Paul leaned close to Bannon. “Chopper Two has been circling the harbor for exactly six minutes,” his voice through the headset sounded weirdly disconnected. The whine of the helicopter’s turbines and the droning beat of the big rotors was numbing. “Let’s fucking hope John Sully hears the message.”
Bannon nodded. “How long do you think we’ll need to be on the ground?” he spoke slowly and carefully back into the soldier’s bleak face, measuring his words because he was unfamiliar with the mike system.
Paul shrugged. “Maybe two minutes… maybe five. As soon as Sully shows his face, we are outta there.”
Bannon frowned. “What about Maddie? She might need more time.”
The man’s eyes became steely, devoid of any emotion. He stared at Bannon for long hard seconds and then said slowly, “We’re not waiting for your wife,” the soldier declared as the helicopter suddenly leaped a hundred feet higher into the air with a gut-wrenching swoop. “We’re not even looking for her.”
Bannon’s face went white. “What?”
“We have orders to get John Sully. That’s all.”
“No!” Bannon shook his head vehemently. “Smith and Colonel Fallow said we were going in to get Sully and Maddie.”
Paul’s expression turned to granite. “Well that’s not what they told me. Your wife is not part of this mission. We’ve only got orders to go in to get Sully.”
“What?” spat Bannon, stiffening on the hard metal bench and turning his face to stare incredulously at the soldier. He felt a sudden suffocating tightness in his chest. His lips moved. He was deathly pale. His voice came out as a small croaking whisper, hushed by the sudden enormity of his realization. He had been betrayed.
“It was all a set-up,” he gasped.
Suddenly the roar of the helicopter, the juddering jolting ride – everything faded into a swirling chaotic mist of confusion and desolation. Bannon’s expression changed, utter dismay twisting his lips like his face was contorted in pain.
“What about the photo? The witness who saw Maddie?” his voice was strangled even through the tinny sound of the headset.
“All bullshit,” the special forces soldier made an irritable gesture of dismissal, and then – almost as an afterthought – shrugged his shoulders apologetically.
Bannon stared dazedly into empty space, his lips becoming soft and slack. He felt himself somehow grow heavy. His shoulders sagged and his face felt suddenly cragged and etched with the deep lines of shock. He felt himself panting, his breath whistling and wheezing from his lungs. There was sweat on his brow. It trickled down his forehead and into the corner of his eye but he did not notice.
He had been betrayed.
The helicopter came in low over the ocean, its wheel struts seeming to brush the crests of the rolling swells that marched relentlessly towards the rugged coast. They were flying into the afternoon sun, and the interior of the chopper lit with bright golden light.
Paul was staring at his wristwatch intently, counting down the seconds. He looked up. “One minute!” he bellowed, and held up a single finger. The rest of the team shouted back the words, and then the helicopter seemed to rear up like a horse, swooping up the face of the cliffs and over a stand of dense trees before dropping like a stone towards the ground.
The special forces team snatched off their headsets and went tense, their bodies coiled like springs. Ringo reached out a hand for the fuselage door.
The pilot pulled back on the cyclic and lowered the collective. The nose of the Black Hawk rose up and Bannon felt himself sink back into his seat. The helicopter seemed to stop in the air as if it had hit an invisible wall. The sensation as the chopper plunged towards the ground was like being trapped in a falling elevator. Bannon felt his stomach churn. His eyes went wide with panic. He saw Ringo across the space of the cargo hold grimace at him mirthlessly. Then the pilot pushed forward on the cyclic control and at the last possible moment hauled up the collective to cushion the landing as the helicopter’s forward momentum bled away. Bannon felt the nose of the helicopter draw level and through the cabin window the world suddenly flattened out as it rushed up to meet them.
The wheels of the chopper swished in long grass, then bounced and settled again with a gently jarring thud. Billowing clouds of dirt swirled in the air like thick smoke.
They had landed.
Steve Bannon had flown back into hell.
Part Three.
Chapter 1.
“Go! Go! Go!” the crew chief shouted. He sprang from his seat and crouched by the open door. Ringo exploded from the helicopter, and the crew chief slapped him on the back. “One!” he barked as the soldier went through the opening. Ringo hit the ground, cushioning the impact with bent legs and a grunt.
“Two!” the crew chief cried. He thumped George on the back as the man paused for a split-second at the breach, and then hurled himself down into the long grass of the sports field.
“Three!”
John went through the open door like he was leaping out of a plane. He hit the ground hard, rolled over on his shoulder and came up in a single fluid movement, bounding away with a curious lumbering gate, weighed down by kit and his weapon.
“Four!” the crew chief shoved Paul out of the helicopter. The team leader landed on his feet and went down in a crouch, goggles over his eyes to protect his vision against the swirling chaos of dust and noise.
Ringo and George were fifty yards to the north. They dropped down onto the ground, flat on their stomachs, side by side. Paul turned his head, saw John sprinting away to face the approach from the marina. He sprang to his feet and ran in a crouch to join him, snapping the goggles off his face and propping them atop his helmet as he ran.
Bannon stared through the open doorway. The crew chief was hunched down behind the machine gun, swinging the heavy weapon in a wary arc. The helicopter’s rotors began to wind down, and the noise faded to a dull idling roar of background noise, like the rhythmic beat of loud music in a crowded bar.
The soldiers had formed a triangle, with the helicopter as the top, and the two teams forming the far points – one facing towards the shops and buildings of the business strip, and the other covering the approach to the field from the marina.
Bannon stared in dreadful fascination. The veil of haze began to thin, lifting like a morning mist, to reveal the unfolding danger.
Only there wasn’t any danger.
The afternoon was ominously still.
Bannon studied the team covering the marina. He saw Paul cock his head to the side and focus with all his attention on a faint stench that seemed to carry like a whisper on the air. Bannon stared hard at the open ground ahead of the team, following the grassy field until it ended at a low wooden fence. Beyond the barrier was the road out of town. It crossed a narrow canal of mangrove and swamp, and then disappeared behind a stand of thick trees.
Nothing moved.
He turned his head and peered at Ringo and George. The soldiers were laying prone in the grass, automatic rifles pressed to their shoulders, sighting across the ground beyond the fence line of the sports field as it rose towards the strip of businesses. Buildings were smoldering, charred timbers like crisp blackened bones around collapsed brick and glass.
Smoke rolled down the slope and hung like a writhing curtain. Bannon narrowed his eyes, and felt his breath choke harsh in the back of his throat.
Through the roiling grey veil suddenly danced ethereal figures, spilling out of the narrow side streets and from within the wrecked shops, forming into clumps and then clusters, and then crowds as they rushed down the hill, howling shrieks of formless, furious sound that rose to a blood-chilling clamor.
There were at least a hundred of the undead, Bannon guessed, moving in an extended ragged line that had no cohesion. They came on like a churning sea, undulating and breaking apart, and then re-forming again to become a solid driving mass of madness.
The closest zombies were almost on top of the soldiers’ position. Inc
ongruously Bannon noticed that most of the undead were women, flailing their arms and running down the gentle slope as though unable to control their legs. Some of the undead were dressed in tattered rags and many others were naked. Their bodies were streaked with blood, their faces contorted with the frenzy of their insanity. They howled and snarled with rage and the world filled with the roar of their hideous horror.
“Fire!” roared Ringo, and the urgency in his cry carried clearly to where Bannon watched in ghastly fascination. Then the air erupted, and the rattling sound of automatic fire ripped the horde apart. Smoke blotted out all Bannon’s vision for an instant.
“Fuck it!” Bannon swore. He craned forward, hunting through the grey curtain with his eyes, desperately searching the haze of shadowy wraiths for a patch of brilliant white. Beside him, the crew chief opened fire with the heavy machine gun, and the helicopter’s fuselage seemed to shudder and vibrate beneath him as an arc of white-hot shell casings spewed and clattered around his feet.
The roar of the weapon was deafening – the sound reverberating and hammering at his ears. Impulsively, Bannon leaped from the chopper and started to run.
“Hey!” the machine gun fell silent for a shocked second as the crew chief cried out to him. Bannon kept running. He felt unnaturally bulky wearing the heavy chest rig and his gait was lumbering. He reached the fold of ground where Ringo and George were, and threw himself face-down into the dirt.
A wall of zombies loomed ahead of him. Ringo and George were firing in controlled bursts, sighting targets through the smoke, working their weapons with precise economy. The undead line rippled and wavered like a field of wheat as the hail of automatic fire scythed them down. The ghouls collapsed in crumpled heaps, flung to the dirt as if punched by invisible fists. Ringo and George kept firing.
Bannon saw one woman take a burst of fire that juddered into her abdomen, tearing her almost in half. She went over on her back, thrashing her legs and with a shrilling scream gurgling in her throat. The ghoul rolled in the grass and then sprang back to her feet. Her guts had been torn open, ragged holes seeping thick syrupy ooze down her legs. The woman threw back her head and howled, her mouth wrenched into a hideous slash, before another searing hail of gunfire caught her full in the face. It blew the top off the zombie’s skull.
The corpse fell backward, and the pulped yellowy mush of its head splattered over the shambling figure beside it. The contents of the skull hung in the air for an instant like a fine mist.
Still the undead came on. Bodies were piling up around the two soldiers, forming a gruesome wall of inhuman sandbags, and the grassy field became wet and slippery with blood and gore. George rolled onto his side, flung an empty magazine away and slotted a fresh one into his weapon. He saw Bannon hunched in the grass.
“What the fuck are you doing?” George asked in the split-second of relative silence. The soldier’s expression was incredulous. He snatched a fresh magazine from one of the pockets of the vest Bannon was wearing. His face was blackened with dust and spattered with flakes of gore and guts so that his eyes looked like they were set in deep dark holes.
“Looking for my wife!” Bannon hissed.
George rolled back onto his stomach and opened fire again.
For a few moments of respite, the charging zombies seemed to lose their momentum. The ground was strewn with the dead and dismembered. Some dragged themselves closer, clutching at shattered limbs, the berserker insanity of their infection still blazing in their eyes. The soldiers picked them off with merciless precision.
Ringo stole a glance at his wristwatch. He was breathing hard. He licked cracked dry lips and wiped his sweating forehead on the sleeve of his uniform. His face was streaked with dust.
“We’ve been on the ground for two minutes,” he said. He spat a thick wad of phlegm into the grass, then squinted up into the sun.
George shook his head, incredulous. “The fuckers just keep coming.”
“We hold here for two more minutes, then start moving back,” Ringo decided. “If this fucker Sully hasn’t turned up by then, he ain’t coming.”
George nodded. Across the field Paul and John were in the process of reloading. The line to the marina was still clear.
The slope of the hill was a slaughter yard. Pale, blood-streaked limbs protruded stiffly from corpses that had been piled upon each other. The stench of death burned in Bannon’s nostrils. It was a smell of guts and gore, of decay and decomposition.
He got numbly to his feet and peered past the break wall of infected corpses, his bloodshot stinging eyes searching the ground for a patch of white. He saw nothing, and the clutch of his despair gripped tight around his heart.
“Maddie!” he cupped his hands around his mouth and cried out. “Maddie Bannon!”
He took a couple of tentative shuffling steps forward. The smoke was being drawn down the hill by a gentle breeze. It rolled across the grass like an eerie ocean fog bank. On the edge of the haze, Bannon saw a sudden apparition of movement – a specter that lurched towards him. He felt himself hope against hope. He called out again, turning towards the approaching figure.
“Maddie?”
An undead woman came bursting through the tendrils of smoke with a crazed snarl of rage, and shrieking a demented scream. Her features were contorted into an infernal bloody mask. Her hair was dripping and clotted with slimy gore, and the skin of her cheeks was charred black. Her lips and nose had been burned from her face so that the open screaming mouth was a vast black hole of horror exposing broken teeth and festering sores that were custard yellow with puss.
A blackened tongue slithered demented from the unhinged jaw and she tottered over the rampart of bodies and flailed her clawed and broken fingers at Bannon.
The air swished before his face and Bannon flinched away as the undead woman’s hand passed just an inch from his forehead. There was a yelp of fear in his throat and his eyes went wide and white with cringing horror. Bannon stumbled backwards as the woman swayed closer, her arms gnarled and twisted.
The undead ghoul took a blundering step forward. In life she had been an old woman, hunched and cronelike. In death her eyes blazed yellow and predatory with the virulent infection. She snapped her head forward and the hoarse rasping sound of her voice was a loathsome serpentine hiss.
Bannon felt his feet go from under him. His arms cartwheeled for a flailing handhold that wasn’t there. He cried out in blind panic… and then he fell to the ground on his back.
Blam!
Ringo fired a single shot, the roar of it deafeningly loud in Bannon’s ears, and the ghoul’s head was wrenched sideways as the bullet went up through the zombie’s jaw, and tore a ragged path out through the back of its skull. The woman buckled at the knees and then fell face-first into the long grass.
Bannon lay prone for one terrified moment, staring at the sightless infected face of the woman. His ears were ringing and there was a churning nausea in the pit of his guts. He was panting like a running dog – the white hot flush of his terror wrung out blisters of sweat across his brow. He sat up in the dirt, slow and dazed and blinking.
“Fucker!” Ringo growled but without visible emotion. “Get your ass back to the chopper.”
Bannon turned and staggered back towards the helicopter. He saw the rotors still turning slowly, saw the helmeted face of the pilot peering through the plexiglass bubble of the cockpit. Bannon was reeling, his heart still hammering in the cage of his chest. The crew chief hunched over the machine gun was waving his arm frantically at him, the man’s mouth wide open shouting words that were being whipped away by the beating sound of the machine.
Bannon hauled himself through the open hatchway. He was trembling. He slumped down heavily on the bench seat, hunched over with his head cradled between his splayed fingers. His breathing quavered in his throat. Behind his closed eyes he saw pinwheels of bright light and flashes of color. He rubbed at his temples, and then opened his eyes again slowly…
…to a fresh
unfolding horror.
Chapter 2.
The slope of the hill was swarming with another wave of undead ghouls that poured down through the long grass. They came in a pulsing surge, milling with those who had fallen prey to the guns, and pushing them forward so that Ringo and George were overwhelmed. The two special forces soldiers fired long withering bursts at the tide of undead, and a dozen fell, but more came behind them. The two soldiers leaped to their feet and went sprinting back towards the helicopter.
The crew chief at the heavy machine gun tried to cover them, but the swarming press of undead was like a tidal wave that threatened to wash them all away. Ringo turned, still twenty yards from the helicopter, and dropped to one knee. Bannon could see Paul and John sprinting back towards the chopper. The two men were running hard, weighed down by weapons and kit. Paul made a fist and was frantically circling one finger into the air. George ran past Ringo and then turned back to give covering fire.
It was too late.
The zombies flung themselves at Ringo, and in a stuttering hail of bullets, the elite soldier went down. One of the ghouls reeled away from the melee, its arm severed at the elbow joint, but others flung themselves at the soldier and his blood-curdling cry ripped the sky apart. A dozen of the ghouls clawed and gouged at his body, tearing the soldier apart and ripping open the pouch of his stomach so that his entrails bulged pink from the wound. Through milling legs and flailing arms, Bannon caught a final glimpse of Ringo. The man’s face was wrenched in agony, his eyes slitted and his jaw hanging slack. He was crawling through the bloody grass towards the helicopter on his hands and knees, the weight of his bowels swinging and slipping beneath him.
Bannon heard George cry out in rage, and then saw the big man open fire, sweeping the barrel of his assault rifle in a wide arc. There was a murderous fanatical roar in his throat. He emptied the magazine in one long burst and then reloaded. Those few seconds cost him his life.
Dead Rage Page 13
