Pox Americana 3

by Zack Archer

  Deb grabbed my hand and pulled me down, wrapping me up in her arms as the helicopter pitched to the right.

  The missile slammed into the side of the helicopter and time and sound seemed to slow. I saw the missile’s metal casing eat through an outer panel on the chopper and keep on going.

  For an instant, I actually believed we’d be okay. The missile had damaged the helicopter but it hadn’t exploded. Just then, oil started spurting from the damaged panel. Green lights flickered red and greasy smoke filled the cabin.

  The chopper began spinning and dropped. Everyone screamed as visibility decreased to a few inches, the helicopter filled with an acrid smoke that made it difficult to breathe.

  A whining sound filled the air and I reached over and held the hands of the ladies, certain that we were plummeting to our doom.

  Laying on the cold metal floor, I stared outside as we spiraled down, the pilots shouting, fighting the controls.

  Lexie, who hadn’t strapped herself in, slid across the floor. I saved her from falling outside by snagging her ankle. The others grabbed her arms and secured her as we spun through the sky.

  I squinted and saw something, the top of a building down below which seemed as big as a football field. The helicopter had leveled off and was approaching the roof as if readying to crash-land. Before I could tell the others, the roof rushed up to greet us.

  I gasped.

  We landed violently, the ‘copter’s blades snapping off as the machine flipped onto its side, gouging across the roof.

  Fires broke out on the exterior of the helicopter as we slid across the concrete in a hail of friction sparks. We were tossed violently around inside. The bay doors buckled, and my leg was splashed by hot machine oil as the chopper lurched to a bone-shattering stop.

  My head slammed against the wall and I nearly lost consciousness. My eyes blurred into the darkness caused by the smoke. I remember my mother once saying that silence equaled death and in the stillness that ensued, I was sure all of us had crossed over.

  And then Raven rose uneasily, crouching, and booted open the mangled bay door. We collectively staggered out of the copter.

  I moved around toward its nose and bit back a scream because everyone behind the controls—Bo, and the pilots—was dead.

  They’d been crushed during the crash-landing, the end of the helicopter compressed like an accordion.

  “Out! Get out!” I shouted, worrying that the small fires licking the back of the helicopter might cause it to explode.

  Lexie grabbed Stevens, Lucy made sure to take a medical pack, and the rest of us grabbed our weapons and whatever else we could carry and exited the darkness of the smoke into Miami’s blinding sun. Even though it was winter, it was seventy degrees and the sun shone brighter than a supernova.

  Shielding my eyes with my hand, I lumbered forward, scanning my HUD which was populating with images and information.

  “What’s the good word, Slade?”

  “Incoming.”

  “What?”

  “Get down!”

  I hit the ground and bellowed for the ladies to do the same as bullets sliced through the air over our heads. The same bastards who’d shot us down were trying to finish the job.

  We listened to the staccato small-arms fire punctuated by a boom as a rocket of some kind slammed into the building’s façade.

  “Who the hell are those guys?” Scarlett asked.

  “Pirates,” I replied, thinking back on what Bo had mentioned during our talk.

  Lying on my belly, I took stock of the situation, looking about while studying the HUD. There was a doorway that presumably led down into the basement off to the right and maze of HVAC equipment and ductwork off to the left.

  “We’ve got two choices, ladies.”

  Deb gave a hollow chuckle. “Any of ‘em good?”

  “I’ll take my chances down there,” Layla said, pointing to the doorway that led down into the basement.

  “Me too,” Lexie said.

  Lucy nodded. “Me three.”

  I blinked, mentally flicking through screens on the HUD, but I couldn’t get a read on the interior of the building.

  “What’s down below us?” I asked Slade.

  “Water,” he answered. “The building’s fifteen stories tall and twelve of them are flooded.”

  “We go down, there’s no way out,” I said.

  “Could be worse,” Raven said. “The place could be filled with zombies.”

  I gaped at the HUD again. There didn’t appear to be any zombies in sight.

  Another fusillade of gunfire broke out and Raven ran a hand down her rifle. “I’ve had enough of this shit.”

  She grabbed her weapon and a rucksack full of ammunition and combat-ran over to the edge of the roof.

  We hesitated, then followed her, everyone taking cover in the HVAC and forest of piping and stainless-steel ductwork.

  I crawled to the edge of the building and peeked up in a lull from the incoming fire.

  Our building was smack-dab in the middle of ten or twelve other buildings. All of them were flooded so that the roofs were the only things still visible, aside from a bridge that was a quarter mile away.

  The water was everywhere, maybe ten feet below our position. It was turquoise in color, slow-moving, and filled with all manner of debris, including clusters of bodies that had gone to bone and bloat.

  There were a dozen shooters visible on four of the buildings, figures wrapped in olive-colored body armor. Six or seven were carrying sniper rifles and the rest were shouldering rocket-propelled grenades or manning heavy machine guns balanced on tripods.

  “We’re trapped,” Lucy said, crouching to my right.

  “Just means we gotta take the fight to them,” Raven replied, slapping a magazine of explosive ammunition into her rifle.

  Most of our weapons were designed for close-quarters combat with zombies. The silhouettes shooting at us were farther away, which meant that we’d have to rely on Raven’s rifle, Deb’s minigun, and Scarlett’s phaser, depending on what kind of distance it had.

  I peeked up and watched Raven fire three shots. The first two flew wide, but the third one struck a sniper. The explosive round vaporized the man and put the fear of God in the other snipers, who either ran for cover or wildly fired back at us. The morons exposed themselves which Deb took advantage of, spraying her minigun, cutting down three more of the snipers as we cheered.

  “This is almost too easy,” Deb said.

  “Hey,” Lexie said. “Look—what is that?”

  I squinted, staring at what appeared to be a flock of birds, maybe twenty in all, rising from behind one of the other buildings.

  My brows rose in curiosity. “Is that…birds?”

  “Bats,” Hollis said.

  But the birds or the bats didn’t move like any creature I’d ever seen before. Their movements were too precise, too choreographed.

  “Drones!” Slade shouted. “They have fucking drones!”

  Images of the drones, which were black and the size of sparrows, filled my HUD. “How many?”

  “Twenty-two,” Slade replied.

  “Those are drones,” I said to the others.

  I don’t think anybody believed I was telling the truth until the first drone fired a rocket at us. The tiny projectile flew over our heads and slammed into the helicopter, blasting a section of it apart.

  “Shoot those fuckers down!” Raven screamed.

  Everyone opened up on the drones, shooting them down like skeet, but one managed to slip by. The thing was so close that I saw a tiny gun bolted to its underside. The gun spun around and fired a shot that struck Deb.

  She fell back, clutching a shoulder that spurted red. I reached for her and she waved me off. “I’m fine. Flesh wound. Keep firing.”

  I shot the last drone down. We helped Deb up and Lucy opened the medical pack and began tending to Deb’s wound, dousing the small hole with alcohol before applying a thick bandage.

/>   “You need to get out of there,” Slade said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, for starters, you’re sitting ducks. If that wasn’t bad enough, you have company coming.”

  I looked at the HUD. There were objects moving up the water, several blocks away.

  “Boats!” I shouted. “We’ve got boats coming this way!”

  Lexie helped Deb up. “Good guys or bad?”

  “We’re not waiting around to find out,” Raven offered. She pointed her gun to the other side of the building.

  We hustled over to the other side and looked down. I scanned my HUD and it flickered and flashed, showing an image of the area around our position. The water was ten or twelve feet below us, but if we could swim across the canal, we’d be able to climb onto a section of overpass and run over to another building which had better cover on the roof, including one that looked like several shooters’ blinds that I imagined had been left behind by the folks who’d guarded the city in the weeks after the world turned over.

  “That’s where we need to go,” I said.

  Before we could jump into the water, motors sounded and we spotted a pair of boats, one painted blue, the other yellow, churning through the canal to intercept us.

  Raven fired at the boats. Her first show missed its mark, but her second shot was true. It struck the yellow boat’s windshield and exploded, ripping a hole through the two men behind the controls.

  The other boat veered off, disappearing behind another building as we surveyed the water down below.

  “Who’s first?” I asked.

  Lucy didn’t hesitate, just jumped into the water. Lexie followed her while holding Stevens up, and then the others. Deb and I went in last.

  The water, which was the color of a river after a storm, was lukewarm and had almost no current. There was plenty of debris in it and I could barely see more than two feet beneath me.

  Deb’s shoulder, although bandaged, was still bleeding profusely, creating a red slick that trailed us in the water as we kicked our legs and fought through it.

  I’d only moved a few feet in the water when something rough brushed against my leg. What was it? A piece of wood? A body? I looked down but couldn’t see a damn thing.

  “Go, go, go!” I shouted.

  Lucy led everyone forward, swimming toward the overpass as the sound of an engine cranking filled the air. The other vessel, the blue boat, was coming back to finish us off. I saw the damned thing approaching in the distance.

  Deb was only able to swim using one arm as a result of her wound, so I tugged her forward, fighting to stay afloat. We were only twenty feet away from the overpass but moving at an achingly slow speed.

  The shooters on the boat opened fire as we ducked under the surface. The bullets speared into the water, barely missing us.

  We surfaced, gasping for air, watching Raven and the others return fire. Hollis emptied out her machine-pistols, spraying the blue boat which was incredibly close, the motor creating a wake that pushed us closer to the overpass.

  A bullet from Hollis’s gun struck one of the shooters in the thigh. The man pitched from the boat into the water as the boat swung off to the right.

  I helped Deb over to the overpass as the wounded shooter dove deeper in the water. Before I could turn to confront him, he grabbed my legs and pulled me down.

  Water funneled down my throat as I fought to breathe while throwing up both hands to block a knife strike.

  The knife luckily stabbed into my stump, which somehow impacted my HUD because it instantly vanished in a burst of static. The shooter pried the knife free and I aimed my cannon at his head.

  He tipped my cannon up as I fired, the darts barely missing his head as

  he swiped his knife at my chest.

  The knife missed my chest but grazed the area just above my groin. A little burst of red stained the water as the shooter pulled back the knife, ready to plunge it into my chest when a form rose from the depths of the canal.

  The form, a shadowy thing, was as long as a sedan.

  There was a burst of bubbles and all I saw was a wall of gray flesh, a mouth full of white, saber-sized teeth, and a mighty fin. A shark. There was a fucking shark in the canal!

  I watch in stunned horror as the shark opened its mighty jaws and clamped them around the shooter’s midsection.

  The man’s eyes went wide with fright, the whites showing all around. He windmilled his arms, to no avail. The shark released the man and then grabbed him again, rocketing off toward the bottom of the canal with the shooter in his mouth, trailing a plume of blood.

  Scissoring my legs, I fought up toward the surface when I felt a low hum emanating from below me.

  Looking down, I was horrified to see another shark—what appeared to be a thick bull shark—scything through the water toward me. My hand swung around and I fired a cluster of metal darts that struck the shark’s snout.

  The monster shook its head back and forth and swam off as I breached the surface and paddled to the overpass.

  Lexie’s face was as white as chalk. “Was t-that w-what I think it was?” she stuttered, trying to wring the water from Stevens’ soaked coat.

  I nodded, spitting out a mouth filled with brackish water. “A shark.”

  “That’s not all,” Raven said. “Check it.”

  I looked back to see other things swirling in the water. A ball of black snakes, thick as fire hoses, roosted on a pile of plywood, and well beyond that, the dark outlines of what I assumed were three or four alligators. The alligators were feasting on the bodies of zombies, people, and animals that floated in the water.

  “Sharks, gators, and snakes, oh my,” Layla said.

  Hollis slumped. “Could this get any worse?”

  “Sure could,” Scarlett replied, pointing.

  The blue boat was heading back toward us.

  A brace of men appeared on the deck with grenade launchers.

  “Slade, are you copying this?”

  Nothing, just static. The struggle in the water must have shorted everything out.

  The blue boat drew near and we brought our weapons up.

  “On my mark!” Raven shouted, raising a balled fist.

  I sucked in a breath and the blue boat suddenly exploded, creating an orange carpet of flames that swept across the canal.

  “Holy shit! Who did that?” I gasped.

  Nobody responded, because none of us had fired our weapons.

  The canal was rocked by a huge row of explosions brought about by two rockets that we watched drop through the sky to obliterate what was left of the blue boat.

  The sound of another engine filled our ears and we aimed at yet another craft, a long, narrow boat made of age-stained wood that was flying a yellow flag with a banana on it as it sluiced toward us. I could tell by the smoke trails rising from the boat that someone on it had fired the rockets that incinerated the blue boat.

  “Hold your fire,” I said.

  The boat with the banana flag cut its engines and a figure sporting a gardener’s hat with a mosquito net obscuring the face, rose from the deck.

  The figure manning the boat pulled back the mosquito net to reveal a breathtaking, mixed-race woman, strong of thigh and full-breasted, with a mane of dark hair that twisted down to her ass. She was wearing camouflaged shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt, black boots that nearly came to her knees, and had a pair of silver revolvers winking at us from the holsters that rose just above her hips.

  There were others behind her, three heavily-armed men in body armor and I reckoned by the way they gave her a wide berth as she strode forward that they were her crew. She was a gorgeous, powerful woman and I was immediately smitten.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Sadie James,” she replied, tipping her head. “Captain Sadie James, and it looks like I arrived just in the nick of time.”

  16

  “We could’ve taken them ourselves,” Raven said.

  Sadie smirked. “You the
ones from D.C.?”

  I nodded, and Sadie searched our faces.

  “Where’s Sharla Frost?”

  “She didn’t make it,” Lucy said.

  “Yeah, well, whoever gave you your flight instructions screwed the pooch, ‘cause you came flying down fucking Broadway,” Sadie said, pointing at the air. “You flew directly over an area that is always hot. The Turk’s men patrol this entire section of town.”

  “Who’s the Turk?” Hollis asked.

  Sirens sounded in the distance. “You’re gonna find out who he is in five minutes unless you come with me,” Sadie said.

  “Permission to come aboard, Captain?” I said.

  “Fuck the permission and let’s go.”

  We jumped onto the boat as Sadie climbed behind the controls.

  “Welcome aboard The Wandering Eye,” Sadie said. “Now please sit down and kindly shut the fuck up.”

  We did, and she full-throttled the engine as the boat raced off.

  Whoever was behind us opened fire with guns and heavier weapons. Bullets chewed through the back of the boat and rockets detonated in the canal, sending up geysers of water. A bullet clipped the earlobe of one of Sadie’s crew and the man, a Hispanic warrior with long greasy locks, touched a finger to the wound and began laughing at the sight of the blood. The other crew members did too and then they stood, expertly balanced as the boat rocked left and right, returning fire.

  We held onto the sides of the boat as it accelerated, the craft lasering between the buildings and shooting through tiny gaps in several overpasses. Scarlett was alongside me, inspecting her phaser weapon which had gotten wet during our swim. She pulled the triggered on the weapon, but nothing happened aside from a stream of water issuing from the barrel.

  A throaty roar echoed behind us. I looked up to see three speed boats pursuing us. The fastest of them, a white boat with a black death’s head skull painted on the front, swung out to the left as it tried to overtake us.

  Up ahead was a partially-submerged bridge with a narrow gap that we’d be lucky to squeeze through. The white boat vroomed forward. Sadie slammed the throttle down, her hair whipping back as she turned into a stiff breeze.