by Munson, Brad
“Sir!” the co-pilot shouted. “Get back in your chair! Strap in! We’ve lost—”
BLEET-BLEET-BLEET
The helicopter nosed down, aiming straight for the ground. The airspeed increased instantly in one massive lurch. Mbutu felt the pressure of acceleration ram into the side of his face like an invisible fat fist. The President’s astonished face flew back, disappeared into his executive cabin.
“Omaha! Omaha! Mayday, Mayday, loss of control! Going down! Going—”
Mbutu Ngasy threw out an arm and seized Denise McKendrick’s hand. He turned his head to face her and looked deeply into the pretty blonde woman’s eyes. He spoke just loudly enough for her to hear him over the shrieking of the engine.
BLEET-BLEET-BLEET
“Thank you for everything,” he said. “Do not be afraid.”
The helicopter smashed into the ground and exploded.
*****
Mark Stiles was the one who had spoken to the pilot last, who had told her they were launching the smoke grenade. He still had the phones on when the alarm started. Even as he stood rooted to the spot, in the center of the landing pad, he was the one who heard her say she had lost control, that the computers were down. System Failure.
He heard the last screaming syllable escape from her throat, heard the chopper’s connection cut off as it slammed into the ground and exploded like a bomb.
In the next instant, before the radio failed entirely, he heard three syllables spoken in a different voice –a new voice.
He heard someone say, “Done and done.”
*****
He ripped off the headphones and threw them away. He spun on his heel and ran straight back towards the Headquarters, his thoughts careening. Rebecca was shouting his name, but he didn’t call back. Sirens and shouting were all around him, trucks were hurtling towards the burning wreckage half a mile away, and Stiles pushed it all away.
He was putting it together.
He pounded through the entrance to the Headquarters. He slammed through the door marked BASEMENT and threw himself down the stairs three at a time, almost falling on his face more than once.
He understood it all now.
The system failure that had popped all the locks on the perimeter fences and let the infected into Omaha. The system failure that kept them from seizing control of Edwards without sending in troops to do it by hand, so they lost everything in the process. The system failure that made the President’s chopper drop like a stone and killed him, killed the pilot, killed Mbutu Ngasy. All of it unraveled in three little words, all of it laid bare because the egotistical little shithead couldn’t keep his mouth shut, couldn’t keep from treating the whole thing like a goddamn video game, just like Worlds of Warcraft, just like the one he’d played with Stiles just weeks before when he’d kicked his ass and said the same fucking thing:
Done and done.
He forced himself to stop outside the first set of doors to the basement where all the IT equipment was kept. There was an anteroom just beyond it, then the belly of the beast itself, the digital center of the whole operation where all the damage could be done. Had been done.
Stiles pulled his beloved Winchester from the shoulder-sling holster where he’d been keeping it. It was going to be something to show the President when he arrived, something beautiful and historical to impress the leader of what remained of the free world. Now it was going to do something far more important. Now it was going to kill the son of a bitch who had just murdered the Commander-in-Chief.
It was going to kill Duncan Boyd.
Stiles kicked open the doors to the anteroom. He pulled up the Winchester, ready to bomb through the far set of doors and start firing without a pause.
A dozen sprinters, shrieking their hunger and hate, were waiting for him in the anteroom. They descended like gigantic birds of prey, all teeth and claws, and rammed straight into Stiles, driving him to the concrete floor.
He felt six sets of teeth bite into him all at once, all over his body. He felt the sprinters start to chew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“No one?” Francis Sherman asked.
Anna Demilio shook her head. Tears were streaming down her face, and she didn’t give a shit.
“No one,” she said. “Not the pilot, not the President, not … not Mbutu. All dead.”
Sherman was sorry he had made her say it out loud. He had known it the minute the Sikorsky had slammed into the ground in full view of the welcoming party.
Only minutes had passed. They were standing on the steps of the Headquarters, watching the rescue efforts, unable to do anything, think anything that went beyond the burning wreck, the smoldering bodies, the stench and the smoke that drifted from the fire and filled his throat, clogged his head.
A communications offer named Sanderson handed him a phone. “Sir,” he said, his voice unsteady but determined. “It’s McCoy. They know what happened.”
How could they–
Oh, he realized. Of course. They had been listening. They had heard it all.
“Sherman,” he said. His eyes were still on the burning chopper. A nurse – a strong woman he knew well, a trusted ally – ran past him and into the building, crying uncontrollably.
The voice in his ear was one of the men he had met when Mbutu had visited the last time – the man who had brought the official White House Bible that they had used to swear him in as Vice President of the United States.
They needed someone, they’d said. The Vice President had died of a heart attack moments after the RSA destroyed Edwards with a nuclear bomb. And Francis Sherman was the best choice. The only choice.
He had agreed to do it. He’d hated every moment of it, but he had agreed. And now ...
“Mr. Vice President,” the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court said in his ear. “It’s time. Are you ready?”
Sherman closed his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “Just say the words.”
*****
Ten minutes later, Sherman was back in his office, looking down on the disaster. Something about the words he had just spoken had changed him. He felt a weight on his shoulders like one he’d never felt before, not even when he had led thousands of soldiers into battle. This was something more. Something different. Something far greater and far worse.
Sanderson, showing unexpected and welcome courage, still stood by Sherman’s side, a respectful distance away. “Sir?” he said, unafraid to ask the question but clearly dreading the answer. “The incursion teams are in place. The assault force is ready. What do we tell them?”
Sherman turned abruptly to his communications officer. It was the first time he’d looked away from the window in a long time.
“Tell them it’s all gone to shit,” he said. “Because that’s the truth. Then tell them to pull the trigger. Tell them to go. Don’t wait for the speech, don’t wait for any more signals, but attack the son of a bitch and kill him. Now.”
He looked back at the burning ruin on his front porch and almost snarled. “Tell them it’s war.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The attack was not scheduled for at least three more hours, but Finnegan wasn’t the least bit surprised when the first alarms went off. They couldn’t contain themselves, he thought. Not when we splattered their fearless leader all over the driveway.
He was standing in the all-too-familiar executive offices of The Chairman when the first alerts sounded. The only one who seemed more relieved than Finnegan was The Chairman himself.
“At last,” the man said, and his flat face blossomed into a lipless, mirthless smile. “The final battle begins.”
Finally, finally, Tristan Finnegan allowed his expression to actually reflect what he was thinking. He smiled – a bitter, weary smirk. He shook his head and huffed out a snort of pure disdain and derision. “Pathetic,
” he said, and he loved the sound of his own voice. He loved that word. “Truly: You are pathetic.”
The security men flanking the door and standing directly behind The Chairman all tensed at once, as if wired together. Knuckles whitened on rifle stocks.
“What … what did you say?” The Chairman’s eyes, burning out of his nearly hairless head, looked like the eyes of a turtle gone mad from thirst. “What?”
“There’s no winning, Mr. Chairman. You made sure of that long ago. The most we can hope for is survival. A small chance to fight another day.”
The Chairman hauled himself to his feet – no easy task, Finnegan knew. It was getting harder for him every day. “Get out. There’s no place for weakness here. Get out.”
Finnegan waited a long time before he said the next word. It was one he had been waiting to say to The Chairman for a very long time, one that he weighed on his tongue, savored, relished, for extended, delicious moments before he released it.
“No,” he said to The Chairman. “No. I’m not leaving. You are.”
He reached inside his coat as The Chairman shuddered and shouted, “Guards!”
The guard to the right of the door shot the guard to the left of the door. The guard behind The Chairman brought his weapon to bear on The Chairman himself, so he couldn’t reach for the ever-present pistol, his final back-up, that waited in his flat desk drawer.
The leader of the RSA looked positively astonished. His wide, watery eyes demanded an explanation.
“If you treat all your employees equally poorly,” Finnegan said, “it’s not hard to turn more than one at a time. It’s hard not to turn all of them, in fact.”
The Chairman was trembling with something more like rage than terror. “Traitor!” he said, very softly at first. Then much more loudly, with more power behind it. “Traitor! It’s too late! You’re done! There’s nothing you can say, nothing you can do to make me take—”
Finnegan pulled his Army issue Beretta M9 from his coat pocket and shot The Chairman in the chest. Three times, center of mass. The first man he’d shot in weeks. The first superior he’d shot in months.
It felt very, very good.
*****
The two guards who were still alive, the first of The Chairman’s men that he had recruited personally, took up positions on opposite sides of the door. The one with very short blonde hair said, “Mr. Finnegan? Any change in plans? Any orders we should relay?”
I’m more than capable of doing it myself, he thought acidly. I’m not like he was. But he chose to simply shake his head. “No. They know what to do. They know it’s time to release the Special Forces.”
The one with very short black hair nodded in return. “We’ll just wait for your orders then,” he said, and settled into his customary parade-rest stance, awaiting direction.
“Yes,” Finnegan said, feeling very calm, very sure. “You will.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Forrest and the three incursion teams got the “go” code much earlier than they had expected, but they didn’t question it and they didn’t ask why. It was simply time to move.
Forrest’s men and equipment had been at the staging area for less than an hour, and they had expected to be there a bit long, but it didn’t matter. It had never been their intention to linger in any event. This was less of a prolonged battle than a headlong charge at a heavily fortified target.
The weather was clear and a little colder than he had expected, but nothing like the lethal winter weather they’d endured in Kansas. A puff of clouds drifted on the eastern horizon, in a near-direct line to Mount Weather, where there really was no Mount at all. In truth, it was a heavily wooded ridge with a low-lying complex that was almost invisible from the winding road that led to it, and even from the air. Hell, Forrest thought as he climbed into his chopper, if a plane hadn’t crashed here back in ‘74, most people wouldn’t even know the damn thing existed. But it did, and it had for half a century.
And now it had to fall.
He got his four Apaches in the air – two from Offutt, two on loan from other recovered bases. As he rose above the rolling forest, he looked down and saw the three Bradley Fighting Vehicles, those latter day tanks, filling the winding road that led to Mount Weather’s unassuming gate. He could barely see the ground troops that were infiltrating the forest on both sides of the road, moving in to breach the installation’s double layers of reinforced chain-link, but he knew they were there, and he knew the damage they could do.
“Castillo,” he said. “Four minutes to breach.”
“Roger,” the gruff female voice on the other end of the radio said. “Boyarsky? Krueger?” The other two insertion teams checked in, tense but ready.
Forrest’s comm officer whispered in his ear. “I can’t raise Boyd,” she said. “He went off line five minutes ago and hasn’t responded. We can’t get in without his help, Colonel. Are you sure ...?”
“We got the word,” he said, not at all happy at the techno-geek’s silence, but still determined. “We’ll do our job and we’ll just have to assume he’ll be there to do his.”
The Bradleys took their last turn and lurched out of the forest, pointing straight at the gate to Mount Weather. “Ready to go, sir!” the driver of the lead vehicle shouted – a little too loud in Forrest’s ear to make him happy.
“Pedal to the metal, gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s do this!” He pushed the chopper’s collective hard, put the Apache’s nose done, and hurtled towards his target. His three companions did the same.
*****
The funny thing, Castillo thought as she crouched in their hiding place, was that this side-entrance wasn’t even supposed to be there. It wasn’t in the plans that Boyd had acquired – which were pretty rudimentary to begin with, since Mount Weather was one of the most highly secret installations even before the outbreak. There was only supposed to be one way in and out, and that was where they were supposed to go. Then the incursion teams had arrived and begun surveillance, to map out the exact time that the sentries patrolled the fences, to search out and identify weak spots in the perimeter … and they had seen many of those guards using a weird little shortcut to get back inside the complex at the end of their shifts: a well-hidden grotto halfway ‘round the complex, buried in brush and shadow. Clearly it had been designed as a service or side entrance long ago, maybe even during the original building of the underground fortress in the middle of the last century, or during one of its many upgrades. Castillo was sure it wasn’t supposed to be used, but since when did regulations ever matter to the grunts?
They hadn’t told Forrest or Omaha about their discovery; after some discussion by the three teams, they decided it was best to keep radio traffic to a minimum. But they’d also decided to split their forces: now Boyarsky’s team would take the main entrance when the time came. Castillo’s would see if they could secure the service entrance. And Krueger’s five-man team would find some high ground and serve as back-up, while they used their considerable skills as snipers wherever and whenever they might be needed.
Castillo’s people were in a shallow little grotto mere feet inside the tree line, ten yards from the chain-link fence and fifty from the service entrance. Boyarsky was in a similar little pocket, more rocky and less woody, within view of the front gates to the installation. They wouldn’t enter that way, of course. They had already chosen the spot to cut through the fence, as soon as the assault vehicles showed up and crashed the party.
Meanwhile, Krueger was exactly where he loved to be: perched in a stand of walnut trees, hunkered down in a makeshift sniper’s nest that would give him a perfect view of the battlefield when the time came ...
… and the time was coming now. All three teams could hear the grinding roar of the Bradleys as they churned down the one and only road to Mount Weather.
Castillo clicked on her comm unit and spoke in a n
ear-whisper to the other team leaders. “You hear that?”
“Yeah,” Boyarsky murmured in her ear. “They’re on their way.”
“I see movement through the trees,” Krueger added. “Down the road.”
“Good,” Castillo said. “Keep an eye—”
Boyarsky screamed in her ear. “FUCK!” he said. “PUT THAT BITCH DOWN, PUT HER DOWN!” She heard gunfire and gurgling, the wet sound of bladed pikes that had become so familiar, and the horrible, guttural groan of a shambler.
“Boyarsky? Report! What happened!? Where are you!?”
The channel to Boyarsky’s team went silent.
*****
Boyarsky and his team had been paying too much attention to all the wrong things.
Their focus was solely, rigidly set on those front gates, on the Mount Weather sentries that were just now responding to the sound of heavy equipment coming their way. The instant they appear, Boyarsky told himself, we jump out of here, cut the fence, and head for the entrance, quick as we–
A shambler, once a woman with long blonde hair, stumbled out of the woods and lunged at Boyarsky’s second-in-command. Boyarsky shouted a curse, complete unaware his comm was still open. Blood spurted from his man’s neck and poured down his shoulder. His knees buckled, his hands dropped, his neck popped and he fell to the ground under the dead woman’s grasping fingers, dead himself for the first time.
The shambler didn’t even pause. It turned with terrifying speed and lunged at a second member of his team. “PUT THAT BITCH DOWN!” he shouted, and lifted his M4. “PUT HER DOWN!”
He fired his weapon on full auto and cut the creature in half, but it didn’t matter: Three more, attracted by the noise and the stench of death, stumbled into their hiding place from three different directions. Another team member fired at a former teenager, square in the stomach, but the teen-thing scarcely flinched. His bared, snaggled teeth, encrusted with blood, seemed to pull the rest of his body forward, and in half a heartbeat the creature buried its open maw in the team member’s throat and pulled his Adam’s apple free.