“Clear,” Sarge yells out.
“Clear,” Gibby calls back.
“Let’s move up,” Sarge says and our team pushes ahead to the elevators in the center of the hotel where the three wings of the building intersect. More figures emerge from the other hallways. Sarge holds up a fist and we pause our advance. I drop to a knee and shoulder my M4.
“Engage,” Sarge orders.
Bullets tear through the hallway, shredding the bodies to pieces and splattering the elevator doors with flecks of blood.
“Tangos down,” Sarge confirms.
We resume our advance down the hall. As we step over the bodies on the floor, I keep expecting one of them to reach out and grab me for some reason, but they’re all dead as hell. I’m probably only nervous about it because this shit just feels like some kind of horror movie. We check the other hallways but they are empty now except for one guy way at the end of the west wing growling at a door.
“I got him,” Colin Lowe says, raising his M110 SASS to his shoulder. He takes a few seconds to aim and then fires a single shot from the sniper rifle. The 7.62 mm round blows half the head off the poor bastard.
“Damn!” says Pittman.
“Fucking showoff,” snorts Arnes.
“Watch it, Corporal,” Colin winks at him. “Sassy don’t like that.”
“Nightmare One Actual, this is Nightmare One-One Romeo,” Gibby hails the lieutenant on our comms. “Hallways on the top floor are clear. Over.”
“Copy that, Nightmare One-One Romeo,” says the Lieutenant. “Tango Mike.”
“What about the rooms, Sarge?” Gibby asks. “Should we check them?”
“Fuck that,” Sarge shakes his head. “We don’t have that kind of time. Besides those things don’t seem to have much luck opening doors.”
Just then a handle clicks in the quiet hallway and a door squeaks open. I raise my rifle as I see a face emerge from the doorway.
“Marines!” I yell out.
“Show me your hands,” yells Sarge.
The woman screams and ducks back inside the room as soon as she sees a dozen assault rifles pointed in her direction. The door slams shut, but a moment later, it opens up a crack and the old woman peers out.
“I’m not sick!” she cries. “Don’t shoot me.”
“It’s okay, ma’am,” Sarge says. “We’re United States Marines. We’re not here to hurt you.”
The old woman steps out into the hallway, her fingers cover her mouth when she spots the carnage on the floor. Farther down the corridor another door slowly opens and a little boy and a teenage girl emerge into the hallway. Sarge holds up a hand and the little boy waves back at him.
Lieutenant Reasoner steps over the body in the doorway of the maintenance room after hearing the commotion in the hall.
“What’s happening out here, Sergeant?” he asks. “I thought this hallway was clear.”
Sarge starts to answer but then the old woman howls. She collapses on the floor next to the body of the first guy we shot. The one that wasn’t dead.
“No, no, no,” she wails and she clings to the dead man in the bloody polo shirt.
Sarge clears his throat to speak, but the woman howls again. The lieutenant leans down to try and say something but before he does he notices something that makes him take a step back. He reaches for his sidearm, but before he can do anything the dead man on the floor lurches up and bites the woman on the face. She screams in pain as he tears off a chunk of her face with his teeth.
The lieutenant doesn’t hesitate to open fire. He hits the man and the woman, pulling the trigger as he backpedals into the room. Will keeps shooting the guy repeatedly until the magazine is empty.
“Motherfucker,” he yells. “Doc!”
Doc Noonan rushes out in the hall to attend to the old woman. She is slumped over facedown on the floor. Doc rolls her limp body over and checks for a pulse. Then he looks at Will and shakes his head.
The lieutenant holsters his sidearm and takes his rifle off his shoulder. He brings it up and fires a round into the silvery-haired head of the dead woman on the floor. Then he lowers the M4 and turns to look at Sarge.
“Sergeant, we can’t afford any more fuck ups like that,” the lieutenant says.
“Yes sir,” says Sarge.
“I mean it,” the lieutenant moves closer. “That could have been my face that got ripped off. I don’t feel like getting killed today, copy?”
“Won’t happen again, sir,” Sarge assures him.
The lieutenant gives me a stern look as well and then turns to leave.
“Sir,” Sarge stops him. He gestures at the kids standing in the hallway. “What should we do about those two?”
“Get them back in the rooms, Sergeant. We don’t need more problems.”
“We’re going to take them with us, though, right sir?” Sarge says.
Will leans to the side a few inches and looks at the kids. The older girl looks to be maybe thirteen and she stands behind the younger boy with her hands on his shoulders. He can’t be more than ten or eleven.
“You know that’s not our mission,” Will says.
“But sir,” Sarge says. “They’re just kids.”
“Do what you can for them,” Will says. “I’ll put in a request with command.”
The lieutenant turns and steps through the doorway to the maintenance room. Sarge mumbles to himself as he turns and heads down the hall towards the two kids, but I don’t catch what he says as I follow along beside him.
“Hey,” Sarge says as he crouches down next to the boy and the girl. “It’s not safe out here. You need to go back inside your room and lock the door.”
The little girl nods.
“You guys have some food in there?” Sarge asks. “Water?”
The kid shakes her head.
Sarge takes out a pair of MRE’s from his pack.
“Give me a couple cans of Rip It,” Sarge says.
“Shit, man,” I say.
“Come on,” Sarge urges me.
I open my pack and grab the cans and hand them over.
“Stay inside until someone comes back for you,” Sarge tells them, even though he knows we won’t be coming back.
The kids disappear back inside the room and close the door. As Sarge and I walk down the hall, I hear the locks tumble into place on the door.
“No way command is going to approve that request,” I tell Sarge. “You know that, right?”
“I don’t like it,” Sarge says. “We’re supposed to leave these kids here to die? It’s not right, man.”
“We don’t get paid to like it,” I remind him.
“Yeah,” Sarge sighs. I can tell the old saying doesn’t make him feel better.
“Didn’t have to give them the last of my Rip It,” I say.
“Those kids are going to die in there,” Sarge says. “And all you can think about is your fucking Rip It.”
“Right,” I tell him. “They’re already fucked. It would have done more for me than it will do for them.”
“Damn, that’s ice cold, Chase,” he says. “Makes me wonder what kind of shit your parents did to make a messed up motherfucker like you.”
“You don’t want to know,” I tell him.
Four
Since the emergency alarm has shut down the elevators and returned them to the ground floor, we hit the fire stairs. When we open the door, motion sensors detect our presence and the lights click on and illuminate the top floors of a concrete stairwell that reeks of stale cigarette smoke. I peer over the railing at the darkened floors below. If there were any of those things down there, the sensors would have tracked their movement and engaged the lights.
I take up my usual position as the slackman behind Harding and follow him silently down to the next floor. In spite of the fact that the majority of the hotel is probably swarming with these things, it feels safe in this stairwell. Knowing the lights are there to warn us means that nothing will sneak up on us.
&nbs
p; The alarms are the only thing that make me edgy. The monotonous blare, the flashing lights, and the droning voice of the woman, repeating the same warning over and over again is unsettling.
“Those alarms are getting on my fucking nerves already,” Arnes complains.
“At least it covers the babbling stream of nonsense flowing steadily from your mouth,” Mac says.
“Very poetic,” Gibby compliments Mac.
“Thank you,” Mac laughs.
That just pisses Arnes off even more. In his eyes, he is always the victim even when his mouth is getting him in trouble.
“Kiss my ass, mister fucking William Hemingay,” Arnes growls.
“It’s Ernest,” Mac corrects him. “Ernest Hemingway.”
“He can kiss my ass, too,” Arnes says. No matter what, Arnes always has to get the last word. His ego never allows him to let it go.
I look back and urge them to shut the fuck up with my eyes. Mac just gives me a shrug as we keep descending the stairs. We still have a couple dozen flights left to go before we reach the ground floor.
As we pass by some of the flimsy stairwell doors, I think I hear some of those things in the hallways on the other side. It could just be my imagination, though. With all the noise from the alarms, I can’t be sure. In any event, none of us are about to open them to find out.
Finally, we reach the ground floor. Going down the thirty-five flights of stairs was not too bad, but I’m already dreading the climb back up to the top floor. We stack up on the door and pause a moment to make sure everyone is ready to rock and roll. Gibby radios to let the rest of the squads know that we are in position, then listens to the radio as we wait for the other teams.
“Solid copy,” Gibby says into the radio. He looks at Sarge and gives him a thumbs up.
Sarge gives a nod and then I follow Harding as he rushes through the door. We find ourselves in a hallway off the main casino floor. Several corpses wander around outside the bathrooms and I open fire at a mutilated cocktail waitress on the right, while Harding takes out a dead security guard and another fresh corpse in a bowling shirt with flames printed on it.
We move forward toward the casino floor and I hear the sound of the other squads opening fire as they engage the dead. The room is a noisy nightmare of flashing lights, jingling bells and moaning corpses. There are napkins, broken glass, poker chips and puddles of blood on the floor. Hundreds of those things wander around between the slot machines and blackjack tables.
I crouch at the end of the hallway and start laying hate on the closest targets, trying to suppress their advance as they close in on our position. As soon as I drop one, another emerges from between the machines. They all have bloody flesh dangling from their mouths. Their arms, legs, and faces have been partially devoured. Some of them already have multiple bullet wounds that should keep them from walking around at all, but these things really do shrug off anything but a bullet to the head.
The tracers come out as I fire on a bartender coming at me from behind the bar at my three o’clock. Several rounds miss and shatter the mirror and bottles on the racks behind the bar before I drop him. A fat guy in a suit stumbles at me from behind him, but I have enough time to pause and change to a fresh mag.
I reload and fire on the guy in the suit. As soon as he falls, I shift my rifle and take out a black woman with a shaved head in a fancy evening gown. After blowing half her head off, I engage an old man in a shirt that reads “VIVA LAS VEGAS.” After he hits the floor, I take aim at a gangly white guy in baggy shorts and a wife beater. Half of his tattooed arm is gone and the goatee around his mouth is caked with crimson blood.
Tracer rounds take him out so I grab another mag.
“Conserve your ammo,” Sarge reminds us.
These things wobble around so awkwardly that it sometimes makes headshots too difficult. I start double-firing for center mass, counting on the recoil pattern of the M4 to make the second shot hit the things in the head.
One after another, the corpses rush at us. It gets unnerving when they show no hesitation about walking into the line of fire. Even as they stumble over the fallen bodies, they keep pushing toward us.
They are relentless, I’ll give them that. No fear whatsoever. But with all of us laying down heavy fire from the hallway, they never even get close to us.
Tracers.
I change mags again and rejoin the bloody siege. Dozens of bodies are piled between the slot machines and the hall. Here and there lies an arm or leg that was shot completely off. A couple of corpses continue to reach for us from the ground but their bodies are so fucked up they can’t do more than drag themselves across the patterns on the carpet.
Finally the steady flow of the dead turns to a trickle. I fire a round at the last one, a casino worker in a red vest and white shirt, and his brains splatter all over the screen of a video poker machine.
We hold our positions for several seconds as the firing at the other end of the casino floor tapers off. I scan across the rows of machines, most of them shot to shit now. Some of the lights still flash and a few of them make garbled noises.
“Clear!” one of our guys calls out across the casino floor.
“Clear!” Harding calls back.
“That’s how we get shit done, boys,” Sarge says. “Good job.”
We advance into the casino, stepping around the bodies on the floor. One of them reaches for me as I get close, so I finish it off with a round to the head. It slumps over on top of several corpses stacked up beneath it as his brains spills out from the entry wound in his skull.
It’s hard to tell with all the noisy machines if more of them still lurk in the dimly lit casino. We move ahead cautiously along the rows of slots, checking each aisle as we work our way across the room.
Out of the corner of my eye, I detect movement. I pivot around and center my rifle on Pittman checking the opposite side of the room with his back to me. I lower my rifle and start to say something but he pivots around and fires. Dumbass had his finger on the trigger again. I try to move but I’m too late. The bullet hits me and I fall back on the ground.
“Fuck!” I yell out. “I’m hit.”
I glance down to see how bad it is, expecting the worst. A giant fucking hole below my body armor from the 5.56 mm round. But there isn’t anything there.
Then I feel the pain coming from my hand as I try to grip the rifle.
I look over at the bloody mess where all my fingers used to be. The two middle fingers are completely gone. My pinky dangles by a thread of muscle and skin.
“Shit,” Pittman curses. He knows he fucked up bad.
“Doc,” Sarge yells. “Graves is hit!”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Mac grabs Pittman by the collar of his uniform and shoves him back.
“I’m sorry, man” Pittman says. “Fuck!”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Mac tells him.
“I’m sorry, Chase,” Pittman says again.
He might be an idiot, but at least he didn’t kill me. Right now I’m just glad I still have my trigger finger.
Doc rushes over and tries to keep me from getting back to my feet.
“Stay down,” he tells me.
“I’m alright,” I tell him.
“Let me look at it,” Doc insists.
I let him take my hand and inspect the wound. The last thing I want is to be out of commission while the rest of my team risks their lives. I’d never forgive myself if something happened.
“Just patch me up,” I tell him. “I’m good to go.”
I hold out my hand trying my best not to look at it. I’m not too squeamish usually, but my hand looks like I shoved it in a meat grinder right now.
Doc sterilizes it and pours some kind of stuff to stop the bleeding. Then he sprays some numbing shit on me before he wraps it up in layers of gauze. The rest of the teams resume clearing the casino floor, but Sarge and our squad hang around while Doc tends to me.
The pain is bad, but the mise
ry that I feel is almost unbearable. I don’t want to let my fucked up hand jeopardize the lives of my team. Now I’m more of a liability than anything else.
“Fucking Pittman,” I curse.
“Must have thought he saw a goat,” Mac says. “Goddamn moron.”
In spite of the pain I’m in, I find myself laughing. Mac has a way of doing that. Nothing ever seems as bad as it is when he is around.
“It ain’t too bad,” Arnes says, eyeing my hand. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch, Graves.”
“You know,” I say. “I always thought you would be the one to fuck up and shoot me, Arnes.”
“I still might,” Arnes shrugs then he leans to the side and spits tobacco juice on the floor.
“Good to go,” Doc says as he tapes the wrap around my hand.
I take a second to inspect the barrel of my rifle. I wipe the blood off it but it appears to be only cosmetically damaged on the vertical grip below the barrel where my hand was. Might have been more pissed about being stuck down here with a disabled rifle than a disabled hand. At least I am still in business.
Time to suck it up. I turn and follow the rest of our squad. Gunshots on the far side of the casino, get me moving again. I know there isn’t time to sit around. We still have a mission to finish.
Five
At the opposite end of the casino floor, corpses pour in from the long hallway that connects to the mall. Team two and team three are laying down heavy fire, pushing toward the conference room steadily as they drop the dead. By the time we reach them, they are just outside the closed double doors.
Sarge pauses next to Sergeant Lowe and points up to the doorway and barks something in his ear. Colin nods and then moves his men up to set up a defensive position just passed the conference room entrance. Sarge gestures for us to follow him and then leads us to the doorway. He tries the handle but it is locked, so he gestures to Arnes who lifts up his leg and kicks the door off the hinges with one of his massive boots.
ROTD (Book 3): Rage of the Dead Page 3