John Ringo - Islands of Rage and Hope

“OORAH!”

“OOORAH!” Faith shouted, sliding down the fast-rope. There were infected pouring onto the roof but that was what a Saiga was made for.

She dropped off the rope and went to pistol since it was faster, targeting the infected and backing away from the rope to let Sergeant Weisskopf have room to land.

Fire started to pour in from the door gunner on the Seahawk. They’d gotten the helo into operation overnight and Captain Wilkes and Colonel Kuznetsov had split duties with Harry taking the copilot position on the Super Stallion. The combined fire of the landed Marines and the machine gun quickly had the roof cleared.

She dropped the pistol and went Saiga, pumping out shotgun rounds until the last infected was cleared.

“MOVE!” Faith bellowed while reloading, her voice muffled by the gas mask. “DOOR, DOOR, DOOR!”

Speed was paramount. The door was the choke point and taking that was just about the most important portion of the mission. They had to fight their way down to the bottom floor, find all the doors and get them closed so they could clear the massive research facility. But first they had to take the high ground.

“Weapon, ma’am,” Sergeant Weisskopf said, picking up her .45.

“Thanks, Andy,” Faith said as the lead squad piled up on the door. They were pouring fire into the interior but clearly not making much headway.

“CLEAR!” Faith yelled, charging the doorway, kukri in one hand and a grenade in the other. “IT’S SCRUMMIN’ TIME!”

She hit the infected at the top of the stairs at chest height, knocking him over and riding him down the avalanche of bodies following him. With only her own mass it probably wouldn’t have worked. Another hundred plus pounds of ammo and guns did the trick. She took out a throat at the same time as she pulled the pin on the grenade and tossed it over the side of the stairs down to the other landing. The fragments from a grenade in such a confined space should have bounced all over the place. Instead, they were caught by the press of bodies below.

Then she got down to some serious scrumming…

“Oh, good Lord,” Hamilton said, holding his head in his hands. “I knew I should have gone along.”

Of course, it was now hard to see out of Faith’s helmet cam since it had immediately splashed red.

“We are missing this!”

Since Faith’s exploits tended to be a bit of a morale boost, if not for the squeamish, the helmet cam videos were available for public view. And the Gurkhas had decided to see who this child was who carried a kukri as if she was due and was going to “instruct” them on clearance.

“I can go to war!” Lance Corporal Ombahadur Ghale shouted. “I can fight! Let us go to war !”

“There will be war aplenty to come,” Sergeant Jitbahadur Rai said. “We must regain our strength to fight these battles. And if this is the way of such war…A great war it shall be! Oooiya Ghorkali! Look at her go !”

“Oooh,” Lieutenant Commander Tuttle, commander of the Louisville , said as Faith swung a Halligan tool into an infected’s crotch. “ That had to hurt….”

The video was sent without sound. Only the leadership was on the broadcast which had been upgraded to continuous two way. So Colonel Hamilton, along with any “higher” who wished to listen in, was getting Faith’s usual running commentary. And he was starting to wonder if she really enjoyed being an officer…

“You want some? How’s this for a mission plan! Action plan my fucking ass , you bastards! Sure, here’s an acronym for you! And you! I’ll PowerPoint you, asshole! There, I just transynergized your fucking head ! It’s time for BUZZWORD BINGO MOTHERFUCKERS…!”

“Your daughter scares me, Captain,” Under Secretary Galloway said quietly.

“She scares me, sir,” Steve said. “But she is well suited to the present situation.”

“Oh, screw this,” Januscheitis said. They’d dropped a few grenades over the side but they couldn’t fire into the mass swarming the lieutenant. “I’m going in…”

He pulled himself up on the railing and dropped off onto the lower stair. It would have been a boneheaded move dropping nearly a story, sure to bust an ankle if not his neck, but he was cushioned by the tide of infected. Not to mention all the bodies, blood and guts.

“IT’S SCRUMMIN’ TIME…!”

“Oh, hell, yeah!” Lance Corporal Freeman said, climbing up after him. “TIME TO HIT THE BEACH, MARINES!”

“Mr. Walker?” Gunnery Sergeant Sands said as the diminutive “technical expert” trotted past him. Most of the Marines were now clogged into the stairs, scrumming the zombies, creating a macroscopic version of antibodies fighting an infection.

“You’re seriously going to miss out on this, Gunnery Sergeant?” Walker said, pausing to draw a trench knife. “What has the Marine Corps come to?”

“Well, when you put it that way,” the gunny said, pulling out a Ka-Bar. “Can’t let the Army have the glory. After you, sir.”

“Once more unto the breach, dear friend,” Walker said, breaking into a sprint. “OR CLOSE THE STAIRS WITH OUR AMERICAN DEAD …!” Despite being nearly seventy and carrying as much weight as any of the Marines, the “civilian technical expert” cleared the rail in a bound and disappeared into the maelstrom below.

“Civilian, my ass,” Gunny Sands growled. “LEAVE SOME FOR ME!”

“In retrospect,” Faith said, sharpening her kukri, “we should have let them get up on the roof and machine-gunned them from the choppers.”

It had taken nearly thirty minutes of scrumming to clear the top two floors of the stairs. And they were still coming up. While the rest of the Marines got their combat time in, Faith was sitting on a good zombie while ammoing back up and fixing assorted “issues” that had cropped up during the scrum. Like her kukri needing sharpening, and straightening out her machete.

“But sometimes it’s just good to get your mad out,” Faith added.

“Probably would have worked better, ma’am,” Gunny Sands said, pouring some water into one of Faith’s magazines to get it half-ass cleaned. “And I’m not sure it was precisely necessary to scrum the stairs, with all due respect, ma’am. Once we had the landing, we could have used firepower.”

“Really, Gunnery Sergeant?” Walker said. “It would have been a superior choice to pour fire into a stairwell that is angled so as to bounce at least thirty percent of the fire back at your position? Especially given that five-five-six would pass through the bodies and continue to rebound?” He was honing his own blood-splattered trench knife.

“Which was what I was thinking, believe it or not,” Faith said, looking over at him curiously.

“That is a point, sir, ma’am,” Gunny Sands said thoughtfully.

“You just did it ’cause you enjoy scrumming, Faith,” Sophia said. She’d stayed out.

“Well, that too,” Faith said, standing up and putting away her kukri. “But I think I got one of my filters clogged with blood. That’s a first.”

“And the colonel sent that he’d appreciate it if you could wash off your helmet-cam, Faith,” Mr. Walker said.

“Where’s my water bottle…?”

Hamilton reran the video from Faith’s entry and considered how the rounds would have bounced around in the stairwell. Then he frowned.

“I hate when she’s right,” he muttered.

Dr. Rizwana Shelley had wanted to see the conditions of London so she had accessed the camera video as soon as the group left the boat. The young lieutenant and one of her sergeants had spent the flight at the back of the helicopter which had given an unfortunately complete view of the conditions. Idly—and if truth be told, somewhat morbidly—curious, she had continued to watch as the assault took place.