The Rising Horde, Volume Two (Sequel to The Gathering Dead )

by Stephen Knight

  “Whoa,” Doofus said. There were volumes of awe in the single expression.

  Roche was about to agree, but something caught his attention, something closer to the camp than the fiery inferno in the distance. In the darkness, he saw the twinkling of several muzzle flashes in the night. They emanated from where one of the Special Forces units was located.

  4

  “Okay, we have dedicated contact now, about six hundred meters from the outer wire,” Switchblade reported. “Several hundred stenches moving toward the lights and Alpha Zero-Nine-Four is between them and the camp.”

  McDaniels turned to Haley. “Colonel, what’ve you got out there?”

  “I have an advance team on the road in SOICS, maybe a thousand meters south. They have Stryker escort. You want them in the fight?”

  “Absolutely, move them in now. Switch, how long can Zero-Nine-Four hold out? Do they need close air support?”

  “Stand by.” Switchblade called over the radio and listened to the response. He leaned back in his chair and made eye contact with McDaniels. “Sir, they’re danger close and would like to fall back a hundred meters so they can elongate the engagement cycle. Otherwise, they might be overrun before the Rangers can roll up. And if the Rangers can get there in five minutes, they’re good. Otherwise, air support would be a great option to have.”

  “Five minutes is a can-do circumstance,” Haley said. “Actually, make it three.”

  “I won’t have Little Bird cover for a few minutes,” Major Carmody said. “One team is still out covering Alcatraz, and the other is coming back to rearm. The pilots say they’re going through their ordnance quicker than expected. There are stenches all over the place.”

  “Then send a pulse to the Apaches,” McDaniels said. “Let’s get them spooled up and in the sky.”

  “Roger that.”

  ***

  “Card Shark, Hercules Ops. You need to get airborne as soon as you can. Over.”

  Masterson checked her watch. The sniper fire from the observation towers had been constant for almost fifteen minutes, with each tower team firing off a round pretty much every minute. That the zeds were at SPARTA’s door was hardly a surprise. She’d had the four AH-64D Apache Longbow advanced attack helicopters preflighted and ready for a hasty sortie ever since nightfall. That didn’t mean the pilots could just light the fires and pull pitch, but it did mean they wouldn’t need to spend an extra forty-five minutes going through the preflight routines. The aircraft could be up and available to fire in five minutes.

  “Ops, this is Card Shark Six. We can be up in five minutes. Where do you need us? Over.”

  “Card Shark, this is Hercules Ops. We need you to back up a Special Forces team that’s danger close with the necromorphs. They’ve got a few hundred headed right for them across Phase Line Dare. We have reinforcements on the way, but they might not get there in time. You’re our ace in the hole. Over.”

  “Johnny, let’s get ready to get out of here. Tell the others,” Masterson said to her front-seater.

  “Hooah.” Her copilot/gunner spoke into his flight helmet’s boom microphone, advising the rest of the Apache crews to start making revolutions.

  “Ops, this is Card Shark. Roger that, we’re on it. Will contact you once we pull pitch. Over.” As she spoke, Masterson’s fingers danced across the instrument panel. The avionics powered up, and the automated checklist ran without a hitch. Everything was green.

  Masterson made eye contact with her crew chief, who had just completed another walk-around of the aircraft. He gave her a thumbs-up. From the maintenance perspective, the Apache was ready to fly. Masterson rolled the engine condition levers to the lockout position, switched on the anti-collision beacons, advised her CPG that she was ready to start turning cycles, and pressed the ignitor button on the collective pitch stick she held in her left hand. The Apache’s twin General Electric 701C engines spooled to life with a rising whine that transitioned to a roar, and the helicopter’s rotors began to spin.

  Beside her aircraft, the rest of the Apache flight, call sign Arrowhead, came to life in a similar fashion. Within two minutes, the aircraft lifted off the concrete parking lot and established forty foot hovers in the slight desert breeze. Masterson conducted her hover checks, establishing that her Apache was fully operational and that all control systems were functioning correctly. Looking through the tube-mounted Integrated Helmet and Display Sighting System—IHADSS—attached to the right side of her big flight helmet, she could see the terrain beyond through the Apache’s nose-mounted forward-looking infrared turret. The third generation imaging technology revealed everything in a ghostly black-and-white representation; vehicles and soldiers and other heat sources glowed in shades of white, whereas cooler objects—the walls of the perimeter, the desert beyond, and the long line of stalled traffic on the interstate—were cool shadows of gray.

  She turned her head from right to left, and the sensors in the helmet communicated the motions to the FLIR turret. The system slewed in concert with her movements, panning across the landscape like a mechanical eye. In the distance, strobing beacons caught her attention. It was the two AH-6M Little Birds swooping toward SPARTA. To the unaided eye, the approaching McDonnell Douglas helicopters would be virtually invisible; their anti-collision beacons emitted only infrared light, nothing the unaided human eye could detect. They would circle around the camp and come in from the rear as the Apaches egressed.

  “Card Shark, this is Six. Let’s get going. Over.”

  Masterson pushed the cyclic pitch stick forward with her right hand, her left never leaving the collective. The big gunship accelerated smoothly, its mast-mounted millimeter wave radar scanning the entire area and sending the information back to one of the multifunction displays on the instrument panel. Optimized to detect heavy armor vehicles, the Longbow radar showed the cars and trucks on the highway with great fidelity. Soldiers weren’t as easy to read, which was where the visual technology of the FLIR came in, but there was a mass of inbound objects at ground level that the system had no trouble reading. Masterson knew immediately what she was seeing—a wall of walking dead, shambling through the desert, heading directly for SPARTA.

  That’s a whole hell of a lot more than a few hundred.

  “Holy shit,” her CPG said over the intercom. “You see all those zeds? There’s like thousands of them out there!”

  “Yeah. Makes me think we’re going to go through the thirty mil pretty quick,” Masterson answered as the helicopter thundered over the perimeter. Below, at the well-lit gate, dozens of civilians still waited, hopeful to be admitted into the safe zone at the last moment. They couldn’t see what she could. If they could, they’d be running away as fast as possible.

  “Got muzzle flashes ahead, Colonel. Special Forces, pulling back ahead of the stenches.”

  “Got ’em.” Masterson pressed the radio button on the cyclic. “Flight, this is Six. Let’s break off into two elements and take position to either side of the alpha det ahead. Set your hovers for around eighty feet. No one’s going to be shooting at us out here so there’s no need to hug the deck. Three and Four, you’ve got the right side. Two, follow me into position off to their left. We’ll go rockets first, then use the chainguns on the rest. One hundred meters in front of the alpha det is a no fire zone unless they ask for it. Over.”

  Each Apache radioed their affirmations.

  “Hercules Ops, Card Shark Six. Over.”

  “Card Shark, this is Ops. Go ahead. Over.”

  “Hercules, Card Shark Six. I’m sending you real-time video from our FLIR. We’ve got, uh, about ten thousand or so necros out here, not a couple of hundred like you reported. You should be able to see the same thing if you pay more attention to the drone data,” she added dryly. “We can service maybe the first thousand with what we’ve got onboard, but you might want to start thinking about pulling the external security teams back past Phase Line Dare. Over.”

  “Card Shark, Hercules Ops. We’ve
got your feed. Uh, roger that last. Over.”

  “Alpha Zero-Nine-Four, this is Card Shark. We’re coming up on you now, and we’ll be splitting into two elements on either side of your position. We’re going to go rockets in thirty and try to buy you some time to pull back. Over.”

  The soldier on the radio had to shout over all the small weapons fire. “Card Shark, Zero-Nine-Four! Fucking nuke every stench you see! Over.”

  “Roger that, Zero-Nine-Four. We’re, uh, we’re going to hit them starting at around two hundred meters out with fourteen pounders. Over.”

  “Negative, Card Shark, negative! We need you to hit them at one hundred meters to give us enough breathing room to fall back a bit and re-engage. Can you do that? Over.”

  “One hundred meters with fourteen pounders? Roger. Your call, just don’t stand up to watch. Are any of your forces in the kill zone? Over.”

  “Card Shark, we’re all good down here. I’ve got a tally on all the troops. Over.”

  “Roger, Zero-Nine-Four. Party in twenty seconds. Over.”

  Masterson brought her Apache into a hover amidst a cloud of expanding dust kicked up by the whirling rotors. She consulted the multifunction display on the right side of the instrument panel and took note that the other Apaches were in synch and had transitioned to a hover on either side of the Special Forces team. More icons appeared on the overlay. The Ranger mounted element was rolling up in the two Strykers that had been provisioned from Fort Hood, and each vehicle had flashing infrared strobe lights that she could see through the helicopter’s night vision system. She checked the air data readouts from the probes mounted on either side of the Apache. There was a light easterly breeze that they would be firing into, so its effect on the rockets would be negligible. She reached for the fire control panel and selected the pod-mounted rockets as the active weapon system. Each M260 pod was filled with nineteen 2.75-inch folding fin rockets, and each rocket packed a fourteen pound warhead full of high explosives. Against normal infantry forces, they would be absolutely lethal, and she could wipe out an entire company of soldiers on her own. But would they work against the walking dead?

  Only one way to find out.

  “Card Shark, we’re good to engage at one hundred meters. Weapons free, good to go in ten seconds. Over.”

  The rest of the flight signaled their acknowledgement.

  “Forward element is at a hundred fourteen meters,” the CPG reported. “It’s not really organized, seems like most of the fast ones are out front, with the slower necros rolling in after them.”

  “Roger that. Stand by to fire.”

  “Safeties off, pods oriented on target. Are we good to fire?”

  Masterson checked the MFDs one last time to confirm there were no friendlies in the zone. “Roger, we’re good to fire.”

  “Here we go. Engaging.”

  The rockets leaped from the pods beneath the Apache’s stubby wings, their solid-fuel motors burning bright and hot in the night sky. The flight time was less than two seconds. The flight of Apaches was almost too close to the engagement area for the rockets to be effective.

  The night was torn asunder by great rippling explosions that savaged the desert and the wall of zombies stumbling across it. Bodies and body parts flew across the landscape as rocket after rocket slammed into the advancing horde. Through the rising dust and smoke, Masterson saw that many—so many—of the necromorphs simply got up and continued shambling toward the Special Forces team, dragging themselves along despite shattered limbs and split bodies. Only those closest to the heart of each explosion were rendered ineffective, blasted into bloody ribbons and disassociated parts of flesh and bone.

  The Special Forces team began its withdrawal, covered by the Strykers and the dismounting Rangers. The narrow zone between the Special Forces fighting position and the approaching wave of zeds was littered with corpses, well over two hundred of them, Masterson estimated. She was amazed at the body count the alpha detachment had racked up in such a short time with its own weapons. Clearly, the necromorphs had no problem walking right into a kill zone.

  The Apaches continued firing, saturating the area with rockets. Each helicopter fired two rockets at a time, so the sparking explosions kept coming, tearing through the zombie advance like a warm knife through butter. But it wasn’t as effective as Masterson had hoped. While she’d been briefed to understand that area-suppression weapons such as the Apache’s rockets and chaingun would be less effective against the stenches than on humans, she was still taken aback by the horde’s resiliency. Even deafening explosions and blinding flashes of light didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Whereas humans would have been disoriented and possibly flash-blind, the necromorphs just kept coming.

  Well hell, girl, if they can stand having arms and legs blown off, a little noise and light isn’t going to bother them a bit.

  Then, the Apaches ran out of rockets.

  “Rockets dry,” her CPG said.

  “Card Sharks, go guns,” Masterson said over the radio. “Break. Alpha Zero-Nine-Four, we’re done with rockets, switching to guns now. How far are you pulling back? Over.” As she spoke, the Apache shook mightily as the thirty-millimeter chaingun on the aircraft’s belly spat round after round at the zeds. Less precise than the rockets had been due to its heavy recoil and the fact that the helicopter wasn’t the most stable platform to shoot from to begin with, the bullets tore up an entire area approximately twenty feet across. Each bullet was explosive and detonated with almost as much force as a hand grenade. Any zed that got hit with one went down and stayed down, but the fragmentation effect didn’t deter the others. They simply ran, walked, or stumbled through the field of fire as if it didn’t exist.

  “Card Shark Six, we’re told to pull back about five hundred meters. Rangers are getting set to fire off some mortars. Over.”

  “Gee, think anyone from Ops was going to let us know that a bunch of mortar rounds are headed through our airspace?” Masterson’s CPG asked over the boom-boom-boom of the chaingun.

  “Alpha Zero-Nine-Four, roger. Break. Hercules Ops, Card Shark Six. Rocket attack only marginally effective, we’re continuing with gunfire. We’re down to—” She checked one of the MFDs. “—about three hundred rounds per aircraft. Understand you have mortar fire coming on station. Over.”

  “Card Shark Six, Hercules Ops. Roger your last. Hold position until Zero-Nine-Four and the Ranger element retreat closer to Phase Line Canyon. Try and hold back as much of the force with your guns as possible. Over.”

  “Hercules, this is Card Shark. Roger, we’ll try. But let us know when the mortars are about to fly. We don’t want to be hovering in their trajectory. Over.”

  “Card Shark, Hercules Ops. Roger that, we’ll let you know so you can move out.”

  Below, the thirty-millimeter rounds continued tearing through the advancing horde. Many zombies were blown into pieces, but through the wonders of high-technology thermographics, Masterson saw that the horde was only growing. Thousands and thousands of zombies were marching across the desert toward the lights of SPARTA. Tens of thousands. Perhaps even hundreds of thousands, despite the punishing airstrike that still continued on the horizon.

  “Hercules Ops, this is Card Shark Six. You’re going to need to get some serious firepower out here, there’s got to be at least fifty, sixty, maybe over a hundred thousand zeds coming in from the east. Over.”

  The chaingun went dry.

  Masterson had been keeping an eye on the round count—it was displayed as part of the systems symbology on her IHADDS monocle—so she wasn’t surprised when the M230 system fell silent. The rest of the Apaches followed soon thereafter.

  “Alpha Zero-Nine-Four, we’re guns dry here. We still have Hellfires, but we’ll have to drop back to use them, and they won’t be very effective against these things. Over.”

  The Special Forces soldier still had to raise his voice over small arms fire. Apparently, the Green Berets were shooting on the move. “Card Shar
k, Alpha Zero-Nine-Four, we’re almost at our fallback position. I think you’re good to break station and rearm. We can hold them for a bit. Over.”

  “Card Shark Two, gun dry.”

  “Card Shark Four, gun dry. Over.”

  “Card Shark Three, same here. Over.”

  “Hercules Ops, this is Card Shark. We’re guns dry. We need to relocate to use our Hellfires. Over.”

  “Card Shark, Hercules Ops. Negative on the Hellfires. Little Birds are launching now with more rockets. Go ahead and RTB to rearm. Mortars out in thirty seconds. Over.”

  “Roger that, Hercules Ops. Break. Card Sharks, we’ve done what we can do this round. Let’s head back and rearm. Over.” She pushed forward on the cyclic, and the Apache accelerated into a gentle right turn.

  ***

  McDaniels and the rest of the tactical operations staff kept their eyes glued to the various tactical displays. All of the external security teams were accounted for and in contact. Some, such as the Navy SEALs and Alpha Detachment Zero-Nine-Four, were retreating under fire to new fighting positions closer to SPARTA. Others experienced only intermittent contact, so were holding their original positions. That wouldn’t last. The battlefield footage sent back from the Apaches had shown just how huge the stench advance was, and that was to the east, where the B-52s were still dropping incendiary weapons. The UAVs showed a similar force moving south, emerging from the flaming devastation that was Odessa.

  Hundreds of thousands. Maybe even a couple of million, McDaniels thought. It was almost beyond the scope of the operations staff to track such a huge advance. The elements of the walking dead were miles wide and deep, a veritable deluge of lifeless, carnivorous corpses. McDaniels knew that SPARTA was as prepared as it could ever be, but facing down the sheer numbers of zeds that moved toward the camp, he wondered if any preparations could have ever been enough.