Grunt Traitor (36 page)

My grunts’ Hydras were all out and ready to fire. I waited until Ohirra was within twenty meters of the first group of GNA engaging with fungees before I let twelve missiles loose, three from each EXO.

Every one found a target as we ran towards the battle lines, exploding almost simultaneously.

A pair of motorcycles went up, the shockwave and shrapnel sending combatants tumbling into the air. Ohirra ran under an exploding SUV as it rocketed into the sky, Sula close on her heels. As the vehicle crashed back to earth, Stranz vaulted the ruined hood. I was so integrated into my display that I almost fell over the wreckage, managing to inelegantly stumble around it.

I’d sent two rounds into the hastily constructed mortar pit and couldn’t help smile when their stash of 40mm rounds cooked off.

I felt hands grabbing at my EXO and I jerked my harmonic blade free. I swung blindly in all directions as I continued targeting. A laser indicator found Sula. I tracked and targeted the device to the edge of the warehouse and sent three missiles into it, smiling as a plume of fire and smoke rose from the area.

Then we were across, no longer in the GNA lines. I kept running, no longer targeting, instead checking the status of each of my grunts. Everything was green. No one seemed to be hurt.

We ran under the 605, ignoring the occasional fungee that hurtled towards us. Sometimes they’d come at me, then turn away, battering their hands and fists on the others. They recognized me as one of their own, just as I recognized them from their red halos. We ran away from them rather than engaging with them. After all, there was no reason to kill them unless we had to.

We were now beneath the black alien vine canopy. No longer did we have the wide open vistas of Greater Los Angeles with views of the ever-present mountains. Now all we saw was the black roof of our new world, with things moving in the shadows, needlers flitting through the leaves, and death everywhere we looked. Even the buildings looked murdered, the alien vines breaking them open and turning them to dust.

We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.

General Douglas MacArthur

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

W
E WERE FORCED
to go to ground at the El Monte shopping center. Ohirra was dehydrated and had begun to stumble the last mile. The suits enabled us to wade through hell, but inside them we were very human. When we stopped, I had Sula and Stranz help Ohirra, giving her water slowly so it wouldn’t make her feel worse. We had little onboard water and food. We’d expended a tremendous amount of energy and needed to get it back.

We’d stopped at what had been a women’s clothing store. Someone had pulled off all the clothes and placed all the mannequins in the middle of the store, where they’d painted them in an impossible variety of garish colors. The greens, blues and yellows were brilliant in the gloom. I both kept watch and checked our time to detonation. It was taking too long to get to our target. We had no idea what was waiting for us at the hive and had to reserve as much time as we could to deal with that unknown. Every second we stopped, every moment we were forced to slow, put the entire mission in jeopardy. Of course, the fault lay with Dewhurst. Had we connected with Mother and her forces, we would have begun much closer to our objective. I knew one thing for certain: whatever we were doing, it had to change.

After twenty minutes, I had Stranz switch places with me and checked on Ohirra.

“How is it?” I asked, eyeing her as she climbed back into her EXO.

She shook her head. “Stupid, stupid. I shouldn’t have let myself get like that.”

“It is what it is. You ready to go?” I knew the answer from her stats, but wanted to give her the chance to reply.

Instead she said, “This is untenable, isn’t it?”

“It is what it is,” I said again. “Right now we just need to move. Every second is a second we can’t get back.”

She frowned. “Then let’s go.”

I shook my head. “Let’s give it twenty more minutes. I need your firepower and your advice. I don’t need you falling out.”

She started to argue, but I held up a hand.

We waited the twenty minutes and I was pleased that her CO2 max had increased to an acceptable level. No sooner did I say it was okay than we were in file out the door, heading down the alien-vine-shadowed street. The vine had ignored the cars and anything made purely of metal, instead seeking those things it could smash and crumble. Here and there the wooden homes were already giving in to the alien vine. Concrete was going too, albeit to a lesser degree. I had no doubt that the deeper we went into the vine, the worse things would be.

Two hours later I was rewarded with visions of almost complete destruction. Rows of homes lay fallen and crumbled, not even a shadow of what they once were.

Traveling through the waste of what had once been the pinnacle of consumer culture was in and of itself a memorial to how great we’d had it. It was also a reminder of how quickly it could be taken away.

We were coming up on Almansur Men’s Golf Club when our HUDs flashed a warning, tracking an unidentified aircraft above the alien vine.

An aircraft? This close to the hive? I’d lost track of the EMP bursts, but it was suicide to get this close. At first I thought it might be a UAV, perhaps even belonging to GNA. But it was much larger. My targeting resolved it as a Chinook. Could it be the Chinook that had come for Dewhurst and HMID Sandi? If so, what was it up to now? It was certain to draw the attention of the Cray, which was something I wanted to postpone for as long as possible.

I’d had everyone form on me to prepare for possible assault when a spasm of PTSD rocked me. The world dissolved into a mélange of Michelle, scarred and crying in my arms, while I saw men with saws and knives and pliers cutting, ripping, attaching hoses and cables to Sandi, who screamed my name over and over. I gritted my teeth so hard my jaws ached.

“Mason?” Ohirra’s voice came from somewhere past Saturn.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to run away from the image. What I was witnessing was the rape of a person, on a fundamental level. They wanted all of her and took it. Seeing it, even if it was my fucking crazy mind’s version of what had actually happened, made me want to track down every single member of GNA and OMBRA and rip them apart with my own hands.

“Mason!” Ohirra shouted over the coms.

The image dissolved in a rain of electronic confetti and I was once again in the alien vine gloom of the new Los Angeles.

“Sorry,” I whispered hoarsely. “I’m back.”

“What happened?”

Fucking PTSD,
I wanted to say, but some questions were better left unanswered. I searched for the Chinook, but it was no longer there. What had happened to it?

As if sensing my confusion, Ohirra said, “It traveled west. We lost it through the vine.”

“What do you think it was doing?” I asked.

“I think they were searching for us.”

“Yeah, me too. Let’s get going. We need to be careful.”

We traveled ever westward. The hive wasn’t visible but we knew where it was. I’d thought about traversing Burbank, then trying to sneak up on the Cray by way of Laurel Canyon or Coldwater Canyon, but time was flying away from me and we had to make as direct a route as possible. In a strange way, the black alien vine canopy was going to be our most useful tactical asset. Just as it concealed the denizens of the sky from us, it would also block the Cray’s view, which should enable us to get closer to the hive without raising contact sooner than we would want to deal with it.

We hit the L.A. river as night fell on the city. Climbing up the embankment and onto the reclaimed ground of Piggyback Yard, we spied several hundred fungees. They stood still, facing in all directions, the trunks of their bodies moving together in an invisible breeze, as if they were all weeds in a wide, fallow field. I saw a red halo around each of their necks.

“I don’t like this,” Sula said.

What’s the worst that could happen?
I wanted to ask, but knew better. The only question was whether to go around or through them. There looked to be thousands of them.

I drew my harmonic blade. “We’re going through.”

“We’re just going to kill them?” Sula said.

“They’re not human. They won’t ever be human again,” I said, knowing that wasn’t exactly the truth.

“But let’s not kill unless we have to.”

“Ohirra, I have lead, you have rear. Stranz, you’re behind me, then Sula. Let’s move.”

I strode forward. When I encountered the first fungee—a young man who could have been, should have been, in high school learning algebra or staring at the girls and their budding beauty—I pushed gently past him. He stood next to a woman who reminded me of a cashier I used to see at a grocery store in San Pedro.

I worked straight through the infected masses, moving as steadily but as lightly as I could. Ohirra had been right. This wasn’t a field to be harvested. They were people. I’d use my blade only if I felt it necessary.

We were perhaps halfway through when Sula started to cry.

“Maintain composure,” I growled. I could understand her feeling. The sheer number of the fungees was something else. The question was, why had they been placed here?

“They’re moving. They’re getting closer together, but slowly.”

“They’re closing in?”

“Projection says we’ll all be tightly packed in less than thirty seconds.”

Was this pocket of infected humanity an early warning device for the hive, or had I blindly led the team into a living minefield?

“Bring about your blades,” I said. “I’m cutting a path through.”

Suddenly the entire field was alive with hands searching for purchase on our EXOs. They gripped and grabbed the others, but left me alone. It was as if a command had been given, something was
directing
them. Then I remembered what Michelle had said, that the Hypocrealiacs were using the fungees to watch us. I grabbed one of the fungees in my EXO hands and stared into its mad eyes, concentrating, trying to make a connection, trying to open a doorway so I could somehow communicate with it or with what was behind it. Was a Hypocrealiac staring back at me through this poor man? Was it studying me, watching me, trying to figure out what I was doing? The fungee’s hands scrabbled at my face plate, nails breaking and fingers leaving bloody trails as it tried to push away from me and get at the others. Its mouth moved silently.

There was just no way. Even if the Hypocrealiacs were using the fungees to conduct their own reconnaissance or as early warning devices I couldn’t bring myself to do them harm. I hurled myself away from the creature, sheathed my blade, and pushed through. I couldn’t cut them. I couldn’t kill them. I’d
been
one of them.

I made it to the other side of Piggyback Yard and into the street. When the others joined me, we stared back at the figures. None followed, but they watched us as we moved on.

We were in Chinatown. The dragon gate had been ripped down and all the colorful signs had been used to board up doors and windows on the lower floors, while the upper floor windows had been covered in plastic. Most of the cars had been pushed to the sides of the street. We felt eyes on us as we strode down vine-shadowed Hill Street. My HUD detected heat signatures on the second and third floors of the buildings lining the street.

“Ohirra,” I began.

“I see them.”

“Be on the watch, Tarantulas,” I warned.

“Look at the windows covered in plastic,” Stranz said. “Notice the people behind them?”

It looked as if the residents of Chinatown had created their own hermetically-sealed environments, creating their own barrier to the spore, which would allow them to survive it until the next threat emerged. The problem for them was that
we
were that next threat. They were well within the destruction radius of the bomb. If what OMBRA techs said was true, Chinatown would be hit with a blast of radiation so severe that nothing would survive.

“Should we tell them?” Ohirra asked.

I nodded. “We owe it to them. Ohirra, why don’t you go knock on a door and see if someone answers? The rest of you, to me.”

Sula, Stranz and I went back to back. They brought their miniguns to bear and I readied my Hydra in the event there was an attack. Not that I thought the people in the buildings meant any harm, but I wasn’t about to put my people in danger if I could help it.

Meanwhile Ohirra went to first one door, then another. I toggled her feed so I could see what she saw. Finally one of the doors opened, revealing an elderly Chinese man standing in a hazmat suit.

“Please leave,” he said. “We don’t want any trouble.”

My HUD detected movement at virtually all the windows surrounding us. I had no doubt that we had more than a dozen weapons trained on us.

“You don’t understand,” Ohirra said. “We’re here to help.”

“We don’t need your help,” the man said, trying to push the door closed.

But Ohirra wouldn’t let him close it. “Listen. In less than seven hours we’re going to detonate a nuclear bomb at the hive. This area is too close. The radiation will kill you.”