The Rising Horde, Volume Two Read online

  THE RISING HORDE

  Volume Two

  by Stephen Knight

  © 2012 by Stephen Knight

  Cover art © 2012 by Jared Rackler

  1

  “Good news from the medical folks. They’ve got a lock on the vaccine.” Jaworski leaned against McDaniels’s desk, his hands in the pockets of his BDU trousers. Despite his words, the wiry Air Force officer didn’t seem overly enthused.

  “That is good news,” McDaniels said. “When will they start manufacturing it?”

  “As soon as possible. They have everything they need. I’m told it’s going to be a fairly simple thing to process, and they have all the tools and materials required. The first batch should be ready to go in thirty hours. Enough to treat five thousand people.”

  “Fantastic, sir. Off the chart fantastic.”

  Jaworski grunted and nodded to McDaniels’s workstation. “You been paying attention to the tactical RSS feed?”

  “Negative. I’ve been on the phone with SOCOM and just got back in from the eastern perimeter. Our MRAPs arrived, and I had them staged out in the desert. We’ve got four maintainers, and I told them to make sure those machines are ready to go at a moment’s notice. But let’s see…” McDaniels clicked an icon on his laptop’s desktop and opened a streaming feed of text. “What is it I’m looking for?”

  “The necros are hammering Dallas,” Jaworski said.

  Fuck. McDaniels opened the item and scanned the report. Embedded images showed the approaching zombie force, and he was stunned to see the size of the army of the walking dead bearing down on north Dallas.

  “The dead couldn’t get past the blocking force to the west, and they were getting hammered by B-52s and the like. Even the stenches find concentrated bomber strikes with napalm B inconvenient,” Jaworski said. “So the entire body turned to the south. And with the other movement coming up from Mexico, we’re between a rock and real hard place.”

  “You think the napalm turned them?”

  Jaworski shrugged. “I have no idea, Cord. That’s what I’m being told, and I kind of want to believe it. And it might make some sense.” He paused and looked around for a moment before refocusing his attention on McDaniels. “Listen, Cord, it looks like we’ve reached the end of the line with regards to a lot of supplies. Munitions are being expended faster than they can be replaced. At least a million necros are down for the count, but there are still millions more out there, and the powers-that-be are having a hard time pushing Class III and V stock to us when entire divisions and air wings are running dry.” Class III supplies were petroleum products such as fuel for vehicles and aircraft, while Class V was ammunition for the whole spectrum of weapons systems, from small-caliber bullets to nuclear weapons with a yield in the megaton range.

  “Colonel, I don’t dig hearing that. We were promised the supply chain would never stop.”

  “Yeah, well, I can only guess that when the stars and bars said that, they didn’t quite realize that the stenches weren’t just going to stop and let us firebomb them into submission. Hell, half the time, the things go running right at the first troops they see. And a lot of times, that’s exactly what they get.” Jaworski nodded at the picture again. “Lots of uniforms in there. Military, law enforcement, emergency services… if a fraction of them remember their skills, we’re going to have the time of our lives. And they cover almost a hundred miles a day on average.”

  McDaniels did some quick calculations. “Then if they cruise through the major population centers north of us, they’ll be in Odessa in…”

  “A little over three days if they march in a straight line. And since there’s a big freeway connecting Dallas to Odessa, it seems likely that’s what they’ll do. Fort Hood is under the hammer, they’re expecting consistent contact within the next day. The stenches are moving out of Austin.”

  “Following the refugees to Fort Hood. We saw the same thing in New York. These things go wherever the food is.” McDaniels leaned back in his chair. “Well, we knew it would probably come to this. We still have a few days. The towers are all up now, and engagement sites are pre-registered all around the complex. Are we still going to get those Apaches from Hood?”

  “I’m told yes, but somehow I doubt it. If the stenches move on Hood, where are those aviators going to want to be? With us, or with their families? I have to say, that’s a no-brainer. I have a commitment from them, but they haven’t shown up yet. Nor have the screening units from the 3rd Armored Cav, beyond the four Strykers we have on-station already.”

  “Colonel, if the Apaches were promised to us, have the aviators start flying in their munitions. Hellfires are useless. We need tens of thousands of thirty-millimeter rounds and thousands of aerial rockets. According to Gartrell, the Apache’s chaingun is very effective against the necromorphs. Again, it’s not a death ray, but even a graze from those rounds leave things pretty fucked up.”

  “I’ll make sure the request comes from a four star who can try and turn it into an order, but I’m not going to hold my breath.”

  “And I’ll do the same right now, unless there’s anything else?”

  Jaworski shook his head. “Don’t wait for me, Colonel. If you can work some magic, hop to it.”

  McDaniels reached for the phone on his desk and dialed a preset that connected him with Army Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, which was where he would get the ball rolling. And if the world wanted Wolf Safire’s vaccine, the ball had better start rolling real soon.

  ***

  Gartrell met with forty noncommissioned officers in a large tent adjacent to the D-FAC. The majority of them were Rangers, but several petty officers from the SEAL detachment had shown up, as well as those from the Special Forces, the Night Stalkers, the cash, and the MI unit assisting with tactical operations. Gartrell had called the meeting so he would have the opportunity to address the order of battle with his peers and junior NCOs in a more casual setting. No officers were present, with the exception of the gigantic Captain Chase, who sat perched on a folding chair in one corner.

  When asked why he wanted to attend, the captain scanned the assemblage of soldiery before him for a long moment before answering Gartrell’s question. “Because I want to see the men who are going to save me when things go to hell.”

  Gartrell thought it over. “Well, can’t argue with that, Captain. Though we’ll need a Ranger in that HULC gear of theirs to carry your fat out of the fire, sir.”

  Gartrell walked to a whiteboard he had set up at the front of the tent. “All right, bargain basement mission essentials that the officers are unlikely to be able to mess up: protect the facility. Defense in depth. Long-range surveillance is essential to defining our responses. If we can see what the enemy intends to do before they can actually execute, we can tailor our response directly. With that, we need not only eyes in the field, but eyes in the sky, and we’re fortunate to have not only helicopters, but unmanned aerial systems with significant endurance. We are doubly blessed by the presence of the Army Corps of Engineers, who may not be able to build levees worth a damn, but have proven invaluable at digging deep trenches, piling high berms, and securing the premises behind tons of moveable walls. And to top that off, they also rerouted a major state highway at significant cost to the taxpayer.”

  There were chuckles at that, but Gartrell didn’t let the mirth live for very long. “Best estimates are that we will be decisively engaged with up to five million stenches within four to five days time. I’ll say that again—hell, I’ll even write it on the white board, since there are non-Rangers out there, and they can probably read.” He received more chuckles, which died down as Gartrell wrote 5,000,000 in bright red marker and underlined i
t twice. “That is five million, folks. That number should cause you some great concern, not because it is extremely vast and impressive, even though it is both those things. You should be concerned with this number because there is another number that directly relates to it. Anyone want to take a guess at what that number might be?”

  “Forty-two!” someone said.

  “Sixty-nine, dude!” someone called out in a dead-on Keanu Reeves imitation.

  “Not in this meeting,” Gartrell said. “I’m totally serious. Can any of you hooahs think of a number that might directly inform this sum of five million?” No one came up with a satisfactory answer, so Gartrell selected a blue marker and wrote 626,346 just below the number of approaching zombies. He pointed at it. “Any guesses as to what this number might be?”

  There were guesses aplenty, but none of them were the answer Gartrell was looking for. He clasped his hands behind his back, and in his best Grave Senior NCO voice, he told the assembled operators what they really didn’t want to hear.

  “That is the number of munitions we currently have at our disposal. Six hundred twenty-six thousand, three hundred forty-six bullets, grenades, rockets, missiles, mortar rounds, and shotgun shells. Six hundred twenty-six thousand, three hundred forty-six instruments of death countering five million of the enemy. And I have been told the number of munitions at our disposal is very unlikely to increase at the exponential rate we need because supply lines are severely stressed and a significant percentage of available ordnance has been used up in engagements from Maine to northern Texas.”

  A murmur ran through the crowd, and Gartrell noticed more than a few expressions of shocked surprise. He nodded. “That’s right. Zed is in Texas in two places, rolling up from the south, which we already knew. And now, they’re bearing down on Dallas from the north after eating their way through half of Oklahoma and the southern Mississippi states. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of them have been destroyed by our forces. Regrettably, most of our forces have been destroyed as well, and our dead have joined zed’s ranks. Once they come through Dallas and Fort Hood—and Fort Hood is full of evacuees with nowhere to go, so it’s a nice juicy target the stenches simply will not pass up—I have no doubt their number will increase by another two million. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the military’s remaining forces will figure out a strategy to contain the stenches, or at least delay them, if not outright destroy them. I am not holding my breath, however.”

  Gartrell turned back to the whiteboard and tapped the number 626,346 once again. “Even though we’ve engineered the appropriate choke points and designed substantial defenses that will undoubtedly be effective, the United States military has never fought a force as large as this in such a small area. I have to tell you that if we do not bring our A-game to this fight, then we will not have a chance at a do-over. SPARTA is the fitting designation for this objective, and I have to think our odds are only slightly better than that of Leonidas’s troops when they made their stand against the Persians at Thermopylae. Though that might just be my well-known bright and cheery outlook shining through, because the Persians were only coming to kill, rape, and pillage, while the necromorphs are coming to eat us. A fine distinction.

  “And just when you think it can’t get any worse, boys, it does. As the dead move toward us, they will drive every living human being ahead of them. Those fellow Americans—men, women, children, their pets, and even the occasional mother-in-law—will want to enter SPARTA and take shelter. You might have noticed that space is already tight, and the word from Colonel Jaworski is this: No civilians are to be allowed through the wire. We do not have the resources to support such a massive influx of civilians and have even the remotest chance of surviving what will be, at best, a very, very long siege. This means most of those folks who show up at our gates will undoubtedly be killed right in front of us, and even worse, we may have to use arms to prevent them from forcing their way into the camp. This promises to be just as fucking horrible as being eaten alive by the dead, but you need to remember at all times that the mission is what’s important here. The medical researchers and scientists in the buildings over there—”Gartrell nodded to his left. “—are the ones who are working to save the rest of us. We’re just their bodyguards. They’re the national assets we are charged to protect. All of you need to remember that. All of you need to make peace with yourselves when you have to do something unspeakable, because the opportunities to sink to new lows will likely present themselves with metronomic regularity.

  “Your officers may not understand this, and they will need you to explain it to them, and to be strong for them when they become weak. And you will need to do the same for the men under your command. Many of your men will very likely disobey orders to shoot Americans, which is understandable and, in almost every case except the one we’re fucking walking into, legal. But this is a time when you will need to reach deep down inside of yourselves and do the right thing, no matter the personal cost. Because it’s not about us, and it’s not about the civilians at the gates, and it’s not even about the stenches. It’s about those people in those buildings over there and what they can do to ensure that mankind does not disappear from the face of this planet.”

  The room was very quiet. Gartrell looked around, and the signs were there; they were starting to get it. None of them liked it, as he’d expected, and many of them were trying hard to suppress their fear, which he knew would be the case. It didn’t matter who they were—SEAL, Green Beret, Night Stalker, Ranger. It didn’t matter what they did—sniper, demolitions expert, hostage rescue specialist, intelligence analyst, doctor, pilot, direct action troop, ass kicker, and shit giver. What mattered was that they knew the worst nights of their lives lay before them, that most of them would die in fear, pain, horror, and despair, and a precious few would even dishonor themselves. Gartrell knew no one could face the horror that advanced toward them and not feel even hard-drilled training slip and melt away. He had gone through just that himself, in the dark, fetid subway tunnels under New York City’s Upper East Side. Gartrell was more experienced than most of the other NCOs in the meeting. He had done more, seen more, been hardened by a career that at times was no less painful than a thousand cuts from a salted blade. He had helped train many of them. And despite that, he was aware that part of him had unspooled during that time under the streets of New York, and he would never be able to reclaim it.

  The same lay in store for those who survived the coming battle. If any did survive.

  He turned back to the whiteboard. “Okay, enough of this philosophical bullshit. We’re all warfighters here in this room. You all know that the only way to kill a necromorph is to put a bullet through its head. Well, that’s true, but a zed without legs isn’t mobile, and a zed crawling on the ground is something that other zeds will trip over. So I want to talk to you real quick about disabling, or otherwise immobilizing, a necromorph and using that to your advantage.”

  2

  The next few days passed amidst a furious burst of activity. Helicopters came and went, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and even their civilian charges toiled in the hot days and cold nights, working on the perimeter defenses, on securing the observation towers, on ensuring the choke points set up at each wall were properly configured and made as secure as possible. It was all backbreaking work, but at least the chances of anyone turning into a zombie were reduced. The vaccine was being handed out to those inside SPARTA, since they were the first line of defense.

  McDaniels was pleasantly surprised when a flight of four AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopters arrived and set down in the northern parking lot, and he took the time to go to the designated airfield and chat with the Apache crews. He was mildly surprised to find the flight was commanded by a female, a short, stout lieutenant colonel named Theodora Masterson.

  “I go by Teddy, not Bat,” she told him after removing her big IHADSS helmet and climbing down from her aircraft.

  “You can call me Cord,” McDaniels sai
d, shaking her hand. “I’m a two-headed mutant—deputy commander and leader of the QRF. Gotta thank you guys for making the flight out here, especially with what’s going down at Hood.”

  Masterson shrugged. “We had orders. They can handle things back at Hood without us.”

  “And just how are things back at Hood?”

  Masterson looked at the rest of the Apaches as their crews secured them. “It still exists. They keep shrinking the perimeter. We lost a lot of folks since the post is so damned big, and they’re down to preserving maybe ten square miles of real estate. But they have the munitions, and they have a ton of warrior ethic, Colonel. However things shake out, it’s not up to us to help anymore.”

  McDaniels nodded slowly. “Roger that.”

  “Hey, if you’ll excuse me, I have to post-flight my aircraft and then get ready for whatever’s headed our way. You mind?” The way she said it, McDaniels could tell Masterson wasn’t really interested if he cared or not.

  “Not at all, Colonel Masterson. You need anything, you give me a shout, and I’ll see that you get it.”

  “Much obliged, Colonel.”

  The Apaches were followed a few hours later by two Chinooks carrying fuel and ammunition for the gunships, as well as several maintainers to keep the attack helicopters operational. Once they unloaded, the Chinooks lifted off to return to the besieged Fort Hood.

  “Balls of steel to be up here when the hammer is coming down at Hood,” Gartrell said a few hours later, when he and McDaniels were inspecting one of the observation towers. The tower was manned by two Rangers, both of whom were sniper-qualified. In addition to their SCAR assault weapons, an M24 bolt-action rifle leaned against one wall.

  McDaniels turned and regarded the Apaches. “You think they’d be able to stop the zeds from overrunning the post?”

  Gartrell shook his head. “Nah. Hood’s just too big, and it’s too inviting of a target. SPARTA’s a flyspeck compared to that place. A few Apaches wouldn’t make a bit of difference there, but they can make a big difference here.”