Apocalypse Of The Dead by McKinney Joe

Author:McKinney, Joe [McKinney, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9780786025992
Publisher: Pinnacle
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 29

Mark Kellogg stood with Jim Budlong on a hastily constructed runway, watching a C-130 taking off for Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Over the last two days, the situation in Pennsylvania had gone from bad to just plain catastrophic. It was like San Antonio all over again. Every bit as fucked up. The civilian population was past the point of saving. The federal government’s response had been orchestrated with their usual day-late-and-a-dollar-short philosophy toward disaster mitigation. They’d come into the area with the idea that moving real-life people out of harm’s way was as simple as moving armies on a Risk board, and now there were thousands dead, and tens of thousands had been infected because they couldn’t be evacuated from affected areas in time.

The Department of Homeland Security stepped in and took the lead on the evacuation process, and as usual they completely misjudged what the people on the ground would actually need. They brought in hundreds of work trucks from neighboring towns to help restore electrical power in the area, but they had yet to deliver even one-tenth of the buses they had promised to help get people out of the hot zone. They delivered thousands of cots and tents and bottles of water, but they had assumed a static relocation of the population and made no provision for moving all those supplies a second or a third time when the battle lines changed, and the infected appeared in areas that Homeland Security assumed would remain safe. There were at least fifteen Katrina-style evacuation villages in the area, all of them now crawling with the infected, the supplies dumped there useless. The military was forced to step in and fill Homeland Security’s shortcomings, and that had stretched their limited resources way beyond the breaking point. He could see it in the faces of the soldiers standing guard all around them. Some, he guessed, hadn’t slept in the last two days.

Kellogg shook his head in disgust and wondered how many times they had to make the same mistakes before they finally grew some sense.

“This is your boy’s flight here,” Budlong said. He gave him a knock on the shoulder and pointed at a C-130 lumbering down the dirt runway. The plane bounced and kicked up a huge tail of gray dust, and then it was airborne, on its way to Minot with the rest of their team and their test subjects.

Kellogg wasn’t thrilled about relocating to Minot. It was the home of the 5th Medical Wing, but it didn’t have a medical facility of the sort they were going to need. Everything would have to be flown in and set up right off the C-130s, and if what had happened in San Antonio and again here in Pennsylvania were any indications, they were fighting a losing battle. The only good news about going to Minot was the seclusion it offered. Set in the middle of the North Dakota prairie, it was a thousand miles from nowhere. At least they’d be able to work in peace.

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