Pandemic Page 157

“Weapons free, I repeat, weapons free. All but squad weapons use single fire. Make your shots count, boys — I don’t think we brought enough bullets.”

He clicked off, then leaned out past the front fender, just enough for the barrel of his M4 to aim down the street.

Three black hatchlings rushed toward him, running through the pools of fire rather than around them. Flames clung to their black pyramid bodies, curled around their tentacle-legs.

So fast … I’ve never seen anything that fast …

Paulius pulled the trigger twice, pop-pop; the middle hatchling went down hard. Another one dropped, either from a Ranger’s bullet or from one of his overwatch men up on the fifth floor. The creature’s forward momentum rolled it awkwardly beneath a burning car.

The third hatchling closed to within five meters.

Don’t fire till you see the blacks of their eyes flashed through Paulius’s mind right before he dropped it with another two-bullet burst.

The thunder of the Apaches’ rotors echoed through the city canyons. The tone suddenly became more raw, more real as the first helicopter came around a building into plain sight, just behind the oncoming wave of attackers. Paulius heard the sharp snare-drum sound of M230 chain guns opening up.

A Molotov landed ten feet to his left, forcing him away from the front fender. He scrambled to the rear fender, looked around it. Through the flickering flames and the s.h.i.+mmering air he saw the enemy rus.h.i.+ng forward.

Hundreds of hatchlings, and behind them, an endless wave of people.

As fast as he could, Paulius yanked grenades from his webbing and threw them at the oncoming mob.

STREETS OF FIRE

Frank Sokolovsky wondered if there could be anywhere colder than where he stood. Besides the roof of the John Hanc.o.c.k Building, sixty stories up, in the dead of night, with a Chicago winter wind whipping in at twenty miles an hour? That was some cold s.h.i.+t right there.

He had worked his way through college on the GI Bill. He’d served most of one tour in Afghanistan before an IED blew his left foot clean off. Frank had considered himself lucky — not only had he lived, he’d been given a medical discharge and gone home to Hyde Park, to his job as a s.h.i.+pping manager, to his wife, Carol, and their daughter, Sh.e.l.ly.

Frank had felt G.o.d’s touch earlier than most. It came with pain, as did all things truly worth having. Carol knew something had changed. She knew even before Frank did, to be honest. He’d made some comment about disciplining Sh.e.l.ly. He still couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but when he woke up the next morning, Carol and Sh.e.l.ly were both gone. That was too bad, because from that morning on he’d known exactly what he would have done to them both.

Frank had left his house and just wandered. His first kill had been a mouthy old lady. Leave me alone, the b.i.t.c.h had said. Can you imagine? Please, no, she had said. The nerve of some people.

He discovered new friends. Together, they found humans, killed them. Then word came of a true leader, a leader asking for everyone with military experience. Emperor Stanton and General Brownstone gave him a wonderful responsibility — a Stinger missile.

For two days, Frank Sokolovsky had frozen his a.s.s off atop the Hanc.o.c.k. People brought him food. Once they’d brought him a whole arm, already cooked. There was probably half of that left.

Finally, though, the waiting was over.

He stood still, mostly hidden from sight, the Stinger on his right shoulder, watching the Apache fly down Michigan Avenue about thirty feet below his rooftop elevation. The helicopter’s nose was tipped down, its 30-millimeter chain gun transforming the street below into a sparkling river of death.

The screaming war machine flew past.

Just before Frank pressed the “fire” b.u.t.ton, he understood — without a doubt — that everything happened for a reason. He had needed money for college, so he joined the army. He’d served in Afghanistan, where he’d learned to fire this kind of weapon, where he’d suffered the injury that brought him home so he could become enlightened at just the right time. Anyone who considered that a coincidence was a fool. Frank knew the hand of G.o.d when he saw it, and for that guidance he whispered a fast prayer of thanks.

He pressed the b.u.t.ton.

A Stinger launcher fires a FIM-92B missile: sixty inches long, twenty-two pounds. It is supersonic capable and can reach speeds of Mach 2.2. Frank’s missile didn’t attain that speed, because it was only in the air for three seconds — one second of flight powered by the launcher’s ejection motor, which hurled the missile out into the predawn sky, and two seconds of flight powered by the missile’s solid fuel rocket engine.

The FIM-92B penetrated right between the Apache’s twin turboshaft engines. The warhead erupted, blowing both engines off the machine with such force that one flew three hundred feet to hammer into the gla.s.s and steel of Water Tower Place. The other engine clipped a building roof before comet-streaking into Chestnut Street, disintegrating into a cloud of tumbling, red-hot shards that shredded everything in their path.

In an Apache, the gunner sits in front, the pilot above and behind him, an armored wall between them. The explosion killed the pilot instantly. The armor kept the gunner alive long enough for the flaming helicopter to fall seven hundred feet to the street below, where he died on impact.

The wreckage smashed into the Converted running down Michigan Avenue, a rolling fireball that pounded flesh into paste. Pieces of the Apache broke off and crashed into stores, shattering gla.s.s, breaking walls and starting several fires.