Acheson returned the gesture, and the helicopter lifted off into the war-torn night.
16
“Hey, Dad, what’s going on?” Lenny asked when he met McDaniels in the D-FAC for a quick dinner. The Howies were there as well. Belinda smiled at him as he pulled out a chair and sat down. He nodded to her, then to Jim and Jeanette.
“Seems to be a lot of action going on, Colonel,” Jim said. “Lots of folks are being pushed onto the helicopters, I see.” The D-FAC trembled suddenly as something thundered out in the desert. “And if I’m not mistaken, it seems that the Air Force is dropping high-explosive bombs now.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you guys about,” McDaniels said. “We’re evacuating the civilians from the camp. The stenches—the zombies—they’re headed right for us. All of them.”
“But aren’t they here already?” Jeanette asked.
“Some of them are here, yes. But there are millions more entering Texas, and in a few days, we’ll be completely surrounded. I don’t want to get into the details, but we’ve decided that it’s no longer feasible to defend the camp against them. There are just too many. If they were live human beings, we could make a stand, but with these things, you need to generate a kill with every shot, and we just don’t have the resources to go around.”
“Why are they coming here?” Lenny asked.
“We don’t know.” McDaniels looked down at his tray. He had a chicken salad sandwich, a small salad, and a power drink. Like everyone else in the camp, he’d been downing the caffeine-laden drinks and coffee at an alarming rate, and the mere sight of the plastic bottle almost made him ill. Just the same, he uncapped it and took a long pull.
“But there must be some reason,” Jeanette said.
“There might be,” McDaniels agreed. “We just don’t know what it is.”
Jim Howie leaned back in his chair and grunted. “Sounds like maybe these things aren’t so dumb after all.”
McDaniels nodded, but chose not to comment any further on that aspect of the situation. “Anyway, once we have all the key InTerGen and government people out of the way, we’ll start with the rest of the noncombatants in the camp. I want you folks to know that you’re first up.”
“What about you, Dad?”
McDaniels played with his salad. “I have to stay behind, son. You know that.”
“What, stay behind while this place is overrun?”
“We have to hold them back until the noncombatants are out of here,” McDaniels said. “And then we have to fight a holding action to cover the retreat.”
“But you’re the commanding officer. You have to get out first!” Lenny said.
“Lenny.” McDaniels looked at his son directly. “Let me explain how these things work. Once we shut down SPARTA, I’m no more valuable than any other troop. There are plenty of people here who have far more specialized skills than I do. And as the commander of this task force, it’s my responsibility to ensure that every soldier, sailor, and airman under my command is taken care of.”
“This isn’t the Titanic, Dad. No one’s going to expect you to go down with the ship!” Lenny hunched over the table, his hands balled into fists. He suddenly looked young and frightened, which, of course, he was.
“I have my duty, son. This is part of what’s expected of me.” He put his hand over one of Lenny’s fists. “You know that, partner. You’ve always known that.”
“I’m not going to leave until you do,” Lenny said stubbornly.
“Lenny!” Belinda looked shocked, and she put a hand on his arm.
He shook it off. “He’s my father! What do you think I should do, Belinda? Just leave him here?”
“I like your attitude, Lenny,” Jim said. “I really do. You have my utmost respect, son, but in this situation, you need to do exactly what your father tells you. The last thing he needs is to be worried about you.”
McDaniels caught Jim Howie’s eye and nodded his thanks.
Lenny ignored him. “Dad, you know I can’t go. Not now. Not when your back’s against the wall like this.”
McDaniels sighed. “Sorry, son. You’ll be on the first space available flight out. That’s just how it is.”
“You tell Mom about this?”
“Of course I did. We talked just before I left the TOC. Things are clearing up at Bragg, so the plan is for you to relocate there. The Black Hawk is flying out to Holloman Air Force Base, where you’ll be transported back east. All of you, if that’s what you want,” McDaniels said, looking at the Howies.
“Well, we’ll take that step when we get to it,” Jim said.
Lenny shook his head. “Dad—”
“Lenny, this discussion is over,” McDaniels said firmly. “I love you, son, and I know you want to be with me. But right now, your mother needs you more, and you need to be with her. Do you understand me?”
Lenny glared at him for a long moment. “Yes. I understand,” he said through clenched teeth.
“No tricks, Lenny. No running and hiding like you did when you were a boy and you broke your mother’s crystal vase.” McDaniels smiled. “Not that there’s a garage attic here for you to hide in.”
Lenny said nothing. After a moment, he pushed away from the table and walked out of the D-FAC. McDaniels started to get up, but Jim put his hand on his arm.
“I’ll make sure he gets on the helicopter,” Jim said. “Let him cool off for a while, then we’ll all go together. How long do we have to wait before the Black Hawk is ready for us?”
“It could be in just a few hours. Since the stenches aren’t continuing westward, I’ve asked that Holloman take over the shipping of the vaccine. Carson is better defended, but now that Holloman might not be at as much risk, it makes sense to send the vaccine directly to a transportation hub that’s better equipped to handle it. They have cargo planes there, after all. If that gets approved, then our helicopters only have to fly about a hundred eighty-five miles one way, which means we can have them out and back in a little over two hours.” The D-FAC shook again as more bombs fell to the desert outside the camp walls. Jeanette and Belinda looked up, the stress plain on their faces.
McDaniels ignored the noise. “That means we’ll be able to transport the essential assets to safety much more quickly, which will free up the helicopters for transporting the rest of you that much sooner.”
Jim nodded. “When do you think that will happen? The approval?”
“My commander is discussing it with his Air Force counterpart, who in turn is hitting up the base commander. I expect the plan to be approved pretty quickly. It makes nothing but sense.” McDaniels reached for his sandwich and took a bite of it. He looked at the Howies for a long moment. “Lenny can be pretty headstrong. You’re going to have your hands full if he’s serious about staying behind.”
“Well, can’t you do something about that?” Jeanette asked tiredly. “After all, you’re his father!”
“Lenny stopped listening to me a long time ago, ma’am. He’s his own man these days.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” Belinda said. “We’ll make sure he comes with us.”
Good luck with that, McDaniels thought.
***
“All right, let’s get this done with,” Roche said to the rest of his chalk as they marched out the gate and into the night. The trenches were still smoking, and the zeds were pushing forward, falling into the smoky mess that had once been their fellows. Roche’s element spread out on either side of the illuminated kill zone, weapons at ready. Most of the troops manning the wall couldn’t see through the smoke that still rose into the air, so it was up to the SOICS-equipped Rangers to see to it that the perimeter remained secure while the trenches were refilled with the incendiary mixture. They carried thick hoses across the lowered drawbridges and dropped them into the trenches, and immediately more of the foul-smelling mixture began pouring out of them. The heat in the trenches had fallen below the mixture’s ignition temperature, so they could be safely refilled.
The only thing the Rangers had to worry about were the legions of zeds that pressed forward. The smoke didn’t prevent them from seeing the zeds with their infrared visors. The soldiers on the walls had to use either night vision goggles or the old-fashioned Mark I eyeball, but Roche and his crew could see each stench’s heat signature clear as day.
Once the hoses had been dropped into the trenches and the Rangers had retreated, the drawbridges were raised. Roche and the others arranged themselves into a skirmish line and, using their high-tech electronics, sighted on the zeds and started firing. One shot, one kill. It didn’t take a lot of skill, since the zombies just kept on coming. Soon, the ground on the far side of the first trench was littered with bodies, and that slowed the advancing horde substantially. Roche found that while he had started firing at a rate of thirty or forty rounds a minute, the pile of bodies slowed the necromorphs so much that he was soon down to firing ten rounds per minute. As he and the rest of the Rangers kept at it, the pile of corpses continued to grow. Because the stenches on the other side of the grisly mounds needed more time to climb over, the Rangers found they could actually catch a few moments of rest here and there—drink from a canteen, ensure their weapons were loaded, even crack a few jokes.
“This! Is! SPARTA!” Doofus shouted every time he put a bullet through a stench’s skull. He was a huge fan of the film 300, and he kept doing his best to imitate the movie’s lead actor. “Zed! Tonight, we dine in hell!”
Roche let him laugh it up, as long as he continued to drop the necromorphs with lethal precision.
“I’m going to think that fighting in this smoke wasn’t exactly a planned endeavor,” said Roche’s company commander, a captain named Meding. “They should have figured out a different way to refill the trenches. This is going to take forever.”
Roche gunned down a zed crawling over the growing pile of corpses. “We have the time, sir.”
“Yeah, so we do.” The captain looked past Roche. “I see Doofus is having a swell time.”
“He has a pretty limited threshold for boredom, sir, so I’d recommend we let him have as much fun as he can stand.”
The captain raised his rifle and cracked off a shot, and a zed tumbled out of sight. “He’s not going to break into show tunes or anything, is he?”
“Only when he gets his Ethel Merman groove on,” Roche said.
Doof started belting out in his best wavering Ethel Merman voice, “There’s no business like stench business, there’s no business I know…”
Meding winced, even though it was tough to hear Doofus’s singing above the occasional gunfire and yet another pounding air raid outside the perimeter. “Damn, I might have to shoot him just to preserve our sanity.”
“It’s an insane world already, sir.” Roche pointed toward the pile of corpses that continued to grow on the other side of the trenches. “I haven’t killed so many zombies since I sat down to play Left 4 Dead 2 years ago.”
As he spoke, something soared past overhead. The sound was virtually inaudible over the bombing and the thrashing beat of orbiting helicopters and the sporadic small arms fire; it was more like something he sensed as opposed to something actually heard, a vague stirring in the back of his mind. From the corner of his eye, he saw Captain Meding also look up, peering into the night sky with his infrared-augmented eyes.
Who the fuck is shooting artillery at us?
The first explosion boomed out from the direction of the camp.
***
McDaniels had just exchanged salutes with the sentries standing guard outside the TOC and was reaching for the door when the explosion tore through the camp. The sudden detonation had a different timbre than all the other blasts he and the rest of the camp’s occupants had long grown used to. Those always came from outside the camp walls, where the mass of zombies gathered thousands deep. This one was much louder and came from inside the camp, where only fragile human lives collected.
“Holy shit!” one of the sentries shouted as he pulled his M4 carbine against his shoulder, barrel low. “What the fuck was that?”
McDaniels heard the subtle shriek of something hurtling inbound as it passed over the walls. He couldn’t see it, but he had been in the service for long enough to know what generated that specific acoustic signature: artillery.
“Incoming!” McDaniels yanked open the TOC’s door and repeated the warning, and an instant later, a sparking explosion lit up the sky as another blast tore across the camp. He charged inside the operations center. Everyone was talking at once, issuing orders, demanding SITREPs, trying to establish just what was going on.
Gartrell turned from where he hovered over the shoulders of Dusty Roads and Switchblade Lewis. “Unless one of the Air Force units misaligned a bombing run, it looks like the stenches got their hands on some arty.”
McDaniels turned to the aviation section. “Carmody!”
“Sir!”
“Little Birds out. I want to find out where that artillery is coming from. We don’t have counterbattery radar, so they’re going to have to go deep and do it the old-fashioned way by looking for it. Hold the Apaches back to defend the camp.”
“Sir, we’re better off sending the Apaches,” Carmody said. “Their millimeter wave radar has air search mode. They’ll be able to launch counterfire using Hellfires.”
“If any of them have Hellfires still mounted on their rails,” Haley said. “Weren’t they stripped off and replaced with rocket pods?”
“Only two fly in that configuration,” Carmody said. Another explosion rocked the camp. “Colonel?”
“Do it, Carmody. Haley, run the fight. I’m going to keep eyes out. Chase, put out the word for the civilians to head for the main InTerGen building and get into the basements. It’s about the biggest place we have where we can put people,” McDaniels ordered. He cursed himself for not having more bunkers built. There were four of them, one at each corner of the camp, but they could only hold a hundred or so soldiers. Neither he nor anyone else on the task force had seriously considered the possibility of the camp coming under attack by indirect fire. And why should they have? They were fighting necromorphs, not the Soviets.
I should have thought of this, he berated himself as he headed for the exit.
“Where the hell are you going, Cord?” Haley snapped.
“To put eyes on target,” he said.
“I’m with you, sir,” Gartrell said, and he snatched up his AA-12 from beside his workstation.
17
Hours before the artillery weapons began to fire, Dead Jeffries and several dozen of the Others faded away from the big guns. It was as if they shared an understanding, an instinct, that to be near the guns would invite their own destruction. Dead Jeffries understood at a nonverbal level that the prey would react to the guns as soon as they began to fire, and that their response would be substantial. So before the sun set, Dead Jeffries struck out across the desert with thousands more of the walking dead. In the distance, just on the horizon, a pall of gray smoke rose. Behind that wall lay the quarry Dead Jeffries had marched halfway across the nation to confront. Cowering behind their walls, their flaming trenches, their aerial bombardments. Soon, Dead Jeffries and the Others would taste their flesh, halt their plans, and end Mankind for all time.
The time for that was when the guns spoke. Though they would not be able to fire for long, Dead Jeffries and the Others needed only a few shots to bring the quarry to their knees.
As the sun shrank behind the horizon and the gloom deepened, the guns finally roared their fury.
***
“Okay, the InTerGen building has been hit,” McDaniels reported over the radio to TOC. “We have fire on the top floor, and the roof and façade have been severely compromised. The second round landed in the middle of the tent city, about a hundred meters from TOC. Notify the cash to prepare for mass casualties—”
“Incoming!” Gartrell grabbed McDaniels’s arm and pulled him behind one of the Rangers’s six-by-six
trucks.
The next explosion was loud and thunderous, and as it echoed across the camp, McDaniels could hear the screams of the injured. Another explosion sounded slightly further away, and he pushed himself to his feet and peered around the truck’s bumper. He gasped when he saw the damage wrought by the falling artillery shells.
One of the CONEX containers that comprised the wall had been blasted into pieces, and the earth that had filled rolled into the camp like an avalanche. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay strewn about, what remained of the Rangers and special operators who had been manning the wall. Several others writhed in agony on the ground, their bodies torn open by shrapnel. McDaniels looked past them, at the gaping hole in the wall, a hole almost forty feet wide, a hole that was currently undefended.
“Let’s go!” he shouted to Gartrell as the sergeant major pushed himself to his feet. Without waiting for a response, McDaniels sprinted toward the hole in the wall, weaving around the dead and ignoring the cries of the injured. He unslung his HK417 and dropped his night vision goggles over his eyes. The floodlights were out along that stretch of wall, and he saw why very quickly. The generator powering them had been severely damaged when the wall was hit, and it was erupting in flames as its diesel fuel supply burned.
“Ops, this is Leonidas. The eastern wall has been breached! A container two places south of the gate has been destroyed! We need Hercules units surged into the area to secure it, and we’ll need aviation support to hold the zeds back until we can get it repaired. Let’s get some engineers forward with some earth movers. We need to plug the hole ASAP! Over.” McDaniels ran into the soft earth and slogged through it, trudging up the incline until he was at its crest. The earth moved under his feet, and he fell back a couple of steps and raised his rifle.
The Rising Horde, Volume Two Page 18
