Last Stand Read online

  These are the works of man.

  * * *

  So – humanity had fallen. Civilization was gone. But the Admiral Gorshkov remained. And those of us upon it yet survived.

  We had done so by staying at sea, far out to sea – as well as by being ruthless with quarantine procedures, shooting anyone who looked the least bit dodgy, and asking questions never. By lighting up anyone we encountered, Two Bravo had more than once found ourselves in the position of killing other living survivors – mainly just to keep them from killing us first. That was just the way things worked in the state of nature, which we had all somehow bumbled our way back down into. But killing civilian survivors was also nearly the exact opposite of why most of us in Regiment had put on the uniform in the first place. We were supposed to be protecting the weak. Not pillaging from them.

  And definitely not culling them.

  But it was what it was. And while open water could keep those of us on this floating outpost of Mother Russia from getting infected or eaten, it couldn’t keep us alive. For that, we had to have the scavenging missions – for food, fresh water, and ammo, especially small-arms rounds, to keep the shore missions themselves humming. We also needed two types of fuel for the CODAG turbine engines that kept the Gorshkov a few steps ahead of the dead, as well as the desperate living. This usually involved taking and holding a port facility long enough for the frigate to refuel.

  Most of these ended up being US naval bases.

  We stayed well away from them at first, figuring military installations – walled, guarded, heavily armed – would be the last bastions to fall. But we never found one that hadn’t been overrun and wiped out, to the last man. This was a puzzle, until we finally figured it out. Not one of them – as far as we could tell from the detritus and forensics of the desperate battles and last stands that had taken place inside – not one of them had been overrun from the outside.

  They all fell from within.

  It was the military brotherhood that cost them everything – refusing to leave bitten men behind, and instead bringing them back inside the wire. This loyalty, this unbreakable bond, had spelled their doom. Of course, we were all doomed.

  The only question was when.

  I reached under my bunk and retrieved “the apparatus” – a little wood and plastic platform I’d built, with a timer, pressure arm, and weapon mount. I pulled my M17 from its belt holster where it hung on the wall, and racked a round into the chamber. I looked at the pistol in my hand, trying to decide if I even had the energy to slot it into the apparatus, never mind set the timer again…

  The hatch to my door knocked. I ignored this, pretending I wasn’t here. Or that I didn’t exist.

  “Top? You up, man?” It was Staff Sergeant Chandler. He went ahead and talked at me through the closed hatch, notwithstanding my attempt at an existential disappearing act. “Mission brief, sixteen hundred, hangar deck. That’s ten minutes, Sarge.”

  And that was another conspicuous change in me since the end of the world. I was no longer an early riser. I didn’t sleep through the day in order to be rested up for our night missions. No, I just didn’t want to wake up. I wanted to keep enjoying the oblivion, the peace of ignorance, the bliss of not knowing – that all of this had happened.

  Waking life was now the nightmare.

  I made my pistol safe and holstered it. I shoved the apparatus back under the bed. I got up and got dressed.

  And I dragged myself to the mission brief.

  * * *

  The first half-dozen 130mm high-explosive impact-fuze artillery rounds went into the open ground way out ahead of both rifle squads, walking up the left side of the main administrative building – sending rolling, rippling fireballs up into the black night sky like tiny suns trying to illuminate the endless black void above.

  There was definitely no donkey action tonight.

  And the op hadn’t yet gone to shit. But I wasn’t holding my breath. The last time we’d had incredibly good luck was longer ago than I could even remember. And incredibly bad luck had pretty much become our default state – hell, it tended to characterize even a good night out for us now.

  Yep – just another black post-Apocalyptic middle-of-the-goddamned night… and another night scavenging mission. Hanging our precious, fleshy, miraculously still-living asses out on shore, just to gather up humanity’s table scraps. Then again, back in the days of the world, it had been a pretty damned big table. And now it had an awful lot of scraps left, what with no one being left alive to eat any of it.

  Tonight’s dinner table was located on Masirah Island, a 40-by-10-mile piece of sandy nothing floating out in the Arabian Sea – fifteen miles off the coast of what used to be Oman. But the island was home to RAFO Masirah – yeah, the Kingdom of Oman not only had an air force, but a royal one, plus bases to house it all in.

  The good news, such as it was, was that the former civilian population of Masirah Island numbered less than 12,000 – mostly fishermen and copper miners. And the air base itself was located up in the little northernmost finger of land, less than a kilometer from water’s edge – the start of the narrow strait between island and mainland – and basically backed into a corner facing the rest of the island.

  So we at least had something to our backs – the water.

  And I had exactly sixteen Rangers out tonight, including me – 80% of the original 20 who’d survived the post-Apocalypse up to this point – and composed of two under-strength rifle squads. The weapons squad no longer existed at any strength, for obvious reasons. All of us were now hunkered down in the dunes that overlooked the air base – and just up from the beach behind us, where we had quietly inserted on two Zodiacs, killing the engines for the last 200 meters and paddling in. The boats themselves, plus us, had been inserted a mile offshore by the helo that lived in the frigate’s hangar deck.

  I flipped my NVGs back down as the last of the explosions from the walking artillery barrage disappeared around behind the row of buildings that lined the main runway, and the darkness came back. I didn’t even know why we were still running night missions at this point, honestly. Force of habit? Maybe we were just more comfortable, or felt less naked, cloaked in our accustomed darkness. Maybe we were desperate to hang onto something of our old identities.

  Something from the world that used to be.

  More tangibly, there was also the ongoing risk of encountering living survivors – who would definitely be armed, probably heavily, if they had managed to stay alive this long – and who would be at a big disadvantage facing us in our NVGs. It was even possible other military units were still operating. After all, we were an existence proof of the thesis that military personnel – in this case, Americans and Russians – could survive. But, while we’d encountered, and fought, and killed, a small handful of survivors… we hadn’t discovered a single other military unit so far. Maybe they were all lying low, just as we were. And, if so, maybe we would never meet one another – like floating in deep space, hoping to bump into alien spacecraft. There was just too damned much empty space.

  Then again, if this was, as it appeared to be, the end of the world, it would be going on for a long time.

  So it was early days yet.

  Through the NVGs, I could already see a few dark, palsied figures stumbling away down the shorter crosswise runway, following the trail of artillery impact points around behind the buildings that fronted the main tarmac. This ran parallel to the water and to our positions in the dunes. I knew that, back on the frigate, the 130mm deck gun would be elevating, and traversing slightly.

  I once asked Uron why we didn’t just use their damned cruise missiles as a distraction, and save all the deck gun ammo. He’d been evasive, as usual – I figured about 75% of what he did tell me was bullshit. The Soviet Union had been a house built on a foundation of lies. When the house fell, the lies remained. The habit of lying did, anyway – inverting and perverting the truth, claiming black was white, and saying it with a straight fac
e, and a smile. Somehow, six months past the end of the world, I think Uron still thought he was one day going to be in a shooting war with another nation-state – namely, ours. Whatever, if anything, was left of the good old USA.

  Which was, of course, batshit crazy.

  Uron was an extremely smart and cagey operator. But he was also paranoid enough that I thought he might actually have a diagnosable mental disorder. Then again, he was still alive, and virtually all the rest of humanity wasn’t, so maybe our threshold for mental disorders needed to get defined down.

  Speaking of mental illness… as I tracked the local dead guys clearing out from this side of the base, moving away in search of the blessed oblivion that would await them if they happened to catch those walking explosions… I swear to God I saw one of them running. Within seconds it had disappeared out of sight, mainly because it was hauling ass.

  But there’s no way I could have seen that right. It had to be a living person, which was actually almost as weird. One of the few nice things about the dead is that they’re slow. Charlie don’t surf.

  And Zack don’t run.

  * * *

  So our night ops were anachronistic, and a mystery to me.

  But not so the artillery barrages. It had only taken a couple of scavenging missions on shore to figure that shit out – albeit at the incalculable cost of four of my guys infected and killed. Our first couple of missions had basically been learning experiences – shambolic and disastrous ones. And, as usual with bad military planning, the cost was paid by young men filling up body bags. Or, in this case, burn pits.

  Infected, they were too dangerous even to put in body bags.

  At any rate, as manically and single-mindedly as the dead were drawn to noise, it turned out to be a hell of a lot easier, not to mention safer, to intentionally use noise to draw them away from our targets before we went in. And military vessels have almost nothing but things that go boom. It sure beat the hell out of leaving a gaggle of the local dead crawling around the environs of our target site, and then accidentally drawing them with our own inadvertent noise.

  And then having to fight our way out again.

  Now, with the walking barrage having moved around to the far side of the target structure, and no more undead foot-mobiles in sight from our position in the dunes, it was time to move out. Or so I thought. I was actually tensing my leg muscles to rise up, plus keying my radio to order the movement – when my NVGs whited out in another massive heat bloom, this one not just bigger than the first series of explosions… but gargantuan.

  Something had gone boom in a much bigger than 130mm way.

  I figured it was either a heavy-ordnance locker, or more likely a big underground aviation fuel reservoir. Whatever the hell it was, it was out of sight of us, on the far side of the buildings – but the explosion rose up into the night sky well over the tops of the three-story structures. Or that’s what I had to imagine it was doing, since I couldn’t see a goddamned thing except for brilliant pulsing white, located directly in front of a crushing headache that instantly squeezed my skull. I shoved the NVGs back up on my helmet mount, and waited to be able to see again, or even think.

  And my first thought wasn’t good.

  It was that the clock was now ticking – and ticking like a goddamned crazy son of a bitch. Using small explosions to draw the local dead guys away from our target site was great. But an explosion that big, probably visible from every point on the island, risked drawing all the regional dead, perhaps every one of them on Masirah – and that was substantially less great. It was, frankly, bullshit.

  This whole mission was becoming bullshit.

  My first, nearly overwhelming impulse was to abort. But I also knew it was Uron’s guys piloting the Zodiacs beached on the sands behind us – and not to mention flying the helo that would ultimately extract us all. And I knew it was always within his power, and that it would surprise me a lot less than I liked to think, if he simply refused to pull us out, if we tried to come back without the goods. Which, for some reason, we didn’t even know what they were on this one.

  The actual target package was some huge state secret.

  Whatever the hell it was, all I knew was it had better be fucking worth it. Worth this much risk. Worth gambling the lives of my Rangers – who, did I mention, were some of the last people left alive on Earth? Never mind good guys. Never mind elite infantry. But whether or not we went forward became a fait accompli anyway.

  Because Katya was already up and moving out.

  Leading the way.

  * * *

  Yes, Katya had gone out with us on this one.

  Katya – Uron’s 2IC, and enforcer. And a fully operational Spetsnaz shooter – a female one. Say what you will about Soviet Russia, they’d always been pretty damned feminist. Many of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War (as they called WW2) had been women, including a lot of terrifyingly prolific snipers. But, on the Admiral Gorshka, Katya answered to Uron – and I’d rarely seen her far from him, ever since the day I first looked upon the two of them, walking together down that pier on the Syrian coast.

  But tonight it was just her, me, and my fifteen Rangers. One big happy extended adoptive dysfunctional fucking family. Though, for some reason, there was for once no contingent of enlisted Russian sailors with us – which Uron usually had the consideration to send along to hump out the food, weapons, ammo, or fuel that were our typical scavenging targets. And also leaving my guys hands-free, to do all the fighting.

  Which at least was familiar to Rangers.

  But without those foreign guys strap-hanging, we could move fast, and coordinate our movements perfectly. Not to mention everyone here would do what I fucking well told them, and trust that I would do everything in my power to keep them alive.

  Check that – everyone but Katya would do I what I told them.

  As it was, right now she was tear-assing across the sandy and scrubby flats toward the air base, obviously expecting me and the others to follow. It was pretty galling to me that she was right. I stole an occasional glance back, over my left and right shoulders, to make sure the team was still with me, even going as we were at a full gallop. In the ZA, we had tried to maintain our fanatical Ranger commitment to physical fitness, but it was pretty damned hard to run five miles in 35 minutes – our usual standard – while crammed onto a warship only 443 feet long. We made do. And right now everyone was still hanging in.

  Everyone but Specialist Cusas.

  I felt more than saw him falling off the back of the train, and slowed my pace to let him catch up with me. On this one, he was our most junior guy out – because I’d left Specialist Smith behind. Which I did as often as I could get away with, for reasons of my own. Now, I slapped Cusas on the back a couple of times, then once on the ass, and he found a burst of speed somewhere, probably from the humiliation of making me hang back for him. Following the rest of the team, the two of us hurdled the knocked-over chain-link perimeter fence – one guess who knocked it down – and ten seconds after that, we’d all reached the main base admin building.

  Our target site.

  * * *

  I had to give Katya credit.

  She was totally fearless – and she did her own fighting. Hell, she obviously relished it. I think she’d probably been going stir-crazy penned up on the Admiral Gorshka, with no one to kill but stow-away rodents. At a pinch, killing human-sized dead would do for her. Though one definitely got the sense she’d prefer to kill the living. Anyway, that was my best guess why she was along.

  Basically as an amusing field trip for her.

  Now, I watched her lead the way inside the blacked-out structure, after crouching down and springing the lock with a small lock-pick set from her rig. NVGs down and rifle up, she slithered inside like the head of a fast, mean snake, the rest of us following in a long and sinuous body. In the cone of dishwater-green illumination from her barrel-mounted IR illuminator, I could see the long hallway spooling out in front of us –
more or less exactly like the first level of a particularly creepy first-person shooter.

  But that stretch of hallway was at least clear.

  Not so the next one. I could hear her weapon chugging even before I turned the right-hand corner, I thought right behind her. But by the time I’d sliced the pie and swung in behind, there were three half-rotted dead guys, one of them a dead chick, all wearing tattered summer-weight khaki uniforms, lying destroyed on the floor, their heads perforated and burst like rotting pumpkins.

  Of course, it hadn’t taken us even a minute into the Zulu Alpha to figure out that only headshots counted. Then again, anyone who’d ever had a Netflix subscription knew that. The real zombie apocalypse had turned out to be about like all the fictional ones. I guess we were just lucky we got the slow, shambling George Romero zombies. And not the crazy-ass running ones from 28 Days Later. Then I remembered what I’d just seen outside.

  Maybe it was my imagination. Or a living guy, most likely.

  Anyway, there wasn’t time to think about it, because by then we’d hit the end of the second hallway, and Katya was already down on one knee picking another lock. I was reminded of the last days of the counter-terror wars, when – mainly following the lead of Tier-1 guys, especially DEVGRU – we’d all sort of stopped kicking in doors and hurling flash-bangs ahead of us. It turned out you lived a lot longer just by breaking in silently, and then killing or capturing bad guys in their beds. And what was true then was about 50 times more so in the current war, the final war… what the men had spontaneously started calling the Zulu Alpha.

  That, too, was probably inevitable – good ole NATO phonetic alphabet slang. More durable than human civilization, it turned out. Anyway, in the Zulu Alpha, door-kicking and flash-bangs were definitely bullshit.