Doc rushes over to take a look at Sykes and Pittman. Sykes has a wound on his arm and a big gash on his head, but he does not seem critical. Pittman looks like shit though. He had a chunk of his face ripped off and his leg was chewed up so bad that I can see the exposed bone in the pool of gushing blood.
“Is it bad, Doc?” Pittman asks.
“You’ll be alright,” Doc lies. He injects Pittman with a dose of morphine and the Marine immediately goes limp on the floor.
“Hang in there,” Doc tells him.
“Fucking North Koreans,” Pittman laments as his eyes close.
“Let’s move him,” Doc says.
Lowe and his squad help carry Pittman into the maintenance room.
“We need to block that door,” Sarge says.
He is down on one knee, sucking wind from our sprint up the stairs. Sarge pauses to take in some air before he manages to finish his thought.
“Those things will bust right through it,” he says.
As usual, Sarge is on point. Barricading the door is all we can do to buy us enough time to regroup, refill our magazines, treat our wounded, and try to figure out some way out of this mess. Still, it takes a moment until we have caught our breath enough to get moving again. When Mac and Harding return to the hallway, Sarge gets back to his feet.
“Let’s get everything we can out here and pile it up to block the door,” Sarge says and gestures toward the nearest hotel room.
Arnes raises the Mossberg and shotguns the door and kicks it open. We move in to clear any threats, but the room is vacant. All of us work together to haul out the dresser, tables, and mattresses and pile them in front of the door.
“Think that’s enough?” Mac asks me as he tosses a chair on top of the pile.
Before I can answer the mob in the stairwell reaches the door and starts clawing and pounding. The door opens a crack and the pile of furniture shifts but keeps them from pushing through for now.
“We better get some more shit,” I say.
Arnes breaches another room across the hall. We rush in with our rifles ready to fire, but find nothing inside the empty room except for the furniture, clothes, suitcases, and a bottle of champagne in a bucket of melted ice. Arnes grabs the bottle of bubbly and chugs it down. He cringes and looks at the bottle.
“Who the fuck is Dom... Per-eeg-non?” he wonders.
“That’s Dom Perignon, you illiterate fucking bumpkin,” Mac says as he takes the bottle from Arnes. “This shit costs like two hundred bucks a bottle.”
“Tastes like ass,” Arnes says.
“Quit fucking around,” I remind them and gesture to the dresser. “Help me move this thing.”
Mac puts the bottle down and grabs the other end after Arnes waves a dismissive hand in my direction.
“You worry too much, Graves,” Arnes tells me as he picks up a chair. “We got this.”
“We just lost nearly half our platoon, asshole,” I remind him. “We don’t have anything under control.”
“He’s losing his shit, man,” Gibby warns me as he carries out a large round table.
The best advantage you can give the enemy is a lack of respect. Our team has held our own, but these things have shown that they can be deadly if we get cocky and put ourselves in a bad position.
Arnes has never seemed all that stable, but we can’t afford him going off the rails right now.
“Get it together, Arnes,” Sarge urges him as he picks up a nightstand and hauls it toward the door.
After we clear out the second room and barricade the hallway with the furnishings, we head back to the maintenance room. Sarge and Colin Lowe are having a powwow with Lieutenant Reasoner, while Corporal Collins tries to contact anyone on the radio. Doc continues to work on stabilizing Pittman, while the rest of us stand around waiting for the word. I find myself staring at the redhead, sitting alone on the stairs to the roof.
“Can you believe it?” I ask Mac.
“What?” he says.
“All this for one chick,” I say.
“Don’t seem like saving her ass is worth more than everyone we lost,” Gibby agrees.
“At least she’s kind of cute,” says Mac.
“Not that cute,” I complain. She lifts her eyes and sees us watching her so we turn around and pretend to be interested in something else.
“Ain’t got no ass,” Gibby says.
“Solid seven,” Mac says.
“Four, tops.”
“Nah,” he says.
“I’m not into redheads,” I confess.
“I’m not into white girls,” Gibby says. “Too much drama.”
Maybe we’re assholes for even having this conversation right now, but it’s better than dwelling on everything that just happened.
“Alright, listen up,” Lieutenant Reasoner announces. “I realize this op did not go down as smooth as it should have—”
“We got our fucking asses kicked, sir,” interrupts Gibby. He isn’t usually one to get out of line, but we’re all a little high strung right now.
“Some of that... a lot of that is on me,” admits Will. “But we have to put that behind us.”
“Bullshit,” says Arnes. “Captain knew he was dropping us into a clusterfuck. This is on him. I’m going to kick his fucking teeth in.”
“Shut up, Arnes,” says Sarge.
“The point is,” Will continues. “We can’t change what happened. We can only control what happens next. I remain confident that we will make contact with command and that the extraction will be coming. Until then we need to make due. Copy?”
There is a murmur of agreement.
“I’m not hearing the level of intensity I’d expect from the best damn recon platoon in the business,” the lieutenant says.
“Oohrah!” the men bark.
“That’s more like it,” he says. “See your team leaders for your assignments. Everyone stay fucking frosty. Be ready to bug out if the situation goes sideways again. We can’t afford any more fuck ups.”
The lieutenant pauses to look around the room, assessing our morale and readiness by the expressions on our faces.
“Let’s get moving, gentleman,” Will says. “The world won’t save itself.”
I got to admit, the guy knows how to talk to people. In spite of everything that just happened, the fight and the attitude swiftly returns to every man in the room again. All of us still respect his command. If we’re going to get through this, it will be because Will kept his head right when the shit hit the fan.
Our team huddles up around Sarge and he relays our responsibilities.
“Okay listen up,” says Sarge. “Gibby, you and I will post up by the east stairwell. Arnes and Harding, take the SAW and set up outside the west stairwell. Mac and Chase, we need eyes up on the rooftop. Even if we can’t reach Nellis on the radio, there might still be some birds up in the sky that made it out of there. Take some extra flares. Maybe you can hitch us a ride out of here.”
“Copy that,” I say.
“See Gunny on your way out and load up on ammo,” Sarge says.
“What happens if the helo doesn’t come, Sarge?” Gibby asks.
“I don’t exactly have a lot of faith in the captain,” I agree.
“Will is working on it,” says Sarge.
“Those motherfuckers are eventually going to get inside here,” Gibby says. “It’s just a matter of time.”
“East stairwell was still clear,” Arnes says.
“We should get out while we still can,” Harding agrees.
“Enough,” Sarge says. “I know we got our backs against the wall, but we still have our orders. Do your jobs and we’ll get out of here. And if those things do get inside before we bug out, then we won’t go down without a fight.”
Sarge waits to see if anyone has more concerns, but no one has anything else to say.
“Time to punch in,” Sarge says. “Get to it.”
Seven
Gunnery Sergeant Rocco Lewis and PFC J
ackson Carver crouch on the floor next to a black bag filled with supplies and boxes of ammunition. Beside the two of them, Corporal Dom Collins and Will continue their efforts to make contact on the long range radio.
Mac and I walk over and each grab a couple boxes of 5.56 mm rounds from the bag. Since this was supposed to be a brief op, we left the bulk of our equipment back on the helicopter. Aside from extra ammo, we opted to carry only the bare necessities to increase our mobility. Given how fast we burned through magazines, it seems like Gunny made the right call there. But if we can’t get an extraction soon, we might live to regret it. We don’t have much in the way of food or water beyond what we carry in our packs.
“How’s the hand?” Gunny asks me.
“I’ll live,” I tell him.
“Is that the hand you use to pet the snake?” he asks. He jerks his hand up and down.
“No,” I tell him.
“Then you’ll probably live,” Gunny tells me.
“Got any extra flares, Jax?” I ask PFC Carver.
Jax reaches into the bag beside him and pulls out several smoke flares and hands them to me. Mac and I cross the maintenance room and head for the roof access.
“Excuse us, Miss,” Mac says as we approach the access stairs to the roof.
The redhead is sitting on the steps, watching Doc work on stabilizing Pittman. She stands up and moves to the side to let us pass.
“You doing okay?” Mac asks her.
“I’m okay, I guess,” she says. “Just trying to keep it together.”
Mac puts a hand on her shoulder.
“Hang in there,” he says.
She tries to smile, but it seems like she is barely holding back all the emotion that has built up inside of her. Seeing this kind of shit takes a toll on people, especially normal people that haven’t been waiting their whole lives to experience it.
It hasn’t really bothered me at all. At least the stuff I’ve seen. Losing our guys, on the other hand, is already fucking with my head.
We move up the stairs and out onto the scorching rooftop in the middle of the desert. The sun is just starting to set, and hot gusts of dry air rush at us from the west. The smoke and fumes are still overwhelming. It almost feels harder to breathe, like no oxygen remains in the air. I follow Mac to the edge of the building and look out over the city, what is left of it anyway.
“Those things really know how to fuck shit up,” I say. “I’ll give them that.”
“You ain’t kidding,” Mac agrees.
“Kind of hard to believe,” I admit.
“What?” he asks.
“This,” I say, gesturing a hand at the city. “That shit could get this bad.”
“Nah, man,” Mac shakes his head. He pulls his Wayfarer shades out of his pack and slips them over his eyes. “We had this coming for a long time. This kind of thing is inevitable. Part of nature. You should feel lucky.”
“Lucky?” I say. That hardly seems like the word I would have used to describe it.
“Yeah, Chase,” he says. “Look around. You’re lucky to be alive to see it. I mean, think about it. All those generations of human beings that came before us. All those civilizations. All the disasters. The wars. The plagues. None of that compares to being here for this. Probably the most important event in human history. You should feel fucking honored to be here. I do.”
Mac drops his gear and takes his notebook out. He searches around his pockets until he locates and extracts a pen.
“You’re fucking crazy, Mac,” I shake my head.
Mac unbuttons his jacket, slips it off, and drops it on the ground. He climbs on the edge of the building and sits down. Mac dangles his feet over the edge and looks out across the abyss.
“You might be right about that,” he says. He picks up his notebook again and flips to a blank page. Mac combs his fingers through his dark waves of hair. He stares out across the city for another moment then scrawls words across the lines of the paper.
I get the feeling someone is watching us, so I turn around and find the redhead standing beside the access door. After I raise my hand to acknowledge her, she waves back and crosses the scalding surface of the roof.
“Red queen coming up on our six,” I mumble to Mac.
“She looking at me?” he asks.
“You’re hanging halfway off a thirty-five story building,” I tell him. “Of course she is fucking looking at you.”
Mac smirks but just keeps scrawling away on the page of his notebook.
“That looks kind of dangerous,” Claire says.
“I like to live dangerously, baby,” Mac purrs.
Claire crosses her arms. She turns her head to the side and stares out at the devastated city.
“Don’t mind him,” I tell her. “He watches too many movies.”
“It’s fine,” she says as she turns back around. “I just wanted to say thank you. I am sorry about your friends—”
“Brothers,” I correct her.
“Right,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Maybe you can tell us what all this was for,” I say. “You must know something about all this shit that’s happening here. What are these fucking things?”
“I’m not sure,” she sighs. “I have an idea what they are from a biological aspect, but I’m not sure what might be causing this to happen.”
“So let’s start with what you do know,” Mac says.
“It’s a long, complicated explanation,” she says.
“I think she is saying we’re too stupid, Chase,” Mac says.
“That does sound like what she is saying,” I agree.
“That’s not what I meant,” Claire sighs.
“Maybe you can dumb it down for us,” he tells her.
“Several years ago, I worked on a research project to improve organ donor tissue preservation methods. Along the way we made a discovery. We found that after death the human body continues to create enzymes, mRNA that transcribes certain DNA into proteins. In the scientific community they were being called zombie genes.”
“Zombie genes?” Mac says. “That is the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
“It does sound pretty stupid,” I agree.
“It was just a name people could attach to the concept,” Claire explains. “Essentially the dead body still tries to repair itself after death. To bring the dead body back to life.”
“That doesn’t happen,” Mac says.
“Of course,” she says. “These proteins are never produced in sufficient quantities to restart the mechanisms needed to keep the body alive, but if someone or something helps them along then…”
She gestures at the things wandering around in the streets.
“How?” I ask her.
“That’s the part I’m not sure about,” she says. “We did a number of... experiments. We tried using chemical supplements prior to death to boost these processes and help preserve the body longer, but we never achieved any measurable success. The closest we came was Dr. Schoenheim, who used high doses of very specific low-frequency microwave radiation to temporarily stimulate a similar response, but there were too many complications.
“What kind of complications?” I say.
“The subjects were not just preserved. They reanimated. However, they were unstable and never fully regained all their functions. So, Winters scrapped the project once it proved to be unprofitable, although I truly believe he realized the potential for harm was too significant. I did, too, but I still believed it was better to try and understand everything before the knowledge could potentially be used against us in the future.
“You think that’s what is happening?” I ask her. “Somebody else figured out your little science project and decided to unleash hell.”
“I hope not,” Claire says. “After he left the company, there were rumors that Doctor Schoenheim continued testing his research on human subjects in South America. But I never took them seriously.”
“Why not?” Mac asks.
“He just wouldn’t do that,” she says.
“Maybe you just didn’t know him as well as you thought,” I say.
“I don’t know for a fact that what we’re seeing here is related to our work at all,” Claire says. “This is all just speculation. The only reason I believe it’s related is because you’re here. Someone must have thought my work was somehow relevant.”
“They said you might be able to help stop all this,” I say. “Is that true?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, I will do everything I can, but I am just one piece of a very large puzzle. You wanted to know what your brothers died for here, and I’m telling you. I felt like I owed you that much for saving my life.”
“You did,” I tell her.
She presses her lips together and tilts her head back as she turns and returns to the access door. Maybe I’m an asshole, but I don’t really feel good about losing our guys to save someone that may have had a hand in causing this, even if she had good intentions.
“You’re welcome,” I say as she gets to the door.
She glances back at me and gives me a half-assed salute.
“Fucking bitch,” I grumble.
“Still say she’s a seven,” Mac says. He returns to scrawling in his notebook.
“Three,” I say back.
“You said four,” Mac reminds me.
“She’s a three now,” I tell him.
“Fucking hell,” Mac says.
“What?” I ask him.
“My pen is out of ink,” he says. He turns around and starts searching through his pack for another pen.
“All of this might be because of her,” I say.
Mac isn’t paying attention, though. He is in a panic because he can’t find his stupid ink stick.
“Damn it,” Mac says. “Do you got a pen?”
I shake my head and then he curses and walks back toward the access door.
“We’re on watch up here,” I remind him.
“I need a pen!” he calls back as he disappears down the stairs to the maintenance room.
Through the clouds of smoke, I watch the red sun sink into the gold mountain range along the western horizon. In the streets below I see those things wandering around in the dwindling light.
ROTD (Book 3): Rage of the Dead Page 5