Strands of Sorrow (18 page)

Tungsten is very dense, very massive and very hard. Besides being used as the filament in incandescent light bulbs, its other major uses were as tank armor and, not coincidentally, armor-piercing rounds.

Thus instead of just going through
one
body, the thumb-sized ball bearings went through
all
the bodies.

The advanced grapeshot turned a broad cone into red mush from just beyond the muzzle to the buildings a hundred meters away. And, in fact, penetrated the buildings’ concrete walls. Blood flew into the air in a solid haze of crimson pea-soup fog that settled lightly over the charging tank.

The few infected who had survived to climb on the forward glacis were blasted off by the overpressure wave and driven under the treads.

“DRIVER,” Faith screamed. “STOP! PIVOT PORT! . . . PIVOT STARBOARD!”

The pivoting tank solved the problem of infected trying to climb on from the sides.

“
FORWARD
!”

Faith slewed the turret to port with one hand, still firing the cupola gun to starboard with the other . . .

“Push
me
again . . .” Faith sang. “This is the end . . .
ONE
NOTHING WRONG WITH ME! TWO
NOTHING’S
WRONG
WITH ME
!
THREE
TARGET CONCENTRATION!”

“TARGET!”

“FIIIIIRE! PIVOT
STARBOARD
, TARGET CONCENTRATION . . . LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR . . . !”

* * *

“Pick it up a little bit, Co,” Commander Sanderson said. He
could
hear the music as it turned out and thought the choice was bloodily appropriate. “I’d rather not get splashed with the blood.”

They were orbiting at five hundred feet. Blood wasn’t really an issue. Bouncers from the canister might be, though. Really he just needed some space from the insane carnage below. The square along the river, a remaining undeveloped plot that was a good hundred meters wide and a half a klick long, was being traversed by the rampaging tank, the crowded infected churned under the seventy-three ton juggernaut and turned to sausage.

“Aye, aye, si—” the copilot said, then turned sideways and puked.

“My bird,” Sanderson said, adding collective and pulling away from the carnage. “Chief, can you keep tracking?”

“Still on it,” the crew chief said in a strained voice. “But I’m gonna have to ralph . . .”

“Fortunately, I don’t have to clean the bird,” Sanderson said, then paused. “Oh . . . craaa—” He couldn’t release the controls so it went in his lap.

* * *

It was the middle of the night at the recently cleared San Clemente NALF. But General Montana wasn’t going to miss this for worlds.

He grinned as the tank practically jumped off the converted barge and began laying waste to the crowded infected.

“There’s my girl,” the diminutive general purred. “There’s my sweet, fell death. Damn, if I was just fifty years younger . . .”

* * *

“Did we have a count?” Galloway asked, setting his waste basket back on the floor.

The one real issue of an underground fortress was air handling. The Hole, with limited access to truly fresh air, always had a vaguely unpleasant smell of reprocessed humanity.

Everyone who had the access and the spare time, which was most of the base, had gotten up early to watch the landing. Faith’s antics were generally good entertainment.

It now had a very distinctive odor of vomit.

They were getting “take” from the camera installed on the covering Seahawk. Long before the NRO had come up with a very good algorithm for counting crowds. Police and “organizers” might not have a clear picture of how many people were at a gathering, but the National Reconnaissance Office was about reality. The same algorithm could be applied to any overhead video. And it was not a “guess.”

“Quarter million, sir,” General Brice said. “They were packed cheek to jowl. Don’t have hard numbers, now, but figure ten percent survivors.”

“The efforts to refurbish a tank no longer seem to be an indulgence,” Galloway said. “Jesus wept.”

“Let me revisit the issue of Buffs and cluster bombs, sir,” Brice said.

“Noted.”

* * *

“Jesus Christ,” Sergeant Hocieniec said over the radio. “They’re
running
!”

“Copy that,” Januscheitis said. “They’re fucking running!”

Zombies never ran. It was an axiom. Betas might hide, but the alpha swarms just kept coming. They’d waded through massed fire from the helos in London and never even slowed down except to feed.

Now the infected in the maelstrom of the square had had enough. They knew there were bigger and badder predators and they’d just met one. Much bigger and much badder. They were just confused by helicopters shooting them, the same with fire from gunboats. The M1, blaring music and bellowing fire, was something that even the most primitive primate brain could recognize as “Dragon.” The beast that was beyond reality, supernatural in its power. The monster in the cave.

They had only the animal instinct and some vague understanding of past. They’d packed into the square, closing with each other in the belief that in numbers they could swarm the prey as they had so many times before and kill it and feast. Individuals were often lost. Which was food for the rest. But with enough numbers, they’d always triumphed before. Now they were trying to get away, prey themselves. But the iron and uranium giant would have none of it. They were crushing themselves, trying to get away, but it seemed there was nowhere to flee . . .

“There’s not enough gators in the world to clean this up,” Hooch radioed.

“Gators, hell,” Januscheitis said. “I’m not sure the wash point operators are going to let her in till she at least rinses off.”

* * *

“BEACHHEAD IS CLEAR,” Faith radioed. “DO YOU COPY? MOVE FORWARD!”

“Roger,” Januscheitis radioed. The square wasn’t deserted, but the infected were trying to make it that way. Screw all the fresh carrion. There were better places to be.
Anywhere
. And it wasn’t so much “carrion” as blood pudding. “Moving forward at this time . . .”

* * *

“We’ve got a following again,” Faith radioed, watching the infected. “Slow it down; we need them to cluster.”

They’d started off with Trixie in the lead of the formation, running down the zombies. That had worked for about an hour. But the problem was, the infected from the square had run while more were still trickling in. Some of their “trickles” were more zombies than you got in a liner. And they tended, because the unit was moving, to end up behind the unit. When they occasionally had to slow down to negotiate through the choked roads, the zombies caught up and fell on the less powerful amtracks. That wasn’t a security problem but it was hard to kill the ones that were in close and even firing at the amtracks risked holing them.

So they had switched. Trixie was now trailing the unit with Staff Sergeant Januscheitis leading and, fortunately, navigating. And her turret was pointed to the rear. The light flow of infected they were running into as the tracks passed could be handled by the track guns or the Marines in the hatches.

While Trixie handled their “followers.” In this case, several thousand infected in a mob. As the tracks slowed, the zombies charged, five thousand voices keening a discordant howl that even now sent a shiver down Faith’s spine.

“
Where’s the wonder, where’s the awe?”
Faith crooned hoarsely as the infected clustered behind them.
“Where are the sleepless nights I used to live for? Before the years take me I wish to see The lost in me . . .”

“Target concentration,” Faith said. She’d turned down the music. She had to. Her voice was already going from screaming orders.

“Target!” Decker said.

“Fire!”

“On the way!”

The center of the mob was taken out. That wouldn’t panic infected. It was only when the beast was in their midst that they panicked. There were more still coming forward. Faith slewed the turret to port, simultaneously opening fire with the commander’s gun.

“Target concentration . . .”

“Target concentration . . .”

“Coax . . .”

“Concentration cleared,” Faith radioed. “Roll it.”

She ceased fire as Decker finished off the last few surviving infected with the coaxial machine gun. It was only then that she realized they were rolling at a walking pace past a burned-out church.

“Someday, maybe, God will forgive us for this, Staff Sergeant,” Faith said.

“God already does, ma’am,” Decker replied. “We are saving people by this, ma’am. And these fallen we send on are already forgiven. How could God condemn them for being victims of a plague, ma’am? Or for any actions before entering this fallen state? They are, too, forgiven by the Grace of Our Lord. We are just filling the choirs of heaven, ma’am.”

“Duly noted, Staff Sergeant,” Faith said as Trixie sped up.

The unit rolled on, leaving the One Hundred Block of Duval Street strewn with offal . . .

“I wish to see what’s lost in me . . .”
Faith sang to the music, clearing up a few last infected with the fifty, her face stone.
“I want my tears back, I want my tears back NOW!”

* * *

Trixie rolled off the barge onto Blount Island as the sun was setting. She was still dripping. Not with blood, with water. Well,
and
blood. They’d stopped by Dames Island where there was a solid sandbar. Faith had taken the splattered tank down into the water and driven back and forth to get the worst of the mess off. The juggernaut wasn’t clean by any stretch of the imagination. There was a biological purée of meat, bone, brains and internal organs in every niche on the exterior and the lieutenant was still covered. But it was clean enough to run through the wash point.

“That was quite a probe, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said. He’d decided it was appropriate for him to be present for the landing. Very appropriate.

The unit had never retreated as planned for the “probe.” There’d been no need. They had swept through all of downtown Jacksonville. They couldn’t cover the entire sprawling city but they’d covered a lot of it. They’d even rearmed Trixie from stores carried in the amtracks. They’d only stopped when the sun was going down. And there’d been very few surviving infected left behind them. The densely populated areas they’d swept repeatedly.

“Downtown Jax orange cleared, sir,” Faith replied, saluting. “And Staff Sergeant Decker and Lance Corporal Condrey have something to report, sir.”

“Yes?” Hamilton said curiously as the lance corporal and staff sergeant popped their hatches.

Decker climbed off the tank in a much less robotic manner than had been his habit and walked up to the colonel. He snapped off a parade ground salute.

“Sir!” Decker boomed as Condrey fell into formation beside him. “Staff Sergeant Decker with a party of one, reporting aboard, sir.”

“Feeling better, Decker?” Hamilton asked, returning the salute.

“Sir, a Marine NCO should never publicly be disrespectful of the chain of command or superiors, sir,” Decker said, almost conversationally. “However, in the case of Lieutenant Klette, may the Staff Sergeant be so bold as to state that the useless fucker should have been fragged immediately upon reporting aboard, sir. I would recommend turning him into vaccine, but his stupid might rub off, sir.”

“Duly noted,” Hamilton said, shaking the NCO’s hand. “I’m more than prone to overlook that public statement and I’d like to welcome you and . . . the Lance Corporal? Aboard.”

“Feeling better, sir,” Condrey said. “The staff sergeant’s . . . When the staff sergeant went off about the fucking lieutenant, sir, I just . . . I used to dream, at first, about somehow strangling the damned lieutenant in his sleep, sir. Other than that, just hoping the wash point is up, sir. Trixie needs a serious wash down, sir. And I’m gonna need to go ever the systems real good. She’s had a hard day for her first date, sir.”

“Wash point is up, Lance Corporal,” Hamilton said cautiously. Decker seemed better but Condrey had simply . . . changed. He had gone from robotic to wild-eyed. “We made sure of that earlier today. Why don’t you two take her over and give her a nice bath while I debrief the lieutenant.”

“I thought he’d cracked, sir,” Faith said. “Decker, that is. Right before we rolled. Started
raging
about how bad an officer Lieutenant Klette was, sir. Almost crying. Then he was like ‘I’m up, LT. Ready to rock and roll.’”

“Happens occasionally with severe situational neurosis,” Hamilton said. “There will be after effects. He was functional for the mission?”

“Perfect, sir,” Faith said. “Couldn’t have a better gunner. Of course, he’s a staff sergeant so you’d expect him to be superb, sir. Condrey is also an excellent driver, sir.”

“The effect of the system was broadly noted,” Hamilton said. “General Montana sends his regards. ‘A Fine, Fell Day’ was the message he wished me to convey. Various ‘good jobs’ from others. Another letter of commendation for your file from Undersecretary Galloway.”

“Thank you, sir,” Faith said. “I think that the . . . effort of getting Trixie into operation was useful. The major issue is getting sufficient concentrations of infected to justify the power, sir. I would recommend at some point doing night sweeps, sir. Possibly without lights, using night vision gear, sir. The sound will carry farther. And if we use some of the IR flares, we can engage the infected while their vision is limited.”

“We’ll discuss that at the full AAR, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said. “Are you up for that?”

“I’m good, sir,” Faith said. “Tired. Sort of . . . washed out, sir. But I’m prepared to do my duty, sir. What I’d really like is a shower and a drink, sir.”

“You don’t drink, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said.

“I know, sir,” Faith said. “And times like this it really bites, sir.”

“Take time for the shower, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said, reaching out and plucking a tooth off the lieutenant’s shoulder and flicking it into the distance. “Definitely the shower . . .”