Handon’s eyes shut again like heavy weights.
In the dark of the ward, his body stirred.
And almost rolled over.
* * *
Corporal Jones was also alone, and sitting in the dark, after Miller and the others marched out to the fight.
She shook her head, half-amused and half-depressed. For some reason, while they had turned on spotlights that lit up the whole front of CentCom like Wembley Stadium, still no one had thought to turn on the damned lights inside the JOC itself. Maybe no one wanted to. Maybe the spectral half-lighting of the monitor glow suited their mood.
And now it suited hers.
Last ops staff standing, Jones thought.
But now she decided to be amused about all this rather than depressed. For one thing, it was her nature to be good-natured – professional, crisp, pleasant. “Chirpy” she’d been called more than once. And for another thing she had a choice about how to feel, so why would she choose to be all gloomy-guts?
Finally, she still had a job to do.
And that job was staring at a single screen – which currently displayed a grainy green-and-black satellite view, of one of the outside-the-wire missions. It showed the courtyard and parade ground of Armoury House in the City, and the surrounding block or two. It didn’t look good, but it didn’t seem to be getting much worse. At least from 500 miles up.
Jones’s job also involved hitting a touch-screen button – which flipped the view to the other mission. They only had one satellite up there they could still task, and this one only had one suitable camera for the job. Luckily, she had at least programmed in the grid coords for the two missions, and so re-orienting the camera was a one-press operation. She hit that button now, and the video flipped, changing to show the rooftops of St. Thomas’s Hospital, on the South Bank. This AO didn’t look at all good or safe, either, but the scene also wasn’t changing much.
So now, sitting alone in the near dark, the room silent but for the muted and not-distant-enough sounds of battle, in the middle of the night at the end of a long day, week, year, war… Jones was having serious trouble staying awake. Her eyes kept falling to half-mast, and she was having to pinch and slap her face. But she kept her eyes glued to the screen. Until…
Until a stranger walked into the JOC.
Looking up, she could see he was small and trim, with spiky hair, geeky glasses, and a mustache-and-goatee-type beard. She was pretty sure she had seen him before, but in her half-somnolent state, she couldn’t focus her mind enough to place him. It was all very dream-like. He stopped just inside the doorway and looked back at her. Then he looked around the JOC, then back to her again. He never spoke, but just walked across the room to the stairwell door and exited. Watching him go, she thought:
That was weird.
When she looked back to her screen, her eyes went wide and adrenaline jolted her system, bringing her wide awake. The rooftop of the hospital was suddenly collapsing and burning – and the Apache that had been parked there was simply gone.
Holy shit.
She stared at this and tried to decide what to do.
But instead of just reacting, she calmed her mind, assessed, and concluded: I need to check the other mission.
And when she hit the button and flipped back to the first scene, she could instantly see it – thick, colorful smoke billowing from the Armoury House courtyard. She hit her radio, started hailing, waited two seconds for a response – and when she didn’t get one, leapt up from her chair…
And she exited the JOC at a run.
* * *
Wesley was briefly confused as he circled the perimeter of CentCom on the extended walls. At first the furious sounds of the battle in the north receded behind him. But then the sounds of gunfire started growing again, fast – and he realized it was coming from the south and southwest. He knew it wasn’t his imagination playing tricks when the RMP senior NCO down there hailed him.
“Go ahead,” Wes said, picking up his pace.
“Sir, we have got HEAVY contact down here in the southwest – totally from out of nowhere. Several shedloads of dead just came out of the night. And they’re right at the damned walls.”
“Copy.” Ah, hell.
Now Wes could almost see it, ahead and below, the darkness swarming and undulating – and moaning. They’d only kept enough lights on for safety down here, and as he took off at a run, Wes hailed the JOC to get the rest of them turned on – but didn’t get any response. In seconds, he’d reached the men fighting and firing flat out down in that sector. And, sure enough, the dead – hundreds or thousands of them – were right at the foot of the extended walls, stretching out into the night to the southwest, with more coming in every second.
Double hell.
Wes found the local RMP commander and assessed the situation. There were way fewer shooters down here than on the north walls, and spaced out more widely – but much more problematically, they were also a hell of a lot less experienced and skilled. There were also no machine guns, no grenade launchers, and much less ammo stockpiled. And, from what Wes could see, though he had absolutely no idea how it had happened, the force of attacking dead here was nearly as bad as it was in the north.
Except it was worse – because it was already closer, piling up against the walls, and rising toward the ramparts. He couldn’t believe it. It was like hunkering down behind the Maginot Line – and then realizing the whole Blitzkrieg was coming at you from behind.
Wes tried to dredge up a smile, or failing that a steely expression, to broadcast to the NCO and the others that he wasn’t panicking – which was his first job as commander. “Well,” he said. “Only one thing to do now.”
The others looked at him expectantly as he hit his radio.
“Trojan Seven from Trojan Six, how copy?”
* * *
“Solid copy, Wes. Interrogative: what the grab-asstic hell is going on down there?” Fick, out on the ground in the prison yard with his QRF, all of them waiting for Foxtrots to start falling from heaven again, knew Wes had gone to check on the south walls. Now it was impossible to miss the sound of firing from that direction, even over the louder and closer battle there.
When Wesley told him, in an efficient briefing with sufficient detail to convey the seriousness of things, Fick realized he had to do several things, all of them fast, to have a chance of recovering the situation. He sprinted over to the nearest mortar pit and shouted for its crew chief’s attention.
“Get that thing turned around!”
While the crew rushed to comply, Fick grabbed the notebook with their hand-written target-packages and started stabbing his finger at them. “Elevate and traverse for here. Instruct the other crew to target here. Be ready to shift fire to here, here, and here. Then stand by and wait for fire missions and corrections. Got it?”
When he was sure he’d been understood, he turned and headed for the gate out into the Common, not needing to tell his men to follow. And he started running, the eleven others right behind him.
It was definitely time to commit the mobile reserve.
* * *
After Kate and Baxter bodily hauled Elliot back over the railing, not even sure whether they’d just kept the young Para from hurling himself into the horde below like a grief-crazed bride on a funeral pyre, Charlotte wondered if they were going to have to do the same for her.
But it seemed neither had the heart to pull her back.
She stood at the railing, trying to breathe. Behind and off to the side, she could hear Kate whisper to Baxter. “She looks like Ripley when Newt was taken: ‘They don’t kill you!’”
“Yeah,” Baxter said. “They actually do kill you.”
It was obvious to everyone, even Charlotte.
Jameson was gone.
There could be no coming back from what he went under.
She felt tears sheeting down her cheeks, and when she struggled to breathe, realized it was because her chest was heaving with sobs. But someh
ow she couldn’t feel anything – no grief, never mind anything like mourning. With clinical detachment, she realized she must be in shock, still completely numb. Mentally, she couldn’t even bring herself to the point of acknowledging that Jameson was gone, never mind believing it. Processing it would be for another lifetime.
It was all too much.
Not after all this. After everything they had been through.
Charlotte never heard the boots pounding on the stairs of the tower behind her, or the shouting after that, practically in her ear. But when hands gripped her arm and turned her around, she tried to cut through the fog and to focus. A young female soldier was looking at her with gigantic eyes. Charlotte knew her from somewhere. The JOC. Jones. The woman shouted again, right in her face, and Charlotte read her lips, as she could still hear nothing but an all-consuming ringing and roaring in her ears.
But it didn’t make sense. Green smoke!
That couldn’t be right. “What?” she said, unable even to hear her own voice. She shook her head, trying to clear it, her tear-streaked face still devoid of expression. Finally, her hearing started to dial back up. Now she could hear the sounds of a battle close by. And she could hear Jones.
“You’re Captain Maidstone, right?”
Charlotte just nodded, blinking slowly.
“There’s smoke! Green smoke! Rabid One needs air extraction!”
Now Charlotte remembered she was still on stand-by. She had a mission. She had to somehow come back from this. To focus. Sharpen up. And forget about what had just happened.
Thank God.
She needed to get to the Fat Cow, parked out in the Common – and fast. She found her rifle, then pushed numbly through the others back into the sniper OP. This guard tower sat right at the junction of the inner prison walls and the extended outer walls – but the only doorway at the foot came out inside the prison. She had to get to the nearest gate. She took off across the yard at a run.
She found she was limping from her crash injury, but even that had already started to feel better. Or maybe the pain there was just whited out by the much worse pain in her heart. She reached the gate, and headed out into the Common. When she made it to the Fat Cow, she climbed in, got a headset on, and got the rotors turning, and found she was facing south out of the cockpit. Her vision was still ropey, but she was pretty sure she could see dead running across the Common.
That doesn’t look good.
But it wasn’t her problem now. Extracting the Alpha team mission was. She had to think about that – she could only think about that. The good news was their extraction point was only a couple of minutes’ flying time. Still, the instant the engines and rotors were up to speed, Charlotte pulled pitch and got the hell off the deck.
And she roared off into the night – unutterably alone.
* * *
When Fick saw Foxtrots flying over the south walls, he realized there wasn’t going to be time for spotting for the mortars, never mind correcting them. He and the QRF were already running flat out across the Common, and he got on the radio, talking as he hauled ass and sucked wind.
“Tube Stroker One! Trojan Seven! Fire mission!”
“Copy, send fire mission.”
“First two southern target packages, one round each tube. You don’t hear anyone screaming in pain after two seconds, fire again for effect, how copy?”
“All received. Read-back of target coords follows, break.”
“Fuck that, no time! You gotta hit ’em now!” Fick flipped channels, even as the dirt ramp up to the south walls appeared out of the darkness and he angled the team toward it. “Wes! Fick! Incoming – TTI RFN! Cover up!”
“Copy, wilco.”
But already the mortar rounds could be heard whistling overhead – on their way down. As Fick hurtled up the ramp, he could see men up top ducking down and taking cover behind the ramparts, and sensed as much as heard his own guys dropping to the dirt behind him. But he kept going, reaching the walkway at the top of the walls as first one, then the other, mortar round impacted, a half-second apart. Both landed in thick concentrations of dead only twenty meters out from the walls, and fifty meters apart. Fick could feel heat on his face and shrapnel whistling by, but none hit him, and he needed to see this. Bringing his rifle to his shoulder with one hand and engaging the pile closer in, he flipped his radio channel again and spoke into his chin mic.
“Fire for effect! Two more rounds each coord set!”
“Copy, wilco.”
“Then walking fire onto next two target packages!”
He kept shooting until he heard screaming to his left, then charged in that direction down the walkway. There was a breakthrough in the line down there, dead coming over the ramparts. He could see defenders grappling with them and shooting in close quarters. He shot and moved, moved and shot, until his mag went empty, then used his bayonet.
He reached an RMP struggling to get out from under an angry Foxtrot, stabbed it in the back of the head, kicked it off into the Common – then dropped down beside the wounded man as the world started exploding on the other side of the walls. Crouching over him, he reloaded, took a sitting position, and picked off the last couple of dead he could see farther down the walls, while the explosions walked by to their front.
When the barrage finally ended, the better part of a minute later, he climbed back to his feet, looked out and around, and assessed. The piled-up dead at the walls had been decimated – reduced to meat piles, then the piles knocked down into ground-beef mulch. The immediate threat had been suppressed. When he looked back, he could see there was still some fighting farther down the walls, and a few dead who had already dropped down into the Common. But the ramparts were being cleared, and the Common could be dealt with later.
He looked down at the man he’d just been lying on, to help him up if he could stand, or give him aid if he couldn’t – but then his face lit up.
“Schmuckatelli!”
Sure enough it was Lance Corporal Schmuckatelli, the coffee-toting schmuck Fick had insulted out on the parade ground, what seemed like a lifetime ago. He sat up and Fick squatted down to check him out. He didn’t look badly injured, mainly a bite wound on his shoulder. Fick got out his aid kit and started getting a pressure bandage out.
“Being vaccinated makes a change, huh?” he said as he worked. “Bandage instead of a bullet to the head. You might actually be the first person to survive a zombie bite.”
But as Fick looked back to the man’s face, he saw he was giving Fick an awed look – more or less the opposite of the sullen expression Fick had first seen there. He got the adhesive bandage inside his shirt and pressed it down.
“Thanks,” the RMP said. “And thanks for coming for us.”
“Forget it,” Fick said.
He looked up now, realizing a small knot of other RMPs, many he recognized, more than a few he’d viciously hazed, but none of whom he’d picked for his QRF, were now standing close by and looking down at him – and doing so with respect, if not awe, on their faces. He guessed they’d seen him fighting his way down the walkway and to the rescue – at the front of the QRF, and right in the thick of it. Once again, as he’d told Wesley: what he said didn’t matter.
He ignored their gazes and looked back down to Schmuckatelli. “Can you fight?”
He nodded. “Good to go, Master Guns.”
Fick helped him to his feet. “Good man – way to SITFU.”
“Sit-foo?”
“Suck it the fuck up.”
Fick reloaded, turned, braced his weapon on the rampart and took a couple of shots, sensing as much as seeing his QRF coming up and slotting into the defense around him – anchoring it, really. The situation had been reclaimed, for the moment. As he scanned out and shot methodically, he could see once again that the pile below had been destroyed – but the herd of dead coming in behind it was thick and mean and coming fast. And it was already starting to pile up again.
“Well,” he growled to Schmuckat
elli out of the corner of his mouth as he fired. “This sucks about a penis and a half.”
The RMP laughed. “Roger that.”
“Fick.”
He turned and saw Wesley trotting up with his rifle cradled, looking a little worse for wear. “Hey, Wes,” he said. “Christ, I leave you down her for five minutes…”
“Not even that, mate.”
“Where the hell did all this come from?” Last time they’d checked, the dead were meant to be coming from the north.
“Good question,” Wesley said. With the firing ramping up again all around them, he hit his radio, and Fick flipped channels to listen in. “JOC, Trojan Six, message over.”
“JOC, send message.” It sounded like Corporal Jones. And she sounded out of breath.
Still catching his own breath, Wes raised his voice over the resurging battle. “Do you think you can you get us some aerial surveillance to the south? Find out where this new herd is coming from – and how many more we’re looking at?”
“Copy that, Trojan. Still no drones flying due to the EMI. But I can re-task the satellite we control, and am taking a look now. Stand by.”
Fick and Wesley looked at each other in the dark, shell casings flying through the air to either side. Fick whistled the Jeopardy! tune, but nobody could really hear it.
“Trojan, be advised, that herd is coming from the southwest – and it’s big. It’s bad, sir. Really bad.”
Wesley and Fick still had their eyes locked.
Fick jumped on the channel. “You want to tell us how?”
“The ZPW has been breached at a second point, and they’re now pouring in through it. Basically, the southwest gate and guard tower… isn’t there any more.”
Fick slightly wanted to ask how the hell a hundred-foot guard tower could simply disappear. But it didn’t matter now.
All that mattered was the fight they and their men were in.
He and Wesley both turned back to it.
The Flood
ZPW – Southwest Guard Tower
[Three Hours Ago]
ARISEN_Book Fourteen_ENDGAME Page 35
