When another shriek came in from behind him, the other side, faster and louder this time. Now he knew that two Foxtrots had him hemmed in from either side. And before he could even begin to spin again, the second one slammed into his back, or rather into Jonesy on his back, and they all went down hard – Elliott face-first into the thick mud.
For a second, the weight of two bodies on his back pushed him so far into the wet loam that he thought he was going to suffocate. Some horrible struggle was taking place on his back – but Jonesy still didn’t make a sound. And then half the weight went away, and Elliott was able to get his chin out of the mud and lever his head up…
And ahead of him, right where he had last seen it, was the first Foxtrot. It lowered itself down into a crouch, buzzing with coiled energy… and it looked Elliott in the eye and hissed, a sound of pure malevolence. Elliott willed his eyes to stay open. Whatever was about to happen, he wasn’t going to hide from it. If seconds were all he had left, he was going to live those seconds.
And then the fell, manic creature uncoiled all that energy and erupted out of its crouch – tearing away off to the right, disappearing into the mists almost too fast to track. Elliott, crushed down, exhausted, tried to get some breath into his lungs. And then he mustered his strength to roll Jones off his back. He rose into a crouch, turned around, and checked on his wounded friend.
And saw he had a bite – a bad one, a whole chunk of his shoulder torn out.
“Stay with me, mate,” Elliott said, digging in Jones’s aid kit for another bandage.
“I’m right here, Elliott.”
As Elliott got the bandage out, he squinted in confusion at what had just happened. For no reason he could imagine the second Foxtrot had just left them there. Spared them. Tearing the packet with his teeth and getting the gauze pad in place, he said, “What the hell just happened?”
Jones looked strangely peaceful. Finally he said, “They say the new ones just infect and run. Maybe it thought we were just one really big bloke.”
Elliott’s eyes went wide. “And we were already infected.” If this was true, then it meant that his refusal to leave Jones, his willingness to sacrifice his life for him… was also all that had saved him.
Jones tried to smile – then winced as Elliott taped up the new bandage. He then started a repeat of the earlier routine of lifting him up onto his shoulders.
“What are you doing?” Jones said.
“Getting you out of here.”
“You saw it yourself! I’m infected. I’m done for.”
Elliott spoke through gritted teeth as he rose again with Jones on his back. “Maybe you’re infected, and maybe not.” They both knew that even a bad bite wasn’t necessarily a death sentence. A handful of people had survived them. “Either way, you’re coming with me.”
Legs burning with lactic acid, lungs on fire, Elliott balanced his rifle with one hand – and his friend with the other.
And he started running again.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Jones began to turn.
At his urging, Elliott set him down in a copse of trees and held his hand, both their arms bent at the elbow. Elliott looked around, trying to keep his rifle handy. He was pretty sure they were behind enemy lines again. Those Foxtrots that had spared them had also left them in the mud while the main body of the enemy passed over and around them.
“It’s okay, Elliott,” Jones said, looking up. His handsome, smiling, pain-racked face said that it really was. “This has been the greatest day of my life.”
Hot tears leaked from the corners of Elliott’s eyes – not for the first time today. He felt like he was in a bad dream – a recurring one, and from which he never awoke. But he laughed through the tears as he said, “Yeah? Mine’s been shit.”
Jones laughed with him. “Hey, I spent today with my Regiment, defending my home and my people – and doing it side-by-side with the best mates I’ll ever have. And now, at the end, what you’ve done for me…” He seemed to be choking up.
There was also the fact that he was dying – the fine black spiderweb lines forming around his eyes, his skin becoming pale, and his eyes growing rheumy. But somehow he was still smiling. To Elliott, he looked like… like he’d never felt so loved or cared for in his life. They squeezed each other’s hands tighter, as if hanging on for dear life.
“And nothing can take that away – any of it.” Jones let go of his hand now as he fought back tears. “It’s okay, Elliott. Go on now. Get back to the Regiment. Keep on fighting.”
Elliott swallowed hard and tried to speak. “I can’t leave you like this.”
“It’s okay.” And with trembling fingers, Jones got out his pistol, and laid it in his lap. “I’ll take care of it. You don’t have to.”
Elliott leaned closer and hugged his friend, holding him tightly, and not letting him go for almost a minute. But then it was time. Wordlessly, with only a nod, he got up, hefted his rifle, and moved out, tears drying on his cheeks.
He knew he was going to have to break through the lines again. He’d done it once, and he could do it again. But it felt very different this time. This time, he had both resolve and – somehow – hope. At first, he wasn’t sure where it had come from. But as he jogged through the woods, picking up speed, suddenly and with startling clarity, a great truth came clear to him. He realized that in the face of certain death, the only thing that gave life meaning… was sacrificing for the people you loved.
And he knew that, no matter what, he wouldn’t be giving up.
And now he knew why.
Post-Apocalyptic Bad-Ass
Five Feet Over Western Russia
Oleg Aliyev hurled himself through the open cargo door and inside his Eurocopter like a man with his head on fire diving into a pool. Shots were still being fired, but they weren’t his, and so far they weren’t hitting him, and he couldn’t even hear or see them hitting anywhere around him, so he wasn’t totally freaked out. His major emotion right now was amazement at how easy it turned out to be to shoot living people – so much easier than he ever would have imagined.
Just draw, point, and shoot.
But maybe everything was easy when you had no choice. And Aliyev had decided, and he felt in his bones the truth of this, that the only way he was getting out of that campfire circle of sinister farm boys, out in the Russian hinterland, was to start shooting first – and to finish shooting last.
Then again, perhaps shooting the first Russian redneck had been so easy because the man had been blind and screaming, his hands covering his face, after Aliyev threw his cup of scalding coffee in it. Yes, shooting that man, who had been standing two feet in front of him, blind and screaming, had been very easy indeed.
Then turning to target the second, the one who was beside and slightly behind him, had also gone well. He shot that guy before he could get his gun clear. But, finally, Aliyev had neither the speed nor the skills to get the drop on and gun down four armed and alert men, however much coffee he threw around.
It had gotten messy from there. And Aliyev had legged it for the helo.
And so now there were either two of them, or maybe only one, one or both possibly wounded, still out there, just outside the weak ring of firelight, plinking at Aliyev as he dove through the door of the helo. In a last stroke of life-saving good luck, they had scampered off in one direction and he in another, and the direction they picked was not toward the helicopter, and the one he picked was.
Now Aliyev turned, raised his weapon, and fired six shots out into the darkness. Then he leaned out, reached down, and grabbed both his bug-out bag and his shotgun, hauled them inside – and finally pulled the cargo door shut. As he did, two incoming shots hit the outside of the door, but didn’t come through. That meant the metal of the helicopter body stopped bullets – or stopped their bullets, anyway, which was all Aliyev gave a shit about.
He turned forward, climbed into the front, and took the pilot’s seat.
A bullet hit the section of co
ckpit glass directly to his left. And this time it came through – and went straight back out the window to his right. In the middle it must have passed an inch in front of his face. Fuck! Aliyev leaned across the cockpit to the left – pilots sit on the right in helicopters – slid open the side window, stuck his gun out, and triggered off probably half the remaining rounds in his pistol’s big-ass thirty-round magazine. He didn’t bother aiming.
He was just trying to put their heads down for the little time he needed.
Then he started bringing the engines up – not giving short shrift to the pre-flight checks this time so much as completely ignoring them. Every few seconds he paused what he was doing and fired a couple of unaimed shots out that window, praying they would be enough to keep the surviving farm boys from swinging around to his front and shooting him to death through the cockpit glass.
When his mag went empty, and he was still on the ground, and the shots to the front of the helo didn’t stop, he realized this plan was a loser. They were going to get him before he could get airborne.
“Fuck it,” he said aloud. “And fuck these guys.”
He clambered back into the cargo area, slid the top off the wooden grenade case, and regarded the big matrix of fuck-shit-up inside. He’d never thrown a grenade before, but like everyone else had seen it in the movies a thousand times. It looked easy enough. He grabbed one in each hand, pulled the pins with his teeth, got the cargo door open a couple of feet – and started chucking.
The field began blowing up, plus whizzing with zipping shrapnel, plus flashing and banging. Aliyev couldn’t tell the types of grenades apart in the low light, and he sure wasn’t going to pause to puzzle them out now. He just distributed them around the field liberally – and when he’d thrown eight or so, he shoved a couple more in his pockets, climbed back in front, and resumed the start-up procedures.
There was no more incoming fire. Whether the last farm boys were dead, wounded, cowed, or run off, Aliyev hardly cared.
A surprisingly small number of lifetimes later, he was actually throttling up, pulling on the collective, and rising up out of this very poorly picked empty Russian field. And now he could once again make out the sounds of the Cossacks plinking at him from below – the grenade shower must have just got their heads down, which was enough for Aliyev. He could hear both the shots, and the tinny impacts they made on the underside of the airframe – but that was no longer his problem, because once again: he was in the wind.
“Ha! I’m out of here, bizzles!” he shouted, for the second time.
That line had been working for him.
And now the shooting of the farm boys became their fucking problem – because they were making a bunch of noise, and they wouldn’t have any ammo left when the walking dead got there, as they inevitably would.
As Aliyev continued to climb, and put himself back on the correct heading, he was feeling well pleased with himself.
Maybe he had a future as a post-Apocalyptic bad-ass after all.
Autorotation
Fifteen Hundred Feet Over Western Russia
“No, no, no, no, no…” But even as Aliyev denied it, he knew he was seeing it right. The low fuel warning light on the helicopter’s dash had come on bright and yellow. When he’d touched down in that misleadingly empty-looking Russian field, he’d had more than half a tank. Now, less than thirty minutes after his totally death-defying escape, the yellow light indicated he was down to fifteen percent.
Then, as he stupidly tapped at it – he didn’t know why, maybe in case there was a needle stuck behind the color touch-screen display? – it turned red on him. That meant he was down to ten percent. And there was absolutely no way he had used five percent of a tank in the last minute. That could only mean one thing.
The fucking Cossacks had got the last laugh. They’d hit his fuel tank.
Aliyev almost jumped out of the pilot’s seat as a sultry female voice said, “Warning. Low fuel.”
He dropped back into his seat, breathing fast. Crap! he thought. Damned luxury helicopters for rich assholes with spoken audio warnings! Everything was just getting on his dick today.
“Warning. Low fuel.”
But he had much bigger and more urgent problems than the aeronautical equivalent of Siri annoying the shit out of him, and he had to focus on these now. In actual fact: he was now pretty much completely hosed.
Well and truly screwed.
He scrabbled around for his NVGs, managed to get them on his face, and cast around frantically below him for someplace level to set it down. He figured “level” was about the absolute best he could hope for at this point. And even that, a safe landing, might only keep him alive for a few minutes longer than otherwise.
But then his heart sank as he realized that staying alive for a few minutes longer was actually well beyond anything he might hope for.
Because down below him, sketched out in night-vision green and black, was a riot of industrial buildings, overpasses, train tracks – and even a few high-rises, a bit farther off in the distance. He was over a city. Even aside from the total absence of large flat places where he might set it down… this was pretty much the worst conceivable place for him to be stranded. He had no idea how many dead would be down there – tens of thousands or millions.
He only knew it would be way too many for him.
“Warning. Critically low fuel.”
“I know! Shut the fuck up!”
Now for some reason he remembered the people who had jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11. The thought of falling a hundred stories to their deaths hadn’t become any less terrifying. It was just less bad than the prospect of burning to death in the jet fuel inferno behind them. But Aliyev found he was different from them. He decided that dying right now in a crashing helicopter somehow seemed worse than dying ten minutes from now being torn apart by the dead. Surely the latter would be more painful.
But he just wanted those ten minutes.
He wanted to keep living.
To do so, he had to find a level spot somewhere, anywhere… there had to be something… there! It was off in the distance, but maybe just close enough. He could now see it was surrounded by giant hulking square buildings, and even what looked like pointy onion domes… but it was a gigantic flat spot, huge and totally level, and it even appeared bricked over or paved.
“Warning. Fuel exhausted. Engine shutdown imminent.”
But the engines started shutting down even before the automated bitch finished saying it. Hyperventilating, Aliyev tried to judge the distance to that square. And, much more critically, he racked his brain for the memory of how to do autorotation. He remembered the fact that, as improbable as it seemed, a helo with engine failure was actually more survivable than a plane in the same situation. Its salvation was in its spinning rotors.
All he had to do – and what he REALLY had to do – was use the helicopter’s forward momentum, as well as the upward flow of air from its descent, and most of all the kinetic energy stored in the spinning blades, to keep the rotors turning long enough to allow him to set down. To keep him from crashing and being turned into charred meat waffles in the urban shitscape below. And he knew there was basically one critical step he had to take to make this happen.
But he couldn’t remember what it was.
Though, once again, he probably had the rest of his life to figure it out.
Then it came back to him. Collective pitch! Lower the collective pitch! That was it. It had to be. It would reduce both lift and drag and put him into an immediate descent. Aliyev hesitated and looked below him. It didn’t look like anywhere he wanted to immediately descend.
Fuck it.
He could go down smooth, or he could go down hard. Either way, he was going down. Swallowing a big lump of terror, he took his left hand and jammed the collective into the floor.
The erratic motion of the aircraft immediately settled down. He was still moving downward, but also forward, and the flight path seemed stable
. The weirdest thing was the eerie silence. He’d never been in a flying helicopter with the engines shut down – and the odds were extremely good he never would be again.
Now he also remembered that he could control his rate of descent by trading it off with his airspeed, using the cyclic normally. Increasing his airspeed would slow his rate of descent – up to a point! – and then the opposite would start to happen, when he’d be out of lift and start to plummet again.
Aliyev very quickly identified that spot on the curve, as he tried to urge this dying aircraft over the warren of buildings below him and into that open square. He eased the cyclic back until the combination of airspeed and rate of descent seemed to maximize the distance he could go before he ran out of sky, and fell the hell out of it. The sweet spot.
But he was having to eyeball all of this.
And as he angled in toward the roof of the last building before that square, and as he realized he genuinely had no idea whether he was going to just make it, or just miss it… something about one of the buildings on the far side of the square grabbed his attention and wouldn’t let go. He couldn’t make out any real details in the NVG view but the shape was extremely distinctive – and equally familiar to him.
And now Aliyev’s throat closed in horror as he realized there couldn’t be two buildings shaped like that – not in the whole world. It consisted of four or five big onion domes arrayed underneath a spire with a smaller onion dome of its own at the top.
And now he was sure. It was what he used to know as Sobor Vasilija Blazhennogo. It couldn’t be. But it was – the fucking Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed, otherwise known to the world as St. Basil’s Cathedral.
He simply couldn’t be here. But somehow he was – a quick glance down at the GPS moving-map display, which he hadn’t had time for in a while, verified it was true. Those were the buildings of Moscow spreading out below him. And, like it or not, Oleg Aliyev was, seriously, coming in for a crash landing…
Right in the middle of Red fucking Square.
American Zulu
Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm Page 24