by Scott Sigler
“We have a battalion-sized force of infantry attacking from the east.”
“Same from the north, south and west,” Dundee said. “Drone video confirms.”
“Weapons free,” Paulius said. “Shoot anything that isn’t us and maintain our perimeter.”
“Roger that, Dundee, out.”
Paulius switched back to the SEAL channel as a nearby Ranger opened up with a long burst from a 240.
“Weapons free, I repeat, weapons free. All but squad weapons use single fire. Make your shots count, boys — I don’t think we brought enough bullets.”
He clicked off, then leaned out past the front fender, just enough for the barrel of his M4 to aim down the street.
Three black hatchlings rushed toward him, running through the pools of fire rather than around them. Flames clung to their black pyramid bodies, curled around their tentacle-legs.
So fast… I’ve never seen anything that fast…
Paulius pulled the trigger twice, pop-pop; the middle hatchling went down hard. Another one dropped, either from a Ranger’s bullet or from one of his overwatch men up on the fifth floor. The creature’s forward momentum rolled it awkwardly beneath a burning car.
The third hatchling closed to within five meters.
Don’t fire till you see the blacks of their eyes flashed through Paulius’s mind right before he dropped it with another two-bullet burst.
The thunder of the Apaches’ rotors echoed through the city canyons. The tone suddenly became more raw, more real as the first helicopter came around a building into plain sight, just behind the oncoming wave of attackers. Paulius heard the sharp snare-drum sound of M230 chain guns opening up.
A Molotov landed ten feet to his left, forcing him away from the front fender. He scrambled to the rear fender, looked around it. Through the flickering flames and the shimmering air he saw the enemy rushing forward.
Hundreds of hatchlings, and behind them, an endless wave of people.
As fast as he could, Paulius yanked grenades from his webbing and threw them at the oncoming mob.
STREETS OF FIRE
Frank Sokolovsky wondered if there could be anywhere colder than where he stood. Besides the roof of the John Hancock Building, sixty stories up, in the dead of night, with a Chicago winter wind whipping in at twenty miles an hour? That was some cold shit right there.
He had worked his way through college on the GI Bill. He’d served most of one tour in Afghanistan before an IED blew his left foot clean off. Frank had considered himself lucky — not only had he lived, he’d been given a medical discharge and gone home to Hyde Park, to his job as a shipping manager, to his wife, Carol, and their daughter, Shelly.
Frank had felt God’s touch earlier than most. It came with pain, as did all things truly worth having. Carol knew something had changed. She knew even before Frank did, to be honest. He’d made some comment about disciplining Shelly. He still couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but when he woke up the next morning, Carol and Shelly were both gone. That was too bad, because from that morning on he’d known exactly what he would have done to them both.
Frank had left his house and just wandered. His first kill had been a mouthy old lady. Leave me alone, the bitch had said. Can you imagine? Please, no, she had said. The nerve of some people.
He discovered new friends. Together, they found humans, killed them. Then word came of a true leader, a leader asking for everyone with military experience. Emperor Stanton and General Brownstone gave him a wonderful responsibility — a Stinger missile.
For two days, Frank Sokolovsky had frozen his ass off atop the Hancock. People brought him food. Once they’d brought him a whole arm, already cooked. There was probably half of that left.
Finally, though, the waiting was over.
He stood still, mostly hidden from sight, the Stinger on his right shoulder, watching the Apache fly down Michigan Avenue about thirty feet below his rooftop elevation. The helicopter’s nose was tipped down, its 30-millimeter chain gun transforming the street below into a sparkling river of death.
The screaming war machine flew past.
Just before Frank pressed the “fire” button, he understood — without a doubt — that everything happened for a reason. He had needed money for college, so he joined the army. He’d served in Afghanistan, where he’d learned to fire this kind of weapon, where he’d suffered the injury that brought him home so he could become enlightened at just the right time. Anyone who considered that a coincidence was a fool. Frank knew the hand of God when he saw it, and for that guidance he whispered a fast prayer of thanks.
He pressed the button.
A Stinger launcher fires a FIM-92B missile: sixty inches long, twenty-two pounds. It is supersonic capable and can reach speeds of Mach 2.2. Frank’s missile didn’t attain that speed, because it was only in the air for three seconds — one second of flight powered by the launcher’s ejection motor, which hurled the missile out into the predawn sky, and two seconds of flight powered by the missile’s solid fuel rocket engine.
The FIM-92B penetrated right between the Apache’s twin turboshaft engines. The warhead erupted, blowing both engines off the machine with such force that one flew three hundred feet to hammer into the glass and steel of Water Tower Place. The other engine clipped a building roof before comet-streaking into Chestnut Street, disintegrating into a cloud of tumbling, red-hot shards that shredded everything in their path.
In an Apache, the gunner sits in front, the pilot above and behind him, an armored wall between them. The explosion killed the pilot instantly. The armor kept the gunner alive long enough for the flaming helicopter to fall seven hundred feet to the street below, where he died on impact.
The wreckage smashed into the Converted running down Michigan Avenue, a rolling fireball that pounded flesh into paste. Pieces of the Apache broke off and crashed into stores, shattering glass, breaking walls and starting several fires.
Frank Sokolovsky stared down at his handiwork. He felt bad about where the helicopter had hit — how many of his kind had died? That was part of God’s plan, though, and who was he to question God?
To the south, he saw another Apache start to climb. Maybe it had seen Frank’s target go down and wanted to get some altitude, but it was already too late; a chasing flicker betrayed a Stinger fired from the roof of the Marriott on North Rush Street. Coincidentally, Frank and Carol had stayed in that very hotel on their honeymoon.
He laughed when the fireball engulfed the Apache. The Fourth of July was nothing compared to this. The flaming Apache banked and flew into another skyscraper, impacting at about the thirtieth floor. Frank didn’t know the name of that building.
He shivered and set down his launcher. Unless someone brought him another missile, his work was done. He looked around. He’d fully expected that as soon as he fired, another helicopter would have swept in and killed him.
Maybe God had bigger plans for him. He’d head back inside, build a little fire and see if he could thaw out some of that arm.
Frank heard the Hellfire missile but he never saw it. By the time he turned around, the Predator-fired weapon detonated within fifteen feet of him, tearing him into three good-sized pieces that all sailed over the side of the John Hancock Building.
Fire danced around the Park Tower’s ruined entrance. Icy, driving wind fed the flames. Clarence felt simultaneously hot and cold, and yet he also felt neither of those things: his mind focused on the battle, on the details that would keep him alive, let him find Margaret.
“Apaches are down,” said a voice in his headset. “Bad guys have SAMs.”
“Tell the Chinooks to abort pickup,” said another voice. “If we lose them, the only way out is on foot.”
Clarence had a Ranger on his left, two on his right, all firing at the attackers scrambling over the perimeter cars.
If only they’d extracted Cooper Mitchell as soon as they found him, then they wouldn’t be facing this army of Converted. But M
argaret had insisted staying was critical, and Clarence had believed her.
A voice on the open channel screamed for help. A burst of gunfire cut the scream short.
So much panicked chatter. Men shouted for help. It sounded like the Rush Street perimeter was about to be overrun.
Something whizzed past his ear. He instinctively jerked backward, so fast he fell onto his ass. He’d come within inches of taking a round in the face.
There weren’t any reinforcements coming in. Air support was gone. The Rangers wouldn’t be able to hold.
Clarence had to keep Cooper Mitchell alive.
He turned and ran into the lobby. “Feely! Get Cooper on his feet, we have to move!”
A maskless Tim shook his head hard so his spiky blond hair flopped back and forth. “No way! Klimas said to stay right here!”
Clarence ignored him. Cooper was sitting on the floor, looking around. Still groggy, but his eyes seemed normal, alert. Clarence knelt in front of him.
“Mister Mitchell, you with us?”
The man’s eyes widened and blinked rapidly at the same time. Then they focused, locked on Clarence’s.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just a little fuzzy, maybe. And call me Cooper.”
“Can you walk, Cooper?”
He nodded.
Tim leaned in. “Otto, we have to stay here!”
Clarence heard a hissing roar. His body reacted; he grabbed Tim and pulled him on top of a surprised Cooper, covering them both with his own body a moment before a crushing blast drove them all against the shaking floor.
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY
Paulius kept firing and reloading, his hands acting on autopilot while his brain tried to work out the rapidly deteriorating situation. They’d lost air superiority. Even with a significant advantage in firepower, they were outnumbered at least a hundred to one.
The snipers on the fifth floor were the only thing keeping the hostiles from overrunning Klimas’s position. At their rate of fire, they’d run out of ammo in mere minutes.
Ranger-fired mortars thoomped every few seconds, followed by popping explosions out beyond the perimeter. The firing arcs were short enough that Paulius felt the concussion wave of each detonation.
The constant roar of the 240s, the pops of M4s and the barks of Benelli shotguns told him the perimeter remained intact. M23 grenade launchers countered the endless barrage of Molotov cocktails, filling Chicago Avenue with shrapnel.
And still the Converted came on, hatchlings and armed militants stepping over the shattered and still-twitching bodies of their comrades. Twenty meters and closing.
He thumbed his “talk” button.
“Claymores, now! Light ’em up!”
He’d barely finished his sentence before the powerful mines started detonating, each one a horizontal storm of seven hundred one-eighth-inch steel balls shooting out horizontally at a speed of twelve hundred meters per second. The enemy soldiers were packed in so tight Paulius could see the Claymores’ blast patterns in the expanding cones of shredded bodies.
The advance slowed. The enemy suddenly broke, turned and ran, leaving behind hundreds of dead and dying. The little snow that remained on the street had turned into red slush, soaking up the blood that flowed down the sidewalk gutters.
I AM THE LAW
Steve Stanton lowered his binoculars.
“Chickenshits,” he said. “They’re running.”
General Brownstone nodded. “Too much enemy firepower. Looks like we inflicted some casualties, though. If I may suggest, Emperor, we should use the M72 light antitank weapons to target their snipers, and all our launched grenades to cover the second wave’s advance.”
That was the right call, and Steve knew it. He’d been hoping the first wave would overwhelm the human soldiers, but they were too well trained and too well armed.
“We don’t have many of those M72s, General.”
She nodded again. “Yes, Emperor. However, I’m certain the humans detonated all of their Claymores, and they have to be running low on ammunition. Our fast ground attack should breach their perimeter if we can clear out the snipers.”
If the second wave didn’t work, Steve’s only option was to launch the third wave. That wave was supposed to be his containment wave, the troops that would kill anyone — Converted included — that came out of the hotel.
He didn’t have time to think it through. The humans could send more helicopters at any moment, and his people had used up most of the Stingers.
The humans were running out of ammo, but so were the Chosen Ones.
He raised the binoculars. “General Brownstone, launch wave two.”
A MAN’S WORD…
Paulius ejected a spent magazine, popped in a fresh one. The enemy had fallen back, but they were still firing. He’d found new cover behind a white delivery truck. Bullets smacked into the metal body so fast it sounded like an off-rhythm drummer experimenting with a new song.
One Ranger lay dying to his left. Another to his right was already gone, or he would have screamed from the flames that engulfed his chest and arm.
An explosion came from the towering hotel above and behind him. Paulius looked up to see a cloud of thin smoke billowing from the fifth floor, window shards tumbling down to the street below. He saw a second explosion — a there-and-gone fireball blowing out a cloud of spinning glass, shredded insulation and torn metal.
He thumbed his SEAL channel.
“Overwatch, displace, rockets targeting fifth floor!”
Another explosion hit the hotel, farther to the right; three smoldering holes gaped wide, making the building look like a tree chopped at the base that might topple over and crash into the street.
The interior perimeter suddenly lit up with hard-hitting snap explosions that cast out waves of dirt and snow. Paulius threw himself face-first to the pavement — there wasn’t much one could do against a grenade volley but lie low and pray.
A machine gun barked. A man shouting “Here they come again!” drew Paulius’s attention back to the street.
He stayed on his belly, aimed his M4 under the truck, found his first targets: a pair of kids — kids, dammit — sprinting forward, each holding a kitchen knife. He took them out, two shots for the first, three for the second.
And then, Paulius saw something that his eyes couldn’t immediately process: a taxi, sliding sideways toward the perimeter, toward him, smashing bodies aside, tires pushing up little waves of red slush. There was something behind that car.
Something big.
“All units, concentrate fire on that taxi!”
The taxi’s doors blossomed with new holes as Rangers and SEALs alike focused their fire, but the vehicle was moving too fast — it was too late to stop it.
Paulius dove away from the delivery truck a moment before the cab crashed in. The truck toppled, smashed down on its right side. A Ranger who had been using the truck for cover didn’t make it clear; the heavy vehicle crushed his left foot, trapping him.
Klimas rolled to his feet, came up ready to fire — and for the first time in his military career, he froze.
A monster. Eight feet tall, shoulders and chest rippling with thick coils of muscle. Molotov firelight played off wet, dark-yellow skin. Open sores dotted the body, some trailing visible rivulets of pus. The wide neck supported a huge, heavy-jawed head topped with spotty patches of tight, curly black hair. The face seemed toylike compared to the oversized body. Its mouth was full of long, thick teeth that could easily rip flesh from bones.
And sticking up from behind each clenched fist, a long, jagged, pointed arc of bone.
The trapped Ranger rolled to his back, stared up at the monstrosity only a foot away. The Ranger screamed.
The yellowish beast raised a bare foot, drove it down into the Ranger’s stomach. The soldier’s screaming stopped. His hands weakly gripped the long leg, then his fingers slid away and his arms fell limply to the wet pavement.
The monster leaned down and roared.
Klimas heard the telltale thoop of a grenade launcher. An explosion knocked the massive creature back, splashing his bloody entrails in a long streak across the white top of the overturned truck.
Gunfire brought Paulius out of it, gunfire aimed at him — a man and a woman sprinting around the delivery truck, the man firing a rifle, the screaming woman aiming a shotgun.
In less than a second, Klimas hit them each twice. The man dropped hard. The woman landed face-first and slid across the packed snow. Klimas fired twice more, aiming for her head, but his shots hit her back instead. As she slid, she raised the shotgun one-handed, screamed “asshole!” and fired.
He felt the blast smack into the left side of his chest and belly, felt a dozen needles dig deep as some of them found ways around the gaps in his body armor.
She slid to a stop. He put a bullet in her head, then looked up.
A dozen more hostiles poured in around the truck. Two of them tackled a fleeing Ranger. Another Ranger lay on the ground, screaming obscenities at the three people on top of him, one biting his face, another stabbing a knife into his right thigh over and over again. And just beyond the truck, Paulius saw two more of the yellow monsters rushing in fast.
His position was being overrun.
I promised Feely I’d get him out, and if I don’t save him and Mitchell, then all this is for nothing.
Paulius turned and ran, tossing a flash-bang behind him. Up ahead, smoke billowed out of the hotel’s entrance.
“All exterior SEALs, fall back to the hotel! Our mission is to get the civilians to safety. Someone find me another way out of that building!”
EVERYONE LOVES A PARADE
Steve Stanton really, really wanted to ride on Jeff’s back, like Hannibal riding an elephant into battle, but that was a bad idea; there were probably still a few human snipers left in the Park Tower.