Raddocks Horizon (Godyssey Legacy Book 1)
Page 28
You’re a bit rusty, old thing.
“Longinus, what the hell was that?” comes Sabre’s voice.
“Yeah I know, I just broadcasted my position across the Solarnet. I’ll tell the flocking masses you say hi.”
Rennin, Obie and Jawa remain still as stone, all clenching their teeth waiting for something to happen, but the streets remain quiet.
“Don’t silencers reduce accuracy?” asks Jawa.
Rennin looks at him with a cross between pity and disbelief, “From this distance? Two hundred years ago, maybe.”
“Maybe no one’s about,” ventures Obie.
“The one I shot was a Screamer, there’ll be more nearby,” says Rennin. He keeps his sights around the body, looking for any sign of movement. Soon enough he sees a soldier walking across the street at a ducked sprint towards the body. “Oh no. Fader, you copy?”
“Here, Longinus.”
“Who’s that daft prick checking the body I just shot?”
“I don’t know, what colour are his pauldrons?”
“Yellow.”
“Horus Unit.”
The soldier is now stationary at the body with a hand to his helmet obviously radioing in the kill. “Channel?” asks Rennin.
“Ninety-eight point six.”
Rennin switches to that channel. “Trooper by the sniper kill, you copy?”
“Identify.”
“Nova Unit Sniper, get yourself back to your unit double time-”
“Oh my god,” says Obie.
Rennin looks back through his scope and sees a swarm of contaminants rushing out of the building. “Run, trooper!”
Rennin focuses on a target and fires a round through its chest killing it instantly. The trooper is scrambling away from a handful of contaminants that are almost on him. Rennin pulls the bolt action back ejecting the empty shell, slides it back and takes another shot, another kill. He ejects another shell, another shot, another kill but there are more piling out of the building.
“Too many,” Rennin says pulling off the bolt mechanism, attaching an assault rifle automatic upper receiver and slamming a full magazine into the underside, all the while staring at the crowd that’s ever growing.
“Sacrificing accuracy for volume, ready to fire,” he says.
Rennin pours out shot after shot, each hitting but not all outright kills. He always hated magazine-fed sniper rifles because they never shoot as straight as the old bolt-action mechanisms, particularly with high calibre rounds.
He takes out one that dives atop the soldier. Bullets are flying out from the other side of the street in a barrage but it’s not stopping the rampaging contaminants. Rennin stops shooting, just watching the sea of bodies running at the gunmen with an increasing amount of ‘Substance 6’ on the scope display.
“What are you doing? Help them!” says Obie. The soldier investigating the original kill has been overrun and can’t even be seen anymore.
The contaminants make it across the street and screams can be heard along with gunfire, but at the sound of tearing flesh and death cries Rennin switches channels back to his own unit,
“Fader, you copy?”
“Longinus! I’ve been trying to reach you!” it is Sabre’s voice.
“I tried to warn the troops on the street but they’re gone,” Rennin says.
“Fader’s dead! The whole unit is gone. Only one from Clone Unit made it back to the gunship.”
Rennin can’t get his head around how fast that just happened. “Orders?”
“A pack of them just ran into the building you’re in-”
Rennin trains his scope to the streets and can see a group back where Horus Unit was taken out all looking towards him with their white eyes. “Jesus, I hate these things,” he says ducking down.
“-they’ll be at your position in moments. Hold them off till Dead Star arrives,” orders Sabre before signing off.
“You heard him. We have to keep the rooftop clear, they won’t land if we’re overrun,” says Rennin. The three of them keep their backs to the ledge and point their guns towards the roof access. Rennin switches to his assault rifle for the closer quarter combat.
Blood droplets strike Rennin’s face seemingly from nowhere. He looks to Obie who has a look of horror on his face, with a huge sword-like claw protruding through his chest. Then he’s gone, pulled over the edge.
Rennin pushes Jawa away from the ledge. “They can climb walls!” he yells, inwardly cursing himself for letting that slip his mind. He should have remembered from his first encounter with the contaminants out the front of the lab.
“Here they come!” calls Jawa, opening fire on the flood of them at the doorway.
Rennin pulls the trigger and nothing happens. He curses, describing a certain mother’s gratuitous fornication with sailors.
“Safety catch, man!”
“Where the fuck is it?” he looks desperately at the side of the gun.
“Other side! Other side!”
Rennin flips the gun over to see the safety catch as plainly as his own ineptitude. He should have known that. It is then he realises he’s holding the gun in his offhand. When did I become left-handed?
He arms the gun just in time for one to leap over the ledge onto the rooftop. Rennin cries out, firing off-balance causing him to fall over. He lets out a yell, willing himself to steady his aim, blasting the thing in the head and the chest but the bullets just don’t look like they’re penetrating. The creature is badly maimed and stumbles back over the ledge, to its death. “Something’s wrong, Jawa, how weak are these bullets?”
“They’re Nexus Arms, should shoot through a tank. These things are strong.” he calls chewing through bullets and mutants alike.
Rennin faces the ledge where others can be heard climbing and snarling. “You right there?”
“For the moment. We’ve got them bottlenecked at the doorway.”
“I’ll cover you,” yells Rennin, shooting any clawed hands he sees gripping the top of the ledge. Insanely, it reminds him of a game he played as a child where you have a hammer and have to hit the alligator heads that pop out of the cave.
“Loading!” calls Jawa.
Fuck! Jawa’s gun needs to have its empty ammo box removed, another refit and the bullet belt placed correctly in the feed tray. It could take twenty seconds to load, maybe more if he fumbles. Rennin swings his weapon around to start firing at the doorway where they storm up one after the other. He hammers one in the head with what must have been ten rounds but it only drops dead when a bullet pierces its eye. He aims lower, tearing through their abdomens, feeling rapture swell within him like a heavenly wave as they collapse from the sheer grievousness of their wounds.
“That’s right, die!” he yells swinging back to the ledge to shoot off a few more clutching hands, and even a face.
“Ready,” calls Jawa climbing to his feet, commencing fire on the doorway.
“Aim for the stomach. If we can’t take them down cleanly we’ll rip ‘em apart!”
“Copy that,” says Jawa and the two of them lay down everything they have standing back to back. Rennin picks off the clawing hands and Jawa blows the literal guts out of the ones charging out of the roof access. Red lights suddenly shine down from above. “The gunship.”
Rennin knows gunship lights are blue, not red, and he risks glancing upwards. What he sees sends a chill running down his spine. He shoots a few more contaminants off the ledge and takes a longer look at the object above. “You’re kidding…”
“What is it?” Jawa glances up. “What the hell is that?”
Above there’s a round disc that looks like a slightly closed black flower, the petals are more like claws arcing downwards. At their crux is a glowing red light. “It’s a Desolator satellite!” Rennin calls as the weapon begins charging, causing an updraft strong enough to lift the empty shell casings into the sky.
Dead Star arrives overhead a few seconds later. It blasts the roof access doorway stopping the flo
w of contaminants. Both Jawa and Rennin swear in happiness but now contaminants are leaping onto the rooftop from all around.
Dead Star settles low enough to board and Rennin yells for them to make a break for it. The two survivors run at the gunship through the now roaring upward wind. Sabre opens both doors on either side to provide some cover fire.
They make it to the gunship with Jawa slamming straight into it, unable to make the climb because of the weight of his weapon. Rennin leaps in cleanly despite his age and the weight of his extra ammo. He shoots a couple of contaminants then reaches down, grabbing Jawa’s vest with his andronic right hand, bracing with his left leg and hoisting the surprised soldier in one handed.
Rennin turns to pilot Bulldog. “Get us out of-” he is cut off by a contaminant diving into the gunship and onto him, throwing his body against the pilot’s seat. A long claw growing out of its wrist is thrust at him. He dodges to the side and it pierces the pilot’s seat behind him. Bulldog cries out.
Fuck!
Rennin removes Drej’s knife, and slashes along its bowel with one smooth stroke. He digs his hand into the wound, grabbing anything he can, ripping it out causing the creature to screech and drop dead.
“Shut the doors!” he screams kicking the carcass out of the side exit. He gets to his feet, clambering desperately into the co-pilot’s seat next to Bulldog who’s clutching his pierced shoulder in shock. Sabre slams the button to close the doors and Dead Star is locked down. Rennin looks over the controls and prays they haven’t changed since his time in the CryoZaiyon War. He puts his hand on the throttle and looks up to see a contaminant standing, snarling at him from outside the cockpit. That face of hate spells one thing to him and makes his stomach flip: recognition. It knows him. The rockets blast and Dead Star makes a shaky escape from the rooftops.
As they lift off, Jawa looks out over the building, watching the contaminants swarm over it and the dust cloud from the ground being pulled towards the satellite. He then hurries to the cockpit to help Bulldog out of his chair and to the nearest seat to assess his injury.
Rennin looks at the empty seat next to him and the hole that’s been stabbed clean through. He winces then looks out to his left and can see a gunship flying alongside so he opens communications. “This is gunship Dead Star, hailing.”
“Copy, Dead Star, this is Gunship Genome.”
Genome is the Clone Unit gunship. “Survivors?”
“One.”
“Any sign of Horus Unit?”
“It was overrun while on the ground, never got off the surface.”
Sabre taps Rennin’s shoulder. “Desolator satellite is about to fire, so heads up.”
Although Dead Star is well out of the blast zone the satellite firing is heard and felt very clearly. The red light increases in intensity for a moment, then the impact from ground zero is felt as a fierce jolt in Rennin’s stomach, followed by a deafening roar and shockwave that jostles Dead Star a little.
Rennin cuts the gunship across to the right to get a look at the impact. Apart from some smoke, there’s no great hellfire that he expected from such a detonation. He’d always heard that Desolator satellites were green-friendly weapons but he never really believed there was such a thing. But here it was: scorched earth, ashen remains but no fallout or collateral damage through fire. The block they fired on is completely obliterated and everything around is stable, if a little shaken up.
A call comes in over the cabin from HQ.
“Yes?” asks Rennin still overwhelmed with everything.
“What do you mean ‘yes’? Identify yourself, soldier.”
Rennin bites his lip hard enough to draw blood. “Gunship Dead Star, sir.” Come on, Caufmann, where are you?
“I mean you personally, trooper.”
“Sergeant Rennin Farrow, Call-sign: Longinus.”
“This is Commander Jorge Croft, your unit is ordered to rendezvous with Raston Squad. They are holding Horizon Stadium. Their position is being overrun.”
“How many? The Desolator must have fried thousands of the hostiles.”
“There’s a lot more of them, son.”
Rennin looks back to Lieutenant Sabre for his orders. He shakes his head. “We lost a lot of our unit, our heavy gunner is out of ammo and our pilot is wounded, don’t they have any support?”
“They’re special forces son, they are the last line, defending the evacuees. They need assistance and you are it.”
“Copy, changing heading to Horizon Stadium.”
“Good man, I’ll-” Rennin slams the communicator button, cutting off the commander. Rennin swings Dead Star around and Gunship Genome does the same, obviously receiving the same orders. Rennin can’t help but feel real pity for the last survivor of Clone Unit. Rennin was thrown back into combat after Indigo Reign without fully recovering mentally, and it was bad, but being put straight into combat the minute after your whole team dies around you is disastrous. It must be getting very desperate already. The combat has hit hard and fast, if Rennin is still reeling from it there’s a good chance many others are too.
“Longinus, the drop zone is outside the West Gate,” says Sabre, assessing his forearm display.
“Why not land in it from above?”
“There are transports evacuating the uninfected to Whitechapel, coming and going through the roof access.”
Rennin scoffs and shakes his head. “Idiots.”
“You let us off and provide cover-fire from the air.”
“What about Bulldog?”
“We’ll take him inside and he can get an airlift to Whitechapel for treatment.”
A minute later they are approaching Horizon Stadium. Rennin shrugs, figuring that at least their landing zone should be clear of contaminants for the time being, thanks to the Desolator. The blast zone is precise with the edge of it mere metres from the stadium itself.
Rennin brings Dead Star in and settles it down just outside the West Gate. Sabre and Jawa pick up Bulldog and support him between them. “Be our eye in the sky, Longinus,” Sabre says, grinning before his face turns serious. “Provide air support should any packs of the bastards come at us from the streets.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Once the uninfected are safely out of the stadium, come in and pick us up, it’s going to get very nasty in here soon.”
“They go where the meat is, I know,” nods Rennin.
“Good luck.” says Sabre as he and Jawa take Bulldog out of Gunship Dead Star and meet up with the survivor of Clone Unit. He walks towards them, seemingly in a daze, without even shouldering his rifle. Rennin thinks he must be really messed up after losing his unit, as he engages the door lock.
Too bad.
With that, Rennin takes off and abandons them.
11.
The Voice That Killed a City
Sindaris Tessol turned seventy-six years old three months ago. He was once a construction worker and Foreman of the building team that erected the Mega Hall forty years ago. He’d lived in the Sanctuary Ravine Retirement Village for just under fifteen years. He had no family he cared to remember, and very few living friends. His looks had never bothered him nor had the slow decrepitude affecting his aging body. At least not until now. The face staring back at him in the abandoned motel bathroom can’t be older than twenty-five. He has aged backwards half a century in a fourteen days.
Sindaris discovered he was infected several weeks previous to his age reversal. He was content to sit at home and wait for the rumoured hit squads, or to die from the virus. Now the black veins around his arms, neck and the sides of his face pulse angrily but his facial ones are far less noticeable. He shakes his head unable to understand his predicament.
A fortnight ago he felt himself die. He felt everything fade and even when his heartbeat failed. He felt a sense of relief, of release. Several hours later he suddenly woke up. At first he was disoriented, thinking everything was a dream, but when he saw his eyes he knew there was something very wrong.
He stands in room 002 of the Bright Horizon Motel, central to the Middle-city District, checking over his face carefully with his alien eyes, looking for any hint of further change. It appears the reverse aging has stopped. Though now another abnormality has surfaced. Sindaris hasn’t grown in size but he weighs almost an extra thirty kilograms. However, those details pale in comparison to what is happening inside his head.
About two days after coming back from the dead he began hearing voices, but more accurately he began thinking them as if they were his own inner monologue. He could hear others in his head that were infected.
The more people that become infected, the more voices there are, and the number of new voices is increasing almost by the minute.
Sindaris is terrified to sleep because when he closes his eyes he sees things, abhorrent things. He has already watched them eat, seeing through their eyes. He has watched them lay traps with the ones the military calls ‘Screamers,’ watched them infect their own families. At first it was visual only; now he can feel what they do, taste who they eat, feel their fears, and when they become hungry so does Sindaris.
Something is different with him, compared to the other infected. He feels all the things the masses of infected feel but does not, at any point, hunger for human or animal meat as they do. Sindaris has been eating out of cans, though his appetite has increased dramatically. Another thing he’s noticed is that the infected become less and less intelligent the longer they exist after they reanimate. Their minds degenerate into something more animalistic and stupid. No such mental decline is happening to Sindaris and the others can sense it. He is not like them and they are being directed to hunt him down.
They call for him in feverish masses, babbling his name.
Sindaris has to hide wherever he can, and has learned to move around without looking at landmarks or street signs; he’s sure they can see through his eyes as he can see through theirs. He can think about where he wants to go because his more complex thoughts are hidden from what he thinks of as the ‘Sharemind,’ but basic impulses like his desire to flee are not. His best hope is to lay low as long as possible until the contaminants are too witless to track him. But whatever is directing them isn’t one of them, Sindaris can sense it. And it is certainly not stupid.