Arisen : Nemesis (45 page)

Finally, he came back around and regarded the only other movement, not to say life, in the room. It was the Zulu – Zulu Zero, if Zack were to be believed. It was still chained to the wall and going spastic now, probably from the heavy metallic scent of blood that filled this tomb. It looked like a body that had been dug up after six months and cursed with reanimation.

It truly looked like death warmed over.

Brendan laid the handgun on the desk, unslung his assault pack, kneeled down and zipped it open. He spared another look at Eli’s body, then looked back up at the Methuselah of the Dead, the oldest of his tribe – and he thought:
Damn. Now I’ve got to carry that son of a bitch out of here by myself.

He got his aid kit out, and keeping one eye on both entrances, wrapped up his wounds – not expertly, but sufficient to get the bleeding stopped.

Then he dug out his dual flex cuffs, hood, and body bag.

And he bagged up his precious cargo.

Sword to a Knife Fight

The Stronghold - North Armored Guard Tower

It was the flashbang and not the frag, which was probably just as well, Jake figured – as he blasted into the guardhouse right behind it and saw the piles and stacks of RPG rounds. This place was basically one big fucking magazine.

He’d bounced to his feet with his .45 and run straight at the entrance even as the grenade was going off, blasting inside with hot air scouring his face, firing his weapon one-handed as he came through the door.

There were no longer fifteen defenders in there, not live ones anyway – a variety of a-S guys were already down on the deck with canoes for heads, and Jake had one guess who had done that. But it was the ones on their feet that were his concern, and they were fortunately moving through cotton wool because of the effects of the flashbang, and Jake saw the whole scene and fight in vivid slo-mo because of the time-dilation effects of adrenaline.

He put a lightning double-tap into one on his feet to the right, then traversed his weapon and did the same to one on the left, simultaneously hooking the guy around his neck with his left elbow and spinning around his body to use it as a shield while he gunned down two in the corners – not stopping but merely turning his momentum into centripetal force as he swung around the dying man like a dual-star system, watching impassively as rounds struck the body before him, then launching himself forward and triggering off again at…

…fucking al-Sîf, who was still perfectly covered up by the back wall, rifle across the top of a crate, and who seemed to
know
Jake was coming for him.

Still barreling forward, Jake went for head shots but unexpectedly al-Sîf rose from behind cover, coming erect while firing, and Jake’s heavy rounds went low into his vest, knocking him back. Jake’s slide locked as the .45 went dry and he left it in mid-air and powered forward with great kicks of his legs, then dove over the top of the crate into the al-Shabaab commander, knocking the rifle from his hands.

Down on the deck, the two locked onto each other in a vicious ground grapple, from which, clearly, one man at most was going to emerge alive.

* * *

Forty feet below, deep underground, Kate was inching forward to press their advantage – when she saw a dark dot fly through the cone of glare from her weapon light, bounce off the wall to her left, then drop to the ground.

Son of a bitch.

She depressed her weapon and light, found the grenade at her feet, snatched it up and tossed it underhand right back around the corner. This time it bounced off the far wall, dropped to the ground at their opponents’ feet, and instantly exploded.

That literally couldn’t have gone any better.

Motherfuckers should learn to cook their shit off
, Kate thought, turning to Baxter and raising her hand for a high-five.

But then came the sound of cracking timbers – and the ceiling came down.

Not, thank fuck, over their heads – but above the intersection ahead, and on the heads of the guys they’d just grenaded.

And it turned out the grenade hadn’t killed all of them – and neither did the collapse. Now Kate and Baxter listened to the sounds of men suffocating underneath the giant pile of earth and rock and wood. It was impossible not to empathize, to feel the horror of being unable to get air, trying to breathe dirt…

Better them than us
, Kate thought. She panned her light around and onto Baxter. The collapse had taken out the little overhead lighting there was. Getting the dirty young man in her cone of glare she said, “You okay?”

He coughed. “Good to go.”

“Okay. Gimme your helmet.”

Baxter squinted. “What for?”

“Unless you’ve got an entrenching tool in that pack, we’re going to need it to dig ourselves the hell out of here.”

Baxter undid his chinstrap and removed the helmet. “Yeah,” he said, glancing upward. “And we’ve got to do it before the others leave us behind.”

Kate refrained from adding:
Or before they’re all dead
. She knew that was likelier than them leaving their teammates behind.

She paused and took a deep lungful of air. She could already feel it getting close in there. When she looked at Baxter, she knew they were thinking the same thing, whether she voiced it or not.

And before we both run out of air and suffocate.

* * *

Jake and al-Sîf exchanged a lightning series of blows and gouges, like two alley cats shrieking and scratching in a cloud of fur and claws, then separated and bounced to their feet.

Standing at his full height in a combative stance, al-Sîf had about thirty pounds and three inches on Jake. But they were both in rippling, ass-kicking shape, with no discernible body fat on either of them.

As neither broke eye contact, each seemed to recognize the other as a badass of the first rank. It wan’t mutual respect. Just recognition.

Jake’s eyes darted to his dropped .45 on the floor, and the other discarded weapons near dead hands, most of them loaded. Al-Sîf glanced back at his Bushmaster on the ground behind the crate. Jake’s gaze followed, and he recognized the weapon – and al-Sîf recognized that he did.

Now Jake’s mouth turned to a tight line and his eyes went dead like those of a big cat about to take down prey. He unsnapped and drew his Yarborough knife from the sheath taped upside down to his chest rig. This was, and had been for years, almost certainly the oldest operational Yarborough knife anywhere in the SF groups. Never mind that probably no one had actually used one in a fight since Vietnam.

Knife-fighting was frowned upon by spec-ops guys. They knew it took three to five minutes for someone to bleed out, and meanwhile you had an angry dying man to deal with. And afterward everyone involved in a knife fight went to the hospital, even the winner. It hardly even mattered if you won. Nobody with half a brain ever brought a knife to a knife fight.

But Jake didn’t give a shit about any of that right now. In his head now was only one thing:
I’m going to gut this son of a bitch. But I’m going to skin him first.

Al-Sîf drew his namesake sword – the giant Moorish scimitar.

This wasn’t as unfair as it looked. In the tight quarters of the cluttered guardhouse, it would be unwieldy, it would be hard to find enough room to swing it properly – and it would take a hell of a lot more time to move than Jake’s knife.

Both were content, though.

Jake to beat The Sword at his trademark game.

And al-Sîf to stand or fall by it.

* * *

Up at ground level, Zack was feeling very alone again. He knew from radio traffic that Jake was fighting on the wall above and behind him. He could also see Todd on the opposite side of the courtyard, dropping Hellhounds on anything that moved. But he was still feeling increasingly isolated and exposed. He knew Godane’s men could walk up on him any time – either from out in the courtyard or, worse, from the darkness inside the building behind him.

And he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do when they did.

Meanwhile, he
bzzz
’d off short bursts from the minigun at anything that popped up in his field of vision. He was trying to conserve ammo, as he didn’t relish having to reload this thing, which would mean being defenseless for however long that took. He’d reloaded it once after the fight kicked off, and after he’d burned through an entire can clearing the walls on the south side. He hoped he might be able to do it faster now. But he doubted it.

The only good news,
he thought,
is that those RPGs are no longer dropping on my head from the armored tow—

Something dropped on his head from above, causing him to jump and bang his scalp on steel. Whatever it was instantly tumbled off the top of the turret and onto the ground beside the truck. Zack froze, both wanting and not wanting to know what the hell that was.

It took off running, and was out of view before he could make it out.

Holy fucking shit…

He now recalled vaguely – having paid little notice at the time, mainly because he had far too many problems of his own – that Todd had come on the radio to report that the giant undead herd was outside, ahead of schedule. To the extent that he even heard it, he didn’t figure it impacted him.

Now he rapidly reassessed.

Todd hadn’t said how bad it was. Now Zack knew he’d better find out. He dug his phone out of a pocket on his vest and called up the SkyRanger app, getting half-dried blood on the touchscreen… and when he got the video up, he saw two things:

One, the dead were already piling up against the north wall – which was basically right behind him.

Two, that section over his head was one of the few that hadn’t been extended up beyond its original twenty feet.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…

Fighting against the blood on the screen, he managed to zoom in on the section that was of critical personal interest. He could see the ocean of grasping arms and gnashing mouths, as hundreds of them tried to dig through one another to the irresistible sounds of the living killing each other on the other side of the wall. And then he saw one basically go running across the rising slope of bodies, somehow doing the crowd-surfing equivalent of walking on water, and leap off the top…

It didn’t make it, smashing into the top section of wall and falling back.

Zack licked his lips. They were bone dry.

And now, when he listened between explosions, he could definitely hear the damned things moaning and scrabbling out there.

It sounded like… death, on an extremely large scale.

He checked his watch, and stole a look behind him at the interior of the building – from which Brendan, Elijah, Baxter, and Kate were conspicuously not emerging. If any of them were ever going to get out of there…

They were going to have to do it pretty damned soon.

Dead Man on Your Back

The Stronghold - Underground

Brendan stumbled through near darkness alone, dirt falling on his head. None of this shit even registered on his manifest of problems.

He had a dead man on his back, in a sort of modified fireman’s carry. He was a scrawny little fucker, and hadn’t gotten any bigger across a year and a half of ZA. Plus he was flexcuffed at the wrists and ankles, had a hood over his gnashing mouth, and was stuffed into a high-quality PVC body bag. All of this was helpful.

But he was still wriggling like a bag of worms, and Brendan could feel the Zulu’s furious intent, trying to devour him through the PVC, less than inches away from him. It also left him firing his rifle one-handed, and having to put the damned bag down whenever he had to reload.

The last thing he’d done in Godane’s chamber of horrors was to retrieve Elijah’s SCAR, which he’d found undamaged. Then he scrabbled around in the dirt until he found the firing pin, then made the repair and clipped the rifle to his own sling. He’d also liberated Elijah’s 5.56 mags. He wouldn’t be needing them where he was going.

As for his wounds, the arm wasn’t terrible, though it was starting to compound with the fragged hand from Lemonnier, degrading his ability to function. The shot-through foot was a bigger problem, and becoming more so. Between him, the undead body, and his weapons and combat load, that foot was having to bear nearly three hundred pounds of weight with every step. And it was shrieking with pain and threatening to give out with each one. And, surprising Brendan very little, it had started bleeding again. Just seeping for now.

But that meant he was on a clock. Though he was already on a clock.

So he was not exactly at his most combat effective. But he still somehow had to fight his way out of there. And, with the tunnel collapses, he also had to
find
his way out of there.

Two guys spilled out into the corridor ten meters ahead. They turned a light on him and shouted. Bren flipped his fire selector to full-auto and gunned them down. The mag went dry. That meant he was going to have to put this very special dead son of a bitch down again to reload. That wasn’t so bad.

The trouble would be picking him back up again.

* * *

Jake had just stepped inside of al-Sîf’s strike, his preferred tactic of closing and destroying, but al-Sîf saw it coming, pivoted, and grabbed at his knife hand – just a little too late to prevent a shallow slash on his upper arm. And while this was happening, Jake was also subject to annoying chatter in his ear. It was Todd.

“Jake – how we doin‘ up there, man?”

He yanked his knife hand away from the left-handed grip al-Sîf had briefly latched onto it, put the iron bar of his forearm across the man’s chest and neck, and pushed him off, breaking contact again. As they both circled and reset, Jake touched his PTT button with his free hand and spoke into his mic.

“Making some progress. Okay down there?”

Al-Sîf gave him an amused look – like it was pretty funny that the SF team sergeant was running his team while in the middle of the most lethal single combat imaginable.