“Uh… Hold on.”
Mark got up and went into one of the front bedrooms. He returned within a few seconds. “Nah, probably not,” he said. “All this is just bringing more of them from the surrounding area. It actually might be making it worse.”
The gunfire increased in intensity, causing Sidney to look back out the window. Two trucks, filled with men shooting, were advancing slowly toward the base from the east. They were attempting to rescue the remaining defenders.
A line of smoke trailed away from the lead truck and an explosion sent bodies flying. They were shooting RPGs at the clusters of infected, helping to clear a path toward the base. Men threw hand grenades into the thick clumps of bodies surrounding the vehicles, while truck-mounted machine guns—the big ones that were too heavy to carry away—tore into the crowd, each round practically cut the infected in half. The response was insanely overwhelming. And it was working.
The trucks reached the base perimeter. Sidney and Mark watched as six or seven Iranians rushed from a building, firing from the hip at whatever target presented itself. The big guns swept the crowds, creating mounds of dead. Once the defenders made it to the trucks, the drivers had to turn around.
That’s when the glorious rescue took a turn for the worse.
There was only room for them to execute a three-point turn, so the trail vehicle reversed. The back wheels left the roadway as they backed up, sinking into the soft soil there. The driver spun the wheels, further complicating their plight as he tried to gain any type of traction. The soldiers in the back continued to fight valiantly, despite their obviously precarious situation. The infected fell by the dozens.
Then the big machine gun went quiet. Sidney got her binoculars and saw two men working frantically to clear a jam or reload it. Since it was a piece of equipment that she’d never used, she was unfamiliar with what they were doing. One man wore oversized gloves and he struggled to remove the gun’s barrel at the awkward angle the crew found themselves on beside the road.
The infected surged, their numbers seemingly endless as they swept into both sides of the truck. Up and over the back of the open bed, they tore the men from their places, ending the threat to them from that vehicle. She swung the binoculars to the left and saw the men in the first truck still firing. The barrel of that machine gun seemed to be glowing red. Not good.
The two of them watched as the machine gun continued to rake the crowd and the men with regular rifles and hand-carried machine guns fired into the press of bodies. The larger explosions had stopped, so Sidney figured their supply of grenades was gone. The truck-mounted machine gun was key. That’s what had been the other truck’s undoing.
“Come on. Come on,” she muttered as this truck also attempted a three-point turn.
“Are you actually rooting for them?” Mark asked.
She grinned self-consciously. “Yeah, I guess so. Crazy, right? We were trying to kill all of them last night, but now I’m sort of hoping they make it. They’re human, you know?”
“They sure are killing a lot of the crazies.”
“Hundreds of them,” Sidney agreed. “That helps us in the long run.”
Mark pointed toward the trucks. “Makes you wonder just how many of them are out there in the cornfields, huh?”
“Yeah, I know. Liberal was a small city, twenty-five thousand or so, but geez, there’s a lot of—oh no.”
Mark followed her gaze. The large machine gun was silent, its barrel glowing white hot. The muzzle was rapidly sinking as the super-heated metal warped beyond repair. The additional defenders from the fort helped to stave off the quick overwhelming attack of the infected, but only for a few minutes.
The infected swarmed over one another in their frenzy to reach the men in the back of the trucks. When they finally clawed their way over the bodies of their fellow infected, they tore at the men, who used their rifles as clubs. The battle raged fiercely for several seconds, but in the end, it was hopeless. There were simply too many of the infected. They were unbothered by injury and fearless in their crazed state.
Then it was over. Bodies littered the ground around the failed rescue vehicles. They’d wiped out an incredible number of the infected, and it hadn’t mattered. The mass of infected moved around and over the vehicles, searching for more victims. It was an awful sight.
Sidney swallowed dryly. It was a stark reminder of how dangerous the infected were. “We need to keep this in mind when we attack their main base,” she said, her voice hoarse.
“What do you mean?”
“Hiding,” she responded. The way the attack on the patrol base went down was almost perfect, minus being trapped in this house for right now. She wanted to think about how they could do the same thing at the bigger Iranian airbase in town. “We have to stay hidden in a safe place where the infected can’t get to us and don’t even know we’re there. Just like we did here.”
He nodded without replying.
“So now, we wait,” she sighed, lifting the binoculars to her eyes once more to watch the men in each of the truck cabs. They were trapped, but for how long? The infected could see them. It was only a matter of time until they succumbed to madness and chose to kill themselves or open the doors to let the creatures take them.
23
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
MARCH 7TH
“Their turf is the next block over,” Phil said, pointing down a side street. “Just walk down this alley and somebody will meet you.”
“You’re not coming with
