Stephen Knight - Slaughterhouse

“We all ready now, sir?” Zhu asked, his voice muffled slightly by his mask.

“Ready. Let’s dismount,” Walker said.

Outside, gunfire roared as the UH-1 made another pass. Walker opened the Humvee’s door and gingerly pushed it open, but he found the Humvee wasn’t the helicopter’s target. The chopper was thumping over the wounded truck, heeling over in a hard bank.

Something shaped like a pie wedge fell from the aircraft and tumbled through the air. Walker realized it was a fuel bladder, a flexible construct normally mounted to the rear of the UH-1’s troop compartment in the hell hole, where the gunners sat. As the bladder arced toward the truck, it trailed liquid. Clearly, its self-sealing properties had been compromised, and Walker wondered if the bladder might explode, like a bomb.

What happened was much worse than that.

Muldoon clambered to his feet, shrugging off Nutter’s attempts to help him. The Huey had finished its first strafing run and was banking around for another pass. One of the Kiowas seemed to stagger in the air, its nose swerving left then right as it moved downrange, descending. The aircraft looked fine, but something was definitely wrong with the pilots, and Muldoon wondered if they had been hit by one of the Huey gunners.

The Kiowa rolled to the left, sideslipped, and crashed into the trees on the other side of Massachusetts 2. Its four-bladed main rotor slashed through the leafy canopy, ripping it asunder with a great tearing noise as the small armed reconnaissance aircraft disappeared from view.

“Whoa! You see that shit?” Nutter asked, awe in his voice.

“Shoot the fucking Huey!” Muldoon bellowed. He grabbed his M4, tucked it in tight against his shoulder, and peered through the scope on its top rail.

Muldoon sighted on the Huey as it came around again. The gunner on the left side of the aircraft was leaning out of the aircraft, supported only by his safety belt as he manhandled an M240 machinegun. Muldoon was momentarily torn. He knew he should try to kill the pilots—that would end the run right then and there—but the machinegun would inflict a lot of harm before he could do that. He heard a chorus of popping noises, like dozens of firecrackers going off all around him. The troops were opening up, finally getting organized. A shrill voice rallied the men into action. It wasn’t Lieutenant “I’m in Charge” Crais. It was the woman, Rawlings.

So she’s hard core. Who knew?

The gunner in the Huey opened up, walking rounds across the highway, through the civilian traffic on the eastbound side, then through the convoy in the westbound lanes, then finally into the truck, where several troops went down. The rest retreated, momentarily abandoning their lanes of fire in the name of survival.

Muldoon sighted on the Huey’s cockpit and began firing on semi-auto as fast and as accurately as he could. The aircraft was a long ways off, but still inside his personal attack radius. He was rewarded with the image of Plexiglas puckering beneath the impact of several rounds, and the helmeted figure behind the windscreen flinched and jerked.

But the helicopter kept coming. Muldoon swung his rifle to the left, going for the pilot in the helicopter’s right seat. Rounds from the M240 slapped the ground around him. Nutter grabbed his arm and pulled mightily, yanking Muldoon right off his feet.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Muldoon shouted, as 7.62-millimeter bullets rained all around them.

“Saving your ass!” Nutter yelled back.

The two men buried their faces in the dirt between the tall weeds. Muldoon heard the rotor beat of the Huey change dramatically, and he rolled over onto his back, bringing his M4 around. The helicopter was banking away once again, but at an angle that was so extreme it had to fight to stay airborne. Something fell away from it, plunging toward the shattered, bullet-torn Bigfoot that sat only fifteen feet away from his and Nutter’s position. The thing landed in the back of the truck, and fluid exploded everywhere. The soldiers in the bed of the truck shouted.

And then, they began to laugh.

Rawlings realized the shit had just hit the fan when the fuel bladder landed on the back of the ravaged M925. Several men lay there, wounded by weapons fire. A group of soldiers, both in and out of MOPP gear, tended to them while others tried to repel the incoming UH-1. On the opposite side of the highway, a second helicopter had just gone down in a flurry of slashing rotors that decimated a good chunk of the sparse forest there. Pale smoke rose from the crash site. Rawlings doubted anyone was going to walk away from that one.

When gunfire erupted from the truck, her dread was confirmed. The fuel bladder hadn’t been filled with aviation fuel. It had contained contaminants that carried the Bug. On impact, the bladder broke, splashing the substance all over everyone in the area.

The Bug was ruthlessly efficient, blessed with a replication rate that was beyond impressive. As soon as it hit a mucus membrane, it went into action, replicating ferociously, penetrating the bloodstream and spreading through the body within seconds. From there, the Bug hijacked the human nervous system like the most capable terrorist ever known. The infected soldiers went to work right away, trying to either kill or infect those who hadn’t succumbed.

The MOPP gear intended to protect from immediate infection worked against those who wore it by reducing fields of vision, smothering hearing capabilities, and impeding movement. The newly-risen Klowns were able to strike before the protected soldiers could adapt to the situation, either by killing them outright or by tearing off their masks and overgarments, which exposed them to the putrid contaminants speckling the truck bed.

Adding to the confusion was the orbiting Huey that continued to fire at those soldiers not in the truck. The remaining uninfected lightfighters were forced to either find cover or return fire.

“Keep firing!” Rawlings yelled.

She was fifty feet from the truck’s tailgate. She had been tossed into the meadow with several other soldiers when the vehicle crashed through the guardrail and rolled down the incline on the other side. She’d lost her M4 and had spent several seconds combing the tall weeds for it. By the time she found it, the UH-1 was almost overhead. The gunners had missed her, but a limping soldier ten feet away had taken a round that had passed through his helmet and into his skull without even slowing. On balance, Rawlings thought he’d been lucky.

The fighting in the truck stopped as the UH-1 wheeled away, trailing smoke. It continued down the highway, its occupants tossing out more fuel bladders and other containers at the open trucks despite the fusillade of small arms fire directed at it. Rawlings turned back to the truck and saw several soldiers arming themselves. Some stopped to smear the blood of the fallen onto their uniforms, cackling as they did so.

“The truck!” she yelled at the soldiers closest to her. “The troops in the truck—they’re Klowns !”

The firing began anew but from the truck outward. One of the soldiers near Rawlings grunted and staggered backward as several rounds struck him. Rawlings had no idea if the body armor saved his life or not as she crouched in the weeds, reducing her silhouette as much as possible. She had no armor, no real protective gear of any kind. She had even lost her cap in the tumble from the truck. The weeds provided conceal-only cover that was marginal, at best. Added to that, she was caught between two soldiers and the Klowns on the truck as they duked it out with assault rifles. She needed to keep her head down and find some substantial cover, and fast.