The Flood (30 page)

They landed out among the swarming Zulus and runners outside – and as Juice ducked down below the level of the window, it exploded with a wicked boom and massive blossoming of light and flame that lit up the whole inside of the hospital. When he popped back up to look outside, they were now being besieged by a
flaming
army of Arab dead, their dishdashas and keffiyahs burning bright and coming off them in burning bits and floating up into the dark sky above.

The last thing Juice saw as he took off again was a flaming globular ball leaping over the heads of the burning Arabs – a flaming airborne zombie baboon. In safer circumstances, he figured, he could charge good money to let people watch that.

The others following right behind him, he reached the stairwell and went leaping up it. At the second-floor landing he pushed through the double doors as Handon caught him up – to the sounds of a chorus of barking, shrieking, and moaning. Darting out into the corridor, they immediately faced the predatory animal motion of baboons loping and leaping down the hall at them – and human figures lurching and running behind them.

Fuck!
Ali was right. The dead had reached and climbed in the second level. Handon brought his sword around just in time to catch the lead baboon on its point, then used its hurtling momentum to fling it down the hall in the other direction. "Back inside!” he shouted.

He and Juice tumbled back into the stairwell, slammed the double doors shut, and threw their bodies up against them. Handon drew his beloved Mercworx Vorax combat knife – it had been with him longer than his wife had – and jammed it through the two door handles, effectively barring both.
That had damned well better be worth it – and hold for a while
, he thought.

Pushing off the door, he and Juice led the others up another level, to the third and top floor, which appeared blessedly free of the dead. They got the stairwell doors shut – and actually had enough time to gather up heavy crap from nearby wards and pile it in front of the doors as a makeshift barricade.

Though Handon shook his head as he did so. Had they now been reduced to the level of those ex-survivors on the ground floor? Piling up furniture for a last stand, which was destined to fail, as soon as the ammo ran out? Distracting him from this dark thought, he heard Pred bark, “C’mere, man.” But he was talking to Juice.

And only when Pred reached out and started squeezing Juice’s face did the latter realize that his beard was slightly on fire. More like smoldering.

Handon felt some hot spots and looked down to find he had a few smoking embers on his uniform and gear.
Jesus Christ…
They all took a second to check out and pat one another down. They had just run through a zombie bat firestorm.

And they were far from out of the fire themselves.

* * *

“Okay, you clever shits,” Henno said. “What now?”

The eternal question.

Juice’s know-how, calm resolution, and basic badassery had bought them a few more minutes of life. But it was still unclear how they were going to spin that out into more – or get themselves out of this collapsing death trap.

“Answers fast, please,” Handon added. Because, having seen those flaming bats torch off that linen closet downstairs, he was pretty sure there would already be a fire burning in there that they wouldn’t be able to put out even if it was safe to go down and try.

He related all this to the others in a few syllables – but the acrid smoke now coming up the stairs and under the door was all the explanation they needed. This was a big old abandoned building – and it probably hadn’t been constructed in the first place to any fire code Westerners would recognize.

None of them had any doubt it would soon be a not-so-towering inferno.

And now this was truly bad dream time, their very worst urban zombie-warfare nightmare coming to life: they were trapped in a burning building, at the center of a sprawling singularity, out of ammo and fast running out of options. Though even the nightmare had never had flaming zombie bats or leaping undead baboons with four-inch fangs. Nightmares only got so bad.

They were well beyond nightmare territory now.

Homer looked to Handon. “Can we get the Seahawk back here – have it pluck us off the roof?”

“Negative,” Handon said, stealing a look at his watch. “They’ll be nearly back at the flat-top by now, and probably refueling. Hour flight time to get back.” He silently cursed. “Other ideas?”

Juice, still playing with the singed ends of his beard, said, “We’ve still got an F-35 up there with two full weapons bays and two missile hard points. We could have her drop ordnance as close to the structure as she dares, clear us some kind of escape channel – then we drop into it and run like hell.”

Henno, dropping out his last rifle mag and checking the contents, said, “That beats dropping down into it with no cleared channel. But we’re still on foot. Still exhausted, still black on ammo, and still surrounded by these dead chimps and Arabian arseheads.”

Pred clucked his tongue. “Well aren’t you just Mister Gloomypants.”

“He has a point,” Homer said. “We may find ourselves doing the Mogadishu Mile – except the hundred-meter event this time.” He didn’t need to belabor his point: that might be as far as they got before being surrounded and pulled down.

Then again, Handon thought, that plan might be the best they had.

He nodded to Juice. “Make it happen.”

Juice nodded, adjusted his chin mic, and turned away to talk the bombs on.

No more than two seconds later, the building rumbled as faint explosions sounded from the front end of it, out near the entrance.

“What the hell was that?” Pred boggled. “JTAC by telepathy?”

What the hell indeed?
Handon thought. He hailed Ali. “What’s going on out there?”

Her voice came back immediately.
“The building’s kind of under attack.”

“No shit. But by what?” Presumably the dead didn’t have artillery. Though virtually nothing would surprise him at this point…

“It’s Zorn. He’s back – riding on his MRAP.”

Handon opened his mouth to speak – but then closed it again. And he stared at nothing for a precious half-second.

And he decided to give up trying to predict what the hell was going to happen today.

Free and Clear

Hargeisa - Outside the CIA Safe House
[Twenty Minutes Ago]

“You shouldn’t count on us getting out of here. Not on this one.”

“Ah, hell,” CSM Zorn said out loud.

The dashboard radio of the MRAP was still tuned to the secret squirrels’ squad net. And Zorn had just hopped back in the cab at the wrong damned time – right after finishing loading up all the salvageable heavy weapons from the top level of the CIA safe house.

He’d also been just about to start the vehicle back up and point her north again – straight back to Camp Lemonnier. There was the minor problem that the camp had been nearly completely overrun again. But it wasn’t the first time, and he’d gotten the place cleared out before. There was also the small matter that he’d recently been bitten – and, according to Handon at least, that serum he was doling out the only thing keeping him alive.

But, thinking about it, Zorn realized he didn’t have any more reason to believe that line of bullshit than anything else that came out of their mouths. He hadn’t had any symptoms whatsoever, so far. Which to his mind meant one of two things. Either he hadn’t been infected at all – and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d dodged a bullet like that, as the scars on his face amply demonstrated. Or else their so-called serum really was a cure after all – and he’d been cured by it. They only told him he had to keep taking it to keep him on the hook and helping them.

Guess I’ll find out
, Zorn thought.

In any case, his days of helping those smug bastards was at an end. He had his MRAP back, he had a lovely new load of heavy weapons to help defend his camp – and no more super-special operators to trouble him. But now, unexpectedly, at the last minute, hearing on the radio that they’d gotten into trouble so serious as to possibly be fatal… Zorn had an unexpected reaction.

Suddenly, he found his conscience troubling him.

An hour ago, that would have been just about the last thing he would have worried about.

* * *

He and that Indian dude in the turban had sat in the cab of the parked-up MRAP, on the outskirts of the shithole of Hargeisa, listening to the spec-ops guys’ mission going horribly wrong. They seemed capable only of pushing forward – from the frying pan to the fire, and then down below it into something worse.

But when it had looked like it was kaput for Alpha team, Zorn’s prison guard had proven unable to keep standing his post. He threw a second set of flex cuffs on Zorn, then grabbed his big-ass weapon, jumped out of the cab and hoofed it.

Which was like leaving the fox tied to the henhouse.

Zorn had quickly got out his credit-card survival tool, which they’d never found or took off him, used the knife to cut his plastic cuffs off, then gone into the back and dug out the spare starter assembly from a box on the lowest shelf in the metal shelving unit. Then he’d fired that bad boy up – and headed not for home, but for the CIA safe house, because the open channel had also played Handon’s report about the goodies that had survived on the top level there.

Once he had parked up cheek-to-jowl with the burnt-out structure, he had to move quickly, carefully, and quietly. But, luckily for him, the operators’ mission had gone noisy – or, as they sometimes said, “Surprise, your operation just turned conventional!” – and they were drawing every damned dead thing in the region right to them, which luckily was over a mile away.

It took Zorn a half-dozen trips, but he got everything loaded up.

And it was only when he was climbing back in the cab, and heard that forlorn transmission, that he hesitated. First of all, there was the outside chance these guys hadn’t been completely full of shit when they’d said they were on a world-saving mission. Now special operators, in Zorn’s experience, thought they were saving the world with every single mission they undertook, down to and including taking a shit. But the fact was the world did need saving at the moment.

But it wasn’t even this that finally decided him. The question Zorn couldn’t keep from nagging him was: Could he just leave these men to die? Sure, they were assholes. But they were also American soldiers. And Zorn, in the end, couldn’t just walk away. He fired up the truck – and he headed south.

Straight back into the center of town.

Rubble Surfing

Hargeisa Hospital - 100M From the Main Entrance

“Eat this, you infected derka-derka bastards!”

Zorn was in fact standing up on top of the MRAP, his boots fifteen feet above the ground, with a gigantic TOW missile balanced on his shoulder. He’d driven right up to the outer perimeter of the singularity around the hospital, facing the main entrance. He was using an iron bar he’d pulled out of the safe house to stave in the heads of any dead who got too interested in him and tried to climb up to the roof from the hood – plus the odd baboon who simply leapt up there.

The TOW missile was one of the variety of toys he’d picked up at the safe house.

And now he launched it – the 152mm 40-pound wire-guided anti-tank missile blasting off at 700mph toward the front of the hospital on a blinding backblast of smoke and flame. When it impacted a quarter-second later it produced a towering, crashing, magnificent explosion that hurled dead bodies a hundred feet in the air and in all directions.

He tossed the absurdly heavy launch tube over the side – these things were technically man-portable, but only barely – then snatched up a smaller and lighter 84mm Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, and fired off the round he’d already loaded up in it, putting this one a little closer into the undead mob than the last. He moved the hinged breach to the side, slid in another warhead from the case of them he’d hauled up there, and fired that one – landing it closer yet.

He was digging himself a channel.

He did two more, then kicked the empty case off the roof, which like the TOW launcher was heavy enough to crush lolling heads and grasping arms below. Then, swinging his improvised club as he slid down the front edge of the roof and onto the hood, he swung back into the cab, simultaneously hailing Alpha on their working channel.

“Hey, dumbasses. I’ve just cleared you a path out of there, though it’s shrinking fast. Now I’m gonna crash the MRAP into the front entrance. You better be there when that happens, which is in thirty seconds.”

* * *

“Well, I guess that’s our ride,” Pred said, matter-of-fact as usual.

They had all heard this on the open channel.

“See,” Juice said, nodding, his face serious. “You just have to reach the far shore. ‘Be bold – and mighty forces will come to your aid.’”

“Zorn’s a mighty son of a bitch,” Henno said. He didn’t appear to like the sound of this plan at all. He obviously didn’t trust Zorn any more now than he had before.

“And he’s about as much of a force as my nutsack,” Pred added, not disagreeing. “Then again, he’s got a heavily armored vehicle. And we’ve got dick. Just a building that’s about to burn down, and a whole lotta undead baboons.”

“True,” Homer said. “Let’s get your nutsack out of here while we may.”

As the other four operators pitched in with unbarricading the third-floor stairwell, Handon hailed Ali, even more terse than before: “You hear that?”

“Got it.”

“What’s your plan?”

“When he gets here I’ll run across to the roof to the front. I can finger-hang and drop down on the MRAP. Two stories max, no problem.”

“Copy, do it.”

As the last of the barricade came clear, Handon lent a hand in dispatching the few human and simian corpses who had rushed the landing there, having gotten in God knew how. Moving as one, they leapt all the way back down to the ground floor, half a landing at a time, the acrid smoke growing thicker and more choking with each step. Homer pulled his shemagh up over his face, and the others covered up with what they had, coughing and eyes burning.