Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

with the rest of America in an unstoppable economic nosedive after the death of its domestic oil, gas, and chemical industries, he considered himself lucky to get a job with the newly formed Quarantine Authority, a branch of the Office of Homeland Security that was assigned to protect the wall that stood between the infected and the rest of the world.

      But all that was two years ago. It felt like another lifetime.

      Today, his job was a routine sweep with the Coast Guard. Earlier that morning, a surveillance plane had spotted a small group of survivors—known as Unincorporated Civilian Casualties by the politicians in Washington, but simply as “uncles” by the flyboys in the Quarantine Authority—working to wrest a wrecked shrimp boat loose from a tangle of cables and nets and overgrown vegetation. Most of the boats left in the Houston Ship Channel were half-sunken wrecks. And what hadn’t sunk was hopelessly, intractably mired in muck and garbage. There was no chance at all that a handful of uncles could get a boat loose from all that mess and make a run for it. And even if they could, they’d never be able to beat the blockade of Coast Guard cutters waiting just off shore. They’d be blasted out of the water before they lost sight of land. But the Quarantine Authority’s mission was to make sure nobody escaped from the zone, and so the order had gone out, as it had numerous times before, to mobilize and neutralize as necessary.

      Now, along with three other pilots from the Quarantine Authority, Barnes was slowly moving south toward the Houston Ship Channel. Once there, they’d rendezvous with the boys from the Coast Guard’s Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron, known as HITRON, and act as forward observers while the H-Boys took care of any survivors who might be trying to escape to the Gulf of Mexico.

      “Good Gawd, would you look at them?” said Ernie Faulks, one of the Quarantine Authority pilots off to Barnes’s right. In the old days, Faulks had made his living flying helicopters back and forth from the oil rigs just offshore. He was an irredeemable redneck, but cool under pressure, especially in bad weather.

      Barnes glanced up from the ruins below and saw a string of seven orange-and-white Coast Guard helicopters closing on their position. Even from a distance, Barnes could pick out the silhouettes of the HH-60 Jayhawks and the HH-65 Dolphins.

      “You know what those babies are?” said Paul Hartle, a former HPD pilot and Barnes’s preferred flanker. “Those are chariots of the gods, my friend. Ain’t a helicopter made that can hold a candle to those bad boys.”

      “I’d love to fly one of them things,” answered Faulks. “I bet they’re faster than your sister, Hartle. Sure are prettier.”

      “Fuck you, Faulks.”

      Faulks made kissy noises at him.

      “All right, guys, kill the chatter,” Barnes said.

      Technically, he was supposed to write up the guys when they cussed on the radio, but he let it slide. A little friendly kidding was good for morale. And besides, as pilots, Barnes and the others were seen as hotshots within the Quarantine Authority. They were held to different standards, given special privileges, looked up to by the common guys on the wall. Being pilots, they had to do more, take bigger risks. It was why all these guys loved flying, why they kept coming back.

      But in every profession there is a hierarchy, and while Barnes and his fellow Quarantine Authority pilots had a firm grip on the upper rungs of the status ladder, the very top rung was owned by the H-Boys from the Coast Guard’s HITRON Squadron. Originally created to stop drug runners in high-speed cigarette boats off the Florida coast, the H-Boys now did double duty patrolling the quarantine zone’s coastline. They flew the finest helicopters in the military, and their gun crews had enough ordnance at their disposal to turn anything on the water into splinters and chum. The pilots in the Quarantine Authority worshiped them, wanted to be them when they grew up. It was the Quarantine Authority Air Corp, in fact, that had come up with the H-Boys’ nickname.

      “Papa Bear calling Quarter Four-One.”

      Quarter Four-One was Barnes’s call sign. Papa Bear was Coast Guard Captain Frank Hays on board the P-3 Orion that was circling overhead.

      “Quarter Four-One, go ahead, sir.”

      “I’d like to welcome you and your men to the show, Officer Barnes. Now, all elements, stand by to Susie, Susie, Susie.”

      “Mama Bear Six-One, roger Susie.”

      Barnes scanned the line of orange-and-white helicopters until he saw one to the far right dipping its rotors side to side. That was Mama Bear, Lt. Commander Wayne Evans, the senior officer in the squadron and the quarterback for this mission. Once the sweep got under way, he would be the link between the individual helicopters and Papa Bear up in the P-3 Orion. Barnes had worked with Evans before and knew the man had a talent for keeping a cool head and an even cooler tone of voice on the radio when things got sticky.

      “This is Echo Four-Three, roger Susie.”

      “Delta One-Six, roger Susie.”

      “This is Bravo Two-Five, roger Susie.”

      The pattern continued down the line of Coast Guard helicopters, each one answering up with their call sign and the code word “Susie,” which was the signal for the sweep to begin.

      When they’d all answered up, Mama Bear said, “Quarter Four-One, you and your men drop to three hundred feet and recon the quadrants north of here. Sound off if you spot any uncles.”

      “Yes, sir,” Barnes answered.

      He gave the orders for his team to drop altitude and spread out over the area. They had done this many times before, and they all knew the drill. And they all knew that the order to sound off if they spotted any uncles was superfluous. The HITRON boys had the finest heat-sensing equipment in the world. Their cameras would spot any bodies down there long before Barnes and his men could. What Barnes and the others were expected to do was identify whether or not the bodies spotted were uncles or zombies. The HITRON boys would only get involved if they had uncles.

      But telling the difference under the current conditions wasn’t going to be easy. They had maybe thirty minutes of usable daylight left, and there was a spreading shadow over the ruins that gave everything, even at three hundred feet, a monochromatic grayness.

      Barnes recognized the ghostly outlines of Sheldon Road beneath the water. Its length was dotted with tanker trucks and pickups that, even at low tide, were a good five or six feet beneath the surface. He looked east, across a long line of metal-roofed warehouses that shimmered with the reddish-bronze glare of sunset. From frequent flyovers, Barnes knew that at low tide the water was only about two or three feet deep on the opposite side of those warehouses. If they were going to find uncles, that’s where they’d be.

      Within moments his instincts proved true. Boats and cranes and even a few larger tankers had been spread by the tides across the flooded swamp that had once been a huge tract of mobile homes. In and among the debris and stands of marsh grass he spotted a large number of people threading their way toward three medium-sized shrimp boats waiting just offshore. One of them already had its engines going. Barnes could see puffs of black smoke roiling up from beneath the waterline.

      Several faces turned up to track his movement over their location. He felt like he could see the desperation in their expressions, and he turned away. He didn’t like doing this, but it was necessary.

      “Quarter Four-One, I’ve got uncles east of the warehouses.”

      There was a pause before Mama Bear answered up. “Quarter Four-One, roger that. You sure they’re uncles?”

      Barnes could hear the indignation in the man’s voice. Though they were all on the same team, the H-Boys knew they were the all-stars. Barnes was sure the man was cussing to himself that a Quarantine Authority pilot in a Schweizer POS had spotted their objective before his boys did.

      Barnes enjoyed making his reply. “Oh, I’m sure, Mama Bear. I estimate between forty and sixty uncles. Looks like they’ve got themselves three shrimp boats, too.”

      There was a pause. Must be on