“Friendlies! Coming in!”
Speech meant it wasn’t the dead.
And the voice, as surprising as it was unmistakable, meant it was his commander – and friend.
Handon.
* * *
“Where is it?”
Ali was not only awake, but climbing back into the cargo area. She ignored the moaning, banging, and friendly forces, and dug around until she found it – the backpack with the mission objective. She’d secured it in back before going forward – but not really secured it against a crash and rollover. When she found it and picked it up, her face went ashen.
The bag was soaked, with an odorless liquid.
She dug the first box out and opened it. Every vial of HRIG was smashed. She dug the second box out. Every vial was perfectly intact. She looked up to see Homer smiling at her.
“Fine. God, miracles, whatever. Come on.” She shoved the box back in, slung the bag, clipped her rifle back on, and turned back toward the cockpit.
“Give me a hand,” Homer said.
She hesitated – but they didn’t have time to hesitate, so she just went back and helped him lift Aliyev up, the two of them shoving him through the cockpit, and out the escape hatch into waiting arms.
“Oh, good. You’re back.” This was Fick.
He and Handon were putting up an equally unlikely and masterful two-man defense of the crash site – or at least the tiny area in front of the escape window in the cockpit glass. It was only because they were tucked up in the lee of the helo on its south side, the armored vehicle and meat wall both flush behind that, and the great mass of the dead flowing around all of it, fixated on the lights and firing on the walls, that they had a chance. Handon and Fick were picking off ones that locked on, and were so far not drawing too many more in all the chaos. Then Ali realized more were dropping than these two were shooting. They were getting help, from the right side of the walls, angels on their shoulders – angels who knew how to shoot. She smelled Wheeler, Savard, and Charlie team.
“Yeah, we’re back,” she said, climbing out into the rain and death. “Had to spend two helos doing it.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Fick said. “Don’t think we’ll need ’em – this thing’s about to be over one way or another.”
Sounding like the annoyed senior sergeant he was, changing pistol mags even as he spoke, Handon shouted, “Any ammo onboard?”
Ali went over and hugged him anyway. “Good to see you, Top. I told you you’d come back.”
“Check the bodybag inside,” Homer said, half-emptying the first magazine of his found M9, then leaning down to lift Aliyev up into a fireman’s carry. “The zipped-up one.”
Handon climbed inside, and emerged a long ten seconds later with a new pistol – a high-capacity FN Herstal .45; and a new rifle – a .50-cal Beowulf, his ammo pouches also somewhat replenished. Ali didn’t need to ask whose those were – she’d only ever seen one Beowulf in her life. It suddenly hit her who was in those two bodybags, and that they were the same ones that had flown with them from Africa. She had no idea how they’d gotten from the plane to this helo. She did know she really didn’t want to leave either of them out here – not Jake, and particularly not Zack. Half-amused, she realized she’d rather rescue those two men dead than Aliyev alive.
“Ready?” Handon said.
But she also knew they were already facing an impossible run over open ground with too little ammo, too few shooters, and one litter casualty. There was no way they could take the fallen with them. It would be a miracle if they made it back as it was. But they had to try, and now was the time. Ali hoped Homer could call down one last miracle for them.
She drew her sword left-handed, as Handon and Fick reloaded and raised their rifles, and Homer gripped his pistol in one hand and the backs of Aliyev’s thighs in the other, everyone sucking breaths to top up on oxygen.
This was going to be one hell of a run.
* * *
Flashing headlights. Thundering engine. Towering steel.
At the last instant, before they could take off into a heaving ocean of dead so thick none of them really believed they were going to get through it… they were stopped, by all of the above, coming straight at them from the east.
All of the above, plus a minigun. And a bellowing voice.
“Somebody call for an Uber, motherfuckers?”
Predator.
The huge Husky armored vehicle smashed through the mob and rumbled to a halt in the mud between the heaving undead horde and the five people huddled in the lee of the crashed helo. Suddenly they had a tiny space they could defend, between the Puma and the Husky, open only on each side of the corridor between them – albeit the noise and motion of the truck drew attention, and meant they now had to defend it.
But at least they had a few seconds of breathing room.
“And now you’ve got a MaxxPro Mini!” Juice said triumphantly, sticking his head out the driver’s-side window.
“Load up!” Handon ordered – and while Homer hefted the unconscious Aliyev up over the side to Charlotte in the truck bed, Jamie shot over their shoulders to cover the rear, Pred spun the minigun in all directions, doing hellacious damage with short and careful but extremely dense bursts, and Ali and Fick covered the gaps on the ground to either side – Handon crawled back inside the helo cockpit. No one even had to ask why.
Seconds later, he appeared again, muscling out first one body bag, then the other. Wordlessly, the others covered them while Homer helped Handon heft them up onto the rain-spattered truck bed. This was in their DNA. Maybe the world would go down as a result of spending these fifteen seconds. But they weren’t leaving their fallen brothers behind. Not out here in the storm, to be eaten by the dead.
“No man left behind,” Pred said.
Juice twisted around in the cab. “What men?”
Homer answered. “Zack and Jake.”
“Seriously?” Juice had last seen them right before their combat jump, in the Dash 8. “Jesus, those dudes get around.”
Since they had a second, Ali shouted at Fick over her shoulder, across the body-loading activity in the protected space between helo and truck. “Hey, thanks for coming for us.”
“No problem. This shit’s a cakewalk since the vaccine kicked in.”
Decapitating a runner, then a Zulu, Ali laughed. “Bet you’re glad now you held that airfield to get Dr. Park out. And us.” Kicking the fallen bodies into something like a barrier, she said, “But you’re right – hardly sporting if the dead can’t infect us.”
“Yeah,” Fick said behind her, dropping out an empty rifle mag. “But fuck ’em.” Noises behind and above caused him to spin in place to see a Foxtrot coming over the top of the helo and down on Ali’s head. He let the rifle go and quick-drew his .45, tracking and emptying the mag into the lurching face. It hit the ground behind her, harmless.
“She was enrolled in my class – of course I thought she was eighteen!”
No one had the first idea what to make of that – but it was Aliyev, coming awake and shouting, in the truck bed. But even as he looked around in panic, he screamed in pain and grabbed at his midsection, evidently injured in the crash worse than it had appeared. Pred dropped down to check him out, but Aliyev stopped screaming and waved him off. “Hey, Drax the Destroyer – forget me. Keep shooting.” Then he saw a bite on his arm, and touched the back of his head, as rain soaked his hair and fogged his glasses. He was all fucked up.
But Pred shrugged, stood, and did as he was told. The dude wasn’t bleeding out, and his airway was obviously okay. On top of that, he now climbed out of the truck before anyone could stop him, stuck his torso in the helo cockpit – and came back out with his Benelli shotgun, which had been wedged in beside the pilot’s seat. By the time he climbed back in, the bodies had been loaded and Handon and Homer were climbing in after them, so Pred reached over the side, picked Ali up, and put her in the truck bed, while Fick jumped in the cab beside Juice.
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“What’s the plan?” Fick asked.
“Good question,” Juice said.
Obviously, getting back to the walls in the truck was going to be a hell of a lot less lethal than trying to do it on foot. But, then again, no-man’s land had filled up thicker and higher while they were out here, so it was going to be bumpy at best, plus everyone in the open bed was exposed, and it was conceivable they could get jammed up in that much meat and mud. Mainly, it wasn’t clear how they were going to get back inside. With the barbarians piled up in front of the gate, the defenders couldn’t possibly open it. And the ten-foot pile of destroyed dead Fick and Handon had jumped down onto was now a fifteen-to-twenty-foot pile of active ones. Climbing up that would be awkward at best, and would get them all eaten at worst.
Finally Juice shrugged. “Hey diddle diddle.” Winging it had been working for them so far.
Fick scanned the death zone. “Fuck me on a griddle.”
“That’s not the rhyme.”
Fick cupped his crotch. “Rhyme this.”
“Oi – everybody cover the fuck up!”
Female voice, English accent. Fick and Juice twisted around and saw Charlotte back in the bed. With everything else, no one had noticed she was on her radio all this time.
But they sure noticed now.
Reason To Believe
2,500 Feet Above Central London
[Six Minutes Ago]
The two twin-seater RAF Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4 multirole fighter jets roared over blacked-out, burning, overrun London. They were just about out of munitions, and low on fuel.
But they were in the air. Their last hurrah.
“—ay again, any Dambuster call signs, this is Wyvern Two-Zero, any joy?”
“You hear that?”
“Yeah, hear it, don’t believe it.” The back-seater hit his radio to respond. “Shit, Wyvern, you still alive?” They’d last been in the air together for an airspace handover above Kent Downs in the doomed battle for the south. She’d been coming out, having rained down dragon-fire on great swaths of dead in the fields below, much good it did, while they were going in.
“Approximately.”
“Because I’m not showing you on radar anywhere.”
“Said I was alive. Didn’t say my Apache made it.”
“Where the hell are you, then?”
“Grounded – rolling in a Husky through south London, toward CentCom in Wandsworth.”
“Explains why we can hear you. We’re headed that way, close.”
“Good. Because some danger-close is just what I need.”
“That so? Stand by, Wyvern. Hey, where’s CentCom?”
The pilot checked his map, then scanned the ground below. “Ten o’clock, four thousand meters. Wanna take a look?”
“Yeah, what the hell else are we doing?”
The pilot alerted the other aircraft they were breaking off and descending for a close target recce, then took them down.
“Okay, Wyvern, where the hell are you?”
“Just gone static, one-five-zero meters north of the CentCom walls – adjacent to a helo crash site!” She was having to shout now, over what no longer sounded like a Sunday drive.
“Copy that. We are visual on your vehicle and crash site.”
“Brill. What we need is danger-close strikes starting let’s call it three-zero meters south of our location, walking in a straight line and terminating three-zero meters north of the CentCom walls. Right up to the front gate, mate. How copy?”
“What, don’t you have a needle you want us to thread? May as well hold it up in your fingertips, too, for all the safe distance you’ve got. Stand by again.”
“We got anything for them?” the pilot asked.
“Yeah. We’ve actually got a two-hundred-fifty-pound Paveway. Figured it was pointlessly small to drop into a million deaders. Plus thought it might come in handy if anyone was alive and needed close support. Very close.”
“And here they are. Still – she at anything like minimum safe distance for a drop like that?”
“Ha. You having a laugh? Then again, if I drop it just right, in the exact middle of that target area, they might survive.”
“Fuck it. It’s the end of the world.”
“Yep. And that’s why God invented laser guidance. Wyvern Two-Zero, Dambuster One-Two, we are tipping in now. TTI let’s call it one-zero seconds. Cover up, kids.” He didn’t bother asking for final release authorization.
He figured they were well past that.
* * *
Meat, mud, and casing shrapnel slapped and peppered the heavy steel panels of the Husky and cracked window glass, as Juice and Fick tried to hide in the footwells of the cab, those in back tried to burrow through the bed into the dirt underneath, and Pred just stayed where he was, keeping the minigun up.
The laser-guided bomb hit exactly halfway between the crash site and the CentCom walls – but 75 meters was nothing like minimum safe distance for even a 250lb bomb. Then again, Predator never read those safe-distance tables. Despite sticking up over the turret gunner shields, he mainly just took cover behind a minigun metal storm.
Plus being Predator.
Even as the explosion settled and body parts rained down to earth mixed with the rain, and those in back stuck their heads back up again, Charlotte cheering, “Get in, my son!”… lights flashed behind them, a low-pitched horn sounded twice, and a distinctive voice popped up on Alpha’s channel.
“Kindly clear the road. We’ve no time for fannying about in a traffic jam.”
It was another truck – a much bigger and heavier tractor trailer, coming in from the same direction the Husky had, but using its twenty tons of cab, plus nearly twenty more of tanker full of fuel, to bash through the singularity like it was the minor annoyance Noise’s tone of voice indicated he thought it was. And it was coming right at their asses.
“Shit,” Juice said, jamming it in gear before they no longer needed to move under their own power – i.e. before the fuel tanker started shoving them forward – even as afterburning jet engines roared low overhead and a line of sparking explosions lit up their path to the front gates, the two jet fighters on a last clean-up strafing run, further clearing as well as illuminating their path, with a pair of Mauser revolver-cannons firing 27mm HE rounds at 1700rpm – all while Fick flipped channels and screamed at somebody to unless they wanted a big cockmeat sandwich with mustard when he got back to open the goddamned fucking gates right now.
The Husky lurched forward, veering left into the newly cleared channel to the walls, rain slashing down and thunder cracking overhead, the light and noise and mass of the tanker bearing down behind them, then threatening to tip over like the one in T2 but managing to stay upright, everyone in the back of the Husky firing or stabbing in 360 degrees to keep hurtling runners and leaping Foxtrots the ever-living fuck out of the truck bed – the minigun whining, Ali’s sword flashing, Homer’s pistol popping, Charlotte’s and Jamie’s rifles cracking, Aliyev’s Benelli thumping, and Handon’s new Beowulf booming unmistakably over it all, then all of them grabbing everything handy, including each other, to avoid being thrown out as the truck careened around the bomb crater itself.
The good news was the gates were cracking and swinging open even as they accelerated straight at them, the defenders on the walls above firing what had to be much of their remaining ammo, doing anything they could to try to clear even the small area below. The bad news was there was fifteen feet of mostly destroyed dead piled up, and the gates opened inward, and it wasn’t abundantly clear how they were going to get them closed again.
But at the last second, Juice cut the wheel, spun them around, or as much as you could spin a Husky – and the tanker truck blasted in behind them, bashing through the meat pile like it was a meat pile, and knocking the gates open another two feet on either side just to fit through.
But active dead were coming fast, so Pred switched out of ammo conservation mode and got into saving everyone’s as
ses mode, sucking rounds up from the ammo box inside, mowing down the front twenty ranks of enemy, while shouting over his shoulder, “Last stop, motherfuckers – everyone out!” He didn’t have to belabor that the minigun was their exit strategy, as the firing from above couldn’t ever be enough.
Handon and Homer powered out of the bed, with Jake and Zack slung over their shoulders, Charlotte and Aliyev scrambled behind them through the tanker-sized gap in the gate, while Ali and Jamie covered the flanks, and Juice and Fick leapt out of the cab and around the sides. Fick turned and shot as he retreated, but kept moving – while Juice stopped on the ground alongside Pred in the turret, who was still buzzing away to keep the tide back while the others got inside.
“Go, mate! I got this!”
Pred looked down to see that it was Jamie, the converted marauder, bleeding and pale, but brooking no dissent or discussion by simply climbing in on top of Predator’s head in the turret, forcing him back down inside. Much bigger and stronger, than everyone, Pred could have resisted. But he didn’t – in part to honor this man’s choice and sacrifice, but mainly because he knew Juice wouldn’t leave without him. As the minigun spun back up overhead, Pred powered out the side door, Ali leaping out above and beside him and Juice, then pounded the timber gate with a huge hand as he passed it, shouting “All in! Close it up! Close it up!”
The heavy gates swung over a carpet of bodies, crushing some, pushing others ahead of it, a handful of active ones rushing through the shrinking crack and getting cut down by defenders inside, the gates slowing against the resistance…
But finally banging into place, and sealing up tight.
They were home.
But not nearly safe. And nothing like done.
* * *
Reloading some of the four weapons he now had on him as he moved, Handon went straight around to the dirt ramp and right back up on the walls, the others following out of instinct or long habit. Getting back up top, he scanned the scene.
Unexpectedly, their whole madcap helo-crash-site, multi-truck, and air-strike adventure had bought CentCom a small reprieve. From up here, he could now see the singularity was being drawn to the site of the bomb hit and the HE strafing run, seeming to remember the noise of it, or else just mindlessly following one another, as had happened with the carrier wing’s air strikes in Virginia. For at least this tiny moment, they were fixating on a point in the center of no-man’s land, and not piling up against the walls. Also, Noise’s bashing with the tanker truck had effectively reset at least the center of the pile to zero. So the pressure on the walls had been slightly relieved.
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME Page 48
