Healers

by Munson, Brad

  Now they had been noticed. One of the two remaining Apaches immediately wheeled towards them, all its weaponry retargeting. They had seconds to live.

  “MOVE!” Stone bellowed and peeled away, making a wide loop across the grass to put as much distance as he could between himself and the doomed vehicle. His new weapon was heavy in his arms.

  He heard the MRAP’s door squeak open behind him, but he didn’t turn to look. He’d just have to assume Allen could get free before–

  The Apache’s missile – the last it had on board, Stone hoped – hit the Cougar head on and literally lifted it on a cloud of explosive force. It blew into a thousand pieces that shot like bullets through the air; some of the smallest, fastest debris rocketed past Stone. He put his shoulders up and his head down and ran, straight towards the attacking troops, altering his course just enough to put him directly under the attacking Apache. Freezing air burned his throat.

  This was the moment. This is what he’d seen in Iraq, more than once, and he knew it was possible – possible – but he’d never actually done it before.

  He stopped. He braced himself and hauled up the M249 SAW and pointed it straight up – as much as he could – right at the underbelly of the Apache helicopter. One hand wrapped around the pistol stock. The other gripped the base of the bipod at the front of the boxy stock.

  He pulled the trigger. And the gun roared. He didn’t aim for the armored underbelly; he did his best to take out the rotors that kept the damn thing aloft. Though the recoil was surprisingly gentle, Stone’s arms and shoulders ached at the vibration of the weapon, but he didn’t stop – he couldn’t.

  The Apache rocked from side to side as the first rounds hit. Bits of tech cracked and twisted off, and it nosed down, looking wounded. It abruptly tipped to the side, exposing the rotor even more completely. Stone kept firing, more and more. He saw chunks of the carbon fiber assembly fly away as the rounds hit the base of the blades and blew the black cowling to pieces.

  The Apache’s shuddering engine screamed like a wounded animal and it fell, straight down, straight towards Stone.

  The soldier back-pedaled as fast as he could, away from the action at the front gate, away from the plummeting tons of metal over his head. He’d never run so fast straight backward, but he knew it was a matter of life and death.

  The chopper hit the ground so hard it made the earth tremble. Stone threw himself down, flat on his belly, and heard bits of the Apache whizz past him. He braced himself for the impact of the chopper’s debris, but nothing hit. It slammed over him, past him, missed him by inches.

  Son of a bitch, he told himself. It worked.

  He waited five beats after the worst of it was over, then pushed himself to his knees. Just as he had planned: The cracked and smoking hulk of the attack helicopter was directly between him and the main force assaulting the gate, providing him with just enough cover to approach – carefully.

  He looked up and saw the third and last Apache still hovering over the gate ... for a moment. Then it abruptly turned tail and headed south, away from the battle. That was exactly what he had been hoping for: The RSA had just lost two of its precious choppers; it wasn’t willing to risk a third.

  The ground forces were on their own now.

  He’d almost emptied the SAW into the chopper. Now he went on one knee and reloaded, just as Allen stumped up behind him, flushed and breathing heavily.

  “Fucking amazing,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Stone answered. They’d have to celebrate later – if there was a ‘later.’ “Looks like our guys are finally getting themselves together. We can help. We might have lost any element of surprise—”

  Allen barked out a laugh as something small and hot blew out of the wrecked Apaches. “Might?” he said.

  Stone ignored him. “—but if I peel off to the left here, lay down as much fire as I can with this fucker, I think we can take out some of the fortifications while our guys—”

  There was a tremendous crashing and shattering in front of them, at the gate. Stone broke off, moved to the side and got a good look:

  Two eighteen-wheeler semis – two! – had just hit the already broken gate straight-on. Their grills had been carefully reinforced; they were effectively turned into battering rams with trailers, and they’d blasted through the chain-link without taking on any damage.

  The RSA troops had obviously been expecting them. They’d set up off to the left and right, leaving a nice wide path for the semis to pass them and ram directly into the Offutt defenders just as they were pulling themselves together. Stone hissed in shared pain as bodies flew. What return fire they could pull together sparked uselessly off the armored cabs of the trucks.

  For one instant, Stone thought the trucks would make it all the way to the HQ itself and destroy it. But they lost momentum and rolled to a halt three-quarters of the way there, deep in Offutt territory, with soldiers ranging all around them, pouring fire into the cabs, the tires, the trailers.

  Unmanned, Stone realized. Hell, there might just be a brick on the accelerator.

  As they rolled to a stop the back of the trailers fell open, without assistance and clearly on purpose. They had been specially modified, Stone could see that. They levered straight down and thumped against the icy ground, making a ramp as wide as the truck ...

  … and sprinters, hundreds of them, poured out of both trucks, already driven into a frenzy by the noise and the smell of human flesh. There were Offutt soldiers all around them, almost crowding them, firing indiscriminately ... and it didn’t matter. The infected launched themselves at the living soldiers, hands like claws, teeth like knives.

  The humans fell in a wave of death.

  Stone, still semi-protected by the wreck of the Apache, could do nothing but watch as his comrades fell. The smart ones pulled back, put some distance between them and the infected, picking off the fastest and closest ones with careful head shots. But it wasn’t going to be enough – not nearly. There were too many sprinters and too few soldiers in too small a space.

  And now the second wave of living RSA troops were beginning to advance.

  “Shit,” Stone said under his breath. He could still do some damage; hurt the right flank as they advanced if he rolled out and used every round of the SAW to its best advantage. But nothing short of a miracle would going to save the base—

  The miracle rose up from the northern horizon, roaring its rage and belching fire.

  The US Army’s own Apache, armed to the teeth and piloted by Colonel Adan Forrest, had finally arrived.

  Chain-gun fire flew from the Apache and tore into the advancing RSA troops, both flanks. Forrest was moving too fast, too low to the ground to take any hits himself. He took out half the RSA troops in a single pass, flew a hundred yards downfield and executed a turn so tight Stone would have thought it impossible. Then he roared back, along an almost the identical path, and did it again, cutting through the enemy like a scythe sweeping through wheat.

  At the same time, a side-mounted loudspeaker bellowed, “Soldiers! Retreat to HQ! Now! Double-time! Retreat and defend the compound!” It was clearly Forrest’s voice, calm and determined.

  The few remaining soldiers that hadn’t already begun to run for shelter turned and ran now. The sprinters, less organized, seemed momentarily confused by the movement, and a moment was all that Forrest needed. His Apache rose straight up, out of range of any remaining RSA fire. It seemed to hang by magic in the smoky air, its nose dipping down slightly ...

  Missiles slammed into the trucks, one-two-three. The explosion was huge, so powerful it felt like a punch in the chest to Stone, a hundred yards away. Two-thirds of the sprinters fell – broken, head-blown, or simply stunned for the moment. The HQ shuddered but held.

  The Apache fired the last of its missiles, right into the struggling remains of the sprinters.

  “Riflemen!�
�� Forrest bellowed from his perch. “Marksmen! Clean it up from a distance!” The Apache didn’t wait for a response; it spun in the air to look back at the living RSA troops, only to see the last of them limping away, struggling to disappear into the wooded terrain, desperate for cover. Three out of four of the attackers would never move again.

  Stone and Allen did as they were ordered. They moved forward, no longer worried about RSA fire from the gate. At the slightest sign of sprinter movement they fired, then fired again. The Offutt troops carefully emerging from the HQ saw them and welcomed them with a shout. It took a long time – the better part of an hour – but they killed every sprinter who’d been set loose, then killed them a second time if they tried to rise again.

  The battle for Offutt was over. The good guys had won.

  Barely.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Forrest was not happy. Not happy at all. And he was most unhappy with himself.

  “I should have been here,” he said as he looked at the devastation. The Apache had landed without incident. The breaches to the northwest and southeast had been repaired with sturdy, temporary barriers, and the last of the shamblers put down forever. The huge hole that gaped where the main gate had been was now blocked with two of Offutt’s own heavy trucks and a hastily assembled wall of debris and construction material. Nothing was getting through there until Forrest and his engineers were damn good and ready.

  But Forrest and Stone both knew the truth: They had nearly lost the base. They could have lost everything.

  They were only a few miles from Omaha and the Fac. They all knew that the future – whatever it held – would begin and end there. And if the RSA gained control of Offutt and all it held, that close to the community that would be making and distributing the Morningstar vaccine …

  Nobody wanted to think about that. Especially not Forrest.

  “You can’t be everywhere,” Stone said. He had grudgingly come to admire the colonel in the weeks they’d worked together. The man was as slick and smooth as a politician; he could handle an unruly mob as well as a battalion, but there was a calm competence and a brutal honesty there, too. You could trust him. He had made Stone and his men actually believe they could restore the world, even if no one knew exactly how that was going to happen. At least not yet.

  Forrest quirked his mouth – as close to a snarl as he ever got. His dark skin seemed to harden into polished wood. “No,” he admitted gruffly, “I can’t. But here? Now? Nothing matters more than Offutt, at least not to me. Not even Omaha. Not even Nashville.”

  Stone couldn’t help but poke him a little. “Not even Fort McCoy?” Fort McCoy was the huge installation in rural Wisconsin where the President of the United States and his Joint Chiefs were housed, guiding the restoration from the relative safety of isolation and secrecy. Less than a hundred people across their broken nation knew the President’s exact location. As far as Forrest was concerned, it was going to stay that way indefinitely.

  Forrest shrugged, forcing himself to regain a measure of good humor. “Well … let’s call that a draw.”

  They left the clean-up and reconstruction crews to do their work, and moved out of the cold Nebraska air into the warmth of the headquarters. It was almost as busy inside as out, leadership communicating with survey teams and patrols, making sure the base was secure again, accounting for the dead, caring for the wounded.

  A thick young woman with burnished brown skin, Angela Castillo, stepped up as they entered. “Colonel,” she said, her voice a mixture of businesslike efficiency and undisguised grief, “the final count is fifty-four dead, twenty-seven wounded, thirteen infected and ... accounted for.” That was the term they had agreed to: The ugly, unavoidable necessity to put down a fellow human who had been infected before he or she could turn into a sprinter or shambler. “The wounded are all in the infirmary, undergoing triage. The perimeter is secure.”

  “Any sign of RSA or infected?”

  Castillo shrugged. “We haven’t spared any teams to go chasing them yet, but forward observers in the towers—” she looked angry and guilty at the same time. “—in what’s left of the towers – indicate no massing within view. Looks like the infected have lost interest again, and the RSA are heading home. For now.”

  Forrest nodded thoughtfully. “For now.”

  “Could be worse,” Stone said.

  “That doesn’t make it any better.” The harsh grief and responsibility was obvious in the colonel’s voice.

  He moved across the room to the huge map that dominated one wall. It covered a four-state region in excruciating detail, showing the presence of settlements, known troops, shambler hordes, and recovered or abandoned resources, all noted and color-coded. No fancy electronics here – that era was over, at least for a while. Just good old-fashioned push-pins and Post-it notes.

  “It’s a tough way to learn the lesson,” Forrest said, “but it’s clear: No more defensive maneuvers. It’s past time, way past time, we go on the offense. Even if that place seems impregnable.” He tapped a finger on the big, black triangle to the southwest: Mount Weather, the federal installation literally built into a mountain, the headquarters of the hated RSA and its Chairman.

  Stone nodded. He’d been waiting to hear these words for weeks. “So,” he said, fighting to keep the eagerness out of his words, “you have new orders?”

  “Not orders yet,” Forrest said. “But we’ve been talking. Planning. Good plans, I think.”

  He looked Stone straight in the eye. “You ready for it? Ready to be part of it?”

  Stone grinned. It was his first genuine look of pleasure since the alarm had torn him awake hours earlier. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Hell, yeah.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Well … damn it,” Francis Sherman said, and sighed deeply. He was deep into a very unpleasant conversation with Adan Forrest on one of the precious few sat phones they had; the colonel’s clipped and businesslike recitation of the assault on Offutt Air Force Base had put a cold stone in the pit of Sherman’s stomach.

  It was just past nine a.m. in Omaha. The rays of the dim winter sun were barely coloring the windows of his office. It made his world seem even more fragile and bleak. “I’m glad you made it back in time,” he said, searching for a positive spin. He paused as Forrest respond, short and bittersweet. “Yes. Agreed. All right: Keep us informed. Sherman out.”

  A walkie-talkie mounted on his shoulder, recovered not so long ago from an abandoned Omaha police station, buzzed insistently. A voice grated at him, without naming itself. “Bad news?” it said.

  He recognized the voice immediately, despite the distortion. Mark Stiles was getting restless.

  He depressed the TALK button and said, “Not great, but we’ll cover it later. Proceed with the tour. We have work to do.”

  He sighed and looked out over the still infected city. We will always have work to do …

  *****

  Stiles didn’t like his orders, but he understood them. As he clipped the walkie-talkie back on his belt, he shrugged at Rebecca Hall, standing close and looking expectant, and drew his parka even more tightly around his shoulders. “Orders are to proceed,” he said. “We’re supposed to keep news of the attack to ourselves until the list of dead and wounded is confirmed.”

  Rebecca scowled. It looked pretty on her, he thought. But then everything did, at least to Stiles. “So business as usual,” she said.

  “And a bloody business it is.”

  They were standing outside the newly christened Town Hall, trying to stay warm as each of the new citizens arrived for their long-planned tour and orientation. Rebecca greeted each of them with a cup of steaming tea from an insulated jug she’d been smart enough to bring along. Every cup was gratefully accepted, but Stiles could see the poorly suppressed desire and regret in every expression: How long would it be before real coffee returned to the worl
d?

  A long time, Stiles thought, the truth of it like a dagger in his heart. Except for a few cases recovered over the last few months and held in a secret location, coffee was more rare than gold in the world after Morningstar. In fact, gold was an easy “get” compared to fresh caffeine in its most perfect form.

  The new citizens gathered around in a tight circle, vapor puffing from every mouth. In spite of the sunlight, the temperature insisted on hovering in the mid-thirties, and they all felt it, straight to the bone.

  “So!” he said, addressing the group like a carnival barker. “All the tests and observations are finally over, all your training is complete, and I can finally say what I’ve wanted to say to y’all for weeks now: Welcome to Omaha!”

  The cheer was ragged and spontaneous, but absolutely sincere: They were all delighted and relieved to be here. “We’re going to go around and give our names – first names only is fine – and tell each other our assigned responsibilities here in this brave new world ...”

  He only half-listened as they spoke; he’d memorized names and duties the night before in his final prep for the tour. A couple of the youngest and most able were joining The Watch, the security and patrol force that kept the fences in place and the citizens from killing each other. Three more were assigned to the ambitious Urban Farming detail as Sherman and his team drove Omaha towards the goal of food independence by the end of the year. He almost smiled when a round man with very little hair up top and a luxurious walrus mustache under an equally impressive nose introduced himself as “Tomlinson. Shoemaker.” It was one of those old-fashioned professions nearly forgotten before the outbreak that was now absolutely essential. Stiles knew the truth: they were damn lucky to have a man who actually knew how to work leather and rubber properly.

  Stiles looked directly at the last new citizen. “And you?” he said politely, truly interested in the answer. Everyone turned to look at the final new arrival as her turn came: a tall, well-muscled, and – Stiles had to admit it – strikingly beautiful woman in her mid-thirties, with auburn hair, fine brows, and a sharp chin. Her hazel eyes were so bright they were almost aglow. “I’m The Dentist,” she said. She had a rich, husky voice.