Aliyev said, “People in hell want Slurpees.” Then, one arm clutching his stomach, he looked up and said, “Wait, fuck me. I had a whole shitload of duct tape – until ten minutes ago.”
“Where is it now?” Noise asked.
“In my bug-out bag. On the other side of the prison walls. Which is on the other side of all that.” He nodded vaguely toward the chaos outside. They all got it.
Noise stepped up to the table and picked up one of the two jugs of liquid acetate sealant, reading the label. “May I have one of these?” he asked.
“Take it,” Park said, not looking up. “The world will have ended, or else been saved, long before we use half of it.”
Noise bowed and exited.
He’d hardly disappeared when more cracking, tearing, and moaning sounded – from down the same hallway as before. “Got it,” Savard said, hefting his rifle and racing off in that direction. Wheeler watched him go, then shouted at the lab staff in there to follow and help barricade, pivoting to cover the other entrances, he and Nesbitt on either side of the table, both of them facing out.
Park never even looked up, filling bullet after bullet.
Some bad noises came from down that corridor – but finally Savard’s voice spoke in Wheeler’s ear, calm as always. “Totally new hole, but got it cleared up and this one barricaded too. Gonna leave a—” His transmission was cut off by a flurry of noises from that direction – more tearing, shrieking, firing, and screaming.
“Sitrep,” Wheeler said into his chin mic. No response. “Shit.” He shot a look at Nesbitt.
“I got this,” she said. “Go.”
Wheeler put his head down and charged down the hallway. Nesbitt watched him leave – then put her eye back on every other entrance to the lab area, clutching her rifle, flipping the safety off. In thirty seconds, the noises down there stopped, and Wheeler returned. He was holding his weapon in one hand.
And with the other, he was pulling Savard across the floor by the drag strap on his vest. Wordless and white-faced, Savard was holding a thick red-stained bandage to his throat. He was also leaving a wide, deep, and rich blood trail behind him. Wheeler laid him down in the middle of the room by the work table and raised his rifle again.
He didn’t turn as he heard unsuppressed firing from the other side of the table – it was Nesbitt shooting up into the corridor that led to the warehouse. Instead he kept his back to her, covered the other side of the room, and calmly hit his radio – to try to get them some help. One ranger wasn’t enough.
This place was turning into a sieve.
And at this rate the riot was going to fill it up fast.
* * *
“Shit,” Ali said, wheeling and slashing overhand, first the katana coming down through a knot of bodies, then the wakizashi through a head that struck through the severed knot.
“What?” Homer asked, his back pressed against hers.
“Sniper OP,” Ali said, nodding. Even the guard tower on the far right was under serious threat now. They’d kind of trained the other defenders to stay out of it, and leave it to the silenced snipers, to keep from drawing attention. That had worked for quite a while, but silence was pretty much out the window now – and the dead were reaching the level of its walkway just due to having piled up virtually everywhere. Moreover, their silence strategy had left the position badly undermanned – and as far as Ali knew, Elliot was still in there.
“We need to save that Para,” she said.
“Really?” Homer asked around sucking breaths, as he swung his axe again and again.
“Yeah. Trust me,” she said, nodding at her taped and disabled right hand. She couldn’t shoot, and someone else was going to have to do it.
“Okay. Right behind you.” Homer always trusted Ali, in everything. “But why don’t you unclip your Mk 12 if you can’t shoot it?” Since they’d been fighting back to back, Ali’s slung rifle had been banging into his ass all night.
“Trust me on that, too,” she said, charging forward through the bodies that thronged the walkway, desperate defenders and rampaging dead both, her swords whirling. Flipping the short sword into an overhand grip, she used that hand to flip radio channels and hailed what she hoped would be someone still alive in the sniper OP. “Hey, blondie,” she said.
Sure enough, it was Staff Sergeant Kate Dunajski who answered – sounding too tired to be annoyed, as she’d been back on the plane in Djibouti. “Send it.”
“That Para sharpshooter still alive?”
“Affirmative.”
“Okay. We’re moving to you – need to get you out of there.”
“Roger – but where do you propose we shoot from?”
“One problem at a time, Sarge. One problem at a time.”
In another minute, still on their feet only due to fighting side by side as a perfectly matched pair of angels of death, Homer and Ali bashed through the last knot of bodies on the walls and onto the circular walkway around that guard tower – only just in time. Kate and Baxter were out front shooting, along with Liam, who was firing short bursts from his MG, conserving the last of his ammo. To their credit, they had Elliot stowed safely inside. But even that wasn’t going to be safe for long. The game was just about up, the dead up to the level of the railing – and the railing itself already bending and cracking.
“You don’t have to go home,” Ali said, swinging one sword and then the other, “but you can’t stay here!” With Homer swinging his axe, the two bought another few seconds for this position. Kate and Baxter backed out of their way, and Ali shouted over her shoulder, “Go! Get Elliot out of here!”
“Where to?” Kate barked back.
“Meet us on the ground! We’ll take it from there.”
As those two ducked inside and hustled Elliot down the stairs, Homer and Ali fought a rear-guard action. Ali spared a look at the young machine-gunner to her right, who was now going for it, firing flat out, violence dialed all the way up – because this was the end, because there was no choice, and because he was obviously determined to stand his post and do his job. The look on his face said that very clearly. Part of Ali wanted to tell him to get the hell out, too – but they simply couldn’t spare the firepower.
And then the railing itself collapsed and frenzied dead poured onto the walkway, Ali and Homer backing away around to opposite sides. However much they swung and stabbed, however many swords Ali had, the two of them weren’t going to be enough to defend this position for even another ten seconds. There were simply too many, the great mass of surging dead rolling over the tower, pushing onto the walkway, and crashing through the glass into the interior room. As they backed away, fighting their way around either direction on the circular walkway, Liam stayed where he was, firing the machine gun nonstop and point-blank into the tsunami of dead even as it rolled over and around him.
Finally the machine gun went silent.
Homer felt Ali’s rifle hit him in the ass. They were back to back again – no more room to retreat.
It was time to go.
* * *
Predator and Juice were also down off the walls, running flat-out through the looming darkness, pelting rain, and charging herds of dead – Predator carrying his bat, but mainly just bashing bodies out of their way at this point, like the Hulk rampaging through hundreds of swarming humanoids. Juice’s SIG was loaded up again, with a full mag he’d scavenged from a dead soldier at the foot of the walls. But he figured it might come in handy later, so he was saving it.
“Hey, at least we’re off the line,” Juice said, staying in Pred’s wake, where it was safer, as they stampeded across the Common.
“Yeah, well, it’s no bed of roses here, either.”
The sound of shrieking to their two o’clock drew Juice’s attention, and he saw Pred already dealing with a runner pack coming in from their ten, so he angled to the right to take the Foxtrots head on. The two big warriors might be immune, but they sure weren’t immortal, and a Foxtrot or two leaping on Pred’s
blind side could sever something important, particularly with all the damage their assault suits had taken at this point.
He raised his rifle and fired as he ran – his first round a center-of-the-chin-point headshot on a gamboling Foxtrot, made while running flat out, which was fucking impressive for absolutely anyone, even Delta or DEVGRU guys, and Juice couldn’t help but smile as he pivoted to target the other one.
He’d truly arrived.
Then something caught the toe of his boot, hard, and he sprawled out and slammed face-first into the dirt, even harder, his vision going black and winking out…
“No naps! What am I always telling you?”
When he shook his head and opened his eyes, Pred was hauling him to his feet, and he first saw what had tripped him – a really big, thick cargo net, inexplicably lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere. But he also saw, lying all around that, a carpet of destroyed bodies – Pred had taken down every dead guy in the vicinity. When Juice looked up at him, he was handing him back his own rifle – bolt locked back. That was what he’d used to clean house.
“Sorry I used your last mag, man.”
Juice shrugged. “I was saving it for you, anyway. Come on.”
The two took off again. They were almost there.
* * *
Amarie cradled Josie to her breast, the other woman two feet away, holding her daughter, with her son clinging to her skirts. The two older boys, Aiden and Luke, stood vigilantly to either side, guarding them all. The two women and five children were all in a knot in the very center of the roof, with the female RMP standing close by, and the male soldier guarding the stairwell door. The rain still crashed down on their heads, as the storm and the end of the world raged all around them – and the only light was from a single fixture on the rooftop access structure, as well as the ambient glow from the spots on the front of the walls, all of which made more shadows up there than light.
Amarie trembled as she tried to cover Josie’s ears to mute the terrible sounds closing in all around them. And then one sound tore through all the rest – a high-pitched shriek, from the side of the building adjacent to the prison walls. But in a half-second, it wasn’t down there anymore – it was up top with them. Amarie’s eyes went wide and she backed away as she could just make out two hands grasp the edge of the roof… then haul up a palsied body behind them.
Climbing onto the rooftop and crouching down, it turned its head and looked at Amarie. And something was making its eyes glow, as it trembled and leaned forward.
Machine-gun fire assaulted Amarie’s eardrums, as the two soldiers opened up on it, both of them advancing. The Foxtrot spun toward them and took off with supernatural speed, lurching and leaping, and in an eye-blink piled into the first soldier, the woman, taking her over on her back, the two bodies rolling and grunting and hissing and yelping. The second soldier stopped shooting at the tumbling pair, but kept running, and when he reached them, dove in to try to pull the two apart.
Amarie and the others watched, transfixed, in horror.
And then another noise drew her eye back to the edge of the rooftop. No shrieking this time – only scraping. But, otherwise, just as before, a dead boy pulled itself up onto the roof, crouched, locked onto the women and kids – and stared.
More firing tore the night – but lower-pitched, slower, closer.
This was Aiden, firing his pistol at the second attacker, five rounds, or maybe ten, Amarie couldn’t keep count, but then it clicked, the gun empty.
And the creature hadn’t gone down.
It coiled and hissed at them, its body shaking with manic energy, nothing but thirty feet of rain-lashed air between it and the women and kids… between it and Amarie’s little girl. She moved her hand from the side of Josie’s head to the front.
“Cover your eyes, baby.”
* * *
The fallen reservist’s headset had been dripping with his own blood when Lt Col Nesbitt swiped it. So instead of putting it on, she had just hooked it on her belt and turned the radio volume way up. Now a hard-ass voice that Park instantly recognized leaked out of it, into the little shrinking cocoon of life and work in the lab area – namely, Fick’s.
“This is Trojan Seven. Everyone be advised. Final fallback location for the defense of CentCom is the rooftop of SHQ. You are ordered to defend your assigned positions until everyone around you is dead. Then you can go. Repeat, final fallback location is roof of SHQ. That’s the Alamo. Good luck. Out.”
Finally, Park looked up at Nesbitt. “You should get your people out,” he said. “While you can.”
She squinted back at him, thinking – but not moving.
Park’s voice grew insistent. “The plane’s full – we’ve made and loaded all the vaccine we’re going to. All that’s left to do now is the weaponization work, and it’s almost done. We’ll be right behind you.”
“Bad idea,” Wheeler said over his back.
“They’re not combatants,” Park said to him, then turned back to Nesbitt. “Get your people out.”
Her eyes flashed, and Park saw it there. She was a leader, and the lab staff who worked here were her responsibility. She started shouting and corralling them and heading for the entrance, having to step over the body of Savard to get there.
He was white and motionless now. He was gone.
* * *
Lt Col Nesbitt, rifle in hand, side arm on hip, paused in the atrium, after leading the children of Hamelin – or perhaps the rats, fleeing a sinking ship – behind her. But she had to stop here to do a couple of things before they attempted their run across the Common.
First was get on the PA and order everyone left in Bio to get the hell out, anyone she might have missed, or who had been hiding out elsewhere in the complex – telling them they had two minutes to get to reception, before the train left the station. Then she got to work, using that two minutes. First, she found the two loadmasters, who were trained to air-drop the pallets of vaccine kits in their cargo chutes, and who had sensibly been sheltering inside – and she sent them back out again, to find the pilot of the plane, and surgically attach themselves to her at the hip. And for the duration.
But then she also went right out the door behind them – and found Captain Gunn, quickly convincing him to detail two of his dwindling number of reservists to help protect her forty-some surviving lab staff on their run across open and overrun ground. He agreed, but mainly because he didn’t have time to argue. Then she went back in, told everyone to grab anything they could use as a weapon – many were already holding metal flask-stands, torn-out stool legs, or lab scissors – and handed her pistol to the woman standing closest to her.
Then she led them all back out again.
Bio was hemmed in – but actually not quite as bad as last time she’d been out there, and she wondered if the parked-up fuel tanker truck had something to do with that. In any case, looping them around the edge of the defenders, then back along the side of the building, turning and firing her weapon as she ran, she was able to half-find and half-punch them a small hole out of there. Then, pausing only to reload and shout at the others to follow…
She took off – out front, in the very lead.
And it proved to be the longest four minutes of her life – aching legs pounding through mud, rain lashing her face, lightning flashes blinding her, all three flavors of dead lurching out of the darkness, shooting and reloading, hearing the two soldiers firing on their flanks, then only one, sucking wind into burning lungs to keep going… and, most especially, never turning around, not once, however bad the sounds behind her got. This was their only chance, and she knew if she stopped, the others would stop.
And they’d all be dead.
The lights and hulking shape of SHQ loomed up ahead.
Salvation was finally in sight. They were going to make it. Or some of them were. It had to be enough. She had to save however many she could. And then…
Her run slowed to a trot, and her face fell.
As they approached the front of the building, she could see it – not only were all the glass walls on the ground floor smashed out, lying in shards and sheets on the ground. But behind them, dead were lurching and rampaging around the lobby.
SHQ was already overrun.
And now she turned, and saw how many of her people were left, how few of them had made it. It was down to one of the soldiers and about twenty-five others. Less than half the original Bio staff. They all crushed up against her, turning outward to defend themselves with whatever they had to do it with. And Nesbitt put on that bloody headset and hit the radio pressel.
“Trojan Seven, this is Nesbitt, be urgently advised: SHQ is overrun. Repeat, your Alamo is a no-go.”
Fick came right back on, though his labored voice and breathing said he wasn’t sitting around watching the show from his command post. “Hey, don’t piss in my face and tell me it’s raining, Colonel. If there are dead in SHQ, clear ’em the fuck out. It’s not like you’re the only guys fighting zombies around here tonight.”
Nesbitt ground her teeth, raised her rifle, emptied half the magazine to defend herself and her group while shoving a couple of terrified techs behind her with one hand, then spoke into her mic. “The front of the fucking building’s gone. If we head for the roof, the dead will just follow us up the stairs.” She paused to empty the rest of her mag, then dropped it out. “So it is raining, you dumb son of a bitch. But come out here in the Common, and I’ll happily piss in your face for you.”
But then, as more dead swarmed their dwindling circle, like sharks around sailors from the USS Indianapolis, except not waiting to circle or probe before they attacked, Nesbitt realized that however bad it was in SHQ, whether they could get to the roof or not, being inside the building was still better than being out in the open. At least they’d have something to their backs. And they would live a little longer. She loaded up her last magazine, shouted, “Everyone on me!”
And she charged inside, firing.
Less than ten seconds later, she hit her radio again. “Trojan Seven, Nesbitt! Ignore my last, I repeat, ignore my last! If you can get to the roof of SHQ, it’s good to go! I repeat, the roof of SHQ is secure! The Alamo is secure!”
ARISEN_Book Fourteen_ENDGAME Page 51
