The original idea had been that Kwon would cover their withdrawal, then quietly climb down the outside of the wire and rendezvous with them at the vehicles.
That was pretty much out now, as was anything that involved quiet.
Brendan was shooting steadily out the passenger-side window, and didn’t stop as he shouted over his shoulder: “Keep us rolling! They’re coming out of the damned woodwork!”
Camp Lemonnier hadn’t been empty. It had just been sleeping.
Kate cut into Todd’s ear from the back: “Hey, Todd. Remember Jurassic Park?”
“Yeah, man!”
“Must… drive… faster…!” When Todd shot a look into the side mirror, he busted out laughing to see that it actually did read, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”
Over the text, and behind it, and all around it, was not a T-Rex, but rather a shitload of runners. Like a New York marathon of runners. And they were earning their name today. It occurred to Todd they’d had it easy on their last demolition-derby drive out of here – because the runners hadn’t even appeared yet. And right now he couldn’t get up enough speed to outpace them – not with the giant truck in the confines of the matrix of roads through camp.
It didn’t help that half the tires had been shot out by those jihadi ass-clowns. It did help, somewhat, that they were run-flat tires. But they would only go so far or last so long before shredding away entirely, and the theoretical top speed of the truck, not all that fantastic to start with, was seriously degraded.
Now he had to take another turn, left-hand this time – and he slowed for it even less than the last one. The heavy cargo in the rear slid across the bed like a counterweight, the back end started to come around, and Todd fought the wheel as the front tires dug in right then left then right again. As he regained control, barely, he spared another look for the mirror. He could see runners still falling in behind them and reaching out toward the back gate of the truck bed. One after the other, they were taking head shots and tumbling away – for now.
Basically, Jake and Kate were back there shooting runners like it was cool. And they were having to do it to keep the frenzied creatures from hauling themselves up onto the truck bed. Todd keyed his mic.
“Kwon, cancel that – I am not fucking slowing down.”
Kwon didn’t bother to answer, probably because they were now nearly at the corner of the camp and the guard tower. Luckily for Kwon, Todd was obliged to slow down enough to turn and avoid crashing into the base of the tower. He didn’t actually see Kwon make the leap, but he heard him hit the top of the cargo stacked just behind the cab.
Then he heard him hit the top of the cab.
And then he saw him bounce over the shattered window glass, land on the hood – and dig in with both hands to the front end of the dashboard as his legs swung around crazily on the hood and then off it. Brendan let go of his weapon and grabbed Kwon by both arms. Todd fought the thrumming wheel to straighten them out after that ninety-degree swerve away from the tower.
The right side of the truck crashed into a building front, shooting off ten-foot-long sparks as it slid along it, then bounced in the other direction and started shooting sparks off the fence – a second after Kwon pulled his legs back up on the hood, after hanging off the left side.
As Todd battled to regain control, a figure flashed out of the night, flailing like a maniac. It landed on Kwon’s back, bounced before it could latch onto him, and then went sliding off the left side, grabbing onto the inside edge of the empty windshield frame.
It let out some kind of hellish hiss – and pulled itself back up, right in Todd’s face, its tongue vibrating in its open mouth and milky white eyes glowing hellishly in the NVGs. Poised there for a fraction of an instant, it struck Todd as exactly like an alien about to strike with its slime-dripping inner jaw. He let go the wheel with one hand, drew his pistol from his vest, thanked the universe that he’d reloaded it, stuck it in the creature’s open mouth, and fired eight times as fast as he could pull the trigger.
As he did, he screamed, “Eat this!” – half-expecting to get splashed with acid.
He didn’t. The manic dead fucker, its head turned into a cylinder, fell off the truck and disappeared under the blurring, flapping wheels. Both of them grunting, Brendan pulled Kwon through the blown-out windshield and into the cab. Todd floored it and aimed them at the nearest section of outer wire that didn’t have a building in front of it. After they crashed through it, he’d figure out how to get them back to the gun trucks.
Squirming to turn himself right side up again in the middle of the bench seat, Kwon said: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
Goddamn, Todd thought.
The stone-cold killer has a sense of humor after all.
* * *
“Dude – what the fuck?”
They were all piling out of the truck and onto the pitch-black taxiway of the airport. They were still moving a hundred miles an hour – they just weren’t being chased or shot at right that second. Todd had not quite paused to pose this question.
Jake hit the ground. He knew exactly what Todd was talking about – the hyperkinetic Zulu who went for Kwon. “Yeah. We saw it, too. Plus another one. It tried to jump on the back of the moving truck – twenty feet through the air.”
Kate appeared from the other side, cradling her weapon, as if for comfort. She said, “Jake blew it right out of the sky. Like skeet shooting. He shredded its torso to ribbons, but it hit the ground, bounced off the tarmac, got up and started chasing us – and catching up. We had to shoot its legs off. At first I thought they were just runners, but Jesus…”
“Some kind of crazy-ass meth-head of a runner.” Todd was still picturing the hissing face that had been six inches from his. He couldn’t stop seeing it. “They were more aggressive. And a lot faster.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “This is something new.”
Brendan came around from checking on the crates in the truck bed.
“’Sup, B!” Todd meant Brendan. He was obviously still wired and buzzing from the fight, and their thrilling escape from death.
Brendan just nodded at him, then addressed the group. “I think the call is we drive all three vehicles out, take the LVAD as far as it will go – then, wherever that is, cross-load everything to the gun trucks. Anyplace is better than here.”
“Concur,” Jake said. “Let’s move out.”
“Fine,” Todd said, “but I’m not driving old and busted here again.” The others gave him a look. He pointed to the shot-up cargo truck. “Old and busted.” Then he pointed to their fancy gun trucks. “New hotness.”
Only Kate seemed to get that one. She also belatedly noticed Todd’s thigh wound. “Let me wrap that up for you,” she said, taking a knee and pulling open her med pouch.
Todd looked down. “I like where your head is at,” he said, echoing her comment from the team room. In this case, her head was directly in front of his groin.
She took the Israeli bandage she’d removed from her pouch and shoved it in his chest. “Wrap it yourself. Cheeky fucker.” But she was half-smiling as she said it.
In four minutes they were back on the road, heading east again through the black night of the dead Somali coast.
Back to something like safety. Maybe.
The Sword
Camp Lemonnier
When Zack uncovered his head and willed his eyes to open, he had a lot to take in – none of it good. Well, just one thing was good: the absence of the careening cargo truck. There was no way he could have gotten out of the way of that in time. And it was a damn good thing he didn’t try, because he would have had exactly a one-in-two chance of diving in the direction the truck didn’t swerve. Somebody up there was looking out for him.
And by that he meant somebody up there in that cab, driving the truck.
He was vaguely aware of some shooting still going on in the background, but it all seemed to
be following the truck, which was already disappearing around a corner and out of sight.
The next thing he saw was a brick-like object lying on the ground a few feet away. He didn’t recognize it, crawled closer, picked it up – and then belatedly clocked what should have been the very first call on his attention: a shitload of shambling dead guys, all of them closing in on him and forming a perfect circle. The only reason they weren’t on him already was because the ones in front were falling on the shot-to-death al-Shabaab guys lying all around, getting a free meal.
Basically, Zack was the only living thing in an unbroken and tightening ring of death – some of it disanimated and lying still as God intended, most of it still walking around. As the dead al-Shabaab guys got oversubscribed by hungry plague victims, the others stumbled over them and locked onto Zack.
He shoved the brick-like object in the cargo pocket of his pants and dove for a gun. Luckily there were a lot of AKs lying on the ground. He fell on one, rolled over, pointed it at the nearest walking corpse, who was very near indeed, and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He dropped the mag. Full. None of these guys had ever got a shot off. But now he saw this one had taken a round right in the receiver.
He threw it away and scrabbled around for another, but the dead were already falling on him. It was too late.
Zack rolled onto his back, to look death in the face.
And, strangely calm in this last moment, he thought: So this is how it ends. He waited until the last second to close his eyes.
A head landed in his lap. The body it belonged to fell over.
Behind it was al-Sîf, swinging his gigantic and badass Moorish scimitar. Heads started hitting the deck to either side. Zack crab-crawled to get clear – he didn’t want to dodge being eaten only to get infected by oozing heads and then find himself chomping on other people himself.
More AK fire started up, close.
The reserve force was here.
* * *
“You and Baxter,” Al-Sîf said, shaking his head, and reaching down to give Zack a hand up. “I have no idea how you lived this long.”
Zack climbed to his feet and peered around in the darkness.
Al-Sîf had stayed back with the trucks, and with the reserve force, in order to tactically control the operation – while Zack had been sent forward, to take the main force to where the Americans were most likely to be.
In fact, he’d done his damnedest to lead them as far away from the Americans as possible, but it hadn’t worked. They’d spotted Triple Nickel loading their truck out in the open. Their tactics from that point weren’t very subtle – they basically all swarmed toward the front of the truck, which was the nearest side of it.
And come to notice it, Zack thought, surveying the ring of their bodies, this hadn’t worked out very well for them in the end.
The shooting by the reserve force was dying down now – until it wasn’t, ramping back up with very little lag. With a chill of horror, Zack realized that this group, led by the Sword, had cleared out the dead that had been converging on him and the remains of the lead team. But they hadn’t even put a dent in all the ex-soldiers that used to garrison this camp.
The dead had their own reserve force. A much bigger one. And they were moving in fast.
In another minute, Zack, al-Sîf, and the eight fighters in reserve had formed a protective ring – hunkered down in all-around defense. Zack’s military education wasn’t great, but he knew things usually didn’t end well for guys forced to fight in that kind of formation. Ask Custer.
Stealing a look over, Zack saw al-Sîf was also wearing his body armor underneath his tactical vest. Most of the al-Shabaab guys didn’t have Kevlar. But their commander did. Now he sheathed his scimitar – Zack had no idea how, as the thick part of the blade looked wider than the mouth of the scabbard – and unslung his assault rifle from his back. Al-Sîf was so much of a badass that he had two trademark badass weapons.
This second was a Bushmaster ACR – for Adaptive Combat Rifle. It had originally been designed for the competition to replace the Army’s aging M4. In the end it lost out to the SCAR and the HK416, but that was like losing a slam dunk contest to Lebron James and Kobe Bryant. The Bushmaster was widely regarded as an awesome weapon, despite – or perhaps because of – a rumored design flaw that caused it to sometimes go full-auto while in single-shot mode.
Al-Sîf even had an EOTech holographic sight mounted on it – a piece of kit generally well outside the budget of anyone in al-Shabaab, or anyone in Africa for that matter.
But burnishing his reputation for badassery even more than the fearsomeness of the rifle was the fact that these things had only ever rolled out to U.S. special operators for review and testing. The rumors about how he had come by his didn’t take long to start, nor require much imagination.
Somewhere along the line, al-Sîf had dropped a Shyatyn Allyl – a night devil.
He had taken down an operator.
* * *
Now he stood over at Zack, who was down on the ground again scrabbling for an undamaged weapon, and firing smoothly over and around the ring of defenders that had circled the two of them. Dead were dropping all over. Luckily they all seemed to be walkers for the moment – the truck had led the local runners on a merry chase out toward the wire.
Zack found an AKS-74U – the stubby, pistol-grip version of the AK – plus a bandolier of mags, which he draped around his neck. He leaned in to al-Sîf and shouted over the percussive popping of the man’s 5.56 rounds: “We can’t stay here!"
Al-Sîf opened his mouth to agree, and also probably to add some smart-ass comment. But he never got it out. A black shape flew over the heads of the ring of defenders. It was impossible to see what it was, only to react autonomously. Zack flinched and dove right, al-Sîf left. Before either could pivot to defend themselves, it had – thank fuck – locked onto the back of one of the outside defenders and taken a huge dripping chunk out of his neck and shoulder with its teeth.
This thing was right in their ranks now, inches away, flailing manically, and al-Sîf let his rifle fall on its sling and drew his scimitar again, striking at the frenetic dead man’s neck. But it was already spinning to attack him and brought its arm up – the scimitar hit at an odd angle and wedged in the bone, stuck good. As he yanked at it with his right hand, the furious, raging corpse ignored this and instead made a half-screaming half-hissing noise and lunged, teeth-first, at al-Sîf’s face.
But it never got there.
His left hand drove up under its chin with his big sheath knife – embedding it so far the blade actually came out the top of its head. Al-Sîf decided to let it stay there. The disanimated body took it down to the ground with it.
He turned to Zack. “We can’t stay here.”
He did yank his scimitar free, but Zack didn’t watch this operation, because he was shooting himself now, trying to put controlled bursts into the ranks of dead who were coming through what was now a big gap in their line – not just from the guy who’d been bitten, and was now down on his knees screaming and using both hands to try to keep all his blood from pouring out his neck, but from the guys on either side of him, who had backed away smartly.
Their circular line was collapsing.
To his everlasting fame and credit, al-Sîf shouted, “Waxaan ka soo jebin! Hadda!” and then he led the breakout himself, sword first. He waded out the gap, whirling, pivoting, and flashing his blade like a giant’s meat cleaver, taking down or taking apart one, two, four of them, in seconds. Heads fell or split in two, the odd arm coming off just from having got in the way.
Dropping out his mag and fumblingly slotting a full one in, Zack spared a look for this swordplay masterclass, impressed. He knew al-Sîf had studied kendo. That sword wasn’t ornamental, or just for beheading tied-up journalists. It was for close combat.
And he used it that way now, slashing and hacking through the undead mob that was trying to extinguish th
em.
Zack wasn’t stupid, so he put himself right in al-Sîf’s back pocket, or just far enough behind not to get hit with the backstrokes. He could hear the others following behind – could hear them because they were all going cyclic, shooting like postal workers. The AK wasn’t known for its accuracy at the best of times, but you couldn’t blame them for getting as much lead in the air as fast as possible. They were now being swarmed by dozens or hundreds of the dead.
But then they had to reload. Pretty much all at once.
And now Zack knew they were back there because they were screaming.
He kept his eyes on al-Sîf’s Achilles-like, fast-moving, one-man rampage – and he kept moving, at all costs, no matter what. They had to get out of there and any delay, any jamming up, any loss of mobility, was going to be fatal. As a distant secondary matter, he took short controlled bursts on any dead who came in on their flanks. Ahead and behind were covered.
And he also tried to remember to keep breathing.
Later he would tell Baxter that this was the dodgiest shit he had ever been involved in, across the entire ZA. Then again, this record wouldn’t last long.
The front gate was coming up and into sight now, just a lighter patch of dark in the night. They’d parked right outside it, maybe fifty meters down the road, close to both the camp and Djibouti Town, probably because they were neither as clever nor as paranoid as the SF guys. There was still firing going on behind Zack, thank fuck. Just less of it.
Al-Sîf hurdled the barrier arm, and Zack limbo’d under it.
And suddenly they were clear, at least to the front, and both sprinting flat out. When they reached the crooked line of parked-up vehicles, Zack spun around to defend while al-Sîf leapt around to the driver’s side. He had the keys.
Zack did a tactical reload, dropping his current mag with whatever was left in it and getting a fresh one in, a bit more smoothly this time. He scanned the dark over the top of the AK’s iron sights. There was a growing crowd of stumbling figures spilling out the gates. But, as far as he could tell, not one of them was alive.
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