《The Secret Apocalypse》Chapter 80

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“We have to go,” Kenji said. “It’s not safe here.”

“Let’s fly out,” Maria suggested.

“But if we take the chopper, we’ll run out of fuel in no man’s land!” Jack argued. “At least if we take the Humvee we’ll have a better chance of filling up when we run out of fuel.”

I shook my head. “We nearly died trying to fill up the goddamn Humvee. Filling up is no longer a simple everyday process. It’s life threatening. Dangerous.”

“But we don’t even know if that chopper works,” Jack said. “Maybe they left it behind because it’s broken.”

I guess because we were arguing and trying to figure out what to do, we didn’t hear the jets until they were practically on top of us.

There were two of them. Weird looking. Big and bulky. And heavily armed.

“What the hell?” Maria asked. “What’s going on?”

“Jesus,” Daniel said. “They’re bringing in the big guns. They’re A-10 Warthogs. Bombers.”

I looked up at them through the binoculars. “What are they bombing?”

“I don’t know.”

The Warthogs flew for the storage hangars, passing directly over them. Were the hangars their targets? I looked more closely over at the massive storage sheds; zooming in as far as I could with the binoculars. It was only then did I notice the huge sliding doors of the hangars were closed. I couldn’t quite tell from where we were, but it looked like they were chained shut. They were barricaded with sandbags and concrete barriers.

The Warthogs began to circle back around.

Kenji was looking through the scope on his rifle. “The hangars are locked and barricaded from the outside,” he said, confirming what I was seeing.

“Why would they do that?” Maria asked.

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“They’re hiding something inside,” Kenji whispered.

I don’t know why he whispered that. Maybe because he realized what it actually meant. Because as far as I could tell, it meant that the military had herded a whole crowd of people into those hangars. They had locked the doors. Thrown away the key.

People inside had been trapped. Quarantined. Nowhere to go.

Had they been infected?

The Warthogs flew over the hangars firing their missiles and dropping their bombs. Huge orange fireballs engulfed the buildings and the surrounding areas. We felt the shockwave from the blast as the ground shook. A second later the noise of the explosions reached us, like we were watching a movie with the sound out of sync.

We were shell shocked. No one said a word or moved or did anything. A few minutes later the smoke from the explosions had drifted up and away into the dusty, red sky.

Kenji shouldered his rifle once more and looked over at the wreckage. I scanned with the binoculars to see if anything remained.

A gust of wind blew through the smoke, giving us a clear line of sight. What I saw turned my blood cold.

Ice freakin cold.

In amongst the concrete rubble and the twisted steel support structures were the infected. They were everywhere. They were running in all directions. Again, there were too many to count, and again they reminded me of ants defending their nest.

“We gotta go,” Kenji said, his voice eerily calm.

I lowered the binoculars, rubbed my eyes and had another look, just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

Unfortunately everything I was seeing was real.

Daniel shouldered his rifle as well and looked through the scope. “Oh my God. How? Why?”

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“What the hell is it?” Jack asked.

Jack and Maria were both squinting but without the aid of a telescopic lens they couldn’t quite see what was happening.

“It’s the infected…they’re… they’re everywhere,” I stammered, unable to form whole sentences.

Daniel couldn’t believe it. “Why the hell did they lock up so many people?”

“They panicked,” Kenji said. “They lost control, so they panicked.”

It would not have taken long for the infection to spread from person to person in such a confined area like that. I wondered how many people the military had forced in there at gun point.

“There’s so many of them,” Daniel said in disbelief.

Too many, I thought to myself. Too many to count. And too many to shoot. They must’ve been crammed in there like sardines.

“How did so many survive those bombs?” I asked. “Those jets just unleashed a whole arsenal!”

No one answered me. They were still in shock, mesmerized by the sheer number of infected that were now running and staggering and crawling all over the airport runways. They were running blindly in all directions. A lot of them were on fire, even more had been scorched black.

We had to leave. And we would have to fly out. We couldn’t risk getting trapped on the ground in one of the Humvees. Not with that many infected running loose. We had to take our chances in the sky.

The Warthogs flew in low for another pass, firing whole clusters of rockets, taking careful aim not to destroy any section of runway. They were expert shooters, I’ll give them that. And they were taking out hundreds of infected at a time. But unfortunately there was still a huge number left.

Kenji warned us if the Warthogs couldn’t take them all out, they’ll probably bring in the Apache attack helicopters, just like they did when they destroyed the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

We did not want to be here when the Apache’s arrived.

Once again, we found ourselves fighting a war on two fronts.

“So what the hell do we do?” Jack asked.

“We have to fly out,” Kenji said. “And we gotta go right now. How long to prep the chopper for takeoff?” he asked Daniel.

“Maybe five minutes,” Daniel answered. “Minimum three.”

“We don’t have five minutes!” Maria shouted. “The infected will be here before then.”

She was right. The infected were running at full sprint. It wouldn’t take them long to get here.

“Those fuel tankers,” Kenji said. “We can blow them up. It won’t stop them completely but it’ll buy us some time.”

“Yeah,” Jack said smiling. “Just like the hardware store. Only bigger.”

Daniel warned us that jet fuel was much more volatile than regular fuel, much more dangerous.

But we didn’t have a choice. The infected were running blindly in our direction. They didn’t know we were there yet, but as soon as they did, we were dead.

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