Dead Team Alpha: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (30 page)

Skye sighs, knowing the child will be so wired from violence that he’ll have a hard time getting to sleep. Such is the way of children. For her? She’ll sleep like a babe, once she has what she needs in hand.

She looks forward to her dreams, the dreams that tell her so much of what the Code Monkeys have been put on the Earth to do, the dreams that fill her with dread and delight at the same time.

The dreams that say that humanity’s time on the planet must finally come to an end.

***

The slaughter down the street is heartbreaking, and Commander Lee’s hands are shaking as she puts her fingers to her mouth and lets loose a high pitched whistle. Soon the whistle is taken up and for blocks and miles around more and more are added, calling out, telling all those that wait inside their houses to come forth and defend what is theirs.

The neighborhoods and streets fill with citizens of the Stronghold: men and women, old and young. Anyone that has the strength to wield a weapon answers the call.

Commander Lee smiles sadly as
hundreds and hundreds of her friends and neighbors join her. This has been what they have drilled for, been trained since birth to handle, what they have all known could be their fate someday.

Th
at day has come and Commander Lee looks left, nodding to those at her side there, then right, nodding to those that have joined from that direction. Then she looks forward and points. The roar of the crowd is ear splitting and the sound of over a thousand feet thunder up from the pavement as they rush headlong into the blood and violence that waits for them.

***

“Now!” Marsh yells and opens fire with his MK-46, making a Code Monkey dance as 5.56mm NATO rounds rip through its body.

He shoves his shoulder against the machine gun, keeping it st
eady on the sill as he turns it slightly, taking down another Monkey. And another. Then the rest see him and start to move away from the main fight, their eyeless faces filled with the desire to tear apart whoever dares attack them.

“Now, Fitz!” Marsh shouts. “FIRE THAT FUCKING THING NOW!”

Fitz pulls the trigger and the MK-47 lets loose with a loud whump-bang as the first round flies free, soaring up over the horde of Zs. It arcs in the air and starts to drop, but just before it reaches the heads of the Zs, the grenade explodes, sending thousands of pieces of shrapnel shooting every which way.

Fitz does as Marsh ordered and keeps firing and firing until there is nothing left for Crespo to help feed into the gun. They both wave their hands, clearing the smoke from out of the way, and their mouths drop open as they see what the weapon accomplished.

Collin, seeing the looks on their faces, stands up and walks his drunk ass over to the window.

“
Well, I’ll be dipped in shit,” he says. “Ain’t that something.”

The Z horde is decimated, having been ripped apart by the dozens of rounds Fitz sent at it. The undead litter the ground, arms here, legs there, torsos piled this way and that. They have been shredded into undead flesh confetti.

But there are also more than a few human casualties.

Marsh shoves that from his mind as he focuses his fire on the blind crazies running his way.

“Get ready!” he yells. “This isn’t over!”

***

The Stronghold attacks.

They fall upon the Code Monkeys with nothing but vengeance in their hearts. Vengeance for their fallen friends, vengeance for
the loved ones that haven’t returned from their missions on the Teams or Crews, vengeance for the destruction of the sense of security they have lived with for so long.

The Stronghold attacks and they strike blow after blow.

One Code Monkey falls under a mob of dozens. Another Code Monkey is able to kill seven before he is cut down. A third raises an arm, ready to slice the head off a screaming teenage girl when his arm is separated from his body by what had once been a lawn mower blade, but is now wrapped on one end with black tape and cloth, held by the teenager’s mother.

Yet,
despite their overwhelming numbers, the citizens of the Stronghold do not keep their advantage for long. One by one, two by two, three by three, they start to fall under the uncanny skills of the Code Monkeys. Instead of a massive mob that should have swallowed the blind whole, it becomes a mass of people with pockets of corpses quickly spreading through it. The Code Monkeys turn to each other, moving back to back through the throng, keeping themselves defended while never letting up their brutal offense.

In the middle of it all, Commander Lee is holding her own. They come for her, but she cuts them down. She works her way from
crazy to crazy, slashing and slicing, hacking and killing. She takes a cut here, a gouge there, but she doesn’t fall, she doesn’t stop.

Yet even with her
success, she knows that those around her are failing. The veteran soldier in her can read the battlefield. She can sense the panic that starts to build. She knows that at any second, the tide will turn and the momentum gained by surprise will be lost.

She has faced the Code Monkeys before. She doesn’t take anything about them for granted.

***

Sliding
on his knees through a man’s legs and slashing upward, Marshall sends the man screaming to the ground behind him as his manhood tumbles from the split in his jeans.

Marshall whirls around, leaping onto the man’s back
, and opens his throat with one blade while stabbing, stabbing, stabbing the man in the kidneys with the other. He giggles as the blood spurting from the man’s neck gets slower and slower.

Licking his fingers, Marshall rolls away from the man and tumbles a few feet to a group of six women trying to stay alive as another Code Monkey works through their ranks. Marshall slams into a woman’s calves, knocking her legs out from under her. She falls to the pavement, dazed as her head smacks into
the ground. Marshall hops on her, straddling her waist as he raises both blades over his head.

“Mommy?” he asks.

The woman’s face turns from pure fear to confusion. Then the blades come.

“Oh, sorry,” Marshall snickers. “You’re not my mommy.”

He yanks the blades free from the woman’s eye sockets and stands, flicking the blood to the ground. All around him, he can hear the terror and panic, the fright and alarm, as people die. His ears taste the sounds, savoring each thud, each whimper, each rent of flesh. His shoulders start to sway back and forth, hearing the rhythm of carnage and loss, letting it all wash over him and move his body to a beat that has been thrumming since the first man picked up a rock and brained another with it.

He feels connected to it all, one with every weapon and every death. His lips turn up in a grin that would have seemed normal for a kid his age; normal as if he were opening a birthday present and finding his number one wish fulfilled. And for Marshall Rosado, Thirtieth Code Monkey, the blood that covers him from head to toe is a wish fulfilled.

***

The MK-46 goes dead and Marsh
throws it aside, taking hold of the AK-47 that Crespo hands him. He shoves the barrel out the window and keeps firing, but even that slight pause is enough for the Code Monkeys and blind crazies to close the distance.

A fist reaches through and grips him by the shoulder, pulling him towards the window. He lets go of the sub-machine gun and grabs the arm
that the fist is attached to. With one fluid motion, he brings his elbow down hard and the arm snaps in two. A woman screams and retreats, but another takes her place and tries to squeeze through the window and get into the office.

“Duck,” Collin says, pushing Marsh to the ground as he casually places the barrel of a shotgun to the woman’s forehead. “Boom.”

The head is vaporized as the 10-gauge round discharges. Collin pumps the shotgun and takes aim again, blasting off the face of the next crazy that tries to get through the window. He fires over and over until only a click happens when he pulls the trigger.

“Thanks,” Marsh says from the ground, covering his head with his arms, not quite sure which is more dangerous, the Code Monkeys or a
drunken Collin with a shotgun. “You can put that down now.”

“There’s too many!” Crespo shouts, picking up
a M-16 from the desk and running back to the window. “And they are too fast! I can’t get a bead on-”

She falls to her knees, a knife sticking from her
throat; a gurgle and a pleading look in her eyes are all she has time for before she crumples to the floor dead.

“You fucks!” Fitz screams. “You motherfucks!”

Dual Desert Eagles gripped in her hands, she opens fire, ripping half the head off the Code Monkey that stabbed Crespo. Of course, another tries to get through her window, but the man loses the entire left side of his face as Fitz fires again. She presses forward, her fingers pulling the triggers without slowing, until her arms are out the window, searching for more targets, desperate to kill anything responsible for the death of her friend and fellow deputy.

Then she screams and stumbles back. Geysers of blood spurt from the ha
ndless stumps of her arms. She turns and looks at Marsh and Collin, her eyes wide with disbelief, as her life squirts out of her and all over the office, joining the slickness of Crespo’s blood.

Marsh rolls to her, yanking off his belt so he can tighten it around her left arm. He shoves h
er down onto her back and struggles to get her belt off for her other arm. Fitz looks up at him, her mouth opening and closing like a dying fish. A high-pitched whine keens from her throat, hits a crescendo, and then tapers off as her heart takes its last few beats.

The sound of gunfire is muted by the grief that fills him. He barely notices Collin yelling as the man stands over him, firing again and again at the windows, fending off the attackers.

“Come on!” Collin shouts, grabbing Marsh by the collar for a change, and pulling him to the back of the office towards the holding area and jail cells he is very familiar with. “We’re gonna get locked down!”

Marsh finally scrambles to his feet, slipping and sliding from all the blood that coats the office floor frown, and shirks off Collin
’s grip. He grabs an M-4 and follows the drunk back into the hallway that leads to the cells, slamming the heavy metal door shut behind him. He pats his pockets and realizes he left his keys out on his desk.

“Forget it!” Collin yells. “Just come on!”

Marsh backs away. The last image before he turns from the small window set in the door is of the two corpses that used to be the bravest women he’d ever known.

***

Commander Lee glares down at the boy before her. She doesn’t see him as a kid, but as a rabid predator that must be put down.

Marshall smiles up at the woman he knows is in front of him, his fingers twirling blades over and over. If he had
eyes, he would have seen how mesmerizing the effect is. But even without eyes, he knows what he’s doing, having done it to a hundred cannibals, wasteland trash, and survy refugees long before the call came to take down the Stronghold.

But Commander Lee is none of those. She’s a warrior. She knows the taste of killing and she knows
the look of a killer. That look is on her face as she lunges at Marshall, her machete cutting the air where his head had been a split second before.

Diving to the ground, rolling left then coming up, Marshall attacks with his blades. But he’s surprised to find the space the woman occupied empty. It throws him off and for one
moment, he’s disoriented, his senses pushed to their extremes to seek the woman out.

The blow comes fast and he cries out as the skin splits across his right cheekbone, tearing old and new scars wide open. He roars with anger and swipes blindly
, literally, for a change. The knife catches a man in the side that has staggered too close. Caught in the man’s ribs, the blade is yanked from Marshall’s hand. Another roar fills his throat, this one born more of frustration than anything else.

His left arm goes numb then explodes in agony as the machete is embedded into his shoulder. Marshall screeches, sounding like the thirteen year old boy that he is, his voice squeaking and squawking. He recovers quickly and internalizes the pain, using it to focus and drive him on. With his right
hand, he pulls the machete free, feeling the warmth of his own blood stream down his wounded arm.

“Cunt,” he whispers as his senses realign and he feints forward, feeling the woman take the bait and dodge out of the way.

Commander Lee gasps as the machete catches her in the right thigh. She knew the first attack was a feint, it was obvious, but she didn’t see the second feint and fell for it like a rookie. He leg goes out from under her and she falls to her knee, her hand clamped to her leg. Weaponless and wounded, she realizes her time has come. She doesn’t close her eyes as so many do, but faces the death that Fate has decided is hers.