Chapter Three
Morning, Thursday, April 28
Kansas City, MO
“Go, go, go!” The MRAP’s engine roared as it mounted the curb and crashed against the stalled minivan. “Hit it again!” the lieutenant screamed. The driver backed up a few feet, ground the gears, and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. The howls of their pursuers were audible, even over the powerful D9 diesel engine as the mine-resistant vehicle slammed into the minivan one more time and shoved it aside at last. Early morning sun made the flying glass glint.
The lieutenant turned in the turret to the line of big black SUVs behind his vehicle, nodding and throwing his arm forward to tell them to proceed.
“Victor 2, we’re clear!” he called on the radio. “How much farther?”
“About a mile,” the scout radioed, his voice hard to understand over the rattle of gunfire. Five seconds later, the gunfire echoed back after it had traveled the mile between the lieutenant and the scout. “Be advised we’re engaged.”
“More of those things?” the lieutenant asked.
“Negative, it’s locals.” The all too familiar whang! of small arms fire rattling off the side of Humvee armor came over the radio before the scout stopped transmitting.
“Engage them if you must,” the lieutenant said.
“Negative!” barked someone else over the frequency. “Evergreen has said no lethal force is to be used against civilians.” Of course Evergreen said that. Fine.
“You heard them,” the lieutenant told his detachment, “no lethal force. Batten down and push through!” He locked the .50 caliber mount and dropped back through the hatch before securing it as well. He just prayed that none of the gun-crazy locals had their own .50 calibers.
They rolled past two abandoned road blocks. The lieutenant kept looking back in the direction of Kansas City, the horizon a collection of smoke plumes. Helicopters circled wildly over the city.
“Perimeter ahead, lieutenant,” the driver called over the roaring diesel engine. Up ahead about a half-a mile was the back entrance to Kansas City International Airport, one of the air freight access roads. It looked like a bunch of semi-trucks were parked, their jobs interrupted by the crisis. But as they got closer, it became apparent that the trucks weren’t parked to wait; they were parked as barricades. There were thousands of people on their side of the barricade.
“Civilians being kept back?” the lieutenant wondered aloud.
“No,” the driver barked, “not anymore, anyway!” He brought the Humvee to a quick halt, still about 500 yards away, but it was still too close. Hundreds of heads turned toward them as the other vehicles in the convoy also came to a stop.
“Oh shit,” the lieutenant said. The radio was screaming for his attention from the security detail behind them. Those hundreds of heads became much, much more and a lot of them began moving toward the convoy. “Turn them around,” he said.
“Where are you going?” the security detail demanded.
“This entrance is compromised,” the lieutenant said over the radio. “We need to find another.”
“We can’t,” the answer came. “The perimeter at the hangar is becoming unstable.” The lieutenant ground his teeth. “Evergreen says to just…push through.”
“That isn’t possible,” the lieutenant said. Five hundred yards away they were now running toward the convoy. He felt his pulse start to race. “There isn’t another way in that your vehicles can navigate.” With the Humvees, his team could get onto the airport property in any of a dozen places, but the SUVs and vans behind him didn’t have that kind of off-road capability. “And we can’t just push through a crowd that size.” Now 400 yards away. “They’ll overwhelm us.”
“Evergreen is ordering you to continue as instruct—”
“Fuck that,” the lieutenant said, smacking the driver on the shoulder. “We’re going hot,” he said and keyed his team chat. “Go hot, I repeat, go hot.”
“Hooah!” the driver exclaimed and revved his engine.
“Lieutenant!” a voice yelled from the radio. He ignored it and popped the top hatch. He unlocked the M2 machine gun and yanked the heavy bolt back, then let it fly forward, charging the gun. The same thing happened in the other six Humvees behind him. Two hundred yards away, several hundred figures stormed toward them, arms outstretched, faces snarling. The lieutenant tried to ignore the howl that came from them, or how they looked so…normal. Other than the fact they wanted to tear him apart and eat him, of course.
“Number Four, come up alongside,” the lieutenant ordered. As it rolled up next to him, the crowd was just 100 yards away. The screaming over the radio was shrill. He knew how to drown it out. “FIRE!” he yelled and pressed the butterfly switch on his gun. Twin .50 caliber machine guns roared, their 700-gram bullets hitting with more than 10,000 foot-pounds of energy, blowing the enemy to pieces as they scythed through the crowd. The protective detail might still be screaming at the lieutenant, but he couldn’t hear it over the hammering machine guns.
There were far too many for even the .50 caliber machine guns to kill them all, but it was enough to punch a hole through to the line of semi-trucks. At that point they were out of luck.
“Dismount!” the lieutenant barked, and his team bailed out, instantly spreading out to create a skirmish line as the protective detail came roaring up in their big black SUVs and vans. He could see the leader of the detail jump out, yelling orders into his sleeve-mounted microphone as he ran to the lieutenant.
“You were ordered not to use deadly force!” The hundreds of yards of people chewed to bloody meat behind the agent created a stark contrast.
“Yeah, well fuck those orders.”
“Clear the damned road,” the man growled, the muscles standing out on his neck.
“We can’t move trucks that big; get her over on foot.”
The man quickly looked over to the roadblock before nodding; that, at least, was fact. He spoke into his wrist mic again. “Get Evergreen out!”
The security detail added to the Army perimeter, though they still refused to fire their weapons, and stayed behind in case the first line fell. The lieutenant’s men fired on single shot, carefully picking their targets and firing with deadly accuracy. The lieutenant could hear Evergreen screaming as she was bodily carried through the barricade by her detail.
“She’s clear!” the detail head yelled. “We’re falling back.” This was the hard part, the lieutenant knew, the moments it took to try and disengage from the enemy. This enemy was far worse than any they’d trained to fight. “Got it,” he said and then yelled to his men, “Slow fall back, hold the line!”
Even with single shots, they were going through ammo at a furious rate. The enemy doggedly refused to go down from single hits, or even respond to them for that matter. The human body was surprisingly hard to stop with a single shot from a 5.56 NATO round. They’d been trained for center mass shots, and those usually weren’t instantly lethal. Especially to these people. People, he thought, they were once people.
A woman came at him in a headlong rush, the remains of a nightgown all she wore. He noticed her blonde hair and wildly flying breasts as he put a round into her upper abdomen. The round punched through, spraying bright red blood, but she only staggered slightly. Her lips pulled back in a snarled scream, and he shot her again. This round punched through her sternum. She still took several more steps before realizing she was dead and crashing face-first to slide to within feet of him. He switched targets and his M4 trigger didn’t fire. Empty mag.
“Reloading!” he yelled and did a rapid magazine swap. The new mag found the well as if it had a will of its own and slid in with a perceptible ‘click.’ He jerked back down to be sure it was seated, released it, and brought the heel of that palm smacking into the slide release. It slammed forward, reloading the gun. It had taken about two seconds, and in that two seconds a man had closed to within a foot. He raised the rifle barrel and pulled the trigger once, twice, again, and slid to the side. The runner jerked and fell past him. The lieutenant backed, checking his magazine pouch and finding two left.
“Move, move, move,” he ordered, and they all fell back. The firing got more and more rapid despite the soldiers being as meticulous as possible. The enemy came faster and faster, and with unrelenting ferocity. His first man went down under the enemies’ clawing hands as the last of the protective detail cleared the barricade. Two more fell as they finally reached the semi-trucks, and three more as they scrambled over them.
“Grenades!” The lieutenant ordered, and the remaining seven men all pulled pins and threw before dropping over the other side and running. The explosives went off in a rapid string of krumps! Debris and gore flew as they raced after the protective detail in a semi-circle, all facing outward. The last pair through the gate pulled it closed and pulled heavy zip-cuffs to lock it closed.
“Won’t hold for long,” the corporal called as he jerked it taut.
“Good enough,” the lieutenant said. The hangar was in view. “Let’s go.”
Five minutes later they were jogging up to the hangar; the sound of big turbojet engines spinning up was easily audible from inside as the ground crew prepared it for takeoff. The head of the protective detail was waiting for the lieutenant by the side entrance.
“You got us here,” he said.
“We said we would,” the lieutenant said, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve. “We’ll hold the perimeter and board last.”
“Yes,” the agent said, “you’ll hold the perimeter, and keep holding it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The President orders you to hold the hangar. After we leave, as well.” The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed, and the agent nodded. “Yeah, you heard me. Think you can keep this order?” The soldier came to crisp attention and saluted in perfect form.
“We do our duty, sir!”
“You do that,” the agent said and walked back into the hangar.
“Lieutenant, bogies coming across the field!”
“Sir, what do we do?”
The jet engines spun up and the huge blue and white E-4B taxied out and turned onto the runway.
“Our duty,” the lieutenant said and raised his rifle, shooting one of the infected as it ran toward the plane. As waves of infected raced toward the few surviving soldiers, the E-4B roared into the early evening sky and banked west, leaving the burning ruins of Kansas City behind.
* * * * *