Down in the darkened truck cab Major Barnes rides next to the driver, peering into the darkness for any sign of ambush. He talks into his headset: “Two hundred meters in. Dr. O’Brien, do you see any sign of survivors—”
Mo, atop the cab, raises her bow. “Not right here,” she says shortly. The walking dead are undirected; the grounded metal framework of the truck blocks their ability to sense those who ride within, and the warm meat on the cab roof is out of easy reach.
A crack of gunfire sounds. Mo looks round sharply as Howe grabs her shoulder. “Down!” he snaps, and she ducks as he raises his MP5 and squints through its night sights. The gunfire is coming from a chapel, half-concealed by trees and the silent army of walking corpses. There are more shots, followed by shouts and a scream, cut off short. “Shooters on the building roofline,” Howe reports: “Four, no, five bodies. Defenses at ground level, barricades, I can’t see anyone manning them. The crowd’s thickest there. Defenders have—no, wait.”
Cold flesh, bodies that do not show on infrared, have formed an abhuman pyramid to one side of the chapel. The survivors on the roof are shooting, but not at the OCCULUS truck: they have problems that are closer to hand. As one corpse disintegrates another takes its place, and the defenders have fewer banishment rounds than Brookwood has open graves. “Doc, can you do anything about them?” Howe asks. “Because I don’t think we’re going to get in there without—”
Mo raises her bow, strikes a shivering note from the burning strings. Howe winces and moves aside. “Give me some elbow room,” she says flatly. Then she touches the strings lightly, coaxing an eerie, familiar leitmotif from her instrument. “Put this out through the PA circuit,” she mutters, grimly determined.
Down below, Barnes grimaces tensely and twists input dials on the truck’s external public address systems. The growing wild resonance of die Walkürenritt floods from the big speakers mounted to either side of the cab; the driver looks sidelong at his CO, then floors the accelerator in low gear, adding the roar of the big diesel (and the crunch of unburied bones) to the music. Barnes announces to the back of the truck: “All right, gentlemen, this is going to be an opposed entry and they know we’re coming. Wards, up! Arms, up! Party time in sixty seconds!”
The risen dead are fleeing, for the most part, out of the way of the truck as it roars and bucks across the path. It’s the music that does it; Mo stands atop the roof, utterly engrossed in tracking the melody. Richard Wagner, it was said, hated violinists: blood drips from her fingertips as the eerie extradimensional resonances of her interpretation of one of his most famous works drags the sound of an entire string section—and a brassy resonance echoing from the metal flanks of the truck—into being.
The truck crunches across skeletal remnants that lie in rows around the chapel, silent and unmoving. A few bodies, less damaged than the rest, lie near a minivan; others are clustered near the door to the building, which is ajar. A few less emaciated figures lie among the skeletonized forms: of these, most bear the signs of gunshot wounds.
“Back us up to the door,” Barnes tells the driver. Switching to the common channeclass="underline" “All right, we’re going in. Standard entry protocol for mass possession. Scary and Howe, over to you. Dr. O’Brien, time to get down off the roof. You can follow with me once we’ve cleared the way. See if we can figure out what we’re looking at.”
The soldiers pile out of the back of the truck, wearing bright yellow HAZMAT suits, MP5s at the ready. The bodies are packed in so tightly around the steps to the chapel that they dash across rib cages and cloak-swathed torsos on the way to the open door.
There’s a snap of gunfire from up top: two of the soldiers drop to their knees and reply with a burst of aimed fire. A black-clad figure tumbles from the roofline. One of the soldiers throws something up and over the eaves; the others take cover as the fragmentation grenade explodes.
“What’s up there?” Mo tries to ask, shouting in Barnes’s ear.
“Bad guys.” Barnes grins hungrily. “Ah.” He taps the earpiece screwed into his left ear: “Follow me.” The gunfire from the defenders on the roof has stopped as he steps out of the back of the truck and walks towards the chapel entrance. Mo follows him, her violin raised. They’re halfway across the ten-meter gap when a silhouette lurches clear of the side of the building and throws itself towards the major. Barnes raises his HK-5 and plants a neat three-round group in the middle of the assailant’s torso; by the time Mo’s bow makes contact with an eerily blue-glowing string, the fluorescence in the back of the revenant’s eye sockets has begun to fade. “Bloody fans, always waiting outside the dressing room ...” Barnes cocks his head on one side, listening. “Dr. O’Brien? This way, now.”
They’re inside in seconds, and one of the soldiers pulls the tall oak door shut behind them. The chapel hall is full of bodies, the long-dead and the fresh draped across one another in promiscuous embrace. Some of the recent bodies are naked: in the soldier’s infrared vision they still glow with body heat.
“Look sharp, some of them made it to the door,” Howe comments over the open channel. A couple of bodies still clutch bulky assault shotguns with drum magazines: one, wearing a distinctly more professional camouflage rig than the rest, is holding a Russian AKS-74 rifle. None of them, however, are moving. The feeders have eaten their fill and moved on.
“Trapdoor over here, sir!” One of the troops waves, pointing at a raised door.
“Secure it,” says Howe. “Tidily, our boy might still be down there.” He doesn’t say what everyone fears: the next living soul they find in this city of the dead will be the first.
As the soldiers move in, something runs at them, out of the tunnel, frighteningly fast. There’s a burst of automatic fire. “Hold that!” yells Howe, as the revenant comes apart in a tumbling rain of dust and bones. “Batons!” A pair of troops step forward, holding heavily customized cattle prods before them—electrical shock-rods, customized with signal generators to loosen the grip of extradimensional horrors on their walking hosts. There’s a snap and crackle of sparks as they test their tools.
“You think he’s down there,” Mo says quietly.
Major Barnes nods. “Cultists. They go to ground for their rituals.”
Up ahead, Scary triggers his shock-stick, sparking the terminals: he grins at Howe. “I love the smell of—”
“Don’t say it, son, unless you want a week on toilet duty.”
“Aw, Sarge.” He steps forward, bending to follow the lead team into the cellar. “That’s harsh.”
There are no living bodies in the tunnel. Some of the possessed are still stirring feebly, their luminous eyes guttering in the darkness, but the flying wedge of soldiers with shock-sticks shut them down in short order: it’s easier than clubbing baby seals.
At the end of the tunnel they come to an open door. Now there’s noise, and the troops take up position to either side of the entrance, ready for a forced entry. But while they’re waiting, Dr. O’Brien and Major Barnes arrive. Mo holds her violin, ready for a killing chord. Barnes glances at her, then waves Howe back from the right-hand side of the door. “What do you think?” he asks quietly.
“It stinks, sir. You saw the sov kit back there?”
“I did. I reckon we’ve got company. More to the point, we haven’t found our boy yet. Could be a hostage situation.”
“Shit. I’ll tell Moran to bring up the snoop kit—”
Mo’s eyes are hollow shadows in the darkness. “Major?”