In the middle of Mott Street the boatman suddenly slewed left, straight towards a building.
‘Down!’ Davis barked. Chino scrabbled back and lay on the floor, sure they were about to collide with a brick wall. The IRC slid into the building through the top of an arched two-storey window. There wasn’t much glass left in the frame but what there was rained down on them. Davis reversed the engine, it howled in protest and they still hit the opposite wall. They found themselves floating quite close to exposed beams, just under the ceiling.
Davis unclipped the outboard and then lifted it up and dumped it into the water.
‘What the fuck!?’ Hank protested.
‘Heat,’ Davis told him. ‘Don’t worry, it’s sealed man. We don’t die in the next thirty seconds, I’ll go down and get it.’
It was only then that Chino realised the firing had stopped.
‘If they’ve lost us then they’ll send patrols in,’ Chino said, for something to say. His heart was beating very quickly. He wanted to break the tension.
‘Patrols we can handle,’ Davis said. Davis and Chino were both motor mouths in comparison with the two southerners in their four-man recon team.
Davis was sat on the edge of the boat, looking around at the peeling paint and the creeping plant life of the building they were floating in.
‘This used to be a really good restaurant, they did awesome…’ Davis disappeared into the water. Water which was churning up and red now. Part of the front of the boat was missing. Even Earl was surprised. There’s something in the water was all Chino had time to think before he realised the boat was crumpling up like a used condom and sinking rapidly.
Chino tried to leap up but felt the boat give way underneath him. His fingers just grasped the wood of the exposed ceiling beams, scrabbling for purchase. He felt something brush against his boot and let out an involuntary scream. He swung his legs up, almost kicking Earl in the face, and managed to wrap them around the beam. His shotgun was hanging down on its slung. He felt something grab it and try and pull him back into the water. Chino just reached down and pulled the trigger. The shotgun firing sounded deafening, even after the barrage they had just experienced. The pull on the weapon disappeared, however. The shotgun bucked up and bounced off Chino’s body armour. Chino swung himself up onto the beam and readied the shotgun, pointing it down into the water.
Earl had an old H&K .45 in one hand. He was helping Hank up onto the beam with the other.
‘What the fuck!?’ Chino demanded. The boat had gone and what was left of Davis was a dark cloud of blood spreading on the surface of the water, though limbs and other body parts were starting to bob to the surface.
Something exploded out of the water and grabbed the beam they were all on. Chino fired, worked the shotgun’s slide and fired again. He was dimly aware of a .45 being fired faster than he’d ever heard one fired before. The beam broke. The water rushed up to meet him.
Chino broke the surface of the water screaming, with his knife/machete cross in his hand, shaking. He hadn’t been able to make out what it was that had leapt out of the water but he knew one thing for certain: it wasn’t human.
Earl was on the surface as well. The old guy also had his knife out. Hank, shit, Chino thought. The ex-Jarine was weighed down with an MMG and about half a tonne of ammunition.
‘Did we get it?’ Chino asked.
‘Dunno,’ Earl said. Chino wasn’t sure if Earl was just being calm or was, in fact, adrenalin deficient.
‘I’m going down for Hank,’ Chino told him. Earl nodded. It was instinct. Get your people out. It was only when he dived under the surface of the bloody water that he realised that he would be in there with… with whatever the fucking thing that had attacked them was.
It was pitch dark in the water. He grabbed his torch and flicked it on. He saw the ex-marine panicking, trying to unclip his MMG and drag off the belts of ammunition at the same time. He was between two of the tables on the floor of the submerged Chinese restaurant. Chino kicked down quickly. He grabbed Hank a little too hard before realising his mistake, as it just freaked Hank out further. He got the marine’s attention, signalled for him to calm down, and then used his thumb to motion upwards.
Chino glanced up. He couldn’t see Earl. He helped Hank out of the weighty ammunition, made sure he had hold of his MMG and then pushed him upwards before kicking off himself. As he assisted Hank’s ascent he caught the sensation of movement behind him, from somewhere out in the water on Mott Street. He glanced back but all he saw was beams of moonlight refracting through the water.
‘Over here!’ Earl called as they broke the surface. Earl was on a flight of stairs that led up into another level of the building. Chino was all but dragging Hank with him towards the stairs. He felt something brush against him under the water, panicked and redoubled his pace, swimming in a frenzy towards the steps. He felt Earl grab Hank and pull the marine out of the water. Chino all but crawled up the wooden stairs.
It smashed through the stairs beneath Chino. He felt blades dig into his leg and open his flesh as it tried to drag him under the water. Earl threw himself bodily down the stairs, grabbed Chino as he was being dragged back into the water. Earl’s other hand smoothly brought up the H&K Mk 23 pistol. Earl fired the pistol rapidly. The slide went back on an empty magazine. Chino realised there was nothing trying to drag him into the water anymore. He all but climbed over Earl, scrambling up the stairs. He burst through a doorway at the top of the stairs and collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath. Earl appeared in the doorway behind him.
‘Grenade,’ the Missourian told them and then turned and dropped a fragmentation grenade into the submerged restaurant. There was a subdued explosion and water slopped into the room.
Hank rose up looking furious, and went and stood in the doorway and started shooting the MMG wildly into the water. Earl put a hand on the ex-marine’s shoulder. Hank stopped firing.
‘Easy now brother, bullets are no good in water.’
Hank nodded. Chino realised that the Georgian wasn’t furious. He was terrified. Hank was shaking like a leaf. Earl ejected the magazine from his Mk 23 and replaced it with a new one, working the slide to chamber a round and then holstering it with the safety off. He started to dry his M14.
‘You need to dry your weapons as best you can,’ he told them.
‘You see what it was?’ Chino asked, looking around. It looked like they were in the restaurant’s wine storage area. Chino repressed the borderline-hysterical urge to have a drink to steady his nerves. Earl shrugged.
‘Alien I guess, don’t know, never seen one before, zombies I seen but not aliens.’ Hank and Chino stared at Earl. It was one of the longest things Earl had ever said to them that hadn’t been strictly operational. ‘I’m going to have a look around. You need to look to that leg.’ He told Chino. ‘And one of you needs to watch the door.’
‘I’m on it,’ Hank told him, still stood in the doorway, MMG at the ready.
‘Move back a little, ese, don’t silhouette yourself in the doorway,’ Chino said. He knew that Hank knew this, just like he knew that the marine was shaken up despite being a New York veteran and, apparently, having seen some shit in Russia whilst working for CELL.
Earl brought the M14 up, took the condom off the end of the barrel and disappeared into the mists.
Chino pulled the med kit out of one of the pouches on his webbing. He cleaned and then dressed the wounds. His leg hurt like a sonofabitch and one of the wounds was a through-and-through but he had got lucky, or at least as lucky as you can get when having sharp things pushed through your flesh. Whatever had attacked them had only pierced meat. It hadn’t got anything vital and Chino would still be able to move.