A hand grabbed Sadie. “Don’t look,” the officer said. “Stow it. Cram your feeling down and carry on with the mission.” He pulled her along until her legs forgot Grey’s death and she was able to run on her own. She did her best to cram her feelings, but they came right back up as hot angry bile. Grey was dead and she was suddenly furious...it was what kept her going.
A minute later, the officer said: “This way.” He was pointing to the right, toward the ridge.
“Not yet,” Sadie said. They were still too close. The officer didn’t listen; he turned up the hill followed by all of his men but one. The soldier ran on with Sadie. After thirty seconds, they were beyond the battle and now Sadie turned. The soldier didn’t turn with her. He kept running; he was the one soldier to run away from the bloodbath.
After seeing Captain Grey’s sacrifice, she wanted to pronounce the fleeing soldier guilty of desertion and shoot him in the back, not to kill him, but to maim him so that he would still be alive when the Azael took over everything, so he would have to live with what his cowardice caused.
These were harsh thoughts and she regretted them as soon as they popped into her head, but she had no time to dwell. New shooting broke out not seventy yards to her right where the seven soldiers had tried to mount the ridge. A spur of hill was between them and all Sadie knew was that there seemed to be a huge amount of firing from the top of the ridge and only sporadic shots coming from the bottom.
The disparity did nothing to stop her and she charged over the spur without fear, almost running right into three of the scarf-clad Azael. They had clearly been looking to flank the soldiers and were shocked to find Sadie right there, ten feet away.
Sadie was hot and fired first, raking them with her M16 held at hip level. They went down but not before two of them fired back—one shot three times into the dirt at Sadie’s feet as he fell forward, his face contorted in agony and the other laced the air right above Sadie’s head until she put a second three-round burst into him, knocking him back.
She didn’t stop to check whether any of them were still alive, she ran on, down one slope and up another. Before her the battle was playing out as a microcosm of the larger fight: the Azael were more numerous and better positioned while the soldiers had superior training and were lethally accurate.
A dozen of the Azael were already dead, but so too were four of the soldiers and the rest were pinned and were being riddled even as Sadie watched. Without thinking, she dropped her used magazine and slapped home a new one. She found a downed tree, set the barrel on it and began a flanking fire that the Azael were slow to realize was being directed their way.
In their multicolored scarves, the Azael were prime targets, and, with greater accuracy than she knew she was capable of, Sadie killed four of them before bullets started heading her way. She had no real training in battle, though she had been around Captain Grey long enough to have picked things up. She ducked down as bullets started cracking into the downed tree and instead of popping up and firing again she squirmed to her right where the branches of the tree offered concealment but no cover.
She was practically invisible and two more men died before her muzzle flash gave her away. Next, using the hill as cover, she shifted thirty yards to her right as the tree and branches she had left behind were rippled with bullets. A narrow creek bed was her next fire point. She was low, mostly hidden from view.
Two Azael suddenly broke from cover and began sprinting higher up the slope, thinking to flank her. Just before she fired they ducked down behind a rock.
“If they come out,” she whispered, leaning into the M16 and aiming to the left of the rock. Someone diagonal from her fired at her, kicking up clods of dirt—she didn’t budge and was rewarded when the two men started sprinting again. She sprayed them with bullets and they both went down.
Only then did she move, slipping back toward the tree trunk. As she moved, she dropped the second magazine and reloaded. This time she only edged her head up enough to see; someone fired at her from beneath a bush missing high.
Sadie slunk down and scrambled around in the leaves until she found a good sized rock which she threw down the slope where it made a loud clack noise as it banged against another rock. The remaining Azael fired in that direction and that was when Sadie popped up, firing into bush. There was a scream and then silence. She held her position, listening. There was at least one more of them. If he moved she would fire, if he didn’t then she would move.
That was her plan at least but then she heard thumping and the crash of branches—the man was running away!
She couldn’t allow it. She had to kill whoever was on the ridge directing the Azael army; it was probably their only chance to win the battle—they couldn’t be warned of her coming. In a flash, she was up and chasing the man. He had ditched his rifle and she did as well, gaining speed, but losing lethality. In seconds, she was among the dead; men who had died by her hands.
Only one was splayed out in the open, the rest were strange colorful humps, slumped among the greenery. She leapt the one that was lying in her path. He looked strangely dead. There wasn’t a mark on him as though he was only a plastic manikin or a realistic cyborg with all its inner clockwork rundown. He looked like he should’ve been breathing still.
Then she left him behind as she raced forward like a leopard after a wounded gazelle. The fleeing man was panicked and slow. He kept looking over his shoulder with eyes as big as fists and his mouth contorted in a soundless scream. She caught up with him so quickly that she hadn’t yet figured out how she was going to kill him or even if she could. Using her momentum she drove him off the path. His legs were going in such spastic circles that it didn’t take much effort to send him careening into a tree.
He hit hard, rebounded and fell at her feet as though he was going to kiss her shoe. She kicked him in the face and then repeatedly stomped on his temple until he stopped moving.
She then spat on the back of his bloody head. “That was for Grey,” she hissed.
Breathing hard, she stood straight and true, feeling flush and alive. It was an effort for Sadie to quell the fantastic desire to throw her head back and let out a bloodcurdling scream of victory. She couldn’t. Her work was not done and she left the dead man to run back for a weapon.
There were many to choose from, however she went after the M16A2 she had been given by the no-named sergeant; she trusted it. The gun was clean and meticulously cared for; it was the weapon of a true warrior. She checked the load and went to finish her battle.
A few minutes later, she saw that her battle would be thirty to one against the toughest of the Azael. Sadie didn’t blink.
Chapter 36
Deanna Russell
The air that she strained through her lungs felt to be comprised of styrofoam for all the oxygen it seemed to contain. Each breath was a trial, while her tired legs were altogether numb which made up for the fact that there seemed to be a railroad spike lodged beneath her ribs. And still she ran on, chasing after the Humvee although it had disappeared five minutes before, lost among the hills and trees.
She kept running, drawn on by the distinctive roar of the Humvee’s engine. It had the growl of a jungle cat, while the two Strykers that were trying to corner it with their big Caterpillar C7 engines sounded like unstoppable mechanical nightmares. Their .50 caliber machineguns hammered the air repeatedly and she had to tell herself that they were missing their mark, because why else would they keep firing?
But what if he was wounded?
Although there were five men in the vehicle she could only picture Captain Grey. He was the only one with a name and a face. He was the only one that meant the world to her. He was the only reason she ran on against all hope.
An explosion stopped her, momentarily. With her breast heaving, she paused to listen hoping to hear only a single big Caterpillar running...but no they were both going as strong as ever and so too was the trusty Humvee.
She forced herself to get moving aga
in, working her leaden legs on and on, until she heard the second explosion. This was a more substantial blast. There was the sound of metal on metal. A great Krannng! split the air and then there came the long, sustained firing of a single .50 caliber. It went on and on.
For thirty seconds, Deanna stood listening to the sound, knowing full well what it meant. Then there came the mechanical hum of but a single engine. A lone Stryker pulled out of the woods on the edge of the valley, heading back to the battle, unopposed.
A whimper escaped her as she began running again. In truth it was more of a slow jog, and even that was an effort. She was exhausted, but her slow speed had more to do with the dread certainty of what she was going to find when she came to the spot where a heavy black smoke roiled into the air. She had a picture in her mind of what she would see there—it was a child’s paint by numbers compared to the reality.
Through a screen of pine she saw the Stryker. It was canted against a tree with its wheels toward the eastern mountains and a gaping hole in its side from which a noxious smoke poured. It, the mechanical beast, was as dead as anything she had ever seen.
She came further down the incline going even slower until she was slightly above the Humvee and then she stopped, unable to go on. It was torn apart. It looked as though it had been chewed up and partially digested. Both of the passenger side doors were hanging by a single hasp each; every window was blown out and the tires sagged. There were fist-sized holes everywhere along its body and yet, somehow it was still running, the engine hiccupping and choppy, but still running.
Though that hardly mattered. There was no one to drive it. The Javelin crew was in pieces. She could see the lower part of a leg off to the side and a hand sitting neatly on a rock. The small bed in back was a stew of blood and flesh and chunks of things that belonged only in nightmares. The interior wasn’t any better.
Michael Gates had been in the passenger seat, so it was only a guess that the bloody thing sitting there was him. He had been struck thirty or forty times and it looked as though an axe had been used to hack him into pieces. What was left of the man behind him was only slightly less vomit worthy, but only by a hair. He had no face. There was a hole where his face should have been, a hole she could put her entire hand in.
She forced her eyes away.
Grey had been driving and the high angle at which she stood didn’t allow her to see what had become of him. She should have turned away right there. She should have said a prayer and went back to Neil to tell him that his best friend—the best man in the valley—was dead. Instead, she came down the slope, sniveling like a child, needing to see for herself that he was dead.
Slowly, certain that she would find him as mutilated as the others with his handsome face a gaping maw of blood and splintered bone like that of the man in the back seat. So very slowly she came around the rear of the Humvee, trying to give herself a few extra seconds to prepare for what she was about to see.
Nothing however could prepare her to find Grey completely gone. The driver’s door was open, but he wasn’t in the seat or on the ground in a pool of blood. She looked around at the thin forest in amazement. “Grey?” she called out.
He answered in a voice worn down to nothing. “Yes?”
She ran around to the front of the vehicle to find Grey sitting with his legs jutting out, leaning against the grill. He was half turned towards it and was fumbling with a hunk of something that was half shiny metal, half smeared with blood.
At first she was thrilled to see that he was still alive and then she saw the hole in the back of his shirt. The blood there was bright and fresh and growing fresher by the second. “Oh God!” she cried coming down to his side and seeing that he had a wound in the front of his chest that corresponded to the one in back.
“It’s ok...it’s ok,” she said in a wavering voice. “Oh God, please let it be ok. Can you talk? Does it hurt?”
He let the metal thing drop and he sat staring at her, breathing like he had a lung full of clam chowder. “No...not much. Help me.”
“Of course.” She started fumbling at his collar, trying to unbutton his shirt so that she could inspect his wound.
With a surprisingly soft hand, he pushed hers down. “No. The missile. Help me...attach it...to the...” A weak cough stopped him in mid-sentence.
She set her jaw and told him, “No. No more bombs. We have to get you to the clinic.” She hopped up and looked at the Humvee. It was in such a disgusting gore-filled state that her stomach rolled as though she had swallowed a quart of lard. Trying to keep from puking, she went to the door behind the driver’s seat and opened it. The seat was amazingly clean, barely any blood at all. It was, however, holed in five places and she thought: This was supposed to be my seat.
Deanna suddenly realized that if Sadie hadn’t stopped her from getting in, she would be dead right then, very, very dead. It sent a shiver right down her back.
“I’m not going to the clinic,” Grey rasped. “I have to stop that last Stryker. Help me...if you love me you’ll help me.”
“That’s not fair,” she said, turning from the bullet ridden chair; from one horror to a worse one.
A shallow grin crossed his pale features. “All is fair in love and war. I know you hate what’s happened to me. I need...” Another soupy cough stopped him for a few seconds. “I need you to hate for it to happen to them.” He raised his good arm and pointed out into the wheat field where the Stryker was gunning everything that moved.
There had been four hundred men in that field. Deanna guessed that at least a hundred of them were dead and the rest were hiding in the grass instead of helping their friends pinned down in the hills.
“I-I do hate it,” she said, feeling that by uttering those words she was going to lose the man she loved. “What are you going to do?”
He tapped the metal object which was nearly as long and thick as his leg. “The tube is shot up. I’m going to attach this to the front of...” More coughs, weaker now, stopped him.
Deanna didn’t need him to continue. What he was suggesting was as obvious as it was insane. “You’re going to attach that...that thing to the front of the Humvee and ram the Stryker? Will that even work?”
He shrugged and it wasn’t much of a shrug; he lacked the strength. “If it doesn’t, I have those.” He jutted his chin at a pair of hand grenades. Compared to the missile, they looked tiny and no more effective than if he threw mothballs at the heavily armored Stryker.
“That’s suicide,” she said as breathless as he was.
“No greater love,” he answered. “John fifteen...fifteen something.”
It was a second before she realized that he was quoting the bible. She knew it went something like: No greater love, than a man who lays down his life for his brothers. New tears came to her eyes, they were bitterly hot. He was going to kill himself and there was nothing she could say to stop him unless she wanted to look like a complete selfish bitch in his eyes. She never wanted him to look on her like that and at same time she couldn’t let him kill himself.
“Let me help,” she said and knelt down in front of the rocket. Like any real man, he had a roll of duct tape to do the job with. It wasn’t easy and time was against them. It took her a minute and the job was ugly, still the missile was strapped in place. She then grabbed the grenades and placed them on the radio which was covered in Michael’s blood and shot to shit. She could tell it alone had saved Grey, absorbing who knew how many of the .50 caliber rounds.
She turned to find Grey trying to kick himself to the driver’s door. “I’ll just need a little help to get in.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, squatting down in front of him. “I’m going to do this.”
He seemed to lack the strength for emotion. His face was slack and all he could say was. “But you’ll die...I don’t want you to die.”
“No greater love,” she answered and then kissed him. He tried to hold her back but he was too weak.
“Please, don�
��t,” he whispered. “Let me...I’m dying anyways. Margaret can’t help me, we both know...we both...know that.”
She rubbed away his tears but let her own fall. “You’re too tough to die, but you’re too weak to drive. Just tell me you love me so I can go.”
“I do love you.”
“And I love you.” There, it was out. She loved him. It was a terrible and ridiculous thing to say it right there. And a wonderful thing.
She was leaving the first man she had ever loved to go die alone and probably in vain and, strangely, it felt ok; it felt right. Part of that feeling was based on the fact that she couldn’t live without him. She was going to die but it would be a brave death, one worthy of this man.
Deanna kissed him one last time and then leapt into the Humvee. With a final wave, she gunned the engine and the beat-up machine jumped forward, faster than she expected. In seconds, Grey was lost in the trees and she was running out across the field—it was a field of gold. The morning sun was hitting it at just the right angle burnishing the land in beauty.
She had to force herself to ignore it. The Humvee, though surprisingly spunky, was running on two partial flats on the right side, giving her a list to starboard that she had to fight in order to keep herself on line. The ride was a rough one as well, the roughest she had ever been on. It would be charitable to call it turbulent. The vehicle shuddered along the rough ground, losing the two passenger doors and most of the remains of Michael Gates when she hit a small gully.
Somehow, he actually left his head behind where it bounced around the footwell like a lotto ball hoping to be drawn. That too had to be ignored; though it was straight up impossible to. As she drove it, would leap around in her periphery. She kept hoping that it would hop out of the Humvee on its own, but it did not and she drove with half her mind on it, fearing that it would eventually bounce into her lap.
The Stryker dead ahead focused her.
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7 Page 37