ARISEN_Book Fourteen_ENDGAME Read online

  “Do it that way if you gotta.” Juice had been meaning to radio Wesley, but could now see right through the glass into their CP, barely twenty steps away, so he just went and stuck his head in. But Wes wasn’t there. An RMP sergeant seemed to be running the show. “Hey, man.”

  The RMP looked up from his radio expectantly, as if he had a lot of calls on his attention. Juice got to it.

  “You think you can have those ammo bearers get a few cases of grenades up here? Afraid we’re gonna need ’em.”

  “Yep, no worries,” the man said, going back to his radio.

  Content, Juice turned and trotted back to his sector.

  * * *

  The conclusion was obvious, to both Homer and Ali. No one could make a headshot on a Foxtrot with a paintball gun.

  Nobody. Not even Ali.

  “Shift to runners?” Homer asked.

  Ali exhaled. “Still too risky. If we had more MZ I’d try it.”

  Homer understood. They needed a sure thing. They had to infect something. And they had to do it now.

  Ali leaned over the edge of the railing, aiming nearly straight down, and took a bead on a Zulu doing nothing more than swaying back and forth, no more than twenty feet away. She couldn’t miss it – no one could.

  She shot.

  The ball broke in the barrel, spraying liquid and bits of crap toward it, but falling short. “Son of a bitch!” She looked at the dripping muzzle. “Got a cleaning kit?”

  “That one’s empty anyway,” Homer said, passing her the second rifle, with the other four MZ paintballs in it.

  She shot again. That round broke in the barrel, too. She looked over at him. They couldn’t go on this way.

  “It might be the needle hole and the acetate,” Homer said. “The balls are aerodynamically unstable.”

  “Or just no longer the right damned size or shape for the barrel.” She flipped open the hopper. “Three left. What now?”

  Homer exhaled. “Someone’s going to have to go out there. And not with the paintball gun. With syringes. Do it right.”

  Ali knew Homer more than well enough to understand he had just volunteered. She also knew there was no chance the vaccine had taken effect on him yet. Her frogman was about to dive out into a sea of the dead.

  With no immunity from infection.

  On what was probably the last day of the ZA.

  Bad Idea, Mate

  CentCom – Inside the Prison

  “Colour Sergeant Croucher!” Simmonds shouted. “Your nine!”

  Croucher spun left at the cross hallway, nearly snap-firing into two figures running at him from that direction. But they were both carrying a bunch of shit, which zombies rarely did, so he eased off his trigger at the last second. The two were ammo bearers, staggering toward the front lines under heavy bergens, each also carrying a heavy case of ordnance.

  Croucher squinted at them. “The armory isn’t back that way. You numpties get lost?”

  Neither answered, but instead just scurried by, panting.

  Croucher looked back at Simmonds. “And next time you think I’m about to get slotted, you don’t have to address me by rank, yeah?”

  Simmonds swallowed, realizing how stupid that had been – protocol trumping survival. Evidently his newfound love for Croucher still hadn’t eclipsed his fear of the man.

  “Wait – Croucher?” This was the same RMP who had taken Simmonds to task and cursed him a few minutes earlier, then got slapped down – daring to speak again only now as the four took off running. “You’re the one who jumped on that live grenade in Sangin and lived to tell the tale.”

  “Long before your time, boy-o.”

  “Yeah,” the other RMP said, evidently remembering the famous story, “but he fell on it on his back and his bergen took the blast. Hardly even got hurt. Smart bootneck.”

  “Well, I’m won’t be doing that for you lot. And not just because I don’t have a bergen.” Croucher put his head down and picked up the pace even more. “Also, I told you to shut the fuck up.” He didn’t seem to know, much less care, that it was the first RMP he’d told to shut the fuck up.

  Simmonds smiled and ran like hell to keep up.

  * * *

  Having come down off a different part of the walls than the Marines, Wesley and his two men entered the prison complex by a different door. While using hand signals to direct his two soldiers in clearing forward down the long hallway, he talked on his radio with the JOC, trying to get more detailed intel about where dead had been spotted – so he could triangulate in on where the hell they were slipping in.

  “Good copy, JOC,” he said. “Wait one.”

  He stopped moving forward, and hissed at his two guys to do the same. “Wait. You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Gunfire.”

  “There’s gunfire everywhere.”

  Wesley cocked his head. “Everywhere outside, sure. But those shots are echoing.” And they were, single booming pistol reports, bouncing faintly but distinctly off the tile floors and walls – inside the prison. “Come on,” he said.

  Wesley raised his rifle and took off at a run.

  * * *

  Croucher, Simmonds, and the two RMPs were already at full speed, and couldn’t pick up their pace any more – even when they heard screaming, coming from their destination.

  The armory.

  Croucher blasted in the open doorway in the lead position without slowing, and Simmonds pumped his legs to keep up and back up his team leader, while readying himself and his weapon to fight. Unfortunately, as he ducked through the doorway and raised his rifle, he was so switched on and focused to scan for targets that he sprawled flat out – on a couple of crates piled up near the entrance.

  As his chin skidded on the floor he could hear suppressed firing beneath the screaming – and also hissing. Lumbering to his feet, he could half-see figures, including Croucher, moving and fighting deeper inside the armory, around the side of one of the tall shelves jutting out from the right. Mastering the impulse to race headlong into the fight, he instead twisted at the waist and shouted back at the two RMPs stepping in behind him.

  “Rear security! Strongpoint the entrance!”

  Then he set his feet, raised his rifle, and moved toward the back of the big room. As he rounded the corner and faced down the aisle, the scene resolved with perfect clarity: two runners had been tearing into two ammo bearers. And Croucher was finishing all of them, runners first. But even as Simmonds took up a supporting position twenty feet back, a third runner dove through one of the shelves from the next aisle over to the left, shoving boxes aside.

  “Croucher! Down!” Simmonds started firing, in dangerously close quarters to the colour sergeant, and the third runner sprawled out across the shelf and went limp.

  Croucher straightened up. “Better.” No rank this time.

  Simmonds lowered his rifle and smiled.

  Shouts erupted from the entrance – along with rapid full-volume firing. The two exchanged a half-second Ah shit look – then took off back toward the door.

  Their boots scudding and rifles up.

  * * *

  Wesley’s heart lurched in nine different directions when he rounded the last corner into the open area the firing had come from, and as the scene resolved before him. Unfortunately its various aspects resolved in the wrong order – and his emotions were definitely shuffled last things first.

  The little girl. He saw and reacted to her first.

  She was not only alive but sitting right out there in the middle of the open floor, large as life. Or, rather, small and delicate as a flower. And at least as vulnerable. Wesley had to tear his eyes away from the surreal vision of her to see…

  The older boy firing a pistol. But even on that very round, his slide locked back, the weapon empty. And while he pulled out the empty magazine and turned to exchange it with one from the smaller boy standing behind him, his target…

  Pulled itself out of a crawlspace on the wal
l, low to the floor. It was a recently turned Zulu, and was now able to proceed unmolested. And then Wes had to tear his attention even from that, and do a dynamic risk assessment, because nearly 180 degrees to the left…

  A runner had just emerged from another hallway. And it was heading straight for the little girl, sitting alone in the middle of the room. She raised her tiny hand and pointed up at it. While looking at up Wesley. And saying something.

  She was pointing it out for him.

  And she sat right between the two of them.

  * * *

  This time Simmonds was in the lead position when he and Croucher blasted out of the back of the armory to within sight of the entrance. And it was instantly obvious the RMP’s security operation – one thing Simmonds figured they ought to be good at – had gone completely tits-up.

  One of them was wrestling on the floor with a Foxtrot, the pair rolling around and flailing their limbs and making unsavory noises. The other – the one who had conspicuously been a dick to Simmonds – was, to his credit, still standing post at the door, trying to hold his weapon with one hand, while clutching at some grievous wound with the other.

  He had been mauled, presumably by the Foxtrot.

  “Got the door!” Simmonds shouted, figuring that securing the room had to be the priority, and Croucher could take care of the one already inside, which was occupied for the moment anyway. Simmonds slowed his pace as he approached the dick RMP and the door, keeping his rifle trained on it. The guy was obviously fixated on some threat outside, and Simmonds had no plans to get jumped by whatever it was.

  As these two obviously had been.

  Now he heard shrieking from the hallway – and it sounded like it might be more than one, so he doubled down on his caution. He heard Croucher firing behind him, but didn’t take his eye off the doorway. Then he saw the dick RMP, bleeding and shaking, take a couple of shots and then physically recoil – from whatever he could see outside, which Simmonds still could not.

  And then, with his palsied left hand, he pulled a grenade from his belt and armed it.

  “Oh, no,” Simmonds called out. “Bad idea, mate!”

  Grenades indoors were a sketchy proposition at the best of times. And this guy was not having his best moment right now. But, heedless of the Marine’s warning, he not only tossed it out into the hallway – but pulled and armed a second one, even as the first was going off.

  He hauled his arm back to throw the follow-up.

  A blurred figure raced out of the whooshing smoke and debris and slammed into him, knocking his rifle away and pressing him up against the wall inside the door.

  The grenade fell and skittered across the floor.

  * * *

  Wesley had never really stopped running – so he just tweaked the angles, hurdled over the top of the little girl, dropped his shoulder, and piled into the runner at full speed, sending it flying. He didn’t have the zombie armor that had kept him safe in Jizan, but the rugby tactics were still effective – and, simply, he couldn’t bring himself to shoot in the direction of the girl, even five feet over her head.

  He preferred to take the infection risk himself.

  But once she was no longer between him and it, he raised his rifle and started firing. The agitated runner was down at the junction of floor and wall, writhing and scrambling to regain its feet, and Wesley’s first five rapid-fire shots only hit chest, shoulder, and wall – and there was no sixth round.

  He had a weapon stoppage.

  None of the operators had ever told him that switching from primary to secondary was always quicker than clearing a jam. He just did it instinctively, letting the rifle fall on its sling and slapping at the M9 in his drop-leg holster, bringing it out and up, flipping the safety, aiming, and firing, almost in the same motion. Six more rapid rounds turned the runner’s head into head cheese, and he pivoted to face the far wall, where the one in the duct was just getting clear, and started firing around the boys until that one went limp as well.

  He dropped the empty pistol mag and reloaded, then pivoted another forty-five degrees to check on his two men. Both were still standing stupidly almost exactly where he had left them, at the point where they had entered the area, both holding their weapons, unfired.

  “Okay, chaps,” Wes said, dropping his slide forward on a live round. “You have got to react faster than that.”

  Even he couldn’t quite believe he’d done everything he just did – before those two managed to do anything at all. But then again, he guessed everything was easy once you knew how to do it. And now, without quite realizing it, he had somehow moved all the way from terrified bumbler, to competent soldier, to combat leader – and now into the role of mentor and trainer. He safetied the pistol, but kept it in his hand. Then he moved to check on the kids.

  Little girl first.

  * * *

  Simmonds tracked the sliding grenade, and of course it didn’t merely skitter across the floor – it had to skitter across the floor directly into the crates stacked by the door, the ones that had sent him sprawling on his ass on the way in. It bounced off the bottom one and came to rest about three feet away.

  Only now did Simmonds read the stencil-painted text on the crate: L109A1 HE Fragmentation.

  A crate of fucking grenades. Of course they were.

  Time was slowing and dilating for Simmonds now.

  Funny that, he thought.

  A few feet from the live grenade, both of them pressed up against the wall, Simmonds could see the Foxtrot further mauling the already badly mauled RMP – the one who had been a total dick to him. Oh, well, Simmonds thought. He had his reasons. I did get two of his mates killed.

  He looked back and around. In addition to the fact that the live grenade was sitting three feet from a whole case of other grenades, they were also all standing in the middle of the fucking armory – the whole place was basically nothing but ammunition and explosives.

  Basically one big bomb. With a lit fuze.

  Turning back further, Simmonds could see Croucher take his final shots into the Foxtrot and RMP fighting on the floor behind him. Both had stopped moving. Croucher then looked up and squinted in alarm. Simmonds followed the line of his gaze. He had seen the grenade on the floor. The colour sergeant squared up on it – and started to put his head down.

  Oh, no, mate, Simmonds thought. Not this time…

  He swiveled back to the mauled dick RMP and the Foxtrot, only a few feet away. He raised his rifle and fired a single round. It caught the Foxtrot underneath the ear. Its wild attacks on the RMP ceased, and it slumped toward the deck. Before it even hit the floor, Simmonds was there, his weapon falling on its sling. He reached over and around the falling Foxtrot, and he grabbed the RMP by his vest, feeling the solidity of the body-armor plates underneath, and he looked him in his wide and panicked eyes. Everything was contained in that look. The badly torn-up man was done, and he knew it.

  Sorry mate, Simmonds thought.

  He swung the RMP around with both hands.

  Spinning to face back into the room, still clutching the RMP’s vest and looking over his shoulder, he could see Croucher hurtling forward. But he had started much farther away, and wasn’t going to win this race.

  Simmonds dove on the live grenade himself.

  Dick RMP first.

  It exploded in the same instant they landed on it. Both Simmonds and the man underneath him launched into the air, flipping up and off to the side like the playback speed had been set at 4x, catapulted into the wall over the stacks of grenades. The explosion and then hard collision with the wall emptied Simmonds’s lungs and made his vision swim. Still clutching the hollowed-out RMP, he dropped on top of the crates, then both of them rolled off and back onto the deck. They ended up lying there – face to face and eye to eye.

  The RMP’s dead eyes stared at Simmonds’ from inches away. Somehow there was no judgment there.

  “Sorry, mate.” Simmonds said it out loud this time – and he meant it. T
he guy may have been a flaming arsehead. But he was still a living person, and a fellow member of Her Majesty’s Forces. And Simmonds was sorry he was dead.

  He felt himself being hauled to his feet.

  It was Croucher. He put his hand out. “Thanks,” he said, his voice for once warm, without even a trace of his usual senior NCO surliness. “You’re a good mucker, Simmonds.”

  “No worries,” he said, taking his hand. “Reckon you’ve done your bit. And you’ve got the George Cross to prove it.”

  Anyway, given his long and death-defying history, clearly God didn’t want Colour Sergeant Croucher to die.

  And who was Simmonds to mess with that?

  * * *

  Wes positioned one of the soldiers to guard the crawlspace – though no more dead were coming out for the moment – while the other faced out, covering the rear. He picked up the little girl off the floor, surprised when she didn’t protest, then walked over to the two boys, who stood side-by-side.

  His first impulse was to take the gun off the older one. But he immediately saw him point it in a safe direction, lower the hammer, and engage the safety. It was more than Wesley knew how to do a few weeks ago, so maybe it was okay.

  He wanted to squat down to their level, but his middle-aged thighs were still aching from all the running, and he was even more heavily loaded than usual with the girl, so he just inclined his head down toward them.

  “Where’s your mum, lads?” He needed to find her.

  But he immediately regretted asking the question. The older boy just shook his head: No. Wesley couldn’t quite tell whether he was unable to speak, or just felt it was unnecessary. The younger boy started crying.

  “Okay,” Wesley said, his voice hushed. “We’re going to get you someplace safe.” He felt eyes on him, and turned his head to see they belonged to Josie, the little girl. He had to tilt his head back to focus on her – the inevitable far-sightedness of advancing middle age. When he did, and locked eyes with her, he could see she was just holding his gaze calmly, with something like curiosity – or maybe even affection.

  Also, her eyes, the color and shape, seemed strangely familiar to him, but he couldn’t work out where from. They must be her mother’s eyes, but Wesley couldn’t picture Amarie’s face right now. He was too focused on what he had to do.