"Stay close. You move wrong, you die." McKnight's eyes were wide, her pupils narrow dots. "When we run, you don't stop. You follow me. I'm going to get you out, but you have to stay close. You understand?"
"Yes." Selah nodded. She was getting her wits back. She took a deep breath.
McKnight shook her. "You stick by me. You clear?"
Selah nodded. "I got it."
Something in her tone caused McKnight to nod and release her shirt. "Then let's go." McKnight ducked out from behind the blast wall into the night. The base was lit up. Emergency lights turned every raised surface silver and white, every shadow into a starkly delineated cutout of jet black. Helicopters were weaving back and forth in an ordered tangle, small mosquito copters and heavy, lethal-looking choppers that rained down massive amounts of fire. Jets were cruising through the skies above, and even as Selah ran after the Sergeant, she saw two cruise right overhead and drop missiles which fell ten feet and then caught fire and surged off and down to strike the ground far away behind them. Even at this distance, Selah heard the awful
CRUMP
sound they made as they hit, felt the shock through the earth.
The Sergeant was fast. She sprinted ahead, and Selah immediately saw why. The line of combat had dropped back to engulf their building. Infantry were stationed inside doorways, alongside bunkers, firing around corners, sniping from afar. Behind them, sprinting and leaping, with fangs bared, came the vampires. They seemed to dance as they were shot, blasted off their feet. It took ten, fifteen bullets to drop just one, and even then they would get back up.
The Sergeant led her along the flank of a second bunker, calling out, "Friendly!" at the top of her voice, bellowing it as she passed soldiers who held back from shooting her at the last moment. Selah fought to keep up. They ran past a soldier laid flat out on his back, a young kid crouched on his chest, face buried in his neck. Past a half-obliterated vampire that continued to drag itself forward, clawing at the ground, black eyes lit up with manic desire. Around a corner they ran, and then out onto a second street. Vehicles were trundling up it, armored carriers and more Humvees. A platoon of troops sprinted forward to help, their rifles held before them, their gear shaking from side to side as they ran.
Down the street, then a left between two great semi-circular hangars, both gleaming in the night like vast soda cans half-buried in the packed dirt. Right down between them, and out into a great concrete space where men boiled with activity around a handful of helicopters. A large area to their left had been set aside for triage, and Selah grimly averted her eyes from the violence that had been visited upon the men and women who lay on the ground, medics moving feverishly between them.
"Incoming!" screamed a voice, and Selah looked behind her to see a flood of vampires surging right after her between the two hangars, some actually galloping on all fours along the ridged outer curves of the buildings, defying gravity with their sheer speed and tenacious grip. Selah broke left, losing McKnight in the press of bodies as men grabbed rifles, others screaming commands, soldiers falling back and opening fire.
Selah cast about wildly for McKnight. The sound of gunfire was deafening, an inferno of white hot lead and dancing shell cases, vampires rushing into the withering hail of death. They dropped, but there were more of them, leaping high into the air, turning into silhouettes against the white flood lights to come crashing down amidst the soldiers. Selah slowed, not knowing where to go. She almost stepped on a young man, his black skin beaded with sweat and smeared with blood as he propped himself up on one elbow and raised his pistol to squeeze off shot after shot.
"Brown! Selah Brown!" McKnight's voice. Selah cast around wildly--there she was! Selah ducked her head and ran, scooping up a discarded rifle as she went, surprised by how heavy it was, the metal still hot, reeking of burnt gunpowder. She slipped her finger over the trigger, not knowing if it had ammo, if the safety was on or off, but wanting it, needing a weapon in this maelstrom.
The Sergeant was barking at a young soldier who was staring at her in confusion. She slapped him hard and he blinked, saluted, and then jumped into a small mosquito copter. McKnight glared at Selah as she ran up, then down at her weapon. Without a word, she snatched the rifle out of her hands. Selah dropped into a crouch as McKnight fired a burst at an obese vampire with a beehive haircut and a missing left arm who was coming at them with seemingly unstoppable momentum. Great chunks of the woman blew out her back, but still she came on, maw opened wide. Selah cast around, saw a dead soldier to her left, a pistol but inches from his hand. She grabbed it, wheeled around on her heel, and fired five shots just as the Sergeant's rifle ran out of bullets. She missed half her shots, but two by luck caught the vampire across the side of her temple and jaw, mangling her head. The vampire crashed to the ground, her momentum causing her to roll forward, and then McKnight had Selah up by the elbow and hustled her into the copter.
Selah scrabbled onboard. There were two seats upfront and enough room in the back for two more. She jumped into a seat and pulled the heavy belt down and across her chest. The blades were already whipping around overhead, blasting dust and rolling bodies away from the copter. The Sergeant climbed onboard. That was all the pilot was waiting for. The helicopter lifted up, and they swung away into the night.
Selah closed her eyes. She felt weak with an overburn of adrenaline and her ears were ringing so badly that she thought she might be deaf. She ran her forearm over her face and looked out the side of the helicopter. The base was being overrun. Flames and fireballs blossomed in the militarized zone outside the walls, but even so, she could see more vampires coming--tiny figures like fleas, leaping and darting forward. Inside the walls, the madness continued. As the pilot fought for altitude, Selah stared in horror. Vehicles had been tipped on their sides, doors ripped open with inhuman strength, soldiers dug free and killed. Platoons had formed circles which were collapsing into their centers, firing out in all directions as the vampires came on. Helicopters continued to strafe the road, laying waste with their guns, but the vampires were too many, too fast, and too hard to draw a bead on. Tanks rolled along, covered in swarming figures that pounded and tore at the plated armor to no avail.
"Good God," said Selah. The klieg lights were being smashed, one by one, so that darkness was flooding the Base. Selah looked at McKnight. The woman was staring down at the battlefield with fierce intensity, a band of muscle leaping into view over her jaw as she clenched and unclenched it. She thrummed with fury, with tension, and Selah wondered how much it had cost her to leave her friends and soldiers behind. To get Selah out, to prioritize her over everything below.
The helicopter moved fast. The Base slid out of view, and soon they were passing over the shacks and huts of the San Bernardino Valley. It was a morass of darkness, speckled with a constellation of fires--from crowds waving burning torches to entire blocks aflame--smoke wreathing the air and forming dark columns through which the copter plunged. Moments later, they were rising up over the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, and then everything below became dark, the slopes of the mountains devoid of habitations.
Selah sank back into her seat. She suddenly recalled Williams on the ground, his throat savagely torn out. She clenched her hands to stop them from shaking and fought for breath. Her chest was tight. She thought she'd been through the fires and been tested. That her experiences in Miami and LA had changed her, made her tough. She wanted to laugh.
McKnight was seated beside her, staring out at nothing, face blank. Selah looked away. She knew she had to figure out the next step, ask questions, demand to know where she was being taken, but she couldn't. She couldn't make her mind work. She leaned her head back. Allowed the stuttering scudding whine of the rotor blades to drown all her thoughts but one. One that kept repeating over and over in her mind:
This is just the beginning.
Chapter 5
They flew for an hour. Selah pulled on a pair of heavy headphones that blocked the roar of the blades overhead and simply watched the landscape roll by. McKnight sat still, staring out at the night and listening intently to her headphones, speaking occasionally, but she was on a private channel and Selah couldn't make out her words. Eventually, the Sergeant leaned back, affixed the rifle to a clip on her chest, and flicked a switch on her headphones.
The pilot immediately lit in. "Sergeant, just what the hell do you think you were doing back there?"
McKnight pursed her lips and looked out the open panel at the night rushing by. "Apologies, sir. There wasn't much time for protocol."
"Protocol? Article 90, Sergeant, Article 90. Striking a superior officer means a dishonorable discharge, you hear me? The hell! Soon as we hit 29 Stumps, I'm going to report your sorry ass, you hear me?"
"Yes, sir," said the Sergeant, her voice weary and unconcerned. "We're en route to 29 Palms?"
"You're damn right, we are." The pilot huffed for a moment, and then, unwilling to let it go, "What's your full rank and name, soldier?"
"First Sergeant McKnight, sir."
"Well, First Sergeant, just you wait. The hell, striking me. Hitting me and giving me orders. Hell."
"Yes sir." The Sergeant reached up and flicked a switch on her headset, and then looked over at Selah. "You all right? You hurt?"
"No," said Selah. "I'm fine." She shot a glance at the partition that separated them from the pilot, and the Sergeant shook her head.
"We're on a private channel. He's probably shitting a brick about it, but whatever."
"Thank you. For getting me out of there."
McKnight's face could have been carved from stone. "Don't think I did it for you. I was just following orders."
"Orders? From whom?"
"Lt. Colonel Jackson. He's been running the Base since you killed Colonel Caldwell."
"I didn't-- Never mind. What about the direct orders to convict me?"
"I'm not saying I know what's going on. But when a Lieutenant Colonel relays a direct order from his Major General saying your ass needs extraction, your ass gets extracted."
"Huh." Selah studied the Sergeant's face, and then looked away. General Adams must have called in a huge favor. Or simply found somebody who would listen. "How are... I mean, have you heard? How is the fight going at the Base?"
The Sergeant's expression was bleak. "Not good. We had to evacuate."
"Oh." Selah searched for something to say. "What happens now?"
McKnight shook her head and looked out at the streaming dark. Her expression became bleak, her face drawn. "I received word that we bombed the Base five minutes ago. Dropped a MOAB." She cut a glance at Selah, saw her incomprehension. "Mother Of All Bombs. Our largest non-nuclear bomb. The Base is gone, and all the vampires with it."
Selah tried to imagine it. Couldn't. "How many vampires do you think were in the attack?"
"Thousands. Two, maybe three thousand."
"Do you think that was all of them?"
"I doubt it. There must still be some in the city." McKnight shook her head and looked out into the night. She looked fragile, hollow almost. As if some core belief or article of faith had been knocked right out of her.
"Do you know where Blood Dust came from?"
McKnight frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"Blood Dust, the drug? It was being harvested from vampires. Made from their blood. The LA vampires--the original ones--they created and then enslaved a whole bunch of new vampires and had them locked up like cows, milking them for blood. I thought at first that they were trying to just make money, but that wasn't it. They wanted money, sure, but just to bribe... the military... to look the other way. They wanted to be able to keep on making more 'thralls,' as they called them, without anybody paying close attention. Their whole goal was to just make these thousands of vampires all along, and then release them all at once."
"You're saying they've been planning to break the Treaty for years?"
"Yeah. Arachne, Louis, the other two or three main vampire leaders. They must have worked this all out way in advance. But even so, they didn't have thousands of these thralls locked away. From what I heard, it was more like five hundred or something."
McKnight tapped her fingers on her knees. "That's not good."
"No." Selah stared down at her hands. "Because it means these new vampires--thralls--are making even more vampires. If they doubled their numbers over night..."
"Then we're facing an epidemic."
They stared at each other, each working out the implications. "This didn't happen during the first war, did it?"
"No," said McKnight. "The first war was nothing like this. They stayed in hiding and would only come out to take out our top brass. It was like fighting smoke. Endless raids, endless hunts as we tried to find them during the day. A thousand of us for every one of them." McKnight shook her head. "That's what we thought would happen again when war broke out. We thought it would repeat the same pattern."
"You guys expected another war?"
McKnight grinned humorlessly, a death's head smile. "Of course. We're the military. It's our job to prepare."
"But ... you prepared for a repeat of the first war."
"Yes." The Sergeant let out a breath and shook her head. "We've refined all these methods for unearthing hidden vampires. We never expected a thousand of them to come running at us, screaming bloody murder."
"So what happens now?"
McKnight shrugged uneasily. "No idea. My guess is that we just lost California. If their numbers grow that fast, we won't be able to contain LA. They'll spread fast and we'll have to fight to contain them in the state." McKnight shook her head again. "That's
if
we can contain it. If it spreads? Gets past the Rockies, into the Southwest, up through Oregon?" She paused, eyes unfocused as she gazed at some internal vision. "Well. It'd slow down at that point. They won't have the numbers to infect. And I'm guessing they would have to feed as they go. But each time one of them reaches a city, we'd see a new outbreak."