Something had stopped the unstoppable juggernaut.
Now they were dead in the water.
And the tide was rising all around them.
Short, Controlled Bursts
Camp Lemonnier - JOC
Fick picked his battered body up off the deck – almost everyone in the back of the MRAP had been knocked to the floor or onto each other by the impact and crash of the vehicle – and put his face to one of the side ports. Because of the steel louvers outside them, made to shield passengers from IED blasts, but which recently had been slicing through dead bodies, it provided a relatively unobstructed view.
“I think we’re back in the goddamned JOC,” Fick said.
“We’re back in the car again,” Predator muttered. He was about the only one who had kept his seat – as usual, the immovable object.
Reyes, dusting himself off, delivered his line. “At least we’re out of the tree.”
Sure enough, it was the sunken pit in the center of the JOC that had doomed them. The MRAP had crashed through the outer wall no problem, then through the first few rows of stations. But then its nose fell off, dropping into the pit, and it finally came to a stop. Because of the truck’s angle, the wheels had no traction.
Pred got up, took a look outside, then grunted. “I don’t suppose getting out and pushing is going to help.”
Fick said, “Not even you, big guy.”
Up front, Handon shook his head and tried to get his senses back after the colossally jarring impact. The windshield had been partially cleaned by the walls of the building, and he looked out of it at the devastated JOC – shattered flat-panel displays, ravaged computers, splintered chairs and desks – and tried to formulate a plan. Maybe they could get some timber underneath the wheels, or use explosives to blow up the side of the pit that had them jammed up…
Because he knew that if they didn’t get out of there in the next sixty or ninety seconds, they were probably never getting out. The legions of dead would even now be flocking to the extremely loud ground zero that was them. And it would soon surround them a hundred thick on all sides. They could stay alive by staying buttoned up in the MRAP. But they’d eventually just die of thirst.
He had to think of something – fast – but nothing was coming.
And then a voice came over the squad net.
“Hey, I’m outside on your twelve. Can you guys do me a favor and release the winch cable?”
Homer.
* * *
Handon found and hit the winch release, then turned around and stuck his head into the rear.
But then he hesitated, wrestling with his next command decision. Should they open the door and push out security? Or stay buttoned up inside, where they were notionally safe? But then he cursed himself for even hesitating, because the question answered itself. Staying buttoned up in an immobilized vehicle, surrounded by the enemy, was a non-stop ticket to extinction. They had to dismount, push out, and defend the site, while the vehicle got unstuck.
And, anyway, before Handon could even bark a command, Ali decided the issue – she got the side hatch open and darted out of it with her rifle. Handon should have known: she was never going to leave Homer out there on his own to do this.
“Everyone out!” Handon shouted. “Push out security and defend the crash site!”
Everyone moved as one to comply. Handon craned his neck up – where he could see Noise up in the turret. “Get ready to engage. Clear us some breathing room.”
“Roger that, Sergeant Major!”
Handon grabbed his weapon and moved to climb out last – when Zorn shouted at him, holding up his ravaged arm. “Hey! How about that cure first?”
Handon hesitated.
“Unless you want me turned and biting by the time you get back.”
Handon didn’t have time for this. But the man had a point – he’d be equally useless to them undead as dead. Worse, actually. So he rummaged around for the pouch Park had given him, pulled out a syringe and vial, stuck the needle through the stopper, and pulled on the plunger. While he did so, he said, “I told you – it’s not a cure. It’s a serum. It’ll keep you from turning, but that’s it. I stop giving you these injections and you’re done.”
He jammed the needle into Zorn’s thigh and rammed the plunger down. Then he took a quick look around. Everyone else had now dismounted. It was just him, Zorn – tied to his shelving unit – and the bagged-up Zulu.
“Behave,” he said.
And he climbed out after his team.
* * *
They’d all moved so quickly to deploy out of the truck that when Handon joined them, the dead hadn’t even had a chance to work their way inside yet. While the operators stood or crouched in a defensive circle around the MRAP, a few beats of eerie silence passed – with only the sound of scrabbling and moaning coming through the walls around them.
Much of the JOC was still intact – enough to make it dim and close in there. But, on the other hand, the MRAP had basically taken out one wall, and some of the roof. And they all knew what would soon be coming through those gaps.
Voice low and serious, Brady whispered: “Remember – short, controlled bursts.”
Somebody laughed out loud, and Reyes looked at Brady and riposted, “Make no mistake, gentlemen. We are in the fight of our lives, against one of the greatest battalion commanders of the Vietnam War, I shit you not.”
“Hey, goddammit,” Pred interjected. “Hey.”
“That thing is out there,” Graybeard whispered. “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear—”
Pred finally shouted, cutting them all off. “Okay, stop that shit right there! You can’t just jump across movies willy-nilly like that. Learn a goddamned sequence of dialogue from one character, why don’t you?”
“I thought that was one character,” Brady said.
“Where’s Ali?” Handon asked Fick, realizing he couldn’t see her.
Fick pointed toward the front – where the thick cable from the winch was snaking out of the far side of the building, and unwinding more each second.
“Cadaver from Thunderchild, how copy, over?”
Handon winced. Not a great time. Then again, if the pilot was busting into his ear, she probably had good reason. She would have seen the chaos going on throughout the base, and had kept out of it until now. They’d been too closely engaged for CAS to be a possibility anyway.
“Thunderchild, Cadaver, send it – fast.”
“Be advised: the outer wire of that base is down in two places. As many dead as you’ve already got converging on your position… now the population of Djibouti Town is sending reinforcements, over.”
“Copy, out.” A few thousand more dead changed nothing. They were about to have their hands full in there – breached outer wire or not.
Handon watched and waited for it.
And in that second, shadows started to crowd the building, around the wall the MRAP had come through. The hissing and moaning grew louder – but then were instantly drowned out by a shriek. It was that unmistakable Foxtrot sound. Then all that was drowned out by the .50-cal in the turret above them starting up.
It was game on.
You Want Some of This?
Camp Lemonnier - North of the JOC
Ali and Homer moved forward outside the JOC, both with their rifles up and chugging suppressed rounds at full speed, clearing their way. Homer had put the steel hook at the end of the cable into his belt, to have both hands free to shoot.
The only thing they had going for them was the great mob outside still seemed more interested in the half-destroyed building and the vehicle that had half-destroyed it, than they were about the two figures moving out of it, making little noise and keeping their profiles low.
Ali went dry, and it was getting too thick now anyway, so she drew her sword in a blur from over her back, striking and cleaving a head in the same motion – and then started swinging and pivot
ing, her long curved blade singing and arcing, as she finessed and carved them a way through the flowing and thickening crowd. As she did so, she belatedly wondered what the hell Homer intended to hook that cable onto – what could possibly be heavy, solid, and rooted enough for the MRAP to pull itself free on? Big tree? Another huge vehicle?
But pretty quickly she worked it out – if only because there was nothing else.
It was the next building over.
And that meant they were going to have to circle all the way around the damned thing in order to secure the cable.
Oh well, Ali thought. We’d better move fast.
Because it wasn’t going to suck itself.
* * *
Within seconds, it was obvious Brady had it right with his original movie reference – because runners were now storming the room, while Foxtrots dropped down from the partially destroyed ceiling and roof. When they hit the ground, they leapt over the half-destroyed tactical stations – one row closer, then another, and the operators had only seconds to make headshots on them.
It was a big room. But, then again, not all that big, particularly with the MRAP taking up the whole middle of it. And as the dead stormed in, they were practically on top of the living right away.
The operators all fired flat out, in all directions, working as a single organism to keep from being overrun. They were all shooting suppressed, so it was a thick chorus of whispers meeting a tightening ring of moaning and shrieking.
All silenced except for Brady. His full-auto M4A1 was chattering blue murder – but, sure enough, in short controlled bursts. He was firing left, right, up at the ceiling, at a half-destroyed one dragging itself across the floor toward his feet. The shearing muzzle flash of the weapon lit up his face in the dim room. Plus he was hollering as he fired. “Die, motherfucker! Come get it, baby! Come on, you bastard! Oh, you want some of this? Fuck you!”
Reyes, a few feet to his side, laughed out loud as he covered his sector. But he also took a careful look under his buddy’s feet – just to make sure one didn’t come up and drag him down from below. But there didn’t seem to be anything down there.
Over their heads, the .50-cal was still banging away non-stop, Noise spinning the turret left and right, but mainly back toward the destroyed wall. Now and then one landed on his turret, but it was completely enclosed in steel and blast-proof glass, so he ignored those, let the others deal with them, and kept firing. He was keeping a lot of the heat off the team.
But still, Handon could tell that there were, for all practical purposes, an infinite number of dead converging on this building. And they would run out of ammo long before they put a significant dent in their numbers. Luckily, Homer picked that moment to report in.
“Cable is secure! Reel it in! Winch it in!”
“Copy,” Handon said, throwing himself back in the truck and diving to the front.
“And friendlies coming back in from the north!”
Handon flipped the winch control to Retract and started the spindle motor. He touched his mic button to order the team to mount back up – but saw they were already doing it, as Brady tumbled into the driver’s seat. They didn’t need to be told. Brady fired up the engine – and revved it a few times in anticipation.
Fick’s head prairie-dogged up into the front. He probably just wanted to see for himself if any of this crazy shit was going to work.
They could all feel the cable go taut – and hear the nose of the gargantuan truck start to lift and inch forward.
Brady put it in gear, and caressed the accelerator.
Up… up a bit more… forward a bit…
The back wheels rolled down into the the deep operations pit – and immediately caught, surging them forward. A second later they hit the other edge of the pit. But between the truck engine, and the winch motor, the giant vehicle half-crushed and half-climbed up over that one – and then went straight through the opposite wall of the building, this time knocking it down in slow motion rather than at high speed.
“Yeah, bitch!” Brady hollered, pumping his fist. “Magnets!”
Fick looked over at him like he was stupid. “What the hell does that even mean?”
“Best show on television,” Brady said, putting both hands back on the wheel, and accelerating the huge vehicle, and the entire team, the hell out of there.
Fick shook his head. “I don’t even have any idea what you’re talking about. In fact, shut the fuck up.”
As the truck emerged from its building carapace out into the open, Handon could see Homer on the ground unlinking the hook from the cable – while Ali covered him, somehow being on all sides of him at once, swinging her long sword too fast to see. Wait a second, Handon thought. Was that cable wrapped around the entire next building over? Even more amazingly, the structure looked half-collapsed itself – like the MRAP had nearly pulled it down.
Never mind. It worked.
Now Ali and Homer turned and sprinted back toward the truck as dead of all flavors and speeds tracked them and tried to cut them off. Someone in back leaned out the side hatch and started firing furiously to cover them. Handon could hear Noise doing the same from above – and one or more of the people in back leaned out and hauled Ali and Homer inside.
“All in!” someone yelled from the back, banging the wall again. “Punch it!”
Brady punched it – hard.
And this time he banked them around away from the worst of the dead tide – and by preserving the ability to see, also kept them out of buildings. In two minutes he had them racing at high speed toward the southeast section of outer wire.
The MRAP blasted through it like cling film and ramped out onto the tarmac of the airport.
They were clear.
Senior Officers Die with Their Men
100 Meters North of the Fallen ZPW
This time, miraculously, it looked like none of the Paras had been hurt in the collapse of the Wall. Random chance, it appeared, was kinder to them than the fuck-ups of their own senior commanders.
Sergeant Bhardwaj found all his section leaders and finished his headcount. Everyone in the platoon was accounted for. And so, it appeared, were the rest of the men in the company, as well as most of the rest of the battalion, at least those who had survived long enough to reach the Wall.
But then a strange thing happened. As Elliott watched, Bhardwaj was unable to reach their lieutenant – and then he was unable to reach any of the officers, or the command element at Brigade Headquarters. He took his hand off his radio and looked at Elliott blankly. “Fuck me,” he said. “I forgot they were having a full leadership meeting.”
“At BHQ,” Elliott said. “Right under the Wall.”
“Yeah. Grab your weapon and come with me.”
He was already moving off, and Elliott hefted his rifle and tried to keep up.
Soon they were moving through a moonscape of debris, some of the collapsed sections of Wall towering up ten or twenty feet. As they walked and climbed, they passed other Paras going back, trying to find their trenches, and recover their rucks and equipment – if it all hadn’t been buried.
Finally, Bhardwaj found a corporal, one so covered in plaster dust his unit must have been one of the last ones to escape the collapse. He grabbed his arm and said, “Oi, have you seen any of the officers?”
“Yeah,” the young man said, looking badly shaken. “I saw them running like hell, behind my section, trying to get away from it.”
“And?”
“I don’t think any of them made it. They were too close.”
Bhardwaj blinked heavily a couple of times, while Elliott scanned the distance through his scope. He presumed the staff sergeant had taken him along to provide security, and he intended to do it. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that what the enlisted leader might really have wanted was just moral support.
“Come on,” he said. “We keep going.”
After another five minutes of climbing over debris, they reached the edge of the Wa
ll itself. The first thing they saw was that it wasn’t completely down – there was still about twenty feet of it standing along most of the gap. It wasn’t much, and it sure wouldn’t hold up the horde for very long. But it was something.
The second thing was that BHQ was almost completely intact. Multiple set radios, camp chairs and tables – even a tea service. It was all covered with dust, but otherwise undisturbed.
Bhardwaj looked up in awe. “The collapse must have… I don’t know, sort of fallen forward, over the top of all this…” The whole section of wall, thousands of tons of it, had somehow tumbled over and out into the surrounding countryside, sparing the ground directly beneath it.
Elliott nodded, and almost laughed. “Which means they would have lived if they had stayed at their posts.”
Bhardwaj shook his head in disbelief. “Instead, they ran – and they died.” He shook his head again, as if he was trying to convince himself of all this.
It was all sinking in with Elliott, too. He knew that a senior leadership meeting typically included the commander of the battalion, Colonel Briars himself, as well as his senior staff officers… plus each of the company commanders… each of the platoon commanders… and finally very senior enlisted men, namely the battalion sergeant major and company first sergeants.
And now they were all gone, wiped out to a man.
Along with the decimation of the NCO corps that had happened back in Kent… Elliott realized with a rush of fear and uncertainty that his new boss, Staff Sergeant Bhardwaj… might actually be the highest ranking man left in 2 Para.
It was inconceivable. But so was everything else that was happening.
And, lastly, they realized that the radio sets were intact – when one of them started blinking with an incoming transmission.
Bhardwaj moved woodenly to pick up the handset.
* * *
“What we’re seeing on aerial surveillance – is it as bad as it looks from ten thousand feet?”
Elliott stood close enough that he could hear both sides of the sergeant’s call with CentCom HQ. There was nothing encouraging being said on either side.
Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm Page 28
