Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (52 page)

A half-beat later all hell broke loose northeast of the lake
as well as in Cade’s ear bud when unexpectedly, over his team’s shared channel,
he heard, “Good shooting, Wyatt. Target is down.” Then the voice he recognized
as belonging to Ari said, “In five, four, three, two ... ” At
‘one’
Cade
saw the black shape flare and level out over the target house and instantly
there were a pair of fast ropes uncoiling snake-like from the aircraft’s open
doors. He blinked and two forms, all in black, weapons strapped across their
chests, rode the ropes to the ground below. Then, a second after the first pair
appeared, another two ninjas exited the hovering Ghost Hawk and rode the ropes
to earth.

For a second the radio was silent in Cade’s ear. Then a
voice he recognized rattled off a couple of orders and the comms went suddenly
quiet—for a second.

“What was that all about?” asked Daymon over the comms.

Finally seeing the black shape for what it really was, the
lone remaining Ghost Hawk, Duncan whistled low and slow and stated, mostly for
Daymon’s benefit, “Cade’s been holding out on us. That there is the cavalry and
I’d give my left nut to sit in the pilot’s seat of one of those birds.”

Still cuffed at the wrists, Foley crabbed past the furniture
and had just taken up station, nose to the sliding glass, when an explosion,
lighting his face up red, rocked the house immediately left of the target
house. Then there was a continuous laser-straight red and orange stream of fire
lancing groundward from the orbiting Ghost Hawk and the house on the right side
of the target suddenly caught fire.

After the fast-moving shock wave rippled the water and
rattled the east-facing windows, a muffled
‘Whoomph’
rolled over the
guesthouse. Cade heard the loud thumping of what could only be a Chinook and
then it came into view far left of the lakefront homes. And as licks of small
arms fire lanced up towards the lumbering chopper, in his ear bud, he heard
whom he guessed was Ari’s co-pilot speaking in clipped syntax, directing the
action on the ground.

Then there were more explosions to the north and more
chatter and then again he heard Lopez’s unmistakable tone and delivery followed
by, “Copy that,” which, deep and sonorous, could only belong to the
surfer-boy-looking Special Agent Adam Cross. All of a sudden Cade imagined an
old Thin Lizzy song befitting the battlefield reunion taking place, then he
heard the unmistakable thundering cadence of a new pair of Chinook helicopters
entering the airspace over the lake.
The boys are back in town
,
indeed
,
thought Cade as the all too familiar combat tingle returned. Juices flowing, he
shrugged on his ruck, snatched up the MSR and Lev’s M4 and said, “Let’s move.”
The newly flowing adrenaline countering any latent ankle pain, he hustled
downstairs following Foley’s shiny bouncing dome. At the bottom of the stairs,
the man of the house turned a one-eighty, held his hands in the air, and shot
Cade a
what about me
look.

In answer to that, Cade cocked his head and stared into the
older man’s eyes. Seeing no signs of deception or malice in them, he pulled his
Gerber and sliced through the man’s cuffs.

“Two coming in,” announced Lev over the comms.

“Copy that,” replied Cade as a soft knock echoed in the
hall. As a precaution, he watched Foley rub his wrists as Duncan disappeared
down the hall to get the door. Then there was a sharp snick of a lock being
thrown and a subtle creak and the noise of clomping boots and labored breathing
invaded the guesthouse.

Stopping and turning where the hall spilled into the great
room, Duncan furrowed his brow and asked, “Done?”

Face white, like he’d seen a ghost, Daymon held his
blood-stained hands up, palms forward, and whispered, “Done.”

From across the lake came the steady popping of small arms
as a firefight raged between troops on the ground and the occupants of the
house flanking Bishop’s. Tongues of orange leapt from windows on the second
story. In the next second, silencing the opposition, red tracers, seemingly
connected like links in a chain, poured from the sky somewhere above and behind
the house full of holdouts.

“They’re not going quietly, are they?” observed Cade.

Shooting a rueful look Cade’s way, Duncan asked, “Your boys
are really taking it to them. When do
we
get some?”

After switching frequencies and holding a separate private
conversation with someone over the comms, Cade looked at the men assembled
around him, met each expectant stare and said, “Police up your gear and lock
and load ... we’re
oscar mike
in
five
.”

Chapter 85

The second Bishop stood and reached across the table for
her, Jamie knew her worst fears were coming true. She’d seen it in his eyes.
The sparkle of hope that had lit up the room the night before and had been
there to a certain extent when he’d met her at the door upstairs was gone. A
look of menace crossed his face as he said:
I’ve survived dozens of
encounters with liars better than you. I’ve been taught how to win hearts and
minds and it’s become evident with you I’ll do neither
. And when he looked
down the hall over her right shoulder, she instantly knew why he had sent
Carson upstairs. And that there were a pair of handcuffs in her immediate
future followed shortly by a lifetime’s worth of agony and degradation and
torture, both physical and mental.

Several things happened at once. Her epiphany, given away by
the look on her face, was followed by a devious grin spreading on Bishop’s
shadowed features. Then she instinctively pushed away from the table and tried
to stand. But by the time those impulses crossed synapses on their way to make
it so, she was wearing most of the former Navy SEAL’s right shoulder and
clavicle in the form of blood and flesh and flecked bone.

Blinking against the onslaught, she cried out as tiny
razorblade-sharp bone splinters bombarded her face and eyes. Then
simultaneously two things happened. Stifling her scream, a sizeable hunk of
shredded pectoral muscle, firm and warm, entered her mouth and lodged in her
windpipe. And the cause of all the damage crackled the air by her ear and
impacted the heavy-gauge stainless skin of the Wolf refrigerator with a solid
sounding slap.

As she instinctively gagged and spit the plug of flesh from
her mouth, she noticed the glass spilling like a wave from the destroyed
slider. Then, like a slow-motion scene from a Matrix flick, food and china and
silverware bunched together at the low end and crashed to the floor as the
table, looking like a sinking ship, reared up and followed her captor over
backwards, a look of utter surprise painting his face.

Fight or flight. The question didn’t register in her brain
as an audible cue. Nor did she realize she had made a decision until a second
after the endorphins flooded her brain and she acted.

Hearing Carson cursing upstairs and then his footsteps
pounding out a hollow cadence above and behind her, she shifted her gaze left
to the block of knives on the island. Midway through the sweep, her eyes had
fallen on something interesting on the underside of the upended table. Her
subconscious mind instantly knew what it was, but not until she stared at the
black lump for a second did she realize her incredibly good fortune.

Elvis

Waiting for a break in the river of dead, Elvis sat in the
truck, thinking. After a couple of minutes wrestling with more questions than
he had answers for, his patience wore thin and he started the big engine.
Lights off, he nosed the rig down the drive and turned right at the ‘T,’
charging hard against the trudging tide of decaying flesh. The effect his
presence had on the creatures was comical as he zippered through the flow of
flesh eaters, causing a bullwhip-like chain reaction when they clumsily
about-faced and gave chase, all shoulders and elbows and hips battling for a
clear lane on the blacktop.

The reversal of flow intensified and as he sped away, in his
rearview, Elvis saw what looked like an undead orgy taking place in the center
of the road.

After driving two straight miles nudging dead from the tow
truck’s path with the bumper guard most of the way, he came to another ‘T’ and
the sultry voice in the box told him he had arrived at his final destination.

“What the fuck,” he said aloud, banging the wheel while the
dead slapped the flanks of the truck. Panic welling within him, he wildly
scanned the horizon while weighing his options. Blackout restrictions or no, he
figured he would see at least the silhouette of a military base, however
distant. A guard tower maybe, standing out boxy against the blue-black night
sky. A fence with coils of concertina perched strategically atop. But he saw
nothing. No base. No soldiers in the distance having a smoke. No vehicles in
the foreground where he assumed a base would be. And worst of all, starting the
slow creep of chill into his stomach, he saw nothing to indicate there had been,
save for the traipsing dead, any activity whatsoever near here for quite some
time.

For just a tick he entertained flashing his headlights as he
had upon arriving at the lake two nights prior. But knowing he wasn’t a
tactician, nor would it serve him to pretend he was, he quickly discarded the
foolish notion.

Instead he turned right and drove madly for a quarter-mile
until he came upon a county road blocked by a swinging gate intended to keep
out vehicles, mainly. The gate had a sign bolted to it warning that trespassers
would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Throw the book at me
,
thought Elvis with a morbid grin.

Beyond the gate was a winding gravel road that meandered up
to a squat, earth-tone-painted cinderblock building he guessed was home to
water pumps or controls of some sort. And best of all, the windowless structure
was on a slight rise and surrounded by a cyclone fence, which in his opinion
presented him the perfect location to arm and abandon the device.

He shifted into low gear and used the truck’s bumper and a
ton of torque to breach the gate. It popped noisily and rocketed inward as
Elvis sped through. He followed the gravel road to the building and stopped
short of the entry. After a quick K-turn he nudged the gate open with the wrecker’s
rear bumper.

Leaving the engine running and the front end blocking the
newly forced opening, Elvis leaped out, stuffed the .45 in his belt, and went
to work.

Jamie

The second that she knew what she was looking at, fight won
out over flight and she ripped the stubby looking gun, tape and all, from the
table’s exposed underside. Without giving thought as to why it was there in the
first place, she thumbed the hammer back and aimed the revolver at the air
above the table’s edge where she suspected Bishop would eventually surface. In
the interim, she reached her left hand out and snatched up a medium-sized knife
from the block.
Not too big to swipe with
, she reasoned. And long enough
to hit a vital organ. It would do the trick, she decided.

The air in the great room had taken on the all-too-familiar
smell of spilt blood. Breathing through her nose, Jamie listened hard and
detected movement on the stairs. She knelt down, the island pressing her back
and Bishop struggling to pull himself up with his one good arm to her fore.

Outside there was a loud explosion. Very near, she surmised.
Then, coinciding with a few long, drawn-out chainsaw-like sounds, the
horizontally mounted windows on each side of the house lit up red and orange
like eyes on a Jack-o’-Lantern.

Carson’s voice: “
Bishop?”

With one elbow hooked over the table edge, Bishop’s head
slowly broke the plane. Instantly the image reminded Jamie of the old Navy
recruitment commercial in which a team of SEALs emerge from black waters,
deadly and wraith-like. This was nothing of the sort. Bishop looked pathetic.
His face was drained of color and his mouth moved fish-like, fighting to draw a
breath.

In her side-vision Jamie saw the toe of a tan boot followed
by a shin and knee and finally a man’s thigh, all muscled and flexing under the
desert tan camouflage fabric.

“Bishop?” said the owner of the leg, only this time with an,
Oh fuck what happened to you
kind of delivery. Not agitated sounding,
but drawn out and filled with compassion.

Knee, thigh, or head?

Jamie chose thigh but her aim was off. Instinctively she
crunched her eyes shut as the report, sandwiched between the table and island,
roared back and forth, seemingly using her ear canal as a pass through.

Semi-deafened, Jamie squeezed the trigger two more times as
Carson fell sideways. The first shot she would find out momentarily passed
through his scrotum mid-stride. The second she witnessed (between blinks) punch
through the soft meat of his hamstring, instantly turning the pants leg crimson
and bringing forth a shrill, gut-wrenching scream.

Both hands allocated to holding together his nutsack, Carson
let his semi-automatic fall to the floor where he joined it a beat later with a
third catastrophic bullet wound to the left hip.

Willing herself to move, Jamie scooted along the
blood-slickened floor and snatched away the boxy pistol. She rose on shaky legs
and crabbed around both men, tiptoeing through splintered china and around the
upended table.

Standing hands on hips with shouts and gunfire rising to a
crescendo outside, she smiled big at the fallen men. For an instant she
contemplated crowing about how
Karma’s a bitch
or spouting something
witty like
you reap what you sow
. But she didn’t. Trembling with rage
and aware of how Bishop, on orders from Robert Christian, had left Heidi for
dead in Jackson Hole, she went to work with the knife.