by James, Glynn
The crowd began to fall.
Reece had in his entire life never felt so wretched and low as he watched over his iron sights and saw the people on the street, running for their lives, taken down by his fire. His vision blurred and his stomach threatened to retch.
And that was the moment when one of the runners, who had slashed through the crowd like a lightning strike, leapt onto the side of the vehicle and barreled into him.
And it wasn’t alone.
Reece hadn’t noticed the guns of the other armored vehicles up the road fall silent one by one, as a wave of more than two dozen runners swept over them.
He didn’t even have time to cry out.
* * *
“Take us out of here,” said Grews from his seat in the helicopter. And as they banked left and away from the wretched scene below, he watched as the last of the armored vehicles succumbed to the swarm of runners. He could also see what the men and women on the ground could not. Beyond the line of bushes, the teeming dead were gathering and moving in greater numbers. Many hundreds of them, inexplicably still standing after the bombing, were heading across the fields toward the thousands of survivors in the quarantine area.
Grews could see through his binoculars that a lot of the undead were missing limbs or stricken with massive wounds that would kill a living human just with the shock and blood loss. But zombies ignored shock, and didn’t need blood, so there they stood, still on their feet, good to go.
How in the name of hell had this happened? Grews had known there might be pockets of them left after the bombing, particularly as many of the bombs were GPS-guided – and those remaining GPS satellites that hadn’t fallen out of the sky were less reliable all the damned time. The dodgy targeting had to explain at least some of it, especially the errant bombs falling within the exclusion zone. But it was carpet-bombing! How could so many still be left standing after that?
Admittedly, no part of Britain had ever been so badly overrun as to require aerial bombing, so this tactic had no track record in British zombie warfare. But how the hell could anything survive the citywide inferno they created? Surely, even if the bombs didn’t target brainstems, they still ripped bodies into beef jerky, which ought to be just as effective. But, from the aerial reconnaissance Grews had now, it looked to him like many of the dead had taken the explosions, gotten badly ripped up… but then pulled themselves to their feet and just staggered on, or else crawled if they were missing a leg or two.
Grews sighed. These were all questions that the top brass would soon be asking him, and he would have to have answers, even though he wasn’t the one in charge of the damned planes. It probably meant sending men back into the ruins to gather forensics, after the whole mess was over. That was of course assuming the mess ended, and that there were men left to do it afterward.
As the helo blasted over the endlessly repeated scenes of chaos and destruction below, Grews got on the radio again.
“Grews to Evac team, message, over,” he said.
The reply was quick.
“Evac team copies, send, over.” The operator on the other end would at that moment be sitting inside a white van that Grews could already see parked near the main road on the other side of the quarantine zone. Below, stretched out over acres of farmland, was the great mass of refugees.
“Listen to me and listen well,” said Grews, his voice steady and clear. “I need you to instruct all military and medical personnel in the quarantine zone to get the hell out of there, to withdraw right now. We have huge numbers of dead breaking through the border. I repeat. The border is breached, is that understood?”
“Roger that, sir.” The operator’s voice wavered. Nerves? Or worse? “Evac copies all. Where do we withdraw to?”
“Anywhere. Tell everyone to get the hell out in any way they can. Tell them to run.”
“Roger that,” replied the operator. “But what about all the civilians in quarantine? We can’t just leave them unattended.”
Grews stared ahead, his eyes looking hollow and haunted. He’d already ordered troops to fire on those civilians on the road, not that it had helped. But could he really now order the bombing of ten thousand people penned up in a field like cattle? Jesus God... He didn’t think he had it in him. The guilt from such an act might be the weight that pulled him under – not to mention leaving an indelible stain on his service record. But… but the dead weren’t there yet. Maybe there was still time. “Tell them to run, too. Tell them to get out of there.”
“What? Repeat your last.”
“I said tell the civilians to run for it.”
There was a distinct pause on the other end. “These people are in quarantine. You want us to just let them out? Into the countryside?”
“Yes. Do it. Just do it.”
Grews switched channels without signing off. Acrid sweat poured from his head and armpits. His voice caught as he tried to speak again.
“CentCom, Grews, message. Over,” he said, dreading what he was about to request.
“Grews, CentCom, send, over.”
“This is Major Grews of Folkestone requesting a second Hammer run. Over.”
“Please state the designated target location. Over.”
Grews paused for a moment to take a deep breath, before resigning himself to deciding the fate of thousands – and hoping that maybe some would leave now, run for it, and perhaps live.
“Target is the Harbledown quarantine zone. Over.”
“Please reconfirm, over.”
“Target is the Harbledown quarantine zone. Request is complete Hammer package. Over.” He let out a deep sigh.
“Acknowledged, CentCom copies all. Full Hammer package to be delivered to Harbledown quarantine zone. ETI approximately two-zero minutes. We will update you this channel.”
Grews looked down, where the quarantine zone was just now coming into view below them. Many thousands of people, the former residents and survivors of Canterbury, were camped out in the several adjacent fields, maneuvering for space, food, water, and most of all for news – like some music festival gone horribly wrong.
It was all about to go much, much worse.
As the helo blasted over their heads, Grews heard the swelling noise of sirens.
Walk Through Fire
Lake Michigan
After the deed was done, and the previous owner/operators of the Diablo had been evicted, the vibe on the top deck was not what you would call convivial. The older girl had looked on in horror, lips slightly parted, as the one grievously wounded man amongst the original crew had been loaded onto the motorboat – which was then unceremoniously dumped in the Diablo’s wake. It had looked like it might capsize for a moment, but finally stayed upright.
The rest of the survivors were invited to jump after it – at gunpoint.
None of this was pretty, not by anyone’s esthetic sense. Not even the guys perpetrating it. Juice in particular didn’t like the taste it left in his mouth. But even he knew it was necessary. They couldn’t let guys who had just tried to murder them all simply hang out. And there was no time to pull over.
If the older girl stared in horror, the younger one averted her eyes altogether. She appeared to be shutting down, which Ali thought was actually a pretty situation-appropriate reaction. She also noticed when the older girl locked eyes with the boy William, just before he was made to walk the plank. Some type of kindness or tenderness had flashed across her face – which before had struck Ali as looking self-involved, even borderline cruel.
In the end, the psychological weather up there had just sucked, so the two girls were sent forward to get ready for their run across the burning island. Juice, Ali, and Pred stayed where they were, reloading and refitting, mainly from supplies they’d pulled from the Three Brothers before it sank. Getting combat-effective again, and fast.
Because they were all going into the fire again.
And, as usual, they only had a few minutes to prepare. Then again, this was work they had all done
so many times that their fingers did it automatically, leaving the rest of them free to think and talk. They talked about something none of them had done in a long time: take a human life. That of a non-dead person. Ali and Juice sat side by side, somehow like brother and sister, at play.
She was slightly worried about him. God knew he’d do what he was told, what had to be done. But there was no mistaking his misgivings during their deliberation. While slipping .45 rounds out of a cardboard box and snapping them into a pistol magazine, she looked across and said, “You okay, big guy? Big teddy bear? Strange bearded thing?”
Juice didn’t look up, but had trouble fighting his smile at that. He was refilling his Camelbak from some water bottles they’d found below. “It was Handon’s call,” he said.
“Not kicking them off. I meant the killing that came before.”
Juice shrugged. “It was necessary.”
Ali slid the full mag back into its pouch behind her, then dropped and double-checked the one in the pistol. “And what about you sparing that kid?”
Juice shrugged again, sliding the water sleeve back into his ruck. “It wasn’t necessary. He gave up.” That’s all he said, but Ali caught the subtext: he was glad it had played out that way. “What about you?” he asked, finishing his work and looking up at her.
Ali shrugged in turn. “I don’t feel bad about the two I slotted. They were some seriously sketchy motherfuckers. And I don’t like to think about what it must have been like to encounter them as a defenseless civilian.”
Juice thought he caught her subtext, and what she didn’t say: defenseless woman. So he simply added, “It’s good we saved the girls.”
“Yeah,” Ali said. “That is definitely one nice thing to come out of this whole shit show.” She looked down at her bandaged hand. But when Juice looked across at her, she seemed to be staring off at something in memory, something far away in space and time. Or at someone, who had been left behind in her past.
Handon stuck his head out the hatch. “Five mikes.”
All three of them could now see the sandy edge of Beaver Island swelling in front of them as the boat blasted toward it. Before it got much closer, the Diablo swung out to the left, circling around the western edge, the side the airport was on. It was going to be a hell of a lot quicker for them to sail up the coast than to hump overland. Unfortunately, they could also see that the approximate location of the airport was marked by a heavy pall of dark gray smoke rising into the air and slowly blowing out to sea. That, and occasional sparks of red tracers arcing up over the forest and into space.
Ali thought the tracers in the smoke looked like storm clouds, circling above them – even as they struggled against the tide.
Predator shook his head as he hauled his bulk to his feet. He said:
“Stand by for shit to get stupid.”
* * *
“Negative, negative!” This was Fick on the open channel to Handon. “We are out of time, come the quick way or don’t come at all…”
Handon had just radioed him to report that the entire fucking western side of Beaver Island appeared to be on fire. It looked to be pretty much the whole half-mile stretch of forest that separated the shore from the airport. Alpha needed to put ashore elsewhere and maneuver around it to Fick’s location.
Handon gritted his teeth and tried again. “It won’t do any good for you to extract a bunch of crispy critters, all dead from smoke inhalation.”
When Fick came back on, Handon could hear heavy small-arms fire on the open channel; plus what sounded like a fifty-cal banging away non-stop, which was a hell of a sound. “Be advised, Mortem – the seaward side of the airfield is THE ONLY APPROACH WE HOLD OPEN. Everything else is swarming with dead. We are surrounded on three sides. So pick your goddamned poison. Die by fire, or die by the dead. Charles out.”
Goddamnit. But Handon looked across to Henno. “Do it.”
Henno cut the wheel sharply to starboard and gunned the engines up to a wild roar before killing them. Their enormous momentum was set to take them to the edge of the island and straight up onto the beach. But as they raced in toward it, they saw something poking out of the water directly in their path – a fin, like some kind of shark… but it quickly resolved as a vertical stabilizer, a tail fin for a plane – and there was a whole fucking aircraft underneath it in the shallows!
Henno kicked the engines up again and frantically cut the wheel, veering off at the last possible second, the keel of the boat sliding across an underwater wing with an evil scraping sound. Their weight pushed the submerged wing down to the bottom and sent the other one levering into the sky to their right, and launching a heavy plume of water up and over the top deck and the wheelhouse. A half-second later, water rolling over the window glass, they were past it and slushing through the wet sand of the shallows, the whole structure finally tipping thirty degrees to the left.
And then they came to rest, the prow just overhanging dry sand.
The Diablo’s work was done.
Handon and Henno hefted their rifles and hauled ass out of the pilothouse, then darted around it to the prow, where the others had already positioned themselves. By the time they got there, Pred and Juice were already down on the sand, each on one knee, rifles scanning the smoky treeline for threats.
They had secured the beachhead.
The two girls went over the side with a hand from Ali, who took care with the younger one’s wounded leg. Ali also helped Dr. Park, then followed him down. Henno leaped over the edge next, and Handon brought up the rear. In addition to the acrid smoke in their nostrils, they could all hear the sounds of a desperate firefight at the airport – sounding strangely muted and peaceful, as these things often did at a distance. They could also feel the heat billowing over their skin in waves from the forest fire.
The trees closest to them weren’t actually burning.
But it was smoky as hell, and damned well wasn’t any kind of safe place to go tear-assing into.
Even as Handon hit the sand, he bellowed, “Everybody get wet! Then get something over your mouths.” As so often, there was no time – but there was also no time to fuck it up. He led the scramble back into the shallows. When he got thigh-deep, he dunked himself and then sloshed back out, passing the others as they filed in. Back on the sand, he pulled out a bandana and wrapped it around his mouth, while gesturing to the others to hurry it the hell up.
He saw Ali move sleekly into the water, once again leading Park by the arm. On their way back out, they passed the two girls, one looking confused, the other steely, the older one helping the younger. Without warning, the older girl pivoted, produced a handgun from out of nowhere – and whacked it into the side of Ali’s head. As Ali recoiled and doubled over, the girl lunged for Park. In a single second, she had her arm around the scientist’s neck, pulled him into a headlock, and put the pistol to his temple. The two were about the same size, and she pulled the wide-eyed man four steps backward into deeper water.
She removed the gun from his head only long enough to fire it once into the air.
The report echoed down the beach, taking several seconds to fade.
Handon calmly pulled the wet bandana down from his mouth. Around him, all the others – aside from Ali, who was bent over, hand to her head – now had their weapons trained on the hostage situation developing in the shallows. There followed a long moment of very tense silence. The forest fire crackled faintly, as did the weapons triggering off in the distance at the airport.
No one spoke.
Handon’s eyes went to the younger girl, who took a limping step away from her sister, then said: “Courtney, what are you doing? These people saved us. Now you’re going to get us both killed!”
The older girl’s eyes flicked over to her. “Shut up, Emily. I know what I’m doing.”
Handon stole a glance over his shoulder, which told him that Predator had his rifle steadied and locked on to the older girl’s forehead – while Juice had turned to cover the tree
line again, his back to the water and the team.
A crisis in their rear didn’t mean the front stopped being dangerous.
Looking forward again, Handon saw Ali straighten up, one hand still held to the side of her head. She looked at the older girl, her face showing incomprehension. “What the hell?” she said. “You can’t want to go back to life with the Shitheads of the Caribbean back there? Do you?”
The face of the older girl twisted up unattractively. “What the hell do you know? Those were our friends you shot!”
The younger girl, Emily, put her hands out placatingly toward her sister, even while she backed away. “Courtney, they killed our parents… and they made us go with them… and they kept us there…” As she spoke, she kept stepping slowly away, as if terrified by the whole situation – and perhaps not least by her own sister acting in such a dangerous and unfamiliar way.
“Shut up! They kept us alive, was what they did – and for a hell of a lot longer than anybody else we knew. We ate every day, got to drink every night, and there were drugs to numb the pain. And they protected us. Life was a hell of a lot better with them than it was gonna be anywhere else. And now most of them are dead, thanks to these dicks.” She looked back to Handon. “We’ll take our chances out on the water. It’s better than going off to God knows where with you… squared-away jarhead robots.”
Ali shook her ringing head. How could she have misjudged them so badly? But then she realized – she hadn’t misjudged. She’d just judged one of them, the younger one, while also projecting her own little sister onto her. As for the older girl, well, Ali had pretty much neglected to assess her at all. And she’d given Handon her recommendation, that the girls could be trusted, knowing he’d take it.
And, in so doing, she’d steered them all badly wrong.
Some kind of rustling sounded behind them in the treeline. Handon pretty much knew what it was before he even risked another look over his shoulder. It was because of the noise of the damned shot the stupid girl had taken. Behind them, he could see Juice drawing his knife and calmly mounting it on the end of his rifle as a bayonet.