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

by Craig DiLouie

  They placed ten M180 cratering demolition kits at regular intervals on the north and southbound lanes of the road. More on the shoulders and median.

  Each kit weighed a hundred pounds. A big rocket was mounted on a tripod and aimed at the ground. A second shaped charge was attached to one of the tripod legs.

  A radio signal would trigger the rockets to fire and strike the shaped charges. The explosion of the shaped charge would rip a hole in the road about six feet deep. The rocket would then propel through the back blast into the hole and detonate at the bottom.

  Then BOOM.

  A crater ten to twenty feet across would appear, a massive trench across I-95 that would stop any vehicles.

  Muldoon’s squad pulled security. They watched their sectors but frequently glanced at the engineers like excited children waiting for Christmas. The explosion was going to be a hell of a thing to see. The boys did love their toys.

  The only problem was time. The whole thing was taking way too long. The engineers were bickering over proper placement of the demolition charges. Muldoon thought Lieutenant Donald would put an end to it. Instead, he took out a tape measure.

  “Lieutenant!” Muldoon called. “We’re on the clock here.”

  Donald frowned. “This has to be done properly, Sergeant.”

  “We’re going to have company real, real soon.”

  “My orders were to do it right.”

  “Contact!” Ramirez said.

  Muldoon grabbed the binoculars. “What you got?”

  “A whole lot of Nasty Girls, Sergeant.”

  He brought the view into focus. Visibility was poor. Smoke drifted like fog across the highway from fires burning on the other side of the reservoir. A column of vehicles and soldiers emerged from the haze. Humvees. Five-tons belching exhaust. Bands of infantry hoofing it.

  No armor. Good.

  Still, it was going to be a close thing.

  He raised the binoculars again.

  A swarm of Klowns emerged from the trees next to the highway. The usual freak show of ragged clothes, self-mutilations, homemade weapons, grisly trophies and naked captives on leashes. They raced across the southbound lanes toward the National Guard.

  Come on! Muldoon wanted to scream at the Guard. They’re coming right at you!

  They did nothing. They didn’t even appear to notice the Klowns.

  Ramirez shook his head. “What the hell are they doing?”

  You’re about to be attacked, you idiots! Fire! Fire!

  The Klowns ran straight at the Guard and fell into step with the column.

  Muldoon felt the blood drain from his face.

  Aw, shit.

  THIRTY-EIGHT.

  Muldoon radioed to base and requested an airstrike. The Apaches were engaged in the west. They’d get there in thirty minutes. He didn’t have thirty minutes. He terminated contact and considered his options while his squad watched him anxiously.

  Donald gave him a thumbs-up. “Good to go, Sergeant!”

  Apparently, the engineer didn’t have a problem cutting corners when two companies of heavily armed, homicidal maniacs were rolling up the road.

  “Hooah, sir,” Muldoon said.

  They could blow the road and leave. Mission accomplished. The National Guard would be slowed, and the battalion could get out of Dodge. Then Lee would send a few whirlybirds to put the Klowns out of their misery with a little precision-guided whoopass.

  Only that wouldn’t happen. Lee wouldn’t spend the fuel and ordnance. He’d be totally focused on getting the battalion to Fort Drum in one piece. And that would leave two companies of infected soldiers free to wreak havoc on what was left of the Greater Boston area. Muldoon couldn’t stomach that idea.

  Brock had real problems on his hands. He wasn’t going to stop Tenth Mountain from leaving the state. He apparently didn’t have enough force available to even try. When the man threatened Lee, he’d been bluffing, hoping to deter him. As if anything deterred Lee.

  It was all on Muldoon. He had nine shooters plus the engineers, three Humvees with two fifty-cals, a Mark 19 grenade launcher and some explosives. It was like a puzzle. The trick was making all the pieces fit so they added up to the annihilation of two hundred infected soldiers.

  “What are we going to do, Sergeant?” Ramirez asked.

  His little command could put a dent in the opposition force, sure, just before it got slaughtered. Those men down the road had all the weapons and training they had before the virus got them. They were organized. The Klowns were working together in large groups. They could maybe even strategize.

  “Sergeant?”

  There was one thing the Klowns didn’t have, which was any interest in force protection. They didn’t care if they were killed or if their unit was destroyed. All they cared about was getting to the party. That was what made them so tough, but also, under the right circumstances, weak.

  He grinned. His men relaxed and grinned back.

  Muldoon said, “We’re going to fuck them up.”

  THIRTY-NINE.

  They drove fast. Gray grit his teeth and yanked the wheel. The car wove through mobs of infected, past scenes of madness and savagery. The Klowns turned and acknowledged them with the delighted surprise of seeing old friends.

  Wade looked behind them. The crazies chased them in a laughing stampede. Ahead, men on ladders were busy crucifying a cop to a telephone pole.

  “Problem,” Gray said.

  Rawlings glared at the back of his head as if looks could kill.

  “Jesus Christ,” Fisher said. “What the hell now?”

  “Gas,” Gray barked. “We’re on the reserve tank.”

  “We’re not far from Hanscom,” Wade pointed out. “Maybe a mile.”

  “Might as well be a hundred,” Fisher said.

  The car sputtered.

  Gray pounded the wheel. “End of the road.”

  They were on a residential street lined with abandoned cars and broken glass. They got out and stared at the flood of laughing maniacs pouring up the road. Nobody gave the order. They knew what to do. They started firing.

  The carbines threw rounds downrange into the mob. Crazies dropped and were trampled by their fellows. Gray’s grenade launcher thumped. The grenade burst in their midst, sending bodies flying through a cloud of smoke.

  “Bounding!” Gray shouted and took off.

  Fisher stopped firing. He looked down at his weapon and released the empty magazine. “Shit, I’m out!”

  “Move!” Wade shouted.

  “Bounding!” Fisher ran.

  The mob was getting closer by the second.

  Rawlings shoved him. “Go! I’ll cover forward!”

  No time to argue. He went, hobbling as fast as his ankle would take him.

  Gray and Fisher had stopped behind an SUV lying on its side in a pile of glass in the middle of the street. Wade turned. He didn’t see Rawlings.

  Gray pumped another grenade into his launcher and fired. “Come on, Wade!”

  “I don’t see her!” Then he heard it—gunfire from one of the buildings. Rawlings was leading them off.

  Fisher was already running. Gray tossed a smoke grenade onto the street. He grabbed the back of Wade’s blouse and pulled him along.

  They stopped after a hundred meters, gasping for air, and looked behind them. None of the Klowns had followed them through the smoke.

  “I don’t see Rawlings,” Wade said. He wanted to scream it.

  Thunder rumbled ahead of them, the steady boom of gunfire. Hanscom.

  “Let’s stay focused here,” Gray said. “We’re not home yet.”

  “Fuck you!” Wade shouted. “You killed her. Just like you killed the others.”

  Gray spit on the ground. “I didn’t kill anybody, and you know it.”

  “If you’d listened to her, we might be out of this already.”

  “She wasn’t one of us, Wade.”

  Wade glared at him. He’d never wanted to kill anybody so badly
in his life.

  “Hey, guys!” Fisher called from ahead. He whooped. “Check it out!”

  Gray turned and walked off. Wade limped after him. At the top of the rise, they saw Hanscom.

  Hundreds of infected ran through the smoke surrounding the compound walls. Machine guns hammered from sandbag positions. In the guard towers, the Mark 19s thumped. Across the Hescos, the lightfighters propped their weapons and kept the fire hot.

  “How do we get back to base?” Gray asked. “What do you think?”

  Wade laughed. “I think it’s beautiful.”

  Gray turned and frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

  Wade smiled.

  FORTY.

  The Klown army ambled down the road. They grinned like wolves, hunting, always hunting. They saw the flare pop in the murky sky. They drooled at the sight.

  Bullets pinged off the road. Men tumbled laughing to the ground. The infected looked around and saw the Humvee on the road, its fifty-cal rocking. Tracer rounds flashed in their eyes. The Humvee pulled a U-turn and sped off down the highway. The Klowns gave chase. The vehicles pulled ahead of the infantry, who jogged along, grinning at the prospect of fresh meat.

  They passed a series of tripods in the road. The crazies knew what it meant but didn’t care. A rocket streamed out of the nearby trees and struck one of their five-tons. The vehicle exploded and rolled, spilling bodies and equipment. The Klowns pointed and laughed.

  Then the demolition kits detonated.

  Muldoon blinked at the blinding flash. Vehicles and bodies tumbled in the blast. A wave of dirt reached for the sky and tumbled back down. A massive cloud of dust hung over the shattered road.

  His Humvees emerged from concealment and rolled onto the shoulders of the highway, fifties rocking. The Mark 19 showered the wreckage with grenades.

  Muldoon picked up the radio. “Sparta Ops, this is Sparta Six. Time to retrograde. Out.”

  The Humvees took off the down the road. But Muldoon and his boys weren’t finished.

  The vehicles pulled onto the shoulder and idled. Muldoon got out with Ramirez. They climbed the shoulder and lay on the road. Ramirez set up the machine gun. Muldoon scanned the dust cloud with his binoculars. A crowd of infantry jogged out of the dust.

  “Man,” said Muldoon. “They sure are dumb.”

  Ramirez looked at him. “They’re crazy.”

  The Klowns passed two abandoned vehicles. Muldoon squeezed the handheld detonator. The electric pulse traveled down the length of wire to the Claymore mines placed on the ground next to the wrecks. Each had embossed on it, FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. The blasting caps activated, detonating the C4 behind a matrix of seven hundred steel balls set in resin. The balls flew out of the daisy-chained mines at four thousand feet per second.

  The Klown soldiers disintegrated in a massive spray of blood and body parts.

  Ramirez sighted on the soldiers in the rear who’d escaped the blast, and started hammering. Tracers flashed downrange. The Klowns charged, firing as they moved.

  “Some human wave shit here,” Ramirez said. “Fuckers think it’s World War One.”

  The Humvees rolled out of concealment and engaged with their fifties and the Mark 19. They walked their fire into the crowd of Klowns. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Muldoon had been right. The Klown soldiers knew their tactics. They knew to lay a base of fire before you maneuvered. Fire, maneuver, fire, maneuver. Sweep the enemy’s position with grazing fire to suppress them, then flank and cut them up with enfilade fire. Tactics 101. But the virus couldn’t wait. It cared nothing for self-preservation. It didn’t understand the concept of victory or defeat. It only wanted to play. It wanted to play right now.

  Muldoon and Ramirez heard a whistle and put their heads down.

  WHAM!

  The ground shook. Dirt pattered against their helmets. The Klowns were firing mortars. Soon, they’d have them zeroed.

  A Javelin missile streamed toward one of Muldoon’s Humvees. The vehicle rocked as it flew apart in a blinding flash.

  “Fuck me,” Ramirez said. “That was Burke and Zeller.”

  Another mortar round crashed into the trees. Splinters rained down.

  Bullets chewed up the asphalt in front of them. The Klowns had set up a machine gun.

  “Time to retrograde,” Muldoon said. He radioed his men to bug out.

  They got up and ran to the burning Humvee. Bullets pinged off the road around them. The heat forced them back.

  “They’re dead, Sergeant,” Ramirez said.

  Another mortar round blew a smoking hole in the highway as they ran to the next Humvee and piled inside it. As they drove off, the men seemed subdued but oddly jubilant. They’d finally won. They’d finally done something good in this nightmarish conflict.

  Muldoon called in his situation report and requested the whirlybirds come in to mop up the Klown mortar team. He didn’t feel jubilant at all. Those were American soldiers they’d killed.

  This kind of winning felt like losing. Like he’d cut the Afghan boy’s throat after all.

  FORTY-ONE.

  Gray lay in a heap on the bloody asphalt.

  Wade stared down at him. What happened?

  The man was alive one second, bleeding from a dozen wounds the next.

  Fisher backed away from him. “Aw, no, man.”

  What’s with him?

  Fisher took another step. “No. Please. Please don’t.”

  Wade looked down at the bloody knife he held. He looked at Fisher. “You’d better run,” he hissed.

  “Why’d you do that, Wade?”

  Wade laughed. “He wasn’t one of us.”

  Ramos’s parting gift had taken its sweet time, but it had finally taken control. Little worms in his head. Little puppet strings.

  He screamed: “Run!”

  Fisher yelped and ran off.

  Wade looked down at the body and chuckled. He’d stabbed Gray in the kidneys. He licked the blood off the blade and stabbed again. He kept stabbing and stabbing.

  Just before Gray died, they looked into each other’s eyes and laughed as brothers.

  There was an old saying among warriors: Make pain your friend.

  He hadn’t really wanted to kill Gray, but the organism in his body demanded everything. It didn’t appreciate divided loyalties. It wanted it all.

  It wanted to see the whole world burn.

  That would be so very freaking hilarious.

  He heard a splash of gunfire. Below him, his brothers and sisters charged into First Battalion’s guns. He wanted to join the party.

  Then he remembered Ramos’s family. They still needed attention. The sergeant would have wanted it that way.

  The laughing virus in his skull thought that was a very awesome idea.

  “Aw, Wade,” Rawlings said.

  He wheeled. At the sight of her, he burst into long, breathless peals of insane laughter.

  HAAAWWWW

  HAAAAAWWWWWWW

  HAAAAAAAWWWWWWWW

  He knew why the infected sought out those they loved. The pain was so exquisite. It hurt soooo good.

  “Sorry,” he managed. “Rawlings.”

  She leveled her carbine. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “Shoot me.”

  She shook her head, tears streaming down her face. “I don’t think I can, Private Wade.”

  “Shoot me now.”

  “Tell me where Ramos’s family lives.”

  He doubled over laughing.

  She said, “I’ll take care of them. I’ll do that for you.”

  He grinned and held up his knife. “Gonna make a hole. Make it—”

  He lunged.

  She fired.

  FORTY-TWO.

  Sergeant Sandra Rawlings watched Boston burn.

  The big fires had radiated out of South Boston and were consuming everything in sight. The South End was gone. The skyscrapers of the Financial District pumped tons of smoke and ash into the already blackened
sky. Chinatown had been burned to a cinder. Back Bay-Beacon Hill was gone, as was Fenway-Kenmore. The fires were eating Dorcester and Roxbury.

  Across the Charles River, Charlestown was a black, smoldering ruin, and the conflagration was spreading across Cambridge and Somerville.

  The firefighters were all dead, the police department overrun. The hospitals, considered centers of infection, had been destroyed from the air. The Governor held East Boston and little else. From Newton to Quincy, Major General Brock and his struggling battalions were steadily being pushed back toward Cape Cod.

  Boston, drained of life, its soul already departed, was being cremated and with it everything that had defined Rawlings as a person. It was a city no more; it was becoming an idea. A symbol. For Rawlings, a memory. She remembered growing up in Dorcester. Living in one apartment after another around the city as an adult. Jobs in various offices in the Financial District before she became a paramedic working out of Christ Hospital. Proud service in the Massachusetts Army National Guard. A tour in Iraq. Then fighting hard, one day at a time, trying to save the city from plague, a plague that had devoured the city long before fire took its turn.

  All of it was gone. Nothing left to fight for. Only the plague lived on.

  Still, she turned toward the sound of the guns. Tenth Mountain was revving up its vehicles, getting ready to move. She wondered where they were going. Was anywhere safe?

  Rawlings admired that they were still willing to fight at all. Those Tenth Mountain boys didn’t know when to quit. Maybe they could use a girl like her. She had a handful of dog tags to deliver. That, and their story. As the sole survivor of the group, she was the sole witness to their end.

  Once more into the breach?

  Hell, no. She wanted to find a house somewhere and take off her boots. Then, she’d get some water and soak in it for a while. After that, she’d sleep the sleep of the dead.

  Nonetheless, Sergeant Rawlings found herself walking down the hill toward the sounds of the gunfire, searching for something that was still worth fighting for, living for. Maybe she’d find it outside Boston. Maybe she’d become a mountaineer after all.