Stage 3 (Book 3): Bravo

by Stark, Ken

  “You know, you might have thought to mention it, Ranger Smith,” Addison threw in. “The least we could have done was unlock it while we were there.”

  Mason knew what the old man was going to say before he said it, and his blood started to boil.

  “And so I did,” Hansen crowed, a smug grin curling the corners of his mouth.

  That was the last straw. It was one thing for the man to put his own people first, but this was something else. This was Hansen using Mason's people as alpha fodder, just so he could carry out some secret agenda. The distinction might be thin, but it was there. Suddenly, Mason wanted nothing more than to wipe that smug grin right off that ugly fucking mug. He covered the distance in two strides and came nose to nose with the man.

  “You should've said something,” he growled. “If that was your plan all along, you should've told us.”

  Hansen returned every bit of Mason's glare. “And then what? Vote?”

  “Here we go again...” Inez sighed.

  There was a time when Mason would have ended this with Hansen on the floor, searching for his teeth. Even now, he was hard-pressed not to return to the good old days.

  “Alright. That's it, Hansen. No more. This one-man show of yours is over. Now, granted, we all share the blame for the mess we're in. Alright. Shit happens. If you've got a way to unfuck the situation, then okay. Good for you, and good for us all. But from now on, you will lay your cards on the table. Got me? And I mean all of them. Believe it or not, someone here might actually have a better idea than yours. Or maybe someone knows something you don't. We can argue, we can debate, we can come to blows if that's what you want. But all of our lives are on the line here, so we all get a say in how and why we risk those lives. Understand?”

  He turned away from Hansen's smug puss before his anger made him do something he wouldn't regret in the least. But for the first time since he'd known bad-ass Gary mother-fucking Hansen, the man didn't have an immediate smart-ass comeback.

  Then, Becks gave the old man her patented, “Daddy...” and the deal was sealed.

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” Hansen snorted, and Mason tried to find peace in the fact that it was probably as close to an apology as the man had ever come in his life.

  “Uh, so did this master plan of yours include how we get from here to there through a mosh pit from Hell?” Christopher asked.

  Hansen grumbled under his breath, then he admitted, “Not exactly, no.” As if to save face, he added a rather less contrite, “But it also didn't include you people bringing in every 50 in the county!”

  “Daddy...” Becks cautioned him again, and he acquiesced. Barely.

  “Alright, fine. I'm sure none of you noticed, but there's a door exactly like that one right below our feet, one floor down. Almost a straight shot from one door to the other. Thirty... okay, make it forty feet. Forty feet and we're in, easy as pie.”

  “Easy as pie,” Teddy echoed in a nervous hush.

  Addison raised his hand. “I noticed...”

  “That's one bitch of a pie,” Alejandra said, slapping Addison's hand back down.

  “Oh, c'mon, peleonera. You can outrun a swarm over a distance of forty feet, can't you?”

  “Luckily, I don't have to outrun the swarm, tamarindo,” she snarled, flipping him her middle finger. “I just have to outrun you.”

  As the back and forth continued, Mason sank deep in thought. It was a damn crazy idea on the face of it. Fifteen people, half of them kids, crossing forty feet of open ground through a swarm numbering in the hundreds. It would be wholesale death and destruction. Slaughter on an epic scale. The whole idea sucked balls in a way that balls had never been sucked before. But for the life of him, he couldn't see another way.

  They had to get out of this place. Not just out of the Alamo – but out of Skyline. This place was done. It might have been able to last another day or two before they'd blundered in full throttle... but not now. He and Hansen had both seen to that. Hand in hand, they'd dug them all into this shithole, and the shit was rising fast. They had to go. Period. And stuff or no stuff, the only way out was through building six. It was halfway to Gloria, after all.

  He turned back to Hansen and leaned so close that their noses almost touched.

  “Alright, Hansen, we have no other options now, so we'll do it your way. But I promise you, if any of these people get killed because of your need to be a know-it-all prick, it'll be on you, and I will take it very, very personally.”

  Hansen was half a head shorter than Mason, but he somehow managed to look him straight in the eye.

  “You got a deal, big man. But the deal goes both ways. Copy?”

  It was all Mason could do to not react in the way he so very much wanted to.

  At last, Sarah put a hand on his shoulder and turned him back to the window, and Becks led her father away, grumbling about monster trucks and tough guys and the fucking nerve of some assholes.

  “Possible,” Sarah said, watching the swarm below and doing her own math.

  Mackenzie came up between them to have a look for herself, and her shadow barged through after her. Mason gave Clancy a scratch between the ears as he propped his big paws on the windowsill.

  “Doubtful,” he answered back, plainly.

  “Aw, they’re not so many,” Mackenzie said, her little nose pressed to the glass.

  Mason buried his hand in her abundance of curls and turned her head to the right so she could see the rest of the swarm packed into the Quad. “Oh! Okay, yah. That's a lot...”

  “No other choice,” he hushed to Sarah.

  “Nope.”

  “One step closer to Gloria.”

  “Yup. Like jumping from stone to stone across a river.”

  “A river filled with piranha. With bears on your ass. Through a swarm of killer bees. With a Sharknado bearing down.”

  “Fair enough,” Sarah smiled, however briefly. “Our people on the flanks, kids in the middle?”

  “I guess. But lots of variables. No guarantees.”

  Sarah put her hand on his shoulder. “You want guarantees, Mace? Get AppleCare.”

  “Ain't no guarantees in the 'poc'lypse,” Mackenzie chirped from below.

  He ruffled her big mop of hair. “No, Mack, I guess there ain't. So how do you think we should do it?”

  To no one's surprise, the girl shrugged and said simply, “The only way we can, Mace. No way through but through.”

  The smell of fresh coffee drew the rest of the crowd away from the windows, and even Mason peeled himself away eventually.

  Inez rationed out what little her old-fashioned percolator could hold, telling them all, “Sorry folks, all we got is black,” as they all took their seats around the central tables.

  Mason waved off the coffee and took a seat next to Beverly, just as she produced a fresh pint of scotch from one pocket or another. Even as he wondered just how much of his private stock she'd helped herself to, and where she could possibly be keeping it all, she passed it over and he poured a full quarter of its contents into his mug.

  “If we wait, some of them might go away,” he heard Teddy say, meekly.

  “Not a chance.” Donn shot the idea down. “Not unless someone else draws them away.”

  “What if we made a big noise ourselves?” Diego suggested. “Like, a big noise! Something that was sure to lure them away?”

  “Anything loud enough to lure them away would only bring others in,” Addison reminded him through a sigh.

  “It's all a trade-off now,” Mackenzie added, barely above the background howls.

  Sarah ruffled Clancy's ears and asked on the off-chance, “I don't suppose anyone has an iPod or a phone?”

  The question was met with silence.

  Mason scowled through a mouthful of scotch. Of course no one had a working phone. They'd used up all the batteries in those first horrible days, trying to get through to their loved ones. Families. Parents. Friends. Anyone who would tell them that everything was going
to be alright and that they weren't alone. If they could have seen far enough into an unimaginable future to save a bit of battery life for a moment like this, every single one of them would've likely slit their own wrists.

  “We'll only get one shot at it,” Alejandra said at last. “Anyone left behind to cover our culos is gonna be left behind for good.”

  “So it's a blitz, then,” Addison summed up. “No snipers, no spotters. One big rush.”

  “All or nothing,” Christopher said to his mother.

  “Just like always,” she said back.

  “Chido,” Alejandra huffed. “I'm getting sick of just sitting around.”

  Over the next hour, Inez kept the dribbles of coffee coming, Mason helped himself twice more to Beverly's bottle, and they talked out a plan. Everyone offered their input – no one was excluded – and nothing was deemed too ridiculous to consider. Hansen sat out most of it in a kind of self-imposed exile. But once they had a plan that might be considered shitty-ass at best, he offered the occasional grunt of advice. And when the plan was slightly less than shitty-ass but as good as it was ever going to get, they ran through it again and again and again, until everyone understood not just their role, but the role of each and every member of the team. For this craziness to have any chance at all of working, they all had to be in perfect lock-step. So Mason went through it again and again and again, until even Detective Sergeant Gary my-way-or-the-highway Hansen was forced to give it his official snort of approval.

  Sk8rBoy William split his remaining crossbow bolts with Teddy, Sarah bestowed her Howitzer upon Hansen, and Inez relieved Mack of her .22. Once they were as ready as a bunch of school kids and civilians with a slightly-less-than-shitty-ass plan could ever be, Mason saw to one last order of business by stuffing a knapsack with what might eventually become useful. He then allowed the rest of them a minute or two to gather whatever possessions they considered too dear to leave behind. But aside from guns and crossbows and SBDs, nothing else was deemed to be worth those extra few pounds.

  Addison and a couple of the boys wolfed down a granola bar or two, and most of the group had a last gulp of water, but the rest of their meagre stores were left behind as they padded single-file down the steps to the main floor. Once there, Hansen led them to the side door. He clearly heard Beverly hitch a gasp in her throat when she saw a chair shoved between push bar and door to keep it secure.

  He didn't have to wonder what was behind that gasp. Sarah had told him everything. That simple chair through the push bar must have brought back a flood of memories, up to and including a child being torn from her arms. But to her credit, she didn't say a word, nor did she produce the bottle to dull the pain. She sniffled once, wiping away a tear before it could form, then she swung the shotgun from her shoulder and clicked off the safety.

  Hansen had one last look at the troops, before he carefully removed the chair and pressed as slowly and as gently on the push bar as he could. With one tiny squeal and a subtle shnick! a pencil-thin crack of light appeared. He put a cautious eye to the crack and stood there, unmoving, for several anxious moments. Then, he pushed the door open a little further and a brilliant shaft of sunlight bathed fifteen anxious faces.

  At last, he stepped aside and let Alejandra and Sarah squeeze through, out into the swarm.

  Sarah hadn't taken more than five steps before coming to a halt. She was so close to two alphas on vigil that she could have reached out and touched them both. A dozen others were danger-close on all sides. Then the swarm shifted, closing off any possibility of retreat, and she was trapped. A single step in any direction would mean death. Following the plan, she stood there as still as a mannequin, kukri in hand, and waited.

  Alejandra didn't get much farther. She managed to creep slowly around a cluster of alphas on vigil and sidestep a big bastard probing toward the Quad. But then, she came face to face with two more on vigil just as all other avenues closed off. And just like that, she had nowhere else to go. She brought the machete up over her head in a two-handed grip, before she too froze in place.

  The next ones out were Mason, Christopher, and Addison. All three spread out as best they could. But barely had Christopher and Addison taken a dozen steps each, before they came to a stop. Mason held his breath and sidled sideways to sneak between two big males, bringing him just that much closer to Sarah. Until he could advance no farther, and he too stuck to the plan and froze like a statue.

  Then came the super-weapon.

  Mack and Clancy came bounding through the door and set off into the swarm as if they'd been let loose in a playground. Clancy bowled over the first alpha he came across and wound himself between the legs of another to upend it, while Mackenzie began running in circles around two others with just enough clicks of her tongue to get them both to break from their vigil. The creatures snarled and clawed after the sound, but the girl stayed always just one step ahead. When they finally became so twisted up with each other that they both fell to their knees, they happened to be close enough to Christopher that a quick double-blow from his hatchet finished the things off.

  It didn't have to be Christopher. It could have been anyone. But that first strike was the signal. All at once, five statues came to life and tore into the swarm in their own way.

  Alejandra was the butcher. She plunged the machete into an exposed neck, cleaving it through almost to the bone. Then, she spun around to deliver a straight slash across a second creature's trachea and gutted a third before any of them had even stirred from their vigil.

  Sarah was the consummate surgeon, and her kukri was the scalpel. A slash to a neck here, an uppercut to an armpit to open the artery there, then the barest nick to a nerve cluster to deaden an arm so she could get close enough for a slash across a slender thigh, and three creatures fell as one.

  In his sweater-vest and glasses, Addison could have been mistaken for a high school teacher, but with his Nut-Buster turned loose, he was nothing less than a barbarian. That saw-toothed club was an awesome weapon, and after taking down a spindly old male with a kick to the knee, he turned the thing loose, hacking and pummeling and slashing his way through four more alphas with as many blows.

  Christopher had a style all his own. He was an artist, wielding that long-handled hatchet as both a scalpel and a bludgeon. If a head or neck presented itself, he'd hack it through like a slender Paul Bunyan chopping at a sapling. If not, a slice under an arm or into a crotch worked just as well. At one point, he even used the wooden handle of the hatchet as a weapon, ramming the thing between the creature's jaws to buy himself the second he needed to draw his knife and slit the thing open from navel to breastbone. Then, he turned to the next.

  As for Mason, he was quite simply a wrecking ball. With that fifty pounds of rebar and more than enough muscle to back it up, he quickly turned every alpha within reach into pulp. He swung, he bashed, he beat and he stabbed, and all of it without breaking a sweat.

  It was a flurry of activity that lasted little more than seconds, but already, a dozen or more alphas lay dead or dying in no-man's land. But it hadn't happened in a vacuum. Every alpha within earshot picked up on the sounds, and when they came close enough to fall to kukri or hatchet or rebar – others came. As the sounds of battle grew, the rest of the swarm went from probing to charging, and it took all five defenders working in concert just to hold the beachhead. They clubbed, they slashed and they pummeled, but with every clang of metal on bone attracting more and more of the swarm, at last there came a tipping point. On Mason's signal, the rest of the fighters came pouring out in a flood.

  Those with crossbows fired bolt after bolt, Diego took careful aim with his slingshot and made every bit of gravel count, and everyone with a spiked bat or war-scythe or javelin let fly at anything that moved.

  Mason kicked into overdrive and lit into the swarm without mercy. He drove his weapon straight through a chest and used the momentum of yanking it free to plunge the back end of the thing through the throat of another. He brought i
t up in an arc to connect with the chin of female in full charge, then down again to split another skull in two. Another swing to splinter a little teenaged alpha's spine, then a backswing to crush in the side of another's head in a spectacular spray of blood and bone and gore.

  Suddenly, the door to building six seemed a mile away. Seven, eight... no, ten alphas were between him and it. He bashed, he kicked, he speared and he stabbed, and with every prodigious swing of his rebar, two or three times as many were there to fill the space. He hadn't advanced more than a few steps before he began to question the entire operation. But it was too late to call it off, and there was no time for half measures. So, he waded into the thickening swarm and gave it all he had, as if it were the last thing he would ever be able to do on Earth. He advanced across no-man's land one step at a time and one dead alpha at a time. Just when he thought he could advance no farther, a little blur of red tore past with a series of chirps, and half of the swarm between him and the door suddenly disappeared.

  It was Mackenzie, coming to his rescue once again. And where the girl went, her shadow was sure to follow. Sure enough, no sooner had he thought the words than Clancy came tearing in to trip up a pair of big alphas and grab a third by the ankle. There were the distinct sounds of bones breaking, then the thing fell face-first to the concrete, spraying out teeth like Chiclets, and Mason stepped blithely over it to have at the next.

  He brought up the rebar and pounded away, and six mighty swings later, he was only ten feet from the door. He bashed a big female over the head, and Clancy led another past at just the right angle and distance, for him to clothesline it across the throat.

  Now, he was only nine feet away.

  He picked out a distinct series of handclaps above the roar, as alphas on either side of him grew ugly red freckles between their eyes and crumpled to the ground.

  Now he was only eight feet away.

  With the car-barrier holding back the tide at one end and everyone fighting for all they were worth to stem the flow from the other, the crush of bodies between the buildings actually seemed to thin. But such things were illusory at best. Even as Mason skewered a bespectacled old male through the chest and clubbed a tiny child into dust, he knew that it was just a matter of time. Even now, the main body of the swarm was picking up on the sounds of battle, and as a solid wall of teeth and claws began charging in from the Quad, the last desperate phase of the plan was put into play.