Last Stand Read online

  And those goals weren’t always compatible.

  Since the Captain’s death, I’d had to perform both roles myself – at once mom and dad for the platoon, comforter and enforcer. And I didn’t fucking like it. That I didn’t believe in the missions, that there was nothing to look forward to, or even hang on for, all of that made it a hundred times worse. And having to watch the brave young men I was responsible for go down one by one… that perhaps made it more than I could bear.

  But now it looked like we were reaching the end of this long, hopeless, shitty, post-Apocalyptic road. Maybe it was better that way. But then, just when I'd mentally grabbed the towel, and was hauling back my arm to throw it in the ring… just then, I looked up and saw a single figure running toward me, right through the middle of the Biblical downpour, human-spawned exploding hellfire, and towering dirt geysers below and behind us.

  Specialist Smith.

  * * *

  “Top! Sergeant Villegas wants to know if he should redeploy!”

  Villegas was leader of second squad. Most of his guys were still manning positions on the south wire, which wasn’t actually being attacked at the moment. Amazingly, Smith had made it all the way to our position, alive, to convey this message, which I’d doubted he would – he looked like a Michael Bay hero running in slo-mo through building-sized explosions. But as I mentally reviewed that image, I suddenly realized: the whole FOB wasn’t actually exploding. The mortars were really only hitting in open areas, between the buildings. I pointed this out to Chandler.

  “No shit,” he said. “They want to retake this shithole, not destroy it! Where the hell else they gonna go?”

  I squinted in thought, and then starting thinking out loud: “They’re not just trying to take us out with the mortars – they’re trying to bring the dead down on us. With the noise.”

  Chandler gave me his best sarcastic-bastard look. “Ya think? Of course that’s what they’re doing. They know eventually we’ll have to stick our necks out to engage the dead, to keep ’em from piling up over the walls. And then they can cut us to fucking ribbons.”

  He was right. I knew he was. Still – I had to know for sure.

  Corporal Avarone picked that instant to tumble into the now rather crowded guard tower, but not in possession of the Raven I’d tasked him with getting. A little hand-launched mini-UAV with a four-foot wingspan, great for ISR at the platoon level, it was more toy than warplane – but it wasn’t that small. I would have seen it.

  “I couldn’t get the fucking engine to start!” Avarone shouted, rolling on his back. “But these bad boys look charged!”

  He handed me a hard case, about laptop size – and when I opened it, inside I found 24 tiny little ornithopter micro-UAVs wedged into a foam rubber insert, like jewelry, along with a pair of AR (augmented reality) glasses.

  Holy shit, I thought. They made this work, too.

  Last I’d heard, it was just another sci-fi DARPA project. I put the glasses on, hit the power switch – and as everything inside the case lit up, I heaved the contents out the window. The two dozen little cyber-fireflies scattered out into the storm, but then took flight – self-organizing into an expanding cloud, which blew out over the battlespace. I settled down with my back to the wall and squinted into the AR displays on the inside of the glasses.

  Nothing. I could see nothing but the other guys in the tower.

  And then I mentally punched myself for being a retard and spun around 180 degrees, facing the front Hesco wall – and there they were: the CG ghosts of dozens of Taliban fighters, hunkering down and shooting from behind cover. Except their cover was no longer concealment – at least not from me.

  The swarm of autonomous ornithopters flitting over and around their positions was now transmitting two dozen live video feeds back to the base station… which assembled them all into a 3D AR space map of the enemy positions – and, finally, overlaid all of it right in front of my eyeballs. Effectively, I was peering straight through the Hesco, behind rocks, and over escarpments, watching the enemy’s every damned move. More robed shooters kept flickering into the scene from nothing, which told me the bugs were still moving outward and scanning more ground – but I’d seen enough.

  As Chandler predicted, these assholes weren’t advancing anymore. They were hanging back, shooting from safety – and waiting to let the dead do their dirty work for them.

  “Yeah,” I said, giving Chandler the glasses. “They’re totally waiting for the dead to draw us out.”

  He put the glasses on, panned his head from side to side, taking it all in… and then executed a no-look grenade toss out the window, presumably perfectly aimed – then stuck his hand up and flipped the bird after it, risking getting his middle finger shot off. Which was presumably worth it.

  I shouted it at him again. “Okay, so drawing us out to fight the dead then sniping our asses would be effective – but temporary! What the fuck are they going to do with a base that’s the center of an undead singularity? They’d just end up with the same damned problem they stuck us with.”

  “Beats the shit out of me!” Chandler said. “I just work here.”

  This, too, presented something of a mystery. If the enemy were going to put on a free dead-guy festival right at the walls of the outpost, that kind of presumed they had some way of destroying them all later, so they could move back in.

  And then… and then… I looked up – at the elephant in the guard tower. It was that big-ass sentry gun, with its even bigger ammo bay, which I guessed held a single 5,000-round belt. That was a whole lot of fuck-shit-up, particularly when deployed on already half-rotted bodies. Plus there were five of these things. And suddenly I felt a fleeting surge of hope—

  Which lasted for about two seconds, until I remembered the manual controller for the sentry guns back in the TOC – and its current status as melted-plastic conceptual artwork. Which meant, with no way to operate the guns, we were still fucked.

  “Top!” Smith shouted. “What’s the plan? What do we do?”

  I took a breath, and looked down and across at the bright-eyed, resolved, and resolutely hopeful young man crouching in the eye of this insane, lethal hurricane, my eyes locking with his. And behind his face, I could still somehow see Cusas’s – shining with love, even at the point of his death, and telling me it was all okay. And after that, for some reason, all I could think about was one thing.

  That, with Smith still alive, and trapped here in this horrific shit-show with us, there was somehow more on the line. More to play for. More at stake. And more at risk. Something infinitely valuable. Of course, each of my men’s lives were equally precious, and equally priceless. And I knew that my hopelessness and despair – which on some level had made me give up on the team, mentally resign all of us to oblivion – was inexcusable. Unforgivable, really. But, with Smith, for some reason, I couldn’t do it. There was some mental block. Even when nothing else felt like it mattered… even when I had given up on myself, and was maybe even given up on Two Bravo…

  I still couldn’t give up on him.

  And then all the explosions, moaning, and bullet thwacks faded away into a kind of muffled, peaceful silence. And, in that silence, what I saw in my mind’s eye was… that documentation binder, tucked in beside the sentry-gun terminal in the TOC.

  “Smith,” I said. “You’re on me.”

  * * *

  Running back the other way through a cataclysmic and blistering mortar barrage, one you only just ran through and somehow survived, felt like a special form of madness. But that’s exactly what we did, Smith and I cradling our weapons and covering up our heads, sprinting like Special Olympians back toward the TOC.

  But with one stop first – the HLZ, and the Valor tilt-rotor.

  Even with shit blowing up left and right, the aircraft still looked intact – a few shrapnel scores, but structurally sound. She was a tough old bird. I hauled open the side hatch and pulled Smith inside with me. The airframe would provide a little cove
r from the metal death storm outside. But that wasn’t why I wanted us in there.

  “Drop your pack, rack, and body armor,” I said. Then I opened up the Tuff Box of liquid-Kevlar assault suits, and yanked out one that looked his size. “Get your ass into this.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I fucking said so.” I took a deep breath, and then softened a little. We could even be heard in here without hollering. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Because we’re not gonna lose you. Not now. Not after everything.”

  Still not really understanding, but trained to follow orders, Smith kitted down. But as he pulled the $100,000 suit over his fatigues, he locked eyes with me across the dim cabin. And I realized, if I was seeing my own expression reflected back at me, it couldn’t have been good.

  “Hey, Top,” he said, his voice also softer. “You okay?”

  I exhaled, for what felt like the first time in a long time. “I’m just fine,” I said. “We’re all gonna be fine. Come on.”

  We made it back to the TOC alive, circling around behind it long enough to hand-crank the diesel power generator. Then we tumbled in the front door, miraculously still upright and unperforated.

  And just in time for the next miracle.

  * * *

  Uron, as always, looked nonplussed. Watching me fire up the sentry-gun terminal, he said, “They’re at the walls, aren’t they?”

  “The dead? Yeah,” I said, largely ignoring him while I worked. “But the Taliban are still up on the ridge lines.”

  “Can the sentry guns engage them at that range?”

  “I’m not engaging them,” I said, moving the mouse toward the five big GO HOT buttons in the middle of the screen.

  “Who are you engaging, then?”

  I clicked all five buttons, one after another. “The dead.”

  From all around us came the whine and roar of shrieking minigun fire – 30,000 rounds per minute of 7.62mm, or 500 every second, blasting outward from all five guard towers.

  “Wait,” Uron said. “Who the fuck is controlling those?”

  “No one,” I said. “No one’s controlling them.” I flipped open the binder of documentation to the back page, and the drawings of local dead guys, their postures contorted by the virus. “The fucking Taliban reprogrammed the AI. To recognize and target the dead.”

  Uron’s expression went from confused to disbelieving – but then melted into awed acceptance. I never found out if he spoke or read Arabic, but I’d bet my last nutsack the words “gait analysis” appeared somewhere on the page he was staring at. The dead definitely moved differently from the rest of us. And I’d long ago learned not to underestimate this enemy. Even after the end of the world…

  They continued to learn and adapt.

  * * *

  By the time I got back to the northern-most guard tower, its minigun had run dry, and I could hear the other four spinning down, as well. All 25,000 rounds had been run through the guns’ collective thirty barrels, which now smoked and glowed red, all in less than a minute.

  Even my run back to the tower had been more pleasant this time around, as the enemy had finally paused their mortar barrage. Maybe it was out of respect for our epic badassery; maybe they were out of mortar rounds; or maybe they just realized they’d been outmaneuvered – their attempt to bring the dead down on us check-mated, with their own hacked software. And with our American hardware.

  When I climbed up inside the tower, looked out, and surveyed the field… the area beyond the walls looked like a meat landfill. Like a slaughter house had gone critical and melted down. Like we’d opened a portal to some level of Hell so profane and obscene even Dante never imagined it. Hundreds of twice-dead bodies lay in piles, twisted in awkward poses, cut to pieces, oozing gallons of viscous black gunk onto the rain-lashed ground. Some hadn’t been destroyed by headshots, but were just taken apart too badly to locomote.

  Hundreds of them lay in piles – but not all of them. A few had survived. And, even then, more were coming, stumbling down from the heights. And that wasn’t even our biggest problem. Because the living were also back.

  And they were pissed.

  * * *

  First they resumed hammering our guard-towers with small-arms fire. But they were clearly done fucking around, because they followed that up with massive volleys of rocket attacks, as well as more mortar bombardment – but white phosphorous rounds this time. Maybe they hadn’t originally wanted to kick the sandcastle down. But we had forced their hand.

  And this time, our third scrap, they were coming hard.

  “Man,” Chandler said. “I knew it. Shit always comes in threes.”

  “I thought shit rolled downhill,” I said.

  Instead of answering, he just gestured vaguely at the vertical terrain that towered up on all sides of us, his meaning clear. We were right at the bottom of a goddamned bowl, and shit was rolling down on us from every possible direction.

  This proved to be the last thing Chandler never said to me.

  The next flight of rockets slammed into the front of our tower, killing Staff Sergeant Chandler instantly. It was down to dumb-ass luck, and who happened to be sitting where. Most of the front-facing Hescos got torn away entirely, and everyone inside was blown out the back and down onto the muddy ground below. Chandler ended up lying full on top of me. I checked his pulse and breathing, just to verify what I already knew. He was gone. Half his thoracic cavity was gone. I rolled him off me, scrabbled around for my weapon – then found Avarone, lying under a pile of singed and smoking sandbags.

  “Come on,” I said. “We gotta fall back.”

  He nodded and looked around. We could both see the unrelenting fire pouring into the guard towers to either side of ours – as well as our guys tumbling out of them while they still could. Thank God they were faring better than we had. I shouted and waved, motioning everyone back toward the TOC, over more exploding ground. It was while running through this all-new hellstorm that I realized the mortar rounds were Willy Pete – and that they were targeting the buildings this time. The structures were reinforced. But not fireproof.

  And dozens of them now burned.

  * * *

  As we sprinted out into the open area of the HLZ, I was surprised to see the Valor still intact. This was also probably down to dumb luck, but who knew – maybe the Taliban had learned how to fly the damned thing, and were keeping it safe. Nothing was shocking anymore.

  But the bird was now our own last hope.

  We covered the final hundred meters through shrapnel and fire and death to discover that, equally miraculously, the TOC somehow wasn’t on fire. Yet. Uron and his pilot were both inside, along with most of second squad, who hadn’t needed to be told to fall back and reinforce the Alamo.

  You could always feel a defense collapsing.

  “Hey,” I shouted, looking around at the dinged-up, dripping, mud-and-soot-covered Rangers. “Where the hell’s Smith?”

  Villegas said, “Sent him and Krieg out to check the perimeter.”

  “Goddammit.” I turned and headed back out the door we’d just come in. When I tried to haul it shut behind me, I found Corporal Avarone blocking it, following me out. He was still singed and bleeding from those rocket blasts. But his expression said if I wanted to stop him, I’d have to fight him. Reaching the rear of the building in seconds, we quickly found Smith and Krieg.

  Both lay face down in the mud.

  The difference was that Smith was still breathing. The Kevlar suit had taken the brunt of the mortar blast that had killed Krieg. Avarone and I got Smith up, his arms draped around our shoulders, and started stumbling back. Along the way, I saw the first Taliban fighters inside the wire – two guys sprinting through a gap in the buildings to the north, all of us looking up and snap-firing at the same time, me doing so one-handed. One of them managed to land a round on my body armor and I tagged one of them somewhere, seeing him stagger, but then we were all out of sight. And as I hauled open the door
of the TOC…

  It stopped being one of the last buildings not on fire.

  * * *

  I found Uron and got in his face. I didn’t even have to say it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Okay. We have to go.” He was both fearless and paranoid, but he wasn’t fucking stupid. Obviously, we couldn’t stay here and live. But, as usual, the demon was in the details.

  “We shit-can all the cargo and load up the bird,” I said. He nodded weary approval. “And then we fly straight to the JFK.”

  But he shook his head at that. “Not happening, tovarisch. Even if your people don’t kill me on sight, they will never release the aircraft and pilot. And my people on the Gorshka need those.”

  I ground my jaw, then looked around the room. The survivors of Two Bravo still handily outnumbered all two of the Russians. I said, “Why don’t we just put a gun to the pilot’s fucking head and hijack the goddamned aircraft?”

  Uron shook his head sadly. “For one thing, because he would let you shoot him before he disobeyed an order from me. But mainly because I still hold four of your men back on the frigate.” His expression grew amused as he started reciting: “‘Never shall I fail my comrades… I will never leave a comrade to fall in the hands of the enemy.’”

  It was from the fucking Ranger Creed. I didn’t ask how he knew it. You didn’t need cyber-ops for that, just Wikipedia. And he was more than cagey enough of a warrior to always know his enemy.

  He said, “You would never leave your people behind. And I won’t leave mine. But I gave you my word: once we get back to the frigate, I will set you and your Rangers free – put you all in a lifeboat, and your carrier can pick you up.” There was simply no time for arguing. I turned to the room and shouted.

  “Two Bravo! Listen up!”

  * * *

  The fight back to the HLZ was tougher than anyone expected.

  There were dozens of Charlie – excuse me, Tali – inside the wire now, plus even more dead stumbling around in the mud, trying to gnaw our faces off. I don’t know how they got in. Maybe the perimeter wall was breached by rockets, or just surmounted by the scores of walking dead bodies piled up against it. Belatedly, I remembered the two men we’d had guarding the escape tunnel – and who weren’t with us now.