A runner pack was charging straight at him.
And so was Shughart – all guns blazing.
* * *
As Ali covered the door, and Rob and Homer rapidly searched the pharmacy shelves for HRIG, a squelchy radio transmission sounded inside the room.
“India Romeo Five-One, Helimed Two-Seven receiving.”
Stealing a look over her shoulder, Ali saw it was the paramedic’s radio. She snorted. “How come this guy has comms?” Between the EMI, and being in the basement of a giant building, her and Homer’s radios were cold and dead.
Rob said, “We’ve got repeaters all over London. LAS radios have to work in basement clubs, giant blocks of flats…” He squeezed the radio on his shoulder and spoke into it. “India Romeo Five-One. Hi, Kev.”
“Rob, you still at Tommy’s?”
“Yes, yes.”
Ali blinked in annoyance, but the EMT was at least still helping Homer search while he chatted. Also, she could hear a very familiar white noise behind the voice on the other end.
“Yeah, ’cause not only is there a bloody Apache parked in my spot. But the rooftop is chockablock with dead – chomping on a bunch of people running around like panicked chickens.”
Shit. “I’ll go,” Ali said, reaching for the door. Someone had to secure the rooftop. No helo, no mission.
“No wait,” Homer said, coming out from behind a row of shelves with two white cardboard boxes. “Got it.” He shoved the boxes of HRIG into a small duty bag and slung it over his shoulder. He and Rob leapt back over the counter and moved to the door. Whatever was happening outside, it didn’t sound good.
“Ready?” Ali asked.
Rob pointed to the H&K on Ali’s hip. “Let me help.”
Ali snorted: Yeah, right. “You can help by staying out of my fire lanes.” But Homer drew his SIG, reversed it, and handed it over. Rob chamber-checked it, pointed it in a safe direction, and even kept his finger off the trigger, so he evidently had some idea what the hell he was doing.
Ali turned, raised her rifle – and led them out again.
* * *
Robots with computer brains could think and move fast, but they couldn’t see through walls or predict the future, and Pred guessed the pack of eight runners must have blasted around the corner, for reasons of their own, and swarmed past Randy before he could engage more than a couple of them.
Moving and thinking fast himself, Pred got his rifle up and started triggering off, figuring he’d have to defend himself after all. But it instantly became clear the robot didn’t see it that way at all. Because it was not only advancing behind the runners. It was not only firing its machine gun.
It was launching motherfucking grenades.
AND PREDATOR WAS RIGHT IN ITS BACKGROUND.
The runners were directly between him and it.
For a good second Pred didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, and figured this was how he was going to go out – as a combination bullet backstop and grenade practice-range blast-wall for a trigger-happy, bloodthirsty, and catastrophically dangerous and oblivious artificial life form.
But then it was all over, almost before it started.
Actually, it was only over when Pred made a hair-trigger instinctive-fire headshot on a runner who was right in his face, which then dropped literally on his boots.
And then it was over.
Partially uncoiling out of his fetal crouch, Pred looked up to see the sociopathic killer robot looking at him with its little red light – over the top of a carpet of destroyed runner bodies. It had all happened so fast, he now had to mentally play the whole thing back to even experience it. He realized there had actually only been one grenade blast – and it had gone off, he could pretty much work out now, about one inch outside of safe deployment range from where he stood. After that, the bot had fired probably twenty rounds from its MG, in three-shot bursts, more or less drawing a cut-out around Pred’s silhouette. He knew that because he could retroactively hear missed or over-penetrating rounds hitting the stone wall behind him, and even feel stone flecks hitting him in the ass.
The only runner the robotic Annie Oakley son of a bitch hadn’t shot was the one directly between it and Pred – presumably because pass-through rounds would have hit him. That was the one he’d had to drop himself. Every one of the others it had put down with perfect precision, while keeping Predator perfectly safe in the middle of the free-fire whirlwind.
“Holy shit, dude,” Pred said, rising to his full height.
The red light winked out, and Randy spun around in place. And it rolled back to its assigned position. On the job.
“You okay?” Juice must have heard the racket from inside.
“Holy shit, dude.”
“Yeah. Thought you might say that.”
Uncomfortable
CentCom – Command Post
“Trojan Seven from Trojan Six.”
“Send it, Wes.”
These were the call signs Wesley and Fick had adopted as commander and senior NCO of the CentCom home guard – effectively of CentCom in its entirety. Or, they guessed they were in charge, much as Wheeler and Savard had guessed that, when reporting the Colonel had killed himself. Maybe it was just as Ali said – this place was like a pirate ship, and almost anyone could take the wheel for a while.
Wesley was back in their guard tower CP on the north walls after getting the home guard positioned where he wanted them around the extended walls. Now he was staying inside and out of the rain – but nonetheless staring out the window at the increasingly restless blackness to the north. But Fick was back down on the ground with his QRF. “No time like the fucking present,” he’d said. But Wesley had interpreted it another way.
Pretty soon they’d again be under relentless attack.
And they were unlikely to be bailed out again by another deus ex machina parade of armored vehicles firing all guns, putting on a sound-and-light show, and building a giant meat wall.
Wesley sent his message. “I just heard from the tanker commander. Miller patched him through from the JOC.”
“And?”
“He wants permission to engage.” Fick didn’t immediately respond, so Wes elaborated. “The dead are coming through the tankers’ lines, faster and thicker every minute. And after they get around behind them, the tanks can’t shoot without risking hitting our people on the walls, or at least damaging the walls themselves.”
No delay this time in Fick’s response. “Do it.”
That’s what Wesley had figured. It was inevitable now, and they may as well put the tanks to work while they were going to be effective. But it was a big decision, and he’d wanted to check with Fick first. It wasn’t that Wesley was underconfident as a commander, though he was still inexperienced – and even less so that he was a mere figurehead. It wasn’t even that he had learned to rely on the advice and wisdom of his senior NCOs, though he had. Derwin had taught him that.
It was that he and Fick had a partnership.
He switched channels to the tankers’ channel. “Alpha One-One from Trojan Six. You’re cleared to engage.”
“Message received, and wilco. Cover your arses.”
Man-made thunder and lightning tore open the night out beyond the walls, from eight different points. The steady rhythmic pulsing of the turret and coaxial machine guns vibrated the very air, which Wesley found strangely soothing. But their broad shearing flashes also illuminated the dead climbing over the meat wall. There were now hundreds of them.
Their torn bodies started falling and adding to the barrier.
“No more hiding now,” Wesley said into the empty air.
He flipped channels again.
* * *
“JOC, this is Miller.”
The mood inside the ops center had changed with the resumption of firing out front, and now Miller was the only one speaking in the near-darkness, and only into a radio mic. For some reason none of the ops staff seemed to find the sound of machine guns soothin
g. Maybe a fight you weren’t actually in just sounded like something bad coming for you.
And they were trapped in there, with nowhere to go.
“Miller, it’s Wesley.”
“Go ahead, Wes.”
“Yeah, listen, I had an RMP nearly break his neck falling off a walkway on the south walls – because it’s chucking down rain and pitch black, and none of them have NVGs. It’s dangerous.”
Miller grimaced. “Zombies are dangerous.”
“Yeah, but I think they already know we’re in here now. Do it carefully, but let’s get a few exterior lights on here and there. Just enough so people can move around and operate safely.”
And also fight. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to.
Miller sighed. “You’re the guv’ner.”
“I think the Governor actually attacked the prison.”
Miller wasn’t even going to dignify that by signing off.
He just moved to Jones’s station and recruited her into doing some artful stage lighting…
For the third and final act of this dystopian drama.
* * *
The north walls whispered. In the two sectors on the left and right, Royal Marines and USOC operators had already started selectively engaging targets below. Two-year veterans of nonstop ZA ops, every one of them had suppressors on their weapons – just as every one of them had NVGs, and could perfectly make out the dead moving across no-man’s land. These were the ones who had already climbed the meat wall and passed through the picket line of tanks.
The MGs on those tanks were now tearing up the night and stopping the flow. But there were still a hundred or more already past them, and those ones needed to be put down before they reached the walls.
After tying in comms with the Gurkha commander in the center, Jameson had suggested they stay out of the scrap for now. The Gurkhas were the one unit on the front line who had neither suppressors nor NVGs. They were the ones who were going to bear the brunt of it when things got bad. And the crossing fire of the operators and the Marines on both flanks was doing a good job of clearing the field.
Jameson wasn’t shooting himself – with the action still light, he had the privilege of acting like a commander – but got up from his spot when he heard grenades crumping off nearby. When he marched down the line to investigate, he found Simmonds wasn’t shooting either – but rather sitting on a crate with his back up against the rampart. That crate was open, and full of grenades. In a relaxed and leisurely fashion, he was plucking them out one at a time, arming them – and then just chucking them over his shoulder.
Jameson was less amazed at this than at the fact that Croucher hadn’t beaten him here to give Simmonds a bollocking.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jameson said.
Simmonds gave him a cheeky smile. “Any damned fool can be uncomfortable. Sir.”
Dammit, Jameson thought. Hoist by my own petard… like Hamlet. Simmonds must have heard him use that line in front of the lift back in Lenin’s tomb in Moscow.
“Where the hell did you get those?”
“Swiped ’em from the armory.”
Dammit. Hoist again. With those purloined mortars, he and Croucher had obviously set a bad example. Direct reflection of leadership, as the American Marines said when junior men fucked up, usually by way of trying to excuse it.
“And it’s keeping my sector clear, sir.”
“Gold star for you. But what about those tankers out there? And the stability of the damned walls? This place was built in eighteen-fifty-something.”
“They’re tanks, sir. And it’s a big fuck-off stone wall. Anyway, I’m throwing them out in the middle between the two.”
Jameson struggled to formulate some objection to this. He looked at the crate again, and figured Simmonds would at least run out of grenades soon enough. He reached down and pulled out four, clipping them to his belt, to speed the process.
“Enjoy it whilst thou may.”
When he got back to his own spot on the line, he found someone had taken it – not only not one of his men, but not a man at all. But she did have a rifle, a carbine, and was already using it, firing over the parapet. It wasn’t suppressed, but you couldn’t hear it now over the firing of the tanks.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Jameson said, getting annoyed all over again.
Charlotte stopped shooting and looked up at him. “I’m down to one Apache – and it’s got no armaments, and almost no fuel.” She pulled the charging handle of her rifle with a throaty clack. “Figured I could make myself useful with this.”
Jameson shook his head. She seemed to be forgetting the pertinent fact that she was an irreplaceable helo pilot – not to mention was on call to extract the simunitions mission in the City. “Shouldn’t you be sitting nice and safe in your cockpit? What happens to those Alpha guys if you get yourself killed?”
She put her eye down to her scope.
“Better keep me alive then. And pass the ammo.”
* * *
When the coaxial machine gun stopped thudding and roaring in the steel coffin of the Challenger compartment, the sudden and dramatic silence that returned was slightly like they had all just died and ascended to the eternal peace of heaven.
Give it time, Captain Windsor thought.
And they wouldn’t have to give it much. Time was accelerating, and would now go by very quickly. The first clue was their coax gun going down, out of ammo – and it hadn’t even had to compete with the turret gun for it, as they had long ago buttoned up inside. Hell, Windsor’d had to fight his way back there, using his side arm, just to sneak back in the loader’s hatch. Granted this was because the vehicle was way out front, the finger in the dyke of the meat wall, and so their front-facing coax gun hadn’t lacked for targets.
Nonetheless, the Challenger’s stated max ammo storage capacity for the auxiliary weapons was 4,000 rounds of 7.62mm – though they had pushed that, using some of the crew compartment as well. Now he and his driver, gunner, and operator were paying for this in discomfort and banged shins. Windsor had also cadged as much ammo for the squadron as he thought he could get away with, from CentCom’s stores. But the GPMGs in their turrets fired 750 rounds per minute, and the coax chain guns almost as much. You didn’t have to be a maths genius to know they could go through every round they had in not much more than five minutes of steady firing. What was left of his squadron wasn’t firing nonstop. But they were firing a lot.
And more every minute.
Now not only was his vehicle down to its main gun. But the calls started coming in from his individual tank commanders as they had gone dry as well. Hell, he could hear the firing thinning out, behind and around him. But they were here to do a job, and they weren’t nearly out of the fight yet.
They were just going to have to develop a new strategy.
* * *
“Do it,” Fick said, just economically repeating himself, and also without delay, when Wesley relayed the second request.
In the bloody, block-to-block, barricaded, and booby-trapped fighting of the Second Battle of Fallujah, it had been the “Iron Horses” of the 2nd Tank Battalion that had saved the Marines’ bacon more times than Fick could remember. But he also never forgot it – and now was willing to give the British tankers the benefit of the doubt, that they knew what they were doing.
And to give them a shot.
Off the top of his head, he had no idea how they were going to engage undead with main guns. But if they wanted to try it out, then shit must be getting bad out there – and fast.
Fick looked around the north prison yard as a couple of exterior lights came on, illuminating the other half of his QRF as they trotted up and back to duty. It was good to have his full force reconstituted again. But no sooner had they formed up than all of them startled and looked up at the first double-boom of explosions outside. The first was a Challenger L30 main gun firing. The second was a 120mm HESH round exploding. The two explosions were bas
ically on top of each other.
Now at least Fick knew how the tanks were engaging.
Point blank.
* * *
The QRF, front-line soldiers, and other experienced combatants on the walls and all across CentCom all stopped jumping and flinching after the first few explosions of tank guns firing and impacting. But one small group who did not was…
The Tunnelers.
They were huddling in one of the prison yards far from the north walls, almost due south, and hiding there in the dark. No lights had been turned on in that location, perhaps because no one was working or fighting there. It was only them – and they were hiding out. They had earlier been escorted to the armory to retrieve their weapons, or ones indistinguishable from those they had used at the Battle of the Gap. And they had even longer ago been released from their latest captivity in quarantine.
But they hadn’t forgotten it – not by a long shot.
And now they were shirking their duty, while still deciding what to do. Whether to go back up on the walls here and fight, as they’d been instructed – to once again take on a role for which they weren’t remotely trained and had no skills. Or else stay down in the relative safety here. Or perhaps leave entirely – try to escape, get away, take off and be on their own again.
And they weren’t so much debating as furiously arguing.
“We pitched in!” Siobhan hissed – keeping her voice down, but getting worked up. “You convinced us to put ourselves second. To stop looking out for our own group first, for once, and throw our lot in with a bunch of people we didn’t even know. To obey the orders of soldiers. And look what we got!”
“Yeah,” Hackworth answered from the cool shadows, working to keep his temper equally cool. “We got to stay alive, and got a safe sanctuary here.”
Standing beside him as always, Colley spoke up, his voice also calm and level. “I think she means Alderney falling off the Wall and getting eaten alive. And everyone getting banged up in the truck crash.”
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