by James, Glynn
If the sniper in the tower got any more rounds off, nobody in the back of the bomber saw or heard it. The twin jackhammer roar of the dual heavy machine guns shook the very structure of the plane, made teeth vibrate, rattled brains. And it just went on and on. The Marines were pretty sure their teeth were going to come out and their bowel control fail at this rate. The barrels were definitely going to overheat soon.
Hundreds of enormous .50 BMG rounds from the twin guns just poured into the control tower. With the plane vibrating, it wasn’t particularly accurate fire. No doubt, just on the law of averages, an awful lot of them made it into the control deck, but they also struck and penetrated every surface of the west-facing side of the whole structure, especially as the plane got farther away.
And right about at the five-second mark, the top or roof of the entire sonofabitch collapsed straight into the big control room below, in a tremendous whuff of dust and debris. Chesney, Fick, and Reyes all cheered spontaneously, their voices deep and resonant. And it was only when the Kid took his right hand from the gun to pump his fist in the air that Fick noticed that a chunk of his arm was gone.
“You’re hit,” Fick shouted. “You’re bleeding, Chesney.”
Still absolutely jacked on adrenaline, the Kid shouted back: “I ain’t got time to bleed!” And he continued blasting away with a maniacal cackle.
Fucking kids, Fick thought, raised on Hollywood and video games…
“Make time,” he said, grabbing his upper arm roughly, while reaching down to the Kid’s waist pack and digging into the blowout kit there for a thick Israeli bandage. He grudgingly decided it was to the Kid’s credit that he kept shooting while Fick wrapped him up. And Chesney also must have the luck of the Irish. Because that .50 sniper round had only just winged him.
If it had caught his arm square, it would have taken it clean off.
* * *
Fick looked contentedly upon the wreckage of the control tower, as Chuckie came around once again, and in a much more relaxed manner this time. “Now that’s good effect on target,” he said, mainly to himself. Of course, the collapse had almost certainly been due as much to the rotting of the structure as it was to Chesney’s shooting. But, either way, there was no more sign of their bothersome sniper. But then Fick’s smile melted away – because another thing there was no sign of was Alpha team.
But, then again, this air extraction mission, call sign Charles One Zero, was here slightly ahead of schedule – and being early was probably only slightly less bad than being late, depending on how popular a spot this turned out to be. And, anyway, even if Alpha were down there, Fick wouldn’t have expected them to just be sitting on the tarmac with their faces hanging out. They’d be under cover. Much as Fick and his men would not be, not if they had any hope of defending the aircraft and the runway.
Now, as Fick continued to scan the terrain below out of the blister, a couple of little ant-like movements on the ground tugged at his eye. He leaned forward and squinted. There were two, then five, then eight… little human figures running jerkily out of the treeline of the forest, and into the cleared area around the airport. They were making for the control tower. And, while they were human figures, they definitely weren’t human.
Not anymore, at least.
Fick sighed. He decided he’d better get his ass back up to the flight deck and get on the horn to Alpha – and tell them to shake a fucking leg. Because the pilots were already banking around and lining up their approach to the runway. And, as unappealing as hanging around on that tarmac had seemed a few minutes before, it had become even less so now.
Fick couldn’t help but be pleased that they’d successfully suppressed the ground fire.
But they’d also just rung the goddamned dinner bell.
Overwatch
Canterbury Quarantine Border
Major Grews paced the back of his mobile tactical operations truck, cursing under his breath. Four hours was what they had said. Four hours to get the problem under control. But it had already gone way past saving, even before he’d gotten his men on the ground. Now he had four combat teams fighting their way through the area of operations (AO). One Troop, 42 Commando, were smack in the middle of it all – and unless they made it to where those damn tunnel folk were barricaded up, there was zero chance of getting those civilians out.
One Troop were his best, his elite, and after their odyssey across fallen Europe, starting in Germany, these men were more than able to handle being outnumbered by the dead. Hell, they were used to it, it was their speciality, but even they would run out of ammunition soon. Then it would be down to hand-to-hand fighting, and things would get messy, and they would start to fall.
Grews knew their time was up and the birds were already in the air. Minutes were all he had left. The operations order from the top was that the people from the tunnel – currently holed up in the temporary housing they’d been given until they could be moved to London – were to be saved at all costs. They would go in and get them, an airlift most probably, but what about his team? They were already rocketing the damn streets with the squadron of Apaches that had been moved in and cleared hot. This terrifically multiplied the chaos that his men were already battling through.
“‘Fucking media nightmare’,” he hissed to himself, and slammed his fist on the inside panel of the vehicle. That’s all Central really cared about? Keeping the tunnelers alive – for “general morale”? What about a whole damn city going down – and barely sixty miles from the capital? What about the people who could still be stuck inside buildings there, and who would soon have those buildings collapsing in on them?
“You have to get the tunnel survivors out of there safely,” Colonel Mayes had said to him. “At all costs. If they die, a few days after we managed to rescue them from that damned tunnel, we are going to have a media nightmare on our hands. I mean a nightmare.”
“Isn’t it a little more important that right now we’re facing the first major urban outbreak in nearly two years?” Grews had asked. “Can’t we just seal the whole town off and airlift them out?”
“Airlift? Yes, of course.” Colonel Mayes had sounded distant. “But we won’t have the capability to lift them out for another couple of hours, which is too close to the cuff. Send your men in. Quell what you can, and if they can get them out of there on foot, that’s even better. If they can’t, then they need to hold that building until the bombing is over and we can get them out safely. Look, I’ve got a detachment from 656 Squadron, Army Air Corps, on their way to you now. Apaches, very formidable, they can provide you with air support as required. They’ll clear the way to the building and then run top cover for your men until the bombing starts.”
“And if they can’t get to the building and hold it?”
“They have to.”
Four hours ago that had all seemed possible. One Troop had gone in, along with three other teams at different locations, and at first the streets had been relatively quiet. But then the evacuations had begun, and doors started opening, and that was when the problems started. How many people had rushed home and hidden themselves away after their brief scare with a fast-moving zombie that hadn’t tried to eat them? Dozens? Hundreds? How many had never woken up… alive? That’s when the attacks began all over the city. And the dead went from hundreds to thousands in less than two hours.
Truly a fucking nightmare.
Grews looked to his operations officer. “Did we get the supply drop in the air to One Troop?”
“Affirmative, sir,” replied the junior officer, who sat on a bench in the back of the truck. “Supply drop is inbound. ETA five minutes.”
“Good,” said the Major. Let’s just hope it reaches them, he thought.
But then Grews frowned. Something was bothering him. As he listened to the chatter of the various radio channels, all buzzing with activity from his troops in contact on the ground, something really began to itch at the back of his mind. How many dead were in the city now? Two thousand?
Five thousand? It was spiraling by the minute. They had evacuated close to ten thousand people before the inner city became hopeless and they sealed it off. Most of the refugees had come from the outskirts of town.
Grews cursed. How many people were in the damn town to start with? The reports from the Apaches were that most of the inner city was now overwhelmed. There were a few pockets of resistance, but those small islands were falling rapidly as the sheer numbers of the dead swamped them.
Then it hit him. What the hell was going to happen when the only living targets were sitting around the outskirts of town? The quarantine personnel, and the refugees? What would the dead do when there was no longer anybody alive inside the town to keep them there?
He looked across at his Ops Officer.
“How many checkpoints do we have? What’s our border coverage?”
The man blinked, considered, then tried to answer. “We have all the main roads held with roadblocks in place, sir. Each is manned by a platoon of infantry, with vehicle-mounted heavy weapons. We also have the Folkestone Harbour garrison handling the refugee situation. They’re at Harbledown, sir.”
“Roadblocks. We only have roadblocks. Harbledown is what, about a mile from Canterbury?”
“Yes, sir.”
A mile. Just a mile. That was too damned close.
Ten thousand refugees milling around in a field, some of them injured, all making a lot of noise – and probably within sniffing range of the multiplying horde.
“Get me Brooks from Harbour garrison, now.”
Inbound
Canterbury
The thunder of missile strikes just kept coming. Jameson and his men had been hunkered down for over two minutes, after receiving zero warning of the imminent bombardment, as they waited out the blasts that shook the ground and ravaged the streets ahead. And they had now kept their heads down as long as they dared, as the dead nearby started getting too close. Bombs falling from the sky didn’t bother the dead in the least; they didn’t even notice them.
Now One Troop uncovered and opened fire again, knocking down the nearest of the incoming threats. They held their positions, not daring to move into the street opposite. The rain of deadly missiles was moving farther away now, blasting great holes in the fronts of shops and other buildings, leaving craters big enough to dump a truck into, and rending the dead into small pieces, which were then scattered across the road.
Then, without warning, the three helicopters ceased firing, banked right, and roared away, heading out of the city, after passing almost directly over the tenement building.
Jameson stood up, his back tingling with shock from the missile impacts that had been so close, far too close, to him and his men. He pressed the talk button on his radio.
“CentCom, One Troop. What the hell was that? How about alerting troops in contact before a danger-close strike?” he bellowed.
Around him, his men had begun to stand up, some of them staggering, but still they regrouped, reformed, and made ready. No one was lost or combat ineffective – yet. But everyone had limits.
“One Troop, CentCom. You are now clear to move to your target. Be advised that Hammerdown protocol is now in place. Inbound ten minutes. Safety zone is within fifty meters of the target building. Over.”
“Clear, my arse—” But Jameson cut himself off, knowing he would only earn himself a ticking off if he spoke further. The rage was burning inside him, and he was already forming words he would regret. But he managed to hold his tongue for the moment.
He looked across the battlefield, judging his team’s next move, and flipped his radio from the command to the troop net. They needed to move fast. No, they needed to move like it was their last day, because if they didn’t, it probably would be.
“First squad, move up! Eli, you’re on point. Get to those traffic lights. Clear and hold.”
A shout of acknowledgement came back, penetrating Jameson’s still-ringing ears. Twelve men, Eli at the fore, broke from their positions and rushed the intersection, leaping the bodies of the dead, rifles raised and ready, checking every corpse as they passed. A handful of shots rang out as still-moving zombies were dropped, the Marines speeding past them without slowing.
“Second squad, patrol forward. Third squad, secure the rear. Hold formation, keep it together. Watch your feet, but keep moving. We have a whole shedload of dead in bits down there, and we have to make it to that tenement building in the the next ten minutes or we are all fucked.”
They moved out by squads, covering the ground of the roundabout in less than thirty seconds. Sporadic shots rang out as still-feisty dead were spotted and dealt with. Ahead, further down the road, first squad was already opening up on the remaining dead coming out of nearby buildings. A grocery store on the left, with its windows smashed, produced perhaps a dozen, maybe more, stumbling over each other to get out – to get their teeth and claws into the Marines. Eli leapt on top of a dented car and barked orders, repositioning his squad like some mad general, and watching over them.
As far as he was concerned, they couldn’t afford to lose a single man.
Jameson hopped over a pile of debris from the missile strikes, which included a severed leg. He didn’t slow, and he tried to keep his mind off what exactly lay scattered on the street around them. He told himself that even though these had been living people a day ago, they were dead already when the missiles hit. They wouldn’t have felt a thing.
Gore was everywhere. A few feet away one of his men sidestepped, lifted his rifle and fired a single shot into a pile of bodies that the explosions had ripped apart, leaving a mangled patchwork of limbs, some of which were still moving. That movement stopped now.
Jameson scanned the ground ahead, up the street and to either side, as they crossed broken pavement littered with debris from destroyed building fronts. Not a single square meter of ground was clear. Glass, splinters of painted wood and plastic, and chunks of brick and masonry lay scattered across the road and the shattered sidewalk as though some giant had thrown it there.
“Keep your eyes peeled for crawlers,” he said into his chin mic, remembering those hands reaching up from the watery darkness of the Channel Tunnel. Even half a zombie in the wrong place, crushed under a car but still able to reach out and bite, could mean death to someone not paying attention.
He caught up with Eli and his first squad, consolidated, and they moved out again, heading up the street and taking ground as quickly as they could. The tenement building loomed closer now – three hundred yards, then two hundred. It seemed that every other structure they passed spewed a dozen or more of the dead, which his men would quickly gun down.
“Jameson,” called a voice in his ear. It was Grews and he sounded agitated. “Jameson, answer me, you bastard.”
“Jameson here. What’s the problem, boss?”
There was a hissing of static and the channel broke up for a few seconds.
“There’s a supply drop coming. Ammo. Are you close to the tenement yet? Are you at the fucking exclusion zone?”
Jameson continued to jog forward, aiming his rifle ahead, making his shots count. So far the Marines had kept the still-walking undead at bay, and they were closing on the tenement now. But in the background, over the snap of assault rifles, a distant and deep humming noise had begun to grow.
“Affirmative, fifty meters to target.”
The street was nearly empty here. Even though the blacktop was largely free of missile impact craters, there were still strangely few of the enemy.
And finally they were outside the gate of the tenement. One of the men got to work on the lock with a heavy set of bolt cutters. Eli and First Squad moved up to the wall – behind which they could see a large concentration of the dead, all trying to fight their way in to the target building. Second and third squads took up supporting positions outside the gate.
“Jameson, the drop will be at your location in sixty seconds. You should see it by now.”
Jameson scanned the skie
s for another helo, but there was nothing.
“Negative, I am not visual with resupply bird…”
And then he did see it – but it wasn’t airborne. Racing down the street they had just come up, bouncing over rubble from the missile strikes, was a 4x4. It barreled toward their position, and Jameson wondered if it was even planning to stop.
“Is it a ground vehicle, sir?”
“No, Jameson. It’s a Lynx, flying with the Apaches. It should be there by now. You’ve got about two minutes to get in that yard. Do you hear me?”
The 4x4 was thirty yards out now, and still accelerating. Inside it, Jameson could now see the wide, terror-stricken eyes of the driver. And he could also see the dogged figures of the dead that hung on all sides of the vehicle. One of them pounded at the driver’s-side window with bloody, broken hands, as others clung to the roof rack and running-boards.
Finally, without warning, the window spiderwebbed and caved, and the zombie lunged in at the driver, its legs kicking at the air as it flailed and bit. The 4x4 swerved violently, turning toward the wall in front of the tenement – which also meant it was speeding directly toward the Marines. Jameson’s eyes went wide as he realized this freakish roadshow was not just going to pass them by.
“Sir, we’re looking at heavy opposition in the ya—” came Eli’s voice over the net, but Jameson interrupted him.
“Everybody out the way! Clear the gate! Now!”
The out-of-control vehicle blasted toward them, moving toward the wall, over which Eli and first squad were already making shots on the mass of dead behind it.
Now everything in Jameson’s vision seemed to go into vivid slow motion…
The massive 4x4 thundering up over the sidewalk, totally out of control, roaring along at sixty miles per hour, clipping the curb and launching into the air…
