“How many is lots?” he shouted back.
O’Neill leaned in from the hall. “Maybe four digits, sir. We’ve got ten minutes, tops.”
“I’m going out,” I said. “I can get in deep and hold them off.” He nodded and I followed O’Neill back up the hall.
The Marines were smart and well-trained. They hadn’t wasted time with a solid barricade, just knocked over a ton of stuff for exes to trip and fumble with. They’d settled back and were letting off controlled, aimed shots, like a shooting range.
There were just too many, though. The Marines were making a dent, but they weren’t slowing the tide.
I marched toward the shambling crowd, cannons blazing. At this range, a round from the M-2’s could go through four or five skulls before slowing down. I thundered through a hundred rounds in a few bursts and dropped twice as many exes. Then they were around me and I fired up the stunners.
Exes don’t have any sense of pain, but they still have nervous systems, and those systems are still linked to their muscles. Which means a 200,000 volt blast will still drop one. The key thing to remember is it won’t stop them. The second the juice is off, they’re good to go again.
One pass of my hands and a dozen exes collapsed. I brought my arms back and watched ten more drop. Rounds splattered off the concrete as O’Neill, Laigaie, and Mao kept them down.
All around me. Ten, twenty, thirty of them. I swung my arms, swept a group of them together with a crunch of bones. They were hanging on my arms, on my legs, clutching at my waist. The sound of chattering teeth filled the battlesuit. I thrashed. I pounded. Warning lights flashed to remind me of the unexpected extra weight on each limb. I kept my eyes shut and crushed anything I got my hands on. My arms swung and I felt bodies slam against them.
I normally don’t suffer from claustrophobia. Even when I first started wearing and testing the armor there weren’t any panic attacks or nervous moments. It wasn’t until the first time I waded into a horde of exes that I started feeling trapped in the suit.
Someone shouted my name. It came again and I opened my eyes. Dozens of corpses surrounded me. The Marines had fallen back another thirty or forty feet. And a fresh wave of ex-humans was closing on me.
Ma Deuce and her twin sister had a shouting match that left fifty or sixty exes sprayed across the tarmac. The armor thudded back while O’Neill and Mao dropped a few dead things. We moved out around the terminal toward a row of hangars. The lenses switched and I saw the row of families running alongside them.
Wallen turned to check our flank and a tall ex fell on him. It was like the cheap-shot scare in a movie. A brunette woman, so close he didn’t have a chance. The walking corpse snapped its jaw and bit off most of his right cheek. The flesh peeled away and his nose stretched up with it for a moment.
He yelled out and froze. Just for a second. Long enough for the ex to get a second mouthful. There was a crack as his nose broke and was pulled off his face.
The Marines brought their guns up to shoot, but Wallen was flailing. A second ex latched onto his torso and sank its jaws in just above his collar. Dry fingers pulled at his arms, teeth pulled at his fatigues, and he fell back into the growing crowd of the dead. He never made another sound.
“Go!” shouted O’Neill. “We need to get to the trucks now!”
The M-2s turned the hangar wall behind us into confetti and I smashed through whatever was left. The Cessna inside got thrown out of the way as I cut through the next wall and into the hangar past that. The Marines flowed through the bottleneck. The exes bunched up.
Five minutes and another couple dozen dead exes later, we were at the trucks. Families were packed in the back and into the cabs. A third of the rifle platoon was missing. Netzley kept trying her radio with no response.
“Move out,” I shouted. “I’ve got point, everyone falls in behind me. Anything gets within ten feet of the trucks you put it down. Clear?”
There was a shout from the Marines, my optics flared to white, and I heard a dozen screams. The computer struggled to compensate and the airport reappeared on the screens. The light was all wrong. Everything was bright and washed-out. The civilians were looking up, their mouths open in awe, and two old Latino women were crossing themselves again and again.
Hanging above us was the shape of a man. It sizzled in the air, like high-tension lines on a damp morning. The white outline gave a friendly salute to Carter and tipped its head at me.
Howdy. The voice buzzed like someone talking with a kazoo, except you could understand him. I heard you were coming. Would’ve been here sooner but a lot of people thought you were still landing at Burbank.
The suit’s sensors were still going wild. “What about the other team? Did the other plane make it?”
The burning wraith seemed to slump a bit. They didn’t. I’m sorry.