Last Stand Read online

  Specialist Cusas.

  He’d obviously been struggling, though hanging in. But the thing about tiredness is it hits your form first. And his raggedy-ass running had clashed with the rising dunes – resulting in him doing a massive face-plant at the top, luckily into soft sand.

  I checked to make sure everyone else was descending the other side to the two Zodiacs down on the strand – and not to mention that the Russians were cranking the outboard motors. They didn’t have to be told – a bunch of guys hauling ass away from a zombie horde pretty much speaks for itself. And I sure as shit didn’t have the breath to be all Indiana Jones, yelling, “Jock! Start the engines!” as the blowgun darts whistled. Seeing the first of the men already flopping over the gunwales of the boats, I slowed to a stop beside Cusas, turned, and took aim over his gasping-fish body at my feet.

  Like I said, the nice thing about our ZA is we got George Romero zombies, the slow ones. There were a shitload of them following us from out of the main building, plus others spilling around either side of it from the tarmac beyond – but the closest were still a good two hundred meters back. We had opened up the gap. And we were all going to get out of there.

  We were going to be just fine.

  Keeping my rifle trained toward the enemy anyway, I squatted down beside Cusas as he rolled over, shaking his head and sucking wind.

  “Sorry,” he said, spitting out sand. “I’m okay.”

  I could see he was struggling for breath. On top of nearly going out like Private Hudson getting dragged down into the horde – then the close-quarters fight, the shoving match, and the run – I think the fall had knocked the wind out of him. I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Hey, you’re fine. Take a beat. I got you.” I spared a look down to see him breathing in deep, and shaking it off.

  When I looked up again…

  There were figures breaking away from the pack, pulling ahead, and running at us.

  Running flat-out.

  * * *

  I tried to put my IR aiming laser on the chin-point of the first one. But he was bouncing around, hauling ass over broken ground.

  Also, now that I had stopped running myself, there were fat sweat droplets rolling down into my eyes under the NVGs. I couldn’t spare a hand to wipe them away, so I just tried to blink them clear. I couldn’t quite focus. Illum tonight was minimal, and whatever was coming for us that fast was still just outside the effective cone of my IR illuminator. As I tried to make out the details on this guy, and his two or three buddies beside and behind him, all I could think was…

  Charlie don’t surf. And Zack don’t run.

  At least, in six months of ZA and nearly nonstop scavenging missions, we’d never once seen one run. Why in God’s name would they start now? So these had to be living people – survivors. And, unlike Katya, I didn’t relish killing for its own sake. I probably wasn’t going to invite these dudes home for tea and cakes. But I also wasn’t going to gun them down in cold blood, not unless I really had to. And so far it looked like they were just doing exactly what we were – running like hell, trying to escape the ravening horde behind them.

  And then they got within range of my IR light.

  And I could finally see – they were definitely dead guys. And not only running flat-out, but already nearly on us. I opened fire, dropping one, then traversed my weapon and missed the second… missed again… finally hit it, rapidly acquiring the third… but then that one was on me, and all I could do was put my shoulder down to bodycheck the thing, sending it tumbling off into the dunes, then rapid-firing into its head as it scrabbled around in the dry sand. The instant it went limp, I spun back around to see—

  The fourth one on top of Cusas. And the two of them in a wrestling match – one too tight and tangled up for me to risk taking a shot.

  I leapt over and reached in to yank it off him – but only came away with an arm, and in the second it took me to drop the dismembered member and reset, another one I hadn’t even seen came piling in, also at a gallop, and fell on Cusas. Now there were three bodies scrabbling around, grunting, hissing, and kicking up sand. I could see Cusas get his knife clear, but he had no leverage to stab with.

  I took a second to do it properly this time – watching the writhing bodies, timing their motion, winding up my right foot – and then giving one a brutal field-goal kick in the chest, which caved in its ribs but also knocked it fifteen feet clear. Then I did the same to the other one, except catching this one square in the head, which exploded, painting a conical spray of rotted brains and black infectious gunk across the slope of the dunes. I brought my rifle up, and shot the chest-burst one four times in the head, turning it off before it could get up. Then I looked up and around in every direction, scanning the field for more threats. Aside from all the normal slow ones still closing on us, that looked like it.

  Only then did I squat down beside Cusas.

  I found him still holding his knife. But he was holding the knife-hand with his other hand, both of them trembling. And I could see his right wrist had a big, ragged bite taken out of it. Fuck. My own chest constricting with panic, I relieved him of his knife, seized the hand with the bite wound, pulled it to stretch out the arm – and hauled the knife back over my head. This was total desperation on my part, but the shit had worked on The Walking Dead. Maybe it would work in real life. If that’s what this was. Anyway, it was a chance.

  Probably his only one.

  But something – maybe the horrifying reality of hacking off one of my guy’s hands with a fucking knife – made me pause before striking, and instead I looked down into Cusas’s face. His NVGs had been knocked clear in the roll-around, and now his wide eyes shone with fear. And then I saw it – the other wound. A big chunk had been bitten out of his neck.

  And cutting off his head would be little help.

  I flipped up my own NVGs, and looked into his eyes. But, somehow, all the panic had leaked out of them now. And instead he just looked at me calmly and steadily, like a very old soul in a nineteen-year-old body. And he said, “It’s okay, Top.” Like it was me who was in trouble, and needed reassuring. “It’s okay.”

  Trying to keep my voice from breaking, I said: “You’re an airborne Ranger, and a good man. And you’re our brother.”

  And then I shot Specialist Cusas in the face.

  And I got my ass on the boat.

  * * *

  Morning again – actual morning this time. I couldn’t sleep.

  But whatever hour I woke, it was always the same thing. Like being reborn – into a nightmare. Somehow, I always forgot it all overnight. The plague. The hair-breadth escape from Syria. The death and sacrifice of Captain Darby – not to mention losing the entire weapons squad, a third of the platoon. Then the unstoppable wave of death, or rather undeath, sweeping across the globe. The complete collapse of human civilization. And then the six months of nightmare existence on the Admiral Gorshkov – and the deaths of four… no, now five… of my Rangers. It all came back again, every morning, in a single, sickening, devastating rush.

  And I didn’t think I could take it anymore.

  I couldn’t keep doing this. I couldn’t keep watching my men, closer to me than brothers, more my responsibility than sons, being picked off one by one. And definitely not on total bullshit missions like the one last night – heroic young men dying to keep roughneck Russian sailors drunk down in the boiler room. Don’t get me wrong, I was pretty sure the Russian Standard was for Uron, Katya, and their very close friends. But at the same time, he’d let a bottle go, here and there, to earn loyalty, gain favors he could call in later, or just to facilitate someone he didn’t like drinking himself to death. Though it would probably take more than two cases of vodka for a Russian sailor to drink himself to death.

  And now, on top of everything else, I couldn’t stop seeing Cusas’s face, in his last seconds on this Earth. The image scorched and seared my brain.

  I reached under the bed, retrieved the apparatus again, cha
mbered my pistol – and this time slotted the weapon into the frame. I sat down on the bed facing it, and set the mechanical timer wheel to 120 seconds. And, sighing out loud, I used some of that time to wonder, hardly for the first time, why I had kept going this long.

  And the only possible answer was: for the men.

  Mentally, emotionally, I’d packed it in long ago – time drags badly in the post-Apocalypse, and these last six months had felt like six eons – and now I was merely going through the motions. And I could see my resignation reflected back at me in the expressions of my Rangers. The light had gone out of my eyes.

  Tick tick tick… 100 seconds left.

  But we just kept getting sent out, tasked with taking down dodgier and more lethal target sites every time. Also, stupider ones, as it turned out. And someone had to lead these missions. At a certain point, I would be so beaten down the best person for the job would be someone else. But, at least until last night, it had still been me.

  Tick tick tick – 60 seconds.

  I took a look around the side of the pistol. Of course the hammer was back; I’d just racked the slide. I slumped down again, staring into the black depths of the muzzle. At this range, it looked bigger than the Admiral Gorshkov’s deck gun had on the day of the Fall. And, at this range, it would do pretty much equivalent damage to my cranium. That place from which hope had fled.

  Tick tick tick – 30 seconds.

  Knock knock knock. That was the outside of my hatch. “Sergeant Vogeler. May I speak with you, please?” And that was fucking Uron.

  I sure as hell wasn’t opening up for that glad-handing son of a bitch – never mind interrupting my own carefully scripted and long-planned death. My exit from the blistering and irrevocable hellscape humanity had tumbled into. My renunciation, not just of the Zulu Alpha, but of life itself. Or what little remained of it.

  Also, somewhat incidentally, I was done being Uron’s fucking Judenrat – serving as jailor to my own people, keeping them in line, shoving them out to the workhouses – or rather killing fields – and then corralling them back in the Ranger ghetto, here in the belly of his floating Russian mini-Empire.

  Tick tick tick – 15 seconds.

  “Top, you’re gonna want to hear this.” Shit. That was Staff Sergeant Chandler. He was harder to ignore. It wasn’t easy to break the habit of service to the men. But in a few seconds I’d be free of even that. “Sarge – we’ve spotted an American warship.”

  I looked up from staring into the muzzle of my own pistol, back to the hatch.

  “It’s a Ford-class supercarrier. The John F. Kennedy. Hell, it’s almost an entire carrier strike group.” Holy shit. The JFK was floating? That didn’t seem possible. I looked back at the pistol, and the apparatus… and the timer wheel.

  Tick – one second.

  Too late— as I reached out, the lever-arm inside the guard fell on the trigger. I exhaled, touched my face to verify it still had the ordinary number of holes… and then double-checked the safety was still engaged on the pistol. Finally, I picked the whole thing up and shoved it out of sight under my rack.

  I didn’t actually build the apparatus to save me from pulling the trigger myself. I built it so I’d have time to change my mind. Each second the timer ran down, I had to decide whether or not to disengage the safety. I don’t know why. Just dropping the hammer, instantly, with no countdown, no build-up, no chance to turn around… somehow never seemed right. Death shouldn’t be an instant change – bright light, then total darkness.

  It should be a corridor you walk down.

  This one I had been walking down for a long time. And one day, sooner or later, I’d reach the end. It was waiting for me.

  I stood up and opened the hatch.

  * * *

  CIC on the Admiral Gorshkov was a lot like the JOC at al-Tanf, but more cramped. It was also kept at least as dark, plus tucked away deep in the bowels of the ship, far from the bridge deck up top. This was to keep it safe from battle damage. The ship could keep on fighting even if decapitated.

  I squinted down at Uron in the glowing dimness. He was a cagey and perceptive bastard, with psychological acumen far beyond that of a grunt, operator, or even intel guy or spook. And I knew he could immediately read it all – written right there in huge letters on my face. He could see the sudden flaring of hope. Basically, if there was an American warship floating, I needed to get to it, along with my men.

  We needed to go home.

  But you didn’t have to be Jason Bourne to read the inevitable response written on his face: Not gonna happen. What he actually said was: “We have intercepted and decrypted radio traffic between the Kennedy and their air assets.” Of course they had – still years ahead of us in cybertech, even after time itself had ceased. “They are going to try for FOB Chapman.”

  This drew me up short. On the one hand, scavenging overrun military bases made sense – that was where all the guns and ammo were, not to mention cubic shit-tons of bottled water and long-life food. But we always went for bases at the water’s edge. It was death-defying enough to try to hold a perimeter against the dead when you had a nice safe ocean at your back.

  But going inland was madness – death on a stick.

  And FOB Chapman, I happened to know, was located in Khost Province, in Afghanistan – which last time I checked was a totally landlocked country – and not exactly in the most accessible part. Chapman was practically within sight of the Khyber Pass, way up in the Spin Ghar Mountains, and hard on the border with what used to be Pakistan.

  “And we are going to beat them to it,” Uron concluded.

  “Why?” I said. “What could possibly make it worth the stretch?”

  Uron’s expression said he knew he could not completely stonewall me on this one. We were his prisoners, but not his slaves. We weren’t going to just march out into certain death, no questions asked.

  “Three things. One, Chapman was hub for American SOF in the region – Army Special Forces, SEALs… also Delta and DEVGRU.” I didn’t know how he knew this, but I wasn’t too surprised.

  I felt new eyes on me, and spun in place. And there she was – Katya. Always lurking in the shadows. I held her gaze, those evil green eyes shining in the darkness, until Uron’s voice drew me back.

  “Two, Chapman was a testing ground for cutting-edge weapons and tech. There are, let’s say, some very interesting and useful toys, which would make our post-Apocalyptic existence more comfortable. Not least yours… and your men’s.”

  “What makes you think any of it’s still intact?” When he didn’t immediately answer, I said, “Okay. What’s the third thing?”

  He tapped his pen against the tactical station he sat at. It looked like one of those aircraft-grade-aluminum tactical pens, the kind you can kill a man with.

  “FOB Chapman… isn’t overrun.”

  * * *

  My hatch knocked again, only louder. I knew who it was this time.

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  She went ahead and just opened the locked door. I didn’t know how. It didn’t matter. Then, wearing that sleeveless tactical outfit of hers, curves even more obvious with no mags in the way, Katya glided up and loomed over me where I lay face down on the bed.

  “You’re doing the mission,” she said. “You know you are.”

  I snorted into my pillow. This mission was pure mass suicide. It would spell the certain and complete end of Two Bravo’s short career as scavengers of the Apocalypse. Sure, the base itself wasn’t overrun by the dead. But it also wasn’t occupied by surviving American military personnel – though I’d briefly gotten my hopes up.

  “It’s the Taliban,” Uron had said, finally dropping his bombshell. I’d been badly shocked – for exactly one second. Then I thought: Hey, it figures. Those guys were like cockroaches, unkillable, always coming back, never missing a summer fighting season – surviving for centuries in an environment that had always been pretty much indistinguishable from the post-Apocalypse. ISIS might
be vicious, child-stoning, oil-stealing gangsters. But the Taliban were smart, devout, committed, in it for the long haul, and believed in their mission – a mission from God.

  So, not a great enemy to have.

  None of this answered the glaring question of how the hell they had taken Chapman in the first place. My first two guesses were the Americans bugged out during the Fall, abandoning the outpost and trying to get home – and maybe get in the fight, back States-side. Or else they’d suffered an outbreak, all got eaten or turned, and then Terry Taliban came down from the hills and mopped them up.

  But it didn’t matter in the least how they got hold of it.

  Because if we went in there and tried to take it back from them, we were going to find exactly what the Arab Caliphate had found when they tried to invade Afghanistan. And the Persians and Greeks before them. What Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan found, and the Brits (three times), and the Soviets – in the nine-year conflict that arguably led to their defeat in the Cold War, and subsequent collapse. Not to mention NATO and the Americans – in their longest war ever, which lasted all the way until the end of the damned world. None of those globe-straddling empires had ever been able to control Afghanistan. Not for long.

  Only now the locals would have extremely advanced firepower. I honestly shuddered to think what the Taliban would be like with Tier-1 weapons and kit. Not to mention they were surrounded on all sides by God only knew how many heaving undead – which would descend and devour all of us within seconds of the first shots being fired.

  Katya gave me a pop on the back of the head.

  I sighed. “I’m sure as hell not doing it because you say so.”

  “I fucking outrank you.” And so she did – she was a Starshina, or sergeant major, E-9 to my E-7. “You do the mission, or you feed the fishes. Maybe I just make you wish you were fish food.”

  My hand flashed out for my pistol where it hung – but she pinned my wrist to the wall, her long nails digging in. I slapped at the fighting knife I kept under my pillow, but she grabbed that wrist too.