Deadfall: Survivors (24 page)

We sped by the liquor store
and the road leveled out a bit into a straight away. Aaron was speeding into the road ahead of us, while Evan kept shouting updates through the back window. I turned around and saw the two trucks rounding up the hill, and beginning to speed up onto the highway. Evan was scrambling to try to set up his big machine gun, but was having trouble setting it up on anything. When he tried to open up one of the containers with the ammunition, a long belt with bullets spilled out all over the floor of the truck bed. I heard him cursing, dropping the machine gun, and picking up one of the rifles the soldier had brought in from the helicopter.

As our truck sped faster and faster, I was thankful that we had found this rather powerful truck. We were staying ahead of them. They must have realized this as well, because we started hearing the sounds of bullets zipping past us. Everyone in the back ducked down
, and one of the soldiers began to fire back at the truck, making them swerve on the road. I did manage to glimpse the other soldier using that large pack he had brought on. It was some kind of radio. He had hooked up a headset of some sort to it, and was shouting into it.

Up ahead, a pile of cars alongside
the right side of the road, was forcing Aaron to slow down a bit to be able to get around them, but in those few instances, our pursuers began to catch up quickly, the hail of bullets clanging off the back of the truck or whizzing past us, zipping in a high pitch ahead of us. The armed soldier replied with gunfire, and then flew back himself into the back of the truck. He had been hit by something.

We pulled around the two abandoned cars and began to speed up again, putting a bit of distance between us and the two trucks, but they were certainly not giving up. Aaron probably had his
foot all the way down on to the floor as we sped up on the highway, the powerful roar of the truck’s engine rumbling underneath us.

As the two trucks reached the car obstacles, I heard Aaron shout from the front.

“HOLY SHIT!”

There was a loud sound, like a
super large vacuum cleaner combined with a grinder, from somewhere up above us, and then the two trucks began to get vanished in a haze of flying metal. One of the trucks flew off the road, glass and metal flying off of it. It was as if a chainsaw had hit a tree, and pieces of wood and bark were just flying off of it. The second truck came to a quick stop, and began trying to turn around when the hailstorm turned to hit it. The truck disappeared in a haze. It was like a picture getting out of focus. Smoke poured out of the front and the cab, and its roof was pulverized.

As we drove on, Aaron began to slow down, I heard the two soldiers cheering in the back. Our savior came into view right above us. It had come down the highway
, and I had not seen it at all, but Aaron sure had. Some kind of attack helicopter had swooped in and done some substantial recycling of those two trucks, and, probably, whoever was inside of them. The helicopter, an Apache I was later told, flew on down the road a little bit, circled around the trucks and then came back towards us.

The soldier on the radio was still talking on it, but there was a huge smile on his face. The soldier that had taken a hit sat up in the truck
, and asked us through the window to pull over.

Aaron edged the truck to the side of the road slowly
, and as we piled out of the car, he sat there in the driver’s seat, griping the steering wheel tightly. Some people threw up, others tensed up. Heather and I stood outside the truck. We were in the edge of this upper valley, maybe a mile before the highway began climbing up, more winding-like into the mountains. On our right, there was a wide meadow type area; probably had been previous farming land. The attack helicopter was hovering just above this area, the tall grass blown flat by the air being pushed down by our savior. The soldier was on the radio talking to the pilot in the helicopter, relaying information about what had happened. I gathered that there were two other of these attack helicopters somewhere else, maybe now being guided to find the other two missing helicopters. I didn’t quite get what the pilot said back to him, but the soldier replied that they would wait here for pickup. Then the Apache lifted off a bit higher off the ground, and sped down the highway in the direction we had just come from.

Evan had jumped out of the back of the truck
, and was digging around inside the back of the cab, coming out with a first aid kit. He rushed back to the bed of the truck. The wounded soldier, well, the one that had been struck by the bullets, was sitting on the edge of the tailgate, and began digging into the kit. He had taken off his outer jacket and was looking himself over.

“It’s not too bad.”

He had been hit, not just once, but three times, but according to him, none of the hits were bad. Could just be soldier badassery, but at the same time, he wasn’t bleeding badly and he was up and about, not unlike someone who might have been shot three times in parts of the body that would make someone just fall over and give up.

Lucy had stayed inside with Aaron, still seated on the driver’s seat, but Tague had come out
, and was now talking to the soldier who had the radio. His name was Captain Rhodes, the guy who had been shot was Private Black, and the one who had been hurt in the crash was also a Private; a tag on his shirt had his name, Cobb. Rhodes was the pilot of the helicopter. The captain had radioed in to another helicopter that was on its way to pick them up here in the clearing, and he informed us that they would get there in about fifteen minutes. He thanked us for the help and we began to exchange our stories.

I know we kept ours mostly on a need to know basis
, and I'm sure they did as well, but here’s  what we figured out.

Out east, based off a few coastal cities, the US Army (which was now essentially what had survived of all the branches)
, had organized itself off five nuclear aircraft carriers and a whole hodgepodge of other ships. They had based themselves in Wilmington, North Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, and Annapolis,  Maryland. When Deadfall had occurred, the Navy had been in so many different areas around the world, and had not been immediately told to do anything different. When the zombies started popping up, orders started getting confused. Within a week, the whole structure on land had fallen apart, and the last orders were to return back to the US. Then less and less information was making it out to the ships around the world.

As the
ships sped back home, they were still able to stay in touch with each other through a satellite system that still worked, but they were getting little word from anything on land. Some big time generals had managed to make it off the land and  onto the carriers. As they began to reach the east coast (they weren’t sure about Pacific fleets, and what was going on in the west coast), they found out the president and his cabinet had gone to a bunker, and had not been heard of since then. With little to no command structure on land, the Admirals and the surviving Generals, decided on the three cities in order to attempt to reestablish contact with any military on land.

Apparently, those first few forays on land were quite disastrous. During this whole time, they had been at sea, and in their already highly controlled habitats, they had not had any issues with zombies
, and were quite unprepared for what they encountered. Their first deaths resulted on these exploratory parties.

These specific men that we had just saved
had been at Fort Bragg, a large military base in eastern North Carolina. They had been part of the largest force at the base that had managed to organize and barricade themselves against the fifty thousand or so zombies that poured into that base in the three weeks they had been there. While they had survived with typical army ingenuity, they were rapidly running out of supplies.

They made contact with the fleet now creating a base for itself in Wilmington, a coastal city, and with their help, they managed to get themselves evacuated out of the fort, along with as many of the helicopters they could get their hands on. For the following months, they returned many times to get more of the helicopters and to mark locations of fuel depots.

Two carriers and countless other ships now made the mouth of the Cape Fear River their home. They had taken over the southernmost tip of the Cape Fear, the old civil war Fort Fisher, torn down the bridges onto the island, purged that tiny sliver of land from zombies, and now had themselves a staging area. The carriers provided electricity for the entire island easily, and they used a military ocean terminal just on the other side to supply themselves. They also made use of the helicopters, scavenged from Fort Bragg, to tag locations with supplies in land, and well organized parties in trucks would drive in and get them. The hope had been to find as many of the military as they could bring back to begin to retake the country.

It never quite worked that way. The group at Fort Bragg had numbered almost
two thousand, but that group was, by far, the largest that had survived intact. Some marines had survived at Camp Lejeune, just north of Wilmington, and there had been a few scant survivors from other bases on the east coast, but that hope for a surge of soldiers never happened. I wanted to mention that most of them had probably bailed and headed home, or in the case of someone I knew, had gone horribly rogue, but I didn’t want to give too much away at that point.

This group, along with many others, had spent the past
nine months now flying as far in as they could, trying to spot survivors. As Captain Rhodes mentioned though, finding any in this dead wasteland was becoming harder and harder. The further west they managed to go, the fewer survivors they found. In fact, this was to be one of the last few scouting parties to be sent out. They were going to be canceling such missions, in order to save on fuel. Apparently, the brass was coming up with new plans on what to do.

On our part we told them, loosely, about our situation. I explained, without giving out details, that we survived in the mountains, and survived because zombies rarely came up there. I could tell from
Tague’s facial expressions, that he was of the same thinking as I was. We still weren’t sure about the group we were looking for. They had certainly sounded military like, and while these guys certainly seemed legit, we just didn’t want to take our chances.

Tague asked them if they knew who had shot at them. The captain said he didn’t, but that it wasn’t new. Every once in a while they would come across a group of survivors who had actually enjoyed the fact that civilization had fallen, and had created their own little fiefdoms. They had been attacked on a few occasions, but it was rarely anything they couldn’t handle. They certainly had never been shot at by RPGs.

When the captain’s radio chirped to life, Tague pulled me aside. We wondered if we should tell them what we knew about the group. We agreed to tell them what we could, without giving away any information about our house. After he got off the radio, we began to explain to him how we had heard the transmission on the radio, how this was some kind of group that was out there looking for some kind of vault or fort, and killing people who were there. The captain listened with a serious look on his face, as we told him how we had tried to track these people down, our failed attempt to get one of them and how we had found them, or at least some of them, at the conference center on Black Mountain. We explained to him that this was probably the group that had attacked them.

He was quiet for a moment before telling us that there had been many talks about the possibility of former soldiers or other government workers with top secret clearance creating their own groups
, and using what they knew to find  secret stashes of military or high tech equipment or supplies used to survive. He had yet to encounter anything like that on his missions. This was certainly information that he was going to have to relay back to his superiors.

All we could tell him about their identities was that they appeared to follow someone called
Inanna, to which the captain could only shrug his shoulders and admit he didn’t know who that was or what that meant.

Their helicopter arrived a few moments later, landing in the clearing, and two other soldiers, carrying duffel bags,
jumped off and ran over. The captain instructed them to take care of the two wounded soldiers. He asked us if we would remain here while he went up in the helicopter to find out what was going on, and we agreed.

Tague, Evan and I moved towards the front of the truck, where Aaron had finally calmed down. Heather had jumped in the passenger side and was sitting with Lucy. We huddled around the driver’s seat
, and I began to relay to the rest of the group what we had learned from the soldiers. There was still a sense of distrust, and not just from Heather, but even from Aaron. When asked why he had been so quick to go help them, Aaron just nodded saying he didn’t know, but I could tell that there was something to it. Without pressing him, we began to discuss our options. We certainly didn’t  want to give up our house, but if what these soldiers said was the truth, then we certainly  needed to keep some kind of connection to them, and if they were rebuilding something on the coast, we would have to make moving there an option, as well.

Evan also mentioned he really wanted to find a way to mount his new toy onto the back of the truck. He had the biggest grin on his face. Tague told him not to say anything too loudly
, or the soldiers might ask to have back what actually belonged to them. The look on Evan’s face made some of us laugh as he realized he just might lose his new toy.