And he wouldn’t last long down there.
Fick flared his chute desperately – but not as desperately as he wanted to, because he still had to hit a narrow window. If he slowed himself enough to make his landing safe, he’d also miss the fantail deck entirely, smacking into the stern above it. He was coming in hot, with basically no room to maneuver. A large door in the rear wall of the fantail opened up on to the hangar deck – for a second he was tempted to go for that, as it would give him farther to slide. But trying to parachute through an open door was just crazy talk, and—
Fuck it, he thought. I’m out of time, anyway.
A small knot of amazed and aghast sailors, wearing helmets and flak jackets, broke and scurried to get clear of his landing zone. Fick hit the unyielding steel deck at speed, his legs collapsing under him, and his momentum carrying him into the bulkhead at the rear. He hit it like a ton of bricks, mostly head first, and collapsed in a pile of himself.
The trailing silk of his parachute floated down gracefully and draped over his half-dead body.
* * *
When the sailors on the fantail unburied him, they found Fick having a bit of a lie-down. Just hugging the cozy steel deck plating for a few seconds there. But, shortly after they revealed his sprawled-out shape from under the burial shroud of silk, he sat up, rose to his knees, knelt there in a daze – and began gathering up his parachute, solely out of habit.
One of the sailors squatted before him and leaned in close, ogling at the profoundly rough condition of this inexplicable Marine-from-heaven. “You need a medic, man?”
Fick just coughed and waved his hand vaguely. He looked down at his double armful of parachute silk, shook his head, and dropped it again.
That was fucking pointless, he thought. He had better shit to do than repack his chute.
A dramatic swooping motion in his peripheral vision drew his gaze up – just as the same group of sailors shouted, broke, and ran for it again.
A second big green canopy flew in through the rain and wind and a big body kissed the deck just a meter to Fick’s left, in a nice two-point landing. It was Graybeard. Just as quickly, a third parachutist appeared out of the storm and landed two meters to his right: Brady.
Fick shook his head. “Oh, you sons of bitches…”
Brady just grinned. Graybeard shrugged, then stepped forward and shrugged out of his harness and pack. “You go,” he said. “We go.” Cursing under his breath, Fick started to get out of his own harness. And then all three of them ducked reflexively as another swooping motion flew at their heads…
This one missed the fantail deck entirely, coming in too low, and crashed into the stern just below it. The three Marines lunged at the parachute lines, or grabbed armfuls of silk, while a couple of panicked sailors rushed over to help. Hauling powerfully, they hefted the limp body at the end of the lines up to the railing, pulled him over, and then lowered him to the deck.
It was Reyes. His head lolled on his neck.
Fick glared down at him. “Dumbass! What possible good do you think you can do here?”
Reyes just looked childlike and slightly hurt, staring up from his prone position on the deck. “I didn’t want to miss anything.”
Fick shook his head. These were just the kind of strong-willed, unstoppable, bulldog-tenacious men he had. Love ’em, hate ’em, or (most often) both, he was stuck with them.
“Okay,” Fick said tiredly. “But, Reyes, your dumb ass is going to the hospital. And I’m not carrying you there.”
Reyes looked even more hurt. “Let me stay here. I can guard the fantail.”
Fick shook his head. “You can guard the goddamned hospital.”
Brady said, “If history’s any guide, that will be the most dangerous place on the ship.”
Fick grabbed a nearby sailor. “Can you carry this man to the hospital?”
The sailor shook his head, cradling a shotgun. “Love to help you out. But we have orders not to leave this post, hell or high water. But we’ve got a litter there you can use.” He pointed to what looked like an improvised aid station, set up in the corner.
“All right,” Fick said, Graybeard already going over and grabbing and unfolding the litter. “We’ll drop him off ourselves, on our way up to the fight. It’s not totally out of the way…”
As they got Reyes loaded up and headed out, Fick shook his head one last time at the absurdity of the whole fucked situation.
Well, he thought, and this was the one consoling thought he could come up with, at least Alpha is safe on the goddamned destroyer…
Predator’s Lament
The JFK Flight Deck
Handon spared a look straight up, along the walls of the pallet maze that surrounded him. He thought about climbing up on top of one of the stacks, as the only way to keep himself alive for a few seconds more. But he was loath to do it, because he couldn’t readily tell his people to do the same. In the two minutes they’d had to plan and coordinate, one thing they hadn’t done was tie in comms. Most of the sailors didn’t even have radios, never mind common frequencies.
Handon brought his gaze back to level and resumed his frantic, hopeless, methodical, perfect-but-still-not-good-enough shooting, forward and left. However many Zulus fell, others pushed by them or climbed over. The only reason Handon was still alive was that the bodies blocked the aisles. If he were out in the open, not protected by the grid of Ammo City, he would have been pulled down several lifetimes (i.e. several seconds) ago.
His pouches were empty again, and he was pulling mags directly from the open crate beside him. Unlimited ammo was great. But what he needed was unlimited shooters; or at least more than the one who still covered his right, and the two or three he suspected, but didn’t know, were still alive behind him, and covering his back. He had a vague sense that those few were collapsing in on him. Somebody had to be there – because he hadn’t been swarmed and pulled down from behind. Yet.
But the noose was closing. And Handon saw no way out.
That he’d go down shooting, fighting in mankind’s last biggest military operation, and in support of its last best bid for survival, was some consolation. But he’d never really doubted he’d go down fighting – that he’d die in a pile of his own brass.
What bothered him was that the job wasn’t done. And he hated to be called home before seeing it through.
He realized the shoulder of the man to his right was now touching his own. Stealing a glance, he saw more hair spilling out from the helmet – it was the young woman who had saved him earlier. She was still on her feet. But, now that they were back to back, there was nowhere else to retreat to, and no other options left.
“Climb!” Handon shouted. “Climb for it!” Maybe he could manage to bring one person with him. Then again, looking up, he belatedly realized the eight-foot wall of crates wasn’t very climbable – it was nearly sheer, in fact. He wasn’t sure he’d have time to scramble up there before he was waist-deep in dead and pulled back down again, with no one covering his withdrawal. For that matter, he wasn’t real optimistic an eight-foot wall was going to long hold up a herd of dead that had just climbed up to the fucking flight deck of a supercarrier.
He figured it was just turning into out-of-options day here in the ZA.
Still firing non-stop, rain-water dripping into his eyes and streaming off his body, Handon glanced up again to try and plot a vertical route.
And enormous black assault boots flew at his face out of the dark gray sky, soles first. Handon recoiled reflexively, and tried to duck. For a second, he didn’t have the faintest idea what was happening.
But then a huge, wet shadow hit the deck and completely filled the aisle to his left. Giant arms reeled in the parachute canopy that floated down behind him, and wrapped it around the two or three flailing Zulus in front of him. Then a pair of tree-trunk-like legs dug into the deck, and the man-mountain started shoving. And as he did so, the entire aisle full of writhing and grasping dead bodies, plus the alre
ady destroyed ones, were pushed back – shoved all the way down the aisle, and straight out of Ammo City.
It was like Paul Bunyan had dropped in, and started tossing giant redwood logs around.
“NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE, MOTHERFUCKERS!” came a bellowing, basso voice, which practically drowned out the storm and the battle itself.
Handon blinked hard at the giant, rippling back.
Predator.
* * *
Having cleared the left flank through the very literal method of using his monstrous physical strength to push the dead straight out of it, now Predator turned, faced Handon, and took a quick look around him.
Handon hardly had time to greet him. He was back to firing flat out, straight up the aisle that faced the ramparts, which he could now almost get a handle on, with his left flank covered again. He did note that Predator didn’t have a rifle; his SCAR-H had been lost in that bunker in Chicago; and the shotgun he’d cadged from the Camerons had gone out the window to lighten the bomber. He still had his side arm; but, in a fight against odds like this, with nearly unlimited opponents, it was just about as useful in its holster as out of it. There it stayed.
But Pred was looking around him, and doing perhaps a better job of creating and maintaining situational awareness than Handon was. Because he quickly clocked a large steel rod that ran along the deck through the gaps in the pallets – a strut that in fact had been recovered from the destroyed crane, and used to stabilize the base of this block of Ammo City. With a guttural roar, and another massively powerful shove of his whole upper body, Predator sent the entire wall of crates spilling over on to its side. Wood and metal clattered and crashed as splintered planks, mags, grenades, and individual rounds erupted, tumbling out into the lashing rain and the chaos of the battle, spilling onto the deck, down the aisles, and all around their enveloped position.
It quickly became clear this accomplished two things. First it cleared some space around them. Handon hardly thought this a great tactical innovation, since it had only been the cover of the walls that had kept him alive this long. And, sure enough, dead started stumbling in over the debris, from the whole front-left quadrant. But the second thing it did was uncover the big steel rod running through the pallets beneath. Pred had no way of knowing that it had taken two burly sailors to carry the huge hunk of metal over there from the wreckage of the crane.
He only knew he liked the look of it.
And when he hefted up the enormous length of iron, and began laying about him with it, Handon quickly developed more sympathy for the plan of clearing out some space. Because, with a little room to swing it, this improvised weapon quickly proved to be much faster and more devastating than Handon’s rifle – plus engaged more opponents at once, and never needed reloading. The iron bar became a crushing extension of Predator’s ridiculous physical strength, as he heaved it left and then right, clearing – and holding – a 270-degree arc out to almost fifteen feet.
Amazingly, he was knocking down the swarming dead faster than they could rush in.
Of all the kill-crazy rampages and heart-stopping bravery and badassery that Handon had witnessed in his very long career, this probably topped them all. The girder sloughed off rainwater as it arced through the air to one side, then the other, crushing dead bodies with each metronome-like swing. It collapsed chests and ribcages, dislocated shoulders, knocked heads clear of necks. Bones, organs, limbs, thoraxes, all of them flew through the pelting rain to tumble and splash across others still standing, or across the surface of the deck. Some of the ones that went airborne from the swinging and unstoppable force knocked down others behind them, like bowling pins.
Predator bellowed his rage out into the storm as he laid down devastation all around him. Rivulets of rain ran off his bulging musculature, and flashes of lightning illuminated his set jaw and eyes that were fixed and precise and emotionless, like a bird of prey, or a great white shark. In this moment, the impossible came to pass: hundreds of undead… ten million of them… all the world’s dead put together, it didn’t matter – they couldn’t resist him and his berserker rage. In this moment, he transcended all mortal limits.
In this moment, he became a god.
Handon had never heard Zulus make any noise except the hissing and moaning associated with their hunger, malevolence, and the nearness of prey. Of course it was his imagination, but he would have sworn he could hear these ones begin to keen with fear, pain, and panic. Dozens of them, and pretty soon hundreds, were just being swept away into slaughterhouse leftovers. Soon there was a ring around them, twenty feet out, waist-high and growing, of dismembered Zulu. Few of them were destroyed, because most had their heads still intact.
But with bodies ruined by the irresistible impacts of Predator’s gargantuan swings, they weren’t much more dangerous than chained-up dogs.
* * *
Over a kilometer away across the water from this desperate scene, Captain Abrams blasted out of his bridge on the Murphy and rolled around the outer side deck toward the stern and within sight of both the CIWS gun station on the stern, and the Bushmaster on the starboard side – and, more importantly, within shouting distance of them.
Both had gone silent, and he could see the two gun crews frantically reloading.
The timing on this sucked a whole barrel of phalluses. The crews just hadn’t been enough on the ball – and, okay, he hadn’t been enough on the ball – to manage the timing needed to keep them reloading in serial, rather than parallel. And this lapse was carrying an immeasurable cost for the men and women on the carrier.
Abrams didn’t need the Raven mini-UAV to see what was happening on the flight deck of the Kennedy. He barely needed binoculars – it was visible with the naked eye.
They were being overrun.
He sucked in a huge lungful of air, and started bellowing: “Move your fat asses! Get those goddamned guns back online! Now, now, now!”
* * *
As Handon fought alongside Predator’s kill-crazy rampage, he now perceived the second Miracle of Ammo City. While monitoring Pred’s lethal frenzy in peripheral – mainly with a view toward not getting hit with the all-crushing steel bar – he had still been facing and shooting forward. And now he saw the heavy strafing fire on the ramparts kick up again – and the flow of undead over its top slow, then nearly stop. The destroyer’s guns were back up – though Handon couldn’t know for how long. Now was their main, and perhaps only, chance.
“Go, go, go!” he shouted. “Displace!”
Predator moved down the mostly destroyed row, exiting Ammo City to the left. He kept swinging his Brobdingnagian steel club, nearly mindlessly now, sweeping the deck all around them, clearing a path for the others. It was just pure arm and chest strength, sending crushed dead bodies flying through the pelting rain in all directions; and even the ten-million-Zulu march couldn’t mobilize quickly enough to replace the ones he devastated. In the fairly big pinhole he created, he and Handon and what turned out to be three surviving members of his team made their escape.
As Predator led the way out, the roar of the battle and the storm somehow faded to background noise for him, and his visual field went into razor-vivid slo-mo – and his mind actually began to wander. His first thought was: Christ – I AM a holy terror when I go off on a rampage. Which is great – just as long as I stay on the right side…
But soon, with every wide, dramatic, slow-motion swing of his land-giant’s improvised weapon, each one collapsing thoraxes and shattering pelvises, he found himself peering off into memory, even as he squinted into the splashing rain and rampaging horde, trying to picture… his wife. God, he had to work so hard even to call up Cali’s face now. She was drifting away from him in time as she already had in space, the horrible, insurmountable expanse of the ZA spreading out and piling up between them.
And he didn’t think he could feel any farther away from her than he did in this moment – standing out in the near dark of the rain-lashed flight deck on this stupid, str
icken carrier, ankle-deep in gore, single-handedly holding off a significant chunk of the entire world’s population of undead.
And, once again, that final phone call with her intruded into his mind, like a cancer metastasizing into healthy flesh, like a thought he couldn’t unthink, a memory that would not be erased… Back at Hereford, he had started trying to get through to her when they first got word that Fort Bragg might actually fall. And he finally did get through – but he did not count himself lucky that he had; though others around him, who hadn’t been able to reach their families, seemed to think him lucky. And finally, in the end, he had never told anyone, with the sole exception of Handon, that she had been bitten, and in the process of turning, when they spoke for that final time.
The memory of her terrified, sad, loving, pleading voice was now like a mortal wound, an arrowhead buried deep in the heart of the great unkillable warrior. None could resist his assault, nothing could stop him. But he hadn’t been there to protect the only thing that really mattered – his darling Cali. He couldn’t save her; and he’d had nothing more to offer her than his poor words, along with tears that no one would ever see.
And without really being aware of it, he looked up to find that there were no more Zulus for him to bash. He cast around to find that he had single-handedly cleared most of the fore-deck down to a manageable level – and that he had led Handon and his survivors right up to the front of the re-forming line of militia.
He had won.
The center of the line was now anchored by the forklift truck, which faced away, toward the stern. On its opposite side, hungry militia tore into the crates and grabbed up ammo; and two or three had jumped up on top of it to fire down into the remnants of the enemy that Pred had so terribly culled. It appeared now the defense would stand, at least for a while longer. Pred turned and saw three tooled-up sailors racing back to the lines behind him, herded along by Handon, who was as always bringing up the rear, last man out. Pred made way to let them in, and moved to face outward and cover their withdrawal.
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 22
