fuck!” Eric said. He looked back at the rapidly receding village, where some of the figures still clustered around Johan while others staggered to the road and began following their vehicle.
“We’ll go to the game preserve,” Nancy said with almost unnatural calm. “The diamond mine. They’ll have good security. We can ride this out.”
“Ride
what
out?” Eric slammed his fist against the dashboard in frustration and horror. “What the fuck is going on?”
Nancy just kept driving.
CHAPTER TEN
Whupwhupwhupwhup…
Ugh, I hated that noise. It meant I was in the air, enclosed in a small, noisy, flying metal coffin that could malfunction at any moment. Planes were bad enough, but helicopters just sucked. Carl was a good pilot, but being in one made my stomach unhappy, and I so did not wanna barf again this month.
Seriously, right before the zombie plague hit I’d had a horrible case of food poisoning caused by bad sushi, then been hit with Walker’s flu. Got chomped by a couple of zombies, and then topped it off by wading into all manner of blood, viscera, and tragedy. And, oh yeah, a helicopter crash.
Maybe I should buy stock in Dramamine.
I snuck a glance at Lil, sitting quietly next to a window and staring out at the passing landscape as the sun rose. It was a stark contrast to her almost manic excitement on the helicopter trip from Redwood grove to San Francisco. The circles under her eyes weren’t quite as extreme as they’d been yesterday, though. Just being up and active seemed to have helped her.
At least this was a larger helicopter than the one we’d taken coming in. It had to be, in order to hold the ten of us plus the flight crew. A female mechanic had replaced poor Red. I didn’t know her name, and had to stop myself from thinking of her as our token red shirt.
When we got to the roof the sky was clear, and there were two helicopters. But we all crammed into one. Both choppers took off and headed south. All smoke and mirrors.
It’s not paranoia when someone’s trying to kill you.
We were all in our matching SWAT chic of black BDUs, long-sleeved fire-retardant shirts, lace-up boots, and assorted Kevlar pieces to cover our vulnerable bits, although JT had made some modifications to accommodate the mobility he needed for his particular skills. He had shoes with flexible soles and a good grip on the bottom, and nothing that restricted his joints.
We also toted our weapons of choice, the trusty M4s plus the new “squirrel rifles” as Tony called them. The AM15s were stubby green autos similar to the M4, but they fired much smaller rounds—a shitload of ’em, too, courtesy of that big spinning drum thingee on the top. It was an interesting weapon, quiet as a pellet gun, no recoil or over-penetration. Yet if you had it on full auto, a tight string could cut a zombie in half like a laser.
I preferred the M4, probably because it was familiar, but the squirrel rifles were great when you had to worry about infectious splatter, or a round going through a rotting skull and into an innocent bystander.
Tony had his BAS (Big Ass Shotgun), which spent most of its time in a holster slung across his back. It was a special weapon for special occasions. Somewhat surprisingly, Tony used it wisely.
Our helicopter veered southwest toward the ocean and the Outer Sunset neighborhood. I watched through the window as zombies lurched their way up and down the streets. Outer Sunset was laid out pretty much in a grid, with numerical streets running north-south and alphabetical streets running east-west. There were no Victorian Painted Ladies out here. The neighborhood once called the Outside Lands—and didn’t that just smack of Lovecraft—had been one of the last to be built on top of what were mainly sand dunes. The houses and apartments were, for the most part, painted in pastel colors, eschewing the gilt-edged purples, greens, and blues. I remembered reading somewhere that a paint job for one of the
“We’ll go to the game preserve,” Nancy said with almost unnatural calm. “The diamond mine. They’ll have good security. We can ride this out.”
“Ride
what
out?” Eric slammed his fist against the dashboard in frustration and horror. “What the fuck is going on?”
Nancy just kept driving.
CHAPTER TEN
Whupwhupwhupwhup…
Ugh, I hated that noise. It meant I was in the air, enclosed in a small, noisy, flying metal coffin that could malfunction at any moment. Planes were bad enough, but helicopters just sucked. Carl was a good pilot, but being in one made my stomach unhappy, and I so did not wanna barf again this month.
Seriously, right before the zombie plague hit I’d had a horrible case of food poisoning caused by bad sushi, then been hit with Walker’s flu. Got chomped by a couple of zombies, and then topped it off by wading into all manner of blood, viscera, and tragedy. And, oh yeah, a helicopter crash.
Maybe I should buy stock in Dramamine.
I snuck a glance at Lil, sitting quietly next to a window and staring out at the passing landscape as the sun rose. It was a stark contrast to her almost manic excitement on the helicopter trip from Redwood grove to San Francisco. The circles under her eyes weren’t quite as extreme as they’d been yesterday, though. Just being up and active seemed to have helped her.
At least this was a larger helicopter than the one we’d taken coming in. It had to be, in order to hold the ten of us plus the flight crew. A female mechanic had replaced poor Red. I didn’t know her name, and had to stop myself from thinking of her as our token red shirt.
When we got to the roof the sky was clear, and there were two helicopters. But we all crammed into one. Both choppers took off and headed south. All smoke and mirrors.
It’s not paranoia when someone’s trying to kill you.
We were all in our matching SWAT chic of black BDUs, long-sleeved fire-retardant shirts, lace-up boots, and assorted Kevlar pieces to cover our vulnerable bits, although JT had made some modifications to accommodate the mobility he needed for his particular skills. He had shoes with flexible soles and a good grip on the bottom, and nothing that restricted his joints.
We also toted our weapons of choice, the trusty M4s plus the new “squirrel rifles” as Tony called them. The AM15s were stubby green autos similar to the M4, but they fired much smaller rounds—a shitload of ’em, too, courtesy of that big spinning drum thingee on the top. It was an interesting weapon, quiet as a pellet gun, no recoil or over-penetration. Yet if you had it on full auto, a tight string could cut a zombie in half like a laser.
I preferred the M4, probably because it was familiar, but the squirrel rifles were great when you had to worry about infectious splatter, or a round going through a rotting skull and into an innocent bystander.
Tony had his BAS (Big Ass Shotgun), which spent most of its time in a holster slung across his back. It was a special weapon for special occasions. Somewhat surprisingly, Tony used it wisely.
Our helicopter veered southwest toward the ocean and the Outer Sunset neighborhood. I watched through the window as zombies lurched their way up and down the streets. Outer Sunset was laid out pretty much in a grid, with numerical streets running north-south and alphabetical streets running east-west. There were no Victorian Painted Ladies out here. The neighborhood once called the Outside Lands—and didn’t that just smack of Lovecraft—had been one of the last to be built on top of what were mainly sand dunes. The houses and apartments were, for the most part, painted in pastel colors, eschewing the gilt-edged purples, greens, and blues. I remembered reading somewhere that a paint job for one of the
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