The Failed Coward (28 page)

*****

Kevin’s rifle kicked into his shoulder one round after another. The spent shell casings flung out the ejection port and soared across the concrete, tinkling and spinning in the virgin puddles. He and his team had wandered out of their shelter and towards the end of the runways near the breech that was closest to them.

The other four of Kevin’s men formed a rough firing line with him, staggered slightly to prevent the hot shell casings from hitting the man to their right. Each of the men walked at a snail’s pace, snapping off rounds into the heads of the undead streaming across the field from their left to right. After a hundred yards and three magazine changes, the men simultaneously dropped to one knee and poured it on.

Kevin and his men quickly emptied the contents of their magazine, dropping zombie after zombie into the grass. Kevin stood to look around at their surroundings. He was paranoid they’d be surrounded.

As the white capped team leader stopped to look around, the throng of undead a hundred yards ahead ebbed. Through his ACOG Fitz saw the heads of the undead spin sideways suddenly, as if they were twisted marionettes with suddenly broken necks. Their milky white eyes glared with a ferocity he had never seen before as they looked in unison at a single thing they clearly hated.

They stared directly at Kevin Whitten.

“Kev brother. We got fucking issues here bro.” The rain clinging to Fitz’s enormous mustache flew off as he hollered over to his friend.

Kevin looked back to their front at the undead that had been streaming in one direction, and were now streaming directly at them. Directly at him. 

Kevin brought his rifle up and observed the intent the undead had. Every last one of them was fixated directly on his person, and they were moving straight at him. The rest of his men slowly stood and realized what was happening.

“HORY SHET Kev!” Quan’s head swung left to right and back again as he made the connection.

Hal didn’t stop firing. He had shelved his standard issue L85 rifle for the M4 the rest of the men used. The last thing he wanted was for it to break and then not be able to find spare parts. He fumbled a bit as he swapped out the magazine and stopped to absorb what was happening around him.

They were all thinking it, but Kyle said it first, “They’re here for you.”

Kevin swallowed. In the back of his mind Corey’s words from the dream in the white room came back to him;

“Shit’s gonna get thick for you.”

Kevin and his men turned and ran for their lives.

*****

Jaden and his fire team leapt off the metal shipping container when they saw the pulsating mass of the dead do a ninety degree turn and head for the four small shapes that he knew to be the WPG men. Jaden had no idea how they’d managed to get the attention of all those fucking dead pricks, but they were headed right at them, and past where they were was the MC-130 that was their ticket out of here.

“To the hangar. Stop for nothing. We’re out of here.” Jaden’s men responded by covering the pavement at nearly superhuman speed. The men were all loaded for bear with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, multiple weapon systems and medical gear and more, but they ran like the wind. Each of the men was already soaked to the bone in the frigid downpour. Jaden was thankful the training he and his men received was so thorough and hellish.

It made real life almost tolerable on days like this.

The men crossed through a small copse of tree stumps and turned on a surface road to head towards the hangar and the plane that hopefully would have a clear enough runway for them to leave on. 

Jaden’s men began shooting on the run as the undead closed in around them like a vise.

*****

Kate and her copilot Nick sat in the cockpit of their plane and went through the preflight checklist. One by one they affirmed and reaffirmed every single item, readout and setting that the plane needed to ensure a safe takeoff and flight. They were attentive and mechanical in their process, missing nothing. In her helmet’s speaker she heard overwhelming chatter from multiple locations across the base. The talk over the channels was frightening. People were dying. Lots of people were dying.

The frequencies normally reserved for their communication had been re-tasked for ground use, and it irritated the fucking piss out of her and her younger copilot Nick. They shook their heads in disgust as they finally switched over to a frequency they had planned to use with Kevin and Jaden’s teams should this moment occur.

“-it started Kate! Get it started! They’re headed right at the hangar!!” Kevin was screaming into the microphone. Kate winced as her ear recoiled in pain from his yell.

“Jumping Jehosaphat Kevin relax, we’re a few minutes from starting it, we need more fuel.” Her response was even and flat. She wasn’t the panicking type.

Jaden came over the radio, “No time, he’s right. Spin that bitch up now. If we need to land in the middle of the goddamn M11 in fifteen minutes that’s better than what’s coming our way.” Kate could clearly hear Jaden was sprinting again. Kate laughed at herself and wondered if Jaden was always running.

“Alright. We’ll figure it out when we get in the air.” She toggled the comms to the interior channel and addressed the rest of her flight team. They were refueling the plane.

“Yank the pump guys. We gotta move now.” Kate gestured to Nick to skip to the more essential preflight stuff. Emergency take off procedures. 

“Captain we’re less than half full right now. We won’t make it home on a half empty belly.” Her flight engineer Dale came back over the channel, telling her what she already knew.

“I know Dale. No time to bitch, we’ll find a meal for her somewhere other than here. Yank the shit and get this thing moving. Jaden and Kevin are coming in hot and they’re saying we gotta scram.” Kate’s voice again was calm and indifferent to the horror out of her view outside the hangar.

Dale responded with a, “You bet Captain,” and they stopped pumping the plane’s lifeblood. 

Kate continued with her checklist and readied the plane to go.

*****

Kevin’s men ran diagonally to meet Jaden’s men in a full sprint heading towards the hangar. Despite being significantly faster than their pursuers, the men ran with every single ounce of strength they could muster. The only thing that made any of them feel safer was putting additional real estate between them and the thousands of hungry, bloody mouths behind them.

Jaden and Kevin exchanged breathless “heys,” as the two teams met each other’s stride. After just a few moments it became clear the younger active Air Force men were much faster than most of them. Only Hal kept up with them. They eventually moved ahead of the WPG men, leaving them a few yards behind and falling back fast.

Fitz’s side split painfully with a stitch. He started to pull up lame, clutching the burning muscle on the side of his torso. “Oh you motherfucking bitch.” He cussed as softly as he could manage.

The WPG men slowed their sprint to assist the aging Fitz. The Air Force men ahead with Harold instinctively slowed their gait as well, sensing something was amiss behind them.

“Fat prick.” Kevin threw his arm under Fitz’s and without missing a step soldiered on carrying a heavy portion of the man’s weight. Ahead of him he watched as the elite Air Force men fanned out and began to fire past him into the bulging horde of undead closing in on them. 

Jaden bucked off ten quick rounds, dropping ten bodies to the slick grass just as fast. When he finished he started walking backwards, assessing their new situation. He thumbed his throat mic and hailed Kate in the plane’s cockpit. “Captain I think we need a ride. Can you come out and start to taxi in our general direction? We’ve got a minor casualty and could use a little hand from you.” He fired five more rounds at the dead before Kate came back to him.

“We’re spinning up, pulling out now. We’ll drop the back ramp. Make sure that fucking runway is clear for me or this’ll be less of a flying away operation and more a driving in circles operation. See you in a minute.” Once again Kate’s calm demeanor dominated the tension. She would be legendary if they survived this.

“Roger that. Guys, she’s coming to us. We can slow down.” Jaden’s men dropped to a knee and they picked up their rate of fire. Kevin and Fitz shuffled past Harold as he poured red hot rounds out of his M4’s barrel into the undead behind them. 

The wall of flesh pressing at their rear was horrifying. The men shooting didn’t have the time, or the interest to look at the faces of the dead people they were shooting. They lined up their weapon’s sights on the shape of a head, and sent a 5.56mm projectile into it. The bodies dropped like gory headless bowling pins, tumbling down and into the way of the undead behind them. The men trying to get on the plane might be rescued by the sheer incompetence of the dead. They were simply too stupid to step over the bodies falling in front of them.

From the direction they had been running in Kate’s enormous MC-130 slid out of the massive hangar opening. The four turboprops picked up speed and the chest shaking buzz grew in intensity. The silent rage of the wall of undead approaching them from one direction was almost overshadowed by the raw mechanical power of the approaching special operations aircraft. The men looked quickly behind them and saw Kate’s face through the tiny cockpit window. She powered the plane up and swung it wide.

When the massive wing passed over their heads the rain stopped for a moment. Immediately after, they were nearly tossed to their asses when the backwash from the massive engines hit them. The men scrambled to their feet with the scores and scores of undead a mere fifty feet away now. The plane slowed its forward progress and they noticed the tail cargo door was now dropping slowly for them to get in.

“TAXI!” Kate announced over their comms.

Fitz and Kevin turned one last time toward their pursuers and separated to empty their weapons. Time for a little sweet payback. They emptied the remainder of the magazines they had, and slapped in fresh ones.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.” Kevin and the warriors surrounding him ran with their last reserves, and climbed up onto the plane’s rear ramp. Harold yanked Fitz up as the older man grimaced from the burning in his stomach.

Ten thousand hands, half filled with sharp weapons, reached out towards Kevin as he looked back from the inside of the plane. A white haired elder male zombie dressed as he would’ve been in life, dressed in the garb of a priest, walked out from the now halted army of dead. 

Mysteriously he locked gazes with Kevin from afar, and he raised a long, archaic sword above his head triumphantly. Kevin noticed the downpour came to a halt immediately, and with a single, unified purpose, the collective mass of undead behind them dropped the weapons they had clutched for so long. Their target lost, they disseminated immediately, spreading out to find fresh flesh to murder.

The priest lowered the sword slowly, and dropped the tip three distinct times in mid air as if he was knighting Kevin from afar. Then, with supernatural strength the priest stabbed the point of the sword down into the concrete, sending a spider web of fractures out from the blade and embedding it there. The hilt wobbled, and Kevin could feel the vibration in his chest even over the rumbling of the massive plane’s engines. 

The army of undead spilled around the form of the priest as if he were a dam stopping a small portion of a flood. The dead priest slowly lifted his left arm, and gently pulled up his blood encrusted black sleeve, revealing his wrist watch underneath. Then with ominous intelligence, the priest rested his finger down on the bezel, counting out for those watching that there would be another time, and soon.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The men gathered around Kevin in the back of the plane watched all this as the ramp door lifted up, shutting the solitary dead priest out from their newly safe environment. The plane powered up further as it made the turn onto the runway for takeoff.

Fitz stepped in front of Kevin and waved a hand in front of his face, snapping Kevin out of his sudden trance.

“Yeah? What?” Kevin shook the cobwebs out of his head.

“What the fuck was that?” Fitz looked at Kevin intently, with fear filled eyes.

“I don’t know,” Kevin muttered.

Harold, standing next to them, added his two cents before walking away, deep into the cargo bay of the plane. “Mate, they didn’t get what they came for. Now they’re taking what they can get.”

Kevin didn’t like that thought one little bit.

*****

After he double checked to make sure Becky and Shelby had made it aboard the plane, Kevin made his way up to the cockpit to talk to his pilot.  He leaned over in between the two seats in the cockpit as he adjusted the microphone on the bulky aviation helmet. Kate looked over her shoulder at him for a moment as she leveled the bird out. The glass of the cockpit was covered in rivulets of water from the rain storm that had just ended.

“What’s the plan Captain?” Kevin asked her as he tried to see something, anything through the thick clouds they were in.

The plane shuddered with heavy turbulence, causing Kate to pause, “Well Mr. Whitten. Due to an inability to top off our tanks, we definitely cannot follow our ideal flight pattern. We are now on plan B.” Her sarcasm was unmistakable.

Kevin sighed. “How fucked up is plan B?”

“Ever been to Morocco?” Kate asked.

“A long time ago. What the hell is in Morocco?” Kevin asked her as the clouds parted, and the sunlight burst into view. The golden orb was still far above, and from the vantage high atop the angry clouds below, they looked white, and puffy, and even friendly.

“There’s a small FOB there that we were doing covert shit out of. It should have an ass ton of fuel for us, and if we’re lucky, some of the Green Berets that were there might want to go home with us.” She turned and winked at him.

“They’re gonna be all men Kate. You’re shit out of luck.” Kevin poked her.