Pred clucked his tongue. “Well aren’t you just Mister Gloomypants.”
“He has a point,” Homer said. “We may find ourselves doing the Mogadishu Mile – except the hundred-meter event this time.” He didn’t need to belabor his point: that might be as far as they got before being surrounded and pulled down.
Then again, Handon thought, that plan might be the best they had.
He nodded to Juice. “Make it happen.”
Juice nodded, adjusted his chin mic, and turned away to talk the bombs on.
No more than two seconds later, the building rumbled as faint explosions sounded from the front end of it, out near the entrance.
“What the hell was that?” Pred boggled. “JTAC by telepathy?”
What the hell indeed? Handon thought. He hailed Ali. “What’s going on out there?”
Her voice came back immediately. “The building’s kind of under attack.”
“No shit. But by what?” Presumably the dead didn’t have artillery. Though virtually nothing would surprise him at this point…
“It’s Zorn. He’s back – riding on his MRAP.”
Handon opened his mouth to speak – but then closed it again. And he stared at nothing for a precious half-second.
And he decided to give up trying to predict what the hell was going to happen today.
Free and Clear
Hargeisa - Outside the CIA Safe House
[Twenty Minutes Ago]
“You shouldn’t count on us getting out of here. Not on this one.”
“Ah, hell,” CSM Zorn said out loud.
The dashboard radio of the MRAP was still tuned to the secret squirrels’ squad net. And Zorn had just hopped back in the cab at the wrong damned time – right after finishing loading up all the salvageable heavy weapons from the top level of the CIA safe house.
He’d also been just about to start the vehicle back up and point her north again – straight back to Camp Lemonnier. There was the minor problem that the camp had been nearly completely overrun again. But it wasn’t the first time, and he’d gotten the place cleared out before. There was also the small matter that he’d recently been bitten – and, according to Handon at least, that serum he was doling out the only thing keeping him alive.
But, thinking about it, Zorn realized he didn’t have any more reason to believe that line of bullshit than anything else that came out of their mouths. He hadn’t had any symptoms whatsoever, so far. Which to his mind meant one of two things. Either he hadn’t been infected at all – and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d dodged a bullet like that, as the scars on his face amply demonstrated. Or else their so-called serum really was a cure after all – and he’d been cured by it. They only told him he had to keep taking it to keep him on the hook and helping them.
Guess I’ll find out, Zorn thought.
In any case, his days of helping those smug bastards was at an end. He had his MRAP back, he had a lovely new load of heavy weapons to help defend his camp – and no more super-special operators to trouble him. But now, unexpectedly, at the last minute, hearing on the radio that they’d gotten into trouble so serious as to possibly be fatal… Zorn had an unexpected reaction.
Suddenly, he found his conscience troubling him.
An hour ago, that would have been just about the last thing he would have worried about.
* * *
He and that Indian dude in the turban had sat in the cab of the parked-up MRAP, on the outskirts of the shithole of Hargeisa, listening to the spec-ops guys’ mission going horribly wrong. They seemed capable only of pushing forward – from the frying pan to the fire, and then down below it into something worse.
But when it had looked like it was kaput for Alpha team, Zorn’s prison guard had proven unable to keep standing his post. He threw a second set of flex cuffs on Zorn, then grabbed his big-ass weapon, jumped out of the cab and hoofed it.
Which was like leaving the fox tied to the henhouse.
Zorn had quickly got out his credit-card survival tool, which they’d never found or took off him, used the knife to cut his plastic cuffs off, then gone into the back and dug out the spare starter assembly from a box on the lowest shelf in the metal shelving unit. Then he’d fired that bad boy up – and headed not for home, but for the CIA safe house, because the open channel had also played Handon’s report about the goodies that had survived on the top level there.
Once he had parked up cheek-to-jowl with the burnt-out structure, he had to move quickly, carefully, and quietly. But, luckily for him, the operators’ mission had gone noisy – or, as they sometimes said, “Surprise, your operation just turned conventional!” – and they were drawing every damned dead thing in the region right to them, which luckily was over a mile away.
It took Zorn a half-dozen trips, but he got everything loaded up.
And it was only when he was climbing back in the cab, and heard that forlorn transmission, that he hesitated. First of all, there was the outside chance these guys hadn’t been completely full of shit when they’d said they were on a world-saving mission. Now special operators, in Zorn’s experience, thought they were saving the world with every single mission they undertook, down to and including taking a shit. But the fact was the world did need saving at the moment.
But it wasn’t even this that finally decided him. The question Zorn couldn’t keep from nagging him was: Could he just leave these men to die? Sure, they were assholes. But they were also American soldiers. And Zorn, in the end, couldn’t just walk away. He fired up the truck – and he headed south.
Straight back into the center of town.
Rubble Surfing
Hargeisa Hospital - 100M From the Main Entrance
“Eat this, you infected derka-derka bastards!”
Zorn was in fact standing up on top of the MRAP, his boots fifteen feet above the ground, with a gigantic TOW missile balanced on his shoulder. He’d driven right up to the outer perimeter of the singularity around the hospital, facing the main entrance. He was using an iron bar he’d pulled out of the safe house to stave in the heads of any dead who got too interested in him and tried to climb up to the roof from the hood – plus the odd baboon who simply leapt up there.
The TOW missile was one of the variety of toys he’d picked up at the safe house.
And now he launched it – the 152mm 40-pound wire-guided anti-tank missile blasting off at 700mph toward the front of the hospital on a blinding backblast of smoke and flame. When it impacted a quarter-second later it produced a towering, crashing, magnificent explosion that hurled dead bodies a hundred feet in the air and in all directions.
He tossed the absurdly heavy launch tube over the side – these things were technically man-portable, but only barely – then snatched up a smaller and lighter 84mm Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, and fired off the round he’d already loaded up in it, putting this one a little closer into the undead mob than the last. He moved the hinged breach to the side, slid in another warhead from the case of them he’d hauled up there, and fired that one – landing it closer yet.
He was digging himself a channel.
He did two more, then kicked the empty case off the roof, which like the TOW launcher was heavy enough to crush lolling heads and grasping arms below. Then, swinging his improvised club as he slid down the front edge of the roof and onto the hood, he swung back into the cab, simultaneously hailing Alpha on their working channel.
“Hey, dumbasses. I’ve just cleared you a path out of there, though it’s shrinking fast. Now I’m gonna crash the MRAP into the front entrance. You better be there when that happens, which is in thirty seconds.”
* * *
“Well, I guess that’s our ride,” Pred said, matter-of-fact as usual.
They had all heard this on the open channel.
“See,” Juice said, nodding, his face serious. “You just have to reach the far shore. ‘Be bold – and mighty forces will come to your aid.’”
“Zorn’s a mighty son of a
bitch,” Henno said. He didn’t appear to like the sound of this plan at all. He obviously didn’t trust Zorn any more now than he had before.
“And he’s about as much of a force as my nutsack,” Pred added, not disagreeing. “Then again, he’s got a heavily armored vehicle. And we’ve got dick. Just a building that’s about to burn down, and a whole lotta undead baboons.”
“True,” Homer said. “Let’s get your nutsack out of here while we may.”
As the other four operators pitched in with unbarricading the third-floor stairwell, Handon hailed Ali, even more terse than before: “You hear that?”
“Got it.”
“What’s your plan?”
“When he gets here I’ll run across to the roof to the front. I can finger-hang and drop down on the MRAP. Two stories max, no problem.”
“Copy, do it.”
As the last of the barricade came clear, Handon lent a hand in dispatching the few human and simian corpses who had rushed the landing there, having gotten in God knew how. Moving as one, they leapt all the way back down to the ground floor, half a landing at a time, the acrid smoke growing thicker and more choking with each step. Homer pulled his shemagh up over his face, and the others covered up with what they had, coughing and eyes burning.
When they hit the ground floor, they found it had the virtue of still being secure against the mountain of dead outside trying to bust in. But on the downside, it was a total, raging, lethal, inferno – at least in the direction of the cafeteria and that linen closet. Luckily, they were heading the other way, toward the main entrance. Actually, that was the only way it was remotely possible to go, without burning to death to the last man. Even heading away from the fire, they were at serious risk of going down from smoke inhalation.
Staggering through the dark, acrid, choking clouds, stabbing or whacking at the odd bat still dive-bombing them, dodging mottled smoldering arms reaching and grasping at them through smashed-out windows, forward they went. Pred paused to field-goal-kick a hairless, blackened, and smoking baboon fifty yards back down the hall and out of sight into the conflagration behind them. And the six exhausted operators ran until they were finally within sight of the lobby.
Smoke choking them, fire cooking their asses from behind, they got there just in time to see the doors and most of the front wall explode, disintegrate, collapse, and disappear as it was violated by the hurtling MRAP – not only knocking down the wall, but pushing crushed and maimed dead humans and baboons ahead of it and under its tires. How it had stayed on four wheels through all that was anybody’s guess, but the thing had awesome power and stability, plus weighed fifteen tons.
“Sweet!” Pred said. “Thirty thousand pounds of MRAP definitely beats five thousand pounds of baboon.”
“Touché,” Juice agreed, dashing ahead of the group.
Even Henno seemed to admit this was a lovely sight. It looked like: salvation.
And then the structure shuddered around them. And the hospital started coming down on their heads.
The MRAP crashing into it had started a collapse of the whole building.
* * *
“Again with this napping bullshit!” Pred shouted, spitting out plaster dust, and heaving away cinderblock stones no normal man could budge, never mind lift, much less send flying. He was frantically digging out his friend – Juice, in the lead, had disappeared under the initial collapse. Handon and Henno ran forward to help, while Homer pulled rear security, firing slowly and steadily with his pistol at the heads of flaming humans and apes that came lurching out of the burning end of the building.
As soon as they got Juice dug out, Pred confirmed he was breathing – though, sure enough, knocked cold again – then squatted down, picked up the 200-pound commando like a rag doll, threw him over his shoulder, and squat-pressed back to a standing position using his tree-trunk legs.
Handon was already assessing whether the MRAP could be salvaged. But even the massive engine on that thing was unlikely to be able to pull it free of half a collapsed hospital. Moreover, they couldn’t even get to it through the mass of debris. It was barely visible at all – mainly the outline of its hood and grille.
Worse, the collapse had partially opened up this side of the building to the singularity outside. And the dead wasted no time in clawing their way in and lurching at the half-stunned operators of Alpha.
And no sooner did it become clear that they couldn’t stay here, than the building, or the gods, or the ZA itself, informed them that they really couldn’t stay here. Because the collapse of the main entrance wing wasn’t an isolated event, a single downfall. It was just the start – of more and worse to come. Two years into the ZA, this building, along with many or most around the world, was like a house of cards. Not just flammable, but unstable. Somebody should have thought of this – like Zorn, before driving an MRAP into it.
More plaster dust fell, followed by chunks of concrete and insulation.
“Go, go, go!” Handon shouted. “Displace!”
Neither Pred nor Henno had time to comment on the fact that the only place they had to displace to, running away from the collapsing side of the building, was the furiously burning side of the building. But the ceiling above them was trembling and buckling, and they had to be anywhere but here. Homer leading, Handon in the rear, Predator shaking the Earth as he ran with Juice on his shoulder, they all headed back toward the inferno.
And they were able to make it as far as the stairwell – somehow.
But again, they had little or no choice. The hospital was progressively coming down behind them. Now they mounted the stairs again, this time everyone panting and laboring and struggling for breath – not least Pred, who was carrying an additional 240 pounds of commando, armor, gear, and beard.
As the whole stairwell shuddered around them, Homer said, “On the upside, the collapse may put the fire out.”
“On the upside, fuck you!” Even Pred didn’t know where he found the breath for that. But he felt it had to be said.
As the stairs bucked beneath them, and the walls on either side waved, Handon shouted, “I don’t think the interior of this place is gonna last much longer!”
The others didn’t know what the hell he was suggesting – until he led them up onto the landing of the second floor, paused a fraction of a second at the double doors to pull his Vorax knife free and slide it back into his chest rig, then carried on leaping up to the third floor. There he yanked open the door and plunged into the hallway, sucking in huge lungfuls of relatively oxygenated air, and checked the corridor to the right – which was back in the direction of the rolling collapse.
And it was still rolling toward them.
“Get outside!” Handon bellowed. “Get up top!”
The ceiling all the way down to the right had fallen and opened that stretch of hallway up to the night sky, which was now illuminated with leaping flames. The others could almost see how it was some kind of pinhole of escape – so they followed Handon, looping back on themselves, back toward the main entrance but two levels above it now. They clambered out onto a shifting and descending landscape of rubble, and turned around just in time to see the section of hallway they’d been in three seconds ago collapse into itself. They would have been dead if they had stayed there.
But now they were standing on the slope of a mountain of collapsing building, already down to probably the original level of the second floor.
Behind them and on both sides, they could see the multi-species horde had already started climbing up the hill toward them, hands, paws, teeth and fangs all grasping and gnashing. Ahead and up above them, they could see the building-top pavilion was still somehow standing. And standing erect on top of it was a human figure – backlit by the rising and rippling flames burning ferociously behind her.
And this figure was holding a Mk12 Special Purpose Rifle.
Her shooting posture absolutely perfect.
* * *
Ali was rubble surfing.
&nbs
p; She’d already loaded up one of the last four mags she’d been hoarding for the Mk12. Now she took her first shots – on the crispy critters with their hair burned off and flesh charred black that were leaping up toward her teammates from ground level, a three-sided noose closing on them in real time. Some of them were primates. Some were humans. Ali didn’t give a shit.
She dropped them all, one after another, taking rapid but measured and perfect headshots. The movement of the fast ones was a problem, but the range wasn’t – they were all inside of a hundred yards. Unfortunately, their proximity was a problem for everyone else on the team, who were staggering and climbing, making their way up to Ali’s high ground, because there was nowhere else to go, and because the undead floodwaters were rising around them on all sides.
And they were not currently in great shape to defend themselves. They were down to three combat-effective shooters – Juice was out cold, and Predator was carrying him, while swinging his bat with his free hand. The other three were nearly or completely out of ammo and doing what they could to defend the group with melee weapons.
And the tide of dead was rising up all around.
So Ali shot and shot and shot, looking like death incarnate with the licking flames rising into the black sky behind her, and despite the whole building slowly bouncing and settling below. Luckily, for now, the roof of the pavilion, her overwatch point, was still intact – even if all the levels of building beneath it were doing a slow-motion collapse under her feet. The pillars that held it up were somehow still standing. Ali just had to bend her knees and use her leg and core muscles for stability.
She needed a stable firing platform.
Because she was the last man shooting – and the only hope the others had of reaching her. God only knew what they were going to do when they got there. Ascend directly to heaven, maybe, she thought with a snort. But, then again, being alive thirty seconds from now beat the alternative. Meanwhile, the flood waters of the dead continued to exceed each previous high-water mark, subsuming their little rubble island. Soon Ali’s perch would be the only spot left high and dry.
The Flood Page 23