Slow Burn (Book 9): Sanctum Page 6

  Chapter 12

  Among other things, Fort Hood had been a stockpile of the Army’s tried and true tools for killing folks on an industrial scale, a temple to our culture’s conceit as to how effectively we figured we could slaughter all comers. Unfortunately, the enemy that showed up, a virus and the people it twisted to its purpose, wasn’t on the list of foes the army had prepared for. Still, it was hard not to fall under the infatuating spell of all that firepower, even with the evidence of its failure spread nearly everywhere I looked, the bodies of the dead. Now Fort Hood was an Easter egg hunt and the prizes hidden in the carnage were weapons and ammunition.

  Aside from being crusted in the blood of the last person to pull the trigger, most of the M4s we found looked damn near worn out. Murphy assured me that wasn’t uncommon. The taxpaying public liked the Army to get their money’s worth out of the weapons they bought. I found a set of night vision goggles, military boots, camouflage pants, and a shirt that fit. All were gory, but cleanliness wasn’t the showstopper while shopping for a new wardrobe. Finding garments that hadn’t been ripped off the previous owner’s body was the trick.

  I found a serviceable pistol with enough magazines to make me feel well-armed. Well, that along with my knife and indispensible machete. Better yet, I discovered that rummaging through the remnants of the dead, I came across hand grenades, one here, a couple there. They totaled several dozen by the time I stopped searching. Not all for just me, of course, they were good additions to our arsenal.

  We spent two days loading a Black Hawk helicopter Martin selected for our trip. We topped off the fuel, scrounged what little food could be found, loaded up our weapons, and gathered ammunition for the door guns on the helicopter. Murphy was loaded up with everything he needed, and Martin, who we were building a trust for by then, was armed as well.

  Martin told us that the Black Hawk had a payload of a couple thousand pounds so we had plenty of weight to spare if we wanted to continue loading. Neither Murphy or me wanted to. We’d been in Fort Hood long enough. It was time to move on. We had enough extra that our new employers in College Station would be grateful. When we needed more, we could come back.

  All we had to do after that was to wait for morning to leave. The flight to College Station would take maybe an hour. I wanted a full day just in case we needed it. I’d been around the block enough times to know that every plan, no matter how simple, goes to shit when Whites get involved.

  The next day, the early morning air was chilly but tolerable as Martin piloted the helicopter into the air. I sat in the gunner seat behind the pilot’s seat, looking through an open window. Murphy was behind me at the machine gun on the other side. We all wore helmets and were able to communicate over the Black Hawk’s intercom.

  We were a hundred feet off the tarmac with Whites coming out of their nighttime hiding places to gawk or run toward us. Murphy said, “Okay, now I believe Martin.”

  “What?” Martin asked over the intercom.

  “That you can really fly this thing.”

  Martin laughed.

  I didn’t say anything. I still had my doubts but was willing to make the bet. Few things were certain anymore.

  Martin announced, “The air seems stable this morning.” As we passed over the hangar we’d spent the previous few nights in, he added, “We should have a smooth ride.” We started west, climbing as we went.

  We flew over the field where the Whites and the Survivor Army clashed. Below, along the streets, naked ones came out to watch us fly over. Some made the choice to chase. Their sad little brains just couldn’t extrapolate the logical conclusion that we were too far away and moving too fast. They saw us, they thought they could catch us.

  Through the decay they ran.

  Houses had burned, leaving surrounding yards and neighboring properties blackened. Trash blew across streets and open fields. Bodies, when they could be identified, or at least those smudges they left, discolorations, shredded clothes, and scattered bones were just about everywhere. On the two-lane country roads between the subdivisions and through the farms leading out into the country, cars littered the shoulders and roads, some alone, some stalled in convoys—crooked, metallic caterpillars. The contents of suitcases and provisions were scattered across the asphalt and into the ditches. Spreading out from the vehicles, like poisonous clumps of pollen, lay the smudges and bones, often close, sometimes forty, fifty, a hundred feet away.

  For the people trying to get out of Killeen, driving to escape failed. Running to get away from cars jammed on the road failed them. Fighting the infected with whatever they’d had on their person failed too.

  Futile struggle and death.

  By the time we were over Stillhouse Hollow Lake, we were high enough that the coming extinction of humankind wasn't so obvious. I spotted the Bell County Expo center looking much smaller from up in the sky than I expected it to be. Interstate 35 slipped behind us, and then we were over farm country.

  The morning landscape was peaceful. A fog filled the creek beds and low valleys in white—sometimes thick white, sometimes just a gossamer haze over the fields with cattle grazing, oblivious. In places, all I saw were treetops and roofs floating on clouds that hid the earth below.

  Heading southeast, we paralleled the road Murphy and I had led the naked horde down on our way to Fort Hood. It was dotted with the houses we’d burned, and the ground all along it was scarred by the destructive passage of tens of thousands of naked Whites.

  We didn't have a plan in the detailed sense for what lay ahead. We were going to fly over College Station and hope that showing up in a helicopter didn't spark an incident. The Survivor Army had given a lot of people in Texas good reason to greet them with bullets instead of talk. We needed to find a safe place to land—no Whites nearby, and none close enough to draw in. Of course, I suggested landing the Black Hawk on a roof on campus, but Martin told me the helicopter had an empty weight of five tons and a loaded weight twice that. Martin explained to me that he didn't want to die caving in a roof.

  Not hard to understand.

  Chapter 13

  When the Texas A&M campus came into view, Martin turned the helicopter in a wide, clockwise circle so we could get a look at what we were getting ourselves into. I got out of my seat and stepped carefully through the narrow space in front of a forward-facing row of jump seats across the helicopter’s main bay. I looked over Murphy’s shoulder, out the window. Murphy had both hands on his machine gun, ready to fire. Everything new required caution. That’s just the way the world worked.

  “What do you think?” Martin asked over the intercom.

  “Looks like every place else,” Murphy answered.

  “We’re about fifteen hundred feet,” said Martin. “You want me to take it down some?”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t think we were going to see anything we needed from so high.

  As we descended, the world below clarified into shit again. Disappointment festered through hopes I hadn’t realized I’d been fostering until they started to fracture. When Fritz talked about what his group had done in College Station I’d created a picture in my mind, unrealistic for sure, an idyllic oasis, a remnant of the old world surrounded by a tall-enough, tough-enough barrier to keep the grotesque savagery of the new world out.

  And why the fuck does it hurt when hopes shatter? Isn’t the world full of enough pain over real things, like when our loved ones die?

  All I saw was the evidence of death, and it was depressing. It gave the impression that nothing below was alive except for the Whites who moved in their helices and gangs. Some hunted individually and in small groups with no organization. They all looked up, though, when they heard the sound of the Black Hawk. Though it wasn’t likely any of them had heard the sound of an engine or seen a moving vehicle on the ground or in the air for months, their snail brains still remembered the smorgasbord from those first days and weeks, when cars were everywhere, full of fleeing food. In those days, a White barely needed to
do anything to feed except wait by a road for a car to come to a stop. Then it was only a matter of breaking the glass or taking advantage of humans’ bad choices to get out of their cars.

  As Martin drew the Black Hawk into tighter circles around the campus, Murphy pointed and said, “You see what I’m seeing?”

  “Yeah.”

  The density of remains got thicker and thicker near the western corner of the campus, and the flowery pattern of death seemed to be centered on a cluster of buildings.

  Martin's voice crackled over the intercom. "Tell me where to go, fellas."

  Murphy pointed to the carnage around the buildings at the western corner of the campus. “If they’re here, that’s got to be where.”

  “Can we go lower?” I asked into the intercom.

  “We can go all the way down to the ground,” Martin laughed.

  Rolling my eyes for no one to see, I said, “You know what I mean.”

  “Somewhat.” He asked, “How low do you want to go?”

  “Low enough to tell what kind of cars are parked down there?”

  Martin laughed.

  Murphy turned and looked at me.

  I pointed at the ground. “If the Mustang is down there, then we’re in the right place. Right?”

  Martin said, “I could drop down to about five hundred feet.”

  Murphy turned back to his window and resituated himself in front of his machine gun.

  I put a hand on a bulkhead and leaned forward.

  “You’re crowding me, man.” Murphy shouldered me over a bit. “Why don’t you go back to your side?”

  “Everything is on this side of the helicopter.”

  Martin said, “The copilot seat is empty.”

  I leaned away from Murphy and seated myself in one of the four jump seats facing forward. Looking to my right gave me a view out the same side of the aircraft as Murphy. It also left me feeling unnerved to have floor to ceiling open doorways to my left and right, because of the angle of the Black Hawk, one showing nothing but sky and the other ground. It didn’t help that Martin was descending, leaving my feet feeling a little light, with a little less friction under my soles than I preferred.

  I grabbed the frame of the jump seat tightly as I watched the ground.

  Martin turned the Black Hawk into a tighter circle and the helicopter banked more steeply.

  With growing worry that I’d slip right out the side, I’d have gotten myself strapped in, but I couldn’t bring myself to let go of anything. “This is more exhilarating than I thought it would be.”

  Murphy chuckled, telling Martin, "He's afraid he's going to fall out."

  Martin laughed and angled the helicopter into another steeply banking turn.

  “Asshole!” I yelled. “Why don’t you just hover?”

  Martin leveled out and straightened it up again. “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.”

  “I think I see it,” said Murphy.

  “It?” Martin asked.

  “The car. The Mustang,” Murphy clarified. “Look, Zed. Down there by the four-story building.”

  I scanned below. “The one with the solar panels all over the roof?”

  "Yeah, back at the corner in the parking lot. By that loading dock. I think it's attached to a cable. I think they're charging it."

  “That your Mustang?” Martin asked as he found a spot in the air to hold the Black Hawk steady for a moment.

  “Black with green stripes,” Murphy confirmed.

  “You see the roof of the building?” I asked.

  “The solar panels are all fucked up,” said Murphy.

  “Look again.”

  “Oh.”

  "Oh, what?” Martin asked.

  “Whites,” I told him. “On the roof.”

  “Take us in closer,” I ordered. With Whites on the building that I assumed Grace, Jazz, Fritz, and Gabe were in, I felt guilt. Grace and Jazz wouldn’t have come to College Station if they’d never met me and Murphy. Fritz and Gabe would have anyway. Now they were all down there somewhere, in trouble, or dead. I forgot about my fear of slipping out the side of the helicopter, got to my feet, and took a few steps over to lean into the cockpit.

  As I moved behind him, Murphy said, “Hold on there, cowboy.” He was probably guessing I had bad ideas in mind.

  I patted Martin on the arm, careful not to touch any of the knobs and dials on the wide console between the pilot and copilot seats. “Get us down close. I want to see inside the windows.”

  Shaking his head, Martin said, “So things here aren’t what those guys said they would be.”

  “Things go to shit,” I told him. “You know that.”

  “What’s the plan?” he asked. “What are we looking for?”

  “Our friends.” I straightened up and turned to look over Murphy’s shoulder out the window.

  Over the intercom, Murphy muttered, “Null Spot rides again.”

  Chapter 14

  At a hundred feet off the ground and just thirty or forty feet higher than the top of the building with the solar panels, Martin piloted the Black Hawk in a tight, slow circle around the building, giving us views of all sides. The Whites on top of the roof crowded the edges, following us around, trying to reach toward the sky and grab across an impossible distance, yelling their frustration through angry faces and bared teeth. More and more came out of the stairway and onto the roof.

  I struggled to get the microphone on my headset positioned. “Lower,” I told Martin.

  “No.”

  “What? Take us closer.” I let my anger over Martin’s response show.

  “No,” he replied. “Too many hazards flying that low with so many buildings around.”

  I started to say something and Murphy elbowed me hard in the ribs as he covered the mic with his other hand. “Chill, dude. Let Martin do his job. He’s the pilot. All you know about flying in helicopters is what you learned playing video games.”

  Murphy was right. I tried not to sulk.

  “You can see all you need to see from here,” Martin added.

  I scanned the grounds as we circled. Naked Whites were all over the place, coming out of buildings, out from behind bushes, out of broken-down cars. The loud whup-whup-whup of the rotors was getting the attention of every White around the campus. “You think that’s the naked horde, some of the ones who disappeared from Fort Hood?”

  “That’s not the whole horde, or at least all that’s left of it, but there’s a lot of them down there.” Murphy pointed at a lawn in the direction of the campus center. Several hundred naked Whites were running in our direction.

  “Why’d they come back here?” I asked, as much of myself as anyone.

  “They scattered in every direction after the battle,” said Murphy.

  A mob of Whites was starting to run a circle on the ground to match the one we were making in the air. On brown grass between the buildings in every direction, Whites wound their way toward us.

  All around the base of the building, I noticed fortifications. The building across the street, the Veterinary Sciences Building—it said so on a big sign—was similarly fortified. Several nearby structures also showed signs of fortification, though to a lesser degree. In and amongst the buildings were strewn the remains, both old and fresh bodies. These had to be the buildings where Fritz’s people had built their home and from where they protected the sequestered scientists who were working to bring hope back to the world.

  And now Whites were everywhere, and I couldn’t help but conclude that had I not led the naked horde into battle with the Survivor Army, had I not assassinated their leadership, then maybe the horde would have kept heading north toward Dallas and hiked themselves onto my list of yesterday’s problems. Instead, the horde had dispersed, and thousands of them were down below on the campus with plenty of Smart Ones among them. And they’d done what they were best at doing, they’d found the normal humans, and they’d overwhelmed their defenses.

  Over the noise of the helicopter’s ro
tors, the Harpy’s voice cackled as she insisted that it was my fault.

  Not true.

  But enough of it was.

  Through my desire to get revenge, I’d inadvertently killed mankind’s only hope, their only chance at a vaccine. As I ruminated myself into guilty despair, a rational thought in my head told me that these couldn’t be the only scientists the whole world over who’d survived and were working on a vaccine, but the irrational part won out. I knew about the ones who’d been working in the buildings below. I didn’t know about any others.

  Murphy bumped me again and pointed down at the building. I looked just in time to see a dark glass curtain wall panel shattering and falling away. The classroom behind the falling glass held people—normal people—waving to get our attention.

  I said, “They need our help.”

  Murphy groaned.

  Chapter 15

  It was time for commands. “Martin,” I called into the intercom, “take us down, level with the roof.” I patted Murphy on the shoulder. “Ok, machine gun boy. Kill ‘em all.”

  Murphy turned to look at me. “I can clear the roof from up here. What’s your plan?”

  I leaned out the side window to get a full look at the situation. “I don’t know how desperate those people are, but they broke out that window knowing the noise will give every White inside a woody, not to mention the ones running across the grass. Those people are desperate.”

  “Murphy?” Martin asked.

  “I don’t know about this,” said Murphy.

  “Look,” I told them, “I’ve been down this road before, at the hospital, we don’t have time to dick around. Either we get down there and we do it now, or we bail out on these people. And Murphy,” I pointed, “those might be our friends in that classroom.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Murphy shot back into his mic. He huffed and yelled over the noise. “As usual, this is stupid.”

  I grinned. “When has that stopped me?”

  “If you’re going in,” said Murphy, “I am too.”

  “No way,” I told him.