“You dry?” Poloski asked.
“Nah. I’ve got two more mags.”
The two men watched the creatures continue to pour onto the main part of the island. Most of them were heading directly under their hovering craft, moving north toward the naval air station and the remaining survivors. But some of them weren’t. In fact, a lot of them were moving to the east and massing at the local marina.
“That’s strange,” Shader commented. “There’s a shitload of them over by the marina.”
“I noticed. You think something attracted them over there?”
Both men strained to see the harbor area. They weren’t far from the mass of boats, but with the Osprey pitching slightly, it wasn’t easy to see into the dark harbor. It all looked like a mass of ships and more Variants than he could count.
“I think we should take a look,” Potoski finally said. “We ain’t doing shit here. Just wasting ammunition.”
“Copy that,” Shader said. “Let’s see if our pilot can swing over there and have a look.”
Jennifer
On Board the Trawler, Finally
Glorietta Bay Marina
“That didn’t last too long,” Manny commented. “We’re already moving back toward land.”
Garrett had realized the tide was working against them. They’d made it about two or three hundred feet from the dock before the tide and the drag of the salt water stopped their momentum. They were now slowly drifting back toward the dock.
“Do we jump?” Jen asked.
“Has anyone found life preservers?” Garrett asked.
“What do you think?” Gardner angrily replied.
They had all been searching the boat for anything they could use to paddle them out further. They hadn’t found a thing. What was worse, there were no life-preservers. From the look of things below deck, the Variant they’d killed had likely been using the craft as a floating home before becoming infected. It was possible he hadn’t left the dock for the open seas in months or years. Without the need to navigate the ocean, life-preservers were not necessary. At least, that’s what Manny had predicted.
The other three would like to have ignored his pessimistic predictions, but Manny’s negative outlook had been remarkably accurate. They hadn’t found a single thing that would help them float, other than an ice chest that might act like a small buoy that they could hold onto.
Garrett looked at the shore. More infected were pouring into the water, and the line of creatures was getting closer by the minute as the ones under the surf provided those above with a platform to stand on. Between the advancing infected horde and the push of the relentless tide, they had less than five minutes before the two forces brought them together.
“I think it’s time,” Gardner finally said.
They grabbed the empty ice chest and tossed it into the water.
“Ready?” Garrett asked Jen.
She nodded and stood up on the gunwale.
“Wait!” Manny said, freezing Jennifer on the edge of the craft.
“What is it?” Garrett asked.
“Don’t you hear it?”
“No! The only thing I can hear is those things on shore,” Gardner replied.
The sound from the horde was deafening. Screams and barks echoed around them. It was like being at the primate enclosure of the San Diego Zoo. If you could take the screeches and barking from the chimpanzees and run it through a stadium loudspeaker system, you might come close to the sound of tens of thousands of Variants trying to get to their next meal.
“No,” Manny said. “It sounds like…”
“A plane!” Jen shouted, pointing into the sky.
The four stared up above the Variants and watched as an Osprey slowly hovered over the crowd. The Variants, intent on eating the four of them, suddenly turned their attention to the military craft that was dogging them from above.
The V-22 moved slowly back and forth as if searching the area around the infected.
“You think they’re looking for us?” Gardner asked.
“I don’t know. But I have an idea,” Jen said.
She ran into the boat and came out a few seconds later with a flare gun. She loaded a round into the gun’s chamber and snapped it closed.
“I hope this works,” she said quietly to herself. She raised the gun and pointed it out and over the open water. She pressed the trigger. A small explosion erupted from the barrel and sent a large red burning ball into the air. It arced over the harbor and landed in the bay.
Jen watched as the Osprey stopped its lateral movements and froze over the creatures. For what seemed like an eternity, it hovered unmoving. Jen loaded another flare into the gun. She broke it open, took the remaining flare, and dropped it into the back. She shut the chamber and began to raise it up once again.
“They saw us!” Manny screamed.
Sure enough, the Osprey began to move in their direction.
“They saw us!” Garrett repeated.
“Yeah. But, so did they!” Gardner said, pointing at the Variants on shore.
What had been a slow but steady push into the ocean became a rush. When Gardner first looked at the horde through his NV goggle, they glowed brightly, dropping creatures into the water at a slow and steady rate. It looked like a Hawaiian volcano oozing lava into the ocean. Now, it was like a flood rushing down a mountain stream. Thousands were being pushed into the bay water, pushing the horde toward them at an even greater rate.
“Jesus. They’ll be on us in no time!” Manny cried.
With the horde filling the bay with the Variants and the ones behind using them as infected stepping-stones, their time to stay alive was rapidly dwindling.
“Maybe ninety seconds,” Gardner said, estimating how long it would be before the creatures got to them.
The Osprey hovered overhead then began to descend. Its rear ramp was down, and Jen could see two soldiers leaning out, staring down at them from above.
Garrett looked up and saw the same thing, but he expected a rope to drop so they could be hauled up. Instead, the transport continued to descend. If it didn’t stop soon, the aircraft would be floating in the bay, marooning that crew along with the four of them.
“What the hell are they doing?” Garrett commented.
“Shit. It looks like they’re gonna land on the water.”
“Do they float?” Jen innocently asked.
“Nope,” Garrett replied as the air around them shuddered from the downdraft. “If they hit the water, they ain’t coming back up.”
Jen watched in horror. The Osprey looked like it was going in. The rescue was quickly turning into a fiasco. She closed her eyes as the rotors of the twin-engine craft pushed over them. She didn’t want to watch.
Shader
Raven 14
The flare had been unexpected, but once Lt. Donaldson saw the red ball arc into the air, she decided to initiate a hot extraction.
“Sergeant. Do you have any rope back there?” Donaldson asked after seeing the SOS signal shoot into the sky.
Shader and Potoski searched the craft for anything they could use to rope down or at least, pull the survivors up with. They found nothing.
“That’s a negative,” Shader replied into his headphone.
The Osprey continued to hover, then slowly began to drop.
“I’m going to go down and get them. We’ll use the ramp. I’ll need some help with the last few meters.”
“I’ve got your back,” Potoski replied. “Let’s bring them home.”
“I sure hope she knows what she’s doing,” Shader commented as they slowly descended toward the trawler.
Potoski leaned out over the edge of the ramp, calling out directions to the pilot. The giant twin-engine craft was pushing massive amounts of air down onto the trawler, forcing the four survivors to duck for cover. About ten meters above the water, the boat’s Bimini ripped and flew towards shore.
That’s when Shader noticed that the rotor wash was pushing the tra
wler toward the advancing horde.
Porky froze as the canvas cover shot away. And he never froze. He had been so intent on helping Potoski guide the pilot, he hadn’t noticed the Variant horde pushing into the harbor. The interior lights of the Osprey, combined with the noise from the engines, had masked the wall of flesh that was rolling at the ship.
“Pull up!” Shader yelled into his mic.
The Osprey suddenly shot up as Donaldson shoved the throttle forward, lifting the craft into the air.
“What was it?” the lieutenant barked in his headphone.
“You’re pushing the ship into the shore.”
Donaldson tilted the craft to the left, giving her a view of the shoreline. She gasped.
Thousands were pouring into the water, shoved forward by tens of thousands from behind. The harbor was only so deep, and it was filling up fast.
Donaldson pushed her fears aside. The Variants would be close enough to the ship within a minute and pushing them toward the horde wasn’t the best idea. Then she had an idea.
“Let’s do this again,” she said over the craft’s internal coms. “Give me some help back there.”
Shader and Potoski looked at each other as the Osprey swung around and came at the boat from the shoreline. As she began to settle lower, Shader recognized her plan.
If coming down on the harbor side pushed them closer, then doing the same from the shore side would push them out.
At ten meters, her plan was working. The boat began to slow its movement inland. Unfortunately, the size of the infected horde was exponentially increasing. There were hundreds thousands of Variants pushing up the island, and many of them were turning in the their direction.
Donaldson settled down to five meters above the ship. Having angled the Osprey toward the land, she was staring at a rising mound of infected flesh. It looked like a pile of ants crawling over each other, attempting to get to their next meal. They were less than a hundred meters away and as high in the Osprey.
“Down three meters,” Potoski said.
Donaldson eased the throttle back and lowered them just a little more.
“Down one more meter,” Potoski said.
“For Christ’s sake,” she muttered. “Do they think I’m running a crane?”
Cranes don’t have downdrafts to worry about. There’s no wind shear operating a winch. One-meter increments were for hand tools and home builders, not a sixteen-ton flying steel tube.
Donaldson did her best not to look forward. She concentrated on maintaining a stable platform.
“Back one meter,” Potoski said. “They’re drifting away.”
Donaldson shook her head and adjusted her controls.
Another minute went by. Potoski hadn’t said a word since their last correction. She assumed they were bringing the survivors on board.
Her co-pilot wasn’t really involved with these maneuvers. He was staring out the front glass, watching in horror as the mound of Variants grew. They were now towering over the Osprey and less than fifty yards to their front. He could see the infected creatures near the bottom smashed as the top of the pile grew. Even with tons of flesh crushing them from above, the Variants near the bottom of the heap reached out at the Osprey, snapping their jaws and whipping their tongues about. Their primal instinct remained, even as their bodies were pulverized by the weight of the growing mountain of flesh.
He estimated the advance of the Variant growth. They had just a few moments remaining before the pile would overwhelm them.
“GO!” Potoski screamed. “We’ve got them.”
Donaldson instantly pivoted in the sky and pointed the craft away from the Variants. She had begun to accelerate with a sigh of relief, when several heavy thuds echoed through the craft. Her controls became a bit mushy, but she quickly compensated with a bit more juice to the throttle.
“How are we doing back there?” she said into her mic.
There was no response.
“Sergeant, reply.”
Again, nothing.
She turned to the co-pilot, who had a look of dread on his face. Something had happened and neither of them wanted to find out.
Porky Shader
Shader and Potoski gripped the harness, leaning out over the harbor water. They were able to concentrate on the survivors with the aircraft now facing away from shore and with the wash of the rotors and drone of the engines blocking out the screams from the Variants.
The people on the trawler had a rough ride, though. Porky wasn’t sure they’d make it when he saw the wall of creatures rising above them, the wind from the Osprey’s blades pushing them into the oncoming horde.
But that damned pilot knew what she was doing. Repositioning the bird put the engine’s backwash in just the right position to move the ship away from the threat. Donaldson was slowly dropping them down to the deck, just a few inches at a time.
Shader turned and motioned to the pilot’s ramp camera, giving Donaldson hand signals on direction and height. She was a magician.
Porky looked over the edge and watched the four huddled in a clutch, heads bowed from the tornadic winds whipping around them.
It was three soldiers in camo and a woman.
With just three meters remaining, porky gave Donaldson a “slow down” signal and held up three fingers. The tilt-rotor slowed down even more, dropping at a snail’s pace.
Shader saw one of the men break free from the huddle and bring his rifle up. He was pointing it toward the Osprey!
Before Shader could react, the man began firing.
The shots rifled to the side as the man dumped his 30-round magazine at a threat unknown.
Shader realized he was concentrating so intently on directing the aircraft that he’d momentarily forgotten about the Variants massing on the shore. Less than a minute ago, he was staring at a growing mountain of infected monsters. How he’d forgotten that terrifying scene was beyond belief.
The ramp settled down, and the survivors were hauled up one by one. The last man on was pulled in and Potoski yelled into his mic.
“GO! We’ve got them.”
Shader held onto his harness as the tilt-rotor craft spun on its axis, turning out to the water. The view suddenly changed as the shoreline came into view. Porky was stunned. The mountain of flesh had grown exponentially. In less than a minute, it had swelled almost a hundred feet in height, untold numbers of creatures boiling over the edge. He had to lean out to see the top of the pile.
The Osprey began to move, slowly accelerating and lifting at the same time.
Then Porky watched as hundreds of the Variants flung themselves out at them. Just like at the Forum, bodies began tumbling from the sky as the creatures dove at the craft. The Variants screamed as they hurled themselves just past the open ramp, plummeting into the water by the dozens.
Shader and Potoski both backed up away from the rain of death and heard the thump of several bodies landing on the aircraft’s frame.
As the Osprey began to move forward, the nose of the craft lifted, dropping the rear into the air. As they banked to port, two Variants fell onto the ramp with a thud, having lost their hold on the aircraft’s frame.
The woman screamed as she and the others gripped anything they could hold onto while the pilot sought speed and altitude with her severe angle of attack. The creatures crouched on the ramp as they sought their prey.
One of the rescued soldiers brought his rifle up and pulled the trigger. It clicked on an empty chamber.
A Variant leapt into the narrow compartment and came down on one of the men. His rifle came up butt-first. He dropped and rolled as the Variant was flung over top of his body. The creature tumbled against the closed cockpit door and sprung back with amazing speed. It was met by Potoski wielding a fire extinguisher he’d pulled from the wall. He smashed the thing in the head with a roundhouse swing, and it fell back against the bulkhead. Potoski used the metal canister as a pile driver and crushed its head, leaving the extinguisher partially buried in
its skull. Potoski watched as the creature’s tongue continued to instinctively whip about its mouth as the rest of the body died.
Shader was a little less barbaric with the second Variant. He drew his M9 and placed two bullets in its head as the creature readied itself for an attack. It staggered back and off the ramp, falling into the harbor below.
“DON’T TOUCH THAT BLOOD!” Shader yelled over the screams of the twin Rolls Royce engines. Both he and Potoski wore a flight helmet with ear protection and a boom mic, while the survivors were struggling with the high-pitched whine of the rotors. They all nodded back.
Shader moved around the dead Variant and pounded on the cockpit door.
“It’s Shader,” he said into his mic. “We’re clear back here. Four more souls on board.”
“Copy that,” Donaldson said. “We’re heading back to the Roosevelt.”
— 32 —
Antonio Lazzaro
U.S.S. Boxer
“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”
–RALPH WALDO EMERSON
It was becoming abundantly clear to Lazzaro that he was going to have to save himself. He’d communicated with primary flight control several times over the last few hours. They’d managed to let fleet know that the Boxer was overrun, stopping any further flights onto the ship. But by the sound of the lieutenant’s voice, it wasn’t looking like anyone was coming anytime soon. Raymond had admitted that Coronado was being evacuated and all air assets were tied up for the foreseeable future.
But his last attempt to contact the LT had proved fruitless. He’d let the connection ring and ring. No one picked up. Chances were they had finally been overrun.
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