AFTER THE RED RAIN FELL
Matt Hilton
Minutes Ago…
I should originally have been on point, but I’d been given the task of breaching the locks on the doors so “Duke” Dickinson went in first, and Duke died instead of me. I’d be a liar if I said a small part of me wasn’t thankful. Duke was no slouch, he was an experienced soldier, and he was armed with an M4 that’d tear new arseholes in an entire roomful of men, but the poor sod didn’t even get off a shot.
Our six-man team was stacked, ready for dynamic entry. I was the dedicated breacher, armed with a Remington 870 with a pistol grip and 12.5-inch barrel, and protected from any flying debris by a helmet, Oakley M-frames and breaching gloves, as well as an anti-ballistic vest over my battle fatigues. I aimed the shotgun at a downward angle at the lock, standing the requisite safe distance away, breathing slow and steady as I listened for the go. Cameras mounted on our helmets relayed live footage of the op back to a control vehicle where our officers counted down. I probably looked cool and collected but my butt-hole was twitching in anticipation.
Greenlight.
I pulled the trigger.
The shockwave from the Hatton round pulverised the locking mechanism and bolt. I ducked back against the jamb, allowing the shotgun to swing on its shoulder harness, and brought up my own M4 as Sgt ‘Hooky’ Johnson yanked the door wide and Duke powered inside. And that was it for him. A split-second of thunder as he brayed out a challenge that echoed through the warehouse, then steaming chunks of him splashed the threshold. Hooky was only a beat behind him, and he skidded on a slick tubular worm of Duke’s intestines. He went sideways, his shoulder rebounding off the doorjamb before he righted and lurched inside. His boots sucked at the splash of bloody guts on the concrete floor and he cursed loudly, but then the rest of us were charging past.
Things had happened so quickly that none of us realised there’d been no detonation, no drumroll of gunfire, that had ripped Duke to pieces, and we were already inside that gloomy space before I recalled that this was going to be no normal sweep and clear operation. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
The team was one man down and had no clear idea of what we were up against.
But we had an objective from which we wouldn’t back down.
We had to sweep and clear the building, each of us with an area of responsibility to secure with overlapping fields of fire, immediate, near and far zones. With Duke torn to shreds, it meant the responsibilities shifted for team members, but we were experienced enough that we could flow with the shifting circumstances. Hooky was now point man, and he cleared the immediate and near zones with one blistering hail of bullets while the rest of us formed a stack alongside the first corner we came to. While I crouched there, ready to proceed again, I looked for hostiles, dead or alive, but there were none.
So what the fuck had killed Duke?
Something shifted in the darkness ahead.
Hooky fired, his M4 lighting the corridor beyond with sporadic flashes.
“What the hell was that?” he said.
“Whatever it was,” snapped Jack ‘RP’ Wilson, “it got Duke. We aren’t leaving this place ’til I’m wearing its fucking skull for a hard hat.”
RP moved past Hooky, sliding along a wall in the darkened corridor, his carbine seeking targets. Hooky signalled the rest of us to move while he covered from the corner. I glanced at him as I passed, and saw that he was chewing his lips. He blinked at me. “I put half a clip into that fucker and it didn’t go down. Stay frosty, Muppet.”
Hooky wasn’t insulting me. We’d all gained monikers that had stayed with us since basic training. My real name is Bill Grover. Think of that blue puppet with the red nose from Sesame Street and you’ll understand why I got stuck with ‘Muppet’.
“I’m icy, Sarge,” I promised him. No way would I admit to almost shitting myself, even though we all were.
Then RP was in full reverse and his machine gun roared.
The two guys in front of me – ‘Brainpan’ and ‘Twinkle’ – made target acquisition at much the same time. Their M4s screamed in unison as brass rattled on the floor at their feet. Flashes and sparks lit the corridor, and beyond the drifting smoke I watched the shadows surge and contort, glimpsing reaching hands, and heads lolling on malformed shoulders. Many of their rounds struck walls, floor and ceiling, but as many bullets found their targets. The solid smack of projectiles through flesh was a drumroll that sung to my heart. I raised my M4 to join in with the chorus.
But then Brainpan edged back, his eyes rolling as he glanced at me. Twinkle yelled something animalistic, a split second before he was yanked bodily into the surging wave of inhumanity that swept towards us. There was the briefest attempt at fighting back, Twinkle’s carbine snapping off a short burst, and then the timbre of his yelling changed to bleats of terror. His last scream was ripped in two along with his body.
“Twinkle’s down,” I yelled, and propped my M4 to my shoulder, filling the gap he’d left with a hail of rounds.
Brainpan was still backpedalling. “Get the fuck out, Muppet! There’s no stopping them.”
He was right. For all that my rounds punched into bodies, scattered gobs of bloody meat and bone in all directions, the tsunami of bodies advancing along the corridor came on as if untroubled. For the first time I got a clear view of the mass of limbs and torsos through my Oakleys and knew I’d be as well trying to hold it back with a pea shooter.
“Fall back!” Hooky’s order was rhetoric; I was already backing up alongside Brainpan. We fired, but we were wasting rounds.
“Shoot them in the fucking head,” Hooky commanded.
I did, but it was advice he’d gleaned from watching too many B movies, and was woefully misinformed. I blatted skulls, one after the other for all the difference it made, because the insidious things just kept on coming and coming. Chest shots didn’t stop them either. The only thing that slowed them was to render their limbs to stumps, but that was only momentary because they still flopped and squirmed, worming their way across the ground with singular intent. You might think an eviscerated torso harmless, but that wasn’t the case. These things didn’t need teeth to gnaw or fingers to rip, when even their jellied flesh consumed.
There were dozens of them, maybe even hundreds, because it was too dark to tell beyond the sporadic flashes of our weapons. The darkness surged and moved, and I was sure that those we could see were only the leading trickle of a tidal surge.
“Where the fuck did they all come from?” Again Hooky was shouting questions for questions’ sake as he laid down covering fire. None of us knew. All we’d been briefed on was that there was a small cell of infected holed up inside the warehouse, and we’d been given the order to go in and clean them out. Nobody told us to expect a horde.
Maybe it was something to do with the hive mind these things were suspected of having. Once assimilated, you became part of the larger organism. Maybe their cell had reached out and called more of their kind. Whatever. All that was important now was getting back out again with our arses intact.
Four of us.
Minutes ago we’d been six. A third of our force down already, and our chances of making the exit door were getting slimmer with every expended round and yet another failure to drop any of those things.
“Fire in the hole!” Brainpan was growing desperate. Using grenades in the corridor was as likely to kill us as it was the shambling mass surging towards us. But what was done was done. I turned, crouching, ducking my helmeted head as if that would save me. The grenade went off within the mass of limbs and torsos so the detonation was dampened by the pile of flesh between it and me. The sound was like God’s loud clap, and then I was pummelled by raining chunks of meat and bone. Some of the sharper clumps rattled off my helmet or stuck in my fatigues. Thankfully a spearing rib fragment lanced into my antiballistic vest and not in my throat. Blood spray was all over my Oakleys. I didn’t try wiping the smear away, just yanked off the M-frames and threw them aside, even as I lurched up and ran back to the first corner we’d initially cleared.