A metal hand reached down and crushed the dead man’s skull. It flung the body back into the mob. “Come on,” said Cesar. “We gotta get out of here.” He batted away two more exes with a shrug of the battlesuit’s shoulders.
Metal fingers closed on her waist and lifted her into the air. She was even more exposed. They set her down on the armor’s shoulders and she grabbed the helmet for balance. “Put me down,” she shouted. She banged her fist on the metal skull. “We’ve got to get somewhere safe. We all do.”
“Doctor Morris,” said the battlesuit, “there’s nobody left. Its just us.”
She looked down.
The exes had overrun the small defense line. The soldiers were dead. One was still twitching but had a trio of exes gnawing on him. She was pretty sure one had put his rifle in his own mouth and the sound had been lost in all the gunfire.
A pair of exes reached for her feet, but she was high enough up that all they could do was brush her heels. The titan swatted them away. Danielle wrapped her arms tighter around the helmet as the battlesuit stomped down the road.
She looked back at the guard towers flanking the hole in the fence. The soldiers there were still picking off exes with their rifles, but it was pebbles to divert a flood. One of them looked at her and she could see his eyes from fifty yards away.
“We’re going to come back,” she shouted. “I promise. Just hang on.”
He gave her a weak wave that looked like it ended in a thumbs-up. The other one just kept shooting at the dozens of exes stumbling past his tower.
*
Smith had put Polk in front to replace Harrison and left Taylor and Hayes to wrestle with Stealth. They marched through the lobby of the records building and pushed the doors open. Smith took a breath, straightened his tie out of habit, and looked at the scene in front of them.
The Black Hawk rested on the pad about five hundred feet away. Its engines were thrumming, even though the rotors were still. A soldier in a flight helmet pumped fuel into the chopper’s tanks and looked over his shoulder.
To one side of the helipad was a mob of ex-soldiers. Sixty, maybe seventy of them. They had the pilot’s attention. Smith saw the flash of green on their heads and a few with rifles swinging on straps. Their teeth clacked together, but over the engines it was more a tremble in the air than an actual sound. There were maybe a hundred yards between the first few zombies and the helicopter.
Sergeant Monroe, flanked by Truman and Jefferson, came from the other direction. They were about as far from the helipad as Smith and his group. They were sprinting, even with their oversized rifles.
A shadow flitted across the ground. Smith looked up and saw St. George plunging out of the sky. His boots hit the tarmac twenty feet in front of them. One of them had a ragged heel.
“Well,” said Smith, “this should be interesting.”
“Stealth,” the hero yelled over the helicopter, “you okay?”
“I am uninjured,” she said. “I trust you received my message?”
St. George looked Smith in the eye. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Everybody got it.”
Smith smiled at him. “You don’t think you can beat me, do you?”
The hero stopped in his tracks. Indecision flickered on his face. He glanced at Stealth, then at the soldiers flanking her. His brow knotted up in concentration.
Smith marched his group past the hero. He paused to give St. George a friendly punch in the arm. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again,” he said. “You’ve got way too much potential to be running around without guidance.”
St. George raised a fist and glared at him.
Monroe and his men were at the Black Hawk, weapons ready. Smith shouted to them while he jabbed a finger toward the exes. “You don’t want to let them reach the helicopter, do you? Get in there and protect American property.”
A thread of blood trickled out of Monroe’s nose, then Truman’s. The three super soldiers fell back and took up position across the helipad. Gunfire drowned out the helicopter. Their Bravos ripped the exes apart one after another. Some of the exes stopped clacking their teeth together and raised their own weapons.
Smith turned to Taylor and Hayes. “Get her on board.” He glanced at his prisoner. “You said you wouldn’t cause any problems, remember?”
“I do.”
“Good.” He led them to the Black Hawk. “God, this is almost too easy.”
“He will beat you,” Stealth said as they marched her forward.
Taylor smacked her in the ribs with his rifle and she stumbled. He yanked her upright. “Not going to happen, you fuck—”
St. George’s punch caught him in the back of the head. The hero grabbed Taylor by the jacket, spun, and hurled him back through the doors of the records building. The soldier flew through three of the huge panes of glass and hit the far wall of the lobby.