SEAL Team 13 (SEAL Team 13 series) (17 page)

As laudable a goal as that was, however, it soon ran into a wall when they reached the street just north of their position and found that it too was filled with the walking dead.

“Well, we’re screwed,” Rankin said from his prone position on the ground, looking over the iron sights of his Beowulf rifle.

“There’s got to be a way across,” Masters gritted out, his face grim. “That’s Ogrook Street. If we cross here, it’s almost a straight line to the coast, with cover the whole way.”

“If you show yourself to
that
,” Alex told him, nodding to the street, where a few dozen figures were walking up and down repetitively, “they’ll be on you before you go fifty feet. Don’t be fooled by the way they’re stumbling, they may have a limited sense of balance, but they can move like the wind, given enough motivation.”

Masters nodded slowly. “All right. Jack, you’re in charge. Get them to the cutter.”

Jack Nelson shot him a surprised look.

“What the hell are you planning, Hawk?” Rankin demanded before the lieutenant could open his mouth.

“You need a distraction to get across, and I’m going to provide one,” he said, starting to inch back from the street. “When you get a chance to move out, don’t wait. Just go. I’ll either be along later, or I won’t.”

“Hawk! Hawk! Damn you,” Rankin hissed as his friend crawled back and was lost in the shadows of the buildings. “Goddamn it, things weren’t supposed to turn out this way.”

“What did you expect? You’re challenging the other side openly to a knuckle-dragging fistfight,” Alex said softly. “When it comes to knuckle draggers, they hold all the cards.”

Nelson was quiet for a moment, and then he shrugged. “So be it.”

“Djinn.”

Hale paused for a moment, stopping his near obsessive scanning of the area below and around his position to key open his throat mic.

“Go for Djinn,” he grunted.

“I’m going to set off a little distraction in a few minutes…,” Hawk Masters’s voice said over the comm. “When I do, you better pull out and join up with the team. They’re going to head north to the Coastie cutter up the coast.”

“What about you, boss?” Nathan asked.

“I’ll be behind you.”

Nathan was silent for a moment, tilting his head over to look through the starlight scope at the streets below.

“What kind of distraction?” he asked finally, a hint of disbelief entering his voice.
If you want a distraction everyone can walk away from, send in Keyz!

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

Oh, this does
not
sound good.

There wasn’t much he could say about it, though, so he just keyed his throat mic one more time. “Roger that.”

From his vantage, the town looked about as hostile as anything he’d ever seen in his life, and he’d spent over half of it in the ugliest places on earth. He didn’t know the name for what he was seeing, but he knew enough to know that these things weren’t human any longer. Some of them looked almost like real people until he got a real good look right into their eyes.

Even in the starlight enhancement he could see the fog of death in their gaze.

Boss. Don’t do something stupid.

Harold “Hawk” Masters was contemplating doing something really stupid.

Not that that was particularly out of the ordinary, given his history and predilection for getting himself into tight spots. His father had certainly been of the opinion that joining the navy was one of the stupider things a man could do with his life, right up until Hawk had “doubled down on stupid” in his opinion and signed up for BUD/S.

They’d stopped talking a lot after that.

That was probably one of the stupider things he could remember doing, from his own point of view, but that really was how his life went.

This, though, this would be his crowning moment of stupidity.

Well, at least I’ve been lugging this damned duffel bag around all night for a good reason.

He went east, less concerned now with hiding than with making decent time. That wasn’t to say that he was walking out in the open, but sprinting from cover to cover with a big honking duffle bag slapping against his legs wasn’t precisely the best definition of
stealth
.

Speed could sometimes be substituted for stealth, however, especially when you weren’t planning on staying under the radar for long anyway. He didn’t particularly want to be spotted, but if he was, he could turn that to his team’s advantage in a pinch.

Where do I make my play? Where oh where?

Actually, there wasn’t much of a choice. He had to clear Ogrook Street and, as a bonus, he decided that he’d shake up Apayauk as well. He was only a hundred feet or so from the intersection, such as it was, and he could already see the figures moving around in the shadows cast by the lights of nearby houses.

Masters raised his Beowulf rifle with one hand and fired from the hip as he kept moving, aiming for groups so that his lack of precision could be somewhat offset by the target-rich environment.

The fifty-caliber assault weapon roared in the night, sending four-hundred-grain rounds down range. Designed for stopping vehicles at checkpoints in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Beowulf’s cartridges weren’t easily diverted from their path once launched. Masters hoped that the weapon’s nickname from its developing firm—“monster stopper”—would prove to be true in a literal sense

The first round slammed through one of the vampires just off center, high in the torso. It would have been a lethal hit for a human—the round from the Beowulf actually made a sizeable hole in the desiccated corpse it had struck—but the thing didn’t go down. It turned toward the source of the gun reports just in time for the second round to strike home, this time literally exploding the thing’s upper-right arm in a spray of flesh and bone. The remainder of the arm struck the road and flopped about briefly as its one-time owner began to walk toward the shooter, just as round three bore right into its chest, dead center this time.

The vampire dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, the big fifty-caliber round obliterating its spinal cord in one destructive instant, sending it into the slushy mud of the packed-dirt road.

Masters didn’t slow down as he continued firing, skidding out into the open and heaving his duffle bag to the ground in front of him. Now with both arms free, he grabbed the front grip of the Beowulf and began choosing his targets a little more precisely.

At point-blank range, there was no question of the outcome with this weapon.

Fifty-caliber rounds slamming through the vampires’ skulls and brain matter tore heads from their bodies with no strain whatsoever, dropping them in their tracks before they could do more than turn in his direction. He emptied the magazine in another six shots, dropping the empty mag with a push of his thumb as he smoothly seated another ten-round box in its place.

“Here I am, you sons of bitches! You want a meal? Come and get it.”

CHAPTER

This was his idea of a distraction?

Hale would have been swearing if he weren’t so busy. While he was packing his kit up in preparation to pull out, his attention had been diverted by the distant boom of gunfire. He paused briefly to check through his spotter’s scope, and found himself in something of a quandary.

On the one hand, he’d been ordered to retreat…that is, to withdraw from the area in preparation for a more effective offensive…and yet on the other, his damned fool idiot of a commanding officer was about to get himself literally chewed up and spit out.

Ugh. That’s a foul thought right there.

The moment of indecision subjectively felt like an eternity, but objectively it only took a passing instant.

Who the hell am I kidding?
he thought as he dropped down again and slid his rifle out of the carry bag.
Never was smart enough to know when to quit. That’s why Nanaja will never leave me be.

He uncapped the lenses of his scope and settled in for the long haul.

One little piggy…two little piggies…three little piggies…time to go to market.

The school rooftop shook with the report of the fifty-caliber BMG rifle.

Well, Masters, you wanted their attention. Now you’ve got it. Any other bright ideas?

The Beowulf roared its defiance in a slow and steady staccato beat, and with every bark from its muzzle another target hit the ground and didn’t move again.

Part of his mind realized that he was firing on American citizens while on American soil. The subtle nightmare of it was only beginning to dawn, however, and in the heat of the moment he could ill-afford to pay it any attention. That they were already dead was a technical point—hell, it was the honest truth—but the horror of it still gnawed at him. This wasn’t what he’d signed up to do; it wasn’t how his life was supposed to run.

Yet this was where his journey had brought him. And it was likely where he would end.

So be it.

He’d drawn a crowd, so much so that his steady shooting with the Beowulf had resulted in a literal pile of corpses that the other corpses were climbing over instead of going around. Unfortunately, there were more of the walking dead than he had bullets for in his rifle, and they were getting closer.

He had seated his last magazine into the receiver when a whining sound tore past him, accompanied by the fleshy splats of a heavy bullet hitting targets. The boom that followed quickly on its heels left no doubt as to the origins of the heavy round that had just felled three vampires in their tracks.

“Nathan, you damned fool.” Masters swore as he brought his rifle up again. “Now they know where you are. I told you to get out.”

He was just talking to himself, of course; he didn’t bother with his comm because it didn’t matter anymore. He knew his job; Nathan most certainly knew his. Orders were obsolete from this point onward—now they could only take things one mad minute at a time.

The Beowulf roared again.

“That idiot.” Alexander Norton swore under his breath, using several choice words and phrases that didn’t translate directly into English.

“While I’m not disagreeing,” Jack Nelson growled, “I’m pretty sure that’s the distraction we were ordered to move on.”

“Go. I’m going to see if I can get the fool out of the rat trap he just tripped on himself,” Norton said, sounding more annoyed than anything else.

“We have orders,” Nelson began, only to be cut off.

“Don’t.” Norton shook his head. “I’m not one of you. I’m a civilian, and the reason I’m here is because I know more about this sort of shit than you ever could in your worst nightmares. So you go follow your orders, and I’m going to go see if I can keep a friend from being turned into a snack food. To each his own, yes?”

Alex straightened up, walking away from the group with a calm, casual manner that just seemed so wrong given the situation. Nelson swore, but finally just shook it off.

“Fine. The rest of you, move!” he growled, pointing north, up the middle of a cluster of houses. “Double-time. Go.”

Derek Hayes and Mack Turner nodded, gathering up an increasingly shell-shocked Judith Andrews between them as they followed Lieutenant Nelson. Behind them, however, Eddie Rankin hesitated and cast a glance after Alexander Norton and the distant flashes of gunfire in the night.

Hesitation turned into motion, and in an instant he was off after Norton. Nelson noticed him go, but suppressed the urge to order him back. He doubted it would do any good, and if there was one thing he’d learned about command, it was that you never gave an order you didn’t expect to be obeyed.

Not only was it pointless, but it literally destroyed discipline when the troops saw you standing around like a schmuck with your thumb up your ass while the person you were trying to command flipped you the bird.

Alex ambled down the slush-and-mud-covered road, not breaking stride for anything. Rankin caught up with him quickly, but the man in black barely glanced at him.

“You have a plan?”

Alex shook his head. “Not even a ghost of one.”

“Good. At least it’s not just me.”

“Hold that thought for a moment, will you?” Alex asked as he paused at a driveway. He turned and walked over to the house’s door, waving over his shoulder. “Be just a minute.”

Rankin watched nervously, checking around to see if they’d been spotted as Alex fiddled with the locked door. In a matter of seconds, he opened it with a flourish and disappeared inside. After a few moments, he was back, walking toward Rankin with a couple of objects in his hands.

He tossed one to Rankin, who caught the crucifix on reflex and goggled at it.

“You must be joking.”

“Nope,” Alex said cheerfully. “A vital part of every vampire hunter’s kit.”

“I never took you for a Christian, Alex.”

“Oh, gods forbid.” Alex rolled his eyes. “It has nothing to do with that.”

Rankin hefted the cross in his hand. “How do you figure?”

“The cross is what makes the difference, my friend, not the crucifix,” Alex chided him as he gestured down the road. “Shall we?”

“What’s the difference between a cross and a crucifix?”

“A cross is the ancient Celtic symbol for the sun,” Alex told him as they walked, “and a crucifix is how Romans murdered the filth of their empire, a few potential exceptions aside. Which of those do you honestly believe is likely to have a more profound effect on a vampire?”

He checked the cross in his hands again. “So it’s really a symbol of the sun?”

“Really.”

“Huh. I guess you learn something new every day.”

“Quite. Now, I believe we’re about to become busy.”

Rankin scowled as several shapes lurched out of the shadows in their direction. “How effective is this thing?”

Alex shrugged, tucking his own cross into his belt. “Honestly? I would lead with the gun.”

“Speaking my language.”

Rankin followed Alex’s example, sliding the cross into his belt before adjusting his grip on his Beowulf, bringing the weapon up to his shoulder. The big rifle roared, its recoil a satisfying comfort against his shoulder as he and The Black walked into the night.

Out!

Masters tossed the Beowulf aside, the big-hero gun spent now. He drew his Smith and Wesson 500 in the same motion, thumb cocking back the hammer on the five-round revolver.

One-handed, the big gun was hardly an ideal weapon, but the half-inch-diameter rounds packed enough power that he was willing to forgive the hammer-blow recoil and blowtorch cylinder exhaust. All the more so when the first round out of the heavy pistol split the skull of his target with almost the ease of the Beowulf.

It was unfortunate that he could only do that four more times.

Time to break out the big guns.

He knelt down, firing another round out of the pistol as he pulled open the zippered section of the duffel with his off hand.

His third shot, a little low, tore through a vampire’s jaw and effectively decapitated it, though the head was still technically attached when it fell to the ground.

Masters switched to a Weaver’s grip on the pistol, emptying it with two more rounds placed as fast and precisely as he could manage considering the recoil, and then the Smith too hit the ground, abandoned after it had served its purpose.

His hand closed around the synthetic grip of the gun in the bag and he drew it out as he rose to his feet, exposing the AA-12. The Auto Assault–12 had a thirty-two-round drum magazine already attached, and the only regret he had about lugging the damned thing around all this time was the fact that he hadn’t loaded the drums with slugs.

Alas. Luckily, it’s not going to make one ounce of a difference at this range.

The full-automatic shotgun roared to life as it came up to his shoulder, and the night was filled with fire and rage.