Okay, he thought. That’s it. I really am done.
The fire was all around him.
* * *
The evisceration of the west side of the water tank by the bunker-busting missile was something Sarah could only compare to an expensive CGI sequence in a Roland Emmerich film. However many millions or billions of gallons of water there were inside there, they did not just go shooting out the large hole made by the rocket. No, almost as soon as the inconceivably high-powered jet of water started blasting out, the sheer violence of it destroyed the structural integrity of the moon-sized cylindrical structure.
And the whole side of the tank folded outward, crumpled, and ripped away. Like a matador’s cape being yanked clear, getting out of the way of, not the bull – but the Flood.
The tidal wave hit Sarah at almost the same time as it hit the plant building. And as the rising waters lifted her up and tossed her around, she could already see large sections of what had only just now been smelter-hot, brilliantly burning firestorms winking out into watery blackness. The flood was putting out the sun.
And it was submerging the Earth.
Sarah let it carry her away.
* * *
The fire was all around Wesley.
But then the Flood raged in, and picked him out of it, and bore him up. But first it put out the fire – completely, everywhere, and utterly.
And it wasn’t a twenty-foot wave, as he had hoped for. It was forty if it was an inch. The water surged out and, pushed by the wave behind it, filled the whole world, to well above the height of a man, and then higher, in seconds. The sheer force of it was bludgeoning, stunning, and irresistible. It was not only the opposite of the raging inferno – it was actually the superior force. Bigger, badder, stronger, and master of the night.
As Wesley started to rise on the dark flood tide pushing him up from below – but knowing full well he’d soon be sinking back under it from the weight of his armor and weapons – the last thing he saw was the tidal wave exit the side of the tank facing the building, knock down that wall and roof, flood into the structure… and then go shooting out the door nearby on the north wall of the plant.
It was the very same door Wesley had taken care to shut when they left.
And, perhaps by closing that door, he caused the water pressure behind it to build up for a fraction of a second. And now those millions of gallons of water didn’t just blast the door open – they blasted it off its hinges entirely, launching it up into the night sky, where it went flipping end over end. Wesley could actually follow it arcing through the air over the top of what was becoming an instant ocean, and see it land in the water no more than fifty feet from him. He saw it bouncing and turning in the raging torrent.
Wesley tried to decide if he had the energy to try to swim – to stroke for his life. Or whether it wouldn’t be better and easier to just relax and sink.
And he wondered if it would make any difference now whether he tried or not.
* * *
The flood was too violent, too forceful, too insistent for Sarah to try to swim upon. It threw her body around like a rag doll. But, for some reason, maybe the lack of armor, she was mainly being thrown around the surface, rather than sucked under, and was still getting air.
But she didn’t imagine this could last.
Because it wasn’t just her being heaved around in the tide. As she rushed along over the top of where the plant used to be, pieces of the building and the machinery it housed went crashing through the water, tossed in the air, and rolled on the waves. Sarah was already getting hit with floating, rushing debris – only small stuff so far.
But any second, she was sure, she would end up trapped under something huge and heavy and simply drown, or else be crushed outright, or maybe conked on the head, lose consciousness, and drown that way.
There were also a hell of a lot of dead guys in the flood tide, many of them charred like s’mores gone horribly wrong, but they were no real threat now. Every time they got close to her, the roiling rapids, channeled not by rocks in a riverbed but by plant remains and machinery below, quickly sucked them away again.
They were all being washed away, downhill, and back toward the sea. And as her body was rocked and tossed, Sarah suddenly saw the symbolism of it all.
Running toward and through that inferno, they had been in Hell – obviously.
But now, after the coming of the flood, it was like the end of the world – the old one, with all the weight of its sins – and perhaps the beginning of some undreamt-of new one. One with all the evil and awfulness washed away – though Sarah was pretty sure now that probably included her. She too was being washed away.
As was Wesley – out there somewhere – though he surely deserved a lot better.
But for her, maybe this was right and just, that she be washed away by the flood, le deluge. Because it was not just washing away all the dead.
It was washing away all the evil and the mistakes. It was washing away all her sins – the deaths of her husband and son, which she failed to prevent; her infidelity to Handon, who loved her, and who needed her to support him – just as it washed away the sins of the world.
And maybe those who were left could begin anew.
Maybe the Kennedy could even be the ark.
Sarah was very tired. Too tired to carry on fighting to keep her head above water. Slowly she stopped kicking and paddling, and just let the flood take her.
She leaned back, closed her eyes, and let the waters carry her away.
And, slowly, she started to slip beneath the waves.
The End
100 Feet Over Hargeisa
Hailey “Thunderchild” Wells battled the controls of her screaming jet fighter – milking every ounce of performance out of it, and every last bit of skill out of herself. She was providing close air support – danger-close, worse than danger-close – to men on the ground who were in the fight of their lives, and whose life expectancy might be measured in seconds. She was doing so in the black of the night, in an aircraft that could not go any slower than 200mph, zooming again and again over a combination set-piece zombie battle, three-alarm fire, and building collapse – all of it close enough to get body parts in her landing gear and scorch marks on her fuselage.
This was, by far, the most physically and cognitively demanding flying she had ever done in her life. Worse, much worse, was that she knew in her bones that it was her, and her alone, who was keeping that team down below alive second to second – never mind keeping alive their hopes of breaking out of there. And she knew just as well that one screw-up, one tiny miscalculation of her targeting, and she’d kill everyone down there instantly, even quicker than the legions of dead swarming up, over, and around them.
She by no means felt up to this mammoth, exacting task – she simply wasn’t that skilled a flier, nor combat pilot. But none of that mattered in the least. She had to be up to it. There was absolutely no choice.
As per instruction by their JTAC on the ground, namely Juice, her attack vector was west to east, which had her screaming over the top of the operators – having already dropped her bombs by the time she got to them, so they would skim over their heads and go into the enemy attacking the east side of the building – with any splash-blast spilling in the opposite direction from the friendlies. Staring daggers into the night-vision targeting system, gripping her stick and throttle with bloodless fingers, she waited… waited… NOW!
She had to let the second GBU-39 glide bomb go unnervingly early, basically skimming it right over the top of the building and the ground-pounders on top. Ordinarily, she would have alerted them of the release of the munition, so they could cover up. But they were too closely engaged to stop fighting and hunker down – and there wasn’t really anything for them to take cover behind anyway.
As she released the weapon, it was all going by so quickly that it seemed to happen at once – release of the munition, building blurring by beneath her, and the explosion down in t
he enemy, sending body parts shooting into the sky.
Direct hit. Thank fuck.
Because Hailey didn’t know how long she could keep this up.
She only knew that she had to.
* * *
“Third time lucky,” Henno said to the newly conscious Juice, both of them putting their hands in front of their faces and leaning away from the latest cataclysmic explosion on the ground, the brilliance of the expanding ball of flame lighting up the night and casting shadows for hundreds of yards.
And it was true – this was the third time Juice had been knocked cold in as many weeks. And, once again, he seemed little worse for wear. Henno was pleased to see him back in action, not least because he liked the precision ordnance going in – and he preferred this escape plan to the one that had involved Zorn.
The others reached Ali’s position in the middle of the roof, and top of the rubble pile – just as the pillars under her pavilion finally gave way. The two on the near side gave out first, so she dropped onto her ass and slid down it toward them in the darkness. When the far side crashed down in another cloud of cement bits and dust, it seemed like the whole hospital had finally collapsed about as much as it was going to.
At least for now.
On the downside, it also made a nice stable hill for the dead to race up and get in position to devour them – probably after ripping them to pieces first. The baboons were competing with the runners to get there quickest. And running on all fours, with four prehensile hands to grip the rubble, they were winning.
Ali slung her rifle – saving that last precious mag and a half – and drew her sword. This was going to be a pretty interesting place for life-or-death swordplay… and perhaps for a last stand. They were going to have to fight their way down to the ground on the side the bombing runs had somewhat cleared up – but the non-trivial number of survivors of that undead barbecue were already coming up at them, all hellishly lit in the reflecting flames from the fire.
And then another sonic boom blasted low over their heads and a thick staggered line of bright sparking mini-explosions blossomed all the way down the slope of rubble – like big Chinese firecrackers, except unleashing pummeling explosive force and a steel rain of shrapnel, cutting a wide hole through the climbing dead.
Juice and some of the others actually got hit by rock fragments and possibly bits of shrapnel from the 25-mil HE rounds of Hailey’s strafing run, going in so close they could taste the sulfur in their mouths. It briefly occurred to Juice to complain and get her to adjust fire. But he knew how hard that strafing shit was to do, and he realized he actually needed her shooting that close to them – that being pretty much their only chance of staying alive – so they’d better just suck it the hell up. He put his gloved hand to his cheek, and it came away bloody. He’d gotten love-tapped – love from above.
Having just blasted through on her first gun run, Hailey now popped up in Juice’s ear. “Cadaver One-Five, Thunderchild. I am down to last two GBU-53s and enough 25-mil for a couple more strafing runs. Recommend I drop those last two bombs and you try to make your breakout. Don’t dally, guys.”
“Thunderchild, Cadaver, sounds like a plan.” It didn’t actually sound like much of a plan – the ground around the hospital, and across about as much of Hargeisa as they could see, was pretty much a death zone. But it was the closest thing they had to one. “Will move on your drop. Watch for our glint tape on your gun runs.”
“Copy, wilco. Tipping in now.”
The others around Juice were starting to engage the first simian and human dead coming up the hill and closing on them. Those with last rounds left – Henno a few in his rifle, Homer some in his pistol – shot, while the others swung. Ali stepped way out to the front with her sword. She liked to have room to swing it, not to mention whirl and dance around both it and her opponents, briefly multiplying them as she divided them from themselves, before both halves hit the ground.
Mainly, she just liked to be out front.
Not least since this was probably going to be it. One way or another.
She, Handon, and Pred – all three of the ex-Unit members – were in that moment thinking the same thing that Handon had during the worst moment of the Battle of the JFK: that they had absolutely no problem dying. It was everybody’s day some day. But failing in their mission was unacceptable.
Failing was bullshit.
Nobody could be lucky every day. But it was supposed to be an operational principle that Delta made their own luck. And so far it wasn’t happening.
The three Unit operators – plus the SEAL, SAS soldier, and Activity operator – all got ready for the end.
That much at least was happening.
* * *
They could hear the roar and whine of the F-35 tipping in again – but then Juice’s ear lit up again: “Break, precedence flash, friendly ground units in AO! Aborting attack run and breaking left!”
And then they could all hear and feel that afterburning turbofan engine blasting down at them as the F-35 pulled up, banked left, and roared back into the sky.
“Say again, Thunderchild,” Juice said. “All before ‘aborting’.”
“Friendly victor on the ground, moving your way. ETA fifteen seconds.”
Handon, listening in on this, frowned in consternation. What vehicle? Had Zorn somehow gotten the MRAP free from the collapse? That seemed unlikely. But as the roar of the jet engine slowly faded, something else became audible underneath it: the high-speed electric roar and whine of a minigun – a big-ass one.
As the smoke on the ground from the last detonating bombs began to blow away, Handon and the others could see the dead dropping in a long straight line – from out at the edge of the cloud of whirling smoke all the way in to the base of the building. They were going down like scythed wheat, or mosquitoes under a DDT fogger – just disintegrating, splashing gunk, and falling in pieces at their own feet.
But it wasn’t Zulu DEET, as became obvious when a few gigantic ricochets hit the rubble and whizzed their way. One smacked Predator dead center in his body armor – and knocked him flat on his ass.
“SON OF A BITCH!” he bellowed as he hit the rubble, then bounced back to his feet.
Handon had never seen that happen before – Pred knocked down, by anything. And that told him something: that this was a 50-cal minigun in play. He’d only heard those things firing from aircraft mounts before, but now he recognized the sound signature.
Nothing like a 50-cal minigun when you’ve got a singularity problem, he mused. It was just tearing a complete hole in the ring of dead around them.
And into that hole now came a big beefy vehicle, blasting out of the smoke and onto the ground below them – minigun first. The huge weapon, mounted in a ring turret, was still whining, spinning, and firing non-stop, the rotating barrels starting to glow red, and whatever size belt in its ammo can being run through it from top to bottom. It was carving a dead-free channel ahead for the truck to sluice through – a channel that wouldn’t last long, but then they were moving fast as hell. The vehicle itself was a big souped-up-looking HUMVEE, a proper post-Apocalyptic ride. One man stood up in the turret firing the minigun, another crouched in the open bed in back. And presumably someone was driving.
“What in Christ’s name is that?” asked Henno.
“Gun truck,” Juice said, cradling his weapon and looking down serenely, impressed and pleased. “Looks like it’s been through the wringer. But it’s rolling.”
It was true the vehicle had been shot to shit, and looked like perhaps it had been patched back together in haste – Joe Shit the Gun Truck. But Juice was right, it was rolling. Before anyone up top could react – or, really, think how to react – it skidded to a shuddering stop at the foot of the half-collapsed building.
The figure in the truck bed stood up – revealing herself to actually be a woman, though she was as tooled-up as anyone in Alpha. She cupped one hand and shouted up at them:
“Come with me if
you want to live!”
Old Friends
Hargeisa Hospital
This was like a lifeboat arriving, against all possible expectations, to ferry Alpha’s beleaguered asses across the flood tide of dead and the hell out of there.
And with no more delay, because there wasn’t time for any, the Alpha six started leaping down the slope of rubble toward the ZA’s least likely extraction. Handon watched Ali lead the way, with Homer and Juice right behind her – then looked back and saw both Pred and Henno moving, but more cautiously.
“What’s the hold-up?” he barked, before having to halve a baboon head with his sword, duck another one leaping at him, then spin around and spear that one through the mouth.
Hopping rocks and swinging his cricket bat, Henno said, “This gonna be more American nutters trying to get us all killed?”
You got a better plan? Handon thought, but didn’t spare the breath to say it.
Pred finally spat and started lumbering downward at speed, causing mini-avalanches as he went. “Hey, I just wanted to see if this sumbitch was gonna bring down the rest of the building first…”
“And what if it does?” Handon said, as he switched his sword to his left hand, rapid-drawing a .45 and emptying it into a pair of runners vectoring in on Ali and Homer as they hit the ground. “You still want to be on it?”
“Good point,” Pred said. “Fuck it, get out of my way.” He redoubled his leaping, which seemed like it might bring down the rest of the building all on its own. Handon waited for he and Henno to power by him. As always, he intended to be last man out.
As he reloaded the .45 with his very last mag and covered the final few meters, he could see the gunner in the ring turret on top of the truck – a big solid dude with no helmet and wavy black hair – banging a new can of ammo into the minigun. In almost the same motion, he rotated the whole turret around 180 degrees, spun the weapon up with an electric whine, and started engaging to the rear and sides. Once again, the dead were carried away by the three-barreled hurricane.
The Flood Page 25