“You ready to get up close and personal?” she shouted.
Fitz tightened his gloved fingers around the hatchet. All around him, the men and women of the Twenty-Fourth MEU prepared to stand their ground. Several officers drew their ceremonial sabers, and everyone else fixed bayonets at the onslaught of hungry beasts moving in on all fours, wings tucked along their backs, stampeding over the dead and dying.
The M240 fire thinned the two dozen remaining monsters by half, but those that made it through jumped over the trenches and galloped toward the line of soldiers.
“I’m out!” Tanaka shouted.
Fitz glanced over his shoulder to see Tanaka climbing down from the turret. That was when Fitz noticed several teenagers running down the dirt road: The Ombres were joining the fight. A Reaver sailed in from the north, claws extended like an eagle’s as it swooped down to grab one of the girls.
“Watch out!” Fitz shouted. He turned to aim his pistol, but someone beat him to the punch. A missile slammed into the side of the Reaver, blowing it into hunks of meat.
Fitz made eye contact with the marine who had fired the missile—it was Bradley, and he was holding Bertha in both hands, grinning like a madman.
“Give ’em hell, marines! Hold your ground!” he shouted.
Fitz turned back to the Reavers making a final push for their position. Several more crashed into the dirt, flopping and jerking in pain.
Tanaka, now on the ground beside the vehicle, drew both his Katana and Wakizashi when he got to Team Ghost’s position. He twirled the blades and shouted something that Fitz couldn’t make out. Several of the Ombres took up position next to Rico and Fitz.
From the cloud of smoke and dust, ten of the beasts emerged, all of them peppered with bullet holes. Behind them, the bodies of dead soldiers and Reavers littered the ground.
It was ten injured monsters against fifty men, women—and children. For the first time since they landed in France, Team Ghost and the Twenty-Fourth MEU had the numbers.
Fitz fired off several shots from his M9 and then holstered the gun. He switched the hatchet to his right hand.
Everyone seemed to be screaming as he took a step forward with Meg’s trusty weapon firmly in his hand. He joined the war cry with his own shout as he ran toward the fray: “All it takes is all you got, marines!”
Sergeant Piero Angaran sat in the dirt with his back to a wall polished smooth by hundreds of years of exposure to the elements. He tore off a bite of jerky and looked down at his only friend in the world. The mouse sat in the crook of his arm, chewing on a morsel of its own.
The tiny creature wasn’t just his friend but also his early-warning system. He chirped whenever Variants were close, but tonight he was quiet.
Piero finished off his snack and stood to look out over Rome from their hideout atop Palatine Hill. A cool breeze that carried the scent of burning flesh rustled his filthy fatigues. His injuries were slowly healing, although his ankle still hurt. It would be a long journey back to 100 percent health, but at least he had food and medicine.
Ringo climbed up Piero’s arm and perched on his shoulder, black eyes roving the darkness below. The moon hovered in the sky, but the light wasn’t bright enough to see the tile roofs, terraces, and cobblestone streets with any degree of clarity.
He flipped down his night-vision goggles and studied the ancient city. For over a millennium, Rome had played an important role in the development of modern culture in Italy and the world. Founded on the very hill where he stood now, the city had expanded in every direction, becoming a hub of Western civilization.
Weeks ago, the Italian military had sent its best—the Fourth Alpini Parachutist Regiment—to save the capital from the Variants, but the soldiers had been no match for the mutated monsters. Piero was the only survivor and perhaps the only living person in all of Rome.
A silhouette crossed the moon—a lonely Reaver, wings outstretched like an osprey. It let out a forlorn, high-pitched wail that seemed to echo over and over. Another creature answered the call somewhere across the city.
Varianti.
There weren’t many of the winged monsters hunting tonight. A good number of the Variants had perished when the EUF bombarded the city with radioactive dirty bombs three days earlier, and the others all seemed to have vanished.
After escaping the bombs by hiding in the Vatican, Piero had bolted for his old shelter, where he made contact with the EUF.
Piero pulled out the radio. It was his only line to the outside world, and his conversation with the EUF radio operator in Spain had saved his life. He had been able to escape the Vatican and avoid the areas of the city hit by the radioactive bombs. They had even promised to send support when they could, but he wasn’t holding his breath.
Hunker down. The radiation will kill most of the Variants. We will send in troops when their numbers have fallen.
The last transmission replayed in Piero’s mind. He moved to the other side of their stone lookout, with Ringo riding on his shoulder. At the wall, Piero stopped and raised his Beretta ARX160 assault rifle to his night-vision goggles. In the green hue were the scattered corpses of the monsters caught outside during the bombing. Their armored shells flickered in the optics. He flipped up his NVGs and scoped the corpses with naked eyes. The juveniles glowed like fireflies.
There were far fewer than he’d expected. So where were the others?
Ringo chirped, and Piero ducked down, heart pounding. He heard the click-clacking a moment later. With his back to the wall, he slowly shifted his gun into position. He already had a round chambered but flicked the safety off while Ringo darted down his arm, leaped to the dirt, and dashed into a small hole in the stone wall.
A low groan replaced the clicking sound, and he waited for the clatter of hooves on the cobblestone streets or the flapping of wings.
None of the familiar sounds came.
Piero waited in silence for several minutes, his heart rate slowly returning to normal. When he was confident there wasn’t anything moving toward his location, he flipped his NVGs back into position and peeked back over the wall with his rifle.
The slope on the other side was clear of contacts. Whatever he’d heard was gone now. He backed away and moved out of the roofless shelter to the dirt path that led to the other side of the hill. Ringo remained in the hole, dark eyes no doubt fixed on Piero’s back.
That was fine; he didn’t want the mouse to follow him out here. In the eerie green of his optics, he studied the white jasmine bushes that blocked his view of the other side of the hill. Though he couldn’t see their colors now, purple and light blue flowers framed the dirt path. He halted near an ancient fountain, where he heard a cracking sound.
This wasn’t the snapping of joints or clicking of armor. This sounded more like the noise an egg made when cracked on the side of a pan.
He slowly moved past the fountain. On the other side was a breathtaking view of the city and the excavation area where Italian archeologists had uncovered the ancient walls of early Rome. Pillars, graves, fountains, and statues dotted the terrain below. Behind him was the Colosseum. If he turned to look, he could just see the high arched walls surrounding the circular structure that had once been the pride and joy of the Roman capital.
The cracking sound pulled him toward a grove of trees to the south. He followed it slowly, moving heel to toe, with the Beretta’s barrel angled at the spindly trees ahead. He knelt with deliberate care, cautious not to scrape his kneepad on a rock, and pushed up his NVGs. Tucked among gangly branches, like a pearl in an oyster, was a glowing white cocoon that squirmed from side to side.
The cracking grew louder, and with it the pace of Piero’s heartbeat. His eyes widened as he watched.
What the hell kind of monster was this?
It was curiosity that drove Piero forward. He slowly walked toward the trees, finger hovering outside the trigger guard of his gun.
A moaning stopped him midstride. The groan seemed to come from a sl
it that had opened in the middle of the cocoon, revealing the pale curved flesh of some sort of creature.
He took another step closer, bringing a hand to his nostrils against the rank rotting-fruit scent of the cocooned monster. The slit in the silky skin of the cocoon peeled back farther. This time he could see what looked like the black outer shell of a bug. A bony belly and smooth plates writhed inside.
This definitely didn’t look like a Reaver—this was something different.
It moaned again and thrashed in its fleshy prison.
The creaking continued, but it wasn’t coming from the beast in front of him. Piero raised his rifle’s scope and zoomed in on a terrace to the west, where he saw another one of the cocoons. He did a quick sweep but couldn’t see any others from his vantage point.
By the time he turned back to the cocoon in front of him, it had opened completely. A beetle the size of a man wiggled out and sloshed onto the dirt. A curved, misshapen head emerged. The multifaceted eyes, centered on the shell, darted back and forth. They focused on him, and serrated mandibles opened to release a low hissing.
All at once the city seemed to come alive with the same noise. Piero swallowed hard, taking a step back. The din was like the call of cicadas in the summer, an almost mechanical sound that rose and fell in waves.
The Beetle pushed itself up onto long limbs lined with jagged spikes. It stumbled, fell, and rose up again on all fours, plates clattering across its armored body. Clawed feet gripped the dirt.
Piero fired a burst into the thing’s left eye. A green fluid exploded out and peppered his boots. Desperately, he fired again into its right eye. He backed away and stared in horror as the blind, insectlike Variant flopped to the ground. It snapped its mandibles together.
The hissing of the other mutated monsters rang out in all directions. Piero stumbled away, turning to run back down the path. He wheezed for air, flinging glances over his shoulder and nearly stumbling. He had to get to Ringo. They needed to get out of here.
The EUF had been wrong. The radiation didn’t kill the beasts: It mutated them into abominations from the very pits of hell. Now Piero knew why most of the monsters had vanished. They weren’t dead—they were just hiding as they morphed into these … demons.
The next step of the Variant evolution was happening all around him, and he was stuck right in the middle of the transformation.
3
Captain Reed Beckham had survived another day, but he felt like a can of expired sardines. The tiny apartment reeked of something sour and rotted, which made it nearly impossible to sleep. Add to that the wails of the infected outside and he had probably only snagged an hour or two of rest.
Beckham stood and stretched his aching muscles. His clothing, saturated with sweat, clung to his skin. He cracked his neck from side to side and the scarf Flathman had given him fell from his nose and mouth, allowing the rancid smell to fill his lungs.
The rotted corpse of a man was curled up on the mattress in the other room, skeletal hands still gripping the gun that he’d used to blow his brains out and splatter them on the ceiling. It was a common way out from the first days of the outbreak for people to take their lives instead of face the monsters.
This guy, whoever he was, had inadvertently helped save Flathman and Beckham. One of the infected beasts had sniffed right outside the door in the early-morning hours but then continued on, uninterested in the rotting body inside. It wasn’t the first time Beckham had used the scent of the dead to camouflage himself, and it wasn’t getting any more pleasant.
“Sun’s up. You ready to make a move for that Humvee we spotted on our way here?” he whispered to Flathman.
“We got time to stop and get a coffee?” Flathman asked with a shit-eating grin. “I’m all out of whiskey.”
“I wish, LT. I could use ten shots of espresso right about now.” Beckham settled for a drink of water from his bottle. He chased down a handful of Tylenol with a long slug. The warm water would help with his dehydration, but what he really needed was an IV.
Flathman watched with a curious eye. Beckham knew he was being sized up, but he couldn’t blame the lieutenant. Beckham, wounded as he was, was a liability, but for some reason, Flathman had made it his personal mission to help Beckham get back to Kate and President Ringgold.
“Thank you, sir,” Beckham said quietly after dragging his sleeve across his lips.
“For what?”
“Saving my ass.”
“You can stop thanking me and pay me back when my time card is punched.” Flathman wagged his head. “‘Ten Lives’ Flathman they called me. ‘The Running Man.’ Pretty sure my ten lives are up, and I’m sure as shit tired of running.”
Flathman pulled out his map, draped it across the couch, and motioned for Beckham to join him.
“We’re on the corner of Fourth Street. This is how far we’ve come in three days.” Flathman dragged his finger over approximately twenty blocks of the city. Then he moved his finger across the map to the outskirts of Chicago. “This is Outpost Forty-Six, aka Deadwood, aka home. It’s thirty miles east of us. We have to find a vehicle to get there, otherwise this is going to take forever. And no more bank trucks.”
“Yeah,” Beckham agreed, recalling the last vehicle they had commandeered. The armored truck had ended up breaking down after two blocks, and the backfire had attracted a dozen infected. Flathman had had to help carry Beckham when his prosthetic leg fell off during the escape.
Beckham looked down at his prosthesis, now held together by duct tape, screws, and a makeshift brace. The damn thing sounded squeakier than a bed frame in a whorehouse and felt twice as rickety.
“That thing going to hold?” Flathman whispered as he folded up his map.
“It had better.”
Flathman crouched down to check the brace.
“Looks okay, but we need to find you something for your …” Flathman’s words trailed off as his eyes flitted up to Beckham’s stump.
“I can still fight,” Beckham said with more confidence.
“I know, Captain. Let’s get moving.”
They checked their weapons, loaded up their gear, and moved to the door. Flathman tightened his Cubs hat on his head and put his ear up against the wood to listen.
The lieutenant motioned for Beckham to get into position as he slowly unchained the first lock and twisted the dead bolt. Beckham wasn’t sure why they had risked the noise in the first place. The chains and locks wouldn’t do much to hold back the infected, and a juvenile could splinter the wood like a toothpick in seconds.
Flathman pulled open the door and strode out into the hallway with his M4 sweeping the shadows. Sunlight flooded through broken windows as they moved down the carpeted passage to the stairs. This time Beckham went first, pointing his M4’s muzzle up and down to clear the stairwell. It was darker here, and the vision in his right eye continued to fail.
Would he even see a threat in the shadows?
He made his way cautiously down the stairs toward the first floor, stopping at each landing to listen. A beam groaned somewhere inside the century-old building, but there was no sign of the infected.
At the first floor, Beckham stopped to rest. He hated the fact he couldn’t keep up. His entire body was swollen, and every time he pissed it felt as if he was passing a kidney stone.
Flathman waited patiently for a few minutes while Beckham took in more water and checked his prosthetic blade. When Beckham was ready to move, Flathman held up his fingers one at a time.
On three, Beckham opened the door to the lobby, and Flathman strode out to sweep for contacts. Sunlight funneled in through the missing windows, spreading over a carpet stained with brown splotches of old blood. An overturned table and couch on its back furnished the open space that reeked of mold and rot.
Flathman pointed at the skirt of glass where the double doors had been. They carefully navigated the broken shards. Vehicles covered in soot and dust littered the street outside. There were a few bodies
crumpled on the sidewalk, mostly just bones and tattered clothing now.
Flathman motioned toward the sidewalk. Beckham rested his carbine on top of his stump. Even that hurt. It was also incredibly awkward. He had lost his trigger finger and knife hand.
They should have just killed me, he thought. Beckham quickly pushed the morose sentiment aside, but such thoughts had become more and more common lately. Every day it was harder to keep fighting.
He filled his lungs with clean air and pushed on.
A terrace full of trees was just around the next corner. Two birds sat on the naked branches, watching Beckham and Flathman as they crept along the metal fence.
Beckham stopped and directed his gun’s suppressed muzzle toward the vehicles at the end of the road. Trash swirled by, but there wasn’t a single infected in sight. The bright sun was keeping them at bay, for now.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t watching. Beckham looked at the rooftop above, wary of the sensation of eyes on his back. Flathman took a knee and pushed up the bill of his Cubs hat to follow Beckham’s gaze. Nothing stirred along the stone ledges. Both men ran the muzzles of their weapons over the dozens of windows on each side of the street to look for the sucker faces of the infected beasts.
Seeing nothing, Beckham and Flathman continued forward. They increased their pace as they closed in on the Humvee.
Halfway down the block, another sound brought them to a halt.
The shriek of a juvenile rang out in the distance. Beckham raked his M4 from left to right, but this sound wasn’t coming from the road or the buildings towering over them. It was coming from the sewer grate to his right.
Another creature answered the call, this time from inside a building to their left. Glass shattered, and the high-pitched wail of an infected followed.
Beckham froze at the sound of feet slapping the ground.
Infected and juveniles. It’s a goddamn party.
Flathman jerked his head toward the Humvee, but Beckham was already running, blade squeaking like a rusty bicycle chain. The intersection where the truck was parked on the curb wasn’t far, but the sound of the approaching monsters was closing in from all directions.
Extinction War Page 5
