CRASH COURSE
BY DANA FREDSTI
“Why are we doing this again?”
“Because Colonel Paxton owes someone a favor.”
Nathan held out a hand to me as I climbed out of the helicopter on unsteady legs, one hand clutching my katana. My legs weren’t the only shaky thing about me. My stomach turned one or two more gentle somersaults even after my feet hit the tarmac, and the whupwhupwhup of the rotors throbbed unpleasantly through my head. Helicopter travel has been on my shit list ever since a copter I was on was sabotaged and went down in zombie-infested San Francisco.
“So we’re paying Paxton’s debt? Hardly seems fair.”
“It’s not,” Nathan agreed. “But it’s SOP in corporations and the military.”
“Huh?”
“Standard operating procedure.”
“Evidently so are acronyms,” I muttered.
Nathan grinned. “Why do you think I went off the grid for so long?”
Nathan’s one of those rough-hewn but handsome types who could be anywhere between forty and sixty. When he smiles it knocks at least ten years off his age, and I can almost see why my mentor, Simone, likes him.
“Now stop bitching and let’s get going. We have people to meet.”
Almost.
Our mission? Fly to a little island off Costa Rica to pick up Brock, the son of some Very Important gajillionaire industrialist or arms dealer or whatever. The kid was bitten when zombies breached the family compound and left for dead by the faithful family retainers during the subsequent evacuation. Only the kid didn’t die.
Can you say very wealthy wild card?
When the dad — who’d been stateside doing business when the shit went down — found out his son and heir was alive and well, he immediately started pulling strings to get him out of Costa Rica. Those had to be some hefty strings to let him commandeer people from two of what were formerly top-secret security organizations — the Dolofónoi tou Zontanoús Nekroús and the Department of Military Sciences — to be what sounded like glorified babysitters.
Nathan and I were supposed to be meeting two operatives from the DMS. Colonel Paxton had told us they were hot shit. Okay, my words, not his, but honestly, he’d practically gone all fanboy when he’d talked about them. Not something I’d ever expected — or wanted — to see from our boss.
We walked across a reassuringly bustling airfield on NAS North Island, located on the far end of the Coronado Peninsula in San Diego. Thanks to quick thinking on someone’s part, Coronado had been turned into a relatively safe zone by blowing up a section of the Coronado Bridge and putting up an effective blockade on the strip of land leading to Imperial Beach. The beaches were patrolled 24/7 to make sure no one infected with Walker’s made it to shore.
“And there’s our ride.”
I followed the direction of Nathan’s pointing finger and stopped short.
“You said there’d be a plane.” I didn’t bother to hide the accusation in my voice.
“That is a plane,” Nathan replied calmly. “Oh. And the thing we flew in on? That was a helicopter.”
Amazing how much sarcasm the man can impart without changing his inflection. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. Of course, you’d also think I’d be used to traveling via helicopter, as I’d had to do it at least a dozen times since the zombocalypse had started.
“I meant a real plane. Not a… a… a Tinkertoy.” I gestured at the little plane sitting on the tarmac at the far end of North Island’s military base. It looked like one of the toy planes my dad collected, not much longer than the copter we’d flown in on, and sure as hell didn’t look sturdy enough for a trip to Costa Rica and back.
“Did I just hear her call my Porter a Tinkertoy?”
I looked up to see a burly black man wearing worn jeans and a green-and-black-checked flannel shirt walking toward us and giving me one hell of a hairy eyeball. He was flanked by two other men, one in his late twenties or so and the other somewhere in his thirties or early forties.
Both men toted an impressive amount of high-tech-looking weaponry, and both wore the type of camo meant to blend into forests and jungles, same as Nathan and me. They were also both blond, but that was the only physical attribute they had in common. The younger guy had to be at least six and a half feet, maybe taller. The very definition of corn-fed.
Assuming a metric shit-ton of corn was involved.
The other man wasn’t as physically overwhelming, but he carried himself in a way that I’d learned to associate with people who could probably kick the shit out of 99 percent of the population. Kind of like Nathan. Same look in the back of the eyes that hinted of dark things that, once seen, couldn’t be unseen.
Nathan shook hands with the black man. “Jack, good to see you. Ash, you’ll be glad to know that Jack is one of the best pilots around.”
“Damn straight I am,” Jack growled, still giving me stink-eye.
Nathan turned to the shorter of the two blond men. “You must be Joe Ledger.”
The man nodded. “And you’re Nathan Smith.”
They shook hands, one of those manly-men handshakes that had the potential to degenerate into an arm-wrestling match unless the men involved were both secure in their masculinity. No arm wrestling ensued and the testosterone levels in the atmosphere remained tolerable.
Ledger and his companion exchanged a brief look and I got the sense Nathan had just passed some sort of unspoken test.
“I’m Ash,” I said brightly. Both men looked at me.
“You’re Ashley Parker, huh?” Ledger’s tone was neutral.
“Um. Yeah.”
“Huh.”
Another brief silent exchange between the two men.
Maybe I was feeling insecure, but I got the feeling I was not what he’d expected. Maybe someone taller?
Whatever, I didn’t need to be a mind reader to know I’d most likely failed whatever exam Nathan had just aced.
“Statistics prove you’re safer in a plane than driving in traffic,” Corn-fed said. “You’re a lot more likely to be roadkill than ground jam.”
I stared without love at Mr. Corn-Fed-on-Steroids. His full name, if it was to be believed, was Harvey Rabbit, but Ledger called him Bunny.
“Aren’t you supposed to be invisible?”
Bunny just grinned at me. He and Ledger sat across from me and Nathan in two of the plane’s four passenger rows. Jack had modified the interior so the front and third rows were reversed to face the second and fourth rows, making conversation easier. It also made it a lot harder to ignore one’s fellow passengers.
Thanks a lot, Jack.
To be fair, once Jack realized how deeply I hated flying, he had done his best to reassure me how safe I’d be in his beloved Porter by inundating me with statistics. Factoids involving takeoff and landing performance, payloads, airfoil, and other stuff that rattled around in my head like marbles in an empty can. I paid as much attention as I could, especially in regard to the location of a very tiny bathroom at the back of the plane.
At this point, all I cared about was that the Porter would get us safely from San Diego to Costa Rica and then back again ASAP. The shorter my in-flight incarceration with Joe Ledger and his man-mountain sidekick, the better. They made me feel totally incompetent — and kind of girly — just by their existence.
“So,” I said, desperate to talk about something other than road jam, “other than friends in nose-bleedingly high places, is there a good reason this kid rates such kick-ass escorts?”