Stephen Knight: Slaughterhouse

Then that petered out, and Marsh stared at more trees as the vehicle slowly accelerated to forty miles per hour.

God damn Humvees…a 1970 VW Beetle has better acceleration.

He checked the side view mirror. The rest of the element turned onto the road behind him as Haberman’s unit dismounted. Rotors thumped overhead, but it didn’t sound like an Apache or a scout. Marsh looked up, and saw a helicopter in red and blue livery pacing the element. A large, stylized number 5 adorned the helicopter’s fuselage, and light reflected off a gimbal-mounted camera slung beneath the helicopter’s nose. The camera was pointed directly at the Humvee.

“Hey, we’re on TV,” Weir said, his voice muffled behind his mask.

Marsh toggled his tactical radio. “Wizard, this is Bushmaster Two-Six. We’ve got a civilian news chopper shadowing us. Over.”

“Roger, Bushmaster. It’s being handled. Over.”

No sooner had the words come over his headset than two OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters sprinted onto the scene. One positioned itself between the convoy and the news chopper, while the second trailed behind the civilian bird. The scouts were armed with one modified M2 fifty-caliber machinegun mounted on the left hardpoint, and one seven-shot rocket tube on the right side. The olive-drab helicopters paced the brighter civilian aircraft for a few moments before the guy flying the news chopper got the idea. The helicopter slowly climbed away and turned due south. The Kiowa Warriors maintained their position for a bit longer, then sprinted ahead, rotors thumping—scouts, doing what they were supposed to do.

“Damn, and I didn’t get my close-up,” Renner said. He drove with both hands on the wheel, his eyes unreadable behind his Army-issue Sawfly sunglasses.

“No one wants to see your mug on their TV set, Sergeant,” Marsh told him.

“So I’ve been told,” Renner said. “By my own mother.”

Despite the mounting tension, Marsh laughed behind his gas mask.

For the first half mile of the trip, it was easy to pretend it was just another day, despite the MOPP gear. Then Marsh spotted thick plumes of smoke ahead. They slowly rose into the sky, coiling and winding like slow-witted serpents. The Kiowa Warriors orbited the area at three hundred feet, flying in a clockwise formation.

“Bushmaster, this is Birddog Five. Over.”

“Birddog, go for Bushmaster. Over.”

“Bushmaster, we have some car fires in a parking lot about, uh, three hundred meters from your position. Looks like it’s next to some park. Something went down here, lots of bodies but no activity. You might want to keep an eye on the trees. We don’t see anything through our thermal sights, but that’s not much of an insurance policy. Over.”

Each scout helicopter had a mast-mounted thermal imaging sight above the main rotor. Marsh had checked them out and been impressed with the system’s fidelity, especially at night. The system could also designate targets with a laser, allowing another helicopter to attack with Hellfire missiles or other guided ordnance. Despite their age, relatively low speed, and fairly short range, the little armed scout helicopters were pretty useful where the ground troops were involved, even though their rounded, goggle-eyed mast-mounted sights looked like Kenny from South Park .

“Roger that, Birddog. We are eyes out. Over.”

The scouts broke off and buzzed farther downrange. As Renner guided the Humvee down the vacant two-lane highway and approached a stately old brick house with four chimneys, Marsh saw something lying on the side of the road. He straightened up and leaned toward the window. It was a decapitated corpse. Actually, it was even less than that—as the Humvee drew closer, he saw it was really little more than a bloodied torso. A patina of gore covered the road. He saw the door to the house was standing open, and more bodies lay on the doorstep.

“McNeely, eyes out!” he shouted to the gunner in the cupola.

“You got that right, sir!” the gunner shouted back as the Humvee rolled past the remains.

The two soldiers behind Marsh stirred, and he sensed they were drawing their rifles closer. He did the same thing.

Something was burning less than a hundred feet off the road, in a parking area for the Brooks Village Historical Area, apparently a recreation of an old English town built back in the late 1600s. Marsh had no idea what the minutemen of the Revolutionary War would have made of the conflict that currently embroiled Boston. Hell, Marsh didn’t know what to make of it himself, and he had access to more information than the soldiers of that era could have even dreamed of. All he knew was that it seemed that every other person in the state of Massachusetts had turned into a cackling lunatic who wanted to kill, maim, and desecrate. And infect. Always infect. Marsh kept the fingers of his right hand wrapped around his M4’s pistol grip. Something was going to happen. He could feel it in his bones, and he scanned the trees on either side of the road, waiting for the rush of crazies to flood out onto the asphalt in front of them, carrying all manner of weapons.

Marsh could tell from the set of Renner’s jaw that he was expecting things to go pear-shaped, as well. But as the park with its lot of burning cars receded in the distance, Marsh forced himself to relax. Looking down, he found his right index finger was almost lying across his rifle’s trigger, and that the safety was off. He didn’t remember doing that.

Damn . He clicked the selector back to SAFE.

The convoy continued on, driving down to the Concord Turnpike Cut-Off. There, Marsh led the column to the left, sticking to Route 2A. This would take them along the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts. They already knew Concord center was in a world of hurt, and they didn’t want to get caught up in anything they weren’t ready to handle. While the battalion was armed to the teeth, the goal was avoid contact with the Killer Clowns for as long as possible.

The road spread out into four lanes, two in each direction, and traffic began to mount. The scout helicopters made some low passes over the cars and trucks, attempting to herd them over into one lane. Renner bullied the traffic in the right lane with the Humvee, forcing civilian vehicles over to the side. Marsh smiled. Nothing like seeing an uparmored Humvee in your rearview mirror, complete with weaponry, bearing down on your ass. Ahead, smoking buildings loomed. Marsh checked his map, and saw it was the remains of Emerson Hospital. That made him nervous. The scouts reported no undue activity, but advised them that traffic began to slow as it drew closer to the traffic circle a few miles ahead.

The convoy rolled past the burnt-out hospital, its parking lots vacant save for a few scattered cars and trucks. And bodies. Lots of bodies. Marsh kept his eyes out. The hospital was doubtless full of raving crazies before they burned it to the ground, so they were probably still in the area. Somewhere. He checked his map again, confirming their location.

“ Target !” McNeely shouted.

Marsh snapped his head up. Just ahead, another road intersected the turnpike, overseen by dark, inactive traffic signals. As the Humvee bore down on the opening, a battered school bus appeared, hurtling toward the intersection from the right, slamming cars out of its path. Its yellow hide was splattered with blood, and several of its windows had been shattered. Tied to the bus’s grille were two nude, mutilated bodies of teenagers hanging upside down, the whiteness of their pale flesh offset by the dark cavities in their torsos. They had been eviscerated. Written across one kid’s narrow chest in what appeared to be dried blood or possibly excrement was the word GOOD. Written on the other corpse was FUCKS. As the school bus surged toward the Humvee, it shed all manner of debris from its roof—branches, leaves, brush, anything that could have been used to break up the vehicle’s outline from the air and disguise it beneath the leafy canopies of the trees lining the road. The Klowns manning the vehicle had waited until the Kiowas had flown past, then inched into position, hoping to ambush the Bushmasters.