And despite the grotesque mutations covering his body, despite the mortal injury that had stolen his breath, there was look of peace on his face.
As if Loeb realized, in that last moment on Earth, he was finally being released from his agony.
-38-
O’Neil lurched between columns of smoke and spreading fires, dodging past soldiers rushing from the Skulls terrorizing them. His whole world seemed to devolve into a blur of chaos, his eyes sheening, watery.
He was alone.
Utterly alone.
He followed the sound of sustained gunfire and the boom of the two anti-aircraft guns. Someone had brought them to life and was using them against the Skulls. The huge shells tore through the monsters’ ranks. Each blast sent showers of gruesome shrapnel into the air.
Between those blasts, he thought he heard the voices of those mercs. The Hunters.
Were they making their last stand near the AA guns? Were they as dead as he felt?
O’Neil figured that he had no other hope. Might as well die fighting like his brothers had.
He rushed toward them, watching Skulls get torn apart. Saw a rifle lying next to a soldier whose neck had been torn open. Skin flapped open over an exposed rifle. O’Neil ignored the gruesome corpse and picked up the rifle.
As he drew closer to the AA guns, he could better see the black fatigues of the Hunters forming a perimeter around them. They had a man on each gun, too, firing at the waves of Skulls descending on them from around the base.
O’Neil thought about trying to influence the Skulls. To turn them around. But he had no more strength, physical or otherwise. Every breath was torture. All he could do was weave between the beasts and shoot any that got too close.
It took everything left in his body to close that distance to the AA guns. Everything to keep running. Because after he lost Loeb, he figured he didn’t deserve to wear the trident of the SEALs anymore. He had lost everyone who had depended on him. Every Hybrid he had sent across the base had died to carry out this mission. And he carried every single one of those sacrifices, from the first Moroccan prisoner to the last SEAL.
He was all that was left.
And he couldn’t answer why.
He didn’t deserve it.
He had no family to go back to.
No one else to protect.
No team he belonged to.
All he had was this twisted, mutated body and the monstrous weight of guilt.
Trying to compartmentalize it all no longer worked.
Didn’t matter that a battle still raged. That fires still devoured this base between the monsters running rampant.
He had succeeded at the mission the brass had given him.
But was everything he had done, everything he had lost, worth it?
He stumbled toward the AA gun where the Hunters were. Saw Meredith first.
She beckoned him. “Where are the others?”
He tried to answer. Tried to open his mouth, but he couldn’t. He simply collapsed, his chest heaving as he gulped down air. Agony raced up and down his limbs. His body was starving and broken, his will sapped.
He had nothing else left to give.
Meredith crouched beside him as the others continued to fire on the raging beasts. She offered him water, and he gulped from the tube connected to her pack, letting it fill his body.
Finally, he wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. Looked up at her, and for the first time, admitted aloud what had happened.
“They’re gone. I’m all that’s left.”
“This isn’t the end, O’Neil,” Meredith said. “We’re still in this fight.”
She gave him one last look of concern. One look filled with pity, then turned back toward the Skulls threatening to overwhelm their position.
That look gave him all the fuel he needed.
No matter how terrible this mission had gone, they had succeeded in sabotaging the Russians’ efforts in the Tangier port. The SEALs had still done what they had come to do.
O’Neil would not wallow in pity.
Either self-pity or someone else’s.
He took a knee and pressed the stolen rifle against his shoulder. Aimed at the first Skull he saw and fired. Saw another beast climbing over a shipping container. Wild hair fell from its head in stringy knots. Its armor was already pocked in bullet holes. The monster let out a howl, tensing to jump off the container.
Instead, he sent rounds peppering its torso. The monster took a few more steps. Raked at the air with its claws, then toppled face first to the ground. He aimed at another beast. Squeezed the trigger. Ensured it was dead, then picked his next target.
The instincts honed over his career turned him into a machine. He operated off muscle memory alone. Ignored his pain, his exhaustion. His whole world became the rifle and whatever he saw through its sights.
Monsters turned to corpses, one after the other. And when he was out of ammunition, Meredith handed him her pistol.
Didn’t matter that the weapon wasn’t as reliable long-range. The beasts continued to press on the Hunters, pushing closer and closer. There was simply too many of them. The beasts continued to pour from the sinking ships and over the walls of the base, even breaking out of the shipping containers. O’Neil could still feel their anger, the hatred instilled in them by the biological agent that had wrecked their body.
That anger kept him functioning. He aimed his pistol at a beast with spiked shoulder blades running straight at him between crates, screaming, its hair trailing behind it, the torn remains of its clothes sodden with blood. Bullets punched through its open mouth and sternum.
It fell forward, carried by momentum. Its body scraped over the concrete, leaving flecks of flesh and blood behind.
And still, the monsters flooded toward them.
“We’re losing control!” Meredith yelled.
She appeared to be talking over her comms. Probably to the merc’s leader, Dom.
If he was alive, then maybe Reynolds had made it, too.
The thought that there was another SEAL left alive renewed O’Neil’s will to survive.
Meredith appeared to be listening to a reply, nodding along with words O’Neil couldn’t hear. Then she looked at O’Neil.
“We’re getting out of here,” she said.
The sound of rotor blades beat at the air. O’Neil watched two choppers lift off from near where the command structure was at the center of the port. Was that their ride out?
Then he saw the mercs twist the AA guns toward the choppers. Andris was at the helm of the closest one. He began firing, rounds bursting like fireworks in the darkened sky. Those blasts traced through the darkness until they hit the first chopper, then the second. Both birds went down in fireballs, plummeting toward the harbor.
O’Neil watched them plunge into the dark waters.
“That was all that was left of the people running this base,” Meredith explained. She fired on another Skull lunging over a pile of skeletal corpses. “But we need to move now. Our captain’s got a ride out of here for us.”
She pointed toward the harbor where O’Neil saw a tugboat motoring along toward them. The growl of its throaty engine rolled over the water.
He couldn’t believe that after everything he had seen here, everything he and these mercs had done, they might actually escape.
As the stolen tugboat neared the water’s edge, Meredith ushered the mercs after her. O’Neil saw Andris drop a couple of explosive charges at each of the AA guns before they began running to meet the boat.
Skulls continued to rush toward them, relentless in their attack. O’Neil saw the spark of gunfire elsewhere in the base, then heard human screams as those last bits of resistance were squashed by the monsters.
The tugboat pushed through the water, motoring alongside the pier, still moving as the Hunters threw themselves into it. O’Neil leapt onto the deck. His talons clicked against it as he rolled, then propped himself upright, aiming his weapon back toward the shore. He fired in concentrated blasts, taking out the monsters chasing the last of the Hunters.