The Flood (34 page)

And into that hole now came a big beefy vehicle, blasting out of the smoke and onto the ground below them – minigun first. The huge weapon, mounted in a ring turret, was still whining, spinning, and firing non-stop, the rotating barrels starting to glow red, and whatever size belt in its ammo can being run through it from top to bottom. It was carving a dead-free channel ahead for the truck to sluice through – a channel that wouldn’t last long, but then they were moving fast as hell. The vehicle itself was a big souped-up-looking HUMVEE, a proper post-Apocalyptic ride. One man stood up in the turret firing the minigun, another crouched in the open bed in back. And presumably someone was driving.

“What in Christ’s name is that?” asked Henno.

“Gun truck,” Juice said, cradling his weapon and looking down serenely, impressed and pleased. “Looks like it’s been through the wringer. But it’s rolling.”

It was true the vehicle had been shot to shit, and looked like perhaps it had been patched back together in haste – Joe Shit the Gun Truck. But Juice was right, it was rolling. Before anyone up top could react – or, really, think how to react – it skidded to a shuddering stop at the foot of the half-collapsed building.

The figure in the truck bed stood up – revealing herself to actually be a woman, though she was as tooled-up as anyone in Alpha. She cupped one hand and shouted up at them:

“Come with me if you want to live!”

Old Friends

Hargeisa Hospital

This was like a lifeboat arriving, against all possible expectations, to ferry Alpha’s beleaguered asses across the flood tide of dead and the hell out of there.

And with no more delay, because there wasn’t time for any, the Alpha six started leaping down the slope of rubble toward the ZA’s least likely extraction. Handon watched Ali lead the way, with Homer and Juice right behind her – then looked back and saw both Pred and Henno moving, but more cautiously.

“What’s the hold-up?” he barked, before having to halve a baboon head with his sword, duck another one leaping at him, then spin around and spear that one through the mouth.

Hopping rocks and swinging his cricket bat, Henno said, “This gonna be more American nutters trying to get us all killed?”

You got a better plan?
Handon thought, but didn’t spare the breath to say it.

Pred finally spat and started lumbering downward at speed, causing mini-avalanches as he went. “Hey, I just wanted to see if this sumbitch was gonna bring down the rest of the building first…”

“And what if it does?” Handon said, as he switched his sword to his left hand, rapid-drawing a .45 and emptying it into a pair of runners vectoring in on Ali and Homer as they hit the ground. “You still want to be on it?”

“Good point,” Pred said. “Fuck it, get out of my way.” He redoubled his leaping, which seemed like it might bring down the rest of the building all on its own. Handon waited for he and Henno to power by him. As always, he intended to be last man out.

As he reloaded the .45 with his very last mag and covered the final few meters, he could see the gunner in the ring turret on top of the truck – a big solid dude with no helmet and wavy black hair – banging a new can of ammo into the minigun. In almost the same motion, he rotated the whole turret around 180 degrees, spun the weapon up with an electric whine, and started engaging to the rear and sides. Once again, the dead were carried away by the three-barreled hurricane.

At the same time, the woman in back opened up an AT-4 – a disposable 84mm anti-tank missile – and fired it off into the far end of the dead-free channel behind them, which was already collapsing. She must have had the round set for detonation delay, because it skipped off the road and bounced back up for airburst at waist level – slicing dead bodies in half, vaporizing them entirely, or tossing them thirty feet through the air. Before that explosion even settled, the woman – a look of fierce determination on her face, beneath a green cap embossed with the word
ARMY
, a dirty blond ponytail spilling out the back of that – tossed the empty tube, scooped up another, and fired that one off, too.

But this second one must have been God’s own anti-tank weapon, because the increasingly crowded area behind them now went up in a truly bowel-shaking explosion – four times the size of the first. But in fact it was two explosions, almost on top of each other.

“Last two mini-bombs away, Cadaver! Get your asses out of there!”

It was Hailey – putting her last ordnance on target.

Now Handon could see Ali, Homer, and Juice piling into the back seat and yanking the doors shut behind them. Seconds later, Henno and Pred leapt directly from a pile of rocks into the open truck bed – rocking even the big heavy truck on its tight rear shocks. That left the front passenger seat – and Handon had to fight his way to it, swinging his wakizashi left-handed and triggering off his very last fat .45 rounds with his right. Two runners, a Zulu, and a Bravo all dropped or fell apart in his path, and he hurdled the remains, hit the ground, and hurled himself into the truck, hauling the door shut and banging on the dash. “
Go, go, go!”

Dead bodies were already slamming into the outside of the vehicle.

The man in the driver’s seat – Handon stole a quick look and saw it was a lanky young man with blond hair poking out from under his Kevlar, also wearing body armor, LBE, and a side arm – jammed the gear shift into reverse, put the accelerator through the floor, and rocketed them backward at a speed that would have been unsafe in a vehicle a quarter its size. As another rocket whooshed out from the truck bed, exploding close enough to pepper the truck with shrapnel, and the minigun banged away non-stop, sending a steel rain of heavy 50-cal casings cascading all over the roof, the driver now cut the wheel and pulled a textbook bootlegger turn.

Whipping the front end around also almost took them into a shell crater – Hailey’s handiwork – and in fact the front wheels crashed into it but then ramped out again, ending with them still on all four wheels and accelerating forward like doomsday out of the collapsing vortex of the half-leveled hospital and the half-destroyed singularity around it.

Handon’s head banged the roof repeatedly as they ramped over bodies – all dead, some destroyed – as the minigunner did his best to clear the way, and then the driver did the rest with the cattle-catcher on the grille. He could also see more sparking mini-explosions ahead and to either side as the roaring F-35 strafed ahead and around them, Thunderchild putting her last hundred rounds of 25-mil into clearing their way the ever-living hell out of town.

“That platform was just too unstable!” the woman in back yelled at Pred, bringing up her M4 and selectively engaging targets to one side. “I had to circle and hope things didn’t get too rough to take you off!”

Pred just slumped down in the corner, taking up half the truck bed. “You people make me tired,” he said. “Also, I think you’re looking for the Colonial Marines up the road.” He didn’t have a single round to shoot anyway, so he just lay down and rested his gigantic bones, and left any shooting to the others – not to mention the movie quotes.

And he just watched it all go by.

The woman stopped shooting long enough to offer her hand. “Kate,” she said.

“Predator.” Her small hand disappeared in his giant one as he shook it.

She cocked her head. “Seriously?” Her voice dropped an octave. “
There's something out there hunting us. And it ain’t no man.
”

Pred almost smiled at this, despite himself. It was a hard one to argue with. And at least she hadn’t used the “You are one ugly mother—” line.

Kate smiled back. That line had actually occurred to her first. But she was actually thinking Predator was kind of cute – not an adjective she could remember applying to a seven-foot, 320-pound soldier.

Opposite the two of them, Henno rose into a crouch and stared out behind them.

And he would have sworn on his life that he could see CSM Zorn up on top of that half-buried MRAP, laying about him with some kind of iron bar in one hand – and shooting a .45 with the other. Where he got the pistol would probably never be known.
Maybe he is unkillable
, Henno thought.
It’s always the biggest arseheads who are.

“You see that?” Pred asked, following his gaze. “Sergeant Major Badass.”

“Sergeant Major
Pain in the
Arse,” Henno said. “But not in ours anymore.”

He sat back down beside his huge teammate.

And the pair of them just leaned back and enjoyed the cool night breeze blowing over them – as together they escaped the burning, shrieking, leaping, flapping, gnashing Somali death zone.

They were finally out of the path of the flood.

* * *

As the last 50-cal casing clanged down on the roof, the minigunner, standing up in the middle of the back seat area, braced himself to lift out the empty ammo can and toss it over the side. Juice was already hefting a new one to hand up to him when he saw the gunner’s pants leg, which was practically in his face, lift up as the man shifted.

There wasn’t a leg inside. Not a flesh one anyway.

Juice froze dead for one second. Then he clinked his heavy metallic watch several times on the titanium of the prosthetic leg.

“Cut it out,” the gunner barked, his voice deep and resonant. Then, as he ducked down into the vehicle, he saw the beard. But he’d already recognized it when its owner was leaping down the outside of the collapsed hospital – even as Juice had recognized the faded Triple Nickel logo painted on the side of the truck. Now the gunner smiled, black stubble crinkling around white teeth, and he said:

“The whole goddamned world ends, and I’m still having to hump through the boonies to bail your hairy ass out.”

“Hiya, Jake,” Juice said, spitting out the window. “Just as pleasant as always.”

“Hello, Juice.” The man reached down and the two clasped hands, resulting in a brief but fierce mid-air arm-wrestling match – and a stalemate. “Always nice to see old friends.”

Juice smiled in recognition.

That had been his line last time around.

* * *

Handon had his NVGs down again – as did the driver, who was running without lights – and monitored the road ahead. It was nearly all clear now. And they were already nearing the edge of town, after only a couple of turns and a few minutes of high-speed driving. Handon somehow had the sense the driver knew these roads well. And maybe had even done all this before.

“We heading north?” Handon asked.

“Yep.”

“Slow down when I tell you. We’ve got one more to pick up.”

“Roger that.”

“What’s your name?”

“Baxter.”

“Handon. Nice driving.” He clapped the driver on the shoulder as the young man looked back to the road and negotiated a last turn. Hargeisa was just about behind them now, with not much but bush and clear road ahead.

“There,” Handon said, pointing to the treeline, where he spotted glint tape through his NVGs. As they rolled up on the shoulder, Noise noiselessly slipped out of the bush and piled into the back, evidently landing on Pred, as they heard the big man growl, “
Ocupado
, motherfucker.”

The truck rolled out again and the open road spread out in front of them.

Now that it looked like they weren’t all going to die in the next minute, and his breathing and heart rate had gotten somewhere down in the ballpark of normal, Handon flipped up his NVGs and swiveled to face the driver.

“Okay,” he said. “Who are you people? And what are you doing here?”

Baxter upshifted then flipped up his own NVGs. There was a fair bit of starlight now, the night sky having cleared of smoke and dust. He stole a glance over at Handon, who could now see he was very young indeed. But he seemed totally focused and serious when he said: “It’s not what
we’re
doing here – it’s what
you
guys are doing here.”

He glanced back to the road, then looked back at Handon – right in the eye.

“You’re here for Patient Zero – aren’t you?”

Handon was too surprised to even know how to respond.

The driver looked forward again. “Zack said you’d come one day.”

Now Handon caught motion in his peripheral vision – and turned to see Ali half-sticking her head up into the front. Now she was the gobsmacked one, staring at them open-mouthed.

The driver nodded again. “We know where it is. And we can take you there. But I don’t think there’s any chance of getting it out.”

Handon didn’t answer – but only thought:

Just watch us.

He was sick to death of running, hiding – and doubting. It was long past time for them to regain positive control of their mission. To regain the initiative. For Handon to restore faith, his own and the others’, in his ability to command. And for all of them to regain their belief in themselves – and in each other.

For them to stop reacting – and start
acting
again. To start operating.

They’d gotten out of Hargeisa alive, somehow. But it went without saying that survival wasn’t nearly enough. Because their mission so far had been a total soup sandwich – a series of betrayals, disappointments, casualties, and near-disasters. But now they were being given a second chance. And second chances were rare.

So they’d damn well better prove themselves worthy of this one.

Handon had been around long enough to know that character was what you did on your third and fourth tries. And it was what defined you.

He sat still and watched the night go by – and he mentally prepared himself.

For their very last shot at this thing.

Goddamned Crazy Son of a Bitch

Jizan - the Waterfront

“I’ll be goddamned,” Burns said, wading out beside the dock and putting his hand on their CRRC. “It’s still here.”

“Bring it in closer!” Browning shouted. He couldn’t see a damn thing out on the blackness of the water, but had to trust that Burns had found their boat. Night had fallen completely now, and the darkness was deep and total with the plant fire out. Also, it seemed their night vision hadn’t totally recovered from that world-straddling inferno.