This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection)

by Craig DiLouie

  Combat was typically unpredictable, but Wade knew their survival here was a matter of simple mathematics. Either they had enough bullets, or they didn’t. Even if they did, if there were too many infected, their guns would eventually overheat and start jamming.

  That was how military units got overrun by crowds of infected: human wave attacks against small groups of soldiers who fired until their weapons jammed. Klowns didn’t take prisoners. They either killed you or made you one of them.

  Wade fired. A bald man’s head erupted in a geyser of brains and blood.

  “Nice shot,” Eraserhead said. “I knew you had it in you.”

  “Go to hell,” Wade told him.

  The SAW was rocking now, firing nine hundred rounds per minute, every fifth a blurred tracer that pulsed strobing red light. Eraserhead was grinning. “Time for some payback.”

  A severed hand trailing a long rag of flesh and tissue slapped against Wade’s chest and flopped to the floor. The Klowns were throwing body parts at them.

  Williams dropped an empty magazine from his carbine. “Reloading!”

  Wade glanced at the hand lying on the floor. He laughed. He couldn’t stop himself. It just rolled out of him. He wasn’t infected. The whole situation was insane. He’d survived a year of combat against the Taliban, and he was going to die fighting a mob of murderous maniacs throwing arms and legs at him. He had to either laugh or scream.

  But laughing was a good way to get himself killed. He half expected his comrades to train their weapons on him. Instead, Eraserhead started chuckling.

  Then they were all laughing at the infected as they killed them by the dozens.

  Laughter really was contagious.

  The crowd was thinning. The soldiers kept the fire hot. Eraserhead put down the last of them with a few bursts. The squad ceased fire.

  Wade raised his goggles, which had fogged again. The hallway was shrouded in a thick, smoky haze. Broken, bleeding bodies lay in piles in their shredded hospital gowns. The sight should have sickened him, but he could only stare in morbid fascination. He knew he shouldn’t look at all. He knew the tableau would haunt his nightmares the rest of his life.

  Ramos tapped his shoulder. “Get ready to move!”

  Wade blinked, surprised he was still alive. “Roger that, Sergeant.”

  They reloaded. They’d burned through most of their ammunition, and they were going to have to get out of the hospital quickly.

  Eraserhead opened the SAW’s feed tray, laid in a new ammo belt and slammed the tray shut. He yanked the charging bolt. “Good to go.”

  Wade heard muffled reports. The gunfire on the floor below them was barely audible over the loud ringing in his ears. No sounds filtered from above.

  Ramos tapped his headset. “I can’t get the LT on the radio. We’re going up.”

  Nobody protested. Leave no man behind. It wasn’t just a noble idea; it motivated them to face danger, knowing their comrades would come for them.

  They’d have to move fast. The building was filling up with crazies awake and dying to play.

  The fireteam chased after Ramos. They flung open the stairwell door and sprinted up the stairs, gasping under the weight of gear and armor.

  They banged onto the sixth floor, weapons at the ready.

  Nothing. They bounded down the hall. Two men covered while the others moved.

  The walls were painted in blood.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ford said.

  Grimacing bodies and spent brass covered the floor. Some of the bodies wore uniforms and clutched broken weapons. One soldier, his back against a wall, still held the barrel of his rifle in his mouth. A section of wall smoldered, blown out by a grenade. Wade looked up at the ceiling. A bare leg protruded from a shattered acoustic tile next to a dangling fluorescent fixture. Gunsmoke hung in the air.

  Ramos called a security halt. The men stopped and formed a circle, backs to the center, guns pointed outward.

  “It’s like a slaughterhouse,” Ford said.

  The soldiers here had died in hand-to-hand fighting. The mob had rolled over them and moved on. Wade recognized the faces of men he knew well: Eckhardt, Jones, Hernandez, Richardson, Lopez, Cox. He didn’t see Lieutenant Harris.

  Despair washed over him. His mind flashed to mountain views and firefights, freezing together in cramped bunkers at Combat Outpost Katie, patrols carrying seventy pounds of gear. Endless hours of joking, hazing, rough sports and petty squabbling.

  Wade looked at his squad and knew they were remembering the same things.

  “Those motherfuckers,” Eraserhead hissed.

  “Our guys gave better than they got,” Wade said.

  Eraserhead spit on a corpse. “How does that make it right?”

  Ramos nodded. “Honorable deaths.”

  Wade remembered that last horrible night at Katie, when they all almost died. These men had looked the tiger in the eye that night only to fly home to America and get ripped apart by a swarm of crazy people.

  Then he pushed his feelings aside. They were still under the hammer, and they all had to stay focused if they wanted to avoid the same fate. The men raised their goggles.

  Williams pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “I’ll get their tags.”

  Wade heard a sound and froze. Then, he heard it again—a moan.

  The men readied their weapons.

  “Let’s get out of here, Sergeant,” Wade said.

  Ramos shook his head. They had to check for survivors.

  The sergeant raised his shotgun as a soldier stumbled out of one of the patient rooms. Wade gasped. Lieutenant Harris, pale from loss of blood, had one hand shoved down his pants. His crotch was covered with a massive red stain.

  Ramos lowered his gun. “It’s all good, LT. We’ll get you out of here.”

  Ford looked as if he might cry. “What did they do to him?”

  Wade knew. They all knew.

  Eraserhead opened his medical kit. “I got this.”

  Harris pulled his hand out of his pants and flung a spray of blood.

  The soldiers lurched away sputtering. Harris roared with laughter and stuffed his hand down his pants again. “Hey! You want some more of the good stuff?”

  Ramos shot the man in the face. He growled and spat.

  Wade touched his cheek. Blood on his gloves.

  Infected blood.

  He raised his weapon at the same time as the others.

  THIRTEEN.

  The office tower was going down. Most of it, anyway. A giant piece wrenched clear and slid off in a biblical cloud of smoke and dust.

  Prince ground his teeth. For him, that building symbolized everything. America’s strength reduced to rubble. His own impotence to stop it. The plague was stripping away everything that gave him a sense of self worth: his family, his command, his country.

  “What did you find out?” he barked at Walker.

  “I had an RTO perform a quick radio check with our special weapons and air units,” the major reported. “I don’t think that’s us.”

  Prince glared at the man, his chest burning. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “That’s not us, sir. It’s not our mortars or air units doing the shooting.”

  “Are you an idiot, Major? Of course it’s not us. That’s heavy artillery. Battlefield howitzers. Not mortars. It’s the National Guard. A unit from the 101st Field Artillery. I would expect even you to recognize the difference.”

  Walker reddened. “My bad, sir.”

  The colonel growled. “I’ll do it myself.” He turned and yelled at the Massachusetts Army National Guard liaison, “Hey, McDonald! What is that?”

  The young lieutenant blanched. He put down the magazine he was reading and stood at attention. “What is what, Colonel?”

  Prince stabbed his finger at the screen. “Some of your people caught the Bug and just blew up an office building on live television! Do you think you might want to do something about it?”

  “Uh,
yes, sir.” The pale liaison turned to his radio and worked the dials.

  “We’re supposed to be helping people,” Prince screamed at him, “not destroying their last fucking ounce of hope!”

  Across the trailer, the support personnel hunched even lower over their workstations. Prince paced in front of the TV like a lion tired of its cage. He was sick of playing defense. He wanted to take the initiative on something, anything.

  Military personnel were catching the Bug. It was bad enough soccer moms were running around hacking up their neighbors with meat cleavers. The average soldier was capable of killing large numbers of people. If America stopped believing the Army would protect them, it’d be every man for himself out there. Game over.

  On the screen, a second building was being shelled, a large hotel. They were hitting it with high-explosive incendiaries—white phosphorous. Several floors were already engulfed in chemical fire, pumping out rolling clouds of dense white smoke.

  Big Brother was going to have Prince’s head, but that no longer mattered. If there were people inside, they were being burned alive. He had to stop it.

  Conventional doctrine, aggressive action, flawless execution. That was his motto, and it had served him well during twenty years of service to the people and the Constitution of the United States. Though conventional thought and flawless execution had gone out the window, he still had aggressive action as a card to play. He could at least do that.

  He wanted to do something. Something real. Something with results. His exhausted, throbbing brain had stopped cooperating. It was time to make some decisions from the gut.

  “What do we have that can take out those Nasty Girls?” Prince asked, using Army slang to describe the National Guard.

  “Our air assets are all tied up,” Walker said.

  “Untie them. Get me something that can fly and shoot.”

  “Sir, are you saying we should engage a Massachusetts Army National Guard unit?”

  “An infected unit. And yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Major. We’ll use the Apaches to track them by radar, confirm they’re infected, and destroy them.”

  “Sir, I feel it’s my duty to point out we’re in a rather delicate situation with the Governor.”

  Prince had never wanted to punch a man so badly in his life. “Delicate?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re going to protect the man and his family and ensure Massachusetts has a government next week. What’s so delicate about that?”

  “He won’t come, sir. He’s still holed up at Logan International Airport, surrounded by state police and Guard. He’s running the government from there.”

  “Did you tell him the President of the United States declared a state of emergency? That’s why we’re here helping him keep whatever he has left from washing away.”

  “He says he declared martial law, Colonel.”

  “Good! We’re all on the same page! So what’s the problem?”

  “He just declared all Federal units on Massachusetts soil to be under state control. He says our command is now subordinate to Major General Brock.”

  The news struck Prince speechless for a moment. The situation had just changed so dramatically it gave him a sense of vertigo.

  Based at Camp Edward in Cape Cod, Major General Brock commanded the Massachusetts Army National Guard, eight thousand strong. Prince considered Brock a dependable soldier and a solid brother officer. National Guard units were scattered all over Boston, and they shared communications and even staged joint operations with Prince’s battalion.

  After declaring a state of emergency, the President had nationalized all Guard units, putting them under Federal control. But with the new order, the Governor was putting Prince’s battalion under Brock.

  Prince glanced across the tactical operations center at the National Guard liaison sitting in front of a radio and talking to his counterpart. “What’s Brock going to do?”

  Walker shook his head and shrugged. “Hell of a time to secede, though.”

  The last thing Prince wanted was a shooting war against an entire brigade of National Guard. His eight hundred lightfighters were no longer in any condition for that kind of fight. And the rest of Tenth Mountain was committed. There was no help available from the outside.

  But he had his orders. That, and there was no way he was going to take orders from the Governor; his boss was the President of the United States. “Major, I want you to draw up a contingency operational plan for doing a snatch grab on the Governor. In and out and with no blood spilled. I want to know what kind of assets we have and what kind of assets he has. Last time I checked, Massachusetts was still one of the fifty states.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise, sir?”

  “I’m sure it’s an order, Major.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Outstanding attitude. Get me eyes on that arty unit and on that airport. As in now.”

  “I’ll get on it right away.”

  “And pull Harry Lee out of the field. I need my S-2.” He regarded Walker with disdain. “He’s the only officer I’ve got with a clear head and a pair of balls.”

  FOURTEEN.

  Lathered in sweat. Eyes wild. Pulse pounding at a heart attack pace.

  The soldiers screamed at each other to lower their guns.

  They were making enough noise to bring the entire hospital down on their heads. Soon, the Klowns would come howling through the doors.

  Wade scanned the faces. Nobody was infected. Yet.

  He looked at the weapons. There was enough firepower to fill the air with metal in seconds. The sergeant’s combat shotgun was fixed on Williams’s chest. The Sledgehammer was loaded with twelve-gauge shells—high-velocity buckshot. On full auto, the gun fired five rounds per second, emptying its twenty-round drum in about four seconds and destroying anything in its path.

  Wade remembered something Ramos had said to him in Afghanistan: The gun calls to be used. He lowered his carbine. “Okay, okay. Listen.”

  The others ignored him.

  “Come on, guys. Put them down.”

  Rapid shotgun blasts caught Williams in the chest and threw him down the hall. Surprised, Wade fell backward and landed on a bloody pile of arms and legs.

  Ford snapped two rounds into Eraserhead’s arm and shoulder then put another three in the ceiling. Eraserhead laughed as the impact spun him around.

  Wade looked up into the Sledgehammer’s smoking barrel as Ramos took aim.

  This is it. Oh fuck, this is it—

  “BOOM!” the sergeant roared. Then he burst into laughter.

  Ford swept his carbine toward Ramos.

  The world exploded in a blinding flash of heat and light.

  Grenade—

  Ramos disappeared in the blast. Shrapnel ripped the walls apart. The concussion flung the bodies against the ceiling and dropped them like puzzle pieces. Wade was lifted and spun through the air. He landed hard on his side and curled into a fetal ball among the dead.

  Bare feet splashed past, hairy legs. Infected looking to play.

  He shut his eyes and didn’t move. His body hurt everywhere. If he had an open wound, even a cut, he was as good as dead.

  Man down, he thought.

  Wade sat up with a jolt. He reached for his carbine by reflex but couldn’t find it. He patted his body, checking for wounds. His armor had caught some shrapnel. He was going to have a lot of bruises, and his ears were still ringing at high volume, but he seemed to be okay.

  Ramos lay a few feet away, his hands twitching and his armor pockmarked and smoking. Ford gasped from a ragged chest wound. Eraserhead was in even worse shape with one arm blown off.

  Wade knew he should pinch off Eraserhead’s artery to keep him from bleeding out, lash a tourniquet around the upper part of the limb, and slap a Kerlix bandage onto the stump. He should stab Ford’s chest with an angiocatheter to release air and keep the man’s lungs from collapsing. Then get both of them a Medevac.

  Wa
de didn’t move. The men were splattered in blood. Blood crawling with live virus.

  He’d seen microscope images of the Bug in one of the endless PowerPoint presentations the Brass was always sending down to the front-line troops. The Bug looked like little worms that lived in bodily fluids, seeking out the brain and its fertile tissues, where it fed.

  The men lying in that hallway were his friends. They were wounded.

  I’m going to help.

  He did nothing.

  He would die for them. If given the chance, they would have died for him.

  Still he did nothing.

  Ramos pushed himself up onto one elbow and coughed blood onto the floor. Half his face grinned at Wade. The other half looked like hamburger burning on a grill.

  Of all of them, Ramos had the biggest reason to walk away from all this. Go over the hill, go Elvis, desert. Boston was his hometown. The man’s sister lived not far from the Air Force facility the battalion was using as a forward operating base. She and her kid lived in constant fear with their furniture stacked against the front door of their apartment. The squad went out there regularly with Ramos to check on them and deliver groceries and water.

  But Ramos had stayed. It wasn’t just that he was true blue Army, one of the gung-ho mo-fos. Wade knew the man believed that every time he put down one of the infected, Maria and little Thomas Flores were a bit safer.

  The sergeant would never see his family again.

  “Gonna make a hole.” Ramos held up his knife. “Make it wide.”

  Wade looked around for a weapon but saw nothing that could help him.

  Ramos struggled to his feet. He swayed, chuckling softly. His one good eye burned with hilarity and malice.

  Wade remembered his last conversation with Beth. She’d been under the control of the Bug, but she was still in there. He could still reach her.

  “Think about your family, Sergeant.”

  Ramos doubled over choking with laughter. He vomited more blood.

  “Thank about Maria. Think about Thomas.”

  Ramos took off his helmet and dropped it among the dead. He ran his bloody hand across his crew cut and licked the edge of his knife. “I’m gonna make you one of us.”