by Munson, Brad
Boyarsky kept firing until his magazine ran dry. He turned the weapon in his hands and used it as a club, just as they’d been instructed in training back in Omaha. It worked, too: He put down two more shamblers. He almost took the head off one of them with a massive upswing of the M4’s stock.
Too little, he realized as he fought. Too late.
It was his last clear thought as two more shamblers rushed him, one from each side, and buried their claws and teeth in his rib cage. Everything else – all his memories, all his dreams, all his plans and expectations – drowned in a red ocean of pain.
Boyarsky fell. It would be twenty minutes before he rose again.
*****
Forrest watched it all from on high, looking down from his hovering Apache. He was alone, sitting in the higher pilot’s seat, while the co-pilot/gunner seat in front and below him remained empty. They didn’t have enough trained and experienced airmen for a standard two-man crew. In fact, his usual co-pilot, Payton, was piloting the other Offutt-based chopper that was in the air today. It was flying two hundred feet to his right, fully loaded and ready for a fight.
The destruction of the Mount Weather guard shack, barely downrange from the choppers, was the first sign of the frontal assault. Forrest was looking straight at it when it disappeared in a white-hot blast of force and flame. He recognized the signature: One of the other three choppers had launched a Hellfire.
A moment later the first of the three Bradleys trundled into view, its guns already spitting fire as it rolled relentlessly forward. Two identical BFVs came in close behind, chain guns booming.
The RSA defenders were not unprepared. Massive amounts of armament had been stored in shacks and under tarps all around the entrance, all in response to the warning they’d received a few days earlier. In fact, the armored guard shack that had just been blown to flinders had been empty for hours, a decoy target from the very beginning.
Forrest watched as three heavily armored soldiers, defenders of the Mount, stepped out of a tent pitched halfway across the lawn; the man in the middle hefted a huge, tan-painted tube in his arms, clutched its handles, and shouted. The RPG boomed as it flew from the launcher and hit the first Bradley square in its treads, burrowed in, destroying it. Before Forrest could do anything to react, a second round flew and finished the job.
Forrest put the Apache into a steep nose dive and opened up on the RPG crew with his chain gun. They died in the blink of an eye; in the next blink he tore their sheltering tent to shreds, to take care of any other defenders who might be hiding inside. Then he pulled back on the collective and soared away.
The second Bradley veered to the left, steering around the smoking wreckage of the first fighting vehicle. The instant the vehicle’s second tread completely left the tarmac, a land mine directly beneath it detonated with a tremendous foomf and tore a huge hole in its side. Soldiers nearby could hear screaming; a moment later there was another breathless foomf as fuel donated, and a tongue of flame emerged from the breach. No one escaped.
Forrest wheeled in the sky and turned back to see the third and final Bradley jerk to a stop halfway between the vehicle that had been destroyed by the RPG and the vehicle destroyed by a mine. Four men fired on it from various fortified points around the yard using heavy weapons he couldn’t identify at a distance, but it didn’t matter: The rounds blew the treads off both sides of the final surviving vehicle. Though it could still fire its weaponry, it couldn’t move. It might never move again.
Forrest keyed the comm channel that allowed him to talk to the other three Apaches hovering high over the battlefield. “Hold your positions,” he said, then dived down again and flew fast and low over the huge green yard in front of the above-ground complex. He could see U.S. troops cutting through the chain-link and blowing holes in the fence in ten different places. As he flew past they penetrated the barriers and started advancing, moving quickly but carefully towards the main entrance.
A few men fell hard. Forrest slowed, pulled up, and saw RSA snipers – in sentry towers, on the roofs of Mount Weather outbuildings – picking off the soldiers who had advanced the farthest. Oh, no, he told himself. Not so fast. He manipulated the gunnery controls as he flew and fired an M70 missile into the base of a sentry tower just to the north of the main gates. The missile blew its legs to pieces in a gout of fire, and the tower – along with its snipers – teetered, fell, and shattered.
He pivoted the chopper to take out more … and saw one of the snipers, then another, pitch brutally to one side and fall. He followed the line of fire back, back, back … and saw his old friend Krueger perched in a walnut tree, calmly cutting down shooter after shooter, apparently never missing a shot.
Good man, he thought. Good man. He pushed on the throttle, began to lift the Apache up to return to his companions ...
... when everything changed.
All at once, in perfect unison, the doors and front hatches of a dozen different shacks, sheds, and temporary buildings cycled open. Forrest made the Apache pause over the nearest structure, and he saw a double clot of soldiers in black body armor stagger over each other to be free.
His eyes widened. His breath caught in his throat.
He opened a channel to all three incursion teams and the leaders of the ground forces. “All channels. Those new troops who just entered the field?”
“We see them,” Castillo said from her team’s place of concealment. One of the innocent-looking shacks had just popped open not fifteen yards away. “We can take—”
“No you can’t,” Forrest said. “They’re not alive. You understand? They’re sprinters. Infected. And they’re all wearing Grade AA body armor and close-range gun-safe helmets. People: You can’t shoot them and win. And once they die and turn to shamblers, you’ll have a hell of a time even getting near the neck or skull.”
He dipped the chopper even lower, drawing closer. A cloud passed over the sun. He was having a hard time believing what he was seeing.
Literally hundreds of soldiers in identical uniforms. Uninjured from what he could see. Intact. Entirely armored except for their lower jaws, fingers, and mouths. And every single one of them sprinters. Every single one driven mad by the Morningstar virus. Infected all at once, weaponized, and set loose.
Killed and reanimated by their own leaders.
He watched in horrified silence as the first wave of Special Forces slammed into the attacked U.S. soldiers, shrugging off gunfire and hand-to-hand assaults, and drove his men into the dirt.
*****
Krueger couldn’t find any other snipers to kill. It almost made him sad. Then he saw the shacks and sheds scattered around the Mount Weather campus fall open or pop apart and the armored sprinters staggered into view.
“Center on the men in the armor,” he called to his four hand-picked partners. “Head shots best, but whatever works.” The opened fire together, not even bothering to call out their choices. There were targets of opportunity everywhere. They would run out of ammunition long before they ran out of people to shoot.
But … no one fell. A few of the sprinters’ bodies spun, but they kept moving. Sparks flew off helmets where a round connected, but almost none of the sprinter-soldiers went down.
They were damn near invulnerable. It was like shooting at an army of undead Supermen.
Krueger keyed open his comm to the other teams. He had heard Boyarsky’s screams as well as Castillo had, but he wouldn’t leave him out.
“You see these guys?” he said.
“They’re right in front of me,” Castillo said. “I can’t avoid ‘em.”
“What’s your plan.”
“Same ol’ same old,” she called. “Get to the entrance, key in our code, get inside and do the deed.”
“Okay,” Krueger said, and fired five more times. Not a single body fell. “So which entrance?” Boyarsky had been tasked with the front
. Castillo had taken the smaller door, around the side of the installation, right in the rocky wall of Mount Weather.
“The service entrance,” she said in his ear. “It’s not like I have a choice.”
Krueger had to agree. “Aim for the mouth!” he said to his comrades. “It’s all that’s exposed and a tiny fucking target, but aim for the mouth!”
He fired again, but he knew it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good.
*****
Forrest made his Apache rise so he could join the other three choppers hovering over the battlefield. They were still alone; after much debate, the leadership had all agreed that whatever aircraft the RSA still possessed weren’t stationed at – or even near – the Mount Weather facility. And they had been right: They had the sky to themselves at the moment. They’d never sussed out where the rebel army’s air support was hiding, but one thing was for certain now: It was more than a few minutes away.
Payton’s gently accented Southern voice buzzed in his helmet. “What the hell, Colonel,” he said. “Are those men infected?”
Forrest grimaced. “Yeah. But they’re not men anymore, Sean. They’re things, and their own people made them that way.”
“What the hell,” Payton said again.
Sheridan from Chopper Three and Taylor from Chopper Four checked in as well. Forrest cut them all off. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said. “Not from up here. The field’s a mess; we’ll kill as many of our own men as the sprinters if we try anything.”
“Fuck that,” said Taylor, and Chopper Four dipped down, broke formation. Before Forrest could call him out, the pilot launched a Hellfire at the front entrance to Mount Weather. The glare of its impact was blinding; the decorative front of the building disappeared in the explosion … and revealed solid stone walls that were just as impenetrable as before.
Taylor had disobeyed orders, Forrest knew, but he couldn’t really blame him. He wasn’t one of Forrest’s men; he came all the way from McChord for this ride. And even if the missile had done no real damage, at least it was one more distraction aimed at the RSA leaders hiding deep in the mountain – the murderous bastards who were controlling those armored sprinters and their few human defenders.
What the hell, Forrest thought bitterly as Chopper Four paused, turned, and rose back towards the other three choppers. Might as well do something rather than–
Chopper Three, less than a hundred yards to his right, screamed like a living thing and dipped to one side as a Hellfire missile pierced its armor. An instant later its tail rotor blew off and it spun to the ground, grinding and shrieking as it fell.
Two Apaches, virtually identical to their own, were diving at them, straight out of the sun.
The RSA air support had arrived.
*****
Okay, Castillo asked herself. What do we do now?
Boyarsky’s team was lost. Krueger’s team was doing damage of its own, but it was far away, pinned down. The only thing that seemed to be going in their favor was the relatively small number of human RSA troops on the ground, or at least in sight. Just shamblers and sprinters in armor, she thought bitterly. Like that’s an advantage.
She had heard Krueger’s last instruction. She had to agree. As she hauled herself to her feet and hefted her M4, she called out to the others: “Aim for the mouth! It’s all we got!”
They jumped out of their hiding place and began to sprint across the manicured lawn, heading for the shadowed grotto where the service entrance was hidden.
Garibaldi and Cortez were in the lead. They blew away random shamblers one after another, barely wasting a shot. The armored sprinters were harder: Garibaldi actually planted a bayonet directly in the writhing mouth of one of them before it arched its back and went down. Castillo was tempted to stop and steal its armor. If they’d had any time at all, it would have been worth it. Even in the midst of the chaos, she wondered what marvelous stash of high-tech combat gear the RSA had stumbled on that made this horror possible.
Another sprinter yowled across the yard directly towards them. Castillo opened fire, round after round, flat into the mad creature’s center of mass. It didn’t even slow down. Instead it collided with Cortez and smashed the soldier’s head with a single blow, howling its pleasure, planting a single bite in the dying man’s neck before it released him and turned to do more damage.
Garibaldi was right behind the monster. He planted his Ka-Bar in the infected man’s neck and drove him down to the grass, then killed him a second time.
Castillo ran past him without a pause. There was no time to help. She had to get to that door.
She heard a second scream – a human, familiar one – as Chen was attacked from two sides at once and fell to the ground. Now there were only three of her men left. Don’t think about it, she ordered herself as she ran. Not now.
Finally, finally, she reached the grotto where the door was waiting. There: A keypad was mounted in a crevice of stone. All she had to do was enter the seven-digit code that Boyd had given her, and they’d be inside.
She glanced up, over her shoulder, and saw the last three members of her team standing between her and the infected horde. She wanted to join them, help them, save them … but no. Get inside first, she told herself.
The seven numbers were burned into her memory. She had been dreaming about them for days. They were the last thing she said when she went to sleep at night, the first thing she said when she woke in the morning.
She keyed them in as Lutaya, the beautiful black soldier and the only woman on her team, screamed and died. 7-3-9, she tapped. 9-6-4-3.
Nothing happened. The red light to the left of the keypad didn’t change color. The door didn’t open.
“Fuck,” she said under her breath, and did it again. It couldn’t be wrong. It couldn’t possibly be wrong.
7-3-9, 9-6-4-3.
Nothing.
Agonized, Castillo broke protocol and opened a channel to Omaha, the channel where the techno-geek who had given her the code was supposed to be monitoring them.
“Boyd!” she shouted, and heard her own voice echoing in her ears, half a beat late. “Boyd, it’s not working! What’s the code? What’s the code?”
No one answered.
*****
Adan Forrest watched in horror as his own Chopper Three and one of the two RSA Apaches fired their missiles at each other at virtually the same instant. He saw the Hellfires stream away. For an instant he thought they would actually strike each other in mid-air, and they must have missed by no more than inches. But they flew past and reached their targets instead. Both choppers broke into pieces in mid-air and tumbled to the ground, almost in unison.
Forrest didn’t waste a moment. He turned his Apache two hundred and eighty degrees in the air and fired his last Hellfire at the only RSA chopper that was left. He didn’t even wait for the targeting system to catch up and give him the news. He knew he had it right.
The RSA Apache, half a mile away, tipped nose-up as if it had been jerked on a string. At the last minute, the Hellfire skidded under it, inches from the fuselage, and disappeared into the distance.
God damn it, he thought fiercely. Missed!
The RSA chopper fired again – not at Forrest, but at Chopper Three, the other helicopter from the U.S. Government. It was too close, too fast for him to do anything about it: He watched helplessly as Chopper Three twisted in the air and fell, smoke gushing from its interior as it plummeted.
He had watched it a moment too long. Just like a fucking amateur, he thought, cursing himself as he looked up again and saw the RSA copter facing him, straight on. He could hear the targeting alarm in his head before it actually sounded.
Target locked, he told himself. I’m dead.
He braced himself, wondering for an instant if he would see the missile before it hit him. Then in the next second, Payton’s Apache, Choppe
r Two, dropped into his field of vision, got between Forrest and the RSA attacker. It fired its last missile as it charged forward.
Payton’s chopper took the hit of the RSA’s Hellfire when it was only ten feet from the enemy Apache. The choppers collided, turned together, tumbled out of the air and slammed into the ground in one single, shattering impact.
Quite suddenly, horribly, Adan Forrest was alone in the sky over Mount Weather. All he could see were the infected soldiers killing his men, far below him. All he could hear was Castillo screaming for help.
“Boyd! Boyd! What’s the fucking number?!”
*****
Krueger couldn’t stand it anymore. He couldn’t bear seeing good men ripped to shreds by armored-up corpses that wouldn’t lay down.
There was nothing more they could do from the sniper’s nest. And even if they lost, they weren’t going to do it hiding in trees like a pack of fucking howler monkeys.
“Down!” he ordered his team. “On the ground, now! Bayonets on, weapons up! We’re going to form a wedge and save Castillo’s ass!”
They were out of their carefully made hidey-holes in a heartbeat and a half. Krueger was the last one down, and the moment they arrived he pointed southeast, towards the service entrance, lowered his shoulders and rushed forward, roaring like a bull in his final run at Pamplona.
His men were all around him. M4s chattered; Berettas roared. He heard the icy scream of bladed pikes, and he stabbed more than one of the armored sprinters in the mouth, the chin, the cheek, the throat, and kept going – kept going.
He had no idea how long it took them. He only knew they carved a path through the chaos that was filling that wide, bloody lawn, until he could see the shadowy grotto, until he could see Castillo fighting off the infected all by herself. Then they were there, between her and the infected, making a wall that would keep her safe for at least a moment longer.