The Flood (29 page)

Another goal for zombie armor.

He didn’t even have time to smile in satisfaction that this maneuver had worked because now, directly out ahead of him, something, unbelievably, exploded even brighter and hotter and more fatally intense than the inferno that was already dominating his attention and consuming the night. As he craned his neck, following it through the sky… he belatedly worked out it was one of those giant vats of fuel oil from the big room on the power side of the plant… being launched into the sky on a pillar of fire.

This was nothing short of biblical.

In the next second, two more launched off right behind it, all three now arcing up and dramatically illuminating the night sky overhead. It was like nothing Wesley had ever seen or imagined – like gala fireworks in Hell, celebrating the end of the world and the beginning of the end. The start of a whole new Apocalypse.

The sight was intoxicating, Wesley thought, but at least they weren’t goi— no wait, as the three vats started to reach the apex of their flights, he realized he had no idea whatsoever where these things were going to come down. He only knew, and he knew this for sure, he didn’t want to be anywhere near them when they did.

It occurred to him that maybe this was why the main fire just kept burning bigger and brighter – it hadn’t even gotten to, much less consumed, all of the many giant vats of fuel oil in that huge room. Meaning there was more – and worse, probably much worse – to come.

Following he knew not what instinct, nor from where, he dropped the mag out of his pistol and reloaded. Whatever was happening, however he was probably about to die, he knew he’d rather have a loaded gun than an unloaded one. He did this without looking, the whole time following the mesmerizing arc of those airborne fuel vats, each trailing behind raging and expanding columns of hellfire.

Within a few seconds, the first two started to look reasonably like they were going to miss him. The first came down on his side of the plant, but much closer to the water – its impact perfectly validating his certainty, which needed no validation, that he didn’t want to be anywhere near it when it did. It hit the ground like an atomic bomb, sending out spherical blast and shock waves, followed by torrents of fiercely burning fuel oil, spraying out in all directions across the ground – and then rising up into an all-new standalone inferno around the impact point, one that was smaller than the main one in the plant, but if anything hotter, brighter, and more intense.

Two more of the vats launched off now, shooting into the sky on their own pillars of fire, just as the second one hit on the far side of the plant, its impact and blast and resulting inferno-lite invisible behind the plant and main fire. With the flames everywhere, and the night come alive and trying to eat him, and finally now the additional lethal hazard of the flaming, exploding fuel-oil vats crashing down around him, this was truly like some Hell even Dante had never imagined.

L’enfer inimaginable
.

Wesley was going to die. But at least, he thought, his French was serviceable.

Trying to monitor the sky and its hellish hail of vats, as well as the converging crowd of dead around him, Wesley also realized he had to alter course now. He was approaching the front of the tank – but basically needed to be on the other side of it, the side that faced the plant. So he veered off farther to the right, to circle around it. But that left him cutting across the tide of incoming dead, instead of running along with it, and as he ran he tried to make headshots on ones on a direct intercept course, generally missing, and instead bowling them over with the armored pads on his shoulders…

“Wesley!”

He could hardly breathe at all, never mind speak, never mind operate the radio right now.

“Wesley! Can you get your shot!? Can you get close enough!?”

Still sucking air and putting his shoulder down, Wesley saw the impact of the third falling vat – the heat from its explosive impact crashing into him, and flaming fuel splashing way too close… but in another few seconds, it had expended much of his violent energy. And now he was able to veer back to the left – around both the explosion and the water tank itself, looping back toward the west side of the tank, and the point where it was closest to the burning plant.

And, most miraculously of all… the way, his path there, looked clear.

He tried the radio, and tried to speak. “Yes! I can make it! It’s hot as hell, and getting worse” – he paused to abjectly suck at the super-heated air – “but I think I can get in position!”

Despite all the madness, the ridiculous peril, the outrageous chaos, the dozens of ways he could have – and probably should have – died every second, it started to look like this actually might work. All he had to do was keep running, the path ahead on his left open and clear, make it another 150 meters or so, then hope he understood how to operate this damned rocket… and make his shot.

And make it count.

And then… and then he saw another vat launch off nearly vertically. And in a few seconds it was clear where it was coming down again – tucked right into the nook between plant and water tank. Terrifyingly quickly, it was falling to Earth again, directly in his path.

Stealing a look over his own shoulder, Wesley saw what he already knew perfectly well in his bones: the dead were right behind him.

He couldn’t possibly go forward, into certain immolation. And he was abjectly terrified of going back, which would without doubt or delay get him swarmed, taken down, and devoured – zombie armor or no.

He was trapped between the millstones.

Lacking other options, he just skidded to a halt, dove into the dirt, and curled up into a fetal ball – zero seconds before the vat hit, exploded into a mini-armageddon that stole the breath from his lungs, banged his organs around in his body – and knocked the runners behind him down and back like bowling pins.

When Wesley dared open his eyes again, he could see three things.

One, the downed dead on the ground behind him were crawling, pulling and dragging themselves across the burning ground toward him.

Two, he himself was on fire – patches of flaming fuel oil dotting his suit.

And, three, he couldn’t even
see
the water tank anymore, due to the raging inferno that was now blazing right between him and it.

Even if he lived through the next minute, he could never make his shot.

Dark Night of the Soul

Hargeisa Hospital - Storeroom

“Cadaver One-One from One-Four.”

It was Ali. “Go ahead,” Handon said.

“Yeah, the human dead are piling up outside pretty quickly – and will be up to the second floor before long. It also looks like there are some big balcony doors on that level already smashed out. Basically, they’ll soon be flooding inside and down on your heads. And that’s if the Bravos don’t just climb up there first.”

“Copy that. Stand by.”

Handon pulled his NVGs back down and stuck them up to the long thin panel of glass in the door of the storeroom they were all hunkering down in. Outside, he could see the unceasing rush, in both directions, of the swarming colony of bats. The corridor was completely flooded with the horrifying things.

Basically, they were now trapped twice, within two different layers of dead that they couldn’t break through – three, maybe, if you counted the baboons still hurling themselves around out there. And as soon as the outer one flooded the building… Alpha would almost certainly be buried alive in there, with virtually zero chance of breaking out.

For a moment Handon just stared out that slit window – because he wasn’t ready to look back at his team, who were waiting for him to issue orders, to come up with the plan that would get them out of there.

And for just one brief moment, Command Sergeant Major Shane Handon almost gave in to the unforgivable sin – despair. He never should have led them back into the town a second time. Somehow, he had forgotten the “adapt” part of “adapt and overcome” – and had simply tried to prevail by brute force, sheer force of will, bashing their way back into town using the same tactics that had gotten them nowhere in the first place.

But he had been so certain this was
it
– the final push, where they needed their last full measure of resolve to see it through.

And now, for the second time, he seriously wondered if his judgment as a combat leader was shot. Maybe he hadn’t slept in too long – sleep deprivation was a known killer of critical faculties. But he’d completed a hell of a lot of missions on a hell of a lot less sleep than this. Maybe there was too much in his head – he was too distracted by all that drama with Sarah, and the other melodramas back on the carrier.

There was also the terrible fault line, seeming to widen every minute, between him and Henno – one that he had been unable to bridge. Whatever the original cause, letting it continue was ultimately his failure. It was his job to make the team work, and he wasn’t getting it done. And he knew things couldn’t go on as they were – no small unit could long survive such a violent rift.

He needed to fix this. And he needed to start now.

But he was only pulled back from his dark reverie by the sound of metallic clanking behind him. When he turned to face the others again, and flipped up his NVGs, he could see the big sloping back of Juice, hunched over in the corner.

“Look,” the bearded one said, still facing away. “We’ve just got to break through to the other side. And this time we all do it together.”

“The other side of what?” Henno asked.

Juice turned around. He had two big gas canisters in his arms – one colored orange, the other green with a silver bottom.

“The other side of death. I promise you it’s good there.”

* * *

“Damn, dude,” Predator said. “What the hell happened to you in that warehouse?” He hardly recognized what sounded like scripture coming from the mouth of his formerly pragmatic and phlegmatic friend.

But Juice was in fact still being pragmatic, despite the dramatic words – and Homer was the first to work out his idea. Wordlessly, he got out a roll of 100mph tape and started duct-taping the two canisters together. While he did this, Juice used his multitool to start hacking together a two-to-one mixer valve attached to the pressure gauge/regulators of both canisters. He narrated as he worked.

“It’s cyclopropane,” he said, not looking up.

Predator, the most trained-up medic among them, grunted in agreement. “Yeah. Virtually nobody uses that shit as anesthetic anymore – way too volatile.”

“Volatile?” Henno asked, sounding unreassured.

“Flammable as shit.”

“Luckily,” Juice said, “we’re in a hospital in what was one of the least developed countries in the world.” He didn’t comment on the other cylinder, which everyone could see from the markings was oxygen.

Pred got it now. He turned to the shelves and came back with a device that looked like a slightly high-tech slushy maker. “Normally the oxygen and anesthesia would be mixed with this vaporizer. But that’s no help to us.”

“Not really,” Juice said, still working on his hacked mixing chamber. “But if you can find me some metal tubing that won’t melt, that would allow a more precision application of this stuff…” Ten seconds of rummaging didn’t come up with anything, so Juice just shrugged and wrote it off.

He stood up and held out his palm out to Handon. “Zippo.”

Handon produced it and handed it over.

“Okay. You guys ready to make a move?”

“Suits me,” Pred grumbled. “I have no problem dying, but I for one don’t plan on doing it in a goddamned closet.”

Juice nodded and spat. “We won’t need our night vision for a while.”

And, without further prologue, he turned the wheel on the valve, flicked the Zippo, and ignited a wispy vent of gas. Then he hefted up both canisters while Pred yanked open the door – and then he twisted the valve wheel all the way to the right while walking fearlessly out into the maelstrom of the corridor.

But maybe he was fearless because he was preceded by an enormous roaring gout of fire, which seemed to fill the entire hallway. He faced left. He turned right. And all up and down the corridor, zipping and flapping bats screamed in a frequency the humans couldn’t hear as they were immolated in their hundreds, their dry leathery wings and ears going up instantly and explosively, in a massive and swirling airborne wildfire.

Juice had found the magic bullet. You couldn’t shoot or stab a thousand bats. But with a flamethrower, you didn’t have to.

Handon almost smiled. He should have known to depend on his team for a solution. He couldn’t do this on his own. And he didn’t have to.

Quickly it became like a scene out of a particularly dark and immersive video game, the very air alive with burning and flapping and disintegrating specters straight out of hell. Their ashes and charred remains started hitting and covering the floor, but ever more flew into the immolating inferno from both sides.

The bats seemingly had bigger problems than how to attack the humans coming out of the storage closet behind Juice’s improvised flame unit – they didn’t seem to care that they were burning to ash, but they couldn’t function very well while doing so – and the operators mainly had to keep from catching on fire themselves, which was aided by their suits and gear all being fireproof. Though not by having flaming bats crashing into them from all sides.

And not just into them – as Handon passed that linen closet, he stole a look inside. Sure enough, flaming bats had found their way in there already, and were flapping and flailing around all the starched sheets and towels. That
definitely
wasn’t going to turn out well. But Handon had to move – and even as he did, he could already see the glow of bright flames licking up the stacks of white cloth inside.

As Juice led them down the last stretch of hallway to the stairwell, he saw the gout of his improvised flamethrower burning closer and closer down to the nozzle – and with more recognition than alarm, knew that once the flame snaked back inside, his two canisters were going to become very unhealthy to whomever was still holding them, or standing anywhere in the vicinity. At the next window – which had not been wire-reinforced and thus was totally smashed out – he hefted up the canisters and gave them a mighty heave out through it.