Allegiance (31 page)

Holding on to the seat
and his cookies, Cade watched the Rockies spin by through the window next to
Hicks’s shoulder. “Never gets old,” he said into his mike.

Gaines nodded and raised
his right hand which was clenched into a fist.

Seeing this, Cade did
the same and delivered a fist bump to the general.
Surreal
, he thought
to himself. Then he swiveled his head and looked over his shoulder in time to
see the black Osprey lifting off. In seconds, the northeast entrance, complete
with the unmistakable winking of muzzle flashes piercing the predawn light,
caught his eye.

“Looks like the numbers
of Zs showing up overnight are multiplying,” he said to Gaines.

“Good observation,
Captain. Seems like there are a few more each night... some are
hot
.”

Cade continued to
scrutinize the scene as it passed underneath the helo. There appeared to be
forty or fifty Zs at the gate. The guards’ fire raked over them, downing at
least half their number before the viewing angle changed and all he could see
was sun-drenched desert and the road to Yoder splitting the horizon to the
east. With the word ‘
hot
’ echoing in his head, he wondered silently to
himself what percentage of the walking corpses were radioactive. A cold finger
traced his spine as he pondered the ramifications of a two-sided attack. An
irradiated herd from Denver would be disastrous. But add a large exodus from
Pueblo, and Schriever would be caught in an undead pincer that would be hard to
defend against and nearly impossible to escape.

“Say goodbye to our
rotting friends,” Ari said in his best Pacino. “Thanks for flying Night Stalker
Airways. We will be cruising at two hundred knots at a sustained eight thousand
feet AGL—above ground level—Major Ripley is going to throttle back her
Frankencopter
so we can keep pace.”

Cade grinned at Ari’s
disparaging description of the Osprey. Clearly the SOAR pilot was one of the
old school aviators—the kind who cut their teeth first on UH-1s and then the
early Black Hawk variants. To say he was biased would be an understatement of
monumental proportions.

He craned his neck and
watched the big Osprey off the port side for a few seconds. And as he closed
his eyes to begin his mental preparations, he felt Ari change the Ghost’s angle
of attack which in turn sharpened their rate of climb. Though it was nothing
like rocketing up the face of the Flaming Gorge Dam, his stomach still closed
the distance with his scrotum, and in no time Jedi One-One had leveled out and
they were cruising along smoothly. With the harmonic whirring of the rotors
directly overhead and the baffled turbines off to his right providing a nice
white noise, his chin hit his chest and he quickly fell asleep.

Outbreak - Day 16

Schriever AFB

Colorado Springs,
Colorado

The first airplanes had
rumbled down the distant runway just before dawn. Their engine noise as they
turned and roared overhead had been loud enough to snap Wilson from a blissful
sleep. Whatever he had been dreaming about must have been good, he thought as
he rolled over and faced away from Taryn in order to conceal his morning wood.

But as he tried to will
the thing down, he had drifted back into another round of satisfying REM sleep
which lasted only a handful of minutes before he was rudely jolted awake by a
new, raucous noise that he couldn’t place.

Outside, somewhere in
the distance, the thunder of rotors beating the air rose to a sonic tempest. It
was coming from the part of the base occupied by the large hangars where he had
endured all twelve hours of his quarantine time.

He sat up and looked
around the room, searching for his cargo shorts. A thin shaft of light speared
through the cracked curtains and fell across the tangled khaki lump sitting on
the floor five feet away. He untangled the thin sheet from his legs and looked
down at his lap. His face colored as he realized he was buck naked. Then he
pinched his nipple just to be sure he wasn’t dreaming or imagining things. It
hurt, so he surmised the situation he was in was not some figment of his vivid
erotic imagination. That he wasn’t somehow reliving in his subconscious one of
those Forum stories that had kept him somewhat sane and
relieved
during
those frequent months’ long
dry spells
was indeed a welcome revelation.

Looking over his
shoulder, he noticed Taryn’s raven-black hair splayed across the pillow. The
sheet was pulled up, covering her chest which he imagined was still bare. She
was still sleeping, so he continued to drink in the sight. Her ears were
pierced multiple times and the strange see-through necklace the thumb drive had
been dangling on was nestled against her neck. The black and gray tattoos
encircling both arms had at first seemed out of place to Wilson. The inked-on
skulls, demons, and skeletons belonged on bikers and ex-cons, he’d thought, not
on first year college students.

But that been before he
had met the nineteen-year-old, and though she was younger than him by nearly
two years, she seemed to have a poise and bearing of someone much older.

The aircraft noise
outside picked up and the whole base seemed to be languishing under it.

Still, Taryn continued
to breath steady. Rhythmically.

A pang of guilt twisted
his stomach as he averted his eyes from her lithe form and focused on his
discarded shorts. Suddenly the guilt was replaced by a sense of dread and a
gut-churning dose of worry as his sagging self-esteem torpedoed the magical
moment.

He darted to his shorts
and quickly pulled them over his blindingly white backside, cinched the belt
and pulled his sweat-stained black tee over his red mop. He located his boonie
hat and crunched it down over his hair.
Who needs a comb
, he mused.

As he laced on his boots
he wondered if this had been his one real shot with Taryn. He wouldn’t trade
the night for anything, but still he had a sick feeling it had been a fluke.
Or
what was even worse, maybe
, he thought,
last night’s events were a
sympathy fling
. That was it. He knew it. He shook his head and grimaced as
the thought of how out of his league Taryn was polluted his mind. Then he stole
one last look. Locked it away—just in case. Taryn’s face was placid and she
seemed totally at peace. Angelic was the adjective that crossed his mind as he
stepped into the humid morning air and closed and locked the door behind him.

Wilson heard the heavy
chop of rotor blades approaching from the west, and in seconds the source of
the racket was directly overhead. He shielded his eyes against the rising sun
and picked up the matte-black hybrid-looking helicopter as it disappeared east
over the nearby tents. Then he felt a sort of harmonic, breath-robbing pressure
in his chest. He shifted his gaze towards the piece of sky the first craft had
come from and picked up the near-silent angular black helicopter as it blazed
directly overhead. It seemed close enough to touch and was following the same
heading as the other aircraft.

Something is up
, he thought as he unlocked the door to his
humble abode. But that thought disappeared the moment he placed a foot inside
the darkened room and found himself under interrogation.

“So I see you grew a
pair, big brother,” said Sasha. The disembodied voice caught him off guard and
startled him a bit.

“Sorry if I woke you up,
sis,” he replied.

“You didn’t,
Wilson
I’m
always
up before seven,” she said sarcastically. “Truth is I
couldn’t sleep... something about being
alone
when a zombie outbreak can
happen at any moment.”

Wilson propped his Todd
Helton Louisville Slugger against the nearest wall, strode across the room and
parted the blackout curtains. “I said I’m
sorry
and I
meant
it. I
woulda called but you know how bad the cell coverage is out here,” he added
jokingly.

Sasha covered her eyes
and was silent for a second. Then she rose from her bunk and padded back
towards the bathroom. “You
really
like her,” she called back over her
shoulder.

“More than any other
girl I’ve ever known. But I don’t want to talk about it... I don’t want to get
my hopes up.”

Noticing the hangdog
look on her brother’s face when she returned, Sasha tried to cheer him up. “You
know, Wilson, the way she shut me out yesterday says more than words. Take it
from me. Most younger sisters try to get in the way of their big brother’s
suitors and she knows that,” she said, nodding her head in order to validate
the random line of bull she had just pulled out of the blue. “Besides,
Wilson... what’s not to like about you?”

He wasn’t falling for
it. Chances were Sasha was just trying to get him to let his guard down so she
could kick him in the junk with one of her patented zingers.

“You are a
nice
guy, Wil...”

“Yeah, and you know what
they say about nice guys... they always finish last.”

“Newsflash, Mister Nice
Guy, there are no other civilian guys here even close to her age. Sooo—
apparently
last
just became
first
. Besides, Wilson, if she didn’t
like your company she wouldn’t have inserted herself into the whole leaving
Schriever fantasy that you and that Brook lady cooked up.”

“It’s no
fantasy
,
Sash. She and her husband and their daughter are leaving today, and you and I
are going too...
if
she can talk her husband into it.”

“Big
if
... It’s
boring as hell here but I’m not holding my breath,
Wilson
. I’m going
back to sleep,” she added as she slipped between her sheets. “Wake me when you
go to breakfast.”

“I didn’t sleep but a
couple of hours since I snuck out on you, so breakfast is going to have to take
a back seat to a few more minutes of shut eye,” Wilson said sheepishly.

“Good for you, Mister
Nice Guy... you grew a pair and apparently they work just fine,” Sasha said,
trying to keep a straight face. Then she pulled the covers over her head and
muffled laughter filtered out.

Wilson threw his shorts
on the floor and climbed into his bunk.
Amazing how fast Sash is growing up,
he thought to himself.
Fourteen going on twenty.

“Sorry brother. I love
you.”

“I love you too sis.”

Outbreak - Day 16

Near Driggs, Idaho

When Jenkins stepped
from the Tahoe to unchain the gate, nothing on the other side was moving.
Earlier, he and Daymon had gone down the fence line and systematically killed
the zombies one by one, he with the Japanese sushi knife and Daymon with a
utilitarian neon-handled machete.

Though he had worked at
a small chicken processing plant as a teen, and had sent his fair share of
future McNuggets to the great coop in the sky, he had balked at using the
knife. Just the thought of jamming a blade into a former human being’s eye
socket gave him a case of the heebs.

But due to the prospect
of gunfire drawing even more of the walking dead up the feeder road, he had
followed Daymon’s lead, sucked it up, and started on the high side of the
property. And by the time he and Daymon, who had started on the low side, had
met in the middle, Jenkins had chalked up eighteen kills up close and personal
while Daymon had culled twenty-four of the putrefying corpses.

“Easy peasy mac and
cheesy,” Daymon sang as he wiped the machete off in the tall grass.

“Says you,” Jenkins spat
as he fought back the bile rising in his throat. “I prefer a bullet to a blade
any day.”

“Still, you better bring
along the Ginsu,” Daymon said with a wink. “Who knows... it may come in handy
down the road.” He poked his head in the back window and checked on Heidi, who
seemed to be feeling better by the minute. Funny, he mused, how the prospect of
being trapped by a horde of dead could speed up the healing process.

Jenkins waited until
Daymon was in the passenger seat and had closed the door, and then he eased the
patrol Tahoe over the prostrate dead.

As the front wheels
found purchase, Daymon clucked his tongue and said, “I’d gun it if I was you.”

“You wanna drive?”
Jenkins shot back. In fact, Daymon’s attitude was starting to rub him the wrong
way. So to show the younger man who was boss, he continued over the pile at a
crawl, only to be greeted by the awful sound of gas escaping bloated organs.
And as the rig bounced overtop, the gunshot-sounding cracks of bone snapping
under the weight of the SUV emanated through the floor pan.

“See what I mean?”

Fuck you
, thought Jenkins as he relented and pinned the
accelerator to the floor, causing the SUV to slew sideways and the spinning
rear tires to spew flesh.

“Better than dragging a
ton of dead meat from the road and breaking our backs in the process, don’t you
think?” said Daymon. “Hell, at the least, I probably would have popped these
cuts on my gut open again.”

“Always thinking about
yourself. Let’s go. Now, now, now...” Jenkins said, shaking his head. “Like a
spoiled brat only child.”

“How did you know?”
Daymon said sarcastically.

Jenkins wheeled the rig
around a small knot of dead, hung a hard right, and laid down two black stripes
as he buried the gas pedal. He took his eyes from the road for a second and
looked Daymon in the eye. “If it walks like a duck,” he said.

“Boys will be boys... I
get that. But too much is at stake here,” said Heidi. Her head and shoulders
poked into the front of the SUV. She looked at Jenkins, then shifted her gaze
to Daymon where it lingered for a long silent moment. “I didn’t persevere while
Christian and his wealthy
shitbirds
had their way with me just so I can
ride along and listen to you two juveniles argue like a couple of fucktards.”

Jenkins mouthed the word
‘
fucktard
’ and tried to grasp its meaning. He’d never heard the term,
though he figured she was right. He was acting like an exposed nerve and should
have never let Daymon get to him. Time to drop the Officer Friendly
protect
and serve
mentality, he told himself. Time to grow some hide, Charlie. In
his peripheral vision he noticed Heidi retreat back into the middle row of
seats. And without saying a word Daymon sunk into his seat and his head
mechanically turned to gaze out his window. Charlie decided to join the silence
party and keep his eyes forward and his words to himself unless he had something
pertinent to add.