Winchester: Over (Winchester Undead) (8 page)

Denver International Airport
, Colorado

Approaching the first pieces of wreckage scattered over the runway, Cliff soon encountered several of the undead wandering about out in the open. Attached to the end of his short barrel FN-P90 was a Gemtech suppressor; although it wouldn’t make his rifle a silent whisper like in the movies, under cover of the loud popping sounds from the burning wreckage, the rifle report shouldn’t be noticed. The sun was starting to set, and he needed to secure shelter if he was going to survive a Colorado winter night.

It was peculiar to Cliff, not moving from cover to cover with quick movements
. Although the threat he faced was from the undead, not armed enemy combatants, he still walked in a tactical crouch out of habit, rolling his feet heel-to-toe to keep the muzzle of his rifle level while moving. Ten years ago, during his training at The Farm, Cliff had smiled to himself when his instructors were teaching them that technique—Cliff had mastered the movement as a freshman member of the marching band at John Marshall High in Rochester, Minnesota.

Rifle up, eyes open, controlled breathing through his nose, Cliff was within
thirty yards of the first undead. The reticle of his Trijicon ACOG in line with his first target, steadily breathing out, Cliff gently squeezed the trigger and was satisfied to see the undead’s head explode away from his shot. Driving his rifle to the right, the next shot was lined up and fired. Moving closer to the dozen or so undead remaining, Cliff saw he had been wrong; they had noticed the rifle’s report, their heads snapping towards Cliff.

“
Well shit, that didn’t work like I planned,” Cliff said aloud. Staying in his combat crouch with his rifle pointed up, he began to move at a much quicker pace to the right of the group. Like a quarterback flushed out of the pocket, Cliff kept his eyes downfield and continued to pick off undead targets while on the move. Having made a large semi-circle around the group while shooting on the quick-walk, the remaining undead were sent back to the grave with a single shot. Cliff quickly made a tactical reload, placing the magazine from the rifle in the deep back pocket of his pants. The magazine still had unspent rounds that could come in handy later.

R
ifle up, Cliff made a slow circle to scan for threats in all directions. Satisfied that he was for now alone on the desolate runway, Cliff took off at a trot towards the wreckage of the President’s aircraft.

The front half of the fuselage had come apart at the wing root
, and had rolled to a sliding stop in a drainage culvert near the fire station located on the taxiway. Although lying on the aircraft’s port side, the cylindrical structure of the front section of the aircraft appeared to be mostly intact. There was a chance that someone had survived the crash. Regardless, he would have to verify the President’s status.

Maypearl, Texas

Jessie checked on the children still sleeping in the tents before coming back to the group sitting around the fire. Bexar had given Malachi one of his “spare” flasks of Jack Daniels whiskey, which Malachi had quickly consumed while recounting everything that had happened since he’d received Bexar’s text message. Between the stress of his journey, the horror of losing his wife, his bad injury, and the effects of the whiskey, Malachi eventually succumbed to it all and fell into a drunken slumber. Bexar and Jack were prepared for this, and wrapped him in a blanket covered with a poncho, then handcuffed his left hand to a chain wrapped around the rear bumper of the Scout.

“
Well Bexar,” said Jack, “if you’re right and he’s infected, this will give us a chance.”

“
Jack, I’m sure he’s infected. I think he’s pretty much fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

December 28
th

Maypearl
, Texas

The sun peered over the edge of the eastern horizon and the twenty-eighth of December had begun for the new world.

In
Maypearl, Bexar stoked the fire to shake the winter’s cold and prepare the coffee for the group. The blue enamel coffee pot was placed on a couple of rocks over one edge of the coals. Rather than wait for the water to boil, Bexar went to his Yeti cooler.
These perishables won’t last much longer
, he thought,
especially with the wide-flung temperatures of a central Texas winter
. Out of the cooler came a dozen eggs, a bag of shredded cheddar cheese, a Tupperware of salsa from his favorite taqueria back home, a twenty-pack of handmade flour tortillas from the same taqueria, and a package of Slovacek sausage. Looking at the breakfast in the making, he thought he would probably be able to find eggs again, but the rest of it would be gone forever after this morning.

Thankfully
, Will and Keeley had slept through the night, but young children know no snooze button and both were now happily awake with the early morning energy found only in children. Jessie and Sandra awoke with the children and began tending to their immediate needs. Jack soon followed out of his tent and, after stopping in the woods to relieve himself, walked up to Bexar.

“
That looks great,” he said. “Have you checked on Malachi yet?”

“
No, I was waiting for you to get up if I didn’t hear anything from him before then.”

“
Okay, let’s go over there.”

Bexar
picked up his AR which had been propped against the camping table and slung it over his shoulder. Jack wore his pistol but let Bexar give cover with the long gun while peeling back the poncho and blanket from Malachi’s face.

Cold lifeless eyes stared back at them
, and Malachi’s skin was cold to the touch. As Jack reached to check for a pulse, Malachi’s head suddenly turned and his teeth snapped at Jack’s hand.

Jack
jumped back. “Shit, that was close!”

“
Well doesn’t this just suck? Sorry Malachi, I love you and will always remember you.” Bexar fired a single shot and gave his friend final rest. Malachi was dead.

NORAD

Maj
or Wright had not been able to contact his wife since the attack. The facility he was in was hardened against the effects of an EMP, even if it wasn’t physically hardened like the former facility in “the mountain.” He knew that the EMP events had disabled most of the electronic devices in the U.S., but that hadn’t stopped him from repeatedly trying his wife’s cellphone using a SAT-phone that was on site.

They were on
Day Three of the attack, and he didn’t see how they would be allowed to leave any time soon. Using data from hardened radar installations, he had reviewed the tracks showing that nearly every aircraft had fallen from the sky. He had examined the communications from the National Command Authority and had seen that the nation was in its death throes. Satellite Intelligence (SATINT) showed that just about every major city was nearly engulfed in raging, unchecked fires. The dead roamed the streets, and the living were quickly becoming an endangered species.

Over the
past twelve hours, Wright had regained communication with five other government facilities. Some of them were physically hardened against attack, others had some preventative measures in place. As much as he had hated Cheyenne Mountain when he was a young officer, Wright desperately wished he was there now. On hand, in the new facility—away from the mountain and back on base—there were some provisions, but they wouldn’t be able to survive a direct assault by the undead.

The National Military Command Center Reservation at the Raven Rock Mountain Complex
, known simply as Site R, was still online. Camp David appeared to be a complete loss to fire, and had been overrun by the undead. Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center went dark with the EMP event, which it should have survived but satellite imagery showed that a large commercial aircraft had crashed through the middle of the command complex.

United States Strategic Command
(USSTRATCOM) had been responsive for the first eighteen hours after the attack, but had since failed to respond. One of the enlisted men had been able to patch into their systems and gain access to the video feeds for the security systems—the lights were on, but they were completely overrun by the undead. No living survivors could be found, and the same appeared to be the case with the facility under Denver International.

Wright could only assume that Air Force One had suffered a fatal incident while attempting to land at DIA
, after losing the aircraft’s transponder and judging by the complete lack of radio traffic. The other VC-25 never made it off the ramp, the Vice President presumed dead with all others onboard.

It was staggering how quickly the virus had propagated and spread.
There was still a lot of data to review, but at first glance it appeared to Wright that nearly every city in the lower forty-eight states had suffered a major system failure, compounded by additional major damage from crashing aircraft, uncontrolled fires, and the rapid spread of the undead.

Besides the handful of secured facilities still operating in the U
.S., three carrier strike groups (CSGs) were returning as fast as their support ships could sail. Three CSGs had been in port in the U.S. when the attack happened, and the other three had gone dark shortly after the attack and were presumed to be lost to the undead.

Cache Site
near Maypearl, Texas

To Bexar and Jack it was obvious that they were in trouble. After burying Malachi next to his wife Amber, the group sat in the still winter air, trying to keep warm near the dwindling fire. Even the children were subdued while they played together.

“
Malachi said that Amber hadn’t been bitten, though I’m assuming they were covered in whatever fell from those chemtrails,” Jack said.

“
Yeah Jack, that’s a problem,” replied Bexar. “We’ve seen that the dead rise again to feed on the living. The living are then killed by the dead, and reanimated by whatever the dead are carrying, but if someone dies any other way they rise from the grave as well. That’s fucked up.”

“
Bexar, what do we do? How do you make it through something like this? We always planned on riding out the storm and then rejoining society as it clawed up from the ashes, but how does the human race even survive something like this?”

“
Jack, all we can do is stay here and do what we planned. Ride out the initial storm, then try to find other survivors.”

“
Okay, well, we better go through Malachi’s stuff and figure out what he has that we can use.” Jack stood and walked to Malachi’s Scout and trailer. Bexar joined him, and soon the contents of Malachi’s vehicle were laid out on the ground.

In the Scout were Malachi’s rifle, pistols
, and some ammo, along with his med-kit, two full five-gallon jerry cans of gas, ten cans of Coleman fuel, two Coleman lanterns with twenty extra mantels, three cases of MREs, and ten gallons of water in two blue water jugs. In the back of the truck were two plastic ten-gallon gas cans full of fuel. The clothing that Malachi and Amber had packed didn’t fit anyone else in the group, but they kept useful items such as shoelaces, belts, and a few cotton shirts.

Bexar was amazed at how much stuff Malachi had stuffed in his little Scout and trailer, but the real
ly interesting items were found in the cache site. Besides more MREs, water, and batteries, buried underneath some of the other gear were a handful of homebuilt Faraday boxes, which were designed to shield electronics from an EMP event. They were amazed Malachi had thought to construct them.

The group had generally believed that society would fall due to a global economic collapse
resulting in rapid inflation, followed by mass starvation and civil unrest. Ever the geek, Malachi had prepared for an EMP. The first Faraday box contained a Yaesu mobile ham radio with microphone and speaker. The antenna was found outside the box. The second box contained a high end Garmin Global Positioning System unit, not the typical small GPS for daily travel, but one used for expeditions. The last Faraday box contained a Voyager shortwave radio that could be hand-cranked. The radio also had an attached solar panel.

Assuming that the
Faraday boxes worked as they had been designed, the group now had a way to navigate. Hopefully, there were still others in the world able to broadcast on shortwave radio, and maybe still some HAM operators with working gear who had survived. Besides the electronic gear, Malachi had also stashed another four thousand rounds of Black Hills .223 ammo, along with another two dozen Magpul thirty-round Pmags.

By the time the
y had finished pulling all the cached items out of the bottom of the modified water tank, the sun was high overhead. The kids went to the tents for their afternoon nap, which gave the adults more time to play with the newfound gear.

Bexar loaded each of Malachi’s
Pmags, while Jack wired the Yaesu radio into his FJ and mounted the antenna on the roof rack. Sandra put the shortwave with the solar panel out to charge, while she and Jessie broke down the MREs from their boxes to save weight and space before packing half of them in the FJ and the other half in the Jeep. The task complete, Jessie grabbed the shortwave and climbed on top of the Jeep’s roof rack, Sandra following behind her. They began scanning through the shortwave channels.

“
Wait Jessie, go back, I heard voices on that channel,” Sandra suddenly said excitedly.

Jessie
went back to Channel 15,260 and called, “Bexar, Jack, come here quick!”

“
…
with that news I am sorry to inform you that it would appear the first cases of the virus have been found in the U.K., and the efforts to contain the outbreak to the continent have failed. We at the BBC have been instructed to inform all citizens that they should not leave their homes. If any family members take ill with the virus or are bitten, quarantine them immediately and notify local authorities. Do not try to aid them, you will be exposed. Globally, we have reports of mass outbreaks across every continent save Australia and the Antarctic. We have lost all contact with the North American continent, and it is now assumed that the United States, Canada, and Mexico are completely overrun. South America reports widespread panic, riots, and looting.

On the continent, most of Eastern Europe has gone dark after the nuclear exchange and the Ministry of Defense is still monitoring the nuclear fallout and radiation as it drifts to the west.
We are told that we are not in danger of receiving any direct radiation, but we will continue to update as we can.

Ministry satellites continue to track the risen dead as they spread out from the major metropolitan locations in the infected areas.
If you are listening to this broadcast from Western Europe, northern Africa, or even the United States
…” The station turned to static.

“
Jack, what happened?” said Jessie.

“
Jessie, shortwave can be weird, but anyway, it looks like we lost the reception we had.” Jack turned to Bexar. “We might be in more trouble than we thought, and we’re still really close to D/FW.”