Ordinance screeched from overhead gunships as they unloaded on the undead.
"It won’t matter now," Eason said.
He walked over to the concrete balcony overlooking the baseball stadium across the parking lot. In the sky above him, his eyes caught the movement of a grey multi-engine jet at high altitude. Eason recognized the plane.
The first time he had seen it was in Mrs. Cooper's Social Studies class back in the 6th grade. Mrs. Cooper taught the class about the ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union. She assigned the class a project to write a paper about some aspect of the cold war. In the school library, Eason found a book on jet planes that the United States used. He flipped through the pages, but stopped and studied an unusual plan with eight engines and huge wings. The book called the plane a B-51 Stratofortress. The book told Eason that the plane carried large payloads of bombs or nuclear weapons.
Eason noticed that the sound of the gunships that had been trying to hold back the undead were no longer to be heard.
Across the parking lot the baseball stadium erupted into a towering inferno of flame and debris. The walls of the park collapsed outward and the shockwave ripped out in all directions. Vehicles in the parking lot blew into the air like dandelion seeds cast into the wind. Others were hurled like wrecking balls tearing into anything unfortunate enough to get in their path. At least one smashed through the glass into the club east section of the football stadium below him.
The shockwave reached out across the river and smashed into the glass barriers of the skyscrapers across the street. A waterfall of shards fell to the streets along the entire north edge of the Pittsburgh skyline.
A wall of brown powderized building material raced out from the blast. Eason dropped down behind a concrete wall as it washed over the building.
A heavy cloud of burnt chalk filled Eason's mouth and his ears screamed from the explosion. He put his hand to his mouth and coughed, but he only sucked in more dust. For several seconds the world was filled with silence, then the banging sound of debris as it fell from the air and hit the stadium.
Eason heard a chorus of screams from people above him in the upper deck seating as material rained down on them. Something large slammed into the upper deck shaking the entire side of the stadium. He caught a glimpse of a stadium seat from the ballpark falling past his outlook.
The light bank above the concession stand flickered and went out. In the distance, Eason heard air-raid sirens wind down as they lost power. Eason's radio crackled incoherently as multiple operators jammed each other's broadcasts.
He picked himself off the ground covered in grist and grime. He looked back at the gate holding the dead back on the ramp.
Mike Fennel's corpse was covered in a thick layer of dirt. The dust covered the zombie's eyes and it turned away from Eason. Mike walked in a new direction toward the sound of the blast and hit the waist-high concrete barrier of the ramp. Mike doubled over the barrier and fell over the edge to fall hundreds of feet to the gates below.
"The dust is blinding them," he said.
Eason grabbed his radio and squeezed, "The dust has blinded some of them; it’s sticking to their eyes. We have to make a break for it while we have a chance."
The radio waves remained jammed, but two soldiers ran up to him coming from the south gate. Behind them, gunfire rattled off and echoed down the level.
Eason waved at them, but they shouted at him before he could talk.
"They broke though behind us," said a soldier with a nametag of Hoover on his pocket.
"The dust is in their eyes, they can't see," Eason said.
"Then they must be following the gunfire," replied Hoover.
"It doesn't matter now," said the other soldier, her nametag read, Jones. "The radios are being jammed by the Air Force, and they just fucking bombed our guys over at the baseball field."
"You sure they can't see?" asked Hoover.
"Yeah," said Eason, "He looked past me and walked right over the edge. A lot of them have to be as blind as fucking bats right now."
"I say we make run for it," said Jones.
"What about everyone else?" asked Hoover.
"I don’t hear gunfire from back there," Eason said.
"Yeah," said Jones, "that’s bad news." "What do we want to do about the civilians on the deck above us?"
"How are we going to explain to a thousand people to keep their mouths shut?" Hoover replied.
"We can’t," Eason said. He knew he would regret this later. "And I don’t think there are enough of us left to stop this.
"No way man," Hoover said, "I took an oath.”
"How are you going to fulfill that oath by ending up getting killed here?" Jones said.
"I can’t make it alone," Eason said. "But the three of us just might have a shot."
"Ok, say we make it out, then where to?" Hoover said while clearing his M-16.
"Those C-130s are coming from 911th at Pittsburgh International," Jones said. "If we can make it there, we should be alright."
"That’s 15 miles away," Eason said.
"Then I hope you had a good breakfast,” Jones said, “cause your about to burn some calories.”
###
Captain Rick Anderson slammed his radio headset against the metal bulkhead of the Command Stryker. Outside the front window of the Stryker, Anderson noticed the yellow of school buses lined up inside the airport.
“They’re out of their minds,” Anderson said. “We can’t bomb our own people.”
“And our orders?” asked Sergeant Ryan Winters.
Anderson picked up the printout of the orders he had received from Division; they were not marked with a signature.
“Captain Anderson,” he read, “As of 1400 hours, martial law has been declared across the continental United States. You are hereby ordered to abandon all refugees after eliminating all wounded. You will link up with additional guard forces at the Beaver Falls Reserve Center by 2100 tonight.”
Anderson crumpled the printout, “Someone orders a massacre of civilians and doesn’t have the courage to put their name to it. Sergeant, I have no intention of following what I consider to be illegal orders.”
“Sir,” Winters said, “I think the Air Force is jamming communication south of us; it’s all garbled down there now.”
“Have we heard anything else from the C-130s that were ordered to break off from Pittsburgh?” Anderson said.
“Negative,” Winters replied. “The last transmission I heard 15 minutes ago ordered them out of the way to make room for the B-52’s run. The Hercules’ pilots seemed pretty pissed and asked for confirmation twice.”
“Get me those pilots as soon as the jamming quits,” Anderson ordered. “I don’t care what it-.” The noise of a large plane stopped Anderson in mid-sentence. He turned around and looked out the open back ramp of the Stryker. Out of view, Anderson heard the screech of tires hitting the runway and the engines of the plane throttle back. A camouflaged green C-130 raced past his view as it feathered its props to slow down.
“Belay that Winters,” Anderson said. “In fact, go radio silent.”
The C-130 slowed to a crawl near the end of the runway and turned a right U-turn on to the taxiway. The props of the plane re-throttled giving it the momentum to carry down the lane. People moved out of the plane’s way well in advance of its approach. It cruised past the hanger and administration building and moved to the end of the taxiway as if it was about to realign at the end of the runway for take-off. Instead, the plane shut down at the end of the taxiway.
Anderson’s Stryker rolled to a stop as the back cargo hatch of the Hercules opened, and its pilot walked down the ramp.