by James, Glynn
Handon didn’t react to this. The appearance of the two men certainly changed the tactical situation. But he still knew right where his guns were. And he knew where his people were. Anyway, everybody went armed now. Didn’t they? Handon drew out this pause, to consider further. Yeah, the two men looked a little sinister. But then again – they had every reason to be as wary of Alpha as Alpha was of them. As Sarah Cameron had sagely noted: the living could be a hell of a lot more dangerous than the dead.
For one thing, they can open doors, Handon remembered her saying. A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth as he thought of this.
But then, as he assessed the scene before him, he realized with a jolt of surprise that this was actually a new situation for his team. The operators of Alpha and of USOC (the Unified Special Operations Command, their parent unit) had so far enjoyed the mixed blessing of almost always going into areas overseas, ones that were totally wiped out. They dealt with the menace of the dead every day. But they almost never had to deal with survivors, or civilians – or even with conventional military units.
And things almost always got messier with survivors and civilians.
In a bizarre way, Alpha had led a charmed life – or at least a sheltered one.
So was Handon in any position even to assess these people, or the threat they might pose? It was new territory. Of course, he and his team had fought bad living people, terrorists and insurgents, for many years before the fall. But that had been a long time ago. And now was not the time to fuck up and make a bad call.
They were too close.
* * *
“Please,” the girl said again. “Can you help us?”
With this, the sick girl gave a little groan. “I’ve got to take her below,” the man with the biker ’stache said, half to the other girl, half to the other boat. He turned, still supporting his burden with little evident effort, and both of them disappeared again.
Handon felt a tap on his shoulder. He swiveled his head, taking care not to turn his back to the other boat, and found Henno facing him from a foot away, his head lowered conspiratorially.
“We don’t have time for this, mate,” Henno said, a faint knife-edge in his voice. “We’ve got an extraction to get to. And we’ve got all of humanity to save. You forget?” What Henno left unsaid was that their commander, Captain Ainsley, had given his life for this mission, and for the objective they now had with them down below, and for all humanity. And Henno had already made it clear he intended to see that Ainsley’s sacrifice was not in vain.
Handon wanted to tell him, Yeah, but we’ve also got OUR humanity to save – or, perhaps, Saving humanity starts at home. But he kept his mouth shut, and just considered his decision. For some reason he couldn’t pin down, it vexed him. The tactical and strategic imperatives were obvious: they should just get the hell out of there. But something was telling him not to. Was he losing his powers of leadership? The ability to make the ruthless decisions that command required?
On top of the unfamiliar situation, fatigue also had to be taken into account. Aside from a few hours of semi-downtime at the cabin, Handon and his people had been going pretty much non-stop since the jump into Chicago two nights previous – which was about 60 hours ago. And even in the day or so before the mission, sleep had not been a big priority, even when it had been possible, or at least less likely to prove fatal.
And, as Handon well knew, sleep deprivation can seriously impair good judgement.
So he had to be very careful here.
At the same time… he found it impossible to ignore the lessons he had learned with, and from, Sarah Cameron, their savior back on the lakeshore. Namely that if they didn’t carefully safeguard their humanity, if they lost the ability to feel compassion toward living people, then there was precious little difference between them and the hordes of walking corpses that surrounded them.
In other words, they were as good as dead already.
Henno recognized that look on Handon’s face, and shook his head. “Just think about this for a second, Sarge. And after you’ve thought about it? Think about it again.”
Handon felt another hand, on his other shoulder this time. A voice said: “I’ll go.”
And there was only one person with a feminine voice on this boat. Handon swiveled his head in the other direction to face Ali. “I’ll go,” she repeated. She already held their med ruck in one hand. Handon looked her in the eye – and he saw it right there. Some part of her needed this. This, helping that injured girl, was somehow personal to her. Maybe she wasn’t even consciously aware of it.
But Handon knew it was there.
“Go,” he said. “Do it.” He then turned his head to face the other boat again. “Throw us a line. We’ll pull ourselves in.”
In a few seconds, the two vessels were close enough to leap across the gap.
Ali handed her rifle over to Handon. With something like a gleam in her eye, she said, “You know what a redneck’s last words are, don’t you?”
“No, what?”
“‘Hold my beer.’”
And with that, she winked, turned, and leapt across the gap.
Hold the Fort
Canterbury
Colley slammed his axe down as hard as he could, grunting with effort as pain hammered through his arms and rattled his shoulders. The zombie’s head all but exploded, half of it falling into the gap below, down into the stairwell of the tenement building, splattering the other dead abominations that scrambled over one another as they reached out for him. The big Moroccan was breathing heavily from exertion, his body on the verge of collapse.
Even back in the Channel Tunnel, they had never had to fight like this. Never had there been so many to fend off all at once, and in such a vertical and perilous space. And there were more coming – he could see them through the bay window at the front of the building, hundreds clawing their way over the fence and falling into the courtyard.
He lashed out with his foot, wanting to scream at the top of his lungs, as he kicked the remains of the creature’s head off his axe, then hauled it back and swung again at the next nearest dead thing.
“Fuck you!” he shouted. “Fuck you. Fuck you.” Over and again.
By his side, his friend Randall hammered the head of another one that had crawled high enough to reach for his legs. He wasn’t lucky enough to have an axe, but instead perched on his knees and made short work of those that came too close with the flat end of a heavy carpenter’s hammer. But this meant getting in close, and dead hands pulled at his clothes and scratched the floor all around him, their diseased flesh threatening to turn him into one of them. His heart felt ready to burst with sheer terror.
Another of the tunnel survivors, McHeath, struggled to push the dead away with a garden spade, but they were filling up the stairwell with frightening speed, their grasping hands getting closer. McHeath had just beheaded one, but that had been a sheer fluke. He’d only intended to knock it back, but the shovel had gone clean through, and the absence of expected resistance had nearly pulled him over. He was pale with exertion and fear, and Colley, who kept glancing around, checking on the others, knew McHeath wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long.
None of them would.
“Hackworth!” he shouted, over the nightmare noise of moaning that seemed to be on all sides of them at once. “Are you close? We can’t hold this for much longer.”
The sound of hammering on wood, and the cracking and sawing of old joists and stairs, continued behind them.
“One more minute!” boomed their leader’s big voice.
How many of these things were crammed into the ground-floor entrance now? Fifty? A hundred? Try as he might, Colley couldn’t see how any more could possibly push their way in. But push they did. Every minute, the dead managed to rise higher and fight their way up the stairwell, even with most of the stairs gone. Those underneath pushed forward, forcing those at the top higher up.
Colley took a breath of rank and sickly
-smelling air and nearly choked. The stench of death lay everywhere, filling his lungs and making his eyes water. Below them, only feet away, a sea of clawing hands reached up, and desperate eyes burning with uncontrollable hunger stared out of pale, dead faces. One slip and any of the men holding the stairwell would plunge to an excruciating death.
Followed by an even worse life-after-death.
Another of the creatures reached up toward Colley, heaving itself up out of the press of bodies. It flailed a badly broken arm, grasping with a hand that was missing most of its fingers, cutting the air inches from Colley’s shins. With a wide swing of his axe, he liberated the arm from its owner.
The last few hours had been like witnessing hell itself spill out into the world, a nightmare that made their previous experiences underground seem trivial. At first they had watched, quietly, from the windows of the upper floors of the tenement building on the edge of downtown Canterbury. They’d killed the lights, everyone crouching in total silence. Even the little girl, Josie, had been calmed by her mother and slept soundly above them, up on the top floor. Apart from the mother, Amarie, there wasn’t a single pair of eyes not looking from behind curtains out into the streets below, watching as everything went from bad to terrible, and then even worse than that.
At first they’d heard the distant sound of gunfire, a faint pop-popping that echoed through the streets, ramping up as more joined the chorus. The few zombies they had seen earlier began to come out, and come closer, but were still slow and inactive – not a grave threat. To these people who had spent two years living through their own unending nightmare inside the Channel Tunnel, fighting every minute for survival, this new crisis had at first seemed more or less to be under control.
They imagined it to be only a small outbreak, and the gunfire in the distance a sure sign that it was being contained and suppressed. They had expected a flurry of efficient activity as the military swept through the streets and cleaned the place up.
But over the next two hours the streets began to fill with more and more of the shambling dead. Windows were broken, doors caved in. Then the screaming began.
None of that mattered, though. Everyone inside the building had a survival instinct born of those two years underground, and they knew that if they were silent, if they didn’t draw attention, the dead wouldn’t notice them. While living in the tunnel they had learned something that would have been valuable to the military if only anyone had thought to ask them. If you are uninjured, and if you cover your mouth, and if you don’t move, and if you are quiet, you can stand within thirty feet of the dead and they won’t see you. Not even the fast ones. No blood, no movement, no sound – no recognition.
It had worked dozens of times in tight situations in the tunnel, and the survivors figured it would work for them now. With forty feet of cobbled yard between the building and the street, and a high wall surrounding that, they were well out of sensing range. If they managed to avoid attention, they would be fine. They all knew how the dead behaved.
But their downfall was in not being able to account for the behavior of the living.
In the third hour, as the gunfire drew closer and the streets filled with more corpses than could be counted, they looked on helplessly as a man burst from the door of a house fifty meters up the street and ran screaming toward their gate. He shouldered his way through the horde, getting scratched and clawed and pulled at as he rushed forward – without question infected before he made it even halfway. By the time he reached the gates – which had so far stood untroubled by the teeming masses that lumbered and milled on its other side – he was being chased by dozens, and then a hundred, or more.
Somehow he managed to lever himself over the wall and fall to the ground below. Even from many yards away inside the building, Hackworth heard a bone crunch as he landed.
The man cried out, but no answer came. Each survivor in the tenement went through his or her own personal crisis in that moment. And each of them came to the same conclusion: this poor, dumb bastard was dead already. No one could help him.
But then, to the group’s horror, he crawled, inch by inch, foot by foot, toward their front door, leaving a trail of blood behind.
And the dead followed, first pushing at the gate, then climbing atop one another, surmounting as a group what none could surmount alone. As they did so, their moaning grew, and more were drawn to the noise. Within five minutes, the first fell over the wall and into the yard, stood up, and staggered to the man who had finally reached the foot of the stairs.
And in that moment, the tunnelers realized the dead were now too close. And too many.
They were inside the perimeter, and the people on the lower floors hadn’t moved when they should have. They’d left it too late. When the first zombie fell over the wall and began making its way toward the screaming man, they were already too late.
Maybe if they had moved right away, thought Hackworth. If he had called them to act. But he hadn’t expected there to be so many, not enough to breach the wall. Even with dozens, or even hundreds, it should have taken the alignment of an awful lot of dark stars for them to pile up in the right place and get over the barrier.
But all it had taken was one panicking dipshit.
“Go! Up!” Hackworth had shouted finally, shaking these vain thoughts from his head. What good were they now? They had been found, the dead were piling up in the stairwell, and there was nothing to do but fight back.
They had survived before, and they would do so again.
Correction. They were doing it all over again.
Now they were destroying stairwells, floor by floor, and retreating higher and higher up into the building. With their destruction work on this floor finally done, Hackworth held the bottom of the ladder as still as he could, as his people, the ones fighting off the rising tide, one by one broke away and sprinted toward him. McHeath came first, then Randall, and at last Colley, turning away and leaving the clawing mass of undead unchecked. The big man scurried up the ladder surprisingly lightly, and then turned and reached back for his friend.
Hackworth was already halfway up when the first of the dead pulled its way out of the heaving pile below and staggered forward. Hackworth climbed as quickly as he could.
Almost there.
He reached out for Colley’s hand, to be hauled up and out of death’s reach, but as he took his hand from the ladder, the first zombie slammed into it, knocking it out from under him. He tottered for a half second, feeling the solid rungs turning to open air, and then plunged backward, flailing at the air and finally landing on top of the creature that had brought him back to earth.
Hackworth’s head hit the hard floor and the world swam around him. He felt the dead man scrambling beneath him, and his vision cleared enough to see that three other zombies had cleared the edge of the broken stairwell. They now lurched to join the bloodbath that Hackworth knew would be his last conscious experience on this Earth.
Then there was a loud bang as something hit the ground heavily next to him. He felt himself shoved aside violently, his view of the stairwell spinning into darkness as his face hit the ground. Another whack of something heavy hitting the wooden floorboards, and then a shadow flitted past him.
Hackworth shook his head and his senses cleared a little. He was still alive. He wasn’t being eaten. He sat up and saw beside him the headless body of the one that had been about to turn him into an afternoon snack.
“Get the ladder,” shouted a voice. He saw Colley wading through the three others with his axe, beheading the first two, and hitting the third so hard in the chest that it flew back into the arms of the horde that still clawed its way up.
Hackworth felt strong arms lifting him to his feet. For a second, he struggled to function as someone pushed him back up the ladder. Then his mind cleared and he helped haul his own weight upward. A last shove and he lay on the dusty boards of the floor above – sweating, panting, shaken, but still alive.
“You okay, Hack?” It
was Colley, shaking him and speaking in his ear.
“Yes. I’m okay,” he replied. “You came back for me.”
Colley nodded. Behind him, Randall and McHeath pulled the ladder up behind their three-man rescue operation.
Hackworth peered down over the edge and straight into the eyes of a dead man, the first to reach the gap below. Another joined it, reaching upward, as more pushed their way out of the crowd.
Then Hackworth looked up.
“How many floors do we have left?”
“Five,” said Colley, heaving and coughing.
“Then we better get smashing those stairs.”
But with this, the ground shook, and the rumble of a massive explosion rocked the building. Windows shattered and plaster dust rained from the ceiling. For a few seconds, the clatter of gunfire in the street stopped, but then quickly resumed.
“What the hell was that?” shouted Hackworth.
“Helicopters,” came a reply from the floor above.
“Helicopters?” Colley said. “What the hell are they doing?”
There was a pause.
“It looks like they’re bombing the whole fucking town!”
Angel of Mercy
Lake Michigan
When Ali leapt the open water between the boats, she didn’t hesitate and she didn’t look back. Even Handon was in awe of her ability to handle herself, not to mention her steel nerves and gigantic sack. But that was precisely why he agreed to let her go. He knew with perfect certainty that everyone on that other boat, anybody who might want to try something, was sure to underestimate her – badly.
As she hit the other deck, Handon and Henno could see the girl there turn to the companionway, then disappear into its dark maw. Ali followed her down, disappearing from view.
