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The Flight From Bellevue to Ellensburg

It was early in the morning and the light of early dawn engendered a reddish colour on the fluffy clouds. George drank his daily energy drink and threw the empty can into a shrubbery. How awful, leaving garbage in the nature. A few years ago some people would kill if they saw somebody litter the nature. But what a heck, the world has bigger problems for the moment. That damned zombie disease had spread and destroyed to most major cities in the USA. The whole country looked like a war zone.

After his morning leak, George jumped into the attack helicopter and started to go through the check list. Plenty of fuel, a lot of ammo and a hole bunch of living dead walking around, just waiting to get dead. Could life be better, George asked him self while he started up the super charged engines. The black monstrous helicopter took off and lifted vertically towards the sky.

The road to North Bend was almost empty. Some ground force units had blocked the road and was searching the wheat and rape fields for zombies. George could see a few of them and reported their positions to the ground force who eliminated them immediately with artillery grenades.

Some miles north the city of North Bend was encircled by the national guard. Private helicopters from the local air field, carrying volunteer sharpshooters, were trying to clean up the city. Most of the work was already done and ground troops with protection suites would soon go from house to house and shoot out the last zombies. However, the large forest surrounding the city was probably full with ranging zombies, searching for human flesh. The problem was how to find them when they were hiding. The infrared camera couldn't detect them because their body temperature was to low and sending ground units would bee to risky. The military would probably burn the whole forest down, to be sure that no zombie survived. The military certainly didn't care about the nature.

When George flew north and he could see the Snoqualmie Summit - a tremendous mountain with a height of 6,270 feet. The top was still covered with snow and the curving serpentine road which leads to Lake Easton looked like a grey giant snake taking a sun bath on the mountain hill. The only thing which indicated that the mountain wasn't a skiing paradise anymore, was blood tracks in the snow. George descent and followed the tracks. After two minutes George found 4 zombies in a holiday village eating on dead bodies. A bullet shower from the 30 mm cannon made mincemeat of the living dead in a few seconds.

Behind the mountain the huge Lake Easton turned up. The surface was calm and George was for a few second blinded when it threw back the sun light. From a distance the Lake looked very peaceful and inviting. But when George got closer he could see people in motor boats who tried to allure dozens of zombies into the water. The living dead couldn't swim so they would drown. The people in the boats would probably run them over with the motor boats forever and ever, just to be sure that they were dead. You couldn't be really sure before the zombie body was turned into scraps.

George thought that the enormous Lake Easton dam looked very ugly. With its huge concrete wall it didn't digest into the surroundings at all. But, if it didn't exist, there would have been no lake to swim in either. It sure boosted the tourist economy when the dam created the lake, but in this point of time, nothing of that mattered. The former tourist paradise had turned dangerous place with a huge, more or less, blood coloured lake. George thought that he should remind himself never to drink any of that water.

From the cockpit George could see that engineer ground unit was trying to seal the road tunnel which leads in the direction to Cle Elum. A large tanker lorry, probably filled with poison gas, parked in front of the tunnel and four uniformed men with gas masks, connected a pipe between the tunnel sealing and the tanker. George passed them at 200 feet and he saw some of the people waved to him. Yeah, you people are doing a fine job, George thought. There is probably a hundred zombies in there, eating corpses. It was a real good trap. George wondered if the person who gave the orders had thought of the emergency exits too.

The village Cle Elum turned up in front of George. Some of the houses were on fire but no one seemed to care. It had rained the day before, so the fire would in worst case burn down the village. It didn't matter anyway. There was probably not enough uninfected people who wanted to live in that hole, now when they could have a much better house somewhere else. Some of those hundred of thousands people who were infected and turned into a hungry zombie, had own nice houses. The house prices had certainly went to the very bottom the last year. You could even get a luxury car for free if you found the right house. What a discount! Only food was expensive now a days.

George continued his flight to Ellenburg. The road below him was closed, but there was a detour. For a second George thought of following the detour, but he changed his mind when he started to climb. Why bother when you are flying a helicopter?

The village Thorp, or rather what was left of it, turned up in front of George. There had been heavy artillery bombardment here. Even a brain dead zombie could tell that, George told him self. George thought that the burned village looked like a mole on the face of the Earth. At least from this height. If he landed there, it would certainly smell like a crematorium.

George lowered the speed when he approached Ellensburg. He didn't contact the tower of Ellensburg airport. It wasn't likely that someone would answer his call anyway. He landed the helicopter at the middle the runway. Totally wrong according to the air traffic rules, but it felt good to have good long range visibility when entering a unsafe area. George took his machine-gun and jumped out. He wondered how much trouble he would go through before he would find that helicopter spare part.

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