The Remaining: Trust: A Novella (5 page)

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Stay calm and controlled.

Take it to ’em.

For a split second, just before the helicopter touched the roof, it rotated just far enough for Abe to see the bridge on the other side of the railway. And the base of it, on the southern side, clustered with cars and completely barricaded. But the cars seemed to squirm like something alive, and Abe didn’t realize what he was looking at until he was sliding off the outboard bench.

There must be hundreds of them…

His feet hit the ground.

Just before he ripped off the headset, Abe heard the pilot of Copperhead-One-Three say, “Boots down.”

THREE

Infected.

Abe came down in a half crouch. The roar of the rotors kicked up and Copperhead-One-Three lifted off away from them. Abe’s gut immediately twisted up inside of him. There had to be at least a hundred of them—maybe more. And they were moving fast, the frontrunners already hurdling over the gridlock of vehicles at the south end of the bridge. And Tyler and his group were too busy keeping their heads down to notice them coming.

How long?
Abe tried to calculate, tried to register how quickly the infected were moving and how much distance they had to cover.
It’s a long bridge. But at a dead sprint? Maybe a few minutes max.

Abe scanned the rooftop, urgency punching through his practiced calm. He needed to find a way down into the building, to stop the threat so that Fargo Group could defend itself. And he had very limited time to do it in.

Each of the three levels had its own roof, like a set of tiers, and in the far corner Abe could see a ladder that led to the next tier down. It was the only access point he could see. He didn’t like it because it left them out in the open, but there weren’t many choices at this point.

He ran for it.

The roof around his feet suddenly began to jolt. Black holes began sprouting up, spewing chunks of insulation and plaster into the air like tiny geysers. Abe felt his whole body tighten, like one giant cringe, but he didn’t stop running even as he waited for that bullet to snap up and get him. He planted a hand on the curved rail of the ladder to stop himself, and he looked back.

In the middle of the roof, one of the soldiers was prone, trailing red across the white roof as he crawled toward them. The bullets kept punching up, closer, and then farther away. Someone underneath them, blindly shooting at noises on the roof. One of the rounds exploded right next to the wounded soldier’s head and he became still, unwilling to move anymore.

The other two were crammed in close behind Abe at the ladder. The soldier who had been sitting behind Abe on the ride in lurched out like he was going to make a run for his wounded comrade, but Abe grabbed his arm. He wore sergeant’s stripes, Abe noted.

“Gimme ten seconds!” Abe shouted. “You got a frag?”

The sergeant produced one from his vest.

Abe snatched it out of his hand and pointed at the roof. “Keep his head down!” Then he slapped the other soldier’s arm. “You’re with me!”

The sergeant pointed his rifle at the roof and began letting rounds loose.

Abe grabbed the side rails of the ladder and simply vaulted over the roof. He didn’t know if the other soldier was behind him, but he wasn’t waiting to find out. He hit the next tier of the roof, and he hit it hard, buckling his knees and nearly putting him on his ass. He recovered, stumbling slightly as he pulled the pin and let the paddle fly off the grenade. For a split second he was terrified that he had no place to throw it, but to his right was a long bank of windows, and the ones closest to him were already blown out. He tossed the grenade like a hot potato through the open window, and then he flattened himself up against the wall and hoped it was more substantial than it felt.

He waited, waited, waited, then—
BOOM
—felt it before he heard it.

Concussion that you could feel in your innards.

The feeling of a full-body impact.

The odd sensation of it ripping suddenly over your skin.

Then he felt a hard slap on his shoulder, and a muffled word came through his ringing, perforated eardrums:
“MOVE!”

And he was moving. Rifle up, through the broken bay windows and onto a desk that rattled unsteadily under his feet. Abe looked at the broken jags of glass passing between his legs as he stepped through and thought about them slicing through his inner thigh and opening up his femoral artery. He got both legs in and then jumped off the desk onto a hard linoleum floor.

The interior of the building was dark. Hazy. Billows of smoke stampeded for the open windows. He could see the glow of daylight on the other side of the room. Shadows and shapes flashed across the light. If there were sounds to accompany it—footsteps or shouts—Abe couldn’t hear them. He decided that he didn’t care what the shadows and shapes belonged to.

He was going to shoot them.

One foot in front of the other. Heart heavy and hard in his chest. Like a palpitating brick. He scanned left as he moved. There were cubicles. They were small. Easily cleared with a passing glance. The walls were thin and would provide nothing in the way of cover. He had to keep moving.

The shadows flashed again. Abe fired his rifle through the rapidly clearing haze. Thought he saw a figure fall but couldn’t be sure. He saw a muzzle flash, felt something zip past his face like an angered bee. He resisted the urge to dive for the cubicles and the false sense of protection they gave. They didn’t have time for a firefight. Tyler didn’t have time for it. The wounded soldier on the roof didn’t have time for it. They only had time for quick, decisive action. He had to keep going. Keep going.
Keep going.

Muzzle flash again.

Abe fired at it, five shots.

Someone screamed. The sound elated him.

Got him! Got that motherfucker!

He reached a body lying facedown. A young man—that was all Abe registered. Maybe he was dead; maybe he was alive. Maybe Abe had tagged him, or maybe it had been one of the Blackhawk gunners, or maybe it had been the grenade. He still held an M4 carbine. He could have been a threat. Abe didn’t stop to determine. He kicked away the rifle and put a bullet into the back of the skull to make sure.

Abe felt something smack his helmet, and then something punched him in the chest.

Holy shit…

Someone about ten yards in front of him, standing there in the gloom, backlit by the daylight behind him. Pointing a pistol at Abe, his feet dancing. Something that Abe called “happy feet,” which was a bit of a misnomer. When someone was so terrified that they could not decide whether to continue fighting or flee, their legs would dance around, caught in indecision.

Abe was still coming at him. He fired once, then felt the bolt lock back, and the next reflexive trigger pull was just empty movement. The man before him stumbled back and Abe thought he had caught him in the chest, but he was far from dead. He was raising the pistol again. Abe was close, and getting closer. He dropped the rifle, let the sling carry it down to his weak side as he grabbed his sidearm.

Abe came within arm’s distance. He juked left off the X, slapped out at the man’s pistol coming up. The pistol swung away, firing impotently into the haze. Abe was in close now, and he tucked his own pistol up tightly into his body as he bore down on the terrified man. Then he thrust out, pulling the pistol back just before it touched the man’s clavicle, and then fired three shots in a downward trajectory, each one punching through the bottom of the man’s neck and traveling down through his body where they punched through organs and vertebrae and the pelvic bone and came out through the man’s leg, groin, and anus.

He toppled to the ground, structurally unsound.

The look on the dead man’s face was one of fear and confusion.

Just like the young man before him, Abe kicked the pistol from his grip and finished him.

Abe stood there over him and coughed, his chest feeling raw. He forced himself to bring the pistol up, scan around for any additional threats. He registered a few more bodies on the ground. None of them was moving. There were no immediate threats.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “You good?”

Abe still held his pistol punched out, twisting from side to side, scanning more out of reflex than anything else. His weak hand left his weapon and went first to his head. He felt the divot in his helmet, but it was shallow. Just a glancing blow. Then he touched his chest, aiming for where it ached, but his finger hit his front chicken plate. Felt the little pieces of the smashed projectile still caught up between the fabric and the plate.

Abe coughed again. “I’m good. I’m good. It hit the plate.” He turned to the soldier. “Who’s got comms?” As he said it, he looked out the bank of windows to the southern end of the bridge and could see the crowd of tattered, ungodly souls scrambling over the barricade of cars at the bottom.

The soldier jerked his thumb behind them. “Sarge.”

Abe sprinted back down the hall, over the bodies of men he had not seen at first. There were at least five or six of them. He jumped onto the desk and quickly but gingerly negotiated the broken glass around the frame. Once outside, he could hear the noise of the infected between the beat of helicopter rotors—the grating, screaming, screeching noise that Abe had come to hate so much.

He grabbed the ladder and hauled up it. “Sergeant!” he yelled as he climbed. “Sergeant!”

He reached the top. The sergeant was crouched over the wounded soldier, working a Combat Application Tourniquet onto his bloodied thigh. The wounded man was still conscious, still upright, but he was looking at the sky and his gaze was taking on that drunken and vacant aspect that was a sure sign of blood loss. The sergeant used the tourniquet rod to torque it down on the wounded soldier’s leg, then he looked back at Abe.

“Sir?”

“I need your radio! Quick!”

The sergeant dipped his head toward Abe. “I’m plugged in. You’re gonna hafta grab it.”

Abe could see the man’s hands were occupied trying to keep his man from bleeding out. The sergeant wore the radio headset, with his helmet over it. Abe leaned down over him and removed the man’s helmet, then snatched off the headset. He started searching the sergeant’s chest rig. “Where’s the button? Where’s the fucking button?”

The sergeant snatched a black circle from one of the MOLLE loops of his vest and thrust it at Abe. “Right here.”

Abe grabbed the button and depressed it with one hand as the other put the headset up to his ear, the boom mike jutting out awkwardly. “Fargo-Six! Fargo-Six! You’ve got infected moving up the bridge at you! How copy?”

Tyler’s only response was, “I got it! I got it!”

“Rocky-Six to Copperheads, I need guns on those infected pushing the south end of the bridge. Can either of you respond?”

Calm. “Two-One, copies. We’re en route.”

“Two-Five, we copy.”

Abe stood there on the highest tier of the trilevel building, looking out across a big dirty expanse of rail yard. Off to the left came the heavy beating sounds of the Blackhawks, their door gunners loading fresh cases of ammunition. The two birds angled and pivoted, one following the other. They split as they rode low over the tops of Fargo Group’s vehicles in the middle of the bridge, one Blackhawk taking one side of the bridge and one taking the other. They dipped down low for a brief moment, like a shark might dive so that it can achieve a more powerful breach. The sound of their rotors changed, turned from basal to almost a sharp, knocking sound. Abe watched the dust across the rail yard kick up, the Blackhawks slowing into a hover, and then they rose, cleared the sides of the bridge, and the door gunners opened up.

It was a bloody, chaotic spectacle. The bright streaks of tracer fire flashed in the early morning light, and they chewed through flesh and concrete, sending small figures crumpling and flailing to the ground. The Copperhead door gunners had the bridge in a crossfire that ground those poor, mad bastards to pieces, and then Fargo Group added their own to the mix, someone finally manning one of the fifty turrets on their gun trucks.

Abe stood there watching it. Watching the infected run blindly into the raking cross fire, like their feet were not on the asphalt of a bridge but rather a conveyor belt, pulling each of them to their violent end. He turned his attention to the other two buildings at the north end of the bridge. He squinted to see the details of them, but several things were obvious. Most of the windows facing him were broken out and thick clouds of rapidly dissipating gray smoke were pouring from them.

Frag and clears
, Abe noted.

The other obvious thing was the lack of muzzle flashes coming from the building. No one was firing at Fargo Group on the bridge. If they were alive at all, they were focused on the two teams of soldiers inside the building with them.

Abe keyed the radio. “Rocky-Six to Yankee-Six or any other unit that came off the Blackhawks.”

There was a long pause. And Abe had time to think about the men in those two buildings, maybe one or two of them having a radio, looking around, wondering how they should relay to Major Darabie that Captain Wright was KIA.