Recovery: V Plague Book 8 Read online

  And I hadn’t thought far enough ahead. Hadn’t put us into as good of a hiding place as I could have. I would have searched the downtown area first as well. Checking all the houses spreading out from the city center would be a logistical and tactical impossibility without a lot more boots on the ground, and they probably wouldn’t even bother with their limited resources.

  I leaned sideways in the chair to keep the point man in sight, catching my breath when he obviously spotted the black and white State Police car I’d tried to hide against the bus. He signed to his team and they spread, entering and clearing the bus before approaching the Dodge.

  The man eased up to it, rifle pointed at the interior until he could see it was empty. He stepped back and signaled to his team. They moved into a large, loose circle and began scanning all of the buildings in the immediate area. Well, shit. That’s what I get for not thinking.

  Slipping out of the chair I stayed low and moved to the rear door that let out into the alley. I looked through the peephole before unbolting its lock and opening it an inch to peer out and see if it was clear. Nothing in sight, I kept pushing it open until I could stick my head out and look in the opposite direction. All clear.

  Raising the dog whistle to my mouth I took a deep breath and blew hard until my lungs were empty. I did this two more times then pulled the door shut and relocked it. I moved carefully back to the front room, staying to the shadows with my rifle up.

  The Russians were still standing in the middle of the street but two of them had moved together and were gesturing at the surrounding area as they talked. It was obvious they were deciding who was going to search which building. I cringed when one of them pointed in the direction of the department store.

  Repositioning at the gate that opened into the lobby, I prepared for what I was going to do if they started to enter the building where Katie and Dog were hiding. A burst through the plate glass window would get their attention, and if I was really lucky might even hit one of them.

  As soon as I fired I would turn and sprint for the back door, taking to the alley. There weren’t a lot of places to hide and with the HIND hanging around overhead I didn’t doubt they’d be on me in nothing flat. But finding me and taking me were two different things.

  Maybe they’d be satisfied with just hosing me down with one of the helo’s machine guns or firing a rocket up my ass, but I was willing to bet their orders were to take me alive. That gave me an advantage. Where they would hesitate to shoot, I wouldn’t be so restrained.

  After another few moments one of the men stepped away and waved at another to follow him. They headed for an insurance office on the side street. The rest of the squad turned and spread out as they approached the six-story bank building. I breathed a sigh of relief, though I knew it wouldn’t be long before they made it to the department store.

  Watching them, I quickly ran over the options in my mind. I had thought there was a chance that the infected females I’d seen would hear the dog whistle and come running, hopefully bringing a bunch of their sisters to the party. But it had been a bit and none had shown up. Guess it was up to me. Time to thin the herd.

  Running to the back door I carefully cracked it open, checking for infected before pushing out into the alley. Quietly closing the door behind me I ran to the far side of the building so I would be out of sight of the insurance office. Moving forward I kept a sharp ear out for the HIND.

  I could still hear the beast, continuing its search grid, but it was several streets away and flying too low for the flight crew to be able to spot me. At the front corner of the office building I’d hidden in I paused, checking the street. For the moment it was clear, no Russians or infected visible.

  Running hard, I crossed the street and continued on down the side of the department store opposite where the two Spetsnaz were checking the building. Entering the alley to the rear, I turned and trotted towards their location, hugging the back wall of the building Katie and Dog were hiding in.

  Passing the department store the alley turned to remain behind the buildings on the cross street and I followed it to the back door of the building the Russians were searching. I had wanted to arrive before they opened the door to check the back but as I approached it cracked open a couple of inches and stopped.

  I was fast approaching from the blind side and threw myself forward as I drew the Kukri when the door moved. Running on the balls of my feet they didn’t hear me coming and pushed the door farther open, one of them beginning to step through to look around in my direction. I was close now and lunged as the man’s upper body came into view.

  There were two of them and I couldn’t get caught up fighting with the first and give the second guy time to shoot me. Barely slowing, I slashed with the Kukri, the Russian spotting me as I started my attack. His eyes widened, then I arrived, the razor sharp edge of my blade slicing into his throat.

  Twisting, I slammed into his body, knocking him back through the opening and following him through. His comrade was a few feet behind him and was already backpedaling when I suddenly burst into the room. His AKMS rifle was up and pointed in my direction, but I had a fistful of his teammates vest and was using him as a combination shield and battering ram.

  Keeping the momentum up I bulled ahead, the second man’s rifle discharging as I shoved the corpse into him. The body muffled the sound of the shot but didn’t stop the bullet. AKMS rifles fire a 7.62 mm round, which is considerably larger and more powerful than the US military’s 5.56.

  The bullet punched through my human shield and I felt a burning sensation along my left side as it carved into my flesh. I had no idea if I’d just received a mortal wound, or only been grazed, but I wasn’t about to stop and find out.

  As the body of the man I’d killed crashed into the other his rifle was knocked off target and he staggered back from the impact. Leaping over the corpse I raised the Kukri and savagely slashed at my opponents head. Ducking, he lifted his rifle to absorb the impact, the blade deflecting off the steel barrel.

  He was pushed farther back by the force of my blow, trying to get the rifle back in front of him. If I let that happen I was dead. Pressing the attack I lunged in again, trying to slash the blade across his legs. He managed to parry my attack with the AKMS barrel and lashed out with a left hook that I didn’t see coming.

  The blow caught me squarely on the right side of my face, staggering me slightly. He had dropped his rifle, useless in a toe to toe battle, and threw a vicious right as he pulled a thin blade that was longer than my Kukri’s twelve inches. I blocked the blow with my arm, the impact of his fist nearly making me drop my weapon.

  Pushing forward, I slashed again, steel ringing loudly as he blocked my strike at the last second. If it had connected he would have been disemboweled. Then I had to defend against a flurry of attacks as he feinted with his fist and stabbed forward with his knife. After the third lunge I felt I had his rhythm and timed a slash with the Kukri to arrive as his arm was extended.

  My blade whistled through the air, making solid contact with his forearm and biting deeply into the muscle and sticking in the bone. He grunted in pain, dropping his knife and I kicked his right knee out from under him. As he crashed to the floor, my blade still lodged in his arm, I drew my Ka-Bar knife and fell on him, ramming the steel into his throat.

  He lay under me, twitching with frothy blood gurgling out of his mouth as he died. His eyes stared up at me, accusingly. The eyes are always the worst part of taking another man’s life. In those last few moments they express so much that unless you’re a true sociopath you can’t help but feel the impact of what you’ve done.

  Not regret, especially when you’re fighting for your life or the life of someone you care about. But unless you’re putting a monster like Wazi down, dying eyes have a way of putting a little black stain on your soul. I wanted to look away, but didn’t. When I was a young pup of a soldier, still wet behind the ears and thinking I knew everything, I’d had a war weary Master Sergeant
named James Bost that was within a few months of mandatory retirement take me under his wing.

  He had fought through the entire Korean War and also pulled four tours in Vietnam with the 1st Special Forces. He was one tough son of a bitch that had truly been there and done that, and for as stupid as I was at the time at least I’d had enough sense to listen to the lessons he tried to teach me.

  One of them was respect for your enemy. Not sympathy or compassion, there’s no room for that on the battlefield, but respect. And part of that respect is treating a fallen enemy who is about to die like a man, not some insect you just crushed under your boot. So I looked into the man’s eyes for the few seconds it took him to pass.

  Master Sergeant Bost had taught me a lot of other lessons before retiring. Without him I’m not sure I’d have become the warrior I did. All of this ran through my head in the few seconds it took the Russian to die. Climbing to my feet I stepped on his arm and yanked the Kukri free, cleaning it on his uniform before re-sheathing it at the small of my back.

  Stepping to the other man I’d killed I reached down and grabbed the RG-6 grenade launcher that was strapped across his body. I worked the sling free and hefted the weapon before taking the bandolier of spare grenades he had on his body.

  The RG-6 is a Russian made weapon that fires forty mm, caseless grenades. It has a big cylinder that rotates as you fire and looks like a supersized revolver. Just like most revolvers, it holds six rounds.

  The grenades I’d taken off the body were a mix of fragmentation for anti-personnel use and high explosive for use against unarmored vehicles and structures. Neither would put much of a dent in the flying tank the Russians used as a helicopter unless I could land a round on a rotor, but it would go a long way towards evening up the odds with the remaining Spetsnaz.

  34

  I was still standing there checking over the grenade launcher when I heard the door to the alley bump open. Spinning, I got the weapon up just in time to smash it into the face of a leaping female. We tumbled backwards, falling onto the body of one of the Russian soldiers I’d just killed.

  The female was small, a girl somewhere in her early teens actually, and while she was fast and ferocious she just didn’t have enough mass to be very strong. Holding her snapping teeth at bay with the RG-6, I freed a hand that had been tangled in its sling and grabbed a fistful of her long hair.

  Yanking hard and to the side I pulled her off of me and rolled with her, letting my new toy clatter across the floor. Her head controlled by my handful of hair, she began trying to claw at me but my arms were longer than hers. The heavy canvas shirt I wore protected my skin and I was able to reach my Ka-Bar and end her struggles with a swift thrust to her throat.

  Leaping to my feet, I dashed for the door when I heard the slap of running feet. As quietly as I could I pushed the door closed, carefully locking the deadbolt. I must have succeeded in securing the entry without the infected noticing me because there wasn’t an immediate pounding on the door from them trying to break in.

  Had the dog whistle actually worked? It was pretty fucking slim evidence but it was a younger infected that had found me. Moving through the dark office I grabbed the grenade launcher off the floor and, avoiding the bodies, headed for the front of the building to get a view of the street.

  As I watched I took a moment to check my injuries. The side of my shirt was soaked with blood as well as a growing area of my jeans. Pulling the shirt open I twisted to get a look, grimacing at the burning pain from the bullet wound. Getting a better look I was relieved to find that I had indeed only been grazed. A shallow furrow was carved in the side of my abdomen, right where a love handle would be if I hadn’t run it off crossing most of the fucking state of Oklahoma on foot.

  There was a small restroom in between the front and back rooms where I grabbed a wad of paper towels and pressed them against the wound. It hurt like hell but I left them in place and buttoned my shirt. Nothing vital had been hit, and though the wound was bleeding freely it wouldn’t lose enough blood to cause me any problems. I hoped.

  Turning my attention back to the street I saw a sizable group of females were already on the asphalt in front, dashing around as they checked the area. More poured in from adjacent alleys as I watched. There were a few young ones but most were adults. I had no idea if my theory still held any water or not. Maybe adult infected could hear better than an uninfected adult. Maybe not. I wasn’t about to blow the whistle again to find out.

  The number of females in the street quickly swelled until there were at least two hundred of them milling about. They would stalk up to the front of a building and push on a door. If the door opened, several of them would continue on inside. If it didn’t push open they would move on without trying to pull.

  I tried to remember how the doors on the front of the department store worked. Did they just swing out, or would they move in either direction? I couldn’t remember, just knew that they were unlocked and I was around the corner and couldn’t see the front of that building.

  But I could see the bank building, and its doors apparently swung in. A handful of females slipped inside and less than a minute later I heard the chatter of an AKMS firing on full auto. Every head in the street snapped in that direction, screams erupting from dozens of throats as the females charged.

  Blinds were ripped off a window on the third floor as one of the Russian soldiers looked down into the street. He disappeared quickly as the infected began flooding through the entrance into the building. I must admit I had a big smile on my face as I watched.

  Moments later more rifles started up and soon it sounded like a war zone. I could hear four distinct weapons and I tried to picture in my mind what they were doing. Coming down wouldn’t be an option. There were just too many females, and more were arriving as I continued watching. Males were also starting to stumble into the area, running into cars and tripping over curbs to fall flat on their faces before getting back to their feet and resuming their movement towards the noise.

  I kept listening, suspecting the Spetsnaz were heading for the roof. There was very likely an open staircase in the middle of the building with no way to block it off. Two of them would hold position, firing into the raging mass of infected while the other four moved. Then they would pause and two of the ones that had moved would provide covering fire for the first two to join them.

  The building was old and the stairwell was probably tight, not allowing more than two shooters to engage the females at a time. I was expecting to hear the hard crump of grenades at any moment, then remembered that normal Russian doctrine was that if there was a grenadier with the unit the rest of the men didn’t carry hand held grenades. And their grenadier was lying dead in the back of the building I was standing in.

  After a couple of minutes of battle I heard the HIND approaching. They must have made a call for assistance over the radio. The massive helicopter came into a hover over the center of the street, the bellow of its engines and fierce down draft from its rotor shaking the building hard enough that I was concerned the plate glass window in front of me would shatter.

  I took a step back to avoid any potential falling shards as I saw figures appear on the roof of the bank. They’d made it to the top. The helo chose that moment to open up on the street with its rotary canon, shredding infected as well as asphalt and vehicles. I couldn’t see the Dodge from where I was hiding but hoped I was due for some luck and it hadn’t just been turned into a big hunk of scrap metal.

  The HIND stopped firing and slipped sideways until it was over the roof of the bank. A door to the troop compartment opened as it slowly dropped down to pick up the soldiers. The helicopter was no more than a hundred yards away, stationary as the men ran for the safety of the open door. The heavily armored open door that allowed access to the interior of the big aircraft.

  I knew the range of the RG-6 was close to four hundred yards, and the one in my hands was loaded with high explosive grenades. I should be able to put two of th
em through that opening without too much difficulty. Stepping forward I grasped the front door knob, ready to yank it open, raise the launcher and fire.

  As my hand wrapped around the knob, I stopped. Sure, I had a big, fat, juicy target just hanging in the air waiting for me to swat it. But if I did there was another HIND somewhere in the area that carried enough ammo, rockets and missiles to effectively destroy every building in the downtown area. They might have orders to capture me but I didn’t doubt they would start scorching the Earth if one of their helicopters was blown out of the sky.

  At the moment they weren’t sure I was here. Yes, they’d seen the police car, but it was hardly the only black and white in America. Besides, I didn’t think the fact that it said Oklahoma State Police on the side and we were in Kansas would mean anything to the Russians. Better to keep my head down and let the infected run them off.

  Retreating back into the darker recesses of the building I watched as the soldiers quickly scrambled aboard their ride. Standing there thinking I was satisfied with the outcome after all. They hadn’t found Katie, or me, and enough infected had shown up to send them back to the safety of the aircraft.

  If they passed off the two missing men that I had killed as having fallen victim to the infected, maybe I was in the clear for the moment. Would they chalk this up as just having missed me and return to base? I wasn’t willing to bet either way, or even make a guess. Without knowing how emphatic their orders to find me had been I had nothing to base an assumption on. Or would they assume I was responsible for their missing comrades, get pissed off and come after me with a vengeance?

  Infected continued to arrive in the area, though in smaller numbers. The HIND began a slow orbit, almost certainly looking for the missing soldiers as well as a clear area so the six remaining troops could disembark. The females kept watch on the helicopter, following it through the streets as it moved over the downtown area. They were doing a great job of making sure it didn’t land and put boots back on the ground.