A Time To Run

by Mark Wandrey

  “Well done!” Young called over their tactical frequency.

  “Yes!” Andrew cheered. “That was fucking incredible!” As they turned, he craned his head to look back at the carrier falling away behind him. A fighter was already hitting the deck. Damn, that was fast.

  “Welcome to the Navy,” Young said. “You’ve taken off from a carrier now. Next up, your first trap.”

  “My what?”

  “Your first arrested landing. Hopefully, it’s more of a controlled crash than your last one.”

  “Great,” Andrew replied, not looking forward to throwing himself at the deck again. Luckily, it wouldn’t be for some time. He checked his position, pulling into formation with Young, and they banked to the east and headed for Coronado. The Lightning handled incredibly, and he basked in being back in the cockpit at long last. This was no flying bus; in fact, it even put his F-15 to shame. The future would have been wonderful. Climbing to 20,000 feet, they flew on.

  * * *

  They came in waves; mass assaults the likes of which hadn’t been seen on American soil since the Civil War. Only these weren’t blue against gray, musket versus musket, bayonet against bayonet. The enemy was armed only with teeth and fingernails, and the Marines had their weapons of war. It was slaughter on an unprecedented scale.

  Captain Sharps wiped water from his eyes. The rain was finally tapering off, not that it mattered, because the storm was only just beginning. They’d beaten off two assaults while inflicting unbelievable losses on the enemy. He guessed anywhere from two to five thousand infected were lying in huge piles at every avenue of approach. The infected had to climb 10-foot-high piles of their own numbers, many still screaming and writhing in their death throes, in order to reach the Marines. The problem was, it also shortened the killing field his Marines could fire into before the enemy closed.

  In addition to the enemy casualties, he’d suffered 29 of his own. Twenty-one from overruns that were only stopped by the use of the Mk-19 grenade launcher at far closer range than was recommended. The other eight were non-injury loses. Six couldn’t kill anymore, most after having to shoot women and children, and were evacuated. The last two were similar, only they’d put a gun in their own mouths and ended it. Sharps had a hard time blaming them, after what he’d done in the intervening hours.

  He turned in the brief respite and saw the second C-130 on final, approaching over San Diego because of the prevailing winds. The first was in the grass off the left end of the field. The LCAC was roaring off into the bay, its maximum load tested with three hundred men, women, and children crowded aboard. This was the dangerous time. Both remaining C-130s would be on the deck before the LCAC could return for the load from the second. Six hundred civilians, mostly unarmed and vulnerable, and the ravenous armies of hell beating at their doors.

  “Sergeant Buckley,” Sharps called.

  “Captain?” the older non-com replied.

  “Ammo situation?”

  “Down to about 10 magazines per man.”

  “Where the hell is that Osprey with resupply?” He’d sent the last one back with his wounded and the last 10 people from the first C-130 that wouldn’t fit on the LCAC.

  “They had an engine problem. It’s redlined. They’re going to retask one of the EVAC Osprey—”

  “No,” Sharps snapped, “belay that. We’ll hold out. Have the two planned Osprey on the deck ASAP and have one of the Navy helos bring in ammo.”

  “I’ll relay that, sir.”

  With comms shot to shit, they were already relying on a Navy E-2 Hawkeye to relay the dispatches between the ground forces and the ships. Several of the Navy Seahawks had been harassing the infected coming across the bridge like army ants, but with only M240 machine guns and no permission to blow the bridge, it was like pissing on a wildfire. Oh, and no word from the colonel. He was beginning to fear the old man was gone, and that made him the battalion commander.

  “ETA on POTUS?” he asked the sergeant once he’d finished talking to the Hawkeye.

  “They have the president’s plane on radar,” he said, “ETA about 60 minutes.” Sharps looked over the situation again. Without the Navy bombers, things were deteriorating fast. A sudden roar made him spin around and gawk for a moment before yelling.

  “They’ve breached the tops of the collapsed hangars!” he yelled and pointed. He’d hoped the hangers would be a serviceable obstacle, but somehow they’d begun climbing up the other side. The structures were only 15-feet-tall on this side, and now a stream of them were dropping down inside the perimeter. A few obviously injured themselves on landing, though that didn’t seem to stop them. Those hurt just hobbled, lunged, or crawled toward the nearest Marine. Whatever drove them to attack seemed to be an unstoppable instinct.

  Marines who’d rotated off the line and ‘rested’ while moving ammo to those on the line all spun and raised weapons. Their carbines spoke with quick, sure bursts and the infiltration was temporarily stopped. Sharps knew there would be more, and that it wasn’t controllable from that angle.

  “Gunny McComb!”

  “Captain?”

  “Blow the claymores on the roof!”

  The gunny nodded and ran to the clackers. The claymore detonation devices were gang-wired in groups 50 yards from the line, to allow for fallback. Gunnery Sergeant McComb reached the line, grabbed the three marked as “Hangar 1, Hangar 2, and Hangar 3” and squeezed the clacker three times. The mines went off as one.

  The twenty claymore mines each held a kilogram of C-4 plastic explosive, which propelled 600 tiny steel balls in a 60-degree arc away from it. They were imminently lethal out to 50 meters, and still dangerous at 200 meters. The 20 mines were set on top of the collapsed hangars, half way down their length and across all the buildings, with overlapping patterns. The explosions slaughtered hundreds of infected on the roof. Unfortunately, the explosions also had some residual rearward concussive force, and twenty odd infected were launched away from the blast, flying through the air to land in the middle of the Marines.

  “Heads up, sir!” Sergeant Buckley warned as he spied one flying toward Sharps. The captain acquired the airborne infected and moved aside to avoid a collision. The sergeant hadn’t noticed the one coming at him until it collided with him. It was a teenaged male, completely naked. The blast had severed his left arm below the elbow. The impact stunned the sergeant, but not the infected, who instantly sank his teeth into the non-com’s face and tore away half his cheek.

  A young Marine private looked up from the smashed remains of an infected who’d splattered at his feet to see the platoon sergeant having his face ripped off and panicked. He leveled his carbine and fired a long five-round burst at the infected. Two of the bullets tore through the infected’s abdomen, one of which then hit Captain Sharps in the left bicep. One of the other bullets hit Sergeant Buckley in the forehead, just below his Kevlar, and nearly took the top of his head off. The last two hit a stack of loaded magazines and destroyed more than a few.

  “Check your fire!” Gunny McComb screamed. The young Marine, horrified, raised his rifle toward the sky. The infected, despite a missing arm and gut shot, leapt off the now dead Sgt. Buckley and onto the hapless private, who cried out and desperately tried to fend it off as it clawed at his face. Gunny snatched his Ka-Bar from his belt, flipped it over blade first and, with a practice overhead throw, stuck it in the teenager’s back, right between the ribs. The blade neatly cleaved the heart in two. The infected jerked and fell over. “You okay, sir?” Gunny asked, looking at the wound.

  “Through and through,” Sharps said, already grabbing a field dressing from his belt and wrapping it over his fatigues. The private was sitting on the ground, gun lying in the mud and crying openly. “Get him to the evac.” Whatever else needed saying could wait, if they survived. “Fall back to the second position.” Fifty meters away was a line of officers’ housing. Just past that were a massive parking lot and several large aircraft servicing buildings. The Marines had created
fortified positions between the buildings with service equipment trucks, cargo pallets, cars, and whatever else they could find. Behind them was the tarmac and runways. It was the last fallback position before the infected were on the field.

  His effective strength was around 700, minus those marshaling the evacuees. Navy FACs, or Forward Air Controllers, were handling the aircraft traffic, at least. Still, he had to cover nearly a mile of territory in all. With some concentrations of his men, it averaged out to around 10 feet per man. Not ideal, considering they were facing a human assault wave.

  Even as they began to fall back, more infected were already tumbling off the roof. Some were obviously survivors of the claymores, others were fresh and uninjured. The never-ending supply of flesh-hungry monsters continued. Gunny McComb relieved the dead sergeant of his radio rig and took up that duty too. Two corpsmen took the body and rushed him toward the temporary medivac area. They didn’t leave their dead behind. He listened to the radio, then addressed his commander with a grim expression.

  “A circling Seahawk reports a massive wave inbound,” he said and pointed to the north east, toward the bridge. “With the rain ending, the air assets have a better view.”

  “At least our company won’t be a surprise. Hurry up, let’s get the second line manned.” Falling back under each other’s covering fire, the Marines did what they hated to do beyond anything else. They gave up ground. As they did, smoking machine guns and grenade launchers were lugged back as well. The fight continued.

  * * *

  At 450 knots, the Lighting would reach Coronado in just 10 minutes. Andrew used those minutes to do his best to refamiliarize himself with the controls. The F-35 was immensely complicated yet designed for one pilot to manage everything through a combination of the innovative helmet HUD and configurable all-glass cockpit. He’d logged a few hundred hours in the F-35 simulators, but it was nothing compared to the real thing. Nothing at all.

  He pressed a control, calling up the fighter’s stores. As a stealth craft, it was designed to carry a wide variety of loadouts. From just a few bombs in its internal bays, to a veritable shit storm split between bays and external pylons. As they weren’t going to be fighting other planes, ships, or tanks, he carried only bombs. Four Mk-83 bombs in the internal bays, and another four on the external pylons. All eight were fitted with GBU-16 laser bomb guidance systems, giving the two Lightnings 16,000 pounds of high-explosive hell to dispense on the infected besieging the Marines.

  Their channel was shared by the Navy E-2 Hawkeye orbiting over Coronado. As Andrew listened to the reports, relayed from the Marines and Navy Seahawks at lower altitude, he was increasingly sure that they were pissing in the wind. They had 16 bombs against what, 10,000 infected, 20,000, or more? If they would all just stand on a couple football fields, he and Young could slaughter the lot of them. That thought didn’t bother him very much. After mowing them down with a KC-130 gunship and holding a day-long running gunfight with them, the infected didn’t feel like humans anymore. They were an enemy. The human race’s enemy.

  But were they really the enemy? This plague, Strain Delta as they called it, didn’t come on overnight. It had taken days, maybe weeks to ramp up in intensity. The government had always said they could deal with this sort of thing. There were agencies that consumed billions of dollars a year just for such contingencies. Plans that the military, his military, should have been privy too. Hell, he thought, maybe all this is part of the plan. That thought filled him with more impotent rage than anything else.

  San Diego was quickly closing 20,000 feet below. The cloud cover had begun to break up as afternoon approached and the rain moved eastward. Young was feeding him data relayed by the E-2 Hawkeye orbiting Coronado Island 5,000 feet below them. What is this all for, he asked himself. Thousands of Marines are fighting and dying down there. The status indicator for the airbase showed all three C-130s were on the ground. An LCAC was already docking with the Essex, offloading personnel. Ospreys were shuttling massive amounts of munitions to the island so the Marines could hold out. Each trip they carried evacuees and Marine casualties. Return trips took considerably longer because the munitions couldn’t simply be thrown aboard. A shift in cargo could be disastrous for any aircraft, particularly the finicky dual tilt-rotor Osprey. He’d heard two Osprey so far were down for maintenance issues; one barely made it to land on the George Washington due to an engine failure.

  “Camelot X-Ray One, we’re ready to begin our descent,” Young announced over the radio.

  “Roger that,” the Hawkeye crewman replied. “Be aware, you have six out of gas Hornets landing on runway three-six.” Andrew had forgotten about how many combat aircraft were in the air when Reagan went down. How many air crews are swimming right now, he wondered.

  Young rolled into a rapid descent over Coronado and Andrew fell in close behind. Andrew’s radar painted the E-2 as they dropped past its altitude, and the line of Hornets sweeping in. As they pulled up below 5,000 feet and leveled out, the two Lightnings raced over the southern edge of the airbase at just under Mach. Andrew rolled left so he could use his Mk1 eyeball on the situation. The Marine’s line was all the way back, just before the air field. Between them and the town was a solid carpet of bodies.

  “Oh my God,” he heard Young gasp. Andrew thought me meant the bodies, until he saw further east. A wave of infected was moving down through the town of Coronado. Formerly a village of highly expensive houses, it was now a scene of bomb-scarred devastation. Here and there houses burned, despite the recent rain, and many more were flattened. To his utter astonishment, the tide of infected was demolishing houses as it moved! At least it looked that way as they shot past. “You’ve got more experience in ground attack,” Young said. “What’s the plan?”

  Andrew pulled into a shallow climb and bled off speed as he used the screen to plot bomb drops. “Really wish we had some thermobarics,” he said, to which the other pilot grunted in agreement. “I figure we expend half our stores here,” he said, sharing the data, “I’ll lase while you drop, then reverse and modify as necessary based on BDA.”

  “Not much time to do bomb damage assessment,” Young pointed out.

  “We’ll try and help with that,” the E-2 crewman radioed.

  “Aren’t you guys nearly bingo fuel?” Young asked.

  “Negative, we’re fine.”

  Andrew had been on enough combat missions to know bullshit when he heard it. However, the hundreds of men fighting for their lives a mile below them convinced him to not give the E-2 any more thought. The crew of the plane could make their own decisions.

  “Roger your plan,” Young said. Andrew nodded to himself and brought the Lightning around hard. He felt himself compressed in the seat as the G’s mounted. The plane had a fucking incredible turn rate and could pull more G’s than a pilot could survive. Part of him regretted never getting to match one against a worthy opponent air-to-air.

  Now at 8,000 feet and 350 knots, Andrew used the guidance and targeting system to sequentially designate four individual targets. As each bomb hit, Young dropped the next bomb and Andrew changed the laser to mark another target. “Target is lased,” he said.

  “Roger that,” Young said from 15,000 feet, “Bombs away.”

  The guidance packages attached to their Mark 83 1,000-pound bombs were designed to lay the weapons in from miles away, keeping the fighter well out of anti-aircraft range. Young released his bombs from less than a mile laterally, and three miles up; well within ideal for the laser receiver. Twenty seconds after release, 1,000 pounds of explosives crashed just ahead of the main mass of infected, followed by a second, third, and fourth. Each bomb created a 40-foot-wide, 25-foot-deep crater, and it killed everything within 100 yards. In a word—devastating.

  “Good hits!” the Navy FAC called from the ground. “You killed the fuck out of—” the broadcast stopped. “Oh, God,” the man said.

  “Report,” Andrew ordered.

  “More, lots, lots more!�
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  “This doesn’t make sense,” Andrew said over the tactical frequency to Young.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The infected are acting in a coordinated manner.”

  “You’re giving them more credit than they deserve.”

  “Am I? The approach to the bridge is a quarter mile from the channel. Even with a million infected in San Diego, if they all came toward the explosions, how many could come down the approach to the bridge?” Young didn’t answer, and Andrew knew he was thinking.

  “Camelot flight,” the FAC called, “Marines inform a major push across the golf course and along the south beach!”

  “That’s what I mean,” Andrew said, “if they were just mindless they would have come straight off the bridge and toward the airfield. These went a half mile south, around the bombing!”

  “Later,” Young said, “going low for visual spotting.” Andrew watched him rapidly descend to under 2,000 feet and fly across the naval air station at less than 400 knots. “They’re swarming all over the first bomb zone,” he reported, “a lot of them, but not huge. Wait, I see now. FAC confirming your report. Andrew, I’m lasing across the line of the concentration.”

  “Roger that,” Andrew said, and finished a turn to come into line. Andrew pressed the arming button and did a quick survey of the controls, biting his lower lip and hoping he had the sequence programmed properly. The display showed the little dot slide into the target box and he smashed down the pickle. “Bombs away.” The plane shuddered each time one of the bombs fell away. 15,000 feet below, the target zone went up in bright flashes of high-order detonations.

  “Nice drops,” the FAC reported.

  “Jesus, they’re coming up the middle too!” Young said. “Lasing, drop again, I don’t have time to climb to 15,000.”