Fury, page 36
With Yong on Zhen’s six, and the van following close behind Yong, Zhen led the three-vehicle procession down the ramp and onto the highway.
Choosing a spot on the highway where it shot off laser-straight to the south for as far as he could see, Zhen pulled over and dismounted his bike. To his right, up a small embankment, was a used car lot. The vehicles were all blackened husks resting on tireless rims.
Adjacent to the northbound lanes, up a steeply angled hill and separated by chain-link fence, was the south end of Pueblo Mall. A large, boxy building housing something called Hobby Lobby was on the opposite side of the fence. Its glass facade was punched through with bullet holes. The windows at ground level were mostly broken out. Dozens of dead bodies, most mummified by the high desert sun, lay scattered about the sidewalk and parking lot. A full-sized import SUV was wedged in one of the store’s two entrances. Already the sound of the van’s engine was drawing the dead out of the other door.
While Zhen’s team wired the van with explosives, he rode on ahead, beeping the bike’s tinny-sounding horn as he stayed to the center of a car-sized gap cleared from the jammed-up traffic.
After riding south for a mile or so, his thumb never lifting off the horn button, Zhen stopped and turned the bike around.
He put the bike in neutral and released the clutch. Steadying the bike’s vibrating mirror with one hand, he focused on the off-ramp reflected back at him. He’d only been waiting for a minute or two when the jiangshi began to appear. At first, they showed up in twos and threes, heads bobbing, eyes searching for the source of the noise. All of the first arrivals had been burned to one degree or another. After another minute or so, the jiangshi were cresting the top of the ramp in waves and pouring down the decline.
Seven minutes had slipped into the past before Zhen was satisfied with the number of jiangshi his horn had coaxed from the burned-out city.
The technique he was employing was akin to siphoning gas from a vehicle—something he was no stranger to. Get the gas flowing from the tank, then let gravity do the rest.
While Zhen had already started the flow from the city, the van bomb was designed to sustain it.
Then, when the lead element reached the van, Zhen and his Cobras would be the gravity that kept the burgeoning horde flowing northbound in the southbound lanes. At first sight of the fresh meat Zhen and his men represented, he was confident the jiangshi would lose any and all interest with the burning van and give chase.
Zhen looked at his watch. He’d been gone for ten minutes. Plenty of time for his expert demolition man, Chun, to finish his task.
With the stink of death coming off the approaching jiangshi causing his eyes to tear, Zhen engaged first gear and rode slowly north. For the first half of the ride back to the van, he stayed just out of reach of the bell cow, blipping the engine and honking the horn to further excite the African American jiangshi. Once Zhen had the van in sight, he kicked the bike into third gear and sprinted the rest of the way.
When Zhen reunited with his team, they were astride their bikes, engines running and helmet straps cinched tight.
“How many jiangshi?” asked Chun.
“One hundred, maybe two,” answered Zhen. “There will be more.” He stole a quick peek at the Hobby Lobby. Jiangshi now stood shoulder to shoulder and three deep at the fence. Their combined weight was bowing the fence outward. Judging by the sharp angle the fence posts had adopted, the entire run was close to failing.
Chun handed over the detonator. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes. A red plastic shroud covered the firing switch.
Zhen pocketed the device then tore off to the north. After traveling roughly five hundred meters, he slowed his bike in the shadow of an abandoned UPS box truck, looped around back of it, and dismounted. He left the bike running and stepped aside to make room for the other bikes.
While he waited for the others to take cover, he checked in with the pilot of the Z-9. Da Yin, an ultra-confident city-dweller whose parents had been hardwired into the CCP since the Tiananmen Square incident, had jumped ahead of the line and was fast-tracked through training. A green aviator when the virus escaped, Yin had quickly honed his skills ferrying party elites to the bunkers they all thought would be their salvation. They were mistaken. Some of them had brought Omega inside with them.
A big fan of American cinema, Yin had chosen his own call sign. A big no-no for an army aviator. Acceptable when your peers had been failing to return from missions in ever-increasing numbers.
“Ice Man, Zhen. How copy?”
Yin loved hearing his call sign come over the radio. Smile blooming beneath the helmet’s deployed visor, he said, “Good copy, Zhen.”
Zhen said, “Do you have eyes on the vehicle?”
“Affirmative,” Yin replied. “But they’ve only covered fifteen kilometers.”
Zhen had had a hunch, due to the teenager’s tentative nature and lack of experience behind the wheel, that the going would be slow. But not glacially slow.
“Keep overwatch as long as possible. They must reach Colorado Springs.”
After receiving a rather terse sounding “affirmative” from the self-proclaimed Ice Man, Zhen fished out the detonator and flipped up the shroud. Alerting his team, he started counting down from five. Arriving at one, he said, “Fire in the hole,” and threw the rocker switch.
The command traveled via radio frequency from the detonator to the RF receiver attached to blasting caps embedded in each of the two one-and-one-quarter-pound bricks of C-4 plastic explosive. The RF receiver fired the blasting caps simultaneously.
The explosion was near instantaneous and rocked the UPS van front to back. Debris rained down on the highway, a twisted bumper falling dangerously close to Zhen and his team.
If Zhen had been watching, he would have seen the shockwave slap down the first thirty or so jiangshi. Though the lead element had closed to within a hundred meters of the van prior to detonation and had been peppered with glass and shrapnel, they were rising up from the debris-strewn blacktop before Zhen and his Cobras had rolled their bikes from cover.
Straddling his bike, Zhen looked south. The initial fireball had already subsided. The van was still fully engulfed. Burning plastic, vinyl, and rubber contributed to the thick, black smoke plume roiling skyward. Gray smoke from the melting tires poured from the wheel wheels.
Zhen sounded his horn, keeping the button depressed. The seconds ticked away as he waited for the dead to make their appearance.
Walking Stick Golf Course
Raven had been standing by the window overlooking the backyard, watching close to a hundred zombies cutting a path toward the distant clubhouse, when she heard a hollow boom. A beat later, as the windows vibrated in their frames, she looked to Duncan.
“What was that?”
“An explosion,” Duncan replied.
Having been pacing the master bedroom since Raven’s back and forth texts with her father, Daymon stopped long enough to peer out the window. Seeing the dead beginning to about-face, he spit a couple of choice epithets and then resumed pacing.
“No duh,” said Raven. “What do you think it was, and how far away did it happen?”
“Sounded like some type of high explosives. I’d put it somewhere south by west of here. A mile, maybe two out.”
Peering out the window, Raven said, “The biters are all heading back this way.”
Daymon stopped again. “Of course they are. We’re going to be trapped in here. I can never catch an effin break. I come all this way, I show you the honey hole, and then this happens. Ever heard of snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat?”
Raven shook her head.
“That’s definitely not you, Daymon.” Duncan chuckled at his funny. “You have idiom dyslexia.”
Daymon shot Old Man the bird. “You knew where I was going. Pisses me off we’ll be leaving all this stuff here.”
Raven said, “You spoke too soon, Uncle Daymon. Looks like the biters are forgetting all about us. They’re bypassing the yard and heading for the street.”
“When they’re all gone, I’m getting the hell out of here,” Daymon declared.
“I have the keys,” Duncan said. “And we have orders from on high. We’re staying put until the cavalry arrives. And five gets you ten that Cade’s idea of ‘cavalry’ is a Chinook or Black Hawk.”
Incredulous, Daymon said, “You’re just going to leave your truck here?”
“What’s your buddy Eazy E say? Something along the lines of ‘throw it in the gutter, go find another.’” Duncan winked at Raven. “That’s what I’m going to do. Sage advice.”
Raven said, “I can’t leave. I promised my dad I would hang tight.”
“Ditto,” Duncan said. “Captain America always comes through in the end.”
“Fine,” Daymon said, his tone that of a petulant child. He plopped down on the bed. “Two against one. And the losing streak continues.”
I-25 Pueblo, Colorado
Three minutes after detonating the bomb, with the van settling on bare rims and flame still licking the empty frames where window glass used to reside, the train of staggering jiangshi parted the ground-hugging smoke.
Zhen kept the horn blaring and led the team away, at slow speed, toward the nearby Cesar Chavez overpass.
Reaching the overpass, the team parked in its shadow, killed their engines, and dismounted.
Doing the math in his head, Zhen figured it would take the fastest jiangshi of the group close to ten minutes to trudge the half-mile to his position.
This was to be just one stop of many the Cobras would make over the course of the next dozen or so hours. The game of cat and mouse would go into the night and stretch to first light. By then, Zhen’s job would be done. The horde would be fully formed, an unstoppable and insatiable mass of decaying flesh and bone within striking distance of America’s largest stronghold.
Smiling at the thought of the walls coming down under the weight of so many undead Americans, Zhen retrieved a cereal bar from a pocket, peeled back the wrapper, and took a bite.
Before Zhen had swallowed that first bite, he felt a sensation deep in his chest that could mean only one thing: An American stealth helicopter was rapidly approaching.
Cursing himself for leaving the man portable missile in the helo, Zhen hunched down over the bars and searched the sky for the incoming threat.
Chapter 40
Viewed through the Ghost Hawk’s fuselage window, South Pueblo looked like it had been hit by a low-yield nuclear bomb. The only thing left standing taller than the scorched trunks of what were likely the largest trees in the city prior to the inferno were the remnants of steel-framed and brick buildings. The intense heat had reduced the former to mounds of malformed girders that resembled the famed Hindenburg zeppelin’s superstructure as it lay in ruins on the field at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in Manchester Township, New Jersey.
The latter resembled the smattering of structures left standing in London after the Nazi Luftwaffe unleashed their Blitzkrieg on the English capital.
As the corpse-choked Arkansas River came into view out Cade’s window, Ari abruptly cut the helo’s speed in half and nosed her into a steep dive.
Over the shared comms, he said, “We’ve got a smoke plume. Twelve o’ clock. Four miles out. Dropping to one thousand AGL.”
Breaking in, Haynes said, “Bringing optics up.”
Griff scowled at Cade. “And here I thought I was going to get to take this damn mask off sometime in the not too distant future.”
Cross said, “Enjoy your time in the wild while you can. When we get back to base, we’re probably looking at an extended stay in quarantine.”
“Damn surfer boy,” Griff shot. “Always champing at the bit to burst my bubble.”
Ari parked Jedi One over I-25. The stretch of highway was bordered on the west by razed business concerns and to the east by train tracks. Fountain Creek, reduced to a trickle due to the lack of rain, meandered south on a serpentine path parallel to the tracks.
Haynes said, “Migrating video to the cabin monitor.”
All eyes in the cabin went to the monitor. The run of car-choked highway displayed on the screen was cut in half by a thin plume of black smoke, the source of which was a mystery due to the standoff distance.
Cade said, “Zoom in.” No sooner had he requested it than the source of the smoke was growing exponentially larger on the monitor. When the camera ceased zooming in, and the image snapped into clear focus, there was no denying they were looking at the remnants of one of the shuttle vans described in the text. The clear proof was the driver’s side door that had ended up fifty yards away. Emblazoned on it in red letters was the golf course’s name and all of its contact information.
“That’s one of the course shuttle vans,” Cade acknowledged. “Lots of smoke. Hard to tell if there was anybody inside when it went up.”
Nat said, “Looks like they hit an IED. I don’t see a crater, though.”
“Dead giveaway that it wasn’t an IED,” Axe noted, “is that the majority of the glass ended up on the ground outside of the minibus.”
Ari said, “I can hover close to the wreckage. Rotor wash will scour the smoke and give you a better view of the van’s interior.”
Cade said, “Haynes, pull back and pan down. There in the foreground. Seems to be a lot of movement between the vehicles a quarter-mile south of the van.”
Haynes said, “Roger that. Coming up.”
Simultaneously the van grew smaller on the screen and, as Haynes manipulated the camera in the gimbal, the stretch of highway due south became the focus.
Commenting on the new image on the monitor, Cross said, “That’s got the makings of a full-blown horde. A couple, maybe three hundred rotters is a solid nucleus.”
Cade said, “Ari, can you bring us in closer using the smoke as concealment?”
“I can park us in the middle of it if you want,” Ari offered.
“Just put it between us and that overpass.”
Griff said, “PLA scouts?”
Cade nodded. “The van is the lure. They’re the bait. They’ve got to be loitering somewhere close by. It’s mid-eighties out there. If it was me drawing the Zs north, I’d do my loitering in the shade.”
Ari said, “What’s the call, boss?”
Cade said, “Go to thermal and check the underpass. If the enemy is still nearby, that’s likely where we’ll find them.”
“Copy that,” Ari replied. “Haynes, go to thermal. Skip, ready both guns.”
As Jedi One went nose down and began to creep slowly forward, Skip powered open the right-side door and both of the weapon bay doors.
In rushed hot air thick with the combined stench of decaying flesh and kerosene-tinged jet exhaust.
Deploying the right-side Dillon, Skip looked to Cade. “Which one of your guys is going to man the left-side mini?”
Only obvious choice was Nat. While he was the biggest of the group and took up more than his share of cabin space, with his messed-up toes he would be a liability if he were to go boots on the ground with the team.
Making room for the big operator to slide by, Cade said, “You’re up, Nat.” Looking to Axe, he added, “You got overwatch. If we encounter riders, try to wing them.”
Anticipating the call, the Brit had already begun assembling his custom Remington MSR sniper rifle.
“If we go boots on,” Cade said, looking to Griff and Cross, “I’m point. Cross, you take rear guard.”
Cross nodded and flashed Cade a thumbs-up.
Shaking his head, Griff said, “Always making good ol’ Griff the meat in the sandwich.”
Cade said nothing. He was staring intently at the monitor.
Ari pulled Jedi One out of the dive roughly two hundred feet above the long snarl of scorched cars on I-25. Applying pedal, the SOAR aviator side-slipped his bird through the smoke plume.
Though keeping the helo’s right flank facing the underpass provided the enemy a huge target to shoot at, it allowed Ari a perfect view from the right seat, Skip a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree field of fire with the right-side minigun, and Axe—prone on the floor with his long gun trained downrange—as stable a platform to shoot from as humanly possible.
All business, Haynes said, “Enemy contact, eleven o’clock. Four bodies on motorcycles. Heat sigs indicate all four engines are hot.”
Flicking his eyes to the threat warning screen, Ari noted the absence of radiation indicating the presence of an activated MANPAD.
What Haynes had described, Cade was seeing on the cabin monitor. “I concur,” he responded at once. “Engage at will.”
As Skip fired a short burst from the Dillon, Cade double-checked his safety harness. If they were going to take fire, the rounds would soon be incoming. No sooner had he thought it than he saw a star-shaped muzzle flash erupt in the shadow of the overpass.
Having withdrawn deep into the shadow of the overpass, Zhen had dragged binoculars from his pack and was busy scanning the southern sky. While he could still feel the disconcerting and barely perceptible resonance in his chest, he could now hear the faint thrum of something scything the air far away. If he didn’t know any better, if he hadn’t been in the presence of the evil black helicopter on more than one occasion, he would probably attribute the audible sound to a rising wind. Maybe explain away the sensation in his chest to a rapid change in barometric pressure. But he did know better. It was out there somewhere. And it was on the hunt.
With the dead marching steadily toward the only viable cover for blocks around, Zhen had a difficult decision to make.
He could recall the Z-8 from the loiter LZ and risk losing the remaining bioweapon stockpile. Another option would be to place a distress call to Yin and order an immediate exfil. The Z-9 was armed with missiles and might just level the playing field. Or the most logical of the three: Recall Yin, wait until he was seconds out, then split up the team and rabbit in multiple directions. This third scenario would, in theory, kill two birds with one stone. First, it would flush out the enemy, who would then find themselves so preoccupied with chasing the mice that the returning dog just might succeed in catching the cat unaware.
