Chapter Twenty-Four

“I feel silly,” I said over the headset.

The noise of the helicopter blades was muffled by the headphones, but it was still damn loud. My teeth chattered from the rattle of the Black Hawk as it flew over a bend in the Kankakee River.

“You look sexy,” Angie assured me. “I love a woman in uniform.”

I grinned. I’d donned a set of camos to blend in with our guardsmen, who now accepted me as one of their own. They’d been suspicious of more vampires at first, but I’d won them over with a combination of being awesome and discovering a cache of beer in the cellar of one of Philippe’s former neighbors. It helped that I proved myself willing to work with them instead of treating them like my minions, though Commander Johnston still couldn’t meet my eyes without blushing bright red. Elizabeth had really rocked his world.

“We’ve got flares ahead,” the pilot announced. “I’m going to circle and look for a place to land.”

“Copy that,” I replied. I sounded so official. Flares were a good sign. I doubted that zombies could operate a flare gun.

Fort Frog was a historical site that had been a French fort before Illinois was a state. The stone walls had been fortified since the outbreak, and the smoke of human settlement rose from the buildings within.

The Black Hawk landed, and Angie and I climbed out. The others in the chopper were under orders to stay inside until I gave them the go-ahead. If the fort was occupied by crazed survivalists, Angie and I could handle them, but our humans couldn’t.

Ground troops waved us inside a clapped-together building made from plywood, duct tape and attitude. A few similar structures were crowded into the area, and I hoped that meant more survivors. We’d picked up more people here and there over the last few months, so many that we’d expanded into two other mansions.

A grizzled man in a uniform blinged out with insignia sized me and Angie up. “I’m General Holub. Who are you?”

“I’m Elizabeth Kinney, and this is my wife, Officer Angela Kinney. We’re here to help.”

We were all still adjusting to this strange, new world where vampires and werewolves worked together to save humanity, but the world was worth saving. Humanity wasn’t dying on our watch, and we had a lot of work to do.