by Evan Currie
“It’s empty, isn’t it?” Alex asked over the boom of another shot from Rankin. “Why take it? It’ll slow you down.”
“Unlike the Beowulf”—Masters shrugged, nodding to the abandoned weapon behind him—“this is a twelve-gauge. I can find ammo for it. Let’s get out of here.”
Eddie started taking shots at the leaders, putting them down and slowing those behind, who were starting to fall back from the pile of corpses Masters had left in his aborted last stand. After a few more shots, they all turned and broke into a run while Eddie reloaded.
“If we hurry, we can catch up to the others,” Alex said.
“No,” Masters growled, “I’ll be damned if I lead this mob right to them. Anything could happen.”
“You mean like we might actually live?” Alex asked sourly. “Fine. I know a place.”
The other two looked at him, surprised.
“You know a place?” Eddie demanded. “In Barrow, Alaska? Are you freaking kidding me?”
“Just outside of Barrow, actually.”
“Oh, that’s so much more believable.”
They ducked between some houses, trying to ignore the creepy sound of feet and hands splashing and scratching behind them with no voices whatsoever.
“Hey, it’s not like I don’t travel, you know.”
“Would you two cut out the comedy routine?” Masters growled as he and Rankin threw themselves up and over a large fence. Alex vaulted off what looked like a doghouse, caught the fence easily, and then cat-vaulted the rest of the distance in a single flowing motion. “And stop showing off!”
Masters and Rankin landed solidly on the other side, now chasing after Alex, who had a lead on them. He was fast, but they were both trained to run and gun with a lot more weight than either of them were lugging at the moment, so they quickly caught back up.
“What took you?” Alex asked, pointing toward the fence that separated them from the airfield. “Over that way.”
They didn’t question him, and the trio bolted for the fence. Again, the two SEALs hit the fence identically, planting one foot ahead of them, vaulting up to grab the top, and then flinging themselves half over before swinging their bodies the rest of the way.
Meanwhile, Alex threw himself at the eight-foot fence, got his hands on the top, and seemed to levitate over it as he curled his legs up and under his body, pulling hard to assist his jump. He landed with a roll on the other side and came up running, giving him a strong lead on the SEALs.
Like the last time, though, it only took them a few minutes to catch up, and the trio ducked behind one of the hangars that dotted the airfield, using the time to get their wind back.
“They’re milling around out there, so maybe we lost them,” Eddie said after taking a quick peek.
“Won’t last.” Alex shook his head. “Vampires can sniff us out, given a little time. They can smell body heat.”
“Well that’s moderately creepy.”
“They’re vampires,” Alex muttered dryly.
“Right. Extremely creepy,” Eddie amended.
“Can the Abbott and Costello routine,” Masters growled. “Alex, where is this place you know?”
“ ‘Know of’ would be more accurate, to be honest,” Alex admitted. “It’s a lodge a few kilometers out of town.”
“A lodge? Who builds a lodge this far up in the butt end of Alaska?” Eddie asked, unbelieving.
“The Asatru.”
“Ass hat, who?”
Alex pinned Rankin with a glare. “Don’t even think of making that joke when we see them.”
Eddie raised his eyebrows, but didn’t quite know what to say in response.
“Not that I care all that much, but you might like to keep your limbs intact,” Alex finished with a roll of his eyes as he glanced around. “Okay, we’ve got to move out. It should be east of here.”
“All right, SERE drills, Eddie,” Masters ordered. “Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Seer?” Alex frowned, confused. “Didn’t know either of you had the talent.”
“What?” Masters was now just as confused as his friend. “SERE training, man. Survive, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. That’s bread and butter to us. Come on.”
“Sometimes I fully believe that you SEALs speak a different language than the rest of us,” Alex muttered, annoyed.
Rankin snorted. “Like you count as the ‘rest of us.’ The damn fool gibberish you spout half the time is enough to give me a headache.”
“Well, if you used your head for more than bashing in doors—”
“Enough. Move,” Masters ordered.
With no time left to get their wind back, the trio broke from cover and ran for the next building as they began to work their way east through the airfield. Reaching another hangar, Masters threw a long considering gaze south to the C-130 sitting on the tarmac.
“Think we can reach it?” he wondered aloud. If there was an ambush set up there, they’d have already spilled out of the plane like everywhere else in this damned town, right?
“Maybe. Why?” Alex asked, looking around.
“Ammo, for one.”
“I’m with the boss on this one,” Eddie said, tilting his weapon up. “Down to three mags, plus what’s left of the one in the receiver. Call it thirty-four rounds. Hawk’s out, and you aren’t packing.”
“What I’m packing doesn’t run out of bullets,” Alex muttered, eyes gauging the distance to the aircraft. “We can probably make it, but if we get spotted things are going to get rough.”
“Better for them to get rough with a full mag than with a badly shaped club in my hand,” Masters decided.
“Fine. Let’s do it.” Alex sighed.
“Stay low, stay fast. Don’t stop, don’t turn around, and whatever you do,” Masters ordered as he got ready to move, “don’t taunt Murphy. We need him on our side.”
Knowing that practically anything they said would violate that last order, the others stayed quiet as they readied themselves for the run. On a silent count of three, the trio broke from cover and bolted as fast as they could to the south, where the National Guard Hercules aircraft was sitting placidly.
CHAPTER 11
Captain Judith Andrews hardly knew what she was doing. Her legs were pumping beneath her and she was breathing hard, but it was all on automatic. She would stumble, catch herself or be caught by one of the others, and then continue to run.
Inside, though, her mind was focused on anything but what she was doing. Inside, she was still thinking about what she had seen, and what she couldn’t possibly have seen.
They couldn’t have been what they looked like. People in costume! That’s what it was.…It has to be, right? But why would they run toward the lieutenant commander’s assault rifle?
Of everything she’d seen, that was by far the most disturbing on so many levels.
The dead state troopers’ bodies, horrific though they were, could be explained. Perhaps they’d died another way and an animal had torn out their throats. That made far more sense than what Masters and that insane nitwit of his had been blabbering about.
Vampires.
They hadn’t even had the decency to pretend to whisper.
Vampires.
In the back of her mind she agreed with the petty officer, quite frankly. They looked far more like zombies.
But that was a part of her mind that she, along with every sane piece of her brain, was currently in the process of silencing with extreme prejudice.
“There’s the edge of town.” Jack Nelson nodded ahead of them. “Hang north — we have to head up the coast.”
They were running from monsters.
It was a thought that she couldn’t quite put out of her mind, an image she couldn’t banish no matter how hard she tried.
Is this what the admiral wanted me to discover? No, no. It can’t be. There must be another explanation.
“The admiral,” she muttered, drawing attention.
�
��What?” Nelson looked in her direction.
“The admiral,” she said, her voice more confident. “I have to report.”
“When we get out of this mess,” the lieutenant said, shaking his head. “For now, you run like the rest of us.”
She stared at him blankly for a moment, until a slap on her back from one of the others jolted her forward. Propelled onward again, Judith continued to move her legs automatically. The town’s homes and buildings looked like shadows thrown up by the lights still burning inside, but for her the entire world had begun to sink in on itself.
Still, having no choice, she ran with the team.
Right up until the moment a form lurched out from behind a building they were passing and grabbed her by the arm. Her reaction was thoughtless, visceral, and later she would feel humiliated by it, but in that instant Judith screamed like the helpless cheerleader in a slasher movie.
* * *
Nelson twisted at the scream, filled with an urge to snarl at the captain they’d been saddled with. He didn’t like the idea of women taking combat roles, even if they were technically just observers. The urge died in his throat when he realized that they’d been flanked, and she’d been grabbed by one of the enemy.
Also, to her credit, the captain was doing a good bit more than just screaming. Not that it was having much effect, but Nelson winced automatically when the butt of her Colt made contact with the creature’s jaw — he adamantly refused to consider the thing human, and Jack Nelson didn’t know a vampire from a hole in the ground — snapping the bone in at least two places.
It didn’t slow the thing’s assault, however, and it was hauling Captain Andrews slowly in as it tried to work its jaw close enough to take a chunk out of her.
Nelson drew his forty-five, wishing he’d taken the boss’s advice and chosen a heavier-caliber piece, and calmly walked up, put the weapon to the thing’s head, and pulled the trigger.
Black blood and gray matter sprayed the side of the building as the creature dropped where it stood.
“You all right?” Nelson asked, gripping the captain’s shoulder.
She shuddered, but nodded. “Yes. I…was surprised.”
“Probably would have surprised me into a new pair of pants, Cap,” Robbie Keyz offered from behind her, where he was taking up a guard position against another attack from that direction. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe, but new pants aside, you wouldn’t have screamed,” she said bitterly.
The EOD specialist shrugged, but didn’t say anything. There was truth there.
“We have to move,” Nelson said, eyes on the move. “The noise will attract others if they’re close.”
In the distance they could hear the booming explosions of Masters’s distraction.
At least they won’t be coming from that direction. No chance anyone will even notice a scream from that war zone.
Unfortunately, that left the rest of the population, and while Barrow was a small town, it was still a town. He’d looked up stats on the place on the flight in, and while they’d spotted dozens of those things walking around the streets so far, there were over four thousand people in town.
And if Norton has the right of things, Nelson thought darkly, that leaves more than three thousand eight hundred or so that are unaccounted for. Not to mention the guardies and troopers.
No matter how he cut the math, that left a whole load of people…things that could still be standing between them and the coast, to say nothing of the cutter in the Beaufort.
So he got his team moving again, female captain and all.
Getting to the coast was literally a matter of jumping from someone’s backyard down onto the half-frozen beach that cut the line between Barrow and the Beaufort Sea. That was the easy part, however. The hard part was still ahead of them — they had to get well clear of town and secure a landing zone (LZ) before they could call in the Coast Guard chopper to pick them up.
It would be an easy hike, assuming that nothing was hunting them.
That was an assumption he wasn’t prepared to make.
“Move your asses,” he ordered, waving them on ahead. “Four klicks to a secure LZ. You heard the specialist: The sooner we’re clear of the buildings where these things can stay warm, the more likely they’ll be in our rear view…permanently.”
The SEALs immediately started moving, no questions asked and none expected. He paused slightly, eyes on the captain, but was pleasantly surprised when she simply heaved her kit up and started moving, same as the rest.
* * *
The town of Barrow was something of a sprawling community, spreading out over seven and a half miles of the north coast of Alaska. The town itself only covered a fraction of that, but the team was on the south end of Barrow, so they had a lot of ground to cover, and a big chunk of that space offered a lot of potential cover and support to their enemy.
Houses lined the coastline, and they’d be well within a stone’s throw of someone’s living room the whole way up the coast.
The team double-timed it past the first few homes, then had to cross a causeway that lay between the Beaufort and the lagoons around which the town was built. Crossing it left a cold chill down the spines of men, who knew only too well how very exposed they were walking across what amounted to a sandbar, with no cover to be had for love or money.
“Eyes on the buildings,” Nelson ordered, directing his HK417 up the bank as they made it across the causeway. “Anything shows its head, take it the fuck out.”
His voice was hard, and he knew that his nerves were strung tighter than strings on a guitar. The last time he’d been in a place like this, or rather a situation like this, he’d honestly believed that the whole world was going to hell.
Should have known better. When Rankin called me up I should have told him to shove this offer up his ass.
He had just been so sick of his burned-out career, sick of spinning his wheels in the most elite organization in the US military. When Rankin had called, he’d known that making any decision in his current state of mind was a recipe for disaster, and now look at him.
“Movement!” Keyz called. “I’ve got movement at three o’clock!”
Oh shit.
“Hold fire,” he ordered. “Stealth’s the name of the game. If they stay away from us, we leave them be.”
The group huddled together and slowed their pace, but didn’t stop moving. They kept their weapons to their shoulders and aimed at the bank, eyes wide as they looked for more targets.
“Got another one,” Derek muttered under his breath, his rifle shifting slightly to cover the new target. “Two o’clock.”
“I see him,” Nelson confirmed.
“Oh, fuck me,” Mack Turner growled. “Number three.”
“If they step down the bank,” Nelson said quietly, his voice calm even though he personally felt like he was about to jump right off the planet, “light them up.”
“So not a problem.”
“I’ve been here before,” Mack grumbled under his breath.
Keyz chuckled. “We’ve all been here before, mate. Where was it for you?”
“Mogadishu.”
“Back alleys of Baghdad for me,” Keyz answered. “Twenty AKs pointed at each of us, and we all knew that if anyone so much as sneezed it was game over.”
“Keep it together,” Nelson ordered. “They’re just watching us. Keep moving. If we can get them at our back, we’ll escape and evade north of town.”
“You do know that they’re just waiting until there’s enough of them to swarm us, right?” Mack asked. “You saw what they did to Masters.”
“All the more reason to delay the confrontation as long as possible,” Nelson told him as they continued to move. “There’s another causeway up ahead. If they let us get that far, we’ll be able to catch them at a choke point.”
“No way in hell they’re letting us get that far.”
Privately, Nelson fully agreed, but he didn’t see the po
int in lighting the game off early. The closer they got to the causeway, the less distance they’d have to run and gun when it came down to it. Taking out these scouts would only serve to bring more scouts, or worse, the whole main force down on their heads.
The SEALs huddled around Captain Andrews, their rifles to their shoulders, aiming up at the bank as they moved. With every step they took, it seemed as though another figure appeared, another shadow against the house lights on up the bank. After a dozen steps they were outnumbered, a few dozen more, and it was pretty clear that things were about to get hairy.
“When they come over the bank,” he said slowly, “run and gun.”
“Roger that.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice.”
“Got it.”
“Keyz,” Nelson spoke again, “what are you packing?”
“What do you need?” the EOD specialist asked dryly.
“Antipersonnel, everything you’ve got.”
Robbie Keyz hesitated for a second. “Planning something I should know about, LT?”
“You’d be the first to know, Keyz. Pass it over,” Nelson said, tapping the man’s shoulder.
“All of it?” Robbie asked, somewhat incredulously.
Derek shuddered from beside them. “Why do I not want to know?”
“It’s Keyz to the City, man,” Mack chuckled. “We’re lucky he doesn’t go boom instead of clank when he walks.”
“Just hand it over,” Nelson ordered, ignoring the byplay.
Keyz sighed, but lowered his HK417 in order to pull a couple of claymores from his vest. He passed them over, then pulled a strip of putty from around the base of his gear and also gave that to Nelson, who was staring at him oddly.
“Plastic with a strip of ball bearings Velcroed into place,” he said. “Just wrap and roll.”
Nelson snorted, shaking his head, but tucked it away just the same. Keyz had just gotten started — he passed over four frags, a half dozen segmented charges, and two satchel charges.
“How is it that this guy hasn’t blown himself up yet?” Mack shuddered.
“Because I’m that good.” Robbie answered the question, though it wasn’t directed at him.
