SEAL Team 13 (SEAL Team 13 series) (25 page)

He managed to grab the handrail as he kicked off the arm and kept climbing. Some of the bodies were riper than others, and Masters desperately tried to ignore the squelching sounds his boots were making, to say nothing of the smell.

The report of Eddie’s M4 was accompanied by the whine of a bullet passing much too close for comfort, but the meaty slap of its impact was followed up by one less hand clawing at him, so he resolutely tried to forget that his friend was trying to pick off enemy combatants within two
feet
of his position.

God, I hope he’s a better shot now than he was back in BUD/S.

With the top of the stairs in sight, Masters banished all other thoughts from his mind, putting everything he had into one last surge to get to the top.

He knew that there was a whole lot worse waiting for him once he got there, after all.

The Coast Guard helo orbited the town from a little over a thousand feet, all eyes on the bird looking out over the sleepy-looking burg with varying degrees of nervous energy.

Captain Andrews could feel a cold chill originating inside her gut, something she’d never experienced before.…She knew that she was right on the edge of panic, and there weren’t even any enemies within sight. But what she couldn’t see and what she knew to be there were two very different things.

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

“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.

He conveniently decided to ignore the fact that he wasn’t looking at anything living.

“Because I’m asking nicely,” he told it, taking another step.

“I have no use for nice.”

“Neither do I.” He shrugged, his insides going cold as he continued to move forward.

“You’re brave, human. Few would approach me so brazenly—even your friend had more respect for my power.”

Keep talking like some Bond villain, bitch.

Masters took another few steps. Fifteen feet now, and the gap was closing.

God, I wish I had some heavy munitions for this thing.

Timed grenade rounds in twelve-gauge would be a good start, but he might as well ask for a deck-mounted cannon and ship’s gunner with an itchy trigger finger. Flatten the whole damned place like the hammer of an angry god, just to be sure.

Having no genie to grant his wishes, Masters kept moving. He was a step or two away from his goal. He could probably open up now without losing much, if any, effectiveness, but this wasn’t a
probably
situation.

“You’re a curious one.” The thing smiled at him, her ragged lips stretched over razor-sharp-looking teeth. “Perhaps I’ll keep you around.”

“No thanks,” he said. “I have my standards.”

She laughed, reaching out for him as she took a step. “What makes you think you have a choice?”

Masters’s eyes flicked down as she closed the distance to within six feet. The chill vanished from his guts, the nervous tension gone like it had never been, and he looked up at her with a smile on his lips.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said as he squeezed the trigger on the AA-12 and held it down.

The automatic weapon was rated to fire three hundred rounds per minute; in practice that meant that it would clear the largest drum it loaded in just a hair over ten seconds. Thirty-two blasts of double-aught buckshot, fired at less than point-blank range, was enough to turn flesh into shredded meat and bone into powder.

The steel shot tore through the thing’s dried flesh, opening up internal organs to the air and spattering everything behind her with shreds of dead tissue and congealed blood. As she was driven back by the barrage of bullets, Masters kept the gap even by advancing, the AA-12 in his hands shuddering with every shot but staying on target with only a modicum of pressure from him.

Ten seconds, however, is a very short period of time. In combat, it can be an eternity, or it can pass in the blink of an eye. This time, it felt like the blink of an eye. The shotgun clacked back on an empty cylinder and Masters flipped it off the straps with a twist of his thumb, throwing the empty weapon, which was unfortunately light, at the still-standing thing in front of him.

Stunned though she might have been by the avalanche of steel, the creature had no problems batting the gun away with a swing of her arm. Masters’s hand closed on his pistol, drawing the Smith and Wesson 500 up smoothly as his thumb locked the hammer back. He pushed the big gun out straight at the target even as he stroked the trigger.

Louder than the shotgun, the Smith roared over every other sound in the immense room, startling many of the creatures into looking around for the source of the noise. The first of the heavy rounds smacked into her shoulder even as she was recovering from his assault with the twelve-gauge, the kinetic impact twisting her shoulder away from strike. Her head snapped back around, red eyes looking onto Masters with a death glare that sent a chill down his spine.

The vampire recovered, springing up and taking a step in his direction, forcing him to backpedal desperately as he was now eager to keep some distance between them. The Smith roared again, the round splitting her skull like a ripe fruit and dropping her in her tracks like a wet bag of sand.

Masters swallowed, cocking the trigger back and re-aiming the weapon. He wasn’t about to do anything stupid like relax.

In fact…

The Smith roared three more times, emptying its remaining cylinders into the immobile form. The thing’s skull was a fragmented mush, and its chest was completely caved in right where the heart was located.

Masters resisted the temptation of getting closer and nudging the body with his toe. He’d seen too many horror movies for that to seem like a good idea, so he took another step back and opened the cylinder breach of his Smith, letting the empty cartridges fall to the cement as he reached for more of the big half-inch-diameter rounds to refill the weapon.

“Yo, Alex!” he called over his shoulder. “I think it’s dead, man!”

There was no answer as he dropped the first cartridge into the revolver’s cylinder, thumbing the big chunk of metal over a bit so that it would accept the next.

“Alex!” Masters started to worry. His friend hadn’t been in the best of shape, but the section of the catwalk where he’d left him had been pretty clear. The horde seemed to be more interested in the rest of the team down below. He dropped another round into the cylinder, moving it ahead automatically, and risked a glance over his shoulder.

Masters let out a breath of relief, though it was mixed with more than its fair share of anxiety—Alex was slumped over the railing. He looked like he was in poor shape, but he was still alive, in one piece, and alone. Masters grabbed his fourth half-inch cartridge and slipped it into the chamber of the big pistol as he turned back and froze.

The body wasn’t there anymore.

Damn it!
Masters spun around as he flipped the big gun closed, one round from a full load.
How the hell did that thing move with its skull split open like a ripe watermelon?!

It would be one thing if he’d put a bunch of low-caliber rounds in center mass, but Masters had seen its skull. Hell, he’d seen its frigging
brains
. He turned, sweeping the whole area as quickly as he could, but there was no sign of the damned thing anywhere.

Take out its neural system, right
, he thought, disgustedly.
Alex wasn’t kidding when he said this one was a different class.

Below and around him, Masters could hear gunfire and the sounds of fighting. He knew that his people were still fighting, but standing there on the generator enclosure, he suddenly felt rather like the bimbo cheerleader who had wandered off on her own in a bad horror movie. It was a sensation he really could have done without.

After covering the full three hundred and sixty degrees of the room with several turns, Masters slowly made his way back to where Alex was slumped.

“Alex! Alex!” he hissed. “Wake the fuck up! I can’t find that freak!”

“So I’m a freak, am I?”

Masters froze, the voice whispering in his ear damned near taking his breath away. He knew he didn’t stand a chance, but he spun around anyway and brought his Smith up to take a shot. A hand blocked him as easily as he might stop a child from taking a swing on him, viciously shaking the pistol out of his hand.

It clattered to the cement, then spilled over the edge, falling thirty feet to the floor. Meanwhile, Masters found himself face to face with something from his worst nightmares.

“Do you have any idea how long it will take to fix what you’ve done?” she hissed in his face, black fluid leaking from the gaping split in her skull. “Dead flesh does not heal.”

Masters swung at her, only to be blocked by her other arm, which effortlessly held him in place. He grimaced at the thing’s sheer strength, unable to budge even an inch. He settled instead for spitting in its face.