Finally, the truck came to a halt. Smoke boiled from its engine compartment and from inside the cab, which had been redecorated with bloody gore. The troops continued spraying the vehicle. Bits and pieces of sheet metal and fiberglass whirled through the air.
Marsh shouted for them to cease fire, but none of them heard. He slapped Kragen on the back of his helmet then ran around the front of the Humvee, waving for the soldiers to stop firing. He made a point of signaling McNeely. The last thing he wanted was for the kid to fire an M430A1 high explosive grenade into one of the truck’s saddle tanks. Marsh breathed a sigh of relief when the last soldier secured his weapon.
Seconds later, people began screaming from the gas station.
Marsh turned.
The doors to the truck’s trailer had opened, and people were boiling out from its depths. Ragged clothes. Ritual self-mutilation. Ornate decorations crafted from body parts, many still bloodied. They brought with them the stink of death, and just to make sure everyone knew the Klowns had arrived, they had a cloud of black flies as escort.
“Soldier booyyyyysss, oh our little soldier booyyyyysss!” one of them sang in a high, chuckling falsetto. He was a hugely obese, bald-headed man whose pasty skin was covered with bloodied handprints. “We’ll be so true to youuuuuuuuu…” As he belted out the perverse rendition of the early 1960s hit, he raised a gore-encrusted hatchet over his head. He ran straight toward Marsh, his huge belly and sagging man-tits flouncing and bouncing with each step.
Marsh shot the fat man in the face as he raced across the median. The man collapsed, and the hatchet bounced across the grass, then skittered across the pavement toward Marsh. Raising his rifle to aim at the other Klowns, Marsh flicked the fire selector to AUTO and squeezed the trigger. He ripped off the eleven rounds that remained in the magazine before the weapon stopped firing, bolt locked back. Several of the Klowns went down, shrieking not with pain, but laughter. Marsh ejected the empty mag and plucked a fresh one from his tactical vest. His thick gloves made his fingers slow and clumsy.
Kragen advanced, moving to stand beside Marsh. Kragen opened fire, covering Marsh while he fumbled with reloading his rifle. Marsh finally got a mag into the carbine’s magazine well, and hit the bolt release, charging the weapon. The rest of the troops began to fire, but half of them hadn’t been able to properly identify the real threat. They were aiming at the shot-up tractor-trailer rig’s cab.
Weir moved into a new firing position to Marsh and Kragen’s left, hitting the oncoming Klowns with grazing fire. It was ineffective. The Klowns kept coming. They just didn’t care about being shot. Marsh sent several rounds into the mass of filthy, insane humanity charging toward him. Several Klowns stumbled and fell, tripping others who scrambled to get past them.
The Mk 19 roared again, and explosions ripped across the rear of the trailer. Torsos and limbs flew as the high-explosive grenades tore through the flimsy metal. When the grenade launcher fell silent, the gunner manning the M240B on the Big Foot started in, punching dozens of holes through the trailer, apparently hoping to perforate any Infected who might still be inside.
“Reloading!” McNeely shouted.
Rotor beats pounded the air as the Apache that had been downrange tilted into a steep bank to the right then flitted across the turnpike.
Marsh hoped the pilots were moving into a better firing position because his men could use the help. Time to call the boss.
“Wizard, Bushmaster Two-Six! Over!”
“Bushmaster, this is Wizard. Over.”
“Wizard, Bushmaster is engaged with a large enemy element at this time! They’re using commercial vehicles to transport dismounts, and they are actively attacking! Over!”
With a muted cry, Kragen dropped to the pavement. As Marsh reached for him, something flashed past his head—an arrow. If he hadn’t moved, he would have been hit.
The projectile skimmed the top of his Humvee, bounced off at an angle, and plunged into the arm of the soldier manning the M240B machinegun atop the Big Foot. He jerked, but another soldier reached up to steady him.
“Weir, maintain fire!” Marsh shouted.
Four more soldiers ran up blazing away at the Klowns, who continued to surge forward. The Infected were cut down with ruthless efficiency.
Kragen writhed on the ground, clutching his leg. His eyes were squeezed shut behind the lenses of his mask. Marsh knelt beside him and looked at the arrow sticking out of Kragen’s left thigh. It had penetrated deep, and he didn’t doubt the arrowhead was lodged in Kragen’s femur.
His radio squawked. “Bushmaster, this is Wizard. Over.” It was Lee again.
“Wizard, go for Bushmaster. Over!” Marsh leaned over Kragen. “Kragen! Hang in there, soldier. I’m going to get you out of here!”
“Bushmaster, Wizard. We’re rotating the Apaches back to you—”
Kragen sat up suddenly, his eyes wide and gleaming. He shuddered mightily, and said something Marsh couldn’t hear over the racket of the fighting. Marsh grabbed the soldier’s shoulders and tried to push him back down.
“Take it easy, Kragen!”
“Surprise, fucker!” Kragen shouted as he pulled his M4 toward him.
He was infected. The Klowns had treated the arrow with something, either piss or shit or some other bodily fluid, and Kragen had gone over to the dark side.
Marsh was quicker. He fired two rounds into Kragen’s mask at close range, blasting the soldier’s brains all over a startled Weir, who jumped away. Two of the soldiers nearest Marsh fell back, looking confused and leveling their M4s at him.
Marsh saw the soldier manning the M240B yank the arrow out of his arm and jam it into the second soldier’s side, causing the other man to yelp and fall backward. The infected soldier then spun the machinegun around on its mount, lowered the barrel as far as he was able, and started hammering the soldiers in the Big Foot’s bed with full automatic fire.
“Take him out!” Marsh yelled, pointing at the soldier with one hand while bringing his M4 around with the other.
Weir looked over at Marsh, saw him pointing back at the truck, and turned. The soldier manning the M240B turned it in Weir’s direction. They both fired at the same time. Weir missed. The soldier on the machinegun did not.
Weir danced and spasmed as a hail of 7.62-millimeter fire ripped into his body. The two other soldiers split off, pulling their sights off Marsh and reorienting on the soldier with the machinegun. Marsh fired his M4 one handed and put three rounds into the Big Foot’s cab before a fourth hit the infected soldier in the thigh. The hit didn’t faze the soldier; he only laughed harder. He finally went down when several rounds slammed into his chest and head in rapid succession.
The other soldier he had stabbed rose up and grabbed the machinegun’s stock. He ripped off his helmet and mask, laughing hysterically as he swung the weapon around to resume firing. Marsh pounded out three shots, and all struck the man’s face and neck.
“One of you get on that weapon!” Marsh shouted to the two soldiers who had taken out the first gunner. He looked over at Weir’s body. Rivulets of dark blood oozed across the asphalt. Lars the Viking from Minnesota was lying motionless on his back. His time with the 10th had come to an end.
McNeely shouted something and opened up with the reloaded Mk 19, firing the weapon at its full cyclic rate. Marsh spun around and saw several Klowns picking their way across the corpse-strewn median. He raised his weapon and sent them to hell with several shots. He needn’t have bothered because most of them were run down by the speeding gasoline tanker as it bulled its way across the station’s parking lot, paralleling the path the cargo truck had just taken. Several Klowns clung to the cab, standing on its running boards, shouting and jeering even as the soldiers moved forward, forming a perimeter of fire teams that took the riders out one by one with precision fire. More rounds were buried into the truck’s grille, and plumes of steam erupted from under the hood as its radiator was perforated by full metal jacketed bullets. Then, the fi
rst of the Mk 19’s rounds found their target, tearing through the cab… and walking back toward the shiny metal trailer the rig hauled.
The one that was presumably full of gasoline.
“McNeely, cease fire! Cease fire!” Marsh shouted. He ripped off his mask and repeated the order, but McNeely was caught up in the act, leaning into his Mk 19 as he pumped round after round at the approaching truck, not letting up even when the vehicle slowly ground to a halt. Marsh sprinted toward him, waving his arms, yelling.
The world turned white and yellow as the sun seemed to rise right from the traffic rotary. Marsh was aware of an increasingly blistering heat before the shock wave slammed into him, hurling him head-first into the Humvee.
FOUR.
Seated in the front seat of Tomcat Six—the lead aircraft in a flight of three AH-64D Longbow Apaches sprinting along the eastbound lanes of the Union Turnpike—Major Brad Fleischer was still a mile away when he saw the huge explosion rip across the roadway. A gigantic white-orange fireball consumed all the vehicles in the immediate area, enveloping them in writhing flame that twisted and turned. Thick black smoke billowed up immediately as the intense heat blazed through everything that was combustible, generating thick carbon which in turn gave rise to the smoke. As an aviator, Fleischer knew that black smoke was not a good thing. Black smoke in a combat setting usually meant someone had met with a very bad end. Fleischer stroked his thin mustache with his forefinger and thumb, watching as the smoke roiled in the sky.
“Whoa!” Smitty, the warrant officer sitting behind him, exclaimed. He was actually flying the Apache, while Fleischer manned the target acquisition and designation system, a turreted platform on the helicopter’s nose that allowed him to observe potential targets and then illuminate them with a high-powered laser to obtain targeting information that would be passed back to the fire control systems. The network of systems would take that information and turn it into data for the Apache’s weapons systems, most notably the eight AGM-114R Hellfire missiles mounted beneath its stubby wings.
“Tomcat Two-One, Tomcat Six. What just happened? Over,” Fleischer asked over the attack battalion’s radio net.
“Six, Two-One. Ah, looks like the Klowns made an attack with a gas tanker…ah, must’ve taken a hot round in the fight. Over.”
“Two-One, this is Six. Were you firing in the vicinity of that target? Over.”
“Negative, Six. When it happened, the chain gun was out of azimuth.” As the pilot of the Apache downrange that had been providing nominal top cover for the blocking force made his report, Fleischer saw more explosions tear through the backed-up traffic on the turnpike. As the heat from the flaming tanker caused the fuel in the stopped cars and trucks to ignite, secondary explosions added even more fire and smoke to the conflagration. Civilians were bailing out of their cars, running from the maelstrom as fast as they could.
“Not much left to shoot at, and it looks like most of the blocking force is gone. Gas station just went up, huge secondary explosion. Over,” the pilot finished as another burst of angry yellow-orange flame roared into the sky.
“Two-One, this is Six. Keep moving. Don’t hover. Keep your eyes open. We’ll be with you in just a few seconds. Over.”
“Roger, Six.”
“Smitty, when we pass Two-One, climb out to five hundred and start orbiting over the engagement area. We need to see who’s still alive down there,” Fleischer said over the intercom.
“Climb to five hundred and orbit right. Roger that,” Smitty responded.
Traveling at over a hundred and fifty miles an hour, they took less than fifteen seconds to cover that final mile. The warrant officer did as Fleischer instructed and eased the helicopter into a climbing turn to the right, holding at five hundred above ground level. Fleischer abandoned the TADS array for his regular Mark I Eyeballs and surveilled the scene below.
It was a catastrophe. The tanker truck had gone up only a dozen yards from the Bushmasters. The flames were yellow-orange, which meant automobile gas was burning. Car fuel was much more reactive than diesel and tended to blow up instead of just burn off. One Humvee had been practically vaporized, despite its armor, and the M925A1 truck that had been transporting the bulk of the troops was awash in flames. The bodies of fallen lightfighters lay everywhere, many of them on fire. A small contingent of troops was frantically trying to haul their comrades out of the burning truck. The last Humvee moved a few dozen yards downrange. A soldier manned the .50 caliber in its cupola, firing past the flaming morass. It took a moment for Fleischer to see what he was shooting at. Klowns, surging out of the first truck’s trailer. Tomcat Two-One was hovering downrange, and he watched several of the infected transform into disassociated organic garbage, courtesy of the Apache’s thirty-millimeter cannon.
“Two-One, this is Six. Work over that entire trailer. Over,” Fleischer said over the attack battalion’s radio frequency.
“Roger, Six. Working on that.” The thin metal that made up the trailer blew apart, peeled back by the Apache’s cannon. It was like watching an invisible butcher flay open a large pig. Inside, dozens of bodies lay on the trailer’s floor, already cut down by the ground fire.
“Wizard, this is Tomcat Six. Over.”
“Tomcat, this is Wizard Six. Go ahead. Over.” It was the presumptive “Lieutenant Colonel” Lee himself.
Fleischer shook his head. He had no idea what the guy was up to, taking Prince’s rank. But by the time the unit made it back to Drum, he might be the only light infantry officer left standing.
“Wizard, this is Tomcat. Bushmaster is down for the count. At least seventy-five percent casualties. We’ll cover from up here, but they’re going to need help recovering their fallen. We might want to think about getting Catfish on station. Over.”
The attack battalion had four UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters allocated to support them. Before sunrise, Lee had issued a fragmentary order for the Black Hawks—call sign Catfish—to be chopped over to support the infantry battalion’s attached cavalry scout element. The Black Hawks had lifted off, carrying the sole remaining members of Hanscom’s previous tenants, the Air Force’s Internal Security Response Team, which had been left behind after the rest of the zoomies had pulled out to maintain security at the airfield. Apparently, the zoomies didn’t trust an entire light infantry battalion to keep their premises safe. The Black Hawks had taken off for Wooster Regional Airport, where they would land and take control of the airfield’s fueling facility. The Apaches were thirsty beasts, and even though the airport was less than fifty miles from Hanscom, the gunslingers and armed scouts supporting them would need a safe place to refuel. The Black Hawks had made it without incident, and the cavalry unit had arrived with their four heavily-armored Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles a few hours later. The airfield was under friendly control…for the moment.
But the upshot was that the Black Hawks weren’t on station to evacuate the wounded.
“Tomcat, this is Wizard. Can your team hold the area long enough to extract the wounded by ground? Over.”
“Roger, Wizard. Tomcat’s got four shooters on station. Situation’s complex, lots of civilians and reduced visibility from smoke, but we can provide top cover for”—Fleischer checked the fuel totalizer readout on the multifunction display before him—“another fifty minutes. Black Hawks would be better. Over.”
“Roger, Tomcat. Understand about the Black Hawks, but we need them to stay where they are. We’re sending back two trucks and two Humvees from the Bushmaster Three element. What’s the situation with the westbound civilian traffic? Over.”
As Lee spoke, Fleischer heard another transmission on one of the side channels—an RTO dispatching the movement orders to the Bushmaster Three element.
He looked around, trying to figure out what was going on below. A lot of civilian vehicles were on fire, but many were not. Cars and trucks were jockeying all over the place, trying to get the hell out of Dodge. He reported that to Lee, adding, “Doesn
’t look like the convoy’s under any direct threat at the moment. Over.”
“Roger, Tomcat. Thanks. Hold station until we can get our people out of there. Over.”
“Wizard, this is Tomcat. Roger that. We’ll maintain top cover for as long as we can, but we don’t have a lot of station time left. We also need to start rotating the scouts out for refueling. Tomcats Two-Seven and Two-Nine will take over aerial recon while the Birddogs do what they gotta do. Over.”
“Roger, Tomcat.”
Fleischer gave his unit and the scout team their orders. The OH-58D Kiowa Warriors would transition their scouting mission to the two AH-64Ds that were relieving them, then they would fly to Wooster Regional Airport to refuel and rearm. Once they returned, the Tomcats would bug out for the forward area refuel point, platoon by platoon. Fleischer was happy that Lee had thought to secure enough fuel to keep the battalion going, because their organic fuel supply wouldn’t get them through the day at their current operational tempo.
The trip was going to be long, and so far, it had been one hell of a busy morning.
FIVE.
Sergeant Sandra Rawlings watched as a fireball, wreathed in a halo of black smoke, climbed into the sky. The thunder of the explosion seemed to roll right through her, though the truck she rode in was well over half a mile away. Debris rocketed upward then slowly returned to earth like some dirty rain, tumbling and spinning. Rawlings didn’t know what had happened, and neither did the soldiers seated around her. Everyone was on their guns, maintaining readiness as the big M925A1, positioned somewhere in the middle of the convoy, lumbered down the Union Turnpike.
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