The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) Read Free Page A

at its ankle and held on.
    "Shit," Salle cursed under her breath. "Give me aerial."
    The top down drone view appeared to the side in split-screen. The snow was falling so thickly now that she could scarcely pick out the thin black line of escapees as they ran to the agent's white van. A flurry of snow blocked the camera.
    "Bring it back down, we need visibility," she ordered.
    "It's already at two thousand feet," one of the pilots protested. "Any lower and we risk getting caught up in the storm."
    "I don't care," Salle said. "If we can't stop that van, it's over. Drop it down and switch to thermal imaging."
    "Yes, sir," the pilot replied, and the stats for the drones plummeted as they took steep dives through the rain of snow. A second later a filter swept across the screen, clearing away the pure white and replacing it with a pale blue. There was a hot red speck in the middle, representing the bunker hole where heat was escaping. The bodies of the escapees were a ghostly pink trail leading from it; so faint they were barely visible.
    "Can you target them?" she asked.
    "Not well, sir," the pilot replied. "The snow's too thick, I can't tell what I'm seeing."
    "Use your judgment. Bomb those people, captain, and do it now."
    The first bomb detached from the drone's icon on the right. At the same time the primary finally escaped Cerulean's grip, emerging out into the white where he throbbed as a moving blue dot. Seconds later the first explosion blossomed as a transient flare of red heat across the pale map. The blue dot ran right through it. The control room trembled slightly as the vibrations reached them.
    "Bomb in front of the primary," Salle ordered. "Work up an algorithm aligned to the map. We know where the road is, we know the speed of that vehicle, and the primary is leading us right to them."
    "Yes, sir. How much ordinance am I authorized to use?"
    "All of it," Salle answered, "until the damn van explodes."
    More red flowers bloomed on the screen. At the same time on the split screen to the right, the paraplegic began to climb the ladder out of the hallway, its legs trailing uselessly behind it.
    "Where's he going?" Joseph asked softly.
    A spike of hope lit in Salle's chest. Surely the infection was taking him now. They'd have at least two primaries, halving the time until America was clear.
    He climbed out of sight into the cold blue of the thermal image, where his blue dot pulsed motionlessly for a minute. More circles of heat bloomed off to the west, then the paraplegic's body fell down the screen, head first past the ladder like a suicide dive. He hit cement with a crunch that shook the control room harder than the bombs, and somehow his head tore away.
    "Ha!" someone in the control room said, in shock. Salle marked who it was unconsciously, while watching the corpse of Cerulean for a long moment. She hoped it would somehow rise, reattach its head and keep moving, but it didn't. Snow fell over it from the hole above and began to smooth out the crevices in its dusky red skin.
    The bastard had cut his own head off. Son of a bitch.
    She steadied herself. On the thermal image there was no sign of a hit. Everything had gone to shit, but moments like this were her forte. This was why she was commander and Lars Mecklarin was dead.
    "I don't care how many missiles or drones we exhaust in the effort," she said coolly, calmly, to the room at large. "That van does not get to Los Angeles to warn them, am I clear?"
    "Yes, sir," came the chorus of replies.
    Salle looked at her control screen before her. The light for her microphone link to the hallways was flashing still, and she cut it. She wouldn't need that again. This phase of the plan was done.
    She turned to Joseph. His face looked as broken as a cracked egg, but the embers of his intellect were still on fire within.
    "Joseph, I need you to get the suits ready," she said.
    Surprise broke through his uncertainty. "But sir, they're-"
    "All of them, Joseph," she said, "and