One of them was her. Their mouths streamed blood and foam. "Share your secret with us, Zane. Come back to us. We forgive you…" Two of them split off and dashed up the corridor, and he knew it was important that he stop them, they knew in their blood how to beat the nasty green shit, and nothing would kill them that would not kill the whole world, if they got out. But he was too weak, and they were closer, now, and he couldn't fight them all, not when one of them was her—
One of them leapt at him, and his arm came up to deflect her, when two more ducked under the arm and ripped at his unguarded abdomen. His right arm flopped uselessly as they feasted on it. Fresh waves of pain swept over him and drove him blind, flashing lights like the instrument panel of a collision-bound jet coming out of pure blackness.
When their screams changed, they were so close around him, burrowing into him, that he screamed with them. He burned all over, but they were melting. His vision came back but all he could see was green. The nasty green shit spread tendrils of searing cold over them, and their skin ran like wax under a blowtorch. Tumors blossomed through the liquefied orgy of her bodies, and ruptured spectacularly as the lysing chain-reaction spiraled into a total meltdown. He went blind again as the vapors ate him, not chain-reacting, but still devouring his exposed viscera. He reached out into the blizzard of agony and sizzling ectoplasm and tried to remember her as she'd been that one time, tried to wrap himself around the tang of sweat on her skin that had made him feel nauseous and exhilarated, that lulled him into precious, dreamless sleep. It was all around him even as the bodies ran together and pooled on the floor, but there was only one of her…
There. Teeth bit into his arm, and he could feel the choral vibrations of her screaming even as she dissolved, raging. "You stupid puto gringo motherfucker, you were too fucking late!"
He pulled her close through the ocean of flesh and the thickening green death, and he had no idea what to do, no plan but to hold her close and die. Nobody was getting out, and maybe that was best, maybe it should just be over. But his body knew what to do. It remembered Dyson's veins intruding into him when the gas came for them in their spider-holes, and it was the same fucking gas, except now it had Keogh's name written in it. His body remembered the seed of immunity Dyson fed him, and passed it to her.
He felt himself going into her, and through all the pain and the dread and longing for death, he knew her. The others had him in their guts, but would never metabolize the cure in time, but in her bloodstream, he could save her. He went inside—
—and was born with her into a second-hand world of belly-crawling under fences to grub in the dirt for pennies, to a mother already half-dead from pesticide poisoning, and a father who deserted her before she knew his face. He suffered with her through a lifetime of abuse and neglect and bigotry and anger, so much anger, like a sun around which the rest of her universe blindly whirled. He sickened and faced death with her from the cancer that killed her mother, begged for salvation and was born again on the spear of transforming light that changed them both. With her, he was buried alive. He writhed with her on a slab, and cursed his own name for failing her. With her, he escaped and found a home at last. He reveled with her in a new life beyond death and the community of her fellow survivors, and he forgave Keogh for his presence in her head. With her, he saw himself coming to kill her for what she had become, and she tore into his flesh, and then—
She came alive in his arms. "Get the fuck off me, pindejo!" she cried, and fainted.
Bracing himself against the wall, he tried to stand. The bodies of the others sloughed off him like mud. Her body glistened and burned, but it was already healing. Only a tiny coal of life glowed in her mangled form, and he felt her draining his strength to repair herself. Painfully, he ripped his flesh from hers, fanged veins uprooted, oozing plasma. She clung to him, a sleeping vampire, thirsting for more life than he had left. He fumbled for the opposite wall, sliding in the swamp of human remains choking the corridor. He felt for the slope with his feet, his legs buckling and shivering. Each step was agony as tendons and nerves bridged grievous wounds, but his stumbling steps grew surer as he reached the top of the corridor and followed the flow of air back up through the maze. The gas burned, but his skin covered itself with a mucous membrane that repelled its worst effects. Up through countless empty galleries and winding corridors, bathed in the warring half-light of Keogh's eyes and the incandescent gas, Storch ran with Stella Orozco's body cradled in his tattered arms. He scaled the shaft of the exhaust vent and pushed her ahead of him back out into the night and the war.
The sky was roofed in black, and the snowfall came down as rain in gusting sheets that washed the corrosive film of nasty green shit and liquid Keogh off what remained of his skin. The bombers had gone, but he could hear the tide of gas rising in the ventilation shaft at his back. He slung linked packets of C-4 over his shoulder and searched the arrow-shot Missionaries for a detonator.
"Pindejo," she whispered in her dreams.
He picked her up and began to run,
~25~
Lt. Col. Greenaway stood in the doorway of the comm trailer and tried to calculate exactly when this engagement spun out of his control. The hows and the whys of it were beyond his ability to even conceive. Indeed, he could barely get his head around what the fuck was happening to his unit even as he watched it, knew only that he would probably still be standing here, deaf, dumb and paralyzed, when they broke the perimeter and killed him.
He had been sitting on the target, this time. He had played by his rules, which had never failed to leave the enemy sputtering and gasping on his own awestruck terror, and later on his own blood. He had chosen a position worthy of the Spartans, and fighters twice as hard, and ten times as dirty. They fought like heroes against an enemy that never showed its face. They had earned not one flesh-and-blood confirmed kill, and for all he knew, every last motherfucking one of his men was dead.
Talley and the comm crew sat or slouched in the trailer behind him, watching the screens like the fleeting final seconds of a lost football game. All of them wore their biowarfare suits and gasmasks, except for Master Sgt. Talley, who had only minutes earlier smashed a monitor with his mask, burning it beyond repair.
Talley's jaw worked at a fist-sized plug of tobacco, and he picked his nose, pulling a menagerie of wonders out of his sinuses, each more ghastly than the last, and smearing them on the console, picking so fiercely that Greenaway expected the next one to be a gray glob with a bit of spinal column glued to it.
Greenaway knew he needed to pull it together, establish contact with the survivors and make another attempt to get the fuck off this mountain, but he felt as if his body had changed all the locks, and he was under house arrest in his own head. He was beyond words, beyond fear, in a stupor of helpless dread. He could feel the waves of cold closing over his head. He should have died then, when he got off the chopper in this godforsaken place. Then the rest of the unit would have gone home, and the fucking mutants and the fucking robot planes could have exterminated each other without him sitting clueless in the middle of it.
If there had been a man in the field to command, he might have snapped out of it, but there was no one left to rally, no one to call to retreat. The last few times he tried to raise someone at the artillery batteries or the vent bunkers, he'd gotten only a sneering Okie voice that said, "Sorry, wrong number," and cut the line. Somebody out there was still shooting up a storm, but they weren't willing or able to pick up and were slinging lead at all points of the compass, so they were as much of a threat as the enemy.
The trailer park was a junkyard, the few vehicles that were recognizable as such were punctured all over with soda-can sized holes from the cluster bombs the second wave of drones dropped. A single intact APC was parked in the underground driveway behind the tower, which was itself a smoking crater, belching noxious green vapors that ate right through their suits.
He'd thought he was still in control up until the drones came. Their peri
meter was breached, and his roving ground patrols dropped off the map, and the innocents he was protecting were fucking mutants, but he thought he could handle it. He ordered his men to fall back from the perimeter and the vent bunkers to prepare for a bugout. The 40mm Bofors cannons started cutting down the drones at twenty miles, once the reflecting radar and computers sorted out the real targets, but the bastards flew so insanely, executing maneuvers that would've put human pilots into a coma, that the cannons barely dented their numbers before they closed and kamikazed the western emplacement. The eastern cannons and the Vulcans cut many of them down right over the trailer park, and the wreckage torched their motor pool. But they got the motherfuckers, shot down every last one of them, and the tower, though it meant nothing to him or anyone else now, still stood. He was proud of himself for a minute there, ready to do the impossible and pull his men out in an orderly retreat and maybe send the goddamned egghead clone mutants in the bunker a present of his own, before he left.
And then shit, in Augean abundance, happened. The bridge detail, undermanned because the missing-presumed-dead Team Dogtown was supposed to be alive and backing them up, got wiped out. Shooting broke out at the vent bunkers—somebody fighting somebody, but who? He figured the Heilige Berg militia was out there, but he was damned if he could figure whose side they were on.
He sent out one of the APC's to clear a runway overland down the mountain through whoever was down there, and watched the snowfield come alive underneath it and swallow it up, not two hundred yards from the comm trailer. The vehicle was a brand-new Cadillac Gage ASV150, a truly bad-ass piece of hardware so new the Army wouldn't get them until this summer, with five men inside. Grenades spewed out the side firing ports, and the turret-gunner raked the snow with both the 12.7mm machine gun and 40mm grenade launcher, but they sank into the downy white field as if into a heaving sea. He saw hands reaching up out of the snow and clutching at the appliqué-steel hull of the car, dragging it nose-down into the snow up to its massive front wheel-wells. There was a single, muffled boom, and then only smoke poured out of the firing ports.
The minefield went berserk, as if the invisible Monster of the Id was coming for them across the plateau, and they knew they were cut off. He called the choppers in to shoot their way in and extract the survivors, if any, and that was when the second wave of bombers came in.
When they knocked the Cobra out of the sky and dropped it on the goddamned tower, Greenaway saw the gas pouring out of the ruin and ordered the four remaining men in his command into their NBC suits. Two of them manned the Vulcans by remote, because the gunnery crews were dead or had deserted. The Bofors guns were overheated, or their tracking computers had crashed, or some goddamned thing, and somebody had cut the hard line to them.
He was still thinking on his feet, ordering the Bell 406 to fall back and wait out the second sortie, and trying to raise whoever was shooting Stingers at the drones from across the field, when the radar, and all the computers and all the communications lines, went static. The phone lines screamed, the satellite feeds exchanging lethal blasts of information with something in the sky. The speakers and phones all shorted out or blew sparks. Monitors flashed streams of digits and scalding blasts of snow. Every computer-driven system in the trailer locked up and rendered him blind, deaf and mute beyond the four thin walls of the box in which he hid. No one seemed to hear him when he closed his eyes and howled.
The guns went silent, and there was only the growing roar of a final wing of drones as they slammed, one after the other, into the mountain. Miraculously, or more likely because they weren't worth the ordnance, the comm trailer stood almost untouched, though cluster-bomb twisters wreaked havoc outside their door.
Now, in the unreal quiet of the aftermath, it was quite impossible to see the now, because it was all still unpacking in his head, all still happening at once until he could understand what went wrong. But it wasn't over.
If there was a way off this mountain, or payback to be extracted, he had to come alive and do something.
"Talley, get these commo faggots some guns and let's get the fuck out of here." He jumped down into snow and marched out to the edge of the devastated trailer park, where he saw two of his men, Manny Aleppo and Rhino, hunched down behind an overturned trailer, exchanging fire with someone in the trees at the edge of the plateau. He just stood there and took center-of-mass shots like blown kisses, and pot-shot their position as if he had all night to get them, which he did. Behind him, someone else lobbed mortars with aimless randomness all over the snowfield. A few got as far as the trailer park, making the rubble dance to assure Greenaway that if he tried to call in the 406 to exfil them, it would be shot to shit the moment it touched down.
"Goddammit, boss," Aleppo hollered, "we want to go home!"
He knew he should say something stirring, something that would steel the troops—both of them—for the final assault. "Me too," he mumbled.
Talley stormed up behind him, spun him around and punched him in the mouth. He sat down hard on something jagged and metallic that sheared his ridiculous rubber NBC suit from hip to ankle. He fought for breath, tasting blood and chipped teeth. He dug for anger to fling at his most trusted noncom, but he found only bone-deep fatigue and nausea, and the chilling certainty that he had simply lived way too goddamned long.
"I suppose you're relieving me, Burl, and I won't get into it with you here and now. If you think you got a better plan, lead on. I'm all motherfucking ears."
"You goddamned psycho sonofabitch, this is YOUR WAR, remember? We're just the hired help, Mort. We knew not a goddamned thing about what we were getting into! And we sure as shit resign, as of this instant. But since this is your war, I think you oughta stay to talk the terms for your surrender, don't you?"
Greenaway went for his sidearm and only then saw it in Burl's stubby booger-hook. "You're—what are you doing, Burl?"
Talley's face crumpled up like an old paper bag. Tears sprang out and froze in the corners of his bloodshot eyes. "You took every goddamned soldier above ground who ever trusted you, and you fed them all into a meat grinder, and what the hell for? For them?" He waved his arm at the ruined tower. "They ain't even human, and then they ain't even here no more, are they? And what about the enemy, Mort? Where were they? Here and gone, and somebody cut up our men from the inside, I'll tell you what. What the hell happened here, Mortimer Greenaway? What the hell were we fighting? What killed us?"
Greenaway looked at the ashes in the snow at Talley's feet. He did not flinch when one of those boots kicked him in the stomach. He just rolled over and wrapped his arms over his head.
"Tell me, by God, or I'll beat it out of you!" Talley shouted, and stomped him just above his kidneys.
Greenaway just kept looking through freezing tears, at a terminal loss for words, but now the snow at Talley's feet was suddenly the thing to be looking at. It shifted and sank into itself like the mouth of an ant lion's den, and the bowl became a hole, and the hole widened between Talley's boots until he slipped and fell into it. A bayonet lunged up out of the hole and sank to the hilt into the hollow of Talley's crotch and his femoral artery. Hot red blood sluiced the snow and raised a merciful curtain of steam as Talley was dragged screaming out of sight, shooting wildly into the air and the ground, screaming Greenaway's name.
Greenaway gathered himself into a crouch and looked around. The three comm geeks stood transfixed before the widening, hungry hole that swallowed the master sergeant. Manny and Rhino shot up the hole, and he almost thought Manny was going to shoot him, when a double-tap to the back of the soldier's neck poleaxed him. Rhino shrieked and returned his attention to the ghost in the trees. No one had the presence of mind to even shoot at the man who climbed up out of the hole.
He was caked in snow and frozen earth and blue with cold, but he didn't shiver. He moved in slow-motion, like some steam driven contraption in need of oil, but he could have run circles around them. Greenaway understood now why the mines had been going o
ff. The Heilige Berg militia burrowed under them all day, perhaps for several days, with their bare hands, to get here. Which sounded insane, but of course it wasn't, because they weren't human. They were Keogh.
He unwound his frosty balaclava hood and smiled at Greenaway. More holes opened up in the crusty snow, and the comm geeks stampeded back to the dubious safety of the trailer. Rhino emptied his rifle and picked up Manny's.
More Keoghs climbed out of the holes, ice-mummies with those same silver-gray eyes. "You see, now," they said to him, "how obsolete you are."
"Fuck you all," he growled. He snatched an M16A2 out of a comm geek's nerveless hands and sprayed Keoghs full-auto.
With only one lung inflated and most of its face shot away, the nearest Keogh spoke only in a sibilant whisper, but the others, emerging from the holes by the dozen, now, took up its speech and amplified it into the voice of the God of the Hive. Even the trees seemed to turn the wind into his voice. "We tried to save you. We tried to take you in, but you were too stupid, and stupidity is the only sin in the real world, Greenaway. Stupidity is extinction. The Old Ones who began this game were stupid."
"Who the fuck are the Old Ones?"
Keogh smiled wider. "Exactly," he said.
Greenaway tugged on his headset. "Terry, do you copy?" Please God, let me have this, at least. "Terry, come in, goddamn you."
"Say my call-sign, beeyotch."
"Terry, this isn't—"
"Say my name—"
Regretting the decision to let the pilots pick their own call-signs, he mouthed the words so Keogh wouldn't hear them. "Count Chocula…"
"Boss, we copy, what the fuck? There's a whole fucking army massed under your nose, come back. You can't want me to come in there—"
"I know. Do not come in to exfil. Repeat, stay back, and put this fucking place into orbit."
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