Gravewalkers: Dying Time (31 page)

Hatchet handed Carmen a
laser storage disk, “I brought you some road music. You be sure to
come back in one piece. Watching you get naked for your
decontamination washes is the sunshine of my life. If the most
beautiful woman I know gets herself killed, I’ll be very
disappointed with the rest of the world.”

“
I wish Critias was as
flattering,” she kissed his cheek. “I’ll come back, and you can
keep watching me with my blessing. I may even dance for you.”
Carmen showed Hatchet her hand, “It’s not like you see a ring on my
finger.”

“
You will if you come back
alone,” Hatchet pledged, “with a rock as big as the
moon.”

“
She won’t be coming back
alone,” Critias commented jealously. “Mount up, princess. It’s show
time.”

Carmen hopped in through
the roof hatch then Critias followed to sit on the passenger side.
Jim was on the radio in contact with a man who watched the street
and he signaled for Hatchet to open the heavy garage door when it
was clear. Carmen started the rumbling engine as she pushed the
disk of music into the dashboard player.

As she pulled out into the
street, Carmen sang, “Whoa, Black Betty,” with the music as she
accelerated so fast that the g-forces pressed Critias into his
seat. “Black Betty had a child,” she sang as she took a left corner
at a drift, “the damn thing gone wild.” The next right put them on
the straightaway toward Foragers’ Castle where she scorched off the
tires with each release of the clutch and ratcheted through the
gears to accelerate up to an insanely dangerous speed.

Critias knew better than to
complain about her reckless driving because she had the skill to
get away with it and wouldn’t listen to him anyway. Their car was
as fast as the Rhino had been slow. They raced past the infected so
quickly that the ghouls did not even have a chance to see what the
passing noise had been.

Carmen had to slow down
when they headed north up the highway so she could dodge debris in
the roadway, but she still pushed the car to rash limits. She only
had one lane through the cars cleared by the Rhino, but it was wide
enough for the Betty to have room to spare and the impacted
vehicles along both sides made a good fence to keep ghouls out of
the road.

It took them only minutes
to get where the Rhino had picked up the survivors; once there,
Carmen slowed down for a look. The car the Denver survivors took
from the airport revealed its identity by having a clean
windshield.

Critias told her, “Here we
go,” as he shut off her music. “You’ve seen the map Bertram made,
but it might have some mistakes.”

Carmen raced on again. She
drifted the corners and barked the tires when she shifted gears. A
left after a straight run dumped them out on a highway crowded with
old automobiles that she weaved through for a long block headed
north before kicked around another left to shoot through the
gatehouse that led into a wooded cemetery.

“
This is a beautiful
place,” she commented as the trees passed their windows in a blur
of speed. Their straight road became a series of turns that
zigzagged through the woods, mausoleums, and tombstones. Another
gatehouse on the westside of the cemetery put them back on a major
boulevard that split the cemetery on their right from dense
suburbia on their left.

“
Bertram was right about
the neighborhood ghouls,” Critias told Carmen. “They must have
swept through here like the wind, to judge by all the cars still in
their driveways.”

The Betty made high speed
down a long straightaway until Bertram’s map sent them left into
the guts of a suburb. The houses were in tight rows down both sides
of the street, so close together that if one were to take fire, the
flames would spread to a thousand others. The overgrown lawns and
countless homes served as prime habitat for squirrels, rabbits, and
deer. That abundant wildlife served to feed ghouls in legion,
though thankfully the infected were not in groups. Critias dreaded
the thought of them having a breakdown in the place since the
ghouls would overrun them in number, and none of the homes was
sturdy enough to offer any shelter.

Carmen had to swerve and
brake to avoid hitting any ghouls, but it still happened with some
regular frequency. The front ram did a decent job when it hurled
their bodies aside even if the impacts jarred their
teeth.

Critias felt grateful when
she finally drove out of the subdivision. They crossed a broad
boulevard to enter a golf course country club by its main driveway.
Carmen followed pavement for as long as it lasted then finally
pulled off it onto a thinly graveled path that had served for
little electric carts the players had ridden. After they hopped off
the course onto a roadway, Carmen negotiated more boulevards to
plunge back into a crowded suburb. Her final exit followed the
still obvious tracks of the Denver car that they had driven through
the tall grass between two of the homes.

“
It’s going to start
raining soon,” Carmen warned Critias with certainty as she drove
out of the neighborhood homes onto a wide level plain of wild
grasses. She still followed the tire marks of the previous vehicle
that had blazed the trail.

Critias observed from the
sparse landmarks that they were in yet another suburb, only it had
not grown beyond the stage of leveled ground and a completed
boulevard for access.

As Carmen got off the grass
onto the roadway, she said, “The airport is just ahead, but the way
in might be a little rough.”

He assumed, “If they could
make it in their car then you can make it in this one.”

“
Not necessarily from this
direction,” she reasoned. “I can drive off a cliff a lot easier
than driving back up one.”

The first raindrops fell on
their windshield as Carmen turned off the roadway to head down a
grassy slope that bottomed out sharply in a valley that a concrete
waterway furrowed at the bottom. She cut across the ditch at an
angle then spun the wheels as the car struggled to climb the far
embankment. At the top, they crossed a superhighway to struggle up
a rocky path that ascended a steeper hill. The track crossed a twin
highway of the reverse lanes further up, to then snake through a
stand of trees. The end of the rough road finally delivered them to
the extreme eastern end of an airport runway.

“
That was some great
driving,” he praised Carmen before he radioed home to tell Jim they
had reached the airport.

Jim radioed back, “You made
it in just over twelve minutes. Carmen must drive like a bat out of
Hell.”

“
You would have to see it
to believe it, Jim. I’ll tell you when we’re airborne with wings
instead of tires,” Critias signed off.

“
Jim says you drive like a
bat out of Hell,” he told Carmen as he watched her bury the needle
of the speedometer that ended at two-hundred and forty kilometers
per hour. She pushed it to more like three-hundred and thirty down
the smooth wide runway.

She sang to him, “But when
the day is done and the sun goes down and the moonlights shining
through, then like a sinner at the gates of Heaven, I’ll come
crawling on back to you.” She decelerated hard as she worked her
way left toward the main buildings with its rows of jumbo-jets that
still had sky-bridges that linked them to their boarding
gates.

“
If there are any more
survivors from Denver, they could be anywhere in this maze,”
Critias observed. “How would we even begin to search for
them?”

The rain began to pour
accompanied by lightning and thunder.

Carmen slowed to about the
sprinting speed of a ghoul as they passed the giant aircraft at
their moorings. She complained, “It would still be difficult to
find anyone even if we could see without this rain. Bertram’s plane
is just ahead by those cars and buildings there. If the other
passengers left by car they could be anywhere at all. If they never
drove away, they would still be in those buildings.”

Critias suggested, “We blow
something up with one of those rockets you have. If they are here
they would see and hear the explosion then they would signal for
help.”

The plane came into view
with its rear ramp still down, just as Bertram had promised it
would be. He had taxied the aircraft to be near a parking lot of
cars so they would not have to run far to reach them. Not much
further past the plane was a line of military fighter jets. Past
those was a line of concrete hangar-bunkers for sheltering more of
those types of aircraft.

“
I might hide in one of
those,” Carmen pointed out the large bunkers. “Go up through the
hatch and shoot anything that gets too close while I drive around
nice and slow so we can have a good look-see.”

“
Forget that,” he
disagreed. “Drive out away from the plane to get us lost in the
rain then swing back to go up the ramp as quietly as possible. If
we’re going to search, I want to do it covertly on
foot.”

Carmen drove out on the
runways to lure away any infected that had seen their car already.
She got away far out into the middle of nothing then
stopped.

Critias climbed halfway
out the roof hatch with his MP5 in hand. The pounding of the rain
worked wonderfully to obscure all visibility and deaden every
sound. Critias fired his m
aschinenpistole
one-handed in single
fire. The occasion was his evaluation period for the weapon that
Carmen had recommended, so he took his time to aim for clean
headshots. Determined ghouls sprinted in out of the rain, sometimes
singly and once in a group of three, until Critias had littered the
tarmac with fourteen twitching bodies.

When they stopped coming,
Critias dropped back inside to his seat then closed the hatch ready
for her to drive off.

The engine died.

“
Please tell me that was a
bad joke,” he hoped aloud.

“
The car just died,” she
shrugged innocently. With a turn of the key the engine came right
back to life. They chuckled over their moment of panic then she
pulled away, doing her best to keep the engine noise to a minimum.
She drove straight back toward their plane and then right up the
ramp to park inside.

Critias climbed out the top
of the car then went to the ramp behind it. He told her, “Go to the
cockpit; see if this thing looks like it will still fly. Watch out
for any ghouls that might have crawled up in there.”

She went to the front
pilot-area of the plane to do as he asked.

He readied his teslaflux
pistol set for silent operation then did his best ghoul
impersonation as he walked down the ramp toward the runway.
Lightning flashed overhead with the boom of thunder that followed a
moment later. Critias waited at the base of the ramp while he put
down the ghouls that still had some interest to investigate the
passage of the Betty. He dispatched them with close-range headshots
as they wandered up stupidly out of the rain. The ghouls didn’t
know to scream at him before it was too late to try and his muffled
shots didn’t summon in any more of them either. Within two minutes,
he had downed five and it seemed no others were aware of his
location as a place of interest.

Carmen reported by radio,
“Everything seems good. You want me to come with you, power up the
plane, or wait here?”

Critias considered what to
do next until a faint red laser beam shined intermittently at him
through the rain. The unexpected spectacle broke his train of
thought. His first impression was that a survivor tried to signal
to him, but then a rifle bullet struck him in the face at the right
side of his jaw.

The blindsiding impact
dropped him flat though it fortunately failed to penetrate his
fibrous armor that trapped the slug and dispersed the energy enough
that he was unharmed.

Apart from having superior
bullet-resistance to anything in the current era, his armor would
regenerate the injury it suffered. His helmet was the most rigid
part of the whole suit and apart from the vulnerable visor was the
toughest spot on his body. It was mostly his surprise and the
slippery ramp that knocked him on his ass rather than from any
wounding.

“
Somebody just shot me in
the face,” he radioed Carmen, but didn’t move or try to get up.
“I’m not hurt, so don’t stick your head out unless you want to get
shot in it.” He preferred to let the sniper think he was dead. If
he got back up, he might take another bullet through the visor, or
to the plane, or maybe even directed at Carmen.

From his tone, she could
tell he was not hurt, but she was still concerned, “Are you
bleeding? Did they think you were a ghoul?”

“
How the hell would I know
why they shot me?” he snapped at her out of reasonable frustration
considering his situation. “You’re the one who painted me up like
this. I’m not bleeding, just lying here on my back. If they see I’m
not dead, they might shoot the whole plane to shit so let’s wait a
minute to see who they are and what they want.”

Three men in dark hooded
rain-ponchos came out from behind the corner of a nearby building
close to the rows of parked cars. They stayed low as they dashed
toward the plane’s ramp.