Murphy slowed the truck as it started rolling over more bodies. The rig swayed from side to side like a powerless ocean liner drifting in a beam sea.
“Wizard, this is Six. Over.”
“Six, this is Wizard. Go ahead. Over.” Walker’s voice sounded high-pitched and strained.
“Wizard, Six. Did you pass on to Mountaineer that we’re rolling up Division Drive? Over.”
“Roger, Six. Mountaineer knows you’re close to making station. It’s all up to you now. Orders for us? Over.”
“Wizard, this is Six. Get the battalion in the fight. Start rolling. Six, out.” Lee had just finished the transmission when someone thumped on the door then clambered up onto the running board. A grizzled, blood-soaked face peered in through the window, blue eyes glittering brightly in the flickering light generated by fires and firearms. Lee started cackling and glanced at Murphy.
“Laugh,” he tittered as he cranked down the window.
Murphy started chuckling as well as he was able.
“Hey, fuckers, who are you?” the man on the running board shouted through hysterical laughter.
“We’re the fucking U.S. Army, asshole!” Lee said, laughing himself. “We got us some shit to bring to the party!”
“You know this place?” the man cackled.
“Fuck, yes! We’ll blow a hole right through the wall!”
The man laughed even harder, and Lee thought the guy was about to lose his grip on the window sill. He peered into the truck’s cab, looking at Lee’s filthy uniform. “Man, looks like you guys’ve been through some shit already. But where’s your junk? We all wear junk here, man!”
Lee had anticipated the question. Presuming “junk” meant the gruesome decorations of body parts most of the Klowns wore on their persons, he reached down to the floor. When he straightened, he was holding a severed hand he had cut from one of the corpses they had used to decorate the trucks.
“You need a helping hand, bro?” he asked, inserting more laughter. He was beginning to understand the insanity. If he had to keep laughing much longer, he might go crazy himself.
The other man laughed then fell away from the window as the truck lurched over a stack of bodies. The tires doubtless kicked up a fountain of gore as they spun for a moment before finding traction.
“Now this is one fucked-up mission, sir,” Murphy said, fighting with the wheel, a stupid grin frozen on his face.
“Just get us to the barrier, Mike,” Lee said. “Just a little farther, man.”
THIRTY.
The world had slipped into total insanity.
Rawlings looked around as the truck rolled through the Klowns, giggling as much as she could beneath her armor. A necklace of twine bearing three rotting fingers encircled her neck, their stink lingering in her nostrils. The odor of decay overrode all the other smells—smoke, ash, exhaust, cordite from expended munitions. The only scent it couldn’t overpower was the reek of her own fear and that of the men in the truck with her as the vehicle rocked around like a ship foundering at sea.
All around them, thousands of Klowns swarmed, pealing in macabre delight as they hurled themselves against the remains of Fort Drum’s defenders, hooting and hollering in the night. Many of them were military, and despite the ravages of the Bug, they still operated in a coordinated fashion. The only reason their attacks weren’t successful was that someone in the headquarters building had seen fit to erect machinegun emplacements on the building’s roof and on the crude walls that surrounded it. The three twenty-millimeter antiaircraft guns roared as they flung thousands of rounds per minute downrange. The defense was incredibly effective. Bodies and parts of bodies lay all around the perimeter. The emplacements were hidden behind banks of sand bags and metal plating that defeated all but the most expert sniper fire. Just the same, Rawlings could see dead soldiers who had been gunned down during the pitched fighting.
Several Klowns tried to climb into the trucks. Muldoon and the others, laughing as maniacally as they could, pushed them off.
“Military only!” Muldoon would shout. “You ain’t a lightfighter, you ain’t shit!”
“I am military, you fuckin’ gorilla!” one NCO shouted back. In his old life, the soldier would have been a wizened, Yoda-like lightfighter. In the grips of madness, he was no more than a cackling lunatic.
“My ride, my rules, Master Sergeant!” Muldoon said, chuckling. Rawlings couldn’t see a good deal of his face behind his night vision goggles, but she was certain the mirth he feigned wasn’t mirrored in his eyes.
“Hey, fires are shifting!” Nutter tittered, grabbing onto the side rail as the truck lurched again.
Rawlings could barely hear him over the din of combat, but she saw the defenders had slewed most of their guns to the south and started hammering away at the combatants downrange, slashing through them with twenty-millimeter rounds and forty-millimeter grenades. The trucks had a fairly clear avenue of approach, and the chances of fratricide had just been markedly reduced.
The Klowns saw the shift, as well. They surged forward, jeering and rushing toward the container walls like some gigantic, single-celled organism. The trucks accelerated, racing them to the edge.
So did several Klown-driven Humvees.
“Okay, here we go!” Muldoon shouted. “Get ready, fuckers!”
Rawlings moved to the center of the truck’s bed with the rest of the soldiers. They crouched, steadying each other against the rig’s incessant swaying.
THIRTY-ONE.
Turner saw the trucks begin their push through the Klowns from his position to the north. Sitting in an uparmored M1045 Humvee equipped with a TOW missile tube mounted in its cupola and two more in the back, Turner watched scene unfold through the TOW’s optical sight. Several Klown vehicles—mostly Humvees and trucks, along with a mix of battered civilian vehicles—surged toward the wall surrounding Hays Hall. A couple of those closed with the trucks and pulled alongside them, effectively cutting them out of Turner’s line of sight.
“Six, this is Seven,” he said into his radio headset’s boom microphone. “You’ll have to take care of the vehicles closest to you. We’ve got no sight picture. Over.”
“Roger, Seven,” came the terse reply.
“Wizard, this is Seven. Party in ten. Over.”
“Seven, this is Wizard. We’re in position. Break. Thunder, fire in ten. Over.”
“Wizard, this is Thunder. Rounds out in ten. Over.”
Turner turned and checked the second Humvee parked abreast of his. Boats was in the cupola, already leaning into the sight of his Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided missile system. Behind the Humvee, two soldiers stood with spare TOW tubes that contained one missile each. After each unit fired, the gunner would need seven to ten seconds to rearm. Ahead of each Humvee, more soldiers crouched down with their weapons out and ready, prepped to repel any reprisal the Klowns might launch when Turner’s element attacked.
“Boats, fire in five,” Turner said over the radio.
“Five. Roger,” Boats responded perfunctorily.
Turner leaned back into his weapon and lined up on one of the Klown Humvees equipped with a Mk 19. The gunner was already leaning back in his cupola, grenade launcher elevated and firing over the wall.
Five seconds couldn’t come soon enough. Turner and Boats fired at the same time, each tube ejecting a missile that trailed fire. The projectiles were surrounded by bursts of brilliant light as their eight flight fins deployed and the booster motors fired, keeping the projectiles oriented on their targets. The missiles rocked briefly in the air as they made final adjustments then hurtled toward the Klown vehicles at speeds approaching nine hundred twenty feet per second. Turner watched with no small delight as his missile slammed into its targeted Humvee and obliterated it, turning it into flaming wreckage and propelling huge chunks of it through the air. The high-explosive warhead’s detonation caused a shock wave to rip across the battlefield, mowing down a dozen Klowns in an instant. Turner ha
d no idea if they’d been killed by the blast, but they’d certainly had their bells rung in a big way.
“Reload!” he shouted as he began unclipping the expended tube from the base of the launcher. Another explosion blossomed into being as Boats’s round hit a tactical truck, completely eradicating it and leaving only the twisted frame remaining.
That’s how we do it, Turner thought. Take that, you fucks.
THIRTY-TWO.
The ferocity of the two explosions surprised Lee, even though he had been expecting them. However, the Klowns surrounding the two trucks didn’t even seem to notice. They just continued their run to the container walls, screaming and yelling and generally having a good time. Lee rolled up his window then reached down and grabbed the M57 Firing Device from the seat. More commonly referred to as “the clacker” because it consisted of a large, flat trigger that made a distinctive noise when it was depressed, the unit would detonate the Claymore mines attached to the truck’s side rails.
“Claymore!” Lee shouted into the radio.
Then, he slapped down on the M57’s trigger.
THIRTY-THREE.
The night erupted once again as the mines on either side of the first truck exploded within microseconds of each other, blasting their payload of steel pellets outward like lethal, metallic fans. The Klowns jammed in tightly around the vehicles were instantly mowed down, no more capable of surviving the onslaught than a field of wheat could withstand an attack from a farmer’s combine harvester. Bright sparks erupted across the nearby vehicles. While the armored Humvees withstood the barrage of pellets, softer-skinned civilian vehicles were turned into something akin to Swiss cheese as the projectiles ripped right through them—and their occupants.
At a hundred feet out, Klowns continued to fall to the ground, their flesh shredded and bones shattered as the pellets did their nasty work. But farther out, the effects of the Claymore blasts were not as immediately lethal. The Infected still fell, perhaps mortally wounded, and writhed on the ground, twisting and laughing and shrieking in pain-fueled ardor.
The second truck released its payload of mines a moment after the first, and more overlapping cones of destruction blazed across the battlefield, ripping, tearing, maiming and killing. In less than two seconds, over two hundred Klowns had been slain, and in the seconds and minutes that followed, twice that number would also perish from the grievous wounds they had sustained from the mine blasts. For a moment, the two trucks were isolated from the rest of the Klowns, surrounded by a barrier of dead and twitching bodies.
“Up!” Muldoon shouted. “Get your MOPP on and fight!”
The soldiers pulled on their MOPP overgarments and face masks and got to their feet, leaning against the side rails of the truck as they raised their weapons. Rawlings did the same. She shouldered her M4 and opened up on one of the Klown-controlled Humvees, riddling it with fire. The attack was mostly ineffective. The uparmored vehicle’s plating and special glass panes turned her rounds, though the already-dead gunner in its open cupola shuddered and jerked from bullets passing through its mangled corpse. Then the Humvee transformed into a ball of expanding fire as it suddenly accelerated toward the container wall as if kicked by a giant. The vehicle slammed into the container and turned into a twisted hulk of burning metal. It took Rawlings a second to figure out what had happened. One of the soldiers in the second truck had hit the Humvee with an AT4, right in the ass, and the ensuing explosion drove it forward. From the rear of her truck, another AT4 roared, and a second Humvee exploded with such ferocity that it leaped into the air and came crashing down on its side.
Several hundred feet away, the Klown force that finally figured out that something was going on. They turned toward the two trucks as the vehicles came to a halt just before the container wall and, in the flickering firelight, Rawlings could see that they had no problems understanding what had just gone down.
The enemy was among them. Outside the walls. Fresh meat.
With a roar, they charged toward the two trucks.
The lightfighters responded with withering firepower from their assault rifles and SAWs, cutting down the first ranks of attackers. Those with M203 grenade launchers added more fire to the fight, and bright, sporadic explosions ripped through the Klown lines, tearing off limbs and rupturing bodies. More and more Infected fell writhing to the ground, howling and screaming with delight even as their blood gushed out of them. Rawlings leaned into her rifle, capping off round after round into the approaching mass of deranged humanity. Men and women fell—some dead, most not—but for all of those she removed from the fight, a hundred more took their place.
Thunder roared.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
Six explosions rent the night, back to back, sending bodies flying through the air as the mortar unit’s first rounds slammed into the Klown force, shredding flesh and shattering bone. The lightfighters cheered, emboldened by the sudden violence of the mortar attack, even as bits of debris and torn organic matter rained down on their heads. The Klowns cheered as well. Death was what they lived for, and pain was a welcome addition to their existence, even if it meant their demise was just around the corner.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
Another salvo of mortar rounds tore through the Klowns, bottling them up and delaying their approach because they had to pick their way across the limb-strewn landscape, slipping and sliding in the blood-wet earth. But still they came, inching their way closer and closer to the trucks, focused on getting to the soldiers and either killing them or infecting them.
A piss-filled balloon splattered against the truck’s bent side rail, and rancid urine splashed across Rawlings, dripping down her waterproof MOPP gear. She gained a new appreciation for the sight-restricting mask that prevented her from smelling the foul liquid as it pooled in the truck bed. She continued firing, draining one magazine then another. Expended cartridges, coupled with the slickness of the cooling urine in the truck, made maintaining solid footing difficult. Rawlings found herself slipping more often than not.
Atop the container wall, more soldiers moved behind the layers of concertina wire. They fired down into the crowd of Klowns and hurled fragmentation grenades into their midst.
Focused on getting to the trucks, the Klowns ignored them.
They were now less than a hundred meters away, too close for mortar engagement. It was up to the troops to hold them back.
Something streaked across the sky as another volley of mortar rounds slammed through the Klowns, and from the corner of her lens-shielded eye, Rawlings saw a TOW missile annihilate another Humvee that came barreling toward the trucks, the M2 fifty caliber machinegun in its cupola chattering. The Humvee’s speed prevented the gunner from hosing the trucks, and the resulting explosion removed it from the tactical picture.
“Dismount! Dismount!”
Rawlings recognized Harry Lee’s voice, and the colonel appeared on the ground in front them, waving the soldiers out of the truck while his driver opened up on the approaching Klowns with a pouch-fed M249 SAW. The soldier held the light machinegun low and ripped off several bursts before he dropped to the ground and deployed the weapon’s bipod before he resumed firing.
“Bound out!” Muldoon shouted. “Rawlings, you’re with me!”
“Roger that!” she replied.
The lightfighters began dismounting in pairs while the troops still on the truck kept pouring on suppressive fire. Rawlings saw that “suppressing” the Klowns was no easy task. They didn’t try to duck and avoid the incoming fire. Instead, they just kept coming until they were taken down. The SAW gunner on the deck was helping stem the tide, however. He was aiming low, taking their legs right out from under them.
The truck quickly emptied out.
Muldoon slapped Rawlings’s shoulder hard enough to rattle her teeth.
“Go!”
She turned and headed for the lowered tail gate, slipping on spent cartridges as she moved. A spray of bullets suddenly raked the
truck, forcing her to duck.
Muldoon wasn’t having any of that. He pushed her forward roughly.
“Come on, Nasty Girl! The vehicles are becoming ballistics magnets! Move your ass!”
Rawlings half-fell, half-jumped out of the truck. She rolled across the ground as another Klown vehicle exploded, shorn in two by a TOW missile. More mortar rounds slashed into the attacking Klowns, causing disarray in the center of their formation. That didn’t stop several hundred of them from surging forward, shouting and jeering as they bore down on the lightfighters. Rawlings rolled onto her belly, checked her lane of fire, then added her own M4 to the mix, popping away at targets as quickly as possible. But the Klowns had the numbers, and despite the mortars, the rifle and machinegun fire, the twenty-millimeter cannons, and the flying grenades, they had the mass.
A raging firestorm erupted, and Rawlings thought someone had decided to have a New Year’s celebration early. Dozens—no, hundreds—of assault rifles and machine guns and grenade launchers opened up. Tracers ripped across the sky, slamming into the Klowns and blasting them backward as the rest of the battalion surged forward and joined the battle. The troops released fearsome battle cries. A score of Mk 19 grenade launchers blasted the advancing Klowns into obliteration, filling the air with whirling chunks of organic matter that trailed viscera and gore.
She checked left and right. There was movement on all sides of her position. Two light infantry companies had arrived, and brought all their toys to the fight.
THIRTY-FOUR.
“They’re here! First of the Fifty-fifth, they’re actually here!”
Brigadier General Ernesto Salvador had been aware the battalion was on post, but he’d had doubts that it was a friendly unit. He’d bottled up what little optimism he had left and waited for a full battalion of infected lightfighters to descend upon the defensive elements surrounding Hays Hall. Once that happened, it wouldn’t be long before the last remaining vestige of the 10th Mountain Division was eradicated. There was just no way his collection of defenders could repel an entire battalion. He’d been encouraged when the first elements to come in contact with the Klowns began attacking them, and that feeling eventually blossomed into a pale sense of hope when indirect fire rained down on the infected hordes. All of that had been dutifully reported to him by the senior NCOs manning the rooftop defenses and the officers commanding the platoons defending the walls. But full-on joy hadn’t materialized until he’d heard the reports that the hundreds of troops amassed to the north were advancing—and engaging the Killer Clowns.
Slaughterhouse - 02 Page 16