Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (5 page)

After taking into account the number of flesh-eaters between
him and the truck, and the fact that the helicopter sat on fuel-soaked ground,
he came to the conclusion that there was no easy answer. And as he knelt atop
the aircraft calculating his odds of survival if he made a dash for the truck,
the solution came to him. As usual, the answer wasn’t exactly what he wanted it
to be. He knew in order to make a clean break while luring as many of the dead away
from the wreck as possible, he would have to take the long route north towards
the church, and then double back outside the fence to the waiting set of
wheels—all the while with
only
a couple or three dozen hungry Zs giving chase.

One step at a time, Grayson
, he reminded himself.
Then one of Mike’s favorite phrases—of which there were many—popped into his
head.
The first step is always the hardest
, the hard-charging Delta
commander usually said prior to going down-range. And in the teams, that
first
step
was making certain all of the available info was known up front and
then running the mission over and over until each team member could execute his
job flawlessly—but also could step in and execute any one of his teammates’
jobs if the need arose.

But unfortunately for Cade, he didn’t have the luxury of physically
running this thing through even once—let alone multiple times until it was rote.
So he did the second best thing: he visualized the route he’d take. He ran it a
dozen times in his head before he was confident and ready to take the
plunge—literally. Then he reran it a dozen more times—after all—the first step
in this instance would be for him to get off the helo and on the ground in one
piece and without further injury. Then
all
he needed to do was convince
the dead into following him away from the wreck all without getting surrounded
and eaten alive.

Piece of cake.

Still reeling from the loss
of Maddox, and lamenting the fact that they had been forced to leave his corpse
on the tarmac at Grand Junction, the Delta team, to a man, had decided days
earlier that they would leave no man behind—and though he had already turned—that
pact also included Durant.

While Cade had been plotting his egress, inside the cabin
Cross unbuckled Gaines and replaced his entrails, wrapping everything up with
some kind of first-aid tape taken from the med kit. Then, with a little help
from Lopez, they manhandled the general’s body into a sitting position.

Meanwhile Hicks busied himself preparing a makeshift sling out
of high tensile nylon rope, the idea being that when Cade returned with the
truck they would combine their muscle and use it to haul the general’s two-hundred-plus
pounds of dead weight out of the helicopter.

“Any way I can help?” whispered Jasper who had wedged his considerable
frame against the cockpit bulkhead, and up until then seemed content just
listening and watching.

After stripping the backpack and MOLLE gear from the general’s
body, Lopez liberated the seven full magazines and handed them across the cabin
to Jasper. “Put these up top ... quietly,” he said. “And we’ll need his
weapon.” He went through the motions of clearing the chamber and set the general’s
SCAR carbine back on safe before passing it over to Jasper.

“So you are serious about taking the bodies with you?” asked
the undertaker.

“We
do not
leave our fallen behind,” Lopez said
sharply.

“And the infected one?” asked Jasper, furrowing his brow.

“We are going to move Heaven and Earth to bring Gaines and
Tice home. And Durant goes too,
if
we can get him untangled,” replied
Hicks, adding a no-nonsense look that ended Jasper’s line of questioning.

“Captain Grayson will be back in a few minutes and that’s
when you come into play,” Cross said, tapping Jasper’s well-developed bicep.

Crouched atop the helo, Cade counted seventeen Zs moaning
and jostling for space, pressed two deep against the cockpit glass. Watching
them, he could almost feel their hunger as they reached excitedly into the
helo, bony fingers kneading the air, straining to grab ahold of Ari, who Cade
guessed had to be shitting in his flight suit right about now.

“Fresh meat,” Cade bellowed as he rose. Then, to
really
get their attention, he waved his arms wildly and half walked, half limped towards
the tail assembly, hollering at the top of his lungs. “Ding, ding, ding. Dinner
time. Come and get it!” He continued hollering and carrying on loudly while inwardly
hoping he wasn’t laying it on
too
thick. The last thing he wanted was for
them to get overly excited and infuse some kind of extra pep into their
normally slow step.

He went silent, stood hands on hips, and observed the Zs
freeze in place. Then, predictably, their heads panned in unison and their rheumy
eyes fixed on him.
Good
, he thought to himself, noticing that they had,
at least for the moment, forgotten about Ari.

Next, in order to get them moving in his direction, he belted
out a few choice expletives unbecoming of an officer.
Mission accomplished
,
he thought as he watched the entire lot of them file around the Ghost Hawk’s
undercarriage, dead eyes locked solely on him.

He paused and steadied himself with one hand on the upthrust
rear canard, which, stabbing skyward, looked quite a bit like an Orca’s black
dorsal fin. After stealing a final glance over his left shoulder, and seeing
that the Zs had covered half the distance to his position, he shifted his gaze
and studied the ground for a flat landing spot free of crash debris.
Now or
never
, he told himself as he dipped his hips, stepped forward, and committed
to the twelve-foot drop.

With the Zs crowding his peripheral vision on the left and
the ground rushing at him from below, he concentrated hard on coming down on
the ball of his right foot with his body canted at an easy angle. In theory, if
performed correctly, he could then fold over and roll out without further
injuring his left foot—or anything else for that matter. The technique, known
as a
paratrooper’s landing fall
—or PLF—was taught to every airborne soldier
before ever setting foot in an airplane.

The descent was rapid leaving him little time to shift on
axis, let alone focus on his desired landing spot. But as luck would have it, Mister
Murphy was occupied elsewhere.
Three good men dead
, Cade thought darkly.
Apparently the damage here had already exceeded Murphy’s expectations, because,
bum ankle and all, his landing was perfect. He barrel-rolled fluidly to the
right, slowed himself midway with both palms flat to the earth, and sprang upright,
slightly gimpy. Shifting his weight to his right leg, he adjusted the MP7 on
its sling so that it dangled out of the way behind his back, and drew the Gerber
combat dagger.

But before he could check his surroundings—let alone take
that first step towards the church—Mister Murphy changed his mind. The carrion
birds went deathly quiet as if they had been watching with bated breath,
excited at the prospect of sharing in the fresh kill. A millisecond after he
sprang up and the birds went mute, a subtle intermittent rasp of fabric chafing
against fabric and the soft firework crackle of brittle grass underfoot reached
his ears. He whipped around and found himself face-to-face with one of the
monsters. At first he supposed it had unwittingly chased his silhouette as he
walked the length of the tail boom. Then a shiver traced his spine when he
realized it was likely that he was witnessing a bit of cunning at play; the
fact that it had stalked him without making a sound was the biggest tell of
all.

For a tick the monster stood stock still, shark-like eyes staring,
seemingly sizing him up with a sort of quiet determination Cade had yet to see
one of them exhibit. A good thing, because in its condition, the sight of the
thing alone froze Cade for the duration.

Most of the Z’s skin had sloughed off, leaving tufts of hair
and glistening muscle clinging to its bare skull. All of the soft fleshy bits
were gone: ears, nose, cheeks, and lips, the loss of the latter leaving it with
a devilish toothy grin.

After the split second staring contest, the decaying
abomination raised its arms and attacked.

Ducking, Cade avoided the cold embrace, and countered with backhanded
roundhouse that left the black dagger buried half a foot into the thing’s brain.
He stepped aside, allowing the achingly-thin zombie to slide free from the
steel, and watched it crumple to the ground, a tangle of bony arms and legs
like something out of a wartime newsreel.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire
, Cade thought
as a claw-like hand, bony nubs trailing ribbons of flesh and sinew, flashed by
an inch from his face. Instincts kicking in, he backpedaled and moved to his
left under the tail boom while two hundred and fifty pounds of moaning flesh-eater
plodded toward him.

Cade regarded its blood-spattered tee shirt swaying with
each uneasy step and recited the words stitched across the chest, “World’s
Greatest Grandpa.” Instantly he thought of Brook’s mother and father and the grisly
details surrounding their final day on Earth.

“Sorry, sir,” Cade said in a low voice. Feeling a twinge of
empathy usually reserved for the living, and with all one hundred and eighty pounds
behind the thrust, he rocketed off his right foot, the Gerber accelerating towards
Grandpa’s left eye socket. The point on the finely honed blade sliced through
the fat layer surrounding the clouded eye, and glanced off the rigid orbital
bone before finally penetrating the creature’s low functioning brain. He
followed through with a sharp elbow strike to the right side of its mottled
gray face, freeing the dagger and redirecting Grandpa’s forward motion left and
away. As the plastic cap on Cade’s tactical elbow pad resonated from the
delivered blow, his torso rotated on the follow through, saddling his left foot
with the combined body weight of both he and his assailant.

Swallowing hard, he fought off the unexpected flood of
nausea as the three bones making up his ankle balked at the maneuver. An
explosion of white hot pain came next. Coursing up his left leg, the intense
stimuli transited his sciatica and rippled like a fast-moving tsunami through
his spine to a spot just behind his right eye, where he was certain a nasty
little imp was fileting his optic nerve with a rusty razor blade. Normally 20/20,
his vision suffered at the periphery, and as he fought the urge to pass out the
world went soft around the edges; he could just barely make out the next echelon
of creatures closing in doggedly, unstoppable and insatiable wraiths fading along
with his eyesight.

Schriever AFB

Annie leapt to her feet, nearly breaking her neck trying to
acquire the source of the shrill screams carrying across the quarter-mile oval
track.

Reacting instantly and instinctively, Brook snatched up her carbine
and in one fluid motion jumped cat-like from the bleacher seat to the sun-baked
ground. She took a few steps forward and then visibly relaxed upon realizing
the spine-tingling sounds, which of late had mostly been associated with death
and doom, were merely the by-product of a healthy game of tag. For Annie’s
benefit she shouldered the M4 and scanned the foreground through the rifle’s optics.

“The twins are just playing tag. Everything’s OK,” she said.
A few seconds slipped by and the screams turned into peals of laughter. Keeping
her cheek to the stock and her eye close to the 3x magnifier, Brook swept the
rifle from left to right along the fence line where she could see the monsters
clutching the fence and Max jumping and snarling protecting his new
sheep
the only way he knew how.

“What do you see?” asked Annie, strain evident in her voice.

“The girls are playing. The Zs are still right where they’re
supposed to be—on the other side of the fence. And it looks like Max thinks
he’s the only thing standing between the girls and the Zs.”

Releasing the breath she’d been holding, Annie followed the
action as her twins ducked and dodged through the lengthening grass, trying
their best to elude their new friend Sasha, who was reaching and swiping and corralling
nothing but air.
Two against one
, she thought. Good odds, but not great,
considering her eight-year-old girls were still truly eight and hadn’t yet been
forced to run for their lives. In fact, just after Mike’s passing, she’d made a
solemn vow to herself to shield Sierra and Serena from the horrors of this new
world for as long as humanly possible, even going so far as resisting the
constant invites to “
Learn the ins and outs of shooting
,” as Brook had
taken to calling her daily target practice on the living dead that lurked just
outside the wire. Paper targets were one thing, Annie had decided after
declining Brook’s first overture. But shooting something that used to be a
human just wasn’t in her. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to force it upon
her kids in order to condition them to the real world outside-the-wire.

Until she was certain there was no danger, Annie kept one
eye glued on her kids in the foreground and the other on the gathered undead
clutching the fence a dozen yards beyond. Finally, forcing a tight smile, she
sat back down and shifted her gaze to Brook. Searching for something meaningful
to say, she locked eyes with her friend, but came up empty. Then, like a
crashing wave, the realization that she and Brook had spoken on but a handful
of occasions since Mike’s passing hit her. And those conversations—centering mainly
around the how’s and why’s of surviving the apocalypse, of which they each held
widely differing opinions—were far from their
normal
shoot-the-shit types
of chats about their men and kids. Something had changed between them. The
feeling that she and Brook were growing apart had started as a barely
perceptible twinge deep in the pit of her stomach the day she’d put her husband
into the ground, and had been ever-present, growing like a widening chasm
splitting the common ground between them ever since. It was nothing calculated
on Brook’s part, of that Annie was certain. She supposed Brook’s metamorphosis
was a by-product of some kind of innate defense mechanism triggered by Mike’s
untimely death. Truth be told, both of them always thought it was going to
happen to someone else’s husband, that the hand of fate would never touch their
lives. But now that it had, and in such an intimate way, Annie was afraid their
relationship would never be the same—if it survived at all.