Apocalypse Of The Dead by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online

some sixty feet or so, Richardson could look through the fairly clear water and see the cars and debris down at road level.
    “You see ’em?” Barnes said.
    Richardson scanned the water for a long moment before he saw what Barnes was trying to show him. There were dolphins down there, three of them. They were headed northbound, toward downtown, paralleling the freeway below them. Richardson guessed the water was between fifteen and twenty feet deep, just deep enough for the animals to skim over the roofs of the sunken cars and still stay submerged. They almost looked like motorcycles zipping through traffic.
    “That’s amazing.”
    “Yeah,” Barnes agreed. “There aren’t many perks to this job, but that’s one of ’em.”
    Richardson watched the dolphins until they finally turned off and swam into the deeper water east of town. They were getting closer to Houston proper now and seeing larger and larger buildings, the ground-level floors flooded to the ceilings.
    Richardson crinkled his nose. “Hey, you smell that?”
    Barnes looked aft and cursed under his breath.
    Richardson turned around in his seat, as much as his seat belt would allow, and saw a long, thick cloud of brown smoke trailing out behind them.
    “Holy shit, are we on fire?”
    “No, we’re not on fire,” Barnes said. He sounded annoyed. “The smoke is brown. We’re burning oil. The smoke from a fire would be dark black.”
    Barnes turned back to his controls and started checking gauges.
    “Are we going down?”
    “We’re fine,” he said, a bit peevishly. “Just keep quiet and don’t touch anything.”
    Barnes keyed his radio and said, “Quarter Four-One to Dispatch.”
    “Go ahead, Quarter Four-One,” said a woman’s voice.
    “Quarter Four-One, we’re losing oil pressure. I’m smoking pretty bad. I’m gonna try to get us back to Katy Field.”
    There was a pause on the dispatcher’s end that Richardson didn’t much like.
    “Ten-four,” the dispatcher said at last. “What’s your location, Quarter Four-One?”
    “Quarter Four-One, we’re over Bay Area Boulevard and El Camino Real. You have any other units in the area?”
    “Negative, Quarter Four-One.”
    There was a pause on Barnes’s end that Richardson liked even less than the dispatcher’s.
    “Ten-four,” Barnes said.
    “Quarter Four-One, be advised. I have Katy Field standing by for your approach.”
    “Ten-four,” Barnes said.
    Richardson watched Barnes’s hands flying over the controls. He had no idea what the pilot was doing, but he could tell plain enough that they were in some serious trouble.
    “Officer Barnes?”
    “Shut up.”
    Several tense moments went by. Barnes continued to work the controls. A terrible acid fear spread through Richardson’s gut as the engine continued to sputter and smoke. Despite Barnes’s best efforts, they were losing altitude and their airspeed was slipping.
    The engine sputtered once more, and smoke began to pour into the cockpit. Warning lights lit up all across the control panel.
    “Quarter Four-One, we’re going down. Repeat, we’re going down. Coming up on El Dorado and Galveston Road.”
    Richardson didn’t hear a reply. The helicopter shook beneath him, and the next moment they were going down way too fast, coming up on a large grouping of trees and some overhead power lines.
    “Hang on,” Barnes said.
    They hit the water with a hard smack that knocked the air from Richardson’s lungs and threw his whole world forward like he was caught on the crest of a wave. The blades of the helicopter’s props struck the water with a series of loud slaps before they snapped completely free of the fuselage. The control panel sparked, and for a moment there was so much smoke that Richardson couldn’t see.
    Then water started to pour over his legs.
    He screamed.
    He felt hands groping at his chest. He tried batting them away, but couldn’t. “Stop it,” Barnes ordered him. “I’m trying to get you loose.”
    And a