The Reaper Plague (27 page)

Her lobe and half her ear came away with a
sickening tear, horrible to hear since it was so close to her
auditory nerves. She cried out despite herself, more in surprise
and shock than serious pain. She’d been hurt far worse but this
deliberate cruelty still rattled her for a moment.

But only a moment.

The huge man’s glittering gaze and flared
nostrils showed her that he enjoyed inflicting pain. Still, her
plan depended on getting some kind of control of the situation,
some kind of freedom to maneuver.

“
That the best you got?
Scott?” she taunted. “I kind of liked that. I kind of like you too.
You got a woman? This door swings both ways, and I don’t mind
sleeping my way to the top.” She cocked her hips suggestively,
licked her lips. “Come on, big man. Let’s take a ride.”

The warlord’s booming laugh filled the room,
and his men cawed along with him, and not just following their
leader. Their amusement was genuine. The Professor said in his
cultured voice, “Oh, dear me miss, you’re barking up the wrong tree
there. I might have responded to some rainbow solidarity, but you
just made the wrong ploy and now I know you’ll say anything. So
shut up.” His enormous fist lashed out and she felt her nose and
cheekbone break, and her left eye went dark.

She’d tried to roll with the blow but, held
fast as she was, the smartest thing she could do was fake complete
unconsciousness. She almost blacked out anyway as they carried her
roughly from Zyra’s room and tossed her into another. She heard the
door slam and a lock click shut.

This room held nothing but a bunk, a wall
locker and a student desk. She crawled up onto the mattress and lay
there on her back, her head swimming and the ceiling spinning. She
felt nauseated, concussed, and her vision tightened to a
black-spotted tunnel. He’d hit her
hard
; the man was
enormously strong.

She wondered how long it would be before one
of the Associates decided to try out their new toy. Holding her
hand to her shredded ear, she had no choice but to lie there, pray
and wait for healing.

And try to make a plan.

-39-

Major General Zimmer exulted in the feel of
the 1500 horsepower turbine engine driving the M1A1 Abrams tank
beneath her boots. She kept it under thirty – it was a gas hog even
at the best of times – but it could do sixty or better in a sprint.
Right now it was the fifth M1A1 – an old tank but still a monster –
in the convoy that drove steadily northward along US1 toward the
rogues of Fredericksburg.

Where the road was clear they raced along.
Where it was clogged with broken vehicles, the lead tank, fitted
with a dozer blade, would shove a way through. It was glorious, and
her blood sang with the ancient song of the cavalry.

Twenty-one tanks, six Bradleys, a gaggle of
other war machines, supply and tanker trucks – and the MRAPs with
the Homeland Security troops. It was probably the most powerful
armored force within three hundred miles, but Alice didn’t believe
in half measures. There was no such thing as overkill in her book.
If the task force overawed the enemy into surrender, that saved
lives. And if it didn’t, she wanted to smash them flat, fast.

By mid-morning the lead heavy rolled up to
the wrecked former golf course and linked up with the survivors of
the Civil Affairs Battalion. Zimmer took the opportunity to have a
team fly a tactical recon drone over the enemy lines.

It wasn’t long before her caution was
validated. The drone video showed seven M1s scattered in hasty
defensive positions, facing south, along with a dozen Stryker light
armored vehicles.
They must have gotten wind of our coming.
Probably have at least one spy in Richmond with a radio. We’ll win
this, the only question is how much it will cost.

Though she preferred to lead from inside a
tank, she had brought along a command track for her tiny staff.
Inside its pop-out tent she gathered her officers and those of the
broken Civil Affairs battalion. “Lieutenant Colonel Muzik, good to
meetcha.” The man looked worn out, but his grip was firm. “This
here’s Jimmy-John, he’s got Alpha Company. Marty Fiddles here has
Bravo. Chuck Gowler has the Bradleys.”

“
And I have one Stryker,
two Humvees and a couple of golf carts,” Muzik quipped. “And about
three hundred support troops. A few of them are MPs, but I can’t
call any of them grunts. Oh, and I guess the Homies are mine,
though I’m happy to chop them to your command.” He grimaced
wearily. “I’m really glad to see you, though, because they still
have most of our women, and a few of our men.”

“
Yeah, Stone always was a
sonuvabitch and once he got power he got to let it all run free.
We’ve known we had to clean the nest out eventually.” She turned to
Envoy Tyler. “Travis, you said they’d be all discombobulated, but
they got seven tanks emplaced, maybe more. Frankly, I don’t want to
go nose to nose, we’ll lose people. You got any ideas other than
the big stick?”

“
Me?” Tyler laughed. “It’s
your show, Alice.”

“
Ma’am?” Colonel Muzik
waved his only hand. “What you see is probably all they have,
facing you here, dug in at the battlefield park. If you can flank
them to the west, you can roll them up. We have information from
their defectors that their center of power is on the campus of Mary
Washington College, on Mary’s Heights, and that’s where the women’s
slave barracks is.”

“
Understood. Fix ‘em, flank
‘em, fight ‘em, finish ‘em. All right gentlemen, I got a plan in
mind. We’re going to use all our tools to save your people and
teach the shitheads of Fredericksburg just what a huge mistake they
made. That means you too, Colonel pretty-boy, with your best
people.”

-40-

Jill came to with a start as the cobwebs
cleared. Light leaked in the barred windows of her third-floor
prison cell. Someone had put a bottle of water, a sandwich, and an
apple on the desk. There was a bucket and a roll of toilet paper in
the corner. She stared at it, then shook her head and chuckled.

The head-shaking was a mistake as the pain
returned with a vengeance. She probed carefully at her face, which
was swollen and tender. By tomorrow the soft-tissue damage should
be mostly healed; the bones, however, might need some surgery. At
least she could see through her left eye again, though it was
blurry.

She heard a wail and an animal grunt from
somewhere nearby, and muffled male laughter. Listening more
carefully, she soon made out a rhythmic thumping and squeaking, and
a woman’s cries of pain in time with the noise.

Unfortunately she thought she knew what it
was. All stoicism fled as she contemplated her probable fate.
I’m supposed to use the bucket, eat the food. It might be
drugged. Then five of them will come in and beat me up
some.

And for dessert, they will take turns
holding me down and raping me
.

She ran her special ops resistance training
through her mind. “There are several strategies to cope with sexual
assault,” she could hear Spooky’s classroom voice in her mind.
“Rape will not be limited to the women, because rape is not about
sex, it is about degradation and power. I will teach you ways to
limit the rapist’s power, and to take some of it back for
yourselves.”

She had to admit, Spooky knew his subject. At
the time it seemed an unlikely scenario. Now, she was very, very
glad of the training. She prepared her first ploy.

Quickly using the waste bucket for its
intended purpose, she strained to void her bowels. Afterward she
smashed the apple flat, tore the sandwich to bits, and threw all
the pieces of food into the improvised toilet. Then she emptied the
water into it too, and used the bottle to stir the noxious mixture
into a runny paste.

Then she turned the bucket over her own
head.

She closed her eyes and held her breath, then
used the pillow to wipe her face more or less free of the stuff. It
stunk horribly. She smeared it all over her body, making sure to
run it under her arms and into her hair. The more disgusting she
made herself and the longer it took to clean up, the longer she
might delay, defer or deter her violation.

As she ran her gooey hands over her body she
paused at her taped-up boot. She’d forgotten it, and they hadn’t
touched it, as it looked like just what it was: a field-expedient
mess, barely functional. She ran a finger underneath the tape, then
her thumb, and withdrew her combat knife sheathed inside.

She lay back down on her bunk and tried not
to listen to the pain and humiliation down the hall. Holding the
blade in a reverse grip, hidden but ready, she thought with rising
hope:
now I have options.

-41-

A half hour later Zimmer gave Major Gowler
the honor of opening the attack.

From the Bradleys on the low hills to the
south, beyond extreme range of the enemy tank guns, six TOW
antitank missiles puffed out of their launchers. The projectiles
were slow compared to a high-velocity round, but they could reach
almost twice as far as the Abrams guns could fire accurately.
Unlike a main gun shell, the missiles were guidable all the way in
to their targets.

One of the Fredericksburger gunners was on
the ball. Realizing what the six puffs meant, he elevated his main
gun and began lobbing high-explosive shells in the general
direction of the offending Bradleys. Precious seconds later, the
other six tanks began to do the same. They also all launched their
smoke grenades, obscuring themselves.

One of the TOW missiles lost its wire
guidance and plunged into the ground. Three others missed, their
firers confused by the smoke. Two slammed home.

One struck the enormously thick front glacis
of its target, rocking the tank and ruining its paint job but
otherwise affecting it not at all. One knifed into an Abrams turret
at a downward angle and exploded, the superheated jet of molten
copper plasma from its shaped charge slicing through the thinner
armor like a blowtorch through a chocolate bunny. The crew died
instantly as the tank’s ammunition cooked off, blowing the turret
sky-high.

Now lacking targets for the smoke, the
Bradleys began working their way carefully forward as five big
brother Abrams advanced frontally northward. They took the best
hull-down positions they could find. At between one and two
thousand meters, they began a deliberate rolling fire at the
smoke-enshrouded enemy, dimly seen through thermal sights.

From this angle, their discarding-sabot
penetrators usually glanced off their targets’ glaces. Two of the
enemy tanks lost their treads to the ripping depleted uranium
bullets, and one more exploded as a skilled or lucky shot found a
weak spot where its turret met the hull. But Richmond’s tanks had
no intention of pressing the attack home from the south.

Less than five miles away to the west, the
flanking forces had turned to attack as soon as the first shot was
fired. Sixteen Richmond tanks in four platoons raced eastward. The
southernmost two groups of four, Alice Zimmer’s tank in the lead,
pounced on the westernmost enemy tank and supporting Strykers and
tore them to bits in a hail of main gun fire. They then moved on
down the line to the next position, a textbook roll-up.

The northernmost two platoons spread out and
bulled straight up on either side of Jefferson Davis Highway,
destroying every hostile vehicle or emplacement they encountered
with ease. Homeland Security’s seven MRAPs followed close behind,
filled to bursting with paramilitary troops and as many MPs as
Colonel Muzik could scrape together and rearm.

The tanks turned to their right and made a
fast cavalry sweep in a line up the heights, through the university
campus, then spread out taking alert positions in the open spaces
between the buildings. Their gun snouts probed ceaselessly, looking
for a tank’s worst nightmare in urban terrain:
antitank-rocket-armed infantry on the roofs.

“
Muzik team, deploy on this
commons! You Homies, dismount and start clearing these buildings, I
want reports, people. Find the women, find the headquarters! I want
prisoners! MPs, assemble on me.” The Colonel stood on the top of
the armored truck as his forces poured out the back
ramps.

The Homeland Security squad leaders took
charge and began clear-and-hold operations, while he looked around
from his vantage point, searching for…something. A key place,
something that looked like a nerve center, where he could get some
answers about where their people were being held.

In the middle distance his eyes caught an
anomaly. Head-tall coils of concertina wire, razor-sharp and
designed specifically to impede personnel, ran along the corner of
a red brick building. The rest was hidden behind a larger
structure.

Something to keep people out…or in. That’s
worth looking at.
He jumped off the vehicle and waved at his
score of eager troopers. “Follow me!” He jogged in the direction of
the building.

At the intervening structure’s corner he
called for a halt, then lay down and eased an eye around the bottom
corner. He jerked his head back as a burst of gunfire stitched the
wall, spattering chips of its concrete construction. “Machinegun
nest on the roof, boys.” Muzik spoke into his radio. “Butler, you
copy? Ease that truck northward a bit until you can see that red
brick building. The one that looks like a dormitory, with the
concertina wire around it. There’s a machinegun nest on the top of
it somewhere. Drop some grenades on it, if you please. Stay away
from the windows, our people might be inside.”