Extraction
JOHN BIRMINGHAM
Night fell on the dead city, and with it, the sounds of things not dead.
Caitlin Monroe leaned against the cold, stone battlements of the old fort and scanned the edges of the forest to the north with the night vision scope fixed to her rifle. The forest had grown wild over there, obscuring all but the roofline of the empty houses beyond.
Well, maybe they were empty, she thought. Maybe not.
Her earpiece crackled with reports from the other lookouts. All of them in French.
“Sector West, clear.”
“Sector South, clear.”
“Sector East . . . hold on.”
A single rifle shot cracked out. The report bounced off the stone walls of the fortress, but she did not turn towards it, staring instead into the darkness to the north, waiting for any sign of movement. But all she saw was the forest; the only movement was the trees swaying gently in the early evening breeze.
“Sector East, clear,” the voice said.
The channel went quiet again, and Caitlin gently pivoted, sweeping the tree line one last time.
“Sector North report,” a new voice crackled inside her ear. In English this time, but heavily accented. Thierry.
“Sector North . . . clear,” Caitlin said at last. And then repeated herself in French.
“Secteur Nord . . . dégagé.”
Still, she did not stand down.
“You see anything, Doc?” Caitlin asked, taking her eye from the scope at last.
Standing beside her, Dr. Juliette le Marjason scoped out the same length of forest with a large pair of high-powered night vision binoculars.
“Nothing,” she said warily, but like Caitlin, she kept looking. Finally, Juliette blew out the breath she had been holding. It steamed in the cold air.
“I think we’re good, Caitlin,” she said. Her English was accented, but not heavily. She had worked in America for three years before all of . . . this.
Caitlin nodded and took a moment to survey all of . . . this.
It might be the last time.
The two women stood at the apex of a massive, graystone bastion, an arrowhead-shaped tower at the northeastern corner of Le Fort de Noisy-le-Sec. Before them, the haunted suburbs of Paris stretched away into the absolute gloom of night. The landscape was a ruin under a clear black sky filled with stars and a waning moon’s gunmetal blue light. Caitlin looked down upon streetlamps snuffed out and broken. Telephone poles had snapped and splintered like matchsticks, and weather-worn billboards faded to white slumped over rusted car bodies.
The houses on the far side of the forest stood two and three stories, and there were nights when Caitlin thought she could hear the hushed whisper of monsters shuffling through the dry dust and mold of those crypts.
“We should go inside,” Doctor le Marjason said. “Bachelard has outdone himself tonight. A feast is promised.”
“Yeah, I can already smell the slow-cooked tins of corn beef from here,” Caitlin said. “Nom nom.”
“No, no, you are awful, Caitlin,” the doctor said, but she was grinning. “Bachelard has made a cassoulet of everything we cannot take tomorrow. He has even done duck legs.”
“Wait, what?” Caitlin said. “What about Daffy? What happened to Daffy?”
“We cannot take him with us, Caitlin. We cannot leave him here. The infected will get him.”
“Doc, there’s not even that many infected left. They died off. Mostly.”
“There are enough,” Dr. le Marjason said. “Daffy was old and lame. He only had one wing. It was a mercy.”
“You’re not selling this, Doc.”
But the French woman did not have to sell the meal. Caitlin had been working hard all day preparing for the bug-out in the morning, and she hadn’t eaten much after breakfast. Just a handful of dried fruit, nuts, and a protein bar so old it had real archaeological significance. As she ducked her head under a low stone lintel, the smells from the kitchen wafted up the spiral staircase from below. What Bachelard was cooking smelled delicious, and her mouth watered.
Pity about old Daffy, though.
Caitlin had liked that grumpy old duck.
Halfway down the stone stairwell, the women had to press themselves against the wall to allow the night watch, Roche and Mercier, to get past them. The young men, a former paratroop sergeant and a Tier One operator from the Bureau were talking and laughing as they climbed the stairs. Roche sucked grease from his fingers, and Mercier chewed on a small drumstick.
Too small for poor Daffy, Caitlin thought, but she greeted the men and wished them well for the night.
The fortress was as secure as anywhere could be in a fallen world. Noisy-le-Sec had been the headquarters of the French Secret Service and, specifically, the military intelligence arm of the French state, the Deuxième Bureau. The layers of security which had once defended the Bureau against enemies foreign and domestic—and once upon a time, Caitlin was very much counted among the former—had allowed a small crew of survivors to hold out here in the first days of the plague. The fort’s thick stone walls, well-stocked armory, and two years’ worth of provisions meant for dispatch to the Bureau’s overseas posts saw them through the worst of the following year.
That and the serum, of course.
Dr. le Marjason had vaccinated everyone who still drew breath in this place in a mad rush by the end of that first horrific week.
“We heard a shot before. Was that you?” Roche, the paratrooper, asked.
Caitlin shook her head.
“Dion, you know when I pull a trigger, you’ll never hear it.”
Roche snorted, and Doctor le Marjason rolled her eyes.
“You boys stay warm up there tonight,” she said. “It’s going to get down near freezing.”
“But don’t cuddle too much,” Caitlin teased them. “I’d prefer you kept your eyes out for the biters, not each other.”
They did not rise to the bait. Instead, Roche shrugged in a very Gallic fashion.
“I don’t think there are many biters left. I haven’t seen one in months.”
“Dude, come on,” Caitlin said. She folded her arms and leaned back against the curving stone wall. It was cold and felt a little damp against her neck. “Remember your classics. It’s the character who says things like that at the start of the movie who gets bitten on the ass by a zombie before the end of the first act. And they get specifically ass-bit because they’re not looking out for shit. The biters are still out there. And plenty more besides. Stay on it, Sergeant.”
Neither man looked particularly chastened. Caitlin had no place in their chain of command. She remained an outsider. It was an accident of history that she was even here. And that accident was sitting at the big common table in the kitchen when she and le Marjason emerged from the stairwell.
Wales Larrison raised a glass of brown liquor, probably cognac, as the women appeared. There had been no bourbon in the fortress stores when everything fell apart, and Wales had been forced to improvise in the years since. More than a dozen people had crowded into the kitchen, and their voices roared even in that comparatively large, open space. Everyone was up, excited for the morning.
Wales’s voice boomed out.
“Caitlin! Jules! Get your asses on down here and have a last drink with me. These cheese-eating Asterixes wouldn’t know how to get on the outside of a decent drink if it was the last thing they ever did.”
Doctor le Marjason frowned at him.
Larrison had been drinking a lot the last few months.
“Wales, this will be the last drink you ever have if you can’t evacuate tomorrow. Thierry will leave you here for the biters.”
“Don’t you worry about me, Doc,” he shot back in his big American voice. Larrison swung one leg up on the table, and it crashed down with an almighty bang. Marjason had crafted the artificial limb from an old table leg.
“I’ll be ready to hop on down the happy trail the hell out of here, but right now, our liberation calls for a toast.”
He banged the wooden leg on the table a couple of times, loud enough that the roar of the small crowd fell away.
Larrison climbed to his feet, or instead to his one good foot. His peg leg, as he called it, he propped up on the seat he had been warming.
“Friends. Countrymen . . . that’s you, Monroe. It’s just you and me now that Daffy’s gone.”
Somebody cheered.
Wales patted the air with his free hand, taking a quick hit from his drink with the other.
“My friends, I cannot let this our last night at your marvelous chateau pass without saying what a wonderful time we’ve had here and how much I’m looking forward to never seeing any of your ugly-ass faces again.”
The cheer was louder this time. It sounded somehow drunker to Caitlin. They had been at the fortress a long time. Long enough to reclaim the grounds, plant their own crops, and even source livestock. Chickens, some goats from a nearby petting zoo, and the sadly departed, slow-cooked Daffy. Everyone was used to Wales by now. And to her, of course.
A hell of a thing, really, when you thought about it. The Bureau and Echelon had once fought a shadow war in this city. Caitlin herself had been taken and tortured in the cells below this fortress. But all of that meant nothing now.
No, she corrected herself, fetching a plate and filling it with roasted vegetables and chicken pieces while everybody listened to Wales’s speech. No, she thought. She and Wales had been allowed into Noisy-le-Sec after she escaped from that charnel house of a hospital precisely because the station chief here, Thierry, had known them so well as rivals. And even, to be completely honest, as enemies.
Thierry was one of those men who were very good at recognizing when circumstances had changed.
Caitlin caught his eye as he leaned against the mantlepiece which ran over the kitchen hearth. A fire burned in there, and Thierry Duval seemed quite content to warm himself by it, nursing a glass of red wine and smiling at Wales. He nodded to her, and she returned the gesture.
Thierry had overseen her torture when she had been imprisoned here in the before times.
It didn’t matter.
He was why she still lived now.
* * *
Wales, who had run Overwatch for all of Echelon’s field agents in Paris, went on with his speech. His French, unlike hers, was flawless. He worked the room into a small riot of laughter and fake outrage, telling stories of the time before the fall when they had been enemies. Only fifteen souls remained within the ramparts of the fortress, and apart from Wales and Dr. le Marjason, they were all field agents and operators. It made sense that only the strongest, most ruthless had survived. The years had been hard. The small audience cheered Wales through his long and often hilarious retelling of old spy stories, but the biggest cheer came when he had so much to drink that he stumbled on his peg leg and fell over. The doctor rushed forward to help him, summoning a couple of Bureau agents to help her get him back to his room. She grabbed a couple of bottles of water to take with them.
Thierry Duval tapped a small fork against the edge of his wineglass, bringing order and quiet back to the room.
“And that, I think, is enough fun for this evening,” he said. “Each your fill, drink no more except for water and get to sleep. We will need all of our energy and focus tomorrow morning.”
A couple of people started to clean up, but Duval stopped them.
“No. Do not bother with that,” he said. “It is a waste of time now. Leave everything exactly as it is. It will be quite the find for some historian a thousand years from now. It is enough; we’re done here.”
He clapped his hands twice, making a sound like rifle shots. The party broke up.
Caitlin, who was not finished eating, stayed at the table, piling more food onto her plate. Thierry raised an eyebrow at her, but she kept eating.
“You never did quite fit in here, did you, Caitlin,” he said.
Caitlin chewed and swallowed a roasted duck-fat potato. Poor Daffy.
“None of us ever fit anywhere,” she said. “That’s how we ended up in this life. That’s why we’re still alive.”
He shrugged.
“A fair point, I will concede. But do not be up all night. We must be rested. I fear this will not be an easy journey.”
She held up a chicken leg.
“Just getting my protein.”
* * *
They were up early, but the convoy did not leave until well after dawn, with the sky a dull gray and the moon still visible to the west where the clouds had frayed like the page of an ancient book. Caitlin climbed the tower one last time after waking and took a final look over the sanctuary. The massive stone walls of the fortress glistened dark and gray. The dead world beyond was shrouded in a cloak of early morning fog.
She wondered what waited for them out there.
The only sound was the wind, whistling across the fort’s southern walls and over the battlements, stirring the thick soup of cold fog.
Thierry had ordered patrols further into the city over the last six months after the first government radio signals came in from Castle Saint-Ulrich. With cautious patrolling to verify hours of drone cam coverage, the surrounding arrondissements were familiar enough now. They had even begun to imagine they might have an easy time of it, driving to the extraction point. But then bandits shot down one of the fort’s two precious drones, and they lost a patrol vehicle to an ambush a few days later.
There was no question of that being the work of the infected. Biters did not use RPGs.
With unknown numbers of le infecté still wandering the city’s ruins, now joined by armed hostiles of unknown strength and capability, Thierry had ordered a daylight evacuation. They did not have enough night vision equipment to spook their way to the extraction point at Orly Airport, and once they passed into the unknown wilds of Paris, it would be too easy to become lost and separated in the dark.
Caitlin was surprised to find Wales Larrison waiting for her by the vehicle they had been assigned, a Land Rover Defender in light desert tan.
Wales was showered, shaved, and had even dabbed on a spot of cologne. Unlike everyone else, who had dressed in combat fatigues or some civilian analogue, he sported a pair of cream slacks that hid most of his wooden leg, a blue shirt and a dark sports jacket. He looked like a high-tone bookie, off to the races, and Caitlin couldn’t help but smile when she saw him.
“How’s your head this morning, old man?”
“I have taken more out of strong drink than it has ever taken out of me, young lady,” he said.
“I made him drink two liters of water, and I gave him a vitamin B shot,” Juliette le Marjason said, appearing from around the other side of the Defender. She wore cargo pants and a photographer’s vest over a long-sleeved T-shirt. Every pocket was stuffed with medical supplies. She had a pistol at one hip and carried an FN SCAR rifle slung over one shoulder. If the doc was this tooled up, they really were going on an adventure, Caitlin thought.
She had dressed in plain black coveralls, lace-up boots and a ballistic vest; light body armor protected her at the most common bite sites, on the forearms, shoulders and neck, even though her vaccine was still good. A human bite could still kill you, even if it did not drive you insane. Caitlin carried an M4 as her primary weapon, but the Bureau’s armorer had kitted her out with whatever she’d asked for.
“Just gimme the lot, Gaston,” she said.
Four vehicles made up the convoy. Two Ford Rangers, her Land Rover and a Panhard VBL armored car. It looked by far the most rugged, but the fort’s other VBL had eaten a rocket-propelled grenade in the ambush a month earlier. Caitlin was more familiar with the Land Rover and was glad to have been assigned to it. It offered no protection against anti-armor weapons, but she wasn’t likely to crash it into a canal if things got sporty.
Also assigned to travel with her were Roche and Mercier, who arrived shortly after Caitlin, looking none the worse for their night watch. More B12 shots, probably. The doc had offered her one, but Caitlin said no. Noisy le Sec’s medical stocks were aging out, and the last thing she wanted was a bad reaction to a jab the morning they were supposed to leave.
There was no ceremony to their departure. Nobody to wave them off. Thierry, in the armored car, signaled to a couple of men at the great iron gates securing the tunnel through the old breastworks and out into the fallen world. The men undid the chains and swung the gates open while a gunner in Thierry’s VBL covered them with a heavy, ring-mounted machine gun. The gates screeched open slowly, and Caitlin felt her flesh crawling.
She imagined she could hear the howl of a million infecté beneath the rusted metal scream of the hinges. She couldn’t, of course. They were mostly gone now, but there were other monsters outside.
The convoy rolled forward.
Mercier and Roche insisted on driving and riding shotgun, respectively. Caitlin and Juliette sat behind them in the second row of seats, with Wales taking the whole back seat for himself and his improvised prosthetic leg.
Even though she had done her fair share of time on the patrols into the surrounding arrondissement, it felt weird to be passing through them in the Land Rover, knowing they would never return to Noisy-le-Sec. The fortress had been their home for a long time now, the world beyond its walls a hostile country.
There was little to be seen from the road, the buildings looming over them on both sides long since fallen to wreck and decay, their rooftops blanketed in ivy and moss. Green tendrils and vines wrapped tightly around every window and door frame. Ivy, thick and heavy, climbed every stone facade and wall, heedless of gravity. Wherever she looked closely at a building, it seemed to be sinking into the earth. Shadowed doorways were black holes in their flanks, waiting to swallow and consume.
Caitlin recalled when she’d first arrived at the fort; she would sometimes climb the battlements in the evening to look down on the gray slate roofs of the old tenements and factories and wonder what lives had been made and unmade there. Now she just looked out the window, scanning for targets among the ruins of what had been. Here and there, they rolled by the desiccated corpse of an infecté or two, even bumping over one shot down by a recent patrol. But it was nothing like the mad, horrific race against spreading carnage and collapse that she had run from the hospital to the fort on the first day of the Fall in Paris. Time and decay had worked the magic trick of cleaning much of the city—or at least this part.
Mercier cut the wheel back and forth to weave through a tight barricade at the edge of their patrolled area. An armored truck marked “UN” had turned over in front of a bridge over a small canal, thick with fetid green water and floating rubbish, probably washed into the system by yesterday’s brief morning storms. The driver started to say something about having to get out and move the wreckage, but the armored car ahead of them geared down and crashed into the hulk at a low enough speed to push it aside without injuring anybody on board the VBL.
“Goddamn,” Wales muttered from the back seat at the crunching, grinding shriek of metal on metal.
The truck toppled into the canal with an almighty splash and a deep belch of dark, rotten water, settling into its watery grave with a series of dull groans and watery farts.
Such a racket would have brought hordes of the infected racing down on them once upon a time. Thousands, even tens of thousands. Now?
Nothing.
The Defender’s engine seemed dangerously loud.
The VBL pulled to a stop at the foot of the bridge. Caitlin leaned forward between the two front seats, but Thierry was too good at his job to order anybody out into the open. The ring-mounted machine gun traversed the ground ahead of them.
His voice crackled through the radio.
“Anyone see anything worth shooting?” he asked.
“Negative,” Roche replied.
Caitlin held her weapon close, but there was no sign of movement anywhere other than the slow, dreamy wake of the poisoned canal. The sloping concrete sides of the watercourse were painted with streaks of rust. Dead fish bobbed on the surface, disturbed by the roiling waves of the truck’s impact. Even with the windows rolled up, it reeked of stagnant water and rot.
A new voice crackled over the radio net.
“Infecté. Onze heures.”
They all turned, craning around to eleven o’clock.
A single rifle crack, more of a pop, really, dropped a naked scarecrow shambling out of an alleyway across the canal.
They waited.
Again.
Nothing.
After three minutes, Thierry announced they would push on.
The VBL led the way across the canal.
* * *
The run to Orly Airport was more of a stuttering crawl. There was an airstrip much closer to the fortress, of course. Charles de Gaulle, a few miles northeast. But the instructions from the Emergency Government at Castle Saint-Ulrich were explicit. They were to convoy overland to Orly, where they would rendezvous with other survivors and await extraction by elements of J-Mops, the Joint Military Operations command improvised by British and French airborne units in the chaos of the Fall.
The chopper flight to Castle Saint-Ulrich from Orly was just a few hours.
It would take longer to get to the rendezvous point twenty-five klicks away than the castle five hundred kilometers away.
If they made it at all.
Sitting in the back of the Land Rover, threading slowly through the chaos of the traffic jams which had strangled the city in her last hours, Caitlin had her doubts. The road network of Paris was choked with vehicles. The main thoroughfares were great frozen rivers of rusted steel, impassable with the skeletal remains of millions of cars, trucks, and bicycles. Duval took them off-piste. Navigating a backstreet path they had plotted over months.
But, of course, that led them to dozens of dead ends, impasses and diversions. Sometimes the VBL was powerful enough to force a way through. More often, they would have to backtrack and work around the delays. By late afternoon they had progressed less than half the way to their objective.
The fog of morning had burned off for an unseasonably warm afternoon, but nobody appreciated the good weather. They could be seen from much further away.
They had just crossed the Marne River, heading south on the Avenue de la Republique, when they got swarmed. Caitlin had been dozing, head propped against the window. She came to in a rush when her ears popped with a heavy, concussive blast. A grenade launcher on the VBL. Instantly she was awake and alert—surrounded by the sporadic crack of gunfire and the deeper rumble of vehicle-mounted weapons.
“The fuck is going on, Roche?” she shouted.
The former paratroop sergeant turned around and stared at her as if she were crazy.
“The fuck do you think, Caitlin? Infecté. Fucking everywhere.”
The four-vehicle convoy was strung out along a narrow road crowded with breakdowns. The biters, perhaps a hundred, were shambling at speed out of a school building to the east. It had been so long since Caitlin had seen a horde up close that she froze and gawked at all the arms and legs twisted hideously or entirely missing. Some appeared to have limbs knitted back into their bodies with a sickly, pulsing scar flesh. Limbs to replace the ones they had lost, sometimes two or more sets, jutted out of their shoulders or even their hips. They came on with that terrible hive-mind focus, clumped wracks of twisted bone and flesh, human spiders of fleshy ruin moving with dread and stilted determination.
Mercier shouted over the engine and the noise of gunfire.
“There’s hundreds of the fuckers!” he cried out.
They had blocked the road ahead of them. A seething mass of le infecté, shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the road, stared at the convoy with dead eyes and gaping mouths.
A single gunshot, way too loud, right next to Caitlin shook her out of her reveries.
Doctor le Marjason fired into a crowd of shambling husks coming at them from an avenue to the west. Wales joined her, tossing off round after round from the shotgun he carried.
Violent contrary needs flayed at Caitlin. She wanted to drive. She wanted to shoot. She needed to flee. And she had to fight.
But she had the worst tactical position of everyone in the Land Rover. She was just a passenger in the back on the wrong side of the vehicle.
The machine gun on the VBL hammered out a long burst, a heavy industrial clatter that drowned out the growl of the Defender’s engine. She saw the rounds hit home, removing limbs, toppling infecté.
Behind them, someone fired a grenade launcher. There was a long, hollow WHUMP and a great cloud of white smoke mushroomed up into the air. A few of the zombies blocking the road ahead of them exploded in a spray of gray, syrupy fluid and pulverized bone. Others fell backwards and struggled to get up again. One of them seemed to have a pair of spade-headed excavator claws grafted onto its torso.
“What is this?” Juliette whispered in horror, over and over. “What the fuck is this?”
The VBL reversed back and forth, muscling aside the burned-out hulk of a minibus. The gun turret swiveled and roared again.
In the brief pause between fire bursts, Caitlin heard the grating scrap of teeth on the metal skin of the Land Rover. She jumped to find an infecté at her window, the lines of rot and necrotic flesh running out of the corners of its eyes. Cancers or tumors? Clumps of shriveled black tissue hung from the hairless, shriveled head.
She didn’t scream.
She didn’t shoot through the window glass.
She checked her primary weapon and waited.
Slowly the convoy organized itself into a mobile fortress with interlocking fields of fire. Even more slowly, they beat back the rotting tide. The biter, chewing at her door handle, went under the wheels of the Defender. A wedge of attackers hit the Land Rover with a sickening thud. Caitlin felt her teeth rattle in her jaw, but shooters in the other vehicles carefully picked them off.
It was a drill they had practiced many times, and it was over a minute later.
Ticking stillness descended on the cabin.
“My god, what were they?” Dr. le Marjason gasped.
“Hungry,” Caitlin said.
“No, I mean, did you see them? What had been done to them?”
Caitlin had.
They all had.
The radio crackled again.
“Proceed to the route,” Thierry said.
* * *
Nobody spoke for a long time. They remained vigilant, on edge. Everyone had seen larger hordes of the infected, naturally. But not for a long time. It was Wales who finally broke the silence.
“Somebody’s been playing God,” he said.
They had crossed over the Seine at Alfortville and into an industrial neighborhood on the other side of the river.
With fewer people having lived here, the roads were more easily navigated, and the ruins seemed merely bleak and abandoned instead of actively malign. Some of the newer warehouses evoked the neglected foundations of a lost future, a modernist city that had never entirely been born.
Thierry called a five-minute break in the middle of a vast clay field in front of a brick factory. Two giant smokestacks reached high into the late-afternoon sky, casting long shadows east. It would have been a weirdly desolate place even before the Fall. But they had good sight lines, and there was even a small pit where they could take turns relieving themselves in something like privacy.
Or as private as you could be, with a lookout riding shotgun over you while you emptied your bladder.
Caitlin squatted in the pink-red dust while Dr. le Marjason stood watch. Then she returned the favor. A cold wind whipped up dust devils, and the fine particles felt gritty on her tongue and the back of her throat. The earth itself was silent here. No birds, no insects, no living things. Only the wind moving faintly and uncertainly.
Caitlin Monroe licked her lips, tasting grit and gun smoke.
She had a bad feeling about this, but then she’d had a bad feeling since waking up in the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital just before everything turned to 48 Flavors of shit.
Juliette climbed out of the pit, rubbing her hands with antiseptic gel. She offered the squeeze bottle to Caitlin, who took it and wiped her hands again.
Be pretty fucking funny to escape the city of the dead only to croak from typhus or septicemia.
“They are discussing the attack?” Le Marjason asked, nodding at the others.
The four vehicles had formed a rough circle in the center of the clay field. Three lookouts stood watch with long guns on top of the armored car and the two SUVs. Everyone else had gathered in a loose knot inside the vehicle fort.
“Dunno,” Caitlin said. “More likely, they’re talking about whether to push through to Orly tonight or find a secure place to make camp.”
Dr. le Marjason shuddered.
“Out here?”
She looked at the barren moonscape around them.
“Doubt it,” Caitlin said. “Thierry mapped out a bunch of defensible sites between Noisy and the airport. We got ammo, food and water. We could hold off a bigger horde than we met today.”
She felt Juliette’s hand close around her elbow.
“Caitlin, they were not normal. They had been . . . changed.”
Caitlin breathed out after a long moment.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But they were as dumb as ever. They went down just as easy as before.”
From somewhere, she recalled a fragment of a quote from her studies at the Naval Academy. The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. They came on in the same old style, and we met them in the same old way or something.
It wasn’t totes apropos for this audience anyway, so she kept it to herself.
They walked to the edge of the group. Thierry, Wales and Mercier leaned over an old paper map on the hood of the Defender. They were talking among themselves. Nobody else spoke.
Not for the first time was Caitlin glad to have fallen in with professionals.
She did not doubt they would make their rendezvous with J-MOP at Orly. Just as she did not doubt that some of the other survivors’ groups meant to meet up there would die on the way if they encountered anything like that infected mass back at the river crossing.
Le Marjason was right to be worried about the weirdness of the infecté, though.
Who had done that to them?
And why?
Was it connected to the ambush of their patrols the last few weeks?
None of it made sense.
She shook off her doubts and joined the conference.
“S’up, Wales?”
“We’re pushing on,” he said.
“We can get to Orly tonight if we stick to the route that skirts the residential districts,” Thierry said. His finger traced a line across the map. “We follow the river until the crossing of the rail bridge here”—he stabbed at the map again—“and then track the rail line all the way to Orly. There is a maintenance road that runs parallel to the tracks and no derailments between us and the rendezvous, according to J-MOP.”
“According to J-MOP,” Caitlin said, leaving the question unspoken.
Could they trust anybody but themselves?
* * *
They made good time following Thierry’s route to the airport, but even so, the light and warmth were leaking out of the day when they arrived. Of all the desolation and loss they witnessed on that slow trawl to Orly, nothing could match the weird otherness of the airfield itself. The terminals stood dark and silent, with the crunch of their wheels on the tarmac the only sound. The super hangars of Orly’s deserted flight depots reminded Caitlin of monoliths on the moon. The whole place seemed less a collection of runways and hangars than a black hole in the howling wastes, an inky absence, riotous with curves and adornments of concrete. The skeletons of fallen, burned-out planes stood in relief against the falling sun and years of wind-blown rubbish had piled up against a chain link fence on the outer edges of the facility.
“You sure our flight was today?” she joked, but nobody laughed.
There was no sign of any other survivors or refugees. No infecté. No hostiles.
Nothing.
“This feel good to anyone?” Caitlin asked.
Juliette was about to answer when Mercier suddenly wrenched the wheel hard. Caitlin’s head thumped into the window, and she saw stars and a comet tail.
The comet was a small antitank rocket that lanced out of the nearest terminal and speared into the side of the VBL. The armored car exploded in a cloud of orange-and-black flames. The shockwave staggered the Land Rover, and the vehicle slewed across the tarmac, pursued by a storm of grenades and automatic weapon fire.
Mercier shouted at Roche. Roche swore loudly and fired out of the passenger window. A grenade exploded too close, and the cabin suddenly pitched and tilted.
“We’re not going to make it!” Juliette cried, but her words were drowned out by the roar of their engine and return fire.
“Nine o’clock,” Wales called out from the back. “Shooters on the top deck of the terminal.”
Caitlin crawled over Dr. le Marjason to take the position under fire. Juliette squirmed beneath her and attempted to get out of the way. All was chaos and madness as they poured fire into the building, and Mercier tried to avoid the long snaking lines of tracer coming back.
“Drive at them!” Caitlin yelled, but the Frenchman was way ahead of her, slewing around and accelerating into the ambush. Caitlin was relieved to see at least one of the SUVs keeping pace with them. She tasted the coppery tang of blood in her mouth and felt the air turn hot and heavy, like breathing in soup.
The volume of incoming fire died away as they sped towards the terminal. A glass wall loomed ahead of them, and they crashed through, turning the world from the cold yellow light of sunset to darkness, from concrete to dust and rubble, from metal and flame to smoke and fire. The building whirled and tilted, the sky spun, and the ground shook.
Caitlin distinctly heard the odd scream of the Land Rover’s tires on the hard tiles of the terminal building just before the loud bang of the heavy steel ram bar slamming into a travelator.
They were inside the terminal. Deep inside.
“Out-out-out!” Roche yelled.
Caitlin was already out, with Juliette half a second behind her.
They hauled Wales from the rear of the Defender and over to a half-collapsed concession stand. It had been a pop-up crêperie. Now it was the best cover they had. Reality flexed and threatened to turn inside out. The terminal looked flat and washed out to Caitlin, like a grainy old black-and-white photograph, but one that had been ripped in half, pasted back together and tinted around the thinnest of edges with garish, unreal colors.
Wales looked sallow and almost permeable.
She checked him for wounds, but he was good on that score.
Juliette le Marjason pushed her aside.
“It is his heart,” she said. “Wales! Look at me. Where does it hurt?”
He winced.
“My left arm. Shoulder.”
The arm of his ridiculous sports coat was intact. Caitlin swore under her breath.
A burst of small-arms fire chewed into the roofing tiles above them, showering all three with plaster dust.
“Doc,” she said, “I’m going to get these fuckers. I need you to see to Wales.”
“Just go,” Juliette said. She was already unloading equipment and first aid supplies from the five hundred pockets of the photographer’s vest she wore.
Caitlin was about to hurry back to the Defender, where Roche and Mercier were hunkered down, returning fire, when her old boss suddenly gripped her arm in a surprisingly strong hold.
“We need some of them alive,” he said in a harsh rasping voice.
“I’m not in a very forgiving mood, Wales,” Caitlin hissed.
“We need to know,” he said, with some difficulty.
“Fine. For you.”
He squeezed her arm and smiled weakly.
She smiled back, readied her weapons and took a deep breath before hurrying back to the vehicle and crouching next to Roche.
“How many of them?” she asked in French. Her French was much better than his English.
Roche shook his head.
“About even to begin I would say. But now we are outnumbered and outgunned,” he replied.
Caitlin peeked around the edge of cover.
The terminal was a warren of check-in desks, empty security lines and looted souvenir shops. The ceiling was high and painted with faded candy-colored stripes that seemed to dance like ribbons in the dim, dusty light. The floor was sticky, littered with wads of bird shit, scraps of paper and rubbish of every kind.
She edged closer to Mercier, hunkered down at the other end of the Land Rover, sweeping the terminal ahead with his assault rifle. Firing every now and then.
She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. Twice. Then once.
Mercier nodded understanding, his face grim and determined under its coating of dust and sweat.
Caitlin turned back to Roche, who had pulled a grenade from his vest pocket and was checking the pin.
“Mercier to provide covering fire,” she said quietly. “When I say go, we run like hell for that door over there.” She pointed to a glass door in the nearest wall. The entrance to a United Airlines club lounge.
Neither man questioned her. They all knew the stories about Caitlin Monroe.
She peered around the end of the Land Rover, saw three men dressed in black combat gear, took aim and fired. One of the men fell, clutching his chest, the other two dived for cover, but Caitlin picked them off with shots to the head. She’d had a lot of practice at headshots the last few years. They were dead before their bodies hit the tiles.
“I thought I was to provide covering fire?” Mercier said, almost ruefully.
“You snooze, you lose, pal.”
She checked her rifle and their surroundings. The coast was clear for now. With a quick nod to Roche, she ran.
They burst into the club lounge and dived for the nearest cover, a reception desk, a cold slab of polished steel, the chairs behind it hard plastic with metal frames.
The space was gloomy rather than dark. Full night had not yet fallen, and the last rays of a blood-orange sunset caught the thick swirl of dust motes in the stale air of the lounge. Her eyes glistened in the dim light.
Mercier joined them a second later.
“Bachelard is leading the others,” he said. “They will assault up the stairwell at the end. Romy is staying to cover Doctor le Marjason and Monsieur Larrison.”
“Good,” Caitlin said. “You boys travel UA out of this place before?”
Neither had.
“I have,” she said. “I all but fucking lived here six or seven years ago. There was a service lift at the other end. It feeds the Air France lounge and the administrative levels above. If they were firing at us from the second floor, they’re in that lounge. We can take the high ground and come down on them while Bachelard hits them from the front.”
The paratrooper and his Bureau colleague assessed the plan and agreed to it in less than two heartbeats.
They moved.
The lounge was deserted. Truly empty save for the desiccated husks of a few corpses here and there. They were so old they didn’t even smell anymore. They lay in tatters, and at first glance, it was hard to tell that these shapes were once human. They looked like the awkward calligraphy of a child scribbling on a pale canvas.
The three killers moved as one, sweeping the space in front of them and around for all threats, human and otherwise.
Caitlin took the lead. Roche and Mercier took turns checking their six. The muted reports of battle reached them from somewhere above. Dust lofted off the rifle shots, briefly executing clumsy pirouettes, then falling back to the ground. Caitlin’s trigger finger ever so gingerly caressing the guard of her M4, ready to fire.
The service lift was where it should have been, but the doors were closed, and there was no power.
Caitlin stepped to the brushed metal door and pulled a knife from her tactical harness. She slid it between the access panels and pushed, levering them open. Roche stepped up to help.
They forced open the doors, and Caitlin nodded grimly to find the elevator car waiting for them.
It was full of bodies.
She didn’t think. She placed a round into each of them. Making sure.
None moved or made a sound. They were long gone.
“Give me a hand,” she said.
Roche bent over and laced his fingers together, improvising a step for her to reach the maintenance panel in the roof. She forced it open with her knife and waited a second.
The sounds of gunfire were louder, but that’s not what she was listening for.
Crawlspaces were often, well, crawling with the infected. They could live for years on vermin.
The elevator shaft was empty, however.
Roche boosted her up through the access panel, and she reached down to help both men up after her.
They fitted torches to their weapons. The three beams swayed chaotically in the pitch-dark shaft, and they climbed the steel rungs of an access ladder fixed to the concrete walls.
The stairs were rusted and pitted with age, but they provided sufficient purchase as they climbed.
Caitlin retook the lead, and they moved quickly but quietly, taking care not to slip. As they reached the next landing, she paused briefly before continuing upwards.
She could hear the concentration of fire on this level.
Finally, they reached the top. Caitlin sprung the emergency clasp, and the doors released an inch or two. She put her eye to the gap, looking through into a collection of open-plan workstations.
To one side stood several large crates stacked atop one another, while a row of lockers filled with spare uniforms and coveralls took up the wall on the other side. She forced the gap wider and climbed through.
This floor was quiet, save for the noise coming up from below.
Mercier and Roche joined her.
She looked for a fire escape. It would be near the service core with the elevators.
The darkness up here was more total, but she found the door on the other side of the elevators.
The volume of fire from below seemed to be increasing.
They entered the stairwell.
She was making the first turn when someone cried out behind her.
Roche.
A zombie had emerged from the cubicle farm. A ravaged horror with skin that looked like melted candle wax. Half its face was missing, but it had still fixed its remaining teeth on the neck guard of Roche’s body armor. It snarled and chewed as the Frenchman struggled frantically to free himself.
Caitlin slammed her fist down on Mercier’s gun arm, not wanting him to shoot in the confined space and give them away. Instead, she smashed the butt of her rifle into the face of the ravenous biter, collapsing skin and bone and whatever the hell was left underneath into a hellish honeycomb crunch of toxic offal.
The thing fell away from Roche, who was shaking and madly checking himself for bites.
“Dude, chill,” she said. “You’re vaxxed. And that thing bit the ass out of your Kevlar, not your neck. Let’s just go. And next time, remember the fucking classics.”
Mercier passed his friend a small flask. Caitlin smelled strong liquor when he unscrewed the cap and took a slug.
“Good call,” she said, and he passed her the bottle.
She took a swig. Cognac. A nice one too.
It burned going down but settled her nerves.
It had been a long time since she’d gone up against a human enemy, and this one was dialed in.
She had no doubt these were the same bastards who’d ambushed the patrols out of Noisy-le-Sec. She was starting to think they might even have faked up the whole remnant authority J-MOPs thing to lure them out of the fortress.
Where was their extraction force, after all?
And the other survivors?
They had been lured into a killing box. All on their own.
“Let’s go,” Caitlin said.
* * *
They assaulted onto the second floor. Roche grunted and dropped to the ground like a puppet cut loose from its strings. A single round had felled him. Caitlin went down on the carpet under the angry buzz of bullets overhead.
“Son of a bitch!”
She rolled over Roche and grabbed him by his body armor. Strap in hand, Caitlin hauled the young man towards the nearest cover. She didn’t pause to think, to examine her surroundings, to question the choices she was already making. Her largest handgun, the Glock 19, had quickly appeared, and it roared, biting huge chunks of wood and masonry from the solid timber furnishing of the Air France lounge.
Roche was gasping and grinding out an arhythmic series of grunts like somebody punched in the stomach trying and failing to draw air into their lungs.
Glass shattered, and rounds cracked past her head to chew up the blonde wood wall panels. Caitlin logged the direction and volume of fire, and part of her mind calculated that they faced maybe seven or eight hostiles. Roche moaned loudly, glancing back over her shoulder; Caitlin saw his legs begin to scythe and kick in reaction to the burning pain that would now be making itself felt. Gut shot by a military assault rifle. There was gore and leakage everywhere.
Caitlin knew exactly the location of a couple of morphine syrettes in one of the bags, but to attend to Roche would mean ceding the initiative to their would-be killers.
He died at her feet, his last breath bubbling out of his lips in a froth of blood.
Mercier was already on the move, pushing forward, and firing.
Caitlin realized then that Roche had probably taken a stray round from Bachelard’s group. There just wasn’t enough fire coming at them. The enemy hadn’t realized they were here yet.
Caitlin holstered her Glock and hauled her Steyr TMPs from the shoulder rigs under her jacket. Safeties flicked off; she held the weapons out around the corner of the desk behind which she hid and unloaded into the free-fire zone of the lounge. The outgoing fire sounded like canvas sheets ripping in the high wind.
After three bursts, she took a quick peek to see what she’d caught.
Impossible to say.
She saw one leg twitching under a desk.
Three shooters in the open.
All white males armed with FAMAS G2 assault rifles. One behind a couch with a possible leg wound. One crouched behind a coffee machine. The last one, aiming from a deeply recessed doorway leading to the bathroom facilities.
She snapped off two quick bursts at the man in the doorway.
The G2 rounds suddenly crashed around her, chewing up her cover and forcing her to fire blind again. Caitlin emptied the rest of the mags with much greater accuracy; however, having sighted her targets, then she turned back into the building and shoulder-charged the first door on the right. It gave way with a crack of splintered wood, and she tumbled into the small meeting room, taking cover below the window ledge, crunching broken glass underfoot.
Caitlin slipped off her backpack and poured half a magazine of 9mm hollow-point from the Glock through the smashed windowpane into the main lounge area in one quicksilver motion.
She opened her oversized pack and pulled out the big artillery. The pistol-grip Benelli shotgun came first, customized twelve gauge, extended mag with a side saddle shell carrier. Next came the deal closer, a specially cut-down Heckler and Koch UMP 45, with an extended box mag housing thirty rounds of .40 caliber Smith & Wesson goodness. She slung the HK over her shoulder.
It was a large, excessive arsenal for just one young lady to haul around Paris, but Caitlin had told Gaston, the armorer, “Just gimme the lot,” and Gaston, the armorer, had not disappointed.
She picked up the shotgun, jacked a cartridge into the chamber and poked the muzzle out through the shattered window. The Benelli was loaded with a buck ’n’ ball combo that gave her a nice spread for quick and dirty area clearance but still packed a nasty surprise in the form of one larger brass slug at the center of the load. Unlike softer malleable rounds, it was armor-piercing and would slice through a car door or ballistic vest without slowing down much.
She methodically pumped half a dozen rounds of buck ’n’ ball downrange. She briefly heard a few distressed cries, more shouting, and the hammering of boots on polished wooden boards, but then the uproar of her sustained gunfire drowned out everything else.
Bending low, she moved through the line of meeting rooms, blasting through the glass walls between each one, flanking their would-be killers in the dark while they tried to fend off Bachelard from the front and Mercier from behind.
Caitlin dumped the shotgun and swung the Heckler and Koch into action.
She thumbed the selector on the machine gun to full auto. One of the reasons she liked the H&K was its relatively low rate of fire, a modest six hundred rounds per minute, which in the hands of an expert operator, made the burst mode all but redundant.
Caitlin looked out of a window into the lounge area with a black widow’s smile.
She had a clear line of fire on five hostile shooters.
“Gentlemen,” she said.
Her movements were quick and machinelike.
One sharp pull on the trigger shattered the window, and as the men instinctively looked up, she nailed two of them with short auto bursts, aiming for the center mass and letting the muzzle drift upwards to punch a couple of rounds into their skulls. The first man looked surprised, his eyebrows raised comically and mouth a perfect O before five rounds stitched him up from the sternum to the forehead. His skull disintegrated. The second attacker was fast and well-trained but doomed. He got his muzzle up a few inches and squeezed off one misdirected round before Caitlin nailed him the same way. A fan of blood and brain matter painted the wall behind him.
A sudden surging roar of fire and then . . . silence.
Six men lay dead on the floor, riddled with bullets, and another three men writhed and groaned in pain. If they weren’t dead, they soon would be. She held on for a few seconds longer, readied her weapon and then rose out of cover.
“Sector West, clear,” she cried out. Then, remembering, she repeated herself in French. “Secteur Ouest. Clair.”
The other fire teams called in.
She heard Bachelard and, a second later, Mercier.
She relaxed just a little at the sound of his voice.
Not much. Just a little.
The burning wreckage of the VBL down on the tarmac threw eerie shapes of guttering orange light onto the ceiling of the lounge. Caitlin emerged into the main part of the room, ready to fire on anything that moved. But nothing did.
She thought she could hear the pops and crackling of the fire down below. Smell the burning rubber, the fuel, the plastic and, of course, the men they had lost, including Thierry.
“Search them,” she said, “Fouillez-les.” And two of Bachelard’s men set to doing so without question. The others took up positions where they could watch for the approach of follow-on forces and defend the space they had just taken.
And that was that, she thought. They were professionals. They’d deal with this and move on to whatever came next.
Mercier joined her, looking haunted.
“I don’t think we’re getting extracted today,” he said.
“Nope,” Caitlin said. “Don’t reckon so.”
She could tell from the quick, professional way Bachelard’s men turned up nothing that they’d learn jack shit from the bodies.
Wales would be pissed, she thought.
If he was still alive.
“Sorry about Roche,” she said quietly. “He was a good guy.”
“The best,” Mercier agreed.
He took out the small flask of cognac and unscrewed the lid.
“To Danton,” he said, taking a swig and passing her the flask.
“Danton,” she said and took a belt for the fallen paratrooper.
René Bachelard came over to confirm what she already knew.
“They’re ghosts,” he said.
Caitlin nodded.
“They are now. So, what next?”
“Extraction?” Bachelard asked, looking more hopeful than he should have.
“I don’t think so, René,” Caitlin answered, almost smiling. “I don’t think there’ll be an extraction. I don’t think there is an emergency government at Castle Saint-Ulrich. And I know for damn sure those weird fucking biters that tried to swarm us back at the river crossing didn’t pimp their own rides.”
The two men stared at her. She was about to repeat herself in French when she shrugged.
“We got played.”
Caitlin Monroe looked at what she had done, what they had all done.
“But I don’t think they knew who they were playing with,” she went on. “And now it’s our turn. We’ll secure a layup point here for tonight. And tomorrow we go to fucking work.”
She jacked a new clip into her Glock 19 and went to see if Wales Larrison had survived.