There were eight of them still together, in two inflatable raiding craft. They were making their way down the Bowery heading south for the time being. CELL would expect them to run to the north, so they hadn’t. They would either double back or find another exfiltration route when the opportunity presented itself.
Chino was lying across the prow of the IRC, his Marshall pump-action shotgun pointing out from under the scrim they had lain across the top of the boat. The scrim was laced with a type of foil that was supposed to confuse thermal imagery. Chino, however, was not willing to bet his life on it.
Behind him, also lying down on the boat, their weapons just pointing out from under the scrim, were Earl and Hank.
Earl was on the left hand side of the boat, covering the Bowery and over into the Lower East Side. He had to be in his mid-forties at least but the x-Delta sniper had looked after himself. The quiet Missourian was wiry with leathery skin and still carried an ancient M14 rifle. Chino’s weird, nanosuited friend, Lazy Dane, went way back with Earl. They had both served in D squadron’s recce/sniper troop in Delta Force.
Hank, another southerner, had been 1st Marine. He had known Alcatraz briefly during the evacuation of New York. Earl had then ended up going to work for CELL. The thoughtful bucktoothed Georgian had witnessed what CELL was like first hand and deserted after finding that the terms and conditions had been altered so much that he was effectively going to end up a lifelong indentured servant of the multinational company. Hank’s Mk 60 medium machine gun was pointing out the right side of the boat. Into what had been Chinatown.
Davis was an outspoken self-proclaimed Irish-African American and southie from Boston. He had been part of the Navy’s SEAL delivery vehicle team and was the best boatman that Chino had ever seen. He was lying down in the back of the IRC, piloting it via a periscope sticking through the scrim and with the aid of guidance from Chino on the prow.
Davis’ suggestion for exfiltration was to head to a dive store he knew in Downtown, scavenge it for working closed circuit or SCUBA diving gear and head to Brooklyn subsurface. As a plan went it wasn’t for the fainthearted, and it was problematic in that Earl wasn’t dive qualified. Nor were two of the members of Sarah’s crew in the other IRC that was trailing them.
Chinatown’s getting weird, Chino thought. He’d been in New York when it had been close to a hundred per cent humidity before but the mist was new. The lower part of Manhattan was still under about ten feet of water. It covered the first storey of most of the buildings. Plant life had returned in a big way, flourishing in the moist environment, returning the city to its roots as a swampy island, Chino guessed. Trees, mosses and other climbing plants crept up the side of buildings, obscuring once glowing signs in Hanzi script. It reminded Chino a little of the swamps of Florida and the Bayous of Louisiana. He was half expecting to see an alligator slither out the second storey window of a laundry and swim across in front of them.
The moonlight shining through the thick mist gave the whole place an eerie, haunted feeling. Haunted would be right, Chino thought, a lot of people died on these streets. He immediately thought back to his brother-resistance fighter, Lazy Dane, and all the dead people the nanosuited soldier saw. He hoped Dane was okay.
Then it sounded like the world was ending. He was soaked as water was kicked up in a line stretching out in front of him. He glanced behind to see Sarah’s boat. The IRC looked like it had been folded down the middle. The thirty millimetre tracers from the gun emplacements looked like stars tumbling out of the night sky at them.
Chino heard the muffled outboard engine rev up as Davis took the boat wide out into the Bowery, behind the line of fire, and slewed it right into a tiny alley that Chino was sure it couldn’t fit down. The boat was a tight fit, Earl and Hank had to roll off the side and into the well but Davis made the turn and gunned the motor, accelerating as fast as he could.
Behind them the rounds started flying through the walls as the auto-cannons tried to walk their aim in on the flimsy boat. Chino hated this. This wasn’t a fight for someone who was basically infantry. All he could do was watch, shout warnings and hope that a thirty millimetre round didn’t cut him in two.
Parts of the buildings on one side of the alleyway collapsed into the water under the intensity of the incoming rounds. Chino was almost thrown off the boat as it hit something, probably a sunken truck just under the waterline. The boat jumped but kept going. Davis was sat up now, having pushed the scrim aside. Earl and Hank, like Chino, were just holding on for dear life.
As Davis shot across Elizabeth Street, Chino caught a glance of the incoming tracers again. They were a broken line of lights pointing at them.
Fuck off, Chino silently screamed.
They were in another alley. Rubble raining down on them as the heavy fire all but bisected buildings. The boat bounced off another submerged obstacle and almost went into the wall. Davis fought with it and kept the craft under control. He slewed the craft hard right onto Mott Street and headed up it, past sunken shop fronts and old signs, the undergrowth whipping at their faces, their passage making eddies in the thick mist. Chino glanced back at Davis. The guy couldn’t have been able to see further than he could but he hadn’t guided them wrong yet.
In the middle of Mott Street the boatman suddenly slewed left, straight towards a building.
‘Down!’ Davis barked. Chino scrabbled back and lay on the floor, sure they were about to collide with a brick wall. The IRC slid into the building through the top of an arched two-storey window. There wasn’t much glass left in the frame but what there was rained down on them. Davis reversed the engine, it howled in protest and they still hit the opposite wall. They found themselves floating quite close to exposed beams, just under the ceiling.
Davis unclipped the outboard and then lifted it up and dumped it into the water.
‘What the fuck!?’ Hank protested.
‘Heat,’ Davis told him. ‘Don’t worry, it’s sealed man. We don’t die in the next thirty seconds, I’ll go down and get it.’
It was only then that Chino realised the firing had stopped.
‘If they’ve lost us then they’ll send patrols in,’ Chino said, for something to say. His heart was beating very quickly. He wanted to break the tension.
‘Patrols we can handle,’ Davis said. Davis and Chino were both motor mouths in comparison with the two southerners in their four-man recon team.
Davis was sat on the edge of the boat, looking around at the peeling paint and the creeping plant life of the building they were floating in.
‘This used to be a really good restaurant, they did awesome…’ Davis disappeared into the water. Water which was churning up and red now. Part of the front of the boat was missing. Even Earl was surprised. There’s something in the water was all Chino had time to think before he realised the boat was crumpling up like a used condom and sinking rapidly.
Chino tried to leap up but felt the boat give way underneath him. His fingers just grasped the wood of the exposed ceiling beams, scrabbling for purchase. He felt something brush against his boot and let out an involuntary scream. He swung his legs up, almost kicking Earl in the face, and managed to wrap them around the beam. His shotgun was hanging down on its slung. He felt something grab it and try and pull him back into the water. Chino just reached down and pulled the trigger. The shotgun firing sounded deafening, even after the barrage they had just experienced. The pull on the weapon disappeared, however. The shotgun bucked up and bounced off Chino’s body armour. Chino swung himself up onto the beam and readied the shotgun, pointing it down into the water.
Earl had an old H&K .45 in one hand. He was helping Hank up onto the beam with the other.
‘What the fuck!?’ Chino demanded. The boat had gone and what was left of Davis was a dark cloud of blood spreading on the surface of the water, though limbs and other body parts were starting to bob to the surface.
Something exploded out of the water and grabbed the beam they were all on. Ch
ino fired, worked the shotgun’s slide and fired again. He was dimly aware of a .45 being fired faster than he’d ever heard one fired before. The beam broke. The water rushed up to meet him.
Chino broke the surface of the water screaming, with his knife/machete cross in his hand, shaking. He hadn’t been able to make out what it was that had leapt out of the water but he knew one thing for certain: it wasn’t human.
Earl was on the surface as well. The old guy also had his knife out. Hank, shit, Chino thought. The ex-Jarine was weighed down with an MMG and about half a tonne of ammunition.
‘Did we get it?’ Chino asked.
‘Dunno,’ Earl said. Chino wasn’t sure if Earl was just being calm or was, in fact, adrenalin deficient.
‘I’m going down for Hank,’ Chino told him. Earl nodded. It was instinct. Get your people out. It was only when he dived under the surface of the bloody water that he realised that he would be in there with… with whatever the fucking thing that had attacked them was.
It was pitch dark in the water. He grabbed his torch and flicked it on. He saw the ex-marine panicking, trying to unclip his MMG and drag off the belts of ammunition at the same time. He was between two of the tables on the floor of the submerged Chinese restaurant. Chino kicked down quickly. He grabbed Hank a little too hard before realising his mistake, as it just freaked Hank out further. He got the marine’s attention, signalled for him to calm down, and then used his thumb to motion upwards.
Chino glanced up. He couldn’t see Earl. He helped Hank out of the weighty ammunition, made sure he had hold of his MMG and then pushed him upwards before kicking off himself. As he assisted Hank’s ascent he caught the sensation of movement behind him, from somewhere out in the water on Mott Street. He glanced back but all he saw was beams of moonlight refracting through the water.
‘Over here!’ Earl called as they broke the surface. Earl was on a flight of stairs that led up into another level of the building. Chino was all but dragging Hank with him towards the stairs. He felt something brush against him under the water, panicked and redoubled his pace, swimming in a frenzy towards the steps. He felt Earl grab Hank and pull the marine out of the water. Chino all but crawled up the wooden stairs.
It smashed through the stairs beneath Chino. He felt blades dig into his leg and open his flesh as it tried to drag him under the water. Earl threw himself bodily down the stairs, grabbed Chino as he was being dragged back into the water. Earl’s other hand smoothly brought up the H&K Mk 23 pistol. Earl fired the pistol rapidly. The slide went back on an empty magazine. Chino realised there was nothing trying to drag him into the water anymore. He all but climbed over Earl, scrambling up the stairs. He burst through a doorway at the top of the stairs and collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath. Earl appeared in the doorway behind him.
‘Grenade,’ the Missourian told them and then turned and dropped a fragmentation grenade into the submerged restaurant. There was a subdued explosion and water slopped into the room.
Hank rose up looking furious, and went and stood in the doorway and started shooting the MMG wildly into the water. Earl put a hand on the ex-marine’s shoulder. Hank stopped firing.
‘Easy now brother, bullets are no good in water.’
Hank nodded. Chino realised that the Georgian wasn’t furious. He was terrified. Hank was shaking like a leaf. Earl ejected the magazine from his Mk 23 and replaced it with a new one, working the slide to chamber a round and then holstering it with the safety off. He started to dry his M14.
‘You need to dry your weapons as best you can,’ he told them.
‘You see what it was?’ Chino asked, looking around. It looked like they were in the restaurant’s wine storage area. Chino repressed the borderline-hysterical urge to have a drink to steady his nerves. Earl shrugged.
‘Alien I guess, don’t know, never seen one before, zombies I seen but not aliens.’ Hank and Chino stared at Earl. It was one of the longest things Earl had ever said to them that hadn’t been strictly operational. ‘I’m going to have a look around. You need to look to that leg.’ He told Chino. ‘And one of you needs to watch the door.’
‘I’m on it,’ Hank told him, still stood in the doorway, MMG at the ready.
‘Move back a little, ese, don’t silhouette yourself in the doorway,’ Chino said. He knew that Hank knew this, just like he knew that the marine was shaken up despite being a New York veteran and, apparently, having seen some shit in Russia whilst working for CELL.
Earl brought the M14 up, took the condom off the end of the barrel and disappeared into the mists.
Chino pulled the med kit out of one of the pouches on his webbing. He cleaned and then dressed the wounds. His leg hurt like a sonofabitch and one of the wounds was a through-and-through but he had got lucky, or at least as lucky as you can get when having sharp things pushed through your flesh. Whatever had attacked them had only pierced meat. It hadn’t got anything vital and Chino would still be able to move.
Keeping one eye on Hank and the doorway, Chino dried off his shotgun and the Majestic revolver, which wasn’t waterproofed. He oiled both weapons as best he could but he didn’t have the time to strip and clean them.
‘Did you recognise it?’ Hank finally asked.
‘Didn’t see enough of it, you?’
Hank shook his head. ‘It was fast, though. Definitely Ceph, you think?’
Chino laughed humourlessly. ‘Man, I don’t even want to think about there being another fucked-up alien species in New York.’
‘I guess CELL didn’t kill them all after all,’ Hank mused.
‘CELL lie? Say it ain’t so.’
Hank let out a little laugh. There wasn’t much humour in it. Chino slid two shells into the shotgun to replace the ones he’d fired. He worked the slide to make sure there was a round in the pipe. He heard the whistle and looked around. Earl came stalking out of the mist.
‘What you see, what you hear man?’ Chino asked. Hank glanced around and then went back to keeping watch. Earl put a finger over his lips and then touched his ear.
Chino listened. He could hear the lapping of the water, a slight breeze through the branches of the trees outside. He started to shake his head and then he heard it. It sounded like a hiccough followed by a series of clicks. He opened his mouth to say something, but Earl held his finger over his lips again. There was an answering hooting noise coming from somewhere else but both had been close by.
‘We’re being hunted,’ Earl told him. Chino felt himself go cold. Somehow it was the more chilling because it was Earl who was telling him this. If rumours were true then Earl had spent the last ten years off the grid, living in the wilds, self-sufficient. ‘If’n we want to move then we either go up onto the roof or back into the water, those are our choices.’
‘We go onto the roof then we’ll get picked off by the guns,’ Hank said.
‘Only if we draw attention to ourselves,’ Chino pointed out. ‘If we keep hidden then we’ll be OK.’
‘And if we meet those things up there?’
‘So you want to go back into the water then?’
Hank gave this some thought. ‘Let’s head up to the roof.’
There was the sound of breaking glass from above them. The three soldiers looked at each other. Earl turned and led the way, heading back the direction he had come from, his weapon at the ready. Hank fell in behind him, the butt of the MMG nestled against his shoulder. Chino followed. Checking behind them all the way.
Three floors up they found the stairway had collapsed. Earl didn’t waste time examining it, he just opened the next door he found, taking them out into an open plan office space.
They saw half a skeleton lying close to one of the windows. Chino guessed that it had been a victim of the Manhattan Virus that had only partially liquefied. There wasn’t even much in the way of damage, though the plant life was starting to creep in and the broken windows let in tendrils of the creeping mist.
Chino thought he heard movement below the
m.
‘Earl,’ Chino said quietly. There was definitely movement below them. He heard a crash. Now that they knew what to listen for they had been hearing more of the clicks and hooting noises. They had seemed to be getting closer, and it sounded like they were all around them now. ‘As much as I appreciate and support your one shot, one kill ethos…’ There was a sound behind them. Chino spun around, shotgun at the ready. ‘If you’ve not fought these things before then I think you should know that it might take more than one shot…’
Chino caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He spun around but there was nothing. Something fell over to his left. He spun around and caught more movement but no viable target.
The door they had just came through slammed open. Chino spun back to it. He caught the shadow of a figure moving behind a partition. His finger tightened around the shotgun’s trigger but there was still no viable target.
Behind him Earl started firing the M14 single shot, steadily and repeatedly. Next to him Hank started firing the MMG.
There, Chino saw it! It was a tall, thin, jagged, misshapen figure, still hidden by the darkness. It looked like it was made of sharp angles. Even in the darkness, as it ran through the tendrils of mist, he could make out the swaying tentacle. It looked like a massive rubbery tail sticking out the centre of its back.
Chino squeezed the trigger. The shotgun bucked. He was working the slide already. The creature staggered, bits flew off it. Another round chambered. The shotgun’s muzzle flash flared again. The creature staggered but kept running. And again. The creature hit the ground and slid towards Chino, dead on the floor.
There were more sprinting at him. Chino shifted aim to his right, firing once, then again. The Ceph staggered with the impact of the first shot and the second shot knocked it out the window. He swung to his left. Two more of the things were trying to flank them. The muzzle flash from the MMG made the aliens look like they were caught in a strobe light.
Chino fired another three rounds and the closest one dropped. He fired two more rounds from the shotgun, one hit staggering the Ceph, the other missing. Chino let the empty shotgun drop on its sling. He moved forwards, drawing the big Majestic revolver from its holster. Aiming carefully, he squeezed the trigger. The revolver bucked in his hand. About two foot of muzzle flash leapt out of the end of the barrel. The .50 calibre compact round hit the soft part of the Ceph and then exploded.
Crysis: Escalation Page 16
