The Flood (31 page)

When they hit the ground floor, they found it had the virtue of still being secure against the mountain of dead outside trying to bust in. But on the downside, it was a total, raging, lethal, inferno – at least in the direction of the cafeteria and that linen closet. Luckily, they were heading the other way, toward the main entrance. Actually, that was the only way it was remotely possible to go, without burning to death to the last man. Even heading away from the fire, they were at serious risk of going down from smoke inhalation.

Staggering through the dark, acrid, choking clouds, stabbing or whacking at the odd bat still dive-bombing them, dodging mottled smoldering arms reaching and grasping at them through smashed-out windows, forward they went. Pred paused to field-goal-kick a hairless, blackened, and smoking baboon fifty yards back down the hall and out of sight into the conflagration behind them. And the six exhausted operators ran until they were finally within sight of the lobby.

Smoke choking them, fire cooking their asses from behind, they got there just in time to see the doors and most of the front wall explode, disintegrate, collapse, and disappear as it was violated by the hurtling MRAP – not only knocking down the wall, but pushing crushed and maimed dead humans and baboons ahead of it and under its tires. How it had stayed on four wheels through all that was anybody’s guess, but the thing had awesome power and stability, plus weighed fifteen tons.

“Sweet!” Pred said. “Thirty thousand pounds of MRAP definitely beats five thousand pounds of baboon.”

“Touché,” Juice agreed, dashing ahead of the group.

Even Henno seemed to admit this was a lovely sight. It looked like: salvation.

And then the structure shuddered around them. And the hospital started coming down on their heads.

The MRAP crashing into it had started a collapse of the whole building.

* * *

“Again with this napping bullshit!” Pred shouted, spitting out plaster dust, and heaving away cinderblock stones no normal man could budge, never mind lift, much less send flying. He was frantically digging out his friend – Juice, in the lead, had disappeared under the initial collapse. Handon and Henno ran forward to help, while Homer pulled rear security, firing slowly and steadily with his pistol at the heads of flaming humans and apes that came lurching out of the burning end of the building.

As soon as they got Juice dug out, Pred confirmed he was breathing – though, sure enough, knocked cold again – then squatted down, picked up the 200-pound commando like a rag doll, threw him over his shoulder, and squat-pressed back to a standing position using his tree-trunk legs.

Handon was already assessing whether the MRAP could be salvaged. But even the massive engine on that thing was unlikely to be able to pull it free of half a collapsed hospital. Moreover, they couldn’t even get to it through the mass of debris. It was barely visible at all – mainly the outline of its hood and grille.

Worse, the collapse had partially opened up this side of the building to the singularity outside. And the dead wasted no time in clawing their way in and lurching at the half-stunned operators of Alpha.

And no sooner did it become clear that they couldn’t stay here, than the building, or the gods, or the ZA itself, informed them that they
really
couldn’t stay here. Because the collapse of the main entrance wing wasn’t an isolated event, a single downfall. It was just the start – of more and worse to come. Two years into the ZA, this building, along with many or most around the world, was like a house of cards. Not just flammable, but unstable. Somebody should have thought of this – like Zorn, before driving an MRAP into it.

More plaster dust fell, followed by chunks of concrete and insulation.

“Go, go, go!” Handon shouted. “Displace!”

Neither Pred nor Henno had time to comment on the fact that the only place they had to displace to, running away from the collapsing side of the building, was the furiously burning side of the building. But the ceiling above them was trembling and buckling, and they had to be anywhere but here. Homer leading, Handon in the rear, Predator shaking the Earth as he ran with Juice on his shoulder, they all headed back toward the inferno.

And they were able to make it as far as the stairwell – somehow.

But again, they had little or no choice. The hospital was progressively coming down behind them. Now they mounted the stairs again, this time everyone panting and laboring and struggling for breath – not least Pred, who was carrying an additional 240 pounds of commando, armor, gear, and beard.

As the whole stairwell shuddered around them, Homer said, “On the upside, the collapse may put the fire out.”

“On the upside, fuck you!” Even Pred didn’t know where he found the breath for that. But he felt it had to be said.

As the stairs bucked beneath them, and the walls on either side waved, Handon shouted, “I don’t think the interior of this place is gonna last much longer!”

The others didn’t know what the hell he was suggesting – until he led them up onto the landing of the second floor, paused a fraction of a second at the double doors to pull his Vorax knife free and slide it back into his chest rig, then carried on leaping up to the third floor. There he yanked open the door and plunged into the hallway, sucking in huge lungfuls of relatively oxygenated air, and checked the corridor to the right – which was back in the direction of the rolling collapse.

And it was still rolling toward them.

“Get outside!” Handon bellowed. “Get up top!”

The ceiling all the way down to the right had fallen and opened that stretch of hallway up to the night sky, which was now illuminated with leaping flames. The others could almost see how it was some kind of pinhole of escape – so they followed Handon, looping back on themselves, back toward the main entrance but two levels above it now. They clambered out onto a shifting and descending landscape of rubble, and turned around just in time to see the section of hallway they’d been in three seconds ago collapse into itself. They would have been dead if they had stayed there.

But now they were standing on the slope of a mountain of collapsing building, already down to probably the original level of the second floor.

Behind them and on both sides, they could see the multi-species horde had already started climbing up the hill toward them, hands, paws, teeth and fangs all grasping and gnashing. Ahead and up above them, they could see the building-top pavilion was still somehow standing. And standing erect on top of it was a human figure – backlit by the rising and rippling flames burning ferociously behind her.

And this figure was holding a Mk12 Special Purpose Rifle.

Her shooting posture absolutely perfect.

* * *

Ali was rubble surfing.

She’d already loaded up one of the last four mags she’d been hoarding for the Mk12. Now she took her first shots – on the crispy critters with their hair burned off and flesh charred black that were leaping up toward her teammates from ground level, a three-sided noose closing on them in real time. Some of them were primates. Some were humans. Ali didn’t give a shit.

She dropped them all, one after another, taking rapid but measured and perfect headshots. The movement of the fast ones was a problem, but the range wasn’t – they were all inside of a hundred yards. Unfortunately, their proximity
was
a problem for everyone else on the team, who were staggering and climbing, making their way up to Ali’s high ground, because there was nowhere else to go, and because the undead floodwaters were rising around them on all sides.

And they were not currently in great shape to defend themselves. They were down to three combat-effective shooters – Juice was out cold, and Predator was carrying him, while swinging his bat with his free hand. The other three were nearly or completely out of ammo and doing what they could to defend the group with melee weapons.

And the tide of dead was rising up all around.

So Ali shot and shot and shot, looking like death incarnate with the licking flames rising into the black sky behind her, and despite the whole building slowly bouncing and settling below. Luckily, for now, the roof of the pavilion, her overwatch point, was still intact – even if all the levels of building beneath it were doing a slow-motion collapse under her feet. The pillars that held it up were somehow still standing. Ali just had to bend her knees and use her leg and core muscles for stability.

She needed a stable firing platform.

Because she was the last man shooting – and the only hope the others had of reaching her. God only knew what they were going to do when they got there.
Ascend directly to heaven, maybe
, she thought with a snort. But, then again, being alive thirty seconds from now beat the alternative. Meanwhile, the flood waters of the dead continued to exceed each previous high-water mark, subsuming their little rubble island. Soon Ali’s perch would be the only spot left high and dry.

Or maybe not.

“Ali, get the hell off that thing!”
Handon somehow found the time and breath to yell at her on the radio.
“It’s coming down!”

“And when it does,” Ali replied, dropping her empty mag out and replacing it in less time than it takes to describe, “I’d rather be on top of it than underneath. You just watch your own asses – and keep moving.” She dropped a particularly agile runner that was racing up the piles of stone toward Handon’s blind side.

It was only when the whole area on the ground below and to her left erupted in rippling chained explosions that Ali noticed Juice was back on his feet. He must have regained consciousness – because he was now calling in air strikes, talking the F-35 on and blasting the ever-living shit out of the horde on that side.

Evidently that was their escape plan – try to clear one side of the structure, then jump off it into the flood and swim for it. Climbing or dropping down from a collapsing building didn’t bode particularly well for their health or safety – not much more than being on foot, out on the ground, in the middle of the undead three-ring circus that was Hargeisa for as far as the eye could see.

But it was something.

Ali kept shooting smoothly at the creatures leaping at her teammates’ backs and sides, as the pavilion continued to jerkily settle beneath her, surfing that rooftop on breaking waves of falling rubble. It was starting to look like she might ride it all the way down to the ground. But one thing she knew: she’d be shooting all the way down
.
Covering her teammates as they climbed up to her.

More rippling explosions went in – close enough that she felt the heat on the left side of her face.

She changed mags again.

Two left.

Blowing Up Hell

JFK - CIC

Sergeant Lovell and Dr. Park stared at the drone video on the monitor with their mouths hanging open. Neither could remotely believe what it was showing them. Wesley was down on the ground in the center of a maelstrom of fire and death.

Finally Park looked over to Lovell and said: “He’s not going to make it.”

Lovell stood up so fast that he knocked his chair over on its back.

“Fuck watching it on TV,” he said.

And he charged across the room toward the drone control station.

* * *

Why the bloody hell couldn’t that thing have come down ON the water tank!?
Wesley thought bitterly, as he lay on the ground and fired his pistol to the rear to defend himself. The Zulus’ and runners’ heads were bare to him as they dragged themselves forward, and thankfully they moved a hell of a lot slower this way, so he emptied his pistol, reloaded, and emptied it again.

Looking forward now, he could see the new Holocaust-like mini-inferno blazing away right between the water tank and the burning power/desal plant itself – caused by the impact of the space-launched fuel vat that had almost ended him – and also right where he needed to fire his rocket. If it had come down fifty feet farther on, the damned vat would have done the job itself, smashing into the water tank and ripping it open. As it was, now there was no way he could do the job. As gargantuan as the tank was, he could barely see it at all, never mind the side facing the plant that he needed to shoot. The vat impact point, and resulting inferno, were directly between him and it.

At least the runners immediately behind him were all dead.

But he was still on fire, Wesley belatedly realized, looking down and checking himself out. He could see the little burning patches on his suit, but not feel them. Maybe it was the fire-retardant suit. Or maybe the heat from the main inferno, and the new smaller but more intense one, were already blasting him with so much energy that all of him just felt like it was on fire. Nonetheless he patted around his body, frantically trying to put himself out.

“Wesley! Wesley!”

“I’m alive!” he shouted into his chin mic. “But I don’t have a shot!”

He cursed under his breath. He could try to shoot the missile straight through the inferno. But what were the odds of that working? Even if he successfully aimed at what he couldn’t see, surely a missile was going to blow up at some point while traveling through fifty feet of fire?

“What about you?”

“I’m in position – on the other side!”

“Then do it – take your shot!”

Pause.
“I’m not sure these little grenades will do the job! The skin of that tank looks tough! I think you’ve got to fire that rocket!”

Oh, for God’s sake…
She’d sung a different tune when she invited herself along for this. “I can’t! I can’t get through the fire! There’s no choice – you’ve got to try it. Or I’ll try to come around to your side!”

Sarah looked up – he’d have to run all the way around the huge tank, then crosswise against the heavy flow of dead bodies streaming in from the west. Even if he made it, there just wasn’t time.

“There’s another option – I can fight your fire for you!”

“What!?”