“Tangos are danger close.” Drew heard Leander keying his mic to warn the fire team. He didn’t think it was going to be enough.
One man went down in a blur of arms and legs when the adolescent demon dove mouth first into this inner thigh. The man fell to the ground pulling the trigger on his rifle in pain and shock. His bullets struck the armor of the man in front of him knocking the breath out of him. The final bullet found the space between the man’s helmet and his body armor. The round severed his spinal cord instantly paralyzing him.
On the other side of the wedge the woman who’d landed there was wrestling with a soldier twice her size. The soldier was keeping the woman’s teeth away from his body by squeezing her neck as hard as he could. He could feel the tendon and muscles in her neck snapping and cracking. She refused to die though. Right up until Flanagan walked over and shot her carefully in the head with his pistol. The soldier on the ground tossed the dead body to the side and jumped back to his feet breathing hard. Flanagan was already moving through the men to get to the kid on the other side.
The kid came straight at Flanagan before he’d taken more than a couple of steps. He raised his pistol and managed to snap off two shots before the boy hit him face first in the chest knocking him backwards. The kid rolled right through him, got up and jumped on the man standing next to Flanagan. The soldier had already lost a big chunk of skin on his arm, so he was pretty much screwed. Flanagan blasted the boy in the back until he stopped moving. The soldier scrambled out from under the kid and stared at the bloody rag on his arm that’d been a nicely pressed sleeve a minute before.
“You really think I’ll turn sir? I’ve heard some people don’t.” The soldier was freaking out. This wasn’t like a bullet to the leg or something that made sense. This was biblical. This was horrible. This was a demon possessing your body.
The man the boy had bitten previously had already turned. In a screaming fit of rage, he charged the men gathered around Flanagan. There was no hesitation on their part to open fire and shred him before he’d taken more than a couple of steps. Luckily the poor bastard had screamed, or they may never have even noticed he’d turned. Another single shot rang out. Flanagan whirled around to see the man who’d gotten bitten on the arm had eaten his own pistol. He must’ve felt the infection starting to claim him.
“All tangos KIA. We have three KIA and one WIA. We’re going to need stretcher bearers and a neck brace.” Flanagan said.
“Negative on the assist. Return to base immediately. Multiple tangos in route to your location. Return to base immediately.” Leander’s voice echoed over the team comms and in the hushed command center. All eyes in the command center were on the monitor showing the multiple bodies streaking through the woods towards the base. They were all moving way too fast to be normal humans. The red blurs barely even slowed at the twenty-foot-tall fence. Drew tore out of the room to help Flanagan get his men back in. LeBron was yelling for them to send reinforcements to the door to keep the crawlerz from breaking in.
Drew pounded down the hallway towards the door Flanagan would be trying to get back to. The hardened steel door was designed to look like a regular wooden door. It served the purposes of a wooden door assuming a wooden door could stop a bomb blast and was EMP proofed. Drew ran to the door but couldn’t get it to open. Blaze joined him a second later to try and help him pry it open.
Outside Flanagan heard the order to return to base and sent his men ahead of him. He bent down and scooped up the paralyzed man who was bleeding out on the ground. The man was staring in shock and horror straight into the sky. He was breathing shallowly but he was breathing. Flanagan started to run.
He wasn’t running fast enough. None of the men in the patrol were. The red blurs indicating the approaching crawlerz looked like lightning bolts compared to the pathetically slow movements of the men running up out of the dirt field they’d just fought for. LeBron noticed the monitor in the corner showing the entryway to the barracks. Drew was pounding on the hardened steel door and kicking the access card reader over and over again trying to get the door to open.
“Belay my last. Fire team disperse. Multiple tangos. Base is on lockdown. Over.” The men in the field heard the message and knew what it meant. This operation was FUBAR. They knew better than to just turn and make a run for it. They regrouped and began jogging for the hangar. It was only a few hundred yards away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the moon.
The team in the command center watched helplessly while the demons swooped in from out of the dark. The crawlerz hit the team hard and ripped them to shreds in no time. When it was finished the entire team was dead or turned. LeBron stared in shock at the monitors then left the command center to go talk to Drew. In the command center Special Agent Leander sat down and watched as the land outside the base swarmed with the oddly shaped shadows the crawlerz cast. He had no idea where they’d come from, but now they had to figure out how to get rid of them.
Chapter 4: Early to Rise
The faux gypsy crew was pulled out of bed before the sun came up. Blaze gathered his crew of groggy misfits in the front of the room to let them know they were going to be going out with the base militia. They were being asked to clean up the recently infected plus some of the other unwanted guests lurking outside. They were each issued a sidearm while a handful of them were also provided with rifles. Their personal weapons had all been stored over in the hangar, so they were at the mercy of the limited gear in the barracks armory. The hangar was no distance at all normally. It’d become an infinitely long trek when the ground between here and there began teeming with the freshly turned.
“There should just be the six that turned last night plus whatever surgers came in with the crawlerz.” Blaze said. The men of the clan waited nervously for the soldiers who’d be joining them to show up. This was a task they’d gotten used to performing almost daily out on the road.
“For those of you who haven’t had the joy of doing this yet just stick close to Drew and me. We’ll see you through it.” Harley said. His massive biceps threatening to rip the tight shirt he was wearing.
Drew looked up from his bowl of cheese flavored instant grits over at Harley. He hadn’t expected to be called out like that. There was plenty of other men in the band just as good as him at doing this sort of thing. He looked over at his brother. LeBron had barely been paying attention. He’d never be called out as the one to stand next to on this sort of expedition. If anything, he’d be the one people asked to stand back out of the way. Blaze had been ordered to take everyone out with him though. Leander wanted the whole base swept clean.
A small group of the special ops guys showed up. Their leader introduced himself as Petty Officer Zimmerman. He was a SEAL temporarily assigned to the continuation forces. He winked at them all when he mentioned he’d been temporarily assigned. Zimmerman asked who LeBron was. When LeBron held up his hand the SEAL told him to report to the command center. He’d be overseeing the base clearing from up there.
“Alright. The team that went out last night got wasted. I don’t want to get wasted. Dying is way up there on my list of crap to avoid today. Every single one of you has more experience than we do at fighting these things. Tell me how you think we should approach this.” Zimmerman shut up and listened.
“The way we normally do it is move in groups keeping our backs to the walls. We focus our fire on the freaks one at a time. You’ve got to remember to look everywhere. They’ll come off roofs, out of trees, even out of the ground. If you see a funny looking pile of leaves just go ahead and shoot it. Don’t get bit, but most of all try and have fun.” Harley gave his standard spiel to the hard-looking men staring back at him. Drew had heard it all before. He always enjoyed the part where the tattooed giant of a man raised his voice comically high to do the ‘try and have fun’ part.
Zimmerman grinned savagely when he heard it too. It was a grin that said he thought they were all going to get along just fine after all. A couple o
f men entered the room pushing AV carts loaded down with spare weapons from the barracks armory. It was mostly Glocks and a few M-16s. There was plenty of ammunition so that was a plus. It sucked that all the really good weapons were over in the warehouse. There was a crew of Marines over there as well, but they were being held in reserve.
“Why didn’t they connect the warehouse to the barracks with a tunnel or something?” Drew wondered aloud. What he was hoping to hear was Zimmerman slapping himself in the forehead as he realized they had an easy way to go get better weapons.
“It’s on the plans but it didn’t get done yet. They had a multiyear phased budget to get this place built. Whoever came up with the phases didn’t construct the tunnels at the same time as they buried the conduit for the power and everything else. That person was an idiot. So here we are.” Zimmerman answered. At least they weren’t missing the obvious solution. It sounded like Zimmerman had already gone down that rabbit hole.
“Those things aren’t going to kill themselves.” Blaze said making sure he had a bullet in the chamber of the Glock he’d picked up. He’d left the rifles for the men from the clan who’d spent more time directly fighting the surgers than he had. The men who’d brought the weapons had extra headsets for Blaze and Harley. If the team could survive until they got to the warehouse, there were plenty of extra ones for everybody else over there.
“Alright. Let’s get this cluster on the road. Try not to get bit. Please don’t accidentally shoot me.” Zimmerman ordered them around in a deadpan manner that had Drew trying to figure out if the man was joking or not. They moved down the hallway in a group and waited while Zimmerman talked on his headset finalizing the plan for moving out into the field. It was obvious the small group of SEALs wasn’t super excited to be going into combat with a batch of felons. Drew assumed Leander was sending them along primarily to be fleshy distractions for the infected to go after while the SEALs did the real job of killing everything.
They waited while the SEALs talked to the command center guys. Once Zimmerman had his orders straight, he relayed them to Blaze to pass on to his men. Blaze told half of them to follow him to the right when they went out and the other half of them to follow Harley to the left. The SEALS would be in the middle. The SEALs would form the tip of the spear when they moved forward. They’d proceed across the field to the warehouse once they’d cleared out as many of the infected as they could with their backs to the wall of the barracks. Zimmerman had actually listened to them on tactics. Running outside and putting their backs to the wall of the building to face the enemy went against every bit of fire team training the SEAL had. They were lucky they had a leader who knew when to ask for help.
Drew was really hoping the infected wouldn’t live up to all the hype. All this preparation was beginning to freak him out. If there really were less than a dozen of the infected moping around outside, then they should be good to go. The team that’d gone out the night before had been fighting crawlerz. They’d gone out in the middle of the night into the middle of the open field to fight the deceptively fast killers. That thought reminded Drew they’d be killing Flanagan today. He was hoping it wasn’t him that had to take the shot. He’d liked and admired the man.
It was time. Zimmerman looked back at everyone and told them to lock and load. Everyone checked their weapons one last time then the front door opened.
“On me.” Zimmerman said leading them out the door. The SEALs went first. Drew heard them start shooting before they were even all out the door. Blaze went out the open-door right after the last SEAL. Drew followed Blaze off to the right. In front of them the SEALs had formed a firing line and were blazing away at the surgers streaking towards them.
Drew turned around to cover their six. Evidently the SEALs had been pre-warned by command since several of them swung around at the same time to stare up at the roof. Two surgers came streaking off the roof diving for the men below. One of the jumpers was torn to pieces in mid-air by the concentrated fire of the men facing backwards. The other one was much further down the line. It barreled into the accountant for the circus who was facing the opposite direction trying to figure out how to shoot his pistol. The savage infected and the timid number cruncher both went tumbling out into the field. Harley went running after the tumbling pair. Once they came to a stop Harley stepped in and shot the surger in the head.
“Did it bite you?” Harley asked the slightly balding accountant. The man stood up fearfully shaking his head no. The small man was obviously hiding his arm behind his back. Harley kept poking him with his rifle barrel.
“I’m good. It didn’t touch me.” The man said loudly refusing to show his arm to Harley.
It was one of those odd moments in combat when silence reigned. Nothing was going on except the drama between Harley and the man hiding his arm behind his back. The man continued to back away from Harley. Harley brought his rifle up and aimed it at the man. The hapless accountant should never have been allowed out of the barracks in the first place. Unless the surgers were deathly afraid of being audited he was useless.
“Show me your arm or I’m going to have to blast your ass.” Harley threatened. The man swung his other arm up with his pistol gripped in it. Before he could threaten Harley with it Blaze shot him in the side. The accountant dropped the pistol and put his hands over his stomach where Blaze had shot him. One of his arms had a clearly visible bite wound on the forearm. Harley raised his rifle to finish the man off right as the formerly mild-mannered accountant’s eyes suddenly shone with rage. The newly turned surger lunged inhumanly fast for Harley’s throat.
Harley snapped off a few shots that put the man on the ground permanently. Once that little drama wrapped up everyone focused on moving down through the field to the warehouse. The sooner they cleared the area the better. Blaze split his half of the team off to go check out a part of the field where the cameras showed several crawlerz may be hiding in the woods. Harley took his team in the other direction.
Drew followed Blaze into a tight group of trees. The rest of their group walking closely behind them. Blaze listened intently to the voice in his headset while the man in the command center described where he was seeing the body heat signatures in the bushes. Blaze pointed at a bunch of briars with oddly shaped piles of leaves and dirt underneath them. Looking closely, they began to make out hands and feet and pieces of clothing revealing where the crawlerz had dug into the ground to hide from the light of day. The little copse of trees blocked a lot of the light and with their faces buried like that, they wouldn’t be able to see anything.
Blaze had them line up in front of the three lumps. He verified again over the headset he was wearing that this was the only spot nearby showing the heat signature. He held up his hand and they all aimed their weapons. He dropped his hand and they all began shooting. Two of the lumps barely moved after catching multiple bullets. The third lump came out of the ground like a rattlesnake with it’s tail on fire. It uncoiled into the firing line like it’d been lying there just waiting for some morons to walk into the woods and mess with it.
They lost another man to the vicious crawler strike. The rest of the line moving in quickly to kill both the crawler and the unlucky man who’d been struck by the monster. There’d been no denying the bite mark since the crawler had bit half the man’s face off before going down in a hail of bullets. The men stood around breathing raggedly. Each of them knowing it could easily have been them laying in the dew dampened leaves with more holes in them than a colander. Their blood mixing on the forest floor with that of the filth covered crawler.
The sound of weapons being fired drifted to them from the direction of the warehouse. Blaze listened intently to his headset then got them all moving in the direction of the gunfire. Drew saw how Blaze looked back at the bloody man lying on the ground. To Drew the guy had just been someone he’d talked to a little bit when they’d still been driving around in the trucks. More recently he’d shared a few communal meals with the man in the barrac
ks. His death wasn’t much more than a footnote to Drew. Based on the look Blaze gave the bloodied body it was hitting him a lot harder.
They ran out of the woods towards the road that’d take them to the warehouse. Blaze took another detour into the woods to take care of a crawler who’d bedded down beneath a pile of construction materials left over from building the warehouse. This time they were ultracareful and made sure to leave plenty of space when they started shooting.
“Run for the warehouse now!” Blaze yelled as soon as they were done putting down the crawler. It’d been spending the day underneath a pile of dirt covered two by fours and broken pieces of plywood. They’d had to shift some of the decaying wood around like a giant game of pickup sticks to be able to get good firing lines on the snoozing monster. A game of pickup sticks played barehanded with a sleeping scorpion in the middle.
Heeding his own order Blaze dropped any pretense at trying to look in control and took off running for the warehouse. Drew immediately took off too. When the guy who’s talking to the guys watching the cameras around the base in a zombie apocalypse takes off running the best thing to do is try to beat him to wherever he’s headed. It was physically impossible to outrun the surgers. Realistically all you had to do was outrun whoever else was with you to get away. A key trick to surviving the apocalypse was surrounding yourself with people you could beat in a footrace.
Crawlerz | Book 2 | Batten Down The Hatches Page 4