Pandemic (64 page)

“Apaches are down,” said a voice in his headset. “Bad guys have SAMs.”

“Tell the Chinooks to abort pickup,” said another voice. “If we lose them, the only way out is on foot.”

Clarence had a Ranger on his left, two on his right, all firing at the attackers scrambling over the perimeter cars.

If only they’d extracted Cooper Mitchell as soon as they found him, then they wouldn’t be facing this army of Converted. But Margaret had insisted staying was critical, and Clarence had believed her.

A voice on the open channel screamed for help. A burst of gunfire cut the scream short.

So much panicked chatter. Men shouted for help. It sounded like the Rush Street perimeter was about to be overrun.

Something whizzed past his ear. He instinctively jerked backward, so fast he fell onto his ass. He’d come within inches of taking a round in the face.

There weren’t any reinforcements coming in. Air support was gone. The Rangers wouldn’t be able to hold.

Clarence had to keep Cooper Mitchell alive.

He turned and ran into the lobby. “Feely! Get Cooper on his feet, we have to move!”

A maskless Tim shook his head hard so his spiky blond hair flopped back and forth. “No way! Klimas said to stay right here!”

Clarence ignored him. Cooper was sitting on the floor, looking around. Still groggy, but his eyes seemed normal, alert. Clarence knelt in front of him.

“Mister Mitchell, you with us?”

The man’s eyes widened and blinked rapidly at the same time. Then they focused, locked on Clarence’s.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just a little fuzzy, maybe. And call me
Cooper
.”

“Can you walk, Cooper?”

He nodded.

Tim leaned in. “Otto, we
have
to stay here!”

Clarence heard a hissing roar. His body reacted; he grabbed Tim and pulled him on top of a surprised Cooper, covering them both with his own body a moment before a crushing blast drove them all against the shaking floor.

Paulius kept firing and reloading, his hands acting on autopilot while his brain tried to work out the rapidly deteriorating situation. They’d lost air superiority. Even with a significant advantage in firepower, they were outnumbered at least a hundred to one.

The snipers on the fifth floor were the only thing keeping the hostiles from overrunning Klimas’s position. At their rate of fire, they’d run out of ammo in mere minutes.

Ranger-fired mortars
thoomped
every few seconds, followed by popping explosions out beyond the perimeter. The firing arcs were short enough that Paulius felt the concussion wave of each detonation.

The constant roar of the 240s, the pops of M4s and the barks of Benelli shotguns told him the perimeter remained intact. M23 grenade launchers countered the endless barrage of Molotov cocktails, filling Chicago Avenue with shrapnel.

And still the Converted came on, hatchlings and armed militants stepping over the shattered and still-twitching bodies of their comrades. Twenty meters and closing.

He thumbed his “talk” button.

“Claymores,
now
! Light ’em up!”

He’d barely finished his sentence before the powerful mines started detonating, each one a horizontal storm of seven hundred one-eighth-inch steel balls shooting out horizontally at a speed of twelve hundred meters per second. The enemy soldiers were packed in so tight Paulius could see the Claymores’ blast patterns in the expanding cones of shredded bodies.

The advance slowed. The enemy suddenly broke, turned and ran, leaving behind hundreds of dead and dying. The little snow that remained on the street had turned into red slush, soaking up the blood that flowed down the sidewalk gutters.

Steve Stanton lowered his binoculars.

“Chickenshits,” he said. “They’re running.”

General Brownstone nodded. “Too much enemy firepower. Looks like we inflicted some casualties, though. If I may suggest, Emperor, we should use the M72 light antitank weapons to target their snipers, and all our launched grenades to cover the second wave’s advance.”

That was the right call, and Steve knew it. He’d been hoping the first wave would overwhelm the human soldiers, but they were too well trained and too well armed.

“We don’t have many of those M72s, General.”

She nodded again. “Yes, Emperor. However, I’m certain the humans detonated all of their Claymores, and they have to be running low on ammunition. Our fast ground attack should breach their perimeter if we can clear out the snipers.”

If the second wave didn’t work, Steve’s only option was to launch the third wave. That wave was supposed to be his containment wave, the troops that would kill anyone — Converted included — that came out of the hotel.

He didn’t have time to think it through. The humans could send more helicopters at any moment, and his people had used up most of the Stingers.

The humans were running out of ammo, but so were the Chosen Ones.

He raised the binoculars. “General Brownstone, launch wave two.”

Paulius ejected a spent magazine, popped in a fresh one. The enemy had fallen back, but they were still firing. He’d found new cover behind a white delivery truck. Bullets smacked into the metal body so fast it sounded like an off-rhythm drummer experimenting with a new song.

One Ranger lay dying to his left. Another to his right was already gone, or he would have screamed from the flames that engulfed his chest and arm.

An explosion came from the towering hotel above and behind him. Paulius looked up to see a cloud of thin smoke billowing from the fifth floor, window shards tumbling down to the street below. He saw a second explosion — a there-and-gone fireball blowing out a cloud of spinning glass, shredded insulation and torn metal.

He thumbed his SEAL channel.

“Overwatch, displace, rockets targeting fifth floor!”

Another explosion hit the hotel, farther to the right; three smoldering holes gaped wide, making the building look like a tree chopped at the base that might topple over and crash into the street.

The interior perimeter suddenly lit up with hard-hitting
snap
explosions that cast out waves of dirt and snow. Paulius threw himself face-first to the pavement — there wasn’t much one could do against a grenade volley but lie low and pray.

A machine gun barked. A man shouting “Here they come again!” drew Paulius’s attention back to the street.

He stayed on his belly, aimed his M4 under the truck, found his first targets: a pair of kids —
kids, dammit —
sprinting forward, each holding a kitchen knife. He took them out, two shots for the first, three for the second.

And then, Paulius saw something that his eyes couldn’t immediately process: a taxi, sliding
sideways
toward the perimeter, toward
him
, smashing bodies aside, tires pushing up little waves of red slush. There was something behind that car.

Something
big
.

“All units, concentrate fire on that taxi!”

The taxi’s doors blossomed with new holes as Rangers and SEALs alike focused their fire, but the vehicle was moving too fast — it was too late to stop it.

Paulius dove away from the delivery truck a moment before the cab crashed in. The truck toppled, smashed down on its right side. A Ranger who had been using the truck for cover didn’t make it clear; the heavy vehicle crushed his left foot, trapping him.

Klimas rolled to his feet, came up ready to fire — and for the first time in his military career, he froze.

A
monster
. Eight feet tall, shoulders and chest rippling with thick coils of muscle. Molotov firelight played off wet, dark-yellow skin. Open sores dotted the body, some trailing visible rivulets of pus. The wide neck supported a huge, heavy-jawed head topped with spotty patches of tight, curly black hair. The face seemed toylike compared to the oversized body. Its mouth was full of long, thick teeth that could easily rip flesh from bones.

And sticking up from behind each clenched fist, a long, jagged, pointed arc of bone.

The trapped Ranger rolled to his back, stared up at the monstrosity only a foot away. The Ranger screamed.

The yellowish beast raised a bare foot, drove it down into the Ranger’s stomach. The soldier’s screaming stopped. His hands weakly gripped the long leg, then his fingers slid away and his arms fell limply to the wet pavement.

The monster leaned down and
roared
.

Klimas heard the telltale
thoop
of a grenade launcher. An explosion knocked the massive creature back, splashing his bloody entrails in a long streak across the white top of the overturned truck.

Gunfire brought Paulius out of it, gunfire aimed at him — a man and a woman sprinting around the delivery truck, the man firing a rifle, the screaming woman aiming a shotgun.

In less than a second, Klimas hit them each twice. The man dropped hard. The woman landed face-first and slid across the packed snow. Klimas fired twice more, aiming for her head, but his shots hit her back instead. As she slid, she raised the shotgun one-handed, screamed “
asshole!
” and fired.

He felt the blast smack into the left side of his chest and belly, felt a dozen
needles dig deep as some of them found ways around the gaps in his body armor.

She slid to a stop. He put a bullet in her head, then looked up.

A dozen more hostiles poured in around the truck. Two of them tackled a fleeing Ranger. Another Ranger lay on the ground, screaming obscenities at the three people on top of him, one biting his face, another stabbing a knife into his right thigh over and over again. And just beyond the truck, Paulius saw two more of the yellow monsters rushing in fast.

His position was being overrun.

I promised Feely I’d get him out, and if I don’t save him and Mitchell, then all this is for nothing
.

Paulius turned and ran, tossing a flash-bang behind him. Up ahead, smoke billowed out of the hotel’s entrance.

“All exterior SEALs, fall back to the hotel! Our mission is to get the civilians to safety. Someone find me another way out of that building!”

Steve Stanton really,
really
wanted to ride on Jeff’s back, like Hannibal riding an elephant into battle, but that was a bad idea; there were probably still a few human snipers left in the Park Tower.

So instead of riding in glory, the emperor of Chicago walked toward the hotel. He walked slowly, and far back from the still-advancing second wave. Steve stayed a few steps behind Jeff so the bull’s wide body would block any stray fire.

Hundreds of bodies lined the streets, victims of mines, snipers and grenades. Where dying flames didn’t burn, the pavement ran red with blood.

As Steve advanced, his third wave came out of hiding. They slid out of cars, stepped out of doorways, all carrying weapons that had yet to be fired. They walked toward the hotel. There were
thousands
of them, so many and so thick it looked like a well-organized parade.

The third wave included most of the Converted who had been soldiers in their former lives. Each of them managed ten civilians. The soldiers communicated via hand signals, runners, cell phones, and most also had some form of radio or walkie-talkie that the scavengers had found in electronics, toy and sporting goods stores. Where the first wave had been cannon fodder, as had most of the second, the third wave was an organized combat force.

General Brownstone had gone up ahead to get a closer look. She jogged back toward him.

“General, have we entered the hotel yet?”

“No, Emperor,” she said. “The human perimeter is collapsing and the building is on fire, but there is still resistance. Shouldn’t be long now. The third wave is already setting up the containment ring — nothing is going to get out of that hotel alive.”

Containment. That was the key. They’d kill Cooper Mitchell, then kill his killers and — God willing — forever wipe out his horrid disease.

Steve checked his phone: 4:19
A.M.
The battle had taken only nine minutes. In warfare, apparently, things happened fast.

He pulled his coat tighter and watched the hotel burn.

Gunfire. Flames. Yelling and screaming, the sounds of panic, of fury, all barely audible over a high-pitched ringing.

Tim lifted his head. His body felt numb.

Cooper Mitchell struggled to his feet. The man looked terrified and shell-shocked. Clarence was still down, unconscious. His gas mask was gone. A long piece of metal jutted out of his shoulder blade, blood trickling from his CBRN suit.

The sight of that blood brought Tim out of it. He pushed himself to his knees, scrambled across the rubble to Otto’s side. The shard hadn’t penetrated that far. There wasn’t time to do things properly, so he grabbed the shard and
yanked
.

Clarence twitched, moaned and rolled over.

Tim looked around for a bandage, a towel, anything remotely clean to press on the wound. Gunfire and the explosion had shredded his medical supplies, scattering them all across the burning lobby.

He helped Clarence sit up, waved Cooper over. Cooper stumbled toward them. Tim grabbed the man’s hand and pressed it against Otto’s wound.

“Keep pressure here,” Tim said. “Press hard.”

Clarence’s lip curled up, his eyes scrunched tight in pain.

“My weapon,” he said. “Someone find my weapon.”

Tim heard a shout above the unending din, a single word:
grenade!

Something exploded across the lobby, close to the front door. A Ranger fell back crying out in agony. Tim stood and started toward the wounded man, but Klimas sprinted through the doors and cut Tim off.

“Feely,
run
! Take the package to the stairwell,
move
!”

Tim reached for Cooper, then saw Otto’s pistol on the floor. He snatched it up, shoved it into Otto’s hands, then pulled Cooper toward the stairwell door at the rear of the lobby.

Tim looked back, saw Klimas lift Otto to his feet and push him toward the stairwell. The SEAL commander suddenly wheeled, fired at three men
who ran through the entrance:
pop-pop
, slight turn,
pop-pop
, slight turn,
pop-pop
. The three men fell to the floor.