Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (55 page)

“You can take the man outta Delta—” said Lopez.

“—but you can’t take Delta out of the man,” finished Cade.

Seeing this, Cross called out across the room to the third
member of the Delta team, a fully bearded operator the size of a small
mountain. “Lasagna,” he said. “Help me get this sack of shit to our ride.”
Then, grabbing a handful of Carson’s torn pants, he winked at Cade and said in
a near perfect Schwarzenegger, “You’ll be back.”

Knowing full well the call of duty would once again whisper
his name while simultaneously wishing for it never to happen again—for both
Raven’s and Brook’s sake—Cade clapped Lev on the shoulder and, still favoring
his ankle, put an arm around Daymon and together the three of them followed
Duncan and Jamie to the waiting Ghost Hawk.

Chapter 90

As they walked towards the matte-black chopper with its
lazily spinning rotor cutting the air, Duncan commented about how quiet it was.
“I felt that black demon in my gut but had no idea what it was until it was too
late.”

“That’s the point,” said Lopez behind a wry smile. “Wyatt
could tell you some stories about our Jedi Ride.”

Duncan said, “I bet. But then he’d have to kill me, right?”

Lopez smiled and went about his business, readying the
flight.

After watching an ecstatic Foley accept a hand up into the
chopper, Duncan let Jamie take a seat ahead of him, then chose an open spot on
the floor next to Carson’s prostrate form.

The bird was pretty crowded by the time the big bearded
operator everyone called Lasagna boarded and shut the door behind him.
Strange
,
thought Cade as he swapped out helmets and plugged the comms wire into a jack
near his head. The operator across from him didn’t have Italian features, nor,
judging by his muscular physique and slim waist, did Cade think the nickname
derived from a penchant for that type of cuisine. So craning over covertly, he
read the name on the man’s Multicam blouse:
Lasseigne.
He nodded and
smiled while tightening his harness.

“Strap in and hang on,” warned Ari over the shipboard comms.
Then he leaned back and repeated the ominous-sounding orders for the benefit of
those not wearing a flight helmet. Finally he looked at Cade and added, “We’ve
got us a celebrity flying Night Stalker Airways. Everyone give Wyatt a round of
applause and please ... save your autograph requests until after we arrive back
at Schriever.”

“So I’m being shanghaied,” said Cade playfully as he pressed
a boot into Carson’s ribs, producing a long, drawn-out moan.
Still alive ...
good.

“Just yanking your chain,” replied Ari. “Where to?”

“Golf course. Northwest of the lake,” Cade said. He hinged
at the waist and looked out the port side as the helo lifted smoothly from the
makeshift landing zone. He saw the Chinooks already nosing off to the east,
their insect-like silhouettes framed against the rising moon. Then the
northeast gate drifted by and he noticed in the light of the still-burning
fires the unchecked dead seemingly forming a step up with their bodies and the
others behind them spilling over the gate.

As the burning structures and black glassy lake spun from
Daymon’s view, they were replaced outside of the window by a gathering of dead,
and he witnessed the same behavior Cade had just been privy to. He grabbed
Lev’s attention and stabbed a finger groundward and mouthed, “Empirical
evidence.”

Flying at an extremely low altitude, Ari buzzed the dormant
water feature. Below, illuminated ghostly white by the rising moon, the Zs were
still wading the waters, giving slow chase to the handful of geese unwilling to
give up their habitat. Shimmering swirls marred the surface as predator and
prey maintained the ongoing dance.

Ari broke in over the comms and said, “Next stop the
eleventh hole. A difficult dog-leg right with ball-hungry traps on the left and
flesh-hungry hazards surrounding the green.”

“Can you take us over the clubhouse first?” Cade said into
the comms.

Ari said, “Roger that,” and the helo banked right and
seconds later was orbiting a hundred feet above the grand building.

“Keep going,” said Cade sadly upon seeing the staggering
mess below. Dressed in the same coveralls and sturdy work boots, but minus the
golf hat and any semblance of life, the Z that had been Walter looked up lazily
and opened its mouth, no doubt moaning at the mechanical thing flitting
overhead.

After saying a prayer for the man who had offered them
sanctuary and in a roundabout way the use of his vehicle, Cade pushed it from
his mind and looked for the Black Hawk.

Still covered in netting, their ride was right where Duncan
had parked it. Cade also confirmed visually the presence of a dozen Zs in the
vicinity. He took the opportunity afforded by their altitude to scan several
fairways surrounding their chopper and saw that they were also overrun by
rotten shamblers.
Going to have to work fast
, he thought, quickly
swapping helmets.

Announcing their imminent touchdown, the whine and thunk of
the landing gear deploying sounded through the cabin. Then Ari began his
countdown, all business.

On
‘one,’
clutching his M4 close, Cade thumped
Lasagna on the chest and mouthed, “Thank you.” As the bird settled softly
adjacent to the DHS Black Hawk, Cade stepped onto the brittle grass, went to a
knee and flipped the NVGs over his eyes. Hearing the others running across the
grass at his six, he shouldered his carbine and began picking off glowing green
forms at distance.

With help from Lopez and his Delta team, in no time they had
the netting rolled up and Carson was transferred, trussed and blindfolded, into
the Black Hawk.

After the transfer and once Duncan had gotten the Black
Hawk’s rotors spinning, Ari launched and orbited the area, Jedi One-One’s
port-side minigun throwing a barrage of hot lead into the approaching Zs.

Five minutes after the transfer, Duncan had the DHS Black
Hawk airborne and was holding a hover over the eleventh hole green with only
the rising moon lighting the ground below.

Communications having just come back on line, Ari’s voice
sounded over the comms. “Cade ... you owe me a detail for this bird. My
customers say your man bled all over back there.”

“Copy that,” said Cade. “I’ll throw in the cash for the
undercoating spray and a vanilla-scented tree for your mirror.” He looked right
and saw a smile spread on Duncan’s green-tinged face.

After a long bout of laughter, Ari replied, “See you soon,
Wyatt.” The comms went silent, and after spotting Ari give the Jedi Ride a
little intentional waggle on axis, Cade watched the Ghost Hawk, shimmering a
bright green in his goggles, turn hard south and climb away rapidly.

“Where to?” asked Duncan. “Knowing you, I think you’ve got
something special planned for this Carson fella.”

Regarding Jamie through robotic-looking eyes, Cade said,
“Think he needs a bath?”

Nodding and looking down at the golf course below, Jamie
said, “Yeah. But go lower. I don’t want him to die from the impact like Jordan
did.”

“Copy that,” said Duncan. “Get that lady some night vision
goggles so she can enjoy the show.”

***

Duncan held the Black Hawk in a ragged hover thirty feet
over the algae-filled water. The down blast from the rotors frothed the surface
and did what the dead had been unable to: sent the geese away with a chorus of
angry honking and a flurry of beating white feathers.

The kerosene-scented exhaust entered the cabin when Cade
hauled open the door. He nodded at Jamie while Lev scooted the prostrate
captive to the curled metal lip. Not realizing the significance of his words in
golf parlance, Cade said, “You’ve got honors,” then shifted his gaze to the
tiny mushroom-shaped cloud far, far away in the distance.

After yanking the scrap of saliva-soaked fabric and enduring
a stream of whispered epithets from Carson’s maw, Jamie regarded his
green-tinted features and said, “For Logan.” There was no hesitating. She
rolled him off into space behind a firm nudge from her boot.

His scream pierced the night air for a two-count, then went
silent.

After seeing the dead pile on and the whitecaps below turn a
lighter shade of green from the warm blood, Jamie backed from the precipice and
sat down hard, tears welling in her eyes.

Cade tore his gaze from the green glow over the horizon and
saw Lev close the door. He waited until Jamie was strapped back into her seat
between Lev and Daymon. Then he flashed a thumbs up to Duncan and said one word
into the comms:
Home
.

Epilogue

In a fraction of a nanosecond, the detonation had produced
temperatures rivaling those on the sun’s surface, instantly vaporizing Elvis,
the device, the wrecker, and everything around him in a half a mile radius.
Next a shockwave containing massive overpressures shot out to all points of the
compass from ground zero, moving at a staggering speed. Then the roiling
thermonuclear cloud sprouted and sucked a great deal of radioactive dust and
debris skyward to forty thousand feet where it merged with the polar Jetstream
and was carried far and wide east and north across broad swaths of Idaho and
Montana.

On the ground from as far as the eye could see, if there had
been a living soul to witness it, nothing moved atop the smooth glassed-over
top soil.

On the periphery, dozens of miles northwest of ground zero,
tens of thousands of dead migrating eastward from cities once high in populace
were instantly blinded and irradiated and sent shambling away in clusters to
all points of the compass.

West of Huntsville

In the dark of the Ogden Canyon Pass, the dead were arriving
from the west in droves. And with each passing hour, hundreds of the walking
corpses were being forced up and over the guard rail to the canyon floor below,
where the ones that survived the fall started a slow crawling hunt for prey,
oblivious of broken limbs or jutting bones or partial paralysis.

Meanwhile up at pass level, with each passing hour, their
ranks no longer being thinned daily by the Huntsville bandits, the amassing
dead were beginning to counter the weight of the stacked shipping containers,
moving them a millimeter at a time behind each surge of newly arrived flesh and
bone.

Oblivious to the ongoing battle between physics and
insatiable hunger, the elderly full-sized male raccoon rattled out of the
underbrush.

Quickly finding itself trapped among a forest of shuffling
feet, a primeval spark flared deep in the coon’s plum-sized brain and the
twenty-pound creature took blind flight east. After being bashed countless
times by bony knees and sharp-edged shinbones, the coon unwittingly climbed up
a cold cadaver’s back, where the contact of warm flesh and fur started a chain
reaction of unimaginable proportions.

It was over in a matter of seconds, with the unlucky raccoon
ending up in a dozen different pieces in a dozen distended stomachs.

But the ensuing melee the coon’s mad dash had started
widened the eight-inch gap between container and guardrail, and the
long-delayed undead diaspora east was underway.

###

Thanks for reading
Warpath
. Look for a new novel in
the
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
series in late 2014. Please feel
free to Friend Shawn Chesser on
Facebook
.