The Valley of Shadows - eARC

by John Ringo

  The growling and screaming at a distance of inches wasn’t helping anyone’s mental state, either.

  A second Cosa Nova gunman looked frantically for anything that would work. Lying on its side was an automatic grenade launcher. Oldryskya saw his searching look pause on the Mk19 and as he reached it, she slid forward and used her appropriated police Benelli shotgun to sharply rap his fingers.

  “We’re way too close to use that, idiot! Give over!”

  Without waiting for him to move, she leaned over him and the semi auto bucked as she fired it at point blank range. She emptied the magazine with rapid shots that chopped at the hands and arms protruding around the edge of the rear hatch. The high-pitched whine of partial deafness immediately overlaid all other sounds in the van, including the previously overwhelming snarling and growling. Some of the zombies fell away, but were rapidly replaced. The door still wasn’t shut.

  Risky heard an engine rev, and then looked up in time to see the van behind them lunge forward, crushing the infected between the two vehicles and smashing the rear hatch shut. Most of a severed hand flopped onto the thigh of the overmuscled guard who had been frantically trying to close the back of the van. He let out a manly yip and shoved it off.

  Oldryskya heard Matricardi laugh immediately after the crunch of sheet metal cut off some of the growling from the infected.

  “You gotta like it when your people think on their feet,” the crime boss said. “I positively love subordinates with initiative!”

  He waved to Tradittore, visible riding shotgun in the vehicle that had “helped” close their door. Tradittore smiled and waved in return, his mouth working as he said something to his driver.

  “All right.” Matricardi smacked the driver’s shoulder. “Lincoln Tunnel to Wall Street. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Tom Smith looked up from the pile of reports. Events had moved rapidly between dinner at Fattore’s and his return at dawn. The primary evacuation contingent still at the bank was fully vaccinated and boosted. The lab was packed out and Curry flown to the most secure location that Smith had. The move to the completed refuge had begun incrementally days ago and continued now. The alternate trading floors were already operational and starting to absorb the staff that Tom was shuttling out of lower Manhattan via hardened buses. The air bridge out of the city, though short on capacity, was running smoothly and his contingency watercraft were staged and guarded.

  Rune brought over one of the guardsmen. Divested of his ersatz zombie rig, the man in front of him was only middling size and middle aged, but still broad across the shoulders. His name tape read “Copley” and the stripes read “sergeant.” He looked about as tired as Smith felt.

  “Have a seat,” Tom said, gesturing to a chair. “My name is Smith and I run security, all sorts, for Bank of the Americas. I wanted to chat, especially to say thanks for helping us extract from the Park. Real shit show.”

  “Thanks, and you’re welcome, sir.” Copley didn’t quite flop into the office chair. “Maybe you can help me with a problem.”

  Looking around the deeply carpeted office, the guardsman in his stained utilities clearly felt out of his element.

  “We’re orphaned,” he admitted. “I can’t reach anyone who knows what we’re supposed to be doing, or where we are supposed to be. Can’t find my chain of command. The only officer I saw last night seemed pretty unconcerned with taking my report about hundreds of zombies in Washington Square Park, and I sure as shit didn’t want to sit around waiting for him to experience a rush of blood to the brain and have an idea. You seemed like you had your head on straight. So here we are. Do you have a brain?”

  Tom leaned forward, shifting his weight onto the elbows that he had planted on the desk.

  “I’m in a tearing hurry, Sergeant Copley, so please consider this SITREP your prep for the frago that follows, but one that you can take a pass on, if you prefer.”

  Tom chose the lingua franca in which both he and Copley were wholly fluent. Fragmentary Orders, or fragos, were the operational communication by which a field commander gave his subordinates just enough information to carry out the mission at hand, in the context of the greater situation, without overwhelming the unit with detail. It was tacitly understood that fragos were delivered by the senior and carried out by the junior.

  That context was going to be critical to any future relationship.

  “I think that this city is already dead, but the different bits of the body are still ignorant of the fact.”

  He gestured to the pile of reports, the maps pinned to the rich paneling of his office walls and the view from the office window.

  “Any activity we see out there is just the nervous system of a big animal, twitching. There’s effectively no city government, no city services, no centrally controlled police force and to the extent there’s any cop force at all, it has gone insane, and now, now we’ve got no solid contact with any higher in military.”

  As he listened, Copley slowly leaned forward, till he was perched on the edge of his seat, matching the taller man across from him.

  “Is there a plan?” Tom continued. “Yes, there is. I’m charged by my employer to get all of the critical financial and technical staff out of this city in order to have enough of an economy to jump-start whatever is left once we fall back to our refuge points.”

  Copley’s ears grew points.

  “I’ve sent most of my staff forward already, and understaffed what I would need for a few emergent missions that I must, must complete before we can finish the evacuation,” Tom said. “So, I need trained and armed personnel and god help me, a little more armor wouldn’t hurt either. I need you.”

  “Sir,” Copley said carefully, “we all still fall under UCMJ. And somewhere there has got to be someone in charge.”

  “Look out the window,” Tom said. “Do you see the fires?”

  Dirty columns of smoke were rising into the dark morning sky from several points in the city. More than one skyscraper was visibly aflame.

  “They’re spreading because there aren’t any firemen to put them out. Did you see any active formed units fighting in the last twenty-four hours? You see how the Statue of Liberty’s torch and crown are lit and nothing else? That’s because those are the only lights whose generator still has enough diesel to keep running. That’s it for city services. Do you have contact with higher on your military circuits? You already said you don’t. Before, this bank was tied in to DHS, NORTHCOM, STRATCOM, you name it. Now we’re getting zero. Not even ‘sauve qui peut’ from higher. The radio from FEMA is just repeating ‘stay in your homes.’ We got a message from SEC that trading was ‘temporarily suspended’ and now we’re getting diddly.”

  Tom took a breath and stretched his shoulder a bit.

  “I’m so short of people that I’m going to ask my brother and his family, you know, the overarmed hyperactive teenage girls, to help me retrieve my chairman from his house in midtown. It will be a hostile extract. ROE is up to me, and ROE is ‘go hot.’ Not an issue with the thirteen-year-old. Keeping her from going hot has been the issue.”

  “Thirteen?” Copley sputtered. “Which one?”

  “Saiga,” Tom replied. “The semiauto shotgun.”

  “Son-of-a—” the sergeant said, shaking his head.

  “I’ll sweeten the deal,” Smith said. “Is your team immunized?”

  Copley’s eyes narrowed.

  “You’ve got vaccine?” he asked cautiously. “Where from?”

  “And booster,” Tom said, ignoring the second bit. “It’s a two-part series. Join my team until we finish the evacuation or for forty-eight hours, whichever comes first, and I ensure that you and your colleagues get the first shot now. Stick with us during the entire evac and you get the booster. Once we reach our fallback point, I’ll work to put you in touch with higher, to the limit of my ability, and in the meantime, you can draw on our stocks to resupply water, ammo, parts, et cetera.”

  Tom sat back while
Copley digested the offer.

  “The truck isn’t mine,” Copley pointed out. He didn’t fidget, but looked at Smith intently, and then down at his hands. “I can only speak for my team. To swing this, I need the same deal for its crew.”

  “I can do that, but if they evac with us, the truck stays behind.”

  “How are you getting out, sir?” Copley didn’t think that was an unreasonable question.

  “Need to know, Sergeant, and unless you are on board, you don’t need to know,” Tom said, standing up. “However, I have to get a mission underway.”

  Smith plucked a handheld radio from the charger on his desk and slipped it into a pouch on his plate carrier. He added freshly filled pistol magazines and some spare batteries. That done, he looked back up.

  “I need your answer.”

  He waited until Copley began to answer and then deliberately cut him off.

  “If you take this deal, you accept my authority without question for the duration or until we connect with competent military authority. You’re all the way in. I don’t have time to renegotiate every couple hours. You take our salt, and you commit. Clear?”

  Copley stood.

  “I know the term, sir. Ready for the frago.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “This is Ding. What’s our coverage?”

  Dominguez was looking at the front of the mayor’s building. His smile didn’t reflect happiness. Just satisfaction. The dead BERT operators were hung by the ankles from the building’s dirty gray facade. Some bodies bore the dreads from the Overture group, more had Cosa Nova polo shirts and a few were otherwise nondescript but still wore bits and pieces of tactical kit. Only one body was suspended above a pool of much larger pool of blood than the rest, apparently hung there before the body’s former owner had finished the messy business of dying.

  The granite over the bodies was splashed with a white-painted legend: Retribution.

  Over two hundred police still stood with him. Ding didn’t have anything like the thousand or more cops that had survived the clearance operation on the dependents’ housing. Hundreds had disappeared through the night. Attrited by the fighting that yielded this monument to their dead, trapped by one of the growing number of zombie mobs that were spreading outwards from the parks and subways or simply dead from self-inflicted gunshots—his family of loss had shrunk.

  A spattering of shots rang out nearby, followed by a cop calling out “Clear.” Dominguez never turned his head. Instead, he raised the radio to his mouth and spoke, still looking at the corpses.

  “C’mon, what’s our coverage?”

  “The take from the city cams is still pretty solid, with a few holes. Central Park is crawling, and I mean crawling, thousands of infected, maybe more than that. The Army survivors pulled out to the east. There are few spots of organized activity, but mostly the civilians are trying to get off island or just get groceries, not that the traffic is moving. Zombies are starting to congregate in midtown, mostly in green spaces and subway entrances.”

  The voice of the remaining Domain Awareness Systems operator scratched at Ding’s mind. In reality it was uninflected, but Dominguez heard it as brittle, cold and full of malice.

  “What kind of bank activity are you seeing?” he asked.

  “There isn’t a BERT operating anywhere in Manhattan,” the DAS man said. “There are burnt and wrecked BERT trucks in a few places though. The midtown banks have pulled security back inside, or maybe all the way off the island, no way to tell. Downtown, the Goldbloom complex is intact and they have set up a cordon outside their front doors. Bank of the Americas has a one block perimeter, using the DHS chicanes downtown. Both are still shuttling helicopters. There was a convoy that headed north a while ago, out of BotA.”

  Ding’s smile grew feral.

  Bank of the Americas. Kohn would be there. Matricardi, the mongering whoreson, might be there. Smith would be there for certain. Ding would give him one chance.

  He turned to the FBI special agent who had moved his family into the police dorms.

  “Can you turn off the jammers and reactivate the trunk lines now?” Ding asked. He waggled his smartphone to make the point. “I want to make a call and I need to reach the right guy.”

  The feeb was exhausted, but his eyes were fever bright. His vest was soiled, the agency lettering smeared with red.

  “Yeah. I can do that. Also, we brought the special weapons. Where do you want ’em?”

  “Load them in the truck.”

  * * *

  Paul Rune watched the little convoy navigate the barricades, squeeze past the guarded exits and head north on FDR Drive. Consisting of the MRAP and two BERT trucks, one recently repaired, it carried Smith’s scratch CEO recovery team. The cell system was still down, but at least they would be able to stay in contact now that the radios seemed to working again.

  “Seems like you left this a little late, Boss. Is the FDR still clear?”

  Tom was rapping out orders on his handheld, and held up one hand as he finished a conversation.

  “Bravo Eight, this is Sierra Actual. Go for SITREP.”

  “SITREP follows—we delivered the package to Mile Seven.” Kaplan’s voice came through clearly. “Our alternates are loitering nearby and I’ll be leaving the dock shack in ten. They will follow as soon as Mile Seven gets underway.”

  Some of Tom’s tension visibly eased, and he settled his weight back on his heels.

  “Great. Get back ASAP. I’ll pass the word if we head your way, but otherwise tuck the RHIBs back into the shed and lock up. Break, Bravo Ten, this is Sierra Actual. Eyes on the FDR.”

  Another voice came back this time. Bravo Ten was a spotter team on the very top of their fifty-story building. Besides eyeball, the team was running hobbyist quad-copters since they’d lost access to the citywide surveillance system.

  “FDR is mostly clear—there appears to be at least one lane open from Battery to nearly Roosevelt Island. A few zombies in view but no mobs. Saw a couple BERT units, contractor unknown, crossing the Williamsburg bridge eastbound, otherwise just occasional civilian traffic, but not much of that. Couple of random firefights earlier but that seems to be settling down. Lots of traffic outbound. Over.”

  “Sierra copies, out.”

  “Stacey and Soph are back on the motor-sailer,” Paul said. “We have a fast boat with shooters within a few hundred meters if anyone thinks about screwing with them. Harbor traffic is light, most of the boats have trickled out over the last few weeks.”

  Paul watched his boss take a slow breath, unwinding a bit more, and spoke.

  “Still shuttling the airlifts. All the birds are up. After the ground fire last night, the helos are departing straight out over water before they gain altitude and then head north and west. But we got a situation. Kohn and her team are still cooling their heels in training room one. I chatted with her staff and they are hinting that she wants to bring more people out.”

  “She gets her four seats and that’s it,” Smith said.

  “Well, she has more information, and she wants to trade.”

  “What could she know that is worth more than a seat out?”

  * * *

  “What’s this thing worth?” Faith said, excited. “How cool is it that we stole an Army tank!”

  Faith rapped the armor of the big six by six with the muzzle of her Saiga, yielding a boring tap, tap sound. Armor should ring, damnit.

  “We didn’t steal it, Faith,” Steve Smith countered. “Your uncle negotiated to borrow it. And it’s not a tank. By the way, and not to be repetitive, but can you move in all that?”

  Her father sounded skeptical, even if he did approve of the full protective coverage that they had improvised for the bank personnel on the mission. Even though she was vaccinated, Steve appreciated that Faith was trying to avoid getting bitten. Missing fingers and eyeballs wouldn’t grow back, even if she was no longer directly at risk of turning into a zombie.

  To that end, all the
shooters wore a variation on the same theme. The Smiths had matching marine foul weather coats over 5.11 trousers and long-sleeved shirts. Faith had been impressed by the bite resistance of Specialist Randall’s gloves, so they went shopping for some, zombie-apocalypse style.

  For values of the word shopping.

  Someone else might call it a smash and grab on a closed sporting goods store where they found, in addition to the gloves, some knit caps as well as ski goggles impregnated with antifog. Faith also bore ten magazines of 12 gauge for her Saiga and several magazines for the HK that she wore on an antique drop holster.

  And her kukri. Most especially her kukri.

  Her father made do with a rifle borrowed from the bank and his original pistol.

  “Lots of armor?” Faith tapped the side of the MRAP again. “Big gun on top? Super noisy and smooshes things? S’tank.” She wiggled in her jump seat. “And yeah, I can move fine—I am zombieproof! Finally. Wish I’d worn this when I was playing mail-girl.” She added a little dance in her seat by way of illustration.

  “I need you to be able to move, Faith,” her father said seriously. “I’m using you and Astroga on the entry team. There are females in the evacuation party and your presence might reassure them.”

  Faith raised an eyebrow skeptically.

  “Reassure them how?”

  “You know, you’re a female, they’re females, we aren’t going to be there to hurt them, that kind of thing.”

  Durante had been listening, and judging from the sudden cloud on the face of the Smith girl, he didn’t want any of that pending conversation.

  He turned to his other side where the predictable pre-mission bull session was underway. The junior soldier, who he could have sworn was a private but appeared to now be a specialist, Astroga, was sitting to his immediate right. The big security contractor listened for a bit. He thought that the young soldier was posing an interesting question to the other riders.