She looked shocked, reached over, and stuck her hand in the hole. “Frank, did he get you in the heart?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t die?!” I was a little surprised she’d ask, considering the upgrade package.
“No. It hurt a whole lot and feeling the hole close up was really disgusting, but it didn’t kill me.”
“Damn.” She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go through that, but I’d prefer not to die. Guess I’ll just have to suck it up, huh?”
“Probably. How’s your boob?”
“Fine. He didn’t even dent the vest. I was just startled as Hell he thought to do it.” She shook her head ruefully and added, “I’m really happy I had the vest on, though. I don’t want to watch my body grow a new nipple.”
I just nodded because I had no idea what to say to something like that.
Thankfully, the need to reply to her statement was taken from me by the nano-critters. All of us hit the dirt at the same time, faces down with our hands covering our eyes. I had to assume that my onboard posse was aware of something that I wasn’t, like the impending laser show.
Charlie got up first. “What the Hell was that about?”
“Fitz, ping Ramos and have him ask Buttons what the Hell that was.” Matt issued the order calmly but looked slightly rattled. “I don’t know, Charlie, but we’re going to find out.”
We stood there, looking around as if we expected something to land on us. Eventually, Fitzgerald got back to us with an answer. Buttons saw a civilian helicopter land on the roof of our target building and took the opportunity to take it out on the off chance that someone interesting was about to make a break for it. Matt sent back a brief message of thanks that included a pointed request that we be informed before such actions were taken.
Fitz also relayed that the convoy was moving quite quickly for such a large number of vehicles, and that the rescue team should start moving toward the overpass. Armed with that information, Matt rounded us all up and had us check and reload any weapons that were low. We were good to go in less than 60 seconds.
“All right. We’ve got about half a mile to cover on foot. The plan is to stick to the right side of the paved road with Franklin on point. We will take cover as necessary to avoid the light show. Clear?” Matt locked eyes with each of us until we gave him an affirmative. “All right. After the light show, we will cross the overpass on the right, as quickly as possible. If we have no incidents, we will then duck into the condo community, take out any sentries, and assess which entrance to the building will function best. Clear?”
We were clear. It was simple and direct. Things would likely become messy once we made our entrance into the building itself, but the degree of trouble would depend on things we were not able to predict. The collateral damage from the laser strikes being one of those things, the other unknown being the exact number of opponents we were going to have to face.
Franklin gave us the high sign and we started walking. I’m grateful, and I’m sure the others were as well, that it was a quiet and uneventful slog. There were no cars and not a peep on our “radar” that had anything to do with enemies. We stopped at the end of the overpass and got the ping from Fitzgerald that we had 15 seconds to get cover and get something over our eyes.
It was a long 15 seconds, facedown in the dirt with my hands wrapped around my face. Fitz came across on the Townhall channel to let us know that the strikes on the crater area were about to start. A moment after that it sounded like the sky squealed.
I didn’t hear the following shots, even as far away as we were, because there were too many other noises. Booming sounds and screams carried across the road, and I felt sick to think that the idea I had come up with was as brutally effective as it sounded.
“Rescue, Fitzgerald here. Relay says you are good to proceed to target. Visual indicates successful strike, and B is moving to target the convoy. Godspeed.”
Flower looked us over and pointed to the other side without a single comment. Franklin took point, and we scrambled over there, hoping to make good use of the confusion.
Hieronymus Bosch would have painted the scene we set our eyes on as we ducked into the elegant, but slightly damaged, brick condominium community on the other side of the overpass. It was Hell after the lights are turned out.
The laser strikes into the water-filled crater did three things we were sure of, even with a quick glance at the tableau. One of the beams melted the water pipe closed. The other shots dazzled or blinded quite a few of the observers instantly. Those near the crater rim, and for some distance beyond it, didn’t fare as well as those that were blinded.
The heat caused the entire pool of water to explode into super-heated steam. There were dozens of bodies that had been steamed to death instantly. Still more looked like boiled lobsters, contorted on the bubbling asphalt.
If I live forever, I will pray I never hear a noise like the screaming of the poor bastards who were still alive. I will also hope that if there is a God, that forgiveness is possible, because I brought that suffering about. It didn’t matter if they were murderous undead things; they still looked and experienced agony just like people.
Not even the most foul, genocidal, child-raping sociopath deserved to have half of their body cooked to the bone and still be conscious to feel the horrible burning that would kill them... not right away, but over hours. What was being human without some kind of mercy, even in the face of an abomination that masqueraded as a person?
God help me.
I didn’t see the sentry until he tried to kill me. Omura took him out, deftly, with an almost graceful motion that sent the head into the air as the body hit the ground. Absentmindedly, it occurred to me I didn’t know a garrote could do that, but I kept it to myself. The only thing that came out of my mouth was air, because Flower shoved me up against the nearest wall.
“Save the morality for later,” he hissed at me, “you do not have time for it now. Do you want to rescue Bajali? Then fucking get back on the program or I will leave you here. Understand?”
Looking into the hardness of his eyes, for one second or a hundred, I was frightened enough that I remembered who I was and what I had come to do. The realization was tempered with the almost-sure reality that by the time the night was finished I would have seen more horror to lose sleep over for the rest of my life.
My brother and my father were here, somewhere, and they could not be allowed to escape or end the day alive.
“Thank you, Matt. Let’s go.”
He nodded, and we kept moving.
The view from our vantage point showed more activity toward the parking garage, and much less towards the front of the building. There was not a single intact pane of glass on that side and little to no movement to be seen.
What few guards that were at all apparent were clustered near the door into the building from the upper garage deck. We counted six other figures moving around on that deck and the one below it.
There was so little movement on the other side that it was actually suspicious.
Franklin turned back to the group and said exactly what I had been thinking. “There’s too little motion at the front. No triage, no nothing. They rigged something in there.”
“Franklin, move up to the near corner of the building. Hard cover if you can take it, soft if you can get it.” Flower’s orders were clear, and he seemed to have formulated an approach in mere moments. “I’ll take out the guard closest to the door. Franklin, you double tap the middle one, and I’ll take the third in the confusion. Frank, Charlie, and Omura, you three move up and take that door. We’ll follow, depending on resistance. Got it?”
We got it. Franklin slipped across the street like a greased weasel, fast and fluid. Flower chambered a round in his absurdly long sniper rifle and waited for a signal from our point man. It could not have been three full breaths before Flower stopped breathing and his finger tightened on the trigger.
Crack! He didn�
�t miss, but there was no way I would have expected him to miss. The guard closest to the door was the victim of a magic trick that made everything from his collar upwards disappear.
Franklin reacted as soon as he heard the shot and the second guard’s head exploded into wet fireworks. The third dropped out of sight in a spray of blood shortly thereafter.
“Go.” Flower’s order was nearly a whisper, but all three of us heard it and moved.
We got the high sign from Franklin as we passed him, scurrying onto the top deck of the parking garage. The only thing there to meet us were the bodies of the three guards, and the cyclopean gaze of a security camera that we weren’t able to see from our original position. The body of the camera sported a red “On” light, and in my imagination, the lens blinked at me.
I broadcast to our team, “They’ve got a camera. Probably know we’re here, if the exploding heads weren’t a clue.”
Flower fired back a quick response. “Take out the lens.” I raised my rifle and cracked it with the stock. The red light went out. “You three,” he followed up after watching me disable the camera, “get in there, split up, and make shit happen. I’ll follow in 60 seconds. Franklin will hold the exit.”
“Sir, I pinged Fitz. Relay says we’ve got about eight minutes before the convoy stragglers enter the theater,” Franklin sent to the whole team.
“You three, I’m giving you five. No more. No less. Scram!”
Chapter 40
We went through the door in a single-file line. Omura mimed tipping his hat to us and scrambled down the open stairway. Charlie and I moved up to the door leading to the lobby and she poked her nose to the window, gave me a thumbs up, and we let ourselves in.
It was a fairly standard corporate lobby, tasteful marble tile, slap-dash colorful art on the walls, and you could almost hear the Muzak that would have been playing on any given normal work day. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a normal workday. There was shattered glass all over the tile and enough dried blood spatters to make Jackson Pollock nauseous. We also learned that Franklin’s intuition about the front door was spot on.
Someone had lined the area with trip wires, caltrops, and no fewer than five Claymore anti-personnel mines. It was, to my eye, inexpertly done, but it would have stopped us long enough for a team of defenders to pick us off like baby seals on an ice floe. The question became, “Then where are the defenders?”
“They were going to box us in and pick us off,” Charlie whispered, clearly on the same mental page as I was.
“Yeah, that’s my guess.”
“So where are they?” She took the words right out of my mouth.
“Potty break, feeding time at the slaughterhouse, or they’re waiting for us somewhere.” I looked around, noting the elevators and the empty reception desk. “We don’t have time to wonder too much. Stairs or elevator?”
“Stairs.”
Charlie and I turned around and headed in the door towards the stairwell that Omura had used to make his disappearance into the structure of the building. His nefarious purposes were clear: blow it up. We had one clear objective, and a few that flew under the banner of “Gosh! It would be great if... ”
The second floor was dead quiet, just offices with open doors into a central free area, and nothing much to speak of beyond that. We elected to not bother poking around and scurried up to the next level.
We were greeted with garbage and six people chained to the walls. They were all on their way to meet whatever Maker they believed in, and it was just a matter of time before they got there. I knew I smelled gangrene somewhere nearby, and a closer look at one of the poor saps confirmed that his hand from the leather belt at his wrist down to his fingers was turning distressing colors.
He wasn’t even able to lock eyes with me. They just rolled around in their sockets. I didn’t have time to look each of these people over, but this man moved me to take action. I slung the rifle over my shoulder and pulled the Man Scythe free as quietly as possible.
I caressed the inside of his naked thigh with the curve of the blade, and he didn’t make a noise; none of them did, and he simply started to bleed out on the floor. When I turned around, Charlie wasn’t behind me.
That’s when I heard her yell, “Hey, Frank! Who’s the asshole in the pajamas?”
I took off down the hallway and into the boardroom at the end of the hall. Charlie stood against the far wall, surrounded by a small crowd of zombies carrying clubs and machetes. Both of her wakizashi were glinting in the light of the daylight-corrected fluorescent light bulbs.
I looked to my left and saw someone I really would have preferred not to see. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much choice in the matter.
“Charlie, meet Stewart. Stewart, meet Charlie. He’s my younger brother.”
She looked thoughtful, a wakizashi in each hand, surrounded by no fewer than eight zombies, and asked me, “Well, does that mean you’re going to kill him or let him make a deal and we’ll get him later?”
I looked at my smug, undead younger brother. His ninja jammies were pressed, he didn’t smell bad, and his claws had been shaved down to long, clean tapers. I couldn’t have been more disgusted if Josef Mengele had popped over to bugger one of the poor bastards who were chained to the wall in the foyer. There was enough blood on Stewart’s hands to merit an eternity of nasty reincarnations.
“If you don’t mind, m’dear, I think I’ll kill him now.”
Stewart “I’m a zombie and I don’t smell” Hightower actually had the nerve to look surprised!
“Frank! I’m still your brother! What do you want to kill me for? Join us! Besides, you’ll make a fabulous cow and fucktoy for me and my associates.”
I couldn’t believe he used Dad’s oily, salesman voice on me. All things considered, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised—Stu was a fucking nudge as a child.
Stewart and I closed the distance on one another and I snapped the blade of my weapon of choice into a low guard position. He drew his sword, the “classic” ninja chokuto. I was also willing to bet there was something in the hand he kept out of sight behind his leg. Shuriken?
In the quarter of a second I had to think about it, it seemed less likely he’d have a distance weapon, even an annoying one in here. My brother was a sneak. I didn’t think more training, dying, and coming back to life would have changed a single thing. Instincts told me it was either a weighted chain, or something equally compact.
I tuned out the noise coming from Charlie’s direction, because something bloody had begun. None of it sounded like her. A few clubs, claws, and teeth against someone who was comfortable using two blades wouldn’t do much good unless they rushed her. Even then I’d put my money on her.
That moment of considering my environment nearly cost me my life. Stewart flew forward and put a foot on the Man Scythe, which slammed it to the floor but not out of my grip. His sword came down, and I let him bury it into my shoulder. It hurt like Hell.
The look on his face when he realized he’d not only landed a hit on me, but that he’d actually tried to kill a flesh-and-blood relative, was almost delightful enough to make me forget that my shoulder was on fire and that I truly wanted to vomit. Instead, I smiled at him.
“Hey, Stu,” I said. “Why don’t you pull that out of my shoulder and take a good look at it, you festering excuse for an ass boil?”
With a snarl, he obliged me, and I dropped to my knees. The snarl cut off rather abruptly, because it was a bit of a shock to see how little of his sword blade remained. The section that had cut into my shoulder had a lovely crescent of metal missing, leaving only a pencil-width of steel holding the blade in one piece. I guess my little friends needed to make more playmates, and I was deeply grateful for their sense of dramatic timing.
He took a step back from me and looked at me as if I were the one who ate people for fun. When he shifted his weight off the business end of my weapon it became instantly clear that a moment of truth had arrived.
I don’t feel any guilt for taking advantage of his surprise or for killing him. He was already dead once, and the second time didn’t matter.
A flick of the wrist turned the Man Scythe upward and sent it slamming into his body. I think it entered behind his testicles and continued for all 20 inches of the blade until it popped out under his sternum.
He froze solid, gasping. I stood up, reversed my grip on the handle, and pivoted with my hips. The blade pulled free, cutting through his pelvic bone, and opening his abdominal cavity to the world. My brother was too shocked to scream and didn’t even attempt to pull his guts back in. All I got from him was a blank stare and a spray of bloody entrails.
I pulled my pistol from the holster and put the barrel to his forehead.
“This is a shame, Stu. I love you, but I’m not the least bit sorry.” I fired once. There was no way to miss.
When I turned around, Charlie was watching me with a very sad expression on her face. The crew that would have done her harm was strewn around the floor in various states of decapitation and dismemberment. It didn’t look like any of them had managed to lay a finger on her.
“We’ll talk about it later. We’ve got to get Baj and get out of here.” I waved her out the door and followed her.
There was a certain silence between us that I didn’t quite understand, but I also knew we had very little time to deal with the rescue. Whatever was happening between us needed to wait until we got the job done, because it wouldn’t matter at all if we died in the attempt. For all I knew, she’d take it up with me in the afterlife, if such a thing existed.
She had stopped in the foyer and was surveying the five remaining people attached to the walls. I tapped her on the shoulder and raised my eyebrow when she turned to face me. Her voice appeared in my head, and she told me she had to do something. I nodded and told her I’d meet her on the next floor.
I turned to go and headed up to the next floor. I had no clue what she was planning; all I knew was that I didn’t hear any noises as I hauled ass up the next flight of stairs.
Blood Soaked and Contagious Page 36