LZR-1143: Redemption (31 page)

FORTY-SEVEN

The helicopter crew huddled around the doorway was easily dispatched, as I was no longer hesitant to use the pistol. They fell to the floor quickly and I kicked the bodies away from the door, scanning the space for more movement before jogging to the wreckage of the bright orange helicopter.

It had taken the landing wrong, likely from an attack inside. Blood spattered the cockpit windows, and the doors all hung awkwardly toward the ground, as the vehicle tilted slightly to one side. The rotor blades were snapped off and long gone, having decimated a large antennae and communications array, which hung off the lip of the roof precariously, wires dangling at odd angles.

The chopper itself was in mostly one piece, missing only the end of the tail, where it had slammed into the brick enclosure housing a second elevator and ventilation shaft. It sat nearly twenty feet from the edge of the roof, but took up the entire helipad.

Helo evacuation would be impossible with it sitting here.

“Kate, let’s see what we can do.”

Even as we walked to the side of the crashed vehicle, I picked up the sound I knew we would hear within minutes.

Rotor blades.

Our ride was coming, and it needed a parking space.

We decided that the landing struts were the best handholds, and each took a position.

“On three?” she asked, looking at the wreckage doubtfully.

“Okay,” I said, getting a solid hold.

“No way this works,” I heard Diana say, tightening the piece of fabric around her leg over the bite wound.

Kate counted down, and on three, we pulled as hard as we could.

The metal shifted and groaned, and my muscles strained. The skids came off the ground slowly and we pulled back, leaning against the weight.

The helicopter slid nearly a foot before we stopped and set it down.

We repeated the effort and gained another foot.

In the distance the helicopter was getting larger, and my ear bud spoke.

“Seeker, this is School Bus, do you copy?”

I strained against the weight of the vehicle, as I thankfully heard Rhodes respond on our behalf.

“School Bus, this is Seeker, we have you five by five. We are finding you a parking space. Stand by.”

Several more feet went by as I began to breath heavily. Kate was kneeling next to the skid in front of her. The edge was approaching, but too slowly. It was beginning to look impossible.

“Hey Mike,” Ky was at my shoulder, voice tentative.

Between breaths, I looked up.

“Not now, kid.”

We pulled again. One more foot.

“Mike, I think I…”

“Ky, seriously. I don’t have the energy. Hold off until we get this done.”

One more foot.

The thick chop of the incoming helicopter’s rotor blades was loud in the sky, now. I could imagine the herds below looking up, looking for food.

Ky disappeared from my shoulder in a huff, and we pulled again.

One more foot down.

Too many to go.

“Seeker, this is School Bus. You have an ETA on that parking space? We have enough gas to stay on station for a few mikes, but you are sorely needed at home.”

We pulled again, and this time the vehicle shot forward several feet. Kate and I looked at each other in confusion and glanced through the cabin of the helo, where Ky’s happy face was peering through the cracked window on the other side.

“I tried to tell you—I feel different. Let’s get this done, jackwads.”

I smiled broadly, and, re-energized, we pulled and pushed until the helo reached a precarious position at the edge. We pushed together and the wreckage tumbled, end over end, crashing against the glass walls of the building, shattering windows and raining debris on the creatures that had gathered below, watching the movement and listening to the noise above them.

A sudden burst of flame as the fuel inside ignited on impact, and the helicopter slammed into the ground, incinerating the small crowd that had assembled to greet it.

I clapped Ky on the shoulder and smiled.

“How’s it feel to be in the club?” I asked.

She looked up at the sky.

“Ask me at sunrise.”

“School Bus, you’re clear for landing. Five and a half persons for evac.” Rhodes’ voice was almost happy.

Almost.

*

The helicopter rose sullenly in the night sky, blades thumping heavily as we moved away from the hellish building that had almost become our tomb.

Beneath us, the city was alternately quiet and awash with movement, as we passed dead neighborhoods, empty of zombies, and major thoroughfares where the larger groups of creatures had massed together as they moved south. Unlikely through design, but through sheer physics, they had found the largest, widest roadways to take them through the city like water following the path of least resistance. The interstates groaned with the numbers, but I noted that they seemed slightly fewer than they had hours before.

Perhaps there was, in fact, and end to them somewhere. Perhaps they were all at the fort.

Perhaps we were already too late.

“Last message we got was millions of these shitheads were outside SeaTac,” I leaned forward to the young pilot. “Is that true?”

He glanced back, eyes serious.

“Yes sir. First group started trickling in about twelve hours ago. That was the group from the south. Then, four hours later, we got another huge herd from the east. They had been amassing on the northern wall for hours, but that just got critical in the last few hours.”

“Millions?”

He looked to the copilot and then back to me, shrugging.

“There’s a fuck ton sir. I would guess that millions is about right.”

I sat back heavily. Kate’s eyes were on me and I simply stared back, empty of words.

Next to me, Rhodes was slowly unwinding a portion of his bandage.

“What are you doing?” said Diana, watching him pull the gauze away.

“I don’t know—it just started itching really bad,” he said, hand moving underneath the last layer of bandages tentatively. “And the pain is fading—”

He stopped talking and pulled the last layer of cloth away.

A pale patch of smooth skin extended over where the fracture had punctured the skin. Flaking, dried blood chipped off as Rhodes ran a hand over the area.

“Holy shit,” he said softly.

“Folks, you may want to take a look, here,” the pilot said over the comms, and we followed his suggestion, looking out the sides of the aircraft.

As we approached from the north of the city, the creatures extended for miles on all sides. Even in the dark of the night, the moon provided all the light we needed to see the horror below.

Endless waves of flesh and bone surged between buildings and over roadways; they flowed between wrecked cars and over debris and trash. Like ants crawling toward a meal, they were relentless in their march. From the city center south, they were legion and they were constant.

I wanted to puke.

There were too many. Too goddamned many.

We had to be too late. What good does immunity do when you’re outnumbered already by ten thousand to one?

The chopper stayed high while we passed the massed creatures below, flipping on its lights as we approached the fort.

They were like a tide of bodies, crashing against the metal walls in surges. Pressed against the walls, then the motion abated, then moved again. With each surge of bodies, the added pressure of the thousands upon thousands of creatures writhing behind multiplied the force at the front of the mass. Already, pulpy bodies could be seen crushed against the metal walls, forming a small layer of dead and oozing flesh below.

The defenders had one job that I could see.

To burn and liquefy the bodies at the base of the walls as fast as possible. As they were pressed into a bloody pulp beneath the feet of their fellow creatures, they raised the ground that much more, slowly giving the surging attackers more height upon which to grasp for the edge of the wall, three full stories above.

In alternating bursts, miniguns let loose a raking blast of fire designed to move creatures away from the walls long enough for the flamethrowers to do their work. Bodies flamed up and disintegrated in the thousands, but it was a drop in the bucket.

The same scene was repeated on all sides, making for a fascinating show in pyrotechnics and fireworks.

We banked hard to the right, then back to the left to make a fast approach to the landing strip. As we passed the runway, two large cargo planes took off in quick sequence, one after the other, rising quickly into the air and banking hard, one to the left, and one to the right.

“What’s the op?” I asked, watching them climb to a low altitude and begin circling.

“Napalm,” he said shortly. “We’ve been flying it in for days now. We were waiting on you to return, since we were concerned about visibility after we lit it up.”

I nodded, and watched as hell began to rain down on the zombies outside.

Small canisters started falling from the rear of the large planes like gumballs out of a broken machine. As the helicopter lowered to the height of the walls, I saw the explosions of flame begin.

In a massive circle around the airport, buildings, cars, and thousands of zombies instantly ignited as the thick, gelatinous liquid coated and stuck to bodies and structures alike. A loud whooshing sound was audible, even here, as the oxygen was literally sucked from the air as the flaming compound laid waste to the bodies it consumed.

The sky ignited in flame, and the defenders on the walls cheered loudly, even if it was only a brief reprieve. The planes, having exhausted their payload, made a quick circle and started to return.

The sky was now only smoke and the licking tongues of orange and red outside the walls as the helicopter set down on the tarmac close to an old hangar bay.

“Thanks, Chief,” I said quickly and jumped down.

We were met by a still-serious looking Lieutenant Colonel Garcia, along with Major Gaffney, who smiled widely and unselfconsciously at seeing us dismount from the helo with a large backpack and several new people.

“Mike,” said Gaffney, pressing past Garcia, who still held a clipboard in one hand.

“Major,” I said, smiling.

“Lieutenant Colonel now, actually. Promotions are easy to come by when you’re running out of officers,” he threw off self-deprecatingly.

“Mr. McKnight,” said Garcia, “I assume you were successful?” He looked past me at the crew moving away from the slowing rotor blades.

“At what?”

“At… I’m sorry, at retrieving Dr. Kopland?”

“Who?”

I tried not to crack a smile.

He finally realized that I was joking, and stared for several seconds before Gaffney chuckled once.

“This way. Finnigan’s chomping at the bit to see you.”

We turned and followed them into the hangar, a new location for the command center. Closer to the north wall, and larger. As we went inside, I could see why. Small banks of electronics surrounded a large map and constantly updating figures on charts above the commander’s desk. They were tracking fuel consumption, ammo reserves, and casualties, among other things.

“Sir,” a young radio operator said to the Colonel, who was leaning over the large map as we walked in. “South wall reports good fire on their side. Estimates coming in of ten to twenty thousand down.”

“Thanks, Corporal,” said Finnigan as we approached. He looked up at our entrance and smiled.

“Now there is a group of happy assholes I never expected to see again,” he said, extending his hand.

“I thought you gave us a 50/50 shot?” I said, taking his large hand and shaking it once.

He laughed.

“Yeah, well. I’m a crappy Army man, but I’m a great poker player, Mr. McKnight.”

He hugged Kate and Ky informally, and Kate spoke quickly.

“Colonel, this is Dr. Kopland and his assistant, Diana.”

He shook the Doctor’s hand as Kopland looked him seriously in the eye.

“We did it, Colonel. We synthesized a new serum. The fatal after effects are gone, but the other side effects are permanent.” He was concise and to the point.

Finnigan stared for a moment, and then nodded.

“Garcia!” he yelled quickly, before realizing that the man was standing to his left.

“Yes sir.”

“Have the medics start rotating men in for the shots—”

“Uh, Colonel? We actually have a solution to that as well.”

His eyebrows rose as we informed him of the aerosolized solution, and he smiled again.

“Can we borrow a chopper?”

*

They sent out the news across all their networks as fast as they could. From the lowest private to the President herself, the remnants of the United States of America now had a fighting chance. The units that had received early doses would be rotated back in for the curative cocktail, or as Kopland put it, the ‘stop sign’ additive. The remainder of the units across the country would receive the aerosolized doses, enhancing their ability to fight and to fight back.

We would only be able to fight in the darkness.

We were still the minority.

We were still on the verge of extinction.

But now, we had a chance. A real chance.

And we didn’t intend to go down without a fight.

As we circled the outside of the fortifications, smoke billowed above a ring of fire outside. The fire was still so hot that every corpse that stepped through it ignited. I watched as the minigunners dispatched those left inside the ring of flames that surrounded the walls, and the flamethrowers burned the piles of corpses in droves. Thousands of gallons of napalm and fuel were being rushed to airplanes and flamethrower embankments every hour, and the fifty caliber heavy guns and miniguns mounted at intervals were only silent while they kept from reheating.

Slowly, the defenders made some headway, thanks only to the delaying and all-consuming effects of the napalm.

Kopland and Diana had helped the mechanics design a quick retrofit to an old flamethrower, and the pressurized contents of the vaccine were straightlined into the dispenser. Another helo was mounted with a similar machine, and we now circled the compound on opposite sides waiting for the signal.