by Tufo, Mark
“Winters, get Eastman on the horn again. Let him know this newest…development.” I let that last word sit sourly upon my tongue. Someone was doing their damnedest to bring about a crappy assemblage of circumstances toward our undoing.
“Thank you, Stenzel.”
“Sure thing, sir.” She walked away to help Rose.
“Can’t get a signal through,” he said.
“BT, none of this makes any sense. If Bennington wants us dead, isn’t right now the perfect time to have us ambushed?” My thoughts ran rampant.
“Back up a sec…maybe clue me in from what direction you’re coming in.”
“This slide is here on purpose.” I showed him what Stenzel had pointed out to me.
“This reeks of Deneaux.”
“Not Bennington?” I asked.
“It’s subterfuge. She gets a few key players to do her dirty work, but she doesn’t yet have the manpower to pull off a full-scale attack.”
“Still, this makes her pretty connected. Someone in the munition’s factory, someone in the armory, now this? Not to mention, that would mean she knows about this mission, so her informant is someone in the know. Bennington is in a better position, but there is some Deneaux reek. What sort of resources would she need to pull this off?”
“Seriously man, not that much. Think about how many support personnel know we’re out here. A private in the motor pool could have given her all the info she needs. As for our little obstruction here, she’d only need one person with a small degree of explosives knowledge and transport. If this was Bennington, we’d be hit by one of his assault teams. We know there’s no love lost there. Or even an airstrike. Shit, he even has a nuke; he gets all the zombies in one spot plus us and drops it. Boom. Game over.”
“Pretty cavalier about the whole thing, aren’t you? Okay, no love lost with spec ops, but they’d still be killing their own. Even Bennington might not be able to pull off that type of order.” I said.
“Fair enough, but this is some sneaky shit. I would rather our enemy be more direct.”
That was something I had to agree on, for the most part. Getting this done as safely as possible, then figuring out exactly who was trying to kill us and for what reason was of the utmost importance. If it was Deneaux, we would have to expect more surprises because she would know we’d find out about the damaged ammunition soon enough; questions would be asked and fingers pointed, and if there was one thing I knew about the bitch, she didn’t much like having the spotlight of blame shining down on her. She would have more layers protecting her than a fermented onion.
I was fuming as we hiked. Here we were, doing our best to ensure the safety of Etna Station, and some nefarious force back there was trying to kill us. And, as far as I could tell, there was no justifiable reason. I mean, I know myself enough to realize there’s a bunch of unjustifiable ones, but to take the step into actively giving it a shot? That plain old sucked. According to the mile markers, which I could not stop looking at, much to my chagrin, we were four and four-tenths miles into our journey. Yeah, nothing made the time go by faster than the seemingly crawling pace we were making. This was like waiting for a pot of water to boil using nothing more than a magnifying glass on a cloudy day. Speaking of which, the wisps, which had thickened and turned blueish-gray, had now coalesced into a mass of dark grays, bordering on black. The temperature had dropped and the wind had picked up. The day was getting better by the moment.
We’d seemingly walked another seven, maybe eight hundred miles, when the first snowflake fell on my nose. The deceitful mile markers said we had another two miles to go. I was looking up at the swirling mass of white shit coming down. I didn’t know if it was going to be a five-minute snow squall or a full-on blizzard.
“Contact,” Winters said. He had his binoculars up and was looking down the roadway. It was three zombies coming around a bend on the mountain road.
“Could be stragglers or the vanguard,” BT said.
We had a half mile between them and us. I figured to get us closer and we’d do our best to dispatch them quietly and quickly. It wasn’t long before they caught sight of us and began to double-time our way. I wanted to wait for them to come to us, as we still had a ways to go to get to our target. The storm looked like it was intensifying. I saw no signs of a break in the clouds, and they looked pregnant with malice.
“At a hundred yards, Stenzel, I want you to take out the one on the right. Grimm, the middle, Springer, you’ve got the left.”
They nodded to my orders. I found we were moving slower; it was a subconscious, yet unified decision among my squad. It’s unnatural to want to move directly into the teeth of the enemy. I’d read enough history and watched enough History Channel specials on past wars to wonder: how in the hell did commanders ever get their men to march straight into another’s formation? I can’t even conceive of what’s going through the minds of those on the front ranks. What’s the survivability odds? One percent? Two, if they’re lucky? Sure, this time our enemy was overmatched, but they were still deadly, and caution won out.
At two hundred yards, we stopped. Stenzel grabbed Rose’s rifle and was lining up her shot, the heavy cross-breeze pushing her, and subsequently her barrel, around. She got down onto one knee. Grimm fired his shot, kicking up asphalt a good ten feet to the side of his zombie.
“Nice shooting, Tex.” Kirby was giving his friend crap.
Springer got the lucky shot of the day. His bullet ricocheted off the ground and into the abdomen of his zombie; it bent over as it absorbed the projectile. Enough of the toxin must have still been present, as it fell slowly, almost comically, to the side. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was Jim Carrey doing a bit of his characteristic over-acting. Stenzel wasn’t messing around; she placed one neatly in the forehead of her target.
“Show off,” Grimm said as he also got down on one knee.
“Want me to take care of it for you?” she asked.
“No disrespect, Corporal, but kiss my ass,” he said. She laughed as he fired. His shot struck high in the thigh, pretty close to what I’m sure the zombie had been fairly fond of during his human years.
“Shit, Grimm! Looks like you were trying to make it personal,” Kirby said as he helped his friend up. The snowfall had picked up, the dusting had given way to flurries. The killings were a small victory, but even that was enough to buoy our spirits; that lasted for, I’m thinking, a good ten, fifteen seconds, max. That was when more zombies came around the bend, first one, then five; by twenty we were already double-timing back the way we had come.
“Vanguard?” BT huffed out as we ran.
“Didn’t see anything like it on the pics. Not…vanguard.” I paused to catch a breath. “That’s them. That’s all of them.”
“We…we were supposed to have two days.”
“No shit,” I growled.
“Rose, when we get back to the original slide…can you make it bigger?” I was supposing we were going to make it back.
“Yup.” My PT freak was wisely conserving her energy. Running miles in mountainous terrain, in boots, laden with gear, plus, we were above the tree line during what was now a full-fledged snowstorm—she was going to need it. As were we all.
Again we’d been duped. We’d received outdated intel, and now we had to work to make sure it didn’t literally bite us in the ass, or anywhere, for that matter. The snow was starting to stick, the roadway beginning to get slick. I hazarded a look to the back. The snow was as detrimental to the speeders, as it was us, but they still had the stamina edge.
“Rose…how long to…set-up a surprise?” The effects of the high mountain air were taking their toll on all of us.
I can…do something in two…minutes,” she pushed out.
My brother’s feet were barely coming up from their contact with the ground; he was hurting.
“BT, Gary, Grimm, Springer—you four—keep going. The rest of us are going to give cover fire for Rose...GO!” I used the la
st of my air to shout that word. I didn’t need any questioning of my orders or even discussion, for that matter. Tommy, Winters, Stenzel, Kirby and myself set up a firing line as Rose began rifling through her bag. She grabbed two large blocks of C-4, shook her head, then grabbed another two. We were firing into the front ranks of the speeders, who had our scent in their nostrils and wanted to cash in with a kill. Maybe before today, my fear would have been irrational, but right now, it was very rational. I was worried that she was carrying nothing more than gray, brick-shaped clay, or that the detonators were nothing more than road flare parts. But I’d smelled the things while I was putting them in my pack. C4 smelled a lot like Moxie, a carbonated beverage that was best suited to melting welds on metal. For those that have never been exposed to that form of soda poisoning, C-4 smells like road tar. Clay, not so much. It stood to reason that Corporal Rose would know the difference between a detonator, a road flare, and a bottle of pop.
I had changed out my second magazine and near as I could tell, we were no closer to an explosive conclusion than we had been when we started. The zombies, though, yeah, they were making up ground in great leaps and bounds.
“Rose?” I yelled over my shoulder.
“Looking for optimum damage, sir!” she replied.
“Any damage will do!” Kirby yelled at her.
“Is it me, sir, or is something off about these zombies?” Winters asked as he dropped a spent magazine to the ground. I noted it fell without a sound as it hit a solid inch of snow.
Speeders were a terrifying take on the traditional zombie trope. Had I my preference, I would have taken the slow shufflers any day of the week. But not only were these ones fast, they looked rabid. Yeah. That was the right word. In their haste to get to us, they pushed, pulled, and pummeled their way to get to the front. We’d seen them not care in the least for their fallen brethren, oftentimes crushing them underfoot, but before now, I couldn’t say I’d ever seen them actively trying to hurt one another in their haste to eat or kill. It wouldn’t stop the inevitable if we stayed there, but it was impeding their forward progress. The twenty we’d initially seen had swelled to hundreds, maybe thousands; impossible to tell in the conditions and our line of sight. I was through my fourth magazine. We were inflicting horrific damage—arms blown off bodies, legs broken and snapping at odd angles, knees collapsing backward, intestines being spilled to the ground, sternums being ruptured, faces being blown apart, skulls ripped clear from heads…and still they came.
“Rose, thirty seconds or not at all!” I said.
“Only need fifteen…fourteen!”
“That a countdown?” Kirby asked.
“Run!” Rose shouted.
I grabbed Winters’ arm as he nearly went down, his left leg spinning out wildly.
“Fuck!” he shouted. “Pulled something.” He grimaced but soldiered on.
“Ten!” Rose said as we came abreast of her.
“A little more warning would have been nice,” I told her as we went past.
“Can’t give me hell for being too slow and then for being too fast, sir,” she said as she matched our pace, doing her best to support some of Winters’ weight as he worked on a stride that wasn’t going to cause him any more discomfort than he was already feeling.
“I can and I will. How much more?” I asked.
“Two seconds.” We’d run another twenty feet and still nothing.
“Hell of a long two seconds.” My voice was, apparently, the trigger needed to set the explosive force into action. Kind of has the same effect on my wife at times, I mused. The ground was trembling under our feet. The noise started off as the rumble of snores a sleeping giant might give off. This quickly yielded to the sound of planes crashing into fuel depots. Between the earthquake and the slippery conditions, I fell over. I made sure to let go of Winters so I didn’t pull him down with me. We were getting peppered with small pebbles—I was thankful we weren’t any closer, as grapefruit-sized and larger were falling not more than twenty feet behind us. I attempted to get to my feet, but was immediately thwarted as a swath of mountainside some fifty feet across began to slide down toward the road—and me. Tommy was simultaneously trying to help me up and pull me through the snow like a sled.
“Fuck me,” I managed when I finally got to my feet and kept going.
“Use enough?” I yelled to Rose. She didn’t hear me through the grinding of boulders. The mountain itself sounded as if it had been mortally wounded. What started as a fifty-foot slide was quickly growing, spreading away from the epicenter. For the moment, we were keeping pace with the ever-expanding cataclysm. This would not last long, as for every single stride taken there was some backslide. It was like trying to run on a frozen lake. My ankle bent violently to the right as I came down upon a fist-sized rock. I let my body go limp instead of trying to correct my balance and potentially do damage to the offended joint, and I went down in a heap. I figured this momentary delay would be much better than hobbling myself.
Tommy spared a glance backward. I shouted for him to keep going. They were just ahead of the falling debris that I now found myself in. I was playing a life-sized and very dangerous game of Asteroids, and I did not have a blaster or the opportunity to go into hyperspace, though, seriously, the bigger problem was there was no knowing where you would re-materialize on the screen. Usually, the game just wanted your quarter and would put you directly in the path of the largest boulder, so, maybe it was a lot like my life. The back of my thigh was clipped by a rock close to the size of a watermelon. It tore through my pants, but the pain was tolerable. It was the loss of my balance that was not. Although, in hindsight, it did have the added bonus of slowing me up enough to miss the giant rock that would have bounced into the side of my head, had I stumbled unimpeded.
“Fuck me,” might have come out of my mouth; if not verbalized, I certainly thought it. I was once again on the ground, scrambling to get up while simultaneously looking out for any more head knockers. When I finally got some forward motion going again, I was twisting and turning my body like a break dancer to steer clear of any more strikes. It was another twenty yards before I caught up to the rest of my squad. The rock slide had finally stopped. We were breathing heavily, most with hands on their knees hunched over, getting some much-needed oxygen, which the altitude yielded grudgingly.
“You all right?” Winters asked as we all recovered. He had walked around behind me to take a look at the gash in my leg.
“Should be fine, but I’ll take a dressing just to keep the cold out,” I told him.
The storm’s intensity had picked up. I was contemplating going back and making sure the job was completed, but caution won out. We weren’t dressed for a blizzard, and I had to think it wouldn’t take much for the rest of the mountain to slide down. My squad’s safety was more important than this accursed mission. Besides, I wanted to get back and make someone pay for this.
“Let’s head out,” I said after Winters gave me the good-to-go signal.
“Sir, I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t expecting the mountain to come down—well, not all of it anyway.” Rose had come over. I was about to respond when Tommy shushed the group. He was standing still, his hand cupped around his ear. We stood like that for a few seconds before he blurted out, “RUN!”
My muscles were pissed off. The lactic acid build-up made them feel rusty; still, they moved with the warning. Not one of us questioned the why of it as we got going again. Tommy’s pace was not slowing. As of yet, the rest of us had no idea what was going on. A deep rumbling began. At first, I thought it was my lungs chugging for air, but as the loudness and intensity grew to that of a runaway freight train, I knew the sound for what it was: avalanche. If we lived, I was sending Rose back to demolitions school for some much-needed updates on her lessons. Besides the snow falling all around us in sheets, we were now being buffeted from the side as the leading edge of the snowy mass struck. Now we had to contend with the peril of being buried alive while also worryin
g about being tossed over the side of the roadway down the deadly drop-off. Plummeting five hundred feet would be the undoing for any of us.
The ground took up its all-too-familiar bounce. When the day had started I hadn’t planned on spending the majority of it running through a bouncy house. Shitty birthday party, as far as I was concerned: no pizza and no presents. Though death was doing its best to bear gifts. Rose was hit hard enough; her right leg collided into her left, causing her ankles to cross. She went down quickly. I grabbed what I could as she was sweeping down toward the guardrail. I got a chunk of her hair, along with a strap from her pack. I pulled hard; if she was in pain, fear had ridden up and overtaken her ability to voice it. With my head tucked down, I leaned forward and drove on. I could not see five feet in front of me, much less any of my squad. A part of me was rightfully concerned that I would step right off into the abyss. After what seemed like miles but was probably not more than the length of a football field, the rumbling significantly decreased in volume and intensity. The sideways snow had subsided, and now we were once again only in the midst of a howling snowstorm.
I let go of Rose and fell to my knees. My chest could not expand far enough or fast enough to recoup what I’d used. I saw a less-than-jolly green giant moving around; BT tapped my shoulder. He was checking on the status of the squad.
He was back in under ten seconds. “PFC Kirby is unaccounted for.” He put his hand down for me to take. I grabbed it, my body begrudgingly stood. I winced as my stomach muscles unfurled.
“Everyone else good?”
“Sore and tired, but good.”
I turned back the way we had come. What I could make out, which wasn’t much, was a wasteland of rock and snow. Finding him in these conditions was a dim proposal, but we had to try. I sent everyone back toward the Hummers except for Winters, BT, and Tommy. Grimm protested, saying they were friends. I promised him I would do everything in my power to get him back. We hadn’t gone more than fifty feet when we came upon a wall of snow some twenty feet high.