Wesley squinted out at the road ahead, looking for anything that might help them. About two hundred yards away, a single abandoned vehicle sat in the middle of another intersection. The rest of the road seemed clear for as far as he could see. Nothing useful, but at least the way ahead was clear for now.
“Wesley!” shouted Burns. “Keep your hands in the cab, okay? Don’t lean out!”
Wesley had no intention of sticking his hands out. But before he could answer, he saw the business end of a shotgun pointing past his head toward the tarmac, just inches from him.
“Wait. you’ll blow the—!”
BANG!
Too late.
The noise was stunning, and every other sound in Wesley’s world faded instantly – the screaming of metal against the road, the shouts of the passengers, the roar of the truck’s engine. Everything went quiet, and was then replaced by a ringing noise that made Wesley’s head hurt. And then he sensed more than saw something shiny tumbling down the road – whatever had been stuck under the truck was gone. Then they were moving faster and the vehicle was no longer fighting him for control. Best of all, the tire was still intact, and not blown out by the shotgun, as Wesley had dreaded.
But the shotgun blast wasn’t the only shot. The rear-view erupted in a blossom of flashes, and the air cracked with reports, and Wesley could barely even make out what was going on behind him. He gripped the wheel and concentrated on what he could do, and that was just keep them on the road.
He steered the truck in a wide arc to avoid a single abandoned vehicle, and then sighed with relief as the road ahead of them opened up, clear of debris, and empty of the dead. On his right, he saw the first of the lakes, and had a view of the city without the looming roadside buildings in the way. Beyond the first line of structures, the mass of dead was already surging forward, spewing through the streets and filling every bit of ground. Some of the smaller buildings, one or two stories high, were being enveloped completely.
Then, on the very periphery of his vision, the flash of a small dark object rocketed across the darkening sky, followed by a sonic boom. Wesley jumped so sharply that he hit his head on the roof of the cab, but managed to regain his composure. A moment later the whump of an explosion sounded in his ears, almost deafening. Across the lake and through the structures, Wesley could see the ground erupting and whole buildings collapsing. Debris and the twisted shapes of dozens or hundreds of zombies were thrown into the sky as some sort of massive explosion tore into them. A few seconds later, the very same shape – a fighter jet, Wesley now surmised – shot past again, and another sonic boom followed. The thing was so damn fast Wesley barely had time to snap his neck around before it was gone again.
“Holy shit!” shouted Derwin. “They’re bombing the area. We need to move!” The man’s face was turning even more pale now.
Wesley tried to ignore the plane and the explosions, not to mention the swarm that now fast approached them, and the closer ones chasing them up the road. He willed the truck to go faster. This was all just a little too much. Could anything else be thrown against them? They weren’t just running from a massive horde of the dead now, they were also driving underneath falling bombs. Did the pilot even know they were down there? Probably not. At any moment the ground could disappear and they could all be atomized to vapor, and it occurred to Wesley that maybe that would be the easiest way out. He was a survivor, and stubborn, but there was only so much that a man could take in one day.
“See ahead? The access road heading off?” shouted Burns, snapping Wesley from his grim thoughts. He could barely make out Burns’ voice, but it was still there, and further along he saw what Burns meant – a leaning metal sign, with an arrow pointing down a section of road that sloped away and out of sight.
“Yes, I see it!”
“That’s where we check first – Lake Rudee. We should be able to see from the ramp if there are any boats, so don’t go too far down in case we have to back up.”
Wesley glanced in the mirror again. How far ahead of the dead were they now? Three hundred yards? He guessed they would have a minute, maybe two, after they stopped. That was if the main mass of the swarm hadn’t already reached the lakes, and the inlet. He had no idea how they were going to pull this off.
“And if there are none?” asked Wesley. His hearing was coming back, but slowly.
“Then we go over the bridge to the next lake,” said Burns, “and hope like hell there are some down there.”
Oh, sod it, Wesley thought, his thoughts growing peaceful again for some reason.
Hoping like hell just seemed to be the order of the damned day.
Bad Day at Ammo City
USS John F. Kennedy
A clean ocean breeze swept over the JFK’s flight deck, as if over wide-open prairie, mercifully wicking the sweat from Commander Drake’s face. Actually, being out on deck was more like standing in an enormous parking lot – except with a sheer 90-foot drop on every side.
Also, this parking lot wasn’t empty. Aside from flight ops in the stern, and infantry drilling amidships, and people and tractors scurrying all over and in various directions, most of them carrying or hauling equipment… there were also two great projects in the fore, out near the front edge of the deck that hung over the gigantic, protruding prow of the supercarrier.
And it was these that were Drake’s last stops on his terminal inspection tour.
The closer one was the site of their primary militia ammo depot. From overheard snippets of conversation, Drake gathered the men had taken to calling it Ammo City. This was built to sit within arm’s reach of the defenders manning the ramparts on the bow. Huge pallets were being unloaded and shifted around – each stacked with crates of 5.56mm rounds, rifle magazines, and 40mm and 25mm grenades. Some of this ammo would be feeding the Marines’ SOF Combat Assault Rifles (SCARs), but most was for a vast armory of experimental XM29 Objective Individual Combat Weapons, which had been recovered from Oceana Naval Air Base.
No one had known what such a huge storehouse of advanced assault rifles was doing there, nor why it had been abandoned. But Drake knew one thing – he was seriously grateful to Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick, who had insisted they spend the time, manpower, and air transport capacity – and they’d had damned little of all three, especially time – to ferry the massive storehouse of weapons and ammo over to the carrier.
Now Gunny Fick looked pretty goddamned smart.
Because, on the short list of things that might save their bacon, the advanced hybrid rifles were at or near the top. Assault rifle underneath, smart grenade launcher up top, with a computer-assisted sighting system and integrated laser rangefinder, these might just be the edge that would allow their largely inexperienced troops to keep the endless ranks of the dead from coming over the gunwale – and then consuming everything and everyone on board.
Whoever was in charge of this ammo-hustling operation, if anyone, Drake couldn’t immediately work out. So he just watched the action for a minute. It looked like it was all coming together. Three enormous aircraft elevators crawled up and down the outside edge of the ship, and the ammo pallets were being brought up from the one amidships. From there, they got picked up by a pair of giant forklift trucks, each of which Drake knew was capable of lifting up to 12,000 pounds.
They then got ferried up to this ad hoc ammo depot, where a dozen men and women broke open the pallets and tried to catalog and organize the contents, shifting crates all around. There were separate areas for 30-round magazines of 5.56mm rounds, 5-round magazines of 20mm grenades, and for individual 5.56 rounds and 20mm smart grenades. A couple of people on the crew were already at work using mechanical magazine loaders to get thousands of the latter into more of the former.
Once the battle got going, they would continue filling the empty mags that would no doubt start to carpet the deck. Drake didn’t imagine they’d be able to keep up with the expenditure of ammo, and the emptying of mags. But even if it was shovelling seaweed agai
nst the tide, at least they were helping.
They were still in the fight.
* * *
Drake was more or less content with the progress he saw here – though one tiny thing bothered him, which he couldn’t at first put his finger on – so he moved on to the construction site out at the very front edge of the ship. This was the dominion of Master Chief Shields – their top surviving engineer and construction rating, who had previously spent twenty-five years keeping U.S. Navy warships glued together and plying the high seas. Shouting here, pointing there, and scurrying back and forth, he was overseeing the effort to turn the carrier into a fixed defensive position.
Down in the engineering workshops, he had designed, and they were even now still constructing, modular metal “ramparts” to be affixed to the front edge of the deck, as well as partially around its sides. These six-foot walls had platforms and firing ports where the defenders could stand, and presumably get a little cover from the ravenous flesh-eating bastards they’d be trying to hold off.
The problem was: the front edge of the deck was also the spot where some of their combat aircraft were going to be taking off from. So the clever part of the rampart design was the hinge – in theory, these would flip them out and over the edge, clearing the deck for outgoing aircraft. And taking off from a carrier under way at sea was death-taunting enough, without having to do it over a big wall at the end of the runway.
“Master Chief!” Drake bellowed as he strode up. “Tell me my birds are going to be able to launch over all this shit.” Because he would very soon be ramping up both his bombing sorties and combat air patrols (CAPs). And he was going to need at least one of his bow catapults and half of the bow runway to do it.
“Aye, sir,” Shields answered, throwing up a sharp salute as Drake walked him down. “Our tolerances are tight – just a yank of the control lever here and they’ll flip right out of the way.”
Drake remembered that Chief Shields had previously been pretty optimistic about his project to graft a huge hunk of steel on to the gaping hole in the side of his boat. And that had worked about as well as a papier-mâché condom.
Drake raised a single eyebrow. “You’re sure about this?”
A shadow seemed to pass over the grizzled Master Chief’s face – but then was immediately replaced by a look of stern resolve. “Those aviators’ lives are in my hands. I take nothing more seriously. And I’ve lost too many men today already.”
Drake nodded. He knew better than to second-guess the Master Chief. He had gotten something badly wrong trying to patch up the boat. But maybe Drake had asked him to do too much, too quickly, and with too few resources. Shields had presided over a disaster. But as the woman said, failure consists not in the falling down – but in the staying down. And Drake knew the man needed second-guessing now like he needed an extra dick in his forehead. It would achieve nothing, and probably just further ding the man’s confidence, which had been dinged enough.
Drake didn’t have time for second-guessing anyway. He had to maintain his faith in his top people. Because they were about all he had.
“Okay,” he said, finally. “But just tell me one thing.” It had suddenly hit him what was wrong with the picture back at Ammo City. He now looked over his own shoulder, to where one of the forklifts was racing across the deck with a triple load of ammo pallets stacked on it. “Why isn’t that man wearing his colored jersey?” All flight deck crew were identified by their colored shirts – aircraft handling and catapult officers wore yellow, green was maintenance personnel and cargo-handlers, white for landing signal officers, red for EOD and firefighters, etc. This was ironclad. But the dude driving the forklift was only wearing the standard digital-camo fatigues.
“He’s not flight deck crew, sir,” Shields said. “He’s galley crew.”
Drake did a double take. “A fucking cook?”
“More like a potato peeler, I think. Maybe a dishwasher. Not sure.”
“Jesus Christ.” Drake knew a lot of people were currently doing jobs they weren’t rated for. It was mend-and-make-do across every corner of this crazy, floating, stranded, dysfunctional city – almost literally all hands on deck. But he didn’t much like the idea of critical, precarious, exacting work – such as moving explosives with heavy equipment – being done as a learn-on-the-job exercise.
Looking back now at the front of Ammo City, he realized something else – that the guys who had put this thing together had used a bunch of motley steel struts, rods, and long iron bars to lay the thing out and stabilize it. Very much in that spirit of mend-and-make-do, they had scavenged the detritus of the three-story crane that had gone over and broken apart in the mishap. Drake vaguely remembered having ordered that crap be pushed over the side. But when it had been policed up and repurposed instead, he’d hardly had time to ask questions about where it went.
And as he snorted once with amusement at this, his gaze went long again – back out to that incoming forklift. And he squinted in renewed concern, because he suddenly got a very disturbing sense that the overloaded vehicle was coming in too fast. It simply wasn’t slowing down, or not slowing enough. Drake focused in on the driver – and saw that the man wore a look of stark panic on his face, his torso bouncing up and down as he stomped on one or both of the forklift’s two big brake pedals.
“General quarters!” Drake shouted – as the quickest and most economical way to get everyone’s attention, and declare an emergency. Almost all the sailors at the two work sites looked up, and several used the second or two they had to get under cover. But the welders working on the ramparts – masked up, propane tanks on back, and welding torches hissing right in front of their faces – didn’t even look up, or pause what they were doing.
The forklift rammed into Ammo City with a terrifying crash, right into the end of one of the rows of stacked crates, its own cargo of pallets leading the way. Much of the row crumbled and collapsed in on itself, though this also acted as a crash pad for the forklift, absorbing some of the force and slowing the truck’s advance.
The top pallet on the fork’s stack, however, stood higher than the row – and got launched over the top. It arced through the air, flying toward the ramparts and impacting the center section almost exactly where it met the front edge of the deck. In that spot squatted one of the welders, who disappeared between the pallet and the steel rampart.
He never had a chance.
Among the rising shouts and chaos, Drake scrambled, rounding on the impact site – not to help the crushed victim, whom he felt sure was beyond help – but to do a dynamic risk assessment of the whole fucked situation. The first thing he saw was the flame of the welder’s acetylene torch – it hadn’t gone out, but still burned and sizzled, sticking out from behind the mass of crates, over a large and expanding pool of dark blood. Now it flamed up against the dry, lightweight wood of one of the pallets. And before Drake could react, the wood ignited into a lively and rapidly growing fire. Beneath the flames, he could just make out the markings on the crate.
“Clear the deck!” he bellowed. “Everyone out! GO, GO, GO!!”
The work detail at Ammo City had already legged it, and now carried on toward the stern, running for the cover of the island. The Master Chief’s team of construction guys, those still standing, raced along behind them. They knew the drill, and were trained better than to try any heroics. Clear the deck meant clear the goddamned deck.
The first propellant-launched grenade went off with a pop, shooting out the back of the flaming crate and flying, slow enough to follow with the naked eye, straight toward Ammo City. But when it got there, it flew right through the narrow center aisle and out the other side, dropping to the deck and skittering down its full length before dropping off the stern into the ocean far below.
It had missed all the stacked ammo and explosives by inches on either side.
Holy fucking shit, Drake thought, did we just dodge a bullet…
But that was all the time for thought he had.
Because, in another second, when the rest of the grenades in that crate cooked off in the fire, they were absolutely guaranteed not to miss everything on the deck – including and in particular the enormous depot of bullets and bombs – and were certainly going to impact and explode on something. If they were very lucky, they would only hit bulkheads, and people, and tractors – things that wouldn’t themselves blow up, triggering yet more explosions.
Basically, all their heroic preparations were about to be reduced to rubble by grenade fire – and their battle ended before it began.
“Oh, fuck this,” Drake muttered, gathering himself and coiling his muscles.
And, for the simple reason that he was closest, and because there was no one else, he ran the opposite way from everyone else on deck – toward the danger. Reaching around the flames that engulfed the crate, he found the release lever he hoped would unlock the rampart – it did – and flipped it out and over. Then Drake put his shoulder down and into the flaming crate – and shoved for everything he was worth.
The big, heavy box – which seemed a lot heavier due to Drake having to push the dead body of the welder before it – scraped across the deck then tumbled over the side, falling nearly 100 feet down to the water below. As it dropped, and as Drake could hear but not see, some hard-to-determine number of additional grenades cooked off. Two or three of them smacked into the steel prow of the ship and exploded. Others arced off over the ocean and splashed down harmlessly. As the echo of the explosions faded, Drake could hear the splash and sizzle as the flaming crate hit the water and extinguished itself.
He collapsed to the deck, sucking oxygen.
Correction: he hoped it had been the dead body of the welder.
* * *
“Why the fuck is this shit on my deck?” Drake asked now, back on his feet, the rescue and recovery effort buzzing around him. He was looking down at a pool of reddish hydraulic fluid on the bow runway – the one that went straight from the waist to the very front edge of the deck, and also ran quite close to Ammo City. It was this that the forklift had hit, and then skidded on, unable to stop.
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 6
