Thoughts of suicide slid across his mind. Lou looked atthe girl he had carried, her emotionless face, the sadness buried deep insideof her. How would she ever recover? Three days ago, she was living in an apartmentin Portland with a sister, a mother, and a father. Hell, she probably even hadgrandparents, maybe some uncles, aunts and cousins. Now she had nothing. Shehad Lou, an ex-hustler who never amounted to anything. She had Katie, the coldbitch that had gunned down her father and sister in the name of survival. Shehad Rudy, 300 pounds of meat with asthma, just waiting for death to comecalling. A homeless man, a cowboy, a doctor, and an aspiring lawyer for ajustice system that had all but become extinct.
He squeezed his eyes shut. His head was beginning tohurt.
"Lou."
He didn't want to hear it.
"Lou."
Go away.
"Lou!"
He heard the rustling of the fabric, the low moan, and hedied a little inside. When he opened his eyes, Zeke was there, his one good eyeopen, his arms rising off the ground as if they were tied to puppet strings.Rudy handed him the sword he had liberated from the pile of confiscated weaponsin the Coliseum. Lou felt its weight in his hands, a heavy weight, the weightof a friend. He swung the blade in a sideways motion, like a baseball player.It caught on the thick bones in Zeke's neck, and Lou struggled to pull it free,putting his foot on Zeke's chest and tugging with all his might.
Zeke's head lolled to the side, black blood oozing downthe side of his neck. Lou swung again, and the head hung a little further. Hewas able to pull the sword free with just his hands this time, and the oldadage proved true. The third time was the charm. Zeke's head rolled onto thefloor.
Lou looked around at the people around him. Their faceswere slack, sad, hopeless. They were all going to die in here, a movie theatershrouded in darkness. Outside, the dead banged on the doors. If only theelectricity were on, they could put on a movie and take their minds off thedead snarling in the hallway.
Lou spotted motion out of the corner of his eye."Goddamit!" he yelled, as he stabbed downward at the still movinghead. The sword went into Zeke's remaining good eye, and it was finally still.
The banging outside intensified.
Chapter 38: We All Fall Down
In the comms room, the report came in. The Coliseum waslost. By the time the helicopters had gotten there, their guns were of littleuse. The soldiers, outmanned and with their defenses blown wide open, had heldfor a while, but eventually, the tide of the dead had broken over them and theywere forced inside the Coliseum.
The Coliseum was crawling with Annies, and the Apacheswere now on their way home, but not before they had destroyed the convoy thatwas responsible for getting 2,000 of McCutcheon's men killed. The pilotsreported that the zone was too hot to attempt a rescue without blowing the lidoff of the Coliseum. Three thousand soldiers... eaten. The thought shook him,worse than any tragedy he had ever experienced in his long career with thearmy.
"Jesus Christ," he said as he folded his handson top of his head and looked at the ceiling. At that moment, he was no longera general. He was a man experiencing the worst that the world had to offer. Heleft the comms room without a word and stepped outside of Warehouse #206,waiting for the rest of his boys to get back.
From the roof of the warehouse, he could hear thesnipers' rifles popping with regularity in the night, no doubt assisted bynight vision scopes. It was somewhat comforting, except for the fact that thepops were coming all too often. McCutcheon pulled a cigarette from his pocket,put it to his lips and smoked it.
Over the noise of the pops from the roof, McCutcheoncould hear the rotors of the Apaches as they returned. He shielded his eyes asthey set down, and he ground out the end of his cigarette with his fingers,tossing it on the ground. He was watching the men disembark, when one of thecommunications officers caught his attention.
"Sir, there will be a communiqué from POTUS in onehour."
"Yeah? Well record it for me. I need to talk to myboys."
McCutcheon walked onto the pavement, and left thecommunications officer behind. Whatever the message was it could wait. Hewanted to talk to the men that had run the mission. As the apaches' rotors fellvictim to gravity and friction, he walked up to the nearest one and greeted thepilot as he began to undo the straps on his harness. "How was it outthere?"
The pilot looked at him, a blank look on his face."It was FUBAR, sir."
"Come again."
"There was nothing we could do by the time we gotthere. The Annies had overrun the place. We couldn't land, we couldn't evenfire, for fear of killing our own, sir."
"Do you think they made it?"
"Sir, I don't think so, sir. There were too many ofthem. Even if we had opened fire, we would have run out of ammunition trying totake them out, sir."
The news was worse than McCutcheon had imagined."Get yourself squared away. Tomorrow, we start thinning out the herd."
"Yes, sir."
McCutcheon wasn't a chain-smoker by any means, but thenews left him wanting another one. He gave in to the temptation, and walkedback inside the warehouse. The whole situation bothered him, but the thing thatbothered him the most was how ineffective the whole operation was. Thereweren't enough soldiers, and they were spread too thin. But how do you fightsomething that kept popping up at every turn, like some sort of deadlywhack-a-mole game? Portland wasn't his biggest regret; it was lost and he knewit. His
