by Sam Sisavath
Close-quarter. Like being stuck in a sewer tunnel.
She couldn’t tell at all that he wasn’t just another man by looking at him. Maybe he was a little too obviously lanky, but the wardrobe hid his skeletal shape underneath it. The whole thing should have been heavy—she would know, having carried all of that in the duffel bag for a time herself—but Will moved in them as if they weighed nothing.
“Sweet threads,” Blaine said. “Gotta get Mae and the gals to make me one of those when we get back.”
Gaby almost smiled, except the shooting above them had increased in intensity and it drew her attention instead. It was still just the pop-pop-pop of small arms, along with the brap-brap-brap of machine gun fire. There were no signs of the Warthogs, and she couldn’t decide whether to be glad or worried by that fact.
She looked back at Will. “How much farther?”
“Almost there,” he said, and turned and continued on.
With his helmet on, she had to strain to hear him. His voice also didn’t sound nearly as hissy.
She and Blaine followed him down the tunnel again, and with each step the gunfire above them (In front of them? Behind them? She swore it sounded as if it were coming from every direction now.) seemed to get louder and faster, more intense as the back-and-forth continued unabated.
Jesus. What’s going on up there?
“Listen to that,” Blaine was saying. “Like World War III times ten.”
“It’s the strike team,” she said. “Striker. Looks like they’re already here.”
“So shouldn’t we, I don’t know, hurry?”
She glanced at Will for confirmation. If he had heard Blaine, it hadn’t pushed him to go any faster.
He knows what he’s doing. Just follow his lead.
But then, creeping into her consciousness, God, I hope he knows what he’s doing, because Blaine’s right; it sounds like World War III times ten up there.
“What’s our code name?” Blaine was asking.
“What?” she said.
“That’s Striker up there. The tanks are Rolling Thunder, right?”
“Uh huh. Lara told me when I talked to her before we came down here.”
“So what’s our code name? Do we even have one?”
“Willie Boy.”
“Willie Boy?” Blaine repeated, staring at her as if he thought she was trying to prank him. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“That’s…not nearly as cool as Striker or Rolling Thunder. What’s about the Warthogs flying around up there?”
“Eagle.”
“Yeah, Willie Boy’s definitely not nearly as cool.” He sighed. “Do I even need to ask who came up with it?”
She smiled to herself under the mask. Inane chatter with Blaine helped to keep her mind off the viciousness of the gun battle above them. It also kept her from screaming at Will to hurry. Hurry before everyone is dead while waiting for us!
She wondered if she might have actually said that last part aloud, because suddenly Will stopped and turned around, and Gaby saw her own reflection in the helmet’s goggles.
“What is it?” she said.
“Here,” he said.
“Here?” she repeated.
The helmet bobbed up and down. “We’ll need help to go farther.”
He turned his head and she followed it to another platform carved into the side of the tunnel about ten feet in front of her. Small streaks of sunlight became visible when she took a few steps forward.
“This is it?” Blaine asked behind her.
“This is it,” she nodded.
“About friggin’ time.”
Definitely about friggin’ goddamn time, she thought, listening to the hellacious gunfire above them.
Turning to Blaine, she said, “Ladies first.”
Blaine grunted. “You’re Danny now, is that it?”
“He’s like a virus. Infecting everyone around him.”
“They have shots for that, I hear,” Blaine said as he climbed up the platform, waste dripping from his pants legs.
Even though she couldn’t smell it, seeing the sewage sloughing off Blaine’s clothes made her gag slightly. She fought through it and followed him up. As she straightened, clutching her rifle, she glanced behind her.
Will had turned around again and was now looking down the tunnel, as if he could see something up there that she couldn’t even with the NVG.
Trust him. You have to trust him.
She and Blaine turned their backs on the dark tunnel and looked up at the round metal object at the end of the ladder embedded into the wall. Long streaks of sunlight slivered through the ventilation holes, partially distorting her night vision. Here, on the platform and standing directly below the grate, the gunfire was even louder, the pop-pop-pop more immediate, and she thought she could even hear the clink-clink-clink of bullet casings flicking across…concrete pavement?
Where the hell were they, exactly?
Blaine went into a crouch and unslung his pack. She watched him frantically dig around before he found what he was looking for and pull it out: a two-way portable radio.
Blaine turned the gear on and, glancing up at the covering, keyed it. “Striker, come in. Striker, this is”—he might have cringed a little when he said—“Willie Boy. Can you hear me? Answer if you can hear me.” When no one answered, he said louder, “Striker, Striker, this is Willie Boy, do you read—”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time,” a familiar voice said through the radio.
Keo.
Gaby couldn’t help but grin to herself, even as the rattle of gunfire echoed from the other end of the connection. There were so many and they were overlapping, sounding more like hail slamming into a metal roof.
“Took your sweet ass time,” Keo said through the radio. “We got tangos coming at us in waves over here. What’s your position?”
“We’re right below you,” Blaine said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Coming to you!”
Blaine stood up and put the radio away, then snatched up his carbine and took a step back from the ladder. Gaby positioned herself next to him, her own M4 pointed up at the grate above them.
Keo had said “Coming to you!” but he hadn’t said when he would get there, or how far he had been when they made contact.
So they waited ten seconds.
Then twenty seconds…
Thirty…
Gaby exchanged a puzzled look with Blaine and wondered if he found staring at her NVG just as comical as she did staring at his.
“He said he was coming to us, right?” Blaine asked.
She nodded. “That’s what I heard.”
“So where is he?”
“Give them more time. Sounds like they have their hands full up there.”
“Sure, why not?” Blaine said. “It’s not like we got anywhere else better to be.”
“No hot dates, huh?”
“Nope. What about you?”
“Maybe a hot shower after this.”
“Or a hundred.”
“Or a hundred,” she nodded.
Gaby looked over her shoulder, expecting to find Will standing behind them, but he was gone. Again.
Dammit, Will, I wish you’d stop doing that.
She refocused on the manhole lid above them instead. It still hadn’t moved since the last time she looked, though she thought she could see shadows flitting across the ventilation holes this time.
“Where’s Will?” Blaine asked.
“I don’t know. He left again.”
“I wish he’d stop doing that.”
She smiled to herself behind her mask. “Yeah.”
She glanced over, hoping to see that he had returned, but there was still just empty space back there. The fact that all of this depended on him and he was nowhere to be found left her more than just a little terrified—
“Gaby,” Blaine said.
She turned around and was going to ask What? but she d
idn’t have to because she could see it:
The round covering above them had started to move...
28
Keo
The HC Dome was over 200 feet high and the length of one and a half football fields. According to Danny, the place was originally built for a capacity of 40,000 before it was expanded in recent years to 60,000. It was where the local professional sports teams played their games, and in its time the Dome (because that was what it was—a stadium with a giant dome on top) was the first of its kind but had since been surpassed by more high-tech sports arenas in recent decades.
Keo didn’t know a thing about the place or what used to go on within its round-shaped walls, and he would never find out because the first time he laid eyes on it, the structure was missing the thing that gave it its name, along with a large chunk of everything else. There was just a pile of rubble where the gargantuan building used to be, the result of two massive cluster bombs dropped by an A-10 that had preceded their arrival.
Plumes of gray and white ash smoke still filled the sky above the jagged skeletal remains, while the Warthogs had begun dropping smaller payloads on the surrounding buildings when the Sikorsky touched down in one of the many parking lots that circled the area. The pilots chose their LZ wisely—in a no-parking zone toward the top half of the lot. There was a surprising mass of cars waiting for them, signs that there had been some kind of concert or game here the night of The Purge.
They were far enough from the crumbling dome—200 meters, give or take—that he didn’t reach for the breathing mask to protect himself from the spreading clouds of pulverized cement and concrete. He was the first one off the MH-60T Jayhawk and blinked against the sun (Day is good. Day is very good!) and proceeded to sweep the area with the MP5SD while peering through the red dot sight, Lara’s voice going through his head from the briefing last night:
“Other than the Dome itself, Eagle will take out the nests around the area. Frank says that’s where the bulk of the blue eyes will be. If we can take them out—all or most of them—it’ll make his job a lot easier.”
He’d gotten three breaths out when a missile slashed over his head and impacted an apartment complex across the street. The resulting explosion sent a sea of brick and smoke and God knew what else into the air.
Ghouls. He was looking at ghoul body parts.
Now that’s something you don’t see every day!
James, the second person off the Jayhawk behind him, saw the building go up and said breathlessly, “Holy fuck.”
“You good?” Keo asked, shouting to be heard over the whup-whup-whup of the rotor blades above their heads.
James nodded back, but his face didn’t look “good” at all.
Tough it out, kid, Keo thought while shouting, “Don’t stray! Understand? Stick to the group!”
Another nod, this one much more assured.
The Warthog that had devastated the building had veered off, traveling miles in the blink of an eye, and Keo heard the brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt! of its Gatlin gun, like some man-made monstrosity cursing its creation, as the warplane razed something on a highway well beyond Keo’s line of sight.
“What’s it doing?” James shouted.
“Keeping collaborators off our ass!” Keo shouted back.
Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!
Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!
Damn, he was loving that sound!
He spun back to the chopper and smacked the younger man on the shoulder, shouting, “Give me security!” as a second Warthog swooped by overhead, the wave of its flight path like a gust of hurricane wind ripping across both their faces, overwhelming even the helicopter’s rotors for a moment.
To his credit, James did exactly as he was told, racing away from the Jayhawk while Vince and Hanson hopped down after him. Keo pointed at them, then at the four-lane road that led into the parking area from a nearby frontage road.
“Take up positions!” Keo shouted. “That’s where they’ll be coming first!”
Vince and Hanson nodded and jogged off, each man resting his machine gun across the hood of a different vehicle facing the south entrance. Keo took a moment to pull out his binoculars and swept the highway in the near distance, the same one the Warthog had strafed earlier. He searched for the moving vehicles he knew would be coming as soon as the collaborators figured out where their helicopter was going.
BOOM! from behind him, as a Warthog fired another missile into a building to the right of the HC Dome. It looked big enough to be an arena, but maybe his perspective was somewhat warped by being at ground level. Even as the structure began to fall apart, a second missile—BOOM!—took out the walls that were still standing.
Keo was too far away to make out any details, but he thought he might have heard what sounded like screams (?) coming from the collapsing building.
“Eagle needs to take out these buildings around the Dome,” Lara had said, staring across the map at Cole. “Use everything you have on them and save the Gatling gun to push back any collaborator reinforcements that will be rushing to Striker’s position.”
To hear her giving the orders, he could almost believe she had come up with every single part of the plan herself, that it wasn’t her, him, and Danny who had hashed everything out on the Trident before heading over to Black Tide. But that was the one thing about Lara he always admired: When she committed, the woman really committed.
“Hey, Coaster!” someone shouted behind him.
He glanced back at Danny, heading to his position from the other side of the helicopter. He was already pulling on a thin white mask over his mouth, and like Keo, James, and everyone else, was shouldering a large pack.
“I’ve heard of silent but deadly, but never loud and deadly!” Danny shouted.
Keo was going to ask him what he was talking about, and why he was putting on the mask, when the stench hit him.
Jesus Christ!
It came from seemingly nowhere and overwhelmed him in the blink of an eye. Keo was used to the stench of vaporized ghouls—or, at least, he thought he was—but he wasn’t at all prepared for this level of assault on his senses, as what must have been thousands of dead (again?) ghouls were exposed to the sun.
He reached into his pocket and took out the mask and snapped it over his mouth, even as his eyes stung and began to water, and if not for the continued whup-whup-whupping of the chopper blades above them, he wasn’t sure if he could keep this morning’s breakfast down.
Danny crouched next to him, the Ranger’s heavily modified M4A1 resting casually atop one bent knee. “You know, I used to come here all the time with our mutual friend. Watched the home team take on the bad guys and drank enough beer to barf out a small swimming pool.”
“Bad guys?” Keo said.
“Yeah, everyone who isn’t on the home team are the bad guys.”
“Of course.”
Danny glanced back at the remains of the HC Dome. “Had a lot of good times in there.”
“Not anymore!”
Danny sighed. “Don’t rub salt in the wound, Kilometer. That’s just mean.”
A sudden massive gust of wind made them both glance up just as one of the Warthogs came back around. Keo stared at the empty slots under its wings as it swooped past them and headed toward a long stretch of highway in the distance.
“Looks like it blew its load all over the place,” Danny said. “I hate it when that happens.”
“That happen often?” Keo asked.
“Once or twice. Let’s hope he stocked up on those sweet, sweet 30mm rounds, otherwise this is going to be one very short trip to the ol’ Dome. Speaking of which—” Danny said and pointed.
“I see it!” Keo shouted.
He got up and jogged over to where Vince had stationed himself, his M249’s bipod perched on the hood of a Jeep Wrangler. He patted the big man on the shoulder and pointed at a vehicle barreling down the frontage road from the highway. “Incoming!”
Vince nodded and repositione
d his machine gun. “Weapons free?”
“Wait until it gets closer!”
He snapped a quick look at Hanson, positioned fifteen meters to his right, his own MG mounted on the hood of a red sedan. He didn’t have to shout across at Hanson, who had already seen the approaching vehicle and turned to face it, too.
Keo took a moment to take in the scene.
Danny was still crouched next to the Sikorsky behind him, with James nearby; Danny may or may not be saying something to the kid. Angie, Mackey, and Delaware were on the other side of the aircraft; they looked alert and ready—or at least as much as they could with the rotors sending a continuous blast of wind against their backs and faces while they tried not to gag on the stench of dead ghouls that continued to swarm them from every side.
He turned back at the approaching enemy—some kind of truck—moving fast toward them, and soon would be turning into the street that ran parallel to the stadium. There was just the one car, so either the guy had been sent here to find out what they were doing, or more likely, it was the only collaborator that had survived one of the Warthog’s recent strafing runs along the highway to reach its destination.
Not that it mattered. One truck, even a technical (though it was still too far off at the moment for Keo to be absolutely sure that was a machine gun mounted on top of its cab) wasn’t going to do much against two waiting MGs.
A tap on his shoulder made him glance back at Danny, who shouted, “I told the chopper to take off! They’re just sitting ducks out here!”
Keo nodded and watched the Jayhawk as it began lifting up, and up…
“Fingers crossed they don’t wander off too far and forget about us!” Danny said, and Keo was pretty sure he was grinning like an idiot behind his mask.
“Not funny!” Keo said.
“You just need a sense of humor, that’s all!”
“I got plenty of that. You’re just not funny!”
“Hey, do I go to where you work and heckle you?”
Without the helicopter’s presence on the ground with them, Keo could suddenly hear his own racing heartbeat again, not to mention the growing acrid stench of dead ghouls wafting across the parking lot from the Dome and surrounding buildings. The Warthogs had taken down everything they could before running dry of bombs, but that left over a dozen or so apartments still standing around them.