Zack took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. He was still alone in the TOC, Baxter still upstairs helping with overwatch. The noise of shooting out in the streets was still penetrating the walls – plus getting thicker, and coming closer. Zack shuddered. The whole building was starting to feel like it was pressing in on him. As if it wasn’t so much a sanctuary as a trap. Like he was just sitting there, waiting to die.
He stopped what he was doing and used biofeedback techniques to try and get his breathing under control. He tried to remember that they had two heavily armed professional badasses in there with them, who were totally committed to protecting the team. He also tried not to think of Benghazi – of that 400-strong militia attacking and burning the consulate, and a fucking U.S. Ambassador dying of smoke inhalation trapped in his “safe room.” Or of those two other professional badasses who had died trying to prevent that from happening.
He cast his eye over to the UAV GCS. The bird was still in its autopilot racetrack pattern. Zack had been prepared to either field requests for the UAV to some of these engagements around the region, or else to beg out of the duty. But no one contacted him. Not a soul. Maybe nobody knew he had the thing. Or else it was wedged comms.
Before he’d really noticed it, because of its gradual approach, the sound of shooting had closed to right outside the building. There was some kind of street battle going on right on their doorstep. Zack was already thinking about running upstairs when somebody up there shouted for him. He doublechecked the drone then ran up the steps. When he got to the top, Bob handed him an M4 rifle.
And Zack saw that Baxter already had one.
“Get your vest on,” Bob said.
Zack could hear the firing more clearly now through the open upstairs windows. He could hear stray rounds snapping by outside, others thwacking into the surface of the building. Dashing back downstairs for his body armor, he made a mental note to keep low and stay away from the windows. As he ran back up, something exploded – something close. It knocked him to his knees in the narrow stairwell, and he could smell smoke and something burning. He ran up the last few steps.
Dugan, Bob, and Baxter were hunkering down by three of the four window holes. They were each pressed up against the towering stacks of ISUs, the plastic crates that covered the walls everywhere but the windows themselves. Dugan got up and came over to Zack.
“What do I do?” Zack said, trying to master himself.
Dugan nodded. They had to shout now over the noise of the battle outside. “We’ve got foot mobiles on the street below, in company strength, with a couple of technicals. Crew-served weapons in back. Looks like local militia. They’re fighting a big tide of the sick people. We’re trying to stay out of the whole damned thing, hoping maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
“Will they?”
“I think they’re pro-government militia – though that might not matter much at this point. Right now they’re not shooting at us. But it’s the collateral damage I’m worried about. The wild small-arms fire is no problem. But that was an RPG that just smacked into our building. If that keeps up, it could degrade the structure. Or, much worse, set it on fire. Then we’ll be McFucked with Cheese. And we have to keep that from happening. Bob is selectively engaging the rocket men, as well as the technicals, as they become a threat. But it’s a total rat fuck. Take the other window. Keep your head down, but keep an eye out. Use your own judgment. You decide somebody’s a threat, you take him out. Okay?”
Zack shook his head vigorously. “Okay.”
With that, he headed toward his assigned position, putting his back up against the ISUs. Underneath the percussive roar of the guns, he could hear rounds smacking into the wall outside. Steeling himself, he popped his head over the edge. Looking down, he could see a throng of sick people on the street below. And a half a block away, a technical – a flatbed truck with a heavy machine gun mounted in the back – was parked up, shooting at them. Zack pulled his head back in. He could hear the heavy .50-caliber rounds blasting into the wall. How long would it hold? He guessed he needed to take the guy out, before he blew a new doorway in their ground floor.
Breathing rapidly and shallowly, he dropped the mag of the M4, checked it, rammed it back in and pulled the charging rod. He then flicked the selective fire switch from safe to single-shot. Finally he checked the EOTech holographic site. The power was off, but he found the button. Taking a few more quick shallow breaths, he eased himself up over the lip of the window and sighted in on the .50 gunner. He put the glowing red dot on the man’s chest. And he started slowly squeezing the trigger. The first couple of rounds flecked off the machine gun. Then the gunner doubled over and tumbled off the back of the truck.
The .50-cal was silent.
Zack smiled out loud at his success.
And then his smile completely melted away as he felt eyes on him. Standing beside and behind the truck was a man crouching with something on his shoulder. And he was definitely looking up, straight at Zack in his window. A great whoosh of smoke billowed out behind the man, and Zack felt more than saw the RPG coming in on him – almost invisible in full front-on view, but growing much bigger every thousandth of a second. As he threw himself sidelong, away from the window and onto the floor, he reflected that these things moved a hell of a lot faster than in the slo-mo hero shots of Jerry Bruckheimer movies.
Instantly it exploded outside, just missing the window. Zack covered up his head as smoke and burning debris whooshed in through the opening. He used his other hand to steady himself, but the whole room seemed to be swaying. No, wait – the wall really was moving! OH SHIT!!! He just had time to throw his arms up as the stacks of loaded plastic crates against the wall tumbled over and onto him, pummeling his head and body and rocking him to the floor.
Blackness.
Oblivion
Blackness.
Then motion, rocking, making his head swim.
Descending.
An iron grip, around the back of his thighs.
And sound – first just a low-pitched, all-consuming ringing… and then, crescendoing up from underneath it, shouting, screaming.
Vision spooling up – view down a leg, and stairs beyond that. He was going down them. All of this partly obscured by a thick gray haze.
Then the smoke hit his lungs, burning. He sputtered.
And then the pain. A sledgehammer pounding in the back of his head, all over and around the brainstem. And then another lightning blast down his left upper arm. Maybe he’d moved it.
Zack’s stomach did a loop, and he retched.
Can’t breathe… He panicked, and convulsed, flailing his whole body away from whatever held him. Oak-tree-like arms lowered him powerfully to the ground.
“Zack!”
Another voice: “Wake up, man! Zack!” Pain across his cheeks.
And a third voice, from below, farther away. “We gotta go, guys! Move, move!” Gunfire, those evenly spaced 5.56 rounds.
“What’s going on?” Zack thought he’d spoken, but couldn’t hear his own voice. He was sitting on the stairs, his back up against the wall. Smoke was everywhere. A huge head was in his face.
It was Maximum Bob. His voice boomed, from an inch away. “Listen up, buddy! The safehouse is burning! It’s gone. We’ve got to go! Now!”
Zack nodded. Okay, he could understand that. He tried to lever himself to his feet. It didn’t work, but Bob yanked him to a standing position with one hand. Still reeling, Zack tried to follow him down. An arm snaked around his shoulder, and he linked in with it. Baxter.
They staggered out the side door, into the covered garage. More firing. Zack looked to his left, where Dugan was standing on the bottom crossbar of the high fence, firing over the top. Bob and Baxter poured Zack into the back bench seat of the Tahoe. From his resting position, he could now see, through the front window, Bob run up to Dugan at the fence. The two shouted into each other’s faces.
Everything spun again, and Zack’s head lolled on his neck
. He fought to hold it upright, fought to keep his eyes open. He saw Baxter get out of the vehicle and heft his rifle. Then both Bob and Dugan ran back into the smoke-filled safehouse. They came back out seconds later, carrying ISUs in stacks. They seemed to come and go in random order, over a time that might have been ten seconds, or an hour. At the end, Baxter put down his rifle and ran inside – having to physically break out of Dugan’s grip to do so. Then the engine started, and the Tahoe lurched forward.
“No!” Zack rasped. “Don’t leave Baxter!”
“Zack! Zack!” It was Baxter, sitting right beside him.
The gate boomed and splintered as the Tahoe crashed into it and roared out into the smoky light of whatever time of day it was. The SUV crashed through human bodies, bucking and shuddering as it ran them down. Then more bodies, and more bodies after that. It lurched and tilted as it went up over them, piles of human shapes. A hand slapped into the window to Zack’s right, six inches from his face. Then it slid off, leaving a shape of itself, in blood. The Tahoe finally leveled out and accelerated.
Blackness.
Flight
WHUMP.
WHUMP.
KA-BOOM!!!
KA-BOOM!!!
Zack came awake again, more smartly this time. His head was much clearer – which was probably why it hurt like roaring hellfire, not to mention the pain in his shoulder and upper arm. Experimentally moving it a wracking two inches, he figured it was either the rotator cuff, or the humerus bone. Or both. The pain was spectacular, nauseating.
The Tahoe was blasting through downtown Hargeisa.
And Hargeisa was burning.
Maximum Bob leaned out of the front passenger-side window. He didn’t have his assault rifle now. Pulled into his shoulder, he had what Zack recognized as their Milkor MGL grenade launcher, which the SEALs had been keeping around for the apocalypse. It had a six-round cylinder, an extensible shoulder stock, a reflex site, and a vertical foregrip. Bob appeared to be putting 40mm grenades into any concentrations of swarming sick people that blocked the way ahead of them. That was the whumping sounds, the launch, followed by the kabooms. He slung his huge upper body back inside, reloaded the cylinder, wound it back, then leaned out and started firing again.
To Zack’s immediate left, Baxter pointed his M4 out the rear left-side window. He was shooting slowly but steadily. The problem with Zack getting his sensory acuity back, aside from the crushing pain, was having to hear all this at full volume. The noise too was crushing. This part of Hargeisa was pretty smoky, so Zack couldn’t work out the situation outside, which was maybe a good thing. But there were buildings on fire, sick and healthy people moving through the streets, the latter running at full speed. There were crashed and abandoned vehicles. Smoke was everywhere. Dugan was using every ounce of his considerable driving skill to keep the vehicle moving. Zack had a strong sense that if they stopped, they were all dead.
They’d be dead in minutes, if not seconds.
Zack twisted and leaned into the very back of the truck, looking for the first aid kit. In doing so, he caught Baxter’s eye.
“Zack! You okay?”
Zack nodded wearily and found instead the big med ruck, the one that Bob had used on the State guy. It was wedged in between thick stacks of ISUs, plus gas cans, water bottles, and all the other emergency supplies they normally kept in the truck. As he yanked it over the partition with one arm, trying to keep the other arm immobilized, suddenly he wondered…
“Hey, where the hell is the State guy?”
Baxter shook his head. “He didn’t make it.”
Both of their heads slammed into the ceiling and the med pack went airborne as the Tahoe ramped over something. As they crashed back to ground, Zack pulled his seatbelt across his chest, buckled in, then unzipped the med ruck. He dug around until he found the most serious painkillers that wouldn’t put him to sleep again and swallowed them dry. The crashing waves of pain in the back of his head started to ebb out, though this was probably the placebo effect. Which was fine by him. He then found a triangular bandage and started making a sling for his chicken wing of a left arm.
Baxter quickly took over. Zack looked into his face and shouted another question. They all had to shout over the gunning engine, the firing, the explosions, and the general bedlam.
“Where are we going?”
“Camp Lemonnier!”
“Are the roads clear?”
“Not so far. Dugan’s just trying to get us the hell out of town. The road to the N2, by the football ground, is completely closed out.”
“What does closed out mean?”
“Street’s blocked with vehicles, from one edge to the other, right where the highway starts. It’s like five cars deep.”
Zack blinked. “We can go via Berbera, on the coast road.”
“Already tried it. The Hargeisa-Berbera road is the same.”
Dugan overheard this from in front. He shouted over his shoulder, while wrestling with the wheel and alternately gunning the engine and braking, not for one microsecond taking his eyes off the road. “No, it’s not as bad there! We may be able to go off-road, around it. But if we get bogged down, that’s pretty much us fucked. I’m looping us back around now…”
The Tahoe went screaming around another turn. Zack could see a handful of faces flash by in the window glass – what looked like faces of the terminally ill, but worn by people somehow still on their feet. Hands reached after them. There was nothing to make eye contact with. Muzzle flashes sparked from adjacent blocks. Dugan swerved again, saw that the road ahead was completely blocked, then made another screaming right-hand turn, just to keep rolling. As he straightened out, they slammed into another knot of bodies, sending several airborne, and crushing the others under their wheels. The enormous truck ramped up over them, then landed heavily. Everyone bounced in their seats. Zack checked his tongue.
Bob slung himself back inside and started reloading again.
Zack shouted, “The cars blocking the highway – can we clear them out with HE?”
Bob turned to face him. “Not with this 40-mil potato gun.”
Baxter grabbed Zack’s arm excitedly, luckily the right one. “Hellfires! We can clear the road with Hellfire missiles!”
Zack said, “Negative, negative, I tried for an hour to task air. There’s nothing flying, at least not for us. Nothing!”
Baxter shook his head, eyes like saucers. “No, no! We’ve already got one flying for us! The Predator that Creech gave you!”
Zack almost snapped his fingers. Of course – the one he put on autopilot when the shooting started, back at the safehouse, a hundred years ago. But the safehouse was also where the controls for the UAV were…
Dugan took another turn, then jammed the accelerator. The powerful machine accelerated smoothly as they straightened out on the big north–south boulevard that led straight through town – all the way to the northern intercity road to Berbera. Suddenly, they were going 60mph, then 80, and 90.
“Whatever you’re gonna do,” Dugan said, “do it fast!”
Baxter was now twisted at the waist, leaning into the back of the truck, and struggling and yanking. Finally he got hold, and pulled it over the seat back and into the passenger area: the portable Ground Control Station. It was packed into its hard case, now closed. When Baxter swung the top open, the laptop was still running. He yanked the power cable for the rest of the electronics and handed it forward to Bob. The Tahoe had a big-ass power inverter, and could run all kinds of shit as long as the engine was going.
Baxter cackled. “And they told me not to bring it! Ha!” He then realized he didn’t know how to use it, and swiveled the case to Zack. Zack checked and saw the control connection was still in place. He took the controller – and then screamed in pain from moving his left arm. He tried to fly with one hand, his off one, then yelped again as he reflexively tried to use his left again. Two other huge hands grabbed the case and flipped it around 180 degrees. Maximum Bob leaned back f
rom the front seat, while Baxter and Zack tried to steady the case.
“Baxter!” Bob barked. “Covering fire!”
Baxter complied, hefting his rifle and leaning out the window. Bob took the controls, studied the video and GPS for two seconds to get his bearings, took the bird off autopilot, and accelerated it at full speed toward the north edge of the city – and the beginning of the northern intercity road. Zack looked over the top of the case. He could see the logjam of vehicles up ahead of them and coming up fast.
On the drone optics, Bob could see the same thing from above. He hissed under his breath: “Target lock, target lock…” The UAV was coming in very fast and steep. Bob raised his head. “Baxter! Lase the cars!” Baxter looked back in, his face uncomprehending. “Your PEQ2! Lase the roadblock!” He meant the AN/PEQ2 laser target pointer/illuminator mounted on the front rail of his rifle.
Suddenly Baxter got it. The Hellfire is laser-guided – and can ride into its target on a laser beam shone by anyone. He turned back outside, switched on the device, and sighted in on the cars directly ahead. Unfortunately, it was an IR laser – invisible without night vision kit. Baxter just used the main rifle sight and prayed the laser beam went the same place. Bob spared a look for him, said a profane two-word prayer, and triggered off the first Hellfire.
They didn’t hear anything above, and didn’t see anything until an enormous shattering explosion of smoke and debris erupted directly ahead. Baxter ducked back in to escape the cloud. “No!” Bob shouted. “Keep painting it!” On the overhead video Bob could see that it had only destroyed the first rank of vehicles, and pushed back but not destroyed the second. Baxter slitted his eyes and pointed his rifle into the center of the ash cloud. Bob fired off the second Hellfire. Another explosion, louder and more thrumming now, like the world’s loudest thunderclap, with aftershocks, the very ground shaking underneath the truck. Bob shot out a bear paw to grab Baxter and yank him back inside. They and Zack all huddled on top of one another as Dugan drove them straight into the blast site.
Arisen : Genesis Page 10
