Grapes hit the ground when a second burst shattered the Humvee’s windows and punctured its tires. He whipped around and spotted a group of men wearing white armbands making their way down a side street, firing on the confused militiamen caught in the crossfire. White armbands. Like the one that fucking Swede had on.
“Those are the Just!” he shouted. “They’re fucking traitors! Shoot ’em!”
His soldiers turned and fired on the Just, who ducked behind a house. The Koreans, as surprised by the new onslaught as Greene, didn’t hesitate and started to advance again, firing as they went.
Suddenly a ragtag convoy came roaring up from the far end of Redemption Avenue. It was a strange collection of tanks, garbage trucks, cars, and vans. Each one was spilling over with helots, shouting at the top of their lungs, shouldering their weapons.
The Koreans turned to face the new threat at their back. One soldier fired an RPG at one of the trucks. With a shrill whistle, the rocket raced toward its target and struck its radiator. The truck blew up and a fireball engulfed its crew. The other vehicles swerved around it. The helots jumped out, took cover, and started shooting.
The street was plunged into chaos. In the dark, the four groups attacked each other, not sure who was in their sights. Hong looked in amazement from the soldiers who’d ambushed them to the newcomers firing on that group, then to the scruffy group at other end of the street shooting at everyone. In the turmoil, with enemies running around everywhere, he couldn’t tell who was who, so he ordered his men to fire on anything that moved.
“Kim! Kim!” he shouted. Then he remembered that the lieutenant was storming the tanker. Hong let out a string of curses. The situation was getting more complicated by the minute. He had to get his men out or they’d be lost.
How many sides are there? he asked himself as he ran along his thinning lines.
Seconds later, the Ithaca burst into a fireball that spread out over a thousand feet. Flames spilled onto the docks, incinerating everything in their path. A sea of fire crossed the road and swallowed up the houses along the dock as if they were made of paper. The monster fire kept advancing, followed by a gigantic tidal wave stirred up by the blast. A boiling, hurricane-strength wind raged ahead of the flames, tearing off roofs, blowing out every window in Gulfport, and overturning cars. The fireball peaked, then folded back on itself, leaving hundreds of burning houses in its wake. The shock wave continued to advance, demolishing everything in its path.
“Who the fuck’re you shooting at?” I yelled in Mendoza’s ear, but he ignored me. Clutching his M4, white-knuckled, he fired steadily, carefully selecting each target.
Prit crawled to my side, skirting a mountain of broken glass. Dozens of bullets whizzed over our heads and slammed into the truck. The damn thing looked like a sieve.
“This is crazy!” the Ukrainian yelled over the din of gunfire. “It’s a free-for-all! If we stay here much longer, they’ll kill us! Our flanks are exposed!”
“We have to take out Grapes! Without him, the militia will turn tail and run!”
“Those aren’t militiamen out there!” Prit pointed to soldiers in strange uniforms who were attacking a house. “Judging by their uniforms, I’d say they’re North Koreans!”
“North Koreans? You’re shitting me! Where’d they come from?”
The Ukrainian shrugged and fired at some shapes approaching in the dark.
Suddenly, everything stopped.
First a flash of light blinded us for a moment. Then a volcano of fire shot up above the roofs. Next came the loudest roar I’d ever heard as a roiling windstorm flattened us. That blast of air hit with such force that the houses tilted and creaked. Except for the tanks, every vehicle was overturned. Splinters of wood and concrete rained down on us like shrapnel. I rocketed through the air, along with the hundreds of people around me who’d been swept up in the maelstrom.
I ended up fifteen feet away, my fall cushioned by a bed of flowers. I lay there on my back, trying to catch my breath, as colored lights circled overhead. My ears rang with a shrill whine.
I struggled to my feet, relieved to be in one piece. The only sounds were the crackling fire and houses collapsing after being thrown hundreds of feet in the air. Then I heard the groans of the wounded.
At least half of the men and women who’d been fighting a moment before lay on the ground, dead or so badly wounded they were beyond help. Not far from me, a helot stared in amazement at a piece of pipe protruding from his stomach. The fragment had skewered the guy like an arrow. Everywhere I turned, I saw bodies mangled by the explosion and shrapnel.
“Prit! Prit!”
“Over here,” said the Ukrainian, dragging himself out from under a section of a roof. “What the fuck happened?”
“I have no idea, but this is hell!” All the houses were demolished. The surviving civilians who lived in those houses ran out of the ruins into the dark, desperate to reach safety. What none of them knew was that the outer wall had been breached, leaving nothing between them and the Undead.
In the distance, the sky was aglow with what was unmistakably a fire. A really big fire.
“That fire’ll devour the town in a hurry,” the Ukrainian muttered, brushing off his clothes.
I grabbed my friend by the shoulders. “We’ve got to get to city hall! That’s where the supply of Cladoxpan is. If we don’t get one of those fungal cultivars, Lucia and I are screwed! And all the helots, too!”
Prit looked at the distant flames with a pained expression. City hall was backlit by the flames of the approaching fire; the blast of wind had destroyed its roof and shattered all its windows. There was no trace of Greene’s flag.
“It’s gonna be the race of our lives,” he said as he loaded his AK-47. “You ready?”
I nodded, scared shitless but determined.
“Let’s go,” Pritchenko said with a growl. “See you on the other side.”
50
Grapes rose out of the rubble. All the skin on his forehead was scraped off. A piece of corkscrew-shaped metal had landed just inches from his head. Blood trickled out of his right ear from a ruptured eardrum. He staggered through the ruins to the spot where he’d been crouching until a minute ago.
At first he thought his Humvee was gone; then he spotted it, twenty feet away, embedded in the living room of a house. Most of his men had been holed up in houses, poised for the ambush. Now those houses were piles of burning rubble. Here and there, a dazed militiaman stumbled through the ruins.
Grapes’s forces were shattered. His only consolation was that the other groups hadn’t fared any better.
Then he detected movement out of the corner of his eye. Two figures were scrambling over upended vehicles. He rubbed his eyes. It couldn’t be! But there they were: that goddamn lawyer and his Commie friend. Somehow the fucking lawyer had survived the Wasteland and made it back to Gulfport. There he was, limping along, not fifty feet away. Anger consumed Grapes, crushing the defeated feeling eating away at him. That asshole was not going to make a laughingstock out of him.
Grapes tripped over an assault rifle and picked it up. His eyes locked on the two men as they crossed the Chink soldiers’ lines and ran toward city hall. Grapes fired, but the gun didn’t go off. Grapes pulled the trigger again and again, until he realized that the blast had destroyed the M4. He threw the gun to the ground in disgust.
He spotted two Green Guards climbing out of the rubble. “Over there! Get ’em!”
The Green Guards looked around, then opened fire. Their delay gave the figure in front enough time to move out of the line of fire. The second figure, whose limp slowed him down, took cover behind an overturned car as bullets took chunks out of the concrete around him.
“Don’t let that motherfucker get away!” Grapes roared at his men. “I’ll get the other guy!”
He jumped over a pile of bodies and headed fo
r the figure who was running full speed toward city hall.
51
Bullets whistled around my head as I curled up into a ball behind an overturned car. We’d almost made it to the far side of the bombed-out battlefield when a couple of militiamen opened fire. I threw myself to the ground as Prit vaulted over a low brick garden wall and out of the line of fire. My old pal looked at me, about to jump over to my position.
“Go on, damn it!” I shouted. “I’ll catch up.”
He hesitated.
“Prit, one of us has to stay behind and stop those guys, or else they’ll nail our asses before we reach the end of the street!”
Pritchenko glanced around and shook his head. He knew I was right.
“Be careful!” he shouted and tossed me the magazine from his AK-47. “I’ll be back soon! Hang in there!”
I nodded, wondering how the hell Prit thought I was going to hold out for even ten minutes. But I didn’t say anything. Time was the enemy. Flames were leaping out the roofs of the houses next to city hall.
Pritchenko waved, as if to say, Be cool. Everything’ll be OK. Then he took off running, and I lost sight of him.
52
The explosion threw Hong against the side of his tank so hard he cracked a rib. He stifled a howl of pain as he stood up. Out of the hundred and twenty men he’d led into battle, he saw only a handful, most too badly injured to be of any use.
The colonel guessed where that explosion came from, and he knew it meant he’d failed miserably. The mission was over. That defeat was hard for him to swallow.
As he leaned against the tank, staring off into space, he felt a hard lump in his jacket pocket where he had put the bottle of Cladoxpan for safekeeping. All was not lost.
The colonel took a deep breath, leapt to the other side of the tank, then ran in the direction of city hall. Hong was playing his last card.
Mendoza heard the shots and peered out cautiously. Flames lit the street, casting an otherworldly glow over the dozens of bodies strewn everywhere. The fighting had stopped, except for two Green Guards firing at an overturned car.
They were the last of the Greens. The rest were dead or had fled. Mendoza savored the victory. The whites-only city was on fire and he was still alive. The Wrath of the Just had triumphed. Their revenge was almost complete. There was just one small detail left. Screwing up his courage, he hurled himself toward those bastards. Then he’d take care of Greene.
Hong and Mendoza spotted each other at the same time. The Mexican was surprised to see the Korean’s uniform, but he didn’t miss a beat. He didn’t know who the guy was, but he wasn’t one of his men. He raised his gun and started firing as he sidestepped the fallen bodies.
Hong picked up his pace without firing. Closer. I’ve got to get closer.
When they were thirty feet from each other, Mendoza’s bullet hit the colonel in the shoulder. Hong staggered, more surprised than hurt, but didn’t slow down. He raised his Makarov and fired at the Mexican three times in quick succession.
The first bullet went high, but the other two drove into Mendoza’s chest and he fell in a heap. His body convulsed a few times and then went limp.
Panting, the colonel stopped and looked at his shoulder. The wound wasn’t deep, but he’d need to clean it out first chance he got. Still clutching his gun, he walked up to the Mexican’s body and kicked him. You son of a bitch! You nearly killed me.
Hong looked away from the body toward city hall. A hundred feet from him, a soldier wearing a green armband was shooting at a wrecked car. The fallen body of the other soldier was proof that his target was a good shot. Hong decided not to bother with them. Let them kill each other. He had more important things to do.
He heard a jingle at his feet. He looked down and saw a couple of metal rings rolling on the ground. A bloody hand gripped his pants leg. What the hell?
Carlos “Gato” Mendoza looked up as his life ebbed out of the bullet holes. On his chest lay two deadly grenades with their pins pulled.
Hong paled and tried to take a step back, but Mendoza held tight to his leg.
“Chinga tu madre, you bastard,” the Mexican mumbled, bloody spittle bubbling out of his mouth in his last act of defiance.
The grenades exploded simultaneously. Their flash was the last thing Colonel Hong saw. He died clutching the broken bottle of Cladoxpan.
53
Prit crunched through the broken glass that carpeted the lobby of Gulfport’s city hall. The curtains fluttered through the broken windows. The fiery wind had blown burning embers through the cracks in the walls. Small fires burned here and there, threatening to come together into a monster fire. Sparks from a transformer lit up the room.
Prit tossed aside the AK-47. It was useless without ammunition. He crossed the lobby, clutching his old knife.
The Ukrainian had no idea where to start looking. The building was huge and time was short. He heard wood beams crash down in one of the offices. The whole building groaned and creaked as the fiery wind wafted inside, inundating everything with the smell of smoke. Just then Pritchenko heard footsteps behind him.
“Well, you finally got here. You almost beat me.” He turned, smiling. “I told you to wait—” The words died in his mouth and his smile faded.
In the doorway, Grapes glared at him with a wild look in his eyes, his face covered in blood. He clutched an ax he’d taken off the wall.
“You piece of shit,” Grapes growled and moved to the center of the room. “You dirty Soviet midget.”
“Nice to see you, too, Grapes.” Prit took a deep breath. “You look a little tired.”
“The first time I saw you, I knew you had balls.” Grapes let out a squeaky, tuneless giggle. “Dammit! We could’ve had it all. Women, power, wealth.”
Prit shifted his knife to his other hand, concealing it as he leaned against the reception desk, never taking his eyes off the Aryan.
Grapes inched slowly, almost imperceptibly, around the seal in the center of the marble floor. “You didn’t choose your friends wisely, Russian,” he barked with a contemptuous laugh. “Your lawyer buddy is dead by now and you’re trapped like a rat. You should’ve picked a better side to be on.”
Prit yawned exaggeratedly. “Are you finished, or do I have to listen to more of your stupid babbling?” he said, feeling the heft of the knife in his hand.
With a roar, Grapes lunged at Prit. He’d tried to distract the Ukrainian and get as close as he could so he wouldn’t miss, but Viktor Pritchenko was a sly old dog.
The ax sank into the wooden counter with a sharp crack, exactly where Prit had been standing. Grapes yanked out the blade and attacked again, brandishing the ax like a Viking.
Prit dodged a couple of times, steadily retreating toward the foot of the stairs. Grapes swung the ax in huge, deadly circles in front of him. Each time the blade cut the air with a sinister hum, the Aryan let out a roar. The giant thug came at Prit faster and faster. The little Ukrainian desperately feinted at the last minute. He was running out of room. Armed with only his knife, he couldn’t get close to Grapes.
As Prit backed up, he stumbled on the bottom of the staircase that led to the second floor. The Ukrainian lost his balance and grabbed hold of the oak handrail. Grapes saw his chance and brought the ax down toward Pritchenko’s arm. Prit threw himself flat on the ground, and a split second later the ax crashed into the railing and sent splinters flying.
Grapes growled as he tried to pull out the blade, but it was stuck deep in the wood. This was the chance Prit had been waiting for. Quick as a snake, he sprang up and drove his knife into Grapes’s forearm. The big Aryan screamed and recoiled. There wasn’t much room between them, but it was enough for a guy Pritchenko’s size to maneuver. The Ukrainian’s arm shot forward and buried the serrated blade in Grapes’s groin.
The Aryan howled and staggered back, furious. Instead of
continuing his attack, Prit crouched, waiting, his eyes fixed on the leader of the Green Guard.
“I’m gonna carve you up, you motherfucker,” Grapes gasped. He ran his hand over his face. His vision was blurry and he was really cold. He felt something sticky on his pants. He looked down—they were soaked in blood.
“Your femoral artery is severed,” Prit said, his voice ice cold. “You’re bleeding out, Grapes. It’s over.”
No! Can’t be! No, no, no, no! The Aryan took a couple of steps toward Prit, but his legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Pritchenko came over to him unhurriedly and grabbed him by the chin.
“Bleeding to death is a painless way to go,” he said, squatting beside him. “You drift off to sleep and then it’s over. A better death than the hundreds of victims on the trains got. So here’s my parting gift to you.”
Grapes opened his mouth, but before he could utter a word, Prit plunged his knife into the man’s stomach. The Aryan howled in pain and his eyes teared up.
“You motherfucking psychopath,” Pritchenko growled, his teeth clenched. He yanked out his knife and plunged it in again, this time skewering Grapes’s genitals. “That’s for Lucullus, you son of a bitch.”
Grapes collapsed in a heap as the pool of blood around him spread. The Aryan stared into Pritchenko’s face. The hate-filled gleam in his eyes faded and finally went out.
Prit looked at him for a moment. The Ukrainian rarely enjoyed killing anyone, but this was a special case. He bent over Grapes’s body and wiped his knife on the man’s shirt. Then he stood and started for the lab.
He didn’t hear the shot. He felt like someone had punched him really hard in the back, and then he got hot, very hot. His arms weighed a ton and his legs were like melted sticks of butter. He tried to turn his head as he fell forward, but couldn’t.
The Wrath of the Just (Apocalypse Z) Page 29