The Flood (24 page)

Arguably, her sword was a better weapon for their current mission anyway. It not only allowed but required her to get a good close-up look at every Zulu before she destroyed it. She was trying to stay on the opposite flank from Juice – whose shoulder cam was allowing Park back on the carrier to get close looks as well.

Ali knew Somali people – because she was one of them. And none of these dead bastards were them. It was weird – like the whole local population had been transplanted to some other town, far away. But maybe Zorn had it right – giant herds, like the one they’d fought in Virginia, had swept away the whole city.

But it was damned inconvenient.

Alpha was now methodically bashing their way through the dusty black streets of Hargeisa. Ali, and the rest of them – using an eclectic mix of primary, secondary, and melee weapons – destroyed dozens, then hundreds. They were working hard to check every Zulu and Romeo they encountered before they dispatched them. None so far were local.

And it was hard not to start feeling like God hated them.

On the upside, they’d had no Foxtrots attacking them yet tonight – and no more of the cursed baboons either. But that was the end of the upside. Because, of what they did have, there were more and more coming, faster and thicker every minute. Ali started to get that tingly feeling – the one that said that they’d begun drawing a singularity. And if and when they did, there wasn’t likely to be a way out for them. Maybe Handon was right.

Maybe today was their day.

Pivoting, spinning, and delivering a wide horizontal stroke that sliced through two heads at once, Ali gritted her teeth in defiance. Death had been coming for her for a long time. She’d make that rendezvous if she had to. And she’d go down swinging. But she took a really dim view of failing in their mission.

Because:
fuck that
. Failing was bullshit.

She pushed out farther and redoubled her sword work. Out ahead of them, she could see more rippling explosions blossom – as Juice called in more air strikes to thin out the massed army that was coming for them. She knew those Hellfires and JDAMs were turning any potential live captures into meat mulch.

But one thing it seemed this town didn’t lack for – all of a sudden – was dead bastards. She pushed her exceptional vision out farther, and in more directions, desperate to find the one dead bastard they needed.

To find the magical dead guy.

Before she became one herself.

* * *

“Man,” Predator said to Juice as he fought alongside him. “You wait all day for one dead guy, and then you get ten thousand at once.”

“Like buses,” Juice said.

“Yeah. Exactly like buses.”

Juice couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. Pred’s humor had gotten kind of dry lately. And now his rifle also went dry, so he let it fall on its sling, got his Louisville Slugger back out – and started bashing his way through ten thousand buses, all of them the wrong ones.

Unsurprisingly, this quickly cleared a wide area around the two of them. Juice, with no immediate opponents, actually took a second and looked up at the black dome of the sky above them. But it wasn’t black at all – it was going crazy with the pulsing light of ten thousand stars, and ten thousand other galaxies behind them, all vivid and bright and full of beauty.

Juice remembered that the night sky over Africa had always been unbelievably brilliant and multifold and luminous, with its much more dramatic stars and constellations. It was because of the lack of ambient light leakage that was universal in western civilization, and which overpowered and dimmed the universe. But Africa was much darker, and let the cosmos shine in all its glory.

It was like that everywhere but Britain now, of course, the light all extinguished.

Almost as striking as the brilliant brightness was the fact that they were in the southern hemisphere now – which meant familiar constellations appeared upside down. Juice could see the reversed Orion, brightest constellation in the sky. He remembered how, on his first deployment to Africa, it had struck him as profoundly trippy and strange, like a face with an upside-down nose. But in a way it had allowed him to really see the constellation, for the first time in a long time. He also remembered that he finally got used to it on his last deployment – and by the time he made it back to the northern hemisphere it looked strange right-side up again.

Somehow the peace and stillness and majesty of it all was even more striking and compelling, floating as it did above the scene of mayhem and violence and desperation they were all living through below – riding their wet rock, spinning through a silent and Godless cosmos, all beneath that beautiful dome.

And trying to keep the dead from eating them.

But now it was probably time for Juice to get back in the fight. On his last mission, the one with the Marines to secure supplies, he felt he’d finally proven he deserved to be in the ranks of the gods of Alpha – and that they could truly depend on him. He had found the place where he really belonged, and a life truly worth living, ZA or no ZA. Even the end of the world couldn’t take away the brotherhood, or his place in it. And it was a damned good place to be.

Even in the midst of mayhem and violence and desperation.

But he hadn’t just earned his place. He had also fought through death – all the way through. He had been so close to dying, sitting alone and bleeding out on that bare warehouse floor… And it wasn’t so much that Predator and the others had dragged him back at the last second. It was that he had actually broken through – to the other side of death.

To where life was, in all its glory.

* * *

Homer put away his rifle shortly after Ali did, and for some of the same reasons. Swinging and stabbing methodically and carefully with his boarding axe, he kept his distance from her – but couldn’t stop himself keeping an eye on her.

He was being pulled by all kinds of contrary impulses. He wanted to be close to Ali. But he knew she didn’t want him there, and he had to respect that. He wanted to protect her – but knew that in close combat she handled herself as well as or better than anyone else in Alpha, probably better than anyone he’d ever served with. She was about the last person who needed his protection.

So instead he focused on protecting his other teammates.

And he actually did begin to worry about them – that relative lack of conditioning he had pondered back at Lemonnier was starting to bite. The team had now crossed Hargeisa multiple times – first at a walking pace, fully loaded, from the MRAP to the safe house, and then to the hospital. They’d then run at full speed back to where the MRAP should have been – carrying on a running fight the whole way. Now they were bashing their way back into the thickest of it.

And it had been a seriously long day even before they got here. This was their third fight, on their third battlefield – and against a third species.

Worst of all, using the melee weapons was tiring them out much faster than shooting would. Those things took strength to swing – and to continue doing so, while moving fast, took serious endurance. Conserving ammo made sense – you never knew how long a firefight was going to last.

But Tier-1 guys weren’t always so good at conserving their strength. They were trained to push way past their limits, to bull through exhaustion and sleep deprivation and dehydration and all kinds of physical boundaries. It was unavoidable that some part of them thought they could bull through anything.

But only God was omnipotent.

Even if the operators sometimes forgot they were mortal.

And Homer could see exhaustion setting in. It was visible in the hunching shoulders, in the mouths hanging open as they sucked wind and tried to get enough air, in the way their footwork was getting sloppier.

Maybe God would bail them out of this – and deliver them the priceless prize they needed. But if that wasn’t His will… Homer wasn’t sure how long the team could carry on. He pushed forward and tried to take as much of the burden on himself as he could. But even as he did, he saw Juice was doing the same.

And his pneumatic spike, the OJ, required a hell of a lot less energy to wield than the others’ melee weapons. It had a tank of energy, the compressed air. And it was extremely effective against the human dead, especially the slow ones. Now Homer could see Juice aerating head after head, their owners dropping like bags of rocks each time he withdrew the spike. And he was clearly getting the hang of using it – learning he could wield it while hardly moving his arms or rifle at all. Just pivot,
snick-snak
, pivot,
snick-snak
.

At the same time he was also working the radio, keeping them alive with close air support. And Homer could see he was having to work harder than the others, to try and be everywhere at once with that head-sticker. But the aggregate expenditure of energy, for the whole team, was definitely less than it had been.

Juice was a good man. Homer moved up to support his friend.

He’d stay beside him until the end.

Until God called the operators home.

Black

Hargeisa - Approaching the Hospital

The three virgin Hargeisa neighborhoods were a bust.

As discriminating as they had been in target selection, no one had been able to pull their mission objective, a first-stage victim, out of this whole shitty mess.

Now they were coming back to the hospital, having circled back around to it. That quarantine tent, if it was even still there, was pretty much Handon’s last hope. He didn’t have any other ideas – other than to keep running around and around this dark and evil place until they were all too exhausted to fight anymore.

Until he, and all his people, were dead.

The UCAV drone had expended all its ordnance – and Juice had hit the verbal
RTB
button, sending it back to the carrier to rearm. This left him free to stick a lot of heads, but he could only do that one at a time. JDAMs killed hundreds. It had always been the Joint Tactical Air Controllers (JTACs), calling down air strikes on the enemy, who had, by far, the highest body count in the counter-terror wars.

On the upside, their F-35 had just now come back.

“Cadaver, this is Thunderchild, back on station over your position. Armament includes two times GBU-39 glide bombs, two times Brimstone ground-attack missiles, four times GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bombs, and twenty-five mil Gatling cannon with two hundred and twenty rounds. Playtime two hours.”

Handon tried to figure out how relieved to be about this. Some of those weapons were decent for close air support – stressing the
close
part, as Alpha was in very close contact. But a fast-mover – an extremely fast-mover like the F-35, with a stall speed of over 200mph – could never provide the kind of precision close-in support a hovering Apache attack helicopter could, or an AC-130 gunship doing lazy circles with its howitzer and Bofors gun pointing in.

Moreover, all that F-35 could do was destroy the dead. What they needed was to capture one. And none of them were getting out of there until they did so. But maybe he could make use of the aircraft’s sensor suite.

“Thunderchild, Cadaver. I need you to do a visual sweep of our AO and tell me what we’re looking at opposition-wise.”

“Roger that, Cadaver. I see Zulus converging on your location from a wide area, and from all directions. You are the center of the storm. Hard to estimate numbers.”

“Copy that. Can you tighten up your view – and try to find us some dead that look different to these ones? We need Somalis – and these are all Gulf States Arabs.” But even as Handon formulated the question, he realized it was hopeless. He wasn’t a hundred percent confident of their ability to make this distinction on the ground, face-to-face. He had no idea how the pilot was going to do it from a thousand feet. But she was game.

“Copy that, Cadaver. Stand by.”

And he heard that powerful jet engine blast by overhead again – at a speed that was probably going to make it useless to them. Handon would have loved to get the carrier’s Fire Scout helicopter drone out there, which could go zero miles an hour, plus swoop as low as they liked, right over the heads of the dead.

But Hargeisa was outside its combat radius, too far from the carrier.

Now Handon wished they’d got it in the air anyway. Not having enough fuel for it to return would have been a pretty minor problem in the scheme of things. And losing one more drone would have been a minor sacrifice.

Major ones were coming.

He could feel it.

* * *

Juice got on the CAS net and got the F-35’s nose-cone video piped straight to his monocle. He couldn’t control the aircraft, but he could look down from it. And more eyes were better. But he pretty quickly decided he didn’t like what he saw.

It was a mass of globular loping night-vision-green blobs – moving
extremely
fast – and coming at them from two directions, west and southwest.

“Top,” he said, “I’ve got at least two troops of Bravos incoming – fast.”

Predator grunted. “Huh. Well that didn’t take long.” He was right – every damned thing in the military got turned into NATO phonetic alphabet slang. Why should the baboons be any different? Or maybe special operators just adapted to new environments fast. They were sure having to adapt fast to this one.

Their top cover verified this assessment – and expanded on it.
“Yeah, Cadaver, whatever those masses of creatures are, I can now actually see four groups of them, coming in from the surrounding treelines, blasting through town – and all heading straight toward you. ETA maybe three or four mikes.”

“Copy that.” Handon raised his voice for the team. “Listen up! We’re moving around the side of the hospital to the quarantine tent.” He led the way, putting away his rifle as he moved and drawing his wakizashi from the small of his back. He was extremely low on ammo, and assumed the others were as well.

Fighting the tide of human dead the whole way, nonetheless in a minute or so they were around the side of the big building – and saw through their NVGs what was probably the remains of what had once been the quarantine area. It was a riot of overturned gurneys and hospital crash carts, biohazard boxes, ancient medical monitoring devices, and the remains of gowns, gloves, and masks. There were also a lot of gnawed body parts on the ground, as well as some shreds of plastic attached to stakes, which seemed to be all that was left of the plastic tent itself.