by Jack Hamlyn
“PUT ‘EM DOWN!” Kurta cried out.
Nobody hesitated. M4 carbines and Ithaca riot guns began firing and it was a real turkey shoot.
The slugheads charged forward and rounds ripped through them, pulverizing them, spraying their anatomy in every direction.
Then The Pole stepped forward and turned his flamethrower on them. Even torn apart as they were, they jumped and jerked as the flames overwhelmed them. A minute later, it was done with—they were carbonized wraiths, snapping and popping, breaking apart.
It was at times like this that Kurta was glad for the filters on the helmets because the stench must have been unbelievable.
“Something moved in there. I saw it,” West said.
All eyes turned to Build-a-Bear. Yes, now they saw it, too, a sort of slinking shape pulling away from the light. West volunteered to go in, but The Pole brushed him aside.
“Let me show you how this is done,” he said.
Kurta let him go. The Pole might have been a lot of things, but cowardly certainly wasn’t one of them. He was a good killer who never pulled any John Wayne hero fantasy shit. His own survival was always paramount in his mind.
While the others hung back, he stepped away from the roasting slughead corpses and stepped into Build-a-Bear. Right away, the sluggo hissed. The Pole put his light on him and hosed him down with the flamethrower…then he retreated.
The slughead, blazing bright and throwing off greasy plumes of black smoke, went wild in his last moments. He spun, he whirled, he smashed into the shelves that held all the little costumes for the stuffed animals, lighting them up. He finally tripped and stumbled into a wall of display bears and they started to burn, too. Within seconds, it seemed, the entire shop was going up, the fire spreading in every direction.
“I always fucking hated Teddy Bears,” The Pole said.
“The sterilization has begun,” Mooney said.
And then, suddenly, there were slugheads everywhere. They poured out of Bath & Body, Hot Topic, and Footlocker. Waves of them converging, it seemed, from every possible direction, filling the corridor in an army of slavering, deranged demons bent on one mission in their miserable existences: exterminating the men who had come to exterminate them.
“PULL BACK!” Kurta cried over the headset. “PULL THE FUCK BACK!”
It was the only logical choice of action.
They pulled back towards the dead escalators, noticing with more than a little unease that there were sluggos on the upper floor staring down at them. They hadn’t started coming down the escalator yet, but they would. It was only a matter of time.
Meanwhile, the horde charged in for the kill.
Ex-3 formed ranks and started pouring everything they had at them—the M4s, the Ithacas, tossing a few grenades to thin the ranks. But it was never quite enough. For every one put down, there were three or four others coming in for the kill. Blasted, perforated, burning, and pitted with shrapnel, they still kept coming. And Ex-3 could only hope to fight this sort of rearguard action for so long.
Kurta ordered Mooney and The Pole forward with the flamethrowers, and they put out a wall of fire that turned most of the slugheads back. Some of them, absolutely berserk with fury, rushed forward right into the flames, screaming as they were engulfed. A few more motivated individuals actually made it through the cordon of fire to collapse at the feet of Ex-3 as charred husks.
The flames giving them a momentary margin of safety, Kurta called Pennworthy with Ex-2 and Janis D with Ex-5. Both teams were in the shit, sluggos converging from every direction. What had started as a mop-up operation had now become a battle for survival.
“We’re getting the fuck out,” Janis D said. “There’s too many! I already lost one and I got another injured! We’re making for the APC…if we can reach it!”
Pennworthy said the same thing. He was down to three including himself. There was no way they could handle the numbers they were seeing.
Which pretty much made up Kurta’s mind.
West and Mooney were all for it, but Spengler started laughing when he heard it. “Ha! Not the great fucking Kurta pussying out on us? I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“That’ll do,” Kurta told him.
And The Pole said, “I don’t know, Kurt. You always tell us to speak our minds. Speng is just speaking his mind.”
“Yeah,” Spengler said. “That’s all I’m doing.”
Kurta, feeling his blood boiling under his skin, said, “No, Speng, that’s not what you’re doing. You’ve been brooding ever since the major spanked you and we all know it. I was going to give you a pass on this. I wasn’t going to embarrass you by mentioning how you went to see Trucks, licking his balls to get my job. I wasn’t going to bring up the fact that you stabbed me in the fucking back. I was going to let it go. But since you don’t want that, let me tell you this, you pathetic little twat. This is your last op with us. You’re a fucking liability. Come Monday, you’ll be cleaning up bodies in the street or mopping out shitters or baking fucking cookies for the kids in the galley—but you won’t be here. You won’t be doing a man’s job with other men because you don’t have the nuts for it.”
Spengler leaped.
It was an automatic response. He did not even think about it. Kurta had publicly emasculated him and there had to be payback for that. So, as the flames licked around them, the slughead corpses hissing and crackling, black smoke filling the air in a sickening pall, Spengler launched himself at Kurta.
But Kurta was no dummy.
He knew Spengler. Spengler was simple-minded, strictly a push-button type. You pressed button A, he got pissed off. You pressed button B, he took a swing at you. He was too stupid to mount a successful verbal counterattack so he did what came naturally to macho sock puppets without brains: he came in for the kill.
Kurta baited him, and when he came, he rammed him in the face bubble with the pistol grip of his Ithaca. Spengler went down hard. His bubble was visibly scratched.
“YOU FUCKING CRACKED IT!” he wailed. “YOU FUCKING CRACKED MY BUBBLE!”
“It’s a scratch,” Mooney told him, knowing as they all did that the Acrylite bubbles had the same tensile strength as the canopies of jet fighters. Not much less than a bullet was going crack it.
Spengler climbed to his feet. “YOU MOTHERFUCKER! I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU! I’LL BE CONTAMINATED NOW!”
“Settle down, man,” The Pole said, but Spengler knocked him aside.
“FUCK YOU!” he cried. “FUCK ALL OF YOU!”
And then he ran off. Kurta called for him to come back, but it was pointless. Spengler had been at the breaking point for some time and now he was completely out of his head.
“Nice going,” The Pole grumbled.
“Stop it,” Mooney said.
“No, no,” Kurta told him. “Let him hang himself. Because what I said to Spengler goes for him, too. It’s his last day with Three.”
Maybe The Pole would have backed off or argued his case, but there was no time because the slugheads were mounting another assault, this one more stealthy. As the drama of Ex-3 played out, they were creeping in from every quarter. When West pointed that out, Kurta saw them, their dark shapes filling the corridor.
Right then, he knew they were in deeper shit than they could have imagined.
21
“WATCH IT! WATCH IT! ALL SIDES!” Kurta called out to the others, but they were already in the thick of it.
He whirled around and saw The Pole blazing away with his Ithaca, dropping ranks of sluggos that charged in, drooling and delusional. Mooney was doing the same with his M4, emptying a clip right into the advancing horde.
But where was the kid? The kid?
Kurta raised his Ithaca and dropped a woman whose face was palpitating like the stinger of a wasp. He erased her throat and her head nearly fell off as she tumbled over. There was the kid. He’d become separated, off to the left, near the entrance to PacSun. But he was showing real control, real courage.
Firing a three-round burst, pivoting, firing again, repeating the process. Not panicking at all.
Four of them charged Kurta and he went into action.
He fired the riot gun again and again, getting splashed with sluggo gore as skulls flew apart and chests imploded. A slug inched up his leg and he flicked it away, smashing it to slime and gristle under his boot.
“Hit it!” The Pole said as he tossed an incendiary grenade. A half-dozen advancing slugheads were consumed in a cloud of burning white phosphorus.
More poured in and it was pretty much every man for himself.
Kurta ran out of shot and clubbed two sluggos aside as a third took hold of him. He pulled his Colt Python .357 and shot the one in the kneecap and cored the other in the face.
But there were more, always more.
Flames were everywhere, smoke rising in a blinding haze. It was like trying to fight in a fogbank. The others were vague shadows and Kurta was afraid to fire and hit one of them.
A trio of slugheads came out of the smog, two men and one woman, living, pocked zombies nursing huge slug-sacks at their bellies. He didn’t bother going for their heads, he clipped all three right in their slugs.
Screaming, disoriented, they contorted and smashed into one another, blood gushing from their bellies as they tried with manically scrambling fingers to repair their destroyed riders.
They were the ideal hosts—they didn’t care about themselves, only their parasites.
All around Kurta there was gunfire and shouting, frantic voices calling over the headset, but he couldn’t tell from which direction they were coming. It was all surreal, nightmarish, absolute pandemonium.
A woman leaped out at him.
She was naked, tumescent, her skin purple-black. As one hand covered her rider, the other went for Kurta’s face. He jammed the .357 in the direction of her foaming mouth and pulled the trigger. At such close range, her face literally split in half, blood and tissue exploding and spraying in every which direction. For one split second after he fired, he saw the bloody skull beneath her skin grinning at him and then she went down at his feet.
There was nothing left to do.
He ran.
22
West looked for Kurta as he slapped another magazine into his M4, firing immediately into the face of a sluggo that was missing much of the top of its head. As he did so, four others came vaulting out at him and one of the exterminators must have been near because he heard the sound of an Ithaca firing and two of the sluggos seemed to explode with putrescence right in front of him. They literally came apart, splashing him with meat, juice, and a greasy tangle of intestines.
A slughead kid grabbed his arm and darted in like a shark, biting down. He felt the pain, but there was no way her teeth could pierce the Tyvek material. He punched her in the head three times before she fell away. She looked up at him with glimmering eyes, lips pulled back from gnashing teeth and he kicked her in the face.
He called out over the headset for the others and voices called back, but where the hell were they?
“Gamestop!” he heard Kurta calling. “Gamestop!”
West knew where that was. It was back behind him, towards Kohl’s, sandwiched between California Nails and T-Mobile. He knocked two slughead kids aside and started running, or attempting to in his biosuit.
“Hurry!” he heard Kurta say.
“Coming, chief! I’m on my way—”
Something slammed into him, knocking him into the doorway of Sephora. A big sluggo stood there. Naked and well-muscled, he was covered in glistening gore. He clutched his slug tightly, lovingly. It seemed to be breathing, swelling with a sound of stretched, wet rubber, then deflating.
He reached down and West drilled him with a three-round burst that opened up his chest, blood flying in gouts. He staggered back right into three other approaching slugheads and then a tongue of flame shot out of the haze and the lot of them went up like Guy Fawkes dummies. Covered in burning liquid, their eyeballs burst from their sockets. He could hear the hissing of their blood boiling in their veins.
Whoever it was—Mooney or The Pole—was gone.
West got to his feet, stumbling forward through clouds of smoke, fires guttering around him. Behind him, there was an explosion and slugheads were screaming.
Before him, he saw a wall of sluggos advancing. He turned and darted into the doorway of Claire’s, leaping behind a rack of necklaces and pendants. The sluggos moved past the doorway without stopping.
West let out a sigh.
Then several more showed.
Gunfire rang out. He heard people calling. Sluggos shrieking. The Pole shouting obscenities.
He rose up, firing at the approaching slugheads, stumbling out into the mall to fire again. He saw ghostly shapes moving in the smoke. And then…then something happened. There was a flash of light, a rumble of thunder, and he was thrown through the doorway of Sephora as a shock wave slammed into him.
23
Mooney didn’t know where the hell anyone was.
The smoke was getting so thick that he couldn’t see more than ten feet in any direction. He had his M4 in one hand and the gun assembly of the flamethrower in the other. His headset picked up only static. He was in a bad way and he knew it. He heard sporadic gunfire, voices shouting, and the ever-present insane cries of the sluggos.
His Acrylite bubble really was cracked, unlike Spengler’s. He had been grabbed by a big slughead and smashed repeatedly into the brick façade outside Forever 21 and with such force that his bubble developed a hairline crack. He wasted the sluggo after he’d been dropped, but the crack wasn’t going to go away. There must have been a weakness in the material.
Which means you need to get the hell out of here, he told himself. Don’t worry about the others. Get to the APC and get there now.
The crack was slight, he knew, but it was most definitely there because now he could smell not only the smoke but the sickening stench of rot, human filth, and, of course, the burning sluggos. The smell of scorched flesh and burnt hair was most pervasive.
He began his march back to Kohl’s, burning anything that got in his path. By the time he sighted the store in the building haze, the flamethrower tanks were nearly empty. He saw the fountain and what floated in it.
Jesus, the stink!
He used his last shot of fuel when an emaciated woman came storming out of Yankee Candle, her slug-sack looking as if it must have weighed more than she did. There was green foam bubbling from her mouth. She actually attempted speech in a gurgling, perfectly horrible voice, and by then, Mooney had hosed her down. Like a blazing human candle, she charged him with an amazing velocity, trailing smoke and globs of sputtering fat. She missed him completely, crashing into the wall where she broke apart into burning fragments.
From the flaming ruin of her torso, he saw a shape try to rise up before collapsing back into the sizzling conflagration.
A creeper! I was that close to seeing a creeper birth itself—
Then something hit him and he was tossed sideways, losing his M4 in the process. He tripped and went down.
He clambered to his feet and there was an immense monstrosity standing right in front of him—a woman, or something that had once been a woman. Her gray hide was loose, slopping, and fungal, her face peeling from the skull beneath in a bulging purple-blue mass. A shock of yellow hair sprouted from the top of her skull. She had one filmy yellow eye, the other a scarified pocket of pus.
Mooney went for his sidearm, and she smashed him in the helmet with a huge hand like a bunched catcher’s mitt. He went down to his knees and she took hold of him, grabbing him by the tanks of his flamethrower and actually throwing him four or five feet. He smashed into the side of the fountain, face bubble first, the crack widening.
Shit!
She grabbed him by the tanks again and he moved fast, unbuckling the harness. She threw the tanks aside. He came up and fired twice with his Colt 9mm. Whether he hit her or not, he couldn’t say. She
smashed him in the bubble with her fist. As he was driven down, she hit him three more times, her fist splashing the glass with oozing pink-yellow drainage, some of which trickled inside his helmet, filling it with a putrefying stink.
He got to his feet, squeezed off a shot that went right through her shoulder, then she was on him again, mouth opening and closing, gouts of yellow foam flying from her lips as she screeched at him.
She hit him with her bulk and he was knocked back, falling into the stagnant water of the fountain. He landed atop one of the bloated corpses and it exploded on contact, white mushy flesh spraying in every which direction. He sank right into its putrescence. Somewhere during the process, the Colt was knocked from his hand.
He fought free, splashing and kicking, only to see the mammoth female sluggo towering over him, then he was knocked into the water again. Huge, meaty hands gripped him by the throat and forced him underwater. He fought against them, but they were incredibly strong. The flesh of the arms sloughed off in sheets as he clawed at them with his gloved hands. What was beneath felt porous and pulpy.
Mooney thrashed, screaming out as he rolled in the water with the other corpses. The helmet lights showed him the bobbing, bird-picked faces of the fungous corpses in the water with him.
The hotsuit itself was waterproof, as was the helmet…but now it had been breached by the crack in the face bubble. Water found it—foul, slimy water, a bacterial soup enriched by the drainage of the corpses—and began to trickle in. He could feel it against his face, feel it gathering under his chin.
The woman held him under and would not let go.
It didn’t matter how much he fought and clawed and kicked. She bore down on him with her full weight and there was just no way to throw her.
Within seconds, the helmet was beginning to fill.
He was going to drown in it!