by D. J. Molles
He was going to shoot them.
One foot in front of the other. Heart heavy and hard in his chest. Like a palpitating brick. He scanned left as he moved. There were cubicles. They were small. Easily cleared with a passing glance. The walls were thin and would provide nothing in the way of cover. He had to keep moving.
The shadows flashed again. Abe fired his rifle through the rapidly clearing haze. Thought he saw a figure fall but couldn’t be sure. He saw a muzzle flash, felt something zip past his face like an angered bee. He resisted the urge to dive for the cubicles and the false sense of protection they gave. They didn’t have time for a firefight. Tyler didn’t have time for it. The wounded soldier on the roof didn’t have time for it. They only had time for quick, decisive action. He had to keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
Muzzle flash again.
Abe fired at it, five shots.
Someone screamed. The sound elated him.
Got him! Got that motherfucker!
He reached a body lying facedown. A young man—that was all Abe registered. Maybe he was dead; maybe he was alive. Maybe Abe had tagged him, or maybe it had been one of the Blackhawk gunners, or maybe it had been the grenade. He still held an M4 carbine. He could have been a threat. Abe didn’t stop to determine. He kicked away the rifle and put a bullet into the back of the skull to make sure.
Abe felt something smack his helmet, and then something punched him in the chest.
Holy shit…
Someone about ten yards in front of him, standing there in the gloom, backlit by the daylight behind him. Pointing a pistol at Abe, his feet dancing. Something that Abe called “happy feet,” which was a bit of a misnomer. When someone was so terrified that they could not decide whether to continue fighting or flee, their legs would dance around, caught in indecision.
Abe was still coming at him. He fired once, then felt the bolt lock back, and the next reflexive trigger pull was just empty movement. The man before him stumbled back and Abe thought he had caught him in the chest, but he was far from dead. He was raising the pistol again. Abe was close, and getting closer. He dropped the rifle, let the sling carry it down to his weak side as he grabbed his sidearm.
Abe came within arm’s distance. He juked left off the X, slapped out at the man’s pistol coming up. The pistol swung away, firing impotently into the haze. Abe was in close now, and he tucked his own pistol up tightly into his body as he bore down on the terrified man. Then he thrust out, pulling the pistol back just before it touched the man’s clavicle, and then fired three shots in a downward trajectory, each one punching through the bottom of the man’s neck and traveling down through his body where they punched through organs and vertebrae and the pelvic bone and came out through the man’s leg, groin, and anus.
He toppled to the ground, structurally unsound.
The look on the dead man’s face was one of fear and confusion.
Just like the young man before him, Abe kicked the pistol from his grip and finished him.
Abe stood there over him and coughed, his chest feeling raw. He forced himself to bring the pistol up, scan around for any additional threats. He registered a few more bodies on the ground. None of them was moving. There were no immediate threats.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. “You good?”
Abe still held his pistol punched out, twisting from side to side, scanning more out of reflex than anything else. His weak hand left his weapon and went first to his head. He felt the divot in his helmet, but it was shallow. Just a glancing blow. Then he touched his chest, aiming for where it ached, but his finger hit his front chicken plate. Felt the little pieces of the smashed projectile still caught up between the fabric and the plate.
Abe coughed again. “I’m good. I’m good. It hit the plate.” He turned to the soldier. “Who’s got comms?” As he said it, he looked out the bank of windows to the southern end of the bridge and could see the crowd of tattered, ungodly souls scrambling over the barricade of cars at the bottom.
The soldier jerked his thumb behind them. “Sarge.”
Abe sprinted back down the hall, over the bodies of men he had not seen at first. There were at least five or six of them. He jumped onto the desk and quickly but gingerly negotiated the broken glass around the frame. Once outside, he could hear the noise of the infected between the beat of helicopter rotors—the grating, screaming, screeching noise that Abe had come to hate so much.
He grabbed the ladder and hauled up it. “Sergeant!” he yelled as he climbed. “Sergeant!”
He reached the top. The sergeant was crouched over the wounded soldier, working a Combat Application Tourniquet onto his bloodied thigh. The wounded man was still conscious, still upright, but he was looking at the sky and his gaze was taking on that drunken and vacant aspect that was a sure sign of blood loss. The sergeant used the tourniquet rod to torque it down on the wounded soldier’s leg, then he looked back at Abe.
“Sir?”
“I need your radio! Quick!”
The sergeant dipped his head toward Abe. “I’m plugged in. You’re gonna hafta grab it.”
Abe could see the man’s hands were occupied trying to keep his man from bleeding out. The sergeant wore the radio headset, with his helmet over it. Abe leaned down over him and removed the man’s helmet, then snatched off the headset. He started searching the sergeant’s chest rig. “Where’s the button? Where’s the fucking button?”
The sergeant snatched a black circle from one of the MOLLE loops of his vest and thrust it at Abe. “Right here.”
Abe grabbed the button and depressed it with one hand as the other put the headset up to his ear, the boom mike jutting out awkwardly. “Fargo-Six! Fargo-Six! You’ve got infected moving up the bridge at you! How copy?”
Tyler’s only response was, “I got it! I got it!”
“Rocky-Six to Copperheads, I need guns on those infected pushing the south end of the bridge. Can either of you respond?”
Calm. “Two-One, copies. We’re en route.”
“Two-Five, we copy.”
Abe stood there on the highest tier of the trilevel building, looking out across a big dirty expanse of rail yard. Off to the left came the heavy beating sounds of the Blackhawks, their door gunners loading fresh cases of ammunition. The two birds angled and pivoted, one following the other. They split as they rode low over the tops of Fargo Group’s vehicles in the middle of the bridge, one Blackhawk taking one side of the bridge and one taking the other. They dipped down low for a brief moment, like a shark might dive so that it can achieve a more powerful breach. The sound of their rotors changed, turned from basal to almost a sharp, knocking sound. Abe watched the dust across the rail yard kick up, the Blackhawks slowing into a hover, and then they rose, cleared the sides of the bridge, and the door gunners opened up.
It was a bloody, chaotic spectacle. The bright streaks of tracer fire flashed in the early morning light, and they chewed through flesh and concrete, sending small figures crumpling and flailing to the ground. The Copperhead door gunners had the bridge in a crossfire that ground those poor, mad bastards to pieces, and then Fargo Group added their own to the mix, someone finally manning one of the fifty turrets on their gun trucks.
Abe stood there watching it. Watching the infected run blindly into the raking cross fire, like their feet were not on the asphalt of a bridge but rather a conveyor belt, pulling each of them to their violent end. He turned his attention to the other two buildings at the north end of the bridge. He squinted to see the details of them, but several things were obvious. Most of the windows facing him were broken out and thick clouds of rapidly dissipating gray smoke were pouring from them.
Frag and clears, Abe noted.
The other obvious thing was the lack of muzzle flashes coming from the building. No one was firing at Fargo Group on the bridge. If they were alive at all, they were focused on the two teams of soldiers inside the building with them.
Abe keyed the radio. “Rocky-Six to Yankee-Six or
any other unit that came off the Blackhawks.”
There was a long pause. And Abe had time to think about the men in those two buildings, maybe one or two of them having a radio, looking around, wondering how they should relay to Major Darabie that Captain Wright was KIA.
But then: “Rocky-Six, stand by for Yankee-Six.”
Abe took a deep breath. Felt his heart tapping against the inside of his throat.
Out on the bridge, the gunfire had come to a stop. Abe could no longer see the shapes of the infected running wildly toward Fargo Group’s convoy.
It’s okay. We did it. We got it done.
“You got Yankee-Six. Go ahead, Major.”
“What do you have over there, Lucas?”
“All enemy combatants are down. We have two wounded in need of medevac ASAP.”
Abe nodded absently. “Rocky-Six to Fargo-Six. What’s your situation on wounded?”
“Uh…four wounded. Three in need of medevac.”
“Rocky-Six to Copperhead-Two-One. You guys switch to medevac role, you copy?”
“Two-One copies.”
Abe pointed to the bridge, though he doubted anyone in the helicopter was looking. “Grab Fargo Group’s wounded, then the wounded from the two buildings on the north end, and then we have one for pickup as well. Should be six total.”
Two-One copied and Abe quickly instructed Two-Five to maintain a flyover in case their door gunners were needed again. He watched one of the big birds turn and bank back toward the north end of the bridge, while the other rose and arced into the sky for overwatch. He directed his attention down again, to the sergeant whose radio Abe was still holding, still tethered to the man’s vest by electronic cords. He was bent over the wounded man, now stuffing the hole in his leg with gauze soaked in coagulating agent. The wounded soldier was moaning, but he was close to passing out, just barely feeling the fiery sting of the coagulating agent reacting with his blood.
Abe knelt down next to the sergeant. “He gonna be all right?”
The sergeant shrugged, avoided eye contact with Abe. And Abe saw more tension in it than just a man caring for a wounded. This was a man caring for his friend. His expression and lack of eye contact was not an accusation to Abe, though Abe could not help feel that little question in the back of his mind—Was it worth it? The sergeant simply knew that hope was not something to believe in. He knew it from the ghosts of other dead friends, and dead family. And his expression was the resignation of preparing for another.
A voice from behind them: “Major!”
Abe turned and saw the soldier who had entered the building with him, clinging to the ladder, just his head and shoulders above the line of the roof. His eyes were slightly widened, his face set into serious tones. Abe felt wary. “What?”
“I found something.” The soldier nodded his head to the side, his eyes glancing down into the building as though he had X-ray vision to see inside. “Uh…you need to see it.”
Abe nodded sharply. When he turned to the sergeant, the man was unhooking the radio manpack from the side of his vest.
“Here,” the sergeant said, passing the radio to him. “Take it, sir. I’ll stay with him.”
Abe hesitated for the briefest of seconds, then accepted the pack. He slung the headset around his neck and simply held onto the radio, rather than affixing it to his vest. There was really no room for it there anyway. Then he turned and went to the ladder, leaving the sergeant and his rapidly dying friend on the roof, waiting for their medevac.
The soldier waited for him at the bottom of the ladder. Abe descended, dropping from the last few rungs. He looked at the soldier expectantly, but the soldier simply motioned him forward again, through the broken window, over the jagged glass, and onto the desk once again.
Inside the building, the smoke had cleared. It seemed oddly still and quiet compared to the clash of guns and explosions that had wracked it only moments ago. Abe passed cubicles with bullet holes in them. Paperwork strewn about. Family photos toppled onto the floor. Office chairs overturned. In one of the cubicles, a stuffed animal sat atop a dark computer monitor—a grinning monkey holding a red heart that said BE MINE on it.
Little ghosts of the people who had once worked here, punching the clock day to day, lost in the mundanity of their existence. Perhaps wishing for adventure and action and not knowing how horrible it would be when it finally came for them. These cubicles like time capsules. These little glimpses into an old world Abe feared would never be brought back to life.
Outside of the cubicles, the world was the chaos of death and gore that Abe had become more comfortable with. It shocked him less now than the sight of forgotten Valentine’s Day gifts and workspace decorations. There were bodies splayed out all along the hall that ran the length of the buildings, between the shattered windows and the bullet-riddled cubicles. Abe counted seven in all, including the two he knew he had killed. They all lay in different poses. Some of them curled up into little balls, huddling in dark corners. Some of them were slouched against filing cabinets. Others lay flat on their backs or stomachs. A few were missing limbs. All were bloody, and that blood was speckled with dirt and dust and chunks of debris. Their weapons had been removed and were piled up in the center of the room, leaning against a windowsill.
The soldier had done what he was supposed to do.
Remove and confiscate the weaponry. Search the bodies.
Still, Abe looked on them with suspicion. “What? What’s the problem?”
The soldier seemed to be taking them in as well. He stared at the bodies with a strange mix of regret and disgust, his head shaking just slightly. He turned to the major and met his gaze directly. He spoke softly. “Sir, every one of these fucks has a Green Zone day pass.” He gestured at them with his rifle. “Every damn one of ’em.”
Abe stood. He stared. And for a moment, the words were just words. Then he felt a hot prickle overcome the back of his neck. He felt warm, then cold. “Greeley Green Zone?” Abe asked, his voice low, almost choked. Stupid question, perhaps, but he could think of no other.
The soldier nodded.
“And you checked them all?”
“Every fucking one, sir.”
“They all have day passes.”
“All of them.”
Abe felt his scalp itching. He scratched it. Rubbed it. Felt sweat on his brow like he’d done something wrong and been caught red-handed. He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. But the sensation remained. It looped steel cables around his guts and cinched them tight.
His first instinct was to tell someone.
His second was to tell no one.
“Fuck me,” Abe said quietly. Then he pointed a stern finger at the soldier standing in front of him. “Don’t say a fucking word about this. You understand? Not until I figure out what I’m supposed to do with it. Not a fucking word.”
The soldier shook his head. “I ain’t sayin’ shit, sir.”
The headset that hung around Abe’s neck squawked at him. He jerked when he heard it, like he’d been stung. He snatched up the earpiece and set it to his ear. The transmission came in suddenly.
“…runnin’ southwest on a surface street, paralleling the railway. You want us to engage?”
Abe didn’t wait for anyone else to step in and attempt to hand out orders. He keyed the radio quickly. “Rocky-Six to that last unit. Can you repeat your last traffic? I only got half of it.”
Static.
“Yeah, Rocky-Six, this is Copperhead-Two-Five on overwatch. Just spotted two males getting into a blue Jeep Cherokee from the ground floor of one of our target buildings. They’re heading southwest on a surface street, paralleling the railway. Do you want us to engage them?”
FOUR
Abe pinched his forehead, the thumb and index finger of one hand pressing into his temples. He spoke clearly and followed radio protocol very deliberately. “Rocky-Six to Copperhead-Two-Five. That is negative. Negative. You are not cleared to engage. Maintain sight of the v
ehicle but do not engage it. How copy? Over.”
“We copy five-by-five, Rocky-Six.” The pilot’s voice was casual. “We’re hanging back, maintaining sight.”
Abe was already running for the end of the hall. He keyed the radio as he stepped over the glass and back outside. “Rocky-Six to Copperhead-One-Three. I need a pickup from the roof. Just me.”
“Copperhead-One-Three, we copy. We’re en route.”
Outside, the world seemed bright yellow. Abe could still see his breath in the air as he quickly attached the radio manpack to his rig, but the sun was warm. Once he attached the radio, he scrambled up the ladder to the top-tier roof. The sergeant and the wounded soldier still sat there. Abe had nothing further that he felt he could say, so he said nothing at all to them.
Abe knelt down, shucking off his helmet. He could hear the buzz of Copperhead-One-Three getting louder. He slipped the headset onto his ears correctly, then put the helmet back on over it. He could feel the wind and the sound of the helicopter growing over him. He remained there on one knee as the bulbous, little black helicopter lowered itself to the rooftop.
When the skids touched, Abe ran and saddled one, hooking himself to the lanyard.
He looked to his left, saw the two soldiers still waiting for medevac. The sergeant looked up at Abe, his expression enigmatic. Abe nodded once, and then keyed his mike. “I’m secure on board, One-Three. Punch it.”
“Roger.”
The helicopter lifted, tilted, and fell away from the rooftop.
Abe swallowed against the feeling of his insides lifting into his throat. “Rocky-Six to Copperhead-Two-Five. Where’s the location of the vehicle right now? I’m in One-Three and we’re on the way to intercept.”
“Okay, it looks like we’re heading south on…Interstate 25. Not sure he knows we’re behind him. But he’s hauling ass.”
Trying to get back to Greeley, Abe thought.
He could not let that happen, though he wasn’t sure why.
