Even as the bird settled on its tires, she brought the engines offline, fast, intent on saving every whiff of fumes in the tanks, and reached around to grab her carbine. Sure enough, she was out on the ground again, or damned close to it. And she needed to make sure she could defend herself, this LZ, and mainly the aircraft – which she knew she could do better from twenty meters away, rather than sitting inside it. History proved a thin-skinned Chinook on the ground wasn’t cover; it was just a shooting gallery that held its targets firmly in place.
But as she twisted at the waist to open the hatch, she froze and yelped in pain. The leg injury she’d sustained in the Apache crash outside CentCom had just screamed at her. Oh, well, she’d fought her way across the Common on it, she could make it twenty meters across uncontested rooftop.
But the sharp stab of pain also ratcheted her breathing in an instant, so she paused for just a second to catch her breath.
The building beneath her groaned – then cracked, loud.
Oh, shit.
* * *
Predator stole a glance at the civilians fanning out around the marauders, even as they fanned out more quickly around Juice, firing nonstop into his position to keep him pinned down – while the impervious minigunner put fairly disciplined bursts into Pred’s spot, which kept him from popping and engaging the dismounts. He figured there were a good seventy or eighty civvies out there, and only about fifteen bad guys. But the bad guys, as they often did, had guns. And guns were the original force multiplier.
It took serious cojones to attack a gunman while unarmed.
And Pred was still pretty much right where he’d been.
Now he was just going to have to charge out into the middle of that. He had no doubt he could terrify, out-move, and particularly out-shoot the dismounts, just as he had singlehandedly taken out the dozen bot-nappers outside. But this situation was different – a steel-encased minigunner was a difficult problem to solve. The dude wasn’t even going to have to stop to change ammo cans – the absence of one on the turret told Pred it was fed from down below, which most likely meant from a single long belt in a huge ammo bay.
Oh, well. He’d just make this up on the fly.
And then… and then a hellacious crash sounded from up on the roof of Armoury House, to the right, sending dust and debris and roofing material shooting up into the night sky, and drifting down again into the courtyard through the rain. As one, the undisciplined marauders stopped shooting and looked up at it.
And, nearly as one, the enveloping civilians jumped them.
They were led by that elderly dude, who kicked it off by walloping one of them in the back of the head so hard with his umbrella the guy’d probably be cleaning dirt out of his nose for weeks after the resulting face-plant. But moreover, in seconds, virtually every other one of the shitbirds had five or six normal people grabbing them, grappling with them, tackling them to the ground, and/or punching them. All of them but one.
That motherfucking minigunner.
Who now started mowing down civilians.
Motherfucker.
Pred charged. He could be at the armored vehicle in a couple of seconds, but meantime he was shooting nonstop into the ballistic glass viewports of the gunner protection kit on the turret – trying to get the minigunner’s attention, to get him to stop cutting down the civilians.
It worked.
The turret started spinning, weapon traversing his way.
The gunner was walking 2,000 rounds per minute onto him.
When they landed, they’d tear through Pred’s body armor like cling film. And then they’d turn even the giant, muscled, all-powerful, unrivaled body of the great Predator into sausage.
He ran straight toward it, bellowing.
* * *
But they weren’t done until Ali said they were fucking done.
Foxtrots leaping at their faces, bad-boy runner pack hurtling toward their backs, claustrophobic bodies and enclosing concrete all around… Ali not only didn’t give a shit. She also didn’t lose her shit.
She wasn’t even sweating.
“Cover me,” she said, both of them laughing at the absurdity of the old cliché, in what could plausibly be their last five seconds on Earth.
Nonetheless, Homer dug down, sucked wind, channeled his inner Predator, and went on an axe-crazy rampage, laying about both of them with every ounce of his spirt and strength, while at the center of this tiny hurricane, Ali sheathed her sword in a single motion, unslung the bag with the HRIG in it, dug out a box fast, and removed four glass vials even faster.
“Sure about that?” Homer asked around heaving breaths.
“Nope. But no choice.”
With three vials in her left hand, Ali gave the fourth a bounce in her right, remembering what Park and Aliyev told her about how they had used this stuff on their test subject, and the effects it produced. Then she stood to her full height, took aim on the snarling face of the closest Foxtrot as it half leapt over and half knocked aside the crowd between them.
And she hurled it with her full strength.
It was a perfect shot, going right where she put it.
Unfortunately, the snarling face was no longer there when the vial arrived, the Foxtrot’s hyperkinetic and unpredictable movements jerking it out of the way in the half-second flight-time of the projectile.
Ali tossed a second vial from left hand to right, and gave it another bounce – not to be cool, but to let the rampaging FNs get a little closer. Of course, if they got a whole lot closer, she and Homer would be dead. She wound up and hurled again.
And hit it square and solid – right in the creature’s junk.
It had leapt five feet in the air after her throw.
“That’ll never work,” Homer said behind her.
“No,” Ali agreed.
Homer was already snatching the last two vials from her left hand, so she just went with it, drawing her sword in a blur and covering him. And what she was covering was him, also in a blur, wrapping a length of the 100mph tape around the two vials, pressed up against the blade of his boarding axe – taping one to each side of it. Homer had evidently been listening when she said she’d used the flat of her sword on civilians.
Now he stowed the tape – and charged.
He went wading out into the thick of it, not waiting for the Foxtrots to get to him, knowing Ali would be following without having to look, staying in his back pocket, whirling and spinning, forward and then back, swinging and stabbing to keep him from getting taken down from the sides or by the runner pack still behind, which he knew from his own covering operations was also pushing toward them fast, closing the pincers. Facing forward, he stabbed faces with the spike-end of the boarding axe to clear his way. But he had to stab carefully.
Because their salvation was taped to that axe head.
The incoming Foxtrots started shrieking, telling Homer they had locked on – and also weren’t waiting for him to reach them, but coming in hard and fast, two irresistible forces on a collision course. And then the first one was there, flying at Homer’s face like dead Superman. He wound up his swing, timing the incoming fast-pitched face, but as he swung the flat of the axe forward, a runner he hadn’t seen lurched upward from beneath his arms, and his blood-and-gore-slick grip slipped on the handle, rotating the head forty-five degrees.
The edge of the blade took the Foxtrot’s head off.
When he reset his grip and rotated the blade, he could see it had also taken one of the vials off. It had slipped out from under the tape. Homer guessed holding together a jeep traveling 100mph, which is where the tape got its name, was one thing, while this was quite another…
But the other vial was still there. One left.
And the next Foxtrot was on him.
He didn’t have time to bring the axe back, so this was going to have to be a backhand swing. Gripping the handle with all his strength, fighting his weak and burning fingers and arms, counting on God to give him a last surge of str
ength when he had to have it, squinting to see through acrid sweat droplets, tuning out the chaos and death raging inches away on all sides, Homer swung the axe around with all his force.
The flat of the blade caught the hurtling Foxtrot square in the face, the vial smashing on the bridge of its nose, the force of the swing knocking it twenty feet back into the crowd.
But then the crowd was on Homer, too close and too many to defend against, and he went face down underneath it, bodies pressing him into the cold concrete, sharp nails and filthy teeth raking and gnashing across his body, trying to find the seams in his suit, going for his hands, face, and neck…
He felt a sharp tug on his drag strap. It was Ali grabbing him and pulling him out of the worst of it, free from the immediate pile, and back fifteen feet, trying to pull him to safety.
But there was no safety.
The mob just converged on them there.
Then he felt a smaller, lighter weight, one not attacking him.
But protecting him – Ali was covering his body with her own.
But now they were both down.
And unlikely ever to get up again.
* * *
Other than Reg, Jamie was the only one still on the Husky, or in any of the vehicles in the courtyard. The others had gone out on the ground, trying to circle round and finish off the one soldier they had pinned down behind the cannon. It wasn’t a bad idea, but Jamie liked the elevated position and cover of the truck, and so had stayed where he was.
Now the others were paying for their aggression.
They were getting jumped by civvy street, dozens of the fuckers coming out of the woodwork, mostly from behind. Fair play, Jamie figured. His group was armed, and the civvies weren’t, and if the lads couldn’t defend themselves, maybe that was too bad for them. But then…
Reg turned the fucking minigun on them.
And that was it – the step too far. Machine-gunning a crowd of civilians wasn’t on, and enough was enough. Jamie had to put a stop to it, whatever the cost, even if it meant killing Reg. He was a bastard anyway. Keeping low, he moved to the turret, pulled his pistol, and stuck it in the one vulnerable spot – the little seam where the front shields met the side ones. But before he could fire, dramatic motion caught his eye from the left – it was the second soldier, the one out in the guard house in the drive, charging them, and shouting.
Shit.
Reg realized it too, and was already spinning the turret to hit the man with his minigun – half-wrenching Jamie’s arm out of its socket. He pulled the trigger anyway, then twice more, but either missed or just wounded him, because Reg appeared up over the top of the turret with his own pistol, and Jamie felt another terrible pain in his shoulder.
He’d just been shot.
* * *
Huh, Pred thought. So that’s what two thousand rounds a minute sounds like an inch from your ear. A single round passing that close made a loud snap. Thirty or so at once was a whole new experience.
He was already diving forward, dropping to the deck, to get under the lethal fire-hosing of the minigun. It contradicted his charge the bastards and make the best of it plan, and would only keep him alive as long as it took the gunner to depress his barrel twenty degrees, about a second. But when it’s get killed in one second, or get killed now, you went with one second.
But even before his face hit dirt, the minigun stopped firing.
Going prone and looking up, Pred saw there was a dude standing in the bed of the truck, with his arm wedged in the gunner turret. And then the gunner rose up out of the turret with a pistol and shot him. He was only sticking up a few inches above the turret shield. But a few inches would do.
About fucking time, Pred thought, raising his rifle as the rat-bastard son of a bitch finally exposed himself.
But even as he sighted in, it was already too late.
Much of the dude’s brainpan exited his head on this side, the exit wound from a bullet entering the opposite one.
Looking up and over, Pred could just make out the shooter.
He was standing all the way up on the barrel of that big goddamned artillery piece to make the shot.
Juice. Of course.
* * *
As Ali covered up Homer’s body with her own, protecting him from the ravening and crushing horde that had fallen on them both, she wasn’t doing it just to put off the end. Instead what she was waiting for was…
The beginning of the end.
Of course she couldn’t know for sure it was coming. You were always playing the odds. But she’d heard Park and Aliyev describe in detail the behavior of a Foxtrot given a high dosage of HRIG, delivered via smashed vial to the face. And she’d seen that vial on Homer’s axe smash square into the face of this one. Finally, she knew that with the two of them down on the deck in one spot, they were guaranteed to be the center of local attention. Which should also make this…
The focus of attention for a rabid Foxtrot.
And sure enough, without warning, it tore into the pack of runners on their backs like a one-zombie Wehrmacht, blitzkrieging through the French army straight to the English Channel. The weight pressing down on them began to lessen, bodies hauled off and tossed aside, or torn into and ripped limb from limb, sent whole or in pieces tumbling down the ramp, or flying into the walls, or up to the ceiling.
Ali kept her body pressed down on Homer’s, unmoving.
Neither of them wanted any part of what was happening up above them. Moreover, neither of them wanted to interrupt it. Much less draw attention to themselves.
And it wasn’t even mainly the tactile sensation of bodies being pulled off. It wasn’t even the auditory input of shrieking like they had never heard, like no one ever had, interspersed with moaning and hissing that sounded for the first time not hungry and ferocious, but terrified. No, it was a spiritual sensation – one of malevolence, anger, evil, a pure force of unspeakable dark power tearing into the undead horde that had until two seconds ago been trying to tear into them.
It was a power somehow bigger and meaner than death.
Death was itself being killed, inches away from them.
And the killer of death was on a kill-crazy rampage.
Only when Ali felt the storm passing over did she uncover and look up. And that fifty yards to the window was clear. Well, nothing like clear, but passable in a way that had not remotely been the case ten seconds ago. The death-killer rabid Foxtrot tornado had mowed something like a path for them.
One that would be closing up again in seconds.
She hauled Homer to his feet and they both took off like meat rockets, not looking back once. They particularly didn’t look back when that unholy shrieking erupted behind them again – and then grew in volume. The death-killer had seen them. And now it was coming for them.
Evidently it liked killing life as much as it did death.
And it could definitely run faster than they could.
There was absolutely going to be no time to open that window and finger-hang the three-story drop. Lungs heaving and burning, legs pumping, heads and shoulders down, Ali clutching the HRIG bag to her chest with both arms, the two of them dove helmets first, smashing through the glass and out into open air, falling thirty feet through the wet and burning night, finally slamming into a soft grass lawn, thank God, both of them shoulder-rolling to absorb the shock of impact, which was also good because the death-shrieking followed them down, and they rolled out of the way fractions of a second before it hit the ground right where they had been, both of them scrabbling away, then turning back to regard it.
It was still beyond a nightmare, grabbing and thrashing and covered in blood and black gore and shrieking in a way that was not just painful to hear, but somehow seemed to contaminate their very souls. But it had also landed upright and square on its straightened legs – which were now jelly, every bone in both of them up to its pelvis shattered to sand. There was simply nothing solid for it to stand on.
“Mobility
kill,” Ali said, climbing painfully to her feet.
Doing the same a few feet away, Homer said, “Shame it’s off the job already. I don’t think we know what these things are capable of yet.”
Ali shrugged as she adjusted the sword on her back and checked her other weapons, then checked the bag to make sure the HRIG had survived the fall. It had, her much-battered body having intentionally taken the force of the impact. “Well, it’s nice to know the shit works.”
“Yeah. I always hate getting killed for nothing.”
“You’re bit,” Ali said, touching a ragged wound on his neck.
“You, too,” Homer said, their faces only inches apart.
“Guess this is where we find out if the vaccine works.”
He checked his watch. “Good thing we both got vaccinated before just about anyone else.”
“Come on,” Ali said, raising her rifle.
There wasn’t time to wrap up the minor wounds. South London was still swarming and burning all around them, and they had a long way yet to go. Limping, half-stunned, wounded all over, and still mostly out of breath, they moved out.
Doing the Mogadishu Mile.
* * *
As Pred climbed to his feet, now muddy on top of everything else, he kept his weapon trained on the other dude in the armored vehicle. But he had his hands up, plus was already shot, and something told Pred not to shoot him again.
He advanced on the truck, weapon up. Without having to look, he could see Juice in peripheral going around and dealing with the other marauders, the ones the civilians had tackled, and he wasn’t being so merciful. Maybe it was because those guys hadn’t been shot yet. He also probably had the right idea – just as on Lake Michigan, they couldn’t endanger their mission by leaving alive a bunch of assholes who’d been trying to murder them five seconds ago.
As Pred reached the bed of the hulking armored truck, reticle on the forehead of the wounded man standing there with his hands still up, his finger moved from his trigger housing to the trigger. Then the man spoke.
“Do what you gotta do, mate. But whatever your mission is, you’ll need the Husky. Take it. And I’ll help if you’ll let me.”
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME Page 42
