The Flood (19 page)

In the second it took him to do that, one of the creatures plowed into him from his left side – with enough mass and velocity to bowl him over. Homer went into a roll, doing anything to keep moving and keep them off him, then came up swinging and stabbing.

The one that had knocked him over kept coming, its too-long arms spread wide and chest puffed, fangs bared. Homer put the spiked tip of his axe straight into its mouth, knocking rotted teeth free on its way to the brainstem. The undead primate monstrosity stopped shrieking and lost all animation, falling off the axe and onto the ground.

He whirled again in time to see one leaping at Ali’s back. She had her katana out and was whirling and slashing like a hot samurai chick possessed, but even she couldn’t face in every direction at once. Homer wasn’t close enough so he tried a move he’d never even practiced. He hurled the axe overhand, leading the hurtling baboon – just enough, as the flipping and whistling blade buried itself in the side of its face, and it slid to the ground, its mass and momentum still enough to take Ali’s legs out from under her.

Before Homer could get there, Handon and Henno had closed ranks to stand over her, the former with a .45 pistol in each hand, firing in two totally different directions non-stop but with perfect control and aim. Henno was trying to reload his rifle when one of the things leapt up and landed full on his chest and face. He let go of his weapon and grabbed the crazed creature by the mounds of fur on either side of its head, to keep it from biting him. Their assault-suits were bite-proof, to human bites at least – but had definitely never been tested against the sharp four-inch fangs of a baboon, powered by the most powerful jaws in the primate kingdom.

But, in any case, both handfuls of fur came free in Henno’s hands, or maybe the skin under them, and the thing opened its mouth and shrieked and lunged at his face. Henno hauled his own head back – and smashed the four tubes of his NVGs into those bared fangs, knocking them back into the baboon’s throat.

Homer had spent enough time in Britain to know that “nutting” someone by smashing the nose with the forehead was a classic move. But this was a hell of a new twist. Having retrieved his axe from the ground, he stabbed the spike through that one’s midsection, planted his feet, and swung all hundred pounds of it off Henno, the black-gunk-oozing creature flying through the air – where it met Predator’s Louisville slugger.

Its head exploded under the swinging aluminum.

In the next second, a pair of them leapt and landed on Pred’s back, one on each of his giant rippling soldiers. Dropping his bat, he reached around behind his ears, grabbed one by the face with each hand, palming them like basketballs, and swung them around together in front of him, smashing and collapsing both heads. He let them drop, shook the gunk off his hands, and turned just in time to see one flying through the air toward the back of Handon, who was still facing out and firing to defend the team. The airborne ape had its comically long arms stretched out wide and Pred simply grabbed one of them with both hands and pre-empted its flight, swinging it in a wide and fast loop around his head and then releasing it to go arcing off into the night.

Not pausing to watch its flight, he snatched up his dropped bat in a flash – it was easy to forget how lethally fast a man Pred was at that giant size – and waded back into the center of the melee, swinging left and right. In seconds, the other operators were mainly trying to get out of his way.

They used the breathing room to reload, then started shooting again.

These things were
seriously
hard to hit – maybe not as manic as Foxtrots, but faster, more vicious, definitely stronger, and with scarier teeth. Nonetheless, having got that breathing room, the six operators soon found themselves standing in the middle of a pile of fifty or so infected and destroyed baboons. It was less than a minute after the initial bum rush.

It had felt like a lifetime, but had all happened brutally, implausibly fast.

They’d all had to fight at the razor-edge of their reflexes and skills – and still had just barely come out on top.

Juice took a series of deep breaths as he looked over at Ali. She’d had the troop size pegged about right at fifty. Only now did he remember to retract the pneumatic spike of his OJ. It had been nearly useless against these things – they simply moved too fast. Or maybe he just wasn’t skilled enough yet with the new weapon.

“Anyone hurt or bit?” Handon barked, putting both pistols in one hand and reloading them with the other.

“Good to go.” “Up and up.” “Up and up.” “Fine, dude.”

Henno wiped a bunch of black gore off the mag pouches on the front of his vest. “No danger,” he said.

They had all reloaded and reset – though nobody’s breathing had nearly slowed yet – when the human dead appeared. They must have heard the shrieking. Not even the truly dead, from back when the dead didn’t walk but instead slept forever, could have slept through that noise. They came walking and running, first from the same direction as the animal dead had.

And then from pretty much every direction.

* * *

LT Campbell and Doctor Park stood side by side, leaning over a station in CIC on the
Kennedy
. Neither spoke. Both could barely breathe.

Before and below them, a single monitor had been playing a black-and-green night-vision horrorscape view of the Somalia mission, from Juice’s shoulder cam. It had been difficult to tell what was going on – and that was
before
the fight.

For the last minute, it had been pure madness and chaos. They could hear the firing of suppressed weapons – which quickly grew so thick and unceasing it became a non-stop whooshing noise, like a puffy auditory carpet. Then the visual field became basically unresolvable. Maybe it was the frame rate of the camera – the Alpha operators were actually moving so fast they were jumping frames, like they were strobe-lit. The glint of blades, the powerful heaving of armored torsos, magazines falling out and blurring back in – and, everywhere, the nightmare globular shapes of whatever the living fucking hell was attacking them. Flying, attacking, heaving, screaming, dropping.

And then – stillness and silence.

Neither Park nor Campbell could find their voices. Their throats were stoppered.

The group out on the ground had now re-formed, facing outward, backs to one another, with Juice’s camera looking south. And now the new incoming threat was visible. It was the walking, and in some cases running, dead. And, from top to bottom, their outfits were obvious – they were all wearing stained white dishdashas, neck to ankle garments with long sleeves, as well as a few checked keffiyahs, still wrapped around heads, or else hanging tattered from shoulders.

Now Park found his voice – and his hand found the transmit bar on the base of the desk mic. “Cadaver from CIC. I don’t think any of those guys are local. None are likely to be early-stage victims.”

* * *

Sitting tight in the MRAP was one of the hardest things Noise had ever had to do in his entire operational career. He had only recently been attached to Alpha and the Marines. But he already loved them. They were his brothers, on more levels than he could count. Everyone alive was his brother.

Even Zorn. But Noise had learned his lesson with him. Before, he’d allowed his concern for the others to distract him for two seconds – and he immediately let them down, failing in his one task, when his prisoner overpowered him.

Now, he stared unblinkingly at the hard-bitten conventional soldier, drumming his fingers on his full-auto assault shotgun, listening to the radio traffic like a hawk, and imagining that ring of death closing around his new teammates.

“I don’t think any of those guys are local. None are likely to be early-stage victims.”

* * *

Thank you very much, Doctor Super-Genius
, Handon thought but didn’t say aloud, if only because he didn’t have the spare breath to spend on it.

It didn’t take Ali’s local knowledge to work out that nobody in Somalia wore the type of garb that was on these approaching dead guys. To Ali, it frankly looked like the attack of the undead Gulf States. It was like everyone in UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar had all simultaneously upped stakes and headed south to Somalia – just to fuck with Alpha team.

In reality, the shrieking must have drawn them, from wherever they’d been hiding out. Alpha’s suppressed weapons might as well have been gas-powered chainsaws for all the good they did them.

And in seconds everyone was shooting again. The good news was that this time their attackers, even the runners, weren’t fast enough to go leaping through their lines. The bad news was that there were more than fifty of them – a lot more. The undead Arab army had indeed arrived.

Handon decided he’d had enough. Hargeisa was proving to be worse than a dry hole – it was a death trap. He was just about to order the team to displace back to the MRAP – when he realized it was already too late for that. They were surrounded and massively hemmed in – from every direction except the fighter monument to their backs, in the center of the circle. While they’d been battling baboons, the undead human reinforcements had been closing the noose. And there were too many for them to shoot their way through – they’d expend all their ammo first.

And the dead just kept coming.

One problem with the dead, among many others, was that they never panicked and retreated. They never regrouped. They never lost the will to fight, or broke and ran. Back when they were fighting human enemies, mainly terrorists and insurgents, much of the operators’ tactics had been based around surprise, speed, and violence of action – all of which sowed confusion, panic, fear, and paralysis in their opponents. The dead never experienced any of this, but there was still a lot to be said for speed and dynamism.

But not today. Handon cursed himself. He’d let them become static and lose their momentum and fluidity. Maybe there’d been no way around it, with the totally new type of threat they’d just encountered. But he should have thought of one anyway. Instead, they’d gotten caught flat-footed, stopped and jammed up.

But they were going to have to make a move in some direction – and fast.

The only option Handon could see was a breakout, which might succeed or it might fail. He didn’t love their odds, he just didn’t see any choice now. But before he could start to organize it… another option appeared.

A break-
in
.

It was heralded by the deep, throaty, slow, rolling, drumbeat of low-rate-of-fire automatic shotgun blasts triggering off –
thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk
– thirty-two of them right in a row, six seconds of rolling thunder. The impact was both immediate and obvious. The ranks of attackers to the north started to turn to meat and mist. Those still on their feet started to turn around. And an elegant voice came over the squad net.

“If Alpha team could kindly drop to the deck that will provide me with a nice head-shooting range.”

Handon and the rest of Alpha complied, grabbing dirt. And, still shooting their suppressed weapons in all directions but that one, they listened and half-watched as Noise – having sprinted all the way there from the MRAP – executed his crowning moment of badass: burning through two hubcap-sized 36-round drum magazines of twelve-gauge shells right in a row. The Auto Assault 12 had no suppressor, so it roared and barked and bright sparks shot out of both the muzzle and the breach and off into the night.

But by the middle of the second mag, Noise himself could be seen standing behind a great lumpy field of dishdasha-clad bodies, piles of limbs and heads and torsos and rivers of syrupy black gunk. Much of it was wriggling, but none of it was walking. He’d just turned dozens of the walking dead into non-ambulatory meat, in seconds.

And that was their signal.

Handon, Henno, Juice, Pred, Ali, and Homer rose to their feet as one. And they barreled through the hole that Noise had punched out for them.

In seconds, they were clear.

And they all ran as one back toward that blessed MRAP.

As he leapt over the carnage of dismantled bodies, suddenly Handon totally got the point of the AA12. Basically, when you got in bad enough trouble that you needed a high-capacity full-auto shotgun…

Nothing else would do.

Resolve

Hargeisa - Saleebaan Road, North of Town

“Cadaver Two, this is Firehawk One, how copy?”

“Solid copy,” Fick said around labored breaths, as he and Brady carried the horrendously torn-up Graybeard on his stretcher, with Reyes out front and rifle up. They were just now leaving the last squat structures of Hargeisa behind, heading north on the dusty hardball road that led straight out of town. Right now they were trying to negotiate a riot of vehicles, many of them overturned, which looked for all the world like someone had put a couple of Hellfire missiles into them.

Beyond this barricade at the edge of town was the blackness of the bush. But at least they now had commo with the medevac helo.

“Cadaver Two, we’ve got your beacon and are hammer down at our max speed – ETA your position approx thirty mikes, break. Looks like anywhere in your vicinity along that hardball is wide enough for us to set down, over.”

“That’s a-ffirm,” Fick said. “We will mark an HLZ on your approach.”

“Cadaver Two, confirm you are not in contact at this time, over.”

“Affirmative. All quiet. Your own engine noise might draw some attention, but we’ll set security and you can just touch and go.”

“Copy that. Is the casualty ready to move?”

“Affirmative.”

“See you shortly, Cadaver. Hang in there.”

Fick for one was just about done hanging in there. Graybeard had never been a small man – and even with a quarter of his blood out of his body, he still weighed a ton. And with only two healthy Marines to heft him, the whole group maintaining a quick jogging pace to get the hell out of Dodge, Fick was physically wrecked. He could see that Brady, that much younger paragon of super-fitness and muscle tone, seemed just fine, which pissed him off.