I’ve seen nightmares made flesh, Judith thought stonily, and now I can see nothing else.
“Radio traffic says that they were heading for the electricity co-op!” Mack called, pointing to the building in question. “But I don’t see any signs of action down there now.”
“I’ve got movement on a nearby rooftop!”
“Where?” Judith demanded, looking for anything to distract her from her fears.
“There!” Hayes said, pointing. “Heat signature!”
She put her NODs to her eyes to look, and it only took her a moment to identify the source. “It’s Hale!”
“You sure?” Hayes asked.
“Unless those things have started lugging around a light fifty!” she called over the sound of the rotors.
Mack snorted. “Let’s hope it’s Hale.”
Judith leaned forward, tapping the pilot on the shoulder even as she spoke into the radio. “Take us back around and closer to the buildings.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The helo banked around, losing altitude as it circled the area while Judith switched the radio over to the team frequency.
“Djinn, this is Andrews. We’re in the orbiting helo,” she said. “Respond if possible.”
She repeated her message once, then started again when a blinking light from below stopped her. Judith frowned. “Why is he using his signal light?”
Mack shrugged. “I don’t see anything on thermal.”
“Infrared?” She asked, looking over at Hayes.
“Negative contact, ma’am.”
“Damn,” she swore under her breath, keying open the frequency again. “We see you, Djinn. Are there hostiles nearby?”
An affirmative flash had her swearing again.
“We have no positive contact from here,” she said. “Say again, no positive contact. Are you certain?”
The light below flashed more quickly, looking almost angry in its intensity.
“Roger that. Last signals intercept put Hawk and co in the power co-op,” she said. “Good intel?”
The light flashed an affirmative.
“Good. Will deploy to provide backup.”
This time there was no responding flash, not that she had been expecting one. The Djinn was one of the navy’s best snipers, but the man was downright antisocial. Even for a shooter.
CHAPTER 16
“Stop. Biting. My. Ankle!”
Masters repeatedly slammed the butt of his AA-12 down on the head of the offending corpse until he finally managed to dislodge its teeth from his leg.
I really should have thought about the whole superhero plan a bit more, Hawk thought grimly as he pulled loose. Thankfully they didn’t get through my boot. I really don’t want to know what kind of bacteria these things have in their mouths.
With a last kick he made it up onto the catwalk, leveling his shotgun from the hip and squeezing the trigger. The automatic weapon bucked in his hand as he emptied the remaining couple dozen rounds of double aught into the few shambling corpses in front of him. The mess made by that much steel shot really wasn’t something he wanted to think about, but it did the job.
He dropped the drum as he stepped over the twitching bodies, locking the last one into place while jogging over to Alex’s hanging body. He let his shotgun hang in its sling as he reached his friend, grabbing Alex by the shoulders and pulling him back over the rail.
“Damn, boy, you got your ass handed to you,” Masters muttered, shaking his head as he took in all of his friend’s visible injuries.
Alex just groaned, not appearing particularly lucid.
Either that or he wasn’t about to dignify that comment with a response. From what Masters knew of his friend, either was a valid possibility. He patted the groaning man’s shoulder and rose to his feet, looking over the catwalk railing and into the generator enclosure and, more specifically, the woman or thing standing on it.
She, it, had apparently lost interest in Alex and was looking down upon the fight like a general surveying the battlefield.
Time to take the fight back to the boss, I guess, Masters thought as he planted a hand and a boot up on the rail, preparing to vault the distance to the enclosure.
“Don’t be stupid.”
He looked down, surprised by the weak sound of his friend’s voice. “You all right?”
“Hell no, I’m not all right,” Alex grunted, rolling up onto his knees. “I just got my ass handed to me by that damned thing over there. It’s a whole different league of beast, and you’re not going to help anyone by letting it kill you.”
“That thing is controlling the rest, right?” Masters demanded. “We have to take it out.”
Alex paused to catch his breath, resting on one knee and wincing as his fractured ribs informed him quite soundly of their presence. “It’s also undead, Masters. Not barely animated like the rest of the filth shambling around this town, but really undead. I don’t think even your overcompensating shotgun there is going to do much to it.”
“That doesn’t mean I won’t try,” Masters said, turning back to the railing and kicking off hard.
“No!” Alex’s scream made for a nice backdrop, Masters supposed as he soared across the gap, fully realizing that he had no chance of making a clean jump.
Nice, he thought, stretching out as he watched the cement come closer. All poetic and shit.
He hit the generator enclosure hard, barely managing to get his hands over the edge of it and pull his upper body up before gravity tried to drag him to a painful death thirty feet below. Okay, maybe the fall wouldn’t kill him, but Hawk Masters was in no way deluded enough to think he’d be able to fight anything off after he’d driven both his legs up into his torso.
He scrambled for a moment, clawing at the cement, then managed to pull himself the rest of the way up, throwing one leg over the side before rolling over onto the enclosure. He took two deep breaths before forcing himself to his hands and knees, then his feet.
Luckily, he supposed, the thing didn’t seem to give a damn about him. He stood up, hefted his AA-12 off the straps, and pointed the weapon at the female-looking figure that was a few paces away.
“Yo!” he called, walking toward her with the weapon leveled. “From my understanding, you control those fucks. Is that right?”
She turned, the wiry hair that masked her skin from the back giving way to gaunt features that didn’t belong on anything mobile. Like all of these creatures, her eyes had the fogged look of death, but hers darted around with a feral intelligence, like a reptile tracking prey. He didn’t know how these things could see through their glassy eyes, but this one had no trouble locking right onto him.
“And if I do?” she asked, her tone taunting.
“Well, then I’d ask you politely to call them the fuck off,” he said, keeping the tremor from his voice.
He could feel a strange mixture of fear and excitement building deep inside of him. The pre-action jitters, ironically enough. As if everything else he’d done so far on this mission had been just a warm-up. His mind had problems with the concept, but his body had no such doubts.
The thing laughed at him.
It was a dry sound, chilling he supposed, but that part of his brain was shutting down now. He didn’t need his survival instincts anymore — they’d only get in the way.
“And why would I do that?”
She sounded genuinely bemused, and what little he could read of her features backed up that impression. Masters took another step toward her, closing the distance one stride at a time.
The closer I get, the better my chances. Only buckshot left. It’s worthless past a couple dozen yards, but inside of six, I’ll be damned if there’s a thing alive that can take thirty-two rounds of double aught and walk away.