to get the attention of a woman airman sitting behind a trio of smaller
computer screens.

“No answer? Cat got your tongue?”

Clearing her throat, Nash turned back towards Brook,
inclined her head and removed her cover, placing it atop a desk cluttered by
laminated topographical maps and grease pencils every color of the rainbow.

Sensing the scrutiny leveled at her, Brook moved her gaze
from the President and the pressing situation on the monitor and locked eyes
with Nash. It was instantly apparent to her that the major was thinking of a
way to deliver a pertinent piece of information diplomatically so as to avoid
releasing the tension bubbling just below the surface that Brook had so far successfully
held in check. In fact, the major seemed to be concentrating so hard on
conjuring up the right combination of words that Brook could almost hear the
sound of eggshells being crushed underfoot.

“OK,” Nash said. “That
is
the wreckage of the stealth
helicopter that carried Gaines and Cade and the rest of the team. This is satellite
footage from a couple of minutes ago. There was a refueling tanker in the area
with eyes on. After a couple of passes with no sign of life on the ground, I
recalled them.”

“You
what
,” spat Brook, veins bulging in her neck.

“Listen ... I made a call.”

“A call? You
need
to send that plane back. Send
another helicopter. Do something—”

“I need to focus on recovering Jedi One-Two and the scientists
aboard,” Nash said coolly.

Steadying herself on the desk to her right, Brook seemed to
shrink. Her shoulders hunched and she let out a low moan. Her worst fear had
apparently became real. Now she and Annie had
everything
in common. Both
widows. Both solo moms in a terrifying new world. Nash’s words yanked her from
the
what ifs
swirling through her mind and back to the room and the
present.

“There was not a distress call when it went down, and we’ve
received no communication from the ground.”

On the monitor, there were licks of fire and the cherry-red
skeleton of the helicopter glowed hot.

“How can you be certain they’re all dead? That Cade is dead?”
Brook said, her voice rising and cracking as she averted her eyes from the apparent
funeral pyre.

The President turned at the sound of Brook’s outburst, while
at the same time, rising from his seat, Shrill grabbed his cover and took a
step in Nash’s direction. But she waved him off with a casual flick of the
wrist that was lost on everyone save Brook and the colonel.

Clenching her fists tightly, creating red half-moons on her
palms where her trimmed nails met flesh, Brook said under her breath, “You’re
going to need Shrill to save your ass if you don’t tell me the truth. And I
want to know
everything
. We should probably sit down, don’t you think?”

Nash made no reply.

Just then a female captain sitting nearby whipped around,
hand cupping her boom mike, and said excitedly, “Oil Can stayed on station—”

“What?” replied Nash.

“Oil Can has a visual on a vehicle moving on the ground.
They have made contact over air-to-ground radio frequency.”

“Is it the general and his team?”

“Roger that, Major.”

A ripple of excitement jumped from person to person making
the rounds of the room.

Nash removed her cover. Plopped it on the desk before her.
“Bring the satellite feed up on three. Cycle it back five minutes if you will.”

“Roger that,” replied the captain.

“I’m sorry Brook,” said Nash. “We’ve all been under so much
pressure the last twenty-four ...”

Making no reply, Brook stalked closer to the wall of
monitors.

“Wait one ... The feed is compiling and coming up on three,”
said the captain, tapping out the correct combination of keystrokes to make it
happen. She rose and delivered the headset to Nash.

Then, several separate yet wholly connected events happened
simultaneously. Monitor three to the right of President Clay flicked to life
and displayed in full color HD a moving vehicle that, from the satellite’s
orbit, looked like a toy Hot Wheel creeping along a strip of highway amid a converging
crowd of zombies. Closer still, cutting the airspace over the recorded scene,
and appearing twenty times larger than the pick-up, was some kind of slow-moving
airplane. Gray and wide-bodied, with a bulbous nose and a tail Shamu would be
proud of. Brook knew instantly that it was most likely the same plane she had
witnessed take off from Schriever’s westernmost airstrip prior to Cade’s
departure earlier in the morning.

Monitor two on the wall in the center position suddenly came
alive with movement as the camera broadcasting the scene in black and white
panned and zoomed in. Now the marching Zs were more defined. That they were washed
by sunlight from the right, which cast long shadows away, led Brook to believe
that the lens was pointed south, thus confirming her hunch that the horde was
marching lockstep from Pueblo. To Brook it was obvious the footage was being
shot from something hovering at a distance. A helicopter was her best guess.
Why the event was being monitored didn’t fully dawn on her until the pair of
rockets lanced from the aircraft, their white contrails and shimmering heat
signature momentarily obscuring the camera as they streaked towards the
creatures on the ground.

“We’re trying to slow them until our ground units are fully
prepared to take them on.”

Thinking about Raven now, Brook said slowly, “When will the
horde arrive here?”

Nash said nothing as more rockets left the pods of whatever
was beaming back the unsteady silent images.

Brook cleared her throat.

“Sometime in the next couple of days. Good news is they
aren’t irradiated. Bad news is there are twenty or thirty thousand of them
following the survivors out of the burning city.”

“And the Delta team?” asked Brook. Locking her gaze on
monitor three, she watched the old footage as the tiny, rust-colored pick-up
reversed from the shadows of an overpass and conducted an abrupt J turn. Then
the vehicle paused as creatures plummeted from the overpass in front and behind
it. Brook ignored the one-sided aerial assault playing out on the center
monitor and stared and prayed and then prayed some more that Cade was in the
truck, which stayed stopped for a long minute and then inexplicably motored up
a freeway ramp already choked with walking dead.

“Who is the pilot talking with on the ground?” asked Nash.

“Anvil Actual,” replied the captain. “He says there are
three casualties.”

“Fast forward the sat feed to real time,” Nash said sharply.
“And Captain, bring me a headset.”

At first the call sign Anvil didn’t ring a bell. But Brook
was certain she had heard the strange combination of code words before.
Sometime in the not-so-distant past. Maybe Cade had uttered them during one of
his frequent nightmares. Perhaps she’d heard someone use the call sign when she
was on one of her ‘
official’
yet
‘unofficial’
forays off the
base. Then her hopes buoyed when she recalled Cade mentioning he’d been assigned
the very same call sign on the recent snatch and grab mission to Jackson Hole.
During an intimate moment he’d even elicited her help in trying to determine
why Nash would want to refer to him as Anvil.

Instantly she cast aside all previous worries and watched
the footage cue to real time. Nash was pacing back and forth in front of the
three displays, gesticulating with her hands, mouth going a mile a minute.
Standing beside Colonel Shrill, President Clay suddenly seemed to be fully
invested in the rescue.

On monitor three the image zoomed in and showed the pick-up
stopped next to a much larger white van. And standing atop that van was a
person clad in all black, who appeared to be sighting down the barrel of some
sort of rifle. Looking closer, Brook noticed a trio of prostrate bodies in the
truck’s bed. And nearly lost in the van’s shadow were two more figures clothed
in lighter-colored fatigues. Judging from the glittering projectiles raining to
the blacktop, the two Delta soldiers were pouring a good volume of rifle fire
into the wall of walking corpses to their six.

Looking directly at Brook, Nash said matter-of-factly, “Cade
is driving the truck.”