The Rising Horde, Volume Two (Sequel to The Gathering Dead )

by Stephen Knight

  “That’s low?” Roberson pointed at the AC-130U, which was at least five thousand feet overhead. “That’s practically airliner territory!”

  “Just watch and enjoy, boys,” the captain said.

  The two Black Hawks and their Apache escorts established a wide orbit well outside the Spooky’s engagement area. The big airplane established a steep, banking turn at five thousand feet, its left wingtip pointed toward the deck. It suddenly began trailing dark smoke.

  Then, a patch of the sun-baked Texas desert exploded. Bright, sparking explosions tore through an area the size of a football field with metronomic regularity as the Howitzer opened up. Kelly and the others cheered as tattered corpses cartwheeled across the sky, slamming into the carpet of zeds surrounding the engagement area, driving even more of them to the deck. Smaller detonations slashed through the firing zone as well, blasting dozens of stenches into ribbons as they rose from the earth after having been flattened by the shock waves from the 105’s shells. The gunship kept the heat on, circling almost a mile away as it released some of the most dramatic devastation the Special Forces grunts had ever seen.

  Despite the fury of the attack, many, many stenches survived it. They continued their trek to the east at a walk, stumble, or crawl. Even corpses that had lost half of their bodies continued the advance. Still, the power of the assault was undeniable, and dozens, if not hundreds, of zombies were either incapacitated or decimated outright.

  After what seemed to be minutes of pounding that kicked up a cloud of dust that slowly moved southeasterly, the Black Hawk pilot’s voice came over the intercom system. “Okay, Gambit, the zoomies are going to let up, then shift fire to a wider radius. They’ll hold off as many zeds as they can, but whatever gets through the curtain is up to us.”

  “Roger that. Can you get the Apaches to pepper a spot with their thirties, just to be sure? I see lots of movement out there. It looks like a lot of those things are still capable of some movement,” the captain said.

  “Rog, we’ll ask them to make a quick pass.”

  The Black Hawk’s bank increased as it turned toward the rising dust cloud several thousand yards away. With the sun behind it, the helicopter’s shadow flitted across the ground and the thousands of necromorphs that covered it. Hanging beneath the helicopter was the sacrificial diesel generator, a squarish object tethered to the Black Hawk’s cargo hook by a quick-release cable. As the other Black Hawk formed up to the right of the aircraft Kelly rode in, the two AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopters sprinted past them downrange.

  Kelly leaned out and watched as the drab-colored machines suddenly transitioned to hovers three hundred feet above the ground, their noses rising high as their pilots used the main rotors as giant air brakes. As the Black Hawks closed on them, Kelly saw the thirty-millimeter chainguns beneath the Apaches pan left and right. Large cartridges were ejected from the gun breeches, and downrange, fetid corpses began to explode as the Apaches walked the rounds through the landing zone. Within seconds, the entire zone was littered with body parts. There was still movement there, but Kelly thought they could manage it.

  Now that’s what I’m talking about!

  “Going in now, Gambit. Get ready to deploy. We’ll ground the genset, then come down into a low hover. Ah, you guys had better make sure you don’t land on anything that can still bite,” the Black Hawk pilot said.

  “Sounds like good advice,” Roberson said. “Wish we had fast rope gear on this tub.”

  “Wish in one hand and spit in the other,” Gogol said.

  “Let’s get it together, guys,” the captain said, flipping over to Quiet Professional mode. “Gogol, you’re with me. Estrada, Kelly, Roberson, you’re out on this side of the aircraft, just like we planned.”

  “Hooah,” Kelly said. He made a perfunctory weapons check, ensuring his M4 SOPMOD assault rifle was zeroed and ready to go. Even though he and the captain would be handling the generator setup, it was pretty obvious he’d have to do some shooting. His weapon was ready for the task.

  “Aircrew, we’re ready to go when you give us the word. We’re removing our ICS headsets. You’ll have to talk to us over SINCGARS from now on.”

  “Roger that, Captain,” the pilot said.

  Kelly pulled off his intercom headset and draped it over the seatback, then slipped on his radio headphones and helmet. He adjusted his microphone, made the requisite commo check, then dropped his goggles over his eyes. There was a lot of dust in the air, and the Black Hawk’s whirling rotors would only churn up more when it transitioned to a low hover over the landing zone.

  The helicopter broke away from the other Black Hawk and slowed as it sidled past the Apaches, which continued to fire into the zone up until the very last second. Once the Black Hawk entered the landing zone, the attack helicopters super-elevated, climbing straight up where they could maintain greater coverage. Kelly leaned out of the Black Hawk as the dust began to swirl, and saw stenches writhing on the ground right beneath the helicopter. One of them met a rather ignominious fate when the transport settled toward the deck and the generator squashed it flat. Kelly eased himself into a sitting position, his feet dangling out the open troop door. Beside him, Estrada did the same.

  “Out, out, out!” the captain ordered.

  Kelly took a breath and shifted forward, dropping over six feet from the hovering helicopter. Half-blinded by dust and not able to hear much of anything over the Black Hawk’s thunderous roar, he landed badly, twisting his ankle. He stumbled and fell to his knees amidst a morass of severed limbs and shattered corpses. Something moved in the dust to his right, and he turned at the waist, pulling his rifle against his shoulder. A necromorph thrashed toward him. It had been blasted into two pieces and had only one arm remaining, but the thing was doing all it could to crawl his way. He fired one round into its head, and it fell still. He then leaped to his feet, ignoring the pain in his ankle as he stumbled back under the hovering helicopter and released the generator from the Black Hawk’s cargo hook.

  “Load clear!” he shouted into his microphone.

  Beside him, Estrada’s weapon cracked. He heard more weaponsfire from the left side of the aircraft, and a moment later, the one of the machineguns in the Black Hawk opened up as well. Kelly went to work, untrussing the generator. One of the lines flapped in the wind and struck him in the face hard enough to break the skin. He ignored it, and a moment later, the captain waded through the rotor wash and helped him secure the system. The Black Hawk roared off, blasting them with another strong dose of ninety mile an hour rotor wash, and it was all the two men could do to hunch over the generator and hold on for dear life.

  Something smacked Kelly’s right foot, sending a spike of pain through his injured ankle. He looked down through the swirling dust and saw a small necromorph. It sank its teeth into his boot’s steel toe, and Kelly kicked it away with a curse. Another zed lunged toward him, shouldering through the scrub brush, dragging entrails behind it. Estrada fired twice, and both ghouls went facedown in the dust.

  “These things are all over the place, even after the bombardment!” Estrada shouted.

  “If you wanted an easy job, you should have joined the Navy and become a SEAL,” the captain shouted back. He swore suddenly and spun, firing at something behind him that Kelly couldn’t see. Then he turned back and resumed work. “Come on, Kelly! Let’s get this thing—”

  One of the Apaches opened up with its chaingun, drowning him out. More noise entered the fray as the orbiting Spooky gunship added its own firepower to the engagement. Shock waves from the 105-millimeter Howitzer rolled over them, and Kelly was pelted by pieces of earth. Or at least, he hoped it was just dirt.

  A woman’s voice came over Kelly’s headset, still audible despite the pounding din. “Gambit, this is Card Shark One-Six. You’ve got company closing in on you fast and furious,” the commander of the Apache unit said.

  “Card Shark, Gambit Six. Can you hold them off us? We’re just getting started do
wn here! Over.”

  “Gambit, Card Shark. You’re going to be finished sooner than you think if you guys don’t get moving. We’re doing what we can, but we don’t have the firepower to hold them off forever. Over.”

  “Roger that, Card Shark.”

  Gunfire erupted all around them, from the team on the ground, from the helicopters, and from the orbiting AC-130. Kelly had never had so much trouble concentrating on a task in his entire life, and to top it off, he had to keep looking up, scanning for incoming stenches. There were always one or two making it through the gunfire, heading right toward them. Kelly or the captain would have to stop what they were doing, pull a weapon, and fire before the creature shambled right up and took a chunk out of the one of them.

  “Come on, Kelly,” the captain admonished.

  “I’m moving faster than you are, sir,” Kelly said. It was true. He already had the light tower completed. He slammed its spiked end into the dry desert earth and stomped on the pegs sticking out from its sides, driving it further. A moment later, the generator hitched, coughed, and came to life with a monotonous drone that Kelly could hardly hear, even at less than five feet away from it.

  “Plug in the lights!” the captain shouted. “I’ve got the—”

  Kelly didn’t see the zed, a runner, until it was almost right on top of the captain. He shouted a warning, and the captain responded automatically by stepping to his right and turning, his M4 coming up to face the threat. Kelly brought his weapon up and fired off two shots, but both of them went through the zed’s upper body without even slowing it. It crashed into the Special Forces officer and drove him to the desert floor. Kelly heard the captain cry out as he hurried around the generator. He saw the stench crouching over the captain, pinning the officer’s rifle across his chest. The captain had one hand under its chin while he reached for his pistol with the other. He cried out again as the stench sank its teeth into the pad of flesh between his index finger and thumb.

  Kelly fired a single round through the zombie’s head, blowing off the top of its skull, exposing the gray-white structure of its brain. The necromorph tumbled off the captain and lay still. Kelly reached down and helped the captain to his feet as the gunfire seemed to crescendo. A zed charged toward them, then fell to the ground after Gogol hosed it with a snap shot.

  The captain pushed Kelly back to the generator. “Let’s get this done!” he shouted as another round from the Spooky’s Howitzer slammed into the ground only fifty feet from where they stood.

  The shock wave staggered both men, and Kelly was left with a distinct ringing noise in his ears. He reached up and found the blast had knocked one of his headset earpieces askew. He pushed it back into place, then turned and checked the light pole. It looked good. He found the heavy cable and connected it to the generator. The floodlights came on, shining brightly in the late afternoon sun.

  “Lights are on!” he shouted.

  The captain pulled Estrada’s iPod from one pocket and slammed it into the small loudspeaker they had taped to a thick piece of white foam. The foam was then taped to the side of the generator. The captain fumbled with the iPod’s touch pad, trying to cue up the music. For a long moment, Kelly was afraid the man didn’t know how to work an iPod. Finally, the damned mariachi music started blaring. There, in the middle of the hot Texas desert, a Special Forces component was locked in a blood battle with thousands of stenches, with all manner of aircraft firing weapons systems of various calibers in an attempt to provide the soldiers on the ground with some breathing room… and the soundtrack for the scene was mariachi music. Kelly found himself laughing in spite of it all.

  “Gambit, Card Shark One-Six. The Spooky’s out of Howitzer ammo, you might want to think about pulling out of there. Over.” The Apache pilot’s voice was almost lost in the thunder of all the weaponsfire—and the fucking mariachi music! Kelly reminded himself—but Kelly did notice that without the pounding of the Howitzer, the rest of the weapons sounded puny.

  “Reaver One Four, this is Gambit. We’re ready whenever you are! Over!” the captain said over his radio.

  “Gambit, Reaver One Four. Uh, we’ll see what we can do. Over.” The Black Hawk pilot’s tone didn’t sound very encouraging.

  Then Kelly saw why. Without the heavy artillery, the necromorphs were able to steam into the area from pretty much all directions. Overhead, one of the Apache’s let loose a fusillade of 2.75-inch missile fire that stemmed the tide of rotting flesh from one side, but did nothing to slow the zeds shambling in from every other direction. Kelly shouldered his rifle and started squeezing off shots, taking down one zombie after another. Estrada had assumed a fighting position about thirty feet away, and Kelly saw he was already surrounded by a pile of ghouls. Estrada dropped zombie after zombie as they surged toward him. Kelly popped a few as well, trying to give Estrada a hand, but there were just too many of them.

  “Reloading!” Estrada pulled the empty magazine from his M4, dropped it to the ground, and slapped another one inside the rifle. He tapped the bolt release lever, and in less than three seconds, he was back in the fight. But the pause had been enough. The zombies were all around him. Estrada went down fighting, pinned to the ground beneath a growing pile of stinking corpses that tore at him with tooth and nail.

  A dozen zombies turned toward Kelly, their black mouths open, and lurched as if of one mind. Surrounded by a cloud of flies, the grotesqueries reached for him, moaning. Overhead, the UH-60 Black Hawk pulled into a high power hover, its turboshaft engines screaming. The crew chief leaned out of his gunnery door, the A-frame of his machinegun in both hands as he fired bursts of full automatic fire, walking the 5.56-millimeter rounds through the advancing necromorphs. Only one or two went down. The rest kept coming, ignoring the hail of bullets the same way they ignored the cloud of flies.

  Kelly pulled a grenade from his knapsack, yanked the pin, and hurled it at the zombies. “Grenade!” he shouted as the heavy metal orb arc through the air. It struck one stench in the head and knocked it off its feet. Kelly started to dive away, but drew short when another ghoul lurched out of the gathering dust right behind him.

  Then the grenade went off, blasting corpses and pieces of corpses through the air. Kelly staggered to his knees as he fired three rounds into the zombie reaching for him. One went through its midsection, another through its shoulder, where it visibly shattered the collarbone behind the ghoul’s parchment-white skin, and the third through the roof of its mouth. The zombie made a confused gurgling sound before its eyes crossed and it fell amidst the scrub brush like a sack of potatoes.

  Behind him, Kelly heard someone screaming. He spun around and lurched to his feet, dropping two zombies as he did so. Over the racket of the hovering Black Hawk, the damned mariachi music, and the sporadic small arms fire in the desert, he heard another keening wail. He looked for its source, and finally found it—the captain, rolling around on the desert floor, his legs and arms torn open and bleeding. But not from the zeds.

  Oh, my God, it’s from the grenade.

  Kelly charged toward the man, but he might as well have just blown him a kiss. Scores of zombies were all over the zone, and they zeroed in on the bleeding man like sharks rushing to take the first bite from a mortally wounded whale. Kelly fired again and again, and dropped four zombies in the process, but it wasn’t enough. The captain met the same fate as Estrada.

  Something bumped into Kelly’s back, and he whirled to find Roberson there. They stood back to back, taking down zeds.

  “Where’s Gogol?” Kelly asked.

  “Feeding the stenches! Reloading!”

  Kelly kept firing. “Reaver, Reaver, this is Gambit. Get us the hell out of here!”

  “Gambit, Reaver. We’re right over you. Stand by, we’re coming in hot!”

  The Black Hawk driver wasn’t kidding. The air churned, and the dust grew thick as the Black Hawk suddenly crashed down almost right beside them, mowing down a score of zeds as the big utility helicopter practically ta
xied across the desert. The pilots weren’t stopping, and Kelly didn’t blame them. If a few stenches got aboard the helicopter, that would be it for the aircrew.

  “Come on, Robby!” Kelly glanced over his shoulder as he started for the Black Hawk, but Roberson was already down. A pack of zombies was right on Kelly’s heels, their eyes coated with dust, the remains of their clothes flapping in the whirlwind that surrounded the helicopter.

  Right behind the horde, the second Black Hawk appeared. The rest of the alpha detachment leaned out the door, firing at the zeds pursuing Kelly with everything they had. Kelly redoubled his efforts, outright sprinting toward the Black Hawk as the door gunner opened fire, sending a virtual fusillade of 5.56 mil into the wall of necrotic flesh right behind Kelly. He felt one of them grab onto his backpack, and he shook the zed off and hurled himself into the troop compartment as the Black Hawk lifted off, rising into the sky.

  Several stenches climbed aboard through the open troop door across from Kelly. One of them charged toward the front of the helicopter and attacked the crew chief. The rest came for Kelly as he thrashed between the troop seats. He couldn’t bring his rifle to bear, so he pulled his pistol and drilled one stench right between the eyes. It slumped to the floor, and for a moment, it blocked the others from advancing.

  The Black Hawk suddenly rolled to the left. Kelly reached for the seat frame beside him, but his gloved fingers slipped off the metal. In the next moment, he was falling through the air. Falling to where thousands of pairs of dead eyes watched him with never-ending hunger.

  12

  “We lost one Black Hawk and about half of ODA Zero Three Four,” Haley told McDaniels. “The helicopter is a total write-off. Unfortunately, so are the men.”

  “What happened?”

  “Most of the Special Forces went down fighting. The helicopter went down after trying to extract the last soldier on the deck. Looks like some stenches got aboard and attacked the crew.” Haley pointed to one of the monitors on the wall of the TOC. “We have some footage from the Apache gun cameras, if you’re interested in watching it.”