by James, Glynn
When the explosive projectiles detonated, it was more like one big rolling explosion than five little ones. When the dust settled, the front rank of dead had simply been atomized. While dropping out the thick magazine, situated way back in the stock, and slapping in a new one, Fick ran straight through the lingering smoke, Graybeard close behind.
As he ran, he looked around until he spotted something colorful on the ground ahead, some detritus from the explosion. Reaching it, he picked it up and turned it over. Bingo – it was one of the ten-gallon jerrycans from the destroyed shed. It looked intact. Another one lay partially underneath a sheet of corrugated tin nearby. Fick gripped the handles of both of them in his left hand, and perched his rifle on that arm.
Moving forward again, scanning the buildings ahead, he rounded one of them – and stopped cold as he ran into a handful of confused dead bastards, just milling around. These must have been the ones too stupid to find the fight, Fick thought. As the group turned and locked onto him, he jabbed the “XE” button on the trigger housing, then flicked the fire selector to full-auto. He sighted in on the leftmost head, depressed his trigger, then panned the weapon smoothly to the right. The big compound rifle was so heavy that even on full-auto the muzzle-rise was negligible. In 2.25 seconds the smaller forward magazine was empty.
And all those Zulus were either headless, or else had canoes for heads.
Their bodies caught up with current events and crumpled to the ground.
Fick ran forward, stepping over and around all the meat, dropped the 5.56 mag out and replaced that. A few meters beyond, he saw a few more of the jerrycans scattered around. The first two he checked had at least one hole in them, but he finally found two more that were intact. “Take these,” he said to Graybeard, then moved out, not waiting long nor looking back.
Fick spotted the hangar he thought he needed, angled toward its door, then shot the handle and lock housing off. He kicked it down and followed it into the semi-darkness inside. The big high-tech sight on his XM-29 glowed and caught his eye – it was in thermal mode, and Fick flashed a grin as he swept it across the room.
Then he remembered Zulus don’t have body heat. That means they won’t show up on thermal particularly well. Or, in fact, at all.
Shit.
If there was a visible light on this weapon, Fick didn’t know where it was or how to use it. Luckily Graybeard followed him in and clicked on his weapon-mounted Surefire tactical light. The room looked clear as he swept the beam across it.
And there sat the Land Rover Longfoot had told him about. Now they just had to hope it would start.
Fick fast-walked over to it, opened the rear door, and tossed in his two jerrycans. He turned, took Graybeard’s, and threw those in after. In the reflected light from the weapon-mounted light, Fick could see Graybeard’s lined, serene, granite-like face. One thing the old guy sure had was patience. Fick pulled open the driver’s-side door now, leaned in, and nudged the gear shift into neutral. He then found the keys in the ignition by touch, turned the engine over, and emerged again.
“Okay,” Graybeard said. “I’ll bite. Where are we going?”
“Not we. You.” Fick pulled out a single map sheet from under plastic on his thigh and unfolded it. “There’s another airstrip, a little private one, about six clicks northeast of here. Here’s your route.” He pulled a felt-tip pen from his tactical vest and drew out a stair-stepping line on the map. He looked up again, his expression grim. “We need at least another 40 gallons of avgas – and 80 would be better. Go get it. Come back. Don’t dawdle. If Alpha and the scientist get here before you get back, we take off without you.”
Graybeard wanted to ask what they’d do when they ran out of fuel in mid-air in that case. But he figured he already knew the answer: they’d deal with that problem if and when they survived all the other ones stacked up in front of it.
But instead he only said, “No problem.”
And now he was just waiting for Fick to get the hell out of the way so he could mount up the truck.
Alamo
Beaver Island
On his run from the hangar back to the runway, Gunny Fick had cause to entertain a thought that he had never before let into his head, not once in a 25-year military career:
I’m getting too old for this shit.
The pilot started hailing him while he was still 20 meters out. “Fick! We need to take off – while we still can!” Fick did see his point. They were by no means safe from being overrun where they were. And if that happened, it would be too late to load up the aircraft and get it rolling down the runway, never mind back into the air.
But none of that mattered. It was impossible for them to take off before Alpha arrived. That was the whole point of the exercise. And everything depended on it.
He shook his head. “Negative. We’re not leaving. And we don’t have the fuel to circle and land again. So man your goddamned sector.”
“This is some Black Hawk Down shit right here,” the pilot muttered, “when the pilot’s on the ground and balls-deep in the firefight…”
Fick ignored this, instead darting over to each position and tweaking their defensive posture. On the upside, they were now consolidated in one area, which consisted of the eastern end of the runway and the control tower beside it. They had essentially collapsed their salient to the east, where the fueling station used to be. Though, in fairness, they’d had their salient collapsed for them by means of a devastating explosion.
On the downside, it was now down to him, Brady, and the pilot out on the ground; a badly wounded Reyes in the tail turret; and the Kid up top. And that was it. And facing their dwindling numbers, a shocking number of Zulus were pouring in from the south now, as well as from the east, and heavier every minute from the north. The Marines were engaged on three sides – and, hell, who was Fick kidding? It was really four sides. It was just that the Kid was keeping the western approach clear enough that they could pretend it was safe there.
But even that comforting illusion wasn’t going to last a whole hell of a lot longer.
Fick took a knee, facing south, and made himself semi-comfortable.
Win or lose, stand or fall… this was going to be their Alamo.
* * *
Staff Sergeant Brady continued to hold the position he’d been holding all day – out on their north flank. And, hell, who was he kidding? He was their north flank. But he spent almost no time or energy bemoaning this fact – nor wondering if this was going to be their last battle together. He had a job to do. And he was going to do it down to his last round and his last breath.
But, as long as he did that, he figured things were pretty likely to work out.
He hadn’t gotten to the very top of the military world, and before that the martial arts world, by complaining, second-guessing, or worrying about the future. He just did what was required of him, in the situation he was in. Plus, he was totally prepared for this moment – at a razor-edge of fitness, with awesome muscle tone and definition, and hardly an ounce of body fat on him. He looked cool in his ballistic Oakleys. His gear was all battle-tested and right where he could get at it.
He’d even shaved that morning.
And when they did finally get out of this particular shit-pile alive, well, he had a kettle, cafetière, grinder, and beans in his ruck back in the plane. The prospect of fresh coffee alone made it worth surviving all this, and would also be there for anyone left alive at the end.
They just had to hold a little longer.
Brady had been having a slightly easier time of it since Reyes came back – because the twin 50’s field of fire, while predominantly to the east, partially overlapped with his. But now he heard the clattering machine guns go silent. A glance over his shoulder showed Reyes contorted around in the turret bubble, reaching back into the plane, trying to pull down fresh belts of 50-cal and get them loaded up. Brady wished he could help. But he didn’t have one second to leave his gun. If he did, the levee would break.
/>
Another thing Brady was glad of was that he had hauled two full crates of magazines and grenades out from the aircraft cabin. That was earlier in the battle, when he’d had two spare seconds to rub together. Now that they were too heavily engaged for him to leave his position, he at least didn’t have to go more than two feet to top up.
The dead were getting closer with each massed attack. Brady could see the semi-translucent ulcers in the eyes of some of them before they went down. And it was getting harder to hit the runners in their heads. It required a level of focus and control that was hard to maintain; never mind that his hands and arms had started to go numb and buzzing from the non-stop firing.
For a while, he had so many targets he’d gone full-auto. But he found himself burning through ammo too quickly. And he had no idea how long they were going to be out on the ground. So he’d gone back to single shot, albeit non-stop rapid single shots. Every time he got a little breathing room he’d either heave a hand grenade toward the treeline, or fire one off from the launcher under his rifle. But less and less did he even have time to take his finger off the trigger.
Soon, at this rate, the dead would be in their lines. And they’d have to go hand-to-hand.
From behind him, he heard Fick bellow, “Marines! Fix bayonets!”
Brady laughed at that one. First of all, there was only him to do it. Reyes was in the plane, the Kid was up top, the pilot didn’t have one – and Gunny himself was rocking that absurd space-gun, which wouldn’t take a bayonet. Secondly, it was just funny. Bayonets had fallen so far out of favor in the wars of the early 21st century that nobody had ever manufactured a bayonet lug for their SCAR assault rifles. But, in the ZA, they had made a comeback. Brady remembered Fick commissioning a bunch of them, based on his own design, from the JFK’s engineering workshop.
This was another way the ZA was more like WWII than the high-tech terror wars: bloody, in the trenches, sometimes hand-to-hand, having to kill the enemy right to their faces. That was a very different proposition from doing it from a thousand yards out with a Nightforce scope, or painting your target with a laser and having an Apache or Reaper UAV drop a Hellfire on it.
Behind him, he heard the pilot call out again to Fick: “Seriously, dude, we’ve got to roll back! We’re burning through all the ammo. We can’t hold off this many!”
Brady could almost hear Fick’s response before he shouted it: “You hold this motherfucking line or I will shoot you myself!” Brady wondered whether that might go down in the pantheon of belligerent Marine quotations. Like, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?” from Belleau Wood or, “You’ll never get a Purple Heart hiding in a foxhole! Follow me!” from Guadalcanal. Though it occurred to Brady that somebody would have to survive this engagement for Fick’s line to attain immortality.
“Hold this line!” Fick repeated. “Do not give one inch! Just give me thirty seconds more…”
Dropping out and replacing yet another mag, Brady idly wondered:
What happens in thirty seconds?
* * *
Fick stole another look at his watch during a two-second micro-lull in the Zulu onslaught. And he cursed the lack of a bayonet lug on the XM-29. He’d never really had any other melee weapon. The samurai-sword craze of the USOC operators had never caught on with his Marines – which was a little ironic because the Marine Corps officers saber was something of a trademark. And Fick still had the LT’s sword, stowed back in his quarters on the carrier.
But he definitely didn’t feel entitled to use it. Even if he’d known how.
Watching the legions of corpses pour in from the forest, he simply couldn’t believe their numbers. It looked like every one of the several thousand the batshit Canadian had described were now coming in on them. Now that Fick thought about it, the island was small enough, 13 miles long, between 3 and 6 miles wide, that they could easily end up with every dead guy on the island all right there. The ones close to the airport had been drawn by the initial duel with the control tower, then their moans drew ones further out, and on like that – until they could have a local singularity, with every Zulu on the island in one big pile.
On the other hand, Fick thought, the island was at least a closed system, so there were only so many. And at some point they’d all be dead.
It was just looking likely that the Marines would all be dead first.
Now, for the first time, a couple of sprinting dead bastards, both of them in rotting Canadian Forces uniform, made it right up to Fick while he was empty and starting his reload. He dropped the rifle and came up with his secondary weapon, a MARSOC M45 Close Quarter Battle Pistol (CQBP). This was the latest, and most likely last, evolution of the iconic Colt M1911 frame – dating from, well, 1911. It was the past and future all rolled up in one perfect package. He fired point blank into the half-decayed face that hissed and lunged the last few inches at him. A pair of fat .45 ACP rounds entered its mouth and blew out the back of its head, and it collapsed at Fick’s feet, its momentum sending it crashing into his shins and desert boots, and taking his legs out from under him.
As Fick went down, the second one dove on his exposed back. He stuck the .45 over his shoulder and fired blind, emptying the mag. The grasping, writhing monster on his back went limp. Looking up, Fick could see another pair racing at him. But both went into the dirt from high-angle head shots. That would be the Kid up top, watching his back. An angel on his shoulders.
The Kid was damned cherubic, come to picture him.
Fick reloaded the pistol as he scrambled to his feet – he’d get dead fast if he stayed on the ground. He started emptying the next mag into the ones following those first four in. There was simply no gap or pause in the attack, no time for him to gain any breathing room or push them back.
But, exactly as his seventh and last round cracked off, the whole treeline to the south went up in a rippling, rolling, billowing, oxygen-sucking series of massive explosions. The running corpses nearly on top of him were still nearly on top of him. But the hundreds lined up behind them were suddenly being cooked on their feet and served up as Zulu Flambé. Fick stole a look over his shoulder, and saw that the treeline to the north was getting a similar incendiary shellacking.
And one second later, first one, then the other, of a pair of F-35 Lightning II 5th-generation multi-role stealth fighters blasted overhead at Mach 1.6, or 1,200 mph, leaving a series of powerful sonic booms echoing behind them.
About goddamned time, Fick thought. Naval aviators – bunch of precious Top Gun wannabes…
He recovered his rifle and finished his reload.
* * *
“What the fuck was that?” the bomber pilot shouted over his shoulder, while simultaneously staring with disbelief at the utter carnage and inferno that now surrounded the airport on three sides.
Fick grunted. “Our close air support.”
Now that the shooters on the ground had cleaned up the front ranks of attackers, they finally had a little breathing room – because the dozen ranks behind had been taken out by a combination of GBU-39 precision-guided glide bombs and Brimstone air-launched ground attack missiles. The F-35s expended all of their ordnance in three blistering passes. They’d had plenty of targets. When they were done, a cheer went up from the surviving Marines.
“Yeah, get some!” Brady yelled, pumping his fist toward the planes. He then pointed a finger at the legions of burning and collapsing dead guys. “Come over here and get a mouthful of dick!”
“Holy shit,” the pilot said, lowering his weapon for the first time in what seemed like hours. “Why didn’t we have some of that earlier?”
Fick sighed and tried to decide whether to answer him. “Because, after flying here and back from the carrier, the F35s have got exactly six minutes of linger time. And with six minutes, I needed them here exactly when shit was worst. Also, they go four times the speed of Chuckie here, so they only took off a half-hour ago…”
It had basically been a feat of l
ogistics and timing, but Fick left it at that. Right now he needed everyone to get back on their guns. While the air strikes had salvaged their position, pulling them back from the brink of catastrophe, they were still under heavy attack. And, before long, they were going to be right back in the deep shit they’d just paddled themselves temporarily out of.
And now much of the forest around them was also burning.
Especially at the far end of the runway, to the east.
Where the hell was Alpha?
Left Behind
Virginia Beach
Dust spewed behind the commandeered truck as it barreled through the streets, passing rows of run-down buildings that hadn’t been inhabited for two years. To Wesley they looked as though they’d been empty much longer. In just that short time, the wood had started to crack and fall away, windows got covered in grime so that he couldn’t even see inside most of them, and doors had rotted off their hinges. He thought that perhaps most of the damage had been done during the early days of the ZA, when people were still alive and battling the dead.
But then, maybe not.
Wesley remembered the shed that his grandfather built – a stout, square, wooden structure that sat in the corner of their garden for most of his childhood. It had always looked pristine, ageless. Yes, it had changed color over the years. Wesley could remember how it faded a tiny bit every summer, though it was still obviously the same box, and the same wood. That was until his grandfather passed away.
After that, how long had it taken? Two years? Three at most. It didn’t change much that first summer or the next, but nearly collapsed when they emptied it out on the day they took his grandmother to the care home. And the grime on the windows had been the same oily film that covered those of the buildings they passed now. When left alone and uncared for, things managed to fall apart pretty damned quickly, all by themselves.
