LZR-1143: Redemption (32 page)

“Waiting for your mark, Colonel,” I said over the comms equipment. “Kate, how’s your end?”

“Good to go here,” she said from the other helo.

“Angels One and Two, this is SeaTac actual. You are ordered to dispense the material at the end of a three count, copy?”

“Copy, sir,” both pilots stated consecutively.

After several seconds, I depressed the trigger on the device, and watched as the mist floated down merely five hundred feet to the defenders on the walls. Across the compound, the other helicopter mimicked our actions. As we reached the starting area for the other vehicle, both machines broke to the left, and started a pattern to disperse over the entire camp. It took only fifteen minutes to cover the entire area.

“Inoculations complete,” Kate said triumphantly, as we circled for a landing.

Suddenly, a voice shot through the comms.

“Break, break. SeaTac actual, this is gate control, north side. We have a breach. I repeat, we have a breach!”

It was the main gate. The double backstopped primary entrance.

It seemed impossible.

The pilot circled tightly and it took merely seconds to see the problem.

It wasn’t just a breach. There were hundreds of them inside the perimeter.

“Gate control, SeaTac actual, what the fuck is going on out there!”

I watched as hundreds of creatures flowed through a ten foot gap in the inner perimeter wall, underneath the suspended container that acted as a final barrier, as several Humvees rolled toward the gate. The two fifty caliber guns stationed on the inside to control for the possibility of several creatures making their way in were going to be overwhelmed quickly.

Behind those stations, troops rushed to the gap, small arms fire increasingly quickly below. The flood of creatures pressed forward, the sporadic small arms an insufficient defense.

“Sir, minigun misfire…made a hole in the west side of the second backstop wall. Fuckers flooded right into the gap. The inner gate was open for a small team to secure the locking mechanism.”

“Well shut the goddamned gate!”

The pilot circled again and I could see the problem.

They had tried. It was jammed.

“Sir, we tried that. Too many of those shits were underneath. A few bodies got jammed up in the mechanism. We can’t lower the gate without removing the jam.”

I tapped the pilot on the shoulder.

“Can you get us a look at the breach?”

He nodded and banked to the right, pulling us out and over the walls of containers, three levels high, and to the side of the backstops at the front gate. Thousands upon thousands of creatures writhed against one another, some of them still flaming from the napalm attacks. At the corner where the backstop extended out from the main wall, I saw the problem. A ten foot gap of twisted steel and smoking metal, through which concentrated masses of creatures were pushing themselves, heedless of the razor sharp metal edges tearing their flesh.

“Lieutenant, focus your fire on the hole,” said Finnigan sharply, voice high and directive. “Fifty cal only, I repeat, fifty cal only. Keep them from coming in.”

“Copy, sir.”

The pilot brought the helo into a hover a hundred feet above the melee as two stations of fifty-caliber machine guns let loose into the gap in the containers. Bodies pressed into a narrow space exploded against themselves, spreading flesh against the pushing, rotting corpses around them. Tracer rounds guided the streams of gunfire into the gap, precisely directing the current of lead into the waiting bodies.

For their part, the corpses did their best to play nice. Even as those in front were ripped to shreds, those behind pushed into the gap. Thousands upon thousands waited behind for their turn.

We broke station and passed back over the wall, where the situation was getting more serious. The fifty cal embankments were only twenty feet from getting overrun. Miniguns fired sporadically from the walls as troops left their stations nearby to run to the aid of their comrades. But no one was prepared for a massive breach with no warning. The two machine gun stations were smoking as tracer rounds smashed into the horde of bodies flooding into the fort. Three Humvees had arrived, their guns blazing as they pulled broadside to the flood of bodies and tried to narrow the angle of approach.

Behind the gunners, individual men and women were firing side arms and rifles, trying to take headshots in the darkness and chaos. Spotlights crisscrossed the maelstrom of churning bodies and exploding corpses.

The flood of bodies had slowed, but it was still too many.

Somehow, they were still making their way through the small gap. The gate had to be sealed or they would push past this line. There were too many and we were too few.

I looked on as an Abrams tank rolled forward, massive turret rotating toward the creatures. A gunner stood at the top, focusing his weapon on the crowd as well, adding to the force of bodies.

Still too many of them. Too few of us.

I scanned the chaos below and made my decision, pointing at a particular spot twenty feet behind the line of action.

“Can you get me down there?” I yelled to the pilot.

He shot me a glance and looked down, then nodded briefly. The helo began to descend, turning broadside to the flood of creatures and bringing one side of the helicopter to face the influx of zombies.

As the skids moved within ten feet of the ground, the first of the herd of creatures reached the first fifty cal gunner. He stood his ground until the end, cutting bodies in half with a final burst from his gun, shouting defiance into the mouths of the ghouls that bore him to the ground, obscuring him instantly. Some stopped to eat, more flooded past.

I dropped from the hovering machine and rolled, coming to my feet near a small tent and a collection of equipment. Men streamed past, small arms firing in accompaniment to the larger staccato of the heavier machine guns.

A flamethrower leaned against the tanks of fuel next to a supply tent, and I quickly shrugged into the equipment. Placing the nozzle in my left hand, I drew my sidearm with my right.

“Break, break,” I said, cutting through the orders on the channel. “This is Mike, I’m heading for the gap—I’m going to clear the bodies. Give me cover. Put some fire on the break in the backstop—they will walk through it, but it slows them down. Can you move that tank up closer? I need to slow down the flow.”

The net was silent for a moment, as I approached the line. Gunfire was fast and furious as a rain of metal met a tide of flesh. Corpses fell mere feet from the gunners, a body-to-body press of rotting, dead flesh pressing forward.

Maybe this wasn’t a great idea.

“All units at the gate,” Finnigan said quickly over the comms, deciding not to argue with an idiot who was willing to wade into a herd of zombies. “Concentrate fire on McKnight’s vector—keep him mobile. Watch his sides and get him to the gate. Heavy Four Six, move lateral to the gate and try to keep them off his left.”

A flood of copy receipt messages hit the net as I took a deep breath and stepped forward.

The gunfire shifted as I raised the nozzle of the flamethrower at head level and released the flames in front of me. In the flood of bodies, I didn’t hope to kill them. I didn’t hope to stop them.

I simply hoped to blind them with the fire.

I hoped that their eyes would melt.

I aimed high, taking those in front of me and to my sides full in the face with the jet of fire, sparing a bullet for those directly in front, pushing the bodies aside as they fell, flaming piles of flesh. The press of bodies was fearsome, and I felt mouths close on my arms and legs as I passed, flames working on those I hit, but other bodies pushing in.

To my left, the Abrams was moving, its treads creaking and rolling against bodies as it moved parallel to the wide opening. It couldn’t plug the hole—it was too small and the gap too large—but it could funnel the flood away from me and keep the odds more even. It blocked the center of the flood and bodies started to stream to the sides, several enterprising corpses even going over the front of the tank until the gunner took care of their ambitions.

Sweat poured from my pores as I became a flaming emissary to the undead, fire blasting into the bodies ahead, gun speaking steadily as I waded forward. Teeth were finding soft spots in my armor, now. I used the heavy metal plating as a bludgeon, swinging my arms and engaging the long blades as I thrashed around. Bodies pressed into my own, and I sprayed fire again.

This had been a bad idea.

They were everywhere.

I was surrounded and I couldn’t blind them fast enough. I was still twenty feet from the gap, and they poured through steadily.

The gunfire was popping steadily, bodies dropping inconsistently around me. It was keeping me from getting overwhelmed, but it wasn’t keeping me clear.

I stopped moving forward, the press of bodies too much for even my strength. Flames were my only weapon, now, and I flooded the bodies around me with fire and death. My eyes burned from the heat, and I looked away, as the faces of the undead loomed in my narrow line of sight.

Mouths open. Eyes leaking from ruined lids in a watery drizzle of whitish fluid. Flames leaping to the sky.

I stumbled once, going to a knee in the press of arms and legs. Hands grabbed my arms and I flailed, one blade breaking against the ground as my arm was driven down.

My leg collapsed underneath me. There were at least twenty of them on me now. I couldn’t press them off.

Somehow, in the moment, I could smell their death.

I felt the snap as the bone in my leg broke. I cried out in pain as a set of teeth found my neck.

Another found the soft tissue of my inner elbow.

“Stand by, six—” the comms began to squawk, and then the balaclava was ripped from my head.

All I saw were rotting, flaming heads.

And teeth. In the confusion, I thought I could feel their burning incisors as they found flesh.

I fell back, bodies on top of me, pressing me into the bloody, flaming earth.

Their stench was overpowering, their energy inexhaustible.

Urged on by their hunger, frantic with need, they were everywhere.

I was one, and my strength was not enough.

It was over.

And then, somehow, humanity took over.

As a set of teeth pushed slowly into my neck and I felt the tendons pulled up, to the surface of my skin, bodies suddenly disintegrated around me and chunks of flesh and flaming hair and bone exploded into the air in a mist of torturous violence. My arms were free, as the heads attached to my attackers disappeared. I stayed prone, back to the ground, blood leaking from multiple bites.

My left arm wasn’t working right, and I knew it was dislocated, pulled by several of those things until it had almost detached.

A stream of tracer-infused minigun fire was clearing the space around me, and I heard the soft whisper of the rotating barrels pause. No comms left, I heard the voice of an angel over the melee of the crowd.

“Michael, if you are alive, get your ass off the goddamned ground and finish what you fucking started! Because when you get back, I am going to kill you until you fucking
die
from it!”

Okay, a slightly vulgar angel.

Kate stood next to Rhodes who held a small minigun in his massive hands, turrets still whirling fifty feet away as he rotated slowly after panning through the horde. I pushed myself from the ground as Kate rushed forward, a whirl of blades and concern as she tore through the flood of creatures that rushed to fill the gap that the deadly minigun had made in the press of bodies. I fired the flames in a circle around me as I watched the tank take its final position. Limping forward, the decreased press of bodies flooding in allowed me to neutralize their attack more effectively, and I pulled my broken leg behind me as I reached the mechanism in the side of the wall. I leaned against the front of the tank, firing another jet of flames into the crowd of creatures moving toward me.

This wouldn’t work. I can’t keep them off me and move the bodies out of the way at the same time.

I fired the last round from my pistol and didn’t bother reholstering, simply dropping it to the ground.

My characters had always done that, and I had never thought it to be realistic. I never understood why the writers thought someone would do that.

But now I knew. I needed my hand, and I needed it now.

My machete came up as my flamethrower died, flames sputtering and falling flat. Cursing, I tried to reach the three mangled bodies that were obstructing the rollers from moving the double-stacked containers down to the ground. The thick, ten feet of steel above me was oppressive as I had to jump back, a crowd of creatures filling the void, flaming heads and sightless bodies stumbling forward.

Then, Kate was there. Blades whirling, she spun to face me and tossed me two small items, which I snagged from the air as I fell back against the tank.

“Throw them.” She said simply, and I looked down.

Grenades.

Lovely.

See? A fucking angel.

I pulled the pins quickly and tossed them ten feet beyond the horde at our feet. They hit the ground, rolling to a stop in the bloody dirt beneath the press of hundreds of shambling feet. A curious creature bent over, seeing the movement and identifying the culprit. Dressed in a suit and tie, face drawn and horrid in the light of the flames and the sound of the gunfire, he cocked his head.

Then the grenades exploded, disintegrating his body and throwing several more into the air.

Bodies fell forward and shattered and I didn’t pause. Together, we shot to the rails, blades making short work of those that came between us and the wall. We had only seconds to remove the jammed and mangled corpses.

The gunner on the tank fired at the narrow angle, trying to relieve us from the press of bodies already surging past the point of the explosion, where mangled bodies crawled on the ground or lay prone, bloodied and damaged masses of flesh.

I heard Rhode’s minigun speak again, and the sputtering cascade of small arms fire. Even the hissing roar of a flamethrower. Voices were raised. More voices. More men and women, surging to the gap, eager to stem the tide.