It was quiet outside. Around the units he could see some scattered bodies but the only movement was that of wind in the trees and the birds. He turned to rouse Lance and saw that he was already standing behind him in the doorway. Without speaking a word they stepped down onto the ground and tried to get their bearings.
Dan used hand signals to indicate, silently, his intent to move down the small street, away from Nebraska Avenue. He didn’t want to have to face the scene of last night’s battle again if he could help it. Lance nodded and they started to move, slowly and quietly.
As they passed the last unit in the drive Dan caught a glimpse of movement out of his right eye. He froze and raised his hand for Lance to do the same. In the window of one of the units was a face, distorted and dirtied with blood and dirt. It stared at them then darted away from the glass, emitting a very low pitched whine. One of the sick and turned humans, but a terrified one and not a threat. They continued to the corner. Dan stepped around a sign that stated they were in a ‘Neighborhood Support Area’. Off to their right the street ended, and Dan was looking into an area of bushes and shrubbery. A walk-way was running left-to-right – the floodway, Dan thought. They had ended up further to the north than he expected. To his left was a silent, abandoned street. The occasional car was parked on the road, but there were no signs of life.
“We need to find a car,” Lance whispered into Dan’s ear. “One with bodies near it. That means they were driving when they got attacked, so the keys should still be on them or near them, at least. We can than get back onto Nebraska and head south, all the way to Fort Carson if we need to.” Dan nodded and they set off along the road in a basic patrol formation, staggered a few meters apart with each man focusing on the area around them.
They didn’t have to go far. The relative emptiness of the street they were on was deceptive. At the next intersection the street opened up both ahead and off to the left, and Dan could again see the destroyed remnants of multiple families that must have tried to flee the horrors around them. He hoped that they had been some of the civilians he had seen escaping past them last night, but he could tell only some had gotten away – the bodies along the street was evidence that a number of people lost their lives out here. They walked past the first few cars and stopped next to a dark Chevrolet Cruze. The driver had succumbed to an assault while still trying to unravel himself from his safety belt, which his arm seemed to have gotten entangled with. Lance moved around the driver’s side and gave Dan a thumbs up. The keys were still in the ignition. Dan kept scanning their route and saw some figures, hunched and aggressive, watching them from up the street. They were eighty meters away and seemed content to stay partially hidden by a row of cars while they assessed the threat posed by Dan and Lance.
Lance gently untangled the dead man’s arm from the seat belt and dragged the body onto the footpath. While he tried to avoid touching the collapsed face which was a congealed mess he didn’t mess around. Dan pointed out their company beyond them and Lance nodded.
“What do you think they’re doing?”
“I saw a stick,” Dan said, quietly. “Judging from the rest of the vehicles here and from what we’ve seen of their behavior, I reckon that they are running at vehicles and trying to smash them up as they drive through. They probably have found that people driving at slow speeds while they avoid the debris aren’t much of a threat but are an easy target.” Lance nodded, and Dan continued.
“If you get ready to drive I’ll move forward and throw a grenade at them. If you come behind me I’ll mount up and then we can get through them if we’re fast enough. We should only be a hundred or so meters from Nevada Ave, so we hang right up ahead. We’ll be able to head south, using the route we cleared yesterday with the hummers to get through.” Lance gave a small nod and slipped into the Cruze’s driver seat, gently clanging the keys as his fingers closed around them.
Dan closed the still-opened passenger-side door of the Cruze as he moved ahead. He heard the engine start up behind him as he clipped his 416 onto his sling and undid one of the grenade pouches. It was sealed by both a dome and Velcro closure and gave a small tearing sound as he pulled the top of the pouch open.
He kept his eyes on the threat in front of him as he walked forward. The M67 grenade was tight inside the pouch but Dan’s fingers easily closed around the square top and gently pulled it out. He felt for the safety bail with his other hand and flicked it off. 60 meters. He looked for an approach and some cover for after he threw the grenade. He didn’t want to be standing in the open when it went off – frag from these things could easily travel up to two football fields. Around twenty meters from the figures was a car up stopped against the gutter. He would throw from the left hand side of the car then dart back and take cover behind its boot. If Lance drove up on his left, then Dan would be able to get into the Cruze in a matter of seconds. Perfect.
Dan inserted his finger into the grenade’s pin when he was a few meters away from his throwing point. You didn’t jerk the pin out – it was too easy to fumble or lose control of the actual grenade. It was better practice to put your knuckles against each other and roll the tops of your hand apart, keeping the pinky fingers together. Dan did this and the pin slid smoothly out as he covered the last step. He cocked his throwing arm back and then smoothly threw the grenade in a high, parabolic arc.
The moment he let go of the grenade he was moving back, crouching and then lying on the ground behind the car on his side, the rear armored plate in his vest covering his vital organs from the direction of the blast. He could see Lance duck behind the steering wheel of the idling car and then the earth shook underneath him as he heard the grenade detonate. As soon as he heard the large crump sound of the blast he was instantly on his feet. He had an instance to register the black dust cloud dissipating from where the figures had been sheltering and the faint smack as clods of earth and fragments of concrete tumbled the ground before Lance was alongside him, braking hard. Dan reached for the door, tumbled inside and then they were past the figures.
“Clear,” Lance said, calmly. They hit the intersection and turned south, back onto the route they had travelled up 24 hours ago. Dan looked in the car’s mirrors but struggled to make out anything of significance from last night’s battlefield. The compound was behind them, and then it disappeared from sight as they wound their way southwards at a steady pace, bumping over the median strip and the occasional body as they went.
***
They hit the remnants of the first position five minutes after turning onto the main road. While they had seen a number of the ghouls fleeing at them along the edge of the road they had only watched as the past and Lance hadn’t stopped the car. The intersection itself was abandoned, but the ground was littered with empty shell casings and expended brass which crunched under their tire wheels and they drove through. There were a lot more bodies along the side of the road than there had been on the previous morning.
“Stop here,” Dan said as they wove their way out the far side of the intersection. Close to the road, straddling the sidewalk and gutter was the twisted body of a soldier, his face staring upwards at the sky.
Lance slowed the vehicle down to a crawl and Dan tentatively stepped out, scanning around him. In the distance he thought he could hear another car driving but the scene around him was quiet. The last creature he had seen was fifty meters back and hadn’t shown an inclination to advance on them when they rolled past. Dan stepped to the soldier and his looked at his equipment. A standard issue M4 – 5.56mm bullets, which was the same the HK416’s used. He hit the magazine release on the dead soldier’s weapon and checked the mag. Empty. In itself that told him why the poor Corporal... Guardez, he saw, reading his name-tag, was lying on the ground.
He’d run out of ammo like the Rangers to the north. Dan wasn’t overly dramatic or poetic but the thought hit him that this was a good death, if that counted for anything. Guardez would never be known by name or deed and his family, if they were sti
ll alive, would never hear what happened to their son, brother or relative. But Dan knew in that instant that the man in front of him had stayed and fought until the end, his options expended until he could fight no more. A good death for a soldier, if that meant anything. Dan checked the pouches on the Corporal’s vest and pulled out four magazines. As he’d gotten down to the last two or three rounds in each he must have re-stashed them, hoping to reload them later when some more boxes of ammo turned. There were a few pouches without magazines in them at all. When things got desperate he must have changed his mind and let them fall onto the ground, giving up hope of ever being able to re-bomb.
Dan didn’t linger. He muttered a hasty farewell to Guardez under his breath – stand down Corporal, you’ve done your duty – and then ran back to the car, having only taken ten seconds in total checking for rounds.
Inside the car Dan transferred the bullets from the steel M4 magazines into the one of the more modern polymer EMAGs he had kept in his vest. Lance had shook his head when he asked if he wanted a couple for himself.
“Best to keep them with one rifle, and I’m driving.” The EMAG had a small clear cut-out that made it easier to see how many rounds were remaining in the magazine – in total Dan now had six rounds, which didn’t even show in the EMAG’s window. Six rounds – three double-taps. Not many. Dan actioned the weapon inside the car, chambering a round, and then he returned his master hand to the pistol group of the rifle. He kept the safety off but his thumb was ready to flick it to semi or full auto in an instant. They continued making their way south, the only survivors visible on the road.
The first military presence they saw was back at the Iron-Horse command site they had been briefed at two nights ago. The other intersections they had driven through had been abandoned, with the signs and debris of combat everywhere. Bullet-holes lined the nearby buildings and the concrete, and there were bodies everywhere. They couldn’t see many soldiers amongst the chaotic sprawl of bodies, meaning most units had been able to withdraw intact with the majority of their men and women. Hopefully after the last civilians had passed through, as Dan didn’t want to imagine the horror any refugees would have faced trying to move down this Avenue if it was undefended.
At the Incident Control Point site they drove into a thinned but still functioning force. The command Bradley and the HQ hummers had gone, but there were enough soldiers – a reinforced platoon, perhaps, or more likely a badly mauled company – to hold the ground. They simply rolled past the first manned vehicles they saw, with a few riflemen covering their approach into the position with machine guns and rifles. No-one challenged them so they kept driving. In the centre of the position Lance wound his window down and called out to a sergeant. They were told that all the smaller posts collapsed in the night as ammunition dwindled and only two larger intersections were held – the one they were at and one closer to Fort Carson, where Highway 85 joined with the main Avenue. These two posts were pulling back, too, the Sergeant said – if they were an hour later in getting these they would have found this position abandoned, as well.
“It should be pretty secure to the south, and the road is clear. Just keep driving, you’ll hit the next secure point and then the route should be clearly marked, taking you into Fort Carson after that.”
“How much fuel have we got?” Dan asked, both out of a desire to keep Lance talking to him and out of a desire to spark up conversation. He’d seen the fuel needle a few miles back and he knew they had enough.
“Just over half. More than enough.” Lance’s voice was quiet and distant, but he was alert to the scenes around him as he weaved the car through the carnage and debris of the last two days and nights. They were lucky to be following heavier armored vehicles – the lead vehicles of the convoy must have forced its way through, judging by the angle and location of vehicles that had been shunted aside. Even then their route through was narrow and winding, and their progress was slow. Dan heard glass crunch underneath their tires. He kept his hands on his rifle as he sent forth a silent wish to the universe that they didn’t get a puncture on their final dash to safety.
They neared a sweeping right-hand turn onto a highway.
“Getting closer,” Lance grunted, his hands staying clenched on the steering wheel.
Dan kept his gaze scanning the surrounds. As they mounted a slight rise that took them onto the highway Dan saw a figure crouching behind a car. It was one of the turned, ghoulish figures that looked half-human, half-animal. He couldn’t hear its snarl over the sounds of the engine and the soft growl of the cars wheels on the tar-seal beneath them, but he could clearly see the flashing, angry eyes and the snarled, exposed expression of fury. It’s face was covered in blood and smeared dirt, with only the shifting outline of teeth and it’s piercing eyes – bloodshot and red, Dan thought, although he second-guessed himself immediately and wondered if he had imagined that detail – standing out from its otherwise dulled, almost camouflaged form blending into the scene of desolation around them. In its hands it awkwardly held a metal picket as it crouched low to the ground. It was watching them as a predator watches prey, weighing up the opportunity for attack.
Dan’s mind flicked back, involuntarily, to the message his Commanding Officer – former Commanding Officer, he corrected himself – had passed on. Lance was silent next to him, and Dan muttered his thoughts out loud.
“We’ve fallen. We’re no longer the apex, the world’s top predator. Now we’re in competition, with... with them.”
Lance grunted. There was a moment’s silence, when only the sounds of the car slowly driving forward could be heard, then Lance spoke.
“We’ll fight back. We always do. Just ask the sabre-tooth tigers or the bison. We’ll run these demons into extinction, too. It’s what we do best as a species.”
CHAPTER SIX
They reached the gates of Fort Carson shortly after 10 o’clock. They passed multiple lines of guards and check-points, but were waved through as soon as their uniforms were recognized. Whatever was happening outside, at least Fort Carson was functioning. And secure.
Recent events had changed Fort Carson dramatically. Instead of a large, expansive base that stepped off into a training area to the south, the fort was now a compact, crammed environment barely coping in less than a fifth of the bases’ buildings to the North. Thousands of survivors were now hunkered down in a small portion of what had still being called a Fort but looked more like a refugee camp from a nameless African civil war. Remnants of the on-base engineer battalion had erected chain-link fences and barbed-wire emplacements throughout the base, sealing off a secured zone from the rest of the base that remained, to all intents and purposes, hostile.
Inside their secured zone the survivors from Fort Carson had made space to accommodate the throng of almost six thousand refugees that had struggled in from the horrors of Colorado Springs. It was a teeming, crowded area that contrasted dramatically with the open, abandoned sights Dan and Lance had just driven through. All around them military men and women were working. Clearance parties were heading out into the unsecured areas of Carson and engineers were preparing to fence off another secured area so they could start opening up more real estate for their refugee population.
“I don’t like our chances of a hot meal,” Lance said as they passed a mobile kitchen that had been set up in a parking lot. The line of refugees snaked out of sight.
Hastily put together signs pointed the way to the Fort Carson Command Post. A few days ago Dan was sure that there had been no such thing on Fort Carson – the garrison headquarters would have been busy conducting ceremonial duties and running routine events, and each units would have had its own headquarters to plan and conduct unit training. All that was gone and a single CP for the Fort had sprung up. It was reassuring to see – unlike the disarray and futility they had been witness to on Peterson Air Force Base, Carson had structure and purpose. Trust the Army, Dan thought. Adapt and overcome, regardless of what horrors it had been faced w
ith. Although the streets of Iraq and the villagers of Afghanistan had been child’s play compared to what awaited them outside their barbed-wire walls, at least those missions had been good preparation and training. They knew how to hunker down and secure themselves deep inside a hostile land. Which was what America had become, in the blink of an eye.
The CP had taken over one of the base’s indoor gymnasiums. Judging from the flow of people and the activity the building was generating, it was the centre of the safe zone through which everything now flowed – it was not only the brain and the central nervous system a normal CP was, but it looked like it was also the base’s physical heart, pumping orders, manifests and schedules via clip-board carrying staff in every direction. Of course, Dan thought. No computers and no networked command and control systems. We’re back to pen and paper and maps. Their Chevrolet looked out of place amongst the military vehicle line-up as they parked it next to a row of hummers and tall, hulking Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs.
A large number of men and women – mainly military but some civilian – moved in and out of the gym’s main doors. Decisions were being made inside this building that affected everything outside – where people would be accommodated, security protocols, rationing and supply. It was a massive undertaking and Dan could imagine how quickly things had ramped up in 72 hours to become the humming scene of activity before them.
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