The Zero Dog War (17 page)

“It’ll have to be good enough. I want nothing left to chance. This goes off flawlessly.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said, nodding. “To make sure it happens with perfection.”

I stopped and looked at him. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to sound as arrogant as you just did.”

He only smiled. “You guys weren’t half-bad before I got here. Now you’re better.”

“Not half-bad, eh? Damning with faint praise, are you?” I could feel anger start to smolder.

He shrugged and seemed a little confused by my building anger. “You aren’t quiet professionals. But not many are.”

“You do this shit on purpose, don’t you? Again you’re implying my people are half-assers. Not like the big bad Special Forces cowboys.
They’re
consummate professionals.”

“How come every time I talk to you, the words come out wrong?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you’re choosing the
wrong words
? No, that can’t be it.”

He took a deep breath. “You’re protective of your people. I admire that.”

I opened my mouth to give a smart-ass answer and managed to bite it back. Barely. Using sheer unadulterated-steel willpower. Silence was the only way I’d avoid a stream of colorful profanity.

Jake looked out at the sprawling city lights. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Leading people. Being the one in charge, responsible for everything.”

I stared at the outline of his face against the harsh white glow of the halogen security lights and still didn’t answer.

“For me,” he said, “every time I’ve got people in a firefight, it’s like my heart’s in my mouth and if I dare bite down I’ll bite right through it. All of them counting on me to make the right choice. Depending on me to get them home again.”

I touched his arm, my fingers on his skin. He glanced at me, smiled and shook his head.

“Your skin is so warm,” he said. “The second thing I noticed about you.”

I bit off a snide quip before it could escape my mouth. After a moment I settled on something nonchalant, though I could feel my pulse beating so hard I could’ve tap danced to it. “What was the first thing?”

He laughed and shook his head again. I started to draw my hand away, but he reached out and caught it with one of his. And I let him.

“I know you see me as an unwanted complication. A problem, maybe even a threat. Perhaps I deserve it, the way DHS dumped me onto your team. But you need to know, I want this mission to succeed. I’ll do whatever I have to. I’m not here to make your life difficult, Andrea.”

Why was it when he said my name, my heart began to beat harder? Look at the hardcore mercenary captain now. One romantic starlit walk down to the aircraft hangars and she turned into a great big sentimental soft-serve ice-cream cone. And then she referred to herself in the third person. I laughed aloud at my own joke. He cocked his head, a quirk of a smile still on his lips and a question in his eyes.

I withdrew my hand from his and waved his unasked question off. “Nothing. Just the voices in my head.”

“You hear voices?”

“Let’s not talk about them now. It feeds their ego.”

He looked at me as if uncertain how serious I was.

“Oh, for God’s sake, I’m kidding,” I said. “You’re killing my routine.”

His face grew grim. “Then I apologize for saving the world from your comedy.”

I laughed, and he grinned. A gentle quiet fell between us. I shifted, trying to find something useful for my hands to do.

“All right,” I finally said. “No more sniping over who’s the better soldier. Let’s declare a fresh ceasefire since we have more important things to go over. Seeing this mission safely in the bag, for one.”

He nodded once. “Let’s get it on.”

“I hope you mean that figuratively because I’m busy right now planning to stave off a zombie uprising.”

“Pencil me in for later, then.” He grinned again, but it seemed more reflex than anything, as if his mind had already turned to the mission, where mine should’ve been. “I’ll go set up in the conference room. Bring Sarge and we’ll plan how to save the world.”

He turned and hurried toward the house. I didn’t follow, not yet, instead watching him go. I could feel the frown on my face, feel the groaning ache of a tension headache beginning behind my eyes. His words on leadership…well, they’d struck a chord with me, but I didn’t have time for Captain Sanders, dammit.

Tomorrow this ended, one way or another.

Chapter Fourteen: All Zombies Must Die!

Mercenary Wing Rv6-4 “Zero Dogs”

Bokor Gelzonbi Manufacturing Facility

SE Holgate Boulevard
, Portland, Oregon

1110 Hours PST April 16th

Go time.

The Bradley Fighting Vehicle raced down the street toward the Bokor Gelzonbi factory, engine roaring and our banner fluttering in the wind. The only thing missing was a bugle sounding
charge
or maybe “Ride of the Valkyries” theme music, although Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” might’ve fit the Zero Dogs better.

“Objective in sight,” Gavin said over the com. “Hold on to your pantyhose. We’re going in.”

No fence surrounded the factory, which boded well for the speed of our initial assault. The building stretched across a wide lot, two stories high in back, with white outer walls topped by black metal awnings. Large glass windows wrapped around the entire front side, and the street-facing grounds had been landscaped with well-manicured grass, bushes and evergreen trees. The loading dock dominated the building’s back end, which was a massive two-story rectangle of white cinderblock broken only by a few narrow reinforced windows and two diamond-plate stairwells that lead to swipe-card-controlled steel doors.

Last night Jake, Sarge and I had narrowed it down to two plans. In the first plan we blew a mousehole in the west side of the building—an expanse of wall with no windows—drove the Bradley through and deployed, repeating the tactics used in our last major assault. The second plan involved using the Bradley as heavy fire support and zombie suppression while the team penetrated the factory, hunted down Necromancer Hansen and destroyed the zombies. We’d settled on option two because I didn’t want the Bradley tied down and unable to provide rapid-fire support or facilitate a rapid retreat, should the situation demand it.

“Lock and load, people,” I said. “Weapons tight until we get inside. Let’s get this done and go for ice cream.”

“Roger that,” Sarge said, and a chorus of affirmatives echoed through my headset.

The building appeared empty. No sign of hostiles on the rooftop or at the doors. Only one car sat in the lot—a high-end Audi. A huge yellow school bus was parked at the opposite end of the building.

The Bradley roared toward the factory. I braced myself in the commander position atop the turret, hatch open, wind on my face and a smear of dead bug on my visor. We jumped a curb, crushed a shrub and approached at an angle to the loading bays. Twenty feet from the wall, Gavin turned us so the Bradley’s backend faced the building. The turret swiveled to cover the steel bay doors.

Sarge slammed down the ramp and charged onto the asphalt, his Heckler & Koch MP10 submachine gun locked against his shoulder. He swept the parking lot with the barrel as he advanced. He ran slightly hunched over, looking like a tank with a very tiny gun, though I knew he’d chosen the weapon for its minimal recoil and almost nonexistent barrel climb. In other words, it’d be excellent for headshots in close-quarters battle. Rafe loped along behind him, already in werewolf form, followed by Jake and Mai with a horde of ferrets surging around her ankles. I swapped helmets, climbed out of the turret and hopped off the backend. The ramp clanged under my boots. Hanzo came up beside me, dressed all in black with a red cross on his chest. He gripped his katana in one hand, and his healing aura flared in a sapphire nimbus around the other hand.

“Kill ’em all, Captain!” Tiffany yelled over the com. I found it a little startling to hear such a sultry voice, a voice made to purr in the sunlight and sigh in the moonlight, say something as unsexy as
kill ’em all
. Kind of like having the soothing voice of the GPS computer in a car say, “You drive like an asshole. Have a nice day.”

I glanced over my shoulder in time to see Tiffany give me a thumbs-up from inside the Bradley. She raised the ramp, and the Bradley sat buttoned up tight, our ace in the hole against the zombie zerg. A moment later the turret turned and the barrel of the chain gun pointed toward the door we planned to breach. Tiffany was on the guns instead of scouting since Hanzo had deployed with us. While we didn’t need a ninja (or even a delusional ninja-wannabe), we very well might need a medic.

We advanced toward the building in a line, Sarge on point, followed by Jake, me, Rafe, Hanzo and Mai with her horde of pets, each of us covering our Area of Responsibility, searching for hostile targets. Once I had to grit my teeth against skeeving out when Mai’s carpet of blue and silver ferret-looking creatures brushed my shins. Mai pulled them back with a gesture so none of us accidentally stepped on one of the things with their too-large eyes and twitching pink noses.

We reached the building and stacked up single file against the wall. Sarge had the entry covered with his MP10, Jake covered the front of the team with his pistol and shielding, and because the rest of the team lacked ranged offensive power, I covered the rear sector. I focused on controlling my breathing, keeping my heart rate slow and steady, even as adrenaline sizzled through my veins. As much as part of me hated the risk to my people, especially on entry when we’d all be charging through the death funnel at the doorway, another part of me loved this shit. Wallowed in the rush. Reveled in the stark challenge of life and instant death.

The steel access door stood at the top of a concrete incline, next to a battered loading bay door and a section of black railing. Sarge hurried up the ramp, and the rest of us followed close behind. No muzzle sweeping of friendly targets. We moved nice and tight. Even Mai’s pets stayed out from underfoot and made no sound.

Sarge signaled us to halt at the top of the ramp, and we took up defensive positions. He swung past the closed door to the opposite side of the threshold. Jake took the other side, with me pressed close beside him, a hand on his shoulder and the rest of the team parallel to the wall behind me.

Sarge slung his MP10 and faced the door. For a moment nothing visible happened, but I sensed the crackle of raw energy as he summoned spell fuel. He reached out with his index finger and began to trace a design on the gray steel door. Power hummed in the air. Where he touched the metal with his finger, dark purple lines etched deep into the steel, glowing with faint light and giving off wisps of black smoke.

Jake and I covered Sarge while he worked the spell, and Hanzo and Mai covered sectors facing out into the empty parking lot, giving us one hundred eighty degrees of cover with the wall at our backs. The spell design took less than ten seconds to complete, and when finished, resembled a group of sharp-angled hieroglyphs bordering the edge of a circle. Lines of power, still glowing purple, radiated from its center, and smoke curled from several places.

“Fire in the hole!” Sarge pressed back against the wall, unslinging his MP10 again.

The spell-drawing glowed brighter and the hum intensified, revving up to a jet-engine scream. The door imploded, crumpling like aluminum foil with a wretched screech that made my ears want to do a double Van Gogh and cut themselves off. A drift of sparks fell to the concrete like cherry blossoms on fire. A basketball-sized chunk of metal hit the floor with a
clunk
. The air smelled as if somebody had stuck a hot straightening iron into a bucket of molasses.

My turn. I conjured my own spell, forging highly flammable vapor into—

“Dammit, Rafe,” I snapped. “Stop panting down my vest with your dog breath.”

“Sorry, Captain.” It could be a challenge to understand Rafe in werewolf form, with all the growls and howls and such, but no one could miss those sad puppy-dog eyes.

A hungry, curious moan echoed from inside the dock. Shit, no time to waste.

I super-condensed the concentrated sphere of magefire and lobbed it into the open doorway. “One, two, three! Cover!”

Everyone turned away and shielded their eyes. The ball of magefire exploded in a dazzling burst of light brighter than three flash bangs, but without the concussive effect. “Go, go,
go!
” I yelled.

During an assault, the doorway was known as the fatal funnel—the chokepoint where the incoming team had the greatest chance of taking fire. We’d trained around Jake’s skills, and point, or number-one status, switched to him. He pushed straight into the room with the shimmer of his barrier curved out in front of him. Sarge swept around the threshold and moved to the right, clearing the hard corner. I moved through and to the left as soon as he vacated the doorway. The flat report of pistol shots rang out, followed by the single-shot pop of the MP10 on semi-auto. I flinched a little at the first shot, but I didn’t glance outside my tight AOR, which was the hard corner to the left. A blood-spattered male zombie staggered and bumped against the wall in my sector, blinded by my flash spell. I cut loose with a stream of fire, slamming the zombie off the cinderblock wall with the force of the magefire. I swept back, searching for new targets to engage as Sarge and I ran the walls.

The rest of the team cleared the entryway. A brief, violent cacophony of gunshots filled the air, mixed with surprised moans and crackling flames. The dock stank like charred bacon and decaying flesh.

Nine zombie corpses lay strewn about the cement floor, most with neat headshots. One still smoldered in a haze of greasy black smoke, my doing. Two had been torn to pieces by Rafe’s teeth and claws, and Sarge swept along behind him, putting bullets through the skulls of the chewed undead. One shot, one kill, and making sure dead stayed dead.

A stumbling mass of fur moaned piteously in the far corner, near a forklift flipped on its side. It took me a moment to recognize a zombie beneath the full assault of Mai’s ferret horde. The ferrets seemed to drool some kind of corrosive saliva, because the zombie began to smoke and dissolve, filling the air with the smell of burned hotdogs. The loading dock’s aroma-fest of meat dishes was enough to make a person a born-again vegetarian.

“Clear!” Jake called out.

“Clear!” I answered, and the rest of the Zero Dogs rattled off the status of their sectors, all clear. An ominous quiet descended in the wake of the shooting fury.

The loading dock was perhaps a hundred feet long by a hundred and fifty feet wide. Stacks of pallets leaned against the far wall. Several pushcarts had piles of what looked like thin, flat squares of meat on them. I tried not to imagine what that meat might be. Three large metal bins sat near a huge roll of plastic wrap and a neon green pallet jack. Scarred stripes of red tape marked the cement. Clipboards hung from screws in the cinderblock, next to the chains of the loading bay doors. Another zombie floundered out of a small receiving office and wobbled toward us in a drunken zigzag.

A shot cracked through the air, followed by the chime of a brass shell casing bouncing off the cement. Jake dropped the last zombie with a perfect shot—center of forehead at sixty feet, be still my beating heart. My ears were still ringing from the gunfire. Spent shell casings littered the floor like gun-battle confetti.

A wide blue internal roll-down door sealed off the loading dock from the shipping warehouse and manufacturing floor. We stacked again and approached it. Jake took point, leading with the shimmer of his barrier in front and his pistol out as he swept hazard spots and obstacles. Sarge followed on his right, sweeping the cone of his sector, and I had Jake’s left side. Heat distortion warped the air around me. Rafe brought up the center. Congealed zombie blood stained his fur up to his elbows, a stark reminder that watching a werewolf attack was not for the faint of heart. Mai followed Rafe with her carpet of ferrets undulating along the cement beside her. Hanzo brought up the rear with his katana. He had his ninja mask up and all I could see were his eyes—the exultant, shining eyes of a teenager who had just
borrowed
the keys to the Corvette.

The roll door whirred upward when we drew close, triggered by a motion sensor. Our team pushed beyond the loading dock into a warehouse filled with shelves of gelatin boxes. Ready-to-ship plastic-wrapped pallets of gelatin boxes sat in rows near the dock entrance.

A skinny zombie with serious decay issues slumped behind a gray metal desk and stared at the psychedelic screen saver on a computer monitor. His bloodshot eyes rolled in their sockets and locked onto Jake. The zombie began to stand, gnashing his teeth. Jake dropped him with a single shot. The zombie fell back into the swivel chair, head thrown back, just another rotting worker sleeping through his shift and never mind the brain splatter on the wall.

Two female zombies stared at us with dull, dead eyes. Foamy saliva ran down their chins. They lurched toward us, moaning with an eagerness I always found disturbing.

“I got ’em,” I said. “Going hot.”

Mai and Rafe knew enough to give me space. Hanging too close to a pyromancer could result in singed fur and eyebrows. I conjured magefire and cut loose, sending a thick stream of flames roaring across the warehouse into the closest zombie, knocking it back into the second RCT. They burned like kerosene-soaked sausages in the seventh circle of Hell. I would’ve felt terrible about scorching them had they been living, sentient beings who could feel pain. Zombies didn’t count, because A) They were already dead and B) They tended to eat people. I was all for alternate lifestyles, but I drew the line at cannibalism.

Evidently there’d been no smoke detectors on the dock, but here the sprinkler system went off, spraying down sheets of water. A shrill alarm blared. The sound stabbed in my ear like an ice pick, making me want to duct tape a pillow over my head to drown it out. In no time we were soaked.