Here's a very brief view of what's to come:
As he’d figured, the rumble of the jet engines had meant
that the monsters who stalked out of sight in the wilderness beyond had come calling. The first place they’d been drawn had been the airport, of
course. But the staccato rattle of automatic gunfire had erupted from that
quarter, followed by the growl of other engines that soon joined the spitting
of lead.
Ron had ordered Jean and Oliver to remain indoors while he
viewed the action that was, for now, confined to the newly cleared and
operational Charlotte-Douglas Airport. Through the powerful lenses of his
finest binoculars he was watching the forming battle from the secure perch of
their rooftop redoubt.
The first thing he’d noticed in the morning light was that
the enormous C5 transport was painted a dull flat green. All markings of the US
armed forces—from any of the branches—had either been removed, or had never
been present. From what he did know, the only versions of that jet that were
operational were all property of one or the other of the branches of the US
military. So this one had either been taken from one of those branches, or had
been in private hands. Or perhaps it belonged to one of the civilian arms of
the government—either the CIA or DIA. Ron pulled the binoculars from his face
and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Hell, the ideas and suspicions made it all
too bothersome to ponder.
What he needed to do was pay attention to what was going on.
During the night, while men had obviously worked through the
dark hours, guided by generated lamps that he could see standing on tripods all
over the tarmac, the newly arrived forces had been quite busy. There were
armored personnel carriers—three of them—and two giant vehicles that he
realized were Abrams tanks. Even those were absent any markings that labeled
them as property of the Army or Marines. They were all just painted that same
flat desert camouflage. There weren’t even any identifying numerals or letters
to differentiate one from the other.
Off to the east of the C5 transport there was a house-sized
oblong of what appeared to be something made wholly of steel. Using the figures
that he could see scurrying around the thing, it was roughly fifty or sixty
feet long and twenty feet wide, perhaps fifteen feet tall. It was on a trailer
with stout wheels. Ron could even see a large semi sitting idle nearby, and he
didn’t need a rocket scientist to tell him that the heavy truck was going to
soon be pulling whatever was on that trailer.
While the men had worked in the temporary electric lamps,
the deaders had come filtering out of the wilderness as Ron had known they
would. But they’d been prepared for that. Whoever these jokers were, the
Colonel had told them what to expect and they had come loaded for bear.
The airport was all but smothered by an army of rot on its
north side. And a mindless pincer movement had gone into motion; the classic
flanking maneuvers of the dead. Of course there were no tactics involved on
behalf of the zombies—they were merely like a river of stinking water that
pushed until it met resistance and then parted to flow around the blockage
until that poisonous stream met again at some further point. It wasn’t measured
and it wasn’t considered, but it was surely effective against the living. Riggs
had long since lost count of the number of times he’d seen people overtaken by
the mindless simplicity of it.
As he put the lenses back to his face, Ron was glad that
he’d talked Jean and Oliver into remaining inside. He wasn’t sure what was
going to happen, but he didn’t like what he was witnessing and he didn’t want
to them to watch what was going on if it went against those people who were now
holding the airport against the dead hordes that had assembled there. Seeing
the inexorable tide flow around the major block of buildings to converge on the
makeshift strongpoint of the big jet and its disgorged cargo, Ron felt that he
could all but hear and smell the stalking mass that heaved itself toward the
pristine lines of the winged vehicle.
He feared the worst.
Realizing that the initial reactions had been just preliminary movements by what he now saw were soldiers, Ron went to one of the chairs he kept at his reloading station and pulled it close to the wall that surrounded the roof. Seated, he leaned forward until his elbows were on the concrete parapet and settled in for the show.
2 comments:
Been looking forward to this for a long time already. Bring it on!
Thanks. I'm working diligently to finish it up.
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