But they somehow kept coming.
Kate could see both Brendan and Kwon putting shots into figures with their rifles – some walking, some crawling, some just wriggling in piles of their own limbs and organs. Somehow it didn’t take her long to work out that they were only taking head shots now. Because it hadn’t taken them long to work out that only head shots did any good.
Once again, thank God, there was no time for thought – only time to react.
Kate was out of the truck and moving almost before it had come to a stop, and immediately tried to work out how to make herself useful.
And then she remembered: Jake would have landed somewhere.
She stepped out into the muddy field between the road and Djibouti Town.
And she immediately saw him get up under his own power, take a knee – and then start shooting, his .50-cal booming again. His personal weapon had been strapped to him, as they always were, and had taken his flight with him. He was now shooting at advancing figures from the town, who had evidently gotten interested in the commotion at the roadside. By the time she reached him, he had cleaned up that whole flank.
He got up off his knee and turned to face her.
There was blood streaming down his face in a broad sheet. His forehead had been gashed open – either by their earlier crash into that CLU, or else by his high-speed encounter with the rocks in this field. It could have been either, or both.
Elijah passed by Kate’s elbow, heading for Jake and saying, “Whoah, Sarge, what say you take a knee while I check you out—” at which he saw the sheet of blood, and added “and get that bleeding stopped.”
Jake not only didn’t lie down, he didn’t even stop walking, and simply shrugged off Elijah when he reached for him. “I’m fine. Just gotta keep the blood out of my eyes,” he said, his voice as rock-steady as before. He cast around and spotted Elijah’s shemagh, which was still wrapped around Kate’s neck.
He didn’t speak to her, and hardly even looked at her. He just reached out and took what he wanted.
Fuck me, that’s hot, Kate thought, to her own significant self-loathing. But there it was, a feeling utterly inappropriate to the time and place.
As Jake wrapped the cloth around his head, Elijah tried again: “Whatever you’ve got in mind, man, it’s not as important as the fact that you have a head wound and a near-certain concussion…”
Jake tied off the checked cloth, hefted his rifle, and just pointed off over Elijah’s shoulder with one hand. Kate turned as well.
She could see the others now bent over their guy trapped under the truck, presumably trying to help get him out of there.
None of them were looking back up the road toward the base.
The garrison was coming for them.
Jake stalked off, straight toward the army of diseased attackers.
Jesus Saves
Edge of Djibouti Town
The others finally worked out the new threat when they clocked Jake shooting in that direction. By the time he reached them, Kwon and Todd were consolidating into a defense, pushing out just beyond the crashed vehicle, while Brendan was still kneeling down with Peter, holding the hand of the trapped and possibly doomed man.
But when Jake reached their lines, he just kept on going.
“What’s your plan, Jake?” Kate heard Brendan ask over the squad net.
“Movement to contact,” Jake said simply.
And she could see he still wasn’t limping. Not only did the grizzled son of a bitch only have one leg, but he’d just been thrown forty feet through the air from a vehicle crashing at 70mph. She could actually understand why he wasn’t the least bit cowed by a few shambling sick guys.
She moved up to try to support him.
By the time she did, he was already firing from the shoulder, non-stop, still moving straight into the middle of the approaching crowd. It also took him about two seconds, and four ineffective center of mass shots, to work out the whole head shot thing. Or maybe he’d worked it out back in Camp. Actually, his .50-caliber rounds weren’t totally ineffective on torsos, tending to take them apart. But now he was taking heads off.
Kate reached the crashed vehicle herself. Its tires were still spinning lazily and the engine still running. It was only then that she realized Price was not only still alive, but conscious. It also looked like there were a couple of crushed bodies of sick Somali guys underneath the truck with him. That in itself was pretty worrying, given current trends in public health.
“You guys gotta go,” Pete was saying.
“Shut the fuck up,” Brendan said. From the white flesh of both their hands, it looked like he was squeezing Price’s hand for all he was worth. Kate shook her head. She figured the man must be in indescribable agony.
There was a lot of firing now, as the first freed inmates of fallen Camp Lemonnier approached. The other Triple Nickel guys were shooting, but from fixed positions – while Jake, that bloodstained keffiyeh wrapped around his head like Lawrence of Arabia, was out front, wading right into them. His Beowulf boomed, easily distinguishable from the others. He was reloading a lot, with only ten shots per mag – and carefully replacing the empty mags back in his vest pouches.
Kate guessed he didn’t know when he’d see more of those.
She looked up now at the sound of full-auto fire, and saw Kwon had gotten on an M240 on one of the surviving trucks, and was now shooting over Jake’s head. He was still way out there and exposed. She took a deep breath and started to head out after him. Something about the veteran team sergeant, his total fearlessness maybe, compelled her to follow.
But she felt an insistent hand on her elbow. It was Brendan.
“I need you here.”
She nodded.
Brendan looked at her and Todd. “We’ve gotta try to lift the truck up enough to get him out.” She nodded even more eagerly, and slung her weapon behind her, as did Todd, and all three moved into position. The booming of the .50-cal stopped, and was replaced by pistol reports – but not 9mm, instead a .45, like the CSM’s. Kate’s eye was drawn to Jake again, and she saw he had his primary weapon slung – he must have burned through all his mutant magazines – and had his side arm out. He was also already reloading that one.
“One… two… three…!”
She lowered her shoulder and put her back into it, and all three of them shoved for all they were worth on the door and running board of the truck. It moved up significantly. Elijah leaned beneath them, grabbed Pete under the shoulders, and tried to pull him out. The trouble was the mud or soft dirt beneath him was rising almost as much as the truck.
The whole thing shifted suddenly, the three of them lost their purchase, and the monster truck collapsed back down. Price howled in agony. It scraped Kate’s soul to hear, and she didn’t even know this guy. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for his SF brothers. Looking down, she saw to her amazement that he was managing a pained smile. She could see him looking through their legs and past them toward the horde that was descending.
Kate knew that all the tenant commands at Lemonnier taken together had totaled over four thousand personnel. It was just too many.
“C’mon guys,” Pete said. “It’s time for you to go.”
“I said shut the fuck up,” Brendan repeated. “Ready?” he said to Kate and Todd. The pistol fire had stopped now and Kate looked up to see Jake trotting back up, his rifle still slung, and slipping his side arm back into its holster on his vest. She pulled out one of her own rifle magazines and tried to hand it to him. He ignored this – she belatedly remembered her ammo was useless to him – and instead reached around her and pulled the tire iron from its mount on the truck.
While he stopped to do this, one of the run-over bodies on the ground came back to life, crawled a few inches, and latched onto his leg with both hands. Kate saw this and opened her mouth to scream a warning, but too late – the mottled face was already biting down.
And she heard the clang of teeth on high-tech car
bon-fiber composite.
She could clearly see now that the grip of the smushed Somali man underfoot had tightened the drape of his pant leg around the small circumference of the prosthetic limb underneath. She looked up, as Jake looked down, first in surprise – and then he looked back up at her, smiling this time.
He bashed in the skull of the attacking torso with the tire iron. It collapsed, finally, into disanimation.
He then kicked it free, turned back toward the front, drew his Special Forces Yarborough knife with the hand not holding the tire iron, and headed back out again, wading into the attacking mob from the camp, slashing and swinging.
It was the bravest and most badassed thing SSG Kate Dunajski had ever seen in her many years in and out of the military. It was also probably pretty fucking stupid, given public health conditions around here. If he survived that shit, Kate wasn’t sure she wanted him coming back to the team.
Then again, maybe she did.
“One… two… three!”
They all shoved again, each reaching down for their last untapped stores of physical strength. The truck lifted higher this time. Elijah reached in again, grabbing both of Pete’s arms and hauling like hell to pull him free. Price started screaming again. Kate’s eyes narrowed as she thought she saw one of the other smushed bodies under there with him start to move…
But then there was very definite movement in her peripheral vision – more stumbling figures of Somalis coming out of the treeline. Kate shouted Kwon’s name and he traversed his machine gun over to that side, just as Kate brought her own rifle up and started shooting to defend the group.
And the truck dropped down again. Price was silent this time. Maybe he was all screamed out. Everybody was shooting now. The gunfire died down slightly as they got that flank under control – only to realize a big strung-out crowd of them was now coming in from the opposite side, from the town. They were besieged from three sides, the noose closing, and Kate started to feel rising panic gripping her chest. She only remembered their trapped, wounded, heroic teammate when she heard him say over the squad net:
“Sorry guys, I’m not gonna make this one with you…”
Elijah was shouting, “No—” but was cut off by a single pistol shot.
And when Kate looked down, she saw Peter Price had gotten his side arm out.
And used it to shoot himself in the head.
PART TWO
“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
– Exodus 21
The Post-Apocalypse
Camp Price ("Bush Camp")
[18 Months Later]
Captain Brendan Jefferson Davis, commander, Operational Detachment-Alpha (ODA) 555, U.S. Army Special Forces, sat with his elbows on his knees, on the one grassy hillock that lay within the north edge of camp. In his hands he held a steepled paperback copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – which he was not reading, but just staring over the top of.
He’d read it four times already.
Instead, he was looking up at Todd, the team’s junior Charlie (18C, engineer sergeant), who was standing up on a ladder and repairing the sign over the camp’s main gate. One side of the wooden plaque had fallen down due to rain and rot, the wood around the nails slowly pulping away. It could get pretty damp up there in the Sanaag region of northern Somalia – particularly in the remote and dense Cal Madow Forests, where the camp sat on the western slopes of hulking Mt. Shimbiris.
The mountain, Somalia’s tallest at nearly 2,500 meters, had a distinctive shape to it, with fairly gentle shoulders rising up until they reached its head – which then jutted up rocky and nearly vertical on three sides. Only a more gradual slope and path up the back side afforded access to the summit. Not that anyone ever went up there.
The end of Todd’s hammer was wrapped in a towel, and making a dull thumping sound through the morning mists.
Everything up here was muffled, one way or another.
Brendan shook his head. He couldn’t believe it had been a year and a half since they put that sign up. But it had.
As junior Charlie, and now the only one, Todd had been responsible for helping design and build the camp in the first place – and now had chief responsibility for maintaining it. Triple Nickel’s bush camp consisted of a half-dozen post-and-pier single-story plywood huts, each built three feet off the ground, with stairs to a single door, and a window in each of the other three sides. These differed very little from the ones their Special Forces forebears had built in Vietnam, living in the bush and training the Montagnards to fight the Viet Cong.
All of the huts sat within a large triangular compound, which had originally been bordered by concertina wire – but was now enclosed by a solid eight-foot-tall wood-post stockade, topped with the concertina wire. A sangar, or small guard tower, anchored each of the three corners.
As Brendan watched, he saw Kate, their CST attachment, emerge from the hooch she shared with Todd. As the sole female, she might have gotten to be the only one who bunked alone – if they’d had odd numbers. But they hadn’t, so she didn’t. Brendan wasn’t sure whether it even would have been much of a privilege. As he recalled, Kate’s first eighteen hours on the ground in the Horn of Africa had been a kinetic nightmare of violence and panic. But the subsequent eighteen months, while not totally without peril, had provided a great deal of downtime.
And a lot of time to feel alone, and occasionally abandoned.
Nearly the whole outside world had gone away – and left them here, isolated in the wilderness, and with only one another for company.
Basically, the long hours of the post-Apocalypse had lain heavily upon them.
Kate spotted Brendan and nodded a greeting, then walked up to the gate and offered to help Todd with his repair. But he was basically done. He smiled down at her and the two chatted easily. As Brendan recalled, the two of them hadn’t even gotten introduced before the fall – of Camp Lemonnier, and of everything else. But in the intervening eighteen months, they’d become close – real battle buddies.
Brendan saw Kate move off and saw Todd watching her as she left – and his gaze lingered on her just a little too long. It was subtle things like this, nearly impossible to disguise, that made it obvious at least to Brendan: Todd’s feelings for Kate went beyond mere camaraderie. And Brendan guessed this was not only because, for a while, it had seemed like she might actually be the last woman on Earth.
But it was equally obvious from how she treated him – affectionately, but like a beloved kid brother – that those feelings weren’t requited. Brendan guessed Todd wasn’t Kate’s type. Whatever type that was, or if she even had one, which itself wasn’t obvious.
Human nature hadn’t really changed, even if most of humanity had.
* * *
Brendan continued to watch as Kate did a circuit of the wire, checking on the fortifications. They had built the camp out and enhanced it a great deal – after it sunk in that it was going to be their home, not just part-time and for the length of their deployment, but full-time, and probably for the rest of their lives.
They’d already dug their own well, set up bag showers, and built a nicely appointed slit-trench latrine. There was a large diesel power generator – originally flown in by helicopter sling-load and later sound-insulated to hell and back by Todd. Power from the generator had been augmented by solar panels on the roofs of the hooches. As it stood, they didn’t have power all day, but they had it often enough to run the devices they needed most.
One of the huts was kitted out as the weight/fitness room. To universal consternation, but little surprise, their original request for airlift capacity to fly in cross-training machines and free weights had been laughed out of CJTF-HOA. So most of the weights were improvised – jerrycans full of water, spare truck axles, a bench carved out of a tree stump.
And of course, airlift of every sort had ceased entirely a year and a half ago.
Next most frequent in there was Kwon, because he was a killer and a protégé of Jake. Then Brendan, mainly out of his sense of responsibility to his men. If they had to run for their lives, he had to be at the front of the formation; and if somebody was badly wounded, he had to be the one to put him in a fireman’s carry and keep on running. After that Kate, probably mostly to fit in. Only Todd blew off exercise. He was naturally lean, and thought it was stupid to walk when you could ride.
The camp was located in an extremely isolated spot, previously resupplied by helicopter and their occasional movements back to Camp Lemonnier. But they had always kept significant supplies cached here, in stacks of plastic Tuffboxes in the hooches, and in dug-out underground cellars: long-life food and barrels of staples, crates of ammo in every caliber they shot, explosives, rockets, pallets of bottled water, diesel fuel for the generator and trucks, batteries for everything, spare parts for everything, and medical supplies including plasma.
These had been augmented more recently by their scavenging runs – which was the only type of mission they ran anymore.
But they ran them well. Brendan imagined that one day, if they lived long enough, this Special Forces team would have to develop some sort of an interest in farming. But, for now, the populated areas of Africa had gone down quickly and completely enough that large and diverse stores of canned goods and long-life food had gone un-raided. Between those, and the thousands of crates of MREs and HUMRATS (humanitarian rations) at military bases and NGO warehouses, the pickings looked like being good for a long time. And the team was extremely good at slipping in and out of towns and cities without waking the dead.
Arisen : Nemesis Page 10
