by Sam Sisavath
“Ma’am?” Parrish asked. “What are your orders?”
Lara didn’t answer him, and Gaby could see her mind working, the gears back there turning, turning…
Her friend didn’t say or do anything for five seconds.
Ten…
“What are your orders, ma’am?” Parrish pressed.
Lara turned around to look at the huddled mass of people behind them. Men and women, civilians and Black Tiders, children and old people alike. They were sitting and standing around in groups; some were chatting in quiet voices, others stealing sleep on the floor. Someone in a corner was singing a lullaby in soft whispers and it was, Gaby thought, a fine voice that in another place and time could have become famous.
“Ma’am?” Parrish asked. “What are your orders?”
Lara turned back to the table. Her face was as resolute as Gaby had ever seen it. “The first priority are these people. We’re going to evacuate the warehouse and make our way to the secondary location.”
“And the counterattack?” Parrish asked.
“The priority are these people, Captain. We already lost their city; we’re not going to lose them, too.”
Parrish nodded. If he was disappointed or disapproved, Gaby couldn’t read it on his face. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Contact the advance units we already have hidden across the city preparing for the counterattack. Their new assignments are to ensure the secondary location is ready to receive and to set up protection grids along the route between here and there. The security units will back up and support Overwatch. In the meantime, I want you to personally organize the evacuation and get everyone ready to move.”
“Do we have enough Mercerian uniforms and gas masks to disguise everyone during the evacuation across the city?” Gaby asked.
Lara shook her head. “Not even close.”
“Lara, there are still Buckies out there. They’re not just going to let us walk everyone over to the secondary location.”
“I know,” Lara said. She pursed a forced smile. “So we’ll do what we’ve always done. We’ll improvise.”
Twenty-One
“It wants us. Everyone who was down there, underneath Houston when Will took out Mabry. Me, Danny, Gaby, and Hanson. Everyone else who was there that day is dead. It’s just the four of us left.”
Keo was in Fenton, but she and Hanson were in Darby Bay. Danny was either still on his way to Black Tide Island or already there. Given how long ago he’d set out for the base, it was likely the latter. With the Gulf of Mexico surrounding him, Danny was probably the safest person right now. “Safe,” of course, was open to debate, considering none of them knew what he was going to find at Black Tide.
Good luck, Danny, because I think we’re all going to need a lot of that tonight.
Gaby looked around the warehouse, searching for Hanson as people picked themselves up from the floor, grabbing what little belongings they’d managed to salvage on the way here. The sudden burst of activity reminded her again just how many people were packed into this one location.
“I gotta go stretch these legs anyway,” the big man had said before he left to give her and Becker some privacy. So where exactly had he gone to “stretch” those long legs of his? Trying the radio hadn’t done any good. Hanson hadn’t answered.
Where the hell are you, Hanson?
She gave up trying to locate him among all the moving bodies and turned around just as Lara walked over to her. She had a rifle slung over her shoulder—it was the first time in a long time Gaby had seen that—and four of Parrish’s men, including Becker, flanking her.
“What’s the plan, boss?” Gaby asked.
Lara gave her a wry smile. Gaby knew that her friend hated it when people called her boss, and she liked it even less when Gaby and Danny did it.
“Parrish will take care of everything that needs to be done,” Lara said. “I need you to come with me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Stop that.”
Gaby smiled and fell in beside Lara as they walked across the building. She shot a quick look back and locked eyes with Becker for a brief half-second. He raised two eyebrows in acknowledgement but didn’t say anything.
Like her and Lara, Becker and every other Black Tider in the room were no longer wearing the Mercerian vests. Those, along with the gas masks they’d been using to disguise themselves, had been handed out to the civilians.
“They’re going to need them more than we will,” Lara had said when she made the order.
They walked past a mother demonstrating how to put on one of those gas masks to her daughter. The girl was a skinny teen, and her Mercerian vest hung off her thin shoulders. The mother’s vest fitted a little bit better, but she still wouldn’t pass for a Mercerian if someone stared long enough or got too close.
“Did you find Hanson?” Lara asked.
“No luck,” Gaby said. “And he’s not answering me on the radio. He told me he was part of the security detail outside, but they don’t know where he went, either.”
“He needs to stick with us, Gaby.”
Gaby nodded. She didn’t need Lara to say the words to know the reasons why.
“It wants us,” Keo had said. “Everyone who was down there, underneath Houston when Will took out Mabry. Me, Danny, Gaby, and Hanson. Everyone else who was there that day is dead. It’s just the four of us left.”
And two of us are in Darby Bay right now, she thought. That fact had been going around her head for a while now, and she still couldn’t decide if it meant anything. Was that the reason the ghouls were here in the first place? Or was that just coincidental? Or was that the reason they were back?
They were halfway through the warehouse when their radios squawked and a voice said, “This is Below, Overwatch. We’ve engaged ghouls in the streets.”
Lara exchanged a quick glance with Gaby, and the two of them picked up their pace. Becker and the other three behind them had no choice but to do the same.
“How many?” a voice said through the radio. Parrish.
“A dozen, two,” someone answered. “More scouts.”
“Keep them away from our location.” Then, “Overwatch. Give us an update on the ones in the woods.”
“They’re still amassing,” a new voice answered.
“How many do you see up there?”
Overwatch didn’t reply right away. Then, after a few excruciating seconds, “Too many. There’s too many of them.”
“Give me an estimate, Overwatch,” Parrish said.
“Thousands,” Overwatch said. “There’s gotta be thousands of them out there.” Then, more to himself than to Parrish or anyone listening through the radio, “Jesus Christ. Where did they all come from?”
No one answered him, because no one knew the answer. Gaby didn’t know where the thousands of ghouls had come from, just like she didn’t have a clue about the ones that had attacked her and Peters in Axton. The stories of Cordine City being overrun by “a horde of ghouls” stuck in her mind even now.
They were always out there. Waiting for the right time to attack.
Waiting for us to let our guards down.
Waiting for Buck to make his play…
They finally reached the side exit, where two Black Tiders opened the door for them. They stepped out into the alley where a half-dozen more soldiers with night-vision goggles were camped out watching the darkened sidewalk and streets beyond. They look wired, ready to go off at any second.
Anxious and scared, is more like it.
The sentries looked over as Lara appeared. She nodded back at them. “Monitor your radios, and get ready to move.”
“Yes, ma’am,” one of them said. The leader, Gaby guessed.
Instead of heading toward the sidewalk, they moved toward the rear and turned into a back alley. More Black Tiders hiding in pockets of shadows nodded as they passed. Not at Gaby or Becker or the others, but at Lara.
“Get ready to move,” Lara said to them.
“Yes, ma’am,” they repeated.
Gaby didn’t have to ask where they were going. It was the tall apartment structure two buildings up the alley where Black Tiders were already opening the back door for them.
“Get ready to move,” Lara said to them.
They nodded back.
There were more uniformed men and women in the long hallway. They, too, nodded and stood more upright when they saw Lara.
“Monitor your radios and get ready to move,” Lara said.
“Yes, ma’am,” they replied.
The same scene repeated itself when they reached the lobby, then took a stairwell door and went up. Gaby wondered if this was what it felt like to take the last walk along the trenches of World War II with a general before a charge. There was a sense of finality to the way Lara talked to them, the way she put her hand on some of their shoulders, and in the way some of them smiled back.
Gaby could tell that Becker felt the same way when she sneaked a look over her shoulder and met his eyes. He was somber, a soldier preparing for the fight of his life. Not scared, but just…ready. Did she have that same look on her face? She had no idea.
They climbed all the way to the seventh floor and finally stepped out onto the rooftop above that. The dark skies and blackened canvas that was Darby Bay spread out around them greeted her. She breathed in the cool air and found herself disappointed it was still so dark. For some reason, Gaby had expected the time to have jumped, for night to have switched to day by the time they emerged out of the stairwell.
Three more hours to morning…
The building wasn’t the tallest in Darby Bay, but it was perfectly positioned next to the warehouse and near the edge of the city. That made it ideal for one of the major Overwatch locations. There were a half-dozen people scattered around them watching different sides of the city—two of them were on the south edge, two more on the east, and she could hear the occasional pfft! pfft! of their suppressed rifles as they fired down into the streets below. She didn’t have to ask what they were shooting at.
Lara walked to the two Black Tiders at the north end. One was lying on his stomach, looking through his rifle’s night-vision scope, while the other one stood next to him peering behind night-vision binoculars at the nothingness beyond. It was too dark and Gaby couldn’t make out much of anything except a wall of black trees in the distance, and she only knew they were trees because she’d seen them in the daylight. At the moment they could have been anything, including the ocean itself.
The man with the binoculars lowered his field glasses and turned around as they approached him. Peters. Gaby didn’t know why she was surprised to see him up here and already back in the thick of it, despite his injuries. After all, she and Becker were doing the same thing. No one was going to get any rest tonight.
“I could use some good news,” Lara said to Peters.
Peters shook his head and held the binoculars out to her. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and was wearing a bandoleer with 40mm grenade rounds in every loop. If he was still pained from his arm injury, she couldn’t see it on his face.
I guess he’s gotten his fill of pills and food, too.
Lara took the glasses and looked through them.
Gaby did her best to focus on the darkness in front of her, but all she could make out was…nothing. Not a damn thing.
“They’re still out there?” she asked Peters instead.
“I wish I could tell you no, kid,” Peters said solemnly.
Behind them, the pfft! pfft! of suppressed gunfire had picked up noticeably. Which meant that while the ghouls in the woods were still building up, the ones already in the city were being very active.
“Have you seen Hanson?” Gaby asked Peters.
“He was up here a few minutes ago,” Peters said. “You didn’t run into him on the way up?”
“No. And he’s not responding on the radio.”
Peters looked across the rooftop at one of his Black Tiders. “Run downstairs and tell Hanson to get his ass up here.”
“Yes, sir,” the man said and ran off.
Lara finally lowered the binoculars and handed them to Gaby without saying a word.
That bad, huh? Gaby thought as she took the glasses. She stepped closer to the edge and, her hand shaking slightly, raised the device to her eyes.
Oh, Jesus.
“It’s a fucking ghoul ocean out there,” the man peering behind his rifle’s scope next to her said. Gaby recognized his voice as the one who’d been answering Parrish’s question over the radio earlier. A man named Turner.
He was right. It did look as if the Gulf of Mexico had made it ashore and was now gathering on land. She had no chance of telling one ghoul apart from another; it was one big wall of black flesh quivering on the other side of a vast mile-long field that separated Darby Bay from the woods beyond.
Where the hell did they all come from? Jesus Christ, where the hell have they been hiding all this time?
And then, as if on cue, the creatures began to move, coming detached from the trees in the background. Moonlight gleamed off their domed heads and pruned flesh, like sunlight reflecting off pearls on the beach. Moving pearls.
“Here they come,” Turner said.
“Fuck me,” Peters whispered.
“Gaby?” Lara asked.
“They’re coming,” Gaby said, her words barely audible to her own ears, maybe because she didn’t actually want to believe it.
God help us.
The blob began to dissolve, becoming jagged lines of individual sentient beings, their charred flesh colors made muted green against the night-vision as they poured of the woods.
God help us all.
Gaby lowered the binoculars and swallowed something that might have been a caterpillar down her throat. She handed the binoculars back to Lara, and neither one of them said anything because they didn’t have to. They had both been in this situation before—maybe a few too many times—and they recognized the horrific sensations racing up and down both their spines at the moment.
“We could really use that air support right about now,” Gaby said.
“They’re en route,” Lara said.
“Soon?”
“Soon.”
Hopefully soon enough, Gaby thought but didn’t say out loud. No one needed to hear that right now, including herself.
“Speak of the devil,” Peters said next to her, just before the roar of jet engines rippled across the Darby Bay skyline.
It started as a small whine before getting louder…and louder.
“Those are my kinds of devils,” Turner said.
Gaby didn’t need the binoculars to see the two A-10 Thunderbolts as they moved across the darkness toward them, coming from the east.
“Send in the clowns,” Gaby said.
“The clowns?” Becker asked from behind her.
She glanced back and smiled at him. “Mayfield. She’s one of the Warthog pilots. Clowns are her thing.”
The planes began banking long before they reached their building, and were now streaking northward toward the field and the wave after wave of ghouls racing across it. Gaby could barely make out the creatures with the naked eye, but there was a reason the green grass that was still visible under the moonlight kept disappearing, as if some entity were swallowing them up meter by meter by meter…
“Kick their ass!” Turner shouted just before the first couple of bombs dropped and ripped apart anything and everything that had the miserable luck to be underneath them.
The world crackled and shook under the onslaught, and the loose gravel underneath Gaby’s boots trembled. A flush of triumph rushed through her as the night exploded in a wall of orange and red fire, the thunderous BOOM-BOOM-BOOM! of explosions rattling her eardrums and shaking her bones. Night became day in the blink of an eye, and seemed to last an eternity even though she knew that wasn’t the case.
A second bomb struck, and the process repeated itself.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
More glorious fires licked at the darkness and devoured swaths of grass and the black creatures moving on top of them. She thought she could hear screams, but maybe that was just her imagination. She was sure, though, that she could smell the thick stench of burning flesh and sizzling blood, carried across the plains by a sudden gust of wind.
Everyone had gone quiet, including Becker behind her, Lara to her left, and the rest of Overwatch around her. If someone was still shooting at targets below them with their suppressed weapons, she couldn’t hear it. Then again, she could barely hear anything over the BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of smaller detonations rippling through the wide field of grass before her.
Thank God there was no one out there. No one alive, at least.
Then the Warthogs had overflown their target and were beginning to curve for a second pass.
Lara handed her the binoculars, and Gaby peered through them.
It was carnage out there. The field was on fire, large waves of flames flickering against the blackened sky. The sight was even more surreal against the green of the night vision than it had been against her naked eyes. There were bodies on the ground; too many, making it impossible to tell how intact they were. But as many figures littered the ground, just as many were still on their feet. There were dozens that were on fire but still moving, still charging toward the city…
“They’re still coming,” Gaby said, the words deflating all that triumph she’d felt earlier. “The Warthogs aren’t going to stop them. There’s too many, Lara.”
“I know,” Lara said. She unclipped her radio and took a breath.
Gaby could see the weight of the world pressing down on Lara’s shoulders and thought, I could never do what she’s done. What she’s doing. Not in a million years. Not in a billion years…
Lara finally pressed the transmit lever. “Parrish, this is Lara. Start the evacuation now.”
“Roger that,” Parrish answered.
Gaby glanced back at Becker, standing behind her. He didn’t say anything, and neither did the three others with him.
Next to her, Lara said into the radio, “This is Lara, to all Overwatch teams. We need to give the evacuation as much time as possible to clear out. Get to your positions and acquire targets. You are clear to fire. I repeat: You are clear to fire at will.”
